Brummie dialect

Stereotypes

According to Thorne (2003), among UK listeners "Birmingham English in previous academic studies and opinion polls consistently fares as the most disfavoured variety of British English, yet with no satisfying account of the dislike". He alleges that overseas visitors, in contrast, find it "lilting and melodious", and from this claims that such dislike is driven by various linguistic myths and social factors peculiar to the UK ("social snobbery, negative media stereotyping, the poor public image of the City of Birmingham, and the north/south geographical and linguistic divide").

For instance, despite the city's cultural and innovative history, its industrial background (as depicted by the arm-and-hammer in Birmingham's coat of arms) has led to a muscular and unintelligent stereotype: a "Brummagem screwdriver" is UK slang for a hammer.

Thorne also cites the mass media and entertainment industry where actors, usually non-Birmingham, have used inaccurate accents and/or portrayed negative roles.

Advertisements are another medium where many perceive stereotypes. Journalist Lydia Stockdale, writing in the Birmingham Post, commented on advertisers' association of Birmingham accents with pigs: the pig in the ad for Colman's Potato Bakes, Nick Park's Hells Angel Pigs for British Gas, the puppet simply known as Pig from Pipkins and ITV's "Dave the window-cleaner pig" all had Brummie accents. In 2003, a Halifax bank advertisement featuring Howard Brown, a Birmingham-born and based employee, was replaced by an animated version with an exaggerated comical accent overdubbed by a Cockney actor.

Pronouns

The following table outlines the Birmingham pronominal system. Note the frequent dropping of initial h and th sounds, as well as the unique possessive and object forms.

• The second-person plural pronoun is often yous (or youse), which acts as the subject, direct object and indirect object. This is a feature shared with many Northern English dialects resulting from Irish immigration.
• Possessive pronouns frequently take an -n suffix, creating forms like yourn (yours), (h)isn (his), ern (hers), ourn (ours) and theirn (theirs).
• The first-person singular object pronoun me is commonly replaced by us (e.g., "give it us").
• The third-person feminine subject pronoun she is commonly replaced by er.
• Reflexive pronouns are regularized across the paradigm to be based on possessive pronouns, resulting in forms like (h)isself and theirselves.

Contractions

Contractions in Brummie contain unique expressions for the area. Most involve negation particles.

Morphophonology

• The past tense forms of strong verbs are often simplified. Examples include kept to kep', swept to swep' and wept to wep'.
• Older Brummies often pronounce nouns ending in -ce with a /-z-/ in the plural form, where it would not be in the standard language. Eye dialect spellings that demonstrate this phenomenon include writing fazes instead of faces, plazes for places, and prizes for prices.
• The third-person present of go, goes, is usually pronounced [gʊz]. The "going to" future form has variants ranging from [gʊnə] to [gɒnə].
• Several verb forms, including make, made and take, realise the vowel as monophthongal /mɛk, mɛd, tɛk/, similar to the monophthongisation of RP says or said.
• Standard English irregular verbs are widely regularized, utilizing the -ed suffix for both past tense and past participle forms (e.g., knowed for knew/known, catched for caught, and drawed for drew).
• Past participles are frequently used in place of the past simple tense (e.g., "I done that" or "I seen him"), and the present simple is sometimes used in place of the past participle (e.g., "I'd 'ave give up").
• Noun pluralization among older speakers occasionally retains the Old English -en suffix, most notably in the word housen for houses.
• The pronouns he, him, his, her, along with the related forms have, has and had are often orthographically represented with an apostrophe ('e, 'im, 'is, 'er, 'ave, 'as and 'ad respectively), reflecting the phenomenon of H-dropping (see #Phonology below).

Consonants

• Like the West Midlands accents of the north, and many other Northern English accents, NG-coalescence is absent, with /ŋ/ being pronounced as [ŋɡ].
  • This velar nasal plus feature is subject to stylistic and age-based variation. Word-final G-dropping is varied upon social class; with [ɪŋ] being favoured by middle-class speakers and [ɪŋɡ, ɪn] by the working class. Older working-class speakers often drop the [ɡ] and use the bare nasal [n], especially in present participle endings like singing. Younger speakers, conversely, tend to use the [ŋg] pronunciation more frequently, especially in nouns ending in [ŋ] in RP.
• H-dropping is present, which mirrors many other working-class British accents. It is, however, most consistent with function words, as mentioned above.
  • Hypercorrection with /h/ commonly occurs with younger middle-class people as well as some older working class, with words such as April and orange being pronounced and represented as Hapril and horange. This is especially seen if the other person addressed appears to be of a higher social status or upper class.
  • Speakers also use the indefinite article an before words beginning with ⟨h⟩ such as an 'ouse. This is a further extension to standardized accents such as RP, where it is only used in learned terms such as hour or honest.
• Th-fronting of /θ, ð/ to /f, v/ respectively is an innovation spreading among an increasing number of teenagers, particularly working-class males, and is nearly categorical with some boys. /θ/ especially occurs before /r/ at the beginning of a word (as in through) however, /ð/ is not fronted word-initially (e.g. this). These phenomena are also common with other regional British dialects.
• Under influence of Estuary English, T-glottalization occurs intervocalically and word-finally, albeit primarily in younger speakers, while middle-aged and elderly Brummies generally retain the voiceless alveolar plosive.
  • Additionally, the T-to-R rule is widespread, where intervocalic /t/ is tapped to an [ɾ] or [ɹ] (e.g., get a becomes [ˈɡɛ̝ɾæ̞~ˈɡɛ̝ɹæ̞] gerra, put on becomes [pəˈɾɒn~pəˈɹɒn] purron).
• The accent is non-rhotic, which means that the consonant /r/ is not pronounced at the syllable rime. However, when as an onset, it is rendered as a single tapped /ɾ/ like of Scottish English varieties: the most prominent examples include intervocalically in disyllabic words, such as marry, perhaps (note the 'h' here is silent) and worry, as well as following a velar or bilabial stop in monosyllabic words, like bright or cream. Other onset environments are otherwise realized as /ɹ/.
  • Linking and intrusive R are essentially universal in Birmingham and the rest of the urban West Midlands region, similar to all other British dialects.
• Yod-dropping (the elision of /j/) is common across age groups in words such as new or few, leading to pronunciations like [nuː].
• The realization of /l/ differs significantly from Received Pronunciation. For male speakers, /l/ is frequently dark ([ɫ]) in all positions. Furthermore, L-vocalization (vocalizing the /l/ into a vowel sound) is increasingly common among younger speakers. However, Thorne (2003) specifies that /l/ is typically dark word-finally and pre-consonantally, but remains clear word-initially, post-initially, word-medially, and word-finally before a following vowel.

