No place in the English-speaking world is more breathtakingly replete with dialects than Great Britain. According to Robert Claiborne, there are "no less than thirteen" quite distinct dialects in Britain. Mario Pei puts the number of dialects at forty-two -nine in Scotland, three in Ireland and thirty in England and Wales, but even that is probably an underestimate. If we define dialect as a way of speaking that fixes a person geographically, then it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that in Britain there are as many dialects as there are hills and valleys. In the six northernmost counties of England alone, seventeen separate pronunciations just for the word house have been recorded.

Professor Higgins boasted in Pygmalion that he could place any man in London within two miles, "sometimes within two streets", but others claim even more specificity than that. (...) In a nearby village that lies half in Lancashire and half in Yorkshire, people claim to be able to tell which side of the high street a person was born on. (from Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson)

 

 

 

The British writer George Bernard Shaw once remarked that “England and America are two countries separated by the same language.” This humorous statement is a simple way of noting that the English language is not the same everywhere it is spoken. It is a living, evolving language that attains distinctive qualities in different environments...