West Country English

In literature, film and television

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

• The [History of Tom Jones, a Foundling|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

Celtic-language influence

• Goco — A bluebell
• Jonnick — Pleasant, agreeable

  Characteristics

Phonology

• West Country accents are rhotic like most Canadian, American, Irish and Scottish accents, meaning that the historical loss of syllable-final /r/ did not take place, in contrast to non-rhotic accents like Received Pronunciation. Often, this is specifically realised as the retroflex approximant, which is typically lengthened at the ends of words. This rhoticity can be attributed to the relative isolation of the South West from the rest of England. Rhoticity appears to be declining in both real and apparent time in some areas of the West Country, for example Dorset.
• , as in guide or life, more precisely approaches,, or.
• , as in house or cow, more precisely approaches or, with even very front and unrounded variants such as.
• Word-final "-ing" in polysyllabic words is typically realised as.
• , as in trap or cat, is often open, the more open variant is fairly common in urban areas but especially common in rural areas.
• * The split associated with London English may not exist for some speakers or may exist marginally based simply on a length difference. In other words, some may not have any contrast between and, for example making palm and Pam homophones. For some West Country speakers, the vowel is even the same in the,,, and word sets:. The split's "bath" vowel can also be represented by the sounds or in different parts of the West Country ; the isoglosses in the Linguistic Atlas of England are not straightforward cases of clear borders. Short vowels have also been reported, e.g.,.
• h-dropping: initial can often be omitted so "hair" and "air" become homophones. This is common in working-class speech in most parts of England.
• t-glottalisation: use of the glottal stop as an allophone of, generally when in any syllable-final position.
• The word-final letter "y" is pronounced or ; for example: party , silly etc.
• The Survey of English Dialects found that Cornwall retained some older features of speech that are now considered "Northern" in England. For example, a close in suck, but, cup, etc. and sometimes a short in words such as aunt.
• Phonological [history of English consonants#Initial fricative voicing|Initial fricative consonants can be voiced], particularly in more traditional and older speakers, so that "s" is pronounced as Standard English "z" and "f" as Standard English "v". This feature is now exceedingly rare.
• In words containing "r" before a vowel, there is frequent metathesis – "gurt", "Burdgwater" and "chillurn"
• "l" sounds are vocalised when not followed by a vowel, so "all old people" is.
• *As a result, the fool-fall merger is common, with both pronounced.
• In Bristol, a terminal "a" can be realised as the sound – e.g. cinema as "cinemaw" and America as "Americaw" – which is often perceived by non-Bristolians to be an intrusive "l", known as the "Bristol l". Hence the old joke about the three Bristolian sisters Evil, Idle and Normali.e.: Eva, Ida, and Norma. The name Bristol itself is often claimed to have originated from this local pronunciation, though this is contested.

  Vocabulary

• Some of the vocabulary used relates to English words of a bygone era, e.g. the verb "to hark", "thee", the increased use of the infinitive form of the verb "to be" etc.

Grammar

• The second person singular thee and thou forms used, thee often contracted to 'ee.
• Bist may be used instead of are for the second person, e.g.: how bist? This has its origins in the Old English – or Anglo-Saxon – language; compare the modern German Wie bist du?.
• Use of masculine pronouns with non-animate referents, e.g.: put'ee over there and e's a nice scarf.
• An a- prefix may be used to denote the past participle; a-went.
• Use of they in conjunction with plural nouns, where Standard English demands those e.g.: They shoes are mine. This is also used in Modern Scots but differentiated thae meaning those and thay the plural of he, she and it, both from the Anglo-Saxon þā 'they/those', the plural form of sē 'he/that', sēo 'she/that' and þæt 'it/that'.
• In other areas, be may be used exclusively in the present tense, often in the present continuous; Where be you going to?
• The use of to to denote location. Where's that to?. This is something that can still be heard often, unlike many other characteristics. This former usage is common to Newfoundland English, where many of the island's modern-day descendants have West Country origins — particularly Bristol — as a result of the 17th–19th century migratory fishery.
• Use of the past tense writ where Standard English uses wrote. e.g.: I writ a letter.
• Nominative pronouns as indirect objects. For instance, Don't tell I, tell'ee!, "'ey give I fifty quid and I zay no, giv'ee to charity inztead". When in casual Standard English the oblique case is used, in the West Country dialect the object of many a verb takes the nominative case.

  Social stigma and future of the dialect