Regional accents and dialects are long-held loves of mine – vocabulary, grammar, idiom and slang, rooted in a particular place.
In childhood, we assimilate quickly, wanting to fit in. From the “eyup me duck” and “weey up” greetings of dad’s Northamptonshire, to the markedly different Portsmouth enclave of mum’s Hampshire, with its Romani dialect roots, there were several influences, not least my own rural blend of the very west of West Berkshire.
The way we speak is an important part of our identity. It expresses and reveals the story of where we are from, or have adopted or absorbed. But it also attracts assumption and judgement. No matter its farmerish burr, my southern English was posh in Northamptonshire. Assimilation was easier in Portsmouth, the dialect part of my own, but there I was a country bumpkin.
Accents and dialect should always be a source of pride and friendly inquiry. But just when it seems we’re embracing them, in train-station announcements or on the BBC, in a cultural shift from the empire-emanating Received Pronunciation (RP) of the King or Queen’s English, are they dying out?
When researching local farmworkers for my new book, I came across voice recordings from the 1960s and 1970s of Reuben Annetts, born 1876, and his son Bert, born around 1900. Bert’s accent is deep and almost West-Countryish, yet recognisably rural Berkshire, but Reuben’s is so rich he sounds Welsh. The accent was changing then.
Changing accents
From the advance of Estuary English, blending RP with Cockney-derived south-east London, regional accents are now being squeezed from another direction altogether. It was evident at the secondary school I worked in, with children adopting American phrasing and accents, more prevalent in their world of TikTok, Netflix and Disney, gaming and music. But we are required to repeat it back, too, adapting our speech to use technology such as Alexa, Siri and customer service bots.
In the latter half of the last decade, Nationwide Building Society won acclaim when it featured 31 poets of diverse backgrounds, ethnicities and accents in its advertising campaign ‘Voices’. Around the same time, a report by the University of York, commissioned for HSBC Bank, lamented that those most distinct of accents – Brummie, Glaswegian, Liverpudlian, Cockney, Mancunian, Geordie – will die out, homogenise or be very subtle by 2066.
The ‘rhotic r’ (pronouncing both ‘r’s in the word runner, for example) has been disappearing since the 18th century, but has strongholds in Scottish and Irish English, rural Northamptonshire, Lancashire, Cornwall, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and the West Country. It’s there too, in mine and my youngest daughter’s accent, that rural burr, especially when we say Thursday, farm or curlew. It’s there in some Indian English, Pakistani English and Caribbean English voices too, not to mention those fictional characters in The Archers.
Perhaps our art of code-switching – shifting linguistic styles to suit social situations – will sharpen instead. A recent afternoon in our village bakery found me code-switching seamlessly in a rapid-fire dual between older village-born friends and a part-time neighbour from London who sends his kids to private school.
Regional accents and dialects express the richness and beauty of place and community in our daily speech. When they’re strong, we listen more attentively, and there’s power in that, too. We should revel in our personal ‘idiolect’ and garner comfort, confidence and delight in our powers of code-switching or becoming bi-accentual. It’s an aural map of our shared places in the world.
More UK culture
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- Brecon Beacons adopts its ancient Welsh name, Bannau Brycheiniog
- Ellie Harrison: the importance of accents
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