The secrets of the posh accent – video Want to talk like the toffs in new film The Riot Club but unsure of your vowels? Let our expert guide you to the perfect upper received pronunciation and you'll never find yourself tongue-tied at a garden party or in an Oxbridge quad again •How to talk posh: a rarely marvlous glossary •Posh Britain: will they always lord it over us? •Quiz: how posh are you? •Laura Wade on Posh and The Riot Club Sounds Familiar? What you can hear You can listen to 71 sound recordings and over 600 short audio clips chosen from two collections of the British Library Sound Archive: the Survey of English Dialects and the Millennium Memory Bank. You’ll hear Londoners discussing marriage and working life, Welsh teenagers talking with pride about being bilingual and the Aristocracy chatting about country houses. You can explore the links between present-day Geordie and our Anglo-Saxon and Viking past or discover why Northern Irish accents are a rich blend of seventeenth century English and Scots. What you can do In addition there are interpretation and learning packages relating to the dual themes of language variation and language change within spoken English. In Regional Voices you can explore the differences that exist in spoken English as you move across the country, while Changing Voices gives you the chance to hear how English has changed in different parts of the country over the last fifty years.
East End Cockney accent 'fading' A new form of accent is replacing the traditional Cockney in some parts of the East End, research has found. White youths are among those speaking in a dialect combining Bangladeshi and Cockney influences - reflecting population changes in the area. Research for the BBC Voices project found white youngsters had adopted words from Bangladeshi friends such as "nang" (good) and "creps" (trainers). Similar accent changes were also found in areas of Cardiff and Liverpool. Local identity A nine-month study of youngsters took place at a youth club in the borough of Tower Hamlets, East London as part of the BBC project into accents and dialects across the UK. "The majority of young people of school age are of Bangladeshi origin and this has had tremendous impact on the dialect spoken in the area," said Sue Fox, a research fellow at Queen Mary College, University of London. "In Cardiff I've heard a number of accent mixes that weren't previously heard before such as Cardiff-Arabic and Cardiff-Hindi."
The Listening Project The Listening Project is a partnership between BBC Radio and the British Library that invites people to share an intimate conversation, to be recorded and broadcast by the BBC and, if suitable, curated and archived by the British Library. These conversations will form a unique picture of our lives today, preserved for future generations. Visit The Listening Project website (BBC) and get involved. Throughout the Project, our experts will be discussing these conversations and highlighting related recordings in the archive, on their Sounds blog. Visit the Sounds blog and join the conversation. Sounds at the British Library Our Sounds website showcases over 50,000 recordings from our world-class collection of 3.5 million items. Listen now to over 50,000 sounds. Oral history and research Oral history in the classroom Our Learning website suggests many opportunities for using audio material in schools. And are you sitting or sat at a computer? The BBC and the British Library: in partnership
What Britain's county dialects can tell us about the national character When I examined the wonderful collection of glossaries of county dialects I realised just how monastic was the zeal with which the Victorian lexicographers went about their compiling. Just as they collected the rocks, butterflies and ancient antiquities that now fill our museums, so (predominantly between 1850 and 1880) they went around collecting examples of local dialect from every county in England and several in Scotland – and even some specific industrial communities such as the mining villages of Yorkshire and Durham. I learned much about the British character through the English language. One of the more interesting aspects of English is the love of identifying action and sound through semi-onomatopoeic phrases. These jolly, affectionate and inventive expressions are known in the linguistics community as "reduplicative rhyming compounds". On matters of climate, Scotland has the final say.
Norfolk schools seek to reclaim derided dialect | UK news Thass a rum 'un, bor, as Norfolk folk might say. Thousands of children are to be taught the county's dialect at school as part of a project to promote the much-maligned rural accent. Derided by city slickers and mocked in adverts for "bootiful" Bernard Matthews turkeys, Norfolk's mother tongue will be recorded and practised by pupils in 11 schools after Friends of Norfolk Dialect, or Fond, was awarded a £24,600 grant to introduce understanding and appreciation of the rich vernacular. "It's critically important that youngsters are aware that there's a wonderful, rich dialect that they need to use or lose. It's not something to be ashamed of," said Norfolk writer and broadcaster Keith Skipper, who founded Fond seven years ago. The Lost in Translation project, which is being funded by the Local Heritage Initiative, was born of a fear that the spread of Norfolk speech was, in the words of Mr Skipper, "wassanwotterwuz", or worse that what it was.
A reason to mither Are you chunnering? Ever seen a tarnack? Love the sound of nurdling? Maybe only if you come from Derbyshire. According to the Yorkshire Dialect Society, because of the influence of the internet, social mobility and globalisation, terms which were once commonly used are now a mystery to younger people. In Derbyshire, however, an effort has been made to document the dialect of a small village, Earl Sterndale, in a new book. He is using his book Words of the White Peak as "a passionate plea to save part of our history". But what about the rest of the country? Earl Sterndale Am mithered deeth - I'm worried to death. Anyroadup surrey, ar mun mek tracks fer wom, al sithee! Ay wur raight gloppendt, thi o' threaped 'im airt as it wurn't raight, 'e wur fair sneeped - He was really lost for words, they all bamboozled him that what he was saying wasn't correct, he was very crestfallen. Chunnering - Mumbling disagreeably but not really wanting to be heard. Na then, surrey, 'owat? North Yorkshire Devon
Routes of English - Pitmatic Lost language of Pitmatic gets its lexicon | UK news A dialect so dense that it held up social reforms has been rescued from obscurity by the publication of its first dictionary. Thousands of terms used in Pitmatic, the oddly-named argot of north-east miners for more than 150 years, have been compiled through detailed research in archives and interviews with the last generation to talk of kips, corf-batters and arse-loops. First recorded in Victorian newspapers, the language was part of the intense camaraderie of underground working which excluded even friendly outsiders such as the parliamentary commissioners pressing for better conditions in the pits in 1842. "The barriers to our intercourse were formidable," they wrote in their report on encountering the Pitmatic dialect. The first Pitmatic dictionary, including pit recollections and analysis of the origins of the dialect's words, has been compiled by Bill Griffiths, the country's foremost Geordie scholar, whose previous work includes the standard Dictionary of North East Dialect.
English dialect study - an overview By Clive Upton What is a dialect? Dialect is one of those words that almost everybody thinks they understand, but which is in fact a bit more problematic than at first seems to be the case. A simple, straightforward definition is that a dialect is any variety of English that is marked off from others by distinctive linguistic features. Such a variety could be associated with a particular place or region or, rather more surprisingly, it might also be associated with a certain social group—male or female, young or old, and so on. But whether the focus is regional or social, there are two important matters that need to be considered when defining ‘dialect’. Back to top Dialect or accent? A common mistake is to confuse a ‘dialect’ with an accent, muddling up the difference between words people use and the sounds they make, their pronunciation. It will be obvious from this that accent, or pronunciation, is a special element of a dialect that needs separate attention to be properly understood.
Bloshy, dossity and spruttled: Not a firm of solicitors but the lost words of Leicestershire Comments (0) There have been snappier book titles, that’s for sure, writes Jeremy Clay. In 1857, the antiquarian Thomas Wright emerged from his room full of dusty old books to publish his grand study of anachronistic language. The name? Deep breath, everyone... It was published in two volumes, quite possibly to accommodate the title. It’s bursting with golden words which might even flummox Will Self if you dropped them nonchalantly into a chat. Some of the entries just need a bit of a brush and tidy up to form themselves into words we know today: Gog mire, for instance, for quagmire. Or a bearward, the keeper of a bear. But perhaps the time has come again for the likes of dizzardly, meaning foolish, goodmanturd, for a worthless bloke, fiss-buttocked-sow, for a fat, vulgar woman or gigga-joggie, for the noise made by the shaking of a bedstead. Where Wright knew a certain word was confined to a particular area, he added a note after the description. Enjoy. Arsomever, adv. Asprous, adj.