A Map of British Dialects (2023)
159 comments
·April 19, 2025PaulRobinson
franticgecko3
I'm from West Yorkshire, the dialect is slowly fading. My grandfather would speak with a strong accent and with spatterings of Norse words. I notice now that, yes, dialects in the UK are becoming homogenised but there is also some American influence seeping in. The American way of pronouncing a double t as a d "better" => "bedder" is increasingly more prevalent in the UK, it's slightly saddening.
simonh
When I was staying with a friend in Norway once we visited his mother, and to me she sounded like someone with a broad Durham/Newcastle accent (my mother is from there) speaking German. A lot of north east words are germanic, or Scandinavian. My grandfather was a farmer near Durham and pigs were swine, children were bairns.
As for American influence, my youngest daughter picked up a lot of that from Youtube at one point, and I once interviewed a girl from Gravesend with such a strong US accent I assumed she'd grown up over there.
trollbridge
Exact same thing is happening in Australia. I'm guessing it's from watching streaming video, Netflix, TikTok, etc. where American accents predominate, and any non-American accents are flattened enough to be sure it's easy for Americans to understand them.
d_burfoot
It's weird that the mainstream TV execs think audiences want boring American accents. To me, one of the best things about the White Lotus (hit HBO show) is that it highlights a distinct array of accents (including Australian).
rwmj
Pronouncing zed as "zee" is particularly annoying (as in "Gen Z").
stevekemp
The one that gets me the most is English people suddenly saying "fall" instead of "autumn".
1659447091
anytime I hear someone use "zed" for Z(ee) the next thing I hear in my head is "Zed's dead, baby"[0] Pulp Fiction and I just can't help but chuckle
PaulRobinson
There was a cartoon in Private Eye a couple of weeks ago that suggested the reason why Millenials and Gen Z could never be reconciled is that they can't agree whether it's pronounced "Generation Zed", or "Generation Zee", as the younger generation themselves would call it.
hermitcrab
I find Valley speak, where people say 'like' every third word, infuriating.
kevin_thibedeau
It may alleveiate the epidemic of th-fronting among young men.
fsckboy
i fought like you for many years but i fink it's just part of the accent now
HK-NC
Norse words?
smh
https://www.viking.no/e/england/e-yorkshire_norse.htm
Most have fallen out of use but e.g. 'laik' is still understood by young people.
mhandley
Beck, meaning stream (small river), is one I remember from growing up in the north east.
casenmgreen
I may be completely wrong, but I think one direction of evolution in pronunciation is the gradual shift to that which takes less physical effort to pronounce.
"Bedder" is less physical work, less effort, in the mouth than "better".
froddd
“Be’er” seems like even less work. For some people
heresie-dabord
> I got bullied at school in North Derbyshire for speaking “too posh”.
Isn't it fascinating that people judge accents harshly? After all, if we can understand one another, what's the problem?
The problem is social stratification within a power structure. Here's a related BBC article from earlier this year.
vladvasiliu
I'm not familiar with the Brits so can't comment on the specifics there.
However, as a kid, I had a similar experience in a completely different country when we moved cities. My accent wasn't "posh" or "higher class" in any way, it was just from a different region. Kids would give me a hard time for it. But the exact same would happen in reverse form in the other region.
Guess people just don't like "outsiders".
Toenex
In the UK people from Liverpool and Manchester are rivals until they meet someone from London when it becomes a North Vs South thing. That all changes again when they meet someone from Glasgow when it becomes England Vs Scotland and yet again when the British meet someone French. There is always a more foreign foe.
bombela
Adding my story to the list.
I grew up in France, from white parents, classical music professionals, catholic practicing. With what I now recognize as a posh french accent, that they consciously learned as a way to climb the social ladder.
I went to the town school where 80% of the students were descendent of North African immigrants, mostly from Algeria.
Most of those kids lived in projects city, and part of their identity is a specific accent differentiating them from the outside of the project city. This accent is not really related to Arabic; it is distinctively different; with what I can only describe as a palpable aggressivity in tone.
I ended up under police protection after a few broken limbs.
This was more than 25y ago. Sometimes I wonder what those kids have become. If they sometimes regret.
As recently as a couple years ago, a white posh accent kid at the same school got bullied and almost suffocated to death with a fire extinguisher. By the next generation of those immigrants.
I am now an immigrant in the Bay Area. Nobody cares about my accent here ;)
heresie-dabord
> school where 80% of the students were descendent of North African immigrants, mostly from Algeria.
