Towards a History of Northern English: Early and Late Northumbrian

• Published in: Studia neophilologica Vol. 80; no. 2; pp. 132 - 159
• Main Authors: Fernandez Cuesta, Julia, Rodriguez Ledesma, Nieves, Senra Silva, Inmaculada
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.01.2008
• ISSN: 0039-3274
• DOI: 10.1080/00393270802493217

This article summarizes the initial stages of a project which aims to document a history of northern varieties of British English from the earliest times to the present day based on texts of different periods. Our work intends to fill a genuine gap in the history of English, since there has been no comprehensive account of these varieties to date. Katie Wales's A Cultural History of Northern English (2006) focuses mainly on the growth of Northern literature in later Modern English, attributable to the development of a sense of regional identity, and to the efforts of 19th/20th century writers and dialectologists, who set out to document these varieties, fearing that they were in imminent danger of disappearing. Our purpose has been to concentrate first on the earlier periods of Northern English and -- as far as this is possible given the scarcity of the extant material -- to chart the development of salient features in subsequent periods, both at the phonological and grammatical levels. We are able to show that many grammatical features from Old and Middle English are still observable in contemporary northern dialects (Widdowson, 2005). The results of our research so far have been presented at various conferences (1 ICEHD 2003, 5 ICOME 2005, DELS 2006, 14 ICEHL 2006, 2 ICEHD 2007) and published in specialized journals (Fernandez Cuesta & Rodriguez Ledesma, 2004, 2007, 2008 and forthcoming). The aim of this article is twofold: on one hand, we intend to describe in detail the material that has remained from the Old Northumbrian period, both textual and epigraphic, and examine the language of the extant texts with regard to some phonological and morphological features traditionally used to describe them. We are aware that some of the traditional features chosen to describe the phonology of Old English, such as breaking and palatal diphthongization, have been questioned by modern scholarship (cf. Daunt, 1939; Lass & Anderson, 1975; Hogg, 1992, 2004; Colman, 2004, among others). However, a theoretical discussion of the interpretation of the spelling evidence, as has been carried out by the above authors, would be beyond the scope of this article. Adapted from the source document