Language and Space: the variationist approach

Language and Space: the variationist approach

David Britain Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex, Colchester, Great Britain CO4 3SQ [email protected]

1. Introduction

In this chapter I discuss the extent to which variationist sociolinguistics has (and has not) engaged with concepts of geographical space and spatiality over the past half century. Three clear issues will become apparent. Firstly, variationism has at worst largely ignored spatiality and at best treated it quite distinctly and separately from other social factors until relatively recently. Secondly, when it has engaged with space, it has tended to be a socially devoid, Euclidean, distance-is-all type of space, rather than a socially rich spatiality, which recognises that “the fact that social processes take place over space and in a geographically-differentiated world affects their operation” (Massey 1985: 16), again until relatively recently. And thirdly, space has not, yet again until relatively recently, seen the sort of critique in sociolinguistics that has been witnessed by concepts such as style (Labov 1966; Bell 1984; Eckert and

2 Rickford 2001; Coupland 2007), gender (Eckert 1990; Meyerhoff 1996), age (Eckert 1997) and so on.

Below, I discuss how space has been integrated into variationist sociolinguistics. Unsurprisingly, the conceptualisation of space in modern studies of language variation and change has tracked the development of the same in human geography, but a generation or so later (Britain 1991, 2002). Perhaps more surprising, however, is the fact that a lot of early variationist work drew inspiration from economic rather than human geography, and this heritage survives until the presentday, in, for example, the way that gravity models still seem central to much work on innovation diffusion (see the critiques of the application of gravity models to dialectology in Britain 2002, 2004, 2005).

2. The sidelining of the spatial in early variationism

It must have been particularly exciting to be a sociolinguist in the 1960s. A new discipline, radically different both from the emerging giant of generative linguistics and from traditional dialectology, but drawing inspiration from both (from the former at least in the very early days, with the concept of variable rules, surviving today in the statistical package, Varbrul), was busy addressing, amongst other things, the many pressing questions encapsulated in Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968). The social embedding of change, captured through the perspective of quantitative variation within the apparent-time model, was one of the most important breakthroughs in these early heady days, and one which continues to drive sociolinguists in their research. As

3 the discipline matured, so many of the tools of the trade were refined, many social categories unpicked and explored, but the fundamental question of how change was embedded in social practice endured. That social embedding, however, did not contemplate a place for space. Space was, instead, treated in a number of ways. Sometimes it was quite simply ignored. Since most very early sociolinguistic research was conducted in cities (with one extremely important exception, to be discussed below), and other social factors seemed more pressing than geography at the time – class, ethnicity, gender –, and since random sampling was used (so there was a nagging pressure to hold all other factors constant to enable the careful control and analysis of the chosen variable social constraints), space didn’t enter the picture. Labov’s (1966) study of “New York City”, for example, was a study of just the Lower East Side of NYC and, even then, only a part of it (Labov 2006: 104). So space was carefully controlled out of the study, and spatial variation within the neighbourhood (let alone within the city) itself not examined. Trudgill’s (1974) study of Norwich, however, random-sampled from five different parts of the city, since doing so “opens up the possibility of investigating geographical variation” (Trudgill 1974a: 22). He addressed geographical variation within the city specifically in the analysis of (ō) (the reflexes of ME ō in words such as boat and goat), showing that in the suburb with areas of newest housing – Lakenham – peripheral to the urban centre, more diphthongs were found than in other suburbs, when social class was held constant. But these were rare forays into geographical variation in the new urban sociolinguistics. It was seen as distinct from the crucial social factors of the day and, if mentioned at all in more theoretical work, was conceptualised largely as a surrogate for time. Here is Weinreich et al. (1968: 155): “the problem of accounting for the geographical transition of dialects across a territory […] appears to be symmetrical with the problem of accounting for the transition of

4 dialects through time in one community”. It was typical of the time in the social sciences to see geographical patterns as fossilizations or slices of time, betraying a historicism much chided by geographers. As Soja has reiterated:

An essentially historical epistemology continues to pervade the critical consciousness of modern social theory. It still comprehends the world primarily through the dynamics arising from the emplacement of social being and becoming in the interpretive contexts of time […]. This historicism […] has tended to occlude a comparable critical sensibility to the spatiality of social life, a practical theoretical consciousness that sees the life-world of being creatively located not only in the making of history, but also in the construction of human geographies, the social production of space and the restless formation and reformation of geographical landscapes. (Soja 1989: 10–11)

With the apparent-time model at the very heart of the variationist enterprise, it is perhaps not too surprising that, in the early days at least, this historicism also pervaded studies of language variation and change.

There are understandable reasons why space was downplayed in early variationist studies. Partly it could have been a reaction to the largely rural focus of traditional dialectology. I have argued before (Britain 2002) that, beyond the wonderful maps of the dialect atlases, there was actually very little that can be considered truly geographical, let alone spatially sensitive in the work of the traditional dialectologists who had a historicist agenda every bit as keen as the later

5 variationists. The role of space was largely reduced to that of a canvas onto which dialectological findings could be painted. A combination of the rejection of the rural focus of a largely asocial “map-heavy” traditional dialectology, on the one hand, and the view, on the other, that cities represented the best places to find the most fluid, heterogeneous, complex communities, facilitating investigations of the social embedding of change “where it’s all happening”, led variationist sociolinguistics to throw the rural baby out with the traditional dialectological bathwater. In the preamble to the Social Stratification of English in New York City – one of the key texts of early variationism – Labov (2006 [1966]) contrasted his earlier work on largely rural Martha’s Vineyard (Labov 1972) with the current research on the Lower East Side, making it clear that the latter represented “a much more complex society” (Labov 2006: 3). Nonetheless NYC was ultimately distilled down to the variables of age, class, ethnicity and gender, factors, which, as is made very clear (Labov 1972: 4– 6), are also some (but not all) of the key pivots of social diversity in Martha’s Vineyard. There, groups of speakers of Portuguese, Native American and other miscellaneous ethnicities made up half if not more of the population (Labov 1972: 6), even before we take into consideration a small resident population coming originally from the Mainland and the large numbers of tourists. In addition, these populations were not distributed geographically evenly across the island, and were, naturally, engaged in a range of economic activities. As the results of Labov’s analysis made it clear, the community showed considerable sociolinguistic diversity with respect to age, location, occupation, ethnicity, orientation towards the island and desire to stay or leave (1972: 22, 25, 26, 30, 32, 39). In terms of social and linguistic structure, Martha’s Vineyard hardly fitted the rural stereotype of quiet and sleepy pastoralism, or of traditional dialectological norms, as Labov showed. By contrasting a highly rural

