Phonetic parallels between the close-mid vowels of Tyneside English: Are they internally or externally motivated?

Abstract

The distribution of variants of the face and goat vowels in Tyneside English (TE) is assessed with reference to the age, sex, and social class of 32 adult TE speakers. The effects of phonological context and speaking style are also examined. Patterns in the data are suggestive of dialect leveling, whereby localized speech variants become recessive and pronunciations typical of a wider geographical area are adopted. Within this broad pattern, however, there is evidence of parallelism between the vowels in terms of the relative proportions of their variants across speaker groups. It is suggested that pressure to maintain the symmetrical structure of the underlying phonological system is guiding this process. Labov's (1991, 1994) principles of chain shift are discussed in this connection. However, it is argued that the patterns in the data are more plausibly explained by considering the social significance of each variant instead of making reference to variants as socially neutral expressions of abstract phonological categories.

What makes acquired foreign accent syndrome foreign?

“…Such information is not always available for a particular dialect. However, Tyneside English has received greater focus over recent years (Docherty & Foulkes, 1999;Watt, 2000Watt, , 2002Watt & Milroy, 1999). These publications predominately concentrate on vowel quality.…”

Tyneside English

“…Because it is undergoing change (see Watt 2000), the system of vowel contrasts used in TE varies markedly between speakers, and so it is difficult to posit a single vowel system or set of phonemic contrasts for the variety. For example, it is perhaps misleading to state that the vowel of boat is [o…] in this accent, when in fact this is only the most frequent of several possible pronunciations of the vowel, some of which are markedly divergent from this quality and which would perhaps stand as better exemplars of the vowel in this variety than [o…] does because they are more localised.…”

Regional vocabulary leveling: The example of south‐eastern French

“…Pedersen (1996: 82) states that ‘we may accommodate for social approval, for opportunistic reasons (…) for communicative efficiency or because it is normative.’ According to Milroy (2002), language attitudes and ideologies should be included in sociolinguistic accounts of variation. More specifically, Watt (2000) argues that, in some cases, social and attitudinal factors may take precedence over internal factors in dialect leveling.…”

“…Among the numerous leveling forces at work in the case of French, three are of particular importance for the region under study: the spread of compulsory education, starting in the 1880s, which required that most teachers go to Paris for their certification; the development of means of transportation, including the railroad system; and the mass media. Education and the mass media have had a significant impact in denigrating regional languages and dialects: Blanchet (1999: 75) explains that ‘the national media (that is to say, Parisian ones) always diminish the importance of regional linguistic and cultural specificities or present them as quaint vestiges of a dead past.’Watt (2000: 73), citing Viereck (1968), points to the fact that in Britain the great influx of people from other regions, along with the influence of education and mass media ‘have in combination served to eradicate the use of localized speech forms, replacing them with forms more typical of the English of other parts of the country.’…”

“…Since Trudgill's (1986) work, studies on leveling have multiplied. Britain is probably the most studied country along with Norway (Watt 2000; Kerswill 1996, 2002, 2003; Dyer 2002; Torgesen and Kerswill 2004; among many others) but other countries have also been described: Denmark (Pedersen 1996), Demark and Sweden (Kristensen and Thelander 1984), Spain (Hernández‐Campoy 2003), the United States (Fitzmaurice 2000) and Canada (D’Arcy 2005). Recently, drawing on a large body of studies on the disappearance or resistance of regional characteristics (see the contributions in Blanchet, Breton and Shiffman 1999 among others), Armstrong (2002) and Boughton (2005) have explored leveling in France.…”