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Mar 7, 2023 · One in four people in the UK regret never learning another language, according to a recent British Council survey involving 3,000 UK adults.We went about ask...
- 2 min
- 13.4K
- British Council
May 27, 2023 · In addition to English, there are several languages spoken in the United Kingdom. Including the languages of the Crown Dependencies (Channel Islands and the ...
- 8 min
- 6.3K
- Manoloyy
Jun 1, 2021 · Here's another episode of British culture. This time, Teacher Matthew would like to ask you about the top official languages spoken in the UK. Do you know th...
- 1 min
- 4.4K
- KG TV
Video segment of Ask The Expert website - answered by Linguist and Teaching Fellow, Dr Mariam Aboelezz; for the full answer visit: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/cult...
- 2 min
- 1082
- UCL Culture
- Scottish
- Geordie
- Scouse
- Yorkshire
- Welsh
- Brummie
- West Country
- R.P.
- Essex
- Cockney
Let’s start in the North, with the accent that universally symbolises glassy lochs (lakes), snowy mountains, tartan, and… shortbread? The Scottish accent as we know it now developed as late as the 1700s, but existed in different forms before that. It was heavily influenced by the Gaelic language, which was (and still sometimes is) spoken in certain...
People from Newcastle speak a dialect called Geordie, which is one of the strongest and most distinctive accents in England. Geordie changes all the rules of Standard English, so nothing is pronounced as you’d expect it to be: the word button would be pronounced BOT-tdan instead of BUH-tun, with a ‘ooh’ sound on the letter U and a rolled T. Yeah, b...
People from Liverpool are called Scousers or Liverpudlians, and their dialect (which, like Geordie, is very strong and instantly recognisable) is called Scouse. Liverpudlians would say woss dtha? instead of what’s that?with a lot of emphasis on the letters A and Y in words. They also roll their Rs, making it hard to tell if they’re saying L or R. B...
One of the biggest counties in England, Yorkshire has a distinctive accent where one of the biggest pronunciation differences is on the letter U, which is spoken as ooo rather than uh – so cut is pronounced coht and blood is pronounced blohd. Apparently it’s seen as one of the nicest and most trustworthy dialects by other people in the UK, but pers...
Officially a different country, Wales has a culture and language of its own that’s spoken by half a million people. They have brilliantly long and complicated words like Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, which is the name of a Welsh village (and the second longest place name in the world). When Welsh people speak English, ...
Possibly the cutest name on our list, this accent is actually one of the most ridiculed in the UK – which is quite mean, because clearly people from Essex have never heard themselves speak. The name is derived from Brummagem and Bromwichham, both historical alternate names for the large city of Birmingham, where people speak this dialect. People wi...
The West Country includes the counties of Gloucestershire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, and the dialect is the closest to the old British language of Anglo-Saxon, which was rooted in Germanic languages – so, true West Country speakers say I be instead of I am, and Thou bist instead of You are, which is very close to Ich bin (I am) and Du b...
The accent of the Home Counties area (the counties of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Surrey, and Sussex) is closest to what people call Queen’s English, also known as Received Pronunciation (R.P.) or Standard English. It’s basically a ‘flat’ accent with emphasised vowels like A (pronounced ah as in car) and O (pronounced ohw as in...
This county’s dialect is so distinct, you can immediately tell if someone comes from Essex. They’ll pronounce words like no as NA-hw and drop the th sound from words like think, so they’d say finkinstead. It’s also become common to drop words like to and thein statements like “Let’s go (to the) shops”. It’s an accent that’s become much more well kn...
Perhaps the most famous British accent other than R.P. is Cockney. It developed as the dialect of the poorer working classes in the East End of London, and it’s still regarded as a marker of ‘true’ East London heritage. Like the Essex accent, Cockney swaps the th sound for f, drops the h in front of words like head, and elongates vowels like A and ...
Dec 5, 2022 · Many more people may speak additional languages than recorded in the census. The 2021 census revealed that the proportion of residents who speak English (or English or Welsh in Wales) as their ...
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English, in various dialects, is the most widely spoken language of the United Kingdom, [13] but a number of regional and migrant languages are also spoken. Regional indigenous languages are Scots and Ulster Scots and the Celtic languages, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and, as a revived language with few speakers, Cornish.
