I've just heard about a forthcoming series on BBC Radio 4 called Word4Word, which "sets out to capture the way the local ways we speak are changing" how's that for a clumsy start?
Here's some further description about it:
There's evidence that in our now intricately connected world, where mobiles and internet and textspeak allow all sorts of hookups that weren't even dreamed of fifteen years ago, we're changing the word-choices we make.
Word 4 Word is part of a major pan-BBC project called 'Voices' that is developing an online dialect map of Britain, in conjunction with Leeds University's Survey of Regional English. BBC Local Radio are taking part later in the year, and dozens of fieldworkers are even now gathering recordings of local language in use, from Brixton to Belfast, from Aberdeen to Aberystwyth. These recordings - of people using dialect, slang, trade terms with their mates - will provide for Word 4 Word the audio soundscapes of the way we're changing the speech we use from day to day.
If you don't think change is happening, go out and cop an earful of Northumbrian teenagers, say. They've probably lost the old 'Pitmatic' talk of the coalfields but have adopted a slangy voguish speech that's everything to do with being cool in the city; they'll perhaps be exhibiting some aspects of Hindi or Bengali too if they've got connections with the sub-continent - yet all expressed in the broadest Geordie.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/word4word 20050119.shtml

Matti

Heh. And 40 years ago here in the Southern North American colonies, it would have been "the times, they are a-changing." (Occasionally delivered with a nasal impersonation of Bob Dylan.)