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Pitmatic

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Pitmatic (originally: "Pitmatical", colloquially known as "Yakka") is a group of traditional Northern English dialects spoken in rural areas of the Northumberland and Durham Coalfield in England.

The feature distinguishing Pitmatic from other Northumbrian dialects, such as Geordie and Mackem, is its basis in the mining jargon used in local collieries. For example, in Tyneside and Northumberland, Cuddy is a nickname for St. Cuthbert, while in Alnwick Pitmatic, a cuddy is a pit pony.[1] According to the British Library's lead curator of spoken English, writing in 2019, "Locals insist there are significant differences between Geordie and several other local dialects, such as Pitmatic and Mackem. Pitmatic is the dialect of the former mining areas in County Durham and around Ashington to the north of Newcastle upon Tyne, while Mackem is used locally to refer to the dialect of the city of Sunderland and the surrounding urban area of Wearside".[2]

Traditionally, the dialect spoken in Northumberland in rural communities, including Rothbury, used the Northumbrian burr.[citation needed] This is now less frequently heard; since the closure of the area's deep mines, younger people speak in local ways that do not usually include this characteristic.[citation needed] The guttural r sound can, however, still sometimes be detected amongst elderly populations in rural areas.[citation needed] The variety spoken in Durham, while non-rhotic, is traditionally still subject to the Nurse-north merger in words like forst 'first' and bord 'bird', which came about as a result of burr modification.

Dialectology[edit]

While Pitmatic was spoken by miners throughout the Great Northern Coalfield — from Ashington in Northumberland to Fishburn in County Durham — sources describe its particular use in the Durham collieries.[3][4][5][6] However, Pitmatic is not a homogenous dialect, and varies between and within the two counties. The Durham coalfield is grouped linguistically with Wearside under the 'Central Urban North-Eastern English' dialect region, while the Northumberland coalfield is grouped with Tyneside as part of the 'Northern Urban North-Eastern English' area.[7]

Dictionaries and compilations[edit]

Dialect words in Northumberland and Tyneside, including many specific to the coal-mining industry, were collected by Oliver Heslop and published in two volumes in 1892 and 1894 respectively.[8] A dictionary of East Durham Pitmatic spoken in Hetton-le-Hole, compiled by Rev. Francis M. T. Palgrave, was published in 1896.[9] In 2007, Bill Griffiths produced a dictionary where each entry includes information on a word's etymology;[10] it was well reviewed.[11] In an earlier work,[12] Griffiths cited a newspaper of 1873 for the first recorded mention of the term "pitmatical".[3]

Although he did not use the term Pitmatic, Alexander J. Ellis's work on the language of miners "between rivers Tyne and Wansbeck" has been studied as an early transcription of Pitmatic, which used informants from Earsdon and Backworth.[13] In the 1950s, the Survey of English Dialects included Earsdon as a site and many of the forms recorded matched the transcriptions in Ellis's early work, although some appeared to have modified under pressure from other forms of English.[13]

Harold Orton compiled a corpus (dataset) of dialect forms for 35 locations in Northumberland and northern Durham, known as the Orton Corpus.[14][15]

Pit Talk in County Durham, an illustrated, 90-page pamphlet by Dave Douglass, a local miner, was published in 1973.[16]

In media[edit]

In 2000, Melvyn Bragg presented a programme on BBC Radio 4 about Pitmatic as part of a series on English regional dialects.[17] Pitmatic has rarely featured in film: one of the few cases is in parts of the second episode of Ken Loach's 1975 series Days of Hope,[18] which was filmed around Esh Winning in Durham with mostly local actors.[citation needed]

British comedian Bobby Thompson was famous for his broad Pitmatic accent, and was popular across North East England.[citation needed]

Related forms of English[edit]

Other Northern English dialects include:

References[edit]

