27.2947, Review: Historical Ling; Socioling: Hickey (2015)

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Subject: 27.2947, Review: Historical Ling; Socioling: Hickey (2015)

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Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 10:39:24
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: Researching Northern English

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-390.html

EDITOR: Raymond  Hickey
TITLE: Researching Northern English
SERIES TITLE: Varieties of English Around the World G55
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson, University of Sussex

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

The most culturally-distinctive region of England is unquestionably the North,
traditionally seen as extending from the River Trent up to the Scottish
border.  This is understandable in historical terms.  The North of England was
the nursery of the Industrial Revolution, and came to contain much of
Britain’s heavy industry, coalmining, textile manufacture, and so forth; in
the days when Britain was “the workshop of the world”, the North of England
was the main workshop of Britain.  The 19th-century movement to convert Adam
Smith’s laissez-faire economic theories into practical government policy,
which has made the modern world so much wealthier than the world of two
hundred years ago, was developed in and disseminated from Manchester, one of
the chief industrial towns of the North – free trade was often called “the
Manchester system”.  At the same period, the co-operative principles of the
Rochdale Pioneers, and Friedrich Engels’s writings about working life in
Manchester, became leading factors in the growth of different styles of
socialism internationally.

With the decline of manufacturing this basis for distinctiveness has faded,
but even now there remains some residual sense of Northern society being a
sister rather than merely (like the West Country or East Anglia) a provincial
subordinate of the society centred on London and the South-East.  The sisterly
relations are not always particularly friendly, in either direction.

Against this background it is not surprising that the North possesses a highly
distinctive variety of English (itself with subvarieties, of course). 
Isabelle Buchstaller and Karen Corrigan’s chapter in this book quotes a
quantitative metric of dialect distinctiveness developed by Bernd Kortmann and
Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (2004); on this metric, Northern English is by a large
margin the most distinctive variety within the island of Great Britain – much
more so than Scottish English, even though Scotland was an independent
country, with a separate written standard, until 1707, and recently came close
to reclaiming its independence.  (Within the British Isles, the only kind of
English that emerges as slightly more distinctive on this metric is that of
Ireland.)

Northern English is a language-variety close to my own heart:  although a
southerner by origin, I lived from age 30 to 47 deep in the rural North of
England.  According to a map reproduced in Raymond Hickey’s introductory
chapter from Russell (2004), for most of that time I lived on the dividing
line between “Near” and “Far” North.  (Although I am familiar with Northern
English, I should warn readers that I have not myself engaged in systematic
empirical research on it, with the very minor exception of Sampson 2002.)

A quick way to offer a flavour of Northern English is to quote a stock remark
used by Standard English speakers to caricature Northern speech, not
inaccurately:  “There’s trooble at t’mill”.  The spelling ‘trooble’ represents
the fact that the Standard contrast between FOOT and STRUT vowels is
neutralized in favour of the FOOT phoneme.  (Historically this is not a
merger; Hickey explains that it is the consequence of a 17th-century phoneme
split which spread from Southern England to almost all parts of the
English-speaking world, including Scotland, but not to Northern England.) 
“T’mill” shows that the definite article is commonly reduced to a consonant
only.  And of course the topic of the utterance reflects the background of
industry and adversarial labour relations.

Differences between Northern English and the standard are not confined to
phonology.  There are plenty of vocabulary differences – for instance
“anything” and “nothing” become ‘owt’ and ‘nowt’, a stream is a ‘beck’, a
valley is a ‘dale’, the vehicle called in Standard English ‘lorry’ and by
Americans ‘truck’ is a ‘waggon’ in the North, and so forth.  And there are
some differences in grammar – when an auxiliary verb is negated, spoken
Standard English usually contracts the ‘not’ (e.g. ‘he won’t’), but a
Northerner is more likely to reduce the auxiliary (‘he’ll not’) – an issue
discussed here by Buchstaller and Corrigan.  William Barras mentions that
nonstandard ditransitive constructions like ‘She gave a book the man’ are
found in Lancashire.  But it is probably fair to say that phonological
characteristics are the most noticeable special features of Northern speech,
and the most researched.

