1970s vs. 2020s Southeastern English Speech

In this video, I compare the speech of Margaret Wilkins (born c.1935) to my own (born c.1998), picking up on some aspects of 1970s speech which I'd say have become rarer, at least in this part of the country, since then. Mrs Wilkins was recorded as part of a 1974 television series called 'The Family', which sought to document ordinary working-class family life at the time in a naturalistic and socially realistic way.
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[@michaelaaylott1686]

When Mrs Wilkins lists the months, she isn’t really talking about the passing of time, she’s listing all the supposedly promised dates for the wedding, meaning that at one point it has been spoken about as going to happen in January, then June etc, so the “it’s been” sounds fairly natural to me - mind you, I’m old enough to remember watching this when it was on tv when I was a child

[@EdwardLindon]

Agreed. And the reason for the sing-song quality is that she's needling him.

[@HweolRidda]

Agreed #2. The meaning was "(the wedding date) has been (in) January", "it has been (in) June" ,etc. As someone raised in eastern Canada the wording and intonation sounded competely normal. (Wrong vowels of course.)

[@rhysepoos]

Yes and I think the intonation isn't necessarily how she would normally read a list, but in this case, she unconsciously elongates the list with her intonation (to make the point that he has been dithering)

[@fuckdefed]

I’d probably phrase it so it was a list with the months not being preceded by any repeated set of words - something like “You’ve promised to marry her several times already: January, June …”.. It’s obviously a list of promised dated though, I don’t think that’s in doubt at all.

[@MrVorpalsword]

absolutely. Hey, message to academics .... don't over analyse and don't assume forms of English speech have died, just because you don't go in the right pubs, the right houses in the right towns!

[@AXE668]

I was raised near Reading and I remember this series. One of the her sons was a bus conductor on the bus I used to take to school. When I worked in Reading in the early 80's, the landlord of a pub near where I worked had a very strong Reading accent which was quite different from the Berkshire accent. If he were to say, "I'm going downtown to buy some brown trousers", it would have sounded like "I'm goin' dane tane to buy some brain traisers"

[@531c]

Its not just time that determines how we speak its very much a class thing.

[@TheStarBlack]

Regarding her tone when listing the months - she is quizzing him here about the planned wedding and why it has been delayed so many times. This may be why she uses those tones, to emphasise that she is suspicious of his story and questioning his truthfulness.

[@zak3744]

Yeah, that was my understanding of what she meant too.

[@jointgib]

Yep

[@seanculligan8592]

I'm currently studying for a master's level phonology exam. This video is dead interesting!

[@kira6149]

It’s really hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that the way young people speak today will one day be considered old fashioned. I imagine people 80 years ago would have felt the same, but it just seems like such an alien concept imagining an 80 year old speak the way my generation speaks.

[@YesYouAreAbsolutelyCorrect]

Why is it so hard to wrap your head around? The change will not be as drastic with the internet, because the slang spreads more universally but dies much faster so we can expect a universal medium to stay in the same place longer because of the old media availability.

[@brain_snakes]

Same with names and style of dress. One day, a guy named Ethan wearing a hoodie and vans will be a stereotypical old guy.

[@RandomGuyyy]

Just imagine a Gen Z pensioner in 2090 saying, "Skibidi rizz! Staight bussin, no cap!'"

[@oliverbanter1865]

in my gym there's a few people in their late 40s who speak in London roadman language. So weird to see

[@zappababe8577]

My daughter already tells me off for saying "yeet"! I think it's a very useful word, it's the opposite of yoink!

[@enta_nae_mere7590]

I noticed the SouthEastern rural accent very early on, lots of elderly speakers in East anglia that aren't speaking Broad Norfolk tend to have that same quality

[@ablestringer9063]

Blast bor the' hent nutn wrarng wi norfuk is thee?

[@chanchito4401]

It was today I found out that I am older than Simon Roper

[@AdDewaard-hu3xk]

Just a kid.

[@zivkovicable]

Im 59, I grew up 5 miles east of Reading, and this accent is so familiar to me. It reminds me of my old school dinner lady Mrs Lewis, & my neighbours Fred & Olive. According to my horified parents I had a rural Berkshire accent until i was around seven years old, when it was ironed out of me.

[@clerigocarriedo]

Thanks a million for yet another great video. Btw I thought Reading was "rhotic", as Ricky Gervais is from Reading and often slips into rhoticism . I thought it was a West Country feature present in Reading but Mrs Wilkinson has no rhoticity... Any ideas?

[@GreatGreebo]

I’m from S.E. Alaska (very close proximity to British Columbia, Canada) and the phrase “don’t get me wrong” was extremely common in our daily speech and still is for anyone over 20 years old (FYI: I was born in the 70’s). Also, the “well” and “I mean” discourse markers are used constantly too; also-also at the end of statements we say “and all that” (instead of Mrs. Wilkin’s “and that”) as a discourse marker. It’s interesting to hear people so far away and so long ago using the exact, same speech patterns. Thank you for this fascinating video essay.

[@antonfredrick]

Thanks for the video! Fascinating as always. I didn’t realize you were a half decade younger than me!

[@joshuannachi_6]

First time hearing "Probabilistically" in actually discourse. Meanwhile, kudos to you, Simon, on the great deal of efforts you put in to make these good videos!

[@elbiggus]

Context: I grew up between Southampton and Winchester, and was born in 1973. Quite a few of Mrs Wilkins' accent/pronunciation/dialect/etc. things are present in my speech to a greater or lesser extent. I might go back and rewatch it later and make some notes...

[@angelachicken4141]

From Southampton/Romsey area same era the twang was evident. An older bloke used to come into the shop for 'ailf aince owld Hoeborn' and if I ordered whisky and soda in the Midlands it was often mistaken for whisky and Cider

[@diamondjr2584]

I was gonna say, heard a lot of similar growing up in pompey

[@jmckenzie962]

I'm from New Zealand, and the thing regarding how Mrs Wilkins uses tones when listing things - I've noticed a similar thing in how my grandparents speak as well. My paternal grandmother in particular, who was born in Christchurch in the 1940's, has that same rising tone whenever she lists things, which always sounded so flowery and archaic to me. People in NZ used to hold Received Pronunciation in very high esteem and as such features of RP often rubbed off on the way many kiwis spoke in those days. There's a clip from the early 70's I must try and find again where a woman who was born and raised in my hometown of Wellington is being interviewed and they sound extraordinarily similar to a posh English person. In contrast, my paternal grandfather, who is sadly no longer with us, was raised in Dunedin and spoke with a much thicker "Southern Man" kind of kiwi accent, a kind of accent that today is often stereotyped as how rural "salt-of-the-earth" white men talk in NZ.

