Purple Words on a Grey Background: Local Accent

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Local Accent

I find regional accents fascinating. At a funeral the other day, the undertaker checked that I had been saying 'Joan', as he thought I might have said 'Jane'. He confessed his hearing wasn't what it was, but I worked out the problem. I say Joan, to rhyme with 'cone', whereas in Lancashire a lot of people say Joan to rhyme with 'corn'.

My native Nottingham accent is a tricky one for people outside the region to get right. I noticed that it was announced today that Alan Sillitoe had died. Famous for his gritty realist 'kitchen sink' dramas, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was probably his most famous, along with The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Set in Nottingham, depicting events in the life of a worker at the Raleigh bike factory, Nottingham people could spot when the accents drifted a little from Nottingham to Yorkshire. Depictions of D.H. Lawrence books suffer the same problem.

Anyway, I just thought I'd tell you what was goin' off, before I head off down the twitchell to go to church. Wouldn't want you gettin' mardy about it.