English dialects: North and south

 
Introduction


Unless a human being has a physical or mental disability, he or she will be born with the capacity for language: the innate ability to speak a language, or in the case of someone who is deaf, to sign a language (i.e. use gestures to communicate). This capacity does not involve any kind of learning – a young child, for instance, does not need to be taught to speak or sign – and occurs in predictable stages, beginning with the babbling cries of an infant and culminating in the full speaking abilities of an adult.
Language is many things; it can be a system of communication, a medium for thought, vehicle for literary expression, a matter for political controversy, a catalyst for nation building (O’Grady & Dobrovolsky, 1989: 1 in Imansyah, 2008: 1).
The existence of language can’t be separated from human life. It can be seen from the fact that all activities related to interaction among people necessitate a language. Language is an important means of communication. Language reflects thinking; obviously we can’t say a sentence until we have first thought of it. Often our thinking gets mixed with emotions and our reasons become loaded with desires, wishes, prejudices, and opinions. The kind of thinking we do is our business until we try to persuade someone else to agree to our point of view; then that thinking becomes another’s business (Meade, et.al, 1961: 94).
The actuality of the theme. The study provides invaluable dialects and inexhaustible material not only for penetrating the deepest roots of the language, its historical past, but also reasonably, without bias and one-sidedness, for assessing and understanding the characteristics of the formation and development of literary norms, various social and professional dialects and language variants. Only the credentials of the dialect make it possible to understand not only the so-called “deviations” from the rules of spelling and grammar, but also the rules themselves can serve as a solid basis for studying the formation and development of word meanings. that dialects - "secular" use "uneducated" segments of society. However, such a decision is in fact historical and incorrect, because, firstly, the literary norm, usually formed on the basis of one or several local dialects, and secondly, the linguistic features of any local dialect because of its not “negligent” speech speakers, strict historical laws.
The aim of the research is to review and compare southern and northern dialects.
Purpose assumes the solution of the following objectives:
·To research development and features of formation of English dialects;
·To compare dialects of Great Britain;
·To illustrate features of their usage in speech.
The object of research is phonetic, grammatical and lexical peculiarities of dialects.
English dialects the following methods of research will be applied:
·The method of linguistic geography which offers an explanation to ways and regularities of language development, characterizes features of language formation in a certain territory;
·Comparative-historical, which allows comparing the dialect phenomena with historical facts.
Theoretical value of the term paper consists that the subject, despite its study, remains interesting and informative for future linguists in view of the matter includes much as linguistic, geographical and historical material. And also demands studying of a set of scientific and publicistic articles on history and geography of England. And having united the history and geographic of England, we will attempt to analyze and describe various dialects.
The practical significance of the term paper in fact that acquaintance with dialects is one of the most important item in teaching foreign language. Because we constantly face with usage of dialect structures in oral and written speech, so, we should not simply understand them, but also be able to explain distinctions to pupils.


