Chapter 2. She said “I don’t like her and her don’t like me”

In the regional variety of English spoken in the Black Country (an area of central England), the object pronoun her is sometimes found in subject function. In a corpus of recorded informal conversations with Black Country dialect speakers, both the Standard English subject pronoun she and its dialect equivalent, her, regularly occurred. This pronoun exchange is not random, but depends on several factors, such as the speaker, the listener, the situational context, the topic, and, most importantly, the speaker’s relation to the referent of she or her. These social and relational concepts bear similarity to those found in the French tu/vous second person binary politeness distinction, since factors such as solidarity, respect and disrespect affect the choice of pronoun.