This book comprises twenty chapters, by contributors who were invited by the
editor to cover different aspects of the subject.  After the editor’s
introduction, a first section contains chapters on general topics, such as
Hilary Prichard’s on “The Great Vowel Shift in the North of England”.  Then
the second section contains detailed studies of the dialects of eight mainly
urban locations:  Tyneside, Sunderland, Carlisle, Sheffield, Middlesbrough,
Manchester, Merseyside, and Lancashire more generally.  (Both Manchester and
much of Merseyside fell within the historic county of Lancashire.)  In view of
this urban focus, it is surprising to see that there is no coverage of Leeds,
Bradford, or their surroundings – that West Yorkshire urban area is
geographically central to the North, and it is the second-largest Northern
conurbation, exceeded in population only by Greater Manchester.  (This
omission means among other things that one of the most distinctive features of
some Northern dialects, the devoicing rule thanks to which e.g. those who live
in Bradford call it ‘Bratford’, receives no mention in the book so far as I
have seen – the index is unsatisfactory, so it is hard to be sure.)  Hull is
another “missing city”.  And there is no coverage of rural dialects, unless
sketchy remarks in the Carlisle chapter about the Lake District count.  (These
gaps are perhaps explained by the editor’s remark that some potential
contributors were unable to accept his invitation.)

The third and last section covers border areas:  after a general chapter by
Chris Montgomery about “Borders and boundaries” there are chapters on the West
Midlands, the East Midlands, the Fenland, the Scottish Border, and a closing
chapter on the English of Polish immigrants in Manchester.  Leading
dialectologists including John Wells and Peter Trudgill have argued that the
“linguistic North” extends much further south than what the average Briton
understands by the phrase “North of England”; Trudgill (1990), who
distinguished “modern dialects” from “traditional dialects” (the latter being
obsolescent speech-varieties spoken mainly in rural areas and hard for
outsiders to understand), proposed a Stammbaum for the modern dialects of
England in which the principal split is between speech-varieties north and
south of a line running from Shropshire south of Birmingham to the Wash, so
that almost all of what is normally called the Midlands groups with the North
rather than the South.  Thus the “border area” section is highly relevant to
the overall topic.  (The main finding of Warren Maguire’s chapter on the
Scottish Border area, though, is that this is a case where a political
boundary coincides closely with a clear linguistic boundary.)

The contributors, as might be expected, predominantly represent Northern
universities, though a number work elsewhere in Europe, and Hilary Prichard is
at the University of Pennsylvania.

EVALUATION

The chapters on individual Northern locations are full of solid quantitative
data, including instrumental data and Labov-style data on interactions between
speech variables and demographic factors such as age and sex.  One
particularly interesting finding in Natalie Braber and Nicholas Flynn’s “East
Midlands” chapter, reminiscent of Labov’s research on near-mergers of
phonemes, is that “even those speakers for whom STRUT and FOOT sound merged,
may still display a distinction when realisations are analysed
instrumentally”.

On the other hand, the topics of some (not all) of the “general” chapters
strike me as somewhat misconceived.  For instance, the chapter immediately
following the editor’s introduction, by Joan Beal and Paul Cooper, is about
“The enregisterment of Northern English”.  The term “enregisterment” was new
to me but it is evidently being used nowadays for the process by which the
public become aware of a distinct language-variety.  Beal and Cooper track the
history of comments from the 14th century onwards about differences between
Northern speech and the emerging South-East based standard, and they focus in
detail on perceptions of Yorkshire English during the 19th century.  The
subject is too slight to bear the weight of Beal and Cooper’s analysis.  We
all know that speakers of a standard language tend to perceive regional
differences from the standard as careless, unsystematic deviations, whereas
linguists appreciate that they are systems with internal logic of their own. 
This is true, linguistics students learn it in their first year, and then, one
hopes, they move on to more substantial topics.  I am not sure what is gained
by working in detail, as Beal and Cooper do, through centuries of
unenlightened quotations about shortcomings in the speech of an area of the
North, which made way gradually for an acknowledgement of “Yorkshire English”
as an independent dialect.

It is not as though “Yorkshire English” were a linguistic reality.  The
principal administrative subdivisions of England are counties, and their
boundaries were largely constant for some thousand years up to 1974; so,
despite confusion introduced by successive waves of local-government
reorganization since that date, it is inevitable that laymen categorize local
phenomena in terms of county names.  (In this review, as is common in writing
with a historical dimension, county names refer to the pre-1974 units.)  But
linguists know that isoglosses do not necessarily coincide with administrative
boundaries.  Neither with respect to Trudgill’s analysis of the traditional
nor the modern dialects of England is there a dialect area roughly
corresponding to the county of Yorkshire.  Trudgill’s Stammbaum for the
traditional dialects of England has a top-level split which runs through the
middle of Yorkshire.  In his map of modern dialects most of Yorkshire, except
for areas round Middlesbrough and Hull, does fall within a single dialect
territory, but that territory is huge, also covering the whole of Cumberland
and Westmorland, much of Lancashire, and smaller parts of other counties.  So
what Beal and Cooper appear to be describing is a process by which the public
came to recognize the reality of a fictional construct.  Does this have
anything to do with linguistics?  Perhaps it might be seen as an exercise in
sociology, though not, I should have thought, very interesting sociology.

