Article: North holding its own against spread of southern English dialects, study finds

Posted on 5 September 2022

Researcher at York featured in The Guardian

Dr George Bailey (Department of Language and Linguistic Science) has recently been interviewed by Mark Brown for “North holding its own against spread of southern English dialects, study finds”. Published in The Guardian, the article focuses on a recent study conducted by Dr George Bailey, alongside Dr Laurel MacKenzie (New York University) and Dr Danielle Turton (Lancaster University), investigating contemporary patterns of dialectal variation in the British Isles.

This research involved analysing a dataset of over 14,000 dialect survey responses collected over many years, producing dialect maps of these results using advanced geospatial statistics, and then comparing these results to those from a similar dialect survey conducted in the 1950s to identity how dialects have changed in this time.

One of the key results from this project is that despite widespread concerns over ‘dialect levelling’, the gradual loss of marked accent features over time, there is still a great deal of linguistic diversity in how English is spoken across the British Isles. The study finds that while certain southern accent features are spreading northwards, many features characteristic of northern accents are holding strong and are either stable or are themselves spreading geographically.

Dr George Bailey was asked to provide insights on what these results mean for the future of northern accents.

“It was a real pleasure to chat to Mark Brown at the Guardian about this project. Studies like this often capture the imagination of the public, as so many of us have a personal interest in accents and dialects and the way we all speak. As a proud northerner myself, it’s reassuring to find that so much of the incredible linguistic diversity we find in the North of England is still present today and won’t be lost any time soon. We found some really interesting differences when comparing our dialect maps to those from the 1950s, and I’m looking forward to the next steps of this research in which we plan to look more closely at population dynamics to understand some of the changes we’re observing.” - Dr George Bailey, Department of Language and Linguistic Science

To read the article in full in The Guardian: North holding its own against spread of southern English dialects, study finds (31 July 2022)