370 R I C H A R D H O G G

Most northern English dialects of PDE lack the phoneme / /. This phoneme arose with the split of ME phoneme /υ/, so that standard English contrasts foot /fυt/ and strut /str t/. The first direct evidence for the split comes in 1640 (for this and other phonological evidence during the period, Dobson, 1957, is essential and invaluable). Interestingly, already in 1596, Edmund Coote, the author of The English Schoole-Master (see Dobson, 1957: 33), had detected the split. Coote, based in Suffolk, objects to ‘the barbarous speech of your country people’, but for us this may be an indication of an East Anglian source

for the split.

A particularly salient variation results from the early Modern English change by which /a/ is lengthened before voiceless fricatives. This lengthening produces standard English forms such as /lɑ f/, /bɑθ/, /pɑ st/ for laugh, bath, past. Although the evolution of such forms is in fact lengthy, so that the position is by no means stable even today, it is worth noting the situation here, since it was in the early Modern English period that the contrasts came to be established. The bestknown dialectal variation is that almost all northern dialects have /baθ/, etc. in all these words. But there are variations too. For example, many midlands dialects show lengthening but not retraction, i.e. /baθ/, and over many southern areas raising to /æ / is common and can equally

affect the vowel of cat to give /kæt/.

In many west midlands and northwestern dialects the final /g/ in words such as thing is retained, i.e. /θ ŋg/ against standard /θ ŋ/. The standard loss of final /g/ is observable from the end of the sixteenth century but

that appears to be the result of earlier loss in East Anglia and Essex.

One interesting change which is to some extent a conservative throwback associated with the Great Vowel Shift is the preservation of the distinction between /i / and /e / (from ME /e / and / /) in meet and meat. As discussed elsewhere, in the standard language these vowels merged during the eighteenth century, but some dialects preserved the distinction. This is true of parts of the north and also of Ireland; see further below. But the distinction has been receding everywhere and may soon be lost completely.

7.6Modern English

If the Middle English period can be described as the age of dialects, then a parallel description of the Modern English period would be as the period of dialectology. The aptness of such a description is based on many different features. And it seems appropriate to consider some of these here. The reason for this is that it is only through a discussion of the basics of the development

of dialectological theory that we can hope to reach an understanding of how the attitudes to and the treatment of dialects has evolved.

Although grammarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often discuss non-standard forms, their principal reason for so doing was almost always from the vantage point of standard English and their aim to guide their readers away from social misfortune; see, for example, Mugglestone (2003). When dialect collections first appear – and perhaps the first important such collection is by John Ray in 1674 with a second edition in 1691 – the interest is primarily in vocabulary. In terms of dialect mapping, Ray classifies forms largely by county, which is a common feature of later studies too. But Ihalainen (1994) suggests that Ray probably considered there to be a north–south divide with that division roughly along a line from Bristol to the Wash, not a division which would seem sensible to later dialectologists. Ihalainen (1994) also provides a useful overview of later eighteenthand nineteenth-century dialect collections, culminating, perhaps, in Halliwell’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, first published in 1847.

But, as Ihalainen also says, there was until the last quarter of the nineteenth century no serious attempt to present a coherent picture of the contemporary dialect situation. There is no single reason why the situation should have changed then, but rather a multiplicity of reasons. Clearly the ever growing urbanisation of England created an emerging polarity between standard English and local urban dialects. As Sweet (1890) writes: ‘The Cockney dialect seems very ugly to an Englishman or woman because he – and still more she – lives in perpetual terror of being taken for a Cockney . . .’ And many dialectologists complained about the way in which the railways were destroying local dialects, in terms rather reminiscent of Wordsworth’s fears for the Lake District in the age of steam.

But there was also a purely linguistic factor involved. For this was the time of both the Neogrammarian movement, which spread out from Leipzig, and of the first systematic attempts at dialect geography, in particular the German atlas started by Georg Wenkler in 1876, almost simultaneous with the birth of Neogrammarianism. In Britain this burst of activity was evident in both the Philological Society and the English Dialect Society. Thus in 1875, Alexander Ellis, with the assistance of others, produced a classification of English dialects which remains important today; see Ellis (1875) and also Ihalainen (1994) for detailed discussion; Trudgill (1999b) offers a brief introduction to the distinctions between presentday dialects and those in the Survey of English Dialects (SED), that is, the dialect situation at the end of the nineteenth century.

