Mummerset

Mummerset refers to a fictional rustic English county, and more commonly, the English dialect supposedly spoken there. Mummerset is used by actors to represent a stereotypical English West Country accent while not being specific to any actual county.

The name is a play on words: it is a portmanteau of "mummer", an archaic term for a folk actor, and the name of the largely rural county of Somerset.

Mummerset draws on a mixture of characteristics of real dialects from the West Country, such as rhoticism, forward-shifted diphthongs, lengthened vowels, and voicing of word-initial consonants that are voiceless in other English dialects. Word-initial "S" is replaced with "Z"; "F" is replaced with "V". 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 since Vroiday".

In literature

In Shakespeare's King Lear, Edgar speaks in Mummerset before he fights Oswald in Act IV, scene 6:

Good gentleman, go your gait, and let poor volk pass. An ’chud ha’ bin

zwagger’d out of my life, ’t would not ha’bin zo long as ’tis by a vortnight. Nay, come not
near th’ old man; keep out, ’che vor ye, or Ise try whether your costard or my
ballow be the harder. ’Chill be plain with you.

See also

• Acting and accents
• Mid-Atlantic English
• Mockney
• West Country dialects
• Farmer Palmer