That is dialect. However, if you're discussing the footie game in RP with your peers, you're likely to be using a different register when you commiserate with a stranger about the death of a loved one, even in RP.
Even in RP, there's casual and formal differentiations; those are registers. (My first linguistics classes were in the UK; in Derby).
Agreed.
In Irish (Gaelic) there's a thing called lenition (this is a kind of mutation), where the spelling of a word can change based on syntax; t lenites to th, but the h is just a signal that "this word is in the genitive," for instance, and it isn't pronounced (some mutations are pronounced).
That's really interesting.
I've only ever known one person who speaks Irish as a first language*, and he insisted it's called Irish and not Gaelic. I can't remember what reason he gave (if any). I don't know whether that was just his opinion or it's a more widespread opinion.
*though thinking about it, other Irish friends may have done and never told me. This guy was very into languages and taught English and Irish.
On the th as f thing; this is called
th-fronting, and it's a known phenomena in terms of looking at linguistic drift.
That article is fascinating. Thanks for posting it.
I'm really surprised at how far it's spread... Hull, wow! It's definitely not a Yorkshire thing (with their thee thy and tha... albeit that these are not in most Yorkshire accents).
The gender split thing surprised me at first, then it didn't. I think it comes from a combination of inverse snobbery, homophobia and anti-intellectualism. Some working class people associate the RP accent in men with being gay. Only men. (Stereotypes of gay women are completely different.) My first response to your register example above of people talking about the footie in RP was a mental image of them doing this on the stands at a Millwall game and worrying that they're going to get beaten up.
In state schools, there's a problem with "anti-boff" culture and high levels of underachievement in working class boys (which isn't the case for working class girls). This comes from a toxic definition of masculinity and a culture among teenage boys where working hard and doing well at school is likely to get you bullied. This doesn't affect girls anything like as much.
When it comes to th-fronting and the spread of Estuary English generally, this would affect middle class boys from families where maybe RP is spoken at home but the parents can't afford to send them to private school so they go to state school instead, where they're faced with this combination of anti-boff culture, homophobia and reverse classism, so there's a massive amount of peer pressure to lose the RP accent ASAP for boys, but not for girls.
Teachers are doing a lot to try to change this (and all homophobia and all kinds of bullying) and it's a big issue in UK schools. The Times Education Supplement probably has a ton of articles about anti-boff culture.
Also, I don't think that this is the only factor in the spread of Estuary. I think there's also the fact that people from different social classes mix much more than in the past and in many ways barriers between social classes are eroding, which is a good thing.
In the late 1400s Dartmouth was so well-known/notorious in terms of piracy that Chaucer makes snarky comments about it in his bit about the Shipman in the Prologue to Canterbury Tales:
And then this bit follows, about "walking the plank"
That is also fascinating.
Yesterday I watched a video on you tube which suggested that the Devon accent is associated with farming while the Cornwall accent is associated with seafaring and pirates. That's not anything I've come across, (and I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a Devon and Cornwall accent anyway, because I'm from too far away) but it's obviously an association that some people recognise. Cornwall has a lot of coast, being right on the end of the South-West Peninsula, so it's not that surprising really.
