Accents in Britain A nation defined by the way it speaks

 

George Bernard Shaw famously wrote: “it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him”. This quote is a testament to the power of accents to position us in the social world by communicating information about our background, our upbringing and the communities we belong to.

A history of diverse accents

The UK has some of the highest levels of accent diversity in the English-speaking world.

Spanning the range from “traditional” accents like Brummie, Cockney, Geordie or Scouse to newer accents like Estuary English, British Asian English and General Northern English, accents in the UK reflect differences in what region people come from, their family’s social class background, their age and their current professions.

Many of these differences are related to the historical development of English in the British Isles. When Germanic tribes from the northwest of the European continent first began settling in Britain in the 5th century, they brought with them distinct dialects of their native Germanic languages. The Angles settled mostly in the Midlands and the East; the Jutes in Kent and along the South Coast; and the Saxons in the area south and west of the Thames.