The Mother Tongue (17 page)

to determine the fate of their captives," as the
Story of English
suggests, is perhaps doubtful. It is after all difficult to imagine circumstances in which a captive could be made to enunciate the letter
h
without being aware of the crucial importance for his sur-vival of how he pronounced it.

Dialects are not just matters of localities and regions. There are also occupational dialects, ethnic dialects, and class dialects. It is not too much to say, given all the variables, that dialects vary from house to house, indeed from room to room within each house, that there are as many dialects in a language as there are speakers. As Mario Pei has noted, no two people in any language speak the same sounds in precisely the same way. That is of course what enables us to recognize a person by his voice. In short, we each have our own dialect.

National accents can develop with considerable speed. Within only a generation or so of its colonization, visitors to Australia were beginning to notice a pronounced accent. In 1965, one "Afferbeck
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THE MOTHER TONGUE

Lauder" published a book called
Let Stalk Strine
which wittily celebrated the national accent. Among the words dealt with were
scona,
a meteorological term, as in "Scona rine";
dimension,
de-fined as the customary response to "thank you"; and
air fridge,
a synonym for ordinary, middling. Other Strinisms noted by Lauder and others are
Emma chisit
for "How much is it?"
emma necks
for what you have for breakfast, and
fairairs
for "a long time," as in "I waited fairairs and airs." A striking similarity between Australia and America is the general uniformity of speech compared with Britain. There are one or two differences in terminology across the country—a tub of ice cream is called a
bucket in
New South Wales and a
pixie in
Victoria—but hardly more than that. It appears that size and population dispersal have little to do with it. It is far more a matter of cultural identity. *

When the first inhabitants of the continent arrived in Botany Bay in 1 788 they found a world teeming with flora, fauna, and geo-graphical features such as they had never seen. "It is probably not too much to say," wrote Otto Jespersen, "that there never was an instance in history when so many new names were needed.'

Among the new words the Australians devised, many of them bor-rowed from the aborigines, were
billabong
for a brackish body of water,
didgeridoo
for a kind of trumpet,
bombora
for a navigable stretch of river containing dangerous rocks, and of course
boomer-
ang, koala, outback,
and
kangaroo.
The new natives also quickly showed a gift for colorful slang:
tucker
for food,
slygrogging
for sneaking a drink,
bonzer
for excellent,
nong
for an idiot,
having the
shits
for being irritable, and, more recently,
technicolor yawn
for throwing up. Often these are just everyday words shortened:
postie
for postman,
footy
for football,
arvo
for the afternoon,
roo
for kangaroo,
compo
for compensation. And then of course there are all those incomparable Australian expressions: scarce as rocking-horse manure, about as welcome as a turd in a swimming pool,

* However, unlike America, Australia has three layers of social accent: cultivated, used by about so percent of people and sounding very like British English; broad, a working-class accent used by a similar number of people (notably Paul Hogan); and general, an accent falling between the two and used by the great mass of people:
VARIETIES OF ENGLISH

don't come the raw prawn (don't try to fool me), rattle your dags (get a move on).

Although historically tied to Britain, linguistically Australia has been as receptive to American influences as to British ones. In Australia, people eat cookies, not biscuits; politicians run for office, not stand as in Britain; they drive station wagons rather than estate cars; give their money to a teller rather than a cashier in a bank; wear cuffs on their pants, not turnups; say mail, not post; and cover small injuries with a Band-Aid rather than a plaster. They spell many words in the American
way—labor
rather than
labour,
for instance—and, perhaps most significantly, the national currency is the dollar, not the pound.

Canada, too, exhibits a fair measure of hybridization, preserving some British words—tap (for faucet),
scones, porridge, zed
as the pronunciation for the last letter of the alphabet—that are largely unknown in America. At least one term,
riding,
for a political constituency, is now pretty well unknown even in Britain. There are said to be ro,000 Canadianisms—words like
skookum
(strong) and
reeve (a
mayor), though the bulk of these are used only in small areas and are not necessarily familiar even to other Canadians.

