The accent and dialect changes every 20 miles or so, so this is obviously a bit vague.
We can’t even agree on what to call a bread roll [0] never mind how some words should be pronounced [1].
My mother was brought up in Liverpool, but her (Irish immigrant) mother hated the Bootle accent so much that she taught her, and her older sister, to speak something closer to RP.
That washed off, and like her I got bullied at school in North Derbyshire for speaking “too posh”. Yet locals in my new home of London clearly place me as being from the North but can’t place where. To be honest neither can most Northerners. I think I’m broadly “South Pennine”, so a bit of High Peak, a bit of Manchester, the odd spot of Lancashire or even West Yorkshire - reflects where I grew up, went to Uni, lived, and socialised with. My partner has a similar accent despite growing up in a part of Manchester with a distinct accent and dialect of its own.
The point is, it’s complex and it’s changing. And it’s not just the UK. It seems to have sped up in recent years. When I hear Canadian voices from 70 years ago, I can hear Scottish tinges. Likewise the US East coast of the mid-20th century had more West Country in it than today.
It was only a friend’s grandfathers generation that could tell what street someone grew up on from their voice alone, and today we are increasingly homogenised - I wonder what “English” will sound like in 200 or 500 years.
I'm from West Yorkshire, the dialect is slowly fading. My grandfather would speak with a strong accent and with spatterings of Norse words. I notice now that, yes, dialects in the UK are becoming homogenised but there is also some American influence seeping in. The American way of pronouncing a double t as a d "better" => "bedder" is increasingly more prevalent in the UK, it's slightly saddening.
Exact same thing is happening in Australia. I'm guessing it's from watching streaming video, Netflix, TikTok, etc. where American accents predominate, and any non-American accents are flattened enough to be sure it's easy for Americans to understand them.
It's weird that the mainstream TV execs think audiences want boring American accents. To me, one of the best things about the White Lotus (hit HBO show) is that it highlights a distinct array of accents (including Australian).
I emigrated from the UK to USA in 1980 and my first code review at Bell Labs I spent about 30 mins explaining my code and then asked if there were any final questions and someone hesitantly asked, "What is this variable 'zed' you keep talking about?"
I used to work for a networking start-up and when we were in the US trying - without success - to sell the company we practised over and over saying "roWter" for "router" (English pronunciation like "rooter").
As a Canadian I read that as "rOATer" for a moment, because the word row rhyming with ow is quite uncommon here -- the row I know is in a boating or a data context.
There was a cartoon in Private Eye a couple of weeks ago that suggested the reason why Millenials and Gen Z could never be reconciled is that they can't agree whether it's pronounced "Generation Zed", or "Generation Zee", as the younger generation themselves would call it.
I may be completely wrong, but I think one direction of evolution in pronunciation is the gradual shift to that which takes less physical effort to pronounce.
"Bedder" is less physical work, less effort, in the mouth than "better".
I'm not familiar with the Brits so can't comment on the specifics there.
However, as a kid, I had a similar experience in a completely different country when we moved cities. My accent wasn't "posh" or "higher class" in any way, it was just from a different region. Kids would give me a hard time for it. But the exact same would happen in reverse form in the other region.
When I first lived in Italy, this was mind-blowing for me as an American from the west coast. I went on a bike ride with the local team I had joined and they stopped for espresso in a nearby town, and the guy who ran the place was like "oh, you're from Padova" when he heard them speaking. An identifiable change in the dialect over a distance you could easily cover on a bike was a huge "wow!" moment for me.
I'm reminded of Serious Klein, who is a German rapper who explicitly sounds like a native English speaker. Imo he's closet to a West Coast rapper, but even this is up to debate. He could easily be from Maryland, or any other American city.
I have no idea what my accent is at this point. I spent enough time in Oxford that I can pass as posh if I need to, moved to a part of Cheshire that had a huge scouse population, then moved to Watford and then Kent and picked up my dad’s dreadful habit of talking vaguely cockney to tradespeople. Now I live in Sheffield and me and my kids have random a mix of long and short As. I also grew up in lower-case parts of the internet and drive myself mad at work switching between that and grown up casing, so it’s not just vocal dialects anymore.
Yeah, that seems to have been lost at some point. From memory they used a picture of what Americans might call a soft dinner roll.
To me it would be more a roll than a bap or a barm, but they're almost synonyms. The weird one for me was when a mate insisted it was a teacake, and I suggested that would only apply if it had raisins in it. What I was describing, he insisted, was a fruit teacake, and without fruit it became a teacake. This is contrary to what the rest of the country believes outside of North Manchester, but has become a running joke for many years between us.
My wife was from Orkney and we spent a few months in the US. So we had US biscuits which are not the same as UK biscuits, US cookies which are not Orcadian cookies, West Country English buns which are definitely not US buns.
Your (Yorkshire?) teacakes are almost but not exactly like my buns.
You can imagine the confusion when the children asked for a cookie, a bun, or a biscuit while in the US.
