Voices of Manchester

Program introduction

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Encounters with Gary Neville

1:02Hello. For today's programme, I was, as usual, thinking about what connections I have with the subject that we'd be talking about. I'm going to have to confess that on this occasion, hardly anything sprang to mind apart from one tiny moment. Picture, if you will, a football crowd streaming out of a stadium. OK, let me be just that bit more specific. It's the Arsenal Stadium in North London and I'm with my son, who at this point is about 10. We're in that state of euphoria that comes from seeing your team play well and win. So, as you climb down

1:35the steps out onto the concourse, you have a sense that you're being carried along by a force greater than your own. There's your own feelings mingling with the cheers and laughter and singing all around you. Suddenly, on this occasion, there's a break in all this. The movement of the river of people changes tack. There's a shout and someone next to us points out a bright white light coming from a TV crew. My son asks if we can go and see what's going on. As we get nearer, we hear people say, it's Gary Neville. This is a moment full of irony and tension. A few years

2:11earlier, Gary Neville played for Manchester United at a time when rivalry between Arsenal and Manchester United got to be so fierce, it turned into brawling. In short, Gary Neville was the enemy. Now, at this moment, some 10 years later, Gary is a famous TV football pundit and he's standing right in the middle of the Arsenal crowd. High-risk moment for him, perhaps? As we get nearer, I see and hear that he's talking to people in the crowd and asking them questions. Vox pops.

2:43So here's Gary Neville, the enemy, with his distinctive Manchester voice, asking London fans what they made of the game. It could easily all get a bit sneery and jeery, even a bit nasty, perhaps? After all, Arsenal fans have a slur word to describe Manchester United players and fans. But to everyone's credit, it was all taken as a bit of a laugh, with the crowd's old enemy, Gary Neville, chipping in with jokes, all delivered, of course, in his own local voice. Then the lights go out, Vox pops over, and my son nudges me forwards. He wants a photo with Gary Neville.

3:20And in his own confident style, I won't try to imitate the voice, Gary said to my son, Come here then. Lined himself up alongside my son, and Gary helped him take the selfie. Good lad, he said. And we headed back into the crowd, with my son beaming all over his face. It was a lovely moment. Most weekends I watch football on TV, which means I often hear Gary Neville's voice, and I like to flavour it with this moment, how when he talked with the Arsenal fans and with my son,

3:51he sounded so in himself. In fact, listening to him on TV every week is a great reminder that the old predictions made 50 years ago, let's say, that regional accents would die out, was wider the mark. So today we're going to talk about the accents and dialects of the region where Gary Neville comes from, Greater Manchester. To guide us through this is my guest today, linguist Rob Drummond. Last time Rob was on the programme, we talked about family sayings, but this time we're talking about the project that Rob has been working on for the

4:24last 10 years or so, and which Rob has now written up in a book. Manchester Voices, Accents, Dialects and Identities. Welcome back to the programme, Rob.

The Manchester Voices project

4:34Thank you.

The Manchester Voices project

4:35So let's go back to the beginning of your project with the idea of it. So what did you set out to do? We set out to initially to collect the voices, the accents and dialects of people in Greater Manchester and how that relates to their sense of identity. So their regional identity or maybe their class identity, any kind of identity. But we're also interested in people's attitudes towards the way they speak, towards the ways other people speak in Greater Manchester, and also to get their particular insights. They're the experts, they're the people whose

5:09voices we're looking at. And we wanted to see what they thought of their way of speaking. And why did you think that was an important thing to do? I think it's interesting whenever we're looking at how language varies and how language is changing over time. It gives us a sense of our history. It gives us a sense of our identity, however we might think of that. But Greater Manchester is a particularly interesting area because prior to 1974, when the Local Government Act came in, what is now Greater Manchester was

5:41mainly Lancashire with a little bit of Cheshire and a tiny bit of Yorkshire and a little bit of Derbyshire. So whenever there are border changes, it's interesting to see what happens to people's accents and their ways of speaking and their attitudes towards it, because perhaps their ways of speaking represents some kind of changing regional identity or maybe a kind of resentment, some kind of push against those changing identities. And have you always been interested in the idea of regionalism as expressed through language?

