Southern English Varieties Then and Now 9783110577549, 9783110575217

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Laura Wright (Ed.) Southern English Varieties Then and Now

Topics in English Linguistics

Editors Elizabeth Closs Traugott Bernd Kortmann

Volume 100

Southern English Varieties Then and Now Edited by Laura Wright

ISBN 978-3-11-057521-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-057754-9 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-057531-6 ISSN 1434-3452 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wright, Laura, 1961-editor. Title: Southern English varieties then and now / edited by Laura Wright. Description: Berlin ; Boston : Walter de Gruyter, 2018. | Series: Topics in English linguistics ; volume 100 | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018007418 | ISBN 9783110575217 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: English language–Dialects–England, Southern. | English language–Variation–England, Southern. Classification: LCC PE1771 .S66 2018 | DDC 427/.9422–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007418 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd., Pondicherry Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck Cover image: Brian Stablyk/Photographer’s Choice RF/Getty Images www.degruyter.com

Contents Laura Wright Introduction 

 1

Paul Kerswill 1 Dialect formation and dialect change in the Industrial Revolution: British vernacular English in the nineteenth century   8 Emma Moore and Chris Montgomery 2 The dialect of the Isles of Scilly: Exploring the relationship between language production and language perception in a Southern insular variety   39 3

David Hornsby A new dialect for a new village: Evidence for koinéization in East Kent 

 74

Jonathan Roper 4 The clergyman and the dialect speaker: Some Sussex examples of a nineteenth century research tradition   110 5

Peter Trudgill I’ll git the milk time you bile the kittle do you oon’t get no tea yit no coffee more oon’t I: Phonetic erosion and grammaticalisation in East Anglian conjunction-formation   132

6

Stephen Howe Emphatic “yes” and “no” in Eastern English: jearse and dow  

7

Richard Coates Steps towards characterizing Bristolian 

 148

 188

Jonnie Robinson 8 ‘I don’t think I have an accent’: Exploring varieties of southern English at the British Library   227 Juhani Klemola 9 The historical geographical distribution of periphrastic do in southern dialects   262 Index 

 293

Laura Wright

Introduction In 2017 we stand at the threshold of a new kind of linguistics. It has long been seen coming: Kretzschmar’s Linguistics of Speech of 2009, for example, shows how the approaches of dialectology versus sociolinguistics, which were considered oppositional in the twentieth century, are now united in response to the challenge of big data. Equally, the division of historical versus present-day language is no longer inevitable, with databases of both readily available for analysis and comparison online. Never before has so much language been presented so ripe, as it were, for study. Never before have we been so well-armed as to what to expect: we know that there will be variation, we know that a Zipf’s Law distribution of those variants will pertain, we know that geographical region and social division will find their expression in language. Yet there are curious anomalies. Most of the world’s Extraterritorial Englishes stem historically from southern dialects, unsurprising in that southern England has always been the most densely-habited part of the country, yet this area is also one of the least studied from a dialectal or a sociolinguistic point of view. In particular the historically important cities of London, Bristol, Norwich, Exeter and Winchester have received surprisingly little attention. Linguists have had little to say about working-class language in Kent, middle-class language in Hampshire, or upper-class language in Gloucestershire, be it from now or be it from then. The availability of big data means that historians, historical geographers and historical linguists now use the same sources: Between fifty and sixty per cent of all non-serial publications in English produced between the beginning of print in Britain in the fifteenth century and 1923 have now been digitized. This enables a connecting up of data in ways that were previously practically impossible. One of the new ways in which historians and historical geographers are dealing with that data is to reconfigure it around people. There are some sixty-six thousand men and women, for example, in the London criminal database, present as individuals. Suddenly, we know if a collection of words was spoken by a ten stone, five foot two inch woman with brown hair and black eyes, and a withered left arm; or by a six foot man with an anchor tattoo on his left arm, and a scar above squinting blue eyes.1

1  Quoted from a radio broadcast (4 May 2015, BBC London 94.9) by Tim Hitchcock, Professor of Digital History at the University of Sussex and co-creator of a series of websites giving access to thirty billion words of primary sources evidencing the history of Britain: the Old Bailey Online, 1674 to 1913 (www.oldbaileyonline.org); London Lives, 1690–1800 (www.londonlives.org); Locating London’s Past (www.locatinglondon.org); and Connected Histories (www.connectedhistories.org). For linguists’ use of the criminal database see e.g. Widlitzki and Huber (2016). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110577549-001

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Yet big data has not resulted in a full-scale replacement of traditional linguistic methods; rather, corpus-building and searching has become complementary to older dialectological techniques of finding and recording informants, using a variety of methods such as native-speaker intuition, personal networks, friendof-a-friend, questionnaire, enrolling the aid of local ‘authorities’ such as vicars and schoolmasters, and comparing present-day findings with those published in earlier surveys, dictionaries and atlases. Big data has created an upheaval, but it is not so much a revolution (as Structuralism once was), rather it has caused investigators from different disciplines to come together and ask new research questions and take a larger perspective than was hitherto possible. In keeping with these observations, the authors in this book do all of the above – noting that here, big data includes not only large number sets such as those provided by census returns, but also the crowdsourced assemblages presented in nineteenth and twentieth century dialect atlases, dictionaries and surveys. Paul Kerswill questions whether dialects in the industrialised parts of Britain were likely to have been swamped by incomers, precisely the sort of question that cannot be ascertained without reliable numerical data. Juhani Klemola juxtaposes data from the published and unpublished resources of the Survey of English Dialects carried out in the mid-twentieth century to reconstruct nineteenth-century auxiliary do versus –s patterning in Somerset, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Dorset. David Hornsby investigates dialect retention and transmission in a small Kentish village by means of kinship and proximity networks. Peter Trudgill and Stephen Howe both use native speaker intuiton as a starting-point for investigation into East Anglian dialect; Peter Trudgill uses nineteenth-century dialect literature as a source, and Stephen Howe found informants via requests in newspapers, internet mailing lists and local radio stations. Jonathan Roper uncovers the rural Sussex Victorian informants who provided the attestations in Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary by means of census data, diaries and journals. Richard Coates addresses the scant serious and not-so-serious accounts of Bristol dialect by surveying previous academic linguistic work and also non-academic, folk-linguistic, evidence. Jonnie Robinson presents the different kinds of holdings available for Southern dialect study in the British Library’s Sound Archive, and Emma Moore and Chris Montgomery use data from the Isles of Scilly Oral History Archive to provide an account of Scillonian English. The ‘then’ in our title thus means ‘as far back as contemporary witness allows’ (Trudgill, Howe, Klemola, Roper, Coates), ‘as far back as sound-recordings allow’ (Robinson, Moore and Montgomery), and ‘as far back as the data goes’ (Hornsby, Kerswill, which in the case of census returns, is 1801). Southern England is populous, and has been comparatively so for the last millennium (it is also multilingual, and has been so for the last millennium). Yet linguists seem to have been daunted by these large groups of speakers. Wales

Introduction 

 3

(2002: 62) says “Britain has essentially been an urbanized society for over 100 years; yet despite a steady increase in sociolinguistic studies in recent years, we still know relatively little about its urban dialects.” Kerswill (‘Dialect formation and dialect change in the Industrial Revolution: British vernacular English in the nineteenth century’) cites the great nineteenth-century linguist A. J. Ellis, who tried to find out about the speechways of the Greater London area in the 1880s only to be thwarted, concluding, time and again, that there was nothing of interest to report. In fact, as verb morphology from Ellis’s informants around the greater metropolis shows, speech in the new suburbs was unlike that of the surrounding countryside at the time, and contained more variants than occur in the area today. Kerswill weighs the competing possibilities of new dialect formation as a mixture of incomers’ speech ab initio on the one hand, versus levelling together with retention and diffusion of older local features on the other. Influenced by Mufwene’s Founder Principle, Trudgill’s sociolinguistic typology model, and Andersen’s theory of open vs. closed dialects, he uses census returns to make the case that the dialects of the newly-industrialized areas of Britain would, in the main, have been levelled varieties of already-existing regional dialect. Emma Moore and Chris Montgomery (‘The dialect of the Isles of Scilly: Exploring the relationship between language production and language perception in a Southern insular variety’) also use census returns to consider whether Scilly’s population is likely to have been levelled or swamped since the sixteenth century when the present population is thought to have been founded. In the 1901 census, a third of the archipelago’s residents were recorded as born elsewhere, with the majority coming from mainland Cornwall. Moore and Montgomery consider the relationship between the dialect spoken on the Isles of Scilly and Cornish English. They describe the linguistic features of present-day Scillonian English, finding certain phonemes to be different from both Cornish English and RP. David Hornsby (‘A new dialect for a new village: evidence for koinéization in East Kent’) uses unemployment records from the 1920s and 30s to establish ratios of who came from where in Aylesham, which is in an area of rural East Kent. Founded in 1928, Aylesham was purpose-built to serve a new colliery and was settled by miners from Yorkshire, the North-East, South Wales, Scotland and the Midlands. He describes a mining village typical of the traditional working-class community, inward-looking, with the collective valued over the individual, ensuring that the new settlement remained socially isolated over the twentieth century and provided the right social conditions for linguistic innovation. On the flip side of industrialization and consequent urbanisation lies depopulation, all those dialects left behind in the otherwise-undisturbed rural areas which became thinly peopled as the labour force swapped working on the farm for working in factories. Depopulation also has its linguistic consequences, and

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Trudgill’s complexification theory predicts that these are the parts of the country where exceptionally complex features are likely to be found. Left alone in isolation over long periods of time, these dialects have had the right conditions in which to develop idiosyncracies and innovate. These more isolated dialects are also likely to retain earlier features that have dropped out of use in Standard English, so that it is not a paradox to find unusual new developments and truly conservative features going hand in hand. David Hornsby finds such linguistic phenomena in Aylesham in Kent (in vowels in particular), Paul Kerswill finds them in Victorian Berkshire (definite article deletion, retention of Anglo-Norman /e/ and Southern Voicing /v/ in verm ‘farm’), Stephen Howe finds them in present-day East Anglia and more northerly eastern areas, and those parts of New England and New York State settled by Easterners (lexicalized emphatic forms of agreeing and disagreeing), Peter Trudgill finds them in Victorian and present-day Norfolk (conjunctions yet, more, case, time and do), and Jonnie Robinson finds them in present-day Devon and Cornwall (intransitive infinitive marker –y). One theme of the book, then, centres around demographics, population movement and population stasis, with concomittent dialect levelling in areas of dense social mixing, and complexification and retention in areas of low social contact. Turning now to sources, the ideal data source, whether historical or present-­ day, has to be verifiable, datable, and sited within an identifiable regional and social context. Unselfconsious spontaneous speech has been taken as the ideal, as it were, with self-aware, self-declared dialect (such as dialect literature) suspect, as potentially being maximally divergent from the perceived norm of the day. Yet good sources (ie regional speakers) may of course be aware of variation, be it according to region, social class, age or any other factor; will not necessarily produce local forms, either as informants shift register or accommodate to the fieldworker, or when dialect features belong to their passive rather than their active repertoires, or if the sought-for local form simply happens not to form part of their idiolect. In other words, evaluating the authenticity of a source is always of concern, and is as important as an awareness of the competence, possible interference, or downright distortion created by the fieldworker, editor, or publisher. These matters are central to the chapters written by Jonathan Roper, Richard Coates and Jonnie Robinson. In keeping with Tim Hitchcock’s observation that big data has led historians to isolate and focus on individuals such as beggars, crossing-sweepers, and itinerant vendors – people who until now were thought to have left no historical trace – and to consider their geographical relationships as well as their social ones, Jonathan Roper (‘The clergyman and the dialect speaker: some Sussex examples of a nineteenth century research tradition’) identifies and names the informants (“peasants”) who lie behind the great late Victorian dialect surveys

Introduction 

 5

of Southern English. A network of clergy and others interrogated, noted down and submitted their parishioners’ speech, but – as is still the case in fieldwork studies – informants’ names were suppressed. He questions why. We can often access the names of the conduits, the vicars and the curates, the schoolteachers, the lawyers, the daughters of the gentry, people of the upper or middling sort who were sufficiently interested to participate in these surveys by reporting their servants’ sayings; but we do not have direct knowledge of who these informants actually were. Roper matches up entries in dialect dictionaries ascribed to such servants with nineteenth-century census data to find out informants’ names, ages and origins. He also matches up dialect words noted in a Sussex curate’s journal of the 1880s with their eventual appearance in dialect dictionaries some years later. This curate kept the equivalent of fieldwork notes, and often named his informants and the social context in which utterances were made, so that the journal source is more revealing than the publication. What it also reveals is considerable discrepancies due to editorial intervention. This is not to discount such publications as unusable; rather, such sources have to be evaluated on their merits, and Peter Trudgill (‘I’ll git the milk time you bile the kittle do you oon’t get no tea yit no coffee more oon’t I: phonetic erosion and grammaticalisation in East Anglian conjunction-formation’) makes use of a particularly thorny source, dialect literature – thorny because, amongst other things, self-consciously presenting local dialect for its entertainment value can lead to overrepresentation on the page. Trudgill avoids this pitfall by focusing on conjunctions where spelling (, ) is standard, reconstructing erosion from earlier, fuller phrases (in case, if you do) to build an argument about phonetic erosion leading to grammaticalisation. Stephen Howe (‘Emphatic “yes” and “no” in Eastern English: jearse and dow’) puts together a plot of the many ways of saying ‘yes’ in English. His focus is on jearse and dow, but he also presents other variants (ho, yeah) which lack a full treatment, with yeah present in early nineteenth-century literature. He shows that jearse and dow are likely to have been in use for at least four hundred years in Eastern Britain and Eastern America, yet have entirely escaped linguists’ attention. Richard Coates (‘Steps towards characterizing Bristolian’) surveys Bristol, an old, large and important city which has nevertheless not yet received an empirical treatment, including dialect quasi-literature such as greetings cards, comedic dictionaries, advertisements on the sides of buses, and phrases on tourist T-shirts. He gathers together such work as has been done in order to aggregate what is currently known about Bristolian, and in particular he considers the history of that notable local feature the ‘Bristol L’. He provides a new hypothesis as to its origins, as well as an account of the placename Bristol (which, despite its appearance, cannot be sporting the Bristol L for dating reasons).

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 Laura Wright

Jonnie Robinson (‘‘I don’t think I have an accent’: exploring varieties of southern English at the British Library’) presents relevant holdings from the British Library, dating from the earliest known sound recordings of vernacular English made by Prisoners of War during World War One. Robinson shows from recent surveys that certain traditional southern dialect vocabulary items and grammatical features are still in use, demonstrating with pronoun exchange in the South West (although extending as far east as Sussex and Buckinghamshire), and the continued existence of the Old English pronoun hine into the twenty-first century in Gloucestershire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. Juhani Klemola (‘The historical geographical distribution of periphrastic do in southern dialects’) uses data from the published Survey of English Dialects (1950–61) and the unpublished incidental material found in the fieldworker notebooks to reconstruct the West Wiltshire/East Somerset heartland of periphrastic auxiliary verb do. He identifies its former area of dominance, its geographical distribution in the 1950s (wider than has been reported) and also shows the process of retreat: as do became abandoned, –s filled the empty slot. This do-replacement with –s accounts for the –sfulness of south-western English which, unlike its Northern counterpart, does not exhibit variation according to type of subject. The dolessness of East Cornwall is explained as owing to the terrain (the Somerset Levels, Quantocks and Exmoor) presenting a barrier to southerly spread, whereas the dofulness of West Cornwall is explained as stemming from the replacement of Cornish by a taught version of Early Modern English (containing, as it did at the time, elevated ratios of periphrastic do) rather than by neighbouring English dialects. There are many new facts, ideas and conclusions presented in this book and here I shall highlight just three to indicate the conceptual range covered. Theory: Peter Trudgill presents the theory that phonetic erosion can lead to grammaticalisation as well as that grammaticalisation leads to phonetic erosion (which is the currently accepted orthodoxy). Methodology: Paul Kerswill presents a method for investigating large-scale demographic shift in order to assess dialect change in the past for which there is little if any actual linguistic data. Data: Emma Moore and Chris Montgomery present analysis of 75 Scillonians’ English, in order to provide information about the dialect of a British archipelago hitherto more or less entirely absent from the linguistic map. Present, past, place, demographic movement and stasis, social division and age of speakers, are all shown to be relevant when considering how the Southern dialects came to be as they are. The time-depth of the southern dialects being in the multiple millennia, there is enormous individuation from habitation to habitation over the area; the distribution of the population is such that it encompasses both the country’s largest urban area and many of its least-disturbed speaking) villages and hamlets, all within just 62,000 square (linguistically-­

Introduction 

 7

­ ilometers. The dynamism of its inhabitants with regard to trade and industry has k had linguistic consequences of the levelling kind; the compactness and fertile land of its island geography has caused a relatively dense network of individual settlements. All this leads to fertile ground for dialectal investigation, both conceptual and factual.

References Kretzschmar, William A. Jr. 2009. Linguistics of Speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wales, Katie. 2002. ‘North of Watford Gap’: A Cultural History of Northern English (from 1700). In Peter Trudgill and Richard J. Watts (eds.), Alternative Histories of English, 45–66. London: Routledge. Widlitzki, Bianca & Magnus Huber. 2016. Taboo language and swearing in eighteenth and nineteenth-century English: A diachronic study based on the Old Bailey Corpus. In María José López-Couso, Belén Méndez-Naya, Paloma Núñez-Pertejo & Ignacio Palacios-Martínez (eds.). Corpus Linguistics on the Move: Exploring and Understanding English through Corpora, 313–336. Leiden, Boston: Brill Rodopi.

Paul Kerswill

1 Dialect formation and dialect change in the Industrial Revolution: British vernacular English in the nineteenth century 1 Historical sociolinguistics and sociohistorical approaches to language change The Late Modern period (c. 1700–1900) is usually described as having been a particularly stable time for the English language, belying the social upheavals of the age (Romaine 1998: 7). However, the main thrust of existing linguistic research on that period deals with printed materials, which by this time were abundant. ­Printing was pretty much standardised in form, and this means that direct evidence of the type of variation that might occur in spoken language will be masked more than it is for earlier periods, when even formal writing was not fully standardised. For the reconstruction of non-standardised phonology, lexis and morphosyntax, this is problematic, a fact which can to some extent be alleviated by focusing on personal and private writings. The extensive analyses of grammar provided, for example, in Kytö, Rydén & Smitterberg (2006), based on large-scale corpora containing a range of written genres, show us the broad sweep of changes in British English in a way that is barely possible using the survey methods of variationist sociolinguistics. Yet, those studies deal with only one (broadly defined) variety: Standard English in England (Kytö et al. 2006: 4). Indirect data on spoken language can be gleaned from a corpus such as The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674–1913 (oldbaileyonline.org; Huber 2007), though its usefulness for sociolinguistic work is severely hampered by the sporadic nature of the attestations of the spoken forms which occur in the corpus. N ­ otwithstanding this, a good deal of historical sociolinguistic and dialectological work on the Early Modern period is based on a range of written genres, including personal letters, and this allows some access to socially and regionally marked varieties (e.g. Ihalainen 1994, and Meurman-Solin 2012 on the Corpus of Scottish Correspondence). For the Late Modern Period, a continuation of the Helsinki c­ orpus-based approach of Nevalainen and colleagues allows for an improvement in sociolinguistic detail  –  but only up to 1800 (Nevalainen et al. 2013). Taking advantage of the emergence of academic dialectology towards the end of the nineteenth century, Wagner (2012) shows that Ellis’s The existing phonology of English dialects, compared with that of West Saxon speech (1889) can be used to demonstrate clear https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110577549-002



Dialect formation and dialect change in the Industrial Revolution 

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regional trends for ­morphosyntactic features, and that these analyses can be compared to dialect data collected for the Survey of English Dialects (Orton et al. 1962–71) and the later Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (Kortmann 2000; https:// fred.ub.uni-freiburg.de/) to show patterns of change. Ellis’s work will be drawn on later in this chapter, but for now we need to recognise that, in order to know exactly how English regional varieties sounded, or how the phonological, grammatical and discourse features of English were deployed in real speech situations and how they varied within and across communities, we would need extensive recorded samples, collected using sociolinguistically-informed methods such as are available only for the 1960s onwards. The intention of this chapter is to take a broad sweep, similar to that of ­Historical Sociolinguistics, but asking very different questions from researchers working in the corpus-oriented tradition of Nevalainen and her colleagues (e.g. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003; Nevalainen 2011) or the more socio­ historical approaches of Bailey (1996), Beal (2004) and Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2009). The linguistic subject-matter of these studies tends to be features which enter the language as a whole and over an extended time scale. Sociolinguistic variation has been successfully investigated within these research paradigms using the categories of social networks, gender and genre  –  particularly in the more quantitative, corpus-driven studies  –  while sociohistorically-oriented research involves the close study of the social, geographical and ideological context of features and the particular time and place of their attestation. My approach in this chapter, which will deal mainly with the nineteenth century, is indebted to these strands in manners that will become obvious, but it will differ in two ways. First, I will focus on the formation of dialects (seen as variable, integrated linguistic systems) in epochs and locations where particular demographic and social changes are taking place – I am thinking here of the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century and the social and demographic changes which followed throughout the nineteenth century. Second, I will take a particular kind of sociolinguistic approach that seems well suited to understanding how these types of sociodemographic change impact on a language, using ‘the present to explain the past’ (Labov 1975). The framework I will use – which I will elaborate below – is based on the notion that the social forces driving language change in large measure derive from face-to-face contacts between people using different linguistic features, and that the nature and frequency of those contacts are determinants of the direction and speed of change. In my discussion, I will focus on the whole of Britain. When dealing with the first part of the nineteenth century, the case studies will be from northern England, primarily because industrialisation in its most all-encompassing form took place there. For the second half of the century, my focus will move ­gradually to the

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south, particularly London and the counties surrounding it. There will, however, be relatively little linguistic data. In part this is due to the general paucity of good dialect data for most of this period. What I am proposing, rather, is a framework to be used in further investigations, and it will be illustrated with linguistic data in small ways that are intended to test the concepts I am presenting.

2 How much can we find out about the development of dialects in Late Modern English? For a long time, the English language was seen by some mainstream scholars as moving in a single sweep from Old English, through Middle English, to the ­‘perfection’ of Standard English in the eighteenth century and the dignity of Received Pronunciation in the nineteenth (see Crystal 2005, Mugglestone 2007). Thus, Wyld (1927: 17) saw dialects from the end of the fourteenth century onwards as of little interest to the study of the history of English, because they were not ‘the vehicle of literary expression’. This reinforced the ‘standard ideology’ that pervaded the work of historians of English until the mid-twentieth century (Crystal 2005: 5) and which continues to be the ‘normal’, common-sense ideology in British society at large today (Milroy 1999: 175). But as Cooper (2013: 261) points out, there was a growing amount of dialect literature (literature written in dialect) during this period, accompanied by well-observed amateur dialect descriptions such as Bywater (1839, Sheffield) and Robinson (1862, Leeds). None of these works was intended to be ‘scientific’; instead, they were written for entertainment or instruction (Cooper 2013) or political campaigning (Langton 1984; 1986). It was not until the final quarter of the century that we find descriptive dialect studies of a type we recognise today as the precursor of modern variationist sociolinguistics, providing accounts that go beyond dialect words and isolated sounds. These began with the publications of the English Dialect Society, which existed from 1873 to 1896 (notably Wright 1892 and Skeat 1896). By some way the most significant of the early dialect publications was the 900-page survey, already mentioned, by A. J. Ellis (1889), which contains phonetic transcriptions of model texts rendered into dialects throughout England and Scotland, as well as parts of Wales and Ireland. Ellis had a network of collaborators, who prepared the texts on the basis of often very detailed knowledge of local speech (see Maguire 2012; Wagner 2012). Given this backdrop of nineteenth-century dialect studies, we need to consider how much we can reliably discern of the significant changes in British English (BrE) vernacular speech which must have been taking place from the



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beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 1770s and continuing through the rapid expansion of industrial towns and cities throughout the century that followed. Did the dialects really plough a furrow separate from that of Standard English as Wyld implies? In answer to this question: clearly there were changes ‘from below’, such as the loss of rhoticity in London (Beal 2010: 15–6), while nonstandard pronoun and verb forms gradually gave way to standard ones. Of particular relevance for us is whether the conditions were right for ‘new-dialect formation’ in Trudgill’s (2004) sense to take place, of the kind attested much later in the New Town of Milton Keynes (Kerswill & Williams 2000). The question is whether we can observe dialect changes, including koineisation (new-dialect formation is the clearest example  –  Kerswill 2013), or else infer it from linguistic descriptions and social information from the period. This is a big challenge in the face of selective, non-quantitative data and a different intellectual view of the social world from our own. However, if we can marshal information from the period in such a way that we can apply our own interpretations to it, then we might arrive at an analysis which is compatible with later sociolinguistic work. This chapter is an attempt to do that. In order to refine our search for relevant information it is useful to have a model to guide us. The work of Henning Andersen (Section 3.1), Peter Trudgill (Section 3.2), and Salikoko Mufwene (Section 5) appears prima facie to fulfil this need.

3 Establishing a workable sociolinguistic model for change in the past: contact, community type and subjectivities The sociolinguistic model I want to develop relies, as already suggested, on the presence of face-to-face contact between speakers, along with the types of social relations between the speakers and the relative size of the different populations the speakers are part of. The contact can be between, for instance, neighbours in a small community, between migrants and a settled population, or between residents and visiting relatives (Kerswill 2006; Britain 2011). Of considerable importance is the contact arising from people’s mobility, for example as daily commuters or as long-distance migrants who have relocated: as we will see, this was already a powerful factor in the London area in the nineteenth century (and had been so from medieval times [Baugh & Cable 1993]). Sometimes social relations allow for close contacts, while in other cases class or ethnic differences constrain the contacts. In a minority of cases, with migration, the proportion of

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incomers becomes so great that the original dialect (or language) is overwhelmed through force of numbers, leading to rapid change. This is known as swamping (Lass 1990; 2004: 367–8). The relative rarity of swamping is a result of the effect of the Founder Principle (a term adopted from population genetics), by which a founding population presents a powerful model for later versions of speech in the particular locality (Mufwene 1996). This general approach to the sociolinguistics of language change is, of course, not new and much of it belongs to the mainstream (see Britain 2016 for a critique). The way I want to implement it for nineteenth-century English is, however, novel, in one particular way. It does not take ‘the language’ as a single, albeit variable, entity as its object of investigation, and in this respect it differs from historical sociolinguistic approaches. Instead, it focuses on a ‘dialect landscape’ consisting of a series of geographically distributed but interlinked communities across which a continuum of language varieties is spoken. This contrasts with the historical sociolinguistic tendency to deal with single linguistic items and their distribution across time, space and social factors. I am particularly interested in how people in a particular community come to use the linguistic features they do. I will generally avoid the term ‘speech community’, because of the difficulty of definition; for instance, I would not espouse the narrow definition offered by Labov of a group of people who adhere to a single set of speech norms (pace Labov 1989) – except insofar as any such agreement is a phenomenon to be explained. Communities are in flux, composed as they are of individuals with overlapping and changing social networks, and boundaries are diffuse. For our limited purposes, namely the actuation and spread of linguistic change, it is useful to see the community as reflecting concentrations of people who are potentially in contact with each other. This is consistent with Gumperz’s (1968: 219) definition of a speech community as ‘any human aggregate characterized by regular and frequent interaction by means of a shared body of verbal signs and set off from similar aggregates by significant differences in language usage’. In addition, there may be a subjective component related to social norms of behaviour, including the use of language. Communities can be viewed at different levels of social analysis – in particular, overarching groups vs. smaller clusters, defined by locally salient factors, including class and ethnicity. In turn, groups overlap and change over time. People belong, in unique ways, more or less strongly to different groups (defined by family, work, e­ thnicity, etc.), and their salience for the speaker varies from moment to moment. However, because of their personal histories and preferences, people will associate and identify more with some groups than with others. These are likely to be ­smaller-scale groups or clusters involving face-to-face contacts (communities of practice [Meyerhoff 2012] are a particular instantiation, but families and school



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friendship groups are salient examples, too). Crucially for us, these are likely to be geographically focused. It is the degree of social stability that this type of localness implies that enables locality-based speech patterns to emerge and to be maintained. However, seen from an individual’s point of view, a community is mainly experienced through her or his social network  –  through everyday personal contacts. Within a social network, weak ties are thought to be the channels along which changes are spread (Milroy & Milroy 1985). All of these social structures  –  ­communities, groups and networks  –  have correlates in linguistic ­behaviour (Milroy & Milroy 1985; Kerswill 1993). It is changes in these patterns I want to explore specifically at the community level. The approach I will be using to achieve this is derived in part from work by Andersen (1988), Trudgill (2004; 2011) and Mufwene (1996; 2001). As with the ideas just outlined, their approaches to language change are broadly socio-­ demographic, in a way that has received advocacy in studies of creolisation (e.g., van den Berg & Selbach 2009; Mufwene 1996). In this chapter, we will test the limits of this approach to establishing the changing states of a ‘dialect landscape’ in the relatively distant past, without the possibility of modern survey and recording techniques.

3.1 Evolutive vs. adaptive changes (Andersen 1988) Andersen’s (1988) paper is a study of the spread of changes across a dialect continuum, with examples taken from Europe. He differentiates between evolutive and adaptive changes. Evolutive changes are language-internally motivated and triggered during language acquisition, while adaptive changes involve the adoption of a linguistic feature (a word or a sound) from another community which speakers have come into contact with (McMahon 1994: 95–6; Andersen 1996: 17). These two types of change are aligned with what Labov (2007) calls transmission and diffusion – the former referring to the intergenerational passing on of language/dialect, the latter the adoption, through contact, of forms which have diffused across geographical space. All of these will become important for our discussion; however, Andersen finds that not all of the cases he discusses can be accounted for by them. To deal with this he introduces a two-part model of change, involving degree of contact and degree of subjective orientation towards or away from one’s own community, the latter being independent of the change mechanism itself. I will deal with the contact part of the model first. Andersen proposes that an important predictive dimension for language change is the degree to which

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members of a community have contacts with people from elsewhere. High-­contact communities are expected to undergo rapid change, with the change involving what Andersen refers to as the adoption of norms. Thus, ‘[t]he bearers of one set of norms adopt aspects of the others’ norms as theirs and adjust their usage accordingly. As a consequence, the relevant aspects of the innovators’ own traditional norms cease to be passed on in their area, and the difference which earlier marked the two speech areas as distinct is obliterated’ (Andersen 1988: 40). Andersen sees this mechanism as leading to simplification: referring to morphology, he states that, in open communities (with a high degree of external contact), there is a ‘decrease in irregularity … There is typically a marked difference in this regard between open and closed communities … the greater potential for variability of usage in open communities favors a more active leveling of irregularities’ (1988: 60–1). On the other hand, in closed communities, which are relatively cut off, we see the opposite happening. Evolutive (internally-driven) changes have a freer rein here: ‘Closed communities … may offer the ideal context for a high-­ fidelity transmission of phonetic detail and thus favor the establishment of incipient rules … As a consequence, … the amount of phonetic change may be greater in relatively closed communities – to the point of being exorbitant’ (1988: 71). By ‘exorbitant’, Andersen is referring to unusual sound changes, though complexity in morphology and even syntax may arise. The second part of Andersen’s social model is to do with the attitudes of the community towards outsiders and their linguistic norms. He introduces the notions of endocentricity and exocentricity, which refer to the relative positivity of attitudes towards outside linguistic and social norms – the community’s subjective orientation. His explanation is as follows: ‘… appeal must be made to the tighter or looser bonds of linguistic solidarity that bind its [an open community’s] members together, that is, to the attitudes they collectively hold towards their own norms vis-à-vis those of others’ (1988: 71–2). Endocentric communities (and dialects) resist external norms. This allows us to set up a four-way classification, in which the same categories are co-opted as descriptors for both communities and dialects (the numbering is mine): –– Endocentric closed (Type 1): geographically peripheral and self-contained, and allowing ‘exorbitant’ phonetic changes (see above). They appear to be rare today in the west (Røyneland 2005: 86). –– Endocentric open (Type 2): urban, innovative in the context of a ‘great or fair amount of interdialectal communication’ (Andersen 1988: 60). And: ­‘Endocentric open dialects may retain their individuality in the face of relatively extensive exposure to other speech forms’ (p. 74). Because of their high degree of external contact, there is by implication scope for innovative features to diffuse outwards.



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–– Exocentric closed (Type 3): linguistic norms have become pervious to outside influence, but contact is actually slight. ‘[O]ne can expect exocentric closed dialects to accept diffused innovations just like exocentric open dialects, but at a rate which is slower in proportion to the lower density of their inter-­ dialectal communicative networks’ (p. 74). –– Exocentric open (Type 4): unlike Type 2, communities are not especially protective of local norms. Instead, they are strongly affected by incoming features, diffusing from local urban centres. Thus: ‘It may be primarily an attitudinal shift from endocentric to exocentric which changes the course of development of a local dialect when it becomes part of a wider socio-­ spatial grouping’ (p. 74). This is, I would argue, the mechanism for the loss of dialect. In Andersen (1988), this framework is drawn in bold outline, and as a result it is a blunt instrument – even if one allows for gradations between the extremes of the two dimensions. Criteria for what constitutes ‘contact’ are not clearly set out, nor is it easy to determine how differences in amount of contact can be measured. Within any community, individuals vary greatly in the degree to which they themselves have high or low amounts of contact, or are exocentric or endocentric in their orientations. Even if one takes some kind of ‘average’ amount of contact or of endo-/exocentricity as the measure, this does not allow us to evaluate the qualitative differences (such as differences in multiplexity) between the contacts which an individual, or the community for that matter, contracts. Endo-/exocentricity is very vaguely defined, and even with questionnaire-based and experimental methods for ascertaining social orientation (Llamas 1999; Llamas & Watt 2015), it is unlikely that it corresponds to a single, measurable dimension.

3.2 Sociolinguistic typology: simplification vs. complexification processes (Trudgill 2002; 2010a; b; 2011) Nevertheless, both ‘contact’ and ‘social orientation’ are useful primes for an initial exploration of types of speech community. This brings us to the second sociolinguistic model: this is Trudgill’s contention that sociolinguistic typology can help explain different kinds of language change (Trudgill 2002; 2010a;  b; 2011). ­Trudgill discusses a range of attested changes for which sociolinguistic details exist. He is concerned to explain why, in cases of language or dialect contact, both simplification and complexification can occur (2011: 31)  –  where

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simplification refers (mainly) to a reduction in morphological irregularity, while ­complexification is additive, that is, of a kind that involves the addition of forms or categories from the language that is the source of the contact, such as new phonemes. He concludes as follows: Simplification will occur in sociolinguistic contact situations only to the extent that untutored, especially short-term, adult second-language learning occurs, and not only occurs but dominates. (2011: 40)

and: We can expect to see additive complexity developing in long-term, co-territorial contact situations which involve childhood  –  and therefore pre-[critical] threshold and proficient – bilingualism. (2011: 42)

Phonological and morphological changes in standard forms of English in the period since 1750 have been relatively minor, but since the research focus has been largely on the standard, the considerable changes in non-standard varieties over the same period have largely been masked. We will return to these in the context of simplification vs. complexification shortly. This goes some way to providing a more fine-grained description of ‘contact’ than that which Andersen gives. In addition, Trudgill also talks about ­isolation  –  the lack of contact  –  and here he too finds the kind of ‘exorbitant’ changes noted by Andersen (Trudgill 2011: 98). Isolation forms part of ­Trudgill’s further typology, as follows; the relevance of these different parameters will become clear as we begin to present data: 1. small vs. large community size 2. dense vs. loose social networks 3. social stability vs. instability 4. high vs. low degree of shared information 5. degree of contact vs. isolation

(Trudgill 2010a: 300)

At the start of the Late Modern period, English-speaking communities in Britain were beginning to experience the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution. ­Communities diversified rapidly, with the expansion of existing towns increasingly based on a single industry and with a highly stratified capitalist structure. We will return to the effects of the Industrial Revolution shortly, but suffice it to say that these developments entailed changes in the values of the five factors above. This will presumably have impacted language in ways that have been explored in modern communities (e.g. Milroy & Milroy 1985; Millar 2016): small



Dialect formation and dialect change in the Industrial Revolution 

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communities with dense social networks, local employment and stability gave way to larger, more diverse units with greater contact, and we would expect a levelling of dialect differences across a larger region. A further factor, migration, is not explicitly mentioned, but is of course crucial. We turn to this now, again using work by Trudgill as a springboard. The sociolinguistic typology approach deals mainly with the explanation of simplification and complexification  –  processes which, it turns out, are of relatively little importance in British English in the period since 1800  –  which means that we might instead look, for example, for rate of linguistic change. That said, we will see an example of complexity in a small community at the end of the chapter. In the model, communities are the independent (or explanatory) variable. They are a given, and so the model has little to say about the formation of new communities and, hence, new dialects. It also has little to say about the transition from one community type to another, and this it shares with ­Andersen’s model. New-dialect formation is the focus of Trudgill’s deterministic model of c­ ontact-driven change, by which any role for identity and ideology is backgrounded in favour of seeing change as an automatic outcome of the proportions of speakers of different dialects in a new community (2004; 2008). In its most s­ traightforward form, a ‘new dialect’ emerges when speakers of different mutually intelligible ­language varieties migrate to a new location where there is no existing population, or a population speaking a different language and with whom there is little social integration. The result is a dialect in which the features that win out are those which were in a majority among the i­ncoming ­speakers. This is a matter of frequencies, and hence deterministic. Trudgill’s example is New Zealand  –  a place where English speakers migrated in relatively large numbers from around 1850. However, in late eighteenth/early nineteenth century Britain, this type of tabula rasa did not exist, and any new dialect that emerged remained in contact with other varieties of English, especially in its own hinterland  –  as seems to have been very much the case during the Industrial Revolution. In New Zealand, a new variety emerged, cut off from the dialect continua of the countries of origin. In Britain, there are, either historically or in the present day, few examples of dialects which are sufficiently distinct from surrounding dialects to be considered separate in the same way: the major exception is Liverpool (Honeybone 2007): ‘Liverpool English stands outside of [sic] dialect continuum, as a relatively new variety’ (Honeybone 2007: 110). In this period, it also appears that only one town of significance was established as a new, planned settlement on unoccupied land, Middlesbrough (Llamas 2015). We will discuss the demographic evidence relating to Middlesbrough later in this chapter. This being the case, the question presents itself of the extent to which we can speak of ‘new dialects’ emerging

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during the Industrial Revolution at all. We will turn to this question in Sections 5, 6 and 7, and in doing so we will find the approach of Mufwene to be of crucial importance; I will present his model there. So far, I have attempted to draw up a set of sociodemographic factors which have explanatory value in terms of the association between community type and language change. In addition, however, we have to be able to operationalise these factors for use with communities in the past for which we have relatively sparse information, but for which, because of the considerable time depth, we can relatively easily see major social and demographic changes. My appeal to the ‘traditional’ sociolinguistic factors of gender, class, age and ethnicity will therefore be minimal, because at this temporal distance and without actual samples of speech it is not really possible to work at the individual level. Historical sociolinguists have been successful in analysing language data from named, literate individuals. Although recently attention has been given to the language of lower-status individuals, such as nineteenth-century pauper and less schooled letter writers (Laitinen 2015), we still cannot gain access to the population at large.

4 Britain and its communities in 1800 By 1800, Britain was already well on the way to being transformed by the Industrial Revolution  –  the massive changes in social and economic structure which were driven by innovations in technology, the harnessing of water and coal power, the invention of the factory system and the development of ­capitalism. Manufacturing, such as cloth-making, had existed in the rural areas prior to industrialisation; these industries now became mechanised while remaining close to the source of water power. Although some have argued that the ‘revolutionary’ side of the Industrial Revolution is doubtful because of the long period of time involved and because both traditional and new industries were affected (Daunton 1995: 125–127), the fact was that the new economy required large movements of people into the industrialising towns and cities. It appears that most of the migration was relatively local, with continued contacts between the towns and their hinterlands, though the system of apprenticeships, as well as the practice of migrant labour, often required men, women and children to travel long distances to find work (Higginbotham nd; Worship 2000). During the nineteenth century, there was also large-scale migration from Ireland to many English towns and cities. Complex population movements such as these clearly helped determine the outcome of any dialect changes that took place.



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5 The Founder Principle, demographic change and scenarios for dialect change in the nineteenth century, 1801–1900 In order to uncover the mechanisms of dialect formation and change during this period, knowing where the migrants came from is not enough. We need to know the proportions of people from different places as well as to have some knowledge about the local dialects, on the basis that, as Trudgill’s determinism model predicts, the outcome of dialect contact depends on the relative frequencies of the linguistic features that were brought in. The determinism model fails, however, to take account of the precise dynamics of dialect or language formation resulting from migration, nor does it easily handle the diverse contexts in which it occurs. It is here that Mufwene’s (1996; 2001) adaptation of the Founder Principle comes into its own. Mufwene discusses his model in the context, not of dialect contact, but of the development of African American English and Caribbean creoles out of specific types of multilingual contact. This approach allows Mufwene to argue that the features of a creole depend on input from mostly non-standard varieties of the lexifier, including grammatical structures, and subsequently on grammatical transfer from the languages of the enslaved Africans. He explains that, in the American colonies, the proportions of Africans to Europeans were at first low, and it was at this stage that African American English dialects were formed, essentially as contact varieties of English. Subsequently, newly-arrived Africans would acquire this established variety. On the Caribbean plantations, the proportions of Africans were much higher, leading to greater grammatical transfer from African languages, resulting in what are labelled ‘creoles’ (Mufwene argues that creole formation is not typologically distinct from other kinds of contact-based change). These creoles were acquired by later arrivals from Africa, children learning them accurately. Although he discusses the relative proportions of Europeans and Africans in the new settlements, Mufwene does not go into detail about the process of dialect transmission. This seems to me to be crucial. The basic pattern is that children growing up acquire the community’s specific accent and dialect features in childhood and adolescence (Labov 2007). For newcomers, the picture is more complex, in that a second language or second dialect is being acquired, with age-related restrictions on what kinds of features can be acquired beyond particular ages. Chambers (1992) posits a ‘critical age’ for dialect acquisition of between seven and fourteen, and this is supported by other studies (Kerswill 1996; Nycz 2015). I would argue that the critical age relates closely to whether the outcome of in-migration for an existing dialect is no change, some change or

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swamping. Let us assume that, for a dialect to be changed, there needs to be, at a given point in time, a minimum proportion of in-migrant people who have not acquired the local dialect. In the absence of detailed information, we can set this number at 50%. I would also suggest that this figure should include a high proportion of adolescents and young adults, because they are more likely to integrate with local networks than are older adults, and would hence be linguistically more influential. I would also argue that the time over which this proportion persists should be around 10–12 years, this being roughly how long a pre-school age child takes to accrue a social network beyond the household and family. This figure of 50% is not entirely arbitrary: it is supported by at least two studies, both of which demonstrate phonological restructuring in places with a very high proportion of foreign-born residents. Looking at the origin and spread of the low-back merger (between words like cot and caught) in small towns in Pennsylvania, Herold (1997) finds that the merger is much more strongly present in towns that had a large, non-Anglophone immigrant population in 1920 than in those that did not. All the towns had a rapid migration-led population increase between 1890 and 1920, but the merger was largely present in mining towns, where the ‘foreign-born’ or ‘first-generation Americans’ (those with one f­oreign-born parent) represented 59% of the population, while it was largely absent in the non-mining towns, where the proportion was 24% (with the remaining migrants being of US origin). Secondly, a study of phonological and grammatical restructuring in British-born young people’s language in London (Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox & Torgersen 2011) found greater changes in boroughs with relatively high proportions of non-British born residents. This is reflected in the proportions of school children who do not have English as a first language (NALDIC 2013): in 2013, these ranged from 33.1% to 76.1% in inner London boroughs (London as a whole having an average of 47.5%, the figure for England being 18.1%). Shortly, we will use nineteenth-century Census figures to look for evidence of the proportions of young people who are likely not to have acquired the local dialect. Before we do so, we should consider whether the Founder Principle is at all applicable in the dialect contact ecologies (language ecology: ‘the study of interactions between any given language and its environment’  –  Haugen 1972: 325) of nineteenth-century New Zealand and industrialising Britain. These ecologies differ from the cases Mufwene discusses in that the lexis of the incoming varieties is more or less shared, as are most of the grammatical and phonological structures. Perhaps more importantly, power structures were different: there were power differentials inherent in capitalism in Britain; even in egalitarian, tabula rasa New Zealand, power was asserted by the Anglican Church, which was able to exclude certain groups. What is shared across all the contact scenarios is that power differences affect the type and amount of contact between groups, as



Dialect formation and dialect change in the Industrial Revolution 

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well as the motivation one group has to accommodate to another. Because the Founder Principle is fundamentally a result of linguistic accommodation, there is every reason to suppose that its effect is universal. In terms of new-dialect formation, Dollinger (2008: 129–132) has discussed the emergence of Canadian English using this framework, arguing that the ­American Loyalists in British North America in the early years of the nineteenth century constituted the founder population of Canadian English and that later incomers from Britain and Ireland had a minimal linguistic influence, despite their very large numbers.

6 Implementing the demographic framework in nineteenth-century Britain Moving now to the industrialising British towns and cities, we should consider three possibilities: first, whether we are dealing with an original local dialect which, as a result of the Founder Principle, is relatively unaffected by waves of newcomers; second, whether the newcomers arrived in an existing community over a sufficiently short time period and in sufficiently large numbers to swamp the original dialect (or to radically restructure it); or, third, whether there were any settlements in ‘virgin’ territory in which new-dialect formation is likely to have taken place. In each case, we need minimally to know the following: –– the size of the original population relative to the incoming population –– the rapidity of any population increase (e.g., by decade) –– the contribution of natural increase (births minus deaths) to the overall increase To these demographic data, we need to add the social dimensions of power, intergroup relations and attitudes. Information about dialect speech in earlier times is sparse and, above all, unsystematic. Using census data, we can, however, investigate whether any of the sociodemographic conditions and changes would predispose communities to the kinds of change we noted earlier. The first national census in Britain was ­conducted in 1801 (Vision of Britain nd(a)), and this has made countrywide ­calculations of demographic changes possible. For our purposes, Lawton (1986) and Lee (1986) provide invaluable information for the nineteenth century on two parameters relevant to dialect change: population growth and decrease, and natural growth vs. migration-based growth. Figure 1 shows population densities across Great Britain at three stages during the long nineteenth century.

400

200

100

99

49

25

1851

Figure 1: Population density in 1801, 1851 and 1911. (Lawton [1986: 11], Figs. 2.1–3). With permission.

800

198

Key to maps Persons per km2 per 1,000 acres

1801

Shetland

100 mls 150 km

0 0

Orkney

mls

0 20

1911

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At the beginning of the century, there were three large centres of population: an area across northern England encompassing Manchester and the industrial centres of the western part of Yorkshire, the West Midlands and London. As the century progressed, these areas grew in population, as did most of the rest of the country including rural areas. It is worth quoting Lawton at length (1986: 10): In England in 1801, areas of high density population were isolated and very small … ­Especially prominent were London and the industrial West Midlands, south Lancashire and west Yorkshire. [1851] … [A] growing, still labour-intensive agriculture supported by a substantial range of craft industry pushed rural population densities to their peak. The distribution was dominated, however, by towns and industry, especially coalfields, major ports and ­commercial centres. London’s county with a population of 2.7m equalled that of the eleven biggest ­provincial centres put together, though expanding high density areas point to emerging conurbations around Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Glasgow. Between 1851 and 1911 rural populations declined throughout Britain … Densities fell severely in the marginal areas … In contrast, on the coalfields, especially northeast England, the east Midlands and south Wales, and the rural/suburban periphery of large towns and conurbations, densities increased rapidly. A century of growth and redistribution had created a very different map from that of 1801. On the coalfields and around London there were large densely populated areas. Suburban growth and conurbation were now … what was happening. The growth of older industrial areas … began to slacken, whilst that of Greater London, the southeast and the south and east Midlands quickened as populations began the twentieth-century drift to the new industries of southern Britain.

Lawton outlines two main trends: in the first half of the century, we witness the growth in population in the northern industrial and coalmining areas, while the second half sees the rise of the ‘new industries of southern Britain’, the emerging service industries which would become central to the twentieth-century economy. Figure 2 shows overall population growth in the two halves of the nineteenth century. Except for peripheral rural areas, there is growth across the board, with concentrations in Glasgow, on Tyneside, the banks of the Tees (Stockton and the new town of Middlesbrough, founded in 1830), in Liverpool, Manchester, West Yorkshire, Birmingham, South Wales and (particularly after 1851) London. Figure 3 shows the components of the population change after 1851, first, natural change (the difference between births and deaths, with the effect of migration removed) and, second, change due to migration (the figure after natural change has been subtracted). ‘Sum of percentage net intercensal change’ refers to the population change between censuses, summed across the six censuses from 1851 to 1911. The measures are relatively rough, with the highest rate being 100% or greater, which amounts to an average of 16.7% or more per decade: many ­individual

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1801–1851

1851–1911

Percentage change 200 100 50 25 0 Decrease

Total change

Total change

Figure 2: Population growth, 1801–1851 and 1851–1911 (Lawton [1986: 13], Figs. 2.5–6). With permission. Shetiand

0 20 mls Orkney Sum of percentage net intercensal change

Sum of net percentage intercensal change

London

02 mls

50 Increase 0

100 80 60

50 Decrease

1851–1911 Natural increase

1851–1911 Change due to migration

0

100mls

0

150mls

Figure 3: Components of population growth, 1851–1911 (Lawton [1986: 13], Figs. 2.7–8). With permission.



Dialect formation and dialect change in the Industrial Revolution 

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towns and cities had a much higher rate than this, at least in the earlier period, as we will see. Figure 3 shows that, except for parts of Wales and the Highlands, natural increase is strong in almost all parts of the country, though Lawton comments that mortality and fertility rates both varied substantially. In many towns and cities, such as those in the West Midlands districts of the Black Country and the Potteries, both were high, keeping populations in balance, while in London m ­ ortality was so high that, across the century, the increase was largely due to migration. In almost all the rural parts of Britain, there were migration-led decreases; the effect this has on dialects is likely to be mixed, since the loss of child-bearing population would lead to older people and their dialects having a conservative influence; on the other hand, depopulation can lead to a small community being subsumed into a larger one. Whatever the case, as we shall see, one effect of the persistence of small, low-contact communities is the maintenance of dialect and, sometimes, the introduction of complex changes (cf. Trudgill 2011: 74). Towards the end of the period, according to Lawton (1986: 12), migration-led increases came to be confined mainly to London’s suburbs and the larger cities, with the northern English industrial areas losing population. The picture being portrayed does not lend itself to new-dialect formation of the kind described for New Zealand. There are, in fact, very few examples of the establishment of entirely new towns in the period – Middlesbrough being a notable exception. As we have already seen, industrialisation took place in areas where various kinds of labour-intensive crafts were already practised, as well as cloth and wool industries. Many of these had exploited water power to drive mills. Thus, even a town such as Blackburn, which grew at a rate of between 25% and 45% per decade in the first half of the nineteenth century from a base of 11,980 in 1801 (Taylor nd), had been a market town since the Middle Ages and a centre of the wool trade and weaving in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with a population of 5,000 (Beattie 1992). Are these figures for Blackburn prima facie evidence that the dialect might have been restructured or swamped? We can take this town’s population change as an example. For simplicity, let us say that the population was 10,000 in 1801. For 50% of the population to come from elsewhere 10 years later, there would have to have been a migration-based increase of somewhat more than 100% by 1811, if we accept that many of the incomers, who were mostly of child-bearing age, would have had children within the period, and these would have added to the locally-born population. We must also assume that some of the increase was natural. With the actual increases being much less than this, Blackburn’s dialect could not have been more than mildly restructured by in-migration, and would have retained its local character (maintaining rhoticity to the present day). It was certainly not swamped.

