One of the most distinctive accents in the north of England could be about to disappear, a study has found.
The strong R sound found in some Lancashire accents is slowly being replaced with a weaker version more common in the rest of the country, the research by Lancaster University has found.
In a pocket of east Lancashire around Blackburn, words such as “car” and “bird” are said with an emphasis on the R sound, which does not tend to be heard in other English accents.
But, although this rhotic speech is prominent in older speakers, the research noted it tended to be a softer sound among the young, suggesting it could be gone entirely in a generation or two.
Dr Danielle Turton, one of the authors of the paper, described east Lancashire as an “island of rhoticity”, the last surviving place in the north where this feature can be found.
Lancastrians such as comedians Eric Morecambe and Les Dawson, actor Jane Horrocks and Bullseye presenter Jim Bowen, would “usually differentiate between pairs of words such as ‘stellar’ and ‘stella’, whereas most of England would consider them to be the same”, Turton said.
Hundreds of years ago, people throughout England used to pronounce strong Rs, researchers said.
The accent survives in Blackburn, where young speakers do mostly say their Rs, but they are, according to the research team, phonetically very weak and often difficult to perceive.
Young speakers also pronounce their Rs less frequently than older speakers, the study shows.
“For the youngest speakers in Blackburn, these Rs are very weak, which raises the question of whether future generations will even hear these weak Rs at all, and whether this distinction will eventually fade away,” the researcher said.
Her paper, An Acoustic Analysis of Rhoticity in Lancashire, is published in the Journal of Phonetics.
Researchers interviewed 28 people from Blackburn to analyse how they pronounced their Rs, and the study presents the first systematic acoustic analysis of a rhotic accent in present-day England.
Turton said the disappearance of the accent might be happening “so gradually that people don’t notice it”.
The study is particularly important as most sociolinguistic studies focus on the south-west of England and relatively little is known about rhoticity in the north, the researchers said.
A 2020 study found northern accents were becoming more similar, with the existence of a general northern English accent among “educated people” in the north.
Many traditional regional dialects and accents have begun to disappear as children are taught to speak without them in order to escape prejudice and are influenced by voices from the south-east of England, which even now still tend to be perceived as “neutral” for TV and radio.
“In recent years, there has been a lot of talk about the disappearance of traditional dialects and the linguistic homogenisation of regions in England,” the researcher added.
“Unfortunately, it seems that this is the case for the east Lancashire ‘island of rhoticity’. In the next few generations, this traditional feature may be lost.
“That being said, Blackburn still retains many other vowel features that make it unique and changes like this often pave the way for further linguistic evolution in the future.”