> Do people really speak Kentish in most of Kent? Or is it a mix of Modern Estuary,
Yes, ish
For example Bermondsey(a former borough in southwark, london) is a weird mix of kent and cockney, but it is still, just about distinct. if you move more into kent, I sounds get longer. from I to Aye, to Aye-eh
In the 80s-2000s half of central london moved to the suburbs, taking the accent with them.
However the south london accent still exists in younguns, depending on parents of course. If you're second generation, and depending on which school you go to, you might get a hybrid accent. (my daughter got a proper bermondsey accent, but I suspect now she'd get, posher accent.)
but, those accents are well away from these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S8JR4eJAXA which sounds more related to broads norfolk when I was growing up. (but 1950s broads was different to 80s)
I think the biggest issue is trying to pin down the hard accent changes vs the gradual.
For example somewhere in Lincolnshire it goes from rural burble to hard yorkshire-eqse stops. I suspect its something to do with the fens.
Yeh it’s strange it includes cockney so prominently. It isn’t really very present unless you spend time around the various gentlemen frequenting sports pubs and pie and mash shops in east London, or if you take a black cab very often. I’d say the “roadman” dialect, mixing cockney and Jamaican patois, plus grime vibes, is FAR more common. I’ll hear it everyday wandering around South and east London. I guess it’s a London dialect so it’s in that umbrella,… but how come cockney gets such a fat slab of land?
You used to be able to get pie, mash and liquor round me in the Bexley area until about 10 years ago, but the ones I knew have closed now and I don’t know where the nearest place is.
Not sure if you can still get Jellied Eels in Eltham, which would be a shame if you can’t.
"RP", by the definition it was originally given, doesn't really exist any more in anyone under 70 or so. What you may now think of as "RP" is usually called Standard Southern British, or SSB.
There are two sorts of Essex, the countryside version that straddles south Suffolk and the London imported one that has become the stereotype, that appears to be estuary on the map. Both have massive crossover depending whether you're in town or village. A rather difficult mapping task!
I had the same feeling. I've lived in Sussex for most of my life and I can't say I've heard a Sussex accent for a long time. Maybe I'm on the wrong side of an urban/rural split?
If you think this is dense, try Italy some time. Huge numbers of highly distinct dialects, because until the mid-1800s Italians spoke huge numbers of entirely different languages, complete with their own full literature traditions. During unification the country settled on Florence's language (the language of Dante) as the "official" language: but everyone still proudly speaks their own language. To my knowledge, Italy is regarded as the densest diverse dialect region in Europe.
How different? What Americans call arugula the British call rocket. Because the British word is derived from the French roquette, which is from ruchetta, a word in italian dialects along the French border. But Americans got their word from aruculu in the southern Calabrese dialect, a result of immigration. The Italian word is rucola, from the Latin eruca.
Americans think "Capeesh" is an Italian word because they heard it in The Godfather. But it's not: it's Sicilian, as is much of the film.
I think something important to explain about British English dialects is the class factor.
It's easy to forget because the classic RP accents have largely died out, but the way I was brought up to speak (actively! My parents would "correct" my speech patterns) is much more reflective of class than locality. This is the case throughout England at least. Brits take this for granted but it's not the global norm!
In many British cities there is also a major race axis to dialects too. Just like how American English has black and white accents, you could make a better-than-chance guess at a modern Londoner's ethnicity from a recording of their voice. (See Multicultural London English).
> This is the case throughout England at least. Brits take this for granted but it's not the global norm!
England and Britain are not interchangeable, unless you specifically mean that all Brits take it for granted that this is only the case in England or something like that?
There was no error there, maybe he doesn't know if class is a major factor in Scotland or Ireland? That could make sense since England as the center of power that class would be more of a factor there for dialects, but I am not sure.
The great thing about LLMs is we don’t have to argue about language any more, a machine can do it for us. Here is is explained:
“The common country error in that statement is confusing “England” with the entire United Kingdom.
Explanation:
• The statement says: “This is the case throughout England at least. Brits take this for granted…”
• It singles out England but then generalizes to all Brits (which includes people from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland—not just England).
• This is a common error, especially among non-UK speakers, where England is incorrectly used to refer to the entire UK.”
I rented a room for a few months, from an elderly couple in the countryside outside Aberdeen. It took a solid week before I could do more than nod politely at whatever the heck they were on about.
Thanks. I am Scottish originally and understand a lot of Scots. I guess I said 'virtually' since Gaelic is probably the only 'official' other language in Scotland but I agree Scots and Doric should be recognised as such.
I had a really interesting situation a couple of decades ago when I was studying. I grew up in a rural part of the UK in the South West. The nearest train station was just over the county border, around 20 miles away.
One day I was waiting for the train, and there were two men talking: a vicar and his friend - both in their 50s. Clearly from that area. Even though I'd grown up in an area with a similar accent - less than 20 miles away - I could not understand a word they were saying.
> This is pretty normal in any large region that has been speaking a language continually for 1600 years.
