As I write, a team of researchers at Leeds University is working its way through £460,000 of our money, preparing a language and dialect atlas of Britain in the 21st century. Good. This is an excellent and important use of public money.

I can understand why the world started on the rocky path to civilisation with so many different languages. Thousands of years ago, before the internet came along, it was extremely unlikely that a tribe in New Guinea would come up with the same word for a carrot as a bunch of Basques living in the Pyrenees. I can also work out why languages die. There is simply no point speaking a tongue that’s shared by only four other people. It’s a waste of paint on the signposts.

That said, I do not understand why English, which has been around since the Saxons put down their axes, has so many regional variations. And, more important, why those regional variations are still with us today, now that we all watch the same television programmes whether we live in Durban, Detroit, Darwin or Dunstable.

My youngest daughter, who seems to spend half her day watching pink animated crap from America, is part of the generation that thinks you dial 911 if you want the police and that “colour” has no “u”. You’d expect her therefore to sound like Paris Hilton. And yet when she opens her mouth, it’s as though Joyce Grenfell isn’t dead after all.

Then there’s estuary English, concocted from a base of cockney and enlivened with constant use of the word “like”, which comes from Los Angeles, and the word “fink” instead of “think”, which is a West Indian add-on; many say its spread across Britain is thanks to the popularity of EastEnders. This, however, can’t be so because otherwise they’d speak it in Inverness too, and they don’t.

It’s not as if we cannot change the accents with which we were born. If you listen to the Queen on a recording made in 1956, it sounds as though she’s speaking while trying to keep a peeled grape between her buttocks, and that her vocal cords are actually made from glass. Whereas today she sounds like any normal public-school games mistress.

Margaret Thatcher did the same thing and, if I’m honest, so did I. When I was 11 I was offered a part in a radio play, provided I lost my Yorkshire accent. I did, and it remained lost until I returned to the north after five years away at school, when, without my thinking, it came back. Then, when I moved to London, it was replaced, quite by accident, with an accent so Sloanily preposterous that I’m surprised I was able to buy anything in a shop without the man on the till being filled with an uncontrollable urge to leap over the counter and kick my head in.

Today I think I speak what most people would call BBC, or received, English. But no. The other day, a linguistics expert, not knowing anything about my early life, listened to me for a while and said “Doncaster”. Not Barnsley, you’ll note, or Sheffield. He was very specific and absolutely right. Apparently, it’s the way I say “one”.

This science of speech was much used when the police had a tape from someone they believed was the Yorkshire Ripper. Anyone could tell the voice was Geordie. Experts, however, could nail it down to a specific village. And they still can. Despite Paris Hilton and EastEnders, Kettering, for instance, still has an accent quite unlike the one used in neighbouring Corby.

According to the scholars, you can zigzag across America for a year and encounter only four different accents (I find that a bit hard to believe, but whatever). In Britain you can drive for just one day and each time you stop for petrol, the cashier will sound different. It’s Punjabi in the morning, Hindi at lunchtime and Tamil in the evening.

I love this variety, although of course it can cause problems. I, for instance, would never employ anyone with a Brummie accent. I don’t wish to be rude to the people of Birmingham, but I’m sorry, it makes you sound thick. Likewise, whenever I meet someone with a Somerset burr, I always imagine that in the next five minutes I’m going to be tied to a candlelit table, with a goat, and raped.

I’m not unusual in this respect. If you walk into a Glossop pub with a Stalybridge accent, someone is going to drop you. And if a Liverpudlian ever tries to get a job reading the national news, someone on the antiracist, antiageist, pro-whale Guardian interview panel is going to say: “The door is the wooden thing in the wall behind you.”

If, however, you have a Yorkshire accent, advertisers will want to give you huge lumps of money for voicing a television commercial because, apparently, it makes you sound honest. This explains why Sean Bean is currently trying to sell me absolutely everything.

And no. You cannot try to adopt a Yorkshire accent because unless you are from Yorkshire you will shorten the word “the” to a “t”, like Robert Carlyle did in The Full Monty. That’s wrong. Dick Van Dyke wrong. Ray Winstone’s Cold Mountain Deep South . . . London wrong. Sean Connery in everything he’s ever done wrong. In Yorkshire the word “the” is replaced by the briefest pause and a small nod of the head.

This small thing is important because when the world finally realises French, German and, yes, even Mandarin Chinese have no place in a modern English-speaking world, we can continue to have our national, and indeed regional, differences highlighted every time we open our mouths to order a McDonald’s.

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