THE CLEVELAND DIALECT.*

RARELY has any dialect had such ample justice done to it as that of Cleveland by the Rev. J. C. Atkinson. There are people who collect local words and phrases, and form them into a glossary by simply arranging them in alphabetical order, as children collect butterflies, shells, or pretty leaves, without farther thought as to their nature, formation, or mutual relations, but viewing them solely as curiosities. A cabinet of curiosities is valuable as containing things that need explanation, and as stimulating the inquiring mind to examine into them with the view of sorting and explaining ; but if it remains unsorted and unexplained, it is only a monument of ignorance and indifference. A local glossary which is compiled in this spirit appears to deserve no better name than an unsorted cabinet. it is not without its use, for it holds curiosities which others may arrange ; and it is not to be discouraged, because a store-cupboard full is better than one empty. But its usefulness, even when measured by this low standard, may easily be exaggerated. Single words, though their meaning be defined, are liable to be misunderstood, and still more liable to be referred to wrong sources. It is only when the dialect is treated as a whole, and its words are exhibited in phrases, proverbs, or verses, that any safe conclusions can be based on its phenomena. This is evident in the treatment of a recognized language. English might be made to appear a dialect of Dutch, Danish,French, orLatin, by careful management of the words selected in a vocabulary. And a dialect is a language. That it is seldom reduced to writing, and boasts of no local press, that education spends its powers in treating its distinguishing features as errors of ignorance and eradicating them, cannot deprive it of its character of a local language, possessing a history as ancient and a development as certain as those of the larger languages by which it is surrounded. In fact, philologically speaking, it is often, perhaps generally, more interesting and important than the great languages. Just as the physical sciences know nothing of the centres of civilization, and a typical form of animal or vegetable life may occur in the unexplored centre of Africa or the wilds of Siberia, and new light may be thrown on the succession of geological strata from the coasts of Patagonia or Greenland, so the history of language is often best elucidated from the most obscure districts and the least civilized portions of the population.

But this reminds us that the very name of Cleveland may be unknown to many readers. It is a high tract of moor and glen, extending westwards from Whitby, and sending tributaries northwards to the Tees and southwards to the Derwent ; while the Esk, which enters the sea at Whitby, belongs specially to this district. It is a world by itself, which is not penetrated by railways nor much sought by tourists, where the rural population live to themselves, and have no use for any other than their native dialect. Hence its peculiar importance to the philologist, whose most fruitful fields are those where admixture of foreign elements is smallest. The Rev. J. C. Atkinson, Incumbent of Danby, a parish where nothing but genuine Cleveland is to be heard, and he himself is probably the only individual capable of speaking " pure " English, has appreciated the advantages of his position. That he was not a native of that part of England, but, as he tells us, "born and brought up in one of the Eastern Counties, and translated, a few years after taking my

degree, into the North, first into Berwickshire, then permanently into Yorkshire," was probably, to one gifted with an accurate ear for the apprehension of sounds, really in his favour ; since he had other standards with which to compare the Cleveland dialect.

In the dialectic peculiarities Mr. Atkinson very rightly distin guishes between words actually different, and words apparently different through peculiar pronunciation of certain sounds. This latter point is well worth the attention he has bestowed upon it.

"The vowel and many of the consonantal sounds, as their words were spoken, were entirely different from those of the accredited English standard." Thus the pronunciation of the long i and a is

such that the words which are properly spelt bizen, litle, grave, hofe, are sounded like barzon, laahtle, greeave, heeaf. Attention

to this will save the investigator from the error of admitting into a glossary as a distinct provincial word that which is only a local pronunciation of a well-known word.

The main interest which ordinary students of language will take in the investigation of this Cleveland dialect is contained in the result to which it tends. As might be expected, it is strongly imbued with Scaudinavisms. Its nearest port is Whitby, whose Danish name supplanted the early Saxon Streoneshal h ; and the whole coast of Northumbria, as far south as the Humber at least —all open to the incursions of the Danes—abounds with similar Danish names. That these invaders, penetrating inland, should maintain themselves most pure in the recesses of a hilly region intersected by glens with no thoroughfare is what was to be expected. If Mr. Atkinson had done no more than show us by enumeration of local names and classification of the dialectic words that this is peculiarly the case in Cleveland, he would have deserved our best thanks. And he has executed this part of his task with a thoroughness which is not even dreamed of by ordinary speculators on language. He has taken not the present names of places, but their oldest forms given in Domesday Book, and clenched the argument by the enumeration of the owners of landed property in the district supplied by the same document, whose names prove to be as Danish as their possessions. How rarely do speculators on names take the trouble to discover their oldest known forms, even when these are easily discoverable in old local deeds, or in the priceless Domesday Book! The result of the examination of local names is that

