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The International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) Conference 24-27 August 2014

Plenary Abstract: Prof. Dr. David Britain

Linguistic diffusion and the social heterogeneity of space and mobility

It is widely assumed to be the case that, in the past century, there has been an ongoing process of dialect levelling in England, with the traditional dialect forms of rural areas in particular dying out in favour of more mainstream, metropolitan, urban-oriented regional variants. At the linguistic level, at least, localism seems to be, on balance, succumbing to regionalism. Furthermore, research on the geographical diffusion of linguistic innovations has assumed a strongly hierarchical relationship with new forms spreading from cities firstly to other large towns and then to other urban settlements before reaching villages and other rural locations. Explanations for these changes usually place responsibility onto increased levels of social and geographical mobility. But these two apparent developments present us with somewhat of a conundrum. On the one hand, within hierarchical diffusion models, it should be large towns most affected by influence from the urban core. On the other, it seems to be rural areas that are most dramatically undergoing dialect levelling. I try to address this conundrum here.

In doing so, this presentation examines phonological and morphological diffusion and levelling in East Anglia in Eastern England, based on analyses of a multilocality variationist survey of a number of different places of different sizes in the region. In putting some empirical flesh on the actual mobilities that shape the lives of people in this region (and others in England), I argue that we must not forget to view mobility sociolinguistically, examining the social differentiation of mobile behaviours and their variable effects on levelling, diffusion and language change. This forces us, firstly, to see the apparent homogenisation of the country’s regional dialects as a heterogeneous and contested process, since the mobilities that engender levelling ‘do not spread evenly over society as if it were an undifferentiated plain’ (Adey 2009:92) and, secondly, to question the universality of prevalent models of linguistic diffusion in the social dialectological literature.

Reference: Adey, P. (2009). Mobility. London: Routledge.

Keywords: diffusion, dialect levelling, dialect contact, demographic change

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