Bob Farrow Born: 14 December 1940 Lives: Hartlepool, Cleveland Time lived in area: All my life

Jonnie Robinson, Curator, English accents and dialects, British Library Sound Archive, writes

Contrary to popular opinion very few individual dialect features, such as the use of a particular word or a localised pronunciation pattern, are peculiar to a single location. Rather it's the unique combination of a variety of aspects of speech that makes the dialect of a town or area different from elsewhere. Many people find it difficult, for instance, to differentiate between a speaker from Tyneside and a speaker from Teesside as the two accents have a number of common features and yet each is in fact distinctive in its own right. The subtle differences might not be immediately apparent to outsiders, but they are extremely important to locals as they help define who they are in relation to others.

Probably the most distinctive pronunciation feature that unites speakers across the north-east is the tendency for speakers to use a glottalised <t> sound. This is an extremely subtle phonetic process and most noticeable when the consonant appears between vowels in the middle of a word or at a word boundary between two vowels. Listen to the way Bob pronounces the <t> sound in the following words and phrases: eighty-five; nineteen-forty; eighty-four; nineteen-sixty; aunty; courting; wanted; nineteen-sixty; forty-four and whether anybody can dig me out or not. Listen also to the vowel sound Bob uses on the words over, road, know and don't. This and the weak vowel used here on the final syllable of the words courting, wanted, decided, buy it and I love itare instantly recognisable features of north-east speech.

On the other hand, there are elements of a Teesside accent that have more in common with speech in Yorkshire than on Tyneside. Listen, for instance, to the vowel sound Scott uses in words in the following words: eighty-five, nineteen-forty, died, I, buy, decided and nineteen-sixty and on the final syllable of the word grandma. Finally, there are aspects of a Teesside accent that might be more readily associated with speech on Liverpool. Listen, for instance, to the vowel sound Bob uses in the words: first and firmly. It's thought that the occasional similarities between a Merseyside and Teesside accent result from the two areas common history of immigration from Ireland. It's perhaps not widely known, but Teesside has the second highest Irish population in England after Liverpool and this has clearly had an impact on speech there. It's this combination of features that makes the speech of Hartlepool distinctive and demonstrates perfectly that there are no absolute accent boundaries, rather sounds change gradually as one moves from place to place.

Bob uses a couple of non-standard grammatical constructions that are characteristic of a number of dialects. Firstly he uses the verb to beunmarked for person in the statement I think my roots is firmly in now, where Standard English requires the form are. He also uses a noun unmarked for plurality in the phrase forty-four year next month. This lack of plural marker is quite widespread among speakers across the whole of the UK on a number of common count-nouns, such as pound, mile, month and so on.