English Dialects

from Charles Barber. Linguistic Changes in Present-Day English

Charles Barber was formerly a reader of the English language and literature at the university of Leeds. He died in 2000. He is the author of one of the most influential and widely-read books on the history of the language, The Story of Language (1964) and, later, The English Language: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge University Press in 1993).

In Linguistic Changes in Present-Day English Charles Barber does not discuss linguistic change in its technical sense, but focuses on social references among existing alternatives – in pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. These changes have resulted from a variety of social factors, notably the expansion of education, the blurring of class lines, and the decline in prestige and power of the traditional ruling classes.

It is obvious to all of us that different kinds of English are spoken, even inside England. This is not merely a question of individual peculiarities (though these of course exist) but of the peculiarities of groups of speakers. We can all recognize a kind of speech characteristic of the north of England, of the West county, of the London area, even if we lack the power to analyse the differences; in other words, there are in England clearly marked regional dialects, and those are much more numerous and finely graded than is apparent to the untrained ear; the ordinary Londoner recognizes a style of speech as “northern”, but he is, in fact, lumping together a whole host of dialects; the speech of Lancashire ¹⁾ differs from that of Yorkshire ²⁾, that of West Riding ³⁾ from that of East Riding ⁴⁾, and so on; and within these areas there are even finer differences, between districts, between towns, sometimes even between neighbouring villages; though in real life you will never meet a dialectologist who can, like professor Higgins in Shaw’s “Pygmalion” ⁵⁾, distinguish between the dialects of different streets. To the ordinary speaker, the most obvious differences between the regional dialects are those of pronunciation: the Londoner trying to imitate Lancashire speech will usually concentrate on such things as the vowel-sounds in the words cup and ask and don’t, and (if he is a good mimic) on certain distinctive features of rhythm and melody. But there are also differences in vocabulary (dialect words) and grammar. “If t’United had less brass to lake wi’, they’d lake better foitball”, says one of Mr. J.B. Priestly’s Yorkshire characters ⁶⁾, using words that would be strange (and even incomprehensible) in the south. “I nivver rekoned nowt o’ barbers”, says another, using a construction equally alien to the southerner.

Besides being thus diversified horizontally into regional dialects, the language is also diversified vertically, into class dialects. In a given town, a mill-hand, a clerk, a primary-school teacher, the shopkeeper, the lawyer, the bank-manager and the company-director may all speak a local variant of the language, but they will also speak a subvariant of it, according to their social status, social pretensions, and education. In every district there is a hierarchy of dialects, corresponding, in some degree, with the local social structure. A speaker will tend to find that the speech of people lower down in this hierarchy sounds “rough” or “vulgar” (and perhaps also picturesque); while the speech of people higher in the scale will sound either affected (“posh”) or desirably refined, according to his ambitions and social orientation. Such judgements have little to do with the intrinsic qualities of the language, but are simply due to associations: if by some historical accident the vowel-sounds of the Cockney ⁷⁾ and of the Eton ⁸⁾ boy had been distributed to them the other way round, we should still have found the speech of the Cockney “vulgar” and that of the Eton boy “posh”.

The social stratification of the language appears in syntax and vocabulary as well as in pronunciation. The speaker higher in the scale describes many of the usages of lower strata as “ungrammatical”, it would be more accurate to say that the grammar of these dialects is different from the grammar of his own. In vocabulary, one can sometimes find a whole series of words used at different social levels: a good example for this is the word for the course of a meal which follows the main course; there are regional variations in this, but the general pattern of usage is as follows: pudding (upper and upper-middle), sweet (middle), dessert (lower-middle), afters (lower-middle and lower), and pudding (lower). The coincidence in usage between top and bottom is interesting, and is found in some other things.

Such differences are often marked by referring to the speech as “educated” and “uneducated”; to some extent, “education” is here merely a euphemism for “class”, for, although class has for centuries been a topic of the greatest interest in England (as the novel reveals), our own age seems to find the subject a trifle indelicate, and only to be referred to, indirectly (like sex, war, death, lavatories, and economic depressions). However, “education” in this context is not only a euphemism for “class”, for it is in fact true that our style of speech is affected by our education. This can often be seen where members of the same family have been through different parts of the educational machine: one may have left school at fourteen and gone into the mill; a second may have gone through grammar school and got a job in business, while a third may have won a scholarship to Oxford and ended up in one of the learned professions; even if they make no conscious effort to adapt their speech to their milieu (which, of course, many of them do), such sets of siblings will end up with markedly different styles of speech, simply from the influence of their varying speech-environments. But even here, of course, there is a close correlation between education and class, since different educations lead to different occupations (not many university graduates are content, like Jimmy Porter ⁹⁾, to become barrow-boys.)

¨ Explanatory Notes

¹⁾ Lancashire – one of the counties in the North West of England which takes its name from the city of Lancaster, and is sometimes known as the County of Lancaster. Lancashire is sometimes referred to by the abbreviation Lancs, originally used by the Royal Mail. The population of the county is 1, 449, 700. People from the county are known as Lancastrians.

²⁾ Yorkshire – a county of northern England and the largest in the United Kingdom. Yorkshire is named after the city of York which is a shortened form of the Viking name Jorvik.

³⁾ West Riding, ⁴⁾ East Riding – former administrative divisions of Yorkshire (also including North Riding) until 1974. Since 1996 the northern part of the area has formed the county of North Yorkshire, while the rest of the Yorkshire area consists of unitary authorities.

⁵⁾ Pygmalion (1912) – a play by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. The main character, Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins, connoisseur of impeccable English pronunciation.

⁶⁾ J.B. Priestly (1894 - 1984) – British journalist, novelist, playwright, and essayist. Priestley's output was vast and varied – he wrote over one hundred novels, plays, and essays, and is best known as the author of the novel THE GOOD COMPANIONS (1929).

⁷⁾ Cockney – one of the best known English Southern dialects. Geographically and culturally it often refers to a working class of Londoners, particularly those in the East End. This regional-social variety of the English language has certain distinctive features in pronunciation, namely: 1) interchange of the labial and labio-dental consonants [w] and [v]: wery for very, vell for well; 2) substitution of the voiceless and voiced dental spirants [θ ] and [ð ] by [f] and [v] respectively: fing for thing, farver for father (inserting the letter r indicates vowel length); 3) interchange of the aspirated and non-aspirated initial vowels: hart for art, ’eart for heart; 4) substitution of the diphthong [aI] for standard [eI]: day [daI] for [deI], face [faIs] for [feIs] etc. Besides, there are some specific features in vocabulary and grammar as well: 1) specifically Cockney words and set-expressions: up the pole ‘drunk’, you’ll get yourself disliked (a reprimand to a person behaving very badly); 2) the so-called rhyming slang: daisy roots for boots, tit for tat for hat, loaf of bread for head, trouble and strife for wife; 3) the use of double negatives: I don’t like no man.

⁸⁾ Eton – English public schoolfor boys aged from 13 to 18 near Windsor, Berkshire, founded in 1440 by King Henry VI. Its pupils are mainly from wealthy families, and many of Britain’s public figures were educated there. So, Eton has traditionally been referred to as " the chief nurse of England's statesmen". Former pupils are known as Old Etonians.

⁹⁾Jimmy Porter – one of the characters, known as the angry young men, of the play by the English playwright John Osborne Look Back in Anger (1956), who though a representative of an upper-middle class and a university graduate, nevertheless chooses a career of a barrow-boy out of protest against the ideals of the British establishment.