2 Black Country Dialect Literature and What It Can Tell Us about Black Country Dialect Purchased

This chapter examines Black Country dialect literature. I look at the small amount of dialect poetry published in the nineteenth century, most of which appeared in local newspapers, and compare it with earlier protest songs from the late eighteenth century, most of which were collected and written down in the 1960s by the folksingers Michael and Jon Raven (in this sense, it is somewhat like Braber, this volume, and a little like Cooper, this volume). I also look at dialect songs circulated in broadsheet form at the annual wakes in the Black Country, some of which were written especially for the event, to examine what we can say about grammatical change both across time in the Black Country and within the Black Country itself. I compare this kind of work to research concerning indexicality and ask how the two approaches can inform each other (in this sense, it is somewhat like Clark, this volume).

The Black Country is an ‘imagined community' (Anderson 1983) existing in the minds of its residents, situated within the four Metropolitan Boroughs of Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton, to the immediate west of the City of Birmingham. In terms of other areas discussed in this volume, it is closest to the Potteries, discussed in Clark (this volume). It is in the West Midlands, to the west of the area discussed in Braber (this volume). The first nationally known reference to the area now known as the Black Country — though there are earlier highly localised references — came from William Cobbett, author of Rural Rides, grammarian, educator and political dissenter. He journeyed through the region and in 1893 referred to it as the ‘Iron Country' (Cobbett 1893: 287). In 1838 Hawkes Smith had referred to the region as the South Staffordshire Mining District, while by 1860 one of the first known references in print to the ‘Black Country' could be attributed to author Walter White in his 1860 book of travels in the region All Around the Wrekin, though the name had appeared locally in print some twenty years previously.

This history of the name reveals the history of the area. The co-occurrence of coal, iron ore and lime were to prove the making of the blackness to which the name ‘Black Country' refers. It refers not to the ten-yard coal seam of the South Staffordshire coalfield, but to the heavy air pollution caused by the extreme density of drop forges, smithies and foundries in what was a very small area.

Today the term ‘Black Country' has enjoyed a resurgence as an area in heavy post-industrial decline seeks to move forward and attract business and tourism to the area. What was once a stigmatised label for some is now actively employed by borough councils including Sandwell, Dudley and Wolverhampton, by government agencies, and crucially, by residents themselves, in constructing a sense of region and of language. Figure 2.1 shows the Black Country flag, created in 2012 in a competition run by the Black Country Living Museum by twelve-year-old Gracie Sheppard from Stourbridge. The museum's website (https://www.bclm.co.uk/) reports that the flag design

was inspired by Elihu Burrit, the American Consul to Birmingham who described the region as ‘black by day and red by night'. With the chains showing a typical product manufactured in the region. The white symbol in the middle represents the Redhouse glass cone and it's [sic] glass making heritage.

It was first used for the inaugural Black Country Festival in 2013, which is now an annual event. The Black Country Society was founded in 1967, and the Black Country Museum in 1978. In 2013 the Black Country Festival was launched, with financial backing from the borough councils of Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton. This is a weekend-long summer celebration of the region with activities and entertainments from displays of local industry (glassblowing, chainmaking) to poetry, comedy and spoken-word evenings, and it includes 14 July, which has been declared Black Country Day.

Commodification of the dialect and imagery of the region is also rising. Black Country T Shirts launched in Cradley Heath at the end of the 2000s and is now a successful face-to-face and online business in Dudley selling Black Country merchandise in the region and much further afield. Figure 2.2 shows the design on one of their t-shirts.

