Ta’lim sohasi: 110000 Pedagogika Ta’lim yo`nalishi

Lecture № 13. Dialects and slang
Outline:
1. The main variants of the English language.
2. The English language of the British Isles
3. Lexical peculiarities of the American variant.
Keywords: Lexical peculiarities, synonymous, Briticisms, territorial variants, semantic structure,equivalents, lexical units denoting
The history of the English language begins with incursion of the Jutes, Saxons and Angles about the middle of the 5th century. The Jutes came first and occupied the smallest territory, principally Kent and the Isle of Wight. The Saxons occupied practically all of England south of the Thames, with the exception of these Jutish territories and of Cornwall, which remained in the possession of the Celts; north of the Thames.They also occupied the regions which later became Essex and Middlesex. The Angles occupied the greatest part of what is now England and extended their conquest to the lowlands of Scotland as Tar as the Firth of forth, with the exception of the west coast. Here then is the explanation of the division of Old English into dialects that have left their trace in the provincial speech of England until the present time.
The first dialect that could lay claim to literary precedence was the Northumbrian, the language of the kingdom of Northumbria, including the North of England and the south of Scotland. Other dialects which had grown apart by the 8th century were: Mercian, spoken in the kingdom of Mercia, corresponding to the midland countries of the present day, Saxon, spoken throughout of the south of England (the most important of the Saxon dialects was the dialect of Wessex, West- Saxon); Kentish, spoken by the Jutes of Kent. Northumbrian and Mercian are two subdivisions of Anglian dialects. After the fall of Northumbria from its political supremacy Northumbrian sank to the position of a provincial dialect, and under King Alfred, in the 9th century, the West Saxon dialect came to be predominant and was regarded as the literary language .
Meantime, however, the name English that is "Anglian" had associated itself inseparably with the idea of any literary form of the vernacular. The Northumbrians had called their tongue "englisc" because it was English, that is Anglian. The Saxons of Wessex applied the same term to their own non-Anglian literary tongue.
From the King Alfred to the Battle of Hastings is about two hundred years. In this time literary English (the West Saxon dialect) had made great strides and seemed to become the universal speech of Englishmen.
The Norman Conquest displaced the southern dialect of Wessex from this position of supremacy The West Saxon sank to the level of the other dialects.
The development of feudalism in England tended to create dialectical divergencies of speech. He who wrote in the native language wrote in that form of it with which he was most familiar. He wrote in the dialect of the district in which he had been brought up, or in which he dwelt. There was an entire absence of controlling standard.
During the 12th, 13th centuries there existed a number of dialects, each one of which had as much right as any other to be called the English language. The geographical limits of these divisions of English speech may be approximately stated as follows:

• 
  the Northern dialect as the descendant of the Northumbrian dialect of Old English.
  

Later a variety of the Northumbrian was developed into the Scottish language.
The Midland dialect was the descendant of the Mercian of the Old English period. It was divided into 2 distinct varieties, called the East Midland and the West Midland. The former stretched over a much larger district and was altogether more important both for its linguistic influence and for the character of the literature that was written in it.

• 
  The Southern dialect was spoken between the Thames and the English Channel. It was a direct descendant of the West Saxon.
  

Kentish may have been originally very different but as it is found in the Middle English period, it is only a variety of the Southern dialect.
Thus, in the 14th century three great dialects existed in Britain, each calling itself English, and each possessing a literature of its own. Of these three it was the Midland that became the national language of the country. There were several reasons that led to the predominance of the Midland dialect. In the first place, it covered a larger territory than the others. It was the dialect of the region most important economically, politically and culturally. The dialect of London was the dialect of such cultural centres as Oxford and Cambridge. It was the form of speech native to Chaucer (1340–1400), the first great literary artist, the "Father of English poetry," as he is often called. He wrote in the Midland dialect and contributed greatly to raising it into a position of superiority. We should certainly distinguish between local (territorial) dialects and "class" dialects or jargons. It is self-evident that the latter cannot be regarded as languages, because they are confined to a narrow sphere, they are unsuitable as a means of intercourse among the people, for society as a whole.
Class dialects, which it would be more correct to call jargons, do not serve the masses of people, but a narrow social group. Moreover, they do not have a grammatical system nor a basic stock of words of their own. In view of this they cannot by any means develop into independent languages.
By slang we mean words or phrases in common colloquial use in some or all of their senses hanging on the outskirts of the literary language, but continually forcing their way into it. On the other hand, the term is often applied to the words and phrases either entirely peculiar to or used in a special sense by some class or profession. The ultimate origin of the name slang is not definitely known. The word itself is probably a slang creation. The sources of slang are extremely varied. Slang is often humorous, witty and sometimes picturesque. It is more and more penetrating into the literary language.
As an intentionally, often humorously strained form of speech in which the desire for novelty and for striking expression is predominant, slang though it draws numerous words from the shop talk of various occupations, gives them a currency outside of the limits of the occupation.
In considering the nature of slang one should not identify it with colloquial speech. Slang, while particularly prevalent in colloquial speech, often has its origin in a striving for renewed concreteness and for novelty. Slang may be easily condemned on the basis of its frequent tendency to use slovenly and bizarre expressions. Slang words are ill-adapted to serve as a medium of intercourse. The very currency of slang depends on its allusions to things which are not supposed to be universally familiar or generally respectable; and hence it is often vulgar since it brings in associations with what is for the moment regarded as unknown or in bad repute.
Slang is not only unstable but it also has no fixed meaning, its terms are vague and ill defined, and they grow more and more uncertain from day to day. When such a word becomes definite in its meaning it has almost ceased to be slang. No doubt that it may accidentally happen that a word which originates as slang is better in expressiveness than its regular synonym. If it fills a real gap in the means of expression, language will take care of it. In fact, anything that is good in slang is almost sure to be picked up and adopted in the language.
It is natural that the English language is not used with uniformity in the British Isles and in Australia, in the USA and in New Zealand, in Canada and in India, etc. The English language also has some peculiarities in Wales, Scotland, in other parts of the British Isles and America. Is the nature of these varieties the same? Modern linguistics distinguishes territorial variants of a national language and local dialects. Variants of a language are regional varieties of a standard literary language characterised by some minor peculiarities in the sound system, vocabulary and grammar and by their own literary norms. Dialects are varieties of a language used as a means of oral communication in small localities, they are set off (more or less sharply) from other varieties by some distinctive features of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.