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Standard English Language and its Dialect Form

   This paper is going to analyse changes that the dialect English language versus standard language. It will look into the orthographical differences in both cases with the specific examples.

   The dialect form of certain words changes to- the RP pronunciation of ‘girl’ or ‘bird’ – so that ‘stairs’ sounds more like the Standard English pronunciation of ‘stirs’.

Child, line 4 – stairs standard:
dialect:
A similar feature is seen here:
Adult, line 1 – here standard:
dialect:

   Here, the space in the mouth used to pronounce the monophthong differs from the Standard English use. In Standard English, where ‘stairs’ requires the mouth to be opened wide and the sound created mid-central (see diagram), the dialect speakers transfer the sound to the high-central

B Features of text

   Both written samples demonstrate some very interesting features of both linguistic and non-linguistic context.
Both use cohesive ties with apparent confidence: the child’s text begins by introducing the topic of the disco, and her next reference to it is anaphoric:

‘I go there’

   She is aware that repetition of ‘the disco’ is unnecessary. However, this cohesion becomes a little unclear in her next two sentences:
‘It is at roy smith’s up stiers. (‘it’ obviously referring to the disco again.) It is on north road.’
This second ‘it’ may be referring back to either the disco or to Roy Smith’s.
Her spoken sample contains the same lack of clarity:
(lines 3/4) ‘I go down there on Fridays (…) at a place called Roy Smith’s (.) it’s at Roy Smith’s up (…) stairs (…) it’s on North Road’.

   In the adult’s written sample, cohesive ties are abundant and clearly referenced:
‘If I were to win a million pounds on the Lottery or something similar, I’d probably put it all in a ‘high-yield’ interest account’,
with further anaphora at the end of the text:
‘there are banks around which specialise in big sums like that’,
again meaning the million pounds.
Another example is:
‘I’d probably still get a mortgage and loans, but wouldn’t exactly have to worry about paying them off.’
He realises that the reader understands what ‘it all’ and ‘that’ refer to having stated ‘a million pounds’, and that the reader understands ‘them’ refers back to ‘a mortgage and loans’.

   The adult’s spoken sample demonstrates the same sophistication, and the speech is linked together with cohesive ties, and reiteration where one string of cohesive ties has been broken by the introduction of another topic, e.g.:
‘a grand of that (.) every month (.) on (…) anything (…) you could spend it on a mortgage (pause) you get a mortgage over something like five years (…) on a decent house (pause) put two grand a month into it (…) a grand a month’ (reintroduction of ‘a grand’).
– adult, lines 23-27

   Each text demonstrates an awareness of the reader’s knowledge of their chosen topic. The child writes about ‘the disco’, using the definite article, indicating an awareness that the reader knows she attends a disco every week: there is no need for her to elaborate on which disco or what a disco actually is, rather she details its location, entry fee and so on. Equally, the adult deems it unnecessary to explain cohesive items like ‘the Lottery’, ‘interest’ or ‘withdrawal’: all of these terms fall within the lexical field of finance and he knows that the reader understands this context.

   Both provide much more explanation in their spoken samples and use discourse markers and solidarity markers that are often omitted in writing.
Discourse markers link the speech and are used as a ‘signposting’ mechanism, breaking the discourse up into chunks of meaning, for example:

‘Well (…) erm I go down there on Fridays’. (child, line 3)
This same information is much more definite in the written sample:
‘I go there on friday’s’
The adult uses moronomy where the child does not: he refers to
‘eight and a half grand’ (line 18),
taking for granted that the listener understands ‘grand’ means a thousand and that he is talking about pounds Sterling.
The child demonstrates moronomy to an extent where, having listed pop music groups, says:
‘and all that’ (lines 18/19),
to indicate that that is the genre of music played at the disco.
Solidarity markers add confidence to the speaker’s words and validate what they are saying. Examples include:
• questions: ‘couldn’t you?’ (adult, line 16)
• loose comparisons, particularly the word ‘like’, found frequently: ‘it’s (.) like a sweetie bar’ (child, line 10); ‘there like a pair of’ (child, line 31)
• general fillers and reinforcers: ‘Well (.) obviously’ (adult, line 21); ‘you know’ (adult, line 43); ‘or something’ (adult, line 26).

