ENGLISH LANGUAGE. VARIANTS.

DIALECTS

PLAN

1. Dialectology as a branch of linguistics

2. English spoken in Great Britain
3. The American English

Literature:

1. Ніколенко А. Г. Лексикологія англійської мови – теорія і практика /

А. Г. Ніколенко – Вінниця: Нова Книга, 2007. – 528 с. (Англ. мовою).
2. Антрушина Г. В. и другие. English Lexicology / Г. В. Антрушина – M.: Дрофа,
2004. – 288 с.
3. Арнольд И.В. Лексикология современного английского языка / И.В. Арнольд. –
М.: Высшая школа, 1986. – 295 с. (Англ. мовою).
 1. DIALECTOLOGY AS A BRANCH OF LINGUISTICS

1. Standard English (the official language of Great Britain)

- form of English which is – current

- literary

- substantially uniform

- recognized as acceptable wherever English is spoken or understood

2. Variants – regional varieties of a language possessing a literary form

3. Dialects - regional varieties of a language peculiar to some districts, having no

normalised literary form.

Dialectology - a branch of linguistics concerned with the analysis & description of

regional varieties of a language.

Dialectologists study & observe 1) phonology (spread of sound change)

2) lexicon

3) morphology

4) syntax

‫ ٭‬boundaries have become less stable than they used to be due to

- the migration of the population

- growing influence of urban life over the countryside
- pressure of Standard English taught at schools
- speech habits cultivated by radio, TV & so on.

STANDARD ENGLISH

American English Family British English Family

(USA & Canada) (Britain, New Zealand, Australia,

Asia & Africa)

 2. ENGLISH SPOKEN IN GREAT BRITAIN

2 variants: Scottish and Irish English

5 groups of dialects: Northern

Midland

Eastern each contains up to ten dialects

Western

Southern

NORTH

1) Scotland: area – 30.000 sq. miles

population – over 5 million

Scottish English (SE) is a variety of Northern English that came to be widely spoken in
the southern part of Scotland, the Scottish lowlands in the 12 th century, up to the 17th
century this variety (known as lowlands scots) was equal in importance with southern
English as a literary language.

The golden age of Scottish literary language (15 – 16 centuries).

At the time of Reformation, the Renaissance & Shakespeare, Southern English began to
strongly influence Scotland.

Since the 18th century SE has survived mainly in rural communities. Standard English is
taught in the schools but the peculiarities of pronunciation are marked even in speech of
educated people.

Pronunciation 1) trilled r /r/ e.g. farmer [farmER]

2) wh → [f] e.g. why [Fai]

3) a + ll → [a:] e.g. wall [wa:l]

4) a+ nd → [a:] e.g. hand [ha:nd]

5) ch → [SH] e.g. cheese [ SHiz]

Grammar 1) “eye” – pl. “een”

2) this → thir

3) may → can e.g. Can I come as well?

4) must → have got to e.g. You’ve got to do it.

5) Pres. Simple → Pres. Cont. e.g. I was forgetting that…

Lexicon: gate – “road”, kirk – “church”, guid – “good”, hale – “whole”, ken – “know”,
ingle – “household fire”, deval – “stop”, douce – “gentle”, owre – “over”, mair – “more”,
bairn – “child”, billy – “chum”, bonny – “handsome”.

NB: Robert Burns wrote his poems in Scottish English. Walter Scott introduced many
Scottish words into his novels.

MIDLAND

WEST EAST

1) a+k → [ei] 1) a + sh → [ i]

back [beik], black [bleik] wash [w i ]

2) u → [u:] 2) a → [æ]

trust [tru:st], plum [plu:m] glass → [glæs]

3) e → [ :] 3) a + nd → [ :]

well [w :l], twelve [tw :lv] candle [k :ndl]

4) final t → [r] 4) gl → [dl]

get them [gerәm], let it be [leritbi] glad [dlæd]

what is it [warizit]
 Standard British English

- language of the middle & upper-class Londoners, developed from the East
Anglian,
- mixed with Saxon elements,
- spoken by large number of people who moved into London from the East Midland
in the 14th century.