In 1889 Ellis produced what is generally recognised as the first systematic survey of English dialects (Ellis, 1889). Alongside this work, there began to appear the first systematic studies on individual dialects, of which Elworthy’s study of the dialect of West Somerset (1875) is a notable example. Even more interesting was the study of the dialect of Windhill in Yorkshire, published by Joseph Wright in 1892. Wright was not only a native of Windhill, a manufacturing township now

Figure 7.4 Modern dialect areas (Trudgill, 1999b)

Zurich, started work on the Survey of English Dialects (SED), which was eventually published in 1962–71 (Orton et al., 1962–71).

It is worth spending some time on the SED, since it is the essential tool for the study of traditional dialectology in Britain (although it is in fact exclusively English). The SED proceeded by means of directly interviewing dialect speakers from some 313 different localities in England, usually, but not always, one single informant from each locality. But these bare facts tell us very little. It is important to understand exactly what the aims of this study were, and to recall that it was only recently that mobile recording equipment had become easily available and also acceptable to untutored informants. Thus, above all, the SED strove to gather information about rural dialects which, it was felt, were fast disappearing under the pressures of urbanisation.

This meant that the SED was interested primarily in speakers who met four criteria: they had to be non-mobile, old, rural and male. Nowadays this group is colloquially referred to by the acronym NORMS. Each term had its own

In vocabulary, it is doubtful, for example, that tab ‘ear’ is any longer found in Nottinghamshire or Derbyshire, and lug, instead of being found widely through out the north and east, as far south as Suffolk, is certainly becoming more recessive as ear becomes the ‘normal’ word in so much more of the country (although it remains a possibility for a Scot like me). Other words which have been lost or are almost lost include: urchin ‘hedgehog’ (northern, also Shropshire, Herefordshire); mind ‘remember’ is still common in Scotland, but pockets of mind formerly throughout England have lost out except perhaps on the Scottish border; quist ‘pigeons’ was formerly found in the west midlands from Cheshire to Gloucestershire, but is certainly not found in Cheshire today. It would be wrong, however, to suggest that all dialect vocabulary has been lost. For example, my own experience would suggest that lake ‘play’ is still possible in many parts of Yorkshire.

If the above paragraph gives only a tantalising flavour, it is perhaps easier to list significant morphological features. Here I concentrate on aspects of the pronoun system. One important feature which still obtained quite frequently in mid-nineteenth-century local dialects was the preservation of the second-person singular pronoun thou, which persisted widely throughout the north and the west, but was always threatened by you, a process which today is almost complete although it remains in the speech of at least some speakers from Yorkshire. That is by no means the only change in the pronoun system. Throughout the south midlands, from Leicestershire to Hampshire his and hers at the time of the SED retained the old Middle English midlands forms hisn, hern, whilst hissen for himself is still found in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, but hissel, the form still found quite widely at that time, is probably receding except in Scotland and the northernmost parts of England.

Let us now turn our attention to syntax, which is often regarded as the cinderella of dialect studies. One reason for this is that both vocabulary and phonology provide an easier and almost immediate reaction. If I were to use the word gallus, for example (which happens to be part of my native vocabulary), I doubt if more than 10 per cent of the British population would know what I meant. Native speakers of British English can normally detect phonological features in dialects other than their own without much difficulty. But often syntactic features are either unnoticed or dismissed as errors, rather than genuine dialectal variations.

Here I want to consider a small group of historical syntactic features, which are sometimes near to extinction, although they seem to have been quite vigorous 150 years ago, others of which remain viable and sometimes strong. The first of these is found in northern dialects, and is called ‘The Northern subject rule’; see Ihalainen (1994: 221–2), also Chapman (1998). The following are typical examples:

They peel them and boils them

Him and me drinks nought but water

I often tells him

I tell him not to

Figure 7.5 Limits of postvocalic /r/ in present-day dialects (from Trudgill, 1999b)

Most ordinary people have the perception that local dialects are disappearing under the pressure of standardisation, the result of a variety of factors, amongst which the rise of literacy due to increased education is perhaps the most obvious. To this must be added other elements such as the rise of mass media (as much the result of mass literacy as anything else) and the continuous urbanisation of the country. And that is indeed true, although, as we shall see, there are counter-effects which mean that the situation is not quite so simple.

Nevertheless, the effects of standardisation can be very well exemplified by considering one of the most notable features of standard English English, namely the loss of postvocalic /r/ in words such as arm (/ɑ m/). This is in striking contrast to the preservation of /r/ in both Scottish English and American English. It is also in contrast to the dialect situation about 100 years ago. For then, all dialects south of a line from Shrewsbury to Dover (but, importantly, excluding London) where equally rhotic, as was the northwest (from Chester northwards) and also the Tyneside area.

now known as sociolinguistics. The first systematic sociolinguistic studies were undertaken by William Labov in New York in the mid-1960s; see Labov (1972) or, for a more detailed and extended account, Labov (1994). Britain had to wait for the studies of Norwich produced in the early 1970s by Peter Trudgill; see especially Trudgill (1974). Since then there have been an increasing number of important studies, several of which are mentioned in the Further Reading to this chapter.

