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Here's the Mancunian Way for today:
Hello and welcome,
“You’re dead posh you,” my mate from Chorlton has told me many times.
“Err, you’re from Chorl-tun,” I consistently retort.
Well it turns out we’re both ‘posh’ and that’s not just inter-Mancunian politics at play - that’s science talking.
Dr Rob Drummond and a team of sociolinguists at Manchester Metropolitan University have spent three years researching how people speak across Greater Manchester, and crucially, what they think and feel about these accents. The results are fascinating.
The Manchester Voices team have identified four distinct Greater Manchester dialects - ‘Manc’, ‘Lancashire’, ‘Wigan’ and ‘posh’.
They recorded clips in a special ‘Accent Van’ and have mapped regional accents, identifying features of local accents to listen out for. The website that accompanies the project has poems, podcasts, a quiz and some historical archive recordings.
In the first stage of the research, during the COVID lockdowns, researchers asked more than 350 people to draw and describe the different accents and dialects on an online map. They also asked people to submit recordings of themselves speaking.
Those early findings showed that people think the ‘Manc’ accent is situated mostly in the city of Manchester itself, while residents of South Manchester, Trafford and Stockport are more likely to sound ‘posh’.
Residents of the northern boroughs of Bury, Bolton, Rochdale and Oldham are characterised as speaking ‘Lancashire’, while Wigan natives are thought to have a distinctive dialect all of their own – and are more likely to catch the ‘buz’ or read a ‘bewk’ than their GM neighbours.
One interviewee of the Accent Van team said local accents should be embraced. “Losing them makes us all the poorer," they said.
Another, from East Manchester, said there is ‘a definite assumption on your education and class dependent on how Mancunian your accent is’.
While a woman from central Manchester said: “I think Mancs are very territorial and I think it says a lot if someone says they’re from North or South Manchester. That sort of gives you a background on who they are.”
Another, who identifies himself as a ‘working class lad from Asthon’ says he thinks he would be seen as ‘a bit of a yokel’ if he went ‘down south’.
He also says that when he first moved to Audenshaw ‘somebody asked me if I was Scottish and I’d moved two miles up the road’.
Dr Rob Drummond, lead researcher on Manchester Voices and reader in Sociolinguistics at MMU says it's been ‘an absolute pleasure’ working on the project.
“We are extremely proud of the resource in Central Library, and hope that people will use it for years to come to find out more about local language in the 2020s,” he says.
The project provides a unique insight not just into the way we speak, but the sense of identity an accent gives us and the prejudices it can create.
Growing up in south Manchester, with a lighter accent, I definitely felt a bit judged by schoolmates with stronger accents. The mate who called me ‘posh’ was not using it as a compliment.
I certainly made an effort to be more Manc by the time I reached high school. So it’s interesting for me to hear the thoughts of neighbours who say they have been judged negatively for having a stronger accent.
And let's not forget that just last week, we heard Ben Jones’ experience of starting university with a Stockport accent. “It is certainly something that people judge you on, they assume that it means you are not well-educated or cultured. The minute you open your mouth – literally – you have a disadvantage. Someone I had just met once asked me whether my home town was one of those desolate wastelands where the factories used to be. All this ultimately led me to modify the way I spoke at university to fit in,” said Ben, who contributed to the Sutton Trust’s Speaking Up report.
The permanent historic record of how Greater Mancunians spoke in the 2020s is now available online and at Manchester Central Library.
He's here!
Father Christmas has landed in Manchester.
A massive likeness of Santa has been erected in front of Central Library and city centre reporter Ethan Davies was there to record the action.
Ethan bravely clambered atop a cherry picker to get a better look at Santa this morning and you can watch the video of his experience here.
Those who build the giant structure each year says this Santa is much easier to put together than 'Zippy', who was apparently 20-metres high before they even started building him.
Potholes the size of canyons
Princess Road has always been one of the busiest routes in Manchester and, as such, has suffered from potholes.
But the gaps currently littering the stretch of the A5103 between Didsbury and the city centre have been compared to canyons. And that description has come from no other than Happy Mondays ‘vibesman’ Bez.
He recently told writer Ben Arnold : “You go down Princess Parkway, they’re like canyons. They’re beyond potholes.”
Quick on the case, lifestyle editor Dianne Bourne decided to investigate further and has found out from Manchester Council that the road will be repaired - but not until January.
Council bosses insist the road is ‘structurally safe’, despite the ‘visual deterioration’ but repair work will begin in the new year when lanes will have to be closed.
A 'happy, smiley baby'
Reporter Stephen Topping has been investigating the tragic death of toddler Awaab Ishak since the case was first mentioned at Rochdale Coroners’ Court earlier this year.
Awaab died just eight days after his second birthday on December 21, 2020.
Medics, housing bosses and loved ones have been giving evidence at an inquest, which is continuing this week.
The little boy breathed in severe levels of mould at his home on the Freehold estate, which is owned and managed by Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBH). It is the same estate where Stephen spoke to families whose children had also suffered breathing difficulties, as they were engulfed in their own battles with damp and mould.
