Dialect Levelling

10 Key excerpts on "Dialect Levelling"

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  Standardization, Ideology and Linguistics

  • N. Armstrong, I. Mackenzie(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4 that internally motivated language change is essentially an analyst’s construct rather than a real phenomenon. If we are correct in that view, it potentially has implications for the dichotomy that Milroy invokes. In particular, it calls into question whether any linguistic change can be a matter purely of abstract or mechanical process, unmediated by factors that ultimately reflect the way language indexes beliefs and attitudes. We do not pursue the issue in detail here. Nevertheless, we do assume that, on occasion at least, Dialect Levelling may be an expression of an overarching phenomenon of social levelling or anti-standardization.

  The overall structure of this chapter is as follows. First, in Section 5.2, we attempt to contextualize the conceptual issues involved, focusing on certain methodological problems together with recent trends in cultural theory. In Section 5.3 we examine what we term ‘social levelling’, the erosion of previously well-entrenched hierarchies. In Section 5.4 we look in more detail at the linguistic manifestations of this process. And in Section 5.5 we present some concluding remarks.

  5.2 Contextualizing the debate

  5.2.1 Methodological limitations

  The nature of the social change we examine here can be referred to in various terms, perhaps the least problematic of which are ‘convergence’, or better, ‘levelling’. The term ‘levelling’ is more suitable as it seems to describe more accurately a symbolic diminution of social distance in certain respects, but without necessarily implying, as the term ‘convergence’ may, a concomitant increase in social cohesion or solidarity. Levelling in this sense seems more intuitively applicable to what we call below ‘vertical’ levelling. For clarity of exposition we distinguish below between regional (horizontal) and social (vertical) levelling, although as we shall see the two can hardly be separated in principle. We refer to ‘social’ levelling because the term ‘social’, as well as being a hyponym in this categorization, is also the superordinate since the term covers both the regional and (for example) social-class dimensions. Regional origin can most obviously be thought of in spatial or horizontal terms, as represented in Trudgill’s well-known pyramid (1995: 30) that relates the social (class) and regional components of UK accent variation. At the same time, the regional axis is ‘social’ in the sense that regional origin is an ascribed attribute possessed by virtually all speakers and capable of influencing social behaviour.

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  Urban Voices

  Accent Studies in the British Isles

  • Paul Foulkes, Gerard Docherty(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  accent levelling, a process whereby differences between regional varieties are reduced, features which make varieties distinctive disappear, and new features emerge and are adopted by speakers over a wide geographical area (see also Cheshire, Edwards & Whittle 1993).

  Explanations for levelling have been sought in the changing demographic patterns of the last 40 years, which have seen an increase in geographical mobility: the populations of inner cities have declined as inhabitants move out to the suburbs and dormitory towns, while the populations of smaller towns and cities, such as Cambridge, Norwich, Ipswich, Reading and Oxford, have increased (Dorling & Atkins 1995; Giddens 1997). In addition, post-Second World War efforts to rehouse those displaced by the war or living in sub-standard accommodation in inner cities led to the creation of 35 ‘new towns’ across the country (Schaffer 1972). Evidence of an increase in social mobility is less clearly quantifiable but individual studies have shown a recent decrease in downward mobility, accompanied by an increase in the number of young men from blue-collar backgrounds taking up white-collar work (Marshall, Newby, Rose & Vogler 1988). Both vertical social mobility and lateral (geographical) mobility are likely to lead to the breakdown of the close-knit social networks associated with traditional working-class communities and thought to be influential in maintaining local linguistic norms (Milroy & Milroy 1992).

