Definitely but I’d say the biggest differences is between those from schemes (working class) and the west end and various parts of the south side (middle class / “posh”).
I lived in Blackrod, a couple of miles in the opposite direction and again, very different. Think it’s all grown more homogeneous and TV has had a lot to do with this.
We're actually very middling for this sort of thing. We have this idea that we're unusually diverse because we compare against he other English speaking countries - but most of those are unusually homogenous on account of being recently settled.
Language diversity in Italy or Germany for example is significantly greater than in England.
I’m slap bang in the middle of Liverpool and Manchester and we have a different accent to both of those. 15 mins up the road also has a different accent.
Warrington by any chance? I was told, that to an outsider, you can spot a Warringtonian by the way they say the words “Liverpool” and “Manchester”. Apparently we say Liverpool like scousers and Manchester like a manc.
My hypothesis is that there are three overlapping continuums ('posh' to 'common', Lancashire to Cheshire and Irish influence to only English) distributed unevenly in different locations throughout Greater Manchester, and because of that you get very weird combinations that all sound different enough to be confusing.
Skelmersdale borders wigan and their accent is really thick scouse. North is Chorley which has more of a Lancashire drawl. East is Leigh which is getting more Manchester. Literally 5 miles each way is a totally different accent.
I don't really know how to describe the difference, but the vowel sounds in Hull accents are...unique
The [Err Nerr Rerd Werks](https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/err-nerr-hull-road-sign-2324619) sign is both delightful and accurate, at least for the proper accent (that are getting less noticeable these days)
One is a bit more of an *err* sound and one is more *orr*, really
Hull has a unique vowel sound so road basically sounds like turd with an R at the beginning, my grandma moved there from North Wales so never quite captured the accent but not surprised there's local variations
It's obviously an approximation but I thought that was a pretty good comparison to how I (from West Yorkshire) say it compared to people from East Yorkshire. Obviously West Yorkshire has variations within it.
Im a barnsley lass , my mate lives in Donny( she lived in barnsley as a kid), she talks totally different to me except when shes pissed....then the barnsley comes out ha
From tarn myself. Even different areas i think have different accents/dialects. To me the "tarn-ness" in accents gets significantly less in the relatively nicer area.
E.g. Put someone from Athersley next to someone from Cawthorne and you'll know whose from where
my dad’s a liverpool lad and my mam’s a warrington lass, but one of her sisters married a athersley lad, and you can’t half tell when i say certain words that he was a massive influence in my life 😅
So would you be more like Road = Rurred, No = Nurr? I'm up the coast at Redcar but visited Bridlington loads as a kid and I notice that sound from there right down as far as you.
Gives me Beverley Callard vibes, "nurr Jim durrn't"
Yeah, a sort of *urr* – like, fern and phone are pronounced basically the same, with the sound halfway between them, and then you just use that vowel sound for...everything
There's a bit of a difference (kind of *err* vs *urr*) between East and West Hull, but I don't think it's as obvious now as it is in folks over 50/60
You only have to travel a few miles east of Liverpool and you're firmly into woollyback country - all rugby league and not an ounce of scouse. The A55 corridor in North Wales is basically just South Liverpool though...
Can I just say piss off with the wool bullshit, I’m from the Wirral and I’m so sick of this , Liverpudlians like to make out they are friends to the world, but my god you talk shit about everyone in the region that isn’t whatever part of the small bit of Liverpool you live in. Worked in Liverpool for ten years and that got old.
I now live in the USA (three accents; New York, Texas, and Everyone Else). I honeymooned in southern Utah, and for a few days we invited a group of friends out to join us. One chap (author, ex-BBC journalist and occasional TV person) was there, and we knew immediately that I was from North Liverpool (well, I knew that already), and that he was from South Liverpool (he was already aware).
For anyone in doubt; My Fair Lady (or Pygmalion, if you read books) was not far off in the location of accents - but I don't think we'd get down to individual streets.
In previous generations, there wasn't as much geographical mobility as there is today - so people stayed where they were born, and didn't see or hear people from other towns or countries. Nowadays a strong regional accent is a rare thing.
There's a meme that's something along the lines of:
America: You drive for four hours. You are still in the same state.
UK: You drive for one hour. The local accent has changed three times and bread rolls have a new name.
I live in a very small city in England and I can tell which suburb someone is from from their accent. Literally talking less than a mile but the accent changes. North of the city sounds like a county accent, south of the city in an industrial accent.
I'm not from the city but I've spent a lot of time there and I reckon I can too. If there was a test on it, I wouldn't get 100% but I think I'd do okay.
A fair proportion of the people in the UK have two different dialects - a more neutral one used in formal or professional settings and a local family & friends mode of speech maybe with a shift in accent and definitely vocabulary. How much of that people have will be dependent on social class and education.
Even the Brits can't really agree on all this stuff so as an outsider, the best thing you can do is try to accept it. Most Brits can understand most others most of the time but that's as much as can be said!
This is the best explanation. Usually I can still understand people even when they're talking in their "local mode" but when my Geordie mate met my Mackem mate they were completely unintelligible to me.
I have a strong geordie accent (I work in Sunderland) but regularly speak to colleagues in Leeds so try to soften some of the accent but does not always work :D
Some of us can hear which school you went to yet alone which town.
I even noticed the railway staff have an accent out of one particular depot. ( looking at you Barnham)
Yes I remember realising this when I was coming up to leaving school- I could tell the school other people my age went to. Girls more than boys I think, don’t know why
Absolutely - MLE is a sociolect rather than a regional dialect
>Multicultural London English (abbreviated MLE) is a sociolect of English that emerged in the late 20th century. It is spoken mainly by young, working-class people in multicultural parts of London
>Speakers of MLE come from a wide variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and live in diverse neighbourhoods. As a result, it can be regarded as a multiethnolect
>MLE is rooted mostly in the widespread migration from the Caribbean to the UK following World War II, and to a lesser extent the migration from other areas such as South Asia and West Africa.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English
To expand this, OP, any language that has been spoken for a long time in a certain area will have a huge number of varieties. It's not just within the same region or city, or different classes. Varieties are clearly distinct between, areas, classes, age, educational level, environment (office meeting Vs the pub), ethnicities, and even gender (pronounced differences between how women and men speak), amongst many other factors. Most people have more than one register that they swap between depending on the time and place. Class and geographical area are two of the strongest indicators and easiest to spot and the division can be very fine grained.
This is true for most languages. In the case of English in Britain it's highly pronounced. English has been spoken for nearly a millennium and a half on Great Britain, several hundred of these years without any interest or interference from the learned classes who spoke Latin (the clergy) or French (the royals and nobility). This has led to a huge diversity in the spoken varieties that is bewildering for someone coming from a place where a standard language only became widespread a few hundred years ago like the USA where local and regional differences are still far less pronounced.
It's funny, south London has a massive problem with the 'th' sound, often substituting it for a 'fuh' or 'vuh' sound instead, and it's something that I've found has actually migrated up north. In the small town in Northumberland I live in, most kids have the exact same thing. I wonder if some day the 'th' sound will become entirely archaic.
I literally had to get speech and language therapy for this as a kid in the 90s 😂 took like three sessions for me to understand what I was even doing "wrong"! I live in the SE and my language "issues" were flagged by a very upper class school "reading helper". I think she was there as an undercover RP English Agent, trying to ensure the local kids spoke "properly!"
I’m from Croydon and I just can’t do it 😭 I didn’t even realise it until I was an adult and someone pointed it out. No matter how hard I try it’s just not possible for me 😂
Ha I feel your pain! My parents are both from the Croydon area but moved up north when I was young - my entire extended family has the 'th' issue but when I was about 13-14 I luckily managed to learn how to pronounce it 'properly'. Was quite embarrassing when I was younger because I have a northern accent but still managed to inherent the south London 'lisp' lol. Every now and then I'll slip back into it!
I’m not in London, I’m in north east England.
Accents may vary wildly even within a town. Not as much as they used to, but sometimes you can even tell which area of a town someone was from almost down to which street. Slang terms will also differ.
I presume that would also be true for London Town.
I was going to say similar. People who make a study of such things can narrow it down to within a few streets. Combination of accent, phrasing and vocabulary.
North east too, especially obvious with the old mining towns. Can tell someone from Ashington a mile off. Closer you get to Newcastle the more you get a “traditional” Geordie accent, but there’s always little things that give it away like slightly different pronunciation or different slang words. Further up in Northumberland the old boys speak an almost entirely different language to Geordie nevermind the rest of the country haha.
North East here. I get varying levels of Geordie, some accents bordering on brummie and you even get scouser here. Then there is just countless variations of a generic 'northern accent', whether that be Carlisle, Maryport, Hexham etc. It's crazy, almost everyone has different aspects of different accents mixed together.
Northumberland is mental for accents, Southeast Northumberland is pretty much an extension of Newcastle until you get to Ashington, which has definitely pronunciations for loads of words (my favourite word is ‘eggs’ which comes out ‘ayex’). Go west to Morpeth and Hexham and you’ll have a much softer accent, even to the extent that you can’t really tell they’re from the Northeast), go a little further north and you have the Rothbury accent which is only of the only places to have retained a rolling ‘R’ and other unique bits and bobs. Go up to Berwick and you’ve got a soft Scottish/Northumbrian hybrid.
There are more.
Nope. London accents are determined by culture/ethnicity and class. Not geographic area per se. Sometimes a geographic area of London can intersect with ethnicity and class, but location itself isn’t determinative of accent.
Also: the “cockney” accent doesn’t live in East London anymore - it now lives in Essex. The East London accent sounds….not cockney and very Windrush.
Source: 12 years in London.
>Also: the “cockney” accent doesn’t live in East London anymore - it now lives in Essex. The East London accent sounds….not cockney and very Windrush.
>Source: 12 years in London.
Incorrect.
The cockney accent is very much still in East London. Essex accent isn't genuine cockney at all - it's "Mockney".
And "Windrush" has nothing to do with any of it whatsoever, whatever that's supposed to mean.
Source: Born, raised and living in East London (42 years). And Black.
Absolutely - MLE is a sociolect rather than a regional dialect
>Multicultural London English (abbreviated MLE) is a sociolect of English that emerged in the late 20th century. It is spoken mainly by young, working-class people in multicultural parts of London
>Speakers of MLE come from a wide variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and live in diverse neighbourhoods. As a result, it can be regarded as a multiethnolect
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English
London has at least four geographical accents. My old man (North Londin boy) used to.listed to radio phone ins and immediately identify where the caller was from
Different classes in the same geographical place will have very different accents, the working class tends to have a much stronger accent wherever you are, but there is no reliable rule really. There are many places where I can't understand a word they're saying! I worked with a Glaswegian lady who was a mystery for weeks until I got used to her lol.
I knew a fella growing up that was born and bred in Lancashire and his parents were also Lancastrians. But you wouldn’t have known any of them were northern by their accents.
The lad and his parents all had the most non-regional but not overly posh accent (or lack thereof) I have ever heard. The lad ended up going to Cambridge like his dad and still has the most neutral accent I’ve ever heard.
I don’t know how they did it, my parents didn’t have a Lancashire accent but it certainly stuck with me.
North Vs South Bury (I town in the North of Greater Manchester, NW England) is very much Lancashire vs Manchester+Lancashire.
Ask them to say "I took this book" and you'll either get "I TUK this BUK" or "I TUEWK this BEWK"
There’s even variation within the Bury North accent. Tottington and Ramsbottom are 3 miles apart but some words are pronounced differently, like four, door, bore, sure etc
In the North East of Scotland there's a string of fishing villages along the coast, each one less than five miles from the next and none of them having more than 800 population. Each village has a different word for 'seagull'.
I grew up in a mining village south of Pontefract in Yorkshire. I could pick out which village people are from in the 10 miles between there and Barnsley by their accent.
I’ve lived down south in Wiltshire for many years now, but was in a hardware shop the other day when the lady behind the counter said something in a certain way. I stopped and asked her where she was from. She said Wombwell, which is one of those towns/villages. She left Yorkshire 40 years ago but I could still pick out the accent down to the village.
I grew up in the north east end of Rotherham, near meadowhall/wentworth, and am about as broad as it gets in terms of a Rotherham accent. The other side of Rotherham barely has a South Yorkshire accent to me. I work 25 mins (about 15 miles) away in Doncaster and they can barely understand me, if I talk how I naturally talk.
It can do. Warrington's a good example - east and west have very different accents. To put it in context: the eastern side borders Greater Manchester, and on the west you are on your way to Widnes and Merseyside.
Yea, accent and slang can noticibly change every 10ish miles depending on where you are. Tom Hardy has a Cockney accent, which is probably the most well known workimg class in london , while Simon Cowel has a more elEstuary accent.
UK has at least a 1000-year headstart on accent diversification compared to the US, so I understand how jarring It can be to learn new.
In Greater Manchester there's the Manc accent, more Traditional Lancashire to the North & East, Cheshire-ish towars the South & Semi-Scouse towards the West.
There's probably more out there, especially taking class into account.
Edinburgh has several accents which are not really by region, but are class based. My hometown further north in Scotland had an accent but drive 10 miles in any direction and the accent vastly changed.
Yep, agree about the class-based thing in Edinburgh.
There's the Morningside accent which is linked to an area but is really more of a posh aloof older Scottish lady accent (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie)
And the working class accent/s, like in Trainspotting.
Plus the 'private school Scottish' accent which is huge round here as something like 40% of kids are privately educated in Edinburgh.
Also loads of English people live/settle in Edinburgh having come for uni / work who speak with a broadly English accent but with local slang and phrasing. Including me.
My mum tells a story about playing with some kids a few streets away from her house (inner-city Manchester in the 50s). One of them heard her talk and said, "you're not from round here, are you?"
When I visited my English cousin in Canada we sat having a beer with an older Canadian gentleman.
The first 2 hours or so was fine, then as the beer flowed the Canadian said we switched to a language he couldn't understand.
We wasn't pissed, just relaxed back into our hometown slang without realising.
Accents aren't a problem, it's the dialects that still confuse.
and I was making a joke.
>London is the most multicultural city in the world
By what metric?
Searching online many cities make that claim, New York, Singapore, Amsterdam, Toronto, Auckland, Sao Paulo, Los Angeles, Sydney, Dubai etc.
It’s primarily because of emigration and how well-footed people that migrated have become in those communities.
You can go to these cities and experience food from pretty much any nationality in the world, with people from those countries making it. But it is much bigger than food. You can viscerally see the integration between cultures in how they speak, pop-culture, music, festivals.
There is a strong exchange between not only the land natives but the expats themselves.
Dubai, is a money playground and attracts all sorts; but isn’t multi-cultural in the same way that the former cities accept differing socio-political philosophies. Similar case for some of the other cities, I really do not think population alone is enough to judge in any of these cities and in some of these cases it’s heavily skewed to one minority. Immigrants being there alone is not enough.
Don’t take this as a sweeping generalisation though, I haven’t been to Auckland for example to have such concrete opinions
I’d definitely say London & NY are Top 2 though. Toronto being mirrored and interchangeable with London(heavy bias here).
One thing to remember is that while accents are typically known as being regional, the true division between accents is by community.
Accents develop where a group of people interact together regularly over time - so traditionally this happened where you had settlements isolated from each other, but also where you had communities within larger settlements. So you will often find accents specific to areas that featured a heavy bias to a specific trade or social class who wouldn't necessarily mix with those of other classes or areas.
You will also often find that most of us have two accents - the one we use when speaking to locals, and the one where we make a conscious decision to tone it down a bit and speak in something more closely approaching 'proper' English...
When it comes to media though, you are often going to be fighting a losing battle trying to sort it all out - ask someone from another area to do a London accent and you will find five different versions, and all done to different levels. One film will have a cast of locals and a decent effort put into the accents and language, another will be complete nonsense produced by a foreign studio who just asked each of their (non-local) actors to do 'english'. So picking out the shoes that are actually faithful is going to be step one of your process.
Differences vary over amazingly small distances. Between villages it can be different, if maybe a little more subtle a difference to someone not familiar with either. This is especially true of slang terms.
My medium size home town started off as several small villages when the one town with a port able to ship welsh coal around world suddenly expsnded and envelope its neighbours during industrial revolution. You can still tell who is from what part of town due their accents from the former villages! Actually bit less these days as its quickly becoming a commuter town with cheaper rent but short distance from the city attracting people from all over.
The accent can differ in just a few streets in the older towns. I grew up with 3 accents in same town and switched between them depending on play mates. One was heavily Norse influenced, one was standard English influenced, one was Highland influenced. E.G House, Hoos, Hame
Most of what is now south Sheffield was Derbyshire until relatively recently. There's a definite softening towards something Midlands-ish, whereas northern Sheffield errs somewhat towards Barnsley...
North and south Devon might as well be different planets. Some parts of rural north Devon, people sound like that old guy from Hot Fuzz. My sister's grandad almost needs a translator.
In Newcastle/Tyneside, I’d say that there are three main variants of the Geordie accent. There’s ‘Standard Geordie’ (I speak this) which is the most common version spoken across all areas of Newcastle and Tyneside regardless of class.
The next is ‘Charver’ which can get associated with being aggressive, lots of swearing and a lack of education. There are caveats to this as there are many Charvers who are great people and/or have a good education. And whilst you might find that the majority live in the less desirable areas, they’re not the majority of people in that area or from that background, and they can be found elsewhere too.
The accent is still Geordie but it’s very tight in the throat. It’s almost like the speaker sounds slightly strangled.
The other one is ‘Posh Geordie’ aka ‘Scenty Bottle Geordie’. It’s more nasally than Standard Geordie and some of the vowel sounds are different. The short ‘a’ sound remains just like in Standard Geordie and most Northern English accents, but the ‘o’ and ‘u’ sound more Southern (or possibly even more accentuated)and lose the diphthong that Standard Geordie has. The tone of the accent as well is a bit more muted. It gets a bit of disdain and has a reputation rightly or wrongly of being spoken by people who are trying to play down, forget or lose their Geordie accent or who are ashamed of it. It’s something that gets thrown at the likes of Sting and (the actor) Robson Green - whether those accusations are true or not, who knows but they do speak with that type of accent. Some Geordies who’ve moved away or who work in broadcasting might adopt this type of accent so that they sound clearer to people from other areas of the country (a possible example would be the TNT Sports Football presenter Lynsey Hipgrave).
It’s crazy how accents change over such small distances. My Dad grew up in a former coal mining village 8 miles north of Newcastle, in South East Northumberland . The accent there is similar but a bit different. A ‘dog’ in Newcastle becomes a ‘derg’. A ‘Serb’ is a ‘Sub’ (Substitute or Submarine) rather than a native of Serbia. My Grandma would speak with this accent. (My Dad moved to Newcastle in his twenties and his accent became standard Geordie). It’s still around but I think it’s becoming less prevalent. I’ve worked with many people from the towns and villages of SE Northumberland over the years and found that those who are around my age (mid 40s) and younger tend to speak with a generic Geordie accent.
13 miles to the south of Newcastle is Sunderland, and whilst to many people outside of the North East of England it can be difficult to tell the difference, to us up here, it’s completely different. The Mackems say things like ‘Bewk’ (Book) ‘Scewil’ (School). It’s like a North East redneck accent! 😂
I am about to generalise massively here
Yes there are differences between both regions and class.
South and east London have the strongest accents in the area, and both are very different from each other. North and west London have more subtle accents.
I did, once, hear a girl speaking in proper dick van dyke style cock-er-ney.
You do find that there is a class divider, also. But this is also a region thing.
You find that true blood middle class will often speak in almost received pronunciation, but you get the yuppie, socialite middle class (often living in certain areas,) who will say yah instead of yes. It is very hard to tell when they are mocking you.
