Britich Accent

This is a bit of a laugh! - an American's version of an English English RP accent!

While I quite like his own native American accent, his EE RP is just plain dreich!!! It's awful - nothing like it, but give him his due....he doesn't have to live with it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSLoF_GXf7U

As for the "down in Hampstead" bit - that's another dead give away - nobody ever says "down in Hampstead" - not if you live in London (or anywhere in Southern England at least) - it's always "up in Hampstead" - Hampstead is the most elevated part of Greater London altitude wise - fantastic views over the city from the top of Hampstead Heath.

It's a wee bit like when people in Southern England say they are "going UP to London for the day", while people in the North of England and up here in Scotlkand always say they are "going DOWN to London for the day". In that case it's nothing to do with altitude - merely geographic. I don't know what people in the Midlands say though - probably both. Or maybe they just say they're "off to London for the day".

Listening to that American guy again he actually starts off sounding a bit Welsh! :-) Then he goes off into something like a kind of Irish for a while, and then I thought I detected a wee bit of Somerset, or was it Oxfordshire? Nah - more like a bit of Western Pennsylvania mixed up with a touch of West Bromwich, or - at a pinch - Sunningdale......or maybe South Kensington. Never mind, I admire his effort. :-)

>>YouTube has a lot of good videos of English speakers trying to do each others' accents. Americans seem to lean towards trying to mimic the RP accent, while Brits seem to always go for either the California Valley Girl dialect or an attempt at a Southern accent.<<

* cringes at the mere thought of Brits trying to sound like stereotypical Valley Girls *

It's all good fun trying to mimic each other's trans-Atlantic accents. As a Scot, though, I'm pretty good at doing a bog standard English English RP accent - I'm told I could be taken for a guy who has lived "up in Hampstead" all his life so long as I don't talk too fast or bang on a wee bit too much as I then start to lapse back into bits of my native Scottish. I can also do a pretty convincing East Ender cum Cockney cum Estuaryspeak, again within time constraints - oi fink vat's puckah, innit mite? At a push I can do a Brummie - that's pretty easy peasy once you get the swing of it, but no way can I do a Scouse or even a Geordie, which is wee a bit puzzling seeing that Geordie is the closest of all the English accents to us here in Scotland, location wise - Geordie goes right up to the Scottish border.

Actually, that's quite a funny situation - accents wise. For the most part of its course the River Tweed forms the border between Scotland and England on the eastern side, geographically. There is a nice wee Scottish town called Coldstream situated right on the north bank of the Tweed....in Scotland. Cross over the river bridge and you are in England....and about a mile along the road you come to an English village called Cornhill-on-Tweed. The two places are little over a mile apart. For the most part the people of Coldstream have a distinct Scottish accent of the Scottish Borders Region. You will hear it on the streets and in the shops, cafes, restaurants and pubs. Over in Cornhill in the village street, and in the shops, cafes and its two pubs you will hear mostly the distinct Northumbrian accent (English) which verges on the Geordie. It's strange how you don't hear all that much in the way of accent "inter-mixing" in the two places which only have a border and a river to separate them.

It's the same at the western end of the Anglo-Scottish border - Carlisle, a cathedral city in England (Cumbria) - and four miles further up the A74 road you cross the border into Scotland and into the wee town of Gretna Green - distinctly recognisable Cumbrian (English) accent in the streets of Carlisle (which is pronounced Car-lyle as you would gather) and a most definite Scottish predominance in Gretna Green. Thus is the place to where young English couples intent on marrying each other once used to elope so that they could marry in Scotland, where many laws differ widely from those in England (and Wales) - and in those days it was possible to marry without a licence in Scotland, and Gretna Green, being literally just inside Scotland and the first conveninent place available to allow these unions, became famous for this reason. The marriage cermemonies were usually performed over the anvil in a blacksmith's shop! That was many years ago - things have changed now, and Gretna Green is more famous for its football team! As well as it's proudly massive sign saying: WELCOME TO SCOTLAND. WELCOME TO THE SCOTTISH BORDERS REGION

On the other side of the road is this teeny weeny little sign saying: Welcome to England....and underneath that - Welcome to Cumbria

ERROR! At Gretna Green underneath the "Welcome to Scotland" sign it says "Welcome to the Dumfries and Galloway Region" and not Scottish Borders! I thought I was still back in Coldstream for a moment there.....

<< It's strange how you don't hear all that much in the way of accent "inter-mixing" in the two places which only have a border and a river to separate them.>>

But have a look towards Berwick. There they have a distinct accent that has both Scottish and Northumbrian aspects but, at a judgement, leans more heavily towards the first than the second. Stangely, the edge of this accent to the south comes just as abrubtly but without a border or a river to mark it, incuding a couiple of villages to the immediate south but with no "blend" towards the North-Northumbrian villages further than a couple of miles away.

Also, it's worth noticing that the accent border is far more solid than that for any other dialect aspects, with both sides of the border sharing vocabulary and grammatical features, as well as the morestriking "broad dialect" pronunciation features: "there's a moose loose aboot the hoose"

AJC:
You are quite right about Berwick - or to give it the officially correct name - Berwick-upon-Tweed. Unlike those other border towns I mentioned, Berwick is more or less unique - although it's now officially in England (Northumberland) and has been for a long time, the town and immediate area has been switched back and forth between Scotland and England nine times over the centuries, but now looks set to remain in England permanently, just five miles or so south of the present day Anglo Scottish border.

But many of the townspeople still regard themselves as Scottish, which is why you will hear the Scottish accent much more frequently than Geordie, or any other English accent, when going around and about its historic streets.

If you go up onto the amazing battlements of the ancient town walls you will see several huge guns pointing out towards the North Sea - in the general direction of Russia as the town of Berwick is still officially at war with Russia! A throwback from a long dead conflict of ancient times, but no peace was ever officially declared to end "hostilities". Why on earth wee Berwick town ever found itself at war with Mighty Mother Russia is a mystery without digging into the archives.

Berwick-on-Tweed is the first stop on the trains running from Edinburgh to London King's Cross.

The Scottish accent prevalent in Berwick is that of the Scottish Borders region - naturally.

Damian, Berwick is not officially in England. It has never been incorporated. Read the Wikipedia article on that: they passed a law once saying that any laws mentioning England should be regarded as applying to Berwick, but they never actually made Berwick part of England.

The "Berwick nationality" question may well be a bit of a grey area historically, and I take on board what you say about it. As I say, the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed has been shunted back and forth between Scotland and England nine times over about 1,000 years due to all the political and military wrangling over time. To the minds of many people it is, at heart, a truly Scottish town - it was once the county town of the former Scottish county of Berwickshire. That in itself identifies its truly Scottish heritage, but nevertheless the shifting of the border in the 15th century to a line a few miles north of that part of the River Tweed - lying north of the estuary area - transferred the town of Berwick and immediate surrounds to the north into England, and the English county of Northumberland, the administrative area now governing the area on a local level. Until the reorganisation of local authority boundaries in Scotland, it was bizarre that the county of Berwickshire was in Scotland, while its former county town was in England.

Interesting to see that Wikipedia described the local Berwick dialect as a mix of Lowland Scots (the Scottish Borders Region) and Northumbrian (Northumberland, and English).

To me personally, the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed is definitely a Scottish town, and England should hand it back to us. It's NORTH of the river, for heaven's sake!!! AND the town's football team is the ONLY English side playing in the Scottish league! It's an absolute travesty!

:-)

It's slightly more complicated than that, unfortunately. What is now called Berwick on Tweed consists of Berwick itself (north of the river) along with East Ord, Tweedmouth and Spittal below the river. The football ground is in Tweedmouth, for instance and has never been in Scotland, despite the team playing in the Scottish league. While these areas may have different names, it very definitely is *one* town in terms of business and socila life and the inhabitants would find a border running through the middle of it slightly inconvenient, to say the least. It would, for example, mean the high school children in Tweedmouth needing to go 30 miles to Alnwick to school every morning. While you might find some there who would prefer to be part of Scotland (though they don't tend to be very vocal about it), it would likely need to be as a job lot that they were transferred.

Although the dialect sounds *more* like that of lowland Scotland than that of Northumberland, aspects of the latter are most definitely there, particularly in the intonation. And this dialect is the same in all of the areas of town on both sides of the river, along with some closely surrounding villages like Scremerston and Murton. I think this shows something about the local sense of identity: more locally Berwick than either English or Scottish.

You guys seem pretty well clued up on the Berwick area - maybe you are locals?

I think the whole accent/heritage/national identification issue of that part of the Anglo/Scottish border region is fascinating, like the town of Berwick itself. Born and bred and still resident in Edinburgh, I am pretty familiar with it (not all that distant after all!) and the couple or so of occasions when I've sauntered along its historic streets I could well be in any Scottish Borders town if the dominant accent is anything to go, by but I admit to hearing the Northumbrian in fair abundance as well I reckon. I still think that Scots was a wee bit more prolific though! :-) You can definitely tell that you are in England though by such things as the names of the banks, just for starters.

When I was at uni in Leeds I passed through Berwick (on the train) loads of times. I still have my student rail pass (33% discount) but that expires next April when I hit 26 and no longer in full time education and so I won't qualify any more.......sob! sob!