30.2369, Review: English; Sociolinguistics: Braber, Robinson (2018)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-30-2369. Thu Jun 06 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.2369, Review: English; Sociolinguistics: Braber, Robinson (2018)

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Date: Thu, 06 Jun 2019 19:30:02
From: Christopher Strelluf [c.strelluf at warwick.ac.uk]
Subject: East Midlands English

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36497857


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-3567.html

AUTHOR: Natalie  Braber
AUTHOR: Jonnie  Robinson
TITLE: East Midlands English
SERIES TITLE: Dialects of English [DOE]
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Christopher Strelluf, University of Warwick

SUMMARY

This short volume provides a general overview of the phonetics and phonology,
morphology and syntax, and lexis of English in Derbyshire, Leicestershire, and
Nottinghamshire. It follows the common structure of de Gruyter’s Dialects of
English series with a goal of providing “the most obvious starting point” for
descriptions of particular varieties of English.

Braber and Robinson built their data from new analyses of recordings collected
from these counties for the Survey of English Dialects (SED; Orton et al.
1962-1971) and held at the British Library, as well as published SED
fieldworker transcriptions and additional materials made available through
University of Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture. They also made use of
recordings of local speech collected through BBC radio affiliates in the three
counties for the Millennium Memory Bank oral history project in 1998 and 1999.

The first chapter briefly describes East Midlands geography and culture. It
describes Derbyshire, Leistercershire, and Nottinghamshire as “core” East
Midlands counties, and excludes Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire from the
study as more peripheral to the region. Despite the region’s low population
density and relatively low level of visibility in popular consciousness of
English regions, the authors point to a number of sources to suggest that the
East Midlands played an outsized role in shaping present-day English, as
standard English spoken in London during the late Middle English period was
“based on the East Midland dialect” (5). They also note the position of the
East Midlands between the more popularly salient English North and South, as
well as West Midlands dialects of Brummie and Black Country. Finally, the
authors indicate that the East Midlands is “unusual in its lack of
representation in popular media” (10), but has played a prominent role in
British sport.

The second chapter turns to phonetics and phonology. The authors provide
impressionistic descriptions of vowels, following Wells’s (1982) typology, and
also offer insights into productions of several consonants and some connected
speech processes. Their analyses often align the East Midlands with northern
Englishes rather than dialects to the south or the nearby West Midlands—for
example, they analyse East Midlands English as generally not maintaining
phonemic splits in the dialectologically important BATH/TRAP and FOOT/STRUT
sets. While most of their reports are based on auditory analyses of old
recordings, Braber and Robinson occasionally corroborate observations with
novel qualitative observations. For instance, they confirm the emergence of an
innovative regional pronunciation of the happY vowel as [ε] by showing that
local students sometimes spell the word “mardy” as <mardeh>. 

Chapter 3 examines a series of morphological and syntactic features. The
authors note the difficulty of studying morphosyntactic features in samples of
spontaneous speech. They are, nevertheless, able to comment briefly on an
impressive range of categories, including determiners, nouns and pronouns,
verbs, negation, prepositions, adverbs, and discourse particles. Several of
these features are detailed with exhaustive tables that appear to list all
variants that could be captured from the recordings, for instance providing
nine citations of “come” being used in the past tense where “came” would
standardly be prescribed (90). The authors also occasionally confirm
morphosyntactic variants as saliently East Midland features through
attestation in popular sources, such as the dialectal negation suffix -na
appearing in a “Derbyshire dialect” version of the Ten Commandments that uses
“conna” for “cannot.”

Research content concludes in Chapter 4, which describes some East Midlands
lexis. Braber and Robinson devote sections to historical origins of place
names, and to vocabularies connected with mining and farming. In this context,
the authors break from the SED and BBC recordings that the rest of the volume
relies on to anticipate forthcoming studies of the “Pit Talk” of East Midlands
coal miners.  While the vocabularies of coal mining and farming are likely
disappearing as these industries decline in the East Midlands, the authors
also show a series East Midlands terms such as “cob” (‘sandwich’), “mardy”
(‘sulky’), and “duck” (‘term of endearment’) appearing increasingly in East
Midlands-focused products and marketing. They show convincingly that these
items of local dialect vocabulary “are an important expression of local
identity” (143), pointing toward the emergence of East Midlands English as an
“enregistered” variety (e.g., Johnstone 2009).

The book also includes annotated transcripts of recordings as Chapter 5, and
brief annotations of references as Chapter 6.

EVALUATION

Braber and Robinson’s study of East Midlands English is a welcome contribution
to English dialectology. Consistent with the stated goal of the Dialects of
English series to provide a “starting point” for research on varieties of
English, the book provides initial descriptions of an impressively broad range
of features for a regional variety that has received relatively little
attention among British Englishes. The book will indeed be an obvious starting
point for future studies in the East Midlands that examine specific features
more intensively, and will provide a useful touchpoint for researchers working
in other regional Englishes, such as the nearby West Midlands or East of
England.

