Ask someone in Britain to do a regional accent and they will almost certainly reach for one of the usual suspects: the Scouse lilt of Liverpool, the Geordie drawl of Newcastle, the Cockney twang of the East End, or the flat vowels of Yorkshire. At a stretch, they might attempt Birmingham. What they will almost never reach for is Nottingham, or Derby, or Leicester, the cities of the East Midlands, whose English dialect is simultaneously one of the most widely spoken varieties in the country and one of the least recognized, least performed, and least represented in the national media.
That invisibility is not accidental. It reflects a long pattern in British broadcasting in which certain accents were treated as neutral and others as marked, where the standard was not any particular way of speaking but a specific set of sounds that happened to originate in the southeast of England. For most of the twentieth century, an East Midlands accent on national television was as close to impossible as made no difference. Which is precisely what makes the handful of exceptions (a Nottingham children's writer, a Derbyshire politician, a Derbyshire actor, a Nottingham-born Marvel superhero) so worth examining.
What Is East Midlands English?
East Midlands English is the traditional dialect and accent associated with the counties of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Rutland, and Northamptonshire, the stretch of central England that sits east of the old Roman road known as Watling Street and south of the Yorkshire boundary. It is a variety that linguists describe as sitting in a kind of linguistic no-man's-land, neither fully northern nor fully southern in character, but sharing features with both.
The most discussed feature of East Midlands phonology is the "trap-bath split", the divide between northern English speakers who pronounce "bath" with a short vowel (as in "cat") and southern English speakers who use the long vowel sound of "father." East Midlands speakers generally use the short vowel, aligning them phonologically with the north on this particular question, though in other respects they pattern differently. Professor Natalie Braber of Nottingham Trent University, one of the leading researchers on East Midlands speech, has described the dialect as occupying a position where "some features are definitely northern" while "there are also things that sound quite southern." Some linguists have gone as far as suggesting that a tripartite North-Midlands-South distinction, rather than the traditional binary, would better capture the reality of English regional speech.
The historical roots of the dialect run deep. The East Midlands was part of the Danelaw in the late 9th century, the territory controlled by Norse settlers under Ivar the Boneless, and Scandinavian influence on local vocabulary and grammar has been traced across the centuries since. The dialect has also been shaped by the Industrial Revolution, which brought waves of Irish and Scottish workers into the textile mills and coal mines of the region, adding further layers to an already complex linguistic fabric.
Within the region, the accent is not monolithic. There are noticeable differences between the speech of Nottingham and Derby, between urban centers and mining villages, between older and younger speakers. The town of Bolsover, for instance, is locally pronounced in a way that would be spelled something like "Bozer", a contraction invisible to outsiders. Minor variations between Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire persist to this day. What unites them all, however, is a shared status: recognizable to people from the region, largely invisible to everyone else.
The Ignored Accent: British Broadcasting's Soft Exclusion
For most of the twentieth century, the BBC operated under the assumption that good broadcasting required a form of speech that was accent-neutral, by which it meant, in practice, the educated southern English that became known as Received Pronunciation, or RP. This was not an explicit policy so much as a set of institutional assumptions that filtered through hiring, training, and production decisions. The result was a media landscape in which certain regional accents were treated as comic relief, local color, or class markers, while others simply never appeared at all.
The East Midlands was in the second category. Unlike the stereotyped northern accents that appeared in British television as shorthand for working-class authenticity, or the Cockney that signaled urban grit, the East Midlands accent had no established role in the national imagination. It was not funny enough to be a joke, not exotic enough to be interesting, not prestigious enough to be authoritative. It was just absent.
This had a cumulative effect on the people who spoke it. When Sophia Di Martino, born and raised in the Nottingham suburb of Attenborough, first heard her own voice played back on television, she recalled the experience as actively uncomfortable. "I remember thinking I was awful," she told NME. "I had such a strong Nottingham accent. And I remember really hearing it on TV because I didn't sound like anyone else. It was not a very comfortable experience for me and I still find it hard to watch my stuff back."
That experience, hearing your own voice and finding that it sounds wrong because you have never heard it reflected back as legitimate, is a common one for speakers of underrepresented dialects. It is also, in its quiet way, a form of cultural marginalization: the message broadcast by the absence of your accent from the national media is that your way of speaking is not the way people speak on television.
Helen Cresswell: Nottinghamshire on the BBC
One of the earliest and most sustained exceptions to this pattern came not through any deliberate policy of regional representation but through the creative stubbornness of a single author rooted in the Nottinghamshire landscape.
