Brummie

Birmingham Accent
Brummie
Native to United Kingdom
Region Birmingham, England
Native speakers
 3.7 million people in metro Birmingham (2014)[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-3 –
Glottolog None
Location of the Birmingham area within England.

Brummie (sometimes Brummy) is the accent and dialect of Birmingham, England. The term derives from Brummagem or Bromwichham, historical variants of the name Birmingham.

It is not the only accent of the West Midlands although the term Brummie is often erroneously used in referring to all accents of the region. It is markedly distinct from the traditional accent of the adjacent Black Country although modern-day population mobility has tended to blur the distinction. For instance, Dudley-born comedian Lenny Henry, Walsall-born rock musician Noddy Holder, Smethwick-born actress Julie Walters, Wollaston-born soap actress Jan Pearson, West Bromwich-born comedian Frank Skinner, are sometimes mistaken for Brummie-speakers by people outside the West Midlands county.

Additionally, population mobility has meant that to a degree, the Brummie accent extends into some parts of the Metropolitan Borough of Solihull, but much of the accent within the borough might be considered to be closer to contemporary RP. For example, Solihull-born presenter Richard Hammond (despite often being referred to as a Brummie) does not speak with a strong Brummie accent but is identifiably from the West Midlands.

The Brummie accent and the Coventry accent are also quite distinct in their differences, despite only 17 mi ( 27 km) separating the cities. To the untrained ear, however, all of these accents may sound very similar, just as British English speakers can find it hard to distinguish between different North American accents or Australian and New Zealand accents.

As with all English regional accents, the Brummie accent also grades into RP English. The accent of presenter Cat Deeley is listed by her voiceover agency, Curtis Brown, as "RP/Birmingham".

In popular culture

Very few films have been made in the Brummie dialect. One of the few examples is the 1971 film The Rank and File, which was part of the BBC's Play for Today series. The film was directed by Ken Loach, who is known for his policy that actors speak in their native dialect.

Examples of celebrity speakers include TV presenter Adrian Chiles, comedian Jasper Carrott, Goodies actor and TV presenter Bill Oddie, hip-hop and garage musician Mike Skinner, rock musicians Ozzy Osbourne (and all other members of the original Black Sabbath), Roy Wood, Jeff Lynne (ELO founders), Rob Halford (Judas Priest), Barney Greenway (Napalm Death), Dave Pegg (of Fairport Convention and Jethro Tull), broadcaster Les Ross, politician Clare Short, SAS soldier and author John "Brummie" Stokes, and many actresses and actors including Martha Howe-Douglas, Donnaleigh Bailey, Nicolas Woodman, Sarah Smart, John Oliver and Ryan Cartwright.

Pronunciation

Phoneme Brummie example
/æ/ [a] trap
/aʊ/ [æʊ~æə] mouth
/eɪ/ [ʌɪ] face
/əʊ/ [ɑʊ] goat
/ʌ/ [ʊ] strut
/ʊ/ [ʊ] foot
/ɔr/ [ʌʊə] force

The strength of a person's accent varies greatly all across Birmingham. Like most cities, the accent changes relative to the area of the city. A common misconception is that everyone in Birmingham speaks the same accent. It could be argued Brummie is an accent rather than a dialect as in Black Country which is a dialect with unique words and phrases, as in owamya? For How are you? Which many comment is not used in Brummie speech. Similarly Brummies pronounce 'I' as 'oy' whereas Black Country uses the dialect 'Ah' as in 'Ah bin' meaning I have been.

There are also differences between Brummie and Black Country accents not readily apparent to people from outside the West Midlands. A Black Country accent and a Birmingham accent can be hard to distinguish if neither accent is that broad. The phonetician John Wells has admitted that he cannot tell any difference between the accents.[2] Urszula Clark has proposed the FACE vowel as a difference, with Birmingham speakers' using /ʌɪ/ and Black Country speakers' using /æɪ/.[3] She also mentions that Black Country speakers are more likely to use /ɪʊ/ where most other accents use /juː/ (in words such as new, Hugh, stew, etc.).[4] This /ɪʊ/ is also present in some North American dialects for words like "eww", "grew", "new" "due", etc., contrasting with /u/ (words like "boo", "zoo", "to", "too", "moon", "dune" etc.). Other North American dialects may use /ju/ for this purpose, or even make no distinction at all.

