British accent stereotypes - 'news'

[Jonathan Lighter]

Check it out:

  1892 in W. G. Burn-Murdoch, _From Edinburgh to the Antarctic: An Artist's Notes and Sketches during the Dundee Antarctic Expedition of 1892-93_ (London: Longmans Green & Co., 1894), 130-31:

  Our first mate, Mr. Adams, is master at the art of spinning yarns. The descendant of generations of sea-captains, he has inherited an inexhaustible supply suited to all audiences. It fairly takes one's breath away to hear him drop from the broad Dundonian accent to that of a Cockney jarvie, then change to soft Inverness, pigeon-English or Glasgie sing-song, always winding up with the harsh Dundee accent for company's sake, I suppose. It is a positively dangerous accent this last, or rather manner of speech I should call it. A stranger in Dundee on hearing it for the first time instinctively stands on guard—left hand in advance, right fore-arm over the mark. ' Edinburrie' is comparatively pleasant and soothing. We have representatives of all our Scotch accents on board and some English. Curiously
our professor of Cockney is a Campbell. This afternoon I listened to pure Peterhead accent, it is melancholy, the notes are those of the yellow-hammer several octaves lower, a sustained note in the minor dropping a semitone at the end of the sentence. The speaker made my teeth water with his descriptions of the sport in Davis Straits,—fishing and shooting that we in Scotland would give our ears for.

  JL

Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Charles Doyle
Subject: Re: British accent stereotypes - 'news'
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Case in point . . . .

Just a few moments ago in class, mentioning some prominent imagery patterns in a Jacobean play, I pronounced the word "forehead" in my customary way, [farId] (the second vowel may be a barred-"i"). Half the students professed not to know what word I was uttering; the other half delicately referred to my pronunciation as "something out of _Deliverance_"). And this is in Georgia!

--Charlie
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---- Original message ----
>Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2008 11:54:33 -0400
>From: Mark Mandel
>Subject: Re: British accent stereotypes - 'news'
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
>---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>Sender: American Dialect Society
>Poster: Mark Mandel
>Subject: Re: British accent stereotypes - 'news'
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 11:24 AM, Gillian Kyles wrote:
>> >Poster: Laurence Horn
>> >
>> >Forwarded from the forensic linguistics list. (Pretty amazing that
>> >research has actually shown that people form impressions of others
>> >based on how they speak...)
>>
>> The writer of the above should live in the South where until
>> relatively recently a certain type of Virginia accent and most other
>> rural southern accents were definitely associated with a certain
>> perceived dimness of mind!
>
>Larry neglected to put in an explicit irony marker.
>
>--
>Mark Mandel
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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