Hard-faced, as in someone with no sympathy
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This Liverpool video makes me homesick for Baltimore (Bawlmer.)
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That accent will forever remind me of Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
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I think it’s true anywhere that a critical mass of people stayed in one place for a sufficient number of generations, although it’s becoming less and less true after a century of mass communication.
I’ve been to parts of China (northern Hunan, north/central Yunnan) where the old folks in villages a few miles apart can barely understand each other. In Hunan they’re all speaking related dialects, but the pronunciation is different enough to make them mostly mutually unintelligible (my friend from Hunan could understand and converse in his grandparents’ dialect, but could barely understand his cousins from the village on the other side of the mountain if they weren’t speaking Mandarin). In Yunnan there is enough ethnic diversity that the languages/dialects aren’t even that closely related. I once went on a three-day trek where we stayed in a village each night that spoke a completely different language, even though they were walking distance from each other.
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There are valleys in Switzerland which have dialects that are unintelligible to those who live in the next valley over.
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Accurate. I’ve known a few but not in the biblical sense.
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You sure that’s “cow”? I kind of heard a different "C-"word.
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It’s a play in one act. Would love to see this reenacted in different accents many times over, forever.
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Absolutely untrue. As I have said in a comment last time this (frankly insulting) anglocentric view point was expressed, when I was in school in Germany I could not only tell by accent which village (all of which were only a few kilometres from each others) someone was from but also whether their family was catholic or protestant.
And here in Norway local dialects are a part of one’s personal identity in a way England would never allow because it would undermine the class structure they are still deliberately cultivating. Local dialects and languages are part of the official Norwegian language and they do not mark you out as a working class person like they do in England. Even the royal family has a local dialect rather than a class-based sociolect.
(Note that I speak about England and not the UK because you did. Most of that is also true in the other parts of the UK but it is definitely most pronounced in England)
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A long time ago, I heard a theory that the Liverpool accent was partly a function of poverty, poor housing and atmospheric pollution caused by industrialisation.
The theory went that the children tended to suffer from adenoid infections which gave rise to a nasal way of speaking which was unconsciously copied by surrounding children, regardless of whether they had adenoid problems or not.
Maybe it’s even true.
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I heard ¿qué? rather than “girl”, but I’m not sure why he would be putting in random bits of Spanish.
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Your “absolutely untrue” has some push back in the form of a group of German linguists of my fond association while i was teaching Biochemistry at the University of Bonn. They also could detect all the local German dialects, however they would be the first to tell you that the actual differences were slight (and they were very proud they could detect them), when compared with the overt distinctions they catalogued in both English and French pronunciations and “accents” (they often called them “dialects”). Putting words into their mouths, they would say: “Germans everywhere would manage to be able to understand despite the greatest differences (even from those in Switzerland) but the same could not be said of a Londoner in Scotland”. One of those linguists insisted that it was a “sane system of spelling” (as compared with English) which constrained the German language to less variation. That is, my off-hand comment, so easily attacked, does have some experts behind it, while i, myself, am certainly no such expert. …ah well.
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It’s true. I tried deducing and failed.
Are we talking local variations of Hochdeutsch (which are somwhere between negligible and nonexistent) or are we talking dialects that are more ore less a language in itself?
I can’t understand my own dad when he talks in the Mecklenburg variant of Plattdütsch, while I can handle the version my relatives from Hamburg use quite well.
Not to mention the time I had to resort to English in order to converse with that one guy from Munich. And I managed to get to grips with whatever they call what the natives in Tirolo orientale use.
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I heard a guy suggest it was from the fact that Liverpool has a very large portion of single mothers, and boys learn to talk from their high pitched mums and there for talk more high pitched them selfs and it just carried on.
Thou the version of scouse in the video is def the sort that goes to gracey market, I was born in liverpool, But I know very few people who are that scouse.
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I have a friend from Liverpool who used to drive the bus for the Austin, TX Metro, and she is nowhere near that scouse. Such a lovely accent, though.
Some stealth scousers:
- Tom Baker (Fourth Doctor)
- Jodie Comer (Villanelle in Killing Eve)
- Jason Isaacs (Captain Lorca in ST: Discovery)
- Paul McGann (Eighth Doctor)
- David Morrissey (the Governor in The Walking Dead)
- Elisabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith in Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures)
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