You say tomato...

Here's an interesting article that ties in nicely with some of the work we've been doing recently on regional variation on the A2 course. In it the writer, Richard Morrison, discusses the 'state' of regional accents and dialects in modern Britain. It is a widely-held (if not necessarily always empirically based) view that 'accents and dialects are dying out', but Morrison seeks to debunk this perspective. He observes that "the British are reasserting their regional distinctions, at least in the one area over which ordinary folk have total control — the way we speak". Morrison continues:

Academics at Lancaster University have found that, rather than disappearing or merging, British dialects and accents are stronger than ever. Indeed, it seems that the great urban argots — Geordie, Scouse, Glaswegian, Brummie and the like — are actually extending their reach into the surrounding towns and countryside, as more and more people assert with their mode of speech their pride in belonging to a particular region.

The writer goes on to observe:

What’s really important is that, despite all the predictions made half a century ago, regional accents clearly haven’t been steamrollered into oblivion by mass communication and social mobility. Yes, all of us listen to the same TV and radio presenters, and many of us live hundreds of miles from where we learnt to speak our mother tongue. Yet we appear not merely to be clinging to the distinctive figures of speech and vowel sounds of our native soil, but actively nurturing them.

We're about to start looking at a phenomenon known as dialect levelling, and related theories that suggest that varieties associated with particular regions are becoming less distinct and are instead adopting non-standard forms that are shared by speakers across the country. The spread of so-called 'Estuary English' over the last couple of decades is often cited as evidence of this phenomenon, whereby speakers from areas as far north as Hull have been recorded using non-standard linguistic features not associated with the traditional varieties of their area but with varieties linked to the South-East of England. Whilst on one level Morrison's observations would appear to run counter to this, he does comment that "[t]he academics say that there are fewer and fewer differences between the way that people speak in neighbouring villages or urban districts. These micro-distinctions are being subsumed into regional “super-dialects”...". So to some extent this is like a localised version of dialect levelling. This gives us another angle to consider when looking at the issue of change in regional varieties, and should encourage us not to make blanket assumptions about the extent or nature of dialect levelling, but instead to consider each regioan and their related varieties on their own merits.