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Double negatives are usually associated with regional and ethnical dialects such as Southern American English, African American Vernacular English, and various British regional dialects. Indeed, they were used in Middle English : for example, Chaucer made extensive use of double, triple, and even quadruple negatives in his Canterbury Tales .
Dialects can be defined as "sub-forms of languages which are, in general, mutually comprehensible." [1] English speakers from different countries and regions use a variety of different accents (systems of pronunciation) as well as various localized words and grammatical constructions.
Negative concord, also called "double negation", as in I didn't go nowhere; if the sentence is negative, all negatable forms are negated. This contrasts with standard written English convention, which interprets a double negative to mean a positive (although this was not always so; see double negative). [89]
[88] [89] [54] [90] The use of double negatives was common in England during the 17th and 18th centuries, especially in the Northern English Cumbrian dialect. [86] Montgommery also identified several features, such as the use of the "a-" prefix (e.g., "a-goin'" for "going") and the attachment of "-ed" to certain verbs (e.g., knowed ), as ...
Syntax of the Surrey dialect included: The Old and Middle English prefix of "a-" is used generally before substantives, before participles and with adjectives placed after nouns, e.g., a-coming, a-going, a-plenty, a-many. Double negatives in a sentence are common, "You don't know nothing", "The gent ain't going to give us nothing"
Cockney is a dialect of the English language, mainly spoken in London and its environs, particularly by Londoners with working-class and lower middle-class roots. The term Cockney is also used as a demonym for a person from the East End, [1] [2] [3] or, traditionally, born within earshot of Bow Bells.
Similar to other English dialects, using the word them to mean those is common, e.g. This used to be a pub back i them days. The word reight/reet is used to mean very or really, e.g. If Aw'm honest, Aw'm nut reight bother'd abaat it. As in many non-standard dialects, double negatives are common, e.g. I was never scared of nobody. [68]
British English (abbreviations: BrE, en-GB, and BE) [3] is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United Kingdom. [6] More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in England, or, more broadly, to the collective dialects of English throughout the British Isles taken as a single umbrella variety, for instance additionally incorporating Scottish English ...