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This chapter is an attempt to bring out general tendencies in the regional dialect levelling which, it is often claimed, is leading to the loss of localised features in urban and rural varieties of English in Britain, to be replaced with features found over a wider region. In particular, I consider two possible mechanisms behind these changes. The first is geographical diffusion, by which features spread out from a populous and economically and culturally dominant centre (Trudgill 1982b: 52–87; Britain 2002). The spread is wave-like, but modified by the likelihood that nearby towns and cities will adopt the feature before the more rural parts in between. At the individual level in such a diffusion model, speakers are in face-to-face contact with others who have already adopted the new feature, and (for various reasons) they are motivated to adopt it themselves.

The second mechanism is levelling, which implies “the reduction or …