Mummerset

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title: "Mummerset" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["acting", "england-in-fiction", "english-language-in-england", "phonology", "west-country", "fictional-counties"] description: "Stereotypical West Country English accent" topic_path: "linguistics" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummerset" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Stereotypical West Country English accent ::

Mummerset is a fictional English dialect supposedly spoken in a rustic English county of the same name. Mummerset is used by actors to represent a stereotypical English West Country accent while not specifically referencing any particular county.

The name is a portmanteau of mummer (an archaic term for a folk actor) and Somerset, a largely rural county.

Mummerset draws on a mixture of characteristics of real dialects from the West Country, such as rhoticism, forward-shifted diphthongs, lengthened vowels, and the voicing of word-initial consonants that are voiceless in other English dialects. Word-initial "S" is replaced with "Z"; "F" is replaced with "V". It also uses perceived dialect grammar, replacing instances of "am", "are" and "is" with "be". The sentence "I haven't seen him, that farmer, since Friday" could be parsed in Mummerset as "Oi ain't zeen 'im that be varmer zince Vroiday".

Some speakers of East Anglian English have objected to media portrayals of characters from that area speaking in "a strange kind of stage Mummerset", as in the TV adaptation of P.D. James' Adam Dalgliesh novel Devices and Desires.

In literature

A speech from Edgar in Shakespeare's King Lear, before his fight with Oswald in Act IV, scene 6, has been described as an example of mummerset: zwagger’d out of my life, ’t would not ha’bin zo long as ’tis by a vortnight. Nay, come not near th’ old man; keep out, ’che vor ye, or Ise try whether your costard or my ballow be the harder. ’Chill be plain with you.}}

References

References

1. (2005). "Concise Oxford companion to the English language". [[Oxford University Press]].
2. "definition of Mummerset". [[Oxford University Press]].
3. See for example "Television Diary: A broad question of a proper accent", ''[[The Stage. The Stage and Television Today]]'', 28 February 1991
4. Maguire, Laurie E.. (January 5, 1998). "Textual Formations & Reformations". [[University of Delaware Press]].
5. Ulrike Altendorf and Dominic Watt. (2004). "A Handbook of Varieties of English". [[Walter de Gruyter]].
6. "William Shakespeare (1564–1616). The Tragedy of King Lear. The Harvard Classics. 1909–14.". [[Bartleby.com]].

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