English language in Northern England

This article is about the varieties of English spoken in the northern part of England, and focuses on accents and dialects. For varieties spoken in other regions of the United Kingdom and Ireland, see English language § Britain and Ireland.

The spoken English language in Northern England has been shaped by the region's history of settlement and migration, and today encompasses a group of related accents and dialects known as Northern England English or Northern English.

Northern England English
Northern English
Region	Northern England
Language family	Indo-European Germanic West Germanic Ingvaeonic Anglo-Frisian Anglic English British English Anglo-English Northern England English
Writing system	English alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	nort3299
How the vowel sound in sun varies across England. The thick lines are isoglosses. Northern English dialects have not undergone the FOOT–STRUT split, distinguishing them from Southern English and Scottish dialects.

The strongest influence on modern varieties of Northern English was the Northumbrian dialect of Middle English. Additional influences came from contact with Old Norse during the Viking Age; with Irish English following the Great Famine, particularly in Lancashire and the south of Yorkshire; and with Midlands dialects since the Industrial Revolution. All these produced new and distinctive styles of speech.

Traditional dialects are associated with many of the historic counties of England, and include those of Cumbria, Lancashire, Northumbria, and Yorkshire. Following urbanisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, distinctive dialects arose in many urban centres in Northern England, with English spoken using a variety of distinctive pronunciations, terms, and expressions. Northern English accents are often stigmatized, and some native speakers modify their Northern speech characteristics in corporate and professional environments.

There is some debate about how spoken varieties of English have impacted written English in Northern England; furthermore, representing a dialect or accent in writing is not straightforward.

Definition

The varieties of English spoken across modern Great Britain form an accent/dialect continuum, and there is no agreed definition of which varieties are Northern, and no consensus about what constitutes "the North".

Wells uses a very broad definition of the linguistic North, comprising all accents that have not undergone the TRAP–BATH and FOOT–STRUT splits. On that basis, the isogloss between North and South runs from the River Severn to the Wash, and covers not just the entire North of England (which Wells divides into "Far North" and "Middle North"), but also most of the Midlands, including the distinctive Brummie (Birmingham) and Black Country dialects.

In historical linguistics, the dividing line between the North and the North Midlands (an area of mixed Northumbrian-Mercian dialects, including the Lancashire, the West Riding and the Peak District dialects) runs from either the River Ribble or the River Lune on the west coast to the River Humber on the east coast.

The dialects of this region are descended from the Northumbrian dialect of Old English rather than Mercian or other Anglo-Saxon dialects. In his seminal study of English dialects, Alexander J. Ellis defined the border between the North and the Midlands as that where the word house is pronounced with u: to the north. For Ellis, "the North" occupied the area northwards of a line running from the River Lune to the Humber Estuary.

Although well-suited to historical analysis, this line does not reflect contemporary language; this line divides Lancashire and Yorkshire in half and few would today consider Manchester or Leeds, both located south of the line, as part of the Midlands.

An alternative approach is to define the linguistic North as equivalent to the cultural area of Northern England – approximately the seven historic counties of Cheshire, Cumberland, County Durham, Lancashire, Northumberland, Westmorland and Yorkshire, or the three modern statistical regions of North East England, North West England and Yorkshire and the Humber.

This approach is taken by the Survey of English Dialects (SED), which uses the historic counties (minus Cheshire) as the basis of the studies. The SED also groups Manx English with Northern dialects, although this is a distinct variety of English and the Isle of Man is not part of England. Under Wells' scheme, this definition includes Far North and Middle North dialects but excludes the Midlands dialects.

Scottish English is distinct from Northern England English, although the two have interacted and influenced each other. The Scots language and the Northumbrian and Cumbrian dialects of English descend from the Old English of Northumbria (diverging in the Middle English period) and are still very similar to each other.

History

Many historical northern accents reflect the influence of the Old Norse language strongly, compared with other varieties of English spoken in England.

