DIALECTS.

Dialects reflect the general language diversified by localities.

A dialect is a variation in the pronunciation, and necessarily in the

orthography of words, or a peculiarity of phrase or idiom, usually

accompanied by a tone which seems to be as local as the word it utters.

It is a language rarely understood out of the sphere of the population

by whom it is appropriated. A language is fixed in a nation by a

flourishing metropolis of an extensive empire, a dialect may have

existed coeval with that predominant dialect which by accident has

become the standard or general language; and moreover, the contemned

dialect may occasionally preserve some remains or fragments of the

language which, apparently lost, but hence recovered, enable us rightly

to understand even the prevalent idiom.

All nations have had dialects. Greece had them, as France, and Italy

have them now. Homer could have included in a single verse four or five

dialects; but though the Doric and the Ionic were held the most

classical, none of them were barbarous, since their finest writers have

composed in these several dialects. Even some Italian poets and comic

writers have adopted a favourite dialect; but no classical English

author could have immortalised any one of our own.

Ancient Greece, as Mitford describes, "though a narrow country, was very

much divided by mountains and politics." And mountains and politics,

which impede the general intercourse of men, inevitably produce

dialects. Each isolated state with fear or pride affected its

independence, not only by its own customs, but by its accent or its

phrase. In France the standard language was long but a dialect. There

potent nobles, each holding a separate court and sovereignty in his own

province, offered many central points of attraction. The Counts of Foix,

of Provence and of Toulouse, and the Dukes of Guienne, of Normandy and

of Bretagne, were all munificent patrons of those who cultivated what

they termed "l'art du beau parler," each in their provincial idiom.

These were all subdivisions of the two rival dialects to which the

Romane language had given birth. But the river Loire ran between them;

and a great river has often been the boundary of a dialect: France was

thus long divided. On the south of the Loire their speech was called the

language of _Oc_, and on the north the language of _Oil_; names which

they derived from the different manner of the inhabitants pronouncing

the affirmative _Oui_. The language of the poetical Troubadours on the

south of the Loire had not the happier destiny of its rival, used by the

Trouveres on the north. It was this which became the standard language,

while the other remains a dialect. Here we have a remarkable incident in

the history of dialects in a great country; it was long doubtful which

was to become the national language; and it has happened, if we may

trust an enthusiast of Languedoc, that his idiom, expressing with more

vowelly softness and _naivete_ the familiar emotions of love and

friendship, and gaiety and _bonhomie_, gave way to a harsher idiom and a

sharp nasal accent; and all ended by the Parisian detecting the

provincials by their shibboleth, and calling them all alike Gascons, and

their taste for exaggeration and rhodomontade gasconades; while the

southerns, who hold that what is called the French language is only a

perversion of their own dialect, like our former John Bull, fling on the

Parisian the old Gaulish appellative of _Franchiman_.[1]

The dialects of England were produced by occurrences which have happened

to no other nation. Our insular site has laid us open to so many

masters, that it was long doubtful whether Britain would ever possess a

uniform language. The aboriginal Britons left some of their words

behind them in their flight, as the Romans had done in their

dominion,[2] and even the visiting Phoenician may have dropped some

words on our coasts. The Jutes, the Angles, and the Saxons brought in a

new language, and, arriving from separate localities, that language came

to us diversified by dialects; and the Danes, too, joined the northern

brotherhood of pirate-kings who planted themselves in our soil. The

gradual predominance of the West-Saxon over the petty kingdoms which

subdivided Britain first approached to the formation of a national

language. The West-Saxon was the land of Alfred, and the royal

cultivation of its dialect, supreme in purity as the realm stood in

power, rendered it the standard language which we now call Anglo-Saxon.

"Had the Heptarchy (Octarchy) continued," observed Bishop Percy, "our

English language would probably have been as much distinguished for its

dialects as the Greek, or at least as that of the several independent

states of Italy." In truth, we remained much in that condition while a

power hostile to the national character assumed the sovereignty. So

unsettled was the English language, that a writer at the close of the

fourteenth century tells us that different parts of the island

experienced a difficulty to understand one another. A diversity of

pronunciation, as well as a diversity in the language, was so prevalent,

that the Northern, the Southern, and the Middle-land men were

unintelligible when they met; the Middle-land understood the Northern

and the Southern better than the Northman and the Southman comprehended

one another; the English people seemed to form an assemblage of distinct

races. Even to this day, a scene almost similar might be exhibited.

