Web Site Shows British Accent Development

Britain is changing its toon.

Recordings of voices from the 1950s, the 1980s and 1990s on a new Web site show that older pronunciations like “toon” for town and “coo” for cow are fading, replaced with more standard forms, officials say.

But Jonathan Robinson, curator of English Accents and Dialects at the British Library Sound Archive, which runs the Collect Britain site, said regional accents are still strong.

“Contrary to popular belief, there is still an incredible amount of regional diversity and the recordings on this Web site illustrate elements both of continuity and of change,” he said.

Robinson said fans of the Newcastle United soccer team in northeast England still refer to their club as “the Toon” – “but often it is used jocularly rather than in normal speech.”

The use of “toon” – which once spread as far south as Yorkshire – does survive in some of the broader Newcastle accents and in some Scottish pronunciations, he said.

Among other major changes has been the “virtual disappearance” of the Northumbrian burr, the way some residents of northeast England have of pronouncing an initial “r” sound at back of the throat, as in French, rather than the front.

Robinson said education, along with greater social and geographical mobility, have led to the changes.

The site features more than 11 hours of interviews and explanation of older words and phrases that have fallen out of use, including “scrat” (to scratch), “gulley” (butcher’s knife), “provand” (fodder) and “clout” (cloth).

The recordings, described as a “treasure trove of local and social history” by the British Library, are useful for linguists and actors perfecting their accents for a role.

The earlier recordings were taken of rural workers for the Survey of English Dialects, by Leeds University; the later ones were recorded by the British Broadcasting Corp. in 1998 and 1999.

The site, launched on Feb. 6, contains recordings of Northern English accents. The rest of the country will be included by August.

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On the Net:

Collect Britain, http://www.collectbritain.co.uk/collections/dialects