6 area with a highly urban one, Labov demonstrated that there are large-scale social(linguistic) processes which are perhaps most obviously and vividly expressed in cities but are not confined politically, sociologically or epistemologically to an urban context. However, this perspective was not picked up and the resulting urban turn in sociolinguistics had significant consequences on the direction that variationism took. Urbanism still pervades much of the discipline – the rural is still portrayed as the insular, the conservative, the backward, the isolated, the static, as an idyll of peace and tranquility rather than as composed of heterogeneous communities, of contact, of change and progress and conflict. (See, for example, in the human geographic literature, Cloke 1999, 2005; Cloke and Little 1997; Macnaghten and Urry 1998; Shucksmith 2000; Short 2006; for further discussion of the irrelevance of the urbanrural divide, see Britain, forthcoming b). Indeed variationism is sometimes even defined in terms of its urban focus: “urban sociolinguistics” or “urban dialectology” are terms used to describe variationism in general by scholars such as Chambers (2003: 1), Chambers and Trudgill (1980, 1998), Coupland (2007), Walters (1988: 119). To engage in a variationist analysis of an isolated rural area is, if we are to follow this nomenclature, to engage in urban dialectology. Others are careful to make the point that diversity – social and linguistic – can be found everywhere: “No matter how small and seemingly homogeneous the community, social status differences play an essential role in shaping dialect differences and can never be entirely discounted” (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1998: 32), and there are (just) a few early and significant examples of variationist studies of rural areas (e.g. Wolfram and Christian’s (1974) analysis of Appalachian English). The fetishism of the urban which struck sociolinguistics at the time was not, of course, confined to this discipline but was prevalent right across the social sciences in the post-war period (Britain 2002),

7 and came under sustained critique from social theorists such as Harvey (1973) and Castells (1977) from the 1970s onwards. As Johnston makes clear from that point “urban areas changed their roles within geography: rather than being the focus of attention per se, they became the contexts within which cultural, economic, social and political processes and conflicts were played out” (Johnston 2000: 878).

3. Early geolinguistics

During the burgeoning period of sociolinguistics in the 1960s, there was relatively little variationist geolinguistics. Indeed a review of what had gone on in the field in 1980 (Chambers and Trudgill 1980) listed little more than the work of the authors themselves. In the 1970s and early 1980s it was Chambers and Trudgill who did most to consider applying geographical perspectives to variationist research, Chambers by quantifying and performing spatial analyses of data from the Survey of English Dialects (e.g. Chambers 1982; Chambers and Trudgill 1998: 106–118), and Trudgill by adopting and adapting work from time geographers such as Torsten Hägerstrand, and introducing quantitative gravity models from economic geography to variationist sociolinguistics to shed light on innovation diffusion (e.g. Trudgill 1974b, 1975, 1983). Trudgill (1974b) began by discussing how cartographical methods for displaying behavioural variability (in this case the uptake of motorcars in Southern Sweden, from Hägerstrand 1952) could be applied to dialect data by placing a grid of equally sized “cells” across the landscape under investigation, sampling from each cell, and calculating the proportion that different variants of a variable are used, on average, in that cell, enabling both contrasts to be made with other cells and, consequently, the

8 proportions of variants used in different geographical areas to be compared and explained. Trudgill argued, like Hägerstrand, that we should attempt to “ascertain the spatial diffusion of ratios” (Trudgill 1974b: 222, his emphasis) and that the work could be applied to examine the geographical dissemination of linguistic innovations. He proposed that such approaches would enable us to compare different time periods, using the apparent time model, as well as consider physical and social barriers to uptake of innovations (as Hägerstrand had done). Then, through an analysis of phonological variation and change on the Brunlanes peninsula near Larvik on the south coast of Norway, Trudgill was able to show the geographical distribution of a change in progress – the lowering and backing of /æ/ from [ɛ] to [̘̟a ˔̙ ] – and point to higher levels of innovation in the urban centres of the peninsula than in the intervening rural areas. His work was an early example of the urban hierarchy model of linguistic innovation diffusion, whereby innovations descend down an urban hierarchy of large city to city to large town, to town, village and country. The usual explanation for this model is that whilst the distance between the diffusing centre and the receiving location plays some role, interaction between urban centres in modern societies is likely to be greater, and therefore a more frequent and effective channel for the transmission of new forms than between urban and rural, an account which owes much to Christaller’s (1933) famous central place theory. Transportation networks tend to link urban with urban, economic and consumption infrastructures tend to be based in and oriented towards urban centres, with the ensuing consequences for employment, commuting and leisure patterns, and these feed the hierarchical nature of diffusion (Britain 2002, 2005, 2006). Trudgill then went further, adopting gravity models from economic geography to see whether it is possible to predict which places will come under a greater influence from a vigorous innovation than others. He examined the extent to which three East Anglian urban

9 centres in England were likely to be affected by the deletion of /h/, assumed to be spreading from London. In order to estimate the likely influence (including linguistic influence) that one place would have over another, the gravity models employed took into consideration two factors: the distance between the two places and the populations of the two places:

Mij = PiPj (dij)2

where M = the interaction between the two places i and j, P = population and d = distance. Trudgill added a third factor, a weighting to take into account how similar the accents of the different interacting urban centres already were. The model predicted that the city of Norwich would be affected by the innovation most and the smaller town of King’s Lynn the least, and subsequent studies of h-dropping in these places confirmed these results. Callary’s (1975) research on the raising of /æ/ in Northern Illinois, USA supported the urban hierarchy model more or less – towns with a population of over 10000 had greater levels of raising than smaller settlements, and a subsequent gravity model analysis by Chambers and Trudgill (1998: 185) of the Illinois data demonstrated a good, though admittedly not perfect fit with the data.

4. Subsequent geolinguistic work

The 1980s saw little rapprochement between “urban” sociolinguistic variationism and the rather sporadic engagement with geolinguistics. A similar period

10 of disengagement had taken place in the social sciences too, but somewhat earlier. Massey notes that “in terms of the relation between the social and the spatial, this was the period of perhaps the greatest conceptual separation […]. For their part, the other [non-geographic – DB] disciplines forgot about space altogether” (Massey 1984: 3) and “continued to function, by and large, as though the world operated, and society existed, on the head of a pin, in a spaceless, geographically undifferentiated world” (Massey 1984: 4). Geographers were expected to “take up a position at the end of the transmission belt of the social sciences, dutifully mapping the outcomes of processes which it was the role of others to study” (Massey 1985: 12). Spatial patterns, at that time, were seen merely as the outcomes of processes of non-geographical kinds. So it was none too surprising that there was little interaction between sociolinguists and geolinguists either. Let’s make it clear, the two sides were not in dispute, but simply they proceeded as if neither needed the other – there was little geographical input to “urban” variationism and the geolinguistics of the time was largely asocial. Both camps agreed both that more had to be done and that the geographical dimension of variationism was underexplored. Chambers and Trudgill (1980), in the first edition of Dialectology, for instance, having presented the limited amount of work that had been carried out in this framework, presented geolinguistics as a potential future avenue for sociolinguistic investigation. Labov, in his summary paper of the first twenty years of variationism, firmly separated “spatial” contributions to language change from the “social”, and treated the study of linguistic heterogeneity in space, society and time as a “natural alliance” (Labov 1982: 20), but of separate disciplines. He (Labov 1982: 42) went on to state that “the study of heterogeneity in space has not advanced at the same tempo as research in single communities”. The division implies that heterogeneity in both time and society are somehow not in space, and that spatiality

11 has not shaped the evolution of social variation in the communities under investigation. But this view was typical of the time (see further Britain 2002, forthcoming c).

Human geography began to move beyond this theoretical and methodological separation of space and society in the late 1970s and 1980s finding a space for itself again, remembering the importance of place and that “the fact that social processes take place over space and in a geographically-differentiated world affects their operation” (Massey 1985: 16). From this point on, human geographers focussed on conceptualising spatiality as a contingent effect contributing to the contextual conditions mediating the operation of causal powers under the banner of “the difference that space makes” (Massey 1984; Sayer 1985; Cochrane 1987; Cooke 1989a, 1989b; Duncan 1989; Savage, Barlow, Duncan, and Saunders 1987; Johnston 1991). This rediscovery of the relevance of, for example, place and region led to a recognition that places and regions are dynamic entities, always in a state of evolution, in which social and economic processes are constantly being played out through a geographically differentiated filter. “Space and spatiality in general is socially constructed […]. That process of construction is constantly evolving. The spatialities of our lives are the product of continual ‘negotiation’, the outcome of the articulation of differentially powerful social relations” (Allen, Massey, and Cochrane 1999: 138). This rediscovery also triggered a concerted effort to develop critical perspectives on the geographies of socially marginalised groups, such as those of gender, childhood, sexuality, ethnicity, ill-health and disability, and “otherness”.

12 Variationist sociolinguistics is slowly beginning to come to terms with this turn in human geographic thought and so more recently, there has been a raised interest in how a richer, socially sensitive approach to space within the discipline can shed light on variation and change. I examine some of the most salient, which fall broadly within three categories: innovation diffusion, dialect supralocalisation and the increasing adoption of identity and practice based approaches in variationist sociolinguistics.

4.1. Innovation diffusion

The literature to date on the spread of new linguistic forms has proposed a number of different models or patterns: ƒ

wave or contagion diffusion (Trudgill 1986; Bailey et al. 1993; Britain 2002, 2004), whereby innovations, like the ripple effect caused when a pebble is dropped into a puddle, radiate over time out from a central focal area, reaching physically nearby locations before those at ever greater distances. Bailey et al. (1993: 379–380) suggest that contagion diffusion is operating to spread lax nuclei of /i/ in words such as field across Oklahoma, in the US, and Labov (2003: 17) suggests that contagion diffusion was at work in the spread of the term hoagie to represent a long filled bread roll from Philadelphia across the state of Pennsylvania;

ƒ

urban hierarchical or cascade diffusion (Trudgill 1974b, 1983, 1986; Callary 1975; Gerritsen 1987; Gerritsen and Jansen 1980; Bailey et al. 1993; Hernandez Campoy 2003, Britain 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006; Labov 2003) whereby innovations descend down a hierarchy of large city to city to large

13 town, to town, village and country. In Britain (2004), for example, I show how the diffusion of l-vocalisation into the East Anglian Fens appears to be reaching small towns before the surrounding countryside, and Kerswill’s (2003: 235–236) investigations of the diffusion of labiodental variants of / / in Britain show that [f v], having diffused, he claims, from London, have reached the cities of Bristol, Derby and Norwich before the nearer but smaller towns of Romsey and Wisbech. It has been from within the urban hierarchical model that gravity models, adopted from economic geography, have been applied to dialectological data (e.g. Trudgill 1983; Chambers and Trudgill 1998; Hernandez Campoy 2003 etc.); ƒ

cultural hearth diffusion (Horvath and Horvath 1997, 2001, 2002) whereby the innovation gains a foothold in both town and country in one particular region before diffusing to other parts of the country; Horvath and Horvath (1997) use the model to show how /l/-vocalization has taken hold in the area around Adelaide and coastal South Australia, before diffusing further afield in the country, and;

ƒ

contra-hierarchical diffusion (Trudgill 1986; Bailey et al. 1993), whereby innovations diffuse against the urban hierarchy, arising in rural areas and spreading to urban ones (also cf. ch. X in this handbook). Trudgill (1986) demonstrates that smoothing processes – reducing triphthongs to diphthongs or long vowels – appear to be spreading southwards from rural north Norfolk in Eastern England into rural and urban areas of the rest of the county and into neighbouring Suffolk, and Piercy (2007) shows that the diffusion of long back vowels in the bath lexical set is spreading against the urban hierarchy in

14 Dorset in the South-West of England, despite the attrition of rhoticity operating hierarchically.

The type of diffusion found appears very much to be context-dependent, however, and there are examples of the same variable diffusing differently in different places. Labov (2003), for example, reminds us that while urban hierarchy diffusion seems to be operating in the diffusion of the cot-caught merger in Oklahoma (Bailey et al. 1993), this merger is not diffusing in the same way across the border from Canada into the United States (Boberg 2000).

The adoption of models of geographical diffusion in the variationist literature owes a lot to the work of the Swedish time-geographer Torsten Hägerstrand who pioneered the modelling of the spatial spread of innovations (e.g. Hägerstrand 1952). It was his work, as was mentioned earlier, that inspired Peter Trudgill’s application of the method to dialectological data most notably in southern Norway and in Eastern England (Trudgill 1974b, 1983). The evolution of human geographic thought has not, however, been particularly kind to Hägerstrand’s approach. Both Blaikie (1978) and Gregory (1985) made cutting critiques of this approach to diffusion, highlighting its lack of sensitivity to social context and its reliance on outdated application of spatial laws and spatial processes (see also Britain, forthcoming a, forthcoming c). Problematically, Gregory (1985) argued, for example, the investigation of the spatial diffusion of innovations has proceeded a)

on the assumption that the diffused form, in spreading spatially, totally levels away the formerly used traditional dialect variants in its path, whereas, for example, dialectological research has shown that often

15 diffusing innovations “mutate” en route. Contact between innovations and local traditional forms occasionally results in hybrid forms characteristic of neither the original innovation nor the conservative dialect (see, for example, Trudgill 1986; Britain 2005), and it is not unknown at all for the social evaluation of an innovation to change as the innovation spreads too. Glottal stops, most characteristic, perhaps, of informal working class speech in the South-East of England (though today they are diffusing across the country and spreading to middle class and more formal speech) have been found more among middle class women than working class speakers in both Cardiff (Mees and Collins 1999) and Newcastle (Watt and Milroy 1999). In Cardiff, Mees and Collins (1999: 201) argued that a shift to glottal stop use represented a shift to “more sophisticated and fashionable speech”; b)

on the assumption that non-adoption of the innovation is a “passive state where the friction of distance applies a brake to innovation […] rather than ‘an active state arising out of the structural arrangements of society’” (Gregory 1985: 319). So rather than considering very slow moving or fossilised innovations (such as the diffusion of /a:/ in the BATH lexical set and /ʌ/ in the STRUT lexical set in southern British English) as having simply “run out of steam”, we should expect to find active lines of resistance to those innovations. Indeed, as Wells (1982: 354) suggested, even middle class people in the north of England “would feel it to be a denial of their identity as northerners to say BATH words with anything other than short [a]”. As Gregory (2000: 176) made clear, resistance to an innovation “connotes a process of sustained struggle: considered and

16 collective action on the part of people whose evaluation of the available information may be strikingly different to that of the ‘potential adopters’”; c)

paying little attention to the structural contradictions on innovation adoption (Gregory 1985: 323) – in other words, sometimes the linguistic system of an accent in the path of a diffusing innovation may be incompatible with that innovation and consequently slow down or block its adoption. An example of the combination of this factor and the previous one is the widespread resistance in the English of Liverpool to the adoption of glottal stops for /t/ reported by Watson (2006). He found that despite the prevalence of glottal stops across a large swathe of contemporary England, including the North, not one glottal stop was found in pre-pausal position in his data from Liverpudlian adolescents (Watson 2006: 59). In addition, the use of [h] for /t/ reported in earlier work on Liverpool English by Knowles (1973: 234) only following short vowels in small monosyllabic function words (e.g. at and what) and not found at all in the surrounding areas of the North-West, or indeed elsewhere in England, not only remained robust in those contexts in the speech of the Liverpudlian adolescents, but had also spread to polysyllabic non-function words where the /t/ was preceded by an unstressed vowel (e.g. biscuit, bucket, chocolate) (Watson 2006: 59). Liverpool is also known for spirantisation of oral stops in intervocalic and word-final position (Watson 2007; Honeybone 2001; Sangster 2001). A shift from a fricated form to the use of glottal stops consequently would entail a more complex change than in varieties without the spirantised forms, and Watson comments that the glottal stop is extremely restricted in Liverpool English to contexts

17 preceding /l/ and other syllabic consonants such as /n/. But Liverpool also has an extremely distinctive local identity and a distinctive demographic history, and its avoidance of glottal stops could be seen as part structural contradiction, part social rejection and local loyalty; d)

paying little attention to social constraints on innovation adoption (Gregory 1985: 323). Gravity models used in the dialectology of diffusion, for example, assume that everyone who uses the innovation has an equal chance of passing it on and that everyone in the geographical path of the innovation has an equal chance of adopting it. However, we live in a socially differentiated world, where access to the resources enabling mobility and contact are unevenly and unequally distributed. Gravity models do not take the complexity of social structure into account, leading Gregory (1985: 328) to argue that such diffusion models “failed to cut through the connective tissue of the world in such a way that its fundamental integrities are retained” and that there is a need “for a more sensitive intellectual surgery”. He argues that gravity models and diffusion theories have operated through “the detachment of ‘potential adopters’ from their social moorings and the displacement of subjects from social struggles” (1985: 328). Few attempts have been made to enrich linguistic diffusion models with social information about the speakers. A few sociolinguists have conducted comparative analyses of diffusion across the sorts of social categories typical of early variationist studies (e.g. contrasting ages, sexes, etc.; see, for example, Trudgill 1983; Britain 1991; Horvath and Horvath 1997, 2001, 2002), and Boberg (2000) demonstrates the effects of a national boundary in undermining predictions based on

18 gravity models. Most notable, perhaps, however, is the important work of Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (see for example, Wolfram 1997, 2002; Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1995; Schilling-Estes and Wolfram 1999) contrasting patterns of change in two seemingly similar communities: Ocracoke off the East Coast of North Carolina and Smith Island in the Chesaspeake Bay of Maryland in the United States. Both were once relatively isolated but today more and more speakers from both islands are coming into contact with people from the mainland and are moving away to seek better employment prospects. Both share some distinctive dialect characteristics: a back and raised nucleus of /ai/: [ʌɪ] and a front gliding realization of /au/: [æɪ]. However, on the one hand, Ocracokers appear to be losing these distinctive features, while on the other, Smith Islanders are increasing their use of them and continuing to diverge from neighbouring dialects (see Wolfram 2002: 770). The important socio-demographic distinction between the two communities is that while Ocracoke is becoming a popular destination for short and long term residence by nonislanders, few people are moving onto Smith Island and many are leaving, resulting in a concentration of the dialect in the mouths of the few that remain. Such communities are, of course, becoming increasingly rare, but the important point here is that the types of change underway on the islands are indicative of differences in their socio-spatial “becoming” (to use a term from Pred 1985: 338); e)

paying little attention, furthermore, to the structural and social consequences of the adoption of the innovation (Gregory 1985: 304). If the innovation is adopted, does this adoption serve to dismantle social and

19 linguistic divisions? If it is not adopted, does this rejection serve to bolster local identities as being distinct from those of the promoters of the innovation? In fact, Gregory (2000: 177), fifteen years after his original critique of diffusion theory, concludes rather pessimistically about the current state of this approach, suggesting that there had been little development in the search for a socially and contextually rich account of spreading innovations. Even in one of the more welltrodden topics of enquiry in the human geographic diffusionist literature, the spread of HIV/AIDS infection, he claims that much research had been “subordinated to the objectivist logics of spatial science” (see Brown 1995 for a noteworthy exception).

4.2. Supralocalisation of dialects

Diffusion, as became clear in the previous section, should be conceptualised as a form of varietal contact. Consequently, and not surprisingly, where breaks in contact frequency are found, we also find that linguistic breaks – isoglosses or dialect transitions – occur (Chambers and Trudgill 1998; Britain 1991, 2001, 2002). These breaks sometimes arise because of physical barriers to interregional communication. They are also shaped, however, by breaks in routinised social practice within speech communities (Britain 1997, 2002, 2005, forthcoming a, b, c). Giddens has argued that routines form “the material grounding of […] the recursive nature of social life” (Giddens 1984: xxiii), and channel everyday human behaviour into a set of self-perpetuating socio-geographical “grooves”. Dialect boundaries and transitions are often found in breaks between the socio-spatial networks of these “grooves”.

20

The geographies and histories of our social networks and those of the social, economic and political institutions which guide our daily lives in the West are played out, routinised and reproduced within functional zones usually centred around (or in the sometimes distant shadow of) one or a number of urban areas. Subsequently, the socio-geographical trajectories of speakers and their institutions are often strongly guided by past practices, by attitudinal considerations and by physical factors, and hence regions are formed (Britain 2002). As Johnston states,

places differ culturally, in terms of […] the ‘collective memory’. For a variety of reasons, some associated with the local physical environment, people’s responses to the problems of surviving collectively vary from place to place, at a whole range of scales. How they respond becomes part of the local culture, the store of knowledge on which they draw […]. That store […] becomes the inheritance of those who succeed, being transmitted intergenerationally to others who will modify it as they in turn tackle problems old and new (Johnston 1991: 50).

Intra-regional mobility, whilst breaking down networks and routines at the very local level, reinforces supra-local structure, and with, for example, improvements in transportation routes, the shift from primary and secondary to tertiary sector employment as the backbone of the economy, higher levels of university attendance (at sites often well away from the local speech community), the normalisation of long-distance commuting, labour market flexibility and the

21 consequent geographical elasticity of family ties and other social network links, these supralocal functional zones are probably larger than ever before (see Britain, forthcoming a; Sayers, forthcoming).

The previously mentioned social and geographical mobility within these supralocal zones has led to dialect contact between the varieties spoken within them. The result has been the emergence over time of regional koines – levelled supralocal varieties which are replacing some of the linguistic diversity that once reigned within individual regions. We now have a good deal of variationist evidence that intraregional mobility is breaking down local varieties (though there are of course exceptions – see the Liverpool example earlier) in favour of larger supra-local ones, creating a smaller number of geographically expansive regiolects (see, among many, Milroy, Milroy, and Hartley 1994; Milroy, Milroy, Hartley, and Walshaw 1994; Milroy 1999; Watt and Milroy 1999; Watt 2002; Watts 2006; also cf. chapter X in this handbook). Milroy, Milroy and Hartley (1994), for example, demonstrated that in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the highly local [ʔt] variant of /t/ is losing out, particularly among younger female speakers, in favour not of the standard [t] variant, but, as we saw earlier, the regionally more widespread but non-standard glottal form [ʔ]. And Watt (2002) found that the regional Northern non-standard variants [e:] and [o:] of the face and goat variables respectively were taking over in Newcastle from the much more locally current [ɪə] and [ʊə] variants (also discussed earlier), with the national standard forms serving as insignificant minority variants and used only among middle class speakers.

