Lecture 13. Regional varieties of the English vocabulary (2hrs)

Objective. To inform the students of the major territorial varieties of the English language; to raise the students’ awareness of their common & specific features; to develop cognitive skills of analyzing & summarizing the information, distinguishing between major & minor aspects, categorizing & estimating relevant facts.

Plan

1. Standard English variants & dialects

2. American English

3. Canadian English

4. Australian English

5. Indian English

13.1. Standard English variants & dialects

Standard E (SE), the language of GB taught at schools & universities, used by the press, radio & television, spoken by educated people, is the form of E which is current, literary, substantially uniform & acceptable wherever E is spoken / understood. Its vocabulary is contrasted to dialecticisms.

Local dialects are varieties of E peculiar to some districts, having no normalised literary form.

Regional varieties possessing a literary form are variants. 2 variants, ScE & IrE; 5 main groups of dialects: Northern, Midland, Eastern, Western, Southern. Every group contains up to 10 dialects.

Cockney is a Southern dialect, the regional dialect of London; exists on 2 levels. As spoken by the educated lower middle classes it is a regional dialect marked by some deviations in pronunciation but few in vocabulary & syntax. As spoken by the uneducated, Cockney differs from SE in pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology & syntax.

C. Dickens: Cockney was characterised by the interchange of [w] & [v]: wery for very, vell for well (lost by the end of the 19^th c). [θ] & [ð] are still replaced by [f] & [v]: fing for thing, farver for father. This variation is found in several dialects. Not limited to Cockney is the interchange of the aspirated & non-aspirated initial vowels: hart for art, ‘eart for heart. The most marked feature is the substitution of [ai] for standard [ei] in day, face, rain, way: [dai], [fais], [rain], [wai].

Specifically Cockney Ws and set expressions: up the pole ‘drunk’; you’ll get yourself disliked (a remonstrance to a person behaving very badly). Its specific feature is the rhyming slang: boots are daisy roots, hat is tit for tat, head is loaf of bread, wife is trouble & strife.

Dialects are chiefly preserved in rural communities, in the speech of elderly people. Their boundaries are less stable now; the distinctive features tend to disappear due to the migration of working-class families, the influence of urban life over the countryside, the pressure of SE taught at schools & the speech habits cultivated by radio, television & cinema.

Dialect in literature: speech characterisation of personages: Yorkshire in ‘Withering Heights’ by E. Brontë; Lancashire in ‘Mary Barton’ by E. Gaskell. The Southern dialect of Dorset is introduced by T. Hardy. A. Tennyson used Lancashire dialect in his poems reproducing peasant speech. Many Ws obsolete in SE are still kept in dialects: to and ‘envy’ < OE andian; barge ‘pig’ < OE berg; bysen ‘blind’ < OE bisene. The standard work of reference in dialect study is Joseph Wright’s ‘English Dialect Dictionary’.

The Sc Tongue & the IrE have a special linguistic status because of the literature composed in them (R. Burns, modern poets including Hugh MacDiarmid). From R. Burns’s poem ‘To James Smith’:

Dear Smith, the slee’st, pawkie thief

That e’er attempted stealth or rief!

Ye surely hae some warlock-brief

Owre human hearts;

For ne’er a bosom yet was prief

Against your arts.

For me, I swear by sun and moon,

And every star that blinks aboon,

Ye’ve cost me twenty pair o’shoon

Just gaun to see you;

And ev’ry ither pair that’s done

Mair taen I’m wi’ you...

Slee’st meant ‘slyest’, pawkie ‘cunning’, ‘sly’, rief ‘robbery’, warlock-brief ‘wizard’s contract’ (with the devil), prief ‘proof’, aboon ‘above’, shoon ‘shoes’ owre :: over; mair :: more.

Plays by J. M. Synge & Sean О’Casey: poetic features of IrE. O’ is Gaelic ‘of the clan of’ (Mac is the Gaelic ‘son’ found in Sc & Ir names). Sean, also spelled Shawn & pronounced [∫o:n], is the Ir for John.

From ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ by J. M. Synge: I’ve told my story no place till this night, Pegeen Mike, and it’s foolish I was here, maybe, to be talking free, but you’re decent people, I’m thinking, and yourself a kindly woman, the way I was not fearing you at all.

Pegeen exemplifies the diminutive suffix found in SE only in LWs. The emphatic personal PrN yourself appears in a non-appositional construction. It was yourself started it (O’Casey). The main peculiarities concern syntax & some form Ws. The concrete connective W the way substitutes the Conj so that. Cf. also the time that, the while for when; all times for always: I’d hear himself snoring out – a loud, lonesome snore he’d be making all times, the while he was sleeping’, and he a man’d be raging all times the while he was waking (Synge).

Ws from dialects & variants penetrate into SE. The IrE > blarney ‘flattery’, bog ‘a spongy, usually peaty ground of marsh’; its derivatives & compounds (bog-trotter, the ironical nickname for Irishman); shamrock (the emblem of Ireland), whiskey.

ScE > bairn ‘child’, billy ‘chum’, bonny ‘handsome’, brogue ‘a stout shoe’, glamour ‘charm’, laddie, lassie, kilt, raid, slogan, tartan, wee. R. Burns & W. Scott.