I give you the ‘ough’…
The wind was rough along the lough as the ploughman fought through the snow, and though he hiccoughed and coughed, his work was thorough."
I give you the ‘ough’…
The wind was rough along the lough as the ploughman fought through the snow, and though he hiccoughed and coughed, his work was thorough."
“English is difficult, but it can be understood with tough thorough thought, though.”
And my brain just broke.
Once you’ve learnt all of them, you get to move onto the next level: British place names!
Where you not only get “everything is pronounced differently, because we stole them from different languages” but the addition of “then the locals pronounced it wrong for centuries and we stuck with it”.
When people pronounce Isleworth as Ah-yl-worth, rather than Ah-y-sil-worth, we know they are outsiders
I think “Looga-barooga” for Loughborough is an urban legend, but like the best urban legends it seems plausible.
I used to live close (Nottingham). Sounds like Lofbro in my mind.
My moment of shame was once working as a locum vet having to find an abattoir in Leominster. Stopping for directions and the first guy did not have a clue about what place I was talking about for way over a minute. Then said: “Oh! Lemsta!” and showed me the way…
For the lovers of the randomness of the English pronunciation
https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem.html
I’m a Midlander, it’s luff-bruh. 
I do like hearing non-Brits pronounce “Worcestershire”
Who wants to have a crack at some Yorkshire place names?
Exhibit A: Mytholmroyd
Actually, you wrote it better than me.
Wus-teh-sher (or Wus-teh-shah? writing phonetically in English is not my strength precisely)
I do tend to sneak an extra syllable in there to make it luff-b’ruh. To long away from the 'shire.
I think the former, but with a slightly shorter “sher”? Wus-teh-sh’ 
Yes, that shire pronunciation I do it with Wiltshire, Yorkshire, etc…
But The Shire from Middle Earth is different. Like a Shire horse…
Having spent portions of my life living in Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Bristol and the East of England I’m not even sure how my accent comes across to people now. Maybe it all averages out to somewhere in the Midlands?
Someone recently said my accent was “posh”, so who knows? Too much time down South maybe?
On Saturday I got asked if I’m German. Because of the accent.
Same here, started one year in Wales, then 3 in Stoke on Trent, 3 in Nottingham and then nearly nine living in Wiltshire but working often in Bristol, Oxfordshire and Hampshire…
After my stint in the Midlands, it was tricky to get rid of the Northern “u”
I get that too, because I somewhat inherited my mum’s neutral London accent (via elocution lessons when she was living in Lancashire as a child). There’s a bit of occasional Bristolian in there and probably some Leicester (as I’ve lived here for 17 years now).
My favourite batshit local pronunciation is “Belvoir” as “beaver”. Which led to the magic that is the Beaver bus:
And no two lexers can agree
Out of context, phew, that bus is hilarious.
Anyway. Starting from the premise that the English language has not got a single vowel that is a single sound, well, it can only go downhill from there… At least in Spanish we have the Royal Academy looking after the language (until you try to read a youngster text, that is)
But then you’ll have the Academy saying El Covid and lot of people saying La Covid 