SOUTH
COCKNEY

- the best known Southern dialect (regional dialect of London)

spoken by 1) the educated lower middle classes

2) the uneducated (2 million Londoners)

Pronunciation
1) [ei] → [ai] e.g. day [dai], make [maik], place [plais]
2) [ai] → [ i] e.g. fine [f in]
3) [ u] → [au] e.g. no [nau], road [raud], home [haum], go [gau]
NB. Gow strite awye to the rilweye stytion.

4) omitting the glottal fricative where it occurs in St. English e.g. ham & eggs →
“am n’heggs”
5) the frequent use of the glottal stop
mild [mi(?)k]

daughter [d o(?)e]

water [w o(?)e]

6) TH → [f]
TH → [v]

7) w → [v] well → vell

v → [w]

Grammar

I says, you says, we says…

 Welsh English

Pronunciation
1) [ei] → [e] e.g. late [let], sail [sel]
2) [eu] → [ o:] both [bo: ], so [so:]
3) [æ] → [a] cat [kat]

Grammar

1) verbs ! e.g. bringed, see-d, catched

2) Passive Voice ! e.g. I was all ate. Not a word was spoke.
3) Article ! a apple, a orange
4) Have/ do e.g. He do go. She have see-d.
5) Part I. e.g. I am a-going. What are you a-doing?
6) Future (will be → will) He will in a minute.
7) Neg. I haven’t done nothing.
8) Adj. It was long long (= very long).
9) Voc. He was off (= angry); he’s lost (missed) the bus.

3. THE AMERICAN ENGLISH

When this nation took its first census in 1790 there were four million Americans (90%
of them descendants of English colonists).

English became the mother tongue & native language of the United States.

However, some English colonists in America noticed that their language differed
seriously from that spoken back home in England. So, they had:

1) coined new words for themselves;

2) borrowed other words from the Indians, Dutch, French, Spanish;
3) been using English dialect words in the general speech;
4) continued to use some English words that had become obsolete in English.
NB. Early Americans had more sharply differentiated dialects than they do have
today. Geographical & social mobility has homogenised the language. The dialects
were smoothed out by: - generation of teachers;
 -2 series of elementary school books (Noah Webster’s The
American Spelling Book, Professor William Holmes Mc Guffey’s Eclectic Readers) .

!!! The dialects are fading away, becoming regional accents.!!!

There are three overall major ones:

the New England (Western dialect), the Southern, the General American.

Western dialect (brought by 15.000 English colonists, ⅔ from East Anglia) is closer
to English English than any other dialect of American English.

1) [a] in ask, can’t, class, grass

2) [o] in box hot, not …
3) omitting or shortening [r] sound car – “cah”, dear – “deah”,
“pahk the cah in hahvahd yahd”

4) earthworm → angleworm
branch → brook

closet → clothes press

at home → to home

shopping → trading

Southern dialect (is used south & east of a line drawn along the northern boundary of
Maryland & Virginia past the Mississippi to the southern part of Missouri)

1) the Southern drawl: class → “clae-is

yes → “yea-is”

I → “I-ah”

time → “ti-ahm”

duty, nude, suit [dju:ti, nju:d, sju:t]

2) weakening of the following final consonants: e.g. fin(d), he(l)p, flo(or), bes(t)

3) Lexicon ! honey → chil(d) all of you → you all children → raise

think, judge → reckon very → right

4) TH → [t], [d]

GENERAL AMERICAN DIALECT (spoken in 4/5ths of the nation’s area by ⅔ of the population)

