A Map of British Dialects (2023) | Hacker News Reader

A Map of British Dialects (2023)

starkeycomics.com

221 pointsgregorvand178 comments

The accent and dialect changes every 20 miles or so, so this is obviously a bit vague.

We can’t even agree on what to call a bread roll [0] never mind how some words should be pronounced [1].

My mother was brought up in Liverpool, but her (Irish immigrant) mother hated the Bootle accent so much that she taught her, and her older sister, to speak something closer to RP.

That washed off, and like her I got bullied at school in North Derbyshire for speaking “too posh”. Yet locals in my new home of London clearly place me as being from the North but can’t place where. To be honest neither can most Northerners. I think I’m broadly “South Pennine”, so a bit of High Peak, a bit of Manchester, the odd spot of Lancashire or even West Yorkshire - reflects where I grew up, went to Uni, lived, and socialised with. My partner has a similar accent despite growing up in a part of Manchester with a distinct accent and dialect of its own.

The point is, it’s complex and it’s changing. And it’s not just the UK. It seems to have sped up in recent years. When I hear Canadian voices from 70 years ago, I can hear Scottish tinges. Likewise the US East coast of the mid-20th century had more West Country in it than today.

It was only a friend’s grandfathers generation that could tell what street someone grew up on from their voice alone, and today we are increasingly homogenised - I wonder what “English” will sound like in 200 or 500 years.

[0] https://www.ourdialects.uk/maps/bread/

[1] https://www.ourdialects.uk/maps/class-farce/

I'm from West Yorkshire, the dialect is slowly fading. My grandfather would speak with a strong accent and with spatterings of Norse words. I notice now that, yes, dialects in the UK are becoming homogenised but there is also some American influence seeping in. The American way of pronouncing a double t as a d "better" => "bedder" is increasingly more prevalent in the UK, it's slightly saddening.

Pronouncing zed as "zee" is particularly annoying (as in "Gen Z").

anytime I hear someone use "zed" for Z(ee) the next thing I hear in my head is "Zed's dead, baby"[0] Pulp Fiction and I just can't help but chuckle

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E3aAvhUucI

I emigrated from the UK to USA in 1980 and my first code review at Bell Labs I spent about 30 mins explaining my code and then asked if there were any final questions and someone hesitantly asked, "What is this variable 'zed' you keep talking about?"

I used to work for a networking start-up and when we were in the US trying - without success - to sell the company we practised over and over saying "roWter" for "router" (English pronunciation like "rooter").

As a Canadian I read that as "rOATer" for a moment, because the word row rhyming with ow is quite uncommon here -- the row I know is in a boating or a data context.

As a Brit, so did I. That said, a "rotor" would be pronounced as "rOATer" and has a completely different meaning.

isn't English fun !

You never have a row with anyone?

As a Canadian, obviously not.

(For real though we don’t use that word for argument or whatever.)

Funny, I just realised that I say "rooter" in French (because route ("roote") means way, like in English), but I say "rAWter" in English

There are two words with the same spelling but separate pronunciations in British English:

Router (rooter) the thing that routes packets in a newtwork

Router (rowter) a machine tool that cuts grooves, etc., in wood or metal.

Ah, so I pronounce the IT equipment wrong. I guess that "raw-ter" sounds really bad then.

Having posted the above a few days ago, last night I (originally from the UK) was in the car with my wife (US born and bred) following and reciting map directions on my phone like "0.8 miles left on San Antonio" which I say as UK standard "nought point eight miles left on San Antonio." After a while she asks "what is nought?" Here we just say "point 8 miles" or "zero point eight miles." We've only been married 42 years and are still learning each other's language:-)

Some time ago a few people from the UK kept calling/referring to someone as a nonce. It took me awhile to say something, but I finally asked because I simply couldn't understand or wrap my head around why they kept referring to this person as a single use random number (mostly for authentication in my case). It was so confusing.

The one that gets me the most is English people suddenly saying "fall" instead of "autumn".

It is a traditional one which fell out of fashion.

https://weather.metoffice.gov.uk/learn-about/weather/seasons...

https://twominenglish.com/autumn-vs-fall/

Now if we start saying "diaper" again instead of "nappy", you can start to worry.

The weirdest one to me is the English suddenly referring to police as "feds".

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/37256/police-in-...

It's not like they didn't already have dozens of slang terms for the police.

There was a cartoon in Private Eye a couple of weeks ago that suggested the reason why Millenials and Gen Z could never be reconciled is that they can't agree whether it's pronounced "Generation Zed", or "Generation Zee", as the younger generation themselves would call it.

I find Valley speak, where people say 'like' every third word, infuriating.

“Literally”!

I may be completely wrong, but I think one direction of evolution in pronunciation is the gradual shift to that which takes less physical effort to pronounce.

"Bedder" is less physical work, less effort, in the mouth than "better".

“Be’er” seems like even less work. For some people

This is a bit of a myth. A glottal stop is a full consonant sound which takes effort to produce. It's not really any 'easier' to produce than an alveolar stop in any objective sense.

Exact same thing is happening in Australia. I'm guessing it's from watching streaming video, Netflix, TikTok, etc. where American accents predominate, and any non-American accents are flattened enough to be sure it's easy for Americans to understand them.

