Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Listen to the Lost Middlesex / London Accent
A few days ago my brother sent me a link to a fascinating collection of disappearing and disappeared English accents.
There are two collections in which I've rooted around so far. Both present English accents from people born during the second half of the nineteenth century. One collection was recorded in 1916, the other during the Fifties and Sixties.
It's a fascinating collection. In some cases it may jog memories and in others fire the imagination. The Kent accents took me back to my childhood listening to the likes of 'Great Uncle Herb' down on my mother's family farm near Sandwich.
Listening to a collection of accents around the south of England, it's notable how much most of the accents share. All have in common that 'ooo-arr' burr we've come to associate with places like Norfolk and Somerset. Even counties now partly consumed by London like Surrey, Kent and Essex had strong 'country' accents in living memory.
You couldn't get much closer to London than Middlesex. So, I was interested to hear a recording of a Middlesex accent from a retired farm bailiff, born in 1868. There's also a recording of a shoemaker from "Hackney, Middlesex" born in 1888. You can hear the crossover between the rural Southern England accent and what we now think of as Cockney. (Ah, so that's where Cockney came from....is it?)
Somewhere between these two accents, I imagine is how the folk round here sounded at around the time Harringay was built up. All fascinating stuff for me.
Access the full collection on the British Library website.
Replies to This Discussion
-
Permalink Reply by Ruth on
-
Brummie accent always comes down low in surveys where people asked to rate accents. There is no rational explanation, merely leftover snobbery about Brum being an industrial city really. Yet Geordie accent is always well loved. Cornish as well...
Accents- such a fascinating topic!
-
Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
-
Is our enjoyment or dislike of different regional accents based only on snobbery and class, Ruth?
Aren't there also some other key factors? Which include different and interesting ways of saying things and the use of dialect words. But above all, the different musicality of accents - the rhythm, pitch and changes of pitch - the way some accents have a pleasing lilt?
A friend whose mother was Portuguese once told me about the saying that in Portugal their language sang; while in Brazil it danced.
(Tottenham Hale ward councillor)
-
-
Permalink Reply by james walsh on
-
I think it depends on who is speaking. Glaswegian spoken by a hardened tough fanatical rangers supporter sounds completely different from his sweet little 6 year old daughter. Same with all accent/dialects. (in my very humble opinion)
-
-
Permalink Reply by Hugh on
-
Throw this into the mix. One of the most sought after accents by call centre operators today is Geordie.
-
-
-
I'm only reporting the findings of sociolinguistics who mostly state that judgements about accents related to ideas of class, industry, etc. There is nothing inherently good or bad about any accent whatsoever. They each do their job in a locality in terms of communication and identity. Even Brummie could be considered lyrical but its got a stigma that wont go away. Geordie gone way up in the ratings esp since that nice man started narrating the antics of the Big Brother house all those years ago.
-
-
Permalink Reply by Lydia R on
-
Actually, all this stuff about class in Britain is vastly overrated (usually by people with chips on their shoulders). I've lived in the U.S. and in Germany and the class system--in different ways--is much worse in both those countries; especially in the U.S. btw. They were the ones who invented the expression "trailer trash" for example but they also have the extra refinement of a caste system.
Last time I was in California I noticed this hard at work in LA restaurants. The kitchens were full of black people I could see only when the doors flapped open, the waiters and waitresses were nearly all Latino and the customers were overwhelmingly white, except for the odd celebrity. I found it all rather disturbing.
But you ask an American about it and and you will get a flat and very offended denial. The thing is, I don't think this is a deliberate lie. It's a sort of cultural American blindness--they believe their own Hollywood myths which usually still insist that the US the land of the free and the equal.
-
-
Thanks for those insights into the States. But perhaps here there is also a bit of myth that class died a death sometime during the Thatcher era. I don't think it's just about chips on shoulders. There is vast amount of sociological research carried out on this that finds class divisions here remain deep and divisive affecting everything from what job you get (or don't) and how long you live.
-
Permalink Reply by Mike C on
-
Great accents from my native Gloucestershire. In particular I like the cider discussion from Slimbridge; Fred talks about Kingston Black, one of my favourites also! - (other beverages are available) ;)
-
Permalink Reply by Richard Woods on
-
Brilliant. But cockney almost certainly came from the docks I believe.For lots mnore on Middlesex try this http://middlesexcountypress.com/
-
-
Cockney may well have been shaped by the docks and other influences, but it seems to me most likely that its origins lie in the area in which it's based. If you listen to the Hackney sample above alongside a few of the old Home Counties accents provided in the BL archive, it seems to me clear where its roots are. Unfortunately the question yields no respectable answer from a casual Google.
-
-
That url is a useful source of other stuff though. I would still want to see the docks as key - so much of real cockney as an accent is off-english. The words of course tended more to use the comprehensible local patois. If you take early cockney and then listen to docklands American or Australian seem to me you start to hear it going back!
- ‹ Previous
- 1
- 2
- 3
- Next ›
© 2024 Created by Hugh.
Powered by
