As an American, I find West Country accents the easiest to understand of all of the different UK accents. Interesting that we share a few similar sounds.
Derek Flores Not quite, what happened was that all of England had a rhotic accent like here in the US. The upper class English invented "received pronunciation" to differentiate themselves from the lower class English, AFAIK in the mid 1800's. Americans and Canadians speak this original English, for the most part.
+NoProbaloAmigo RP has a lot of German influence. The house of hanover is from Germany so the royals have leftover influence. I speak German so hear the connections easily
as a linguist and a Cornish native I can tell you that the most iconic features of the Cornish accent/dialect are the grammatical structure and old Cornish words. The annunciation of words is harder to differentiate between Devonian or bristolian etc although the differences are there the biggest differences are dialectal. Think of the Jamaican accent. Mimicking how Jamaicans pronounce words doesn't make you sound Jamaican. However I you learn the dialectal grammar and speech patterns you will have much more success. This is why London Jamaicans can speak with a cockney accent but still sound very Jamaican!!!
you can be proudof your achievments,of difficulties you have overcome but how can you be proud of something that was accidental. You did not have any input to where you were born.You may count yourself lucky to be born into a loving family or be born in a beatiful place but thats lifes lottery.
@@seeifficare pride in your acts and success is just is, pride. But pride in who you are or where you're from is part of accepting yourself. No need to go very nowadays in the western nations to come across youth who hate everything about themselves. There's 'prides' for everything, yet kids are taught self hate and you would wonder why then suicide rates explode in youth...
I'm a caretaker for my husband for almost 15 years. That asks more effort than 'just being born somewhere'. But hey, I don't mind. English is my second language. I'm not proud of that but it also demanded more effort than 'to be from somewhere'. It keeps me busy every day.
I live in an area in which Cornish people settled around the mid 1800s. It's in South Australia where there were copper mines. The accents of some of the older generation was still evident. Even though they were born in Australia and never even visited Cornwall. They rolled their Rs well too.
Believe it or not, the "West Country Burr" is alive & well in the U.S.! On the lower Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay the locals of Cornish descent are refered to as the "Hoi Toiders" due to their vestigial accent. It's more pronounced in the older folks, of course, but is still discernable to varying degrees throughout the region. Kinda cool, huh?
Interesting... I'm from the eastern shore of Maryland & my last name is Cornish. I know its probably not my native last name but I'm digging deeper into it.
Just a thought... A lot of Cornishmen settled in the Carribean as well (Pirates.. Har-Har). They settled into the local population pretty well, or so I'm told. I dunno, but perhaps your family may have migrated north at some point for some reason. Could be..... Either way, it's interesting & fun, but not important. I once knew a tree lizard that claimed he was a brontosaurus on his mother's side!
Newfoundland Canada also seems to have a similar dialect. Many of the settlers who came to Newfoundland had been British, Irish, & Scottish. The impact still shows today. The overall dialect and some sayings sound alike, and we also tend to Drop the H. Irish Gaelic or Scottish Gaelic also impacted our words, sayings, or even the what we phrase things. Linguistics and little details like this just fascinate me.
I hope Cornish follows the Welsh language revival. These are the real British languages and it's nice for British identity for these languages to survive.
I hear traces of a Newfoundland accent in the speech of the people who were interviewed, which isn't surprising, since the Newfoundland accent is said to be a mixture of West Country English and Irish.
And also the Andalucian accent in Spain. People from Andalucia, because of their accent, are considered to be a bit thick by the more 'cultured' people from Madrid and the north.
Maybe, but for entirely different reasons. The Cornish are using words that were used before English was even a language. Not so for American Southerners.
The funny thing is the Cornish pronounciation is similar to the original pronunciation of Shakespeare's plays. OP sounds a bit more Irish, to me, but still very similar.
Sophie Michelle I’m Australian too! My dad was born and grew up in Penzance and his family is from there, and my mum’s family who’s Australian descends from various parts of Cornwall. It’s so refreshing and fulfilling to research where you’re ancestries lead back through time and history!
Im in Bendigo, a mining town, so our population has a massive Cornish heritage. So this accent doesn't actually sound thatt strange to me. We definitely have some of those twangs in our Australian accent.
@@ains6798 Tons of our miners were originally Cornish. There's a huge number of people who can trace heritage to Cornwall here, particularly in SA I think
The closest Cornish accent I've heard from a non-Cornish person is probably from Caroline Catz on Doc Martin. Most actors tend to butcher it, especially in that particular series.
I can't believe my ancestors spoke like that. It's a nice, comforting accent. My family was from the West Country: Cornwall, Penzance, Pembrokeshire. They left for America in the late 17th Century for Pennsylvania because of the persecution of their Quaker religion.
I'm Boston second generation Irish. Grew up in Roslindale. I could literally see all of Boston from my back yard. My accent was so different from my cousins in South Boston. Extremely noticeable. Same family within sight.
I am from West Devon near the Cornwall border but am in Cornwall now on the Isles of Scilly and notice the difference between Cornwall and Devonshire accents. I speak like oi for I etc and the oi sound is pronounced a lot more in Devon and I also drop my H's and not sure if I roll me R's like.
@@bethcarey144 I'm from nr. Looe originally, then went into Liskeard & then moved nr. Callington & they all have distinctive accents. My paternal grandparents were from Polperro & St. Ive (nr. Callington.) The real difference though was between my maternal grandparents, grampy was from St Neot & Nan was from St Mabyn.
Most of my friends aren’t from Cornwall so none of them have a Cornish accent like I do and they sometimes try to do one a fail badly and one of the lines my family says quite often is “you alright my lover” and one of my friends heard that in a shop and thought it was me and got sad when it wasn’t 😂😂
The West Country accent just reminds me of Phil Harding from Time Team. After 20+ years of watching that program, he has come to embody that accent to me.
