Showing posts with label accents. Show all posts
Showing posts with label accents. Show all posts

Thursday, 5 December 2019

Jo Swinson's strange accent

The wife watched The One Show on BBC1, which was followed by the Andrew Neil/Jo Swinson interview, so despite myself, I watched the first few minutes.

He asked the obvious question, "Would you agree to a second Indyref if the SNP demanded that in return for supporting a second referendum on Brexit?", which she resolutely refused to answer.

So far, so boring.

What was weird is that Ms Swindon has a Scottish accent most of the time, but she pronounced some words in proper Queen's English, in particular the word "vote".

Did anybody else notice this?
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UPDATE: prompted by Staffordshire Man's comment, I subjected myself to the first ten minutes again on BBC i-Player, and he's right. She pronounces words with long vowels (like 'campaign', 'time' or 'voting') not in Queen's English but in the Bristol/south west fashion, with the long vowels slightly too long. Short vowels are straight Scottish, using Andrew Neil as a comparison.

Thursday, 10 September 2015

Watching television with the sound off.

On Tuesday evening, the family was out until 9 o'clock, I was listening to music fairly loud and had Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners (a TV programme) on silent.

A new character was introduced, and as soon as he started talking, I got the impression that he had a northern accent (i.e. Yorkshire/Lancashire) - even though the sound was off. It puzzled me, so I continued watching to see if I could guess the others.

Good old Hayley speaks pure Estuary/Essex, I would say that was obvious from the way her lips were moving but I knew the answer, so that doesn't count.

One cleaner clearly looked a bit foreign anyway, but when he spoke, it was also obvious that he had a foreign accent; one guy appeared to have a Welsh accent and the last lady to be introduced appeared to have a Brummie accent.

Having thus made my guesses, I turned up the sound again for the last bit to see where they came from and, basically, I got them all right. The even weirder thing was lady who I thought was a Brummie didn't have a strong regional accent at all, but she came from Derby (which is not that far from Birmingham).