Do you have the dialects in the UK?

Question

Hello guys, I am from Italy and I’ve got this curiosity…
In case you don’t know what a dialect is, that would be a sort of language spoken in just one city or region and not in the whole country. Usually a dialect is similar to the official language of the place but with some differences.
In other words, do you understand where a British man comes from just as he opens his mouth? Can you get if he is from London, Liverpool, Manchester or Edinburgh for example?
Thanx to all of those who will answer :-P

Answer 1

"Can you get if he is from London, Liverpool, Manchester or Edinburgh for example?"



Oh yes indeed. Very much so.



Every region of the U.K. has its own dialects, accents and slang. It's sometimes difficult for people from one part of Britain, to understand people from another part of Britain, for those very reasons.

Answer 2

Some accents or dialects stand out and you can straight off the ball, figure out where they come from. You can identify a Welsh, Irish and Scottish accent very easily but even within those accents you can take it further. Like I live in the West coast of Scotland and you would be able to identify the differences in the way we speak compared to someone from the East of Scotland.



This is same with the English accent as you can often figure if a man is from Northern England or from the South. You can also sometimes pin point to which city they are from if you have excellent ears on listening out for the unique dialects.

Answer 3

Yes, here in the North West I can recognise an accent of someone only a couple of miles away. The distance from Manchester to Liverpool is less than an hour by car, but the accent (and words they use) are very different.



My husband comes from the South East and struggles to understand my accent and the different words I use.

Answer 4

Yes we do have dialects here in UK - a dialect is quite distinct from an accent. Probably the best known English dialect is Cockney Rhyming Slang - but speaking it is a whole new world in it's own right.



Before you visit any of the Cockney Dialect links below - you should be warned that they contain rude swear words as well as ordinary words. To be fair, the English language is full of what we call 'four letter words' - swear words.



http://www.thedialectdictionary.com/view/letter/Cockney+Rhyming+Slang/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockney



There are plenty of other examples here in UK of local dialects - probably the best well known is the Yorkshire Dialect - this link will explain about that.

http://www.yorkshiredialect.com/



If we go back to the early 19thC here in UK, the English language was spoken differently in each region of the UK. It is only when we started to put our children into schools properly for the first time that things began to become standardized in terms of received and spoken English.



Back in the 18thC an Italian gentleman published a book of English Phrases for travellers. He called his book, "English as She is Spoke" - this book became very popular here in UK - the title alone speaks for itself - a mad and wonderful misuse of English - very amusing.



More

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvh6ra1gbjc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VIzQEBVmNI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBBQAljhFEM



The English language starts life out there on the streets - it is entirely democratic. There is no committee dictating to the people how to speak or what to say. New words arrive almost by the day. The OED (Oxford English Dictionary) is responsible for ensuring that popular new words eventually become 'standard English'. One such recent word is 'chav' a low life person. This word 'chav' comes from the Roma language and was just slang, but now it's official.



If you look in an English dictionary you'll also find an army of Italian words too. Not forgetting every Greek word we could collect too.



Scroll down at bit at this next link and you'll find some if not all, of the Italian words we've stolen and put into English - why bother making them up when you can just take them from someone else's language?



http://www.translationdirectory.com/glossaries/glossary171.htm



This next will give you a sample of a kind of English which you will no longer hear anywhere. It is not Shakespearean English - instead it is a quality of English spoken by the upper class English way back in the 19th and early 20th centuries.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px5hvNWoVLE



Finally, a Cockney from the 1950s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Da8LcOMQU08



Welcome to English





London UK 030713.0631

Answer 5

Yes we have many accents and dialects over here and of course you can tell where a person s from by listening to them. Some accents are more common than others, i am from the county of Cumbria in Northern Engand and as many other locals i have the Cumbrian accent but it is not a very common one so some people would struggle to identify where i come from.

Answer 6

Aye,



Far too many to mention Bonny Lad.



Above was part of mine.



Bonny Lad is a nice greeting from someone in the North that has respect for you.

Many of the accents are based in the North, we are more Anglo Saxon than our counterparts in the South who were probably influenced from the snooty nosed EUC visitors from a few Century ago.

We say, Northerners have no heirs or graces, we are down to earth Bonny Lad.

