The Website for People Who Love Britain - Anglophiles
Check out this really cool map that shows all the linguistic diversity around the British Isles. It’s a fantastic map of all the various British (and Irish) accents.
Undoubtedly some may have been left off – but overall it’s a good summary!
Which one is your favorite?
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Oxford received English.
Three e’s in Teesside.
You missed off Cheshire, which is mine, and is neither Potteries nor Mancunian.
More work needed on Ireland. According to this, Limerick has the same accent as say Kerry or Waterford.
This map needs a LOT of work. Hiberno-English is a dialect (language), not an accent. It is spoken with many regional accents throughout Ireland, including Northern Ireland. I haven’t even started looking at the rest of map—if you can Ireland that wrong, why bother with the rest?
Well, as we said in the post, we didn’t make the map and it probably left some things off. But it’s still interesting.
Hey all, this is actually the original mapmaker here. The intent was to try to give a nice summary of the accent-dialect continuums since I could not find an existing one that covered the entire isles, so I constructed this based off of various other maps and linguistic resources.
People are definitely right, though, there is surely a fair amount of incompleteness, and I definitely leaned towards more specificity within English English. For example, in the case of Ireland, it was indeed based on a resource intended to highlight the north-south dialectical variations, and being not as familiar with Ireland at the time I didn’t presume to make authoritative markings about the southern part of the island and just placed Ulster as a major variety of note and the generalizing Hiberno-English elsewhere. Poor labeling perhaps.
Anyway, this was never really finished and I think I gave up copyright when submitted to wikipedia commons, so if people would like to contribute to improving it that would be great.
Shropshire has a quite distinct accent, as does Telford. The dialect in Dawley would keep you entertained for days, it has some really old English.
Wales has a far more variety of accents than just “Welsh” and “Cardiff” !
North Welsh is almost Scouse in places, nothing like South Wales.
There is another way of describing the south-east (within the M25 and quite a bit beyond). It is “Thames Estuary” English, i.e. a sort of contrived cockney accent that you find almost anywhere from Reading (Berkshire) to Essex (obviously) to Kent and to most of Surrey.
Yam-yam is missing as a Midlands accent. I think the map needs to be bigger then maybe it could be a bit more accurate.
Agreed – Black Country has to be one of *the* most distinctive accents (and even then varies between towns) but has been overlooked here for some reason. Likewise, these days I live in the East Midlands, but there is no generic accent – Derby, Leicester and Nottingham all sound very different, to my ears at least. As for Yorkshire, no way is there a “one size fits all” accent; Hull in particular has a very different accent to the rest of the county.
It just says Yorkshire. There is about 10 different accents in Yorkshire. This map only takes you halfway.
According to my husband (a North Londoner) London has several accents itself – I believe Cockney was originally East London.
The Norfolk accent might very well be an acquired taste, but it sounds like home to me. And yes, I do realise that it sounds like incestuous country bumpkin to everyone else 🙁
I absolutely LOVE the Scouse accent.It’s just so unique. But I have to say I’m also a bit partial to the Lancashire accent. My fiance being from Blackburn and all. 😉 I just love the way he talks.
WOW, Ireland is SOOO over generalised! Hiberno-English and Mid Ulster are dialects, not accents, there is SOOO many accents in those two areas.
Hi rb,
This is a nice map. Would you be able to tell me which resources you used to create it?
Thank you.
We didn’t create it. We got it off Wikipedia.
Mine’s a hybrid of North Yorks. and Central IN, US!!!