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21505 results in English language and linguistics: general interest

Page 318 of 1076

  • 3 - Language change: observing and accepting it

  • Peter Trudgill, Universitetet i Agder, Norway
  • Book:
    Dialect Matters
    Published online:
    05 August 2016
    Print publication:
    04 August 2016, pp 44-53

  • Summary

    Changes in language – in pronunciation, grammar and word-meaning – are inevitable and unstoppable. They are also a little mysterious. All languages change through time, but it is not easy to say why. It seems simply to be a built-in characteristic of human languages that they change. This is fascinating, but it can also be disturbing. This section of the book is devoted to arguing that we should prefer to be fascinated by linguistic change rather than be disturbed by it.

    Fing and bruvver

    Right now is a very exciting time to be doing research on the English language. All languages change: if you heard Shakespeare, you would find him hard to understand; and if we had recordings of Anglo-Saxon, you would not understand it at all. The sounds of English have changed enormously over time.

    Why is this? We do not really know. It is just an inherent characteristic of human languages that they change. We do not fully understand how changes take place, either, so when we do have a chance to observe a change as it is happening, that is exciting. It is too late to observe how the change from Chaucer's “k-nicht” – his way of saying knight – to our “nite” happened; but here in England we can now very happily study, while it happens, a fascinating new change involving the two th sounds, as in thigh and thy. Older Norfolk people will have noticed that many younger people no longer have these sounds. They replace them with f and v, as in fing and bruvver.

    When sounds fall together like this, it is technically called a merger. This particular merger is known as TH-fronting. It started in London around 1850 and had spread to Bristol by 1870. It was reported in Reading around 1950, Norwich in 1960, Hull 1970 and Glasgow 1980. There is a clear pattern of geographical spread: it has not arrived in Liverpool yet, but it probably will.

    Some people are not as excited about TH-fronting as I am. They complain about it. They are part of the venerable Complaint Tradition which is repeated in every generation: older people hear youngsters speaking differently and object.

    There is nothing wrong with TH-fronting, however. Nothing terrible comes of it.

  • 10 - Grammar: the wonder of it all

  • Peter Trudgill, Universitetet i Agder, Norway
  • Book:
    Dialect Matters
    Published online:
    05 August 2016
    Print publication:
    04 August 2016, pp 151-162

  • Summary

    This section continues the discussion of grammar, but concentrates more on grammatical processes and categories, and how they differ between different language varieties.

    What is your evidence?

    What a pity that some people in this country think that grammar is something to get worried or indignant about. Grammar is a magnificent and exciting and wonderful thing. To see it reduced to the mundane level of letters to the press complaining that people say sat rather than sitting is depressing, as is Mr Gove testing our children by instructing them to “Complete the sentence below using either I or me: My team and ____ are playing next week.” Obviously he thinks the “correct” answer is I, which I agree is not wrong; but it is certainly not so common in that context as the equally correct me.

    All languages and dialects have their own special grammars. Over the millennia, human minds and societies have produced a range of amazing grammatical phenomena. I wonder if Mr Gove knows that many languages have two different pronouns corresponding to English we? This is very sensible, because we is ambiguous. If I tell you that “We've got great tickets for Carrow Road for Saturday”, you might get excited until it turns out that the “we” is me and my wife, and not me and you. (Mr Gove would mark me wrong for that last sentence.)

    And what about verbs? English verbs are not particularly interesting. If you start from the basic form move, you can use the grammatical endings we call morphemes to produce the forms moving, moved and moves (except in Norfolk, where we don't even trouble ourselves about the latter). And that's it.

    But in other languages there are verb morphemes which do all sorts of fascinating things. In the Californian language Pomo, there is a grammatical prefix f- which means ‘with the side of a long object’. It would be rather fun, I think, to be able to say “I fmoved it” in English.

    And many languages have morphemes we call evidentials. These are compulsorily attached to verbs to show what your evidence is for saying something. They mean things like ‘I know because someone told me’ or ‘I saw it’ or ‘I assume’.

