Modern boundaries of the English East
Midlands.
East Midlands English is a
dialect traditionally spoken in those parts
of Mercia
lying East
of Watling
Street
(the A5 London - Shrewsbury Road).
Today this
area is represented by the counties of the East Midlands of England
, (Derbyshire
, Leicestershire
, Lincolnshire
, Nottinghamshire
, Rutland
and Northamptonshire
, see below).
Origins
Like that
of Yorkshire
, the East Midlands dialect owes much of its grammar
and vocabulary to Nordic influences, the region having been
incorporated in the Norse controlled Danelaw
in the late
9th century. For example, the East Midlands word
scraight ('to cry') is thought to be derived from the
Norse,
skrike in modern Scandinavian, also meaning to
cry.
East Midlands dialects in literature
The romantic English novelist, and East Midlander,
D. H.
Lawrence who was from the Nottinghamshire
town of Eastwood
wrote in the dialect of the Nottinghamshire and
Derbyshire Coalfield in several dialect poems as well as in his
more famous works such as Lady
Chatterley's Lover and Sons and
Lovers.
Though spoken less commonly today, the dialect of the East Midlands
has been investigated in notable texts such as the affectionately
titled
Ey Up Mi Duck series of books (and an LP) by
Richard Scollins and
John Titford.
These books were originally intended as a
study of Derbyshire Dialect, particularly the distinctive speech of
Ilkeston
and the Erewash
valley, but
later editions acknowledge similarities in vocabulary and grammar
which unite the East Midlands dialects and broadened their appeal
to the region as a whole.
"Ey Up" (often spelt ayup / eyup) is a greeting thought
to be of Old Norse origin (se upp) used widely throughout the
North
Midlands
and South
Yorkshire
, and "Mi
Duck" is thought to be derived from a respectful Anglo Saxon form of address, "Duka"
(Literally "Duke"), and is unrelated to waterfowl.
Non-natives of the East Midlands are often surprised to hear men
greet each other as 'Mi Duck.'
Dialect words
In recent years, humorous texts such as
Nottingham, As it is
Spoke have combined phonetically spelt standard English words
together in order to deliberately confuse non-natives to the
region. For example:
- Aya gorra weeya?:is the wife with you? (lit. "Have you got her
with you?)
- It's black uvver ahh Bill's mother's:it looks like rain. (lit.
"It's black over Bill's Mother's." q.v.) -- a common, if somewhat
old fashioned, Midlands expression implying impending bad
weather.)
- Thiz summat up wee im:I think he may be ill. (lit. "There's
something up with him.")
- Yo nor'ayin no tuffees!:You aren't having any tuffees
(sweets)!
However, there are many words in use in the traditional East
Midlands Dialect which do not appear in standard English. The short
list below is by no means exhaustive. More comprehensive glossaries
exist within texts such as
Ey Up Mi Duck by Richard
Scollins and John Titford.
- badly:hungover/ill
- belt-job:defunct coal-mining definition for an "easy" job such
as sleeping whilst watching a conveyor belt
- blubber:to cry/weep uncontrollably (i.e. "Stop your
blubbing.")
- bonny:overweight (in Leicester and Nottingham)
- (Not to be confused with the
- Scots word meaning
'beautiful')
- clouts:trousers (usually pronounced claarts)
- croaker:doctor
- croggie:an (illegal) crossbar ride, "two-up" on the crossbar of
a man's bicycle
- cob:a bread roll (bap),(as verb:) to
throw
- duck's necks:bottle of lemonade
- fast: stuck, caught (oh's gorrer finger fast)
- jitty/jetty:alleyway
- larup/larop:to cover with (usually a thick substance)
- mardy: grumpy, sulky (i.e. "She's a mardy one!")
- mash:to make a pot of tea (i.e. "I'll go mash the tea.")
- nesh:a weak person, or one who feels the
cold
- oakie:ice cream (common in Leicestershire)
- oh: she, usually in reference to the wife
- paste:to beat, often used interchangeably with larrup
- piddle:falling liquid as rain or urine (i.e. "It's piddling
down with rain" or "A dog's just piddled on the wall")
- piggle:to pick at a scab, spot or a skin irritation (i.e. "Stop
piggling that scab!")
