English language in Northern England


The English language in Northern England has been shaped by the region's history of settlement and migration, and today encompasses a group of related dialects known as Northern England English. Historically, the strongest influence on the varieties of the English language spoken in Northern England was the Northumbrian dialect of Old English, but contact with Old Norse during the Viking Age and with Irish English following the Great Famine have produced new and distinctive styles of speech. Some "Northern" traits can be found further south than others: only conservative Northumbrian dialects retain the pre-Great Vowel Shift pronunciation of words such as town, but all northern accents lack the FOOT–STRUT split, and this trait extends a significant distance into the Midlands.
There are traditional dialects associated with many of the historic counties, including the Cumbrian dialect, Lancashire dialect, Northumbrian dialect and Yorkshire dialect, but new, distinctive dialects have arisen in cities following urbanisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: The Manchester urban area has the Manchester dialect, Liverpool and its surrounds have Scouse, Newcastle-upon-Tyne has Geordie and Yorkshire has Tyke. Many Northern English accents are stigmatised, and speakers often attempt to repress Northern speech characteristics in professional environments, although in recent years Northern English speakers have been in demand for call centres, where Northern stereotypes of honesty and straightforwardness are seen as a plus.
Northern English is one of the major groupings of England English dialects; other major groupings include East Anglian English, East and West Midlands English, West Country and Southern English English.

Definition

The varieties of English spoken across Great Britain form a dialect continuum, and there is no universally agreed definition of which varieties are Northern. The most restrictive definition of the linguistic North includes only those dialects spoken north of the River Tees. Other linguists, such as John C. Wells, describe these as the dialects of the "Far North" and treat them as a subset of all Northern English dialects. Conversely, Wells uses a very broad definition of the linguistic North, comprising all dialects that have not undergone the TRAP–BATH and FOOT–STRUT splits. Using this definition, the isogloss between North and South runs from the River Severn to the Wash – this definition covers not just the entire North of England but also most of the Midlands, including the distinctive Brummie and Black Country dialects.
In historical linguistics, the dividing line between North and Midlands runs from the River Ribble or River Lune on the west coast to the River Humber on the east coast. The dialects of this region are descended from the Northumbrian dialect of Old English rather than Mercian or other Anglo-Saxon dialects. In a very early study of English dialects, Alexander J Ellis defined the border between the north and the midlands as that where the word house is pronounced with to the north. Although well-suited to historical analysis, this line does not reflect contemporary language; this line divides Lancashire and Yorkshire in half and few would today consider Manchester or Leeds, both located south of the line, as part of the Midlands.
An alternative approach is to define the linguistic North as equivalent to the cultural area of Northern England – approximately the seven historic counties of Cheshire, Cumberland, County Durham, Lancashire, Northumberland, Westmorland and Yorkshire, or the three modern statistical regions of North East England, North West England and Yorkshire and the Humber. This approach is taken by the Survey of English Dialects, which uses the historic counties as the basis of study. The SED also groups Manx English with Northern dialects, although this is a distinct variety of English and the Isle of Man is not part of England. Under Wells' scheme, this definition includes Far North and Middle North dialects, but excludes the Midlands dialects.
Scottish English is always considered distinct from Northern England English, although the two have interacted and influenced each other. Both the Scots language and the Northumbrian dialect of English descend from the Old English of Northumbria and are still very similar to each other.

History

Many northern dialects reflect the influence of the Old Norse language strongly, compared with other varieties of English spoken in England.
In addition to previous contact with Vikings, during the 9th and 10th centuries most of northern and eastern England was part of either the Danelaw, or the Danish-controlled Kingdom of Northumbria. Consequently, Yorkshire dialects, in particular, are considered to have been influenced heavily by Old West Norse and Old East Norse.
However, Northumbrian Anglo-Saxon and Old West Norse have arguably had a greater impact, over a longer period, on most northern dialects than Old East Norse. While authoritative quantification is not available, some estimates have suggested as many as 7% of West Cumbrian dialect words are Norse in origin or derived from it.
During the mid and late 19th century, there was large-scale migration from Ireland, which affected the speech of parts of Northern England. This is most apparent in the dialects along the west coast, such as Liverpool, Birkenhead, Barrow-in-Furness and Whitehaven. The east-coast town of Middlesbrough also has a significant Irish influence on its dialect, as it grew during the period of mass migration. There was also some influence on speech in Manchester, but relatively little on Yorkshire beyond Middlesbrough.