  • 8 - Sounds and fury

  • Peter Trudgill, Universitetet i Agder, Norway
  • Book:
    Dialect Matters
    Published online:
    05 August 2016
    Print publication:
    04 August 2016, pp 122-133

  • Summary

    This section is concerned with pronunciation. Linguistic scientists discuss the subject of pronunciation using the terms phonetics, which is the study of the way in which human beings produce speech sounds, and phonology, which is the study of the way in which speech sounds are organised and used in different languages to make the contrasts which distinguish between one word and another. This section, then, is necessarily occupied with the topic of accents. Everybody has an accent, because your accent is the way you pronounce your language, and you cannot speak without pronouncing!

    Your accent normally goes together with your dialect – where dialect consists not only of your pronunciation but also of the words and grammatical forms you use – so if you speak Norfolk dialect, you naturally speak it with a Norfolk accent. But it is also possible and normal to speak the Standard English dialect with a local accent, which is what I do when I am giving a university lecture – I use Standard English grammar, but I speak in my native local Norfolk accent.

    There is a small minority of people in Britain, however – especially in England – who do not have a local accent. These people are not only native speakers of Standard English, but also speak with what is called the RP accent – which is the topic of the first article. My main message in this section is that all accents are worthy of respect, and that no accents are lazy, inferior, wrong or ugly.

    Well-spoken?

    There are a few people in England who are not fortunate enough to have a regional accent. They include many of the men who are currently in charge of the nation. David William Donald Cameron, George Gideon Oliver Osborne, Nicholas William Peter Clegg and Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson all have the misfortune of not seeming to come from anywhere in particular at all when they speak English. You can tell they hail from England, rather than Ireland or Canada or New Zealand. But that's about it. They are nowhere men.

    This is because their parents paid large sums of money – £30,000 a year for Eton, currently – for them to go to schools for deracinated upper-class people where they, quite naturally, came to speak like all the other deracinated upper-class pupils.

  • 5 - Head Movement

  • Andrew Radford
  • Book:
    Analysing English Sentences
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    04 August 2016, pp 245-316

  • Summary

    Overview

    So far, we have examined a range of syntactic structures which are derived by a series of Merge operations. In the next three chapters, we go on to look at structures whose derivation involves not only Merge but also a range of different types of movement operation. In this chapter, we focus on a specific type of movement operation called Head Movement whereby the head of one phrase moves to become the head of the phrase immediately above it. We focus mainly on two specific types of Head Movement operation – one which affects auxiliaries in present-day English, and another which affected main verbs in earlier stages of English. In addition, we also look briefly at how Head Movement can apply to nouns.

    Auxiliary Inversion

    English has a number of structures (illustrated below) in which we find a phenomenon which is widely referred to as Subject-Auxiliary Inversion/SAI:

    (1)

  • (a)What time will the guests arrive at the hotel?

  • (b)Under no circumstances would the president accept a bribe

  • (c)So quickly have the flames spread that the firefighters are losing control of the fire

    • In each of these examples, in front of the (underlined) subject we find a (bold-printed) auxiliary, and in front of the auxiliary is an italicised constituent which is an interrogative phrase (what time) in (1a), a negative phrase (under no circumstances) in (1b), and a degree phrase (so quickly) in (1c). What is unusual about this is that subjects are normally positioned in spec-TP and auxiliaries in T (as we saw in Chapter 3), and hence an (underlined) subject would normally precede an associated (bold-printed) auxiliary, as in:

    (2)

  • (a) The guests will arrive at the hotel

  • (b) The president would not accept a bribe under any circumstances

  • (c) The flames have spread so quickly that the firefighters are losing control of the fire

    • If we make the reasonable assumption that the underlined subjects in (1) are in the same spec-TP position as they occupy in (2), this means that both the bold-printed auxiliary in (1) and the italicised interrogative or negative phrase preceding it must be contained in some projection positioned above TP.

