Dialects of English

A nasty shock awaits many visitors to Britain. Imagine 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 or 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 or chip shop. Some accents are so strong that they present problems for British people, too. Variations within the British 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. Intonation patterns also differ between regions.

There is a kind of standard British English pronunciation, based on 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 a 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 accent.

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 the other varieties of English have been increasingly accepted on mainstream TV and radio, Westcountry remains the Cinderella among accents, confined to comedy and gardening programmes.