"On the whole, there are in the above list 119 names of places as given in Domesday, of which 38 end in by, 6 in torp, 12 in inn, 3 in clif 2 in borg, 2 in dale, 1 in grif, 3 in al, all of which are indisputably of Danish origin And also 2 in ham, 39 in ton. Of the latter, it is only necessary here to say, that while it is a mistake to assume ton to be an exclusively Anglo-Saxon termination in names of places (tun being also an Old Norse word, and still used in Iceland in connection with a farmer's residence), in not a few cases among these Cleveland names in Sun or ton, we find the same prefixes as are met with in other names of

undoubted Danish origin and etymology And thus, on the whole, we come to something like the conclusion that at least 75 per cent. of the Domesday names of Cleveland localities is certainly Old Danish, and very possibly a larger proportion still."

An estimate of the number of ordinary words derived from Scandinavian and from other sources, taken from the glossary,

yields a somewhat similar result—that 13 per cent. are AngloSaxon, 44 Scandinavian, 19 common to the two ; the remainder being from Celtic, French, Latin, and other uncertain sources. This estimate is based on an examination of one small portion only of the glossary, but may serve as an approximate average of the whole.

But there are great difficulties which beset the attempt to derive our language, or any dialect of it, from prevailingly Scandinavian sources. The most serious of these is found in the difference between the German (including the Saxon and Frisian) and the Scandinavian definite article. The former is always a distinct word prefixed to the substantive. The latter is an affix attached to the end of the substantive. This radical difference of formation is an easy test by which any dialect may be referred to the one or the other stock. Neither the current English, nor any dialect of it, nor its older forms, exhibit any trace of the Scandinavian postfixed article. How, then, can we venture to claim a Scandinavian origin for any English dialect, since this essential Scandinavian characteristic is wanting? Must not the Scandinavian words, however numerous, be regarded as intruders, obliged to conform to the Anglo-Saxon grammatical system already in possession of the ground ? Mr. Atkinson deals well with this all-important point. He brings to bear upon it his knowledge of the Danish dialects, and shows that the Scandinavian article, though appearing in the form of an affix in all the literary languages of the North, nevertheless is a prefixed word in some dialects which retain the older forms of speech, especially those of Jutland, the very region from which the invaders would most easily reach England ; and argues that this article is the older one,—a conclusion which gains probability Irons the fact that it is even now exclusively used in both Danish and Swedish before an adjective, and only abandoned for the other where the substantive stands without an attendant adjective. If this be true, the article forms no radical distinction after all between the German and Scandinavian tongues. We think he might go further. Since these two stocks of language betray the closest affinity in their inflection and their formations generally, and their roots are for the most part identical, their separation from one another cannot be relegated to a dim, prehistoric antiquity. At a period, therefore, remote as regards the history of nations, but not distant in that of language, they were one ; and if they then had a definite article, it must have been one of the two in question. The unanimous testimony of the German languages and the partial testimony of the Scandinavian in favour of the prefixed article cannot be set aside by the only partial use of the affix by the Scandinavians. But it ought further to be con sidered that the definite article is after all only a late device in language. Sanskrit knows it not, nor does the Greek of Homer, nor Latin; and it is only very partially used in Gothic and Anglo Saxon. When it was required, it was only the demonstrative pro noun which assumed that function ; and a pronoun, like an adjective, may either precede or follow its substantive. The Scandinavians preferred generally to affix, the Germans to prefix, their pronoun; and what was at first optional came to be the fixed habit of the language, a habit which might in certain dialects never be adopted. Thus the hard-and-fast line which would make the Jutlandera pure • Scandinavians, and their neighbours the Frisians and Angles pure Germans, and regards their respective origins as distinct, is really only an invention of philologists who generalize confidently on too narrow preinisses.

Our observations have been based mainly on the suggestive matter contained in the introduction : not that we have not thoroughly sifted the glossary itself, but because the conclusions to which it leads lend themselves more easily to such discussion as we can here give than the isolated specimens we could present from

the glossary. We regret not to be able to present examples of the manner in which words are treated in the fatter; this is scarcely possible on account of the fullness of the articles, and the numerous abbreviations adopted, which would render the extracts barely intelligible.

It must be observed, in conclusion, that although this is primarily a glossary of the dialect of the small district of Cleveland only, which perhaps presents our Northern speech in greatest fullness, yet it represents much more; and the native of any of the counties north of the 1Iumber and Ribble will find countless words and expressions which lie recognizes as those of the country of his birth. Not till the dialects of other Northumbrian districts are treated with equal fullness and equal mastery of English and Scandinavian philology, can the precise relations of these dialects to one another be accurately settled.