  1. ^ Sadgrove, Michael (3 July 2005). Mining for Wisdom (sermon). The Ordination of Deacons. Durham Cathedral. Archived from the original on 23 May 2014. Retrieved 26 June 2024.
  2. ^ Robinson, Jonnie (24 April 2019). "Geordie: A regional dialect of English". British Library. Archived from the original on 25 September 2020. Retrieved 25 June 2024.
  3. ^ a b A Man on the Streets (19 April 1873). "Amongst the People". Newcastle Weekly Chronicle – Supplement. p. 4, col. 6 – via British Newspaper Archive. A great many of the lads, especially from the Durham district, [...] [used] the purest 'pitmatical', shouted across the streets, [...].
  4. ^ "The New Electorate". The Times. No. 31531. 21 August 1885. p. 4, col. 6. (At the Oakenshaw pit in County Durham): "[A]fter a few minutes delay in the overman's cabin, thronged with men talking an unintelligible language known, I was informed, as Pitmatic, we took our places".
  5. ^ Hitchin, George (1962). "Chapter IV: 'The People Who Walked in Darkness'". Pit-Yacker. London: Jonathan Cape. p. 70 (Seaham Colliery, c. 1910): "I was also acquiring a new language. This was 'pitmatic'. It was a mixture of the broadest dialect of Durham and a number of words (often of foreign origin) used exclusively by pitmen when below ground". OCLC 3789510 – via Internet Archive.
  6. ^ Priestly, J. B. (1934). "Chapter Ten: To East Durham and the Tees". English Journey. New York: Harper & Brothers. pp. 265–266. OCLC 69655102 – via Internet Archive. The local miners have a curious lingo [...] which they call 'pitmatik.' It is [...] a dialect within a dialect, for it is only used by the pitmen when they are talking among themselves. The women do not talk it. When the pitmen are exchanging stories of colliery life, [...] they do it in 'pitmatik,' which is Scandinavian in origin, far nearer to the Norse than the ordinary Durham dialect.
  7. ^ Beal, Joan C.; Burbano-Elizondo, Lourdes; Llamas, Carmen (2012). "Section 2.2: Delimiting the region". Urban North-Eastern English: Tyneside to Teesside. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-0-748-64152-9. OCLC 793582295.
  8. ^ Heslop, Richard Oliver. Northumberland Words. A Glossary of Words Used in the County of Northumberland and on the Tyneside. Volume I (A to F) (1892). Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & co. for the English Dialect Society – via Internet Archive. Volume II (G to Z) (1894). Henry Frowde, Oxford University Press for the English Dialect Society – via Internet Archive.
  9. ^ Palgrave, Rev. Francis Milnes Temple (1896). A List of Words and Phrases in Every-Day Use by the Natives of Hetton-Le-Hole in the County of Durham, Being Words not Ordinarily Accepted, or But Seldom Found in the Standard English of the Day (pdf, doc). London: Henry Frowde for the English Dialect Society. OCLC 163056065. Retrieved 24 June 2024. Via The Salamanca Corpus Digital Archive of English Dialect Texts
  10. ^ Griffiths, Bill (2007). Pitmatic: The Talk of the North East Coalfield. Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria University Press. ISBN 978-1-904-79425-7.
  11. ^ Wainwright, Martin (30 July 2007). "Lost language of Pitmatic gets its lexicon". The Guardian. Retrieved 22 August 2021. His new book reveals an exceptionally rich combination of borrowings from Old Norse, Dutch and a score of other languages, with inventive usages dreamed up by the miners themselves.
  12. ^ Griffiths, Bill (2004). "Historical introduction". A Dictionary of North East Dialect (first ed.). Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria University. pp. xvii–xviii. ISBN 978-1-904-79406-6 – via Internet Archive.
  13. ^ a b An Atlas of Alexander J. Ellis's The Existing Phonology of English Dialects, http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/EllisAtlas/Index.html, has further details.
  14. ^ Rydland, Kurt (January 1992). "The Orton Corpus. A collection of dialect material from the north-east of England". Anglia. Journal of English Philology. 110: 1–35. doi:10.1515/angl.1992.1992.110.1. Retrieved 28 June 2024.
  15. ^ Rydland, Kurt (1998). The Orton Corpus: a Dictionary of Northumbrian Pronunciation 1928-1939. Oslo: Novus forlag. ISBN 978-8-270-99306-2. OCLC 40847001. Vol. 10 of Studia Anglistica Norvegica, ISSN 0333-4791.
  16. ^ Douglass, Dave (1973). "Pit Talk in County Durham: A Glossary of Miners' Talk together with Memories of Wardley Colliery, Pit Songs and Piliking". Oxford: History Workshop. OCLC 990097. Retrieved 25 June 2024.
  17. ^ Bragg, Melvyn (23 November 2000). "Pitmatic". The Routes of English. Series 3. BBC Radio 4 . Retrieved 27 June 2024.
  18. ^ Loach, Ken (18 September 1975). "1921". Days of Hope. BBC One. Retrieved 27 June 2024 – via YouTube.

External links[edit]

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