West Midlands English: speech and society blog

Wolverhampton based newspaper The Express and Star, has published the results of its Great Black Country census.

It showed that in answer to the question: “Which attribute best typifies Black Country culture?” 46% out of the 2,000 people who responded said that it was the region’s dialect. This was the highest score for that question.

Why is it that people living in the Black Country today, or who were born in the region but live worldwide, continue to speak – and sometimes write – in Black Country English? Is it a cut or a bonk? Ar doe no or I don’t know? The survey has shown that far from being consigned to history today’s Black Country not only exists, but is alive and well, thank you!

One of the distinctive ways in which this is happening is through the region’s distinctive accent and “dialect” (which we prefer to think of as a language variety, although more of this in a later post). The Black Country may be a place defined by geography (even though its precise boundaries have been identified as a grey area by readers who answered the survey). It is also, though, in today’s technological age, defined by an affinity with the Black Country, regardless of where in the world you may live. Even though the region has been through huge social and industrial changes over the last fifty years or so, what remains unchanged is people using and taking pride in marking their identity with the Black Country through the ways they speak.

Our project has also found that people mark their Black Country identity through using vocabulary such as cut and bostin, grammatical forms such as bist and 'er (in place of her or she), 'im or ey for he and a distinctive intonation pattern when speaking English. This is particularly the case when performing acts of comedy, drama, poetry and song across the many performance venues across the Black Country region. Such uses of language didn’t happen accidentally, but can be traced back to at least the Middle Ages and before that, to a time when the Black Country played host to Anglo Saxons.

In the 1960s and 1970s, linguists predicted that rising population mobility and the opening up of employment prospects through increased educational opportunities would lead to differences in regional varieties of English dying out. This hasn’t happened, and our project has gone some way towards finding out why. It is because people born and brought up in the Black Country choose to use local forms in a deliberate and self conscious way as a way of marking their Black Country roots. Yo’ve gorra spake proper to get a job or a GCSE, but whether yo spake proper or not in today’s world, it’s your choice.

The survey results aren't available on the Express & Star's website just yet. Have a look at their readers' response to the announcement of our project back in 2010: http://www.expressandstar.com/news/2010/01/27/120k-for-research-project-on-dialects/