that there are‘ languages of social groups’. The dialect of Lancashire, and in this case, the particularly nuanced version representing the form spoken in the Wigan area can therefore not only be attributed to the location where it is spoken, but also to the social class that speaks it – namely the workingclass. Peter Wright in his book Lanky Twang touches upon this characteristic of the Lancashire dialect, when he says that‘ every Lanky town and village has its own dialect, the towns having more a mixture of the surrounding country dialects and Standard English’.
Wright also notes that the characteristics of‘ the Lanky’( as in, a person from Lancashire) are likely to make one believe that‘ Lancashire is a county to avoid’. Yet, as he goes on to comment,“ The Lancashire dialect is rich in proverbs and sayings, both humorous and pointing a moral”( 1991, p. 5). The people of Lancashire, therefore, do seem aware of their‘ otherness’, and have reclaimed this by creating humour, whereby they can poke fun at themselves and the situations they find themselves in through their use of dialect literature, as the following analysis hopes to illustrate.
Beginning, then, with‘ Posh Visiters’( see extract on page XX), the first signifier that the poem is employing the use of dialect is what Jane Hodson( 2014, p. 94) describes as the
SotA Anthology 2015-16
phonetically transparent respelling of‘ visiters’. In Standard English, or RP, visitors would be pronounced / ˈvɪzɪtəs /, however, in this case, Unsworth is attempting through phonetic respelling to convey the way a Wiganer would pronounce it as / ˈvɪzɪtɘz /. This immediately distances any reader that does not speak Wigan dialect, or more broadly perhaps, northern English dialect, from the poem as it highlights a difference in pronunciation between Standard English and Wigan dialect. The use of the word‘ posh’ preceding it also contributes to this effect, as the implication is made that if the reader does not pronounce visitors as / ˈvɪzɪtɘz /, then they might be seen as one of the posh outsiders too. This immediately shows the distance working-class Wiganers would traditionally place between themselves and anyone they viewed as a‘ posh’ outsider.
The first example of the use of eye-dialect( Hodson, 2014, p. 95) can be seen in the opening line of the poem where the narrator of the poem, a young man named Jeffrey, quotes his mother as saying‘ were’ instead of‘ we’ re’, without the apostrophe included. Eye-dialect, according to Hodson, signifies visually that the speech of the speaker is non-standard, even though that particular word may not have been uttered in a specifically nonstandard way. Jane Walpole explains the reason for writers’ use of eye-dialect when she says:“ If a character is at all socially acceptable, then- whether he be a Harvard professor or a Seattle car salesman- his dialogue, though having dictional variations, will be written with grammatical and orthographic correctness. But if the character is from an inferior social class, if he is of an ethnic minority, if he is foreign, rustic, or ill-educated … his dialogue becomes branded as substandard by the use of colloquialisms, solecisms, and eye dialect.”
By using eye dialect, Unsworth indicates to the reader that the speakers in this poem are from a family that have a low social status, and therefore likely a low level of education. Lancashire dialect does not tend to concern itself with the lives of the upper or middle classes, but rather is written in dialect as a way of preserving the dialect for those to which it belongs: the working Lancashire, or Wigan, people.
The first stanza then goes on to present numerous phonetic respellings of words, for example:‘ goo’ int av cump’ ny’,‘ neaw’,‘ yo’,‘ towd’,‘ burr’,‘ wa’ ant’,‘ abeawt’, and‘ gowd’. These phonetic respellings cover both of the forms of semi-phonetic respelling Hodson( 2014) discusses – phonetically transparent respellings, and those which she describes as making it‘ difficult to be