The UK’s most relaxing accent has been revealed, and we’ve just missed out on the top spot.
With its roots in Old English and Old Norse, we’ve always thought that the Yorkshire dialect was pretty damn special.
Of course, we’re biased, but now there’s some new evidence to back us up.
And that’s because a new study carried out by Spa Seekers, in collaboration with an expert from the University of Sheffield, has revealed the most relaxing accents in the UK.
Unfortunately, we just missed out on the coveted top spot which went to the Welsh accent.
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But our smooth dulcet tones won us joint second place with the Cornish accent, and that’s an accolade we are gladly going to accept.
Northern Irish and received pronunciation (RP) came in just underneath, rounding off the top five.
The survey asked a group of 1,502 nationally representative people to rank 15 UK accents from most to least relaxing.
Dr Chris Montgomery, a senior lecturer in dialectology at the university, said that no accents “have inherent parts that makes them relaxing”.
“It’s the connotations that they have that people learn over time. With the Welsh accent, people probably go to Wales, they might go on holiday. They come to Wales to the countryside, associate it with being in that place, going to the beach, perhaps being in Snowdonia or the other national parks.
“Essentially, what you’ve got is a number of different accent names, you’ve got a number of different scales and then people rate on those scales. And then we looked at what the rank ordering was”
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Featured image – Unsplash