Being a RAF kid I moved about a bit so got exposed to a lot of accents. While I’m gash at foreign languages I’ve an ear for regional variations.
Both my parents are from Manchester, but Pa B was from the south of the city and Ma B from the north, so their accents are quite different.
I did a chunk of growing up in the London suburbs where I was ‘a bit norvan’. The City kit didn’t help to be sure. When I was 13 we moved to Northumberland, where they regarded anyone from south of Durham as a ‘cockney’, so I was far more conspicuous than any 13 year old boy wants to be at a new school.
A few months on and I could pretty much pass for an Alnwick local if it was going to avoid a kicking. On top of fear, it’s where I really learned to really listen out for accents. The most fascinating aspect of the local accents was that there was a split by profession as much as geography. The old-boy fishermen around Boulmer and Craster had a very different delivery (faster, harder on the ‘r’s) than the local farmers. An outsider would probably be able to follow a farmer’s chat, but the fishermen would need subtitles if you weren’t used to it.
After leaving the RAF Ma and Pa B moved to a village near Lincoln and my mum in particular has picked up a lot of the dialect over the years. I‘ve certainly heard her use a few of the words in
@Gixxerman ’s OP.
My daughter is born and bred Winchester and pretty much sounds like an elocution coach.
