British Accents Audio Collection

http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/recordings/index.shtml

Excellent map with links to recordings

http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/whereilive/highlandsandnorthernisles/voices/index.shtml?clip=3

I love the Scottish accent..... seriously listen and see if you can understand.

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/whereilive/highlandsandnorthernisles/voices/index.shtml?clip=3>

To the untrained ear that sounds like Dutch.... I bet if we asked to compare a Dutch audio to this one people might think it' the same language.

Does others think this audio sounds like Dutch (well soundwise)??

Methinks that's not a "Scottish Accent", but SCOTS, the language! Seriously, there's a difference. Those people aren't speaking English, aha :-p.

The recording of a guy in Edinburgh, discussing cerebral palsy/disability issues in Scotland, is spot on capturing the typical general Edinburgh accent. Notice the intrusion of Estuary even up here so it is not strictly confined to Southern England and that's for sure....listen to the words "society" and "equality". This South Eastern region of Scotland ...Lothian and the Borders Region, is where Estuary is more noticeable in ordinary, every day speech.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/recordings/group/scotland-edinburgh.shtml

I found this one interesting...it was recorded in Anglesey, North Wales, where my best mate from uni lives. There is definitely an age divide between speech patterns in that area it seems...the people chatting here are obviously elderly people. My mate and a lot of his mates in Anglesey don't really sound like that at all. When I first met Andy I thought he was from the English Home Counties, but he is Anglesey born and bred and a fluent Welsh speaker.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/recordings/group/wales-holyhead.shtml

Those people speaking on Whalsay (one of the most remote of the Shetland Islands, the extreme northernmost point of the UK) are speaking in their own distinctive accent which has strong Norse connections and inflexions in their speech, so really it's not Dutch you should be thinking about, but Norwegian, because those people are actually a lot closer to Bergen, in Norway, than they are to their own Scottish capital city, Edinburgh, let alone far, far away London.

This is an accent from the first area of Wales (North) you cross into from England...Flintshire....and it's proximity to Liverpool shows itself in some of the ways the bloke pronounces some of his words. He mentions that word "hiraeth" (meaning a longing or nostaligia) which is a Welsh word for which there is no exact equivalent in English.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/recordings/individual/wales-flint-roberts-vernon.shtml

Three girls (all hairdressers in the capital city of Cornwall, Truro) and I have no difficulty understanding them at all. There is a definite generation gap in accents down in Cornwall.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/recordings/group/cornwall-truro.shtml

Now a group of elderly guys chatting in a pub in Marazion (a typical Cornish name...it's a wee fishing village).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/recordings/group/cornwall-marazion.shtml

I loved being in Cornwall lasy year but I was so pissed off at not hearing anbody speak Cornish properly. If those lassies in Truro are right and "the Cornish accent dies out" then what hope is there for a proper revival of the Cornish Language?

OK, don't get too mad over there in America but this is a clip of one of those old guys in the Cornish pub making a Language related joke at the expense of an American tourist to the fishing village who innocently asked where the urinal was.....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/recordings/individual/cornwall-marazion-cargeeg-ken.shtml

<Methinks that's not a "Scottish Accent", but SCOTS, the language! Seriously, there's a difference. Those people aren't speaking English, aha :-p.>

Surely it sounds to me as an accent of English.

But a distant cousin of most English accents. I swear to God I never heard anything like this before. It took me a wee little while they were speaking English or what you calling. I actually like how they said 'cold'.

this sounded like dutch to me. English is second language for me.

I listened real carefully to the accents of Ulster Scots, Cornwall, Somerset and Bristol to get some clue of the origins the dialects of the American South.

Of all that I listened to, the Cornish and Ulster dialects sound the most familiar. What really leaped out was to hear Ulster people from County Down say 'young 'un', 'heered', 'axed', 'take a notion', 'ye' for 'you'; I hear these phrases all the time here.

The Cornish accent has much of the flat straightforward quality of American English. It is also very earthy. The next task for me is to find out how many of the first settlers in Virginia and the Carolinas were actually from Cornwall and nearby.