Perhaps a good way to start hearing the different English accents (I’ll leave Scottish, Welsh, and Irish accents to somebody else) would be with the most obvious distinctions.
The really big divide is between northern and southern accents - southern accents, such as the examples in the OP, have the long “a” in words like “pass” and “bath”, so they sound like “pahss” and “bahth”. Most northern accents have a short “a” there, the vowel sounding not too different from (most) American accents. Even Jane Leeves gets that one right when she does Daphne’s northern accent.
Another difference is that most English accents are non-rhotic (they don’t pronounce the "r"s), but west country and Lancashire accents are rhotic (and East Anglia? I admit I’m not very familiar with those ones).
I missed the post if anyone replied to someone asking about Daphne and her brother from “Frasier” – What are those accents and what are the actors accents?
I have a specific one:
Ending “a” as “er” which I remember first hearing on “Space: 1999” as
“Moon Base Alpher” instead of “Moon Base Alpha”
I’ve since also noted that some American East Coast (Boston particularly) can also do this: as in “Martha park the car” which in Bostonian is “Marther Pawk the caw”
What area(s) gives us the “er” for “a” and is there a non-“r” accent in Great Britain that is similar to the American “w” for “r”?
> . . . Daphne and her brother from “Frasier” . . .
As I said in an earlier post, her brother Simon is played by Anthony LaPaglia, who hails from Adelaide, Australia and is known mostly for playing New Yorkers of Italian-American descent. Whoever cast him as her brother should give up casting and find a new profession. He was presumably trying to do a Manchester accent. Who knows what it actually sounded like.
He sounded like he was trying to do a working class London accent, but it was a curiously strangled effort. Not quite in the Dick van Dyke league though.
Addition to the northern vs. southern rule I mentioned above - northeners use a short “u” so that “luck” is pronounced like “look”. Down south, “luck” sounds something like “lahk” or even “lack”.
This is a feature of my Coventry accent. When I say “bus” it is said almost with pursed lips,to give a very short “U” sound. Not so much now, but years ago I would laugh at certain BBC announcers who would pronounce my home town as “Caventry”
I don’t think that this is right. Every Northern accent that I’ve heard pronounces look and luck in completely different ways. The actual “oo” sound in look is pronounced, as opposed to the southern variant that pronounces it more like “luck”.
Another characteristic of some northern accents is an inability to pronounce the “s” sound correctly. Bus becomes buzz, for instance. Even fellow northerners take the mick out of me for that one.
