7 English in Britain
Richard Hogg
7.1Introduction
We can be certain that, for as long as the English language has been established in Britain, so dialect variation has also existed. If we examine dialect variation in present-day English, even if it is possible to assume that there is a single over-arching speech community which makes up the language which we might, for the lack of a better term and with acknowledgement of the insult thereby perpetrated on the Irish, call ‘British English’, there remains the problem of what we recognise as the dialects of that community. We could simply recognise the individual nations, and talk about English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish dialects. But it takes only a moment to see that that will not do. The speaker from Kent does not see his or her dialect as the same as that of someone from Newcastle, any more than speakers from Aberdeen and Glasgow think that they share a single dialect.
Suppose, however, that we were able to set out a geography of British English dialects which somehow overcame the above points. Dialects are not merely a matter of geography. For dialects vary by much more than geography. Speakers vary in age, gender, social class and, increasingly, ethnicity. So, speakers from the same geographical area must differ from each other because of their age, their gender, and other social variables. All these variations may cause difficulties for the student of present-day English. But for the historian of English they are even worse. Amongst the questions which we will have to face up to, the most basic, here, as elsewhere, concern the question of data. This question confronts historical dialectology in several forms.
Firstly, there is the issue of who our informants might be. Not only are there no recordings of informants for any period significantly before the twentieth century, but the only material we have before then is in the form of written texts. This leads to a second issue. Speakers vary not only in geography, but also in age, gender, social class and ethnicity. If we are dealing with English before the twentieth century, then ethnicity is a not a serious issue (although instances of exceptions to this can be found). But class and gender are ever present.
These present difficulties of their own in the context of written language. For, overwhelmingly, our written texts are produced by men of the upper classes. It is true that female writing can be found from the time of the Paston Letters
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in the fifteenth century (although male scribes were used by the non-literate women), but it cannot be denied that women are significantly under-represented in every period until, and including, the present. Proportionately, it may well be the case that lower-class speech, in terms of written material, is even more poorly represented than female speech. Even age causes problems. For, in every historical period, the majority of data comes from the middle-aged.
The picture I have painted above must seem depressing. But to understand the problem is, as always, half way to the solution. We do have to acknowledge the limitations of our methods and data. But we do not have to submit to them. Indeed, such limitations make the study of historical dialectology more interesting. One way in which this happens is intimately connected with the history of English dialectology itself. We should start our story with the coming of English to Britain. Note that the use of the term English above is one that I, and others who are not, in the sense of national identity, English, find unappealing. Yet there is no helpful alternative, even if it excludes, wrongly, many Irish dialects. I can only hope that the variations I use will be unambiguous in context.
7.2Old English
When the Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain, they came from a variety of Germanic tribes and the language they spoke is often described as a dialect of Germanic. Thus, for example, Prokosch (1939: 31) talks about dialect groups, and this usage is quite common in works written from a Germanic or IndoEuropean standpoint. It is usually held that English as a unity was transmitted to the prehistoric period of English. As the founding father of the history of English, Henry Sweet, wrote (1876: 560–1), ‘What were the dialectal distinctions in English during the first few centuries of the conquest of Britain? The answer is that they were very slight.’ This is a reflection of the era in which Sweet was writing. It was a time when the nation-state was pre-eminent, and in linguistics the Neogrammarian revolution was on the point of bursting forth. It is certainly true that we have very little evidence indeed about dialectal variety in English before, at the earliest, around 700, when the first vernacular texts begin to appear. And these first texts do not in themselves provide convincing evidence of substantial dialectal variety.
However, there are important theoretical objections to Sweet’s view. Most writers believe in some form of the theory of linguistic uniformitarianism. This states, roughly, that whatever holds today must also have held true for the past. And since we know that dialect variation holds true today, it must therefore hold true at every time in the past history of English. In particular, there must have been dialect variation throughout the Old English period too. Of course, the emergence of dialectal varieties is gradual, and there may well be valid arguments about how to evaluate evidence of dialect variation in particular cases; see, for example the
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Figure 7.1 Anglo-Saxon England (from Hogg, 1992a: 419)
argument between DeCamp (1958) and Samuels (1971) about the origins of Old English dialects.
How, then, are Old English dialects conventionally delimited? In his Old English Grammar Alistair Campbell writes (1959: 4): ‘In the extant Old English monuments four well-marked dialects are to be traced, Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon, and Kentish.’ This is a standard view, although, as we shall see,
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Campbell’s position is actually more sophisticated than this. Nevertheless, this picture, which can already be found in Sweet’s work, is substantially the one found in almost all textbooks. Once manuscripts begin to appear in substantial numbers, it gradually becomes clear that they can be assigned to one of the above four dialects on linguistic grounds alone. These grounds include the evidence of palaeography, i.e. the study of the manuscripts themselves, since such matters as letter-shapes are important and may give clues about the provenance of texts. There may also be evidence of where particular texts are located geographically, although such evidence is often insecure.
