Southern English Varieties Then and Now

Laura Wright

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783110575217
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110575316
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Most of the world's Extraterritorial Englishes stem historically from southern English dialects - Southern England having been the most densely-habited part of the country. However, the dialects of Southern England remain under-studied. The papers in this volume consider both diachronic and synchronic aspects of the dialects of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Kent, Sussex, Dorset, Somerset, Devon, Cornwall, Gloucestershire and the Isles of Scilly.

Paul Kerswill

1 Dialect formation and dialect change in the Industrial Revolution: British vernacular English in the nineteenth century

1 Historical sociolinguistics and sociohistorical approaches to language change

The Late Modern period (c. 1700–1900) is usually described as having been a particularly stable time for the English language, belying the social upheavals of the age (Romaine 1998: 7). However, the main thrust of existing linguistic research on that period deals with printed materials, which by this time were abundant. Printing was pretty much standardised in form, and this means that direct evidence of the type of variation that might occur in spoken language will be masked more than it is for earlier periods, when even formal writing was not fully standardised. For the reconstruction of non-standardised phonology, lexis and morphosyntax, this is problematic, a fact which can to some extent be alleviated by focusing on personal and private writings. The extensive analyses of grammar provided, for example, in Kytö, Rydén & Smitterberg (2006), based on large-scale corpora containing a range of written genres, show us the broad sweep of changes in British English in a way that is barely possible using the survey methods of variationist sociolinguistics. Yet, those studies deal with only one (broadly defined) variety: Standard English in England (Kytö et al. 2006: 4). Indirect data on spoken language can be gleaned from a corpus such as The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674–1913 (oldbaileyonline.org; Huber 2007), though its usefulness for sociolinguistic work is severely hampered by the sporadic nature of the attestations of the spoken forms which occur in the corpus. Notwithstanding this, a good deal of historical sociolinguistic and dialectological work on the Early Modern period is based on a range of written genres, including personal letters, and this allows some access to socially and regionally marked varieties (e.g. Ihalainen 1994, and Meurman-Solin 2012 on the Corpus of Scottish Correspondence). For the Late Modern Period, a continuation of the Helsinki corpus-based approach of Nevalainen and colleagues allows for an improvement in sociolinguistic detail – but only up to 1800 (Nevalainen et al. 2013). Taking advantage of the emergence of academic dialectology towards the end of the nineteenth century, Wagner (2012) shows that Ellis’s The existing phonology of English dialects, compared with that of West Saxon speech (1889) can be used to demonstrate clear regional trends for morphosyntactic features, and that these analyses can be compared to dialect data collected for the Survey of English Dialects (Orton et al. 1962–71) and the later Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (Kortmann 2000; https://fred.ub.uni-freiburg.de/) to show patterns of change. Ellis’s work will be drawn on later in this chapter, but for now we need to recognise that, in order to know exactly how English regional varieties sounded, or how the phonological, grammatical and discourse features of English were deployed in real speech situations and how they varied within and across communities, we would need extensive recorded samples, collected using sociolinguistically-informed methods such as are available only for the 1960s onwards.

The intention of this chapter is to take a broad sweep, similar to that of Historical Sociolinguistics, but asking very different questions from researchers working in the corpus-oriented tradition of Nevalainen and her colleagues (e.g. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003; Nevalainen 2011) or the more sociohistorical approaches of Bailey (1996), Beal (2004) and Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2009). The linguistic subject-matter of these studies tends to be features which enter the language as a whole and over an extended time scale. Sociolinguistic variation has been successfully investigated within these research paradigms using the categories of social networks, gender and genre – particularly in the more quantitative, corpus-driven studies – while sociohistorically-oriented research involves the close study of the social, geographical and ideological context of features and the particular time and place of their attestation. My approach in this chapter, which will deal mainly with the nineteenth century, is indebted to these strands in manners that will become obvious, but it will differ in two ways. First, I will focus on the formation of dialects (seen as variable, integrated linguistic systems) in epochs and locations where particular demographic and social changes are taking place – I am thinking here of the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century and the social and demographic changes which followed throughout the nineteenth century. Second, I will take a particular kind of sociolinguistic approach that seems well suited to understanding how these types of sociodemographic change impact on a language, using ‘the present to explain the past’ (Labov 1975). The framework I will use – which I will elaborate below – is based on the notion that the social forces driving language change in large measure derive from face-to-face contacts between people using different linguistic features, and that the nature and frequency of those contacts are determinants of the direction and speed of change.