6:12Is that something that's always interested you? Yeah, definitely. This started years and years ago when I was first doing my PhD. I used to be an English language teacher and I was teaching English as a second language. And I was teaching in Manchester and I had lots of Polish students at the time. And I was intrigued as to why some of them seemed to be learning English with a Manchester accent and some of them didn't. And that became my PhD. And ever since then, I've been interested in this. And did you have any preconceptions as to what you thought you might find? Because we all enter a

6:46research project with our own bias and our own prejudices. I knew there'd be differences. I knew that from, because I live in Greater Manchester and I work at Manchester Met Uni, so I work in the city. And so I'm surrounded by, and I'm not from there, so I'm from the south-east of England. So I'm a bit of an outsider, but I hear all these differences. So I knew there'd be differences and I knew there'd be strong feelings. There'd be some kind of maybe pride in the way people speak. So we kind of thought that going in, but I don't think we'd

7:17realise quite how much difference and quite how much pride there was. So how did you think you were going to catch, if I could put it that way, catch these accents and dilates it in the jargon? I'll use a bit of jargon. How were you going to collect the data from the field? Well, here is where we had quite an innovative method, is that we had what we called the accent fan. And this was a, it was really a mobile recording studio that we were able to drive around the boroughs of Greater Manchester and invite people to climb aboard. And we weren't in

7:51there with them. When they got in, they were faced with a really nice, quiet, peaceful space. And there was a voice recorder and a video camera. And they were asked questions kind of electronically, through this, through this tablet. And it just gave them a time to reflect on the way they speak. And let me get this clear. Is that one person at a time? Or could there be dialogue? We would have, we would have either one person or it wouldn't be dialogue. It would, it would be two, two people who knew each other. So we could, or maybe three, even three, we could fit three in the back, three in the back of the van. It sounds worse than it was, but we could fit, you know, two or three

8:26people in the back of the van. So often we had kind of couples or families or bits of family, or a couple of friends. And that, that was quite nice, actually, because then there was that extra spark of almost, you know, disagreement sometimes that, you know, the question would be asked and someone would answer it and say, oh, no, you don't say that. And, and have you not thought of this? So that was quite a nice way to do it as well. And that's quite important, isn't it? Because sometimes when people are in a one-to-one situation with a microphone, they formalise their speech, sometimes lose some regional difference. But then when they're with friends, mates, spouse, or whatever, then they reinforce their accent and they chat,

9:02can chat in what is, if you like, their authentic home voice or maybe work voice even. Yeah, that's true. That does. And that does happen. And that does, that is a big kind of consideration for the kind of research we do. And we're always trying to get people kind of feel quite relaxed. We often, one technique we use, which we used in this, this too, is to give people a task where they're not thinking about what they're saying. So in our example, we had what we called the directions task or the map task, where we gave people a, this kind of a map of where it had

9:36specific features and they had to describe the route along the map as if they were talking to somebody else. Like the way to the station or something like that. Well, exactly. But this was a made up map where each item, each kind of feature on the map was a word or a phrase that contained a particular sound we were interested in. So for example, the first, there'd be something like the first item was a boat on a lake and then there'd be a dancing monkey. So they're saying, well, you go down past the boat on a lake because we're interested in those vowel sounds. We're interested in how they say boat

10:08and how they say lake. We're interested in how... Particular to Manchester. Exactly. But if you just give somebody a list of words and say, read these out, then they'll be too formal. They'll want to standardise it. Let's hear one of your recordings, Rob. Go round the bike, turn left and then you'll come to a farmhouse, the tractor there. Turn left under that and then go along to the school. Go round the school and you'll come to a dancing monkey. You'll have to go round the dancing monkey and then along to

