West Country dialects are commonly represented as "Mummerset", a kind of catch-all southern rural accent invented for broadcasting.

Until the 19th century, the West Country and its dialects were largely protected from outside influences, due to its relative geographical isolation.

Thomas Spencer Baynes claimed in 1856 that, due to its position at the heart of the Kingdom of Wessex, the relics of Anglo-Saxon accent, idiom and vocabulary were best preserved in the Somerset dialect.

[9] The dialects have their origins in the expansion of Old English into the west of modern-day England, where the kingdom of Wessex (West-Saxons) had been founded in the 6th century.

The use of masculine and sometimes feminine, rather than neuter, pronouns with non-animate referents also parallels Low German, which unlike English retains grammatical genders.

However, recent research proposes that some syntactical features of English, including the unique forms of the verb to be, originate rather with the Brythonic languages.

In more recent times, West Country dialects have been treated with some derision, which has led many local speakers to abandon them or water them down.

[13] In particular it is British comedy which has brought them to the fore outside their native regions, and paradoxically groups such as The Wurzels, a comic North Somerset/Bristol band from whom the term Scrumpy and Western music originated, have both popularised and made fun of them simultaneously.

In an unusual regional breakout, the Wurzels' song "The Combine Harvester" reached the top of the UK charts in 1976, where it did nothing to dispel the "simple farmer" stereotype of Somerset and West Country folk.

In other areas, Celtic vocabulary is less common; some possible examples of Brythonic words surviving in the Devon dialect include: Some of these terms are obsolete, but some are in current use.

This can be seen in literature as early as the 18th century, for instance in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play The Rivals, set in the Somerset city of Bath.

Universal primary education was also an important factor as it made it possible for some to move out of their rural environments into situations where other modes of speech were current.

A West Country accent continues to be a reason for denigration and stereotype:[29] The people of the South West have long endured the cultural stereotype of 'ooh arr'ing carrot-crunching yokels, and Bristol in particular has fought hard to shake this image off In the early part of the twentieth century, the journalist and writer Albert John Coles used the pseudonym Jan Stewer (a character from the folk song Widecombe Fair) to pen a long-running series of humorous articles and correspondences in Devon dialect for the Western Morning News.

[30] The tales perpetuate – albeit sympathetically – the rustic uneducated stereotype as the protagonist experiences the modern world.

There is a popular prejudice that stereotypes speakers as unsophisticated and even backward, due possibly to the deliberate and lengthened nature of the accent.

Edward Teach (Blackbeard) was a native of Bristol,[34] and privateer and English hero Sir Francis Drake hailed from Tavistock in Devon.