Why northern children of the future will talk like reet southern softies

Cambridge study suggests local accents may die out within half a century as English is homogenised

NORTHERN accents could start dying out within the next 45 years as a result of the dominance of standard southern English, according to a new Cambridge University study.

Children across the north of England are increasingly using pronunciations more usually heard in the South as they are easier to pick up, researchers say.

It means some northern speech pattern for words such as “strut” (to rhyme with “foot”) and “singer” (rhyming with “finger”) could soon be lost. But some entrenched pronunciations such as “bath” with a flat “a” will likely survive.

Meanwhile, rhotic accents most commonly heard in the South West are also in danger of disappearing, as the rolling “r” in words such as “farmer” are replaced with a softer “aah”.

The findings came after researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Portsmouth built a physics-based model to determine the future of the English language. They examined data from a 1950s study of dialect by the Survey of English Dialects and compared it with a 2016 study of 50,000 English speakers carried out by the English Dialect App.

Analysis shows the pronunciation of words in south east England has already replaced northern versions over previous decades and will eventually become standard across the country. As an example, the word “thawing” was commonly pronounced “thaw-wing” at the start of the 20th century but now the majority of people say it with an intrusive “r”, which means it sounds like “thaw-ring”.

“We found that the word has changed because it was tricky to pronounce and children are more likely to pick up the easier pronunciation. This then becomes the norm,” said Dr James

Burridge, from the University of Portsmouth. Modelling accounted for people who move around their home location and travel further afield, for work or to move in with a spouse and was run using updated information on population distributions and migration patterns. Experts say the results can help predict how the English language will evolve over the next 40 years.

According to the researchers, while pronunciations across England are increasingly southernised, dialectal variations between regions are also fading. Some words like “backend”, spoken in areas of Yorkshire to describe autumn, will completely disappear within 20 years, it was predicted.

But Dr Tamsin Blaxter, from the University of Cambridge, said: insisted the linguistic changes will not result in northerners completely losing their accents. “An ‘accent’ would refer to the pronunciation of all words of the language, and what we see are changes happening in big classes of words – but not all of them,” she said.