NorthernGent
Posts: 8730
Joined: 7/10/2006 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: childoftheshadow For such a small country, they have a lot of accents Very true, and the accents are so strong that I guarantee that any American who stepped foot of London and the Home Counties would not be able to understand the natives......Geordie, Yorkshire, Brummie, West Country, Devon, East Anglia, Scouse, Manc...would pass foreigners by.....Northern accents are unintelligible to the untrained eye. It doesn't help foreigners when they come over and realise that no one speaks the English they are taught in school (queen's English, unless they go to London and the Home Counties)...so they spend about 3 months not being able to understand anyone. All the English accents are great, some of them are plain hilarious.......the farming accent from Devon, the West Country, East Anglia etc offer first rate comedy material.....the Brummie accent is one I personally think is underrated and undervalued, it's a real down to earth accent..........Scouse is like an Irish/English/Welsh hybrid monster.......Manc is smooth......Lancashire and Yorkshire sound like 18th century mill weavers......but the Newcastle/Sunderland/Durham accent in the North East takes first prize for sheer local pride - we still use old Norse words, which other parts of the country abandoned a long time ago, and we basically have our own dialect that no one else can understand. I've always liked a disctinctive accent, New York area stands out....I quite like that accent....maybe it was through watching programmes like Heart to Heart, and Cagney and Lacey when I was about 7, but it stuck with me, anyway. I like the German accent, it's funny......I always have this urge to ask them to stop shouting at me, but they wouldn't see the funny side...'different sense of humour over there..........the South Wales accent is such a warm accent, it's similar to Geordie in that respect......the Welsh are generally salt-of-the-earth types........struggling to think of others......
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