The best known accents in the West Midlands area are the Birmingham accents (see "Brummie") and the Black Country accent (Yam Yam).
Dialect verbs are used, for example am for are, ay for is not (related to ain't), bay for are not, bin for am or, emphatically, for are. Hence the following joke dialogue about bay windows: "What sort of windas am them?" "They'm bay windas." "Well if they bay windas wot bin them?". There is also humour to be derived from the shop-owner's sign of Mr. "E. A. Wright" (that is, "He ay [isn't] right," a phrase implying someone is saft [soft] in the jed [head]). Saft also may mean silly as in, "Stop bein' so saft". The Birmingham and Coventry accents are quite distinct, even though the cities are only 19 miles/30 km apart. The g sound may be emphatically pronounced where it occurs in the combination ng, in words such as ringing and fang. Around Stoke-on-Trent, the short i can sound rather like a short e, so milk and biscuit become something like "melk" and "bess-kit". Strong 'Potteries' accents can even render the latter as "bess-keet". The Potteries accent is perhaps the most distinctly 'northern' of the West Midlands accents, given that the urban area around Stoke-on-Trent is close to the Cheshire border. Herefordshire and parts of Worcestershire and Shropshire have a rhotic accent somewhat like the West Country.