Northampton, England
The Northampton Accent
Northampton sits inside the East Midlands dialect area, which covers Nottingham, Derby, Leicester and Lincolnshire, England. The nearest other area is Modern RP, about 5km away.
Take the quiz and see how close your accent is →
What people in Northampton sound like
- “Duck” and “me duck” as a friendly address, regardless of who to.
- “Mardy” for sulky or bad-tempered — the region's best-known word.
- A bread roll is a “cob”.
- “Ay up” as the standard greeting.
These are the markers of the East Midlands accent as a whole. No survey claims every speaker in Northampton has all of them — the full East Midlands profile sets out where the region varies.
Northampton against Modern RP
Northampton is close enough to the Modern RP area that the two get confused. These are the questions where the survey expects a different answer on each side.
| Question | Northampton | Modern RP |
|---|---|---|
| In your natural accent, does “bath” use the vowel in “cat” or “father”? | “bath” takes the short vowel of “cat” | “bath” takes the broad vowel of “father” |
| Do “singer” and “finger” rhyme in your natural accent? | yes — “singer” has a hard g | no — they sound different |
| Do “put” and “putt” have the same vowel in your natural accent? | “put” and “putt” sound the same | “put” and “putt” have different vowels |
| In relaxed speech, do you pronounce the H at the start of “house”? | “house” sounds like “ouse”, without the H | the H in “house” is pronounced |
Dialect areas near Northampton
Is your accent from Northampton?
There is no way to answer that from a description. The test asks 29 questions about the words you use and how you say them, scores your answers against the East Midlands English profile and every other profile in the survey, and shows you where people who answer the way you do actually live.