10:41the father and daughter. So we were asking them first a lot about where they live and about, you know, where they grew up and what they think about the place they live and what do they think about the people who live there. And then we were asking if they were aware of different areas of Greater Manchester and how they compare. And then we did ask explicitly about people's language. We asked about how they... what do they think of the way they speak? How would they describe their accent? Are there any words or phrases that they use that are typical of where they're

11:11from? And then we asked whether people ever felt judged because of the way they speak or whether their accent has ever worked in their favour or if it's been a problem for them in any way. So we... and whether the way they speak is linked to their sense of who they are. So we've got some really... some really interesting insights from people. I'm dead broad. Always have been. And I love it. Because it's who I am and it just means I'm from Wigan. And I love hearing thought tart from where we live. Everybody sounds like

11:43me. Apart from when you answer the phone and it's always dead posh. And then as soon as they realise it's you, it just goes back to normal. And just before we dive into your findings, just remind us, how big is Greater Manchester? So Greater Manchester is made up of 10 boroughs, most of which will be familiar to a lot of people because they're based around particular towns like Bolton and Bury and Rochdale and Oldham and Stockport. And it is a population of around 3 million. I think just over 3 million

12:15now. OK. So let's look at what you find as the project progresses. So you're moving the van around

Mapping regional accent areas

12:24these different boroughs. You're going to different boroughs in your van. And are you finding differences? Yeah, it's quite interesting. So we knew there'd be differences, but we didn't quite know how they would sort of divide within the region. In actual fact, it would take quite a broad approach. I would say that we found three main accent areas where you have the kind of north of Greater Manchester, and that's places like Wigan and Bolton and Bury and Oldham

12:55and Rochdale. Then you've got central Greater Manchester, which is Salford, the north of Manchester and the borough called Tameside, and then south Greater Manchester, which is Trafford and south Manchester and Stockport. And I think those three, there are three broad accent and dialect areas. I don't think we really found, you know, specific variation borough by borough, because that's not really how accents work. Accents and dialects tend to be on a continuum. So let's get down to some specifics. I'm going to be very conventional and stereotypic. The

13:29one vowel that I hear as being very Manchester in my stereotypic way is that vowel on the end of happy, which is, you can hear, I say as happy, but many Manchester people say it differently. So take us through some of these vowels. Yeah, so the happy, the happy vowel is a good one. So the happy, yeah, it's that vowel at the end of a word happy, which you and I both say as happy. You know, I'm, say, from the south-east of England. In much of the north of England, it becomes an i sound, so it's more like happy, i. But then in Manchester specifically, and a couple of other places, but very much in

14:02Manchester, it becomes an i sound, so it becomes more like happy, happy. So instead of happy, you've got happy, happy, and happy. So that's a very Manchester thing. Also very Manchester is what we call the letter vowel, and this is the vowel at the end of a word like letter. So we would have that as a, and most accents in England would have that as a, what we call a schwa sound, that a letter, just a very neutral, relaxed kind of sound. But in Manchester, it becomes more, what we call, is more open. It's pronounced with the mouth a bit more open

14:35and the tongue a bit further back, and it becomes closer to something like leto, leto. And that's where that stereotypical Manchester comes from. And you'll often see Manchester written like that, as a kind of a, this stereotypical kind of representation of the accent, where it's spelt Manchester and then O-H at the end, because it's trying to capture that Manchester. So let me go back to Gary Neville. He's turning out to be my hero, isn't he? So he's from Bury. Let's hear a bit of him.

