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

Two BBC journalists go on a quest to find out whose accent is older – and uncover a dramatic history filled with hidden twists and surprises that have shaped the language we speak today.

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… 

William Park: ... would say "baaath", "graaass", and so on, with a long "ah"-sound. In my accent, "foot" rhymes with "put", but not with "strut" – the latter has an "uh"-sound, like in "upper". I grew up in Suffolk, in East Anglia, where the accent is a variation on southern standard English. We say a lot of things in the southern way with a stretched out "a" sound, for example. But we also have our own bit of regional flair. If you greeted me with "Ey up m'duck", I might ask how you are doing with "yer oroight buh?"

Today, the southern English accent is often associated with upper-class traditions and social prestige. For example, the King speaks in a type of southern-based accent, known as Received Pronunciation, as did the late Queen. This type of accent is also known as "BBC English" because of the way BBC news presenters spoke in the past.

But does that mean southern English accents are older, and more "original" than northern ones? Actually, a dive into history reveals a much more complex and surprising truth...

Molly: For a start, English is a language of many regional dialects (which are the words and grammar that a group of people use) and accents (the sounds of a person's speech). They reflect our place of birth and upbringing, and also our identity. "As humans, we like to be part of groups, and we like to differentiate ourselves from others," says Natalie Braber, a professor of linguistics at Nottingham Trent University in the UK.

To understand why some of these accents and dialects are older than others, let's travel back 1,500 years....

William: ... to the Angles and the Saxons, groups of tribes who came to England from northern Germany during the 5th and 6th Centuries. They spoke a mix of Germanic languages and largely landed in the east of England and set up home there. East Anglia gets its name from the Angles and is the origin of the word "England". 

Old English grew out of those Germanic languages, mixed with languages already present in Britain, such as Celtic and Latin remnants.

"It makes sense to think of East Anglia as being the source of the earliest variety of English as we know it," says Kerri-Ann Butcher, a lecturer in English Language at the University of Leeds. A 5th-Century deer ankle bone from Norfolk with a runic inscription saying "roe deer" might be the earliest example of writing in Old English found in the UK.

So, that surely means my East Anglian home accent is the one that's closest to the original Anglo-Saxon sound, right? Well, not really – because there are few more linguistic twists and shifts to come.

The Anglo-Saxons began to settle among the British tribes they found and divided the country up into kingdoms: Kent, Wessex, Sussex, Essex, East Anglia, Mercia (middle England) and Northumbria. Northumbria encompassed northern England and some of Scotland – perhaps indicating the first signs of a north-south divide. 

Over the course of the next few centuries, the Anglo-Saxons were followed by other groups that settled in England and transformed the language: the Jutes and Danes from modern Denmark, Friesians from Germany and the Netherlands, and the Vikings from Scandinavia. That's why modern English is not just an updated form of Old English – instead, it has absorbed many different languages. And those linguistic changes did not play out equally across England. They varied from region to region, depending on where the newcomers arrived and settled.

The north-south split

Molly: By the 9th Century, the area of England that is now Yorkshire, the East Midlands, and East Anglia were largely ruled by the Danes. The Anglo-Saxons were pushed into the southwest, West Midlands, and held a pocket of the north in Northumbria. Devon and........

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