I don't have an accent!

An elderly English gentleman was walking along the road one day. He looked rather weary and leaned heavily on his cane as he struggled along in the summer heat. The local vicar was returning home in his car along the same road. When he saw the old man he pulled over and wound down his car window.

"I say" called the vicar to the old man; "can I give you a lift?"

"No thanks" the man replied, "I live in a bungalow".

It's okay to wince; it really wasn't a good joke and it would have been entirely lost on citizens of the Excited States to whom a building lift is an "elevator".

Several years ago I visited New Orleans on business (long before Katrina the wicked wind goddess of the Atlantic destroyed the city). One morning I found myself inside the hotel lift/elevator with a gentleman and his wife. The gentleman gestured towards the buttons on the wall and inquired as to which floor I wanted.

"Fourth floor please" I responded.

The gentleman's wife's face lit up as she turned towards me and loudly proclaimed - in a broad southern drawl - "Oh! you have an accent!!!!"

Had I been thinking quickly I might have replied "and I presume that you, madam, speak standard English". But I missed the moment.

Being of a cockney persuasion myself, I was given to teasing my Manchester born wife about her accent. "I don't have an accent" she would protest in a broad Lancashire dialect. I still tease today but she no longer denies it - she drives a Hyundai Accent.

Anywhere in Canada except the Maritimes, you can drive two thousand miles without hearing any significant change in dialect. In Britain you can sometimes drive as much as a hundred miles before the dialect changes so completely that you need a translator to communicate.

It certainly hasn't escaped the attention of the folks at George Mason University in the Excited States that English is spoken around the world with a huge variety of local dialects. In fact they have a database that currently has 1290 variations. You can listen to them all by visiting the university's Speech Accent Archive. I say, th'can listen t'them all b'visiting the university's Speech Accent Archive th'knows.

10 Things I Miss Most About Britain: #10. The British Accent

Oh, You Have An Accent!
I was in a hotel elevator in New Orleans some years ago. An American couple were in the elevator with me. The gentleman asked me which floor I wanted. "Fourth floor please" I replied. "O-oohhh, you have an accent!!!" exclaimed his wife in a thick southern drawl. Don't you wish that the right words would come to you in these situations? I could have replied (perhaps somewhat sarcastically) "and I presume, madam, that you speak standard English!". But I was polite and explained my origins and current domicile in Canada. She told me she recognized a "hint of British" in my accent.

A Hundred Miles
So what is a "British accent"? You can travel 100 miles in Britain and people will speak quite differently. My own accent is rooted in "Cockney", but a period spent in the north-east taught me a little "Geordie". She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed is a "Yonner" from Oldham. We met in the midlands where people from the "Brummagem" area almost sing the English language. The accents of Scotland and Northern Ireland are remarkably unique and just as diverse.

Bi-Lingual Roadsigns
But regional variations in pronunciation are just the tip of the iceberg. Different languages are spoken in Britain. English, with all its regional accents, is predominant. Welsh is still very strongly supported by a lot of people. Cross the border into Wales and you will find bi-lingual roadsigns: English and Welsh. The Cornish language is dying out but there are still a few people down in the county where the palm trees grow who keep the language alive. And, in the Scottish Highlands and Islands, Gaelic is spoken. Unlike Canada, where many immigrant languages can be heard, Britain's languages are all native languages going back hundreds of years.

Ancient Teutonic
The English language originated from ancient Teutonic and has much in common with modern German. The English spoken in Chaucer's day would be unintellligible to modern Britons. The Georgian era brought a strong French influence which gave southerners the soft "ah" pronunciation of the letter "a" (as in "l-ah-st", "f-ah-st" etc). The north of England retained older pronunciations and is thought, by some scholars, to be closer to the older forms of the English language.

Yeh, Really Eh!
Americans may find British accents quaint but they have never sought to deny that they speak "English". English is the official language for air traffic control all around the world. It is still spoken - with regional variations - in many countries all around the planet. The idea of "standard English", also sometimes called "BBC English" is an anachronism. As my Canadian friends would say, "yeh, really eh!".