In addition to previous contact with Vikings, during the 9th and 10th centuries, most of northern and eastern England was part of either the Danelaw or the Danish-controlled Kingdom of Northumbria (except for much of present-day Cumbria, which was part of the Kingdom of Strathclyde). Consequently, modern Yorkshire dialects, in particular, are considered to have been influenced heavily by Old West Norse and Old East Norse (the ancestor language of modern Norwegian, Swedish and Danish).

During the mid and late 19th century, there was large-scale migration from Ireland, which affected the speech of parts of Northern England. This is most apparent in the accents along the west coast, such as Liverpool, Birkenhead, Barrow-in-Furness and Whitehaven.

Northern accent and dialect varieties

Variations in modern Northern English accents/dialects include:

• Cheshire dialect
• Cumbrian dialect
• Geordie (spoken in the Newcastle/Tyneside area which includes southern parts of Northumberland)
• Lancashire dialect and accent
• Mackem (spoken in Sunderland/Wearside)
• Mancunian (spoken in Manchester, Salford, various other areas of Greater Manchester, parts of Lancashire and eastern Cheshire)
• Northumbrian dialect
• Pitmatic (two variations: one spoken in the former mining communities of County Durham and the other in Northumberland)
• Scouse (spoken in the Liverpool/Merseyside area with variations in west Cheshire and southern Lancashire)
• Teesside (spoken in Middlesbrough/Stockton-on-Tees and surrounding areas)
• Yorkshire dialect

In some areas, dialects and phrases can vary greatly within very small geographic regions. Historically, accents did change over very small distances, but this is less true in modern Britain due to enhanced geographic mobility.

Phonological characteristics

Red areas are where English dialects of the late 20th century were rhotic; in the North, only some of Lancashire is included.

Pronunciation of [ŋg] in the word tongue throughout England; the major Northern counties with this trait are located where the North West and West Midlands meet.

Speech features

There are several speech features that unite most of the accents of Northern England and distinguish them from Southern England and Scottish accents.

Trap–bath split

The accents of Northern England generally do not have the trap–bath split observed in Southern England English, so that the vowel in bath, ask and cast is the short TRAP vowel /a/: /baθ, ask, kast/, rather than /ɑː/ found in the south. There are a few words in the BATH set like can't, shan’t, half, calf, rather which are pronounced with /ɑː/ in most Northern English accents as opposed to /æ/ in Northern American accents.

The /æ/ vowel of cat, trap is normally pronounced [a] rather than the [æ] found in traditional Received Pronunciation or General American, while /ɑː/, as in the words palm, cart, start, tomato, may not be differentiated from /æ/ by quality, but by length, being pronounced as a longer [aː].

Foot–strut split

The foot–strut split is absent in Northern English, so that, for example, cut and put rhyme and are both pronounced with /ʊ/; words like love, up, tough, judge, etc. also use this vowel sound. This has led to Northern England being described "Oop North" /ʊp nɔːθ/ by some in the south of England. Some words with /ʊ/ in RP even have /uː/ – book is pronounced /buːk/ in some Northern accents (particularly in Lancashire, Greater Manchester and eastern parts of Merseyside where the Lancashire accent is still prevalent), while conservative accents also pronounce look and cook as /luːk/ and /kuːk/.

Other vowels

The Received Pronunciation phonemes /eɪ/ (as in face) and /əʊ/ (as in goat) are often pronounced as monophthongs (such as [eː] and [oː]), or as older diphthongs (such as /ɪə/ and /ʊə/). However, the quality of these vowels varies considerably across the region, and this is considered a greater indicator of a speaker's social class than the less stigmatized aspects listed above.

The /ɒ/ vowel of LOT is a fully open [ɒ] rather than the open-mid [ɔ] of modern Received Pronunciation and Southern England English.

R sound

The most common R sound, when pronounced in Northern England, is the typical English ; however, an is also widespread, particularly following a consonant or between vowels. This tap predominates most fully in the Scouse accent. The North, like most of the South, is largely (and increasingly) non-rhotic, meaning that R is pronounced only before a vowel or between vowels, but not after a vowel (for instance, in words like car, fear, and lurk). However, regions that are rhotic (pronouncing all R sounds) or somewhat rhotic are possible, particularly amongst older speakers:

• Lancashire and Greater Manchester areas north of the city of Manchester may residually be rhotic or pre-consonantally rhotic (pronouncing R before a consonant but not in word-final position), for example, in Accrington and Rochdale.

