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Englishes in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland

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Englishes in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland Englishes in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland Raymond Hickey University of Duisburg and Essen Summary The differentiation of English into separate varieties in the regions of Britain and Ireland has a long history. This is connected with the separate but related identities of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. In this chapter the main linguistic traits of the regions are described and discussed within the framework of language variation and change, an approach to linguistic differentiation which attempts to identify patterns of speaker social behaviour and trajectories along which varieties develop. The section on England is subdivided into rural and urban forms of English, the former associated with the broad regions of the North, the Midlands, East Anglia, the South-East & South as well as the West Country. For urban varieties English in the cities of London, Norwich, Milton Keynes, Bristol, Liverpool and Newcastle upon Tyne is discussed in the light of the available data and existing scholarship. English in the Celtic regions of Britain and Ireland is examined in dedicated sections on Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Finally, varieties of English found on the smaller islands around Britain form the focus, i.e. English on the Orkney and Shetland islands, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. Keywords regional English, England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, sociolinguistic variation, gender- specific language use, ethnolects, class-differentiated language, language change The title of this chapter refers to four historical parts of those islands known traditionally as the British Isles. They consist of two major islands off the north-west coast of Europe. The first is Britain, i.e. consisting of England, Wales and Scotland. As a part of Britain, Scotland retains a high degree of distinctiveness, both culturally and linguistically, and enjoys a degree of political autonomy reflecting its status within the United Kingdom. The second island is Ireland, consisting politically of Northern Ireland, the northern third of the island, which since 1922 has been a constituent part of the United Kingdom, and, since 1949, of the Republic of Ireland which encompasses the lower two thirds of the island, including the north-west county of Donegal. The label ‘British Isles’ is a geographical term which is felt by many as inappropriate as a general reference, not least because Ireland is not a part of Britain. For the present chapter, the compound label ‘Britain and Ireland’ is used to refer to the two large islands in question. As Britain contains both England, Wales and Scotland, it is preferable to avoid general references such as ‘British English’ as this does not refer to any one variety spoken across the whole island of Britain. The term is nonetheless found in linguistic literature when discussing the standard of English used in public life in England, and to a much more limited extent, in Scotland, at least with regard to pronunciation. The more geographically accurate label ‘Standard Southern British English’ is found. 1 Sociolinguistic variation Britain and Ireland show considerable sociolinguistically determined variation. The length of time that English has been spoken in both countries is certainly one of the main Raymond Hickey Englishes in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland Page 2 of 22 reasons: there has been a long period during which such variation could arise in the case of these islands. But other factors can also be recognised: language contact has played, and continues to play, a signficant role. Historically, this has been with other major European languages, but today much contact exists with immigrants from beyond Europe whose languages add to the linguistic mix in Britain and Ireland. There is furthermore a strong contrast between urban and rural language and the regions of both islands show distinct identities which are expressed linguistically. This variation has been dealt with in a series of four volumes which have been completed for the four parts of these islands, see Lawson (ed., 2014) for Scotland, Hickey (ed., 2016) for Ireland, Durham and Morris (eds, 2017) for Wales and Jansen and Braber (eds, 2018) for England. The varieties of English found in Britain and Ireland today testify to the long period of development and contact which they have undergone in the past thousand years or so. The range of dialects stretches from traditional rural forms, which maintain many conservative features of Early Modern or even Middle English, to the dynamic varieties of the large urban centres which are characterised by contact and mixture. In addition, the input from second language speakers and global trends in varieties of English may well have an influence on established varieties and lead to new trajectories of change shaped by sociolinguistically determined language variation. In