Dialect researchers given a 'canny load of chink' to sort 'pikeys' from 'chavs' in regional accents

By Andy McSmith

Friday, 1 June 2007

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If, in this age of instant nationwide communication, you think that regional dialects have died off in the UK, you must be a bit of a noggerhead (as they say in Somerset), or perhaps or a nizgul (from the Black Country), or you're a bit cakey (Staffordshire), or batchy (Essex), mazed (Devon and Somerset), niddy-noddy (Isle of Man), or just gormless (Yorkshire).

Researchers at Leeds University are sifting through a vast collection of examples of regional slang words and phrases turned up by a project run by the BBC, in which they invited the public to send in examples of English still spoken throughout the country.

So much information came back that the Arts and Humanities Research Council has awarded a team led by Sally Johnson, Professor of Linguistics and Phonetics at Leeds University, £460,000 to study it. Among thousands of items turned up by the BBC Voices project is the range of words the young use to insult one another.

How, for instance, do they describe someone who goes around dressed in a lot of cheap, trendy clothes and jewellery, someone like the singer Lily Allen, for example? The best-known insult thrown at such a person is "chav", which can be heard all across the south of England and has spread north.

But in the South-east, such a person may also be called a "pikey", a corruption of 'turnpike sailor', a derogatory name that used to be directed at gypsies.

Other regional insults, all given the same meaning, include "charva", a Romany word heard in Newcastle, "scally" on Merseyside, "ned" in southern Scotland, and "kev" - short for Kevin - around Birmingham.

One of Lily Allen's offences against sartorial standards was to be photographed in a dress and trainers - trainers as the universal word for footwear known as "pumps" in Yorkshire, "gutties" in Scotland, and "daps" if you're on the south coast. "These labels are perhaps more eloquent of the people who are using them, and their attitudes, than of the people they try to stick these labels on," Clive Upton, a member of the research team, said.

"There is a study to be done as to whether when somebody calls someone else a 'pikey' or a 'scally', the word means the same to the hearer as to the person using it. Some people might think of it as a style statement, others might hear something threatening.

"But while we are in academia studying these questions, the people who really know what is going on and the people who are really driving the language forward are the people who speak it."

Mr Upton, who is Professor of English at Leeds University, said that they were "very pleased" - and indeed, "well chuffed" - at receiving their generous grant. He could, of course, have been "bostin" if he had come from the Black Country, or if he was a Scouser he would have been well "made up" over so many spondoolicks, because as a Geordie might say, £460,000 is a "canny load of chink"

The word on the street: dialects from around Britain

Northern Ireland

Foundered: cold, chilled

Hirple: hobble or walk with a limp or unevenly

Peasewisp: untidy heap

Scrake of dawn: very early

Yam: crying sound of a cat

Glasgow

Go-carry: piggy-back

Midgie men: bin men

Oaxter: armpit

Planked: hidden