Listen carefully – can you still hear a proper Kent accent?

National Poetry Day next week celebrates regional dialects and words. Alex Claridge talks to linguist David Hornsby about the evolution of the Kent accent

Mention the Kentish accent to anyone and they’ll probably tell you it’s not too dissimilar from the way Londoners have spoken for generations.

They’ll describe it as indistinct to much of the rest of the South East, the tongue known as Estuary English.

But Kent has in fact a far richer and more diverse linguistic heritage than might be supposed.

And it is one that intrigues socio- linguist Dr David Hornsby, head of the department of English language and linguistics at the University of Kent.

The 54-year-old is an expert on the way language evolves.

“Accents in Kent are a lot more diverse than you might think,” he says.

““Yes, there’s the bog standard south-eastern accent. But you can find older people who still speak the traditional accent, who still roll the letter r.”

This, Dr Hornsby explains, is known in linguistics as the “rhotic r” and is most notably found in the West Country and pockets of Lancashire.

“You can still find people in Kent who speak in this traditional way,” he said.

“They tend to be people who don’t have much contact with the towns, don’t move about much and don’t have much contact with London.”

Indeed, it is the spread outward of London English which has come to characterise what we would call a standard Kent accent.

It is a good time to discuss accents as next Thursday is National Poetry Day, which this year celebrates regional dialects and words.

Kent has rich history here, too.

On the Isle of Thanet, for example, a traditional word for an ant is pismire, a word imported into English from Scandinavian languages. Lodge in old Kentish means shed while keys are sycamore seeds and a yaffle is a green woodpecker. Then there are the various words for woodlouse. These include monkey peas, peabugs or cheesebugs.

There are divergencies inside the county, too.

In north Kent a large edible crab is a ponger, but in Folkestone it is called a heaver. Dr Hornsby is also interested by the pockets of accents in Kent which defy the broader picture.

He says there is “richness here which is worth looking at”.

People in Staple or Appledore are found to pronounce vowels differently to the places around them, substituting an “e” in some words for an “i”.

And then there’s Aylesham, which can be said to have an accent all of its own.

“I’ve always been fascinated by Aylesham,” Dr Hornsby says. “If you talk to the people there, they will not sound like they come from east Kent.

“It’s a mixed dialect which emerges from migration into the area.”

Aylesham’s history as a mining vi l lage meant that miners and their families were encouraged to move to east Kent from

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‘If you talk to people in Aylesham they will not sound like they come from east Kent’