As far as the texts themselves are concerned, it turns out that the evidence is much more patchy than we could have wished for. Of all the texts available to us, the vast majority come from the eleventh century, and, if we exclude the poetry, for reasons to which we shall have to return, a very large proportion are written in a form of West Saxon. To stick to the traditional dialect areas, we can suggest that all the texts we have can be assigned to West Saxon, with the following exceptions:
Northumbrian: (a) a small number of eighth-century, mainly poetic, texts, e.g. Cædmon’s Hymn, Bede’s Death Song, and the runic inscription from the Ruthwell Cross; (b) an extensive group of late tenth century interlinear glosses, of which the best known are the glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels and the
Northumbrian part of the Rushworth Gospels (see immediately below). Mercian: (a) a group of eighthand ninth-century Latin to English glossaries,
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namely the Epinal, Erfurt and Corpus Glossaries; (b) the ninth-century gloss to the Vespasian Psalter; (c) the Mercian gloss to the Rushworth Gospels, see immediately above.
Kentish: (a) a series of charters from Kent and surrounding areas dating from throughout the ninth century; (b) some short texts and glosses to Proverbs, all from the tenth century.
In West Saxon itself, the first substantial group of texts appear just before and after 900, and these are texts associated with the court of Alfred the Great, notably the Cura Pastoralis (Pastoral Care), the first parts of the Anglo-Saxon
(Parker) Chronicle, and the translation of Orosius. There are a number of texts in the second half of the tenth-century, but the great bulk of texts appear around 1000, when the texts of Ælfric and, a decade or so later, Wulfstan were composed, followed by much more material for the following decades until the effects of the Norman Conquest are felt.
The reason why the position is different with regard to the poetry is that almost all the poetry is contained in four manuscripts, namely the Vercelli Book, the Exeter Book, the Beowulf manuscript, and the Junius manuscript, all of which can be dated to around 1000. Undoubtedly many of the poetic texts were composed much earlier than this – for example a fragment of the Dream of the Rood, which is found in the Vercelli Book, is also found on the eighth-century runic inscription on the Ruthwell Cross, see further below. But from the point of view of dialectology
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the crucial factor is that all four manuscripts are written in a dialect which seems to be a mixture of West Saxon and Anglian forms without much clear linguistic evidence of their ultimate origins.
I have already alluded to questions of diachrony. Clearly, Old English dialects must have been subject to variation through time as well as through geography. Yet the picture we have painted above has ignored that issue. Diachronic change in the Old English period certainly occurred, but some aspects of such change can be contentious. We shall have to return to them later. To understand such variation, we need to tackle the question sideways. We also have to note that a complete account of Old English dialects is always going to be impossible. There are simply not enough texts: we are missing, for example, texts from an area such as East Anglia, despite the fact that it was one of the first areas settled by the English. In such cases it is possible, to some extent, to work back from the Middle English evidence, but this can only take us so far.
With these reservations in mind, let us now look in more detail at the traditional view of Old English dialectology. Historically, the emphasis has always been on questions of variation in phonology and morphology. There are good reasons why this should be so. The most obvious of these is that, in a historical period where the raw material, i.e. texts, are scanty, it is easier to concentrate on features which are relatively abundant. Syntax, in particular, requires a great deal of material before generalisations can be made. But in both phonology and morphology only a little can go a long way.
However, a more compelling reason than the accidents of contingency relates to the history of linguistics. In the upheavals of the Neogrammarian movement mentioned above, not only was diachrony privileged above synchrony, but the establishment of apparently inviolable claims about sound change (the so-called Ausnahmslosigkeit¨ der Lautgesetze = exceptionlessness of sound change) equally privileged phonology over syntax. This has meant, although there are exceptions, that historical dialectology has been more interested in examining the effects of sound change than in any other element of the language.
The argument above may seem unfair. Indeed, it has to be tested by the relevant evidence. If we consider a standard view, such as presented in Campbell (1959), we find that dialectal variations are largely viewed in terms of sound change. Thus almost all writers accept the view that a fundamental dialect split occurred at the very earliest period, when West Germanic */a / developed to /æ / in West Saxon but to /e / everywhere else. This split is often referred to as Pogatscher’s Line, and this reflects the assumption that it deals with a dialect isogloss in Old English.
Pogatscher’s Line turns out to be of particular interest. It is true that outside West Saxon the normal development of */a / is eventually to /e /. However, it is not obvious that every dialect reached /e / by the same route. In particular, it seems quite possible that, whilst there was an early general raising to /e / in Anglian, the situation in Kentish was rather different. There the original forms may have been retained at least until the eighth century; see Hogg (1988). If this is so, we
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are dealing with differential diachronic change, rather than mere geographical variation.
