Irish people with English accents

Wibbs

Erik Shin wrote: »

In the 70's you had 1 TV channel.....

Maybe you did E, most of my peers in 70's Dublin had four; RTE, BBC 1, BBC2 and UTV and from 1982 Channel 4 and by the mid 80's Sky, Super Channel, MTV and the like. The films we saw were also majority American. Much of the music too. And no interwebs and few enough had video recorders(even if they did again it would be mostly American flics they'd have watched) so our main media entertainment was the TV. TV that started in the morning and ran throughout. Most kids outside of school watched a lot of TV. The majority of which was UK and US based and again we didn't sprout British or American accents.

At some point and I'd narrow it down to the late 90's, the mid Atlantic accent lost its previous stigma and took off from there. Mostly, at least at the start among some younger women. Even today it's usually among some women where we have the most extreme version of it. I recall reading before that people tend to imitate the accent of the person they're speaking with as a social intimacy/fitting in thing and women are more likely to do this(they're also better at learning new languages as a general thing).

My Dad spoke with a British accent, but only because he spent decades working in the UK. However he did initially lose his Irish accent on purpose. He was a young employee in the British public service at the start of the Troubles, so an Irish accent wasn't a positive attribute.


My Mum has one of those 'chavvy' English-Irish hybrid accents from working for years on racing yards around lads from Northern England.
When she's drunk, he sounds like an Irish culchie, infused with Bet Gilroy from Corrie. 'Get that fookin' dawg out of de yaaaaaaaard!'

Mortifying.

Brendan Bendar

P. Breathnach wrote: »

We might be thinking of different examples, but I don't have that impression.

There is, to my ear, a "neutral" Irish accent. By that, I mean an accent that is distinctively Irish, but not associated with any particular region in Ireland. It is generally spoken by educated middle-class people.

Terry Wogan had it, Gay Byrne has it.

[I have it. Nobody doubts that I am Irish but, unless given other clues, people cannot figure where in Ireland I come from.]

Kilkenny ancestry P, but Monkstown/ Booterstown from the sound of that post.

Very 'buttoned down ' twang to it ,if you pardon my observation.

pauliebdub

It seems to be fairly common with some Church of Ireland people who go to CoI schools and only mix with people who are very similar to themselves who tend to have English or very neutral mid Atlantic accents.

Hector Bellend

pauliebdub wrote: »

It seems to be fairly common with some Church of Ireland people who go to CoI schools and only mix with people who are very similar to themselves who tend to have English or very neutral mid Atlantic accents.

Who lives in the mid atlantic?

_Dara_

Erik Shin wrote: »

The difference between growing up in the 70's and today is television saturation.
In the 70's you had 1 TV channel..... today....kids are woken up by tv, it's their babysitter....they hear the American accent constantly...it's a different scenario completely to when we grew up

By the 90s, American TV was much more commonplace and there was no distractions such as the internet like now so those shows were watched. I don't see TV or film being the source of the sea change.

Your Face

I knew a fella who went over to England for 6 months work experience and came back talking like one of the Gallagher brothers.

LordSutch

Lots of people have accents, some by design some by by accident.

Erik Shin

_Dara_ wrote: »

By the 90s, American TV was much more commonplace and there was no distractions such as the internet like now so those shows were watched. I don't see TV or film being the source of the sea change.

For kids it is

Wibbs

Erik Shin wrote: »

For kids it is

But that was my point. I was a kid exposed to US and to UK accents, by far the majority of my media experience growing up, but none of my peers picked up these accents. Probably my earliest TV memories were of Sesame Street. I did pick up some knowledge of Spanish words from that(we got the Californian version IIRC), but not the accent. Didn't pick up the British accents from Play School, Blue Peter or Magpie either. Something has changed in the last 20 years. There has certainly been a change in how the mid Atlantic accent is regarded. Where once it was seen as the preserve of saddos, it is now seen as something of an attractive accent and has far more uptake among Irish people. As noted before a fair chunk of media types have this accent. Watch something like Xpose on TV3 and it's hard to avoid it.

Erik Shin

Wibbs wrote: »

But that was my point. I was a kid exposed to US and to UK accents, by far the majority of my media experience growing up, but none of my peers picked up these accents. Probably my earliest TV memories were of Sesame Street. I did pick up some knowledge of Spanish words from that(we got the Californian version IIRC), but not the accent. Didn't pick up the British accents from Play School, Blue Peter or Magpie either. Something has changed in the last 20 years. There has certainly been a change in how the mid Atlantic accent is regarded. Where once it was seen as the preserve of saddos, it is now seen as something of an attractive accent and has far more uptake among Irish people. As noted before a fair chunk of media types have this accent. Watch something like Xpose on TV3 and it's hard to avoid it.