15:08It's probably more me than the football, Gary Neville, to be honest with you. I think 80% of my week, maybe even 90% is spent in my businesses. And then obviously at weekend, a class going doing sort of the punditry and watching the football matches as my sort of break. If you put Gary Neville in the van and he was speaking, would you be able to say, would you be able to pinpoint it now with your acute ear and say, he's from Bury? Is it that close? Could you do that? Unfortunately, that's the one borough where we'd struggle because Bury is a bit of a

15:41funny one in that it's quite, if you look at a map, it's quite long and thin. And a lot of Bury is kind of encompassed into what might be seen as a sort of central Manchester. So I think from all of our boroughs, that one seemed to have maybe one of the least sort of specific accents. So that's a long winded way of saying, no, honestly, I wouldn't have been able to do that. We'd have recognised him as Manchester. But if somebody were from Wigan, Bolton, even Stockport or Salford, we'd have a better chance.

16:14So did you get to a point after your 10 years research where someone would play your recording, perhaps you hadn't gone out in the van, didn't know where the van was going, played your recording and you could say, ah, yes, that's Wigan. Oh, yes, that's Salford. I think there are certain ones where you've got a good guess. And I would say the most obvious ones are things like Wigan and Bolton. And one interesting thing around Wigan and Bolton is where you have the nurse vowel, the nurse and square vowel. So this is, you know, we give these vowels names, but it's the vowel sound in the word nurse and the vowel sound in the

16:48word square. And in Bolton and Wigan, they're merged. So it becomes square, the words, so nurse and square rhyme, nurse and square. And you'll hear this in someone like Peter Kay. Did you take your van on the road to Liverpool? Because it is quite extraordinary that if you stand in the middle of Liverpool and you stand in the middle of Manchester, these are two very distinct voices, phonetic patterns, pronunciation of words, and we're not even getting into the dialect words. And yet the distance between Greater Manchester and Merseyside is what,

17:2210 miles? It's incredible. The whole of, I would say the whole of the North West, well, really the North of England, but the North West is especially rich for this over such short distances. Well, even within Greater Manchester, we've got this, but yeah, over to Liverpool. And what would be interesting there is if we, if we took the van over to Liverpool, but stopped every couple of miles, we'd hear that gradual change from kind of Wigan over into, to Liverpool. It would gradually, you know, become more and more Liverpool and less Greater Manchester.

17:53Yes, it's quite, quite amazing. Okay. More celebs. How about Oasis, the Gallica brothers? So they're very, yeah, they're very, they're, they're typical Manchester, stereotypical Manchester. So they're from Burnage. They grew up in a place called Burnage, which is in the Manchester borough. And they have what is seen as, if you ask somebody from outside of Manchester, outside of Greater Manchester, if you ask somebody from down South, that's the Manchester accent. They, they, you say Manchester accent, you think of them. What's really interesting about their accent is when we spoke to older people, so maybe people in their seventies or eighties,

18:30and when we asked them about their accent, they would say, people from Manchester, they would say, well, I have a real Manchester accent, not like that fake one that came in in the nineties with, with Oasis and the Gallagher brothers. So they see that as a fake put on accent. This is no Gallagher. I'm, I don't really chase my youth. Do you know what I mean? I had a great youth. It was brilliant. And I don't dye my hair. I don't wear earrings. I haven't got any tattoos. I'm not bothered about chasing the girls and all that. I'm in it for the work, you know.

19:00And if you did what I did, why wouldn't you do it? Now, this is the way accents develop. Accents change all the time. And maybe it has changed as a result of some, you know, some exaggerated sort of almost performative ways of speaking. But that's how, that's how language works. And of course the nineties and the early two thousands were such a, a big time for Manchester anyway, culturally in terms of music and football and all of these things. So if that's what people are hearing, that's what they're going to acquire. And then that becomes the default. And I would say that is now seen as, you know,

19:34a version of that is seen as the, a default kind of Manchester accent. September's always busy. Whole Foods Market can help. Their September stock up event makes it easy to load your pantry and freezer with flavorful, nourishing food. Even better, there are hundreds of sales. Get dinner going with canned soups and veggies. Lean on frozen pizzas, pastas, and seafood everyone loves. Their build your own family meals feeds four for just $35. Stock up at Whole Foods Market.