The dialect associated with the region is a Midlands dialect, viewed by many as conservative, though as Asprey (2007) points out, the area has long had in-migration from other areas of the UK, notably Wales, Ireland, Shropshire and Worcestershire. Current migration from around the UK, as well as Commonwealth countries and the EU, means that the dialect is undergoing change and some levelling. Clark and Asprey (2013) list its major features. Phonologically it is north of what Wells (1982) refers to as the historical foot/strut split, though many speakers now do have some kind of split, with the strut value ranging within the range [u ~ y~ a~ d]. It is definitively north of the bath/tRap split, with the Southern value of bath as [a:] parodied as not Black Country. In morphological terms, traces of the [ns] negative marker, yielding forms like |k.Dno| for the negative form of modal can, were reported in the Survey of English Dialects (Orton and Barry 1971: 1054) but are now moribund. The common negation strategy for auxiliary and modal verbs is younger; it relies on ablaut negation, and is heavily indexicalised, featuring on t-shirts, mugs, tea-towels and used in Facebook groups in stock phrases like ‘Black Country ay we' (this is the newer negative form of the verb be - ‘aren't we', which marks negation using ablaut). The dialect still contains, though at decreasing levels, [n] for present tense verbs (typical of Midlands dialects), [n] for adjectival marking in phrases like ‘a boughten cake' for a shop-bought cake, and [n] for noun plurality, in phrases like ‘flen' for fleas and ‘peasen' for peas. All three features have been used in the texts I discuss, even though Asprey (2007) shows that in her sample all three are getting rarer in the present-day variety. The present analysis is therefore examining an earlier and, in many ways, more distinct variety, further away from Standard English norms. Such distance and difference can become tools of the dialect literature writer, in that they can add social class, gender, regional and attitudinal information about a character. They also lend themselves to the aims of the producer of indexicalised goods for consumption; a process now closely entwined with the production of dialect literature. The danger for the dialectologist in using such sources as evidence of actual production is clear: presence of a variable in the text is not proof of its presence in the speech community.

The theoretical underpinnings and aims of this chapter are set out in (1) and (2).

Sebba (2009) as well as Androutsopoulos and Juffermans (2014) have drawn on terms used by Kloss (1967) to suggest that Ausbau, a process whereby linguistically similar varieties diverge as a result of elaborations of functions and resources in society, can be used in a social practice account of spelling. That is, that respelling the Black Country dialect to make it more distinctive could be seen as a choice planned by members of a speech community for various ends — to show distinctions of identity, to differentiate the dialect from another dialect, or simply to make it distinctive as a means of attracting attention (as writers have done) and to make money (as institutions like the Black Country Museum undoubtedly do with the merchandise they sell). We might go further and suggest that an enregisterment of moribund or declining forms remains useful to authors and others marketing the imagined Black Country (museums, musicians, clothing and accessory manufacturers) even when they are no longer a core part of the usage of all the speech community. I demonstrate that some features used in my sample are still in use in the speech community now, and that others feature more consistently than the linguistic record would predict.

Shorrocks (1996) makes a crucial distinction between dialect literature and literary dialect (also discussed in several other chapters in this volume, including the Introduction). The first is literature written for an audience which speaks that variety; the second not necessarily so. In the Black Country there is a history of both forms, though the tradition of representing Black Country voices in mainstream literature is not as embedded as it is in many regions, for example, Yorkshire or Lancashire. Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler is the earliest author to represent Black Country voices to a wider audience and used a small amount of literary dialect to do so; though little known now, she was popular during her lifetime (1860—1929). Her novels included Cupid’s Garden (1897) and Concerning Isabel Carnaby (1898), a novel that won wide public acclaim; by 1899 the book was in its fifteenth edition and 40,000 copies had been sold. The novel was translated into French and German and a Braille version was also produced. She also wrote A Double Thread (1899), which The Daily Graphic named ‘The Novel of the Year', and The Farringdons (1900). More widely known are works from the second half of the twentieth century by authors such as Meera Syal's Anita and Me (1997), Anthony Cartwright's Cinderheath quartet (Cinderheath being a covername for his native Dudley) (2004, 2010, 2013, 2017), and the novels of Paul McDonald, centred on Walsall (2001, 2004, 2008).

Dialect literature is arguably more consistently represented now in the Black Country than at any other time in the region. Since the term Black Country became more widely popularised in the middle of the nineteenth century, pieces by local poets and writers have appeared in local newspapers at infrequent intervals. At the same time, chroniclers of the region and interested laypeople began collecting broadside songsheets from wakes and fairs. These were written versions of songs, sometimes written to commemorate the wake (festival day) itself. The English Broadside Ballad Archive (online) describes their genesis:

In its heyday of the first half of the seventeenth century, a broadside ballad was a single large sheet of paper printed on one side (hence ‘broad-side') with multiple eye-catching illustrations, a popular tune title, and an alluring poem — the latter mostly in black-letter, or what we today call ‘gothic,' type.

