The Bristol Dialect

Advertisements
Bristol natives speak with a rhotic accent, in which the 'r' in words like car is pronounced.

Some inhabitants also speak an English dialect known colloquially as Bristolian (or even more informally as "Bristle" or "Brizzle"), in which an L sound is appended to words that end in an 'a' or 'o' (thus "area" becomes "areal", etc). This unique dialectal idiosyncrasy is known as the Bristol L (or terminal L).

Further Bristolian linguistic features are the addition of a superfluous "to" in questions relating to direction or orientation (a feature also common to the coastal towns of South Wales), or using "to" instead of "at"; and using male pronouns "he", "him" instead of "it". For example, "Where's that?" would be phrased as "Where's he to?"

Dialect researcher Stanley Ellis found that many of the dialect words in the Filton area were linked to work in the aerospace industry. He described this as "a cranky, crazy, crab-apple tree of language and with the sharpest, juiciest flavour that I've heard for a long time".