Introduction

We open this chapter concerning the grammar of Birmingham and Black Country (BC) English by reminding readers that, within any dialect speech community, speakers have access (albeit to varying degrees depending on exposure throughout their lives to different varieties) to a range of structures along what we can term a continuum, with in this case the Birmingham and BC local varieties at one end and standard West Midlands English at the other. It is important to remember in this chapter that although we will analyse grammatical structures, we are not compelled in doing so to make constant reference to Standard English (StEng), and that most speakers in the West Midlands are not standard southern English speakers.

A poll run by the BBC Voices site in 2005, reported on by the BBC Black Country Voices site Have Your Say, asked chatroom users which accent was ‘the worst in Britain’: