The best United Kingdom accent is a matter of interpretation, of course. Whether you think someone’s accent is fun, strange, indecipherable or just annoying, there’s always one accent that will be easiest on the ears than all others.
For me, the accent that I like the best is the North England accent, more specifically the Midlands accent. If you ever get the chance to meet someone from Leeds, be sure to say “hello” to them from a relative distance and make sure they’re in a good mood. You’ll be met with a pleasant and hilarious “EH-loh!” shouted to you from across the rain-soaked street.
And an angry person from Yorkshire is fun to listen to. There’s a certain bite to the accent that makes their threats particularly sharp and bitter. One might recall the defenders of the wall in Game of Thrones. Most of those actors were from Yorkshire. The entire cast of “Chicken Run” were as well, if anyone remembers that movie.
Of course, the Midlands are just the lower end of the region that homes the most threatening brogue: Scotland. The Scottish accent is well-known from films like “Braveheart” and “Trainspotting” and it’s not hard to enjoy the slang and figures of speech, if you can understand them.
The London accent is what a native would probably call “posh.” This is one of the most accessible accents on the Island because it’s the one Americans are most familiar with, whether they know it or not. The upper-class London accent sounds like exactly that: upper class, imposing and stringent. Think Monty Python.
The lower-class of London, however, is what you hear in a Guy Ritchie movie. It’s hard to talk about the accent without the colorful language they often incorporate. Needless to say, they have a penchant for talking with their teeth and biting the H off the fronts of their words, except for the word “herb.”
West is Wales, where the accent gets a little muddled. I personally find this accent to be beautiful because it invokes Dylan Thomas’ recordings of his own poetry. The Welsh language is beautiful on its own, too, creating glorious words like “Llanfairpwllgwyngyll.”
What’s left to mention is the Irish accent, which is charming no matter where you are. Everyone, before they die, should hear a person from Northern Ireland say the word “brain” as much as they should hear a person from Scotland say “bairn.”
The most interesting Irish accent to me is the mechanical monotone Irish accent as opposed to the sing-song jubilant accent that makes Americans think of Leprechauns. When he plays a sullen or villainous Irishman, Colin Farrell nails this monotone. It sounds like a menacing, creaky floorboard.
So there’s a snapshot of UK accents. Watch movies from the UK, listen to the subtleties in the way people speak, and see if you can tell where on the islands someone is from by the way they pronounce their words.