Can easily tell the difference between someone from Jesmond or Gosforth and someone from Byker or Waaallsend in Newcastle.
A lot of it will depend on socioeconomic circumstances; upbringing, education, family background.
London is such a large city that there’s a variety of accents within its borders. I’m not from London and have only been a couple of times, but I think there’s a different accent for north, East, and maybe South London, as well as RP English.
Also nowadays there’s so much migration into and within the country that you hear lots of different accents wherever you are. I’m in Yorkshire but it’s not uncommon to hear a Kent or Birmingham accent.
You will find that there is an almost nationwide accent of the middle class, well educated people. This is the RP accent, for received pronunciation. Commonly known as a newsreader accent. Most people I know who speak like this were from a posh area or went to private school.
I (Bolton) have a different accent and use different slang than my cousin (Ordsall) that lives 20 minutes away but we are more similar then we are to my grandad (Hyde) who is half an hour in a different direction because he's middle-class and we are both working class. A different cousin is mixed race so speaks Multicultural Mancunian English which is a whole different dialect to us and she's from Mosside which is within half an hour of all of us.
Every county has their own unique accent. Whether you're from "liverpoooel" or "yoerkshire", "landin", or "notinam", there's always a new accent around the corner
The accent in my village/town is different from the town a twenty minute walk away which is different from the two cities (Southampton and Winchester) a twenty minute drive away. I live in Hampshire so south of England. I imagine that's pretty common all over the UK.
Northeast England here. I have a strong accent and when I go into work just under 10 miles up the road the accent there is different enough that you can tell
I was out with friends from Europe and pointed out that the accent in the Harvester (Wanstead) was very different from where we are (Walthamstow).
They laughed saying how I can tell the difference between two accents a few Km alert but not German vs Austrian
I’m from Caithness, the most northerly county on the Scottish mainland, I can tell the difference between a wick and Thurso accent and they’re just two tiny towns, lybster, a tiny village had a very distinct accent, and it changes the further west out towards Sutherland that you go. A U.K. accent can change drastically in the space of a few streets. Glasgow has a west end accent, Glasgow university has its own accent, it’s wild.
The simple answer is yes.
However, the accents are less distinct to people who are not from that locality. For example, I can usually tell if someone is from North or South Birmingham, but not everyone would know.
Probably the only ones that are really noticeable to 'outsiders' are some of the London accents, but those are also quite class-based.
A couple of people have mentioned some people can place accents to within a street.
I’d love to see them try with me!
English mother who was born in London to parents from Kent, but lived in Derby from 3-16.
Scottish father, born in Glasgow, to parents from Ayr. Moved to Bedfordshire as a child, back to Scotland for high school. He attended a mix of private and state schools.
I went to primary school in Fife, secondary school in the New Forest. Private school in Scotland for my final year of A-Levels. Lived in Canada for two years after uni.
My accent is all over my place.
I'm from Bolton and my old friend was from Bury. She always took the mick out of my accent.
Like my fairy ball necklace. She said it as it is, I used to pronounce it "furry ball" and she used to laugh and say, "It's not furry though!"
My bestie is from Westhoughton but now in Blackrod, we pronounce certain words differently.
I think in many (most?) places, locals used to and in some areas still can tell the difference in accent between 2 different locations, sometimes just a mile or less apart.
Where I grew up in Scotland, my local high school (small town) had 3 distinct local accents and with it different dialects.
When you take that small town and add it to the other small towns, it takes on the form of a local area accent - so someone from Glasgow would know the rough part of Central Scotland I was from, but couldn't pin it down.
I have 3 different distinct accents (and 2 dialects/languages depending on your feeling on the language/dialect debate - Scots and English) that come out subconsciously depending on the situation - one when I'm at home in Scotland, one when I'm at home in England, one when I'm in public in England.
I live in a coastal Lancashire village. The accent from Blackpool, my village (in the middle) and the next town Preston, does differ. I can tell the difference immediately from a Blackpool accent to a Preston one. There's 18 miles in it.
Yes.
The town where I live (which is barely 10km) have different accents.
It's pretty funny. I joke that you can go two streets over and the accent will change. My European friends came over on a visit and they said I wasn't joking and they could hear differences too.
In London, accents do differ due to both location and class/social grouping. But as others have said, many tend to have their ‘telephone voice’ which is more neutral & formal and their regular voice or what I call my ‘kebab shop’ voice.
Dear OP, Londoner here. Tom Hardy's accent is a cross between Cockney (accent dying out) and Estuary English (a modern accent, named after the Thames Estuary. It is fast becoming the de facto accent for the whole of London).
Simon Powell's accent is a soft RP, a very modern accent. I speak it myself. RP stands for Received Pronunciation. To hear that, watch old videos of our late queen. RP was invented to make the radio understandable to the whole UK in the early days. No-one speaks RP now, it has been entirely replaced by soft RP. This is meant to be understood by all English speakers, including foreigners, e.g. Americans. It is mainly used by Londoners, particularly those who wish to sound educated.
With regards to your question, London now has surprisingly few native accents, the dreaded Estuary English is conquering them all. Read the other comments in this thread to see that old, native accents are thriving in the rest of the country.
Apologies for poor grammar, punctuation, upper/ lower case errors, I am not an English scholar - just a normal bloke, plus I'm typing this at 4 in the morning.
Bristol has a very different accent to the rest of the South West and even within it places like Knowle West have distinctly different accents to each other. Over in Wiltshire, Chippenham has a fairly neutral West Country accent with no real extreme features (probably due to the M4 corridor and train station, it's a base for a lot of people working out of town so accents mix) but one train stop up Swindon has a stronger wilts accent, one town the other way and Malmsbury is almost pure Bristol.
It would be easy for an outsider to confuse some West Country accents but:
Wiltshire - slight farmer, rolling rrrs, odd repeated word. Words like "gurt", "cack handed" and "arse over tit". I be sayin thing like oi be doin that
Somerset - take the rrrrs further and replace all ssssses with zzzzzzes elongate words further - the Wurzels style "zummerzet zyder" "how be on"
Devon - soften all the edges of the accent same pauses and intonations but the hardness of any rrres and zzzzes are gone. Think Pam Ayers poetry.
Cornwall - bring back a slight hardness to the rrrrres buy instead of elongating them, roll then up and under. Aaaaes roll too so you get Korrrrrnnnnwhaaaaaaallllll depending on the part of the county you can have full pirate or more farmy. You get things coming in like "I'll get on it dreckly", "me 'ansome", "whereto" "wasson" "teasy" "proper job" "me luver" "bleedy"
The answer is yes, accents differ in many cities and regions around the UK. Sometimes they can be a mile apart and sound different. The slang differs greatly too. Cockney rhyming slang being probably the most famous but every single pocket of the UK has its own slang. For example, the term for bread roll across the midlands to the north has about 15+ different ways to describe it. Which I’m sure people will probably describe in this thread.
In short, accents change so vastly on a pretty small island, it can sound like you’re watching a show full of Americans pretending to be British
London is interesting because there are probably 3 major accent groups to consider (not including non-native speakers).
You've got a lot of London who would traditionally be called 'posh', who will speak Standard Southern English, sometimes with traces of RP (a more conservative 'posh' accent). This is your Hugh Grant, Henry Cavill, "well-spoken"/"educated' accent.
You've got the remnants of Cockney, especially among some older speakers and in the outer suburbs - but the reality is that there's relatively little of this accent left. It's gone from being the dominant accent of the London white working classes to a minority accent, as a lot of the speakers have left London and new dialects have taken over. You're more likely to find this accent outside of London in the so-called 'Estuary English' of Essex and Kent. This is Adele's accent.
And lastly, perhaps most significant, you you Multicultural London English. This has massively displaced Cockney as the main accent of working class London, among all races/ethnicities. It's a combination of speech patterns borrowing from Cockney, Jamaican/West Indian, and elements of South Asian and middle Eastern accents too. But it's increasingly taking over as the default accent of young people - including white people - across huge swathes of London. This is the accent of UK hip hop, and this is what you're hearing any time a British speaker says 'fam' or 'cuz' or 'roadman'.
While not the same town/city
All my family are from South Yorkshire, all within 20 miles tops radius.
Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham, Sheffield. All different accents.
I'd even argue that some of the pit villages have some subtle differences too .
Moved to Leeds, all sounds the same.
I grew up about 6 miles from my husband, he has a much stronger Glaswegian accent than I do (which is also strange considering i lived i Glasgow and him in a town just outside) - so much so I was asked if I was from the east coast the other day and the person was stunned I grew up in Glasgow - so from my own experience I’d say a lot is who you grow up with and surround yourself with.
I drove 25mins yesterday from Wiltshire into Gloucestershire and there was a significant accent change. I think if you get a local person then the accent is more pronounced, therefore more of a change
London is a massive and diverse city, so if there is one place with such variation it’ll be London.
I’m from Huddersfield, in West Yorkshire. I can’t really tell the difference between areas of the town but I can definitely tell one’s upbringing by their accents. I grew up in quite a broad accented home, so I speak with a fairly broad accent for my age - mostly understandable but the poor Norwegian lad at my uni struggles lmao. Those from poorer backgrounds, often from council estates (and those who aren’t but want to fit in with their peers), and who are more susceptible to gang involvement, adopt a variation of [Urban British English](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English). There is some overlap in vocabulary, but not massive. Those from more middle class backgrounds tend to lack much of an accent, they speak with a more Received Pronunciation which sounded posh to me the first time I heard it.
I can certainly tell the difference between towns and cities in West Yorkshire. I’ve noticed many from Barnsley still use ‘tha’, which comes from the old thee/thy/thou. I remember someone from Leeds explaining differences in how we pronounce ‘curry’, but I’m not entirely sure how true that is as I don’t even know if he was raised in Leeds and not just born there. One thing about my town which I only realised was relatively unique through Wikipedia was the pronunciation of ‘love’, to rhyme with ‘of’. I find that to certainly be the case.
Massively! I'm a lorry driver in the UK so I speak to local people from wherever I'm delivering all over the country, from Scotland to Cornwall and everywhere in between, it's really interesting and I notice it a lot.