They don't roll their R's, they just pronounce them all (or at least they pronounce more of them than most English people). If they rolled them, they'd sound Scottish or Russian :)
Yes, "roll" is the wrong word. To me, that signifies a vibration, whether of the tip of the tongue, as in Spanish, or the back of the tongue, as in French. I'd say that the Cornish "curl" their Rs -- in the American fashion, though not quite as strongly as in some American accents
Omg i am so thankful to find this video! I have to try to write a cornish accent and i really did think they sounded like pirates before finding this!!!
I do think the accents have been diluted because of migration sadly. Lived in Devon for a few years and there was one market trader who came from Somerset. He couldn't understand my London accent which I thought was hilarious because his was so strong I couldn't understand him either
Accents... As areas such as Wales, west Cornwall and Ireland switched from Celtic to English over a short period of time you were left with new accents that were possibly a mix of the old and that of the newcomers who taught the language. There might be a surprising amount of English accents such as now extinct North Cotswold/South Midlands remaining in Irish/Welsh accents. In these areas you have surprisingly little dialect of celtic origin. Standard English was taught. Devon (the neighbouring county to Cornwall) also had celtic language areas that mixed at a much slower rate with English, and therefore the Devon dialect seems to have significantly many more celtic features and possibly sounds than Cornwall. For example elements of Welsh English identified as being celtic are also spoken widely across the entire westcountry. If you go to the Outer Hebrides they sound very Welsh, not Scottish, an irony because their gaelic accent is famed for its Norse influence. A tour of Britain in the 1950s would of been truly fascinating, however the pace of change of language is frightening, we are losing so much culture, another great extinction of the modern age. No thanks of course to the narrow minded unsupportive attitudes promoted by the BBC.
Fascinating. I was brought here by a random google search. After watching "The Pirate" in the movie Dodgeball. I became interested in the reason WHY we all do a particular accent for a pirate which took me to a blog which mentioned the West Country in the UK and here I am. I'm American and now need to know if it was this accent which gave us Americans the distinctive R sound we make.
No specific region gave you that sound. Most of the early and later settlers to North America had rhotic accents (the "R" after vowels), regardless of regional background, because most of the UK - even South East England - was rhotic then. It was shortly afterwards that non-rhoticism really took off in England and Wales. It never did in the rest of the UK, though, and many parts of the UK and Ireland actually have a harsher "R" than most Americans.
Elle Litobarski To be fair the ''typical pirate accent'' is supposed to be more along Bristol way rather than Cornwall and it is not too bad a facsimile of the accent around there. Traditionally they did say ''oo arr'' which is the origin of the pirates ''arrrr''.
Optifog is correct. You should look up David Crystal's video on 'Original Pronunciation', which is how Shakespeare spoke, You'll see that back in the 1600s the accent was very similar to the West Country accents of to-day, and as such when the English settled in America they brought a similar accent to this. Other influences are the Scottish and Northern English L sound, which is why North America mostly uses a variant of the 'dark L' as opposed to the rest of England's 'light/clear L'. To hear something like this accent in America now, look up the hoitoiders. They're in America and 'hoi toid' is how they say 'high tide'. Very West Country sounding at times (most times in fact). The Story of English is a very, very long programme but it's all on TH-cam and it covers America thoroughly. There's a group that research and live life (or just role-play? I forget) like the original Puritans and their accent is interesting. Sounds rather West Country but not quite, and when they made the documentary a pocket of Americans still talked that way, and that's where the group were centred. But to clarify, non-rhotic accents existed from the middle ages but they were regional and not nearly as common as rhotic accents. Then the rolled/tapped R became less common in favour of the R heard in the West Country, and eventually it was nearly purged from speech. However, in Scotland and Wales it remained quite strong (and in Ireland but that has a lot to do with the Irish language, whereas in Scotland it had more to do with the Scots language). Then non-rhotic accents began to appear but even then many accents only deleted R in unstressed syllables or vice versa, and instead of deleting them in the extreme North they softened them to a uvular (French, sort of) R, known as the Northumbrian burr. We have this in much of Southern Ireland, and in Louth. It went in stages: ('R' represents rolled r, 'r' represents approximant/American r, '-' represents deletion.) 1100s - Syllable onset, syllable offset: R,r 1500s - Syllable onset, syllable offset: r,r 1700s - Syllable onset, syllable offset: r, -
Well, the British Isles is where most of our ancestors came from. Good to know that we're our mother's child (even though we're probably the most rebellious and individual of our siblings (Canada, Australia and New Zealand) lol)
So, I am one of those cases where I grew up in Cornwall, and when I was 29 I moved to the US. It took about 1 week for everyone to dial in to my accent because for some reason, us Cornish folk actually pronounce a lot of words similar to Americans. I don't mean with the American accent as such, but the actual sounds. In Cornwall, everyone around me said "Schedule" similar to Americans, with an SK sound, and not an SH sound. Also, unlike other parts of the UK, stereotypical words like "Bloody" and a lot more aren't used much, only rarely. I've only been here for 7 years in the US, but the adaptation to American dialect was extremely easy. I didn't have to change a thing. I've only had to chance about 2-3 words in my entire upbringing to make it easier for Americans to understand. Aluminum being one of them, due to it being a different spelling, thus different pronunciation that throws some Americans off. Funny enough, I didn't have to change "reckon" at all. I'm sure it's a state dependant thing, I am in Indiana, but Hoosiers (people from Indy) use it too. I figured it was just a South thing, but I was wrong. Even "innit" is understood. Sometimes I'll put on the fake Cornish accent, to sound like a "Farmers" and no one can understand me here, but the truth is, it's fake. When I talk in my normal Cornish accent, people understand everything I say. My wife (American) can't understand other British accent words very well, even though she's been with me for 7 years. On TV I sometimes have to explain what words mean that she has never heard me say before. Fun fact though, people from PA had a harder time understanding me than people from IN. I haven't heard a request to repeat my sentences in about 6 years. So easy to adapt to people from Indiana and Michigan.
All languages have dialects. The scientifical definition of dialect is "regional variation of a language" (Saussure, Ferdinand de, Cours de Linguistique Génerale). Perhaps cornish english dialect had celtic cornish language influence in its substratum. I hope cornish have a revival.
