1227: Why England has so many Dialects Apr 19, 2018

Compared to the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa, the UK has many more dialects. The reason for this is because English has been spoken there for longer, but that has to be interpreted in two different ways. The first is the more obvious: there was more time for the dialects to diverge as any tend to do naturally, and have more or less influences from other languages like Danish, Norman French, and a few Celtic languages. However, the second, and less obvious reason, is that what we think of as English now comes from a variety of different dialect groups, and while they merged to a great extent, it was not complete. Why so many dialects in England often goes all the way back to Old English, and the Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish, and West Saxon dialect groups that developed into regional dialects of modern UK English. Many of the syntactic features that differentiate the various Northern, Midlands, and Southern dialects today date all the way back to Old English or Middle English.
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