Should a peasant of the Yorkshire dales, and one from the vales of

Taunton, and another from the hills of the Chiltern, meet together, they

would require an interpreter to become intelligible to each other; but

in this dilemma what county could produce the Englishman so versed in

provincial dialects as to assist his three honest countrymen?

If etymology often furnishes a genealogy of words through all their

authentic descents, so likewise a map of provincial idioms might be

constructed to indicate the localities of the dialects. There we might

observe how an expansive and lengthened river, or intervening fells and

mountains which separate two counties, can stop the course of a dialect,

so that the idiom current on one side, when it passes the borders

becomes intrusive, little regarded, and ere it reaches a third county

has expired in the passage. Thus the Parret, we are told, is the

boundary of the Somersetshire dialect; for words used cast of the Parret

are only known by synonyms on the west side. The same incident occurs in

Italy, where a single river runs through the level plain; there the

Piedmontese peasant from the western end meeting with a Venetian from

the eastern could hold but little colloquial intercourse together; a

Genoese would be absolutely unintelligible to both, for, according to

their proverb, "Language was the gift of God, but the Genoese dialect

was the invention of the devil." In those rank dialects left to run to

seed in their wild state, without any standard of literature, we hardly

recognise the national idiom; the Italian language sprung from one

common source--its maternal Latin; but this we might not suspect should

we decide solely by its dialects: and we may equally wonder how some of

our own could ever have been mangled and distorted out of the fair

dimensions of the language of England.

All who speak a dialect contract a particular intonation which, almost

as much as any local words, betrays their soil; these provincial tones

are listened to from the cradle; and, as all dialects are of great

antiquity, this sounding of the voice has been bequeathed from

generation to generation.[3] It is sometimes a low muttering in the

throat, a thick guttural like the Welsh, or a shrill nasal twang, or a

cadence or chant; centuries appear not to have varied the tone more than

the vocable. The Romance of "Octavien Imperator," which was written

possibly earlier than the reign of Henry VI., is in the Hampshire

dialect nearly as it is spoken now. The speech of a Yorkshireman is

energetically described by our ancient Trevisa. "It is so sharpe,

slytting, frotyng, and unshape, that we sothern men maye unneth

understond that language." As we advance in the North, the tones of the

people are described as "round and sonorous, broad open vowels, and the

richness and fulness of the diphthongs fill their mouths" with a firm,

hardy speech.

A striking contrast is observable among those who by their secluded

position have held little intercourse with their neighbours, and have

contracted an overweening estimation of themselves, and a provincial

pride in their customs, manners, and language. Norfolk, surrounded on

three sides by the sea, remains unaltered to this day, and still

designates as "Shiremen" all who are born out of Norfolk, not without

"some little expression of contempt." There is "a narrowness and tenuity

in their pronunciation," such as we may fancy--for it is but a

fancy--would steal out of the lips of reserved, proudful men, and who,

as their neighbours of Suffolk run their common talk into strange

melancholy cadences, have characterised their peculiar intonation as

"the Suffolk whine!" In Derbyshire the pronunciation is broad, and they

change the G into K. The Lancashire folk speak quick and curt, omit

letters, or sound three or four words all together; thus, _I

wou'didd'n_, or _I woudyedd'd_, is a cacophony which stands for _I wish

you would_! When the editor of a Devonshire dialect found that it was

aspersed as the most uncouth jargon in England, he appealed to the

Lancashire.[4]

But such vile rustic dissonance or mere balderdash concerns not our

vernacular literature, though it seems that even such agrestic rubbish

may have its utility in a provincial vocabulary; for the glossary to the

"Exmoor language" was drawn up for the use of lawyers on the western

circuit, who frequently mistook the evidence of a rustic witness for

want of an interpretation of his words. Some ludicrous misconceptions of

equivocal terms or some ridiculous phraseology have been recorded in

other counties, among the judges and the bar at a county assize.

But it is among our provincial dialects that we discover many beautiful

archaisms, scattered remnants of our language, which explain those

obscurities of our more ancient writers, singularities of phrase, or

lingual peculiarities, which have so often bewildered the most acute of

our commentators. After all their voluminous research and their

conjectural temerity, a villager in Devonshire or in Suffolk, and, more

than either, the remoter native of the North Countree, with their common

speech, might have recovered the baffled commentators from their agony.

The corrections of modern editors have often been discovered to be only

ingenious corruptions of their own whenever the original provincial

idiom has started up.

