American Reacts to 17 Different British Accents
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- čas přidán 26. 11. 2023
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As an American I am only familiar with what we refer to as a "standard" British accent. Today I am excited to learn all about 17 different British accents, what they all sound like, and where in Britain they are located. If you enjoyed the video feel free to leave a comment, like, or subscribe for more!
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True story: my grandmother grew up in the city of Nottingham, but moved to South Wales. She was chatting on the doorstep with a neighbour, when a stranger passed, stopped and turned, and asked if my grandmother was from - not Nottingham, but - a particular suburb in Nottingham!! That's how diverse our accents are!
I moved to Australia when I was 30 and one day in the doctor's surgery I heard two old ladies talking in what was a dead ringer of my grandmother's Brummie accent. It was so exact that I had to ask them their origins and, yep, you guessed it, they came from the same suburb of Brum!
well a up me duck, where abahts from notts was your nan from? I'm guessing st. anns or meadows
I too have always had that skill being able to drill into where the accents collide in certain towns even villages on occasions. I remember one occasion when at work we had a new starter from a town in South Yorkshire who used odd words I recognised from an entirely different regional town. I asked him about it and he was amazed as he had spent a short time prior to adoption as a toddler in that town but was adopted at the age of 4 years old and moved 100 miles south where he lives to this day
There's something wrong Tyler if you can't tell the difference between Scouse and RP😂
I mean, most non-native Brits probably think Scousers aren't speaking English.
😂
@@f0rth3l0v30fchr15t thats cos they aint. lol
Love the scouse accent!
I feel honoured he thinks of us as having a posh accent 😅. I wonder where he thinks we "received our pronunciation? Probably round the back of a pub from somebody selling stolen gear 😂
For hundreds of years people's lives were pretty much confined to a 20 mile area (a day's walk or so), so there are lots of unique accents.
But surely any country would be the same?
@@jemmajames6719 Yeah, I'm not sure what the situation is in countries like Germany or France though. Do they have a similar situation?
The populace has got more and more mobile over the centuries so it wouldn't be the same in the US but should be similar in Europe.
@@jemmajames6719 - you have to consider that the British Isles had wave after wave of invaders and settlers. Those became established in different parts of the country, so you had areas with quite strong linguistic influences.
We've had Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, Normans . . . Plus influxes of 'refugee populations' such as the Huguenots.
Hi Tyler. Just to let you know Haggrids Robbie Coltrane is actually Scotish so the accent in the Potterverse is all talent.
The accents in the UK have slowly became softer due to first radio and then television and more so in the last 30 years due to American shows on television.
There are over 300 accents in the UK. The most well known tend to be ones associated with particular cities or areas. Having said that, there would also be different accents within those cities and areas as well, which locals would be able to tell apart. I think most people from the UK could hear people speaking English from anywhere in the world and still understand them (with a few exceptions), so it blows our mind when you can't tell the difference between two hugely different accents or say that you can't understand them. Perhaps, our brains have developed to be good with accents, because we are exposed to them so much.
And thats excluding all our foreigners...
Gotta say, I can't tell the difference between west coast US-ian and Canadian. That's because so many tv shows were filmed in Vancouver, much of the media we consume is a weird mashup of Californian and West Canada and we in the UK end up thinking they're the same thing.
There's around 40 not 300 U edder
Include all the foreigners in that....
Way more then.
Welsh is its own language, it's a Celtic dialect. Just as "Scottish" is a very different vernacular to "English with a Scottish accent".
Ive got a Northern Ireland accent but she was doing a Belfast accent. We have many variations in our wee country too, like Derry , Ballymena and my Armagh accent.
Wasn't Ian Paisley from Armagh? I don't know if it was the accent or the situation but every time I heard him speak I'd become depressed and deflated.
I'm sure your accent is beautiful though.
@@jamesleateno Paisley was from Ballymena!
Born in Armagh, reared in Ballymena and spent most of his mature life living in Belfast......a real mix.
@jamesleate he was born in armagh, MP North Antrim so Ballymena direction. Lol hopefully it was the situation! I put a positive spin on my accent. The only thing with NI accent is its soooo hard to say anything with a W or a R. Shower is a nightmare to get out lol!
Another interesting fact about the Norn Irn (Northern Ireland) dialect is the pronunciation of the letter "H", you can basically tell a person's religious/political persuasion by how they pronounce words beginning with the letter "H".
There’s no such thing as a “normal” British accent. When most other countries think of the British accent they think English accent and the posh version. Some of these as a previous comment stated, are tame or a stereotype. The range of accents throughout the UK is more than 17, way more.
i don't even think of myself as british i'm english first then british second, if at all!
