30.1609, Review: English; Historical Linguistics: Wright (2018)

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Subject: 30.1609, Review: English; Historical Linguistics: Wright (2018)

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Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2019 15:44:20
From: Enrico Torre [contact at enricotorre.com]
Subject: Southern English Varieties Then and Now

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36463618


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-3609.html

EDITOR: Laura  Wright
TITLE: Southern English Varieties Then and Now
SERIES TITLE: Topics in English Linguistics [TiEL]
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Enrico Torre, Università degli Studi di Genova

SUMMARY

‘Southern English varieties then and now,’ edited by Laura Wright, is a
collection of essays focusing on the dialects spoken in the South of England,
hitherto relatively neglected in the academic field of English
sociolinguistics (both historical and contemporary). The book includes nine
chapters, each one dedicated to a specific case-study, preceded by the
editor’s short introduction.

In her concise prologue, Wright emphasizes the fact that, although the South
of England is the most densely populated part of the country, its linguistic
varieties are surprisingly underrepresented in terms of sociolinguistic and/or
dialectal studies. Indeed, the southern regions of the UK have generally been
dismissed as linguistically homogeneous and uninteresting to the study of
language variation. This book aims to counter this unfortunate situation.
Wright provides a sketch of the main threads of the book: 1) the process of
social transformation in the history of England, 2) the relation of
complementarity between traditional sociolinguistic methods of finding
informants and the recent investigations of large repositories of data, and 3)
the increasing unification of dialectal and sociolinguistic approaches on the
one hand and the study of historical and contemporary data on the other. In
closing, Wright argues that all the studies included in the book contribute
some innovation to the discipline, concerning either theory, methodology, or
data source.

Chapter 1, written by Paul Kerswill, is entitled ‘Dialect formation and
dialect change in the Industrial Revolution: British vernacular English in the
nineteenth century.’ In this contribution, the author does not carry out a
linguistic analysis but rather proposes a methodological framework for the
investigation of dialect formation in epochs and locations characterized by
ongoing demographic and social changes. Kerswill’s approach 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.” (p. 9). While this perspective is not new, the
author applies it to ‘a dialect landscape’ consisting of “a series of
geographically distributed but interlinked communities across which a
continuum of language varieties is spoken” (p, 12). He argues that, in order
to discover the mechanisms of dialect formation and change, it is necessary to
know where the migrants came from, the proportions of people from different
places and to have some knowledge about the local dialects. Moreover, the
author encourages fellow researchers to take long time spans and substantial
geographical breadth into consideration in the search for insights on the
social and demographic conditions of language change. 

In Chapter 2, entitled ‘The dialect of the Isles of Scilly: Exploring the
relationship between in language production and language perception in a
Southern insular variety,’ Emma Moore and Chris Montgomery outline an
empirical linguistic study aimed at verifying the truthfulness of the informal
historical descriptions of Scillonian English as remarkably close to Standard
English. After providing some information of the Isles and the history of the
dialect, the authors proceed to describe the features of this variety as it is
spoken today, with the aid of the Isles of Scilly Museum’s Oral History
Archive, which contains recordings of 75 people born between 1901 and 1993.
The phonological and grammatical features suggest that the resemblance of
Scillonian English to Standard English is exaggerated. Then, Moore and
Montgomery illustrate two case-studies comparing vowel sounds and diphthongs
in Scillonian vs. Standard English, taken into consideration sociolinguistic
features such as gender, age, and education of the speaker. These studies show
that the Scillonian variety of English is not as standard as expected and, in
some aspects, resembles mainland Cornish English (e.g., the patterning of the
‘trap/bath vowels’). Next, the authors present a language perception
experiment, where the participants were asked to listen to two samples of
speakers from the Isles of Scilly and two distractor samples. They listened to
the same speaker in two guises: speaking about farming practices and speaking
about Scillonian traditions. The results show that the same speaker was
considered to sound less Scillonian in the former condition. Indeed, the
ideology of Scillonian purity depicts islanders as educated and refined, and
the manual labor of farming does not conform to this picture. The authors then
conclude that social meanings associated with language varieties are
determined by language ideologies and contextual factors.