It's weird that the mainstream TV execs think audiences want boring American accents. To me, one of the best things about the White Lotus (hit HBO show) is that it highlights a distinct array of accents (including Australian).

Thanks! Now I'm inclined to watch it. I do love when shows make a point of keeping distinct accents.

What with having moved a lot as a bairn, I feel that accents in many places are fading away. And also, I tend to sound like whoever I've been talking most to for the last two hours. It's a bit weird, that…makes people ask why I'm speaking with x accent. (^_^);

Norse words?

https://www.viking.no/e/england/e-yorkshire_norse.htm

Most have fallen out of use but e.g. 'laik' is still understood by young people.

Beck, meaning stream (small river), is one I remember from growing up in the north east.

It may alleveiate the epidemic of th-fronting among young men.

i fought like you for many years but i fink it's just part of the accent now

When I was staying with a friend in Norway once we visited his mother, and to me she sounded like someone with a broad Durham/Newcastle accent (my mother is from there) speaking German. A lot of north east words are germanic, or Scandinavian. My grandfather was a farmer near Durham and pigs were swine, children were bairns.

As for American influence, my youngest daughter picked up a lot of that from Youtube at one point, and I once interviewed a girl from Gravesend with such a strong US accent I assumed she'd grown up over there.

I agree, it’s very sattening

There really isn't one 'west yorkshire' accent, nor one 'north yorkshire' accent, there is much much more variety than that. A leeds resident sounds different from a wakefield or dewsbury resident, and even then there can be variation where some people exhibit less of their locale accent than others, depending on how much they rebelled against sounding 'local' in their teens.

I have no idea what my accent is at this point. I spent enough time in Oxford that I can pass as posh if I need to, moved to a part of Cheshire that had a huge scouse population, then moved to Watford and then Kent and picked up my dad’s dreadful habit of talking vaguely cockney to tradespeople. Now I live in Sheffield and me and my kids have random a mix of long and short As. I also grew up in lower-case parts of the internet and drive myself mad at work switching between that and grown up casing, so it’s not just vocal dialects anymore.

> the bread pictured here

no bread is pictured

Yeah, that seems to have been lost at some point. From memory they used a picture of what Americans might call a soft dinner roll.

To me it would be more a roll than a bap or a barm, but they're almost synonyms. The weird one for me was when a mate insisted it was a teacake, and I suggested that would only apply if it had raisins in it. What I was describing, he insisted, was a fruit teacake, and without fruit it became a teacake. This is contrary to what the rest of the country believes outside of North Manchester, but has become a running joke for many years between us.

The general unawareness of what a barmcake (barm) is outside of Bolton/east lancs, particularly in London, never ceases to amuse me.

“What the hell is a chip/bacon/sausage/pastie/pie barm!?”

To be fair, it was nearly 50 years before I knew what the "liquor" Cockneys put on their pie and mash is.

My wife was from Orkney and we spent a few months in the US. So we had US biscuits which are not the same as UK biscuits, US cookies which are not Orcadian cookies, West Country English buns which are definitely not US buns.

Your (Yorkshire?) teacakes are almost but not exactly like my buns.

You can imagine the confusion when the children asked for a cookie, a bun, or a biscuit while in the US.

When I asked for a bag of scraps in the chippy tonight the lady asked if I wanted "any breadcakes luv" showing me they were an 'outsider' (from about 30 miles away I reckon).

Also, no-one has called me 'duck' in the last week; which just feels wrong.

> I got bullied at school in North Derbyshire for speaking “too posh”.

Isn't it fascinating that people judge accents harshly? After all, if we can understand one another, what's the problem?

The problem is social stratification within a power structure. Here's a related BBC article from earlier this year.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyjdyj729ro

> if we can understand one another, what's the problem?

The accent is just being used a heuristic of where you're from, which is the actual judgement. Posh = not from round here.

Northerners are famously insular and protective of their communities (I love them for it but I think it can go a bit far sometimes)

>Posh = not from round here.

Perhaps the best example of that is that, as one of the linked maps [0] says, both British people who rhyme "scone" with "gone" and those who rhyme it with "alone" think that the other pronunciation is the "posh" one.

[0]https://starkeycomics.com/2024/05/10/eight-british-and-irish...

Would you say that the usage of "posh" has drifted significantly to the third meaning?

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/posh

I'm not familiar with the Brits so can't comment on the specifics there.

However, as a kid, I had a similar experience in a completely different country when we moved cities. My accent wasn't "posh" or "higher class" in any way, it was just from a different region. Kids would give me a hard time for it. But the exact same would happen in reverse form in the other region.

Guess people just don't like "outsiders".

In the UK people from Liverpool and Manchester are rivals until they meet someone from London when it becomes a North Vs South thing. That all changes again when they meet someone from Glasgow when it becomes England Vs Scotland and yet again when the British meet someone French. There is always a more foreign foe.

The concept of the everchanging {in-group vs. out-group} is especially present in Japanese culture. It strongly affects wordchoice, too. Within a family, father might be chichi or, in more formal families, otousan, but it speaking of fathers to someone outside your family, you might refer to your father as chichi, and any other father as otousan.