[@katrinabee9846]

I was just about to compare to the NZ accent. I'm also a Kiwi, born and raised in Wellington. Simon does a great video on the change of London accent - there's a certain year where it sounds very very New Zealand. Look it up, it's fascinating.

[@katrinabee9846]

Found it! kzbin.info/www/bejne/aZ27p2aKqZmraJIsi=YjpuyYtsZLdaXQ5h&t=640

[@jmckenzie962]

Update: I did in fact find the clip I was referencing, it's from a documentary called "Notes on a City" from 1971 about the changing urban landscape of Wellington and how the city was becoming more car-dominant with the construction of the motorway at that time. The whole film actually features a lot of these very RP-influenced NZ accents that you'll never hear today except from _very_ old people - the particularly extreme example I was thinking of can be found at about 18 minutes in. New Zealand English has changed a _lot_ in the past 50 years.

[@squeezyjohn1]

When I used to go to the old Oxford United ground to watch the matches, I couldn't believe the accents of some of the proper old Oxford boys who went. Their pronunciation of the word "No" was definitely "Nay" but with a sightly more rounded mouth and the vocal gymnastics with pitch they would do while saying it was incredible to witness ... almost like Kenneth Williams! They were probably born in the 1940s. That accent is still there with a few of the most working class families among people like me born in the 70s or 80s ... but the majority have switched to a form of estuary or RP.

[@MrOtistetrax]

Those old boys likely grew up in areas of Oxford that were originally satellite villages, but were incorporated into the city as it grew after the war - places such as Headington (where the Manor ground was) or Cowley or Marston would have been pretty much fully rural when they were kids. My own Grandparents experienced this expansion, and despite living in the city by the time I was born, both had accents that you would definitely associate with country folk.

[@bretrohde7300]

You’re rocking it, Simon!

[@squeezyjohn1]

I normally lap up your content ... but I find it hard to do here because this is basically the accent I grew up hearing and so I know it's very specifically Reading/Berkshire. I've lived in Oxfordshire / near Oxford for most of my life and we used to joke about the Reading accent a lot in the 80s. You're getting so very precise with your analysis of the accent here under the banner of "Southeastern English" that you miss the differences with the way it would have been spoken in Oxfordshire (more midlandsy and nasal) or Hampshire (flatter and more cut) ... who knows what they would have said in Kent (not me!) ... I like the way you have identified the creep of London pronunciation with the mouth vowel, but this lady's accent is totally Reading, and I have no doubt that the way she pronounced about is the old way she learnt to do it.

[@tressel2489]

not sure about Kent in the 70s, but my grandmother (same age as Mrs Wilkins) moved there from London in the 40s and said that the people there seemed like these absolute yokels to them, speaking with a comically rural accent and quite hard to understand.

[@jillp1840]

Ha ha! I was born and raised in Kent (in the 1960s) so I have commented also. I found the 'Southeastern England' jarring as Kent, Sussex and maybe Surrey are South East to me. Where I live now (Surrey / Hants borders) and ergo Reading I always consider to be Southern. And I thought, "She sounds nothing like me".

[@danielr4774]

Funny this popped up in my recommendations. I'm an Irish TEFL teacher and I love The Family series! It makes everyday life in the 70s feel so real instead of the disco/hippy image I had. My mam was 16 when it was filmed. Crazy to think about

[@wulfgreyhame6857]

Chrissie Hynde, lead singer, founder and principal songwriter for The Pretenders, wrote their hit "Don't Get Me Wrong" for their 1986 album "Get Close". Hynde is American, though with a long presence in England (I recall reading Chrissie Hynde articles in NME around 1974). I've never thought of the expression as recent in any way. There was a British movie of the name released in 1937.

[@piynubbunyip]

I'm thinking of all the occasions I heard near lost accents in Australia leap out at me, ripping through time to the present.

[@ellpeetee2069]

I'm from Reading and to me the old Reading accent has a definite hint of West Country

[@GrilloTheFlightless]

The South East used to have a rich variety of accents. A lot of them are dead or dying and have given way to ‘standard southerner’. A lot of people thing Pam Ayres has a West Country accent, but it actually comes from Berkshire. She was bin and grew up in Stanford In The Vale (now Oxfordshire but was then in Berkshire). Reading, where the lady in this clip is from, is also in Berkshire, and had its own accent. The Reading accent has sometimes been called ‘cockney farmer’ because it shares some characteristics with West Country accents, but also some similar characteristics as the East End. ‘I’ would sometimes come out as ‘oi’ and some ‘ou’ or “ow” sounds come out differently. (“I’m going down town to spend a pound” becoming “Oim going dayne tayneto spend a paynde”) I was born there in 1977, but we moved away in 1979. My mother tells me I had a Reading accent when I was a toddler - although I don’t really remember having it, and haven’t had it for most of my life. Then I lived in Farnborough until the early 2000s. One of my college friends in the mid 90s (from the much posher Ash) once asked me why sometimes I sound really posh, and at other times sound like a Londoner. I suspect it may be fragments of my old Reading accent creeping in. Regional accents in the South East are dying at a pace. I went back to Reading for university in 1995 and I barely heard the accent. I’ve always suspected it may be a combination of urban conurbation wiping out the old accents in rural areas, migration of people to other towns and mass media. Professor Jayne Setter, a phoenetics professor working at Reading University, has attributed the death of the Reading accent to increases and improvements in the rail networks, other improvements in transport and the rise in local industry. She says: “It’s largely because Reading has become a bit of a sleeper town for London and also we’ve got Thames Valley park with all the tech companies - the silicon valley of the UK in some ways.” She goes on to say ““I think that means that we’ve had a lot of people migrate to Reading, largely from the southeast and London but we’ll get people coming to Reading from all over the country that want to work in its industries.” and ““The accent has turned into to one of those Thames Valley, you-could-be-from-anywhere kind of accents. It’s very interesting the way this has happened””. Interestingly, she also suggests that the Berkshire/Reading accent is probably closer to the way English was spoken in Shakespeares time (at least in the South) It’s something called accent levelling. Sooner or later our own way of speaking will ‘level out’ due to influences elsewhere. And the internet and social media will cause more international influences than ever before to creep in. It’s already happening. I heard some teenage girls talking in a bus a while ago and I couldn’t understand a damn word. Except for when they briefly slowed dow and said “then her brother and her sister” but the way drawn-out way she said “brother” had a sort of dipthonged “bruv-er-ah” sound. Similarly “sist-er-ah!”. Effectively getting an extra syllable out of each word. The English language is changing. It’s natural. And it’s always happened. After all, people think of Shakespeare as writing in “oldie worldie” English. It is, in fact, Modern English (as opposed as Old or Middle). It’s essentially our own language before it changed and evolved over years to lose some words and gain others. But as natural as it is, I mourn the loss of Southern regional accents. The counties of the North seem to have a strong linguistic identity. But in the South it seems to be working class, posh or big-standard southerner. All the varieties in between have gone. And what he have is largely informed by the accents in London. Even in Devon and Cornwall, which had their own very rich dialects, we see things dying out. My grandmothers family all had strong Devonshire accents. But the last time I went to Devon and Cornwall all I heard was ‘generic southerner’. It’s sad. For anyone interested, Professor Setter discusses the Reading accent in an interview with The Reading Chronicle, 09/09/22.

