'They were competing for supremacy': Which is the oldest English accent?
Records from this time show clear dialectical differences between the north and south of England. "A long time ago, lots of language and linguistic groups were competing for a sort of supremacy," says Chris Montgomery, senior lecturer in dialectology at the University of Sheffield in the UK.
The Norman invasion in 1066 brought Norman French to the island, gradually changing Old English to heavily French-influenced Middle English – which was then officially used in court and in official communications.
If you look at studies of historical English, people say there's actually quite a heavy influence of East Midlands English in the standard form – Natalie Braber
William: Over the course of all these influences and invasions, the English language became very messy. There were many words taken from other languages and spelling was inconsistent. The advent of the printing press in 1476 began to standardise some spellings and marked a useful point from which we can deduce past pronunciations – which is helpful for our quest to find the oldest living accent.
In those early days of printing, "the spelling system (...) was pretty good at reflecting the pronunciation," says Danielle Turton, a sociolinguist at Lancaster University in the north of England. Words that had similar spellings probably sounded the same at the time they were printed. "Blood", "good" and "food", for example, now have three different long "oo" sounds, but historically might have rhymed, says Turton.
Other vowels were also pronounced differently across England. "Foot" would have sounded the same as "strut" and "put", featuring a short "oo" sound.
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