If I was to time travel, how far back could I go and still have a conversation with someone in my high street?

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I am sorry if I have asked this before, it is one of those things that I think about every now and then, but have no idea what the answer is.

My home town is now a West London suburb and has a quite long history.

I'm fairly sure that if I travelled back 100 years, I would still be able to understand the language of people around me, maybe even 200 years, though I imagine the accent would be a heck of a lot different to nowadays.

300 years ago? I doubt if I could understand much of what was being said.

I have no evidence to base my thoughts upon, so I was wondering if anyone out there could give a rough estimate as to how far back I could travel, and still understand people.

Once you get back so far it gets baffling. My lecturer is quite fluent in Old English and has read a few passages to me, I can't understand them at all.

As for American English, it depends on when English arrived in America as to how it would sound .. Bits of old English will have been retained probaly from when English was introduced. I think it's similar with India

In America though we are continually in contact with each other - and other mutual countries - so much of the language is the same (in terms of vocab - word order, and often pronounciation is different), the differences are often very slight especially in the built up areas (e.g. New York, LA - likes of Arizona desert would be entirely different) .. I think it's called dialect levelling. Supposed to be writing an essay on the very same thing just now.

My "main street" and much of the village has stood in its present state since around 1860. Only thing that has changed is the road has tarmac on it. Very odd looking at photographs.

Those clips of accents from 100 years ago are brilliant, thanks ProfYaffle. I'm Lancashire born and bred too and sound nothing like those!

(my Dad does a bit though - and the Bolton one is pure Fred Dibnah)

Has anyone else noticed how old recordings make the speakers sound so much more strident and with a huge variety in their intonation? Not exactly high-pitched - it's hard to describe how they sound - but no matter whether they have a regional accent or RP, they sound a lot more clipped in the recordings and as if they are declaring every time they speak and holding forth rather than the more modulated and smooth tones we speak with now. Maybe people spoke with what we recognise now as a more confident and assured tone back then?

You can even tell the difference in the Queen's speeches and newsreaders over the decades. Both were lot more declarative and posh-sounding in the 50s and 60s with a huge difference from the 90s onwards.

Ooh ... this is such a cool thread. Which someone has just pointed me to.

I think you might actually manage to catch bits of some stuff in the fifteenth century. It'd be difficult, though, and it'd depend hugely where you were in the country.

There's a project where someone read aloud this poem written in Black Country dialect in about 1400, and they did it in as close as they could manage to what they think the accent was then. People from the local area were asked to listen and lots of them could pick out words or get the gist. There's a video of it kicking around somewhere.

Btw, I will take up one tiny point.

The versions of Chaucer people usually read for A Level are only sort of the original text. They usually regularise spelling and remove symbols like thorn and yogh, which makes it easier. Thorn is just a 'th' sound, so no trouble, but yogh is a sort of awkward 'gh' or 'y' sound, and I think that would be one modern speakers might struggle with.

I have heard that if you are Danish, you'd have a good chance of understanding some sounds in northern medieval English better than we do in England, because the accent was so influential even when they language itself was quite far removed from Norse.

My thought on this is that you would understand them a lot more than they would understand you because you are used to hearing and listening to different accents - TV radio and travel - but even a hundred years ago they didn't travel very far from their hometown throughout their lives and so never really had the chance to hear many accents and would find it hard to work out.

I find old texts interesting but tend to look more at the difference in sentence structure than spelling. I tend to believe that most people could spell very well and tended to make it all up as they went along, but I could be wrong. I just think that spelling is a modern phenomenon.

That's so true, they'd have more difficulty with us.

With spelling, people sort of make it up as they go along, but they're pretty strongly guided by their dialect. So you might get someone who writes 'knight' in one sentence and knighte' in another, but they wouldn't go wildly off-piste and write it 'niyte' because to them, they'd sound different.

I know this is true up to about 1550 and I suspect it is later, too - it's one of the ways people know where different manuscripts were written, because they're all spelling words more or less the same way, to reflect the local dialect.

Huh. That's fascinating, help.

What an amazing thread!

Checking in

HelpTheSnails, it's one explanation but not the whole: dd has listened to recordings of modern actors on old equipment and apparently they don't sound that different; you can still hear that they are modern actors. Otoh I did know some elderly people in my youth who sounded a bit like a 1940's newsreel: enunciating very clearly and with rather different vowel sounds to the rest of us.

I do have some recordings of Shakespeare and Chaucer in what they think their pronunciation might have sounded like. Takes a bit of tuning in to, but I reckon you would get their in a day or two- like me when I go to Denmark (native Swedish speaker).

Actually, now you mention that, I know a very elderly academic (he's just turned 90 and still working - amazing bloke) who ennunciates like that, but I never made the connection.

Ooh! This has reminded me of something really revolting.

I have heard that in the quite recent past, people's accents were different because they had missing teeth. There are areas of the country like Cornwall, where because the water is soft, your teeth are more likely to rot. Women would have their teeth taken out as a pre-wedding present, so they'd not have to rely on their husbands shelling out for the dentist. So presumably they mumbled.

I think I also heard that the pitch of voices would differ, because on the whole we are healthier and a bit bigger than people used to be, so our lung capacity is different.

I guess neither of those things would have a huge effect on understanding but would contribute to making things sound a little different.

I think there would be no problem in understanding anything after the Great Vowel Shift. If you go back to the early days of the shift (started in the 15th century) it might get more challenging, but I think you'd have to go further back to reach incomprehensible.

I think Anglo-Saxon would be incomprehensible, though a level of communication could probably be achieved (especially if the time traveller from the future had ever learned German).

TheSnaill - Barcelona?

So, If I went into a Hammersmith pub and said 'A pint of your best ale good man!'

Would I get a good kicking for being an alien, or just an idiot in, say 1800. (I know I probably would in 2014)

If you did that in 1800 and you were female I think you'd probably be arrested as a lady of easy virtue, complex!

I've just listened to 'Wiltshire' my home county and I actually don't think the accent has changed that much. It obviously has, but not as much as I'd expect. I also see now why someone asked me at work the other day where I was from because I sounded a 'little bit agricultural' - cheeky sod. But I suppose I do have this accent to a much lesser extent and I've not really noticed before.

I know one of my Icelandic friends mentioned that Old Norse/Icelandic and mdoern Icelandic are incredibly similar, with writing being very similar for sure, and with pronunciation being more different, but still okay to distinguish. So for her, where she lives, she'd probably find it okay.

Where I am, I think the accent has changed so much, I'd struggle. The Essex accent was influenced heavily by Cockneys and so on, and I'm sure a few hundred years back it was so different it would be unrecognisable as being from here, and probably hard to understand.

ergh, the teeth story sounds plausible!

I know that round my end, the noise of the cotton mills was so deafening that certain vowel sounds had to be overemphasised, which is partly why accent varies so widely in just a few miles across NW England. these accent variations are gradually moulding back together now, though...as the towns get swallowed up by Liverpool and Manchester!

If I timetravelled, I would definitely pretend to be a teenage boy, a la Ayra Stark. if I remained a girl, I would probably end up in a brothel or something.