@@user-ne1kp8yo8n yes I'm like that
I usually mix it up on immigration papers when I'm travelling 😅@@user-ne1kp8yo8n
@@user-ne1kp8yo8n Funny - I'm the opposite! British first and English second, and I never really think of myself as English, just British.
@@gazzie12000 I do'nt consider myself either, i be from Yorkshire. ( Waiting for the stick !! )
There are 40 plus just in England. A lot of the differences are very subtle. Even many British can't tell one from the other if they are close to sounding the same.
Far more than that, there's about 4 accents within a few miles of me
The moment he said 40 in Britain, I was i can name more than that in England alone
these impressions of accents were laughable. The poor chap didn't have much to work with here.
She's not exagerating the differences, she absolutely nails it! very accurate. How do we have so much more variety in accents in a tiny space? I'm guessing because we have waaaaay more history.
The UK isn't a large place now, but when you had to travel days by horse to get anywhere it was a whole lot bigger and most people wouldn't stray far from their village. It probably felt like travelling to another country does to us now.
She mentions Burns for Inverness but he was born, bred and buttered in Ayrshire! Her Scottish accents are keich.
Keich! Ive no heard that in dunkeys!
@@tasha1721 aye its about due a comeback IMO🥳
@@janineadkins8259 agreed! 😂
Recieved Pronounciation is a artifical accent created when radio first became popular. It was designed to ensure that no matter where you were in England or how bad your radio reception was, you could understand what the person was saying. We have a lot of accents for two reasons. Lots of people have migrated to england over the years or invaded. We also didnt travel very far in general until more mass transit like trains came around so accents reinforced each other in small areas.
Robert Burns was from Ayrshire.A different accent entirely than the Highland accent.
The Inverness accent is actually very clear and a sort of Scottish version of Received Pronunciation which most people seem to like hearing.
Exactly! Her rendition of an Inverness accent is an insult.
Chuck in the Doric dialect and that'd screw him!
There are so many accents all in a very small landmass. You can go as little as 30 minutes down the road in any direction and hear a completely different accent to your own.
I live in a small seaside town in the south-west, I can go north to Bristol or south to Bridgwater etc and they both have noticably different accents to both me and each other.
The Bristol accent is very thick sounding and Bridgwater is a zumerzet accent. I'm a Westonian, Weston-Super-Mare for those that don't know where a Westonian comes from which must be pretty close to your town.
@@chrisspere4836 Can't get much closer, as I too am a Westonian! Lol
Tyler, the reason there’s such variation in such a small place (compared to US) is that we are much older than the US. The world was a much bigger place when they developed. Just 50 miles down the road would be a day of travel and so accents developments very separately. To the extent some were not just accents or dialects but their own language even, like Scots. The modern accents are actually watered down versions of the dialects/languages they once were which would have been almost unintelligible to each other in many cases.
Hagrid had a very good SouthWest English accent, especially considering the actor was from Scotland!
And both Dumbledores had very bad Somerset accents.
@@neuralwarp True....if not having any trace of a Somerset accent counts as a bad Somerset accent.
Britain is much older than cars and trains. The accents were developed when few people ever left the town they were born in.
Her accents here are definitely at the 'party trick' level, rather than 'dialect coach' level.She does a fair stab - but doesn't sound like a native of any of these regions. No Brit would believe any were her natural accent- apart from her RP.
Stephen Fry does come from East Anglia- but his accent is very definitely RP. It's that 'class' element at work.
The Northern Irish and Irish accents are very different - you'd have to listen to native speakers to hear the difference properly- but they are both distinctive.
17 accents gives you a flavour of what we have, but there are many many more - even London has a variety, depending where you live. I used to do a 10 mile commute by bus across West London, and listening to the local school kids getting on the bus there were 3 distinct variations as we travelled towards central London.
"The Northern Irish and Irish accents are very different... "
Meaningless statement. More about politics than linguistics.
Next level, local accents.
Her scouse was very tame. That also depends on which part of Liverpool you grew up in.
It can be much thicker
A huge part of the reason of why we have such varied accents is because of which different countries invaded us and where they landed and much of the country they conquered and which parts they didn't. And then yes after that most people started where they were after that so an area or a cities accent would over time become much more unique. Once trains and cars arrived we became much more aware of the different accents.
Yes the invasion played a part but also the age of the uk. America is only around 247 years old where as England is around 1100 years old. More than 3 times as old with people in back as far as the Stone Age. People way back weren’t traveling far as they had to travel mostly by foot unless they were wealthy. So the at meant many accents and dialects formed in areas of the uk
Exactly.
The UK has so many accents, it's unreal. This doesn't cover all of them and the variations. It's because we've been invaded so much and became invaders, etc... lol.
