Do you speak Manc... or are you Posh?
RESEARCH TEAM IDENTIFY FOUR DIFFERENT EMERGING GREATER MANCHESTER ACCENTS
DO you speak ‘Manc,’ ‘Lancashire,’ ‘posh’ or ‘Wigan’? That’s the question a group of sociolinguists at Manchester Metropolitan University are trying to figure out.
The Manchester Voices research project has been looking at how people speak across Greater Manchester’s ten boroughs and what people think and feel about our different accents.
The project has identified four emerging accents within Greater Manchester folk, finding that the ‘Manc’ accent is mostly situated in the city centre, while residents of South Manchester, Trafford and Stockport are more likely to sound ‘posh.’
Residents in Bury, Bolton, Rochdale and Oldham tend to have a more ‘Lancashire’ sounding accent while locals in Wigan have their own distinctive dialect. Comprised of academics Dr Rob Drummond, Dr Holly Dann, Dr Sadie Ryan and a group of student research assistants, the Manchester Voices research team hope the project will celebrate the diversity of language across the city-region. “The project came about partly because there hadn’t really been a big study that looked at the whole of Greater Manchester,” Dr Sadie Ryan tells the M.E.N.
“Northern languages are often stigmatised in the UK and people have told us they can be held back from certain things in life because they have a very distinctive Salford accent, for example.
“We wanted to look at whether people have pride in their accents or if they wanted to change them.”
When asked whether these changes will only continue over time, Dr Holly adds: “Language is constantly evolving and it’s a neverending process.
“There’s always going to be new populations moving into the area who have their own linguistic backgrounds.”
The next stop for the project is the Accent Van, a renovated camper van that’s touring the city-region to get people to put their voice to the research.
They’ve already visited the likes of the Mosley Common Scarecrow Festival, a mosque in Rusholme and the Museum of Transport, and have more dates coming up.
We wanted to look at whether people have pride in their accents or if they wanted to change them
Dr Sadie Ryan