Dialect Poetry, discourses and situated practices

Social and geographical mobility are prerequisites for dialect enregisterment leading to increased awareness of local forms and eventually hearing them as ‘signals of authentic local identity’ (Johnstone, Jennifer & Danielson, Reference Johnstone, Jennifer and Danielson2006: 93–94). Although rural, the Forest's population increased due to the establishment of commercial mines in the 18^th century. Today, tourism is the main industry and it promotes the area's mining heritage (Olivey, Reference Olivey2016), and its unique landscape as a film location, e.g. Star Wars. The Forest features in both South West and West Midlands regional programming and in rural lifestyle programmes, e.g. Countryfile. The local community's familiarity with discourses relating to landscape and industrial heritage form the context for establishing the Forest, and its dialect, as distinctive.

The following discussion describes how the dialect poetry is embedded within a set of ‘sociohistorically locatable practices’ in which ‘Forest’ is indexically linked in a cultural framework: Faddle, Theatre, Bard, Dialect (Agha, Reference Agha2003: 232). The Faddle is a variety show that began in 2004, and is held annually at the Forest Theatre in Coleford. During the event, a local author is named ‘Forest Bard’ and performs their dialect poem, produced specifically for the event. In 2016, other acts featured two local dialect raconteurs, a brass band and male voice choir. To encourage younger audiences, the event also featured a young pop singer and a ‘Junior Forest Bard’. Dialect is further linked through the Bard's performance of their poem and through dialect songs, jokes and stories performed by raconteurs. The song ‘A land between two rivers’ is performed at the Faddle and at other events as a local anthem, thereby establishing the Forest at the centre of the community's own construction of place and separate from surrounding areas. Members of a mainly older, local audience receive the messages typifying the Forest dialect and can produce similar demonstrations of the traditional dialect – a dialect that was documented in the 19^th century. The Forest Faddle and other heritage events, provide the foci in which prior messages about the dialect and its speakers are repeated over time and space and transmitted across the community (Agha, Reference Agha2003: 246).

All poems are published on the website along with details of the Faddle event. The online medium facilitates enregisterment by increasing awareness of the NS forms represented in the poems. Biographical information about the authors is published, including their name, the year they were Forest Bard, and a picture of the author, the majority of whom are female. The website lists the authors’ provenance, thus establishing their credentials as authentic native dialect speakers. The poems must be about the Forest and its inhabitants, and ‘must be in Forest dialect’. The purpose is summarised in the website title: ‘Promote & Maintain the Forest Identity’. For juniors, ‘Forest dialect is optional’ and, indeed, junior Bards write only in Standard English. The discourses on the website establish the norms for dialect representation in the community – ‘the senior Forest Bard’ who adheres to local dialect norms and the ‘Junior . . . Forest Bard’ who adheres to notions of correctness (Deanforestvoice.org, 2015). The poems are embedded within a speech chain network in which messages linking dialect to author personae and place are transmitted and re-transmitted across the community (see Agha, Reference Agha2003: 231–233, 242–246; Johnstone et al., Reference Johnstone, Jennifer and Danielson2006: 78–81; Beal, Reference Beal, Hancil and Beal2017: 33–35). I now turn to an analysis of the linguistic form and content of the poetry.

Linguistic Repertoire – frequency and patterns of variation

Table 1 summarises the most frequently occurring forms; the linguistic feature's distribution in Texts, i.e., the number of texts containing the feature; and NS spellings as a percentage of the total of NS and standard (StdE) spellings.

Table 1:

Linguistic features in order of frequency

Table 1 shows the most frequently occurring linguistic features. Dialect is represented at multiple levels including pronunciation, grammar and lexis. The following discussion shows how writers use NS features associated with the three nearby regions to represent dialect – South West (SW), West Midlands (WM) and South East (SE) Wales. Frequently occurring words are in bold with number of occurrences. NS features found in the poems are 1) non-regional – H–dropping and alveolar nasal for -ing; 2) SW features – fricative voicing, NS demonstrative forms, infinitive do; 3) a SW/ WM feature – Verb be and 4) SE Wales feature fleece. The SE Wales border with the Forest is heavily influenced by both SW and WM dialects and the following features are present – fricative voicing, infinitive do, Verb be. Wakelin (Reference Wakelin1972: 120) comments that infinitive do is a well known SW feature but that it has an unusual distribution on the English-Welsh border. In Gloucestershire, it occurs on either side of the Severn including the Forest, neighbouring Monmouthshire in Wales, and East Gloucestershire, but not adjacent areas. SE Wales also shares the short-i pronunciation of NS fleece with the Forest (Parry, Reference Parry and Wakelin1972: 145–153).

