Hearing the Bristolian accent in Skins

Pandora

Yes I know Skins is made for 30 somethings who want to believe a teenagers life in 2009 is just like this. But you know what I kind of like it. Part of my enjoyment is it being set in Bristol and boy oh boy those 'cut your throat down after a bottle of cider at chasers' accents. Yes there really rough and some very ropey but they do remind me of home, specially now living in Manchester.

What I love about the Bristolian dialect is the interesting usage of words such as.

  • A'write me Lover.
  • Right you are my love.
  • Gurt lush
  • Smittin

There's a shop in Bristol where you can buy T-shirts with the interesting phrases on it. Actually looking at Wikipedia.

A dialect of English is spoken by some Bristol inhabitants, known colloquially as Bristolian, or even more colloquially as “Bristle” or “Brizzle”. Bristol is the only large English city with a rhotic accent, in which the r in words like car is pronounced. The unusual feature of this dialect, unique to Bristol, is the Bristol L (or terminal L), in which an L sound is appended to words that end in an 'a' or 'o'.Thus “area” becomes “areal”, etc. This is believed to be how the city's name evolved from Brycgstow to have a final 'L' sound: Bristol. Further Bristolian linguistic features are the addition of a superfluous “to” in questions relating to direction or orientation (a feature also common to the coastal towns of South Wales), or using “to” instead of “at”; and using male pronouns “he”, “him” instead of “it”. For example, “Where's that?” would be phrased as “Where's he to?”, a structure exported to Newfoundland English.

Stanley Ellis, a dialect researcher, found that many of the dialect words in the Filton area were linked to work in the aerospace industry. He described this as “a cranky, crazy, crab-apple tree of language and with the sharpest, juiciest flavour that I've heard for a long time”

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Author: Ianforrester

Founder and firestarter of cubicgarden ltd. Emergent technology expert, public service supporter, defender of human scale flourishing, city dweller, European at heart  and social geek event organiser. Captivated by the digital legacy, future of dating, human data interaction, self-hosing, personal data, open-source, house music, neurodiversity thinking, kindness and  collaborative futures for all. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io