Dialects of England: Traditional and Modern.

After the retirement of the Romans from the island the invading immigrants were the Jutes, Saxons, Danes and Angles. The Jutes seized Kent, The Isle of Wight and a part of the mainland; the Saxons had all those parts that have now the suffix ‘sex’, as Essex, Sussex, Middlesex, and Wessex; and the Angles took possession of that tract of the north that has the present terminations ‘land’, ‘shire’ and ‘folk’, as Suffolk, Yorkshire, Northumberland. These last afterwards gave the name to the whole island.

Dialects are not to be considered corruption of a language, but as varieties less favoured than the principal tongue of the country. Of the various dialects, it must be borne in mind that the northern countries retain many words now obsolete in current English: these words are of the genuine Teutonic stock. The pronunciation may seem rough and harsh, but is the same as that used by the forefathers; consequently it must not be considered barbarous. The other countries of England differ from the vernacular by a depraved pronunciation.

Awareness of regional variation in England is evident from the fourteenth century, seen in the observation of such writers as Higden/Trevisa or William Caxton and in the literary presentation of the characters in Chaucer’s “Reeve’s Tale” or the Wakefield “Second Shepherd’s Play”. Many of the writers on spelling and grammar in the 16^th and 17^th centuries made comments about regional variation, and some (such as Alexander Gil) were highly systematic in their observants, though the material is often obscured by a fog of personal prejudices.

The picture which emerges from the kind of dialect information obtained by the Survey of English Dialects relates historically to the dialect divisions recognized in Old and Middle English.

The classification of modern dialects presents serious difficulties as their boundaries are rather vague and the language standard more and more invades the spread area of the dialectal speech. One of the most serious attempts at such classification was made by A. Ellis. His classification more or less exactly reflects the dialectal map of modern Great Britain and it was taken as the basis by many dialectologists.

The map below displays thirteen traditional dialect areas (it excludes the western tip of Cornwall and most of Wales, which were not English speaking until the 18^th century). A major division is drawn between the North and everywhere else, broadly following the boundary between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia, and a Secondary division is found between much of the Midlands and areas further south. A hierarchal representation of the dialect relationship is shown below. (№8, p.324).

Relatively few people in England now speak a dialect of the kind represented above. Although some forms will still be encountered in real life, they are more often found in literary representations of dialect speech and in dialect humour books. The disappearance of such pronunciations, and their associated lexicon and grammar, is sometimes described as “English dialects dying out”. The reality is that they are more than compensated for by the growth of a range of comparatively new dialect forms, chiefly associated with the urban areas of the country. If the distinguishing features of these dialects are used as the basis of classification, a very different-looking dialect map emerges with 16 major divisions.