The BBC 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 | 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
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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 |
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.  | | 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." |