Large! The thing that gets me is that, geographically, all of the UK would fit easily into the state of Oregon, but you'd have to be a linguist to describe even one distinctly Oregonian accent, let alone dozens. It's not surprising to me that a very old country would have so many accents, but it's surprising that they would still perpetuate into the present, after mass media, travel, and mass communication seems to have flattened or homogenized so many fine distinctions based on geographic isolation.
The West Midlands Region needs some serious sub division. Herefordshire has nothing of the brummie and Shropshire fades out from the black- country yam-yam into a border talk that is sadly dieing out due to the amount of migration from the South. It is still destinct in rural communities. Man pronounced 'mon', cold pronounced 'cowd' and sheep pronounced 'ship'. I could barely follow my father speaking to his father, due to the amount of local words they used. They were 'upper wommers' though (people who live in the hills!).
I am not sure if it is still on but there is a TV series in UK called The Only Way is Essex. Which got quite famous when Chris Pratt [1] did its accent on The Graham Norton Show.
The accent attempt is at 1m30s but that's an Essex accent from the towns, and largely the result of Londoners moving out to Essex, if you head into the countryside, Essex sounds like this:
The names of dialects aren't super useful to people who aren't from the UK. Also, dialects often are continua, so drawing borders without any sort of hierarchy to indicate closeness is quite pointless.
What would be cool if one could click on each dialect/region and hear a few words spoken in that dialect.
In my view many of these small regions (that blend into one another) could be combined to give a much more useful map with more sharply distinct accents.
Such a map may be less precise, but far more useful to most.
This is good but it’s not diverse enough for North West England. In ‘Wigan’ (as shown on the map) you’ve got the Oldham/Bolton accents (book - bewk; first - fussed) which are similar but as distinct as Brummie/Black Country.
In Merseyside you’ve also got Wools/Scousers, each with different patter and pronunciation. Not to mention Warrington and its accent further East.
Years ago, I went to live and work in Strasbourg. My French was… rudimentary, school-level, but after a few weeks I was picking up the rhythm and following along. Then the grand chef came up from Paris. During the night out entertaining him, I asked him to slow down a bit as I was struggling with his accent. He completely lost it, insulting the locals as peasants, and claiming the accent was theirs not his. Kind of put a damper on the evening.
Obviously the Marseille “dialect” is recognisable, but otherwise, travelling throughout France, and even the French-speaking parts of Switzerland, I could understand folk.
A somewhat public thank you to Donald Omand from Aberdeen University for all the work he did in documenting the dialect of Caithness - that purple-ish bit at the far top right of the Scottish mainland.
Oddly enough, I've always been fascinated by Australian accents. It somehow made me particularly happy especially after I watched this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QCgqQdmr0M) where I couldn't understand a single sentence. I then tried to learn this accent in Sydney and was discouraged by many of my Aussie mates. Now I just have a little bit of the Sydney accent, which is roughly /ai/ -> /oi/ (bike -> boi-ke), /ei/ -> /ai/ (day -> die). I don't know why, but I like this accent, it sounds and feels warm, open and full.
According to this I am from one of the smallest Dialect regions (Coventry)- I really wonder why it could be a dialectical enclave; I am aware that the Forest of Arden divided Coventry from Birmingham and the Black Country making them distinct, but I had no idea that it was such an isolated dialect.
Too specific for this map but there's also an intriguing case of town in England called Corby, where people speak mainly with a Scottish accent https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28225325. Pretty fascinating.
The thing is, this sort of thing can never be represented with borders.
A more accurate map might be ones akin to wildlife population maps, with splodges dotted around the country. Many accents exist in the same place and depend on a huge range of factors like class, immigration statistics, and geographic isolation.
I am French so obviously not the best to discuss dialects but I would be curious to know what key reason would bring so many of them.
We have dialects in France, a few are very distinct but I would not call a dialect when someone pronounces a few things differently. I know that this is subjective, but still.
There are out course some mad places where they ("they" means, you know, they) call chocolatine a pain au chocolat (a French private joke, see https://www.legorafi.fr/2013/03/20/toulouse-il-se-fait-abatt... - in French from a leading national newspaper)
It seems likely that regional languages impact accents in the "primary" language, and even if that's not the mechanism, the cultural attitude of discouraging "different" dialects might have the same damping effect on accents.
I know right? Lot of squinnies on here bemoaning the accuracy but I’ve spent my whole life being told my dialect is just half cockney, half bristonian by the rest of the country. I feel so seen.
Is that true? I think a dialect needs to have at least some of its own words.
If people in your town use the same words as the town across the river, but you pronounce your R's and the others do not, I would say you speak the same dialect but with distinct accents.
Maybe the point is moot because any two populations separate enough to develop distinct ways of pronouncing words inevitably also create words of their own.
I had the opposite confusion. I asked the sysadmin where he was from, I had guessed Germany. He told me he was from Madrid, just had to relearn speaking after he had a brain tumor removed a few years before.
