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/

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I know the author says that the map will always be wrong, I understand that, but this map is badly out of date.

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).

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.

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

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

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...

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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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).

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.

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!"

"..."

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

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)

Where's Doric in Aberdeenshire??

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.