Introduction

In July 2015 the last deep coal mine in the East Midlands of England closed. That was the Thoresby pit, near Mansfield. Although in decline for many years, the final contraction of deep coal mining in the United Kingdom had been rapid, including in the East Midlands. In this region, the number of pits fell by a third in the 1970s and by a further 70 per cent in the 1980s. This had a heavy impact on local communities in spatially very diverse locations. For many years, coal mining had been a central aspect of local industry; the mines employed large numbers of workers and many communities relied on coal for their economic survival. Mining also gave these communities a sense of identity and belonging. For example, miners used specific words in their daily work, which can all be classified as ‘pit talk’ but which varied from region to region, and these words had become part of local everyday language. Now that the coal mines have all closed, this linguistic variety is used less and is in danger of being lost. With the ageing population of former miners still present, we have a short window of opportunity to preserve and investigate these words. This book takes the opportunity to examine the lexical variation of mining communities. It reviews to what extent these words were and are used around the East Midlands, and it investigates the effects of migration on this vocabulary as miners moved around the country in search of work. The sections in this introductory chapter discuss the background, research questions and aims, structure of the book, language in the East Midlands in general, dialect attrition, lexical variation, and industrial languages and heritage.

Background

Barbara Freese has written: ‘Coal was no mere fuel, and no mere article of commerce. It represented humanity's triumph over nature – the foundation of civilization itself’ (Freese 2003: 10). Thesing has added: ‘In its encyclopedic definition, it seems both simple and sublime in a biblical fashion: Mining is the process of taking minerals of coals from the earth … People have mined the earth for thousands of years … What distinguishes the industry of coal mining, however, is its enormous scale and its terrible human costs’ (Thesing 2000: xi).