“An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him…
…The Scotch and the Irish leave you close to tears.
There even are places where English completely
disappears.
In America, they haven’t used it for years!”
If you live and/or work in London, culturally, pretty well any work environment is now pretty much like the Bridge on Star Trek; a critical mass of people have been on a long, often international, road of education and work experience; multiculture is now long-established as the norm.
For people who remain more ‘home town’, stereotypes and other old socio-cultural labels still tend to be acceptable and used (see above), though that’s generally a consequence of parochialism.
I think Welsh stereotypes can be divided into north and south.
The north Welsh are miserable, insular people who live on farms in the middle of nowhere, or tiny villages with unpronounceable names. They hate outsiders, as soon as they see an Englishman, they will instantly become mono-lingual in Welsh. Their hobbies include shagging sheep and hating the English.
The south Welsh are friendly, outgoing, loud and common as muck. Back in the day they were coal miners, but are now mostly on the dole. They did Welsh all the way through school, but can only remember how to say “fish and chips”. Their hobbies include rugby and getting pissed.
The fact you seem to earnestly believe this makes it twice as funny.
Interesting contributions to this thread; did you cut and paste all of this from some 1970s themed website?
… and setting their holiday homes on fire.
The miserable, insular members of my family from North Wales regard people from South Wales as “English”. No, worse than English, for letting their language wane. They however spit on the attempts of the Welsh Assembly to reinforce use of the Welsh language and often haven’t got a clue what some words in official missives mean because the dialect is so different between North and South. You just can’t please them! (Yeah, and I bet it sticks in their craw that one of their proud men - my Dad - married a bloody Englishwoman!)
These days you might find that us provincial bumpkins think of the average Londoner as increasingly being foreign-born and non-white. (With the Danny Dyer-type as a warm fuzzy memory from the past.)
It’s not just London though - ask someone from elsewhere to describe an average person from Leicester, and you may find that the only thing that they can come up with is “Asian” (as in Indian/Pakistani), I bet few could identify a traditional Leicester accent.
Same with Bradford, many people aren’t going to associate the citizens of that town with the proud Yorkshireman mentioned above, but will assume they have roots in the sub-continent.
Disclaimer: not everyone, everywhere, obviously. Just in my experience, because I don’t work on the Bridge on Star Trek.
Having been born and raised in Essex but now living in London, I’ll just leave this here.
In Shakespeare’s Henry V, you have the colorful trio of Captains, Fluellen, MacMorris, and Jamy, from Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, respectively. The play has often been compared to a stereotypical WWII movie where you have the combat team from, say, Brooklyn, Texas, and Boston (whose members might well be called “Brooklyn”, “Tex”, and “Boston”). The literary device, in both the play and the movies, was intended to show the patriotic unification of a country against a common enemy**.
**
No, I answered the question: “what stereotypes do Britons have about other Britons”. Do you understand that answering that question doesn’t mean I hold those views personally? Did you stumble into the wrong thread by mistake? Must be pretty easy with the hectic, “Star Trek bridge”-like existence Londoners like yourself lead (lol).