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would be made by an author depicting two students with strong
Mississippi accents getting the best of the townsfolk in Cambridge,

Massachusetts.
Dialects in Britain have been among the most studied linguistic

phenomena since the nineteenth century. George Bernard Shaw was
only somewhat exaggerating when he wrote, in Pygmalion, that

Henry Higgins could, through a short sample of speech alone,

“place a man within six miles. I can place him within two miles in
London. Sometimes within two streets.” Or perhaps Shaw was just a

little ahead of his time. In the late 1970s, Peter Sutcliffe, the

“Yorkshire Ripper,” murdered thirteen women (and attempted to
murder seven others). During this time a number of tapes were sent

to the British police from “Wearside Jack” claiming to be
responsible for the crimes. Because in part Sutcliffe’s accent did not

match that of the man on the tapes, he was released after being
picked up for questioning and went on to murder three additional

women before being caught and sent to prison for life in 1981.

Stanley Ellis, a British dialectologist at the University of Leeds,
later analyzed the tapes of “Wearside Jack” and was able to trace the

accent of the hoaxer to the specific village of Castletown in
Sunderland. Police arrested the person who made the tapes for

“perverting the course of justice” and sending police on a wild-
goose chase that perhaps allowed Sutcliffe to kill several additional

victims.

We can start with large groupings and slowly make finer
distinctions. The first would be between England and everywhere

else. You would think that the English of England, being the

original source of all the other variants of English, would be the
most traditional, but this is almost exactly the opposite of the truth.

English, particularly London English, has evolved more rapidly in
pronunciation than has American English. Let us take the word

“stone” as an example. In Anglo-Saxon this was pronounced
“stahn.” The vowel changed somewhat around 1100 to be

pronounced more like “stawn” before the Great Vowel Shift, after

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