I'm drafting a teaching guide to dialect varieties of the British Isles (a subject taught for examination here).

I will put this on my Web site when it's finished - but that may take some time. I would like to post a few extracts here, and evaluate people's responses.

Here's a bit from the start:

What is dialect?

It may be useful to begin by deciding what a dialect is. Dialect describes a language variety where a user’s regional or social background appears in his or her use of vocabulary and grammar. This description is a very open one, and there is continuing debate about its application to particular varieties. Before considering these, it may help to explain the related feature of accent. (Some linguists include accent, along with lexis and grammar, as a feature of dialect.)

Accent denotes the features of pronunciation (the speech sounds) that show regional or social identity (and arguably that of an individual, since one could have a personal and idiosyncratic accent).

Problems with this description

This description of dialect lacks precision and coherence. We can see these as problems, but reflecting on the reasons for them brings more understanding of what dialect means, and of why an exact definition is an impossibility. That is, any dialect is a generalization from the individual language use of a wider population. It comes from observation and perhaps some objective study. But we will not, if we stand outside St. Mary-le-Bow church in London, hear everyone around us speaking a uniform variety of English that matches a description of “Cockney”. We will, however, if we speak to a hundred people who have lived there for more than ten years, observe some common features of lexis, grammar and phonology that we would not find commonly used if we repeated the observation in Aberdeen, Hull or Plymouth.

There is a more fundamental objection to the conventional description of dialect – and this is that all language is dialect, including Standard English. This was originally a regional dialect, but has become a prestige variety, favoured by the courts, government, the civil service, the officer class of the armed services and the elite universities. Moreover there is a prescriptive tradition in education and broadcasting that has formalised the status and prestige of both written and spoken standard English.

Barrie Rhodes, of the Yorkshire Dialect Spciety, states this more bluntly:

Increasingly, we have come to criticise the whole concept of dialect (and associated adjectives such as “traditional” and “regional”); we now subscribe more to the notion of “idiolect” in recognition of the fact that there are as many “dialects” as people. For instance, one of my friends in Norway uses the “musical hall northern” expression "Ee, by gum!" and so, increasingly, does her daughter. My friend says she picked up this expression from one of her mother's in-laws in Lancashire.
Now, given that this expression is habitually used by two people in Lillestrom, does it now make it part of that locality's “dialect”? This sort of example makes a nonsense of trying to draw boundaries (and, even worse, draw isoglosses) around “dialect regions”. We have to accept that the term “dialect” is nothing more than a convenient label, a shared shorthand for a very complex concept.


Size

Does a region or other social organization need to be of a given size in order to have a dialect – and if so, what is this? People from the south of England may speak of “Yorkshire dialect” (as Frances Hodgson-Burnett does in The Secret Garden). And there is a Yorkshire Dialect Society. But we might qualify this description by saying that really Yorkshire has a number of more local dialects, perhaps in one of the historic Ridings or centred around one of the big cities.

Scots is a regional variety of English, spoken throughout Scotland, alongside Standard English. Some speakers may freely mix elements of Standard English (SE) and Scots, for example features of grammar that the speaker does not know are from one or the other. (These might include, say, the Scots use of past participle after needs or wants, where SE has present participle: Scots has “this wants done” where SE has “this wants doing”). But if Scots is the form of English widely spoken in Scotland is it then, perhaps, a language in its own right? So when does a dialect become a language? When a shepherd in Yorkshire's north-western Dales says, "If tha seeas a yow rigwelted, tha mun upskittle it", is he speaking in a dialect or a separate (Anglo-Norse?) language?

Politics and language variety

Deciding when a variety of a language may be considered a language in its own right is sometimes a matter of linguistic fact, but may also reflect political wishes. Welsh is clearly a distinct language (it is not intelligible, to speakers of any other language). In the same way Icelandic is not intelligible to speakers of related North Germanic languages, such as Swedish.

Scots also does not have a standard system of spelling – there is no official body to endorse this. (Neither does English, of course). And until recently, it did not have its own national assembly, while official publications for Scotland came from the Scottish Office, a branch of Whitehall government.

Norwegian (which perhaps has fewer speakers than Scots – some 5 million worldwide) is the official language of Norway (it has two varieties, Bokmål and Nynorsk). The Norwegian state, like France, determines acceptable forms through a learned body, the Språkråd. Scots today is arguably in the same position as Norwegian in 1814, when the country gained semi-independence, and its own parliament. But Swedish, Danish and Norwegian (both varieties) are mutually intelligible. The differences among them are perhaps no more profound than those between Standard English and Scots (of any Scottish region).

Welsh is not a Germanic language, and is not the language most widely spoken in the whole of Wales (English is). But it is now established as one of two official languages in Wales. Official publications use both Welsh and English (Welsh appears first), while there are requirements for broadcasters to produce programming in Welsh. Perhaps the growing activity of government in Edinburgh will lead to the emergence of Scots as a separate language (in an official sense). But this has not happened yet.

Dialect is all around you

Of course, if we accept that all vernacular language varieties are in some sense dialects, then this is a truism or statement of the obvious. But it may help us stop thinking that dialect is something that other people do in big cities or remote dales, and that we are not dialect users, too. Some supposed dialects – especially urban ones – have attracted the attention of broadcasters or writers, in ways that have made them familiar to a wider public. That is we can put a name to their speakers, Cockneys and Scousers and Geordies. The effect of this can be unhelpful.

· First, we do not really know about the authentic language of people in London and Liverpool or on Tyneside – so much as a simplified or popular representation, based on TV drama.
· Second, rural varieties of English seem not to receive as much notice.
· And third, we can forget that everyone lives in a region, that may have its own distinctive dialect forms – to a linguist, Staffordshire or Hertfordshire or Westmorland are no less worthy of study than London, Liverpool or Newcastle.

If you are a teacher or a student, then you can find resources for studying dialect very easily. There are very extensive materials that you can find on the World Wide Web, for dialects that are not local to you. But you can find much more by staying at home – by reading, or listening to, the language of the people who live and work there, perhaps older people or those in historic and traditional occupations. (Or those who have time to talk about occupations that are no longer practised.)

You can very easily gather, share and publish data, using digital recording devices (such as mp3 players/voice recorders) or computers with multimedia functions, and suitable recording software such as Audacity (records mp3 files) or Helix Producer Basic (records Real Audio files).

What is a dialect?

See David Crystal's Encyclopedic Dictionary of Language and Languages (Blackwell):

"Accent: In phonetics, those feature of pronunciation which signal a person's regional or social identity. The term is often contrasted with dialect, which includes features of grammar or vocabulary.

Dialect: A language variety in which the use of grammar and vocabulary indentifies the regional or social background of the user."

The point at which a dialect becomes a separate language is debatable. I speak fluent German but I can only understand around one word in ten when listening to
Swiss German, which is regarded by some people as a dialect of German but by others (and rightly so) as a separate language known as Schwyzerdütsch. Similarly, Scots can be regarded as a distinct language from English - and I recall an occasion where an interpreter was provided in an English court of law for a young lad from Strathclyde accused of a crime committed in London.

See:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/european_la...finitions.shtml
"The oft-cited distinction between a language and a dialect is that 'a language is a dialect with an army and a navy': there are no hard and fast rules, and distinctions often tell us as much about politics as they do about linguistics."