No place in the English-speaking world is more breathtakingly replete with dialects than Great Britain. According to Robert Clai-borne in Our
Marvelous Native Tongue,
there are "no less than 13"

separate dialects in Britain. Mario Pei puts the number of dialects
as
nine in Scotland, three
in
Ireland, and thirty in England and Wales, but even that is probably an underestimate. If we define dialect as a way of speaking that fixes a person geographically, then it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that in England there are as many dialects
as
there are hills and valleys. Just in the six counties of northern England, an area about the size of Maine, there are seventeen separate pronunciations for the word
house.

Professor Higgins boasted in
Pygmalion
that he could place any man in London within two miles, "sometimes within two streets."

That isn't as rash an assertion as it sounds. Most native Londoners can tell whether someone comes from north or south of the Thames. Outside London even greater precision is not uncommon.

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THE MOTHER TONGUE

I live in a dale in Yorkshire that is just five miles long, but locals can tell whether a person comes from up the dale or down the dale by how he speaks. In a nearby village that lies half in Lancashire and half in Yorkshire, people claim to be able to tell which side of the main street a person was born on. There may be some hyperbole attached to that, but certainly Yorkshire people can tell in an in-stant whether someone comes from Bradford or Leeds, even though the two cities are contiguous. Certain features of British dialects can be highly localized. In
Trust an Englishman,
John Knowler notes that he once knew a man whose odd pronunciation of the letter r he took to be a speech impediment until he happened to visit the man's childhood village in an isolated part of Northum-berland and discovered that
everyone
there pronounced r's in the same peculiar way.

In England, dialects are very much more a matter of class and social standing than in other countries, as George Bernard Shaw well understood when he wrote that "it is impossible for an En-glishman to open his mouth without making some other English-man despise him." At the top end of the social range is the dialect called Frailly, also largely the work of the tireless Afferbeck Lauder, based on the aristocratic pronunciation of frightfully, as in

"Weh sue frailly gled yorkered calm" ("We're so frightfully glad you could come"). The main distinguishing characteristic of the speech is the ability to talk without moving the lips. (Prince Charles is an ace at this. ) Other examples of Frailly, or Hyperlect as it has also been called, include "Aim gine to thice naiow" ("I'm going to the house now"), "Good gawd, is thet the tame?" ("Good God, is that the time?"), and "How fay caned a few" ("How very kind of you").

At the other extreme is Cockney, the working-class speech of London, which has never been more painstakingly recorded than by Shaw in the opening pages of
Pygmalion.
A brief sampling:

"Ow, eez ya-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan y' da-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel's flahrzn than ran awy athaht pyin." This translates as "Oh, he's your son, is he?

Well, if you'd done your duty by him as a mother should, he'd know better than to spoil a poor girl's flowers, then run away
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VARIETIES OF ENGLISH

without paying." Even Shaw could keep this up for no more than a few pages, and reverted to normal English spelling for the flower girl with the parenthetical remark "Here, with apologies, this des-perate attempt to represent her dialect without a phonetic alphabet must be abandoned as unintelligible outside London.- In England, as in America, the systematic study of dialects is a recent phenomenon, so no one can say just how many rich and varied forms of speech died before anyone got around to recording them. One of the first persons to think to do so was, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, J. R. R. Tolkien, later to become famous as the author of the Hobbit trilogy, but at the time a professor of English at the University of Leeds. His idea was to try to record, in a comprehensive and systematic way, the dialect words of En-gland before they disappeared forever. Tolkien moved on to Ox-ford before the work got underway, but he was succeeded by another enthusiast, Harold Orton, who continued the painstaking work. Fieldworkers were sent to 3 13 mainly rural areas to inter-view people who were elderly, illiterate, and locally born (i. e., not contaminated by too much travel or culture) in an effort to record the everyday terms for practically everything. The work took from 1948 to 1961 before
The Linguistic Atlas of England
was produced.

