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John Derek Bevan
Lives: Flint, Flintshire
Time lived in area: All my life
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John remembers inadvertently listening to his own voice on tape - and being surprised how he sounded.
Language of interview: English
Duration: 00:48 (mins/secs)
The participants were asked to describe how they spoke in their own words.
How do you describe your accent: "Typical Flint, broad vowels, Welsh, Irish and Scouse mixed together."
Have there been other influences on the way you speak: Not Given
Do you have skills in languages other than English?: No
Other languages: None
JOHN: We had a family company and I had seven, seven or eight brothers and we were all in the company and had directors meetings every Monday, every month, sorry. And my father had one of those old reel-to-reel tape recorders and he bought it, he bought it, but he didn't tell us and so he switched it on during our directors meeting and played it back afterwards and it was the funniest thing that you've ever heard of, people (spluttering) couldn't speak and stopping and starting and it taught me a real lesson. As you see, you couldn't understand that it was you. You couldn't realise that it was you - and you couldn't even realise that it was your brothers talking, you know, it was just the funniest thing, but we never kept the tape unfortunately - it would have done really good for this programme.
Jonnie Robinson, Curator, English accents and dialects, British Library Sound Archive, writes
We all react with some surprise (and even disappointment!) when we hear recordings of ourselves as we don't necessarily pick up on features in our own speech in the same way others do. Many speakers in this part of Wales are occasionally disappointed when they're assumed to come from Merseyside or even surprised to be identified as Welsh. This is because the Flintshire accent is a wonderful combination of the speech patterns shared with other Welsh speakers and the features that are a natural consequence of the close links the area has historically had with Cheshire, the Wirral and Merseyside generally.
Listen carefully to the vowel sound used by John in the following words: company, brothers, Monday, month, us, funniest and done. This is a feature of most speakers in the north of England, including Merseyside, but very different from the vowel used in these words by speakers in the rest of Wales. The tapped John uses in the words brothers, directors and sorry - a sound produced when the tip of the tongue makes very brief and rapid contact with the roof of the mouth - is extremely common on Merseyside and indeed in North Wales. Likewise the way John articulates his <s> and sounds - with the main body of the tongue slightly pushed slightly further forward in the mouth than is usual in most English accents - is very common in this part of the country. Listen above all to the way he pronounces these consonants in the words <>seven, brothers, directors, meetings, sorry, recorders, afterwards, speak, stopping, starting, lesson and realise.
In contrast, the vowel sounds John uses in words in the following sets: tape, played and say and old and programme and the weak vowel used in the final syllable in programme are much more like the sounds used by speakers elsewhere in Wales and certainly not associated with speech on Merseyside. It's this combination of features that makes the speech of north-east Wales so distinctive and demonstrates perfectly that there are no absolute accent boundaries, rather sounds change gradually as one moves from place to place.
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