Blogger Background


Background
My name is Robert Brooks. I was born and raised in Warrington, as were my parents, and as were three of my grandparents. In fact, the paternal line of my family has lived in and around the Warrington area for at least the past 400 years, and possibly even longer.
I grew up speaking and hearing nothing but the Warrington dialect until, at the age of 22, I left my home town to study Spanish at University College London (UCL). After university I moved permanently to Finland, and I have been here ever since. During the 15 years since I left Warrington, I have studied, researched, and worked with various languages, such as: Spanish, Finnish, Portuguese, Swedish, and Basque. I studied English and Linguistics at the University of Helsinki for some time, I speak Finnish like a native and I currently work for Nokia Plc as a language specialist. I also edited and compiled the first English - Finnish phrasal verb dictionary in Finland, which was published in July 2007.

The point of writing all this down is not to blow my own horn, rather to act as credentials for the Wirelect project, that is, I know what I am doing.

However, I by no means know everything about language, in fact I suspect this project will prove that I know very little about even my own dialect. The fact is, this project is impossible to carry out without YOU, the person reading the information on this blog. If you were born in or around Warrington, or you have spent a considerable amount of time in or around Warrington, then please contribute to this project.

3 comments:

  1. Good morning Robert.

    Like the idea of the site.

    As a former news editor of the Warrington Guardian, and ex-Sir Thomas Boteler pupil, I've probably got a vested interest in stuff like this.

    Could I suggest one possible addition for your dialect word of the week - 'occurd' - probably just a corruption of awkward but usually attached to another insult - eg 'occurd bugger' or 'occurd sod'. Usually meaning a thick ear is coming your way soon (or it did in my case).

    One of my old English teachers, who dated back to the glory days of Boteler Grammar School, would always remark on the misuse of 'our' and 'are' as some kind of Warrington affliction.

    Cheers anyway and again, best of luck

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    Replies
    1. Hello Pete.

      Thank you for your comments. I grew up hearing the same threat :-)

      I am pretty sure that 'occurd or 'occ'rd is indeed a corruption of "awkward", and it does seem to collocate with "bugger" and "sod". I have heard it also used with "get", which is in itself an interesting word when used as a noun. I do not know if "get" is peculiar to Warrington, I suspect not.

      Your comment on the "our/are" distinction is very interesting, and I do not make a distinction when in Warrington myself (elsewhere I usually do for the sake of clarity).

      Perhaps teachers in those days were so firmly rooted in rote learning and prescriptive teaching methods that they underestimated an individual's ability to adapt their register to a particular situation.

      Incidentally, my uncle went to Boteler Grammar School.

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    2. 'Get' (also pronounced 'git') is certainly not peculiar to Warrington. Just listen to Liverpudlian John Lennon's song "I'm So Tired", in which he curses Sir Walter Raleigh for being the stupid get who introduced tobacco to England.
      Attempting to write local pronunciation is a difficult task, I think. Werdyoostop? 'Occurd' looks like a misspelling of 'occured'. I could suggest 'okud', but how would you know it was a short 'o'?

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