An Overview of Linguistic Research Concerning Birmingham and Black Country English

Birmingham and Black Country English are both typical of varieties situated on the so-called North–South linguistic divide in England. In both morphological and phonological terms it sits on this boundary, or to be more precise, forms a transition zone which might more reasonably be termed a ‘Midlands’ dialect area.

Birmingham English

Wells's 1982 work on accents of English in the British Isles includes a description of what he terms ‘West Midlands phonology’. Although this work gives a good overview of possible phonological variation in the regional variety, very little previous work has been undertaken on Birmingham English, which remains an under-researched area. The lack of purely linguistic research concerning Birmingham is possibly a reflection on the low status accorded to urban varieties as essentially bastardised and corrupted dialects, not seen as pure and correct forms of dialect with a historical pedigree.

The first sources available to any linguistic investigation from linguists themselves come from Ellis (1889) and his large-scale survey of phonological variation in the British Isles. Ellis visited one location in Birmingham, this being Selly Oak. As what was by then an urban locality, the city was passed over by the Survey of English Dialects (SED) with its emphasis on questioning non-mobile, older, rural males. Since the main aims of the SED were philological and historical, attempting to catalogue earlier lexical variation and the preservation of older phonological and morphological variation among older rural males, Birmingham was not seen as a suitable ground for linguistic investigation.