Puneet Varma (Editor)

Manningham accent

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The Manningham accent, a.k.a. the Bradford-Asian accent is a sub-dialect of the Yorkshire dialect, spoken and used primarily in Manningham and Frizinghall, with significant users in Shipley and other smaller areas outside Bradford city.

Background

Coalescing primarily among people with third-generation British-Pakistani heritage in Manningham roughly around the turn of the millennia in 2000, the Manningham Accent combines grammatical and phonological foundations of the Yorkshire dialect which among the less aspirated dialects of English with similar aspiration of certain consonants and vowel pronunciation of languages such as Punjabi and Urdu: it frequently omits the definite and indefinite article as well as prepositions which are today found in the most cosmopolitan (social context-levelled) Yorkshire dialects. First developed within the Pakistani community of Manningham, this topolect equally is cognate with the dialect spoken by the British-Bangladeshi community who represent a small proportion of the overall population and have a large proportion of the homes in a particular ward of the Metropolitan Borough including Manningham Road and Lumb Lane.

This topolect developed in Manningham, Frizinghall, many parts of Shipley and other outer areas of Bradford (distinct from the regional ethnolect of the British-Pakistani and British-Bangladeshi communities) from greater than average social homogeneity in educational and formative years' between these community groups and users of the older topolect which varied significantly in vowels and idioms from standard varieties of English. To an extent the dialect has drawn on in some respects more standard and South-Asian English dialects of older relatives for learning and entrenchment of its own speech patterns, idioms and vowel pronunciations.

References

Manningham accent Wikipedia