Reading Charles Dickens’ novels, we still feel as if we’ve been transported back to 1820s London. This experience is due in part to his rich reporter-like description, but even more to his dialogue. Dickens captured the vocabulary of the times and places in which his stories were set, even going so far as to phonetically recreate the distinctive accents of his most distinctive characters. The Pickwick PapersFor example, the transposed “v” and “w” pronunciation of the beloved valet Sam Weller was fashionable in the East End for a time, but reading Londoners’ voices of the time is one thing, hearing them is quite another.
Of course, there are no audio recordings of Dickensian London, but the closest thing is The video above is by YouTuber Simon Roper – in particular Section starting around 11:30he plays the accent of a Londoner from 1826. Almost everything he says would sound quite intelligible to today’s English speakers, although it’s likely that very few of us would ever encounter someone who speaks exactly like that in real life.
During this period, Roper adds in his on-screen notes, “the onset of glottal strengthening can be heard. A glottal stop is inserted between the vowel and the plosive consonant at the end of the word,” and further, “non-rhythmic (the loss of the r in most positions) causes the vowel originally followed by an ‘r’ to become a central diphthong.”
That’s some serious talk for a guy who says he’s “not a linguist.” And yet, in the video, Roper puts together an impressive journey through 660 years of London accents: “12 recordings, all of suspiciously similar-sounding men, each set 60 years after the previous, each the grandchild of the previous.” (After the video went viral, New Statesman Evaluate his achievements) The oldest was written in 1346, and to anyone who hasn’t studied Middle English, its rhythm will sound more familiar than its content. For most modern people, it’s around 1586 before comprehension becomes such an easy matter, but Roper’s accent sounds distinctly transatlantic by 1766. Perhaps not coincidentally, that was just before Americans decisively broke away from the mother country and did things their own way, but they also preserved some of the older ways, such as speaking.
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Based in Seoul, Colin MaOnershall Writing and broadcastingHe has written papers on cities, languages, and cultures, and his projects include the Substack newsletter. Books about cities And books A city without a state: Walking through 21st-century Los Angeles. Follow us on Twitter CollinhamOnershall or Facebook.