In my discussion, I will focus on the whole of Britain. When dealing with the first part of the nineteenth century, the case studies will be from northern England, primarily because industrialisation in its most all-encompassing form took place there. For the second half of the century, my focus will move gradually to the south, particularly London and the counties surrounding it. There will, however, be relatively little linguistic data. In part this is due to the general paucity of good dialect data for most of this period. What I am proposing, rather, is a framework to be used in further investigations, and it will be illustrated with linguistic data in small ways that are intended to test the concepts I am presenting.

2 How much can we find out about the development of dialects in Late Modern English?

For a long time, the English language was seen by some mainstream scholars as moving in a single sweep from Old English, through Middle English, to the ‘perfection’ of Standard English in the eighteenth century and the dignity of Received Pronunciation in the nineteenth (see Crystal 2005, Mugglestone 2007). Thus, Wyld (1927: 17) saw dialects from the end of the fourteenth century onwards as of little interest to the study of the history of English, because they were not ‘the vehicle of literary expression’. This reinforced the ‘standard ideology’ that pervaded the work of historians of English until the mid-twentieth century (Crystal 2005: 5) and which continues to be the ‘normal’, common-sense ideology in British society at large today (Milroy 1999: 175). But as Cooper (2013: 261) points out, there was a growing amount of dialect literature (literature written in dialect) during this period, accompanied by well-observed amateur dialect descriptions such as Bywater (1839, Sheffield) and Robinson (1862, Leeds). None of these works was intended to be ‘scientific’; instead, they were written for entertainment or instruction (Cooper 2013) or political campaigning (Langton 1984; 1986). It was not until the final quarter of the century that we find descriptive dialect studies of a type we recognise today as the precursor of modern variationist sociolinguistics, providing accounts that go beyond dialect words and isolated sounds. These began with the publications of the English Dialect Society, which existed from 1873 to 1896 (notably Wright 1892 and Skeat 1896). By some way the most significant of the early dialect publications was the 900-page survey, already mentioned, by A. J. Ellis (1889), which contains phonetic transcriptions of model texts rendered into dialects throughout England and Scotland, as well as parts of Wales and Ireland. Ellis had a network of collaborators, who prepared the texts on the basis of often very detailed knowledge of local speech (see Maguire 2012; Wagner 2012).

Given this backdrop of nineteenth-century dialect studies, we need to consider how much we can reliably discern of the significant changes in British English (BrE) vernacular speech which must have been taking place from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 1770s and continuing through the rapid expansion of industrial towns and cities throughout the century that followed. Did the dialects really plough a furrow separate from that of Standard English as Wyld implies? In answer to this question: clearly there were changes ‘from below’, such as the loss of rhoticity in London (Beal 2010: 15–6), while nonstandard pronoun and verb forms gradually gave way to standard ones. Of particular relevance for us is whether the conditions were right for ‘new-dialect formation’ in Trudgill’s (2004) sense to take place, of the kind attested much later in the New Town of Milton Keynes (Kerswill & Williams 2000).

The question is whether we can observe dialect changes, including koineisation (new-dialect formation is the clearest example – Kerswill 2013), or else infer it from linguistic descriptions and social information from the period. This is a big challenge in the face of selective, non-quantitative data and a different intellectual view of the social world from our own. However, if we can marshal information from the period in such a way that we can apply our own interpretations to it, then we might arrive at an analysis which is compatible with later sociolinguistic work. This chapter is an attempt to do that. In order to refine our search for relevant information it is useful to have a model to guide us. The work of Henning Andersen (Section 3.1), Peter Trudgill (Section 3.2), and Salikoko Mufwene (Section 5) appears prima facie to fulfil this need.

3 Establishing a workab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titel Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Dialect formation and dialect change in the Industrial Revolution: British vernacular English in the nineteenth century
• 2 The dialect of the Isles of Scilly: Exploring the relationship between language production and language perception in a Southern insular variety
• 3 A new dialect for a new village: Evidence for koinéization in East Kent
• 4 The clergyman and the dialect speaker: Some Sussex examples of a nineteenth century research tradition
• 5 I’ll git the milk time you bile the kittle do you oon’t get no tea yit no coffee more oon’t I: Phonetic erosion and grammaticalisation in East Anglian conjunction-formation
• 6 Emphatic “yes” and “no” in Eastern English: jearse and dow
• 7 Steps towards characterizing Bristolian
• 8 ‘I don’t think I have an accent’: Exploring varieties of southern English at the British Library
• 9 The historical geographical distribution of periphrastic DO in southern dialects
• Index