Right now that I’m sober I can give you a more lucid answer.
Yes there is a Northern Irish accent, though with every single accent in the world there are regional variations .
If there wasn’t a N.I. accent then people would’nt be able to say, yes that persons from N.I. on hearing them.
Yes, they probably wouldn’t get the nuances between a speaker from Belfast and a speaker from South Armagh, but they’d recognise the larger area that they’re from.
I have a mild Estuarine accent,I know and Cockneys know, that it is similar but recognisably different from an East End accent,.
To those of us who live in this region.
To an American or even a northern English person it will sound like a London area accent
We all like to think that we’re unique in various ways but individuals make up groups, and all groups share certain characteristics.
Oh, don’t worry – my feelings are in no way hurt. I was more concerned about John Mace getting a confused understanding about things. Though I was genuinely interested in finding out what you where trying to say. It looked as though you almost had something, there.
Lust4Life, you’ve been around long enough to know that insults are not permitted in GQ. This is an official warning.
I am also giving you an official instruction not to post drunk in this forum again, as you did yesterday. We really don’t need these incoherent posts. If you do so, you may be subject to a warning.
You said the accents are the same irrespective of background, I said they weren’t because there isn’t a single Northern Ireland accent. There are, of course, commonalities amongst accents in that part of the world but there isn’t a single NI accent. The shared characteristics do not mean all the accents are the same.
put down the sabre, let’s refrain from remarks like this in GQ. I’m making this a note rather than a warning, since it’s fairly mild. But don’t do this again.
I also found this quite difficult to parse, but I think Lust4Life was trying to say that Geordie, Lowland Scots and Northern Irish dialects have a lot of similarities and appear to all be part of the same “branch” of the English dialect family tree.
I thought here he was trying to say that there wasn’t any difference between Protestant/Catholic speakers from the same geographical area - this is interesting to me as I have thought in the past I could detect a difference in Belfast Catholics and Protestants, but I’m far from an expert - does anyone have any more difinitive knowledge?
I think by pure he probably means closer to English from England. I’m surprised by ther highland/lowland distinction - I would have said the most noticeable differences were East/West. The accent of someone from Edinburgh is on average easier for an English person to understand than someone from Glasgow, though I believe the Aberdeen accent can be quite difficult to understand.
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Denise Mina, born, raised and living in Glasgow has a very distinct Belfast accent (at least to my non native English ears).
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That sounds more like a (relatively mild) Glasgow accent to me, though I can hear similarities.
Only if you compare an upper middle class Edinburgh accent with a working class Glasgow accent. Working class Edinburgh accents are just as thick and impenetrable as Glaswegian accents.
Don’t forget that, although linguists do not make the distinction the general public does between “separate language” and “only dialect”, by all reasonable terms Scots (tyhe Western Germanic language, not the Gaelic) was at one time a “separate language” – the speech of a nation with a literary standard, not mutually intelligible with another tongue, which has converged with English so that today Scots is “a dialect of English”. But 1400s Scots such as, say, Dunbar wrote is not comprehensible to a reader of English without copious footnotes. Modern Scots, of course, is, even if dialectally strange to a Home Counties (England) or Standard American speaker.
I looked her up on youtube and automatically knew her as Scottish, although accents in the North-east of this island, especially outside Belfast, do often sound on first hearing like Scottish accents.