Varieties

Northern English contains:
In some areas, it can be noticed that dialects and phrases can vary greatly within regions too. For example, the Lancashire dialect has many sub-dialects and varies noticeably from West to East and even from town to town. Within as little as 5 miles there can be an identifiable change in accent.

Phonological characteristics

There are several speech features that unite most of the accents of Northern England and distinguish them from Southern England and Scottish accents:
The grammatical patterns of Northern England English are similar to those of British English in general. However, there are several unique characteristics that mark out Northern syntax from neighbouring dialects.
Under the Northern subject rule, the suffix "-s" is attached to verbs in many present and past-tense forms. More generally, third-person singular forms of irregular verbs such as to be may be used with plurals and other grammatical persons; for instance "the lambs is out". In modern dialects, the most obvious manifestation is a levelling of the past tense verb forms was and were. Either form may dominate depending on the region and individual speech patterns and in many dialects especially in the far North, weren't is treated as the negation of was.
The "epistemic mustn't", where mustn't is used to mark deductions such as "This mustn't be true", is largely restricted within the British Isles to Northern England, although it is more widely accepted in American English, and is likely inherited from Scottish English. A few other Scottish traits are also found in far Northern dialects, such as double modal verbs, but these are restricted in their distribution and are mostly dying out.

Pronouns

While standard English now only has a single second-person pronoun, you, many Northern dialects have additional pronouns either retained from earlier forms or introduced from other variants of English. The pronouns thou and thee have survived in many rural Northern accents. In some case, these allow the distinction between formality and familiarity to be maintained, while in others thou is a generic second-person singular, and you is restricted to the plural. Even when thou has died out, second-person plural pronouns are common. In the more rural dialects and those of the far North, this is typically ye, while in cities and areas of the North West with historical Irish communities, this is more likely to be .
Conversely, the process of "pronoun exchange" means that many first-person pronouns can be replaced by the first-person objective plural us in standard constructions. These include me, we and our. The latter especially is a distinctively Northern trait.
Almost all British vernaculars have regularised reflexive pronouns, but the resulting form of the pronouns varies from region to region. In Yorkshire and the North East, hisself and theirselves are preferred to himself and themselves. Other areas of the North have regularised the pronouns in the opposite direction, with meself used instead of myself. This appears to be a trait inherited from Irish English, and like Irish speakers, many Northern speakers use reflexive pronouns in non-reflexive situations for emphasis. Depending on the region, reflexive pronouns can be pronounced as if they ended -sen, -sel or -self or ignoring the suffix entirely.

Vocabulary

In addition to Standard English terms, the Northern English lexis includes many words derived from Norse languages, as well as words from Middle English that disappeared in other regions. Some of these are now shared with Scottish English and the Scots language, with terms such as bairn, bonny, gang or gan and kirk found on both sides of the Anglo-Scottish border. Very few terms from Brythonic languages have survived, with the exception of place name elements and the Yan Tan Tethera counting system, which largely fell out of use in the nineteenth century. The Yan Tan Tethera system was traditionally used in counting stitches in knitting, as well as in children's nursery rhymes, counting-out games, and was anecdotally connected to shepherding. This was most likely borrowed from a relatively modern form of the Welsh language rather than being a remnant of the Brythonic of what is now Northern England.
The forms yan and yen used to mean one as in someyan that yan, in some northern English dialects, represents a regular development in Northern English in which the Old English long vowel <ā> was broken into /ie/, /ia/ and so on. This explains the shift to yan and ane from the Old English ān, which is itself derived from the Proto-Germanic *ainaz.
A study of a corpus of Late Modern English texts from or set in Northern England found lad and lass were the most widespread "pan-Northern" dialect terms. Other terms in the top ten included a set of three indefinite pronouns owt, nowt and summat, the Anglo-Scottish bairn, bonny and gang, and sel/sen and mun. Regional dialects within Northern England also had many unique terms, and canny and nobbut were both common in the corpus, despite being limited to the North East and to the North West and Yorkshire respectively.