22 Similarly, research by both Mathisen (1999) and Watts (2006) has suggested that [ŋɡ] forms of (ŋ) may well be “rejuvenating” to become a supra-local form of the Midlands and parts of the North-West. Watts examined dialect contact and diversity in Wilmslow, a town situated some 20km south of Manchester. Wilmslow is a predominantly middle class town, where many of Manchester’s wealthier business people, white-collar workers and football stars live. In the 1970s, a large local authority-run housing estate – Colshaw – was built on the side of Wilmslow to rehouse people who had previously been living in substandard housing in Manchester. Watts (2006: 147, 294, 170) found that while the middle class residents of Wilmslow used extremely low levels of many widespread non-standard forms (e.g. less than 14% /n/ in unstressed words (94% in Colshaw estate), less than 3% th-fronting in words such as think and mother (>43% in Colshaw), yet non-standard [ŋɡ] forms of stressed (ŋ) (in words such as sing and ring) were used in more than 50% of tokens (and over 80% among the 11–18 year olds). Mathisen (1999: 120) found a very similar pattern for speakers in Sandwell, near Birmingham. A number of other studies suggest its retention among young speakers across the Midlands and parts of the North-West, e.g. Redditch (Ryfa, forthcoming a), the Wirral (Grainger 2005) and Liverpool (Watson 2007).

Such supra-local koineisation is also underway, as Ellis (1889) noted over a century ago, in south-eastern England, much to the excitement of journalists and politicians, the emerging regiolect having been named “Estuary English” (for discussions see Maidment 1994; Parsons 1998; Peys 2001; Przedlacka 2001; Ryfa, forthcoming b, etc.). Torgersen and Kerswill (2004), for example, have demonstrated

23 that the somewhat different vowel systems of the towns of Reading and Ashford in south-east England are converging and Britain (2005) has highlighted the variable acquisition of supralocal south-eastern forms in the Fens. There is, of course, variation within this regiolect, and local varieties still exist. Regional supralocalisation is still underway, only affecting certain features and not others, and distinct local dialects form part of the mix that has engendered the regiolect in different places – the East Anglian version of the regiolect is distinct from, say, the Sussex version, since, obviously, East Anglian dialects helped shape its very emergence. Allen, Massey and Cochrane (1998) investigated the growth of the “South-East” as the focus of Thatcher’s neo-liberal project of the 1980s, and, using a number of measures such as income levels, wage increases, house price inflation, hi-tech employment growth, government public spending increases, revisited the “region” as a geographical concept. They emphasised that the South-East isn’t “out there”, well defined and demarcated, waiting to be documented, but is created, shaped and reworked by practice, both individual and institutional, within it. The region is both fluid and diverse. Dialectological evidence from this region highlights that at some levels the region shows considerable linguistic homogenisation, but at others provides examples of considerable linguistic diversity. Recent work on relative pronoun marking in the South-East of England emphasises that there is still considerable intra-regional differentiation. Cheshire, Fox and Britain (2007), comparing London and the Fens (150 km apart, but both in the “South-East”), show radically distinct choices of pronoun marking. As Figure 1 shows, the two varieties agree in only one respect – the avoidance of which as a relative pronoun. Regions are still complex, diverse and fluid entities and the dialect patterns of the south-east of England exemplify that supralocal homogeneity is far far from complete.

24

Figure 1 about here

Mentioned earlier was the fact that both physical barriers and breaks in routinised communication networks can be the cause of dialect boundaries. Important, though, also is the recognition that these physical and social factors, along with attitudinal ones, together can serve to reinforce and recreate boundaries. The Fens in Eastern England is the site of a large bundle of isoglosses separating East Anglian dialects from East Midland ones as well as “Northern” ones from “Southern” ones (see Britain 1991, 2001). But social, physical as well as attitudinal considerations need to be taken into consideration to account for why this area is host to so many dialect transitions. Before the 17th century the area was largely boggy marshland with sparsely distributed communities settled on small patches of higher ground which were often subjected themselves to regular flooding; because of their impenetrability, the area served as a regional and military frontier. Both the place and the people were stereotyped negatively by non-Fenlanders. Darby (1931: 61) claims that there arose “a mythical fear of a land inhabited by demons and dragons, ogres and werewolves”, and he quotes both Felix who claimed the Fens were “especially obscure, which ofttimes many men had attempted to inhabit, but no man could endure it on account of manifold horrors and fears and the loneliness of the wide wilderness – so that no man could endure it, but everyone on this account had fled from it” as well as the famous diarist Samuel Pepys who in an entry on 18th September 1663, describes his travels “over most sad fenns, all the way observing the sad life which the people of the place do live, sometimes rowing from one spot to another and then wading”.

25 These physical and attitudinal and political reinforcements of the Fens as a boundary led to social routines respecting this boundary too, and thereby (to recite Giddens), a set of self-perpetuating socio-geographical “grooves” developed which reinforced the view of the “Fens-as-barrier”. Nowadays, connections across the Fens are much easier, but the traces of the historical frontier can be still be seen in the geographical patterning of all but the very most recent linguistic innovations arriving in the area. Britain (1991, 1997, 2001) provides linguistic evidence of the northeast/south-west dialect boundary in the Fens which mirrored the path of the historical “frontier”, and Britain (2002: 612–616) shows how at a more local level, public transportation networks, drainage channel systems, relative population densities, political boundaries, local rivalries and competition between two urban centres with competing service, employment and entertainment provision reinforce local (and highly salient) dialect boundaries. Very much more recent innovations from southern England, especially non-salient, supra-regional ones, such as the vocalisation of /l/, have ignored these local contextual conditions and created north-south differences in the Fens, rather than east-west differences. These differential geographical patterns can, of course, only be fully understood through an appreciation of the contextual historical, social, political, attitudinal, economic and geographical development of the area.

4.3. Practice-based approaches

The examples above have highlighted how social practice helps create and reinforce spatial distributions of linguistic features at the regional and subregional level. Research at the very local level, at the level of the local neighbourhood, has also

26 been fruitful in demonstrating how our variable social geographies as speakers can serve to create and reinforce variable linguistic geographies.

