Read a novel by Charles Dickens, and you’ll still today feel transported back to the London of the eighteen-twenties. Some of that experience owes to his lavishly reportorial descriptive skills, but even more to his way with dialogue. Dickens faithfully captured the vocabulary of the times and places in which he set his stories, and for some particularly colorful characters, went as far as to render their distinctive accents phonetically: that of The Pickwick Papers’ beloved valet Sam Weller, for instance, with its swapping of “v” and “w” sounds that briefly overtook the East End. But it’s one thing to read the voice of a Londoner of that time, and quite another to hear it.
No audio recordings exist of Dickensian London, of course, but we have the next-best thing in the video above from Youtuber Simon Roper — and specifically the section that begins at about 11:30, when he performs the accent of a Londoner in the year 1826. Most everything he says should sound quite intelligible to any English-speaker today, though few, if any, will ever have encountered someone who speaks in quite the same way in real life.
In this era, Roper adds in the onscreen notes, “you can hear the start of glottal reinforcement, where a glottal stop is inserted between a vowel and a plosive consonant at the end of a word.” What’s more, “non-rhoticity (r‑loss in most positions) has caused vowels that were originally followed by ‘r’ to become centering diphthongs.”
Serious stuff, for a man who describes himself as “not a linguist.” Nevertheless, Roper has in this video assembled an impressive tour of London accents over 660 years, with “twelve recordings, all of men with suspiciously similar voices, and each one is set 60 years after the last one, and each one is the grandson of the previous one.” (When the video went viral, the New Statesman profiled him for his achievement.) The earliest, set in 1346, will sound more familiar in cadence than in content, at least to those who haven’t studied Middle English. Comprehension doesn’t become a much simpler matter for most of us moderns until about 1586, but Roper’s accent comes to sound veritably transatlantic by 1766. Perhaps not coincidentally, that was just before the Americans broke off decisively from the motherland to do things their own way — but also to preserve a few of the old ways, including ways of speech.
Related content:
A Brief Tour of British & Irish Accents: 14 Ways to Speak English in 84 Seconds
Peter Sellers Presents The Complete Guide To Accents of The British Isles
A Tour of U.S. Accents: Bostonian, Philadelphese, Gullah Creole & Other Intriguing Dialects
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.