Regional English accents are dying out because children are picking up American phrases from TikTok, Netflix and Disney, an author has warned.
Nicola Chester, who has also worked as a school librarian, explained that she noticed it with her pupils adopting the accent ‘prevalent’ in TV and on the internet.
Writing in Countryfile Magazine, the author said: “Accents and dialect should always be a source of pride and friendly inquiry.
“But just when it seems we’re embracing them, in train-station announcements or on the BBC, in a cultural shift from the empire-emanating Received Pronunciation of the King or Queen’s English are they dying out?…
“From the advance of Estuary English, blending RP with Cockney-derived south-east London, regional accents are now being squeezed from another direction altogether.
“It was evident at the secondary school I worked in, with children adopting American phrasing and accents, more prevalent in their world of TikTok, Netflix and Disney, gaming and music.
“But we are required to repeat it back, too, adapting our speech to use technology such as Alexa, Siri and customer service bots.”
Ms Chester is best known for her nature writing including her memoir On Gallows Down about growing up in rural Berkshire.
Her warning over the fate of regional accents chimes with a 2016 report commissioned by HSBC which suggested that ‘talking to machines and listening to Americans’ would kill off regional accents and phrases within 50 years, leading to a more universally informal spoken English.
Some voice assistants in cars currently sold in the UK have been found to respond to Americanisms such as ‘open the trunk’ but not ‘open the boot’.
A 2022 study on accents in South East England by linguists from the University of Essex, and the University of Manchester found that cockney and received pronunciation were vanishing among young Britons, and being replaced by ‘multicultural London English (MLE) – and standard southern British English
MLE incorporates pronunciations from the Caribbean, west African and the Asian communities.
And it’s not just regional accents that are under threat. A 2016 study from Cambridge University into English dialects found words from London and the South East had spread across the country, to the detriment of regional dialects.
It also highlighted how the northern tendency of using a short “a”, such as in “last” – instead of the long vowel favoured in the south – had moved south of Birmingham since 1950.
The researchers used a smartphone app on 30,000 people across the country to test how they pronounced words and compared the results with a 1950 study into local dialects.
It found that the Essex-ism of saying “free” instead of “three” had spread from just 2 per cent of the population in 1950 to 15 per cent, while the long “r” in “arm”, once a very common pronunciation in the South West, had almost died out.
But while Ms Chester may blame the influence of social media and US streaming giants for the threat posed to our regional accents, it seems there is also a perception across the pond that America’s own regional accents may be in decline.
In 2022, US news channel CNN’s podcast Margins of Error explored whether American regional accents were being replaced by a ‘“general American” accent that doesn’t sound like it’s from anywhere in particular.’
Nicole Holliday, assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, told the podcast that accents developed in part as a result of the lie of the land.
“Before we had planes and stuff, people living on one side of a mountain did not talk to people living on the other side of the mountain,” Holliday said. “And when groups of people are segregated from each other, they develop different ways of speaking.”
But with populations today much more mobile and connected through technologies such as the internet, phone networks and social media, it is perhaps inevitable that accents and dialects will continue to slowly shift.