not2old

has your dichotomy changed for the better or worse?

55 years in Canada I have tried to retain my merseyside antwacky speak, quite often using words or phrases the local yokel do not understand what I'm saying.

I find myself quite often lost for words, then having to look inside the Liverpool English Dictionary to recall words & their meanings from the past.

my wife on the other hand purposely lost her British accent within 12 mths, often being asked if she is Irish.

dbd33

My accent has softened but is still clearly Australian. I know that because it's the usual guess. I fear that my phrasing is archaic now, It may be that people in England no longer say teefed or butcher''s or brassic but I still do.

CanadaJimmy

Because of Peppa Pig my son says "swimming costume" and "campervan" and things like that. Me and my canadian wife also use words there's not really any equivalent for like calling someone a "yob" or a "chav", haha.

Partially discharged

Despite living here now for over 40 years, I still drop 'numpty' and 'yobbo' into my conversations.

Danny B

I know this thread is about spoken English, but I got called a wanker for using the word 'whilst' in an email the other week. Some younger Canadians are philistines.

bats

At least they called you a wanker instead of something Canadian.

rmontg

Living outside of the UK for over 10yrs its definitely softened, at least until I visit the UK then its like I never left sort of like a switch. But I still use certain slang words, and I think we have the best insult words which I still use.

Souvy

My grandson is on the brink of talking. It is my intention that he will be fully conversant with the use of the word "bollocks". He will thus be part of a small, select, group of franco-Quebeckers (the other two members being his dad and gran).

It's interesting when I talk to people in the village, which is a tad parochial. They often ask where I'm from because my accent isn't local. I tell them to guess. Invariably it goes French, Belgian, Swiss and then they run out of ideas. My French isn't that good but it seems to be unthinkable that a white bloke speaking some form of French can be anything other than one of the aforementioned. It always comes as a shock when I tell them where I'm really from.

I do admittedly retain something of a proper French accent, having gone to college in France 40 years ago. Even that is starting to get a little rough around the edges.

There was an exception recently. When I told the lady quizzing me I was a Brit, she instantly switched to fluent English. She was actually from France but had lived in Nigeria for many years.

Atlantic Xpat

First phrase I taught my eldest daughter when she started to speak: "You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off". It was very cute at the time.

Jingsamichty

The soft drink that the rest of the English-speaking world knows as "squash" is universally known in Scotland by the much funnier name of "diluting juice" (to distinguish it from "fresh juice", of course!).

In the Scottish accents it's even funnier... "duloo'-n juice". I never realised anyone called it anything else until I left Scotland. I soon realised that nobody in the rest of the world knew what "duloo'-n juice" was so I modified my vocabulary to call it squash, and that's what my children grew up calling it.

It was (and still is!) a source of great amusement to my Scottish family when we or our kids asked for a glass of squash. "Oh my God!", they would say through howls of laughter. "It's like having the Queen round!"

ann m

I need a good Canadian word for “knackered”

Mackem_66

I'll still sometimes say cream-crackered but I suspect the Canadians have no idea. We used to say paggered in the NE but that is one that has faded from my vocabulary.

BristolUK

Bushed I knew, but Bagged is apparently another.

CanadaJimmy

Reminds me of “ropey” (feeling a bit ropey).

Gordon Barlow

This is far too interesting a topic to let the thread die early! (I have a "Back in the Day" thread on the Rest of the World forum that also deals with languages and accents, and I have the "Life's Turning-Points" in this Maple Leaf Forum.)

In my long life I have come across Americans masquerading as Canadians, usually when the US is bombing the whatsit out of some Third World country, and I have a quick way of calling them out: I ask them to say "out and about". They usually forget to say "oat and aboat".

My wife and I were both born and bred Australian, and it invariably irritated her when people said "Linda I can tell you're Australian, but is Gordon English?" My response has been to ask what county they thought I was from, and they could rarely come up with anything better than "oh, somewhere in the south". Then I would say "if you can't name the county, I must not be English. It's the Henry Higgins test." (Eliza Doolittle at the Ball, remember?) Actually, I have the accent of a Brit who has spent many years in east or west Africa; "unidentified colonial", I call it. Our son, too, has an unidentified-colonial accent, being brought up here in the Caribbean and mixing with a wide variety of English-speakers.