Urban Voices

Accent Studies in the British Isles

Paul Foulkes,Gerard Docherty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317858973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Accents and dialects are constantly undergoing small variations over time, but evidence shows that change may have become increasingly rapid in the past few decades. 'Urban Voices' presents one of the few recent surveys of this phonological variation and change in urban accents across Great Britain and Ireland.Each of the specially commissioned chapters is divided into two parts. The first provides a detailed description of accent features within one or more urban centres, including information on social and stylistic variation and ongoing change. The second discusses a range of current theoretical and methodological issues. Some chapters present wholly new data based on fieldwork carried out specifically for inclusion in 'Urban Voices', while others summarise data from well-known research, up-dated and reanalysed in accordance with new findings.Containing copious illustrative and pedagogic material, this textbook presents a clear pathway to state-of-the-art research for students of sociolinguistics, dialectology, phonetics, and phonology at advanced undergraduate and graduate level. In addition, the detailed descriptive data and the accompanying cassette constitute a valuable resource for students and teachers of English, clinicians and speech therapists, forensic phoneticians, researchers in speech recognition and speech synthesis, and actors.Contributors: Deborah Chirrey, Edge Hill University College / Beverley Collins, Rijks Universiteit Leiden, Netherlands / Gerard J Docherty, University of Newcastle, UK / Paul Foulkes, University of Leeds, UK / Nigel Hewlett, Queen Margaret College / Raymond Hickey, University of Essen, Germany / Paul Kerswill, University of Reading, UK / Anne Grethe Mathisen, University of Oslo, Norway / Kevin McCafferty, Universitetet i Tromso, Norway / Inger Mees, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark / Lesley Milroy, University of Michigan, USA / Mark Newbrook, Monash University, Australia / James M Scobbie, Queen Margaret College, UK / Jana Stoddart, Olomouc, Czech Republic / Jane Stuart-Smith, University of Glasgow, UK / Laura Tollfree, Monash University, Australia / Peter Trudgill, University of Fribourg, Switzerland / Alice Turk, University of Edinburgh, UK / Clive Upton, University of Leeds, UK / Dominic Watt, University of Leeds, UK / J D A Widdowson, University of Sheffield, UK / Ann Williams, University of Reading, UK.

1

Urban Voices – Overview

Paul Foulkes and Gerard J. Docherty

Urban Voices is a collection of specially commissioned chapters written by researchers concerned with accent variation in the English spoken in the British Isles. Contributors include sociolinguists, dialectologists, phoneticians and phonologists.

We have two immediate aims in assembling these chapters. These are (i) to provide a collection of recent research based on empirical studies of accent variation; and (ii) to collect together descriptive data yielded by such studies to stand as a reference resource. Contributors were therefore asked to do two things: first provide a description of the phonetic features of a particular accent, and then discuss methodological and/or theoretical implications of their data.¹

In this Overview we first outline these two aims in more detail. We then take a brief excursus to address the various labels which have been used to cover the sort of work we have collected here, suggesting that a new term is required in order to encapsulate the diversity of interests represented. Following this, the general structure of the book is described in detail. Finally, we turn to the individual contributions, offering a précis of each of them. This enables us to tackle a third, less direct, aim. A prime motivation for collecting any work together in the way we are doing here is, of course, to raise questions as well as answer them. By inviting contributions from a range of academic disciplines, all of which focus on accent variation, we hope to identify some of the strengths, limitations, tensions and gaps in sociolinguistics, dialectology, phonetics and phonology. By doing this we hope to provide a platform for continued research in these fields.

1.1 Immediate aims

1.1.1 Empirical research on accent variation

The first aim of this book is to represent a cross-section of recent research carried out on accent variation. No similar collection has appeared since Socio-linguistic Patterns in British English (Trudgill ed. 1978). As indicated by its title, the latter is a collection of works by sociolinguists, and in his Introduction to the collection Trudgill identifies the common debt owed by its contributors to the pioneering methodology of Labov and his colleagues. Trudgill goes as far as to call the work represented in the book ‘sociolinguistics proper’, although it is perhaps more widely regarded as one branch of the broad discipline of sociolinguistics. This branch has been variously labelled variationist sociolinguistics or urban dialectology, and in 1978 it was still in its relative infancy outside of North America. It has since continued to flourish, and is still characterised by studies where empirical data are exploited to yield answers to linguistic questions: advancing linguistic theory, furthering our understanding of the structure of language, and accounting for the dynamics of variation and change (see further Chambers 1995).

