Vocabulary
“Come By Here”: Welsh English Location
Welsh English often locates things with “by”: “come by here”, “he’s by there”. It is not a detour, and it is not “nearby”. It is the ordinary word for “here”, and it is one of the few grammatical giveaways that separate South Wales from the west of England.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
Does “come by here” sound like a normal way to say “come here”?
Welsh English locative “by here” / “by there”. Most other varieties would just say “here”.
- Yes — “by here” is how I say it
- No — I would just say “here”
- Something else
Who says what
Each accent profile in the survey has an expected answer to this question. Where a profile allows more than one answer, the region genuinely varies.
Why this question is in the survey
Vocabulary questions like this one are the fastest way to place a speaker, because the answer is a single conscious word choice rather than a sound people cannot hear in themselves. They also travel: a word that splits England into five regions often splits North America into three quite different ones. Every answer is stored with a coarse map cell for the town you grew up in, and a region is coloured in once at least five people there have answered.
See the full question bank, the accent profiles these answers feed, or how the scoring works.