Talk:Brummie dialect

Extent of the Brummie Accent/Dialect Region

We should define Birmingham, Solihull, Lichfield, Tamworth, Bedworth, Bromsgrove, Redditch and even Smethwick/Bearwood to be the Brummie dialect region - much like we do for Scouse despite the differences in the broadness/strength of the accent. We could also mention that there are areas of Brummie speech like Stratford-upon-Avon and parts of Shropshire that have have many Brummie speakers despite being separated from Birmingham by other accent regions - for example the Black Country accent of Bridgnorth in Shropshire and Cannock in Staffordshire giving way to the Brummie accent of the comedian Greg Davies, raised in Wem, and the Coventry/Leamington/Warwick accent being spoken in the region between Bedworth and Stratford. Overlordnat1 (talk) 10:21, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

‘there’=‘theer’?

It is ONLY in the Black Country (and going out from there towards Stoke) where some people say things like ‘Ah’ll jine you theer’, it’s ALWAYS “I’ll/oil join you there” in Birmingham. Overlordnat1 (talk) 10:26, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

I was looking at the sentence in this article about “*In Brummie, some SQUARE words shift to the set of NEAR such as there and where, thus pronounced as /ðɪə/ and /wɪə/ insted of /ðɛə/ and /wɛə/ respectively.”, then I saw your comment here about this.

I don’t know what the source is for the statement in the article on this, and I cannot see anything obvious in Clark & Asprey’s West Midlands English: Birmingham and the Black Country about such pronunciations for Birmingham; though they do note such in relation to Black Country speech, particularly [ðiə]. As far as I can see it is not mentioned in Steve Thorne’s PhD thesis, ‘Birmingham English: A Sociolinguistic Study’, either (apart from a reference to an “old Birmingham folk-rhyme” in which “theer” appears), or in the dictionary, Proper Brummie, which he compiled with Carl Chinn.

Having said that, from an historical point of view /ðɪə/ and /wɪə/ are likely to have been formerly used in Birmingham. In 1889 Alexander J. Ellis recorded [ðɪə̝̄^ɹ̱] and [wɪə̝̄^ɹ̱] for Selly Oak, which was then still in north Worcestershire, whilst Graham Squiers’ use of the spellings “theer” and “wheer”, in his Aerbut Paerks monologues of the 1920s and 1930s, could well be seen an indication that /ðɪə/ and /wɪə/ were likely to be part of working-class speech on the north-western side of the City at that time.

Furthermore, the Survey of English Dialects, undertaken in the mid-twentieth century, notes [wɩə], [wɩə^ɽ] and [wɩəɹ] at Romsley, alongside [wɛːə], together with [wɩəɹ] and [wɩə] at Hockley Heath, alongside [wəː], these being the nearest locations to Birmingham on its south-western and south-eastern sides respectively. In addition to this a cousin of mine, who was born and raised in Alum Rock, and who is now in his seventies, occasionally uses /ðɪə/ and /wɪə/, at least emphatically (but mostly /ðɛː/ and /wɛː/). All of which might support the idea for a usage of /ðɪə/ and /wɪə/ in Birmingham into the mid to late twentieth century.

By now though, I would have thought such pronunciations as /ðɪə/ and /wɪə/ were definitely recessive in Birmingham, and, if they are still used, would be restricted to a limited group within the older generation. I certainly wouldn’t expect them to be used by anyone born in the current century – but, there again, maybe someone else knows different!? 193.61.220.3 (talk) 13:20, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

I’ve just been checking the history of the article, and it seems that a gentleman called Yanis Bourgeois was responsible for adding the sentence “*In Brummie, some SQUARE words shift to the set of NEAR such as there and where, thus pronounced as /ðɪə/ and /wɪə/ insted of /ðɛə/ and /wɛə/ respectively”, which he put up on 29 May this year. So I’ve posted a question on his Talk page, asking him what his exact source is for this. 193.61.220.3 (talk) 10:50, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

You can find a paragraph about it in the book West Midlands English : Birmingham and the Black Country by Urszula Clark and Esther Asprey. You can get acces to it via the link :

West Midlands English: Birmingham and the Black Country - Urszula Clark - Google Livres, click "Book Overview" and then go to page 54. However perhaps this particularity and the front realisation of the CHOICE vowel only apply in the Black Country (?) YanisBourgeois (talk) 20:14, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