[@TonyWhitley]

Same is true of The Midlands where I was born (before migrating to "Silicon Ditch" 40 years ago). I used to be able to hear which town people came from, now Brummie yowling is spreading its deadening effect. Of course, my accent was already very different from my 19th century grandparents, in some part due to the migrants (Irish, Scots and later West Indian and then Indian) that flooded to the Coventry factories back then.

[@Tobberz]

This is very interesting - my mother moved to Reading as a child in the 60s, and would say that she would hear much older people speaking with a rhotic accent, but that it was fast dying out

[@NoirL.A.]

i'm yankee and here in the states due to modern tech regional accents are dying out fast it's sad but inevitable.

[@marsy1480]

Yes, Mrs W sounds a lot like my home accent in the Romford (Essex) area during the 70’s.

[@markwilson7788]

Totally fascinating, as always. Stuff that I would fail to register myself, I can see because of your explanation. As someone alive at that time, I can absolutely recognise people talking in that way, but the change totally passes me by without you pointing it out.

[@erfelgamazig]

This is an amazing explanation of Southeastern English. I'm not familiar with these phonetic characters. Thanks for all this work. We don't use "and that" in the part of the USA where I live. We are more likely to end a non-committal sentence with "or whatever." I am 64 years old, so the first sentence I remember was at a significant event. My Aunt and Uncle were talking about the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. "I hated it that JFK was shot and killed by that butcher. He was so cute." (Yeah, the last part was totally unnecessary, and not even related to the senseless assassination) Thank you so much, Simon.

[@TheCharlesFr]

Wonderful analysis and very interesting

[@sheilam4964]

Great observations, insightful and thought provoking.

[@IndraSinha]

Thank you, Simon, for these thoughtful talks. They always leave me with something useful. My entire life is writing and bringing characters to life. Finding their voices is a fundamental part of this and for me is the most satisying part of the work. Your point that certain aspects of an elderly person's speech could be generational rather than a restult of ageing is very interesting to me and opens up all sorts of possibilities. Thanks again, I look forward to your nexr film.

[@ablestringer9063]

In the early 70s as kids we used to greet each other with "Whatcha!" which I think was a contraction of what are you doing. I still use it when I subconsciously recognise I'm talking to someone of my background and age.

[@Silentlyfamous]

I found originally coming from Reading there were 2 types of accent. The Reading town accent which sounds like a London area accent and then the Berkshire accent which sounds more like a West country accent such as the Wiltshire area. Although when me and my Dad had a drink with 2 Bolton Wanderers fans, they said they loved our cockney accents, which to us was funny as our accents were more a rural Berkshire accent. But even to me Mrs Wilkins accent was slightly unusual compared to older speakers of a Berkshire accent I heard such as my Grandfather and great uncles who were Native Reading town folk. Ricky Javais has a Reading accent which has mixes of a London area and Berkshire accent with similarities to a West country a cent in certain words.

[@clerigocarriedo]

Very interesting!! I was wondering why Mrs. Wilkins is not rhotic at all, whereas Ricky Gervais is a bit.

[@Silentlyfamous]

@@clerigocarriedo Yes Ricky does have a slight rhoetic sound funnily enough some Reading folk do have a soft rhoetic sound, and these were folk born in the 1930's and 40's. But other Reading town people have a London area accent. I suppose it's where Berkshire is positioned especially Reading around 30 miles West of West London and West Berkshire which has more of a Rhoetic sound more akin to a Wiltshire accent as the 2 counties border one another at the Western edge. East Berkshires border with Middlesex touches around the Langley and Slough areas which would have a London area accent a mere stones throw away from Brentford and Hounslow. Yet my friends who are from Reading have more of a London area accent as their parent or parents were originally from London. Bracknell is a good example with the overspill population from London and only around 8 miles East of Reading they sound like Londoners and refered to me as a farmer Lol, As my Reading accent sounded more rural similar to a West Berkshire accent. Simon would know far more than I do but mines just on listening to people talking and accents which I find fascinating. But a great observation that Ricky has a slight Rhoetic sound but Steven Marchant who's from Bristol who worked a lot with Ricky in his various Television programmes might have rubbed off on Ricky's accent. As Steven Marchant has a strong Bristolian Rhoetic accent. Also Reading had quite a big Irish community one of the biggest in the south outside of London as my maternal grandmothers parents came from Longford and Kildare plus a big Afro Carribbean community so the town became a melting pot but I think the Rhoetic element was naturally there long before newcomers arrived in the town.

[@RandomNonsense1985]

I keep seeing “Berkshire” and have to remind myself OP isn’t referring to Western Massachusetts.

[@cathyquinn9820]

This is the old Reading accent which is dying out - it's become a more general Estuary accent but retaining a bit of the rustic vowels. If you hear any of the Wilsons interviewed more recently you can hear their own accent isn't as broad as it was in the 70s. The series was on when I was a 7 year old in Reading and I saw it when it was repeated about 1980. Tom is definitely from the north east - he sounds very like James Bolam in the Likely Lads. The 'and that' is a kind of prevarication or imprecision.

[@iac4357]

Fascinating. Thank You.

[@debbief9861]

How interesting! Right up my street. Subscribed. I'm delighted there are modern-day Professor Higgins-type scholars around. I'd feared that no one studied all this anymore.

[@CarolineFord1]

Everything changes all the time, we only notice when we look back.

[@Jon867]

What's interesting about the perception of time to me, someone in their 40s, is how analogue my childhood was in the 80s and early 90s compared to today. Things which were culturally dominant for decades in the pre-digital age - like department stores, print media and linear broadcast TV - have largely lost their relevance over the last 20 years.

