West Country English
West Country English is a group of English language varieties and accents used by much of the native population of the West Country, an area found in the southwest of England.
The West Country is often defined as encompassing the official region of South West England: Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire, Bristol and Gloucestershire. However, the exact northern and eastern boundaries of the area are hard to define. In the adjacent counties of Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Hampshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire, it is possible to encounter similar accents and indeed, much the same distinct dialect, albeit with some similarities to others in neighbouring regions. Although natives of all these locations, especially in rural parts, often still have West Country influences in their speech, their increased mobility and urbanisation has meant that in the more populous of these counties the dialect itself, as opposed to the people's various local accents, is becoming increasingly rare.
Academically the regional variations are considered to be dialectal forms. The Survey of English Dialects captured manners of speech across the South West region that were just as different from Standard English as any from the far North of England. There is some influence from the Welsh and Cornish languages depending on the specific location.
In literature, film and television
In literary contexts, most of the usage has been in either poetry or dialogue, to add local colour. It has rarely been used for serious prose in recent times but was used much more extensively until the 19th century. West Country dialects are commonly represented as "Mummerset", a kind of catch-all southern rural accent invented for broadcasting.Early period
- The Late West Saxon dialect was the standard literary language of later Anglo-Saxon England, and consequently the majority of Anglo-Saxon literature, including the epic poem Beowulf and the poetic Biblical paraphrase Judith, is preserved in West Saxon dialect, though not all of it was originally written in West Saxon.
- In the medieval period, Sumer is icumen in is a notable example of a work in Wessex dialect.
- The Cornish language descended from the ancient British language that was spoken all over what is now the West Country until the West Saxons conquered and settled most of the area. The Cornish language throughout much of the High Middle Ages was not just the vernacular but the prestigious language in Cornwall among all classes, but was also spoken in large areas of Devon well after the Norman conquest. Cornish began to decline after the Late Middle Ages with English expanding westwards, and after the Prayer Book Rebellion, suffered terminal decline, dying out in the 18th century..
17th century
- In King Lear, Edgar speaks in the West Country dialect, as one of his various personae.
- Both Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh were noted at the Court of Queen Elizabeth for their strong Devon accents.
18th century
- Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, set in Somerset, again mainly dialogue. Considered one of the first true English novels.
19th century
- William Barnes' Dorset dialect poetry.
- Walter Hawken Tregellas, author of many stories written in the local dialect of the county of Cornwall and a number of other works.
- Anthony Trollope's series of books Chronicles of Barsetshire also use some dialect in dialogue.
- The novels of Thomas Hardy often use the dialect in dialogue, notably Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
- Wiltshire Rhymes and Tales in the Wiltshire Dialect and other works by Edward Slow.
- The Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Sorcerer is set in the fictional village of Ploverleigh in Somerset. Some dialogue and song lyrics, especially for the chorus, are a phonetic approximation of West Country speech. The Pirates of Penzance and Ruddigore are both set in Cornwall.
- John Davey, a farmer from Zennor, records the native Cornish language Cranken Rhyme.
- R. D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone. According to Blackmore, he relied on a "phonogogic" style for his characters' speech, emphasizing their accents and word formation. He expended great effort, in all of his novels, on his characters' dialogues and dialects, striving to recount realistically not only the ways, but also the tones and accents, in which thoughts and utterances were formed by the various sorts of people who lived in the Exmoor district.
20th century
- 'Zummerzet speech' is discussed in The Somerset Coast by Charles George Harper.
- Songs of the Soil by Percy G Stone, verse in Isle of Wight dialect, rendered phonetically, showing similarities with 'core' West Country dialects.
- A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys contains dialogue written in imitation of the local Somerset dialect.
- Albert John Coles, writing as Jan Stewer, wrote 3,000 short stories in the Devonshire dialect for local Devon newspapers, and published collections of them, as well as performing them widely on stage, film, and broadcast.
- David Foot wrote often about the West Country. Footsteps from East Coker was about his childhood village and beyond.
- Laurie Lee's works such as Cider with Rosie portray a somewhat idealised Gloucestershire childhood in the Five Valleys area.
- John Fowles's Daniel Martin features the title character's girlfriend's dialect.
- Dennis Potter's Blue Remembered Hills is a television play about children in the Forest of Dean during the Second World War. The dialogue is written in the style of the Forest dialect.
- The songs of Adge Cutler were famous for their West Country dialect, sung in a strong Somerset accent. His legacy lives on in the present day Wurzels and other so-called "Scrumpy and Western" artists.
- The folk group The Yetties perform songs composed in the dialect of Dorset.
- Andy Partridge, lead singer with the group XTC, has a pronounced Wiltshire accent. Although more noticeable in his speech, his accent may also be heard in some of his singing.
- J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter fantasy novels feature Hagrid, a character who has a West Country accent.
- Berk, the central monster character from The Trap Door, is voiced by actor and comedian Willie Rushton.
- Archaeologist Phil Harding from Channel 4's Time Team speaks with a strong Wiltshire accent.
History and origins
The dialects have their origins in the expansion of Old English into the west of modern-day England, where the kingdom of Wessex had been founded in the 6th century. As the Kings of Wessex became more powerful they enlarged their kingdom westwards and north-westwards by taking territory from the British kingdoms in those districts. From Wessex, the Anglo-Saxons spread into the Celtic regions of present-day Devon, Somerset and Gloucestershire, bringing their language with them. At a later period, Cornwall came under Wessex influence, which appears to become more extensive after the time of Athelstan in the 10th century. However, the spread of the English language took much longer here than elsewhere.
Outside Cornwall, it is believed that the various local dialects reflect the territories of various West Saxon tribes, who had their own dialects
which fused together into a national language in the later Anglo-Saxon period.
As Lt-Col. J. A. Garton observed in 1971, traditional Somerset English has a venerable and respectable origin, and is not a mere "debasement" of Standard English:
In some cases, many of these forms are closer to modern Saxon than Standard British English is, e.g.
| Low German | Somerset | Standard British English |
| Ik bün | I be/A be | I am |
| Du büst | Thee bist | You are |
| He is | He be | He is |
The use of masculine and sometimes feminine, rather than neuter, pronouns with non-animate referents also parallels Low German, which unlike English retains grammatical genders. The pronunciation of "s" as "z" is also similar to Low German. However, recent research proposes that some syntactical features of English, including the unique forms of the verb to be, originate rather with the Brythonic languages.
In more recent times, West Country dialects have been treated with some derision, which has led many local speakers to abandon them or water them down. In particular it is British comedy which has brought them to the fore outside their native regions, and paradoxically groups such as The Wurzels, a comic North Somerset/Bristol band from whom the term Scrumpy and Western music originated, have both popularised and made fun of them simultaneously. In an unusual regional breakout, the Wurzels' song "The Combine Harvester" reached the top of the UK charts in 1976, where it did nothing to dispel the "simple farmer" stereotype of Somerset and West Country folk. It and all their songs are sung entirely in a local version of the dialect, which is somewhat exaggerated and distorted. Some words used aren't even typical of the local dialect. For instance, the word "nowt" is used in the song "Threshing Machine". This word is generally used in more northern parts of England, with the West Country equivalent being "nawt".