See the European Minority Languages website, which includes both Schwyzerdütsch and Scots:
http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/saoghal/mion-chanain/en

Scots (Lallands) and Ulster Scots (Ullans) have been recognised as languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages:
http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/EN/Treaties/Html/148.htm

My wife is from Ulster. I had a few problems understanding my mother-in-law when we first met. I was fooled by the following expression that she used in a early conversation that we had: "thon wee fellow fernenst me" = "the chap that live opposite me". I love Ulster expressions such as "He got a quare gunk" and "Give my head peace", the latter being the title of a BBC Ulster sitcom: http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/gmhp/
See http://www.ullans.com

Further to the what I have already posted concerning English dialects, I found Melvyn Bragg's TV series "The Adventure of English" particularly useful - and the book is pretty good too.

Having been reminded of the much-quoted definition about a language being a dialect with an army and a navy, I decided to check it's origin. Most authorities seem to agree that it emanates from Max Weinreich:

"A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot " (Yiddish original)
This is found in Weinreich's "Yivo and the problems of our time", Yivo Bleter, 1945, Vol. 25, No. 1, p. 13.

Adding a humorous note to the discussion concerning dialect, here are some fun websites:

Dialectizer: http://www.rinkworks.com/dialect/
Some years ago I recall being given a copy of a DOS program that converted any text into Jive. This a website that converts other websites into Cockney, Jive, Redneck, Elmer Fudd, etc.
Alternatively, just feed in a text of your choice. Here's my original text, followed by the translation into Cockney:
1. "I was walking down the road the other day when I felt thirsty, so I went into a pub and ordered a pint of beer."
2. "I were walkin' dahn the road the bloody uvver day wen I felt firsty, so I went into a rub-a-dub and ordered a pint of beer."
Hmm, a couple of rhyming slang opportunities missed, I think: (i) "road" = "frog" ("frog and toad"), (ii) "beer" = "pig's" ("pig's ear").

The Jive version is better: "Ah wuz walkin' waaay down d' road t'oda' day when ah felt dusty, so's ah went into some pub an' o'dered some pint uh beer. Ah be baaad..."

The BBC TV series and book The Story of English featured Jive - as did the comedy film Airplane (the scene in which an old lady converses with two big guys fluently in Jive). Melvyn Bragg's series The Adventure of English featured Gullah, another Afro-American variety of English.

For the Ali G translator see See http://mackers.com/alig
The opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice reads:
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
which translates into Ali G slang as:
"It is a truf universally acknowledged, dat a single geeza in possession of a wicked fortune must be in dig of a bitch."

For an academic b*llsh*t generator see:
BULL at http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/nnh/critic.htm
BULL stands for Basic Unitary Literary Language. It’s a computer program by John Holland that generates impressive-sounding sentences such as:
"In a situated discourse, the metonymy of inclusion devolves into the hegemony of pre-existing structure."
I love this kind of stuff . I wrote a poetry generator along these lines (in collaboration with my old friend David Steel) back in the 1970s, but it’s a long time since I saw anything as good as this. If you think the above sample is BULL then the real thing is even better:
"If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime superstate need to be decoded as the ‘now-all-but-unreadable DNA’ of a fast deindustrializing Detroit, just as his Robocop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration through violence upon the racially heteroglossic wilds and others of the inner city."
The above text is authentic and written by one of the winners of the Annual Bad Writing Contest: see Volume 11, 82 of the Humanist Discussion Group at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/

I also like the Postmodernism Generator: I am grateful to Tim Johns for drawing my attention to this clever CGI program at
http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern
Written by Andrew C. Bulhak, it generates completely meaningless but impressive-sounding essays, e.g. Baudrillardist hyperreality and subpatriarchialist theory, by V. Andreas Buxton, Department of Gender Politics, University of California, which begins as follows:
"Sexual identity is part of the paradigm of narrativity," says Foucault; however, according to Finnis [1] , it is not so much sexual identity that is part of the paradigm of narrativity, but rather the fatal flaw, and subsequent futility, of sexual identity. It could be said that Sartre suggests the use of presemiotic textual theory to attack sexism. Foucault uses the term 'Baudrillardist hyperreality' to denote the difference between art and class."
Great stuff!

Study this link and you might end up talking "funny" (my pupils comment) just like me

Here's a link which can quickly become addictive:

http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/

If you click on the English link, you'll come across 20 or so native speakers from all around the world … but the non-native speakers are also fantastic.

Re the Speech Accent Archive at: http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/

A great site, David! I have spent at least an hour today, browsing the archive and listening in particular to the regional varieties of English. I am not a linguistics specialist - I began my career as a teacher of German -but I have always been fascinated by accents and dialects and can mimic a few. I have put in a link (and mentioned David as the source) on my "Favourite Websites" page (language-related sites) at:
http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/websites.htm

Just a couple of comments about the text that the speakers are asked to read:
“Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.”

The term "snow peas" is unknown in British English. We call them "mange-tout peas", don't we? I was intrigued by our Canadian cousins ordering "snow peas" in a restaurant in British Columbia one evening - so I joined them. The penny dropped when the meal arrived. Most British English speakers would expand "go meet her Wednesday" to "go and meet her on Wednesday". I noticed that a couple of the British speakers at the site inserted an "on" before "Wednesday". But I realise that a standard text is useful in order to make comparisons, even though it is unnatural. The word "store" is North American, but it is creeping in over here and probably would not be regarded as unnatural. Our local supermarket is called "Country Store".

My personal choice of interesting and distinct British and Irish accents would be:
 London (Cockney). The London accent is spreading into the surrounding Home Counties, giving rise to a variety known as "Estuary English": http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/
 Bristol
 Birmingham - usually instantly recognisable. The sample speakers from Birmingham at the above site have a fairly soft Black Country accent .
 Liverpool - very distinct and completely different from the surrounding rural areas.
 Glasgow - can be completely unintelligible!
 Yorkshire & Lancashire
 West Country (Somerset / Devon / Cornwall)
 Geordie (Northumbrian) with the distinct Danish "r".
 Cumbrian
 Welsh - the accent, not the language. My father was Welsh (lovely lilting accent).
 Scottish Highlands
 Ulster - Belfast being a particularly harsh form of the accent/dialect: See the BBC website, which has samples from the BBC Ulster TV series, "Give My Head Peace": http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/gmhp/. My wife Sally is from Belfast.
 Dublin - very distinct from other varieties of Irish English and close to Liverpool English
 County Cork, Ireland - a lovely sing-song lilt. My sister-in-law Helen is from Cork.
 West Coast of Ireland (County Limerick, County Clare)
 Donegal

I hail from Maidstone in Kent, which falls within the area of Estuary English, and I only have a slight regional accent. I live in Maidenhead, Berkshire, where there used to be a fairly distinct accent with a post-vocalic "r", which you can still hear amongst the older generation, but Berkshire is now mainly Estuary (which lacks the post-vocalic "r"). The post-vocalic "r" begins to creep in towards West Berkshire and can be heard clearly when you reach Wiltshire.

Glad you liked the site. I was tipped off about it by Keith Bryant who works at the National Centre for Flexible Learning in Sweden.

Here's another site you might like:

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/poll98.htm

It's the results of Professor John Wells' work on current pronunciation practices in British English. I first read about this in the IATEFL News (the article can be downloaded from the link I've just put in). One of the results which surprised me was that certain 'Northern' sounds are being taken up in the south of England. Professor Wells highlights the way that the word 'chance' is being pronounced more and more with the vowel sound in the word 'pat', rather than the one in the word 'part'.

As a teacher of EFL, I am made constantly aware of the fact that English changes all the time, and that the changes are brought about by the people who speak the language, rather than by any prescriptive body. This doesn't mean that you can be sloppy, but that, in my opinion, you need to accept change and to be a bit careful about universal prescriptions about how the language works.

The 'Mission Statement' on the GMU site (the one I posted earlier) makes interesting reading for me, at least …

David Writes:



Thanks - very useful!

