Cover not available
Part of
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
References
Allen, John, Doreen Massey and Allan Cochrane
1998 Rethinking the region. London/New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Allinson, John
2005 Exodus or renaissance? Metropolitan migration in the late 1990s. The Town Planning Review 76(2). 167–189. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Amos, Jennifer
2011 A socio-phonological analysis of Mersea Island English. An investigation of the diphthongs (aʊ), (aɪ) and (ɔɪ). Unpublished doctoral thesis. Colchester: University of Essex.Google Scholar
Britain, David
2010 Supralocal regional dialect levelling. In Carmen Llamas and Dominic Watt (eds.), Language and identities, 193–204. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
2013 The role of mundane mobility and contact in dialect death and dialect birth. In Daniel Schreier and Marianne Hundt (eds.), English as a contact language, 165–181. Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
2017 Which way to look? Perspectives on “urban” and “rural” in dialectology. In Emma Moore and Chris Montgomery (eds.), A sense of place. Studies in language and region, 171–188. Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018 Dialect contact and new dialect formation. In Charles Boberg, John Nerbonne and Dominic Watt (eds.), Handbook of dialectology, 143–158. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.Google Scholar
2021 What happened to those relatives from East Anglia? A multilocality analysis of dialect levelling in the relative marker system. In Karen Beaman, Isabelle Buchstaller, Susan Fox and James Walker (eds.), Advancing socio-grammatical variation and change. In honour of Jenny Cheshire, 93–114. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Britain, David, Tamsin Blaxter and Adrian Leemann
2020 East Anglian English in the English Dialects App. English Today 143(36:3). 14–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Champion, Tony
2001 The continuing urban-rural population movement in Britain. Trends, patterns, significance. Espace, Populations, Sociétés 1–2. 37–51. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2005a Population movement within the UK. In Roma Chappell (ed.), Focus on people and migration, 92–113. Basingstoke et al.: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2005b The counterurbanisation cascade in England and Wales since 1991. The evidence of a new migration dataset. Belgeo 1–2. 85–102. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2009 Urban-rural differences in commuting in England. A challenge to the rural sustainability agenda? Planning, Practice & Research 24(2). 161–183. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Champion, Tony, Mike Coombes and David L. Brown
2009 Migration and longer-distance commuting in England. Regional Studies 43(10). 1245–1259. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cruttenden, Alan
2014 Gimson’s pronunciation of English, 8th edn. Abingdon/New York, NY: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Department for Transport
2008 Transport statistics Great Britain. 2008 edition. [URL] [URL] (19 February 2020.)
Di Paolo, Marianna, Malcah Yaeger-Dror and Alicia Wassink
2011 Analyzing vowels. In Marianna Di Paolo and Malcah Yaeger-Dror (eds.), Sociophonetics. A student’s guide, 87–106. Abingdon/New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ellis, Alexander J.
1889 On early English pronunciation, part V: Existing dialectal as compared with West Saxon pronounciation. London: Trübner & Co.Google Scholar
Eustace, Stephen S.
1969 The meaning of the palaeotype in A. J. Ellis’s ‘On early English pronunciation 1869–89’. Transactions of the Philological Society 68(1). 31–79. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fabricius, Anne H., Dominic Watt and Daniel E. Johnson
2009 A comparison of three speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithms for sociophonetics. Language Variation and Change 21(3). 413–435. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Findlay, Allan M. et al.
2001 Mobility as a driver of change in rural Britain. An analysis of the links between migration, commuting and travel to shop patterns. International Journal of Population Geography 7(1). 1–15. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grossenbacher, Sarah
2013 “Escape to the country” and its linguistic consequences: An analysis of mouth and kit in Suffolk. Unpublished Bachelor’s thesis. Bern: University of Bern.Google Scholar
2016 From east to west? Dialect diffusion between Swindon and Bristol. Unpublished Master thesis. Bern: University of Bern.Google Scholar
Hall-Lew, Lauren
2010 Improved representation of variance in measures of vowel merger. In Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 9(1). DOI logo (19 February 2020.)Google Scholar
Johnson, Daniel E.
