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.

CFSKate interesting link. My Dc have Dutch/Friesland names. Funny to think they maybe Old English too. I'm going to have to research this a bit more.

The Beowulf Poems are a good way to listen to the Anglo Saxon language - Wassail!

Great thread! Thanks for starting it, OP.

I grew up on the Herts/Essex border where everyone of my parents' generation and beyond spoke with a North London accent. But my grandparents, who all came from Herts, and people of their generation, spoke very much like the person from Essex on the linked British Library archived thread - an accent I've always associated with Norfolk/Suffolk.

My maternal grandad worked for the local council in the Parks department, and it was his job to mow the lawns -which he always called 'greensward', or, as he pronounced it, 'grin-sard'. It was my favourite word as a child, and I took every opportunity I could to make him say it!

WRT the Sunday night bath in the 1970s - we did that, too. The rest of the week we made do with a wash in the kitchen sink, although we had a perfectly serviceable (inside) bathroom.

That Eddie Izzard cow clip is great! DS is watching tv so I held my phone up to my ear and could understand every word. Didn't realise it had subtitles. Mind you, I once translated Fries for some Dutch speakers as it was easier for me to understand than for them.

DH and I also once chatted to a couple in Luxembourg. No idea what language or dialect they were speaking but we could understand each other enough to carry on a conversation. It may have been Luxembourgish, Limburgs or Plat Deutsche, at a guess. It wasn't Dutch, Flemish or Africaans at any rate. We forgot to ask them.

I love the British library link!

I grew up in a small, rural community, and I found someone in the British Library archive from the neighbouring village!
I would say that I knew (still know!) lots of people of my parents generation with that accent, and even when I was growing up some of the kids still had a bit of a twang, but you don't hear it really now - I don't think many young people can afford to live there anymore, it's all massive houses and people commuting to the City.

People who don't wash regularly and lead an outdoor life don't really smell of BO. I've known loads of New Age travellers living in buses and the like who only had a weekly wash in the winter, and didn't wash their endless layers of baggy knitwear that much, and they had a kind of earthy, musty smell that wasn't particularly unpleasant, especially when combined with joss sticks and patchouli . I imagine your average medieval peasant would have smelt a bit like that (minus the patchouli, probably).

I too was surprised by the West Country-soundingness of the Berkshire accent. But that was when the county actually had an identity other than that of a dormitory for London . I grew up in Bucks, on the Berks border, and I would say that the Bucks accent has to be pretty much extinct by now.

Minus the patchouli, but possibly plus some kind of scent. It always amazes me how available things I think of as exotic were. I've just read about a grocer taking an order for five pounds of saffron. Must've cost a bomb. So I think from the same trade routes they'd have had access to something smelly enough to cover up the must.

Way off topic, sorry. I came on here to link to this, which is Anglo-Saxon read aloud: acadblogs.wheatoncollege.edu/mdrout/

Ooh yes! Pomanders!

It's official: the Days of Yore smelt like the Glastonbury Festival circa 1992

Now I want a time machine- to go back to both!

The poet, Tennyson, was born in Somersby Lincolnshire and he wrote some poems in the Lincolnshire dialect. I am from nearby and I can't even pronounce some of the words never mind understand them.

Fascinating thread.

My father's family were all from Liverpool, and their normal 'working class' Liverpudlian accent of the 1940's/50's/60's was nothing like the kind of broad Scouse you hear today. So that's changed a lot; perhaps the same is true of most big cities as they become more cosmopolitan.

On the Americans-sounding-like-17thc-English-people thing, I've just remembered hearing a gripping radio 4 programme, which annoyingly I can't now find anywhere on t'internet, in which Jonny Dymond went to a fishing village somewhere in the US and talked to various people there who all had amazingly rural-sounding English accents. They were descended from English settlers iirc. Will have a poke around and see if I can track it down.

There was a TV programme years ago that told the Story of English and went to the USA to speak to people on the eastern seaboard that had accent that hadn't changed since the settlers first went from England.

I haven't watched this download on line but here is the link:

topdocumentaryfilms.com/story-of-english/

Robert McCrum wrote an accompanying book called, not surprisingly, The Story of English.

What an incredible archive! Listening to the Suffolk accents took me back to when I was growing up and we had neighbours who still had the very strong Suffolk accent (and I struggled to understand everything then, never mind 400 years ago).

Fab thread! I read Linguistics and Phonetics at University (and it was surprisingly unsatisfying sadly) but the years of sitting in the language lab, analysing vocal spectogram printouts will stay with me forever!

Our then professor had been involvede with Yorkshire Police in the search for the Yorkshire Ripper, and was asked to analyse the accent on the tapes sent to the police - they turned out to be a hoaxer but at the time they were thought to be crucial evidence. He was able to identify the accent on the tapes to within a few streets in a suburb of Sunderland, and he was right! He said that as people didn't move away from their area very much (and the lower down the social scale, the more so) then actually it was pretty straightforward. That's how much of a "fingerprint" British accents once had.

My favourite accent/dialect gem is the way in which sheep farmers still count their sheep, not in English "one two three" but variations on Yan Tan Tethera, in Cumbria, the Dales etc, a throwback to the old Celtic languages.

www.fellpony.f9.co.uk/country/wool/count.htm

About the old Berkshire accent sounding like the West Country - if you're old enough to remember Pam Ayres - she was from Berkshire/Oxfordshire.

Great thread. Marking my place to come back and read later.

HAs anyone mentioned the great vowel shift yet?

By the way, for those who like this type of thread, some of us have been lobbying MNHQ for a language topic (Cunning Linguists?).

Please come and add your support. www.mumsnet.com/Talk/site_stuff/1945805-Any-chance-of-a-topic-about-language-and-linguistics?msgid=44514512

I love this thread.
Accent wise I find listening to radio 4 plays so frustrating at times. I am from the West Country and my father has a very broad West Country accent. I now live in suffolk and the two accents sound completely different to me. However when every they have people from either region on the tv or radio they get the accents confused.
And then the Pam Ayres accent comes into it all which is different again.
I remember as a child laughing about his people from Somerset sounded, which was completely different to us in Dorset, well we thought so any way.

Interested to see Middlewich mentioned up thread,I must listen to that!
Pam Ayres sounds very West Country to me,surprised she from Home Counties!
I went to school with lots of second generation Scousers whose parents had moved out of Liverpool in the 1960s slum clearances,like John Bishop,to Winsford in Cheshire.
They all sounded more Scouse than Cilla

This thread rocks.
Eddie Izzard also rocks.

I'm Aberdonian, and the older generation (over 70s) have a very different way of speaking from the younger ones.

It's not that the younger generations are speaking in slang, or that the older ones are using archaic words. They just sound very different.

Then there's the wonderful Doric, that everyone up here understands, so I don't know how far back I could go.

How exciting.

We have a brand new topic to play in.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/cunning_linguists

I love RP accents.
I want to sound like Celia in Brief Encounter!
(Can just imagine the stares at the Tesco checkout )

I was just thinking about my own Aberdeenshire Grandparents and parents, GoldenGytha. As the generations continue so much disappears. My Grandparents could speak 'proper English' when appropriate but would use the Doric and quite broad accents in normal life. My parents generation used much more 'proper English' and would only lapse into their local dialect occasionally. I can understand a broad Aberdonian and a lot of Doric but would feel ridiculous using it and my own Dcs have only a vague idea of a few words. A whole beautiful rich vocabulary lost in less than a hundred years.