I met John Wells at a gathering of Esperantists some years ago. No, I'm not an Esperantist; I was just interested to find out what it was all about.

Regarding the above website, I've noticed numerous shifts in pronunication and usage in my lifetime. My grandfather, a Man of Kent, pronounced a post-vocalic "r" but my generation had already lost it. I see more and more North American forms of pronunciation, as well as individual words and phrases, creeping into British English, but there is also a slight shift the other way too, which I've noticed when visiting our Canadian cousins: for example, "fridge" has replaced "ice-box" and "lift" co-exists with "elevator". My British English has sometimes confused our cousins, e.g. when I said "I'll knock you up early tomorrow morning" and "That's a load of b*ll*cks!", but I automatically slip into North American usage when talking about cars in Canada and habitually say "gas", "trunk", "hood", "fender" in order to be better understood.

What about the rising intonation that characterises young (especially female) speakers of Australian English? That's creeping in over here too - attributed by some people to the popularity of Australian soap operas such as "Neighbours". An Australian colleague of my generation claims that the rising intonation is relatively new in Australia too. Rising intonation is well established in some regional accents of the British Isles, however, e.g. Bristol and East Anglian - and, of course, Welsh and Irish English.

Some very helpful comments here - thanks. I will assimilate some of these into the emerging guide. Here's the next section...

Lexis

The lexis of dialects is perhaps their most conspicuous feature for listeners and readers. (If we see unfamiliar grammatical forms, we may be able to infer meaning readily; but if we see a novel lexeme we can at best guess its meaning from the context.) This will include both forms that are peculiar to the dialect and forms that are found elsewhere, but have a distinctive meaning in the dialect. So beer-off for an off licence is a distinctive form (found in East Yorkshire), while happen is a verb in Standard English, but in some Yorkshire dialects is used as an adverb, in the sense of maybe or perhaps, corresponding to Shakespeare’s haply. (For example, “Happen it may rain tomorrow”.) There is no initial /h/ sound, so in dialect the written form may be given as appen. The common written representation ‘appen implies mistakenly that the speaker has dropped a sound that was never there in the first place.

While in Standard English indicates simultaneous time. But in East and West Yorkshire dialect it has the sense expressed by until in Standard English. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Home Truths (Saturday 24th January 2004) the wife of a member of the Spurn lifeboat crew said of her husband and his colleagues: “A lot of men go out in the morning. They don’t get back while seven o’clock at night…”

Grammar

Distinctive grammar in dialects may be harder to detect or explain than distinctive lexis.

· One example is the way that dialect speakers on Tyneside use modal verbs.
· Another would be the use of past participle in Scots after wants or needs – where a Standard English speaker says, “That wants doing” or “This needs fixing”, the Scot says, “That wants done” and “This needs fixed”. (Barrie Rhodes notes that in Yorkshire, generally, we use want as the auxiliary in such constructions, where want and need are more or less interchangeable in other regions.)

The social functions of dialects

Are there language interactions where dialect forms work differently from Standard English? In the past some speakers might have known only to use a dialect, but today many are aware of both dialect and Standard equivalents – so may use one or the other more or less in different social contexts. This may for purposes of greater or less formality or intimacy; and it may be conscious or involuntary (as when a speaker assimilates his or her style to that of another).
It is worth considering how far dialect is determined by geography and historical accident, and how far it may be related to sociolinguistics. (For example, it may be that geography and historical isolation explains the origin of a dialect, but that social attitudes explain its survival.)

The primary social function of any dialect (or of all language) is communication, but there are also claims to status and identity that are bound up with the choices of variant forms. However, the emergence of a prestige variety of Standard English is largely a series of accidents. Had Alfred (king of the West Saxons) not defeated the Viking Guthrum at the Battle of Edington, then York might have been established as the capital of England, and the Standard English of today might have been an Anglo-Norse variety. Of course, that did not happen.

Dialects and Standard English

Without the notion of Standard English, we may find it hard to identify anything as a dialect at all – since the distinctiveness of a dialect consists in those things that are different from the Standard. (This does not mean that a dialect emerged from people who took Standard English and then changed it; it is more likely that the standard variety and the dialect variety developed from some common and some locally distinctive influences over time, or that the dialect forms are older, and have been more resistant to tendencies to converge towards a standard variety.)

There is a problem in identifying any dialect as the standard, since this implies that other dialects are inferior or wrong. In the case of spoken English, we have good evidence that such prejudice exists – so there is an exaggerated danger that, in referring to a standard, we will strengthen what is already a tyranny. It may help to note that Standard English, too, is a dialect – albeit one that is no longer found in any one region of Britain. Barrie Rhodes notes:




The “standard” is a human choice that could have been otherwise (like driving on the right or left). It is not in any intrinsic way better or worse than other dialects. Nor are the historic regional dialects corrupt variants. Indeed, in many cases they preserve far older lexis, meanings or grammar than the so-called standard.

Historical and contemporary changes

In studying dialect forms, as they exist now, you should be aware of the history behind them. Regional varieties of English have historical causes that may go as far back as the Old English period. They may embody or reflect much of the history of the places where they are used.

Language is not a uniform and unchanging system of communication. It varies with place and changes over time. For example, human beings are capable (physically) of a wider range of speech sounds than any one speaker ever uses. Each language in its spoken standard forms has its own range of speech sounds, while regional varieties may leave out some of these and add others. Welsh has a distinctive sound represented in spelling by ll (voiceless unilateral l, common in place names). Some English speakers use post-vocalic r (rhoticization), though this is not common outside the north, Scotland and the south-west.

The social history of any region often explains the language variety that has arisen there. York was the heart of the Danelaw, the Viking kingdom in Britain. To this day, the lexicon of dialect speakers in the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire retains many words that derive from Old Norse. Scandinavian influence on the language does not stop with the end of the Danelaw, however: in the 19th and 20th centuries maritime trade and commerce in the North Sea and the Baltic brought many Danes, Norwegians and Swedes to ports like Hull and Newcastle.

The West Riding also has a large corpus of words of Old Norse origin. The Norwegian influence is stronger here, whereas Danish is more influential in the East Riding – there are more “Norwegian” forms than the '”Danish” of, say, the East Riding. There is a historical explanation in the trade routes from Dublin, via the north-west coast of England, over the Pennine uplands to York, capital of the Danelaw. We see an illustration of this in the place-name ending –thwaite, of Norwegian origin, which is common in West Yorkshire, Lancashire and the Lake District, but rare east of the Pennines, where the Danish cognate -thorpe is far more common.

Over many centuries, regional varieties retained distinctive lexis, grammar and speech sounds, because most speakers stayed in the place where they grew up, or near to it. In the late 20th century greater social and geographical mobility, combined with the influence of film and broadcast media, has altered the way varieties develop. Geographical location still exerts an influence, but it is not the only one. So, for example, British people of Asian descent, living in Bradford may speak a variety of English, which has West Yorkshire and Asian speech sounds, as well as those of RP, and a lexicon based on standard English with neologisms from the languages of the Indian sub-continent, and perhaps a few traditional Yorkshire dialect words.

As a teacher in a rural Devon secondary school I often heard kids saying, for example, “Where ‘re uz to?” (“Where are we?”), “Oi be” (“I am”), “Oi’ll see ‘ee somewhen” (“I’ll see you sometime”), which a teacher from our exchange school in Germany dismissed as “incorrect”. I pointed out that such expressions were not incorrect in the context of the rural Devon dialect, as everyone who spoke the dialect used them. There were some unusual formations of tenses too, but I can’t remember the system – and it was a system. And, of course, the German children on an exchange visit that I organised picked up all the non-standard local variations from the families that they stayed with.

My wife Sally is from Belfast. Although well-educated, she habitually conjugates verbs in way that sounds incorrect to speakers of standard English, but it appears to be common throughout the dialect area, e.g. “He got threw out” and “Did you went…?” She often rearranges sentences too, e.g. “It’s cold getting” instead of “It’s getting cold”. In Irish English you often hear the “after” construction in verbal phrases – more common in the South than in the North, e.g. “I'm after going down there” (past tense).

Regarding the social status of dialects, we have more hang-ups about this than German speakers, for example. In Switzerland it would be normal for a university professor to give his lectures in accented High German and then to chat to his students in Swiss German in the coffee bar afterwards. The situation is similar in Austria. I regularly visit St Johann in Tirol. People of all social classes speak Tyrolean German to other Tyroleans. But Tyrolean is more or less unintelligible to North Germans, so they tend to speak accented High German to them (and to me). But when they speak to Bavarians, who come from a closely-related dialect area, they seem to find a halfway mark. In other words they are virtually tri-lingual and particularly good at code-switching. The problem in England (less so in Scotland, Wales and Ireland) is that we have traditionally associated an accent or dialect with “incorrectness”. Things are changing now: v. the number of BBC news presenters that have a regional accent.

Thanks for the comments.

I am struck by how well-informed the discussion is - in secondary schools in England, the teaching of English language usually falls to teachers whose qualification is in English. That seems sensible, though mostly they have subject knowledge of literature, but less commonly of either modern languages or any science (both of which would arguably be better pre-requisites for teaching what is in effect language science).

There is, though, an interesting difference of approach, which some of the postings partly reveal. In teaching English (or any language) to non-native speakers, then we may use a reference model of grammar in which notions of correctness (conforming to standard or prestige varieties) are sometimes present.

Graham's last comment is more in tune with a descriptive approach - and that allows for more sophisticated (and truthful) models of language, that can accommodate the varieties in the systems of different localities, or of other kinds of social grouping.

The attitude displayed by the German exchange teacher is one that you would find in almost any generally-educated Briton, who is innocent of modern language theory. The bullying attempt to impose a correct version of English on the nation is an absurd anachronism.

These ideas were promulgated by Bishop Robert Lowth, and derived from the study of grammars of classical languages. Yet these grammars themselves were written to explain only the high literary forms of ancient languages. We now know that they did not take account of demotic forms, such as the koiné or vulgar Greek, that one finds in the New Testament.

The myth that modern European languages are "descended" from Greek-and-Latin (ignorantly yoked to each other) is fatuous, but very persistent. And it leads to silly attempts to shoehorn a Germanic language into a Latin model, which was not, to begin with, even a very accurate model of Latin - and had the convenience of being applied to the moribund written form of the language used for scholarship in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

To take a very simple example, David Crystal refers to adverbs as a "dustbin" class of words - since it is not at all coherent, and includes words which are logically and semantically not remotely in the same class (such as indications of time or frequency [sometimes, daily] and intensifiers [exceptionally]).

The apostles of correctness are maintaining flat Earth views - when a scientist encounters evidence that does not fit his or her hypothetical model, then it makes no sense to say it is wrong or incorrect, since manifestly it happens. "I am" is a standard English form, whereas "I be" is used in some parts of the west of England. But as a finite verb from the infinitive "be", the regional variety is certainly not less legitimate in any fundamental grammatical sense, than the distinctly irregular standard form. The prescriptive grammarian would no doubt, on seeing an Australian swan, say that it was "wrong" or "incorrect" since "proper" swans are white. To say what reality should be (in language science as in natural science), rather than explaining what it is, this is the position of a fool. Most people know that they are ignorant of natural sciences, and so defer to the experts. This does not happen with language.

I'm not sure that we have hang-ups about using regional forms. The UK is more homogeneous than some other countries in its language use - but we are comfortable with differences of accent, and with some local lexis. On which point, I've noticed odd bits of Scots escaping from the lips of (national) politicians, such as "outwith" where a Sassenach would say "outside" or "beyond".

We have fewer hang-ups now than we did 50-60 years ago - and, yes, my memory does go back that far . I recall the radio broadcaster Wilfred Pickles, a Yorkshireman by birth, provoking a storm of protests from listeners when his (almost) RP accent as required by the BBC at the time slipped. He is best known as a host of the show "Have a Go" and in performances as a character actor, e.g. in "Billy Liar", where his delightful Yorkshire accent was a sine qua non of the role.

Listen to Wilfred's watered-down accent as a newscaster and his "real" accent in "Have a Go" at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/wired/listening.shtml
- a nice collection of sound clips!

Harold Wilson's regional accent came back when he got into power in the 1960s:
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/mullan.htm
- another useful Web page!

Very interesting, Andrew. I am an ex-Huddersfielder living in Australia and my parner is an ex-Geordie. I now understand, after living in Sweden for a short time, why my mother still says, "They did a midnight flit" because the Swedish word for movement is flyten. Also the use of bairn/barn for child, and kirk/kyrken for church.
I've wondered if the dropping of the definite article in the Yorkshire dialect is a reflection of the lack of it in Swedish/Danish. eg I'm going t'pub??

The roots of our language were covered in the first part of the excellent ITV series "The Adventure of English", written and presented by Melvyn Bragg. The book accompanying the series was published by Hodder & Stoughton late last year: ISBN 0 340 82991 5.

There was a BBC TV series in the 1980s called “The Story of English”, covering similar ground, also with an accompanying book by McCrum R., Cran W. & MacNeil R., published in 1986 by BBC Publications (Faber & Faber), ISBN 0 571 13828 4. Amazon has a few copies left.

I have both books on my bedside bookshelf – fascinating reading. I don't know if video versions are available for sale. I recorded most of both series for home viewing and I watch them over and over again.

A good deal of what you hear (and read) today in the Northern English dialects can be traced back to the language spoken in the Danelaw - as opposed to the area of our island that was under West Saxon rule. Many words in the area of the Danelaw derive from the Viking language: v. street names in York that end in "gate" (from the Viking word for "street") and the unique pronunciation of the "r" sound in Geordie, which is close to the modern Danish "r". See the Geordie Dictionary at http://www.thenortheast.fsnet.co.uk/GeordieDictionary.htm and other links at this website produced by David Simpson.

A Danish friend of mine told me he was planning a shopping trip to Newcastle, and the topic of the Geordie dialect came up in the course of our ensuing conversation. He was a bit sceptical when I said that some words and phrases in Geordie and Danish were pronounced almost identically, so I suggested that he put it to the test by going into a pub and ordering a Newcastle Brown in Danish, phrasing it thus: "Give me a Brown". He tried it and was amazed when the barman gave him what he ordered without batting an eyelid.

My wife and stayed overnight in Alnwick (Northumbria) on the way to Scotland a couple of years ago. I was very hard-pushed to understand the local dialect but my wife, who is from Belfast, found quite a few overlaps with her regional dialect/language (Ulster Scots or Ullans), e.g. "bairn", "kirk": http://www.ullans.com/

I always adopted a descriptive approach when teaching German. German, like English, has a wide range of dialects. The dialects that diverge most from the accepted standard form - are which non-locals find most difficult to understand - are spoken in the areas most likely to be visited by tourists: Bavaria, the Black Forest, Austria, Switzerland. Many learners of German who visit these areas are therefore disappointed when attempting to use the language that they have learned at school, because it has not prepared them for the strange sounds and words that they hear.