[@untitled9229]

22:54 I'm about the same age as you and something I like doing is going on google street view and looking at the places I grew up in, and setting the dates to as early as they go. Usually this is around 2008-2010, and my memories of that time are like you said, just like the modern day, but looking back on how things looked then - the cars, the clothes people are wearing, etc - it can be really jarring just how old it looks

[@rungus24]

Her voice sounds pretty similar to modern Norfolk to me, or like a watered down version of Norfolk. You know, I love it when I hear Americans say the word 'roof' with a short vowel, like I used to hear in Norfolk, where I grew up.

[@mikedavidson1970]

Great work

[@Urlocallordandsavior]

It's basically the accent imitated in the movie Spinal Tap.

[@jillybrooke29]

I was born in London and had a rather posh accent till I was 7, we then immigrated to New Zealand and had their accent for 4 years, Came back to London and I developed a cockney accent speaking very fast. Now I have been in East Sussex for 22 years and I have slowed down my speech and now speak much more clearly and slowly, same as my friends and acquaintances here. I loved this programme when I was 16, it was fascinating to me. At that time I had been working for a year.

[@BsktImp]

Presumably, you take into account the context: Mrs. Wilkins having a slightly heated exchange fuelled by concern for her daughter will display different speech characteristics from, say, reminiscing about the past with her hubby, or reading a bedtime story to a toddler.

[@DeanMorrison]

I really enjoyed that Simon, thanks. I'm 64 from Barnstaple in Devon but have lived in Hastings in Sussex since 1988. When I first moved here I noticed older country people had elements of speech similar to mine. What I'd call a Sussex accent seems to have almost dissapeared now..I knew an old farmer called Nelson Russell from near Crowborough. He wou ld hav e been birn around 1910. There are some old KZbin videos of him from around 1995 - they'd make an interesting case study for you. Will post a link in a reply to this post.

[@DeanMorrison]

Nelson talking about hedgelaying tools kzbin.info/www/bejne/hnbal3SPirqHrbMsi=7orLR_7U3wHKKnrb

[@DeanMorrison]

Nelson talking about making cider - his voice was weakening a little at that age. kzbin.info/www/bejne/lXO4i4GlirOsosUsi=CnFCzGcUVENWKZjP

[@DeanMorrison]

Anoher one about his marrow tree. He was a natural born raconteur - was national veteran hedgelaying champion and the last farmer in Sussex to plough with horses. kzbin.info/www/bejne/gqvCq56Yi72HeLssi=GHlIZLa7Lt9qFig6

[@alanwyatt]

I'm sure you'll be familiar with the recordings of English speakers made by a German researcher just before WW1. I was surprised when hearing it the first time, how 'countrified' they sounded. I was born in 1964 and grew up in Surrey/Hants and spent time near Reading. I do recall hearing tinges in accents occasionally although many spoke with a sort of RP or a more southern (London) generic accent. Moved to Devon half a lifetime ago and have heard many more accents since. But rural England had much in common in the way they spoke. When you mentioned older people you heard, Simon, it reminded me of 'the oldest person I ever met' meaning not in age, but earliest born. As a child I remember seeing an old chap and his wife who lived near us. I would have been about 4 and the old man had fought in the Boer wars. So I think he was born around 1880.

[@Lily-Bravo]

"Don't get me wrong" was a song by the Pretenders in the 1980s, but the phrase was well known before that.

[@RandomNonsense1985]

And written by an American!

[@adrianparker-e9f]

My late aunt went to live near Maidstone, Kent, just after the war. She came from Hull, but i always thought that she was from Kent because she spoke with the accent of that area. I have travelled to various parts of the country, and dialects once associated with those parts are/have all but disappeared in some places. Sometimes it's only older people with the local accent. Also, anywhere neat to London now seems to have the same speech style.

[@TheTedder]

How much of this can be attributed to differences between male and female speech?

[@Volorai]

There are entirely negligible gendered differences in spoken language. The only differences are related to the differences in vocal projection between AGABs. But those are hardly strict enough to result in linguistic differences, considering how easy voice training is.

[@AmyThePuddytat]

​@@VoloraiThere are considerable differences in intonation. And it's across the sexes/genders. “AGAB” shouldn't automatically used as synonym of that since we're not talking about what anyone is _assigned._

[@Volorai]

@@AmyThePuddytat There isn't any other universally inclusive terminology to refer to "biological sex". All existing terminology is gendered. If there ever is universal, un-gendered terminology to refer to it, I'll probably start using that since its what I want to use. I'm extremely skeptical that there are considerable differences in intonation, considering my own and others experience with vocal intonation. AFAIK, there is no significant physiological differences in vocal cords across "sex" that would result in linguistic differentiation.

[@erickehr4475]

The most jarring thing to me was that they were having a very civil disagreement.

[@rogerkearns8094]

Amazing that, as tiny children, we pick all this up, seemingly with hardly a thought.

[@kevingriffin1376]

I’m a native speaker of Boston English (New England USA). The speakers in your video sound British to me but I have no difficulty understanding them. “Don’t get me wrong,” is a common expression in especially older speakers of my “dialect.”

[@belstar1128]

its quite strange how some languages change faster than others like British English has changed a lot in a short time American English hasn't as changed much. i am a native Dutch speaker and i found a news video from 1985 and i was really surprised how old it sounds but this was only a few years before i was born. i also sometimes get called out for using outdated spelling they changed it in the 90s

[@MaoRatto]

That's how it feels to be raised in the South in the USA. When one of my works first came into my state, he noticed how obsolete we sounded. My younger co-workers often struggle to understand what I am saying due to... When growing up, we weakened a lot of sounds. Often not allowing TR, DR being Africanized at all, but the T,K,P lose their aspiration, but the vowels are strong in the first word of a sentence. Doesn't help I do speak quick and noticing a slow acceptance of tolerating repeated front vowels for a "regularized" past-tense, while that never happened as I believe it's due to a vowel change, while here, it would KEEP it irregular or make regular words IRREGULAR to avoid a repeated -it, -ed, or -at situation, though noticed a pattern where we say "and" closer to the woman in the video, but /ɶnd/ at times, or glottalize then nasalize the n or unintentional adding a vowel at And when the word starts with a consonant.

[@Natalia-l1y]

It's much more understandable than today's English

[@orangewarm1]

have you taken into consideration her origins though? her parents origin is sure to have influenced her. 'ordinary working class South Eastern family' isnt specific enough. As you know, Essex is very different from Tooting. South London is even different East London or North London.

