A Real-Time Approach to Understanding Language Variation and Change: The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich Revisited

Value

£349,955

Description

Language change is a natural and inevitable process. Social and demographic shifts in recent decades have accelerated change across regional English varieties, which are ‘levelling’ to lose their distinctive features (Kerswill & Williams, 1999). The local industries that once played a vital role in cultivating regional culture, identity, and linguistic diversity are disappearing in post-industrial Britain. Ironically, meanwhile, attitudes towards linguistic diversity have themselves shifted; traditional/regional varieties are increasingly being recognised as vital cultural assets warranting preservation. This has motivated linguists to question the role of individuals in such changes, asking: to what extent can individuals change their accents and/or dialects over their lifespan? A growing body of longitudinal ‘panel’ studies, comparing the same speakers at different points in time, has recently emerged in response to this question. Findings show that either i) linguistic changes do advance over the lifespan, but at a much slower rate than the community, ii) they regress, with speakers becoming slightly more conservative than they were in earlier life, or, iii) change across the lifespan is absent. Outcomes vary depending on the linguistic feature and community being studied, with most evidence drawn from studies concerning morphosyntactic or consonantal features. To fully understand lifespan change, additional longitudinal data on gradient linguistic features, such as vowels, from a diverse range of individuals and communities is necessary.

This project is a rare and time-sensitive opportunity to address this gap. We will conduct a replication of the UK’s first ever sociolinguistic investigation of linguistic change, namely Peter Trudgill's well-known survey of Norwich English (1974, data collection 1968). We will re-record as many of Trudgill’s original participants as possible as part of a panel study over 56 years, making it possible to evaluate lifespan changes to individuals’ speech production and perception for the first time. We will collect new samples from the present-day Norwich community for comparative ‘trend’ analysis with Trudgill’s corpus, tracking community-level change across five generations. Our deep longitudinal perspective will significantly improve understanding of the causes and mechanisms behind complex community-level linguistic shifts, as our methods capture the dynamic nature of social, cultural and economic factors that influence dialect change, loss, and survival.

Impact

Planned academic impact

This project aims to deliver three conference presentations, one journal article, and a book proposal to CUP. Interviews will be archived with Norfolk Records Office and the UK Data Service.

Planned non-academic impact:

• Six educational workshops
• Curriculum materials
• Corpus creation
• Project website