East Midlands English

East Midlands English was a dialect traditionally spoken in those parts of Mercia lying East of Watling Street (the A5 London - Shrewsbury Road). Today this area is represented by the counties of the East Midlands of England, (Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Rutland and Northamptonshire, ). [See Appendix2] The dialect of the East Midlands, once filled with interesting variations from county to county, is now predominantly RP.  R's are dropped, but h's are pronounced.  The only signs that differentiate it from RP:

• ou > u: (so go becomes /gu:/).

• RP yu; becomes u: after n, t, d...  as in American English. [12; 208]

West Midlands English

West Midlands English is a group of dialects of the English language. The traditional Black Country dialect preserves many archaic traits of Early Modern English and even Middle English, and can be very confusing for outsiders. The thick Black Country dialect is less commonly heard today than in the past. Varieties of West Midlands English: Black Country (Yam Yam), Brummie (spoken in Birmingham), Potteries (North Staffordshire), Herefordshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Cheshirian dialect. The West Country dialects and West Country accents are generic terms applied to any of several English dialects and accents used by much of the indigenous population of the southwestern part of England, the area popularly known as the West Country. This region encompasses Bristol, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset, while Gloucestershire and Wiltshire are usually also included, although the northern and eastern boundaries of the area are hard to define and sometimes even wider areas are encompassed. This is the dialect of Ozzie Osbourne!  While pronunciation is not that different from RP, some of the vocabulary is:

• are > am

• am, are (with a continuous sense) > bin

• is not > ay

• are not > bay [12; 104]

Northern English

Northern English is a group of dialects of the English language. It includes Northumbrian, which is more similar in some respects to Scots. Among the other dialects are Cumbrian, Tyke (Yorkshire dialect) and Scouse. Northern English shows Viking influence because the area was all north of the Danelaw. Norwegian has had a greater impact on most northern dialects than Danish, but the East Riding of Yorkshire has been influenced more by Danish. There are also Irish influences on accents at Liverpool, Birkenhead and Middlesbrough. Northern English is one of the major groupings of British English, which also goes for East Anglian English, Midlands English and Southern English. Northern English contains: Cumbrian dialect, Geordie (spoken in the Newcastle upon Tyne/Greater Tyneside area), Lancashire, Mackem (spoken in Sunderland/Wearside), Pitmatic (two variations, one spoken in the former mining communities of County Durham and the other in Northumberland), Scouse (spoken in Liverpool with variations as far as North Wales), Tyke (spoken in Yorkshire).

The Northern dialect closely resembles the southern-most Scottish dialects.  It retains many old Scandinavian words, such as bairn for child, and not only keeps its r's, but often rolls them.  The most outstanding version is Geordie, the dialect of the Newcastle area.

Geordie

Geordie speech is a direct continuation and development of the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxon settlers of this region. They consisted of mercenaries employed by the ancient Brythons to fight the Pictish invaders after the end of Roman rule in Britannia in the 5th century; the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who thus arrived became, over time, ascendant politically and — through population transfer from tribal homelands in northern Europe — culturally over the native British. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that emerged during the Dark Ages spoke largely mutually-intelligible varieties of what is now called Old English, each varying somewhat in phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. This Anglo-Saxon influence on Geordie can be seen today, to the extent that poems by the Anglo-Saxon scholar the Venerable Bede translates more successfully into Geordie than into modern-day English. Thus, in northern England, dominated by the kingdom of Northumbria, was found a distinct "Northumbrian" Old English dialect.

A number of rival theories explain how the term came about, though all accept that it derives from a familiar diminutive form of the name George, which was "a very common name among the pitmen (coal miners) in the north-east of England; indeed, it was once the most popular name for eldest sons in the region.