[@wojtdid4700]

I never realized the influence of one's family's origin on their speech, but it is definitely very strong. Like I always wandered why do linguist who study polish rural dialects always want to know where the informant's parents came from until I realized that my aunt spent her childhood with her grandparents and she always brings up examples of linguistic features present in the speech of her grandma, whose family village is like twelve kilometers away and the dialect there is very different even though it is spoken by the same ethnographic subgroup and it's considered the same dialect by linguists

[@AdDewaard-hu3xk]

Is a cut vowel a schwa? There are many schwas . . .

[@EnigmaticLucas]

@@AdDewaard-hu3xkOnly in dialects with the STRUT-commA merger

[@masonwillis708]

The point you make about elderly people saying things in the early 2000s that are now lost (as they have passed) is something I was talking to my mum about just the other day. My Granddad (who died aged 88 in 2016) used to say ‘Wotcha’ instead of ‘Hello’ to people that were very close to him. I heard a few of his friends and brothers say it too. To my knowledge, I’ve not heard it in nearly a decade. Perhaps I’m wrong, but it was the first thing that came to mind. Three other examples my mum and I thought of are: ‘Gor’ Bennet’ ‘Ain’t ‘Alf’ and ‘hanky’. For example: ‘Gor’ Bennet it ain’t ‘alf cold! Glad I brought me hanky’.

[@fuckdefed]

I haven’t heard “ain’t half” for yonks, or even “Gor lumme” and “Gordon Bennett” (never encountered “Gor Bennett” though). Certain phrases seem to to currently only used by the very elderly and will probably disappear in 10 years or so such as “wireless” for “radio” and “outdoors” for “off licence”.

[@MrOtistetrax]

My Dad said “wotcha” to me just yesterday!

[@masonwillis708]

@@MrOtistetrax Oh lovely! How old is your dad?

[@MrOtistetrax]

@@masonwillis708 He’s 75. Some of my friends and I (in our 40s) will still use it occasionally too. But usually with a sense of kitsch irony.

[@masonwillis708]

@@MrOtistetrax I love that! You've inspired me to do likewise!

[@amandachapman4708]

I'm fascinated by the spectrum of accents from Cornwall, through Devon, Dorset, Somerset, into Wiltshire, then Berkshire. I get the impression that there is an underlying similarity/continuity with local variations. Something along the lines of the Cumberland/Westmorland/ Lancashire / Yorkshire spectrum. I suppose local speakers in any of the counties I mention will be up in arms that I am suggesting such a thing 😉 Also, I was interested in the "mouth" discussion, which reminded me of the Canadian pronunciation of similar words. My Sony headphones tell me that its battery level is "about x percent" using that pronunciation. Oddly enough, in various east Lancs towns, the "ou" sound is rather similar to this.

[@Fredreegz]

The way she talks really reminds me of whenever Eric Idle played an old woman in Monty Python sketches. Always used to put on a hammed up version of this accent.

[@Sylkis89]

The generational vs just "old people" thing is a bit more complex. In case of native speakers of rural or otherwise less prestigious dialects (even urban working class), it is common for people to adopt (at least to some extend) more mainstream-like, more prestigious pronunciations, be it consciously by masking, or unconsciously/naturally by just mirroring other speakers they come in contact with (even limited contact, e.g. listening to them on TV). But as approaching the pensioner age, then whether by conscious choice, or involuntarily just as a result of changes happening to the brain at some stages in life, at least some features of one's native dialect from childhood start resurfacing, and the person's pronunciation reverts back (at least partially) to a state closer to the original one. And this greatly contributes to the perception of certain ways to speaking to be an "old person" thing in the eyes of a younger generation, because they do notice that, in fact, their parents or aunts, etc., speak "normally" in their childhood (of the younger generation), and later on when these children become adults and their parents(, etc.) retire, their way of speaking changes. This might not be applicable to the lady in the video you reviewed, but just noting it that you having this "old people type of speech" assumption as a child was a result of a far more complex phenomenon with a lot of different aspects to it and ways in which it shows than you had assumed, or how you explained it now in the video to be just an generational thing. There's many simultaneous components to it, generational, neurological, regional, class-related, and probably yet far more that I didn't think of when writing this.

[@benjaminwilson2945]

It's interesting that you said Tom sounded Irish to you because to me he clearly sounds like someone from the northeast of England. I'm from the northwest though so maybe it's easier for people from the north to identify non southern accents.

[@fuckdefed]

I agree, I was astonished that Simon suggested Tom was from Sheffield as he sounds more like he’s from the Sunderland/Middlesborough region just South of Newcastle. I’m from the West Midlands btw just to add context to my non-expert opinion.

[@IAmRobertPersson]

Forgive me if this is already addressed later in the video than I have got to now, but have you taken into fact that Reading is a considerable distance west of London? The way Mrs Wilkins says “find” doesn’t sound southeastern to me at all. If anything, it sounds Borsetshire. Is that a remnant of a dialect spoken in that part of Berkshire before London-style speech took over?

[@thetek2006]

Escellent. A fascinating and oddly enjoyable video. I'm 49, I grew up and have spent all my life in the Bromley area of SE London. Within the last 20 years I've noticed a distinct change in the way young adults are talking, both those of a better spoken kind and those of a more "common" sounding kind though in outwardly different directions. An example would be my sister's children (late teens) who are somehow quite well spoken yet they and others I have heard exhibit a speech cadence which I find mildly irritating, being very up and down in pitch, sometimes to an almost comedic degree and sometimes what I hear as the dreaded questioning intonation at the end of sentences.

[@benjaminwilson2945]

The ending of the video was really interesting. As someone from Liverpool I would say there is strong generational differences in the Scouse accent. This is not because of accent levelling, because in many ways certain features of the Scouse accent have actually gotten stronger. If you wanted me to give you some examples of the dialectal changes I would be happy to do so.

[@auntyjo1792]

Very true.

[@rachelblaquiere9134]

It's taken me this long (or "so long"?) to realise Simon and I were born in the same year

[@dessertstorm7476]

"and that" is very mancunian and still in usage currently, its used frequently at the end of sentences with no real meaning, but kind of means "etc". A southerner might find that odd and question what it means

[@abody499]

nah it's much wider than mancunian. i'd guess it was commonly used in british working class variants, maybe not all - i really dont know, but certainly common. i agree it sort of means etc. In the first example it was "at work and that" which I interpret as saying not only at work but other places he's not sure of enough to define at the time of speaking. or maybe to avoid listing all the places she might have to tell people.

[@dessertstorm7476]

@@abody499 i would definitely say its broadly a northern thing if not specifically manc. I grew up in the south east and never heard it until I moved to manchester. You wouldn't hear it on eastenders, but you would definitely hear it on coronation street.