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We can briefly turn to Middlesbrough, the only nineteenth-century new town of any size. Here, we can see indications that new-dialect formation might have contributed to the characteristic features of the dialect. Middlesbrough grew from a population of just 40 in 1821 to 39,284 in 1871. Below are the figures for each census date in this period (Llamas 2015, quoting census data): 1821 1831 1841 1851 1861 1871

40 154 5,463 7,631 18,892 39,284

In Middlesbrough, discounting the tiny populations in 1821 and 1831, there are three intercensal increases of greater than 100%, 1831–41 (344%), 1851–61 (148%) and 1861–71 (108%). The usual caveats apply with respect to the proportion of these figures representing natural increase, as well as the need to include the offspring of the incomers in the native population. The first period (1831–41), with the largest percentage increase, probably saw mainly local in-migration. During the second and third periods, it is known that there were well-established ­migrations from Ireland, Wales and elsewhere (Llamas 2015), with 16% of the population from outside the town (Wikipedia ‘Middlesbrough’). By 1871, as many as 20% of adult males came from Ireland (Llamas 2015). The first period would have been the initial dialect formation stage – local migration would have meant only slight restructuring on the part of the new arrivals, preserving its North Yorkshire/Teesside character. For the second and third periods, the percentage population increases combined with the relatively modest proportions of the population born elsewhere (16–20%) suggest the possibility of some restructuring  –  though it would probably have been slight. However, Llamas (2015) takes a line that is consistent with new-dialect formation when she notes that ‘the influence of the larger Irish migration [than the Welsh migration – PK] into ­Middlesbrough can perhaps be more keenly felt in the accent and dialect, particularly given the similarities of Middlesbrough English with Liverpool English’. Liverpool also received relatively high numbers of Irish people during this period ­ oneybone argues that this migration can account for some of the and later, and H distinctive Liverpool features that place it outside the dialect continuum, but by no means all (Honeybone 2007: 136). Despite the rapidity of the technological advances, it is clear that the process of urbanisation extended back some centuries before industrialisation began. In Europe, the main source of detailed linguistic information about dialect formation in new industrial centres is Norway, where, in the first two decades of



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the twentieth century, small industrial towns were established to serve metal ore processing plants, exploiting hydroelectric power for the furnaces (see Kerswill 2010; 2013). In each case, the tiny original populations were vastly outnumbered by migrants from elsewhere in Norway, and also Sweden. New, mixed dialects of Norwegian were formed within two or three generations. Because of the recency of the new-dialect formation in these places, the stages of the process are relatively easy to establish and the origins of the dialect features can be traced with considerable certainty. Further research on Middlesbrough, as well as British towns which are not ‘new’, is likely to provide some answers to questions surrounding the origins of urban dialects in nineteenth-century Britain. So far, we have dealt almost exclusively with demographic change, informed particularly by the work of Mufwene. In the next section, we will change the focus to a later time period. Focusing on the late nineteenth century, we will deal more with mobility, contact, stratification and ‘centricity’ in the communities in which dialect change took place. Andersen’s and Trudgill’s ideas will again come to the fore.

7 Community type, contact and ‘centricity’: the industrial cities So far, our purely demographic treatment of towns like early and mid-nineteenth century Blackburn and Middlesbrough has not considered how these communities were structured, and what kinds of contacts they had with other places. With only circumstantial evidence (and without more detailed research), we can only make assumptions. As we have seen, Blackburn was an industrial town with traditions stretching back a good 100 years before the Industrial Revolution, and it became an industrial boom town. We can assume that there already existed a strong class distinction, and that this grew sharper in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As in other Lancashire towns, there was a good deal of immigration from Ireland (Taylor nd) – but not as much as in, for example, Middlesbrough. Much of the in-migration remained local, drawing on the neighbouring rural areas for both labour and also textiles produced at the nearby water-powered mills. It was not isolated, being at the centre of the Lancashire textile trade, but it was far from a port. It may well be that these characteristics led to a sense of civic pride as well as working-class solidarity, both factors which would promote the maintenance of a local dialect. In terms of Andersen’s classification, Blackburn might have had an intermediate amount of contact (between open and closed), and it might have been towards the endocentric end of the attitude scale.

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As a new town built on the Tees estuary to serve as a port for the export of coal as well as the site of a new iron works, Middlesbrough saw rapid in-migration from both the locality and farther afield, including Wales and especially Ireland. Llamas (2015) cites Chase (1995: 6), who argues that the Irish were ‘perfectly assimilated into the dominant popular culture of the region, a culture that was unskilled, non-unionised, hard-drinking and hard-living’. Despite this, the Irish were less assimilated than the Welsh. As a port, it would have received sizable numbers of visiting seamen. All of this suggests a community with more outward facing contacts than Blackburn had a little earlier. Little can be said about local speech in the mid-nineteenth century, though in living memory it has lacked some of the markedly North-eastern features of Tyneside, such as divven’t for ‘don’t’ and gan for ‘go’. However, it shares with the North-east the lack of the so-called reduced definite article, found in most of Yorkshire (the historical county where Middlesbrough is situated), as in I went [təʔ] shops for ‘I went to the shops’. There is, however, some evidence that the area did originally have both definite article reduction and some of the morphosyntactic forms now restricted to Durham and Tyneside. Shortly, we will look more broadly at the evidence provided by Ellis (1889): for now, we can note that the southern part of the district of Cleveland (Middlesbrough formerly constituted part of Cleveland) contained forms such as: [ɡɑŋz] [geɐd trʊf t jal θɪŋ]

‘goes’ ‘went through the whole thing’ (with the definite article taking the form [t])

(Ellis 1889: 505)

A further comment by Ellis is highly significant for us. When staking out the ‘North East Moors’ dialect geographically, he writes that he is including only the southern part of Cleveland: South Cleveland, North Cleveland being spoiled for dialect by the iron works (Ellis 1889: 496)

– commenting that: North of Stokesley the dialect has been corrupted by the development of the ironworks, of which Middlesborough is the head. (Ellis 1889: 500)

Ellis’s correspondent from the district is aware of dialect change in the iron town of Middlesbrough, and indicates that it has moved away from ‘dialect’. We cannot say for sure what it had moved towards, but we can assume it was a form closer to Standard English. Today’s dialect, with its general lack of strongly local features, would seem to bear this out. At the height of its expansion and ­prosperity,



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­ iddlesbrough could have been categorised as fairly high contact (open) and M fairly exocentric. How exceptional was Middlesbrough? Figure 1 shows a rapid increase in density of population in the newly industrialised areas, and Figures 2 and 3 show how this density is reflected in population growth and its components. As we have seen, at least one older town, Blackburn, has a continuity of population that almost certainly precluded any major restructuring or new-dialect formation. From population statistics for other earlier industrial cities like Manchester or Leeds, it is clear that the populations rose steadily across the century. However, reliable figures are only available from 1801, and at that time Manchester already had a population of over 81,000 (visionofbritain.org.uk). We can therefore not exclude new-dialect formation at an earlier date. In Newcastle, which saw a rapid rise only in the second half of the nineteenth century, the peak intercensal increase (between 1881 and 1891) of 31% (visionofbritain.org.uk) is well below our 50% threshold (including as it does both natural and immigration-driven increases); even here, new-dialect formation is unlikely to have taken place – though, again, we cannot dismiss it for the pre-census period (the population was already 34,000 in 1801 (visionofbritain.org.uk)).

8 Loss and maintenance of dialect: The South-east of England Ellis (1889) makes many references to groups of people not speaking ‘dialect’, and here we can detect in him a strongly essentialist view, with a premium on the authentic. ‘Dialect’ is set against ‘received speech’ (‘rs’), and this is done in four main ways. The first is to disparage certain people’s efforts to speak rs as symbolic striving for upward mobility. Thus, we are told that, ‘The petty shopkeepers of Leeds speak a refined form of speech, which cannot properly be called a dialect, but is an attempt to speak rs., continually frustrated by dialectal tendencies and youthful habits’ (Ellis 1889: 396). Second, rs is spoken by ‘tradespeople and [the] best class of inhabitants of rural market towns’ (Ellis 1889: 63); this does not signify any particular deprecation on Ellis’s part, while recognising a highly stratified social order. Third, the use of rs, or a variety that has moved towards it, is the result of dialect contact, as shown by Ellis’s comments on Middlesbrough. The same is also true of North-west Cheshire, which ‘is affected by Liverpool and Birkenhead influence, that is, it has no dialect proper’ (Ellis 1889: 406). The fourth way ‘received speech’ is contrasted with dialect appears to be more common in the south of England than in the north. For example, Ellis informs us

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that, ‘About Lymington and Christchurch [in Hampshire – PK] there is no dialect’ (Ellis 1889: 37). The same is true of the Isle of Sheppey in Kent (pp. 136–7), as well as parts of Hertfordshire (p. 189). In all these places (as well as Middlesbrough and Liverpool), the implication is that this levelling (he doesn’t use the term) towards the standard is the result of heavy migration. But it is only in the context of London and the South-east that the migration origins of this ‘vertical levelling’ (i.e. towards the standard; Hinskens, Auer  & ­Kerswill 2005: 11) is made explicit and discussed in depth. In this region, Ellis (1889: 119) notes, ‘the composite nature of a very shifting population in this district renders the growth of any dialect proper impossible’. However, Ellis allows for ideological changes related to education having an influence, too: ­‘enormous congeries of persons from different parts of the kingdom and from different ­countries, and the generality of school education, render dialect nearly ­impossible’ (p. 225). As a case study, we will take Ellis’s comments on the town of Bushey, on the Hertfordshire/Middlesex border about 18 miles from central London. Bushey’s population grew following the opening of its railway station in 1841, on the main West Coast line, which was opened in 1837. Between 1801 and 1891, the population rose from 856 to 5,652 (Vision of Britain nd(b)). Although the population was small, Bushey formed part of a string of surburbs following the new railway lines and arterial roads. The account given by Ellis’s correspondent is striking (p. 235): The Rector of Bushey: “This place offers no opportunity of assisting your work. The inhabitants come and go, from various places, and remain but a very short time, but chiefly from London. I will not call this place a colluvies omnium gentium [swarm of all nations – PK], but very much like it, and hence has no special language or dialect.”

Ashford is a small town close to central London, some 28 miles south of Bushey. Here, Ellis reports that: The Vicar at Ashford says: “The inhabitants of this locality are mainly strangers from every corner of the country who have settled here for a brief space and never remain long. They represent any and no special pronunciation.”

Ashford’s history is similar to that of Bushey. Its station was opened in 1848 by the Windsor Staines and South Western Railway Company, and the town also became part of London’s suburbanisation. Another similar place is South Mimms: As South Myms (3 [miles] nnw. Barnet) lies in a corner of Mi[ddlesex], projecting into H[ertfordshire], I hoped to find more of a rural character, but no perceptible differences from Enfield were found. The Vicar, however, noted that the village being on the old high road to the north, “the population has a large proportion of families originally from a distance”.



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What of the linguistic forms used in these and other similar suburbs? They include the following: I are, we am, am you, I knows (Rickmansworth) I are, I am, I wur, we was, I loves, they loves, I seen (Willesden; Ellis’s comment: ‘nothing distinctive, nothing rural’) I am, I loves, we says, they gives, he do (Enfield; Ellis’s comment: ‘Hence this has fully the London SE [southeastern] character, with no distinctive rurality’)

Today, some of these forms have not been in use in London or the suburbs for many decades (the only ones that survive are probably I seen and we was). Forms with the present tense –s suffix regardless of person and number are now only found considerably further to the west, and we am is restricted to the West Midlands. However, it is clear from Ellis’s data that a number of these nonstandard features were shared by all these locations on London’s periphery, and this could be the result of regional dialect levelling. Another possibility is that they represent the preservation of older London features, showing the effect of the Founder Principle in London, with features diffused to the suburbs by people moving out from the city. Whatever is the case, they stand in sharp contrast to forms that were certainly rural southeastern dialect at the time, such as the following from Preston Bissett in Buckinghamshire in the 1920s (Harman 1929): A. Hullo! Wheeur be ya a-gooin? B. I beeant a-gooin anywheeur. A. That ye be! B. No, I beeant; I be a-gooin back.

This dialogue contains the participial prefix a–, as well as indicative be. In Hampstead Norreys, Berkshire (near Reading), Lowsley (1888) notes the following (my comments in parentheses): Gie I a apple ‘Give me an apple’ (with ‘pronoun exchange’ – use of a form resembling the Standard subject form as an object) Hast a bin to verm this marnin? ‘Have you been to the farm this morning?’ (with a distinct 2nd person singular verbal and pronominal form, absence of the definite article for familiar/ predictable contexts, the preservation of Anglo-Norman /e/ in farm, and /v/ for initial /f/).

These forms, too, no longer exist in Berkshire. Importantly, when compared to the forms given for the London suburban varieties, all of these forms are both more remote from Standard English and more localised. It is worth noting that the forms of the copula given for the suburban locations – viz. are and am – are Northern in origin and are part of both London dialect and Standard English

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(albeit with different person/number agreement), while the be forms, which are given for the two rural dialects, occur in southwestern dialects. According to Trudgill’s typological model, conservative, often complex features can be maintained in small, close-knit communities, as well as new features being generated. For instance, Hampstead Norreys preserves distinct second-­ person morphology, and the use of the participial a– as a grammatical marker shows greater complexity on this point than most other varieties of English, which do not have it. A striking example of the generation of a new category is the omission of the definite article for familiar and/or predictable contexts vs. its retention elsewhere. Following Trudgill, we can say this is because there is much shared knowledge in such communities. Lowsley (1888: 5) explains this as follows: ‘The article the is omitted in cases where there is no doubt as to what place, &c., may be referred to’. This new category probably represents a spontaneous complexification in a local, low-contact dialect (though we would need to investigate its geographical spread before asserting this more strongly). We are now in a position to attempt to assign openness/closedness and exocentricity/endocentricity to the final speech communities we have discussed, as follows. Below, I have repeated the proposed categorisation for the two northern towns we discussed earlier: Blackburn: medium contact (between open and closed), somewhat endocentric (orientation towards the community). Middlesbrough: fairly high contact (open), fairly exocentric (orientation outside the ­community). Bushey, Ashford, Willesden and Enfield: high contact (open), high exocentricity Preston Bissett and Hampstead Norreys: low contact (closed) and largely endocentric.

9 Conclusion The model I have presented is a composite one, calling principally on demographics and, within that, arguing for a detailed understanding of children’s and adults’ acquisition of dialect, especially in the context of migration between dialect areas. This in turn affects the degree to which migration into an area can lead to restructuring of a local dialect. The Founder Principle is central to this mechanism. At its core is demography, with the linguistic outcomes of the contact process being predictable from the proportions of people speaking different dialects. The mechanism is primarily automatic, involving accommodation (Trudgill 2008). These proportions are not fixed, but change through time



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as a function of natural increase/decrease and in- vs. out-migration. This in turn determines whether an existing dialect will remain unchanged, be restructured or be swamped. I have argued that, by looking carefully at population figures for a given town over several decades, it is possible to infer the type of change that most likely took place, even in the near-absence of linguistic data. Key to this is to find a workable method of calculating the proportions of incomers (particularly young people) to existing residents at any one time, taking into account children’s sociolinguistic development (Kerswill 1996). Although there is not (yet) enough data to determine what the calculation should be for change to be induced, its parameters are clear, namely, the proportion of incomers should be higher than a certain value, and the duration over which that proportion persists should be greater than a certain time. I have argued that the proportion is roughly 50%, and that the duration is around 10–12 years. The upshot of this is that we can assert that new-dialect formation in the way described for New Zealand (Trudgill 2004) or Milton Keynes (Kerswill & Williams 2000) is absent in the English of the British Industrial Revolution – with one or two exceptions. Out of the three alternatives – new dialect formation, restructuring, and swamping – restructuring probably accounts for most of the industrialised urban dialects. The Founder Principle, as adapted for language change by Mufwene, also deals with the types of relationships between the linguistic groups in contact. Mainly these involve power disparities, ranging from the master/slave relationship to (in the case considered in this chapter) social class in an early capitalist society. This restricts certain kinds of intergroup and interpersonal contacts, and promotes others. The implication is that, even here, it is the automatic effect of face-to-face accommodation that is central (at least at the time we are dealing with). The model of change I am presenting adds a subjective element, that of endo/ exocentricity (Andersen 1988). We have not seen direct evidence of the workings of this in this chapter; Ellis (1889) does contain occasional references to speakers having ‘pride’ in their dialect, but these are few. What Andersen provides in introducing this dimension is the possibility of looking more closely at agency and intentionality; however, dealing with change in the past makes it difficult to operationalise these concepts. When considering whether new-dialect formation, restructuring or swamping took place, there is a tendency for us to imagine these as discrete ‘events’. Although this is the stance we have taken in this chapter, it is an idealisation. As mentioned at the beginning, we should not see (speech) communities as discrete, static units, but as changeable, multidimensional human groupings which do not have fixed boundaries and which interact with other similar groupings; this is very close to Gumperz’s view of the speech community (1968). We should not risk projecting further back into the past than we have good evidence for.

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However, by taking a longer time span than is available to variationist sociolinguists, as well as considerable geographical breadth, we can reach beyond the study of present-day dialect variation to gain insights about the social and ­demographic conditions of language change in a way that would otherwise not be possible for us.

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Emma Moore and Chris Montgomery

2 The dialect of the Isles of Scilly: Exploring the relationship between language production and language perception in a Southern insular variety 1 Introduction The Isles of Scilly are a group of islands off the South West coast of England. Whilst there has been a reasonable amount of attention paid to the dialects of South West England, at least historically (see, for instance, Altendorf & Watt 2008; Wagner 2008 for an overview), there is little empirical linguistic research on the Scillonian variety of English  –  the exception being Thomas (1979). ­Nonetheless, there exist a number of informal historical accounts of the variety which describe it as “more pure” (Heath 1750: 436) or “much better” (Troutbeck 1794: 168) than neighbouring mainland dialects, and its speakers as lacking the language features typically found in the adjacent variety of Cornish English. Our research on the variety reveals that similarities with Cornish English do, in fact, exist, but that the trajectory of Cornish English forms on the islands reflects ­Scilly’s distinct sociocultural history and identity. This raises questions about how the language forms produced by speakers are identified with locales. Using a new tool for capturing, visualising, and querying listeners’ real-time reactions to voice samples, this paper will explore the relationship between actual language production and how language forms are perceived. It will show that different language features function to mark different kinds of social meanings and that some language features carry more weight when it comes to identifying a locale. In addition to providing more data on an understudied variety of Southern English, this paper will confirm Schreier et al.’s (2010: 3) claim that  –  far from being conservative and homogeneous varieties  –  “lesser-known varieties of English” have much to contribute to our understanding of important issues in sociolinguistic theory.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110577549-003

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2 The Isles of Scilly: Location, population and industry The Isles of Scilly are located approximately twenty-eight miles west of the South Western most tip of England (see Figure 1). They are accessible by air, with flights departing Monday-Saturday from Land’s End and Newquay (Cornwall) all year round, and from Exeter (Devon) between March and November. The islands are also serviced Monday-Saturday (with the occasional Sunday sailing) by a passenger ferry between Easter and October, and a freight ship three days a week all year round. Both vessels depart from Penzance in Cornwall. The islands have a modest population which has been relatively stable over time (1877 in 1901, 2097 in 1911, and 2203 in the latest census [Office for National Statistics, 2011]). 75% of the population live on St. Mary’s, the largest of Scilly’s five inhabited islands. St. Mary’s is the only island to have an airport, a secondary

Exeter

Newquay

Cornwall

Penzance Land’s End Isles of Scilly 0

10

20

40 Miles

N

Figure 1: The position of Isles of Scilly relative to Cornwall and the rest of the UK, showing the location of direct transport links to the islands. (This map contains: Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2013 and 2016; National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database right 2013 and 2016; NISRA data © Crown copyright and database right 2013; NRS data © Crown copyright and database right 2013. Location data is © Crown Copyright and Database Right 2016. Ordnance Survey (Digimap Licence)).



The dialect of the Isles of Scilly 

 41

school, and key facilities such as a supermarket and banks. It is also where the passenger ferry and freight ship dock. The other inhabited islands (known as the ‘off-islands’) are Tresco, St. Martin’s, Bryher and St. Agnes. Small passenger launches and jet boats link these islands to St. Mary’s and to each other. The transport links to the islands support the islands’ tourist industry, which provides over 85% of the islands’ income (Council of the Isles of Scilly 2004: 14). There is some farming and a small amount of fishing on the islands, with favourable weather conditions supporting flower farming in particular. The islands’ current indigenous population is believed to have descended from 1571, when Sir Francis Godolphin caused the islands to be repopulated (see comments in Borlase [1756: 112–113]; Bowley [1964: 69]). Whilst there are signs that the islands were inhabited as early as the Stone Age, Bowley (1964: 67) notes that “[t] here is little written evidence of the lives of the inhabitants of Scilly before the 16th century.” It is, of course, possible that the hardships of island life and the likelihood of invasions led to the islands being depopulated on multiple occasions prior to Godolphin’s tenancy. Furthermore, the low population counts on the islands ­(especially the off-islands) mean that it would not take a large influx to substantially alter the make-up of the population. This all adds to the population’s fluidity and the dialect’s susceptibility to change. A mixed and fluid population also reduces the affects that the Cornish language might have had upon Scillonian English. There is some evidence that Cornish existed on Scilly after Godolphin’s arrival: English antiquary, John Aubrey (1626–1697) noted having an informant who was “An ingeniose young man, a native of Scylly, who perfectly understands the Cornish language” (Fellows-Jensen 2000: 94). This is supported by Heath-Coleman’s (1995: 60) placename research, which concludes that “the Cornish which was spoken on Scilly shared in the very latest general phonological developments of the language’, i.e. those not normally recorded (on either the mainland or Scilly) until after 1600”.1 Nonetheless, Thomas (1985: 36) notes that “throughout the Isles we lack any direct record of the Cornish language ever having been in use. It must have been spoken, but at too early a time to be remarked upon by literary visitors”. Godolphin was the first in a line of governors to lease the islands from the British crown. The islands’ lease continued in the Godolphin line until 1834 when it was taken over by Hertfordshire landowner Augustus Smith. The lease remained in Smith’s family until 1920, at which point all but one island – Tresco – reverted to the Duchy of Cornwall (currently His Royal H ­ ighness, the Prince of Wales).2  Today,

1 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for alerting us to these sources. 2 Tresco is currently managed by the Dorrien-Smith family (direct descendants of Augustus Smith), who manage the island as the Tresco Estate.

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 Emma Moore and Chris Montgomery

the Duchy own most of the freehold on the islands, with the exception of St. Mary’s main town, Hugh Town, which was sold off in 1949. The nature of the islands’ governance led soldier, Robert Heath, writing in the eighteenth century, to note that islanders “have, upon all Occasions, been firmly attached to the Crown” (Heath 1750: iii). Augustus Smith is generally credited with improving the prosperity of the islanders; English writer Wilkie Collins, who sailed to the islands in the nineteenth century, noted that when Smith “first came among his tenantry he found them living miserably and ignorantly. He has succoured, reformed, and taught them; and there is now, probably, no place in England where the direr hardships of poverty are so little known as in the Scilly Islands” (Collins 1861: 93). Smith was credited with improving Scilly’s infrastructure by constructing new roads and piers (Uren 1907: 67), and introducing compulsory education to the islands before it was enforced on the mainland (Mothersole 1914: 48). However, his methods were uncompromising; “[t]o relieve the congestion, Mr. Smith drafted the boys off to sea, and sent the girls across to the mainland as shop-assistants, or domestic servants” (Uren 1907: 67). Mothersole (1914: 48) goes so far as to claim that Smith deliberately dispatched the “ne’er do weels” to the mainland in order to improve the island population. Although no doubt influenced by his own status as an islander in exile, Frank Banfield, writing in the Gentleman’s Magazine in the late nineteenth century, suggests that islanders may not have been averse to travelling; he observes that “[n]early all the children of the place have gone roving, and so there are few portions of English earth that are not in constant communication with our diminutive archipelago” (Banfield 1888: 54). Banfield’s evaluation of the Scillonian character reflects a more widely represented view of the Scillonian as more cultured, educated, and better spoken than his mainland counterparts, as we illustrate below in our discussion of the historical metalinguistic commentary about the variety of English used on the islands. Despite being part of the ceremonial county of Cornwall,3 Scilly has its own separate county council, and islanders do not refer to themselves as Cornish. As McMullen (1893: 57) observes, “[t]he inhabitants call themselves Scillonians, and to speak of them as Cornish is offensive”.

3 Ceremonial counties refer to the current structure of English counties according to The Department for Communities and Local Government (https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/ englands-traditional-counties; accessed 16th March 2016). They are not the same as the administrative counties. The Isles of Scilly are not part of the administrative county of Cornwall, but they are part of the ceremonial county of Cornwall.



The dialect of the Isles of Scilly 

 43

This overview suggests that there are three key factors which differentiate Scilly from the South West mainland: (i) the nature of island governance; (ii) the ‘tabula rasa’ situation in the sixteenth century; and (iii) the linguistic situation. Of course the historical development of (iii) is no doubt influenced by (i) and (ii), and we consider this further in the next section.

3 The history of Scillonian English Although there is limited systematic description of Scillonian speech, there are ample metalinguistic comments which reveal how Scillonian English has been perceived across time. As noted in the Introduction, these comments are consistent in describing Scillonian English as more standard than adjacent mainland varieties. Extracts (1)-(3) provides examples from the eighteenth century, through to the twentieth. (1) “… the Language of Scilly refines upon what is spoken in many Parts of Cornwall; probably from the more frequent Intercourse of the Inhabitants, some more than others, with those who speak the Standard English best” (Heath 1750: 436). (2) “The Islanders are remarkable for speaking good English – far preferable, at least, to what is generally heard amongst the humbler classes of any county, at some distance from the metropolis … This excellence, perhaps, is in a measure owing to the frequent intercourse with shipping from all parts of the Kingdom” (Woodley 1822: 105–106). (3) “I spent the next morning in the local school, and was astonished at the quality of the English that I heard. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch4 attributes this exceptional purity to the fact that in Cromwell’s day the Bedfordshire Regiment were stationed in the islands and married the islanders … All the children sang and danced for me, and the purity of their vowel sounds was as remarkable as the daintiness of their dancing” (Mais 1934: 257, 277).

As (1)–(3) note, the ‘purity’ of Scillonian English is attributed to language contact  –  either with the elite networks of the islands’ governors (1), with seafarers using Scilly’s harbour or buying ships (2), or with soldiers located on the islands’ garrison (3) – points of contact also noted by Banfield (1888: 53):

4 Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch was a Cornish writer. His novel, Major Vigoureaux, published in 1907, was set on the Isles of Scilly.

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[w]hen Sir Francis Godolphin obtained his very feudal lease, he provided openings in the Cassiterides5 for those in whom he was interested, and his family did the same kindness for some whose fortunes were unsettled by the Civil War. Afterwards the rise of a considerable shipbuilding and shipping interest at Scilly introduced some new blood, while the fact that Scilly had a considerable garrison and naval squadron always near it, during the great French war, will account for more.

It seems feasible to assume that the ship-building industry and the military bases on Scilly facilitated short-term language contact on this islands. Whilst shortterm contact may have had limited effects on the dialect, census records confirm on-going immigration into Scilly’s population – suggesting more durable contact with other dialects of English. For instance, the 1901 census shows that 30.4% of Scilly’s population of 1877 people were born in places other than Scilly (data from The Isles of Scilly Museum 2007). Trudgill (2004: 23) has noted that dialect contact can lead to dialect levelling which can, in turn, lead to the loss of socially and linguistically marked language forms. This may explain why dialects in areas of high contact are perceived as more ‘standard’ than other dialects. However, it is important to note that the large majority of Scilly’s incomers in the 1901 census were from Cornwall (48%, 276 people). Although incomers came from many other locations in the British Isles (as shown in Figure  2), only Cornwall provided a sizeable number of people. Of the other locations, the most sizeable inputs, after Cornwall, were Devon (3%, 60 people), and London (2%, 46 people). More recent census data suggests that this trend of Cornish immigration persists over time. For instance, migration data from 2011 shows that of 267 total migrants,6 202 (76%) were from Cornwall, with no more than four people coming from other locations in England and Wales (Office for National Statistics 2011). Whilst historical commentators are keen to highlight contact with elite social circles, long-term contact with Cornish English is downplayed in many of the accounts of Scillonian English  –  despite the facts of Cornish in-migration. For instance, Banfield (1888: 45) claims that “[t]he accent of the county of which electorally they [Scillonians] form a part is entirely wanting on their tongues”. Ellis (1890: 41) determined that “no attention … need be paid to [Scilly]” when

5 Banfield is eluding to the identification of Scilly as the Cassiterides, the islands from which the ancient Greeks obtained tin, although Bowley (1964: 21) observes that the “evidence for any islands’ being positively identified as the Cassiterides is meagre”. 6 Defined in the census data cited here as persons with a different address one year before the census date of 27th March 2011. As Scilly’s tourist economy relies upon seasonal workers, it is possible that these more transient individuals feature in this total. However, Scilly’s main tourist season runs from Easter to October and, as Easter was late in 2011 (Easter Sunday fell on the 24th April), it is unlikely that many seasonal workers were counted in this census data.



The dialect of the Isles of Scilly 

 45

N 0

30

60

120 Miles

Portions of this work are based on data provided through EDINA UKBORDERS with the support of the ESRC and JISC and uses boundary material which is copyright of the Crown, the Post Office, and the ED-LINE Consortium. Other portions of this work are based on data provided through www. VisionofBritian.org.uk and uses historical material which is copyright of the Great Britian Historical GIS Project and the University of Portsmouth

Figure 2: Isles of Scilly residents born outside the islands in the 1901 census.

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 Emma Moore and Chris Montgomery

c­ ompiling his celebrated account of early English pronunciation, on the basis that it lacked a notable vernacular dialect. It should be noted, though, that there is no evidence of Ellis ever visiting Scilly, and that his opinion relied upon the word of ‘the Proprietor of the Isles’, who said he did “not know of any part of the British Isles in which ‘the Queen’s English’ is less murdered”. The absence of Cornish influence is also reported in the twentieth century: Vyvyan (1953: 19) observes that “the people had no Cornish intonation when they spoke”. However, other observers are more circumspect about the links between Scillonian English and mainland varieties. For instance, Heath (1750: 173) and Troutbeck (1794: 168) concede that Scillonian English has West Country influences; Grigson (1948: 20) observes that there is “a tinge of Cornish dialect”; and Bowley (1964: 118) notes that “some features of Cornish English are found”. Of course, these observations are informal and reflect perceptions of language, rather than reports of actual usage. However, there is a small amount of work which offers more reliable and descriptive insights into the actual language forms used on the islands. Historian and archaeologist, Charles Thomas, produced “A Glossary of the Spoken English in the Isles of Scilly” in 1979. In addition to providing a glossary, Thomas (1979) reviews some of the sources discussed above, and also comments on the phonology of the dialect. His observations are drawn from material from the glossary, Scillonian place-names, and “the writer’s own observations over the last twenty years of visiting the islands” (Thomas 1979: 139). He also refers to an earlier glossary of West Cornish words (Courtney 1880), published by the English Dialect Society. Like Thomas, Courtney (1880: ix–x) includes some comments on phonology in her introduction, and notes that despite differences within West Cornwall locations, “[t]he most marked difference in speech … is found between the dwellers on ‘the mainland’ (Penzance, &c) and the inhabitants of Scilly, or, as they would call themselves, ‘Scillonians’.” In addition to noting the Scillonian voices are “pitched in a different key”,7 she explicitly notes the following pronunciation differences: /θ/ > [t] (so that ‘three’ become ‘tree’); /aɪ/ > [ɔɪ] in words in the PRICE lexical set; /ɔɪ/ > [aɪ] in the CHOICE lexical set; and [ɔ:] in words in the THOUGHT lexical set (as opposed to [a:] in West Cornish). The first of these is a curious example, which is certainly no longer

7 Although it is generally believed that West Cornish English is more like Standard English than East Cornish English (due to the later loss of Cornish and subsequent later introduction of English into the West; see Wakelin 1975: 202–205), an anonymous reviewer points out that Cornish influence may have remained in the West’s distinctive intonation patterns. This could explain Courtney’s claim that Scillonian English is “pitched in a different key”, given that it may not share this influence on its variety. See also the quotation from Vyvyan (1953: 19), given above, who observes that Scillonians “had no Cornish intonation when they spoke”.



The dialect of the Isles of Scilly 

 47

heard in Present-day Scillonian English. Thomas (1979: 140) observes that this pronunciation is also noted by Woodley (1822), and suggests that it may reflect the influence of Irish soldiers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (note, also, the presence of Irish incomers in the 1901 census data shown in Figure 2). However, it is difficult to imagine that their numbers were significant enough to cause this kind of language accommodation. Courtney’s observation on the PRICE vowel seems more plausible (note that this, too, is noted by Woodley 1822). As we discuss below, the onset of the PRICE vowel is still raised (and sometimes rounded) in contemporary Scillonian English. However, as Thomas (1979: 139) observes, Courtney’s observation regarding the CHOICE vowel, can no longer be found – although Thomas provides some lexical evidence that this sound change may have been found in Cornish English. It is possible that Courtney’s comment alludes to the perceived merger of PRICE and CHOICE. However, as shown below, CHOICE is also raised in Scillonian English, which keeps the two lexical sets distinct in the present-day variety. Thomas adds some pronunciation features to Courtney’s list. Table 1 shows those which can be described according to Wells’ (1982) lexical sets, and notes whether Thomas considers these to be current forms (as of 1979, of course), rather than sounds suggested by the words in the glossary or place-names.8 In addition to these features, Thomas (1979: 139) also clearly states that rhoticity is “virtual[ly] absent” from the Scillonian dialect. Thomas’ (1979: 142) data leads him to conclude that the Scillonian dialect “has all the characteristics of an isolated pocket of early Modern English; it exhibits in its phonology certain modifications which are not found in west Cornwall, the closest mainland; and, lexically, it retains words which are either earlier than the corresponding terms found in west Cornwall, or have been introduced from regions outside the South-West”. Table 1: Distinctive Scillonian pronunciations, according to Thomas (1979: 139–141). Feature

Pronunciation

Current?

DRESS FACE NURSE PRICE

[ɑ, a] [aɪ] [ɑ:] [ɔɪ]

N Y Y Y

8 Thomas adds some other features to this list (such as front vowel alternations, and consonant voicing), but they are rather idiosyncratic in nature and difficult to evaluate relative to what we might consider to be systematic in the Scillonian grammar.

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Thomas’ observations, then, seem to mirror those made in the metalinguistic commentary described above. However, there are reasons to be suspicious of some of Thomas’ (1979) observations. For instance, he lists eight “oral informants”, of whom three are not native to Scilly. So, whilst it is difficult to question the thoroughness of his lexical data, it is not clear how systematically he observed the phonology of Scillonian speech, and how much he was subject to the ideologies of Scillonian dialect ‘purity’. Consequently, in the next section, we provide a more systematic account of Scillonian English, drawn from an archive of audio recordings with a range of Scillonian speakers.

4 The features of Present-day Scillonian English The descriptive material in this section is drawn from the Isles of Scilly Museum’s Oral History Archive. This is a series of recordings made by local people interviewing other local people and recordings date from the 1970s onward (the archive can be searched online here: https://www.dhi.ac.uk/scillyvoices/). The purpose of the archive is to record the experiences of Scillonians, and the informants are identified by museum volunteers on the basis of their ‘Scillonian character’ (a vague criterion, but one which includes consideration of Scillonian heritage, community roles, and how well-known someone is within the community). The archive currently contains recordings of 75 Scillonians born between 1901 and 1993. Whilst there are, of course, pronunciation differences according to age and social characteristics within the archive (and we address some of these below), Table  2 provides a broad descriptive overview of traditional Scillonian pronunciations (by that, we mean those pronunciations heard from Scillonians which are most distinctive from Standard English).9 In addition to these phonological features, the grammatical features in Table 3 can be heard in the archive recordings.

9 Although the term ‘Standard English’ is usually restricted to a variety based on its grammatical and lexical features, we use it in relation to accent features in this article in order to reflect the way this term is used in the metalinguistic commentary about the Scillonian variety from 1750 onwards (i.e. well before RP was an acknowledged variety). Furthermore, our discussion attempts to trace the long-term relationship between Scillonian English, Cornish English and more standard forms of pronunciation. Given that the terms ‘RP’ and ‘Southern Standard British English (SSBE)’ are often used to refer to the same ideological concept at different points in time, we do not consider it appropriate to use these terms in the context of this discussion.



The dialect of the Isles of Scilly 

 49

Table 2: Typical Scillonian pronunciations found in the Isles of Scilly Museum’s Oral History Archive. Vowels are given according to Wells’ (1982) lexical sets. KIT DRESS TRAP LOT STRUT FOOT BATH CLOTH NURSE FLEECE FACE PALM THOUGHT GOAT rhoticity Intervocalic /t/ Word final Yod-dropping /t/, /d/ and /n/ Initial syllable cluster reduction /h/-dropping

[ɪ ̞] [ɛ] [a(:)] [ɒ̝] > [ɒ̜] [ʌ̝] [ʊ̈] [a:] [ɒ̝] [ɚ] [i:] [e̞ɪ] [a(:)] [ɔ:] [oʉ] > [oʊ] > [ɛʊ] [ɹ] [ɾ] [ən] Sometimes found Sometimes found Regularly found

GOOSE PRICE CHOICE MOUTH NEAR SQUARE START NORTH FORCE CURE happY lettER horsES commA

[ʉ] [ɑ̝ɪ] > [oɪ] [ɔ̝ɪ] [ɛ̈ʉ] > [əʉ] [ɪɚ] [ɛɚ] [ɑʴ] [ɔʴ] [ɔʴ] [ɔʴ] > [ʉɚ] [i:] [ɚ] [ɪ] [ə]

Table 3: Nonstandard grammatical items found in the Isles of Scilly Oral History Archive. Feature

Example

Levelled was Levelled weren’t

I don’t think any men was lost on that one Er, no, it weren’t army, it was, er- er- to do with the naval … people in the section, I think it was. I said, “I aren’t going, Sir.” Well, Pete was a bit simple, wasn’t he, and Charlie seen that You never imported nothing

Levelled aren’t Levelled past tense forms Negative concord

Tables 2 and 3 only include features which occur in the speech of more than one speaker in the archive. So, whilst there is still work to be done investigating the extent of the variability in the use of these forms, it is clear that the Scillonian variety of English is not quite “scarcely removed from Standard (southern) English [with] a slightly modified ‘received pronunication’ (R.P.) as of educated persons” (Thomas 1979: 109), as implied by much of the metalinguistic commentary on the variety. Below we provide two case studies which demonstrate more systematically that the story of Scillonian English is more complex than suggested by the ideology of Scillonian ‘purity’. The first of these focuses specifically on the relationship between Scillonian English, Cornish English and Standard English.

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4.1 Case study 1: TRAP and BATH Moore and Carter (2015; 2017) have demonstrated that there are two distinctive patterns for the TRAP and BATH vowels in Scillonian English. These patterns correlate with gender and education. Gender is important to the patterns of language variation found on Scilly, given that there is still quite marked segregation in gender roles on the islands. For instance, even today, there are no women who skipper boat services and only the occasional woman who crews on these services. Education is important because the islands did not have their own secondary school until 1966. Prior to this, wealthy and/or especially bright children were sent away to selective and fee-paying boarding schools between the ages of 11 and 16. Figure 3 shows a series of density plots of raw formant data, according to education-type and gender. The data is taken from a sample of 13 of the oldest speakers in the archive (all born between 1901 and 1931, and split by gender and education type so that there are 3 or, in one instance, 4, speakers in each cell). Density plots are like contours on a map. Peaks show areas of greater density where formant measurements cluster. TRAP vowels are shown in grey and BATH vowels in black. The data shows measurements for F1 and F2, given that F1 has been found to correlate with vowel height, and F2 with how front or back a vowel is (see Ladefoged 1982, amongst others).10 Figure 3 shows that the mainland-educated males have a pattern that is most like Standard English: their TRAP and BATH vowels are largely distinct from each other, and there is a difference between the F2 values for these two lexical sets. That is to say, BATH vowels seems to be further back than TRAP vowels, as we would find in Standard English. The mainland-educated women seem to show a similar pattern, but the two lexical sets are less distinct than in the similarly-­educated males’ data. On the other hand, the Scilly-educated speakers’ plots show much more overlap between TRAP and BATH. In this respect, the ­Scilly-­educated speakers seem to have TRAP/BATH vowels which pattern more like vowels in Cornish English than in Standard English. This is because the separation of the TRAP and BATH lexical sets that we find in Standard English did not proceed to completion in Cornish Englishes. Whilst there is some variation in Cornwall with regard to the precise vowel quality of these vowels (reflecting the phased introduction of English westwards along the peninsula; see note 8), in any given location, the vowel quality is the same for both lexical sets (Wakelin 1975; 1986); the TRAP/BATH split is only marked by duration in this region, with BATH vowels being longer than TRAP vowels.

10 Formants are natural resonances, created by the configuration of the vocal tract. F1 and F2 refer to the first two formants visible on a spectrogram.



The dialect of the Isles of Scilly 

Mainland-educated

 51

Scilly-educated

500 600

800

Female

700 900 1000 F1 (Hz)

Set TRAP BATH

500 600

800

Male

700 900 1000

1800 1600 1400 1200 1000 1800 1600 1400 1200 1000 F2 (Hz) Figure 3: Density plot showing raw formant data in Hertz (Hz) for TRAP and BATH, according to education-type (horizontal axis) and gender (vertical axis); from Moore and Carter (2017).

Moore and Carter (2017) also tested for the duration of TRAP and BATH, using random forest variable importance measures to test the relative importance of F1, F2 and duration on predicting whether a vowel was TRAP or BATH. Their analysis showed that F1 was not a very important predictor, but that F2 was a significant predictor for all social groups. In fact, it was the most significant factor predicting whether a vowel was TRAP or BATH for all groups except the Scilly-­educated men. Duration was also a significant factor for everyone, but it was the most significant factor for the Scilly-educated men only. To sum up these patterns, they suggest differences in language use based on education type, and these patterns seem to be much more extreme for the men than for the women. For the men, the patterns for F2 and duration work in ­opposition  –  mainland-educated men primarily use F2 to mark the TRAP/ BATH split, as in Standard English; whereas Scilly-educated men primarily

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use ­duration to the mark the TRAP/BATH split, as in Cornish English. The women show weaker versions of the same patterns, although it is notable that, despite duration being a more significant predictor for the Scilly-educated women than for the mainland-educated women, the Scilly-educated women still favour F2 over duration. That is to say, the Scilly-educated women seem to be more readily moving towards the Standard English pattern than the Scilly-­ educated men. These patterns suggest that  –  contrary to much of the historical metalinguistic commentary  –  there are similarities between Scillonian English and Cornish English. But – in line with that same commentary – there are also similarities between Scillonian English and Standard English too. It depends which Scillonian one listens to and, in this sense, it is not easy to argue that one TRAP/ BATH pattern is more Scillonian than the other. Rather it seems that Cornish and ­Standard English forms have been adapted on the islands to reflect and construct oppositional Scillonian personae via a process of ‘socio-stylistic reallocation’ (Britain & Trudgill 1999: 247–248). Moore and Carter (2015; 2017) argue that this is the case by showing that the forms not only correlate with education type, but also with ways of ‘being Scillonian’ (as evidenced by differences in social practices and interview topics across the speakers sampled). They argue that the pattern is more distinct for the males than for the females because of differences in the language markets available to men and women. Whilst type of education has an effect on the kinds of social practices that men engage in, it has little effect on the activities in which women engage. Despite the mainland-educated Scillonians only leaving the islands for secondary schooling (and otherwise living there all their lives), there are more mainland-educated men than Scilly-­educated men managing local farms, and/or being councillors and magistrates. On the other hand, there are more S ­ cilly-educated men than mainland-educated men engaged in employment linked to boating or fishing. However, women in the generation sampled by Moore and Carter (2017) generally do not engage in any of the types of employment found for either group of men. Irrespective of their educational background, they largely work in flower and farming industries (often tying and packing flowers on local farms), in addition to undertaking all of the domestic responsibilities of the home, and often other part-time work (such as working in local shops). Consequently, Moore and Carter (2017) argue that the more vernacular patterns of TRAP and BATH on Scilly have acquired social meanings that are more commonly associated with the activities of men than those of women. On the other hand, the more standard patterns of TRAP and BATH are linked to social meanings (being ‘educated’, more ‘refined’) that reflect the characteristics of the historically-­ dominant Scillonian identity type, as ­articulated in the ­metalinguistic commentary on



The dialect of the Isles of Scilly 

 53

the islands. This could explain why both groups of Scillonian women seem to use relatively more standard-like variants of TRAP and BATH, irrespective of their social and educational background. Given the salience of these particular vowels and the greater ideological pressures on women to avoid socially stigmatised linguistic features like these (see Mugglestone 2003: 78, who refers to the pronunciation of the BATH vowel as ‘a salient feature of ‘talking proper’’), the women’s use of TRAP/BATH variants may be more constrained that that of men. We offer this case study to demonstrate the complexity underlying the use of linguistic forms on Scilly and to demonstrate the difficulties in assigning social meanings to forms which can also be linked with other varieties of English. It demonstrates that there are links between Scillonian and Cornish forms, but that these links are not straightforward. This may go some way to explaining the ambiguity in how individuals have written about the Scillonian dialect. However, we note that TRAP and BATH are quite marked forms in English English because of the ideological baggage they carry (as noted above). In our next case study, we consider two other features  –  the vowels in the MOUTH and PRICE lexical sets – which carry a different kind of ideological weight.

4.2 Case study of MOUTH/PRICE The lexical sets of MOUTH and PRICE have been of interest in sociolinguistics because of a pattern known as ‘Canadian Raising’, whereby the onsets of MOUTH and PRICE are raised when they precede voiceless consonants. In Canadian English, this pattern is consistent, whereas in other varieties where it is has been found (see Moreton and Thomas [2007: 2] for a review) it is more variable, such that raising is more likely to occur before voiceless consonants but it may not always do so. The variable pattern exists in Scillonian English, although investigation suggests that it is in decline. Figure 4 shows data from 15 Scillonians born between 1901 and 1931, split by gender and education. These include the same speakers analysed in the TRAP/ BATH case study, with the addition of 2 more Scilly-educated males. The figure is a box plot, which shows F1 measurements for the onsets in MOUTH and PRICE for vowels which precede obstruents. The plot distinguishes between following voiceless contexts (in white) and following voiced contexts (in grey). F1 measurements are used in order to reflect vowel height. The following context has been restricted to obstruents to exclude contexts which strongly disfavour the raising process found in those varieties  –  such as Scillonian English  –  which show it variably (for instance, if a speaker had a disproportionate number of following sonorants, this would skew her/his results as raising is much less likely to occur

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mainland

Scilly

1.0

female

Normalised maximum smoothed F1

1.5 2.0

2.5

Voicing h v

1.0 1.5 male

2.0 2.5 MOUTH

PRICE

Set

MOUTH

PRICE

Figure 4: Box plot showing degree of raising in MOUTH and PRICE for older Scillonians (from Moore and Carter, under review).

in these environments). These measurements have been normalised to permit comparisons across speakers. Figure  4 shows an allophonic raising effect for these speakers, although the extent of this effect varies by lexical set, educational group, and gender. For all speakers except the mainland-educated women (who show only a weak raising effect), the pattern is more robust for MOUTH than it is for PRICE. Note also that MOUTH tokens tend to be raised more than PRICE tokens for all speakers (again, with the exception of the mainland-educated women, who show no difference in raising for MOUTH and PRICE). In addition to showing the raising effect most clearly, the Scilly-educated speakers also tend to have more raised variants than the mainland-educated speakers. This is true for both MOUTH and PRICE for the men, but only MOUTH for the women. These results show that a raising effect similar to the ‘weak’ version of Canadian Raising exists



The dialect of the Isles of Scilly 

 55

for these Scillonian speakers.11 This effect is found across speakers irrespective of education and gender (although the effect is less apparent in the data from the mainland-educated females). Although the forms appear to be more raised in the speech of the Scilly-educated speakers, the mainland-educated speakers still have audibly raised pronunciations for the onsets in MOUTH and, to a lesser extent, in PRICE. Unlike the patterns for TRAP and BATH, the evidence from MOUTH and PRICE suggests that the traditional Scillonian English pattern for these vowels is distinct from both Standard English and Cornish English. Chambers (1989) reports that Anderson (1987: 40–49) mapped the Survey of English Dialects (SED) data for MOUTH and PRICE according to the voicing of following contexts and found that only 5/313 sites showed voiceless/voiced contrasts. All of these areas were around the North-East and East Midlands (with only Huntingdonshire, now in Cambridgeshire, showing a phonetically similar Canadian Raising pattern). That is to say, there was no evidence of a raising effect in the Cornish SED locations (or, indeed, anywhere in the South West). Furthermore, Wakelin (1986: 27–28) observes that there is variability in the pronunciation of MOUTH in the South West, with the onset variably centralised, fronted, or monophthongised, and with centralized forms shared with the South East. Pronunciations of PRICE tend to be more consistent; there are differences in the precise pronunciation found, but the onset of this vowel is generally centralised or retracted throughout the South West region (so raising occurs overall, irrespective of the voicing of the following context). Consequently, it could be argued that, of these two features, a raised PRICE vowel is most noticeably South Western; whereas a raised MOUTH vowel may be less distinctively South Western (given the variability of this form in this region and Wakelin’s observation that centralized forms are shared with the South East). This may explain why the Scillonian speakers have more readily sustained an allophonic raising pattern for MOUTH than PRICE  –  we return to this in our discussion below. The data from TRAP and BATH offers some insight into why Scillonian English may be perceived as ‘purer’ than adjacent mainland varieties (given that some Scillonians seem to have a pattern that is closer to Standard English than Cornish English). However, the data from MOUTH and PRICE is more ambiguous, given that Scillonians (irrespective of education type) seem to be using forms that clearly differ from Standard English. This suggests that differences from ­Standard English may be tolerated for some pronunciations and not others, without

11 Although the reduction of the effect for PRICE suggests that it may be in decline, as the Moore and Carter (under review) effect is significantly less apparent in data from younger speakers).

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­ ffecting the status of a particular variety. In order to investigate whether or not a this is the case, we turn to data from a perception experiment which examined how listeners reacted to features of Scillonian English in real time.

5 Perceptions of Scillonian English The following section reports on research more fully described in Montgomery and Moore (forthcoming). In order to test the perceptions of Scillonian English, we developed an experiment which gathered the following data: (1) Listeners’ biographies, including location and travel experience This allowed us to test the effects of familiarity with the Scillonian dialect, given that respondents’ locations have been demonstrated to affect geographical perceptions of dialect areas (Montgomery 2012), as well as the way in which they are regarded (Preston 1999; Bishop, Coupland & Garrett 2005). Travel experience has also been shown to be an important predictor of accent classification ability by Clopper and Pisoni (2004). (2) Ratings and placement of samples of Scillonian English, and free comment data relating to listeners’ reactions to the samples There has been longstanding and widespread interest in that way in which non-specialists react to language use (e.g. Lambert et al. 1960; Giles & Powesland 1975; Montgomery 2011), and this work demonstrates that, ­ ­compared to standard speakers, non-standard speakers are likely to be judged less ­favourably in terms of status, and (sometimes) more favourably on social attractiveness scales. Obtaining ratings allowed us to examine where ­Scillonian English is situated along these scales. Placement data (data which ‘places’ the varieties geographically) revealed which variety informants thought they were responding to, and free comment data provided further qualitative data which elaborated on participant responses. (3) Real-time reactions to samples of Scillonian English, and listener comments about the reactions Perceptual studies have only recently started to focus upon the ­“psychoacoustic prominence” (Watson & Clark 2014: 39) of individual features in a spoken stimulus (as opposed to soliciting reactions to whole accents). This type of research generally uses spliced tokens preselected by the researcher(s) in order to investigate the effect of one specific variable (see, for instance, Campbell-Kibler 2009, 2011; Labov et al. 2011; Watson & Clark 2013a; Levon & Fox 2014; Pharao et al. 2014). Given that we were interested in finding out which linguistic features listeners react to in Scillonian



The dialect of the Isles of Scilly 

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speech, and which sociolinguistic contexts trigger reactions to them, it was not appropriate to pre-select a feature for analysis. Consequently, we asked listeners to respond to naturally-occurring linguistic features as they heard ­ revious research using a real-time approach (Labov et al. them in real-time. P 2011; Watson & Clark 2013b; Watson & Clark 2014) has noted the difficulty in identifying precisely which feature has provoked a listener response. Consequently, we introduced a review task which asked listeners to comment on why they had identified a particular feature as salient. This innovation enabled us to better understand which of the features of Scillonian English are notable to listeners. Having reviewed the types of data gathered by our experiment, we provide more information on the tool and the precise processes of data collection in the following section.

