This session and web-page is the first look at communities that are maintaining older forms of English. The mainstream is two large communities – the USA and the UK – having English as maternal language. Then there are several other maternal language communities and many which use English as second or alternative language. Amazingly, the UK and USA still retain nearly identical phonology despite a war of independence, and only minor misunderstandings.
Let them die. A number of accents have disappeared even during our lifetimes, usually because they were used in occupations that have declined. Yan-tan-tether counting of sheep was reported in the Lakes, Ayr, Dorset and Derbyshire between the wars, 1300 years after Welsh disappeared. Wool, once a principal source of wealth, is now nearly worthless. Quarrying areas such as Cornwall had their own dialects. Clee Hill quarry once employed 2,000 men, who might not make themselves understood in Ludlow five miles away. It may be extinct now, apart from in a few very old people. Horse-drawn ploughing ceased about five generations ago in England, and with it the dozens of words for the evener – ebber, gantrils, thrib-tree, totrils, wang, and swingle-tree variants like swivel, swibbletree, wibbletree, and whippletree. They are recorded in the Survey of English Dialects (Orton and Dieth, 1960), but “earthlings” are extinct as linguistic communities. Chinn and Thorne (2001) listed about 2,800 words in their book “Proper Brummie“, but I was dismayed to find I had never heard two thirds of them. It turns out that many are from Warwickshire agriculture. We can dignify our forebears without needing to preserve industries that are now no more.
Here we are interested in accents – vocabulary and vowel variations – that continue to be used daily in some region or workplace in England. Those considered here are : lore and language of children; Forest of Dean; Potteries. Black Country and Lakeland will be discussed later. Something will also be said about elision, in accents such as those of Shropshire.
Children’s lore and language
Children’s words can preserve old forms. The Opies recorded some as “the lore and language of school children”. In San Francisco a skipping rhyme recalls the aviator Lincoln Beachey , an amazing pilot who pioneered recovery from a spiral nose dive. He met his end in 1915 when the wings fell off his plane. He is largely forgotten now, except when children sing this jump-rope rhyme :
Lincoln Beachey thought it was a dream
To go up to Heaven in a flying machine.
The machine broke down and down he fell.
Instead of going to Heaven he went to…
History is preserved in the speech of modern school playgrounds. “Oranges and lemons say the bells of St Clements is thought to date from 1665, though the “chop off your head” line was inserted long after Henry VIII, and refers to beheadings at Newgate jail. “Ring a ring of roses” is another English skipping song, carrying mythology about the black death. “London bridge is falling down” records diversion of repair funds to the queen’s purse.
Forest of Dean
West Saxon, the high Winchester-based dialect disappeared after the Norman conquest, but some rural West Country accents retain rhoticity and the beon form, and impose initial voicing. In Old English three fricatives had voiced allophones, which in mainstream Modern English became phonemes. They are /s/ – /z/, /f/ – /v/, / θ/ – /ð/. Modern Forest of Dean speech is noticeable for curious voicing: “vorest”, “zandztoon” and Forest consonants often lead to Malapropisms, according to Morgan:
“Im ‘ad ‘iz appendages removed – jus’ a’ter the General Erection it wer.”
“I be gwain to git Garge a pup ver ‘iz birthdoy, one o thoy zpotty damnations.”
Coal could be collected on the surface centuries ago, and later adits were driven into hillsides. Collecting lumps of coal to heat a home was already established in the middle ages, long before it had any industrial value. In fact peasants were sometimes fined for gathering coal and disrupting the landlord’s crops. The copper miners on the Great Orme 3,000 years ago were five year olds! Making vertical tunnels requires more organisation, with props and lights. Energy-intensive processes such as glass-blowing and smelting was initially met by charcoal. Steel required greater heat, which was met by driving off off volatiles to leave coke. Coal miners were one of the first conservative industrial communities. Some miners’ words spread across the country: gob (‘mouth’; from worked gap in coal-face; it had to be sealed- ‘shut the gob’. butty (‘workmate’). A Forest of Dean greeting was; “Ow bist thee awld butty? Ow’s yer acker cuttin’?”. Later it meant unpowered canal barge
Potteries Dialect
Ceramic production in North Staffordshire developed from a backyard industry to the big kilns of the five towns. Despite decline in UK ceramics, the accent is still quite strong in playgrounds: costna kick a bo agen a wo an ed eet wiv yed and bost eet (‘can you kick a ball against the wall, and head it with your head and burst it’). Bosted is ‘ugly’, though means broken in neighbouring dialects and bostin’ means ‘excellent’ in Black Country.
