BRITISH researchers have been given ￡460,000 to study the UK’s growing number of differing regional dialects.
A team from the University of Leeds are examining a vast collection of examples of regional slang words and phrases turned up by the BBC Voices project, a survey of regional English which amassed 700 hours of sound recordings. They invited the public to send in examples of English still spoken throughout the country.
The Leeds researchers are led by Sally Johnson of the Department of Linguistics and Phonetics and Clive Upton of the School of English. They have received UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funding to describe and interpret the material and make it available as a catalogue for people to access.
Thousands of new entries were posted on a website set up to explore regional phrases and slang words. It showed that regional dialects are flourishing, despite fears that standardization on radio and TV would destroy them.
The project reveals an amazing range of words to describe the simplest things. For instance, there are many different ways of saying “trainer”--the word for casual footwear, including “pumps” in Yorkshire, “gutties” in Scotland, and “daps” if you’re on the south coast.
Among thousands of items turned up by the project is the range of words the young use to insult one another. For instance, how do they describe someone who goes around dressed in a lot of cheap, trendy clothes and jewellery? The best-known insult thrown at such a person is “chav”, which can be heard all across the south of England and has spread north. But in the Southeast, such a person may also be called a “pikey”, a corruption of “turnpike sailor” and a derogatory name that used to be directed at gypsies.
Other regional insults, all given the same meaning, include “charva”, a Romany word heard in Newcastle, “scally” on Merseyside, “ned” in southern Scotland, and “kev” - short for Kevin - around Birmingham.
The project runs to the end of 2010, looking at accent and dialect and their relation to such issues as gender and ethnicity. It will build up a detailed lexicon of regional vocabulary, demonstrating how urban, social and geographical factors have influenced the verbal landscape.
The project will also examine how language is reported in the media. It collected hundreds of news articles and will catalogue the types of language making the news.