• Lincolnshire may weakly retain word-final (but not pre-consonantal) rhoticity.

• Uvular rhoticity, in which the same R sound as in French and German is used, has been described as the traditional "burr" of rural, northern Northumberland – possible as well, though also rare, in County Durham.

Other features

In most areas, the letter y on the end of words as in happy or city is pronounced [ɪ], like the i in bit, and not [i]. This was also the norm in RP until the late 20th century. The tenser [i], similar to Southern England and Modern RP, is found in throughout the North East from Teesside northwards, and in the Merseyside and Hull areas.

The North does not have a clear distinction between the and of most other accents in England; in other words, most Northern accents pronounce all L sounds with some moderate amount of velarization. Exceptions to this are in Tyneside, Wearside and Northumberland, which universally use only the clear L, and in Lancashire and Manchester, which universally use only the dark L.

Some northern English speakers have noticeable rises in their intonation, even to the extent that, to other speakers of English, they may sound "perpetually surprised or sarcastic."

Distinctive sounds

Major distinctive sounds of Northern English

English diaphoneme	Example words	Manchester (Mancunian)	Lancashire	Yorkshire	Cumbria	Northumberland (Pitmatic)	Merseyside (Scouse)	Tyneside (Geordie)
/æ/	bath, dance, trap	[a~ä]
/ɑː/	bra, calm, father	[aː~äː]					[äː~ɑː]	[ɒː]
/aɪ/	fight, ride, try	[aɪ~äɪ] Geordie and Northumberland, when not final or before a voiced fricative: [ɛɪ~əɪ]
/aʊ/	brown, mouth	[aʊ]	[æʊ]	[aʊ~æʊ]		[ɐʊ]	[æʊ]	[ɐʊ~u:]
/eɪ/	lame, rein, stain	[ɛɪ~e̞ɪ]	[e̞ː] Lancashire, Cumbria, and Yorkshire, when before ght as in weight: [eɪ~ɛɪ]				[eɪ]	[ɪə~eː]
/ɛ/	bed, egg, bread	[ɛ]
/ɛər/	fair, hare, there	[ɛː] rhotic Lancashire and some places by the Scottish border: [ɛːɹ]					[eː] (square–nurse merger)	[ɛː]
/ɜːr/	fur, her, stir	[ɜː~ɛː] rhotic Lancashire and some places by the Scottish border: [əɹː]						[øː~ʊː]
/ər/	doctor, martyr, smaller	[ə~ɜ~ɛ] rhotic Lancashire and some places by the Scottish border: [əɹ~ɜɹ]; also, Geordie: [ɛ~ɐ]
/iː/	beam, marine, fleece	[ɪi]				[i]	[iː~ɨ̞i]	[iː~ei]
/i/	city, honey, parties	[ɪ~e]		[ɪ~e~i] Hull and northern North Yorkshire: [i] rest of Yorkshire: [ɪ~e]	[ɪi~i]		[i]
/ɪər/	beer, fear, here	[ɪə] rhotic Lancashire and some places by the Scottish border: [ɪəɹ]					[iɛ̯]	[iɐ̯]
/ɔː/	all, bought, saw	[ɒː~ɔː]	[ɒː~ɔː]				[o̞:]
/ɔːr/	horse, north, war		[ɒː~ɔː] rhotic Lancashire and some places by the Scottish border: [ɒːɹ~ɔːɹ]
	hoarse, force, wore	[ɔː] (possible horse-hoarse distinction)
/oʊ/	goal, shown, toe	[ɔʊ~ɔo]	[oː~ɔː~ɵː] West Yorkshire, more commonly: [ɔː] Hull, especially female: [ɵː]				[ɔu~ɜu~ɛʉ]	[ʊə~oː]
/ʌ/	bus, flood, put	[ʊ] (no foot–strut split) Northumberland, less rounded: [ʌ̈]; in Scouse, Manchester, South Yorkshire and (to an extent) Teesside the word one is uniquely pronounced with the vowel [ɒ], and this is also possible for once, among(st), none, tongue, and nothing
/ʊ/
/ʊər/	poor, sure, tour	[ʊə] rhotic Lancashire and some places by the Scottish border: [ʊəɹ]					[o̞:]	[uɐ]
/uː/	food, glue, lose	[ʏː]	[ʊu] North Yorkshire: [ʉ:]		[ʉː]	[yː]	[ʉː]	[ʉu~ʊu~ɵʊ]
/ɒ/	lot, wasp, cough	[ɒ]
intervocalic & postvocalic /k/	racquet, joker, luck	[k] or [k~x]	[k]				[k~x] or [k~ç]	[k~kˀ]
initial /h/	hand, head, home	[∅] or [h]						[h]
/l/	lie, mill, salad	[l~ɫ] /l/ is often somewhat "dark" (meaning velarised) [ɫ] throughout northern England, but it is particularly dark in Manchester and Lancashire.						[l]
stressed-syllable /ŋ/	bang, singer, wrong	[ŋg~ŋ] [ŋ] predominates in the northern half of historical Lancashire		[ŋ] [ŋg] predominates only in South Yorkshire's Sheffield			[ŋg~ŋ]	[ŋ]
post-consonantal & intervocalic /r/	current, three, pray	[ɹ] or, conservatively, [ɹ~ɾ] [ʁ] in Lindisfarne and traditional, rural, northern Northumberland					[ɾ]	[ɹ~ɾ]
intervocalic, final & pre-consonantal /t/	attic, bat, fitness	[ʔ] or [t(ʰ)]					[θ̠] or [ʔ]

