Accents and dialects

I came across this site, which has the most extensive list of Geordie dialect words I've ever seen.

The term Geordie refers to people from the Tyneside area in and around Newcastle in the north-east of England. Some of the words are common ones with specific Geordie pronunciation, but there are a lot of unique dialogue words and in some ways, it's a language of its own.

Geordie Dictionary A-B
 
Duck59 said:
I came across this site, which has the most extensive list of Geordie dialect words I've ever seen.

The term Geordie refers to people from the Tyneside area in and around Newcastle in the north-east of England. Some of the words are common ones with specific Geordie pronunciation, but there are a lot of unique dialogue words and in some ways, it's a language of its own.

Geordie Dictionary A-B
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How captivating! I enjoy reading such dictionaries.
Belta (great) has the bel as in bellezza root, or so I assume...

This is so true: if you don't ask, you don't get. I wish I knew that when I was younger😊. I am passing it to my child nowadays.

Shy bairns get nowt.

62219
 
I have, elsewhere on this site, mentioned stotties, a well-known north-east delicacy. Stotties, or stotty cakes, are in fact a type of heavy bread rather than a cake. The word "stot" means to bounce and originates, I believe, from the Dutch language. You still hear the word often, usually in the case of raining heavily. For example:

Howay man, it's stottin' doon, I'm nee gannin' up the Toon in this!

Translation: Give over, my friend, it is raining very heavily and I am certainly not going into the centre of Newcastle in this weather.
 
caseydog said:
There is an old saying here. If you go anywhere other than the South, and speak with a Southern accent, people will automatically deduct at least 20 IQ points.
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That was part of the reason I took classes to rid me of mine.

When I was living in Minnesota, I was talking with a coworker who didn't know my provenance, and he'd just gotten off the phone with another office in Kentucky:

"God, I think I'm dumber after listening to her: 'How y'all doin' up thar?' I swear, people from the south are just dumb!"

So I answered him with my best Fargo accent, and pointed out that's how he sounded to the rest of the world, so maybe dumb is as dumb sounds, huh? 😒
 
TastyReuben said:
That was part of the reason I took classes to rid me of mine.

When I was living in Minnesota, I was talking with a coworker who didn't know my provenance, and he'd just gotten off the phone with another office in Kentucky:

"God, I think I'm dumber after listening to her: 'How y'all doin' up thar?' I swear, people from the south are just dumb!"

So I answered him with my best Fargo accent, and pointed out that's how he sounded to the rest of the world, so maybe dumb is as dumb sounds, huh? 😒
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The Fargo accent is a good one. But, nothing quite like the Boston Accent...

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLwbzGyC6t4

Pahk thah cah in Hahvahd Yahd.

CD
 
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Even individual places can have different accents. I lived in Oxford for 11 years and there were three distinct Oxford accents: one was the rather plummy and posh one you hear in much of the south-east of England; the second was kind of London estuary-English that (unfortunately) is rampant everywhere; the other had a rural twang, nowhere near as pronounced as the far south-west of England, but discernibly more countrified.

That, however, doesn't match the town of Berwick, in the very far north-eastern corner of England. Berwick-upon-Tweed, to give it its full name, has passed between England and Scotland about fourteen times and given its location and history, it's perhaps no surprise that accents vary greatly. There are people with very Geordie accents, some have rural Northumbrian accents, others have the tones of the Scottish Border towns and others sound more like Edinburgh. In between all that, there are mixtures of everything. If you ever get the chance to visit Berwick, it's a pleasant place to see (have a walk around the ramparts that surround the place), but it can be a fascinating experience just listening to people talking.
 
Speaking of British accents, I do remember sitting around the office and hearing my British coworkers making fun of a fellow from Cornwall behind his back, including mocking his "rural" accent: "Oy've go' a loyvely trac'or, Oy 'ave."

What struck me was I could have just as easily been sitting in a northern US state hearing locals making fun of someone from the south.

People are funny sometimes, huh?
 
LissaC said:
For a tour of US accents (btw this guy is great):
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1KP4ztKK0A
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He gets some American accents right, but not all. His New York is pretty white collar. His Pittsburgh sounds nothing like my grandparents and my dad, who were born and raised there. His Texas is accurate, but anyone who's lived here a long time would know it is faked. I'd say it's pretty good fake Texas accent. His cajun is the same, a very good fake cajun.

It is probably universal -- you can learn an accent/dialect, but it is hard to fool the locals.

CD
 
TastyReuben said:
Speaking of British accents, I do remember sitting around the office and hearing my British coworkers making fun of a fellow from Cornwall behind his back, including mocking his "rural" accent: "Oy've go' a loyvely trac'or, Oy 'ave."

What struck me was I could have just as easily been sitting in a northern US state hearing locals making fun of someone from the south.

People are funny sometimes, huh?
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That, I'm afraid, is a very common thing. People with rural accents are routinely mocked and regarded as country bumpkins. It also happens to people with strong regional accents - there is an assumption that if you have one, you can't be very intelligent or educated.

In some ways, the BBC didn't help, although they now have a number of announcers and presenters with regional accents. I can think of a famous (in Britain, anyway) example of two people from the same place having totally different accents. The newsreader and presenter Sue Lawley and the comedian Lenny Henry (now Sir Lenny) both come from Dudley in the West Midlands. Sue Lawley consciously lost her accent and had what we may call a typical BBC English accent, rather posh and home counties. Lenny Henry retained his Black Country drawl. It was quite amusing to see Lawley interviewing Henry once. He managed to persuade her to say something in her native tones. She did so rather self-consciously, but did so nonetheless.
 
Another one I'll add: my dad's sister is my aunt, pronounced like 🐜, though my wife says it like "ont."

Similarly, where I live, we all say apricot with an "ape" at the beginning, and lilac sounds like lie-lack, while my wife would say apricot with an "app" sound at the beginning and lilac would be more like lie-lock.

I keep correcting her, but she persists in her errors. :laugh:

Also, it's common to say "aholt," with a hard "t" at the end, in place of ahold, but we also soften many "t" sounds to something else, depending on the word: winter becomes "winner" and interesting is "inna-resting."
 
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