ANGUAGE

IN SOCIETY

ialec s in Co tact

GEl\: -RAL EDITOR:

Petcr Trudgill, Prof sso of Linguistic Science,

University of Reading
ADVSORY

EDITORS:

PETER TRUDGILL

RaJph Fasold, Professor of Linguisties,

Georgetown University
WilJiam Labov, Professor of Linguistics,
University cf Pennsylvania
Language and Social PsyehoJogy
Ediled by Howard Giles and Roben N St Clair
2 Language and Social Networks
Les/ey Mi/roy
3 The Ethnography of Communication
Mrie! Savi/le- Troike
4 Diseourse Analysis
Michael Stubbs
5 Introduction to SocioJinguisties
ume
Vol
1: The Sociolinguis ics of Soeiery
Ralph Faso/d
6 Introduetion to SoCioiinguistic
ume
Vol
1I; The Soeiolinguistics of Language
Ralph Fasold
7 The Language of Children and Adoleseents
The Acquisition of Cornmunicative Competcnce
Suzanne Romaine
8 Language, the Scxes and Society
Philip M Smilh
9 The Language of Advcrrising
Torben Vcstergaard and Kim Sc/roder
10 Dialects in Contaet
Peter Trudgil/
11 Pidgin and Creole Linguistics

Peter Mhl/ausler

BASIL BLACKWELL

 Pcrer

Trudgill

First published

1986
1986

Basil Blaekwell Ltd

108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 lJF, UK

ntents

Basil Blackwell Inc.

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Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Accommodation between Dialccts
2 Oialect Contact

British Library Cataloguing in Publica/ion Data

Trudgil!, Peter
Dialects in contacto
l. Dialeetology
2. Gramrnar,
I. Title
471'.2

3 Dialect Mixture and the Growth ofNew Dialects

Cornparative

and genera!

P201

ISBN ~631-12691---D
SB '~31-12733-X

f rences
Pbk

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publica/ion Data

Trudgill, Peter.
Dialects in eontaet.

..,

(Language in society; ID)

Bibliography:
p.
lncludes index.
1. English Language-Dialects.
2. English Language-Social
aspects.
3. Language in contact. 1. Title. Il. Series: Language in society (Oxford,
Oxfordshirc);
10.
PE 1711.D 1986427 85-30815
IS8
~31-12691-0
ISB ~3l-12733-X
(pbk.)

Typeset by Katcrprint Co. Ltd , Oxford

Printed in Great Britain byT.J. Press LId, Padstow

..

4 Koinization in Colonial English

ndex

VI

VlI

1
39
83

127
162

169

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time coming - too long, 1suspect, in the view
of thc publishers - and has been worked on in many different locations.
1 am particularly
grateful to colleagues and students who discussed
topics in the field of dialect contact with me at the Australian National
University,
the Univcrsity of IIlinois, Stanford University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Toronto , as well as at
the University
of Reading. 1 am also especially grateful to Philip
Carpenter,
J. K. Chambers,
Nikolas Coupland, Ralph Fasold, Jcan
Hannah,
John Harris, Richard Hudson, James Milroy, and Lesley
Milroy, who read earlier drafts of the book and gave invaluable advice,
only some of which fell on deaf ears. 1have also , J hope, oenefited from
discussions with and vital inforrnarion received from the following, to
whorn 1 also express my thanks: Ian Bild, William Downes, Janet
Fletcher, Tina Foxcroft, Elizabeth Gordon, Jan Hancock, John Holm,
Ernst Hkon Jahr, L. W. Lanharn, Tom Melchionne,
Helge Omdal,
Jarnes S. Ryan, Alison Shilling, Gary Underwood, Keith Walters, and
Jeffrey P. Williams.

..
J

..

1 would like to thank 'he following for permission to redraw and

reproduce figures: Cambridge University Press (l.4, 1.5, 1.6); Professor
J. K. Charnbers (1.7); Mouton de Gruyter (1.1, 1.2, 1.3). 1 am also
grateful to the folJowing for permission to redraw and reproduce maps:
Cambridge
Univr-rsity Press (3.15); Craom Helm Ud (2.9, 2.10);
Edward Arnold (4.4); Universiteitsforlaget,
Oslo, Norway (3.4).

Introduction

This book is concerned \Vith the subject of linguistic change. It is,

however, about only a very resiITc:ted set of all the possible types of
change that can occur in language. It is concerned, in fact, with those
changes that take lace durin or as a consequence of contacts between
closely related varieties of language. It deals wit 1 owan wny mutua y
;ntelbglble lnguistc vanehes may mftuence one another, as welI as with
the social and geographical spread o hnguistic forms frorn one dialect to
another. It also focuses on theway in which, in certain dialect mixture
situations, totally new dialects may be formed. These changes c1early
form only a fraction of the changes that can occur in human languages,
and 1 do not wish to overstate the importance of the role of dialect
contact in inducing change. Nevertheless,
it emerges that a very great
deal of information is already available in the literature on particular
instances of contact-induced
change , and an extensive study of these
works does suggest very strongly that dialect contact i5, in its way, as
important aD area for investi ation as l;mguage contact.
e wor IS very much a study in SOCIO mguisncs. This is especially so
in that it argues for the crucial importance,
in the stud of dialect
contact, of human behaviour in face-to- ace interaction. Unlike many
mteractlOaal
sociolinguistic studies, however, it concentrates,
in the
manner of Labovian-style
secular linguistics, on language form rather
than on matters of greater concern to social scientists .
What 1 have tried to do in this book is to examine a numbcr of tne
particular instances of dialect contact described in the literature, both in
my own work and that of others, and draw fram them, as far as possible ,
general conclusions about !he forces that appear to be at work durin
~
processes involved in dlalect contact. My method has bcen to
attempt explanations - usual!y very ad hoc - for developments that have
occurred in one situation, and then to see if these can be generalized to
other similar situations.
The ultimate goal of work of this type wilI be !O 1='1'-"'I\..1 \..Aa\..11% nuu

VIII

lNTRODUcnO

1
Accommodation between Dialects
~U061LL ) p. (19~6) DJa/ects
,~\JCl

Ir')