Adding my story to the list.

I grew up in France, from white parents, classical music professionals, catholic practicing. With what I now recognize as a posh french accent, that they consciously learned as a way to climb the social ladder.

I went to the town school where 80% of the students were descendent of North African immigrants, mostly from Algeria.

Most of those kids lived in projects city, and part of their identity is a specific accent differentiating them from the outside of the project city. This accent is not really related to Arabic; it is distinctively different; with what I can only describe as a palpable aggressivity in tone.

I ended up under police protection after a few broken limbs.

This was more than 25y ago. Sometimes I wonder what those kids have become. If they sometimes regret.

As recently as a couple years ago, a white posh accent kid at the same school got bullied and almost suffocated to death with a fire extinguisher. By the next generation of those immigrants.

I am now an immigrant in the Bay Area. Nobody cares about my accent here ;)

> school where 80% of the students were descendent of North African immigrants, mostly from Algeria.

Ah, the Colonial power structure. A gift that keeps on giving. But tribalism runs deep too.

> in the Bay Area. Nobody cares about my accent here

For the most part in the modern US, money=caste. Tribalism still runs deep (see: US politics) but how people pronounce isn't such a factor as it can be in the EU and in the UK.

As you are probably aware, French in Canada is also a many-caste system.

> Isn't it fascinating that people judge accents harshly? After all, if we can understand one another, what's the problem?

Two populations in close proximity separated by social differences will develop accents and use those accents to differentiate themselves. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

It'll sound like whatever the Amish speak! Apparently their population grows exponentially, while the rest, not so much.

I was born in the peak district but never quite gained the accent. Didnt sound either like a townie or a sheep shagger.

I live in london also, but people cant place me. They sometimes guess Irish or German.

I'm reminded of Serious Klein, who is a German rapper who explicitly sounds like a native English speaker. Imo he's closet to a West Coast rapper, but even this is up to debate. He could easily be from Maryland, or any other American city.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_Klein

> dialect changes every 20 miles or so

When I first lived in Italy, this was mind-blowing for me as an American from the west coast. I went on a bike ride with the local team I had joined and they stopped for espresso in a nearby town, and the guy who ran the place was like "oh, you're from Padova" when he heard them speaking. An identifiable change in the dialect over a distance you could easily cover on a bike was a huge "wow!" moment for me.

An Italian told me that he married a girl from the next valley and was asked by an elderly relative, 'why did you marry a foreigner?'.

When is this map from? 1955?

Essex accents had travelled well into Hertfordshire by the 1970s. Cockney has evaporated and the condensate largely landed in Essex and Hertfordshire.

Do people really speak Kentish in most of Kent? Or is it a mix of Modern Estuary, MLE (multicultural London English) and RP (received pronunciation)?

I know the author says that the map will always be wrong, I understand that, but this map is badly out of date.

There are two sorts of Essex, the countryside version that straddles south Suffolk and the London imported one that has become the stereotype, that appears to be estuary on the map. Both have massive crossover depending whether you're in town or village. A rather difficult mapping task!

Yeh it’s strange it includes cockney so prominently. It isn’t really very present unless you spend time around the various gentlemen frequenting sports pubs and pie and mash shops in east London, or if you take a black cab very often. I’d say the “roadman” dialect, mixing cockney and Jamaican patois, plus grime vibes, is FAR more common. I’ll hear it everyday wandering around South and east London. I guess it’s a London dialect so it’s in that umbrella,… but how come cockney gets such a fat slab of land?

> pie and mash shops

p-aye an mashhhh, bruv

You used to be able to get pie, mash and liquor round me in the Bexley area until about 10 years ago, but the ones I knew have closed now and I don’t know where the nearest place is.

Not sure if you can still get Jellied Eels in Eltham, which would be a shame if you can’t.

I heard one of manzies shut down in bermondsey this year, but there is a new one on the isle of sheppey.

it was the deptford one. the bermondsey and peckham ones are still going strong.

That's multicultural London English, or MLE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English

> Do people really speak Kentish in most of Kent? Or is it a mix of Modern Estuary,

Yes, ish

For example Bermondsey(a former borough in southwark, london) is a weird mix of kent and cockney, but it is still, just about distinct. if you move more into kent, I sounds get longer. from I to Aye, to Aye-eh

In the 80s-2000s half of central london moved to the suburbs, taking the accent with them.

However the south london accent still exists in younguns, depending on parents of course. If you're second generation, and depending on which school you go to, you might get a hybrid accent. (my daughter got a proper bermondsey accent, but I suspect now she'd get, posher accent.)

but, those accents are well away from these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S8JR4eJAXA which sounds more related to broads norfolk when I was growing up. (but 1950s broads was different to 80s)

I think the biggest issue is trying to pin down the hard accent changes vs the gradual.

For example somewhere in Lincolnshire it goes from rural burble to hard yorkshire-eqse stops. I suspect its something to do with the fens.

Sarf Londn, happy memories...

"RP", by the definition it was originally given, doesn't really exist any more in anyone under 70 or so. What you may now think of as "RP" is usually called Standard Southern British, or SSB.

