What is normal in your country but weird in the rest of the world?

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England is fairly small. Because of this, you’d expect that we all sound fairly similar, wouldn’t you? Maybe there might be a bit of a difference between the North and the South, but not much more that that.

Wrong!

Everywhere you go, we sound different. Basically every county has its own accent. And there are 48 counties!

You’ve got the West Country accent, where everybody sounds like a farmer.

You’ve got the cockney accent, which you should use if you ever need to look ‘ard. ‘Yeah, alright geeza, ‘giz a minute an’ I’ll be there.’

You’ve got the Birmingham accent, which is quite hard to describe, but let’s put it like this: I found an article in which 51 English cities were ranked by ‘sexiest accent’, 51 being the worst.

Birmingham came last…

You’ve got the Essex accent, which can be summed up in ‘yeah, ‘e was well owd, innit!’

Then you’ve got the Northern ones; the Geordie accent, the Liverpool accent, the Manchester accent, so many accents!

Northern accents are basically just (sometimes big) variations of ‘Ayup lad, can ya tell me the way t’ Sainsbury’s?’

On that ‘sexiest accent’ thing, the Manchester accent was ranked as #1, but that’s when I realised.

The website it was on was called ‘lovinmanchester!’

I won’t say what my city was ranked, because, you know, potential stalkers and/or murderers, but it was in the mid-to-low 40’s, which would be fine, except the Newcastle accent is #39! How?!

This map sums it up pretty well, although these regions could probably be split again into even more accents.

And as for the Newcastle thing, I’m only joking, please don’t kill me! I know what you Northerners are capable of!