Dialect describes a language variety
where a user's regional or social background appears in his or her use of
vocabulary and grammar. English language is well known for its dialectical
differences. In the past English people used only dialects. But with the rise
of the Standard English now speakers are aware of both dialect and Standard
equivalents. So, in addition to the educated standard in each major
division of the English-speaking world there are local forms of the language
known as regional dialects.
The presence of regional dialects is is a feature that characterizes the
British English more than the English of the former British colonies where
English is used as the first language. But in Great Britain the dialectical differences are very great. They
go back to the earliest period of the language and reflect conditions that
prevailed at a time when travel was difficult and communication was limited
between districts relatively close together. Even among the educated the speech
of northern England differs considerably from that of the south. In words such
as butter, cut, gull, and some the southern vowel [Λ] occurs in the
north as [U], and in chaff, grass, and path the southern
retracted vowel [a:] occurs as short [a] in northern dialects.
In the great Midland district one distinguishes an eastern variety and a western,
as well as a central type lying between. But such a classification of the
English dialects is sufficient only for purposes of a broad grouping. Every
county has its own peculiarities, and sometimes as many as three dialectal
regions may be distinguished within the boundaries of a single shire. This wide
diversity of dialects is well illustrated by the materials published since 1962
in the Survey of English Dialects. In the six northern counties at least
seventeen different vowels or diphthongs occur in the word house, including
the [u:] of Old English hūs.
The dialect of southern Scotland is also a dialect that has rich literary
and historical backgrounds. In origin it is a variety of Northern English, but
down to the sixteenth century it occupied a position both in speech and in
writing on a plane with English. In the time of Shakespeare, however, it began
to be strongly influenced by Southern English. When in 1603 James VI of
Scotland became the king of England as James I, and when by the Act of Union in
1707 Scotland was formally united to England, English was plainly felt to be standard,
and Scots became definitely a dialect. During the eighteenth century it managed
to maintain itself as a literary language through the work of Ramsay, Ferguson,
and Robert Burns. Since then it has gradually lost ground. English is taught in
the schools, and cultivation of English has, rightly or wrongly, been taken as
the first test of culture.
Irish English, or Hiberno-English is also a dialect that has left its mark
on the literary tradition, although in different ways at different periods. In
the eighteenth century, “stage Irish” was a familiar convention for
representing and often ridiculing Irish characters in plays written by English
authors whose use of stereotypical linguistic features was not always accurate.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Irish authors, especially
Douglas Hyde (1860–1940), J.M.Synge (1871–1909), and W.B.Yeats (1865–1939),
used selected features to give an Irish flavor to their works. In the twentieth
century there has been a more realistic tradition, including the work of Sean
O’Casey (1880–1964) and Brendan Behan (1923–1964) and the use by James Joyce
(1882–1941) of carefully collected dialect phrases in Ulysses and Finnegans
Wake. The distinctiveness of Irish English derives from a mixture of three
sources: the influence of the Irish language; the influence of Scots,
especially in the Northeast; and the nature of the original English that was brought
to Ireland from western England in the seventeenth century and that has remained
quite conservative compared with both RP and American English.
Syntactic structures in Hiberno-English often reflect the patterns of the
Irish language. The present perfect and past perfect tenses of English (have
got, had got), which have no equivalents in Irish, can be expressed using after,
the verb to be, and the present participle: He said that he knew
that I was after getting lost (“…that I had got lost”). Irish also does not
have the equivalent of indirect questions introduced by if and
whether; instead of the declarative word order of Standard
English, these sentences have the interrogative word order that is found in
other varieties of English, including African American Vernacular English . He
wanted to see would he get something to eat. The influence of the Irish
prepositional system upon Hiberno-English is evident in the use of with instead
of for meaning “for the duration of”: He’s dead now with many a year;
He didn’t come back with twenty-eight years. The lack of an expression for no
one in Irish, explains why anyone is used where no one is
expected in Standard English: Anyone doesn’t go to mass there.
Thus,
we see that there are a number of recognizable dialects in the British Isles
that have significant literary and linguistic heritage.
Reference:
A
History of the English Language. Baugh, Albert C., and Thomas Cable. 4th ed. Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1993.