Chapter 3, contributed by David Hornsby, is entitled ‘A new dialect for a new
village: Evidence for koinéization in East Kent.’ The focus of the study is
the contact variety of the former mining village of Aylesham, which appears to
significantly differ from both traditional Kentish and modern south-eastern
varieties. The village was established in 1926 to house miners working in the
Kent coalfields, in particular, the nearby Snowdown Colliery. Designed for
miners originally from other parts of the UK, Aylesham was set apart from
neighboring villages. The population of the village was initially made up of
migrants and it was linguistically diverse (Goffee 1978). In the beginning,
the population was also unstable (due to the high turnover) and relatively
fragmented, and it was only in the 1950’s that a proletarian community began
to emerge, due to intermarriage and the birth of second- and third-generation
children. On the basis of the judgment sample of 12 informants of different
generations, Hornsby provides a description of the phonology of the Aylesham
dialect, also discussing some grammatical lexical forms. The author observes
that locals use several vocalic forms which significantly diverge from
supralocal south-eastern varieties (e.g., the trap/bath vowel split is absent
in Aylesham, and words like ‘strut’ are pronounced with a schwa). His findings
are compatible with Trudgill’s (2004) claim that the majority variants from
the input dialect mix, or ‘compromise’ variants where more than two forms are
strongly represented in the mix, which are most likely to prevail in the new
variety. With particular regard to second-generation speakers, we are told
that intraspeaker variation is between a single local and an RP-like
south-eastern variant, while supralocal innovations seem to have failed to
take on, probably due to the strength of local networks and the village’s
isolation.

In Chapter 4, ‘The clergyman and the dialect speaker: Some Sussex examples of
a nineteenth-century research tradition,’ Jonathan Rope describes the data
collection practice employed by clergymen in the nineteenth century to collect
data about English dialects. Adopting Sussex as a case study, Rope tells us
that members of the Diocese of Chichester approached native speakers with the
same background as those used by sociolinguists in the following century,
namely non-educated rural people but, contrary to what is widely believed,
their informants were not limited to older, male individuals. On the contrary,
they were rather diverse in terms of gender and age (see Parish 1880), unlike
the informants in twentieth-century dialect studies. Indeed, Rope points out
that professional linguists often have limited time and encounter few people,
who often share a homogeneous background. Long-term residents like clergymen,
instead, had the chance to collect their data in the course of their normal
duties; moreover, they would know and meet “a wider spectrum of local people,
whereas there is an inescapable suspicion that outside researchers are often
referred to the same few people, the same locally acknowledged experts or
‘represented villagers’” (p. 127).
 
Chapter 5, contributed by Peter Trudgill, is entitled ‘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 grammaticalization in East Anglian
conjunction-formation.’ In this study, the author argues that, although
phonetic erosion is normally considered an outcome of grammaticalization, the
causal relationship between the two phenomena may not always be
unidirectional. Indeed, on the basis of an analysis of the historical
development of conjunctions out of nouns, verbs, and adverbs in the
traditional dialects of East Anglia, Trudgill suggests that phonetic erosion
may be a triggering factor of grammaticalization, rather than a consequence.
After showing that the East Anglian dialect is extremely stress-timed (a
condition which tends to favor phonetic erosion), he proceeds to illustrate a
few cases of conjunction-formation which show the process of erosion, either
completed (‘time,’ ‘do’) or in progress (‘yet,’ ‘more,’ ‘case’). For instance,
in the case of ‘do,’ the author shows a three-step evolution: in the first
stage, ‘do’ is used elliptically for ‘if you do’ (e.g., “don’t you walk
upstairs yet, do you’ll whitewash the whole stair carpet,” p. 142). At stage
2, the tense agreement is broken and ‘do/don’t’ begin to occur in non-present
contexts (e.g., ‘he pinned ahold of her other leg, don’t she’d have been in,’
p. 143). Finally, the positive/negative distinction is lost, with the
‘do/don’t’ distinction neutralized in favor of ‘do’ (e.g., “keep you them
elephants still, do we shan’t half be in a mess,” p. 144). Although the
hypothesis that what happened was actually ellipsis rather than phonetic
erosion cannot be ruled out, Trudgill claims that the balance of the evidence
is in favor of erosion.

In Chapter 6, entitled ‘Emphatic “yes” and “no” in Eastern English: jearse and
dow,’ Stephen Howe addresses the use of ‘jearse’ and ‘dow’ as emphatic forms
of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in a large portion of Eastern England, “from the Colne to
the Humber, including Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire,
Lincolnshire and part of Essex.’ (p. 148) After providing a brief summary and
a historical excursus of the uses and forms of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in English, the
author introduces his online survey on the use of ‘jearse’ and ‘dow,’ which
was administered both in the UK and the US. The answers provided by the
informants show that the use of ‘jearse’ and ‘dow’ is mostly emphatic and
that, in the varieties which have both, they mirror each other grammatically
and semantically. Moreover, Howe notes that both words begin with [d]:
[dʒɪ:əs] and [dɛ:ʊ]/[da:ʊ]. The vast majority of the informants (69%) ticked
that these forms are used by the “older generation”, suggesting that ‘jearse’
and ‘dow’ are now obsolescent but were once common. However, they are still to
some extent used by people who grew up hearing the traditional dialect. Then,
the author turns to the origins of these emphatic forms, proposing that they
developed from augmentation of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ by interjectional ‘dear.’ He
supports his position with arguments from phonetics (Minkova 2014), syntax,
and semantics, showing that his hypothesis is preferable to a range of
alternatives.