So, the East Anglian accent is part of what makes up the American Southern accents. It's a London, East Anglian and West Country mix... That's why those Americans say things like : "Dang! I done dropped it" 😅
There can be variations of Scottish accents in one town and hundreds all over Scotland.
Scottish sounds Geordie to me
@da90sReAlvloc there's loads of Scottish accents and dialects. One somewhere might sound a bit Geordie if it is close to the border.
"I forgot."
We know, goldfish, we know.
The fundamental answer to "why are there so many accents in the UK when it's so much smaller than the USA?" is that for a much, MUCH larger percentage of the USA's history, movement of people and hearing people from other regions via mass media has been possible. For hundreds and hundreds of years here in the UK (and much of the old world), people were effectively limited to their home village and maybe a few nearby where they would go to trade; they spoke almost exclusively with people from their own village, and as such accents and dialects could continue to develop to be more and more divergent and geographically specific. Essentially, without TV, radio, phones, and cars, the world is _effectively_ much bigger - remember that distance is only really relevant relative to how easily distance can be covered.
There are two main Welsh language soap operas. Pobol y Cwm is based in South Wales, and gas been broadcast since the 1970s. Rownd a Rownd is based in North Wales and has been on screens since the mid 90s. Neither is particularly fussy about the type of Welsh accent, as long as you can speak Welsh. Sometimes, the cast will be speaking English depending on the storyline, showing that many are bilingual. Pobol y Cwm had Michael Sheen guest staring as a doctor when one character, Kelly, was in hospital a few years back (I think before lockdowns)
I grew up near Bradford in West Yorkshire. That accent is quite different from East Yorkshire, South Yorkshire and North Yorkshire. It's deiscernably different even from Leeds which is not very far away. Having lived in Hampshire since 1971 I have mostly lost what Yorkshire accent I had which was never very strong. But I still can't bring myself to pronounce "bath" with the extravagantly long A sound of the South of England. I say it to rhyme with path, not baath. But I have discovered that if I am speaking to someone else with a strong regional accent - it used to happen a lot at a summer school I regularly attended in South Wales - I become much more Yorkshire.
Stephen Fry be from East Anglia, but you cetainly could'nt tell that, by the way he speaks. He's what they call Public School, where, it seems, the first thing they do is "beat any accent out of you", metaphorically or physically.
I have just returned to the UK after 25 years living in the USA, and I can tell you that I STILL can't distinguish between the subtleties of most American accents, and I think many Brits would agree with me. We can hear a broad southern accent, or maybe someone from the Bronx, but once you get into the subtleties of Boston or West Coast, the differences simply don't register with me. If you take the time to point them out with individual examples I can certainly hear them, but they just don't register in day-to-day encounters. Which I think means that we can all pick up the subtleties of pronunciation of accents we are surrounded by (either in real life, or on TV), but less good at hearing regional variations when we're not familiar with them. Love your videos by the way - keep them going, Tyler!
I'm from Ireland, and have never been to the US, at all but I do know certain American accents. I'd definitely notice Texas, California, Boston, Minnesota, New York (especially Brooklyn), and the southern accent of course. "Standard American" just sounds normal to me though so if someone didn't have one of these other accents, I wouldn't know whether they were from Nevada or Ohio.
I actually struggle more with English accents, despite being to the UK several times, having English family, and getting a lot of UK TV channels here.
the accents on here are very "tame" mild versions of each
Agreed. I have a Cheshire accent, which wasn't covered, but sufficiently near several of the accents that were. The attempt at a scouse accent was very mild compared to what you actually hear, and the Lancashire and Yorkshire ones were too. There are of course multiple Lancashire and Yorkshire accents, but I can understand the need to keep the video short.
When I was young, I went to Newcastle for an interview and the accent was almost incomprehensible; certainly much stronger that in the video.
Yeah, they’re more impressions than an accurate portrayal. I think she’s trying to make sure she’s more understandable and barely uses regional dialects
Except the West Country one. Only old people speak like that. The rest of us have MUCH tamer accents or speak in RP lol.
@@puffpride8344 This doesn't stop me from hearing the odd teenager saying: "Alreet me lover!", from time to time, whilst walking around Bristol.
@@virtualranger7780 Oh we say that and we put on an accent when we say it lol. But yeah that exists. We just fake the accent because it sounds weird af in RP or a very tame West Country accent. I will say though, Bristol is probably the place where the accent is most alive. If you're gonna meet a young person who has a strong West Country accent, it'll be there.
