Dialects of English

A nasty shock awaits many visitors to Britain. Imagine that you have learnt English for years, you can read newspapers and you have no problem following the television, but when you go into a fish and chip shop in Newcastle, you can not understand a word they are saying. The language has been standardized for a very long time, and regional dialects in Britain have largely died out – far more so than in Italy or Germany, for example. That is to say, the vocabulary of the dialects has died out, but the accents and a few bits of distinctive grammar remain. It is the accent which gives the visitor a problem in the fish and chip shop. Some accents are so strong that they present problems for British people, too. Variations within Britain are so great that accents from New York or Texas are often easier to follow than ones from Liverpool or Glasgow.

It is mostly the vowels which differ from one dialect to another. In Manchester, shut rhymes with put, and in the south it rhymes with but. Intonation patterns also differ between regions.

There is a kind of standard British English pronunciation, based in a confusing way on class and geography. It is the accent of the south-east, but not that of London itself. It could be said that the upper classes have the dialect of their own, with a pronunciation known as RP (Received Pronunciation). The majority of middle-class people speak a sort of classless, democratic version of RP, with a slight admixture of the local regional accents.

People’s attitudes to the various regional accents depend on a whole range of historical and social factors. The Birmingham accent is considered ugly, cockney is associated with criminals, Scottish is thought of as serious and sensible, Irish as poetic. An interesting case is that of the so-called Westcountry accent. This comes from the south and west, which is the least industrial region; consequently the accent is identified with farm-workers, sometimes considered stupid by city folk. While all other varieties of English have been increasingly accepted on mainstream television and radio, Westcountry remains the Cinderella among accents, confined to comedy and gardening programmes.

To see the likely direction of change for the future, we need to look at the speech of young people. Here we find several interesting developments. One is a spread of a light London accent over much of the country – especially in areas like the West Country where it replaces the low-prestige local accent. Another is an openness, through the media, to American and Australian influences. The Australian effect is quite recent, and results from the huge popularity of Australian TV soap operas Neighbours and Home and Away. Strangely enough, this does not usually mean the adoption of vocabulary: nobody says sidewalk instead of pavement, or gas instead of petrol, however many American films they watch. It is rather the phrases, idioms and grammatical forms which are contagious. No way has caught on, as in the form: “No way am I going to go out with him”. The use of the word like as a sentence-filler has become very common: “She was like really upset, and she just like walked out”.

Americans and Australians sometimes use a rising, question-type intonation on statements, often in the middle or at the end of sentences: “I spoke with my teacher (rising intonation), and he said I had to redo the test”. This is used to engage the attention of the listener; it means “Do you remember my teacher?” or “Are you listening?” To the great dismay of the older generation, this intonation is becoming very popular in Britain.

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