Furthermore, their treatment seems to suggest that a local language-variety is
a unity which its speakers, or outsiders, either recognize or fail to
recognize as a whole.  The reality is much more differentiated.  For Northern
English, the lack of a STRUT phoneme is a cliché, the first thing any
southerner thinks of in connexion with Northern speech, and Northerners know
that.  Many of them will produce approximations to STRUT vowels in company
that is wider than their intimates; sometimes they get them wrong.  I came
home from work one day and asked my young daughters, natives of the North,
where their Mum was; they were obviously aware that their parents used a vowel
that they did not hear from their schoolmates, and one of them told me proudly
“She’s in the kitchen, [kʌkɩŋ] a [pʌdɩŋ]”.  Contrast the absence of STRUT with
the use of ‘tret’ (rather than ‘treated’) as the past tense of ‘treat’.  My
impression is that ‘tret’ may be restricted to the North-East, but there it is
absolutely normal, and those who use it do not appear to think of it as
non-standard.  Even speakers who pride themselves on correct usage will say
(and, I imagine, write) ‘tret’ – though Standard speakers from the South would
certainly regard ‘tret’ as an error or a picturesque dialectism.  Contrast
that again with the use of the FLEECE rather than PRICE vowel in the first
syllable of ‘either’.  I am fairly sure it is mainly Northerners who say
‘eether’ (though I find no confirmation in Upton et al. 1994), but a Southern
‘eyether’ speaker would not think of ‘eether’ as a mistake:  it is a more a
matter of individual choice, like preferring coffee to tea.  (The Oxford
dictionaries of the standard language list both pronunciations, which could be
why the Survey of English Dialects ignored the issue.)  To talk of
“enregistering” a regional language-variety to my mind blurs the fact that, in
reality, people are conscious of many different elements of a language-variety
to different extents or in different ways.

Again, Chris Montgomery’s “Borders and boundaries” chapter involves
experiments in which student informants carried out tasks such as plotting
their perceptions of dialect areas on a map.  The data generated are analysed
in sophisticated ways, but I am left unsure of the overall purpose.  (When I
noticed that some informants had identified accents as belonging to points in
the North Sea, I wondered whether the students took the experiments as
seriously as their teacher did.)  The chapter turns out to be concerned
largely with the question whether England should be seen as divided into
“North” versus “South” or whether a “Midlands” region should be recognized
between the two.  That seems an empty debate about terminology rather than
realities.  Linguistically, the truth surely is that the speech of what is
commonly called the Midlands is intermediate in most respects between the
dialects further north and further south, though there are also features found
only in areas of the Midlands.  (These would include ‘yow’ for “you”, or the
remarkable Black Country negation system, discussed in Esther Asprey’s
chapter, which changes the vowel of the verb rather than suffixing ‘-n’t’,
e.g. ‘doe’ for “don’t”, ‘day’ for “didn’t”, ‘caw’ for “can’t”, and so forth.) 
Need anything more be said?

Other shortcomings run through some of the specific as well as the general
chapters.  In a number of cases I would take issue with factual assertions. 
More than one contributor claims some usage to be pan-Northern which I believe
is by no means so.  Buchstaller and Corrigan say this of ‘yous’ as a
second-person plural form; I do not remember ever hearing the form ‘yous’,
again it is not mentioned by Upton et al., and from what I have read I took it
to be distinctively Irish.

Writers who imitate Northern dialect in ordinary orthography invariably write
the vowel-less definite article as ‘t’ ’, but the editor’s introduction claims
that the phonetic reality is not [t] but either the fricative consonant of the
standard form, glottalized or not, or a glottal stop.  I have certainly heard
very clear [t]s, with consonantal release.  Since consonant-only “the” is an
icon of Northern-ness (unlike some other features which are below speakers’
conscious awareness), I suppose it is possible that I was hearing an
artificial pronunciation, adopted to express aggressive local patriotism in
the presence of a southerner – but I notice that William Barras in his
“Lancashire” chapter gives [t] and glottal stop as the leading possibilities,
which matches my impression.  (Barras says that an interdental fricative also
occurs, but he transcribes this with the symbol for the voiceless fricative –
I wonder whether it is ever voiceless.)

Another factual error, though one that has nothing to do with linguistics, is
Sandra Jansen’s suggestion that the 1778 invasion of Whitehaven during the
American War of Independence was the last time the British mainland has been
invaded by hostile forces.  Fishguard was invaded by French revolutionaries in
1797.

There are other places in the book where contributors seem confused about
usages which they describe as distinctively Northern but illustrate via
examples that would be normal in Standard English.  Buchstaller and Corrigan’s
chapter on “Morphosyntactic features of Northern English” is full of such
cases.  For instance, they say that Northern English has a feature “in which a
possessive form is used in an expression which is not ... possessive in
nature”, and their first example is ‘Wor Thomas’ll be fourteen on Christmas
Day ...’  Obviously the pronunciation ‘wor’ for “our” is nonstandard, but that
is beside the point.  There is a special Northern use of “our” + child’s name,
but this is not it.  A good example would be ‘Coom ’ere, our Thomas’ where the
name is used vocatively.  ‘Our Thomas’ll be fourteen ...’, on the other hand,
is Standard English.  Likewise Buchstaller and Corrigan say that definite
articles are used in phrases where the standard language would disallow them,
giving examples that include ‘the autumn’, ‘the measles’:  again these phrases
are standard.  There are many further cases in this chapter.  A case from
another chapter is Adam Mearns’s use in his “Tyneside” chapter of ‘everyone
must have thought we were the entertainment’ to illustrate a “characteristic
North East use of _must _ as an expression of conclusions rather than
obligations”.  All English-speakers use “must” that way.

A further type of problem is various inconsistencies and loose ends that have
not been edited out.  We saw that the introductory chapter sets the scene with
a map of Northern England on which various boundaries are marked – but these
are not explained.  I do not know whether the “Near/Far North” boundary is
intended to mark a linguistic isogloss or some other kind of division, and the
adjacent discussion implies that whatever the “Far North” is supposed to be,
it begins much further north than the line on the map.  I know that the line
labelled “Approximate traditional dialect line” refers to the top-level split
in Peter Trudgill’s Stammbaum only because I am familiar with Trudgill’s book.
 Hilary Prichard (p. 55) describes one dialect boundary as following a course
as implausible-sounding as the border of a gerrymandered U.S. voting district
– I imagine she has listed places in the wrong sequence, or something of that
kind.

In Carmen Llamas’s “Middlesbrough” chapter, I could not follow the
relationship between her Figure 1, which claims that [x] occurs as one
possible allophone of /k/ word-finally between vowels (the only realization
used by some informants), and Figure 7 which does not include the fricative as
a possibility.  And I found the Figures in Helen Faye West’s “Merseyside”
chapter very hard to interpret, with no explicit statement of the meaning of
blue versus red dots, or solid versus dotted versus dashed lines.  Esther
Asprey’s Table 7 attempts to transcribe Black Country verb forms in both
phonetic symbols and ordinary orthography, but the two systems are muddled
together; and she uses an abbreviation “PDE” for which I found no explanation.
 Likewise, the Scottish Border chapter makes repeated reference to a Scottish
Vowel Length Rule which is not familiar to me, and not explained.

Finally, there are some simple English-language solecisms.  “Concise” seems to
be used for “precise” on p. 37; on p. 80 “negative attraction” should surely
read “negative contraction”.  It is odd to say that “Yorkshire is one of the
largest English counties” (p. 35) when, famously, it is by far the largest of
all, well over twice the acreage of Lincolnshire, the runner-up.

In summary:  the material in this book on the speech of individual localities
contains much valuable information, but it should be be used with caution. 
And the gaps in coverage are far too large for the book to be seen as a
definitive account of its subject.  What can one say about a book on any
aspect of the North of England in which Yorkshire features only marginally? 
’Amlet baht t’Prince.

REFERENCES

Kortmann, B. and B. Szmrecsanyi.  2004.  Global synopsis: morphological and
syntactic variation in English.  In B. Kortmann et al., eds, A Handbook of
Varieties of English, vol. 2.  Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Russell, D.  2004.  Looking North: Northern England and the National
Imagination.  Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Sampson, G.R.  2002.  Regional variation in the English verb qualifier system.
 English Language and Linguistics 6.17–30.

Trudgill, P.  1990.  The Dialects of England.  Oxford: Blackwell.

Upton, C., D. Parry, and J.D.A. Widdowson.  1994.  Survey of English Dialects:
the Dictionary and Grammar.  London: Routledge.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Oriental Studies at Cambridge University in
1965, and studied Linguistics and Computer Science as a graduate student at
Yale University before teaching at the universities of Oxford, LSE, Lancaster,
Leeds, and Sussex. After retiring from his Computing chair at Sussex he spent
several years as a research fellow in Linguistics at the University of South
Africa. Sampson has published in most areas of Linguistics and on a number of
other subjects. His most recent book is a new edition of ''Writing Systems''
(Equinox, 2015).





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