Evolution of a Northern and Southern English Accent, 1586 - 2006

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[rebeckahblewett]

I'm always in awe of the writing. The dialogue and voice acting in itself is brilliant. I'm blown away. Thank you for these, Simon.

[wenqiweiabcd]

Interesting how the two Englishmen went from understanding each other well to barely understanding each other and then back to understanding each other relatively well again.

[jmckenzie]

I loved the conversation from 1946 about cars. The Cumbrian and the Londoner come from completely different worlds, yet share the commonality of never having been in a car. And while the upper-class, car-owning people they refer to may inhabit different physical regions, socially they live in the same world, one which is totally alien to both of them.

[AxelGage]

This is a quibble - but having the Southerner at the top and the Northerner at the bottom throughout was more confusing than I'd thought it would be

[riptidemonzarc]

This of course raises the question of whether sheep language has also evolved since those comparisons were made

[fugithegreat]

I wish this kind of attention to historical accuracy was more present in screenwriting and acting. Sometimes I just can't immerse myself in a film because I keep thinking that they wouldn't have spoken that way. In the rare occasions that they do attempt historically authentic speech, it makes me so happy, and so do your recreations, Simon!

[amybradley]

I love that you included the sharp, audible inhale to show you agree with someone. I've never heard that outside Scandinavia. I find it really interesting that it's a more wide-spread part of speech.

[pinkfakecheez]

9:13 I'm Northern English (Lancastrian but very close to Yorkshire and dad's family are from there going way back) and when we play up the accent to be silly we also say "deed" and "dee-in" e.g. "'is tha olreet lad, or is tha deein?"

[NellMckay]

Thank you I enjoy your work. As a north eastern English speaker I was surprised at just how understandable the Cumbrian dialect was even going back to the 16oo's. Many of the words and sounds are still the same here in North Yorkshire amongst rural communities. From what you said it now makes more sense, why Londoners always ask if I'm from Scotland. X

[modalmixture]

I really love the moment in these videos when a language slips into that uncanny space where it flips between comprehensible and unintelligible. It gives the strange sense of hearing an exotic new language and suddenly being able to understand it as a native speaker. Holding both of these experiences in my head at the same time is wonderful and very revealing about language.

[Great_Olaf]

Something I love about this series of videos is just how natural and mundane the topics of conversation are. So many language videos use completely abstract sentences with so little bearing on the reality of the people's lives in that time and place, it's incredibly refreshing to hear people talking about ordinary things in their lives like food, travel, the farm, those pretentious rich people, or childhood experiences.

This video in particular was also fascinating, seeing how the curve of intelligibly started high, dropped, and rose again, showing that dialect diversity is always something of a moving target, they merge and diverge constantly. That merging isn't just a modern phenomenon brought about by modern media and standardized schooling. 8 know you said the earlier northern dialect work was a bit more speculative, based more on comparison than on contemporary commentary, but that method still implies that there was more intelligibility between them than there would be later. And the 1500s is just far too late after the germanic settlers arrival for that to have simply been a result of not having enough time to drift. That implies to me that dialect merging and diverging was a regular recurring process than, and that it likely still is now. That gives me hope for the future, that just because we're losing a lot of languages and dialects now, we won't wind up speaking a global homogenous language with no variation, maybe old languages will die, but new ones will be born.

[JimmyChappie]

Another incredibly fascinating, well-researched and well-put-together video. As someone from north-east England with a good knowledge of Swedish, I was able to understand the Cumbrian speech pretty well all the way back. I was also pleasantly surprised that what is almost certainly an etymological cousin of the Swedish word 'fånga' (to catch/capture) exists in Cumbrian (to fang), no doubt through Old Norse influence . Thank you Simon.

[calebballantine]

They were both very polite in 1646 greeting each other with a very proper mutually intelligible “good evening”, although they were distinctly more at odds when it came to the naming of a horse. The little touches are brilliant.

[FionaEm]

As an Australian, I use the put/cut distinction similarly to someone with a London accent. I've always found it interesting that we seem to have settled on an accent partway between SSB and Cockney, even though white ppl in colonial-era Australia came from all over the British Isles and would have had a range of accents.

I find your videos about the current and historical differences between northern & southern English accents fascinating.

[FAS]

Changing use of language is fascinating. When I grew up in East Sussex the accent was still semi-rhotic, but by the time my daughter was born in 1972, rhoticity had completely disappeared.
When I visit Lancashire, young people speak with a different accent to my relatives who came from the area around Ashton-under-Lyne, Bury, and Rochdale, and who were born at the beginning of the 20th century. They spoke more like my grandfather who was born in 1876 and spoke a dialect that would probably be difficult to understand in Lancashire today.
My father grew up in Liverpool, and his accent, and of others of his generation, was not like that of the Beatles. Unlike most regional accents, the Liverpool accent seems to have become stronger over time. When I commented on this to a colleague of my own age from Liverpool, he said that his parents' accent was not as strongly Liverpudlian as his. The accent spoken by my father and his contemporaries reminded me of that of a middle-class family from West Kirby, who looked down their noses at Liverpudlians.
Now, I often struggle to understand the accent and vocabulary of our grandchildren, and if I live long enough to meet the next generation, they may be completely incomprehensible.

[joyousmonkey]

Another exquisite video. The N vs S dialogues were truly captivating. It still saddens me that we're losing and have already lost so many accents and dialects, only to be replaced with a stodgy, grey affair with the occasional mid-Atlantic element. Keep up the good work - it serves to commemorate such beautiful variety.

[EuanMcG]

You are my absolute favourite YouTuber, and make me sorely miss my days on Edinburgh's undergrad linguistics programme researching Scottish sound changes

[DaveHuxtableLanguages]

Another tour de force! Brilliant stuff. Well done.

[bassfingers]

Thank you for these videos. Better than any radio broadcast (with the possible exception of the Shipping Forecast 🙂). Fantastic listening.

[alexthomas]

I've loved both of the other versions and this was truly a new level entirely. My jaw dropped when you got to the 1886 recording. Incredibly well done.