This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
There is something very "web" about this inbound link: http://www.newsland.it/nr/browse/it.cultura.linguistica.inglese/61777.html
Yeah, man. That is mad "Web". Yarr.
Also, in regard to the Rome reference. This isn't all that odd when dealing with the Translation Convention. In english language productions of certain Greek dramas, it is a tradition to give Spartans a hillbilly accent.
discussion removed from entry:
// Shouldn't be on this page. Northern Irish is a British accent, Irish isn't since the Republic of Ireland isn't part of Britain.
Missing Mummerset You are missing the archetypical "rural" accent (even used in the UK) of "Mummerset" — used for Cornwall through to Somerset and old Wessex. Plenty of "oo-ar", chewing a stalk of hay (stalk, not stack); associated with intellectual challenge, broad ignorance and depthless cunning.
Seth: Think The Vicar Of Dibley
Looney Toons: Unnamed person at 62.25.109.196: We already have a "Rural" entry, which does seem to be what you're talking about. Since your description is a lot better than what we have now, I've blended it into the existing text. (Which you could have done yourself, you know...)
Kinitawowi: Is this the right place to stick in Norfolk? Basically the same thing only with less cunning and more incest... (Disclaimer: yes, I am from Norfolk.)
Fast Eddie: Point of personal interest in regard to Yorkshire: Is this current? Is "thee" and "thou" still heard there in the marketplace?
Seth: No-one uses Thee or Thou unless they are trying to be overly flowery. Not even in Yorkshire. But they do use a lot of words that we don't, in full slang mode Yorkshire is more impenetrable than Cockney. (It should also be noted that i talk almost all the time with Received Pronunciation (Queens English, the educated accent) except when mad/drunk and I slip into Estuary English (Working class, southern) - so lack of contact with rural accents might influence this)
Dave: Yes, they do; it is quite prevalent in t'North Riding of Yorkshire. Whilst we're on this, shouldn't we split Yorkshire into South and West (e.g. Sean Bean) and North and East (e.g. All Creatures Great and Small). Though this won't even touch the tip of major dialects in Yorkshire, it can offer a distinctive variation 'twixt the two main types.
Fast Eddie: See, that "they", followed by that "we" is making want to hear from someone in Yorkshire. No offense intended. <carefully watches ip-address geo-locater for a Yorkshire hit>
Robert: As my contributor page says (between the lines), I'm from the West Riding of Yorkshire. While I personally don't use anything stronger than the occasional 'owt', there are still plenty of young people who still use thee and thou, and this in a major town. The pronunciation has shifted to 'thi' and 'tha', e.g 'Tha knows nowt bout owt' ('Thou knows naught about aught') but they're still second person singular pronouns.
Furthermore, some of the older folk in the smaller villages may as well be speaking Old English, complete with dual pronouns, for all I can tell. Last Of The Summer Wine underplays the accent, not vice versa.
Fast Eddie: Interesting! Seth is as far south of Birmingham as you are north of it. Seth thinks the "thee/thou" usage is myth. He is usually truthful. Is Birmingham on some sort of cultural divide, like Maryland is in the States?
Seth: Actually i come from the south, but my IP is in the north since that's where i have Uni. I want your fancy pants IP tracker toy thing. I might not have heard the The thee/thou usage but that doesn't mean they don't use it i guess. For what it's worth my friend here hasn't heard it either.
Robert: The north of England generally starts five miles south of the speaker — if they're claiming to be northern. In London, the north starts at Watford. Here, it starts at the Humber. Up in Scotland it starts on the Tyne, and Yorkshire is lumped in with the soft south, almost French.
In practice, England is criss-crossed by several cultural dividing lines, both east-west and north-south. Birmingham is in the Midlands, neither northern nor southern, but something other. Seth and I may only be 200 miles apart, if that, but only on the ground. Culturally, the gap is somewhat larger, though we are both still English.
Fast Eddie: Forgive my ignorance. Here is what an American is translating out of the discussion: Seth is a big-city boy going to Uni in (what he feels is a nearly-rural) college-town. Robert lives out in the country, albeit in a place big enough to call a "town", but not a city.
I'll stop there. Is any of that right?
Seth: Errm no, its hardly "big city" where i am now is much larger than where i came from. We considered everything north of London north. (Also once this discussion is over i'm gonna wipe all this location information)
Robert: I'm being deliberately vague, but there over are half a million people in this town, legally a city. Seth lives somewhere pretty rural, within commuting range of London. I live somewhere urban, with open country close at hand. Neither really fits the county stereotypes, but it's still a noticeable cultural distance — far enough for both of us to be unreliable about what it's like in the other's county.
Fast Eddie: OK. I think I've got it. Thanks for all the help. There is a very solid accent/usage divide between Essex and Yorkshire. "Urbanity" is not the issue. That was a reaction to the American sitch, where the "country" around cities tend to have a much more noticeable accent than the local urban center. Second person singular pronoun forms still live in Yorkshire.
Weird. That may the last place on the planet where they do, in English.
Seth: Its mostly down to the fact that England is about the same size as a single american state. We have a massive population in a small area to the point where we have very little rural left. So north or south its very likely anyone you ask is from a town or city. Places like Cornwall and Yorkshire that can still be called Rural (Just about) are few and far between. (Wipes locational information above).
Another note, I've never heard of Welsh being treated as the same as Irish as far as comic relief is concerned.
