Hailing from North Yorkshire, where the folks are known for plain speaking and flat vowels, it took me a little while to become acclimatised to the Devonian accent. Fortunately, I’d already lived in Cheltenham in Southwest England for about five years, so I’d already gone south, and so had my accent. I’ve always had a tendency to pick up the accents of people around me, and when I bumped into an old school friend a few years ago, he informed me that I’d lost my original accent. My northern vowels can still return at times, especially if I’m visiting North Yorkshire for more than a few days, but I suppose my voice has landed somewhere in that neutral space between North and Southwest.
There have been a few notable incidents on my journey to assimilation into the Devon way of life. I distinctly remember a waitress in a tea room informing me, in her soft Devonian tones, that they’d run out of scones but could offer crumpets for afternoon tea. I was quite smitten with the lovely mellowness of her voice. Needless to say, I ordered the crumpets and was very happy with my lot.
A bit later on, in a hardware shop in Bovey Tracey, Mrs C and I were perusing the crammed rows of shelves when we heard a young man speaking loudly to some of the shop staff. The shop was Bob Arnold’s, and it had a bold statement on its window, proclaiming it to be: “the shop that’s bigger than it looks.”
This was no idle boast. The shop went back a long way and the aisles were filled with pretty much anything you might need, from wood stain to pots and pans. It was the kind of place where you could find exactly the right hinges or screws for whatever project you were working on at the time.
The shop has closed now, of course, as many of these small independent shops have gone from high streets across the country, most of them put out of business by online shopping and out-of-town stores. It’s a pity, because we’ve lost something we’ll never get back.
In Bob Arnold’s emporium, there were usually two or three staff on duty, all of them men and, it’s fair to say, past middle age. They wore overalls which, in my memory, were brown, though they may also have been dark blue. These outfits were another lovely old-fashioned tradition that seems to have disappeared from shops.
The word “overall” seems to mean different things in different parts of the world, so picture something like a lab coat that a scientist might wear, but dark blue or a sort of muddy brown. If you went into a hardware shop or a bicycle shop, the chap behind the counter would be wearing one. My grandad worked in a factory where they made agricultural machinery and I believe he wore the same kind of overall at work. He also wore them while tinkering in one of his sheds (he had several), protecting his clothes as he fixed up something that had been broken.
But to go back to the hardwood shop and that youthful customer. He was quite a tall young man, with a strangely high-pitched Devon accent, and he was there to complain about the quality of a rat trap he’d bought recently. The trap had bent, apparently, and failed to catch its intended victim. This was a particular problem because, as he explained, he was having a competition with his mate to see who could catch the largest rat. I remember Mrs C and I sharing a look and thinking, There are rats so big they bend the traps? Where have we moved to? It was quite an eye-opener.
My next encounter with a very thick Devonian accent came after we’d moved to the house where we live now. I was pottering about in the garden, squatting down to weed the small flower bed near the fence. As I wielded my trowel to attack the offending dandelions and strands of ivy, a head suddenly appeared over the top of the fence. The man’s face was flushed, his skin darkened by the kind of sunburn you get from working outside all day, and his unruly mop of wiry hair gave him a slightly crazed look.
He launched into a loud speech in strange, guttural tones. Somewhat startled, I got to my feet, and because I couldn’t untangle a single word of what he’d said, I assumed it was a foreign language. I was on the verge of apologising for not speaking German, but then he spoke again. I picked out a word or two and realised he was English, just with a very strong accent.
My synapses caught up and decoded what he’d said. Apparently he’d heard the noise of me digging, perhaps the soil and stones rattling against the fence, and he’d assumed some kind of animal was scrabbling about and trying to get free. We exchanged a few words and I understood most of them.
The man was a local and I was to encounter him several times over the following years, often because he wanted something. He was well known for asking to use the telephone, as he didn’t have one in his house, and he’d sometimes ask people for a lift or to pick up some shopping. He often seemed quite brusque, but I think that was partly down to his manner of speech. He could also be kind.