Two recent research projects are particularly notable. Firstly, at the very local level, is Eckert’s (2000) investigation of the relationship between dialect, adolescent communities of practice in Detroit and the appropriation of space in and outside school by those young people. Eckert shows, for instance, how engagement in out-of-school urban and suburban sites, hanging-out in parks and cruising along the streets connecting the suburbs with more central parts of Detroit are all intertwined with language change. Strong correlations between the use of advanced variants of changes in progress and engagement as a cruiser or a frequenter of the urban parks show that those adolescents who brave the freedom, excitement and danger of these activities are those most likely to be leading many of the changes in Eckert’s study (cf. chapter X in this handbook). For example, the backing of /ʌ/ to [ɔ], a change led clearly by “Burnouts”, shows clear positive correlations with cruising activity, while /ʌ/ fronting to [ɛ], on the other hand, a “Jock”-led change, correlates negatively with cruising (Eckert 2000: 151–152). Eckert concludes that “[t]he use of urban variables […] is a resource for the entire population in the construction of linguistic styles related to engagement in urban practice” (Eckert 2000: 153). Secondly we can look to the work of Barbara Johnstone and her colleagues examining how dialect features arise, become associated with and stereotyped to a particular place, and how speakers then synthesise local attitudes, media representations and other discourses concerning this stereotype to “trademark” or “enregister” the dialect of the place as a commodity, highlighting that a multitude of sources can together create a context for, shape and renew local patterns of

27 language variation. Johnstone, Andrus and Danielson (2006), drawing data from corpora of newspaper reports about the Pittsburgh dialect, from interviews with local city residents and from extensive ethnographic observation, show how the monophthongisation of /au/ to [a:] has taken the journey from indicator to marker to stereotype (in Labov’s (1972) parlance), both in terms of sociolinguistic patterning in the speech community and in terms of media and other commercial representations of the dialect, and in so doing has joined a small number of local dialect features which are clearly above the level of speaker consciousness. These features have become “legitimised” through ever more serious exposure in the media, and speakers use them as a resource for marking identity, “performance” and other discourse strategies, signalling, importantly for our discussion here, a link between language and place. Johnstone et al. (2006) make it clear that /au/ > [a:] originally signalled “working class” and “male” but not necessarily “Pittsburgh”, but that the evolution of the form in the speech community, its representation in the local Pittsburgh media, and its subsequent commodification in the city (in the form of T-shirts and mugs with dialect forms printed on them) have recycled or reallocated what were class and gender associations into place-based ones.

Besides these more socially sensitive approaches to geographical language variation, another branch of geolinguistics which has seen somewhat of a revival in recent years is dialect cartography (cf. chapter X and X in this handbook), a revival sparked both by improvements in cartographical technology and software, and by a desire, following Labov’s (1994) important work theorising patterns of phonological merger, split and vowel chain shifts, to investigate the geographical dispersion of those important language changes affecting North America. Telsur, a large-scale

28 project collecting and analysing recordings of telephone interviews with over 750 speakers from across the US and parts of Canada culminated in the publication of the Atlas of North American English (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006) showing the geographical distribution of a wide range of the changes addressed in Labov (1994). Labov et al.’s examination of the maps that resulted from their analyses of the Telsur data led to similar conclusions as those based on the English Fens data and the evidence of supralocalisation discussed above: regional dialect boundaries from the past (for example from much earlier dialect atlas work, often concentrating on lexical items rather than phonological variation) had often persisted to the present day and where the modern boundaries were different this was often a result of the most recent changes in the speech community. Labov, Ash and Boberg argued that “regional dialects are becoming increasingly differentiated from each other […] within most of the regional boundaries, linguistic changes in progress have the effect of solidifying and developing the regional pattern. Many local dialects are indeed disappearing, but they are assimilating to larger regional patterns rather than to a national or international model” (2006: 119). The cartographic work carried out by Labov and his associates is exemplary, but it is so because it is grounded in a thorough theoretical understanding of the nature of phonological change in the US based on decades of careful empirical investigation and on sophisticated acoustic analysis of large corpora of carefully collected data.

5. Concluding remarks

29 All in all, variationism has not fully or adequately engaged yet with socially rich theorisations of geographical space. It has tended both to fetishise some types of space (e.g. urban spaces as opposed to rural ones) as well as, often, to divorce space from social structure and language from the geographical “becoming” of the speech community. Interestingly, differences in academic focus have meant that it has been hard to contrast, for example, whether the many parts of the English speaking world are all undergoing similar types of geolinguistic change in the early 21st century. The recent focus in British variationism on consonantal change has led to an academic focus on diffusion, levelling and convergence, whereas the North American focus on vowels has led to a broader discussion of differentiation and divergence. Yet, as we have seen, both appear to be undergoing supralocalisation and thereby reinforcing regional dialect areas. The examination of mergers, splits and chain shifts in North America, on the other hand, has not been particularly successfully applied to changes currently afoot in British English, where in the South, researchers have found contact-based approaches more fruitful to explain recent phonological developments (see, for example, Torgersen and Kerswill 2004; Fox 2007) and where in the North, changes underway have been explicitly excluded from Labov’s (1994) typological focus on vocalic chain shifts.

But a welcome critical consciousness about the role of space is beginning to enthuse scholars of language variation and change, and this volume, as well as others (e.g. Lameli, Kehrein, and Rabanus, forthcoming) are symptomatic of a blossoming of interest in the language-space interface that extends well beyond variationist sociolinguistics.

30 References:

Allen, John, Doreen Massey and Allan Cochrane,

1998

Rethinking the

1993

Some patterns

Region. London: Routledge.

Bailey, Guy, Tom Wikle, Jan Tillery and Lori Sand

of linguistic diffusion. Language Variation and Change 3: 359–390.

Bell, Allan 1984

Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13:

145–204.

Blaikie, Piers

1978

The theory of the spatial diffusion of innovations:

A spacious cul-de-sac. Progress in Human Geography 2: 268–295.

Boberg, Charles

2000

Geolinguistic diffusion and the U.S.-Canada

border. Language Variation and Change 12: 1–24.

Britain, David

1991

Dialect and space: A geolinguistic study of speech

variables in the Fens. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Linguistics, University of Essex.

Britain, David

1997

Dialect contact and phonological reallocation:

‘Canadian Raising’ in the English Fens. Language in Society 26: 15–46.

31 Britain, David

2001

Welcome to East Anglia! Two major dialect

‘boundaries’ in the Fens. In: Jacek Fisiak and Peter Trudgill (eds.), East Anglian English, 217–242. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer.

Britain, David

2002

Space and spatial diffusion. In: Jack K. Chambers,

Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 603–637. Oxford: Blackwell.

Britain, David

2004

Geolinguistics and linguistic diffusion. In: Ulrich

Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, Klaus Mattheier and Peter Trudgill (eds.), Sociolinguistics: International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, 34–8. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.

Britain, David

2005

Innovation diffusion, ‘Estuary English’ and local

dialect differentiation: The survival of Fenland Englishes. Linguistics 43: 995–1022.

Britain, David

2006

Language/Dialect contact. In: Keith Brown (ed.),

Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, Volume 6, 2nd ed., 651–656. Oxford: Elsevier.

Britain, David

forthcoming a

One foot in the grave? Dialect death,

dialect contact and dialect birth in England. International Journal of the Sociology of Language.

32 Britain, David

forthcoming b

“Big bright lights” versus “green and

pleasant land”? The unhelpful dichotomy of ‘urban’ versus ‘rural’ in dialectology. In: Enam Al-Wer and Rudolf De Jong (eds.), On Dialectology. Leiden: Brill.

Britain, David

forthcoming c

Conceptualisations of geographic

space in linguistics. In: Alfred Lameli, Roland Kehrein and Stefan Rabanus (eds.), The Handbook of Language Mapping. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Brown, Michael

1995

Ironies of distance: An ongoing critique of the

geographies of AIDS. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13: 159–183.

