London accent dominating English

LONDON: An accent associated with London and south-east England is increasingly being adopted across the UK, reducing the diversity of accents, an app-based study

LONDON: An accent associated with London and south-east England is increasingly being adopted across the UK, reducing the diversity of accents, an app-based study by University of Cambridge researchers showed.

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The English Dialects App has been downloaded more than 70,000 times. More than 30,000 people from over 4,000 locations around the UK have provided results on how certain words and colloquialisms are pronounced.

One major finding is that some features of regional accents, such as pronouncing the ‘r’ in words like ‘arm’, once considered normal throughout the West Country and along much of the south coast, are disappearing in favour of the pronunciations found in London and the south-east.

Lead researcher Adrian Leemann, from Cambridge’s Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, said: “Our results confirm that... more and more people are using and pronouncing words in the way that people from London and the south-east do.”