Southern English Varieties Then and Now

302 Pages·2018·6.306 MB·English

by  Laura Wright

Laura Wright (Ed.)
Southern English Varieties Then and Now
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Topics in English Linguistics
Editors
Elizabeth Closs Traugott
Bernd Kortmann
Volume 100
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Southern English
Varieties Then
and Now
Edited by
Laura Wright
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ISBN 978-3-11-057521-7
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-057754-9
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-057531-6
ISSN 1434-3452
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wright, Laura, 1961-editor.
Title: Southern English varieties then and now / edited by Laura Wright.
Description: Berlin ; Boston : Walter de Gruyter, 2018. | Series: Topics in
English linguistics ; volume 100 | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018007418 | ISBN 9783110575217 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: English language–Dialects–England, Southern. | English
language–Variation–England, Southern.
Classification: LCC PE1771 .S66 2018 | DDC 427/.9422–dc23 LC record available
at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007418
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck
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Contents
Laura Wright
Introduction   1
Paul Kerswill
1 Dialect formation and dialect change in the Industrial Revolution: British
vernacular English in the nineteenth century   8
Emma Moore and Chris Montgomery
2 The dialect of the Isles of Scilly: Exploring the relationship between language
production and language perception in a Southern insular variety   39
David Hornsby
3 A new dialect for a new village: Evidence for koinéization in East Kent   74
Jonathan Roper
4 The clergyman and the dialect speaker: Some Sussex examples of a
nineteenth century research tradition   110
Peter Trudgill
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   132
Stephen Howe
6 Emphatic “yes” and “no” in Eastern English: jearse and dow    148
Richard Coates
7 Steps towards characterizing Bristolian   188
Jonnie Robinson
8 ‘I don’t think I have an accent’: Exploring varieties of southern English at
the British Library   227
Juhani Klemola
9 The historical geographical distribution of periphrastic do in southern
dialects   262
Index   293
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Laura Wright
Introduction
In 2017 we stand at the threshold of a new kind of linguistics. It has long been seen
coming: Kretzschmar’s Linguistics of Speech of 2009, for example, shows how the
approaches of dialectology versus sociolinguistics, which were considered opposi-
tional in the twentieth century, are now united in response to the challenge of big
data. Equally, the division of historical versus present-day language is no longer
inevitable, with databases of both readily available for analysis and comparison
online. Never before has so much language been presented so ripe, as it were, for
study. Never before have we been so well-armed as to what to expect: we know that
there will be variation, we know that a Zipf’s Law distribution of those variants will
pertain, we know that geographical region and social division will find their expres-
sion in language. Yet there are curious anomalies. Most of the world’s Extraterrito-
rial Englishes stem historically from southern dialects, unsurprising in that south-
ern England has always been the most densely-habited part of the country, yet this
area is also one of the least studied from a dialectal or a sociolinguistic point of view.
In particular the historically important cities of London, Bristol, Norwich, Exeter
and Winchester have received surprisingly little attention. Linguists have had little
to say about working-class language in Kent, middle-class language in Hampshire,
or upper-class language in Gloucestershire, be it from now or be it from then.
The availability of big data means that historians, historical geographers and
historical linguists now use the same sources:
Between fifty and sixty per cent of all non-serial publications in English produced between
the beginning of print in Britain in the fifteenth century and 1923 have now been digitized.
This enables a connecting up of data in ways that were previously practically impossible.
One of the new ways in which historians and historical geographers are dealing with that
data is to reconfigure it around people. There are some sixty-six thousand men and women,
for example, in the London criminal database, present as individuals. Suddenly, we know if
a collection of words was spoken by a ten stone, five foot two inch woman with brown hair
and black eyes, and a withered left arm; or by a six foot man with an anchor tattoo on his
left arm, and a scar above squinting blue eyes.1
1  Quoted from a radio broadcast (4 May 2015, BBC London 94.9) by Tim Hitchcock, Professor of
Digital History at the University of Sussex and co-creator of a series of websites giving access to
thirty billion words of primary sources evidencing the history of Britain: the Old Bailey Online,
1674 to 1913 (www.oldbaileyonline.org); London Lives, 1690–1800 (www.londonlives.org); Locat-
ing London’s Past (www.locatinglondon.org); and Connected Histories (www.connectedhisto-
ries.org). For linguists’ use of the criminal database see e.g. Widlitzki and Huber (2016).
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110577549-001
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2   Laura Wright
Yet big data has not resulted in a full-scale replacement of traditional linguis-
tic methods; rather, corpus-building and searching has become complementary
to older dialectological techniques of finding and recording informants, using a
variety of methods such as native-speaker intuition, personal networks, friend-
of-a-friend, questionnaire, enrolling the aid of local ‘authorities’ such as vicars
and schoolmasters, and comparing present-day findings with those published in
earlier surveys, dictionaries and atlases. Big data has created an upheaval, but
it is not so much a revolution (as Structuralism once was), rather it has caused
investigators from different disciplines to come together and ask new research
questions and take a larger perspective than was hitherto possible. In keeping
with these observations, the authors in this book do all of the above – noting
that here, big data includes not only large number sets such as those provided by
census returns, but also the crowdsourced assemblages presented in nineteenth
and twentieth century dialect atlases, dictionaries and surveys.
Paul Kerswill questions whether dialects in the industrialised parts of Britain
were likely to have been swamped by incomers, precisely the sort of question that
cannot be ascertained without reliable numerical data. Juhani Klemola juxtaposes
data from the published and unpublished resources of the Survey of English Dialects
carried out in the mid-twentieth century to reconstruct nineteenth-century auxil-
iary do versus –s patterning in Somerset, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Dorset.
David Hornsby investigates dialect retention and transmission in a small Kentish
village by means of kinship and proximity networks. Peter Trudgill and Stephen
Howe both use native speaker intuiton as a starting-point for investigation into
East Anglian dialect; Peter Trudgill uses nineteenth-century dialect literature as a
source, and Stephen Howe found informants via requests in newspapers, internet
mailing lists and local radio stations. Jonathan Roper uncovers the rural Sussex Vic-
torian informants who provided the attestations in Joseph Wright’s English Dialect
Dictionary by means of census data, diaries and journals. Richard Coates addresses
the scant serious and not-so-serious accounts of Bristol dialect by surveying pre-
vious academic linguistic work and also non-academic, folk-linguistic, evidence.
Jonnie Robinson presents the different kinds of holdings available for Southern
dialect study in the British Library’s Sound Archive, and Emma Moore and Chris
Montgomery use data from the Isles of Scilly Oral History Archive to provide an
account of Scillonian English. The ‘then’ in our title thus means ‘as far back as con-
temporary witness allows’ (Trudgill, Howe, Klemola, Roper, Coates), ‘as far back
as sound-recordings allow’ (Robinson, Moore and Montgomery), and ‘as far back
as the data goes’ (Hornsby, Kerswill, which in the case of census returns, is 1801).
Southern England is populous, and has been comparatively so for the last
millennium (it is also multilingual, and has been so for the last millennium). Yet
linguists seem to have been daunted by these large groups of speakers. Wales
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Introduction   3
(2002: 62) says “Britain has essentially been an urbanized society for over 100
years; yet despite a steady increase in sociolinguistic studies in recent years, we
still know relatively little about its urban dialects.” Kerswill (‘Dialect formation
and dialect change in the Industrial Revolution: British vernacular English in
the nineteenth century’) cites the great nineteenth-century linguist A. J. Ellis,
who tried to find out about the speechways of the Greater London area in the
1880s only to be thwarted, concluding, time and again, that there was nothing
of interest to report. In fact, as verb morphology from Ellis’s informants around
the greater metropolis shows, speech in the new suburbs was unlike that of the
surrounding countryside at the time, and contained more variants than occur in
the area today. Kerswill weighs the competing possibilities of new dialect forma-
tion as a mixture of incomers’ speech ab initio on the one hand, versus levelling
together with retention and diffusion of older local features on the other. Influ-
enced by Mufwene’s Founder Principle, Trudgill’s sociolinguistic typology model,
and Andersen’s theory of open vs. closed dialects, he uses census returns to make
the case that the dialects of the newly-industrialized areas of Britain would, in
the main, have been levelled varieties of already-existing regional dialect. Emma
Moore and Chris Montgomery (‘The dialect of the Isles of Scilly: Exploring the
relationship between language production and language perception in a South-
ern insular variety’) also use census returns to consider whether Scilly’s popula-
tion is likely to have been levelled or swamped since the sixteenth century when
the present population is thought to have been founded. In the 1901 census, a
third of the archipelago’s residents were recorded as born elsewhere, with the
majority coming from mainland Cornwall. Moore and Montgomery consider
the relationship between the dialect spoken on the Isles of Scilly and Cornish
English. They describe the linguistic features of present-day Scillonian English,
finding certain phonemes to be different from both Cornish English and RP. David
Hornsby (‘A new dialect for a new village: evidence for koinéization in East Kent’)
uses unemployment records from the 1920s and 30s to establish ratios of who
came from where in Aylesham, which is in an area of rural East Kent. Founded
in 1928, Aylesham was purpose-built to serve a new colliery and was settled by
miners from Yorkshire, the North-East, South Wales, Scotland and the Midlands.
