- guardian.co.uk, Wednesday March 28 2007 00.12 BST
- The Guardian, Wednesday March 28 2007
The world is shrinking in lots of ways but happily not in all of them. The past is a foreign country with a long "a" in Dorking but it retains a short vowel in Huddersfield. In Stoke-on-Trent people still take only short baths, while in the Medway towns, he who laughs last laughs longest. If we are to believe the British Library, England, like Gaul, is divided into three parts: a south-east dominated by long vowel pronunciation of words like France and class stretching up to about Northampton, a broad west-to-east strip of flatter vowels stretching from Cornwall across to Norfolk, and an impregnable redoubt of short vowels in the north. There is something splendidly obdurate about the fact that, according to the library's new Sounds Familiar? website, there is a sort of linguistic Hadrian's Wall somewhere to the south of Birmingham. North of this invisible line of defiance against estuary English and received pronunciation, millions keep the long grass short, while to the south even the shortest grass is always long. There are enclaves and minorities on each side of the boundary, the library says, with long vowel headmasters reported from Keswick and short vowel dancers overheard in Peterborough. The persistence of all these differences is a tribute to an indomitably unbiddable spirit and may even be a useful metaphor against conformism in other fields too. The south-east controls the nation in many ways but, depending on where they are from, an English person's accent is still their castle - or indeed their castle.
Staff
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