Open Writing

I was probably 12 years old before I strayed for significant periods of time outside my native county, Yorkshire in England. That is except for a hop over a dry stone wall into neighboring Derbyshire, and a couple of weeklong vacations as a four and five-year-old.

As a result, I grew up believing that everyone in England, except BBC news readers, conversed in the staccato phrases and short, pithy sentences I had heard since the cradle. My immediate family spoke grammatically correct English with a generic Yorkshire accent, modified by the presence of my grandmother, a genuine Cockney, born within the sound of Bow Bells.

Though England is a small country geographically, each county has an identifiable accent and dialect. Yorkshire, being the largest county, supports several dialects that are quite diverse. Probably the most musically attractive Yorkshire dialect is to be found in the Vale of York, east of the city by that name.

The native speech patterns and sounds of the Vale extend pretty much to Scarborough on the coast. In sharp contrast to that, the speech of mainly blue-collar people in the industrial belt of south Yorkshire, from Doncaster to Sheffield, could not by any standard be described as musical.

It is one of the ugliest dialects you could possibly encounter, and all but incomprehensible to any but the speakers, with the possible exception of Chaucer, and linguistic scholar Frank Shaw, who wrote the books “Learn Yourself Scouse” and “Talk Strine,” about the speech patterns of Liverpool and Australia respectively.

It has defied the best efforts of schoolteachers and whole educational systems to eradicate it, and is deep-seated in those Saxon and Scandinavian genes left over from the days when England was everyone’s plunder playground. Fragments may even date to the days when Woad was de-rigueur.

Laziness also plays a part. For example, “Oowashywee” translates to “Who was she with.” The response “Shiwawiersen,” tells you that “She was by herself.” “Gorragerritgoin” equates to “I’m having problems starting my car.” The argot also contains some medieval word usage such as “Tha” for “You” and “Thissen” for “Yourself.”

My maternal grandfather spoke it, but his youngest son, who rose high in the steel industry, managed to divest himself of it by a huge effort of will. He had no option but to switch back to the form when he was talking to his father.

An extra grandfather I had was a Derbyshire farmer, and short on words. His plough was horse-drawn. He and Dick, the horse, had a language all their own, consisting of various clicks of the tongue, interspersed with grunts and urging or restraining noises. It worked very well for them.

My grandfather also hill-farmed sheep. When it came time for shearing, or to bring them down for the winter, his Border Collie did most of the work and was a joy to watch. I remember only one word being spoken in carrying out the complex herding maneuvers; “Bide,” which meant stay by me.
All the other commands were by whistles, somehow accomplished by inserting his index and little finger between his lips, and blowing, which produced the piercing sound needed to carry the mile or so of upper moorland that often separated him and his dog.

Amongst my grandfather’s bag of select words were “Nobbut just,” and "Mebbe''. He might utter “nobbut just” in response to the question, “Did you get all the sheep down before the snow?” It meant that he had barely accomplished it in time. “Mebbe” carried far more weight than just “perhaps.” In his lexicon it could mean “I’ll think about it,” or a conditional response to “Do you think the hay crop will be enough to get through the winter?” I suppose it reflected a farmer’s caution about anything that depended on the weather.

America is not without its regional accents and colloquialisms, and even distinct languages. In the Mississippi river delta, Creole, which is a French patois with some Scottish flavorings, is still the lingua franca in some communities. On the Barrier Islands off the eastern seaboard of the Carolinas, Gulla is spoken by the families who came there as survivors of slave ships from Africa, wrecked on the coast. Gulla is another patois, based on West African tribal languages.

In remote areas of the Appalachian Range, and even in parts of New Jersey, communities that became isolated, either from choice or geographical circumstance, speak languages all their own. Though there is disagreement about the origins of the languages, popular belief is that they derive from intermarriage with Native Americans and/or Romany people.

American dialects and speech sounds are also regionally diverse, but harder for me to place. I like a good Texan twang and the half-choked New England burr, even the language- mangling Brooklynese. But nothing pulls at my heartstrings more than listening to the spoken word from any number of regions in the British Isles and Southern Ireland, except sadly, my home town.