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.

Meh. I think our hygiene levels have gone ridiculously high as a society now. Too high.

We're seeing asthma and allergy rates skyrocket and a lack of natural pheromones which attract us to the most sexually compatible partners :(

At least in the 1600s, you'd know you had a compatible MHC with the farmer you were shagging

Funny you mention that, georgina - yesterday I was reading a Joanna Trollope novel written in the 80s, and she has her very fancy, smart, cleanness-conscious American character wash her hair 'every two days'.

So odd ... these days that'd be considered absolutely basic by many people, and a bit icky by some on MN!

I have asked this question before on other forums.

Those of us who grew up in the 70s remember that Sunday night was bath night. I don't recall having a bath any other time. I didn't know anyone who had a shower in their house. My father had a very physical dirty job and had a bath daily.

Remember that underarm deodorant, and indeed the concept of BO, was invented in the 60s. But it was OK because everyone just smoked then and stank of fags.

My mother collects 1940s stuff. She has a poster on the wall from the war telling people what they should do to maintain hygiene. according to that you should wash and change your underwear once a week.

So what people would smell like 400 years ago I hate to think. I know that on Tudor Monastery Farm the woman on there was saying that people wouldn't like to become immersed in water because water carried diseases.

Oh, in a complete tangent to the original point of the thread, as you may have heard people from Japan think that those of us in the west smell of gone off milk. Well it is true. After just two weeks in Japan I can confirm we all do.

Despite doing about 6 Shakespeare plays at school I struggle to follow the meaning of the script on stage. So I doubt I'd manage that well.

Maybe I'd manage better with some Rabbie Burns, but I'm not overly confident.

Simon Armitage did a documentary about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (he's written a version of it) and he said it's another of those poems that people from a certain area (think it was around Shropshire) can understand more easily because of the local dialect.

Of course, a similar question might be about traveling forward in time.

How far forward would you have to travel before you would find it hard to hold a conversation?

Would it be more than travelling back in time?

I've just listened to the prisoner archive recordings (thanks Snail for a great link) and I understand the recordings from my home area - Hull and Beverley, Yorkshire - really well. it was only the crackling of the recording that was a difficulty really. It sounds just like my grandparents and dad -even my 20 something cousins. I wonder if the accent has changed so little because Hull is quite isolated and didn't get a lot of incomers until very recently?

Fascinating thread. I was born in 1949 and in my living memory people have always been conscious of how other people smelt and tried to avoid the smell of dirty clothes and stale BO. Of course we lived and worked in just as close proximity, if not closer, than people do today We had no bathroom or indoor toilet until I was twelve, but we all had a bath every day in a tin bath in the kitchen with water heated by an Ascot. Cleaning clothes was much more difficult because washing was done by hand and took ages. Coats, jackets, skirts, trousers had to be dry cleaned which was very expensive and couldn't be done very often. Coal produced a lot of sooty smuts that had to be scrubbed off by hand.
It was access to the technology that made people cleaner and sweeter smelling, not some sudden enlightenment of a younger generation. Similarly I would suggest that it is television and radio that has been the greatest factor in homogenising speech.

Brummy accent is one of the oldest in the country, if not the oldest on england

My high street is very old, over thousand years as is the local public boys school

Not sure I would understand them or not?

Have just listened to the archive recording from Sevenoaks. I grew up near there and the accent, although I can understand it, is nothing like anything that I remember. I would have placed it far further west.

By the way, the first commercial deodorant was patented in the late nineteenth century. My Mum certainly used Mum rollette in the 1950s.

The Yorkshire soldiers could be old lads speaking down the pub today-I don't think the accent's changed much at all.

I think Middle English is much easier to understand when read aloud and that Black Country poet made much more sense than the 'Scholar's ME'. I was surprised what a difference it made actually.

When I did Anglo Saxon at uni I found the same thing-if you closed your eyes and listened really carefully you could just about understand-or at least get the gist of what was going on.

Love this thread!

My grandma was born in 1910 and told me that they did indeed shave their armpits as young women but only for Christmas and parties. She also speaks very differently. Much more clipped and formal to my ears, even in everyday speech. She will use phrases like "a five and twenty past two".

I speak Dutch and now find older English, and sometimes even Anglo-Saxon texts far more understandable than I used to. Understandable is a relative term however. They used to be totally incomprehensible, now I can pick out the gist. :)

My Mum's Black Country relatives would use "yow bist" for you are. Similar to du bist in German.

I only knew one grandparent and she grew up in Victorian Croydon as the daughter of a publican. She used orf and gorn and other south London pronunciations, a bit Cockney, not remotely posh. I still sing the songs she taught me to my grandchildren in the same music hall style accent "My old man said foller the van" etc

"Eddie goes to Friesland to try and speak old english. Apparently the english language as we know it originated from holland in its earliest form 1000 years ago (old english). Eddie proves it by going to holland to buy a cow..."

tunip, I missed your post yesterday, but the Sterkarm Handshake is brilliant. There's also a sequel, which I enjoyed but not quite so much.

I've just listened to the Berkshire recording on that archive and it sounds nothing like the accents I grew up with. It's much more rural and more West Country than home counties.

This is the best thread I've read on MN for years.

I love the British Library link. My most local accent growing up is Middlewich, and to me that sounded unchanged. But it doesn't surprise me the Sevenoaks is totally changed because now it's just a chunk of commuter belt full of people not originally from Kent (ok, massive over-generalisation), whereas 70 years ago it will have been far more rural and traditional. The population of Cheshire hasn't altered as much. It would be interesting to know how many different versions if an accent exist within a town/city, now that there is so much more movement in the world. Eg I live in sheffield - in my village there is a lot of RP (lots of incomers working at the universities and hospitals), but also a lot of properly local people who have a kind of Derbyshire accent. I took my DS swimming in the NE of Sheffield once, and he asked me what language a woman on the bus was speaking, her (proper northern Sheffield) accent was so different from anything he'd ever encountered. (V embarrassing!). But then there are big communities of Poles, Somalis, Chinese etc all in different areas if the city all with different variations on the Sheffield accent. It could be a really interesting linguistics project (if I were young again!)

True Roobie, but I don't think people sounded like that in Sevenoaks by the 1950s. (Nobody I knew anyway). I suppose that fits with the migration out from London in the twenties and thirties though. I do think it sounds quite close to some Sussex accents though.

No real input but had to say: WHAT A CRACKING THREAD! Marking my place.

what a great thread! we have not been in cornwall for long and we have trouble understanding all of what the 'real' cornish have to say! we are getting better!

Now this is my kind of thread! Was about to post the Eddie Izzard Frisian clip but see I've been beaten to it

My grandad (we called him Granfer) was born in late Victorian Bristol and spoke broad Old Bristolian - you could really hear the germanic influences, all 'thee' and 'thou' and 'ow bist?'.

There's a novel by Connie Willis called Doomsday Book, which is about time travel to medieval times. Worth a read.