Lecture 9 regional varieties and dialects

1. The national literary language. Local dialects and variants. Dialects on the territory of the British Isles.

2. Variants of the English language .

3. American English.

1. The concept of norm is one of the main in linguistics since the norm embraces all language levels: phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary. It is determined socially, historically and linguistically. It is stable and compulsory for all the speakers of a certain language as well as internationally recognized as standard.

The norm is abstract. It is realized through national, generally received variants: Br E, Can E, Am E, Au E, etc.

The national literary language in Britain was formed on the basis of the South-Eastern dialect (London dialect) which developed from a territorial dialect into socio-regional. Modern English orphoepic norm – Received Pronunciation developed from that dialect. BRP embraces only a small portion of population of Britain – about 3-5%. It enjoys a high social status, being characteristic of public school graduates. All the rest of the population uses one of the regional standards.

Regional varieties possessing a literary form are called variants ( the Scottish Tongue, Irish English).Varieties of the language peculiar to some districts and having no normalized literary form are called dialects. There are 5 main groups of dialects in Britain.: Northern, Midland, Eastern, Western, and Southern. They differ in pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.

e.g. Northerners pronounce ‘come, love, bus’ as ‘coom, loov, boos’; they pronounce ‘ dance, chance, France’ like Americans but the word can’t is pronounced with a long a. Sometimes Northerners leave out the article ‘the’ and possessive pronouns ’my, his, your’, etc.

One of the best known and most picturesque is the dialect of Cockney whose home is East End of London. Cockneys pronounce ‘wait, late, tray’ like ‘white, light, try’, etc. ‘h’s’at the beginning of the words are often dropped; ‘ouse, ‘ere, ‘ave. Intradental sounds are replaced with labio-dental: farver (father), fing (thing).

A characteristic feature of Cockney is the so-called rhyming slang. A phrase is used instead of a word with which it is rhymed: frog and toad – road, apples and pears – stairs, pot of honey – money, strike me dead – bread, loaf of bread – head, trouble and strife – wife.

Due to people’s migration and to teaching Standard English at schools all over the country dialect differences have been slowly dying. Nowadays in Britain there are two opposite tendencies: 1) prejudices against substandard forms are still strong, British are most particular as to pronunciation norms; 2) a growing number of people, especially the young, reject BRP as associated with the Establishment and are proud of their roots. Mass culture, folk songs sung by popular singers have also contributed to lowering of standards, more regional deviations have become accepted.

2. The status of Am e, Au E, Can E, etc. has been a disputable question for a certain periods of time. The prevailing point of view now is that they cannot be called dialects having their own literary norms. They cannot be called separate languages either since the bulk of phonemes, words and grammar forms used in them are the same. So the term ‘national variants’ is preferably used.

There are certain factors, which predetermined common features and differences in the national variants of the English Language. Common features are connected with the following:

1. one and the same language source (English of Britain of the 17-18^th cent.);

2. common dialectal basis (immigrants brought local dialects with them);

3. orientation to British literary norm due to its high social status;

4. analogous stages passed by all national variants in their development (transplantation, adaptation to functioning in new conditions, formation of national variants and functioning as separate variants).

Factors which caused differences are as follows:

1. local geographic, ethnic, social conditions;

2. great distances between the colonies and the metropoly;

3. regularity of contacts;

4. other languages influence.

3. American English.

Vocabulary differences between British English and American English fall under four major categories.