Celebrating a New Dialect.

I’ve always been fascinated by dialects, you know, and the UK has had a rich collection of them going back a millennium and beyond. They could be so different even a hundred years ago that a person speaking in one local dialect could be all but incomprehensible to a person from another part of the UK. I even encountered this problem myself when I lived in Northumberland as recently as the late eighties.

But I’ve noticed over the course of my lifetime that they’ve largely been diluted by the spread of universal media, and are now largely replaced by a wide variety of local accents which are relatively easy to understand with a modicum of familiarisation. Most people now use something approximating to Standard English, but with different stresses and variation in vowel sounds and a smattering of buzz words that are more or less universal.

I’m happy to report, however, that one new dialect has defied the trend and gone against the flow. We now have the Football Coach dialect, a fascinating new way of abusing the Mother Tongue that’s become almost as incomprehensible as the traditional regional dialects were. It can be heard nearly every time a football coach is interviewed after a game and either shown on the TV or reported in writing on the news pages. They slaughter the common rules of syntax, appear quite incapable of comprehending the relationship between clauses, employ amusingly inaccurate vocabulary, and almost always use the present tense when describing or commenting on past events. They give the impression that they’re trying to sound important and failing miserably.

So does this disturb me? Well, sometimes it irritates, and sometimes it amuses, and sometimes I give up because I haven’t a clue what they’re trying to say. And when all’s said and done it really doesn’t matter because a game of football is only a game of football and there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the world of professional sport (however much the managers, the media, and the big money interests like to feed the message to the masses that football is the only true religion.)

But it’s still an interesting phenomenon.

(And incidentally, I’m only referring here to coaches whose first language is English. Those coaches – of which there are many – whose first language is something else must obviously be excused. Having said which, have you ever heard Sarina Wiegman being interviewed? She speaks better English than most of the English do, and she’s Dutch.)