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Telegraph.co.uk

Sunday 22 May 2016

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British regional accents 'still thriving'

Britain’s regional accents are becoming more widespread despite the increasingly homogeneous nature of society, according to academic studies.

Forecasts have suggested accents would disappear and merge into a national way of speaking, albeit with some class and regional variations.

But experts found that Geordie, Scouse, Mancunian, and Brummie accents are, if anything, becoming more distinct. However nuances between districts within the big cities are disappearing.

Outside the cities, the hundreds of accents that once distinguished small towns and rural districts are gradually being subsumed into regional “super-accents”.

Experts have identified eight to 10 of these likely to predominate within the next 40 years. They include estuary English, the burr of the southwest and separate accents in the West Midlands, Yorkshire and north and south Wales.

The resilience of urban accents is most evident in northern England; in the south only two cities — London and Bristol — have strong accents of their own.

“People want to protect their identity,” Dominic Watt, a lecturer in forensic speech science at York University, told a newspaper.

“You could be parachuted into pretty much any British city and the shops look the same, people dress the same and have similar pastimes and interests. What still makes these places separate and distinct is the dialect and accent.”

Studies have found that some Scouse features, such as where the “k” sound is pronounced “kh” in words such as back, are becoming more prominent and widespread. The effect has even spread into north Wales.

Paul Kerswill, professor of sociolinguistics at Lancaster University, who is about to begin a study into the spread of the Liverpudlian accent, told a newspaper: “Liverpool and Manchester are only half an hour apart but the accents remain rock solid. There must be a lot of commuting between the two cities but they are not merging.”

Accents are more varied in northern England because they have not been subjected to the mass levelling of speech caused by London and its commuting hinterland.

In the southeast, Kent, Essex and East and West Sussex are all losing their distinctive accents while the capital’s own cockney is also under threat.

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