Sound and vision blog

Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator for Sociolinguistics writes:

Sit-coms are wonderful vehicles for celebrating regional speech. Gavin and Stacey, for instance, is a brilliantly affectionate deconstruction of stereotypical - but nonetheless recognisable - cultural and linguistic differences between Barry and Billericay. The new BBC series, Hebburn, follows in the same tradition by lovingly capturing one of our most distinctive British dialects, Geordie, albeit with principal cast members drawn from across the North East of England from Darlington to South Shields. The highlight of every episode for me is counting the number of times female characters use that iconic Geordie exclamation - 'eh!' - each example surpassing the previous in terms of length and bewilderingly high pitch.

An entry in The New Geordie Dictionary (Graham 1979) describes 'ee' as 'an expression of delight', but makes no reference to the fact it is, I would suggest, considerably more common in female speech. I associate it with female speakers across the whole of the North East and sense it's used to convey an even greater range of emotions - from disappointment, despair and dismay to surprise, amusement or excitement. I also think its geographical boundary once extended much further south as I can definitely remember my grandmother (b. 1907 in Altoft, West Yorkshire) using it, particularly when prefacing a comment about her own or someone else's perceived 'daft' behaviour. This recording of a young female speaker from Hartlepool captures an authentic example in the phrase "I thought, 'eh God!'" at 0 mins. 44 secs.

Do you come home jiggered after work and narked that you can't lake out 'cause it's siling down? Don't get the monk on - just enjoy the extraordinary diversity of British regional speech in the BBC Voices Recordings (http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/BBC-Voices).

This set of group conversations about the words we use and encounter in our daily lives were recorded in locations across the UK by BBC Local Radio in 2004 and 2005. You'll be dead chuffed we've made them available.

You might even want a gleg at the linguistic descriptions we've provided of the accents and dialects captured in each recording.

Enjoy yoursen!

We are still working on the analyses of the Scottish data collected by the BBC. But afore ye go...

Jonnie, one of the Voices researchers, has been working for many months as part of the team who have made Evolving English: One Language Many Voices. The free exhibition will open to the public next week (on Friday 12th November) and run for six months in the British Library's main exhibition gallery.

Last week we began talking about the exhibition in the national press, and on TV and radio. One of the key features of the exhibition will be that visitors can contribute their own accents, words and voices to the national collection using recording booths in the library — and also online using the online voice-blogging application, AudioBoo — more details to come on this.

The BBC website ran a magazine feature (here) about how we pronounce the eighth letter of the alphabet, which we also wrote an information box for. Are you an /ɛɪʧ/ person or a /hɛɪʧ/ person? This reminded me of one of the last times the debate surfaced in the British media — the Guardian in London published a very prescriptive opinion piece on it in 2007, but I very much liked the response on the same page from poet, language activist and friend of the British Library sociolinguistics team, Michael Rosen (see here for Michael's remarks).

Catherine Burton has also blogged about the exhibition and the 'H question' for the Independent here.

We will write more about the exhibition on this blog in the coming weeks, but in the meantime you can plan your visit and book the related talks and events running through the exhibition at www.bl.uk/evolvingenglish. The same link will allow you to access the online parts of the exhibition once it's officially open next week.

The interviews that we’re listening to are all centred around a discussion of vocabulary. Each participant is asked to provide their words for a number of different concepts such as ‘attractive’, ‘to sleep’ and ‘friend’. We’re just over halfway through the recordings and have already noted down a wide range of words, showing that regional variation in vocabulary is still very rich.

In these two audio extracts people in Braemar, Aberdeenshire and Dalmellington, Ayrshire talk about their words for ‘tired’. These include ‘trachled’, ‘knackered’, ‘wabbit’ and ‘forfochen’. So far we’ve found ‘knackered’ to be used in most parts of the UK but the other three seem to be particular to Scotland and the north.

It’s interesting to note the discussion the participants have about these words. In Braemar, for example, one speaker remarks that he would use ‘trachled’ to describe a person who is walking slowly. Another comments that for her the word is associated with a mother who has been worn out by young children. The Dalmellington speakers debate the nuances of the meaning of ‘wabbit’ which also evokes the idea of being exhausted by children.>

All of these words have the same literal or denotative meaning of ‘tired’. This is what would be found in a standard dictionary definition. It’s the connotative meanings, the associations and value judgments that people attach to the words, that vary. In some cases these are very personal but they can also be socially or regionally shared.

