Studying Dialect

Rob Penhallurick

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350308114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book provides an accessible yet comprehensive introduction to the study of the dialects of English as they are spoken around the world, from the earliest dialect dictionaries of the sixteenth century to contemporary research emerging from the field of geolinguistics. Organised into ten thematic chapters, it explores and evaluates the methods and purposes of each approach to the study of dialectal variation, with full explanations of technical terms throughout. Illuminating one of the most productive fields of interest in language study, this compelling book is essential reading for students of dialect and regional difference in English.

CHAPTER

1Lexicography: From early works to The English Dialect Dictionary

This chapter includes the following:

•Introduction to English dialect lexicography.

•Overview of the first lexicographers of English dialects, sixteenth– nineteenth centuries.

•Guide to the first national dialect dictionaries, seventeenth–nineteenth centuries.

•Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (1898–1905).

1.1Introduction

What does the word maze mean and why would anyone be curious about it?

In Standard English, the noun maze means a labyrinth or a bewildering mass of things, but this is not the word that Nick Stephens of Cornwall submitted to the BBC’s Voices web-pages in 2005. He said, ‘Yoom maze for “you’re crazy/ stupid”’, adding, ‘Probably could have written a book on this but sadly my grandparents have passed on now.’ (See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cornwall/voices2005/stories/jan2005/voices_from_you2.shtml.)

According to the Voices dialect survey, this maze is a local word, here in adjectival form, meaning crazy or stupid, and for Nick Stephens it represents the bygone Cornish English of older generations. Another adjectival form of the word in this sense was recorded in one of the early dialect dictionaries of English, Francis Grose’s Provincial Glossary of 1787, which says that M az ’ d, or Mazed means ‘mad’ as in ‘A mazed man, a crazy, or madman.’ Grose was interested in cataloguing words and meanings which were used only locally in England rather than generally across the whole country. This was a trailblazing task in the late eighteenth century. He says that mazed is a word from Exmoor, and the source of his information was a short article published in August 1746 (pp. 405–8) in the scholarly monthly The Gentleman’s Magazine under the title ‘An Exmoor Vocabulary’. The pseudonymous compiler of the Vocabulary, ‘Devoniensis’ (a name which means ‘about or from Devon’), says that his aim in describing ‘this barbarous dialect’ (p. 408) was to provide a service to readers from other parts of the country, for ‘perhaps it may afford some help to their understanding our old books’ (p. 405). Devoniensis was one of a growing number of scholars in the first half of the eighteenth century showing an interest in local speech because of what it could tell us about older forms of the English language. (‘Devoniensis’ was the Devonshire-born clerk, William Chapple (1718–81).) So we see that dialectal maze has quite a history, and that there have been, historically, a number of reasons to be interested in the word and its meaning, and we also get a hint of an assortment of attitudes towards regional dialectal speech.

In fact, one of the great traditions in dialect study is the exploration of vocabulary. The frequent end-product of such an enquiry is a list of words accompanied at the very least by the words’ definitions and an indication of their geographical provenance, that is, which parts of the world they are used in. Often these are quite short lists compiled by individuals and published in pamphlets or in specialist journals or on the Internet. These comparatively short lists are dialect glossaries (such as the Exmoor Vocabulary by Devoniensis), and any student of dialect, with a bit of time, patience, and practice, can research and produce their own dialect glossary, thereby contributing to the lexicographical tradition in dialect study, lexicography being the making of dictionaries and glossaries. And there have been some great dialect dictionaries – great in the sense of large, quite a few of them MONUMENTAL, as well as great in terms of their achievement. A glance at any of the bigger dictionaries, such as the 4700-page English Dialect Dictionary (1898–1905, edited by Joseph Wright), might provoke the fleeting thought that one would have to be a little mazed to take on such a task, in which case there have been a good number of mazed dialect lexicographers.

In dialect lexicography, then, the term dictionary usually refers to the larger projects, and glossary usually to the smaller in scale.

The investigation of vocabulary is a tradition in the study of dialects of English which can be traced back to the sixteenth century. This chapter and the next will tell the story of this tradition. We will negotiate the rich mass of surveys by looking at the main contributions, their motivations, methods, assumptions, and their achievements.

The term dialect itself is defined briefly in the Preface, yet a key theme of Chapters 1 and 2 is the very process by means of which the dialectal or regional became identified in the English language. We will be concerned with dictionaries and glossaries of regional dialect rather than with the treatment of dialectal items in other types of dictionary, although that issue is of some relevance here. Neither will we deal with the lexicography of slang, nor of occupational dialect and jargon, although the borders between these and regional dialect are sometimes quite blurry. We shall concentrate on works which themselves have concentrated on the regional in English lexis (vocabulary).