I can only go on my own experience and what a play therapist told me, that the over exposure to English and American TV does affect a child's accent...I have no research to back it up, so must have a look

looksee

I have lived in Ireland for 45 years and still have an English accent. I use Irish words and phrases though, so the combination is confusing. There are still some people who react badly to an English accent - unless I give the impression I am a tourist, especially in Dublin, which can result in almost excessive helpfulness I think the fact that my accent has not changed is down to the fact that I do not have a 'musical ear'.

murpho999

_Dara_ wrote: »

By the 90s, American TV was much more commonplace and there was no distractions such as the internet like now so those shows were watched. I don't see TV or film being the source of the sea change.

TV in the 70s and 80s was full of American TV too.

70s:Mash, Starsky and Hutch, Brady Bunch, The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, Streets of San Francisco, Six Million Dollar Man, The Odd Couple, Mary Tyler Moore Show. Charlies Angels, Happy Days, Hawaii Five-0,

80s: Chips, A Team, Dukes of Hazard, Cheers, Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, Alf , The Cosby Show, Cagney & Lacey, Dallas, Different Strokes, Family Matters

These are just programmes I can think of off the top of my head that were on Irish and UK TV an awful lot and were hugely popular.

topper75

P. Breathnach wrote: »

I quite like the television programme Lords and Ladles, where viewers get to see and hear the owners of castles and mansions around the country. They seem to see themselves as Irish. As their families have been here for hundreds of years, it seems a bit churlish to say that they are not.

I'm still not convinced to be honest.

Hundreds of years of sending their kids to schools to another country: England. Not entirely sure what is Irish about that. There is a certain daftness and bloodymindedness to it.

Imagine if I moved to Dublin to work but generations and generations of my family thereafter are sent back to Clare for school!? Insane. Like some sort of Japanese soldier in the jungle in the late 1940s, they refuse yet to disobey the Statutes of Kilkenny (1377!). I can't take them seriously in that respect.

rainbow kirby

My great-aunt is 40 years in Essex and still has a strong Dublin accent. I'm 4 years in London and my accent is flattening a little.

bobbyss

Forgot to mention Michael D. Limerick. Galway. And briefly Manchester and USA. But sometimes he speaks like William Rees Mogg.
How can that be explained!

seachto7

What about people who use American or English expressions, but keep the Irish accent, as opposed to having an English or American accent.
e.g. Expose presenters. “Social media was lit up….”

Yamanoto

topper75 wrote: »

Hundreds of years of sending their kids to schools to another country: England. Not entirely sure what is Irish about that. There is a certain daftness and bloodymindedness to it.

Imagine if I moved to Dublin to work but generations and generations of my family thereafter are sent back to Clare for school!? Insane. Like some sort of Japanese soldier in the jungle in the late 1940s, they refuse yet to disobey the Statutes of Kilkenny (1377!). I can't take them seriously in that respect.

But that is what many Protestants in the State do by necessity. Due to the scattered and low-density demograpic, very few outside of Dublin have access to a local C of I secondary school - just 12 counties have them, with only six free second-level schools (and three of these are in Dublin and Wicklow).

As for the Anglo-Irish shipping their kids off to board in England, it's mostly because of tradition & it being considered the 'done thing' - much like many middle class Dublin professionals sending their sons to Rugby playing schools like Blackrock or St. Michael's. It's also giving your kids the best education you can afford & with respect to the three Protestant boarding schools in ROI, they'd be no match for the likes of Harrow, Westminster etc.

Benjamin Buttons

rainbow kirby wrote: »

My great-aunt is 40 years in Essex and still has a strong Dublin accent. I'm 4 years in London and my accent is flattening a little.

In the 'accent business' we call that a slow puncture, just come back every now and then and have it 'pumped up' by a professional such as my good self.
Competitive rates available on my website: www. Want your original accent back? It's gonna cost ya.ie
I take sterling.

Wibbs

seachto7 wrote: »

What about people who use American or English expressions, but keep the Irish accent, as opposed to having an English or American accent.
e.g. Expose presenters. “Social media was lit up….”

Loan words and expressions I can understand. I and my peers certainly picked them up when I was growing up, but didn't pick up the accents.

andekwarhola

Teyla Emmagan wrote: »

Yes, half the country seemed to talk like David Norris at one stage. It's amazing how much our national accent seems to have changed when you listen to the old clips. I think it was a hangover from colonialism, as if we all believed at one stage that to speak properly we had to sound English. But we seem to have relaxed now into realising our own accents are perfectly fine.

Agreed although it's also down to general class trends in the media.

If you look at British media and TV in the same eras, you see RP everywhere before regional accents began being allowed in.

