One of my favorite shows is the BBC's Time Team, in which group of archeologists do weekend digs in the gardens and golf courses of England looking for old stuff.

Here is my question: what accent does Phil have? He's the one with the long hair and the hat and he's usually up to his knees in mud.

More broadly, what characters from film and TV exemplify various regional accents?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: neveu,

Phil is from the West Country: Devon or Cornwall. I'd imagine some-one from that area could be more specific. Phil has always amused me; anyone looking and sounding less like the popular conception of an archaelogist would be hard to find.

Quote "...More broadly, what characters from film and TV exemplify various regional accents?..."

I'm not much of a soap opera person but my guesses would be:

East Enders - working class London (and occasionally Cockney)

Coronation Street - Urban Lancashire

Brookside - Liverpool

Last of the Summer Wine - Yorkshire

Of course, I don't know whether or not you even get these programmes in the USA.

I just ran across this online dialect collection on Metafilter.

Ah, I'd seen that before, the British Library archive. Unfortunately I've just got a script error trying to go to page 2 of the alphabetically sorted list.

What someone needs to do is put up a simple collection of representatives of the main ten or twenty dialects. Over at the Speech Accent Archive they've got almost 100 native speakers, but mainly randomly scattered through the USA and with no systematic coverage of anywhere else, so it's not much use for saying "Listen, that's a Yorkshire/Newcastle/South-West accent".