dunner blart

Looking at the BBC’s Voices project made me think of my own native tongue - Potteries dialect. My grandmother lived with us in my early years, I learned the dialect from her and was still speaking with a broad North Staffs accent when I went to college.

In fact, at one stage I was given elocution lessons by the college to try and hammer my speech into something more like standard English (I was studying radio journalism at the time).This actually had the effect of ironing out my accent without improving my diction much. And diction is really the problem with English speech – all those swallowed vowels and wordsruntogether. These days I suppose I’ve just got a generically Northern accent, with not much remaining of Potteries except a few quirks. The full value given to the oo in words like look and book, for instance, and greeting people by saying “ayer” like characters do in Stephen King novels.

Potteries dialect is pretty much dead now, like most regional tongues. This is a shame because it qualified as at least a proto-language, with fairly strict rules of pronunciation, word order, etc. I was once told by a lecturer in Anglo Saxon that it was pretty much state of the art English for the year of the Norman Invasion. The lecturer, incidentally could not only tell that I came from Stoke but also what part of Stoke I came from. People still say “I’d as lief” do something, meaning “I’d just as soon…” which is pure Chaucer.

Anyway, here’s a compendium of Stoke dialect terms. It’s remarkable how many of them are criticisms of people for showing a lack of stoicism, for instance:

Nesh – sensitive to the cold
Mard – whiny or complaining. Such a person was mardy, or a mardarse
Blart – to cry for no good reason. Ay, dunner blart!
Werrit – worried, with the sense that the person was a natural born worrier
Scrawp – nag or complain
Tickle-stomached – squeamish, oversensitive

Which tells you quite a bit about Stoke, and why pretty much everybody born there wants to leave.

Comments

[Jarndyce]

Mardy is very Yorkshire, too, especially Sheffield: one track by the Arctic Monkeys is called Mardy Bum, and they're a Sheff-Rotherham band.

[Laban Tall]

I have a copy of a book called "Arfur Tow Crate In Staffy Cher" which explains how to speak correctly in that fine county.

Example :

Mar necks dower kne burr scorra kind slice on Benty Lay

(my next door neighbour's got a council house on the Bentley estate)

Gooey no posh is her ? Anna terry stuns die near goody nuff fur rum ?

(Going all posh, is she ? Aren't the terraced ones dowwn here good enough for them ?)

[jamie]

Ser they dust know arfer tow crate anow, wut?

[jamie]

...and it's Bentilee, by the way. Which, in a term I recall fondly from my childhood, is rough as a badger's arse.

[Alex]

My favourite Yorkshireism - the verb "to laike" for "to play". Clearly derived from the Danish...which means I went to school with folk who spoke Viking...

[jamie]

My favourite yorkie-ism is "spawny", which I believe means "outrageously lucky." That -ny suffix sounds like Old Norse, too.