Yorkshire lass Emma Walker has helped Spanish speakers learn important phrases such as ‘alright chuck!’ which is incredibly useful if they end up living in Sheffield
A Brit ex-pat has carved out a career teaching people to speak northern. Innovative Emma Walker, originally from York, now lives in central Spain and teaches people how to speak with a Yorkshire and Geordie ‘twang’.
Emma, who lives in Barcelona, helps people to prepare for life up north in England and works with non native English speakers to perfect their accent through her pronunciation business.
She insists there’s a huge gap in the market for her services and says she teaches her 300 international clients to learn regional dialects.
She added that she sees students from as far as Brazil, Japan and Thailand who are all eager to master saying “ey up”, “alright chuck!” and other phrases before they move to places like Leeds and Sheffield.
“They want lessons to understand,” she explained. “Often people are moving to the UK and they want lessons to understand what is going on around them. I had one student who was from Brazil and she was moving to Sheffield to study, and she was very nervous about how she would get on.”
Students’ progress depends on the strength of their English to begin with, and she said she also encourages students to watch soaps such as Emmerdale and Corrie to help them learn the dialect and how it is used in every day speech.
“Within a year, they will sound like a completely different person,” she added. One of her students, Miguel Badilla, from Chile, said learning the Yorkshire accent is her favourite, despite never having visited.
“I have never been there but the accent alone makes me want to go there and meet the people,” she said. “They sound lovely – like they would invite you to have a cup of tea any day of the week.”
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