A turnip by any other name

But as use of dialect wanes, Nick Morrison reports on efforts to keep the native tongue alive.

YOU may know it as a bagie, or maybe a snammy. To others, it's a snarter, a snadger or a snagger. Others yet call it a turmit or a tormit. You may have thought it was just a humble turnip, but it seems it goes under more names than a secret agent.

From bairn, meaning child, to yat, meaning gate, the North-East is rich in dialect. Some of the words, such as bairn, are in everyday use across the region and widely understood. Others are more geographically limited, and spoken and understood by just a select group of people.

But the rapid changes in society over the last 50 years have put some of this dialect at risk. The decline of heavy industry, a bastion of dialect in terms of developing and maintaining its own phrases, has dealt a blow to the survival of a horde of phrases; and greater mobility has seen both native speakers dispersed to parts of the country where their words are unintelligible, and brought in people unfamiliar with the tongue being spoken around them.

Guardians of this part of our heritage are the Durham and Tyneside Dialect Group, dedicated to collecting and recording the use of dialect English in the North-East. The group sprang from research carried out by Bill Griffiths in the 1990s, later brought together in a book published by the Centre for Northern Studies at Northumbria University.

"We then got a grant for a questionnaire, and we got over 500 responses, and that made us realise that there was a lot of interest in dialect, and we also got a lot of new words we hadn't had before," says Bill, whose own interest in the subject was prompted by his PhD in Old English.

"We asked people what words they had heard of, but they would also write in extra words, and there was evidence that people were reusing words. Dut means a bowler hat, but somebody wrote that it was a woolly hat; sneck, a door latch in an old fashioned gate, was coming in as the latch on a Yale lock. There were words that were carrying on and changing."

But while the research was underway, evidence emerged that led Bill to develop ideas about the development of dialect which go against much conventional thinking. Traditionally, the region has been seen as being divided into two, one largely Viking-influenced and the other largely the product of the Anglo-Saxons, but Bill says, at least as far as dialect is concerned, the picture is more mixed.

"You cannot say that people in the Tees are just using Old Norse and people in Northumbria are using old Anglo-Saxon, the two are merged. Beck, for a stream, is Old Norse, but you get that used everywhere. You get local specialisations, but sometimes these are just minor variations, such as the words for turnip, and sometimes words get lost, and when words get lost you get the appearance of something patchy."

Marrer is one example of this. Once in widespread use to mean a workmate, it largely survived in the coal pits, with the result that it became to be seen as a pit word.

As well as the expected contributions of Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon to the North-East dialect, a surprising input has come from Dutch, responsible for stot, meaning to bounce, and hoy, to throw. The theory that Dutch influence is largely a result of North Sea traders crossing paths, or perhaps smugglers bringing gin from Amsterdam, is supported by the fact these words are not recorded before the 18th century.

But what came across even in those initial surveys, is that the majority of people who knew a wide range of dialect words were in their late 30s or older. While language is a continually evolving creation, there are more old words being lost than there are new words being added.

"There is a core of 50-100 words which are well-known, and in use by young people, but at the same time our research has been a study of loss," Bill says. "If you went back to the 19th century, you would have hundreds if not thousands of dialect words. Now, older people will know a couple of hundred, and young people will just know the core."

SARK, for a shirt and from the Old Norse, was common up until the First World War but is now rarely heard; lowe, also Old Norse and meaning a flame, just survives into the 20th century, and oxter, Old English for an armpit, has similarly fallen by the wayside.

Bill says the chief factor in wiping out dialect words was the advent of compulsory education, for primary pupils in 1871 and secondary children in 1945. The spread of standard English militated against the regional variants, a process exacerbated by the mass media, spreading their versions of the language.

But as well as words disappearing, new words are being added. One now in common use is charver, to mean a gypsy or a lad, from the Romany chavo, which means a young person or child. Ken, for home, is also an import from Romany.

And the North-East has still the richest of the English dialects, a product largely of the way the region was industrialised in the 18th and 19th centuries.

"The development of the coalfields and the ship building gave it solid, durable industries. For 200 years, there was a continuity in employment, and that meant a lot of the traditional dialect was preserved," Bill says.

"Also, there is a social continuity: people move in from other areas, join the coal mining communities and then start speaking the local dialect. Of course, now the coal mining and the heavy industry has gone, dialect is of no real use in the office or the call centre."

THIS connection is seen most clearly in pitmatic, the language which originated from the County Durham coal pits and then spread across much of the North-East, with some slight variations, such as divvent on Tyneside as opposed to the pitmatic dinnut.

As part of his efforts to preserve the dialect, Bill is waiting to hear of the success or otherwise of an application for a Heritage Lottery Fund grant, with a decision due in May or June, to carry out a major regional survey into which words are used in which areas. He is also keen to record dialect spoken by native speakers for posterity.

"Hopefully, it will be possible to trace the historical development of dialect, because urban dialect is very mobile and has not been studied much, if at all. There has been an awful lot of changes, so it will be interesting to see the different local preferences," he says.

But even though the number of words in common use is declining, the existence of a stubborn core is reassurance that dialect will continue to survive, at least to some extent. "There are words like bairn, and because they're useful I think they will keep their place," Bill says.

"Dialect is essential, it is one of the defining elements of North-East culture. It covers the Great North Coalfield, from Trimdon to Ashington, and it has given a consistency to the culture. It needs to be treasured and valued a lot more than it has, but it is not hopeless."

* Bill can be contacted at 21 Alfred Street, Seaham, SR7 7LH, or via www.pitmatic.co.uk