YorK. I Easll .BlacklNell

corcta.c

A~LOMMODATION

BET\VEEN DIALEcrs

ACCOMMODATIO:-l

very.well that, say '. ~merican English sidewalk corresponds to English

English pavement, u ISperfectly possible that the American will eventually s~art saying pavement, and/or that the English person will begin ~o
say sidewalk - even though there is no strictly communicative point 10
their doing so.
EX<l why this.kind of thing..should happenis not immediatelv clea~.
th~t seeks to ex lain these a arent] r unnecessary lingui~
m?odicatlOns IS.that developed by the sociai I2svchologlst Howar
IleL
Glles (1973) wntes ot conversational
situations thai- 'if the senderj
CIyaCriC situaton wishes to gan the receiver's approval, thcn he may
aJapt hls accent patlerns fowards that of ths persono re. reduce pro:
nunclanon
dlsslml]arties.'
Giles labels tRiS process--accent
conver!j.:.
ence' , and points out that the reverse process. 'accent divergenc~, may
take place instead if, for example, spc:1kers wish to dissociate themseives from or show disapproval 01 otners. Thcse processes o convergence and di\'ergence can clearly al so takc ~e
at the grammatical and
lexic:lI levels (though see Coupland, 1984). and are prcsumably part of a
wider pattern of behaviour modification under the influence of and in
response to others. Scholars in fields such as communications
and
psychology have, indeed, investigated this type of convergence/divergence behaviour with reference to many other non-linguistic factors such
as body movernent, proximity, speech rhythm, speech speed, silence,
gaze direction, eye contact, and so on. (A critical summary is provided
by Gatewood
and Rosenwein,
1981 in their papcr on interactional
synchrony. See also Cappella, 1981; Dittrnan, 1962, 1972; Feldstcin,
1972; Jaffe and Fe!dstein, 1970; Kendon, 1970; and Patterson, 1973,
1983.) There is in this literature a strong sense that convergence of this
type is a universal characteristic of human behaviourIn any case, behaviaural convergence is obv' usly a topic of ~tural
and central interest for social psycholo ists and lan ua e rovides them
\vit a very useful site for the study of this phenomcnon.
Gi!es and his
C-workers, as social psychologists of Ianguage , have cleveloped, using
la guaoe as data the theory alluded to above and labelled by thern
accom~~
theo~ This theorLfs>cuses ?n spe~ch, and dis~uss~
ane attemp s~
ain wh[ speakers modtfy thcir lar~u~e
I!!.,the
jfresence of others in the way and to the extent .that they do. !~o
examines toe effects and CQsts of this type of modification.
... "iles's initial (1973) paper looks mainly at convergence and divergence in short-terrn contacts and in terms of adjustments up and down
the social dimension from high-prestige
to low-prestige accents. In
situations where speakers with accents of different social status come
into contact, the direction in which accommotlation
will take place is
often problematical,
and Giles and others have devoted considerable

..

attention to exploring what factors are involvcd in determining who

accornmodate-, to who; why speakers do it; to what cxtent they do it;
and how it is perceived by others (see Giles et al., 1973).
From the perspective of the linguist, however, it is clear that ~
modation can a(so take place between acccnts that differ re io a
rather than socJally, and t at It can occur in the long term as well as in
the short termo In lona-term ontacfs, whO accommodates 10 ,ho is le;S:
~matical,
;ince, in most cases where this phenomenon
can be
obselved, we are dealing with contact bctween speakers of different
regional varieties, and with reglOnally mobile individuals or minority
groups who accommodate,
in thc long term, 10 a non-mobile ma 'orit
t at t ev ave come to (ve amon st.
e pro em is then one of
etermining how spea ers accommodate,
the extcnt to which they
accommodate,
and why sorne stuations and so me individuals produce
more - or different types of - accommodation
than others, Long-term
accornmodation
is therefore of I
.
- c; or the social s e
5ut of considef3.bie interest to the Iinguis.L

OneJJJeo:

BETWEEN DIALEcrS

Short-term accommodation
Work in accommodation theory on short-term accommodaton
between
speakers wlth socially different accents has roved to be most in si htful
!rom a socIOpsychologlca
perspectl~.
It has been found, for example ,
that hnglllstlc convergence In a socially downward directon can lead, in
some cultures, to speakers being evaluated as kinder and more trustworthy than if thcy do not converge (Giles and Smith, 1979); and that, if
a person anticipates meeting another 'socially significant' person in the
immediate future , then the latter's speech (if, say, overheard) is perceived by the former as being more like the former's own speech than
wouid otherwise be the case. Many other exarnples could be given.
Frorn a linguistic point of view, however, work on accommodation
theory has until recently been less informative. This is not, of course,
intended as a criticism of the work of social psychologists, since their
objectives were obviously very different. However, it is apparent that
many more insights, in addition to those already obtained, could be
gained by more linguisticaJly sophisticated
analyses of the accornmodation process itself than those initially employed by Giles and his
associates. In the wor~f
thes~_~9.~i~l2.svc~ologists,
for instance,jhe
?egre~ ~f li.n~~o~.!!!odation
indulged in by speakers is measu!}!d
ImpresslomstlcaE>'. Typically, tape recordings of speakers are played to
groups of hngUlstically nave subjects who are asked to assess them in
terms of accent 'broadness'.
No actual linguistic analysis is involved at

ACCOMMODATION

ACCOMMODATrON

BETWEEN DIALECTS

all. It is apparent,
however, that dctailed linguistic analyses of ihe
accommodation
process would bring with thern a number o bencfits for
both social psychologists and, especially, linguists. For example thcy
would permit, amongst other things:

(1) An exact, rather than impressionistic,

9..uantification of degrce ~

IlETWEEN

D1ALECTS

clients grouped by social class. In faet, CoupJand writes that the percentages of variants in her s eech 'prove to b..: almost as good an indicator of
the socioeconomic
class and e uca iona
ac groun of her interlocutor5 as the percentagl: of those forms in the ..8r0....!:!EL0fcl~~ts' own
speech'. Indeed, Coupland's study as a whole is an exccllent example o
the benefits of quantification in the study of accommodation.

Jinguistic accommodationj

(2) An examination
changcd

tn1s;

(3) A study
whethcr
place in
different

of which linguistic features are and are not

during accommodation,
togcther with cxplanations for
'~
..

of whether accommodation
is a uniform proces~ or
ljng~y
dIfferent types of accommodation
take
the case of different speakers, different situations, or
relationships;

",.
1:

"g'"'
~
'"
~

(4) A study of .the limits of acccmmodaton,

what are the Iinguistic
(as opposed to social and psychological) constraints 011accornmodation, and is it possibJe to accommodate totally to a new variety?

