The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #168377   Message #4068155
Posted By: Howard Jones
12-Aug-20 - 03:51 PM
Thread Name: BS: English as taught in Nordic countries
Subject: RE: BS: English as taught in Nordic countries
England is too small to distinguish between districts and regions. East Anglia is a distinctive part of the country, but it's only about 150 miles from London to the Norfolk coast. In that journey you'd pass through at least four areas with with recognisably distinctive accents and dialects (Estuary English, rural Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk), and countless more local variations which are probably noticeable only to locals or experts in language. When people moved around less, there was a noticeable physical difference between "pudden-head" Angles from Suffolk and Norfolk and "coffin-head" Saxons from Essex.

I grew up in Essex (not far from where the Mayflower pilgrims gathered) and I use all the words Leeneia listed, with the exception of "snuck", which I think of as American usage rather than associating it with the 17th century. I'd use "mad" in the sense of being angry but not quite the way Americans do, as a direct alternative to angry, but in phrases like "so-and-so drives me mad".