The article has a section "Why Scots/Doric are not included" that covers this: "This map is specifically of the English language, and Scots (and its subset, Doric), are not English." It then links to another article that discusses Doric: https://starkeycomics.com/2019/03/01/every-native-british-an...
Which is the accent where 80% of consonants and 1/3 of vowels are pronounced like a hard "ff"? I associate it with Manks, but I'm just a Yank so what do I really know.
Slight pet peeve: Northern Ireland dialects of English are not "British English"; they're Hiberno-English dialects. Northern Ireland is not part of Great Britain, nor is it British.
The accent and dialect changes every 20 miles or so, so this is obviously a bit vague.
We can’t even agree on what to call a bread roll [0] never mind how some words should be pronounced [1].
My mother was brought up in Liverpool, but her (Irish immigrant) mother hated the Bootle accent so much that she taught her, and her older sister, to speak something closer to RP.
That washed off, and like her I got bullied at school in North Derbyshire for speaking “too posh”. Yet locals in my new home of London clearly place me as being from the North but can’t place where. To be honest neither can most Northerners. I think I’m broadly “South Pennine”, so a bit of High Peak, a bit of Manchester, the odd spot of Lancashire or even West Yorkshire - reflects where I grew up, went to Uni, lived, and socialised with. My partner has a similar accent despite growing up in a part of Manchester with a distinct accent and dialect of its own.
The point is, it’s complex and it’s changing. And it’s not just the UK. It seems to have sped up in recent years. When I hear Canadian voices from 70 years ago, I can hear Scottish tinges. Likewise the US East coast of the mid-20th century had more West Country in it than today.
It was only a friend’s grandfathers generation that could tell what street someone grew up on from their voice alone, and today we are increasingly homogenised - I wonder what “English” will sound like in 200 or 500 years.
[0] https://www.ourdialects.uk/maps/bread/
[1] https://www.ourdialects.uk/maps/class-farce/
I'm from West Yorkshire, the dialect is slowly fading. My grandfather would speak with a strong accent and with spatterings of Norse words. I notice now that, yes, dialects in the UK are becoming homogenised but there is also some American influence seeping in. The American way of pronouncing a double t as a d "better" => "bedder" is increasingly more prevalent in the UK, it's slightly saddening.
Exact same thing is happening in Australia. I'm guessing it's from watching streaming video, Netflix, TikTok, etc. where American accents predominate, and any non-American accents are flattened enough to be sure it's easy for Americans to understand them.
It's weird that the mainstream TV execs think audiences want boring American accents. To me, one of the best things about the White Lotus (hit HBO show) is that it highlights a distinct array of accents (including Australian).
Pronouncing zed as "zee" is particularly annoying (as in "Gen Z").
anytime I hear someone use "zed" for Z(ee) the next thing I hear in my head is "Zed's dead, baby"[0] Pulp Fiction and I just can't help but chuckle
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E3aAvhUucI
I emigrated from the UK to USA in 1980 and my first code review at Bell Labs I spent about 30 mins explaining my code and then asked if there were any final questions and someone hesitantly asked, "What is this variable 'zed' you keep talking about?"
I used to work for a networking start-up and when we were in the US trying - without success - to sell the company we practised over and over saying "roWter" for "router" (English pronunciation like "rooter").
Funny, I just realised that I say "rooter" in French (because route ("roote") means way, like in English), but I say "rAWter" in English
There are two words with the same spelling but separate pronunciations in British English:
Router (rooter) the thing that routes packets in a newtwork
Router (rowter) a machine tool that cuts grooves, etc., in wood or metal.
As a Canadian I read that as "rOATer" for a moment, because the word row rhyming with ow is quite uncommon here -- the row I know is in a boating or a data context.
You never have a row with anyone?
As a Canadian, obviously not.
(For real though we don’t use that word for argument or whatever.)
As a Brit, so did I. That said, a "rotor" would be pronounced as "rOATer" and has a completely different meaning.
isn't English fun !
There was a cartoon in Private Eye a couple of weeks ago that suggested the reason why Millenials and Gen Z could never be reconciled is that they can't agree whether it's pronounced "Generation Zed", or "Generation Zee", as the younger generation themselves would call it.
The one that gets me the most is English people suddenly saying "fall" instead of "autumn".
It is a traditional one which fell out of fashion.
https://weather.metoffice.gov.uk/learn-about/weather/seasons...
https://twominenglish.com/autumn-vs-fall/
Now if we start saying "diaper" again instead of "nappy", you can start to worry.
It may alleveiate the epidemic of th-fronting among young men.
Norse words?
https://www.viking.no/e/england/e-yorkshire_norse.htm
Most have fallen out of use but e.g. 'laik' is still understood by young people.
I may be completely wrong, but I think one direction of evolution in pronunciation is the gradual shift to that which takes less physical effort to pronounce.
"Bedder" is less physical work, less effort, in the mouth than "better".
“Be’er” seems like even less work. For some people
> I got bullied at school in North Derbyshire for speaking “too posh”.
