Cumbrian Language in its Cultural Context

Syntax & Sentence Constructions.

Any sufficiently divergent dialect of English will have aspects of grammar that differ from those of standard English, and Cumbrian is no exception. Most of the differences are to do with pronouns, verb conjugation and what kinds of sentence construction are considered natural and acceptable. Some of the greater points of divergence appear in 19th-century texts but are not noted in 20th-century analyses, suggesting that southern ‘standard’ grammar had started to erode away Cumbrian syntax by that time.

The first thing to note is that the copula works differently in later Cumbrian. The copula is the verb to be, and it is an extremely irregular verb in English, because it has numerous different forms depending on the context it appears in. If you’re talking in the first person singular (that is, talking about just yourself) in standard English, you use the word am. In the second person singular, you use the word are. In the third person singular, you use the word is. In later Cumbrian, these forms are often all levelled to is.

Aa’s nut owwer fain wid it.

I’m not very happy with it.

(Lit. ‘I is not over happy with it’).

Thou’s a laal yan, isn’t the?

You’re a little one, aren’t you?

(Lit. ‘Thou is a little one, isn’t thee?’).

Some locals was commen en gaan...

Some locals were coming and going…

(Lit. ‘Some locals was coming and going…’).

This is mentioned a few times in the Orton survey, and survives to this day in broader speakers. While this is one grammatical feature that is seen by some to mark one out as uneducated, there is nothing about this system that makes it less fit-for-purpose.

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