East Midlands English

Dialect of English

East Midlands English is a dialect, including local and social variations spoken in most parts of East Midlands England. It generally includes areas east of Watling Street (which separates it from West Midlands English), north of an isogloss separating it from variants of Southern English (e. g. Oxfordshire) and East Anglian English (e. g. Cambridgeshire), and south of another separating it from Northern English dialects (e. g. Yorkshire). This includes the counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Rutland and Northamptonshire. Dialects of northern Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire usually share similarities with Northern English dialects. Relative to other English dialects, there have been relatively few studies of East Midlands English.

The Eastern English Midlands were incorporated in the Norse controlled Danelaw in the late 9th century by Ivar the Boneless. With their conquest, the county towns of the East Midlands counties were converted into fortified, Viking city states, known as the Five Boroughs of the Danelaw. The region's dialect owes much of its grammar and vocabulary to the Nordic influences of its conquerors. For example, the East Midlands verb to scraight ('to cry') is thought to be derived from the Norse, skrike in modern Scandinavian, also meaning to cry. The East Midlands dialect of Middle English which extended over a much larger area, as far south as Middlesex, is the precursor of modern English spoken today, which has descended from the early modern English of the early 16th century.

The novelist and East Midlander D. H. Lawrence was from the Nottinghamshire town of Eastwood and wrote in the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Coalfield dialects in several poems as well as in his more famous works such as Lady Chatterley's Lover and Sons and Lovers. Though spoken less commonly today, the dialect of the East Midlands has been investigated in texts such as the Ey Up Mi Duck series of books (and an LP) by Richard Scollins and John Titford. These books were originally intended as a study of Derbyshire Dialect, particularly the distinctive speech of Ilkeston and the Erewash valley, but later editions acknowledge similarities in vocabulary and grammar which unite the East Midlands dialects and broadened their appeal to the region as a whole. "Ey up" (often spelt ayup / eyup) is a greeting thought to be of Old Norse origin (se upp) used widely throughout the East Midlands, North Midlands, North Staffordshire and Yorkshire, and "m' duck" is thought to be derived from a respectful Anglo Saxon form of address, "Duka" (literally "duke"), and is unrelated to waterfowl. Non natives of the East Midlands and North Staffordshire are often surprised to hear men greet each other as "m' duck".

Those who speak traditional regional dialects are not trying unsuccessfully to speak Standard English. East Midlands English follows a series of distinct grammatical rules. Some examples follow below.

Until the mid 20th century, it was not uncommon to hear the use of informal forms of address, thee and thou, as compared to the more formal you. Use of the informal form of address is now uncommon in modern speech.

East Midlands accents generally lack the trap–bath split, so that cast is pronounced rather than the pronunciation associated with most southern accents. Most accents in the East Midlands lack the foot–strut split, with words containing like strut or but being pronounced with , without any distinction between putt and put. East Midlands accents are generally non rhotic, instead drawing out their vowels, resulting in the Midlands Drawl, which can to non natives be mistaken for dry sarcasm. The PRICE vowel has a very far back starting point, and can be realised as Yod dropping, as in East Anglia, can be found in some areas, for example new as , sounding like "noo". H dropping is common, in which is usually omitted from most words, while NG coalescence is present in most of the East Midlands except in Derbyshire where is pronounced as In Lincolnshire, sounds like the u vowel of words like strut being realised as may be even shorter than in the North. In Leicester, words with short vowels such as up and last have a northern pronunciation, whereas words with vowels such as down and road sound rather more like a south eastern accent. The vowel sound at the end of words like border (and the name of the city) is also a distinctive feature. Lincolnshire also has a marked north–south split in terms of accent. The north shares many features with Yorkshire, such as the open a sound in "car" and "park" or the replacement of take, make, and sake with tek, mek, and sek. The south of Lincolnshire is close to Received Pronunciation, although it still has a short Northern a in words such as bath. Mixing of the words was and were when the other is used in Standard English. In Northamptonshire, crossed by the north–south isogloss, residents of the north of the county have an accent similar to that of Leicestershire and those in the south an accent similar to rural Oxfordshire. The town of Corby in northern Northamptonshire has an accent with some originally Scottish features, apparently due to immigration of Scottish steelworkers. It is common in Corby for the GOAT set of words to be pronounced with This pronunciation is used across Scotland and most of Northern England, but Corby is alone in the Midlands in using it.