Although they are mostly written in Standard English, direct speech from the characters is sometimes represented as dialect speech, making these a source of literary dialect. The broadsheet songs often receive a second audience when they are reprinted in local history magazines like the Blackcountryman (this being the quarterly, subscription-only journal of the Black Country Society) and the Black Country Bugle. This latter is also a local-interest publication, though it combines present-day news with historical interest pieces, old photographs, local recipes and archaeological reports.

The sources used for this study were selected precisely because they feature the use of literary dialect. They come from sources where the authors were more used to writing Standard English (in the case of Bartlett, this poem is his only dialect poem), or used literary dialect for effect (as in the case of Christie Murray, whose narrator thinks in Standard English but whose dialogue is reported in dialect). They do, however, blur the edges between the two categories. The last source, Summer's End, has a child narrator whose inner monologue is for the most part robustly Standard English, but segues on occasion into Black Country dialect. The blurring at the edges of the two categories confirms their use but does indicate that some writers' own use of Standard English might not be categorically and cleanly separated from their use of dialect. Indeed, there is much in the very small sample examined here which does not tally with the words of Taavitsainen and Melchers (1999: 14), who assert that

[in] fiction nonstandard forms are mostly found in dialogues and they are used as powerful tools to reveal character traits or social and regional differences; that is what they ‘do' in texts. Thus the function of nonstandard language in literature is to indicate the position and status of the character, and often such features are used for comical purposes to release laughter. It is mostly the low and the rural that are presented as speakers of nonstandard; humorous parts are attributed to minor characters and nonstandard language to side episodes.

This remark is true for some but not all of the data sources, which I now introduce and discuss.

I have taken texts from time points across the span of three centuries to examine the features that are represented in dialect literature and ask questions about how stable Black Country is as a variety, how it might have changed, and why. I also examine the issues surrounding the use of dialect literature as a source of linguistic knowledge in relation to morphological structure and set down some caveats and challenges for researchers going forward with such research. Data sources are gathered from six different pieces of writing. They span dialogues, songs, poems and novels. Literature written by Black Country authors is sparser than it is in other areas investigated, such as Newcastle upon Tyne and Yorkshire (see, for example, Maguire, this volume; Cooper, this volume). It appears more plentiful, though, than in areas such as the East and North Midlands (see Braber, this volume; Clark, this volume; Hodson, this volume). Dating the literature itself becomes hard when that literature is a song, as I will discuss in the final section of this chapter. Songs can become unmoored from the context and purpose for which they were written. This may lead to a change in content where morphological forms are concerned.

The texts I have chosen span the 1800s—2000s. They are set out in Table 2.1.

The texts all count as dialect literature. The first text is a four-line dialogue on voting choices which appeared in the Morning Herald in 1817. The Morning Herald was founded in 1780, and was initially a liberal paper aligned with the Prince of Wales, but later became aligned with the Tories, ceasing publication in 1869 (Oliphant 1892: 228). Martin Danvers Heaviside is a pseudonym of Matthew Davenport Hill, the brother of Reginald Hill, inventor of the Penny Post. He was a regular contributor of satirical content to various newspapers and quarterlies. Born in Birmingham, he later became recorder for that city and a criminal law reformer. The content of the excerpt is satirical and refers to an attempt by the Whig Lord Thomas Foley, contrary to his father's wishes, to stand for parliament in 1816 as MP for Worcestershire against the eventual MP, Henry Beauchamp Lygon (History of Parliament 2018).

The second is a song which was first distributed in the 1820s in broadsheet form following the Corn Laws passing into statute. It is number 1331 in the Roud Folk Song Index, and was recorded by several Midlands artists, including notably Roy Palmer, the West Midlands historian, author and folk musician. It concerns a riot on the Earl of Dudley's estate in which many of his workers ran through Dudley town centre damaging property in protest at inflated corn prices. The version I deal with here was transcribed from the singing of a labourer working at the roadside in Dudley in 1880 by W. H. Duignan, and republished by Jon Raven (1965). Duignan, then, rendered the words into print and can be seen as responsible for orthographical choices and accuracy.