You just need to listen to the various generations of the royal family to see that RP is effectively dead.

I read somewhere that accents “move” up the social hierarchy over time. Aspects of speech which are widely working class will eventually become traits of the upper class - while meanwhile the working cm lass have moved on.

I had the same feeling. I've lived in Sussex for most of my life and I can't say I've heard a Sussex accent for a long time. Maybe I'm on the wrong side of an urban/rural split?

I think something important to explain about British English dialects is the class factor.

It's easy to forget because the classic RP accents have largely died out, but the way I was brought up to speak (actively! My parents would "correct" my speech patterns) is much more reflective of class than locality. This is the case throughout England at least. Brits take this for granted but it's not the global norm!

In many British cities there is also a major race axis to dialects too. Just like how American English has black and white accents, you could make a better-than-chance guess at a modern Londoner's ethnicity from a recording of their voice. (See Multicultural London English).

> This is the case throughout England at least. Brits take this for granted but it's not the global norm!

England and Britain are not interchangeable, unless you specifically mean that all Brits take it for granted that this is only the case in England or something like that?

Edit: for the downvoters: https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/difference-between-britai...

There was no error there, maybe he doesn't know if class is a major factor in Scotland or Ireland? That could make sense since England as the center of power that class would be more of a factor there for dialects, but I am not sure.

The great thing about LLMs is we don’t have to argue about language any more, a machine can do it for us. Here is is explained:

“The common country error in that statement is confusing “England” with the entire United Kingdom.

Explanation: • The statement says: “This is the case throughout England at least. Brits take this for granted…” • It singles out England but then generalizes to all Brits (which includes people from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland—not just England). • This is a common error, especially among non-UK speakers, where England is incorrectly used to refer to the entire UK.”

I didn't get the impression that bjackman was confusing England with the UK. They are two distinct statements, one applying to England and the other to the UK. Appeal to LLM isn't going to convince me otherwise!

Yes exactly in fact I was specifically thinking of my belief that class is signalled less strongly in many Scottish dialects. But the general concept of class being closely related to accent is something that people will instinctively understand throughout the whole of Britain (and probably Ireland too), even if it's not that big an effect in their own local dialect.

That's exactly what I mean. It's not entirely the same in e.g. Scotland. But Scottish people will understand English class signals.

Hilarious that you'd read my comment explaining British class and linguistics dynamics and assume I don't know what Britain is lol

Glad you find it hilarious, but if you think that the rest of the UK spends great amounts of time considering England I would encourage you to visit some of these places.

>Just like how American English has black and white accents, you could make a better-than-chance guess at a modern Londoner's ethnicity from a recording of their voice. (See Multicultural London English).

The whole thing about MLE is that it's multicultural, i.e. not stratified along ethnic or racial lines. I do not think I would be able to judge the ethnicity of a Londoner aged under (say) 30 in this way.

If you think this is dense, try Italy some time. Huge numbers of highly distinct dialects, because until the mid-1800s Italians spoke huge numbers of entirely different languages, complete with their own full literature traditions. During unification the country settled on Florence's language (the language of Dante) as the "official" language: but everyone still proudly speaks their own language. To my knowledge, Italy is regarded as the densest diverse dialect region in Europe.

How different? What Americans call arugula the British call rocket. Because the British word is derived from the French roquette, which is from ruchetta, a word in italian dialects along the French border. But Americans got their word from aruculu in the southern Calabrese dialect, a result of immigration. The Italian word is rucola, from the Latin eruca.

Americans think "Capeesh" is an Italian word because they heard it in The Godfather. But it's not: it's Sicilian, as is much of the film.

wait what? I always thought "capeesh" was just "capisce" with the end swallowed? Is "capisce" not standard italian?

Standard Italian: capisci

   [Capisce is] borrowed from the spoken Sicilian and Neapolitan equivalents of Italian capisci, the second-person singular present indicative form of capire (“to understand”).

See: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/capisce

Capisce, pronounced with a distinct 'eh' at the end ('capeesh-eh'), would be standard Italian for 'he/she understands' or 'you (polite) understand'.

But 'capeesh' tends to be used differently in American mob films, meaning either 'Got it, pal?' or 'Yeah, I got it' ("Capeesh? Capeesh."). Those would be different in standard Italian: capisci ('capeesh-ee'), and capisco ('cap-is-coh'), respectively. It's that final example that makes it obvious that the mobsters aren't speaking standard Italian - there is no 'sh' sound in capisco, so eliding the final vowel wouldn't get you to 'capeesh', but to something more like 'cap-isk'.

However, the corresponding forms in Sicilian are capisci and capisciu. Eliding the final vowel yields the observed 'capeesh' in both cases.

It makes perfect sense that the mobsters would be speaking Sicilian rather than standard Italian. Italian immigrants in the US were overwhelmingly from Italy's south, which is generally poorer than the north. (The Mafia, in particular, is an organization with its roots in western Sicily.) Most of these immigrants came before the advent of standardized/centralized schooling in Italy, and so were never taught modern standard Italian. Instead, they spoke their native Romance languages, generally dialects of Sicilian and Neapolitan.

