Bristol: Encyclopedia II - Bristol - Dialect

Bristol - Dialect

Many Bristolians speak a distinctive dialect of English (known colloquially as Brizzle or Bristle). Uniquely for an urban area of Britain, this is a rhotic dialect, in which the r in words like car is pronounced. It is perhaps this element of the dialect which has led outsiders to dub it "farmer speech".

The most unusual feature of this dialect, unique to Bristol, is the Bristol L (or Terminal L), in which an L sound is appended to words that end in a letter a. Thus "area" becomes "areal", etc. This may lead to confusions between expressions like area engineer and aerial engineer which in "Bristle" sound identical. Other examples include 'Americal' and 'Canadal', and, when unsure, the answer 'I have no ideal'. In the same way, the Swedish Ikea is known by some as 'Ikeal'. This is how the city's name evolved from Brycgstow to have a final 'L' sound: Bristol.

Another Bristolian linguistic feature is the addition of a superfluous “to” in questions relating to direction or orientation. For example, “Where’s that?” would be phrased as “Where’s that to?” and “Where’s the park?” would become “Where’s the park to?”. Interestingly, this speech feature is very predominate in Newfoundland English, where many of that islands early European inhabitants originated from Bristol and other West Country ports and lived there in relative isolation in the centuries to follow.

For a full listing of all of Bristol's colloquialisms vist: That Be Bristol - Dictionary

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Dialect", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki