'They were competing for supremacy': Which is the oldest English accent?

editor1onAugust 7, 2026Leave a Comment

The 'foot-strut' split

Between the 12th Century and the 18th Century, English vowel sounds changed dramatically, in what's known as the Great Vowel Shift. Long vowel sounds like "ee"s and "oo"s changed pronunciation – but not in all words, and not in all regions.

The reason for the shift is unknown, but it had a big effect on how English was spoken. And while the vowel sounds changed, the spellings of words tended to remain the same – which meant the spellings no longer consistently reflected the sound of words. "It has a lot to answer for when it comes to why English spelling is so complicated, and why there's so many different ways to pronounce an 'a' or an 'e,'" says Holly Dann, pronunciations editor at the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

The shift didn't happen everywhere all at once. In some areas of the country older pronunciations were preserved, says Dann.

BBC/ Serenity Strull/ Getty Images Vowel sounds in England changed dramatically between the 12th and 18th Centuries in what is known as the Great Vowel Shift (Credit: BBC/ Serenity Strull/ Getty Images) — Vowel sounds in England changed dramatically between the 12th and 18th Centuries in what is known as the Great Vowel Shift (Credit: BBC/ Serenity Strull/ Getty Images)

One of the later changes in the Great Vowel Shift is called the foot/strut split – a rift that further divided the north and south.

From the 17th Century onwards people in the south of England began to pronounce "strut" with a short "uh" sound, as in "upper", not with a short "oo" as in "foot". However, that change didn't happen in the north, where people stuck to the short "oo" sound for both strut and foot. Today, northern speakers typically still pronounce foot/strut that way.

"The northern pronunciation [of those words] is absolutely the original one," says Turton. "It was the south that branched off and created this new vowel."

This means that even though East Anglia may have been the home of the earliest English sounds at one point, it didn't keep that position – it ditched some, but not all, of the early sounds.

Meanwhile, other northern regions, held on to those old vowels.

The north and south "drifted apart", says Montgomery, "and then you end up with this really important signifier of the north-south divide," meaning, whether you pronounce "strut" to rhyme with "foot", or not.

Molly: Erm, hello – there are some of us slap bang in the middle, too!

In the East Midlands, some of the words we use sound northern – if we were to say "foot" and "strut", they'd sound the same, like "put". We also use article reduction: instead of saying "I'm going to the shops", we might say "going t' shops". We also have what Braber calls the "happy vowel", which sounds more like "happ-eh".

While the East Midlands accent frequently gets lost in the research, it might have had more influence in forming Old English than I expected. "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," Braber says. "Around the time of the Black Death [the plague in 14th-Century England] … a lot of merchants from the East Midlands moved into the south and took up positions of power. Some said they took some of their language forms with them."

There are some older words that you think are peculiarly American, which actually have an interesting history in England – Hugh Montgomery

In fact, what we would now regard as a posh, upper-class English accent is surprisingly new. Take Received Pronunciation, for example: It didn't exist until the 18th Century. And while the Royal family now speaks with a southern accent, that wasn't always the case: it is believed that Richard III, King of England in the mid-1400s, spoke with a northern Yorkshire accent.

"Crucially, that southern vowel [the elongated "a" sound], you wouldn't have heard that [in the 1400s]," Montgomery says.

Ancient sounds in American English

Fossil sounds – ancient sounds in modern speech – show up in English varieties spoken around the world, too.