Example 4
Rob : This wheel’s completely disjaskit.
Alan : I might could get it changed.
Rob : You couldn’t do nothing of the sort. It needs dumped.
This conversation between two Geordies (people from Tyneside in England) is likely to per- plex many English speakers. The double modal might could is typical Geordie, though it is also heard in some parts of the southern USA. The expression needs dumped is also typical Tyneside, though also used in Scotland, as is the vocabulary item disjasket , meaning ‘worn out’ or
‘completely ruined’. The way English is pronounced is also quite distinctive in Tyneside, and perhaps especially the intonation patterns. Because they like the speech heard in television programmes such as Auf Wiedersehen Pet , Byker Grove and Joe Maddison’s War , some people can imitate the tune of Geordie speech – if nothing else. We are dealing here not just with different accents but with dialect differences within a country, since the distinguishing forms involve grammatical usages and lexical items as well as pronunciation.
Regional variation takes time to develop. British and US English, for instance, provide much more evidence of regional variation than New Zealand or Australian English. Dialectologists can distinguish regional varieties for almost every English county, e.g. Yorkshire, Lancashire, Northumberland, Somerset, Cornwall and so on, and for many towns too. Some British
dialects, such as Scouse (heard in Liverpool), Cockney and Geordie, even have distinct names showing how signifi cant they are in distinguishing groups from one another. Within the London area, the Cockney dialect is quite distinctive with its glottal stop [c] instead of [t]
between vowels in words like bitter and butter , and its rhyming slang: e.g. apples and pears for
‘stairs’, lean and lurch for ‘church’, the undoubtedly sexist trouble and strife for ‘wife’ and the more ambiguous cows and kisses for ‘the missus’.
In the USA, too, dialectologists can identify distinguishing features of the speech of people from different regions. Northern, Midland and Southern are the main divisions, and within those three areas a number of further divisions can be made. Different towns and even parts of towns can be distinguished. Within the Midland area, for example, the Eastern States can be distinguished; and within those the Boston dialect is different from that of New York City; and within New York City, Brooklynese is quite distinctive. The Linguistic Atlas Projects ( http://us.english.uga.edu/ ) provide a rich source of information on the features of pro nunciation, grammar and vocabulary which distinguish different US dialects. In the rural Appalachians, one can hear pronunciations such as acrosst and clifft , as well as verbs with a -prefi xes, such as a-fi shin’ and a-comin’ . Words for dragonfl y in the Eastern States include darning needle , mosquito hawk , spindle , snake feeder , snake doctor and snake waiter , but of these only darning needle is used in New York. From darning needle , however, New York has developed two new variants dining needle and diamond needle . (It becomes diffi cult at this point to remember that these are all names for an insect not a sewing implement!)
In areas where English has been introduced more recently, such as Australia and New Zealand, there seems to be less regional variation – though there is evidence of social variation. The high level of intra-national communication, together with the relatively small populations, may have inhibited the development of marked regional differences in these countries. In New Zealand, for instance, there are greater differences among the Maori dialects than within English, refl ecting the longer period of settlement and more restricted means of communication between people from different Maori tribes before European settlers arrived. Maori pronunci- ation of words written with an initial wh , for example, differs from one place to another. The Maori word for ‘fi sh’ is ika in most areas but ngohi in the far North, and kirikiri refers to ‘gravel’
in the west but ‘sand’ in the east of New Zealand. There are many more such differences.
Exercise 3
Can you guess what the following words and phrases mean?
They are all words collected from regional dialects of British English. A good British English dialect dictionary will provide information about their meanings and where they are used.
(a) snowblossom
(b) time for our snap
(c) mask the tea
(d) the place was all frousted
(e) clinker bells
(f) a great mawther
(g) I’m really stalled
(h) a bairn
(i) an effet
(j) I’ll fill up your piggy, it’s time for bed Answers at end of chapter
Figure 6.1 is a map of England showing where different dialect words are used for the standard English word splinter . The boundary lines are called isoglosses . This is just one word out of thousands of linguistic features which vary in different dialects, and which were documented by Harold Orton’s comprehensive Survey of English Dialects in the 1950s. When all the informa- tion on linguistic regional variation is gathered together on a map, with isoglosses drawn between areas where different vocabulary, or grammatical usages or pronunciations occur, the result looks something like a spider’s web. Some of the web’s lines are thicker than others because a number of boundaries between features coincide. But there is also a great deal of overlap between areas. The line between an area where people use [a] rather than [a:] in a word like path , for example, does not coincide with the line which separates areas using have you any sugar? rather than have you got any sugar? Areas which use the word elevenses rather than snap or snack do not all use different words for brew or snowfl ake or manure or
Figure 6.1 Words for splinter in English dialects
Source : Trudgill (1994: 21).