How our scone is winning
HOW you pronounce the word ‘scone’ does not show how posh you are – it just reveals where you are from.
It’s long been thought that to pronounce scone to rhyme with ‘cone’ revealed a sort of higher class distinction.
Instead, according to linguistic experts, it’s just a geographic distinction. And if you’re from the North East, you’re more likely to pronounce it rhyming with ‘gone.’
The ‘Scone Map’ of the UK has been produced by Cambridge University academics and was revealed on Sunday as the nation celebrated English Language Day and Shakespeare’s birthday.
The results follow the launch of the English Dialects App in January 2016 which has been downloaded more than 70,000 times.
To date, more than 30,000 people from over 4,000 locations around the UK have provided results on how certain words and colloquialisms are pronounced.
Based on the huge new set of results, researchers at Cambridge, along with colleagues at the universities of Bern and Zurich, have been able to map the spread, evolution or decline of certain words and colloquialisms compared to results from the original survey of dialect speakers in 313 localities carried out in the 1950s.
Those who rhyme it with ‘gone’ predominate in Scotland, Northern Ireland and the north of England. Those who rhyme with ‘cone’ dominate in southern Ireland and the Midlands. The rest of the country is a mixture of the two pronunciations.
There is a third pronunciation available for the word – in the form of the village of Scone in Scotland, which is pronounced “skoon”.
“It is not a matter of being posh, or thinking you are posh, if you pronounce scone as in cone,” says phonetics expert Professor Jane Setter of the University of Reading, co-editor of the English Pronouncing Dictionary.
“It is more a matter of where you grew up. By and large, the pronunciation that rhymes with gone is more common, however.”
The research also revealed regional diversity in dialect words and pronunciations is diminishing as much of England falls more in line with how English is spoken in London and the South East – however the North East seems to be an exception.
Newcastle and Sunderland stood out from the rest of England with the majority of people from these areas continuing to use local words and pronunciations which are declining elsewhere.
For example, many people in the North East still use the traditional dialect word for a small piece of wood stuck under the skin, ‘spelk’ instead of Standard English ‘splinter.’ A ‘spelk’ map has also been produced by Cambridge University revealing the region to be in glorious isolation in its use of the word.