Even today, most Italian-Americans will be able to tell you which 'dialect' their grandparents spoke.

> It makes perfect sense that the mobsters would be speaking Sicilian rather than standard Italian.

Absolutely. More to the point, it's an example of just how impressively detail-oriented Francis Ford Coppola was.

No, it is not. When they say "capeesh" in the movie, they're trying to say "do you understand?" (second person singular). In Italian, that would be "capisci" (pronounced "ca-pee-shee").

Additionally, capisce ("does he understand?") in Italian, is pronounced "ca-pee-sheh".

The "capeesh" is derived from Sicilian.

Germany also has a fairly vast selection of local dialects, maybe not as crazy as the Brits and Irish but certainly more than you'd think.

Fa says aat? Fowks dinnae spik "Grumpian" up in Aiberdeen, they spik'i Doric.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doric_dialect_%28Scotland%29

The article mentions not covering Doric or Scots since they are considered virtually second languages

I love it, have listen: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/ZrJMVPQyxvg

Not 'virtually', Scots is a different language to English, and Doric is a dialect of Scots.

English and Scots are sibling languages, c.f. some of the geographically close Scandinavian languages.

If you want a quick guide to languages in Britain, the site has an additional article which the original links to:

https://starkeycomics.com/2019/03/01/every-native-british-an...

Thanks. I am Scottish originally and understand a lot of Scots. I guess I said 'virtually' since Gaelic is probably the only 'official' other language in Scotland but I agree Scots and Doric should be recognised as such.

I rented a room for a few months, from an elderly couple in the countryside outside Aberdeen. It took a solid week before I could do more than nod politely at whatever the heck they were on about.

Here is the equivalent map for German: https://language.mki.wisc.edu/essays/high-and-low-german/

Here's a similar one from Wikipedia that includes Dutch dialects as an example of dialect continuum: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialektkontinuum#/media/Datei:... probably based on this historical map: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/11kvga1/an_1894_ma...

This Wikipedia page also has some interesting maps: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nederlandse_dialecten

I had a really interesting situation a couple of decades ago when I was studying. I grew up in a rural part of the UK in the South West. The nearest train station was just over the county border, around 20 miles away.

One day I was waiting for the train, and there were two men talking: a vicar and his friend - both in their 50s. Clearly from that area. Even though I'd grown up in an area with a similar accent - less than 20 miles away - I could not understand a word they were saying.

The names of dialects aren't super useful to people who aren't from the UK. Also, dialects often are continua, so drawing borders without any sort of hierarchy to indicate closeness is quite pointless.

What would be cool if one could click on each dialect/region and hear a few words spoken in that dialect.

I agree.

In my view many of these small regions (that blend into one another) could be combined to give a much more useful map with more sharply distinct accents.

Such a map may be less precise, but far more useful to most.

This is good but it’s not diverse enough for North West England. In ‘Wigan’ (as shown on the map) you’ve got the Oldham/Bolton accents (book - bewk; first - fussed) which are similar but as distinct as Brummie/Black Country.

In Merseyside you’ve also got Wools/Scousers, each with different patter and pronunciation. Not to mention Warrington and its accent further East.

> This is pretty normal in any large region that has been speaking a language continually for 1600 years.

Large! The thing that gets me is that, geographically, all of the UK would fit easily into the state of Oregon, but you'd have to be a linguist to describe even one distinctly Oregonian accent, let alone dozens. It's not surprising to me that a very old country would have so many accents, but it's surprising that they would still perpetuate into the present, after mass media, travel, and mass communication seems to have flattened or homogenized so many fine distinctions based on geographic isolation.

Of course the dialects are not so densely distributed in North America, and English has only been evolving in the Americas for a few hundred years, but there are a bunch of dialects, and I find them super interesting.

My paternal grandparents were honest-to-goodness Ozark hillbillies who spoke Ozark Midlands (also called South Midlands), which is very close to, and sometimes conflated with, Appalachian English.

I'm in the Ozarks now and at least in the region where I live, this dialect seems to be disappearing. I still hear traces of it, but I don't think I've heard anyone really speaking it in years.

That's too bad. I love that dialect--perhaps because it was the language that my grandparents spoke.

If you're curious about it, you could listen to some of Terry Gross' interview with Ralph Stanley. He spoke Appalachian English, but it's indistinguishable to my ear from the language my grandparents spoke.

Here's the interview at NPR:

https://www.npr.org/2016/06/24/483428938/bluegrass-legend-ra...

I think social media is reducing local accents in a way mass travel or media never seemed to - probably because it exposes people to “cool” accents in a way that old media never did.

> you'd have to be a linguist to describe even one distinctly Oregonian accent, let alone dozens.

You could definitely describe two or three, but you picked a new, far flung, low-population state as an example. Britain has 14x the population of Oregon. If Oregon had two accents, you might expect Britain to have 28.

Going to older eastern parts of the country, you can usually tell where people are from within probably 100 miles. You can tell Chicago from Milwaukee from Detroit from Pittsburgh from Boston. You can tell Northwest Arkansas accents from Western Arkansas accents. You can hear a parent's Texas in the accent of somebody you grew up with in Kansas. You can even tell south Jersey accents from Baltimoreans if you ask them both to say the word "Orioles." Literally impossible for a Baltimorean to say. Orirols? Orals?

California has hella accents too.

The West Midlands Region needs some serious sub division. Herefordshire has nothing of the brummie and Shropshire fades out from the black- country yam-yam into a border talk that is sadly dieing out due to the amount of migration from the South. It is still destinct in rural communities. Man pronounced 'mon', cold pronounced 'cowd' and sheep pronounced 'ship'. I could barely follow my father speaking to his father, due to the amount of local words they used. They were 'upper wommers' though (people who live in the hills!).

I am not sure if it is still on but there is a TV series in UK called The Only Way is Essex. Which got quite famous when Chris Pratt [1] did its accent on The Graham Norton Show.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af7UD-IxzZI

The accent attempt is at 1m30s but that's an Essex accent from the towns, and largely the result of Londoners moving out to Essex, if you head into the countryside, Essex sounds like this:

https://youtu.be/1xxRdiiyT70?si=PlBnim1PW_y8nh5I

How did you find this video from 2013 with (as of writing) 290 views, and with it not mentioning Essex or accents at all?

I know that part of the world quite well, it's from a local historical society, I just searched for them. They don't advertise well!

Corbyite. Sounds like a mineral formed when Iron-Bru percolates through sandstone.

And is then finished in a trouser press…

Or indeed the Star Trek episode:

“The Corbomite Maneuver“

Perhaps it was inspired by a day out to Corby?

Irn-Bru, the national soft drink of Scotland.

Their ads are brilliant.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1lcuZoYiuVs

A somewhat public thank you to Donald Omand from Aberdeen University for all the work he did in documenting the dialect of Caithness - that purple-ish bit at the far top right of the Scottish mainland.

https://www.wickvoices.co.uk/voices_listen.php?id=0806202309...

"You will find the same thing in [...] France".

Actually, you don't. Strong regional accents are pretty rare compared to the UK or Germany

What about Ch'ti [1] or Savoyard?

The article is about dialects not accents. Even just considering French accents, I find the Marseille one distinctive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picard_language

There are a couple of light accents in France (Toulouse,Marseille) but not many.

Stronger accents are found outside France: Quebec, Africa...

Not unrelated to a longstanding policy of suppressing regional languages:

> Depuis plus de deux siècles, les pouvoirs politiques ont combattu les langues régionales

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_France

Exactly. My grandfather was punished in school whenever he spoke Breton

Years ago, I went to live and work in Strasbourg. My French was… rudimentary, school-level, but after a few weeks I was picking up the rhythm and following along. Then the grand chef came up from Paris. During the night out entertaining him, I asked him to slow down a bit as I was struggling with his accent. He completely lost it, insulting the locals as peasants, and claiming the accent was theirs not his. Kind of put a damper on the evening.

Obviously the Marseille “dialect” is recognisable, but otherwise, travelling throughout France, and even the French-speaking parts of Switzerland, I could understand folk.

According to this I am from one of the smallest Dialect regions (Coventry)- I really wonder why it could be a dialectical enclave; I am aware that the Forest of Arden divided Coventry from Birmingham and the Black Country making them distinct, but I had no idea that it was such an isolated dialect.

Cov is pretty distinct. for example the apple's siri british voice 3 I would argue is light Cov accent.

Given how close beeer-ming-um is, you'd think they'd be similar.

It's because so many malcontents were sent to Coventry *wink*

It is quite distinct in the pronunciation of "ing". The N and the G are strongly emphasised. "Singing" is a good test word. The Gs jump out at you.

Too specific for this map but there's also an intriguing case of town in England called Corby, where people speak mainly with a Scottish accent https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28225325. Pretty fascinating.

[edit - Corby is on the map! It refers to the accent as "Corbyite" in the middle of "Northants".]

The TV programme "Toxin Town" is set in Corby, about birth defects caused by mishandled environmental waste.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg7pvl59wxo

Right! They also explained in that series that the Scots were economic migrants there for the steelworks work. Great series too.

oh thanks!

Oddly enough, I've always been fascinated by Australian accents. It somehow made me particularly happy especially after I watched this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QCgqQdmr0M) where I couldn't understand a single sentence. I then tried to learn this accent in Sydney and was discouraged by many of my Aussie mates. Now I just have a little bit of the Sydney accent, which is roughly /ai/ -> /oi/ (bike -> boi-ke), /ei/ -> /ai/ (day -> die). I don't know why, but I like this accent, it sounds and feels warm, open and full.

You seriously couldn't understand a single sentence?

No, unfortunately. English is not my first language.

Try this Scottish accent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUZyNLZZjMs

Or this MLE (Multicultural London English) one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5bqYlsXDdg

An amusing anecdote, especially the Superman comparison at the end...

  "but I had nothing on bar me jocks"

I like Kent and Sussex accents. Rod Hull (carer of Emus) had a good one.

