Areal Features of the Anglophone World 9783110279429, 9783110278842

Table of contents :
Areal features of the anglophone world
I. Case Studies
English in England
English and Scots in Scotland
English in Ireland
English in the United States
English varieties in the Caribbean
English in Africa
English in Asia
Shared features in New Englishes
English in Australia and New Zealand
II. Feature complexes
Global features of English vernaculars
Phonological inventories
Negation in varieties of English
Tense and aspect
Verbal concord
Pronominal systems
Reflexive and intensive self-forms
Vocabulary
Pragmatics
Subject index
Name index
Language index

Citation preview

Areal Features of the Anglophone World

Topics in English Linguistics 80

Editors

Elizabeth Closs Traugott Bernd Kortmann

De Gruyter Mouton

Areal Features of the Anglophone World

edited by

Raymond Hickey

De Gruyter Mouton

ISBN 978-3-11-027884-2 e-ISBN 978-3-11-027942-9 ISSN 1434-3452 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. ” 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen 앝 Printed on acid-free paper 앪 Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Preface The issue of common features among the varieties of English worldwide is currently topical in anglophone linguistics with scholars attempting to identify these features and to give principled accounts of their origin, development and dissemination throughout the English-speaking world. Questions of possible historical connections and typological similarities among the features under consideration have been centre-stage in investigations in this field. The collective terms used to refer to these common features include ‘vernacular universals’ or ‘angloversals’. Several key publications have appeared dealing with central questions in this arena and these are discussed in the introduction to the current volume. Furthermore, beyond the field of English there is much topical research on areal linguistics which has a bearing on the analyses and interpretations offered within anglophone linguistics. Given the topicality of the research agenda surrounding common traits among forms of English it seemed appropriate to the editor to bring together a range of scholars who have been working in this field and to offer a structured volume reflecting current insights in the field. To grasp the organisation of the volume it has been divided into two large sections, the first dealing with the features found in particular areas of the anglophone world, typically individual countries, e.g. England and the United States, but also regions, such as the Caribbean, or groups of countries, such as Australia and New Zealand. The second section is concerned with analysing related groups of linguistic features and examining their expression and occurrence in the anglophone world. The unifying consideration throughout all contributions is the areal distribution of features and the issue of relatedness and variation among features. During the genesis of this volume the author received much assistance from Bernd Kortmann (Freiburg) as editor of the series Topics in English Linguistics; this help is gratefully acknowledged here. On the part of the publishers, Birgit Sievert, editor for linguistics at de Gruyter Mouton, and her colleague Wolfgang Konwitschny were a source of assistance and encouragement and ready to answer all the questions which arose during the production of the book. Raymond Hickey July 2012

Contents Areal features of the anglophone world Raymond Hickey

1

I. Case Studies English in England David Britain

23

English and Scots in Scotland Warren Maguire

53

English in Ireland Raymond Hickey

79

English in the United States Matthew J. Gordon

109

English varieties in the Caribbean Jeffrey P. Williams

133

English in Africa Thorsten Brato and Magnus Huber

161

English in Asia Umberto Ansaldo and Lisa Lim

187

Shared features in New Englishes Devyani Sharma

211

English in Australia and New Zealand Pam Peters and Kate Burridge

233

viii

Contents

II. Feature complexes Global features of English vernaculars J. K. Chambers

261

Phonological inventories Daniel Schreier

277

Negation in varieties of English Lieselotte Anderwald

299

Tense and aspect Kerstin Lunkenheimer

329

Verbal concord Lukas Pietsch

355

Pronominal systems Susanne Wagner

379

Reflexive and intensive self-forms Peter Siemund, Georg Maier and Martin Schweinberger

409

Vocabulary Stephan E. Gramley

439

Pragmatics Klaus P. Schneider

463

Subject index Name index Language index

487 495 502

Areal features of the anglophone world Raymond Hickey 1.

Introduction

The common thread running through the current volume is the concern with features of non-standard English which show an areal distribution, i.e. which cluster geographically across the world. This concern is a natural continuation of investigations into the interaction between varieties in their historical and contemporary forms and into language contact in general (Hickey ed., 2010). This is of particular relevance when looking at regions in which English is present at several locations, e.g. the Caribbean (Williams, this volume) or Africa (Huber and Brato, this volume). But areal concerns go beyond these individual considerations and examine the overall structure of varieties searching for explanations in the process. For instance, the common features found in New Englishes in South Asia (Sharma, this volume) and South-East Asia (Ansaldo and Lim, this volume) could have an areal explanation, due to the presence of background languages from large family groups but they could also be due to similarities in the acquisitional situation for speakers of these varieties. For settler varieties in former English colonies the reasons for areal features could lie in the input varieties taken to the locations in question in the early days of settlement, i.e. one could be dealing with founder effects. Another avenue to be explored is the possible existence of vernacular universals in varieties of English world-wide (Chambers, this volume). Their presence at a given location would then not be due to contact and transfer but to the surfacing of universal tendencies. The various factors just mentioned all combine to yield typological profiles for English in different parts of the world. For the current volume the aim will be to examine these profiles and determine whether the features they contain correlate with areal divisions of the anglophone world. The volume is divided into two roughly equal halves, one dedicated to case studies of countries or regions and one concerned with structural domains of language and their realisations across the anglophone world. For the discussions in this book, the vernaculars of the different locations are centre-stage. It is assumed that the greatest degree of

2

Raymond Hickey

differentiation is to be found on the basilectal level where the levelling influence of more standard varieties is felt least. This is not to say that acrolectal varieties around the world do not have unique profiles, but their investigation would be the topic for a different volume, and has indeed been pursued in the chapters of Hickey (ed., 2012). 1.1. Areality and ‘linguistic areas’ Before looking at detail it should be remarked that this book is not about trying to ascertain linguistic areas nor does the assumption that such areas exist play a role here. Rather the concern is with determining whether there are areal concentrations in the anglophone world and, if so, how these came about. The notion of ‘linguistic area’ has been current in general linguistics ever since Trubetzkoy (1928) applied the German term Sprachbund ‘language league/federation’ (possibly from Russian soyuz ‘union’ used by Jan Baudouin de Courtenay in 1904). The term then became part of mainstream terminology, assisted in this by seminal publications such as Emeneau (1956). The term ‘linguistic area’ can be a useful conceptual aid and in the early days of research it helped to heighten scholars’ awareness of shared structural features among not necessarily related languages in circumscribed geographical areas (Matras, McMahon and Vincent eds, 2006). However, the term came to dominate research (Campbell 2006) in that scholars often felt that a binary decision had to be made as to whether a given geographical area could be classified as a linguistic area or not.1 What can be more fruitful is research into the forces and mechanisms which lead to languages in a given area coming to share features. This approach would see the scholarly concern more with discussing ‘areality’, how it emerges and continues to develop, rather than with applying the label ‘linguistic area’ in any given study. 1.2. Areality and geography Areality – the areal concentration of linguistic features – is closely linked to geography. If features diffuse from an assumed starting point then this diffusion may halt at a salient topographical feature, commonly a chain of 1

See the title of Muysken (ed., 2008) which reflects a concern with areal features rather than the label ‘linguistic area’.

