Question: how do you find out what the boundaries of the different accents are?

Damien Hall answered on 16 Jun 2011:

You do it by interviewing lots of people in different places, analysing their accents, putting the analysis on a map (or probably a few maps), and drawing lines on the maps around the accents that are the same.

But to answer this question in a bit more detail, you have to think about what an accent actually is. Basically, it’s a collection of sounds that people in a certain place say differently from other people. The important thing is that it’s a COLLECTION of sounds, and you have to look at each sound in the collection individually.

So think about an English accent and a Scottish accent. There are a few differences between those, but let’s take two as an example. When there’s an “r” at the end of a syllable, like in the word “car”, Scottish people often say the “r” so that the word sounds like “carrr”, but English people usually don’t, so for them the word sounds like “cah”. Another difference between (northern) English and Scottish accents is that in northern England, many people pronounce “put” (like “put that down!”) and “putt” (like in golf) the same, but in Scotland they pronounce them differently (and in Southern England they pronounce them differently too). So, to find the accent boundary between an English accent and a Scottish accent, I would ask lots of people in towns along the border to say “car”, “put” and “putt”, and I would note how they said them. If someone said “carrr” and their “put” and “putt” sounded different, I would mark a ‘Scottish accent’ point on the map at the place where that person was from; if someone said “cah” and their “put” and “putt” sounded the same, I would mark an ‘English accent’ point on the map. I would do this lots of times, so that my map was filled with points (one for each person) that said either “Scottish” or “English”. I would then draw a line separating the Scottish points from the English ones, and that would be the accent boundary.

What would be really interesting is if the accent boundary did not follow the border between the countries! In fact, we have found that it doesn’t. There are lots of people in a place called Gretna, in the South-West of Scotland, who sound like English people.