F. R. Bartlett was a Bilston doctor who lived his whole life in the town and would have been witness to the severe deprivation there and the cholera epidemic of 1832. It concerns the death by freezing of a small boy on his way home from school. The story made headline news and is said to have affected Bartlett so badly that he wrote the verse as a reaction to it. The poem is the only one to be written in dialect in a large self-published volume of verse otherwise in Standard English, which he called Flashes from Forge and Foundry.

A Capful o' Nails by David Christie Murray is the tale of nailmakers in West Bromwich seeking to escape the truck system whereby they buy raw materials from a ganger or gangmaster and sell the finished nails back to that same gangmaster at a very low and non-negotiable price. Although it was local journalist Christie Murray's first novel, it achieved only limited local success despite having a London publisher. It is dialect literature, being told through the first-person narratorial lens of the protagonist's son, watching his father seek to organise industrial action and ultimately die in the process.

The next source is a verse poem dealing with a cockfight in Bilston (the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act in 1849 made cockfighting illegal but it remained hugely popular in the Black Country as elsewhere, and there is an area of Wolverhampton called Fighting Cocks). It was written down in the Bilston Almanac in 1923. The Bilston Almanac began in 1872 and was a trade directory mixed with songs, poems and local news which appeared for sale annually, but the song dates from some time in the 1830s. It uses many dialect features, though the collector and the person they collected it from are both unknown and so discussing it is problematic.

Perhaps the least canonical of the texts is the last. Archie Hall's writing style does not divide the narratorial voice into Standard English usage and those of characters into dialect usage. Indeed, it is written as a ‘coming of age' novel about a boy of thirteen after the Great Depression of the 1930s, contemplating his future in a declining Black Country. He is drawn to life as a bargeman, and spends some time working as a glassblower, but decides to return to school to finish his education on the advice of his friend Gyp, a war veteran and anarchist who spends time in and out of jail and tries to convince the young protagonist that work in the Black Country will no longer be easy to find, and that formal education might offer an escape route. Although the concentration of dialect features rises in first-person dialogue, the narrator's own voice is non-standard throughout, and it is not possible to say that the novel is literary dialect.

Buchstaller (2006) reports that covert and overt attitudes to variants differ greatly for quotative go. Similarly, informant attitudes in Asprey (2007) to dialect in the Black Country were mismatched. Informants would misreport use/non-use, particularly of variants they considered stigmatised. Thus three informants categorically denied ever using the third-person subject pronoun [s:] but used it at interview many times. Conversely, some informants reported that they used dialect features frequently but did not use these at interview or during discussions with other speakers post-interview. It is worth bearing in mind the caveats that apply to collecting speech in communities whose speech is stigmatised, and worth considering whether singers changed their variety, or whether collectors ‘tidied up' speech as they wrote it down.

I draw on the related concepts of indexicality (Silverstein 2003) and enregisterment (Agha 2003) to discuss what we can reliably infer about Black Country grammar from historical sources. Silverstein (2003: 194) explains that indexical order is

the concept necessary to showing us how to relate the micro-social to the macro-social frames of analysis of any sociolinguistic phenomenon. … Such indexical order comes in integral, ordinal degrees, that is, first-order indexicality, second-order indexicality, etc., in the following general schema of dialectic: any n-th order indexical presupposes that the context in which it is normatively used has a schematisation of some particular sort, relative to which we can model the ‘appropriateness' of its usage in that context. At the same time, there will tend to be a contextual entailment — a ‘creative' effect or ‘effectiveness' in context — regularly produced by the use of the n-th order indexical token as a direct (causal) consequence of the degree of (institutionalised) ideological engagement users manifest in respect of the n-th order indexical meaningfulness.

Put concisely then, indexical order is the application of a schema to a linguistic form. Should extra meaning be layered onto an existing schema such that the linguistic form accrues a different primary meaning, Silverstein proposes that we call such an order n+1.