First, we will look at the origins and development of interest in English dialect words and idioms up until the mid nineteenth century, concentrating on Britain. Then we move on to the achievements of the late nineteenth century, a period which saw the culmination of immense activity in dialect lexicography, before (in Chapter 2) considering the twists and turns of the twentieth century and onwards (in Britain and across the English-speaking world) up to the present day. Running alongside this we will trace the evolution of the distinction between the dialectal or non-standard and the Standard, as in Standard English, a distinction substantially influenced by the work of lexicographers.

1.2Early works: sixteenth century to late seventeenth century

From the late sixteenth century onwards there was a gradual identification and separation by lexicographers of the non-standard and the Standard in the English language, a process which climaxed in two massive, parallel projects in the second half of the nineteenth century: Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (EDD; 1898–1905), and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED; 1884–1933). The terms non-standard and Standard English themselves are comparatively recent labels, dating from 1913 and 1836, respectively, according to the OED, and lexicographers of dialect were instrumental in helping to construct the two categories. The labels are an outcome of the process of construction.

From its very beginnings in the fifth century AD, English has been a language characterized by geographical variety. The earliest recorded comment on the regional diversity of English was in a historical chronicle written in Latin in the first quarter of the twelfth century by the monk William of Malmesbury (1125; edition of 1870, p. 209), a passage which was used again at the end of the fourteenth century by John of Trevisa in his English translation of another chronicle, the Polychronicon (1387; edition of 1869, p. 163). This short passage criticizes the English spoken in northern England for its uncouth, strident, and incomprehensible nature to the ears of southerners, and it marks the beginnings of a discussion about the relative merits of different varieties of English that continues to the present day. From the end of the sixteenth century through the seventeenth and eighteenth, a general educated opinion arises which, while showing an interest in dialect, also demonstrates a distaste for local, provincial speech when measured against the cultured language of the higher classes in the south-east of England. This opinion informs an agitation during this time in favour of identifying a regularized, supra-regional, educated English to be used in formal and public contexts. Eventually this campaign becomes concerned not only with lexical and grammatical usage in writing and speech, but extends also to pronunciation, in that attempts are made to exclude provincial accents from definitions of the ‘best’ English. This ‘best’ English was eventually to crystallize around the concept of a Standard English.

But there is more to the pre-nineteenth-century interest in dialect than this developing opinion. We also see a curiosity about the history of English as the national language of England, a curiosity which necessarily incorporated an awareness of dialect, because in its essence English is characterized by regional diversity. One of the pioneers of the study of early English and of dialect vocabulary was the cleric Laurence Nowell (whose dates are circa 1515–70).

1.2.1Laurence Nowell’s Vocabularium Saxonicum (1565)

Nowell was an antiquary (a scholar of antiquities), with an interest in place names and in mapping the British Isles. In English studies he is known as the compiler of the Vocabularium Saxonicum, the first attempt at a dictionary of Old English. (The Old English period is the earliest in the history of the language, stretching from the fifth century to the early twelfth, and the term is often abbreviated to OE.) The Vocabularium Saxonicum is an unfinished manuscript, which remained unpublished until the edition prepared by Albert Marckwardt in 1952. It is likely that it was completed by about 1565, and was passed on by Nowell in 1567 to his pupil William Lambarde, a scholar and lawyer, who made additions to it. It was a major source for the first published dictionary of Old English, William Somner’s Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum of 1659 (see Marckwardt, 1947, and 1952, p. 16). Nowell’s Vocabularium is an early example of a citation dictionary, that is, it provides illustrative citations or quotations for many of the words defined. Nowell used a broad range of written sources from the Old English period, but he also drew upon his knowledge of the regional language of his own time, including in his dictionary 190 local words (the great majority from his native Lancashire) which had survived from Old English in local use but had dropped out of wider currency.

Wakelin (1977, p. 44) illustrates the etymological value of Nowell to dialect researchers (etymology being the study of the history and origins of words) by quoting the following entry from the Vocabularium (Marckwardt, 1952, p. 90):

Ha

an. Hawes. The frute of the white thorne or hawthorne. Lanc., hagges.

