It’s a long time since I heard tap-water called ‘corporation pop’.

When I was growing up in Accrington in the 1960’s, that’s what kids were given to take on a picnic, along with jam buttys, all in a bag, and called ‘bait.’

Regional variations of idiom and usage account for the richness of English in its spoken and written forms, and it is these variations that Simon Elmes has mapped in his book, Talking for Britain – A Journey Through the Voices of a Nation, now out in paperback.

Using the resources of the BBC to their best advantage, Elmes sent out over fifty field-workers operating from their local radio stations around the country, to interview and record the speech of men and women of all ages and occupations, The result is a set of stepping-stones through the river of language, carrying us from Cornwall to the Hebrides.

The differences are striking, and all the more surprising in the context of twenty-four hour telly and the spread of Estuary English. Get away from the London area, and language is continuing in all its variety. Yes, there are changes, but that is healthy. The common myth that language has flattened out and shrunk to a ghastly media version of itself, is not born out by Elmes’s findings; that communities of all kinds in all places go on identifying themselves through their language – and indeed take pleasure in it as a little bit of a secret code.

Elmes makes the point that closed communities, like fishermen, miners, or weavers, have always developed their own vocabulary suited to their own situation. Similarly, any community cut off from the larger swath of life will enjoy an insider’s speech, often unintelligible to anyone else. As the world opens up – which has happened most dramatically in the last fifty years, and as traditional industries die off, some of this particular language is lost, but other parts of it will reach a wider culture and stay there.

But if specifically regional words like ‘knackered’ and ‘scatty’ and ‘chuffed’ feed into the mainstream, the tributaries of English are still being replenished, often by foreigners coming to live and work here, making their own kind of argot out of a medley of languages. ‘Bling’, is Jamaican, supposedly from ‘Bling Bling’ being the sound of the light flashing off shiny cheap jewellery.

Elmes found too, that while younger people often speak a very different regional variation to their grandparents, they still pride themselves on their localness. They may watch Eastenders and Coronation Street, with their ‘Bacardi Breezer’ for geezer, and ‘chuck’ and ‘pet’. but they still prefer their own brand of speech. There may be many more borrowings and travellings of language, but human beings still seem to want the differences that words allow.

The idea of a private language is fascinating; at its most intimate it is lovers’ talk – the words of endearment and teasing that only we share when we are together. Gangs and societies always mark themselves linguistically, while passwords and code-words signify who can be trusted and who can’t. Nancy Mitford’s famous U and non-U approached language as a series of rooms that only certain people could enter. Standard English, which came complete with RP voices and evening dress for announcers – even on the radio, attempted to make an English for everyone, while provocatively cutting out about 90% of the country, in terms of class and dialect.

Now perhaps, English for everyone is found in the mix and the variety – not in standardisation.  Our literary festivals bear that out. Cheltenham this year offers a world-language – not because it will all be the same, like some mad Esperanto, but because there will be so much difference.

Language, it seems, is too robust for prescription, which may be where the French got it wrong, and the mongrel rough and tumble English got it right. The French speak more precisely than we do, but have about half the number of words available to them. English continues to increase its available vocabulary, and to fight off the threats both from media-speak, and what Alan Garner calls White Man’s Business English.

So when I get frustrated at Thames Valley Teenage English, which uses ‘like’ every other word, without ever arriving at a simile, (it was, like, y’know, like amazing, like nothing else, like I said, like, oh god, like that, yeah?) I take heart from Simon Elmes’ Voices, and remember that English now, as for Tristram Shandy, is a hobby-horse ridden at full pelt over changing ground.