Agha uses the term enregisterment to label a ‘linguistic repertoire differentiable within a language as a socially recognised register', which has come to index ‘speaker status linked to a specific scheme of cultural values' (2006: 231). These related though different theoretical tools help to explain the assignation of meaning to arbitrary forms by speakers and to explain the emergence of a recognisable ‘way of speaking' or register which can be associated with a social group. Studies conducted previously both in the UK and elsewhere have argued that the literary language of dialect literature can be a useful source for determining which aspects of a dialect have become enregistered. Beal (2009) examines Geordie and Sheffield dialects. Cooper (2013, 2015) examines Yorkshire. Honeybone and Watson (2013) examine Liverpool, while Clark (2013) examines Black Country and Hermeston (2014) examines Geordie through the performance literature of the music hall. Many other chapters in this volume also address these issues (e.g. Beal, Braber, Clark, Cooper, Crowley and Honeybone).

I present evidence here that there is a Black Country dialect which has become a recognisable register to the people living both inside and outside the Black Country area. I also argue that certain features of the dialect are indexicalised, though the orders at which they are indexicalised vary according to the age and class of speaker, and indeed whether that speaker is inside or outside the Black Country area.

The variables chosen for this study were all identified in Asprey (2007), in which I asked informants to respond to a twenty-part questionnaire reporting on usage gleaned from Contemporary Humorous Localised Dialect Literature (CHLDL) books (Honeybone and Watson 2013), literature, poems, recordings and internet glossaries over time. In addition, the features asked about had been attested in previous studies of the Black Country, including Higgs (2004), Howarth (1988) and Manley (1971). The village of Himley had also been included in the Survey of English Dialects because it was on the rural south-western edge of the Black Country. The variables of interest are explained and exemplified in Table 2.2.

In all cases, the chosen written sources were consulted for the presence or absence of these features and the distribution noted. Any alternative possibilities for the variants were also gathered. The results are given and discussed in the next section.

2.8. Results

The other variants are all attested in the sample and many appear highly stable across time. This indicates one of the problems of doing historical linguistics by examining written sources. Not only is the sample small, but the aims of those writing literature for entertainment may be at direct odds with the aims of descriptive linguists seeking to track variants across time and observe speaker use. The presence of variants in such texts is no guarantee that they are in common use in the speech community at that time. In the Black Country this is linked to another issue, which is that variationist linguistics in the UK came late to urban areas affected by migration and thus not ‘pure enough' for study. There is a dearth of spoken language to compare features to. Indeed, Taavitsaainen and Melchers capture this well when they refer to the ‘dark ages of dialectology' (1999: 14). We can say that the variants used were known to the writers of the time and are very possibly intended to represent speech in the region at that time. All of our authors are familiar with the dialect they portray; however, this familiarity may be negotiated given that Hill, for example, was studying law at the time the poem was written, and Bartlett had studied medicine. Nevertheless, both had ties to the region: Hill returned to the family home at Kidderminster after coming down from university and Bartlett returned to live and work in Bilston for the rest of his life. It seems unlikely that they had no contact with speakers of the dialect at all — indeed their professions and domestic life could hardly have precluded contact with some speakers of the dialect. Although Archie Hall left the Black Country to study, his severe depression coupled with his homesickness meant that he later returned to it, and indeed has spoken at length about his relationship with the dialect in a BBC documentary which he filmed in 1974, titled Archie Comes Home. Similarly, David Christie Murray, although he went into the army at eighteen and later became a journalist, reporting all over Europe, spent his formative years until eighteen in West Bromwich, and indeed spent much of his journalism career working on local papers like the Wednesbury Advertiser and the Birmingham Morning News. These authors, then, were professionals who nevertheless had more contact with their home region than many who are educated out of their first variety. It is not possible to say who composed the first versions of The Brave Dudley Boys, or indeed The Battle of Bilston, but since one concerns local farmers and the other cockfights, it is unlikely that the composers moved in high social circles at all times. In their form, therefore, and their composition as poem and song, these pieces differ from the literature in terms of the speakers who composed them. It is likely that the prose pieces were composed by those whose variety at work was closer to the standard, and that the song was sung and the poem read and recited by those whose first variety was Black Country.

There is also the dimension of class to examine. This is hard to do because some texts allow little interpretation of class. Dudley and Stourbridge in 1817, for example, were both growing towns, though Stourbridge was at the time less industrialised than Dudley. It is hard to make sense of any class comment Danvers Heaviside might be offering, though it is clear that some difference of stance or opinion is implied in his comic couplet:

Dudley Man. ‘Oi say, surree, hew dust thee vowt for?'

Stourbridge Man. ‘I caw tell — I've not made up my moind.'

Dudley Man. ‘Whoysna vowt for —? Thur best feller ee the wurrld; damned his own feyther at foiv' 'ear ode'!

The small sample of older Black Country texts I present here does, I argue, offer us some evidence concerning which features were in use and which are now known to be representative of the region. Even in 1817 the ablaut negative forms of the verb are present in Heaviside's parody text given above. The only texts which allow serious class analysis or indeed any other robust comparison are those with multiple voices and of a greater length. The Battle of Bilston has only one narrator, but they give no indication as to their class. There is also only one change from third-person narration to reported speech, though it does encapsulate a change from a more standard negation structure to a less:

Yet that Darlas'on cock was a good 'un,

He was red as a sodger's coat.

And the way he went at the other,

Made the Bils'on men change their note.

For he pecked like a miner a-holin',

And struck clean and straight with his spurs,

‘By Christ' said ‘Old Bull's Head' ‘he's a true un,

And let him say he binna, wot dares.'

But the Bils'on cock warn't yet beaten

He was steel to the very backbone

And with a blow on the head, his opponent

On the turf he dropped dead as a stone.

The change between the more recognisable negation of warn't (which is still used in the area today and exists on a cline with [wa:nt ~ wa:, ~wo:] and the older [bins] is clear, but from such scant evidence it is hard to say what it can tell us about age or spatial distribution.

Still harder to interrogate is the even older version of Brave Dudley Boys, though its structure reveals many now-moribund features of the dialect:

Toims they bin moighty queer, Wo boys! Wo!

Toims they bin moighty queer, Wo boys! Wo!

Toims they bin moighty queer, for the fittle is sa very de-ar,

And it's O! The brave Doodley boys! Wo boys! Wo!

We bin a-marchin up and de-own,

Fur to pull the housen de-own.

The difficulty of comparison is made plain in the lack of opportunity for a negative verb — as a protest song the majority of the verse is about positive (illegal) action and does not contain negative polarity.

Bartlett's Collier's Story is a rich source of data, revealing the consistency of the [ns] negative marker, the existence of a-prefixing with the continuous and perfective aspects, and the use of third-person subject female [s:]:

Well! One day las' Janooary,

Arter trudgin' miles around

Seekin waerk— in' vain as nary

Such a thing sir, c'ud be found,

Tho' fer wicks un wicks tergether

Norra single stroke ah struck

Till ah 'gan a-thinkin w'ether

Fate w'ud ever turn me luck

An ah thus a'bin a'playing orrl the time, right up ter now—

Burras ah were jes' a-sayin

It soo 'appened sir, as 'ow

On that day last Janooary

Ah'd returned wum, tired quite

W'en our little wench there Mary,

W'ot is lookin' thin un w'ite,

Cum a-runnin in a-cryin

Bob's bin sent back from the Schule,

An' ee conna walk — ee's lyin'

On the path be th'owd pit pule.

More useful as a source is Christie Murray, whose novel gives us the nailers and those who finance the nail trade, the merchants. Both groups speak nonstandard English, but the merchants live luxurious existences, attending local political events, living in large houses with servants and carriages, and taking up musical instruments for pleasure. One such character is Mr Brambler, a kind and upright merchant who seeks to support the protagonist's father in challenging the corrupt pricing system. His language is more standard than that of Mr Sim the ganger, whom Mr Brambler challenges:

‘This is a black business' said Mr Brambler, ‘and I'm bent at getting at the bottom on it. I suppose you've got some kind of a notion as to whose hand is on it?' … ‘may I ask if your ideas pints anywheer in the direction of Quarrymoor?'

Mr Brambler uses non-standard on for ‘of', has two clear instances of Black Country phonology in the square and choice sets (anywheer and points) and uses third-person plural verbal [s] in pints. In this he is very different from Mr Sim the ganger, who is only ever represented as using Black Country morphology, and even from the protagonist's morally upright, self-taught father, who aspires to a better life for his children and fellow workers. The narrator is clear that his father can style-shift, and indeed we see this when he starts to talk to workers and suggests a strike:

‘We'em goin' to get up a bit of a strike.' Father always spoke with a broader accent to men of his own class than he used in talking to educated people like the doctor, or the parson, or the district visitors, who were the only decent people who came our way.