Wakelin points out that twentieth-century dialect forms of haws with a medial [g], such as haigs, haggles or heagles , and haigins recorded by the Survey of English Dialects (Orton and Halliday, 1963, p. 451), are difficult to trace back to the Old English form haga, because OE -ag- regularly leads to -aw- in modern English, in this case giving haws. However, the Vocabularium provides this -g- form above, hagges, from Lancashire for as late as 1565, suggesting the survival in regional English of a base form with gemination (that is, the doubling of an originally single consonant), *hagga, from which we can postulate a derivation for the twentieth-century -g- forms.

Nowell’s editor, Marckwardt (1952, pp. 10–13), recognizes the weaknesses in the Vocabularium, such as mistakes regarding Old English grammar, an ignorance of Norse influence, and even errors caused by Nowell’s Lancastrian perspective – assigning incorrect meanings to OE words based on contemporary northern forms and meanings. But it should be remembered that the Vocabularium was an unfinished work, which nevertheless has assumed a greater importance as an information source for historians of the language in recent decades, because it remained unpublished for 400 years.

For Nowell, the significance of the local words he lists was in their direct lineage from Anglo-Saxon, or Old English as we now usually call it. Much of the major work on English dialect in Britain up until the mid-twentieth-century Survey of English Dialects is characterized by interest in the history of the language. For some scholars before Joseph Wright’s EDD (1898–1905), the study of dialect was of interest solely because it offered a route to a greater understanding of early English and its writers.

1.2.2 Alexander Gil’s Logonomia Anglica (1619)

Alexander Gil’s Logonomia Anglica of 1619 includes the first attempt to characterize the main dialect areas of England (pp. 15–18). Written in Latin, it is not a dictionary, but the short section on dialects does list some features of regional English pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary, such as the noun witpot meaning ‘sausage’ from the west of England (p. 17). Gil (1565–1635), a schoolmaster with an interest in devising a phonetic spelling system for English, identified six dialects: the Common or General, the Northern, Southern, Eastern, Western, and the Poetic. All six are listed under the heading Dialecti (‘dialects’), though clearly only four are regional. The first refers to features in widespread use across the country, and the last to refined writing. The Logonomia, therefore, provides an early instance of the distinguishing of the regional and the supra-regional (literally, ‘above the regional’) in English.

Furthermore, like Edmund Coote in the spelling manual The English Schoole-Master (1596, p. 30), and Christopher Cooper in The English Teacher (1687, p. 77), Gil (p. 17) uses the term ‘barbarous’ to refer to provincial speech (actually barbariem in Gil), a term which by this period had the sense ‘uncul-tured, uncivilized, unpolished’. (You will recall that Devoniensis also used it in 1746 to describe the Exmoor dialect.) Edmund Coote (1596, pp. 30–1),a headmaster in Bury St Edmunds, warns against the corruptive influence of local pronunciations on spelling, but in the process provides some interesting information on the contemporary East Anglian accent. The work of Gil, Coote, and Cooper contributes to that body of writing between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries that argued that a standard variety of English (to use present-day terminology) was needed, and that it should be based on the usages of the cultured south-east. Gil and Coote also take part in the parallel process of identifying and constituting the dialectal. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that establishing the standard variety and constituting the dialectal are two aspects of the one process.

Martyn Wakelin, in his survey of ‘The Treatment of Dialect in English Dictionaries’ (1987, p. 157), points out that from early in the history of English lexicography scholars were attempting to differentiate words considered of lower and higher status, for example, between the ‘vulgar’ and the ‘choicest’ words as recorded in Henry Cockeram’s The English Dictionarie of 1623, the first part of which listed the latter, and the second the former. Among the general dictionaries, Wakelin identifies (p. 157) Stephen Skinner’s Etymologicon Linguæ Anglicanæ of 1671 and Elisha Coles’s An English Dictionary of 1676 as the earliest in which a regional element (in the lower-status category) is openly acknowledged. The pattern that develops is of, on the one hand, dictionaries whose prime aim is to designate what we could call either the general or common or even core, and eventually standard, vocabulary of English, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Abstract
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Editors’ Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• The International Phonetic Alphabet
• Studying Dialect Timeline
• 1 Lexicography: From early works to The English Dialect Dictionary
• 2 Lexicography after 1900, and dialect grammars
• 3 Cartography: European beginnings
• 4 Cartography: Purpose, legacy, and the early linguistic atlases
• 5 The cartography of English dialects, and the regeneration of linguistic geography
• 6 Sociolinguistics
• 7 After sociolinguistics: Variationist dialect study
• 8 The great argument in dialect study
• 9 Perceptual dialectology
• 10 Geolinguistics
• Bibliography
• Webography
• Index