One day I was driving to work when he appeared in the road, arm outstretched to stop me. I pulled up and opened the window, assuming he was after a lift or some shopping, but in fact he was holding out a metal clip designed to hold a cotter pin in place. A few days previously, he’d seen me struggling on my allotment with a big old rotavator (that’s a rotary cultivator, for those who don’t know), trying to fit one of the sets of blades to the shaft. He’d worked out that what I was missing was a new clip to hold the cotter pin in place, so he’d found one for me and waited in the road until I came past.
The man passed away years ago, but I still have that clip, and it’s still doing its job on the rotavator.
Intonation aside, many aspects of the Devon accent are relatively easy to understand, though they can sound confusing at first. Referring to a young girl as a “maid” is easy enough, and the same goes for “boy” for a man, although it’s pronounced more like “bey.” Somebody might say, “All right, bey?” Meaning, “Are you all right?” or “How are you?”
Online sources tell me that “maid” can be used for an adult woman, but I “haven’t come a cross that usage. I can say though, that “bey” is frequently used for men of any age. It’s part of a laddish culture, I suppose, standing in for words like “mate”, and not derogatory in any way.
The accent can be harder to follow when folks miss out words or rearrange them slightly, and it can take a moment for newcomers to glean the slightly obscured meaning. For instance, “Where’s that to?” or “Where’s he to?” means “Where is it?” or “Where has he gone?”
Words are also dropped in phrases such as “I’m going Exeter” instead of “I’m going to Exeter,” or “He’s going Newton Abbot.” Unusual, but not impossible to understand.
Then there are words you won’t hear anywhere else. The one that springs to mind is “dimpsy,” which refers to that quality of light in the early evening as the day heads towards dusk. People might say, “It’s going dimpsy,” meaning it’s time to put your car’s headlights on. Another sweet one is addressing somebody as “my lover,” which sounds a little direct but it’s just a friendly greeting and has no regard for age or gender.
Some commonly found Devonian words are corruptions. “Great” sometimes becomes “girt.” and “potatoes” becomes “teddies”. It’s claimed by some that “teddies” should refer only to King Edward potatoes, but I think it’s simply a corruption of “taters,” itself a corruption of “potatoes.”
Another corruption is the word “dreckly,” meaning “directly” in the sense of “I’ll do it directly” i.e. “I’ll do it in a moment.”
Another phrase I like is “proper job,” which you’d say to someone who’s done something well. Where I’m from, we’d say, “You’re doing a grand job” but “proper job” is more likely be a standalone phrase rather than a full sentence. Say you’ve dug a vegetable bed and prepared it nicely, a passing gardener might nod and say, “proper job.” There’s even a brand of ale named after it.
“Ee” or “er” generally mean “he” or “her”, but they can also refer to inanimate objects, especially “ee”. If you were bringing somebody a drink, for example, they might indicate the table and say, “Put ee there” or sometimes “Put ‘im on the table.”
This is by no means an exhaustive list; it’s simply a reflection of the phrases I’ve heard, and I’ve sometimes picked them up. In my books, The Devonshire Mysteries and The Devonshire Crime Thrillers, you’ll find references to characters who have trouble understanding one another at first. IN one of the mysteries, Alan teases Dan (a dyed-in-the-wool Londoner) when Dan unconsciously uses a Devonian phrase, and DC Spiller has to explain to a colleague from London that a local can’t understand his accent.
It’s my way of bringing my experiences into my stories, and I hope it adds something to the flavour.
Sadly, I think that a lot of localised accents and dialects are slowly being changed as people absorb the language they hear on television or online, and those distinctive voices of long ago are lost in the verbal muddle.
Perhaps the Devonian accent will fade in time, but if you visit Devon having read this, you won’t be surprised if somebody refers to you as “my lover” or “bey,” and you’ll know that “Proper job” is high praise indeed.
On the whole, Devon’s a friendly place, and I’m sure you’ll soon pick up the local language, wherever you’re to.
Thanks for reading.
Do you have and fascination words in the local dialect where you live?
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