One explanation is that it was established during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. The Jacobites declared that the natives of Newcastle were staunch supporters of the Hanoverian kings, in particular of George II during the 1745 rebellion. This contrasted with rural Northumbria, which largely supported the Jacobite cause. If true, the term may have derived from the popular anti-Hanoverian song "Cam Ye O'er Frae France?", which calls the first Hanoverian king "Geordie Whelps", meaning "George the Guelph".

Another explanation for the name is that local miners in the north east of England used Geordie safety lamps, designed by George Stephenson, known locally as "Geordie the engine-wright", in 1815 rather than the competing Davy lamps designed by Humphry Davy which were used in other mining communities. Using the chronological order of two John Trotter Brockett books, Geordie was given to North East pitmen; later he acknowledges that the pitmen also christened their Stephenson lamp Geordie.

Linguist Katie Wales also dates the term earlier than does the Oxford English Dictionary; she observes that Geordy (or Geordie) was a common name given to coal mine pit-men in ballads and songs of the region, noting that such usage turns up as early as 1793. It occurs in the titles of two songs by song-writer Joe Wilson: Geordy, Haud the Bairn and Keep your Feet Still, Geordie. Citing such examples as the song Geordy Black written by Rowland Harrison of Gateshead, she contends that, as a consequence of popular culture, the miner and the keelman had become icons of the region in the 19th century, and "Geordie" was a label that "affectionately and proudly reflected this," replacing the earlier ballad emblem, the figure of Bob Crankie.

Newcastle publisher Frank Graham's Geordie Dictionary states:

The origin of the word Geordie has been a matter of much discussion and controversy. All the explanations are fanciful and not a single piece of genuine evidence has ever been produced.

Graham is backed up historically by John Camden Hotten, who wrote in 1869: "Geordie, general term in Northumberland and Durham for a pitman, or coal-miner. Origin not known; the term has been in use more than a century.". Geordie has also been documented for at least 180 to 240 years as meaning the whole of the North East of England.

Bad-weather Geordy was a name applied to cockle sellers:

As the season at which cockles are in greatest demand is generally the most stormy in the year - September to March - the sailors' wives at the seaport towns of Northumberland and Durham consider the cry of the cockle man as the harbinger of bad weather, and the sailor, when he hears the cry of 'cockles alive,' in a dark wintry night, concludes that a storm is at hand, and breathes a prayer, backwards, for the soul of Bad-Weather-Geordy.

Travel writer Scott Dobson used the term "Geordieland" in a 1973 guidebook to refer collectively to Northumberland and Durham.

• -er > /æ/, so father > /fædhæ/.

• /ou/ > /o:'/, so that boat sounds like each letter is pronounced.

• talk > /ta:k/

• work > /work/

• book > /bu:k/

• my > me

• me > us

• our > wor

• you plural > youse

• The accents of Northern England generally do not use a /ɑː/. so cast is pronounced [kast] rather than the [kɑːst]

• The Received Pronunciation phonemes /eɪ/ (as in face) and /əʊ/ (as in goat) are often pronounced as monophthongs (such as [eː] and [oː], or even as older diphthongs such as /ɪə/ and /ʊə/).[6;68]

Lancashire

Lancashire are dialects belonging to two groups of English dialects: West Midland in the south and Northern in the north.[See Appendix 2] The boundary represented originally the boundary between Mercia and Northumbria and in modern times has tended to move further north. The dialects of south Lancashire have been much affected by the development of large urban areas centred on Liverpool and Manchester.

There is also some evidence of Scandinavian influence - possibly linked to the medieval Norse settlements of West Lancashire and neighbouring Wirral Peninsula in Cheshire. For example - the Lancastrian dialect word 'skrike' (meaning to cry out, to weep or shriek - definition from Crosby (2000)) is found in other places such as Lowland Scotland. Sources link this word to the Old Norse skrika - meaning scream.

