Reel Wheel

This morning a reader (oh, all right, it was Terminal Student) sent me a link to this segment on NPR's Weekend Edition about an audio archive of British regional accents.  It includes recordings of two speakers with really interesting accents.  Give a listen—can you follow what they're saying?

NPR host Sheilah Kast seemed to need a translation of what they're saying, but I didn't find them to be too hard to follow after the first few words, although I had to pay close attention.  All those years of memorizing Monty Python are finally paying off, I guess.  Is it my imagination, or does the old woman talking about baking bread say [wæɹm wæθɹ̩] (with a theta) for "warm water"?  I'd never heard that dialect feature before.

The collection these recordings are drawn from contains 681 items, including longer recordings of the two speakers in the broadcast, so you can listen to the voices of disappearing varieties of English for hours on end.  I suppose I'm used to a huge country connected by TV, radio, telephones, and continuous mass migrations, but I'm always surprised by the sheer variety of accents that exist in the UK.  England and America may be two countries separated by a common language, but from where I'm sitting it's a wonder people from adjacent counties in England can understand each other at all.

[Now playing: "Somebody Told Me" by The Killers]

Comments

[chris waigl]

According to the page on Miss Dibnah's recording, and my ears, you are right. They use the SAMPA transcription [waT@`] and indicate the does the same for "better", "quarter" and "butter".

I had a bit of an unexpected problem with the curator's pronunciation of "well", though. It is so aspirated that I'd expected a word starting in /wh/. (The only time I've heard a speaker make a clear distinction between aspirated and non-aspirated /w/ was when listening to a speech of Queen Elizabeth. I found this fascinating...)

[Alistair]

This site is great, one more resource to use with my students. I come from a part of the UK where you cross the county border and you have a different accent. I once went to the northeast of England and got off the train into a taxi, the driver started to chat to me and I couldn´t understand a word he said.