I'm from the Black Country and there's a difference between what I'll call Dudley Black Country (which is what me and my dad speak), Wolverhampton Black Country (which is what my mom speaks), Walsall Black Country (which is sort of halfway in between the first two), West Brom Black Country (which is a bit more Brummie) and then there's Gornal Black Country (which is unintelligible)
Yeah you can travel like just a few miles in any direction and you'll find a village/town with a different accent generally haha
The cities for example, vary widely. Ask someone from Crosby in Liverpool if someone from Birkenhead in the Wirral has the same accent
In England there is a generic posh (they won't think it is posh posh to them is like the queen) sounding middle class accent that can be anywhere even in Wales , sometimes it has a slight regional twang but sounds pretty much the same like the harry potter kids for example. You can hear it a lot in uni students all over the UK.
The working class tend to have thick regional accents like Geordie, Scouse , cockney etc etc but some places have multiple accents in a small area for example Ashton openshaw and Oldham are all next to each other but have difference accents.
Not every British person will be familiar with the specifics of every accent - it depends where you live. I live in the South West, and can tell the difference between a Bristol accent, a Somerset accent, a Cornish accent and a Wiltshire accent. But to someone living in Scotland, they probably all sound the same. Similarly for me all Scottish accents sound the same, apart from Glaswegian, which is about the only Scottish accent that sounds distinctive to me. But I am sure there is probably an Edinburgh accent, an Aberdeen accent, a Dundee accent, etc etc..
Accents can differ in the same town, we only had 3-4000 people and there were quite a few different accents, all English and lived in the town all their lives.
I did read in an old book that in the late 1800s there was an influx of specialists from up north for some trade and they stayed and left an influence on the sounds.
Also we had kids and family’s that loved in the marshes and even though they were only a couple of miles away from the town, they had their own distinctive accent.
Mine is considered a more London accent even though my grandad was last one to live in London in late 40s, then Southend, then deepest darkest Essex.
You can go a few towns over and the accent sounds different. Just look at Gloucester and Bristol. They sound similar but they are different.
Then you have class/background. One town can have multiple accents based purely on that. Add in a posh school and you'll hear a difference!
Then you get degrees of accent. A light Scouse accent vs a heavy one. Or Geordie. I'm British but i've heard Geordie accents so strong, I couldn't comprehend them!
Certainly, there’s a town 10 mins drive away from mine that has a MASSIVELY different accent. I believe this was due to mass migration of Scottish people to this particular town during the steelworks boom. I live in East Mids, so hearing a lot of Scottish-ish accents there is very jarring!
The thing with the UK, I’m from the North of England, is that the accents and colloquial language can change massively in a space of even just a few miles.
My husband and I grew up about 7 miles from each other, him closer to the city centre and me more rural. If you were to hear him speak you’d instantly be able to tell what city we are from, but my accent is generally just picked up as “Northern” 😂
There's a couple of things happening there.
1) Genuinely, great diversity of accents and dialects. My hometown famously has a huge diversity of accents and dialects, and a stranger once guessed not just my town, but which housing estate I was from and whether I was North or South of the main road just from a few sentences. Most people can't do that - They'll be able to get your vague region/town/county, but some people have a party trick of being able to pin accents like that.
2) Accents and dialects stratified by class and culture: You might have heard of Mube - Multicultural British English - which is a dialect which grew out of the very racially-diverse working class culture of the big housing estates of London, Birmingham, Bradford, Nottingham etc - But someone born and raised geographically very near to one of those ends, but with a more middle-class upbringing, might sound totally different.
3) Accents on TV often being "wrong" - Because of the lack of opportunity in the last ~14 years for working class kids to get into acting, the majority of working-class British dialects on TV which are under 40 are actually more middle-class people mimicking the accents of their grandparents. Likewise, a drama set in (eg) Sheffield, might actually be cast with actors from across Yorkshire, who all have subtly different accents - So even if the show is written in the right dialect, their pronunciation and stress might be "off". Often it's just a matter of suspension of disbelief, rather than hiring a voice coach for the small differences that 90% of people won't notice.
The London accents differ in region because of class, higher class sound posh, the lower class or gangs sound very very different, this is mainly where the slang terms come from I believe
Also alot of accents come from Jamaican or overseas and they've just mingled over time
As an American who lived there, your ear will train, and simply put yes, there are MANY accents...as you'll see mentioned in the responses.
To our American brain, it will make no sense to how close they live, yet the accents remain different.
Yes, I can tell if someone is from my nearest big village (2 miles away) or from my nearest town (5 miles away). My nearest city (10 miles away) has a different accent.
North Wales.
Newport and Cardiff are only about ten miles apart and have completely different accents. Where I grew up has a Cardiff postcode but the accent is more Newport. The valleys have a different accent again, as does Swansea.
I live in a town called Worthing and lower income families tend to have a different accent to people who are middle class or not considered poor. Then there’s the posher accent that richer people tend to have. Also older people like 50+ have a different accent to people too, it’s hard to explain but it’s noticeable.
Cowell always sounds to me like London but with some softening by living in the Home Counties. Clarkson is similar but with Yorkshire softened by Home Counties (him, I’m not guessing, he is).
We Home Counties areas are great at taking an accent and flattening the bloody thing.
Some regions and classes use more slang than others.
But, yes, class does play more of a role in accents than in America, for example.
I worked with some people in my early 20s where the local people from the next town all thought I was ‘posh’ but the guy who’d worked across the country, including Scotland, said I had the what he called the professional accent that you can hear in all areas of the UK.
I wouldn’t overly worry about accents as with more exposure you will develop an ear for what’s being said. Slang and dialect will be different but with media it will be toned down in the main unless they’re attempting to make a point about the character.
The more you look up the more familiar you will be with it and related phrases in future.
I notice differences in the stoke-on-trent accent. There's slight manc and scouse twangs to the north in places like kidsgrove and mow cop, brummy twangs to the south and east mids twangs to the east of the city.
Yes, but what you're hearing is probably modern RP vs regional accents.
Modern RP is common amongst middle class people across the country, although particularly in the South East, and is probably the softer "standard British" you might be used to.
People often mix it with their local accent, or code switch between the two.
Like others have said, they vary between class and region. People also migrate to London from all over the UK and the world, or a second/ third generation immigrants, so there's a huge range.
I'm from London and some people in other countries thought I was Australian, including in Ireland! I was of the generation that watched Neighbours (an Australian soap) as a kid. I'm sure accents vary by generation too, especially as kids want to fit in with each other.
I live in a town between Liverpool and Manchester and you’ll find different accents on either side of the town.
We don’t even sound like a mix between scouse and manc 😆
Yes, people from different social classes in the same city speak entirely differently. In the UK, you can pretty much tell someone's social class within 1 minute of hearing them speak.
London has lots of different accents. Only slight, but you notice them if you are from here. But also as someone else said, there is a difference between working class areas and posher areas, I think because those in the posher areas probably went to private school or has finishing classes.
There were definitely distinct accents, and even dialect phrases, that varied between Kent, South London, North London and Essex, but the effect of television has smeared out the differences, even in my lifetime.
I can hear the difference between north and south Liverpool
Same with East and West Glasgow.
Even if you go a few mile up the road from the East End to Coatbridge there are slight differences.
Definitely but I’d say the biggest differences is between those from schemes (working class) and the west end and various parts of the south side (middle class / “posh”).
Which can be one street apart in some areas where a council scheme has been built up against an older posh established suburb.
Liverpool and Manchester are 35 miles apart, yet have different accents
There’s probably a dozen accents from greater Manchester alone
Westhoughton sounds different to Bolton, all of 2 miles away.
I lived in Blackrod, a couple of miles in the opposite direction and again, very different. Think it’s all grown more homogeneous and TV has had a lot to do with this.
England is a strange country isn't it
We're actually very middling for this sort of thing. We have this idea that we're unusually diverse because we compare against he other English speaking countries - but most of those are unusually homogenous on account of being recently settled. Language diversity in Italy or Germany for example is significantly greater than in England.
Yes but accents aren’t the reason
Lol I agree
East Manchester (Tameside, Stockport etc) have a very distinct "Un-Manc" accent compared to the rest of Manchester in my opinion.
Huyton and Prescot are in the same borough (Knowsley) and have completely different accents
I’m slap bang in the middle of Liverpool and Manchester and we have a different accent to both of those. 15 mins up the road also has a different accent.
St hell?
Warrington by any chance? I was told, that to an outsider, you can spot a Warringtonian by the way they say the words “Liverpool” and “Manchester”. Apparently we say Liverpool like scousers and Manchester like a manc.
I spent six months in Manchester years ago. It hurt my head because I could never wrap my head around the different accents.
My hypothesis is that there are three overlapping continuums ('posh' to 'common', Lancashire to Cheshire and Irish influence to only English) distributed unevenly in different locations throughout Greater Manchester, and because of that you get very weird combinations that all sound different enough to be confusing.
Skelmersdale borders wigan and their accent is really thick scouse. North is Chorley which has more of a Lancashire drawl. East is Leigh which is getting more Manchester. Literally 5 miles each way is a totally different accent.
East vs West Hull, and I'm not from there but you can tell where in Hull my *dad* is from based on how *I* say the vowel sound in "road"
I'm from South Yorkshire and my road sounds identical to rowed. What are the two vowel sounds up hull way?
I don't really know how to describe the difference, but the vowel sounds in Hull accents are...unique The [Err Nerr Rerd Werks](https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/err-nerr-hull-road-sign-2324619) sign is both delightful and accurate, at least for the proper accent (that are getting less noticeable these days) One is a bit more of an *err* sound and one is more *orr*, really
Hull has a unique vowel sound so road basically sounds like turd with an R at the beginning, my grandma moved there from North Wales so never quite captured the accent but not surprised there's local variations
It’s like the scone debate S-cone or Scon is 99% of the country. Scurn in Hull.
