“You Say Potato – The Story of English Accents”  by Ben Crystal and  David Crystal

I first met David Crystal at the start up of the Globe Theatre.   There were fascinating talks on how Shakespeare wrote his work and how the actors would sometimes go on with the just written script in their hand – (not too disimilar from today, when actors sometimes learn script changes  while in make up).   Thanks to David Crystal we would hear how the words sounded in Shakespeare’s time.
I met his son Ben Crystal when I was doing phonetics at UCL.  ‘You Say Potato’  is never boring, an endlessly fascinating book and never pompous and often funny.
Ben Crystal describes his accent as ‘modified RP,  a slightly rougher version of Received Pronunciation.” This is becoming the norm in our standard English speech.  He writes of influences on his speech:
“I was born in Ascot, raised near Reading and grew up in North Wales.  I went to university in Lancaster and I also have their short ‘a’ in my accent….After travelling in the States, I often tell my dawg to seddle down while I boil the keddle.”
If you want to take the mystique out of English accents, understand the difference between accents and dialects and want to understand a bit more about your unique way of talking in English, then this is the book for you.  No way of talking is perfect, but you are perfect in the way you talk.  Click below for details on You Say Potato.