Areal features of the anglophone world

3

mountains, a major river or a coastline. A case where areality has a clear geographical limitation is with islands. Usually there is a higher concentration of features within an island than with a region beyond it, a mainland or a further island, though this can exist, see comments on Ulster and Scotland below. Island locations in the anglophone world include Jamaica, Barbados and the minor anglophone islands of the Lesser Antilles, Newfoundland, Malta, the Channel Islands, St Helena, Tristan da Cunha, the Falklands, New Zealand (a double island), Hawaii and the many Polynesian island states where English is spoken, such as Fiji. Most of these islands are too small to evince significant internal differentiation in geographically determined varieties of English. However, the larger islands may do so and when one is dealing with islands of the size of Newfoundland then internal distinctions become clearly perceptible. Examining islands for areality has a certain pedigree in linguistic research and this research usually involves more than English. For instance, Heinrich Wagner’s 1959 study Das Verbum in den Sprachen der britischen Inseln is a seminal work which, while dated in its presentation and analysis, is nonetheless a milestone in the typological examination of languages in the British Isles, basically English and the Celtic languages. This approach has been re-considered and re-assessed, see Filppula (2004) and Hickey (1999, 2002). Areas may have subareas depending on relative concentrations of features and such subareas may cross geographical boundaries. For instance, in the British Isles the province of Ulster (north of Ireland) and Scotland, especially in the west, form just such a subarea and share a number of features which are not found in the south of Ireland or in Britain south of the border with Scotland. Among these features are the Scottish Vowel Length Rule, which renders vowel length predictable from phonotactic environment (Aitken 1984), and the high mid realisation of /u(:)/, [+]. Physical borders between areas or between parts of an area are not the only relevant factor. For non-linguistic and non-topographical reasons an area may show a high degree of areality and these reasons may lead to a conceptual notion of a region or area arising. An example of this is again the province of Ulster in Ireland. Although there is no clear physical border between this province and the south of Ireland there has always been more exchange between the different groups in Ulster (and west Scotland) than there has been with the south of Ireland. This contact over many centuries has led to a sharing of features between different varieties of English in Ulster and between English and Irish in that province.

4

Raymond Hickey

1.3. Areality and level of language Ihalainen in his review of dialects of English in the past few centuries made the following observation: ‘…phonological criteria can be used to differentiate between quite small areas as against grammatical and syntactic features that may unite areas showing a great deal of phonological differentiation’ (Ihalainen 1994: 248). This fact is of relevance for the issue of areality: what it means is that morphosyntactic features (see Britain 2007 for a review of the situation in England) are more likely to be similar across larger parts of an area than are phonological features. There is a good reason for this: because the way one speaks is immediately available for sociolinguistic assessment it contains more variation and is manipulated more readily for identificational purposes (or for dissociation). These functions cannot be fulfilled to anything like the same degree by grammar: features on this level of language occur with much lower frequency rates and so cannot be used to identify speakers as reliably as phonological features. There is a further reason for the primacy of sound features: the phonetic realisations of phonological segments form continua along which speakers can shift, making minute distinctions in their realisations. In grammar, however, the distinctions are largely binary: either feature X is present or it is not. However, on both the levels of sound and grammar the quantitative representation of features can, and is, unconsciously manipulated by speakers. 1.4. Areality and systemic change Certain features would appear to diffuse within an area with greater rapidity and greater completeness than others. Prosodic features would seem to be at the forefront of quick-diffusing features. An instance of this is syllabletiming which is found in the Caribbean, in Jamaican English, for example, and in English in large tracts of Africa: West, East and in many forms of Black South African English. The permeability of linguistic systems on the level of prosody may be high because alterations on this level do not usually lead to systemic changes or reductions of meaning. Such ‘realisational’ features are found in the ‘New Englishes’ of South-East Asia as well (Ansaldo and Lim, this volume). The key consideration here would seem to be the relative resistance of closed linguistic subsystems to contact-induced change (Winford 2005), for example, inflectional morphology. Of course there is nothing which can be eliminated per se from possible contact-induced change (Thomason

Areal features of the anglophone world

5

2000). Nonetheless, features which do not affect the system of the receiving language have a greater chance of diffusion. A case in point would be the extended range of busy in South African English which it shares with Afrikaans, a probable source of this range (Mesthrie 2002; Watermeyer 1996). 1.5. Areality and type of contact The areal concentration of features is a result of language contact. The nature of the areality which arises is dependent on the type of contact, for instance, how intense it is, how long it lasts, the status of the languages and the varieties involved. For the structural permeation of different linguistic systems language contact must crucially include generations of language learners from the communities using the languages in question. In recent years research into varieties of English has emphasised the distinction between high-contact and low-contact varieties, e.g. Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi (2009: 268), following Trudgill (2009). But it is the intermingling of children from different language communities which provides the highest degree of feature diffusion across a language divide. This is particularly true if the speakers from one of the communities are involved in language shift. This has been the case in the history of English, e.g. with Celts during the Old English periods shifting from Brythonic to English (Hickey 2012a). Without language shift there has also been diffusion of this kind, consider the prosodic and realisational similarities between vernacular white and black speech in the southern United States, evident, for example, in diphthong flattening (wife = [wa:f]), lengthening and breaking of short vowels (kid = [kiid]). 1.5.1. The typological status of features Apart from the levels of language involved in areal development, there is also the issue of what status features have. In statistical terms some features are more common than others. For instance, a voice distinction in the consonant inventory of languages is common, occurring in nearly all European languages, except Finnish. However, front rounded vowels are much more unusual, though in Europe one can recognize their presence in an area from France across to Hungary and northwards to Scandinavia. The unusualness referred to here is meant in cross-linguistic terms. Within a

