I noticed that British people sometimes use me instead of my. For example, Liam Gallagher does it quite often.
Example:
The wind was strong I have nearly lost me pants
What is a story behind this alteration? Is it appropriate in formal language? Do people really speak like that? Or is this a dialect rather than a widely spread manner?
Best Answer
This is not a substitution of me for my but a common dialectal pronunciation of my (Northern England and some Australian accents).
According to Wikipedia, other areas of the North have regularised the pronouns in the opposite direction, with meself used instead of myself.
Moreover, the vowel in 'me' (the one you're referring to) is shorter ([mi]) than that of the regular 'me' ([mi:]) and this pronuncation of 'my' is usually used where 'my' is unstressed.
The pronunciation of emphatic/stressed 'my' was [mi:] in Middle English (before the Great Vowel Shift) and its unstressed/unemphatic form was [mi].
The Great Vowel Shift was a vowel change (1400-1700) that shifted almost all the long vowels to diphthongs but it did not affect short vowels. So the pronunciation of emphatic 'my' shifted to [aɪ]* but the short vowel in 'my' [mi] in its unemphatic form remained unaffected in some accents (Northern British, Irish, some Australian accents etc).
*GVS shifted [iː] to [aɪ]. For example, the pronunciation of 'bite' was /bi:t/ before the GVS.