1.2 General notions of british dialects

In order to understand the nature and origin of conditions prevailing in dialects today we must learn to understand the circumstances which fostered them. And first of all we want to start from history of the English language.

English is descended from the language spoken by the Germanic tribes (the Frisians, Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) that migrated to the land that would become known as England. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, around 449 AD, Vortigern, King of the British Isles, issued an invitation to the "Angle kin" (Angles, led by Hengest and Horsa) to help him against the Picts. In return, the Angles were granted lands in the southeast. Further aid was sought, and in response "came men of Ald Seaxum of Anglum of Iotum" (Saxons, Angles, and Jutes). The Chronicle documents the subsequent influx of "settlers" who eventually established seven kingdoms: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Kent, Essex, Sussex, and Wessex.

These Germanic invaders dominated the original Celtic-speaking inhabitants, the languages of whom survived largely in Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland. The dialects spoken by these invaders formed what would be called Old English which was a very similar language to modern Frisian which was also strongly influenced by yet another Germanic dialect, Old Norse, spoken by Viking invaders who settled mainly in the North-East. English, England, and East Anglia are derived from words referring to the Angles: Englisc, Angelcynn, and Englaland.

For the 300 years following the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Kings of England spoke only French. A large number of French words were assimilated into Old English, which also lost most of its inflections, the result being Middle English. Around the year 1500, the Great Vowel Shift transformed Middle English to Modern English.

Modern English began its rise around the time of William Shakespeare. Some scholars divide early Modern English and late Modern English at around 1800, in concert with British conquest of much of the rest of the world, as the influence of native languages affected English enormously./18/

As for the United Kingdom until 1700 the small population was sparsely distributed and largely rural and agricultural, much as it had been in medieval times. From the mid-18th century, scientific and technological innovations created the first modern industrial state, while, at the same time, agriculture was undergoing technical and tenurial changes and revolutionary improvements in transport made easier the movement of materials and people. As a result, by the first decade of the 19th century, a previously mainly rural population had been largely replaced by a nation made up of industrial workers and town dwellers.

The rural exodus was a long process. The breakdown of communal farming started before the 14th century; and subsequently enclosures advanced steadily, especially after 1740, until a century later open fields had virtually disappeared from the landscape. Many of the landless agricultural laborers so displaced were attracted to the better opportunities for employment and the higher wage levels existing in the growing industries; their movements, together with those of the surplus population produced by the contemporary rapid rise in the birth rate, resulted in a high volume of internal migration that took the form of a movement toward the towns.

Industry, as well as the urban centers that inevitably grew up around it, was increasingly located near the coalfields, while the railway network, which grew rapidly after 1830, enhanced the commercial importance of many towns. The migration of people especially young people, from the country to industrialized towns took place at an unprecedented rate in the early railway age, and such movements were relatively confined geographically.

Soon after World War I, new interregional migrations flow commenced when the formerly booming 19th-century industrial and mining districts lost much of their economic momentum. Declining or stagnating heavy industry in Clydeside, northeastern England, South Wales, and parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire swelled the ranks of the unemployed, and the consequent outward migration became the drift to the relatively more prosperous Midlands and southern England. This movement of people continued until it was arrested by the relatively full employment conditions that obtained soon after the outbreak of World War II.

In the 1950-s, opportunities for employment in the United Kingdom improved with government sponsored diversification of industry, and this did much to reduce the magnitude of the prewar drift to the south. The decline of certain northern industries - coal mining shipbuilding, and cotton textiles in particular - had nevertheless reached a critical level by the late 1960s, and the emergence of new growth points in the West Midlands and southwestern England made the drift to the south a continuing feature of British economic life. Subsequently, the area of most rapid growth shifted to East Anglia, the South West, and the East Midlands. This particular spatial emphasis resulted from the deliberately planned movement of people to the New Towns in order to relieve the congestion around London./9/

Increasing democratization of society in the XIX century, together with improved communications, began the slow process of exposing everyone to the rich variety of regional dialects existing in the country. On the other hand, the same developments spread the powerful influence of the standard form of the language, and progress in education, in the professions, and in society continued to depend on the possession of an acceptable accent and a grasp of the "correct" grammar and vocabulary. In the course of time the British Broadcasting Corporation would come to select its announcers and newsreaders on considerations of accent which went far beyond the dictates of intelligibility.

Yet with their roots firmly fixed in the history of the language, the dialects of England have persisted through the generations. Whatever was useful in each new age has been added to local speech as well as to the standard "supra-dialect": Scandinavian and French words through invasion; Classical and Romance words in the Renaissance; words from many other languages through colonization and trade; continuous changes in pronunciation.

Thus English belongs to the western sub-branch of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languages. The closest undoubted living relatives of English are Scots and Frisian. Frisian is a language spoken by approximately half a million people in the Dutch province of Friesland, in nearby areas of Germany, and on a few islands in the North Sea.

After Scots and Frisian, the next closest relative is the modern Low Saxon language of the eastern Netherlands and northern Germany. Other less closely related living languages include Dutch, Afrikaans, German and the Scandinavian languages. English speakers understand many French words, as English absorbed a tremendous amount of vocabulary from the Norman language after the Norman conquest and from French in further centuries; as a result, a substantial part of English vocabulary is quite close to the French, with some minor spelling differences (word endings, use of old French spellings, etc.), as well as occasional differences in meaning.