6

Raymond Hickey

language with any ‘marked’ features it does not make sense to talk of them being ‘unusual’. The typological status of features is relevant to varieties of English. For instance, the occurrence of a distinction between second person singular and plural for pronouns is not unusual as most non-standard varieties of English either maintained or developed means of making this distinction (Hickey 2003). Added to this is the fact that quantifiers are often co-opted for this purpose. Hence the appearance of you + all, which merged to y’all [jo:l] in varieties as wide apart as Appalachian English (Montgomery 1989) and South African Indian English (Mesthrie 1995), is of little or no typological significance. However, a distinction between past and remote past, the latter indicated in African American English via stressed been (Green 1998), is typologically unusual in the context of varieties of English. 1.6. Areality and clustering Features in languages/varieties can become typologically significant if they involve clustering. If features bundle in an area then this would imply that speakers of the language/variety have adopted or foregrounded a category and not just accepted a feature through diffusion. A case in point would be aspect in the English of the British Isles. Already in late Old English there were signs of progressive aspect achieving formal expression via the gerund. The later contrast between simple present and the progressive present led to a re-interpretation of the former as an habitual as seen in Modern English I speak (e.g. every morning to my sister on the phone) and I am speaking (e.g. to my sister right now). In many vernaculars of British, Scottish and Irish English the habitual receives a further expression via a lexical verb combined with do (van der Auwera and Genee 2002; Kortmann 2004) or an inflected be, e.g. I do write often; I does be writing often; I bees writing often. In comparison to other West Germanic languages (German and Dutch) or the North Germanic languages, English shows a greater prominence of progressive/habitual aspect (Binnick 2005), something which it shares with the Celtic languages. This prominence was preserved in varieties taken overseas in the colonial period (Hickey 2004).

Areal features of the anglophone world

7

1.7. Areality and transportation A specific caveat, necessary when discussing areal features in the anglophone world, is that shared features may be due, not just to areal contact, or not solely to this, but to common input from the source regions of the British Isles, see the general discussion in Tagliamonte (2006) and the specific discussion of aspect in Rickford 1986). It is also important to stress that the considerations below are based on a snapshot of developing varieties at the present. In the past, more recent or more remote, the occurrence and density of features will have been different, greater in some cases and less in others. This situation highlights the fact that any areal investigation of languages or varieties presents a picture at just one point in time and hence all statements concerning areality apply now and may not have applied to the same extent in the past nor will they in the future. Common input: Negative concord During the development of standard English in eighteenth-century England (Hickey 2010), negative concord was seen as undesirable because it was a common vernacular feature but also because it was seemingly illogical – two negatives were assumed by prescriptivists to cancel each other out as in multiplication. For non-standard varieties of English negative concord is an established feature and it was present in the vernaculars taken overseas during the colonial period. For that reason, the presence of negative concord is irrelevant for considerations of areality. Common input to overseas varieties can involve more minor features than negative concord – in terms of total occurrence in a variety – and/or features which were represented in fewer of the transported varieties. A case in point would be ASK-metathesis – the pronunciation of this word as [æks] – which is now a prominent feature of African American English. The [æks] pronunciation was represented in the varieties of English with which early African Americans would have been in contact, e.g. southern Irish English and many dialects from England. What is significant in this context is that ASK-metathesis is recessive in traditional dialects of the British Isles but has a different status in African American English where it is a marker of its vernacular forms. Colonial lag: Palatal glide insertion A palatal glide after velars and before /a/ is well attested in English in the north of Ireland, cf. car [kjær], gap [gjæp]. This feature may well have been more widespread in early modern English (found in the Lower South

8

Raymond Hickey

of the United States, Montgomery 2001: 131) and have been transported to the Caribbean, see Harris (1987) and Holm (1994: 370). In this context the lesser-known Englishes can be of importance as they may well retain features not present in the major varieties of the anglophone world – see Trudgill, Schreier, Long and Williams (2002) on the /w/-/v/ merger – or only in subvarieties of these – see Schilling-Estes (1995) on pre-nasal /z/ > [d]. Reallocation: Double modals In varieties which historically have had a Scots input, notably Appalachian English, sequences of two modals might be found, e.g. She might could come tomorrow (Montgomery 2001: 148, Feagin 1979). Here it might be more the mechanisms than the actual forms which were inherited. Such constructions are also found in African American English (see Martin and Wolfram 1998: 32-35). On the occurrence in Scottish English, see Miller (1993: 120-121); for Scots, see McClure (1994: 72-73). There are also a few attestations from Tyneside, see Beal (1993: 191). The greater occurrence in the United States would seem to be due to the reallocation of this feature in varieties of English there. In Britain the feature is clearly recessive. Relative rarity: Positive ‘anymore’ Some features are so rare that their appearance in more than one location of the anglophone world necessarily implies an historical connection. For instance, the use of anymore in a positive sense may occur in the Midland area of the United States (and further out into the west, Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1998: 142; Eitner 1991) as in They go to Florida on their holidays anymore. The speech of eighteenth-century Ulster Scots settlers is probably the source of this feature. The Ulster Scots themselves had in turn picked this up from native speakers of Irish before emigration. However, Butters (2001: 331-332) views positive anymore as an extension of the negative use and is doubtful of the proposed Scotch-Irish antecedent. But why this should have occurred in American English and not in other parts of the anglophone world is left unanswered. Unrelated features: Fortition of dental fricatives There are varieties of English, as far apart as Irish English, Newfoundland English, Caribbean English and basilectal forms of Black African English, as well as Atlantic and Pacific creoles, in which the fricatives /2, 3/ are

Areal features of the anglophone world

9

realised as dental or alveolar stops, i.e. [t, d] or [t, d]. There may be a significant distribution according to syllable position with more stop realisations in onsets (Irish English). Where this fortition exists, speakers may show a dental articulation when the stop is followed by /r/ as in through [tru:]. In African American English the stop realisation seems to apply primarily to the voiced segment, e.g. these > dese (Wolfram and SchillingEstes 1998: 75). Given the typological unusualness of the fricatives /2, 3/, for instance they do not occur in the Bantu languages or in the Polynesian languages which underlie many creoles in the South-West Pacific, it is not surprising that they should be replaced by stops in forms of English which arose where the languages just mentioned are spoken. The absence of /2, 3/ in varieties in sub-Saharan Africa is an areal feature of English in this large region, but it is not one which arose through contact and transfer between early varieties of English in Africa but by substitution (assuming that the input varieties of English during the founding period had /2, 3/). Of course, for many countries the spread of English was staggered, i.e. a small indigenous group picked up English from exposure to non-African speakers of the language and then they passed on their indigenous variety to larger sections of the population. A quantitatively less well represented alternative to the realisation of /2, 3/ as dental fricatives is the phenomenon of TH-fronting (Foulkes and Docherty 1999: 11). By this is meant that [f] and/or [v] are used for /2/ and /3/ respectively. This a stereotype of vernacular London English but is also to be found in other varieties, such as African American English and Southern American white speech (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1998: 324; Green 2002: 117-119; Thomas and Bailey 1998: 87). Mergers and areality: The distinction between and Historically, words like which [wit$] and witch [wit$] were distinguished consistently, the merger being of late modern origin (Jespersen 1909: 374375). In general, conservative forms of English, such as Scottish and Irish English, make a distinction in voice with these approximants (found recessively in American English also, Montgomery 2001: 143), but there are noticeable exceptions to this rule of thumb, e.g. Newfoundland English which has only the voiced approximant. See Hickey (1984) for a discussion of this feature in relation to syllable structure. The distinction between and is, for vernacular varieties of Irish and Scottish English, a clear areal feature, though via retention and not

