Mummerset
Template:Short description Template:More citations needed Mummerset is a fictional English dialect supposedly spoken in a rustic English county of the same name.<ref name="OUP - Concise Oxford companion to the English language - Mummerset">Template:Cite book</ref> Mummerset is used by actors to represent a stereotypical English West Country accent while not specifically referencing any particular county.<ref name="OUP - oxforddictionaries.com - definition of Mummerset">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
The name is a portmanteau of mummer (an archaic term for a folk actor) and Somerset, a largely rural county.<ref name="OUP - oxforddictionaries.com - definition of Mummerset"/>
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".<ref name="OUP - Concise Oxford companion to the English language - Mummerset"/> 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".<ref name="OUP - Concise Oxford companion to the English language - Mummerset"/>
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.<ref>See for example "Television Diary: A broad question of a proper accent", The Stage and Television Today, 28 February 1991</ref>
In literatureEdit
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:<ref name="Laurie E. Maguire - Textual Formations & Reformations - page 156">Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="A Handbook of Varieties of English - The Dialects in the South of England - Altendorf and Watt - page 197">Template:Cite book</ref> Template:Poem quote