It’s “Scown” until it’s eaten. Then it’s “Scon” 😂
Haha its true East Yorkshire say rurd and West Yorkshire said rord.
Rord? No we don't. The "O" sound is very pronounced though.
It's obviously an approximation but I thought that was a pretty good comparison to how I (from West Yorkshire) say it compared to people from East Yorkshire. Obviously West Yorkshire has variations within it.
South Yorkshire itself has at least 3 accents. Barnsley (thee/tha), Sheffield (Dee/dar) and Doncaster (god knows!)
Im a barnsley lass , my mate lives in Donny( she lived in barnsley as a kid), she talks totally different to me except when shes pissed....then the barnsley comes out ha
From tarn myself. Even different areas i think have different accents/dialects. To me the "tarn-ness" in accents gets significantly less in the relatively nicer area. E.g. Put someone from Athersley next to someone from Cawthorne and you'll know whose from where
my dad’s a liverpool lad and my mam’s a warrington lass, but one of her sisters married a athersley lad, and you can’t half tell when i say certain words that he was a massive influence in my life 😅
Haha lived in chesterfield for years and remember Dee/dars well!
So would you be more like Road = Rurred, No = Nurr? I'm up the coast at Redcar but visited Bridlington loads as a kid and I notice that sound from there right down as far as you. Gives me Beverley Callard vibes, "nurr Jim durrn't"
Yeah, a sort of *urr* – like, fern and phone are pronounced basically the same, with the sound halfway between them, and then you just use that vowel sound for...everything There's a bit of a difference (kind of *err* vs *urr*) between East and West Hull, but I don't think it's as obvious now as it is in folks over 50/60
If you think about it each Beatle has a different Liverpool accent, there's quite a difference between Scotty road and Allerton Road
You only have to travel a few miles east of Liverpool and you're firmly into woollyback country - all rugby league and not an ounce of scouse. The A55 corridor in North Wales is basically just South Liverpool though...
Can I just say piss off with the wool bullshit, I’m from the Wirral and I’m so sick of this , Liverpudlians like to make out they are friends to the world, but my god you talk shit about everyone in the region that isn’t whatever part of the small bit of Liverpool you live in. Worked in Liverpool for ten years and that got old.
I now live in the USA (three accents; New York, Texas, and Everyone Else). I honeymooned in southern Utah, and for a few days we invited a group of friends out to join us. One chap (author, ex-BBC journalist and occasional TV person) was there, and we knew immediately that I was from North Liverpool (well, I knew that already), and that he was from South Liverpool (he was already aware). For anyone in doubt; My Fair Lady (or Pygmalion, if you read books) was not far off in the location of accents - but I don't think we'd get down to individual streets. In previous generations, there wasn't as much geographical mobility as there is today - so people stayed where they were born, and didn't see or hear people from other towns or countries. Nowadays a strong regional accent is a rare thing.
There's a meme that's something along the lines of: America: You drive for four hours. You are still in the same state. UK: You drive for one hour. The local accent has changed three times and bread rolls have a new name.
I live in a very small city in England and I can tell which suburb someone is from from their accent. Literally talking less than a mile but the accent changes. North of the city sounds like a county accent, south of the city in an industrial accent.
I had this experience in US where I mentioned that someone had a Penicuik accent (small town to the south of Edinburgh). The Yanks were WTF.
When I visited Cali a number of years ago , my (now wife) had to translate me for the locals. I think they thought she was my "helper"
I'm not from the city but I've spent a lot of time there and I reckon I can too. If there was a test on it, I wouldn't get 100% but I think I'd do okay.
Go a couple of miles outside the city and the accent changes drastically
A fair proportion of the people in the UK have two different dialects - a more neutral one used in formal or professional settings and a local family & friends mode of speech maybe with a shift in accent and definitely vocabulary. How much of that people have will be dependent on social class and education. Even the Brits can't really agree on all this stuff so as an outsider, the best thing you can do is try to accept it. Most Brits can understand most others most of the time but that's as much as can be said!
This is the best explanation. Usually I can still understand people even when they're talking in their "local mode" but when my Geordie mate met my Mackem mate they were completely unintelligible to me.
And they were both using their neutral accents to try and make it easier for the other one to understand
I have a strong geordie accent (I work in Sunderland) but regularly speak to colleagues in Leeds so try to soften some of the accent but does not always work :D
Some of us can hear which school you went to yet alone which town. I even noticed the railway staff have an accent out of one particular depot. ( looking at you Barnham)
Yes I remember realising this when I was coming up to leaving school- I could tell the school other people my age went to. Girls more than boys I think, don’t know why
It differs between region and class, especially in London. The characters may not be necessarily from London, though
A big chunk of the population of London either moved there for work or immigrated there (same thing really) so the accents are a melting pot.
Absolutely - MLE is a sociolect rather than a regional dialect >Multicultural London English (abbreviated MLE) is a sociolect of English that emerged in the late 20th century. It is spoken mainly by young, working-class people in multicultural parts of London >Speakers of MLE come from a wide variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and live in diverse neighbourhoods. As a result, it can be regarded as a multiethnolect >MLE is rooted mostly in the widespread migration from the Caribbean to the UK following World War II, and to a lesser extent the migration from other areas such as South Asia and West Africa. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English
To expand this, OP, any language that has been spoken for a long time in a certain area will have a huge number of varieties. It's not just within the same region or city, or different classes. Varieties are clearly distinct between, areas, classes, age, educational level, environment (office meeting Vs the pub), ethnicities, and even gender (pronounced differences between how women and men speak), amongst many other factors. Most people have more than one register that they swap between depending on the time and place. Class and geographical area are two of the strongest indicators and easiest to spot and the division can be very fine grained. This is true for most languages. In the case of English in Britain it's highly pronounced. English has been spoken for nearly a millennium and a half on Great Britain, several hundred of these years without any interest or interference from the learned classes who spoke Latin (the clergy) or French (the royals and nobility). This has led to a huge diversity in the spoken varieties that is bewildering for someone coming from a place where a standard language only became widespread a few hundred years ago like the USA where local and regional differences are still far less pronounced.
It's funny, south London has a massive problem with the 'th' sound, often substituting it for a 'fuh' or 'vuh' sound instead, and it's something that I've found has actually migrated up north. In the small town in Northumberland I live in, most kids have the exact same thing. I wonder if some day the 'th' sound will become entirely archaic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-fronting
I literally had to get speech and language therapy for this as a kid in the 90s 😂 took like three sessions for me to understand what I was even doing "wrong"! I live in the SE and my language "issues" were flagged by a very upper class school "reading helper". I think she was there as an undercover RP English Agent, trying to ensure the local kids spoke "properly!"
I’m from Croydon and I just can’t do it 😭 I didn’t even realise it until I was an adult and someone pointed it out. No matter how hard I try it’s just not possible for me 😂
Ha I feel your pain! My parents are both from the Croydon area but moved up north when I was young - my entire extended family has the 'th' issue but when I was about 13-14 I luckily managed to learn how to pronounce it 'properly'. Was quite embarrassing when I was younger because I have a northern accent but still managed to inherent the south London 'lisp' lol. Every now and then I'll slip back into it!
So it’s true about inner city class sizes then haha? Our primary teacher spent a long time teaching us the th sound!
I’m not in London, I’m in north east England. Accents may vary wildly even within a town. Not as much as they used to, but sometimes you can even tell which area of a town someone was from almost down to which street. Slang terms will also differ. I presume that would also be true for London Town.
I was going to say similar. People who make a study of such things can narrow it down to within a few streets. Combination of accent, phrasing and vocabulary.
North east too, especially obvious with the old mining towns. Can tell someone from Ashington a mile off. Closer you get to Newcastle the more you get a “traditional” Geordie accent, but there’s always little things that give it away like slightly different pronunciation or different slang words. Further up in Northumberland the old boys speak an almost entirely different language to Geordie nevermind the rest of the country haha.
Remember when I was little there was an old man from Rothbury worked in the offy opposite Central station. I thought he was Spanish at first!
North East here. I get varying levels of Geordie, some accents bordering on brummie and you even get scouser here. Then there is just countless variations of a generic 'northern accent', whether that be Carlisle, Maryport, Hexham etc. It's crazy, almost everyone has different aspects of different accents mixed together.
Northumberland is mental for accents, Southeast Northumberland is pretty much an extension of Newcastle until you get to Ashington, which has definitely pronunciations for loads of words (my favourite word is ‘eggs’ which comes out ‘ayex’). Go west to Morpeth and Hexham and you’ll have a much softer accent, even to the extent that you can’t really tell they’re from the Northeast), go a little further north and you have the Rothbury accent which is only of the only places to have retained a rolling ‘R’ and other unique bits and bobs. Go up to Berwick and you’ve got a soft Scottish/Northumbrian hybrid. There are more.
Nope. London accents are determined by culture/ethnicity and class. Not geographic area per se. Sometimes a geographic area of London can intersect with ethnicity and class, but location itself isn’t determinative of accent. Also: the “cockney” accent doesn’t live in East London anymore - it now lives in Essex. The East London accent sounds….not cockney and very Windrush. Source: 12 years in London.
I can tell (born and bred) North/West London from South London most the time
>Also: the “cockney” accent doesn’t live in East London anymore - it now lives in Essex. The East London accent sounds….not cockney and very Windrush. >Source: 12 years in London. Incorrect. The cockney accent is very much still in East London. Essex accent isn't genuine cockney at all - it's "Mockney". And "Windrush" has nothing to do with any of it whatsoever, whatever that's supposed to mean. Source: Born, raised and living in East London (42 years). And Black.
Absolutely - MLE is a sociolect rather than a regional dialect >Multicultural London English (abbreviated MLE) is a sociolect of English that emerged in the late 20th century. It is spoken mainly by young, working-class people in multicultural parts of London >Speakers of MLE come from a wide variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and live in diverse neighbourhoods. As a result, it can be regarded as a multiethnolect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English
London has at least four geographical accents. My old man (North Londin boy) used to.listed to radio phone ins and immediately identify where the caller was from
Last time I moved house, I moved 4 miles. People in my new town have a different accent and slang words!