1) using the short flat a in ask, can’t, class, dance

2) unrounded o in box, hot, lot
3) the retention of R sound caR, haRd
4) [j] is omitted after t, d, n, s: duty, nude, suit
5) rr+a → [e]
Spelling! Br. Am.
Honour honor
Centre center
Catalogue catalog
Programme program
Indian terms: to go on the war path
bury the hatchet
pipe of peace
fire water
names of the states: e.g. Alabama, Massachusetts, Texas
Difference in vocabulary
Br. Am.
chemist’s drugstore
Luggage baggage
Banknote bill
Petrol gas
Hire rent
Carriage car
Rubber eraser
Underground subway
Autumn fall
Lavatory bathroom, restroom
Tin can
 FUNDAMENTALS OF ENGLISH LEXICOGRAPHY

Plan
1. The connection between lexicology and lexicography. Types of dictionaries.
2. Historical development of British and American lexicography.
Literature:

1. Arnold I.V. The English Word. - М., 1986.— pp. 272-285

2. Ginzburg R.S. A Course in Modern English Lexicology.- М., 1966.— pp. 249-268
3. Rayevskaya N. M. English Lexicology. - К., 1971.— pp. 325-330

1. The connection between lexicology and lexicography.

Lexicography is the theory and practice of compiling dictionaries. The aims of
lexicography is the semantic, formal and functional description of all individual words.
Number of words in the most comprehensive dictionaries ranges from 500,000 to
600,000.

The term “dictionary” is used to denote a book listing words of a language with
their meanings and often with data regarding pronunciation, usage and/or origin.

Main Types of English Dictionaries.

Unilingual(explanatory) dictionaries – dictionaries in which the words and their

definitions belong to the same language.

The most important unilingual dictionaries of the English language are “The Oxford
English Dictionary”, Webster’s dictionary.

Bilingual(translation) dictionaries – dictionaries that explain words by giving their

equivalents in another language (Russian – English Dictionary by Smirnitsky, English –
Russian Dictionary by Galperin, English – Russian Dictionary by Muller)

Multilingual(polyglot)dictionaries – dictionaries that serve the purpose of comparing

synonyms and terminology in different languages( Buck, Darling “A Dictionary of
selected Synonyms in the Prrincipal Indo – European languages).
Both bilingual and unilingual dictionaries can be: general and special

A. General dictionaries represent the vocabulary as a whole with a degree of

completeness depending upon the scope and bulk:
- explanatory dictionaries;
- bilingual and multilingual dictionaries;
- frequency dictionaries;
- rhyming dictionaries;
- etymological dictionaries;
- phonetical dictionaries;
- thesaurus type dictionaries.
Special dictionaries cover only a certain specific part of the vocabulary:

- technical dictionaries;
- phraseological dictionaries;
- dictionaries of abbreviations, antonyms, neologisms, borrowings, toponyms, proverbs
and sayings;
- dictionaries of synonyms;
- dictionaries of old English and Middle Elglish;
- dictionaries of American English;
- dialects and slang dictionaries.
Finally, dictionaries may be classified into: linguistic and non-linguistic.

Linguistic dictionaries are word- books, their subject matter is vocabulary units(their
semantic structure, usage, etc.)

Non-linguistic (encyclopaedic) dictionaries are dictionaries giving information on

all branches of knowledge (“The Encyclopaedia Britannica”, “The Encyclopaedia
Americana”)

2. Historical development of British and American lexicography.

Regular bilingual English-Latin dictionaries were in XV c. The unilingual

dictionary is a comparatively recent type. The first unilingual English dictionary
appeared in 1604. It was meant to explain difficult words occuring in books (R. Cawdrey,
3000 words). N. Bailey “Universal Etymological English Dictionary”, (1721) included
pronunciation and etymology. Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) was meant to
establish the English language in its classical form: “Fix and regulate English”. A
pronouncing dictionary by Th. Sheridan appeared in 1780. The Golden Age of English
Lexicography began in the end of the XIX c. when The English Philological Society
started work on compiling “The Oxford English Dictionary”. The first American
dictionary was compiled by S. Johnson, Jr (1798). N. Webster is considered to be the
father of American lexicography. He tried to simplify the spelling and pronunciation that
were current in the USA of that period (1828). He wanted to give the American English
the status of an independent language distinct from British English.