Ah, the Colonial power structure. A gift that keeps on giving. But tribalism runs deep too.
> in the Bay Area. Nobody cares about my accent here
For the most part in the modern US, money=caste. Tribalism still runs deep (see: US politics) but how people pronounce isn't such a factor as it can be in the EU and in the UK.
As you are probably aware, French in Canada is also a many-caste system.
mr_toad
> Isn't it fascinating that people judge accents harshly? After all, if we can understand one another, what's the problem?
Two populations in close proximity separated by social differences will develop accents and use those accents to differentiate themselves. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
switch007
> if we can understand one another, what's the problem?
The accent is just being used a heuristic of where you're from, which is the actual judgement. Posh = not from round here.
Northerners are famously insular and protective of their communities (I love them for it but I think it can go a bit far sometimes)
davidw
> dialect changes every 20 miles or so
When I first lived in Italy, this was mind-blowing for me as an American from the west coast. I went on a bike ride with the local team I had joined and they stopped for espresso in a nearby town, and the guy who ran the place was like "oh, you're from Padova" when he heard them speaking. An identifiable change in the dialect over a distance you could easily cover on a bike was a huge "wow!" moment for me.
hermitcrab
An Italian told me that he married a girl from the next valley and was asked by an elderly relative, 'why did you marry a foreigner?'.
fecal_henge
I was born in the peak district but never quite gained the accent. Didnt sound either like a townie or a sheep shagger.
I live in london also, but people cant place me. They sometimes guess Irish or German.
thom
I have no idea what my accent is at this point. I spent enough time in Oxford that I can pass as posh if I need to, moved to a part of Cheshire that had a huge scouse population, then moved to Watford and then Kent and picked up my dad’s dreadful habit of talking vaguely cockney to tradespeople. Now I live in Sheffield and me and my kids have random a mix of long and short As. I also grew up in lower-case parts of the internet and drive myself mad at work switching between that and grown up casing, so it’s not just vocal dialects anymore.
999900000999
I'm reminded of Serious Klein, who is a German rapper who explicitly sounds like a native English speaker. Imo he's closet to a West Coast rapper, but even this is up to debate. He could easily be from Maryland, or any other American city.
andai
It'll sound like whatever the Amish speak! Apparently their population grows exponentially, while the rest, not so much.
fnord77
> the bread pictured here
no bread is pictured
PaulRobinson
Yeah, that seems to have been lost at some point. From memory they used a picture of what Americans might call a soft dinner roll.
To me it would be more a roll than a bap or a barm, but they're almost synonyms. The weird one for me was when a mate insisted it was a teacake, and I suggested that would only apply if it had raisins in it. What I was describing, he insisted, was a fruit teacake, and without fruit it became a teacake. This is contrary to what the rest of the country believes outside of North Manchester, but has become a running joke for many years between us.
pbhjpbhj
When I asked for a bag of scraps in the chippy tonight the lady asked if I wanted "any breadcakes luv" showing me they were an 'outsider' (from about 30 miles away I reckon).
Also, no-one has called me 'duck' in the last week; which just feels wrong.
ninalanyon
My wife was from Orkney and we spent a few months in the US. So we had US biscuits which are not the same as UK biscuits, US cookies which are not Orcadian cookies, West Country English buns which are definitely not US buns.
Your (Yorkshire?) teacakes are almost but not exactly like my buns.
You can imagine the confusion when the children asked for a cookie, a bun, or a biscuit while in the US.
ljm
The general unawareness of what a barmcake (barm) is outside of Bolton/east lancs, particularly in London, never ceases to amuse me.
“What the hell is a chip/bacon/sausage/pastie/pie barm!?”
b800h
When is this map from? 1955?
Essex accents had travelled well into Hertfordshire by the 1970s. Cockney has evaporated and the condensate largely landed in Essex and Hertfordshire.
Do people really speak Kentish in most of Kent? Or is it a mix of Modern Estuary, MLE (multicultural London English) and RP (received pronunciation)?
I know the author says that the map will always be wrong, I understand that, but this map is badly out of date.
KaiserPro
> Do people really speak Kentish in most of Kent? Or is it a mix of Modern Estuary,
Yes, ish
For example Bermondsey(a former borough in southwark, london) is a weird mix of kent and cockney, but it is still, just about distinct. if you move more into kent, I sounds get longer. from I to Aye, to Aye-eh
In the 80s-2000s half of central london moved to the suburbs, taking the accent with them.
However the south london accent still exists in younguns, depending on parents of course. If you're second generation, and depending on which school you go to, you might get a hybrid accent. (my daughter got a proper bermondsey accent, but I suspect now she'd get, posher accent.)
but, those accents are well away from these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S8JR4eJAXA which sounds more related to broads norfolk when I was growing up. (but 1950s broads was different to 80s)
I think the biggest issue is trying to pin down the hard accent changes vs the gradual.
For example somewhere in Lincolnshire it goes from rural burble to hard yorkshire-eqse stops. I suspect its something to do with the fens.
tankenmate
Sarf Londn, happy memories...
whoistraitor
Yeh it’s strange it includes cockney so prominently. It isn’t really very present unless you spend time around the various gentlemen frequenting sports pubs and pie and mash shops in east London, or if you take a black cab very often. I’d say the “roadman” dialect, mixing cockney and Jamaican patois, plus grime vibes, is FAR more common. I’ll hear it everyday wandering around South and east London. I guess it’s a London dialect so it’s in that umbrella,… but how come cockney gets such a fat slab of land?
ascorbic
That's multicultural London English, or MLE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English
KaiserPro
> pie and mash shops
p-aye an mashhhh, bruv
simonh
You used to be able to get pie, mash and liquor round me in the Bexley area until about 10 years ago, but the ones I knew have closed now and I don’t know where the nearest place is.
Not sure if you can still get Jellied Eels in Eltham, which would be a shame if you can’t.
throwawayE3
[dead]
pxeger1
"RP", by the definition it was originally given, doesn't really exist any more in anyone under 70 or so. What you may now think of as "RP" is usually called Standard Southern British, or SSB.
leoedin
You just need to listen to the various generations of the royal family to see that RP is effectively dead.
I read somewhere that accents “move” up the social hierarchy over time. Aspects of speech which are widely working class will eventually become traits of the upper class - while meanwhile the working cm lass have moved on.
countrymile
There are two sorts of Essex, the countryside version that straddles south Suffolk and the London imported one that has become the stereotype, that appears to be estuary on the map. Both have massive crossover depending whether you're in town or village. A rather difficult mapping task!
zelos
I had the same feeling. I've lived in Sussex for most of my life and I can't say I've heard a Sussex accent for a long time. Maybe I'm on the wrong side of an urban/rural split?
SeanLuke
If you think this is dense, try Italy some time. Huge numbers of highly distinct dialects, because until the mid-1800s Italians spoke huge numbers of entirely different languages, complete with their own full literature traditions. During unification the country settled on Florence's language (the language of Dante) as the "official" language: but everyone still proudly speaks their own language. To my knowledge, Italy is regarded as the densest diverse dialect region in Europe.
How different? What Americans call arugula the British call rocket. Because the British word is derived from the French roquette, which is from ruchetta, a word in italian dialects along the French border. But Americans got their word from aruculu in the southern Calabrese dialect, a result of immigration. The Italian word is rucola, from the Latin eruca.
Americans think "Capeesh" is an Italian word because they heard it in The Godfather. But it's not: it's Sicilian, as is much of the film.
dogmatism
wait what? I always thought "capeesh" was just "capisce" with the end swallowed? Is "capisce" not standard italian?
troad
Capisce, pronounced with a distinct 'eh' at the end ('capeesh-eh'), would be standard Italian for 'he/she understands' or 'you (polite) understand'.
But 'capeesh' tends to be used differently in American mob films, meaning either 'Got it, pal?' or 'Yeah, I got it' ("Capeesh? Capeesh."). Those would be different in standard Italian: capisci ('capeesh-ee'), and capisco ('cap-is-coh'), respectively. It's that final example that makes it obvious that the mobsters aren't speaking standard Italian - there is no 'sh' sound in capisco, so eliding the final vowel wouldn't get you to 'capeesh', but to something more like 'cap-isk'.
However, the corresponding forms in Sicilian are capisci and capisciu. Eliding the final vowel yields the observed 'capeesh' in both cases.
It makes perfect sense that the mobsters would be speaking Sicilian rather than standard Italian. Italian immigrants in the US were overwhelmingly from Italy's south, which is generally poorer than the north. (The Mafia, in particular, is an organization with its roots in western Sicily.) Most of these immigrants came before the advent of standardized/centralized schooling in Italy, and so were never taught modern standard Italian. Instead, they spoke their native Romance languages, generally dialects of Sicilian and Neapolitan.