  • 7 - Respecting ordinary language

  • Peter Trudgill, Universitetet i Agder, Norway
  • Book:
    Dialect Matters
    Published online:
    05 August 2016
    Print publication:
    04 August 2016, pp 104-121

  • Summary

    This section again argues for the legitimacy and value of vernacular language, as the previous section did with respect to grammar, but here I attempt to do this with respect to the normal everyday usage of words and phrases. In particular, I argue against the use of the form of business-school terminology which is intended to commodify more or less everything. And I attempt to point out the value of discourse markers such as well and like. One problem that English-speaking people have is that most of us know very little about our language because we have not been taught very much about it at school; but we are particularly ill-informed about the nature of our spoken language. So much more attention is focussed on written English that many essential features of the spoken language can easily be thought of as aberrations. In fact, we spend so very much more of our lives speaking than writing that, if anything, it is the written form of the language which is aberrant.

    Well

    When we were about 6 years old, there was a joke which we thought was very funny: “Have you heard about the three deep holes? Well, well, well … ”.

    I agree it is not very amusing, but a correspondent to the EDP seems not even to have heard of it. He is “irritated beyond bounds”, poor chap, by the continuous use of the word well at the start of “almost every report on the news”. He wants the word to be banned, unless it applies to a person's state of health, or a hole in the ground which supplies water. He does not say how he will set about enforcing this ban; I suppose a short prison-sentence for any offending journalist might work.

    But he has completely missed the point about the important role words like well play in English, or in any language. They are called discourse markers, and they have very important functions. There are rules about how to use them which we all know, even if we do not know we know them. You can sometimes hear foreigners using well incorrectly because they do not know what the rules are.

  • Preface

  • Andrew Radford
  • Book:
    Analysing English Sentences
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    04 August 2016, pp xi-xvi

  • Summary

    Overview

    This book has grown out of a substantial reworking of my Analysing English Sentences book published by Cambridge University Press in 2009, which itself was a reworking of my Minimalist Syntax book published in 2004. Feedback from teachers, students and reviewers led me to make substantial changes to numerous parts of the text and exercises, and to add new chapters, exercises and references: details of the most substantial revisions are given below. This new book has three main aims. The first is to provide an intensive introduction to key background assumptions in syntactic theory, to how the syntactic component of a grammar works, and to the argumentation and critical evaluation skills which underlie contemporary work in syntax. The second is to provide a description of a range of phenomena in English syntax, making use of the theoretical concepts and constructs introduced in the book. The third is (through the extensive exercise material in the book) to enable readers to gain experience in devising analyses of specific phenomena, and in critically evaluating the theoretical and descriptive strengths and weaknesses of competing analyses.

    Key features

    The book is intended to be suitable for people with little (if any) grammatical knowledge and/or experience of linguistics; it is aimed at intermediate undergraduates, or graduates in the first year of a Masters programme. It is not historicist or comparative in orientation and does not presuppose knowledge of earlier or alternative models of grammar. It is written in an approachable style, avoiding unnecessary complexity and unexplained jargon. Each chapter contains

  • • a core text (divided up into ten sections or so) focusing on a specific topic

  • • a summary recapitulating the main points in the chapter

  • • a list of key concepts/principles introduced in the chapter

  • • a bibliographical section providing extensive references to original source material

  • • a workbook section containing two (or more) different kinds of exercise

  • • a set of model answers accompanying the exercises, together with extensive helpful hints designed to eliminate common errors students make and to help students whose native language is not English

  • • an extensive glossary and integral list of abbreviations.