...
1

n n

80~

88.7

68.9

We begin by dealing with the first of these benefits - that which arises
from exact rather than impressionistic quantification. We bear in mind
in so doing that it has been one of the achievements of soeiolinguistics to
demonstrate
that the quantification of !inguistic phenorncna can reveal
hitherto unsuspected findings of considerable importance. Given that
this is so, we must expect that exact quantification
will provide an
analysis of the accommodation
process more r~ing.J.han
t1itoIthe
social psychologist.
We can illustrate this particularly clearly by examining those situations in which social psychologists have been most interested, namely
those involving short-terrn' accommodation
bctwcen speakers with
socially different accents. For example, Coupbnd (1984), in a pioneering study of t'
'. .
odat'on of an assistant in a travel
agency to customers,
in Cardiff, Wales, investigates
three
ardif{
E"nglish variables. These are:

Figures 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3, frorn Coupland (1984), show a very c1ear
correlation between the assistant's pronunciation and those of 51 of her

60

'O

40

353 :'~31 fl'

~
~

20r--

16.7

of accornmodation

(1) Ihl vs. 0 in house, hammer etc.

(2) [t] vs. [9] in better, city etc.
(3) IUI vs. Inl in walking ; waiting etc.

..

assistant

~
[

Quantification

c1ients

lOO~

O1-.1.1 ..to:::::J......-L.;-_
1 1 1
II

ILL.I

1
1 1 1
..I...-.--:';M

lIIN
occupational

IlIM

lllilJ
IV

c1ass

Figure 1.1 Variable (h): comparison of clients' use and assistant's use; c\ients
by occupation (fram Coupland, 1984)
A further example of this type of quantification is the following. In his
initial paper, Giles (1973) argues that the process of accommodation
may lead to circularity in the researeh of sociolinguists. In a comment on
Labov's work in New York City (Labov, 1966), Giles suggests that it
may be the case that when they are intervewing informants, sociolinguists expect the pronunciation
of their inforrnants to correlate with,
say, social class. The interviewing linguist therefore accomrnodates
in
anticipation,
as it were, and speaks wlth a 'broader',
more Tegil
accent when interviewing
lower-class speakers than when recording
higher-class inforrnants.
The informants in the ace-to-face situation
tnen ac.commodat~ !Q. the intervICwer, producing the sort of language
\Vas expected and fu!filling the sociolinguist's erophecy. The results
Prsome
sociolinguistic surveys may terefore, aecording to Giles, be
somewhat suspect.
~sing
SGciGlinguists WGuld, J believe, wjsh to reject thi
hx.pothesls rather strongly. Certainly my own feeling concerning my

tiat

ACCOMMODATION
ACCOMMODATION

BETWEEN

001clients

60-

n n

so.O

~'

n.1
20fI~O

IL1~~L_-L~L-~Ll~-LJ

__ ~~

l!

Figure 1.2

,y \lccupation

c:ee

801-

;;

1Il N
occupational

Variable (t): comparison

(from Coupland, 1984)

1001-

>

clients

IS'::

IV

and assistant's

use; clients

n n

8~8

7~0

~.7

73~

68)2.
601-

55.7

'Al

401-

o
<>
0.0

c:'"
~

fi
OL-~o~~I~-L

__ ~-L
Ir

F:::ure 1.3
h .x'cupation

__ ~~

1lI N
occupational

Variable (ng): comparison

(from Coupland, 1984)