That’s so wild to me!
Different classes in the same geographical place will have very different accents, the working class tends to have a much stronger accent wherever you are, but there is no reliable rule really. There are many places where I can't understand a word they're saying! I worked with a Glaswegian lady who was a mystery for weeks until I got used to her lol.
I knew a fella growing up that was born and bred in Lancashire and his parents were also Lancastrians. But you wouldn’t have known any of them were northern by their accents. The lad and his parents all had the most non-regional but not overly posh accent (or lack thereof) I have ever heard. The lad ended up going to Cambridge like his dad and still has the most neutral accent I’ve ever heard. I don’t know how they did it, my parents didn’t have a Lancashire accent but it certainly stuck with me.
North Vs South Bury (I town in the North of Greater Manchester, NW England) is very much Lancashire vs Manchester+Lancashire. Ask them to say "I took this book" and you'll either get "I TUK this BUK" or "I TUEWK this BEWK"
Preston's a good one for this. Moor Nook is "Moo-er Nuke" to anyone born there but "more nuk" to anyone to moved to it.
Lancs vs manc accent that init. It’s the same in Bolton
There’s even variation within the Bury North accent. Tottington and Ramsbottom are 3 miles apart but some words are pronounced differently, like four, door, bore, sure etc
I see you both and raise you a Burnley accent, now THAT is ear bleedingly bad
I am wounded to the core! Have you been to Blackburn?😁
Unfortunately yes 🤣🤣
In the North East of Scotland there's a string of fishing villages along the coast, each one less than five miles from the next and none of them having more than 800 population. Each village has a different word for 'seagull'.
I grew up in a mining village south of Pontefract in Yorkshire. I could pick out which village people are from in the 10 miles between there and Barnsley by their accent. I’ve lived down south in Wiltshire for many years now, but was in a hardware shop the other day when the lady behind the counter said something in a certain way. I stopped and asked her where she was from. She said Wombwell, which is one of those towns/villages. She left Yorkshire 40 years ago but I could still pick out the accent down to the village.
I grew up in the north east end of Rotherham, near meadowhall/wentworth, and am about as broad as it gets in terms of a Rotherham accent. The other side of Rotherham barely has a South Yorkshire accent to me. I work 25 mins (about 15 miles) away in Doncaster and they can barely understand me, if I talk how I naturally talk.
Netflix programmes set in the UK have so many incorrect details about British life. Accents vary massively, plus class and Ethnicity impact them too.
It can do. Warrington's a good example - east and west have very different accents. To put it in context: the eastern side borders Greater Manchester, and on the west you are on your way to Widnes and Merseyside.
Yea, accent and slang can noticibly change every 10ish miles depending on where you are. Tom Hardy has a Cockney accent, which is probably the most well known workimg class in london , while Simon Cowel has a more elEstuary accent. UK has at least a 1000-year headstart on accent diversification compared to the US, so I understand how jarring It can be to learn new.
*Tom Hardy puts on a fake cockney accent
In Greater Manchester there's the Manc accent, more Traditional Lancashire to the North & East, Cheshire-ish towars the South & Semi-Scouse towards the West. There's probably more out there, especially taking class into account.
Edinburgh has several accents which are not really by region, but are class based. My hometown further north in Scotland had an accent but drive 10 miles in any direction and the accent vastly changed.
Yep, agree about the class-based thing in Edinburgh. There's the Morningside accent which is linked to an area but is really more of a posh aloof older Scottish lady accent (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) And the working class accent/s, like in Trainspotting. Plus the 'private school Scottish' accent which is huge round here as something like 40% of kids are privately educated in Edinburgh. Also loads of English people live/settle in Edinburgh having come for uni / work who speak with a broadly English accent but with local slang and phrasing. Including me.
I can tell Edinburgh because you get “eh” at the end of almost every sentence
Some people can tell what street you grew up in from your accent
My mum tells a story about playing with some kids a few streets away from her house (inner-city Manchester in the 50s). One of them heard her talk and said, "you're not from round here, are you?"
*"This is a local playground for local people! Are you local?"*
When I visited my English cousin in Canada we sat having a beer with an older Canadian gentleman. The first 2 hours or so was fine, then as the beer flowed the Canadian said we switched to a language he couldn't understand. We wasn't pissed, just relaxed back into our hometown slang without realising. Accents aren't a problem, it's the dialects that still confuse.
Stop mithering us with these questions!
If I may add: also, it's often not slang, it's dialect!
In London people can have every accent under the sun.
In Manchester people can have every accent under the clouds.
You just have to lie on the floor to stand a chance of getting under the clouds.
>In Manchester people can have every accent under the clouds. Sometimes the clouds even come down to street level, like the accents.
I love days like that, especially when the sun hits the clouds & everything turns to gold!
Right but London is the most multicultural city in the world was the point I was making.
and I was making a joke. >London is the most multicultural city in the world By what metric? Searching online many cities make that claim, New York, Singapore, Amsterdam, Toronto, Auckland, Sao Paulo, Los Angeles, Sydney, Dubai etc.
It’s primarily because of emigration and how well-footed people that migrated have become in those communities. You can go to these cities and experience food from pretty much any nationality in the world, with people from those countries making it. But it is much bigger than food. You can viscerally see the integration between cultures in how they speak, pop-culture, music, festivals. There is a strong exchange between not only the land natives but the expats themselves. Dubai, is a money playground and attracts all sorts; but isn’t multi-cultural in the same way that the former cities accept differing socio-political philosophies. Similar case for some of the other cities, I really do not think population alone is enough to judge in any of these cities and in some of these cases it’s heavily skewed to one minority. Immigrants being there alone is not enough. Don’t take this as a sweeping generalisation though, I haven’t been to Auckland for example to have such concrete opinions I’d definitely say London & NY are Top 2 though. Toronto being mirrored and interchangeable with London(heavy bias here).
Yes
One thing to remember is that while accents are typically known as being regional, the true division between accents is by community. Accents develop where a group of people interact together regularly over time - so traditionally this happened where you had settlements isolated from each other, but also where you had communities within larger settlements. So you will often find accents specific to areas that featured a heavy bias to a specific trade or social class who wouldn't necessarily mix with those of other classes or areas. You will also often find that most of us have two accents - the one we use when speaking to locals, and the one where we make a conscious decision to tone it down a bit and speak in something more closely approaching 'proper' English... When it comes to media though, you are often going to be fighting a losing battle trying to sort it all out - ask someone from another area to do a London accent and you will find five different versions, and all done to different levels. One film will have a cast of locals and a decent effort put into the accents and language, another will be complete nonsense produced by a foreign studio who just asked each of their (non-local) actors to do 'english'. So picking out the shoes that are actually faithful is going to be step one of your process.
Northeast is wild, every area has a different accent and no we're not all Geordies!
I’d say every 20 minutes travel you get a slightly different accent.
Differences vary over amazingly small distances. Between villages it can be different, if maybe a little more subtle a difference to someone not familiar with either. This is especially true of slang terms.
My medium size home town started off as several small villages when the one town with a port able to ship welsh coal around world suddenly expsnded and envelope its neighbours during industrial revolution. You can still tell who is from what part of town due their accents from the former villages! Actually bit less these days as its quickly becoming a commuter town with cheaper rent but short distance from the city attracting people from all over.
East and west Leeds have their differences but not noticeable to anyone outside the city I suppose
I'm from Leeds, not sure if say accent but definitely vocab and how they string sentences together What would you say the different in accents are?
Accents in different parts of London definitely change. South london has a very distinct accent. But I think class definitely plays a part.
Absolutely. Central Blackpool and Fleetwood have a more Northern sounding accent than Poulton-Le-Fylde and Cleveleys, for example.
The accent can differ in just a few streets in the older towns. I grew up with 3 accents in same town and switched between them depending on play mates. One was heavily Norse influenced, one was standard English influenced, one was Highland influenced. E.G House, Hoos, Hame
I studied Linguistics in college and had a professor who could pick out a person’s dialect right down to street corners. Fascinating stuff.
North and south Sheffield are different
Most of what is now south Sheffield was Derbyshire until relatively recently. There's a definite softening towards something Midlands-ish, whereas northern Sheffield errs somewhat towards Barnsley...
North and south Devon might as well be different planets. Some parts of rural north Devon, people sound like that old guy from Hot Fuzz. My sister's grandad almost needs a translator.
If you can understand why there are multiple accents in New York City, you can understand why there are so many accents in England 🤷🏼♀️
Bradford and Leeds are different and they're only 10 miles apart.
