How to Talk Like a Local

Introduction

When I first told friends that I was embarking on a project collecting British dialect, their first thought was often that I would meet a lot of lonely people. I confess I feared they might be right. The speakers whose gems I was looking for were sure to be the last ones standing, bearers of vanishing vocabularies that would never be replaced. For the word ‘dialect’ has become synonymous with decline, just as English, we are told, is destined to become monolithic, bland, and peppered with universal lines absorbed from TV and Internet chat rooms.

It has been one of the nicest surprises of my career to learn just how wrong we were. That English is far from losing its edge I already knew – its golden age may even lie ahead of us still – but I accepted without question that it was different for dialect. Like most people I know, I believed that our local vocabularies are being ironed out at the same electric pace as new words are being coined, and for a much bigger audience than a particular neighbourhood. That what we now have is a general lexicon from which everyone, north and south, young and old, draws for expression. What I’ve discovered in the course of writing this book is that dialect is alive, well, and kicking hard. It’s just doing so in new and different ways.

Of course, thousands of beautiful and unmistakably local words are dying out; many have already done so. They are just as surely to be missed as the new are to be celebrated. For the most part they belonged to a world now lost to us – one populated with horse-drawn ploughs, dockers and cotton workers, collieries and tin-mines. The lexicons of these and other industries are still there if you look hard enough, but as the need for them diminishes, so do the aural snapshots of the life they once so brilliantly described. Yet, over the 1,500 years of English’s history, it was ever thus – words have come and gone (and often come back again) throughout, but the footprints they leave remain as telling as ever.

That new dialect is being coined today was an exhilarating find – of all the surprises that the writing of this book gave me, that was the big one. But there were lots of other discoveries along the way. As a collector of new words on the margins of Standard English, I’ve long realised that slang prefers particular subjects: sex, money, drink and drugs being at the top of the list. And so it is, I’ve discovered, with dialect. Local vocabulary collects around certain themes in just the same way. Some of these themes are as you might expect: given the nature of dialect – which is often as personal as it is local – it is hardly surprising that members of a family attract a whole range of different epithets. The staples in life, too, are natural targets for home-grown expression: bread, hunger, putting on a brew, packed lunches – all are core parts of our daily routine. And, just like slang, the lexicon for drunkenness is vast.

If the themes around which our local words congregate are fewer than you might expect, they make up for it with the dazzling variety within them. The dialect waterfront may be narrow – it is a world that deals in the easily accessible and concrete rather than the abstract – but it is infinitely deep. And it tells us an awful lot about Britain, its past, present and its locals (all of us).

Take a stereotype about the British: that we are a pessimistic bunch. If the number of local words for ugly is anything to go by – and it far surpasses the number for pretty – then on this occasion the cliché may have nailed it. And so it probably follows that the widest dialectal variation for things connected to our health and our body dwell on the more unsavoury aspects: blisters, for example, or armpits, or the faintly animalistic act of panting. It may seem cruel too that English dialect has quite so many words for physical handicaps or misfortunes. Whether knock-kneed, pigeon-toed or splay-footed, you would be hard-pressed to find a place in Britain that didn’t have a local name for it.

Food, too, is usually mentioned in the standard portrait of the British, and rarely without a raised eyebrow. In dialect, however, food has a special place. And rightly so. For all the mockery over the British palate, the variety of foods wrapped up in its history is reflected in a wealth of local words. For bread alone there are estimated to be hundreds of terms which all hold a special resonance (not to say flavour) up and down the land. Being hungry is a labourer’s lot, and the lexicons for being famished for your snack or packed lunch are particularly full. In the same vein, if there is anything which defines Britain in the world’s eyes more than English beer, it is probably tea-drinking. The nation’s two potable obsessions come together in the idea of brewing tea: an act which is called dozens of things depending on where in Britain you want to put the kettle on.

The British may be a nation of shopkeepers, as the saying goes, but it seems we are also a lot of gossips. And the act of exchanging titbits of information about each other is another theme that, when it comes to dialect, knows few limits. It persists across the nation in a glorious collection of names. Among its local variants are jangle (Liverpool and North Wales), jaffock (Lancashire) and pross (Durham). In addition there is chamrag which probably links cham, from champ meaning ‘to grind or chew’, and rag, which as a noun means ‘the tongue’ and as a verb ‘to talk’, often teasingly. But my favourite must be hawch, a development of the standard hawk meaning ‘to spit’ and today a term that has been reborn in the home of clotted cream and jam teas – to me it sounds like making the noise of a full mouth whether with food or gossip.

These are but a few of the subjects which, travelling up and down Britain, you will find packed with local vocabulary – earthy, funny and full of the resonances of the accent they were born for. Not all of the words are old by any means – the young are mixing it up locally like the best of their ancestors. And this is why dialect survives – it is being taken up, reshaped and moved on by new generations of English-speakers who, contrary to rumour, can still distinguish between home and country.

The selection of words in the book are but a minuscule proportion of the vast array of local words from our past and present. They have been chosen for their colour, for the stories behind them, and for the representation they give of the regions that use them. To those who look up their favourite word and find it lacking, I apologise, but I hope that they will find some new treasures along the way.

I am often asked for my favourite of all the words I collected (and of the many I didn’t, thanks to the wonderful Voices Project conducted by the BBC, and to the efforts of many, many more before me). The truth is it changes every time I look at the words in this book. Two of the most enduring ones, though, have to be Northamptonshire’s make a whim-wham for waterwheels – to idle away your time by doing nothing at all, and East Anglia’s dardledumdue, a daydreamer. These choices must say something about me, but they also, I think, hold within them everything that is so wonderful about dialect. They, more than any rival expression in standard English, are simply born for their task. So far I’ve come across only one other person in each county who uses them. In this case at least, I hope they won’t be lonely for long.