LANGUAGE VARIETY IN ENGLAND

1
♦

Language Variety in
England

One thing that is important to very many English people is where they
are from. For many of us, whatever happens to us in later life, and
however much we move house or travel, the place where we grew up
and spent our childhood and adolescence retains a special significance.
Of course, this is not true of all of us. More often than in previous
generations, families may move around the country, and there are
increasing numbers of people who have had a nomadic childhood and
are not really ‘from’ anywhere. But for a majority of English people,
pride and interest in the area where they grew up is still a reality. The
country is full of football supporters whose main concern is for the club
of their childhood, even though they may now live hundreds of miles
away. Local newspapers criss-cross the country in their thousands on
their way to ‘exiles’ who have left their local areas. And at Christmas
time the roads and railways are full of people returning to their native
heath for the holiday period.
Where we are from is thus an important part of our personal
identity, and for many of us an important component of this local
identity is the way we speak – our accent and dialect. Nearly all of us
have regional features in the way we speak English, and are happy that
this should be so, although of course there are upper-class people who
have regionless accents, as well as people who for some reason wish to
conceal their regional origins. The vast majority of the population,
however, speak in a manner which identifies them as coming from a
particular place. They speak like the people they grew up with, and in
a way that is different from people who grew up somewhere else. Of
course, people may change the way in which they speak during their
lifetimes, especially if they move around the country, but most of us
carry at least some trace of our accent and dialect origins with us all of
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our lives. Other people will use this information to help them decide
where we are from, and will say things like ‘You must be a Londoner’,
‘You sound as if you’re a southerner’, ‘Whereabouts in Scotland are
you from?’, ‘I can’t quite place your accent’, or ‘You’re from Yorkshire,
aren’t you?’. And labels for people of different regional origins are
freely used – you can get called ‘Geordie’, ‘Cockney’, ‘Jock’, ‘Taffy’,
‘Scouse’, and so on, depending on what you sound like when you
speak.
This book on English dialects is about this variety in the way we
speak English, and it is about the way all of us who are from England
speak our native language, because all of us speak with an accent, and
all of us speak a dialect. Your accent is the way in which you
pronounce English, and since all of us pronounce when we speak, we
all have an accent. Some accents, it is true, are more regional than
others. Some people have very regional accents, so that you can tell
exactly where they come from if you are clever enough at spotting
accents. Other people have fewer regional features, and you might be
able to place them only approximately – ‘You’re from somewhere in the
West Country, but I can’t tell where.’ And yet other people may have
very few regional features at all, so that you might be reduced to saying
something as vague as ‘You’re a southerner.’ There are even a small
number of people – probably between 3 and 5 per cent of the popula-
tion of England – who have a totally regionless accent. These are
usually people who have been to one of the big Public Schools, or who
want to sound as if they have. This accent is sometimes referred to as
a ‘BBC accent’ because readers of the national news on radio and
television are usually selected from this minority of the population.
Similarly, everybody also speaks a dialect. When we talk about
dialect we are referring to something more than accent. We are
referring not only to pronunciation but also to the words and grammar
that people use. Thus if you say

I haven’t got any

and I say

I ain’t got none

you and I differ in the grammar we use, and are therefore speaking
different dialects. Normally, of course, dialect and accent go together.
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If you speak Lancashire dialect, you will obviously speak it with a

Lancashire accent. But it is worth making a distinction between accent
and dialect because of what happens with the important dialect we call
Standard English. Standard English is the dialect which is normally
used in writing, and which is spoken by the most educated and
powerful members of the population: probably no more than 12–15 per
cent of the population of England are native speakers of Standard
English.
The fact is that everybody who speaks with a BBC accent also speaks
the Standard English dialect, like, say, Anna Ford or Alastair Burnett.
But not everybody who speaks Standard English does so with a BBC
accent. Most people who speak Standard English – perhaps 7–12 per
cent of the population of the country – do so with some kind of
regional accent, like Melvyn Bragg or John Kettley. This accent and
this dialect do not therefore inevitably go together, and it is useful to
be able to distinguish, by using the terms dialect and accent, between
speakers who do combine them and those who do not.
Standard English is not often referred to as a dialect, but since it is
a variety of the language that differs from others in its grammar, it is
clearly just as much a dialect as any other variety. Standard English
uses grammatical forms such as

I did it
A man that I know
He doesn’t want any
She isn’t coming
We saw him

The other, Nonstandard Dialects may use grammatical forms such as

I done it
A man what I know
He don’t want none
She ain’t coming
We seen him

Standard English also comes in a number of different forms around

the world. The grammar of American Standard English is obviously a
little different from English Standard English. English Standard Eng-
lish speakers say
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 THE DIALECTS OF ENGLAND

I haven’t written to him even though I should have done

Americans would say

I haven’t written to him even though I should have

English speakers would say

It’s got cold in here

American Standard English speakers would say

It’s gotten cold in here

Scottish Standard English is a little different again, of course, and so

is Irish Standard English. Within England, however, Standard English
is written and spoken more or less the same over the whole country.
Standard English speakers from the south of England are more likely
to say things like

I won’t do it We haven’t seen him

than speakers from the north of England, who are more likely to say

I’ll not do it We’ve not seen him

But what regional differences there are are very few.

It is important, too, not to confuse the issue of Standard English
versus Nonstandard Dialects with the issue of formal versus informal
language. All dialects can be spoken in less or more formal styles,
depending on the nature of the situation. If someone says

I’m bloody sozzled

they are speaking an informal style of Standard English. If, on the

other hand, they say

I be very drunk

they are speaking a more formal style but of some nonstandard dialect.
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Like all other dialects, Standard English admits stylistic variation,

including the use of swearing and highly informal vocabulary, or slang,
such as sozzled.
In this book we shall not be saying very much about Standard
English. Nearly all of the thousands of textbooks, grammars and
dictionaries that have been compiled for the English language are
already about Standard English, even though most people do not speak
this dialect. This book will do only a little to redress this balance, but
it is mainly about the other dialects of the language. Nor shall we have
a lot to say in this book about slang. Rather, we shall be concentrating
most closely on the nonstandard, regional dialects to be found in
different parts of England, which, as we have seen, are spoken by the
vast majority of the population, and which have to do, amongst other
things, with where people are from.
Most often, in talking about these regional dialects, we will be
concentrating on those social dialects which are most unlike Standard
English. In any given area we find a social scale of dialects, with people
at the top of the social hierarchy tending to speak Standard English,
and with more and more nonstandard regional features occurring as we
go down the social hierarchy. We shall be focusing our attention
towards the most regional of the varieties.
We shall also be looking at two rather different sorts of dialects.
Traditional Dialects are what most people think of when they hear
the term dialect. They are spoken by a probably shrinking minority of
the English-speaking population of the world, almost all of them in
England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. They are most easily found,
as far as England is concerned, in the more remote and peripheral rural
areas of the country, although some urban areas of northern and
western England still have many Traditional Dialect speakers. These
dialects differ very considerably from Standard English, and from each
other, and may be difficult for others to understand when they first
encounter them. People who say

She bain’t a-comin or Hoo inno comin or Her idden comin

‘She’s not coming’

are speaking Traditional Dialect. So are people who, for example,

pronounce bone as ‘bee-an’ [ben] or ‘bane’ [be:n] or ‘bwoon’ [bwυn].
Mainstream Dialects, on the other hand, include both the Standard
English Dialect and the Modern Nonstandard Dialects. Most native
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English speakers speak some variety of Mainstream Dialect. These

dialects are associated with native speakers outside the British Isles,
especially in recently settled areas which speak mixed colonial dialects,
such as Australia and most of America and Canada. In Britain, they are
particularly associated with those areas of the country from which
Standard English originally came – the southeast of England; with most
urban areas; with places which have become English-speaking only
relatively recently, such as the Scottish Highlands, much of Wales, and
western Cornwall; with the speech of most younger people; and with
middle- and upper-class speakers everywhere. The Mainstream Mod-
ern Nonstandard Dialects differ much less from Standard English and
from each other, and are often distinguished much more by their
pronunciation – their accent – than by their grammar. Mainstream
Dialect speakers might say, for example,

