Ey up m'duck!

That means "hi", in my regional dialect. I'm Molly Gorman, a BBC journalist from Derbyshire, a county in the Midlands – a region that is roughly in the middle of England. My colleague William Park grew up in East Anglia, in the south-east of England. Together, we decided to track down the oldest English sounds still used commonly today – and in the process, have a friendly little competition over whose regional accent is older.

When it comes to English accents, one major dividing line runs between the north and the south of England. While my home region is more or less in the middle, there's one aspect of my accent that's typically northern: we tend to pronounce words like "bath", "grass" or "laugh" with a short "a", as in "cat". Also, we pronounce "strut" to rhyme with "foot" – we say both with a short "oo" sound (like "book" or "cook"). Will on the other hand…