How many different types of English accents are there in Great Britain?
If you go to http://www.fonetiks.org/ , you’ll find samples of nine different English accents, including four from Great Britain–and Cockney, a well-recognized variant, is not even included. The “Received Pronunciation” of Great Britain is that spoken “in everyday speech in the families of Southern English people who have been educated in the public schools [‘public schools,’ as used in the English, not American, sense].” But, as the lexicographer Daniel Jones said, “There exist countless other ways of pronouncing English, some of them being used by large communities.” Whenever groups of people are more or less isolated from from other speakers of a language for long periods of time and interact intensively with one another in ways that they do not interact with people outside those specific groups, they develop distinctive speech patterns. So that’s why the pronunciations sound different; they ARE different. In the play Pygmalion