Tyler listening to these accents they were tame representations of the accents the people speak , the people from these areas have a way thicker accent with local colloquialisms and often speak a lot faster making it very hard to understand to the american ear.
the 3:36 "London" accent she shows is not how modern day londoners really sound, it's called the "Cockney Accent" and it developed in east london... and though some people still have that accent over here, it's usually the older generation or people who moved outside of london. the younger generation may still hold elements of the accent but most people in london have a variation of Recieved pronounciation mixed with elements of slang and some other accent they grew around with from the migration population in london, so Caribbean, African, Asian ect ect.
Dunno if it's just me, but the Cockney accent sounds like a dying breed at this point
MLE is much more common than either Cockney or RP in the Saarf-East.
The Cockney accent is Londons accent anything else is a parasite
Listen to some Scottish accents, we don’t all have a Glaswegian or Edinburgh accent, our dialect and accent changes pretty much every time you drive from one town to another, I belong to NE Scotland where we have our own distinctive dialect which instantly identifies us as coming from that part of Bonnie Scotland 🏴
All three of her attempts at a Scottish accent sound, to a Scot, exactly like an English person failing to do a Scottish accent.
Small mercies that she didn't attempt a Fife or Buchie accent.
I'm just glad she didn't try Doric lol
She relocated Burns to the Highlands and dubbed him a knight
There are more than 17 " British" accents in England !
There are many SCOTTISH accents/dialects. Not just Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Try listening to the DORIC accent of North East Scotland. (Aberdeen/Peterhead).
If you think there is no difference between SCOUSE and RP, then you need a hearing test !!
The next town to me is only 8 miles away, and they speak in a different accent to me.
Same a council estate for 4 miles from me speaks a different accent.
Americans aren’t exposed to many English accents because decisions are made that you won’t understand them, so there’s only a few accents that make it into mainstream movies. I’m from New Zealand, we get a lot of British TV here, so I can understand them all pretty well.
Part of the reason that Trainspotting was subtitled when aired in the US.
@@bareakon They've also been known for dubbing Australian films.
EVERY town and city has its own accent. Also don't confuse accents with dialects of which Yorkshire has its own.
Yep Barnsley sound different from Sheffield that's just south yorkshire it self
"how are there so many accents?"
It might not be a very big country, but it's very old. The accents were formed before you could get to the next town easily, so they all sort of evolved in isolation. The US, on the other hand, was all colonised at more or less the same time, relatively speaking, so the accents span a much greater distance
You wait till he finds out how many pubs there are in Romford.
Really class in the uk isn’t necessarily based on financial status or job. There are a lot of very wealthy working class people as there are a lot of cash poor ‘posh’ or upper class. I don’t think class here is quite the same as in the US.
The Republic of Ireland is not part of the UK, only northern Ireland the two are different countries, and accents can change within the same county the Yorkshire accent can change from city to city.
Her “London” accent is what is more commonly known as a Cockney accent, and mostly to be found in the East End of London.
There are almost 40 different accents in England alone it can change county by county. It is believed the reason for this is because of the various settlers eg Vikings Saxons Norman's etc., that came together to form the language . Also another factor is where the area is , eg by the sea , weather , industry etc.,
A big factor is language deviates more when it's isolated. The UK has had a very long time where the fastest way to communicate was for someone to ride a horse.
So areas only loosely mixed with neighbouring areas(after all if it's an hour walk across a dirt road you're unlikely to do so unless you had a good reason to).
In the modern age accents are getting lost because travel and communication are so much easier. It's no longer an hour walk on a dirt road, it's a 5 minute trip on a train or 10 mins on the bus/car. You can always ring someone or video call, etc. The distance between the accents is shrinking as everyone's accent becomes a sort of average of those they communicate with frequently and the range of accents most people communicate with becomes broader.
There's 40 in Yorkshire alone, love.
Someone said 300 British accents, and I'd believe them. There are 4 in my town alone.
Tyler, I always love your enthusiastic interest in learning new things. According to the U.S. Census there are more than sixty million people in the United States who claim either English or Irish heritage, followed by German at forty million. The history of U.S. accents is in no small way brought into existence from our ancestry. When you think of it this way, we hear variations of these accents everyday even though they are being modified in most parts of the country by influence of the many other ethnic language patters in the U.S. I don't think you have ever reacted to the Wired channel's two or three part series where they explain "American" accents. It would be fun to see you react to those videos on the heels of this one. I am significantly older than you, but I have heard and been aware of the many U.K accents increasingly throughout my life. I think if you listen to U.K. speakers (We are going to encounter them mostly through the media.) and listen closely enough to hear the way they speak and where the speakers come from (Easy info to look up.) you will indeed find that you are actually familiar with these variations. I also watch a lot of British movies and television series. Wonderful video. I hope you have a great day. Peace
Most Brits were brought up watching US TV shows so have no trouble understanding American English. I can tell the difference between some of the US regional accents. I can just about tell the difference between US and Canadian speakers; where you would have no difficulty. Like you say, our ears get 'attuned' and the average Brit detects all the different UK accents just as you can detect all the US regional ones.
Tyler England would fit into many us states . In the uk an accent can change from 1 side of a city to the other
She gets Yorkshire wrong like everybody we don’t add a hard T we miss it all together. Tyler there is a different accent every 30 miles. I can tell if people are from the other side of my city even too. Oh and she wasn’t exaggerating the differences she was being mild
I was brought up in the East End of London in the 1950's and 60's. Natural accent the 'Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' example. My secondary school from 11 was in a posher part of London, and they very quickly switched me to received pronunciation. So effectively that while my family mostly stayed with a generic Cockney accent, I can 't even fake it anymore. At the time the view was that if you were going to succeed (university, good job etc) you needed to shed your accent; particularly those seen as 'lower class'. It is much better now, but for years anyone with aspirations shed their native accent.
Similar story for my Gran. b Stepney 1896, she boarded in Chelsea for work as a charwoman at Kensington Palace (Grandad was a Cornish Bobby at Marble Arch). Spent her last years with us in Canada, and reverted to her childhood ways and accent, as I grew to love kippers, but drew the line at jellied eels.
I’m a Geordie and I have spoken to Australians and New Yorkers and there is difficulty understanding some of the words I use, which is why I do my best to speak as posh English as I can when I visit those places.
I've got a scouse/lancashire accent and vocabulary. I do the same with a terrible posh voice so I can be understood. "Thas reet klempt, knowwharrImean lar?" doesn't really work abroad. Or at home 😂
I could tell the difference, but pretty much all of them were very poor attempts of them. She also got a few things wrong. Robert Burns is not from Inverness. He's from Alloway in Ayrshire, while Ewan McGregor is from Crieff near Perth, not Edinburgh, and I can tell as I'm in Scotland
I agree, I'm in Inverness and her Invernesian accent was appalling. Glad she didn't try the Hebridean accent!
Accents over here are very distinct even in smaller areas. I'm from Newcastle and it's possible to tell where in the city someone is from if you know the accent! I was picked out as not sounding local by a nurse at my GP surgery because I grew up in a different part of Newcastle!
It's not just Americans who can't tell the difference though. Geordie accents are often mistaken for Welsh/Scottish/Irish ones. I've lost count of the number of times if I've been asked if I'm from any of those places. Just earlier this year had someone from the south coast insist I was Scottish because I didn't sound like Ant and Dec (2 very famous TV presenters who are from Newcastle - just a different part of Newcastle to me!) which kind of proves my point of if someone from the area doesn't have the exact stereotype of that accent people don't realise they're from there - so there are many variants even within cities.
That's before dialect is thrown in the pot too! When you get to certain parts of the UK you can tell who invaded them because of dialect. There's several words we use in the Geordie dialect which are similar to Norwegian words for example.
I speak with a peak District accent, (a toned down mancunian accent, with a hint of Yorkshire), and i can tell if someone I'm speaking to is from 10 miles north or south from me.
This is fascinating. Brit here, and I can hear a solid difference between the accent. Obviously, knowing where they're from is just native information, but if there's an big difference in the ability to even hear/detect a difference, then that's really interesting.
Yes: Gangsta, Chelsea, Cockney, Estuary, and Essex are all in parts of London, but totally different.
Even though she did the yorkshire accent with Sheffield, Yorkshire is the UK largest county and is split into 4 areas, North Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire and East riding of yorkshire which I am from, more precisely Kingston Upon Hull. And all have different variations. Especially Hull.
The world is smaller now. When our accents developed people rarely left their towns or cities, and over hundreds of years they were not connected to other places all that much. Also of course being an island we were invaded ALOT, having all these other cultures bring their own accents, which integrated and changed the local's dialect creating a new merged form. Further, we have a much denser population for different accents to develop, so although the country's landmass is smaller, the population is much denser than America on average, with more towns and cities closer together.
Love your videos, there are so many accents even within the same city and towns
I'm from Northern Ireland. We can tell where people are from by their accents within about 6 miles. I once heard a barman in Sydney who had clearly tried to lose his accent - probably on the run. I asked if he was from Downpatrick and he went white as a ghost, he angrily asked me how I knew that - from your accent I said, he was completely shocked, said he didn't have an accent, I just laughed, you can't really lose it.
Same in Scotland and if the accent doesn’t give it away then the choice of words does, Scot here living in England near the Welsh border, I’ve found that the English struggle with Scottish, Welsh and Irish accents yet we all understand each other? My accent is NE Scotland specifically Doric dialect and since moving to England I’ve been asked many times which part of Ireland I’m from 😂
This many accents are completely normal for any settled area that has been settled for ages and which has seen many peoples come and go. In Germany also, we can have accents that are very distinct from one village to next one over and it includes not only accentuating words but even vocabulary. Think of it this way: The UK has been created by people who have settled in various parts and they have each developed their own language systems without much need to communicate with anyone living several day trips away. Then it has been invaded by the Vikings, the Angles and Saxons, the Romans, and has had an enormous French influence (French being the language at court (hence pig and pork, cow and beef, etc.)). As a seafaring nation itself, it has invaded most countries on earth at one time or another and people from there would immigrate back to England, again influencing the language where they lived. It is centuries and centuries of these immigration and settlement patterns that create a rich linguistic tapestry in really old countries. America was settled since the late 1500s but only even existed as a nation on its own for about 300 years; and English was the major and eventually official language. Book printing was already invented and technology catered to a pretty good general education of first generation immigrants to all learn the same lingua franca (English) which, after Webster, was also codified in its differences from British English to become General American. Of course, the larger areas (South, Northeast, West etc.) has had cross influences due to major settlement patterns (Midwest had many German and Scandinavian immigrants, California and the South Mexicans, Louisiana had its French past etc.) and their regional accents were influenced by these. Yet, by and large, you simply have not had the history to develop hundreds and thousands of local accents (I guess linguists can prove local variations, but I mean clearly distinguishable for the everyman) and, you are also much less likely to stay within one region for your entire life individually. Yet, your country was (and is) vast and many areas are not densely populated and can therefore be moved into. People move from New York to Philadelphia, then to the frontier in Kentucky and lo and behold, it is Gold Rush season and you move your family to California. In Europe, most people stay put where they are more or less and used to stay put until higher education and travel and commuting possibilities arose in the nineteenth century… The land is pretty much owned in its entirety by someone, so we do not move as easily or when we do, it requires that someone else moves out first.
A 1000 years ago we did not have many roads.Nobody moved around so much so never heard other accents.The local accent came about.
Britain, and England in particular, before we were unified used to be a large collection of kinglet nations. Almost like different clans. This could be a reason behind our different accents
My local accent has almost completely died out- you only really hear it in people over the age of 60 as the younger crowd speak more of a received pronunciation (I'm something of a throwback as I spent most of my youth with my grandmother). One of my friends once met an old man in a pub and said "hey you have the same accent as my friend- are you from X-village?" and this man looked really confused and admitted that's exactly where he was from. The pub was only ten miles from the village but the accent was distinct enough for my friend to spot it. I only live about 50 miles away today- within the same county- and people still ask where I'm from as I "have an accent".
West Country accent is why all pirates talk like they do in films due to fact the first filmed pirate (long John silver) had a deep Somerset accent ,
I went to school in Headington Quarry, Oxford. Our accent was called the Quarry Gable. David Mitchell sometimes drops into it during one of his rants on "Would I lie to you". Makes me feel quite homesick.😂
The best thing about Received Pronunciation (RP) is its _clarity_ . As far as the _generalised_ West Country accent sounds (esp in Devon and Cornwall), if you listen very carefully - and use a bit of imagination - you can hear where what WE regard as a 'typical' American accent comes from, developing over a few hundred years. Tyler's lovely accent, for example, has a sort of languid, 'lazy' quality about it that you can find all over the South West.
The variation is in part due to the 'founder effect". Where accents have travelled abroad they don't represent the full range of accents because it's never a representative sample. The greatest variety is always in the original.
I grew up in a town in South Wales which grew out of two villages, barely a mile apart, but I can tell which one someone is from by their accent.
Some accents vary within a single city or at least within 20 miles.
Oh yes - when you're on the bus in some regions, you can hear the accent changing as the bus goes along its route.
I find with most accents, it's the vowels that matter most. Consonants can vary from region to region (like a scouser changing a hard k sound to a more guttural, gravelly sound, or the fricative t sound that sounds almost like an s in many Irish accents), but if you can nail the vowel sounds of a particular accent, you're doing alright.
There are some very distinct accents not covered here such as Barnsley in South Yorkshire.
Way more than 3 different accents in Scotland. I can go 4 mile left, 4 mile right and 4 mile north (I'm on coast so south I would be in the water😂) and all accents are different😊
P. S. Alot of Americans don't know a Scottish accent, I've been asked numerous times by Americans if I'm Irish 😂
I find it funny how in Grimsby they have a Lincolnshire accent and 12 miles up the road in Immingham it's a lot more Yorkshire
I'm from the West Country and what she does there is a dying accent. It's extremely rare to meet someone under the age of 60 that sounds like that. We either speak in a much tamer way that you'd have no hope of picking up on, or we speak in RP.
