How are our dialects changing? Dialect blog-16/11/2015

One theory from a 1930’s linguist is that ‘all English-men are branded on the tongue from birth and that a person could tell so much about another as soon as they opened their mouth, in particular not just the region they came from but also the social class they aspired to’. Our dialects form and are a part of our identities whether we like them or not. It was a century ago that George Bernard Shaw, an Irish playwright wrote that ‘no English man can open his mouth without another despising him’. It’s remarkable that 100 years on this is still incredibly true, that so much about ourselves is judged by the way you speak. Assumptions of your class and in some cases intelligence levels can be formed on the basis on just your language. Did you know this?

From the size of the UK in comparison to countries like America, Russia and China, you would assume that the amount of dialects spoken is minimal, however this couldn’t be further from the truth. There are roughly above 30 distinctive different dialects that are spread across the regions, filling the 9 regions of England to the brim with contrasting ‘lingo’. There are dialects spoken in different countries, however none are as contradistinctive as the dialects in the UK. So why does the UK, have such a diverse dialect?

The variation of dialects are not surprising with the exposure of all different accents made possible by the use of social media and technology, we all are open to each other’s language which may or may not affect our dialects and language choices. It may not however be technology that is causing forever changing dialects; everyday situations that we are unknowingly put into every day, spending hours with people who have similar, stronger or dissimilar dialects to our own. Whether it will affect our own, I don’t know. I think that it probably would impact more on our choice of language rather than the amount our dialect changes.

The pronunciation of the language varies from each of the different regions, with the ‘typical’ Bristolian not pronouncing there “t’s” in water, so it is heard as ‘wau-er’. How can this mean, that this shows a lack of our intellects? How has this been accumulated by others? I believe it is because those who would judge a Bristolian accent and stereotype them as an individual who are ‘thick and incapable’, are given the impression that without the influence of our dialect would still speak in the same way. It is only when an individual with a different accent or has a higher Received Pronunciation than us, that we realise that there is a difference in our dialects.