Isn't it fascinating that people judge accents harshly? After all, if we can understand one another, what's the problem?
The problem is social stratification within a power structure. Here's a related BBC article from earlier this year.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyjdyj729ro
I'm not familiar with the Brits so can't comment on the specifics there.
However, as a kid, I had a similar experience in a completely different country when we moved cities. My accent wasn't "posh" or "higher class" in any way, it was just from a different region. Kids would give me a hard time for it. But the exact same would happen in reverse form in the other region.
Guess people just don't like "outsiders".
> if we can understand one another, what's the problem?
The accent is just being used a heuristic of where you're from, which is the actual judgement. Posh = not from round here.
Northerners are famously insular and protective of their communities (I love them for it but I think it can go a bit far sometimes)
> dialect changes every 20 miles or so
When I first lived in Italy, this was mind-blowing for me as an American from the west coast. I went on a bike ride with the local team I had joined and they stopped for espresso in a nearby town, and the guy who ran the place was like "oh, you're from Padova" when he heard them speaking. An identifiable change in the dialect over a distance you could easily cover on a bike was a huge "wow!" moment for me.
I was born in the peak district but never quite gained the accent. Didnt sound either like a townie or a sheep shagger.
I live in london also, but people cant place me. They sometimes guess Irish or German.
I'm reminded of Serious Klein, who is a German rapper who explicitly sounds like a native English speaker. Imo he's closet to a West Coast rapper, but even this is up to debate. He could easily be from Maryland, or any other American city.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_Klein
I have no idea what my accent is at this point. I spent enough time in Oxford that I can pass as posh if I need to, moved to a part of Cheshire that had a huge scouse population, then moved to Watford and then Kent and picked up my dad’s dreadful habit of talking vaguely cockney to tradespeople. Now I live in Sheffield and me and my kids have random a mix of long and short As. I also grew up in lower-case parts of the internet and drive myself mad at work switching between that and grown up casing, so it’s not just vocal dialects anymore.
It'll sound like whatever the Amish speak! Apparently their population grows exponentially, while the rest, not so much.
> the bread pictured here
no bread is pictured
Yeah, that seems to have been lost at some point. From memory they used a picture of what Americans might call a soft dinner roll.
To me it would be more a roll than a bap or a barm, but they're almost synonyms. The weird one for me was when a mate insisted it was a teacake, and I suggested that would only apply if it had raisins in it. What I was describing, he insisted, was a fruit teacake, and without fruit it became a teacake. This is contrary to what the rest of the country believes outside of North Manchester, but has become a running joke for many years between us.
My wife was from Orkney and we spent a few months in the US. So we had US biscuits which are not the same as UK biscuits, US cookies which are not Orcadian cookies, West Country English buns which are definitely not US buns.
Your (Yorkshire?) teacakes are almost but not exactly like my buns.
You can imagine the confusion when the children asked for a cookie, a bun, or a biscuit while in the US.
The general unawareness of what a barmcake (barm) is outside of Bolton/east lancs, particularly in London, never ceases to amuse me.
“What the hell is a chip/bacon/sausage/pastie/pie barm!?”
To be fair, it was nearly 50 years before I knew what the "liquor" Cockneys put on their pie and mash is.
When is this map from? 1955?
Essex accents had travelled well into Hertfordshire by the 1970s. Cockney has evaporated and the condensate largely landed in Essex and Hertfordshire.
Do people really speak Kentish in most of Kent? Or is it a mix of Modern Estuary, MLE (multicultural London English) and RP (received pronunciation)?
I know the author says that the map will always be wrong, I understand that, but this map is badly out of date.
> Do people really speak Kentish in most of Kent? Or is it a mix of Modern Estuary,
Yes, ish
For example Bermondsey(a former borough in southwark, london) is a weird mix of kent and cockney, but it is still, just about distinct. if you move more into kent, I sounds get longer. from I to Aye, to Aye-eh
In the 80s-2000s half of central london moved to the suburbs, taking the accent with them.
However the south london accent still exists in younguns, depending on parents of course. If you're second generation, and depending on which school you go to, you might get a hybrid accent. (my daughter got a proper bermondsey accent, but I suspect now she'd get, posher accent.)
but, those accents are well away from these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S8JR4eJAXA which sounds more related to broads norfolk when I was growing up. (but 1950s broads was different to 80s)
I think the biggest issue is trying to pin down the hard accent changes vs the gradual.
For example somewhere in Lincolnshire it goes from rural burble to hard yorkshire-eqse stops. I suspect its something to do with the fens.
Sarf Londn, happy memories...
Yeh it’s strange it includes cockney so prominently. It isn’t really very present unless you spend time around the various gentlemen frequenting sports pubs and pie and mash shops in east London, or if you take a black cab very often. I’d say the “roadman” dialect, mixing cockney and Jamaican patois, plus grime vibes, is FAR more common. I’ll hear it everyday wandering around South and east London. I guess it’s a London dialect so it’s in that umbrella,… but how come cockney gets such a fat slab of land?