Analysing English Sentences
  • 2nd edition
  • Andrew Radford
  • Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    04 August 2016
  • Andrew Radford has acquired an unrivalled reputation over the past thirty years for writing syntax textbooks in which difficult concepts are clearly explained without the excessive use of technical jargon. Analysing English Sentences continues in this tradition, offering a well-structured introduction to English syntax and contemporary syntactic theory which is supported throughout with learning aids such as summaries, lists of key hypotheses and principles, extensive references, handy hints and exercises. Instructors will also benefit from the book's free online resources, which include PowerPoint slides of chapter key points and analyses of exercise material, as well as an answer key for all the in-book exercises. This second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated throughout, including additional exercises and an entirely new chapter on exclamative and relative clauses. Assuming no prior knowledge of grammar, this is an approachable introduction to the subject for undergraduate and graduate students.

  • 13 - Accent rules

  • Peter Trudgill, Universitetet i Agder, Norway
  • Book:
    Dialect Matters
    Published online:
    05 August 2016
    Print publication:
    04 August 2016, pp 186-195

  • Summary

    This section discusses features of our local accents, together with their history, and the ways in which these features have spread from one accent to another. The section stresses that all accents have their own rules and regularities; and that local pronunciations of particular vowels and consonants should not be considered to be “bad” or “ugly” or “wrong”: judgements of this type are always social in origin and have no basis in linguistic fact.

    In New England

    If you look at a map of New England, the region of the northeastern USA which consists of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont, you can see that people from Norfolk and northern Suffolk must have played a big role in the settlement of the area. New England is full of towns with names like Attleboro, Brandon, Burnham, Framingham, Haverhill, Hingham, Lynn, Newmarket, Norfolk, Norwich, Rockland, Thetford, Walpole, Windham, Wolcott and Yarmouth. Some of these names occur more than once: there is a Windham in New York, a Windham in Vermont and a Windham in Connecticut; and there is a Norwich in Connecticut, and another one in Vermont.

    Puritanism was a big thing in seventeenth-century East Anglia, and the Pilgrim Fathers included plenty of migrants who would have been EDP readers if there had been such a thing at the time. So you would think, then, wouldn't you, that there would be at least a trace of our local Norfolk and Suffolk dialects in the way people speak over there today, even allowing for the fact that nearly 400 years have passed since the arrival of the Mayflower in North America?

    There are a number of distinctive features in the speech of the people of eastern New England which distinguish them from other Americans. One of these is a pronunciation which American dialectologists call “the New England short o”. This refers to a short pronunciation of words like home, stone and road which is not found anywhere else in the USA. Americans represent this pronunciation by writing ‘hum’, ‘stun’, ‘rud’.

    Don't you think this sounds rather like something you can hear any day walking around Norwich market? People with truly local accents in our part of the world also pronounce home, stone and road with a short vowel.

  • Themes

  • Peter Trudgill, Universitetet i Agder, Norway
  • Book:
    Dialect Matters
    Published online:
    05 August 2016
    Print publication:
    04 August 2016, pp xviii-xx

  • Summary

    I often refer in these columns to the following local Norfolk themes and topics.

    Norwich City Football Club makes frequent appearances: the club and the team are supported in the EDP circulation area by very many more than the 27,000 or so spectators who turn out to watch them at every home game at the Carrow Road ground, and who represent just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to local interest and concern about how “City” are getting on. I mention Norwich Market rather often: this is said to be the largest permanent open-air market in England (it runs six days a week), and has been on the present site, in the heart of the city, since the eleventh century; I always think of the market as being the heart of working-class Norwich. See www.visitnorwich.co.uk/shopping/shops/listing/norwich-market.

    Radio Norfolk also makes several appearances: this is our local BBC Radio Station, one of the most successful in England, with a weekly listenership of about 200,000.

    FOND is the Friends of Norfolk Dialect organisation, which was founded in 1999, with Keith Skipper as one of the prime movers: the society is dedicated to conserving and recording Norfolk's priceless linguistic heritage, to engendering positive attitudes to the dialect and to keeping the dialect alive. See www.norfolkdialect.com/index.htm.