  The projects discussed here were designed to explore the links between such geographical and social factors and Dialect Levelling. The MK project was a study of the emergence of a new dialect in the new town of Milton Keynes (Kerswill 1994a, b, 1996a; Kerswill & Williams 2000). In the second (the DL project), three towns were chosen as research sites, similar in size but differing in their geographical location, demographic characteristics and social composition. The choice of town was informed by the claim that highly mobile populations give rise to diffuse social network structures which in turn promote rapid dialect change (Trudgill 1986, 1992, 1996b) and that the kind of stable communities we find in old-established urban populations promote the enforcement of local conventions and norms, including linguistic norms (L. Milroy 1987b). Milton Keynes, designated in 1967 and built on a green-field site adjacent to the Ml motorway, lies within an 80-kilometre radius of several important urban centres, including London, Oxford, Coventry, Leicester and Cambridge. It is Britain’s latest and fastest growing new town with a population that has increased from 40,000 in 1967 (MKDC 1990) to 176,000 by the time of the 1991 Census. Some 75% of the in-migrants to the town moved from other areas in the south-east, including London. In Milton Keynes, then, we have a socially fluid population made up of newcomers with aspirations to improve both their housing conditions and their employment prospects. Moreover, having arrived in the town, many residents continue to move within Milton Keynes itself (Williams & Kerswill 1997). Such instability hinders the formation of strong local ties and the kind of close-knit, stable social networks which reinforce linguistic norms and inhibit language change.

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  Modern Arabic

  Structures, Functions, and Varieties, Revised Edition

  • Clive Holes(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Georgetown University Press

    (Publisher)

  The major finding of Blanc’s study, a landmark in the study of variation in Arabic, was that interdialectal conversation is subject to two tendencies: “classicizing” and “leveling.” “Leveling” refers to the tendency of speakers to eschew dialectal elements that are highly localized in favor of alternatives that have greater areal currency. This can affect all linguistic levels from phonology to lexicon, but it is particularly marked in the latter, the level of language structure at which speakers are themselves most conscious of dialect differences. A simple example will illustrate the principle. In a conversation between educated Arabs from the Gulf, Baghdad, Cairo, and Jerusalem, there are available to the speakers at least three dialectal ways of expressing “existential” ‘there’, as in ‘there are people who think …’, that are geographically distributed as follows:

  In this case, fi: is the variant likely to be used by all of the speakers because it has no association with any particular area and represents the nearest thing to a dialectal “common denominator” for this particular group. Speakers in a heterogeneous group tend to “level” their speech in the direction of what they recognize as a pan-Arab dialectal mean even if this sometimes involves, as it does here for the Iraqi, using a dialectal form that is not Iraqi at all. The preparedness of speakers to shift to dialectal forms that are not their own does vary, however. On the one hand, a Bahraini or Qatari would be most unlikely to use hast in a cross-dialectal situation because he or she might not even be understood by speakers from outside the Gulf, so localized is this word. On the other hand, Egyptians in particular seem much less inclined to shift away from Egyptianisms not found in other dialects, perhaps because of the dominant position that their dialect has established for itself over many decades in the educational systems and media of most Arab countries.32 We are here talking about “leveling” in a situation in which the dialects of the collocutors are markedly different from each other, but the same principle holds even where they are from less widely dispersed geographical areas. Speakers from less well-known or prestigious communities in a given country will tend to accommodate their speech to the dialect of a more prestigious area or group when the occasion demands, for example, peasants from the Nile Delta or Upper Egypt will make an effort to approximate to Cairene usage when they visit the capital; schoolchildren who use a “Bedouin” dialect with family will switch to an “urban” one at school.33

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  Advancing Socio-grammatical Variation and Change