The Lancashire Dictionary stated that the Furness (Barrow, Ulverston etc.) had always had more in common with Cumbrian (Cumberland and Westmorland) dialect than with the rest of Lancashire, and so excluded it; with regards to Scouse, the accent is gradually spreading amongst younger people in Merseyside in certain areas. According to Crosby, the "border" between Scouse and Lancashire dialect is loosely estimated between Garswood and Bryn. However, Lancastrian accents are found west of Garswood, most notably in St Helens as shown in the accents of local celebrities and broadcasters such as Johnny Vegas and Ray French. Steven Gerrard from Whiston, Merseyside sounds notably different to Vegas (originally from Thatto Heath). This illustrates that the variation between Scouse and St Helens accents occurs within only a few miles.

This dialect, spoken north and east of Liverpool, has the southern habit of dropping r's.  Other features:

• /œ/ > /u/, as in luck (/luk/).

• /ou/ > /oi/, as in hole (/hoil/)

• Words such as cold and old are pronounced cowd and owd

• Use of a /z/ sound for an /s/ as in bus /bʊz/

• The word self is reduced to sen or sel, depending on the part of Lancashire.

• Make and take normally become meck and teck. In older dialect, parts of north and east Lancashire used mack and tack. [11; 136]

Scouse

Scouse is the very distinctive Liverpool accent, a version of the Lancashire dialect, that the Beatles made famous.[See Appendix 2] The Scouse accent is highly distinctive, and has little in common with those used in the neighbouring regions of Cheshire and Lancashire. The word "scouse" is a shortened form of "lobscouse", derived from the Norwegian lapskaus (and/or the Low German Labskaus), a word for a meat stew commonly eaten by sailors. In the 19th century, people who commonly ate "scouse" such as local dockers, families and sailors became known as "scousers" especially in the north end of Liverpool and the "Wallasey Pool".

• the tongue is drawn back.

• /th/ and /dh/ > /t/ and /d/ respectively.

• final k sounds like the Arabic q.

• for is pronounced to rhyme with fur.

• /θ/ becomes /f/ in all environments. [θɪŋk] becomes [fɪŋk] for "think.

• /ð/ becomes /v/ in all environments except word-initially, in which case it becomes /d/.

• The use of 'giz' instead of 'give us'.

Scouse is highly distinguishable from other English dialects and because of this international recognition on 16 September 1996 Keith Szlamp made a request to IANA to make it a recognised Internet dialect. After citing a number of references, the application was accepted on 25 May 2000 and now allows Internet documents that use the dialect to be categorised as 'Scouse' by using the language tag "en-Scouse".[11; 95]

Yorkshire

There is much variation in this region, some very local; the Survey of English Dialects identified many different accents in Yorkshire. On a large scale, there are differences between a Dales dialect and a Scarborough dialect – both of which can be, in turn, very hard for outsiders to understand. Even relatively close places, for example, Harrogate and Leeds, a mere 13 miles (21 km) apart, have distinct accents and even dialects, Natives will usually have little difficulty in identifying that a speaker is from a different, though close, town (for example, "dee" ("thee") and "da" ("thou").

The Yorkshire Dialect Society draws a border roughly at the River Wharfe between two main zones. The area to the southwest of the river is more influenced by Mercian dialect whilst that to the northeast is more influenced by Northumbrian dialect. The distinction was first made by A.J. Ellis in On Early English Pronunciation. It was approved of by Joseph Wright, the founder of the Yorkshire Dialect Society and the author of the English Dialect Dictionary.

The East Riding dialect has many similarities with the Danish language. The West Riding is less pure in its influence, also containing elements of Icelandic, Norman and Saxon. However, many of the characteristics that have sharply divided the two areas have now passed out of use.

The Yorkshire dialect is known for its sing-song quality, a little like Swedish, and retains its r's.

Some features of Yorkshire pronunciation are general features of northern English accents. Yorkshire speakers have short [a] in words like bath, grass, and chance as opposed to the long [ɑː] of Received Pronunciation (RP). Yorkshire speakers tend to have no contrast between /ʊ/ /ʌ/, making pairs of words like put and putt homophones, both pronounced as the former with /ʊ/.