Chapter 7, contributed by Richard Coates, is entitled ‘Steps towards
characterizing Bristolian,’ and introduces the urban variety of English spoken
in Bristol, which has been so far been neglected in sociolinguistic studies,
despite local salience in Bristolian identity. The author presents a list of
lexical items which could be taken as candidates for being considered as
typical Bristolian (e.g., ‘fowsty,’ i.e. ‘moldy’; ‘mucker,’ i.e. ‘mate,
friend’). Next, he addresses the features typical of Bristolian grammar, such
as the non-standard conjugation of the copula (e.g., ‘weem in a right mess
now,’ ‘ise goen dowtown awlrite?’) and modal verbs (e.g., ‘dost,’ ‘canst’),
the use of the third person masculine subject pronoun for the third person
neuter, especially when referring to tools or machines, the exchange of
subject and object pronouns (e.g., ‘cider I up. Get I a Blackforn,’ ‘why
casn’t thee do it?’), the adessive rather than allative use of the preposition
‘to’ (e.g., ‘where’s he to?’), the periphrastic ‘do’ (e.g. ‘they did get a bit
reckless now and again’). Finally, Coates discusses the phonology of the
Bristolian dialect. Several consonantal phenomena of some interest include
namely: /h/-dropping (contrary to the received view), th-fronting, initial
fricative voicing, rhoticity, and, above all, the Bristol ‘L.’ The latter is
the intrusion of a final [l] either word-finally (e.g., ‘ideal’ for ‘ideal,’
‘cinemal’ for ‘cinema’) or word-internally (e.g., ‘I gotta-l-ave a drink,’ ‘I
found a dead sparra-l-awk’), a phenomenon whose origins are still debated.
With regard to vowels, despite falling within the area of lengthening of
Middle English /a/ before fricative sounds, in Bristol, the lengthening does
not necessarily take place (e.g., /bæθ/). Moreover, the reflex of Middle
English /u:/ did not undergo diphthongization in the Bristol area.
Furthermore, both reflexes of Middle English /ɛ:/ are found: [e:] and [ei].
Finally, there is an isogloss separating the reflexes of Middle English /i:/
and /ih/, which both occur as [əi] (or [ʌi]) north of Bristol and as [ɔi] to
the south.

Chapter 8, contributed by Jonnie Robinson, is entitled ‘“I don’t think I have
an accent”: Exploring varieties of southern English at the British Library.’
This study provides an overview of the three main collections of dialectal
date which can be accessed in the British Library, namely the Survey of
English Dialects, the BBC Voices Recordings, and the Evolving English
VoiceBank, focusing on the three southernmost regions used for administrative
purposes: London, the South East, and the South West. In particular, Robinson
looks and finds surviving forms of southern vernacular (e.g. ‘shrammed,’ a
form for ‘cold’ used in Gloucestershire, Dorset, and Devon, or ‘ent down,’
i.e. a form for ‘to rain heavily’ recorded in Cornwall), although they often
obsolescent. The author provides details on the distribution of these lexical
items, also making generous use of quotes from the database, including
contributors’ own metalinguistic comments. Moreover, rhyming slang is
discussed at some length (e.g., ‘having a bubble,’ i.e. ‘be joking’). Then,
Robinson illustrates some features of southern dialect grammar, such as the
use of pronoun exchange (e.g., ‘my brother told I,’ ‘us saw he’), which is
particularly frequent in tag questions (e.g., ‘we’d wait till it did get dark
didn’t us’), to the point that the author hypothesizes a subconscious
connection of pronoun exchange with this environment. Another interesting
grammatical feature of southern dialects is the retention of Old English
accusative singular third person masculine pronoun ‘hine’ (e.g, ‘I used to
stop up all night with hine’). Finally, the author discusses the nicknames
attributed to southern varieties and the speakers’ attitudes toward their own
and other variants. 

