What keeps the range of UK accents in existence?

Great Debates
21

The influence of the media is strong, but it hasn’t been around for that long. Compare that to the hundreds of years local communities have had to build up their own accents. The same probably applies in other countries with other languages, but, as foreigners, we don’t notice them as much.

There is also be less internal migration, like Gorillaman said. I once searched for my surname on probably the same website he used. My surname seems pretty common, but it turns out that almost all of us are in London, South Essex, or North Kent. Now, my family is very fertile, but we can’t account for all of them! It was pretty much like searching for ‘Woods’ and finding them all within a fifty mile radius of you.

Perhaps it’s because you don’t usually need to move all that far here. Hell, the distance between blocks in the US is sometimes more than the distance between towns in the UK, IME. Visiting there was an eye-opener as to why the car is such a mainstay in American culture. I have known a few people on my hometown - twenty miles from the centre of London - who’d never left the town at all. Not even to go to London. They felt no need to.

I have slight issues with using the term RP or BBC English for the kind of accent Tony Blair has. RP applies to the Queen, but his accent is hugely different to the Queen’s. I speak like Tony Blair, but I don’t speak like the Queen at all.

The reason it’s also called BBC English is that, in times past, you had to have that accent if you work for the BBC in any role but the gaffer, pretty much. You also needed that to be in any senior professional job, like a lawyer. That is not so much the case now.

It depends where you’re from, though; speak with a strong Cockney, Brum or Bristol accent and you won’t be taken as seriously in s ome of those professional jobs. Be Welsh, Liverpudlian or - sometimes - Georgie or Yorkshire - and you’ll get away with it. Although you still have to ‘soften’ your accent then (but that’s partly about comprehensibilty, not just snobbery). However, you can get a job as TV presenter with any accent at all now - softened down.

The ‘new RP’ is somewhat of a mix between RP and Estuary. It’s like speaking according to a dictionary but occasionally dropping a t.

Tony Blair probably started his accent off by being posh and going to posh boarding schools, btw. When he was a kid, he won’t have spoken like he was Scottish or from Durham. He’s also softened his posh accent down a bit.

22

Actually, this is a better answer:

There is linguistic convergence in the UK thanks to the media and immigration.

There is also linguistic divergence due to specific regions having individual identities, and hanging on to them.

I apologise for my lack of Google-fu to explain these terms, but I don’t seem to be able to find any good cites recently without about ten pages of hunting.

23

I pick up accents very fast without realizing it. When I was 15 I spent 3 weeks in Australia and came back with an Australian accent. Strangers thought I was British and a few friends/relatives were slightly creeped out. It took about 3 weeks to for me to sound like an American again.

24

Because, contrary to a couple posts above, people don’t get their accents from the media. They get their accents from their peers. (Cite: any sociolinguist you care to mention, such as Peter Trudgill or J.K. Chambers.)

As for the OP I don’t know about Northern Illinois and Southern Illinois but there is a lot of work being done on regional US accents and there is definitely evidence of divergence. William Labov in particular has done a huge amount of work on this and says that there is more difference between the accents of major US cities now than at any time in the past. Of course at the moment a lot of this is only perceptible to specialists in the field.

25

That’s just because RP, like any other accent name, covers a range of actual accents. If you heard me speak, you’d identify my accent as “Geordie”, but I don’t sound like any of the guys from Auf Wiedersehen Pet, for instance (and they each have different accents to each other). They’re all Geordie accents, though.

26

It’s a form of code-switching, and I certainly know I do it, both with accent and with dialect.

27

There is a lot of misinformation going on in this thread. Just to name a few:

  1. Media has little to do with a way actual people speak. Interaction is key to picking up a language, and beyond a few lexical items, you don’t pick up much from TV.

  2. I am HIGHLY dubious of any claims of knowing where someone is from within a “four block radius” just from the dialect. Particularly in a US city. Particularly NYC, since this is what I study. There is just not that much difference. There is no evidence, even, that different boroughs have different accents, though that is a popular folklore. It has way more to do with class.

  3. Being able to adjust your speech to a situation is not usually code-switching but a matter of style. We each are masters of many different styles, but most people don’t actually speak more than one dialect. Some people do, for sure, but most of the time it’s about style.

I don’t study dialects in the UK, but from what I’ve read, there is definitely some convergence. The UK has always had a dizzying array of dialects. However, no country of that many people is ever going to adopt one single dialect. The way we speak reflects so many facets of our identity, from region to ethnicity to class and education, and there will always be differences and there will always be a desire to express those differences through our speech.