"We wunt be druv" is the Sussex motto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_wunt_be_druv

Anyone interested in the history of English dialects will love The Story of English, BBC 1986. Some snippets of recorded speech showing the evolution of the language and proximities.Highlights include comparing an elderly Norwegian and Yorkshireman say the same sentences and hearing the descendents of East Anglian UK emigrants to Chesapeake Bay in the USA centuries later speak with a mixed E Anglian/US accent.https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh06URz4IJQ4aI0A-xjXOtx2O...

I was just thinking about the variety of british dialects, have been consuming more UK media recently.

It would have been even more interesting to have an interactive map that also has audio files linked to it.

The weirdest British accent is the one where they pronounce the R sound as a W, like a child who hasn't mastered it yet. It honestly took me many YouTube videos of different people with the accent to realize it wasn't a speech impediment.

How does something like that persist? Everyone has their ignorant opinions, of course, and mine is simply that this goes beyond "different" into straight up wrong.

isn’t that the upper class accent? probably mimicking or conserving former latin pronunciation or maybe german

A few years ago I worked on an empirical (twitter data) look at how English dialects change from place to place and how British and American evolved separately (based on Google Books): https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

</ShamelessPlug>

Waze has decided I need a London accent to find my way. Kate now says "Go strai on". Kate used to sound like a genteel granny. I miss her.

The thing is, this sort of thing can never be represented with borders.

A more accurate map might be ones akin to wildlife population maps, with splodges dotted around the country. Many accents exist in the same place and depend on a huge range of factors like class, immigration statistics, and geographic isolation.

Reminds me of the classic "One Woman, 17 British Accents": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyyT2jmVPAk

Which is the accent where 80% of consonants and 1/3 of vowels are pronounced like a hard "ff"? I associate it with Manks, but I'm just a Yank so what do I really know.

If you find cockney over that area over something non British I would be impressed.

Source, have lived in said area.

Interesting, but more of a measure of what has been lost in some parts of the country to change.

I find it surprising that regional dialects are still quite strong given how much everyone is exposed (via TV and Internet) to other dialects (US expecially).

In my experience, there's only a small subset of people who will get their accent from the mass media rather than their parents and the people around them. That accent will also almost always be an vapid pseudo-American one, mysteriously bicoastal, combining LA valley girl, 90s NY highly-commercialized hip-hop regionalisms, and barely enough of their local accent to keep from getting punched. Also, since 2008, the word "folks."

This is mostly I think wealthy and upper-middle class people, but there are also definitely a lot of strivers who just think they're better than everyone local, and don't want to sound like they come from where they come from, but like American surfer-artist-activists.

Same thing happens in the US, through. A lot of Americans relating to the television more than their neighbors. Even worse, since the accents in US media have become terrible and authentic local accents rarely heard, young US media addicts are often imitating British and Australian people who are imitating US accents.

I honestly rarely hear any authentic southern US accents in TV and movies, only imitation ones. Imitation of the representations created by a highly centralized media might ultimately and gradually turn all of us into caricatures, even of ourselves.

Strong is relative. The regional differences in my generation (40) and younger mostly come from accent and not from the vocabulary, whereas for my parents and grandparents it would be both.

There is still local vocabulary: nesh, mardy, cob, duck being obvious answers, but more of it is dying out: tuffee, sile, causie.

https://cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk/ is the chicken dinner!

Tbh I was worried when I saw this title but its not bad

I find this fascinating. Didn't see it in the article, but I wonder how many people speak each dialect. Since of those areas are very small.

Why are there so few on this map? Seems wrong to me :)

Love seeing Pompey on there. Ryan Starkey is no dinlo.

I know right? Lot of squinnies on here bemoaning the accuracy but I’ve spent my whole life being told my dialect is just half cockney, half bristonian by the rest of the country. I feel so seen.

Pompey is less strong on the island these days, but Leigh Park people sound like I remember from childhood still.

I don't live there anymore but I was at Victorious festival a few years ago watching an American band (can't remember which). The front man told a story of when they recorded their first album in Portsmouth. Someone in the crowd lifted up their pint and shouted "Yawrigh' mush!". And the screen ads said "Don't be a din - put it in the bin". Those words feel like they're from some dreamworld until you hear them again in person.

Those words are used, but a lot of people on the island use a massively watered down version of the dialect now. When I was a kid we said "baw" for "ball" "vis,va' 'n fing" for "this, that and thing" and "dinny/din/dinlo" (simpleton/idiot), "mush/musty" (a person, you may know, but don't want to name - a bit like "mate"), "kark it" (died), "lairy" (as in cheeky, obnoxious, pushy - hard to describe.), "lakes" (originally "cool" but started to be ironic), "wew X" as an emphasis ("wew" being "well", so "wew smar'" (really "smart", as in really good), "wew lairy" (really "pushy/cheeky/whatever it means"). "Giving i' aw va'" ("Giving it all that", being lairy/trying it on.) "kushty" (great/good). And much more. I can't write down everthing unfortunately.

As I said, you still here all this when Parkies speak, but on the Island it is a lot less heard these days.

