West Midlands English

Postscript: Pedagogical stylistics: Past and future

“…However, circumstances change. When she moved from the University of Wolverhampton to Aston University, Urszula's research focused the study of identity, regional accents, dialects, and variations of English (Clark, 2013(Clark, , 2019Clark and Asprey, 2013). Her interest in stylistics, however, remained a constant and led her to contribute an article on the work of four contemporary women writers of detective fiction from a critical discourse stylistics perspective (Clark and Zyngier, 1998).…”

Text-worlds, blending and allegory in ‘Flamingos in Dudley Zoo’ by Emma Purshouse

“…This opening speech creates a world-switch to a world which has a different deictic signature to the matrix text-world established by the title because it is projected from the viewpoint of a character in the poem. This world-switch contains a question couched in the negative, ‘ay we?’ In Black Country dialect, the negative is signalled on common verbs by ablaut rather than a clitic or particle (Clark and Asprey, 2013: 97–104). This is unusual, and a reader without this contextual knowledge may read it as meaning ‘are we?’ rather than ‘aren’t we?’ The negative proposition creates a world, marked as negative, in which both the speaker’s and addressee’s status as special is questioned.…”

“…It is allegorical because the state of affairs presented explores issues of dialect use, including the prejudices that are often deeply ingrained with regard to the status of dialect speech, even among those who use it, and this must be metaphorically extrapolated from the fable rather than the fable being used as a straightforward exemplification of the message. The poem appears in Spake: Dialect and Voices from the West Midlands (Clark and Davidson, 2019), a collection that showcases writing from the West Midlands and which sets out to challenge attitudes and prejudices towards non-standard English. The collection forms part of Clark’s extensive work on language and identity in the region.…”

The impact of British accents on perceptions of eyewitness statements

“…For example, anecdotal reports by Workman (2015) are that people associate a Birmingham accent with criminal activity, and criminal activity with low intelligence. Academic research across more than forty-five years reveals the Birmingham accent is consistently one of the least well rated in the United Kingdom in terms of prestige, intelligence and attractiveness (Clark and Asprey 2013;Coupland and Bishop 2007;Giles 1970). Work by Thorne (2005) shows that raters feel the Birmingham accent sounds lazy and uneducated.…”