English dialects in the North of England: phonology

Defining “the North of England”

The North of England is a region whose boundaries have been defined in a number of different ways by laypersons, members of the tourist industry and linguists. Wales (2002), using the methodology of perceptual dialectology, demonstrates that undergraduate students in a British university vary widely in their perceptions of the geographical boundaries of the North. Typically, when asked to draw a line on a map of Britain, students resident in the South of England would place this line much further South than those resident in the North or Midlands. Expressions such as “North of Watford Gap” testify to the perceptions of southerners in this “austrocentric” nation (Wales 2002: 46). Historically, we might think of the North as the area covered by the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, stretching from the Humber to the Firth, with Sheffield marking its southernmost point on the border with Mercia. This area would include the modern counties of Northumberland, Cumbria, Tyne and Wear, Teesside, Humberside, Yorkshire, Merseyside, Greater Manchester and Lancashire, but exclude Cheshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire. Tourist maps tend to agree with this definition: the National Trust handbook has Merseyside and Lancashire in the North-west, but Cheshire in the central area; the route maps in Country Walking magazine place Cheshire in the “Heart of England”, Lincolnshire in the “East of England” and Derbyshire alongside Nottinghamshire in the East Midlands. Confirming this last location, a film released in the cinema in summer, 2002, is set in Nottingham and entitled Once upon a time in the Midlands.

Dialectologists have attempted to define the North in purely linguistic terms. Whilst these more objective judgements do not show the same range of divergence as the students in Wales’s (2000) study, there are differences, particularly apparent when we contrast accounts of “traditional” dialects with those of “modern” ones. Ellis (1869–1889) divided England into six major dialect areas, on the basis of ten isoglosses. His area V, the northern division, covers “the entire North and East Ridings with some of the West Riding of Yorkshire, northern Lancashire, most of Cumberland and Northumberland, all Westmorland and Durham” (Ihalainen 1994: 245). Ellis’s divisions are based on four phonological criteria: the pronunciation of words like some, the pronunciation of r, the pronunciation of the definite article and the pronunciation of words like house. His northern division excludes the southern parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and the far North of Northumberland and Cumbria (these latter belonging to area VI, “the lowland division”). Wakelin (1983) divides the traditional dialects of England into four regions, roughly corresponding to the dialect areas of Middle English: North, West Midlands, East Midlands and South-west. Wakelin’s northern region reaches slightly further South than Ellis’s, with its southern boundary stretching from the Humber to the Ribble. The SED likewise follows the divisions of Middle English dialects. The Basic Materials are divided into four volumes: the northern counties and Man; the West Midlands; the East Midlands and the South. The northern Counties covered in volume I are Cumberland, Westmorland, Northumberland, Durham, Lancashire and Yorkshire.

By using county boundaries to delimit the regions covered by their volumes, Orton (1962–1971) thus brings the territory covered by “the North” further south than either Ellis or Wakelin to coincide with Anglo-Saxon Northumbria. Although Orton and his fellow SED researchers seem to have organized their volumes in this way for administrative convenience rather than as a theoretical statement, as Wales (2002: 48) points out, their “northern Counties” division does accord with popular perceptions, especially those of northerners. Wales herself follows the SED’s example in her cultural history of northern English (Wales 2002: 48). Most recently, Trudgill (1999) divides the traditional dialect areas of England into three regions: North, central and South. Trudgill’s criteria are the pronunciation of long as  vs.  , night as /ni:t/ vs. /nait/, blind as  vs. /blaind/, land as /land/ vs.  , arm as /arm/ vs. a:m/, hill as   vs.  , seven as /sεvə​n/ vs. /zεvə​n/ , and bat as /bat/ vs. /bæt/. Trudgill’s northern region is subdivided into the Lower North and Northumbria, with Lancashire in the western central and South Yorkshire in the eastern central regions. Trudgill’s definition of the North is thus closer to Ellis’s, with Northumberland separated from the rest of the North, and Lancashire and South Yorkshire outside the North altogether.

Trudgill uses a different set of criteria to classify modern dialects, of which he writes:

In Britain, they are particularly associated with those areas of the country from which Standard English originally came – the southeast of England; with most urban areas; with places which have become English-speaking only relatively recently, such as the Scottish Highlands, much of Wales, and western Cornwall; with the speech of younger people; and with middle- and upper-class speakers everywhere. (Trudgill 1999: 6).

These criteria are: the vowel in but  vs. , the pronunciation of arm as /arm/ vs. /a:m/, the pronunciation of singer as  vs.  , the pronunciation of few as /fju:/ vs. /fu:/, the pronunciation of ee in coffee as /I/ vs. /i:/, the pronunciation of gate as /ge:t/ vs. /geit/ and the pronunciation of l in milk  vs. . On the basis of these criteria, Trudgill divides the modern dialects into two major areas, North and South, with the North subdivided into northern and central. Merseyside is here classified along with the West Midlands and Northwest Midlands as part of the West central group, on the basis of having  for singer. The northern division is then further subdivided into the Northeast (from the Tees to the Tweed) and the Lower North (Humberside, central Lancashire and the central North). The single criterion for the major division between North and South here is the vowel in but, pronounced  to the North of a line running from the Wash just south of Birmingham to the Welsh border and  South of this line.

Wells likewise uses this feature as one of the main criteria for dividing English accents into northern and southern types:

We cross from the south to the linguistic north at the point where we pass the northern limits (in broad local accents) of the FOOT-STRUT split and of BATH broadening. In a northern accent, then, put and putt are typically homophones,  , while gas and glass rhyme perfectly, [gas, glas]. (Wells 1982: 349)

Like Trudgill, Wells (1982) notes that the North, so defined, also includes “most of the midlands. It includes, for example, the Birmingham-Wolverhampton conurbation, Leicester and Peterborough” Wells (1982: 349). He then goes on to subdivide the North into the Midlands, the middle North and the far North. The geographical areas covered by these subdivisions are similar to those in Trudgill (1999), except that, for Wells, Liverpool is in the middle North rather than the Midlands.

The accounts of linguists thus differ according to the type of dialect classified (traditional vs. modern) and the range of linguistic criteria used in classification. They do, however, all agree on a core area which is indisputably northern, an area roughly corresponding to the territory of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, south of the present-day border with Scotland. It is acknowledged that the far North, or the North-east from Tees to Tweed, has dialects which are markedly different from those of the lower or middle North. Whilst acknowledging that, according to the criteria selected by Wells, the Midlands share certain highly salient characteristics with the North, I shall define “the North of England” as coterminous with that of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria, i.e. stretching from Berwick-upon-Tweed and Carlisle in the North, to Sheffield in the South, and including Merseyside and all of pre-1972 Lancashire (thus Warrington and Widnes, which are now in Cheshire), and all of Yorkshire and Humberside. This area is coterminous with the six northern counties of the SED, and is also the area covered in Wales’s (2002) cultural history of northern English.