Vowels

Phonemic incidence

Birmingham has lexical peculiarities when it comes to pronunciation, usually retained by older speakers. Note that there are a handful of words that are pronounced in a non-standard way (e.g. baby /ˈbæbəi/) but are considered distinct dialectal words ('babby') in their own right; see #Lexicon below.

• Ad-, con-, ex- when unstressed are pronounced with their reduced forms (/əd-/, /kən-/, /əks-/), contrasting with the full forms (/ad-/, /kɒn-/, /ɛks-/) found in most areas north of Birmingham.
• Been and seen is generally shortened to /bɪn, sɪn/, being homophonous to bin and sin respectively.
• Bus is pronounced with a final voiced consonant (/bʊz/) without exception, making it homophonous to buzz.
• Get can be pronounced as /ɡɪt/.
• Girl varies in pronunciation between /ɡal ~ ɡɛl/.
• Guernsey, meaning a woollen sweater, can have the first vowel be pronounced with /a/.
• Home is /ʊm/ by older speakers.
• Hoof, roof, spoon are pronounced with the long vowel /huːf, ɾuːf, spuːn/, unlike the typical northern /hʊf, ɾʊf, spʊn/.
• One is pronounced as /wɒn/, which contrasts with won (verb) /wʊn/. This can be found in other varieties of British English as well.
• Tooth is pronounced /tuːθ~tʊθ/, ranging from the 'educated' south to the 'vulgar' north respectively; this exhibits Birmingham's transitional area between the southern and northern dialects.
• Was has pronunciations varying from /wɒz~wʌz~wʊz/.
• Week is shortened as /wɪk/, homophonous to wick and creating a minimal pair with weak (adjective) /wiːk/.
• Worse/worst is typically pronounced as /wʊs(t)/.
  • Likewise, older Brummies will also pronounce first as /fʊst/.

Shibboleths also exist which distinguish people from different districts or social classes:

• Edgbaston: A middle-class district, the vowel in second syllable is pronounced by locals and other middle-class speakers as /ɑː/ or /ə/. The working class pronounce it as /æ/, signifying that those speakers cannot live there.
• Solihull: Middle-class speakers pronounce the first vowel as GOAT, whereas working-class speech use LOT.

Phonological processes

• Nasalization is heavily exaggerated and stigmatized. Nasality in Brummie is often stronger than in the RP variety; whereas in RP a vowel can only be nasalized before a nasal consonant (i.e. /m, n, ŋ/), Brummie can also nasalize vowels after the aforementioned consonants and even independently in the strongest accents. This realization is often compared to other regional dialects, for example, singer is rendered as [ˈsɪ̝̃ŋɡæ], but compare also Nick [nɪ̝̃k] and kick [kɪ̝̃k].
  • This is caused by the dialect's preferred "articulatory setting", where the pharynx is kept quite tight and the tongue is pushed higher and further back than in other British English dialects.
• Assimilation is highly prevalent in connected speech, with anticipatory, progressive and coalescent assimilation all occurring frequently.
• Elision of consonants commonly occurs in consonant clusters (e.g., backwards realized as [ˈbækədz] or forwards as [ˈfɒɹədz]). This process also frequently extends to the loss of weak vowels in unstressed syllables (such as police becoming [ˈpliːs] or Saturday becoming [ˈsæʔdɜi]).
• As with other English varieties, prepositions regularly take weak forms, especially before word-initial consonants (e.g., of becoming [ə] or [ɒ], and to becoming [tə]).

Prosody

The intonation and prosody of Birmingham English are highly distinctive and serve as primary markers of the dialect.

• There is a strong relationship between vowel quality and intonation, meaning that intonational dips and rises frequently affect vowel sounds and vice versa. This vowel quality is most noticeably affected at the ends of speech acts.
• Unstressed syllables possess greater tonic variation than in standardized varieties of English. Furthermore, unstressed syllables tend to fall more than stressed syllables, whereas stressed syllables generally tend to rise more than unstressed syllables.
• Variation in tonic movement is much more prominent at the beginning and end of speech acts than in the middle.
• West Midlands speech characteristically features "terminal raising" in statements, meaning the pitch rises at the end of an utterance rather than falling.
• Negative verbs (such as wasn't or weren't) often take a markedly high intonational tone.
• Birmingham intonation shows a strong preference for "rise-plateau" and "rise-plateau-slump" pitch movements. This typically involves a jump-up in pitch on the unaccented syllable immediately following the nuclear syllable, which is then maintained on succeeding unaccented syllables, though the last one or two syllables may decline slightly.