A country of many accents!

Whilst all English students would like to improve their vocabulary and grammar skills, pronunciation can depend on where your English teacher comes from. I am of course a native speaker, but native speakers definitely don't all sound the same.

If you've been lucky enough to spend some time in England, you will have noticed that depending on where you visited, English people can sound very different.

I'm originally from the East Midlands/Anglia region of England, which is fairly central. I would say my accent isn't particularly strong, but I would speak very differently if I was born in the west or north of England.

There are many, many different accents in England, which can be surprising to some people, considering how small England is. People talk about the Queen's English - RP/received pronunciation English. This is the accent you may here on the BBC news or when some politicians speak. I read only about 3% of the population actually speak like this. The rest of us speak with a regional accent. These accents can be named after the area/city you come from. Eg. brummie accent/Birmingham, scouse accent/Liverpool and geordie accent/Newcastle.

So if you meet someone from Truro in Cornwall, they'll sound very different to someone from Newcastle in Tyne & Wear.

Add to this regional dialects, which is when areas have different words for the same object. Here's an example. In Polish you have bułka, which I call a roll or bread roll. But other regional names for this include cob, bun and barm cake!

So as an English language teacher I can sometimes tell where a student's previous English teacher came from, because the student has picked up the teacher's accent.

So when you next ask your English language teacher how to pronounce a word, it will all depend on where they come from.

#nativespeaker, #brzegdolny, #pronunciation