Their findings also themselves point toward very compelling directions for
future research. At the level of individual variables, for instance, during
their description of the GOOSE vowel, Braber and Robinson note that “following
/l/ frequently prompts more fronted GHOUL” (39). Since following /l/ generally
results in lower F2 and pre-/l/ allophones of GOOSE often resist fronting
(e.g., Thomas 2001 for examples from North American varieties), the East
Midlands appear to exhibit an opposite allophonic conditioning pattern from
many other Englishes for a widespread sound change. At the systemic level,
Braber and Robinson’s discussions of popular representations of East Midlands
English features point toward a speech community in the early stages of
enregistering its language. East Midlands English may, then, offer insights
for how it is that a language variety undergoes the process of enregisterment.

It is noteworthy that nearly all of Braber and Robinson’s language data comes
from extant recordings archived at the British Library. These recordings, for
which Robinson is lead curator at the British Library, have been described
elsewhere as a tremendous resource for historical dialectology (e.g., Robinson
2017). This book admirably demonstrates some of the ways that extant
recordings like the various collections at the British Library might be used
to for linguistic research. It is clear that Braber and Robinson have
exhaustively mined SED and Millennium Memory Bank recordings, and by doing so
have been able to extract at least some observations on many linguistic
features without the time and expense of conducting new interviews. Of course,
they are also able to report much greater time-depth than they would be able
to do with interviews conducted today, since the SED fieldwork was conducted
half a century ago. At the same time, their approach not only draws on these
under-utilized extant sources, but also contributes new meaning to these
extant sources. This is particularly true in the case of SED materials, where
Braber and Robinson’s analysis helps synthesize meaning that is obscured by
the glut of raw data published in the SED basic materials.

The reliance on extant recordings and the requirement to cover a broad range
of features naturally limits the depth with which Braber and Robinson can
cover any feature. This is especially the case for morphosyntactic features
and lexical items, where the authors acknowledge that they are limited to
whatever features happen to have occurred. As a consequence of this, the
extent to which a given feature is really characteristic of East Midlands
English often cannot be clear. For instance, a single speaker from Swadlincote
contributes many of the forms of negative constructions in tables on pp. 70
and 97, so it’s possible that this speaker is just especially recessive (or
innovative, depending directions of change). It is a bit more disappointing
that phonetic data are presented entirely as impressionistic transcriptions.
While it is obviously beyond the scope of the book to provide extensive
acoustic analyses, it would be helpful, e.g., in the case of vowels, if the
book occasionally provided formant estimates to give context for the
transcriptions Braber and Robinson settle on--especially in cases where the
authors disagree with transcriptions of SED fieldworkers or weigh in on
disagreements among SED fieldworkers. 

The reliance on SED recordings and field materials also means that the book is
often more suited to describing traditional features of East Midlands English,
rather than describing the variety today. Braber and Robinson’s introduction
notes that in previous work, “the dialect has been described and discussed
more from the historical perspective than as a living and changing regional
dialect still in use today” (4). While Braber and Robinson draw on the
relatively recent Millennium Memory Bank recordings and refer to ongoing
research with modern speakers, descriptions often focus on features which the
authors impressionistically conclude are disappearing among younger speakers.
This is especially clear in the chapter on lexis, which devotes substantial
attention to coal mining and farming vocabulary that “is disappearing from
usage” (126). Of course, the book offers a great deal by documenting
disappearing dialect features, but in many cases thorough description of the
“living and changing” character of East Midlands English awaits further
research.

As that research appears, _East Midlands English_ will continue to serve as a
broad, accessible overview of an under-researched variety of English. It is
also an excellent model for using archival recordings as an entrypoint to
studies of speech communities.

REFERENCES

Johnstone, Barbara. 2009. Pittsburghese shirts: Commodification and the
enregisterment of an urban dialect. American Speech 84(2). 157-191.

Orton, Harold, Eugen Dieth, Willfrid Halliday, Michael Barry, P.M. Tilling &
Martyn Wakelin. 1962-1971. Survey of English Dialects A and B: Introduction
and the basic material. Leeds: E.J. Arnold & Son.

Robinson, Jonathan. 2017. British Library sound recordings of vernacular
speech: They were lost and now they are found. In Raymond Hickey (Ed.),
_Listening to the past: Audio records of accents of English_ [Studies in
English Language], 13-38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thomas, Erik R. 2001. An acoustic analysis of vowel variation in New World
English [Publication of the American Dialect Society 85]. Durham: Duke
University Press.

Wells, J.C. 2001. The Accents of English, vol. 1, An introduction. Cambridge:
Cambridge University
Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Christopher Strelluf is an assistant professor in the Centre for Applied
Linguistics at University of Warwick. He received his PhD from the University
of Missouri in 2014. His research interests include language variation and
change, dialectology, and interactions between language and power. His
monograph _Speaking from the Heartland: The Midland vowel system of Kansas
City_ is available as the 103rd Publication of the American Dialect Society.





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