‘We'em goin' to get up a bit of a strike,' he said.

‘Bin you?' said old Blowhard, swinging round to his little anvil, and raining a shower of tinkling blows on the hot iron. ‘Then yo' can count me out on it.'

‘I mek bold to say,' said my father, ‘as theer's no white men i'the world at this minute as is trod down like we be.'

‘Trew for thee, ode lad,' said Blowhard, wheezing away over his anvil. ‘But I'm none for helpin' the thieves to rob us. I'd as lief goo an' play as anybody, but wheer's the grub to come from? I remember the last strike thirty 'ear ago. We'd been at play seven wiks, an' … I'd ha' gi'en all my right o' man for a bit o' tommy.' (1896: 18)

We see here use of verb levelling by the protagonist's father to em, use of we for object pronoun second-person plural, as well as Black Country relativiser as for who. This shift is typical of the narrator's father throughout the novel, and Blowhard's speech typifies all other working men.

A more nuanced source is the multivoiced novel Summer's End, which does reveal more about age-related variation, as well as much about class variation. The protagonist gets four weeks' work as an assistant in a glassblowers one summer and befriends the glassblower he is there to assist:

‘Do we make good glass round here?' I asked. ‘Is it well thought on?'

‘'Tic best in the world', he answered, ‘bar none. Stourbridge cut glass — Black Country table glass. There comes no better.'

I was pleased.

‘Ah'm glad o' that,' I said sincerely, ‘ah really am glad.'

A smile broke his stern face up and made him look years younger.

‘Ah'm pleased that yo'm glad, young 'un,' he answered, ‘that's the nicest thing ah've heard said in a long time. Yo' listen to me, — come into glass when you leaves school. Thing's will have picked up . come here wi' me and Is'll teach you all that I know. My word's on it.' He took a sandwich from his fittle bag and bit on it. ‘Hasn't got any snap with thee?' he asked surprised, ‘no fittle to chew on?' He dug into his fittle bag, pulled out a couple of thick wedge sandwiches and handed them to me. ‘Get this down thee', he ordered. ‘There's enough here for the two on us.' (1976: 72)

This passage shows not only the young narrator's ability to style-shift, but older features of speech. The glassblower uses thee forms, second person [s] verb endings in the present tense and the older verb paradigm of have [hasnt] before thee. Asprey (2007) also found all these forms extant in the speech of the oldest speakers in the Southern Black Country.

Although the texts vary in length and narrative style and have authors whose immersion in the dialect is likely to have varied across the lifespan, they share a remarkable number of morphological features. This does not in itself imply that the variants are in active use at the time the writers wrote down the texts (with the likely exception of The Brave Dudley Boys, which was performed and transcribed). The writers, though, seek to capture something of the dialect, for narrative means and for literary effect. All writers are (as far as they can be traced) well-grounded in their communities and knowledgeable about the dialect, in that their accounts of how it is formed chime well together. In morphological terms the two stand-out suggestions are that the verbal negation system by ablaut which is now so enregistered in the region is variably emergent at best in these sources. Tellingly, it is the Stourbridge man in Danvers Heaviside's early work whose speech is represented as containing ablaut negation, while the Dudley man uses possibly the older strategy of [ns] — the word whoysna might be interpreted as why doesna (th)a, though this is extremely ambiguous. Across the rest of the corpus this ablaut negation then remains hidden, restricted only to [nt] and [t] forms, until it surfaces again in Hall (1976). More startling is the continued presence of the older [ns] strategy across time in Bartlett's poem, Christie Murray's novel and the poem about the cockfight in Bilston. Hill does not include it in the youngest piece of literature in 1976, by comparison. At the other end of the scale of stability, the Midlands form of the subject third-person female pronoun is stable across time. So too is the verbal continuous marker. So, for much of the sample, is noun plural [n].