My understanding of the class aspect of British English is that there is less regional variation among the most “standard”/high class accents when compared to American English. There is a lot of regional variation in “standard” American English.

There is also a widening in difference among some of the larger dialect areas in the US; the southeast and the northern cities are becoming more different, thanks to two vowel shifts that are heading in different directions. Increased mobility and communication just can’t compete, it seems, with identity.

28

I wasn’t talking about ‘being able to adjust’, but automatic and subconcious changes.

29

One rule is that you learn language from interaction, not from passive listening. This is why your dialect will sound more like the people around you than like the dialects you hear on TV and in movies. You can force yourself to speak like people you hear on TV, but that takes a conscious effort. Furthermore, you will hear a mixture of dialects on TV, so you would have to force yourself to speak like a particular one. It’s also the case that there are more dialects in the U.S. than you think. It’s not quite like the U.K. in the number of dialects packed within a small area, but there is a lot of differentiation in dialects in the U.S. Many people aren’t particularly good at picking up on such things, but some are, as several posters have already indicated.

The reason that there are more dialects in a given area in the U.K. than in the U.S. is that dialects take a long time to develop. Two hundred years ago there was more differentiation in dialects in the U.K. than there is now. After all, English speakers had been living there for over a thousand years by that point. There was less moving to other parts of the country, less visiting other parts of the country, and no TV or movies. In the U.S. two hundred years ago, in much of the country English speakers had only just arrived there. The dialects hadn’t yet had a chance to develop in much of the U.S.

Today there is just as much moving around, visiting other places, and TV and movies in the U.K. as there is in the U.S. The differentiation in dialects is decreasing somewhat in the U.K., but there’s still more differentiation there than in the U.S. because there was more differentiation two hundred years ago. In contrast, people are more settled in the U.S. than they were two hundred years ago. Two hundred years ago, there were no established dialects of English in the U.S. except on the East Coast because there were no communities of English speakers who had lived there (the present U.S. outside the East Coast) for more than a few years. So the amount of differentiation in dialects in the U.S. has probably increased in the past two hundred years, although not to the present level of the U.K.

30

So was liberty3701…

Sounds like someone was fond of tall tales.

31

It’s old, done in 1988, but there’s a marvelous PBS program about regional accents in the USA called “American Tongues” – well worth watching. As a lifelong Bay Stater I can attest that the New England segments were spot on.

32

I also wouldn’t overlook the important of pride and shame. Some people hang onto the accent of their birth despite outside influences such as the media because they’re proud of where they came from; some jettison it because of the opposite reaction.

33

There are bits and pieces of this on youtube. It looks great.

34

This is true. There’s intense rivalries between towns and cities that are very close (mostly related to sport), within the UK: Manchester and Liverpool, Sunderland and Newcastle, Glasgow and Edinburgh, Wigan and St. Helens, for instance, as well as country rivalries (e.g. Yorkshire and Lancashire) and a general north/south rivalry.

35

I’m just going to pop in to point out that it is England that is approximately 50,000 square miles. The UK is about 94,000, and Great Britain 81,000.

36

What’s always baffled me is how the British accents of America’s early settlers ever turned into the American southern drawl.

37

Why? Many of the elements of American speech are still existing in British dialects today.

38

Yup - divergence, like I said above, for the ones that keep their accent even if they move away for a while. A few people even start to sound more Geordie (or whatever) when they’re around speakers of a different dialect.

The media does have some influence. My generation picked up a slight Aussie twang due to Neighbours, the way they speak in Friends and Buffy got picked up here - the phrases, not the accent (lots of people complain about ‘Buffy-speak,’ and they don’t mean direct quotes) - and my daughter says some words with a distinct American accent because she’s only heard them on TV. Communicating with people internationally over the internet changes some of the language you use, too. It’d be daft to say that the media forms dialects when people are little kids learning the language, but it’s equally daft to claim it has no effect.

39

People’s accents are largely determined by the accents of people they speak with, not those they hear on TV or elsewhere. And even with improved transport and communication, most verbal interaction is with people who live within 50 miles. For that reason, regional accents are persisting.

40

County pride has been strong here for years and remains so, partly because of All Ireland GAA sports presumably. Amongst students who come to Dublin from other counties, many tone down their accent or affect a Dublin accent but it always seems to me to be far more common amongst female students than male students.