Most Yorkshire accents are non-rhotic, but rhotic accents do exist in some areas that border with Lancashire. Parts of the East Riding had rhotic accents traditionally, but this is now highly recessive.

• /œ/ > /u/, as in luck (/luk/).

• the is reduced to t'.

• initial h is dropped.

• was > were.

• still use thou (pronounced /tha/) and thee.

• aught and naught (pronounced /aut/ or /out/ and /naut/ or /nout/) are used for anything and nothing.

• Definite article reduction: shortening of the to a form without a vowel, often written t'. Down the pub is pronounced downt pub, where the t represents a sound more like a glottal stop than a true t sound.

• The weak form of with is pronounced wi'.

• The word us is often used in place of me or in the place of our (e.g. we should put us names on us property), also common is to use the sound ahs in place of us, ah in place of our, and me in place of my (for example, we should put ahs name on ah property).

• Where and there often become a diphthong [iə] leading to pronunciation as whia and thia with the a representing a schwa.

In some areas, it can be noticed that dialects and phrases can vary greatly within regions too. For example, the Lancashire dialect has many sub-dialects and varies noticeably from town to town. Even within as little as 5 miles there can be an identifiable change in accent. The Yorkshire Dialect Society has always separated West Riding dialect from that in the North and East ridings.[5;76]

Conclusion

Summing up the results of this research -the English language is not homogeneous. It has many varieties even within the boundaries of England. This variation has been predetermined by historical and social factors. According to A.D. Shweitzer «the impact of social factors on language is not confined to linguistic reflexes of class structure and should be examined with due regard for the meditating role of all class-derived elements – social groups, strata, occupational, cultural and other groups including primary units (small groups).»

In the process of research an attempt was made to find out the characteristic features of the present day varieties of the English language in the United Kingdom .The research paper enabled to attain the following objectives:

1. The definition of the notion “dialect” was given.

2. A substantial analysis of the major UK dialects was related in the research paper.

Dialect is a variety of a language that is usually associated with a geographical region. Dialects have a distinctive vocabulary and grammar, and when people speak in dialect they use an associated local accent.

In considering the history and development of the English language it may be maintained that a regional variety of English is a complex of regional standard norms and dialects. Every regional variety is characterized by a set of features which makes this dialect difficult for outsiders to understand it.

The comparative analysis of the language system of the regional varieties of English highlights the differences in the pronunciation in the system of consonant and vowel phonemes, in intonation, and in lexis.

The research paper emphasizes the most notable aspects of dialects’ usage which are important for specialists majoring in English and for those who study it as a foreign language. The more we know about regional variation and change in the use of English, the better one is exposed to comprehend the differences of English in England proper.

For certain geographical, economic, political and cultural reasons one of the dialects becomes the standard language of the nation and its pronunciation or its accent – the received standard pronunciation. This was the case of London dialect, whose accent became the «RP» («Received Pronunciation») of Britain.

It has been estimated that the standard pronunciation of a country is not homogeneous. It changes in relation to other languages, and also to geographical, psychological, social and political influences. In England, for example, we distinguish «conservative, general and advanced RP».

As a result of certain social factors in the post-war period – the growing urbanization, spread of education and the impact of mass media, Standard English is exerting an increasing powerful influence on the regional dialects of Great Britain. Recent surveys of British English dialects have revealed that the pressure of Standard English is so strong that many people are bilingual in a sense that they use an imitation of RP with their teachers and lapse into their native local accent when speaking among themselves. In this occasion the term diglossia should be introduced to denote a state of linguistic duality in which the standard literary form of a language and one of its regional dialects are used by the same individual in different social situations. This phenomenon should not be mixed up with bilingualism that is the command of two different languages. In the case of both diglossia and bilingualism the so-called code-switching takes place.

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