It’s interesting to read that but it’s undoubtedly true that saying ‘join’ as ‘jine’ and ‘there’ as ‘theer’ is a recessive trait in Birmingham, if it still exists at all (though it would be original research to add that to the article of course). What it says on page 55 is curious, it says that words in the NEAR and SQUARE lexical sets get confused and it gives the word year as an example but this seems wrong to me as in Birmingham, for most speakers, year is in the NURSE lexical set, not the NEAR one, and it’s only because words in the NURSE set are sometimes pronounced like they’re in the SQUARE set that ‘year’ is sometimes said as ‘yare’ rather than just ‘yur’. This phenomenon, whereby people say ‘Birmingham’ as ‘Bairmingham’ seems to me to be more prevalent in the Black Country too for most words (though year is normally in the NEAR set in the Black Country anyway). Again it would be original research to disagree with this author on that though. --Overlordnat1 (talk) 17:43, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for the reply to my question, and my apologies for not responding sooner but I have not been in the library for a couple of weeks now. As to a possible ɴᴇᴀʀ-sᴏ̨ᴜᴀʀᴇ merger, as referenced in Clark and Asprey’s West Midlands English: Birmingham and the Black Country, p. 54, I did say that I could not see anything obvious here about such pronunciations as /ðɪə/ and /wɪə/ for Birmingham, and what they say in this respect appears, in fact, to be only for the Black Country. The reference they give to “Clark (2008: 153)” is to her interpretation of C. Painter’s 1963 ‘Specimen: Black Country Speech’ who, apparently, has /ɪə/ for the sᴏ̨ᴜᴀʀᴇ lexical set. Clark and Asprey’s other references are to Kate Fletcher’s spellings of “the’er” and “we’er”, in her 1975 biblical translations into the Black Country Dialect, and evidence presented in Asprey’s own 2007 PhD thesis ‘Black Country English and Black Country Identity’. Accordingly, as far as I can see, they are not claiming that /ðɪə/ and /wɪə/ are found in Birmingham today; particularly as there is nothing in Steve Thorne’s work about such being contemporary pronunciation in Birmingham English at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century. As I’ve said, however, historically it would seem that /ðɪə/ and /wɪə/ are likely to have been used in Birmingham, indeed Clark in her earlier work, ‘The English West Midlands: phonology’, p. 153, following comments on a ɴᴇᴀʀ-sᴏ̨ᴜᴀʀᴇ merger, says “A similar phenomenon can be observed for onset raising (apparently yielding [ɪə]) in Bm/BC <theer>/<thee’er> there, <w(h)eer> where, for which there is written evidence.” Unfortunately Clark is not explicit in this regard, but I take it that such evidence for the Black Country (BC) would be Fletcher, whereas that for Birmingham (Bm) might be the Aerbut Paerks monologues by Graham Squiers’; though the latter can only be an indication that /ðɪə/ and /wɪə/ were likely to have historically been part of working-class speech on the north-western side of Birmingham in the first quarter of the twentieth century but not since. All in all I personally think that the statement “*In Brummie, some SQUARE words shift to the set of NEAR such as there and where, thus pronounced as /ðɪə/ and /wɪə/ insted of /ðɛə/ and /wɛə/ respectively.” is somewhat misleading, in that it no longer appears to be a current feature of local speech in Birmingham, and so would advise it be modified to one indicating such as possible former historical pronunciations of these tokens only. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.61.220.3 (talk) 13:36, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

On the subject of ‘jine’ and ‘join’, Thorne does not deal explicitly with the ᴄʜᴏɪᴄᴇ set, though does reference it under that of ᴘʀɪᴄᴇ, saying “For speakers with the strongest Birmingham accents ... a phonemic merger” is in operation between the two sets, resulting in there “being virtually no audible difference between the vowel sound occurring” in them. On the diphthong in ᴘʀɪᴄᴇ (and therefore, presumably, in ᴄʜᴏɪᴄᴇ) he says it has variants “ranging from [oɪ] in close-mid position to [ɔɪ]; the most common starting point being somewhere just below C[ɔ] in open-mid position (= [ɔ̞]) and moving in the general direction of /ɪ/”. As far as I can see he makes no mention of an unrounded onset here for Birmingham, though he references Anne Grethe Mathisen’s 1999 article on speech in Sandwell as having both [aɪ] and [ɑi], alongside [ɔɪ], in this regard (Mathisen actually gave “ai ~ ɑi > ɔi” for the ᴘʀɪᴄᴇ set, which she qualifies by saying “Occasionally [ɔi]”, alongside exclusively “ɔi” for the ᴄʜᴏɪᴄᴇ diphthong. However in Mathisen’s earlier 1992 thesis, which formed the basis of much of her later article, when it came to ᴘʀɪᴄᴇ words she clearly states that, although “Typical realisations” in Sandwell were [ɒɪ] and [ɔɪ], she did not actually “explore the phonetic variation” here, but rather the inclusion of schwa and “a phenomenon that might be called triphthongisation”, which seems to put into question her use of unrounded onsets for ᴘʀɪᴄᴇ, particularly with a onset as front as [a]). Historically Alexander J. Ellis’ 1889 data for Selly Oak gives an unrounded onset for both ᴄʜᴏɪᴄᴇ and ᴘʀɪᴄᴇ words, but this is more like [ʌɪ] than [ɑɪ]. Clark and Asprey, pp. 50-51, like Thorne note how “the ᴄʜᴏɪᴄᴇ set in Birmingham is linked to the realisation of ᴘʀɪᴄᴇ”, but here they reference Ray Tennant’s jocular works on what he termed ‘Brumslang’, from the early 1980s, interpreting his spellings of “ile”, “biled” and “vice” (for ‘oil’, ‘boiled’ and voice’) as containing the diphthong [aɪ]; though, personally, I would say this could quite easily be seen as [ʌɪ] or [ɑɪ]. I think it should be noted here that whilst Tennant, who looks to have lived around the Bordesley Green, Little Bromwich and Small Heath areas of the City, gives examples of ᴄʜᴏɪᴄᴇ words with unrounded onsets, like “tie”, i.e. ‘toy’ (he even has the ꜰᴀᴄᴇ word ‘nail’ as “nile”), he also has ones for ᴘʀɪᴄᴇ words with rounded onsets, like “poil”, i.e. ‘pile’, thereby, seemingly, keeping a distinction between the diphthongs. But it appears, from the nature of his booklets, that he was just attempting to highlight the greatest differences in local pronunciation from Standard English, so whilst the inclusion of forms of ᴄʜᴏɪᴄᴇ words with an unrounded onset could be seen as an indication such were in use in Birmingham during the mid to late twentieth century it is not possible to know at what level or over what geographical area of the City this might have been. Given the above, therefore, it seems likely to me, that, as with /ðɪə/, something like /dʒʌɪn/ is, by now, also a recessive feature in Brummie, restricted to a dwindling group of older speakers. But, if there is evidence of current usage, I would be glad to hear about it. Thank you. 193.61.220.3 (talk) 16:26, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

One thing I forgot to mention here, which I think is worth noting, at least with regards to Black Country pronunciations of ᴘʀɪᴄᴇ and ᴄʜᴏɪᴄᴇ words (especially given what Mathisen put about such in both her thesis and article) is that in his 1988 retrospective survey of the Black Country Dialect, as spoken in and around West Bromwich in the first quarter of the twentieth century, Norman Marrow notes only [ɒɪ] as being found in both the ᴘʀɪᴄᴇ and ᴄʜᴏɪᴄᴇ sets. Though, interestingly, he also says, on the use of this diphthong, that it “leads outsiders to hear a Black Country persons ‘my’ as [mɔɪ] ... and his or her ‘boy’ as [baɪ]”, despite them, apparently, being actually pronounced with the same diphthong, i.e. as [mɒɪ] and [bɒɪ]. 193.61.220.3 (talk) 13:12, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Maybe so. There are some Brummies of Caribbean origin who say ‘voice’ as ‘vice’, though that’s surely the Caribbean influence. Listen to Benjamin Zephaniah here:- [1] Overlordnat1 (talk) 08:03, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

Accent or Dialect???

I am from the Bristol area, not from Birmingham, but with the risk of offending Brummies, is Brummie (using the abbreviation for convenience) really a dialect, not just an accent? I know that there is no formal definition of what differentiates a dialect in the way that language separation is defined, but mutual intelligibility and number of different words in use is generally used. Whereas an accent would use very few or no different words, but the common words in use would be pronounced differently.

I would say that Brummie speakers are completely intelligible to pretty much all UK native English speakers. Whereas, say Glaswegian or some Northern Irish dialects are not, except to those more familiar with them. There are other examples which can be said to be dialects, e.g. some Yorkshire speakers and Geordies are probably not completely intelligible to all other native UK English speakers. Therefore I would say that Brummie is only an accent not a dialect. Maybe I am more used to it, knowing people from Birmingham, and other UK native English speakers have more issues understanding Brummie?

I have lived in southern Germany for a few years. German has several dialects, which have much more significant differences to German than most accents in UK English and are not intelligible to all native Germans, e.g. Niederdeutsch, Bayrisch (Baorisch/Bavarian), etc. All Germans are taught in school in Hochdeutsch (high German) or what we would term standard German.

Bayrisch / Baorisch is not considered by most linguists as a separate language to German, because the number of different words is too small, but it is definitely a dialect, not merely an accent. Niederdeutsch too, and Niederdeutsch shares commonalities and geographical area with Dutch, so I believe can be considered a dialect of Dutch and German, although German and Dutch are definitely different languages. Bavarians and Niederdeutsch speakers will speak, or even must speak Hochdeutsch to Germans from other areas.

I don't consider that UK English has many of such dialects with such big differences to standard British English. In the past there were often more differences as people travelled less and TV and radio has changed language, so modern speakers tend to be more mutually intelligible. When I have been asked by Germans, I have said that in the UK most regions would be said to have regional accents rather than dialects, as the significant differences, as the German dialects have to Hochdeutsch, are generally not common. Lkingscott (talk) 13:20, 22 January 2023 (UTC)