I introduced a module entitled "Varieties of German" on a humanities degree course on which I taught at an HE college in the 1980s. It included historical varieties, different text types (literary, propaganda, advertising, etc) and regional dialects. The module was one of several that offered an alternative to the traditional literature-based modules that were on offer. It was very popular.

Not all students of language - including their mother tongue - are interested in literature. But in in the 1960s, when I entered university, there were very few courses that were not based on literature. A friend of mine entered university round about the same time as I did in order to study Russian. He is probably the most gifted linguist that I have ever met – an amazing polyglot - but he failed his first-year Russian literature exams miserably and was advised to leave the course. Later on in life he studied at a college that offered language courses that were skills-oriented and included options such as politics, economics and ICT. He passed his finals with flying colours. The native Russian external examiner who attended his oral examination wanted to give him a mark of 100% on the grounds that he could not fault my friend's Russian. "This man would make a good spy", he said. In fact, he did make a good spy, but it was a rather boring job with GCHQ. It was only later, after the Cold War came to an end, that my friend was able to use his Russian in a way that he enjoyed, working for a firm of export consultants, travelling to Russia and meeting people.

Your story, Graham, of the Dane in the pub makes a lot of sense. I've recently had occasion to get to know Norwegian (Bokmål, which is very close to Danish - as it only made a break for linguistic independence in 1814).

The written forms often seem closer to German, so in both we find qualifiers that end in -ig. (Norwegian uses the same form both as adverb and adjective.) But in Norwegian the sound is the long [ i ] vowel, which sounds close enough to our -y ending on silly, pretty, very and so on.

Pronouns and modal verbs, and some prepositions all look and sound familiar to English speakers. If you ask for a glass of beer, you would say: Kan jeg har et glas øl?. I can imagine that many northern bartenders would understand that, though they might want to know what kind of ale you wanted.

There are some vowel sounds heard on the east coast, changing slightly from Hull, through North Yorkshire up to Tyneside, that are not found in RP, but are present in modern Norwegian, such as the vowel in words like "hvor" (where) and "kom" (come).

In Helsinki the street signs appear in Finnish and Swedish, so for every "katu" there is an equivalent "gata". In Oslo, the sound is the same as the Swedish, but the spelling is "gate", as it is in York, Leeds and Beverley.

A list of street names in Beverley, East Yorkshire, reveals Scandinavian influences in, among others: Beckside, Cherry Garth, Flemingate, Hengate, Highgate, Hall Garth, Way, Holgate, Keldgate, Ladygate and Lairgate. We see a modern use of the form in Walkergate and New Walkergate - which are named after Admiral Walker (a 19th century deputy lieutenant of the East Riding). Street names from the Viking period do not use people's surnames.

Many family names or surnames contain Scandinavian elements - these may be names of places, Viking personalities, trades or occupations, and Norse gods. Examples include: Airey, Appleby, Asquith (Askwith), Beckwith, Brandreth, Chippendale, Fotherby, Fothergill, Grimshaw, Hague, Heseltine, Heslop, Hislop, Hogarth, Holmes, Kendal(l), Lofthouse, Pickersgill, Rowntree, Scargill, Schofield, Stockdale, Sykes, Thackeray, Thorpe, Threllfall, Thwaite(s), Willoughby, Wolstenholme and York.

From the name of the god, Thor we get such forms as Thorburn, Thurkettle, Thurstans, Thurston, Turpin and Turtle.

I recall, in Hamburg, reading the column in a local newspaper, written in Hamburger Platt, which you probably know better than I do. It looks closer to Dutch or Vlaams than modern high German. The column I recall (from 1972, on a brief student exchange, so it must have stuck fast) began: De Heid blüht, de Immen sund dor (Die Heide blüht, die Bienen sind da). That dialect word for bees explained the name of the eponymous Immensee in Theodor Storm's novella, which I had met some time before, but without realizing what the name meant.

You are being helpful and patient with this stuff, so here's the next lump...

Social factors affecting variations within dialects

Do dialect forms have any relation to social attitudes? William Labov’s study of language use on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard suggests that they do. Labov linked this use to subjective attitudes and showed that variation was not random, but correlated with age, attitude and social situation.

One social factor that affects variation within dialects is the sex of a speaker – where women will be more likely to use forms that are seen as correct, while men will often choose to use a non-standard form and seek the covert prestige of resisting the ideas of respectability associated with Standard English.

This is one possible explanation of the findings of Peter Trudgill in research in Norwich. In the late 1970s Trudgill interviewed people, whom he categorized by their social class and sex. He observed a number of variables against this (say the use of a particular speech sound in pronouncing a specific word) and recorded the data.

Peter Trudgill - gender, social class and speech sounds


Peter Trudgill's 1970s research into language and social class showed some interesting differences between men and women. This research is described in various studies and often quoted in language teaching textbooks. You can find more in Professor Trudgill's Social Differentiation in Norwich (1974, Cambridge University Press) and various subsequent works on dialect.

Trudgill made a detailed study in which subjects were grouped by social class and sex. He invited them to speak in a variety of situations, before asking them to read a passage that contained words where the speaker might use one or other of two speech sounds. An example would be verbs ending in -ing, where Trudgill wanted to see whether the speaker dropped the final g and pronounced this as -in'.

In phonetic terms, Trudgill observed whether, in, for example, the final sound of "singing", the speaker used the alveolar consonant /n/ or the velar consonant /ŋ/.

Note: you will only see the phonetic symbols if you have the Lucida Sans Unicode font installed and if your computer system and browser support display of this font.

Trudgill found that men were less likely and women more likely to use the prestige pronunciation of certain speech sounds. It appeared that, in aiming for higher prestige (above that of their observed social class) the women tended towards hypercorrectness. The men would often use a low prestige pronunciation - thereby seeking covert (hidden) prestige by appearing “tough” or “down to earth”. This is a plausible explanation of the results that Trudgill reported. But there may be others. Further observation may tend to support Trudgill’s explanation, but with some further qualifications.

Trudgill followed up the direct observation by asking his subjects about their speech. This supported the view of men as more secure or less socially aspirational. The men claimed to use lower prestige forms even more than the observation showed they really did. Women, too, claimed to use high prestige forms more than they were observed to do.

This may be a case of objective evidence supporting a traditional view of women as being more likely to have social class aspirations than men. But it may also be that, as social rôles change, this may become less common - as women can gain prestige through work or other activities. Trudgill's observations are quite easy to replicate - you could do so as part of language research or a language investigation. The value of this research is considerable.

· First (if we accept the explanation of Peter Trudgill’s method of investigation), then we have an extensive set of findings that remain as worthy of study today as they ever were. (Students and teachers need to look at some of the information, as presented in tabular form.)

· Second, it remains open to interpretation – you might, for example, study the findings both before and after reading Trudgill’s own explanations of the differences. This might lead you to challenge or to support the ideas of hypercorrectness among women and covert prestige among men.

Moreover, you can then think of further research that you could carry out, to see if Trudgill’s findings (from Norwich) would be repeated in other places.

Barrie Rhodes (in an unpublished research paper from 1998) suggests that generalisations about sex, age and social differentiation in non-standard speech may sometimes need to be re-evaluated along locally-specific, historical, occupational, socio-economic and lexical choice dimensions. He argues that, in the West Yorkshire community he researched, social networks influenced by changes in the once dominant textile industry have had a particular effect, especially on women's speech.

Sex-differentiated speech was shown to be less predictable than is sometimes claimed; in this study the youngest females emerged as proportionately significant conservers and users of the non-standard lexicon. Knowledge and use of non-standard words amongst some age/sex groups was shown to rise rather than fall with increasing social status. A lexical analysis revealed a matrix of differential trends and patterns in non-standard word knowledge and use; attrition appeared to be not simply a quantitative function but to be lexically selective in a complex way.

