Jonnie Robinson, Curator, English accents and dialects, British Library Sound Archive, writes:
The dialect of the far north-east of England is arguably the most distinctive of all British English dialects. It has a rich dialect vocabulary, including phrases such as our lass here, meaning my wife, and has a number of instantly recognisable accent features. It's interesting that the speakers here make a distinction between the way that particular phrase is pronounced north of the river (i.e. in Newcastle upon Tyne) and locally. There are a number of other features of speech here that are typical of broad dialect in the north-east: listen, for instance, to the way the phrase over forty is pronounced - the sound in the word over is omitted and so it sounds similar to the pronunciation of the word our in a number of other English accents. This in fact reflects an older English pronunciation preserved in the poetic usage o'er. In other parts of the north, such as Yorkshire and parts of Lancashire, the word over can also be pronounced with a short initial vowel sound, so that it rhymes with hover. The pronunciation of the first vowel sound in the word water is a much-stereotyped marker of speakers in the whole of the north of England and was indeed at one time common in a number of words beginning orthographically with the letters , such as wasp, want, walk, warm and so on. It's possible that the change in pronunciation has occurred because the initial sound requires a speaker to use rounded lips and thus the following vowel has mutated so that it too can be pronounced with lip-rounding. Although such archaic pronunciations are still relatively widespread in the north and provide an insight into the development of the English language, they are perhaps nowadays increasingly associated with older speakers. | 