10

Raymond Hickey

via spread. The distinction is also being increasingly lost, certainly in Ireland, because the new supraregional form of speech which arose in the 1990s and early 2000s and which emanated from Dublin (Hickey 2005) does not have this distinction. This and other developments like it which affect the concentration of features in an area are the subject of the following section. 2.

The dynamics of areality

Certain developments in a language, and the community which speaks it, can be viewed as (i) areality-enhancing and others as (ii) areality-diminishing. 1) areality-enhancing developments accommodation (Trudgill 1986) during contact (without shift); feature transfer during language shift leading to sharing across at least two languages. 2) areality-diminishing developments dissociation (Hickey 2005, 2012b) between languages or varieties; processes of standardisation or de-creolisation, importation of outside features to only some of the languages/varieties in an area.

Figure 1. Increase in areality due to close contact

Example: Rural African American English and white southern American English; English and Irish communities in Newfoundland.

Areal features of the anglophone world

11

Figure 2. Increase in areality due to language shift

Example: Celtic regions of the British Isles where grammatical categories have come to be shared by two languages (English and a Celtic language); varieties of English in the south-western United States with a Spanishlanguage background.

Figure 3. Decrease in areality due to one-sided feature development

Example: Occurrence of short front vowel lowering in communities which do not have this traditionally, e.g. advanced speakers of Californian English.

12

Raymond Hickey

Figure 4. Decrease in areality due to dissociation

Example: Rise of new phonetic features in advanced Dublin English, increasing the distance to local varieties in the city (Hickey 2005). The assessment of areality is always based on a snapshot at a particular point in time. For instance, the lowering of short front vowels, a characteristic of young female speech in California, is reducing areality in the general context of English on the western coast of the United States. However, if this feature spreads in the near future and encompasses all regions of this area and becomes a mainstream pronunciation, then areality in fact increases. The generalisation which is evident here is that a new feature reduces areality in the initial stages but increases areality if it spreads and establishes itself across an entire region. In the case of the dissociation scenario (Figure 4. above) the new feature or features can become a part of general forms of speech and so spread, leaving older vernacular forms as increasingly insignificant varieties quantitatively. In the case of Dublin English the new phonetic features (back vowel raising, velarised [1], retroflex [5]), which arose in the 1990s, have entered supraregional forms of Irish English through imitation and spread from the capital and have become areal features of English in the Republic of Ireland in the course of this development.

Areal features of the anglophone world

13

4. Conclusion The areal approach to analysing varieties of English (Siemund, Maier and Schweinberger 2009) can offer new insights into how features have clustered in regions and continue to do so. This perspective also shows an interface with other approaches within the field of variety studies. For instance, the examination of cross-variety variation (Siemund 2003) is a key aspect of many of the investigations which underlie the contributions in this volume, e.g. that by Lieselotte Anderwald on negation (see Anderwald, this volume), Kerstin Lunkenheimer on aspectual distinctions (see Lunkenheimer, this volume), or Peter Siemund on intensifiers and reflexives (see Siemund, Maier and Schweinberger, this volume). Similar investigations have been carried out among the varieties of English both within the British Isles and at overseas locations – see the documentation and analysis in Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi (2004). The typological approach to variety analysis has experienced considerable impetus in recent years, see the contributions in Kortmann (ed., 2004). Here the methods of general typology have been applied to the study of non-standard forms of English by Anglicists and provided insights into how varieties of English can develop and cluster structurally. Another fruitful avenue of research is that of vernacular universals, see Chambers (2004), Filppula, Klemola and Paulasto (eds, 2009), Nevalainen (2006a, 2006b). Here commonalities among varieties of English are traced to more general properties of language, such as the tendency to reduce complex phonetic segments, which are assumed to surface independently of common historical input or language contact (see Chambers, this volume). The issues broached in this chapter form many of the concerns in the current volume and, taken together, offer a particular perspective on both the development of varieties of English and their present-day forms. The application of areal considerations in the analysis of change in varieties of English is thus taken as a beneficial means of gaining a better understanding of the configurations found throughout the anglophone world. References Aitken, A. J. 1984 ‘Scottish accents and dialects’, in: Peter Trudgill (ed.) Language in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 94114.

14

Raymond Hickey

Algeo, John (ed.) 2001 English in North America. The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. 6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Auwera, Johan van der and Inge Genee 2002 ‘English do: on the convergence of languages and linguists’, English Language and Linguistics 6.2: 283-307. Beal, Joan 1993 ‘The grammar of Tyneside and Northumbrian English’, in: Milroy and Milroy (eds), pp. 187-213. Binnick, Robert I. 2005 ‘The markers of habitual aspect in English’, Journal of English Linguistics 33.4: 339-369. Britain, David 1997 ‘Dialect contact and phonological reallocation: “Canadian Raising” in the English Fens’, Language in Society 26.1: 15-46. 2007 ‘Grammatical variation in England’, in: Britain (ed.), pp. 75-104. Britain, David (ed.) 2007 Language in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burchfield, Robert W. (ed.) 1994 English in Britain and Overseas: Origins and Development. The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butters, Ronald R. 2001 ‘Grammatical structure’, in: Algeo (ed.), pp. 325-339. Campbell, Lyle 2006 ‘Areal linguistics: a closer scrutiny’, in: Matras, McMahon and Vincent (eds), pp. 1-31. Chambers, J. K. 2004 ‘Dynamic typology and vernacular universals’, in: Bernd Kortmann (ed.) Dialectology meets Typology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 127-145. de Klerk, Vivian (ed.) 1996 Focus on South Africa. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Dobson, Eric J. 1968 English Pronunciation 1500-1700. Second edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Eitner, Walter H. 1991 ‘Affirmative “any more” in present-day American English’, in: Trudgill and Chambers (eds), pp. 267-272. Ekwall, Eilert 1975 A History of Modern English Sounds and Morphology. Translated by Alan Ward. Oxford: Blackwell. Emeneau, Murray B. 1956 ‘India as a linguistic area’, Language 32: 3-16.

