Brummie Saxons

As my regular reader will know, I’ve been reading Beowulf and Tolkien’s notes on translating it, and something struck me straight away. That Brummie “yow” for you – it isn’t a quaint local quirk at all. It’s a straight hangover from Old English ēow. Tolkien would have grinned at that. He argued that words we think of as homely or rustic are often the unbroken threads of our earliest English. You don’t have to sit in a seminar to hear the echo of the Saxons – you just need to walk into a Birmingham pub.

But let’s be clear: English isn’t Britain’s oldest tongue. Long before the Angles and Saxons rowed over, the island was speaking Brythonic – the ancestor of Welsh, Cornish, and Breton – and Goidelic Gaelic. You still hear them in the names of our rivers, hills, and towns: Avon, Thames, Tor. That’s the deep bedrock. English is the later layer – but it’s the layer most of us live on, and its oldest words are still embedded in dialect.

And Birmingham is Mercia. Not just plonked in the Midlands, but bang in the heart of the kingdom that once overshadowed all the rest. In the 8th century, Offa ruled the show – minting coins, building his dyke, treating with Charlemagne. The Mercians probably enjoyed a bit of heavy metal too – the Oswald Osbert Quartet thundering away, with a young Ozzy as frontman in spirit if not in name. Mercia lost its crown when Wessex muscled in, but language has a longer memory than politics. Mercia may have gone, but its tongue never packed up and left.

The dialect survivals prove it. In the north, bairn for child. In Yorkshire, owt and nowt. In Lancashire and the West Country, thee and thou. And in the Black Country, house pronounced ows, which is closer to Old English hūs than anything you’ll hear at Oxford. All the while, “proper” English went wandering, polished for parliaments and pulpits.

And here’s the laugh. The people who thump their chests about our glorious Anglo-Saxon heritage are usually the same ones sneering at dialects as “lazy.” They don’t realise that the speech they dismiss as sloppy is actually the truest continuity we’ve got – closer to Beowulf than their own received pronunciation. If you want to hear England’s past still alive, don’t go to Westminster Abbey – go to Wolverhampton on a Saturday night. Heritage sounds like “Yow alroight, bab?” not “Rule Britannia.”