To think there's no identity in the south east?

[catsarenice]

This is inspired from lots of other threads that crop up but mainly the scone and santa ones!! People from certain regions/counties seem to really have their own identities and pronunciations etc. I am from the south east and can never say 'we pronounce it as .... where I live'. I know people that say 'scon' and others that say 'scoan', some say 'Santa' some say 'Father Christmas'. I also couldn't tell you if someone was from Sussex, Hampshire, Kent, Essex or London (unless they're on Towie or Eastenders!!!). However, there seems to be real identity 'up north' and distinction with accents e.g. specific towns/cities within a county such as Sheffield and Leeds. Is this because people move around more down here? Don't even call our bread rolls the same thing as each other around here!!! So AIBU to think this is correct?

I beg to differ, there are definitely some strong accents in the SE. Portsmouth has an extremely distinctive accent - to the untrained ear I can see how it resembles a cockney accent - but it is different. I could tell you if somebody hailed from Portsmouth or closer to the W Sussex/Chi area quite easily.

Being proud of qualities into which you had no input is really tragic. Where your mum was when she gave birth is one of those.

Be proud of what you do - not an accident of birth, appearance or whatever.

I think a couple of posters have made good points about huge numbers of Londoners being moved out of London to new towns, such as Basildon, Harlow, Milton Keynes, in the post war years which spread the London accent over a wider area. The original accent of the residents of the old village of Harlow will have been easily overwhelmed by the accent of the thousands of new town residents.

And to support another poster the Southampton accent is very different from the Portsmouth accent and people from each of those cities very definitely identify as seperate from each other.

Just another thought! The people of the south coast (of England, to satisfy the op of another thread!), roughly between Chichester and Bournemouth also refer to themselves as from the South Coast in terms of regional identification as opposed to from the south east.

I think the accent thing is a shame, I grew up in a bit of the north where the accent was different in towns five miles apart, but then mine is watered down and almost gone now too, I just sound generically middle class London.

I very much agree with this. I grew up in a Lancashire village and although I have lived away now (London/Kent/overseas) for longer than I lived in Lancashire, I am still very proud of my roots and most definitely Lancastrian. My accent has also been watered down and people tend to assume I'm Southern (unless they catch me saying odd words like bath, grass, class etc). But speaking to my family, I effortlessly switch back into full-on Lancastrian (with dialect so not just an accent change). I always make a joke of it (Southern friends are often shocked when they hear me switch accents on the phone) and say I'm bilingual....I speak Northern and Southern.

Even up North, some of the identity that used to exist is being lost though (so moving closer to the more generic South East model). The village where I grew up (and where my family have lived for 100s of years) has expanded hugely and is full of "incomers". The old village families still exist but the closeness and the heritage is being watered down. It used to be that I could go back and visit and talk to anyone in the village - and if I said my mother's maiden name, everyone would know exactly who I was (and all my relatives!) but this is no longer the case with so many "new" people moving into the area. It's sad really. There used to be a difference in accents every few miles (my father came from a village 5 miles away so he used to make fun of my mother's accent!) but this is disappearing as the local population becomes more "blended". That's the price of progress I suppose but it does make me a little sad sometimes.

The South-East is a pretty big area, with a very high population density (to state the bleeding obvious).

I live in Kent (in one of the less salubrious areas). I'd say there are several distinct areas within that county alone - the Medway, Thanet (or Fanet as the locals and my DDs call it), the posher parts (Tunbridge Wells, etc), the outer London bits....

Auburn I think we must come from the same area. I also live up north now and get the same sort of thing. And about "London prices"

There are parts of the South East that most definitely have regional quirks! I grew up in Mid-Kent and my DP grew up in West Kent. It wasn't until I began working in West Kent and we met that I realised that how I pronounce worlds that end in "alk" was not proper haha. Where I grew up we used to pronounce walk as "wawlk" talk as "tawlk" and so on. I genuinely never thought of this as a quirk until I moved across the county though! There are also certain words and phrases that we said a lot as teens that DP has never heard of. For instance "bum basic" meaning properly basic, or "chad" that had a short-lived existence (thankfully) but meant the same as fit or hot. I still love Mid-Kent and I love West Kent/ East Sussex too, but there is definitely regional dialects and quirks within the county if you look :)

I have lived in Sussex most of my life and unfortunately the lovely 'zuzzex' burr you used to hear older people speak with is all but lost. My village likes to think it has an identity but it's just a bunch of hipsters/ crunchies/ weirdos who send their kids to the local Steiner school and do lots of yoga to keep their chakras aligned.

I spent a significant portion of my early childhood just within the M25 which had the most influence on my accent. Although it's only been a small portion of my life I have what a Londoner once described as a "generic within 70 miles of London, southern accent" No one has ever placed where I'm from with accuracy. My family have mixed accents from across the country, and I resisted the stronger accent from my later childhood.

