Chereads / Super English / Chapter 26 - 26. Varieties of English (Part-5)

Chapter 26 - 26. Varieties of English (Part-5)

I live in a dale in Yorkshire that is just five miles long, but locals can tell whether

a person comes from up the dale or down the dale by how he speaks. In a nearby

village that lies half in Lancashire and half in Yorkshire, people claim to be able

to tell which side of the main street a person was born on. There may be some

hyperbole attached to that, but certainly Yorkshire people can tell in an instant

whether someone comes from Bradford or Leeds, even though the two cities are

contiguous. Certain features of British dialects can be highly localized. In Trust

an Englishman, John Knowler notes that he once knew a man whose odd

pronunciation of the letter r he took to be a speech impediment until he happened

to visit the man's childhood village in an isolated part of Northumberland and

discovered that everyone there pronounced r's in the same peculiar way.In England, dialects are very much more a matter of class and social standing

than in other countries, as George Bernard Shaw well understood when he wrote

that "it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some

other Englishman despise him." At the top end of the social range is the dialect

called Frailly, also largely the work of the tireless Afferbeck Lauder, based on

the aristocratic pronunciation of frightfully, as in "Weh sue frailly gled yorkered

calm" ("We're so frightfully glad you could come"). The main distinguishing

characteristic of the speech is the ability to talk without moving the lips. (Prince

Charles is an ace at this. ) Other examples of Frailly, or Hyperlect as it has also

been called, include "Aim gine to thice naiow" ("I'm going to the house now"),

"Good gawd, is thet the tame?" ("Good God, is that the time?"), and "How fay

caned a few" ("How very kind of you").

At the other extreme is Cockney, the working-class speech of London, which has

never been more painstakingly recorded than by Shaw in the opening pages of

Pygmalion. A brief sampling:

"Ow, eez ya-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan y' da-ooty bawmz a mather should,

eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel's flahrzn than ran awy athaht pyin." This

translates as "Oh, he's your son, is he?

Well, if you'd done your duty by him as a mother should, he'd know better than

to spoil a poor girl's flowers, then run away without paying." Even Shaw could

keep this up for no more than a few pages, and reverted to normal English

spelling for the flower girl with the parenthetical remark "Here, with apologies,

this desperate attempt to represent her dialect without a phonetic alphabet must

be abandoned as unintelligible outside London.-

In England, as in America, the systematic study of dialects is a recent

phenomenon, so no one can say just how many rich and varied forms of speech

died before anyone got around to recording them. One of the first persons to

think to do so was, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, J. R. R. Tolkien, later to

become famous as the author of the Hobbit trilogy, but at the time a professor of

English at the University of Leeds. His idea was to try to record, in a

comprehensive and systematic way, the dialect words of England before they

disappeared forever. Tolkien moved on to Oxford before the work got underway,

but he was succeeded by another enthusiast, Harold Orton, who continued the

painstaking work. Fieldworkers were sent to 3 13 mainly rural areas to interview people who were elderly, illiterate, and locally born (i. e., not contaminated by

too much travel or culture) in an effort to record the everyday terms for

practically everything. The work took from 1948 to 1961 before The Linguistic

Atlas of England was produced.

The research turned up many surprising anomalies. The Berkshire villages of

Kintbury, Boxford, and Cold Ash are within about eight miles of each other, yet

in each they call the outer garment of clothing by a different name—respectively

greatcoat, topcoat, and overcoat. In the whole of the north topcoat is the usual

word, but in Shropshire there is one small and inexplicable island of overcoat

wearers. In Oxfordshire, meanwhile, there is a lozenge-shaped linguistic island

where people don't drink their drinks, they sup them. Sup is the northern word

for drink. Why it should end up being used in an area of a few square miles in a

southern county by people who employ no other northern expressions is a

mystery to which there is no logical answer. No less mysterious is the way the

terms twenty-one and one-and-twenty move up the country in alternating bands.

In London people say "twenty-one," but if you move forty miles to the north

they say "one-and-twenty." Forty miles north of that and they say "twenty-one"

again. And so it goes right the way up to Scotland, changing from one to the

other every forty miles or so. Just to complicate things, in the Lincolnshire town

of Boston they say that a person is twenty-one years old, but that he has one-and-

twenty marbles, while twenty miles away in Louth, they say the very opposite.

Sometimes relatively obscure English dialect words have been carried overseas

where they have unexpectedly prospered. The usual American word for stealing

a look, peek, was originally a dialect word in England. The English say either

peep or squint; peek exists only in three pockets of East Anglia—but that was

the area from which many of the first immigrants came. In the same way, the

word in England for the cylinder around which thread is wound is either reel or

bobbin. Spool, the main American word, is limited to two compact areas of the

Midlands. The casual affirmative word yeah was also until fairly recently a

quaint localism confined to small areas of Kent, Surrey, and south London. The

rest of Britain would say yes, aye, or ar. Much the same thing seems to have

happened elsewhere in the British Empire. Three of the most pervasive

Australianisms, fair dinkum, cobber, and no worries, appear to have their roots in

English dialectal expressions.