Callary, Robert

1975

Phonological change and the development of an

urban dialect in Illinois. Language in society 4: 155–170.

Castells, Manuel

1977

The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach.

1982

Geolinguistics of a variable rule. Discussion

London: Arnold.

Chambers, Jack K.

Papers in Geolinguistics 5: 1–18.

Chambers, Jack K.

2003

Sociolinguistic theory, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.

Chambers, Jack K. and Peter Trudgill Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1980

Dialectology, 1st ed.

33 Chambers, Jack K. and Peter Trudgill

1998

Dialectology, 2nd ed.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cheshire, Jenny

2002

Sex and gender in variationist research. In: Jack K.

Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.), The Handbook of language variation and change, 423–443. Oxford: Blackwell.

Cheshire, Jenny, Sue Fox and David Britain

2007

Relatives from the South.

Paper presented at UK Language and Variation Change 6, Lancaster University, September 2007.

Christaller, Walter

1933

Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland. Gustav

Fischer: Jena.

Cloke, Paul 1999

The country. In: Paul Cloke, Philip Crang and Marc Goodwin

(eds.), Introducing Human Geographies, 256–267. London: Arnold.

Cloke, Paul 2005

Conceptualising rurality. In: Paul Cloke, Terry Marsden and

Patrick Mooney (eds.), Handbook of Rural Studies, 18–29. London: Sage.

Cloke, Paul and Jo Little (eds.)

1997

Contested Countryside Cultures.

London: Routledge.

Cochrane, Allan

1987

What a difference the place makes: The new

structuralism of locality. Antipode 19: 354–363.

34

Cooke, Philip

1989a

The contested terrain of locality studies.

Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 80: 14–29.

Cooke, Philip

1989b

Localities: The Changing Face of Urban Britain.

London: Unwin Hyman.

Coupland, Nikolas

2007

Style: Language Variation and Identity.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Darby, Henry

1931

The role of the Fenland in English history. Ph.D.

dissertation, Department of Geography, St Catherine’s College, Cambridge University.

Duncan, Simon

1989

Uneven development and the difference that space

makes. Geoforum 20: 131–139.

Eckert, Penelope

1990

The whole woman: Sex and gender differences in

variation. Language Variation and Change 1: 245–267.

Eckert, Penelope

1997

Age as a sociolinguistic variable. In: Florian

Coulmas (ed.), The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, 151–167. Oxford: Blackwell.

Eckert, Penelope Blackwell.

2000

Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Oxford:

35

Eckert, Penelope and John Rickford (eds.)

2001

Style and Sociolinguistic

Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ellis, Alexander

1889

On Early English Pronunciation, Volume 5.

London: Truebner and Co.

Fox, Sue

2007

The demise of Cockneys? Language change in London’s

‘traditional’ East End. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Linguistics, University of Essex.

Gerritsen, Marinel

1988

Sociolinguistic developments as a diffusion

process. In: Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, Klaus Mattheier and Peter Trudgill (eds.), Sociolinguistics: An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, Volume 3(2), 1574–1591. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.

Gerritsen, Marinel and Frank Jansen

1980

The interplay of

dialectology and historical linguistics: Some refinements of Trudgill’s formula. In: Peter Maher, Allan R. Bomhard and Ernst F. K. Koerner (eds.), Papers from the Third International Conference on Historical Linguistics, 11–38. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Giddens, Anthony

1984

The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory

of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

36 Grainger, Heather

2005

Is the Wirral really Scouse? The use of local and

supralocal forms in East Wirral. MA dissertation, Department of Linguistics, University of Essex.

Gregory, Derek

1985

Suspended animation: The stasis of diffusion

theory. In: Derek Gregory and John Urry (eds.), Social Relations and Spatial Structures, 269–336. London: Macmillan.

Gregory, Derek

2000

Diffusion. In: Ron Johnston, Derek Gregory,

Geraldine Pratt and Michael Watts (eds.), The Dictionary of Human Geography, 4th ed., 175–178. Oxford: Blackwell.

Hägerstrand, Torsten

1952

The Propagation of Innovation Waves. Lund:

1973

Social Justice and the City. London: Arnold.

Gleerup.

Harvey, David

Hernandez Campoy, Juan Manuel 2003

Exposure to contact and the

geographical adoption of standard features: Two complementary approaches. Language in society 32: 227–255.

Honeybone, Patrick

2001

Lenition inhibition in Liverpool English. English

Language and Linguistics 5: 213–249.

37 Horvath, Barbara and Ronald J. Horvath

1997

The geolinguistics of a

sound change in progress: /l/ vocalisation in Australia. In: Charles Boberg, Miriam Meyerhoff and Stephanie Strassel (eds.), A Selection of Papers from NWAVE 25: Special Issue of University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 4(1), 109–124. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.

Horvath, Barbara and Ronald J. Horvath

2001

A multilocality study of a

sound change in progress: The case of /l/ vocalization in New Zealand and Australian English. Language Variation and Change 13: 37–57.

Horvath, Barbara and Ronald J. Horvath

2002

The geolinguistics of /l/

vocalisation in Australia and New Zealand. Journal of sociolinguistics 6: 319–346.

Johnston, Ron

1991

A Question of Place: Exploring the Practice of

Human Geography. Oxford: Blackwell.

Johnston, Ron

2000

Urban geography. In: Ron Johnston, Derek

Gregory, Geraldine Pratt and Michael Watts (eds.), The Dictionary of Human Geography, 4th ed., 875–878. Oxford: Blackwell.

Johnstone, Barbara, Jennifer Andrus and Andrew Danielson

2006

Mobility, indexicality, and the enregisterment of “Pittsburghese”. Journal of English Linguistics 34: 77–104.

38 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, 223–244. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Knowles, Gerry

1973

Scouse: The urban dialect of Liverpool. Ph.D.

dissertation, Department of Linguistics, University of Leeds.

Labov, William

1966

The Social Stratification of English in New York

City. Washington, DC.: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Labov, William

1972

Sociolinguistic Patterns. Oxford: Blackwell.

Labov, William

1982

Building on empirical foundations. In: Winfred

Lehmann and Yakov Malkiel (eds.), Perspectives in Historical Linguistics, 79–92. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Labov, William

1994

Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal factors,

Volume 1. Oxford: Blackwell.

Labov, William

2003

Pursuing the cascade model. In: David Britain and

Jenny Cheshire (eds.), Social Dialectology: In Honour of Peter Trudgill, 9–22. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

39 Labov, William

2006

The Social Stratification of English in New York

City, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. First published Washington, DC.: Center of Applied Linguistics [1966].

Labov, William, Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg

2006

Atlas of North

American English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Sound Change. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Lameli, Alfred, Roland Kehrein and Stefan Rabanus (eds.) forthcoming

The

Handbook of Language Mapping. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Macnaghten, Phil and John Urry

1998

Maidment, John

Estuary English: Hybrid or Hype? Paper

1994

Contested Natures. London: Sage.

presented at the 4th New Zealand Conference on Language and Society, Lincoln University, Christchurch, New Zealand.

Massey, Doreen

1984

Introduction: Geography matters. In: Doreen

Massey and John Allen (eds.), Geography matters!, 1–11. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Massey, Doreen

1985

New directions in space. In: Derek Gregory and

John Urry (eds.), Social Relations and Spatial Structures, 9–19. London: Macmillan.