III M
c1ass

__

~~~Ll~
IV

of clients' use and assistan"s

use' clients
,

~':r\ y of the En..&lih spo~en in Norwich (Trudgill. 1974) W

h t
ao, mmodation did indeed take lac
...
oda'ed lir ~
. 1 to my 111 ormants rat h er t h an 10
. duci
l
~UIStI;.i_ V
ucmg t h ern to accomm
.
_
o d ate to

me. As a native of the are a 1 was investigating, moreover, 1 had done

easily and in a relatively automatic, subeonscious way. (In carrying
out linguistic interviews, as is well known, one wants as much a possible
to reduce the effeet o the 'obse er's paradox' (Labov, 1972) and to put
informants at t ir ease. One has to behave, dress and speak in the
manner most likely to produce rcJaxed conversation,
and linguistic
convergence is part o this overaJl pattern.) 1 h d, however, no direct
evidence to support ti is feeling, or o refute
iles's hypothesis. What
as required was a quantitative study o the accornmodation
process as
it had occurred during rny sociolinguistic interviews.
To investigate t e ex
ccommodation occurred, 1 therefore be an an anal sis of m own s eee a an m erviewer OiliTry
orwieh tape recordings. Linguistic self-an Iysis by intervi~ers
has
been carried out before, notably by Jahr (1979) in a paper in Norwegian
entitled 'Er det snn jeg snakker?' (Do 1 speak like that?) (see also
Jahr, 1978). Jahr analysed his use of a number o syntactie variables
as an ir terviewer for Talmalsundersfjkelsen
(investigation
of spoken
language: abbreviated TAUS) i Oslo, He concludes that his syntax was
to a certain extent influenced by the sex of his informants and also by

(t)-l
(t)-2
(t)-3

20~

<J
o.

their svntax.
Analysis of my own recordings revealed that aecommodation
of a
rather dramatic phonological
sort did indeed take piace. Fig re 1.4
shows the seo res for the variable
that were obtained by ten of the
informants in the Norwic study. (These inforrnants have been selected
from the total sample of 60 for the purpose of this study to give (t) seo res
across the whole range.) Figure 1.4 also shows the (t) scores obtained by
mysel in interviews with eaeh of these informants.
The variable (t) refers to the pronunciation of intervocalic and wordnal /tI as in better and bet and has three variants:

I~O

assistant

~
~
.5:!

..,

III M
c1ass

of clients'

"2
]'"

DIALECTS

thTs

assistant

2Q.O

OL-~O~

BETWEEN

DIALECTS

---=--=-

[t]

= [1]]
= [2]

Index scores are caJculated in such a way that they range frorn 0,
indicating consistent use of the prestige pronunciation
[t], to 200 for
consistent use of the low-prestige glottal-stop variant.
Figure 1.4 dcmonstrates a remarkable degree of eoincidence between
my seo res and those of my informants. Clearly, accommodation
has
taken place. lt is apparent, however, that the c10se approximation of the..
!Wo lines as they slope 3.cross the graph has been produced by illi
~ccommodating to my informants [ather than vice versa. For two of the
informants, Mrs W. and Mrs B., my scores are the lower, i.e. 1 did not
use so many glottal stops as th y did. These are the two informants who

ACCOM.1DATION

BETWEE.

ACCOMMODATION

LECfS

f degree

of

BETWEEN DI

IALECTS

never

have been revealed

by impressionistic

measures

accomrnodation. Figure 1.5 again compares my pronunciation

of my Norwich informant , and relates to the variable (a:}z which deals

with the degree of fronting or backing of the vowel of the lexical set of
part, path, ha , banana, etc. There are three variants:

140
1:0

0--

100
80

ith that

inforrnant

(1)

o__
o

00

40

(a:)-l

(a:)-2
(.. )-3

--o
0

Indices are calculated in such a way that consistent

pronunciation
(RP) back vowel
:1 o

20

OL-~~~~~~~

__ ~ __ ~ __ ~ __ ~ __ ~

Mrs

Mrs

Mr

Mrs

Mrs

Mrs

Mrs

W1

W2

Mr

Mrs

= [o:]
= [Q:-9:]
= [a.]

use of the received

low- resti e front

vanant

Mrs

L
200~o

Figure 1.4 Variable (t): seleeted seores in author's Norwieh study (Trudgill,

__

180

1974)

/0_0

160

were lowest on the social scale and who used m st glottal stops. For the
other eight info mants, the gr ph shows that 1 used more g ottal-stop
realizations of Itl than they did, including those informants with the
highest social class indices and lowest (t) scores. It is probable, 1 believe,
that if 1 had been modifying my pronunciation in such a way a to induce
rny informants to produce pronunciations
that would correlate with
social class in the anticipated direction, then the cross-over pattern on
the graph would have be en reversed: 1would have had high 'r (t) indices
th n the working-class speakers, and lo ver scores than the middle-class
speakers.
The fact that 1 have higher scores than most of the informants must be

ascribed
to the factor of age. Glottal-stop realizations of (t) are increas.;.
ing in freq' ency, nd younger speak rs typically scorc hig Jer than older
.3?eakers, otter thmgs being equal. At the time of the mterview J wa-s
aged 24, and the ten inforrnants shown here were a!l older than that.
~t
tbe influence of the sex oLtbe interlocutor
ootcd..b.y
Jahr (1979) is probably at \Vor
~r?m the graph it !?O' s a if 1 may'
well have een usmo a hi her roportlOn of low-prestl e lottal-s
realizations of Itl when talkin 10 the two men t an to the ei I1t
This is consonant with the findings of Shopen (ms. who has found that
in Australian English at least, both men and women use more higher~
status pronunciations,
on average, when talking to wornen than when
talking to men.
\Ve can argue , then, that linguistic analysis is a use fui tool in any
examination of the processes in volved in linguistic accommodation.
This
is clearly demonstrated
in figure 1.5, which presents a finding that would

e.

l'

inforrnants

140
120
100

8\

(a:)

.--.

_._.~o"-....

o_o

o-

author

60r

~~L__-L__~
Mrs

Wl

Mrs
B

~oL"-....
__ ~ __ ~.

__~

L-__~ __~ __

Mrs

Mrs

Mrs

Mrs
J

Mr

Mrs

Mrs

Figure 1.5 Variable (a:): seleeted scores in author's Nor 'ich study (Trudgill,
1974)

Figure 1.5 shows that, although as we have just se en l.did accommo- ...
dat to my informa~'n
the ~ase of (t), 1di
commodate to them
~y
pronunciation
of (a:) (or if did, any accommo ation was very
slight).
Without a detailed linguistic analysis, a finding of this sort vould not
have been possible. If no linguistic analysis had been carried out, we
would not have known for certain that, during accommodation
between
accents that differ at a number of points, some features are modified and
some are noto Now that this fact has been attested, the very interesting
question arises: why are some as ects of ronunciation
altered..Qjlc
the accommodatlOn process while others remain unchanged?, If we are
a6Ie to make some progress towards answering this question, we may

10

ACCOMMODATION

BETWEEN

ACCO

DIALECTS

also gain some insights into the mechanisms that come into p.lay in
dialect contact situations of the sort that we shall be observmg in
subsequent chapters.

Explanations

for modification

IMODATION

BETWEEN

DIALECTS

(though see Bell, 1984). The same explanation obviously works for the
accommodation
process: in contact with speakers of other lang age
vari ties, speakers modify those features of their own varieties of which
they are most aware.
This leads, of course, to a further question: wh exactl are s eakers
more aware of sorne variables than ot ers? Our earlier Norwich
research (see Chambers
and Trudgill, 1980 sugge ted that in the
absence of cer ain factars, at least one of which must be pre$eG
linguistic variable wIiI normally be an mdlcator. In fhe case oi Norwlch,
neast,
the factors which !ead to greater awareness and thus to an
indicator becoming a mark:E are the following:
(1) Greater awareness attaches to forms which are o ertly stig atized in a articular communit . Very often, this oyen stigmatization is beca use there is a high-status variant of the stigmatized
form and this high-status variant talli s with the orthography
while the stigmatized variant does not. Examples of this in orwich English include 0 vs. Ihl in hammer etc., and Inl vs. IUI in
walking etc.
(2) Greater
awareness also attaches to forms tha1 are currentl
involve m mguistic change.
(3) S ea ers -e_also more aware of variables whose var" t are
,2honetically radically different.
(4) Increased awareness is al so attached to variab
at are involv
in e maintenance of honological contrasts. Thus, in Norwich,
items from the lexical set of huge, cue, music, view, tune may be
pronounced
with either lu:1 or Iju:/. The latter pronunciation
implies a contrast in minima! pairs such as Hugh:who, dew:do,
feud:food etc. The former, on the other hand, involves a loss of
this contrast.

formal
specch

reading
passage

Figure 1.6

Variable

(a:): by c1ass and style (fr

'1

casual
specch

Trudgill, 1974)

But w y not? Simply to point out that (a:) is an indicator and (t) a
marker is not to explain why this is so, or how this distinction arises in
the first place. Labov suggests in fact that~arkers
are relatively high in
a s eaker' consciousncss
as comparr>d to mdlcators. (Variables which
. ave an especiaJly high level of awarenes
associated with them are
called stereorypes.) The high leve! of a 'areness associated with'a ma '.QL
leads speakers to modify their pronunclahon
ol It m sltuations (such as
10rmal occasions) where they are monitoring t eir speech m~t c10sely

..

Long-term

accornrnodation

\Ve are thus able to argue that, <1ltting accommodation

to speakers who
are members of the same immediate speech community,
speake~
i'Odil'Y their pronunclatlOll of Iingulsdc vanables that are marke...
wlthm the commumty.
1his 15 5ecause oi {he sal ence which attaches to
marker~ and indeed turns variables in o arkers in the first place. Thi;
salience is, in turn, due to factors such a tose we have just outlined to do with stigmatization,
linguistic chan:;, phonetic distance, and
phonological contras:.,(see Timber ake, 1977; Kerswill, 1985) .

12

ACCOMMODATiON

ACCOMMODATION

BETWEEN DlALECTS

The next qucstion we would like to ask concerns the xtent to which
speakers accommodating
to othcr speakers from otj",'speech communines wIlI ot!ave in li,e saJile way (see Knops, 1981). ls! the case tfiat,
~commodabng
to vanefies that are regionally different from th ir
own, speakers wil! also modif fcalures that for them are in some wa
salient ( t IS not immediately clear tnat t .ey wi 1, since accommodatioD
beyond the speech community will often be a rather mrrerent
. rom ac ommodation within it. Accommodation
\.ithin the s eech cornmumty, as 111my Nor lch interviews, inyolve a tering the frequency of
usage o partIcular yanants ot yana51es oyer which the speaker airead
as control. Accommo atIon
eyon t e speech communit
on thTJ~ther hand, may we 111volve the adoption of tata y n w fea ures '?!.

pronuncianon.

We move now to nn investigaton of this issue, with particular reference to the question of whether It IS salient linguistic fea mes that are
modified in all types of accent convergence. We do this by examining a
not uncommon type of long-term, ex ra-speech cornmunity accornmodation in the English-speaking
world, namelj accommodation
by
speakers of English English to American English as a result of resldence
in the United States.
In carrying out this investigation,
we are naturally cone rned to
establish exactly what are the features of American English that are
most prominent
in t e consciousness
of English English speakers,
for whatever reason. This, in faet, is a rela ively simple task as far
as phonology
is concerned.
Obviously the mas salient features of
American
En lish ronunciation,
for trlglish pea le, are precisely
tose \'\'1 ich are reproduce
during tmtatlOll.
ost speakers o
ng ish
English do not of course spend much of their lives imitating
merican
English, but there are a number of speech events where this does
happen, such as the tellina of jokes invoh'in
Americans,
and the
p!aying of American roles by ng IS 1 actors Pcrhaps, however, the
most obvious site for thestudy of the imitaton of American English by
English English speakers lies in the linguistic behaviour of Britsh pOD
singer.sIt can readily be noted that singers of this type of mus'c observe to a
remarkable
extent a number of tules concerning the way in which the
\vords of pop and rock songs should be pronounc~.
The strength with
which these rules apply vares considerably from singer to singer and
time to time. but it is clear that most such singers employ different
accents when singing than when speaking. lt is also clear thar, whatever
the s~eaking a~cent, the si~g~ng accent is one whi
.s influenced by
Amencan
English pronuncianon.
The process that 1 l. volved in this
phenomenon,
moreover
.
iously imitation and not accommodation.

..

BETWEEN DlALECTS

13

In modifying their accents as they do, singers render their pronunciation

less like that of their British audiences, not more.
Analysis of the pronunciation
used by British pop singers, from tht;.
late 1950s to the late 1970s shows that the followin
as ects of
merican English oronuncia ion are widespread, normal or even com~lsory
(see Trudgill, 198':
(1) Word
such as life, my tend to be ~un with. a m~nophthongal vowel of the t pe [a-], alth ugh III spoken English English
they are most usually pronounced with a diphthong of the type
[al-m-Al]
etc.
(2) Words such as girl, more tend to be pronounced with an Irl even
by those Engli h English speakers (the majority) who do not have
non-prevocalic Irl in their speech.
(3) Words such as body, top may be pronounced with unrounded [o]
instead of the more usual British [o].
(4) lt is not usual to pronounce words such as dance, last with the la:1
that is normal in the speeeh of south-eastern
England. lnstead
they are pronounced
with the lrel of cal (as in the north of
England, although the pronunciation
is usually [re] rather than
northern [aJ). In addition, words such as hal] and can't, which are
pronounced
with la:1 by most northern English speakers, must
also be pronounced with lre/. Thus:
cat
south-eastern
England
northern England
pop-song style

=
lrel =
lrel =

te!

[re]
[a]
[re]

dance

half

la:1
lrel
lrel

la:1
la:1
lrel

(5) The pronunciation

of intervocalic Itl in words like better as [t] or
[2], which are the pronunciations most often used by most British
speakers, is generally not used. In pop singing, a pronunciation of
the type [r-Q] - a voiced alveolar flap - has to be employed.
Q!hcr features of American English pronunciation do occur but th~
are less freguent and less wide pread. Clear y, the above fiye features.
he
most common in British pop-singng style because it is the~
pronunciations
which are most saliently characteristic
of American
accents for the sin ers and, presumabl , other British
or at least
n Iish
eo ie. As to w
ritish ingers should want to imitate
Americans, see Trudgill, 1983, chapter 8.)
Why these features should be sa ient in this way is less easy to.
establish, but an exarnination of the rcasons suggested above for the
growth of markers in Norwich English does give us some clues. The
factor that has to do with ongoing linguistic change is not likely to be of

14

ACCOMMODATION

ACCO IMODATION BETWEEN DIALECTS

BETWEEN DIALECTS

relevance. But the other factors - those that have to do wi h phoneti .

distance, stigmatization,
and phonological contrast - do provide sume
pointers. In particular, we can note a sirnilarity between the last two: the
variable
affected by stigmatization
often involve, as the comme1
above abo.'t orthography
suggest , phoflological rather than phonetic
variation and alternation or contrast between surface phonemes. Tne
(g) variable, for instance, involves alternation between one phon !1 e
IUI and anot er In/; whilc (h) involves alterna ion bet veen a phon
e
/hJ and i s absence, just as the Hughiwho
(yu) variable involves alternation between zero and Ij/. Note then that the salience of r.on-prevocalic