Even today, most Italian-Americans will be able to tell you which 'dialect' their grandparents spoke.
robocat
Standard Italian: capisci
[Capisce is] borrowed from the spoken Sicilian and Neapolitan equivalents of Italian capisci, the second-person singular present indicative form of capire (“to understand”).
bjackman
I think something important to explain about British English dialects is the class factor.
It's easy to forget because the classic RP accents have largely died out, but the way I was brought up to speak (actively! My parents would "correct" my speech patterns) is much more reflective of class than locality. This is the case throughout England at least. Brits take this for granted but it's not the global norm!
In many British cities there is also a major race axis to dialects too. Just like how American English has black and white accents, you could make a better-than-chance guess at a modern Londoner's ethnicity from a recording of their voice. (See Multicultural London English).
thebruce87m
> This is the case throughout England at least. Brits take this for granted but it's not the global norm!
England and Britain are not interchangeable, unless you specifically mean that all Brits take it for granted that this is only the case in England or something like that?
Edit: for the downvoters: https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/difference-between-britai...
bjackman
That's exactly what I mean. It's not entirely the same in e.g. Scotland. But Scottish people will understand English class signals.
Hilarious that you'd read my comment explaining British class and linguistics dynamics and assume I don't know what Britain is lol
thebruce87m
Glad you find it hilarious, but if you think that the rest of the UK spends great amounts of time considering England I would encourage you to visit some of these places.
null
Jensson
There was no error there, maybe he doesn't know if class is a major factor in Scotland or Ireland? That could make sense since England as the center of power that class would be more of a factor there for dialects, but I am not sure.
bjackman
Yes exactly in fact I was specifically thinking of my belief that class is signalled less strongly in many Scottish dialects. But the general concept of class being closely related to accent is something that people will instinctively understand throughout the whole of Britain (and probably Ireland too), even if it's not that big an effect in their own local dialect.
thebruce87m
The great thing about LLMs is we don’t have to argue about language any more, a machine can do it for us. Here is is explained:
“The common country error in that statement is confusing “England” with the entire United Kingdom.
Explanation: • The statement says: “This is the case throughout England at least. Brits take this for granted…” • It singles out England but then generalizes to all Brits (which includes people from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland—not just England). • This is a common error, especially among non-UK speakers, where England is incorrectly used to refer to the entire UK.”
croemer
Here is the equivalent map for German: https://language.mki.wisc.edu/essays/high-and-low-german/
Here's a similar one from Wikipedia that includes Dutch dialects as an example of dialect continuum: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialektkontinuum#/media/Datei:... probably based on this historical map: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/11kvga1/an_1894_ma...
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Tijdreiziger
This Wikipedia page also has some interesting maps: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nederlandse_dialecten
amiga386
Fa says aat? Fowks dinnae spik "Grumpian" up in Aiberdeen, they spik'i Doric.
bradley13
I rented a room for a few months, from an elderly couple in the countryside outside Aberdeen. It took a solid week before I could do more than nod politely at whatever the heck they were on about.
gregorvand
The article mentions not covering Doric or Scots since they are considered virtually second languages
dfawcus
Not 'virtually', Scots is a different language to English, and Doric is a dialect of Scots.
English and Scots are sibling languages, c.f. some of the geographically close Scandinavian languages.
If you want a quick guide to languages in Britain, the site has an additional article which the original links to:
https://starkeycomics.com/2019/03/01/every-native-british-an...
gregorvand
Thanks. I am Scottish originally and understand a lot of Scots. I guess I said 'virtually' since Gaelic is probably the only 'official' other language in Scotland but I agree Scots and Doric should be recognised as such.
devrandoom
I love it, have listen: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/ZrJMVPQyxvg
fy20
I had a really interesting situation a couple of decades ago when I was studying. I grew up in a rural part of the UK in the South West. The nearest train station was just over the county border, around 20 miles away.
One day I was waiting for the train, and there were two men talking: a vicar and his friend - both in their 50s. Clearly from that area. Even though I'd grown up in an area with a similar accent - less than 20 miles away - I could not understand a word they were saying.
croemer
The names of dialects aren't super useful to people who aren't from the UK. Also, dialects often are continua, so drawing borders without any sort of hierarchy to indicate closeness is quite pointless.
What would be cool if one could click on each dialect/region and hear a few words spoken in that dialect.
abm53
I agree.
In my view many of these small regions (that blend into one another) could be combined to give a much more useful map with more sharply distinct accents.
Such a map may be less precise, but far more useful to most.
CharlesW
Reminds me of the classic "One Woman, 17 British Accents": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyyT2jmVPAk
karaterobot
> This is pretty normal in any large region that has been speaking a language continually for 1600 years.
