Academic confirms that the North East speaks ‘properly’

You have probably never taken issue with Daniel Jones, who became head of phonetics at University College London in 1912. But you might do.

He was the gentleman who more-or-less decided that accents, such as the faultless ones used by natives of the North East and elsewhere, were somehow “wrong”.

He backed the idea of Received Pronunciation (RP), which essentially means speaking like Stephen Fry.

RP is not concerned with the slang so beloved of the North East and elsewhere. It deals with the way we pronounce everyday words used throughout the English speaking world.

Dr Michael Pearce, senior lecturer in English language at the University of Sunderland, has plenty to say on the subject.

He told us: “One of the things that some people, thankfully, perhaps fewer people now than in the past, wrongly think about English accents and dialects is that they somehow represent an inferior form of the language; that ‘Standard English’ (often with a southern pronunciation) is ‘proper’ English, and that speakers with marked regional accents and dialects are simply failing to get English ‘right’.

“This, of course, is wrong on many levels.”

It seems that there is no genuine arbiter of how we should speak. There is no more reason to decide that the accent for Standard English should be that of the southern counties, any more than it should be Mackem, Geordie or Hartlepool.

Dr Pearce continued: “What we know as Standard English, the kind of English we see used in newspapers like this across the English-speaking world, is a relatively late development in the 1,500-year history of the language. For about 1,000 years there was no standard; in the Middle English period, the age of Chaucer, texts were written down in the local dialect of the place they were produced in.”

But what about what Dr Pearce calls North East English (thereby wisely sidestepping some age-old squabbling)?

He said: “As someone with a professional interest in the history of English, what really gets me going is the fact that so many of the features of North East accents have such a long historical pedigree.”

It seems the North East accent was never wrong at all, or even wrang. It was reet.