Question for Cornish people: I've noticed in Cornish accents on TV (often fake Cornish accents), not only is the R rhotic (so the R in "paper" would be pronounced the way an American would pronounce it), but a rhotic R is added to words without an R. So for example on Doc Martin, Cornish characters often pronounce "Louisa" as "Louiser," and she pronounces "Prada" as "Prader." Is that correct?
It is to an extent. People tend to overdo the Cornish accent and turn it into a more Bristolian accent. I love Doc Martin but their accents are terrible! The two people that are the closest to the genuine accent is Al and Bert Large! The others just tend to 'over famer' it a bit!
This explains why the boatman Faser Hicks and the busman, on the show An Island Parish, spoke differently. They had an exaggerated rolling of their Rs.
alan wxm Cornish had their own kings, language, gods and heritage, they called themselves the Dumnonians, they had a fair relationship with the Romans and their last king was Geraint until he was killed by Anglo-Saxons from Wessex in 710. Technically speaking Wales didn't exist until after Gruffydd ap Llywelyn (1063, First and last true Welsh King), Wales was just a region of tribal counties not a country itself. To call Cornish "West Wales" is technically incorrect as Wales comes from the word Walh, which means "foreign", probably because they did not speak Anglo-Saxon English :)
***** Historically the English are largely descendants of The Angles, The Danes, The Jutes, The Saxons and The Celt Britons, all of these tribes and cultures melded together to form what is the modern English people. England also has new ethnicities adding to its make up right now; The Poles, The Indians, The Romanians, The Jamaicans etc. Its all in constant change to newcomers.
+Somalian Teafactory I dont think he was trying to make any point with the term "West Wales", it was the Anglo-Saxons who called modern Cornwall "West Wales" to distinguish it from "North Wales" (encompassing the modern country of Wales). The people living in modern Cornwall were Brythonic Celts like the people living in modern Wales, so any Brythonic lands were "Wales" to them (Wēalas, lands of the Walha or Celtic Britons).
The real Cornish accent that I remember hearing as a boy has almost disappeared - the speakers in this clip are nothing like as broad as the old fishermen we used to hear in the pub. There are still a few around, but I haven't heard them recorded anywhere on the internet.
I found out i am British and i found how where from and it was Cornwall. I grew up in the United States and apparently i have some of the Cornwall accent. I do pronounce Car exactly how he tried to pronounce it. I love that i just found this out and will do my research to find out how Cornish i really am.
I personally think they down played the accent for whatever reason. He interviewed mostly townies. On the cornish/devon border up north is still thick with recent generation.
What I have often wondered, is what was the accent of the Cornish people when they first started speaking English? There must have been a period , before they became \West Country' when they must have sounded similar to Welsh. I'm surprised that no one has done a reconstruction like they have done with Shakespearean or Old English.
There really isn't much evidence other than oral accounts of what the Cornish language looked like (thanks for nothing Anglo-Saxons). The Welsh have the advantage of a much bigger population base to reconstruct the language from, as well as the fact that the English could never quite stamp it out. Cornwall's relatively tiny population stood no chance by comparison. We didn't even get vernacular prayer books during the English Reformation
I have Cornish ancestors, but mostly English and Scottish. Stank and Stanly is a common word here. I wonder if it comes from the Cornish Immigrants to America. Hello to my Cornish cousins: Pascoe, Treloar, Chenoweth, John, Chegwyn....
I went to Cornwall last year and met with some young people there. And, as far as I know, nobody speaks like this anymore. Sadly, people have changed their accents for a more 'standardised' one and, if you are not british, you can barely distinguish the differences between a young cornish speaker and a young south-england speaker nowadays. What's more, I found that young cornish people would rather say 'movie' instead of 'film', 'fall' instead of 'autumn', 'cookie' instead of 'biscuit', 'mall' instead of 'shopping centre', and so on... I'm not from the west country, so the question is: are these words traditionally from the west country area and later on brought to America, or are they American borrowings? By the way, you can only hear 'Alright, me lover' and these kind of sentences, said by young people, if they are joking. If not, you can't. (These people I met with was from St. Austell and Truro)
Truro (and Falmouth) is uniquely English for its location in the centre of Cornwall, likely owing to its university culture attracting English people from more urban (and to some extent Americanised) locations. As a Cornish local from the Truro area, I can say that those words aren't as common as you might have thought from your visit, but your having the accent or not is highly dependent on your parentage, class and location (try the more "off the beaten track" locations like Camborne, Redruth, St Mawes and to a lesser extent Penzance. They're more "working class" Cornwall and less dependent on the tourist trade, thus giving you accents less affected by the English and Americans)
Yuri Ivanov That's probably because you're not from the mid-atlantic. The old woman at the end especially doesn't sound much different from some old ladies I know back home.
You're correct. This was inaccurately described in this video, which does a few things fairly unscientifically as well. I have to imagine that they used to roll them but it's hardly a typical feature these days and hasn't been for some time. The R is often tapped (similar to rolling but rolling is rapid taps and tapping is a single tap) in Liverpool, Wales, and Scotland (and just as frequently avoided in 'fashionable' forms of these accents). Until recently it was rather common in Ireland as well, but these days you'd want to go to the extreme Southwest to hear it.
I’m from further up country, but almost certainly of Cornish origin. I’m from an open cast clay mining area and believe my ancestors to be ‘Cousin Jacks’👍
"If you're not proud of where you come from, what else can you be proud of?" I think George Carlin can answer that question. “Pride should be reserved for something you achieve or obtain on your own, not something that happens by accident of birth. Being Irish isn't a skill... it's a genetic accident. You wouldn't say I'm proud to be 5'11" or I'm proud to have a pre-disposition for colon cancer.”
"Just coz he's happy to be Cornish doesn't mean he thinks he's better than anybody else" I know. I was being facetious. "If your proud of being clever that's great, if your over proud and think your more clever than someone else, that's the problem." Do you mean 'superior' than someone else? Seeing as I came across as an arsehole with that question, I would like to make it clear that I'm not proud of that. "Plus not everyone believes in natural phenomena as 'accidental' , I certainly don't..." So... you think a predisposition for colon cancer is fate? "Realise when someone has good or bad intentions, and base your criticism on that." Just because someone acted on good intentions does not necessarily make the action itself justifiable. "Many people use the word pride as a form of 'glad' or 'happy' . It's obvious this guy meant it like that, don't get it twisted." Those people are wrong and have already twisted the word. That's fine but don't balme me for doing it whilst I advocate its proper definition. Now I would just like to state again that I am not personally having a go at that man. He seems a jolly fellow and I enjoyed the input he gave to this interview. I just happen to have a dry sense of humour which some people disapprove of or simply don't get. Relax and take care everybody.
George Carlin was right about that. You can appreciate and love where you from but pride is a pretty dumb thing to say when speaking of genetic luck.... I love my county but proud? That's a bit egotistical
Gretchluver1 You and George Carlin are the reason why people in England are losing their culture and heritage. If we are not proud of where we come from, then we aren't proud of ourselves. I'm happy to say however, that when you atheist liberals inevitably die out from having lower birthrates we'll keep on being proud of our ancestors and our land.
That's not quite true - by the 18th century Cornish was a rarity, even in the far west. One of the contenders for 'last monolingual Cornish speaker', Dolly Pentreath of Mousehole, died in 1777. It's likely that people were bilingual for a long while, and then even as Cornish dropped off as spoken language, many still maintained the ability to understand it... but in the 18th century it was definitely understood to be on the road to extinction.
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As an American, I find West Country accents the easiest to understand of all of the different UK accents. Interesting that we share a few similar sounds.
Agreed.
Derek Flores Not quite, what happened was that all of England had a rhotic accent like here in the US. The upper class English invented "received pronunciation" to differentiate themselves from the lower class English, AFAIK in the mid 1800's. Americans and Canadians speak this original English, for the most part.
MyCatShitsFire Because we speak the original form of English, before the upper class in London invented "received pronunciation."
+NoProbaloAmigo RP has a lot of German influence. The house of hanover is from Germany so the royals have leftover influence. I speak German so hear the connections easily
+stuffums That makes sense, but are most German dialects non-rhotic?
I am from cornwall and when I say "alright" I sound so stereotypical and it's hilarious
Same 😂 I still have a Cornish accent from when I moved closer to London😅😅
Sorry ,can i ask you something,belong to you the accent of William Defoe in"Light House" was cornish ?
@@pumpkin91ful didnt watch it sry
@@pumpkin91ful cornish accent is like pirate
@@shaunh1820 Have a look at the trailer Dafoe is fantstic , he seems british .
I am proud of my ancestry. Long Live the Cornish People!
I want to hear your accent
Long live the cornish people
Good on ya.
Well said. Oy aare
Right on boy
as a linguist and a Cornish native I can tell you that the most iconic features of the Cornish accent/dialect are the grammatical structure and old Cornish words. The annunciation of words is harder to differentiate between Devonian or bristolian etc although the differences are there the biggest differences are dialectal. Think of the Jamaican accent. Mimicking how Jamaicans pronounce words doesn't make you sound Jamaican. However I you learn the dialectal grammar and speech patterns you will have much more success. This is why London Jamaicans can speak with a cockney accent but still sound very Jamaican!!!
❤👍
“If you can’t be proud of where you come from, what else can you be proud of?”
Very well said.
you can be proudof your achievments,of difficulties
you have overcome but how can you be proud of
something that was accidental. You did not have any input to where you were born.You may count yourself
lucky to be born into a loving family or be born in a
beatiful place but thats lifes lottery.
@@seeifficare pride in your acts and success is just is, pride. But pride in who you are or where you're from is part of accepting yourself. No need to go very nowadays in the western nations to come across youth who hate everything about themselves. There's 'prides' for everything, yet kids are taught self hate and you would wonder why then suicide rates explode in youth...
I'd rather be proud of things I've achieved than a language my ancestors used
My stomache hurts
I'm a caretaker for my husband for almost 15 years. That asks more effort than 'just being born somewhere'. But hey, I don't mind. English is my second language. I'm not proud of that but it also demanded more effort than 'to be from somewhere'. It keeps me busy every day.
Darn! they didn't let the example speakers speak enough :(
Because that dr. Mills...is too self important and obnoxious.
Agreed!
I was born in Penzance and I still live there now CORNISH THROUGH AND THROUGH
I live in an area in which Cornish people settled around the mid 1800s. It's in South Australia where there were copper mines. The accents of some of the older generation was still evident. Even though they were born in Australia and never even visited Cornwall. They rolled their Rs well too.
What do u think the kiwi accent sounds like? Even tho it varies here
Believe it or not, the "West Country Burr" is alive & well in the U.S.! On the lower Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay the locals of Cornish descent are refered to as the "Hoi Toiders" due to their vestigial accent. It's more pronounced in the older folks, of course, but is still discernable to varying degrees throughout the region. Kinda cool, huh?
Interesting... I'm from the eastern shore of Maryland & my last name is Cornish. I know its probably not my native last name but I'm digging deeper into it.
+Rick Rijuana Beats Are you saying your last name is literally "Cornish" or it's a Cornish sounding last name like Clemens or Teague?
+Infinite Sky My last name is literally Cornish
Just a thought... A lot of Cornishmen settled in the Carribean as well (Pirates.. Har-Har). They settled into the local population pretty well, or so I'm told. I dunno, but perhaps your family may have migrated north at some point for some reason. Could be..... Either way, it's interesting & fun, but not important. I once knew a tree lizard that claimed he was a brontosaurus on his mother's side!
Robert Williams Did any Cornishmen settle in Jamaica? If so, I could have Cornish heritage, because that's where my father's family hails from
Newfoundland Canada also seems to have a similar dialect. Many of the settlers who came to Newfoundland had been British, Irish, & Scottish. The impact still shows today. The overall dialect and some sayings sound alike, and we also tend to Drop the H. Irish Gaelic or Scottish Gaelic also impacted our words, sayings, or even the what we phrase things. Linguistics and little details like this just fascinate me.
Scottish people are British
@@thomsboys77 not by their choice and that's the real Scottish not the fake scot settlers that claim to be British
I have travelled all parts of the world and my accent has been described as Irish, Ozzy, South African etc etc but its Cornish suck it up. Love it
I hope Cornish follows the Welsh language revival. These are the real British languages and it's nice for British identity for these languages to survive.
I hear traces of a Newfoundland accent in the speech of the people who were interviewed, which isn't surprising, since the Newfoundland accent is said to be a mixture of West Country English and Irish.
So basically this has the same stereotypes for U.K. folks as the American Southern accents have for Americans.
Because it's he same people who came from England to America and brought their stereotypes with them😆
And also the Andalucian accent in Spain. People from Andalucia, because of their accent, are considered to be a bit thick by the more 'cultured' people from Madrid and the north.
Lol that’s where the southern American accent came from
Like father like son
Maybe, but for entirely different reasons. The Cornish are using words that were used before English was even a language. Not so for American Southerners.
The funny thing is the Cornish pronounciation is similar to the original pronunciation of Shakespeare's plays. OP sounds a bit more Irish, to me, but still very similar.
They drop the H in Lancashire as well. It's an 'ospital.
My heritage is from Cornwall - I’m Australian so I wanted to learn what it sounds like
Sophie Michelle I’m Australian too! My dad was born and grew up in Penzance and his family is from there, and my mum’s family who’s Australian descends from various parts of Cornwall. It’s so refreshing and fulfilling to research where you’re ancestries lead back through time and history!
Cornwall is like heaven on earth.
Im in Bendigo, a mining town, so our population has a massive Cornish heritage. So this accent doesn't actually sound thatt strange to me. We definitely have some of those twangs in our Australian accent.
@@ains6798 Tons of our miners were originally Cornish. There's a huge number of people who can trace heritage to Cornwall here, particularly in SA I think
The closest Cornish accent I've heard from a non-Cornish person is probably from Caroline Catz on Doc Martin. Most actors tend to butcher it, especially in that particular series.
I can't believe my ancestors spoke like that. It's a nice, comforting accent. My family was from the West Country: Cornwall, Penzance, Pembrokeshire. They left for America in the late 17th Century for Pennsylvania because of the persecution of their Quaker religion.
I Come from the Chenoweths who came from cornwall to America in the 1700s
@@ambitchinbear9260 You must be old
@@ambitchinbear9260 1700s? I'm Jealous. My ancestors came to USA in 1974.
"persecution" they were puritans 🤣🤣🤣
I'm Boston second generation Irish. Grew up in Roslindale. I could literally see all of Boston from my back yard. My accent was so different from my cousins in South Boston. Extremely noticeable. Same family within sight.
It's a delightful sounding name for a language and it's matched by its people!
My ancestors came from warbstow Cornwall to America in the 1800s. I always wondered what they sounded like.
_If you're not proud of where you come from, what else can you be proud of?_
Where you are going.
This is a very good one.
That is wonderful that they are hanging on to words from the original Brythonic/Celtic tongue of Cornwall!
I am from West Devon near the Cornwall border but am in Cornwall now on the Isles of Scilly and notice the difference between Cornwall and Devonshire accents. I speak like oi for I etc and the oi sound is pronounced a lot more in Devon and I also drop my H's and not sure if I roll me R's like.
I'm from South East Cornwall, near the Devon border. When I cross the Tamar, I hear a change! Only 4 miles difference!
@@bethcarey144 I'm from nr. Looe originally, then went into Liskeard & then moved nr. Callington & they all have distinctive accents. My paternal grandparents were from Polperro & St. Ive (nr. Callington.) The real difference though was between my maternal grandparents, grampy was from St Neot & Nan was from St Mabyn.
Most of my friends aren’t from Cornwall so none of them have a Cornish accent like I do and they sometimes try to do one a fail badly and one of the lines my family says quite often is “you alright my lover” and one of my friends heard that in a shop and thought it was me and got sad when it wasn’t 😂😂
The West Country accent just reminds me of Phil Harding from Time Team. After 20+ years of watching that program, he has come to embody that accent to me.
They don't roll their R's, they just pronounce them all (or at least they pronounce more of them than most English people). If they rolled them, they'd sound Scottish or Russian :)
John Richards Actually, there is a very small R roll in Cornish accents! And a larger one in the Cornish language!
or italian lol we have a very RRRRolling r.
Yes, "roll" is the wrong word. To me, that signifies a vibration, whether of the tip of the tongue, as in Spanish, or the back of the tongue, as in French. I'd say that the Cornish "curl" their Rs -- in the American fashion, though not quite as strongly as in some American accents
Thass right! We use whass called a rhotic r.
Omg i am so thankful to find this video! I have to try to write a cornish accent and i really did think they sounded like pirates before finding this!!!
As an American, I can talk with a West Country/Cornish accent very well, especially for voice impersonations.
My great grandfather is from Cornwall England. Always wondered where the last name Penpraze came from.
Limited knowledge, but seems to translate as 'top of the meadow'.
I do think the accents have been diluted because of migration sadly.
Lived in Devon for a few years and there was one market trader who came from Somerset.
He couldn't understand my London accent which I thought was hilarious because his was so strong I couldn't understand him either
In Boston, we have a dialect and slang Hollywood keeps imitating it but never gets it right!
Wonderful Video! Reminds me of how my grandparents talked only they were from western north Carolina USA
Accents... As areas such as Wales, west Cornwall and Ireland switched from Celtic to English over a short period of time you were left with new accents that were possibly a mix of the old and that of the newcomers who taught the language. There might be a surprising amount of English accents such as now extinct North Cotswold/South Midlands remaining in Irish/Welsh accents. In these areas you have surprisingly little dialect of celtic origin. Standard English was taught. Devon (the neighbouring county to Cornwall) also had celtic language areas that mixed at a much slower rate with English, and therefore the Devon dialect seems to have significantly many more celtic features and possibly sounds than Cornwall. For example elements of Welsh English identified as being celtic are also spoken widely across the entire westcountry. If you go to the Outer Hebrides they sound very Welsh, not Scottish, an irony because their gaelic accent is famed for its Norse influence. A tour of Britain in the 1950s would of been truly fascinating, however the pace of change of language is frightening, we are losing so much culture, another great extinction of the modern age. No thanks of course to the narrow minded unsupportive attitudes promoted by the BBC.
That Cornish accent is very close to my Virginia plantation accent.
3:44 that is all you need.
Fascinating. I was brought here by a random google search. After watching "The Pirate" in the movie Dodgeball. I became interested in the reason WHY we all do a particular accent for a pirate which took me to a blog which mentioned the West Country in the UK and here I am. I'm American and now need to know if it was this accent which gave us Americans the distinctive R sound we make.
No specific region gave you that sound. Most of the early and later settlers to North America had rhotic accents (the "R" after vowels), regardless of regional background, because most of the UK - even South East England - was rhotic then. It was shortly afterwards that non-rhoticism really took off in England and Wales. It never did in the rest of the UK, though, and many parts of the UK and Ireland actually have a harsher "R" than most Americans.
Elle Litobarski
To be fair the ''typical pirate accent'' is supposed to be more along Bristol way rather than Cornwall and it is not too bad a facsimile of the accent around there. Traditionally they did say ''oo arr'' which is the origin of the pirates ''arrrr''.
Optifog is correct. You should look up David Crystal's video on 'Original Pronunciation', which is how Shakespeare spoke, You'll see that back in the 1600s the accent was very similar to the West Country accents of to-day, and as such when the English settled in America they brought a similar accent to this. Other influences are the Scottish and Northern English L sound, which is why North America mostly uses a variant of the 'dark L' as opposed to the rest of England's 'light/clear L'.
To hear something like this accent in America now, look up the hoitoiders. They're in America and 'hoi toid' is how they say 'high tide'. Very West Country sounding at times (most times in fact).
The Story of English is a very, very long programme but it's all on TH-cam and it covers America thoroughly. There's a group that research and live life (or just role-play? I forget) like the original Puritans and their accent is interesting. Sounds rather West Country but not quite, and when they made the documentary a pocket of Americans still talked that way, and that's where the group were centred.
But to clarify, non-rhotic accents existed from the middle ages but they were regional and not nearly as common as rhotic accents. Then the rolled/tapped R became less common in favour of the R heard in the West Country, and eventually it was nearly purged from speech. However, in Scotland and Wales it remained quite strong (and in Ireland but that has a lot to do with the Irish language, whereas in Scotland it had more to do with the Scots language). Then non-rhotic accents began to appear but even then many accents only deleted R in unstressed syllables or vice versa, and instead of deleting them in the extreme North they softened them to a uvular (French, sort of) R, known as the Northumbrian burr. We have this in much of Southern Ireland, and in Louth.
It went in stages: ('R' represents rolled r, 'r' represents approximant/American r, '-' represents deletion.)
1100s - Syllable onset, syllable offset: R,r
1500s - Syllable onset, syllable offset: r,r
1700s - Syllable onset, syllable offset: r, -
Well, the British Isles is where most of our ancestors came from. Good to know that we're our mother's child (even though we're probably the most rebellious and individual of our siblings (Canada, Australia and New Zealand) lol)
@Gaming Git Brummy pirates! Birmingham is land-locked, the farthest part of the country from the sea.
So, I am one of those cases where I grew up in Cornwall, and when I was 29 I moved to the US. It took about 1 week for everyone to dial in to my accent because for some reason, us Cornish folk actually pronounce a lot of words similar to Americans. I don't mean with the American accent as such, but the actual sounds. In Cornwall, everyone around me said "Schedule" similar to Americans, with an SK sound, and not an SH sound. Also, unlike other parts of the UK, stereotypical words like "Bloody" and a lot more aren't used much, only rarely. I've only been here for 7 years in the US, but the adaptation to American dialect was extremely easy. I didn't have to change a thing. I've only had to chance about 2-3 words in my entire upbringing to make it easier for Americans to understand. Aluminum being one of them, due to it being a different spelling, thus different pronunciation that throws some Americans off. Funny enough, I didn't have to change "reckon" at all. I'm sure it's a state dependant thing, I am in Indiana, but Hoosiers (people from Indy) use it too. I figured it was just a South thing, but I was wrong. Even "innit" is understood. Sometimes I'll put on the fake Cornish accent, to sound like a "Farmers" and no one can understand me here, but the truth is, it's fake. When I talk in my normal Cornish accent, people understand everything I say. My wife (American) can't understand other British accent words very well, even though she's been with me for 7 years. On TV I sometimes have to explain what words mean that she has never heard me say before. Fun fact though, people from PA had a harder time understanding me than people from IN. I haven't heard a request to repeat my sentences in about 6 years. So easy to adapt to people from Indiana and Michigan.
Oh, I tuck into a blooming Cornish pasty at this very moment !
Why hasn't anyone done something like this show for our Geordie accent/dialect :(
They have! TH-cam Alistair McGowan
All languages have dialects. The scientifical definition of dialect is "regional variation of a language" (Saussure, Ferdinand de, Cours de Linguistique Génerale). Perhaps cornish english dialect had celtic cornish language influence in its substratum. I hope cornish have a revival.
We're certainly trying!
Dear Beth: I wish you much success.
Born in Cornwall and I'm proud
I learned almost nothing from this video. All I learned is that if I want to hear a Cornish accent, I should listen to Hagrid. Shame on you, BBC.
Goomba Pizza hagrid doesn't have a Cornish accent.😂😂
Daisy he does, well, an affected one anyway.
39717 😂😂 I guess, when I was younger I thought he just had a sore throat😂😂
"keep your ears peeled"... and hear a lot of _English_ guy's prattle.
I'll bet Mike Myers could probably pull it off.
Im american and hearing those Cornish folk made me think of Appalachian English
Question for Cornish people: I've noticed in Cornish accents on TV (often fake Cornish accents), not only is the R rhotic (so the R in "paper" would be pronounced the way an American would pronounce it), but a rhotic R is added to words without an R. So for example on Doc Martin, Cornish characters often pronounce "Louisa" as "Louiser," and she pronounces "Prada" as "Prader." Is that correct?
It is to an extent. People tend to overdo the Cornish accent and turn it into a more Bristolian accent. I love Doc Martin but their accents are terrible! The two people that are the closest to the genuine accent is Al and Bert Large! The others just tend to 'over famer' it a bit!
That's interesting. Thanks so much for the reply! I do love the Larges, so I'm glad their accents aren't bad.
This explains why the boatman Faser Hicks and the busman, on the show An Island Parish, spoke differently. They had an exaggerated rolling of their Rs.
Cornwall use to be known as west Wales as the Cornish are native Britons like the Welsh.
alan wxm Cornish had their own kings, language, gods and heritage, they called themselves the Dumnonians, they had a fair relationship with the Romans and their last king was Geraint until he was killed by Anglo-Saxons from Wessex in 710. Technically speaking Wales didn't exist until after Gruffydd ap Llywelyn (1063, First and last true Welsh King), Wales was just a region of tribal counties not a country itself.
To call Cornish "West Wales" is technically incorrect as Wales comes from the word Walh, which means "foreign", probably because they did not speak Anglo-Saxon English :)
Cornwall has its own flag even
steph Geekling So does London...
***** Historically the English are largely descendants of The Angles, The Danes, The Jutes, The Saxons and The Celt Britons, all of these tribes and cultures melded together to form what is the modern English people. England also has new ethnicities adding to its make up right now; The Poles, The Indians, The Romanians, The Jamaicans etc. Its all in constant change to newcomers.
+Somalian Teafactory I dont think he was trying to make any point with the term "West Wales", it was the Anglo-Saxons who called modern Cornwall "West Wales" to distinguish it from "North Wales" (encompassing the modern country of Wales). The people living in modern Cornwall were Brythonic Celts like the people living in modern Wales, so any Brythonic lands were "Wales" to them (Wēalas, lands of the Walha or Celtic Britons).
Im from cornwall and im proud im only hete to see others try do cornishh
As an Irish person, I appreciate that Cornish & other West Country accents fully pronounce R
'If you're not proud of where you come from what else can you be proud of'. WELL SAID that man!!!
I would have liked to hear the local people speaking for longer periods of time so I could hear the inflections more.
The real Cornish accent that I remember hearing as a boy has almost disappeared - the speakers in this clip are nothing like as broad as the old fishermen we used to hear in the pub. There are still a few around, but I haven't heard them recorded anywhere on the internet.
Yeah I’m Cornish and the general southern accent is taking over, I even have the general southern accent
The lady in the red jacket from Penzance could easily be mistaken for an American. Fascinating!
What?
I had to laugh when Wycliffe was on in the 90s,they all sound bristonian🤣🤣
awesome :D
'ere, Penzance! Wasson me loverrr??!
Cooooor, bleh 'ell.
A good report, but the last time I visited Cornwall I very rarely
actually heard a real Cornish accent.
lol what's the video clip played at the start from?
I found out i am British and i found how where from and it was Cornwall. I grew up in the United States and apparently i have some of the Cornwall accent. I do pronounce Car exactly how he tried to pronounce it. I love that i just found this out and will do my research to find out how Cornish i really am.
I LOVE how every country has a hill billy part of it
Some cornish people really do speak with a much stronger accent than the examples in this video
I personally think they down played the accent for whatever reason. He interviewed mostly townies. On the cornish/devon border up north is still thick with recent generation.
Very good
The late American actor Robert Newton had the perfect West Country accent, as Long John Silver.
Sounds very similar to a Nova Scotian accent. At least certain parts of Nova Scotia (Canada).
Fella who founded my town was from Cornwall.. guess what he called my town?
Cornwall?
Swindon?
I love the Cornish accent! is it true that if you live in a place for long enough you pick up their accents?
Not necessarily but most likely yeah
What I have often wondered, is what was the accent of the Cornish people when they first started speaking English? There must have been a period , before they became \West Country' when they must have sounded similar to Welsh. I'm surprised that no one has done a reconstruction like they have done with Shakespearean or Old English.
Most Cornish people whose descended to Corineus was from Dumnonia tribe same as the Welsh counterparts.
There really isn't much evidence other than oral accounts of what the Cornish language looked like (thanks for nothing Anglo-Saxons). The Welsh have the advantage of a much bigger population base to reconstruct the language from, as well as the fact that the English could never quite stamp it out. Cornwall's relatively tiny population stood no chance by comparison. We didn't even get vernacular prayer books during the English Reformation
Definitely seems to sound the closest to older English (Shakespeare era)
I have Cornish ancestors, but mostly English and Scottish. Stank and Stanly is a common word here. I wonder if it comes from the Cornish Immigrants to America. Hello to my Cornish cousins: Pascoe, Treloar, Chenoweth, John, Chegwyn....
great video
Good Video.
I went to Cornwall last year and met with some young people there. And, as far as I know, nobody speaks like this anymore. Sadly, people have changed their accents for a more 'standardised' one and, if you are not british, you can barely distinguish the differences between a young cornish speaker and a young south-england speaker nowadays. What's more, I found that young cornish people would rather say 'movie' instead of 'film', 'fall' instead of 'autumn', 'cookie' instead of 'biscuit', 'mall' instead of 'shopping centre', and so on... I'm not from the west country, so the question is: are these words traditionally from the west country area and later on brought to America, or are they American borrowings?
By the way, you can only hear 'Alright, me lover' and these kind of sentences, said by young people, if they are joking. If not, you can't.
(These people I met with was from St. Austell and Truro)
Truro (and Falmouth) is uniquely English for its location in the centre of Cornwall, likely owing to its university culture attracting English people from more urban (and to some extent Americanised) locations. As a Cornish local from the Truro area, I can say that those words aren't as common as you might have thought from your visit, but your having the accent or not is highly dependent on your parentage, class and location (try the more "off the beaten track" locations like Camborne, Redruth, St Mawes and to a lesser extent Penzance. They're more "working class" Cornwall and less dependent on the tourist trade, thus giving you accents less affected by the English and Americans)
It’s a rhotic ‘r’, not a rolled one.