Helen Cresswell was born in Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, in 1934, educated at Nottingham High School for Girls, and spent the latter part of her life at Old Church Farm in the village of Eakring, a small conservation village in the center of the county that became central to some of her most beloved work. She became one of the most prolific and celebrated children's writers of the postwar period, publishing more than 100 books and writing extensively for television.
Her most significant television creations, Lizzie Dripping and The Secret World of Polly Flint, were both rooted in the physical and cultural landscape of Nottinghamshire. Lizzie Dripping, which ran for two series on the BBC in 1973 and 1975, was filmed on location in Eakring itself. The show followed a young girl named Penelope (played by future Blue Peter presenter Tina Heath) who can see and communicate with a local witch that no one else can perceive. The name "Lizzie Dripping" came from Cresswell's own back garden: she overheard a neighbor scolding her daughter with the phrase, a local slang term for a dreamy, distracted girl prone to confusing fact and fiction. The character, and the show, were entirely of their place.
Critically, both Lizzie and Polly Flint spoke with East Midlands accents. On national BBC television in the early 1970s and mid-1980s, this was genuinely unusual. A children's drama set in Nottinghamshire, with characters who sounded like they were actually from Nottinghamshire, was not the norm. Cresswell never made an ideological argument about regional representation; she simply wrote what she knew, set in the landscape she inhabited, with characters who spoke the way her neighbors spoke. The result, almost inadvertently, was some of the most distinctive and authentic regional television of the era.
Lizzie Dripping was successful enough to outrate Blue Peter, the BBC's flagship children's program, a fact that reportedly gave Cresswell considerable pleasure. The series ran to six books and was later reprised for aJackanory anniversary special and a BBC audiobook. Polly Flint followed in 1987 as a six-part miniseries, adapted from Cresswell's 1982 novel, set against the backdrop of a Nottinghamshire legend about a village swallowed by the earth. Together, these two series represented something that British television of the period rarely offered: East Midlands voices, in East Midlands settings, treated as the natural center of the story rather than its comic periphery.
Dennis Skinner: Dialect as Political Identity
If Helen Cresswell brought the East Midlands accent to children's television through the back door of literary adaptation, Dennis Skinner brought it to the House of Commons as an explicit act of political self-definition.
Skinner was born in 1932 in Clay Cross, Derbyshire, the son of a coal miner who had been blacklisted after the 1926 General Strike. He went down the mines himself at 17, worked at Parkhouse Colliery and later Glapwell Colliery, became a leader of the National Union of Mineworkers in Derbyshire, studied political theory and economics at Sheffield University on a NUM-funded course, and was elected MP for Bolsover in 1970. He held the seat for 49 years, until losing it in the 2019 general election.
Throughout that career, Skinner spoke in an unmistakably broad Derbyshire dialect. He did not moderate it for the chamber. He did not soften it for television appearances. He explicitly stated that he would not alter his way of speaking for the sake of a political career, a refusal that was, in the context of British political culture, more radical than it might appear.
Tony Blair described him as "a genius of a particular type of left-wing rally speech", a description Skinner characterized as a backhanded compliment. His parliamentary style was adversarial, highly personal, and deliberately working-class in its idiom. His annual heckles during the Queen's Speech, delivered in his Derbyshire voice at the absurdity of British parliamentary ceremony, became a tradition in themselves, widely circulated and quoted.
The Derbyshire accent is closely related to Nottinghamshire speech but has its own distinct features, particularly in the mining communities of north Derbyshire where Skinner grew up. When another MP once attempted to mock Skinner's speech patterns by performing what he imagined was a northern dialect, Skinner was entirely unbothered. His accent was not a performance that could be imitated for comic effect. It was simply how he spoke, where he was from, and what he refused to leave behind.
In a political culture that has historically rewarded the suppression of regional accent and the adoption of standard southern speech as markers of seriousness and authority, Skinner's Derbyshire dialect was not incidental to his public identity; it was central to it.
Jack O'Connell: Derbyshire Goes to Hollywood
The actor Jack O'Connell was born in Derby in 1990 and came to national attention through a series of British television roles before his profile expanded internationally. His breakthrough was the television series Skins, followed by roles in This Is England '86 and '88, and then a series of prominent film roles including the lead in Angelina Jolie's Unbroken (2014), in which he played Louis Zamperini, and Starred Up (2013).