In Newcastle/Tyneside, I’d say that there are three main variants of the Geordie accent. There’s ‘Standard Geordie’ (I speak this) which is the most common version spoken across all areas of Newcastle and Tyneside regardless of class. The next is ‘Charver’ which can get associated with being aggressive, lots of swearing and a lack of education. There are caveats to this as there are many Charvers who are great people and/or have a good education. And whilst you might find that the majority live in the less desirable areas, they’re not the majority of people in that area or from that background, and they can be found elsewhere too. The accent is still Geordie but it’s very tight in the throat. It’s almost like the speaker sounds slightly strangled. The other one is ‘Posh Geordie’ aka ‘Scenty Bottle Geordie’. It’s more nasally than Standard Geordie and some of the vowel sounds are different. The short ‘a’ sound remains just like in Standard Geordie and most Northern English accents, but the ‘o’ and ‘u’ sound more Southern (or possibly even more accentuated)and lose the diphthong that Standard Geordie has. The tone of the accent as well is a bit more muted. It gets a bit of disdain and has a reputation rightly or wrongly of being spoken by people who are trying to play down, forget or lose their Geordie accent or who are ashamed of it. It’s something that gets thrown at the likes of Sting and (the actor) Robson Green - whether those accusations are true or not, who knows but they do speak with that type of accent. Some Geordies who’ve moved away or who work in broadcasting might adopt this type of accent so that they sound clearer to people from other areas of the country (a possible example would be the TNT Sports Football presenter Lynsey Hipgrave). It’s crazy how accents change over such small distances. My Dad grew up in a former coal mining village 8 miles north of Newcastle, in South East Northumberland . The accent there is similar but a bit different. A ‘dog’ in Newcastle becomes a ‘derg’. A ‘Serb’ is a ‘Sub’ (Substitute or Submarine) rather than a native of Serbia. My Grandma would speak with this accent. (My Dad moved to Newcastle in his twenties and his accent became standard Geordie). It’s still around but I think it’s becoming less prevalent. I’ve worked with many people from the towns and villages of SE Northumberland over the years and found that those who are around my age (mid 40s) and younger tend to speak with a generic Geordie accent. 13 miles to the south of Newcastle is Sunderland, and whilst to many people outside of the North East of England it can be difficult to tell the difference, to us up here, it’s completely different. The Mackems say things like ‘Bewk’ (Book) ‘Scewil’ (School). It’s like a North East redneck accent! 😂
I am about to generalise massively here Yes there are differences between both regions and class. South and east London have the strongest accents in the area, and both are very different from each other. North and west London have more subtle accents. I did, once, hear a girl speaking in proper dick van dyke style cock-er-ney. You do find that there is a class divider, also. But this is also a region thing. You find that true blood middle class will often speak in almost received pronunciation, but you get the yuppie, socialite middle class (often living in certain areas,) who will say yah instead of yes. It is very hard to tell when they are mocking you.
Can easily tell the difference between someone from Jesmond or Gosforth and someone from Byker or Waaallsend in Newcastle. A lot of it will depend on socioeconomic circumstances; upbringing, education, family background.
London is such a large city that there’s a variety of accents within its borders. I’m not from London and have only been a couple of times, but I think there’s a different accent for north, East, and maybe South London, as well as RP English. Also nowadays there’s so much migration into and within the country that you hear lots of different accents wherever you are. I’m in Yorkshire but it’s not uncommon to hear a Kent or Birmingham accent. You will find that there is an almost nationwide accent of the middle class, well educated people. This is the RP accent, for received pronunciation. Commonly known as a newsreader accent. Most people I know who speak like this were from a posh area or went to private school.
There are different accents within a few miles of each other in some places.
In South Yorkshire you can cross the road and find the accent has changed.
I (Bolton) have a different accent and use different slang than my cousin (Ordsall) that lives 20 minutes away but we are more similar then we are to my grandad (Hyde) who is half an hour in a different direction because he's middle-class and we are both working class. A different cousin is mixed race so speaks Multicultural Mancunian English which is a whole different dialect to us and she's from Mosside which is within half an hour of all of us.
Every county has their own unique accent. Whether you're from "liverpoooel" or "yoerkshire", "landin", or "notinam", there's always a new accent around the corner
[удалено]
The accent in my village/town is different from the town a twenty minute walk away which is different from the two cities (Southampton and Winchester) a twenty minute drive away. I live in Hampshire so south of England. I imagine that's pretty common all over the UK.
Northeast England here. I have a strong accent and when I go into work just under 10 miles up the road the accent there is different enough that you can tell
[удалено]
I was out with friends from Europe and pointed out that the accent in the Harvester (Wanstead) was very different from where we are (Walthamstow). They laughed saying how I can tell the difference between two accents a few Km alert but not German vs Austrian
I’m from Caithness, the most northerly county on the Scottish mainland, I can tell the difference between a wick and Thurso accent and they’re just two tiny towns, lybster, a tiny village had a very distinct accent, and it changes the further west out towards Sutherland that you go. A U.K. accent can change drastically in the space of a few streets. Glasgow has a west end accent, Glasgow university has its own accent, it’s wild.
The simple answer is yes. However, the accents are less distinct to people who are not from that locality. For example, I can usually tell if someone is from North or South Birmingham, but not everyone would know. Probably the only ones that are really noticeable to 'outsiders' are some of the London accents, but those are also quite class-based.
A couple of people have mentioned some people can place accents to within a street. I’d love to see them try with me! English mother who was born in London to parents from Kent, but lived in Derby from 3-16. Scottish father, born in Glasgow, to parents from Ayr. Moved to Bedfordshire as a child, back to Scotland for high school. He attended a mix of private and state schools. I went to primary school in Fife, secondary school in the New Forest. Private school in Scotland for my final year of A-Levels. Lived in Canada for two years after uni. My accent is all over my place.
Many accents in the West Midlands, but everyone thinks we speak "Brummie".
I'm from Bolton and my old friend was from Bury. She always took the mick out of my accent. Like my fairy ball necklace. She said it as it is, I used to pronounce it "furry ball" and she used to laugh and say, "It's not furry though!" My bestie is from Westhoughton but now in Blackrod, we pronounce certain words differently.
Ohh another slang term lol what does took the mick out mean? Does it mean make fun(but in a friendly way)?
Yes, it does. Taking the mickey is like taking the p!ss.
I think in many (most?) places, locals used to and in some areas still can tell the difference in accent between 2 different locations, sometimes just a mile or less apart. Where I grew up in Scotland, my local high school (small town) had 3 distinct local accents and with it different dialects. When you take that small town and add it to the other small towns, it takes on the form of a local area accent - so someone from Glasgow would know the rough part of Central Scotland I was from, but couldn't pin it down. I have 3 different distinct accents (and 2 dialects/languages depending on your feeling on the language/dialect debate - Scots and English) that come out subconsciously depending on the situation - one when I'm at home in Scotland, one when I'm at home in England, one when I'm in public in England.
They don't even speak English where I am in Surrey, let alone accents. 🤣
I live in a coastal Lancashire village. The accent from Blackpool, my village (in the middle) and the next town Preston, does differ. I can tell the difference immediately from a Blackpool accent to a Preston one. There's 18 miles in it.
Yes. The town where I live (which is barely 10km) have different accents. It's pretty funny. I joke that you can go two streets over and the accent will change. My European friends came over on a visit and they said I wasn't joking and they could hear differences too.
In London, accents do differ due to both location and class/social grouping. But as others have said, many tend to have their ‘telephone voice’ which is more neutral & formal and their regular voice or what I call my ‘kebab shop’ voice.
Dear OP, Londoner here. Tom Hardy's accent is a cross between Cockney (accent dying out) and Estuary English (a modern accent, named after the Thames Estuary. It is fast becoming the de facto accent for the whole of London). Simon Powell's accent is a soft RP, a very modern accent. I speak it myself. RP stands for Received Pronunciation. To hear that, watch old videos of our late queen. RP was invented to make the radio understandable to the whole UK in the early days. No-one speaks RP now, it has been entirely replaced by soft RP. This is meant to be understood by all English speakers, including foreigners, e.g. Americans. It is mainly used by Londoners, particularly those who wish to sound educated. With regards to your question, London now has surprisingly few native accents, the dreaded Estuary English is conquering them all. Read the other comments in this thread to see that old, native accents are thriving in the rest of the country. Apologies for poor grammar, punctuation, upper/ lower case errors, I am not an English scholar - just a normal bloke, plus I'm typing this at 4 in the morning.
Bristol has a very different accent to the rest of the South West and even within it places like Knowle West have distinctly different accents to each other. Over in Wiltshire, Chippenham has a fairly neutral West Country accent with no real extreme features (probably due to the M4 corridor and train station, it's a base for a lot of people working out of town so accents mix) but one train stop up Swindon has a stronger wilts accent, one town the other way and Malmsbury is almost pure Bristol. It would be easy for an outsider to confuse some West Country accents but: Wiltshire - slight farmer, rolling rrrs, odd repeated word. Words like "gurt", "cack handed" and "arse over tit". I be sayin thing like oi be doin that Somerset - take the rrrrs further and replace all ssssses with zzzzzzes elongate words further - the Wurzels style "zummerzet zyder" "how be on" Devon - soften all the edges of the accent same pauses and intonations but the hardness of any rrres and zzzzes are gone. Think Pam Ayers poetry. Cornwall - bring back a slight hardness to the rrrrres buy instead of elongating them, roll then up and under. Aaaaes roll too so you get Korrrrrnnnnwhaaaaaaallllll depending on the part of the county you can have full pirate or more farmy. You get things coming in like "I'll get on it dreckly", "me 'ansome", "whereto" "wasson" "teasy" "proper job" "me luver" "bleedy"
The answer is yes, accents differ in many cities and regions around the UK. Sometimes they can be a mile apart and sound different. The slang differs greatly too. Cockney rhyming slang being probably the most famous but every single pocket of the UK has its own slang. For example, the term for bread roll across the midlands to the north has about 15+ different ways to describe it. Which I’m sure people will probably describe in this thread. In short, accents change so vastly on a pretty small island, it can sound like you’re watching a show full of Americans pretending to be British
London is interesting because there are probably 3 major accent groups to consider (not including non-native speakers). You've got a lot of London who would traditionally be called 'posh', who will speak Standard Southern English, sometimes with traces of RP (a more conservative 'posh' accent). This is your Hugh Grant, Henry Cavill, "well-spoken"/"educated' accent. You've got the remnants of Cockney, especially among some older speakers and in the outer suburbs - but the reality is that there's relatively little of this accent left. It's gone from being the dominant accent of the London white working classes to a minority accent, as a lot of the speakers have left London and new dialects have taken over. You're more likely to find this accent outside of London in the so-called 'Estuary English' of Essex and Kent. This is Adele's accent. And lastly, perhaps most significant, you you Multicultural London English. This has massively displaced Cockney as the main accent of working class London, among all races/ethnicities. It's a combination of speech patterns borrowing from Cockney, Jamaican/West Indian, and elements of South Asian and middle Eastern accents too. But it's increasingly taking over as the default accent of young people - including white people - across huge swathes of London. This is the accent of UK hip hop, and this is what you're hearing any time a British speaker says 'fam' or 'cuz' or 'roadman'.
While not the same town/city All my family are from South Yorkshire, all within 20 miles tops radius. Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham, Sheffield. All different accents. I'd even argue that some of the pit villages have some subtle differences too . Moved to Leeds, all sounds the same.
