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Jonnie Robinson, Curator, English accents and dialects, British Library Sound Archive, writes:
These speakers make use of a number of features that are typical of a Cornish accent. Above all, they're all rhotic speakers - that is they pronounce the sound after a vowel. At one time, this was a feature of speech throughout the UK and, indeed, until relatively recently still widely heard across much of southern England. Nowadays, however, it's increasingly restricted to the West Country and the far south-west of England, a small area of Lancashire and most of Scotland and Ireland. Listen to the way these speakers pronounce the words alter, words, more, more, visitors, hear, hark, mother, posher and moors. This, and the stereotypical West Country pronunciation of the words say and civilised with a sound for the initial consonant is nowadays no longer as widespread among younger speakers, but clearly still present in the speech of some Cornish people.
A very traditional feature of West Country dialect is the use of non-standard pronouns, such as them for they, which occurs particularly frequently in the speech of older people in tag-questions, such as here in the statement they used to say 'they're cutting up', didn't them.
Listen also to the use of non-standard verbal constructions, such as the inflection of present tense verbs in the phrase they cuts up and I gets among visitors or the archaic present participle in the statement very often I heard people a-speaking. Finally the use of am as a third person plural of the verb to be was at one time widespread in the West Country and West Midlands, but is now perhaps less common among younger speakers. Listen to the statements, they think they'm better educated and we think they'm a but thick - constructions where Standard English requires are.
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