London property landlord Nick Parkin has written a guest blog post for us. In it he talks about different British English accents, and his experience of just how confusing they can be even for a native British English speaker!

British English accents

British Accents can be incredibly confusing to someone not born and bred in the country.

Any particular accent will often reveal much more than simply the area of the country that the speaker came from: it may often indicate their social class, and education. This explains why most call centres are situated in Yorkshire and Southern Scotland – these areas have accents which most of the UK population find pleasant, understandable, and socially neutral.

My own accent is very southern (London) middle class, educated. Early in my career I worked in a Lancashire Chemical Works with “Blue Collar” tradesmen (working class). When I started work I noticed a strange phenomenon – whenever I was nearby they would start talking in some strangulated high pitched language which I found harder to understand than their natural Lancashire accents (which were difficult enough for me!).

Northern folk are very welcoming and friendly so I was quickly able to unravel the story behind this new language I was hearing. They were actually teasing me about my southern accent, but getting things very very wrong!

Their ears were detecting a clear southern accent, but just as I can’t tell the difference between a Warrington accent and a Manchester accent, their ears wouldn’t distinguish between my middle class London accent, and a Cockney working class accent which to me is a different language to my own. So to tease me they were doing a Cockney accent thinking that it mimicked my own, and to make matters worse their Cockney mimicry was NOT good!

So, when you are learning English, and struggling to understand what someone is saying to you …… remember, it may not be you that doesn’t speak the language!

Nick Parkin, Renting London Flats

Read more about English accents and dialects in the UK

Listen to recordings of the diverse voices of the UK

And here's a selection of accents from the British Isles, from impressionist Mister Seanie. His characters and stereotypes are exaggerated of course (and perhaps insulting depending on which part of the UK you come from!), but it's an entertaining and mostly accurate account of some of the wide variety of English accents we have here.

Have you ever had problems understanding an English accent?

Image by Dimitry B

St. Andrew's Day is on 30th November.

It is the official National Day in Scotland, UK, and in 2006 was designated an official bank holiday by the Scottish Parliament.

St Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland, and also Greece, Russia and Romania. He was one of Jesus Christ’s Twelve Apostles and is thought to have been a fisherman, like his brother Simon Peter (Saint Peter).

St. Andrew's Day is an opportunity for people around the world to celebrate Scotland’s culture and heritage.

In 2009, the St. Andrew's Day celebrations were a key part of the finale weekend of the Homecoming Scotland year.

2009 was Scotland’s first Homecoming Year, and the year consisted of a calendar of events marking the 250^th anniversary of Scottish poet Robert Burns’ birth and celebrating all things Scottish.

The Homecoming Year was so successful that another is planned for 2014.

The Scots Language

There is some disagreement over whether Scots is a language in its own right, rather than one of the ancient dialects of English. Some believe that it is the ‘English of Scotland’, a part of General English; others that it is a Germanic language, as distinct from English as Swedish is distinct from Danish.

Its relationship with the English of England has been compared to Frisian in the Netherlands, which is dominated by Dutch; and Norwegian, which was once dominated by Danish.

Scots vocabulary overlaps with English, but Scots has words that are absent from Standard English. Some words are shared with dialects of Northern England, while others are unique to Scotland.

Distinctive Scots vocabulary comes from a variety of sources, including Old English, Old Norse, French, Dutch and Gaelic. * Here is some text written in Scots (from the Homecoming Scotland web site), with the partial English translation below it:

Scots

“Hamecomin Scotland 2009 is a year-lang leet o events tae celebrate aw that’s guid aboot Scotland. 2009 is the anniversary o the birth o Scotland’s maist kenspeckle makar, Robert Burns. Jine us tae merk Burns’ birthday, Scottish contributions tae gowf, whisky and Scotland’s muckle minds and innovations forby. Whither ye bide faur awa or doon the road, come hame tae oor ain unique cultur and heritage. In 2009, come hame tae Scotland.”

English

“Homecoming Scotland 2009 celebrates the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns’ birth. We’re also celebrating some of Scotland’s great contributions to the world: golf, whisky, great minds and innovations and Scotland’s rich ancestry and culture.” **

You can see how different Scots is to English

Try this Think You Know Scots? quiz with words like 'fankle', 'ramgunshoch' and 'genty'

Find out more about the Scots language from the Scots Language Centre or listen to Scots language on the Scots Language Centre’s channel on YouTube.

St. Andrew's Day fans are invited to join the online World Wide Ceilidh, where you and a partner can upload your photos, put on a kilt and a sporran, and dance a Scottish reel! The kilt and sporran are part of Scottish national dress – see the photo above.

St. Andrew's Day Traditions

Across Europe, in parts of Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and Romania, there are superstitious beliefs that a woman’s future husband can be revealed on the night before St. Andrew's Day. From the Homecoming Scotland site:

“In some parts of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, young women would write down the names of potential husbands on little pieces of paper, and stick these into little pieces of dough, called Halusky. When cooked, the first one to float to the surface of the water would reveal the name of their future husband.

In Poland, it is popular for women to put pieces of paper (on which they have written of potential husbands) under the pillow and first thing in the morning they take one out, which reveals the name of the future husband.” **

Do you have any St. Andrew's Day traditions in your country? I'd love to hear about them.

Image © SteveWagner

* Oxford Companion to the English Language

**© 2008 EventScotland

English is spoken in more than 60 countries in the world and, according to some figures, is used by more than 1 billion people.

Many varieties, accents and dialects of English exist worldwide.

English accents in the UK

The UK is a relatively small country, but we have a surprising variety of English accents and dialects.

Visitors and immigrants who have learned to speak English abroad can find the range of dialects and accents in the UK confusing, and some accents difficult to understand.

Areas of the UK with distinct accents include Scotland, Wales and Ireland; the counties of Cornwall, Yorkshire and Norfolk; and the cities of Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, Newcastle, Birmingham, Belfast and Dublin. And these are just a few examples, so you begin to get an idea of the wide variation in English pronunciation across the UK.

Immigrants to the UK, or students residing here temporarily to learn English, are very likely to learn to speak English with a specific accent, depending on their location in the UK.

Many students tell me they want to learn to speak ‘English English’ (as opposed to American English, for instance) – they are often surprised to learn just how many variations of English accent exist here in the UK.

You can hear how pronunciation varies across the UK with recordings of modern and old dialects, received pronunciation and minority ethnic English pronunciation, on the British Library Sounds Familiar? web site.

English dialects in the UK

Generally speaking, English accents are varieties that differ only in terms of pronunciation: for instance, Standard English can be spoken with a regional accent, whereas English dialects differ in terms of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.

However, the distinction is not always clear-cut and there is much debate about how many non-pronunciation features (grammar, vocabulary, idiom) it takes before an accent becomes a dialect.

Regional dialects of the UK include those of Orkney, Shetland, Glasgow and Edinburgh, Wales (where the dialect is strongly influenced by the Welsh language), and Ireland where we have:

• Anglo-Irish used by the descendants of English settlers;
• Ulster Scots – the speech of the descendants of 17c Protestant Scots settlers;
• and Hiberno-Irish spoken by usually Catholic people whose ancestral tongue was Gaelic.

These are just a few of the many English dialects in the UK.

Listen to English dialects

You can listen to 288 extracts of English dialect from the Survey of English Dialects, a nationwide survey of the vernacular speech of England, undertaken by researchers at the University of Leeds. You can search for dialects by county or date.

English accents and dialects are discussed on the BBC's Radio 4 radio programmes Routes of English. You can also hear examples of the accents and dialects on these shows.

How much does accent and dialect vary in your country and in your language?

Image by  Joe Lodge