As an American, I'd be hard pressed to not think think they were Americans if I were within earshot of them.
My thoughts exactly. They sound maybe 95% the same as the mid-atlantic dialect I grew up speaking.
As an American, I don't think they sound even remotely American. I mean, they're speaking English, but that's where the similarities end.
Yuri Ivanov That's probably because you're not from the mid-atlantic. The old woman at the end especially doesn't sound much different from some old ladies I know back home.
jimboldcerveza I've never heard anyone from America who sounded anything like these people. That's all I can say.
Yuri Ivanov You should get out more.
Kernow is a brilliant place
I'm of Italian extract... the rrrrrr in a totally rolled... seems to me the rrr is suspended by the tongue rather than rolled in west-country accents
You're correct. This was inaccurately described in this video, which does a few things fairly unscientifically as well. I have to imagine that they used to roll them but it's hardly a typical feature these days and hasn't been for some time.
The R is often tapped (similar to rolling but rolling is rapid taps and tapping is a single tap) in Liverpool, Wales, and Scotland (and just as frequently avoided in 'fashionable' forms of these accents). Until recently it was rather common in Ireland as well, but these days you'd want to go to the extreme Southwest to hear it.
I thought the same. Couldn't hear any rolling at all
I have to do a Cornish accent for a show and I don’t know how to do one haha, I can do Newcastle though and other accents
I hope I'm not speaking Br-eye-thonic. But I'm from Britain, not Brighton. C'mon Alistair, this is about language and pronunciation.
What I find funny is they seem to think pronouncing the letter "r" seems dumb.
what song is that at 0:23 ?
I’m from further up country, but almost certainly of Cornish origin. I’m from an open cast clay mining area and believe my ancestors to be ‘Cousin Jacks’👍
When the narrator referred to the Cornish people refusing the English language he should had said German dialect.
Does John Nettles from Midsommer Murders have a true Cornish accent? He was born in Cornwall
The woman in the red coat could be from Maine USA
omg they really do sound a bit like those north carolina islanders
Im from St Just in Penwith we were told we spoke with a lilt no some oo rr crap.
Im from Gloucestershire and i hate it when people ask if im from brizzle. I sound nuffin like that mate. Sadly ive picked up a Welsh accent tho😭😭😭
There are people from rural Oxfordshire who sound more stereotypically "farmer" than the Cornish
Rob W
And Wiltshire, innem
Where are the examples of the Cornish accent? I played this video hoping to hear it.
Makes me teasey!
Strange that they used the "Wurzels," a band from Somerset, to try and give an idea of what a Cornish accent is though ! 😂
I’m Irish but some of my ancestors came from Cornwall, they were from Redruth?.
They have my sympathy.
"If you're not proud of where you come from, what else can you be proud of?"
I think George Carlin can answer that question.
“Pride should be reserved for something you achieve or obtain on your own, not something that happens by accident of birth. Being Irish isn't a skill... it's a genetic accident. You wouldn't say I'm proud to be 5'11" or I'm proud to have a pre-disposition for colon cancer.”
"Just coz he's happy to be Cornish doesn't mean he thinks he's better than anybody else"
I know. I was being facetious.
"If your proud of being clever that's great, if your over proud and think your more clever than someone else, that's the problem."
Do you mean 'superior' than someone else? Seeing as I came across as an arsehole with that question, I would like to make it clear that I'm not proud of that.
"Plus not everyone believes in natural phenomena as 'accidental' , I certainly don't..."
So... you think a predisposition for colon cancer is fate?
"Realise when someone has good or bad intentions, and base your criticism on that."
Just because someone acted on good intentions does not necessarily make the action itself justifiable.
"Many people use the word pride as a form of 'glad' or 'happy' . It's obvious this guy meant it like that, don't get it twisted."
Those people are wrong and have already twisted the word. That's fine but don't balme me for doing it whilst I advocate its proper definition.
Now I would just like to state again that I am not personally having a go at that man. He seems a jolly fellow and I enjoyed the input he gave to this interview. I just happen to have a dry sense of humour which some people disapprove of or simply don't get.
Relax and take care everybody.
***** I thought that was very well said. Respect :)
George Carlin was right about that. You can appreciate and love where you from but pride is a pretty dumb thing to say when speaking of genetic luck.... I love my county but proud? That's a bit egotistical
cool how you quote others also how is it a accident? wtf does that really even mean by your ethnicity?
Gretchluver1 You and George Carlin are the reason why people in England are losing their culture and heritage. If we are not proud of where we come from, then we aren't proud of ourselves. I'm happy to say however, that when you atheist liberals inevitably die out from having lower birthrates we'll keep on being proud of our ancestors and our land.
how can i watch that whole song?
The song is called “Combine Harvester”. Just type it into the TH-cam search and the full song should show up. Lol 😂
Ang! The language is also being revived my lover! Kernow bys vyken! Da yw genev Kernewek!
Beth Carey Is that Cornish? "Da" is "well" and "yw" is "the" in Welsh. 😊
Sounds weird, love from straya
Da yw genev Kernewek = Dw i'n hoffi Cernyweg / I like Cornish ("da yw gennaf Cernyweg").
Oh my. Is the first woman the mother of Tobias Menzies? They look so alike.
1:04 A word like 'caa' would become 'car'. Strange indeed! ;P
That's pretty fascinating that the English language wasn't even spoken in the extremity of Cornwall until the mid 18th Century
That's not quite true - by the 18th century Cornish was a rarity, even in the far west. One of the contenders for 'last monolingual Cornish speaker', Dolly Pentreath of Mousehole, died in 1777.
It's likely that people were bilingual for a long while, and then even as Cornish dropped off as spoken language, many still maintained the ability to understand it... but in the 18th century it was definitely understood to be on the road to extinction.
@@willhazell1447 OK thanks
Geddaway withee!
Is that Dawn from Bake Off?