Barrie Rhodes elaborates on some of these factors:



Barrie Rhodes has stated that he does not see his study as contradicting Peter Trudgill’s pioneering work. But by changing the focus somewhat, he has perhaps suggested the importance of some social factors with which Trudgill’s Norwich study was not concerned. It appears that we cannot say that either men or women are, on the whole, more likely to use a traditional or archaic dialect form – sex is one factor among many, and there are reasons why both men and women, in different contexts and for different reasons, will conserve or drop features of traditional regional language varieties.

I am reading all this with great interest and I know this is not adding anything erudite to the discussion, but couldn't help telling you that my maiden (Huddersfield origin) name was Turpin and had no idea it was from Thor. When I looked it up some years ago it was suggested it was from the Norman French because there was a bishop called de Turpinne, but can now see that it goes back further than that. My parents will be very interested. They are the only people in Tasmania on electoral rolls with that name, but it has disappeared with me.

Have you come across the idea of Majority English? You'll find a description of it on Joel Miller's site (http://www.bentarz.se).

As a teacher of English as a Foreign Language, I have to confront what the question of what kind of English I'm going to teach. Shall I pick the English spoken by about 20 million people in the South-East of England, or the language spoken by around 230 million of the inhabitants of the USA, or the one spoken daily by around 300 million people on the Indian subcontinent? Or perhaps the one spoken by up to 1,000 million people worldwide?

It's clear to me that if you're going to set your standard according to majority practice, then Indian English is really the standard to use! However, there are much more sensible standards to use, such as beauty and clarity of expression, fun or just plain functionality. I think that the 'problem' with standards like these is that they don't belong to any specific national grouping … but, so what?

I studied at Hamburg University. My landlady spoke a variety of German that was closer to Platt than High German. Yes, it sounds more like Dutch or Vlaams.

Regarding language and gender, I’ve told this story before: When I was working on a project in Hungary in the early 1990s a Californian feminist was touring the country giving lectures on sexism in language. She gave a lecture at the college where I was teaching, pointing out the necessity for avoiding words like “actress” and always writing “he/she”. He lecture went down like a lead balloon. The Hungarians were puzzled, as they don’t distinguish between “he” and “she” in their language. The have one word for “he and “she”, and gender is not indicated unless it is essential for avoiding ambiguity. Finnish is very similar – and they have a very high proportion of female members of parliament.

Turpin, coming through Norman French, makes sense. That is, they are Normans - originally Norwegian Vikings, the descendants and buddies of Gangerhrolf, whom the Victorians dubbed Rollo the Rover. They (the Victorians, not the Vikings) also made William the Bastard into William the Conqueror. I am grateful to C.S. Lewis for alerting me to the older form - he always calls William "the Bastard". There are Turpins in the East Riding (I have taught some), and, of course, the infamous Dick Turpin was from around here.

A Norwegian today is a Nordmann - the "d" is silent, as in Norman...

Language and gender? That reminds me. A few weeks back, I sat on a train, travelling between Brussels and Bruges. (Between Brussels and an intermediate station the information is displayed in two languages on the scrolling digital display; but after that, in the Flemish region, the French disappears - which makes even the Welsh look broad-minded, as they at least give the English version after the Welsh one.) And into my carriage came three research chemists, on their way to a symposium in Bruges. They were organic chemists, two from Spain and one from Italy. So they used English as the lingua franca. Their very fluent and controlled speech was peppered with special lexis (dichlorobenzine, and so on). One of the chemists was researching the toxicity of synthetic materials (plastics) by treating them with artificial saliva - research of great interest to toy manufacturers, needing to know what is safe in the mouths of babies.

I told this story afterwards to a group of sixth form students, then asked them to form a mental picture of the chemists. By now, you may have done the same.

All three were women, two very young (though old enough to have done some very interesting and serious research). If you managed to see them as women, or to avoid seeing some middle-aged blokes in white coats, then you are maybe less prone to gender assumptions than many people, certainly in the UK.

There is some irony, Graham, in your story of the lecturer. There are still some linguists who support Dale Spender's and Robin Lakoff's views about men's dominance, though Deborah Tannen's theory of difference seems to be more widely accepted. The irony is that, while making a case for the way a female perspective has been overlooked, the lecturer should be so inattentive to, or ignorant of, the characteristics of the language of her audience. I am often embarrassed to attend meetings where British colleagues speak to an international audience, and refer, without explanation, to the arcane details of our education system from OFSTED to QCA, from GCSE to GNVQ, of Becta and of Baker Days, of SATs and National Strategies. Those who are easily infected by ephemeral metaphor can now be heard, in any meeting, referring to causes or influences as "drivers".

To end close to where I began, the three research chemists, far from struggling with a foreign tongue, were speaking their own, and the world's, common language. The evidence of their clarity, coherence and control comes in the ease with which I can recall so much of the conversation. Oh, and being women, they were very good at taking, and yielding, turns to speak.

I've just had some serious dental work done today - by a young female Brazilian dental surgeon with a perfect command of English...

Here's a bit more on dialect...

Representations of dialect in writing

Some of the earliest representations are found in literary works. Novelists such as Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence all depict speakers of dialect, in ways that show their grammar, lexis and accent. In the case of some dialects, we have more than one representation – so we can compare Hardy’s rustics with the poems of William Barnes (who wrote in a Dorset dialect). Here is a fairly early example, from the second chapter of Wuthering Heights (1847), in which the servant Joseph refuses to admit Mr. Lockwood into the house:

" ‘T’ maister’s dahn I’t’ fowld. Goa rahnd by the end ut’ laith, if yah went to spake tull him."

Tennyson (1809-1892) has a similar approach in his poem, Northern Farmer, Old Style:

“What atta stannin’ theer fur, and doesn’ bring me the aäle? / Doctor’s a ‘toättler, lass, and ‘e’s allus i’ the owd taäle…”

Joseph comes from what is now West Yorkshire, while Tennyson’s farmer is supposedly from the north of Lincolnshire. Here is an earlier example, from Walter Scott’s Heart of Midlothian (1830), which shows some phonetic qualities of the lowlands Scots accent. In this passage the Laird of Dumbiedikes (from the country near Edinburgh) is on his deathbed. He advises his son about how to take his drink:

“My father tauld me sae forty years sin’, but I never fand time to mind him. – Jock, ne’er drink brandy in the morning, it files the stamach sair…"
George Bernard Shaw, in Pygmalion (1914), uses one phonetic character (schwa) in his attempt to represent the accent of Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl:

“There’s menners f’ yer! T*-oo banches o voylets trod into the mad…Will ye-oo py me f’them.”

* - I cannot show the character here, as the forum does not allow the extended character set.

However, after a few sentences of phonetic dialogue, Shaw reverts to standard spelling, noting:

“Here, with apologies, this desperate attempt to represent her dialect without a phonetic alphabet must be abandoned as unintelligible outside London”.

The pioneering work in linguistics of the brothers Grimm led to a more scientific approach – and a great bout of activity as researchers began to make records of regional dialects. The emergence of a phonetic alphabet enabled researchers to produce accurate transcriptions of speech sounds.

Dialects are non-standard forms. They do not, therefore, normally have a standard spelling system. If one wishes to represent dialect in a way that shows the speech sounds, then use of phonetic transcription would be helpful. (The alternative is the kind of invented “phonetic” spelling that one sees in D.H. Lawrence: “ ‘Asna ‘e come whoam yit?” – which is still common in literary works.)

