Accent discrimination in Higher Education

In this blog, Senior Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics, Esther Asprey, discusses the possible lexical loss in Black Country dialect, and the pilot project which seeks to explore whether this is indeed the case. 

If we have a standard language, and if, as eventually happened, state education is made free and mandatory, Governments will encourage educators to educate THROUGH that standard, and dialects will not really need standardising. Not only that, but the writing of dialect will lessen since the standard will be seen as more appropriate. Those who write it will be those with just enough literacy to write some standard but not enough to consistently write and spell the standard (these days most of us write mostly in the standard for most occasions).

In this way we lack any grammars or dictionaries of Black Country dialect that have been systematically compiled. Although excellent researchers like Brendan Hawthorne, Dave Reeves and Jon Raven have released comprehensive word lists, these lack the involvement of the wider speech community. Corpus dictionaries like the Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary for Standard English use large computer hosted bodies of literature from novels to science journals, children’s annuals to feminist zines, football results to trade directories for seed companies. Traditional dictionaries like Oxford rely more on written citations but still stretch their nets wide to catch up to date, in context uses of new words. No such dictionary exists for Black Country, so that none of its speakers can have a clear idea of whether, if a word is used in the Lye, it is also used in Colley Gate, or Whitmore Reans, or Caldmore. Not only that, but we have no idea of how many words are no longer in common use, or if indeed young Black Country speakers are bringing in any NEW dialect words.

A project I am planning aims to change all this. Using a mixture of online and face to face questionnaires we hope to trial a pilot project to see if words are becoming less used, where they are used, and who uses them. We would love to see you all take part. I spoke to BBC News about it here, and had an excellent chat to ITN about it here. 

I will be collecting the first words at my workshop for Wolverhampton Literature Festival on Sunday 2 February at 2pm in the Art Gallery, Wolverhampton. Please do encourage speakers of the dialect to sign up: Last words - are we losing Black Country dialect words?- Dr. Esther Asprey