She’s not coming or She isn’t coming or She ain’t comin

They might also pronounce the word bone as ‘bown’ [b{υn], ‘boun’
[bɔυn] or ‘bawn’ [bɔ:n]. In this book we shall be discussing both the
Mainstream Modern Dialects spoken by the majority of the population,
and the older, minority Traditional Dialects.
The systematic scientific study of Traditional Dialects began rather
late in this country compared to many other European countries, but
much of what we shall be saying in this book about Traditional Dialects
will be based in part on the very important work of the Survey of
English Dialects. Inspired and conceived by Harold Orton, and based at
the University of Leeds, the Survey has been recording and reporting
on Traditional Dialects in England since the 1950s.

Dialect Areas
People often ask: how many dialects are there in England? This
question is impossible to answer. After all, how many places are there
to be from? If you travel from one part of the country to another, you
will most often find that the dialects change gradually as you go. The
further you travel, the more different the dialects will become from the
one in the place where you started, but the different dialects will seem
to merge into one another, without any abrupt transitions.
There are no really sharp dialect boundaries in England, and dialects
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certainly do not coincide with counties. Yorkshire Dialect, for instance,

does not suddenly change dramatically into Durham Dialect as you
cross the County Durham boundary. Indeed, the dialects of northern
Yorkshire are much more like those of County Durham than they are
like those of southern Yorkshire. Dialects form a continuum, and are
very much a matter of more-or-less rather than either/or. There is
really no such thing as an entirely separate, self-contained dialect.
Dialectologists often draw lines on maps dividing areas which have a
particular word or pronunciation from those which don’t. If they then
put all these lines together on a single map, they find that none of them
are in exactly the same place. Dialects differ from immediately neigh-
bouring dialects only slightly, and can be heard to change slowly and
word by word, pronunciation by pronunciation, as you travel from one
village to the next.
All the same, in this book we shall be talking about Traditional
Dialect and Modern Dialect areas as if there were such things as
separate dialects. This is a convenient thing to do. We realize that
dialects form a continuum, but for the sake of clarity and brevity, we
divide this continuum up into areas at points where it is least con-
tinuum-like. That is, we draw boundaries between dialect areas at
places where we find a situation most closely resembling an abrupt
transition. This has the advantage of fitting in with most people’s
perceptions of how dialects work. After all, if you can tell a Liverpud-
lian from a Mancunian by their speech, it will not necessarily worry
you that there may be places between Liverpool and Manchester whose
dialects you will have trouble in placing. However, in our discussions
of dialect areas, it must always be borne in mind that these areas are not
particularly firmly or permanently fixed, and that they can only be a
simplified approximation to what actually happens in real life. The
lines we draw on our maps dividing one dialect area from another
cannot easily be located at any precise point on the M4 motorway, the
London-to-Carlisle railway line, or anywhere else.

Origins of Dialect Differences

One very interesting question that is often asked is: where do different
dialects come from? Why are there dialects? Why is it that people in
different parts of the country speak differently? This is a difficult as
well as interesting question to answer, and one that we shall be tackling
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in later chapters also. The question is probably easier to answer if we

