Hey, Mr. Red:

My grandma never lost her Yorkshire accent, even though she lived 83 years in Canada. Having grown up hearing those garbled syllables over the Sunday roast, I expect to handle the language issue fairly well. In the meantime, I keep in practice by watching Heartbeat and Dalziel & Pascoe.

However, I have a friend who went to study at the University of York. When she arrived, she took a cab from the train station to the uni. The driver chatted to her all the way in a strong Yorkshire accent and she started to panic, thinking she would never understand a word spoken to her in that city. Of course, her profs were toffs with accents that were more or less RP, so she had no problem.

Cheers, Hester