This post may be something of a disappointment to anyone wanting a comprehensive analysis. As I said last week, while the modern accent can be compared, for its differences, with standard British English accents, it would be wrong to compare the dialect in the same way, as both the modern standard and the local dialect are descended separately from different dialects of Middle English, and even Old English. Modern Standard English arises from the form of the East Midlands dialect of Middle English as spoken in the London area (and note that what is usually taught today as ‘Standard’ Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, was not this dialect, but Wessex), whereas the dialect spoken in North Staffordshire was West Midlands.

It would take a whole doctoral thesis to make a thorough analysis of the phonology of Pottery dialect, so here are just some of the most noticeable features:

Middle English (ME) long U /uː/ has split: in many cases it has become /ai/, as in house or council (the first of these is a Germanic word, the second Romance, which is itself interesting for dating the evolution of the sound), so that “Arfur Tow Crate in Staffy Cher” can make fun of the phrase ‘kind slice’ for “council house”. Other words with ME /uː/, however, have developed to /ɛu/. Now and mouse are examples of this.

ME /a/ before a nasal had already become /ɒ/ in the West Midland area, so that man is pronounced /mɒn/, and cannot is /kɒnə/.

ME /eː/ has simply diphthongized in many cases: see is pronounced /sei/, while ME /ai/ has become a closer monophthongal vowel /iː/: say is pronounced /siː/.

ME /iː/ has in many cases merged with ME /eː/ – wife /weif/, mice /meis/. Elsewhere it has undergone the general vowel shift to /ai/, and then simplified to /aː/ and then to /ɑː/ my wife is often called /ˈmɑː liːdi/ (= “my lady”).

ME /el/ has opened to /al/: tell pronounced /tal/. In final /al/ the /l/ has vocalized and the /a/ backed and risen to form a diphthong /ou/: ball pronounced /bou/.

Apart from the phonology, Pottery dialect has some archaizing grammatical features as well: retention of a second person singular form of modal verbs is the most obvious. The shibboleth question for recognizing another Potteries native is “Cost kick a bo’ agen a wo’, then yed it til thee bost it?” Translated, this is “Can you kick a ball against a wall, then head it until you burst it?” It loses a lot in the translation.

In the 1970s a series of books (well, they were more like pamphlets really) were published that illustrated local English dialects by making fun of them, not in a nasty way, but affectionately, by people who wanted to record local phrases and pronunciations before they disappeared. One of the first was “Krek Waiter’s Peak Bristle” (translate as “Correct Way to Speak Bristol), which included such useful terms as “Bem Breckfuss”, and “Count’s Louse”.

There were three “Bristle” books, and these were followed by others, including “Arfur Tow Crate in Staffy Cher”, which also spawned a sequel. While “Bristle” made great play of the Bristol ‘added l’ (for those who don’t know, many words ending in schwa have /l/ added to them – including Bristol itself, which was earlier “Bristow”), the Staffy Cher books were able to draw on the vowel system of Stoke on Trent (Potteries) dialect as well as its grammatical idiosyncracies, and unlike the Bristol examples, they need to be ‘translated’: “Dine thar straight” (‘down thy street’), “Kind Slice” (see “Count’s Louse” above) “Eye Straight” and “Eye Lean” (High Street and High Lane).

Apart from poking fun, these books actually demonstrate some aspects of English phonology that turn up even in more standard forms of the language – so “Bem Breckfuss” includes the assimilation of alveolars to labials, and both “Count’s Louse” and “Kind Slice” shows the frequent interpolation of a plosive between a nasal and a sibilant. Non-phoneticians are often surprised to learn that their speech also exhibits these features.

Following from Ed’s comment about the occurrence of rhoticity in English dialects as reported by Ellis, Joseph Wright, and the Survey of English Dialects, it seems to me that Ellis was having great trouble identifying exactly what sounds he (and his principal co-workers, Thomas Hallam and Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte) was hearing when the orthography contained ‘r’. I think we can assume that the incidence of rhoticity was falling, and perhaps quite rapidly, throughout the country during the nineteenth century, which wouldn’t have helped. Also the sound itself was ceasing to be a ‘proper’ trill or tap, and becoming more like the present-day approximant.

He recognised what we call “intrusive r” in many parts of the country, and if we had continued to use the phrase he had for it – “euphonic r”, perhaps we might have spared ourselves as linguists a lot of grief from the general public who have picked up on “intrusive r” and beaten us on the head with it for allowing what they hear as a blatant solecism to be perpetuated.

I’d also like to acknowledge here Jack Windsor Lewis’ comment about Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Grammar, and John Wells’ Accents of English. I agree that Ellis’s presentation could have been better, but as the pioneering effort it was, I think he did a great job in covering an immense amount of ground.

Ed’s comment to my last post allows me to widen the discussion from the specific question of th > f in modern English, and its history, to that of how much linguists/dialectologists/orthoepists – call them/us what you will – have or have not registered change in the language.

I’ve been reading Alexander J Ellis’s monumental “Early English Pronunciation”, jointly published by the Early English Text Society, the Chaucer Society and the Philological Society between 1869 and 1889, in five parts, and well over 2000 pages. Despite its title, Part V is an analysis of the English dialect area of Great Britain (i.e. of that part of the island that has been English-speaking for many centuries) and the Isle of Man (which Ellis admits is less interesting as English is mainly a “learned” language for the Celtic-speaking natives) during the 19th century. Many of the dialects include th > f as a feature, at least in some words.

The nearest modern equivalent to Ellis is John Wells’ “Accents of English”, and I was surprised when I looked in the bibliography to Wells’ work that Ellis is not mentioned. While Wells gives a set of key words to identify particular vowels, Ellis goes back to the Old English basis as his starting point, and shows the way in which each OE sound has developed in the various dialects. This accounts for the way in which some sounds have developed differently in the modern forms. As an example, some dialects of the north west and north west midlands of England have, as a reflex of OE /Å«/, the phoneme /ai/, so that house is pronounced /(h)ais/, and mouse /mais/. So what happens to OE /Ä«/, which gives standard modern English /aɪ/? It becomes /É›i/, so that mouse and mice are still distinguished. Wells does not mention this, but then he is talking about accents, not dialects. This raises the question, which I shall not attempt to address here: where is the boundary between an accent and a dialect?

Ellis was not only concerned with vowels, as is shown by the th > f example. He also recognized /tl/ for /kl/ in many dialects, and the rhotacization of /t/ in some contexts and in some dialects. John Maidment wrote about this here and the comments to his post show that /t/ to /r/ is quite widespread. Ellis expressed no surprise at any of these features, and was at pains to point out several times in the work that it was a linguist’s job to describe what he heard, not to pass judgment on the correctness or otherwise of his informants’ speech. Perhaps he has been neglected because, writing before the development of the IPA, he used a phonetic script called palaeotype, which is not always easy to interpret nowadays.