These provincial modes of speech have often actually preserved for us

the origin of English phraseology, and enlightened the philologist in a

path unexplored. In one of the most original and most fanciful of the

dramas of Ben Jonson, "The Sad Shepherd," the poet designed to

appropriate a provincial dialect to the Witch Maudlin's family. He had

consulted Lacy the comedian, who was a native of Yorkshire, respecting

the northern phraseology. Unfortunately, this drama was never finished;

and the consequence is, that the dialects are incorrectly given, and are

worsened by the orthography of the printer. Yet it was from this

imperfect attempt to convey some notion of our dialects that Horne Tooke

was able to elucidate one of his grammatical discoveries, in regard to

the conjunction IF, which, from "The Sad Shepherd," is demonstrated to

be anciently the imperative of the verb GIF, or give. Thus it was, by

apparently very rude dialects, this famous philologist was enabled to

substantiate beyond doubt a signification which had occurred to no one

but himself.[5]

A language in the progress of its refinement loses as well as gains in

the amount of words, and the good fortune of expressive phrases. Some

become equivocal by changing their signification, and some fall

obsolete, one cannot tell why, for custom or caprice arbitrate, guided

by no law, and often with an unmusical ear. These discarded but faithful

servants, now treated as outcasts, and not even suspected to have any

habitation, are safely lodged in some of our dialects. As the people are

faithful traditionists, repeating the words of their forefathers, and

are the longest to preserve their customs, they are the most certain

antiquaries; and their oral knowledge and their ancient observances

often elucidate many an archaeological obscurity. Hence, two remarkable

consequences have been discovered in the history of our popular idioms;

many words and phrases used in the land of Cockney, now deemed not only

vulgar but ungrammatical, are in fact not corruptions of the native

tongue, but the remains of what was anciently at different periods the

established national dialect.[6] This transmitted language descended to

the humbler classes, unimpaired and unaugmented, through a long line of

ancestry. Again, it is often probable that the provincial word which in

its pronunciation merely reverses the order of the letters, as now

uttered, and which is only heard from the mouths of the people, may

convey the original spoken sound, and be the genuine English. Are we

quite sure that the polishers may not often have been the corrupters of

our language? Nor let us be positive that the metropolitan taste has

always fixed on the most felicitous or the most forcible of our

idiomatic words or phrases, since we may discover some lingering among

our provincial dialects which should never have been dismissed, and

which claim to be restored. When JOHNSON compiled his "Dictionary," he

was not aware of the authentic antiquity of our dialectic terms and

phrases. Our literary antiquities had not yet engaged the attention of

general scholars. Provincialisms were not deemed by the legislator of

our language legitimate words; he did not recognise their primitive

claims, nor their relative affinities, but ejected them as vagabonds.

But words are not barbarous nor obsolete because no longer used in our

written composition, since some of the most exquisite and picturesque,

which have ceased to enrich our writings, live in immortal pages. After

the issue of Johnson's great labour, our national literature began to

attract the studies of literary men, who soon perceived how this

neglected but existing stock of idiomatic English in our provincialisms

more certainly explained our elder writers in verse and prose. Amid the

murmurs raised by the archaeologists, ASH attempted to supply the

palpable deficiency of Johnson; but the matter was too abundant, and his

space too contracted. In vain he attempted his "Supplement;" all the

counties in England seemed to rise against the luckless glossarist; but

notwithstanding its limited utility, his vocabulary was often preferred

for its copiousness to the more elaborate lexicon. The spirit of inquiry

was now abroad after the "winged words;" and ingenious persons, within

these twenty years,[7] have produced a number of provincial glossaries;

but several are still wanting, particularly those of Kent, and Sussex,

and Hampshire. All these glossaries collected together might form a

provincial lexicon marking each county. A few might be allowed to enter

into the great dictionary of the English language; but that would not be

their safest place, for they would then lie at the mercy of successive

editors, who would not always discern a precious archaism amid the

baseness and corruption of language. The origin, the nature, and the

history of our provincial idioms have yet never been investigated,

though the subject, freed from its mere barbarisms, opens a diversified

field to the philosopher, the antiquary, and the philologist.

Grose, who wrote in 1785, notices the state of those counties which were

remote from the metropolis, or which had no immediate intercourse with

it before "newspapers and stage-coaches imported scepticism, and made

every ploughman and thresher a politician and a freethinker." The

accelerated intercourse of the people has long passed beyond the diurnal

folio and the evanescent stage-coach, and in a century of railroads and

national schools the provincial glossary will finally vanish away.