Are northern English accents dying out? Are they eck as like | Stuart Maconie

Academics predict that northern dialects will soon fade away. That's nobbut a load of soft southern blether

Ah, the stalwarts of summer! Cowes, Goodwood, the Proms and, these days, gloomy academic prognostications about the future of northern accents. Last summer, Manchester University claimed that the speech differences of the big northern cities were fading, merging into a generalised uber-northern that, implausibly, might include Alan Bennett, Ant and Dec and Atomic Kitten. This year, Cambridge and Portsmouth eggheads" (compulsory designation) tell us, yet more gloomily, that northern accents could start dying out within 45 years, drowned by the rising tide of estuary" English and the dominance of southern dialects which apparently are easier to pick up" for children.

Really? Easier to pick up where? Where are these weird kids? The mean streets of Cheltenham perhaps but not Chorlton. From my experience, Mancs are getting more Manc, Geordies more Geordie and Scousers more adenoidal with every passing football and festival season, brandishing their glottal stops and short a's as if they were cudgels. But there is more.