That were it: Regional variation in English was/were agreement

Non-standard use of was (1) and were (2) varies geographically within England in terms of the linguistic constraints on their use and any levelling of the verb paradigm towards one form or the other.

In the North of England, we might also expect the Northern Subject Rule to apply, whereby non-standard singular agreement is licensed with full NPs but not pronouns (unless they are non-adjacent to the verb) (Pietsch 2005). The regional picture is, however, muddied by the fact that even analyses of the same dataset have arrived at different conclusions regarding the significance of region in was/were variation within England (cf. Anderwald 2001, 2002 and Szmrecsanyi 2013).

(1)The dogs was energetic. 
(2)He were happy.  

To contribute to our understanding of linguistic constraints on agreement and their role in regional dialect variation, Claire Childs, University of York, presents findings from an ongoing AHRC project, ‘Interactions in Grammatical Systems: North-South Dialect Variation in England’. The talk focuses on data from sociolinguistic interviews undertaken on Zoom with people from one of four English cities that represent different dialect areas: Newcastle upon Tyne (North East), Leeds (Yorkshire), Nottingham (Midlands) and Southampton (South).  

Quantitative analysis shows that was/were agreement is constrained by a range of linguistic and social factors, some of which are common to all of the varieties. However, localised agreement systems are shown to exist even within large areas like Northern England that might have been expected to behave similarly. The results overall highlight the importance of comparative dialectology that moves beyond the frequency of forms across space and examines the nature of linguistic systems that underpin patterns of use.