'Dialect' and 'Accent' in Industrial West Yorkshire

409 Pages·1985·34.84 MB·English

by  K.M. Petyt

DIALECT AND ACCENT IN INDUSTRIAL WEST YORKSHIRE
Varieties of English Around the World
General Editor:
Manfred Görlach
Englisches Seminar
Universitat zu Köln
Albertus Magnus Platz 1
D-5000 KOLN 41
Germany
GENERAL SERIES
Volume 6
K.M. Petyt
Dialect and Accent in Industrial West Yorkshire
DIALECT AND ACCENT
IN INDUSTRIAL WEST YORKSHIRE
by
K.M. Petyt
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
1985
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Petyt, K.M.
Dialect and accent in industrial West Yorkshire.
(Varieties of English around the world, ISSN 0172-7362. General series; v. 6)
Abbreviated and slightly modified version of the author's thesis (doctoral) -- University of
Reading, 1977.
Bibliography: p.
1. English language - Dialects -- England — West Yorkshire. 2. English language -- Eng­
land - West Yorkshire - Accents and accentuation. 3. English language - Social aspects
-- England - West Yorkshire. 4. West Yorkshire — Social life and customs. I. Title. II.
Series.
PE2084.W45P4 1985 427'.81 85-20136
ISBN 90-272-4864-8 (alk. paper)
© Copyright 1985 - John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or
any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
P R E F A CE
This book is an abbreviated and slightly modified version of my
doctoral thesis, which was submitted to the University of Reading in
1977. I have omitted some of the preliminary material which dis­
cussed earlier work in the field, and some of the less interesting
descriptive parts - a thesis is required to demonstrate how it re­
lates to other studies and to present all its results, but a book
should not give a potted version of what has been better covered
elsewhere (and my own book The Study of Dialect has now made avail­
able an outline of the development of dialectology), and need not
report the least fruitful parts of a project. Beyond this, I have
made few changes, apart from correcting obvious flaws of presentation.
The book, and the methods on which it is based, may appear some­
what dated. It largely follows the approach of Labov (1966a), and
planning and fieldwork were carried out in 1970-71, within a few
years of the appearance of that pioneering work. Analysis of the
data and writing-up were done during my spare time over the follow­
ing five years or so (I was employed full-time during the whole
period of my work). Other commitments have delayed this publication
until 1985, and much has changed in the fields of sociolinguistics
and dialectology during the fifteen years since I began work. Cri­
ticisms have been made of 'Labovian' studies (see for example Hudson,
1980), and other approaches have been attempted in social-urban dia­
lectology (for instance, Milroy, 1980). If I were to take account
of all these developments, and of everything I learned by experience
and all the second thoughts I have had, I would probably tackle the
subject quite differently. But since I cannot start again, I feel
that it would be better to present the material almost in its orig­
inal form, rather than trying to amend or reinterpret it in the light
of subsequent research. It is one of very few thoroughgoing Labov­
ian studies carried out in Britain, and it was intended to be primar­
ily descriptive rather than theoretical. I publish it now in the
hope that, though the theoretical framework and some of the conclus­
ions have been shown to have flaws, many of its descriptive findings
may still be of interest and value - and may be interpreted according
to whatever theoretical viewpoint is adopted.
C O N T E N TS
Introduction 1
The Area 6
Chapter 1: Dialect Studies of West Yorkshire 9
Chapter 2: Methodological Matters 15
1 Samples and Surveys 15
2 Social Class 24
3 Variation 33
4 Style 40
Chapter 3: The West Yorkshire Sample 49
1 Sampling Method 49
2 Characteristics of the Sample 51
Chapter 4: The Fieldwork and Analysis 65
1 Fieldwork 65
2 Analysis 73
3 Interpretation 74
Chapter 5: The Traditional Dialect of the Area 79
Chapter 6: The Present.Situation: Performance 101
1 An Examination of Some Linguistic
Variables 101
Phonological Variation 103
Other Variables 179
2 Other Non-Standard Features 214
Phonological Features 215
Grammatical Features 230
Vocabulary 239
Chapter 7: The Present Situation: Evaluation 243
1 Opinions and Attitudes 244
2 Self-Evaluation 259
3 Subjective Evaluation 294
Chapter 8: Conclusions: 327
1 Traditional Dialect and the Present
Situation 327
2 Dialect, Accent,Standard English
and RP 335
3 The Influence of Standard English
and RP on West Yorkshire Speech 339
4 Variation and Change 343
5 The West Yorkshire TSpeech Community' 353
Appendices : 359
A The Questionnaire 361
 Variation in the Interviewer's Speech 367
 Τ and V Forms 373
D Informants' Opinions about the Area 381
E Informants' Opinions about Social
Class 387
Bibliography 395
TRANSCRIPTION
The system of transcription employed in this book is basically
that of Gimson (1970). I use the same symbols as Gimson when ref­
erring to RP; for specifically Yorkshire sounds or phonemes some
additional symbols are required: these can be found in Gimson's
'List of Phonetic Symbols and Signs', but I employ them with the
value I describe in the text. When dealing specifically with phon­
emes and phonetic contrasts, I employ the usual slants: otherwise
transcriptions are enclosed in square brackets.
Map shouiing Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield and surrounding areas,
including Windhill (Jw= Joseph Wright), Almondbury (AE = A· Easther),
and the locations at which the Survey of English Dialects conducted
investigations (Y21, Y22 etc): these works are described in Chapters
1 and 5·
INTRODUCTION
