British - English and our eccentricities!

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Following a post I made yesterday, there were times when I thought people did not quite understand what was going on and the spirit of the post. There were differences in the words which may have meant something different to other readers so I thought I would talk about some stuff that makes us slightly different to others and to try and stop any confusion. For example, the British sense of humour may seem to be completely barking mad as was evident in the post yesterday. We often use jokes, innuendo’s and other words and tease each other mercilessly which may seem very odd to others. We are not insulting each other but taking part in a repartee or bantering! Intro What is being British? Great Britain is also known as The United Kingdom is made up of four distinct and different countries of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Each nation has their own language which then subdivides into regional and local dialects. The predominant language is British English as often Malu will point out she speaks British English and not American English. Regional accents. There are around 30 different regional accents in the UK and then local dialects within those different areas. Some words are meaningless to other people from outside that area. For example, Gilly hails from the North of England from the City of Liverpool whereas I hail from the South East of England from the Town of Dover. Roughly a 300-mile road trip which would take around 5 hours. However, Gilly has moved South and now lives around 30 miles away from me. Her accent is quite clearly different from mine. She has what is known as a Scouse accent whereas I have a Southern accent more akin to received pronounced (RP) English. We would have no difficulty understanding each other although I dare say Gilly could lose me with some of her local sayings. My daughter, on the other hand, was brought up in Dartford around 10 miles from where we currently live. Her accent is definitely Estuary English which drives me crazy and I am constantly correcting her. I am sure often she does it to wind me up. For example, she will often not pronounce her ‘T’s when speaking so instead of saying Butter She will say butaa or instead of Water she will pronounce it warta with both with a silent T but sounds like ugh! Ugh indeed it makes me feel quite irritated when she speaks like this often ask her would that have a T in it somewhere??? Colloquialisms Local sayings and nuances Just some of the terms we might use English slang to describe money • A Quid = A pound or a Nicker • A Fiver= £5 • A Cockle £10 or a tenner • A Pony = £25 • A ton = £100 or a century • A Monkey =£500 • A Grand = £1000 Where difficulties lie are when we try to speak to someone from Scotland. Especially if someone is from Glasgow. The cable company Sky have their main call centre in Glasgow. You can imagine the fun talking to someone from Glasgow. Often I have to apologise and ask them if they could put an English speaker on as I honestly cannot understand half of what they say! The BBC usually have fairly clear speakers speaking RP English however there is a bizarre trend to have regional News readers who quite frankly do not pronounce in understandable English which I find irritating to say the least. Listening to news programmes from 20-30 years ago the English spoken was quite succinctly RP or in other words similar to Queens English. Personally, I much prefer to listen to this on the news. Language evolves all the time. Some words and phrases we use go out of fashion and it is hilarious when you have to explain the meaning of words that we might have used many years ago. Unfortunately, Americanism’s have crept into the English language over the years. For example ‘we was’….. Sorry no you were’nt It should be ‘we were’. Another example on the weekend. No, it is at the weekend. Sometimes when I read stuff on the internet I can tell immediately that the person who has written a piece is not a native English speaker. On a recent cruise to Norway, the announcer on the ship was Italian. Guess what,no one could understand a word the man was saying apart from the odd word here and there. It became a standing joke among us. We would laugh and say he wants us to change platform and go to platform 9. So for those who speak English as a second or third language, you may think you are speaking English and you probably are but accents can lose the meanings completely and can cause misunderstanding and offence. I have to say here though. Most British people are lazy when it comes to learning another language. So hats off to anyone who does speak another language. As a piece of advice, I would highly recommend reading Malus posts. She has an excellent command of the English Language and can spot errors in spelling and grammar like a hawk! I promise you that you will learn a lot from her! Tomorrow I will write about the British sense of Humour!