Differences in vocabulary
Because the Doyle family were an intimately related group of people, spanning only two generations, there was relatively little variation in their choice of vocabulary – but still plenty to be of interest! However, we have to be careful not to attribute all the differences we notice to either age or gender. In order to make any generalised claims, we would need to explore these two variables more systematically, by interviewing some men of Karen and Lynnie’s generation and some girls of Stephen and Peter’s generation. If you interview a more varied group of people, you will almost certainly find more variation, which might be along dimensions of age, different regional origins or different social groups etc.

It is also best to let people talk freely and listen to the words they use naturally, rather than necessarily taking their word for what they say they do! On their spidergrams, for the word ‘attractive’, Karen Doyle had written ‘pretty’ and Lynnie had written ‘nice’, Stephen had written ‘fit’, and Peter had written ‘pretty/handsome’ (interestingly chosing two terms normally used for women and men respectively). In the following extract from the family interview, the words highlighted in pink are the ones offered by Karen and Lynnie in front of the boys, those in grey are the ones the boys initially offered in front of the older women, and those in blue are the ones they were eventually encouraged to admit to by Jodie, the interviewer. (The very last one was smothered in embarrassed laughter, and therefore inaudible, because this was clearly not something the boys would normally say in front of women – something a linguist might refer to as a ‘taboo’ word.)

JODIE: All right then, let’s move on.... What did we say for attractive?

WOMAN: Fit.

STEPHEN: Sexy, fit, gorgeous. Can’t think of any more. Fine.

WOMAN: Pretty.

BOY: Pretty.

JODIE: What if you saw someone across the street that you really liked the look of? What would you say to your mates?

STEPHEN: She’s fit, her. I’d better not say the other thing. Yeah, she’s lovely.

JODIE: Would you really say, “She’s lovely?”.

STEPHEN: No I wouldn’t. I’d say she’s fit her. I wouldn’t half Uhmmm! [Laughs] A bit of a ?????? Can’t think of nothing else. She’s fit should get it.

Differences in grammar
Although most of us are conscious of our choice of vocabulary and continue to acquire new items of vocabulary throughout our lives, grammar is usually a more intuitive matter, fixed relatively early in our lives and relatively resistant to change beyond puberty. However, compulsory education, as well as media exposure to speakers from many parts of the English-speaking world, mean that we are all a little more self-consious about our use of English grammar than previous generations would have been.

It may or may not come as a surprise to you to realise that, with very few exceptions, the Doyle family speak Standard British English throughout the interview. This is hardly remarkable, as - however relaxed they seem - they must have been conscious that their conversation was being recorded. (The fact that it is impossible to observe someone ‘behaving naturally’ without affecting what they do or how they do it is sometimes referred to as the ‘Observer’s Paradox’.) The fact that the Doyles speak a fairly standard variety of English makes it relatively easy to write down what they say. But we still face decisions about how to spell some words. For example, we may write ‘wanna’ or ‘dunno’ or ‘innit’ simply to indicate the way that the Standard English phrases ‘want to’ or ‘don’t know’ or ‘isn’t it’ are pronounced. (Even the use of ‘me’ rather than ‘my’, or ‘meself’ rather than ‘myself’, may simply be a matter of accent rather than grammar.) There are also features like ‘does it different than/ to’ rather than ‘does it differently from’, or ‘me and him’ rather than ‘he and I’, which might break some of the rules of written grammar that you were taught in school, but which are common to many varieties of casual speech, regardless of region or even social class.

However, the following grammatical features (which all come from the transcript of the interview with the Doyles) are not classified as Standard British English. A linguist would need to listen to many hours of natural speech to know how typical they are of the local dialect, or even of the speakers concerned (because people do vary their speech according to the situations they find themselves in), but there are systematic patterns in the way they are used by the Doyles.

i) the use of ‘them’ as a determiner
The fact that we have an electronic transcript of the interview makes it easy to search for features like this and compare the speech of different people. It seems that the consistent use of ‘them’ before a noun (ie as a what is sometimes called a determiner) is a feature common to the whole of the Doyle family, but it is never found in the speech of the interviewer Jodie, nor in that of Barbara from the OU, who both use ‘those’ in the same circumstances. It is interesting, though, that Stephen does use ‘these’ on one occasion, so it would seem that, at least for him, ‘these’ refers to things close at hand and ‘them’ to more remote things.

For example:
Stephen?: I think the games were different back in them days to what they are now.

Stephen: ... just talk to them... as though I’m one of them boys.