The research turned up many surprising anomalies. The Berk-shire villages of Kintbury, Boxford, and Cold Ash are within about eight miles of each other, yet in each they call the outer garment of clothing by a different name—respectively
greatcoat, topcoat,
and
overcoat.
In the whole of the north
topcoat
is the usual word, but in Shropshire there is one small and inexplicable island of overcoat wearers. In Oxfordshire, meanwhile, there is a lozenge-shaped linguistic island where people don't drink their drinks, they sup them. Sup is the northern word for drink. Why it should end up being used in an area of a few square miles in a southern county by people who employ no other northern expressions is a mystery to which there is no logical answer. No less mysterious is the way the terms
twenty-one
and
one-and-twenty
move up the country in alternating bands. In London people say "twenty-one," but if you move forty miles to the north they say "one-and-twenty." Forty miles north of
that
and they say "twenty-one" again. And so it goes
THE MOTHER TONGUE

right the way up to Scotland, changing from one to the other every forty miles or so. Just to complicate things, in the Lincolnshire town of Boston they say that a person is twenty-one years old, but that he has one-and-twenty marbles, while twenty miles away in Louth, they say the very opposite.

Sometimes relatively obscure English dialect words have been carried overseas where they have unexpectedly prospered. The usual American word for stealing a look,
peek,
was originally a dialect word in England. The English say either
peep
or
squint;
peek
exists only in three pockets of East Anglia—but that was the area from which many of the first immigrants came. In the same way, the word in England for the cylinder around which thread is wound is either
reel
or
bobbin. Spool,
the main American word, is limited to two compact areas of the Midlands. The casual affirma-tive word
yeah
was also until fairly recently a quaint localism con-fined to small areas of Kent, Surrey, and south London. The rest of Britain would say
yes, aye,
or
ar.
Much the same thing seems to have happened elsewhere in the British Empire. Three of the most pervasive Australianisms,
fair dinkum, cobber,
and
no worries,
appear to have their roots in English dialectal expressions.

Some idea of the isolation and antiquity of certain dialects is shown in the fact that in the Craven district of Yorkshire until well into this century, shepherds still counted their sheep with Celtic numbers that predated the Roman occupation of the islands. Even today it is possible to hear people using expressions that have changed little from the Middle Ages. The Yorkshire query "Weeah to bahn?" meaning "Where are you going?" is a direct contraction of "Where art thou bound?" and its considerable age is indicated by the absence of a
d
on
bahn.
In South Yorkshire, around Barnsley, people still use
thee
and
thou
as they did in Shakespeare's day, though the latter has been transformed over the centuries into
tha'.

Complex unwritten rules govern the use of these words both gram-matically and socially.
Tha'
is used familiarly and is equivalent to the French
tu. Thee
is used in the objective case. Thus a Barnsley youngster might say to his brother, "Tha' shurrup or Ah'll thump thee," which translates as "You shut up or I'll punch you."
Tha'
and
thee
have sprouted the further forms
thissen
and
missen,
which are
VARIETIES OF ENGLISH

equivalent to
yourself
and
myself.
These forms are used all the time, but only in well-defined situations. Parents and other elders use them with children, but children never use them with their parents or elders, only with other children, while teenagers use them among their own sex, but not with the opposite sex.

With all their grammatical intricacies and deviations from stan-dard vocabulary, dialects can sometimes become almost like sep-arate languages. Indeed, a case is sometimes made that certain varieties
are
separate languages. A leading contender in this cat-egory is Scots, the variety of English used in the Lowlands of Scotland (and not to be confused with Scottish Gaelic, which really
is
a separate language). As evidence, its supporters point out that it has its own dictionary,
The Concise Scots Dictionary,
as well as its own body of literature, most notably the poems of Robert Burns, and it is full of words that would leave most other English speakers darkly baffled:
swithering
for hesitating,
shuggle
for shake,
niffle-
naffle
for wasting time,
gontrum niddles
for a cry of joy, and count-less others. Although Scots, or Lallans as it is sometimes also called, is clearly based on English, it is often all but incomprehensible to other English speakers. A few lines from Burns's poem
To a Haggis
may
give some idea of its majestic unfathomability: Fair fa' your honest sonsie face,