Cumbrian Language in its Cultural Context

My Experiences with the Dialect.

While I was raised in the south of England, my dad’s side of the family is Cumbrian, and as a result I have had some exposure to the dialect, mostly as spoken by people older than me. My family is from the north-eastern part of Cumbria, in the area surrounding Penrith: my father and his siblings were born at Skelton, my grandparents were born in that general vicinity in the mid and late 1930s. It is probably my older relatives who have most influenced my interest in this subject.

I would describe my grandfather’s pronunciation as on the tail end of later Cumbrian, with relatively little southern influence in terms of the actual vowel qualities. However, the arrangement of lexical sets depends on who he is talking to. Many older Cumbrians I know, including my grandfather, do something called code-switching, which all of us do on some level. Codeswitching is where we automatically switch between different ways of speaking depending on our audience: we might automatically speak more formally to a teacher or employer, for example, or swear more around our friends. This applies to speech and behaviour.

Code-switching is more noticeable in people who speak more than one language natively; they will be able to switch between their languages without any effort, and without having to pay attention to each word to make sure they don’t accidentally mix languages. The two languages are, if you like, in ‘different places’ in their mind; when they’re in English mode, they will not accidentally use words from their second language, and vice versa. They will slip up occasionally, just as children will occasionally swear around their parents by accident, but it’s automatic for the most part.

This also applies to speakers of more than one dialect. It’s particularly noticeable in Germany and Scotland, where rural people (even younger people) may speak a dialect so far from standard that people in cities find it difficult to understand them.

They will be able to automatically modify their speech as necessary. This seems to be what some older speakers do in 182