20:06Welcome to the haunted library. Have you come in search of a tale? This podcast invites you to browse the shelves and find stories that will linger long after you've left this place. From gothic masterpieces to pulpy penny dreadfuls. Join me, Colin Morgan, with new episodes twice a week. Find the haunted library wherever you get your podcasts.

20:40So let's talk about some other well-known Greater Manchester people. Sarah Cox. Here's Sarah Cox. We mentioned setting up the gazebos at Charlie Market. Also, when you're down the market and all the rain gathers and all the tops of the stalls droop down and then the markets all have to push it up. Yeah. So Sarah Cox, another one of the Bolton. I mean, you know, Bolton are kind of taken over the airwaves in many ways. And there are lots of Boltonians with very proud Boltonians as well. Now, how about my hero, John Cooper Clark? Where's he from?

21:13So he's Salford. He's a proud Salfordian. I would say from the outside, from hearing people's accents, I think the Manchester Salford distinction is quite small. But they won't like me saying that because, of course, there's some rivalry between Manchester and Salford. Yes. The first time I saw John Cooper Clark, I remember thinking that he's got a remarkable way in which somehow the accent helps him push the words, push the vowels. I could think of him doing his poem about being very sporty, you know, the overall smell of brute. He would sort of be able

21:46to push on the vowel more than somebody like me. Yeah. Well, I think that's interesting because that's where the differences in accents, most of the differences in accents lie in the vowel sounds. You know, there are some differences in consonant sounds, but it's mostly in the vowels. So with people like John Cooper Clark, with a Salford accent and a Manchester accent, the vowels like the start vowel, how he says art, art rather than art. It's that kind of, and it's often quite elongated as well. Yes. And new prime minister, Andy Burnham, where's he from? And what do you notice about

22:19his speech? Well, funnily enough, he took part in the project. So we've actually spoken to Andy Burnham about his accent. So in 2016, we were running the pilot study. We had a trial run with this and we took out an accent van and we were parked up outside Wigan Library and we saw a man standing there and we thought he looks a lot like Andy Burnham. And at the time he was campaigning to be mayor, the first mayor of Greater Manchester. And we went over and we said what we were doing and he was ever so good. And he took part and he sat in our accent van and he told us

22:50all about his accent and he answered all the questions. And so he grew up in Liverpool and then was representing Wigan as an MP, which is in Greater Manchester, but on the sort of Liverpool side of things. So he describes his accent as a generic Northern accent. And he says he does face criticism sometimes in that people think he's either turning up the Scouse or turning up the Manc depending on where he is. But that's a really natural thing to do, to be fair. Well, we have the word by dialectalism, don't we? Well, try, but I can't even say it, try

23:24dialectalism so people can hop between them depending on who they're with or who they're wanting to talk to. Absolutely. Now, a little note for you listeners. As you may know, Word of Mouth is produced in partnership with The Open University. And to test yourself on how well you can tell one UK accent from another, you can visit the Word of Mouth programme page and follow the links to The Open University.

Perceptions and diversity

23:47Now, back with you, Rob. You also looked at self-perception and perception of others. Now, this is getting into quite a tricky territory because it's not specifically about the accent itself. It's how we view each other. So tell us a bit about this and what's going on in Greater Manchester. So people have, in our case, a blank map of Greater Manchester. And we did this online. We had really good software made to do this. People are faced with a blank map of Greater Manchester and they draw a shape around a particular area. Maybe they think people in this particular area, maybe in the

24:21northwest of Greater Manchester, they speak like this and they'll label that way of speaking. So they're labelling the accent. Yeah, they're labelling the accent. Then when we have enough people doing this, we then can overlay all of those maps. We use this fancy bit of software to overlay all of those maps. And then we're able to create these kind of heat maps to show where, you know, we can search for a word like posh and we'll be able to create a heat map to show it'll be a brighter colour showing the area of Greater Manchester where people are viewed as speaking posh or viewed as speaking rural or viewed as speaking in a nasal way. So this

