Accents and globalisation part 1
OneMonkey and I have been listening to Journeys in English this weekend courtesy of Leeds library's audiobooks download service. It's Bill Bryson's BBC series from 20 years ago about the history, use and future of the English language. The time lapse since the series was made was interesting in itself, with the (then) new word cyberspace having already fallen out of favour for instance. The programme also talked about the fears of dialect loss, the ultra-standardisation of English (possibly along American lines, but that's another story) from people moving around and being influenced by the TV etc. It generated a lot of discussion between us, we paused the thing so often it took about half an hour to listen to the final five minutes, but I'll try and stick to a couple of topics over the next couple of posts.
One of those was how much our speech had changed in twenty years. We now live a few miles from where most of my family's from, coincidentally directly across the valley from the hamlet one of my great-great-grandfathers left 160 years ago to find work in the slightly more built-up and industrial bit I've left behind. Nevertheless, twenty years of OneMonkey and I influencing each other's accents, not to mention stints at 3 universities surrounded by staff and students from different backgrounds, and we both sound different from our teenage selves, particularly OneMonkey whose Geordie accent has all but gone as he's slowed down and enunciated to allow non-native speakers a chance to understand him. He never uses the word 'geet' (here rendered for the well-spoken Yorkshireman as usual) whereas in 1997 it was in practically every sentence - for those unfamiliar with the word, imagine using it for emphasis as you would 'dead' i.e. dead good, dead late, dead hungry. My grilled bread sounds much more like 'toe-st' than 'turst', which not everyone will see as a bad thing.
Have a think about how your speech has changed in the last twenty years. You probably say tweeting and texting a lot more than you did then. Have you lost any dialect phrases? Learnt any new ones? Has your accent got stronger from moving back home, or weaker from moving away, or been influenced by your favourite TV programme? (Notice I didn't say 'TV show' there but I did use TV not telly. I find myself saying movies instead of pictures sometimes...) Is the change gratifying, worrying, or just interesting? Feel free to answer some or all of these questions in the comments below. Or tweet me @JYSaville