 
1. Language dialects of English
1.1 The concept and essence of dialects

It may be useful to begin by deciding what a dialect is. Dialect describes a language variety where a user’s regional or social background appears in his or her use of vocabulary and grammar. This description is a very open one, and there is continuing debate about its application to particular varieties. Before considering these, it may help to explain the related feature of accent. (Some linguists include accent, along with lexis and grammar, as a feature of dialect.)
Accent denotes the features of pronunciation (the speech sounds) that show regional or social identity (and arguably that of an individual, since one could have a personal and idiosyncratic accent).
This description of dialect lacks precision and coherence. We can see these as problems, but reflecting on the reasons for them brings more understanding of what dialect means, and of why an exact definition is an impossibility. That is, any dialect is a generalization from the individual language use of a wider population. It comes from observation and perhaps some objective study. But we will not, if we stand outside St. Mary-le-Bow church in London, hear everyone around us speaking a uniform variety of English that matches a description of “Cockney”. We will, however, if we speak to a hundred people who have lived there for more than ten years, observe some common features of lexis, grammar and phonology that we would not find commonly used if we repeated the observation in Aberdeen, Hull or Plymouth .
There is a more fundamental objection to the conventional description of dialect – and this is that all language is dialect, including Standard English. This was originally a regional dialect, but has become a prestige variety, favoured by the courts, government, the civil service, the officer class of the armed services and the elite universities. Moreover there is a prescriptive tradition in education and broadcasting that has formalised the status and prestige of both written and spoken standard English.
The ability of spoken language is believed (by many) to be attributed uniquely to humanity. Despite this evidently phenomenal existence the exact date of language’s birth remains unknown and yet it continues to evolve. (Klein, 2009)
The study of this ever mutable method of communication has come to be known as linguistics. However due to the communal and social nature of the human race the study of sociolinguistics could be said to more accurately represent language within human societies. Furthermore Linguists have known for some time that differences in language are tied to social class (Ross, 1954)
Sociolinguistics is the study of the way in which language varies and changes in social groups (communities) of speakers, focusing primarily on the impacts of linguistic structures (such as sounds, grammatical forms, intonation features, words, etc) and social factors (such as a speaker’s gender, ethnicity, age, degree of integration into their community, etc). (Reference)
The study of sociolinguistics has ancestry in dialectology, beginning in the 1960s (reference) partly due to the existence of inadequate methods associated with previous approaches to the study of dialect. Sociolinguistics uses recordings of informal conversations as its data; taking a significantly more scientific approach relying on quantitative analysis to highlighting dialect differences.
One possible reason for this change and transition of language through social groups may be attributed to a unit of cultural evolution, the Meme. A meme is defined as “an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.” (Dawkins,) By this definition a Meme acts as an ‘evolutionary/replicatory’ unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, allowing transmission from one mind to another through an act of imitation such as writing, speech, gestures or rituals.
This description of the Meme and its transmission can be applied to the Learning of language. Such learning requires, at its foundation, the ability to imitate sounds (Tomasello, Kruger, & Ratner, 1993). One may be uncomfortable in describing something as complex as language as “imitation,” however, language clearly fit the evolutionary theory in regards to Memes. Information is copied from person to person, variation is introduced both by degradation (due to failures of human memory and communication) and by the creative recombination of different memes. Selection of this variation is then a potential result of limitations on time, memory, transmission rates and other kinds of storage space.
As described sociolinguistics is built on the foundations the presence dialect variation is from random, but are determined by what Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968) defined as ‘orderly heterogeneity’ – structured variation. This ‘structure’ can be shown in a number of ways, particularly interesting from the sociolinguist perspective is the correlation often exhibited between linguistic structure and social status.
Varieties of English can be identified into two groups referring to the changes of the variable (Figure 1). The variable (t) refers to the use of a glottal stop instead of [t], such as in the word bottle, which can be written bot’le to represent the changed pronunciation of the medial (middle) [t]. Most English speakers appear to glottalise final [t] in words such as cat, with no/little correlation to social class. This is not the case however for the use of glottal stops in the medial position, e.g., bottle (bot’le), butter (but’er). This variant is associated with a social stigma. Table 1 shows the occurrence of glottal stops corresponding to social class in Glasgow for all positions within a word (including the final [t]) compared with that occurring only in medial position (Macaulay 1977). Upper class (Professionals) is represented by Class I whilst the working class is represented by Class III (unskilled workers). When considering the glottal stop in the medial position, the highest social class show zero occurrences, while the lowest class uses 68.8%.
The above linguistic variation is not isolated in its relation to social classes; there are of course many other variables in English which show similar sociolinguistically significant distributions. Trudgill (1974) showed the relationship for variables (ing) and (h) in a Norwich based urban dialect study (Table 2). Once gain the values show the percentage of variant forms used by different classes. The variable (ing) refers to variations of alveolar [n] and a velar nasal [ng] in words ending with -ing for example breeding and cooling. Once again a lower social status is associated a higher percentage of nonstandard variation (alveolar) rather than standard (velar nasal) endings. In common terms this variants is known as `dropping one’s g’s,’ and is a commonly recognised marker of social status over the English-speaking world.
The variable (h) refers to the presence between [h] and lack of [h] at the beginning of for example heart (‘eart) and hand (‘and). This particular variation is slightly more complicated as most urban accents in England do not have initial [h]and as such no variable of it. However in regions that do represent both variants (present of and lack of initial [h]) a similar pattern is shown. The lower the individual’s social status, the more likely he/she is to drop h’s.
As shown in all the examples above a common pattern appears to form (these cases have dealt with stable linguistic features) this can be plotted affectively as an s-shape curve. Figure 2 shows the correlation for the absence of present tense markers (‘she play’ rather than ‘she plays’) with social classes (Trudgill 1974) once again the ‘lower’ the social class, the higher the variation from standard.
As shown in figure 2 the data represents a continuum (s-shaped curve) despite differences between classes, this can be consider once again in a broadly ‘evolutionary’ sense. Just as the transmission of linguistic features (memes) may be stopped by physical geographical barriers (i.e. mountain ranges, oceans), it may also be hindered by social class. This limitation results in boundaries between social dialects that tend not to be perfect. As such sociolinguistics has should be considered a quantitative approach not a qualitative method.
The above approach outlined for analysing language variation has been popular, being used across many speaking communities worldwide. However, whilst these studies have accepted the basic guidance (the linguistic variable), some have suggested (reference) that sociolinguistic studies have been naive by correlating social facts about the subject in isolation (gender, ethnicity and social class), rather than observing how social groups come to be and change over time, and subsequently analysing the variants that emerge as a result. As a result some studies have become to approach studies form a bottom up perspective, examining self-forming social groups and see linguistic structure reflect these grouping rather than starting with a broad social category, and look at the language use within it (a top-down approach).





1.2 Key factors influencing the formation of dialect speech

Some 25 years ago I was confronted with an enigmatic comment “You do this new thing awfully well”, followed by a necessary explanation, “the way you speak”. That new thing? What new thing? I’d been speaking like that all my life, occasionally censured for it. Eventually I saw David Rosewarne’s article (1984, Estuary English, Times Educational Supplement 19) and the penny dropped. It seemed the accent I shared with tens of millions of others in SE England had risen from being maligned and least desirable, and become the height of fashion. Those who write letters to the Times on such topics were also caught out. Rosewarne alluded to an earlier history of Estuary English in communities along the shores of the Thames Estuary, but without citing any sources, and then promptly claimed the expression for himself. Of course, he couldn’t know that our English language master had already told us at school in 1950 that our dialect was Estuary English. It seems I’d been speaking Estuary English for 50 years before Rosewarne coined the expression. Perhaps it was our English master who coined it, or perhaps he’d read it somewhere. If so, it would be exciting now to know where.
The story goes, that certain phonological features were spread from London to towns along both shores of the Thames estuary (Essex to the north, Kent to the south). This was mediated by Londoners migrating during the 19th century, following the relocation of docks, shipbuilding, naval dockyards and other industries from what is now inner London. Similar migrations in all directions from London led to these accent features spreading throughout the home counties. By 1900,