Shadowing Practice: 1976: NORTHUMBERLAND accents | Word of Mouth | Voice of the People | BBC Archive - Learn English Speaking with Video
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For all the viewers who don't live in the north-east of England, it is, in a sense, time for a song, because I think this is a lovely accent, which you could indeed put to music.
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It's spoken by thousands of people, now, every day of their lives.
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But to those not used to it, it's probably a little hard to follow at first.
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It's the sort of accent which, although rich and resolute, does in the end make you grateful that we all also understand the Queen's English.
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This isn't a condemnation, far from it.
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I grew up in a neighbouring county and I loved it.
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But for everyone south of the Tees and north of the Tweed, It is quite tough on the air.
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So up north, Northumberland.
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He's far away from more sheep this afternoon.
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If he doesn't get his cell in shortly, the heat will get him down.
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Then if I drive with the heat, you better start all in his gym, get your sheep in before the heat gets up, and then he can walk away after that.
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Oh, yeah.
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Oh, yeah.
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We're not here because we want to be here, OK?
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We've got to do something.
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You've got to live, you know?
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What a living.
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It gets home at the end of season capital D.
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Eight percent.
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That's not...
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You know, I don't think we wouldn't do, is it?
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Pretty sure they wouldn't.
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I couldn't have that.
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You said it wasn't.
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Oh no, like we're not.
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We just, you know, you have to.
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But I don't think I could have a, you know, eight to five job.
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Yeah.
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Such as putting car wheels on, fixing batteries up, you know.
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From eight to five, I couldn't do that.
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It's just not my type of work.
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That type of work is shearing.
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They work as a team, wandering across the Chiviotts every spring in the hope of making
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making enough money in three months to last them apart from a few odd jobs for the rest of the year
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their voices with those rolling hours pronounced from somewhere deep at
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the back of the throat aren't easy to follow it's an accent that's sometimes taken for scottish
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and sometimes for the harsher urban milt of tyneside and it's a way of life that's dominated by the sheep
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Shall never die out the sheep.
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We spent our time making these shepherds walking sticks.
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This is how it starts to be with the ram's horn.
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Then this is a post a little bit farther advanced.
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It's a little bit further down and straightened up.
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And it still has this bit twist on.
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But after we get them boiled and warmed and hot, we can get them passed together.
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These were put in the long winter nights where when I was a youngster, I was a shepherd in the upper Cougar Hill.
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When I was brought up there and this is what we spent the long winter nights with, make carving working sticks.
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This is the sort of stick that I like to work with, a good playing stick.
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They're a great help when you're a shepherd on the hill to have a really good stick to work with.
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It's a skilled job being a shepherd.
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You can't just get a dog on a stick and say, well, I'm going to be a shepherd.
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It just doesn't work that way.
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It's a slither thing, it's just bright into it.
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Your father that's here, he is a shepherd, his grandfather was a shepherd, his great grandfather on both sides were shepherds.
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It's a way of life that may seem unchanging, but the decline of the hill farmer has brought problems for the hill shepherd.
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I'll tell you what's wrong with other hill places.
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There should be resident tenants.
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If there was an tenants, they would get men under them.
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Nationalise other hill places and let the herds have them.
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That's what I said.
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That's good for the country, that.
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If you're going to nationalise them, that'll be the end of all the work.
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There'll be no good shepherds left either.
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It's not the young man that'll get us.
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They want to give them a decent living to get out there.
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their conversation still reflects their work and their pride in their skills even
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when they're relaxing over what in Northumberland they call their bait.
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He clips a different stale of what you think?
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What clips the hand-brewed stale?
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The right hand stale, the burn stale, the Guffrey burn stale.
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He's out right hand it and the way up the back burn.
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Martin, Martin.
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He's about six foot nine isn't he?
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That's a big jury sitting out with him, with the feet flat across the floor and it'll be a I've done my deceit.
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Man bought him, he says, Furley's hellopman, give a man a seat.
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He couldn't get banged.
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His bloody feet hit from the window, right to the bar.
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He says, man, burp.
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Them two dunes, I might have thought about it.
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Hell, what's different from there wasn't chuck and cheese?
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Well, there was, yeah.
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Burp was a comic in short.
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He was a soft-haired, bad-dummed flavour.
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He was.
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We had a clipping gang, you know, used to go and whip that cricket.
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He went away in the morning and came back on a Saturday night to kill the sheep.
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And he had mutten for your breakfast, mutten for your dinner, mutten for your tea and mutten for your supper.
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And there was three days he was nearly bleeding.
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And there was a couple of that day when he was fishing.
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I'll shut those gates.
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We'll let them shut those gates.
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We have three there.
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I think we have five there.
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No, no, no. Take a bear, boy.
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So I wonder how many people, if they turned on in the middle of that piece of film, would have realised that it was in England now?
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Oh, probably not.
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I can remember the first time I went to Northumberland, being absolutely unable to understand the word that was said.
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I went to one of the fishing communities on the coast, couldn't understand the word.
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And later on I learned to love it and got to know these same people up in the hills, these shepherds.
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And particularly I remember a piper.
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These Northumberian pipes, they played with the bellows, you don't blow down them, played with the bellows under one arm and the bag under the other.
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And they're really for playing inside the house.
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One old chap said to me that they weren't like the Scottish pipes, They were nutsy squally in the hoofs, rather lovely.
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But it really is a way of life.
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And I think for lots and lots of people, many, many words there will be quite unintelligible.
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All right, well, let's get cracking on that, because we have to sort of try to decipher, in a way, what was said.
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Now, going through that film, can you just pick out, you've made a lot of notes, pick out some of the words and tell us about what they came from, what they meant and that sort of thing.
