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Comment by franticgecko3 | Hacker News Reader

I'm from West Yorkshire, the dialect is slowly fading. My grandfather would speak with a strong accent and with spatterings of Norse words. I notice now that, yes, dialects in the UK are becoming homogenised but there is also some American influence seeping in. The American way of pronouncing a double t as a d "better" => "bedder" is increasingly more prevalent in the UK, it's slightly saddening.

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When I was staying with a friend in Norway once we visited his mother, and to me she sounded like someone with a broad Durham/Newcastle accent (my mother is from there) speaking German. A lot of north east words are germanic, or Scandinavian. My grandfather was a farmer near Durham and pigs were swine, children were bairns.

As for American influence, my youngest daughter picked up a lot of that from Youtube at one point, and I once interviewed a girl from Gravesend with such a strong US accent I assumed she'd grown up over there.

Exact same thing is happening in Australia. I'm guessing it's from watching streaming video, Netflix, TikTok, etc. where American accents predominate, and any non-American accents are flattened enough to be sure it's easy for Americans to understand them.

It's weird that the mainstream TV execs think audiences want boring American accents. To me, one of the best things about the White Lotus (hit HBO show) is that it highlights a distinct array of accents (including Australian).

Thanks! Now I'm inclined to watch it. I do love when shows make a point of keeping distinct accents.

What with having moved a lot as a bairn, I feel that accents in many places are fading away. And also, I tend to sound like whoever I've been talking most to for the last two hours. It's a bit weird, that…makes people ask why I'm speaking with x accent. (^_^);

Pronouncing zed as "zee" is particularly annoying (as in "Gen Z").

anytime I hear someone use "zed" for Z(ee) the next thing I hear in my head is "Zed's dead, baby"[0] Pulp Fiction and I just can't help but chuckle

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E3aAvhUucI

I emigrated from the UK to USA in 1980 and my first code review at Bell Labs I spent about 30 mins explaining my code and then asked if there were any final questions and someone hesitantly asked, "What is this variable 'zed' you keep talking about?"

I used to work for a networking start-up and when we were in the US trying - without success - to sell the company we practised over and over saying "roWter" for "router" (English pronunciation like "rooter").

As a Canadian I read that as "rOATer" for a moment, because the word row rhyming with ow is quite uncommon here -- the row I know is in a boating or a data context.

As a Brit, so did I. That said, a "rotor" would be pronounced as "rOATer" and has a completely different meaning.

isn't English fun !

You never have a row with anyone?

As a Canadian, obviously not.

(For real though we don’t use that word for argument or whatever.)

Funny, I just realised that I say "rooter" in French (because route ("roote") means way, like in English), but I say "rAWter" in English

There are two words with the same spelling but separate pronunciations in British English:

Router (rooter) the thing that routes packets in a newtwork

Router (rowter) a machine tool that cuts grooves, etc., in wood or metal.

Ah, so I pronounce the IT equipment wrong. I guess that "raw-ter" sounds really bad then.

Having posted the above a few days ago, last night I (originally from the UK) was in the car with my wife (US born and bred) following and reciting map directions on my phone like "0.8 miles left on San Antonio" which I say as UK standard "nought point eight miles left on San Antonio." After a while she asks "what is nought?" Here we just say "point 8 miles" or "zero point eight miles." We've only been married 42 years and are still learning each other's language:-)

Some time ago a few people from the UK kept calling/referring to someone as a nonce. It took me awhile to say something, but I finally asked because I simply couldn't understand or wrap my head around why they kept referring to this person as a single use random number (mostly for authentication in my case). It was so confusing.

The one that gets me the most is English people suddenly saying "fall" instead of "autumn".

It is a traditional one which fell out of fashion.

https://weather.metoffice.gov.uk/learn-about/weather/seasons...

https://twominenglish.com/autumn-vs-fall/

Now if we start saying "diaper" again instead of "nappy", you can start to worry.

The weirdest one to me is the English suddenly referring to police as "feds".

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/37256/police-in-...

It's not like they didn't already have dozens of slang terms for the police.

There was a cartoon in Private Eye a couple of weeks ago that suggested the reason why Millenials and Gen Z could never be reconciled is that they can't agree whether it's pronounced "Generation Zed", or "Generation Zee", as the younger generation themselves would call it.

I find Valley speak, where people say 'like' every third word, infuriating.

“Literally”!

There really isn't one 'west yorkshire' accent, nor one 'north yorkshire' accent, there is much much more variety than that. A leeds resident sounds different from a wakefield or dewsbury resident, and even then there can be variation where some people exhibit less of their locale accent than others, depending on how much they rebelled against sounding 'local' in their teens.

It may alleveiate the epidemic of th-fronting among young men.

i fought like you for many years but i fink it's just part of the accent now

I agree, it’s very sattening

Norse words?

https://www.viking.no/e/england/e-yorkshire_norse.htm

Most have fallen out of use but e.g. 'laik' is still understood by young people.

Beck, meaning stream (small river), is one I remember from growing up in the north east.

I may be completely wrong, but I think one direction of evolution in pronunciation is the gradual shift to that which takes less physical effort to pronounce.

"Bedder" is less physical work, less effort, in the mouth than "better".

“Be’er” seems like even less work. For some people

This is a bit of a myth. A glottal stop is a full consonant sound which takes effort to produce. It's not really any 'easier' to produce than an alveolar stop in any objective sense.

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