Local Accents

Less educated people use numerous local accents which can be either urban (characteristic of a city like Liverpool or New York) or rural (spoken in the countryside, like South Wales or the Appalachians).

In the old time a natural barrier like a river or a mountain would be enough to make the speech of two villages different. But today mobility of the population have increased immensely. In­novations "leap" from big cities to small towns and countryside. Comparison between the data of the Linguistic Atlas of North America collected in the fifties and the data presented in the Phonological Map of the U.S.A. completed by the end of the century has demonstrated that the accents of the major cities in the U.S.A. have become much more different than they used to be fifty years ago (Labov 1999).