On My Beef With Eye Dialect (Part Two of Two)

(Welcome back to my beef with eye dialect. Last week we looked at the English class system, my relation to it, and its oppression of dialect deemed nonstandard, drawing parallels with the oppression of minority languages. This week we'll examine the use of eye dialect more in depth and whether any alternatives are still viable in the case of Broad Yorkshire in particular.

Running abbreviations: RP = Received Pronunciation, SE = Standard English, BY = Broad Yorkshire.

Also, content warning: cited NSFW language)


She Sed Wot [link]

Falling back to our eye dialect... First off, there appear to be two similar but conflicting definitions of what we mean by eye dialect. One is the use of phoneticised spellings of standard pronunciation (as in the heading), the other is using phoneticised spellings to indicate non-standard diction. The two senses combine in their design of othering the speech recorded, and by extension the speaker, often in order to make fun of them. After all, attacking what is different from you is the basis of a lot of lazy humour. You could compare this to someone altering or distorting their voice while telling a joke for a character - the one who gets the teller's natural voice is always the one who is treated with the most respect within the joke, if the teller is not the narrator themselves.

For example, here's a joke about Mancunians (inhabitants of Manchester) and Scousers (inhabitants of Liverpool):

In a maternity unit there is a shortage of labels, so the midwife goes out into the corridor and tells the three new fathers (a Manc, a Scouser and a Nigerian) there that they'll have to go in and pick up out their children by family resemblance.

The Manc goes in first, and comes out with a baby. The baby's black. The Nigerian guy says, "Excuse me, mate, I think that baby's mine." The Manc says, "Sorry, man, I didn't want to take any chances - one of them's a Scouser!"

When I heard that joke, the person telling it did an approximation of a Mancunian accent on the last line - that's part of the joke. The Nigerian man's line they delivered in their natural speaking voice, the same as the rest of the narration. He's a straight man, the voice of reason, the one we agree with. We're meant to laugh at the Mancunian (and by extension the Liverpudlian as well). (It's important not to discount potential racism informing the person (who wasn't a person of colour) deciding not to do an impression of a Nigerian person, but I think this sympathetic straight-man aspect is also decisive.)

We might suggest the same with eye dialect: you don't write in eye dialect yourself; to do so would be a sign that you aren't educated (and thus are unable to make the distinction). Eye dialect becomes a way to mark a character's speech and thereby thoughts as substandard and open to derision. Dickens (never afraid to stoop for a cheap laugh) does this all the time with his working class characters; any number of butcherings of AAVE (African American Vernacular English) in white authors' works throughout American history have served a similar purpose.

An interesting case relating to BY is in Barry Hines' novel A Kestrel for a Knave (set in Barnsley). Throughout the novel the working class characters' dialogue is written in dialect (Billy says Alarm's gone off tha knows, and Gi'o'er! That hurts! [short for give over, meaning stop it]), the more well-to-do characters (and the narrator) speaking SE. In the Penguin Modern Classics afterword, when talking about adapting the book for the film Kes, Hines says that he wrote the script entirely in SE, and the cast translated it back into BY for filming. He also mentions that he regrets writing with dialect and would rather the dialogue were all in SE.

These two details, I feel, reinforce the interpretation of eye dialect (or in Hines' case, of written dialect at all) as othering by its very nature - the writer and the cast, both speakers of BY, have no need of it; so we are left to assume that the inclusion of the novel's dialect is for the benefit of outsiders not familiar with BY, even though it seems (in its author's eyes) to demean the characters who speak it.