Chapter 9 is contributed by Juhani Klemola. It is entitled ‘The historical
geographical distribution of periphrastic DO in southern dialects,’ and
represents a study of the distribution of periphrastic ‘do’ based on both the
Survey of English Dialects (SED) and the unpublished notebooks of the SED
fieldworkers. After providing a summary of previous studies, the author
provides a preliminary outline of the distribution of periphrastic ‘do’ based
on SED published materials. Then, he turns to the unpublished SED fieldworker
notebooks, showing that this grammatical feature is recorded in a
significantly larger area. As Klemola points out, “The formal nature of the
questionnaire interview situation probably did not encourage the use of
features such as periphrastic DO, whereas the incidental material contains
utterances that the fieldworkers picked up from their more informal
conversations with the informants.” The author then directs attention to the
absence of periphrastic ‘do’ from Devon and East Cornwall, while it is present
in the remaining Central and Western parts of the South, including West
Cornwall. The explanation offered is that periphrastic ‘do’ can be considered
as an innovation originating in West Wiltshire/East Somerset and spread from
there but did not reach Devon and Cornwall because of the presence of several
natural barriers. The reappearance of periphrastic ‘do’ in West Cornwall would
be due to the introduction of English into this area as late as the Early
Modern English period. Indeed, the English spoken in this area is closer to
early Standard English usage than to surrounding dialects (Wakelin 1975). The
periphrastic ‘do’ would then be introduced through education. The construction
‘do + uninflected verb’ (e.g., ‘he do go to the cinema every week’) is
attested in the eastern areas of Wales. Finally, Klemola shows that the data
support Elworthy’s (1886) intuition that periphrastic ‘do’ was not immediately
replaced by the standard English rule, where only third person singular forms
receive the present tense marker ‘-s,’ but went through an intermediate stage
when the ending was generalized to all persons.

EVALUATION

Overall, “Southern English varieties then and now” represents a valuable
collection of contributions to the field of English linguistics, focusing on
an area of the UK which is so far underrepresented in terms of sociolinguistic
and dialectal studies. Not only does the book provide a significant amount of
synchronic as well as diachronic information on the peculiarities of a range
of often neglected dialects but, due to the heterogeneous nature of the
contributions, it also illustrates a range of perspectives and methods to the
study of linguistic varieties. In so doing, the volume strikes a nice balance
between traditional and recent approaches, keeping a dialog alive between the
past and the present of English sociolinguistics and dialectology. At the same
time, a dialog is kept open between the past and the present of the language,
as both historical and present-day data are taken into consideration to
describe dialectal features. The choice of the topics is also principled as
phonology, grammar and the lexicon all receive the due attention. While each
chapter can stand as a self-contained contribution, the volume as a whole
coheres. For all the above-mentioned reasons, this book represents a valuable
addition to the ‘Topics in English Linguistics’ de Gruyter series. 

The inclusion of methodologically and theoretically diverse contributions
proves a felicitous choice since it provides the reader with a snapshot of
contemporary sociolinguistics and dialectology, illustrating how the field is
reacting to what Laura Wright, at the very beginning of her introduction,
defines as “the challenge of big data” (p. 1). The label ‘big data’ is here
used broadly speaking to refer to all the large datasets such as census data
and the crowdsourced nineteenth and twentieth-century corpora, atlases,
surveys (a digital version of which is many cases available, nowadays). The
studies contained in this book show that the discipline is appropriating these
resources, making extensive use of them to complement the traditional
techniques of finding and recording informants, using a variety of methods
ranging from personal networks to consulting local authorities. As an example,
Moore and Montgomery’s study embodies this integration of multiple methods, by
investigating databases and carrying out experiments to understand the true
nature of Scillonian English (viz. the narrative of ‘purity’). Trudgill’s
tackling of a thorny theoretical issue like the relations between
grammaticalization and phonetic erosion with the aid of East Anglian
literature and native speaker intuition represents another clear instance of
methodological pluralism at work. To some extent, all the chapters integrate
different methods and/or perspectives (with the partial exception, perhaps, of
Roper’s more historiographic contribution).

On a different note, the book also provides a cross-section of the varieties
of English spoken in the South of England, contradicting to some extent the
received view of the area as linguistically homogeneous and of little interest
for dialectal study. Instead, taking into consideration southern England past
and present, a more complex and fascinating story emerges. While it remains
true that, overall, the dialects of the North and the Midlands probably
present more ‘deviant’ features compared to standard English than southern
dialects, the South of England represents a linguistically multifaceted
entity. A densely inhabited, dynamic, diverse, and rich in history, southern
counties retain their linguistic and cultural peculiarities, which deserve to
be explored both synchronically and diachronically. The chapters included in
this volume represent significant steps in this direction: a wide range of
data are available, as are the methods to analyze them. The chapters which
make up ‘Southern English varieties then and now’ have only touched upon a few
issues regarding (some) dialects spoken in the South of England, but they have
the potential to pave the way to more in-depth investigations into these
hitherto understudied varieties.
 
