Britain from A to Z : A

During the latter half of July 2013, my wife, son, and I took a trip to Great Britain. Specifically, we visited Scotland, England, and Wales. This trip was primarily intended to be our son's college graduation gift. Andrew is a huge fan of Wales and has been studying its geography, history, and language. We debated whether to do the trip on our own or as part of a tour. Ultimately we decided on the latter and booked Icons of Britain from CIE Tours. It lasted 15 days, starting in Glasgow, Scotland, and ending in Windsor, England. Our days were jam packed with travelling and activities. While there we observed a number of interesting similarities and differences with the USA. I decided to write a series of posts discussing these, using topics that began with the letters A through Z. So, without further adieu...

Accent

In Britain, essentially everyone speaks English. Some Scottish people also speak Gaelic while some in Wales speak Welsh. For all the English speakers, there is a wide variety of accents. This is just like the USA where the people in various regions speak English with different accents. In reality you could say that the whole of the English speaking world speaks with different accents. The Scottish accent is different from the English accent which is different from the Welsh accent which is different from the American accent. There was a couple on our tour from Australia. They had yet another accent. And within these individual countries, there are regional accents. It is very interesting how different accents can be, yet still be understandable. However, there were those few cases where we met someone with such a thick accent, we could barely understand them. Our tour guide, Tom, liked to say to our tour group, which was mostly Americans, "You people are the ones with the accent." Yet I dare say that there are citizens right there in Britain whose accent would stump other lifelong citizens of the UK.