turn it round and ask: why doesn’t everybody in every part of England
speak the same? The answer is that English, like all other languages in
the world, is constantly changing, and that different changes take place
in different parts of the country. A change may start in a particular
location and spread out from there to cover neighbouring areas. Some
of these changes may spread so much that they eventually cover the
whole country. More often, though, changes will only spread so far,
leading to dialect differences between areas which have the new form
and areas which do not.
Often the spread of changes will be halted by barriers to communi-
cation such as countryside which is difficult to cross. One of the most
important dialect boundaries in England runs through the Fens, which
until quite recently was an isolated, swampy area which was very
difficult to get across. It is not an accident therefore that people in
Norfolk say laugh ‘lahf’ /la:f/ and butter ‘butter’ /b tə/ while people
v
in Lincolnshire say ‘laff’ /l{f/ and ‘bootter’ /bυtə/. As we shall see
later, the Norfolk pronunciations are newer forms which are the result
of changes which never made it across the Fens into Lincolnshire
because very few people made it across, because of the difficulties of the
terrain.
Language change is one of the most mystifying and fascinating
phenomena that dialectologists and linguistic scientists encounter. Some-
times we can explain language change by reference to external factors:
it is easy to account for the wholesale adoption by the English language
of very large numbers of originally French words by referring to the
Norman Conquest of England by French-speaking rulers in 1066. But
more often than not there is no such explanation, and we have to say
simply that it appears to be a natural characteristic of human languages
that they change – in pronunciation and grammar as well as vocabulary.
We are especially bad at explaining why a particular language change
occurs when and where it does rather than in some other place and at
some other time.
If we look far enough back in time we can see that it is often change
in language that has led to the growth of different languages in the first
place. The fact is that the languages we today call Swedish, Danish,
Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, German, Dutch, Frisian and English
were, around 2,000 years or so ago, all the same language. These
languages, which form what we now call the Germanic language family,
are all descended from a common ancestor of which we have no
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records. This original Germanic language, in its turn, is derived from

an ancestor language which is often called Indo-European, which was
spoken somewhere in Eurasia perhaps 6,000 years ago, and which is the
parent language not only of Germanic but also of Hindi, Bengali,
Persian, Sinhalese and nearly all the languages of Europe including
Russian, Lithuanian, Greek, Albanian, Italian and Welsh.
The break-up of the original Indo-European language into its mod-
ern descendants, and of the original Germanic language into English,
German, etc., were caused by the same phenomenon – language
change. What happened was that the language changed but that it
changed in different ways in different places. The more time that
elapsed, the more the language changed, and the more the different
varieties of the language drifted apart, until the descendants of people
who long ago all spoke the same language today speak many different
languages, most of which are totally mutually incomprehensible. We
can see that, for example, Dutch and Norwegian come from the same
family of languages as English when we notice the many similarities
that exist between them, such as:

Dutch Norwegian English

twee to two
drie tre three
huis hus house
man mann man
brood brød bread

But English speakers can still not understand Dutch or Norwegian

without first studying them. A thousand years ago they probably would
have been able to.
This same mechanism has been at work within the English language
itself ever since it was first brought to Britain by Germanic-speaking
invaders and settlers about 1,500 years ago. Even then the language was
not at all uniform. But over the intervening centuries the English
language has changed enormously, with the result that the Old English
or Anglo-Saxon language as written by King Alfred is no longer
comprehensible to us, and the mediaeval Middle English of Chaucer is
by no means easy to read, and would be even harder to understand if
we could hear it spoken.
As the language has changed in this way, it has changed in different
ways in different parts of the country, with the result that, as the
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centuries have gone by, differences between the dialects have increased.
The fact that English has been spoken in England for 1,500 years but
in Australia for only 200 explains why we have a great wealth of
regional dialects in England that is more or less totally lacking in
Australia. It is often possible to tell where an English person comes
from to within about 15 miles or less. In Australia, where there has not
been enough time for changes to bring about much regional variation,
it is almost impossible to tell where someone comes from at all,
although very small differences are now beginning to appear.

The Future
It is unlikely, however, that there will ever be as much dialectal
variation in Australia as there is in England. This is because modern
transport and communications conditions are very different from what
they were 1,500 or even 100 years ago. Even though English is now
spoken in many different parts of the world many thousands of miles
apart, it is very unlikely that English will ever break up into a number
of different non-intelligible languages in the same way that Indo-
European and Germanic did. German and Norwegian became different
languages because the ancestors of the speakers of these two languages
moved apart geographically, and were no longer in touch and com-
municating with one another. In the modern world, barring unforeseen
catastrophes, this will not happen, at least in the near future. As long
as Americans and British people, for instance, are in touch with one
another and want to communicate with one another, it is most unlikely
that their dialects will drift so far apart as to become different lan-
guages.
It is equally unlikely, however, that we will ever all end up speaking
the same dialect. From time to time, people who ought to know better
predict that in fifty years’ time all British and Australian people will be
speaking American English just like the Americans. This is clearly
nonsense. What is actually happening to the different varieties of
English seems to be this. At the moment, American and English
English are diverging in their pronunciation. In many respects, Ameri-
can and English accents are slowly getting more unlike one another.
This is because changes in pronunciation are taking place in America
which are not happening in England, and vice versa. To take just one
example, there is a growing tendency in American English to pro-
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nounce words like man as ‘mee-an’ [mən] which is not found at all in
Britain. Similarly, there is a growing tendency in Britain to pronounce
words like better as ‘be’er’ [bεʔə], with a glottal stop (see p. 77), which
is not found in America.
It may well be, therefore, that in 100 years’ time the different accents
will take a little more getting used to, and a little more concentration,
if we are to understand one another. It must be borne in mind, though,
that familiarity always breeds greater understanding. When talking-
films were first introduced into Britain from the United States, very
many people complained that they could not understand them. This
may seem very strange to us now, but of course until the 1930s the
vast majority of British people had never heard an American accent.
Now British people have no trouble in understanding the sort of
American English that appears on television because it is so familiar to
them.
The same tendency to divergence is probably also occurring in the
case of grammar, although it is a little harder to tell what is happening
here. The two varieties are in any case very similar grammatically, but
it seems that one or two further differences are beginning to emerge,
so that it may be that American and British English are moving slightly
further apart grammatically, albeit extremely slowly.
On the other hand, American and British English are probably
getting more alike when it comes to vocabulary. More and more words
are crossing the Atlantic in both directions. Until the 1950s, most
British people said wireless. Now most say radio. Many scores of words
now used quite naturally by all British speakers were formerly consid-
ered ‘Americanisms’. Twenty years ago Americans never used the
British and Australasian swear-word bloody. Now increasing numbers
of them are doing so. And so on.
This difference between what is happening with accents and what is
happening with words is quite easy to explain. It is a simple matter to
learn new words and expressions and add them to our vocabularies, and
all of us do this all our lives. We can even pick up words and phrases
from the radio and television, and with so many television programmes
crossing from Britain to America and vice versa it is not surprising that
words and fashionable phrases cross with them. Pronunciation, on the
other hand, is very different. Pronouncing our native dialect is some-
thing we all learn how to do very early in life, and it is a very complex
business indeed, involving the acquisition of deeply automatic pro-
cesses which require movements of millimetre accuracy and micro-
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second synchronization of our lips, jaw, tongue, soft palate and vocal
cords. Once this has been learned, it is very difficult indeed to unlearn,
which is why nearly all of us have a foreign accent when we try to speak
a new language. Accents do not therefore change nearly so readily.
What seems to be necessary for someone to change their accent, even
if only slightly, is for them to be in frequent face-to-face contact with
speakers with different accents. Scots probably hear London accents on
television every day of the week, but they do not acquire any features
of a London accent unless they move to London and spend large
amounts of time talking to Londoners. Nearly all British people,
similarly, are exposed to lots of American English, but the only British
people who acquire any features of an American accent are those who
spend time in America or otherwise spend a great deal of time inter-
acting with Americans.
The same is true of the role of the electronic media in influencing
the spread of linguistic changes within England itself. Television
obviously plays a role in influencing the words and phrases people use,
but it does not play any important part in influencing their accents or
the grammatical structure of their dialects. The point about the televi-
sion set is that you do not talk to it – and even if you do, it can’t hear
you.
The answer to the question of whether British and American English
are converging or diverging is therefore a complicated one: in some
ways they are converging, in other ways they are diverging. Either way,
it is nothing to worry about.

The Correctness of Dialects

We have to acknowledge, however, that there are plenty of people who
do worry about language change. England seems to be full of people
who write to the newspapers and the BBC complaining about the way
in which the language is ‘degenerating’, without appearing to realize
that the way they speak and write themselves is the result of thousands
of years of language change. They complain about ‘Americanisms’
(which are by definition bad for these complainers), and about ‘decay’
and ‘corruption’ in the English language, as well as about ‘sloppy
speech’ and ‘bad grammar’. These complaints are a very interesting
phenomenon, and one that seems to be repeated in every generation for
every language. Although language change is, as we have seen, natural
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and therefore inevitable, there always seems to be a minority of people

who speak the language in question who do not like it. There is of
course nothing that they can really do about language change, but they
continue to complain all the same.
Sometimes we can explain their horror in social terms. Objections to
‘Americanisms’ are presumably really objections to what the objectors
perceive to be symbolic of a threat to their culture and way of life.
(After all, very few people object to the introduction of, say, French
words into English, because French culture is not perceived as being
threatening.) Similarly, if they object to the increasing use of glottal
stops in words like better in English, this is presumably because the
glottal stop was formerly a feature of lower-social-class dialects which
is now beginning to find its way up the social scale in a way that some
older middle- and upper-class people might find threatening. In other
cases, however, we are simply reduced to saying that there will always
be some people who will object to anything that is new just because it
is new.
These intolerant people may also in some cases be the same people
who are critical of all English dialects other than Standard English.
There are a number of people who believe that Standard English is
‘correct English’, and that all other dialects are ‘wrong’. They seem to
believe, in fact, that Standard English is the English language, and that
all other dialects are in some way deviations from or corruptions of
Standard English. Historically, of course, this is not true. Standard
English has its origins in the older Traditional Dialects of the southeast
of England, and rose to prominence because this was the area in which
London, Oxford and Cambridge were situated, and which contained
the royal court and the government. If the capital of England had been,
say, York, then Standard English today would have shown a close
resemblance to northern dialects of English.
The fact is that all dialects, both Traditional and Modern, are
equally grammatical and correct. They differ only in their social
significance and function. As a result of a historical accident, the
Standard English dialect is today the dialect which is used in writing,
and which, by convention, is used for official purposes. This is why we
teach children in British schools to read and write in this dialect. This
does not mean, however, that there is anything wrong or linguistically
inferior about the other dialects, which, as we have noted, are spoken
by, and will undoubtedly continue to be spoken by, the majority of the
population of England.
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All dialects of English have their own perfectly valid grammars, and
we shall be looking at some aspects of these grammatical structures in
more detail in chapter 4. The fact that these grammars may differ in
some respects from Standard English does not make those grammars
wrong or inferior, merely different. In some cases, differences between
Standard English and other dialects are due to changes that have taken
place in Standard English. An example of this is the retention in the
nonstandard dialects of the older negative form, as in

I don’t want no dinner

which has been lost in Standard English. In other cases, it may be that
Standard English retains older forms which have been lost in other
dialects, such as verb forms like

I drew a picture

where certain other dialects might have newer forms such as

I drawed a picture

There is nothing linguistically superior about Standard English. It is

not more ‘pure’ or more correct than other forms of speech. It is not
even legitimate to claim that it is more ‘acceptable’ than other dialects,
unless we specify who it is acceptable to. There are very many people
who find Standard English highly unacceptable, at least in certain
situations. The superiority that Standard English has is social. As we
said above, we shall not be discussing the Standard English dialect to
any great extent in the rest of this book, since it has already been very
well and thoroughly described and discussed in our grammar books and
our dictionaries.

Differences in Language Use between Dialects

As we have seen, dialects differ in their pronunciation – their accents
– and in their grammar and vocabulary. All aspects of the language are
important in differentiating between dialects, although, as we have
seen, in the case of the Modern Dialects pronunciation is usually the
biggest clue as to where someone comes from. There is also one other
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difference between dialects, however, and one which is not so often