We all have our own range of words for expressing the idea of being tired, each with its own set of connotations. These can influence the word we choose to use in a given situation and might go some way to explain why one person will say ‘trachled’ when another would use ‘wabbit’.

As soon as a person opens their mouth and speaks it’s difficult to avoid noticing the way they pronounce their words. On first meeting someone it’s easy to quickly form opinions about where they come from and what kind of person they are based largely on their accent. Whether these turn out to be true or not it another matter. This can have an impact on the way we interact with a person, depending on how their accent makes us feel and the associations it causes us to make.

This speaker describes how people reacted to the way he spoke when he moved to Glynneath in the south of Pembrokeshire, a part of South West Wales popularly known as ‘Little England beyond Wales’ because it is predominantly populated by English speakers.

His strong Welsh accent marked him out as being different which provoked negative responses from both school teachers and children. He adapted by consciously changing his speech to sound more English in order to fit in and avert the attention drawn to him.

One of the other speakers in the extract mentions the more positive reactions her Welsh accent provokes when talking on the telephone to people in call centres. She also comments on how she feels about hearing people talk with Birmingham or Geordie accents.

It’s clear that our accent can provoke strong emotional responses in other people which in some circumstances actually have an impact on the way we speak. It’s clear too that these responses are subjective, we all have our own preferences for particular accents and others that we can’t stand to hear. So however you feel about the way you speak there are, refreshingly, always going to be people out there who think something entirely different.

This is the third of our posts about Welsh recordings from the BBC Voices collection. The interview took place with a farming family in Builth Wells in Powys (formerly Brecknockshire).

In the clip below, older and younger generations talk about swearing. They have a relatively relaxed attitude to swearing – certainly more relaxed than many of the other interviews we've catalogued so far, in which we've noticed that the received idea that swearing has got worse over the generations and other variations on the theme are very common. The family point out that in the hard-working environment on the farm, a bit of effing and blinding is permitted. Have a listen to parents and son talking about it here (there is no language that would be considered offensive in the clip).

This part of Wales is quite close (about 10 miles) to the border with England, and although the speakers do "sound Welsh", their accents share some characteristics with the accents of the West of England.

If you listened to the clip above of James, the son, you may have heard an instance of 'yod drop'. This is the omission of a [j] sound that many speakers would have after the initial [f] in 'fuse', heard at 01:01 on the clip: "gramps has just got a bit of a short fuse hasn't he...".

Many British speakers would associate this pronunciation with East Anglia, and other rural areas to the north east of London. In fact, yod drop used to be a prevalent feature in many accents of British English until only a few (or a "foo") generations ago.

Following on from the last Voices of the UK post about code-switching in Northwest Wales, this week we have speakers from the south of Wales, from Treorchy in the Rhondda. This is an area not so often perceived as bilingual: according to the Welsh Language Board’s 2004 survey, 12.9% of the population of Rhondda Cynon Taf (the local authority area) identify as able to speak Welsh compared to 71.9% in Gwynedd (where last week’s post about Bethesda referred to). To access the WLB report click here (p.48).

However in the south of the country there is much talk of “Wenglish”. This doesn't really imply full code-switching between the two languages, but it is often informally used to express certain aspects of pronunciation or regional vocab that are found in English spoken in “the Valleys”. Globally, speaker communities seem to have become quite fond of blending the ‘-nglish’ part of the word (a sub-morpheme – morphologists take note!) with the name of other languages: there is Hinglish (for the code-switched Hindi-English spoken by an estimated third of a billion people in urban India) and Singlish, the name given to the creolised English spoken in Singapore. But we're getting off the point!

The Wenglish that our Treorchy group are addressing refers to those words that (probably) come from Welsh and that are used in their community. Have a listen to their discussion about the word cwtch here  (note: Blaencwm is a village a couple of miles up the road from Treorchy).