5.1 The real-time reaction and evaluation tool The tool was administered via a web browser interface. After providing their biographical and location data, and giving consent for their data to be used, respondents entered a calibration test which introduced the method of collecting their reactions data. The calibration test required respondents to identify instances of (th-) fronting (the occurrence of [f] for [θ] and [v] for [ð]) in a recording of a 65 year old male from the East End of London, using the interface shown in Figure 5.12 The interface provided instructions for the respondents (including what they were listening for: “When you hear him [the speaker] use an ‘f’ sound in place of a ‘th’ sound, please click the green button below the sound wave straightaway”), a large ‘Play’ button, the sound wave of the voice sample, and a large green ‘Click’ button beneath the sound wave. As well as familiarising respondents with the interface to be used for the remainder of the test, it also permitted us to examine the speed at which listeners reacted to known features (these response time data were later used to normalise the data provided in the test proper). Upon completion of the calibration test, respondents then entered the test proper and listened to four male voice samples. These included two distractor samples (from Stoke-on-Trent, a city in Staffordshire in the North-West Midlands

12 Thanks to Sue Fox for supplying this sample.

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The Voices Project Test Sample In one of the tasks that follow, we will ask you to listen to a voice sample and click a button whenever you notice anything in the way the person sounds which makes you wonder where he is from (or confirms where you already think he is from). To allow us to link your click to a point in the sound file, we need to get an idea of how fast your reaction times are. To do this, we need you to listen to the extract below. The person in this extract says lots of words where he pronounces words that begin ‘th’ as ‘f’. For instance, he has a tendency to pronounce words like ‘thanks’ and ‘Thursday’ as “fanks” and “Fursday”. When you hear him use an ‘f’ sound in place of a ‘th’ sound, please click the green button below the sound wave straightaway. You can do this by hovering your mouse over the green button and clicking. This will record the exact point in time where you reacted to the sound clip. Press play when you are ready. You will only hear the voice sample once, but don’t worry if you don’t catch all of the ‘f’ pronunciations.

Click

Next

Figure 5: Click interface and instructions for the test sample.

region, and Barnsley, a town in Yorkshire, in the north of England),13 and two samples from the Isles of Scilly. The Scilly samples differed according to topic and ­discourse content in order to test whether responses to Scillonian English were affected by the context in which the variety was heard. If topic affects how listeners reacted to Scillonian English, this offers an explanation for some of the ambiguity in the metalinguistic commentary about whether or not Scillonian English contains Cornish or more generally South Western features. We were also interested in testing the effect of discourse content on what individual perceive in a variety. Given the ‘ideology of Scillonian purity’, we wanted to find out whether knowing where a voice sample is from skews how listeners react to it. To control for the effects of other influencing factors, the Scillonian samples were taken from the same interview with the same male speaker, born in 1947 on the Isles of Scilly. Although younger than the speakers analysed in Section 4, this speaker shared many of the characteristics of the male Scilly-educated Scillonians described above, including fronted TRAP and BATH vowels, with BATH

13 Thanks to Hannah Leach and Kate Burland for supplying these samples.



The dialect of the Isles of Scilly 

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generally longer than TRAP (although see below), and MOUTH and PRICE vowels with raised onsets.14 The precise words containing tokens of these vowels are discussed below. The two Scillonian guises were edited in Praat (Boersma & Weenick 2015)15 so that they were of broadly equal length (48 and 49 seconds), and to ensure that both contained Scillonian variants of TRAP and BATH and MOUTH and PRICE (along with similar numbers of other features found in Scillonian English).16 The first of the guises dealt largely with a discussion of farming practices, and contained no location cues for listeners. The second dealt with Scillonian traditions and contained a number of location cues. We refer to the first guise as the ‘Farmer guise’, and the second as the ‘Islander guise’. Transcripts of both guises can be found in Figure 6. Table 4 provides the precise words containing the TRAP/BATH and MOUTH/ PRICE variants.17 Note that there are different numbers of tokens in each of the guises. Although attempts were made to control for this, the use of natural data prevented us from having exactly the same number of tokens in each sample. It was also not possible to include variants occurring in the exact same linguistic contexts for each lexical set for each guise. Where there are notable variants for any individual variable, these are shown with the use of different fonts. For instance, although the speaker generally has BATH vowels which are longer than TRAP vowels, in the Farmer guise, two of the TRAP vowels (back and that) are especially long.18 Note also that the MOUTH vowels exhibit the raising pattern noted above, such that tokens with following voiceless consonants (e.g. out) tend to be raised more than those with following voiced consonants (e.g. most instances of down). However, as Table 4 shows, this speaker does not generally differentiate between these environments as systematically as the older speakers analysed in Section 4, and even the vowels followed by voiced consonants

14 A younger speaker was used in order to gain a high quality recording, which could be more successfully digitally edited. The older recordings used in Section 4 were all initially recorded on tape and subsequently digitised. Whilst the quality was sufficient for acoustic analysis, it was not comparable with the quality of the comparison distractor samples used in the perception experiment. 15 PRAAT is a computer programme which assists in the analysis of speech by producing waveforms and spectrograms (see: http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/; accessed 11th July 2016). 16 We deal only with TRAP/BATH and MOUTH/PRICE here in line with the previous content of this paper. See Montgomery and Moore (forthcoming) for a discussion of other variables. 17 This table only includes stressed version of the tokens (so it excludes, for instance, unstressed versions of and). 18 Of course, given longstanding linguistic research which shows the importance of topic to linguistic style (for instance, Rickford & McNair-Knox 1994; Love & Walker 2013), it is unsurprising that we find some variation in our speaker’s use of variants according to guise.

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Table 4: TRAP/BATH and MOUTH/PRICE features in each guise (words occurring with particular variants are indicated by the use of alternative fonts). Feature

Typical Scillonian pronunciation

Farmer guise

Islander guise

BATH MOUTH PRICE

[a:] [ɛ̈ʉ] [əʉ] [ɑ̝ɪ] [oɪ]

TRAP

[a(:)]

plant, last out, out, house, down life, carbide, carbide, prize, nine, time Anzacs, Anzacs, back, that

class, last around, down, down, now, out time, off-islands, by, quite, off-islands, Isles, lie Samson, Samson

Scilly farmer guise [Six seconds of ‘pips’]…So he started to make a life out there. World War One broke out. He joined the Anzacs and he got wounded at Gallipoli. Came back to the UK to recuperate. Father went into pigs and all sorts of green crops and that, you know.The farmhouse up there had carbide gas. There was a little carbide plant in where the boiler house used to be. I also remember, must have been the last one they did, but they used to have an agricultural show as well. Father used to take his bull down and, cos he used to keep a bull here then - registered bull. He usually won first prize with his. Must have been eight or nine at the time. Scilly islander guise [Six seconds of ‘pips’]…I mean the only time we met up with the off-islands was one day a year. Occasionally they came to Samson picnic with us. Samson picnic was funded by May Day. The top class of the boys would go around with collecting tins. And we quite often had a sports day with them as well. Er the last one was done one of the long fields down there. When we were kids, we could go to one of the off-islands and be the only one there, or one of the Eastern Isles and be the only one there. I mean, you can’t even do that in the middle of the week now. Everybody’s got a boat. And the other thing - kids - we used to lie in bed and listen to, every evening, a weather plane going out. Figure 6: The ‘Farmer’ and ‘Islander’ guises. (The following specifically Scillonian locations are mentioned in the Islander guise: ­off-­islands ‘the term used to refer to the inhabited islands other than St. Mary’s, which is the largest of the inhabited islands’; Samson ‘one of the largest uninhabited islands, a popular place for day trips’; the Eastern Isles ‘a collection of uninhabited islands at the easternmost point of the archipelago, and a popular place for wildlife spotting’.)



The dialect of the Isles of Scilly 

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have audibly raised onsets. The PRICE vowels show a much less marked raising pattern, with all tokens audibly raised, irrespective of following context – indeed, as Table 4 shows, some tokens followed by voiced consonants (e.g. time in the Islander guise) are more raised than tokens followed by voiceless consonants (e.g. quite in the same guise). This reflects continuing loss of the raising effect for PRICE vowels (a trend which was apparent in the data from the older speakers discussed in Section 4). For all four voice samples, listeners followed the same process for providing evaluations, reactions, and a review of their reactions. They initially played the voice sample once and provided evaluation data along a number of five-point semantic differential scales designed to gain reactions data for the accent evaluation dimensions of Status (“educated ~ uneducated”; “ambitious ~ unambitious”; “articulate ~ unarticulate”; “confident ~ shy”), and Solidarity (“friendly ~ unfriendly”; “reliable ~ unreliable”, “talking to best friend ~ talking to stranger”; “laid back ~ uptight”). They were also asked to indicate where they believed the speaker to be from using a list of regions based on the Government Regions of England supplemented with notable islands off the coast of England (North East, South East, South West, North West, London, Scilly, Channel Islands, West Midlands, Yorkshire & Humber, Isle of Wight, East, East Midlands), as well as the general locale of the speaker (e.g. ‘from the countryside’, ‘on the coast’). In addition, they were invited to add free text comments relating to the speaker’s location and locale, as well as any other comments they had about him. After completing this part of the test, listeners played the sample again and, using a similar interface to the calibration test, were asked to respond to features as they listened to the speaker. They were given slightly different instructions to reflect the fact that they were now not listening for a specific feature: “listen out for anything in the way this person sounds which makes you wonder where he is from (or confirms where you already think he is from) … When you hear something that sounds distinctive, please click the button below the sound wave straightaway”. On completion of the reactions click test, respondents were presented with a screen, like that shown in Figure  7, which gave each instance of a click that they had made, along with the transcript of the sample +/− 3 seconds from the location of their click. They were invited to examine each click and to account for their reason(s) for clicking where they did. They did this via a free text box. They were also given the option of removing their click by checking a box stating that “I made a mistake and didn’t mean to click here”, or selecting “I don’t know” if they were unsure about why they had clicked where they did. Once the three stages (evaluation, clicking, reviewing) had been completed for one sample,

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The Voices Project Voice sample 2 Below is the sound wave you just heard, showing where you clicked in the last task. There is also a transcript of what you heard. You can hear the portion of speech you selected by clicking on the master in the sound wave. Each click also has a box next to it. If you know what it was that made you click, please write what this was in the relevant box. If you don’t know, or you made a mistake, please tick the appropriate box. You can listen to the sample as many times as you like for this portion of the task. If you notice anything else in the course of completing this part of the task, please write about this in the box at the end.

out he joined the Anzacs

and

he ˆ Click

got

wounded

What made you click here? I made a mistake and didn’t mean to click here.

I don’t know.

got wounded

at

Gallipoli

ˆ Click

What made you click here? I don’t know.

came

back

I made a mistake and didn’t mean to click here.

to

ˆ Click

the

What made you click here? I don’t know.

I made a mistake and didn’t mean to click here.

Figure 7: The click review screen.

r­ espondents then moved on to the next sample, and repeated the process until all four had been listened to. The online test was conducted in 2014 and gathered data for six weeks. This resulted in 112 participants. There were 80 females, 28 males, with a further five refusing to say/not defining their sex in a binary fashion. Of the total respondents, five provided no reactions data and, as a result, they were removed from the sample, leaving 107 respondents whose data are reported below. Respondents had a mean age of 32 (the highest age was 72, and the lowest age was 16). Eight of the respondents lived in the Isles of Scilly, and a further six had visited the Islands. In the next section, we consider how the Scilly guises were regarded and placed by respondents, before discussing the factors that might have influenced these responses.



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The dialect of the Isles of Scilly 

5.2 Evaluation and placement of the Scilly guises The two Scilly guises were perceived in very different ways by the listeners in our tests, as shown in Table 5. This demonstrates statistically significant differences between the ratings given for the Status and Solidarity dimensions. The Farmer guise was more highly rated with regard to Solidarity, and the Islander guise was more highly rated with regard to Status. Given our earlier comments on the relationship between these dimensions and standard speech, these results suggest that the Islander guise more closely approximates the ratings we might expect for Standard English than the Farmer guise does. Moving on to the free comments, several of these made it clear that listeners were unaware that the two guises were from the same speaker. For instance, one participant stated that the Islander guise “definitely sounds very different to the previous example from the south west [the Farmer guise] but not sure where from”, and another listener stated that he was “Younger than the others [i.e. the other samples]”. One Scillonian listener stated of the Scilly Farmer guise that “the accent sounds familiar”, but claimed of the Islander guise that “I know the bloke”. These statements are supported by the different ways in which the Scilly guises were classified in both the location task (shown in Figure 8), and the locale task (shown in Figure 9). Note that in both of these tasks, respondents were able to assign samples to as many locales/locations as they wished. In the locale task, unsurprisingly, the Farmer guise was allocated to the ‘Countryside’ by the majority of respondents. The Islander guise was allocated to the ‘Coast’ by the majority of respondents, although there was more disagreement about the locale of this guise, with 89 alternative placements given (versus 75 for the Farmer guise). This suggests greater agreement about the locale of the Farmer guise than the Islander guise.

Table 5: Mean ratings for each guise (* = p njIʔ > ɲjIʔ > jIʔ]

This is very much “adaptation to adjacent phonetic units (assimilation)” and “loss of phonetic segments, including loss of full syllables”. The subsequent re-analysis of the remaining material as a conjunction was thus unavoidable. Once the [ɲ] had been assimilated to the following [j], there was no other possible interpretation.

4.2 Conjunction MORE This argument concerning the role of phonetic erosion in bringing about grammaticalisation is strengthened by another example of conjunctivisation in the Norfolk dialect literature where a similar development can be seen to have occurred, as illustrated in these examples where more is being used as an equivalent to Standard English neither: Aunt Agatha she say ‘You don’t know the difference.’ Granfar say ‘More don’t you.’ Aunt Agatha says ‘You don’t know the difference.’ Grandfather says ‘Neither do you.’ The fruit and vegetables weren’t as big as last year, more weren’t the taters and onions. The fruit and vegetables weren’t as big as last year, and neither were the potatoes and onions.

The amount of phonological material that we can suppose has been diachronically deleted in this case is rather extensive. We have to look for an origin for forms such as He don’t like it, more don’t I in grammatical structures such as He don’t like it, and no more don’t I which are, crucially, still also current in the dialect. Here, no more is the East Anglian dialectal equivalent of Standard English neither. It would be quite normal for and no more to be realised in lento speech in ­traditional East Anglian dialects as [Ən nƏ mͻ:]. We can therefore suppose a reduction of and no more to more through the gradual phonetic erosion of material via a syntagmatic reduction sequence such as: [Ən nu: mͻ > Ən nƏ mͻ > n̩nƏ mͻ: > n̩n̩ mͻ: > n̩ mͻ: > nmͻ: > mͻ:]

Indeed, this is considerably more than just a supposition because each of these versions can still be heard in the dialect.

Phonetic erosion and grammaticalisation in East Anglian conjunction-formation 

 139

The number of segments has indeed been reduced, and pronunciation has “become less effortful”. Once again, moreover, the phonological reduction has ultimately had a drastic effect on the grammatical categorisation of more, which can now – in addition to being already available in English, according to the OED entry, as an adjective, pronoun, adverb, noun and preposition – also function as a conjunction in these dialects.

4.3 Conjunction CASE A further interesting example is provided by the form case: We mustn’t carry any case they stop us We mustn’t carry any in case they stop us.

This usage of case clearly results from processes of reduction applied to in case. Because such phonetic realisations can still be heard in the dialect, we can suppose a diachronic process of phonetic erosion of the type: [In khæis > Iŋ khæis > Əŋ khæis > ŋk ̩ hæis > ŋk ̩ hæis > khæis]

5 Erosion completed In the case of YET, MORE and CASE, it could be argued, contrary to my position, that what actually happened was that noryet, nomore, and incase had already undergone univerbation and grammaticalisation, and that it was the grammaticalisation which led to the phonetic erosion. In the following two cases, however, it would be much harder to argue for such a point of view.

5.1 Conjunction TIME In all three of the above examples, grammaticalisation can be seen in our dialect texts – as well as in the dialects themselves – to be ongoing or incipient, since in addition to yet, more and case we also find relatively uneroded instances of nor yet, no more and in case. Now, however, we come to two further examples where this is no longer the case, and where grammaticalisation has gone to completion. First, we note the recategorisation of time as a conjunction. It is very well known to older East

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­ nglians that in the traditional dialects, time operates, or operated, in a way A which is equivalent to the Standard English subordinating conjunction while, as the ­following examples show: Go you and have a good wash and change, time I get tea ready. Go and have a good a wash and change while I get tea ready. You remember what old Martha used to say, time she were alive. You remember what old Martha used to say, while she was alive.

The English Dialect Dictionary lists time as a form meaning “whilst, while, during the time” in certain English dialects, and gives examples of this usage from two separate geographical areas: Yorkshire and north Lincolnshire; and Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. The three East Anglian examples cited in the Dictionary are: Time I do this = while I do this [which is labelled ‘East Anglia”]

Wait outside time I’m gone in [which is quoted from Cozens-Hardy’s 1893 work Broad Norfolk] He come time I was gitten’ o’ my wittles (= he came while I was getting my victuals), [which is labelled ‘Suffolk’].

The presence of this conjunction form in North Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, on the one hand, and Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, on the other, could represent the results of two independent episodes of grammaticalisation, given that even at their closest points Norfolk and North Lincolnshire are about 90 miles or 150 kms apart: the parallel with the grammaticalisation of the general English noun while as a conjunction shows that this kind of development is not an unexpected one. (This may also have happened in the case of do – see below). Alternatively, it might be simply that the EDD lacks data for the intervening areas, or that the form has died out in the intervening area, dividing an initially unified area into two. In any case, what we have here is a change in grammatical status from noun to conjunction, with corresponding bleaching or loss of semantic content. Our discussions of the grammaticalisation of yet and more and case, and of the ­chronological development revealed by the still extant and not yet fully grammaticalised variants such as That snew that there hard you couldn’t see no hedges nor yet nothing else, suggest that the origins of the development involving time might also lie in the phonological erosion and, ultimately, omission of preceding ­elements such as during the or for the, though in this case this is no longer recoverable, since alternative uneroded forms no longer occur.

Phonetic erosion and grammaticalisation in East Anglian conjunction-formation 

 141

5.2 Conjunction DO The final and most remarkable example of East Anglian phonetic erosion leading to conjunctivisation involves the use of the originally verbal from do as a conjunction equivalent to general English ‘or, otherwise’. (The translation of the title of this paper out of the East Anglian dialect I’ll get the milk time you bile the kittle do you oon’t get no tea yet no coffee more oon’t I thus goes “I’ll get the milk while you’re boiling the kettle, otherwise you won’t get any tea or coffee and neither will I”.) The English Dialect Dictionary give examples of this usage of DO from Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire. The Dictionary’s gloss is “used elliptically for if you do etc”, but this is not entirely correct, as can be seen from Norfolk dialect literature examples such as: You lot must have moved it, do I wouldn’t have fell in. You lot must have moved it, or I wouldn’t have fallen in.

The Dialect Dictionary itself cites a number of examples, including the following. From Cambridgeshire: Don’t go anigh that ditch, do you’ll fall in Don’t go near that ditch, or you’ll fall in

From Norfolk: Don’t you leave that old hare lying there, do the old crows will joll her Don’t leave that old hare lying there or the old crows will peck at her

From Norfolk/Suffolk: Don’t keep on a-dewin o’ that, dew you’ll get inter’ a mess Don’t keep on doing that or you’ll get into a mess

From East Suffolk: Don’t come here again; du, I’ll throsh yow Don’t come here again or I’ll thrash you

From Essex: Don’t you sleep ‘ithin that plaice, do to-night you’ll be a-larfin on the wrong side o’ yer faice Don’t sleep in that place or tonight you’ll be laughing on the wrong side of your face I have to put it close agin m’ eyes, do I can’t see at all I have to put it close against my eyes or I can’t see at all.

Do is functioning in these examples as a non-verbal form with no semantic content connected to “doing” anything, and is equivalent to Standard English otherwise, or.

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An identical development has occurred in varieties of American English. The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) cites examples of conjunction DO in African American Vernacular English from novels by Zora Neal Hurston (b. 1903), set in Florida: Dat’s a thing dat’s got to be handled just so, do it’ll kill you. (Mules and Men, 1935) Don’t you change too many words wid me dis mawnin’, Janie, do Ah’ll take and change ends wid yuh! You got to have a subjick tuh talk from, do you can’t talk. Yuh can’t live on de muck ’thout yuh take uh bath every da – Do dat muck’ll itch yuh lak ants. (Their eyes, 1937) Git this spoon betwixt her teeth do she’s liable to bite her tongue off. (Seraph, 1948)

There are also examples from further north. One of the DARE informants writes that, in eastern North Carolina, during the period approximately from 1915–1930: “I remember hearing White people, speakers with moderate education, saying things like Shut the door tight, do it’ll blow open before morning and Leave the note in the middle of the table, do she won’t see it.” This form could have been brought across the Atlantic to the USA from East Anglia or, as with TIME, it could represent a case of independent development: if grammaticalisation can happen once, it can happen again. How did this grammaticalisation of DO come about? How can the verb to do end up being a conjunction ? Our discussion above leads us to suppose that it is ultimately due to phonological developments involving the loss of phonetic material. This hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that less advanced, less completely grammaticalised forms can still be found such as the Don’t come here again; du, I’ll throsh yow cited in the English Dialect Dictionary, where the comma in the second clause strongly suggests that du (do) is a truncated form of “if you do”. We can reconstruct three crucial stages in the diachronic development of do as a conjunction which can all be seen from an examination of dialect literature texts. It is of course the first stage at which phonetic erosion is involved. Stage 1 Don’t you take yours off, do you’ll get rheumatism. Don’t take yours off, or you’ll get rheumatism. Don’t you tell your Aunt Agatha about the coupons, do she’ll mob me. Don’t tell your Aunt Agatha about the coupons, or she’ll tell me off. Don’t you walk upstairs yet, do you’ll whitewash the whole stair carpet. Don’t walk upstairs yet, or you’ll whitewash the whole stair carpet Don’t you put her proper name in, do she’ll pull both on us for libel. Don’t put her proper name in, or she’ll sue both of us for libel.

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Compare these with examples where don’t appears rather than do: Put that there antimacassar over her face, don’t she’ll give me nightmares. Put that antimacassar over her face, or she’ll give me nightmares. You’d better turn that broom the other way up, don’t you’ll be breaking someone’s neck. You’d better turn that broom the other way up, otherwise you’ll be breaking someone’s neck. Shet that gaate, don’t yar old sow’ll girr out, (from the EDD: Cozens-Hardy,1893) Shut that gate, or your old sow will get out.

These forms represent the earliest stage in the grammaticalisation process, where phonetic erosion has led to the complete loss of lexical material. In each of the above examples, the re-insertion of material such as … if you …would convert these forms back into the pre-grammaticalisation form of the construction such as with: Don’t you take yours off; [if you] do you’ll get rheumatism or Don’t you take yours off; [you] do, you’ll get rheumatism or Don’t you take yours off; do [and] you’ll get rheumatism and You’d better turn that broom the other way up;[if you] don’t you’ll be breaking someone’s neck.

This is indeed “loss of phonetic segments, including loss of full syllables” – in these cases, up to two syllables. Stage 2 At stage 1, a verbal-type negative/positive distinction between do and don’t is still maintained, together with the grammatical link of tense between the verb in the first clause and the quasi-auxiliary verb form in the second. At stage 2, as grammaticalisation progresses, this tense agreement is broken and do and don’t begin to occur in non-present-tense contexts: Have the fox left?- No that in’t, do Bailey would’ve let them went. Has the fox left?’- No, it hasn’t or Bailey would’ve let them [the hounds] go. He pinned ahold of her other leg, don’t she’d have been in. He pinned hold of her other leg, otherwise she’d have been in. She say that wouldn’t have done to have done nothing to the boy, do I might have gone round for nothing, not knowing. She said that it wouldn’t have done to do anything to the boy, or I might have gone round for nothing, not knowing.

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A distinction between positive and negative quasi-verbal forms is still maintained here, since the positive form do in the second clause corresponds to a negative form in the first clause, and vice versa. But the originally present-tense forms do and don’t are now being applied in past-tense contexts, as is illustrated by the fact that expansion to sentences with fully verbal do and don’t is no longer possible: we would expect instead had and hadn’t: Have the fox left?- No that in’t, [because if it had] do Bailey would’ve let them went

Stage 3 The final stage in the grammaticalisation process can be seen in the following examples: Sing out, do we shall be drownded! Call out, or we shall be drowned! Where’s the ladder?- That stand in the stackyard, do that did do. Where’s the ladder?’- It’s standing in the stackyard, or at least it was. Keep you them elephants still, do we shan’t half be in a mess. Keep those elephants still, or we won’t half be in a mess.

In these examples, as it happens, there still appears to be grammatical agreement between present tense forms in both clauses, but we see that the originally verbal negative/positive distinction has now been entirely lost, with do appearing where in earlier stages don’t would have been expected: the do/don’t distinction has been neutralised in favour of do. Our final examples, however, show clearly that the process has gone to completion because there is no quasi-verbal grammatical link either to the tense or to the negative/positive polarity of the preceding clause: That’s a good job we come out of that there field, do he’d’ve had us! It’s a good job we came out of that field, or he would have had us! That was up to him to do his job proper, do there wouldn’t be nothing yet nobody to start things off again. It was up to him to do his job properly, otherwise there wouldn’t have been anything or anybody to start things off again We stabled them elephants right in the middle, do we should’ve capsized. We stabled those elephants right in the middle, or we should’ve capsized Things must be wonderful bad, do master would never have broke. Things must be extremely bad, or master would never have gone bust.

The complete life-history of East Anglian conjunction do is thus: I. phonological erosion and reduction, and loss of lexical material of the type … if you …

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II. loss of tense marking of do and don’t rather than did, didn’t. III. loss of negative/positive polarity, with loss of don’t and neutralisation in favour of do. It is true of course that in the case of both the conjunctions DO and TIME, the question does arise as to whether what happened was actually phonetic erosion rather than ellipsis (as the English Dialect Dictionary has it in its account of DO). This question comes up because in East Anglian English TIME and DO have clearly been established as conjunctions for a considerably longer period of time than MORE and YET, and no synchronic evidence of the phonological processes involved is available in the dialect currently spoken today. Of course, as one would expect, the dialect literature does contain instances of phrases such if you do, and at the time, but there is no evidence of intermediate forms. Fischer (2010: 253) refers to “ellipsis rather than gradual phonetic erosion”, indicating that the difference between ellipsis and erosion is that ellipsis is a sudden process, while phonetic erosion is something which occurs over a long(ish) period of time. A sudden change involving wholesale omission of a phrase such as in, say, because if you do would constitute ellipsis; but of course once phonetic erosion has gone to completion, its outcomes are identical to those of ellipsis, as recognised by Andersen (2008 – see above). I suggest, however, that the example of what we know has happened with MORE, YET and CASE, together with the demonstrated tendency of East Anglian dialects to extreme phonetic erosion, suggests that what actually happened with DO was a erosion and reduction of the type: [jʉ: dʉ: > jʉ dʉ: > jƏ dʉ: > jdʉ: > dʉ:]

As with the establishment of YET and MORE and CASE as new conjunctions, the conjunctivisation of TIME and DO does presuppose a number of processes of grammatical and semantic reanalysis. But I suggest again that the initial impetus for the linguistic changes which occurred to the originally verbal do in the Norfolk dialect was phonetic.

6 Conclusion Bybee et al. (1994) argue in favour of the Parallel Reduction Hypothesis, which suggests that, in grammaticalisation, semantic reduction and phonetic reduction go hand in hand – “semantic reduction is paralleled by phonetic reduction” (1994: 19). There may, they say, be a causal relationship between the two. Joseph

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(2011:194), however, has suggested that there is no necessary connection between grammaticalisation and phonetic erosion at all. He writes that a widespread view – as we saw above – is that grammaticalisation is determined by the clustering together of several processes/mechanisms, (e.g. semantic bleaching, phonetic reduction, etc.).This raises the question of how this clustering is accomplished by the speakers engaging in the particular changes, and how these various processes come to be coordinated. This is especially problematic since all interested parties accept that each of these effects can occur independently.

In the particular case of the development of the new nonstandard conjunctions in the highly stress-timed Norfolk dialect, I suggest that the evidence is in favour of the impetus for grammaticalisation beginning with the phonetics and only subsequently spreading to semantics.

Dialect Literature Sources Benham, Charles E. 1895. Essex Ballads. Colchester: Benham Newspapers. Claxton, A.O.D. 1954 [1968]. The Suffolk Dialect of the Twentieth Century, 3rd edn. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Cooper, E.R. 1932 [1984]. Mardles from Suffolk. Newbury: Countryside Books. Cozens-Hardy, Sydney. 1893 [2010]. Broad Norfolk: being a series of articles and letters. Whitefish: Kessinger. Grapes, Sydney. 1958 [1974]. The Boy John Letters. Norwich: Wensum Books. Mardle, Jonathan. [Eric Fowler]. 1973. Broad Norfolk. Norwich: Wensum Books. Riches, C. 1978. Orl Bewtiful and New. Norwich: F. Crowe. West, H.M. 1983. East Anglian Tales. Newbury: Countryside Books. The East Anglian and His Humour. 1966. Ipswich: Anglian.

References Andersen, Henning. 2008. Grammaticalisation in a speaker-oriented theory of change. In Thórhallur Eythórsson (ed.), Grammatical change and linguistic theory: the Rosendal papers, 11–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Butcher, Andrew. forthcoming. The sounds of Australian languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bybee, Joan, Revere Perkins & William Pagiuca. 1994. The evolution of grammar: tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ferragne, Emmanuel, & Francois Pellegrino. 2004. Rhythm in read British English: interdialect variability. Paper presented at the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Jeju Island, Korea, October 4–8, 2004, ISCA Archive, http://www.isca-speech. org/archive/interspeech_2004.

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Ferragne, Emmanuel. & Francois Pellegrino. 2007. An acoustic description of the monophthongs of East Anglia. Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 1513–1516. Fischer, Olga. 2010. An analogical approach to grammaticalisation. In Ekaterini Stathi, Elke Gehweiler & Ekkehard König (eds.), Grammaticalisation: current views and issues, 181–220. Amsterdam: Benjamin. Heine, Bernd. 1993. Auxiliaries: cognitive forces and grammaticalisation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heine, Bernd & Tania Kuteva. 2007. The genesis of grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heine, Bernd, U. Claudi & F. Hünnemeyer 1991. Grammaticalisation: a conceptual framework. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heine, Bernd & Heiko Narrog. 2010. Grammaticalisation and linguistic analysis. In Bernd Heine & Heiko Narrog (eds.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic analysis, 401–423. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heine, Bernd & Mechthild Reh. 1984. Grammaticalisation and reanalysis in African languages. Hamburg: Buske. Joseph, Brian. 2004. Rescuing traditional (historical) linguistics from grammaticalisation theory. In Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde & Harry Perridon (eds.), Up and down the cline: the nature of grammaticalisation, 45–71. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Joseph, Brian.2011. Grammaticalisation: a general critique. In Heiko Narrog &Bernd Heine (eds.), The Oxford handbook of grammaticalisation, 193–205. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hopper, Paul & Elizabeth Traugott. 1993. Grammaticalisation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ross, Malcolm, Andrew Pawley & Meredith Osmond. 2001. The lexicon of Proto Oceanic: the culture and environment of ancestral Oceanic society II: the physical environment. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. Schiering, René. 2006. Cliticisation and the evolution of morphology: a cross-linguistic study on phonology in grammaticalisation. Konstanz: Konstanzer Online-PublikationsSystem Bibliothek der Universität Konstanz. [http://www.ub.uni-konstanz.de/kops/ volltexte/2006/1872/] Schiering, René. 2010. Reconsidering erosion in grammaticalisation: evidence from cliticisation. In Katerina Stathi, Elke Gehweiler & Ekkehard König (eds.), Grammaticalisation: current views and issues, 73–100. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Seinhorst, Klaas. 2014. Phonetics in Functional Discourse Grammar. Web Papers in Functional Discourse Grammar, 87. Trudgill, Peter. 1974. The social differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trudgill, Peter. 1999. Norwich: endogenous and exogenous linguistic change. In P. Foulkes & G. Doherty (eds.), Urban voices: accent studies in the British Isles, 124–140. London: Edward Arnold. Trudgill, Peter. 2001a. Greek dialects: linguistic and social typology. In Angela Ralli, Brian Joseph & Mark Janse (eds.), Proceedings of the first international conference of modern Greek dialects and linguistic theory, 263–272. Patras: Patras University Press. Trudgill, Peter. 2001b. Modern East Anglia as a dialect area. In J. Fisiak and P. Trudgill (eds.), East Anglian English, 1–12. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer. Trudgill, Peter. 2004. The dialect of East Anglia: phonology. In B. Kortmann & E. Schneider (eds.), Handbook of Varieties of English, vol. I, 163–177. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Stephen Howe

6 Emphatic “yes” and “no” in Eastern English: jearse and dow 1 Introduction In Eastern English, a significant number of speakers have emphatic forms of “yes” and “no”: jearse and dow.1 Neither of these forms is recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Survey of English Dialects (SED) or the English Dialect Dictionary (EED); however, in the survey conducted by this study, jearse and dow have been found in a large swathe of Eastern England from the Colne to the Humber, including Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Lincolnshire and part of Essex. They are also used in Northeast America. Although not recorded by the ­Linguistic Atlas of New England (LANE), the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) cites daow, daowd, dow, doh or day-oh in Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New York State. Respondents to the current study report daow in New Hampshire, jass in Upstate New York and possibly Vermont, and jyes or djess in Maine and Massachusetts. Colonists from Eastern England are likely to have brought dow and jearse to New England in the seventeenth century; four hundred years later, this distinctive feature of Eastern English still survives.2 What is the origin of jearse and dow, and how are they used? This study will examine jearse and dow and other forms of “yes” and “no” in English. There is a multiplicity of forms: informal yeah ~ nah, yep ~ nope, and regional or archaic yea, aye ~ nay, Northeast American ayuh “yes”, Suffolk ho “no” and Northern English why-aye, amongst others. In addition, speakers vocalise uh huh ~ uh-uh, and make the gestures of nodding and shaking the head. And there are significant differences between languages and cultures in what “yes” and “no” can signify. Note: I am grateful to a number of people who kindly read earlier drafts of this study: David Britain, Peter Trudgill, Nicholas Warren and John Widdowson. I also thank several others for their help and information: Stephen Laker (Kyushu University), Kento Nagatsugu (Kyushu Kyoritsu University), Hajime Takeyasu (Fukuoka University), Lorna Delanoy of the Farmland Voices oral history archive, Chris Jakes of the Cambridge Central Library Cambridgeshire Collection, Cambridgeshire historian Mike Petty, the hosts and producers at BBC Radio Suffolk, Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire, and members of the Center for Research on Vermont mailing list at the University of Vermont. Last but not least, I wish to thank all the respondents to my survey in England and the US. 1 In this study, I use jearse and dow generally to refer to all the variants of “jearse” and “dow”. 2 For reasons of space, American daow and jearse cannot be discussed here – see Howe ­(forthcoming). On ayuh, see Howe (2017). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110577549-007

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So there are more than a dozen ways – and three m ­ odalities – of­­communicating “yes” or “no”. The trimodality  – language, v ­ocalisation and g ­esture  – of “yes” and “no” is quite exceptional, making an interesting and potentially significant area of research in understanding human communication and its origins.3

1.1 Interjectionality Bloomfield ([1933] 1996: 177) defines yes and no as special completive interjections. Stange (2016: 19–20) considers them potential interjections, “the essential criterion being their emotivity”. She contrasts examples where yes and no are “simple statements” with those where they function as interjections “expressing how the speaker feels about the topic in question”. Quirk et al. (1985: 74) point out that interjections frequently have sounds that do not otherwise occur in the language. We can also note that sound changes often do not affect sound-symbolic words (shown from Grassmann on, cited in Hinton, Nichols and Ohala [1994] 2006: 9). Quirk et al. add (1985: 853) that “many interjections may be associated with nonsystematic features such as extra lengthening and wide pitch range”, and note (1985: 74) that nonce interjections, like those found in comic strips, “reflect a[n] (…) unstructured freedom to make use of expressive vocalizing in ordinary conversation”. If we look at yea, Old English gea corresponds closely to forms in other Germanic languages, including Old Frisian gê, jê, Old Saxon jâ, Old High German ja, jâ, Old Norse já, and Gothic ja, jai (OED sv “yea”). OED concludes that these forms are “all derivable ultimately from a primitive Germanic *ja, je, which has undergone modification in different directions as the result of sentence stress or emotional emphasis”. Such expressive vocalising or emotional emphasis is important in “yes” and “no”; “yes” and “no” also have a wide range of accent variation. All this can produce a variety of forms.

1.2 Augmentation As well as accent variation and expressive vocalisation, another important process in “yes” and “no” particles is augmentation. “Yes” and “no” are frequently combined with 3 There has been a flurry of research on “yes” and “no” recently, including Holmberg’s (2016) study of the syntax of “yes” and “no”, and Wallage and van der Wurff’s (2013 and 2014) papers on the etymology of yes. There are also two current research projects in pragmatics on “yes” and “no” and polar questions, YesNo: Affirmative and rejective responses to assertions and polar questions (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and BiasQ: Bias in Polar Questions (Universität Konstanz) (www.xprag.de, accessed 4 April 2016).

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interjections – oh yes, oh yeah, oh no, oh aye and so on. They can also be combined in other ways – for instance aye-aye, aye and like, yes of course, yessir, nossir, abbut “aye but”, yebbut “yes but”, yealtou “yea, wilt thou”, yelly “yea, will you”, and yes it is. I begin by discussing types of responses to positive and negative polar questions. 1.2.1 Particles and echoes In a universals study of yes–no questions and their answers, Moravcsik (1971: 163–165, 171–172), in her sample of about 85 languages, describes three types of answers to positive and negative questions, paraphrased briefly below. Type 1: Echo An affirmative or negative statement that echoes the question: (1) Did you go? (a) I did (b) I didn’t (2) Didn’t you go? (a) I did (b) I didn’t

Type 2: Particle + echo An affirmative or negative statement preceded by an affirmator/negator:4 (3) Did you go? (a) Yes, I did (b) No, I didn’t (4) Didn’t you go? (a) Yes, I did (b) No, I didn’t

Type 3: Particle An affirmator or negator alone: (5) Did you go? (a) Yes (b) No

4 Moravcsik (1971: 64, 163–164) uses the term affirmator to refer to “yes” or “no”, i.e. “both affirmator proper and negator”.

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(6) Didn’t you go? (a) Yes (b) No

Moravcsik suggests that Type 1 (the echo) might occur in all languages, though the conditions on deletion and substitution differ, and that Types 2 and 3 are found in only some languages. Holmberg (2016: 3), in his recent study of the syntax of yes and no, believes that probably close to half the world’s languages use verb-echo answers, though many languages with such answers “are reported to also have the alternative of using an affirmative particle” (2016: 68). He lists languages employing verb-echo answers (as a standard form of answer to a yes– no question) and those not employing such answers (2016: 65–67, Tables 3.1 and 3.2); however, these data have to be treated with caution, as English is listed as not employing verb-echo answers, when it obviously does.5 We can find all three of Moravcsik’s types in English: Particle (7) Will you marry me? (a) Yes (b) No

Echo (8) Do you take this man/woman to be your lawfully wedded husband/wife? (a) I do

Particle + echo (9) Slogan of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign (a) Yes, we can

Indeed, according to Vennemann (2009), yes and no are less common in English than in closely related German. Contrast for illustration the marriage vows: German (10) Willst du __ lieben und ehren und mit ihm leben (…) bis der Tod euch scheidet? (a) Ja!

5 Further, the qualification verb-echo is too narrow. Japanese speakers can echo without a verb: Q: Syokkiaraiki wa kirei? A: Kirei yo. Dishwasher-topic clean? Clean-assertive particle. Q: “Is the dishwasher clean?” A: “Clean”. English earlier could echo with a pronoun: Ancrene Riwle “Is hit nu swa ouer vuel for tototin vtward. ȝe hit”; Chaucer “shal I thus yow my deeth foryive […] Ye, certes, I!” (OED sv “yea”).

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English (11) Do you promise to love her, comfort her, honour (…) her (…) for as long as you both shall live? (a) I do

Vennemann ascribes the echo in English to Celtic substratal influence. The Continental Germanic languages do not have a cognate of yes, which may derive from particle plus echo. However, if echoes are found in all languages, as Moravcsik suggests, it is difficult to prove Celtic influence on English for this construction. We could view particle and augmentation as in apposition (cf. Krifka 2013: 7–8). Crystal (2008: 31) defines apposition as “a sequence of units which are constituents at the same grammatical level, and which have an identity or similarity of reference”. However, he notes that either (or any) of the units should be omissible without affecting acceptability. For “yes”/“no” particles and augmentor(s), this is not always the case. Holmberg proposes a verb-echo versus particle parameter (2016: 231, also 69, 147, 152). I argue that the difference between echoes and particles is not parametric (how and why would such a parameter have evolved?) and not simply binary (English has both, as do many languages). There are also other types of response. The hypothesis of the present study is that “yes” and “no” particles are highly conventionalised and reduced responses. They are thus a result of normal processes of language usage and change – prior combinations of previous generations, making conventional, symbolic units, is a core characteristic of human language.6 Ellipsis is usual in echo responses. Quirk et al. (1985: 889) define ellipsis quite generally as “grammatical reduction through omission”. As they point out (1985: 88–89), “Reduction (…) and information focus (…) enable users of language to suppress those elements of meaning which are informationally predictable, and to highlight those which are informationally important”. This is a core function of “yes” and “no” in the interaction between speaker and hearer. Holmberg notes that echo responses “are uncontroversially derived by ellipsis”. He argues further that “even answers that employ particles are complete sentences, derived by ellipsis from full sentential expressions, and that the two types share essential syntactic properties” (2012b). For example, in this analysis the answer “Yes” to the question “Is John coming?” is derived from “Yes [John is coming]”, with ellipsis of the bracketed clause (Holmberg 2016: 1). Holmberg adds: “The alternative is that yes and no and their counterparts in other languages are clause substitutes, substituting for a whole clause, the content of which is inferred from the context, specifically from the question”. Krifka labels (English) yes, no, okay, right, uh-huh 6 Cf Dunn et al. (2011); Howe (2012). For Holmberg’s view, see (2016: 7).

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and uh-uh response particles (2013: 1, 7). He explains response particles such as yes and no “as anaphoric elements that pick up propositional discourse referents that are introduced by preceding sentences” (2013: 1). Halliday and Hasan (1976: 209), on the other hand, believe that yes and no are not clause substitutes as they can be accompanied by part or the whole of the clause they are said to substitute (Are you coming? – Yes, Yes I am, or Yes I am coming). They state (1976: 137–138) that yes and no “are really more readily interpretable as elliptical forms (…) they express just the polarity option in the clause, positive or negative, leaving the remainder to be presupposed”; “The words yes and no are purely indicators of polarity, and they are regularly elliptical for the whole of the presupposed clause” (1976: 178). Moravcsik suggests that affirmators, such as yes or no, are present in question structures, even if not overtly represented. She discusses the assumption “that yes and no are extraposed and abbreviated copies, or pronouns, of their statements”, citing the following observations: yes and no when accompanying a statement are always semantically redundant and syntactically optional; yes and no may substitute their statements in some cases; in all or almost all languages, “yes” and “no” normally precede their statements (1971: 164–165).7 However, she (1971: 166–168) doubts the “pronominal” character of “yes” and “no” particles, stating that “If yes and no stood for an affirmative and a negative statement, the same way as he stands for male animate noun phrases, then alternative questions should be able to be answered by yes and no.” As illustration she gives the example: Are you listening or aren’t you listening? *Yes *No

Not all of the uses of yes and no can be described simply as ellipsis, substitution or anaphora. Yes and no can be used without a preceding linguistic context: (12) On seeing your team score a goal (a) Yes!!! (13) To show that you want someone to stop doing something (a) No. It’s not right. We mustn’t.

7 Nübling (2002: 31), in a discussion of prototypical interjections in German, suggests that “left and right” peripherality are dependent on the type and degree of spontaneity of emotion, with immediate, reflex-like reactions tending to occur first; more reflective emotions can follow. English examples of “yes” illustrate this: Yes, that’s right! versus Well, I suppose so. Yes.

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To conclude this section, “yes” and “no” particles are abbreviated, conventionalised responses. This hypothesis explains why we find “yes” and “no” particles in some languages but not all. Further, their meaning and use are a function of the conventionalisation in each language; thus although there are many similarities, “yes” and “no” are not identical cross-linguistically. However, because particles are highly abbreviated, conventionalised and bleached, they are often augmented by speakers.

1.2.2 Negative questions “Yes” alone in response to a negative question can be ambiguous: (14) She doesn’t love you any more? (a) ?Yes

It may not be clear whether “yes” here signifies Yes, she doesn’t love you or Yes, she does love you. Holmberg concedes (2016: 10) that intonation can be important – some of his informants pointed out that with sufficiently emphatic intonation, typically high pitch and vowel lengthening, yes alone was grammatical. He also suggests that prefixing the answer with oh – to give oh yes – also “mark[s] polarity reversal”, making the answer well formed. Both of these processes – emphasis and augmentation, here with an interjection – are central to the current study. Indeed, we could argue that emphasis is a form of augmentation. Goddard (2003: 4) “It is well known that an odd property of the so-called ‘polarity-based’ yes/no system of English is that yes doesn’t work properly as an answer: to be clear, one has to reply [e.g. to Isn’t Mary at home?] Yes she is. Many languages have a special, extra response word to affirm a question posed in the negative (…) and English once did too, in the distinction between yea and yes”. It is here then that we find the most recent explanation for the origin of yes (Wallage and van der Wurff 2013); namely that, because of the ambiguity of the particle alone, “yea” was augmented with “is so”: “yea” + “is so” > “yes”

In other words, particle + echo. According to OED (sv “yes”), the former use of “yes” in English was, in answer to a question not involving a negative, more emphatic than “yea/aye”,8 and in answer to a question involving a negative. 8 There is only one example of gyse used this way in Old English (see Wallage and van der Wurff 2013: 190, 212–213).

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Moravcsik also discusses languages where the particle or particles used to answer negative questions is or are different “in shape” from that used to answer positive questions. Examples include French oui–si and German ja–doch where the “yes” particle differs, and Chaha bä–ē and Soddo yällä–aw where the “no” particle differs (1971: 172–173). Holmberg (2016: 167–168) lists languages in his sample with a “reversing affirmative particle”, including Albanian, Georgian, Greek, Hungarian and Wolof. Almost all are polarity-based. Holmberg generalises that “truth-based systems do not have reverse particles, because they do not need them”, as such languages “can always use ‘no’ to disconfirm the negative alternative of a negative question” (2016: 168, 167). Many Germanic languages have a reversing affirmative particle or an augmented affirmative particle – e.g. German doch already mentioned, Swedish jo, Dutch dialectal toet,9 and Dutch “yea” + “well” > jawel. To summarise this discussion, augmentation can create new forms of “yes” and “no”, to specify, clarify, emphasise or expand the speaker’s meaning. Table 1 shows examples of augmented forms of “yes” and “no” in English from traditional dialect (SED, EDD), standard and regional varieties, and my survey respondents. Note that augmentation can be pre- or postposed (or with emphasis, ­superimposed). A form of augmentation is reduplication, as aye-aye. Middle English ȝei, ȝey, ȝeyȝe may derive from a duplicated form *ȝēȝe (OED sv “yea”); Chaucer has reduplicated “yis, yys”, “nay, nay” (Oizumi 2003). Table 1: Augmented “yes” and “no”. well aye aye and like by gum aye oh yes oh yea(h) och aye, oh aye, oh ah ?“a(h)” + “ye(a)” > aye ?“yea” + “is so” > yes yes fay yes sure

yes sir, yessir; yes siree < “yes” + sireea no sir, nossir; no siree < “no” + siree yeah mums, yeah man, yeah yute, yah safeb yealtou “yea, wilt thou”, yelly “yea, will ye”c why aye wuh yiss why neea, why no aye aye aye but, abbut

a OED (sv “yes siree”, “no siree”). b Caribbean (Barbados) English. Thanks to Kevin White. c Yealtou, yelta or yeltow “yes, wilt thou?” and yelly “yes, will ye?” used as exclamations of surprise (EDD sv “yea”).

9 The Meetjeslands dialect in East Flanders. Thanks to Ruben Pauwels.

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1.3 Conventionalisation, univerbation and reduction “Yes” and “no” particles derive from a process of conventionalisation, univerbation and reduction: Particle plus echo “yea” + “is so” > yes (Wallage and van der Wurff 2013) Other forms of augmentation of a particle “aye” + “aye” > aye-aye “yes”/”no” + “sir” > yessir, nossir “aye” + “but” > abbut “why” + “aye” > why-aye “a(h)” + “ye(a)” > aye (see Howe 2017) Other forms of response Scandinavian “ne” + “ay” (‘ever’) > “nay”

Words for “yes” and “no” in other European languages also originate from “devalu[ation]” and “semantic erosion” (Fónagy 2001: 66): Old Latin noenum (“not a single”) > Latin non Vulgar Latin hoc ille (“[it is] this one”) > French oui “yes” Old High German ni ein (“not a single one”) > nein “no” Latin per se intelligitur (“it stands to reason”) > Hungarian strong affirmation persze

Similarly, Wallage and van der Wurff (2013: 194):10 Latin hoc ille (“this (s)he [did]” with ellipsis of “did” and generalisation of the 3rd person response to all contexts) > o il > French oui “yes” Latin non ille (“not (s)he”) > nen il > earlier French nenni “no”

More widely, too, there are similar processes. Osaka Japanese, for example, has a “no” form tyau, standard Japanese tigau, tigaimasu, meaning “it differs”. Other languages have forms for “yes” or “no” that are morphologically analysable as an existential or copulative verb or verb of saying (plus something else) (Moravcsik 1971: 169):11 Agta (Philippines) “no” bakkan (“it isn’t”) Amharic “no” yəlləm (“there isn’t, it is not”)

10 Note the two derivations for French oui. 11 These examples are quoted in the form given in Moravcsik.

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Ancient Greek “no” u phēmi (“I don’t say”) Chinese “no” bú shìr (“not be”), bù hǎu (“not-good”) Cantonese “yes” hai (“be”)12 Kannada “no” illa (“that which doesn’t exist”) Swahili “no” hapana (“is not”); “yes” ndeya and “no” siya are copulative forms

Universally, then, we can perhaps claim, following Moravcsik, that all languages can respond “yes” or “no”, but not all languages have conventionalised yes and no particles.

1.4 Bleaching What we have seen in this discussion are processes of augmentation, conventionalisation, univerbation and reduction in forms of “yes” and “no”. With frequent use, the augmented meaning may become bleached. One such example is yes, an augmented form which is now an ordinary affirmative reply in standard English. Thus, a formerly emphatic or contradictory particle has been generalised as a neutral form. We can then see new emphatic augmented forms, as suggested in jearse and dow, the focus of this chapter.

2 Forms of “yes” and “no” in English 2.1 “Yes” 2.1.1 Yea/yaye OED writes (yea, adv. and n.): Old English (West Saxon) géa combined with the corresponding Anglian gé to produce the Middle English type ȝe(e, ye(e; the Northumbrian development of the Anglian form, gíe, gí (…) gave a Middle English type ȝie, continued in modern northern dialect in yi, yigh, yoi. In later West Saxon the falling diphthong of géa became a rising one, geá, iá, whence arose southern ȝo and northern ȝa (but compare Old Norse já). In other respects the phonology of the English forms is obscure. The modern standard spelling yea and pronunciation /jeɪ/ show arrested development of the vowel, but the pronunciation /jiː/ is current locally.13

12 Wu (2015), cited in Holmberg (2016: 6). 13 Liberman (2014) suggests that yea may owe its pronunciation to the Scandinavian borrowing nay. On yea, great and break, see Minkova (2014: 262–264).

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Yaye is shown in Orton and Wright’s map (Figure 1) in relatively small areas of northwest and southeast England. Both are labelled “2” and marked as of uncertain ­etymology. The SED data show the northwestern forms to be yaye [jaɩ]; the southeastern forms are [jɛː] (Kent 2) and [jɛə, jɛ] (K1, K4). Kent 7 has “older” [jɑː] as well as [jɩs, jɛːs, jɛə, jɛˑə]. Surrey 1 records [jɛːᵊ]

Scotland

YES VIII.8.13 If I asked you: Have you met that man, you could say: . . . . 1

AYE orig obsc c1575

2

YAYE ?

3

YES OE gēse

Wales N

Miles

0 10 20 30 0

20 40 Kms

Figure 1: Neutral “yes” (i.e. non-emphatic and non-contradictory) in traditional dialect in England (simplified slightly, Orton and Wright 1974).

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Table 2: “Yea” and “ya” in the English Dialect Dictionary. Variant

Area

yea [jē; jī, joi] ya [jā, ja]

In general dialectal use in Scotland, Ireland and England Scotland, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Suffolk, Devon Also in the forms below Cheshire Devon Wexford, Leicestershire East Lancashire West Riding of Yorkshire, Lancashire Lancashire East Lancashire, northwest Devon North Country, West Riding of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Hampshire West Durham North Country, West Riding of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Nottinghamshire South Lancashire West Riding of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire

yai ye yee yeh yeigh yhi yi yigh yih yoi yoigh yoy

in the incidental material in addition to yes, yays. Surrey 3 records [jəː] for “contradictory yes”. I also quote EDD entries for “yea” and “ya” to show the range of variants (Table 2, simplified slightly). Note that EDD description for “yea” [jē; jī, joi] “In general dialectal use in Scotland, Ireland and England” differs from Orton and Wright’s map for “yaye” based on SED data. A first point to note here is that none of the variants listed in either the EDD or the SED has initial [dʒ]. Secondly, we must ask why this common Germanic form seems to have almost disappeared in English, and what this could tell us about the origins of aye, yeah and yes. According to SED data, in neutral use yea appears to have been almost completely replaced by aye and in some regions by yes; in contradictory use, “yea” had already been replaced by “yes” in Old English.

