Bristol liquids

The British Library website has an extensive collection of sound recordings — more than 25,000 of them that anyone can listen to on-line. They include nearly three hundred digitized recordings of accents and dialects made for the questionnaire-based Leeds Survey of English Dialects carried out over half a century ago. Over the following 25 years fieldworkers revisited many of the sites to record further interviews in the form of unscripted and unrehearsed narratives. There are also numerous other recordings made subsequently, often by local radio stations. The sound clips, from all over England, are supported by commentaries on the lexis, phonology and grammar of the recorded passages. What a resource for us all!
The current “recording of the week” is from Bristol. It bears the headline “Ever heard the Bristol ‘l’?”, a reference to the intrusive l for which the area(l)’s accent is known. You can duly hear area pronounced as ˈɛːɹjəɫ just over two minutes into the recording, and piano as piˈanəɫ right at the end.
I discuss this phenomenon in Accents of English (CUP 1982), vol. 2, p. 344, where I mention the Bristolian father whose three daughters were supposedly called Evil, Idle, and Normal.

You can compare the BL recording (Knowle, speaker born 1937) with a more recent YouTube one made by Terry the odd job man (Filton, born 1970; blog, 12 Oct 2007). Terry has now progressed to offering “Bristolian language lessons”. It might be difficult to detect putative intrusive l with him, because he tends to vocalize dark l anyway. Notice his massage with “hyperrhotic” r, ˈmasɑːɻdʒ (discussed in AofE, p. 343).
I suspect he’s actually an actor playing a character, but if so it’s a good act.