8 Difficult English Accents from the UK and Ireland
Looking for precise and professional language translation? Look no further! I specialize in accurately translating English to Haitian Creole, French, and Spanish.
Trust me to deliver exceptional results that capture the essence of your message. Contact me today for flawless language translations.
🇬🇧Up for a listening challenge? How many of these accents can you understand? Let me know in the comments. Bonus points if you can figure out where they’re from!
📺 WATCH NEXT:
Guess These English Accents from Around the World 👉🏼
Where Did English Come From? 👉🏼
✍🏼 ON THE BLOG:
Prefer reading to watching? We’ve got you covered!
Why Intonation is So Important in English 👉🏼
💻 CERTIFICATE OF ONLINE LANGUAGE TEACHING (CEOLT)
Interested in teaching English or another language online? Check out my premier language-teaching course 👉🏼
⬇️ GET MY FREE STORYLEARNING® KIT:
Discover how to learn any foreign language faster through the power of story with my free StoryLearning® Kit
👉🏼
📖 LEARN A LANGUAGE THROUGH THE POWER OF STORY:
Stories are the best way I have found to learn ANY language. Forget the boring textbooks and time-wasting apps and learn a language the natural, effective way with one of my story-based courses. 👉🏼
🗣 SUPERCHARGE STORIES WITH SPEAKING PRACTICE
Many StoryLearning students have found great success combining story-based learning with 1-on-1 speaking practice. We recommend LanguaTalk for finding talented tutors who can help you become more confident.
Book a free trial with a 5-star tutor here 👉🏼
📸 FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM:
Get daily language tips, comics, reels, and more on Instagram (@iwillteachyoualanguage) 👉🏼
⏱ TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 – Intro
0:14 – Accent #1
1:29 – Accent #2
2:22 – Accent #3
4:03 – Accent #4
5:47 – Accent #5
7:50 – Accent #6
8:49 – Accent #7
10:01 – Accent #8
📜 SOURCES & ATTRIBUTIONS:
🎬 Video Clips:
Old Liverpool – 1930's footage (colour and sound enhanced)
How to Speak ISLE OF MAN(MANX) Dialect Words and Phrases
Yn Cholloo: "Loshtit dy bollagh!"
The Outer Hebrides by Air. 4k drone.
Manx Dialect Ice Bucket Challenge
Man Shocks With a Very Heavy Merseyside Accent | Judge Rinder
Funny liverpool accent of this amazing girl
Scouse Style | Snog Marry Avoid
Accent tag Hull East Yorkshire ENGLAND
Lucy Beaumont Edinburgh Comedy Fest Live 2014
[ ʰp ] unvoiced bilabial pre-aspirated stopWest Country Yap
Harry Potter – Best of Hagrid
Funniest Irish Accents Compilation
An Irishman's Guide to the Irish Accent
WELSH ACCENTS: HALLOWEEN SPECIAL 🎃👻🏴
Who's coat is that jacket?
Gypsy Travellers: A Life On The Run
🖼 Images:
“Edward I – Westminster Abbey Sedilia” by Unknown is licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
“Six Blackfeet Chiefs” by Paul Kane is licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
“Statue of King Alfred in Wantage Market Square” by Steve Daniels is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
I do love British accents, i as a Brit can’t understand some people sometimes haha!
happens to me too!
🇮🇪 to my Irish friends… I am aware that we’ve managed to remove the necessary nuance in our final edit of this video! Hopefully it goes without saying that Ireland is not British, but we have a responsibility to make that clear, and we screwed up! I will attempt to fix it in the title and thumb, please let me know if we succeed or not! And apologies for any offence caused.
8 Difficult British Accents You WON’T Understand !!!!! Ireland is not British. Please change the title of your video it’s insulting
As someone from the US, I found the woman from the Outer Hebrides by far the easiest to understand despite the remoteness of the area.
I find the West Country to be the most similar in terms of sound (maybe not vocab) to a Broad American accent. Our vocab and grammar are most similar to other areas of Southern England and our accent probably sounded very similar to theirs when theirs was still rhotic in the 18th century.