Areal features of the anglophone world

15

Feagin, Crawford 1979 Alabama English. A Sociolinguistic Survey of the White Community. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. 1991 ‘Preverbal done in Southern States English’, in: Trudgill and Chambers (eds), pp. 161-190. Filppula, Markku 2004 ‘Dialect convergence areas or “Dialektbünde” in the British Isles’, in: Alexandra Lenz, Edgar Radtke and Simone Zwickel (eds) 2004. Variation im Raum – Variation in Space. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, pp. 177-188. Filppula, Markku, Juhani Klemola and Heli Paulasto (eds) 2009 Vernacular Universals and Language Contacts. Evidence from Varieties of English and Beyond. London: Routledge. Foulkes, Paul and Gerry Docherty 1999 ‘Urban Voices – overview’, in: Paul Foulkes and Gerry Docherty (eds) Urban Voices. London: Edward Arnold, pp. 1-24. Green, Lisa J. 1998 ‘Aspect and predicate phrases in African-American vernacular English’, in: Mufwene, Rickford, Bailey and Baugh (eds), pp. 37-68. Harris, John 1987 ‘On doing comparative reconstruction with genetically unrelated languages’, in: Anna Giacalone Ramat et al. (eds) Papers from the 7th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Pavia, Italy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 267-282. Hickey, Raymond 1984 ‘Syllable onsets in Irish English’, Word 35: 67-74. 1999 ‘Ireland as a linguistic area’, in: James P. Mallory (ed.) Language in Ulster. Special issue of Ulster Folklife (45). Holywood, Co. Down: Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, pp. 36-53. 2002 ‘Language change in early Britain: The convergence account’, in: David Restle and Dietmar Zaefferer (eds) Sounds and Systems. Studies in Structure and Change. A Festschrift for Theo Vennemann. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 185-203. 2003 ‘Rectifying a standard deficiency. Pronominal distinctions in varieties of English’, in: Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker (eds) Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 345-374. 2004 ‘English dialect input to the Caribbean’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Legacies of Colonial English. Studies in Transported Dialects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 326-359. 2005 Dublin English. Evolution and Change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007 Irish English. History and Present-day Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

16

Raymond Hickey 2010

‘Attitudes and concerns in eighteenth-century English’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed) Eighteenth-Century English. Ideology and Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-20. 2012a ‘Early English and the Celtic hypothesis’, in: Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds) Oxford Handbook of the History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2012b ‘Supraregionalisation and dissociation’, in: J. K. Chambers and Natalie Schilling (eds) Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Second edition. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2002 Collecting Views on Language Change. Special issue of Language Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier. 2010 The Handbook of Language Contact. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. 2012 Standards of English. Codified Varieties Around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holm, John 1994 ‘English in the Caribbean’, in: Burchfield (ed.), pp. 328-381. Ihalainen, Ossi 1994 ‘The dialects of England since 1776’, in: Burchfield (ed.), pp. 197274. Kortmann, Bernd (ed.) 2004 Dialectology Meets Typology. Dialect Grammar from a CrossLinguistic Perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Kortmann, Bernd and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi 2004 ‘Global synopsis: morphological and syntactic variation in English’, in: Kortmann et al. (eds), pp. 1142-1202. 2009 ‘World Englishes between simplification and complexification’, in: Thomas Hoffmann and Lucia Siebers (eds) World Englishes – Problems, Properties and Prospects. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 265-285. Kurath, Hans and Raven I. McDavid, Jr. 1961 The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States. Based upon the Collection of the Linguistic Atlas of the Eastern United States. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Martin, Stefan and Walt Wolfram 1998 ‘The sentence in African-American vernacular English’, in: Mufwene, Rickford, Bailey and Baugh (eds), pp. 11-36. Matras, Yaron, April McMahon and Nigel Vincent (eds) 2006 Linguistic Areas: Convergence in Historical and Typological Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan. McClure, J. Derrick 1994 ‘English in Scotland’, in: Burchfield (ed.), pp. 23-93.

Areal features of the anglophone world

17

McDavid, Raven I. 1971 [1955] ‘The position of the Charleston dialect’, in: Williamson and Burke (eds), pp. 596-609. Mesthrie, Rajend 1996 ‘Language contact, transmission, shift: South African Indian English’, in: de Klerk (ed.), pp. 79-98. 2002 ‘Endogeny versus contact revisited: Aspectual busy in South African English’, in Hickey (ed.), pp. 345-358. Miller, Jim 1993 ‘The grammar of Scottish English’, in: Milroy and Milroy (eds), pp. 99-138. Milroy, James and Lesley Milroy 1999 Authority in Language. Third edition. London: Routledge. Milroy, James and Lesley Milroy (eds) 1993 Real English. The Grammar of the English Dialects in the British Isles. Real Language Series. London: Longman. Montgomery, Michael 1989 ‘Exploring the roots of Appalachian English’, English World-Wide 10: 227-278. 2001 ‘British and Irish antecedents’, in: Algeo (ed.), pp. 86-153. Mufwene, Salikoko 2001 ‘African-American English’, in: Algeo (ed.), pp. 291-324. Mufwene, Salikoko, John R. Rickford, Guy Bailey and John Baugh (eds) 1998 African-American English. Structure, History and Use. London: Routledge. Muysken, Pieter (ed.) 2008 From Linguistic Areas to Areal Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nevalainen, Terttu 2006a ‘Vernacular universals? The case of plural was in Early Modern English’, in: Terttu Nevalainen, Juhani Klemola and Mikko Laitinen (eds) Types of Variation. Diachronic, Dialectal and Typological Interfaces. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 281-301. 2006b ‘Negative concord as an English “vernacular universal”, social history and linguistic typology’, Journal of English Linguistics 34.3: 257-278. Pederson, Lee 2001 ‘Dialects’, in: Algeo (ed.), pp. 253-290. Rickford, John R. 1986 ‘Social contact and linguistic diffusion: Hiberno-English and New World Black English’, Language 62: 245-290. Schilling-Estes, Natalie 1995 ‘Extending our understanding of the /z/ > [d] rule’, American Speech 70: 291-302.

