Any working class accent whether from north west south or east London and Essex sounds the same to someone who doesn't notice the subtle differences!

Iwas brought in London and was with someone for several years who insisted on the difference of living south of the Thames !

I have now lived in the Midlands for a few years and worked in the black county as well as Coventry!
People can't tell the difference with a true Brummie accent and yet they are very different !

What I don't get with Bears accent is the baby talk ! Where does that come from?
La la land?

There's something in the thread questioning if bear is mentally ill, this link is in there:

http://understanding.infantilism.org

He may be an infantilism doing it for comfort or as a coping mechanism.

Personally, I find the cockney accent rather sexy

I also like how they always seem to be proud of their Eastend roots.

He's still a cretin though!

Today I learned I'm dumb as hell. I thought Essex was in London

From memory only, I think it was "You played it for her, you can play it for me (other sentences - if she can stand it, etc) Play it"

ETA - there were a couple of other sentences between the two but that's it, after checking.

When my OH first came to live in London from oop north over 6 years ago, he thought all London accents from both sides of the river sounded the same and were 'cockney'

Now he's worked in Chingford and currently in Essex, he can not only tell the different accents apart, he (like me) thinks they're completely different.

It's probably similar to us thinking all American accents are the same apart from the Brooklyn New York accents, but they have regional differences just like we do.

If we lived there, I'm sure we'd be able to tell them apart, however subtle the differences might be.

not far out, Essex borders London and East Angular

my area Canning town, again my point is that the present day people regard newham and waltham forest as the east end of london although it isnt and the main reason is based on the diaspora of people.

lool maybe i know her lol

i would say nowadays its harder to tell as so many people have moved around plus with new accents.

I never knew that! I guess that would confuse people.


I cannot tell the difference either, carly!

Oh, it is okay, Cheri! You are American so we can let you off.

You don't work in a big financial services company do you?

No - not me.

I was born in St Barts hospital so within the sound of Bow's bells. My parents lived in Smithfield but we moved out to Essex when I was one then to Peckham when I was nine and a couple of years later to the Croydon borders where I lived for most of my adulthood but now live in Hersham (as made famous by Sham 69)

Though *technically* a cockney I speak quite nicely but with a bit of an estuary twang most of the time but lapse into a more pronounced 'sarf' London accent with fellow south Londoners.

In my early 20s before the rough edges had been worn off my pure south London accent I did a catalogue shoot with a French photographer and models from the Home Counties and Birmingham and mine was the only accent he couldn't understand

A year or so back I did a freelance job in Loughton and can confirm that everyone talked like the TOWIE lot, it was bizarre because I wasn't expecting it, it was like getting off the tube in another country.

I love how this thread about where Bear is from has turned into a long discussion about peoples' accents

So I'll throw my experience into the mix... I'm originally from Essex. Growing up, I thought I just had a generic southern England kind of accent (or, to my ears, no accent at all). But when I went to uni, people told me that I said "fink", "fing", "roofless" etc, and that this was apparently a bad thing. This came as a complete shock. I've tried to work on my "th"s so that people take me more seriously in a professional environment, but I find it really hard. It doesn't come naturally at all. Sometimes I overcompensate and people think I have a lisp!

I find it annoying that many people seem to equate the hard pronunciation of "th" with being stupid.

I was born and brought up in South London - as I've got older and moved around the rough edges of it have rubbed off a bit. I live in NE Lincs now and we are twinned with a French village, A lot of the French say they find me easier to understand than a lot of other 'twinners' because I sound like they were taught (presumably they heard a Southern accent). My husband is Yorkshire born but has lived all over - I explained to them that his accent is a bit mixed up because he's a mongrel. They were confused - we looked up the word in the French dictionary - it translated as bastard - hmmmmmmm.

This is one of my bugbears, & I'm noticing it more & more nowadays! Mark Labett (The Chase) does it, & I have to say I tut & shout at the TV when he does. He's far from stupid, he was a maths teacher.

It's also travelled up to Scotland & I've put it down to laziness, or mimicking some of the TOWIE clan, as it seems to be the younger ones who speak like that.
I have rightly or wrongly put it down to some of them as being poorly educated, or from quite deprived areas. They also never pronounce their T's or D's & generally use a lot of slang (Scottish) words.
It makes me cringe when people don't speak properly.

That made me laugh!

I'm really glad you posted this. There is a terrible amount of snobbery around accents which is just pure prejudice and your post highlights it nicely. People obviously just have the accent of their family and/or friends in their formative years. It means nothing more than that.

(On a side note - it is more difficult to teach children spelling and grammar when they don't pronounce their words correctly as they have to be taught how they are saying things wrongly before they can be taught how to spell them properly. A perfect example of this is 'could of' and 'should of' instead of 'could have' and 'should have'. Because the child has always said 'could of' and 'should of' they have no idea that the correct word is 'have' and have another stage of learning to go through before they understand it than people who speak properly in the first place.)

My ex was exactly the same as you - he had a 'normal' Essex accent, which was more pronounced than he thought, and as he climbed up the career ladder he tried to ditch some of the bad habits (particularly f's instead of th's) and found it really tricky. You shouldn't have to do it really, after all it's just an accent, but I think he felt pressure when he began to find himself surrounded by ex-public school types.

you are one of the last true cockneys, kids don't get born at Barts anymore, and people that settle with families in Smithfield have so much money, they probably use the Portland

there are TOWIE types in Loughton, but loads of middle class quite well spoken too, Alan Davies is from Loughton and he doesn't speak like Gemma Collins