The following is a message which Paul Kerswill (one of the country's leading sociolinguists, working at the University of Reading) sent to the English Language discussion list in January 2001. He has given permission for it to be made available through the LAGB fact-sheets.

The message arose out of a discussion of project topics for A-level (age 16-17) students. He starts by defending the use of quantitative methods (which had been criticised in other messages), then he gives a wish-list of worthwhile and interesting projects which would tell us more about the complex ways in which English is changing in the UK.

Paul Kerswill, 19 January 2001

Posting to The English Language List

Yes, it's true that the methods we use are still adaptations of Labov, Trudgill and Cheshire. I'm in that tradition, too. But there are good reasons for this, and they mean that further research replicating this style is still valid – though of course the results will often be highly predictable if exactly the same questions are asked again and again. Labov’s Martha’s Vineyard (Mass.) and NYC research showed decisively that accent/dialect features tend to be distributed systematically across a community. That systematicity relates to social groupings at two levels of abstraction.

First, there are the large-scale divisions of age, sex and class – all of which are relatively easy to operationalise and are suited to a stratified sample of reasonable size. Labov’s main NYC study used this strategy, and so did Trudgill’s in Norwich. We did this in our Reading/Milton Keynes/Hull study, though our research questions were related the diffusion of features across England.

Second, there are small-scale, immediate groups normally known as social networks. Labov explored these in Harlem, NYC, though it is Lesley and James Milroy in Belfast in the late 70s who had them as the organising principle for their study. Somewhat related to this is the approach taken by Cheshire in her late 70s Reading study and Labov in his late 50s Martha’s Vineyard study. The difference is that they did not attempt to quantify social networks, but rather looked at aspects of individual behaviour, including attitudes, which appeared to symbolise group and local identities. All these studies correlated social parameters (of whatever sort) with linguistic features using the standard quantitative Labovian index score technique.

So far, in the study of contemporary language change and the social and geographical distribution of linguistic features these approaches have not really been superseded. The basic technique remains to associate linguistic features with social features using some kind of counting technique. But the questions have changed. In particular, the social side of the equation has become much more diverse and (some would say) sophisticated and realistic. We can look critically at different age groups – examining how young people might innovate (Penelope Eckert in Detroit and ourselves in Milton Keynes), and logging how individuals change as they grow older (research in Sweden has been quite impressive). How do ‘new dialects’ emerge through contact between speakers of different dialects of the same language (our MK study and Peter Trudgill’s New Zealand study, the latter reported in the latest edition of his ‘Sociolinguistics’)? Then there is the issue of what kind of social parameters are ‘real’ and relevant to speakers. With respect to this, Eckert has talked about ‘communities of practice’, and identified ‘Jocks’ and ‘Burnouts’ as categories with respect to which her informants positioned themselves. And others (like me) are getting interested in the diffusion of non-British features into mainstream English via speakers of Caribbean or Indian subcontinental descent (both Sebba and Rampton have looked at teenagers’ switching between such varieties, but not at the wholesale adoption of these features).

And so on. As for the practical idea of having A level students, and university students for that matter, contribute more systematically to a larger project, well, Tim Shortis has been engaged in such an enterprise in Bristol for some years now by way of a fairly detailed questionnaire survey. I’ll let him speak for himself on that! Danuta Reah has just told us of her attempts to set up something like this. What the BNC and other corpora do not have is any particularly relevant information on the accent/dialect features we are talking about here. It should be possible for individual teachers to at least keep a log of what their students have done, a photocopy of good projects and a copy of the tapes or minidisks. I don’t know anything about how to keep a central information archive (not the materials themselves), but it could be done relatively simply along the lines Danuta suggests. As for the quality of students’ projects, with a little supervision some basic things can be got right, like getting decent quality cassette recordings and getting proper information on the speakers.

Meanwhile, so that students and teachers are not frustrated, there is a lot to be gained in finding out about the geographical and social diffusion of linguistic features across the country – as I think Peter Trudgill has pleaded for in a posting. Many features have a southeastern origin. Students could also look for new, local features. I don’t think vowels diffuse outwards from London to anything like the same extent as the consonants - especially the use of /t/ and /v/ for TH, glottal stop in various phonological environments, and labiodental R. We didn’t find anything at all southern about Hull vowels. Instead, there was widespread use of a central, RP NURSE-like vowel for the GOAT vowel – this is a Hull stereotype that is apparently increasingly found elsewhere in Yorkshire. But Liverpool is going its own way with final /t/ and /k/. And here’s one I’ve been pondering about – are southerners ceasing to drop their aitches? Peter Trudgill doesn’t quite trust our result that there’s been a huge and very recent increase in the use of /h/ among Reading and Milton Keynes working-class speakers, but no increase at all in Hull.

