Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T03:42:16.115Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘All the Lads and Lasses’: lexical variation in Tyne and Wear

A discussion of how the traditional dialect terms lad and lass are still used in the modern urban dialects of Newcastle upon Tyne and Sunderland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 December 2012

Joan Beal  and
Lourdes Burbano-Elizondo
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Taking as our starting-point the results of an investigation conducted on data collected in the 1950s for the Survey of English Dialects (SED) (Glauser, 1985), in this paper we look at data collected between forty and fifty years after the SED to examine variation in the semantic fields BOYS/GIRLS; SONS/DAUGHTERS. Glauser's SED data consisted of single-word responses mainly from older male informants to questions such as: ‘Children may be of either sex: they're either….boys, or …. girls.’1 (Orton, 1962: 89), but we have examined data from two more recent sources – the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE) and Burbano-Elizondo's (2008) study of linguistic variation in Sunderland – in order to ascertain which words occur in these semantic fields. Whilst Glauser's observation that lad is elicited more frequently than lass is borne out, we find that, in the sense of ‘sexual partner’, where these words do not appear in the SED data, lass is used more frequently than lad in the more recent data from Tyneside and Sunderland. We also find that, whilst there is no clear correlation between use of the words lad and lass and the social class of speakers, males use both these words more than females.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Today , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , December 2012 , pp. 10 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

Aitchison, J. 1994. Words in the Mind. An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Beal, J. C. 2000. ‘From Geordie Ridley to Viz: popular literature in Tyneside English.’ Language and Literature, 9(4), 343–59.Google Scholar
Beal, J. C. & Burbano-Elizondo, L. 2010. ‘“All the lads and lasses”: lexical variation in Tyne and Wear.’ Paper presented at Sociolinguistics Symposium 18 (SS18), 1–4 September, University of Southampton.Google Scholar
Beal, J. C., Burbano-Elizondo, L. & Llamas, C. 2012. Urban North-Eastern English: Tyneside to Teesside. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Burbano-Elizondo, L. 2008. ‘Language Variation and Identity in Sunderland.’ Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Sheffield.Google Scholar
Candlish, A. 2006. Ha'way/ Howay the Lads: a History of the Rivalry between Newcastle United and Sunderland. Cheltenham: Sports Books Ltd.Google Scholar
Coupland, N. 2006. ‘The discursive framing of phonological acts of identity: Welshness through English.’ In Brutt-Griffler, J. & Evans Davies, C. (eds), English and Ethnicity. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 19–48.Google Scholar
Eckert, P. 2005. ‘Variation, convention and social meaning.’ Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Oakland, California. Online at www.stanford.edu/~eckert/EckertLSA2005.pdf (Accessed October 1, 2012).Google Scholar
Ellis, A. J. 1889. The Existing Phonology of English Dialects, Compared with that of West Saxon Speech. New York: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Glauser, R. 1985. ‘BOYS and GIRLS, SONS and DAUGHTERS: the evidence of the Survey of English Dialects.’ English World-Wide, 6(1), 37–58.Google Scholar
Hermeston, R. 2011. ‘“The Blaydon Races”: lads and lasses, song tradition, and the evolution of an anthem.’ Language and Literature 20(4), 269–82.Google Scholar
Johnston, P. 1985. ‘Linguistic atlases and sociolinguistics.’ In Kirk, J. , Stewart, S. & Widdowson, J. D. A. (eds), Studies in Linguistic Geography. Beckenham: Croom Helm, pp. 81–93.Google Scholar
Llamas, C. 1999. ‘A new methodology: data elicitation for social and regional language variation studies.’ Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics, 7, 95–118.Google Scholar
Maguire, W. forthcoming. ‘Mapping The Existing Phonology of English Dialects.’ To appear in Dialectologia et Geolinguistica, 20.Google Scholar
Maley, J. 2006. ‘New twists to the great class conundrum.’ The Guardian, May 5, 2006. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/britain/article/0,,1768057,00.html (Accessed June 1, 2012).Google Scholar
Milroy, J., Milroy, L. & Docherty, G. 1997. ‘Phonological variation and change in contemporary spoken British English.’ London: ESRC: Unpublished final report, Department of Speech, University of Newcastle upon Tyne.Google Scholar
Milroy, L. & Gordon, M. 2003. Sociolinguistics. Method and Interpretation. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.Google Scholar
Orton, H. 1962. Survey of English Dialects: Introduction. Leeds: E. J. Arnold & Son Ltd.Google Scholar
Orton, H. & Wright, N. 1974. A Word Geography of England. London: Seminar Press.Google Scholar
Upton, C., Parry, D. & Widdowson, J. D. A. 1994. Survey of English Dialects: The Dictionary and Grammar. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Upton, C., Sanderson, S. & Widdowson, J. D. A. 1987. Word Maps: A Dialect Atlas of England. New York: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Wright, J. 1896–1905. The English Dialect Dictionary. London: Henry Frowde.Google Scholar

Websites

BBC News http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-18352185Google Scholar
Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE) www.ncl.ac.uk/decteGoogle Scholar