Tag Archives: Dialect

Celebrating Notts Language

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Map of Nottingham with language tags. When I first returned to Nottingham, I kept popping into the cob shop at the Theatre Royal tram stop because the staff there had such thick Nottingham accents. One of them had a form of Notts turrets, interjecting duck at every opportunity: ‘Egg mayo, duck, with lettuce, duck, on white or brown, duck…’ It was music to my ears, a lovely warm feeling, like sinking slowly into a bubble bath and turning the hot tap with my toes. God, how much I’d missed those flat vowels.

Dialect is a form of intangible culture and an integral part of identity. It carries the knowledge, values, attitudes, and experiences of people. The Notts dialect is something I’ve celebrated and promoted in various forms during my 13 years as LeftLion Literature editor, through comics such as Dawn of the Unread and Whatever People Say I Am, through documentaries on the wireless, and more recently through the writing of that mardy bloke from Eastwood – dialect was the second artefact in the D.H. Lawrence Memory Theatre. Natalie Braber, a Professor in Linguistics at Nottingham Trent University, provided the contextual essays for this.

I mention this as Natalie has recently finished a project where she interviewed a broad range of people, including schoolchildren, ex-miners, locals – those who were born here, and those who have moved here – to try and map out the Notts accent. Each participant was asked ‘to share what language means to them: their favourite words and expressions – whether dialect, familect (words used within families), ethnolect (language associated with an ethnic group), work-related vocabulary or words from another language; and poems, stories and songs which invoke place’.

I submitted shin-tin’ as my favourite word (‘she isn’t in’) and read an extract from Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958). I find the dialect in Lawrence’s work, such as the poem ‘The Collier’s Wife’, too complex to read. Only those who straddle the Derbyshire/Notts border, like mining historian David Amos, have the tongue for it. This is why ‘Celebrating Notts Language’ is important, because it captures the richness and variety of spoken dialect.

Although the East Midlands dialect of Middle English was an influence on the development of Standard English, there’s been little research into the spoken English of the area. Dialect tends be thought of in terms of north (bath) and south (baath) when perhaps there needs to be a tripartite distinction. Nottingham, as always, is hard to categorise, borrowing from the north (‘bus’) and south (‘aaas’/house) – exactly as you would expect from a city bang in the middle of the country.

There are many arguments suggesting language is becoming homogenous, mainly due to the globalisation of work and media, would it be too radical to suggest that a bigger threat to dialect is we are talking less to each other? The mining and industry communities that Lawrence and Sillitoe wrote about are gone – as is the pub where ‘everybody knows your name’. More people work remotely or interact with a screen rather than a human. Millennials no longer need to call each other when a status update or WhatsApp message serves the same function. Surely this must impact on language, accent, and dialect.

Natalie’s website: Celebrating Notts Language 

This article is a variation on one published on the Digital Pilgrimage, 14 August 2023. Further Reading

  • James Walker/Made in Manchester Productions. Tongue and Talk: The Dialect Poets of the Pits (2021) BBC Radio 4
  • James Walker. Thar’t a Mard Arse. Memory Theatre.
  • Natalie Braber. Mardy ducks: Nottingham Dialect Words. Memory Theatre.
  • Natalie Braber. What is the Nottingham dialect and where does it come from? Memory Theatre.
  • Natalie Braber. Lawrencian Dialect. Memory Theatre.
  • Natalie Braber and Jonnie Robinson (2018) East Midlands English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Natalie Braber and Sandra Jansen (Eds.) (2018) Sociolinguistics in England. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Natalie Braber (2018) Pit Talk in the East Midlands. In: N. Braber and S. Jansen (eds.) Sociolinguistics in England. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 243-274.
  • Natalie Braber (2018) Performing identity on screen: Language, identity, and humour in Scottish television comedy. In: R. Bassiouney (ed.) Dialect and identity performance. London: Routledge, 265-285.
  • Natalie Braber, Suzy Harrison and Claire Ashmore (2017) Pit Talk in the East Midlands. Sheffield: Bradwell Books.
  • Natalie Braber and David Amos (2017) Images of the Coalfields. Sheffield: Bradwell Books.
  • Natalie Braber and Diane Davies (2016) Using and creating oral history in dialect research. Oral History 44(1), 98-107.

