A tour of the British Isles in accents: for those who would be tempted to mention “A British accent” and leave it at that.
…Smart to remember, too, that all these regions will have microregional variants. The Dublin accent referenced here, for example, is only one of at least five or six that I can identify, and I bet there are a lot more I’ve never heard or can’t tell from one another. Ditto for other regions in Ireland. The “Irish accent” as normally heard in US TV and film until quite recently has never been much more than an overstated, artficial “Dublin Stage” accent.
Equally, what most people in the US think of as “the British accent” beloved of movie villains everywhere is usually the so-called Received Pronunciation or RP, a kind of by-blow of the BBC’s refusal for a long time to allow its announcers to use anything but an approved version of the Home Counties “posh” accent. (This dialectic “glass wall” has finally started cracking in the last decade.)
So cool.
oi followers watch this
there’s been all kinds of exciting polls & surveys about what people associate with each accent, and apparently people find geordies (newcastle accent) inherently trustworthy (REALLY, PEOPLE, AFTER THE ANT & DEC THING?) and scousers and cockneys inherently untrustworthy, which explain why most banking call centres are in the north east.
also everyone thinks my native accent, the glorious west devonian, to be dumb as rocks…and lo: why i don’t have it any more
This is reminiscent of that audio overview of American accents that I can’t find, and a very good reference. 🙂
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)