With regard to formal matters, all chapters are easy to read and understand,
engaging and accessible for a general audience with basic linguistic training.
All contributors generously provide examples to illustrate the phenomena under
discussion and clarify their point, but wisely avoid overusing them,
circumventing the risk of becoming tedious. The use of tables and maps to
illustrate both quantitative and qualitative evidence effectively facilitates
the reader’s understanding. Finally, all chapters are roughly uniform in
length and structure, contributing to the general elegance and cohesion of the
volume. The presence of a few typos does not seriously impact the readability
of the contributions and certainly does not undermine the value of the
chapters. For these reasons, the book is also an ideal resource for
undergraduate and master’s dissertations.

While my assessment of ‘Southern English varieties then and now’ is overall
very positive, I will now point out a couple of shortcomings of the book.
First of all, the absence of a concluding chapter is, to some extent,
disappointing. While it is understandable that the editor had a limited amount
of space and thus awarded priority to the case-studies, I still believe that
book would have benefitted from including a brief concluding chapter, tying in
with the introduction, restating the goals of the book and, suggesting
directions for future developments. Indeed, since the previous nine chapters
go a long way toward challenging the stereotype of a linguistically
homogeneous South a short concluding chapter could effectively and elegantly
wrap up the contents of the book. While this is no fundamental flaw, the
absence of a concluding chapter may leave the reader with a sense of
incompleteness.

A further less than ideal property of the book regards the occasional
sloppiness in the presentation of either data or methods. Admittedly, this
issue is not particularly serious, but I will provide a couple of examples
just to illustrate the point. In Chapter 1, Kerswill writes, “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 industrialization 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.”
The problem with this quote is that it cuts Scotland off Britain: if the study
does not deal with Scotland, then the use of the expression ‘the whole of
Britain’ is incorrect. If Scotland is instead included in the study, then it
is inaccurate to make it fall within England. To reiterate this is just a
slip-of-the-tongue which does not seriously undermine Kerswill’s contribution.
The second example is from Chapter 3. While Hornsby’s study is overall
well-structured and very informative, the selection of informants for his
pilot study is only vaguely illustrated. Hornsby writes, “[f]or the pilot
study, a judgement sample of 12 informants (7 males, 5 females) were selected.
Aged between 45 and 82, all but one were either born and raised in Aylesham or
came to the village before the age of 5, and were educated there.” (p. 86)
This is legitimate, but it would have been useful if the rationale of the
selection had been made explicit, just to let the reader know if these
participants were somehow considered as more ‘prototypical Ayleshamers’ than
other potential candidates or the selection was made randomly (either option
is perfectly defensible). 

Despite the minor liabilities listed above, I believe this book represents a
valuable contribution to the field, which has the great merit of presenting a
challenge to a well-entrenched stereotype about the dialects of the most
populated part of the UK. The studies which make up this book may be followed
by more comprehensive studies of these (and other) southern English varieties,
in order to explore in-depth their features and shed more light on their
relations with each other as well as with Standard English and the dialects of
other parts of the country.

REFERENCES

Goffee, Robert. 1978. Kent Miners: Stability and Change 1927-76. Canterbury,
University of Kent PhD thesis. 

Elworthy, Frederic Thomas. 1886. The West Somerset Word Book: A Glossary of
Dialectal and Archaic Words and Phrases Used in the West of Somerset and East
Devon. London: Truebner & Co.

Minkova, Donka. 2014. A Historical Phonology of English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.

Parish, W.D. 1880. To “Ixe”. Notes and Queries (6th series) 1. 76.

Trudgill, Peter. 2004. New Dialect Formation: The Inevitability of Colonial
Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Wakelin, Martyn F. 1975. Language and History in Cornwall. Leicester:
Leicester University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Enrico Torre is a research fellow in English at the University of Genoa,
Italy. He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Lancaster University, UK and his
research interests include English linguistics (both synchronic and
diachronic), theories of language, and the history and philosophy of
linguistics. He is currently investigating the notions of analogy, pattern,
and family resemblance in the history of linguistics. Moreover, he is
exploring the connections between contemporary linguistic theories and the
structuralist tradition. In the recent past, he has analyzed the patterns of
use of Italian idioms.





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