As an American, I find West Country accents the easiest to understand of all of the different UK accents. Interesting that we share a few similar sounds.
Derek Flores Not quite, what happened was that all of England had a rhotic accent like here in the US. The upper class English invented "received pronunciation" to differentiate themselves from the lower class English, AFAIK in the mid 1800's. Americans and Canadians speak this original English, for the most part.
+NoProbaloAmigo RP has a lot of German influence. The house of hanover is from Germany so the royals have leftover influence. I speak German so hear the connections easily
you can be proudof your achievments,of difficulties you have overcome but how can you be proud of something that was accidental. You did not have any input to where you were born.You may count yourself lucky to be born into a loving family or be born in a beatiful place but thats lifes lottery.
@@seeifficare pride in your acts and success is just is, pride. But pride in who you are or where you're from is part of accepting yourself. No need to go very nowadays in the western nations to come across youth who hate everything about themselves. There's 'prides' for everything, yet kids are taught self hate and you would wonder why then suicide rates explode in youth...
as a linguist and a Cornish native I can tell you that the most iconic features of the Cornish accent/dialect are the grammatical structure and old Cornish words. The annunciation of words is harder to differentiate between Devonian or bristolian etc although the differences are there the biggest differences are dialectal. Think of the Jamaican accent. Mimicking how Jamaicans pronounce words doesn't make you sound Jamaican. However I you learn the dialectal grammar and speech patterns you will have much more success. This is why London Jamaicans can speak with a cockney accent but still sound very Jamaican!!!
Newfoundland Canada also seems to have a similar dialect. Many of the settlers who came to Newfoundland had been British, Irish, & Scottish. The impact still shows today. The overall dialect and some sayings sound alike, and we also tend to Drop the H. Irish Gaelic or Scottish Gaelic also impacted our words, sayings, or even the what we phrase things. Linguistics and little details like this just fascinate me.
I live in an area in which Cornish people settled around the mid 1800s. It's in South Australia where there were copper mines. The accents of some of the older generation was still evident. Even though they were born in Australia and never even visited Cornwall. They rolled their Rs well too.
Believe it or not, the "West Country Burr" is alive & well in the U.S.! On the lower Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay the locals of Cornish descent are refered to as the "Hoi Toiders" due to their vestigial accent. It's more pronounced in the older folks, of course, but is still discernable to varying degrees throughout the region. Kinda cool, huh?
Interesting... I'm from the eastern shore of Maryland & my last name is Cornish. I know its probably not my native last name but I'm digging deeper into it.
Just a thought... A lot of Cornishmen settled in the Carribean as well (Pirates.. Har-Har). They settled into the local population pretty well, or so I'm told. I dunno, but perhaps your family may have migrated north at some point for some reason. Could be..... Either way, it's interesting & fun, but not important. I once knew a tree lizard that claimed he was a brontosaurus on his mother's side!
I can't believe my ancestors spoke like that. It's a nice, comforting accent. My family was from the West Country: Cornwall, Penzance, Pembrokeshire. They left for America in the late 17th Century for Pennsylvania because of the persecution of their Quaker religion.
I hear traces of a Newfoundland accent in the speech of the people who were interviewed, which isn't surprising, since the Newfoundland accent is said to be a mixture of West Country English and Irish.
And also the Andalucian accent in Spain. People from Andalucia, because of their accent, are considered to be a bit thick by the more 'cultured' people from Madrid and the north.
Maybe, but for entirely different reasons. The Cornish are using words that were used before English was even a language. Not so for American Southerners.
Sophie Michelle I’m Australian too! My dad was born and grew up in Penzance and his family is from there, and my mum’s family who’s Australian descends from various parts of Cornwall. It’s so refreshing and fulfilling to research where you’re ancestries lead back through time and history!
Im in Bendigo, a mining town, so our population has a massive Cornish heritage. So this accent doesn't actually sound thatt strange to me. We definitely have some of those twangs in our Australian accent.
@@ains6798 Tons of our miners were originally Cornish. There's a huge number of people who can trace heritage to Cornwall here, particularly in SA I think
The closest Cornish accent I've heard from a non-Cornish person is probably from Caroline Catz on Doc Martin. Most actors tend to butcher it, especially in that particular series.
I'm Boston second generation Irish. Grew up in Roslindale. I could literally see all of Boston from my back yard. My accent was so different from my cousins in South Boston. Extremely noticeable. Same family within sight.
I hope Cornish follows the Welsh language revival. These are the real British languages and it's nice for British identity for these languages to survive.