Lynnie?: So it’s just getting used to all them things that they say... ...them business fellers, they would have a Liverpool shirt on

ii) verb forms
In Standard British English, the verb ‘be’ behaves in an irregular way (with various inflections like ‘am’, ‘is’ ‘been’ etc), but it is interesting to see that both Karen and Lynnie sometimes, although not always, use it as a regular verb (like, for example, ‘walk’ or ‘talk’). This is a feature shared by a number of British English dialects. It may be dying out, however, as neither Stephen nor Peter use it during the interview.

For example:
Lynnie: It doesn’t automatically be cheap, trendy clothes.

Karen: I just be meself.

In Standard English, the first person plural of the past tense of the verb to be is ‘we were’. In many British dialects, however, ‘we was’ is used, and in some dialects ‘I were’, ‘she were’ etc are found.

For example:
Karen?: We was, like, ‘Talk properly!’

In Standard English, the past tense of ‘come’ is ‘came’ but in a number of British English dialects ‘come’ is also used to indicate past events (or, as in the case below, an imaginary situation). This usage may apply to various verbs. Evidence that it is not simply a case of the ‘historic present’ is provided by the fact that it is not normally inflected with the third person singular –s (so here we have ‘come’ rather than ‘comes’), even when the speaker would normally add the –s in the third person singular.

For example:
Peter: Say you went to work in a pub in Widnes and someone come in…

iii) the double negative
The double negative, as in ‘I haven’t got no money’, is a stigmatised feature in English, although it is the normal way of forming the negative in many other languages, including French and Spanish. Because it may take various forms (for example, with ‘nothing’ and ‘nowhere’) and by definition crosses word boundaries, it is the kind of feature that is a little more complicated to search for with a computer. Because it is stigmatised, people may be self-conscious of using it, and may therefore not use it consistently. In the following example, Stephen effectively says the same thing in two different ways a couple of turns later in the same part of the conversation.

For example:
Stephen: Can’t think of any more... Can’t think of nothing else.

iv) the pronoun system
As remarked above, it is hard to say whether the use of ‘me’ as opposed to ‘my’, or ‘meself’ as opposed to ‘myself’, is a matter of grammar or simply pronunciation, and forms like ‘me and him’ as opposed to ‘he and I’ are widespread in casual speech. However, in the Doyle family interview, Peter uses one pronoun form which is only rarely heard in English English, and reflects the Irish influence on both Liverpudlian and New York speech. It is the use of ‘youse’ to indicate the plural of ‘you’ - again, a grammatical feature shared with many other languages.

For example:
Peter: No but me mum and me Auntie Lynnie talk the same, and me and him talk, like, the same as well. It’s that youse come out with different words than us.

v) discourse particles
English has a number of ‘filler’ words, like ‘eh’ or ‘what’ or ‘innit’, which don’t necessarily mean very much in themselves, but indicate how the speaker feels or would like the hearer to respond. In some languages, like Irish and Chinese, there are even more of such expressions, known technically as ‘discourse particles’. Sinagporean English, which draws heavily on the languages of South China, is particularly distinctive in its use of the particles ‘ah’ and ‘lah’. So it was fascinating to hear Stephen in the Doyle family interview using similar expressions in his English. Can this really be the same Chinese influence, as result of all that sea traffic to and from South Asia and Chinese migration into Liverpool. Or is there some other explanation?

For example:
Stephen: ...it was, ah, mad you know, lah.

In your own community you may spot a different set of grammatical features. Look out, for example, for the widespread use of ‘innit’ or of ‘goes’ or ‘like’ to introduce direct speech.

Here’s an example of three different uses of ‘like’ taken from one of Lynnie's speeches in the Doyle family interview:
When I’ve been on holiday with my kids, they’ve only spent a week or something with like a kid from Manchester and Chamonix starts like talking American or she’ll start picking up their accent or talking like them. In America, within like the minute we got there Chamonix was, you know, lived there all her life after just 5 minutes and was talking American and we was like, “Talk properly”, and she was like “Hey Mom”, and I’m like, “No you don’t speak like that Chamonix, talk properly!”.

The pink highlighted instances of "like" indicate a straightforward comparison, as in ‘as if’ or ‘in the same way’. This would be one of the well-established ‘dictionary meanings’ of the word.

The yellow highlighted instances of "like" are what linguists sometimes call a ‘filler’, similar to ‘umm’ or ‘er’.

The grey highlighted instances of "like" represent a relatively new phenomenon in Britain, where ‘be like’ functions to introduce direct speech in the same way as ‘say’ or ‘go’.

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