Oh b****r

THURSDAY 10 APRIL

THE THINGS WE SAY
As you know, I’ve always been fascinated by the way people around England use their native tongue to express themselves; the many ways in which the rich sounds of English have been twisted, warped or otherwise manipulated into accents that are often almost - and sometimes, completely - unintelligible to ‘outsiders’. A Tynesider waaks to wawk while a Teessider wawks to wairk. In Sheffield, ‘going down the road to the school’ emerges mysteriously as goo-in darn t’roe-ad to t’skoyle and ‘Monday to Friday’ becomes ‘Monday while Friday’.

Outsiders who say that some accents might as well be foreign languages are quite right. You can probabaly guess that German der Mann ist mein Vater means ‘that man is my father’. But how about Lancastrian artye witshert? This is strongly-accented ‘art thou wet-shod?’, the phrase often used to mean ‘is it raining outside?’ QED.

Things get infinitely more complex, of course, when what you are confronted with is a fully-grown dialect rather than a mere accent. Whether a dialect is obscure and unintelligible enough to be classed as a language in its own right depends, I guess, on how many unique words and expressions it contains and how they are used. A dialect word for ‘slow-burning coal’ is not as important in this respect as words for ‘hat’, ‘dog’ or ‘fire’.

Some dialects - very definitely including Northumbrian, and probably Tyneside Geordie, too - could easily be defined as separate languages; as different from standard ‘BBC’ English as Catalan is from Castilian Spanish. To possess utterly unEnglish words like dut and femmer is quite an achievement! (The north-east cannot decide what a dut actually is. On Tyneside, it seems to refer to a bowler hat; in East Durham - my homeland - it’s a woolly hat of the sort to which pompoms are sometimes attached.)

Finally, you may have heard me mention a few of the words I heard in Herefordshire on this morning's Nightshift. Here are a few more...
gawl - pry, snoop
killship - shamefaced
skith - minimal snowfall
spag - quarrelsome, argumentative
beethy - damp, soft
caddle - potter about
kank - bad temper
grault - ghost
I was also surprised to hear bait used in its north-east sense of ‘snack, packed lunch’.

Some years ago, a ‘dialect map’ of England was drawn up by some learned professorial types somewhere. One of the words they used to determine regionality was the word children use to excuse themselves temporarily from playing a game; where I come from, that word is skinch; in Sheffield, it’s fainites and in London, it’s kings. Why the words are so different from each other, or what their origins are, is anyone’s guess. What word did you use?

CONTACT ME
Post comments on this blog or contact me in any one (or more) of these ways....
ian.robinson@bbc.co.uk
ianstuartrobinson@googlemail.com
text 07786 200954 (while the programme is on-air)
call (between about 0545 and 0630 Monday to Friday) 0191 232 6565
Ian Robinson, The Nightshift, BBC Radio Newcastle, Spital Tongues, Newcastle-upon-Tyne NE99 1RN

NOTE
Please bear in mind that the views expressed in this blog are my own and NOT the views of the BBC.