Pronouns – forms and grammar

Wagner (Reference Wagner, Kortmann and Schneider2004: 157) considers the pronominal system to be the most distinctive feature of the SW region. The features she describes, occur in the data along with pronouns associated with the WM. The paradigm accounts for 9.5% of the corpus (440 words out of total of 4,620). NS forms comprise 56.1% of pronoun usage, making the pronoun system a rich source of representation for writers with the potential to index dialect and typical speaker.

Table 2 shows the frequencies of those pronouns that occur with NS forms, compared with StdE forms. The pronoun system represented in the data, combines a number of linguistic features including H-dropping of he, him, his, her; SW forms – un, thoy; and SW/WM forms thee (47), thou/tha (31), thy (22). The frequent use of NS forms for third-person singular pronouns and the predominance of masculine pronouns, suggests a preference for representing male characters. The use of NS second-person pronouns enables writers to address the audience directly, thus creating an interpersonal relationship between the writer and a local audience persona. The use of personal pronouns in constructing persona and character are discussed further in the section 4.

Table 2:

Standard and non–standard pronoun forms

NS pronouns are further combined with Pronoun Exchange (PE) – a SW grammatical feature. PE refers to the use of subject pronouns in non-subject positions and, more rarely, the reverse. Wagner (Reference Wagner, Kortmann and Schneider2004: 157) suggests that it occurs more in Gloucestershire than in other regions. Both types of PE occur in the data. In examples 1 and 2 below, writers combine reverse PE her-she with other frequently occurring features from table 1: fricative voicing zed-said; infinitive do da-do; fleece – short-i vowel wik-week.

1. 1. Her zed. ‘Thas twice thees wik’

2. 2. And her da rant on,

PE occurs with second-person pronouns in one direction only. The subject pronoun thou, does not occur as an object in the data. By contrast, the object pronoun thee, frequently occurs in subject position, reflecting the findings from dialectology, that PE is possible with thee but not thou.

1. 3. ‘Ware bist thou gwoyn’ I asked our Jim

2. 4. Thou's bin we thic Jim

3. 5. I bin working ’ard

4. 6. thee be the first

In examples 3 to 6, NS second-person pronoun forms which are commonly found in the traditional dialect of all three nearby regions, occur with other features – PE; Verb be - be can occur with all pronouns in the present tense and is common in the SW/WM; bist, bin are associated more with the WM and SE Wales; although they do occur more rarely in the northern SW (Parry, Reference Parry and Wakelin1972: 153; Trudgill, Reference Trudgill1999: 106; Markus, Reference Markus2019, EDD be). These forms can be traced back to early Old English (Oed.com, 2020, be, v.). The frequency of Verb be forms seems to reflect the relative frequencies suggested by dialectologists be > bist > bin. In addition, bist occurs in everyday interactions as a local greeting ’ow bist ole butty? – How are you, old mate? Features from this greeting, could contribute to a register as non-natives use it routinely to index dialect.

Summary

Writers use features commonly found in the traditional dialects of the three regions neighbouring the Forest – SW, WM and SE Wales. Furthermore, writers’ usage of NS features tends to match the patterns observed by dialectologists. The poems are replete with NS forms which, when taken together, could construct a register for representing the Forest dialect, i.e., a subset of features used more widely to typify the dialect (Agha, Reference Agha2003: 231). The pronoun system particularly, is a rich source for representing the dialect on multiple linguistic levels which interact in complex ways with persona and character representation. Dialect is indexed through the use of recurring spelling patterns representing pronunciation and grammar. Within those patterns, a number of frequently occurring words emerge – e.g. ee, er, thee, thou, verb forms be, bist and do, and demonstrative thic/k. These words could also contribute to the register.

Discourse analysis and discussion

Agha (Reference Agha2003: 243) asserts that each genre, in this instance dialect poetry, has its own referents, i.e., a set of depicted ‘characterological figures’ or ‘social personae’ that become indexically related to dialect. In this section, I have collated those nouns in the data, used by the authors to construct characters, recognisable as typical local speakers.

Table 3 groups semantically related nouns into categories by gender. The categories are organised in order of frequency. The majority of terms have masculine associations (145 m v 30 f tokens), as do the top three most frequently occurring categories. First name references consist of traditional male names which are mostly monosyllabic or diminutive. First name references combine with varied friendship terms to create associations of informality and solidarity with male characters. Nouns include NS forms, thereby linking dialect with masculine identities e.g. moyt, butty – mate. Men are represented by manual and professional roles of which miner and freeminer mark the central identity for a Forester. The term freeminer invokes a unique forester identity that goes back to the Middle Ages, one that is afforded its own unique rights and privileges to the Forest, and to the land (Wakelin, Reference Wakelin1972: 145; Olivey, Reference Olivey2016). This heritage is promoted on tourism websites, in heritage museums and periodically in the local and national press, expanding the range of discourses constructing foresters and the forest as unique (e.g. Wyedeantourism.co.uk, 2020).

Table 3:

Semantic categories by gender of characters portrayed

The following examples show how miners are linked to place – forester, forest (31) and home (16). Forest(er) indexes dialect – f spelled as v; whereas the latter occurs as the dialect word wum, in examples 7-8.

1. 7. Our fayther wuz a miner … ee wuz a vree miner, a speshul kinda mon . . . ee worked the shifts, cum wum tired and black

2. 8. Tribute to a Vorest Miner . . . My fayther wuz a miner . . . My fayther is a Vorester

3. 9. Thee grancher [grandfather] were a Freeminer a proud and splendid breed

Ethnographic observations reveal that members of the community have the strongest claim to a Forester identity, by invoking a kinship relationship to a Forest miner or freeminer. Examples 7–8 written by female authors, invoke a forester persona through a first person account of kinship relationships to male miners and further link father to dialect – fayther. Furthermore, frequent use of second-person pronouns brings into focus the authors’ narrative voices which ‘speak’ directly to audience and characters alike. In example 9, the author's choice of NS Thee grancher invites the audience to align themselves with a forester identity by invoking their kinship relationship to a male freeminer.

1. 10. Ivor was calling have yur tommy [lunch] have yur tea,

   Come on owld butty [mate] these stop and squat by me.

In example 10, the author constructs her own persona as a male forest miner combining dialect terms tommy and butty with other mining terms and practices – carbide lamp, shaft. Miners would squat to have their lunch in the mine. While butty is associated with other mining communities in South Wales, the East Midlands and Lancashire, tommy seems to be local to the Forest. Butty also refers to the Butty system that operated in the Forest. A Butty(man) was a sub-contractor who supervised a few miners and paid their wages. (Wright, Reference Wright and Wakelin1972: 40; Olivey, Reference Olivey2016; Oed.com, 2020, butty, n.1).

The prominence of masculine nouns contrasts with the lack of feminine nouns. The poems represent male characters, whose identities are interpersonal, relational and professional. Dialect indexes mostly male character attributes. Females are mainly confined to family relationships: mother-mam, wife-missus. Even when the writers are female, they adhere to the ‘forester as male’ norm by constructing male persona – miner, or by invoking kinship relationships to male miners.

Finally, the inclusion of animals reflects a traditional rural representation of foresters who would keep domestic and farm animals (Olivey, Reference Olivey2016). Authors invoke foresters’ relationships to farmyard animals especially. Animal names are informal - piggies, or index dialect e.g. H-dropping – en-hen; fleece – ship–sheep; and dialect words e.g. porker, hoss – pig, horse. Gender is represented for animal characters. Most animals are male, with pigs being the most frequently mentioned whereas female animals (en, edge'og) feature as main characters in just two of the poems.