Cwtch is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) with the particular spelling <cwtch> from 1983 onwards. It's also in Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (EDD) as <cooch> (1898-1905), although Wright notes that no one surveyed for the compilation of the EDD knew the word. So the earliest known written form <cooch> is from  J.D. Robertson’s "Gloss. Words County of Gloucester" published in 1890. The OED suggests that it derives from Welsh cwts, meaning resting place, and that this most likely was a borrowing/adaptation of English couch.

As our speakers say, the word now has both its noun meaning, that of ‘cubby hole’, and verb meaning, that of ‘to cuddle’, plus other related forms such as ‘coal store’ and as a dog command. It is possibly more familiar to non-Wenglish British speakers over the last couple of years because it featured in the BBC drama Gavin and Stacey, set in Barry, South Wales. The scene where Stacey asks Gavin to “give us a cwtch” isn’t available online but here is a token scene starring Stacey’s best friend Nessa – note the all-purpose Wenglish response tidy.

I was excited and delighted to spend some time analysing the recording from Bethesda in Northwest Wales, because it is the village I was living in before I moved to London last year (to come and work for the Voices of the UK project). Proust wrote of scents evoking hidden memories, and I believe that there can also be something about a certain pronunciation of a vowel or the almost unconscious recognition of previously unnoticed intonation that, if you haven't heard it for a while, brings back memories of other times and places.

The recording is of a group of sixth formers at the main school in my old town. Unlike most of the recordings made by Radio Wales, the students give their responses to the stimulus words in the survey ("what's your word for 'unattractive?'"; "what's your word for when it rains lightly?") in Welsh rather than in English. In fact there are a set of BBC Voices recordings made by Radio Wales's sister station, Radio Cymru, which took place "yn gymraeg" (in Welsh). The insistence of the students in providing their words in Welsh chimed with my experience of living in the town. I understand quite a lot of the language, attended Welsh classes all the time that I lived and worked there and could chat, shakily, with the staff in the local supermarket. Bethesda is, along with Caernarfon and Blaenau, a real stronghold of Welsh language speaking. One of the students says: "but um… we’re one of the like ... the little communities that actually are pure Welsh".

However one of the striking features of Bethesda (and Bangor and Caernarfon - I'm not sure about Blaenau) Welsh is the amount of code-switching going on in natural speech. The same student says: "uh they [the teachers at school] don’t think I speak um very good Welsh because I do it [codeswitch]". She is referring to the habit of inserting English words into Welsh clauses. It's a shame that we don't have any examples of this in the recording. The oral historian conducting the interview was from the South and a monolingual English speaker, so there aren't any Welsh sentences with English words switched into them.

What we do have are a few instances of the reverse situation: inserting the odd Welsh word into an English sentence. The title of this post refers to the circumflex accent used to mark vowel length in Welsh, as in gêm the word for "game". To means "roof" in Welsh, so when Jenna says, "we call it a ‘to bach’ I don’t know… it’s like a little triangle on top of the word," she means that the Welsh word links the shape of the circumflex to the shape of a little (triangular) roof.

Perhaps the most discussed aspect of mixing Welsh and English by this group is the tendency in their language community to create verbs by adding a Welsh suffix onto a borrowed English word. For example, they talk about how in Welsh there is a word lluchio which means "fling" or "throw" but which they use for "hitting someone hard". Then another speaker comments that he'd say slapio when talking about hitting someone. This shows the practice of taking an English word and adding the "verbal suffix" -io (analagous to, say, the infinitive ending -er in French). Jenna again comments: "but then I say ‘climbio’ instead of ‘dringo’ which means um climbing a mountain really". When asked why she says, "it’s just we have so many like English influences around us [...] we do know the Welsh… correct Welsh word for the words, just we use them [the English ones] because it sounds more cool". Have a listen to their discussion about other -io words on the BBC Voices site here.

There has been a lot of great research into Welsh-English code-switching over the past 10 years at Bangor University. My friend and colleague Jonathan Stammers did his PhD there (2009) on "The Integration of English-Origin Verbs in Welsh" (see LinguistList announcement at http://bit.ly/dvqf06 and links there to conference presentations and an abstract of Jon's thesis).