If people recognised real truths of experience instead of being led away by print they would admit that the northern speech is, in southern ears, almost a foreign tongue. A man brought up in the south and finding himself among the populace in a Lancashire town will at first not understand half of what he hears. It is true that the roots are so similar and the words in common so often repeated that the new dialect is mastered much more quickly than would be a foreign tongue. Nevertheless, if the speech of Lancashire belonged to a separate realm, and if the Kentish man, let us say, came into Lancashire as a foreign country, he would think of the Lancashire dialect as a foreign language. Had the two forms of speech developed in different Royal Courts and adopted each its own experiment in spelling (let alone each its alphabet) the one would be more foreign to the other than is Low German to Dutch.
The first of all words, the personal pronoun, is an example. The Kentish man says "I"; he translates the classic word "ego" by a sound which is a rapid diphthong of the pure A, "Ah," and the pure I, "EE." The Lancashire man expresses exactly the same idea by the open A, "AH"; a completely different sound. When he talks in his own name the personal pronoun rhymes with "BAH." When the Kentish man says exactly the same thing the personal pronoun rhymes with "PIE." And you could not get two vowel sounds more distinct. You may take any number of instances. The "o" of "OLD" in the south is "ow" in the north. Then there is the closed "e" of the south and the open "e" of the north--"Yes" and "Yaahs," and, on the contrary, the closed "a" of the north and the open "a" of the south--"păth" and "pahth."
There is another point about accent which is its curious variability within a short space of time. It varies so rapidly that within one human life a vulgarism or a jest becomes meaningless. What has happened to the "v" replacing the "w" in the Cockney speech, for instance? When the _Pickwick Papers_ came out it was universal; Dickens was as close an observer of the physical realities of his time as Mr. Bernard Shaw is to-day. Compare Dickens's Cockney with Mr. Bernard Shaw's admirable and exact transliteration of that noble tongue in its present phase. They are almost two different things! Some have explained this by saying that there has been a change in race, that London has been invaded from the north and from the Midlands; that it was the old Kentish accent which London spoke with in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, and that a Mercian accent has displaced it. The late Professor Yorke Powell maintained this. It may be so; more probably the change is a change _in situ_. Mr. Weller's great grandson (who, I am sorry to say, is now driving a motor-bus instead of a stage coach) talks the modern tongue, and it is utterly different from his forbear's speech.