    The “Boy John” letters, which are cited a number of times, were written to and published in the EDP between 1946 and 1958. Sidney Grapes, their author, was the proprietor of a bicycle shop, later a garage and motor business, in Potter Heigham, in the Broads area of eastern Norfolk. In the years before World War II, he acquired a reputation as an amateur Norfolk dialect comedian, performing at social functions in many parts of the county and on the radio. His highly entertaining letters appeared in the newspaper at irregular intervals – Grapes would simply write them when he felt like it – and they were always signed “The Boy John”. They are a work of not a little genius, and are a brilliant and accurate representation of the Norfolk dialect of his time.

    Thorpe is the eastern Norwich suburb where I was born and grew up. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorpe_St_Andrew.

  • 7 - A-bar Movement

  • Andrew Radford
  • Book:
    Analysing English Sentences
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    04 August 2016, pp 386-477

  • Summary

    Overview

    syntax of Wh-Movement in interrogative clauses. In this chapter we will see that there are other types of clause which can be argued to involve Wh-Movement, including exclamative and relative clauses. In addition, we will look briefly at a number of other movement operations (including Neg-Movement, Deg-Movement, Top-Movement and Foc-Movement) which have in common with Wh-Movement that they move a constituent into spec-CP. We will see that these different kinds of movement operation are specific instances of a more general type of movement operation known as A-bar Movement (because it moves a constituent into an A-bar position like spec-CP – i.e. a position which is opaque/invisible to agreement and anaphor binding). This chapter also serves a second function of exposing you to alternative analyses that have been proposed for the syntax of relative clauses, and you'll become familiar with the ways in which analyses are refined in the light of new data, and with the kinds of argumentation which linguists use to evaluate alternative analyses. In the exercises, you'll have a chance to practise your analysis, argumentation and evaluation skills in relation to competing analyses of a range of types of relative clause.

    Wh-exclamatives

    In addition to wh-questions like those discussed in the previous chapter, English also has wh-exclamatives (i.e. wh-clauses used as exclamations). In the same way as wh-questions begin with an interrogative wh-word or wh-phrase, so too wh-exclamatives begin with an exclamative wh-word (like how in 1a below, or what in 1c) or an exclamative wh-phrase (like how very strange in 1b and what big feet in 1d):

    (1)

  • (a) How he longed to see her again!

  • (b) How very strange her behaviour was!

  • (c) What I would give for a drink!

  • (d) What big feet you have!

    • Like their wh-question counterparts, wh-exclamatives can also serve as embedded clauses – as in the case of the clauses bracketed below:

    (2)

  • (a) You wouldn't believe [what a great time we had]

  • (b) It's amazing [how very fond of his grandmother he is]

    • However, wh-exclamatives have a number of characteristic properties which differentiate them from wh-questions. Let's look at some of these.

  • 5 - Languages and dialects in contact and conflict

  • Peter Trudgill, Universitetet i Agder, Norway
  • Book:
    Dialect Matters
    Published online:
    05 August 2016
    Print publication:
    04 August 2016, pp 73-89

  • Summary

    In this section I look at contact: contact between people speaking different languages, and contact between people speaking different dialects. I examine the use of certain languages as lingua francas – that is, as languages of wider communication in multilingual situations. I also discuss issues to do with minority languages and dialects, including language conflict; and I explore different facets of bilingualism – the use of two languages – and bidialectism – the use of two dialects.

    Julius and Cleopatra

    A lot of people know that, as Julius Caesar was being stabbed to death, he turned to his friend Brutus, who was one of the assassins, and said Et tu, Brute?, the Latin for ‘And you, Brutus?’, or ‘What, you too?’

    A lot of people know this, because those were the words put into Caesar's mouth by William Shakespeare. But it is probably wrong. We do not know if Caesar said anything at all: we do not have any eye-witness reports. But we do know that if he did say something, he probably did not say it in Latin.

