Funetics!

In the 1970s a series of books (well, they were more like pamphlets really) were published that illustrated local English dialects by making fun of them, not in a nasty way, but affectionately, by people who wanted to record local phrases and pronunciations before they disappeared. One of the first was “Krek Waiter’s Peak Bristle” (translate as “Correct Way to Speak Bristol), which included such useful terms as “Bem Breckfuss”, and “Count’s Louse”.

There were three “Bristle” books, and these were followed by others, including “Arfur Tow Crate in Staffy Cher”, which also spawned a sequel. While “Bristle” made great play of the Bristol ‘added l’ (for those who don’t know, many words ending in schwa have /l/ added to them – including Bristol itself, which was earlier “Bristow”), the Staffy Cher books were able to draw on the vowel system of Stoke on Trent (Potteries) dialect as well as its grammatical idiosyncracies, and unlike the Bristol examples, they need to be ‘translated’: “Dine thar straight” (‘down thy street’), “Kind Slice” (see “Count’s Louse” above) “Eye Straight” and “Eye Lean” (High Street and High Lane).

Apart from poking fun, these books actually demonstrate some aspects of English phonology that turn up even in more standard forms of the language – so “Bem Breckfuss” includes the assimilation of alveolars to labials, and both “Count’s Louse” and “Kind Slice” shows the frequent interpolation of a plosive between a nasal and a sibilant. Non-phoneticians are often surprised to learn that their speech also exhibits these features.