I have been watching some episodes of the British TV series Peaky Blinders. It is set just after WWI in Birmingham, and the main characters are criminals (of the namesake gang and others).
My ESL doesn't allow me to understand how much of the difference among how they speak and present-day Standard British English is due to local variation (out of London), how much to temporal variation (almost one century ago) and how much to sociolinguistic variation (the character not being too educated).
If someone were to address a modern average British speaker (say, from London), speaking exactly like those characters (take Thomas Shelby, the character played by Cillian Murphy, if the differences among the characters matter), what could the modern average speaker guess about him? Where would they place this Shelby-sounding person? Would the latter mostly sound from out of town, or also old-fashioned? Or even stranger?
For a concrete example, in this sample you can hear Thomas Shelby addressing his men. I notice that some vowels and diphthongs are different from standard English (for instance /pʊb/ rather than /pʌb/, I'd say), and the general prosody of the sentence as well, but I cannot pin it down precisely, nor say how it “sounds like” globally.
Best Answer
I'm an Australian EFL speaker who enjoys many British TV shows, but I haven't watched "Peaky Blinders".
My impression, from the sample linked, is primarily of being from the north of the UK, and many of the sounds and phrases seem like almost Irish-English (but not quite).
Birmingham itself is not as far north as the speech sounds to me, and modern Birmingham speech has a different... rhythm, for want of a better word, to my ears.
If I heard the speech without reference to the city, i would have assumed relatively modern far north of England characters, not educated in 'posh' schools, but not ignorant either - the speech itself is quite eloquent.