  In Honour of Jenny Cheshire

  • Karen V. Beaman, Isabelle Buchstaller, Susan Fox, James A. Walker, Karen V. Beaman, Isabelle Buchstaller, Susan Fox, James A. Walker, Karen V. Beaman, Isabelle Buchstaller, Sue Fox, James A. Walker(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Section 2 Combining the Social and the Grammatical 2.1 What Happened to Those Relatives from East Anglia? A Multilocality Analysis of Dialect Levelling in the Relative Marker System David Britain 2.1.1 Dialect Contact, Dialect Levelling, and Uneven Mobilities As a result of variationist and other dialectological investigations of language change over the last 30 years, evidence that England’s traditional dialects have been undergoing attrition has been emerging thick and fast (Britain 2009). Much of the evidence we have for this comes from studies of phonological variation and change, which have, amongst other things, highlighted the levelling of localised or marked variants, the emergence of new variants from contact between old ones, the regional (re)invigoration of regional forms or the geographical and social spread of innovative and/or unmarked and/or majority forms (Trudgill 1986; Kerswill and Williams 2000; Britain 2005, 2018). Foulkes and Docherty’s (1999) volume Urban Voices, for example, contains many case studies of such levelling across the British Isles and acted in many ways as a catalyst for others to track these changes in more places. It was generally agreed that one (if not the main) cause of these changes was mobility-induced dialect contact. One aim of some earlier work (Britain 2009, 2010) was to argue not just that such contact did indeed lead to levelling of traditional dialects, but that such mobility (bringing with it different ingredient language features into the local feature pool) was also the generator of new dialect forms and that mobility did not necessarily lead to an inevitable and unidirectional shrinking of dialect diversity but rather had the potential to increase such diversity as well. This has been best demonstrated in recent years by the large London English projects conducted by Jenny Cheshire, Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox, and Eivind Torgersen (e.g., Cheshire et al

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  Toward a Social History of American English

  • Joey L. Dillard, Linda L. Blanton(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  To Americans, such statements — especially about region — have constituted virtual heresy. To even fairly popular and utilitarian British writers on language (Schur 1973), however, it has not been strange to observe a universal form of English, not tied to any particular region of country. For those immigrants to North America who enjoyed the advantages of such liberty as was provided in the new environment and were not tied to other languages, access to the leveled dialect was possible within one generation. (This is not quite the same as a statement that the leveling process was complete one generation after the first group of English-speaking immigrants arrived.) At this point, it is necessary to part company with on-the-spot observers, especially insofar as their explanations are concerned. It is easy to credit the accomplishment of leveling - and it was so regarded — to the schools, school-teachers, and to other adults, but it is pretty clear that the dynamics of peer-group interaction among children had a great deal more to do with it. Their greater influence is generally recognized, although not without some cavils (Kazazis 1970). Stressing the range of data that the child copes with, C.—J. Bailey (1973: 24) makes a general statement that surely applies to the eighteenth-century colonies: The result is that what the child produces gets more and more restricted to the exemplar of his peers (unless he is isolated Leveling and Diversity 63 from them) . . . Attribution of such influence to peers is a fairly new thing in linguistics, and it was largely absent from the work of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada (Underwood: 1974).

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  Dialect and Language Variation

  • Michael D. Linn(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Constructing a diasystem means placing discrete varieties in a kind of continuum determined by their partial similarities. How-ever, in passing from a traditional to a structural dialectology, the more pressing and more troublesome problem is the opposite one, viz. how to break down a continuum into discrete varieties. What criteria should be used for divisions of various kinds? Can non-technical divisions of a language into dialects, patois, and the like be utilized for technical purposes? 1 3 Before these questions can be answered, it is necessary to distinguish between standardized and non-standardized language. This set of terms is proposed to avoid the use of the ambiguous word, standard, which among others has to serve for socially acceptable, average, typical, and so on. On the contrary, STANDARDIZATION could easily be used to denote a process of more or less conscious, planned, and centralized regulation of language. 14 Many European languages have had standardized varieties for centuries; a number of formerly colonial tongues are undergoing the process only now. Not all leveling is equivalent to standardization. In the standardization process, there is a division of functions between regulators and followers, a constitu-tion of more or less clearcut authorities (academies, ministries of education, Sprachvereine, etc) and of channels of control (schools, special publications, e t c . ) . For example, some dialectal leveling and a good deal of Anglicization has taken place in the immigrant languages of the United States, and we might say that a word like plenty has become a part of the American Norwegian koine. But in a sense proposed here, there is no standardized American Norwegian which is different from Old-World Norwegian, and from the point of view of the standardized language, plenty is nothing but a regional slang term.

