Thank you, Mr Hextol for promoting and praising our unique Northumbrian dialect! Your last paragraph is spot on! The world will, indeed, be a poorer place if local dialects and accents die out.
The world as we know it will come to an end if we all end up speaking the Queen’s English! That’s for soothrons, an it’s nowt ti de wiv us!
Linguistic variety is a good thing. It has been the reality for most of the world’s languages. No language is the same today as it was in the past. Change is the natural rhythm of life, and languages display this truth perfectly.
However, the Northumbrian dialect has not been infected by the Vikings. The Vikings took over Yorkshire in the ninth century, so the modern Yorkshire dialect has many Norse words in it, but they never settled north of the Tees.
English Northumbria continued to speak Old English for centuries afterwards. It is the foundation language of the modern Northumbrian dialect which has been spoken here continuously for more than fourteen hundred years. Standard English, by comparison, is a mere youngster, no more than five hundred years old!
The Northumbrian Language Society’s official policy is to encourage people in the North-East to speak the dialect among family and friends, and to speak Standard English when you have to.
So, haway hinnies, larn yorsel ti speek proper, an keep wor tung alive!
PETER ARNOLD
Northumbrian Language Society
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