[n4r9]

Thanks for the info! Kark it, musty and lakes I haven't come across. As kids we used lairy to mean aggressive or confrontational. Mush, dinlo/din/dinny and squinny are I think truly Pompey, tho it hasn't always been that way. Mush and dinlo are actually Romani words; you sometimes hear them in other areas with regular traveller populations. There's an old episode of Steptoe and Son where the son uses mush, so I think it was common in inner London at one time. Squinny I don't think is Romani. I used to think it was a Pompey oddity but I recently found out that someone from near Birmingham used it growing up.

I'd say a lot of the letter changes (v/f for th, w for l, dropping t's) are fairly standard estuary accent, e.g. the kind of accent Danny Dyer has.

[memsom]

Yeah - but they were there when I was a kid in the 70's and 80's so predates the notion of Estuary English. They come more from the fact Portsmouth had a big influx of dock workers from East end of London at one point. The vowels are completely different. Where london would take "town" and make it "taahn" (like a long ah sound) we say "teihn" (to rhyme with plane, but not pure, more breathy, hence my h) - it's not a pure. I would "oy" like in "boy". The vowels are very Hampshire.