The Variety of the English Dialect

The Variety of the English Dialect

Introduction

If we compare Alexander Ellis' nationwide dialect survey of 1889 with the situation at the beginning of the 21st century, one obvious socio-historical linguistic process that seems to account for much of the transformation in this landscape is dialect death. In most cases and in most places, dialect variation in England today seems radically less marked, less divergent and less locally orientated than that spoken just over one hundred years ago.

So what has this diversity been replaced by, and how has that replacement taken effect? The English have not, over the past century, become a nation of RP speakers - the diversity has not been replaced by standard forms. Similarly, the English have not become a nation of Cockney speakers - the diversity has not been replaced by one dominant urban dialect. (see Trudgill 1986, Kerswill 2002) that have resulted from the high levels of sociogeographical mobility that the country has witnessed over the past century. These socially and regionally based 'compromise' dialects, shaped by contact between local, regional, interregional and other, including standard, varieties, are beginning to replace not just the traditional rural dialects of the country, but also affect both the stereotypical working-class strong social networked norms of the urban centres as well as the received standard variety. Dialect contact, then, I argue, is inextricably linked with dialect death in England. Furthermore, unlike in many other Anglophone countries, very little research has investigated the English dialects of ethnic minority groups in England, nor, furthermore, the effect that dialect contact between the ethnic minority and White communities is having on dialect diversity among the White community. We will see, therefore, that dialect contact has indeed led to dialect death. In doing so, it has, however, created new and distinctive dialects in the process. Diachronically, a good deal of the country's dialect diversity is historically recent, and shaped by socio-demographic trends over the past century.(U. Ammon, N. Dittmar, K. Mattheier, P. Trudgill (eds.).2003 Pp 123-125

Background

Many people believe the word dialect refers only to the use of unusual vocabulary, but this is only one aspect of a dialect. This preoccupation with vocabulary is perhaps not surprising. Grammatical variation tends to be very subtle and many non-standard constructions are in fact national, rather than regional features of popular speech. Likewise, differences in pronunciation, although noticeable, rarely affect our ability to understand each other. So it is only when someone uses an unfamiliar word or expression that we assume they are speaking in dialect. Local words and expressions.

There was, until quite recently, greater lexical diversity across the UK. For centuries, local lifestyles and speech changed very little. Despite a gradual erosion of dialect vocabulary over the course of the twentieth century, one still regularly hears local words and expressions, and Tyneside is a particularly fruitful hunting ground. Much of the local vocabulary is descended from Old English (Anglo-Saxon), but has changed or been replaced in other varieties of English further ...