addition, social mobility (Britain 2012) is already contributing to new contacts and mixtures as phenomena such as counterurbanisation lead to an increasing influence of urbanites on the rural surroundings to which they move. 2 Historical background English is a west Germanic language with its origin in England; it is most closely related to Frisian and at a slightly greater distance to German and Dutch. Historically, English is divided into four periods: Old English (450-1066), Middle English (1066-1500), Early Modern English (1500-1700) and Late Modern English (1700 to the present). Due to colonial expansion and recently, due to its status as a lingua franca, English is found in many countries across the world (Hickey ed., 2004). In the present context, the main countries with native speaker populations are Great Britain (England, Wales, Scotland) and Ireland, both of which contributed to overseas forms of English during the colonial period (1600-1900) due to deportation and emigration, the latter both voluntary and involuntary. There are many pidgins and/or creoles deriving from English as a lexifier language, e.g. in West Africa, the South-West Pacific and the Caribbean. English is also found as a second language, with various degrees of proficiency, in many countries of South and South-East Asia as well as West and East Africa and countries in southern Africa. Due to recent immigration, especially after WWII, forms of English from South Asia and the Caribbean, established themselves in Britain and have interacted with traditional forms of English. 3 Dialect regions of England In the following sections the regions of England with recognizably distinct forms of English are listed, going from North to South, and salient features are quoted. There Raymond Hickey Englishes in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland Page 3 of 22 follow some further sections on English in the major cities of England. In this context the sociolinguistic significance of linguistic variation is discussed (Chambers and Schilling 2013). The level of language which shows the greatest degree of regional variation is phonetics/phonology and hence pronunciation features figure prominently in the discussion of regional forms of English in the following sections. There are also references to distinctive grammatical features but the lexical items characteristic of different areas of both Britian and Ireland have not been discussed because of space restrictions. In discussions of pronunciation repeated references are found to lexical sets, see Wells (1982) for the original set. 3.1 The North The North of England is the region north of an imaginary diagonal line from Merseyside in the West to the Wash in the East, though there are many different conceptions and definitions of the North (Hickey 2015). Northern English is somewhat more conservative in its phonology compared to the South and has not gone through many of the changes found in the latter area. The two most obvious of these are (1) the lowering of early modern English /U/ to /V/, e.g. [kUt] for [kVt] cut (the so-called FOOT-STRUT split, Wells 1982), (2) the lengthening of low vowels before voiceless fricatives, e.g. [pas] for [pA;s] pass (Beal 2008: 130). Some varieties have not undergone the Great Vowel Shift to the same extent as the south of England, retaining /u:/ for a subset of the MOUTH lexical set. The FACE and GOAT vowels are [e:] and [o:] respectively in the lower North, but in the far North the diphthongs [i@] and [u@] are found. The vowels of the FORCE and NORTH lexical sets can have low realisations, e.g. course [kQ:s]. Other features apply to sub-varieties of the North, e.g. the fronting of mid-back vowels in Hull as in home [h{:m]. Wales (2006) is a general survey of Northern English. A prominent feature of non-standard English syntax, assumed to be of Northern origin, is what is labelled the Northern Subject Rule (Ihalainen 1994: 221). Basically this is an agreement pattern between verbs and preceding subjects whereby a preceding pronoun blocks the use of an inflectional -s on a verb, irrespective of the person or number of the verb (although some dialects have relative scales for different points in verbal paradigms). The pattern can be seen in sentences like We meet and talks together in the morning. Inflection is also favoured by preceding nouns as in The workers gets extra timeoff at Christmas. This agreement pattern is well-attested in northern Middle English and Middle Scots (Mustanoja 1960: 481f.). In areas of England south of an approximate line from Chester to the Wash (Klemola 2000: 336) the distribution of this type of agreement is uneven. East Anglia favours zero marking on all persons, while other southern dialects show a free use of inflectional -s with adjacent pronominal subject, something which is rare in the north. Klemola (2000) has considered possible influence by northern forms of Welsh (in Cumbria, Westmoreland and other parts of the far north of England) on English dialects there. There would appear to be a parallel to the Northern Subject Rule of English in Welsh and Klemola sees it as influencing English historically.
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