It is important to recognise that sociolinguistics is not a rival to traditional dialectology. Yet it brought new methods of working and permitted an investigation of a much wider segment of the population, so that now younger, as well as older, informants could be sampled, and women, as well as men, were seen as proper subjects of study; also, in contrast to the SED, these sociolinguistic approaches were concerned with the interaction of different social classes. The consequences of such a revolution (that seems a more appropriate word than ‘evolution’) may not redraw the dialect geography of Britain, in the sense that the historical maps still hold. On the other hand, we now can draw new maps which can alter our perceptions of what is happening to dialects today.

This brings us back to the view that dialects are disappearing. Most of the sociolinguistic studies are based on precisely delimited areas: for example, Trudgill (1974) was a study of the sociolinguistics of Norwich; see also, for example, Milroy (1980), Cheshire (1982). This is inherent in the methodology. Nevertheless, there has been some geographically quite large-scale work done which is of the highest importance in assessing the state of present-day dialects. Perhaps the most interesting of these is Cheshire et al. (1993). This work was a first attempt to assess the language of schoolchildren throughout the British Isles. Although, for reasons outside the authors’ control, the study was not as fruitful as had been hoped, it still remains a foundation for further work in the area.

Perhaps the most important general result from this survey, and one which has been confirmed by more local studies, is that there has indeed been a process of dialect levelling, that is to say, there has been a decline in dialectal variety throughout Britain (although Scots and Ulster English tend to go their own way, presumably for reasons of national identity). But this decline in variety is not in the direction of standard English. Instead, what seems to be happening is that the different urban dialects are becoming more and more alike whilst remaining distinct from the standard.

In this survey the six most frequent usages (all with a percentage score of 85 per cent or higher) were:

them (Look at them big spiders)

should of (You should of left half an hour ago!)

‘no plural marking’ (. . . you need two pound of flour)

what as subject relative (The film what was on last night was good) never as past-tense negator (No, I never broke that)

there was with notional plural (There was some singers here a minute ago)

(1994). Throughout Scots all vowels are short, except before a stem boundary, a voiced fricative or /r/. Typical examples, where English dialects have a long vowel, are Scots bead /bid/, lace /les/, cf. English /bi d/, /le s/. Perhaps the most obvious examples occur before inflectional forms so that there is a clear contrast between need /nid/ and knee+d /ni d/.

In syntax also, there are significant differences from English. Perhaps the best known of these concern modal verbs and negative marking. As in many other dialects, the variety of modal verbs is more restricted than in standard varieties, but Scots dialects have a distinctive usage not found elsewhere in Britain (except the contiguous area of Northumberland), although there are some parts of the US where the usage is found, notably in the Ohio–Pennsylvania area. The construction is called the Double Modal construction, and can be exemplified by sentences such as:

He might could do it if he tried (‘He would be able to do it . . .’)

She should can go tomorrow (‘She ought to be able to go tomorrow’)

The term Double Modal may not be fully accurate, since the following triple modal is equally possible:

He’ll might could do it for you (‘He might be able in the future to do it for you’)

Double modals are, of course, inherently interesting, since they break the usual assumption about English that there can only be one modal per verb phrase. But Scots also has a negation system which is different from that found in English dialects and which interacts with modals, so that we find sentences such as:

She couldnae hae telt him (‘It is not possible for her to have told him’)

She could no hae telt him (‘It was possible for her not to have told him’)

and even:

He couldnae hae no been no working (‘It is impossible that he has not been out of work’)

See further Brown (1991), Brown & Millar (1980). I have such forms in my own native dialect.

The evidence that we have just reviewed, from both English and Scottish dialects, supports quite strongly the belief that dialect levelling is taking place. This, however, should not lead us to assume that traditional rural dialects have completely disappeared, although they are undoubtedly on the decline, despite, I think, the comments of Trudgill (1999b: 108). But they are being replaced not so much by standard English as by a generalised non-standard variety. And this variety is different in the two countries, and could even be increasing because of external influences, such as the distinctive political atmosphere in Scotland.

The type of dialect levelling we have just discussed is sometimes reminiscent of the ‘colourless’ language which we noted in later Middle English. There are differences, to be sure, but there are also resemblances. However, there is another