Some idea of the isolation and antiquity of certain dialects is shown in the fact that in the Craven district of Yorkshire until well into this century, shepherds still
counted their sheep with Celtic numbers that predated the Roman occupation of
the islands. Even today it is possible to hear people using expressions that have
changed little from the Middle Ages. The Yorkshire query "Weeah to bahn?"
meaning "Where are you going?" is a direct contraction of "Where art thou
bound?" and its considerable age is indicated by the absence of a d on bahn. In
South Yorkshire, around Barnsley, people still use thee and thou as they did in
Shakespeare's day, though the latter has been transformed over the centuries into
tha'.
Complex unwritten rules govern the use of these words both grammatically and
socially. Tha' is used familiarly and is equivalent to the French tu. Thee is used
in the objective case. Thus a Barnsley youngster might say to his brother, "Tha'
shurrup or Ah'll thump thee," which translates as "You shut up or I'll punch
you." Tha' and thee have sprouted the further forms thissen and missen, which
are equivalent to yourself and myself. These forms are used all the time, but only
in well-defined situations. Parents and other elders use them with children, but
children never use them with their parents or elders, only with other children,
while teenagers use them among their own sex, but not with the opposite sex.
With all their grammatical intricacies and deviations from standard vocabulary,
dialects can sometimes become almost like separate languages. Indeed, a case is
sometimes made that certain varieties are separate languages. A leading
contender in this category is Scots, the variety of English used in the Lowlands
of Scotland (and not to be confused with Scottish Gaelic, which really is a
separate language). As evidence, its supporters point out that it has its own
dictionary, The Concise Scots Dictionary, as well as its own body of literature,
most notably the poems of Robert Burns, and it is full of words that would leave
most other English speakers darkly baffled: swithering for hesitating, shuggle for
shake, niffle-naffle for wasting time, gontrum niddles for a cry of joy, and
countless others. Although Scots, or Lallans as it is sometimes also called, is
clearly based on English, it is often all but incomprehensible to other English
speakers. A few lines from Burns's poem To a Haggis may give some idea of its
majestic unfathomability: Fair fa' your honest sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the puddin'-race!
Aboon them a' ye talc your place,Painch, trip, or thaim:
Weel are ye wordy o' a grace
As lang's my arm.
In America, a case is sometimes made to consider Cajun a separate tongue.
Cajun is still spoken by a quarter of a million people (or more, depending on
whose estimates you follow) in parts of Louisiana. The name is a corruption of
Acadian, the adjective for the French-speaking inhabitants of Acadia (based on
Nova Scotia, but taking in parts of Quebec and Maine) who settled there in 1604
but were driven out by the British in the 1750s. Moving to the isolated bayous of
southern Louisiana, they continued to speak French but were cut off from their
linguistic homeland and thus forced to develop their own vocabulary to a large
extent. Often it is more colorful and expressive than the parent tongue. The
Cajun for hummingbird, sucfleur ("flower-sucker"), is clearly.an improvement
on the French oiseaumouche. Other Cajun terms are rat du bois ("rat of the
woods") for a possum and sac a lait ("sack of milk") for a type of fish. The
Cajun term for the language they speak is Bougalie or Yats, short for "Where
y'at?" Their speech is also peppered with common French words and phrases:
merci, adieu, c'est vrai ("it's true"), qu'est-ce que c'est ("what is it"), and many
others. The pronunciation has a distinctly Gallic air, as in their way of turning
long "a" sounds into "eh" sounds, so that bake and lake become "behk" and
"lehk." And finally, as with most adapted languages, there's a tendency to use
nonstandard grammatical forms: bestest and don't nobody know.
A similar argument is often put forward for Gullah, still spoken by up to a
quarter of a million people mostly on the Sea Islands of Georgia and South
Carolina. It is a peculiarly rich and affecting blend of West African and English.
Gullah (the name may come from the Gola tribe of West Africa) is often called
Geechee by those who speak it, though no one knows why. Those captured as
slaves suffered not only the tragedy of having their lives irretrievably disrupted
but also the further misfortune of coming from one of the most linguistically
diverse regions of the world, so that communication between slaves was often
difficult. If you can imagine yourself torn from your family, shackled to some
Hungarians, Russians, Swedes, and Poles, taken halfway around the world,
dumped in a strange land, worked like a dog, and shorn forever of the tiniest
shred of personal liberty arid dignity, then you can perhaps conceive the background against which creoles like Gullah arose. Gullah itself is a blend of
twenty-eight separate African tongues. So it is hardly surprising if at first glance
such languages seem rudimentary and unrefined. As Robert Hendrickson notes
in his absorbing book American Talk, "The syntactic structure, or underlying
grammar, of Gullah is … extraordinarily economical, making the language
quickly and readily accessible to new learners." But although it is simple, it is
not without subtlety. Gullah is as capable of poetry and beauty as any other
language.
One of the first serious investigations into Gullah was undertaken by Joel
Chandler Harris, known for his Uncle Remus stories.