2.1.2 Aye The most widespread form recorded by SED for neutral “yes” in traditional dialect is not yea, but aye. It is used not only in the North and Midlands, but also in areas of the South, East Anglia and Lincolnshire. It appears suddenly about 1575 and is “exceedingly common” about 1600; it is initially written I

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and its origin, like yes, is uncertain (OED sv “aye/ay”). For further discussion, see Howe (2017).

2.1.3 Yeah Yeah is also a major variant. Compare Leech, Rayson and Wilson (2001: 244) who state on the basis of the British National Corpus that “In conversation, people (…) overwhelmingly prefer the informal pronunciation yeah to yes”. It is perhaps surprising, then, that EDD has no entry for “yeah”. According to OED it is a colloquial, originally US, casual pronunciation of yes. If yeah is overwhelmingly the more common form today, how can we explain its lack of record in EDD? And is yeah really from US English? If so, it has become very widespread in other ­varieties of English, which is not impossible given the yes-like OK. The OED’s earliest reference to yeah is from 1905. However, that can be antedated from England in 1811 (Loveday and Loveday 1811: 11): Mrs Solus: Solus: Mrs Solus: Solus:

We’ll live and love so tender! You’ll mix my powders “Hover round your bed, And bathe your temples, and bind up your head.” Yeah! you fond gipsey.

The Google® Books Ngram Viewer charts yeah as increasingly in print from 1920, with a great spurt from the 1960s.14 OED gives the pronunciations of yeah as /jɛː/, /jɛ/ for British English, and /jɛ(ə)/, /jæ(ə)/ for US English. This would suggest that the forms with final schwa and their spelling yeah are perceived as American. However, SED has [jɛːᵊ] in Surrey (Sr 1, Walton-on-the-Hill), and “yes” and “no” have wide accent variation in both British and American English. SED notes in the volume for the East Midland counties that variants without final -s may represent either “yea” or “yes” (1971, III, III: 1176).15 However, “yea” is not widely recorded in SED (cf. Figure 1). My own native dialect of the Isle of Ely (C1) records [jæː]. Other similar forms recorded in SED in the East Midland counties include Norfolk [o jɛ] (Nf 7),

14 Search range between the years 1800 and 2000 of the corpus “English”. A search of the “American English” corpus shows a curve from the 1920s, with a first peak around 1945 followed by a very steep rise from the 1960s. For the “British English” corpus we see a gradual rise from the 1920s, increasing somewhat from the 1960s and sharply from the 1980s. https://books.google.com/ngrams (all searches 15 April 2016). 15 On the complex changes of the “long vowel shift” in English, see Minkova (2014: 256–267).

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[jɛː] (Nf 9), [oː jɛː, jɛːᵊ] (Nf 12) all “contradictory yes”, [oː jɛː] (Nf 13) “neutral yes”; Suffolk [jɛ] (Sf 2) “contradictory yes”, [jɛ] (Sf 4) “neutral yes”; Bedfordshire [jeˑə] (Bd 2); Essex [jʌ] (Ess 5), [jɛˑə] (Bd 9) both “contradictory yes”; Hackney [ǫɷ jɛːᵊ] (MxL 2) “contradictory yes”.16 Given that the survey informants were born before talking pictures, radio and television broadcasts, SED forms are perhaps unlikely to be from US English. Yes was originally an emphatic or contradictory form, and in some parts of the country remains so (see below). Unaccented variants of yes are only likely to have become “overwhelmingly” more common when (or in varieties where) yes was generalised as a neutral form. If yeah is originally an unaccented form with loss of final -s, it might indeed be relatively recent. In conclusion, then, perhaps the most likely explanation is that both US and British English had unaccented variants without final -s, and that the US form and particularly the spelling yeah have become widespread through popular culture. On this note, Paul McCartney tells the story of when the Beatles wrote She loves you (recorded in 1963): we “played it to my dad and he said, ‘That’s very nice, son, but there’s enough of these Americanisms around. Couldn’t you sing, “She loves you. Yes! Yes! Yes!”’ (Miles 1997: 150).17

2.2 “No” Forms for “no” in English – excluding “dow” – are somewhat less complex than those for “yes”. The SED survey used the same question to elicit neutral “no” as for “yes”, namely “If I asked you: Have you met that man, you could say: …” The results are summarised in Orton and Wright’s map (Figure 2).

2.2.1 No No is recorded in the North, Midlands and South in Figure 2. It is worth noting here that none of the variants has initial d-. OED (sv “naow”) records a variant nao, naow in various sources from the end of the nineteenth century.

16 On problems with transcriptions from Norfolk in the SED, see Trudgill (1983: 34–41). 17 John Lennon recalled: “I don’t know where the ‘yeah, yeah, yeah,’ came from. I ­remember when Elvis did ‘All Shook Up’, it was the first time in my life that I had heard ‘uh huh’, ‘oh yeah,’ and ‘yeah, yeah,’ all sung in the same song” (Badman 2009, “She loves you”).

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Scotland

NO VIII.8.13 If I asked you: Have you met that man, you could say: . . . . 1

NAY ON nei c1175

2

NO OE nā

Wales N

Miles

0 10 20 30 0

20 40 Kms

Figure 2: Neutral “no” in traditional dialect in England (simplified slightly, Orton and Wright 1974).

2.2.2 Nay The etymology of nay is Scandinavian “ne” + “ay” (“ever”) > “nay” (ON nei 1175) (OED sv “nay”). In Orton and Wright’s map nay is fairly common in the North; it also occurs in a small area of the Midlands. In EDD, “nay” [nē, neə] is given as in general dialectal use in Scotland, Ireland and England. In SED, one location in Leicestershire (Lei 7) records five forms of “no”, including [nɛɩ] and “more common now” [nɔɷ].

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2.2.3 Suffolk ho EDD has no record for ho meaning “no”.18 However, SED records ho [hʌɷ] for “no” in one location in Suffolk (Kersey, Sf 5, postcode IP7, not shown on Orton and Wright’s map). Sf 5 has ah “yes”, ho “no”, and yes (yis) “contradictory yes”. Suffolk dialect humorist Charlie Haylock (p.c., August 2015) from Edwardstone (postcode CO10) also cites ho: “My part of Suffolk doesn’t say jearse or dow (…) we say chesss! or shesss! for an emphatic ‘yes!’ (…) and hoe! for the emphatic ‘no’”. An informant from Otley in Suffolk (IP6) has ho as well as sheers or cheerse and tow. He states that ho is “the ‘ordinary’ word for no in these parts (at least for dialect speakers) (…) I grew up with it and still use it regularly”. Another informant recalls: “Many years ago when I was a lad in Ipswich we said cheerz for ‘yes’ and doe for ‘no’, but a few years back I had a temporary job working out at Clopton/Otley and a youngish bor I worked with there always said hoe for ‘no’ if he saw you doing something wrong”. A further respondent, from Ixworth in Suffolk (IP31), reports as follows: “Jearse” rhymes with pierce but pronounced with a harder ch at the start of the word making it sound more like chearse. “Dow” is pronounced with a hard sound at the start – almost tow and rhymes with the word no. Both words are pronounced with an elongated vowel sound (…) There [is] also a variation on “dow”. The word how (rhymes with no) was sometimes used instead of “no” or “dow”, but I remember this was used more to imply incredulity, disbelief or even ridicule – “of course not” probably describes it best.

All these Suffolk forms are plotted in Figures 4 and 5. They are interesting, as they show voiceless initial consonants – chesss, shesss, sheers, cheerse and tow – whereas my Isle of Ely forms, and indeed the majority of forms recorded in the current survey, are voiced. The informant above from Otley states: “‘Jearse’ and ‘dow’ were, and still are, everyday words amongst my contemporaries who were brought up in rural areas (…) We say sheers (sometimes it’s a faint ch at the ­beginning – so more like cheerse) and tow (a diphthong somewhere between toe and how), with long drawn-out vowels”. We suggest that the initial consonants have shifted: dʒ > tʃ > ʃ

In a study of consonant strength, Lavoie (2001: 41) states that the most common environment for strengthening is initial. Two of the most common strengthenings 18 On ho meaning a call to a horse to stand still, or a stop, delay or cessation, see EDD “ho, 1 and 5” respectively; on ho(o) as an initiator meaning “well”, see “ho(o”; and on how as in how-way, howay, see “how, int.” None of these meanings explains the unvoiced forms of “jearse”.

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in her database are devoicing and aspiration. In such case, a possible explanation for ho is a change from breathy voiced dow to tow and ho: d̤> tʰ > h

Ho would thus be a derivative of tow. One caller to the radio programme on BBC Radio Suffolk, born in Sudbury in Suffolk, uses the intermediate forms on air: cheerse and a strongly aspirated tʰow. The comments of several respondents seem to support this explanation. One informant states: “My father (b[orn] 1914, Worlingworth, Mid-Suffolk [around nine miles (14 km) from Otley]) and his peers would pronounce ‘jearse’ more as cheerse and ‘dow’ almost as [if] it had an h in, as dhow. Both words were often extended for effect, as in cheeeerse and dhowwwww”. Another respondent, from Beccles in Suffolk (NR34), about 25 miles (40 km) from Otley, writes that “‘Dow’ would normally be pronounced doe but (…) in exclamation may be elongated or more like dhow”. On the pronunciation tow, a respondent from Nowton, near Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, writes “tow, nearest rhyme to now, again elongating the vowel sound with a little quiver to it”. An informant from Lowestoft in Suffolk (NR32) describes the local pronunciation of “dow” as follows: “The spelling of ‘dow’ is not quite correct: it gives too much emphasis to w. ‘Dow’ in Lowestoft had heavy emphasis on the d but did not rhyme with ‘cow’. It was quite close to dough, or dhow or doe”. A respondent from Leiston in Suffolk (IP16) describes the pronunciation as “D’hoowh! rhyming with hoe. The initial part often delivered similar to a laugh or a cough and the remainder of the word extremely drawled out”. The explanation seems plausible, then. However, it is worth concluding this discussion by mentioning that Sater Frisian also has an initial h- form hoa for ‘no’ beside usual noa, naa, recorded in Kramer’s (2014) corpus.

2.3 “Contradictory yes” Wallage and van der Wurff (2013: 184) write that Old English gese, gise, gyse “is due to a development particular to Old English, which took place between the Anglo-Saxon settlement, or shortly before it, and the time of the word’s earliest attestation in Old English texts”. The Old English data are very limited: outside the glosses, there are just 25 examples of gea and ten of gyse (Wallage and van der Wurff 2013: 190–191): the evidence for gyse in the corpus of surviving Old English texts is obviously limited, but the generalization that emerges is that OE gyse occurred predominantly as the second part of an adjacency pair in which it provided a positive polarity to a negative utterance. That

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utterance could be either a question or an assertion. In contrast, gea was typically used in response to a non-negative utterance.

From the data, Wallage and van der Wurff extrapolate the following system for ca. 900–1100: Positive polarity response to a positive utterance: gea Positive polarity response to a negative utterance: gyse

Their derivation gea is swa > gyse, i.e. particle + echo, is theoretically plausible. As the Old English forms show the effects of i/j mutation, gea is swa must have occurred in the same prosodic unit to trigger mutation – there cannot have been a pause between gea and is swa. The sequence “in proto-Old English underwent routinization, became frequent and eventually univerbated into gyse” (Wallage and van der Wurff 2013: 202–4, 211). However, the parallel negative particle nese (Northumbrian næse, næsi) is somewhat problematic. OED (sv “yes”) has an alternative explanation, gea + sī, the third person singular present subjunctive of “to be”, thus “yea, be it”, suggesting that nese (næse, næsi) may derive similarly from ne + sī. Wallage and van der Wurff (2013: 195–197) review a number of problems with the “yea” + sī > “yes” hypothesis. From our point of view, “yea” + subjunctive is not emphatic, and does not account for the use of yes as a positive polarity response to a negative utterance. A third explanation is “yea” + swa “so”. Support for this is found in the derivation of Romance si from Latin sic “so”. OED gives an example of so meaning “yes” in Middle English: Somme seide nay & somme so (sv “so” I.5.a). However, this hypothesis, too, has a number of problems and OED (sv “yes”) concludes that the derivation is phonologically inadequate: as Wallage and van der Wurff (2013: 195) point out, the i/j mutation “cannot be due to swa since that word contains no i or j”. Turning to Modern English, EDD (sv “yes”, “iss”) records quite a wide range of variants in traditional dialect. Note that none of the variants has initial [dʒ]. Note also the y-less forms of “yes” in Table 3, in many areas,19 contrasting with the absence of y-less variants of “yea” in Table 2. An interesting question is whether “aye” could be in origin a y-less development of “yea” of some kind, see further Howe (2017). OED states (sv “yes”) that, in answer to a question not involving a negative, yes was “formerly usually more emphatic than yea or ay; in later use taking the 19 For late Medieval English, the eLALME map “Forms lacking initial [j] in YET, YODE (WENT), YOU, YOUR, YEAR, YIELD” shows y-less forms in a relatively restricted area of the West Midlands, a few locations in the Southwest and sporadically elsewhere. http://archive.ling.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme_scripts/lib/create_feature_map.php?mapid=4320005 (accessed 4 March 2016).

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Table 3: “Yes” in the English Dialect Dictionary. Variant

Area

[jes; jis, īs; unstressed jəs]

Various dialect forms and uses in Scotland, Ireland and England

eece, eeece, ees(e, eess, or eez

Yorkshire, Northamptonshire, Shropshire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Suffolk, Essex, Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Wiltshire, Dorset, West Somerset, Devon, Cornwall North Devon, Cornwall Berkshire Sussex, south Devon Scotland, Shetland Isles, Ireland, Cumberland, west ­Yorkshire, south Staffordshire, Leicestershire, Warwickshire, ­Gloucestershire West Yorkshire, Worcestershire, Kent Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Shropshire, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, Suffolk, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, ­Cornwall

es(s e-us yahs or yas yis(s

yus iss, also written hiss [is]

place of these as the ordinary affirmative response word”. In answer to a negative question, the distinction from yea “became obsolete soon after 1600, and since then yes has been the ordinary affirmative response word in reply to any question positive or negative”. However, a distinction between neutral “aye” and contradictory “yes” or similar is in fact recorded quite widely in SED data. SED elicited “contradictory yes” with the following question: “If I said to you: You haven’t met that man, have you? and you had, you’d answer: … I have”. In neutral, non-contradictory use, yes occurs in the South and a large area surrounding the Wash (SED map, Figure 1). This means that in these areas the original meaning has become bleached and yes generalised as a neutral particle, in response to a positive as well as a negative question (as in “If I asked you: Have you met that man, you could say: …”).20 Still, a significant area of England maintains “aye” in this function in the SED data. Plotted on a map in Figure 3, OED’s report of the demise of the original function of “yes” appears somewhat premature, then.21 We cannot therefore correctly

20 For an example of this change in progress, the SED entry for Sutton Veny in Wiltshire (W7) lists neutral “yes” as yes [jɛs] (a shorter form of contradictory “yes” [jɛːs]) but “older” neutral “yes” [aɽːɽ]. 21 SED locations recording neutral “aye” and contradictory “yes” or similar: East Midland counties Nottinghamshire 1, 2, 3, 4; Lincolnshire 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9; Northamptonshire 3, 4; Suffolk 2, 3, 5; Buckinghamshire 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Bedfordshire 1, 3; Hertfordshire 1, 2; Essex 1, 5

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Maintenance of two types of “yes” Neutral “aye” versus contradictory “yes” (or similar), based on SED data for England only

SED locality recording distinction

Figure 3: Maintenance of two types of “yes”.

speak of “northern aye” and “standard yes”: firstly, in the SED data “aye” is quite widespread outside the North, and secondly, “yes” is maintained in many areas as a contradictory particle.

West Midland counties Cheshire 1 (“aye” – “yaye”); Derbyshire 1, 2, 4; Shropshire 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11; Staffordshire 1, 4, 6, 7; Herefordshire 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; Worcestershire 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; Warwickshire 4, 5, 6, 7; Oxfordshire 1 Southern counties Wiltshire 4; Hampshire 3, 6 Northern counties Northumberland 2, 6, 8; Cumberland 1, 3, 5; Westmorland 3; Lancashire 5 (“aye” – “yaye”), 6 (“aye” – “yaye”), 10 (“aye” – “yah”); Yorkshire 5, 12 (“aye” – “yaye”), 17 (“aye” – “yaye”), 21 (“aye” – “yaye”), 28, 31, 33 (“aye” – “yah”)

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2.4 “Contradictory no” SED did not include a question to elicit emphatic or contradictory “no”. Dow, then, and possibly other emphatic forms, was not recorded. However, two locations in Lancashire did record “contradicting” “nay”: neutral no versus “contradicting” nay in La6 (Pilling), and neutral neo versus “contradicting” nay in La8 (Ribchester).

3 Jearse and dow In my native dialect of the Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire, many speakers have emphatic forms of “yes” and “no”: jearse and dow.22 Positive yes/no question (15) Did ’e goo to Ely yisty? Did he go to Ely yesterday? Jearse! Dow!

Negative yes/no question (16) Din’t ’e goo to Ely yisty? Didn’t he go to Ely yesterday? Dow! Jearse!

SED elicited “contradictory yes” with the following question: “If I said to you: You haven’t met that man, have you? and you had, you’d answer: …. I have”. However, in my dialect this question would not elicit jearse, as neither jearse nor dow can be immediately followed by an echo such as I have in the same prosodic unit: *Jearse I hev *Dow I in’t23

22 On the speech of Cambridgeshire, see Vasko (2010) who writes that the county “has largely remained a blank spot on the dialect map of Britain”. 23 The following are grammatical, as attested by a number of informants, because course begins a new prosodic unit: Jearse | Course I hev Dow | Course I in’t

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Table 4: Neutral and emphatic “yes” and “no” in the Isle of Ely. Neutral

Emphatic

yeah no

jearse [dʒɪːəs] dow [dɛːʊ, daʊ]

3.1 Jearse and dow survey For the survey for this study, informants completed an online questionnaire.24 The UK survey received over 100 respondents in approximately 75 locations 24 http://stephenhowe.info/survey/ for England, http://stephenhowe.info/dow/ for America: (1) Name (2) Email (3) Gender (4) What year were you born? (5) Where did you grow up? (6) Where do you live now? (7) Is your information about the area where you live now or where you grew up (or both)? (8) Is your area in England, the USA, Canada, Australia or New Zealand? (9) What is the zip or postal code of the area (or areas)? (10) Do or did people use jearse and/or dow in your area? (11) Do or did people use both jearse and dow, or just one of them? (12) If people still say jearse and/or dow in your area today, who uses them? (a) Older generation (b) Middle-aged (c) Younger generation (13) Who do you use jearse and/or dow with? (a) Family (b) Friends (c) At work (d) Everyone (14) How do or did people pronounce jearse and/or dow (what words do they rhyme with)? (15) How do or did people use jearse and/or dow? Please feel free to add any further information I used several methods to publicise the survey: BBC.com news article (BBC Online 2015) Guest on BBC Radio Suffolk Guest on BBC Radio Norfolk Guest on BBC Radio Lincolnshire Interview on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire Newspaper article (Cambridge News 2015) Newspaper article by Peter Trudgill (Eastern Daily Press 2015)

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in the East of England. It thus compares well with SED (two sample points in ­Cambridgeshire, 13 in Norfolk, five in Suffolk, 15 in Essex and 15 in Lincolnshire). It covers urban as well as rural locations, including Norwich, Boston and Ipswich. The socioeconomic-educational range was relatively wide. Approximately 60% of respondents to the UK survey (of those who gave their sex) were male and 40% female. The youngest respondent (of those who gave their date of birth) was born in 1992 (but did not use jearse or dow); the oldest was born in 1929. The American survey received approximately 35 responses. Approximately 55% of the US respondents were male and 45% female. Most were academics or similar professionals on the Center for Research on Vermont mailing list. The survey was publicised via BBC local radio, BBC.com and the press. The sample is biased by where I was a guest on the radio (Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Lincolnshire, but not Essex; not in the US) and the listenership and readership of the different media. This bias includes the age, sex and socioeconomic group of listeners and readers. In England, jearse and dow are recorded by this study in Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, Huntingdonshire and part of Essex – a swathe of the country stretching from the Colne to the Humber.

4 How are jearse and dow pronounced? 4.1 Jearse In the village of Kirton, four miles (6 km) south of Boston, both jeese and dow are recorded in the glossary Tairtyville Talk by Pearson (1995). The author gives the pronunciations as follows: Jeese “rhymes with geese” Dow “rhymes with cow”

In the survey for this study, where respondents gave a pronunciation, it is shown on the map. For the vocalic part, variants are jearse, jeese and jurse, shorter forms such as jiss and chess, and very long forms such as jeeease, juuuuuurse and cheerrrrrrs. An informant from Southwold in Suffolk states: “jearse (…) to rhyme with

Center for Research on Vermont mailing list American Dialect Society mailing list Local history societies in the UK and USA

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pierce, but drawn out. Sometimes a shorter sound like jisss – It would depend on the emphasis required”. A respondent from Beccles in Suffolk notes on the pronunciation of jearse: “sometimes, in exclamation, elongating the ear sound”. An informant from Cambridgeshire Isle of Ely gives the pronunciation of jearse and dow as cheerrrrrrs and dowwwww. One final-voiced form cheeerz is recorded from Ipswich. One informant from near Boston in Lincolnshire reports the pronunciation as jeeease or sometimes “a shortened jeeee”. Another, from Irstead in Norfolk, reports that “jearse rhymes with year but the s was often missing and the j was more like a soft g or possibly dj”.

4.2 Dow The most widespread pronunciation of the initial consonant is d-. This emphatic pronunciation can be a breathy voiced [d̤]; parts of Suffolk have tow, toh and ho. I chose the spelling dow as it covers two of the main pronunciations: dow rhyming with cow and dow rhyming with low. Another common pronunciation, in Lincolnshire and areas bordering the county, is written doo. An informant from Grimsby states “My paternal family is originally from the Fens (a long time ago), so it may be a family thing that’s been passed down, but I’ve always associated it with the Lincolnshire Wolds, where the rest of my relations lived”, adding that doo “definitely rhymes with zoo – the ‘oo’ bit can often be lengthened for extra emphasis!” Another respondent reports that her grandfather, who lived and worked on the East Lindsey marshes in Lincolnshire, pronounced it as “doo, to rhyme with you”. An informant from Walton Highway, near Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, notes two pronunciations of dow: “Dow /dəʊ/ (stronger ‘certainly not!’) and /duː/ (a bit more humorous ‘you must be joking!’)”. Also interesting is the description by an informant from Lowestoft in Suffolk, who notes: “We used dow very often; I remember it sounding almost as if there was an a after d – daoow”. A respondent from Southwold in Suffolk states “dow, rhyming with cow but with more sound on the w like dow-a”. And an informant from Coningsby in Lincolnshire reports doowa. For comparison with the vowel sounds of “no”, Lincolnshire records [nɷə] or similar in quite a number of locations in the SED (where [ɷ] is a lowered [u]). Norfolk often records [nou] or similar; Suffolk records [nʌɷ] plus ho, and Cambridgeshire records [noɷ, nʌɷ]. In addition to the accent variation and expressive vocalisation of these forms – one respondent writes “dow” as dOOooOOw, another as dowwwww – the pronunciation of course also depends on the background and age of the users – where and when they grew up. David Britain (p.c., September 2015) gives a detailed analysis of his and his mother’s different pronunciations of dow:

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I was brought up in the West Norfolk Fens (…) my basilect is essentially Wisbech rather than Norfolk (…) For me (and mum) we can’t use the mouth vowel in “dow” (my mouth is [ɛː], hers [ɛu]). I guess it must be goat for both of us. Mum, being a good Norfolk girl, has nose–knows split, with nose in the region of [uː] (…) “our” [uː] variants of “dow” rather than being goose are actually relics of goat – [uː] (my goose is fronter than my [uː] vowel in “dow”), with me also having “dow” as [əu] (…) (as I have nose–knows merger) and mum not having “dow” as [əu] because none of her nose words are [əu].

As David Britain deduces, we would indeed expect the vowel of dow to be goat if it originates from no (see Wells 1982: 146–147, 337–338, 525–526).

5 What do jearse and dow mean? A respondent who grew up mainly in the Cambridgeshire Fens explains the meanings of “jearse” and “dow” as follows: Jeers as in “yes of course” Doh as in “no that’s daft”

An informant living in Little Downham, the SED location in the Isle of Ely, writes that jearse is used “for emphasis, as if Good heavens, yes”. A respondent from Swardeston, Norfolk, gives the example: Is thut stilla rainun out there Lou? Dyis thussa hullun ut down

A respondent from Southwold, Suffolk, states that jearse is used “to counter a statement that is plainly wrong”, giving the example: [The local football team] Ipswich won’t win tonight Jearse … course they will!

She adds that “You wouldn’t use it as an affirmative for a question like ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Then you would simply say yes”. On dow, she notes: “an emphatic no – like no, not at all or no, never – also perhaps showing some disagreement with the other person (…) It is not a ‘no thanks’”. For the Lincolnshire village of Kirton, Pearson (1995 sv “jeese”, “dow”) gives the meanings of jeese and dow as Jeese: “Yes, emphatically” Dow: “means no, emphatically or scornfully”

On dow, Peter Trudgill (p.c. November 2014) writes, based on a sample of about 25 Norwich friends, “The actual usage is a little bit more difficult to reconstruct,

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but there seems to be something of a consensus that it was a negative reply to a question that was deemed to be based on a false or foolish premise, so it basically means ‘of course not!’”. He gives the example: Are you gawta swot up for that test? Dow!!!

Joan M. Sims-Kimbrey writes in Wodds and Doggerybaw: A Lincolnshire Dialect Dictionary (1995 sv “dow”) that dow “casts scorn on a suggestion and means, simultaneously, ‘no’ and ‘don’t be so bloody stupid!’” The use of jearse and dow, as described by informants, is overwhelmingly emphatic. Further, the two forms seem to be a mirror pair, grammatically and semantically, in those dialects that have both. Phonetically, they do not rhyme or half-rhyme, unlike OE gese and nese, yea and nay, and yep and nope; however, both have initial d- ([dʒɪːəs] and [dɛːʊ], [daʊ]). How can we explain this emphatic meaning, semantically and grammatically paired forms, initial d- and different final sounds?

6 Who uses jearse and dow? A female respondent (born 1949) from Wells-Next-The-Sea, Norfolk, notes: “My dad who lived until he was 99 spoke like this. I speak like this as does my youngest daughter. We all have always lived in Wells”. A respondent born in 1953 writes: “Born Swanton Morley, lived 12 years North Runcton, went to Lynn High School for Girls, three years teacher training in Lincolnshire” … “I would say something like dow, that don’t or as an emphatic negative (…) Jearse as an emphatic yes (…) More subtle than dow – I had to think twice about whether I still use it and I would say not so much as dow”. A male respondent from Winterton-on-Sea in Norfolk, born in 1985 and with an MA from the University of East Anglia, uses both forms: “I often use the words myself as a Norfolk born and bred inhabitant”. In New England, one respondent from Newbury, Vermont, describes how at school using daow had “in” status, at least among children: “It also had a class connotation I think. The town kids or what would pass in my time for ‘higher end’ kids – usually not living ‘outback’ (…) I can remember feeling ‘in’ when it became commonplace in my lexicon (starting at 6 when I went to school) which bothered my mother no end”. Generally, people using jearse and dow today are middle-aged or older. Of respondents to the UK survey who gave information on generational use,

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Trent

er Humb

“Jearse” in Eastern England Geographical distribution

dzears

Grimsby

“jearse”

Lincolnshire Wolds Lincoln

jiss

Newark jeeease,jeeee

Boston jisss,dyisss jeese The Wash

jierce jiuss

King’s Lynn jess jeese jierse jeece

Peterborough

jeerse

Grea t Ou se

jearse

jeerse

jis

Cambridge

jiss

chess,cheers Haverhill

cheerse chesss shesss

possible jearse

ji-erce cheerse jis jears,jerrs jiiiiiss jearse jearse,jess,jisss

cheerse

sheerse,cheerse cheers

d’yiss

jearse

cheeerz Ipswich chairs Stour

Colchester

lne Co

Hertford

jeerse

chearse cheers Bury St Edmunds

Bedford

jierce jurse jyiss chursssss jierce jeerssss jeers djeers Norwich Y jeers are jierce dyis jurse djearse jiss

djiss

jeaeaearse

jearse jearse

cheerrrrrrs jearse, jeers

jierce jear(s)

juuuuuurse jearse jearse Ely

jiss

jearse

London

Figure 4: Respondents reporting “jearse” in use or living memory.

50 miles 80 kilometres

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Emphatic “yes” and “no” in Eastern English: jearse and dow 

er Humb

“Dow” in Eastern England

doo

Geographical distribution

Trent

doo Grimsby doo doo Lincolnshire Wolds

“dow” doh

“ho”

Lincoln doo

doo

doowa

Newark

doo Boston doo,dOOooOOw doo dow doo The Wash dow dow

doh

doo doo doo

doo Peterborough

King’s Lynn dow doooo doh,doo

dow dooo

doooo,dəu doh

Gre at O use

dow

Ely dowwwww Cambridge

doh

doh dow

dow doh

dow

dower

doh

dow

doh

doh

dow dow Norwich dyew doh,deew e Yar doh dow dow dow dow

dow dow,doh

doh,toh

tow Haverhill

doh,dow

Otley d’hoowh ho tow doh doh dow,doh

ho tʰow ho doh Ipswich doh ho S to ur dow Colchester

lne Co

Hertford

dow,doh daoow

doh,dhow

dow,dow-a dhow

doh

ho Bury St Edmunds

Bedford

d-ow doh

dow,doh dow

London

Figure 5: Respondents reporting “dow” in use or living memory.

50 miles 80 kilometres

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­ pproximately 69% ticked “older generation”, 29% checked “middle-aged”, and a only 1% ticked “younger generation”. This suggests strongly that in England at least, jearse and dow are obsolescent. Peter Trudgill writes of his sample of Norwich friends “most of us remember it being used at one time by people of our age”. An informant from Ipswich, born in 1945, remembers “my family/friends using it 50/60 years ago, but not lately”. And a further respondent states: “I have been involved with primary education here in North Suffolk for some years, and have not heard the words used for a long time”. In my own family, my grandfather and father use(d) jearse and dow, as do I when speaking to my father; but my nephews and niece, aged 12, nine and six and growing up in the Isle of Ely, do not. In contrast, an informant from Rollesby in Norfolk comments that “my sons in their early twenties work on farms and they still use both words”. The news editor at BBC Radio Suffolk (p.c., July 2015) writes: “I come from a village near Beccles in North Suffolk and we use(d) jearse and dow. In fact my mate (…) from Leeds still mocks me for it”. On a perception of jearse and dow as rural forms, a respondent from Harleston in Norfolk states: My family have been farmers for over 100 years and I thought the words were a type of farmer language. My late grandfather always used jearse and dow when answering yes or no to absolutely anybody. My brother and I often talk to our own young children in what we call “farmer boy” language which is just broad Norfolk dialect. The children find it really funny trying to guess what we are saying. Now sometimes the children use jearse and dow when communicating to us.

However, jearse and dow are or were used in urban as well as rural areas, as Figures 4 and 5 show. Peter Trudgill writes in his column in the Eastern Daily Press­ (7 September 2015) that dow was certainly very common when he was growing up in Norwich (the cluster on the “dow” map represents Peter Trudgill’s sample of Norwich friends). And both Ipswich and Boston record “jearse” and “dow”. In summary, jearse and dow are used by people who grew up hearing and speaking traditional dialect (regardless of their adult socioeconomic status). However, while they are quite extensive in Eastern English, jearse and dow are unlikely to be used with people outside the dialect speech ­community.

7 Origin of jearse and dow I suggest that jearse and dow developed from augmentation of “yes” and “no” by interjectional “dear”, that is “dear yes” and “dear no”.

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For jearse, in connected speech under influence of alveolar [d], palatal [j] assimilated to post-alveolar [ʒ], as in would + you > [wʊdʒuː], with lengthening: unlike unaccented or neutral forms of “yes”, jearse is normally emphatic. Wells (1982: 222) writes that /r/ was already lost before /s/, /ʃ/, and occasionally other consonants, by the sixteenth century and perhaps as early as 1300 in a “quite separate” development to subsequent r-dropping. Some early instances of /r/-loss are OE cerse – ME cesena ‘of cress (plural)’, OE gorst – ME gost ‘gorse’, and place names in the Domesday Book such as OE Deorling-tun > Dallingtune ‘Darlington’, all eleventh century; similarly ME mornings – monyngys ‘mornings’, c. 1452 (Minkova 2014: 121–122), and variant forms such as morsel – mossel (1290), parcel – passel (c. 1468) and tarsel – tassel (1459). The common denominator in these early examples of loss of /r/ is /r/ + dental consonant. Minkova, quoting Hill (1940), believes the most plausible explanation to be assimilation with simplification of the long consonant. The set triggering /r/-loss defined by Hill are all the coronal consonants of Middle English (Minkova 2014: 122), i.e. including [s] and [n]. Minkova writes (2014: 123) that “Surprisingly, the instances of pre-­ consonantal loss [such as cesena, gost and Dallingtune] (…) are not traditionally considered precursors to a general /r/-loss in coda clusters”. However, she concludes (2014: 124) that “It is likely (…) that the earlier and the later cases of /-rC/ simplification ­represent a single historical process stretching over more than six centuries and ­affecting different dialects and different lexical items unevenly”, adding that “Vowel lengthening is one possible outcome rather than an essential stage in the process of /r/-loss”. For Eastern English, Minkova (2014: 123) cites the sixteenth-century commentator William Bullokar (c. 1531–1609), who wrote that /r/-loss before /s/ was a “widespread vulgarism” in East Anglian texts. And for New England, Bailey (2012: 40) reports that in the second half of the seventeenth century “town records are full of spellings where historical r is omitted”, including Mos “Morse” (1669) and bud “bird” (1675). The Salem witch trial documents include Geale ‘girl’, Googe ‘George’, nuss ‘nurse’ and doe ‘door’ (Rosenthal et al. 2009: 74). But what about dow? The fairly clear origin of jearse suggests a parallel development: “dear” + “no” > dow

Although it is less straightforward phonetically to account for a change from “dear no” to dow, alveolar [d] + [n] > [d], with assimilation or elision of [n]. ­Synchronically yeah–jearse and no–dow could be analysed as strengthening or fortition of the word-initial consonant: /j/ and /n/ are sonorants (high sonority), and /dʒ/ and /d/ are obstruents (low sonority). However, they are unlikely to be simply a result of fortition. If this were the case, we would expect to find some

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sporadic [d] forms in the data: while we find many variants of “yes” and “no”, no forms with initial [d] are recorded in EDD, SED or LANE.25 Both jearse and dow have initial [d]. This is readily explicable if they originate from dear + particle, but problematic if we assume a different etymology. A further important point, already noted, is that in my native dialect jearse and dow are a mirror pair, like yes and no. Compare similarly the comments of several respondents: one from near Downham Market, Norfolk, writes “jearse was an affirmation – more than just a yes (…) dow was the opposite of jearse”. Another from Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, describes the use as “Jearse: yes of course; dow: no of course not”. An informant from Lowestoft, Suffolk, states: “Emphatically, in both cases. Did you git in trouble Sat’day? Daoow! Did you git the right answer to that maths? Djearse!” Similarly, a respondent from Bungay in Suffolk comments: “dow was always used as an almost scornful response to a question or proposition, showing rejection of it or opposition to it. Jearse, similarly, carried emphasis with it, but in a positive way, conveying approval and corroboration”. A common origin of jearse and dow seems therefore likely, supporting the “dear” + “no” explanation. Further supporting this hypothesis, two or three sources report dow as having a nasal quality. The first, a respondent from Acle in Norfolk, comments that “dow sounds a bit like a nasal no, i.e. the d is hardly audible nor distinguishable from a t”. This description is perhaps uncertain, but two sources from New England also report nasality. The first is from Rhode Island in the early 1930s (in an email on file at DARE): “unspellable ‘Daough’ nasal, ‘Day-oh’”. The second is from Vermont in the 1950s: “Dow [dou] (…) [dō] are pronunciations of the word no, heard especially in rural areas. The sound has a nasal quality” (Hughes 1959: 133). As well as the phonetic evidence and corresponding positive form, the semantics also fit: dow means “dear no”. Although dear yes and dear no are no longer used as separate expressions in my native dialect, in the examples cited earlier we can replace jearse with dear yes and dow by dear no with no significant change of meaning. Syntactically, too, they are often interchangeable. 25 LANE did not include a question to elicit “no”. In the current study, in some cases respondents cited both y- and j- forms for “jearse”. For example a woman (born 1984) from Halesworth in Suffolk states: “Jearse – rhyming with ears/jeers, and also hearse (both y sound, and j, but mostly y, so yerrs). Also frequently hear yiiiiiisss/jiiiiiss, although maybe this is just Suffolk yes?” One US respondent writes: “I heard jearse quite often when I lived in London in the mid-80s. In fact, I had a girlfriend who used it regularly. She was from (…) Hertfordshire. But I think she thought, and I know I thought, it was just a funny (as in amusing) way of saying yes. Sort of like folks when I was growing up in southern California saying jes and sometimes a drawled-out version that was more like jay-ess for yes. I wouldn’t expect these to make the dictionary, though, as they are just kind of random, funny pronunciations of a word spelled y-e-s. No?” Interestingly, “jearse” is recorded only 30 miles (50 km) from the Hertfordshire location in my survey.

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(17) Did ’e goo to Ely yisty? Dear yes! Dear no! (18) Din’t ’e goo to Ely yisty? Dear no! Dear yes!

7.1 Augmentation: Why add “dear” to “yes” and “no”? Final support for the origin of jearse and dow is EDD’s report (sv “yes”), from Dorset, of non-univerbated dear yes and dear no used similarly to assert or declare emphatically or solemnly (“asseveration”). It gives one quote: Dear yes, I’ve often heard of it

Similarly for “no”, again from Dorset: You’re not an object, Mr. Locke. Dear no, not at all an object.

We also find (oh) dear yes and (oh) dear no in Dickens’ writings. The concordance CLiC Dickens, based on 15 novels, gives 19 instances of “dear yes”. Tale of Two Cities: “Damn it all, sir!” said Stryver, staring at him, “am I not eligible?” “Oh dear yes! Yes. Oh yes, you’re eligible!”

And 60 instances of “dear no”. David Copperfield:26 “She doesn’t sing to the guitar?” said I “Oh dear no!” said Traddles

Dear is an intensifier, or augmentor in the terminology of this study. Thus dear yes and dear no, and by derivation jearse and dow, are intensified or augmented rather than specifically contradictory “yes” and “no” forms. OED records constructions with “dear” such as dear bless, dear help, dear love and dear save us! These are expressions of astonishment “usually implying an appeal for higher help” (OED sv “dear”). EDD (sv “dear”) lists various phrases with dear as exclamations of surprise, sorrow and so on, including dear bless you, dear help you, dear keep us, dear mercy and dear knows. The earliest use of dear interjectionally 26 Dickens does not use dow in David Copperfield, though both jearse and dow are recorded in Yarmouth in my survey, see Figures 4 and 5.

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cited by OED is from 1694. Dear represents or implies a fuller dear Lord. Given the date of English emigration to New England between 1629 and 1640 (see e.g. Fischer 1989: 16–17), although Puritans were not the only emigrants to New England nor religion the sole motive for leaving home (see in particular Cressy 1987), it is likely that Lord was omitted in order not to blaspheme, the augmentor by this time was simply dear and the Puritans unaware of its origin, or jearse and dow were already simplex forms. Compare New England jeezly, probably from Jesus (DARE sv “jeez”, “jeezly”) with no blasphemous meaning. I have found no jearse or dow in the fifteenth-century East Anglian Paston Letters; of course letters, composed and considered, are unlikely to contain such forms. However, “dear” does occur as a qualifier; while none is “dear yes” or “dear no”, they do attest to the use of “dear” as an augmentor of some kind, for example:27 John to Margaret Paston (1465) “Myn owne dere sovereyn lady”

And “dear” occurs in other contemporary sources (eMED and Oizumi 2003, emphasis mine): A, dere God, what mai þis be? 1390, Death of Edward III (Vrn) 1 Dere god, here preyere myne. 1400, Cursor Mundi (Trin-C R.3.8) 10483 Dere lord, I pray þe Also me to saue. 1475, Ludus Coventriae (Vsp D.8) 45/65 So sall his maistir, & I may, be my dire saule! 1450, Wars of Alexander (Ashm 44) 5349 O mercy, dere herte, and help me. Chaucer Troilus and Criseyde 1.535

For modern America, DARE gives “dear” as an interjection chiefly in the North, North Midland, and especially the Northeast. It also quotes from LANE (map 600): “The map shows a great variety of expressions used as exclamations of impatience, irritation, sudden anger and the like (…) pshaw, dear, the devil”. A further use of “dear” in New England dialect is intriguing. Gould writes in Maine Lingo (1975, sv “dear”): “Dropped by newer generations, this was a word old-timers used in talking to one another, and it had none of the sweeter meanings. It was hardly more than a substitute for ‘you-there!’ or ‘old chap’”. Similarly, Lewis notes in How to Talk Yankee (1989, sv “de-ah”): “Don’t be alarmed if you hear a couple of rough, tough clam diggers address each other as ‘De-ah.’ It’s an old

27 Digital text from Gairdner (1904).

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custom and indicates not a whit of effeminacy. The greeting crosses all lines of sex and age, and even total strangers may talk to each other thus”. If the etymology put forward by this study is correct, dear yes and dear no have undergone univerbation to jearse and dow in Eastern English.

7.2 Other explanations Alternative etymologies of jearse and dow can be mentioned just briefly here, as they offer an explanation for only one of the forms, are more problematic phonetically, do not match the meaning of jearse or dow, or are used differently:28 Germanic cognate Dziē meaning “yes” occurs in Old Frisian (for a review of various explanations, see Bremmer 1989: 99). Present-day Sater Frisian has djee and djäi for “yes” beside the more common jee and jäi. However, Kramer (2014) also has djier for the usual jier ‘year’, dji for ji ‘ye’, and djeel for jeel ‘yellow’.

Interjectional “dear” < Old French dea < diable There is “no evidence that the O.F. dea! ever crossed the Channel” (Mayhew 1905: 434).

Jearse < “Jesus yes” Does not explain dow.

Jearse < “yes sir” Does not explain dow.

Jearse and dow < “God yes” and “God no” Phonetically less likely than “dear yes” and “dear no”.

Dow < “don’t know” Does not match the meaning; does not explain jearse.

Dow < “doubt it” Does not explain jearse. 28 I thank John Widdowson for several alternative explanations, and Martin Astell, the Sound Archivist of the Essex Record Office, for alerting me to “do way”.

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Dow < “do way” (meaning “to leave off, cease, stop”, see OED “to do way” under “do, v.”) Does not explain jearse.

Dow < duh or Homer Simpson’s d’oh (OED “duh” and “doh”)29 Used differently; do not explain jearse.

8 Conclusion Jearse and dow emerge as an Eastern English shibboleth: we can speak of a langue de jearse ’n’ dow. How could words for “yes” and “no” used from the Colne to the Humber in England and in most states of New England and New York State in America be missed by so many studies? The obvious answer is that they are interjectional responses used to express an opinion emphatically, unlikely when putting pen to paper, or in an interview with a stranger. Some people who knew jearse and dow did not regard them as proper language. Sims-Kimbrey labels dow “One of those indiscriminate sounds” (1995 sv “dow”), and a respondent from North Walsham in Norfolk (NR28) writes: “I used to think they were just saying yes and no but in a sloppy way, never realised they were perhaps actually (…) different words”. An informant from Suffolk states: “I’d always believed these words were essentially rural, and almost expletive”. And a respondent from Halesworth in Suffolk (IP19) states that they are used “Quite theatrically! Mostly in storytelling, exclamation, or for emphasis. Often in reaction/contradiction to something they are being told, rather than simple questions”. Storytelling is one technique of eliciting more natural, less self-conscious language or dialogue. But what about theatre or the drama of the courtroom? Scherb (2001: 21) states: “If we had to judge by surviving texts alone, East Anglia was the West End or Broadway of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century England”. Similarly, Coldewey writes (2008: 211) of the “predominance of East Anglia over all other regional theatrical traditions in late medieval England”. Bailey (2012: 29, 41) notes the “massive documentary record” from early New England, not least the Salem witch trials of 1692. However, neither jearse nor dow seems to appear in

29 The “Homer Simpson” d’oh is a parallel. Although not connected to the etymology of dow (see Dan Castellaneta’s [2010] explanation), the “expressive vocalising” does show parallels in sound symbolism.

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drama or court records from the East of England,30 or in Salem witch trial records or other documents from early New England.31 Nonetheless, the presence of “dow” and possibly “jearse” in New England gives a likely age of four hundred years or more. The proportion of older versus younger users recorded by this study suggests these emphatic forms of “yes” and “no” are receding now but were once more common.

References Badman, Keith. 2009. The Beatles: Off the record. London: Omnibus Press. Bailey, Richard W. 2012. Speaking American: A history of English in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. Baker, Emerson W. 2014. A storm of witchcraft: The Salem trials and the American experience. New York: Oxford University Press.

30 Richard Beadle, author of The Medieval Drama of East Anglia and Proglema to a Literary Geography of Later Medieval Norfolk, and co-editor of Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, states: “I haven’t come across anything like the forms you mention in the early East Anglian plays (…) ‘dear yes’ and ‘dear no’ don’t, as far as I recall, feature either” (p.c., September 2015). John Coldewey, author of The Non-Cycle Plays and the East Anglian Tradition, writes: “I don’t have any recollection of these in the records I used. They are strange enough words that I probably would have remembered them” (p.c., September 2015). Jean Pfleiderer, author of The Community of Language in the East Anglian Drama, states: “I can’t recall seeing your ‘jearse’ and ‘dow’ in any of the texts I worked with, nor anything that would seem a likely earlier variant. That, of course, does not mean they were not there (…) What I can say, though, is that, since I was looking for words and phrases that appeared regularly in texts from East Anglia but that did not appear, or rarely appeared, in other Medieval English dramatic texts, I hope I (…) [would] have noticed and feel confident I would remember if these two words appeared regularly and fit that case” (p.c., September 2015). Michael Preston, co-author of Chapbooks and Traditional Drama: An Examination of Chapbooks Containing Traditional Play Texts, and editor of A Complete Concordance to the Digby Plays, has “not encountered those words in ME and Early Modern English, or I think not” (p.c., October 2015). And Fiona Williamson, author of Social Relations and Urban Space: Norwich, 1600–1700, states: “I can quite categorically state that having spent many years at the Norfolk Record Office (…) and, having spent a great deal of this time trying to access the ‘voices’ of ordinary men and women through 17th century court depositions (city and county), I have NEVER come across either of these words!” (p.c., September 2015). My own search of a number of trials and witness depositions from the East of England in the Corpus of English dialogues 1560–1760 (Kytö and Culpeper 2006) also produced no “jearse” or “dow”. 31 Emerson W. Baker (p.c., 30 September 2016), author of A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience, does “not recall ever seeing either term [“d(a)ow” or “jearse”] in the Salem witch trial records, or any other early New England documents”. A word search of the digitised Salem Witchcraft Papers (2011) proves negative.

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BBC Online. 2015. Stephen Howe’s mission from Japan: Is that a “jearse” or a “dow”? 20 August 2015. www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-norfolk-33987641. Beadle, Hilton Richard Leslie. 1977. The medieval drama of East Anglia: Studies in dialect, documentary records and stagecraft. 2 vols. University of York DPhil thesis. Beadle, Hilton Richard Leslie. 1991. Proglema to a literary geography of later medieval Norfolk. In Felicity Riddy (ed.), Regionalism in late medieval manuscripts and texts, 89–105. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Beadle, Hilton Richard Leslie & Colin Richmond. 2006. Paston letters and papers of the fifteenth century, part III, supplementary series 22. Oxford: Early English Text Society. Bloomfield, Leonard. 1996 [1933]. Language. New York: Henry Holt; reprinted Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Bremmer, Rolf H. Jr. 1989. Late Old Frisian ay “yes”: An unnoticed parallel to Early Modern English ay(e) “yes”, of obscure origin. NOWELE 13. 87–105. Castellaneta, Dan. 2010. Dan Castellaneta on Homer’s “D’oh!”. Archive of American Television. www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/dan-castellaneta (accessed 23 January 2017). CLiC Dickens: Mahlberg, Michaela, Peter Stockwell, Johan de Joode, Catherine Smith & M. Brook O’Donnell. http://clic.bham.ac.uk/concordances/ (accessed 2015). Coldewey, John C. 2008. The non-cycle plays and the East Anglian tradition. In Richard Beadle & Alan J. Fletcher (eds.), The Cambridge companion to medieval English theatre. 2nd edn. 211–234. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cressy, David. 1987. Coming over: Migration and communication between England and New England in the seventeenth century. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, David. 2008. A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics. 6th edn. Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell. DARE: Dictionary of American regional English. Digital version. Houston Hall, Joan, Luanne von Schneidemesser, George H. Goebel & Roland L. Berns (eds.). University of Wisconsin– Madison: Harvard University Press. www.daredictionary.com (accessed 2015–2016). Dunn, Michael, Simon J. Greenhill, Stephen C. Levinson & Russell D. Gray. 2011. Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals. Nature 473, 79–82. EDD: The English dialect dictionary. Wright, Joseph. 1898–1905. London: Oxford University Press. eLALME: An electronic version of A linguistic atlas of late mediaeval English. 2013. Angus McIntosh, Michael Louis Samuels, Michael Benskin with the assistance of Margaret Laing and Keith Williamson; first published by Aberdeen University Press, 1986; revised and supplemented by Michael Benskin & Margaret Laing; webscripts by Vasilis Karaiskos & Keith Williamson. www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/elalme.html (accessed 4 March 2016). eMED: Electronic Middle English dictionary. 2006. In Frances McSparran, Paul Schaffner & John Latta (eds.) The Middle English compendium. University of Michigan. https://quod.lib. umich.edu/m/med/ (accessed 7–9 December 2016). Fischer, David Hackett. 1989. Albion’s seed: Four British folkways in America. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fónagy, Ivan. 2001. Languages within language: An evolutive approach (Foundations of semiotics 13). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins. Gairdner, James (ed.). 1904. The Paston Letters, A.D. 1422–1509, vol. 1. London: Chatto & Windus. www.gutenberg.org/files/43348/43348-h/43348-h.htm (accessed 10 March 2016).

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Goddard, Cliff. 2003. Yes or no? The complex semantics of a simple question. In Peter Collins & Mengistu Amberber (eds.), Proceedings of the 2002 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. www.als.asn.au (accessed 6 April 2014). Gould, John in collaboration with Lillian Ross and the editors of Down East Magazine. 1975. Maine lingo: Boiled owls, billdads, and wazzats. Camden: Down East Books. Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood & Ruqaiya Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English (English Language Series 9). London & New York: Longman. Hill, Archibald A. 1940. Early loss of [r] before dentals, PMLA 55 (2). 308–359. Hinton, Leanne, Johanna Nichols & John J. Ohala. 2006 [1994]. Sound symbolism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holmberg, Anders. 2016. The syntax of yes and no. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Howe, Stephen. 2012. A re-examination of Greenberg’s universals. Fukuoka University review of literature and humanities 44 (I). 209–253. Howe, Stephen. 2017. Aye–aey: An Anglo-Frisian parallel. Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 77 (1–2). 210–242. Howe, Stephen. Forthcoming. Daow and jearse: Emphatic “yes” and “no” in Northeast America. Hughes, Muriel Joy. 1959. A word-list from Vermont. Vermont history new series 27 (2). 123–167. Kramer, Pyt. 2014. Formen-Wörterbuch des Saterfriesischen. www.allezhop.de/frysk/ FormenWtb/FWB.htm (accessed 21 April 2016). Krifka, Manfred. 2013. Response particles as propositional anaphors. In Todd Snider (ed.) Proceedings of the 23rd Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference, University of California, Santa Cruz, May 3–5, 2013. 1–18. http://journals.linguisticsociety.org/ proceedings/index.php/SALT/article/view/2676 (accessed 2016). Kytö, Merja & Culpeper, Jonathan. 2006. A corpus of English dialogues 1560–1760. University of Oxford Text Archive. LANE: The Linguistic atlas of New England. Kurath, Hans (ed.) with the collaboration of Miles L. Hanley, Bernard Bloch, Guy S. Lowman, Jr. & Marcus L. Hansen. 1939–1943. 6 vols bound as 3. Providence: Brown University for the American Council of Learned Societies. Lavoie, Lisa M. 2001. Consonant strength: Phonological patterns and phonetic manifestations (Outstanding dissertations in linguistics). New York & London: Garland. Leech, Geoffrey, Paul Rayson & Andrew Wilson. 2001. Companion website for Word frequencies in written and spoken English: Based on the British National Corpus. London: Longman. http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/bncfreq/ (accessed 24 April 2015). Lewis, Gerald. 1989. How to talk Yankee. Unity: North Country Press. Liberman, Anatoly. 2014. Yes? Yeah … Oxford etymologist blog. http://blog.oup.com/2014/12/ etymology-affirmations-yes-yea-yeah-yep-aye/ (accessed 7 April 2015). Loveday & Loveday. 1811. A prologue and epilogue spoken at the Theatre-Royal, Weymouth, on Monday, the 4th of November, mdcccxi, By Mr. and Mrs. Loveday; and printed for their benefit. Weymouth: Commins. https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=mOZZAAAAcAAJ&pg= PA11&dq=%22yeah%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi2hJGCh43MAhUj5KYKHeSKAzY4Mh DoAQghMAE#v=onepage&q=%22yeah%22&f=false (accessed 14 April 2016) Mayhew, A. L. 1908. “Dear”: “O dear no!”. Notes and queries 10 S. X. (257). 434–435. Miles, Barry. 1997. Paul McCartney: Many years from now. London: Secker & Warburg. Minkova, Donka. 2014. A historical phonology of English (Edinburgh textbooks on the English language). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Moravcsik, Edith A. 1971. Some cross-linguistic generalizations about yes–no questions and their answers. Working papers on language universals 7. 45–193. Stanford University: PhD thesis.

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Nübling, Damaris. 2002. Die prototypische Interjektion: Ein Definitionsvorschlag. Zeitschrift für Semiotik 26 (1–2). 11–46. OED: OED Online. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com (accessed 2015–2017). Oizumi, Akio (ed.) programmed by Miki Kunihiro. 2003. A complete concordance to the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Vol. 13, Supplement series 3: A lexical concordance to the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vols. 1–5. Orton, Harold & Nathalia Wright. 1974. A word geography of England. London & New York: Seminar Press. Pearson, Ken. 1995. Tairtyville talk or the language of Kirton. Boston, Lincolnshire: Richard Kay. Pfleiderer, Jean D. 1981. The community of language in the East Anglian drama. University of Colorado PhD thesis. Preston, Michael, M. G. Smith & Paul S. Smith. 1977. Chapbooks and traditional drama: An examination of chapbooks containing traditional play texts, part I, “Alexander and the King of Egypt” chapbooks. University of Sheffield. Preston, Michael, Georgina Boyes & Paul Smith. 1999. Chapbooks and traditional drama: An examination of chapbooks containing traditional play texts, part II, “The Christmas Rhyme Book” chapbooks. University of Sheffield. Preston, Michael (ed.). 1977. A complete concordance to the Digby Plays. University Microfilms. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. Harlow, Essex: Longman. Rosenthal, Bernard, Gretchen A. Adams, Merja Kytö, Margo Burns, Matti Peikola, Peter Grund, Benjamin C. Ray, Risto Hiltunen, Matti Rissanen, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Marilynne K. Roach & Richard B. Trask (eds.). 2009. Records of the Salem witch-hunt. New York: Cambridge University Press. Salem witchcraft papers, digital edition. 2011. Original three volumes edited by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum. 1977. New York: Da Capo Press. Digital edition partially revised, corrected and augmented by Benjamin C. Ray and Tara S. Wood.http://salem.lib.virginia. edu/texts/transcripts.html (accessed 6 October 2016). Scherb, Victor I. 2001. Staging faith: East Anglian drama in the later Middle Ages. Madison/ Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and London: Associated University Presses. SED: Survey of English dialects. Orton, Harold & Eugen Dieth. 1962–1971. Basic materials. Introduction and 4 vols. (each in 3 parts). Leeds: E. J. Arnold for the University of Leeds. Sims-Kimbrey, Joan. 1995. Wodds and doggerybaw: A Lincolnshire dialect dictionary. Boston: Richard Kay. Stange, Ulrike. 2016. Emotive interjections in British English: A corpus-based study on variation in acquisition, function and usage (Studies in corpus linguistics 75). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins. Trudgill, Peter. 1983. On dialect: Social and geographical perspectives. Oxford: Blackwell. Vasko, Anna-Liisa. 2010. Cambridgeshire dialect grammar (Studies in variation: Contacts and change in English 4). www.helsinki.fi/varieng/series/volumes/04/ (19 March 2015). Vennemann, Theo. 2009. Celtic influence in English? Yes and no. English language and linguistics 13 (2). 309–334. Wallage, Phillip & Wim van der Wurff. 2013. On saying “yes” in early Anglo-Saxon England. Anglo-Saxon England 42. 183–215.

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Wallage P. & Wim van der Wurff. 2014. On saying yes in Cotton Vitellius C v: A case of final vowel elision in Old English? Old English newsletter 45 (1). www.oenewsletter.org/OEN/ archive/45_1/wallage.php (accessed 2016). Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williamson, Fiona. 2014. Social relations and urban space: Norwich, 1600–1700. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Wright, Joseph. 1905. The English dialect grammar. Oxford: Henry Frowde. Wu, Hofa M.-J. 2015. The syntax of yes–no questions and their answers in Taiwanese. University of Newcastle: PhD dissertation.

Richard Coates

7 Steps towards characterizing Bristolian 1 Background In this chapter, I shall present the rather little serious and academic literature which exists on the subject of Bristolian, the urban dialect and accent of Bristol, and place it in the context of other writings and popularly held opinions on the subject. Then, with the future development of Bristolian studies in mind, I set out the claimed distinctive lexical and grammatical features of the dialect, before closing with a section on phonology which places an emphasis on certain findings of dialectological surveys which might have repercussions, as yet uninvestigated, in the sociolinguistics of the city. I am well aware, of course, that to try to characterize a city dialect’s “distinctiveness” in this way is problematic. Such dialects are not monolithic or socially uniform, and any attempt to delineate their boundaries rigidly is an artificial exercise. But, for reasons that I set out, partly special to Bristol, we need to start with such findings or pseudo-findings as we have, and with popular understandings of them. Few of the important recent surveys of English accents and dialects make reference to Bristolian, not even to situate it in its regional context (for instance Altendorf and Watt 2008; Britain 2010; Kortmann and Langstrof 2012; the exception is the four pages of Hughes, Trudgill and Watt 2012: 86–89). The fact that there is so little hard linguistic literature on the topic, the fact that none of what there is very recent, and the fact that so little of the relevant research has been conducted within the framework of modern urban sociolinguistics will inevitably give this chapter an undertheorized and old-fashioned air, but it is offered in the spirit of ground-clearing and platform-building. It is also inevitable that this critical stocktaking is largely traditionalistic and by implication working-class NORM-oriented, and it excludes consideration both of the heterogeneity of English usage in Bristol which arises from twentieth- and twenty-first century social and geographical mobility, and also of the city’s present-day m ­ ultilinguality. Both of these topics await full-scale study.

1.1 What do we know about Bristolian? For all that Bristolian is the dialect of one of England’s ten largest cities, and one which is salient locally in popular perceptions, it has not been the subject of much academic study. Wakelin (1986: 197) describes this lack of professional https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110577549-008

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interest as “surprising”, and remedial action as “clearly urgently to be desired”, but coverage was still described as “sparse” by Shortis (2006: 4) and it remains so in 2017. Previous serious work on the dialect can be listed in short order. There is nothing from what we might call the classical period of English dialectology; neither Ellis (1889) nor Wright (1898–1905; 1905) has anything direct to say, and the Survey of English dialects team under Harold Orton’s direction did not visit the city, coming no closer than Blagdon and Weston by Bath in Somerset and the hamlet of Latteridge in Gloucestershire. There are three studies by European scholars (Weissmann 1970; Oberhofer 2011; Poignée 2015). Weissmann’s very detailed, essentially structuralist, articulatory study addresses the phonetics and phonology of the local accent, on the basis of interviews in 1961–2 with local members of a “politically oriented club” coyly referred to as the “YCL Club”, presumably the Young Communist League, a matter not unrelated to Weissmann’s citizenship of the German Democratic Republic. “Following the informants’ wishes, discussion was mainly about politics, but also about travel experiences and so on.” (Weissmann 1970: 155; my translation).1 Oberhofer’s Graz University master’s thesis is an attitude study bearing on the level of prestige enjoyed by Bristolian, which includes a short linguistic characterization of the dialect (2011: 35–40). She confirms the local salience of Bristolian as an element in Bristolian identity through a questionnaire-based study (see for example Beal 2006: 10, whose book does not, however, mention Bristol), finding some uncertainty, both lay and professional, about whether it is best understood as an accent or a dialect. Over half her respondents felt positively about it, and on balance they felt that it has no particular correlation with age or gender (though with a slight association with older males), and that it is not dying out. More negative feelings were expressed, in classic regional self-denigratory fashion, by those claiming to be native speakers. Native speakers also tended to believe, incorrectly, that outsiders also did not like Bristolian very much; incorrectly, it appears, because almost annual journalistic “surveys” rate Bristolian as no worse than middling among regional Englishes, even though it regularly gets lumped in with general West Country. (But it depends to some extent on what the respondents are after; West Country is regularly rated as unsexy.) Poignée’s recent thesis from Århus is also an attitude study, trying to establish what features typify the dialect in local eyes, and what (if anything) differentiates academic and popular perceptions and evaluations of the dialect.

1 “Auf Wunsch der Informanten wurde in der Hauptsache über Politik, aber auch über Reiseerlebnisse und sonstiges gesprochen.”

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The first known study of the city dialect by a scholar at a British university, and the only sociolinguistically-conceived one, was a master’s thesis from the University of Bristol (Kester 1979, submitted with a tape-recording) which has vanished completely, but which was consulted and quoted by Wakelin (1986) before its regrettable disappearance. Wakelin’s contribution is a seven-page chapter (1986: 197–203) which presents a description of some salient linguistic features (including variable ones) and two short texts, one of them from Kester’s thesis. Wells (1982) devotes eight pages to the accents of the West Country including a page and a half on the vowel system of Bristolian, and the fifth edition of English accents and dialects (Hughes, Trudgill and Watt 2012) has four pages. Blaxter (2010) is an Essex University undergraduate dissertation on the sociolinguistics of rhoticity in Bristolian. There is, frankly, hardly anything else which is original or scholarly or both. I have pulled together everything I have been able to find on local lexis into a list, assembled in part with the help of successive cohorts of students and checked by those originating locally. This can be found online in a provisional but regularly updated form in the research repository of the University of the West of England, Bristol (Coates, Vicker and others 2014). Its latest incarnation (February 2016) figures in a modified form in this chapter. Coates and Spittal (2015) is a similarly provisional, but extensive, bibliography of writings on and in the language of the Bristol area more generally (understood as historic Somerset, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire).

1.2 Situating Bristolian Like most British regional dialects, Bristolian is often the source and the butt of humour, which may be either positively or negatively directed. The situation is confused by the perceived similarity of its accent to those of the West Country proper (the four south-western counties), and of Somerset in particular, and the rustic stereotype is often crystallized explicitly in mentions of farmers (cf. Oberhofer 2011: 66). The local newspaper has even carried an editorial affirming that “[t]he people of the South West have long endured the cultural stereotype of ‘ooh arr’ing carrot crunching yokels, and Bristol in particular has fought hard to shake this image off.” (Evening Post, 7 August 2008). Elmes (2005: 24) recounts the “merciless persecution” of a schoolboy in Bristol who had a “farm accent”. One web offering2 purporting to be about Bristolian dwells on the lyrics of the comic songwriter Adge Cutler (1930–74), who was however from outside the city, from Nailsea in Somerset, though he wrote exploiting such rural ­stereotypes in what passes for both Somerset

2 www.mintinit.com/speakbristolian.php, accessed 19 February 2016.

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dialect and Bristolian. Another stereotype associates Bristolian with pirates, riding on the back of all pirate literature since S ­ tevenson’s Treasure Island through the person of Long John Silver. The origin of the ­association between piracy and Bristolian or West Country accents in film representations has been open to question. No doubt Bristol’s reputation as a home port for eighteenth-century privateers and the probability that the infamous Edward Teach, Blackbeard, was from Bristol (Coates 2014) have contributed in a general way, but it is possible that the durability of the association was helped by the appearance of the Dorset actor Robert Newton in the 1950s Disney films ­“Treasure Island” and “Blackbeard the Pirate”. However, since at least 1933, the official nickname of Bristol Rovers Football Club has been The Pirates, exploiting and reinforcing the stereotypical association. The association of Bristolian with Adge Cutler underlines the truth of the common observation that items written in dialect are often on humorous topics,3 a fact which also feeds back into the “linguistic literature” of Bristolian. There exist a small number of items which purport to be dictionaries. Three of these consist entirely of definitions of ordinary words, expressions and names humorously misspelt to suggest local pronunciation, in the manner of the Australian fountainhead of such works, Let stalk Strine by “Afferbeck Lauder” (Morrison 1965). These are by Derek Robinson (“Dirk Robson”, 1970, 1971, 1972).4 Something slightly more like a true dictionary is the Dictionary of Bristle (DoB) by Ira Rainey and Andy Hulcoop (“Harry Stoke and Vinny Green”, 2003, 2005, 2009, 2013; the pseudonyms are actually local place-names).5 This book includes among the “Robson”-type entries a few recognizably local words and phrases, and it has, with due caution and a fistful of salt, been accepted as corroborating or even establishing the existence of some such expressions. It might be thought inappropriate to mention such works of the comic imagination in a chapter of a book of this nature, especially so early on, but the lack of academic source material is emphasized by the fact that the phonetician John Wells (1982: 344) cites “Robson” as (or as though) an authority, and he is also mentioned by Martyn Wakelin (1986: 197). The reason for dealing with such

3 And the accent and dialect of course underpin the routines of Bristol-born comedians Justin Lee Collins and Russell Howard, and Matt Lucas’ finely-observed comic grotesque Vicky Pollard in the BBC radio and (later) television series Little Britain. 4 Sample entry: Wimms Inns Toot: Militant female movement dedicated to fighting pollution, making jam, wearing hats, and singing Jerusalem (1970: 31). (I don’t want to be branded humourless. Some of the entries are very funny. [RC]) 5 The title of the book has caused local irritation on the grounds that Bristle, if spoken in the expected way, does not represent any pronunciation of the city’s name that has ever existed (Brian Iles in the Evening Post, 3 September 2013, inter alia).

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apparently trivial material now is that, in a sense, modern interest in and perceptions of Bristolian are being driven by stereotypes and these, reinforced by the “dictionary” material, may be influencing its usage and its visibility, and perhaps, in a sense to which we shall return, even its form. Some of what is heard and features prominently is undoubtedly performance (“doing being Bristolian”) rather than natural conversational usage, and deals mainly in stereotypes which are so well established as to count as fossils. The dialect is the matter of occasional discussion in the local press and in local history forums, often taking up topics grounded in the stereotypes already mentioned. Local awareness of some aspects of Bristolian, most saliently some lexical and grammatical ones, has resulted in its commodification (cf. Beal 2009). In 1987, a company called Beast Clothing was set up to produce T-shirts and other merchandise emblazoned with stereotypical phrases, packaged and sold like postcards of the Clifton Suspension Bridge or tours of SS Great Britain, but, unlike those, commodified to exploit the comic potential inherent in ­dialect.6 Beast now presents itself as the custodian of uniquely Bristolian soft culture, and is in effect the main provider of Bristolian dialect as an element in the linguistic landscape of its native city, being the outlet not only for its inscribed clothing but also for the “forf edishun” of the Dictionary of Bristle, and offering a brief dialect tutorial on its web-site. It would be interesting to have an analysis of exactly who buys their goods and why – local people for their own use? locals for gifts? visitors for themselves or for gifts? – but I have seen no such analysis. Beast have had to work hard, in one sense, because what can be shown to distinguish Bristolian at all linguistic levels from other dialects of the region is relatively little, as we shall see, and one senses that they have already exploited just about everything which is exploitable in the limited range of emblazonments they have already produced on T-shirts, socks, knickers, bobble hats, babywear and mugs. Having established that commodified material is a significant element in such salience as Bristolian possesses, and, provisionally, that nearly everything

6 www.beast-clothing.com/, with some puffs from the local and national press: “Beast’s t-shirts are a cult phenomenon and have been cropping up all over the world.” – Western Daily Press. “There is a saying that the hallmark of a confident society is its ability to laugh at itself. If this is true, then ‒ judging by how popular these t-shirts are becoming – Bristol’s levels of confidence aren’t doing too badly at all.” – Venue Magazine. The company’s slogan is “loves it. wears it. speaks it.” This commercial soil was fertile. Other Bristol dialect T-shirts are available; note those on offer from Redbubble, www.redbubble.com/, accessed February 2016, along with dialect greetings cards and postcards.

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distinctive about Bristolian has been commodified, we are almost in a ­position to move on to the promised description of the dialect, or rather of selected aspects of it.

1.3 Bristolian literature Studies of traditional dialect are often able to draw on a substantial amount of material written in the dialect. In the case of Bristol, as opposed to Somerset, the Forest of Dean and Wiltshire, for example, this is impossible. Just as academic interest in Bristolian has been muted, so has the creative urge among its users and more casual observers. We find occasional traces, sometimes hardly more than individual words in normal everyday use, in some oral histories (such as Helme and Davies 1999). In 1988, a collection of memories was published by Bedminster Writers’ Workshop including a small number of literary pieces in dialect by Olive Knowland (p. 102), Barbara Boulton (p. 103), and Angela Sims (pp. 140–2).7 There is a single poem, by Maureen Burge, that could be called dialectal in a collection of prose and verse published by Bristol Broadsides (1981: 25).8 In 2011, a local bus company offering sightseeing tours publicized some poems in dialect and put them on its web-site; the poems no longer figure on their buses or on the web. To the best of my knowledge, that is the sum total, unless one includes the radio broadcasts by local teacher Geoffrey Woodruff in the late 1950s, some scripts of which may survive.9 One of these was analysed by Wakelin (1986: 202); if it is typical, these are really “demonstrations” of the salient features of the dialect and accent which amount to comic distortion of their frequency in normal speech, and have no other literary point, in any sense of the term. Woodruff’s pitch has been taken in recent years, in a hammed-up way, by the comedian Jodi Kamali, performing as “Terry the Odd Job Man”.10 The premise is the familiar one that speaking in dialect is funny by definition, alas for its speakers.

7 Pat Dallimore’s locally well-known poem “Shush – Mum’s writing” (in Dallimore and others 1978; see also Morley and Worpole 1982: 81) has only light, and not specifically Bristolian, dialect features. 8 “A mother’s fond words to her child”. Other items in this book contain the occasional local word or non-standard grammatical structure. 9 Some of Woodruff’s performances were available on 7” vinyl record and are now on CD: Geoffrey Woodruff entertains (Sounds of Bristol: a portrait of Bristol in sounds, dialect and song), Saydisc CD-SDL 322. 10 www.youtube.com/user/terrytheoddjobman; a set of DVDs, Terry’s Bristolian language lessons, is also available.

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If we ask why there is so little Bristolian literature, we may conclude that it is partly because rural dialects were thought more worthy of attention as part of the Romantic project to idealize the countryside, symbolizing as they did the rosy past, whilst city dialects represented the thorny present. That cannot be the whole story, though. Dickens’ novels include Cockney and Gaskell’s include Mancunian; John Collier and Ben Brierley wrote dialect stories and poems in the penumbra of Manchester, and Abel Bywater wrote his almanacs in Sheffield. Perhaps, in addition, Bristolian was thought insufficiently distinct from West Country English to merit separate attention. Perhaps the native Thomas Chatterton queered the pitch by writing in sensationally popular fake medieval language that may have been understood by outsiders as in some sense representing Bristolian and therefore, through its well-understood medievalism, obviating the need for separate consideration of the dialect viewed as evidence for the survival of older English. Perhaps the (sometimes tenuous) association of important nineteenth-century writers of Standard English with Bristol was enough for Standard English to be thought to represent the authentic language of Bristol – consider the native Poet Laureate Southey and the more marginally Bristolian Wordsworth and Coleridge, for example. Probably none of these factors was decisive in itself, but their cumulative effect may have ensured that there was no Victorian impetus for the kind of “rescue dialectology” performed in rural counties and not enough industrial novelty in the economic position of Bristol to generate the kind of horrified middle-class interest that was shown towards the newly prosperous cities of the north and midlands. Whatever the reason, in the light of the conclusions of the last two sections, it is clear that proper study of Bristolian has to start more or less from scratch, in the present day, and with modern sociolinguistic methods. We need to be alive, as suggested above, to the probability that some conspicuous Bristolian simply replicates and reinforces the stereotypical expressions which feature so prominently in the material discussed in the last two sections, and that that is what passes for Bristolian in some quarters. Such expressions can amount to fossil usages, and may be used playfully or ironically rather than in a non-affective conversational way (Shortis 2003). Oberhofer (2011: 54) finds that only three candidate Bristolianisms are reported (or confessed) as being used by over 40% of her respondents: GERT/GURT LUSH, KEENER and Where’s that to? (On all of these, see the discussion below.) The first and third stand under suspicion of being at least as frequently used as social counters (i.e. whilst performing, “doing being Bristolian”) as they are used as fully referential expressions, and the same applies to certain words with “Bristol L” (discussed below: especially idea, area, IKEA and ASDA). The less conspicuous Bristolian which underlies the irony has to be sought. We start with the discussion of lexis, where stereotypical Bristolianisms are perhaps best known and most obvious.

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2 Characterization of Bristolian: Lexis Since 2009–10, with the collaboration of successive groups of students hailing from the Bristol area, I have been making a collection of words and expressions that appear to be, have been claimed to be, or are confirmed to be in use in Bristol and to have limited currency elsewhere – that is, a collection which approximates to a category of vocabulary distinctive of Bristolian (Coates, Vicker and others 2014, with updates). In a sense, this ground-clearing intended primarily for English language students is an artificial exercise. No linguist will be surprised that few words and expressions seem to be truly unique to Bristol and/or to its immediate area because lexical isoglosses rarely respect restricted ­administrative areas. Moreover, what qualifies as “Bristol” for these purposes might be c­ ontested; I have taken it to mean the conurbation centred on Bristol (which is partly in South Gloucestershire) and immediately adjacent areas of historic Gloucestershire and Somerset. The alphabetical list that follows represents the state of the collection in April 2017, and is intended to include those expressions which are or which might be taken as candidates for being considered typical or stereotypical of Bristolian. It should be emphasized that the list represents the maximum reasonable claim, and that the truly current distinctive lexis is a subset, perhaps a fairly small one, of this list. It is quite possible that the use of some items on the list is or has been more widespread, e.g. as age-­ related slang. A gloss, an etymology and commentary where possible and appropriate, and at least one source are offered for each entry. The list excludes a few distinctive words appearing in place-names whose recent lexical usage is doubtful: back ‘quay’ (Williams 1960; Coates and Scherr 2011: 156–161), dumball ‘pasture subject to occasional tidal flooding’ (Coates 2007), batch historically ‘sloping ground; village green on such ground’ and tyning historically ‘enclosure, paddock’, of which the last two are both reasonably current in local names (also in Somerset), and perhaps even in current name-creation, but do not appear to have a separate lexical existence. But both are probably in retreat even in naming; the greens formerly called The Batch in Westbury on Trym and Shirehampton (Bristol; formerly Gloucestershire) are now usually referred to using other expressions. (See also PITCH in the list below. On local place-names more broadly, see Coates (2017).) Items found in published sources are indicated accordingly, usually by an acronym; see in the reference list DoB, EDD, OED, SED. Others are referenced conventionally. Items marked with an *asterisk are found in historical sources only. The asterisk is also used for items which informants report not to have been heard in recent use.

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Items actually heard by the writer, collaborators or other informants in current usage (i.e. not just proffered as examples in the course of discussion about Bristolian) are attributed using initials. For some other examples of Bristolian usage not mentioned elsewhere, see Shortis (2003, 2006: 6). For a historical collection of Bristolianisms, see Sanigar (undated). Some items in the list below are corroborated by Sanigar, but his work includes much that was current in, whilst not restricted to, 1920s Bristol.

*AFEARED ‘frightened’ [mainly Somerset, SED VIII.8.2, also wider West Country] BABBA, BABBER, BABS ‘baby’; ‘mate’ [DoB; cf. Welsh baban, which has been claimed as the source of the English word baby (Breeze 1993)] (widely evidenced) BAITY ‘angry’ [DoB; seems to have been originally London school slang from the mid-nineteenth century (OED); cf. bate, bait ‘fit of temper’] (TO HAVE A) BENNY ‘fit of temper’ [DoB; said to be from the name of the character Benny Hawkins in the TV soap Crossroads (1964–86)] (LS) BLAD ‘idiot, loser’ [DoB; origin unknown; nothing similar in England, but cf. BLAD, sb.5 from Scotland and Ireland in EDD: ‘1. A person of weak, flabby constitution’.] BLIGE! exclamation of surprise, ‘blimey!’ [DoB; evidently from oblige, but it is unclear how or why, unless as a euphemism for blimey, which is already euphemistic] (RC, BI) *(TO) CAB ‘to spread on thick’ [appears to relate to the sense ‘a sticky mass; anything dirty, wet, or clammy’ in EDD cab sb.1 and v.1] (BI) CACKS ‘pants’ [DoB; perhaps obscurely related to more widespread kecks (< kicks?) ‘trousers, pants’, attributed originally to Liverpool by Eric Partridge (OED); perhaps showing pre-velar vowel lowering like that met in Sussex or west Somerset, or contamination by cack ‘excrete’?] CADDLIN(G) ‘worrying, fussing’ [caddiling in Pat Dallimore’s poem “The ballade of Sally Ann” (Bristol Broadsides 1981: 11); probably wider southern and western] CHOB(B)ING ‘stealing apples from the orchard, scrumping’ [twice in Avonmouth reminiscences (Helme and Davies 1999)] *CHOCK-TEETH ‘molars’ [also in nearby counties, SED VI.5.7, but always close to Bristol; OED speculates that some early spellings may be mistaken for cheektooth, or be related to choke, but dialect data shows that that is probably wrong and that the word is best viewed as related to chock ‘lump, block’, from the shape of the relevant teeth. Chock is found as a surname in Westbury on Trym in the seventeenth century (and survives there in Chock Lane), which is likely to be a variant of Chalk (Hanks, Coates and McClure 2016, s.n.).]

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(TO) CIDER [someone] UP ‘to line up a drink of cider [for someone]’ (TO) COME TIGHT ‘to hurt (intransitive)’ [DoB] (LS) *COOPIE ‘fowl, chicken’ [clearly in some way related to the near-universal interjection coop used for calling chickens, or to (chicken-)coop (found as far south as Gloucestershire (EDD)), or both] (BI) (TO) COOPIE/COUPIE DOWN ‘to crouch down’ [DoB, Elmes 2005: 44, who associates it also with south Wales; also north Somerset; seemingly from coupee, a particular dance-step, extended to mean a ‘sort of bow or salutation in dancing’ (OED)] (LS); however, Sanigar (42) has (CROUPY) (TO) DAP ‘to bounce’ (SED VIII.7.3; Upton and Widdowson 1996: map 80; EDD s.v. dap); DAP ‘plimsoll’ [DoB; the ‘plimsoll’ sense may derive from the ‘bounce’ sense – the rubber soles of the shoes allow you to spring up and down easily − but there are other (folk-)etymologies on offer for the ‘plimsoll’ sense,11 which is also found in adjacent counties and South Wales, but popularly held to be characteristic of Bristol]; from the ‘bounce’ sense comes also DAPPER ‘child, toddler’ [cf. the widespread cliché a bouncing baby] (widely evidenced); Sanigar 54 Hence also DAP-BAG. (MV) (TO) DOG UP ‘to eye [someone] up threateningly’ [DoB; metaphor based on aggressive dog behaviour] DRIVE ‘(bus-, taxi-)driver’ [used as a term of address, stereotypically in “Cheers, drive”, on exiting from the bus or taxi] (widely evidenced) *FLANNEL ‘vest’ [word, but not the sense, said to be from Welsh gwlanen ‘flannel’ (or rather its soft-mutated form wlanen); the later meaning would be a case of ingredient-meronymy (i.e. with a word for a material used to name the object which is made out of it, like a cane or an iron); MV is sceptical of the word’s existence in Bristolian] FOWSTY ‘mouldy’ [DoB; probably a phonological variant of fusty; compare also frowsty in the same sense from Stow on the Wold, Gloucestershire (Moreton 1890: 52); cf. and contrast the relation between dust(y) and the surname Dowst; sense extended from the smell to the cause of it] (RbC); Sanigar 64 FOUSTY + 52 DOUST in restricted expressions. By metaphorical extension, bruises and cuts can GO FOWSTY ‘infect’ too. (MV) 11 Dap cannot be an acronym of “Dunlop Athletic Plimsolls”, as sometimes claimed, because it appears in the Western Daily Press in March 1924 (OED) whilst the Dunlop Rubber Company did not take over the original maker till 1925 (Wikipedia, under “Plimsoll shoes”, accessed in 2014).

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GERT or GURT LUSH see LUSH GLENNER stylistically ≈ ‘loony’ [DoB; i.e. someone seen as suitable for homing in the former Glenside Mental Hospital, Stapleton] GLIDER ‘cider’ [DoB; from the rhyme? jingling term for a cider drinker? allegedly from the name of a particular home brewed white cider of about 1987] Sometimes also appears as HANG GLIDER. GRAMPFER GREY ‘woodlouse’ [DoB; other local words are found in nearby counties; this one is not otherwise recorded in the dialect literature. Cf. common dialect gran(d)fer ‘grandfather’, Upton and Widdowson (1996: map 38)] GRAMPS [pet-name for] ‘grandfather’ [likely to have a wider but not so far ascertained currency] (RC; MV; occasionally noted in the tributes column of the local newspaper) GRANNER [pet-name for] ‘grandmother’ [DoB] (TO) GUFF ‘to fart’ [DoB; seems not to be originally Bristolian; early mentions in the sense ‘puff, whiff’ appear to be Scots (OED)] HEADFIT ‘fit of temper’ [DoB] (RbC) JAN ‘tramp’ [DoB; possible generic usage of the West Country form of John; cf. jack ‘fellow, etc.’, ‘representative common person’ (OED Jack n1, I.1.a and I.2.a), ‘every man jack’] JASPER ‘wasp’ [Claimed as local in a newspaper feature (Bristol Post, 15 February 2017), but attested more widely, to judge by a range of forum and blog posts.] KEENER ‘hard worker, geek’; generally adjective + (??) agentive -ER is possible, cf. e.g. MUNTER; it seems to be the construction type, as much as the individual words, which is Bristolian; on this, see further below [DoB; cf. OED keener n.2 ‘[o]ne who drives a hard bargain; also, a person or thing in some way superior’; the Bristol term seems to be a reinvention of the form in a different sense, sometimes with negative connotations (RbC, LS)] LUSH, general adjective of approval, often intensified as GERT or GURT LUSH [DoB; ‘great lush’; probably originally abbreviated from luscious as a term of general (including sexual) approval, rather than as a bleaching of the adjective lush ‘luxuriant’; it is far from clear it was originally Bristolian, the first recorded use in something close to the Bristolian sense being in Richmal Crompton’s novel The thorn-bush (1928) – see OED draft additions to lush adj1 (2007)] (RC; also reported by informant PJC from comments about her dog)

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GERT LUSH is of interest as being grammatically odd even in Bristolian; the case of gert MACKY (reversible as MACKY gert) is different because the two adjectives overlap in sense. Gert lush has been suspected of being “foisted on us [Bristolians] in some way … and is now repeated as performance”. (BI) Now regarded by many as the prime Bristolian stereotype. MACKY ‘very big’ [DoB; stereotypically applied to human feet; presumably unrelated to the Gloucestershire expression at mack ‘on heat [of a sow]’ (EDD)] MINT ‘great, fantastic’ (i.e. adjective of approval) [DoB; extension of the word as used in in mint condition? possibly not so much regional as 1970s teenage slang; MV is sceptical whether this is originally Bristolian. Cf. more widespread minted ‘well off, rich’] MUCKER ‘mate, friend, companion’, someone who mucks in with you [OED claims this twentieth-century expression to be of military origin, therefore not necessarily Bristolian; EDD only knows the term as meaning ‘miser’, in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire] (MV) MUNT ‘bad, off, not nice’ [DoB]; for MUNTER, see KEENER. *PINE-END ‘gable-end’ [SED V.1.5; term known also from Wales, so possibly originally a folk-etymological form of Welsh piniwn ‘gable, dividing wall’ (itself of English origin), see OED; but perhaps really a variant of pane(-end) ‘side, section’] (TO GO A) PISSER ‘(to have a) a bad fall’ [DoB; meaning restricted from something originally more general, ‘[a] dispiriting, frustrating, or annoying circumstance, turn of events, etc.’ (as OED sense II.3.b)? the structure and possible original meaning of the noun resemble modern non-dialect bummer] (TO) PITCH ‘to settle (of snow)’ [DoB; Elmes 2005: 45; for related senses, see OED pitch v2, esp. senses 11a-c ‘to settle, alight, land (of birds, etc., and metaphorically of people)’; the noun pitch is used in Somerset and especially Gloucestershire in the sense ‘short steep hill’ (EDD pitch, v.1 and sb.2, sense 20), including in minor place-names, but this usage was formerly widespread in western and southern England] (RbC, LS) PITH ‘the soft inside of a loaf of bread’ [found also in other western counties (EDD pith sb. sense 3)] (BI); Sanigar 114 PETH PROPER JOB ‘pretty good’, ‘the real thing’ [usually used as a free-standing expression of approval; used in the name of some local businesses, e.g. hardware, DIY; now also name of a beer brewed in St Austell, Cornwall (!), suggesting wider currency of the expression] (RC; widely evidenced)

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PUDDIES ‘hands’ [possibly a baby-talk form of the adjective pudgy in the sense ‘short and chubby’ or ‘sticky, muddy’, or possibly an altered pet-form of pad ‘(fox’s) foot’, all found in Somerset (EDD); is this really general West Country?] (MV); Sanigar 110 *QUINNET ‘stone for throwing at things or people’ [development of the sense ‘wedge, esp. the wedge which keeps the ring of the scythe ‘nibs’ in place’ found in western and southern counties (EDD quinet, quinant, apparently from medieval French coignet ‘small triangular axe; angle-plate’] (BI) *SCALLOP(S) ‘slice(s) of potato deep fried in batter’, no longer available from fish and chip shops as once [obviously an extension of the Somerset sense ‘the residue after lard is melted out’, ‘the stringy part of the fat which cannot be resolved into lard’ (EDD)] (BI) (TO) SCRAGE ‘(to) graze, scrape (skin)’; also a noun [DoB; blend of scrape and graze or gouge?] (RC); Sanigar 128 SCRUMPS ‘bits of fried batter, small crispy chips’ [DoB; from their appearance? cf. scrump ‘undersized, withered apple’, which is the base of scrumpy ‘rough cider’; esp. also scrumpings ‘scraps left after rendering lard’, SED III.12.10 in Somerset; and/or influenced by a sense of scrump EDD v.2 sb.2 ‘crunch(y)’] (LS) SCUD ‘scab’ [DoB; probably from the tanning-industry term meaning ‘dirt, lime, fat, and fragments of hair which must be removed from a hide’ (OED, n2, sense 3; cf. also EDD scud v.1 sb.1, sense 6 ‘to crust over’); the industry was well represented in early-modern central Bristol and there is still one active tannery there] (RC, LS); Sanigar 134 Hence also the derived adjective SCUDDY, which can also be used disparagingly of people. (MV) SCUT(T)LER ≈ ‘tart, floozy’ [DoB; possible (but not historically clear) a ­ daptation of the word for a member of one of the tough street gangs of late Victorian ­Manchester (Davies 2008); the word became widely known through an article by ­Alexander Devine in the Manchester Guardian in 1890] (TO) SHEAR ‘to trim (e.g. hedges)’ [SED IV.2.3, north Somerset], and giving way to TRIM even in the SED basic data. Still used, also for trimming hair, but in that sense perhaps originating in a worn joke based on sheep-shearing] (RbC) SLIDER ‘slide (children’s playground equipment, or something equivalently ­slippery)’ [DoB; a word that has many recorded applications, mainly technological (OED), but this one seems unique to Bristol; often applied to a rock near the northern end of the Clifton Suspension Bridge] (RC; widely evidenced)

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(TO) SMOOTH ‘to stroke (a pet animal)’ [sense I.1.c of the verb in OED appears in only literary usage; but locally, e.g.: “I couldn’t get within smoothing distance [of a cat]”] (RC; also widely evidenced) SPANNER ‘idiot’ [DoB; ? from or alluding to spanner in the works] SPAWNY ‘lucky’ [DoB] (LS; seen on a Bristol City Football Club fans’ web forum (2004)12) *SPRACK ‘fidgety (of children)’ [also north Somerset, SED VIII.9.1; known to be a word of the south and west (Upton and Widdowson 1996: map 45), originally ‘active, brisk (esp. of children)’ in a general sense (OED)] SPREETHED or *SPREAZED ‘chapped (of skin, hands)’ [DoB; cf. spreed SED VI.7.2 in Gloucestershire and other south-western counties] (Sanigar 126 SPREATHE) STINGER ‘stinging nettle’ [Urban dictionary13] (LS) THE KIDDIES or THE KIDDY ‘the best’ (set phrase used like the bee’s knees, the tops, the dog’s bollocks) [DoB] (LS) TOPPER ‘end crust (of bread)’ [DoB; The dialect dictionary14] TURBO ‘kind of local home-brewed cider’ [cf. Turbo Island in Stokes Croft, an area used by street cider-drinkers] (TO) TWAT ‘to hit’ [DoB] (MV sceptical about whether this is Bristolian; he mentions the BBC TV science-fiction sitcom Red Dwarf as possible source of it as a slang word)15

12 www.otib.co.uk/index.php?/topic/28559-luton-are-so-lucky/, accessed 24 February 2016. 13 www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Stinger&page=2, accessed 22 February 2016, where it is explicitly claimed as Bristolian. 14 www.thedialectdictionary.com/view/letter/Bristol/7711/, accessed 22 February 2016. 15 Informants mentioned in connection with items in the above list are BI, LS, MV, PJC and RbC. Forms marked RC (the writer) include some items elicited from informants as well as overheard ones.

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Maps showing selected lexical items with regional ­distributions including or close to Bristol

LIVELY ACTIVE WICK

UNEASY LISH

ACTIVE

RESTLESS

WICK

RESTLESS

ON THE GO

FIDGETY WACKEN ACTIVE LIVELY ON THE GO WICK ACTIVE FIDGETY

FIDGETY RESTLESS LIVELY SPRACK

LISSOM

ON THE GO FIDGETY

LISSOM

ENERGETIC

FIDGETY BUSY

LIVELY

ACTIVE

ACTIVE SPRY RESTLESS

LIVELY

Map 2: Bristol sprack (Upton, Sanderson and Widdowson 1987: 19) ACTIVE (child) Other terms recorded included frim, brave, litty, pert, upstrigolous and wiggy-arsed.

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MIND THINK ON TELL

REMEMBER

TELL

REMEMBER RECOLLECT REMEMBER

MIND MIND MIND

Map 133: Verbal mind (Upton, Sanderson and Widdowson 1987: 150) REMEMBER (to...)

However, in Bristol, retained mind is most characteristically a pragmatic marker, a post-sentential tag amounting to an emphatic confirmation of the material in the preceding sentence with a possible implicature that the conversation partner had not taken it, or might be at risk of not taking it, sufficiently into account.

3 Lexical morphology: The -er suffix There is no grammatically unitary phenomenon of -er suffixation, but the unexpectedly high incidence of an -er suffix in words in the list of characteristic ­Bristolian lexis resembles what in the days of debate about structural levels within the framework of transformational generative grammar would have been called a

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“conspiracy”16 to produce such forms from a range of possible origins. This symptomatic usage has a long history in the area. The seventeenth-century Poor Book of Westbury-on-Trym parish consistently refers to clothers supplied to the poor from the rates (Wilkins 1910: passim). Recapping from the previous section, the following words fit the formal description, and their grammatical status is given: dapper (animate agent noun) glenner (delocative or deonymic noun and demonym; the semantically related abusive term remmer, i.e. someone suitable for or requiring remedial care, has also been reported in Bristol, but it is not clear how local it is) granner (denominal noun with affective suffix) keener (deadjectival noun) munter (deadjectival noun) pisser (? obscurely formed deverbal or denominal noun expressing causation) slider (deverbal noun of unclear semantic status, expressing facilitation?; or simple phonological variant of slide like clother(s) mentioned above?) stinger (inanimate agent noun) topper (could be viewed in several ways; ? obscurely related to top in sense of ‘upper part’, which in a loaf is also a crust, and then applied to end-crusts as well; or a deadjectival noun from top in its related adjectival sense)

While the pattern is characteristic, no consistent meaning or function is discernible. One informant (MV) notes that it is also used to form hypocoristics from proper names: Sammer (< Sam), Jimmer (< Jim). This appears to be a distant descendant of a Rugby School and Oxford University slang usage of the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century (OED, -er suffix6), but may be i­ ndependent.

4 Bristolian grammar 4.1 Morphology of the copula and modals In the relatively recent past, the copula and modal verbs must have exhibited non-standard conjugation, shared in some measure with nearby dialects, though this feature has become very elusive except in material which draws on it in a 16 “Conspiracy Theory (the idea that cases of homogeneity of target/heterogeneity of process call for a theory based on surface constraints rather than rules) …” (Vaux 2011).

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stereotypical way. It is this feature especially which is often brought out by ­Bristolians to bemuse or amuse outsiders. The copula in particular exhibits a suite of forms which show variation, and it is the non-standard ones, inevitably, which feature most in the local literature: Ark at they, they’m full a crap, innum? Weem in a right mess now. Ise goen dowtown [sic] awlrite? (All three examples: DoB) If youm in Bristol, ope you can make it (Facebook post 2012)

The examples quoted would seem to suggest the extension of historic am into all persons/numbers of the present tense whilst vanishing from the first person singular in favour of is. The only true study of the matter (Kester 1979: 8, as cited by Wakelin 1986: 199) reports the conjugation of BE as follows: 1/3SG be alongside is + am 2SG bist alongside is17 3SG be alongside is 1/2/3PL ’m alongside is

The conjugation with is throughout + I am + he be is said to be more frequent. The forms from DoB and Facebook are consistent with this characterization overall (provided the Facebook example is taken to be plural) whilst favouring the “less frequent” forms, as one might expect if the authors deployed the latter perceiving them to be more authentic – a tactic amounting to the exaggeration and overdifferentiation which is frequent in situations where a dialect is perceived to be under threat and needs support, or simply for comic effect. A trace of the obsolete thou form of 2SG can be seen in bist, noted also in the stereotypical ow bist? ‘how are you?’, but no other trace has been reported in copula forms. The pronoun itself survives marginally (see below). Kester reports a small number of other non-standard modal verb forms: cast, i.e. CAN 2SG, and dost, i.e. DO 2SG (1979: 14, 82). Wakelin, citing him, calls these “a familiar Bristol feature” but says it is “gradually disappearing under the influence of education”. Doos is reported as the regular present-tense form of DO (e.g.  Elmes 2005: 44). Wakelin (1986: 202) also mentions other second-­person items from Geoffrey Woodruff’s broadcast scripts, including positive cast ‘canst’, theece ‘thee dost’, negative cassn’t ‘canst not’, dussn’t ‘dost not’, interrogative swanna ‘dost [thee] want to?’, and negative interrogative bissn’t ‘bist [thee] not?, dissn’t ‘didst [thee] not?’. (The glosses are Wakelin’s. See also Trudgill (1990: 87).)

17 DoB gives two examples of the apparently blended form youms, not found reported elsewhere.

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My impression is that such forms are no longer in use at all except when exploiting them in a fossilized expression used stereotypically, as gleefully embodied in the title of Adge Cutler’s song Thee’s got’n where thee cassn’t back’n, hassn’t?18 The sentence Yer ee casn’t put that down yer.19 is more likely to have been ­plausibly constructed than observed and reported, as seems the case with a number of entries in DoB. That is a tried and tested ploy of traditional dialect ­lexicographers; see Roper (2007: 185); Coates (2010: 78).

4.2 Object pronouns Kester (as quoted by Wakelin) notes the use of ’n for ‘he’, ‘it’, but equips the form with a question mark. This is more credibly understood to mean that ’n is a direct object pronoun such as is found used in the south-west more g ­ enerally with reference to countable nouns (SED I.7.1, V.7.7; Wakelin 1986: 34; Upton, Parry and W ­ iddowson 1994: 486; Ihalainen 1991: 105 and note 2); most likely this is a reduced form of unaccented him (Britton 1994). What is very characteristic of current Bristolian is the use of the 3SG MASC SUBJ pronoun for the 3SG NEUT, especially when referring to tools or machines, as noted elsewhere in the West Country for count nouns of various sorts by Upton, Parry and Widdowson (1994: 486) and Wagner (2003, 2005).

4.3 Pronoun exchange It is often remarked that Bristolians exchange unemphatic subject and object pronouns, as formerly in much of the south-west (Wakelin 1986: 34; Ihalainen 1991: 106–7), though whether this occurs consistently is a matter which has never been systematically investigated and most observations are anecdotal. What are ­historically subject forms can also be used as prepositional objects. Ark at ee! (widely evidenced) with he for him20 Whas I sposed to do wiv ee? (referring to a bus ticket) as above Cider I up. Get I a Blackforn. with I for me

18 ‘You’ve got it where you can’t back it [up], haven’t you?’ 19 ‘Here, you can’t put that down here.’ (www.thedialectdictionary.com/view/letter/Bristol/7511/, accessed 2014). 20 Ee might also be a form of thee (‘thou’) with the initial consonant lost, but is understood as third-person by informants when explicitly asked. Formerly also used in the catch-phrase Ark at ee looking at I. (BI)

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and inversely: Why casn’t thee do it? with thee for thou, confirmed by the verb inflection Thees cassn’t potun, casst? with thee for thou, confirmed by the verb inflection (Elmes 2005: 33) … innum? negative tag with them for they (plural form of the stereotypically invariant innit?)

(All the above are taken from DoB, except where indicated.) Traditional south-western thee for the 2SG subject pronoun is mapped by Upton and Widdowson (1996: map 33) as if supplanted by you in, or at least close to, Bristol and in Somerset, but the isogloss is not mapped at a fine enough scale to be sure.

4.4 Periphrastic DO South-western unstressed periphrastic DO is well known (Wakelin 1986: 36–38), and it appears residually in one instance of past tense usage on Kester’s tape (1979), recorded from an informant born about 1900 (“they did get a bit reckless now and again”). It is probable that this feature, once prevalent in the wider southwest, is now almost extinct in Bristol, though Brian Iles reports it as still in normal use by a 90-year-old relative in the eastern part of the Bristol conurbation (2016).

4.5 An unusual prepositional usage One of the most striking and easily observed features of Bristolian is what might be called the “adessive, not allative” usage of the preposition to, exemplified in Where’s that/he to? This is equivalent to Where’s that?/Where is it? in other d ­ ialects, with no suggestion of motion. The origin of the usage is unknown, but it was noticed in SED (4: IX.9.7). It has also been anecdotally reported from South Wales.

4.6 Other grammatical features Local usage of widespread non-standard grammatical features is not dwelt on here. Such features include: double negatives, “possessive” reflexive pronouns (theirselves), historic personal pronouns as demonstratives (them people), loss of the number distinction in the past tense of the copula (we was), and usage of what amounts to a passive rather than a durative aspectual form in participles of verbs of location such as STAND and SIT (he was stood/sat in ….). Examples of the last of these phenomena may be heard, and seen written, in local educated usage.

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5 Bristolian phonology As noted above, the phonology of Bristolian has been the subject of brief treatments by Wakelin (1986, publicizing the findings of Kester 1979 and a performance of Woodruff 1957), Wells (1982) and Hughes, Trudgill and Watt (2012 and previous editions). The rural context of the city accent can be traced in the pages of the Linguistic Atlas of England (LAE), derived from the findings of the Survey of English Dialects (SED). It should be borne in mind below that when SED/LAE are referred to, it is the rural context that is described, and the text should be taken as implying that the phenomenon mentioned may be of relevance in the city but has not yet been properly investigated using modern techniques. A significant issue in English sociolinguistics is that raised by Foulkes and Docherty (1999), namely that urban accents are progressively becoming subject to regionalization, i.e. losing any especially local distinctiveness. Whether this is the case with Bristolian is a moot point; proper sociolinguistic investigation of some of the salient points mentioned below is only beginning, in the shape of the “Sounds Bristolian” project at the University of the West of England. None of what is written below should be taken as preempting the outcome of such ­investigations. Widespread and common non-standard features, such as “g-dropping”, are not discussed below unless there are good historical distributional reasons for doing so, as in the case of initial /h/-retention.

5.1 Vowel system Wells (1982: 348) characterizes the Bristolian vowel system as “considerably closer to RP than one would find in a west-country rural accent” (underlining the need for detailed sociolinguistic investigation), and offers the following table and exemplification: Kit

i

ir [iɻ]

Fleece i

Near

Dress ɛ

Face ɛi

Square ɛir [ɛɻ]

Trap æ

Palm a

Start

ar [aɻ ~ a˞]

Lot ɑ

Thought ͻ

North

ͻr [ͻɻ ~ ͻ˞]

Strut ʌ

Goat ͻʊ

Force ͻr

Foot ʊ

Goose u

Cure

Bath a

Price ɑi

happY i

Cloth ɒ

Choice oi

lettER

ər [ɚ]

Nurse

Mouth aʊ

commA

ə ~ əI

ɜr [ɜ˞]

ur ~ ͻr

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5.2 Consonantal phenomena (i) Bristol falls within, or is closely adjacent to, the area of initial /h/-retention (LAE map Ph220; Upton and Widdowson 1996: map 23). However, any work which has ambitions to present Bristolian stereotypes confidently gives many examples lacking initial /h/, and in this respect

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­ ristolian is a typical English urban accent rather than standing in any simple B relationship with its accent hinterland. (ii) Th-fronting was noted as a widespread individual peculiarity by Wright (1905: 238), and is mentioned in Bristol at least since Weissmann (1970: 221) and also incidentally by Trudgill (1999: 137–8). In the wake of the late ­twentieth-century expansion of the phenomenon from its London heartland

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it is often now taken as a defining element in the Bristolian accent (exemplified in DoB and widely commented on informally). (iii) Bristol falls within the area of initial fricative voicing (including the recessive relict phenomenon [zw-]) (LAE map Ph230) The [ð] which results from the voicing of Old English [θ] in THOU and other ­“grammatical” words is lost in the few stereotypical phrases in which it remains, in the modern dialect, as evidenced by Ark at ’ee! (in cases where the last word is thee not he). Intervocalic [ð] in words like BROTHER variably becomes [v], as in many places in the south of England and elsewhere in recent decades. This was not heard by Kester or Wakelin, and does not appear in Hughes, Trudgill and Watt’s data; but it is now so salient that it can be treated as stereotypically ­Bristolian (e.g. in DoB: bruvver, neever). This intervocalic [ð] can, in typically unaccented grammatical words such as OTHER, WITHOUT, sometimes be [d], and the same is true word-initially, according to Weissmann (1970: 221). (iv) Rhoticity Bristolian is a classic rhotic dialect; that is, in its basilectal form etymological /r/ is pronounced preconsonantally and word-finally. The /r/ may merge with a preceding schwa or back vowel to form an [ɹ]- or [ɻ]-coloured vowel, or with a schwa to form a syllabic consonant. The usage is more or less typical of traditional south-western English accents in general (Upton and Widdowson 1996: map 15), and is evaluated in much the same way over the whole of its range: as the feature symbolizing rural, rustic, and therefore non-prestigious status. ­Rhoticity appears to co-vary in the expected way with social status and formality of utterance, to judge by informal observations. It was Wells’ view (1982: 341) that in Bristol some degree of rhoticity can be found quite high up the socio-economic scale, a matter which could do with (dis)confirmation in the new millennium. A Bristol Centre for Linguistics study of this matter is being prepared for publication. (v) The Bristol “L” This most celebrated of Bristolian pronunciation phenomena is a difficult matter and deserves extensive discussion (for a good preparatory one, see Trudgill 1986: 78–81). It was not identified, perhaps surprisingly, by Sanigar (1924) in his published article on the Bristol “L”, which is devoted to establishing in laborious detail that /l/ is vocalized word-finally but is retained in sandhi-position. It remains the subject of public comment, often affectionate, always humorous and sometimes even contemptuous. It is “… derided and stigmatized …” according to Wells (1982: 344). It has been taken more than any other phonological feature as symbolic of the city’s history and cultural independence. Its origin, nature and incidence are also debatable, and this is an appropriate place for a full discussion

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of the matter (see more briefly Coates 2009). It is a modern phenomenon. The first practically certain example of its appearance in the historical record is in 1862, when a girl called Marcia is recorded as Marshall, not in Bristol but in nearby Keynsham, Somerset (Doreen Lindegaard, pers. comm. via Brian Iles). There is also a Leveniel, presumably Lavinia, Boyd, married in the city on 24 July 1871, where there is no possibility of confusing her given name with an ordinary word of the language as there is with marshal.21 The passion that the topic generates is quite remarkable. Brian Iles, writing to the local newspaper, summed up some aspects of its status as follows: I’m a great champion of the “Bristol L” – it is unique, and as such should be cherished. But that doesn’t mean that I use it in normal speech any more, although it can escape if I get heated. (Bristol Post, 26 March 2014)

In short, people love it, but it is in danger of dying out, he claims. It may have been educated or beaten out of some people (or both) in earlier generations. Jonnie Robinson (2014)22 has also called it “unique”, and proceeds to a description of its incidence: A unique feature of Bristol dialect is “parasitic L” (or “Bristol L” as it’s often called in popular descriptions). This refers to the process whereby a word that in most accents ends in a weak vowel – e.g. area, idea and cinema23 – is pronounced in Bristol dialect with a word final  – i.e. to sound like areal, ideal and cinemal. This feature is often caricatured in stereotypical portrayals of Bristolian speech, but it’s likely very few people have heard an authentic example. You can hear several spontaneous examples in the conversation in Knowle West here [an associated recording with time of incidence given], including: 0:41:11 I can remember the first time I had a bananal [banana] 0:41:45 I know at one time he came home … and our ma was stood at the living room windle [window]

Robinson continues: The second example above is particularly striking as it reveals a two-step phonological rule: firstly the final syllable of window is interpreted as containing an underlying weak vowel – i.e. winda. This is a pretty widespread phenomenon in speech across the UK  …. In Bristol this process creates an environment where “parasitic L” can occur – hence window > winda > windle. You might think, therefore, that pairs like idea and ideal or area and aerial are ­indistinguishable

21 Bristol Record Office document P/St MR/R/3/17 (St Mary Redcliffe parish register); see also Bristol Museums, Galleries, Archives web-site, “Desert Island Doc: A very Bristolian bride”, www. bristolmuseums.org.uk/blog/desert-island-doc-bristolian-bride/ (2014), accessed October 2014. 22 britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/sound-and-vision/2014/03/bristolian-my-ideal-of-an-ideadialect.html, accessed March 2015. 23 This must mean [ˈsınǝmǝ], not [ˈsınǝma:]; on the question of final vowels, see further below.