> pie and mash shops
p-aye an mashhhh, bruv
You used to be able to get pie, mash and liquor round me in the Bexley area until about 10 years ago, but the ones I knew have closed now and I don’t know where the nearest place is.
Not sure if you can still get Jellied Eels in Eltham, which would be a shame if you can’t.
I heard one of manzies shut down in bermondsey this year, but there is a new one on the isle of sheppey.
[dead]
"RP", by the definition it was originally given, doesn't really exist any more in anyone under 70 or so. What you may now think of as "RP" is usually called Standard Southern British, or SSB.
There are two sorts of Essex, the countryside version that straddles south Suffolk and the London imported one that has become the stereotype, that appears to be estuary on the map. Both have massive crossover depending whether you're in town or village. A rather difficult mapping task!
I had the same feeling. I've lived in Sussex for most of my life and I can't say I've heard a Sussex accent for a long time. Maybe I'm on the wrong side of an urban/rural split?
If you think this is dense, try Italy some time. Huge numbers of highly distinct dialects, because until the mid-1800s Italians spoke huge numbers of entirely different languages, complete with their own full literature traditions. During unification the country settled on Florence's language (the language of Dante) as the "official" language: but everyone still proudly speaks their own language. To my knowledge, Italy is regarded as the densest diverse dialect region in Europe.
How different? What Americans call arugula the British call rocket. Because the British word is derived from the French roquette, which is from ruchetta, a word in italian dialects along the French border. But Americans got their word from aruculu in the southern Calabrese dialect, a result of immigration. The Italian word is rucola, from the Latin eruca.
Americans think "Capeesh" is an Italian word because they heard it in The Godfather. But it's not: it's Sicilian, as is much of the film.
I think something important to explain about British English dialects is the class factor.
It's easy to forget because the classic RP accents have largely died out, but the way I was brought up to speak (actively! My parents would "correct" my speech patterns) is much more reflective of class than locality. This is the case throughout England at least. Brits take this for granted but it's not the global norm!
In many British cities there is also a major race axis to dialects too. Just like how American English has black and white accents, you could make a better-than-chance guess at a modern Londoner's ethnicity from a recording of their voice. (See Multicultural London English).
> This is the case throughout England at least. Brits take this for granted but it's not the global norm!
England and Britain are not interchangeable, unless you specifically mean that all Brits take it for granted that this is only the case in England or something like that?
Edit: for the downvoters: https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/difference-between-britai...
There was no error there, maybe he doesn't know if class is a major factor in Scotland or Ireland? That could make sense since England as the center of power that class would be more of a factor there for dialects, but I am not sure.
The great thing about LLMs is we don’t have to argue about language any more, a machine can do it for us. Here is is explained:
“The common country error in that statement is confusing “England” with the entire United Kingdom.
Explanation: • The statement says: “This is the case throughout England at least. Brits take this for granted…” • It singles out England but then generalizes to all Brits (which includes people from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland—not just England). • This is a common error, especially among non-UK speakers, where England is incorrectly used to refer to the entire UK.”
Has anyone seen models (free or paid) to detect accents from audio?
Fa says aat? Fowks dinnae spik "Grumpian" up in Aiberdeen, they spik'i Doric.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doric_dialect_%28Scotland%29
I rented a room for a few months, from an elderly couple in the countryside outside Aberdeen. It took a solid week before I could do more than nod politely at whatever the heck they were on about.
The article mentions not covering Doric or Scots since they are considered virtually second languages
Not 'virtually', Scots is a different language to English, and Doric is a dialect of Scots.
English and Scots are sibling languages, c.f. some of the geographically close Scandinavian languages.
If you want a quick guide to languages in Britain, the site has an additional article which the original links to:
https://starkeycomics.com/2019/03/01/every-native-british-an...
Thanks. I am Scottish originally and understand a lot of Scots. I guess I said 'virtually' since Gaelic is probably the only 'official' other language in Scotland but I agree Scots and Doric should be recognised as such.
I love it, have listen: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/ZrJMVPQyxvg
I had a really interesting situation a couple of decades ago when I was studying. I grew up in a rural part of the UK in the South West. The nearest train station was just over the county border, around 20 miles away.
One day I was waiting for the train, and there were two men talking: a vicar and his friend - both in their 50s. Clearly from that area. Even though I'd grown up in an area with a similar accent - less than 20 miles away - I could not understand a word they were saying.
> This is pretty normal in any large region that has been speaking a language continually for 1600 years.
Large! The thing that gets me is that, geographically, all of the UK would fit easily into the state of Oregon, but you'd have to be a linguist to describe even one distinctly Oregonian accent, let alone dozens. It's not surprising to me that a very old country would have so many accents, but it's surprising that they would still perpetuate into the present, after mass media, travel, and mass communication seems to have flattened or homogenized so many fine distinctions based on geographic isolation.
