I'm from West Yorkshire, the dialect is slowly fading. My grandfather would speak with a strong accent and with spatterings of Norse words. I notice now that, yes, dialects in the UK are becoming homogenised but there is also some American influence seeping in. The American way of pronouncing a double t as a d "better" => "bedder" is increasingly more prevalent in the UK, it's slightly saddening.
When I was staying with a friend in Norway once we visited his mother, and to me she sounded like someone with a broad Durham/Newcastle accent (my mother is from there) speaking German. A lot of north east words are germanic, or Scandinavian. My grandfather was a farmer near Durham and pigs were swine, children were bairns.
As for American influence, my youngest daughter picked up a lot of that from Youtube at one point, and I once interviewed a girl from Gravesend with such a strong US accent I assumed she'd grown up over there.
Exact same thing is happening in Australia. I'm guessing it's from watching streaming video, Netflix, TikTok, etc. where American accents predominate, and any non-American accents are flattened enough to be sure it's easy for Americans to understand them.
It's weird that the mainstream TV execs think audiences want boring American accents. To me, one of the best things about the White Lotus (hit HBO show) is that it highlights a distinct array of accents (including Australian).
Thanks! Now I'm inclined to watch it. I do love when shows make a point of keeping distinct accents.
What with having moved a lot as a bairn, I feel that accents in many places are fading away. And also, I tend to sound like whoever I've been talking most to for the last two hours. It's a bit weird, that…makes people ask why I'm speaking with x accent. (^_^);
I emigrated from the UK to USA in 1980 and my first code review at Bell Labs I spent about 30 mins explaining my code and then asked if there were any final questions and someone hesitantly asked, "What is this variable 'zed' you keep talking about?"
I used to work for a networking start-up and when we were in the US trying - without success - to sell the company we practised over and over saying "roWter" for "router" (English pronunciation like "rooter").
As a Canadian I read that as "rOATer" for a moment, because the word row rhyming with ow is quite uncommon here -- the row I know is in a boating or a data context.
Having posted the above a few days ago, last night I (originally from the UK) was in the car with my wife (US born and bred) following and reciting map directions on my phone like "0.8 miles left on San Antonio" which I say as UK standard "nought point eight miles left on San Antonio." After a while she asks "what is nought?" Here we just say "point 8 miles" or "zero point eight miles." We've only been married 42 years and are still learning each other's language:-)
Some time ago a few people from the UK kept calling/referring to someone as a nonce. It took me awhile to say something, but I finally asked because I simply couldn't understand or wrap my head around why they kept referring to this person as a single use random number (mostly for authentication in my case). It was so confusing.
There was a cartoon in Private Eye a couple of weeks ago that suggested the reason why Millenials and Gen Z could never be reconciled is that they can't agree whether it's pronounced "Generation Zed", or "Generation Zee", as the younger generation themselves would call it.
There really isn't one 'west yorkshire' accent, nor one 'north yorkshire' accent, there is much much more variety than that. A leeds resident sounds different from a wakefield or dewsbury resident, and even then there can be variation where some people exhibit less of their locale accent than others, depending on how much they rebelled against sounding 'local' in their teens.
I may be completely wrong, but I think one direction of evolution in pronunciation is the gradual shift to that which takes less physical effort to pronounce.
"Bedder" is less physical work, less effort, in the mouth than "better".
This is a bit of a myth. A glottal stop is a full consonant sound which takes effort to produce. It's not really any 'easier' to produce than an alveolar stop in any objective sense.
