Ulster-Scots Urban Speech in Ulster: A Phonological Study of the Regional Standard English of Larne, County Antrim

Robert J. Gregg

PART TWO: The Ulster-Scots Rural Dialect as a Background to Larne

2.0 The US rural dialects surrounding Larne have naturally had a very strong influence on the speech of the town itself. It would indeed be true to say that what might be called the 'non-standard' speech (non-standard Larne) of certain suburbs is an almost unaltered version of the country dialects belonging to the immediate vicinity. Thus, to the south the dialects of Glynn and Glenoe exert their pressure along the Glynn Road and Inver Road respectively, and to the west the virtually identical rural dialect of the Millbrook-Kilwaughter area encroaches by way of the Ballymena Road on the district known as the Head of the Town, or rather the Heid o' the Toon. To the north and north-west two or three generations ago workers from the country south-west of Ballymena (Slaght,(36) the Grange etc.) were settled in the neighbourhood of Brown's Linen Factory. Their dialect, which is in any case closely similar to the other US rural dialects already mentioned, has been well preserved in this district to the present day and as a result of school and other social contacts some of its special phonological features, e.g. the use of the medial glottal stop in place of /t/ in words such as:

butter [ˈbʌʔər] Saturday [ˈsɑ:ʔərde] bottom [ˈbɔ:ʔəm] etc.

have even spread to the standard speech of other parts of the town.

2.1 In order to estimate accurately the role played by these rural US dialects in the formation of Larne modified standard English it is necessary to study in detail the phonological structure of the two styles of speech. To begin with, a list of the vocalic phonemes of a typical US rural dialect — that of Glenoe,(37) about four miles south of Larne — is given below for purposes of comparison:

2.2 When the two vowel inventories are set side by side, it is clear that apart from No. 2 on the Larne list and Nos. 2, 3 and 4 on the Glenoe list, which show some divergence, the other comparable items match perfectly at the phonemic level and almost as perfectly at the phonetic level. A detailed study of the Glenoe allophones (38)would reveal further a complete correspondence of short and long, strongly stressed and weakly stressed, lowered, advanced or retracted variants, occurring in each case in comparable phonetic environments.

2.3 Even the points of divergence are more apparent than real, for at the phonetic level Glenoe No. 3 is identical with the main member of Larne No. 2, and Glenoe No. 2 with the weakly stressed allophone of Larne No. 2. Further, although Glenoe No. 4 does not normally occur in the type of Larne speech analysed above, it is used by non-standard (and, of course, also by Glenoe speakers) in most of the words which have Larne No. 2 in the modified standard. In the case of the phonetic divergence indicated between Glenoe No. 7 and Larne No. 5, this again is not an absolute but rather a relative difference, the rural speakers on the whole tending here (as well as for the first element of the Glenoe [ae] diphthong) to use a more retracted and the urban speakers a less retracted version. Individual Larne speakers could certainly be found whose /a/ coincided phonetically with the Glenoe [ɑ:].

2.4 The main difference, of course, between Glenoe and Larne lies not in the phonological raw material but rather in the actual incidence of the phonemes and their divergent distribution at the lexical level, each giving evidence of its own distinctive diachronic evolution. There is a fair amount of lexical overlap in all forms of English, but in this connection it must be borne in mind that the Glenoe speaker is following the model of what is fundamentally a Lowland Scottish language-type,(39) whereas the Larne speaker uses his own local form of standard English.

The following tables will give some idea of the relationship between the two language-types:

2.5 The same types of unpredictable correspondences are observable if we begin with the Larne forms:

2.6 A third way to compare these two language-types is to start with the phonetic form of certain lexical elements and compare their divergent meanings. In this way we see that one and the same sequence of sounds will sometimes have additional semantic correlates (marked with +) in Glenoe as compared with Larne, and sometimes the Glenoe and Larne meanings will be totally different:

2.7 The consonantal systems of Larne and Glenoe also resemble each other very closely at both the phonetic and phonemic levels. The actual inventory of sounds and their qualities are identical, the only differences being distributional and functional.

2.8 With regard to incidence, the phoneme /x/ is extremely rare in Larne, where it occurs chiefly in personal names and place names and in a few exclamations. In Glenoe (and nonstandard Larne), however, it bears a much fuller functional load, comparable to that of the other fricatives. It is to be heard in Glenoe words of divers origins - Old English, Old Norse, Gaelic, etc. — and very often corresponds to a traditional -gh- in the graphic form of the language:

Glenoe also has /x/ in many purely dialectal words with no Larne counterpart:

[drix] 'dreary' (weather, etc.) [dæ̈xt] 'wipe' [le:xˊ] 'low' [skre:xˊ] 'screech' [pɛ:xˊ] 'pant' [bɑ:xəl] 'clumsy person' [ˈsprɑ:xəl] 'sprawl' [ˈstśɑ:xe] 'unsavory mixture of food' [fərfɔ:xən] 'exhausted (tired)' [ˈspjʌxən] 'tobacco pouch' [hÜx] 'a shout' [ˈgriśəx] 'embers' [stɔex] 'stench' [ˈbləüxər] 'cough' [ˈdʌŋxəl] 'manure heap',(42) (dung-hill)

2.9 The interdentals [t] [d] [n] have a wider distribution in Glenoe (and non-standard Larne) than in Larne. In the latter they occur only immediately before /θ/ and /ð/. In the former they also occur directly in front of /r/ or schwa + /r/ (within one and the same morpheme), the /r/ in the first case being realized as a single-flap, lingual [r] and likewise in the second case, if another vowel follows:

Before interdental [t] and [d], /n/ and /l/ will, of course, also be realised in Glenoe as interdental [n] and [l]:

2.10 This, however, is not the complete functional picture. In addition to this wider range of allophonic occurrences of the interdentals in Glenoe as compared with Larne, Glenoe also shows a contrastive use of interdental [t] [d] [n] versus alveolar [t] [d] [n] in pairs such as the following:

Such significant contrasts are never possible in Larne, and it must be noted that even in Glenoe these are not just simple phonological oppositions. In each instance the use of an alveolar rather than an interdental is an oristic signal marking a morphemic suture or a word juncture, for the interdentals never occur finally in a morpheme. In other words this contrastive use of alveolars versus interdentals is a matter that has to be investigated at the morphological level rather than the purely phonological level of analysis. There is the possibility of similar oppositions occurring in non-standard Larne, for example:

[ˈbo:ldər] 'bolder' versus [ˈbo:ldər] 'boulder'

2.11 A difference at the purely allophonic level between Larne and Glenoe concerns the use in the latter (and in non-standard Larne) of glottalized variants of the unvoiced plosives occurring in medial and sometimes final position:

In non-standard Larne medial and final /t/ is often realized as a simple glottal stop:

2.12 Other differences in the incidence of certain consonants in Glenoe as compared with Larne may be ascribed to the language-types on which they severally model themselves. The Larne medial cluster /mb/, for example, is generally matched in Glenoe by a simple /m/:

A simple /n/ and /l/ in Glenoe likewise corresponds to the Larne medial and final cluster /nd/ and final /ld/:

In the same way Glenoe often has a simple /ŋ/ where Larne has the cluster /ŋg/:

Introduction | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Conclusion | Notes