Pure Written Dialect [link]

I think Hines' discomfort with the idea of written dialect is telling. English other than SE is stigmatised to the extent that it is denied the legitimacy of being written down even by its native speakers. To non-linguists, "accent" and "dialect" are things that happen to other people - if you have an accent, or, worse, speak in dialect, it is a mark of being uneducated. Linguists point out in vain that it is impossible not to have an accent or not speak in a dialect, because these terms have been co-opted into the oppressive narrative of aggressive linguistic normativity. For the record, accents differ on how words are pronounced, and dialects differ in terms of words and constructions used. The line between isn't always very definite, but it has been observed that in the face of increased social and popular mobility the traditional dialects of UK English have tended to be replaced by more-or-less SE spoken with a particular accent. This coincides with the far end of my mixed dialect continuum outlined above. I would also argue that the demotion of dialects to "accents" is a common, self-fulfilling weapon in their erasure.

It doesn't have to be like this, though. It is famously said that the difference between a language and a dialect is an army and a navy - just like the dividing line between different species of the same genus becomes harder to see the closer you look, at what point a dialect becomes a separate language has historically been more a matter of politics than of taxonomy. The different "dialects" of Modern Arabic and Chinese are divergent enough that they are often unofficially termed separate languages; the Romance and Nordic languages are close enough that their individual languages can be classified as different points on a dialect continuum. As the usual rough test for two creatures being of the same species is whether they can interbreed successfully, so the rule of thumb for the dialect/language split is whether two candidates are mutually intelligible, and to what degree.

Take Scots. Debate rages over whether it is a dialect of English or its own language, closely related to English but separate, in the manner of Norwegian's relation to Swedish. As I described above for BY, the situation is complicated by the imposition of SE on the pure form - many Scots themselves appear to consider the language merely substandard English. But thanks to the existence of a literary tradition dating from the Middle Ages and including writers such as Robert Burns there is an established written form of Scots.

Here's the penultimate stanza of Burns' To a Mouse (of which the third and fourth lines have become proverbial in SE) with an SE translation:

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane, In proving foresight may be vain: The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley, An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy!

But little Mouse, you are not alone, In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes of mice and men Go often askew, And leave us nothing but grief and pain, For promised joy!

There are several features that distinguish the Scots original from the English: there are words that are found in archaic SE (thou art, thy, nought), as well as ones that have no direct equivalent in SE (lane, Gang aft agley). There are words that do exist in SE, but that have more consonants than the Scots versions (o', an', lea'e) - in this case the apostrophe is called an apologetic apostrophe, as it is apologising for Scots' divergence. Since the 20th century it is no longer used, so for instance in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting we get passages like Renton's analysis of Jean-Claude Van Damme films from the opening chapter:

As happens in such movies, they started oaf wi an obligatory dramatic opening. Then the next phase ay the picture involved building up the tension through introducing the dastardly villain and sticking the weak plot thegither. Any minute now though, auld Jean–Claude's ready tae git doon tae some serious swedgin. – Rents. Ah've goat tae see Mother Superior, Sick Boy gasped, shaking his heid.

(It's worth noting that some Scots purists condemn Irvine Welsh's writing as hopelessly Anglicised. It's noticeable that the very literate Renton frequently switches between SE and Scots forms - like and here, elsewhere realised as n.)

We can tell from the rhyme scheme in the Burns poem (men rhyming with vain and pain etc.) that even the words that exist in SE and are written exactly the same aren't necessarily pronounced the same. I think this is a key point - in a pure dialect, there is no need to mark consistent pronunciations if they differ from another, because the written form is meant to be read without reference to it.

Writing Tyke [link]

Let's go further with that. There's a lot of dialectal variation within Yorkshire, but around Sheffield (dialectally West Yorkshire), where my family are from, the vowel in goat (using John Wells' lexical set) varies between something like [o:] (like a Spanish o, but long) and [ow] (quite Sheffield - if you've ever heard Sean Bean say O2 you'll recognise the elongated vowel sounds we tend to come out with). I tend towards the latter. Regardless, the underlying phoneme that stays the same across different words in the goat set (old, poke, over etc.) and so wouldn't need to be represented by a different spelling in pure dialectal writing. If it is spelt out somehow (like eauw or something for the latter) it becomes clear that we are in eye dialect territory - a difference is being marked from a standard.

