English language in Northern England

The spoken English language in Northern England has been shaped by the region's history of settlement and migration, and today encompasses a group of related accents and dialects known as Northern England English (or, simply, Northern (English) in the United Kingdom).^[2][3]

The terms 'accent' and 'dialect' are broadly defined terms in the English language,^[4] this article strives to comply with these accepted definitions. This article largely focuses on accents. Most current language differences in the north of England are arguably accent orientated, though there are some clear historical influences from older true dialects that are no longer in common use.^[5][6][7][8] Certain 'local words' and speech patterns certainly are inherited from older dialects that existed in the area.^[9][10]

Well-known accents and dialects in the United Kingdom are Cockney, Welsh English, Yorkshire, Scouse and Scottish English; in modern Britain, these differ largely through word pronunciations, though vocabulary differences certainly still exist. These accents are not typically notable when speakers with such accents/dialects write in standard English.^[11]

An accent can be thought of as a subpart of a dialect and a dialect is a subpart of a language.^[12][13] The term 'dialectology' is also used in some academic studies relating to accent/dialect studies.^[14]

In the context of this article, an exhibit of the relationship between key terminology is as follows:

Manchester Local Accent - Regional Dialect - British English Language.

Examples of recognized dialects that are in current use:

Another more extreme example is Afrikaans and Dutch - though seen as distinctive languages they are largely mutually intelligible and serve as an interesting model for how languages develop and language dialects fork when a population is geographically isolated or comes into contact with other language groups.^[17]

The strongest influence on the modern varieties of the

Northern England's urban areas have numerous distinctive accents[21] There are unique expressions and terms that are very local, and arguably were once aligned with older northern dialects.^[22] Northern English accents are often stigmatized, and native speakers commonly attempt to modify their Northern speech characteristics in corporate and professional environments.^[23][24][25]

In the vernacular the terms 'accent' and 'dialect' are used without a great deal of distinction, and there are clear examples of unique words or expressions that might have at one point been part of a unique dialect, in modern English speaking Britain, spoken English is broadly intelligible across the whole of the British Isle, all British English speakers can understand each other.^[26]

There is some debate as to how modern spoken English has impacted modern written English in the north, though it is clearly hard to represent a spoken accent in a written language.^[27] The existence of the works of well known 'Lancashire Dialect' poets emphasizes the historical shift from a true northern dialect in the 1700s to northern accents in the modern north.^[28]

Many people from northern England traditionally have taken 'lessons in elocution' in order to adopt a more standard use of the English language. This has been viewed as archaic, but recent studies demonstrate attempts by professionals to 'soften their northern accents' is currently on the rise.^[29][30]

Definition

The varieties of English spoken across modern Great Britain form an accent/dialect continuum, and there is no universally agreed definition of which varieties are Northern.

Using this definition, the

Although well-suited to historical analysis, this line does not reflect contemporary language; this line divides Lancashire and Yorkshire in half and few would today consider Manchester or Leeds, both located south of the line, as part of the Midlands.[32]

An alternative approach is to define the linguistic North as equivalent to the cultural area of Northern England – approximately the seven historic counties of Cheshire, Cumberland, County Durham, Lancashire, Northumberland, Westmorland and Yorkshire, or the three modern statistical regions of North East England, North West England and Yorkshire and the Humber.^[35]

This approach is taken by the Survey of English Dialects (SED), which uses the historic counties (minus Cheshire) as the basis of the studies. The SED also groups Manx English with Northern dialects, although this is a distinct variety of English and the Isle of Man is not part of England.^[36] Under Wells' scheme, this definition includes Far North and Middle North dialects but excludes the Midlands dialects.^[32]

Scottish English is distinct from Northern England English, although the two have interacted and influenced each other.^[37] The Scots language and the Northumbrian and Cumbrian dialects of English descend from the Old English of Northumbria (diverging in the Middle English period) and are still very similar to each other.^[38]

History

Many historical northern accents reflect the influence of the

During the mid and late 19th century, there was large-scale migration from Ireland, which affected the speech of parts of Northern England. This is most apparent in the accents along the west coast, such as Liverpool, Birkenhead, Barrow-in-Furness and Whitehaven.[41]

Northern accent and dialect varieties

Variations in modern Northern English accents/dialects include:

• Cheshire dialect
• Cumbrian dialect
• Geordie (spoken in the Newcastle/Tyneside area which includes southern parts of Northumberland)
• Lancashire dialect and accent^[42]
• Sunderland/Wearside
  )
• Salford, various other areas of Greater Manchester, parts of Lancashire and eastern Cheshire)^[43]
• Northumbrian dialect^[44]
• Pitmatic (two variations: one spoken in the former mining communities of County Durham and the other in Northumberland)
• Scouse (spoken in the Liverpool/Merseyside area with variations in west Cheshire and southern Lancashire)
• Teesside (spoken in Middlesbrough/Stockton-on-Tees and surrounding areas)
• Yorkshire dialect^[45][46]

In some areas, dialects and phrases can vary greatly within very small geographic regions. Historically, accents did change over very small distances, but this is less true in modern Britain due to enhanced geographic mobility.^[47]

Phonological characteristics

There are several speech features that unite most of the accents of Northern England and distinguish them from Southern England and Scottish accents:^[48]