All pieces contain the female object pronoun [s:], and indeed this is still in widespread use among speakers today. Unusually though, it seems to be little involved in processes of enregisterment. It was recognised by speakers in Asprey (2007) to be local, judged by many to be overtly stigmatised and local, but is not employed by the new wave of merchandise seeking to use enregisterment as a sales tool. The reasons for this are unclear at this stage since the Black Country is one of the few areas preserving the form, the others being Stoke on Trent (Leach 2018) and Shropshire (Hubbard 1960).

Similarly, if action is completive, past tense forms may be preferred over perfective aspect. This means that tracking perfective marker [s] is also difficult. Taken together this means a large volume of songs, poems and prose is needed to say anything meaningful about morphological variation existing or not existing. The same, however, is true for collection of morphology in speech of the present day, and so this does not in itself rule out morphology as a subject for examination, and indeed may tell us much about the development and persistence of Black Country morphological forms.

As far as the features I discuss here are concerned, it seems that for the authors and singers who rendered these versions, many variables were candidates for being indexicalised as representative of Black Country speakers; however, across time, the ablaut negation form of modal and auxiliary verbs begins to win out for authors against [ns] negation, while forms such as [n] for adjectival marker and [n] for noun plural fall from notice or come to index older speech. As for enregisterment, the second aim of this chapter was to discuss who actually enregisters forms. This is a difficult question indeed. Much work on the subject has relied on written sources where the majority of a population had limited access to literacy and a rich oral culture. Much emphasis is placed in current times on poets and novelists. In the case of the Black Country, the lives of Bartlett, Christie Murray and Hill teach us that mainstream publishing houses did not value dialect poetry and prose (Hill's other volumes are better-known and sold more; Christie Murray met with no commercial success; and Bartlett did not write in dialect apart from the piece we examine). I would issue a cautious warning against relying on dialect literature or indeed literary dialect to examine indexicality and enregisterment and a plea that more difficult sources be engaged with. In the present time there are newly emergent spaces which allow those whose focus is not Standard English to write and create (see also Nini, Bailey, Guo and Grieve, this volume). Many Facebook groups testify to the fierce pride and interest of residents and speakers in the language and region of the Black Country while revealing that standards of literacy are varying for residents, and that in their writing they reveal much of the Black Country variety as it is today. Similarly the literary output of these communities in the form of jokes, poems, prose and vocabulary lists lends itself to investigation and puts the emphasis on indexicality back into the speech community.

The Black Country contains folk songs which were written after humorous or noted events (at wakes, fairs, bull baitings, cockfights and wife sales (events at which men discontented with their wives would exhibit them in public as a form of disgrace, and often illegally sell them to another man). It also contains songs written for political reasons. It would be prudent to trace different versions of the songs and chart their changing structures and lyrics. By the time of its 1880 rendition, The Brave Dudley Boys was a protest song in general terms and no longer an anti-Corn Law song. Golez Kaucic (2005) reminds us that when a song gets taken out of context,

the process of losing a contextual function is the opposite of its acquisition . During this process, the song's musical image changes as well. The folk song is not a fossilised structure — which is why its wording or dialect can change in the course of transfer from one carrier to another.

In other words, folk songs, learned as they often were ‘from the singing' of another, were not always subject to rigid standardisation and might be more representative of the time in which they are sung and observed by song collectors than one imagines. Comparing Raven's 1880 version with the 1967 version collected by Charles Parker confirms this: the [n] verbal ending is gone by 1967.

The Black Country was, as I discussed in my introduction, slower to emerge as a recognised area than some other parts of the country during industrialisation such as Tyneside (see Beal, this volume; Hermeston, this volume). The variety is thus slower to be recognised and labelled (this being a step towards enregisterment) and indexical patterns in dialect literature are harder to remark on until later in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century (see Clark 2013 for evidence of emergent enregisterment after 1970). Indexicalisation changes over time, and dialect writing is a rich, though complex, source to attest to this. It can be employed in the quest to understand which morphological features symbolise the Black Country at a given moment, but caution must be used when doing so, for all the reasons this chapter has outlined. Similarly, enregisterment and commodification of the variety occurs now at grassroots level, some of it driven by locals keen to see their variety receive recognition for its difference and vibrancy, some by institutions keen to sell merchandise which chimes with the interests of the speech community. This process also can inform us, but the features which are enregistered are by no means the historically most ‘Black Country' features, as my analysis has shown.