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  Space in Language and Linguistics

  Geographical, Interactional, and Cognitive Perspectives

  • Peter Auer, Martin Hilpert, Anja Stukenbrock, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, Peter Auer, Martin Hilpert, Anja Stukenbrock, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Beal points out that many of the regional varieties of English that are now considered endangered were themselves the result of leveling processes sparked by geographic mobility. In England, a boom in dialect dictionaries in the 19th and early 20 th centuries was accompanied by a surge in dialect literature and the development of regional dialect societies. In the U.S., 19 th -century ‘local color’ fiction featured respelled represen-tations of regional varieties, and actors performing stereotypical regional characters were popular on the entertainment circuit. The American Dialect Society was founded in 1889, at the height of the Gilded Age of industrial-ization and the accompanying immigration from Europe and geographical mobility in the U.S. Ideology and discourse in the enregisterment of regional variation 125 Regional dialectology, along with efforts to document and/or preserve linguistic diversity, might thus be seen as attempting to push back against the homogenizing forces of industrialization and widespread geographic mobil-ity and linguistic leveling that industrialization sparked. The dialect atlases of the 19 th and 20 th centuries recorded distinctive regional forms just as, or sometimes well after, the geographical and social isolation that maintained these differences was abating. Current efforts to document endangered lan-guages emerged after many of the languages in question were already past re-viving. It is tempting to adopt Hall’s account, assuming that linguistic and metalinguistic practices like these represent (belated) reactions to the econ-omic and social processes and pressures of globalization. I argue against such accounts. At least when it comes to language, re-newed attention to the local is not a nostalgic or desperate response to global-ization but an inevitable concomitant of globalization.

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  Analysing Older English

  • David Denison, Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, Chris McCully, Emma Moore(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The relationship between perceived loss and overtly expressed awareness of dialectal diversity can likewise be understood in terms of processes of enregisterment and assignment of indexicality that operate in a range of periods and places. Moreover, to invert Labov’s much- quoted phrase, we can use the past to explain and inform the present: those who predict the demise of regionally distinct dialects in twenty-first-century Britain might note that the very features that they analyse as being lost to levelling may well have been the result of an earlier wave of dialect contact, and some of the best-recognised varieties of British English today, such as the urban dialect of Liverpool, 10 are themselves the result of levelling and new dialect formation in the nineteenth century. 10 See Honeybone (2007) for an account of new dialect formation in nineteenth-century Liverpool. Levelling and enregisterment in northern dialects 139 10 Quantitative historical dialectology APRIL M C MAHON AND WARREN MAGUIRE 1 Comparing modern and historical varieties: a perspective from ‘big history’ Over the past decade, it has been possible to discern the beginnings of a major shift in perspective in history scholarship and in the university history curriculum, beginning in the United States but now also starting to make itself felt in Europe. At the heart of this shift is an argument that history ought to be big: that is, it should be taught on a grand scale, from the beginnings of the universe to the present day (or, as Schulman (1999) aptly puts it, ‘from the Big Bang to the Big Mac’). David Christian, in a hugely influential paper which may mark the start of the big history movement, argues that ‘the discipline of history has failed to find an adequate balance between the opposing demands of detail and generality . . . we need large- scale maps if we are to see each part of our subject in its context’ (Christian 1991: 223–4).

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  Language, Society, and New Media

  Sociolinguistics Today

  • Marcel Danesi(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  dialect is a variant of a language that is recognizable in terms of specific differential features (phonological, grammatical, lexical, semantic, pragmatic) that evolve according to where it is spoken and who speaks it. But the line between a “dialect” and a “language” is rarely clear-cut. The term “English” is now interpreted as referring to a “language,” rather than a “dialect.” But there are many versions of “English” according to the areas in which the language is spoken (British English, American English, Canadian English, Australian English, and so on). However, these are hardly considered dialects of one another any longer, even though historically speaking they are. In other words, the language spoken in territories that achieved nationhood at some point after British colonization is no longer perceived as a dialect of British English (the source language) for sociopolitical reasons. Only the variants within each English-speaking nation are now considered to be regional dialects (Cajun American, Newfoundland Canadian, Cockney, and so on).

