Dialects go where speakers go Mobility, language, variation and change'

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Dialects go where speakers go Mobility,
language, variation and change.

• Dave Britain
• Dept of Language and Linguistics
• University of Essex
• dbritain_at_essex.ac.uk

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Dialects as bastardisations of languages
(dialect wrong standard language
right, correct, proper)

• If you allow standards to slip to the stage
  where good English is no better than bad English,
  where people turn up filthyat schoolall those
  things tend to cause people to have no standards
  at all, and once you lose standards theres no
  imperative to stay out of crime.
• Norman Tebbitt cited by David Graddol and Joan
  Swann (1988 102) Trapping Linguists Language
  and Education vol 2 95-111).

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Dialects as the antiquated speech habits of
people in the countryside
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Dialects as reflecting the big bright lights of
the city
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The native speaker problem

• Almost all studies only looked at native speakers
  of the dialect
• How native do you have to be to be native?
• ..

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But people move about.

• Usually mobile people were excluded from studies
  of this kind.
• But what if they make a difference?
• .only from the mid-1980s, really, did this begin
  to be considered an important part of dialect
  studies.

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New themes in dialect study

• the study of postcolonial Englishes (and
  Spanishes, Frenches, Japaneses, etc)
• the study of other large scale labour population
  movements (e.g. Indian languages moved around the
  world to work on plantations)
• the study of second dialect acquisition how well
  do people (esp. children) pick up a second
  dialect when they move from one place to another.
• the study of dialect accommodation what happens
  when a person from one place meets a person from
  another.
• the study of the Englishes of migrants to English
  speaking countries

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and more

• the study of the dialects of New Towns
• the study of New Englishes in countries where
  English is often used as a common language but
  tends not to be the first language e.g.
  Singapore, Hong Kong
• the study of dialects and urbanisation what
  happens when people from the countryside move to
  the city?
• the study of the migration of British people to
  non-English speaking countries
• the study of the dialects that emerge from local
  migration, commuting, and general increased
  mobility

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Evidence of mobility1

• Urbanisation
• Champion (2001 144) shows that between 1950 and
  2030, the proportion of Northern Europes
  population living in urban areas is set to
  increase from 72.7 to 88.8.

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Evidence of mobility2

• Counterurbanisation migration out of cities and
  large towns to places of lower population
  concentration.
• Champion (1998) shows that in the UK the
  greatest beneficiary of counterurbanisation has
  been the remote rural and most remote rural
  settlement categories, with London and the other
  metropolitan cities shedding the largest
  proportions of their population

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Evidence of mobility3

• Increased internal migration

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Evidence of mobility4

• Increased commuting

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Evidence of mobility4 contTravel to work
patterns
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Evidence of mobility5

• An expansion in uptake of higher levels of
  education
• National Audit Office (2008 12) shows that
  university attendance rates have more than
  trebled since 1978

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Evidence of mobility6

• Increases in public and private transport
• The Department for Transport shows that
• - distances travelled by train increased by 55
  and by car by 1087 between 1952 and 2007 (2008
  14)
• - the average distance travelled per person per
  year increased by 45 between 1995 and 2006
  (2008 16)
• - the size of the road network increased by 32
  between 1952 and 2007 (2008 125).

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Evidence of mobility7

• A shift from primary and secondary to tertiary
  sector employment as the backbone of the economy
• many branches of industry have become
  increasingly freed from locational ties to
  natural resources and many parts of the economy
  have been given an enormously high degree of
  potential mobility (Allen et al 1998 141-2).
  Furthermore, there is a well reported tendency
  for tertiary sector employment to relocate to
  financially more advantageous locations (Coe and
  Townsend 1998 392)

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Evidence of mobility 8

• An increase in mobile and flexible working
• facilitated by transportation developments, the
  internet (allowing home-working, rapid
  connectivity from remoter rural areas, allowing
  businesses to relocate to financially
  advantageous locations, etc), and employment
  legislation (e.g. flexibility around childcare)

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Evidence of mobility 9

• Geographical reorientations of consumption
  behaviours (shopping in out-of-town malls and
  hypermarkets, entertainment complexes, etc).
• Findlay, Stockdale, Findlay and Short (2001)
  demonstrate that recent migrants to rural areas
  are much more likely than longer term residents
  to commute to work rather than work locally
  (2001 6) and do their shopping for milk, other
  food, petrol and newspapers in a town or city
  rather than locally (2001 6).

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Evidence of mobility 10

• Increasing geographical elasticity of family
  ties.
• While the population of England increased by
  9.5 between 1971 and 2006, the proportion of
  single person households under retirement age
  rose between 1971 and 2007 by 133 (Self 2008 2,
  17).

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The new themes can be clustered into 5 broad
categories

• - Dialect attrition (or death) and
  supralocalisation
• - New dialect formation
• - Second dialect acquisition
• - Accommodation
• - Diffusion of new linguistic features
• All of these are in some way linked and show
  similar patterns.

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Two tasks.

• Thinking about the sorts of mobilities which
  might cause dialect change
• Some dialect data from rural and urban East
  Anglia investigating potential influences from
  London and the standard variety