Imagine time-travelling to Manchester, England in the late 1700s. What do you think people would sound like?
That’s the challenge facing Amanda Seyfried in The Testament of Ann Lee: portraying a working-class Mancunian accent from three centuries ago.
When historical linguists reconstruct past speech, it is an interpretative process. It relies on written evidence, including spelling, poetic rhymes, criticisms in old pronouncing dictionaries about how people ought to speak, and dialect descriptions. From these fragments, we can piece together a historically informed reconstruction.