O'Connell's Derbyshire accent is, by all accounts, strongly maintained, distinct enough to register as specifically regional rather than a generic "northern" sound. In a British acting landscape where regional accents have historically been softened or dropped for mainstream roles, his continued association with his Derby origins represents the same kind of refusal that Dennis Skinner embodied in politics: a decision not to perform the neutral version of yourself that institutions seem to require.
Sophia Di Martino: Sylvie and the Nottingham Marvel
The most recent and, in terms of raw reach, the most globally visible example of East Midlands English in mainstream media came with the Disney+ series Loki, which premiered in 2021. Di Martino played Sylvie, a female variant of the Norse god Loki, a character who in previous MCU appearances had always been portrayed by Tom Hiddleston with a cultivated, ambiguously upper-class British accent. Sylvie sounded completely different. She sounded like Nottingham.
The decision was Di Martino's own. Speaking to Left Lion, she explained both the representational and the character rationale: "I didn't want to make Sylvie too posh. She hasn't had an easy life. She hasn't grown up as a princess, like Loki had grown up as a prince. She's had a very different experience. I wanted to keep her really grounded."
The accent was not a quirk or a mistake or a decision that passed without comment. It was noticed, discussed, and celebrated by Nottingham audiences in particular, for whom seeing their own way of speaking reflected on a global Marvel production was a genuinely novel experience. "I get so excited when I hear a Nottingham voice on TV," Di Martino told the same publication, "so to have this Midlands accent in something as huge as the Marvel Universe is so great."
There is a line from her early career that reads differently in retrospect. Her first professional television role was in Holby City, and hearing herself played back with her strong Nottingham accent made her deeply uncomfortable, the sound of a voice that didn't match anything she had been trained to expect from television. By the time she got to Loki, that discomfort had become a source of grounded authenticity. The accent that once sounded wrong to her own ears was now the thing she was most proud of keeping.
The Bigger Picture: Representation and the Invisible Dialect
What connects Helen Cresswell's Lizzie Dripping, Dennis Skinner's parliamentary speeches, Jack O'Connell's Derbyshire voice, and Sophia Di Martino's Sylvie is not just geography. It is a shared relationship to the question of what kind of speech counts as legitimate on a national or global stage.
The East Midlands accent has historically occupied the worst possible position for media representation: not exotic enough to be deliberately featured, not powerful enough to be aspirational, not comic enough to be a running joke. It simply did not exist in the national media imagination. The result was generations of people from Nottingham, Derby, Leicester, and the surrounding counties who heard their own voices reflected back to them only in local contexts, who learned, implicitly, that their way of speaking was private, regional, parochial, not quite the real thing.
Each of the figures discussed here pushed back against that invisibility in their own way. Cresswell did it by writing characters rooted in Nottinghamshire and insisting that they sound like they were from there. Skinner did it by walking into the most prestigious legislative chamber in the country and refusing to modulate a syllable. O'Connell did it by taking internationally visible roles without shedding the accent that marked where he was from. Di Martino did it by taking one of the most watched streaming series in the world and making its central new character sound like Attenborough.
The progress is real but uneven. East Midlands English remains under-researched by linguists and underrepresented in media. But the pattern of visibility, once started, tends to build on itself. Sophia Di Martino has noted that hearing a Nottingham voice on television excites her precisely because it is still unusual. The fact that Sylvie exists, that Skinner's decades of speeches are archived, that Lizzie Dripping is available to stream: these create a visible record where there was once almost nothing. Accents survive partly because they are spoken, and partly because they are heard. The more the East Midlands voice appears in places where it was not supposed to be, the less it will seem like an intrusion.
References
- Braber, N. (2019, October 31). Could you recognise an East Midlands accent? EngLangBlog. englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2019/10/could-you-recognise-east-midlands-accent.html
- Cresswell, H. (1973). Lizzie Dripping [Television series]. BBC.
- English Coach Online. (2023, May 1). Nottingham accent: An interview with Professor Natalie Braber. englishcoachonline.com/blog/nottingham-accent-natalie-braber-interview
- Left Lion. (2021, August). Loki star Sophia Di Martino on joining the Marvel Universe. leftlion.co.uk/features/2021/08/loki-star-sophia-di-martino-on-joining-the-marvel-universe
- NME. (2021, September 23). Sophia Di Martino interview: Loki, Marvel, and Sweetheart. nme.com/features/film-interviews/sophia-di-martino-interview-loki-marvel-sweetheart-3052400