Awaab's family made several complaints and requests to move home before his death, his inquest has heard. After struggling with his breathing, Awaab was admitted to hospital on December 19, 2020, and discharged the following morning.
But he returned the next day, when he was pronounced dead after suffering a cardiac arrest brought on by respiratory failure.
Coroner Joanne Kearsley is due to give a conclusion based on the evidence this week. You can read a round-up of all the key evidence heard so far here.
Ready to go but stuck
‘Every day’ Greater Manchester hospitals are packed with 1,000 patients who are medically allowed to be discharged but cannot be, a senior health chief has revealed.
As Helena Vesty reports, there are high numbers of people in hospital beds with Covid-19 meaning bed numbers are being perilously squeezed.
Steve Dixon, chief delivery officer for Greater Manchester NHS, last week warned that ‘all parts of the health and care system are under significant pressure’ as it heads into winter. And bosses are spending millions on trying to discharge people from hospital before a cold snap begins.
“We know that on any given day, we have around 1,000 in a hospital bed who are ready to go home. And for one reason or another, those patients do not go home on the day that they are ready to go home,” Mr Dixon told a joint health scrutiny committee last Wednesday.
“There is a significant amount of work and effort around discharge and flow, that includes working with social care, voluntary sector, families, working with the care home and domiciliary care - but a main focus on discharge and flow."
Written off
Shadow Levelling Up Secretary Lisa Nandy says the way her local council in Wigan transformed its public services can inspire Labour's plans to ‘reimagine the state and smash up a century of centralisation’.
The Wigan MP told the Locality Convention in Sheffield that the 'Wigan Deal', introduced to reshape council services as austerity cuts kicked in from 2010, was ‘what we need at national level as well’.
Setting out Labour's vision if it gets into government, she compared Britain to ‘a football team trying to score a goal but with only a couple of players allowed to touch the ball’, with the contribution of most people and most places ‘written off’ because of regional inequalities.
The Labour frontbencher, who was elected in 2010, said a partnership between the state and local communities was needed if the changes needed to transform left-behind areas were to become reality.
You can read more on this story from Northern Agenda editor Rob Parsons here.
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Weather etc
- Tuesday: Light showers changing to partly cloudy by early evening. 12C.
- Road closures: A single lane of the eastbound carriageway of the Mancunian Way, after the A6 junction, will be closed between 8pm and 5am tonight for urgent repairs. A single lane on the westbound carriageway, after the Princess Road junction, will also be closed.
- Trivia question: Which architect and designer of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, also designed the Imperial War Museum North?
Manchester headlines
Death at car wash: A homeless man has been found dead in a vehicle behind a car wash in east Manchester. Emergency services attended the Hand Car Wash & Valeting Centre, on Hyde Road, at around 8.15am. Police say a man, believed to be 40, was pronounced dead at the scene. Officers are now working to track down his next of kin. There are not believed to be any suspicious circumstances surrounding his death.
Sceptre: A huge operation to tackle knife crime across Greater Manchester will target ‘hotspots’ this week. Operation Sceptre will see Greater Manchester Police step up efforts to tackle knife crime, with undercover operations, knife arches, stop and searches and weapon sweeps used to crack down. The action follows a number of recent tragedies in the area - including the death of a 19-year-old who was stabbed to death on Wilmslow Road, in Fallowfield.
A cool £30m: The two sold-out concerts Harry Styles played at Emirates Old Trafford this summer helped give Manchester's economy a near £30m boost. Gigs from The Killers and Red Hot Chilli Peppers also contributed, as well as five T20 Blast games, four Hundred matches, an England test match against South Africa and two one day internationals. The figures have been compiled by Marketing Manchester, the not-for-profit agency charged with promoting Greater Manchester on a national and international stage.
Debenhams: AM alpha, the company leading the planned £70m transformation of the iconic former Debenhams store, in Manchester city centre, say work to turn the building into a mixed-use development comprising retail, leisure and office space will start next year. The Rylands building, on the corner of Market Street and High Street, has been empty since the chain entered administration in December 2020. Debenhams was later bought by Boohoo but all its stores were closed.
Worth a read
A ‘rancid’ stench, brazen dealers peddling drugs in plain sight and a broken front door for six months - that has become the sad reality of life for people living in a north Manchester tower block.
Plagued by drug users ‘shooting up’ outside their flats and machete-wielding gangs running loose outside, fed-up tenants in Kingsbridge Court, Harpurhey, say they no longer feel safe in their own homes.
"They are dealing outside the building on an every day basis," said David Gardner, who has called Kingsbridge Court home for more than two decades. "Some of the tenants have been accosted trying to run back from the shops."
Reporter Tom George has been speaking to tenants for this feature, who claim their concerns have fallen on deaf ears.
That's all for today
Thanks for joining me. If you have stories you would like us to look into, email beth.abbit@menmedia.co.uk.
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The answer to today's trivia question is: Daniel Libeskind.
