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From Factories to Accents: How Industrial Cities Forged England’s Working‑Class Dialects
Episode 223
Published 4 days, 22 hours ago
Description
This episode traces how the boom of late‑eighteenth‑century industrialization brought diverse speakers into Britain’s new cities, forcing their speech to merge and evolve into distinct urban dialects such as Cockney, Scouse and Mancunian. We explore the sociolinguistic forces—migration, class pressure, media influence—and the work of scholars like Peter Trudgill that revealed these varieties are systematic languages in their own right.
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