Imagine time-travelling to Manchester, England in the late 1700s. What do you think people would sound like?
That’s the challenge facing Amanda Seyfried in The Testament of Ann Lee: portraying a working-class Mancunian accent from three centuries ago.
When historical linguists reconstruct past speech, it is an interpretative process. It relies on written evidence, including spelling, poetic rhymes, criticisms in old pronouncing dictionaries about how people ought to speak, and dialect descriptions. From these fragments, we can piece together a historically informed reconstruction.
In the late 18th century, English certainly sounded different, but not unrecognisable. Manchester would have been variably rhotic at this time. This is the pronunciation of the strong “r” sound in words like “star” or “bird”. Rhoticity is a feature shared with present-day American English.
In terms of vowels, the northern pattern in which words like “good” and “blood” are exact rhymes was present then as it is today. Both of these features are present in Seyfried’s portrayal.
Another feature Seyfried exhibits, but which is no longer typical of 21st-century Manchester accents, is her lack of what linguists call diphthongs, or gliding vowels. You can hear this in words she says like “great” and “clothed” where she uses vowel sounds that viewers might recognise from traditionally Lancashire or Yorkshire speech. These sounds were entirely consistent with 18th-century Mancunian accents but not today’s.
Seyfried has said she based her accent on actor Maxine Peake’s – although Peake is from Bolton, and not Manchester proper, this is not a bad decision. Bolton has its own distinct accent, but smaller towns often retain older features for longer while urban centres tend to experience accent changes more quickly.
In that sense, Peake’s accent may reflect features that Manchester has since moved away from, making her a more suitable reference point than a present-day speaker from the city.
Historic accents on screen
Seyfried’s performance sits within a broadly plausible northern English frame. Viewers online are divided: some praise the accent, others find it distracting. The difficulty is that without recordings we cannot know exactly how a Manchester accent sounded in the 18th century. It is though, entirely possible that her pronunciation is closer to historical reality than modern ears expect.
To this end, dialect coaches on historical films face a dilemma: do they recreate the speech of the time as faithfully as possible and risk losing the audience, or use something more contemporary? How far back could we go and still understand English?
We would manage 18th-century English reasonably well. For instance, it’s easier to understand Robinson Crusoe in 1719 than the 1500s English in Shakespeare or even the late 1300s and early 1400s middle English in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. But recognisable does not mean identical, and reproducing it, accent and all, too strictly could alienate viewers.
Most historical films don’t try to recreate how people actually sounded in the past. In Hamnet, which is set in the 1580s, the characters speak in modern received pronunciation instead of the kind of English spoken in Shakespeare’s time.
Even in stories set closer to the 18th century, such as The Favourite, Olivia Coleman’s Queen Anne still sounds distinctly modern – arguably, even more so than her Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown. Actors playing Tudor courtiers, medieval knights and even Shakespeare himself are routinely given modern accents on screen. Audiences rarely question it – or even notice.
Sociolinguistic research has long shown that southern and “prestige” accents, like that of royalty or the upper classes, are often treated as neutral and timeless while regional varieties are more readily linked to place and class. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that when Manchester appears on screen – especially in a historical setting – audiences listen more closely.
Part of that scrutiny might stem from its rarity. Working-class accents are under-represented in major films, and are even less often heard in leading roles. When they do appear, they carry the weight of representation. That scrutiny is understandable. Accent carries belonging, and carelessness can feel dismissive.
Amanda Seyfried seems aware of this sensitivity, noting in interviews that she originally suggested Olivia Cooke, who is from Oldham in Greater Manchester, for the role of Ann Lee. That comment, I think, shows that she recognises something important: these accents signal place, history and belonging and they matter to people.
So how authentic is the accent in The Testament of Ann Lee? In the absence of recordings from that time, certainty is impossible. But perhaps the more interesting question is not whether Seyfried’s accent is perfect, but what it means to hear a northern voice carry a feature film. It shifts our assumptions about what the past sounded like, and about who we imagine at its centre.