Large! The thing that gets me is that, geographically, all of the UK would fit easily into the state of Oregon, but you'd have to be a linguist to describe even one distinctly Oregonian accent, let alone dozens. It's not surprising to me that a very old country would have so many accents, but it's surprising that they would still perpetuate into the present, after mass media, travel, and mass communication seems to have flattened or homogenized so many fine distinctions based on geographic isolation.
mikelevins
Of course the dialects are not so densely distributed in North America, and English has only been evolving in the Americas for a few hundred years, but there are a bunch of dialects, and I find them super interesting.
My paternal grandparents were honest-to-goodness Ozark hillbillies who spoke Ozark Midlands (also called South Midlands), which is very close to, and sometimes conflated with, Appalachian English.
I'm in the Ozarks now and at least in the region where I live, this dialect seems to be disappearing. I still hear traces of it, but I don't think I've heard anyone really speaking it in years.
That's too bad. I love that dialect--perhaps because it was the language that my grandparents spoke.
If you're curious about it, you could listen to some of Terry Gross' interview with Ralph Stanley. He spoke Appalachian English, but it's indistinguishable to my ear from the language my grandparents spoke.
Here's the interview at NPR:
https://www.npr.org/2016/06/24/483428938/bluegrass-legend-ra...
leoedin
I think social media is reducing local accents in a way mass travel or media never seemed to - probably because it exposes people to “cool” accents in a way that old media never did.
pessimizer
> you'd have to be a linguist to describe even one distinctly Oregonian accent, let alone dozens.
You could definitely describe two or three, but you picked a new, far flung, low-population state as an example. Britain has 14x the population of Oregon. If Oregon had two accents, you might expect Britain to have 28.
Going to older eastern parts of the country, you can usually tell where people are from within probably 100 miles. You can tell Chicago from Milwaukee from Detroit from Pittsburgh from Boston. You can tell Northwest Arkansas accents from Western Arkansas accents. You can hear a parent's Texas in the accent of somebody you grew up with in Kansas. You can even tell south Jersey accents from Baltimoreans if you ask them both to say the word "Orioles." Literally impossible for a Baltimorean to say. Orirols? Orals?
California has hella accents too.
jimnotgym
The West Midlands Region needs some serious sub division. Herefordshire has nothing of the brummie and Shropshire fades out from the black- country yam-yam into a border talk that is sadly dieing out due to the amount of migration from the South. It is still destinct in rural communities. Man pronounced 'mon', cold pronounced 'cowd' and sheep pronounced 'ship'. I could barely follow my father speaking to his father, due to the amount of local words they used. They were 'upper wommers' though (people who live in the hills!).
craigdalton
Anyone interested in the history of English dialects will love The Story of English, BBC 1986. Some snippets of recorded speech showing the evolution of the language and proximities.Highlights include comparing an elderly Norwegian and Yorkshireman say the same sentences and hearing the descendents of East Anglian UK emigrants to Chesapeake Bay in the USA centuries later speak with a mixed E Anglian/US accent.https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh06URz4IJQ4aI0A-xjXOtx2O...
The accent and dialect changes every 20 miles or so, so this is obviously a bit vague.
We can’t even agree on what to call a bread roll [0] never mind how some words should be pronounced [1].
My mother was brought up in Liverpool, but her (Irish immigrant) mother hated the Bootle accent so much that she taught her, and her older sister, to speak something closer to RP.
That washed off, and like her I got bullied at school in North Derbyshire for speaking “too posh”. Yet locals in my new home of London clearly place me as being from the North but can’t place where. To be honest neither can most Northerners. I think I’m broadly “South Pennine”, so a bit of High Peak, a bit of Manchester, the odd spot of Lancashire or even West Yorkshire - reflects where I grew up, went to Uni, lived, and socialised with. My partner has a similar accent despite growing up in a part of Manchester with a distinct accent and dialect of its own.
The point is, it’s complex and it’s changing. And it’s not just the UK. It seems to have sped up in recent years. When I hear Canadian voices from 70 years ago, I can hear Scottish tinges. Likewise the US East coast of the mid-20th century had more West Country in it than today.
It was only a friend’s grandfathers generation that could tell what street someone grew up on from their voice alone, and today we are increasingly homogenised - I wonder what “English” will sound like in 200 or 500 years.
[0] https://www.ourdialects.uk/maps/bread/
[1] https://www.ourdialects.uk/maps/class-farce/