The other day in my inbox appeared a word-of-the-day from the photoblog Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary.

The word was kee.

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This is not a word that I was familiar with. Nor I suppose are you.

If you ask the average person on the street what the plural of cow is, they’d likely tell you cows.

I’d even go so far as to guess that if you asked the average dairy or beef farmer in their barn, they’d reply cows as well.

But according to Samuel Johnson, in some parts of England at the time he was compiling his dictionary—which was the mid 1700s—the plural of cow was kee.

Fortunately for us Samuel Johnson goes on to point out that this was only a provincial usage and that it wasn’t the proper plural word for cow.

Oh, no, the proper word was kine.

It turns out that the plural cows had only just appeared as an English word with any frequency in the century before Johnson.  People were still using kine, and evidently kee, during his lifetime.

This variety in the plural word for cow underlines for me the ongoing importance of dialect.

The English language is not now uniformly spoken across the world and this has always been the case.

The word cow came to English with the Germanic Anglo-Saxons as cuu and may have roots tracing back to Indo-European.

Cows have long been very important to people, who, through most of history would have lived closer to, and seen more of, cows than we do today.  But in times before motorized transport and mass communications local language pockets evolved words like cuu slightly differently from place to place.

Long before Samuel Johnson, a degree of standardization had come to English through expanding literacy, but accents and local dialects persisted then and they persist now.

No one has quite figured out why this might be.

We now live in a world of conflicting pressures on the standardization of the language.  On the one hand broader and more instantaneous communications mean that we can all hear the English spoken by any other English speaker.  The internet age means that superstars that might influence how we say things are all the more widely known.

Yet at the same time the English language has permeated more locations and cultures than ever before and so, many more local usages can be expected to be integrated into English.

Part of the reason there are still local accents and dialects might be tribalism. That’s why there were differences centuries ago. It’s still true today I think.

I heard Grant Barrett just recently talk about how he learned to use the phrase “standing on line” when he moved to New York and how it is part of the bag of tricks people use to mark themselves as belonging.

I know everyone else calls those things cows, but we here in outer provincia, we call those things kee.