Historical and cultural elements in the formation of British accents

Varieties of English around the world are all derived from one ancestral root-stock (variously called Anglo-Saxon or Old English). In part at least, the distinctive sounds and grammatical properties of each are tied to developments in the history of the language, these sometimes dating back many centuries. It is in the UK and Ireland, and in England in particular, however, that this matter of pedigree is most significant. This fact is unsurprising. English is, after all, at bottom the product of England and southern Scotland, born of a fusion of West Germanic dialects brought from mainland Europe to the islands of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries AD, and perhaps even earlier. Fusing over the centuries with elements of Celtic, Norse, and French, and subject to sundry other influences as a result of the islands’ complex history of trade and conquest, the language in its homeland has had time and motive both to preserve ancient forms and to fragment to a degree unknown elsewhere in the English-speaking world.

Thus, constant echoes of earlier phonology and grammar are to be heard in the British regional varieties. They are very clearly evident where contrasts appear between regional accents and the convenient touch-stone accent of RP, which is itself an evolving accent but one which, as a model for pronunciation of British English, does not go back before the nineteenth century. The STRUT/PUT merger of the English North and North Midlands, i.e. the vowel in words like strut and hut being the same as in put, is Anglo-Saxon, for example. So are long monophthongs where RP and some other accents have diphthongs. So too, among many other features, are the ‘Velar Nasal Plus’ feature (as in the pronunciation  of sing or  of singer [Wells 1982: 365]) of the English north-west Midlands, and the rhoticity (i.e. the pronunciation of /r/ following a vowel, as in star or start) characteristic of Scotland, Ireland, south-west England, parts of Lancashire and the Northeast, as too of North America of course. Corresponding grammatical features from earlier periods of English include multiple negation (or negative concord), as in She couldn’t say nothing about them, and personal pronoun forms like thou and thee.

The length of time over which English has been evolving in the small area that is the British Isles accounts in large part for the complex variation in its present-day dialects. To this must be added the region’s ethnic and political mix, both now and in the past. There are, of course, two sovereign states represented, the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. The United Kingdom in turn comprises the nations of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and matters of national as well as of narrower regional identity come into play when espousal of features of language are concerned. In the present, Wales especially, and Scotland and Ireland to lesser extents. In the past, this interaction with Celtic has been most influential in the north and west of the region, as has that with Norse in Ireland, in northern Scotland and the Orkney and Shetland Isles, and in northwest and eastern England. The economic and political dominance exerted on Britain by London and the southeast of England has also inevitably shaped accents: not itself a regional accent, RP nevertheless has an essentially southeastern phonemic structure and phonetic bias; such processes as the Great Vowel Shift have acted to shape modern phonology more consistently and more completely in the south of England than elsewhere.