Irl in American English for English listeners may have to do with the
fact that this dif erence between the two varietic al o concerns~ence of a phoneme versus its absence, whil the salicnce of l<el in dance
al so involves alternaton betwecn two phoncmes l<el;:md la:1 rathcr than
a purely phonetic differcnce. The other three features are less easv to
account for, but notice that American 101 in hot does sound like En~lish
la:1 in hcart (see be ow), and that Itl = [9] involves loss of phone mic
contras! between Itl and Id/. The phonetic distance bet wecn [a-] and, sa y,
[DI] is rather striking and may aiso be of relevance hcre (see point 3
below).
We may al so note, as further evidence for the importance of phonemic alternation
in leading to salience in cross-dialectal irnitation. that
there are a number of other American features that could ha 'e been
~alient but do not seem to be. Analysing linguists, for instance , might
contrast the longer, cIoser realizations of l<el common in rnanv varieties
of American English, as in bad [ba-?d], with the more open, shorter
variants found in England, as in [bed]. Irnitation by pop singers, however, typical!y does not involve this feature which is, from an English
English point of view, purely phonetic.
.If we then accept imitation as a good guide to the degree of salience of
A~,1
pronunclatlon
features for English listeners, we can now
move n o an examination of whether it is in f~ these salient features
w lC are a so, as \Ve might want to predict. accommodated
to when
Eng IS
nglish s eakers come into contact wlth Amencans.
e ata on which this examination
is based is perhaps a little
un usual. There are two main data sets. The first consists of notes made
by myself on the segi. -cntal phonology of native speakers of English
English who have be en or are living in the United States. These no es
are bascd on informal observations
of speakers mostly engaged in
academic occupations,
and were often made, 1 confess, at conferences
and during lectures. There are, of course, dangers to be aware of .
working with data fror i such a restricted social base but the
tes
.
.
'
no es
are numerous enough - and contain sufficient observations on. non-

15

academics - for me to be ieve that this is not a serious cause for concern.
The second set consists of observation
of what happened to my own
speech when, as a native speaker of English English, 1 spent ayear
living in the USA. There are of course obvious worries about informal,
untaped investications of one's own spee~h. 1 at empted, howe~er., to
ensure that the qata was as 'clean' as possible by nonng pronuncianons
employed
y me in a relatively unconsci?us ~ay and that .1, as it w~~e,
caught myself saying unawares. ~Ma~y linguists are, 1 ?ehevc, fa.m liar
with the phenomenon
of realizing tnat they
ave said something of
linguistic interest only after they h ve said it.) Lingui stics colleagues
were also kind enough, frorn time to time, to point out Arnericanisrns in
my speech.
.'
My notes show that i1 is indeed the features smgled out by PO? smgers
_ ~d for the most part no other features - that are modIfied during
acco11'modation. A comparison of imitation by pop singers with accommodation by expatriates, as far as the fi le main features are COIcerned,
sho

NS

the foll wing:

(1) lai/: [al] > [a] as in life. This feature o British pop-singing style
is not in imitation of Americans as a whole, but rather of Southerners
and/or Black.
Manv American Blac s have monophthongal
realizations of /ail. This pronunciation is also very widespread in the speech of
Whi es in the American South, In so me areas, such as parts of Virginia,
it occurs before voiced consonants or word-finally only, while in other
are as of the South it is found in al! environments.)
Inde d, m ny
American sinzers
who have a di hthonzal
of lail in their
~
~ pronunciatior
speech also adopt the monophthong when singing, in imitation o: Blacks
and/or South rners. During mv time in the USA 1 was not in the South
or in close contact with Blacks or Southerners.
It is therefore n.Q!
surprisi '5 that 1, like most other Eng ish visitors to America, did fill,t
acquire this reature. Nor did an)' of my othe; nf rmants.

p'

(2) Ir/: 0 > Ir/le

as in cart. During my stay in the USA there we~
no signs at al! of any acquisition of non-prevocalic Ir/;, 1 did occasionally
pronounce Ir/ in this position, but this was done deliberately and consciously to avoid confusion between, say, 130b and Barb, rny English
pronunciation
of the latter often being taken by Amcricans as the
former. My notes in fact suggest that the vast majority of non-rhotic
adult English English s eakers in the
A do not ac uire this feature
unti t ey ave een in America for a considerable period (say ten ycars
Or so), if at all. Those that do acquire it certainly acquire other
American English features first. and acquire it, too, in an inconsistent
and/or lexically conditioned andJor not entirely accurate manner (se e
chapter 2). One of my inforrnants, resident in the USA for ten years,

16

ACCOM. OOA TIO

as consistent 10 pronouncing Irl only in the vords [or, where, here, and
are, and with a couplc of very rare exception
p nounced non-prevocalic Ir/ nowhere else, not even in aren 't.
It seems then, that Irl, though apparently salient, is not readil
accommodated
to.
s
.
,. othcsis inc
t? The
answer appcars to 'be that, while salience (as indicated by imitatio ) is
indeed crucial, as we have argu d, it is not the whole story. Salient
featmes \ViII be accommodated
to unless o her factors inter ene to
iav. inhibit or even prevent accommodation.
n IS particular case
the i
actor wou
ear o e a
onotactic constraint, Ionrhotic English English accents, obviously, have a p onotactic rule which
permits Irl to occur only before a vowei, and prevents its ocurrenc
preconsonantally
and pre-pau ally.
Now there is plenty of evidence available to indicat that phonotactic
constraints of thi type are very strong, and e use e nsiderable difficulty
in foreign language learning. Broselow (1984), for inst nce, argues that
in second-language
acquisition 'syllable structure re trictions are particulariy susceptible to transfer'.
and suggests the following syll ble
structure transfer hypothesis:
When the target
permittcd in the
invol e altering
ted in the native

ACCOMMODATION BETWEE'

BETWEE~ DIALEas

language permits syliable structures which are no!

native language, 1 arners : ill make errors which
these structures to those which wou!d be perrnitlanguage.

Thus, English speakers who have no troublc at a1l pronouncing l J 1:1

sing e c. have considerable difficulty \ ith word-initial [1J] in. say, Burmese, and con -ert forms such as Nkomo [rjkomo] found in Africin
la guages to forms such as [onkoumou] that conform to English ptterns.
There seems to be no reason at all why thesc difficulties should :.".1
also apply to second-dialect acquisi io and to the eccommodacoa
process. 1 can certainl
a test that if 1 \ ant to ronounce sa
ar. :lS
Ipartl I find it ver hard to do so in t e ow of con" rsation, and i: is
ort y 01 note that even those British pop singers who appear to re
trying hardest to imitate American singers ncverthcless rarely achie.e
an Irl- pronunciation
rate of higher than 50 per cent (see Trudgill, 19~':)
even though, one assumcs, thcy are usually performing songs that tz.ev
have rehcarscd ano sung many times before. We can clairn, theref :-;.
. tI at ~lthough non-prevocalic Irl is indeed a salient feature of Amen::w
~ngJs 1 ~or Eoglish peop e, the phanotactic constraint present in t!1!;;
non-~hotlc acccnt prevents them from accornmodating
to Am ri.::m
Enghs on thls partIcular feature.

lALECfS

17

(3) 10/: 101 > laJ. A& in there was no trace of any tendency 'n rny
spe cl1 to madify the pronunciatian
of hot, top etc. from [hot] to r ot],
