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.