Read a novel by Charles Dickens, and you’ll still today feel transported back to the London of the eighteen-twenties. Some of that experience owes to his lavishly reportorial descriptive skills, but even more to his way with dialogue. Dickens faithfully captured the vocabulary of the times and places in which he set his stories, and for some particularly colorful characters, went as far as to render their distinctive accents phonetically: that of The Pickwick Papers’ beloved valet Sam Weller, for instance, with its swapping of “v” and “w” sounds that briefly overtook the East End. But it’s one thing to read the voice of a Londoner of that time, and quite another to hear it.
No audio recordings exist of Dickensian London, of course, but we have the next-best thing in the video above from Youtuber Simon Roper — and specifically the section that begins at about 11:30, when he performs the accent of a Londoner in the year 1826. Most everything he says should sound quite intelligible to any English-speaker today, though few, if any, will ever have encountered someone who speaks in quite the same way in real life.
In this era, Roper adds in the onscreen notes, “you can hear the start of glottal reinforcement, where a glottal stop is inserted between a vowel and a plosive consonant at the end of a word.” What’s more, “non-rhoticity (r‑loss in most positions) has caused vowels that were originally followed by ‘r’ to become centering diphthongs.”
Serious stuff, for a man who describes himself as “not a linguist.” Nevertheless, Roper has in this video assembled an impressive tour of London accents over 660 years, with “twelve recordings, all of men with suspiciously similar voices, and each one is set 60 years after the last one, and each one is the grandson of the previous one.” (When the video went viral, the New Statesman profiled him for his achievement.) The earliest, set in 1346, will sound more familiar in cadence than in content, at least to those who haven’t studied Middle English. Comprehension doesn’t become a much simpler matter for most of us moderns until about 1586, but Roper’s accent comes to sound veritably transatlantic by 1766. Perhaps not coincidentally, that was just before the Americans broke off decisively from the motherland to do things their own way — but also to preserve a few of the old ways, including ways of speech.
Related content:
A Brief Tour of British & Irish Accents: 14 Ways to Speak English in 84 Seconds
Peter Sellers Presents The Complete Guide To Accents of The British Isles
A Tour of U.S. Accents: Bostonian, Philadelphese, Gullah Creole & Other Intriguing Dialects
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
I could not understand 1st and 2nd recordings. Your ear has to become accustomed to the accent too, fascinating though.
This just fascinates me. It took me a while to get used to the accent in each of the first few recordings. You can really hear the German influence! Then before the language moves to what we’re used to today, it almost sounds like it has a Welsh lilt.
Thank you for doing this. I worry that we’ll lose so much when all the accents are diluted into something that sounds the same across the country.
So interesting. Untill around 1700 you can make it out clearly. I hear a lot of Welsh, North East, Irish, West Country Brummie, Yorkshire accents all over within apart from Southern untill late 1800.
The earlier recordings all reminded me of the way Hanna Hauxwell spoke.
Really interesting 🙂
I found this recording fascinating and very well done. Thank you for sharing.
Interesting for sure, especially tolisten to. However Dickensian London ysually refers to the 1840s onward, when he began publishing, not 1826 when he was just a child.
I hope this doesn’t include the fake, wannabe gangster, rude boy accent that so many since 2000 talk with, lads from London say it’s a London accent but every, fake gangster rude boy talks like it whatever part of England your in. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, just think Anthony Joshua and Dizzie Rascal.
loved this, but having the same story told over in the different london period dialects would be helpful for us who don’t speak english as a native language.
Elizabethan English I understand completely, the earlier incantations, they seem fixated on wool and moths and wormwood. Problem is the subject matter of the earliest versions are boring so the mind wanders. I have to listen too hard, the way modern German sounds to me .