Meaning of "my love"

It is almost certainly a fairly ordinary West Country term of endearment in the UK, although I cannot give a definitive citation. See:

Love, My Love, Luvver

I added an explanation of these terms being used towards strangers, to prevent any grockles getting confused over their summer hols :) I'm not really sure on the origin of the differences between them though, so if anyone could shed any light on that would be useful. I'm originally from West Dorset and everyone there says "my love" and sometimes just "love", I also lived in Exeter for a few years where "luvver" or "my luvver" seems to be the norm. Is "luvver" just a different pronunciation of "lover" that has been picked up by common parlance? What about sometimes having "my" between them?

Wikipedia: Talk:West Country English

There are variations on this all over the country. In the East Midlands (where I was raised), it was quite common for adults who had never been introduced to casually call each other "Me duck". This practise still continues among people of a certain age, but it is slowly dying out.

East Midlands dialects in literature

The romantic novelist and East Midlander D. H. Lawrence was from the Nottinghamshire town of Eastwood and wrote in the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Coalfield dialects in several poems as well as in his more famous works such as Lady Chatterley's Lover and Sons and Lovers.

Though spoken less commonly today, the dialect of the East Midlands has been investigated in texts such as the Ey Up Mi Duck[4] series of books (and an LP) by Richard Scollins and John Titford. These books were originally intended as a study of Derbyshire Dialect, particularly the distinctive speech of Ilkeston and the Erewash valley, but later editions acknowledge similarities in vocabulary and grammar which unite the East Midlands dialects and broadened their appeal to the region as a whole.

"Ey up" (often spelt ayup / eyup) is a greeting thought to be of Old Norse origin (se upp) used widely throughout the North Midlands, North Staffordshire and Yorkshire, and "m' Duck" is thought to be derived from a respectful Anglo Saxon form of address, "Duka" (literally "Duke"), and is unrelated to waterfowl. Non-natives of the East Midlands and North Staffordshire are often surprised to hear men greet each other as 'M' Duck.'

Wikipedia: East Midlands English