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The 大象传媒 Voices team have been hard at work trying to discover
which celebrities have the most appealing voices. Nationwide, nearly 5000
people were asked a variety of questions about their attitudes to accent,
dialect and the way we speak.
| Voices Fact Box |
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If you speak more than one language scientists suggest
you are less likely to develop Alzheimer's.
Women talk 'posher'. In every studied language of the world, females
use more 'prestige', 'standard' forms of language.
The Scots dialect has at least 75 different ways of expressing tiredness
- a few of them - bauch, daviely, defait, dirt deen, fornyward聟.
Welsh was frequently heard in the English court at the time of Henry
V11 and was the language of a Downing Street inner circle when Llloyd
George was Prime Minister
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Super smooth Sean Connery wins most pleasant voice category
at a canter, with Terry Wogan, Trevor McDonald, Moira Stewart and Hugh Grant
also in the top five.
Northern Irish Reverend Ian Paisley was top of the could
do better category, closely followed by Billy Connolly, Janet Street-Porter,
Cilla Black and Jasper Carrott.
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| We weren't
so keen on Ian Paisley's tone |
But what about us? What do we think of our own accent?
Most of us - over 60% - think we have some kind of accent, with 4% considering
their accent to be very strong.
Some respondents described their accents as: "Not
very posh - don't pronounce the H in why, or pronouce hello "hair-lair"
etc."
And some people felt they had lost the richness of local
dialect altogether descibing their accent as: "Boring,
one tone and dull, there's no real regional definition
to it apart from Southern."
And perhaps worse one respondent felt "Very
slightly between a Hampshire Hog and a Country Bumkin."
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