How many colloquial accents are there in England?

Answer 1

This is a really difficult question to answer for two reasons. The first is that there's a really high number of local accents (to the point that local people whose families have been in the area for tens or hundreds of years might be able to tell a native of the next town by the slight variance in accent that might not be noticeable to other people). The other factor is the high level of national and international migration, which mean that people take on different speech patterns as they are exposed to a range of accents and dialects. For example, when I was growing up the accent at home was a 'standard' home counties English accent, which I still use most of the time, and always use at work when I could be speaking to someone from Scotland one minute and Texas the next, so it is important that my speech is clear and that I can be understood. But at school lots of my friends had a local accent with elongated vowels and where consonants are omitted from the ends of words, which I tend to revert to when I am at home and being lazy! My natural everyday speech is probably a combination of the two so wouldn't fit into either category. What tends to happen now is that migrants retain some of their native accent, but also pick up regional characteristics as well. I have heard an Asian/Glaswegian accent, which was particularly unusual to my ear, and high levels of migration to the Midlands and London create some interesting accents there, as well.