Mike from Irving, Texas, has a co-worker who regularly uses brung instead of brought. Is it okay to say “he brung something”? The word brung is a dialectal variant that has existed alongside brought for centuries. It appears in the informal phrase dance with the one what brung ya (or who brung you, or that brung you), which suggests the importance of being loyal. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Brung vs. Brought”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Mike. I’m calling from Irving, Texas.
Hi, Mike. Welcome.
Hey there. What’s up?
Well, we’ve got kind of a little controversy going on in the office.
One of our co-workers, who I think may come from the country,
Was talking about something, and he said,
I brung the seeds. They were talking about gardening.
And a number of our other co-workers were just incensed.
What did you say? Where were you raised?
And that began a discussion of the word brung.
Is it really a variation on the word brought or bring?
Is it bring, brang, brung, or is it bring and brought?
And where does the word come from and that sort of thing?
Wow, so they all jumped on him.
They all jumped on him and thought he was from some illiterate backwater.
Where is he from?
He’s from the Dallas area.
Okay, interesting.
And you yourself don’t use Brung in that way?
No.
Not in any serious sense, no.
And how did he react to that?
He was surprised that people were calling him on it.
That’s a good clue, by the way.
He’s always used it, and he was just really kind of surprised.
What kind of business are we talking about here?
We’re a staffing agency.
We hire engineers for companies all over the country.
So he works in some kind of human resources and has to deal with people all day long?
Absolutely.
Okay.
And he’s a college graduate, so that would make one hope that he’s literate.
Well, he is literate.
He is literate, and he’s speaking English, but it’s not standard English,
And it’s actually not lazy or stupid or uneducated English.
It’s simply a dialect variant that has existed alongside brought for centuries.
You’ve got these two different conjugations of the verb to bring,
Which have each generated their own forms,
And they both have moved into English along separate paths,
And Brought has kind of pushed ahead in the race.
And Brung is still there, but it’s far behind.
And so Brought seems to most of us and is considered the standard.
And Brung, when we hear it, sounds non-standard.
And so we can make judgments about his intelligence or his education.
But the truth is, there was a time in parts of the United Kingdom where Brung was probably what you would always hear.
Well, sure. It’s preserved in that saying, dance with the one that Brung you.
Yeah, in English, it’s canonized more or less in that idiom, right?
Dance with the one what brought you means you should always pay attention to who provided the goodness in your life.
Unless he’s just bad at his job, he’s not an idiot.
I didn’t think he was an idiot.
It just struck everyone as being really odd and began a small discussion.
Well, the reason I said it was a clue when you told us that he was surprised is because that’s often how dialect speakers react when they encounter a body of speakers from another dialect.
They’re like, kind of, they’re like, what do you mean?
Everybody I know, where I’m from, all of my people.
Says Tomp.
Yeah, yeah.
They say brung or brang.
What did you bring to the party?
I brung a tater salad, right?
So it’s a dialect.
And that’s the thing is when we get in this conversation of standard versus dialect,
It’s always important to say standard English is an amorphous thing,
But it is generally agreed to be the English that you should speak to people who you work for
Or your parents or a judge or a police, you know, people in authority.
Yeah, it’s going to be jarring if you see it in business correspondence, for example.
On the other hand, dialect is perfectly normal at a family get-together or at church
Or in your neighborhood and talking to the folks down at the shopkeepers down at the store,
You know, that kind of thing.
So dialect has its place and its role.
So what are you going to take back to your friend who brung the seeds?
I’m going to tell him that he doesn’t need to hide from his coworkers.
Hey, thanks a lot for calling.
Thanks.
Well, thank you very much for having me on.
Bye-bye now.
Take care.
Oh, the dialect language conversation is always a tough one because you want people to be authentic.
Sure.
True to their upbringing.
Proud of their dialect.
Proud of their speech.
That’s your linguistic heritage.
Make this clear.
There is not one monolithic standard English.
No, no, no.
It does not exist.
You might think it does, but your monolithic English is somebody else’s dialect.
Absolutely.
It’s diverse.
In the workplace, if he’s hiring engineers, maybe they’re judging him.
Maybe he’s not getting the best candidates or the best clients because he speaks a dialect.
It is unfortunate, so you have to take that into account.