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in Bristol dialect, but in fact speakers who use Bristol L invariably convert word-final  to a weak vowel so that aerial is pronounced area thus maintaining the distinction. Again you can hear evidence of this in the conversation in Knowle West [south of the Avon, RC] such as:  0:03:26 I lived at where the old origina Whitfield tabernaca was

Wells (1982: 345) essentially agrees with the above apart from the claimed “invariable” nature of the two-way flip. The incidence of /l/-loss appears sporadic. The incidence of the “L” is also sporadic, though Weissmann (1970: 220, 231) implies it is consistent. It does not appear today to be invariable, neither does it appear to be solely a word-final phenomenon as has previously been claimed (Trudgill 1986: 81). Because of its variability, it is hard to cajole a speaker into producing it reliably, and all attempts to investigate it have therefore remained outside the structure and formality of the elicitation interview and the phonetics lab.24 There is now clear evidence that it may be occasionally be word-internal, if only in internal sandhi. A recent public talk by Brian Iles, kindly shown to me in draft by the author, offers reported examples of “L” in both internal and external sandhi, such as: I found a dead sparra-L-awk, I like draw-L-ing, I gotta-L-ave a drink, I ain’t got no bra-L-on, as well as more routine examples of final “L”. The examples also illustrate the “L” after any low back vowel as well as schwa. Trudgill (1986: 81) claimed that the phenomenon was absent in words whose unstressed (final) syllable has /əu/ in Received Pronunciation. That might be due either to the randomness of data collection, or to a relatively recent spread of “L” into such words. The first explanation seems more likely to me. The apparent absence of the “L” from such forms in earlier data might otherwise suggest, improbably, a relatively recent local change of final [əu] to schwa. An important point is that, when the “L” appears after what in other accents would be the final diphthong in idea, including in sandhi-position, the diphthong is normally reduced to a short monophthong, thus [ɑıˈdıƚ] or [ɔıˈdıƚ]. The phonetic nature of the “Bristol L” and its origin are open to debate. Weissmann (1970: 220) says it is weakly voiced (“mit wenig Stimmton”), which is hard to square with other reports and my own experience. Even its status as a lateral has been questioned; according to Wakelin (1986: 198) “… there has been discussion as to whether this is a genuine lateral or a vocoid. I usually hear it as [ƚ].” In the text which Wakelin reports and in the fuller tape from which it is taken, it is heard in Victoria, India, China, America, Arabia, sauna, photo, tomatoes, potatoes; but

24 It is richly exemplified in a passage of Pat Dallimore’s conversational speech quoted in Elmes (2005: 39). She may be heard at www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/text-only/england/bristol/ and news.bbc.co.uk/local/bristol/hi/people_and_places/nature/newsid_8439000/8439168.stm, accessed 8 March 2016.

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in the spirit of Robinson’s remarks above about window, we must assume that the local base-form of the last three words must end in a schwa.25 In the speech of Kester’s informant, Wakelin’s source, Wakelin says /l/ is absent from Taj Mahal (though it is there in the section of the passage appearing in the transcription), imperial and penalty, but an examination of the transcript shows that it is present in other (not utterance-final) words such as little, beautiful and hospitals. This suggests (as Trudgill did), but not without ambiguity, that the “Bristol L” might have originated as a hypercorrection phenomenon compensating for variable loss of (?syllable-)final /l/,26 perhaps at first, and predominantly, in sandhi-position, i.e. before a word beginning with a vowel, and utterance-finally. The informant on Kester’s tape, as reported by Wakelin, has in successive sentences “India then” and “India[l] and”; he also has “Arabia[l] and” and “China[l] but”. The difficulty with its presence in sandhi-position, from the historical point of view, is that word-final /l/ in Bristolian is always dark, but in sandhi-position, syllable-initially, especially before a front vowel, it would need automatically to be “lightened”, i.e. fronted. It is hard (but not impossible), therefore, to imagine an excrescent dark /l/ emerging as a response to being in a phonetic environment in which its phonetic nature would automatically have to be adjusted. As we shall see, I do not think the hypercorrection explanation by itself is quite sufficient. Since Bristolian is a rhotic accent, the “L” is invariably absent from those words which have final schwa in Received Pronunciation and retain etymological in the spelling, such as hammer. But it is possible that in those communities where rhoticity becomes variable, sporadic examples of *[ˈhæməƚ] and the like may be heard and reported (including notably [ˈæɁməsfıəƚ]), which would represent an interesting case of conflict between two features carrying heavy, but different, regional or local identity value. Regarding the phonetic nature of the “L”: it is interesting that some non-­ specialist sources clearly imply that they are hearing something other than a normal mid-central schwa followed by the “L”. The web-site called The dialect dictionary offers bananawls, replicawl, fotawl and aeriawl.27 If this is not just a non-specialist’s way of notating “dark L” (Hughes, Trudgill and Watt (2012: 87) say: “Dark /l/ is

25 Robinson (1971: 9–11) gives a large number of examples of words that might be subject to the “Bristol L”. Some probably have been or still are. 26 As first suggested by Wells (1982: 344–5). Unfortunately, Wells incorrectly includes the history of the name of Bristol in his account (and Trudgill follows him); on this, see the postscript to this chapter. The name originated as Old English brycg-stōw ‘bridge shrine or (holy) place’ (Smith 1964, vol. 3: 83–4; Higgins 2014). But its development does not illustrate the “Bristol L”, as explained fully in section 6 and in Coates (2017). 27 www.thedialectdictionary.com/view/letter/Bristol/.

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very dark”), it adds some strength to a speculation which I had already formulated independently, and which I offer here with all due reserve. The “Bristol L” may originally not have been an /l/ at all. It may have originated as a strongly backed [ʌ] or syllabic velar or uvular approximant,28 contrasting with the unstressed /-ər/ with fully retained /r/ or syllabic /r/. Such an approximant may have been reinterpreted in articulatory terms as schwa + a dark allophone of /l/ (or a syllabic [ƚ]), and sometimes actually realized in speech as schwa + [ƚ] (or a syllabic [ƚ]),29 perhaps first by outside observers who noticed its comic potential in near-homonyms such as area and aerial, idea and ideal. Thereafter, a true lateral may have been variably admitted, possibly when in sandhi position before a front vowel where the laterality could have been articulated and thus perceived more saliently (?no idea(l) in his head). That is, its phonetic nature may have originated as a perceptual phenomenon rather than an articulatory one, i.e. it came to be reinterpreted in articulatory terms. It is hard to imagine any independent articulatory development of a vowel which would lead to its becoming, or sprouting, a lateral consonant except on the terms outlined above. The upshot of this suggestion be that /r/ and /l/ in word-final position would have contrasted minimally as an approximant with tongue-front stricture and an approximant with a tongue-back stricture. The “Bristol L” is still alive and kicking, contrary to Jonnie Robinson’s claim quoted earlier, and continues to be reported convincingly. However, it is hard to elicit convincingly, because any informant in any way attuned to the possible subject of the questionnaire, interview or lab session may choose to lay the “L” on with a trowel. However, it can regularly, even if not frequently, be heard in the casual conversation of native Bristolians on the streets or on the radio. Whether what can actually be heard is an /l/ or a “lateral-sounding” vowel is something that might be elucidated by very sensitive speech analysis equipment capable of resolving and disambiguating the third vowel formant and above. It has not happened yet, but envisaging the possibility would be a good ideal. Hughes, Trudgill and Watt (2012: 87) note that a phenomenon similar to the “Bristol L” is found in the English of south-eastern Pennsylvania (Gick 2002). No connection is known between the two varieties. Gick also presents anecdotal evidence for such an “L” from other parts of America, and in another paper offers a theoretical account of the consonantal intrusion (Gick 1999). I should note here that he proposes, in his 2002 paper, a similar perception-based origin 28 The wording of Collins and Mees (2013: 171) suggests scepticism about the lateral component of the modern phenomenon. It may or may not be significant that [ʌ] is reported south and east of Bristol in the unstressed syllable of POCKETS (LAE: map Ph198); Wright (1905) has nothing to offer on this. 29 I.e. a case of alveolarization, the inverse of what is involved in the common English process of [l]-vocalization.

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for ­excrescent [l] in certain American accents. My proposal was formulated independently, but Gick’s suggestion has the priority.

5.3 Vocalic phenomena (i) Bristol falls, broadly speaking, within the area of the southern lengthening of Middle English /a/ before a fricative and fricative groups (LAE map Ph3) It is noteworthy, though, that Bristol is the geographical centre of one of the two small mapped areas of the south (the other being in much of Herefordshire and northern Monmouthshire) where the lengthening did not, or did not necessarily, take place. One native pronunciation of the name of the city of Bath is /bæθ/ (RC; Shortis 2003), which is within the area too, and the short vowel has been heard (anecdotally) in some relevant words of the CHAFF type. Where the vowel is lengthened, Bristolian has a fronted or very fronted variant, as can be seen on the map in much of the south-west. (ii) Bristol is close to the heterogloss separating two reflexes of Middle English /u:/, namely [u:] in Gloucestershire and [au] in Somerset (LAE map Ph149) The undiphthongized reflex of /u:/ in Gloucestershire has rarely been commented on. Like the failure of lengthening before fricatives and fricative groups, it is a very conservative feature, and the conservativeness of the wider Bristol area in these respects is not understood. There is no suggestion that this phenomenon involving /u:/ persists to the present day. (iii) Bristol is close to the heterogloss separating two reflexes of Middle English /ɛ:/, namely [e:] and [ei] (LAE map Ph64) The diphthongal variant appears to be historically proper to Somerset, and the monophthongal to the wider south-west. Anecdotally, both variants have been heard from native Bristolians, and the incidence and possible variability of this phonological feature remain to be investigated. Hughes, Trudgill and Watt (2012:  87) say that /ei/ and its back counterpart /ou/ are pronounced “rather wide” (i.e. with the first element of the diphthong relatively open, with lowered tongue-front, but they give no indication that the monophthongal variant exists in Bristol. Wells (1982: 349) notes what he calls “smoothing”, i.e. monophthongization, of closing diphthongs before a sonorant or an unstressed vowel (pale, mile, going), but there may be more to it than that, at least historically. The phenomenon may have originated in geo-

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graphically-based variation rather than being proper to particular phonetic ­environments. (iv) Bristol is close to the heterogloss separating two reflexes of Middle English /ih/ followed by a consonant, and two reflexes of Middle English /i:/, in both cases [əi] (and/or [ʌi]) and [ɔi] (LAE maps Ph33 and Ph103-118) The unrounded variant occurs north of Bristol and the rounded variant to the south. The relevance of this possible source of variability in the city accent has not been investigated. (v) Other minor processes not specific to Bristolian Scope for further study is provided by the following phenomena which have been observed and commented on briefly in relation to Bristolian: An intervocalic (partly-)voiced lenis stop or tap for /t/ (Wells 1982: 343–4) and its possible interaction with increasingly prevalent nationwide intervocalic glottalling (noted early by Weissmann 1970: 222) The glottalling of syllable-final /k/ observed by Weissmann (1970: 222) The loss of initial /w/ before a following rounded vowel, as in ’e udden’ do daa’ ‘he wouldn’t do that’ (Elmes 2005: 46) The coalescence or near-coalescence of /au/ and /əu/ noted by Wakelin (1986: 198) A so-called “drawl” or diphthongization of the unstressed final vowel in words like dairy (see e.g. fowstay FOWSTY ‘disgusting, mouldy’, urrlay ‘early’ (DoB); note also Elmes 2005: 38)

6 The name of Bristol The name originates as Old English brycg-stōw ‘bridge place or shrine’, and develops in a form which survives as the surname Bristow.30 Such a form survives both in a local pronunciation often written as Brista and in Welsh Bryste (though it is not clear to me how current the latter is). The final /l/ in the place-name (not the surname) appears for the first time in the twelfth-century documents written in Norman French or Latin, sometimes with a Latin inflectional suffix such as -ia (/-ja/) The most natural explanation of the additional /l/ is that scribes equated the final sound of the name with the back or fully vocalized allophone of Norman French /l/, i.e. [ƚ] or [ṷ], and wrote it accordingly with . When a suffix was 30 Note that the surname Bristol may be from the lost settlement of Burstall in Skeffling, East Riding of Yorkshire (Redmonds 2015: 88–89) as well as an updating of Bristow.

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added, the sequence of sounds [ṷja], inadmissible in syllable-initial position in Norman French, was equally normanized by using the symbol for the allophone of /l/ occurring before a vowel, especially a front one, namely . This was accordingly what scribes whose native language or language of scribal training was Anglo-Norman French put when writing an English name in French or Latin, and ensured that the town’s name was never spelt *Bristowia or *Bristouia. (The occasional Bristowa is found in some relatively late-medieval documents.) The scribes’ usage must eventually have been imitated in speech by citizens beyond the community of bureaucrats, though as we can tell from the persistence of Brista to modern times, this outcome was not a foregone conclusion. The one thing we can be sure of about the in medieval mentions of Bristol is that, despite well-entrenched opinion to the contrary, it is not an example of the “Bristol L”. The in the town-name dates from the twelfth century (Smith 1964, vol. 3: 84), but the “Bristol L” is not attested securely till the mid-nineteenth, as noted above. I have not discovered a single instance of the phenomenon in question in any of the usual genres of local writings in English between the sixteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, whether in verbatim depositions, probate inventories, parish clerks’ entries in rate-books, vestry minutes, local comic verses or explicit comments on local dialect. But there is a complication. The evidence for the in spellings of Bristol (in whichever language) goes back 800 years. But if the pronunciation Brista /ˈbrıstə/, a form of Bristow with a reduced vowel in final position, persisted among the non-literate, around a century and a half ago such speakers may have started saying Brista with a final /l/ along with other words ending in schwa, thereby reinventing the pronunciation probably used by the literate for many centuries. But it is clear that the original origin of the pronunciation, as represented in written texts, did not involve the “Bristol L”.31

7 Conclusion In this chapter I have drawn attention to the relatively small amount of serious work on the accent and dialect of Bristol, in order to account for its paucity, and 31 I am indebted to Brian Iles for spirited discussion of the detail of the “Bristol L” and many other points in the chapter; to Nils Langer of the University of Bristol for some collaborative enterprises concerning Bristolian; and to my student native speakers at the University of the West of England, especially Rebecca Carmichael, Jack Desambrois and Matthew Vicker. Brian Iles and Nils Langer, and also Tim Shortis, have also provided bibliographical information. I am grateful to James Murphy, Laura Wright and two anonymous reviewers for improving comments on the text.

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to explain the disproportionate salience of non-academic and comic writing on the topic and the prominence of poorly interrogated stereotypes in perceptions, popular and otherwise, of the subject matter. I have tried to lay out the groundwork for future investigation, sifting the current from the less current, the credible from the less credible, and the partly understood from the uninvestigated. The dialect and accent cannot be understood outside their social and cultural contexts, and it needs to be borne in mind that an element of the cultural context, the prevalent local stereotypes used in “performing” the dialect, may be implicated in driving change in certain well-known observed directions, whilst other localisms remain far from fully understood. Note: The missing thesis referred to above, Kester (1979), has now been located, and it contains the following additional lexical items or senses claimed to be Bristolian: BOUGHTEN ‘bought (as opposed to home-made)’ CRY OFCREE ‘signal for pause during a game’ (children’s usage, = ‘fainites’, ‘kings’ elsewhere) (TO) DAP also ‘to go on a short errand’ DUFFER ‘bailiff’ DUMAN ‘old woman’ (a reduced form of that expression) (TO) KEEP KYE ‘to keep watch’ (TO) PASH ‘to hit with the fist’ WRAW ‘angry’

References Altendorf, Ulrike & Dominic Watt. 2008. The dialects in the South of England: phonology. In Bernd Kortmann and Clive Upton (eds.), Varieties of English: The British Isles, 194–222. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Beal, Joan C. 2006. Language and region. London: Routledge. Beal, Joan C. 2009. Enregisterment, commodification, and historical context: “Geordie” versus “Sheffieldish”. American Speech 84 (2). 138–156. Bedminster Writers Workshop 1988. Bristol reflections: a book of memories 1910–1988. Bristol: Bristol Broadsides (Co-op) Ltd. Blaxter, Tam. 2010. “We still talk Cadbury Heath”. A quantitative study of rhoticity in Bristol English. University of Essex: BA dissertation. Breeze, Andrew 1993. Welsh baban ‘baby’ and Ancrene Wisse. Notes and Queries 40 (1) [238 of the continuous series]. 12–13. Bristol Broadsides. 1981. Shush – Mum’s writing again! Bristol: Bristol Broadsides (Co-op) Ltd.

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Britain, David. 2010. Grammatical variation in the contemporary spoken English of England. In Andy Kirkpatrick (eds.), The Routledge handbook of World Englishes, 37–58. London and New York: Routledge. Britton, Derek 1994. The etymology of modern dialect ’en, ‘him’. Notes and Queries 41 (1) [239 of the continuous series]. 16–18. Coates, Richard. 2007. South-West English dumball, dumble, dunball ‘pasture subject to (occasional) tidal flooding’. Journal of the English Place-Name Society 39. 59–72. Coates, Richard. 2009. How old is the Bristol “L”? The Regional Historian (UWE) 20. 39–41. Coates, Richard. 2010. The traditional dialect of Sussex. Lewes: Pomegranate Press. Coates, Richard. 2014. Blackbeard’s surname. Nomina 37, 159–168. Coates, Richard (2017) Your city’s place-names: Bristol. Nottingham: English Place-Name Society. Coates, Richard & Jennifer Scherr. 2011. Some local place-names in medieval and early-modern Bristol. Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 129. 155–196. Coates, Richard, and Jeffrey C. Spittal (eds.). Accents, dialects and languages of the Bristol region: a bibliography. University of the West of England, working paper. http://eprints. uwe.ac.uk/25225/. Coates, Richard, Matthew Vicker and others .2014. Bristol vocabulary: a provisional list. University of the West of England, working paper. http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/24526/. Collins, Beverley, and Inger M. Mees. 2013. Practical phonetics and phonology, 3rd edn. London: Routledge. Dallimore Pat and others. 1978. Shush ‒ Mum’s writing. Bristol: Bristol Broadsides. DoB = Rainey and Hulcoop 2003. EDD = Wright 1898–1905. Ellis, Alexander J. 1889. On early English pronunciation, vol. 5: The existing phonology of English dialects. London: Early English Text Society, afterwards English Dialect Society. Elmes, Simon. 2005. Talking for Britain: a journey through the nation’s dialects. London: Penguin.  Gick, Bryan. 1999. A gesture-based account of intrusive consonants in English. Phonology 16 (1). 29–54. Gick, Bryan. 2002. The American intrusive L. American Speech 77 (2). 167–183. Hanks, Patrick, Richard Coates and Peter McClure (eds.). 2016. Oxford dictionary of family names in Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Helme, Judy and Sue Davies (eds.). 1999. A mouthful of memories: an oral history of Avonmouth. No place, no publisher. Higgins, David. 2014. The meaning of Old English stōw and the origin of the name of Bristol. Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 132. 67–73. Hughes, Arthur and Peter Trudgill. 1979. English accents and dialects. London: Edward Arnold. Ihalainen, Ossi. 1985. “He took the bottle and put ’n in his pocket.” The object pronoun it in present-day Somerset. In Wolfgang Viereck (ed.), Focus on: England and Wales, 153–61. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ihalainen, Ossi. 1991. On grammatical diffusion in Somerset folk speech. In Peter Trudgill and J. K. Chambers (eds.), Dialects of English: studies in grammatical variation, 104–119. Harlow: Longmans. Kester, M. W. H. 1979. The Bristol dialect: a comparison between age-groups. University of Bristol: dissertation.

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Kortmann, Bernd and Christian Langstrof. 2012. Varieties of English: regional varieties of British English. In A. Bergs and L. Brinton (eds.), Historical linguistics of English: an international handbook, 1928–50. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. LAE = Orton, Sanderson and Widdowson 1978. Moreton, Lord (eds.). 1980. A glossary of dialect and archaic words used in the county of Gloucester, collected and compiled by J. Drummond Robertson. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner for the English Dialect Society. Morley, Dave & Ken Worpole (eds.). 1982. The republic of letters: working class writing and local publishing. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press. Morrison, Alistair, writing as “Afferbeck Lauder”. 1965. Let stalk Strine. Sydney: Ure Smith. Oberhofer, Katharina. 2011. Bristol speech: linguistic and folk views on a socio-dialectal phenomenon. University of Graz: MA dissertation. OED = Oxford English dictionary. Orton, Harold and others (eds.). 1962–71. The survey of English dialects, vol. 1 (Introduction), vol. 2 (West Midland) and vol. 4 (Southern). Leeds: E. J. Arnold. Orton, Harold, Stewart Sanderson and John [D. A.] Widdowson. 1978. The linguistic atlas of England. London: Croom Helm. Poignée, Laura Malene. 2015. Investigating language attitudes in an urban setting: perceptual dialectology fieldwork in Bristol. Århus University: MA thesis. Rainey, Ira and Andy Hulcoop, writing as “Harry Stoke and Vinny Green”. 2003. A dictionary of Bristle. Bristol: Broadcast Books. Redmonds, George. 2015. A dictionary of Yorkshire surnames. Donington, Lincolnshire: Shaun Tyas. Robertson, J. Drummond. See Moreton. Robinson, Derek, writing as “Dirk Robson”. 1970. Krek waiter’s peak Bristle. Abson, Bristol: Abson Books. Robinson, Derek, writing as “Dirk Robson”. 1971. Eurekal! Son of Bristle. Abson, Bristol: Abson Books. Robinson, Derek, writing as “Dirk Robson”. 1972. Bristle rides again: a third guide to what the natives say. Abson, Bristol: Abson Books. Robinson, Jonnie. 2014. Bristol L ‒ what a wonderfa ideal. British Library Sound and Vision blog, britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/sound-and-vision/2014/03/bristolian-my-ideal-of-anidea-dialect.html. Roper, Jonathan. 2007. Sussex glossarists and their illustrative quotations. Sussex Archaeological Collections 145. 181–194. Sanigar, William T. (1924) Bristol word lore. (1) Eccentricities of the local diction (I and II); (2) The Bristol pronunciation: a study of the letter L; (3) The Bristol pronunciation: the disappearing R. Western Daily Press 18 and 20 March 1924; 14 July 1924; 23 August 1924. [See also a notebook of W. T. Sanigar, Bristol word lore, 164 pp., small octavo, containing paste-ins of these articles from the Western Daily Press + two letters to the WDP, by J. C. Philliskirk (1951) and Geoffrey Woodruff (1957). Bristol Record Office, Great Western Cotton Factory MS collection no. 13423/37.] Sanigar, William T. (undated) A glossary of Bristol colloquialism. Carbon copy of typescript. Bristol Record Office no. 37918/SAN/HM/7. [Dictionary in alphabetical order of initial letters; below that, random.] SED = Orton and others 1962–71. Shortis, Tim. 2003. Accentuating the positive. Online at www.bbc.co.uk/bristol/content/sop/ brizzle/story.shtml (last updated 24 September 2014).

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Shortis, Tim. 2006. Proper job. Voicing Bristolian. Don’t leave it to Vicki Pollard. Bristol Review of Books 1. 4–7. Smith, Albert Hugh. 1964–5. The place-names of Gloucestershire, 4 vols. Survey of English Place Names 38–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in contact. Oxford: Blackwell. Trudgill, Peter. 1990. The dialects of England. Oxford: Blackwell. Trudgill, Peter. 1999. Norwich: endogenous and exogenous linguistic change. In Paul Foulkes and Gerard Docherty (eds.), Urban voices: accent studies in the British Isles, 124–140. London: Arnold. Upton, Clive, David Parry and John D. A. Widdowson. 1994. Survey of English dialects: the dictionary and grammar. London: Routledge. Upton, Clive, Stewart Sanderson and John D. A. Widdowson. 1987. Word maps: a dialect atlas of England. London: Croom Helm. Upton, Clive, and John D. A. Widdowson. 1996. An atlas of English dialects. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vaux, Bert. 2011. Conspiracy theory. Available online at http://www.academia.edu/1707931/ Conspiracy_Theory. Wagner, Susanne. 2003. Gender in English pronouns: myth and reality. University of Freiburg im Breisgau: PhD thesis. www.freidok.uni-freiburg.de/volltexte/1412/pdf/Diss_Freidok.pdf. Wagner, Susanne Gendered pronouns in the southwest of England. In Bernd Kortmann, Tanja Herrmann, Lukas Pietsch & Susanne Wagner (eds.), A comparative grammar of British English dialects: agreement, gender, relative clauses, 211–367. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Wakelin, Martyn F. 1986. The southwest of England. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Weissmann, Erich. 1970. Phonematische Analyse des Stadtdialektes von Bristol. Phonetica 21. 151–181, 211–240.  Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English, 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilkins, Henry John. 1910. Transcription of the “Poor Book” of the tithings of Westbury-onTrym, Stoke Bishop and Shirehampton from A. D. 1656–1698, with introduction and notes. Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith. Williams, E. Watson. 1960. The bakke of Bristowe. Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 79. 287–292. Woodruff, Geoffrey. 1957a. How to speak Bristolese. Woodruff, Geoffrey (1957b) Letter: The Bristol L. Western Daily Press, 25 June 1957. Wright, Joseph. 1898–1905. The English dialect dictionary, 6 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wright, Joseph. 1905. The English dialect grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jonnie Robinson

8 ‘I don’t think I have an accent’: Exploring varieties of southern English at the British Library 1 British Library Sound Archive The British Library (BL) is home to the UK’s national Sound Archive: an extensive collection of over 6.5 million recordings of speech, music, wildlife and the environment dating from the 1880s to the present day. The collections include substantial numbers of commercial and unpublished spoken voice recordings from early wax cylinder and shellac disc through vinyl, open reel and compact cassette to modern digital files. Field recordings relating to significant nationwide surveys document local varieties of English over a period of 100 years; historic and contemporary recordings in the Library’s Drama and Literature collections and Radio archives provide evidence of performance and broadcast voices across time; and oral history interviews represent a rich source of spontaneous speech data. Together they capture prestigious and vernacular varieties of spoken English and are widely used by linguists, teachers and students, learners of English as a foreign language and creative audiences, including authors, actors, journalists and script writers. The BL’s holdings include the complete audio archives of surveys such as the Survey of English Dialects, Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects, British National Corpus and BBC Voices Recordings and date from the earliest known sound recordings of vernacular English made by British and Irish prisoners of war during World War 1 to the recently created Evolving English VoiceBank, a collection of 15,000 voices recorded by visitors to the BL in 2010/11. The geographic coverage varies between collections and the content differs according to the purpose and methodology of the fieldwork. In addition to its language and dialect holdings the Library’s extensive oral history collections represent a rich and relatively unexploited resource for linguists. Of particular interest to dialectologists are substantial collections with nationwide coverage, such as the Millennium Memory Bank (BL shelfmark: C900) and Listening Project (BL shelfmark: C1500), both of which feature speakers from diverse social and geographic backgrounds from across the UK. In recent years the Library has developed access to this linguistic audio content. The BL Sounds online dialect archive (http://sounds.bl.uk/ Accents-and-dialects/) includes some complete collections and selected excerpts from others, and the educational resource Sounds Familiar? (http://www.bl.uk/ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110577549-009

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learning/langlit/sounds/index.html) presents accessible linguistic analysis of Survey of English Dialects and Millennium Memory Bank content. This chapter provides an overview of the three collections most relevant to academic linguists interested in historical and present-day English dialects. It gives details of the coverage of each collection for southern England and explains how the recordings can be accessed. As with any dialect area there is, of course, no precise geographic boundary to demarcate southern English but this discussion is limited to the three southernmost English regions used for governmental and administrative purposes1: London, the South East, and the South West, with occasional additional reference to intuitively southern varieties spoken in places like Hertfordshire and Essex. Finally I present a series of observations that demonstrate how these three collections can be used to locate and investigate features of linguistic interest.

2 Survey of English Dialects The Survey of English Dialects (SED, BL shelfmark: C908) was the first nationwide survey of the vernacular speech of England, undertaken by researchers based at the University of Leeds under the direction of Harold Orton and Eugen Dieth. By the late 1940s Orton and Dieth thought it vital to survey spoken English because, they believed, the linguistic landscape of post-war England would be drastically altered by increased social and geographical mobility and by wider access to broadcast media and education. From 1950 to 1961 a team of fieldworkers collected data in 313 mostly rural localities, initially in the form of transcribed responses to a questionnaire containing over 1300 items. The informants were mostly farm labourers, predominantly male and generally over 65 years old. Advances in audio technology during the 1950s made it increasingly possible, and indeed desirable, to record brief informal conversations on site. Several localities were revisited to record original informants or replacements with similar profiles, a process that continued into the early 1970s. The interviews were unscripted and unrehearsed, encouraging speakers to use their normal speech forms. The length and quality of recording varies and conversations focus generally on memories of younger days including work, village and family life and traditional farm practice and domestic routine in the latter half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.

1  e.g. elections to the European Parliament, NUTS (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for ­Statistics) etc.

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The BL holds digital copies of the entire recorded output. This consists of recordings in 288 of the 313 localities presented in the four-volume Survey of English Dialects Basic Material (Orton et al, 1962–1971), a set of pre-SED pilot recordings made mainly in the north of England and several recordings in locations not included in the published data. As SED fieldwork in the south took place towards the end of the survey, audio coverage is generally more complete and recordings are often longer (up to twenty minutes) in the southern network than elsewhere. Excerpts (approximately five minutes) from recordings in localities included in the Basic Material (Orton et al, 1962–1971) are available at BL Sounds (http://sounds. bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/Survey-of-English-dialects). These are accompanied by PDFs that provide an index of lexical, phonological and grammatical features that occur in the corresponding recording. Extracts from Peter Tavy (Devon), Portesham (Dorset), East Harting (Sussex) and Hackney (London) replicated at Sounds Familiar? (http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/index.html) include orthographic transcripts and observations on linguistic points of interest in the recording. Table 1 below gives details of SED sound recordings of southern English by county. Table 1: SED recordings (1952–1967) featuring speakers from southern England. County

SED localitiesa

BL recordingsb

Extracts at BL SOUNDS

Gloucestershire

7

7

7

Oxfordshire

6

6

6

Buckinghamshire

6

6

6

Middlesex and London

2

2

2

Somerset

13

14

13

Wiltshire

9

8

8

Berkshire

5

5

5

Surrey

5

5

5

Kent

7

7

7

7

10

7

Devon

Cornwall

11

12

11

Dorset

5

5

5

Hampshire (incl. Isle of Wight)

7

6

6

Sussex

6

6

6

  For individual SED localities see Orton (1962: 31–33).   The recordings from two SED localities (Ashton Keynes, Wiltshire and King’s Somborne, Hampshire) were not deposited at the BL but the original discs and digital copies are held in Special Collections at the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. The BL collection includes additional recordings in 4 non-SED localities (St Day, St Cleer and Duloe in Cornwall and Hemyock in Devon).

a

b

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 Jonnie Robinson

3 BBC Voices Recordings The BBC Voices project provided a snapshot of the linguistic landscape of the UK at the start of the twenty-first century by encouraging members of the public to contribute their words and reflect on the language they used and encountered in their daily lives. An online data gathering exercise carried out by BBC Nations and Regions was complemented by an audio strand: the BBC Voices Recordings (BBCV, BL shelfmark: C1190). Between May 2004 and July 2005 group conversations were recorded in 303 locations involving a total of 1,293 people across the UK, Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. The vast majority of conversations were conducted in English, but the collection also includes 31 interviews in Scots, 9 in Welsh, 5 in Scots Gaelic, 3 in Irish, 3 in Ulster Scots, and 1 each in Manx and Guernsey French. To ensure the data were comparable across radio stations and between speaker groups, each conversation followed the same loose structure. This methodology was devised by researchers at the University of Leeds under the direction of Professor Clive Upton. In advance of a recording session, each participant was sent a ‘spidergram’ containing a set of 40 prompt words (e.g. TIRED, TO PLAY TRUANT and NARROW WALKWAY BETWEEN OR ALONGSIDE BUILDINGS). BBC audio gatherers used this spidergram to initiate discussions about alternative words and to explore participants’ attitudes to language, the reactions of others to the way they speak, their reactions to other accents, the language of their parents and/or children, the role of education in language use, the influence of the media/popular culture and attitudes to swearing and ‘bad language’. The entire set of 283 conversations conducted in English and Scots is available at BL Sounds (http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/BBC-Voices), accompanied by PDFs that provide an inventory of the lexical items supplied in response to the spidergram. Detailed descriptions of the incidental content of selected recordings present linguistic features in three categories: a glossary of spontaneously occurring words and phrases that are not considered mainstream usage and thus potentially reflect regional and/or social variation; an auditory assessment of noteworthy phonological features; and an index of grammatical forms that contrast with Standard British English. Table 2 below gives details of BBCV recordings made by local radio stations in the south of England. All the recordings listed in table 2 are accompanied by PDFs with inventories of the elicited lexis; column 4 shows how many recordings per radio station also have a comprehensive description of the incidental lexical, grammatical and phonological content.

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Table 2: BBCV recordings (2004–2005) made in southern England. BL recordings

BL SOUNDS

Full linguistic notes

BBC Asian Network

2

2

0

BBC Three Counties Radio

6

6

1

BBC Radio Oxford

5

5

1

BBC Radio Berkshire

5

5

2

BBC Radio Gloucestershire

5

5

1

BBC Radio Bristol

2

2

1

BBC Somerset Sound

3

3

1

BBC Radio Wiltshire

5

5

1

BBC Radio Devon

6

6

3

BBC Radio Cornwall

5

5

3

BBC Radio Solent

5

5

1

BBC London

5

5

2

BBC Radio Kent

5

5

3

BBC Southern Counties Radio

5

5

1

BBC Local Radio Stationa

  In 2004/5 BBC Asian Network broadcast nationally from production centres in Birmingham and London with a target audience of people of South Asian descent or with an interest in South Asian affairs; BBC Three Counties Radio served Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire; BBC Southern Counties Radio broadcast to Surrey and Sussex; and BBC Solent covered the Isle of Wight, Hampshire and Dorset. a

4 Evolving English VoiceBank The Evolving English VoiceBank (BL shelfmark: C1442) was created between November 2010 and April 2011 as a result of the BL exhibition, Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices. The exhibition explored the evolution of the English Language over 1,500 years through the Library’s collections and celebrated historic and contemporary diversity by presenting examples of English usage across time and space. Visitors to the Library’s Paccar Gallery in St Pancras and to complementary mini exhibitions held at six partner libraries across England (Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Norwich and Plymouth) were encouraged to contribute a voice recording to create a snapshot of spoken English at the start of the twenty-first century. They could either recite a reading passage designed to capture their accent – the VoiceBank – or submit a word or phrase they felt was somehow ‘special’ in their variety of English – the WordBank.

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The passage chosen for the VoiceBank (VB) was a children’s story, Mr Tickle (Hargreaves, 1971), since a straightforward text allows speakers of all ages to read confidently, including non-native speakers of different abilities. More importantly the text contains a near comprehensive set of English vowel phonemes and consonant variants and a range of connected speech processes that enable comparisons between speakers. Contributions to the WordBank (WB) include local, regional and vernacular forms and idiolectal expressions used within families or friendship groups. The exhibition attracted over 147,000 visitors, approximately 15,000 of whom submitted recordings that resulted in a substantial audio archive. By February 2018 6,009 contributions had been accessioned, comprising 4,412 VB items and 2,103 WB submissions (several visitors supplied contributions in both categories). A set of 170 VB and 428 WB recordings is available at BL Sounds (http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/Evolving-English-VoiceBank and http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/Evolving-English-WordBank respectively). The selection features speakers of all ages and embraces varieties of English in the UK and overseas including non-native speakers. Table 3 below gives details of VB and WB recordings supplied by contributors from the south of England.

4.1 Exploring southern vernacular lexis The south of England – especially the Home Counties and South East – is often dismissed as a comparatively unproductive location for investigating lexical variation in relation to other areas of the UK. This may be attributable to the role played by southern varieties in the development of Standard English, but also perhaps reflects the fact that over the last century in particular, many communities elsewhere have enjoyed greater stability in terms of population and m ­ igration: critical factors in supporting dialect continuity. The following WB contributions, however, offer a more encouraging picture of the survival of historic local forms and of the potential of the BL’s holdings for unearthing apparently elusive southern dialect vocabulary: my word is to piggle and it means to kind of pick at something like you’d piggle at a scab or something like that and I don’t know where it comes from I don’t know whether it’s a younger word but I think my parents say it as well (C1442/3494) we say puggle and it means to poke and we’d say like to have a puggle in something would be to have a bit of a poke about and have a bit of a look so it’s P U double G L E and I don’t know where it comes from I always thought it was a real word and it turns out it’s not (C1442/1180)

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Table 3: VB and WB (2010–2011) recordings supplied by speakers from the south of England. Countya Gloucestershire Oxfordshire Buckinghamshire London

VB recordings

WB recordings

BL SOUNDS

12

BL SOUNDS 1

5

2

9

1

2

1

12

1

4

2

208

7

136

26

Somerset

11

3

10

6

Wiltshire

11

1

8

4

Berkshire

11

0

6

1

Surrey

37

1

10

1

Kent

41

2

10

5

Cornwall

4

0

3

1

14

2

6

1

Dorset

16

0

8

1

Hampshire (incl. Isle of Wight)

23

0

13

4

Sussex

13

0

6

1

Devon

  Contributors were asked to provide details of where they grew up and what they felt were the major influences on their accent (e.g. ethnicity, other languages spoken at home, education, occupation etc.). Not surprisingly many speakers used geographically imprecise terms like ‘West Country’, ‘South East’ or ‘Home Counties’ and/or identified themselves as RP speakers although most supplied more precise details. Table 5 includes only those speakers who claimed a strong association with a particular county (or village/town/city/area). a

There are a number of intriguing aspects to these two recordings. Firstly, both contributors are young females (born in 1993 and 1981 respectively) who speak with RP-like accents – the former grew up in Somerset but stresses she does not have a ‘farmer’ accent, while the latter describes herself as having ‘grown up in the south of England’: the antithesis, in other words, of stereotypical dialect speakers. What is particularly revealing in the second contribution is the implication that a perfectly valid form may be in some way illegitimate – her comment that she at one time considered puggle a ‘real’ word suggests that she has not only encountered consternation when using it, but has presumably also been persuaded the word does not exist: an all too familiar consequence of the common misconception that dialect is somehow substandard or simply wrong. No lesser authority than the Oxford English Dictionary (OED, online) categorises puggle as ‘Eng. regional (chiefly south-east)’ meaning ‘[t]o push or poke a stick or wire down (a hole or aperture) and work it about in order to clear an obstruction’ and describes piggle as ‘Eng. regional’ meaning ‘to pick or scrape at […] esp. with the fingers’ – both

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corresponding closely to the contributors’ own self-reported usage. OED entries for both include citations from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while the English Dialect Dictionary (EDD, 1898–1905) offers similar definitions and, intriguingly, locates puggle exclusively in Hertfordshire and Essex – ­compelling evidence, then, of nineteenth century southern dialect forms still known and used over a century later. The most recent British citation for puggle in the OED is 1905 (there is a US entry for 1984), which might lead one to assume it had fallen out of use in the UK. Above all, then, this recording demonstrates the vital role the BL’s audio holdings can play in challenging the impression formed from print evidence alone, that certain dialect forms have become obsolescent. BBCV in particular provides robust proof of the continued use of localised vocabulary in the south of England. Inventories for each recording location of all the lexical items elicited in response to the spidergram prompt sheet are published as PDFs at BL Sounds (http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/BBCVoices) alongside the corresponding sound recordings and show that several forms are restricted to locations in the south of England. The most notable are daps [= CHILD’S SOFT SHOES WORN FOR PHYSICAL EDUCATION], which was recorded in every location in Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire and in two sites in Dorset; twitten [= NARROW WALKWAY BETWEEN OR ALONGSIDE BUILDINGS], which was recorded in all four locations in Sussex and one in Surrey; granfer [= GRANDFATHER], which was supplied in locations in Gloucestershire, Dorset, Wiltshire and Cornwall; shrammed [= COLD], which cropped up regularly in Gloucestershire, Dorset and Devon; scat [= TO HIT HARD] and ent down [= TO RAIN HEAVILY], both of which occurred in multiple sites in Cornwall; and clicky or clicky-handed [= LEFT-HANDED] and chield [= BABY], which were both frequently supplied in Devon and Cornwall. Entries in either the OED or EDD confirm the local provenance of these forms, while terms like clicky and shrammed are recorded with a similar distribution in Upton et al (SED D&G, 1994). In addition to these more widely used forms, several lexical items were supplied in only one or two locations. Given the relatively large distances between recording sites I suspect many of these forms occur over a wider area, but Table 4 below presents a selection of items that are localised somewhere within the south of England. The right-hand column in Table 4 records whether an item is documented in a print publication or previous survey. Especially noteworthy in Table 4 is the use of mitchy in Penzance in contrast to mitch: the form recorded in Plymouth and in the OED. This phenomenon is discussed in Trudgill (2016) and the OED entry at -y notes that ‘[t]his suffix has been in continuous use in the south-west until the present day, where it is the regular infin. ending of verbs when used intrans. in the counties of Somerset, Devon, and Dorset’, albeit the most recent citation is from as long ago as 1863. Although rare

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Table 4: Selected lexical responses supplied by BBCV contributors (2004–2005) from the south of England. Prompt word

Elicited response

Location (BL shelfmark)

TIRED

daggled

Cinderford, Gloucestershire (C1190/14/03) SED D&Ga

leary

Wool, Dorset (C1190/30/05)

Chedzoy (2003)

lishy

Ash, Kent (C1190/17/01)

EDD

measled

Lewes, East Sussex (C1190/36/03)

EDD

not too fitty

Dulverton, Somerset (C1190/31/01)

EDD

wisht

Penzance, Cornwall (C1190/10/02)

EDD

UNWELL

Previous record

Mawla, Cornwall (C1190/10/03) COLD

nearped up

Cinderford, Gloucestershire (C1190/14/03)

EDD

scrimped up

Wool, Dorset (C1190/30/05)

EDDb

snatched

Dungeness, Kent (C1190/17/03)

EDD

Beer, Devon (C1190/13/01)

EDD

LEFT-HANDED coochy

Postbridge, Devon (C1190/13/03) watty-handed

Cinderford, Gloucestershire (C1190/14/03)

EDD

Cirencester, Gloucestershire (C1190/14/04) INSANE

scrammy-handed Swindon, Wiltshire (C1190/34/05)

EDD

mazed

OED

Mawla, Cornwall (C1190/10/03) Beer, Devon (C1190/13/01)

MOODY

teasy

Penzance, Cornwall (C1190/10/02)

OED

got the wape

Warleggan, Cornwall (C1190/10/01)

EDD

teasy

Feock, Cornwall (C1190/10/04)

OED

Penzance, Cornwall (C1190/10/02) PLAY TRUANT

vinnied

Maiden Newton, Dorset (C1190/30/03)

EDD

minch

Penzance, Cornwall (C1190/10/02)

OED

Mawla, Cornwall (C1190/10/03)

RAIN LIGHTLY

mitch

Plymouth, Devon (C1190/13/06)

OED

mitchy

Postbridge, Devon (C1190/13/03)

damp down

Beer, Devon (C1190/13/01)

EDD

scud

Penzance, Cornwall (C1190/10/02)

Parish (1875)

Wool, Dorset (C1190/30/05) shucky

Boughton Monchelsea, Kent (C1190/17/02) EDD (continued)

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Table 4: (continued) Prompt word

Elicited response

Location (BL shelfmark)

WALKWAY

backsy

Devizes, Wiltshire (C1190/34/03)

Previous record

Swindon, Wiltshire (C1190/34/04) Swindon, Wiltshire (C1190/34/05) drang

Maiden Newton, Dorset (C1190/30/03)

EDD

drong

Dorchester, Dorset (C1190/30/01)

EDD

Wool, Dorset (C1190/30/05) opeway

Penzance, Cornwall (C1190/10/02)

EDD

Mawla, Cornwall (C1190/10/03) tewer

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire (C1190/14/02)

GRANDFATHER bamp

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire (C1190/14/02)

gransher

EDD

Cinderford, Gloucestershire (C1190/14/03) SED D&G

  See entry for duggled.   See entry for scrimpy [= (of ground) ‘crackling with frost’].

a

b

in BL audio data this feature was widely recorded in the SED Incidental Material in Devon (Brotherton Library Special Collections shelfmark: LAVC/SED/2/2/37), with examples such as milky [= ‘to milk’], sheary [= ‘to shear’] and sucky [= ‘to suck’] in Chawleigh; knocky [= ‘to knock’] and milky [= ‘to milk’] in Gittisham; and milky [= ‘to milk’] in Widecombe in the Moor. This BBCV token offers new evidence to suggest this dialectal process extends into Cornwall but, more importantly, that it survives in the twenty-first century, as demonstrated even more convincingly by a speaker in Postbridge (C1190/13/03) who uses hedgy [= ‘to hedge’] completely spontaneously: when you stone hedgy you put the stones up look it up in there edgeways with with a stone wall there all put flat one on top of the other. As is clear from Table 4 most of the items here are sufficiently well established locally to feature in existing dictionaries and surveys. Several, moreover, mirror previous known usage extremely precisely. A speaker in Mawla, for instance, offered the expression wisht as a winnard: the EDD entry for wisht records this as a ‘stock phrase’ in Cornwall, noting that traditionally winnards (the local name for a redwing) ‘reach Cornwall in late autumn and in the winter are very thin and miserably weak’. Similarly, the phrase mazed as a sheep supplied in Beer is captured in the OED entry in a citation from Devon in 1892, while teasy as a snake/ adder elicited in Penzance clearly resembles the entry taisy as an adder in Merton (2012). It is not possible to provide here a comprehensive list of vernacular similes

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and metaphors captured in BL recordings, but one BBCV example not included in Table 4 above illustrates the continued transmission of traditional expressions. In response to the prompt UNATTRACTIVE a speaker in Cinderford (C1190/14/03) supplied her’s like a bolting of straw tied up with one band which replicates almost exactly a citation from Shropshire in the EDD entry for bolting: ’’er wuz jest like a boutin o’ straw ooth one bun’ round it’. Not surprisingly SED informants supplied several such folk expressions, most notably a female from Hemyock in Devon recorded in 1959, who recited a series of traditional riddles, including the following for FIRE DOG [= ‘andirons/pair of ornamental metal stands for supporting burning wood in fireplace’] and COW: head like an apple neck like a swan back like a greyhound and three legs to stand on four stiff standers four lily-hangers two lookers a crook and a whip-about (C908/68 C2)

The EDD entries at AN-DOGs [= ‘andirons’] and LILY-HANGER [= ‘cow’s teat’] cite the same riddles almost verbatim: ‘Head like an apple, Neck like a swan, Back like a long-dog, And dree legs to stan’2; and ‘Two hookers two lookers, Vower stiff standers, Vower lily-hangers, And a whip-about’. The two entries in Table 4 which have not been found in print reference works are bamp [= GRANDFATHER] in Cinderford, and backsy [= NARROW WALKWAY BETWEEN OR ALONGSIDE BUILDINGS] in conversations in Swindon and Devizes. An online search reveals a number of references to bamp or bampy, particularly in relation to usage in South Wales, just across the border from Cinderford in the Forest of Dean. Surprisingly this is not recorded in Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects publications (Parry, 1997, 1999; Penhallurick, 1991), but online discussion groups such as at Forum Wales (online, 21 0ctober 2006) suggest bamp(y) clearly resonates with speakers in South Wales, and an additional example from a BBCV contributor from Newport (C1190/05/05) further endorses this view. Although backsy, likewise, does not feature in any dictionary or glossary consulted, it, too, enjoys a considerable online presence. A Rodbourne Community History Group blog post at Swindon in the Past Lane (online, 5 December 2011) includes a photograph with the caption ‘one of the many backsies around Rodbourne’; a comment posted on local newspaper website Swindon Advertiser (online, 17 December 2013) notes Swindon’s Railway Village ‘looked amazing with its imposing chimneys and the ‘backsies’’ and a history of the Swindon railway works notes that ‘all the houses

2  Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art, Vol. 54 (1921: 257) records an even closer match – ‘head like an apple, neck like a swan, back like a grey-hound, and three legs to stand’ – as an ‘old farm-house riddle [for] andiron’.

