Hacker News Reader

Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in a small fishing village in the north of Scotland - an area notorious for its very strong accents (to the point of some documentaries filmed locally having to be subtitled in English!).

However, people who lived on farms spoke with a noticeably different accent (at least to the ears of locals) - even though they might be physically on a kilometer or two from the nearest village.

NB This was in the 70s - I suspect none of these communities are quite as insular as they used to be.

View on HN

The movie "Hot Fuzz" played up variations in regional accents in England. There's a scene (1) where the London cop (Simon Pegg) has to use two rural cops in order to interpret the dialect of an old farmer.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cun-LZvOTdw

That scene is only a slight exaggeration. Rural West Country accents can be almost totally unintelligible to users of standard English.

https://youtu.be/WjTIFkWJctY?t=40s

Its amazing how diverse the accent can be in such a tiny part of the world. Its extremely easy to tell if someone is from Bristol, Gloucester, Swindon or Salisbury immediately.

Yeah I've always wondered why that has happened in Britain but not so much in the US in that people on different ends of the country can often sound not too dissimilar,

I would guess that parts of the UK haven't had any serious external influences in terms of culture or population for a very long time indeed - at least until fairly recently.

e.g. In my mouth I remember my parents joking that anyone whose family hadn't been in the village for at least three generations were still regarded as "incomers".

It used to be that way in the US, too, up until radio and TV began exposing everyone to the accents from the Northeast (politicians) and California (Hollywood).

The accent of Hollywood wasn't actually the accent of California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent

The west coast was settled barely 200 years ago, and at that time they would have spoken essentially the same mix of accents as those on the east cost. That's not a lot of time to differentiate. In addition, there's a lower population density in th US and people need to move larger distances, e.g. to shop at the nearest town, so the areas of mostly similar pronunciation should be expected to be larger.

Then there are travel and long-distance communication, which cause linguistic convergence in essentially every country, so there dialects in the US are never going to be as fractured as they used to be in Europe.

I went to BYU which has mormons from all over the US, it was really rare for me to be able to tell where someone was from (and even noticing someone having a non-standard but still American accent was fairly uncommon).

This is a hypothesis about how variation relates to the period of time in which a language has been in an area. Simply put, the more diversity within a region, the more likely that place is the origin [1].

So in this case, England will have the most linguistic diversity within English since it originated there.

This hypothesis has an analogue within population genetics, e.g. Africa has the most genetic diversity compared to other regions.

I don't know if this effect has been given a name yet, but it would seem to apply to any system where 1) mutations accumulate over time 2) populations tend to be stable but 3) groups occasionally move about very large distances.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/3dq1ko/why...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098220...

Wow. There's a linked video of farmers from Kerry, Ireland as well. I can't understand the first one, the second just barely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsUvcjk8J5c

Haha, I ran into a couple of Irish lads in a club in the weekend.

I know it sounds like a stereotype, but with a few pints down them I swear I couldn't understand a thing they said when they were talking to each other. I had to check they weren't speaking Gaelic or something.

You definitely get used to accents quickly though. After a couple of weeks of hanging out with a bunch of Scottish people, I could understand Glasgow patter like it was normal English.

and Robert Newton can be thanked for turning it into the pirate voice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Newton

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Country_English#Social_st...

Communication technology has undoubtedly had an effect on the Scots language, but I think that education is a far bigger factor. For generations, children have been taught exclusively in English and chastised for using Scots. Like Welsh and Cornish, Scots was a victim of linguistic imperialism.

I think at times it’s difficult to separate imperialism from economic dominance. Sometimes these things are due to economic might (for example Brazilian Portuguese is more influential than peninsular Portuguese, however, Brazil is hardly the imperialist in this scenario)

Is it imperialism or economic influence which might make an edinburger accent more prevalent in Scotland?

I think the point on linguistic imperialism was referring to things like the Welsh Not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Not

I can remember a girl in a class when I was at school in the late 70s being asked a question by a teacher and she clearly had been day dreaming a bit so replied "fit?" (i.e. "what?"). The teacher got very angry and threw a wooden blackboard cleaner at her head which just missed by a few cm.

I can also remember some kids getting far worse treatment in primary school for slipping into dialect (e.g. one chap who mispronounced something was told by the teacher to look at the blackboard more carefully so he went right up to it and the teacher went behind him and slammed his head into the blackboard).

[Edit: I should have said "loonie" rather than "chap" - a "loon" being a boy, a "loonie" a young boy - similarly "quine" and "quinie" for girls and young girls - aye it's a sair fecht ;-)]

Another small, fishing town in the north of Scotland alumni here - Wick, Caithness, this I suspect is "much" further north than arethuza. He lived near the Big City of Aberdeen ;)

Just to give you a sense of how local accents can be. The Caithness accent (mostly Norse origin with a little bit of Gaelic thrown in) is often confused for Irish - even by people who live within 50km of the county. (Personal experience, no references).

I'm from Portknockie (an interesting name in itself) not sure I would describe that as "near" Aberdeen.... ;-)

Should have said North East rather than North!

Even in populated areas there can be professional differences, my favorite being Pitmatic, a variation on the dialects of Northeast England that derives from coal miners. It is indeed disappearing, if not disappeared (along with most of the coal miners)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com