As Cambridge sometimes gets a mention here, I notice today a team of Cambridge researchers are claiming that "More and more people are using and pronouncing words in the way that people from London and the south-east do."Researchers concluded "regional differences" were disappearing, "some quite quickly", although people in the north-east of England seemed to be "more resistant to the patterns of overall levelling in dialect" and, although I would agree that there has been changed I also can't help feeling that only somewhere as self-cocooned as Cambridge could imply that in the streets and bars and shops of say Dudley, Hereford, Nantwich, Coalville, Doncaster, Worcester, Burnley you are likely to hear people talking in a 'southern' accent. It uses the genuine decline in some features of northern dialect, the strong 'r' in particular, which has been steadily declining in England since Elizabethan days, and extrapolates that into the conclusions above.