Idiolect – It’s the way I speak, innit?

I’ve long been aware of idiolect, or personal vocabulary, and fascinated by it. Not so much words or phrases which are unique to somebody – they’d obviously be part of it, but are only a tiny percentage – but what makes your vocabulary yours. Constructions, choice of words, aberrations, idioms. Shibboleths come into it, too, obviously: many English-speaking Canadians pronounce the word ‘about’ as ‘aboat’ for example, to the extent that if I do hear it I find I’m usually listening to a Canadian, or at least a person who has lived in Canada or spent a lot of time with Canadians. Speaking of which, a former colleague of Keith’s, who was a translator and linguistics expert, once said to me that he would always have known that I was East Anglian. Well, OK, I though, but you have been told, and you’re East Anglian yourself, so that’s hardly surprising. Then he went on to ask – at which point I nearly yelled with surprise, since he had no way of knowing that – “How come you’ve spent so much time with Irish people?”

I do draw the line at pulling out a notebook and writing down what people are saying to me, as was the practice of a German room-mate I once had. Still, that was a question of trying to improve her vocabulary in a foreign language, which is perhaps a bit more understandable (I wonder if she still remembers an expression our Welsh room-mate used of the doctor’s receptionist “Oh she’s a real nasty old piece of knitting”?). That Civil Service hostel I inhabited in my middle twenties certainly had a varied and changing population, and my idiolect still carries some of the souvenirs, such as the useful verb ‘to broddle’ (to dig/ poke about in order to find something), as contributed by my Yorkshire-born friend Sheila Mary.

I’m not sure that that one hasn’t passed into the ecolect (what the household speaks), actually. In almost thirty years it’s inevitable that Keith and I have caught usages such as ‘a driddle’, ‘never ask’, ‘meesen’ (mice), ‘chop chop’ and ‘no-brainer; from each other, and coined a few between us. “What is Termite soup?” asked our friend Victor, looking bemusedly at the joint shopping list. But then Victor himself was one of those astonishing people who not only speak several languages, and manage to keep them separate, but can just switch in and out of them. My spoken idiolect has too much mixing of languages in it, and definitely too many bastardisations (even if they are deliberate). Trouble is, these things can be surprisingly memorable. Typos from letters of enquiry, for example, such as musume, everlope and samp. And then there are the ones which start as mis-read words and then stick – that’s a category all on its own, though I know I’m not alone there. Yesterday a friend mis-read ‘Pie of the Day’ as ‘Pig of the Day’ on a menu, for example, and we all agreed that his version sounded much better…