They don't roll their R's, they just pronounce them all (or at least they pronounce more of them than most English people). If they rolled them, they'd sound Scottish or Russian :)
Yes, "roll" is the wrong word. To me, that signifies a vibration, whether of the tip of the tongue, as in Spanish, or the back of the tongue, as in French. I'd say that the Cornish "curl" their Rs -- in the American fashion, though not quite as strongly as in some American accents
Most of my friends aren’t from Cornwall so none of them have a Cornish accent like I do and they sometimes try to do one a fail badly and one of the lines my family says quite often is “you alright my lover” and one of my friends heard that in a shop and thought it was me and got sad when it wasn’t 😂😂
The West Country accent just reminds me of Phil Harding from Time Team. After 20+ years of watching that program, he has come to embody that accent to me.
I am from West Devon near the Cornwall border but am in Cornwall now on the Isles of Scilly and notice the difference between Cornwall and Devonshire accents. I speak like oi for I etc and the oi sound is pronounced a lot more in Devon and I also drop my H's and not sure if I roll me R's like.
@@bethcarey144 I'm from nr. Looe originally, then went into Liskeard & then moved nr. Callington & they all have distinctive accents. My paternal grandparents were from Polperro & St. Ive (nr. Callington.) The real difference though was between my maternal grandparents, grampy was from St Neot & Nan was from St Mabyn.
Omg i am so thankful to find this video! I have to try to write a cornish accent and i really did think they sounded like pirates before finding this!!!
The funny thing is the Cornish pronounciation is similar to the original pronunciation of Shakespeare's plays. OP sounds a bit more Irish, to me, but still very similar.
This explains why the boatman Faser Hicks and the busman, on the show An Island Parish, spoke differently. They had an exaggerated rolling of their Rs.
I do think the accents have been diluted because of migration sadly. Lived in Devon for a few years and there was one market trader who came from Somerset. He couldn't understand my London accent which I thought was hilarious because his was so strong I couldn't understand him either
I personally think they down played the accent for whatever reason. He interviewed mostly townies. On the cornish/devon border up north is still thick with recent generation.
Accents... As areas such as Wales, west Cornwall and Ireland switched from Celtic to English over a short period of time you were left with new accents that were possibly a mix of the old and that of the newcomers who taught the language. There might be a surprising amount of English accents such as now extinct North Cotswold/South Midlands remaining in Irish/Welsh accents. In these areas you have surprisingly little dialect of celtic origin. Standard English was taught. Devon (the neighbouring county to Cornwall) also had celtic language areas that mixed at a much slower rate with English, and therefore the Devon dialect seems to have significantly many more celtic features and possibly sounds than Cornwall. For example elements of Welsh English identified as being celtic are also spoken widely across the entire westcountry. If you go to the Outer Hebrides they sound very Welsh, not Scottish, an irony because their gaelic accent is famed for its Norse influence. A tour of Britain in the 1950s would of been truly fascinating, however the pace of change of language is frightening, we are losing so much culture, another great extinction of the modern age. No thanks of course to the narrow minded unsupportive attitudes promoted by the BBC.
Fascinating. I was brought here by a random google search. After watching "The Pirate" in the movie Dodgeball. I became interested in the reason WHY we all do a particular accent for a pirate which took me to a blog which mentioned the West Country in the UK and here I am. I'm American and now need to know if it was this accent which gave us Americans the distinctive R sound we make.
No specific region gave you that sound. Most of the early and later settlers to North America had rhotic accents (the "R" after vowels), regardless of regional background, because most of the UK - even South East England - was rhotic then. It was shortly afterwards that non-rhoticism really took off in England and Wales. It never did in the rest of the UK, though, and many parts of the UK and Ireland actually have a harsher "R" than most Americans.
Elle Litobarski To be fair the ''typical pirate accent'' is supposed to be more along Bristol way rather than Cornwall and it is not too bad a facsimile of the accent around there. Traditionally they did say ''oo arr'' which is the origin of the pirates ''arrrr''.
