Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Does anyone else find Northern English accents often difficult to understand? If someone spoke to me in a Lancashire or Geordie accent there's a good chance I'd have to struggle very much to understand them.
Does anyone else find Northern English accents often difficult to understand? If someone spoke to me in a Lancashire or Geordie accent there's a good chance I'd have to struggle very much to understand them.
I wouldn't go as far as "couldn't understand" but if I heard people talking to each other in broad Scouse or Geordie without expecting to hear it I'd have to listen in extra closely. I remember overhearing two men who looked like builders on the train home from work once here in London - they were a fair way away so I could only hear the occasional foreign-sounding intonation and guttural sound which sounded similar to English. I'm used to hearing foreign languages in London and trying to work out which language it is, so at first I thought it was Dutch, only it would be pretty odd to have Dutch builders working over here so I listened in a bit closer and they were Geordies, speaking in proper dialect as opposed to just an accent.
I grew up in Yorkshire and have family in Lancashire so can still pinpoint a lot of the northern accents to within a few miles, but I think a lot of southern English people would struggle to distinguish between them. Recently I was in a pub with a friend of mine who's London born and raised, and when somebody with a really strong Leeds accent started talking on TV he made a reference to them being from Lancashire, a mistake that I can't imagine any northerner ever making, but understandable I suppose if you've not been exposed to the variety of accents people up there still have.
Isn't Geordie practically a language of its own? Someone spoke it to me once and I couldn't understand anything.
A broad Yorkshire accent is hard to understand too and there are so many different vocabulary words that you can't tell whether it's the accent or the words themselves.
My husband is from Lancashire and uses a lot of words that were new to me. Most people here in the US can hardly understand him so I have to interpret. When I was in Lancashire I couldn't understand when two people were talking to each other. In addition to the vocabulary and the pronunciation, there was also a lilt to their speech, a little bit like singing. Two people meeting in the street sounded to me like, "Oh Ri?" "Am ri n Yu?" huh?
I remember some children came up to me and one of them had been elected to speak. He said, "Can you understand us?" I tried to explain that I could but I had to try hard and that I knew they probably couldn't understand me. They stood there for a second and then just walked away.
There are certain places in the south, places that must have given a lot of their people to my part of the USA, because when I hear them speaking I can barely tell whether they are English or American. But, yes, it's hard to understand the dialects of the North and worse when you get off the beaten path.
I grew up in Yorkshire and have family in Lancashire so can still pinpoint a lot of the northern accents to within a few miles, but I think a lot of southern English people would struggle to distinguish between them. Recently I was in a pub with a friend of mine who's London born and raised, and when somebody with a really strong Leeds accent started talking on TV he made a reference to them being from Lancashire, a mistake that I can't imagine any northerner ever making, but understandable I suppose if you've not been exposed to the variety of accents people up there still have.
Do even teenagers have them or do the youngest people in the North sound like they're from the South due to changing culture and media influence? Cheryl Cole is the most famous example of a Geordie accent and she's quite young (29), would she be among the youngest people who have the northern dialects that strong or does it go down to the very youngest people? I read Geordie is faring pretty well as far as surviving as a dialect.
Do even teenagers have them or do the youngest people in the North sound like they're from the South due to changing culture and media influence? Cheryl Cole is the most famous example of a Geordie accent and she's quite young (29), would she be among the youngest people who have the northern dialects that strong or does it go down to the very youngest people? I read Geordie is faring pretty well as far as surviving as a dialect.
I can't speak for Geordie as I don't know the region well enough. Where I come from in some of the older people (some of the real locals who've probably had family in the area for centuries and who have never lived anywhere else) you can sometimes hear words like 'watter', 'babby' and 'frozzen' for 'water', 'baby' and 'frozen', but while these dialect forms are dying out you still get teenagers with strong accents, though perhaps not as strong as their grandparents. People said with the coming of cinema that we'd all end up sounding American, which 80 years later is far from the truth so personally I think the media's influence is overstated. I'd say migration patterns potentially have a bigger effect, so as long as the small post-industrial towns with static/declining populations carry on not getting many people moving to them you'll still be able to go 10-20 miles and hear a change in accent for a while yet.
Does anyone else find Northern English accents often difficult to understand? If someone spoke to me in a Lancashire or Geordie accent there's a good chance I'd have to struggle very much to understand them.
No, they are kind of similar to our accents where I live. They say alot of the words that we say, for example, wean or naw.
Do even teenagers have them or do the youngest people in the North sound like they're from the South due to changing culture and media influence? Cheryl Cole is the most famous example of a Geordie accent and she's quite young (29), would she be among the youngest people who have the northern dialects that strong or does it go down to the very youngest people? I read Geordie is faring pretty well as far as surviving as a dialect.
No, anyone born in an area will have the local dialect. Not from the area, but thats what i've seen when i've visited. They don't have a standard english accent.
I can't speak for Geordie as I don't know the region well enough. Where I come from in some of the older people (some of the real locals who've probably had family in the area for centuries and who have never lived anywhere else) you can sometimes hear words like 'watter', 'babby' and 'frozzen' for 'water', 'baby' and 'frozen', but while these dialect forms are dying out you still get teenagers with strong accents, though perhaps not as strong as their grandparents. People said with the coming of cinema that we'd all end up sounding American, which 80 years later is far from the truth so personally I think the media's influence is overstated. I'd say migration patterns potentially have a bigger effect, so as long as the small post-industrial towns with static/declining populations carry on not getting many people moving to them you'll still be able to go 10-20 miles and hear a change in accent for a while yet.
My personal belief is that television influences slang but has little effect on accents. The brain processes recorded media differently from real-life media, so no matter how much Monty Python an American watches, they're not going to start speaking with an English accent.
Do even teenagers have them or do the youngest people in the North sound like they're from the South due to changing culture and media influence? Cheryl Cole is the most famous example of a Geordie accent and she's quite young (29), would she be among the youngest people who have the northern dialects that strong or does it go down to the very youngest people? I read Geordie is faring pretty well as far as surviving as a dialect.
Yes, even the youngest of children still have strong regional accents or dialects in most areas, in my experience. I don't believe media influence can change an accent - it's not like people only have regional accents because they've never been exposed to something else. A child will generally speak with the accent of where they grew up - even if their own parents have different accent. So if the greatest influence in their life, their parents, can not override the influence of local speech, why should the media?
North Yorkshire is the best accent, not being biased either!
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
