I need to convince myself — again — to stop following links further and further into the bowels of Wikipedia.  But: Yorkshire Dialect and Accent:

One of the closest differences in dialect in the area is between the West of the City of Wakefield (such as Ossett, Wakefield and Horbury) compared with the East (eg. Castleford, Pontefract and Featherstone), areas less than 3 miles apart

What?  Three miles?

I know I’m Californian.  Anglos have had a strong presence in the area for about a century and a half, and not far before the arrival of the Trans-Continental Railroad.  Railroads, I would expect, smooth regional accents.  Mass media, more so — and California, having Hollywood and early television and radio studios, essentially created the more-or-less-standard U.S. accent.  So, bearing that in mind: three miles?  Weren’t people walking in those days?

This kind of fine-grained distinction in accents — and I’m most familiar with the phenomenon in Britain — suggest a kind of dialectal inertia that is baffling to me.  I understand that towns had hundreds of years to develop their accents in isolation, but the fact that so many are preserved into the 21st century, though modified — and just how geographically close-by some distinct accents are — still surprises me.  I imagine that there must be some in-group/out-group identification going on.  British humor seems frequently to revolve around accent — Python, for instance, Wallace and Gromit, and Neil Morrissey’s character on Men Behaving Badly come to mind — and much of that I understand only at an intellectual level, and I presume I still miss most of it.  The Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine film Sleuth (if you haven’t seen it, don’t Google, don’t read the description, just watch it) uses accent for a pointed social commentary, and I entirely missed that when I first saw it.

A book I once read — I’m pretty sure it was Jane Walmesley’s Brit-Think, Ameri-Think — talked about the experience of young British women coming to America and being told their accent was “beautiful, even if they were from Liverpool or Birmingham” (I think that’s exact, but I’ll have to wait for the maturation of Google Books to be sure.)  The book, by the way, is constantly hilarious, maybe never more so than in the dedication of the book to the author’s daughter, child of an American and a Briton, who reportedly describes herself as “half and hahff”.

The title of this post references the seminal Homicide: Life on the Street episode Three Men and Adena, in which “the arabber” tell the detectives that if they say the name of the city — “Baltimore” — that he could tell each of them what street he (the detective) grew up on.  The difference, by the way, frequently seemed to me to be the length of the “ah” in “Bahll-mər”.  This suggests that the phenomenon I’ve described is not unheard of in this country, but I’m just citing television at this point.  More erudite commentary is courted.

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 22:51:07 +0000
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