Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-8mjnm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-17T15:15:31.568Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

East Anglian English in the English Dialects App

Regional variation in East Anglian English based on evidence from a smartphone-based survey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2020

Extract

East Anglian English was the first British variety of English to be subject to dialectological scrutiny using sociolinguistic techniques (Trudgill, 1974, and his subsequent work) and since then has been subject to only sporadic investigation (e.g. Britain, 1991, 2014a, 2014b, 2015; Kingston, 2000; Straw, 2006; Amos, 2011; Potter, 2012, 2018; Butcher, 2015). Recent research has suggested that, in those few locations that have been investigated, East Anglian English is gradually losing some of its traditional dialect features, in favour of forms from the South East more generally. Kingston (2000), Britain (2014a) and Potter (2018) all found, for example, a rather steep decline in the use of East Anglia's traditional third-person present-tense zero. Furthermore, we are aware of the arrival into East Anglia of linguistic innovations from the South East of England, such as TH fronting (Trudgill, 1988; Britain, 2005; Potter, 2012) and /l/ vocalisation (Johnson & Britain, 2007; Potter, 2014), but we only know about their success in a few parts of the region – Norwich, East Suffolk and the Fens. Since Trudgill's investigations across East Anglia in the 1970s, however (e.g. Trudgill & Foxcroft, 1978), and despite a few multilocality studies (Britain, 1991, 2014a; Potter, 2018) no research has been able to provide a picture of the state of the traditional dialect across the whole region. We have therefore only a patchy understanding of the extent to which traditional dialect obsolescence, dialect levelling and innovation diffusion have impacted the dialect landscape of this region as a whole.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Amos, J. 2011. ‘A socio-phonological analysis of Mersea Island English.’ PhD dissertation. Colchester: University of Essex.Google Scholar
Britain, D. 1991. ‘Dialect and space: A geolinguistic study of speech variables in the Fens.PhD dissertation. Colchester: University of Essex.Google Scholar
Britain, D. 2005. ‘Innovation diffusion, “Estuary English” and local dialect differentiation: The survival of Fenland Englishes.’ Linguistics, 43, 9951022.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Britain, D. 2010. ‘Supralocal Regional Dialect Levelling.’ In Llamas, C. & Watt, D. (eds.), Language and identities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 193204.Google Scholar
Britain, D. 2013. ‘The role of mundane mobility and contact in dialect death and dialect birth.’ In Schreier, D. & Hundt, M. (eds.), English as a Contact Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 165181.Google Scholar
Britain, D. 2014a. ‘Linguistic diffusion and the social heterogeneity of space and mobility.’ Plenary talk presented at the 3rd International Society for the Linguistics of English conference. Universität Zürich: Switzerland.Google Scholar
Britain, D. 2014b. ‘Where North meets South?: Contact, divergence, and the routinisation of the Fenland dialect boundary.’ In Watt, D. & Llamas, C. (eds.), Language, borders and identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 2743.Google Scholar
Britain, D. 2015. ‘Between North and South: The Fenland.’ In Hickey, R. (ed.), Researching Northern English. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 417435.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Britain, D., Kolly, M.–J. & Leemann, A. 2018. ‘Using impact to make impact? Experiences from a dialect crowdsourcing project.’ In Macintyre, D. & Price, H. (eds.), Applying Linguistics: Language and the Impact Agenda. London: Routledge, pp. 8398.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butcher, K. 2015. ‘An exploration of the variables (t) and (ing) in Ipswich English: modelling linguistic variation in phonological theory.MRes dissertation. Colchester: University of Essex.Google Scholar
Duffer, L. 2008. ‘Dialect attrition in Gorleston, Norfolk.BA Dissertation. Colchester: University of Essex.Google Scholar
Ellis, A. 1889. On Early English Pronunciation (Vol. 5). London: Truebner and Co.Google Scholar
Foulkes, P. 1997. ‘Rule inversion in a British English dialect: A sociolinguistic investigation of [r] sandhi in Newcastle.’ In C. Boberg, M. Meyerhoff & S. Strassel (eds.), A Selection of Papers from NWAVE 25. Special Issue of University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, pp. 259270.Google Scholar
Hay, J. & Sudbury, A. 2005. ‘How rhoticity became /r/-sandhi.’ Language, 81, 799823.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, W. & Britain, D. 2007. ‘L-vocalisation as a natural phenomenon: Explorations in sociophonology.’ Language Sciences, 29, 294315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kerswill, P. 2003. ‘Dialect levelling and geographical diffusion in British English.’ In Britain, D. & Cheshire, J (eds.), Social Dialectology. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 223243.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kingston, M. 2000. ‘Dialects in danger: Dialect attrition in the East Anglian county of Suffolk.MA dissertation. Colchester: University of Essex.Google Scholar
Labov, W. 1966. ‘The social stratification of English in New York City.’ Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Leemann, A., Kolly, M.–J. & Britain, D. 2018. ‘The English Dialects App: The creation of a crowdsourced dialect corpus.’ Ampersand, 5, 117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Llamas, C. 1999. ‘A new methodology: Data elicitation for social and regional language variation studies.’ Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics, 7, 95118.Google Scholar
Orton, H. et al. 1962–71. Survey of English Dialects: Basic Materials: Introduction and 4 Volumes (each in 3 parts). Leeds: E. J. Arnold & Son.Google Scholar
Potter, R. 2012. ‘Dialect maintenance in the speech of residents of Suffolk.BA Dissertation. Colchester: University of Essex.Google Scholar
Potter, R. 2014. ‘Investigating the social differentiation of language use in Suffolk.MRes dissertation. Colchester: University of Essex.Google Scholar
Potter, R. 2018. ‘A variationist multilocality study of unstressed vowels and verbal –s marking in the peripheral dialect of East Suffolk.PhD dissertation. Colchester: University of Essex.Google Scholar
Rupp, L. & Britain, D. 2019. Linguistic Perspectives on a Variable English Morpheme: Let's Talk about –s. London: Palgrave.10.1057/978-1-349-72803-9CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spurling, J. 2004. ‘Traditional feature loss in Ipswich: dialect attrition in the East Anglian county of Suffolk.BA Dissertation. Colchester: University of Essex.Google Scholar
Straw, M. 2006. ‘Dialect acquisition and ethnic boundary maintenance: Barbadians in Ipswich.’ PhD dissertation. Colchester: University of Essex.Google Scholar
Trudgill, P. 1974. The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Trudgill, P. 1986. Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Trudgill, P. 1988. ‘Norwich Revisited: Recent linguistic changes in an English urban dialect.’ English World–Wide, 9, 3349.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trudgill, P. 1998. ‘Third-person singular zero: African-American English, East Anglian dialects and Spanish persecution in the Low Countries.’ Folia Linguistica Historica, 18, 139148.Google Scholar
Trudgill, P. 2001. ‘Modern East Anglia as a dialect area.’ In Fisiak, J. and Trudgill, P. (eds.), East Anglian English. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, pp. 112.Google Scholar
Trudgill, P. 2004. ‘The dialect of East Anglia: Phonology.’ In Schneider, E., Burridge, K., Kortmann, B., Mesthrie, R. & Upton, C. (eds.), A Handbook of Varieties of English: Volume 1: Phonology. Berlin: Mouton, pp. 163177.Google Scholar
Trudgill, P. & Foxcroft, T. 1978. ‘On the sociolinguistics of vocalic mergers: Transfer and approximation in East Anglia.’ In Trudgill, P. (ed.), Sociolinguistic Patterns in British English. London: Edward Arnold, pp. 6979.Google Scholar
Uffmann, C. 2007. ‘Intrusive [r] and optimal epenthetic consonants.’ Language Sciences, 29, 451476.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wright, J. 1902. English Dialect Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar