Italian-Danish

@ArishMell I live in the West Midlands. And you're right, different accent from London. I never thought here they would say "but", "butter" etc... with a U sound, instead of an A sound. And also they say BREAKFAST-DINNER-TEA instead of BREAKFAST-LUNCH-DINNER. First time I was confused, but now I got used to it ☺

@dareme Ah yes, the West Midlands has very distinctive accents quite different from those of, say Nottingham only fifty miles from Birmingham, or Bristol a hundred miles away!

And those accents are all very different from the various London and Home Counties voices; different again from the South-West.

The hard-U is given something of a hard "OO" sound, as in "book" across much of the Northern half of England.


I was told by someone from Dudley that in the past, perhaps his grandparents' time, many people from one part of the Black Country and Birmingham would struggle to understand people from other parts of the same area, because the both the accents and dialects were different across even those short distances.


My parents were from Nottingham but moved two hundred miles South, so my siblings and I are all natives of the English Channel coast. Yet we always called the mid-day meal, "Dinner" and the evening one, "Tea". (Generally the full cooked meal would have been the Dinner but when my Dad and I were working the cooked meal became the evening one.)

Our Mam (another regionalism there) never really lost her Nottinghamshire accent. I am told my own accent is a peculiar mix of Southern and slightly Northern, and I have picked up some Yorkshire language from friends living that far North!

@ArishMell Your comment has been very interesting to read. As an Italian, I (wrongly) thought in the past that all the different accents and dialects were only an Italian thing. Well, I was wrong.
I can understand the accent around here perfectly now, like the Nottingham accent (like you said your parents were from).

When I moved here I was struggling with the Scottish accent, but now I can understand it perfectly (also because there are a lot of Scottish people on TV, aren' there?). I would sometimes struggle with the Irish accent though, but I got used to the US and Canadian ones too.

And let's not start now with the "cob" debate lol

@dareme Thankyou!

It is remarkable how accents change so much across a geographicallyy small country!

I have not been to Italy but assumed it does have regional accents.

I know France does, and even has a local language stll spoken in the far South-West, with an accent that sounded to me nearer South-Midlands English than to the familiar general French one!