A Brief Tour of British & Irish Accents: 14 Ways to Speak English in 84 Seconds

Amer­i­cans, com­ing from the enor­mous and rel­a­tive­ly recent­ly set­tled place we do, tend to have a hard time with accents, strug­gling to grasp the extent of the vari­ety of region­al ways of speech in small­er, old­er coun­tries, let alone to use them our­selves. Study­ing the Kore­an lan­guage, I’ve found that under­stand­ing a native speak­er from one city does­n’t mean I’ll under­stand any­thing said by anoth­er native speak­er from a city fifty miles away. (Though that holds true even for Kore­ans them­selves; hence the preva­lence of sub­ti­tles on their tele­vi­sion shows.) Vis­it­ing Lon­don a few months ago, eas­i­ly as I could make sense of every­body speak­ing my native tongue, I pre-emp­tive­ly gave up hope of pick­ing up on the nuances of all the accents peo­ple had brought to the city from their home­towns — much less the numer­ous and sub­tle dialects native of Lon­don itself. Every­one I met insist­ed that a Briton’s accent says more about their ori­gin, class, sta­tion in life, and degree of self-regard than any oth­er qual­i­ty, but not know­ing New­cas­tle from Southamp­ton when I first set foot on Eng­lish soil, I had to take them at their word (how­ev­er they hap­pened to pro­nounce it).

The video above, in which pro­fes­sion­al dialect coach Andrew Jack demon­strates four­teen British accents in 84 sec­onds, might help sort things out for my fel­low con­fused coun­try­men. “Received com­mu­ni­ca­tion is the great com­mu­ni­ca­tor,” Jack says, using the accent I assume he grew up with. “As soon as you devi­ate from that and you go into Lon­don speech, for exam­ple, you lose a lit­tle bit of the com­mu­ni­ca­tion.” By that point, Jack has seam­less­ly tran­si­tioned into Cock­ney, from which he then shifts into the accents of East Anglia, the West Coun­try, York­shire, Lan­cashire, Liv­er­pool, North­ern Ire­land, Dublin, the Scot­tish high­lands, Glas­gow, North Wales, and South Wales. The Youtube com­ment box below has, pre­dictably, filled with com­plains about all the accents — the com­menters’ own, dare I imag­ine? — that did­n’t make it into this brief lin­guis­tic tour. Though far from com­pre­hen­sive, the video does in any case put the lie to the notion so many non-Brits seem to have that they can “do a British accent.” If you encounter one of them, don’t ask them to demon­strate it; ask them which British accent they mean. Then you’ll real­ly hear how poor­ly they fare.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Peter Sell­ers Gives a Quick Demon­stra­tion of British Accents

Peter Sell­ers Reads The Bea­t­les’ “She Loves You” in Four Dif­fer­ent Accents

Sir Patrick Stew­art Demon­strates How Cows Moo in Dif­fer­ent Eng­lish Accents

What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like to Shake­speare: Recon­struct­ing the Bard’s Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.