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 1. Language and identity
2. Dialect areas
3. Origins of regional differences
4. Influence of other languages
5. Change and spread
6. The media
7. Other dialects and languages
1. Language and identity Most British people feel that where they are from is very important. For many of us, the place where we grew up has a special significance. This is not true of all of us - more often than in the past, families move around the country, and there are many people who had a nomadic childhood and are not really 'from' anywhere. But for a majority of people, pride and interest in the area where they grew up is still a reality. An important component of this local, personal identity is the way we speak - our language, accent and dialect. For some of us in the British Isles, this regional identity is tied up with the fact that we speak another language in addition to English as our mother tongue - Welsh in Wales, Norman French in the Channel Islands, Gaelic in Scotland, Irish in Ireland. And nearly all of us who are monolingual in English display regional features in the way we speak our language, although there are upper-class people who have regionless accents, as well as people who for some reason want to hide their regional origins. The vast majority, though, speak in a way which identifies them as coming from a particular place. They speak like the people they grew up with, and differently from people who grew up somewhere else. People may change the way in which they speak during their lifetimes, especially if they move around, but most of us carry at least some trace of our accent and dialect origins with us all of our lives. Other people can use this information to help work out where we are from, and will say things like "You must be a Londoner", "You sound as if you're a southerner", "Whereabouts in Scotland are you from?", or "You're from Yorkshire, aren't you?". And labels for people of different regional origins are freely used - for example 'Geordie', 'Cockney', 'Jock', 'Taffy', or 'Scouse' depending on what you sound like when you speak. There is a social component to this variation as well. The 'higher' up the social scale you look, the more you will find that accents and dialects are less 'broad' - the more 'broad' a way of speaking is, the more regional clues there are as to exactly where a speaker comes from.
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