The Mother Tongue (17 page)

So while certain distinctive pronunciations like “doo-er” (or “doo-ah”) for
door,
“oo-off” for
off,
“kee-ab” for
cab,
“moider” for
murder,
and so on are all features of the New York accent, almost no native New Yorker uses more than a few of them.

Outside New York, regional accents play an important part in binding people together—sometimes in unexpected ways. On Martha's Vineyard the “ou” sound of
house
and
loud
was traditionally pronounced “həus” and “ləoud.” With the rise of tourism, the normal, sharper American “house” pronunciation was introduced to the island and for a while threatened to drive out the old sound. But a study reported by Professor Peter Trudgill in
Sociolinguistics
[page 23] found that the old pronunciation was on the increase, particularly among people who had left the island to work and later come back. They were using the old accent as a way of distinguishing themselves from off-islanders.

Dialects are sometimes said to be used as a shibboleth. People in Northern Ireland are naturally attentive to clues as to whether a person is Catholic or Protestant, and generally assume that if he has a North Down or east Belfast accent he is Protestant, and that if he has a South Armagh or west Belfast accent he is Catholic. But the differences in accent are often very slight—west Belfast people are more likely to say “thet” for
that,
while people in east Belfast say “hahn” for
hand
—and not always reliable. In fact, almost the only consistent difference is that Protestants say “aitch” for the eighth letter of the alphabet while Catholics say “haitch,” though whether this quirk “has been used by both the IRA and the UDR 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 survival 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 Lauder” published a book called
Let Stalk Strine
that wittily celebrated the national accent. Among the words dealt with were
scona,
a meteorological term, as in “Scona rine”;
dimension,
defined 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 1788 they found a world teeming with flora, fauna, and geographical 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 borrowed 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
boomerang, 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, 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 10,000 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 Claiborne 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. 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 instant 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 Northumberland 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 Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.” At the top end of the social range is the dialect called Fraffly, also largely the work of the tireless Afferbeck Lauder, based on the aristocratic pronunciation of
frightfully,
as in “Weh sue fraffly 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 Fraffly, 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 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 desperate 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 England before they disappeared forever. Tolkien moved on to Oxford before the work got underway, but he was succeeded by another enthusiast, Harold Orton, who continued the painstaking work. Fieldworkers were sent to 313 mainly rural areas to interview 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 Berkshire 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 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 affirmative word
yeah
was also until fairly recently a quaint localism confined 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 ta 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 grammatically 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 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.