In the intervening two decades a wealth of fieldwork, description and analysis has been carried out, and many of the central concerns of such work have remained largely intact. Labov remains inarguably the most prominent player on this stage, as will become clear in many of the chapters in the present volume. However, twenty years is a long time in linguistics. Urban dialectology has been touched by technological advances, new paradigms in adjacent theoretical fields, and perhaps most of all by upheavals in the social structure of the communities under scrutiny. Methods of data collection and analysis have been refined and reassessed, and the findings of such work are being exploited for an increasingly wide range of purposes. And while Labov’s work still exerts tremendous influence, research on English in the British Isles has inevitably begun to develop its own character, shaped by its architects, and by the influence of neighbouring academic disciplines and traditions. In order to reflect this diversity of interest we have therefore sought contributions to Urban Voices not only from sociolinguists, but also from linguists of other backgrounds for whom phonological and/or phonetic variation is important.

Although the common focus of this book is on variation within the British Isles, this should not be taken as indicative of parochialism. Rather, the discussions raise important general issues in linguistic theory and methodology, for our understanding of speech production and perception, and the mechanisms of linguistic change. Some of these issues are broached in more detail below.

1.1.2 Descriptive resources

Our second principal aim is to draw together descriptive material pertaining to the accents spoken in urban areas of the United Kingdom and Ireland. It should not be overlooked that the data collected in empirical studies form a highly valuable resource in themselves. Published work emanating from empirical projects tends necessarily to be selective in the data which are presented, since, by design, researchers tend to be setting out to use a subset of their collected data as evidence in some particular theoretical debate. Journal articles tend to present data drawn from a micro-study of some or other variable with a view to illustrating, for example, that change is in progress in pronunciation, or that the range of variation can be interpreted as supportive of a particular theoretical or methodological stance. Indeed, all of the offerings in the present volume follow this very path. However, the concentration on a selection of variants (combined of course with the temporal constraints found in the execution of any empirical research project) usually results in large portions of the collected data being unpublished, or only partly analysed, and often even wholly untouched.

While it was impossible to rectify such a situation fully in the course of the two years or so in which this book took shape, we have sought to tap into the collected fieldwork corpora held by the contributors to bring as much descriptive material as possible into the light. We have asked all contributors to present descriptions of the spoken vernacular(s) of their area(s) of research, which are as full and detailed as possible. (Note that we concentrate on aspects of phonetic and phonological variation; see J. & L. Milroy (eds) 1993 for a collection of chapters discussing grammatical variation.)

The accent descriptions follow a standard format which is described in detail below. This process of aggregating descriptions in itself raises numerous interesting and important issues in terms of the aims and methods of work which centres on variation data (which we again address below).

The assembled material will serve as a valuable resource tool, to be used in conjunction with established sources such as Wells (1982). First and foremost this makes a great deal of comparable data accessible for the conventional pursuits exercised by dialectologists, sociolinguists, phonologists and phoneticians. However, beneficiaries of this material will also include those working in the increasing number of fields where a thorough understanding of non-standard spoken vernaculars is vital. These include education (e.g. J. & L. Milroy 1985a; L. Milroy 1987a: 202ff.), speech therapy (e.g. L. Milroy 1987a: 208ff.), forensic phonetics (e.g. Nolan 1991, 1997; Mahoney, Dixon & Cocks forthcoming) and speech technology (e.g. Hoequist & Nolan 1991).

Speech technology is perhaps the most prominent commercial area in which an understanding of variation in speech has been sought. However, a recent upsurge in telephone sales and call centres has led to a much wider commercial interest in the features of accents, and in public attitudes to variation.

Telesales companies have apparently taken great care to locate their call centres in regions where their workers’ accents will be favourably perceived. The south of Scotland, the north-east of England, Yorkshire, south Wales, Derby and Merseyside have all recently reaped the benefit of this new line of industry. So far, though, there has been little involvement on the part of linguistic researchers. Instead, companies tend to execute their own research. The Institute for Personnel and Development, for instance, has carried out qualitative interviews with recruitment consultants to assess perceptions of employees’ accents (IPD 1996). A few accents seem to have a fairly universal perception, with Birmingham continuing to fare badly. However, the perception of both Received Pronunciation (RP) and ‘Cockney’ varied widely in the IPD study, while the influx of call centres in 1998 to Merseyside (Jones in The Independent on Sunday, 29 November 1998) brings into question the usual stigma attached to Scouse.

The changing and varying perceptions of accents revealed by commercial research suggests that academic linguists have a potentially important role to play in explaining this range of perceptions. However, no wide-scale attitude survey has been carried out since Giles’ work in the 1970s (e.g. Giles 1970; although see Newbrook this volume for a local study). It would not be surprising to find that changes in attitudes to variation are linked to the ongoing and widespread changes in both social structure and pronunciation that are described in Urban Voices.