40 Mathisen, Anne Grethe 1999

Sandwell, West Midlands: Ambiguous

perspectives on gender patterns and models of change. In: Paul Foulkes and Gerard Docherty (eds.), Urban Voices: Accent Studies in the British Isles, 107–123. London: Arnold.

Mees, Inger and Beverley Collins 1999

Cardiff:

A

real-time

study

of

glottalisation. In: Paul Foulkes and Gerard Docherty (eds.), Urban Voices. Accent Studies in the British Isles, 185–202. London: Arnold.

Meyerhoff, Miriam

1996

Dealing with gender identity as a sociolinguistic

variable. In: Victoria Bergvall, Janet Bing and Alice Freed (eds.), Language and Gender Research: Rethinking Theory and Practice, 225–252. London: Longman.

Milroy, James, Lesley Milroy and Sue Hartley 1994

Local and supra-local

change in British English: The case of glottalisation. English World-Wide 15(1): 1– 33.

Milroy, James, Lesley Milroy, Sue Hartley and David Walshaw

1994

Glottal stops and Tyneside glottalisation: Competing patterns of variation and change in British English. Language Variation and Change 6: 327–357.

Milroy, Lesley

1999

Women as innovators and norm-creators: The

sociolinguistics of dialect levelling in a northern English city. In: Suzanne Wertheim, Ashlee C. Bailey and Monica Corston-Oliver (eds.), Engendering Communication:

41 Proceedings of the 5th Berkeley Women and Language Conference, 361–376. Berkeley: BWLG Publications.

Parsons, Gudrun

1998

From ‘RP’ to ‘Estuary English’: The concept

‘received’ and the debate about British pronunciation standards. MA dissertation, Department of Linguistics, University of Hamburg.

Peys, Stéphanie

2001

In pursuit of Cockney speak. Unpublished MA

dissertation. Department of Linguistics, Université de Pau et des pays de l’Adour.

Piercy, Caroline

2007

‘We don't say oo /ar/’: Diffusion of Phonological

Change in Dorset English. Research on languages and linguistics at Sussex (ROLLS) seminar series, University of Sussex, 12th November 2007.

Pred, Allan 1985

The social becomes the spatial, the spatial becomes the social:

Enclosures, social change and the becoming of places in the Swedish province of Skåne. In: Derek Gregory and John Urry (eds.), Social Relations and Spatial Structures, 337–365. London: Macmillan.

Przedlacka, Joanna

2001

Estuary English and RP: Some recent findings.

Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 36: 35–50.

Przedlacka, Joanna

2002

Estuary English? A Sociophonetic Study of

Teenage Speech in the Home Counties. Bern: Peter Lang.

42 Ryfa, Joanna

forthcoming a

A sociolinguistic investigation of the

New Town dialect of Redditch. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex.

Ryfa, Joanna

forthcoming b

Englishes of London and the South

East of England. In: Tometro Hopkins, John McKenny and Kendall Decker (eds.), World Englishes. London: Continuum.

Sangster, Catherine

2001

Lenition of alveolar stops in Liverpool English.

Journal of Sociolinguistics 5: 401–412.

Savage, Mike, James Barlow, Simon Duncan and Peter Saunders

1987

“Locality Research”: The Sussex programme on economic restructuring, social change and the locality. Quarterly Journal of Social Affairs 3: 27–51.

Sayer, Andrew

1985

The difference that space makes. In: Derek

Gregory and John Urry (eds.), Social Relations and Spatial Structures, 49–66. London: Macmillan.

Sayers, Dave

forthcoming

Reversing Babel: Declining linguistic

diversity in late modern societies. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex.

Schilling-Estes, Natalie and Walt Wolfram

1999

Alternative models of

dialect death: Dissipation vs. concentration. Language. 75: 486–521.

43

Short, Brian

2006

Idyllic ruralities. In: Paul Cloke, Terry Marsden

and Patrick Mooney (eds.), Handbook of Rural Studies, 133–148. London: Sage.

Shucksmith, Mark

2000

Exclusive countryside? Social Inclusion and

Regeneration in Rural Britain. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Soja, Edward W.

1989

Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of

Space in Critical Social Theory. New York: Verso.

Torgersen, Eivind and Paul Kerswill

2004

Internal and external

motivation in phonetic change: Dialect levelling outcomes for an English vowel shift. Journal of sociolinguistics 8: 24–53.

Trudgill, Peter

1974a

The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Trudgill, Peter

1974b

Linguistic change and diffusion: Description and

explanation in sociolinguistic dialect geography. Language in Society 3: 215–246.

Trudgill, Peter

1975

Linguistic geography and geographical linguistics.

In: Christopher Board, Richard J. Chorley, Peter Haggett and David R. Stoddart (eds.), Progress in Geography, 227–252. London: Arnold.

44 Trudgill, Peter

1983

On Dialect: Social and Geographical

Perspectives. Oxford: Blackwell.

Trudgill, Peter

1986

Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell.

Walters, Keith

1988

Dialectology. In Frederick J. Newmeyer (ed.),

Language: The Socio-cultural Context, 119–139. (Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey 4.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Watson, Kevin

2006

Phonological resistance and innovation in the

North-West of England. English Today 22(2): 55–61.

Watson, Kevin

2007

Liverpool English. Journal of the International

Phonetic Association 37: 351–360.

Watt, Dominic

2002

‘I don’t speak with a Geordie accent, I speak, like,

the Northern accent’: Contact-induced levelling in the Tyneside vowel system. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6: 44–63.

Watt, Dominic and Lesley Milroy 1999

Patterns of variation and change in

three Tyneside vowels: Is this dialect levelling? In: Paul Foulkes and Gerard Docherty (eds.), Urban Voices: Accent Studies in the British Isles, 25–46. London: Arnold.

45 Watts, Emma

2006

Mobility-induced dialect contact: A sociolinguistic

investigation of speech variation in Wilmslow, Cheshire. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Language and Lingustics, University of Essex.

Weinreich, Uriel, William Labov and Marvin Herzog

1968

Empirical

foundations for a theory of language change. In: Winfried Lehmann and Yakov Malkiel (eds.), Directions for Historical Linguistics, 97–195. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Wells, John Christopher

1982

Accents of English: The British Isles,

Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wolfram, Walt

1997

Issues in dialect obsolescence: An introduction.

American Speech 73: 1–12.

Wolfram, Walt

2002

Language death and dying. In: Jack K. Chambers,

Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 764–787. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wolfram, Walt and Donna Christian

1974

Appalachian Speech.

Washington, DC.: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Wolfram, Walt and Natalie Schilling-Estes

1995

Moribund dialects and the

language endangerment canon: The case of the Ocracoke Brogue. Language 71: 696– 721.

46

Wolfram, Walt and Natalie Schilling-Estes Blackwell.

1998

American English. Oxford:

47

Figure 1: Distribution of relative markers in subject and object function in (inner) London and the Fens (from Cheshire, Fox and Britain 2007)

70 60

% use of variant

50 40 30 20 10 0 that

what

which

who

Ø

relative pronoun variant Inner London subject

Inner London object

Fens subject

Fens object