    It is much more likely that his dying words were uttered in Ancient Greek. The Roman historian Suetonius – not an eye-witness either, as he was writing about the event over a century after it happened – claimed that what Caesar said was Και συ τέκνον? (Kai su, teknon?), the Greek for ‘You too, my son?’

    But surely the language of Ancient Rome was Latin? (It was.) So why on earth would Romans be speaking Greek? Well, most of them didn't: they spoke Latin. But the patricians – the toffs like Caesar – were bilingual in Latin and Greek, and they tended to speak Greek to each other.

    When Caesar died in 44 BC, Alexander of Macedon had been dead for nearly 300 years; but it was Alexander the Great whose conquests had taken the Greek language across the Middle East and Iran into the places which are now Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, northwestern India, and parts of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

    Greek became vitally important as the lingua franca – the language of wider communication – in a very large area of the eastern Mediterranean.

  • 2 - Words

  • Andrew Radford
  • Book:
    Analysing English Sentences
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    04 August 2016, pp 60-110

  • Summary

    Overview

    This chapter provides a more in-depth look at the grammatical properties of words than was possible in the brief sketch provided in §1.3. It begins by recapitulating (and exploring in more detail) what was said about the categorial properties of words in §1.3, and goes on to explore how we determine what grammatical category a given word belongs to in a given use. In the course of the discussion, some new categories will be introduced which are not familiar from traditional grammar. We will see that categorial information alone is not sufficient to describe the grammatical properties of words and that a more fine-grained analysis requires the use of grammatical features.

    Grammatical categories

    In §1.3, we saw that words are assigned to grammatical categories in traditional grammar on the basis of their shared semantic, morphological and syntactic properties. The kind of semantic criteria (sometimes called ‘notional’ criteria) used to categorise words in traditional grammar are illustrated in much simplified form below:

    (1)

  • (i) Verbs denote actions (go, destroy, buy, eat, etc.)

  • (ii) Nouns denote entities (car, cat, hill, John, etc.)

  • (iii) Adjectives denote states (ill, happy, rich, etc.)

  • (iv) Adverbs denote manner (badly, slowly, painfully, cynically etc.)

  • (v) Prepositions denote location (under, over, outside, in, on etc.)

    • However, semantically based criteria for identifying categories must be used with care: for example, assassination denotes an action but is a noun, not a verb; illness denotes a state but is a noun, not an adjective; in fast food, the word fast denotes the manner in which the food is prepared but is an adjective, not an adverb; and Cambridge denotes a location but is a noun, not a preposition. Because semantic criteria can give misleading results if not applied carefully, it is generally more reliable to use morphosyntactic (i.e. morphological and syntactic) criteria to categorise words.

    The morphological criteria for categorising words concern their inflectional and derivational properties. Inflectional properties relate to different forms of the same word (e.g. the plural form of a noun like cat is formed by adding the plural inflection -s to give the form cats); derivational properties relate to the processes by which a word can be used to form a different kind of word by the addition of an affix of some kind (e.g. by adding -ness to the adjective ill we can form the noun illness).

  • 11 - More about words

  • Peter Trudgill, Universitetet i Agder, Norway
  • Book:
    Dialect Matters
    Published online:
    05 August 2016
    Print publication:
    04 August 2016, pp 163-172

  • Summary

    In this section, I look at various Norfolk-area dialect words and their histories, and consider the implications that these words can have for the study of our language way beyond our region.

    Yes

    It may surprise some people to learn that quite a lot of languages do not have words for ‘yes’ and ‘no’. How could they possibly manage without them? But they do. Latin managed it; Gaelic manages it. It's easy: “Are you ready? – I am.” “Did they see it? – They did.” “Has he arrived? – He has not.”

    Some languages, though, go the other way and have not one but two words for ‘yes’. In German, ja means ‘yes’ – but not if you are disagreeing with something. If someone says the German equivalent of “It isn't raining, is it?”, and you think it is, you will reply Doch!, meaning ‘Yes [it is raining, you're wrong]’.

