Unit 1

DIALECTS

Trudgill, Peter. 1994. Dialects. London and New York: Routledge.
ISBN: 0-415-09038-5

Contents

USING THIS BOOK

Studying English Dialects
Posh and Less Posh Dialects
English in many Shapes and Forms
Dialects -- the Old and the New
Dialect Maps
What Dialect Maps Can Tell Us
How Dialect Boundaries Get to Be Where They Are
Spot Your Dialect Area
Present-Tense Verbs
Different Dialects, Different Grammar
Dialect Grammar -- the Old and New
Overdoing Things

FURTHER READING
ANSWERS TO EXERCISES

USING THIS BOOK

(Trudgill, Dialects: 1994, vii)
This book covers a number of key issues in the field of dialectology, and involves readers actively in exploring them - in collecting data, in discovering patterns, and in thinking about general principles. It is intended for beginners who know only as much about dialects as any citizen does (i.e. a great deal), and it keeps the linguistic analysis of the data at the lowest possible level of technicality. If it is successful, readers should acquire a taste for doing dialectology; they should 'learn by doing', and be able to carry out themselves, in a modest and elementary way, the sorts of activities that academic linguists and dialectologists perform in their professional work.

The book is designed in the first instance for use in classes, and some of the suggested activities will involve the whole class. However much of the work can also be done individually, so the book could also be used by an individual working alone. It is also aimed primarily at users in the United Kingdom, since all the examples are taken from British dialects of English.

Each chapter consists of a short discussion of general principles applied to some data, followed by a number of exercises. To get the full benefit of the book it is essential to try at least some of the exercises. The exercises are of two types: those for which data are provided, and those which require readers to find their own data. The first type provide the skills you need to analyse data, and model answers are provided at the back of the book. The second type take more time, but will be correspondingly more interesting, because readers will learn to apply the general principles to their own experience.

Readers whose appetites are sufficiently whetted to take the study of dialects further will find helpful pointers for further reading at the end of the book. Dialectology is a fascinating subject to read about, but it is one of the intentions of this book to show that it can be even more enjoyable to do.

1. Studying English Dialects

(Trudgill, Dialects: 1994, pp. 1-4)

Like all languages, English is very varied. It comes in many different regional and social varieties. All these varieties are linguistically equivalent. No variety of the language is linguistically superior to any other.

Some English words:
sidewalk, chiyack
rone, ashet, faucet
sophomore, dreich

We are very used to talking about our language as if it were a single, clearly defined entity: the English Language. Looked at in one way, this is only sensible, particularly when we think of the written language. English is a language which has its own literature, its own grammar books, and its own dictionaries. It is also a language which is quite clearly not French, not German, not Chinese -- or any other language. To talk about the English language does actually mean something.
This view of English can be rather misleading, though. It is equally sensible, looked at in another way, to claim that there is no such thing as the English language, if by that we were to mean that there was only one way to speak or write English. The point is that English -- like all other languages -- comes in many different forms, particularly when we think of the spoken language -- and in this book we are concentrating on spoken English. Anyone can tell that the English of the British Isles is different from the English of the United States or Australia. The English of England is clearly different from the English of Scotland or Wales. The English of Lancashire is noticeably different from the English of Northumberland or Kent. And the English of Liverpool is not the same as the English of Manchester. There is very considerable regional variation within the English language as it is spoken in different parts of the British Isles and different parts of the world. The fact is that the way you speak English has a lot to do with where you are from -- where you grew up and first learnt your language. If you grew up in Liverpool, your English will be different from the English of Manchester, which will in turn be different from the English of London, and so on.
Where you are from, of course, will not be the only thing which influences how you speak. People speak different kinds of English depending on what kind of social background they come from so that some Liverpool speakers may be 'more Liverpudlian' than others, and some Manchester people may be easier to identify as Mancunians than others. Some speakers may even be so 'posh' that it is not possible to tell where they come from at all (we shall discuss this further in Unit 2).

