Here’s something Professor Henry Higgins could have used…a new service from the British Library called Sounds Familiar, accents and dialects of the UK.
From the website: “Do you call a bread roll a cob, batch, bread cake, barm cake or scuffler? How do you pronounce the words cup and plant? And are you sitting or sat at this computer? The UK is a rich landscape of regional accents and dialects, each evidence of our society’s continuity and change, our local history and our day-to-day lives. This site, aimed at A-Level English students across the UK, captures and celebrates the diversity of spoken English in the second half of the twentieth century.” No mention of how us Yanks mangle the mother tongue.
More in this press release from Managing Information
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Rural English
Years ago I was on a bus in England listening to a middle aged farmer talk about applying for work in the nearest town over the winter months. Unfortunately, he didn’t get the job, or, as he said “I woren’t pucked”. It seemed like a reasonable past tense to “picked” to me.