Black Country dialect: no more waggin" for Halesowen pupils

The Black Country dialect is extremely various from Birmingham’s. Pretend, for a second, that you care. That’s why Brummies call men and women like me (born in Wolverhampton, raised in Sedgley, even though later on schooled in Solihull, and struggling a Proustian rush every time I consider about the nocturnal vista of flaming blast furnaces I saw when I sat on my nan’s back stage in Wednesbury) Yam Yams. We’re so known as due to the fact even – picture! – Brummies consider we cannot talk suitable. “Yam Yams” is a reference to the Black Nation use of “Yow am” (or yow’ m).

This issues because a major college in Halesowen has banned pupils from making use of “gonna”, ”woz”, “it wor me” and other purportedly yam-yammy locutions in the classroom in order to boost their grasp of common English and, thereby, employability. Dudley North MP (and Yam Yam) Ian Austin backs the ban.

But there’s much more to Black Nation dialect than these words, far more even than Walsall-born Noddy Holder’s orthographically challenged titles for Yam-Yammy Slade songs (Gudbuy T’Jane, Cum on Come to feel the Noize). There is a wealthy linguistic heritage that the Scottish novelist AL Kennedy recognized: when I interviewed her about her guide Day, which tells the story of an eponymous Lancaster bomber tail gunner who hailed from Wednesbury. “There’s an tremendous sense of humour in the way Black Country people speak,” stated Kennedy. “It really is a really playful and very outdated language.”

It is the two of these things: “Ow bist” (How are you?), for illustration, is a contraction of the Middle English “How be-est thou”, to which a reply may well be “Bay as well bah”, which, like the French comme ci, comme ça, signifies “I am not too undesirable”. “Bay” means “am not” (as in “I bay gooin’ ter tell yow agen”). “Yam Yams” say “aks” rather of “request”, “lickle” not “small”, and when we perform approximately we say we are “lungeous”. “I ay sid ‘er” implies “I have not noticed her”.

I bear in mind my principal school instructor (who came from Lincolnshire) asking his class at Alder Coppice college in Sedgley what we meant by “saft”. It was, we told him, a gently reproving mixture of silly and daft. But we possibly did not place it really like that.

Later on my O-degree background teacher Mr England insisted that Black Country dialect, not like its upstart nearby rival, Brummie, was a lot more closely connected Middle English than any other regional dialect. That imagined is picked up on the exceptional Sedgley Manor website, which gives a dictionary featuring this kind of gems as “bunny-fire” (bonfire), “clack” (eg “Cease your clack!” ie “Shut up!”), “kaylied” (drunk), “waggin’” (bunking off school) and “lezzer” (not what you are thinking, but a meadow – derived from the Previous English “leasowe”). If you stood in Sedgley Bull Ring now, what you’d hear spoken is a dialect nearer to Chaucerian English than any in use in England.

I am also moved to tears as I publish these phrases, recalling words that filled my childhood that I’ll by no means communicate once again. I have been deracinated, standardised, made – linguistically at least – just that tiny bit less charming.

That fate awaits, perhaps, the pupils of Colley Lane college as well. Doubtless they will acquire in terms of employability and task protection as their headteacher and MP hope, but they chance dropping a cherishable and irreplaceable heritage as properly.

Black Country dialect: no more waggin" for Halesowen pupils