The southeast of England is a relatively young dialect area in classificatory terms. A large area of what is now part of the Southeast - especially the counties directly south of London: Surrey, Sussex, but even Kent - used to belong to the Southwest linguistically. Former general Southern features seem to have receded to the Southwest proper quite rapidly at least since the end of the nineteenth century. Today, the Southeast of England is clearly dominated - and influenced - by the metropolis London. Based on Trudgill’s modern dialect areas, the Southeast includes, for the purpose of this chapter, the metropolis itself and the Home Counties, i.e. those counties neighbouring on London: Middlesex, Essex (where it doesn’t belong to East Anglia), Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire (where they do not belong to the South Midlands), Berkshire, Hampshire (where they do not belong the Southwest), Surrey, Sussex and Kent.