18

Raymond Hickey

Siemund, Peter 2003 ‘Varieties of English from a cross-linguistic perspective: Intensifiers and reflexives’, in: Günter Rohdenburg and Britta Mondorf (eds) Determinants of Grammatical Variation in English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 479-506. Siemund, Peter, Georg Maier and Martin Schweinberger 2009 ‘Towards a more fine-grained analysis of the areal distributions of non-standard features of English’, in: Esa Penttilä and Heli Paulasto (eds) Language Contacts Meet English Dialects. Studies in Honour of Markku Filppula. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 1946. Tagliamonte, Sali 2006 ‘Historical change in synchronic perspective. The legacy of British dialects’, in: Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (eds) The Handbook of the History of English. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 477-506. Thomason, Sarah G. 2000 ‘Contact as a source of language change’, in: Brian D. Joseph and Richard D. Janda (eds) The Handbook of Historical Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 687-712. Tristram, Hildegard L. C. (ed.) 2000 The Celtic Englishes II. Heidelberg: Winter. Trubetzkoy, Nikolai Sergeevich 1928 ‘Proposition 16’, Acts of the First International Congress of Linguists, pp. 17-18. Leiden. Trudgill, Peter 1986 Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell. 1990 The Dialects of England. Oxford: Blackwell. 2009 ‘Vernacular universals and the sociolinguistic typology of English dialects’, in Filppula, Klemola and Paulasto (eds), pp. 304-322. Trudgill, Peter and J. K. Chambers (eds) 1991 Dialects of English. Studies in Grammatical Variation. London: Longman. Trudgill, Peter, Daniel Schreier, Daniel Long and Jeffrey P. Williams 2002 ‘On the reversibility of mergers: /w/, /v/ and evidence from lesserknown Englishes’, Folia Linguistica Historica 26: 23-45. Turner, Lorenzo D. 1971 ‘Notes on the sounds and vocabulary of Gullah’, in: Williamson and Burke (eds), pp. 121-135. Wagner, Heinrich 1959 Das Verbum in den Sprachen der britischen Inseln. [The verb in the languages of the British Isles] Tübingen: Niemeyer. Watermeyer, Susan 1996 ‘Afrikaans English’, in: de Klerk (ed.), pp. 99-124. Wells, John C. 1982 Accents of English. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Areal features of the anglophone world

19

Williamson, Juanita V. and Virginia M. Burke (eds) 1971 A Various Language. Perspectives on American Dialects. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Winford, Donald 2005 ‘Contact-induced changes: Classification and processes’, Diachronica 22.2: 373-427. Wolfram, Walt and Natalie Schilling-Estes 1998 American English. Dialects and Variation. Oxford: Blackwell.

I. Case Studies

English in England David Britain 1.

Introduction

In the public imagination, geographical origin is the primary differentiator of language variation. Where you are from seems more likely to determine the label given to your dialect than any other aspect of your social identity. In dialectology, too, geographical location played and still plays to a large extent, a central role in how we collect data, analyse and classify those data and theorise those data in our research. And in the principal texts in English dialectology, it is commonplace to include, early on, maps depicting what are claimed to be the main dialect areas of the country, areas that are meant to house internal homogeneity, but are distinct from each other because of a (usually small) number of salient linguistic differences. This chapter begins by looking at these dialect areas of England – how they have been determined, how they have changed over time, and what they tell us about the English dialect landscape. It is important to remember, however, when pointing the lens at areality, that it is easy to forget that many other factors go out of focus, some of which sociolinguistics has shed a good deal of light on, e.g. social class (e.g. Trudgill 1974), and some of which we are only now beginning to understand with respect to the dialect landscape of England, such as ethnicity (e.g. Fox 2007, Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen 2011, Sharma and Sankaran in press). As soon as we focus on these and many other facets of speakers’ social backgrounds, the areal picture then becomes necessarily somewhat (or considerably) blurred. Remembering back to Trudgill’s (2000:30) now famous pyramid depicting the relationship between areal variation on the one hand and social variation on the other, we are reminded that our perspective on areality interacts intimately with social class – the dialect areas are ‘larger’ and grosser the nearer we look to the top of the pyramid – and, one would want to argue, interacts with a whole host of other factors too. In looking at areality on its own, therefore, we need to suspend belief momentarily in all those other social factors that we know index language variation. For the purposes of this chapter, therefore, I hereby place these other factors to one side. One factor that I believe cannot

24

David Britain

be placed to one side, though, is geography itself. Areality is not the same as geography. I will argue, later in the chapter, that there are a whole host of geographical processes and developments which we need to take into account that also blur rather than sharpen our focus on areality – taking these into account, we can better understand what is happening to the areal patterns of England’s dialects today. 2.

Dynamic areality: the evolution of England’s dialect areas

Studies of the areal distribution of dialect features have both a long tradition in English dialectology, and, of course, reach back well into the history of English – we have at our disposal maps claiming to depict England’s dialect regions based on empirical studies that date back well over a century. In this section, I examine these depictions of the areality of English English over the past 150 years, exploring them both linguistically and spatially – I look at which linguistic features were chosen to determine the dialect boundaries of these maps, and glance diachronically at them to see what they can tell us about how the proposed regions have changed (or not) over time, and how linguists have projected they may look in the future. As we will see, despite differing methods of data collection and analysis, there is a reassuring degree of continuity in the maps presented in the literature, as well as evidence of ongoing areal change over time. For the purposes of this chapter, our diachronic tour begins with Alexander Ellis’s (1889) monumental survey of the traditional dialects of England, described by Ihalainen1 (1994: 232) as ‘the first survey of English dialects based on rich, systematically collected evidence’. He gathered data by means of two reading passages (one of 15 sentences and one of 7 containing key sounds and constructions of interest) and a word list with over 900 items, which over 800 volunteers around the country were asked to transcribe into the local traditional dialect. Not all tasks were administered in all locations, however. These transcriptions were then converted, by Ellis and his assistant Thomas Hallam, into a ‘palaeotype’ – a phonetic transcription system predating the IPA2. Thereby, data were collected from almost 1500 locations across the anglophone British Isles. Ellis was aware of the problematic nature of the data collection methods, 1 2

Ihalainen (1994) provides excellent more detailed coverage of this and other early descriptions of geographical variation in English non-standard dialects. For a useful ‘conversion’ of some of the transcriptions into IPA, see Eustace (1969).