The West Midlands Region needs some serious sub division. Herefordshire has nothing of the brummie and Shropshire fades out from the black- country yam-yam into a border talk that is sadly dieing out due to the amount of migration from the South. It is still destinct in rural communities. Man pronounced 'mon', cold pronounced 'cowd' and sheep pronounced 'ship'. I could barely follow my father speaking to his father, due to the amount of local words they used. They were 'upper wommers' though (people who live in the hills!).
I am not sure if it is still on but there is a TV series in UK called The Only Way is Essex. Which got quite famous when Chris Pratt [1] did its accent on The Graham Norton Show.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af7UD-IxzZI
The accent attempt is at 1m30s but that's an Essex accent from the towns, and largely the result of Londoners moving out to Essex, if you head into the countryside, Essex sounds like this:
https://youtu.be/1xxRdiiyT70?si=PlBnim1PW_y8nh5I
How did you find this video from 2013 with (as of writing) 290 views, and with it not mentioning Essex or accents at all?
I know that part of the world quite well, it's from a local historical society, I just searched for them. They don't advertise well!
The names of dialects aren't super useful to people who aren't from the UK. Also, dialects often are continua, so drawing borders without any sort of hierarchy to indicate closeness is quite pointless.
What would be cool if one could click on each dialect/region and hear a few words spoken in that dialect.
I agree.
In my view many of these small regions (that blend into one another) could be combined to give a much more useful map with more sharply distinct accents.
Such a map may be less precise, but far more useful to most.
This is good but it’s not diverse enough for North West England. In ‘Wigan’ (as shown on the map) you’ve got the Oldham/Bolton accents (book - bewk; first - fussed) which are similar but as distinct as Brummie/Black Country.
In Merseyside you’ve also got Wools/Scousers, each with different patter and pronunciation. Not to mention Warrington and its accent further East.
Here is the equivalent map for German: https://language.mki.wisc.edu/essays/high-and-low-german/
Here's a similar one from Wikipedia that includes Dutch dialects as an example of dialect continuum: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialektkontinuum#/media/Datei:... probably based on this historical map: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/11kvga1/an_1894_ma...
This Wikipedia page also has some interesting maps: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nederlandse_dialecten
"You will find the same thing in [...] France".
Actually, you don't. Strong regional accents are pretty rare compared to the UK or Germany
Years ago, I went to live and work in Strasbourg. My French was… rudimentary, school-level, but after a few weeks I was picking up the rhythm and following along. Then the grand chef came up from Paris. During the night out entertaining him, I asked him to slow down a bit as I was struggling with his accent. He completely lost it, insulting the locals as peasants, and claiming the accent was theirs not his. Kind of put a damper on the evening.
Obviously the Marseille “dialect” is recognisable, but otherwise, travelling throughout France, and even the French-speaking parts of Switzerland, I could understand folk.
Not unrelated to a longstanding policy of suppressing regional languages:
> Depuis plus de deux siècles, les pouvoirs politiques ont combattu les langues régionales
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_France
Exactly. My grandfather was punished in school whenever he spoke Breton
What about Ch'ti [1] or Savoyard?
The article is about dialects not accents. Even just considering French accents, I find the Marseille one distinctive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picard_language
There are a couple of light accents in France (Toulouse,Marseille) but not many.
Stronger accents are found outside France: Quebec, Africa...
A somewhat public thank you to Donald Omand from Aberdeen University for all the work he did in documenting the dialect of Caithness - that purple-ish bit at the far top right of the Scottish mainland.
https://www.wickvoices.co.uk/voices_listen.php?id=0806202309...
Corbyite. Sounds like a mineral formed when Iron-Bru percolates through sandstone.
Irn-Bru, the national soft drink of Scotland.
Their ads are brilliant.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1lcuZoYiuVs
Or indeed the Star Trek episode:
“The Corbomite Maneuver“
Perhaps it was inspired by a day out to Corby?
And is then finished in a trouser press…
Oddly enough, I've always been fascinated by Australian accents. It somehow made me particularly happy especially after I watched this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QCgqQdmr0M) where I couldn't understand a single sentence. I then tried to learn this accent in Sydney and was discouraged by many of my Aussie mates. Now I just have a little bit of the Sydney accent, which is roughly /ai/ -> /oi/ (bike -> boi-ke), /ei/ -> /ai/ (day -> die). I don't know why, but I like this accent, it sounds and feels warm, open and full.
Try this Scottish accent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUZyNLZZjMs
Or this MLE (Multicultural London English) one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5bqYlsXDdg
An amusing anecdote, especially the Superman comparison at the end...
You seriously couldn't understand a single sentence?
No, unfortunately. English is not my first language.
According to this I am from one of the smallest Dialect regions (Coventry)- I really wonder why it could be a dialectical enclave; I am aware that the Forest of Arden divided Coventry from Birmingham and the Black Country making them distinct, but I had no idea that it was such an isolated dialect.
It is quite distinct in the pronunciation of "ing". The N and the G are strongly emphasised. "Singing" is a good test word. The Gs jump out at you.
