Is the Brummie accent fading?
Is the Brummie accent gradually disappearing? We hit the streets of the city centre to find out whether its unique dialect is fading away and how it is perceived around the country. We'll explore peoples thoughts on its relevance here in contemporary Birmingham..
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00:00Okay, the Birmingham accent. Well, with some people it's like the force.
00:06The force is really strong with them. With some people they are difficult to
00:11understand. You've got to like really focus on it. But in general I think it's
00:16become a lot weaker and there's lots of people who don't really have a strong
00:20Birmingham accent anymore. But just when you feel comfortable that you, you know,
00:25you can talk with anybody, you'll bump into a few people and they'll hit you
00:28with the full force of it. I don't believe so. They're still here constantly
00:34kind of thing. I've always, my mum and dad have always kind of tried to make me
00:40talk a bit more proper. But like yeah, no, I think it's still thriving, especially
00:45in the city kind of thing. So yeah, I've never really noticed it dying out or anything
00:50like that, so no. Maybe in the city centre, yeah. I'm at uni in Birmingham so I'm a
00:55little bit out of the city centre. I don't come in an awful lot. But kind of around the
00:59outskirts of Birmingham, I hear it all the time. So I go to King's Heath, you go to
01:02Harborne, you hear it everywhere. So I don't think it is. I think it's alive and
01:08well. I think also that a lot of people who don't live in the area hear a West
01:17Midlands accent and think of it as a Birmingham accent. And there are
01:22actually a lot of variations of West Midlands accents and they're all going
01:27strong. So you can probably tell I'm not local to Birmingham. I moved here about
01:3125, more than 25 years ago. And I kind of learned that there are lots of accents
01:39in the West Midlands. Well it depends where, what you think the Birmingham accent is.
01:43I'd say a lot of people think the Black Country is a Birmingham accent, but it's not.
01:48Yeah, I think it has a bit of a bad reputation, like Birmingham really in
01:51general, doesn't it? But yeah, I mean, I'm kind of impartial to it. There's worse
01:56accents out there anyway, that's for sure.