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Accents

  • The recordings of interviews in our holdings can be used to study the way people spoke as well as the subjects they talked about. To assist in this area of research, links are given below to lists of the digitised recordings arranged according to the accents of the interviewees. The links in these lists are to the relevant catalogue records from which the recordings can be played.
  • Under each geographical or other heading, the interviews are arranged chronologically by the interviewee's stated or estimated birth year (which range from 1882 to 1959) and then by year of recording (which are mainly in the 1980s). The sex of the interviewee is also given.
  • Most interviewees in the geographical sections are listed under their birthplaces but some are listed under the places where they grew up if they moved there soon after birth.
  • Unless otherwise stated, interviewees from British and Irish regions were manual workers. Interviewees described as non-manual include trade union officials and industrial managers who may earlier have been manual workers.
  • Where a recording is of someone talking in a context other than an interview, this is noted.

East of England and English midlands

Lincolnshire; Norfolk; Suffolk; Bedfordshire; Birmingham; Coventry; Northamptonshire; Nottinghamshire; Oxfordshire; Staffordshire; Warwickshire; Worcestershire

North-east England and Yorkshire

County Durham; Yorkshire

North-west England

Cheshire; Cumberland; Lancashire (including Liverpool and Merseyside)

South-east England

Kent; London (including parts of historic Essex, Middlesex and Surrey); Sussex

South-west England

Devon; Gloucestershire (including Bristol); Hampshire; Wiltshire

Ireland, Scotland and Wales

'Received pronunciation'

University-educated and/or middle and upper class people with no distinctive regional accent

Non-UK and Ireland

Barbados; Canada; France or French-speaking Belgium; Germany; India; Italy