24:59isn't guided by us. This is guided by how people describe them. And so from that, we ended up with our four main accent and dialect areas of Greater Manchester. And this was in order of when these labels came up most frequently. And the most frequent label was Lancashire. We put together things like Lancashire or Lanks or Lanky, whatever, but we labelled it as Lancashire. And that took in all of the northern boroughs, what used to be Lancashire, unsurprisingly. The next most popular

25:29one was Manc. So when people had said Manc or Manchester or Mancunian or whatever, and that was focused right on the centre of Manchester Borough and Salford. The next most popular one was Wigan. This is where we see Wigan as having its almost unique accent. So this means people had looked at the map, put a circle around Wigan and just labelled it Wigan or Wiganese. And the fourth most popular area, which isn't strictly an area, but it came up so often, was the label posh. And this was on

26:01Stockport and South Manchester and Trafford. And any of your listeners who are from that area or from the north of the northwest of England or from Greater Manchester will absolutely recognise that that is seen as the posh bit. So this is bringing in value judgements. So are people making value judgements about different accents? Were they saying that one accent was worse than another? Yeah, absolutely. So what we do is when we have all of these descriptions, we go through a process of

26:34coding them, which just means we put similar descriptions together and we end up with our different kind of keywords. When somebody described an accent as, or an area as being well-spoken or posh or educated, that kind of gets a high status label. Then if we search the map for that, if we create heat maps of that, we get all of the posh, well-spoken, educated bit, the high status is again in the south. And so, you know, all of these things tie in together, that idea of there being a posh accent, that this idea of there being a more standard way of speaking. When we then look at the speech data we

27:09have, we can see that those are the areas where those really noticeable regional features just don't exist. So people still equate, if you like, more accented voices as being lower status. Now, one key area we've missed out so far is that Manchester, like most places, most cities in the UK, it's a very diverse place. It's drawn in people from all over the world. So can you tell us a bit about what that means for how people living in Manchester speak right now? So speaking both

27:40English and other languages, hopping between the two, that kind of thing? Yeah, so there's lots of languages in Manchester. I think it's such a common situation for so many people now that they live within more than one language. And I like this idea of, you know, my colleague at work, Carla Bedouin, she talks about languaging, and this idea of language being a verb, and that that's a lot of what's going on. You don't just, you know, you don't just use a language. It's not a static thing. It's the process of languaging, of dipping in and out of different

28:13languages. So I think we have a lot of that in Greater Manchester. We also have things like, you know, you'll be aware of in London, there's been a lot of research over the years into what was called by linguists, Multicultural London English. And there's a similar thing happening in Manchester. So what we call maybe a more broad sort of Multicultural British English. But there's definitely a variety of that where people are speaking with features of Multicultural London English. But it's clear there's a Manchester accent behind it. So it's a version of that. And of course,

28:47that has come from lots of interaction, lots of mixing of different ways of speaking. So I think we've got, you know, a huge diversity of voices in Greater Manchester. And the best thing about it is that this diversity isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Well, thanks for that, Rob. We'd like to finish the programme with a farewell, as you know, that chimes with the theme of the show. So before you do that, let me thank you properly. Thanks to Rob Drummond for coming on to Word of Mouth today to talk about the accents

29:18and dialects of Manchester. So can you take us somewhere in Manchester and see us out with a with a Manchester farewell? I'm going to go for a northern Greater Manchester. So ex-Lancashire traditional tararcock.

29:39With a subscription to the BBC website and app, you can now get early access to your favourite BBC podcasts. Listen to shows like You're Dead to Me, In Our Time, Good Bad Billionaire, and more. Plus, there's all the other great benefits you get with a BBC subscription, from live streaming the BBC News Channel and acclaimed documentaries to in-depth analysis and features. Visit bbc.com forward slash subscribe to find out more.