a bit of a distraction

[ritaxis]

I was listening to a BBC reporter talking about the earthquake in China. Aside fromthe awfulness of the event, I was really struck by his accent, which was one I was sure I had never heard before. It was I guess "thick" in that every sound of every word was particular to the accent, but it was also perfectly comprehensible to me which would I guess mean that it isn't thick? The point is, I thought it was a really nice way of speaking, and I could listen to him all night long.

It seemed like his sentences had a rhythm like Irish speakers, but his pronunciations sounded more like Northern England (please remember I have no right to make judgements like this as my exposure is so slight). He did something odd: he pronounced urban with an H. Like Hurban. I'd never heard that sound attached to a word beginning with that vowel. So I paid attention at the end of the segment, learned his name, and trolled the BBC website and eventually Google till I learned that his name is Martin Patience and he's originally from Glasgow.

But I don't know what kind of Glaswegian accent he has (or if it's really a Glasgow accent or something else). So if you know Scottish accents, would you please listen to a Martin Patience piece and tell me what you think?

I know this is a distraction. But I dearly love the way that man talks and I'd just like to know more about it and searching online has been less than helpful.

Comments

[del-c.livejournal.com]

Definitely Scottish, not Glasgow, but although I'm rubbish at accents I'll stick my neck out and say West rather than East.

Have you ever heard Ken MacLeod speaking?

[del-c.livejournal.com]

Sorry, didn't read your post properly where you had already established he was from Glasgow. Told you I was rubbish at accents.

It's not the Glasgow accent of the stereotype.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Well, I never heard Ken Macleod before, but it is certainly quite different from Martin Patience. I can hear only a few things that are similar.

(I was thinking of you in particular when I wrote this post because you've been helpful at other times when I was asking things about the geography of accents in the UK)

[del-c.livejournal.com]

Thanks, sorry I'm not much use this time.

Speaking of reporters with accents, the Beeb's former Political Editor John Cole, who is from Northern Ireland, was famous for starting words with "h", so that if you wanted to parody his accent you would say "Hondootedly Mossis Thotcher" and everybody would get who you were trying to imitate. But trawling for "john cole bbc" on YouTube brings back only poor examples.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

East Central Scotland, I think. If you've ever heard the Proclaimers sing (a pair of identical twins, born in Leith, Edinburgh) then you'd spot the similarities in tone and pitch. It's not any sort of West Scottish or Glasgow area accent I know of and I know of what I speak personally which is North Lanarkshire.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Thank you for turning me on to these guys! I'm not sure I can actually hear their accents very well in their singing, but I'm hearing some similarities in there, something about where the voice is in the mouth (nasality? but that doesn't sound right for what I mean).

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Martin has a Twitter account so you could get in touch and ask him, I suppose.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

ah, but I don't have a twitter account . . .

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't like to be more precise about Martin Patience's accent than to say "Scottish accented standard English". The Scottish accent is regarded favourably in the rest of the UK, as long as it's not too strong.

This is a real Glasgow accent. I can just about understand people from Glasgow, if given a little time to "tune in". I remember years ago being in a Youth Hostel in Norway and having to translate for a Glaswegian lad. Basically, he talked as slowly and correctly as he could and the Norwegians in the group failed to understand him. Then we would repeat what he had just said in our accents and they understood perfectly.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

I don't like the idea of a "real" accent. It makes real people like Patience unreal, which they're not. Our ideas of accent are statistical measures of central tendency, real populations contain outliers.

BBC Radio 4 did a documentary going back to Loyd Grossman's hometown in Massachusetts. For American readers, Grossman is a restaurant critic and television presenter famous for his amazing speech patterns (his catchphrase from the 1980s show "Through the Keyhole" can be parodied as "Who could pawssibly live in a hice like this?". So you might expect a trip home to be a visit to the Planet of the Grossmans. But actually they've all got normal New England accents. It's just Loyd who talks like Loyd.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I suspect Patience talks like he does because he wants to. I think he may have been emphasizing certain aspects of his accent, while also working to project really clearly and comprehensibly, as a deliberate thing. I could speculate why, but I don't know enough about him to say anything.

All I know is I could listen to him all day (and I nearly did, yesterday).