Stephen McKenna Born: 1 February 1943 Lives: Omagh, County Tyrone Time lived in area: All my life Occupation: Retired schoolmaster

Jonnie Robinson, Curator, English accents and dialects, British Library Sound Archive, writes

It's interesting to hear Stephen talk about the echoes of Elizabethan English that he hears in older speakers locally and the comparisons he draws with the English used by William Shakespeare. The same has been said of English dialects in the Appalachian Mountains in the USA. Stephen observes, for instance, that some rhymes Shakespeare uses no longer work in many modern English accents - wind and blind, for instance and flower and door but are retained locally.

The words wind and blind would indeed have rhymed in Elizabethan times, although it's difficult to say whether they would both have been pronounced by Shakespeare using the vowel sound in the modern pronunciation of find or, perhaps more likely, the vowel sound used in the modern pronunciation of pinned. In fact the word blind was pronounced with this short vowel in a number of English dialects until relatively recently - a reflection of the Germanic origins of words in this group. German speakers still use this pronunciation on words such as blind (= blind), finden (= to find), Kind (= child) and Wind (= wind) for instance.

Stephen also points out that the words flower and door would at one time have rhymed and pronounces them to illustrate this. Indeed many speakers in the far north-east of England and in large areas of Scotland still use a vowel sound in words such as mouse and cow that renders them homophonous with cow and coo respectively. Thus flower sounds as if it were in fact spelt flewer. This again reflects a much older pronunciation that was common both to Middle English and Middle High German and is another illustration of the Germanic origins of modern English. The word floor, on the other hand, is pronounced exactly that way in a number of contemporary Yorkshire accents, and the word door shares that same vowel sound.

The eminent Shakespearean scholar, John Barton, has suggested that Shakespeare's accent would have sounded to modern ears like a cross between a contemporary Irish, Yorkshire and West Country accent - and cites the present-day speech of the Appalachian Mountains as the most suitable model for actors attempting to imitate a period performance. Traditional dialects are above all characterised by their retention of conservative forms of speech - old-fashioned vocabulary, non-standard grammatical constructions and archaic pronunciations - long after the prestige language has changed. This is, of course, true of the dialects Barton refers to and explains why, for instance multiple negation - constructions such as I ain't done nothing - are perfectly acceptable in Shakespearean English and modern dialects, but not in contemporary Standard English.

Above all, Shakespeare would certainly have been a rhotic speaker - that is he would have pronounced the sound after a vowel in words such as farm, word and north. This was at one time a feature of speech throughout the UK but is nowadays increasingly restricted to the West Country, a small area of Lancashire and most of Scotland and Ireland. It's also, of course, a feature of most English accents in the USA and thus confirms Barton's observations. This explains why, for instance, American productions of Shakespeare retain the potential for word-play based on words such as caught versus court or fort versus fought that are lost in most English productions.