Was watching Tales of The Unexpected recently, which I remember from the 70s as a kid. Watching it now, it's hilarious how plummy/luvvie the acting/accents are, even when portraying normal characters.

andekwarhola

seachto7 wrote: »

What about people who use American or English expressions, but keep the Irish accent, as opposed to having an English or American accent.
e.g. Expose presenters. “Social media was lit up….”

Language is never static, especially vernacular langauge.

Whether that's something to be applauded or not is another matter.

lawred2

stimpson wrote: »

He can't. Apparently to a yank his accent is awful.

I doubt that.

Wibbs

lawred2 wrote: »

I doubt that.

Hugh Laurie? Even to my non American ears his accent sounds below par and "off". There are far better examples of non American actors and actresses pulling off American accents. Going the other way is another matter. Vanishingly few American actors can pull off a British accent and certainly not an Irish accent. Denzil Washington can do a British one pretty well and Gwyneth Paltrow nailed it as well. The various Irish accents seem to be very difficult to get right, at least judging by all the attempts varying from kinda, yeah, but no, to bloody awful. Even Meryl Streep who can do an English accent pretty well was in the yeah, good attempt but defo not a native.

Badly Drunk Boy

Wibbs wrote: »

Maybe you did E, most of my peers in 70's Dublin had four; RTE, BBC 1, BBC2 and UTV and from 1982 Channel 4 and by the mid 80's Sky, Super Channel, MTV and the like. The films we saw were also majority American. Much of the music too. And no interwebs and few enough had video recorders(even if they did again it would be mostly American flics they'd have watched) so our main media entertainment was the TV. TV that started in the morning and ran throughout. Most kids outside of school watched a lot of TV. The majority of which was UK and US based and again we didn't sprout British or American accents.

At some point and I'd narrow it down to the late 90's, the mid Atlantic accent lost its previous stigma and took off from there. Mostly, at least at the start among some younger women. Even today it's usually among some women where we have the most extreme version of it. I recall reading before that people tend to imitate the accent of the person they're speaking with as a social intimacy/fitting in thing and women are more likely to do this(they're also better at learning new languages as a general thing).

I grew up in Kildare and had the same telly stations as you. And like you, there were no American accents around here, unless you put one on for effect (very temporarily). I wonder if the internet is to blame for this. I mean, the arrival of the internet coincides with the arrival of this way of speaking.

Yesterday, my brother was talking to me about the violence in Charlottesville and he mentioned the police "beating on" the protesters. I had to express my disappointment in him. In fairness, he doesn't normally fall for these Americanisms but still, I had to comment on it.

Hector Bellend wrote: »

Who lives in the mid atlantic?

"The Azoreans?" he said, inflecting the last word upwards.

mikhail

It never fails to amuse me how personally some people take other people's accents. I suspect it's a case of easily bruised nationalism.

Agricola

Shane Ross talked a good game in the newspapers and from opposition benches once elected.

Then he got a bit of power and a seat at cabinet. He's now as useless as a chocolate teapot. So accent or not, the man is obviously 100% Irish!

Dr. Kenneth Noisewater

Breaston Plants wrote: »

Yer man that used to do the football show on Today f.m, Michael McMullen, hilarious accent.

Believe it or not, Moykel is originally from Antrim!

Liam28

Lia_lia wrote: »

I was on a call at work the other day with a guy in the UK. He had a very distinctive Killarney accent... Not Kerry but Killarney! Could get it straight away. He'd been living in the UK for 40 or so years and when I asked where he was from he was indeed from Killarney. Went to the same school as my brother. Not a hint of an English accent.

Lot of people mentioning a Kerry accent here, but it is spot on to say there are several accents in Kerry. Killarney is completely different to Tralee, North Kerry different to South, West Kerry has the Gaelic twang. I met a man last week and before I know he was a Kerryman, I asked him if he was from Sneem. Wonder if this applies anywhere else. OK I know North / South Dublin are poles apart, Cork city accent is different to West Cork, same with Limerick city and county. But is there one Donegal accent, one Cavan accent, one Mayo brogue?

CHealy

Liam28 wrote: »

Lot of people mentioning a Kerry accent here, but it is spot on to say there are several accents in Kerry. Killarney is completely different to Tralee, North Kerry different to South, West Kerry has the Gaelic twang. I met a man last week and before I know he was a Kerryman, I asked him if he was from Sneem. Wonder if this applies anywhere else. OK I know North / South Dublin are poles apart, Cork city accent is different to West Cork, same with Limerick city and county. But is there one Donegal accent, one Cavan accent, one Mayo brogue?

There are about 3 distinct accents in Cork City alone, northside and southsiders have their own waffle and then theres the "Rochestown/Montenotte" accent. East and North Cork are very similar from what I can tell and then West Cork is pretty much the same as the general Kerry area. Ireland is great for accents for such a small place.