chapter 12

Accents and dialects

It’s one of the first things we notice. We meet someone speaking
our language who comes from a different part of the country, or a
different part of the world, and we realize that they don’t speak it in
the same way that we do. They sound different. They use different
words and different grammar. The differences may even be so great
that we have difficulty understanding them. Why is this?
The answer is all to do with accents and dialects. It’s important
to understand the difference between these two terms, so I’ll take
them one at a time.
A dialect is a way of talking that belongs to a particular part
of a country. It uses local words and phrases, and often these are
well known in other parts of the country. For instance, if we heard
someone talking about a ‘wee child’ or a ‘bonny coat’, we’d be fairly
sure they came from Scotland. (‘Wee’ means ‘little’ and ‘bonny’
means ‘pretty’.) If we heard someone saying they were running
down a ‘jigger’ or they were wearing a ‘cozzy’, then the odds are that
they’re from Liverpool. (A ‘jigger’ is the alley that runs behind a row
of houses; a ‘cozzy’ is a costume, especially one for swimming.) And
someone who says ‘nowt’ (‘nothing’) is probably from Yorkshire.
There are more English dialects per square mile in Britain than
in any other part of the English-speaking world. This is because
Britain has such a varied history, with Germanic people from

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different parts of Europe settling in different parts of the country,

some mixing with Celts from Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. It didn’t
take long before the settlers in one small locality developed their
own special way of talking. But all countries have accents and
dialects. In the USA, if we heard someone calling a group of people
‘y’all’ (= ‘you all’), we’d know the speaker came from a southern
state, such as Texas, or was copying southern speech. If someone
said ‘dropped eggs’ instead of ‘poached eggs’, they’d be from the
north-east, in New England. And if we sat out on a ‘stoop’ (the steps
leading up to the front of a building) munching on a ‘hero’ (a type
of sandwich), we could be fairly sure of being in or around New
York.
Some dialects have hundreds of local words, and many of them
have been collected into dictionaries. We often see books of them
on sale in tourist centres around the country, and we can find lists
of them online too. All we have to do is type ‘New York dialect’,
‘Yorkshire dialect’ (or whatever) into a search engine, and we’ll get
lots of hits. Or we can make up our own lists from the local words
we use ourselves. Dialects are always changing, and the words
young people use are sometimes different from those used by older
people.
Dialects also have distinctive patterns of grammar. For instance,
Scots English has its own way of saying ‘not’. People who say ‘I
canna come’, ‘I’m no going’, and ‘I dinna ken’ are likely to come
from Scotland. In standard English, we’d have to say ‘I can’t come’,
‘I’m not going’, and ‘I don’t know’. And several local dialects around
Britain say things like ‘five mile’ (instead of ‘five miles’) or ‘I saw
thee’ (for ‘I saw you’).
Notice that dialect words and sentences can tell us that someone
comes from a particular town or city (such as New York), or a
particular county or state (such as Yorkshire or Texas), or a broad
part of the country (such as the north-east or Scotland). When we
look at the way English is used around the world, we can even talk
about whole countries. People talk about ‘Australian English’ or
‘Irish English’. In Chapter 10 I talked about British and American
English. Here we have dialect differences on a grand scale.

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 accents and dialects 73

People in Britain say ‘We walked along the pavement’. In most of

the USA this would be ‘We walked along the sidewalk’. In Australia
it would be ‘We walked along the footpath’. Think of the parts of a
car. In Britain we look out through a ‘windscreen’ at a ‘bonnet’; in
the USA we look through a ‘windshield’ at a ‘hood’. At the front of
a British car there’s a ‘bumper’ and at the back there’s a ‘boot’; in
the USA they are a ‘fender’ and a ‘trunk’. We identify British cars
with ‘number plates’, but American cars have ‘license plates’. We
switch on our ‘sidelights’ in Britain, but our ‘parking lights’ in the
USA. Inside British cars there’s an ‘accelerator’, a ‘gear stick’, and a
‘milometer’; inside American cars there’s a ‘gas pedal’, a ‘gear shift’,
and an ‘odometer’.
There are also differences in grammar between British and
American English. Ask a British person the time at 3.45 and the
answer will probably be ‘It’s a quarter to four’. In many parts of the
USA it would be ‘It’s a quarter of four’. Someone from Britain might
say ‘I’ve just got a new coat’. The equivalent American sentence
would be ‘I’ve just gotten a new coat’. In Britain, they’d say ‘The bus
hasn’t arrived yet’; in the USA we’d also hear ‘The bus didn’t arrive
yet’.
Dialect differences, then, are all to do with vocabulary and
grammar. That’s the essential point to remember when thinking
about the other important term: accent. Accents are only to do with
pronunciation. Like dialects, they tell us which part of a country,
or which country, someone comes from, but they do it through
sounds rather than through words and sentences. All the dialects
I’ve mentioned have an accent. People from Scotland speak in a
Scottish accent. People from America speak in an American accent.
And so on.
Actually, we need to be a bit more precise. It’s better to say
that people from Scotland speak in one of many possible Scottish
accents. The way they sound in Glasgow is very different from
the way they sound in Edinburgh, and people from other parts
of Scotland sound different again. It’s the same in England, or the
USA, or Australia, or anywhere. There’s no such thing as a country
with just one accent.

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Nor, indeed, is there any such thing as a person with just one
accent. Our accent changes over time, depending on where we’ve
lived and who we’re talking to. I’ve lived in Wales, Liverpool, and
the south of England, so my accent is a mixture of sounds from all
three places. When I’m in Wales, the Welsh bit of my accent comes
to the fore. When I visit Liverpool, I sound more Scouse. And when
I go to London, I sound more southern.
My accent changes, also, depending on the kind of occasion
I’m involved in. If I’m giving a lecture in English to a group of
students in Germany, then I’ll speak a little more slowly and
carefully than usual, and my accent will sound more like someone
reading the news on the BBC. And when I’m on the radio myself,
the regional features of my pronunciation become less noticeable.
Once, someone from my home town, who’d heard me on the radio,
stopped me in the street and said ‘It didn’t sound like you at all!’
But all these accents are me. They’re all in my head, and my vocal
organs can handle each of them. I often unconsciously slip into
other accents, too. In fact, everyone does this. You meet someone
who has a different accent from your own, and you start getting
on well with them. After a while, you’ll find yourself talking a bit
like they do. And they’ll find themselves talking like you do. You
end up, both of you, sharing bits of your accents. Then, when you
separate, you switch back into your normal accents again.
Why do we have accents? I’ve said that they tell other people
which part of the country we’re from. But it’s not just which part
of the country. Accents can also tell others about the kind of social
background we have or the kind of job we do. Listen to the people
who read the news on the radio. Sometimes they have a regional
accent, and we can tell they come from a particular part of the
country. But often they don’t. We can hear their accent, and it could
be from – anywhere.
In England, that neutral accent is called Received Pronunciation
– or RP for short. It’s an accent that developed at the end of the
eighteenth century among upper-class people. You’ll remember
how, in Chapter 11, I talked about the way these people started
to use standard English grammar? That was one of the ways they

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found to keep their distance from the lower classes, most of whom
spoke a regional dialect. Another way was to pronounce their
words without any trace of a regional accent. If ordinary people all
over the country dropped their ‘h’ sounds in words like ‘hospital’
and ‘hand’, then RP speakers would make sure they kept them in.
If ordinary people all over the country pronounced the ‘r’ in such
words as ‘car’ and ‘heart’, then RP speakers would make sure they
didn’t.
As a result, a new kind of accent came into being. At first it
was used by the people in powerful positions in society, such as
the royal family, bishops, professors, doctors, and judges. Then
teachers began to use it in the big public schools (such as Eton,
Harrow, and Winchester), and taught it to the children. There are
many stories of children with a regional accent arriving for the
first time at one of these schools and finding the older children (or
even the teachers) laughing at the way they spoke. The newcomers
would change their accents to RP within days! That was happening
200 years ago. It still sometimes happens today.
When these children grew up, many of them became lawyers
and civil servants, or held other positions of power. Many joined
the army or navy and went abroad. The nineteenth century was a
time when the British Empire was growing. As new colonies were
gained all over the world, British people were put in charge – and
they all spoke with an RP accent. Before long, that accent was the
‘voice of Britain’. It became the voice of the BBC. And, to this day,
the accent that most foreigners are taught, when they learn to speak
British English, is RP.
Since 1800, RP has been the chief ‘cultured’ accent in Britain.
A lot of people simply call it ‘posh’. It was never spoken by huge
numbers – at most, by about five per cent of the population – but it
was the accent that people associated with someone who was from
the higher social classes or who had received the best education.
That’s why it was called ‘received’ pronunciation. It was seen as a
sort of inheritance from your ancestors.
Other languages also have cultured accents. There are posh
ways of talking in France and Spain, and in any country which has

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a history of upper-class and lower-class division within society.

Other parts of the English-speaking world have their cultured
accents too. If you’ve seen the film Crocodile Dundee, you’ll have
heard Paul Hogan use one of the street accents of Australia. Not
everyone in that country speaks like he did. Many Aussies have
educated accents too.
Things have begun to change in Britain. The division between
upper and lower classes isn’t as sharp as it used to be. People with
regional accents have obtained some of the top jobs in society. Prime
Minister Gordon Brown with a Scottish accent. Huw Edwards
reading the BBC news with a Welsh accent. If people telephone a
call centre to get information about train times, or how to insure a
car, the person on the other end of the phone will very likely have a
regional accent these days. Once upon a time, you’d only have heard
RP. A few years ago, linguists did a survey of the accents used in call
centres in Britain, and they found that Edinburgh and Yorkshire
accents were the most popular. And some accents, such as those
from Birmingham or Newcastle, were hardly used at all.
People have strong feelings about accents. They think of them
as ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’, ‘intelligent’ and ‘stupid’, ‘musical’ and
‘harsh’, and much more. But accents can’t be classified in this way.
What one person hears as melodious, another hears as grating.
And some of the accents that are felt to be unpleasant by people
inside a country are considered delightful by people outside. The
Birmingham accent is often given a low rating by people from
England. But when I played several accents to a group of foreigners
who didn’t know much English, they thought Brummie was one of
the most beautiful ones.
Why do we have such strong feelings about accents – and about
dialects too? It’s all part of a larger story to do with the way language
expresses our identity.

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who ’ s there ?

There have always been accents and dialects. The earliest

writings in English have differences in spelling, vocabulary,
and grammar which show that the authors came from different
parts of the country. And if we go back much further, to the
time when humans began to talk, we can guess that there would
have been accents then too.
Imagine. You’re in your cave, and it’s a dangerous world
outside. You hear a noise, so you call out (in your primitive
speech) ‘Who’s there?’ A voice replies. If you recognize the
accent of the voice as one that belongs to your tribe, then you’ll
go outside happily to see what they want. But if you call out
‘Who’s there?’ and you don’t recognize the accent, you’d better
take your club with you when you go outside, and be on your
guard. A strange voice probably means an enemy.
If evolution is a matter of the ‘survival of the fittest’, then I
think accents may have helped. Those who had the best ear for
accents may have lived longer. And actually, when you think
about it, it’s not so different today. I can think of some places
where the sound of an alien accent immediately puts people on
their guard. Probably you can too.

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