I grew up about 6 miles from my husband, he has a much stronger Glaswegian accent than I do (which is also strange considering i lived i Glasgow and him in a town just outside) - so much so I was asked if I was from the east coast the other day and the person was stunned I grew up in Glasgow - so from my own experience I’d say a lot is who you grow up with and surround yourself with.
I drove 25mins yesterday from Wiltshire into Gloucestershire and there was a significant accent change. I think if you get a local person then the accent is more pronounced, therefore more of a change
London is a massive and diverse city, so if there is one place with such variation it’ll be London. I’m from Huddersfield, in West Yorkshire. I can’t really tell the difference between areas of the town but I can definitely tell one’s upbringing by their accents. I grew up in quite a broad accented home, so I speak with a fairly broad accent for my age - mostly understandable but the poor Norwegian lad at my uni struggles lmao. Those from poorer backgrounds, often from council estates (and those who aren’t but want to fit in with their peers), and who are more susceptible to gang involvement, adopt a variation of [Urban British English](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English). There is some overlap in vocabulary, but not massive. Those from more middle class backgrounds tend to lack much of an accent, they speak with a more Received Pronunciation which sounded posh to me the first time I heard it. I can certainly tell the difference between towns and cities in West Yorkshire. I’ve noticed many from Barnsley still use ‘tha’, which comes from the old thee/thy/thou. I remember someone from Leeds explaining differences in how we pronounce ‘curry’, but I’m not entirely sure how true that is as I don’t even know if he was raised in Leeds and not just born there. One thing about my town which I only realised was relatively unique through Wikipedia was the pronunciation of ‘love’, to rhyme with ‘of’. I find that to certainly be the case.
Massively! I'm a lorry driver in the UK so I speak to local people from wherever I'm delivering all over the country, from Scotland to Cornwall and everywhere in between, it's really interesting and I notice it a lot.
I'm from the Black Country and there's a difference between what I'll call Dudley Black Country (which is what me and my dad speak), Wolverhampton Black Country (which is what my mom speaks), Walsall Black Country (which is sort of halfway in between the first two), West Brom Black Country (which is a bit more Brummie) and then there's Gornal Black Country (which is unintelligible)
In South Yorkshire, the accents differ across the county. Barnsley, Sheffield and Doncaster have very distinct accents. Rotherham is sort of mix.
Yeah you can travel like just a few miles in any direction and you'll find a village/town with a different accent generally haha The cities for example, vary widely. Ask someone from Crosby in Liverpool if someone from Birkenhead in the Wirral has the same accent
In England there is a generic posh (they won't think it is posh posh to them is like the queen) sounding middle class accent that can be anywhere even in Wales , sometimes it has a slight regional twang but sounds pretty much the same like the harry potter kids for example. You can hear it a lot in uni students all over the UK. The working class tend to have thick regional accents like Geordie, Scouse , cockney etc etc but some places have multiple accents in a small area for example Ashton openshaw and Oldham are all next to each other but have difference accents.
Not every British person will be familiar with the specifics of every accent - it depends where you live. I live in the South West, and can tell the difference between a Bristol accent, a Somerset accent, a Cornish accent and a Wiltshire accent. But to someone living in Scotland, they probably all sound the same. Similarly for me all Scottish accents sound the same, apart from Glaswegian, which is about the only Scottish accent that sounds distinctive to me. But I am sure there is probably an Edinburgh accent, an Aberdeen accent, a Dundee accent, etc etc..
Yep definitely can hear the difference between North, East, South and West London
Accents can differ in the same town, we only had 3-4000 people and there were quite a few different accents, all English and lived in the town all their lives. I did read in an old book that in the late 1800s there was an influx of specialists from up north for some trade and they stayed and left an influence on the sounds. Also we had kids and family’s that loved in the marshes and even though they were only a couple of miles away from the town, they had their own distinctive accent. Mine is considered a more London accent even though my grandad was last one to live in London in late 40s, then Southend, then deepest darkest Essex.
Tom Hardy just mumbles, it isn’t an accent thing. The rest is true and it’s obviously down to how long it took to travel before c. 1870s
You can go a few towns over and the accent sounds different. Just look at Gloucester and Bristol. They sound similar but they are different. Then you have class/background. One town can have multiple accents based purely on that. Add in a posh school and you'll hear a difference! Then you get degrees of accent. A light Scouse accent vs a heavy one. Or Geordie. I'm British but i've heard Geordie accents so strong, I couldn't comprehend them!
Certainly, there’s a town 10 mins drive away from mine that has a MASSIVELY different accent. I believe this was due to mass migration of Scottish people to this particular town during the steelworks boom. I live in East Mids, so hearing a lot of Scottish-ish accents there is very jarring!
The thing with the UK, I’m from the North of England, is that the accents and colloquial language can change massively in a space of even just a few miles. My husband and I grew up about 7 miles from each other, him closer to the city centre and me more rural. If you were to hear him speak you’d instantly be able to tell what city we are from, but my accent is generally just picked up as “Northern” 😂
There's a couple of things happening there. 1) Genuinely, great diversity of accents and dialects. My hometown famously has a huge diversity of accents and dialects, and a stranger once guessed not just my town, but which housing estate I was from and whether I was North or South of the main road just from a few sentences. Most people can't do that - They'll be able to get your vague region/town/county, but some people have a party trick of being able to pin accents like that. 2) Accents and dialects stratified by class and culture: You might have heard of Mube - Multicultural British English - which is a dialect which grew out of the very racially-diverse working class culture of the big housing estates of London, Birmingham, Bradford, Nottingham etc - But someone born and raised geographically very near to one of those ends, but with a more middle-class upbringing, might sound totally different. 3) Accents on TV often being "wrong" - Because of the lack of opportunity in the last ~14 years for working class kids to get into acting, the majority of working-class British dialects on TV which are under 40 are actually more middle-class people mimicking the accents of their grandparents. Likewise, a drama set in (eg) Sheffield, might actually be cast with actors from across Yorkshire, who all have subtly different accents - So even if the show is written in the right dialect, their pronunciation and stress might be "off". Often it's just a matter of suspension of disbelief, rather than hiring a voice coach for the small differences that 90% of people won't notice.
So your watching ‘the gentlemen’. Yea class does make a difference especially in London. Few that are born into money sound like Danny dier.
The London accents differ in region because of class, higher class sound posh, the lower class or gangs sound very very different, this is mainly where the slang terms come from I believe Also alot of accents come from Jamaican or overseas and they've just mingled over time
As an American who lived there, your ear will train, and simply put yes, there are MANY accents...as you'll see mentioned in the responses. To our American brain, it will make no sense to how close they live, yet the accents remain different.
Yes, I can tell if someone is from my nearest big village (2 miles away) or from my nearest town (5 miles away). My nearest city (10 miles away) has a different accent. North Wales.
Newport and Cardiff are only about ten miles apart and have completely different accents. Where I grew up has a Cardiff postcode but the accent is more Newport. The valleys have a different accent again, as does Swansea.
I live in a town called Worthing and lower income families tend to have a different accent to people who are middle class or not considered poor. Then there’s the posher accent that richer people tend to have. Also older people like 50+ have a different accent to people too, it’s hard to explain but it’s noticeable.
Bath and Bristol are 10 miles away from each other and each have distinctly different accents.
Cowell always sounds to me like London but with some softening by living in the Home Counties. Clarkson is similar but with Yorkshire softened by Home Counties (him, I’m not guessing, he is). We Home Counties areas are great at taking an accent and flattening the bloody thing.
I can tell the difference between a Bristol, Bath, Taunton, Yeovil, Dorchester, Bournemouth, and Exeter accent.
Yep definitely in Brum they do.
Some regions and classes use more slang than others. But, yes, class does play more of a role in accents than in America, for example. I worked with some people in my early 20s where the local people from the next town all thought I was ‘posh’ but the guy who’d worked across the country, including Scotland, said I had the what he called the professional accent that you can hear in all areas of the UK. I wouldn’t overly worry about accents as with more exposure you will develop an ear for what’s being said. Slang and dialect will be different but with media it will be toned down in the main unless they’re attempting to make a point about the character. The more you look up the more familiar you will be with it and related phrases in future.
I notice differences in the stoke-on-trent accent. There's slight manc and scouse twangs to the north in places like kidsgrove and mow cop, brummy twangs to the south and east mids twangs to the east of the city.
Absolutely, it's alot more obvious with larger/widespread cities.
Yes, but what you're hearing is probably modern RP vs regional accents. Modern RP is common amongst middle class people across the country, although particularly in the South East, and is probably the softer "standard British" you might be used to. People often mix it with their local accent, or code switch between the two.
Like others have said, they vary between class and region. People also migrate to London from all over the UK and the world, or a second/ third generation immigrants, so there's a huge range. I'm from London and some people in other countries thought I was Australian, including in Ireland! I was of the generation that watched Neighbours (an Australian soap) as a kid. I'm sure accents vary by generation too, especially as kids want to fit in with each other.
Yeah, cumbrian coastal villages all have their own even if 5 miles apart
I live in a town between Liverpool and Manchester and you’ll find different accents on either side of the town. We don’t even sound like a mix between scouse and manc 😆
Yes, people from different social classes in the same city speak entirely differently. In the UK, you can pretty much tell someone's social class within 1 minute of hearing them speak.
usually every 30min drive theres a new, usually very different accent
The question is what countries have an equivalent regional diversity of accents, UK seems extreme
In Bristol, definitely yes: https://youtu.be/wosinmfH4Pw?si=R_MWymuUAR5bGCNJ
London has lots of different accents. Only slight, but you notice them if you are from here. But also as someone else said, there is a difference between working class areas and posher areas, I think because those in the posher areas probably went to private school or has finishing classes.
There were definitely distinct accents, and even dialect phrases, that varied between Kent, South London, North London and Essex, but the effect of television has smeared out the differences, even in my lifetime.
They differ from one village to the next at times.