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Yeah, but in fact there wasn't a great deal of vocabulary that was unusual.
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It was the way of the pronunciation.
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Again, the brr, the thing as you mentioned is deep down in the throat.
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Now the effect of that is to pull back the vowel sounds that are related to it.
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So when they say afternoon, instead of saying er, the rr pulls it back and they say afternoon.
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And as soon as somebody said that rr sound, the next two or three syllables become terribly difficult to understand, and you're really thrown.
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And words like work become walk, and then the effect of the W initially in a word when an a sound follows it.
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In the standard language, we've undergone what we call a rounding, so quarry has resulted from what was earlier quarry.
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They would still say quarry, and you notice one of them said whack.
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Now whack is our modern word in standard English, walk.
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And even the ordinary short sounds like in a word like not becomes nut, nut but a lovely sort of rounded sound, which doesn't exist, that er sound,
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in standard English at all.
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One of the things, though, that I noticed, maybe just with these particular men,
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but a characteristic of most country speech is slowness of delivery and evenness of delivery.
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But these men were speaking very quickly all the time.
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Yeah, they were obviously eavesdropped on and were in quite a relaxed mood.
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I think Northumbrians give you the impression of speaking quickly, because you have to listen to them so hard.
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Those chaps who were lying back eating their sandwiches over dinner time, they weren't really talking fast.
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They were discussing what ought to happen to the land.
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And you notice one of them said they ought to give it to the herds.
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The herds is the shepherds.
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The second part of the word shepherd, the herds.
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But they say herd.
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How do you spell that?
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How do you spell it? Or herd.
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Well, you can't spell it.
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Herd, yes.
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It's H-E-R-D, I suppose.
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It's the second part of shepherd, you see, the herd but say harb, and the r has that interruption.
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And then what was it they said?
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They went and give them a decent living to gan out there.
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To gan out, yes.
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Yeah, to gan out there.
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And of course this gan is another of these examples of the preservation of an old form,
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to gan, the old infinitive which has gone out in standard English and has given us our modern word, to go.
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And so you've got this conservative element, much of it literally unchanged over a thousand years,
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going back unchanged all that time.
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We'll listen to a man now who specialises in using the Northumbrian vocabulary, back to Northumberland, and to Fred Reid.
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Fred Reid used to be a coal miner.
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He's retired now and in his seventies.
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His poems are all in the dialect, using local words, skilfully and, I think, movingly.
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The Northumbrian literary tradition that Fred Reid represents is urban, but it's not the voice of Tyneside.
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It comes from the east coast of Northumberland around Ashington and Blythe, where, towards the end of the last century, new mining communities sprang up.
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As a boy, Fred Reid's first job was down this Ashington pit.
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One old chap used to put himself in the dark, and I could hear him in the pitch darkness,
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his tremulous, teen sort of voice with a childlike intonation saying, the Lord's my shepherd, HX care of me.
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I soon learned what was meant by the phrase,
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quite a number of phrases used down the pit are used on the surface,
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but they have a metaphorical, they're similes.
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It's not the same meaning as down the pit.
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For instance, if someone says to you, take your pipe till the reek hands out,
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that means that you've retired after lighting a squib, and you mustn't go into the place again until the reek's cleared away.
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Now, that's what it means down the pit.
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But on the surface it means, well, keep your head, keep your cool.
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Just hold on a bit, don't lose your temper temper, don't get hotted up.
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And then such phrases as bumping the debodice kissed has a different meaning.
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It means that you don't get your own way on the surface.
Why This Northumberland Accent Clip Is Perfect for Speaking Practice
This video isn’t just a window into a unique way of life—it’s a goldmine for English learners. The warm, rolling Northumberland accent is rich with natural rhythm and colloquial phrasing, making it ideal for practicing shadowing technique. Unlike scripted content, the dialogue feels real: shepherds chatting about work, tools, and daily struggles. This authenticity helps you pick up how native speakers actually sound when they’re relaxed, not just how they “should” speak. Plus, the mix of slow, deliberate explanations and quick back-and-forths gives you a chance to practice both pacing and intonation.
Breaking Down the Natural Flow: 3 Key Phrases
- “We're not here because we want to be here, OK? We've got to do something. You've got to live, you know?” This exchange uses short, repetitive sentences and casual tags like “OK” and “you know”—common in everyday speech. Notice how the speakers don’t pause between thoughts, mimicking the flow of real conversation. Repeating this helps you sound less robotic and more like a native.
- “It's a skilled job being a shepherd. You can't just get a dog on a stick and say, well, I'm going to be a shepherd.” The contrast between a statement and a playful exaggeration (“get a dog on a stick”) shows how native speakers use humor and emphasis. Pay attention to the rise in tone on “well”—it adds personality, which is key to natural speaking.
- “These were put in the long winter nights where when I was a youngster, I was a shepherd in the upper Cougar Hill.” This sentence has a “rambling” structure, typical of storytelling. Native speakers often add extra details mid-sentence, and practicing this helps you feel comfortable with imperfect, human speech patterns.
Your Simple Shadowing Routine for This Video
Ready to try shadow speak? Start by watching the video once to get the gist. Then, play a 5-second clip, pause, and repeat it immediately—mimicking the accent, pace, and even the pauses. Record yourself (a shadowing app can help track progress!) and compare it to the original. Focus on the deep, throaty vowels (“sheep,” “hill”) and the way words blend together (“got to” becomes “gotta”). Do this for 10 minutes a day, and you’ll notice your pronunciation and fluency improve. Remember: the goal isn’t to sound exactly like a Northumberland shepherd—it’s to learn how to adapt to different accents and speak with confidence. Learn English with videos like this, and you’ll be well on your way to sounding natural in any conversation.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.