2009 Getting off the GoldVarb standard. Introducing Rbrul for mixed-effects variable rule analysis. Language and Linguistics Compass 3(1). 359–383. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kerswill, Paul
2003 Dialect levelling and geographical diffusion in British English. In David Britain and Jenny Cheshire (eds.), Social dialectology. In honour of Peter Trudgill (Studies in Language and Society 16), 223–243. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kerswill, Paul and Ann Williams
2000 Creating a new town koine. Children and language change in Milton Keynes. Language in Society 29(1). 65–115. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kingston, Michelle
2000 Dialects in danger. Dialect attrition in the East Anglian county of Suffolk. Unpublished master thesis. Colchester: University of Essex.Google Scholar
Kökeritz, Helge
1932 The phonology of the Suffolk dialect, descriptive and historical. Uppsala: Appelberg.Google Scholar
Labov, William
1994 Principles of linguistic change, vol.1: Internal factors (Language in Society 20). Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope and William Labov
2017 Phonetics, phonology and social meaning. Journal of Sociolinguistics 21: 467–496. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leemann, Adrian, Marie-José Kolly and David Britain
2018 The English Dialects App. The creation of a crowdsourced dialect corpus. Ampersand 5. 1–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Milroy, James
1992 Linguistic variation and change. On the historical sociolinguistics of English (Language in Society 19). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Milroy, James and Lesley Milroy
1985 Linguistic change, social network and speaker innovation. Journal of Linguistics 21(2). 339–384. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Milroy, Lesley
1987 Language and social networks, 2nd edn. (Language in Society 2). Oxford/New York, NY: Blackwell.Google Scholar
National Audit Office
2008 Widening participation in higher education. [URL] (19 February 2020.)
Office for National Statistics
2016 Internal migration, England and Wales. Year ending June 2015 [URL] (19 February 2020.)
Orton, Harold et al.
(eds.) 1962–1971 Survey of English dialects. Basic materials: Introduction. 4 vols. (each in 3 parts). Leeds: Arnold & Son.Google Scholar
Piercy, Caroline
2006 Mixed with others it sounds different doesn’t it. A quantitative analysis of rhoticity from four locations in Dorset. Unpublished master thesis. Colchester: University of Essex.Google Scholar
2010 One /a/ or two? The phonetics, phonology and sociolinguistics of change in the TRAP and BATH vowels in the southwest of England. Unpublished doctoral thesis. Colchester: University of Essex.Google Scholar
Potter, Robert
2018 A variationist multilocality study of unstressed vowels and verbal -s marking in the peripheral dialect of East Suffolk. Unpublished doctoral thesis. Colchester: University of Essex.Google Scholar
Rupp, Laura and David Britain
2019 Linguistic perspectives on a variable English morpheme. Let’s talk about -s. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Self, Abigail
(ed.) 2008 Social trends 38. Labour Market. [URL] (19 February 2020.)
Taylor, Matthew
2008 Living working countryside. The Taylor review of rural economy and affordable housing. London: Department for Communities and Local Government.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter
1974 The social differentiation of English in Norwich (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 13). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
1986 Dialects in contact. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
1988 Norwich Revisited: Recent Linguistic Changes in an English Urban Dialect. English World-Wide, 9: 33–49. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1996 Two hundred years of dedialectalisation. The East Anglian short vowel system. In Mats Thelander et al. (eds.), Samspel och variation. Språkliga studier tillägnade Bengt Nordberg på 60-årsdagen, 471–478. Uppsala: Institutionen för nordiska språk Uppsala Universitet.Google Scholar
1998 Third person singular zero. African-American English, East Anglian dialects and Spanish persecution in the Low Countries. Folia Linguistica Historica 18(1–2). 139–148.Google Scholar
2004a The dialect of East Anglia: phonology. In Bernd Kortmann et al. (eds.), A handbook of varieties of English, vol. 1: Phonology, 163–177. Berlin/New York, NY: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
2004b New dialect formation. The inevitability of colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Wells, John C.
1982a Accents of English, vol. 1: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1982b Accents of English 2: The British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar