Brummie accent
 

Messing around again with google :rolleyes: -- this article caught my eye. Chris has often said she hates her Birmingham accent, but I guess I never realized what an awful stigma is still attached to it in the UK! Look at the last sentence of the article, about 'giving people w/ the accent a fair chance'. I had no idea the accent was so scorned over there!


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/w...ds/3187433.stm

I've always thought she sounds adorable LOL.



-Lis

That was interesting. I always thought Chris's accent must be a high class british kind. (not knowing anything about such, except that Cockney was low)
She sounds all refined to me... :D

I love her accent! I always love to find interviews or live shows where she talks. I feel her pain with hating an accent though. -_-

I LOVE Christine's accent. I always thought she sounded classy. This must be why she always claims she hates to hear herself speak. I wonder why Birmingham has such a bad public image.

From what I know, Birmingham used to be viewed as a very industrial, ugly, blue collar type place w/ few redeeming features. However if you check out various websites you can see it's been 'refurbished' in many areas and looks like a pretty decent place now. As somebody wrote about it:

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"I have been to Birmingham - it is ok. They seem to have replaced a lot of the grottiness with modern development. But it's not a very romantic city - All modern American-style bowling allies, Starbucks, and pub-clubs etc. I could live there for a year or two with a good job."
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So it basically sounds like any American city LOL.

Here's an interesting description of the accent-- it's amazing how many sites you can find that explain exactly WHY this accent is viewed as inferior! It's crazy!!

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Ozzy does ramble on in a way that most Brummies who haven't done massive amounts of drugs don't, but his sounds and his intonation are basically the way real Brummie sounds.

The most important elements of the Brummie accent are the rounding of the long I sound and the downward intonation of both words and sentence endings. Both of these elements seem to make other Brits think Brummies are unimaginative and even "thick," although Brits probably mostly think Brummie is unattractive because of the unaesthetic qualities of the cities in that area of the country.

Words like Friday start to sound like "Froyday." The "a" sound at the end of the word is also underarticulated because of the downward intonation, so it comes out sounding like "Froydeh." The "ee" sound is over pronounced though so "city" is pronounced like "si-tee" and even "si-tay" the closer one gets to the Black Koontray (Country) to the west of Birmingham. In the Black Country accent (Wolverhampton, Dudley), the "oy" sound is even more strongly pronounced although, in my opinion, the accent has more tonality to it.

The rhythm of a Brummie sentence is just as important as the pronunciation, though. Just imitating the sounds will not make you sound like a native. While it's not an atonal accent, it definitely has less tonality on a whole than RP, Estuary and most of the northern accents. I heard someone say once that the Birmingham accent is "bad" because its speakers don't open their mouth as vertically as much as southern speakers and instead keep their lips as horizontally as possible. While I disagree with the value judgment, I find that trying this helps me imitate the accent better.
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This whole thing is really interesting to me, i have to say. I found this website so neat:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A496352

Check out the papagraph where the do the phonetic pronunciation-- I can totall hear Chris saying it that way LOL.

-Lis

I had to break out Rockline from 1988. I don't care what she thinks about her accent, but I love it. I'm trying to notice the little differences among Christine, Mick, and John's accents. :)

It's funny. I never really took note of the differences in Mick, John & Christine's accents. I always just thought of them as English accents. :laugh:

I didn't know that Ozzy Osbourne & Christine McVie were from the same city. I wonder if they knew each other. It would be kind of hard to find two people so completely different from each other. :laugh:

I think Ozzy's speech is affected by years of drink/drug abuse and perhap the meds he is on..I don't know if I'd view his speech as a prime example of a Brummie accent. :lol:

I would love for some Brits to chime in here. ;) Help me understand the madness!!

FWIW I think Mick speaks w/ a very upper crust/posh private schools type accent, while John is just standard London English-- I think there's a term for it, it's like an abbreviation of two letters... RP or something, what does that stand for? Have to go look LOL. OK, no, RP is not the same as Standard English. goodness this is confusing.

Chris once said her father used to call his accent a 'speech impediment', isn't that sad? I think the poor people of Birmingham have/had serious self esteem issues!

Also on another note John did dsay in his Q&A how much Birmingham had changed, 'he didn't recognize the place'. I'll assume he meant that as a compliment! ;)

-Lis

It's hard to follow Ozzy. After all this time watching The Osbournes, I'm still wondering what he says half the time. :shrug:

Yes, I rely on subtitles as well!! They really help!!

One thing I don't get is the contradiction of how some people say the accent is monotone (which Ozzy definitely is) while others say it has a 'lilt' which I totally think Chris has.

She does do the downward lilt at the end of most sentences though, and ends sentences on more or less the same 'tone', which apparently is a feature of the accent.

I should've been a linguist.... :o

-Lis

Yes, love subtitles! I don't think Christine is monotone. Yes, you should have been a linguist...Lis the Linguist. ;)

I'm googling out the wazzoo tonite... such cool things pop up. Here's 'Ealing Broadway'-- sort of John's home town. Looks very quaint.

http://www.ealing-web.com/ealing_broadway1.htm


And here's two interesting Birmingham sites....

http://www.frommers.com/destinations...489010001.html

http://www.virtualbrum.co.uk/people2.htm --Here they list famous Brummies-- Christine Perfect is all the way at the bottom, the last bloomin' name!
what the &*@&??? ggrr.

-Lis

that is so wrong. Christine is waaaaaaay deserving to be at the top with a pic!

Totally works. :nod: