An increasing number of British people don't pronounce the word 'three' properly - these maps explain why

Adrian LeemannThe linguistics research team at Cambridge, L-R: Heidy Suter, Sarah Grossenbacher, Melanie Calame, Marie-José Kolly, Dave Britain, Stephanie Wanitsch, Daniel Wanitsch, and Adrian Leemann.

The wide variety of accents and dialects that characterise the different regions of Britain are in decline, according to new research from Cambridge, which shows that we're all taking in a generic South East English accent rather than keeping our local tongues.

That is likely going to make it easier for us all to communicate in the future, but it comes at a cost: We're gradually losing the entertainingly difficult-to-understand brogues of unreconstructed Scouse, Geordie, or Glaswegian.

The most surprising sign of this shift is that large swathes of British people now pronounce the word "three" incorrectly. Or at least, differently - but certainly not the way it is written. Sixty years ago there was broad agreement on how that word was said properly. Now there isn't.(More on the "three" controversy later.)

Business Insider spoke to Tam Blaxter of Adrian Leeman's research team at the Cambridge Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, to find out what's going on. The Leeman team has constructed an amazing app, called English Dialects, which asks you to choose the "correct" pronunciation for dozens of common English words. The app collects the results to enhance its database of spoken English variations. Best of all, the app calculates where you grew up based on your answers - with a creepy level of accuracy. You can download the app from Apple or Google.

The team used the data - 30,000 responses - to create these maps which show where you live depending on how you think different words are said.