You can silence our voices, but you can never take our chips and gravy! (Photo via Simon Thomas)
CONTENT NOTE: This is a news story about the decline of the northern dialect, eclipsed from below by the south, and as such – in a perhaps doomed effort to save it – this will be written exclusively in northern, a language separate from English and one I am fluent in. A translation will be provided for southerners below.
Eeee! Fry me greyhound in lard and shag me mother: t’northern accent is gerrin the gravy tekken out of it by That London, That Fucking London, I call it, ooh London, bet you love London, don’t yer, ooh, buses running more than once an hour is good, is it? Get ter fuck. Get ter fuck. Get yersen ter fuck.
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Mansfield Bitter. Researchers at t’University of Cambridge – which is int south and thus biased scum, north should fuckin separate from um, declare independence, make Leeds the capital, Leeds has everything That London has, Leeds has this new things called ‘burritos’, only instead of a flour tortilla it’s a cob, and instead of rice and beans and chipotle-smoked chicken it’s just a round slice of ham and some marge, but they ave um, and they don’t cost £8 a pint, that’s how much pints cost in London now, £8, which in the north can buy an house.
GOD’S COUNTRY, PARMO, THINGS MADE OF BRASS: WHY WANT FRED DIBNAH KNIGHTED BY THE QUEEN. OASIS ARE THE BEST BAND IN THE WORLD. WHY GO ABROAD WHEN BLACKPOOL EXISTS. COCAINE IS CHEAPER IN THE NORTH BUT YOU HAVE TO CALL IT ‘CONK DUST’ OR YOUR DEALER WON’T SELL IT TO YOU. FRIED EGGS GO WITH EVERY FOOD. I’M SO MARDY ABOUT THIS LANGUAGE NEWS THAT I’VE SHAT ME KEKS. JORVIK VIKING CENTRE.
* * *
Yeah a new study from the University of Cambridge has found that the regional diversity in dialects is being slowly washed out, with dialects in the north and West Country now falling more in line with those London and the south-east, according to the first set of results from a new app that tracks English dialects and their usage.
The app – called, obviously, ‘The English Dialects App’ – was launched in January 2016 and has already been downloaded 70,000 times. Researchers are using data from 30,000 users across 4,000 locations to quickly and accurately map language change in line with the Survey of English Dialects undertaken between 1950 and 1961. That Survey took 11 years and hundreds of interviews with farmers about how they say ‘scone’: now, in 2016, researchers are able to collect over and above the same amount of data just with a push notification. Truly, we are living in the future.
Anyway first finding is: dialects are flattening across the board. “People in Bristol speak much more similarly to those in Colchester now than they did fifty years ago,” Professor David Britain of the University of Bern said of the findings. “Regional differences are disappearing, some quite quickly. However, while many pockets of resistance to this levelling are shrinking, there is still a stark north-south divide in the pronunciation of certain key words.”
And lead researcher Dr Adrian Leemann of Cambridge’s Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics said: “When it comes to language change in England, our results confirm that there is a clear pattern of levelling towards the English of the south-east; more and more people are using and pronouncing words in the way that people from London and the south-east do.”
There are some pockets of resistance to dialect change, though: Newcastle and Sunderland were both shown to be pretty committed to still saying “stottie cake” a lot, and generally preserving their pronunciation and colloquialism usage. Northern pronunciation was also shown to be thriving – saying ‘last’ with a short a, for instance – and was in fact spreading downwards, with the Midlands and West Country showing more instances of the northern pronunciation than 50 years ago. The north is recruiting warriors for a war against the south. That’s my theory, anyway.
As for the reason for this dialectal flattening? Same as usual: in the past 50 years there’s been greater geographical mobility, with people moving into cities for study and work and out of cities to chill and shoot things in the countryside. Greater mix, greater mingling of accents, a meeting in the middle of dialects and colloquialisms.
The next challenge for the English Dialects App is to accurately map the pronunciation of the word ‘scone’ across the country, with diverse areas resistant to the correct pronunciation i.e. the one that rhymes with ‘gone’. “Everyone has strong views about how this word is pronounced but until we launched the app in January, we knew rather little about who uses which pronunciation and where,” Leemann said. “Our data shows that for the north and Scotland, ‘scone’ rhymes with ‘gone’, for Cornwall and the area around Sheffield it rhymes with ‘cone’ – while for the rest of England, there seems to be a lot of community-internal variation. In the future we will further unpick how this distribution is conditioned socially.” That’s when, that’s when the war breaks out. When they announce that, and man turns against man, yelling ‘scone’ or ‘scone’, flesh on flesh, blood on blood. That’s when the Civil War that will claim so many lives will truly spark and combust. Jorvik Viking Centre.
More northern VICE content:
This Is What It’s Like to Be Britain’s Youngest Mayor
All Hail the Return of Ronnie Pickering, the North’s Answer to Batman