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had ‘backsies’ – back alleys to us outsiders’ (Timms, 2012: 5). Clearly then BBCV represents a data set of previously undocumented dialect lexis. Alongside confirmation of dialect continuity, there is also evidence of localised lexical innovation. A prime example is the set of responses for INSANE from Cornwall. Bodmin in Mawla (C1190/10/03), fit for Bodmin in Warleggan (C1190/10/01) and Bodmin mad in Feock (C1190/10/04) are, presumably, a reference to the Hospital of St Lawrence’s in Bodmin, formerly the Cornwall County Asylum. Although not captured in print dictionaries, Urban Dictionary (UD, online) has an entry for going Bodmin which includes the following definition: ‘[b]asically, if someone is referred to as “going Bodmin” or being, “a bit Bodmin”, then he/she ain’t right in the head!’. Indeed ‘Going Bodmin’ was the title of the very first episode of the popular ITV comedy drama set in Cornwall, Doc Martin (2 December 2004), which suggests the phrase is prominent in present-day local dialect. Similarly local references occur sporadically in the data for YOUNG PERSON IN CHEAP TRENDY CLOTHES AND JEWELLERY: meader was elicited in Cotham, Bristol (C1190/07/01) and trowbo in Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire (C1190/34/01). In both cases these were supplied by local sixth-form students and refer, respectively, to an area of Bristol (Southmead) and a neighbouring town (Trowbridge), each viewed with disdain by the speakers in question. Both meader and trowbo merit entries at UD, indicating how local rivalries and contemporary lifestyles can combine to spawn new dialect vocabulary. Children’s playground language is a fascinating repository of established local forms and source of continuous innovation as confirmed by two WB contributions – an older male (born in 1934) from London: when I was a boy we used to say fainites and cross our fingers to stop whatever it was we were doing chasing each other this is a different expression from my wife’s in Nuneaton (C1442/1873)

and a young female (born in 1993) from Poole, Dorset: when I was a kid we used to say the word thousies when we were playing it or tag and it would basically mean that the tagger couldn’t get you because you had your fingers crossed and you’d said thousies and for some reason this made you immune and I’ve never heard it used anywhere else (C1442/351)

Research by folklorists Peter and Iona Opie (1959: 149) documented a number of regional variants for truce terms – the code word used to withdraw briefly from a playground chasing game or to seek immunity from capture. Fainites was particularly popular in London and the South East and Roud (2010: 360–370) confirms its continued use in this area – but neither has any record of thousies nor of twixies, which appears to be current in parts of Essex (personal correspondence). A young female hairdresser from Truro (born in 1980) also demonstrates how speakers

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continue to refresh the local dialect. Firstly, she describes as ‘typically Cornish’ her frequent use of tuss to refer to someone whose name she cannot immediately recall, providing examples such as what’s she called you know old tuss or I met old tuss today (C1190/10/05). Again no historical record of this was found, but a UD entry notes it is used ‘in Cornish dialect […] as a general insult for one who is inept or unlikeable in some way’, with examples such as turn the radio off I hate that tuss Scott Mills or pass the ball to me, tuss. The same Truro hairdresser also offers several mainstream and vernacular variants for TOILET but comments that when out with friends she usually just says I’m chacking for a piss (C1190/10/05). The EDD records chacking in Cornwall in the sense of ‘half-famished, thirsty’, but one can readily imagine how being desperate for food or drink might be re-­ applied to being desperate for the toilet. Such imaginative recycling and adaptation of a traditional dialect word shows how speakers continue to use dialect creatively and humorously to express local identity. Typical of this playful use of dialect is the enthusiasm many speakers of all ages and social backgrounds share for rhyming slang. There are several theories as to the origins of rhyming slang, but it is most closely associated with London – hence its popular nickname ‘Cockney rhyming slang’. Slang lexicographer Eric Partridge (1972: 12) claims it emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in the East End of London, although it would certainly be wrong to suggest it remains an exclusively London or indeed purely southern (or even uniquely British) phenomenon today. Many speakers of British English frequently use well-established rhyming slang such as butcher’s3 [= ‘to look’] completely naturally – often blissfully unaware that it is rhyming slang – but also use more caricatured forms like apples and pears [= ‘stairs’] in a deliberately light-hearted way or even invent impromptu rhymes for comic effect. There are several examples of rhyming slang within the BBCV data across the whole of the UK. One of the most frequently elicited rhyming slang terms was brassic (or occasionally boracic) [= LACKING MONEY]. Even though this occurred across the whole of the country, it is perhaps significant that there were far more examples from the South East (even compared with the South West) and a particularly high concentration in London and the Home Counties. Indeed tokens of rhyming slang generally in BBCV occur most frequently in this part of the country, which suggests, despite enjoying a national and indeed international presence it remains a particularly conspicuous identity marker for some speakers of London and South East English. Table 5 below ­presents a selection of items of rhyming slang encountered in BBCV

3  Short for butcher’s hook – earliest OED citation 1936 – but the convention of rhyming slang is that the final element (i.e. the rhyme) is omitted.

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Table 5: Examples of rhyming slang supplied by BBCV contributors (2004–2005) from the south of England. Lexical item

PROMPT / definition

Location (BL shelfmark)

Previous record

apple fritter

bitter (i.e. beer)

Redhill, Surrey (C1190/36/04)

NPD

apples and pears

stairs

Hackney (C1190/03/04)

OED

Brahms and Liszt

DRUNK

Purley, Berkshire (C1190/06/04)

NPD

Conan Doyle

boil

Redhill, Surrey (C1190/36/04)

NPD

cream crackered

TIRED

Purley, Berkshire (C1190/06/04)

NPD

Lewes, East Sussex (C1190/36/03)

Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire (C1190/34/01) crown jewels

KIT OF TOOLS

Marylebone, London (C1190/03/02)

NPD

daisy roots

boots

Redhill, Surrey (C1190/36/04)

OED

dicky dirt

shirt

Marylebone, London (C1190/03/02)

GDS

elephant’s

DRUNK

Marylebone, London (C1190/03/02)

GDSa

Gillie Pegs

legs

Redhill, Surrey (C1190/36/04)

Gregory Peck

neck

Redhill, Surrey (C1190/36/04)

got the zig

ANNOYED

Marylebone, London (C1190/03/02)

NPD

Hank

hungry

Hackney (C1190/03/04)

NPDb

Hampstead Heath

teeth

Redhill, Surrey (C1190/36/04)

OED

Lionel Blairs

TROUSERS

Worthing, West Sussex (C1190/36/05)

NPDc

ones and twos

shoes

Marylebone, London (C1190/03/02)

GDS NPD

pig’s ear

beer

Redhill, Surrey (C1190/36/04)

raise a laugh

scarf

Redhill, Surrey (C1190/36/04)

round-the-houses

TROUSERS

Marylebone, London (C1190/03/02)

OED

taters

COLD

Cirencester, Gloucestershire (C1190/14/04)

NPD

taters in the mould Tom

Redhill, Surrey (C1190/36/04) UNWELL

Tom and Dick whistle whistle and flute

Reading (C1190/06/02)

suit

Marylebone, London (C1190/03/02) Redhill, Surrey (C1190/36/04)

  See entry for elephant’s trunk.   See entry for Hank Marvin [= ‘starving’]. c   Lionel Blairs [= ‘flares’, i.e. ‘flared trousers’]. a

b

NPD

Purley, Berkshire (C1190/06/04) NPD

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recordings from the south of England. Entries are arranged alphabetically and column 2 indicates whether an item was elicited in response to the spidergram prompt sheet or gives a definition for examples taken from incidental material. Only the most familiar rhyming slang terms are recorded in the OED, but many more are captured in publications such as The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (NPD, 2013) or Green’s Dictionary of Slang (GDS, 2010) as noted in column 4. The enduring appeal of rhyming slang and the fact it is an extremely productive process means it is, therefore, highly likely to remain a source of lexical innovation for Londoners (and others). This explains the exuberance displayed here by the group in Redhill who supply several examples, including three that are not, to our knowledge, documented in print: Gillie Pegs [= ‘legs’], Gregory Peck [= ‘neck’] and raise a laugh [= ‘scarf’]. Gregory Peck is recorded in NPD for ‘specs’ (i.e. ‘spectacles’), but there is a more promising entry at cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk (online) confirming its use for ‘neck’, with the illustrative phrase gerrit down yer Gregory (there is also an entry in the sense of ‘cheque’ but ‘neck’ has a greater approval rating among the site’s users). It is likely that Gillie Pegs [= ‘legs’] is either confused with (or possibly inspired by) Gillie Trotters [= ‘trotters/feet’] as recorded in NPD, but I have found no other corroborating evidence for this or for raise a laugh [= ‘scarf’]. Given that raise a laugh is an idiomatic English expression it meets the criteria for rhyming slang, and may be, therefore, an example of an original form the speaker has invented or heard used. Original forms of rhyming slang are created all the time; some are adopted enthusiastically and thus gain wider recognition. To illustrate this, consider two young speakers from East London (one male, one female, both born in the 1990s) who supplied the following WB recordings: we use some rhyming slang still not an awful lot but like having a bubble you’re having a laugh (C1442/00535) you’re having a bubble mate I think that came from the East End of London when they spoke Cockney some years ago (C1442/02263)

As there is no entry for having a bubble in either NPD or GDS this is clearly a relatively recent coinage. Bubble-bath [= ‘having a laugh/be joking/not be serious’] is, however, included in the Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (DCS, 2014), where it is classified as a modern variant of an older form tin bath. Bubble(-bath) is now clearly sufficiently well-known in London to have featured in the following exchange in an episode of EastEnders (13 May 2014), the long-running British soap opera set in the fictitious London suburb of Walford:

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Nick Carter: (presenting his daughter, Nancy, with a pair of boxing gloves) I borrowed them from the gym now don’t hold back whack these on girl Nancy Carter: (looking somewhat taken aback) was you having a bubble?

It is difficult to predict why some rhyming slang forms take hold more successfully than others but bubble bath > laugh is somehow inherently suitable as it is an item of everyday vocabulary and a slightly frivolous object in its own right with the added attraction of alliteration. Not only that but it requires quintessentially ‘Cockney’ phonology to work: although the rhyming component, bath, is seldom actually uttered, in order for it to rhyme with laugh we implicitly accept a pronunciation with TH-fronting, i.e. [bɑːf]. The phrase raise a laugh, on the other hand, is arguably much less transparent and, moreover, only works in a southern or RP accent since laugh does not rhyme with scarf in dialects in the north (unlike the pairs bath [bɑːf, baf] and laugh [lɑːf, laf] which – as long as TH-fronting is applied – rhyme in all accents). Alongside monitoring dialect continuity and innovation the cases noted earlier of puggle and hedgy demonstrate that BL audio content also offers linguists concrete evidence for post-dating documented usage of dialect and/or apparently archaic vocabulary. Given that OED includes citations from published SED data4 and from the few transcripts of SED sound recordings available on the BL website5, it seems reasonable to suggest that all recordings now available at BL Sounds (http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/Survey-of-English-­dialects) are worthy of similar consideration. Table 6 below gives a small selection of lexical items that fall into this category. The SED audio archive is a particularly rich source of data in this regard, but due to the sheer volume of examples I only include here tokens from sound recordings made in Sussex and Devon – thereby ensuring representation from the South East and the South West – supplemented with the most noteworthy items from BBCV and WB. Column 4 indicates the most recent citation date for each item with an entry in OED, but as this information is not consistently available for EDD entries it is not included here. I single out three entries here for comment. Firstly it is perhaps especially surprising that catchy has not yet made it into the OED. Not only is it recorded in SED Incidental Material (Brotherton Library Special Collections shelfmark: LAVC/ SED/2/2/37) in Parracombe, Chawleigh, Widecombe in the Moor and Blackawton, but it occurs spontaneously in an SED recording made in 1963 in Kenn:

4  See e.g. entry for nicky [= ‘small bundle of wood used for kindling’]. 5  See e.g. entry for ploy [= ‘to employ’].

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Table 6: Selected examples of rare lexical items recorded in the south of England. Lexical item Definition

Date: Location (BL shelfmark)

Previous record

catchy

(of weather) changeable, showery

1963: Kenn, Devon (C908/30 C4)

EDD

clit

knot/tangle (esp. in child’s hair)

2010: Isle of Wight (C1442/2529)

EDD

drixey

dead, rotten, decayed (esp. of wood)

2005: Postbridge, Devon (C1190/13/03)

EDD

idget

triangular horse-hoe used to clear ground between rows of hops/ beans

1959: Fletching, Sussex (C908/32 C6)

OED (1891)

lerrups

rags, tatters

2010: Cornwall (C1442/790)

EDD

petch

(of snow) to settle on ground

2010: ‘West Country’ (C1442/1150)

EDD

pot-butter

butter salted and put into pots for storage

1963: Peter Tavy, Devon (C908/30 C5)

OED (1888)

rally

to make loud/sharp noise

1959: Hemyock, Devon (C908/62 C2)

OED (1893)

skenter

(of animal) to fail to fatten

2005: Dulverton, Somerset (C1190/31/01)

EDD

spar

rod used to secure thatch

1959: Warnham, Sussex (C908/32 C4) 1959: East Harting, Sussex (C908/33 C3)

OED (1874)

stean

earthenware jar for storing butter/cheese

1963: Peter Tavy, Devon (C908/30 C5)

OED (1908)

steeper

central branch of hedge 1963: Kenn (C908/30 C4) cut half through and laid lengthways to repair/trim hedge

OED (1837)

stent

mining rubble

1964: Cornwood (C908/31 C2)

OED (1902)

tipteer

Christmas mummer

2004: Lewes, East Sussex (C1190/36/03)

EDD

venville

form of tenure obtaining in parishes adjoining Dartmoor

1963: Peter Tavy, Devon (C908/30 C5)

OED (1887)

yaffle

green woodpecker

2010: Yeovil, Somerset (C1442/2760)

OED (1893)

2005: Postbridge, Devon (C1190/13/03)

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sometimes we finished it all depends about eight o’clock nine all depends on the weather if it was a catchy time be about ten (C908/30 C4)

and again forty years later in a BBCV conversation recorded in 2005 in Postbridge: the farmers in those days if you was making hay this side the valley and the weather was bit catchy and you could see somebody […] the other side the valley who was you know struggling a bit […] if you finished yours you wouldn’t go home everybody would turn to and go and help (C1190/13/03)

Secondly, the WB contributor who supplied yaffle expresses perfectly the surprise many dialect speakers encounter when they first realise that a word that is familiar and unremarkable to them is not universally understood: when I went up to university I was doing biology and lots of people up there had never heard of yaffles well yaffles is woodpeckers

Finally, the explanation provided for lerrups refects the same inventiveness apparent in the use of chacking discussed above. The EDD entry includes a citation ‘her vrock waz all to lerrups’ implying that lerrups was traditionally applied to shredded or worn-out fabric, but as this contributor explains, speakers are able to generate fresh connotations so that all to lerrups may now be applied to modern technology, such as cars: I’m from North Cornwall and [lerrups] is used quite widely round there the most common context is all to lerrups which means all to pot all messed up disorganised but people also use it to mean ruined as in destroyed physically so I’ve heard people say a broken down car has been lashed to lerrups so overused as well I suppose

4.2 Exploring southern dialect grammar It is often asserted that grammatical variation is no longer a major distinguishing factor between dialects in the south of England (Edwards, 1993: 214), due ostensibly to the closer relationship between Standard English and southern English noted above. Indeed if one compares the mid-twentieth century SED recordings with their present-day counterparts then there is, admittedly, a noticeable decline in the frequency with which non-standard forms occur. It is also undoubtedly true that several vernacular forms occur in many dialects, such as the demonstrative determiner them (e.g. in them days); unmarked manner adverbs (e.g. she ran off quick); the absence of a plural marker on a restricted set of count nouns (e.g. it cost ten pound); or the generalisation of come as a simple past and past participle form (e.g. he come

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home late last night). However, it would be wrong to say there are no longer distinctive features of southern English grammar. While it is not possible to examine all aspects of southern dialect morphology and syntax here, by presenting a comprehensive review of evidence in BL sound recordings of the survival of historic features of the pronominal system in the South West, we hope to demonstrate the value of BL audio archives for investigating continuity and change in dialect grammar. Although BBCV contributors were primarily asked to discuss their lexical choices, they were also invited to reflect on speech locally and on English usage more broadly. This prompted numerous observations on dialects past and present and anecdotes that illustrate stereotypical features of local speech. Many contributors in the West Country, such as a speaker from Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, recalled previous generations’ use of non-standard pronoun constructions: I remember watching some young boys in the village square with their bicycles cycling round and then uh someone opened an upstairs window and called out and one of the lads said oh her’s not talking to we us don’t belong to she (C19910/14/02)

This linguistic reminiscence illustrates a phenomenon known as pronoun exchange: a process whereby the case marking of a pronoun contrasts with Standard English usage – typically a subject form appears in object position (e.g. my brother told I), the converse (e.g. her said so) or a combination of both (e.g. us saw he). Hogg et al note that ‘[e]arly dialect literature and glossaries show a complete absence of pronoun exchange in northern English, but make frequent reference to it in the west midlands and south west’ (1992: 231). Not surprisingly, then, pronoun exchange is widely recorded in response to the SED prompt GIVE IT ME (IX.8.2) (for more on which see Gerwin 2014). Most informants in Somerset, Wiltshire, Berkshire and Dorset supplied the indirect object I here, and there are also occasional tokens in Gloucestershire, Devon and Oxfordshire but none in Cornwall, Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex and Kent, suggesting this feature was most closely associated in the 1950s with the heartland of the West Country but not the extreme South West and South East. Isoglosses are seldom precise for any dialect feature, and, equally importantly, most dialect speakers alternate between a given vernacular variant and its more mainstream counterpart so BL sound recordings that feature spontaneous tokens, as opposed to reported or performed usage, offer a more nuanced view of pronoun exchange from the middle of the twentieth century to the present day. Table 7 below gives examples of spontaneous pronoun exchange captured in SED and BBCV recordings in the south of England. In most cases informants also used standard forms but repeatedly offered multiple examples of pronoun exchange, although only one per location is included here to illustrate geographic distribution.

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As Table 7 illustrates, at the time of the SED, pronoun exchange in fact extended across much of the western half of southern England, with numerous examples in Cornwall (albeit not with I as an object pronoun) and a handful of examples even as far east as Buckinghamshire, the Isle of Wight and Sussex. It is also instructive to note that pronoun exchange is far more likely to occur in certain contexts: object I, subject us, subject her, object he and subject them occur with the greatest frequency in Table 7. If one takes into account the total number of examples (Table 7 only includes one example per pronoun per location) then subject her was the most frequent form encountered in SED sound recordings, closely followed by subject them and object us. In the case of the latter two it is worth noting how frequently they occur embedded in a tag question, as in the example from Gittisham in Devon: we’d wait till it did get dark didn’t us (C908/30 C2). Although there are clearly fewer examples of pronoun exchange in present-day recordings, indicating this feature is indeed recessive, there are sufficient examples to confirm it survives, albeit only among older speakers in Gloucestershire, Somerset, Devon and Dorset. Perhaps more interestingly, many (but by no means all) of the spontaneous examples in BBCV recordings occur in tag questions, suggesting the possibility that pronoun exchange may subconsciously be increasingly identified with this environment. The fact it also invariably appears here in a phonetically eroded form that has undergone auxiliary contraction – e.g. wasn’t them [wɒnəm], doesn’t/don’t them [dʌnəm] or didn’t us [dɪnʌs] – leads one to speculate that it might perhaps have survived as a lexicalised dialect marker as is the case with the emergence of analogous forms in other dialects (c.f. innit in Multicultural London English). The citations in Table 7 for Gwinear – we sent hine down to he (C908/27 C2) – and Cinderford – then her’d tighten the top on hine down (C1190/14/03) – also include a reflex of the Old English object pronoun hine where him or it appears in modern Standard English. The OED records hine as ‘the accusative singular third person masculine personal pronoun form’ and notes: ‘this original accusative has been replaced by the dative him. […] By the mid 12th cent. this replacement was normal in northern and many midland varieties; it appears to have been complete everywhere before the end of the Middle English period’

SED published data at GIVE IT ME (IX.8.2) records hine [= ‘it’] in a similar area to object I [= ‘me’], with examples in several localities in Gloucestershire, Somerset, Wiltshire, Devon, Dorset and Hampshire but none in Cornwall, Berkshire, Surrey, Sussex and Kent, contradicting the implication in the OED that this is an obsolete form. The phonetic transcriptions show initial was universally omitted (c.f. unstressed he, him, his and her in most modern dialects) with hine

1956: Coleford, Somerset (C908/65 C4) 1956: Horsington, Somerset (C908/66 C1)

he skimmed I

you give I a old horse and cart

subject us

1956: Sherborne, Gloucestershire (C908/62 C3)

they didn’t trouble about I

1957: Fovant, Wiltshire (C908/22 C4) 1958: Parracombe, Devon (C908/29 C2) 1958: Weare Giffard, Devon (C908/29 C5) 1958: Gittisham, Devon (C908/30 C2) 1963: South Zeal, Devon (C908/30 C3) 1963: Widecombe in the Moor, Devon (C908/31 C1) 1964: Blackawton, Devon (C908/33 C3) 2005: Beer, Devon (C1190/13/01) 2005: Postbridge, Devon (C1190/13/03)

we’d wait till it did get dark didn’t us brother

us could see his lantern there

Master Percy us used to call him

used to row it up in rows didn’t us

us used to play cricket

us didn’t have no stoves nor nothing

us used to have some happy days in harvesting

us is going to sea

when us was out hedging

(continued)

1956: Blagdon, Somerset (C908/65 C2)

we went up after some taters didn’t us

2005: Wool, Dorset (C1190/30/05)

he come to find I

1957: Tingewick, Buckinghamshire (C908/62 C10)

1960: Steeple Ashton, Wiltshire (C908/22 C3)

when us got there

1960: Burbage, Wiltshire (C908/22 C2)

that’s like I

1960: Sutton Benger, Wiltshire (C908/21 C3)

thee’s got to work for I now

d

he said he’d give I extra 6

1955: Whiteshill, Gloucestershire (C908/57 C6)

they told I

object I

1960: Sutton Benger, Wiltshire (C908/21 C3)

same as me have

subject me

Date: Location (BL shelfmark)

Example

Pronoun

Table 7: Examples of spontaneous pronoun exchange recorded in the south of England.

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2005: Dulverton, Somerset (C91190/31/01) 1960: Sutton Benger, Wiltshire (C908/21 C3) 2004: Feock, Cornwall (C1190/10/04) 1958: Weare Giffard, Devon (C908/29 C5) 2005: Beer, Devon (C1190/13/01) 2005: Postbridge, Devon (C1190/13/03) 1956: Sixpenny Handley, Dorset (C908/68 C3) 1959: Whitwell, Isle of Wight (C908/32 C2) 1964: Horam, Sussex (C908/33 C1) 1963: Chawleigh, Devon (C908/30 C1) 2005: Wool, Dorset (C1190/30/05)

her can communicate all right

a calf’d make that today wouldn’t her

don’t look it though does her

he won’t be home her said for a few minutes

her’s going up the road

when you come home her’d thrash your legs

old-fashioned isn’t her

the old man died out and her got out then

used to be liver and crawl wasn’t her

I can remember she making cheese

go in and talk to she

subject him

1956: Slimbridge, Gloucestershire (C908/62 C4)

1956: Merriott, Somerset (C908/66 C3)

her would want to chop your bloody head off

2004: Cinderford, Gloucestershire (C91190/14/03)

1956: Withypool, Somerset (C908/65 C8)

if her had to

him would do twelve hours or more oddingb

2004: Cinderford, Gloucestershire (C91190/14/03)

then her’d tighten the top on hine down

when I’ve had as much cider as him have

1959: Uffington, Berkshire (C908/23 C4)

object she

1958: Stewkley, Buckinghamshire (C908/63 C1)

if her’s a bit middling off her goes

2005: Maiden Newton, Dorset (C1190/30/03)

we had chicken though didn’t us

her can tell you that

2004: Warleggan, Cornwall (C1190/10/01)

we don’t have much to do with drinks see do us

subject her

1963: Kilkhampton, Cornwall (C908/26 C2)

what us call a hook

2005: Knowle West, Bristol (C1190/07/02)

1959: Hemyock, Devon (C908/62 C2)

we heard they rallying of the chains didn’t us

nobody’d break into we ’cause we had a bull terrier

Date: Location (BL shelfmark) a

Example

object we

Pronoun

Table 7: (continued)

248   Jonnie Robinson

subject them

object he

1958: Weare Giffard, Devon (C908/29 C5) 1963: South Zeal, Devon (C908/30 C3) 1963: Widecombe in the Moor, Devon (C908/31 C1) 2005: Beer, Devon (C1190/13/01) 1958: Gwinear, Cornwall (C908/27 C2) 2004: Warleggan, Cornwall (C1190/10/01) 2005: Mawla, Cornwall (C1190/10/03) 1956: Sixpenny Handley, Dorset (C908/68 C3) 2005: Wool, Dorset (C1190/30/05) 1959: Whitwell, Isle of Wight (C908/32 C2)

that’s why I left he

he’d […] take your hat and chuck he in the ring

I went down there as a boy with he

when the grockles come down they looked at he

we sent hine down to he

what else do I call he

if you step on he he’ll bite you

I shot a blackbird […] and killed he

used to help he

take his dinner down to he

1956: Slimbridge, Gloucestershire (C908/62 C4) 2004: Cinderford, Gloucestershire (C91190/14/03) 1956: Blagdon, Somerset (C908/65 C2) 1956: Wootton Courtenay, Somerset (C908/65 C5) 1956: Stoke St Gregory, Somerset (C908/65 C10) 2005: Dulverton, Somerset (C91190/31/01) 1957: Fovant, Wiltshire (C908/22 C4) 1958: Gittisham, Devon (C908/30 C2)

I know them have years ago

years ago they was accepted wasn’t them

where the devil be them to

six weeks wouldn’t them

them went up to fifteen

but they didn’t haee no cars did them

haven’t got any horses about now have them

what did them used to say Frank

(continued)

1955: Bream, Gloucestershire (C908/62 C2)

it’s what them do call Crown Land

d

1958: Parracombe, Devon (C908/29 C2)

it was touch and go with he

1960: Steeple Ashton, Wiltshire (C908/22 C3)

1956: Horsington, Somerset (C908/66 C1)

c

we calls he the faller

1956: Wedmore, Somerset (C908/65 C3)

you do call he a beast’s name

1956: Merriott, Somerset (C908/66 C3)

him comed up this way

we had to carry he across the brook

1956: Horsington, Somerset (C908/66 C1)

him get himself mudded all over

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2004: Feock, Cornwall (C1190/10/04) 1956: Sixpenny Handley, Dorset (C908/68 C3) 1956: Kingston, Dorset (C908/68 C7) 2005: Maiden Newton, Dorset (C1190/30/03) 1959: East Harting, Sussex (C908/33 C3)

some call them frails don’t them

they have a hook then don’t them

a lot of them dead isn’t them

well they don’t ploy labour do them

1956: Withypool, Somerset (C908/65 C8) 1956: Horsington, Somerset (C908/66 C1) 1960: Steeple Ashton, Wiltshire (C908/22 C3) 1959: Hemyock, Devon (C908/62 C2) 1956: Sixpenny Handley, Dorset (C908/68 C3) 2005: Wool, Dorset (C1190/30/05) 1956: Higher Ansty, Dorset (C908/68 C4)

there was another stream cutting they off

get up and harve they towards the church

they calls they the foggersl

we heard they rallying of the chains didn’t us

you never seed ne’er-a-one of they

never stopped did them

she did come on and tie up every one of they

a

1956: Blagdon, Somerset (C908/65 C2)

I had to go and look after they k

1953: Binfield Heath, Oxfordshire (C908/62 C9)

he cares about they burning

j

2005: Mawla, Cornwall (C1190/10/03)

lot of people say he got the scates don’t them

need a operation don’t them i

2004: Warleggan, Cornwall (C1190/10/01)

used to grow hundreds of mangolds didn’t them

got this open chimlayg haven’t them h

2005: Beer, Devon (C1190/13/01) 2005: Postbridge, Devon (C1190/13/03)

f

loads of words means the same thing doesn’t them

Date: Location (BL shelfmark)

Example

d

a

 OED rally [= ‘to make a loud/sharp noise’]. b  OED odd [= ‘to do odd jobs/casual labour’]. c  SED D&G faller [= ‘shutting-post of a gate’].  OED grockle [= ‘tourist’]. e  EDD hae [= ‘to have’]. f  OED mangold [= ‘mangel-wurzel’]. g  EDD chimlay [= ‘chimney’]. h  EDD scate [= ­‘diarrhoea’]. i   EDD frail [= ‘flail, i.e. implement used to thresh corn by hand’]. j  OED ploy [= ‘to employ’]. k  EDD harve [= ‘to harrow’]. l   OED fogger [= ‘cowman’].

object they

Pronoun

Table 7: (continued)

250   Jonnie Robinson

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frequently realised as [ən] or as a syllabic nasal consonant [n̩̩] ; hence the SED D&G editorial decision to interpret this orthographically as en. Since the underlying form sought by the SED questionnaire at GIVE IT ME (IX.8.2) is the neuter direct object pronoun it does not present the complete picture, overlooking representations of the masculine direct object pronoun, for which I turn again to SED sound recordings. There are far too many examples to record here individually, but as with object I, SED audio data suggests a wider distribution, including the counties listed above plus several localities in Cornwall, where hine occurs both as a masculine object following a preposition – e.g. he had some money coming to hine in St Ewe (C908/27 C1) – and as a neuter object in a description of hedge-­ laying technique in Kilkhampton: lie hine down there and just ditch hine a little bit (C908/26 C2). There are also a handful of tokens that confirm hine also occurred in mid-twentieth century dialects in the South East: Inkpen, Berkshire – a butcher killed hine for me (C908/23 C5) Whitwell, Isle of Wight – I used to stop up all night with hine (C908/32 C2) Harlington, Bedfordshire – lift hine like you do a sack of wheat (C908/63 C8) Sutton, Sussex – then they’d thatch hine in (C908/32 C5)

Table 8 below lists spontaneous examples of hine in BBCV recordings. Although these are once again less commonplace than in SED recordings, there is nonetheless evidence here that hine remains a feature of broad dialect in a number of areas in the West Country and far South West. Table 8 only includes one example per location for any given grammatical function. Unlike pronoun exchange hine appears to exist under the dialect radar – it is never a topic of conversation among BBCV participants, for instance, nor is it the subject of conscious ‘performance’ mimicking conservative speech. This is perhaps understandable in that hine seldom receives prominent stress and the auditory similarity in rapid speech of the nasals /m/ and /n/ (and the potential for /n/ to assimilate to [m] in certain phonetic environments) means the distinction between hine and him is either blurred or so subtle that it is not always immediately ­apparent – unlike the obvious difference between, for instance, she and her. The following two extracts from two speakers in Postbridge (C1190/13/03) ­illustrate this: now I know a chap who used to drive a steam-roller and he used to be able to put a pasty and he reckoned a pasty if his wife made hine [ɪf ɪz wɔɪf meːdn̩] would trig6 and hold a steam-roller

6  OED trig [= ‘to apply wedge/block to prevent wheel moving’].

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Table 8: Spontaneous examples of historic hine in BBCV recordings (2004–2005) in the south of England. Location (BL shelfmark)

Example

Function

Cinderford, Gloucestershire (C91190/14/03)

they used to shift hine a bit further up the scowl-holea

neuter direct object

her’d tighten the top on hine down

preposition + neuter object

Knowle West, Bristol (C1190/07/02)

he took his overcoat off and wrapped round hine was curtain material

neuter direct object

priest let’s hine serve on the altar and he loves every minute of it

masculine direct object

I don’t know what I’d do without hine

preposition + masculine object

if you got a house and you wanna sell hine we won’t benefit from that

neuter direct object

I had to point out to hine that it’s been happening for a long time

preposition + masculine object

Maiden Newton, Dorset (C1190/30/03)

you had to cut hine up

neuter direct object

Postbridge, Devon (C1190/13/03)

I caught this ferret took hine home

neuter direct object

Wool, Dorset (C1190/30/05)

tear hine up in squares

neuter direct object

Mawla, Cornwall (C1190/10/03)

go over and see if you can sell hine a raffle ticket

masculine direct object

Feock, Cornwall (C1190/10/04)

I hadn’t told hine nothing about this

masculine indirect object

I used to walk up with hine in the evenings after work

preposition + masculine object

Dulverton, Somerset (C91190/31/01)

  OED scowl-hole [= ‘quarry/gravel pit’].

a

pile your wood on top and you put the ends through the loop and out your boot on the eye and pull hine up tight [pʏɫn̩ ʌp tɔɪt] you twist it around the stick what you had in your hand and you’d twist hine around [twɪstn̩ əɹəʏnd] and make a sort of a bow and then you stick hine in under [stɪkn̩ iːn ʌndɚ] so’s he couldn’t flip back and that’s how it was done

Only rarely, when hine receives prominent stress, is it clearer to distinguish from him as in the following example from Cinderford (C91190/14/03) and then our mother’d get me winding these blinking hand around on the mangle and uh her’d look at it and her’d say oh another couple of times through and that’ll be all right then her’d tighten the top on hine down [ɚːd tɔɪtn̩ ðə tɑp ɑn ɪn dəʊn] and so it was much harder to turn

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All the tokens in Table 8 are elicited from older speakers, so it is unclear whether this feature remains productive. Unfortunately, most of the younger BBCV speakers were recorded in urban locations where hine is less well-documented generally so the prospects of its continued transmission is extremely difficult to assess. However, unlike pronoun exchange, speakers who favour hine tend to use it repeatedly, though seldom categorically, such that it is a much more high-frequency phenomenon.

4.3 Exploring southern accents Unlike lexical and/or grammatical variants, which either occur serendipitously (and therefore unpredictably) or require elicitation tasks, any voice recording of sufficient duration offers ample opportunity for phonetic or phonological analysis. BL audio holdings therefore support a range of enquiries, including real and apparent time studies comparing speakers from collections created at different points in time or older and younger cohorts within the same collection, as well as investigations of diachronic change or synchronic variation between speakers according to geographic and/or social background. One of the challenges with untranscribed audio, however, is locating suitable recordings. Phonological descriptions posted at http://sounds.bl.uk can be used by researchers to establish the relevance of a given recording for studying a particular phonological feature. These descriptions, provided as PDFs attached to all SED recordings and selected BBCV recordings, present in IPA typical realisations of every lexical set (Wells, 1982) and other phenomena related to vowels (e.g. the presence or absence of rhoticity), and provide an inventory of noteworthy consonantal features (e.g. TH-fronting, yod dropping) and connected speech processes (e.g. secondary contraction, sandhi R), thereby allowing users to create their own corpus of recordings that include sufficient examples of any target variable(s) under scrutiny. It is also worth stressing here that, although RP is certainly not a southern variety in terms of its geographic distribution within England, it is historically based on southern norms and there is arguably a greater concentration of RP speakers within the South East of England than elsewhere in the UK. In addition to the local southern voices noted in Tables 1–3 above, the BL has an extensive set of recordings of RP speakers and although there are intentionally none contained within the SED, BBCV has 14 recordings made exclusively with RP speakers of various ages and the Library has to date accessioned 433 VB recordings with RP speakers aged 6 to 75. Although in both cases these are not speakers exclusively from the south, they represent a substantial data set for anyone interested in studying any aspect of RP.

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Given the relative wealth of literature relating to the phonology of southern varieties (e.g. Wells, 1982: 301–348; Tollfree, 1999: 136–184; Przedlacka, 2002; Hughes et al, 2005; Altendorf & Watt: 194–222, Anderwald 2004, Gerwin 2015), rather than discussing individual accent features I draw here on data relating to popular perceptions of, and attitudes towards, southern accents. Some accents (and/or dialects) in England are so well-established and sufficiently identifiable they are invariably referred to by well-known nicknames. Geordie (Newcastle upon Tyne), Brummy (Birmingham), Cockney (London) and Scouse (Liverpool), for instance, are the most frequently referenced dialects in BBCV conversations and many VB contributors from these areas describe their own speech using these terms. Individuals vary as to how precisely they apply such labels – Geordie, for instance, is often used to refer to speakers from the North East as a whole and Brummy is invariably applied to West Midland accents generally, despite distinctions between Newcastle and Sunderland or Birmingham and the Black Country that are both phonologically discernible, but also culturally important to locals. Despite the obvious elasticity of this popular taxonomy, it is nonetheless instructive to note which nicknames are attributed to southern varieties, as, like the actual accents themselves, they can be revealing in terms of social as well as geographic distinctions. Perhaps not surprisingly the most common labels show a clear distinction between accents in the South East and the South West. Cockney occurs extremely frequently in BBCV conversations both referring to a broad London accent and, for some speakers – perhaps particularly those outside the South East – as convenient shorthand for a vague notion of a generic South East accent. There are far too many examples to list individually here, but a VB contributor’s description of her accent captures this common tendency to merge South East identities under a single Cockney umbrella: I’ve got a South East England accent so a lot of people think it’s a Cockney accent but it’s not I was brought up in Kent on the Isle of Sheppey so the Isle of Sheppey’s kind of got its own twang to it anyway so it’s sort of probably a combination of a London accent and an Essex accent as much as that grinds my gears to say it (C1442/1339)

As is true of all accents, Cockney prompts strong reactions – both positive and negative – and, again perhaps particularly outside London, the term often conveys feelings of mistrust and suspicion, as demonstrated by this observation in Wilmcote, Warwickshire: Cockney is always your you know cockney sparrow sharp you know um wide boy type accent (C1190/01/05)

The more recent label, Estuary English, is also frequently supplied by BBCV ­speakers. Strictly speaking Estuary English refers to a relatively homogeneous

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accent spoken across large parts of the Home Counties, categorised by Rosewarne (1984) as a combination of RP and London English that, like any accent, encompasses a wide range of speakers from near-RP to those at the more London end of the spectrum. A recording made by a female VB speaker captures succinctly some of the flavour of Estuary English: my accent probably comes from London sort of Estuary English type thing influences from Cockney slang and things like that we use a lot of glottal stops [glɒʔl ̩ stɒps] so we don’t pronounce our T’s coz I’m from Luton [luːʔn̩] and we drink water [wɔːʔɐ] and we don’t pronounce our T’s (C1442/3403)

Unlike its ‘parents’, Cockney and RP, Estuary English is, however, almost universally condemned as somehow inauthentic and hence stigmatised. One speaker from Tillingham in Essex captures the typical anxiety of a middle-class parent faced with the prospect of their child acquiring Estuary English: she has a daughter of four who’s about to go to school with people who sound like that she can’t bear the thought that they’re going to have this Estuary Essex twang (C1190/02/01)

A perceived lack of authenticity is conveyed even more strongly by the term mockney (i.e. ‘mock Cockney’), which is used in BBCV conversations in Clapham (C1190/03/01), Oxford (C1190/27/01) and Milton Keynes (C1190/37/05) to refer to an accent considered to be affected by middle-class speakers in imitation of London speech. Mockney (earliest citation, 1967), Cockney (earliest citation in sense of ‘dialect of London’, 1890), and Estuary English (earliest citation, 1984) are all sufficiently widely used to merit entries in the OED. As with the South East, popular perceptions of accents in the South West inspire a number of nationally used labels, mostly based on the impression – largely, but not entirely true – that the area is predominantly rural. The terms yokel and bumpkin occur frequently in BBCV recordings to convey notions of rustic speech, regardless of the actual local linguistic distinctions between urban and rural accents. Synonyms such as hill-billy (OED), recorded in Clun in Shropshire (C1190/29/01), and woolly back (NPD), recorded in Leeds (C1190/19/03), only occur in, and with reference to, the north and Midlands, whereas yokel and bumpkin seem most closely associated with speakers in the West Country and South West and are invariably used to imply a lack of sophistication – a sense confirmed by their respective OED entries. Similarly disparaging are apparently light-hearted forms based on equally clichéd notions of rural life, as in the ­observation from a BBCV speaker in Beer in Devon: they all thinks we’m carrot crunchers (C1190/13/01). The analogous forms swede, recorded in Cam in Gloucestershire (C1190/14/01) and Ilminster in Somerset (C1190/31/02), and swede basher,

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recorded in Wool in Dorset (C1190/30/05), reflect similar views of rural life (and speech) from an urban perspective. Carrot cruncher (NPD) and swede (GDS) both clearly embody stereotypical associations of the West Country and South West with farming and food production, but the reaction of a speaker from Plymouth (a city of over 250,000 inhabitants) confirms how such misrepresentations frequently cause offence: I tell you what I gets called quite often is a carrot cruncher and I hate it (C1190/13/05). Like Estuary English and mockney (and, to a lesser extent, Cockney), bumpkin, carrot cruncher, swede and yokel are applied to accents in a loosely defined area, in effect the whole of the South West of England. There are, however, occasionally more locally focused references. Table 9 below shows a small number of nicknames used to refer to inhabitants of specific villages, towns, counties or locations within the West Country and South West of England; column 4 notes previous evidence of these terms. Finally, I consider a selection of labels used to categorise RP. The approved linguistic terms Received Pronunciation and/or RP occur frequently in BBCV and VB recordings as does the popular label, B.B.C. English. All three terms tend to be used objectively to describe a regionally neutral, socially prestigious accent, while more loaded terms are used to convey contrasting a ­ ttitudes towards the Table 9: Local nicknames for accents/speakers in BBCV recordings (2004–2005) in the south of England. Label

Definition

Location (BL shelfmark)

Devon dumplinga

Devonian

Beer, Devon (C1190/13/01)

Previous record

Hampshire Hog

inhabitant of Hampshire

Wool, Dorset (C1190/30/05)

OED

janner

person with stereotypical Plymouth, Devon South West (esp. Devon) (C1190/13/05) accent Wool. Dorset (C1190/30/05)

NPD

Kimberlin

nickname for person not born on Isle of Portland

Dorchester, Dorset (C1190/30/02)

EDD

moonraker

inhabitant of Wiltshire

Wool, Dorset (C1190/30/05)

OED

Scat-Up

inhabitant of Chacewater, Cornwall

Mawla, Cornwall (C1190/01/03)

b

a  Evidence for this as a traditional nickname for Devonians is perhaps provided by the Devon Dumplings Cricket Club (see http://www.devondumplingscc.co.uk/index.html), founded in 1902 in the tradition of similar ‘wandering’ clubs such as Hampshire Hogs, Free Foresters and I Zingari. b  Included in list of Cornish parish nicknames in Old Cornwall journal according to online message board response submitted by Don Tremethick, 20.05.2015 (see rootsweb at http://archiver. rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/CORNISH/2010-05/1274330789).

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variety. Some descriptors clearly imply a sense of approval of, and admiration for, RP, such as well-spoken (uncatalogued VB file [email protected]), clear (C1442/1335), standard (C1442/1280) and proper English (C1442/1120), while terms like Sloane Ranger (C1190/27/01), city slicker (C1190/30/01) and plum-in-the-mouth (C1190/28/04) are used ­dismissively by non-RP speakers to convey the sense of exclusivity and elitism some people associate with the accent. RP speakers in the VB archive are a particularly interesting case study here. As all contributors were required to describe their own voices, the collection offers fascinating insights into the way RP speakers view their linguistic identity. Table 10 below presents a small selection of recordings supplied by RP contributors that capture a range of sentiments. They embrace positive (or at least neutral) notions of social status and prestige – e.g. normal, middle-class, public school, Queen’s English – and, by Table 10: A selection of terms used by VB contributors with RP accents (2010–2011) to describe their own voices. Descriptor

Description

BL shelfmark

Speaker background

bland

I don’t think that I have an accent in ­particular I think it’s quite bland

C1442/1191

London

clipped

I went to secondary school that was a bit C1442/1314 posh so my accent changed quite a bit became a bit more clipped and became fixed by then and then I remember going away to South America when I was ­nineteen and I didn’t speak English for about four months and when I did speak English again I sounded really posh much more Received Pronunciation

Kent

generic

I speak with a fairly generic southern accent

Bath

middle-class

my accent is very middle-class London C1442/1178 because I went to a primary school which had very ­middle-class people and my parents are doctors

C1442/1132

London

middle England my accent is from sort of middle England C1442/1718

Plymouth

neutral

my accent is neutral southern England maybe Received Pronunciation

C1442/405

Oxford

no accent

I don’t think I have an accent

C1442/3154

Dorset/­Derbyshire/ Caithness

normal

normal middle-class English

C1442/1099

South (continued)

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Table 10: (continued) Descriptor

Description

BL shelfmark

Speaker background

not from anywhere in particular

I don’t think my voice is from anywhere in particular I think I’ve got what used to be called Received Pronunciation and according to The Times today it’s now coming back into fashion

C1442/898

South

not regional

my mother’s from Coventry and my C1442/1039 father’s from Sussex and I grew up in Nigeria and I went to school in Eastbourne and Oakham so I would say don’t really have a regional accent at all

Eastbourne

posh

my accent is basically southern English slightly posh

C1442/1425

South

public school

I was born and brought up in southern England moving around every few years and went to public school in Berkshire

C1442/1380

Berkshire

Queen’s English

I don’t know about my accent I speak a C1442/2011 fairly Queen’s English but I came from the West Country so perhaps I’ve got a Devon burr

West Country

snob

my mother is a snob and so I’ve developed C1442/1 a bit of a posher accent than my other North London girlfriends could probably attest to

London

way of contrast, a more negative sense of aloofness and isolation – e.g. clipped, posh, snob. They also offer a glimpse, perhaps, of RP speakers’ frustration at an apparent lack of geographic affiliation – e.g. middle England, not regional, not from anywhere in particular – or distinctive character – e.g. bland, generic, neutral, no accent.

5 Summary While an overview such as this can only offer a selection of observations, it provides considerable evidence of continued variation and change in southern varieties of English and demonstrates how BL archival sound recordings can support a variety of linguistic investigations. The SED audio complements the findings of the survey’s Basic Material (Orton et al, 1962–1971), and the later Freiburg English

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Dialect Corpus (Kortmann 2000; https://fred.ub.uni-freiburg.de/), but crucially also offers new insights into mid-twentieth century southern dialect, while BBCV and VB have the potential to inform both qualitative and quantitative sociolinguistic research enquiries. Above all, the evidence presented here shows that dialects in southern England, while inevitably subject to change, remain vibrant and varied and represent a worthwhile, if hitherto comparatively uncelebrated, subject for variationist studies.

References Altendorf, U. & D. Watt The Dialects in the South of England: phonology. In B. Kortmann & C.  Upton (eds.), Varieties of English 1: The British Isles. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Anderwald, Lieselotte. 2004. The morphology and syntax of the varieties of English spoken in the Southeast of England. In B. Kortmann & E. Schneider (with Kate Burridge, Raj Mesthrie & Clive Upton) (eds.), A Handbook of Varieties of English. Vol 2. Morphology and Syntax, 175–195. Topics in English Linguistics 50. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. BBC Voices Recordings. BBC, UK, rec. 2004–2005 [digital audio files] British Library, C1190. http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/BBC-Voices. BL Sounds. London: British Library. http://sounds.bl.uk/(accessed 14 January 2016). Chedzoy, A. 2003. A Bit of a Bumble. Newbury: Countryside Books. Cockney Rhyming Slang: London’s Famous Secret Language. 1998–. http:// www.­cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk/(accessed 4 January 2016). Dalzell, T. & T. Victor (eds.). 2013. The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. London: Routledge. Devon Dumplings Cricket Club. http://www.devondumplingscc.co.uk/index.html (accessed 4 January 2016). EastEnders. BBC, UK, (20.00), 13/05/14, BBC1, 30 mins. Edwards, V. The grammar of Southern British English 1993. In J. Milroy & L. Milroy (eds.). 1993. Real English: The Grammar of English Dialects in the British Isles. London: Longman. Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices. [public exhibition] London: British Library, 17/11/2010-03/04/2011. Evolving English VoiceBank. British Library, UK, rec. 2010–2011 [digital audio files] British Library, C1442. http://sounds.bl.uk/Accentsand-dialects/Evolving-English-WordBank & http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/Evolving-English-VoiceBank. Forum Wales. http://www.fforwmcymru.com/fwforum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=3137 (accessed 4 January 2016). Gerwin, Johanna. 2014. Ditransitives in British English Dialects. Series:Topics in English Linguistics [TiEL] 50 (3). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ‘Going Bodmin’. Doc Martin Series 1 Episode 1. Buffalo Pictures in Association with Homerun Productions, UK, (tx time n.k.), 02/12/2004, ITV1, 47 mins. Green, J. 2010. Green’s Dictionary of Slang. London: Chambers.

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Hargreaves, R. 1986 [1971]. Mr Tickle. London: Thurman. Hogg, R. 1992. The Cambridge History of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hughes, A., P. Trudgill & D. Watt. 2005. English Accents and Dialects: An Introduction to Social and Regional Varieties of English in the British Isles. 4th edn. London: Hodder Arnold. Merton, L. 2012. Cornish Dialect. Sheffield: Bradwell Books. Opie, P. & I. Opie. 1959. The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Orton, H. 1962. Survey of English Dialects: (A) Introduction. Leeds: E.J. Arnold. Orton, H., W. Halliday, M. Barry, P. Tilling & M. Wakelin (eds.). 1962–1971. Survey of English Dialects (B): The Basic Material, 4 volumes. Leeds: E.J. Arnold. Oxford English Dictionary. 2010–. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/ (accessed 12 January 2016). Parish, Rev. W. 1875. A Dictionary of the Sussex Dialect and Collection of Provincialisms in use in the County of Sussex. Lewes: Farncombe. Parry, D. 1997. The Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects.Vol. 1: The South-East. Swansea: no publisher. Parry, D. 1999. The Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects. Vol. 2: The South-West. Swansea: no publisher. Partridge, E. 1972. A Dictionary of Historical Slang. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Penhallurick, R. 1991. The Anglo-Welsh Dialects of North Wales: A Survey of Conservative Rural Spoken English in the Counties of Gwynedd and Clwyd. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Przedlacka, J. 2002. Estuary English? A sociophonetic study of teenage speech in the Home Counties. Frankfurt am main: Peter Lang. Robinson, J. 2007. Sounds Familiar? Accents and Dialects of the UK, London: British Library. http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/index.html (accessed 2 February 2016). Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art. Vol. 54. 1923. Plymouth: W. Brendan & Son. rootsweb. http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ (accessed 9 January 2016). Rosewarne, D. 1984. Estuary English. Times Educational Supplement 19 (October). Roud, S. 2010. The Lore of the Playground: One Hundred Years of Children’s Games, Rhymes and Traditions. London: Random House. Survey of English Dialects. University of Leeds, UK, rec. 1952–1974 [digital audio files] British Library, C908. http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and dialects/Survey-of-English-dialects. Survey of English Dialects Incidental Material. Brotherton Library Special Collections, University of Leeds, LAVC/SED/2/2/1–40. Swindon Advertiser. http://www.swindonadvertiser.co.uk/yoursay/blogs/born_again_ swindonian/10934451.Atiny_tour_round_the_town/ (accessed 4 January 2016). Swindon in the Past Lane. http://swindonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/rodbournecommunity-history-group.html (accessed 4 January 2016). Thorne, T. 2014. Dictionary of Contemporary Slang. London: Bloomsbury. Timms, P. 2012. In and Around Swindon Works. Stroud: Amberley. Tollfree, L. South East London English: discrete versus continuous modelling of consonantal Reduction. In Foulkes, P. & G. Docherty (eds.), 1999. Urban Voices. London: Arnold. Trudgill, P. The sociolinguistics of non-equicomplexity. In Seiler, G. & R. Baechler (eds.), 2016. Complexity, Variation, and Isolation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Upton, C., Parry, D. & J. Widdowson (eds.). 1994. Survey of English Dialects: The Dictionary and Grammar. London: Routledge. Urban Dictionary. 1999–. http://www.urbandictionary.com/ (accessed 19 January 2015). Wells, J. 1982. Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, J. (ed.) 1898–1905. English Dialect Dictionary. London: Henry Frowde.

Juhani Klemola

9 The historical geographical distribution of periphrastic do in southern dialects 1 Introduction The use of unstressed periphrastic do in affirmative declarative sentences is already fairly well-documented in nineteenth century descriptions of south-­ western dialects. However, it is not possible to determine the geographical ­distribution of this feature in any detail on the basis of these descriptions. And, somewhat surprisingly, even the more recent discussions of south-western dialects offer conflicting descriptions of the geographical distribution of do-periphrasis. It is sometimes claimed (see Wakelin 1977, 1983, 1984a) that the use of periphrastic do is a very isolated feature in some south-western localities, possibly a remnant of a single, larger area. But others (cf. Rogers 1979) have argued that the use of do-periphrasis is more widespread in the South-West of England. My aim in this chapter is to determine the geographical distribution of periphrastic do in English dialects. The discussion is based both on the published SED material and on the unpublished incidental material found in the SED fieldworker notebooks, which provides a rich, but surprisingly little-used, corpus of dialectal verb syntax.1

2 Previous attempts at delimiting the ­geographical distribution of periphrastic do in English dialects Joseph Wright states in his English Dialect Grammar that ‘the periphrastic form I do love, &c. for I love, &c. is in gen[eral] use in the south-western dialects’ (1905: 297). Unfortunately, however, Wright does not give any more detailed indication of the geographical boundaries of the use of do-periphrasis. A survey of some nineteenth century descriptions of south-western dialects confirms that periphrastic do was used at least in Cornwall (Jago 1882: 57), Dorset (Barnes 1886: 23), Gloucester (Robertson 1890: 37), and Somerset (Elworthy 1877: 49–51). It is worth remarking that, some 50 years earlier, Jennings (1825) does not single out the use of periphrastic do 1 This is a revised version of the data and argument first presented in my unpublished PhD thesis (Klemola 1996: 21–74). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110577549-010

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in his discussion of the ­‘remarkable facts’ and ­‘peculiarities’ of the dialect of Somerset. It does not seem likely that Jennings could just have failed to observe the use of do-­periphrasis as his discussion is, on the whole, very detailed, including such features as the differences in third person singular marking in verbs (-th/-eth vs. -s) between West and East S ­ omerset (op.cit..: 3), the use of the inflected infinitive (op.cit.: 6–7), forms of be (op.cit.: 7) and ­a-prefixing (op.cit.: 8). It is more probable that Jennings, writing in 1825, simply did not consider the use of periphrastic do as a markedly dialectal feature, i.e. at the beginning of the nineteenth century the form had not yet become ­stigmatized in ­Standard English. Visser’s (1963– 73: 1507–09) discussion of the eighteenth century grammars, which indicates that till the late eighteenth century some grammarians, at least, gave the simple and periphrastic forms simply as alternatives, lends some support to this idea.2 The only detailed information on the geographical distribution of the use of periphrastic do in English dialects towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, is found in Alexander Ellis’s monumental study, On Early Pronunciation. Part V:  The Existing Phonology of English Dialects English ­ ­Compared with that of West Saxon Speech. (Ellis 1889).3 Although Ellis does not explicitly discuss the geographical boundaries of the use of periphrastic do, it is still possible to reconstruct at least roughly the area where the construction was in use on the basis of the comments scattered in his study. According to Ellis, do-periphrasis was found in his areas D4 (Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and parts of West Hampshire), D10 (West Somerset) and D12 (West Cornwall), as well as in parts of his areas D5 (Isle of Wight) and D13 (in Monmouthshire). Map 1, which shows the geographical distribution of periphrastic do during the latter half of the nineteenth century, has been drawn on the basis of the remarks found in Ellis (1889). The following remarks were used as the basis for Map 1:

2 Visser quotes Anselm Bayly’s (1772) A Plain and Complete Grammar of the English Language, which gives, without any comment, the forms “I love/I do love; I loved/I did love” and Lewis ­Brittain’s (1778) Rudiments of English Grammar, which recognises the following uses of do:  “Thus:  1° I do, or did love; 2° I have, I had, or I shall have done loving; 3° Imperative, or entreating: Do let him love.” Visser’s latest quote is William Cobbett’s (1818/1833) A Grammar of the English Language, which states that “As an auxiliary or helper, it [sc. do] seems to denote the time of the principal verb: as I do walk, I did walk; and we may say, I do execute my work, or, I do do my work.” However, as Visser points out, Cobbett adds the cryptic remark: “However … do and did, used as auxiliaries, do a great deal more than express time. In fact they are not often used for that purpose only.” 3 Ellis’s pioneering dialectological work has often been unjustly underestimated or ignored. For a reappraisal of Ellis as a dialectologist, see Shorrocks (1991).

