ABSTRACT
Twenty years ago I arrived in the city of Lancaster in the north-west of England, having travelled up from London, where I was born and bred. Now, the speech of most of the north-west is fairly familiar to me, but at the time I was struck by what I heard. The word book sounded like not People would tell me that they wanted something fixing, rather than that they wanted something fixed. And where was I going, if I went up a ginnel? (A ginnel turned out to be a narrow passageway between buildings.) What I was experiencing was a different DIALECT, a different regional dialect. The term dialect refers to a variety of language characterised in terms of pronunciation, grammar and lexis; the term ACCENT refers to a variety of language characterised in terms of pronunciation only.