English in England

25

and so the transcriptions were often checked on trips to the locations themselves and discussed sometimes at very great length, judging by some of the detail about their interactions in the text, between Ellis and Hallam, and then confirmed or amended or discarded, or published but with a clear ‘health-warning’. On the basis of this huge volume of data, Ellis produced a map of the dialect regions of the country, dividing England up into 5 dialect ‘divisions’, each with a number of sub-divisions or ‘districts’ and many of these were in turn divided further into ‘variants’. Map 1, from Kitson (1995: 47), shows Ellis’s Divisions and Districts (and includes minor amendments suggested by Wright (1898-1905) following his own slightly later dialect survey). In the volume itself, Ellis provides extensive detail about each and every location in his study, and the mostly phonological, but also grammatical and occasionally lexical characteristics of each. But for Ellis himself, the principal dialect divisions of the country are captured by examining just four linguistic variables, creating 10 isoglosses or what he called ‘transverse lines’. These were: i.

3

Realisation of the STRUT3 vowel, in words such as ‘sum’ in the English Midlands, Ellis notes one isogloss marking the northern limit of the use of [v], and another marking the southern limit of [u]. Remarkably, given the later frequent ‘isoglossisation’ of the STRUT/ FOOT split, this work recognises the extreme variability of this transition zone from place to place and person to person, with Ellis and Hallam paying incredible attention to the many interdialectal forms between these two vowels, discussing interspeaker variation in the same locations, including in the same household. For Ellis, this was clearly an areal site of variability, a finding common to later empirical dialectological work on this feature (Britain 2001), as well as work based on traditional dialectological findings (Chambers and Trudgill 1980, Upton 1995). These same features are also used to help draw District and Division boundaries in the far north of England, to plot the extent to which the North-East is marked by variability in STRUT vowel realisation – Ellis’s line marking the northern limit of [u] is further north than the line marking the southern limit of [v], suggesting variability in Tyneside extending up to the Scottish border.

His variables here are converted into Wells’ (1982)’s familiar lexical sets.

26

David Britain

ii. Rhoticity involving what Ellis describes as a ‘reverted’ or ‘retracted’ retroflex /r/.This feature is the prime determining characteristic of his ‘Southern’ Division, uniting all the counties of the south coast of England, and reaching up to Oxfordshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire. iii. Definite Article Reduction (DAR): Again Ellis recognises zones of variability in his areal demarcation of the realisation of the definite article. He marks the southern boundary of the presence of DAR passing to the south of Cheshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, but to the north of Lincolnshire and Leicestershire. Another line marks the northern limit of the use of standard (as well as vowelless interdental) forms of the article – this runs from the Humber across to Leeds and Lancaster, and another still the northern limit of DAR, just to the south of Tyneside. iv. The pronunciation of words in the MOUTH lexical set. Ellis marks the southern limit of [u:] forms (running to the south of North Lincolnshire, North Yorkshire and the extreme far north of Lancashire). v. Ellis’s final line is one in the far north of England showing the meeting point of ‘L[owland] Scotch and N[orthern] English speech’ (Ellis 1889: 21). (see map on following page)

English in England

Map 1.

27

Alexander Ellis’s Dialect Divisions and Districts, including minor amendments from Wright (1898-1905) (from Kitson 1995: 47).

28

David Britain

His further division of the country into districts, as seen in Map 1, is naturally based on a closer and larger set of distinctions, and the text goes into ornate detail about the finer characteristics of each district and subdistrict that he identifies. Note that the divisions he makes are entirely phonological. Although there is regular commentary on morphological and grammatical forms, it is not reported consistently enough to be able to so carefully plot the regional distributions of different morpho-syntactic variants as is the case with most phonological forms in his survey. This may well, of course, be largely due to the data collection techniques – informants may well have been concentrating on an accurate phonetic portrayal of the dialect, but faithful to the written items on the questionnaire rather than thinking about rewriting the original text to portray grammatical variability. One rather interesting aspect of Ellis’s region plotting is an examination of the features he didn’t choose to examine, with one such feature being the realisation of the BATH vowel. It is not used as an indicator of dialect areas by Ellis and is in fact commented on in the text generally rather rarely. Given its iconic status as arguably the most salient regional dialect marker in England today, its lack of prominence in Ellis’s work is rather noteworthy. What does Ellis’s map show? Firstly, it shows an extensive SouthWestern/Southern area extending from Cornwall to Kent and the outskirts of London, and reaching up almost to the Midlands. It shows a large East Anglia/East Midlands area, an area along the Welsh border comprising Monmouth, Herefordshire and Shropshire; a lower North, incorporating the Midlands, Lancashire, and the main Industrial cities of the North, an upper North of rural North Yorkshire and Cumbria, and a distinctive North East. Lincolnshire appears to stand somewhat isolated too. Less noticeable from the map is the role of London. Ellis is particularly vocal about the extent of dialect levelling in and around the capital (see also Britain 2009a), in Essex and the Home Counties, but in terms of areal scope, the core of the levelled area is relatively restricted. The next source of dialect maps from which we can begin to glean areal patterning is the well-known Survey of English Dialects (Orton 19621971), a large, England-wide survey, consistently applying a long traditional dialectological questionnaire in over 300 locations across the country, gathering data on the same linguistic items, as far as was possible, from each informant. The Basic Materials of the SED represent a much more systematic and complete corpus but lack the insightful commentary, anecdotes and often torturous concern for detail that is present in Ellis (1889). They provided the material not only for the Linguistic Atlas of England (1978), but also for a whole host of other cartographical explor-

English in England

29

ations, popular and otherwise (e.g. Upton and Widdowson 2006, Andersen 1987) opening up the rather dense but extremely valuable tomes of transcriptions of questionnaire responses for closer interpretation. The LAE, like the Survey itself, tended to treat each word in the questionnaire as distinct, so maps were produced for each word, rather than each phoneme. Consequently, we can see maps of the realisation of the stressed vowel in ‘butter’ (1978: Ph50) and that in ‘thunder’ (1978: Ph52) etc, but not a composite one for the STRUT vowel as a whole drawn from all of the relevant words in the Basic Materials. This approach was bemoaned by McDavid (1983: 49) who argued that ‘the English interpretive works are disappointing…their charts treat too many variants with too many symbols. The delineation of English dialect areas…is yet to come, from someone who will look at patterns rather than items’. It could be argued that this ‘lexical’ approach to the cartography of the SED (rather than traditional dialectological methods per se) is partly to blame for the perception that the ‘North’ and the ‘South’ of England are divided by an isogloss border rather than the transition zone that was identified by Ellis back in the late nineteenth century, highlighted in composite analyses of SED materials by Chambers and Trudgill (1998) and Upton (1995) and which survives to this day (Britain 2001, forthcoming). This ‘isogloss’, along with those of the BATH lexical set drawn from the same data, contributes in a small way, along with the endless TV documentaries, media debates, interventions by politicians, tourist paraphernalia, and so forth to the strengthening of the general societal enregisterment of this North-South boundary as the overwhelmingly dominant, multiplex geographical divide in England – a country divided by, amongst other things, two vowels. The nature of the SED data did enable a different kind of geographical analysis, however, and one which, although not providing a structural phoneme by phoneme, structure by structure cartography of English dialects, still involved data amalgamation permitting comparisons between the areal distributions of lexical, phonological and morphological features. Viereck (e.g. 1986) led the way, producing maps of ‘heterophones’ (see Map 2), ‘heterolexes’ (Map 3) and ‘heteromorphs’ (Map 4) bundles of phonetic, lexical and morphological isoglosses based on substantial numbers of relevant items from the SED. So we begin to get a picture here of, for example, the broader phonetic differences between the dialects based on a wider range of items. But we still derive from this a picture based on one or two representatives of a number of lexical sets, rather than a complete picture of each individual set. The heterophone map, for instance, is based on 5 words from the STRUT and DRESS sets, 4 from FOOT, MOUTH, GOAT and TRAP, 3 from BATH and LOT, 2 from

30

David Britain

FLEECE, GOOSE and KIT, and one each from PRICE, SQUARE, FACE, START, NURSE, and PALM, with THOUGHT, CHOICE and NEAR absent.

Map 2.

Viereck’s (1986b: 245) map of heterophones in England, based on the Survey of English Dialects.

English in England

31

c Map 3.

Viereck’s (1986b: 734) map of heterolexes in England based on the Survey of English Dialects.

32

David Britain

Map 4.

Viereck’s (1986a: 250) map of heteromorphs in England, based on the Survey of English Dialects.

English in England

33

The heterophone map, however, does show strong similarities with Ellis’s map: the distinctiveness of Lincolnshire, the North-East, the Welsh border area and the Upper North clearly remain areas of distinctiveness. Many relatively weak heteroglosses are found across the Midlands, separating the East Midlands from the lower North, re-emphasising its transitional qualities. Devon and Cornwall are marked as distinct, as they are in Ellis. Some differences emerge, however: East Anglia seems to be divided quite markedly from the East Midlands along with Norfolk from Suffolk, though the latter could well be the result of fieldworker transcription differences (see Trudgill 1983: 35-41, Britain 1991). The influence of London is quite visible in the South East, and this has the effect of pushing the South-West westwards, beyond the Isle of Wight. The heterolex map is very similar indeed, with a distinctive North-East, Upper North, Lincolnshire, East Anglia, and a south-west divided as for phonological features. Much less clear here is the celebrated boundary between the lower North and the South and the lack of heterolexes around London is quite dramatic. The heteromorph map provides a less clear picture – the distinctiveness of East Anglia is evident (many of the morphological forms included were third person verb forms, known to be distinctive there – Trudgill 2004), as is Lincolnshire and the role of the Humber in distinguishing the latter from Yorkshire. The North-East is clear, as is the Devon-Cornwall part of the South-West. If we are to discern some trends in comparing these maps with each other and with those of Ellis, we could point to: a. A more robust emergence of London as strongly influential beyond its suburbia, especially in the lexicon but less so in the morphology; b. The contraction of the South-West but the preservation of eastern and western subdivisions; c. The preservation of a distinctive East Anglian area, showing the sharpest distinctions with the area to the west, rather than to the south (See Britain forthcoming for a sociohistorical and geographical justification of this pattern); d. The continuation of a tripartite North, in addition to a distinctive Lincolnshire; e. An interdialectal Midlands. f. Clear resemblance between the Ellis (1889) map, largely based on phonology, and the Viereck (1986b) heterophone map. g. Phonological and lexical variation showing more clearly marked areal patterning than morphology.

34

David Britain

The exploitation of the SED for cartographic purposes accelerated rapidly with the arrival of the computer. Powerful statistical and cartographic software has enabled researchers to manipulate the Basic Materials data in ways that permit much more sophisticated representations of dialect distributions, as well as performing dialectometrical work assessing the similarity of one chosen SED location to all others. Viereck pioneered much of this work (e.g. 1990), but here I report briefly on work undertaken by Shackleton (2010). Using computational dialectology, he applied ‘methods of measuring differences in pronunciations as numerical distances between sound segments’ (2010: 2) to the SED data in order to identify ‘dialect regions as clusters of localities with relatively similar patterns of usage, distinguish regions of relative uniformity from others with substantially greater variation, and, to some extent, identify regionally coherent groups of features that can be associated with and used to distinguish at least some traditional English dialect regions’ (2010:4). The composite map that emerged as a result of his computational analysis can be found in Map 5. It is instructive to compare it with Viereck’s heterophone map – they are, after all, based on the same dataset, although Viereck uses just a sample of it, and both analyse it in rather different ways, with Viereck looking at similarities from place to place and Shackleton examining phonetic distance between the pronunciations in each place. The correspondence of the two maps is indeed not overwhelming, but some clear patterns emerge. The south-west is similar in both, and if we blame fieldworker isoglosses for the apparent distinctiveness of Norfolk in the Viereck map, a broader London – South East – East Anglia region emerges similar to the one in the Shackleton map. The North-East is distinctive in both. But the Shackleton map does not highlight such clear differences overall between the upper and lower North4, but has a distinctive East and North Midland area, and, to the West, a Western/Southern area.

4

Map 5 is a composite map of two techniques that Shackleton applied to the data. He (2010: 40) shows that when kept distinct, one of the techniques does highlight a lower versus upper North distinction more clearly.

English in England

Map 5.

35

Shackleton’s (2010: 163) map of traditional dialect regions in England, based on the Survey of English Dialects.

Shackleton’s work highlights the potential benefits of applying modern computational techniques to a large and systematic spatially organised corpus, and it provides us with a clear picture of the areal distribution of

36

David Britain

phonological variation across England. But this picture, we must remember, is rather dated. Most of the speakers recorded in the SED were born in the nineteenth century. There has been no systematic nationwide survey of English dialects since, and so we have no more recent data of similar scope and extent that can be processed using similar techniques. More recent attempts to map the dialect regions of the country have been made by Trudgill (1999) who provides a trio of maps representing the past, the present and a projected future (Figs 6, 7and 8). The map showing the traditional dialects is based on the areality of 8 features, namely (1999: 33): a. b. c. d. e. f. g. h.

The use of [æ] or [