While it’s certainly managed to position itself as the access language to the rest of the world over the years, with a total of 378 million native speakers and 743 million non-native speakers currently dotted across the globe, there’s no denying it’s a tricky one to pick up.
This 1,400 year old West Germanic language – with close to 50 regional dialect variations in just the UK alone – gives even native speakers many a chance to slip up in their pronunciations from time to time.
Nothing illustrates this more perfectly that the pronunciations of place / location names.
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Here in Greater Manchester, our ten boroughs are filled with place names that commonly get mispronounced by anyone other than local residents, so we’ve picked out 10 that are most likely to catch people out.
Let’s set the record straight.
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1. Daubhill
This area of Bolton is often known to catch even some of the borough’s residents out themselves, so don’t worry if you’re confused by it.
While many would presume it’s ‘dawb-hill / dowb-hill’, it’s actually closer to /dobble/.
2. Blackley
Another one where you’ll need to ignore the way it’s spelled if you want to pronounce it correctly, as it’s not ‘black-ly’ like the colour.
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It’s /blake-ly/ instead.
3. Beswick
This pronunciation may be a little easier to have a crack at first time round if you’re familiar with other similar words and place names across the country.
Think Keswick, Warwick, Alnwick and so on.
Basically, the ‘w’ is silent, just forget it’s there – it’s pronounced /bez-ick/.
4. Greenacres
If we take this Oldham place name, most of us not from the area would likely split the word into two and presume it’s pronounced the same as ‘green’ and ‘acres’ – but we’d be wrong.
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In reality, locals tend to pronounce it as /grin-ickers/.
5. Hulme
This one’s a pretty common word name in the Manchester borough.
Whether it’s used for the area of Hulme itself, or as a suffix to other areas such as Levenshulme, Davyhulme, Cheadle Hulme and so on, people often have trouble pronouncing it.
If you want to get it right, you’ll need to ignore the fact there’s an ‘l’ in there, as it’s silent.
It’s pronounced more like /hewm/.
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6. Altrincham
If we’re talking about pronunciations that don’t make sense, this one’s got to be up there.
The affluent Trafford town attracts crowds from far and wide, and those crowds probably all pronounced the name incorrectly on the first try.
That ‘ch’ sound is actually pronounced as ‘g’.
So rather than it being ‘Altrin-ch-am’ or ‘Altrin-kam’, the pronunciation is actually closer to /oltrin-gum/ instead.
7. Baguley
We’re convinced they stuck the ‘u’ in this place name for fun as a way to trip people up when they try to pronounce it.
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For some reason, it’s actually just pronounced /bag-ly/.
8. Whalley Range
No, we’re not referring to the second word in this particular place name, luckily that’s pronounced exactly as you’d expect.
Whalley, on the other hand, can cause some slip-ups as it’s another case of a silent letter creeping into a spelling and confusing matters, so you’ll want to ignore the fact there’s a ‘h’ in there, and pronounce it closer to /wall-y/.
This isn’t to be confused with the neighbouring Derbyshire town of Whaley Bridge either, as that one’s pronounced /wayl-y/.
Confused yet?
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9. The Haulgh
Yet another Bolton place name that catches even the best of us out.
By looking at the spelling of this one, it’d be easy for most of us Northerners to presume it’s pronounced ‘halsh’ thanks to the popular local bakery chain Greenhalgh’s – which is also a common surname – but again, we’d be wrong.
It’s pronounced the /hoff/.
10. Bury
We had to stick one that’s a bit up for debate on this list, didn’t we?
In the case of this Greater Manchester borough, the pronunciation of the name is very much open for interpretation depending on who you ask, and whoever you ask is likely to be very adamant that their pronunciation is correct too.
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It’s either /burry/ or /berry/ – and if we’re honest, the latter is more commonly used.
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BONUS – Godmanchester
Okay, so this one isn’t in Greater Manchester at all, it’s actually a little town that lies in Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire, but we obviously don’t need to explain why we’ve chosen to stick it on the end of this list.
What we do need to explain is how it’s pronounced, though.
Us Mancunians only need to take one look at this place name to presume it’s pronounced /god-man-chester/, like our wonderful city, just with ‘god’ added in front, but we’d couldn’t be further from correct.
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It’s actually pronounced /gum-ster/.
Why it’s pronounced that way is simply down to regional dialect and nothing else – we can’t really explain it.
Trending
Tyson Fury calls Usyk and Joshua ‘s***houses’ and doubts AJ fight will happen
Danny Jones
Tyson Fury is at it again on social media, blasting both Anthony Joshua and Oleksandr Usyk after the latter suggested he was “afraid” of him.
While Fury is beginning preparations for his fight against AJ due to be held this December, Usyk attempted to rattle the Gypsy King’s cage in the meantime.
Speaking in an interview on his YouTube channel, the Ukrainian said, “Despite his toughness and how he is generally described, he is afraid. Yes, of me.” It didn’t take long for Tyson to respond in kind:
As you can see, the Wythenshawe-born heavyweight spends nearly a full minute shouting expletives, calling Usyk a “little s***house and a ‘little s***bag” before warning, “I’ll put my fist right through the side of you, you little sausage.”
The two have been interested in organising a fight to unify the WBC and IBF belts – held by Fury and Usyk, respectively – for some time now, with Tyson’s promoter Frank Warren insisting that he does believe it will happen at some point in the future.
Rubbishing the suggestion he is scared and dishing out some trash talk of his own, Fury then goes on to call out another “s***house”, as he puts it, labelling Joshua a “big bodybuilder” rather than a boxer and suggesting that he has been delaying signing the contract.
Despite Warren stating that terms would be agreed sometime soon, the long-awaited all-British bout could still be in doubt as we’ve already seen one potential fight disintegrate in the 11th hour.
AJ is coming off back-to-back defeats against Usyk, who he’d no doubt hoped to beat on his way to finally facing Fury. Nevertheless, the WBC champion believes he does want it at all, remarking: “You little sausage, you do not wanna fight, your manager’s a sausage.
The rant continues in a similar vein, with Fury adding: “I’ve never seen anything like yous, both a pack of s***houses.
“However, I will be fighting 3 December if this sausage does not sign the contract, which I don’t think he [will] because I don’t think he’s got the b****cks to, because he’s a s***bag.
It remains to be seen what kind of response Joshua will give and if the fight will finally be locked in. All we know is that it’ll be a big disappointment for fight fans if the match-up falls apart again.
Featured Image – Tyson Fury (via Twitter)
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American tourist baffled by Manchester in hilarious TikTok vlog
Daisy Jackson
An American tourist’s chaotic trip to Manchester has gone viral after he documented the whole thing in a TikTok vlog.
Adeib El Masri, a successful LA-based photographer and TikToker with more than a million followers, said that our city was like ‘a different world’.
He has previously been documenting his experiences of visiting London, including several vlogs about the British weather.
Over the course of two days spent up north, Adeib appeared baffled by the concepts of queueing, fairgrounds, and people being nice to each other.
His pair of heart-warming videos have amassed more than half-a-million views at the time of writing.
At St Peter’s SquareAt the Trafford CentreInside Dog BowlAmerican photographer Adeib El Masri documented his trip to Manchester in a two-part vlog. Credit: TikTok, @adeibb
In the first instalment, Adeib films himself at Manchester Piccadilly, saying: “I’m in Manchester. It looks kind of the same except all the buses are free apparently.”
From his taxi, he adds: “Everyone is so much nicer here, I can already tell.”
He then takes a trip to ‘Trafford Mall’, where his visit to the cruise ship-inspired food court The Orient prompts him to say: “This mall has the most Vegas vibes ever. Like ever.”
On his second TikTok vlog, he praises Manchester for being ‘so pretty’ while walking through Chinatown, and says we have our ‘own Big Ben’ in the Kimpton Clocktower.
Adeib and his friends tried to go for afternoon tea at an undisclosed location, but were turned away for not booking 24 hours in advance (‘very pretentious’, he says) and end up visiting a local Costa instead.
He then documents his trip to a fairground, where everything about the experience seems to delight and confuse him.
He says: “So guess who’s at a carnival! So it’s not a carnival, it’s a parking lot.
“There’s a child running the stands. I’m very confused.
“Moral of the story, check where the funfair is, it could be a parking lot that isn’t a real funfair.”
Fairground disappointment aside, he does concede: “You know what, Manny is a 10 out of 10, d’you know what I mean.”
He later says, on a visit to Dog Bowl: “To save the day I decided to go bowling. Bowling is not available. It’s fine,” before heading to Nando’s.
Once safely back in London, he updated his followers with this: “Manchester was like a different world. Everyone is much nicer, like genuinely out-of-their-way nice, which is bizarre.
“Literally nothing went right in Manchester. I was there for like a day and a half, I almost got deported. Let’s just not get into it.
Emily Sergeant -
11th October 2021 
