English accents and dialects
... There are a lot of different accent and dialects, and they can be very broad or strong. ... When people are talking about regional English, they usually use the words accent and dialect. ... In Britain there are many different accents, for example, northern, southern, north-eastern etc. There are a lot of different dialects as well, Cockney, Brummie, Geordie etc. But there are also a big group of people who speaks with an English-black or a West Indian dialect, a dialect that is called “patois”. If a Spanish or a Chinese person speak fairly fluent English, they can still have a Spanish or a Chinese accent. As well as an English person, who speaks French, can have an English accent. ... How the English language was brought to Britain In the first half of the 15th century settlers, called Angles, came from across the North Sea to Britannia. ... The invaders spoke dialects of a language family that is nowadays called West Germanic; which includes German, Dutch and English. The Britons spoke dialects of Celtic – Irish, Scots Gaelic, Cornish etc. ... We now call the language from this early period, up to 1100 or 1150, Old English. ... There were actually four distinct dialects; Northhumbrian – spoken north of the river Humber Mercian – in the Midlands Kentish – in the south-east West Saxon – in the south and south-west They are called dialects because mutual understanding between the dialects could be difficult. ... This might be hard to understand so to make it easier, here is a translation to modern English: “All the speech of the Northhumbrians, and especially at York, is so sharp, piercing and grinding, and unformed, that we Southerners can hardly understand it.”* After occupations and settlements of Vikings, which was going on for about a hundred years, and the Norman Conquest in 1066 Old English was much reduced and Middle English was introduced. ... This system is the dialect we today call Standard English. RP / Standard English We have covered that there is a difference between accents and dialects. Whenever British English is taught, in a non-English speaking country, the accent that you will learn is almost always RP, which stands for ‘received pronunciation’. ... This accent is not spoken by more than about 3% of the English population, and it is mostly by those who have been educated at public schools or people of a higher social group.