This is more dif cult to explain, since the chang could be interpreted as
being a purely phon tic one invoIving no phonotactic constraints. It is
possibIe, however, that the answer to the question of why this modification was not made lies instead in the notion, wel! known to students of
dialectology, of homonymic clash, English English already has a vowel
of the low back unrounded [aJ type in the exical set of heart, park,
calm, half cte. It is true that this voweJ in my speech, approximately [a: J,
is not absolutely identical with the voweI many Americans have in hot,
top etc., approximately [q-~J. But it is close e ough to ea se confusion, as in the e se of my Barb being interpre ed as American English
Bob, mentioned above. Certainly, if I try to say hot i the Ame ican
manner, it feels to me as if I were saying heart. The wholesale adoption
of the Am rican vowel wouId thus have led to the Ioss of contrast
between pairs su has:
hot
PO!

cod

heart
part
card etc.

Just as the possibility of the loss of contrast can prevent the occurrence
of sound changes,
o apparently can it infiuence accommodation.
In
ot ier vords, it is precisely the same characteristics of laI a make it
salient, and th refore a candidate
for accommodation,
that delay
(although not prevent - mergers do occur!) its accommodation.
A
similar phenomenon
occurs in the Engli h of Belfast (J. MiIroy, personal communication),
where speak rs accommodating
upw rds do not
genera Jy change tei! [e:] to [el] in lane etc. because [el] already occurs as
a realization of al! in Une etc.
There are, however, other factors one should per aps considero For
instance, t
relationship
etween English English 101 and US Englis
10/ is not entirely straightforward.
In rr any varieties of U English ,
some words which in English English have 101 actually have 1::11rather
than 10/: lost, long, off etc. Other words which have 101 in English
English have IJ in US English: oj, what, was, etc. Successful accommodation would therefore be a somewhat complex process.
Secondly, Labov has suggested (personal communication)
that a
further inhibiting factor in my own case may be that [a] is al so a
conservative , rural, low- tatus pronunciation
i
orfolk, the Englis
county of which I am a native.
The rcst of my data indicates, in any case, that while Eng . h English
speakers d in fact accommo ate on thi feature more readily than they

18

ACCOMMODATION

BETWEEN

. still
. takes sorne considerable
do on Irl, it
begins.

...,!

..

ACCOMMODATlON

DlALEcrS

time be f ore a ccommodation

(4) la:1 < lrel in 4E.nce, last etc. The data indicates that this is a change
which English English speakers do make reasonably early on, if they are
going to accommodate
in the long term to US Eng1ish. Even speakers
from the north of England, moreover, can be perccived to acco-: rnodate on this feature. First, the vowel in words such as hal] and can't
changes from la:1 to lrel and, secondly, the phonetic realization of lrel
changes from [aJ to [Le-re], e.g. [Iast] > [la-st] last (southern English
English [Io:st]). In my own specch there was some trace of accornrnodation on this feature (see below), though much of it was at a relatively
conscious level and occurred only in certain situations.
This feature would seem to be a very obvious candidate for change
during accommodation,
since it involves a very simple modification.
English English speakers aiready have the vowel lrel in their inventory,
and it would therefore be a very simple matter to substitute this for la:1
and say /dans/ rather than Ida:ns/. Southern English English has
romance /roumzens/, so why 110t Idrensl? It has ant lrent/, so why not plant
/plsent/?
It is therefore not easy to explain the delay that occurs in the acquisition of this feature amongst those English English speakers who
accommodate
lo US English. Introspection,
however, suggests a sociopsychological explanation,
at least in my own case. Since this explanation stems from introspecrion, it mal' not be applicab!e in other cases,
although informal discussions have indicated that other people may
have the same experience. The explanation lies in the faet that the vowel
leel in this lexical set is toa salient an American feature. It is not ado
immediatel
because It sounds, and fee1s, toa American. The
e
IS .00 strof)3. (
y t IS is, it is har to say, but note again that
alfernation between phonemes is involved: see below.)
Other similar phenornena can be noted, even if they have not yet
been studied in any systematic way. In England, 'Northerners'
are
stereotyped
by 'Southerners'
as saying butter etc. as /buta/ rather than
IbAt'J/, and as saying dance Id<ensl rather than Ida:ns/. 'Southerners',
on
the other hand, are stereotyped by 'Northerners'
as saying Ida:nsl rather
than Idrens/, while the ~ronuneiation of butter appears to be of relatively
little significance and is rarely commented on. It is therefore interesting
to note that Northerners
moving to the South and aceommodating
to
Southern speeeh usually modify butter /buto/ to Ib/\t;:,1 or at least t
/boto/, but mueh less rarely modify /dams/ to Ida:ns/. Many Northerners,
it seems, would rather drop dead than say Ida:ns/: the stereotype that
this is a Southern form is again toa strong.

BETWEEN

DlALEcrS

19

The argument given above for suggesting that the modification of la:1
to te! (and therefore also vice versa) should be an easy one to make
because of the prior existence of the required phoneme in the system,
may in fact be precisely the explanation for why these changes are not
made. If differences between two aceents involve simply the incidence of
a particular phoneme in a given lexical set, then that difference wil! be
very highly salient - and maybe too salient - since speakers are conditioned to tune in to features that are phonemic in their own variety.
English English speakers are highly aware of US English lrel in dance
beca use they themselves have leel in romance. Southern Eng!ish English
speakers are highly aware that Northern English English speakers say
butter Ibutdl because they themselves
have lul in Iput/. Northern
speakers are highly aware that Southern speakers say /da.ns/. because
they themselves have la:1 in ealm, hal], car, banana ete. On the other
hand, they are not so aware of the Southern butter Ib/\!'JI pronuneiation
sinee they have no such vowel as IN.
(5) It/: [tJ > [9L My notes indieate that this is a feature which is
accommodated to very early on by many spcakers of English English in
North America. It is also a modification
that took place relative.!y
rapidly in my own speeeh - not consistently,
but to a considerable
extent. This is not difficult to aceount for, especially since the inhibiting
factors we have discussed in (2)-(4) above appear not to be present.
First, the cha!1ge is a purely phonetic one involving no phonological
eomplication~. Intervocalic Itl simply becomes realized as [9J. Secondly,
no homonymic clash is involved. For example, in my own speech latter
and ladder rernained distinct as [Ireg;:,]and [leed;:,]. (This, of course, is not
what happens in many genuine American aceents, where the contrast
between Itl and Idl is neutralized intervocalically,
both bei.rg realized as
[9]: see above.) Thirdly, the flap [9J is actually already available in my
native accent. (lt is al so common in London varieties of English, as a
more formal alternative to [2] for intervocalic It/, and is widespread in
south-western and Welsh (see above) varieties, especially rural dialects,
as the most usual realization of this consonant.) In many East Anglian
varieties, there is a phonotactic constrain: (which does not occur in, for
example, London English) whereby a glottal stop may not oceur both
before and after an unstressed III or 1;:,/. Thus, while gel is [gE2] and ir is
[ltj, and get him is [gE?m-gE?:Jm], get ir cannot be *[gE?!?J. In cases
such as these the pronunci+ on has to be [gt:<;!!?J(or the more formal