He describes a mining village typical of the traditional working-class community,
inward-looking, with the collective valued over the individual, ensuring that the
new settlement remained socially isolated over the twentieth century and pro-
vided the right social conditions for linguistic innovation.
On the flip side of industrialization and consequent urbanisation lies depop-
ulation, all those dialects left behind in the otherwise-undisturbed rural areas
which became thinly peopled as the labour force swapped working on the farm
for working in factories. Depopulation also has its linguistic consequences, and
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4   Laura Wright
Trudgill’s complexification theory predicts that these are the parts of the country
where exceptionally complex features are likely to be found. Left alone in iso-
lation over long periods of time, these dialects have had the right conditions in
which to develop idiosyncracies and innovate. These more isolated dialects are
also likely to retain earlier features that have dropped out of use in Standard
English, so that it is not a paradox to find unusual new developments and truly
conservative features going hand in hand. David Hornsby finds such linguistic
phenomena in Aylesham in Kent (in vowels in particular), Paul Kerswill finds
them in Victorian Berkshire (definite article deletion, retention of Anglo-Norman
/e/ and Southern Voicing /v/ in verm ‘farm’), Stephen Howe finds them in pres-
ent-day East Anglia and more northerly eastern areas, and those parts of New
England and New York State settled by Easterners (lexicalized emphatic forms of
agreeing and disagreeing), Peter Trudgill finds them in Victorian and present-day
Norfolk (conjunctions yet, more, case, time and do), and Jonnie Robinson finds
them in present-day Devon and Cornwall (intransitive infinitive marker –y). One
theme of the book, then, centres around demographics, population movement
and population stasis, with concomittent dialect levelling in areas of dense social
mixing, and complexification and retention in areas of low social contact.
Turning now to sources, the ideal data source, whether historical or present-
day, has to be verifiable, datable, and sited within an identifiable regional and
social context. Unselfconsious spontaneous speech has been taken as the ideal,
as it were, with self-aware, self-declared dialect (such as dialect literature)
suspect, as potentially being maximally divergent from the perceived norm of
the day. Yet good sources (ie regional speakers) may of course be aware of varia-
tion, be it according to region, social class, age or any other factor; will not nec-
essarily produce local forms, either as informants shift register or accommodate
to the fieldworker, or when dialect features belong to their passive rather than
their active repertoires, or if the sought-for local form simply happens not to form
part of their idiolect. In other words, evaluating the authenticity of a source is
always of concern, and is as important as an awareness of the competence, pos-
sible interference, or downright distortion created by the fieldworker, editor, or
publisher. These matters are central to the chapters written by Jonathan Roper,
Richard Coates and Jonnie Robinson.
In keeping with Tim Hitchcock’s observation that big data has led histori-
ans to isolate and focus on individuals such as beggars, crossing-sweepers, and
itinerant vendors – people who until now were thought to have left no historical
trace – and to consider their geographical relationships as well as their social
ones, Jonathan Roper (‘The clergyman and the dialect speaker: some Sussex
examples of a nineteenth century research tradition’) identifies and names the
informants (“peasants”) who lie behind the great late Victorian dialect surveys
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