Lewis Lehe riffs on English accents, discussing the possible replacement of Received Pronunciation with Dizzeerascalian.
Two weeks ago, my Kindle took a 100-mile train ride to the Lost & Found of Newcastle railway station. I rode up last week to retrieve it in person, because I couldn’t understand the Geordies on the phone well enough to arrange a shipment. “Geordie” is what the British call a person from Newcastle, and there is even a TV show called “Geordie Shore” that runs pretty far with the pun and Geordies’ love of tanning.
Newcastle was a shock. When Geordies stand more than ten feet from me, their speech stops resembling spoken English in the same way that, when I take my glasses off, everyone with a beard looks like Abe Lincoln. I’d get suspicious: “Why is everyone on this tram but my seatmate speaking Farsi?”
I cling to a mysterious intuition that if you built a complete human being out of popsicle sticks, it would sound just like Dizzee Rascal.
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The accent is so awesome that, even if I could understand one damn thing anyone said, I would still ask the Geordies to repeat themselves three times. Drifting to sleep in my Newcastle hostel, I re-imagined English historical figures with Geordie accents: King Henry VIII, Winston Churchill, Simon Cowell…What if ‘The King’s Speech’ took place in an alternate universe where all England spoke Geordie, except for the incapable king, whose shameful disorder caused him to speak like a member of our world’s royal family?
After eight months here in England, I’m left to concede that America has nothing on England in the accent department. For example, Leeds and Manchester would together fit in the Atlanta metropolitan area, but you’d have to travel eight hundred miles from Atlanta, to Philadelphia, to trace the contrast between Noel Gallagher and the cashier on my corner who tries to upsell me lotto tickets.
In the US, people make a big deal out of their accents to feel special. And we do have some neat niche accents—like the Cajuns in Louisiana, Yinzers in Pittsburgh and the Gullah-speakers in South Carolina. But we basically have about six main ones: Southern, Black, New England, New York, regular, and Sarah Palin. That’s in a country with 300 million people.
Last month I said at a party that I like how the East London rapper Dizzee Rascal talks and my conversation partner rolled his eyes. I guess there is some class taboo attached to the accent because I haven’t heard Dizzeerascalian spoken on the BBC. But I’m blissfully ignorant of any English prejudices, and so I innately like Dizzee Rascal’s pronunciation. I cling to a mysterious intuition that if you built a complete human being out of popsicle sticks, it would sound just like Dizzee Rascal. Now, my ambition is to learn his accent, and to convince America that Dizzeerascalian is the true English; that the English accent Americans know was synthesized in the 1960’s; that the Queen Elizabeth II we hear on TV is dubbed by Hugh Grant, a Belgian. If anyone asks what motivates this conspiracy, I’ll say, “British humor. It’s hard for us to understand.”
Photo of Newcastle Station from Flickr/ikkoskinen
An earlier version of this post appeared in The Leeds Student.
yeah we have alot of accents.
from memory we have about 420 accents in the uk. the northeast accents are heavily influenced from the scandinavian countries and their rule eg. danelaw there. some ‘viking’ words (apart from location names) are still used in the northeast
Um…yeah the UK’s got some wicked awesome accents, and they are more varied than the US. Not 15 minutes south of Newcastle is Durham, and people swear there’s a difference between a Newcastle accent and a Durham accent…though I can’t really hear the difference and I’ve been living there for years. However, I think there’s more variety to U.S. accents than you suggest. I mean, “black” is not an accent, for starters. That label itself is a bit offensive, really…..but even more than that, African-American communities in the southeast, for example, don’t have the same accent as African-American communities in… Read more »
The regional accents in the UK are really out of this world. I encountered Glaswegian in Glasgow a couple years ago. I couldn ‘t understand a word , but everyone sounded awesome. The people in Glasgow were super friendly and everyone wanted to engage me in conversation. I nodded politely while they enthusiastically recounted stories about … well… I’m not sure. But whatever it was, I was impressed.