Sandra Jansen - Levelling and diffusion in the Cumbrian city dialect of Carlisle

The data presented in this book stem from recordings of sociolinguistic interviews with people from Carlisle. My fieldwork in the community took place in two major stages in February/March 2007 and February/March 2008 with the addition of three individual recordings in September 2009 and two further recordings in September 2010. In all, I made eighty recordings, recording a total of 109 speakers. The recordings lasted from around 25 to 90 minutes. Participants were recorded individually, in pairs and in one case in a group of three. In the following I discuss the sampling decisions, methods and interview procedure.

In the first section I discuss the social variables age, sex and social class as external motivations of change (cf. Labov 2001).

The age of the participants of this study ranges from 15-99 and the adjusted sample for this study ranges from 22-78. The more traditional approach is to categorise speakers in age cohorts, usually according to life stages (e.g. Trudgill 1974; Hall 2008). Fewer, but not less convincing studies (e.g. Hall-Lew 2009 and to a certain extent Baranowski 2007) use age as a consecutive variable. In this study, the vowel and consonant variables are statistically analysed taking speaker age into account as a continuous predictor. The figures for the consonantal variables are still presented with age categories in order to make the results more accessible. The age cohorts are 22-39 (young), 40-59 (middle), 60-78 (old).

Age is not only important on the individual level but also on the speech community level. In sociolinguistics, age is represented in real-time and apparent-time studies as tool to investigate language change. Labov (1963) introduced a set of methods in order to tackle the problem of analysing language change in his Martha’s Vineyard study and later in his New York study (Labov 2006). His approach of combining diachronic and synchronic approaches in order to study language change is a paradigm shift away from structuralism where language change is believed to only be observed diachronically but not synchronically.

Sankoff (2006: 113) describes how sociolinguists benefit from the apparent-time approach:

The most important implication […] is that apparent time is a truly powerful concept in locating the presence of change. […] a researcher who locates a gradient age distribution in a new community under study is virtually assured of having identified change, whether or not age grading is also involved.

Di Paolo and Yaeger-Dror (2010: 9) stress that “the speakers’ age at the time of the interview is primarily important because it marks their life-stage […], and their progression through the linguistic market ” (their emphasis). Thus, the speaker’s behaviour and attitude towards socially loaded variants can change over the course of a life, i.e. the importance a speaker gives to the use of certain variants varies.

In this study, the social category sex is based on the biological categories male and female . Sex differences are particularly interesting when it comes to the question of who leads linguistic change. Labov states that “in the majority of linguistic changes, women use a higher frequency of the incoming forms than men” (Labov 1990: 206). As Chambers (2009: 256) points out, this statement is somewhat vague because most changes are towards standardised forms. Therefore, Labov (2001: 293) refines his claim in the Sex Paradox : “Women conform more closely than men to sociolinguistic norms that are overtly prescribed, but conform less than men when they are not.” In general, women tend to use more standard forms than men because women’s perception of non-standard use of language is sharpened and women, in the majority of cases, lead language change (Wodak and Benke 2017: 138). However, male speakers lead change towards non-standard variants. For example, Trudgill (1972) shows that WC male speakers lead the change towards the use of [ɪn] instead of using the more standard variant [ɪŋ]. Likewise, Williams and Kerswill (1999: 160) find that WC (Working Class) boys in Reading and Hull are leading the change towards [ʔ] for (T).

Even though Chambers (2009: 105) states that “very few biological differences between males and females have an effect on language”, in instrumental/acoustic phonetics physiological differences between men and women have to be mentioned. Male speakers tend to have a larger larynx than female speakers. The size of the larynx influences the size of the vocal cords, i.e. males also have longer vocal cords which in return means that females have higher Hertz frequencies when speaking. In general, the aim of sociophonetic studies is to compare speaker groups and thus, normalisation procedures have to be applied to the data in order to extract physical sex differences (cf. Chambers 2009: 106f) by acoustic means.

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