 

Alan Sillitoe Writing Workshop at Radford Care Group

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This is the second of three blogs originally published on the City Arts website for Words for Wisdom, a project which aims to bring older and young people together through literature. During my commission we explored Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which is why we had to host some of the sessions in Radford.

When thinking about possible locations to host writing workshops for the Words of Wisdom project, Radford was an absolute must. This was the setting for Alan Sillitoe’s debut novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Karel Reisz’s 1960 film adaptation staring Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton would feature the family home of 5 Beaconsfield Terrace, with neighbours and family appearing as extras.

Born in 1928, Sillitoe grew up in abject poverty and squalor. The family lived an itinerant existence, moved on as the area underwent slum clearances. On one occasion the family of six occupied a single room in a building. They weren’t the only ones. Always on the brink of starvation, Sillitoe’s mother was forced into prostitution to help feed the family. “We were in a class of our own,” observed Sillitoe’s brother Michael “it was impossible to fall any lower.”

Sillitoe failed his eleven plus and ended up in Radford Boulevard Senior Boys’ School, leaving without qualifications. Like everyone else in the area, including his father, he ended up doing a stint at Raleigh. Given Sillitoe’s personal circumstances it’s little wonder he has Arthur Seaton declare “I’m out for is a good time – all the rest is propaganda”. Yet despite these awful conditions, Sillitoe avoids ‘misery lit’ in his writing. Instead we find a defiant individualism in his characters, epitomised by Seaton’s personal mantra of “don’t let the bastards grind you down”.

I found a similar attitude in my sessions at Radford Care Group where four women aged between 70 – 80 shared stories that were Seatonesque in their cunning and charisma. One woman, Brenda, grew up on Salisbury Street, a few doors down from the Sillitoe family, and brought in a photo of Sillitoe’s mother Sabina on the street. You can see the Raleigh factory in the distance. This was particularly poignant as Brenda explained her ex husband burned all of her photographs except a treasured few. She also shared a letter from Brian Sillitoe, who kept in contact over the years.

One of Brenda’s personal photographs which she kindly shared with us.

When we discussed dialect in the novel, Brenda introduced me to words from her childhood like ‘chumping’ – which is where you collect wood for a bonfire stack. Streets would have competitions to see who could make the biggest bonfire, meaning she would sneak out at night and steal debris from her neighbour’s stack. Presumably they were doing similar, so there was no point feeling guilty. Another favourite word was ‘guzunder’ as in ‘it goes under’ referring to a bed pan that goes under the sheets.

When I turned up for our sessions the group were usually intensely working on a ‘word search’, whereby they had to search through a grid of letters to find hidden words. “Keeps me brain working, duckeh” one of them explained. So, when we met up next, I created a word search that included local dialect and phrases from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, such as: White Horse, Gin and Orange, Blackberryin, Notnum.

The group were really grateful for the sessions because it helped them remember things they’d long since forgotten, such as the US Army billeted at Wollaton Park during World War II. Some of the stories I was told would make Arthur Seaton blush! Although Brenda was too young for a romantic liaison, it didn’t stop her from taking advantage of the ‘Yanks’. Instead, she promised soldiers a date with her sister if they gave her some gum. The scam worked, but much to the chagrin of her father when he had to chase away various soldiers who came knocking at the door for the promised date.

Photo by James Walker

One thing I didn’t expect from these sessions is how it would make me feel. I struck up a real friendship with these septuagenarians and writing this I realise how much I miss our Friday conversations. They made the best of adversity and had a positivity that was infectious. “We had nothing growing up” one told me. “I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

While in the Care Home I also bumped into a man called Harry. He used to repair watches in Victoria Market and is a family friend I have known for 25 years. I sat down and said it was so lovely to see him, that I hadn’t seen him for ages. But he couldn’t remember me. He looked really confused and I realised he had dementia. He died a few weeks later.

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