Below are some common features of a recognisable Brummie accent (a given speaker may not necessarily use all, or use a feature consistently). The letters enclosed in square brackets – [] – use the International Phonetic Alphabet. The corresponding example texts enclosed in double quotes (") are spelt so that a reader using received pronunciation (RP) can approximate the sounds.

Recordings of Brummie speakers with phonetic features described in SAMPA format can be found at the Collect Britain dialects site.[7]

Rhymes and vocabulary in the works of William Shakespeare suggest that he used a local dialect (Birmingham and his birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon, are both in the English West Midland dialect area and only about 25 miles apart).

Stereotypes

A study was conducted in 2008 where people were asked to grade the intelligence of a person based on their accent and the Brummie accent was ranked as the least intelligent accent. It even scored lower than being silent, an example of the stereotype attached to the Brummie accent.[8]

According to Birmingham English: A Sociolinguistic Study (Steve 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"). However, the Brummie accent is the only 'northern' accent to receive such attention.

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" or "Brummie screwdriver" is UK slang for a hammer.

Steve 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,[9] 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 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.[10]

Dialect

According to the PhD thesis of Steve Thorne at the University of Birmingham Department of English, Birmingham English is "a dialectal hybrid of northern, southern, Midlands, Warwickshire, Staffordshire and Worcestershire speech", also with elements from the languages and dialects of its Asian and Afro-Caribbean communities.

Traditional expressions include:[11]

0121 do one 
an expression meaning "go away" incorporating the telephone area code for Birmingham
Babby 
variation of "baby"
Bawlin, bawl 
to weep, as in "She started to bawl'" (Not unique to Birmingham)
Bottler 
a popular and enjoyable song
Cob 
a bread roll (comes from the fact that bread rolls look like street cobbles)
Fock 
a milder and more nuanced version of the swear word
Gambol 
a West Midlands term for a forward roll
Go and play up your own end 
said to children from a different street making a nuisance. It has been used as the title of the autobiographical book and musical play about the Birmingham childhood of radio presenter and entertainer Malcolm Stent
Our wench 
affectionate term, meaning 'sister' or sometimes used by a husband referring to his wife; derived from the older 16th and 17th meaning of "woman"
The outdoor 
exclusive West Midlands term for off-licence
Pop 
another word for a carbonated drink, e.g. "Do you want a glass of pop?". (common in other parts of England)
Snap 
food, a meal, allegedly derived from the act of eating itself (example usage "I'm off to get my snap" equates to "I'm leaving to get my dinner"). May also refer to the tin containing lunch, a "snap tin", as taken down the pit by miners
Scrage
a scratched cut, where skin is sliced off. For example, "I fell over and badly scraged my knee"
Suff 
another word for drain, as in "put it down the suff"
Throw a wobbly 
to become sulky or have a tantrum
Trap 
to leave suddenly, or flee
Up the cut 
up the canal (not unique to Birmingham)
Yampy 
(often "dead yampy") mad, daft, barmy (also used is the word "saft", as in "yow big saft babbie"). Many Black Country folk believe "yampy" is a Black Country word, originating from the Dudley-Tipton area, which has been appropriated and claimed as their own by both Birmingham and Coventry dialects, although yampy is found in areas of the black country both outside Birmingham and Tipton/Dudley so might have been a general south Staffordshire and north Worcestershire areas.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "UK Population Estimates". ONS. Retrieved 28 June 2014
  2. ↑ Wells, John (2011-06-13). "John Wells’s phonetic blog: the Black Country". Phonetic-blog.blogspot.com. Retrieved 2014-05-18.
  3. ↑ Handbook of Varieties of English, Mouton de Gruyter, 2004, page 148
  4. ↑ Handbook of Varieties of English, Mouton de Gruyter, 2004, page 151
  5. ↑ Handbook of Varieties of English, Mouton de Gruyter, 2004, pages 145-6
  6. ↑ John Wells, Accents of English, page 364, Cambridge University Press, 1981.
  7. ↑ Collect Britain, Samples of Birmingham speech. (WMA format, with annotations on phonology, lexis and grammar.)
  8. ↑ Brummie accent is perceived as 'worse than silence', The Times, 4 April 2008.
  9. ↑ "Pig ignorant about the Brummie accent" Birmingham Post, 2 December 2004 (From The Free Library)
  10. ↑ Face of the Halifax given a makeover ... and a cockney's voiceover, The Guardian, 20 January 2003.
  11. ↑ Birmingham Mail Survey

External links

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