Grammar and syntax

The grammatical patterns of Northern England English are similar to those of British English in general. However, there are several unique characteristics that mark out Northern English.

Northern Subject Rule

Under the Northern Subject Rule, the suffix "-s" (which in Standard English grammar only appears in the third person singular present) is attached to verbs in many present and past-tense forms (leading to, for example, "the birds sings"). More generally, third-person singular forms of irregular verbs such as to be may be used with plurals and other grammatical persons; for instance "the lambs is out". In modern dialects, the most obvious manifestation is a levelling of the past tense verb forms was and were. Either form may dominate depending on the region and individual speech patterns (so some Northern speakers may say "I was" and "You was" while others prefer "I were" and "You were") and in many dialects especially in the far North, weren't is treated as the negation of was.

Epistemic mustn't

The "epistemic mustn't", where mustn't is used to mark deductions such as "This mustn't be true", is largely restricted within the British Isles to Northern England, although it is more widely accepted in American English, and is likely inherited from Scottish English. A few other Scottish traits are also found in far Northern dialects, such as double modal verbs (might could instead of might be able to), but these are restricted in their distribution and are mostly dying out.

Pronouns

While standard English now only has a single second-person pronoun, you, many Northern dialects have additional pronouns either retained from earlier forms or introduced from other variants of English.

The pronouns thou and thee have survived in many rural Northern dialects. In some case, these allow the distinction between formality and familiarity to be maintained, while in others thou is a generic second-person singular, and you (or ye) is restricted to the plural. Even when thou has died out, second-person plural pronouns are common. In the more rural dialects and those of the far North, this is typically ye, while in cities and areas of the North West with historical Irish communities, this is more likely to be yous.

Conversely, the process of "pronoun exchange" means that many first-person pronouns can be replaced by the first-person objective plural us (or more rarely we or wor) in standard constructions. These include me (so "give me" becomes "give us"), we (so "we Geordies" becomes "us Geordies") and our (so "our cars" becomes "us cars"). The latter especially is a distinctively Northern trait.

Almost all British vernaculars have regularised reflexive pronouns, but the resulting form of the pronouns varies from region to region. In Yorkshire and the North East, hisself and theirselves are preferred to himself and themselves. Other areas of the North have regularised the pronouns in the opposite direction, with meself used instead of myself. This appears to be a trait inherited from Irish English, and like Irish speakers, many Northern speakers use reflexive pronouns in non-reflexive situations for emphasis. Depending on the region, reflexive pronouns can be pronounced (and often written) as if they ended -sen, -sel or -self (even in plural pronouns) or ignoring the suffix entirely.

