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I'd like to ask what kind of accent it is. Is it Geordie of British English? Please refer to this video hyperlink: a British English accent.

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    In the audience, there were various "Northern" voices, but nothing really consistent to a narrow dialect, as far as I could hear.
    – J. Taylor
    Commented Feb 20, 2018 at 8:14
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    'Geordie' is specifically a Newcastle Upon Tyne accent and, in its extreme form, can be almost incomprehensible to people unfamiliar with it. The first lady in the clip is speaking with a slight accent from the English north east but not necessarily Geordie. Only someone from the area could tell you whether hers is a slight Geordie accent or not, though many people from outside the area refer to all north east accents, incorrectly, as Geordie in the way that some people, including Geordies, refer to all south east accents as 'Cockney'. I have a Derbyshire accent so I don't count either way.
    – BoldBen
    Commented Feb 20, 2018 at 8:48
  • Thanks for your comments (@J. Taylor & @BoldBen), which make me aware that an accent can be referred to as a broader type rather than a narrower one. By the way, from time to time, I notice a range of words that are pronounced in a quite different way from those in Standard British English, like "scanning", "stuff", "dirty" in the clip. Commented Feb 22, 2018 at 8:44

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The video is of 'Question Time', a question answer series for politicians to answer local problems. This means that the panel is usually speaks with less of an local accent (more standard British English (BrE) or RP, and the questioners in the audience more likely to have regional accents.

This particular episode was filmed in Darlington, UK, which is in between Yorkshire, where a Yorkshire accent predominates, and Tyneside, where a Geordie accent is more common. Of course, these two accents are not far apart in comparison to the wide variety in the UK.

The very first person speaking in your link, the woman in red at 8:15, pronounces the word 'stuff' with the same vowel as 'book' (ie. there is a STRUT/FOOT merger. Also, in the same speaker, the FACE vowel is monophthongized, ie, for 'today' instead of /ti 'deɪ/ it is pronounced /ti 'de/. But both of these are features of both Yorkshire and Geordie.

I can't find any particular features in that recording to distinguish speakers from being Geordie or Yorkshire (though there certainly are differences in theory). I couldn't get any more precise than general Northern.

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    I think you can be a bit more precise than "Northern"; you could call it "North-Eastern". There's enough in the woman in red's accent to make me think "Geordie", but it's not as strong as a "true" Geordie and I suspect she would vigorously deny being Geordie!
    – AndyT
    Commented Mar 21, 2018 at 16:50
  • Thanks, @Mitch, for your explanation with reference to the phonological theories behind, which is very useful to me cos recently I've been into phonetics and phonology studies! Many thanks! Commented Mar 25, 2018 at 23:52

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