TeesSpeak an Urban Dialect

Urban/Industrial Dialects

I first became interested in my dialect when training as a teacher in North Staffordshire in the early 1960’s. Not many people were able to place it . To some I sounded ‘Geordie’ but others were equally convinced I was a Scouser. I’ve been asked if I was Irish , Welsh and even, on one occasion, if I was from the Isle of Man! When I asserted my credentials as a North Yorkshireman , which, as a Middlesbroughian, I am, I was met with amazed disbelief by one Wessie (West Yorkshire ) student “Bloody queer Yorkshireman wi’ an accent laak that!”



Reading what dialect books were available in those days was completely unhelpful. Any description or discussion of dialect was totally based on an agricultural rural England. It was as if the Industrial Revolution and the consequent urbanisation had never happened. I recognised the dialect I was supposed to be speaking according to the books. It was the dialect I heard in the villages and on the farms to the south of Teesside but it was no longer the speech of Teesside. Not even ocatagenarians in Middlesbrough spoke like that. Also according to some dialect maps, the River Tees was some linguistic iron curtain. So how was it when I walked over the Newport bridge from the Yorkshire side to meet my cousins from the Durham side at Billingham Beck they spoke exactly like me?



When , much later, I read Peter Trudgill’s ‘The Dialects of England’ I was excited. At last I had a context in which I could place my natural speech. The dialect map of England has been radically altered by industrialisation and urbanisation.The urban areas have a language dynamism of their own. These are the ‘new’ dialects which, of course, have in part evolved from the traditional ‘agricultural’ dialects but they reflect a different culture and a different reality. The industrial urban areas drew in people not only from their own immediate hinterlands but also from every corner of the British Isles. In the workplaces and in the closely packed terraced streets Irish folk now spoke with East Anglians with Cornish with Welsh with Scottish etc. as well as with those from the immediate locality.



TeesSpeak is, I believe such an ‘urban dialect’. Obviously it has close links with the Durham and Tyneside speech to the north, itself an industrial dialect so closely associated with the coal mining industry it is often called ‘Pitmatic’ To the south TeesSpeak meets and, intermingles with, the traditional speech of Cleveland (North East Yorkshire) and still retains some vocabulary from that dialect. West of Darlington the dialect changes to Teesdale more closely linked with Cumbrian speech. than that of the lower Tees Valley. Whilst being closely connected with all these ‘neighbours’,to my ear, the Tees Valley dialect is still sufficiently distinctive to be considered a dialect in its own right.