A brief history of northern English

The origins of northern English can be traced to the language of the first settlements of northern Germanic tribes in what was to become the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. However, as Wales (2002: 47) points out, the Romans had already divided Britain into Britannia superior (south of the Mersey-Wash line); Britannia Inferior, north of this line; and Britannia Barbara, north of Hadrian’s Wall. Thus, even before English was spoken in this country, the threefold cultural division of South, North and far North was recognized. What can further be established is that Britain had been invaded by Germanic tribes before the end of the 5^th century, and that by the 9^th century, written records show clear dialectal differences between texts written in the North and South of what is now England. Versions of Caedmon’s hymn, which is found in Bede’s History of the English Church and People, exist in both West Saxon and Northumbrian dialects. Both these versions were written in the 9^th century, when Bede’s Ecclesiastical History was translated from Latin. Differences between the two texts include West Saxon <ea> for Northumbrian <a>, and West Saxon <eo> for Northumbrian <e> suggesting that the West Saxon had diphthongs where Northumbrian had monophthongs in words such as bearn/barn (‘child’, cf. present-day northern bairn) and heofon/ hef n (‘heaven’).

Opinion is divided as to whether these dialectal differences in Old English have their origins in the different tribal dialects of the Angles in the North and the Saxons in the South, or whether they evolved in the 200 years between the first settlements and the first written records. Certainly, by the 8^th century, the geographical distribution of the dialects of Old English coincided with some of the political boundaries of the Heptarchy, but even at this early stage, the differences between northern and southern dialects were the most distinctive, with Northumbrian and Mercian more similar to each other than to the dialects of East Anglia, Wessex or Kent.

Texts from the Middle English period provide evidence both of a number of differences between northern, midland and southern dialects of English, and of a growing awareness of these distinctions on the part of writers. By the 14^th century, there is clear evidence that northern dialects were becoming stigmatized, at least in the eyes (or ears) of southerners. Perhaps the most frequently-quoted example of this is John of Trevisa’s (1380) translation of Higden’s Polychronicon, in which Trevisa inserts the following comment:

Al the longage of the Northumbres, and speciallich at York, is so scharp, slitting and frotyng and unshape, that we southerne men may that longage unnethe understonde. I trowe that that is bycause that they beeth nigh to straunge men and aliens that speketh strongeliche (cited in Freeborn 1998: 259).

Notable here is the characterization of northern English as both harsh and unintelligible to “we southerne men”, an in-group whose superiority is assumed. However, the superiority of the South did not go unchallenged: in the Second Shepherd’s Play of the Townley Cycle (Wakefield), the sheep-stealer Mak disguises himself as a court official in order to trick the locals. His attempt is received with ridicule, as he is told ‘let be thy southern tooth and set in it a turd’. Thus the stereotypes of the condescending southerner and the proudly defiant Yorkshireman are already established by the end of the 14^th century.

Some of the dialectal differences between northern and southern dialects of Middle English are apparent in versions of the Cursor Mundi, originally written in the North towards the end of the 13th century, but copied by a southern scribe in the 14th century. The southern scribe makes several changes which provide evidence of dialectal differences. One clear North-South distinction is that between <a> spellings in the North and <o> spellings in the South for words like know, none and hold. As the modern spellings show, the <o> spelling has prevailed in Standard English, but survival of pronunciations with /e:/ in Scots provide evidence for an earlier /a/ or /a:/ which is retained in the North, but rounded to /o/ in southern dialects. This change seems to have happened at least by the 12th century, for texts from this period show the same pattern of <a> spellings in the North (and Midlands) but <o> in the South (Examples can be found in Freeborn 1998: 116).

Many of the differences between northern and southern dialects of Middle English can be attributed to the greater influence of Scandinavian languages in the North. The first recorded landing of Viking invaders was the raid on Lindisfarne in 793, but sustained contact between English- and Scandinavian-speaking people did not occur until the second half of the 9^th century, when the great armies of the Vikings settled in East Anglia, the eastern part of Mercia, and southern Northumbria. Along with those of the Norwegians who sailed from Ireland to the North-west of England, these settlements make up the ‘Scandinavian Belt’ crossing England diagonally from Cumbria to Lincolnshire, in which the greatest concentration of Scandinavian features in English dialects is still found. In the Middle English period, northern dialects of English were characterized by Scandinavian features such as the pronouns they, their, them, as well as the levelling of inflections which has been attributed to language contact. These morphological features were to be adopted into the Standard English which developed in 15^th century London, and so are no longer recognized as northern. As Wales (2002: 45) points out, no comprehensive history of northern English has ever been written: typically, histories of English confine their accounts of northern dialects to an enumeration of the characteristics of Middle English dialects and the contributions of northern dialects to the 15^th century standard. References to northern English after 1500 tend to consist largely of quoting the derogatory remarks of southerners as proof that only Standard English mattered in the modern period. Perhaps the most frequently-quoted extract is the following, from Puttenham’s Art of English Poesie, where the author says of the would-be poet:

…neither shall he take the termes of Northern-men, such as they use in dayly talke, whether they be noblemen or gentlemen, or of their best clarkes all is a matter: nor in effect any speach used beyond the river of Trent, though no man can deny but that theirs is the purer English Saxon at this day, yet it is not so Courtly nor so currant as our Southerne English is, no more is the far Westerne mans speach: ye shall therefore take the vsuall speach of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying about London within lx myles, and not much aboue. (1589, cited in Freeborn 1998: 307).