The Norse people gave us our character and we have lots of it.

We are well know for our humor and friendly nature in the North East.

Answer 7

Regional accents are still going strong, and so therefore you can quite easily determine which part of the country somebody comes from, but dialects have died out to a large extent. I think all UK cities still have some dialect words that are peculiar to that place only, but there are not enough dialect words in any city/region to render that person's speech incomprehensible to the outsider.

Answer 8

Yes, absolutely. There are dozens of different dialects in the UK and you can tell where a person is from straight away.

Answer 9

Yes, we have accents and dialects throughout the UK and some cities even have multiple accents or dialects.



People in the southeast seem to think they speak in a "standard" way while the rest of us are unintelligible and common. The truth is, the rest of us feel that way about them :)

Answer 10

We have hundreds of them, and usually unless someone speaks the Received Pronunciation common in the south east of England, I CAN tell roughly where someone comes from as soon as they start talking.



Liverpool is particularly distinctive - we call it the Scouse accent (Scouse is the name of a local stew and somehow it got applied to the accent and the people as well). Try listening to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YcWkvkEZUg - absolutely typical strong Liverpool accent. (Very funny man too - IF you can understand him!)

Birmingham and the area around it are also easy to recognise: it sounds a bit like Scouse but more like they have a blocked nose.

London is more difficult - the accent varies within the city because it's so big and you can get anything from cockney to "posh".

Answer 11

I think you are a troll.



First you patronise us with an explanation of what a dialect is, then you ask us if London, Liverpool, Manchester or Edinburgh have dialects! Do you really think we are so pathetic!



We call them accents and the United Kingdom has thousands of them. Have you tried to use Youtube to find out what these accents actually sound like.

Answer 12

Some of us KNOW that accents are NOT the same as dialects..Yes WE DO....OUR accents are influenced by the dialects spoken STILL by some.....

Answer 13

We call them accents here and no a lot of the time you cant tell where someone is from unless they have a broad accent.

Some parts of Scotland have strong accents and others dont.

Irish and welsh can be strong.

You can understand most people though.

Answer 14

Well, I have lived in Italy (Lanciano (CH), Abruzzo) and I would say Italy is very unique in its dialect/language, I have never known anywhere like it even towns let alone regions have their own language. For example as you know the basic word for cheese in Italian is formaggio but where I was in Lancianese dialect it is lukasc.



As a foreigner coming to Italy and learning the language I found it really hard to communicate with the old people of Italy because a lot them didn't even speak Italian they just spoke their local dialect. For instance my friend Lori who was born and bred in Australia but spoke fluent Italian because her parents are Italian but when she married a man from Abruzzo and moved there it took her 2 years to learn how to understand her husbands parents because they spoke dialect.



In the UK its a different story, the first official and main language is obviously English spoken throughout England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. In terms of the way English is spoken in those countries its more phrases and slang rather than dialect and language, basically its the same words in English but it just sounds different because of the accent. We can defiantly tell whereabouts someone is from in the UK as soon as they open their mouth and understand them, same as how I can now tell if someone is from Naples.



For example two different greetings one from London and one from Liverpool. Some people in London greet each other by saying "Alright Bruv?", "Bruv" stemming from the word Brother but shortened to "Bruv" and replacing the "th" with a "v". Some people in Liverpool greet each other by saying "Goin On Lad?", "Goin On" being like Whats Going On and "Lad" is a well known alternative UK slang word for Boy. Its a bit like when you Italians say Va Bo rather than Va Bene or Tutto Post rather than Tutto Apposto.



Its hard to explain because Italy and the UK are different countries and cultures, as you know Italy is a new country in terms of unification of city states and regions, some dialects in Italy sound more German or French than Italian (especially in the North).



But the only similarities are this, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own national languages because they are Celtic nations, England on the other hand (and not many people know this) have a mixture of German, French and Scandinavian ancestry.



Some people in Wales/Cymru speak Welsh/Cymraeg (a lot of my family speak this language).



Some people in Scotland speak Scottish Gaelic or Scots.



Some people in Northern Ireland speak Irish Gaelic.



We do have other languages besides English but that is only because they are countries in their own right rather than ex city states or independent regions like in Italy; Italy will always be unique in its diverse dialects.