Other playground words are shotties ‘marbles’, crogging to cheat at shotties, peedy ‘small marble’, rocks ‘sweets’, bucker a dare, usually jumping canals; buckered -to have failed a dare; thadge ‘a lot’, smidge a little bit
Thou persists. English used to have “thou” and “ye” pronouns as well as the general purpose “you”. This persisted longest in religious communities, but is still audible in Potteries speech: dust ‘do you want?’;
ow at ner ‘how you doing?’; dust ayer? ‘Dost thou hear?’; I cost, cost thay? ‘I can, can thee?’; dunna they be facey ‘don’t be cheeky’. ow at – ‘how are you’; wot you on – ‘what are you doing’; arm as dry as a larm burner’s clog ‘thirsty’. The persistence of both thou and -na makes this Potteries phrase sound like Scots:
dunna fash thesen if thee conna.
Heavy Onset syllables
Sentence-level phonology is a distinctive of Potteries speech and are a good opportunity to study syllabification rules in English The book title below may be transcribed phonetically as: “tɔː kreɪt i stæf fiː tʃɜː” Povey is insisting that heavy onset is essential for Potteries speech, even if it means breaking up words in an unusual way. This is why his title is difficult to read for non-dialect speakers.
Syllables are built around a vowel, called the nucleus. A variable number of consonants come before it, called the onset. Finally comes the coda, which tends to trail off and is often used for rhymes. The graphic above shows these three parts. The “maximal onset principle (Selkirk, 1982) says that any consonants in between vowels should be assigned to the following syllable.
Black Country has a stress pattern that prefers to finish on a rising VC. “School” becomes “skoo-ul” at the end of a sentence. Some accents of Eastern Australia also do this.
Elision in dialects
Some accents are hard for outsiders because in rapid low speech many sounds may be dropped. Shropshire accents are a good example. The village signposted as Ratlinghope is pronounced like “ratchup” locally. Georgina Jackson in 1879 recorded some distinctive vocabulary, fairly standard syntax, but a high level of elision. Jackson recorded “scratch” collapsed into “scrat”, and “must not” collapses to “munna”. “Death” is pronounced “jeth”, or jed in Black Country. The voiced stop /d/ becomes a voiced affricate. Jackson records a butcher showing agricultural implements, and a near-drowning:
“Yo seemen to know summat about ‘em Ma’am. I could sho yo a ‘noud-fashioned tool sich as I dar say yo never si’d afore”
“I eard a scrike ma’am an’ I run an’ theer I sid Frank ad pecked i’ the bruck an douked under an’ wuz drowndin’ an’ I jumped after ‘im an’ got out on ‘im an’ lugged ‘im on to the bonk all sludge an’ I got ‘im wham afore our Sam comen in.”
h-dropping is usual in most low speech (though not in Geordie). In Black Country it is almost absent, unless the speaker has no choice, e.g. “ship ahoy”. This is a great contrast with Anglo-Saxon, We now find it hard to say an /h/ before another consonant, so Old English “hwat” and “hwere” are difficult, and the three /h/ sounds of PIE are really difficult. wom is easier to say than “‘home”
/t/ to /r/ is very strong in Scouse. Cilla Black made famous lorra lorra laughs . The Norse influence on Merseyside speech persists in lobscouse (‘stew’) sndf scallying (dubious, possibly illegal activity by young people.
Linguists speak of pidgins, creoles and koinés, accents as vowel differences, and dialects as involving syntax variation. In practice elisions are what make local accents difficult for outsiders. French changed during the revolution to lower-class Parisian speech, with many endings elided, so we now find the previous version strange. Modern Danish elides many sounds, so is much harder than Swedish for a foreigner.
Koinés are less marked, as the languages in contact are already mutually intelligible. Australian was a koiné between Cockney and Irish English. The Fenland koiné was the fairly recent (18th and 19th centuries) amalgamation of different regional dialects in the Fenland area (Norfolk, Lincolnshire, and Huntingdonshire, Orton & Tilling 1969). The Wash forms the northern boundary, with Peterborough, Downham and Soham marking other limits. The general English north south splits /u – ʌ / (‘cup’, ‘butter’) and the /a – a:/ (‘castle’, ‘last’) occur in the Fens across a north-east to south-west line, where communication was weak. Deletion of /h/ occurs in the west only. /au/: is [e:] to the west, [eu] to the east. Past tense ‘ed’ forms and ‘-ing’ forms are realised with [ɪ] to the west, but [ǝ] to the east.