If you want to know about what people think of Rural people in England ask them about the Welsh (They are often mocked for a particular act with sheep).
Irish are the heavy drinking - easy going comic relief and the Welsh are treated as the slightly backwards "They have their own ways" comic relief.
Also we find their language very funny, towns with 30 letter names (I dare you to look at a street sign that says Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch and not laugh - i dare you - people outside just call it Llanfair PG though) that sort of thing. The only place that makes people laugh more is Milton Keynes. (It's a long story, the town was designed to be a "New Town" some time in the 60's and it was outdated by the time they placed brick one)
Fast Eddie: Yup. It is hard to remember, sometimes, that England is smaller than Louisiana and has a population count like that of the entire Left Coast of the States. As for Wales ... everything I know about Wales was learnt from The Magician's House. There are badgers there. :-)
Silent Hunter: That was filmed in Canada.
Seth: I did some reading on Wikipedia and found (After a while)
Use of the singular second-person pronoun thou (often written tha) and thee.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yorkshire_dialect_and_accent#Vocabulary_and_grammar
Branfish: I'm a Yorkshire chap and I have to say that I don't think I've EVER heard someone say "thee" except when comically exaggerating their dialect. Also, in my experience, "daft" means the same thing everywhere. Also never heard "laik" being used for "play" or "spice" being used to mean "sweets". Apart from those four things, though, everything else in that wikipedia entry rings true. Oddly, the two things that seem to have not been mentioned in that whole wikipedia article are what I'd have thought were the most obvious differences between north and south - that Northerners don't put invisible 'R's into words like "pass" and "grass" and don't pronounce 'U's as 'A's (whereas Southerners often pronounce words like "under" to sound like "ander").
Mister Six: I've heard "spice" for "sweets", but only from the elderly. Many of these dialect details have been stomped flat in major urban and suburban areas by the homogenising effect of television. However, things such as "thee" and "thou" can still be heard in some of the more remote/secluded villages in Yorkshire and, I would guess, in some of the less... upmarket towns. Expect them to die out during our lifetimes, though. Full disclosure: I'm from the suburbs of Leeds, which is an upwardly-mobile Yorkshire city and thus not representative of everywhere in Yorkshire. Oh- and I can definitely imagine an older person saying of a disabled man: "he's a bit daft."
CaptainTimesink: Yank from the Upper Midwest butting in here, but I've heard my grandparents (second-generation Americans of Norwegian ancestry) referring to the clearish-whitish gumdrops as being "spice" flavored. I'd characterize their taste as being roughly minty. Don't know if that contributes anything or not.
Also, if the troper who contributed the phrase "rural with a twist of lime and 128-bit encryption" has not yet received truly mind-blowing sex for doing so, I stand ready to contribute.
Looney Toons: Whether I accept or not depends greatly upon the nature of your contribution.
Article says: "Despite the fact that the dialect should be irrelevant, the cast of the show Rome is entirely British, and their actual accents are used to reflect their characters' positions in the social hierarchy of Ancient Rome; i.e. the lower class soldiers usually speak with rougher Newcastle accents, while the noblemen speak with more refined accents."
Licky Lindsay says: I haven't actually seen Rome, but this is a trope all its own, and a fine old respectable one at that. Think about the way different varieties of English are used to represent different cultures in Lord of the Rings (I mean the book... the movies don't really do it justice). I'm pretty sure there's a name for this sort of thing in literary and/or movie criticism.
Mister Six: See The Queen's Latin.
Ack Sed:Just to muddy the waters further,accents vary widely between different counties,and even towns,of Northern Ireland. E.g. people from the northeast rural areas are frequently taken as Scottish by English,whilst Belfast people are seen as loud,annoying and ignorant and often have voices that would grate on a seagull's ears.
Branfish: "These all sadly appear far too often in British TV." ~ What the hell is that meant to mean? Does the writer think everyone on TV should speak in Received Pronunciation or something?
Silent Hunter: No, I meant the stereotypes appear far too often.
Branfish: Aha. Edited to clarify.
Silent Hunter: Regarding Sellers Market, that's Truth in Television, then and now. In 2001, 5.71 of the population of the Birmingham local authority area identified themselves as Indian, three times the England average. 10% are Pakistani in origin. Second or third generation immigrants are sounding more and more Brummie.
I went to the Rockefeller Center in New York City and told a guy by the lift I was from London. He started going into Cockney rhyming slang. I had to point out I'm not from that part of London. We don't all sound like Ray Winstone.
Brickie: Would people find it useful, do you think, if Youtube links to people speaking in the various accents were hotlinked in somehow? A clip of Gwen and Ianto for Welsh, a bit of Timothy Spall for Birmingham, some Jimmy Nail for Newcastle, that sort of thing.
Inkblot: That'd be fantastic. This page does a poor job of describing what the various British accents sound like.
Dave: How about a note about the occurence, especially in computer games of American voice actors trying to do British accents and doing a fine job until they come across something were the pronunciation is totally different. As an example the computer game Call of Duty has several American voice actors playing British people and we get the following words in the US style: "depot", "missile", "cell phone". To us English, this really jars on the ears and makes us want to shout "learn the language"!
Looney Toons: Can someone — if I don't get to it myself — please revise this page to make it look more like the American Accents page? A standardized look between the two would be great, and to be honest, American Accents is far more readable.
