Accent

Southern..living in midlands

I have an Essex accent. I think my way of speaking sounds dreadful on an answering machine. If I try to speak properly it wouldn't be natural.

Always lived in Surrey so I guess it is just SE English accent if there is such a thing. Although family who moved to East Sussex took on a slight;y different accent after a while. I never really thought I had an accent at all until on a visit to North Yorkshire years ago they did not know what I meant when I asked for 'rolls' in a bakery. But that was maybe just a regional word that was different.
Interestingly I 'pick up' accents when I am in other parts of country which has always made me think I don't have one but would quite like one!

Accents are amazing, aren’t they? I am from the pit area of Durham and, while the rest of England will think I am a Geordie, I’m not. I speak pitmatic. At the age of eighteen, I decided I didn’t want to speak like that anymore and, after about seven years of making sue my ‘ing’ words ended in ’ing’ instead of ‘n (‘going’ instead of ‘go-un’), I thought I had cracked it. Once a year, the ‘un’ sound would appear and I would choke on the pronunciation. Now, aged sixty three, people still think I am a Geordie and, oh, how I wished I hadn’t changed the way I was going to speak. I think it is ‘ahm’ sound I make for ‘I’m’ that still makes me a Geordie, so to speak and I’m pleased that the sign is still there.

But accent never truly leaves you. I’ve been living in Spain for ten years and am just in the process of returning to God’s country yet, five years ago, in Spain, I began talking with a man who was definitely from my neck of the woods and, within fifteen minutes, I was back there with ‘aye’, ‘man and even ‘traa (bye-bye)’. A great experience. I hadn’t lost it at all but simply hidden it away. I’ll soon be back there in god old County Durham and back to being my real self. Yippee!

Surrey. The French have regional accents and when speaking French I was told I have a Parisian accent and my daughter Provençal.

DH lived in Texas for a year in the 50's. He spoke English at home and American at school.

I have a good friend who hales from Co. Durham. Like me, she spent a lot of her married life away from her home county, but, while it may have softened around the edges a little over the years, she has never lost it and is an absolute joy to listen to! Like you, DeeWBW, I seem to be losing the 'g' off my 'ing' words more these days! And frankly, who cares!

I have a Northern Ireland accent. Everyone has an accent!

As a child, I lived all over the country for a couple of years at a time, following my dad's job as an engineer on the railways. My mother was from a working class Liverpool family but never had much of and accent. Neither did my dad, who was from Southport. I started off in London until I was five years old and if my sister and I came home saying words like grarse, parf, larf etc. Mum would correct us by insisting it was grass, path, and laff i.e. northern short A. That was her only concession to regional accent. Over many house moves, my sisters, having a better ear for accents, picked up the local lingo wherever we lived but I never seemed to. People can never place where I'm from but I'm not really from anywhere ?

Bijou when I participated in an 'exchange' with a German family I was told I had an accent like a Hamburger! ?

Inishowen - DD went to Antrim a couple of weeks ago, she and DGS loved it. Her comment was 'Why haven't I been before?!'

Us comes from down devn - us can't talk proper like, but us ave got the best oliday places down yur. When us talks to thiggy grokels, they dunt understand us a bit.

To be honest I'm not as broad Devon as that, but have got a definite accent which unfortunately portrays one as a country yokel and a bit thick to the rest of the country, but believe me we're as intelligent as the next accent.

I have been asked if I'm Australian, Canadian, American, Irtish and one or two others as I think I have a real multi-national accent. I was born in Belfast in 1948 and at the age of 5 moved to Canada and from there into the US. As my father was always chasing 'The Dream', we traveled over a very large portion of the US. Starting off in New York and down the whole East Coast and living in Miami Beach and then driving across and through all of the southern states stopping in many before travelling up the west coast eventually traveling back to Lexington, Kentucky which was my last home in the US. When I was 13 my parents separated and my mother, sister and I came 'home' to Northern Ireland. I have now lived in England for 43 years most of those in London. I still get asked , "What is your accent?".

I have a strong Black Country accent, despite not having lived there for most of my life. My mother used to depair when we all talked 'common' even though we went to Grammar school. I hate it when people accuse me of being a brummy, and get annoyed when I read studies like the one that said most people associate a BC accent with low intelligence! I loved it when I was 'courting' DH and my dad took him to the pub and he couldn't understand what anyone was saying (he was from Wolverhampton which calls itself the heart of the Black Country now, although the girls from the High School used to sneer at us for being Black Country in the 60s)

I have a Lancashire accent and have been patronised more than once by strangers saying "Ee by gum." When I speak. It's "put on" posh accents that get me. You can always tell an assumed posh accent fom a genuine one.

I have a Glasgow accent although I have lived elsewhere for most of my life. Sometimes when I tell people I come from Glasgow they say "Oh I thought it was Edinburgh" and I am clearly supposed to take this as a compliment, which I don't. Not every one from Glasgow speaks like Billy Connolly. Some of us are more like Kirsty Wark.

Even after over 40 years in the UK, I have in English, a strong French colonial accent; in French a colonial/English accent, in Spanish Castilian. In the States, I have been praised for my "lovely British accent" .
When young my children were horrified to be asked if their mother was "foreign", they replied that she wasn't she was their mum!

I think it's great hearing different accents. I just want my DDs and DGC to speak well I.e. So folks can tell what they're saying and to speak grammatically well too. It's a competitive world out there and I don't want them to be disadvantaged if folks couldn't understand them.

I wasn't born in the Midlands but perhaps now speak with their tortured vowels!

'Tortured vowels* Herbie. Love that expression! But I would be inclined to apply that description to some of the accents around London and the SE. They can manage to squeeze several vowel sounds in where I would use 1 eg naouw for 'now'.

Interesting feedback from everyone about accents. It is clear that most people can shift their accents according to context. Making yourself understood is a main reason. But the need to 'fit in' is also seen in the accents now being developed by young people that differ from their parents. Innit?

A lot to do with identity, don't you think?

Some people never lose their accents. I haven't but my elder sister spoke with a Mancunian accent in Manchester and now has a Cornish accent! Chameleon?

I miss hearing the Geordie accent now. Living abroad I sometimes have to ring the pensions people at Newcastle, and I could listen to them for hours!

Norfolk/suffolk. Always a talking point when I meet people. Some people love it but I get the feeling some people think I'm a bit of a country bumpkin.

Moved from ther 35 years ago and never lost it. It's especially bad when I go back.

I come from South Wales, but as I have lived in Oxford for over 40 years, I have just about lost my Welsh accent unless I am with a Welsh friend or if I go back to Wales when I immediately sound just like everyone else's,

My English teacher insisted that we all learnt English as well as our native Norfolk. He said there were people in the outside world who wouldn't understand us otherwise! Also English was handy at job interviews. He was right. Outside Norfolk and to furreners I do have to 'tork proper' I am bi-lingual!

I cannot understand Glaswegian or Newcastle accents - which can lead to confusion as firms seem to think Newcastle is an accent to be trusted so base their call centres there.