discussed as the others. The fact is that dialects also differ in terms of
how they are used by their speakers. There are different norms in
different dialect areas as to how language is supposed to be used, and
even what it is for.
Some urban dialect areas, for instance, are known for the ability of
their speakers to conduct conversations containing quickfire wit and
repartee. This is true, for instance, of Merseyside and of Cockney
speakers. In other areas, such as East Anglia, slower speech styles and
more sardonic wit is appreciated. This is part of a much wider pattern
in the world’s languages whereby different communities have different
ideas about what is good and bad in the use of language. Differences
can be found of many different types: how much people say, how
quickly they speak, how loudly they talk, the degree to which they talk
to strangers, when and whether they say please and thank-you, and so
on.
Within England these differences are usually not big enough to cause
serious problems of communication, but they do lead to stereotyping of
speakers from certain areas as having certain characteristics. The skilled
practitioners of Cockney-style conversations might be valued in Lon-
don as amusing and interesting, but are readily perceived by speakers
in neighbouring East Anglia as being arrogant and dominating. East
Anglians are correspondingly perceived by Londoners as being taciturn
and unfriendly, but will tell you if asked that they do not like to intrude
conversationally where they are not wanted. And so on. Dialects differ
in their conversational styles as well as in their accents, grammar and
vocabulary. This often emerges in anecdotes and tales about different
parts of the country. The following conversation could surely not have
taken place in London or Liverpool:

I was lost in a Norfolk lane, so I stopped a man and I said to

him: ‘Good morning!’
He looked at me. ‘Good morning,’ I cried. ‘Can you tell me
if I am right for Norwich?’
He continued to look at me. Then, in an uneasy, suspicious
way, he said: ‘What d’ye want to know for?’
I might have been annoyed, but leaning out of the car and
putting on an affable expression which I usually keep for tea-
parties, I said: ‘My dear old bor, I want to know because I want
to get to Norwich.’
15
 THE DIALECTS OF ENGLAND

The ghost of a smile flitted over his rustic face, and he

replied after some deep thought, rather reluctantly, and looking
away from me: ‘Well, you’re right!’1

Other Dialects and Languages

The dialects of English that we have mentioned so far are the Tradi-
tional Dialects of England; and the Mainstream Dialects, including
Standard English and the Modern Nonstandard Dialects. These of
course account for the majority of the population of the country. But
they do not account for the entire population. Many other forms of
English, and other languages, are also spoken in modern England.
There are many speakers of overseas varieties of English such as
American and Australian present in the country for shorter or longer
periods, and speakers of Welsh, Irish and Scottish forms of English are
naturally especially numerous. Other forms of English are brought with
them by foreign tourists, business people and other visitors such as
Germans and Japanese who speak English with different degrees of
proficiency, having learnt it for the most part at school as a foreign
language, each individual usually aiming as best he or she can at the
sort of English that English people speak without actually getting all
the way there.
Different from these forms of English are those that have been
brought to England by speakers from countries where English is not a
foreign but a second language. In countries such as India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Tanza-
nia, Singapore, Malta and many others, English is so widely used as the
language of education, government and wider communication, even
though there are no or very few native speakers, that distinctive,
institutionalized forms of English have developed. Indian English, for
instance, as spoken by highly educated Indians, has its own distinctive
characteristic words and pronunciations in the same way that American
English does.
Different again are the forms of English, now widely spoken in
England, that are of Caribbean origin. Some forms are clearly English
of a type which is Caribbean in the same way that Canadian English is
Canadian and Australian English Australian. Other forms of Caribbean
English, sometimes known as ‘patois’ or ‘creole’, are so unlike other
forms of English that it would be better in some ways to regard them
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 LANGUAGE VARIETY IN ENGLAND

as languages related to English rather than actually English. These

fascinating varieties of language derive most of their vocabulary from
English. Many of their grammatical structures, however, stem from
African languages and from the creativity of speakers from all over
West Africa who, during the early years of the Atlantic slave trade, had
as their only common language a limited amount of English which they
fashioned, out of their own mental resources, into normal languages of
considerable subtlety and complexity which nevertheless have an ab-
normal history. In some parts of England new forms of creole-influ-
enced English are spoken by some people of West Indian origin, and,
amongst certain groups of young people, by their non-West Indian
friends.
The poem ‘Inglan is a Bitch’ by the well-known Linton Kwesi
Johnson, part of which is given here, is written in a form of English
with a number of patois features.