Here’s my wish-list for new information on recent dialect/accent change:

PHONOLOGY

1. Glottalling of T in five environments:

(i) preconsonantally as in ‘let me’

(ii) word-finally prevocalically as in ‘a lot of’

(iii) medially and prevocalically as in ‘letter’

(iv) utterance-finally (before a turn-end) as in ‘I live in George Street’

(v) before ‘syllabic’ L, as in ‘bottle’: here, there is an additional variable, whether or not the /l/ is nasally released and hence syllabic (as in traditional RP), or preceded by a schwa (as in most southern varieties)

2. Use of glottally reinforced /p/ and /k/ in ‘paper’, ‘worker’, or glottal replacement of these sounds. Is replacement restricted just to certain words, e.g. ‘stupid’? What about glottal stop replacing medial /d/ in ‘didn’t’ and ‘wouldn’t’? Is this lexically restricted as well?
3. Replacement of voiced TH by /d/ or /v/ in initial position – or retention of the voiced fricative even when /v/ is used medially. Nigel Kennedy has /v/ in initial position, and so do two teenagers I know in Nottingham, but I don’t think this is usual
4. Replacement of voiced and voiceless TH by /v/ or /f/ generally
5. Replacement of voiceless TH by /t/, as in ‘tree’ for ‘three’. Is this restricted to particular ethnic groups? Is it spreading to other groups? Or is it imitation of certain ethnic varieties for stylistic purposes?
6. Use of labiodental R (sounding like a cross between ‘w’ and ‘v’ – see Foulkes and Docherty’s work on this)
7. Loss of postvocalic R in areas where this is relevant (parts of Lancs. and the south and west). Is it linguistically systematic (i.e. does it disappear with some vowels before others?)? Is it socially stratified?
8. Loss/preservation of northern distinctions between ‘eight’ and ‘mate’, ‘right’ and ‘write’, ‘out’ and ‘owt’ – and many others I don’t know about. Also E. Anglian distinction between ‘nose’ and ‘knows’
9. Preservation/loss of centring diphthongs in FACE, GOAT – ‘feeace’, ‘gooat’, etc. in the far north of England.
10. Extent of East Riding monophthong in ‘ride’, ‘time’, diphthong in ‘right’, ‘bike’
11. Use of initial /h/ in lexical words (i.e. not unstressed function words like pronouns)
12. Use of diphthongs vs. monophthongs in GATE and GOAT vowels in North Midlands area (diphthongs are southern, monophthongs northern)

GRAMMAR

1. Use of ‘levelled’ past tense of BE: ‘I was, you was, she was, we was, they was’ AND ‘I weren’t, you weren’t, she weren’t, we weren’t, they weren’t’. What are the local forms? Are they still being used? In Reading, you can hear ‘wadn’ among many younger speakers, though the levelled forms seem to be gaining ground. Also forms of (StE equivalents of) haven’t, hasn’t, isn’t, aren’t, can’t.
2. Use of ‘northern subject rule’, essentially, that copula BE takes the form ‘is’ with a plural noun and ‘are’ with a plural pronoun ‘they’.
3. The use of universal ‘innit’: this is used regardless of main verb, giving, e.g., ‘We may as well go round Gemma’s, innit?’. Is this _really_ used after all positive declarative sentences regardless of verb? I think there may be restrictions. Also, of course, we need to know how far the feature has spread. It’s very common here in Reading, along with the positive polarity ‘is it’. In Hull, we’re not sure it is used regardless of verb, but the _form_ ‘innit’ is certainly replacing the original ‘intit’.

I’m sure others will come up with other features that should be explored. The above is a suggestion for how to use a tried-and-tested methodology to a meaningful end.

DIALECT LEVELLING AND DIFFUSION

Here the main question is how far features from major urban centres, such as Bristol, Cardiff, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, etc., have spread to smaller towns and the countryside. I’ve seen a small-scale study of the Isle of Man where Irish features seem to have been replaced by Liverpool features, and one from Runcorn which suggested the use of Liverpool rather than Cheshire features among native Runcornians with Liverpool connections. Also one from the new town of Telford. (All were student projects.) The methods used will be essentially Labovian, though knowledge of relevant urban dialects will be necessary.

ALTERNATIVE TACKS TO TAKE

One approach we have found very informative in understanding dialect levelling is dialect recognition tests. We found that, as Reading gets less distinct and more ‘Cockneyfied’, younger Reading speakers fail to recognise taped samples of older Reading speech, locating it very firmly in the far West Country. Hull speech is recognised by one and all in Hull, confirming, we argue, its relative lack of change. On the other hand, Reading speakers recognised London teenage speech as such, while they did _not_ locate younger Reading speech in London. This suggests that Reading speech still contains salient non-London features.

In some parts of the country (including East London, Luton, Bradford, Birmingham), it will be interesting to look at the use of different ethnic markers by teenage speakers of various ethnicities. These can be accent features, as well as words, including swearing and other discourse markers. This can be extended to the study of code-switching among ethnic minority speakers, as well as inter-generational changes within their families with respect to use of languages.

Paul Kerswill 19/1/01