The wave height bouy off Porthleven went up to 65ft one monday night then broke!
Yip, that rhotic R is the only real similarity I hear, too.
Take that back! You might not get sunstroke when you’re there, but in rankings of the top surf spots in the world, Watergate Bay in Cornwall is always up there.
Incidentally, the dropping of r’s in the non-rhotic accents is a more recent thing than the split between the U.S. and the U.K. It wasn’t until sometime in the eighteenth century that the dropping of r’s began to happen in much of the U.K. and some parts of North America. The dropping of r’s started with certain accents in southeastern England and spread from there. Now all of the U.K. except for the West Country and some of Scotland drop their r’s. The Irish don’t, and North Americans (except in parts of New England, New York, the southern U.S., and eastern Canada) don’t. Australians, New Zealanders, and South Africans do drop their r’s.
There’s some similarity in the relaxed drawing out of long O and A vowel sounds (compared to, say, a stereotypical Texan accent, perhaps), in addition to the rhotic R.
My Tywerdreath-born great grandmother later lived in Alaska with her husband and children (where she is buried), and there she became close friends with the Winns, a Cornish family from “Mousehole.”
Regarding the comments on pasties:
I’d never heard of them, and was at a loss when my distant cousins in Sonora talked about them (and cooked some for me). I asked my aged mother soon afterwards if she knew what they were and she replied, “Of course! Grandma [the little girl from Tywerdreath] used to make them all the time. I just don’t like them, so I never learned how to make them.”
Someone, above, mentioned Padstowe. “Aunt Maria,” left behind when the family emigrated, was “a domestic” in Padstowe in her later years, having worked a small farm earlier; she died in Padstowe of “an attack in her head and her heart,” according to my barely-literate Cornish great-great grandmother in a letter to my grandmother.
While I wouldn’t say that this is true anymore as recently as thirty years ago one could, if a native of many if not most metropolitan areas tell not only a person’s social class (still easy, but we’re not supposed to talk about such things, being a “classless” society and all :rolleyes:) but their ethnicity. This is a sticky topic. Where I come from (Boston, eastern New England) there was and in some places still are distinctly ethnic (or “ethnic” if you prefer) ways of speaking.
I’ve worked with all kinds of people, from all different classes and ethnicities, and the “townie” accent was quite common, arguably the norm, when I was gbrowing up. One could tell whether someone was Italo-, Irish- or Jewish-American by the way they spoke, the speech cadences, proncounciations and the like. There was a “Jewish voice” and an “Irish voice”, and so on. I could tell just over a phone, whether sales rep or secretary.
This is rather OT but worth going into. It seems that ethnic acccents are unique in America in that they reflect a mix of old country and new; and what comes out is often quite different from the old world immigrant accent but also far from “normal”. This is probably a “transitional thing”. Even most young Southerners are losing their drawl in favor of the flat, cool youth accent ones hears all the time on television and in the movies. It’s like no one has his/her own “style” anymore :(.
My answer qualified by being born in Bristol, and having spent my childhood in rural southern England, California and Somerset and adulthood all over (now in Scotland) but with an enduring interest in US and other English Accents (accents of English.)
WHen I lived in Hertfordshire you could walk as far as north Norfolk through Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and Suffolk to the East, and through Bedfordshire, Berkshire, North Hampshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, South Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Somerset and Devon where variations of the same Southern English rural accent were spoken and would have taken an expert to disentangle blind recordings. London and the southern home counties differed, being already the beginninings of ‘estuary’ English. This accent also seemed to travel well by sea being close to Newfoundland (I worked with a Newfie in the sixties who must have been born c1920 and she sounded similar) and to the Falkland Islands accent. This is no longer so apparent with the middle counties and even many young people (my niece) from Somerset speaking slightly westernised estuary English. Norfolk and Devon are less so affected.
Alistair McGowan mentions that Cornish was overtaken by English and this allows one to differentiate between Cornish and Devonish. The easiest way of listening for it used to be the fact that as the Cornish learnt their English in School, they learnt it from teachers from up country and tend to have a more pronounced London Sound to their accent- London mixed with west country. Of course this differentiation has become less apparent as estuary English- London glottal stops and vowels has spread so widely. Also, Cornish and Devonish to my ear, are less different now to what they were fifty years ago.
None of the accents sounds American to me. I was most impressed when I visited Plimoth Plantation thirty years ago to hear two of the re-enactors walking up the central drive, one talking broad Norfolk, the other talking Somerset/Devon west country.
Sounds like an old carrot cruncher to me.
It’s worth listening to the first video, because the accent is quite different to the generic West Country accent that we hear on TV.
The accent didn’t remind me strongly of any other accent, but there were some words and phrases that sounded similar to other accents. For example, listen to the speaker saying “4-legged emmet”; it is quite reminiscent of a northern Irish accent.
It occurs to me that phonetic features are not the only markers of accent (and accent similarity) - there are also prosodic features (rhythm and melody).
There’s also a feature associated with some accents that is (maybe wrongly) referred to as “nasal”; a kind of drone, like Fran Drescher in “The Nanny”. An Irish person attempting (usually badly) to imitate an American or a Brummie accent will often affect this droning or “nasal” sound.
Does anyone know the correct technical description for what I am talking about? Is it a real feature of any accents, or only of bad imitations and sitcoms?
I am from a small fishing village on the coast of Maine, in the very northeast part of the US. Most of the (working class) population that is older than… say 50, sounds VERY much like videos that I have seen of similarly aged Cornish fishermen (and working class). And I can imagine that due to a more global society and also the effect of the internet in both places, the younger generations sound both more similar to each other and much less like the accent of their parents and grandparents.
When my father goes on vacation to Florida in the winters, he is most often asked if he is from either the UK or AUS. He’s been a commercial fisherman here in Maine for over 65 years and he has what would most definitely be called a THICK Downeast accent. I do as well. However, 30 miles inland the accent is noticeably not as pronounced as if is on the coast here.
I agree. The examples definitely sound British rather than any sort of American or Canadian.
As an Englishman I’d never mistake it for American, though I think the rounded “owst” vowels on the first link could make it sound vaguely North American, though possibly a Canadian / NE american type accent.
English here, and no, I’d never mistake it for an American accent. Perhaps this is partly because “Cornish” accents are used quite a lot on TV (in fiction, anyway - I don’t think there are any West Country newsreaders on national TV), so they’re not exactly unfamiliar even if you’ve never been to Cornwall.