I saw a BBC drama from the 1970s where a man with a West Country accent would say (it was subtitled as) e.g. "He'm a farmer", replacing "He is a farmer", consistently throughout.
I have never come across that grammar before and can't find any source for it. All of his other grammatical constructions were comfortably familiar, and no other character (not even neighbours in the same village) spoke in that way.
I wondered, were we supposed to understand something particular from that? Would we have, in the 1970s?
Not everybody in the UK has an exhaustive command of regional accents, including people who work on BBC dramas. It's very possible they just made something up and hoped to get away with it.
I suppose it's possible, but the accents otherwise seemed very natural to that area and to the actors, and it seems remarkable as a choice of invention.
I'm reminded of "I can't use contractions" Cmdr Data in Star Trek. (He does, all the time). It didn't seem an artificial choice in that way.
I can't say I've ever hear it in the south west, but in the west midlands (specifically black country area) the 'am' replacing 'are' is a very common construct (possibly because 'ar' is used in the same context as 'aye' so "Oh ar" or even just "ar" = "Oh aye!" in other regions) so you get things like "am ya?" = "are you?" and "you'm" (or even just "yam") being a contraction of "you am".
anecdata: when i lived in Kidderminster, my more well spoken friends used to call people from Stourbridge "Yam yams" because of their propensity to say "Yam awrite am ya?" (Are you alright?) as a greeting
I saw a BBC drama from the 1970s where a man with a West Country accent would say (it was subtitled as) e.g. "He'm a farmer", replacing "He is a farmer", consistently throughout.
I have never come across that grammar before and can't find any source for it. All of his other grammatical constructions were comfortably familiar, and no other character (not even neighbours in the same village) spoke in that way.
I wondered, were we supposed to understand something particular from that? Would we have, in the 1970s?