Introduction
As we sat down for dinner at a conference in Rouen in May 2014, we got talking about the recent publication of Sociolinguistics in Scotland, edited by Robert Lawson. We were told that similar volumes were being planned for Ireland and Wales (they have since been publishedâin 2016 for Ireland, edited by Raymond Hickey, and in 2016 for Wales, edited by Mercedes Durham and Jonathan Morris). We were both working on sociolinguistic topics in England and therefore keen to complete the series, so we laid the plan for a similar publication. To our delight, Palgrave welcomed our proposal and you are now reading the fruit of what started as a dinner table chat.
This book, similar to its counterparts in Scotland, Ireland and Wales, encompasses a range of studies representative of the research conducted in the sociolinguistic field in England in the 2010s, notably on phonological , lexical, syntactic and intonational variation in English and British Sign Language . Set out over the next 13 chapters, they contribute to the development of sociolinguistic theory and suggest directions which may be fruitful for future studies. This introduction provides a short synopsis of the development of sociolinguistics as academic field in England. Finally, it considers directions which future research could, and perhaps should, take.
Previous Work on Sociolinguistics in England
Here we review previous dialectological and variationist work on varieties of English in England, outlining studies which encompass different aspects of the interplay between language and society. While this review presents a wide range of topics, we do not claim that this is a complete overview, but we aim to highlight important milestones in the development of sociolinguistics as academic field in England.
In the nineteenth and in the first half of the twentieth century regional variation was the main concern of linguists and philologists. A first large-scale dialectological survey was carried out by Alexander John Ellis in the middle of the nineteenth century. He used a dialect test in which people, usually from small villages, were asked to read a short passage of 76 words in their local dialect in order to identify dialect areas that were mainly based on vowel distributions. Some decades later, in the early twentieth century, Wright published his highly influential English Dialect Dictionary, a six-volume collection of dialect words, compiling 70,000 dialect words which is now available as digitised source.1
In the middle of the twentieth century, Harold Orton started work on the Survey of English Dialects, choosing the rural fieldwork sites. The aim of the project was to preserve a record of âtraditional vernacular, genuine and oldâ (Orton 1960: 332). Data were collected by fieldworkers who mainly interviewed non-mobile, older, rural males (cf. Chambers and Trudgill 1980) in these rural communities, that is, the least mobile, most static people in the fieldwork sites. Orton shared the sentiment on the need of recording traditional dialects before they are lost with Wright, who stated in the preface to the English Dialect Grammar: âThere can be no doubt that pure dialect speech is rapidly disappearing [âŠ] The writing of this grammar was begun none too soon, for had it been delayed another twenty years, I believe it would by then be quite impossible to get together sufficient pure dialect material to enable anyone to give even a mere outline of the phonology of our dialects as they existed at the close of the nineteenth centuryâ (Wright 1905: ivâv taken from Beal 2010: 3).
From the 1970s onwards, there was a notable shift away from dialectological topics towards variationist sociolinguistics with Peter Trudgill as the most influential representative of this approach in England. His work in Norwich mainly focused on external factors such as gender and social class in order to explain the present variation . Seminal works such as Dialectology (1980; with Jack Chambers), Dialects in Contact (1986) and The Dialects of English (1990) were based on his sociolinguistic and dialectological work in England and Norway. While Trudgill mainly focused on phonological variation of adult speech , in her playground study Cheshire (1982) explored grammatical variation in the speech of children and found that children already show language variation , and boys use more non-standard forms than girls. She concluded that language variation on the grammatical level is governed by social and linguistic factors.
In the 1990s, consequences of dialect contact were explored further and two seminal projects on dialect contact situations in England were conducted. Dialect levelling and diffusion were identified as driving forces in language change . Kerswill and Williams (e.g. 2000) picked up the idea of new dialect formation from Trudgill (1986) and investigated dialect levelling and the creation of a koine in Milton Keynes, a New Town west of London . Britain (1997) also investigated dialect contact scenarios in the Fens, a sparsely populated area in the east of England, where he showed the geographical proximity is not the only factor influencing language use in dialect contact situations and that we must also take into account the accessibility and psychological orientation of people. A question, which has sparked a lot of discussion in sociolinguistics in the last two decades, is whether local and/or regional varieties will be lost and a more general variety is the future of English in England or whether urban centres grow more apart in their use of language.
In the 1990s, a large project on Phonological Variation and Change in Contemporary Spoken English (PVC) investigated phonological variation and change in present-day urban dialects (cf. Milroy et al. 1999), focusing on Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Derby. The team around Lesley and James Milroy investigated variation and change processes in a considerable number of vowels and consonants. One of the outputs of this project was the edited volume Urban Voices (1999) by Foulkes and Docherty, in which phoneticians describe and discuss the variation in a number of urban varieties in the UK and Ireland. This book was highly influential for the research conducted in these areas in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It set the scene for investigating changes by diffusion, in particular of consonantal variables, such as Richards (2008), Jansen (2012) and Flynn (2012).
Research into the dialect use in the North East has a long tradition. The data of the PVC project were preceded by the Tyneside Linguistic Survey (TLS) in the 1960s, an investigation into the local dialect . In both projects, TLS and PVC, interview data were collected. Under the direction of Joan Beal, Karen Corrigan and Herman Moisl, the data of both projects were then amalgamated to what became the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE, http://âresearch.âncl.âac.âuk/ânecte) in the early 2000s. This corpus was complemented by a corpus based on recordings conducted at the University of Newcastle since 2007, called NECTE 2. Both corpora were then combined to The Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE, http://âresearch....