Researchers to unlock distinctive West Midlands accent

The region's linguistic heritage is set to be explored in a new research project comparing the way today's West Midlands residents speak to text from an ancient medieval manuscript originating from the area. The research by the University of Birmingham is looking at how far people in the region share the language of their predecessors captured in the Vernon Manuscript, the biggest surviving late-medieval English manuscript. Written in the West Midlands dialect around 1400AD, the lavishly illustrated Vernon Manuscript contains more than 350 texts spread over 700 pages and weighs a whopping 22kg, the equivalent of a checked-in suitcase. Comprising of a collection of poetry and prose, the manuscript was created by two regional scribes aiming to make religious texts accessible to local non-Latin speakers, telling the stories in a way that will challenge modern readers' expectations of such texts. The researchers are hosting a number of sessions across the West Midlands inviting residents to view images of pages from the manuscript and read some of the texts, putting today's accents to the test and unlocking the origins of the distinctive West Midlands dialect.