well mi dbu day wok an mi dhu night wok

mi dhu clean wok an’ mi dhu dutty wok
dem seh dat black man is very lazy
but if y’u si how mi wok y’u woulda sey mi crazy

Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin’ it
Inglan is a bitch
y’u better face up to it

mi know dem have work, work in abundant

yet still, dem make mi redundant
now, at fifty-five mi gettin’ quite ol’
yet still, dem sen’ me fi goh draw dole

Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin’ it
Inglan is a bitch fi true
is whey wi a goh dhu ’bout it?2

In addition to these forms of English, we have to recognize that

many English cities are now very multilingual places, with London’s
schoolchildren in particular speaking, in addition to English, many
scores of different languages as their mother tongue. Languages such as
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 THE DIALECTS OF ENGLAND

Panjabi, Gujerati, Bengali, Italian, Greek, Maltese, Chinese, Turkish

and many others are very widely spoken in different parts of the
country.
These languages have come, of course, from overseas in relatively
recent times, but England has a long history of being multilingual. It
is a mistake to think of the country as having been entirely English-
speaking until modern times. In the early years of this century, for
instance, very many speakers of the Jewish language Yiddish were
concentrated in the East End of London, and Yiddish still has a
number of speakers in the country. Cornish was spoken in western
Cornwall until at least the eighteenth century. And in earlier centuries,
refugees speaking Dutch and French fled from religious persecution to
England and were present here in many cities in very large numbers
until they were gradually assimilated linguistically. Norwich, to take
just one example, was more than one-third Dutch-speaking in the
sixteenth century, and Dutch continued to be spoken there for over 200
years.
Earlier arrivals included the Gypsies, in late mediaeval times, who
spoke an Indo-European language originally from northern India,
closely related to Panjabi and Hindi, called Romany. Romany is prob-
ably not spoken in England any more, but it survives in Wales and is
widely spoken by Gypsies all over Europe and in North America. What
does, however, survive in England is a very interesting language called
Anglo-Romany which consists of Romany words spoken with English
grammar and English pronunciation. Here is an extract from St Luke’s
gospel (15.3–6) in Anglo-Romany:

Jesus pukkered them this parable: ‘Suppose tutti’s got a hun-

dred bokros and yek of them’s nasherdi. Is there a mush among
the lot of you as would not muk the wavver ninety-nine in the
bokro-puv and jel after the nasherdi bokro till he latchers it?
Karna he’s latchered it he riggers it on his dummer, well-
pleased he is. Karna he jels home he pukkers his friends and all
the foki around: ‘Be happy with mandi, because I’ve found my
nasherdi bokero.’3

In mediaeval times, too, England was a very multilingual place. In

the twelfth century Norwich contained sizeable groups of speakers of
English, French, Danish, Dutch and the Jewish form of Spanish
known as Ladino. Very probably, England has not been a monolingual
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 LANGUAGE VARIETY IN ENGLAND

country at all since the occupation of the originally Welsh-speaking

country by the Latin-speaking Romans.
There is also one other indigenous language that we must mention.
This is British Sign Language, the language used (although of course
not spoken) by the deaf community in this country. It has gradually
come to be recognized that this is a genuine language in its own right,
with its own structures and expressive power, and that it does not bear
a particularly close relationship to English. Like other minority lan-
guages, it has had a history of persecution at the hands of people who
have believed that it was not a ‘proper’ means of communication and
that the deaf would be better employed trying to learn English. But it
is undoubtedly a rich and subtle means of communication for those
who are congenitally deaf and without it their lives would be much the
poorer.
British Sign Language has recognizable regional dialects, with small
differences in the signs used in different parts of the country. We shall
nevertheless not be discussing BSL in the rest of this book. Nor shall
we be discussing the other languages of England, whether, like Cor-
nish, they arrived here before English or, like Panjabi, they arrived
after. This is a book about English, and we shall be looking only at
dialects of English in England. We shall, however, acknowledge the
debt that English owes to the other languages in its vocabulary. We will
also be saying that England would be a poorer place without its rich
pattern of regional dialects. The same is equally true of the rich pattern
of different languages that characterizes England in the late twentieth
century.

19