Pat Holscher wrote:Dpuckey wrote:
Accents were clearly Hollywood Devonshire not real Devon, I used to live there. However with a really thick Devon accent full of dialect most people would probably not have understood a word they said!
I've never been to the UK, but things like this always amaze me. So even now a Devon accent is really distinct?
I've never been off the North American continent - except swimming- but this doesn't surprise me. Even here in the states, where television and radio have been eroding regional accents and colloquial expressions, they endure surprisingly well.
When I lived in New England you could often make a pretty good guess what town someone was from, if they grew up there. Some of them were subtle differences that you had to be attuned to but others were quite pronounced. Take, for instance, "Marblehead", with strong stress on the third syllable: definitely from Salem/Danvers or P´bd. Don't like the homogenization of language? "So don't I." (Malden/Medfd)
I don't know if that is still so, I lived there 30 years ago and things change as towns that were distinct entities, but only a few miles apart or abutting, become subsumed into the greater metropolitan area and take on the character of the suburb, which actually they are not, or were not. When I lived in Salem I knew young people who had never been to Boston, an hour away. Or if they had it was for some particular reason. Otherwise, what for? An extreme example of this: I had a talk one time with a man out west (Spenser, Mass). He was 85 and his one big journey, by horse, which he remembered in detail, had been to East Brimfield, less than 20 miles away. To him, Boston was a foreign mystery. I'm not poking fun here, far from it: he was a very interesting fellow and we talked long into the night.
Sandy