[@abody499]

ok interesting. that begins to answer my next idea that there was a certain starting point in terms of latitude from where it began and was commonly used north of this starting point. The evidence for this is that it was common across Scotland in working class speech communities. [edit: in the same generation of speakers as on the video]

[@andrewwoodgate3769]

When you travel(led) west from London, into Oxon, Hants, Berks, you quickly hit a speech pattern which I think IS a remnant of Wessex speech.

[@KooShnoo]

I like this.

[@davenewton9652]

I'm not UK born, though two of my grandparents were from greater London. And I lived in the UK in my 20s/30s. I'm going to have to rewatch the main part of the vid to think about further. The last part, with Simon's address to us is interesting - that we grow up thinking something is "old peoples" language, but it is really just the way that an old person spoke when they were young. There's a saying that "I'm a 20 year old stuck in a 70 year old's body" or some such. When I think about it, my written and spoken language is still definitely influenced by the people who were my seniors in my first office jobs or university, and family. Some of whom were close to retirement when I was in my late teens/early 20s. Things that you pick up just as part of the general surroundings to you. As opposed to the [semi]conscious changing of an accent because, for instance, you are going to University. We carry SOME of that forward into our own ideolect. But only some. And a small fraction of THAT might carry forward to the 20-somethings that I work with today. And so on. Some gets left behind, some carries on.

[@brendanjackman3600]

Really cool to see analysis of intonation! Would love to see more of that. Do we lose most of that for periods of history before audio recording?

[@xrimn9294]

I found it interesting that you addressed rhoticity a minute after I noticed your - to me surprising - pronounciation of the R in a few cases of "here" and "further". The rules when native speakers pronounce their r's in a non-rhotic accent are complex indeed. Also, in the same way one might find it jarring to see young people use old-timey speech, it is jarring to me that your earliest memories are post 2000. Not that I would have thought you were much older if I had stopped to think about it. It's just weird realizing, from adult to adult, that there is a big chunk of history lived that we don't share. As you age, your frame of reference doesn't necessarily adapt I guess. I love these super detailed videos on niche subjects of yours!

[@johnmulvey5121]

Very interesting!

[@DadgeCity]

I thought Tom sounded like he was from Newcastle!

[@BiTurbo228]

Me too! I was thinking 'he sounds like a Georgie to me...'

[@chrisroberts1919]

I used to walk various portions of the Thames Path between Oxford and Reading. The variation of accent is significant. Perhaps there are the two main groups. The (to my ear) "London" (commuter) type and... "Pam Ayres". (An enthusiast for accent, if ever!). But a lot of external influences... Didcot with its Railway... The Science Campuses around Harwell... the Proximity of Oxford etc. As a 70 y.o. "Shropshire Lad", who spent his formative years in Cheshire, I use many of the older "Family" constructs? But we Brits do tend to adopt accents and mimic... "Fit in" with (at) the local community (Pub!)... :P

[@Mushroom3D]

I thought Mrs Wilkins was Terry Jones for the first few seconds. 😂 "He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy".

[@MaoRatto]

14:59 I notice this phonetic realization despite not even close to England mainly in where normally /u/ originally got fronted in the south at times as /ʏy̯/, but lowered into /ø/, but also in indefinite articles like "an" before words with /e, ɪ, or ɛ/ when in high stress environments. Also, having the all of the front round vowels vs. unrounded . Like in " and " becoming a nasal œ, but D being reduced. with a high tongue position. Anytime t or d are reduced, it often rounds the lips due to the N or M in the world or just doing a German convience thing where in a base word form. It stays as "o", but shifts to "ö", but here it applies to historical /ɪ/ being backed to /ʌ/ as I notice the /ʌ/ is more fronted, the schwa sometimes in certain environments becomes /ɜ/ while /ɐ/ shows up when a word like " what " changes verbs after it. I notice some have deleted N's or M's or merged.

[@theoryismypraxis3538]

to me the /w/ sound in "don't" ( 0:26 ) is not very prominent to my ear really. I would have probably tried to reflect it in the vowel when transcribing. Good ear on your part. the glottal stop after the /n/ is also very subtle

[@jillp1840]

I found this interesting as someone born into the working class in the early 60s in N.W. Kent (about 60 miles East of Reading) and who now lives about 16 miles South of Reading. My immediate thought was, "She doesn't sound like me." As you commented, the London sounds are there, but it was the "South West" sounds intermingled that caught my ear. We didn't have that in our area. My son's mother-in-law was born just outside Reading, and has one peculiar pronunciation that we're not sure is 'just her' (although her daughter has inherited it) or whether is part of the Reading dialect. She pronounces 'nearly' as 'narely' (to rhyme with 'rarely'). I would equate 'you see' with today's 'right' marker, although I use it as corroboration. 'You see? I SAID that would happen.' I would love to know if / how speech changes over time. Sometimes I realise there are words or phrases I just haven't used in about 40 years and I wonder why they fell out of use. I suspect that how I speak now has become 'posher' from when I was a child, although to my ears I still have slovenly habits with glottal stops, saying 'yeah' and 'innit'. You mentioned writing for the times. My personal plea, and bugbear is hearing (in films / TV programmes) people say, "She's pregnant". We would NEVER be so bold back in the 60s and 70s! It was always a coy "She's in the family way" or "She's expecting" or the cruder "She's up the spout". Thank you for an interesting video, although of course it has made me feel ancient!

[@davenewton9652]

Somewhere I have a cassette tape that my parents sent from when we lived overseas to their parents. 50 years ago. I should dig it out. It'd be interesting to see how my dad sounds then to now.

[@jillp1840]

@@davenewton9652 You should do that!

[@forthrightgambitia1032]