    This was also true of earlier forms of English, from Anglo-Saxon up to Elizabethan times. Yea corresponded to German ja, and yes to doch. But we went even further than this in English and had two words for ‘no’ as well: “You're ready? – Nay [I'm not]”; “You're not ready? – No [you're right, I'm not].”

    There are also a number of different words for ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in various English local dialects. In the north of Britain, ‘yes’ is aye – you hear it all the time in Scotland. In the traditional dialects of the West Country they said “iss”. And of course in this part of the world, too, we naturally have our own word for ‘yes’.

    I remember extremely vividly one occasion when I heard it used. One summer Sunday in the early 1950s, when I was about 10, my grandfather took my cousin and me for a walk in the country, as he sometimes did. Around midday we found ourselves in Swardeston, and ready for a rest. Grandad got talking to an old boy who was sitting on a bench on the village green, leaning on his stick.

    After a while, Grandad asked him a question which absolutely astonished me: had the old gentleman, Grandad asked, known Edith Cavell?

  • 9 - Respecting local speech

  • Peter Trudgill, Universitetet i Agder, Norway
  • Book:
    Dialect Matters
    Published online:
    05 August 2016
    Print publication:
    04 August 2016, pp 134-150

  • Summary

    In the section that follows, I write about various ways in which our society would be a better place if there was more respect than is currently the case, on the part of metropolitan, social and educational elites, for local habits of speaking and local ways of using language.

    He in't watchen on the marshes

    When he was conducting his 2012 anti-Norfolk dialect campaign from the safety of the other side of the Suffolk border, one thing Ken Hurst did was to contrast the Norfolk dialect with the dialect of North Yorkshire. He quoted the famous Lyke Wake Dirge:

    When thoo frae hence away art passed, ivvery neet an’ all …

    “There, Norfolk dialect lovers,” he wrote gleefully, “is proper dialect for you!”

    You can see what he means. The language is impressively different. But Ken was being provocative – and I am provoked into saying that he was being unfair. The Lyke Wake Dirge dates from the 1500s, so it is bound to look very different from modern English. (The word lyke, by the way, means ‘body’. We still have it in Norfolk in the form of lych, as in the lychgate to churchyards, where the first part of funeral services used to be held.)

    North of England dialects do seem more “dialectal” than southern dialects like ours because Standard English originated in London, with some input from Oxford and Cambridge – and from Norfolk. Norwich was the second largest city in the realm, and there was a lot of immigration into London from Norfolk; so it is not so much the case that Norfolk dialect is quite like Standard English as that Standard English is quite like the Norfolk dialect!

    Today, dialects north of the River Humber are more conservative than English dialects anywhere else in the world. Linguistic changes in England normally begin in London and spread outwards from there, so the far-northern dialects still have mediaeval pronunciations like “hoose, moose, oot” rather than modern “house, mouse, out”. The London-based change from the one vowel to the other, which reached Norfolk centuries ago, hasn't arrived there yet.

Dialect Matters
  • Respecting Vernacular Language
  • Peter Trudgill
  • Published online:
    05 August 2016
    Print publication:
    04 August 2016
  • Based on Peter Trudgill's weekly column in the Eastern Daily Press newspaper, this book has two overall messages. The first is that language is a fascinating and enjoyable phenomenon which not enough people know enough about. The second is that we should not discriminate negatively against individuals and groups because of their accent, dialect or native language. Linguistic prejudice, known as 'linguicism', is more publicly and shamelessly demonstrated than racism and sexism, as is 'prescriptivism', the practice of elevating one language or language variety as 'better' than another. Written in an entertaining and accessible style, Trudgill's columns support the language of ordinary people and explore topics such as nonstandard versus standard dialects; vernacular (everyday) language as opposed to politically correct language; informal vocabulary as opposed to business-school jargon; and minority versus majority languages. Each article is also accompanied by notes designed for students and those unfamiliar with the East Anglian setting.

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