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Jonnie Robinson, Curator, English accents and dialects, British Library Sound Archive, writes:
Most linguistic research seems to suggest that individuals and communities adopt new forms of speech - particularly in terms of pronunciation - in imitation of people they meet in face to face situations. Increased geographic and social mobility, as acknowledged here, alongside wider access to education has undoubtedly brought large numbers of speakers from different backgrounds together more than in the past and this may have led to dialect levelling - a process where differences between dialects are arguably less pronounced than previously. As these teenagers acknowledge, many people from outside Truro have arrived in the area in recent times and this has had an impact on speech, creating instantly noticeable differences between generations within the same family.
Nonetheless, there's sufficient evidence to suggest that accents are simply changing, rather than disappearing and will indeed continue to change - perhaps more rapidly and more drastically in some parts of the country than others. What's indisputably the case is that there's still an enormous amount of diversity and these speakers use features that, although not recognisably Cornish, are nonetheless revealing about other aspects of their identity.
The vowel sounds, for instance, used by these speakers in most, goes, no, go, so and slowly is typical of younger female speakers in the south of England generally and their frequent T-glottaling is a widespread phenomenon among younger speakers throughout the UK. Listen particularly to their pronunciation of the phrases without a doubt, not as broad, I haven't got a very strong accent, give it a couple more generations, a lot of different people from a lot of different areas and it's not all Cornish. This is a feature that's age-specific, rather than characteristic of a particular accent and it can be heard among younger speakers the length and breadth of the country. Intriguingly it seems to arouse widespread disapproval in some circles, and yet it's something that's a distinctively British innovation - it's not, for instance, a feature of any US accent and thus one of many examples that British English and American English, in terms of pronunciation at least, are diverging rather than converging.
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