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Jonnie Robinson, Curator, English accents and dialects, British Library Sound Archive, writes:
Contrary to popular opinion very few individual dialect features, such as the use of a particular word or a localised pronunciation pattern, are peculiar to a single location. Rather it's the unique combination of a variety of aspects of speech that makes the dialect of a town or area different from elsewhere. Many people, for instance, often confuse speakers from Middlesbrough with speakers from Newcastle upon Tyne or even occasionally with speakers from Liverpool as the Teesside accent has a number of features in common with the other two areas and yet it's clearly distinctive in its own right.
There are a number of features shared by speakers in the whole of the north-east of England, and probably the most distinctive in terms of pronunciation is the tendency for speakers to use glottalised consonants for the sounds . This is an extremely subtle phonetic process and most noticeable when the consonant appears between vowels in the middle of a word or at a word boundary between two vowels. Listen to the way these speakers pronounce the target consonants in the following words and phrases: drinkers, trackies, they're wearing like a tracksuit and ten pence.
On the other hand, there are elements of a Teesside accent that have more in common with speech in Liverpool than on Tyneside. Listen, for instance, to the vowel sound Scott uses in words: person, word, certainly and burgled. In addition, the omission of <t> sound at the end of the statement what's all that about and the rhythm and intonation pattern here at times have more than a hint of Merseyside. It's thought that the occasional similarities between a Liverpool and Middlesbrough accent result from the two areas common history of immigration from Ireland. It's perhaps not widely known, but Middlesbrough has the second highest Irish population in England after Liverpool and this has clearly had an impact on speech there and this unique combination of features makes the Middlesbrough accent extremely distinctive.
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