Here is a little snippet of one of the introductory pages of the book. There will be more in the coming weeks and months. Let me know what you think.
I remember when I was a kid, no-one ever talked about a dialect. Come to mention it, no-one ever talked about language much. If someone brought up the subject of language, it was usually about some other language, some foreign language - usually French – and how it sounds “bloody lovely”. Or maybe German and how that sounds “bloody awful”. The English language never came up much in conversation; it seemed to be reserved for school. But the English we learned in school was a strange animal, it didn’t feel like the English that I knew and it certainly didn’t sound like the English that I spoke.
We were told not to split infinitives, or leave dangling prepositions. We were warned about “bad grammar” and told to pronounce properly. I didn’t know what any of that meant, except the pronunciation bit, and as far as I could tell I pronounced the words in exactly the same way as everyone I knew, so didn’t that count as pronouncing properly?
I distinctly remember one lesson when we had been forewarned that it would be about bad language. The excitement was palpable. The entire class was itching to hear the teachers explain to us about swearing. We thought that they might swear during their explanations; we even thought that we might get to swear, purely, of course, as an integral part of an active discussion. We couldn’t wait for that lesson to start. I remember that, for once, everyone was sitting nicely, facing the front, paying attention.
Miss Gardiner, “with an I; GAR-DI-NER”, she always told us in over-exaggerated syllables, turned to face the class.
“What is bad language?”, she said dramatically.
“Fuck off”, someone replied from the back before she could make the rhetoric apparent.
“Out”, she said pointing to the corridor with her bony finger, and we all suddenly realised that it wasn’t going to be the lesson we had hoped for. That was the way it was taught in those days, and I’m not talking about the 1950s here, this happened in the mid-80s!
The British education system just didn’t know how to get creative with regard to its mother tongue. Instead of embracing the diversity of regional variety, exploring the history of the development of the language, and using the way we actually spoke as a means to highlight our linguistic heritage, we were told that we couldn’t speak properly, and more damagingly, the inference was that we would never learn.
The scary thing is that my school was a perfectly ordinary comprehensive in an upper working class area of Warrington. It was hardly Eton College or some other public school hell-bent on brow beating every last drop of the regional out of my speech. My school was “dead ordinary” as we put it, and the staff seemed ordinary too, but there was an insidious slant to the English curriculum that had infected all schools.
Hiya Wirelector.I think you have summed up the teaching of English(certainly in my inner town schools) perfectly. We never even considered we werent speaking "proper" English,yet we seemed to be reminded everywhere in school that we werent.Singing in the choir we were told to role those "r's".Our teacher was very good but was continually telling us we had lazy mouths!We were told once that we sounded like "Crewners"English was one of my favourite subjects though.
ReplyDeleteI like the taster. I think it's fascinating how languages and dialects are so diverse, and also how they can change over time. Our head master in Primary School also said we pronounced the "oo" sound like "crewners" as in Gaynor's comment. Looking forward to more tasters.
ReplyDeleteYes, it seems that English teachers were quite adept at making us feel bad about our own language. I hope the situation has changed in English schools nowadays.
DeleteOne of the main reasons for deciding to write the book (except to document the dialect of course) is to spread the idea that the way we speak is perfectly fine. The Northern English dialects have been stigmatised for centuries as somehow substandard or just plain incorrect. This is simply not the case. I want people like us who grew up feeling stigmatised to realise that our speech is the result of thousands of years of mixing and borrowing from the languages of Celtic tribes, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, etc and that it is a rich and vibrant dialect. I want to stimulate discussion on the topic and make people in Warrington and the North in general proud of their linguistic heritage.
I think worse thing was that as I was growing up I began to realize that some people thought that not only was the dialect inferior but also the people who spoke it. Office juniors in the 60's wre told how to answer phones,even though we could all be perfectly understood.We ended up doing it parrot fashion,which sounded more unfriendly to me.
DeleteThat is my point precisely. English people in particular make assumptions about other English people on the basis of the way they speak. We all do this all the time, and for the most part it is harmless and is simply a way of strengthening tribal (dialect & region) ties. Unfortunately, there are many cases when dialect and/or accent have been used to stigmatise a group of people. Think of the majority of the Northern dialects, Cockney, Scouse, Brummy, Geordie. They have all been stigmatised and the people who speak those dialects have been stigmatised along with them. This is not how a "civilised" society should work, and many people have come to see dialect speech as a burden that they should rid themselves of. This is nothing short of tragic! Our dialect is what forms a large part of our identity and it should be cherished and supported. Each and every dialect is the unique result of the way our ancestors spoke and the linguistic forces that influenced them. These forces could be invaders from other countries, trends from the capital, or simply innovations made by local people. Whatever they were, they are our direct linguistic history. The dialect we speak is a living history of our local situation over millenia.
ReplyDeleteYes its sad that people go out of their way to loose their local speech,you hear it happening all the time in the media.A local newsreader goes nationwide and you would think it was a different voice!.Then there are the times it happens unconsciously.My niece teaches in Liverpool and now has the beginnings of a scouse accent.She doesnt think she has though.
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