Unlike other languages English is analytic (i.e., relatively uninflected). Over thousands of years English has lost most of its inflexions, while other European languages have retained more of theirs. Indeed, English is the only European language in which adjectives have no distinctive endings, except for determiners and endings denoting degrees of comparison. Another characteristic is flexibility of functions. This means that one word can function as various parts of speech in different contexts (ex: the word "walk" can be used both as a noun and a verb). Another feature is openness of vocabulary that allows English to admit words freely from other languages and to create compounds and derivatives. English is a strongly stressed language with 4 degrees of stress: primary, secondary, tertiary and weak. A change in stress can change the meaning of a sentence or a phrase. In comparison with other languages English stress is less predictable.

The English vocabulary has changed continually over more than 1,500 years of development. The most nearly complete dictionary of the language, the Oxford English Dictionary, contains more than 600,000 words, including obsolete forms and variant spellings. It has been estimated, however, that the present English vocabulary consists of more than 1 million words, including slang and dialect expressions and scientific and technical terms, many of which only came into use after the middle of the XX century. The vocabulary is approximately half Germanic (Old English and Scandinavian) and half Italic or Romance (French and Latin), with copious borrowings from Greek in science and borrowings from many other languages. The English adopted the 23-letter Latin alphabet, to which they added the letters W, J, V. For the most part English spelling is based on that of the XV century. Pronunciation, however, has changed greatly since then. During the XVII and XVIII centuries fixed spellings were adopted, although there have been a few changes since that time. Numerous attempts have been made to reform English spelling, many during the XX century. The English vocabulary is more extensive than that of any other language in the world, although some other languages—Chinese, for example—have a word-building capacity equal to that of English. /18/

1.3 LOCAL DIALECTS ON THE BRITISH ISLES

On the British Isles there are some local varieties of English which developed from Old English local dialects. There are six groups of them: Lowland (Scottish), Northern, Western, Midland, Eastern, Southern. These varieties are used in oral speech by the local population. Only the Scottish dialect has its own literature (R. Burns). There are some origins of dialects which are the most popular.

Estuary English is a name given to the formulation(s) of English widely spoken in South East England and the East of England; especially along the River Thames and its estuary, which is where the two regions meet. Estuary English is commonly described as a hybrid of Received Pronunciation (RP) and South Eastern Accents, particularly from the London, Kent and Essex area — i.e., the area around the Thames Estuary.

The term Cockney is often used to refer to working-class people of London, particularly east London, and the slang used by these people. It is also often used in reference to the "cockney accent." A "true" cockney is often said to be someone born within earshot of the Bow Bells, i.e. the bells of St Mary-le-Bow church in Cheapside in the City of London (which is not itself in the East End).

East Anglian English is a dialect of English spoken in East Anglia. This easternmost area of England was probably home to the first-ever form of language which can be called English. East Anglian English has had a very considerable input into the formation of Standard English, and contributed importantly to the development of American English and (to a lesser extent) Southern Hemisphere Englishes; it has also experienced multilingualism on a remarkable scale. However, it has received little attention from linguistic scholars over the years. East Anglian English contains: Norfolk dialect (Broad Norfolk) and Suffolk dialect.

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 below).

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.

The West Country accent is said to be pure native Anglo Saxon. Academically the regional variations are considered to be just dialect forms. The Survey of English Dialects captured manners of speech across the West Country that were just as different from Standard English as anything from the far North. Close proximity has completely different dialects such as Cornish, which is a Celtic language related to Welsh, and more closely to Breton.

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).

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.

Welsh English, Anglo-Welsh, or Wenglish refers to the dialects of English spoken in Wales by Welsh people. The dialects are significantly influenced by Welsh grammar and often include words derived from Welsh. In addition to the distinctive words and grammar, there is a variety of accents found across Wales.

Scottish English is usually taken to mean the standard form of the English language used in Scotland, often termed Scottish Standard English. It is the language normally used in formal, non-fiction written texts in Scotland. Although the terminology has often been used vaguely, modern usage distinguishes clearly between Scottish English and Scots.

Manx English, or Anglo-Manx, is the dialect of English which was formerly spoken by the people of the Isle of Man. It has many borrowings from the original Manx language, a Goidelic language, and it differs widely from any other English, including other Celtic-derived dialects such as Welsh English and Hiberno-English. Early strata of Anglo-Manx contain much of Gaelic and Norse origin, but more recent Anglo-Manx displays heavy influence from Liverpool and Lancashire in North West England. A.W. Moore noted that the dialect varied to some slight extent from parish to parish and from individual to individual, but in the main the same turns of phrase and the same foundational stock of words pervaded the whole Island. In recent years, the Anglo-Manx dialect has almost disappeared in the face of increasing immigration and cultural influence from the United Kingdom. A few words remain in general use, but apart from the Manx accent, little remains of this dialect and it is seldom heard on the island in its original form today.

Hiberno-English — known more commonly as Irish English — is spoken in Ireland and is the result of the interaction of the English and Irish languages. English was mainly brought to Ireland during the Plantations of Ireland in the sixteenth century and established itself in Dublin and in the area of Leinster known as the Pale. It was later introduced into Ulster during the Plantation of Ulster through Belfast and the Lagan Valley in the seventeenth century. The linguistic influence of the Irish language is most evident in Gaeltachtaí, areas where Irish is still spoken, as well as in areas where, before the complete adoption of English, Irish continued to be spoken for longer than in other areas.

The standard spelling and grammar of Irish-English are largely the same as UK English. However, some unique characteristics exist, especially in the spoken language, owing to the influence of the Irish language on the pronunciation of English. Due in most part to the influence of the US media abroad, many words and phrases of American English have become interchangeable with their Irish-English equivalents, most especially with the youngest generations. British English, however, remains the greatest influence on grammar, spelling and lexicon on English in the Republic of Ireland./28/