Representations of northern English in 16^th-century literature emphasize the outlandishness of these dialects to Londoners’ ears. In William Bullein’s Dialogue both Pleasant and Pitifull (1578), the character Mendicus is quite literally the beggar at the gates of London. His Northumbrian dialect is noticed at once by the lady of the house, who remarks: “What doest thou here in this Countrie? me thinke thou art a Scot by thy tongue.” Mendicu’s speech is one of the few 16^th-century representations of Northumbrian dialect, characterized by the use of <o> for <a> in words such as mare for more and sarie for sorry, as well as a number of words which would have been familiar to Londoners from the Border Ballads sung in the streets: limmer ‘scoundrel’, fellon ‘brave’, deadlie feede (the blood feud of the North Marches). Other words, such as barnes ‘children’ and ne ‘no’, are still used in Northumberland today. Bullein had spent several years in Tynemouth, and so had had the opportunity to observe the Northumbrian dialect first-hand. His representation of the dialect seems accurate, but the effect in the play is to reinforce the stereotype of the uncivilized northerner.

The quote from Puttenham suggests that the acceptable model for literary English was that of an area within a 60-mile radius of London, and that the English spoken north of the Trent was singled out, along with that of the South-west, as particularly outlandish, albeit northern English is acknowledged to be ‘purer’. This double-edged attitude towards northern English was to persist throughout the modern period. John Ray’s Collection of English Words not generally used (1674) shows an antiquarian interest in northern dialect, and even Dr Johnson acknowledged that, having “many words…commonly of the genuine Teutonic race…the northern speech is…not barbarous but obsolete” (1755). On the other hand, 18^th century grammarians and elocutionists catered for readers who were anxious to rid themselves of the stigma of provincialism in an increasingly London-centric society. John Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791), after outlining his “Rules for the Natives of Scotland, Ireland and London for avoiding their respective peculiarities”, makes the following remark about “those at a considerable distance from the capital”:

If the short sound of the letter u in trunk, sunk, &c. differ from the sound of that letter in the northern parts of England, where thay sound it like the u in bull, and nearly as if the words were written troonk, soonk, &c. it necessarily follows that every word where the second sound of that letter occurs must by these provincials be mispronounced. (Walker 1791: xii, my emphasis)

Walker’s remarks here show a clear judgement that any dialect diverging from the polite usage of London (not that of the Cockneys, who are the “inhabitants of London” intended to benefit from Walker’s rules) is simply wrong, and must be corrected with the help of the Critical Pronouncing Dictionary. A by-product of this is that Walker, along with other 18th-century authors such as Thomas Sheridan, William Kenrick and the northerner John Kirkby, give us detailed information about northern pronunciation in the 18th century, if only in order to proscribe it. The feature described by Walker in the quote above is of course one of the most salient markers of northern English pronunciation to this day: the lack of what Wells (1982: 196) terms the “FOOT-STRUT split”. Other features of northern pronunciation particularly singled out for censure in the 18th century include the Northumbrian burr, first noticed by Defoe, who wrote:

I must not quit Northumberland without taking notice, that the Natives of this Country, of the ancient original Race or Families, are distinguished by a Shibboleth upon their Tongues in pronouncing the Letter R, which they cannot utter without a hollow Jarring in the Throat, by which they are as plainly known, as a foreigner is in pronouncing the Th: this they call the Northumberland R, or Wharle; and the Natives value themselves upon that Imperfection, because, forsooth, it shews the Antiquity of their Blood. (Defoe, Daniel. 1724–1727. A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. Volume 3. London, 232–233)

Although Defoe calls this an “imperfection”, he acknowledges that the Northumbrians themselves take pride in this feature, possibly alluding to the folk-belief that it arose from copying a speech impediment of local hero Harry ‘Hotspur’ Percy, heir to the Duke of Northumberland. 18^th-century authors, in condemning northern dialects, provide us with a good deal of information about the characteristic features of these dialects at the time.

The 19^th century saw the rise of the large industrial towns and cities of the North, and a corresponding awakening of working-class consciousness and regional pride. This found its expression in various forms of dialect writing: almanacs, poetry, dialogues and music-hall songs and recitations. At the same time, the new discipline of philology gives rise to scholarly accounts of northern dialects such as Joseph Wright’s (1892) Grammar of the Dialect of Windhill and numerous dialect glossaries such as Richard Heslop’s Northumberland Words (1892). By the end of the 19^th century, universal primary education was perceived as a threat to the survival of traditional dialects: Heslop expresses his concern that “the tendency to assimilate the form of the dialect with the current English of the schools is increasing”, but the construction which he uses to illustrate this point, Me and my marrow was ganning to work, is still in use today.

Similar concerns about the viability of English dialects have been expressed throughout the 20^th century, and continue into the 21^st. The SED, which began in the 1950’s, set out with the intention of recording “traditional vernacular, genuine and old”, before such dialects were irretrievably lost due to the effects of urbanization, mobility and the BBC. Echoes of these concerns can be found in accounts of dialect levelling at the turn of the millennium, both in scholarly texts such as the papers in Foulkes and Docherty (1999) and in popular accounts of the spread of Estuary English. It is certainly the case that traditional dialects are being replaced by more modern, urban vernaculars, and that, within certain regions, the dialect of influential towns and cities is spreading. But even where there is clear evidence of levelling in the North, this seems to be in the direction of a regional, or pan-northern, rather than a national model, so that we can confidently expect northern dialects to remain distinctive for some time yet.