During the last few years I have been collecting local dialect words and saving them for posterity. This is not as easy as it sounds, as its difficult for locals to identify words that they commonly use as being dialect, its only when you mix with others and they look at you in a quizzical manner that you question what you have said!  Some time ago I attended a local dialect class run by John Levit who gave me the derivation of some of the words and I was surprised to learn that most were Medieval or Old English and had just stopped being used elsewhere Some were Scandinavian and since this area was on the borders of Danelaw its not surprising that some words still exist.

Another interesting feature of the north staffs dialect is the use of ne at the end of the word to make it negative.  ie Thee shutne goo dinethear sirree, theyt beyt dooin thesell a mischeyf.  Common words that have a ne tagged to them are Shutne, Wutne, Conner (should not, would not, cannot)

I have never heared this anywhere else but of course is used in Latin in the same way. I would be interested to hear other peoples views about this.

Pete Turner