One of the things I really like and am interested in are the different quirks and vagaries of every day life and language. Whilst countries such as France celebrate their regions and differences, too often in the U.K. such things are watered down or ignored leading to widespread ignorance of ancient traditions, foods and cultures.
A rare exception to this though is the different term for the humble bread roll one might have around midday. Although the breads themselves can and do change, people tend to use different words for often near identical products.
‘Cob’ advocates clash with ‘barm’ defenders, while ‘bap’ supporters grapple with ‘bun’ defenders. But scientists have finally settled the debate, with the plain “bread roll” moniker being revealed as Britain’s most popular term.
Data from more than 14,000 native English speakers, gathered via a questionnaire from university academics, was used to compare the UK’s regional lexicon differences.
Researchers at Lancaster, York and New York universities, also probed the thorny issues of where the north-south divide in England which in many ways can be summaries by what the correct name is for an evening meal.
Overall, bread roll was the favourite primarily due to its near universal popularity in southern England, southern Wales and Scotland, according to the research.
‘Bun’ was the favourite of the North East, while ‘bap’ dominated in north Wales. Other parts of the north of England were divided up into a patchwork of different labels.
‘Cob’ rules supreme in the East Midlands, with a hotspot around Nottingham and Derby, while ‘bap’ is king in the West Midlands, and ‘barm’ dominates in Manchester and Liverpool.
Barm is confined to the North West, comprising an area that runs from Manchester westward to Liverpool and northward into the western half of Lancashire (from Blackpool to Preston),” the researchers say.
Tea cake spans much of Cumbria the eastern half of Lancashire (Blackburn, Burnley) and the Western half of West Yorkshire.
Muffin is perhaps the most geographically localised, confined to East Manchester and areas such as Oldham and Rochdale.
Cob is largely concentrated in the Midlands around Nottinghamshire. Batch is used in two very small areas: Liverpool, in the North West, and Coventry, in the West Midlands.
Bap is fairly widespread, but is most concentrated in Staffordshire, the West Midlands (Stoke-on-Trent, Birmingham), and North Wales.
What do you call such a food? Being born in Cumbria and spending much of my childhood in Newcastle, my instinct would be to call it a teacake, or bun though I’d use the term bread roll if talking to a southerner if only because they wouldn’t know what I was talking about otherwise,
There are lots of cultural and linguistic differentiations between almost all parts of the country but one that generally works out is how not just we have different words but even when we use the same ones, they are pronounced differently.
I always think it is funny in an ignorant sort of way how people in the South often make fun of people in the North despite the fact the words and pronunciations are actually often much closer to the oldest forms of English.
In the 1600s, ‘cut’ and ‘strut’ rhymed with foot nationwide, but then an unexplained phenomenon occurred called the “foot-strut split”, where the vowel in ‘cut’/’strut’ was sharpened in the South, with northerners still using the traditional and historically accurate version.
This change never occurred in the north of England, which means that for northern speakers these words rhyme with each other.
One of the most obvious splits between Northerners and Southerners is the term used for the evening meal. Though there are exceptions around Glasgow and SW England, generally speaking northerners have tea and southern have dinner.
And while the North is divided in its name for a ‘cob’, it unites when it comes to naming the evening meal. ‘Tea’, as the northerners know, is the most common term for the post-work meal.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the wealthy upper classes ate their largest meal later in the evening, calling it dinner. The working classes, on the other hand, would have dinner during the day and high tea in the evening as a source of sustenance after returning home from a long day at work.
To finish things off whilst we from the north have our tea after work, in my case about 4pm or 5pm so a very traditional northern time, unlike Southerners, we don’t have ‘lunch’ around Midday but instead keep the much older term for the meal as being ‘Dinner’ which Southerners stopped using when the London based monarch and aristocracy began to ape Continental European terms to demonstrate their alleged sophistication.
To read more about the class-structure in the U.K. then why not visit my old tried and trusted History of social classes and does classmatter? or indeed Was it something I said? – Accents and dialects of the world and GreatBritain or The oldest living Englishlanguage Do Accents Hold YouBack? and finally the infamous U and Non-U
