Newcastle. Chances are, when you read that, you said it in your head in one of a few different ways.
In fact, there’s a lot of variation in how people pronounce the city’s name, probably more than for almost any other place name.
So, we took to the streets with a fairly simple question: “Where are we?”
And we got quite a few different answers.
There’s the castle/carstle question, of course. This is technically known as a trap-bath split: people from the South tend to pronounce the ‘a’ sound in ‘bath’ differently from the ‘a’ in ‘trap’, whereas in most Northern accents both ‘a’ sounds are short.
But there are other areas of disagreement too.
For one thing, how would you pronounce ‘new’? Noo? Neeuw?
And then there’s the emphasis: is it NEWcastle or newCAStle?
In a lot of North East accents, the first syllable is almost swallowed, with much more emphasis on the ‘cas’ in castle, but almost no one from anywhere but here pronounces it that way.
Of course, everyone’s voice sounds slightly different, but there seem to be three main ways people tend to say the name of this fair city:
NEWcarstle — a hard, Southern ‘a’ with the emphasis on the ‘new’ — if you say it like this, you probably didn’t grow up here.
NEWcastle — the main emphasis is still on ‘new’, but the soft ‘a’ suggests you’re probably Northern, or maybe from the Midlands (the ‘a’s start to vary around Leicester.) Plenty of Geordies pronounce it this way, but so do lots of others.
newCAStle — you rush through ‘new’ and emphasise the start of ‘castle’. Most people who pronounce it this way seem to be from the Newcastle or Northumberland area originally, or they live here and have picked it up from locals.
Which do you think was most common on the streets of the city itself?
Watch our video to find out.