It's because so many malcontents were sent to Coventry *wink*
Cov is pretty distinct. for example the apple's siri british voice 3 I would argue is light Cov accent.
Given how close beeer-ming-um is, you'd think they'd be similar.
Too specific for this map but there's also an intriguing case of town in England called Corby, where people speak mainly with a Scottish accent https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28225325. Pretty fascinating.
[edit - Corby is on the map! It refers to the accent as "Corbyite" in the middle of "Northants".]
The TV programme "Toxin Town" is set in Corby, about birth defects caused by mishandled environmental waste.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg7pvl59wxo
Right! They also explained in that series that the Scots were economic migrants there for the steelworks work. Great series too.
oh thanks!
I like Kent and Sussex accents. Rod Hull (carer of Emus) had a good one.
"We wunt be druv" is the Sussex motto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_wunt_be_druv
I was just thinking about the variety of british dialects, have been consuming more UK media recently.
It would have been even more interesting to have an interactive map that also has audio files linked to it.
The thing is, this sort of thing can never be represented with borders.
A more accurate map might be ones akin to wildlife population maps, with splodges dotted around the country. Many accents exist in the same place and depend on a huge range of factors like class, immigration statistics, and geographic isolation.
Tbh I was worried when I saw this title but its not bad
Waze has decided I need a London accent to find my way. Kate now says "Go strai on". Kate used to sound like a genteel granny. I miss her.
I find this fascinating. Didn't see it in the article, but I wonder how many people speak each dialect. Since of those areas are very small.
Why are there so few on this map? Seems wrong to me :)
I am French so obviously not the best to discuss dialects but I would be curious to know what key reason would bring so many of them.
We have dialects in France, a few are very distinct but I would not call a dialect when someone pronounces a few things differently. I know that this is subjective, but still.
There are out course some mad places where they ("they" means, you know, they) call chocolatine a pain au chocolat (a French private joke, see https://www.legorafi.fr/2013/03/20/toulouse-il-se-fait-abatt... - in French from a leading national newspaper)
probably related to the policy of suppressing regional languages discussed in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43735946
It seems likely that regional languages impact accents in the "primary" language, and even if that's not the mechanism, the cultural attitude of discouraging "different" dialects might have the same damping effect on accents.
Love seeing Pompey on there. Ryan Starkey is no dinlo.
I know right? Lot of squinnies on here bemoaning the accuracy but I’ve spent my whole life being told my dialect is just half cockney, half bristonian by the rest of the country. I feel so seen.
Pompey is less strong on the island these days, but Leigh Park people sound like I remember from childhood still.
Perhaps it’s gone out I can remember a Leytonstone accent, and a Barnet one. But that’s accents not a dialect.
Those are dialects. An accent is what you have as a second language speaker.
(Of course reality is more complicated; creoles and pidgins etc )
Is that true? I think a dialect needs to have at least some of its own words.
If people in your town use the same words as the town across the river, but you pronounce your R's and the others do not, I would say you speak the same dialect but with distinct accents.
Maybe the point is moot because any two populations separate enough to develop distinct ways of pronouncing words inevitably also create words of their own.
thats the thing, norfolk dialect had about four main strains, but most of the dialect as disappeared, leaving only the accent
My first year at uni:
Me: "How about that James guy, huh? He's obviously fought his way past disability, what a great guy, an example to all of us."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, he's a professor at Oxford, that's quite some achievement"
"So what?"
"Well, I mean, you know, he's gotten past his handicap. You can kinda hear it on him, right?"
"He's Brummie..."
"Is that like a palsy or something?"
"No, there's nothing wrong with him, he just comes from a certain area near Birmingham"
"Ah. I'm gonna go find a rock to hide under."
A few years later, around when I got married:
"Hey Nacho, where are your in-laws from? Your mom and I tried to talk to them"
"They're from Scotland"
"What language do they speak?"
"English"
"What, really? I tried to talk to your father-in-law, I couldn't understand anything!"
"..."
I had the opposite confusion. I asked the sysadmin where he was from, I had guessed Germany. He told me he was from Madrid, just had to relearn speaking after he had a brain tumor removed a few years before.
Where's Doric in Aberdeenshire??
The article has a section "Why Scots/Doric are not included" that covers this: "This map is specifically of the English language, and Scots (and its subset, Doric), are not English." It then links to another article that discusses Doric: https://starkeycomics.com/2019/03/01/every-native-british-an...
Which is the accent where 80% of consonants and 1/3 of vowels are pronounced like a hard "ff"? I associate it with Manks, but I'm just a Yank so what do I really know.
If you find cockney over that area over something non British I would be impressed.
Source, have lived in said area.
Interesting, but more of a measure of what has been lost in some parts of the country to change.
https://cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk/ is the chicken dinner!
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Slight pet peeve: Northern Ireland dialects of English are not "British English"; they're Hiberno-English dialects. Northern Ireland is not part of Great Britain, nor is it British.