Optifog is correct. You should look up David Crystal's video on 'Original Pronunciation', which is how Shakespeare spoke, You'll see that back in the 1600s the accent was very similar to the West Country accents of to-day, and as such when the English settled in America they brought a similar accent to this. Other influences are the Scottish and Northern English L sound, which is why North America mostly uses a variant of the 'dark L' as opposed to the rest of England's 'light/clear L'. To hear something like this accent in America now, look up the hoitoiders. They're in America and 'hoi toid' is how they say 'high tide'. Very West Country sounding at times (most times in fact). The Story of English is a very, very long programme but it's all on RU-vid and it covers America thoroughly. There's a group that research and live life (or just role-play? I forget) like the original Puritans and their accent is interesting. Sounds rather West Country but not quite, and when they made the documentary a pocket of Americans still talked that way, and that's where the group were centred. But to clarify, non-rhotic accents existed from the middle ages but they were regional and not nearly as common as rhotic accents. Then the rolled/tapped R became less common in favour of the R heard in the West Country, and eventually it was nearly purged from speech. However, in Scotland and Wales it remained quite strong (and in Ireland but that has a lot to do with the Irish language, whereas in Scotland it had more to do with the Scots language). Then non-rhotic accents began to appear but even then many accents only deleted R in unstressed syllables or vice versa, and instead of deleting them in the extreme North they softened them to a uvular (French, sort of) R, known as the Northumbrian burr. We have this in much of Southern Ireland, and in Louth. It went in stages: ('R' represents rolled r, 'r' represents approximant/American r, '-' represents deletion.) 1100s - Syllable onset, syllable offset: R,r 1500s - Syllable onset, syllable offset: r,r 1700s - Syllable onset, syllable offset: r, -
Well, the British Isles is where most of our ancestors came from. Good to know that we're our mother's child (even though we're probably the most rebellious and individual of our siblings (Canada, Australia and New Zealand) lol)
So, I am one of those cases where I grew up in Cornwall, and when I was 29 I moved to the US. It took about 1 week for everyone to dial in to my accent because for some reason, us Cornish folk actually pronounce a lot of words similar to Americans. I don't mean with the American accent as such, but the actual sounds. In Cornwall, everyone around me said "Schedule" similar to Americans, with an SK sound, and not an SH sound. Also, unlike other parts of the UK, stereotypical words like "Bloody" and a lot more aren't used much, only rarely. I've only been here for 7 years in the US, but the adaptation to American dialect was extremely easy. I didn't have to change a thing. I've only had to chance about 2-3 words in my entire upbringing to make it easier for Americans to understand. Aluminum being one of them, due to it being a different spelling, thus different pronunciation that throws some Americans off. Funny enough, I didn't have to change "reckon" at all. I'm sure it's a state dependant thing, I am in Indiana, but Hoosiers (people from Indy) use it too. I figured it was just a South thing, but I was wrong. Even "innit" is understood. Sometimes I'll put on the fake Cornish accent, to sound like a "Farmers" and no one can understand me here, but the truth is, it's fake. When I talk in my normal Cornish accent, people understand everything I say. My wife (American) can't understand other British accent words very well, even though she's been with me for 7 years. On TV I sometimes have to explain what words mean that she has never heard me say before. Fun fact though, people from PA had a harder time understanding me than people from IN. I haven't heard a request to repeat my sentences in about 6 years. So easy to adapt to people from Indiana and Michigan.
All languages have dialects. The scientifical definition of dialect is "regional variation of a language" (Saussure, Ferdinand de, Cours de Linguistique Génerale). Perhaps cornish english dialect had celtic cornish language influence in its substratum. I hope cornish have a revival.
The real Cornish accent that I remember hearing as a boy has almost disappeared - the speakers in this clip are nothing like as broad as the old fishermen we used to hear in the pub. There are still a few around, but I haven't heard them recorded anywhere on the internet.
I have Cornish ancestors, but mostly English and Scottish. Stank and Stanly is a common word here. I wonder if it comes from the Cornish Immigrants to America. Hello to my Cornish cousins: Pascoe, Treloar, Chenoweth, John, Chegwyn....
They spent all that time explaining how Cornish people don't speak the way they do on tv, and then they interview two guys who sound exactly like pirates.
Question for Cornish people: I've noticed in Cornish accents on TV (often fake Cornish accents), not only is the R rhotic (so the R in "paper" would be pronounced the way an American would pronounce it), but a rhotic R is added to words without an R. So for example on Doc Martin, Cornish characters often pronounce "Louisa" as "Louiser," and she pronounces "Prada" as "Prader." Is that correct?
It is to an extent. People tend to overdo the Cornish accent and turn it into a more Bristolian accent. I love Doc Martin but their accents are terrible! The two people that are the closest to the genuine accent is Al and Bert Large! The others just tend to 'over famer' it a bit!
Yuri Ivanov That's probably because you're not from the mid-atlantic. The old woman at the end especially doesn't sound much different from some old ladies I know back home.
