Has the way we speak changed?

A few years ago I asked one of the girls at work how she was and she said "champion!" I was a bit taken aback by that response because I'd not heard anyone say they were "champion" for the best part of thirty years and she was no more than eighteen or nineteen years old. When I was that age and younger however, adults in West Cumbria would often answer "champion" to an enquiry about their health ( an enquiry that might have been "what fettle?") or about anything else to which a standard english response of "fine " or "perfectly allright" might be a suitable response.

Growing up in Cumbria in the 1960's, and particulary among the farming community, almost everyone I mixed with spoke with a definite regional accent and many, the family in particular, peppered their conversation with dialect words not heard elsewhere. No-one born here would use southern vowel sounds and any one who did was thought to be rather posh. "Champion" was one word that seems to have all but gone, "starvation", used to describe a very cold day is another (ie as in "let me get near the fire, its starvation out there"!) and "whisht!", an instruction to be quiet, was another which I heard rather a lot!

I remember the 1960's as a time when everybody spoke with a definite Cumbrian or at least northern accent but I wonder whether that's just a reflection of the people I mixed with or whether fewer people nowadays do have accents. I suspect its a bit of both - I certainly came across children at the Grammar School who had been brought up here but spoke with non local accents (because their parents were from elsewhere) but its only in recent years that I've come across entirely local youngsters - ie those with Cumbrian parents - with neutral accents and often southern vowel sounds.

Have other Today Generationers any thoughts on this with regard to their home regions? A few weeks ago my stepdaughter had a visit from eight or nine friends from University - they came from as far apart as London, the Midlands, the North West, the North East and Edinburgh but I couldn't tell their accents apart. If you'd asked me to place them I couldn't have done it - am I alone in thinking this a great shame?

Other changes in the way we speak are perhaps even easier to explain - words have come into existence during the last fifty years to describe things that simply didn't exist in the past (internet, fax, blog to name the most obvious) and other phrases and expressions are invented almost weekly. Who'd heard of anything not being "fit for purpose" until last year, or "sub prime lending" before last month! The meaning of long established words has also changed - something odd or unusual was still "queer" when we were young, "regular" was to do with timing and applied to buses and bowels and had nothing to do with the size of coffee cups or pizzas! "Gay" appeared in childrens books to describe something cheerful and happy and in Cumbrian dialect means "very". "Regular" of course is an americanism, as is the use of "Hi" as a greeting - not something I'd heard in Cumbria much before I was an adult.

Another change, not directly to do with speech, is the way we address strangers and the way children address adults. I notice that older people I speak to at work sometimes insist on addressing me as Mr Troughton long after I've introduced myself as Roger, asked them to call me Roger and then told them to stop calling me Mr Troughton. Younger people on the other hand, often who've never met or spoken to me before, will address me informally from the outset as if we were old friends (they are usually trying to sell me something!).