The grammar of North East English

This is a 'contemporary' grammar of North East English (NEE): the features treated here are attested in a large naturalistic corpus of writing produced since c.2010 by people who either live in the region or have strong affiliations with it.

More information about the Ready to Go (RTG) corpus can be found here.

There is also a historical dimension to the grammar because the main focus is so-called 'traditional' dialect (though well-established later innovations are also covered). By 'traditional' I mean non-standard grammatical forms and functions which have survived in the living speech of north-easterners since at least the late nineteenth century. It builds on the ground-breaking work published by Beal (1993) and Beal, Burbano-Elizondo and Llamas (2012).

In order to establish the historical pedigree of the features presented, I use the Survey of English Dialects (SED) as a benchmark. Almost all the morphological and syntactical items described here and attested in RTG were also found in the early 1950s in the speech of folk from County Durham and Northumberland, most of whom had entered adulthood by the end of the nineteenth century (Orton and Halliday 1962: 11-18). In other words, present-day Northumbrians share many morphosyntactic features with rural Northumbrians who were born in the Victorian age and whose long-dead voices are preserved in sound recordings and fieldworkers' notes made at the start of the reign of Elizabeth II.

To extend the time depth even further, I refer to a number of standard historical lexicographical works, including the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (ODEE), the Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL) and the English Dialect Dictionary (EDD). But my main lexicographical source – which itself is cited heavily in EDD – is Richard Heslop’s Northumberland Words: A Glossary of Words used in the County of Northumberland and on the Tyneside (1892-93). This English Dialect Society publication provides ‘a good idea of the structural characteristics’ of NEE in the nineteenth century (Ihalainen 1994: 213), and is an impressive work of late Victorian scholarship.