My first job when I left school was working as a trainee television aerial rigger for a company called Fred Dawes in Manchester. From it's base in central Manchester you only had to travel a few miles down the road to somewhere like Oldham, Denton, Wigan, or dare I say it, Bury, and I could have been in a strange country.
Every town had it's own distinctive dialect which until you got used to it could have been a foreign language and difficult to understand.
The same still applies to a lesser extent today. Every part of the British isles has it's own dialect, whether it be Kent Liverpool Glasgow Birmingham or even Manchester. I love the diversity of our language, whether it be the whine of one town, the gentle burr of another, or the harsh guttural sound of another. Yet how often is somebody judged purely on the sound coming out of their mouths at the first meeting, particularly when talking to a stranger on the telephone?
