Below is a sample of the Bolton/Worktown corpus data with commentary from Timmis (2010).  Not all the data in the archive is as convincing as this sample - the observers varied in the extent to which they captured linguistic detail.  I have had to wrestle constantly with the problem of what spoken data from the archive seems authentic enough to include in the corpus.  I make no claims to perfection in this regard and can only point to reasonable credentials for the task: I was brought up in Bolton and I have spent a lot of time studying spoken language.  You will, of course, judge the authenticity of the data for yourselves and I would welcome any observations you may have

 

Sample Dialogue

 

A: I think Farr’s buggered now. The Arsenal are a good team.

B: Aye, they get beaten when they play bad.

A: Bassett’s been with them a long time now.

B: Look here, they geet him at the same time as the Wanderers geet Taylor,

because he should have come here, Bassett, but Bolton thought he were too

little so they let him go. Dick Lyn sent him here.

A: Aye, that’s all right but Taylor’s been with Bolton good while, he has

had a benefit.

B: Aye. Art gooin to Blackpool on Monday?

A: Aye. I’st be gooin. I’m taking the child and mother. Well, there’s a few

on us.

 

Commentary

 

The attempt to capture the dialect in this example is not only convincing

to this researcher, born and brought up in Bolton, but reflects accurately

grammatical features described in Shorrocks’ (1999) Grammar of the Dialect

of the Bolton Area. In the extract above, for example, we see the following

dialect features which are described in Shorrocks (1999):

 

•  ‘bad’ as an adverb form

•  ‘geet’ as the past of ‘get’

• ‘were’ as the third person past simple of ‘to be’

• ‘art’ as the second person cliticized form of ‘to be’ with the pronoun

• ‘thou’

• ‘I’st’ as the cliticized form of ‘I shall’

• ‘on’ used where standard English would use ‘of’

 

Photo©Bolton Council