Do u have an accent?

[i]Everyone has an accent![/i]

We don't notice our own in the normal course of life because we are surrounded by people with the same basic accent. When we go to another part of the country the residents soon notice we are from elsewhere, even if they can't place our accent with any accuracy.

If we move elsewhere we tend to lose our native accent in favour of the adopted one, but may keep traces for life. I am a Southerner (English) but inherited Midlands traits from my parents' Nottinghamshire accent they never completely lost; and I have picked up Northern English dialect phrases from some years of visiting friends "Up North". Respectively those areas are around two hundred and three hundred miles from my native and resident counties.

For example, I pronounce [i]bath[/i] and [i]castle[/i] as those - with a hard 'a' as in "sand" where most Southern English people give the 'a' a slight 'ar' sound: nearly [i]barth, carstle[/i]. Yet the same Southerners say "sand" with a hard 'a'! We do [i]not [/i]though, go around saying "Ooh Aarrrrrgh!"; no more than Yorkshire people say "Eeh bah gum!" Those are comedians' inventions.


A few people try to rid themselves of their native accents, out of real or perceived necessity; but really they are trying to adopt the accent of their new surroundings or company. That was more common in the past, linked to mere snobbery and stereotypes.


It is amusing to we Britons to see phrases like "the English" or "the British" accent, singular; in SW posts from (mainly) Americans. The British Isles are home to an enormous range of regional native Welsh, Scots, Irish and English accents and dialects! Not only that, but many of these change markedly across only a few tens of miles; and more so in the past, even across the few miles width of a conurbation.

While of course the many here from many other countries bring their own languages, dialects and accents.

There are two English accents that are semi-invented: Received Pronunciation based on the Home Counties voice; and the "Estuary English" attempt at London's East End and Essex accents. (R. Thames estuary.) These areas centre only around 40-50 miles apart, E-W, but the natural accents are very different.

The former is very precise, rather clipped, and with no dropped consonants. The art-critic Brian Sewell has cultivated it for his own voice into oh-so-affected. "Estuary English" was affected particularly by 1980s-90s entertainers, DJs and the like trying "to get dahn wiv de yoof" - think something like the American actor Dick van Dyke's horrible attempt at Cockney in the film[i] Mary Poppins[/i].

Both are often exaggerated into dreadful parodies of their foundation voices.

[The true Cockneys with their well-known "Gor Blimey, Guv!" accent, dropped letters and rhyming slang, are natives of one small area of the formerly-industrial, East End of "Lunnon" (London).]