Why do we have regional accents?

“How do accents start and where did they come from?” asks Sachin Bahal from Toronto in Canada.

Hannah is schooled in speaking Geordie by top accent coach Marina Tyndall. And Adam talks to author and acoustics expert Trevor Cox about how accents evolved and why they persist.

We meet Debie who has Foreign Accent Syndrome – an extremely rare condition in which your accent can change overnight. After a severe bout of flu, which got progressively worse, Debie’s Brummie accent suddenly transformed into something distinctively more European.

Listen to the podcast at: BBC Radio 4 – The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry, Series 12, The Stressful Scone