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Map 1: Periphrastic DO in South-West England towards the end of the nineteenth century (after Ellis 1889).

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1) D4 = w.MS. = western Mid Southern In grammatical construction, that which strikes a stranger most is I be for I am, the prefix (ɐ) before the past participle, as ((Ǝ’i)v ɐdƎ ˙n) ‘I have a-done’; and the periphrastic form I do go for the simple I go, together with the curious use of the nominative for the objective case, and sometimes the converse. (p.43) 2) D5 = e.MS. = eastern Mid Southern, Var iii, Isle of Wight I be, we’m going, don’t us, I’ve a walked, I do know, are general. (p.107) BUT: D5 = e.MS. = eastern Mid Southern: In grammar, I be, he be, we am, they am, are heard, not I are. I lives not I do live, he live, we lives. (p.96) 3) D12 = w.WS. = western West Southern 7. “Isn’t half a man,” says she, “ he’ll guzzle all the liquor he can hitch and scrape, and he do pay nobody. Some do say he isn’t particular about taking what isn’t his own. (p. 172) 4) D13 = SW. = South Western. Mo = Monmouthshire Mo., though long a part of England by law, is essentially Welsh in feeling. By Chepstow, on the borders of Gl., the pronunciation, to judge from the wl. sent me by Dr. J. Yeats, approaches very near to that of adjoining Gl., D4. The use of auxiliary do and did is the rule, as it seems to be among Welsh speakers. (p.179) The use of the periphrastic forms, as did tell for told, was regular. (ibid.) 5) D4 = w.MS. = western Mid Southern; D10 = n.WS. = northern West Southern In D4 and 10 the periphrastic form, as I do love, without any intention of emphasis, is used for I love (p.834)

It must be borne in mind, however, that the density of Ellis’s network of localities varies from one area to another and that the reliability of his descriptions is dependent, to some extent, on the reliability of the information he received from his numerous correspondents. But even though Ellis’s study can only give us a rough description of the area where do-periphrasis was in use during the latter half of the nineteenth century, it nevertheless provides us with an invaluable reference point with which to compare the situation nearly a century later when the SED fieldwork was conducted. In recent decades, attempts to determine the geographical distribution of do-periphrasis have been made by Wakelin (1977, 1983, 1984a) (see Maps 2 and 3) and Rogers (1979) (see Map 4).4 Both Wakelin’s and Rogers’s discussions are based on the published SED Basic Material. It is thus rather surprising that not only do 4 Wakelin (1977: 120–121) does not include a map but does provide a detailed description of the geographical distribution, cf. below.

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Map 2: Periphrastic do in South-West of England (Wakelin 1983: 8).

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SOMERSET

DORSET

DEVON

CORNWALL

0

100 km 50 miles

0 Map 3: Periphrastic do in the South-West of England (Wakelin 1984a: 83).

GLOS

BERKS WILTS SOMERSET DEVON

HANTS

In this area the present tense of the verb is usually formed with do e.g. They do go In this area it is usual to add .s to most persons of the present tense e.g. they goes although this is also sometimes heard in unmarked parts of Devon, Somerset and Cornwall.

DORSET

CORNWALL

Map 4: Periphrastic do in South-West of England (Rogers 1979: 39).

Wakelin’s and Rogers’s delimitations differ considerably, but that W ­ akelin’s three delimitations of the use of do-periphrasis are also all different from each other. The explanation for these discrepancies lies with Wakelin’s limited use of the available data:  Wakelin (1977:  120–21) states that “the present distribution is a rather

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curious one – one area round the Severn comprising localities in Mon and Gl, one very small area in central and west Co, and a third, larger, area comprising parts of W, Do, and So.” This statement is echoed also in Wakelin (1986: 36–38): “The uses of the vb. do (in pr. and p.t.), when unstr., are extended in two small SW areas (plus one in Monmouthshire and Gloucs/Avon, which, however, includes Bristol) – central and W. Cornwall and parts of Wilts, Dorset and their e­ nvirons – to introduce a simple inf.: I d’ know, they d’ go, etc.” However, this can be explained by the fact that the delimitation of do-­periphrasis in Wakelin (1977) is based on the answers to SED question VIII.7.5; Wakelin’s (1983) map (see Map 2) is based on the answers to SED III.10.7 and VIII.5.1; whereas Wakelin (1984a) (see Map 3) is based on the answers to SED question VIII.5.1 only.5 However, there is considerably more evidence of periphrastic do in the SED Basic Material than Wakelin’s various discussions of do indicate. There are altogether 13 questions in the SED Basic Material that contain information about the use of periphrastic do. Thus it is surprising that Wakelin’s delimitations of do use are based on answers to only a couple of SED periphrastic do questions instead of all thirteen. Rogers (1979) (see  Map 4) does not provide a list of the SED questions his map is based on, but his do-area is considerably larger than any of Wakelin’s maps, and we might suppose that Rogers has used a larger subset of the 13 SED questions that provide data on the use of periphrastic do for his map than Wakelin.

3 The geographical distribution of periphrastic do in traditional dialects As the comparison of the delimitations of the use of periphrastic do found in Wakelin (1977, 1983, 1984a) and in Rogers (1979) indicates, the matter of the geographical distribution of do-use has not been discussed satisfactorily in the existing literature on traditional dialects in the South-West of England. Thus it is necessary to turn again to the SED Basic Material to see how much information we can get out of that dialect survey. A careful study of the SED Basic Materials

5 Wakelin considers periphrastic do to have been more widespread in the past:  “The uses of the verb do – in reduced or unstressed form – are extended in some (now very isolated) south-­ western dialects to introduce a simple infinitive: I d’know, they d’go, etc. […], and it may well be that the areas shown on the map were once part of a single, larger area bounded by Watling Street” (Wakelin 1983: 9). [Emphasis mine – JK.]

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indicates that information about the use of periphrastic do can be found in the answers to the following 13 SED questionnaire items:6 III.3.7 (If I didn’t know what a cowman is, you would tell me: He is the man …. that looks after the cows.) III.10.7 (Now let’s have it all together. Bulls bellow etc.) IV.6.2 (Some people have a shed and a wire-netting run at the bottom of their garden in which they …. keep hens.) VI.14.2 (Your wife, when for the first time she wears a nice new hat that goes well, likes to hear you say: My word! It …. suits you.) VI.14.14 (You say of a woman who rules her husband:  …. She wears the breeches.) VIII.1.9 (Look at their faces now. Don’t you think this boy …. resembles his grandfather?) VIII.5.1 (What do good people do on Sunday? They go to church.) VIII.5.2 (But some lazy people like to read the Sunday papers, and so they …. stay at home.) VIII.6.2 (There are two times in the day that every schoolboy knows. One is about 9 in the morning, when school …. begins, and the other is about 4 o’clock when school …. finishes.) VIII.7.5 (What do burglars do? They break into houses and …. steal. So you can say: We ordinary people buy the things we need, but …. burglars steal them.) IX.3.6 (A tailor is a man who …. makes suits.) IX.3.7 (In fact, she never misses any chance; every chance she gets, she …. takes.) IX.3.9 (Last year it was astonishing how quickly they [potatoes] …. grew.) The geographical distribution of periphrastic do, based on the answers to the abovelisted 13 SED questions, is given in Map 5.7 When Map 5 is compared with Maps 2, 6 In the following, I have first given the number of the SED questionnaire item and then also included in brackets the item in the form that it is given in the Dieth-Orton questionnaire (Dieth and Orton 1952). 7 Periphrastic do –forms are found in the following SED localities in the Basic Material: III.3.7: 15 He 6; 23 Mon 4,6,7; 31 So 1,4,6,11,13; 32 W 1,7; 36 Co 7; 38 Do 1,2,3,4 III.10.7: 31 So 7,11,12,13; 32 W 3,4,5,6,7,8,9; 36 Co 4,5,6,7; 38 Do 1,2,3,4,5 IV.6.2: 23 Mon 4,5; 31 So 4; 32 W 9; 36 Co 4,7; 38 Do 1,2,3,4 VI.14.2: 24 Gl 7; 32 W 8; 38 Do 3,4 VI.14.14: 23 Mon 4; 31 So 2,4,10; 32 W 8; 36 Co 4,6; 38 Do 2,3,4,5 VIII.1.9: 31 So 4; 36 Co 6,7; 38 Do 2,4,5 VIII.5.1: 23 Mon 4,5; 31 So 4; 32 W 5,8; 36 Co 4,6,7; 38 Do 3,4,5

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Map 5: Periphrastic DO in the published SED Basic Material.

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3 and 4 above, it can immediately be seen that Rogers’s map (Map 4) covers almost the same area as my Map 5. The main difference between my Map 5 and Rogers’s map (Map 4) is Rogers’s omission of Monmouthshire and East Wiltshire localities. Wakelin’s two maps (Maps 2 and 3), however, cover a significantly smaller area than my Map 5, which is based on a comprehensive survey of the SED Basic Material. Periphrastic do in the SED fieldworkers’ notebooks It has often been noted that the SED questionnaire was not planned within any coherent or comprehensive framework of grammar (see. e.g Ihalainen & Klemola 1993). Thus the SED Basic Material is not ideally suited even for determining the geographical distribution of such grammatical features as the use of periphrastic do. The unpublished SED fieldworker notebooks, although they naturally do not overcome the problem of the lack of a coherent grammatical framework, are still extremely valuable in attempting to determine the geographical distribution of grammatical features in traditional dialects. For the purposes of determining the geographical distribution of the use of periphrastic do I collected every instance of periphrastic do found in the SED notebooks from the following counties: Shropshire (11 Sa) Herefordshire (15 He) Worcestershire (16 Wo) Warwickshire (17 Wa) Monmouthshire (23 Mon) Gloucestershire (24 Gl) Oxfordshire (25 O) Somerset (31 So) Wiltshire (32 W) Berkshire (33 Brk) Cornwall (36 Co) Devon (37 D) Dorset (38 Do) Hampshire (39 Ha)

VIII.5.2: VIII.6.2: VIII.7.5: IX.3.6: IX.3.7: IX.3.9:

23 Mon 4; 36 Co 4,5; 38 Do 2,3,4 23 Mon 3; 24 Gl 6; 31 So 7; 36 Co 7; 38 Do 2,3,5 23 Mon 3; 24 Gl 4; 31 So 7,11; 32 W 1,5,8; 36 Co 4,6,7; 38 Do 1,3,4,5 23 Mon 2,4; 31 So 4,7; 32 W 1,7,8; 36 Co 4,6,7; 38 Do 2,3,4,5; 39 Ha 6 31 So 7; 32 W 1,5,8; 36 Co 4,5,6,7; 38 Do 1,2,3,4,5; 39 Ha 6 7 Ch 2; 18 Nth 2; 21 Nf 11; 23 Mon 3; 31 So 4,7; 39 Ha 6

NB. The answers to the SED IX.3.9 also include did forms in 7 Ch 2, 18 Nth 2, and 21 Nf 11. These have not been included in Map 5, as they are likely to be emphatic forms rather than instances of unemphatic periphrastic do.

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The search of the SED fieldworker notebooks yielded a corpus of 571 instances of periphrastic do (do 487 instances; did 84 instances). The distribution of periphrastic do, determined on the basis of the SED incidental material, is shown in Map 6. The area Map 6 covers is significantly larger than the distributions given in the previous maps, especially in the north and east. The fact that the western limit of the use of periphrastic do in Map 6 coincides with the border between England and Wales in Monmouthshire should not be taken to imply that do-­periphrasis would not be found in Wales. In fact, as Parry (1977: 161–162) and Thomas (1985: 214) make clear, the use of periphrastic do is very common in South-East Wales. The reason this fact is not shown in my Map 6 is simply that the Survey of English Dialects did not cover Welsh localities. Strictly speaking, of course, Monmouthshire, which at the time the SED was conducted was an English county, should, according to the post-1974 county boundaries, be called Gwent, and listed as a Welsh county. In a way, it is not surprising that the SED incidental material should show a wider distribution of the use of periphrastic do than the published Basic Material would lead us to believe. The formal nature of the questionnaire interview situation probably did not encourage the use of features such as periphrastic do, whereas the incidental material contains utterances that the fieldworkers picked up from their more informal conversations with the informants. It must also be pointed out that the possibility of fieldworker isoglosses cannot be ruled out altogether even in the case of periphrastic do (cf. Trudgill’s (1983: 38–41) discussion of phonetic SED fieldworker isoglosses in East Anglia). The total number of fieldworkers employed by the SED project was 11, and the notetaking practice of the fieldworkers was variable – this can be clearly detected in the notebooks. It does not seem likely, however, that the problem of field-worker isoglosses could be as serious when dealing with grammatical data as it may be in the case of phonetic data. A further point to bear in mind is that, in fact, only 13 of the 1322 questions in the SED questionnaire managed to elicit instances of periphrastic do, and out of these 13 questions, only seven (III.10.7; IV.6.2; VIII.5.1; VIII.7.5; IX.3.6; IX.3.7; IX.3.9) were explicitly designed to elicit information about verb morphology or syntax. Map 6 shows a rather surprising gap in the distribution of periphrastic do in Devon and East Cornwall. It is remarkable that periphrastic do is not used at all in the dialects of Devon and East Cornwall that otherwise are in many respects very conservative, showing, for example, widespread voicing of initial fricatives and traces of the old -eth ending in verbs.8 The reason why periphrastic do should not

8 The fact that unstressed periphrastic do is not found in Devon had already been noticed by Barnes (1886: 23).

The historical geographical distribution of periphrastic do in southern dialects 

Map 6: Geographical distribution of periphrastic do in the SED fieldworker notebooks.

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be used in these areas which, on the whole, are linguistically very conservative, is not immediately clear. Ihalainen (1991) is likewise puzzled by the non-use of periphrastic do in Devon and East Cornwall. He phrases his bafflement in the following manner: Periphrastic do reappears in western Cornwall, so that Devon forms a do-less island in the west. For the time being I have no convincing explanation for this interesting gap in an area that is in many other respects quite uniform linguistically. It will not do to say that Devon is innovative, because it can be shown that in many ways, for example as regards the use of invariant be, Devon is far more conservative than Somerset. (Ihalainen 1991: 298.)

One possible explanation might be to consider do historically as an innovation that originated somewhere in the West Wiltshire/East Somerset area and spread from there. The roundish shape of the isogloss on the map would support the interpretation that West Wiltshire/East Somerset form the focal area of periphrastic do usage, and, indeed, in the light of historical documents, periphrastic do seems to have originated in just this area. According to Ellegård (1953: 164), ‘the origin of the do-construction […] has to be sought in the Central and Western parts of the South, from where it spread eastwards and northwards”.9 In this scenario the absence of periphrastic do from Devon and East Cornwall would be explained by assuming that, because of the succession of natural barriers formed by the river Parrett and the marshlands surrounding it in the Somerset Levels, the Quantock Hills, and the barren Exmoor in north-east Devon, the innovation never reached these areas.10 The reappearance of periphrastic do in West Cornwall is due to the fact that Cornish was the dominant language in the westernmost areas of Cornwall until c. 1500, and that Cornish only gradually died out during the period 1500–1700 (Wakelin 1975: 203). Thus the English language was introduced into the western parts of Cornwall as late as the early Modern English period (1500–1700). It is for this reason that the English language spoken in West Cornwall is in many ways closer to early (sixteenth-seventeenth ­centuries)

9 Poussa (1990) argues that the rise of periphrastic do in the spoken language took place during the OE period as a result of the Celtic-Germanic contacts in the South-West of England. She also states that “in my interpretation […] the most conservative rural dialects of the Somerset area represent the lowest lects in the remains of a post-creole continuum extending both west and east, though the eastern dialect continuum is far older” (Poussa 1990: 420). Without passing a judgement on Poussa’s contact-universals theory, it may be noted that the argument set forth here, that periphrastic do originated in the area of East Somerset and West Wiltshire, would not contradict Poussa’s argument. 10 The isogloss which separates the do area of Somerset from the non-do area of Devon falls on a major and long-established dialect boundary between Somerset and Devon (cf. Klemola 1994).

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­ tandard English usage than to the surrounding dialects.11 Periphrastic do in S the westernmost parts of Cornwall most probably stems from the early Modern English “Standard” language rather than from the dialectal periphrastic do found in other parts of the South-West of England. Thus the periphrastic do form in West Cornwall is most probably introduced through education, as a part of the process described by Wakelin (1975: 100) in the following terms: … the English language in west Cornwall was introduced under the influence of education: speakers of Cornish in the Modern Cornish period would learn not the ancient Wessex dialects of east Cornwall, Devon and Somerset (although these nevertheless probably had some influence), but a version of English taught them in schools and by the upper classes and better-educated (note that it was the gentry who gave up Cornish and spoke English first), an English deliberately acquired, as distinct from a regional dialect passed on from generation to generation.

Although the notebook data are not collected systematically enough to allow for any proper quantification, the data do seem to reflect the core and peripheral areas of do-periphrasis use. Map 7 shows the areas where five or more examples of periphrastic do were recorded in the notebooks (West Cornwall, Dorset, East Somerset, West Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Monmouthshire). I consider these areas to form the core area of the use of periphrastic do. Map 7 also includes the areas where fewer than five examples of periphrastic do were recorded in the notebooks (Central Cornwall, West Somerset, East Wiltshire, West Hampshire and parts of Herefordshire). I regard these as more peripheral areas of the use of periphrastic do. In the discussion so far, the present and past tense forms of periphrastic do have not been distinguished, on the assumption that no significant difference would exist between the use of periphrastic do and periphrastic did. The numbers of examples in the SED incidental material (do 487 examples, did 84 examples) probably only indicate that present tense forms are more likely to be used in a face-to-face interview situation, and not any difference between the use of do and did forms. However, when the instances of periphrastic did are mapped separately, an interesting distribution appears (see Map 8). The occurrences of periphrastic did would seem to correspond fairly well with the core areas of the use

11 Wakelin (1975:  203) characterises the traditional dialects in western Cornwall as follows: “Many of the phonological types present here have been considered to be old Standard English ones, introduced in the early MnE period, and replacing other older (Cornish and English) forms of speech. This area is also the one in which morphological forms are more conformed to those of Standard English usage, and in which Cornish words are still found.” See also Wakelin (1975: 100, 1984b: 195).

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Map 7: Core and peripheral areas of periphrastic do (SED notebooks).

The historical geographical distribution of periphrastic do in southern dialects 

Map 8: Periphrastic did in the SED fieldworker notebooks.

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of do-periphrasis, with the exception of Cornwall, where only two instances of periphrastic did were recorded, both in St Ewe (36 Co4). In other words, as a rule, no occurrences of periphrastic did were recorded in the areas that are marked as peripheral on Map 7. This may indicate that the change from the periphrastic use of do towards the standard English-type tense marking started in past tense environments. The distribution of periphrastic did forms gives some indication that only present tense forms of periphrastic do are used in West Cornwall, especially when we take into consideration the fact that the SED incidental material includes a fairly large number of examples of present tense forms of periphrastic do from West Cornwall:  St Ewe (36 Co4) 35 instances; Gwinear (36 Co5) 41 instances; St Buryan (36 Co6) 26 instances; Mullion (36 Co7) 22 instances. In fact these represent the highest numbers of instances of periphrastic do recorded in the SED notebooks, except for Whitchurch Canonicorum (38 Do3), where 27 instances of periphrastic do were recorded. This means that the usage in West Cornwall would in this respect be similar to the Irish English usage; in Irish English the use of periphrastic do is also limited to the present tense periphrastic do (c.f. e.g. Bliss 1972: 80).12

4 Periphrastic do in Wales The data on the geographical distribution of periphrastic do in Welsh English come from Parry’s (1977, 1979) The Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects (SAWD). This survey, which is based on the SED questionnaire, provides detailed data on lexical and phonological features of the southern dialects of Welsh English. Unfortunately, however, the grammatical information offered by Parry’s survey is 12 This observation is interesting from the point of view of the possible substratal influence from the Celtic languages both in Irish English and in Cornish English. It is generally assumed that the formative period of both Irish English and the English spoken in the west of Cornwall fell during the Early Modern English period (1500–1700). The lack of past tense forms of periphrastic do in these varieties, in distinction to the usage both in early Modern Standard English and the dialects spoken in the South-West of England, could be seen to be due to reinforcement from the Celtic substratum – the existence of a distinct Present Habitual form bíonn (‘is wont to be’) of the substantive verb bí ‘be’ in Irish may have acted as a reinforcing factor for the Irish English do be construction and the do + V construction (see Ó Siadhail 1989: 177–178 for a discussion of the semantics of the substantive verb in Irish). The possibility of reinforcing substratal influence is made more probable by the lack of the past tense form of periphrastic do in these two nonadjoining varieties of English. For the possibility of Celtic influence on the origin of do in English, see further van der Auwera & Genee (2002) and McWhorter (2009)

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very patchy (cf. Thomas 1985: 214), and it is therefore not very easy to determine the geographical distribution of periphrastic do in Welsh English in any detail from it. Parry (1977: 161–162) lists the following examples of periphrastic do from South-East Wales: She do wear the trousers They do keep hens They do go to Chapel/Church

Gw 1,4,6,9,12; MGmg 11; SGmg 17 P/Bre 7; MGmg 10,11 Gw 9, 12, 13

And Parry (1979: 148, 153) lists the following examples from South-West Wales: We do collect different fruits You do watch We do call it The cows do graze in the fields did grow

D/Cdg 2 D/Pem 4 D/Pem 9 D/Pem 9 D/Cth 6

Just how patchy the data on periphrastic do in Parry (1977, 1979) are, becomes apparent when the above instances of periphrastic do are presented on a map. Map 9 shows the instances of periphrastic do found in the SAWD.

Map 9: Periphrastic do in the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects (base map from Parry 1979: viii).

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On the basis of these patchy data Thomas (1985: 214–215) and Coupland & Thomas (1990: 5–6) have inferred a general distributional pattern of periphrastic do usage in South Wales thus: In the industrial areas of Gwent and Glamorgan […] and the rural areas of Brecknock and east Radnor, the attested form is exclusively the one with do. It also occurs sporadically elsewhere, in Pembroke, Cardigan and west Radnor, but there the more frequent form is that with be. (Coupland & Thomas 1990: 5–6.)

Penhallurick (1993: 41–42) confirms that periphrastic do is not used in the northern counties of Gwynedd and Clwyd. When these data on the distribution of periphrastic do in Welsh English are combined with Map 6, which gives the distribution of this feature in England on the basis of all the available SED data, we arrive at a distribution of periphrastic do in England and Wales shown on Map 10.13 Thomas (1985:  214), and Coupland & Thomas (1990:  5) note that in Welsh English the following three present habitual constructions are possible: He goes to the cinema every week: Inflected present He do go to the cinema every week: do + uninflected verb He’s going to the cinema every week: Inflected be + inflected verb

They further point out that the non-standard second and third examples show a clear geographical distribution:  periphrastic do is used in the eastern areas of early bilingualism in Wales, and the BE + ing construction is favoured in the western areas of more recent bilingualism. Thomas (1985: 215) and Coupland & Thomas (1990: 6) also suggest that the sporadic instances of periphrastic do in South-West Wales indicate that this feature is spreading westwards, but they do not present any independent evidence for this claim. Their claim that the do pattern in Welsh English is historically connected with English dialects of the West Midlands [and South-West] seems plausible, however, when we examine the geographical distribution of periphrastic do in England and Wales shown on Map 10.14 The BE + ing construction, on the other hand, is apparently a calque on the equivalent construction in Welsh, as Thomas (1985: 215) and Coupland and Thomas (1990: 6) also assume.

13 In Map 10 the west Herefordshire locality He2 (Weobley) has tacitly been included in the distribution of periphrastic do although there is no direct evidence for the use of the feature in He2 in the SED records. 14 This observation, in fact, was first stated by David Parry in his Leeds M.A. thesis (Parry 1964). A discussion of periphrastic do is found also in Parry (1972).

The historical geographical distribution of periphrastic do in southern dialects 

Map 10: Periphrastic do in England and Wales.

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5 Periphrastic do vs. the generalised -s marker The following quote from Elworthy (1886: xlvi) provides an interesting perspective on the possible route of the linguistic change where the older construction with periphrastic do is replaced by the more “standard-like” -s inflection: Another advance apparently connected with increasing instruction is the more common use of the inflection us in the intransitive and frequentative form of verbs instead of the periphrastic do with the inflected pres. infin. I workus to factory, is now the usual form, whereas up to a recent period the same person would have said, I do worky to factory. An old under-gardener, speaking of different qualities of fuel for his use, said, The stone coal lee·ustus (lasts) zo much longer, and gees morey it too — i.e. does not burn so quickly — Feb. 2, 1888. He certainly would have said a few years ago — The stone coal du lee·ustee (do lasty) zo much longer. This form is also superseding the old form eth, which latter is now becoming rare in the Vale of West Somerset.

Elworthy made the observation that when speakers change their grammar and drop the rule which allows the use of unstressed periphrastic do in affirmative declarative sentences, they do not switch directly to the standard English rule, where only 3rd person singular forms receive the inflectional ending -s. Rather, they seem to generalise the present tense marker -s to all persons, both in singular and in plural.15 This use of the inflectional ending -s resembles the so-called northern subject rule (for a discussion, see Ihalainen (1994: 221–222). The difference is that whereas in the northern dialects present tense verbs take the ending -s only in those cases where the verb is not immediately preceded by a personal pronoun subject, as in Birds sings, but They peel them and boils them, south-­ western dialects do not follow this restriction and thus the -s marker occurs both in sentences with a pronominal or non-adjacent subject and sentences with a full noun phrase subject, as in the following examples They peels them and Farmers makes them. In other words, the form of the subject (full NP vs. personal pronoun) does not affect the -s marking of the verb in the south-western dialects in a way that it does in the northern dialects. Unfortunately it is not possible, on the basis of synchronic interview data, to detect directly the grammatical change that Elworthy observed. However, there is another way of getting evidence, albeit indirect, for the possibility that the change from the use of periphrastic do to the generalised -s marker that Elworthy reports has really taken place. This evidence is provided by the geographical

15  The generalised -s marker cannot be properly characterised as an agreement marker anymore, since it does not serve to signal any information about the characteristics of the subject. It appears to serve the function of marking the present tense rather than any agreement features.

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distribution of the two alternative forms. To get an idea of the geographical distribution of the generalised -s marker in traditional dialects in England, I have mapped the responses to the following SED questions (with pronominal subjects) that provide information on the distribution of the generalised -s marker (to avoid confusion with the northern subject rule-construction, I have excluded questions III.10.7 (Bulls bellow), and VIII.7.5 (Burglars steal them) which contain a full NP in the subject position from the list below; the answers to these two questions are mapped separately in Map 10): IV.6.2 (Some people have a shed and a wire-netting run at the bottom of their garden in which they …. keep hens.) V.2.12 (How do you see in this room when it gets dark? We put the light on.) V.7.7 (If you see that your gravy is too thin, what do you do to it? To thicken it.) VI.2.8 (When two little girls get cross with each other, what do they often do? They [i.] …. pull each other’s hair.) VI.3.2 (What do we do with them? To see.) VI.4.2 (What do we do with them? To hear.) VI.5.11 (When I have an apple, I [i.] …. eat it.) VIII.5.1 (What do good people do on Sunday? They go to church.) VIII.5.2 (But some lazy people like to read the Sunday papers, and so they …. stay at home.) IX.1.9 (To please the children, I often go down on hands and knees and …. creep.) The geographical distribution of the answers to these ten SED questionnaire items are given on Map 11a.16 For ease of comparison, Map 7, which indicates the

16 Generalised -s –forms are found in the following SED localities in the Basic Material (Square brackets around a locality indicate that the answer to the question does not include an -s form, but the Incidental Material listed under this question does contain a generalised -s form.): IV.6.2: 3 Du 5; 11 Sa 9,10; 15 He 1,3,4,7; 16 Wo 2,4,5,6; 23 Mon 6; 24 Gl [1]; 25 O 5; 32 W 1,3; 33 Brk 1,3,5; 34 Sr [1,4]; 38 Do [4]; 39 Ha [5],6,7; 40 Sx [1,2] V.2.12: 6 Y [24]; 15 He 1,2,3,4,7; 16 Wo 4,5,6; 23 Mon 2,3,6; 24 Gl 1; 31 So 12; 33 Brk [4] V.7.7: 1 Nb [1]; 7 Ch [1,2,6]; 9Nt [1,2]; 10 L [3,4,5,7,8,13]; 11 Sa [5,6,9,11]; 12 St [5,8,11]; 13 Lei [1]; 15 He [1,2,3,4,7]; 16 Wo [3,4,6,7]; 17 Wa [7]; 21 Nf [7]; 23 Mon [4]; 24 Gl [1,5]; 25 O [1,2,3,4,5]; 26 Bk [3]; 29 Ess [12,13]; 32 W [3]; 33 Brk [1,2,3]; 34 Sr [1,2,3]; 35 K [2,5,6]; 37 D [4,6,7,9]; 39 Ha [1,2,4,5,7]; 40 Sx [1,2,3,5,6] VI.2.8: 5 La 6; 8 Db [4,6]; 10 L [8,14]; 16 Wo 2; 25 O 5; 26 Bk [3]; 15 He [7]; 39 Ha 7; 40 Sx [3] VI.3.2: 5 La [4,6,9]; 6 Y [7,8,23]; 11 Sa [9]; 15 He [3,7]; 16 Wo [3,4,6]; 33 Brk [1]; 37 D [7]; 39 Ha 3,[7]; 40 Sx [1,2] VI.4.2: 33 Brk [1,4]; 39 Ha 1,[6]; 25 O 1,[3,6]

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Map 11a: Generalised -s vs. periphrastic do (South-West of England).

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core and peripheral areas of do-usage in the south-western dialects, has been chosen as the base map for Map 11a. In an attempt at a rough quantification of the data, I have included separate symbols for those localities where answers to only one or two SED questionnaire items included the generalised -s marker, and those localities where answers to between three and ten SED questionnaire items contained the -s form. Map 11a gives a very good picture of the geographical distribution of the generalised -s marker in relation to periphrastic do in affirmative declarative sentences. The two constructions (periphrastic do and generalised -s) are in almost total complementary distribution: very few -s forms are recorded in the area where periphrastic do is used, and, similarly, very few periphrastic do forms are recorded in the area where the generalised -s form in found. Furthermore, the overlap between the periphrastic do construction and the generalised -s marker mainly takes place in the areas that are marked as peripheral areas of periphrastic do usage on Map 7. The only exceptions to this are the four Wiltshire localities (32W 1,3,6,7); four Monmouthshire localities (23Mon 2,3,5,6); and three Herefordshire localities (15He 4,5,6), and of these localities, only 32W 3 and 15He 4,5,6 show more than two instances of the -s marker. The fact that the overlap of the two constructions takes place in the peripheral areas of periphrastic do usage and that in the area of overlap -s forms are found in smaller numbers than in the more eastern areas of -s marking, gives support to Ihalainen, who argues that “a transitory belt lies between a prototypical do-area and an s-area, so that one can actually plot the thinning out of the feature concerned” (1991: 290–291). If the suggestion that the area in the South of England where the generalised -s marker is found (Map 11a) represents the area where periphrastic do has previously been used is accepted, i.e. that the change towards standard English type tense and agreement marking proceeds via the generalised -s marker, we may then assume that Map 11a gives an indication of the historical distribution and contraction of periphrastic do in English dialects. This would also support Wakelin’s (1983: 9) guess that “it may well be that the areas [of periphrastic do use] shown on VI.5.11: 5 La [6]; 6 Y [7,8,23,29,30,31,32]; 10 L [6,10]; 15 He 3,4; 16 Wo 4,5; 26 Bk 3; 29 Ess [15]; 33 Brk 5; 34 Sr [3]; 39 Ha 7; 40 Sx [1,3,6] VIII.5.1: 1 Nb [6]; 2 Cu [4,5]; 3 Du [4,5]; 5 La 6; 6 Y [6,7],11,18,[21]; 7 Ch [4]; 8 Db [5]; 9 Nt [1]; 11 Sa [9,10,11]; 12 St [2]; 14 R [2]; 15 He 2,3,[7]; 16 Wo [2,3,4,5],6,7; 17 Wa [2,7]; 24 Gl 1,5; 25 O 1,[2,3,4,6]; 26 Bk 3; 29 Ess [7,14]; 30 MxL [1,2]; 31 So [1,2,12]; 32 W 3,[6,9]; 33 Brk 1,[2],3,4,5; 34 Sr [1,2,3],4,[5]; 35 K [1,2,4]; 36 Co [3]; 37 D [1,2,4,5,7,8]; 39 Ha [1],2,[3,4,5],6,7; 40 Sx [1],2,3,[4],5,[6] VIII.5.2: 6 Y 14; 8 Db 1; 15 He 3; 16 Wo 4,6,7; 23 Mon 5; 24 Gl 1,2,5; 25 O 1; 32 W 9; 33 Brk [1,3],5; 39 Ha 1,3,6,[7]; 40 Sx 5 IX.1.9: 5 La 7; 6 Y 29; 16 Wo 3,5; 32 W 7; 33 Brk 5; 35 K 6; 39 Ha 4,7; 40 Sx 1,[3],5

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the map were once part of a single, larger area bounded by Watling Street”. Interestingly, this area coincides almost perfectly with the classic Moore, Meach and Whitehall (1935) delimitation of south-western dialects in Middle English. Other south-western features that follow this very old dialect boundary include the use of uninflected be and the voicing of initial fricatives (see Wakelin 1983: 6ff.). In Map 11b I have plotted the occurrences of the generalised -s marker in the whole of England. Map 11b gives a clear indication of the fact that the use of the generalised inflection marker -s in the south-western dialects of England is not the same construction as the northern subject rule construction; only scattered instances of the -s marker with pronoun subjects are found in the North of England, whereas in the South-West of England the type of the subject does not play a role in the occurrence in of the -s marker. We know that periphrastic do is a dialect feature which historically has been receding in a westward direction. Thus the clear complementary distribution of the two constructions gives some support to the suggestion which goes back to Elworthy (1886), that when dialect speakers drop the rule from their grammar which allows unstressed periphrastic do in affirmative sentences, the change proceeds via a generalised -s marker construction. In Map 12 I have mapped separately, for the sake of comparison, the answers to those two SED Questionnaire items that contain a full NP subject immediately adjacent to the verb. The two SED Questionnaire items are the following: III.10.7 (Bulls …. bellow.) VIII.7.5 (What do burglars do? They break into houses and …. steal. So you can say: We ordinary people buy the things we need, but …. burglars steal them.) In Map 12 separate symbols are used for those localities where the answer to only one or the other of the two Questionnaire items contained the -s marker and those where the answers to both questions contained the -s marker.17 17 Generalised -s –forms with full NP subjects are found in the following SED localities in the Basic Material. (Square brackets around a locality indicate that the answer to the question does not include an -s form, but the Incidental Material listed under this question does contain a generalised -s form.): III.10.7: 1 Nb 1,[3,4,5,8],9; 2 Cu 2,3,4,5,6; 3 Du 1,2,3,4,5,6; 4 We 1,2,4; 5 La [1],2,[3],4,6,[7], 8,11, [12],13; 6 Y [1],2,3,[4],5,6,[7],8,9,10,[11,12],13,[15,16],17,[18,19],21,22,2 4,[25,26,27],28,[29], 30,[32,33]; 7 Ch 1,[2],6; 8 Db 1,2,3,[4,5]; 9 Nt [2],3,4, 10 L [1],4,5,6, [8],9,10,11,[12], 14,[15]; 11 Sa 6,7,[9]; 14 R [2]; 15 He 7; 16 Wo [4,5,7]; 17 Wa [3],5, 7; 23 Mon [4]; 24 Gl 5; 25 O 1,[4,5,6]; 30 MxL [1]; 31 So 7,12; 32 W [3],6,9; 33 Brk 1,2,[3,4]; 34 Sr [1],2,[3,4,5]; 35 K 1,[2],3,6,7; 36 Co [2,4]; 37 D [1,3],5,[7],8,9,10; 39 Ha 1,2,[4],5,6,7; 40 Sx 1,[2],3,[5]

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Map 11b: Generalised -s in England (full NP subjects excluded).

VIII.7.5: 1 Nb 4; 2 Cu 4,5; 3 Du 2,3,5,6; 4 We 3,4; 5 La 1,3,11,12; 6 Y 2,3,9,12,13,15,19,21,24, 26,31; 8 Db 2,4,5; 9 Nt 3,4; 10 L 2,3,4,5,9,10,13; 11 Sa 2,3,5,6,7,8,9,10,11; 15 He 1,2, 3,4,5,6; 16 Wo 1,2,3,4,5,6,[7]; 23 Mon 1,2,6; 24 Gl 1,2,3; 25 O 1,3,5; 26 Bk 3; 31 So 1; 32 W 9; 33 Brk 2,4,5; 39 Ha 1,2,3,6,7.

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Map 12: Generalised -s in England (full NP subjects only).

Map 12 provides a clear indication that the northern subject rule was alive during the time the SED was conducted; a comparison of Maps 11b and 12 shows clearly that whereas in the northern dialects only scattered examples of -s are found when the subject is a personal pronoun adjacent to the verb, the type of the subject NP (pronoun vs. full NP) does not affect the occurrence of -s in the south-western areas. It must, however, also be pointed out that the fairly large

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number of instances of -s on Map 11b indicates that the northern subject rule is not categorically observed even in the North of England. (Notice however that the violations of the northern subject rule typically occur in Yorkshire and the North Midlands counties to the south of Yorkshire; the counties representing the North proper (Northumbria, Cumbria, Durham, Westmorland) follow the northern subject rule in practically every case.)18

6 Conclusion The main purpose of this chapter has been to try to determine the geographical distribution of periphrastic do in traditional present-day dialects of English. The attempt at delimiting the area where periphrastic do is used in traditional dialects is based both on the published SED Basic Material (Orton et al. 1962–1971) and the unpublished material found in the SED fieldworkers’ notebooks. The few previous attempts at determining the geographical distribution of this feature have been based on a much narrower data base and thus, not surprisingly, they have also led us to believe that the geographical distribution of periphrastic do is much narrower than the present study indicates. Edwards, Trudgill and Weltens (1984: 23), in their survey of English dialect grammar research, discuss the use of do-periphrasis. They point out that some aspects of this construction have not been satisfactorily discussed in the existing literature on dialect grammar. In particular, they (ibid.) list the following aspects of the use of periphrastic do as ‘not clear’: –– its geographical distribution is not clear (cf. Rogers, 1979:  39 and Wakelin 1972a: 120–1), –– several sources seem to limit its use to the present tense, –– sometimes it is not clear whether simple present and past are actually replaced by this periphrastic construction, or whether they exist side by side, with different meanings or not, –– Its habitual meaning is not entirely certain, at least for Herefordshire; it is referred to as “the use of redundant do” (Leeds 1974). It is perfectly possible however that authors have simply failed to observe the difference in aspect.

18 Note, however, that the discussion here is based only on the data published in the SED Northern volume. See Ramisch (2010) and Pietsch (2005: 169–172) for discussions of generalised -s that take into account the mostly unpublished SED ‘incidental material’. For further discussion on the origins of the Northern Subject Rule, see Benskin (2011), de Haas (2011) and Cole (2014).

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The analysis of the SED fieldworker notebook data presented here provides an answer to the first two of the questions set by Edwards, Trudgill and Weltens. The geographical distribution of the use of periphrastic do presented above is based on all the available SED data, and thus represents the situation at the time the Survey of English Dialects was conducted with as much accuracy as we can hope for. The SED data also give some indication that periphrastic do is only used in the present tense in West Cornwall, but that both the present and past tense forms are used elsewhere. The nature of the data (which, as we have seen above, consist of unconnected utterances and utterance fragments) has not allowed me to answer the last two of the questions set by Edwards, Trudgill and Weltens in this chapter.19 I have also been able to demonstrate that the geographical distribution of periphrastic do, at the time when the SED fieldwork was conducted in the 1950s, was more extensive than has earlier been reported. This result illustrates the importance of the unpublished SED materials.

References Barnes, William. 1886 [1970]. A Glossary of the Dorset Dialect with a Grammar of Its Word Shapening and Wording. London: Trübner & Co. and Guernsey: Steven Cox, The Toucan Press.) Benskin, Michael. 2011. Present indicative plural concord in Brittonic and Early English. Transactions of the Philological Society 109: 158–185. Cole, Marcelle. 2014. Old Northumbrian Verbal Morphosyntax and the (Northern) Subject Rule. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Coupland, Nikolas & Alan R. Thomas. 1990. Introduction: Social and linguistic perspectives on English in Wales. In Nikolas Coupland & Alan R. Thomas (eds.), English in Wales: Diversity, Conflict, and Change, 1–18. (Multilingual Matters; 52). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Dieth, Eugen & Harold Orton. 1952. A Questionnaire for a Linguistic Atlas of England. Leeds: Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society. Edwards, V.K., P. Trudgill & B. Weltens. 1984. The Grammar of English Dialect: A Survey of Research. London: Economic and Social Research Council. Ellegård, Alvar. 1953. The Auxiliary DO. The Establishment and Regulation of Its Use in English. (Gothenburg Studies in English. II). Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Ellis, Alexander John. 1889. On Early English Pronunciation. Part V: The Existing Phonology of English Dialects Compared with that of West Saxon Speech. London: Asher & Co. for

19 The semantics of periphrastic do in southwestern dialects of English are discussed in some detail in chapter 4 of Klemola (1996) and in Klemola (1998).

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Index Acle, Norfolk 178 adessive TO 207 African American Vernacular English 19, 142 Agta 156 American English 20, 142, 148, 160–161 Amharic 156 anonymity 111–112 Aritinngithigh 134 Ash, Kent 235 Ashford, Middlesex see suburbs of London augmentation 149–156, 179 Awngthim 134 Aylesham, Kent 74–107 Bath, Somerset 216, 259 BATH-TRAP split 50–55, 60, 88–89, 99 BBC Voices Recordings 230–241 Beccles, Suffolk 164, 171, 176 Beddingham, Sussex 115 Beer, Devon 235–236, 247–250, 255–256 Bepton, Sussex 125–126, 129 Bidjara 134 Binfield Heath, Oxfordshire 250 Blackawton, Devon 242, 247 Blackburn, Lancashire 25–27, 32 Blagdon, Somerset 247, 249–250 Bodmin, Cornwall 238 Boston, Lincolnshire 171, 176 Boughton Monchelsea, Kent 235 Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire 238, 240 Bream, Gloucestershire 249 Bristol 188–223, Cotham, Southmead 238, Knowle West 248, 252 Bungay, Suffolk 178 Burbage, Wiltshire 247 Burwash, Sussex 110, 129, Burwash Wheel 119 Bushey, Hertfordshire see suburbs of London Cam, Gloucestershire 255 Canadian Raising 53–55 Cantonese 157 census, national 21, 23, 26, 40, 44–45, 102fn, 110, 114, 115, 119–120, 126 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110577549-011

change, adaptive 13, evolutive 13 Chawleigh, Devon 236, 242, 248 Cheltenham, Gloucestershire 236, 245 Chinese 157 Cinderford, Gloucestershire 235–237, 246, 248–249, 252 Cirencester, Gloucestershire 235, 240 Clun, Shropshire 255 Coleford, Somerset 247 communities, closed 14, 32, close-knit 32, 80–81, 105, endocentric 14, 32, exocentric 14, 32, high-contact 14, low-contact 25, 32, of practice 12, open 14, 32, proletarian 80–81, 100, 105, speech 12 complexification 15–16, 32 Coningsby, Lincolnshire 171 conjunctions 133, 137–145 Cornish 41 Cornish English 44–55, 69, 274–275 Cornwood, Devon 243 Danny, Sussex 113 Dean, East, Sussex 128 Dean, Forest of 237 definite article, omission of 32, reduction of 92 Devizes, Wiltshire 236–237 dialect, literature 10, 137–144, 179, 191–194, 198, landscape 12, swamping 12, 20–21, 25 Dickens, Charles 179 DO, periphrastic 207, 262–290, in Wales 278–281 Dorchester, Dorset 236, 256 Downham Market, Norfolk 178 Dulverton, Somerset 235, 243, 248–249, 252 Dungeness, Kent 235 Dutch 155 East Anglian English 135–146, 148–183 East Lindsey, Lincolnshire 171 echo 150–151, 154–156 Edwardstone, Suffolk 163

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 Index

ellipsis 133, 145, 152–153 Enfield, Middlesex see suburbs of London English Dialect Society 10, 117 English, Old 164–165 erosion, phonetic 132–145 evolutive see change Evolving English VoiceBank 231–233 Feock, Cornwall 235, 238, 248, 250, 252 Fletching, Sussex 243 focusing 84, 95, 104–105 FOOT-STRUT split 88–91, 100–101 Founder Principle 12, 19–21, 31 Fovant, Wiltshire 247, 249 French 134, 155–156, 181 fricative voicing, word-initial 211 Frisian 149, 164, 181 German 149, 151, 155–156 Gittisham, Devon 236, 246–247, 249 Gloucestershire, South 195–203 grammaticalisation 132, 136–145 Greek 134, 157 Grimsby, Lincolnshire 171, Gwinear, Cornwall 246, 249, 278 H-addition 126 H-dropping 49, 88, 98, 126, absence of 136 H-retention 98fn, 208–209 Halesworth, Suffolk 178fn, 182 Hampstead Norreys, Berkshire 31–32 Harleston, Norfolk 176 Harlington, Bedfordshire 251 Harting, East, Sussex 243, 250 Hemyock, Devon 237, 243, 248, 250 Herstmonceux, Sussex 110 Higher Ansty, Dorset 250 hine 251–253 Horam, Sussex 248 Horsington, Somerset 247, 249–250 Hungarian 156 Hunstun, Sussex 122 Hurstpierpoint, Sussex 113 Ilminster, Somerset 255 industrialisation 23–24, East Kent coal 75–77, 81–85

Inkpen, Berkshire 251 interjections 149 Ipswich, Suffolk 163, 171, 176 Irstead, Norfolk 171 Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire 160, 163, 168, 171, 176 Isles of Scilly 40–43 isolation 16, 23, 47, 77, 80, 99, 107, 114 Italian 134 Ixworth, Suffolk 163 Japanese 151fn, 156 Kannada 157 Kenn, Devon 243 Keynsham, Somerset 212 Kilkhampton, Cornwall 248, 251 King’s Lynn 173 Kingston, Dorset 250 Kirton, Lincolnshire 170, 172 Latin 134, 156, 165 Lavant, Sussex 120–122 Leeds, Yorkshire 255 Lewes, Sussex 235, 240, 243 levelling 31, 95, 104 Leiston, Suffolk 164 Little Downham, Cambridgeshire 172 Liverpool 17, 196 London 20, 23, 25, 30, East 241, Hackney 240, Marylebone 240 Lowestoft, Suffolk 135, 164, 171, 178 Luthigh 134 Luton, Bedfordshire 255 L, Bristol 211–222, vocalisation 88, 126, clear/dark 98, 214–215 Maiden Newton, Dorset 235–236, 248, 250, 252 Mawla, Cornwall 235–236, 238, 249–250, 252, 256 Mbiywom 134 Merriott, Somerset 248–249 Merton, Devon 236 Middlesbrough 26–29, 32 Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire 33, 94–96, 255 Mullion, Cornwall 278

Index 

network density 80, uniplex 96 Newbury, Vermont, USA 173 Newport, Wales 237 New Zealand English 20, 33, 95, 104, 106 Norwich, Norfolk 172–173, 176 Nowton, Suffolk 164 Otley, Suffolk 163 Parracombe, Devon 242, 247, 249 Paston Letters 180 Pennsylvania, USA 20 Penzance, Cornwall 234–236 Petersfield, Hampshire 126 Peter Tavy, Devon 243 Plymouth, Devon 235, 256 polarity 144–145, 153–154 Poole, Dorset 238 Postbridge, Devon 235–236, 243–244, 247–248, 250–252 prestige 101, 106, 257 Preston Bissett, Buckinghamshire 31–32 practice, communities of see communities pronoun exchange 206–207, 245–250 Puluwatese 134 Purley, Berkshire 240 questions, negative 150, 154–155 R-dropping 91, 177 Reading, Berkshire 240 Redhill, Surrey 240–241 reduction, phonetic see erosion reduplication 155 Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire see suburbs of London Rhode Island, USA 178 rhoticity 47, 49, 97–98, 211 Rodbourne, Wiltshire 237 Rollesby, Norfolk 176 Runcton, North, Norfolk 173 -s, present-tense 282–289 Scillonian English 46–60, perceptions of 56–68 Selmeston, Sussex 115 Sherborne, Gloucestershire 247

 295

Sidley, Sussex 114 simplification 14–16, cluster 126, 133, 177 Sixpenny Handley 248–250 Shirehampton, Gloucestershire 195 Slimbridge, Gloucestershire 248–249 Somerset 195–203 South Mimms, Hertfordshire see suburbs of London Southwold, Suffolk 170–172 St Buryan, Cornwall 278 St Ewe, Cornwall 251, 278 Stapleton, Gloucestershire 198 Steeple Ashton, Wiltshire 247, 249–250 Stewkley, Buckinghamshire 248 Stoke St Gregory, Somerset 249 Stow on the Wold, Gloucestershire 197 stress-timedness 135–136 suburbs of London, Ashford 30, 32, Bushey 30, 32, Enfield 31–32, Rickmansworth 31, South Mimms 30, Willesden 31–32 Sudbury, Suffolk 164 Sutton, Sussex 251 Sutton Benger, Wiltshire 247–248 Swahili 157 swamping see dialect Swanton Morley, Norfolk 173 Swardeston, Norfolk 172 Swedish 155 Swindon, Wiltshire 235–237 T-glottalling, lack of 88–98 TH-fronting 210–211, absence of 88 TH-stopping 211 Tillingham, Essex 255 Tingewick, Buckinghamshire 247 Tongan 134 TRAP-BATH split see BATH-TRAP split Trowbridge, Wiltshire 238 Truro, Cornwall 238–239 Uffington, Berkshire 248 univerbation 139, 156 Vermont, USA 173, 178

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 Index

Walsham, North, Norfolk 182 Walton Highway, Cambridgeshire 171 Warleggan, Cornwall 235, 238, 248–250 Warnham, Sussex 243 Weare Giffard, Devon 247–249 Wedmore, Somerset 249 Wells next the Sea 173 Westbury on Trym, Gloucestershire 195–196, 204 Whitchurch Canonicorum, Dorset 278 Whiteshill, Gloucestershire 247 Whitwell, Isle of Wight 248–249, 251 Widecombe in the Moor, Devon 236, 242, 247, 249 Wight, Isle of 64, 166, 243, 249, 251, 263, 265

Willesden, Middlesex see suburbs of London Wilmcote, Warwickshire 254 Winterton on Sea, Norfolk 173 Wisbech, Cambridgeshire 172 Withypool, Somerset 248, 250 Wool, Dorset 235–236, 247–250, 252, 256 Wootton Courtenay, Somerset 249 Worlingworth, Suffolk 164 Worthing, Sussex 240 -y, infinitive intransitive suffix 234–236 Yarmouth, Great, Norfolk 178 Yeovil, Somerset 243 Yinwum 134 Zeal, South, Devon 247, 249