Dedcot in 1985:
The Lost Village:
Local Voices:
The Wessex accent is rarely heard around Dedcot anymore, having been replaced over the generations both by ‘London creep’ and by the influence of the BBC. But it can still be found amongst the old age pensioners, especially in the villages further out of town. Some of the distinctive features of Wessex dialect include:
- Substitution of ‘z’ for ‘s’ and ‘v’ for ‘f’ (‘I zaw a varmer’).
- Substitution of ‘d’ for soft ‘th’ (‘dree’ for ‘three’).
- Strongly pronounced ‘r’ sound, as in the ‘arrr’ popularly associated with pirate speech.
- Pronoun exchange (‘him’s a good hammer’).
- Addition of a ‘y’/‘ee’ to the end of verbs with no direct object (‘I dig the garden’ vs. ‘I do diggy vor dree hours’).
- Simplified form of the verb ‘to be’ (‘I be, you be, he be’ instead of standard English ‘I am, you are, he is’).
- More use of the ‘-en’ suffix to denote ‘made of’. As well as the standard English wooden, golden etc, there is also ‘bricken’, ‘dirten’, ‘glassen’, and many others.
- More strong verbs, i.e., those that change vowel sounds in the past tense, such as ‘clomb’ instead of ‘climbed’.
Due to the ‘f’ being pronounced as ‘v’, and strong vowel sounds, Foxhall Road in Old Dedcot was misheard by the incoming army. The Dedcot barracks were named after the road and remain ‘Vauxhall Barracks’ to this day.
Wessex dialects are most well known in the works of Thomas Hardy, but can also be found in the poems of rural life from William Barnes, in the opening chapter of Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and in the quirky modern poems of local poet Pam Ayres.
Dedcot Introduction
Dedcot History
Dedcot Character Generation
Playground Football; rules of the game
Episode 1: Life on Mars Bars
Episode 2: Twix a Rock and a Hard Place
Episode 3: SCreme Egg Scramble
Episode 4: Time for a Picnic
Episode 5: Marathon Man
Episode 6: Careless Wispas
Episode 7: Bar Noir
Episode 8: It Takes Allsorts
Episode 9: Jolly Tots and Candy Bots
Episode 10: Double Deckers and the Trusty Tube
Episode 11: Bounty Hunters
Episode 12: A Ripple in Time, Part 1
Episode 13: A Ripple in Time, Part 2
Episode 14: Smartie Pants
Episode 15: Reality Bitz
Episode 16: The Welsh Confection
Episode 17: Aero space
Episode 18: Curly wurly Timey wimy
Episode 19: The Malteser Fulcrum