Only about two percent of Britons actually speak the accent foreigners are taught
Learners of English around the world are often drilled in Received Pronunciation, the so-called King's English. Yet only about one Briton in fifty speaks it. Everyone else talks with some regional flavour, and a Leeds study team found the country's speech still as varied as ever despite decades of radio and television.
English began as the Anglo-Frisian speech of Germanic settlers who crossed from the coasts of today's northern Netherlands and north-west Germany. The Britons they met spoke Common Brittonic, a Celtic tongue, whose influence was long thought slight, though some scholars now credit it with grammatical changes that set English apart from its Germanic cousins. Old English was a patchwork of dialects, of which Late West Saxon came out on top.
Two invasions then reshaped it. Scandinavian settlers of the eighth and ninth centuries simplified its grammar and added words, and the Normans of the eleventh century layered on a vocabulary from French that entered through courts and government. The split still shows. Everyday, concrete words tend to be Anglo-Saxon while abstract ones lean Latin or French, which is why the farm animal is a Germanic swine or cow but the meat served to Norman lords became pork and beef.
Within the United Kingdom the main groupings are English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish English, each with many local dialects. Received Pronunciation grew out of Midland and Southern speech heard in early modern London. In the capital today, Estuary English mixes RP with Cockney, and Multicultural London English has emerged among young working-class speakers; a 1979 survey found more than 125 languages spoken in inner-city pupils' homes. In Northamptonshire, the town of Corby even has a dialect coloured by West Scottish speech.
Typical features include dropping an R that is not followed by a vowel, the intrusive R that links a vowel-final word to the next, and replacing T between vowels with a glottal stop. British speakers also more readily treat group nouns as plural, saying the police are investigating. When the University of Leeds won a 460,000-pound grant in 2007 to study dialects, it described itself as well chuffed.
Source: British English