1.2 Accent studies

Interest in accent variation, as we have already noted, is widespread, and various labels have been assigned to academic pursuits concerning accent variation. The terms sociophonetics and sociophonology have been used to reflect the relatively recent interest in variation on the part of phoneticians and phonologists. More common than these are urban dialectology and variationist (or quantitative) sociolinguistics. All of these names clearly derive from modifications to the names of other fields, to reflect the origins of such work as a side-branch of longer-established traditions. As such, work on accent variation seems to find itself in peripheral areas of various disciplines. None of the labels we have listed seems to us particularly revealing in capturing the range of empirical and theoretical considerations which are found across the spectrum of work on accents.

We suggest that the lack of a single label inhibits communication between parties interested in accent variation. In this excursus we take a brief look at the names currently used by those researching on accent features. We conclude that a novel term, accent studies, might be better suited than any of the existing ones as a means of marking out a unified territory for research on accent variation.

The first pair of current labels, sociophonetics and sociophonology, appear mutually exclusive in their scope, encapsulating as they do the long-standing divide between phonetics (as the study of sounds in their concrete form) and phonology (by contrast the study of ‘sounds’ as abstract entities in a linguistic system). As such, neither can adequately express the obvious fact that empirical observations of language are almost always interested in both the concrete and the abstract. The procedure of many chapters included in Urban Voices, for example, involves collecting concrete/phonetic data, but also exploiting those data to assess their implications for our understanding of the linguistic system. This dual interest is clearly reflected in the chapters by Scobbie, Hewlett & Turk and by Tollfree, who examine some of the implications of phonetic variation for our understanding of phonological representation and organisation. Similarly, the chapters by Watt & Milroy, Hickey, Trudgill, and Docherty & Foulkes assess the implications of phonetic variation for our understanding of how change is initiated and how it filters through the phonological system.

‘Urban dialectology’ reflects an interest in regional dialects of English that has been apparent since at least the time of Chaucer, and dialectology as a reasonably well-defined scholarly subject has been pursued in Britain for well over a century (see further Chambers & Trudgill 1980). Until relatively recently the defining characteristics of dialectology have been a concentration on geographical variation, with research carried out mainly in rural locations, and with one of its main aims being the recording and preservation of non-standard forms. Much work has targeted older male informants, on the assumption they would be the best guardians of such forms, and interest in lexical variation has been especially prominent. The contribution here by Stoddart, Upton & Widdowson discusses the continuing role of some of these considerations.

The innovative work of Labov brought about an abrupt change of tack in the pursuits of dialectology. Interest turned to urban dwellers (on the basis that the majority of the inhabitants of the USA, as in Britain, live in urban areas), informants were sampled from a range of social groups (defined by socioeconomic class, gender, age, and/or ethnicity), and much more attention became directed towards phonetic and phonological variation (since subtle variation in pronunciation patterns was identified as correlating with these social categories). The name urban dialectology reflects this developing paradigm while keeping sight of its ancestry. Several chapters included in Urban Voices can be said to fit into this mould, although various issues are raised concerning methodology (e.g. McCafferty, Hickey, Newbrook), analysis (e.g. Williams & Kerswill, Stuart-Smith), and interpretation of results (e.g. Watt & Milroy, Mees & Collins, Mathisen).

The label ‘urban dialectology’, however, is also in some respects unsatisfying. One of the first items in the curriculum of a typical undergraduate course in linguistics is the difference between accent and dialect. The latter is taken to refer to any differences between varieties of the same language, whether at the level of pronunciation, phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis or pragmatics. Accent, by contrast, refers to differences of segmental or suprasegmental pronunciation and/or phonology. With this distinction in mind, almost all work carried out under the rubric urban dialectology can in fact be said to investigate differences of accent rather than dialect, and reference to ‘dialectology’ would therefore appear slightly imprecise. (Watt 1998 picks up this concern, preferring the term ‘accent levelling’ to the more usual ‘dialec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Map of locations
• The International Phonetic Alphabet
• List of contributors
• 1 Urban Voices – overview
• 2 Patterns of variation and change in three Newcastle vowels: is this dialect levelling?
• 3 Derby and Newcastle: instrumental phonetics and variationist studies
• 4 Sheffield dialect in the 1990s: revisiting the concept of NORMs
• 5 West Wirral: norms, self-reports and usage
• 6 Sandwell, West Midlands: ambiguous perspectives on gender patterns and models of change
• 7 Norwich: endogenous and exogenous linguistic change
• 8 Dialect levelling: change and continuity in Milton Keynes, Reading and Hull
• 9 South East London English: discrete versus continuous modelling of consonantal reduction
• 10 Cardiff: a real-time study of glottalization
• 11 Glasgow: accent and voice quality
• 12 Edinburgh: descriptive material
• 13 Standard English in Edinburgh and Glasgow: the Scottish Vowel Length Rule revealed
• 14 (London)Derry: between Ulster and local speech – class, ethnicity and language change
• 15 Dublin English: current changes and their motivation
• Appendix – Audio samples
• References
• Index