As I understand it, an accent or dialect happens when one group is cut off from another, whether it be socially or geographically. Given the small size of the UK (it’s area is given here as 130, 478 sq. kilometers, which is roughly 50,000 square miles, or slightly smaller than Illinois), why haven’t the various and widely varied accents been lost in modern times? There are trains and busses and television and movies - all things that would have people listening to other accents on a daily basis - why are there still so many very unique accents and dialects in the UK? Pride? Classism? Sheer stubborness?
In contrast, I don’t think the average non-linguist could tell you more than “Northern Illinois” or “Southern Illinois” from our accents in my state. Maybe “Chicago area” as a third, but most Northern Illinois people sound like me to my ears.
I think it’s just a very persistent legacy from olden tymes when people didn’t travel much. Even with the advent of travel and mass media etc, the vast majority of personal interactions still take place with local people, so it’s still being self-reinforced to a much greater extent than it’s being diluted by outside influences.
Because your accent gets “fixed” before you hit puberty. Something happens in the brain that makes it darn near impossible to change an accent appreciably once you’re an adult (which is when you’d travel more outside your home base, and be exposed to “standard” English more). This acts as a damping mechanism to the loss of regional accents, but as people move around more and mix things up, accents do change and some of the more obscure ones disappear altogether.
Accents are disappearing, merging, and appearing. Estuary English is spreading rapidly. Asian and Caribbean accents persist within those of British-born communities.
Lack of internal migration. Yes, we hear other accents all the time, but I’m confident in saying that the majority of the population remain living in one region for most of their lives. Geographic distribution of surnames indicates this is the case: an anecdotal example is a friend of mine who comes from Yorkshire. The phone directory of her home town has several pages of entries for her surname, whereas my local one has just two people.
Even when people do move, their children will acquire the accent that surround them, to some extent. I may not be native to East Anglia (Irish mother, London-born father, born in a godforsaken northern city), but I’ve still picked up some elements of a Suffolk accent.
Not all British accents are necessarily regional, are they? When I hear Tony Blair speak, am I hearing a regional accent or an accent of a particular class or vocational group?
By the way, when I was in Germany in the 1970s, I studied German and talked a lot with the locals as part of my job (a liaison position between the 3rd Brigade, 3rd ID and the local population) and I learned to pick up different accents among the local Germans. My landlady had a really thick Hessian accent, which is really gutteral and and roughly equivalent to the Southern U.S. drawl.
I saw a demonstration on a Channel 4 programme called “The Heist” of a linguistics expert analysing the accent and speech pattern of a “kidnapper” (it was a mock kidnapping of a painting).
The expert listened to the voice of the “kidnapper”, and was able to discern the origin of the speaker down to a particular neighbourhood (4 streets, iirc) in the East End of London.
The “kidnapper” was in his late 50’s early 60’s, so it’s possible that this type of accuracy in analysis wouldn’t apply to a younger person, but it was still impressive.
I think you’re hearing “Received Pronunciation” or “BBC English.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_English The British equivalent of American “Anchorman English.”
For my part, I wonder why “Black English” or “Ebonics” is so persistent in the U.S. when the black kids grow up exposed to so much media that, mostly, is not in that dialect.
Wasn’t that how the Yorkshire Ripper was caught? His voice on the taunting calls to the police let them narrow his home down to a single town, and they just interrogated everyone there, IIRC.
Nope certanly not he was a hoaxer, that person was caught recently with DNA techniques.
He was dubbed ‘Wearside Jack’ by linguists and he sent his cassettes in envelopes that were kept for years as evidence, these were tested for DNA and when he committed a much more recent crime his DNA was added to the criminal database, a susequent review of long outstanding cases turned him up.
I took a year of courses for speech/language pathology, and one of our teachers was this sort of expert. He could identify a person’s childhood home within 25 miles - regardless of where they moved to as an adult and for how long. Chicago was his extra-special specialty. If you were from Chicago, he could pinpoint it within 4 blocks. So this sort of expertise does exist.
Thanks for all your replies. Seems like there’s a number of reasons, along with “but they *are *blending/disappearing.”
It’s not really accurate to describe Blair’s accent as RP. He’s known for having a somewhat flexible accent, depending on his audience, tending towards a casual “y’know” glottal-stop sound when he wants to seem less formal. Some of this is probably unintentional (I certainly don’t have a Suffolk accent in a job interview, and not through deliberate suppression), but some of it does seem contrived. His more usual voice is definitely a class-based one rather than regional, indicating ‘upper middle class’. It certainly has no trace of his Edinburgh & Durham roots.
Cite? I certainly developed my adult accent in my twenties. I sound nothing like someone from the Cape Flats, which is the accent I had until I was 19-20.
Or
Do you think Sting speaks with a thick Georgie accent when he’s alone?
I also think it’s population density. In the US, apart from the coasts and midwest, the population is really sparse - so “local” interactions are over a much wider area. Here, we’re all crammed into an island, so our immediate peers are much closer together.
On the issue of Tony Blair, his accent was simply “barrister”. He was taught to speak like that at Lincoln’s Inn. Listening to some of my own recordings as I train to be a Barrister, shows that my proudly South Asian Military type accent seems to be giving way to something heard on BBC World.
My tutor has a very strong Belfast accent in ordinary conversation, but it changes substatially whenever he is in court or in lectures.
My father claimed, and I have no reason to think he was lying, that when he first began teaching in a secondary (high) school in Co. Tyrone in Northern Ireland, that he could tell what town or often townland a student was from by his accent. This was at the end of the 1950s, in a rural area where television was still somewhat of a novelty. These towns were often only a couple of miles apart.
I’m fairly good with accents by the county or by the big town but I can’t hear much difference geographically in Dublin, rather by social class and Dublin is such a mishmash of different people now that all the accents blend together somewhat.
In Britain, I can tell the various regional accents usually but I noticed that younger people with a university education often have a neutral accent, perhaps that’s the Estuary accent that **GorillaMan **talks about above.
I think this is true of many (perhaps all?) English speakers, both consciously and subconsciously they modify their accent depending on context. If I were talking to someone who was still learning English I would modify my accent and turn of phrase for example.
OK, this I’m skeptical of. I would imagine that most folks in Chicago (or anywhere in the US, for that matter) live as adults more than 4 blocks from their childhood home, and most schools service an area larger than 4 blocks (if they even serve a particular neighborhood at all). So even if I grow up in a particular 4-block area, most of my neighbors have accents from different neighborhoods, as do most of the kids I go to school with. In fact, I can only think of three friends I had growing up who lived within that distance of me, and one of them had a definite Appalachian accent he’d gotten from his parents.
When I was in college in Baltimore, I read of someone who could do that with New York city accents - talk to him for a minute or two and he would tell you where you grew up within a few blocks.
By the time I left Baltimore after ~15 years, I had a similar skill, if not quite as sharp. I could peg the neighborhood of almost any white native of the area, and in some cases drill down to a few block area. This over a maybe 400 square mile region.
Similarly in NJ where I was raised, - it is common for people to try to guess “What Exit are you from” upon learning you are from NJ, based on your accent alone. Many people can guess much better then chance after only a few greetings.