Re:cognise

Professor Natalie Braber, Programme Leader for the Linguistics:

"Language is really interesting because we all use language every day, and language is constantly changing.

And having a dialect is a really positive thing, speaking your own variety, it's a really important part of your identity of your culture and of your heritage, it makes you who you are.

I started interviewing different people and was doing lots of work with school children and sixth form college students, finding out about their perceptions of local language which are often quite negative, which I thought was quite a shame.

But when I was interviewing people one of the women I interviewed said that miners have a language all of their own her grandfather had been a miner.

So I interviewed a few miners to really talk about the language they used when they were working, the tools that they used the job descriptions the processes.

So in the East Midlands the miners' strike of 1984-85 is still quite a sensitive topic.

Lots of mining groups won't talk to each other, but one thing that all these mining heritage groups have in common is that they want this information to be passed on to younger generations, they're very worried that younger people will know nothing about what coal mining is or what work they did.

So a lot of the work I've been doing is trying to get people to work together and one way of doing that is with working with younger people, but also by engaging other things.

So we've been working a lot with things like poetry, creative writing, art and music, because that's a more sensitive way into quite a touchy topic that's difficult for a lot of people to work with.

One of the miners that I spoke to who did one of the creative writing workshops said that this was the first time he felt he'd been able to write using his own dialect and that was a valid language variety to use, and that to me is a great thing."