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Through all the books Hagrid speaks a bit oddly. He changes word order, skips letters/parts of words or merges words. Is this some kind of specific dialect or accent?

"Won't make no diff'rence!" sobbed Hagrid. "Them Disposal devils, they're all in Lucius Malfoy's pocket! Scared o' him! An' if I lose the case, Buckbeak-"

- The Prisoner of Azkaban, Chapter 11: The Firebolt

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  • 13
    Olde Hagrish? :)
    – DVK-on-Ahch-To
    Mar 17, 2015 at 22:09
  • 3
    The on'y kind!!
    – CHEESE
    Feb 9, 2016 at 16:54

1 Answer 1

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48

From a Blue Peter BBC interview with JK Rowling in 2001:

BPP2: Good question, good question. I've got another good question here ... what accent is Hagrid supposed to speak in?

JKR: West country ... where I come from, I come from the West country.

BPP3: So now we know.

So Hagrid is intended to have a West Country accent.

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  • 7
    N-not Scottish? Blimey, I've been reading wrong all this time XD
    – Mac Cooper
    Mar 17, 2015 at 19:43
  • 6
    I'm from Bristol, and I always read it as a Bristolian accent, Robbie Coltrane really pulls it off in the movies too :p
    – ZenLogic
    Mar 17, 2015 at 19:44
  • 5
    I've heard that in spite of being (geographically) much smaller, the U.K. has a great many more dialects/varieties of English than the U.S.
    – Joe L.
    Mar 17, 2015 at 21:50
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    @JoeL.: You have heard correctly. Parts of the UK have had stable English-speaking communities for 700 years or so, that's a long time for distinctive regional dialects to develop. Modern travel and communciation have reduced the diversity somewhat but there's still a lot of variation.
    – Royal Canadian Bandit
    Mar 17, 2015 at 22:23
  • 6
    Having already displayed my stupidity (:P) I must shower you all in my tremendous and entirely relevant knowledge that cows too have regional dialects (not even making this up)
    – Mac Cooper
    Mar 18, 2015 at 9:12

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