I am Sat vs. I am Sitting

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello there.

Hello, who’s this?

This is Diana Hersey from Duncanville, Texas.

Welcome to the show, Diana. Where in Texas?

Duncanville, Texas, which is the southwest suburb of Dallas.

What can we do for you, Diana?

I just have a query about language use in between I am sitting down and I am sat down.

And people are saying he was sat there.

I heard this in England quite a few times.

They’re not using the ING anymore. They’re just saying he is sat there or we were sat there instead of we were sitting there. And I just wondered if this had crept into the States too, I think probably. But it definitely, I heard my brother say it in England and I heard other people. I’ve heard James Corden on the television say it.

So that was my question, whether you had noticed anything or whether it’s just an accepted change in language usage.

I have noticed that myself.

So just to be clear, where some people would say you were sitting,

Speakers of this particular dialect of English would say you were sat,

Or they would say I was sat instead of I was sitting.

And what about this one, Diana?

Have you ever heard someone say, I was stood, instead of I was standing?

Occasionally, yes.

I was stood in the back of the crowd.

I was stood in the back. I’ve heard that too, yes.

Yeah, you’ve got a good ear for this. This is a dialect change.

I can tell you a little bit about this, Diana.

Linguists have noticed this as well, and have been studying it since the mid-1980s.

But real work has been done on it since, where they’ve gathered data

And looked at actual transcriptions of people speaking to figure out what’s going on here.

And it looks like this construction, this innovation and this dialect feature

Was originally mostly heard in the north and the southwest of England.

But there’s been a large uptake of it since the early 1990s, although it’s not universal.

The fact that a 75-year-old man is now using it means that it has spread quite a bit, for sure,

Because such innovations tend to appear in the speech of younger speakers.

And in one academic paper, they say that the Irish and Welsh are far less likely to say the bestood version than the English are.

But the Irish do also sometimes say besat instead of besitting.

So this English innovation, this particular direct feature, has spread further than England.

It has penetrated into Ireland as well.

So it’s more likely to be found in the speech of speakers born after, say, I don’t know, 1985.

Although, again, it’s becoming more common.

Yeah, Diana, thank you for bringing this field report.

It’s really cool.

Okie dokie.

I appreciate it.

Okie dokie.

Take care, Diana.

Be well.

Thank you so much.

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