The peculiarities of the York accent are being put under the microscope by a team from the linguistics department of the University of York.

Dr Sali Tagliamonte, of the university's language and linguistic science department, is conducting an academic study into why English dialects differ and how and why they change over time.

She says the York accent is particularly interesting because it has not changed for centuries and is a conservative version of northern British English.

"York is a particularly good test case," said Dr Tagliamonte, who is Canadian by descent.

"It has remained linguistically insular for centuries and the industrial revolution had little impact. Over the last 200 years the primary influence has been from dialects in the north and north east. I'm very interested in how language has changed over the centuries and at a community level."

Dr Tagliamonte is examining phrases she considers to belong to people from York, like, 'It's a nice place, is York'. Inversion of the subject and verb in a sentence is a typically York feature, she claims.

She moved to the city five years ago from the University of Ottawa, Canada, and has published two research papers entitled, Was, Were Across The Generations: View From The City of York, and Come, Came Variations In English Dialect.

The main part of this research will be on relatively standard features such as the choice between "I won't go" and "I'll not go".

Her evidence was collected in 1996 from 92 people who were born and bred in the city.

She said: "I am a linguist and a social scientist and look at the interface between social structure and language.

"We tried to get people to tell us their life stories so that we could take socio-cultural and linguistic information through the expression of their experiences."

The impact of Rowntrees, the coming of the university and the old cattle market are all things which have been considered as part of the research.

"Understanding the patterns of language in one community can help the understanding of the larger and more complex process of language change in general," said Dr Tagliamonte.

"And since linguistic patterns reflect social trends in a community, we can also understand social processes better."

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