Regional accents of English


Spoken English shows great variation across regions where it is the predominant language. The United Kingdom has a wide variety of accents, and no single "British accent" exists. This article provides an overview of the numerous identifiable variations in pronunciation of English, which shows various regional accents and the UK and Ireland. Such distinctions usually derive from the phonetic inventory of local dialects, as well as from broader differences in the Standard English of different primary-speaking populations.
Accent is the part of dialect concerning local pronunciation. Vocabulary and grammar are described elsewhere; see the list of dialects of the English language. Secondary English speakers tend to carry over the intonation and phonetics of their mother tongue in English speech. For more details on this, see non-native pronunciations of English.
Primary English speakers show great variability in terms of regional accents. Examples such as Pennsylvania Dutch English are easily identified by key characteristics, but others are more obscure or easily confused. Broad regions can possess subforms. For instance, towns located less than from the city of Manchester, such as Bolton, Oldham, Rochdale, and Salford each have distinct accents, all of which are grouped together under the broader Lancashire accent. These sub-dialects are very similar to each other, but non-local listeners can identify firm differences. On the other side of the spectrum, Australia has a General Australian accent which remains almost unchanged over thousands of miles.
English accents can differ enough to create room for misunderstandings. For example, the pronunciation of "pearl" in some variants of Scottish English can sound like the entirely unrelated word "petal" to an American. For a summary of the differences between accents, see Sound correspondences between English accents.

Overview

wordRPGACansound change
cot–''caught merger
lot–cloth split
father–bother merger
father–bother merger
trap–bath split
trap–bath split
trap–bath split

English dialects differ greatly in their pronunciation of open vowels. In Received Pronunciation, there are four open back vowels,, but in General American there are only three,, and in most dialects of Canadian English only two,. Which words have which vowel varies between dialects. Words like bath and cloth'' have the vowels in Received Pronunciation, but in General American. The table above shows some of these dialectal differences.

Britain and Ireland

Accents and dialects vary widely across Great Britain, Ireland and nearby smaller islands. The UK has the most local accents of any English-speaking country. As such, a single "British accent" does not exist. Someone could be said to have an English, Scottish, Welsh, or Irish accent, although these all have many different subtypes.

England

Southern England

There are considerable variations within the accents of English across England, one of the most obvious being the trap–bath split of the southern half of the country.
Two main sets of accents are spoken in the West Country, namely Cornish and West Country, spoken primarily in the counties of Devon, Somerset, Gloucestershire, Bristol, Dorset, and Wiltshire. A range of variations can be heard within different parts of the West Country: The Bristolian dialect is distinctive from the accent heard in Gloucestershire, for example.
The Cornish accent has an east–west variation, with the east of the county having influences from West Country English and the west of the county having direct influences from the Cornish language.
There is great variation within Greater London, with various accents such as Cockney, Estuary English, Multicultural London English, and Received Pronunciation being found all throughout the region and the Home Counties.
Other accents are those of
  • the East Midlands
  • East Anglia
  • the Home Counties. The Essex accent has an east–west variation, with the county's west having Estuary English speech features and the county's east having the traditional Essaxon/East Anglian features.
  • A range of accents are spoken in the West Midlands.
In February 2019, the New York Times published a quiz that maps the geographical differences between British and Irish dialects.