Dialect:

(Trudgill, Dialects: 1994, p. 2)
These social and geographical kinds of language are known as DIALECTS. Dialects, then, have to do with a speaker's social and geographical origins -- and we are talking here about all speakers. It is important to emphasise that everybody speaks a dialect. Dialects are not peculiar or old-fashioned or rustic ways of speaking. They are not something which only other people have. Just as everybody comes from somewhere and has a particular kind of social background, so everybody -- including you -- speaks a dialect. Your dialect is the particular combination of English words, pronunciations and grammatical forms that you share with other people from your area and your social background, and that differs in certain ways from the combination used by people from other areas and backgrounds.
It is also important to point out that none of these combinations -- none of these dialects -- is linguistically superior in any way to any other. We may as individuals be rather fond of our own dialect. This should not make us think, though, that it is actually any better than any other dialect. Dialects are not good or bad, nice or nasty, right or wrong -- they are just different from one another, and it is the mark of a civilised society that it tolerates different dialects just as it tolerates different races, religions and sexes. American English is not better -- or worse -- than British English. The dialect of BBC news-readers is not linguistically superior to the dialect of Bristol dockers or Suffolk farmworkers. There is nothing you can do or say in one dialect that you cannot do or say in another dialect.

Dialectologist:

(Trudgill, Dialects: 1994, pp. 2-3)
Scientists who study dialects--DIALECTOLOGISTS--start from the assumption that all dialects are linguistically equal. (We will discuss the issue of social equality in Unit 3.) What dialectologists are interested in are differences between dialects. The task of dialectologists is to describe different dialects, to note differences between them, and importantly, to try and explain how these differences came about. We shall be looking at different aspects of the dialectologist's work in subsequent units.
Most people who have grown up somewhere in the English-speaking world are already rather good English dialectologists, even if they have never studied English dialectology. During our lives, we become familiar with a wider and wider range of varieties of English and are usually able to tell quite a lot about a person we meet for the first time simply from the way they speak. Their words, grammar and pronunciation tell us things about their regional and social background. In the following exercises, you are asked to say what you can about the origins of the texts in question.

EXERCISES
(Trudgill, Dialects: 1994, pp. 3-4)

1.1 What is the regional origin of the following poem? [ANSWER]
The wuid-reek melts wi the winter haar
And aa the birds are gane;
They're burnan the leaves, the treen are bare,
December rules a dour domain.

The wuid-reek draws a memorie
Frae some far neuk in the brain
When I was a loun and hadna loed
And never kent the world's bane.

Och, burn the leaves and burn the branch
And burn the holly treen!
O winter, burn the hairt I want -
And syne burn mine again!

1.2 What is the regional origin of the following passage? Make a list of the words and spellings which led you to make this identification. [ANSWER]
She must have felt me staring at her, for she turned around, and her eyes, which were an astonishing color, now looked at me with an open small-town concern. And now I realized the detective had seen me chatting with nothing less than a blonde. We stepped into a squad car, the siren was turned on, and we drove to an exit, and then turned back to the apartment. By the time we arrived, there were two more squad cars in the street. Our silence continued as we rode up in the elevator, and when we got to the apartment, a few more detectives and a few more police were standing around. There was a joyless odor in the air.

1.3 What is the regional origin of the following passage? Make a list of the features which led you to make this identification. [ANSWER]

I've lost my pal, 'e's the best in all the tahn,
But don't you fink 'im dead, becos 'e ain't.
But since he's wed, 'e 'as ter nuckle dahn,
It's enough ter vex the temper of a saint.
E's a brewer's drayman, wiv a leg of mutton fist,
An' as strong as a builick or an horse.
Yet in 'er 'ands 'e's like a little kid,
Oh! I wish as I could get him a divorce.

1.4 The following words mean different things in American and British English. Find out what the differences are: [ANSWER]
nervy, scrappy, pavement, homely, momentarily, cheap

1.5 The following English words have at least two different pronunciations in different varieties of the language. Say what they are:

dance, butter, bath, off, card, head, plant, one, supper, girl

1.6 Watch an American TV programme, for example a comedy or crime show, and an Australian TV programme, for example a soap opera, and make a note of all the words and expressions which strike you as being distinctively American and Australian. Discuss these words and expressions.