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Duration features have been thought to be the most obvious correlates of speech rhythm. Previous studies have shown that they can be used to distinguish among some world's languages. This paper investigates to what extent the methods employed in these studies can be applied to the dialects of British English. We have tested whether a set of variables derived from automatically extracted duration measurements constitute reliable predictors that could be used for automatic dialect identification. Preliminary results show that the automatic procedure, combined with the high interspeaker variability, yield overlapping rather than crisp dialectal categories.