Saying hi courtesy of Aidan Jones (Flickr)

We all know that learning another language is hard work. Even after over twelve years getting to grips with German, I still hear myself make the odd mistake – infuriatingly often in the very simple territory that I was supposed to have conquered many years back. Nevertheless, after having lived here for a while, simple things like greetings and pleasantries usually just roll off the tongue without requiring too much effort – “Guten Tag” and “Wie geht es Ihnen?” and so forth.

Every time I hear “Moin moin” in the streets of Hamburg, I start to reflect about regional dialects. Okay, not every time: but often. You see, as a child growing up in London, I quickly learnt that accents from other parts of the United Kingdom were to be understood either as signs of below-average intelligence or as a misguided attempt at comedy. After all, nobody really wanted to speak like that, did they?

There were, for example, arguments when the first regional accents appeared on the BBC Radio News in the 1990s. Until that time, the media had allowed non-standard English no more than a few soap operas where all the characters were supposed to be uneducated and/or of morally reprehensible conduct anyway.