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Urban Matters: Current approaches in variationist sociolinguistics
Edited by Arne Ziegler, Stefanie Edler and Georg Oberdorfer
[Studies in Language Variation 27] 2021
► pp. 89–118

Counterurbanisation, dialect contact and the levelling of non-salient traditional dialect variants

The case of the front short vowels in Eastern England

ORCID logo | University of Bern,
ORCID logo | University of Bern,
Earlier investigations of the linguistic consequences of mobility in largely rural East Anglia in Eastern England showed a quite dramatic decline in the use of the salient traditional dialect variants. In this chapter, we present a variationist sociolinguistic analysis of a relatively unsalient linguistic characteristic of the traditional dialect of this region – the use of the /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ vowels in a small set of lexical items that take /ɛ/ and /æ/ respectively in the standard – in order to assess the extent to which salience is implicated in the levelling process. We find evidence of considerable levelling of the traditional forms nevertheless, but not to the extent that we had found for more salient variables, suggesting salient linguistic variables may indeed be more vulnerable to attrition in contexts of intensive dialect contact.
Keywords: language variation, dialect contact, dialect levelling, counterurbanisation, mobility, salience, East Anglia, mergers
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Intra-national mobilities and dialect levelling
  • 3.Dialect levelling and Short Front Vowels in East Anglian English
  • 4.Methods
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1 get
    • 5.2 have
    • 5.3Merger in progress?
  • 6.Discussion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 16 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.27.04bri
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