
You Say Potato
A Book About Accents
Author: Ben Crystal, David Crystal
Narrator: Ben Crystal, David Crystal, Hilton McRae, Jane Savage
Unabridged: 7 hr 5 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 05/21/2015
Categories: Nonfiction, Language Arts, Linguistics
Synopsis
He says bath, while she says bahth.
You say potayto. I say potahto
And-
-wait a second, no one says potahto. No one's ever said potahto.
Have they?
From reconstructing Shakespeare's accent to the rise and fall of Received Pronunciation, actor Ben Crystal and his linguist father David travel the world in search of the stories of spoken English.
Everyone has an accent, though many of us think we don't. We all have our likes and dislikes about the way other people speak, and everyone has something to say about 'correct' pronunciation. But how did all these accents come about, and why do people feel so strongly about them? Are regional accents dying out as English becomes a global language? And most importantly of all: what went wrong in Birmingham?
Witty, authoritative and jam-packed full of fascinating facts, You Say Potato is a celebration of the myriad ways in which the English language is spoken - and how our accents, in so many ways, speak louder than words.