Rich Round 0 It is becoming possible to believe that
regional language, too, will remain as a permanent baffle- ment in this tiny island. There was a time when we Cassandras were sure that local accents would inevitably be smoothed flat by the onrush of tele- vision and such-like, but television itself has helped to restore the courage of Scouse-ism and Geordiana and the dense guttural of the Glas- gow keelie. I like to think we can remain an island of phonetic oddities, each of us convinced that everybody else has 'an accent' while we speak the pure, the undiluted mother tongue, When I was working in London the other day with a Welsh recording engineer, I was startled to hear him say to one of his mates, 'Right, mon, we'll have a wee toty bit of prrojector the nu, ock aye!' under the weird impression that this was a colourable facsimile of my own elegantly bland diction. But I enjoyed his delusion. Long gone are the days when I argued for hours with a Yorkshire brother-in-law who insisted that 'form' had only two consonants, and that the function of the 'r' was simply to lengthen the vowel. I have also stopped guffawing at Cockneys whose version of French includes such gems as `moi-r-et vous. In Scotland, we speak beautiful French because we speak plain English, of course, and pronounce 'o' rich and round, as in pure French. But not every Frenchman does.
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