The Southeast

The Home Counties Modern Dialect area

The Southeast of England is here loosely equated with the Home Counties, these being the counties adjacent to London: Kent, Surrey, East and West Sussex, Essex, Hertfordshire, Hampshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, and Bedfordshire. In the past, however, the accents of the Home Counties used to belong to very different dialect areas. Trudgill (1999: 44–47) labels these traditional dialect areas the Southeast (Berkshire, north-eastern Hampshire, Sussex, Kent, Surrey), the Central East (parts of Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, non-metropolitan Hertfordshire and Essex) and the Eastern Counties (Norfolk, Suffolk, north-eastern Essex) plus London, which was considered a “separate branch of the Eastern dialects” (Trudgill 1999: 46). Note that the Eastern Counties are also referred to as East Anglia.

The accents of these areas have been undergoing extensive dialect levelling in recent decades. As a result, a considerable part of these different dialect areas are now joined together to form one large modern dialect area, called by Trudgill the “Home Counties Modern Dialect area”.

[...] the non-traditional dialect area of London has now expanded enormously to swallow up the old Southeast area, part of East Anglia, most of the eastern Southwest, and most of the Central East, of which now only the South Midlands remain. The new London-based area we call the Home Counties Modern Dialect area. (Trudgill 1999: 80)

The exact degree of linguistic uniformity within this area is still unclear. Research on urban accents in the Southeast indeed points to an increase in homogeneity, in particular with regard to middle-class accents. However, local and regional accent differences also persist.