I know, I have some friends who live in Newark
I think that the zeitgeist popular culture Valley Girl equivalent, though there’s a class difference as both characters are working (or under-) class would be encapsulated in two popular characters in the comedy shows ‘Little Britain’ and ‘Catherine Tate’.
Vicky Pollard - Bristol working class.
Lauren - London working class with elements of African and Afro-Caribbean speech incorporated.
…a deer
I dont know if this applies to other parts of the UK but those at the bottom of the working class who aspire to be petty criminals or who wish to be regarded as tough ,deliberately exaggerate their accents .
Brought up on a crime ridden council estate I noticed that people whos family and neighbours weren’t particulary badly spoken ,in their teens suddenly started speaking an exaggerated accent veering between gruff and nasal ,with more glottal stops then you could shake a fist at and a very liberal insertion of swear words.
ie.“I was fuckin walkin dahn the fuckin road wannI?and fuck me ,I nearly fuckin ,fucked myself up cos I was fuckin”…and so on .
Many of them also adopt unnaturally deep or harsh voices which must be bad for their vocal chords.
Is this only a south eastern thing ?
My wife and I both love the movie, Billy Elliot. But we had to watch it once through with sub-titles. I don’t know what accent that is, but there are times when it sounds like a foreign language. … Jamie Bell, by the way, does an impressive variety of accents, and does them well. He’s nailed more than one American accent.
No, we get exactly the same sort of thing in Hull, but with different vowel sounds, goat-fronting and so on.
Gradually, we’re all merging into a monoculture, and many examples (“I’m like totally no” and so on) are being imported through TV and film.
One person I have noticed who has changed his accent is the Nigel Kennedy, the violinist. I remember seeing him on TV when he was about ten years old and he spoke with quite a “posh” accent. Now he has adopted an awful fake Cockney accent. What’s he trying to achieve, a more popular following?
One other interesting thing is the geographical distance between wildly different accents is very short. It always freaks me out a bit that I can drive for only an hour or so on the motorway, step out of the car and everybody is speaking with a completely different accent.
I also think that Patrick Stewart is a good example of a posh accent.
Funny, but I remember this term as widely used in the books ‘Trainspotting’ and ‘Glue’, Irvine Welsh’s fascinating accounts of life in Scotland.
As an expat brit living in Texas, married to a chinese woman who grew up in Mexico, you can imagine my chagrin at hearing my daughters accent when she pronounces words like ‘theyar’ (for ‘there’) and ‘lahk’ (for ‘like’)… We have a few communication issues 
It’s said that in certain parts of the country, such as the North East of England and the Black Country, you can pinpoint almost to the exact street where a person originates from, just by listening to his accent.
Nigel Kennedy’s a screw-up with such an identity crisis he probably couldn’t speak in any single ‘natural’ accent if he tried.
Patrick Stewart does still have tiny twinges of Yorkshireman underneath the huge RSC resonances.
Re. Lust4Lift and Barrington - I’d be amazed if there’s really anything new in people in certain situations adopting a ‘tough-sounding’ voice. (And I don’t like Lust4Life’s suggestions of social connotations, either. Perfect example of sterotyping a person through their speech.)
I should always preview: I’m with Rayne Man more than mrcheese regarding geographical distribution, unless your hour on the motorway is rush hour on the M25 
(Plenty of times I’ve narrowed down a person’s origin to a particular part of Suffolk)
There was that famous case of the false Yorkshire Ripper confession tape. Experts were able to pinpoint the speaker to a very small area of Sunderland. Mind you, it still took years for the police to catch this hoaxer.
“Hen” is common in parts of Scotland.
Spectre of thingy You have mail
As long as you mentioned the Beatles, I always noticed that they had different accents among themselves. George Harrison’s and Ringo Starr’s accents always seemed noticeably thicker than the others’, so much so that Harrison’s accent was discernible in his early singing, e.g. “Do you want to know a secrut?”. The thickest accent of all belonged to their poor fired ex-drummer Pete Best; I’ve heard him in interviews and I tell you, that accent would stand up in the middle of a room without any support.
Oh…I thought it might be a vestige of accusitive case marking on he/him.
Or “Now my advice for those who die/ Declur the pennies on your eyes”. Very Liverpool, that.
Hi Mr. Cheese! So glad this thread on accents brought you out!
What is a council estate? Is it simiar to our public housing?
I was born in Australia, but lived in England from age 2 to age 9. My accent really hasn’t changed much for most of my life: it’s somewhere in between RP and Educated Australian. I once met an Englishman in Australia who, after hearing me speak a few words, said that he couldn’t decide whether I was from Leeds or Leicester. I can’t detect any Yorkshire or East Midlands in my accent at all – but I did live 7 years in Leeds, and my mother was from Leicester. So some people can pick these things!