I was on the telephone for over an hour today on a support call with a gentlemen from the UK. His voice sounded uncannily like the "cockney" accent Australian Anthony Lapaglia affected when he played Simon Moon, Daphne Moon's brother on the TV series Frasier. He made prodigious use of glottal stops and dropped H's. I asked him if was an East Ender, but he said he was from the East Midlands a couple hundred miles north of London.



Does the East Midlands accent sound like that or was he pulling my leg?

scott1328 wrote:He made prodigious use of glottal stops and dropped H's. I asked him if was an East Ender, but he said he was from the East Midlands a couple hundred miles north of London.

Couple of hundred miles north of London is Grimsby or Hull and they sound bugger all like Simon does in that clip (isn't he supposed to be from Manchester anyway?).

I'm not sure that area is really in the Midlands either, it would more normally be considered the northeast.

ETA: This is pretty cool. BBC language Archive:-

Grimsby = 185mi north of London
http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialect ... 6XX-0301V0

Grantham = 112mi north of London
http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialect ... 39X-1400V1

Thommo wrote:

scott1328 wrote:He made prodigious use of glottal stops and dropped H's. I asked him if was an East Ender, but he said he was from the East Midlands a couple hundred miles north of London.

Couple of hundred miles north of London is Grimsby or Hull and they sound bugger all like Simon does in that clip (isn't he supposed to be from Manchester anyway?).

I'm not sure that area is really in the Midlands either, it would more normally be considered the northeast.

ETA: This is pretty cool. BBC language Archive:-

Grimsby = 185mi north of London
http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialect ... 6XX-0301V0

Grantham = 112mi north of London
http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialect ... 39X-1400V1

neither of those accents are quite right. But the Grantham accent seems most similar.

Maybe he wasn't from so far north then. Grantham would be around the centre of the area that would usually be called east midlands. Dropped aitches and glottal stops aren't really distinctively cockney as much as distinctively working class to be honest.

Bit further south yet (and not so far from where I live) we get Northampton. Not sure it's necessarily east midlands, but it's not too far away.
http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialect ... 5XX-0401V0

This isn't too different to how the people I went to school with sound. Also we get the brilliance of the brummie sounding girl saying how much less like a brummie she sounds and the lad saying he doesn't have an accent.

The accent on that clip is a stab at a working class south-east England accent - London and surrounding areas - as far as I can work out. Very different from either an East Midlands or North East accent.

Thommo wrote:Maybe he wasn't from so far north then. Grantham would be around the centre of the area that would usually be called east midlands. Dropped aitches and glottal stops aren't really distinctively cockney as much as distinctively working class to be honest.

Bit further south yet (and not so far from where I live) we get Northampton. Not sure it's necessarily east midlands, but it's not too far away.
http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialect ... 5XX-0401V0

This isn't too different to how the people I went to school with sound. Also we get the brilliance of the brummie sounding girl saying how much less like a brummie she sounds and the lad saying he doesn't have an accent.

Yeh loike, nun of them 'ave loike, an accen'. Defini'ely not moi aan'y or moi un'le.

Being from the East Midlands (Nottingham) and married to a Cockney, I don't recognize that accent at all.

Fallible wrote:The accent on that clip is a stab at a working class south-east England accent - London and surrounding areas - as far as I can work out. Very different from either an East Midlands or North East accent.

The Northampton one? It's probably a bit more like a South East than an East Midlands accent I'd agree, although Northampton itself is pretty much on the cusp between the two regions, it's very far from the South coast compared to Maidstone, say.

Funnily enough although the townies I went to school with mostly sounded like that, the villagers in the village I grew up in don't, the rural accents in these parts sound substantially west country. We legitimately have farmers wives who say things like "ooh arr, my duck" and farmers who say "get orrrrrrrrf moi laaaaaaand". This despite us being not at all in the west, just a few miles down the road from the furthest point in England from the sea.

No, I meant the one in the OP. Some sort of South East working-class accent. I have friends from your general neck of the woods, there are some quite distinctive characteristics.

Ahh right, thanks.

scott1328 wrote:I was on the telephone for over an hour today on a support call with a gentlemen from the UK. His voice sounded uncannily like the "cockney" accent Australian Anthony Lapaglia affected when he played Simon Moon, Daphne Moon's brother on the TV series Frasier. He made prodigious use of glottal stops and dropped H's. I asked him if was an East Ender, but he said he was from the East Midlands a couple hundred miles north of London.

My home town is Peterborough, about a hundred miles north of London, but definitely East Midlands. There are a lot of accents there which sound as if they're from London, I suspect due to overspill. The local accent is slightly peculiar, but I suppose you could mistake it for a London accent. As I said in other threads, I've lost count of the number of times Scots have assumed I was Australian, which I believe is due to the longer "a" sounds we use in, say, "car park".

Also worth remembering that Essex is East of England.

I had no idea Anthony Lapaglia was Australian. He's usually putting on some New York accent or another in his films and convincingly so.