english blog

We're all aware that people from the different regions around the UK tend to use certain words and meanings, pronunciation and even grammatical structures in different ways: that's a basic principle of geographical variation and has its roots in the history of Britain. But a new study at the University of Manchester has identified some interesting trends which suggest that some regional variations - particularly in word choice (lexis) - might be disappearing as southern terms spread north. I'd call them Vans , myself The research is reported on in the Daily Telegraph and the Mail Online , but if you want the real detail and a full look at the language maps that have been created by Laurel Mackenzie and her team at Manchester, go straight to the Multilingual Manchester website . Here you can look at the questions that were asked of the 1400 respondents throughout the UK: questions such as "What word would you use to describe the footwear featured in this picture?"...

Following on from Friday's post about another attempt to 'ban' students from using dialect and non-standard terms (and/or slang, depending on your definition of the term), another story - this time about accent - has appeared. According to The Cumberland News and Star , a Cumbrian teacher has been told to ditch her regional accent and make it more 'southern' to suit her Berkshire pupils. Now it appears that it's not just students who are having their language policed, but teachers are also being told what to say and how to say it. Where will the language police strike next? Back in 2010, Ofsted raised a similar issue at a school in Portsmouth which prompted this blog post and this response in the TES , among other things.

First it was slang getting slagged off and now it's dialect being dissed. Is this a slippery slope towards linguistic fascism? We've reported several examples of so-called slang bans on this blog over the last few years - a few are listed below - but in many cases, the definition of what constitutes 'slang' has been pretty broad, and more often than not, just plain wrong. And that's before you even start to look at the whys and wherefores of imposing 'zero-tolerance' policies towards forms of non-standard English. In The Daily Mirror yesterday, Martin Fricker reported on a school in Halesowen, part of the West Midlands' Black Country, where such a zero-tolerance approach to local dialect had been introduced. The Daily Telegraph reported it as well, but what is striking in so many of the responses quoted from parents of children at the school is how insulted many of them feel at being told that their variety of English is sub-standard. Take for example,...

Following on from last week's Tonight programme and its focus on attitudes to regional accents, here's a great piece by accent coach Erica Buist on what she describes as snobbery and disdain for foreign accents among many English people. While accent prejudice is nothing new, it's troubling to see how it can apparently stand in the way of well qualified people getting jobs and being accepted. As Buist points out: Even out-and-out xenophobes start sentences with, "I don't mind foreigners, but …" While it's tedious to hear bigotry tarted up as a point of view, at least the lie is an acknowledgement that xenophobia isn't acceptable. But companies don't start sentences with, "we're not xenophobic, but …" – they make it company policy. Elsewhere in the piece she quotes research from the University of Chicago that suggests foreign accents undermine a speaker's credibility with listeners, even if the listeners aren't aware of ...

ITV's Tonight programme last night (available on ITV player ) featured some good coverage of attitudes to different accents, including a survey by ComRes into how people rate certain regional varieties. The overall findings suggest that many people still feel that their accent pigeonholes them socially and that prejudice is often rife among some employers towards people with certain accents. As the programme blurb states: ...even in modern Britain, where equality is the new God, prejudice about accents is alive and well. And we often found it thriving most - along the north-south, “us and them” fault-lines of old. Our research not only shows that more than a quarter of Britons (28%) feel they have been discriminated against because of their regional accent but also, according to another batch of research by the law firm Peninsular, that 80% of employers admit to making discriminating decisions based on regional accents. As part of ENGA3 we've been looking at language vari...

Welcome back to blog followers from last year and hi to new people starting the course this year. I've tried to keep regular tweets going from the @EngLangBlog account over the summer holiday in place of blog posts and I've rounded up a few of the most interesting ones about accent and dialect here for you. These should be particularly helpful if you're doing ENGA3 this year, especially those Colchester 6th Form College students doing the summer assignment in the packs from last term. Lucy Mangan on accent adaptation and prejudice A guide to Nottingham accent and dialect A piece on the changing nature of the Leicester varieteh