I find accents very interesting, and this book did well to cover the subject from multiple angles. ( )

I was born in the East Midlands, was an undergraduate in the West Midlands, and now work in the West Country. I've lived with Indians, Chinese, Poles, and Yorkshiremen. And I've spent plenty of time in Oxford and the US. What then of my accent? Presumably it's an appalling mess, drifting around the globe like a tectonic plate on speed. But no, it's basically the same as it was when I was a kid, but a little more neutral.

I grew up in Lincolnshire, a fairly rural county with a fairly rural accent. When an American friend of mine first met my grandparents she nodded along with the conversation, not really saying much. I thought she'd come over uncharacteristically shy, but she admitted later that she simply hadn't understood a word that my grandparents said. My parents' accents are a little less pronounced, and mine even less so. Of course, everyone thinks they don't have an accent. But they're all wrong, everyone does have an accent. Except me, I really don't. No, really!

If you find the topic of accents interesting then you'll probably quite enjoy I Say Potato by Ben and David Crystal. I wish I could say something more profound, but it really is that simple. It offers some insights into the history of accents in the English-speaking world, as well as how attitudes towards various accents have changed over the years.

It's not a long book, and it does drag its feet occasionally. There are several chunks of the book where it attempts to point out with text the subtle differences between accents around the UK and later around the globe. “People from here say ‘aaah’ while people from there say ‘oooh’,” it says; meanwhile people reading say ‘zzzz’.

Oh, and then there's the worst part of the book. Having been lured in by Al Murphy's lovely illustrations on the cover, the book then utterly fails to have any on the pages. Boo!

( )

I was born in the East Midlands, was an undergraduate in the West Midlands, and now work in the West Country. I've lived with Indians, Chinese, Poles, and Yorkshiremen. And I've spent plenty of time in Oxford and the US. What then of my accent? Presumably it's an appalling mess, drifting around the globe like a tectonic plate on speed. But no, it's basically the same as it was when I was a kid, but a little more neutral.

I grew up in Lincolnshire, a fairly rural county with a fairly rural accent. When an American friend of mine first met my grandparents she nodded along with the conversation, not really saying much. I thought she'd come over uncharacteristically shy, but she admitted later that she simply hadn't understood a word that my grandparents said. My parents' accents are a little less pronounced, and mine even less so. Of course, everyone thinks they don't have an accent. But they're all wrong, everyone does have an accent. Except me, I really don't. No, really!

If you find the topic of accents interesting then you'll probably quite enjoy I Say Potato by Ben and David Crystal. I wish I could say something more profound, but it really is that simple. It offers some insights into the history of accents in the English-speaking world, as well as how attitudes towards various accents have changed over the years.

It's not a long book, and it does drag its feet occasionally. There are several chunks of the book where it attempts to point out with text the subtle differences between accents around the UK and later around the globe. “People from here say ‘aaah’ while people from there say ‘oooh’,” it says; meanwhile people reading say ‘zzzz’.

Oh, and then there's the worst part of the book. Having been lured in by Al Murphy's lovely illustrations on the cover, the book then utterly fails to have any on the pages. Boo!

( )

This "book about accents" is really mostly about UK accents, and I think is going to be of limited interest to most of my fellow Americans, unless they happen to be real Anglophiles or language nerds. Fortunately, I'm kind of both, so I found it at least mildly interesting, but not, I confess, nearly as interesting as I would have found a book about the accents of my home country. Even if we do have fewer of them.

Anyway, the authors are a father-and-son team of a linguist (David) and an actor (Ben), both of which have an obvious professional interest in the subject. It's written in a very breezy, informal style in which they pass the writing back and forth to each other, with David getting a little bit into the linguistic details of various accents, and Ben tossing out stories about his acting experiences, or sharing conversations he's had with other actors about using or not using their native accents. Both of them talk quite a bit about how various accents are perceived, and how those perceptions are changing.

Its all very light and readable, which isn't a bad thing. I've read some of David's solo books, and while they're interesting, they can get a bit dry. But I think it really goes a little bit far on the casual, chatty style and ends up feeling very slight. It's not bad, but it did leave me wishing for something a little meatier.

I was very interested, though, by Ben's impassioned discussion about performing Shakespeare using the pronunciation that the words would have had in Shakespeare's day. I got curious to hear some of this while I was reading about it, so I looked it up, and found a video of Ben Crystal himself doing Hamlet's most famous soliloquy in this fashion. I have to say, it wasn't at all what I expected, and it's weirdly appealing. ( )

_ Hello. I'm David Crystal. I'm a linguist and I was so taken aback when my son Ben said gaRAZH rather than GAREidge that I asked him to write this book with me. He's lived in the US and is younger than I and so is well qualified to address the topic of accents. I'm not altother an old fogey, though, as I'll prove by referring to some with-it Hollywood films.

_ Hi. Ben here. I'll be telling you about various voice-over jobs I've had and, because I'm a droll sort, about the jobs I failed to land or was let go from. I've lived in Gloucester, Caerphilly, and Leicester and though I can speak in the accents of all those places beneath it all my speech is RP.

_ Indeed. I think readers will be pleased to learn that we'll be discussing at bemusing length a Shakespeare project in which we both took part.

_ That's right. Dad will go into the technical details and I'll amuse you by telling you about the acting roles I did and didn't get in the project.

_ Ben, I don't suppose you're aware of having just said pruhJEKT, not PROjekt?

_ Darn it, Dad!

(Audience laughter. Strings playing something anodyne as closing credits roll.)