What do these people have in common?
J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series,
as well as her character Hagrid, shouldn't have said that.
No more questions. Don't ask any more questions.
The original Darth Vader find the passenger list
How long is it since we've seen each other?
Maybe it was yesterday. Hildy.
We don't have a clip of Banksy.
The answer is that all of them come from the city of Bristol.
Admittedly, Cary Grant lost his accent bit when he moved to America.
And we don't exactly know what Banksy sounds like.
But anyway, today on LetThemTalkTV.
You're going to learn all about the Bristol accent with myself and accent
coach Luke Nicholson will be dissecting the accent of Stephen Merchant,
as well as other speakers from the city of Bristol.
You'll learn about the Bristol L
a phantom L that's pronounced,
even if it's not in the words.
And will also look at why, if you learn this accent too well,
you might end up sounding like a pirate.
Just to remind you that this is part two of a series on British accents.
comes from the Anglo-Saxon Brigstowe
which means something like place at the bridge.
Do you want to know how they used to
sound in Bristol 1000 years ago,
when it was part of the Saxon kingdom of Mercia?
At that time, Old English, also called
Anglo Saxon, was just another German dialect.
And the Norman invasion of 1066 hadn't happened yet,
bringing in all those French words into English.
Not to mention all the words from the Vikings,
those Scandinavian words, as well as Latin and Greek,
that make up so much of our language today.
Here's a clip from the first few lines of Beowulf
written in the West Saxon dialect.
Let's have a listen to the Bristol accent.
There was almost like a crime underbelly when I was growing up in Bristol
and my mum was involved with community service.
You know, if you get a drink driving, charged or some minor crime,
Might say, my mum wasn't a criminal.
She got I think she stole some of these pencils from Argos.
So something you might have noticed in this clip is that the speaker is robotic.
That means he's pronouncing every R in the spelling.
You can hear him pronounce ser-vice
this rather than service, which is how I would pronounce it.
Or char-ge rather than charge.
So that R is always pronounced.
Community service is a drink driving charge.
The Bristol accent is that similar
to other accents in the region
So you'll find rhoticity throughout the whole of the South-West.
But not everyone in the South-West will be a rhotic speaker.
You might also find variable rhoticity, so some people will
pronounce R's in some words and then drop them in others.
I believe that the rhotic accents used to be more
widespread in England, and that's probably why
the American English is rhotic, because a lot of the early
immigrants were from the East and at that time the use of 17th century
Southeast English would have been rhotic and that influenced the American English.
But that's that's still one of the accents in Britain, which is Rhotic.
also notice that he's using a glottal stop.
Glottal stops are actually common throughout the whole of the UK.
You can hear an example in community where he replaces the T with a glottal stop.
This is very common in Bristol
So it would be something like communi'e
You can hear in the clip the vowel sounds that he uses in driving.
Minor crime is an oi type vowel
which is different to the I sound in my accent.
So in my accent it's an I sound, I might say drive.
And in my accent that vowel starts lower.
In his accent, it starts higher in the mouth.
Driving charge with some minor crime driving charges,
Well, one famous difference with the Bristolian accents,
which you can't hear as much anymore, is the so-called Bristol L.
So words ending in the letter A.
For example, the name Eva would have
an L at the end, or at least a sound that.
So it sounds a bit like evil rather than Eva - Evil Turner.
Okay.
And that's known as the Bristol L, the Bristol intrusive L.
The primaL donnaL or the Karl RosaL opera company.
Oh, you said primaL donnaL on primaL donnaL.
there is when is speak Bristol, mate
And the Bristol accent says sometimes known as the pirate accent.
Because whenever you sort of mimic a pirate, it comes out of aha! with a.
And maybe because there was a port, lots of people were coming from the South-West,
they were going onto the seas and we were hearing lots of rhotic accents.
Maybe that's where it came from. I'm not sure.
Why there's a full cargo of my own shipmates
as Sail with Arc becalmed right here in Bristol.
If some of them was scarred in the service of England.
Yeah, you'll certainly find these archaic
in English dialects, but a lot of them have have kind of gone now.
But in Bristol, for instance, you'll hear
BIST for the word ARE as in you are.
And it's the same as German - du bist.
You are. Okay, Now, that's interesting.
I did not know that there's still this is still used today.
Someone will know. Somebody. Someone.
Someone watching will Now tell me, young crone, is this Putney?
You don't have to talk in that stupid voice to me.
Bristol is in the west of England.
But what about those cities in the north of England?
Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle.
And what have the Vikings got to do with those accents to find out?