   Interestingly, while both of the child’s samples contain few solidarity markers, the adult’s samples contain more than expected: in the written sample there is ‘probably’ and ‘I think’, and (as already illustrated) there are several throughout his spoken sample. This may be an indication of him attempting to bring his speech and writing closer to Standard English, or closer to a perception of ‘correctness’. This will be further analysed in section D b).
There is little evidence of metaphor in either of the spoken or written samples. I would suggest a number of reasons for that: the child’s language has developed beyond ‘simple’ forms of metaphor like overextension (e.g. pointing to a horse and saying “doggy”) and, with her chosen topic, perhaps felt that there was no opportunity to use metaphor. Equally, while perhaps the adult may have had the opportunity or semantic sophistication to use a metaphor (or at least an analogy) in explaining what to do with Ј1m, he evidently chose to keep the explanation more factual than imaginative.

C Phonetics and spelling

    In the Darlington dialect, there are particular phonetics that dominate the general sounds of the speakers’ speech, for example the schwa and the deep being used for many monophthong vowel sounds:
Child, line 3 – go
line 11 – stuff
line 18 – Boyzone
Adult, line 3 – radio
line 22 – terribly
line 37 – account
The monophthongs are also frequently opened and sustained, as can be seen in words like:
Child, line 1 – disco
line 18 – All
Adult, line 19 – really
line 22 – bored
Conversely, stops (p, b, t, d, k and g) are often omitted in glottal stops, as is a common feature of the dialect, resulting in examples such as:
Adult, line 15 – got
line 25 – decent
line 26 – gets
Child, line 28 – Darlington

   These omissions make some words very staccato and someone unfamiliar with the dialect would probably find the lack of some consonants in words difficult to decipher!
The phonetics of a word spoken in the Darlington dialect differ according to its context, usually the word following it: if the first letter of a subsequent word is a vowel, then the last letter of the preceding word is normally pronounced. If the first letter of a subsequent word is a consonant, often the preceding word’s final letter is dropped.
Child, line 3 – ‘at a place called Roy Smith’s (.) it’s at Roy Smith’s’
The first ‘at’ is pronounced, while the second drops the final ‘t’ like so:
The same is true of fricative ‘h’, when it begins a word like ‘he’. This varies – on some occasions, it forces the preceding word’s final consonant to be excluded and sometimes the opposite is true:
Adult, line 1 – ‘’Cause he’
line 5 – ‘He owns’
line 9 – ‘it he’
• In line 1, the ‘h’ is dropped in favour of the ‘s’ from ‘’Cause’;
• in line 5, the ‘h’ has nothing preceding it and is pronounced; and
• in line 9, the final ‘t’ of ‘it’ is dropped in favour of pronouncing the ‘h’.
Generally, the dialect does not overlap with the spelling in each subject’s written sample. The adult’s text contains no spelling mistakes and no relations to his pronunciation of words like ‘out’, where in speech he have a glottal stop, or ‘year’, where he could represent his accent and spell it ‘yur’.

   In the child’s written sample, there is an indication of confusion between phonics ‘ee’ and ‘ea’, as she mis-spells ‘meet’ and writes instead ‘meat’. As discussed in section A, her reasons behind mis-spelling ‘stairs’ as ‘stiers’ are debatable as to whether she has spelt it according to her own pronunciation, or whether it is another confusion between two phonics that seem similar to her. She also mis-spells the name Chris, omitting the ‘h’ and writing ‘cris’, perhaps unaware that the ‘Ch’ – normally pronounced as the affricate- is pronounced as a hard ‘c’ in this case.

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