Question for people from the UK

@hunkalove There was once a shop in Kensington named “No Scone Unturned”. They were clearly rhyming it with “stone”. The scones themselves were delicious. I hated when they closed. 🙁

@SW-User Travelling from place to place, ordering scones everywhere -- all in the name of science!

"I'll have one of those, uh, what do you call them?"

@DrWatson I'd volunteer for that job. Now how do we pronounce fish and chips 🤔

@SW-User AWESOME MAP!

@ArishMell huge difference in dialect between the black country and Birmingham no one understands Nlack country the have their own words and are known locally as ( yam yams )

@daddybloke Yet as I say, only a few miles or so apart! Then go 20 miles up the road to Derby and the accent is already changing to a more rounded one from the sharper, slightly sing-song West Midlands voice.

I recall one evening in the pub the barmaid talking to a man standing next to me, who had a recognisably Northe-Eastern accent. She identified him as from Middlesborough, as she was, not Newcastle - I could not tell the difference but they knew it.

I wonder if other countries have such a wide range of accents over such short distances?

@ArishMell We always had pikelets, never crumpets. I only came across crumpets in latter years which are identical.
My parents and their parents were from Southern Birmingham but did not have what I would regard as a Brummagem accent which is more associated with the Black Country.

@bijouxbroussard fawn rhymes with spawn

John rhymes with Bonn.

@TheSirfurryanimalWales Fawn, spawn, John and Bonn all sound the same to me. Also Don and Dawn. Hock and hawk. My husband hears the differences. We grew up in different regions of the US.

@DrWatson i have heard fawn and john as the same in parts of the US

@ninalanyon Hmmm! I know America dominates computing, the Internet etc.; but I try to avoid affecting Americanisms - as I avoid affecting Latin or French phrases as was once the fashion in ages past among the arty types!

With one important difference: the names of things invented in those countries, such as respectively there the "transistor", the "aqueduct", the "metre".

Oh - and in British English, "~ising" :-)

@ArishMell I'm from the south west, the Oxford dictionary is my reference, it prefers -ize for words derived from Greek. Even Collins and Cambridge have started to accept those spellings.

See https://www.lexico.com/definition/summarize

As for program for computers, it has been program with one m for my whole life, it's not an Americanism. It would be an Americanism to use it instead of television programme though.

@ninalanyon I see: I take your point.

Dictionaries necessarily reflect contemporary use, rather than form it; though I think it a pity our own version of our own language is being taken over (like so many other things) by the USA.

Much more serious though is narrowing vocabulary, hence knowledge. About three years ago now, I think, the OED drew considerable justifiable criticism for its new children's edition rightly including many IT terms but wrongly expunging nature ones, like the ordinary names of common plants and animals.

@RuthW69 Well my mum was from Lancashire and she said scone - and made delicious ones!

@comfi1 Aye, and 'appen my Midlands parents always said "scone"!

Funny isn't it, regional accents being so different in a space less than 200 miles "high"! (Their Nottingham to Appleby-in-Westmoreland, perhaps.)

:-)

@SW-User thats how my scots say it