I love british accent 🇬🇧. Thank you for sharing some of the unique variants. 💙
I take exception to Irish accents coming under the header of British accents, but much respect for that clip of TD Michael Healy-Rae. I actually remember that speech he made. I don’t ever really look at the Dáil sessions, so it’s funny that it was this one.
Love it. Having lived in the UK (Wales), I could recognise most of them.
Being from Ireland, I’m not fond of the idea of being part of “British isles” but it what it is… but with the travellers, most Irish people can understand them
Most English can too and usually confuse them with Irish. And then some remember that terrible movie with Brad Pitt and Mr Madonna
I sympathise, but “British Isles” is a geographical, not a political, term, so I don’t mind.
Olly, one, if not the most important thing about your channel is that you’re a trustworthy down to earth guy. Please don’t continue to use exaggerated clickbait faces like that in the future. Your smiling face is enough, only tiktok kiddies like this style, not serious language learner, your target group 🙂
Well, something important to take into account is that “Irish” is not related to “British”
Yes… I think we’ve somehow managed to lose the nuance in our edit of this video. I will fix it !
My elderly mother was from the Hebrides and learnt English at School. We lived in England due to my father’s work. Most people on meeting my mother assumed she was Irish or Polish.
I understood every word that each of them were saying, but only correctly guessed six of the accents. Then again, I’ve never been to Europe, so I was going based strictly on the linguistic characteristics.
Very Interesting! Many years ago, there was an excellent series on the US Public Broadcasting Network called ‘The Story of English” They went all over the world to show the origin and to describe the various ‘varieties of English’. They went to Yorkshire and showed a ‘regular’ Yorkshire accented postman making a delivery to an old farmer who had a completely different accent that had Norse sounds. I looked it up and this took place somewhere near Hull.
We lived in Yorkshire for a while when I was around ten and went to school in Harrogate. All the kids spoke about the same, except this one kid who lived way out on the moors and had a completely different accent and I think used words like thee and thou! He was brought to school by taxi, and I remember he was always teased about the way he spoke.
Fun fact: In the Republic of Ireland, the islands of Ireland and Britain are officially referred to as ‘The Irish Isles’.
Kerry County Welsh and Gypsy English accents were quite hard to understand for me, but I’m probably just not used to it.
I’m French and we also have gypsies on our territory, I can understand them most of the time, in addition to some French regional expressions and I would say that my accent is pretty natural, probably because I’m used to work with different languages so I also learned to speak slowly when I speak my own native language. 😄
They were travellers . Gypsies and travellers are not the same thing . Romani come from India originally and they have their own language and their own part English part Romani dialect . Those were Irish travellers they prefer to be called Pavees
As strange as it is, since I’m an American from the Midwest, I can understand: Isle of Man, Hull, Outer Hebrides, West Country, a little of Kerry, Welsh, a little of the Nomadic Irish. Thank you for a very fascinating video!
Well, all the ones you mention are western British accents, and influenced American speech through seafaring and immigration. Not that that necessarily makes it easy, so well done! As a west Brit myself, I struggled with some of them, though I might have done better with a little more time and some context.
I understood most of them but not where they were from. Growing up in Kenya we had people from all over the world so you learned a lot of different dialects and English accents. 😊 have a great weekend.
After living in London for over 20 years I got used to all kind of accents possible 😅
I only got the last 2 remarkably as an American: Welsh & Irish Traveller. I knew about Irish travelers from a YouTube video I saw a few years ago
Scouser here , fun fact the different areas of Liverpool have slightly different accents . The first scouse girl had a north end accent , the same as me . Usually found in Walton , Kirkdale , Norris green , Croxteth etc. . Kirkdale and croxteth are both Viking names . Walton is Anglo Saxon for walled settlement. Great place Liverpool for history . Great vid by the way la .
Swede here 🙋🏼♀️ I absolutely didn’t understand all of it, but definitely more than I expected. Funny thing is that #7’s rhythm/melody is quite similar to the Swedish’s. It almost sounded like (overblown) swenglish 😂