David Crystal-Accents

On a programme of Sunday Brunch, Davod Crystal and his son have a discussion with the presenters about accents.

He states how at the moment there is accent levelling across the country, the reason for accent levelling is because take London for example, people are moving in and out of London due to work and moving around, because of this, different accents get bought back into the city. This creates something like one big accent. As it is almost being shared around. This is the geographical movement for employment.

Crystal also states how, there is no such thing as one accent, e,t,c, "Bristolian". In Bristol, you have places like Hartcliffe, Whitchurch, Knowle and Clifton. In each of these different places, there are different influences to the "Bristolian" accent.

David Crystal has a web page called 

Yousaypotato.net

Here, you say potato into the website on a microphone, and it compares it to people all over the country. This is useful because you can compare different influences on words due to where you live.

We can also see that how strong your accent is fluctuates due to social situation. 

It often fluctuates between Reserved Proununciation and, for example,

Bristolian. The people you'd often see using Reserved Proununciation, are teachers/doctors/bankers and headteachers and you'd use it in job interviews.

But people that would use the Bristolian accent would be random, casual people on the street, or friends. And you would use this type of accent is used in casual/social situations. 

The ability to fluctuate between Reserved Proununciation and Bristolian is called "Bi-Dialectism