Interesting discussion. My earliest memories are of the 90s, stronger towards the end of the 90s, as in the early 90s I was a small child. It is intriguing how my memory of that time is slightly garbled. I mean I didn't have a smartphone until early 2015, and yet the experience of using an old style mobile phone from about 1999-2015 hasn't really left much of a trace in my memory, except the early years playing snake. I don't distinctly remember the TV being of worse quality and yet when I watch TV from the late 90s and early 2000s it manifestly was. As for 'South Eastern' - I always assumed this meant Kent to me. At least if people in Kent say the South East they mean Kent and maybe Sussex, Surrey and at a stretch Essex. Calling Reading the South East is a little strange to me. It would be interesting to see speech patterns in Kent at that time - I know from speaking to my parents that in the 70s there were still people who spoke with an older dialect and accent from Kent. It was considered a slight rural burr, a softer version of say the he accents in the West Country or East Anglia. Even at that time though the cities and towns in the north of Kent such as Chatham, Maidstone, Sittingbourne and Faversham had already being increasingly influenced by London accents, especially given the naval presence in the era (which was still a thing then) and the hop pickers who came down from London. Also, your discussion of the model of English and how it works I think becomes more alien the further back we go. I think this is one of the reasons people struggle to understand Shakespeare at school whilst people who read it a lot of out of interest become quite attached to the modes of speech. It is not the unusual vocabulary which can be glossed, or the conceptal understanding of the world, which again can be explained as historical phenomena. We can be trained to understand the classical rhetorical techniques that complicate much of the sentence construction such as the florid anthimeria, the usage of nouns as verbs for example, that anyway has elements of things we do in a more controlled way in the modern world. We're very consciously aware of these facts or can be trained in them. It is instead because the patterns of speech, the filler words and the ways of constructing sentences that make the whole thing seem so alien to us and almost ritualistic. Discourse markers such as "an't" and "marry" seem almost comical to us, or sacred, depending on one's context of exposure to such language. I think this in part explains why say Catholicism traditionally used Latin for religious services, or even today Muslims are expected to read the Quran in Classical Arabic. The distance of time and the jarring nature of the expressions creates a separateness that can then be closely connected with ideas or concepts of a different world.

[@MrVorpalsword]

What about the Lad's accent, its North Easterny but all over the place too. Boys who joined the army often end up with confused accents like his .... and Gypsies often have really mixed up accents too?

[@freddiefox.]

Have you seen the videos (from film) of Bertrand Russell speaking? He was born in 1872, but the recordings are from 1959, so a fascinating record of how people from the late 19th century spoke, probably. You'd have to listen and judge for yourself.

[@Langwyrm]

Sheffielder here. I've never heard anyone around here that speaks like that (though there are a few features that they have in common with a few dialects near here). I think it's more Mersey or Tyne.

[@markaxelson5940]

Fascinating! Now I want to know something...did Tom and Marian ever end up married?

[@Nibunibu999]

Yes they did and divorced a few years after. The wedding was a major national event at the time. Many years ago I used to drink in the Wellington Arms on Whitley Street which was the Wilkins' 'local'. It's now a Greggs.

[@marianarcher5600]

I just wanted to point out that my mother Margaret Wilkins was originally from Hertfordshire and not from Reading and Tom was Irish born and raised in Sheffield . I also think that calling her Wilkins is in my opinion a tad disrespectful

[@jillybrooke29]

Hello Marian, gosh what memories the programme brings back for me, going to work at 15, at lunchtimes and weekends looking around the shops, buying clothes from C & A,, laughing most of the time...such happy days in the 70s. I did wonder what happened to your family. People are so different these days, sad really.

[@simonroper9218]

​@@marianarcher5600 Hi Marian, it's very surreal to get a comment from you - thank you very much for your insights :) I'm genuinely sorry for the oversight regarding your mother's surname, and would be very happy to alter the video and take this version down. If you are unhappy with the video in general, I'd be happy to just take it down and leave it down - the last thing I wanted to do was to show disrespect to her or your family, and I'm very sorry for not being more diligent about this!

[@GreatGreebo]

Marian, Greetings! Also, did they get married??! I’m genuinely curious. I hope you are well and thank you for the comment.

[@pwmiles56]

The advert before this video had a woman saying "it's a virginal flooring". Sorry, she meant "it's original flooring". Random observation.

[@andrewsveikauskas]

21:21 I'm american, so the examples I'm exposed to are different from yours... But I've noticed boomers in old recordings do tend to sound different than more recent recordings of the same people. Listen to any american from a place like New York who was young in the 60s/70s and spoke with a non rhotic accent. In recordings 30-40+ years later, the same individuals are very often much more rhotic. This is to say, older people do seem to catch on to current trends (such as non rhotacism declining in the US) and adjust their speech. Not all of their speech patterns are direct from their youth

[@QuizmasterLaw]

I am old enough to have been alive then and speak a lot of languages lived in a lot of countries. Globally, accent normalization is definitely happening. The Southern USA accent from my childhood was entirely different from the Northeastern and Western US accents. Meanwhile, it has basically disappeared and some features of the Northeastern accent, notably nasalization have also disappeared. they are normalizing to each other at the same time that the transatlantic anglo accent is normalizing. I expect this is also happening with english in the antipodes. The Indian accented English remains quite distinct, i presume that to be the case of Jamaican but I expect all the caribbean english dialects are normalizing to a common accent.

[@TheEggmaniac]

Im fascinated by British accents and their differences. But Im not a linguist. Simon I dont think you have a southern standard British accent. You sound like you have a kind of neutral accent, as in getting close to modern RP. But with subtle northern English overtones. To me you use certain north east English sounds. But Im sure youve mentioned before youre originally from Cumbria. Perhaps the accent is similar? The accents of everywhere in the UK is constantly changing, but I reckon its changing faster is some areas, like the south east of England, than it is in other areas.

[@TonyWhitley]

A "neutral accent"?

[@iberius9937]

How funny that I was talking about the lax vowel /ɪ/ in Latin before clicking on this video were you mention lax vowels 1 minute in.

[@benedyktjaworski9877]

I really liked your wondering about language change, the cut-off points where new generations don’t experience some ways of speaking at all in real life, at the end. But now look at this from the angle of particular languages. You’re talking about English in England, one of the most used languages in the world, in the country where the dialectal variation is so strong - so you’ve been exposed to a large variety of speakers, and still are (though of course the older generations had died out, so the generational change is there still). But this should make one realize just *how much* the change affects minoritized languages. The speakers there often have contact *only* with their family and neighbours, they might not experience the ways of speaking of a town 30 kilometres away at all during their life (as they’d be using the majority language with strangers when travelling), and the learners of those languages often don’t have much contact with native speakers at all. The language change among native speakers accelerates, idioms and grammatical constructions get lost a lot quicker, often unrecorded, and learners are not even aware just how imperfectly they learn the language - and the native speech of two generations ago sounds “jarring” to everybody. I don’t have any specific point here to make, just puts some perspective on minority languages and their revival movements, I guess.

[@simonsimon325]

This isn't really related to anything in your video. It's just when you were talking about the 2000s it reminded me of a conversation I had the other day. We were speculating when the transition would happen that people would refer to the 2020s simply as the 20s. If someone says the 20s, 30s, etc to me, it's the 1920s they're talking about. So when did the 20s become the 1920s not the 1820s, and when will it become the 2020s? I was just curious as to exactly what the trigger is for that transition. Will it be when the majority of society are born in the current century?

[@debbief9861]

You're right! It is indeed a strange thing when and how this happens.