For some kinds of study (where the focus is not on speech sounds), an approximation to Standard English forms is acceptable. Thus the Yorkshire adverb happen (=maybe) sometimes appears in the same written form as the Standard English verb to happen – even if we know that for some speakers the dialect word begins with the [æ] vowel. (Barrie Rhodes suggests that we should write it as appen, since there is no initial consonant for Yorkshire dialect speakers; the use of an apostrophe, as in ‘appen, suggests that the dialect form is somehow a mistaken or inferior variation of happen, even though appen is a different part of speech [adverb, where happen, in Standard English, is a verb] in the lexicon of the regional variety.

There are some modern authors who write novels, using (for dialogue alone, or both narrative and dialogue) an approximate transcription of a regional variety of English or a creole, and this tendency is widespread in published poetry (which sometimes indicates the speech sounds used by the poet in performance).

For an example of the former, consider this extract from James Kelman’s 1994 novel How Late It Was, How Late, which is written in modern Scots:

They shook hands.
Didnay take ye long, said Boab.
Naw it was just a wee footery job. Good saw by the way, good feel to it.
Aye like I says it was my fayther's. It's been in the family for donkeys'. I think it was my grandfayther's.
Is that right? Hh! Heh ye wouldnay have a bit of sandpaper?
Naw son sorry, ye're unlucky; I had some but it's away.
Just thought I'd ask.

The narrative also uses this variety of English – in this passage of dialogue we note the regional lexis (wee, footery, didnay, wouldnay) or variant meanings for standard lexis (away), as well as a representation of the Scots speech sounds (fayther’s, naw, and perhaps Boab, of which the usual spelling is Bob).

In Sozaboy the Nigerian author Ken Saro-Wiwa explains that it is written in “rotten English” – this is “a mixture of Nigerian pidgin English, broken English and occasional flashes of good, even idiomatic English.”

Some of the poems of James Berry, John Agard and Linton Kwesi Johnson resemble transcripts, using a simple “phonetic” representation, of urban black English varieties or Caribbean creoles. Here is an excerpt from one of Mr. Johnson’s poems, Di Anfinish Revalueshan:

soh mi a beg yu mistah man
please come out a yu shell
yu cyaan dwell inna di paas
cat laas fi evah yu know mi bredda
now dat di sun a shine brite
please come out a di doldrums a di daak nite

It is as well to remember that these are literary examples – otherwise one may find people claiming these writers as the authentic voices of Black Britain (as if this were one uniform thing), or moving from an evaluation of the merits of the verse as art, and political comment, to its quality as a representation of the speech of a community. (In a symbolic sense, it may well be taken as representative, but we would need to see a lot more evidence, as linguists, before we could draw any conclusions about how typical or widespread this is as any kind of scientific or descriptive representation of the everyday speech of people in any part of Britain. In the same way, we would not readily accept the rustic characters in Thomas Hardy’s novels as an objective representation of the speech of Dorset in the mid to late 19th century.)

You may also see comical pseudo-phonetic or punning transcriptions to illustrate regional accent – on the analogy of Afferbeck Lauder’s 1965 guide to Australian English, Let Stalk Strine. A series of postcards entitled Learn to Speak Hull, Speak More Hull! and Speak Hull Again! contains “transcriptions” such as “fern curls” (phone calls) along with glosses – for “fern curls” it is “telecommunications”. So we find, among others:

· Erk (=a type of wood; oak)
· Meolidiz (=my annual vacation; my holidays [also yurolidiz])
· Nerz kern (=the pointed end of a rocket; nose cone)
· Nerth Pearl (=the most northerly point on earth; North Pole)
· Pearl Tax (=the Community Charge; Poll Tax)
· Perm (=a composition in verse; poem)
· Perp, the (=head of the Roman Catholic Church; Pope)
· Surfer (=posh name for a settee; sofa)

Most of these examples exploit the peculiarity of a vowel used by speakers in Hull and some parts of the East Riding.

Film and TV drama

Dramatists who write for film and TV (or the stage) may attempt to show the lexis and grammar of a dialect speaker, but their work is not authentic data in illustrating dialect in live use. (It may be instructive and worthy of study for other reasons.) And actors are not typical speakers – they are highly trained in the physical articulation of speech sounds, which they articulate with greater clarity (by exaggeration, distortion and amplification of speech as it might naturally occur).

Film studios often employ special voice coaches (who may be expert phonologists) to assist performers in learning a regional accent, in a work where naturalistic authenticity is important. By comparing apparently inauthentic and authentic film accents, we may learn something about the real-life original. Barrie Rhodes notes of some popular TV dramas:



To be fair, few such dramas aspire to local authenticity – and there are probably as many offending examples of generalized London speech in film and TV, as there are false northern accents.

From the language students’ point of view, the value of such dramas as evidence for genuine local or regional speech sounds and language forms is nil. But they do have value as evidence of people’s mistaken or inexact ideas about speech sounds and language forms that they do not know. If you want to study speech sounds in Peckham, you have to listen to the natives, not the cast of Only Fools and Horses.

Andrew writes:



I remember Afferbeck Lauder's Let stalk Strine and Fraffly well spoken very well. I still have copies on my shelves.

I paid a tribute to Afferbeck Lauder's humour in my keynote paper at the WorldCALL 1998 conference, University of Melbourne. You'll find a couple of references and examples in the paper, which was entitled "True creativity often starts where language ends". It's on the Web at:
http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/worldgd1.htm

Here's the relevant extract:

More examples of pseudo-phonetic or punning transcriptions can be found in the late John Pepper’s series of books dedicated to the Ulster dialect. He used to write an entertaining column in the Belfast Telegraph, in which he picked up on some of the amusing features of local speech. In Ulster – and in Ireland as a whole – people of all social classes have a natural way with words; their speech is full of humour and they are quick with a repartee that will cut anyone down to size. Here are few examples from John Pepper’s books:

- I leff a note for the braidman to lave four snowtaps an’ a corn square. (Conveying information about a note left for the baker.)
- That fella’s not only futless he’s legless forby. (A comment on the state of intoxication of a man in a bar.)
- Hayeawlwiye? (Do you have everything with you?)
- She’s just an oul girn. (She complains a lot.)

See this page by Dick Alexander for examples of Ulster humour:
http://www.postcardsforyou.com/ulster.html
e.g.
- "If he died with that face, nobody would wash him."
- "That woman would start a fight in an empty house."

As for actors, have you seen the film Divorcing Jack? It’s set in Belfast – with a script that is at least as rude and as impenetrable as that of The Commitments, which is set in Dublin. But why did they choose Robert Lindsey to play one of the leading roles? His accent slips all the time. There are dozens of Northern Irish actors who could have got it right. I guess it's all about money...

How about Gervais Phinn’s book The other side of the Dale? He was the after-dinner speaker at a conference I attended in York. It’s probably the most entertaining after-dinner speech I have ever heard, but I think the Japanese guests at my table were totally confused by his rendering of rural Yorkshire dialects!

Finally, the poetry of Robbie Burns may be worth mentioning – although it can be classified as Scots rather than English. Most English people know the phrase Auld Lang Syne but haven’t a clue what it means (Old Times Long Ago) and that it derives from one of Burns’ poems.

Thanks for those observations - I will be borrowing some of them for my guide, of that's allowed! Here's another dollop...

Regional varieties and non-regional varieties

Paul Kerswill and others contrast traditional dialects with modern dialects. The traditional dialects are varieties spoken by people in a given geographical area – in this sense we can regard the speech of the Black Country, East Yorkshire or Cardiff as a traditional, regional dialect.

The modern dialects are varieties spoken in urban areas. Kerswill notes two contrasting tendencies at work.

