Off the beaten track

My son’s special girl teaches drama in a part of Birmingham called Dudley. Natives of Dudley have a very particular accent. They pronounce the name of their home something like “dood-lay”. I think it’s probably a Dudley accent that people think of when they say that a Birmingham accent is along with Liverpool, the most disliked in Britain. I would have said the same for decades but since I’ve been going to Birmingham over the past few years I’ve been inclined to hear it as reassuring. It’s familiarity I guess. When I lived in Paris, where everyone had wonderful accents of course, I always felt back at home when I heard someone call me darlin’ and I also love a rich West Indian accent – and that was the South London accent I most missed, I think, when I moved.

S’s SG tells me that her students are sometimes known, by people in the wider city, as “yam yams.” This is because of the locals habit of substituting I am for yam as in “yam going to chippaiy” or, as we might say in Oxford, ” I am going to the chip shop.” Fascinatingly she told me about other vernacular words like “I bist” also meaning I am.

So with my new-found interest in the accents of the West Midlands, an area also known as The Black Country from the great factories and forges that used to colour the landscape I was rather enchanted to come across a translation service .– Good to know that university teachers are still mining those offbeat seams. It’s dirty work but someone has to do it.