Katie Wales's Northern English: A Social and Cultural History considers the role of northern English in the history of “standard English.” So mythologized is the north-south split in English history that it is useful to examine how language might be implicated in both its origins and its maintenance. The assertion that northern English developed out of the social and cultural realities of the region is not surprising. But Wales's central argument is that we can find substantial northern English influence in standard English, and yet commentary on its linguistic difference aided the social and cultural ascendancy of a south-centric English nation. The characterization of roughness and barbarity in northern language and society was a strategy of “othering” that over time helped to establish and then reenforce the presumed superiority of southern England, particularly the culture of the court. Consequently, the north-south split became rhetorically necessary for the development of an English national identity. Given this, Wales calls for the “reclamation” of northern English (5), arguing that until now histories of the English language have emphasized the triumph of standard English, with northern English “along with other vernaculars, dismissed not only as ‘non-standard’ but also therefore as ‘subordinate’” (4).

After discussing current characterizations of the north-south divide, Wales describes the process by which the language of the north developed differently from that of the south, including a lengthy discussion of the “creolization” of language in the north incorporating the Celtic, Northumbrian, Norse, and Danish elements of various conquerors and settlers from the ninth century at least until the Norman invasion. This section of the book is the most inaccessible to historians. The heavy use of phonemic symbols in the texts and in maps presumes a knowledge of linguistics that is unlikely to be shared by a wide readership. As a result, a key element of her argument—that this creolization resulted in a “flattening” of elements particular to each language and the creation of standard forms in northern English long before the stabilization of Old English in the south—is hard to grasp. This is an important point because she goes on from here to assert the interdependence of northern English and standard English. Long before written English was standardized in the late seventeenth century, it already contained many elements of syntax and grammar imported from the more stable northern English because of extensive exchange between north and south. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, concern about the Scots prompted the crown to show favor to powerful northern families, incorporating them into the court in order to ensure their loyalty. Interregional trade was already substantial despite the notoriously bad road system, and so, by the early modern period, immigration had brought northern dialect into southern usage, both at court and in the street.

When not bogged down by the phonemic symbols, Wales does an excellent job of weaving the linguistic developments into the political, economic, and social history, in the process making a useful contribution to the recent reassessment by historians of mobility in premodern Britain. Nevertheless, at times Wales seems to conflate “southern” with “court” and “northern” with “common,” and this works against her efforts. Were the new arrivals at court bringing with them the same northern dialects as merchants and laborers? And were the northern linguistic contributions of these various immigrant groups integrated in the same way, given levels of literacy and the codification of the written word versus the fluidity of the spoken word?

Whatever the patterns, attributes of northern English were integrated into what became standard English; but the remainder of Wales's book is concerned with another way in which the north and northern English has had a presence in the south. Using a wide array of sources, including Chaucer, Romantic poets, music hall songs, and Private Eye, she successfully argues that northern English has been most influential as a marker of difference from the south, employed by southerners to assert their superiority and by northerners to defend their difference. Over centuries, commentary on the language of the north has been used to characterize its landscape and people. The earlier texts that Wales uses for this section are not particularly accessible for readers who are not comfortable with Old and Middle English. But her sources are very effective when she moves into the period of the Industrial Revolution. As writers, politicians, and observers struggled to grasp the rapid changes that were widening the gap between the “soft” agricultural south and the industrial north, “the distinct dialect of the mining communities,” for example, was “almost unintelligible to outsiders [and] merely reinforced the image of barbarousness” (124). Simultaneously, however, northerners were embracing and promoting their dialects in response to southern cultural incursions.

Northern English: A Social and Cultural History is the product of a professor of English focusing on linguistic history and may not find much of a wider audience. Nevertheless, it does offer new insight into the history of the English language and the role of northern English in the development of both national and regional identities.