Dialect is a funny beast – and treacherous, too.
Used correctly it can increase the chances of rapport between a speaker and their audience… it creates a sense of togetherness and a shared cultural background. That is, of course, one of the main reasons for dialects.
When it goes wrong however, exactly the opposite happens.
Let me give you an example from the days when I was a university researcher.
Entering Yorkshire
One of the people I often worked with was a blunt Yorkshire man: let’s call him John. Where John came from the traditional greeting was ‘Na thn’. A literal translation into more-or-less standard English would be “now then”. He used it where other people would use ‘Hi’ or ‘Hey”.
The problem was, he was often making presentations to Geordies (people from around Newcastle, in the north east of England). The only time they used “Now then” was in the middle of an argument – as in “now then, just who do you thin you are?”.
Inevitably, things got off on the wrong foot – even when the audience knew John and were (you would think) used to him.
Let’s face it, a few dozen people in an audience are not going to change as easily as one person – the speaker, John. It made more sense for John to simply great his audience in a different way.
But because “Na thn” was metaphorically built into him, it was easier said than done.
And in case you think you speak something close to the Queen’s English so that this cautionary tail can’t possibly apply to you, let me as you two questions…
- what’s normal for you (so that you think other people are the ones with accents) won’t be normal for other people – even if you do use Queen’s English or Received Pronunciation. Had you thought of that?
- you use jargon, don’t you? And what’s jargon if not a technical version of dialect?
What examples of dialect have you come across?