I found out i am British and i found how where from and it was Cornwall. I grew up in the United States and apparently i have some of the Cornwall accent. I do pronounce Car exactly how he tried to pronounce it. I love that i just found this out and will do my research to find out how Cornish i really am.
alan wxm Cornish had their own kings, language, gods and heritage, they called themselves the Dumnonians, they had a fair relationship with the Romans and their last king was Geraint until he was killed by Anglo-Saxons from Wessex in 710. Technically speaking Wales didn't exist until after Gruffydd ap Llywelyn (1063, First and last true Welsh King), Wales was just a region of tribal counties not a country itself. To call Cornish "West Wales" is technically incorrect as Wales comes from the word Walh, which means "foreign", probably because they did not speak Anglo-Saxon English :)
***** Historically the English are largely descendants of The Angles, The Danes, The Jutes, The Saxons and The Celt Britons, all of these tribes and cultures melded together to form what is the modern English people. England also has new ethnicities adding to its make up right now; The Poles, The Indians, The Romanians, The Jamaicans etc. Its all in constant change to newcomers.
+Somalian Teafactory I dont think he was trying to make any point with the term "West Wales", it was the Anglo-Saxons who called modern Cornwall "West Wales" to distinguish it from "North Wales" (encompassing the modern country of Wales). The people living in modern Cornwall were Brythonic Celts like the people living in modern Wales, so any Brythonic lands were "Wales" to them (Wēalas, lands of the Walha or Celtic Britons).
That's not quite true - by the 18th century Cornish was a rarity, even in the far west. One of the contenders for 'last monolingual Cornish speaker', Dolly Pentreath of Mousehole, died in 1777. It's likely that people were bilingual for a long while, and then even as Cornish dropped off as spoken language, many still maintained the ability to understand it... but in the 18th century it was definitely understood to be on the road to extinction.
What I have often wondered, is what was the accent of the Cornish people when they first started speaking English? There must have been a period , before they became \West Country' when they must have sounded similar to Welsh. I'm surprised that no one has done a reconstruction like they have done with Shakespearean or Old English.
There really isn't much evidence other than oral accounts of what the Cornish language looked like (thanks for nothing Anglo-Saxons). The Welsh have the advantage of a much bigger population base to reconstruct the language from, as well as the fact that the English could never quite stamp it out. Cornwall's relatively tiny population stood no chance by comparison. We didn't even get vernacular prayer books during the English Reformation
I went to Cornwall last year and met with some young people there. And, as far as I know, nobody speaks like this anymore. Sadly, people have changed their accents for a more 'standardised' one and, if you are not british, you can barely distinguish the differences between a young cornish speaker and a young south-england speaker nowadays. What's more, I found that young cornish people would rather say 'movie' instead of 'film', 'fall' instead of 'autumn', 'cookie' instead of 'biscuit', 'mall' instead of 'shopping centre', and so on... I'm not from the west country, so the question is: are these words traditionally from the west country area and later on brought to America, or are they American borrowings? By the way, you can only hear 'Alright, me lover' and these kind of sentences, said by young people, if they are joking. If not, you can't. (These people I met with was from St. Austell and Truro)
Truro (and Falmouth) is uniquely English for its location in the centre of Cornwall, likely owing to its university culture attracting English people from more urban (and to some extent Americanised) locations. As a Cornish local from the Truro area, I can say that those words aren't as common as you might have thought from your visit, but your having the accent or not is highly dependent on your parentage, class and location (try the more "off the beaten track" locations like Camborne, Redruth, St Mawes and to a lesser extent Penzance. They're more "working class" Cornwall and less dependent on the tourist trade, thus giving you accents less affected by the English and Americans)
So refreshing, fun and overall very impressive examination of the dialect, not like the horrible, patronising, smug, preachy BBC that we are now saddled with.
I’m from further up country, but almost certainly of Cornish origin. I’m from an open cast clay mining area and believe my ancestors to be ‘Cousin Jacks’👍
You're correct. This was inaccurately described in this video, which does a few things fairly unscientifically as well. I have to imagine that they used to roll them but it's hardly a typical feature these days and hasn't been for some time. The R is often tapped (similar to rolling but rolling is rapid taps and tapping is a single tap) in Liverpool, Wales, and Scotland (and just as frequently avoided in 'fashionable' forms of these accents). Until recently it was rather common in Ireland as well, but these days you'd want to go to the extreme Southwest to hear it.
