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Jonnie Robinson, Curator, English accents and dialects, British Library Sound Archive, writes:
Perhaps the most salient feature of pronunciation in Great Britain is the distinction between speakers in the north who generally pronounce the vowel in words such as bath, last and dance with a short vowel – rather like the vowel in the word cat - and those in the south, who use a long vowel for these words - rather like the sound you are asked to produce when a doctor examines your throat. Thus you can immediately deduce something about a person who pronounces baths to rhyme with maths or pass to rhyme with mass.
There are, however, two words that many northerners pronounce with a 'southern' long vowel: master and plaster. It's possible that the former has undergone change as a result of its association with school, education and notions of 'prestige' pronunciation, although the latter is harder to explain. This situation does, however, lead to pronunciations of compound words or phrases that sound somewhat anomalous, such as the word plaster-cast here, with a 'southern' vowel sound initially and a 'northern' vowel sound in the final syllable. Other good examples would be the product name Elastoplast (with the vowel sounds reversed) or Stevie Wonders' 1980s hit master-blaster and the term master-craftsman. Whatever the origins of this phenomenon, it's a fascinating deviation from northern norms for many speakers in the north-east, Cumbria, Lancashire and Yorkshire, but intriguingly not in the Midlands where the 'northern' short vowel is used for all words in this set.
Probably the most distinctive pronunciation feature of speakers across the whole of the north-east of England is the tendency to use glottalised consonants for the sounds . This is an extremely subtle phonetic process and most noticeable when the consonant appears between vowels in the middle of a word. Listen carefully to the way these speakers pronounce the target consonants in the following words: simple; circle; gauntlet; broken; chicken and opposite. There are also a number of characteristic vowel sounds we associate with the north-east. Listen to the vowel sounds used by this group in words in the following two sets: they, game, same and way and goes, no, broken and nowhere. Also typical of many speakers on Tyneside is the striking use of a weak vowel in the final syllable, here, of, kicking and running as well as in chicken.
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