Prejudice & accents in England....

Maybe, maybe, Guofei Ma? A dinna understan (I do not understand).

Why do people from the English North hate London with such a passion?

Why do Southerners hate Northerners? Accents maybe? Maybe the SOutherners view the Northeners as backwards, country bumpkins.

Southerners traditionally have looked down on Northerners as provincial and backward. However, this is less and less the case. Some idiots hate northerners but these are a minority. Most southerners probably don't even know much about the north. Also, as a Londoner, I used to even look down on the south and laugh at the attempts of the Essex boys and girls trying to gatecrash the London party.

Perhaps we're jealous of your frivolous (check spelling!) spending and 4x4 cars that you use to navigate round London's streets! You're all Southern softies south of B'ham! :-)

You keep talking, petal, we'll keep spending and driving...

Aye it's renowned that southerners are soft.

So many people who now reside in Manchester are always telling me how much better it is than there previous southern home town.

You can shove your south east standard London tones up your arse!!

And also why do most Americans seem to think that England only consists of London? Maybe it's cos you are all thick as a big dumb yank wrestler!

Gearge Bush, your a wanker! and you can shove your f*****g banner up your arse!!

"oh USA is full of shite, oh USA is full of shite,it's full of shite,shite,and more shite,oh USA is full of shite!"

Don't forget that you SPEAK english, so show respect to who your masters are daft yanks.

Look, Robert, most SE towns are sh**. That's why they pretend to be part of London. But London is not the SE. It just happens to be in the middle of it.

Manchester's a big city and a fashionable one at that. I'm not surprised if they came from somewhere like Ipswich or Oxford they prefer Manchester. If they went to London, they would prefer that too.

But why the vitriol? Americans think England is London in the same way most English people reduce America to a few locations (New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, Miami etc.) or France to Paris.

Why do people from the English North hate London with such a passion?
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Because you Southerners are all a bunch of arrogant bastards. But you are also a bunch of wimps. It isn't true that the Scots hate the English. Many Scots have told me that they like Northerners but hate anyone south of the Watford Gap.

I like your liberal use of the word "all".

My dad says you northerners are a bunch of woopsies. What do you say to that?

Well Southerners are all poofs and woofters! :-) You don't get a high standard of living down South unless you have about £1million in your back pocket. £100,000, if that, will buy you a very nice and spacious house up North. I agree a lot of Southerners are arrogant sods, I'm not a great fan of the London accent anyway! The one they always use when an English character is in an American film!

Divided Englishness:
the north and south of the mind


In Divided Englishness: the north and south of the mind Milada Frankova argued, as the title of her paper suggests, that one of the reasons that the North-South divide is so strong in England is because it is so deeply embedded in the mind. It is part of the popular imagination, part of the English psyche. This observation was a constant theme recurring in many of the papers throughout the week.

There is a tendency in England for people to regard the North-South divide as something quite unique to the English, but this is simply not the case. There are strong North-South divides in the United States and in Italy, and in Germany there is an East-West divide based on very similar deep cultural differences.

The North-South divide has existed in England for several centuries. The industrial revolution has contributed greatly to the North-South divide over the past 200 years. However in the nineteenth century the view of a North-South divide began to move away from politics and economics, powerful though those forces are, and towards the l yrical . It began to be embedded i n the imagination. A perfect example i s Wordsworth's romantic portrayal of the Lake District.

Milada Frankova argued that literature has made a great contribution to the overall concept of Englishness, and in the same way it has contributed to the differing pastoral imagery with which we associate the North or the South.

The same pastoral view exists in today's literature and she gave a few examples. In A.S. Byatt's Still Life Daniel talks of his Yorkshire, Northern brain, almost as though such a thing were an accepted medical phenomenon. The prejudices too are still very strongly represented in literature. In Jane Gardam's 1996 novel Faith Fox s h e describes tribes above and below The Wash which is the geographical point where the accent divides.

Temples of Delight by Barbara Trapido depicts a teacher, an ordinary, educated and likeable person who views the North as a 'repository of people, good, plain, simple sorts who have not had the ambition or the enterprise to make something of themselves. Of course once upon a time there had been George Stephenson and the traction engine and so on, but that unfortunately was history. The North in the present time was full of people who expended their energies on growing leeks, on breeding pigeons, on eating faggots with mushy peas and also on voting Labour'.

Perhaps, though, the North-South divide, and the deep belief in its permanent existence, may not be an altogether bad thing. The North-South divide has a key role in the multi-cultural debate and it may have a role in devolution. The difference between the North and the South is not something that should be wrenched from the English mind, but instead something that should be celebrated in a multi-cultural society.

Literature is a rich vein in which to look for Englishness and its various meanings. Three papers delivered at the conference looked at different views of what being English is through examples of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century writing.

To Rita, don't come to London, you'll get mugged by a squeaky baseball cap & Stolen TN wearing Dj Luck & Mc Neat loving put-on badboy yardie accent hood rat white boy

or just don't go South of the river, or is that North.... errr

only kidding place is GRRRREAT!!

just don't go outside the Metro...... Hackney is next to "Shit Hole" in the dictionary

as is Tottenham