[@darkclownKellen]

Who the hell are you? Youre last video opened up a new paradigm for me and its giving me an existential crisis

[@debbief9861]

This comment made me nod and laugh and worry all at the same time!

[@Hertog_von_Berkshire]

I have lived near Reading most of my life and have known many people from Reading over the years, some predating The Family. The Reading accent is quite specific and Mrs Wilkins' accent doesn't conform. It's my belief that she was raised somewhere else. I can't quite put a finger on where that might be.

[@Hertog_von_Berkshire]

And his accent has a fair bit of Dublin in it; possibly Romany Dublin.

[@Tobberz]

As a complete layman, I've noticed you pronounce the vowel in words like "me" differently to me. I'd also consider myself a speaker of SSB, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

[@So-Be-It_85949]

You are 3 years younger than my child.

[@mattpyatt307]

I’d be interested if you could do a video of a dialect continuum from west to east as I have a noticed a few similarities between Ipswich and Bristol accents being from Colchester I can tell the difference but there is not a great deal written on east Anglian English

[@Sylkis89]

as a native speaker of Polish, where we actually pronounce semivowel consonants /w/ and /j/ after vowels, your (and I mean even specifically yours, the creator of this video) diphthongs are actually blends of 2 vowels with one of them just not being syllabic, you do not pronounce semivowels in these diphthongs as exemplified in this video. It sounds different when people make diphthongs with semivowels vs non-syllabic vowels, and the 3 greatest hallmarks of Polish accent in English is not distinguishing between long and short pure vowels and not marking almost any lip rounding or spreading (though this also depends on a dialect, more rural dialects still do this, but mainstream urban dialects lost it, and it's important later), pronouncing semivowels instead of diphthongs (not even diphthongs with semivowels, but a pure vowel followed by a semivowel - and this is also why most mainstream/urban dialects of Polish lost lip rounding and spreading in the vowels, to make the /w/ so much more contrasting, clearly defined without blending with either the preceding or the following vowel), and not pronouncing the th-sounds (replacing them with dental /t/, /d/, and /f/, /v/ - depending on a word) and it makes for s "heavy" sounding accent largely because of pronouncing semivowels very clearly instead of non-syllabic vowels. In case you're wondering how a vowel followed by a semivowel vs a diphthong with a semivowel vs a diphthong with a non-syllabic vowel sound different, first think of a difference in sound of how Irish people will pronounce a clear R-consonant after a pure vowel, vs Americans will pronounce a rhotacized vowel that in this context will be an equivalent to a diphthong with a semivowel. Then, think how differently the short I and short U (I don't have IPA on this computer, sorry) in diphthongs sound from /j/ and /w/ at the beginning of words, they're very different in English, with the diphthongs often loosing the qualities like lip rounding un the non-syllabic U and such, to a greater of smaller extent, or at least it not being strong enough to make it possible to consider it a consonant, for the quality to be dominated by the obstructions made with the lips/tongue, rather than the vowel qualities dominating it.

[@Henderson101]

For the about thing. We say about with a glottal stop and the vowels are like ei sound in hate or mate. So “pound” sounds like “pained”. To me she sounds like a variation on that sound.

[@Canweezy]

I may have missed it in the past, but have you ever done a video - or considered doing a video - on researching the old Sussex accent, or dialects? I've always known older people in Hastings, for instance, who have grown up there and spoken with a strange, West-Country like accent, but my generation (25 and below) seem to be speaking in a kind of generalised English accent. I'd be interested to know if there's any material on old Sussexian accents?

[@nevreiha]

it's a shame that we lose features in general as seperate ways of speaking are less and less isolated, older (recent) ways of speaking are quaint but homely to an extent. I suppose we gain new language features and differences for each we lose so it isn't all sad.

[@GiddeonG]

I love the translated phonetic based script that accurately describes not only the words but the precise sounds used to make them. It's like music. You could write a poem in brummy or yorkshire or cockney and have it perfectly replicated by someone who can read it and sound it out. What do you call that script? Does anyone know?

[@Overcrook65]

I suppose you mean the International Phonetic Alphabet. While it cannot always represent spoken language with complete accuracy, as it is a standardisation of sounds and does not convey all the nuances of speech flow, intensity, rhythm, and melody, it is indeed very useful.

[@davidloveday8473]

I'm not sure it's fair to call it "Southeastern Speech." In a sense I see your point - Reading is geographically, kind of, in the south east of England. But its right on the western side of the south east, more central - the next county along is Wiltshire and there you're in what planty of people would call the the west country, or at least its edge. And either way, isn't the key point that there has never been such a thing as a single Southeastern accent? Instead, a patchwork/continuum of different accents and dialects, even within eg. London. Her accent seems to me pretty typical of (certain) people from that pocket west of London, with aspects that to Londoners like me are reminiscent of what we might associate with the west country or even (perhaps wrongly) East Anglia and the east of England. Similar aspects can he found in Oxfordshire. I have always thought that this is basically evidence of a certain amount of commonality in historical dialects across the entirety of the South of England, East to West, to which London for all sorts of reasons (not least its exposure to outside influences due to being a massive trade and migration hub) is a huge anomaly.

[@pheart2381]

I can remember the original Bletchley,Buckinghamshire accent. Much more countrified,almost Somersetish in parts. It got diluted by Londoners moving into the area. When I moved to Yorkshire some people thought I was from London,and some, from Somerset!! Bletchley born and bred,with parents from East London. The actress Ellen Terry's accent is interesting. Not at all what I was expecting. She was from Ireland,but her father(also an actor) gave her elocution lessons to give a refined English accent. When she sais Again it doesn't sound cultured at all!

[@marcdefaoite]

I don't think Burns is Irish (I am), but I can hear how you might think that. Or if he is Irish he lived most of his life in England.

[@Henderson101]

First off, is reading South Eastern? It is west of London and north of Portsmouth and we are dead south. Secondly, her accent sounds a lot more southern than the blokes. she sounds more like the accent around Portsmouth. Reading always has a twang. my dad grew up in Newbury and the r's always sounded burr like to me. You should check out the classic Pompey accent. it sounds like her accent for a lot of the vowels, but we have glottal stops and the dark L like cockney.

[@josephnguyen4548]

I have a friend who’s around the same age as you are and he’s also British from southeastern England, and I have never heard him say “rubbish” You brought up a good point at the end of the video about how we don’t really notice how our languages change in real time. I used to wonder if people living during the great vowel shift noticed the changes as time went on. More likely than not, most didn’t notice.

[@BarnabyMarder]

I thought Tom was from the North-East!