David Crystal and English pronunciation

Yesterday afternoon OneMonkey and I enjoyed a highly entertaining talk at the Ilkley Literature Festival by David Crystal the well-known linguist. His latest book is Sounds Appealing: The Passionate Story of English Pronunciation, which covers a wide range of topics under that heading, so he concentrated his three-quarters of an hour on regional accents.

You probably know how interested I am in accents and attitudes to accents, and you may also have picked up that Geordie OneMonkey and I have quite different accents (slowly morphing into one another until, we often joke, one day we'll both sound like we're from Middlesborough) so we had plenty to talk about afterwards. As Prof Crystal said, accents and differences in pronunciation provoke strong feelings: there are two aspects to pronunciation, intelligibility (can people understand you?) and identity, and clearly it's the identity aspect that stirs people up.

Because people move around so much or (as with OneMonkey and I) settle down with someone from a different place, it's harder to pin down someone's origins from their accents than it once was. However, apparently on average the accent changes every twenty-five miles in England (possibly in the whole UK, I forget which he said), which is fascinating. It also makes me wonder how 'the Yorkshire accent' can be seen as the third-nicest accent in the UK when Yorkshire is a massive place encompassing such different accents as Hull and Huddersfield (both of which I dislike), Sheffield, Whitby and Bradford. Do they all sound broadly similar to people from further afield, I wonder? In the same way that I say someone sounds southern, but unless they sound like Phil from Time Team (Somerset?) I'm unlikely to be more specific.

David Crystal obviously knows his stuff and was a witty and engaging speaker, full of anecdotes and facts, and not averse to doing impressions of the Queen. If his books are half as entertaining they should be well worth a read and I intend to seek some out at the library soon. I'm only amazed I've never read any of them before.