The Mother Tongue

by Bill Bryson

  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 A
tlas 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.

  With all their grammatical intricacies and deviations from standard vocabulary, dialects can sometimes become almost like separate languages. Indeed, a case is sometimes made that certain varieties are separate languages. A leading contender in this category 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 countless 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,

  Great chieftain o’ the puddin’-race!

  Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,

  Painch, trip, or thaim:

  Weel are ye wordy o’ a grace

  As lang’s my arm.

  In America, a case is sometimes made to consider Cajun a separate tongue. Cajun is still spoken by a quarter of a million people (or more, depending on whose estimates you follow) in parts of Louisiana. The name is a corruption of Acadian, the adjective for the French-speaking inhabitants of Acadia (based on Nova Scotia, but taking in parts of Quebec and Maine) who settled there in 1604 but were driven out by the British in the 1750s. Moving to the isolated bayous of southern Louisiana, they continued to speak French but were cut off from their linguistic homeland and thus forced to develop their own vocabulary to a large extent. Often it is more colorful and expressive than the parent tongue. The Cajun for hummingbird, sucfleur (“flower-sucker”), is clearly an improvement on the French oiseaumouche. Other Cajun terms are rat du bois (“rat of the woods”) for a possum and sac à lait (“sack of milk”) for a type of fish. The Cajun term for the language they speak is Bougalie or Yats, short for “Where y’at?” Their speech is also peppered with common French words and phrases: merci, adieu, c’est vrai (“it’s true”), qu’est-ce que c’est (“what is it”), and many others. The pronunciation has a distinctly Gallic air, as in their way of turning long “ā” sounds into “eh” sounds, so that bake and lake become “behk” and “lehk.” And finally, as with most adapted languages, there’s a tendency to use nonstandard grammatical forms: bestest and don’t nobody know.

  A similar argument is often put forward for Gullah, still spoken by up to a quarter of a million people mostly on the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina. It is a peculiarly rich and affecting blend of West African and English. Gullah (the name may come from the Gola tribe of West Africa) is often called Geechee by those who speak it, though no one knows why. Those captured as slaves suffered not only the tragedy of having their lives irretrievably disrupted but also the further misfortune of coming from one of the most linguistically diverse regions of the world, so that communication between slaves was often difficult. If you can imagine yourself torn from your family, shackled to some Hungarians, Russians, Swedes, and Poles, taken halfway around the world, dumped in a strange land, worked like a dog, and shorn forever of the tiniest shred of personal liberty and dignity, then you can perhaps conceive the background against which creoles like Gullah arose. Gullah itself is a blend of twenty-eight separate African tongues. So it is hardly surprising if at first glance such languages seem rudimentary and unrefined. As Robert Hendrickson notes in his absorbing book American Talk, “The syntactic structure, or underlying grammar, of Gullah is . . . ​extraordinarily economical, making the language quickly and readily accessible to new learners.” But although it is simple, it is not without subtlety. Gullah is as capable of poetry and beauty as any other language.

  One of the first serious investigations into Gullah was undertaken by Joel Chandler Harris, known for his Uncle Remus stories. Harris, born in 1848 in Eatonton, Georgia, was a painfully shy newspaperman with a pronounced stammer who grew up deeply ashamed that he was illegitimate. He became fascinated with the fables and language of former slaves during the period just after the Civil War and recorded them with exacting diligence in stories that were published first in the Atlanta Constitution and later compiled into books that enjoyed a considerable popularity both in his lifetime and after it. The formula was to present the stories as if they were
being told by Uncle Remus to the small son of a plantation owner. Among the best known were Nights with Uncle Remus (1881), The Tar Baby (1904), and Uncle Remus and Br’er Rabbit (1906). All of these employed the patois spoken by mainland blacks. But Harris also produced a series of Gullah stories, based on a character called Daddy Jack. This was a considerably different dialect, though Harris thought it simpler and more direct. It had—indeed still has—no gender and no plurals. Dem can refer to one item or to hundreds. Apart from a few lingering West African terms like churrah for splash, dafa for fat, and yeddy or yerry for hear, the vocabulary is now almost entirely English, though many of the words don’t exist in mainstream English. Dayclean, for instance, means “dawn” and trut mout (literally “truth mouth”) means “a truthful speaker.” Other words are truncated and pronounced in ways that make them all but unidentifiable to the uninitiated. Nead is Gullah for underneath. Learn is lun, thirsty is tusty, the other is turrer, going is gwan.