Nowt as clear as Northern folk whose accents are ‘merging’

Study suggests Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester dialects are becoming one ‘General Northern English’

NORTHERN accents are starting to become more similar as a middle-class “General Northern English” dialect has emerged, a study has found.

Residents of Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield are difficult to distinguish based on their speech patterns, according to researchers at the University of Manchester, although Scouse and Geordie accents are still distinct.

This dialect levelling indicates a shift towards a northern equivalent of Estuary English, as educated urban residents retain typically northern speech markers, such as short vowels in words such as “bath” and “glass”, but cannot be easily identified by their city.

Researchers believe the shift is partly due to an increase in the prestige associated with northern accents, making people more likely to want to retain linguistic features of their home city even if they move to other parts of the country – whereas in days gone by they may have adopted a more standard form of speech.

Dr Patrycja Strycharczuk, who led the research, said: “I often hear statements like ‘I’m from Liverpool/manchester/sheffield, but I don’t have the accent’.

“However, there is very little systematic evidence that General Northern English really is a coherent variety, so that’s the question we asked ourselves.

“It may seem as though local accents are dying out, but we believe we’re actually seeing a new variety becoming established – educated, urban and northern.

“The question is whether General Northern English also has the same status for those who don’t speak it – can a speaker be perceived as standard in London? I don’t think we’re there yet, but the shifting attitudes in the North are a first step.”

The team analysed the speech patterns of 105 educated speakers from Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle upon Tyne and Sheffield reading the same passage from the story The Boy who Cried Wolf. They then used machines programmed with artificial intelligence to see what differences they noted between the speech in the recordings.

The machines struggled to distinguish between the accents of people from Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield – suggesting they speak with a very similar accent or the unique features of each accent are not very pronounced.

Some linguistic features distinctive to the three cities were no longer present in their speech, yet they still had an identifiable northern accent given the presence of features such as the shortening of vowels, which is distinctly northern, the researchers concluded.

Despite the seeming partial homogenisation of different northern dialects, the researchers said this should not be taken as evidence that differences between accents in the North are becoming less pronounced overall.

They note that some subtle differences in vowels across different cities which had previously not been known about were identified during the study – suggesting new unique points of difference are emerging.

The study, which was published in the journal Language and Computation, concludes: “While some traditional accent features may be recessive, most speakers in our sample can still be reliably localised to their particular city. This is often cued by less described, but nevertheless systematic vowel features.”

‘It may seem as though local accents are dying out, but we believe we’re actually seeing a new variety’