Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is episode 113, a Southern accent.

In this episode, we're going to turn our attention to the south of England.

Since we looked at the Northern dialect of middle English in the last episode, I thought

it would be a good idea to contrast that dialect with the speech of Southern England.

So this time, we'll look at some of the unique features of this old Southern dialect,

and we'll see how developments in this region informed some of the modern differences between

Northern and Southern speech in Britain.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is HistoryOfEnglishPodcast.com,

and you can sign up to support the podcast at patreon.com slash history of English.

When I was visiting England in the 1980s, I was standing at Victoria bus station at

late at night.

Three of us were waiting for a bus, three strangers.

One of them was from the north of England.

I can't remember where, but I think it was Yorkshire somewhere.

The south was from the south of England.

I think somewhere around Kent.

And there was me, the Australian.

And seriously, I was doing the interpretation between the Northern person and the Southern

person because I had trouble understanding each other's dialect, I suppose.

That was listener Catherine from Australia, recounting her experience with the north-south

linguistic divide in England.

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