Another example would be the vowel in strut. In Yorkshire it's [ʊ], which is the same as the vowel in put (and Wells' foot set, though in many parts of the Yorkshire and the North in general that has [u:], the same vowel as goose). People trying to parody a Northern accent often write things like "fookin'" to indicate /'fʊkin/ (where they themselves would probably say /'fʌkiŋ/), though to me (and people who pronounce Luke and look similarly) that looks like it should be read /'fu:kin/. (This was, by the by, the point that came up in the conversation that sparked this whole rumination.) Drawing the attention of people gormless enough to do this sort of thing to that can earn accusations of being "chippy" (i.e. having a chip on your shoulder), because it's apparently unreasonable to be angry at the eradication of your culture being used as a badly-informed joke.

Anyway. There are features of BY that don't exist in SE, though: the most famous is probably definite article reduction, where the is reduced to a glottal stop, traditionally spelt t' (A were walkin down t'road). There are other reduced forms that don't exist in SE like dun't for doesn't (It dun't matter) and me for my (A've lost me phone again). In pure BY the second person singular pronoun forms are still used (thou realised as tha, thy reducing to thi like me and taking third person singular endings), the reflexive -self of SE is met with forms in -sen (If ever tha does owt for nowt, do it for thisen), and while is used where SE has until (She's workin while five; occasionally causing quite a bit of of confusion), amongst other features.

It's important to note that features such as mesen and gang (from the Burns) are not corruptions of SE forms – they are different forms that have survived from Old English, often longer than their equivalents in SE - take nowt (pronounced /nawt/ most places, but /nowt/ round Sheffield), continuing archaic SE naught, or tha continuing thou. If you’re familiar with German you might recognise  features in Mousie (Mäuschen) and gang (sie ist gegangen). A good example is the present participle: SE playing, BY laikin (same root as LEGO [laik good]). The Old English form was closer to the German spielend – the generalisation of the noun-forming –ing (German –ung) is a hypercorrection that does not cross into most pure dialects.

In any potential pure written BY standard, a decision would have to be made to what level to phoneticise the spelling. We can follow Scots in ignoring sounds that are present in SE but absent in BY (so ow right at the beginning of the first half for SE how, goin for SE going); spelling the equivalent of SE I as A might be accepted (we could argue SE I is a regular pronunciation of the price vowel, so pure BY should be allowed to regularise it to the trap vowel), but the suggestion (as some BY writers have done) of spelling the equivalent of SE weak to and for as ter and fer is more contentious. Do we represent all weak forms in spelling as a rule? To is already an exceptional pronunciation (it doesn't rhyme with toe, after all), but weak for is unresolved. Incidentally, the question of how representative to make an orthography (and whether to make a new breakaway set more representative of reduction) is an established pattern with the likes of Belarusian as compared to Russian.

A Sailed Ship? [link]

All this is really, though, just idle speculation. If BY was to have its own literary tradition (beyond being othered as the speech of uneducated characters), the time to establish it was at the very latest the beginning of the last century. The influence of SE has pulled us too far along the gradient, I fear, for a pure BY to be able to be freestanding. While local pride has grown stronger with the destigmatisation of "regional accents", I very much doubt that there is enough of a foundation left to build on; the pure dialect has to all intents and purposes been erased, just as was desired. In the 19th century nationalising drive many previously minor Slavic languages delved into medieval texts to reclaim words that were definitely not Russian loans, and people began to use them again, but I don't imagine that a parallel situation could ever really arise now that our society seems (with such incredibly positive results, and which I completely support in other regards) to tend towards the communal rather than the individualising. I would love to be proved wrong, of course - though as I'm not a native speaker of pure BY it's out of my hands.

That's the thing that really gets me about eye dialect - it's waving the possibility of having a proper non-Standard literary tradition in the non-Standard speaker's face, and then blowing your nose on it. It's a disgusting distortion of the written word, which used right could be brilliant.

(So there you have it. Join us next week for my answer to a frequently-asked linguistic question - which is the hardest language in the world to learn?)