Monday, October 31, 2011

Survey results and food for thought!



Well, a disappointing response to the survey, but thank you to the people who answered, I appreciate your interest in the topic :-)


Despite the very low number of responses, the conclusions that can be drawn are as I had expected: Warringtonians pronounce "Nothing" as Neiwt.


This is important because it clearly distinguishes the Warrington dialect from the Lancashire dialect. Warrington was, of course, part of Lancashire up to 1974, when it then became part of Cheshire. A shift in county borders does not mean a shift in dialect, so the difference in pronunciation is interesting.


The Lancashire dialect has been studied in some detail, and one of its features is the owt - nowt pronunciation of anything - nothing, respectively. Although the Warrington dialect has many similarities and indeed shares many features with the Lancashire dialect, in this instance it differs distinctly. 


Naught, Neiwt and Nowt seem to be almost certainly related. Naught meaning the decimal "0" and equally "nothing". Naught seems to have developed from the much older Old English word "nawiht" or "nōwiht", which in turn is a contraction of "ne-ō-wiht", which means "not a thing". It is easy to see the connection between "neiwt", "nowt" and "nawiht". This often happens in dialects; a word becomes popular for an arbitrary reason and then sticks despite concurrent developments in the standard language.


It seems "nawiht" and its various pronunciations has been around since the Old English period (400 - 1100AD). So we can assume that both neiwt and nowt are between 1500 - 1000 years old.


The premise that both pronunciations have been around so long, and that "nowt" has not superseded "neiwt" is testament to the Warrington dialect. Warrington was part of the County Palatine Lancashire for hundreds of years, and yet it still maintained its own unique features.


So the next time you say "neiwt", you are not saying nothing, you really are saying something!!!

Monday, October 24, 2011

New Dialect word of the week AND another survey

A "double whammy", to use the American vernacular, this week.

The new dialect word of the week is a real gem! Click on the link to find out.

And we have another survey that may be related to the dialect word of the week; I hope to find out from the good people of the town.

The survey focuses again on pronunciation, and this time we are dealing with possibly a very old word indeed! More details when the survey results are published.

So, to business - How do you pronounce the following words in the dialect:

Nothing:

1. Nowt
2. Neiwt
3. Some other pronunciation

Anything:

1. Owt
2. Eiwt
3. Some other pronunciation

As with the previous survey, please answer with the corresponding numbers and year of birth. My answers are:
2 & 2, 1974.

If you answer with a number 3 for either or both, please try to spell your pronunciation.

Let's see what we come up with. Many thanks :-)

Saturday, October 22, 2011

British Library Wordbank project

I have contacted the British Library concerning its Wordbank project, which aims to collect dialect words for posterity.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/world-translation-center/british-wordbank/162263300513573

The project has been running for some months now, and they have amassed quite a lot of dialect words from around the country. I hope the British Library will take me up on my offer of collaboration as we are essentially striving towards the same goal. Let's see what happens. I'll keep you all posted.

Keep those dialect words coming in, and we can record the Warrington dialect for future generations!

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

New dialect word of the week

A new dialect word of the week in keeping with the season :-)

Click on the "Dialect word of the week" link on the right.

Monday, October 17, 2011

Survey Results

Thank you to everyone that responded to the survey!

We didn't get as many responses as I had hoped for, and as such it is a little difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions. However, here is a little information on the phenomena we can see at work in the responses we received, and one conclusion that we can draw from the available data:

The omission of the "T"s in the "Go get them" sentence is a common linguistic phenomenon known as glottalisation. The term comes from the part of the throat known as the glottis, where the vocal chords are situated. Glottalisation occurs when the vocal chords are temporarily closed to obstruct the passage of air through them. This creates the sound that we think of as representing the omission of the "T"s.

If you now say "Go ge' 'em" to yourself, you will notice that there is a very brief gap in between ge' and 'em; this is the glottalisation, or as it is often called, the glottal stop.

The replacement of the "T"s with "R"s is another common linguistic phenomenon known as a linking R. The linking R occurs between two words; the preceding ending in a vowel sound, and the following beginning in a vowel sound. Note, we are referring to the sounds now, and not the actual letters! So, in the sentence "Go get them", in the natural speech of many Warringtonians, the verb get loses the final consonant and thus ends in a vowel sound /e/, and the pronoun them loses its initial consonants and begins with a vowel sound /e/, and hence we have the required prerequisites for the linking R to occur. As as our survey shows, it does indeed occur :-)

The second part of our survey requires us to know a little about a linguistic phenomenon known as phonetic transcription. As the name suggests, it belongs to the field of phonetics, which is defined as the study of the sounds of human speech. We need not go into this area in great depth, only to say that the sounds of any language are represented in written text by the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA (which can be seen in dictionaries next to the word entry).

To be clear, the IPA does not refer to the spelling of words with letters (orthography), rather the sounds that make up words!

Our survey was interested to see if and when there has been a change in pronunciation of the vowel sound in "book". The two coexisting pronunciations are represented in the IPA phonetic transcription as follows (note that phonetic transcriptions are always surrounded by forward slashes):

1. book (rhyming with stuck) /buk/
2. book (rhyming with puke) /byk/


Of the six responses we received, five of them reported that they pronounced "book" as /buk/. Only one reported a pronunciation of "book" as /byk/. What is interesting about this is that those using the /buk/ pronunciation are born from 1950 onwards. The one /byk/ pronunciation was born pre-1950. On its own this carries very little weight, but in the absence of further responses, I factored in the pronunciation of my own Warrington-born relatives born pre-1950, and they all pronounce "book" as /byk/.

We can therefore conclude, albeit tentatively, that there was the start of a vowel sound /y/ - /u/ shift in the Warrington dialect at some point circa 1950!

This pronunciation shift is also relevant for similarly pronounced words such as: "look" and "cook".

Again, a big THANK YOU to all those that took /tuk/ not /tyk/ the time to answer. Your participation is very much appreciated :-)





Thursday, October 13, 2011

A quick survey

I would like to do a quick survey concerning pronunciation in the Warrington area. It should only take you 30 seconds to do, but would provide very interesting results.

How do you pronounce the following word - BOOK?

1. Rhyming with "stuck"
2. Rhyming with ""puke"

How do you pronounce the following sentence - GO GET THEM?

3. Without the "T"s, as follows: "Go ge' 'em"
4. With an "R", as follows: Go gerrum

Please respond by posting a comment underneath this blog entry.

The comment only has to include: the number that corresponds to your pronunciation AND your year of birth. For example, my response would be: 1 & 4, 1974

No other information is required.

Let's see how many responses we get, and I'll post the results in a few days.

Many thanks :-)



Monday, October 10, 2011

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Wirelect is one month old today!

Wirelect is one month old today!

And to celebrate, here are some statistics ;-)

In just one month visitors from 32 cities in 9 countries around the world have read Wirelect content nearly 1000 times!

Most visits come from England, followed very closely by Finland, and then Australia.

We have had comments from a few people, with one regular contributor in addition to myself.

This is a great start, but we need more words and phrases in order to amass enough data to put together a dictionary. If you are a Warringtonian, please add a comment. The best contributors will get their name in the finished dictionary!

Thank you to everyone who has visited and/or contributed. Keep watching, this is just the start!