Vocabulary

In addition to Standard English terms, the Northern English lexis includes many words derived from Norse languages, as well as words from Middle English that disappeared in other regions. Some of these are now shared with Scottish English and the Scots language, with terms such as bairn ("child"), bonny ("beautiful"), gang or gan ("go/gone/going") and kirk ("church") found on both sides of the Anglo-Scottish border. Very few terms from Brythonic languages have survived, with the exception of place name elements (especially in Cumbrian toponymy) and the Yan Tan Tethera counting system, which largely fell out of use in the nineteenth century. The Yan Tan Tethera system was traditionally used in counting stitches in knitting, as well as in children's nursery rhymes, counting-out games, and was anecdotally connected to shepherding. This was most likely borrowed from a relatively modern form of the Welsh language rather than being a remnant of the Brythonic of what is now Northern England.

The forms yan and yen used to mean one as in someyan ("someone") that yan ("that one"), in some northern English dialects, represents a regular development in Northern English in which the Old English long vowel /ɑː/ <ā> was broken into /ie/, /ia/ and so on. This explains the shift to yan and ane from the Old English ān, which is itself derived from the Proto-Germanic *ainaz.

A corpus study of Late Modern English texts from or set in Northern England found lad ("boy" or "young man") and lass ("girl" or "young woman") were the most widespread "pan-Northern" dialect terms. Other terms in the top ten included a set of three indefinite pronouns owt ("anything"), nowt ("naught" or "nothing") and summat ("something"), the Anglo-Scottish bairn, bonny and gang, and sel/sen ("self") and mun ("must"). Regional dialects within Northern England also had many unique terms, and canny ("clever") and nobbut ("nothing but") were both common in the corpus, despite being limited to the North East and to the North West and Yorkshire respectively.

See also

• Northern Subject Rule – Distinctive feature of Northern English and Scots
• Scottish English – Varieties of English language spoken in Scotland
• West Germanic languages – Group of languages

Sources

• Beal, Joan (2004). "English dialects in the North of England: phonology". In Schneider, Edgar W.; Burridge, Kate; Kortmann, Bernd; Mesthrie, Rajend; Upton, Clive (eds.). A handbook of varieties of English. Vol. 1: Phonology. Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 113–133. ISBN 3-11-017532-0.
• Beal, Joan C. (2010). Introduction to Regional Englishes. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-0-7486-8726-8.
• Hickey, Raymond (2015). Researching Northern English. John Benjamins. ISBN 978-90-272-6767-2.
• Lodge, Ken (2009). A Critical Introduction to Phonetics. Continuum International Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-8264-8873-2.
• Pietsch, Lukas (2005). ""Some do and some doesn't": Verbal concord variation in the north of the British Isles" (PDF). In Kortmann, Bernd; Herrmann, Tanja; Pietsch, Lukas; Wagner, Susanne (eds.). A Comparative Grammar of British English Dialects: Agreement, Gender, Relative Clauses. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-018299-6.
• Trudgill, Peter; Hannah, Jean (2002). International English: A Guide to the Varieties of Standard English (4th ed.). London: Arnold. ISBN 0-340-80834-9.
• Wales, Katie (2006). Northern English: A Social and Cultural History. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-511-48707-1.
• Wells, John C. (1982). Accents of English. Vol. 2: The British Isles (pp. i–xx, 279–466). Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511611759. ISBN 0-52128540-2 .
• Williams, Ann; Kerswill, Paul (1999), "Dialect levelling: change and continuity in Milton Keynes, Reading and Hull" (PDF), in Foulkes, Paul; Docherty, Gerard (eds.), Urban voices. Accent studies in the British Isles., London: Arnold, pp. 141–162, archived from the original (PDF) on 16 September 2012

Further reading

• Katie Wales (2006), Northern English: A Social and Cultural History, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-86107-1