• The accents of Northern England generally do not have the
  Southern England English, so that the vowel in bath, ask and cast is the short TRAP vowel /a/: /baθ, ask, kast/, rather than /ɑː/ found in the south. There are a few words in the BATH set
  like can't, shan’t, half, calf, rather which are pronounced with /ɑː/ in most Northern English accents as opposed to /æ/ in Northern American accents.
• The /æ/ vowel of cat, trap is normally pronounced [a] rather than the [æ] found in traditional Received Pronunciation or
  General American
  while /ɑː/, as in the words palm, cart, start, tomato may not be differentiated from /æ/ by quality, but by length, being pronounced as a longer [aː].
• The
  foot–strut split is absent in Northern English, so that, for example, cut and put rhyme and are both pronounced with /ʊ/; words like love, up, tough, judge, etc. also use this vowel sound. This has led to Northern England being described "Oop North" /ʊp nɔːθ/ by some in the south of England. Some words with /ʊ/ in RP
  even have /uː/ – book is pronounced /buːk/ in some Northern accents (particularly in Lancashire, Greater Manchester and eastern parts of Merseyside where the Lancashire accent is still prevalent), while conservative accents also pronounce look and cook as /luːk/ and /kuːk/.
• The Received Pronunciation phonemes /eɪ/ (as in face) and /əʊ/ (as in goat) are often pronounced as monophthongs (such as [eː] and [oː]), or as older diphthongs (such as /ɪə/ and /ʊə/). However, the quality of these vowels varies considerably across the region, and this is considered a greater indicator of a speaker's social class than the less stigmatized aspects listed above.
• The most common R sound, when pronounced in Northern England, is the typical English postalveolar approximant
  non-rhotic
  , meaning that R is pronounced only before a vowel or between vowels, but not after a vowel (for instance, in words like car, fear, and lurk). However, regions that are rhotic (pronouncing all R sounds) or somewhat rhotic are possible, particularly amongst older speakers:
  • city of Manchester may residually be rhotic or pre-consonantally rhotic (pronouncing R before a consonant but not in word-final position), for example, in Accrington and Rochdale.^[49]
  • Lincolnshire may weakly retain word-final (but not pre-consonantal) rhoticity.[49]
  • Uvular rhoticity, in which the same R sound as in French and German is used, has been described as the traditional "burr" of rural, northern Northumberland—possible as well, though also rare, in County Durham.^[49]
• In most areas, the letter y on the end of words as in happy or city is pronounced [ɪ], like the i in bit, and not [i]. This was considered RP until the 1990s. The tenser [i] is found in the far north, and in the Merseyside and Teesside areas.
• The North does not have a clear distinction between the "clear L"^ⓘ and "dark L"^ⓘ of most other accents in England; in other words, most Northern accents pronounce all L sounds with some moderate amount of velarization. Exceptions to this are in Tyneside, Wearside and Northumberland, which universally use only the clear L,^[50] and in Lancashire and Manchester, which universally use only the dark L.^[51][52]
• Some northern English speakers have noticeable rises in their intonation, even to the extent that, to other speakers of English, they may sound "perpetually surprised or sarcastic."^[53]

Grammar and syntax

The grammatical patterns of Northern England English are similar to those of British English in general. However, there are several unique characteristics that mark out Northern English.^[60]

Under the

While standard English now only has a single second-person pronoun, you, many Northern dialects have additional pronouns either retained from earlier forms or introduced from other variants of English. The pronouns thou and thee have survived in many rural Northern dialects. In some case, these allow the distinction between formality and familiarity to be maintained, while in others thou is a generic second-person singular, and you (or ye) is restricted to the plural. Even when thou has died out, second-person plural pronouns are common. In the more rural dialects and those of the far North, this is typically ye, while in cities and areas of the North West with historical Irish communities, this is more likely to be yous.^[63]

Conversely, the process of "pronoun exchange" means that many first-person pronouns can be replaced by the first-person objective plural us (or more rarely we or wor) in standard constructions. These include me (so "give me" becomes "give us"), we (so "we Geordies" becomes "us Geordies") and our (so "our cars" becomes "us cars"). The latter especially is a distinctively Northern trait.^[64]

Almost all British vernaculars have regularised reflexive pronouns, but the resulting form of the pronouns varies from region to region. In Yorkshire and the North East, hisself and theirselves are preferred to himself and themselves. Other areas of the North have regularised the pronouns in the opposite direction, with meself used instead of myself. This appears to be a trait inherited from Irish English, and like Irish speakers, many Northern speakers use reflexive pronouns in non-reflexive situations for emphasis. Depending on the region, reflexive pronouns can be pronounced (and often written) as if they ended -sen, -sel or -self (even in plural pronouns) or ignoring the suffix entirely.^[63]

Vocabulary

In addition to Standard English terms, the Northern English

The forms yan and yen used to mean one as in someyan ("someone") that yan ("that one"), in some northern English dialects, represents a regular development in Northern English in which the Old English long vowel /ɑː/ <ā> was broken into /ie/, /ia/ and so on. This explains the shift to yan and ane from the Old English ān, which is itself derived from the Proto-Germanic *ainaz.^[68][69]

A

• Northern subject rule
• Scottish English
• West Germanic languages

References