Nethercote: Twenty years of Valgrind

The long a thing wasn't acquired during Frenchification -- it was part of the dialect common in particular parts of the south-east much much *later* than Frenchification (like, 600 years later). The dialect differences in the UK before the advent of mass travel -- and to a considerable degree afterwards -- are quite remarkable. I can easily tell whether people were brought up in Hertfordshire like me purely from their accent, and can even often tell when people were brought up in the same *city*. Go all the way across Hertfordshire from where I was born and the accent is quite different to my ear -- and Hertfordshire is a small and homogenous county. Somewhere big and chaotic like Yorkshire or God forbid London has dozens of sub-regional accents, easily distinguishable even by non-natives (though London, being a melting pot, has such a chaos of accents that you probably need to be a professional to figure out what the hell is going on: it's not simply based on geographic divisions like Yorkshire more or less is).

> And then we have the Queens English, or Received Pronounciation, or BBC English, or whatever the snobs like to call it which - despite being the newest dialect - is taken to be gospel.

RP is not by any means the newest dialect! It's old and has been wearing fuzzy slippers for quite some time now (and is little spoken any more: the accent spoken by, say, your average Cambridge grad is definitely not RP, and you basically never hear it even on the BBC any more unless you're listening to old recordings). Listen to what the kids are speaking in London now: forget the grammar and even vocabulary, even the phonetics are different. To me as a speaker of something quite like the Cambridge accent who grew up surrounded by the levelled accents of the 1980s south-east, it's amazing. Some people speaking Multicultural London English sound almost like they're singing to my ear :) my niece can code-switch in and out of that effortlessly: one dialect speaking to her friends, something quite different speaking to boring old adults like us.