Northern England

The accents of Northern England have a range of regional variations.
Cumbria has regional variants in Western Cumbria, Southern Cumbria, and Carlisle.
Modern Northumbrian has local variants in Northern Northumberland, Eastern Northumberland and Newcastle, Sunderland, and mid- and southern County Durham. A specialist dialect called Pitmatic is within this group, found across the region. It includes terms specific to coal mining.
Yorkshire is distinctive, having regional variants around Leeds, Bradford, Hull, Middlesbrough, Sheffield, and York. Although many Yorkshire accents sound similar, accents in areas around Hull and Middlesbrough are markedly different. Due to this, the Middlesbrough accent is sometimes grouped, with modern Northumbrian accents being a midway between the two regions.
The Hull accent's rhythm is more like that of northern Lincolnshire than that of the rural East Riding, perhaps due to migration from Lincolnshire to the city during its industrial growth. One feature that it shares with the surrounding rural area is that an /aɪ/ sound in the middle of a word often becomes an /ɑː/, for example, "five" may sound like "fahve", and "time" like "tahme"; this way of pronouncing the "i" sound is shared with the Middlesbrough accent, as is the distinctive pronunciation of words like 'work' or 'shirt'.
Historic Lancashire, with regional variants in Bolton, Burnley, Blackburn, Manchester, Preston, Blackpool, Liverpool, and Wigan. Many of the Lancashire accents may sound similar to outsiders, with the exception of Manchester and Wigan, where an older dialect has been maintained.
The Liverpool accent, known as Scouse, is an exception to the Lancashire regional variant of English. It has spread to some of the surrounding towns. Before the 1840s, Liverpool's accent was similar to others in Lancashire, though with some distinct features due to the city's proximity to Wales. The city's population of around 60,000 was swelled in the 1840s by the arrival of around 300,000 Irish refugees escaping the Great Famine, as Liverpool was England's main Atlantic port and a popular departure point for people leaving for a new life in the United States. While many of the Irish refugees moved away, a vast number remained in Liverpool and permanently influenced the local accent.

Scotland

The regional accents of Scottish English generally draw on the phoneme inventory of the dialects of Modern Scots, a language spoken by around 30% of the Scottish population with characteristic vowel realisations due to the Scottish vowel length rule.
Highland English accents are more strongly influenced by Scottish Gaelic than other forms of Scottish English.

Wales

The Welsh language heavily influences the use of English in Wales, which is characterised by unique grammatical conventions and a distinctive lexicon not found in other dialects of English. As in Welsh, the placement of the subject and the verb after the predicate allow the speaker to add greater emphasis at the start of a declaration, such as italic=yes or italic=yes. In south Wales the use of the tag question italic=yes is common irrespective of the Subject–verb–object word order, while the word where in a question is often followed by the auxiliary "to", as in "italic=yes"
Aside from lexical borrowings from Welsh such as italic=yes and italic=yes, colloquial English terms such as italic=yes and italic=yes are largely limited to the South Wales Valleys. Despite the varieties of English spoken in Wales, the features of English in the South Wales valleys are commonly recognisable as "Welsh English" to people from the rest of the UK.
The Cardiff dialect and accent is quite distinctive from that of the South Wales Valleys, primarily:
  • Rounding of the second element of to
  • *here pronounced or in broader accents
  • A closer pronunciation of as in love and other
  • is widely realised as, giving a pronunciation of Cardiff as
In many bilingual areas Welsh words are often used in English conversations. As such, the term "Wenglish" has been in use since the 1980s to refer to this mixing of both languages.

Isle of Man

has its own distinctive accent, influenced to some extent by the Lancashire dialect and to a lesser extent by some variant of Irish English.

Ireland

has several main groups of accents, including the accents of Ulster, with a strong influence from Scotland as well as the underlying Gaelic linguistic stratum, which in that province approaches the Gaelic of Scotland, those of Dublin and surrounding areas on the east coast where English has been spoken since the earliest period of colonisation from Britain, and the various accents of west, midlands, and south.

Ulster

The Ulster accent has two main sub accents, namely Mid Ulster English and Ulster Scots. The language is spoken throughout the nine counties of Ulster and in some northern areas of bordering counties such as Louth and Leitrim. It bears many similarities to Scottish English through influence from the Ulster varieties of Scots.
Some characteristics of the Ulster accent include:
  • As in Scotland, the vowels and are merged, so that look and Luke are homophonous. The vowel is a high central rounded vowel,.
  • The diphthong is pronounced approximately, but wide variation exists, especially between social classes in Belfast.
  • In Belfast, is a monophthong in open syllables but an ingliding diphthong in closed syllables. But the monophthong remains when inflectional endings are added, thus daze contrasts with days.
  • The alveolar stops become dental before, e.g. tree and spider.
  • often undergoes flapping to before an unstressed syllable, e.g. ''eighty''