· On the one hand, there is a standardizing tendency, or dialect levelling – so the urban dialect shares more features with standard spoken English.
· On the other hand, the urban dialects still retain features that are distinctive to the area where they are spoken – so Hull and East Yorkshire dialect retains distinctive

- sounds (like the “er” vowel)
- lexis (non-standard forms, like beer-off for an off-licence or tenfoot for the access road behind a house, and standard forms with non-standard meanings, like the use of while in the sense of until)
- grammar (such as I aren’t for Standard English I’m not)

Dialect levelling

Kerswill argues that there is a levelling process, whereby the modern or urban dialects over time move closer to spoken standard English, while retaining their own distinctive forms. He explains dialect levelling thus:




Estuary

One modern dialect – or perhaps this is an academic fiction based on several modern dialects – is so-called Estuary English. Here is David Rosewarne’s description:



Rosewarne claims that people correct their speech for reasons of social aspiration. They lose grammatically non-standard features, such as
· double negatives
· the word ‘ain’t’, and
· past tense forms like writ for ‘wrote’, come for ‘came’.

They also, he claims, change accent. In the Southeast, they avoid the most stigmatised phonetic features, such as dropping of h and using /t/ instead of the glottal stop. The result has been the emergence of a new southern or south-eastern variety (some characteristics of which have spread to the midlands and the north). This variety, which we may call Estuary, has these features:

· glottal stops for /t/, including some between vowels
· vocalised /l/ as in fill, giving pronunciations sounding like ‘fiw’
· ‘Cockney’ (London) vowels (broad diphthongs, so that mace sounds like RP ‘mice’, buy sounds like RP ‘boy’, and rice has a vowel resembling that of RP ‘choice’)
· a general absence of h-dropping
· use of standard grammar

Paul Kerswill accepts the description but disputes the claim that this is a recent variety. He insists that something like “Estuary” has been around for longer than its commentators claim, but that in the 1990s its geographical spread has accelerated. This reflects tendencies in language change generally. It is perhaps rare for a new variety to arise suddenly and spontaneously. But one can see how a number of variant forms can slowly coalesce to represent a variety that becomes recognizable to language users – and when this happens they may adopt the features of this variety through accommodation.

All descriptions of regional varieties are general and approximate – individual speakers may use all or some of them, and each to a greater or less degree, which will itself vary from one situation to another.

While “Estuary English” is a loose and approximate name, the same is true of other popular names for traditional dialects, such as Cockney (supposedly spoken by people born within the sound of Bow Bells – the bells of St.Mary le Bow [Marylebone], Scouse (Liverpudlian) and Geordie (Tyneside). These popular names may also sustain inaccurate ideas. But behind these imprecise general descriptions, there are real language features that are more common in specific geographical locations. As a language student or scientist, you should look for objective evidence of this, either in published research, or in your own investigations.

More recently, Jane Setter, Director of the English Language Pronunciation Unit, gave this short description of Estuary:

Be my guest!

Have you seen the website at UCL devoted to Estuary English?

It's at http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/

I have spoken a variety of Estuary all my life - although people tell me I tend to sound "posher" when I am giving a lecture.

Hi, Graham,

Yes - I know that one. Without overdoing the navel-gazing, I can add that I have some decent articles by Peter Trudgill, Paul Kerswill and Paul Coggle on this subject, on my Web site:

www.universalteacher.org.uk/lang/rp.htm

www.universalteacher.org.uk/lang/estuary.htm

Jane Setter alerted me to some excellent and more recent work by Joanna Przedlacka. You can see it at:

www.phon.ox.ac.uk/~joanna/homepage.html

and get the full research paper at

www.phon.ox.ac.uk/~joanna/sap36_jp.pdf

The next stuff I will put on here will contain an account of Joanna's work...

I like Trudgill's stuff.

OK, let me do some navel-gazing too. Paul Coggle and I have worked together - and had a few beers together. I was external examiner for the MA course in "Advanced Language Studies: Computing" at the University of Kent when Paul was there. He introduced me to the concept of "Estuary English". And, of course, he was one of the authors of the best-selling Ealing Course in German. I taught German at Ealing College (later to become part of Thames Valley University), 1971-1993.

Enough from me for 10 days! I'm heading for Austria tomorrow to do some serious skiing and après-ski...

Here's a bit more from the guide.

Joanna Przedlacka's study of "Estuary"

Perhaps the most authoritative recent research is that of Joanna Przedlacka. Between 1997and 1999 Dr. Przedlacka studied the sociophonetics of what she calls "a putative variety of Southern British English, popularly known as Estuary English." In fieldwork in four of the Home Counties (Buckinghamshire, Kent, Essex and Surrey) she studied fourteen sociophonetic variables, looking at differences among the counties, between male and female speakers and two social classes. She studied sixteen teenage speakers, using a word elicitation task. (Dr. Przedlacka's report, Estuary English and RP: some recent findings, is available as a portable document file (PDF), while a summary, with some of the more important interpretation, is on her homepage, along with digital audio files to exemplify the speech sounds in the study.

Get Joanna Przedlacka's Estuary English and RP (103 KB)
Go to Joanna Przedlacka's homepage at www.phon.ox.ac.uk/~joanna


Joanna Przedlacka compared her examples to data taken from the Survey of English Dialects (SED). She found that:

glottaling (supposedly a distinctive feature of Estuary English) showed a pattern not dissimilar to that of fifty years ago, as shown in the SED data, but that
l-vocalisation had increased.

She compared the Estuary English data and recordings of RP and Cockney speakers. This demonstrated that Estuary speakers were intermediate between RP and "Cockney" as regards the incidence of t-glottaling and l-vocalisation. She suggests that this may be an oversimplification of the issue: one should also consider factors such as geographical variation or idiosyncratic characteristics of the speakers.

Here are some more detailed observations from Dr. Przedlacka's research:

Vowel fronting

The word blue uttered by a speaker from Buckinghamshire, has a front realisation of the vowel, while other front realisations can be heard in boots, pronounced by a Kent female and roof (Essex female). A central vowel can be heard in new, uttered by a male teenager from Essex. Back realisations of the vowel, as in cucumber, uttered by a Kent teenager are infrequent. The vowel in butter has a back realisation in the speech of an Essex speaker, but can be realised a front vowel, as in dust or cousins, both uttered by teenage girls from Buckinghamshire.


Glottaling

Glottaling of syllable non-initial /t/ is not the main variant in Estuary English. Here the word feet, spoken by a Kent female, exemplifies it. Realisations where the /t/ is not “dropped” are more frequent - as in bat, (Surrey speaker). Intervocalic /t/ glottaling is virtually absent from the Estuary English data. Here is one of the very few instances of it in the word forty, uttered by a Buckinghamshire female. It is frequently found in Cockney, as in daughter, said by a teenager from the East End of London.

L-vocalisation

The majority of tokens with a syllable non-initial /l/ have a vocalised realisation, as in milk (Kent speaker). Dark l, which is the usual RP realisation (as in an RP speaker's pronunciation of ankle), is also present in Estuary English, alongside clear tokens, as in pull (Essex teenager). However, clear realisations of /l/ are infrequent in the data.

Joanna Przedlacka's conclusion is that "Estuary" does not correspond to anything very coherent:



This would tend to support Jane Setter's view, that "Estuary" is not so much a variety as an umbrella term that covers a range of accents. While she identifies them as belonging to the south east, one should also note Paul Kerswill's tracking of their movement to the Midlands and further north.

I have put the draft version of the whole guide on the Web now. It's at:

www.universalteacher.org.uk/lang/britishisles.htm