Dialects are sometimes said to be used as a shibboleth. People in Northern
Ireland are naturally attentive to clues as to whether a person is Catholic or
Protestant, and generally assume that if he has a North Down or east Belfast
accent he is Protestant, and that if he has a South Armagh or west Belfast accent
he is Catholic. But the differences in accent are often very slight—west Belfast
people are more likely to say "thet" for that, while people in east Belfast say
"hahn" for hand—and not always reliable. In fact, almost the only consistent
difference is that Protestants say "aitch" for the eighth letter of the alphabet
while Catholics say "haitch," though whether this quirk "has been used by both
the IRA and the UDR to determine the fate of their captives," as the Story of
English suggests, is perhaps doubtful. It is after all difficult to imagine
circumstances in which a captive could be made to enunciate the letter h without
being aware of the crucial importance for his survival of how he pronounced it.
Dialects are not just matters of localities and regions. There are also
occupational dialects, ethnic dialects, and class dialects. It is not too much to say,
given all the variables, that dialects vary from house to house, indeed from room
to room within each house, that there are as many dialects in a language as there
are speakers. As Mario Pei has noted, no two people in any language speak the
same sounds in precisely the same way. That is of course what enables us to
recognize a person by his voice. In short, we each have our own dialect.
National accents can develop with considerable speed. Within only a generation
or so of its colonization, visitors to Australia were beginning to notice a pronounced accent. In 1965, one "Afferbeck Lauder" published a book called
Let Stalk Strine which wittily celebrated the national accent. Among the words
dealt with were scona, a meteorological term, as in "Scona rine"; dimension,
defined as the customary response to "thank you"; and air fridge, a synonym for
ordinary, middling. Other Strinisms noted by Lauder and others are Emma chisit
for "How much is it?" emma necks for what you have for breakfast, and fairairs
for "a long time," as in "I waited fairairs and airs." A striking similarity between
Australia and America is the general uniformity of speech compared with
Britain. There are one or two differences in terminology across the country—a
tub of ice cream is called a bucket in New South Wales and a pixie in Victoria—
but hardly more than that. It appears that size and population dispersal have little
to do with it. It is far more a matter of cultural identity.
When the first inhabitants of the continent arrived in Botany Bay in 1 788 they
found a world teeming with flora, fauna, and geographical features such as they
had never seen. "It is probably not too much to say," wrote Otto Jespersen, "that
there never was an instance in history when so many new names were needed.'
Among the new words the Australians devised, many of them borrowed from the
aborigines, were billabong for a brackish body of water, didgeridoo for a kind of
trumpet, bombora for a navigable stretch of river containing dangerous rocks,
and of course boomerang, koala, outback, and kangaroo. The new natives also
quickly showed a gift for colorful slang: tucker for food, slygrogging for
sneaking a drink, bonzer for excellent, nong for an idiot, having the shits for
being irritable, and, more recently, technicolor yawn for throwing up. Often
these are just everyday words shortened: postie for postman, footy for football,
arvo for the afternoon, roo for kangaroo, compo for compensation. And then of
course there are all those incomparable Australian expressions: scarce as
rocking-horse manure, about as welcome as a turd in a swimming pool.
Although historically tied to Britain, linguistically Australia has been as
receptive to American influences as to British ones. In Australia, people eat
cookies, not biscuits; politicians run for office, not stand as in Britain; they drive
station wagons rather than estate cars; give their money to a teller rather than a
cashier in a bank; wear cuffs on their pants, not turn ups; say mail, not post; and
cover small injuries with a Band-Aid rather than a plaster. They spell many
words in the American way—labor rather than labour, for instance—and,
perhaps most significantly, the national currency is the dollar, not the pound.
Canada, too, exhibits a fair measure of hybridization, preserving some British
words—tap (for faucet), scones, porridge, zed as the pronunciation for the last
letter of the alphabet—that are largely unknown in America. At least one term,
riding, for a political constituency, is now pretty well unknown even in Britain.
There are said to be ro,000 Canadianisms—words like skookum (strong) and
reeve (a mayor), though the bulk of these are used only in small areas and are
not necessarily familiar even to other Canadians.
No place in the English-speaking world is more breathtakingly replete with
dialects than Great Britain. According to Robert Claiborne in Our Marvelous
Native Tongue, there are "no less than 13″ separate dialects in Britain. Mario Pei
puts the number of dialects as nine in Scotland, three in Ireland, and thirty in
England and Wales, but even that is probably an underestimate. If we define
dialect as a way of speaking that fixes a person geographically, then it is scarcely
an exaggeration to say that in England there are as many dialects as there are
hills and valleys. Just in the six counties of northern England, an area about the
size of Maine, there are seventeen separate pronunciations for the word house.
Professor Higgins boasted in Pygmalion that he could place any man in London
within two miles, "sometimes within two streets."
That isn't as rash an assertion as it sounds. Most native Londoners can tell
whether someone comes from north or south of the Thames. Outside London
even greater precision is not uncommon.