Verbal negation strategies in the Black Country- spatial and temporal variation

Abstract

This paper examines data from the traditional language variety of the Black Country area of the west Midlands of England; an area lying directly to the west of the city of Birmingham. I introduce the strategies which have been used over time to mark negation of modal and auxiliary verbs in Black Country English, drawing on historical and present-day sources and to inform this introduction. I then outline the phonological rules which have governed the two main competing strategies, one of which continues to govern the present-day localised system of negation. I next examine the rise of one strategy over the other and discuss the timeframe in which this might have occurred, using both dialect surveys and literary sources to strengthen my case. I finally examine the sociolinguistic stratification of the local negative forms, and their sociolinguistic significance within the modern speech community. For this last section I draw on a modern corpus of 39 Black Country residents which was collected between 2003 and 2006.