  This chapter looks at the sociolinguistic study of geographically based linguistic variation. This includes not only the investigation of regional dialects per se, which falls more specifically under the rubric of dialectology, as mentioned, but also phenomena such as language admixture within the speech of certain communities, bilingualism, the assignment of prestige to specific dialects, known as diglossia, and the relation of dialect speech to social perceptions generally.

  3.1 Dialects and Other Regional Variants

  The term dialect comes from the Greek word dialektos , meaning “speech.” It referred in antiquity to the actual ways in which people spoke in conversations. It is often the case that what we call a “national,” or “standard language” is historically a dialectal variant that became the standard or norm at some point in time because of social, literary, or political reasons. For example, in France the language spoken in Paris, known as Parisian French, is today considered to be the standard language. Speech communities that do not use it routinely, having historically lived away from Paris, are said to speak a regional variant or dialect of this standard. But Parisian French was, once, just one among many dialects. The reasons why it became the official (national) standard are connected to the social, political, and economic prestige of the city of Paris. Initially, there was no perception of the Parisian variant as being prestigious with respect to other variants of French. But the instant that it became so, the other variants took on dialect status.

  This historical pattern applies to the linguistic histories of most nations. The emergence of Florentine Tuscan as the basis for the standard language of Italy, for instance, had nothing to do with the quality of its pronunciation or grammar, but rather, with the fact that three famous and influential medieval writers (Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio) used it to promote an incipient literary style written in a vernacular tongue, rather than Latin, that people from all over Italy admired and wanted to emulate. Also, Florence had become a major political and economic center within Italy and, thus, speaking the vernacular of the Florentines was perceived as politically and socially beneficial; this reality led, over time, to making the Florentine vernacular a “standard” one for all Italians.

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  Theories and Methods

  • Peter Auer, Jürgen Erich Schmidt, Peter Auer, Jürgen Erich Schmidt(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Oxford: Blackwell. Kerswill, Paul 2003 Dialect Levelling and geographic diffusion in British English. In: David Britain and Jenny Cheshire (eds.), Social Dialectology: In Honour of Peter Trudgill , 223 243. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Kerswill, Paul and Ann Williams 2000 Creating a new town koine: Children and language change in Milton Keynes. Language in Society 29: 65 115. Kerswill, Paul and Peter Trudgill 2005 The birth of new dialects. In: Auer Hinskens, and Kerswill (eds.), 196 220. 20. Linguistic stability 373 Kristensen, Kjeld and Mats Thelander 1984 On Dialect Levelling in Denmark and Sweden. Folia Linguistica 18: 223 246. Mattheier, Klaus J. 1985 Ortsloyalität als Steuerungsfaktor von Sprachgebrauch in örtlichen Sprachgemeinschaf-ten. In: Klaus Mattheier and Werner Besch (eds.), Ortssprachenforschung , 139 157. Ber-lin: Schmidt. Oosterlinck, Carolien 1992 Fonologische dialectvariatie in Wondelgem. Taal en Tongval 5: 114 128. Pedersen, I. L. 2005 Processes of standardisation in Scandinavia. In: Auer, Hinskens and Kerswill (eds.), 171 195. Rys, Kathy 2007 Dialect as a second language. Linguistic and non-linguistic factors in secondary dialect acquisition by children and adolescents. Unpublished dissertation, University of Ghent. Rys, Kathy and Johan Taeldeman 2007 Fonologische ingredie ¨nten van Vlaamse tussentaal. In: D. Sandra, R. Rymenans, P. Cu-velier and P. Van Petegem (eds.), Tussen taal, spelling en onderwijs , 1 9. Ghent: Acade-mia Press. Sabbe, S. H. 2005 Dialecten in Zedelgem: Kennis, attitudes, functionaliteit en resistentie. Unpublished Mas-ter’s thesis, University of Ghent. Schirmunski, Viktor 1930 Sprachgeschichte und Siedelungsmundarten. Germanisch Romanische Monatschrift 18, 113 122 (Part I), 171 188 (Part II). Siebenhaar, Beat 2000 Sprachvariation, Sprachwandel und Einstellung: Der Dialect der Stadt Aarau in der Labi-litätszone zwischen Zürcher und Berner Mundart .

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