I think it's outdated to say that RP is middle/upper class. I grew up in social housing in a very working class family but I have an RP accent.
That wasn't a "London" accent. It was a "cockney" accent, which is East London. That accent is dying off too though. It's not as far gone as the West Country accent but it's on its way out. It's being replaced with the "multicultral London English" (MLE) accent, also called "roadman". It's a beautiful mix of accents. I'd love to see you react to it.
On a day to day, you mostly hear Received Pronunciation in corporate business (sort of a 'Business-professional variant' of it, or perhaps even as a 'Telephone-voice'). From College/University and then onto work in an office, you generally start to get your original accent sanded down (rough edges taken off), until you sound more and more generically 'business-sounding' (from my experience). Then, when you go back home to parents and family, your old accent springs back like it never left :)
Dialects developed over hundreds of years while there was still only horse and carriage. Most "staff" / peasants never travelled so they are what the local accents grew among. There are parts of the Uk where I (having lived there for 8 years) wouldn't understand the broad farmer Devonian accents. For example. I love Liverpudilan though. It's both beautiful and savage lol =)
When I was a teen, we had front door neighbors and they had a defeinte Cheshire accent, well not as much an accent but rhythm to how they spoke. Then there is the West Yorkshire which was demonstrated and the next door Manchester one which tends to be nasally flat (almost sounds a bit like standard American)
I am from the Birmingham area and that was the only one that didn't sound very convincing to me..I wonder if other people felt the same for their region..she is obviously exaggerating them. One does not simply walk into Mordor in a slightly exaggerated Yorkshire accent cracked me up.
Read this as she was speaking in her Birmingham accent and I was like 😑 then she did the scouse accent straight after and I felt the same, being from Liverpool.
For me being from the south west hrr accent was fairly mild to me. Sure us younger folk dont have super thick accents but we wouldn't bat an eye at one wayy thicker than hagrids
Agree. There are variations in Birmingham accent depending on class and area. She didn't nail it in my opinion
In Portsmouth down here in south UK, we have our own accent, and Leigh park (a massive housing Estate) has its own accent on its own. We are very varied down here. There’s at least 100 accents in UK with very subtle differences.
This is before you get into micro region accents too. For example I live in the North East and for people who live here you can tell the difference between the accents in Newcastle, Durham, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough and a pit accent that that's all within a 60 mile radius. One of the examples she uses for Geordie, is Billy Elliot, but that is not actually Geordie, its a Billingham/colliery village accent that is distinct from Geordie (depending on the character in the film).
She showed Bristol on the map when covering the South West accent but we don't sound like farmers, we're closer to the stereotypical pirate accent.
Also, we have different accents for the north & south of the city. In fact, we can often tell what estate someone grew up on just by their very local accent.
Also, I dated a woman from Wolverhampton (the next city over from Birmingham), we frequently spent time in Birmingham when travelling to her family by train or on narrow boat holidays on the Black Country Ring (the Midlands have more canals than Venice!!).
The woman's impression of the Brummie accent was honestly pretty bad.
The North Walian accent she uses is more common in North West Wales, where Welsh is most commonly spoken. I’m from Wrexham in North East Wales, where the accent is somewhere between the North Wales accent she uses and a Northern English accent. This is because there’s some people from England have come over the border to live and work, particularly from the nearby counties of Cheshire, Shropshire and Merseyside.
For the South Walian accent, I recommend watching an episode of Gavin & Stacey.
For the sake of humanity I recommend never watching an episode of Gavin & Stacey ever. It is overly sentimental and not in the least bit funny everything is just supposed to be sickeningly nice (like an episode of Heartbeat....bleugh).
@@jamesleate He doesn’t have to. I was just giving an example where he can find the accent.
@@marblwrexbro458 Sorry, it's a natural reaction to the mention of that show. I didn't mean it to sound so mean.
9:18 You should watch that video on the languages of the British Isles. It’s very fascinating.
Ireland 🇮🇪 is not a British Isle/Island. This is an outdated Imperialistic and Possesive term that is not recognised by the Irish Government nor by the Majority of Irish people living in Ireland. The correct geographical term for these Islands is Great Britain and Ireland. The correct political term for these Islands is the UK and Ireland.
7:00 In that case, can I direct to the discography of The Wurzels.
11:50 100 miles really *is* a long way over here.
14:40 This one puzzles me; Burns was from Ayrshire.
Hi Tyler,
In general, no-one has RP as their natural accent, it is learnt/taught.
The idea is to allow everyone to understand.
we also have the telephone voice, its not quite RP but more understandable, and we can click in and out of it
Speak for yourself
@@mattybrunolucaszeneresalas9072 OK, I'm sorry, I was not aware of anywhere that RP was the natural accent, can you tell me where that might be?
@@stephenlee5929 middle and upper middle class londoners usually
@@stephenlee5929 A lot in the counties around London too, the home counties etc like Surrey but also some parts of Hampshire/Wiltshire. The Salisbury accent for example is much more commonly RP than the rest of Wiltshire (West Country).
You managed to interrupt each clip perfectly. Well done.
Love love your show !
Stay curious and excited .
Hi , from rainy old London . 😂❤3
I was drinking in a bar the other night and overheard three very large women talking. Their accent appeared to be Scottish, so I approached and asked, "Hello there! Are you three lassies from Scotland?"
One of them angrily screeched at me, "Its Wales you bloody idiot, Wales!!"
So I apologized and replied, "I am so sorry. Are you three whales from Scotland?"
And thats the last thing I remember.
Tyler. I’m from South Wales. For a few years I worked in the capital, Cardiff, 12 miles from home, their accent is totally different to mine, and five miles north you are in the Rhondda Valleys and their accent is different again. My brother lives in Bala in the north. It’s a Welsh speaking community. My brother’s son is a Welsh speaker, English is his second language, his son & daughter aged 6 & 4 only speak Welsh. Their English is as good as my Welsh i.e. please, thank you, good morning etc. I have great difficulty understanding my nephew and his wife when they speak English, and we are only 140 miles away.
The BBC used to only speak RP but these days they have entered a more realistic atmosphere. The listening audience prefer the BBC’s announcers to speal the same way we do. So there are Welsh, Geordie, West Indian, Scottish and others on the network.
Burns was from Dumfries as far as I remember not from the Highlands!
I'm stunned you can't hear any difference between a newsreader and a scoucer 😂 amazing
I was brought up in Stirling and there is a Stirling accent which is quite a clipped version of a Scottish accent. And there are three versions even in that city. I enjoy your videos but remember Scots are British as well. Cheers x
The city I live in in Ireland you can tell what part of the city someone is from just by accent. That gives you an ideas of just how many different ones you'll hear
The Irish accent is not a British accent.
@@condorone1501 thats why I didn't say it was
@conallmclaughlin4545 The title of the video is 17 British Accents. They Included The Irish accent as being a British accent.
@@condorone1501Yes. Annoying imperialist rubbish.
Yup Tyler, when I started my channel I wondered if I should use a text to speech thing as I've normally got quite a strong scouse accent! 😅 In the end I just decided to tone it down a little hahaha! As it is, most of my subscribers so far are American, so thank you all for persevering! 🤗🤣
In Britain, people barely ever left their local area ever over many hundreds of years, so there was a lot of regional evolution in the language. Much of the states only has around 200-300 years of English language history and during this time, it has been normal for people to move around a lot, hence there is less regional variation.
there are so many accents some are super subtle, like in my home town i can get down to the villagers and street level in accents, i lived in fort worth for a time and went to the mall wearing my home towns sports shirt, and one guy says you arent are you.. turned out he was from a town 8 miles from me, so we started talking faster and faster our accents got broader the people we were with slowly lost track they said it was like we were talking a different language
I would say quite a few of those accents were a bit toned down. My Husbands family comes from the West Country, and there are times I struggle to understand some of his relatives, being a mix of Yorkshire, Herefordshire and West Midland myself ( I moved around a bit when younger). It is often said that if you got a Geordie and an Cockney in the same room they would not be able to understand each other, and there is a fair degree of truth in that.
Thats quite entertaining cause my great grandparents on my mothers side were from Yorkshire and Devon and they needed their kids to translate for them due to their accents
It was different before population explosions in London, Manchester, etc., and before constant motorway movement. People lived and worked more locally. On a single rail journey you'd hear local dialects change as passengers boarded.
Over the last 20 years there have been other accents evolving - e.g. Estuary English is an extremely common variation of RP spoken in the South East; Multi-cultural London English is commonly spoken among young working class ethnic minority communities in London; the Essex accent has become an evolved version of cockney London accent.
This lady is brilliant!.... very clever indeed.
This lady only did 17 accents (for time purposes probably). There's easily at least 17 different accents in each county. Drive 20 minutes in any direction and the accent will have changed twice. Bear in mind with the Welsh accent, it takes less than an hour to drive the entire length of Wales and you'll pass through at least four accents while you do it.
It’s only if you live in a country or watch a lot of , say , programmes from a (particular) country that you can pick up the accents. I’m sure if I lived in the States I’d be able to pick up a lot of different accents