- puddled/puddle-drunk:intoxicated
- puther:to pour out uncontrollably
- pot:a plaster cast
- rammel:rubbish/waste
- scraight/scraitin':to cry/crying
- snap:lunch/food,
- snidered/snided/snied:covered/infested, (DH Lawrence used the word 'Snied' in a
description of an infestation of mice in Sons and Lovers.),
- sucker:iced lolly
- twitchel:alleyway
- tabs:ears
- tuffees:sweets, confectionery
People
from Leicester are known in the popular holiday resort Skegness
as "Chisits", due to their pronunciation of "how
much is it" when asking the price of goods in shops.
Grammar
Those who speak traditional
regional
dialects are not trying to speak
Standard English and failing. East Midlands
English follows a series of distinct grammatical rules. Some
examples follow below.
Formal address
Up until the mid 20th century it was not uncommon to hear the use
of informal forms of address,
Thee and
Thou, as compared to the more formal
Yo or
You. Use
of the informal form of address is now uncommon in modern
speech.
Personal pronouns
Personal pronouns differ from standard English as follows:
- yorn:yours
- mine:mine
|
- theirn:theirs
- ourn:ours
|
Example
"It eent theirn; it's ourn!" (It isn't
theirs; it's ours!)
Reflexive pronouns
Reflexive pronouns are characterised by the replacement of
Self with
Sen (From Middle
English
seluen)
Y'usen -
Yourself,
Mesen
-
Myself,
Thisens -
Themselves/Yourselves,
Ussens -
Ourselves
Example
"We sh'll ay to do it ussens." (We
shall have to do it ourselves)
Dialect variations within the political region
Although
Northamptonshire is located in the East Midlands, and has
historically harboured a dialect comparable to other forms of East
Midlands English, particularly among the older generation, the
linguistic distinctiveness of Northamptonshire has significantly eroded. This is represented by
the dialect of Kettering
which is influenced by the dialects of western
parts of East
Anglia
, the West
Midlands, and the South as well as the
'Watford Gap Isogloss', the demarcation
line between southern and northern English accents.
In
Kettering (north of the Watford Gap
) the word 'glass' rhymes with 'mass' whereas in
Northampton
, only 14 miles further south but south of the
Watford Gap, the pronunciation of 'glass' rhymes with
'farce'. Contrary to popular belief, the Watford in
question is Watford
village and not the town of Watford
which borders the north of London.
The Danelaw split the present county into a Viking north and a
Saxon south. This is quite plainly heard, with people in the south
speaking more like people from Oxfordshire or Cambridgeshire and
people in the north sounding more like people from
Leicestershire.
Also of
note is the anomalous dialect of Corbyite
spoken around Corby
in the north
of Northamptonshire, which reflects the migration of large numbers of
Scottish and Irish steelworkers to the town during the 20th
Century. The dialect is often compared to Glaswegian
.
The
dialect of Coalville
in Leicestershire is said to resemble that of
Derbyshire because many of the Coalville miners came from there,and
the dialect of Glossop
in North West Derbyshire has similarities with
Northern English due to its close geographical position to Greater
Manchester
.
Lincolnshire is, in a sense, separated from the remainder of the
East Midlands. East of the Lincolnshire
Wolds
, in the southern part of the county, the
Lincolnshire dialect is closely linked to The Fens
and East
Anglia, and, in the northern areas of the county, the
local speech has characteristics in common with the speech of the
East Riding of
Yorkshire. This is largely due to the fact that the
majority of the land area of Lincolnshire was surrounded by sea,
the Humber
Estuary
, marshland, and the wolds; these geographical
circumstances permitted little linguistic interference from the
East Midlands dialects until the nineteenth century when canal and
rail routes penetrated the eastern heartland of the county
.
Counties in which East Midlands English is Spoken
Bibliography
- Evans, Arthur Benoni (1881) Leicestershire words, phrases and
sayings; ed. by Sebastian Evans. London: Trübner for the English
Dialect Society
- Wright, Joseph (ed.) (1898-1905) The English Dialect
Dictionary. 6 vols. Oxford University Press (appendices include
dialect words grouped by region)
- Skeat, W. W. (ed.) (1874) Derbyshire lead-mining terms, by T.
Houghton; 1681 ... Derbyshire mining terms, by J. Mawe; 1802 [with
other texts]. London: N. Trübner for the English Dialect
Society
- Mander, James (1824) The Derbyshire miners' glossary. Bakewell
: Printed at the Minerva Press, for the author by G. Nall (High
Peak and Wirksworth districts)
- Pegge, Samuel (1896) Two collections of Derbicisms; ed. by W.
W. Skeat & T. Hallam. London: for the English Dialect Society
by H. Frowde, Oxford University Press
External links
Links to East Midlands dialect in literature
References
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