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Janet Smith
Born: 14 February 1944
Lives: Burnley, Lancashire
Time lived in area: All my life
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Janet remembers a kitten getting stuck down her aunty's toilet and the attempts by the family to retrieve it.
Language of interview: English
Duration: 0:35 (mins/secs)
The participants were asked to describe how they spoke in their own words.
How do you describe your accent: "Lancashire accent."
Have there been other influences on the way you speak: Not Given
Do you have skills in languages other than English?: Yes
Other languages: Spanish
JANET: An aunt of mine, er, she's what, in her mid 80s now, they were living on Briercliffe Road and she can remember a little kitten, unfortunately getting, er CONTRIBUTOR: Oh yeah, I've heard of that JANET: It er, got too inquisitive and dropped down the long drop and they ad to pull it out coz they shuffed a brush down then it could grab owd o the brush an get brough up again, so I don't know how many animals got, er, treated like that, but you see they didn't have lids on , they just had a seat with a hole in but they dint have your normal lid that you have on a loo now, so there's no telling what could get down.
Jonnie Robinson, Curator, English accents and dialects, British Library Sound Archive, writes
It's always interesting to place a person geographically according to the way they speak and there are a number of ways of gradually pinpointing someone to a specific location by focusing on crucial elements of a speaker's accent. Janet is typical, for instance, of many speakers in the north of England and the Midlands in that she pronounces the word aunt to rhyme with the word ant.
There are also several features of Janet's speech that we associate more specifically with a number of areas of Lancashire, such as her pronunciation of words in the following two sets: road, hold, don't know and hole and mine and like. Finally you can hear an unusual vowel sound in Janet's pronunciation of the words now, down, out and how. This is an extremely distinctive feature of many speakers in Burnley and the surrounding area, but not common in other parts of England.
A long-drop was a type of open toilet with a long pipe that emptied straight into the sewers.
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