I now live in a very localised county, the type where 6 miles away is beyond local. People do tend to stay within a small area through their lives despite the area being well connected to much of the country. When I did supply teaching, it could take me weeks to acclimatise to subtle variations of accent despite it not being particularly strong to an untrained ear. I remember one school where local pronunciation frequently caused me to give out rulers instead of rubbers. The other thing that surprised me was the clear invisible distinction in identity between local football teams with no transition zone.

The village where I grew up (and where my family have lived for 100s of years) has expanded hugely and is full of "incomers". The old village families still exist but the closeness and the heritage is being watered down
But aren't you an incomer in someone else's area?

it does make me a little sad sometimes
Do you also feel sad at the changes you've brought to the parts of Kent / London / overseas when you've lived there?

I'm honestly not trying to have a go at you, or to be stroppy, but your post seems a little contradictory.

Maybe it's just because people you're meeting in the south east don't bang on about their regional accent/ brand of tea/ fish and chips/ ways of doing ordinary every day stuff?

As a life long brightonian I do think we have different accents as such. I don't think I could tell a south easter from their accent though.
Having lived up north for a year in my youth my accent was a source of amusement to many though.

My husband comes from Pompey I come from about twenty miles away. He had an accent different to mine.

I think there are huge variations in the accents up North. So Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Leeds etc all completely different. I'm from Yorkshire and there is a lot of 'Yorkshire pride'! But it is very beautiful..
I think the southern counties, mainly surrounding London are quite homogenous but also people move around/commute a lot more. Agree with the other poster; nobody is proud of Berkshire, or Bedfordshire or Hertfordshire.
Essex is distinct! I can normally tell a Kent accent too.

There's no particular accent associated with the south east because the standard accents are what would be considered "normal". It's like the taste of water; water has a taste but we don't notice it because it's normal. We only really notice things when they are strange or different. Odd-tasting water is immediately flagged up by our taste buds, regional accents are flagged up by our ears.

There isn't the regional competition in the south east that exists in other counties. People in the south east are more likely to be affluent, have a higher standard of education, etc. There is no need for a big contest between East Sussex and West Sussex, or between Surrey and Kent, because the people are generally more contented. If you're happy, there is no need for petty prejudices and point-scoring.

I was born in the Midlands but have lived for a long time in both the north of England and the south east. In the north, I found people were very suspicious to "outsiders" - hostile even. There was always an underlying feeling that I was somehow inferior because I wasn't born in the town I happened to live in.

In the south east I found the opposite. Nobody cared where I was from, they seemed prepared to take me as they found me. If there was any kind of feeling that I was inferior, they kept it very well hidden.

I'm originally from Essex and I can tell an Essex accent from an East London one, no problem. I now live in Sussex and I miss the entrepreneurial spirit of Essex and the bling. While Sussex is lovely, it's dull compared with TOWIE country (yes, I'm from the heart of TOWIE land).

However Sussex is beautiful and stubborn. We say here 'we won't be druv' and we bloody well won't be.

I was brought up in Sussex and remember one (old) person with a proper distinctive 'Auld Sussex' rural accent. Actually did used to say 'ooarrr'🤣. Pretty much a dead accent now I'd expect.
Live in the Notts now (or 'up North' as I'd have thought of it back then) and to me, the South East, as an earlier poster said, sounds like it's either posh (like me🤔although my vowels are ever flattening) or not posh!

It's sad to think of centuries old accents dying out isn't it?

All the immigrants in the south east have diluted the dialects.
Whens the last time you heard a proper Cockney? All the markets used to carry the great voices of cockney rhyming slang.
Now, i never hear a cockney accent.
I often hear home counties accents though.
The pie mash liquor jellied eels around the thames ports have now been diminished by fast food joints of varying ethnicity.

Well give me a delicious curry over jellied eels any day of the week.

Thank you immigrants.

There are sussex/Hampshire dialects but I hardly ever hear it and if I do it's in the older generation and usually in a rural area rather than the towns. As PP's have said, the south east is now much more populated with folk from not only nationwide but worldwide so it's hardly noticeable, and unless you knew a sussex accent, I don't think you'd automatically recognise it. Plenty of local sayings though, usually involving the South Downs, seem to be widely used!

I think it's maybe because the South East is more of a melting pot

Outside London and a few places like Brighton, I've found vast swathes of the south east to be largely whites-only and very parochial.

It is also possible that a mass media based in London gives the impression that the distinctive aspects of London culture are actually national culture.

I find this post really strange. South and north London have completely different accents and are about 10 miles apart. Kent is totally different to reading.

I think maybe your issue is you don't know many locals? Henrietta who moved to a riverside flat in Wandsworth from Woking doesn't represent the local area

Specialsubject I completely agree. Its just an accident of birth. Being proud of where you are born is at the heart of nationalism.