The Black Country Dialect

(a modern linguistic analysis) is available at £7.99 including postage from:

Laghamon Publishing, P.O.Box 4137,Kinver,Stourbridge, West Midlands, DY7-6WZ

Is it Anglo-Saxon?

There are hardly any Welsh or Norse words in Black Country, and fewer French words. Six out of seven works come from Anglo-Saxon. This makes it sound more like German or Dutch. Some Black Country words are left over from Anglo-Saxon and are no longer used in standard English: “fettle” (food) is the most obvious, but here are also “tundish” ( a beer funnel) and “leasow” (an untilled meadow). Some vowels continue to pronounced the old way. Anglo-Saxons pronounced “a” as “o” when it came before a nasal. Black Country speakers still say “mon” and “omboon” (ham bone).

Did Chaucer speak Black Country?

The English that was adopted in 1425 came from Mercian. It was the dialect spoken by people who moved from Norfolk and nearby to London to work as smiths and other artisans. Chaucer lived in what would have sounded like a hoos, with his weef, and hay would romance heer with a bottle of weena, drunk by the light of the moan. Shakespeare would have pronounced them in more or less the modern way, as house, wife, he, her, wine, and moon. The changes are called the Great Vowel Shift in Middle English. All the vowels of standard English changed between the time of Chaucer and that of Shakespeare.

How is Forest of Dean related to Black Country?

The speech of Gloucestershire is recorded in the writing of John Smyth (1640). A y-prefix is used frequently, as in “sit y downe”, “I can y finde it”, “her has y milkt”. The demonstrative “thic” (that) continues to be used in Gloucestershire, but is not found in BCD. Some phonetic features are not at all similar to BCD, especially the way voicing of consonants is added or removed, and are more like the speech of the South-West: venison was pronounced “fenison”, cuckold as “guckold”.

Modern Forest of Dean speech (Morgan, 2010) is also noticeable for its voicing : “vorest”, “zandztoon”. The phonetics of “h” are similar to BCD: it is usually absent, and “head” is pronounced “yud”. Some vowels are similar: “mon” (man), “clane” (clean); “toim” (time). Some syntax features are similar to BCD. Negative contractions take the form “thee disn’t”, “thee cosn’t”, and “thee bisn’t”.

A miner’s greeting was:

“Ow bist thee awld butty? Ow’s yer acker cuttin’?”

Consonants often move in Forest speech to give Malapropisms, according to Morgan:

“Im ‘ad ‘iz appendages removed – jus’ a’ter the General Erection it wer.”

“I be gwain to git Garge a pup ver ‘iz birthdoy, one o thoy zpotty damnations.”

How are Shropshire dialects related to Black Country?

Shropshire speech was written down by Georgina F. Jackson (1879), and shows some features familiar to BCD. The most obvious is “round the Wrekin”, which means a circumlocution, even to Midlands people who have never been to this extinct volcano near Wellington. A few Shropshire words are also familiar: “tuthree” - a few; “gawby” - a fool. However, most of Jackson’s large vocabulary are not recognisable: “scrat” – fight, or a miser; “dutch” – affected; “dunny” – hard of hearing; “slench” – cut of meat. Although most of the vocabulary has not transferred to BCD, some grammar my have. Jackson records a butcher showing agricultural implements, and a near-drowning:

“Yo seemen to know summat about ‘em Ma’am. I could sho yo a ‘noud-fashioned

tool sich as I dar say yo never si’d afore”

“I eard a scrike ma’am an’ I run an’ theer I sid Frank ad pecked i’ the bruck an

douked under an’ wuz drowndin’ an’ I jumped after ‘im an’ got out on ‘im an’

lugged ‘im on to the bonk all sludge an’ I got ‘im wham afore our Sam comen in.”

Perhaps the most interesting connection with 19^th. century Shropshire is the phonetic elisions. Death was pronounced “jeth”, “scratch” collapses into “scrat”, and “must not” collapses to “munna”. This tendency may be behind the BCD contractions.