This temptation to concentrate on phonological features must be resisted. There are, however, important phonological dialect variations, including, of course, Pogatscher’s Line. For the perspective of the later history of English, that change is indeed important since /e / is the source of Anglian ME forms such as /se d/ ‘seed’ where West Saxon would have given ME /sε d/. Not all variations have obvious consequences for later periods. For example, from quite early in Old English there is a split between southern [a] and northern [ɒ] in words such as mann monn ‘man’. The split is no longer found, but there is clear evidence that it did remain during the ME period and indeed it may be possible to trace the gradual disappearance of the northern form as it becomes confined to the west midlands; see Kristensson (1987), Hogg (1997).
Sometimes, the full impact of changes is not apparent until after the Old English period. For example, the important change of i-mutation results in /u( )/ and /o( )/ being fronted to, respectively, /y( )/ and /œ( )/. Throughout northern areas the latter is retained, but it becomes /e( )/ in West Saxon. Since in ME even northern forms unround, there would appear to be nothing remarkable happening. In the case of /y( )/, at first sight it looks even less interesting, since /y( )/ remains in both West Saxon and Anglian. But that ignores Kentish in both cases. There, not only does /œ( )/ unround, as would be expected in the south, but /y( )/ both unrounds and lowers to /e( )/. This is the source of PDE words such as merry from OE myrige.
One apparently insignificant change which is both a sign of what will happen in later centuries and a good link to morphology is the loss of final inflectional /n/ in Northumbrian. There we find infinitives such as habba ‘have’ where other dialects have habban. Although the change is restricted to some morphological categories, it is an early sign of a more extensive loss in ME. Northumbrian, in fact, has a wide range of morphosyntactic changes. These include: new forms of the verb be, such as aron ‘they are’ alongside sint or sindon found elsewhere – aron is clearly the antecedent of PDE are; the secondand third-person singular of the present tense are confused so that we find both the types ridas and ridað (also rides rideð) for both ‘thou ridest’ and ‘it rides’. The two examples we have chosen are obviously particularly important for the later history of the language. We may also note that the standard (but now archaic) second-person type thou ridest appears to have originated in this period in the south: even today, northern dialects prefer forms without final -t.
In dealing with syntactic variation, we face the major difficulty that the dominance of West Saxon material makes it difficult to distinguish between genuine dialect differences and features which are only found in West Saxon because other material is too scanty. However, one well-documented case is variation in negative contraction. In West Saxon and West Mercian contraction of the negative particle ne with verbs such as habban ‘have’ and was ‘was’ is very common, whereas in the north and east uncontracted forms occur in about one-third of cases.
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In lexis, on the other hand, there have been extensive studies over many decades. Much of the effort here has been expended in distinguishing between Anglian and West Saxon vocabulary, but there have also been important attempts to identify the characteristics and origins of the standardised vocabulary employed, above all, by Ælfric. Studies on contrasts between West Saxon and Anglian cover not merely lexis; word formation is also relevant. For example, it can be shown that the feminine agentive suffix -icge (e.g. hunticge ‘huntress’) is almost always of Anglian origin, whilst -estre (e.g. huntigestre) occurs only in West Saxon.
One point has become more emphasised over the past two or three decades in lexical studies. This is the difficulty of clearly delineating texts, especially when many texts are either copies of others or our understanding of dialect boundaries is so imprecise. It is with this issue that I want to conclude this overview of Old English dialectology. Since the mid-1980s there has emerged an increasing dissatisfaction with the traditional approach to Old English dialects, although, admittedly, there has not yet been time for a new consensus to appear. There can be little doubt that the impetus for this dissatisfaction comes from recent work on Middle English, which we shall review in Section 7.3.
One problem which we have already noted is the impossibility of ever obtaining a complete picture, since we lack texts from large parts of the country. Another issue that we have touched on is the interaction of diachronic change and geography. And a further important question is the localisation of individual texts. These two last issues come together in what we can call the West Saxon problem. It has long been known that there are significant contrasts between early West Saxon, the language of Alfred and, hence, perhaps the language of Winchester roundabout 900, and late West Saxon, particularly associated with Ælfric roundabout 1000. Unfortunately, the very names appear to presuppose that the differences are diachronic. But this is difficult to square with well-known differences such as the absence of <ie> spellings in Ælfrician writings as against the frequent use of those spellings in early West Saxon; see also the more detailed and recent work by Peter Kitson using additional charter material (1992, 1993).
Because of problems such as these, I have argued elsewhere (Hogg, 1992c) that it may be more helpful to group the major texts or textual traditions by some alternative classification. The most obvious possibility is to use the known diocesan boundaries. The reason for this, of course, is that almost all our texts come from monks working in one or other monastery. Thus, instead of talking about Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon and Kentish, we might refer to Durham, Lichfield, Winchester and Canterbury or to the dioceses whose sees are situated in these places. In itself this is not sufficient, because it ignores other important centres such as Worcester and Rochester. It does, however, allow us to disassociate texts from pre-determined dialect groupings and also emphasise the central role of the church.
Some texts present difficulties of their own, which may only be exacerbated if they are too simply classified as one dialect rather than another. An instructive group of texts here are the ‘Southumbrian’ Rushworth 2, the ‘North Mercian’