Thanks for the info! Kark it, musty and lakes I haven't come across. As kids we used lairy to mean aggressive or confrontational. Mush, dinlo/din/dinny and squinny are I think truly Pompey, tho it hasn't always been that way. Mush and dinlo are actually Romani words; you sometimes hear them in other areas with regular traveller populations. There's an old episode of Steptoe and Son where the son uses mush, so I think it was common in inner London at one time. Squinny I don't think is Romani. I used to think it was a Pompey oddity but I recently found out that someone from near Birmingham used it growing up.

I'd say a lot of the letter changes (v/f for th, w for l, dropping t's) are fairly standard estuary accent, e.g. the kind of accent Danny Dyer has.

Yeah - but they were there when I was a kid in the 70's and 80's so predates the notion of Estuary English. They come more from the fact Portsmouth had a big influx of dock workers from East end of London at one point. The vowels are completely different. Where london would take "town" and make it "taahn" (like a long ah sound) we say "teihn" (to rhyme with plane, but not pure, more breathy, hence my h) - it's not a pure. I would "oy" like in "boy". The vowels are very Hampshire.

"roight"

My first year at uni:

Me: "How about that James guy, huh? He's obviously fought his way past disability, what a great guy, an example to all of us."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, he's a professor at Oxford, that's quite some achievement"

"So what?"

"Well, I mean, you know, he's gotten past his handicap. You can kinda hear it on him, right?"

"He's Brummie..."

"Is that like a palsy or something?"

"No, there's nothing wrong with him, he just comes from a certain area near Birmingham"

"Ah. I'm gonna go find a rock to hide under."

A few years later, around when I got married:

"Hey Nacho, where are your in-laws from? Your mom and I tried to talk to them"

"They're from Scotland"

"What language do they speak?"

"English"

"What, really? I tried to talk to your father-in-law, I couldn't understand anything!"

"..."

I had the opposite confusion. I asked the sysadmin where he was from, I had guessed Germany. He told me he was from Madrid, just had to relearn speaking after he had a brain tumor removed a few years before.

There is also a strange thing called 'foreign accent syndrome':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_accent_syndrome

Perhaps it’s gone out I can remember a Leytonstone accent, and a Barnet one. But that’s accents not a dialect.

Those are dialects. An accent is what you have as a second language speaker.

(Of course reality is more complicated; creoles and pidgins etc )

thats the thing, norfolk dialect had about four main strains, but most of the dialect as disappeared, leaving only the accent

Is that true? I think a dialect needs to have at least some of its own words.

If people in your town use the same words as the town across the river, but you pronounce your R's and the others do not, I would say you speak the same dialect but with distinct accents.

Maybe the point is moot because any two populations separate enough to develop distinct ways of pronouncing words inevitably also create words of their own.

Has anyone seen models (free or paid) to detect accents from audio?

I am French so obviously not the best to discuss dialects but I would be curious to know what key reason would bring so many of them.

We have dialects in France, a few are very distinct but I would not call a dialect when someone pronounces a few things differently. I know that this is subjective, but still.

There are out course some mad places where they ("they" means, you know, they) call chocolatine a pain au chocolat (a French private joke, see https://www.legorafi.fr/2013/03/20/toulouse-il-se-fait-abatt... - in French from a leading national newspaper)

probably related to the policy of suppressing regional languages discussed in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43735946

It seems likely that regional languages impact accents in the "primary" language, and even if that's not the mechanism, the cultural attitude of discouraging "different" dialects might have the same damping effect on accents.

In the UK, some traditional dialects are almost different languages. It is not really like that anymore, but people do have whole swathes of vocabulary that outsiders do not understand.

I think in France you got rid of the diversity in a lot of ways by having the French Language Academy.

Yes, we have a few different accents (and not a lot) but the world are basically the same, except for a few.

You do not expect to not understand someone in France, it may just be more difficult because of the accent.

Where's Doric in Aberdeenshire??

The article has a section "Why Scots/Doric are not included" that covers this: "This map is specifically of the English language, and Scots (and its subset, Doric), are not English." It then links to another article that discusses Doric: https://starkeycomics.com/2019/03/01/every-native-british-an...

Slight pet peeve: Northern Ireland dialects of English are not "British English"; they're Hiberno-English dialects. Northern Ireland is not part of Great Britain, nor is it British.

'British' is [also] the adjective for people from the United Kingdom (UK). The full name of the UK is the 'United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland'.

Well, the English spoken in Northern Ireland is essentially the same as the rest of Ireland and is more distant from what’s spoken in Great Britain.

A lot of northern accents have heavy Scottish influences, but I will agree they're far from an English accent and more similar to Donegal and Scottish accents.

The English may be the same, but the accents are different, and often so are the speech patterns.

Folks in GB can generally distinguish someone with a Northern Irish accent from someone with a more southerly Irish accent.

e.g. Belfast, or Derry accent vs Dublin accent.

Yes, they're distinct _within Ireland_, but overall the English spoken in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland is all considered by linguists to be Hiberno-English, and is its own distinct dialect family vs, say, North American English. And Ulster English is even spoken within the Republic of Ireland, which is obviously not part of the UK and is not British at all.

> And Ulster English is even spoken within the Republic of Ireland

Not surprisingly so since Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan were also extensively settled by Scots immigrants, but were cut off from what's now casually called Ulster in 1922. So they had 300+ years of shared language versus 100 of separation.

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