Mining lost vocabulary

Northumbria University Press is helping to keep the language of the mines alive with a new book, Pitmatic: The Talk of the North East Coalfield .

The book, by local linguist and historian Bill Griffiths, delves into the colloquial English spoken in the mining communities of the Northern Coalfield, whose last major mine, Ellington Colliery, closed in 2005.

Bill Lancaster, director of Northumbria's Centre for Northern Studies, hoped the book would help preserve a distinctive cultural tradition for posterity. "Pitmatic is a language within a language developed by coal miners and is fast disappearing," he said.