#and am fond of Cumbrian ones

[reggiespoon]

I've seen in various biographies so many post-Thermidor quotes from haters about Robespierre's accent. A smattering serves to illustrate the general tone, which is that he retained a strong regional accent that was sneered at by high society:

The high inflection of his voice was disagreeable to the ear; he cried out rather than spoke. His time in the capital had not entirely erased his harsh accent. His pronuncation of certain words revealed the harsh tones of his province, with the result that his speech was deprived of all melody.

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his rather sharp voice sought for oratorical effects but found only fatigue and monotony;

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a voice that was toneless, monotonous and harsh, with laboured elocution.

And curiously, from Peter McPhee:

There was uproar, and a deputy retorted to Robespierre’s sing-song intonement by shouting ‘we want no psalm-singing here!’

As a Brit, I'm fascinated by the social and cultural nuances of different accents; we have a ludicrous number of accents for a relatively small country, and the metadata on class, race, geography, industry, education, history, attached to every single one is staggering. This is undoubtedly true of every country on earth, so I really wish I could understand from a French person what a strong Artois accent implies about someone. Country bumpkin? Urban poverty? Uneducated? Unfriendly? Too friendly? Intelligent? Naive? Savvy? Underclass? Upper crust? What assumptions would a Parisian automatically make about someone with such an accent?

I'm an English speaker, i therefore imagine Robespierre speaking in English when I read his speeches (in English), and for personal reasons, I'm itching to work out what his accent might be like in a British context. The analogous accents here (from "monotonous, toneless" to "sharp, sing-song") would seem to be Yorkshire and possibly Cheshire or Cumbria. Yorkshire accents are tonally fairly flat, while Cheshire is more rolling and rounded and Cumbria has a sharper, more Geordie-style inflection.

Robespierre with a Middlesbrough accent (or Darlington omfg) is very funny to me, but tbh that may be the closest English comparison? Although I did read several long articles about the Picard and Ch'ti languages and I recall that Robespierre was mocked particularly for his consonants (in some article in Suleau's royalist rag), which is apparently a distinctive feature of Ch'ti? And in that case, the closest British analogue is Scouse, like a proper Brookside Scouse accent, with a lot of <sh> and <χ> sounds.

And if Middlesbrough was funny, Scousepierre is absolutely SENDING ME.