It took only a term at Oxford to lose my Grimsby accent
It’s freshers week and thousands of young people are about to sound very different. By Kate Bunn
That’s why he took a stack of George Formby records with him to listen to. So that the socialist revolutionary would not lose his oik accent.
One of those stories just far, far, too good to bother to check despite there being echoes of it further back in history related to other lumpen determined to remain so.
Listening to Owen or some Mockney twat like Ben Elton rather vividly reminds me of this skit.
‘Bloody Hampstead no’ good enough fer yer, ye have to go poncing off t’ Barnsley.’
https://youtu.be/rQDeU6dHX-c?feature=shared
Freshers week at Oxford: a young chum of mine had been disappointed by that. Instead of being told to report to College on the preceding weekend she was told to arrive on Wednesday of the week. Once she’d moved into her room she went to the Porters’ Box to see if there was any mail for her. There was a letter from her Tutor, bidding her welcome and assigning her first essay topic. The essay was to be delivered to his pigeon-hole by noon on the Friday. “Some freshers week!” she exclaimed. “Serves you right for choosing a non-trivial subject. Anyway you’d still have had Friday evening and the weekend free of work” said I, sympathetically.
One of the observations from my mother (a school teacher) is that kids accents come from school.
I don’t have a lot of west country-isms, but that’s a lot about Swindon being a bit odd. There’s locals bits of Swindon, multiple generations etc like Stratton, but a lot of Old Town, West Swindon and the Northern development is first/second generation people. Like Corby having Scottish accents.
It’s why I talk like Harry Paget Flashman irl
Not the accent, the liberal use of ethnic slurs for the wogs from Calais down.
My accent (neutral RP) comes from school. At the age of eleven I went from a Derbyshire mining village to a boarding school in Sussex. I had no intention of changing my accent but within 9 months I “spoke posh” as my former playmates described it. I occasionally have trouble with the U in butter and still use some dialect colloquialisms but apart from that I think it would be difficult to identify my origins from my speech.
You don’t “lose” an accent in a term, you can only deliberately pretend to be something you’re not. Which is cringe. But it’s the Guardian, so
Bristolian – quite a difficult accent to lose. Not lived there for over 50 years but still manage to sound like Ellis Genge.
So that’s Ellisl Gengel ’round your way then?
Ha Ha…. sayz the kiddie from Baff.
He’d be ‘Our El’ if we were related, obviously.