The dialects spoken in Yorkshire have probably received more
attention than those of any other region of Britain. Many of the
publications of the English Dialect Society were concerned with this
area, and the great Joseph Wright, editor of its massive English
Dialect Dictionary and the English Dialect Grammar, was a native of
a village near Bradford. Soon after the winding up of that Society,
Wright was largely responsible for the founding of the still-
flourishing Yorkshire Dialect Society, which has encouraged work both
on and in the dialects of the area: serious descriptive studies, and
both serious and light-hearted works in poetry and prose, such as
have appeared not only in his own publications, but also in numerous
almanacs , newspaper columns, and so on.
But great numbers of Yorkshiremen, like myself, know these dia­
lects only from such sources - or perhaps we have heard them from
a few old people or some country folk. Certainly we do not speak
like that ourselves; some of us may be able to imitate dialect-
speakers to some extent as a party trick, but in our everyday speech
we do not say [find] for find, [ni:t] for night, [nive] for never,
[foit] for foot, [varl] for very, [mak] for make, [noe] for no, and
so on; we pronounce these words, in our opinion, very much as does
the man on the BBC. Nor do we use many unusual vocabulary items,
or past tense forms like telled or plurals like een or childer: in
lexicon and grammar we are not far from StE. The forms of speech
described as 'the dialect of' Bradford, Leeds, Huddersfield, or
wherever, are generally those considered to be the 'genuine', 'pure',
'traditional' speech of those localities - but they do not seem to
be used by the great majority of town-dwellers today.
And yet nearly all of us, in spite of having a mode of speech
probably closer to StE and RP than to 'real' Yorkshire dialect, have
had the experience of being recognised as Yorkshiremen (see p.253 )·
What is it, if we do not speak what is usually described as 'dialect',
which continues to give us away? To attempt to answer this question
was my main aim: to examine which kinds of features persist, and
which have been or are being modified.
Abercrombie (1951) once said that English people divide into
three groups according to the way they speak: 1) RP speakers of
StE, 2) non-RP speakers of StE, 3) dialect speakers. Now these
divisions are probably too sharp: for instance, many people from
time to time use lexical or grammatical items that could not be con­
sidered to be StE, yet they could hardly be described as 'dialect
speakers' - they are closer to the second group than to the third;
but generally this is a reasonable summary picture. The first
1 See Dyson (1975) for examples of these.
2 DIALECT & ACCENT IN IDUSTRIAL WEST YORKSHIRE
group, users of RP and StE, has of course been extensively described;
and the third, dialect speakers, has received a good deal of atten­
tion, especially in Yorkshire. But the second group (including those
I have just mentioned) has been relatively neglected - though it is
quite possible that it includes the majority of the population of
Britain, and almost certainly it includes very many urban Yorkshire-
men. I decided that this was the group I should make sure of cover­
ing; I would examine the speech of a good number of native Yorkshire-
men from my home area, the 'wool' district of industrial West
Yorkshire. I wanted to see what sort of regional features had now
given way to StE and RP, and what sort still persisted in the towns -
what is it that continues to make most Yorkshiremen recognisable as
such, and how is it that some seem more 'Yorkshire' than others?
I had been thinking along these lines when I came into contact
with Labov's work on New York City, and also with the first study
within the same framework to be carried out in Britain, that of
Trudgill on Norwich. I soon decided that it would be profitable to
carry out a major part of my own investigation along the same lines,
for a number of reasons. For instance, this would involve the study
of a sizeable sample of the population, selected by sound random
procedures, rather than an attempt to find particular types of
speakers as had been usual in most previous studies: this should help
to reveal the actual extent to which 'dialect' is still spoken, and
indeed to which any non-standard feature is used. Also, it would
make 'variation' central, and it was obvious to me that variation in
the degree of 'broadness' was very noticeable in the area: some
people clearly had more or 'stronger' Yorkshire features than others,
and it would be profitable to measure this more objectively, and to
see whether it tied in with social status, say, or age, or with some
other factor such as 'situation' (for the same person seemed some­
times to speak more broadly than at others).
Other reasons for my deciding to test the Labov approach on new
material related to some of the claims made on the basis of findings
in New York or Norwich. For instance, Trudgill had not found
evidence of the 'hypercorrection' (in an idiosyncratic sense of the
term) of the next-to-highest class claimed by Labov to be an impor­
tant factor in linguistic change - would my findings support the
former or the latter? Trudgill had claimed that the working class/
middle class division was revealed to be important linguistically -
could this be shown to be the case by an examination of different
2 The term 'broad', though not a scientific one, is common in
the area, and I shall employ it from time to time in its popularly
accepted sense. I shall also, unless otherwise indicated, use
'dialectal' and 'dialect speaker' thus, rather than in terms of my
own definition of 'dialect' which is proposed in Chapter 8.