[gttI2-gEtIt]). The fact that tne phone is rcasonably widespread already
in some varieties of English English has the consequence that it is not
too strongly stereotyped as being American. The fact that it is already
available in my own speech in intervocalic position meant that there was

20

ACCOMMODATION

ACCOMMODATION BETWEEN D1ALECTS

BETWEEN D1ALEC.TS

no difficulty in my extending it to al! intervocalic positions. Fin~lIy, it is

a1so worth noting that the pron -nciation o: intervocalic Itl 111 many
British English accents - iudecd i.icrcasia :'. in al! acccnts except those
of tne north-west, the west midlands, the,~ '..' -west and most of W~les,
and high-status
accents everywhere
_ ,.> become problem,aheal.
s
Sp~akers can either select the variant [t; . 1'::11 is sociai.ly ~arkc~
being careful, formal, posh, upper class '- r", vi [?], which IS socially
marked as being careless, informal, rough, lo-ver c1ass etc. The use o
the flap [9] is a convenient way out of having to select a pronunciation
vhich is socially markcd in one way or another. (For most speakers, [:;>]
as a realization of word-final Itl is not nearly so salient and occurs much
more frequently and higher up the social scale than the more conspicuous intervocalic ItI.)

The

overall

picture,

then, is that the majority of English English

to American English follow exaetly the same
route. There is no way, of course, of predicting how fastand how far
individuals wil! accommodate,
if indeed they accommodate at all. This,
we can assume, will depend on a number of factors, including personality type. What we can say is that ifthey accomrnodate, they wil! almost
certainly accommodate phonologica!ly by acquiring features in a eertain
order. The order is:

speakers accommodating

(1) -ltI- > -[9J(2) la:1 > lrel in dance ete.

(3) [o] > [a] in top ete.
(4)

.!

..

0> Irlj_

{C#

Thus, English people resident in the USA who pronounce top as [thop]
will al so certainly have at least some tendency to pronounce dance etc.
with lrel, while the reverse is not necessarily the case. Al! my informants,
in fact, conform to this pattern, with accommodation
to a given feature
implying accommodation
also to those features lower on the hierarchy,
but no. necessarily to higher features. (One apparent exception to this
pattern was an Englishwoman who had lived in the USA for over ten
years and who had non-prevocalic Irl and 101 as [o] but who did not have
lrel in the lexical set of dance. It emerged, however, that most of her
time in America had been spent in eastern New England where, as in
England, dance has the vowel of pa c-id not of pat.)
Our hypothesis is therefore confirmed, if in modified formo Accommodation does indeed take place by the modification of those aspects of
segmcntal phonology that are salient in the accent to be aceommodated
to. This salience is revealed by what happens during imitation, and can
most likely be mainly accounted for by the involvement of phonemic

21

contrasts and alternations.

There are, however, a number of factors
which intrude to delay or prevent, to different extents, the acquisition of
part.cular salient features. The factors include phonotactic constraints in
particular, but also the possibility of homonyrnic clash and strength of
stereotyping. These factors produce, in two-accent contact, a hierarchy
of features such that those with thc fewcst or weakest inhibiting Iactors
are aceommodated
to first, regardlcss of the actual speed of accomrnodation of a given individual.

In any examination of the routes followed by individual speakers during

accommodation,
there is another important factor that we have to
discuss. This is a factor which has been of little interest to social
psychologists but must be of relevance to linguists: the need to 0e
nderstood.
We are concerned
here, of course, with interaction
oetween ieIated varieties where mutual mtelhglblhty is not \ls!!ally a
senous or long-term problem. 1.tcan, however, be a short-term nroblem
"in some cases, and speakers i" this sort of situation rapidly ac ire an
awareness that so me features are 1 ely to cause mterlocutors more
trou61e than others (see Haugen"S 1'966 dlScussion of intra-Scandinavian
~iiuhIca fon).
This point, and its iruluence on accommodation,
has been investigated by Shockey (ms.) in her examination of long-ter m accommodation by middle-class Americans living in England to English English,
the reverse of the process we have been discussing above. She observes
that the speech of long-term American residents in England is characterized by three main modifications:
(1) The pronunciation
of loul as in boat becomes fronted from [o-u]
to [su], a feature of modern RP. Whether this aspect o the RP
accent is sa!ient for American speakers to the same extent as
certain other more phonemic features is not clear, as it re?rescnts
a modification that is purely phonetic. As such, however, it is
subject to no inhibiting factors. (There are, of course, a number
of areas of the USA where front or central realizations such as
[0U-SU] occur, particularly in Philadelphia, along th- central east
coast, and in the inland south, but Shockey's informants all carne
from the midwest or California and did not have this feature
natively.)
(2) The pronunciation
of the vowel of hot, top etc. as rounded [o], as
in most British accents, rather than as the unrounded [o] typical
of most American accents. This, of course, is the reverse of the

22

ACCOMMODATION

process that occur

ACCO

ETWEEN DIALECTS

during accommodation

in the opposite

direc-

t.on, suggesting that the contrast be ween [o] and [a], which is
inde d phonetically one of the sharpest differences between the
two varietie , is salient for both sets of speakers. Degree of
phonetic
tributing

distance betwecn phones must sur Iy e a factor conto salience (see above; and Thelan er, 1979, p. 108).
However, unlike the change in the reverse direction, f e change
by American speakers from [o] to [o] produces no Iikelihood of
homonymic clash.
(3) The intervocalic flap [Q] is modified t [t] in the set of latter and to
[d] in the set f ladder. Shockey has some interesting data on this
feature frorn recordings of her own speech:
percentage [Q]
after si. months in England
after three years in England

Itl
100
66

Id!
100
77

She points out that even after three years her scores are higher
than those of her informants
(se e below), and suggests that
accommodation
must be a slow, ongoing process which is not
completed for a number of years. Note also that Shockey was
much slower in losing flaps than 1 and my English informants
were in acquiring them. This points to another factor whic. must
be of importance in influencing the rate of accornmodation
on
particular featur s: the relative naturainess of a phonetic/ honological change. The voicing of intervocalic voicel ss stops, as in
moving frorn British to American English, is a very well-attested,
natural and ph netically rnotivated type of sound change. The
reverse process, as in moving from American to English English,
whereby voiced stops becorne voiceless in intervocalic contexts, is
neither natural nor we!! known as a Iinguistic change. It is
therefore not surprising if English-to-Arnerican
ae ommodation
takes place much earlier with resp ct to this feature than
Arnerican-to-English
aecommodation.
1

."

ow Shockey's
mants shows that
and interestingly
differently:
percentage
informant
inforrnant
informant
inforrnant
F aps have been

al alysis of tape-recorded
interviews with her inforall of them are variable with respect to this feature,
tha , as in her own speech, Itl and Id! are affected
ftaps

1
2
3
4
reduced,

as a result

/tI
17

Id!
61

37

58

41

67

39
of accommodation

68
to English

MODATION

BETWEEN

DlALECTS

23

English, from a presurncd original score of 100 per cent in both cases,
but the reduction is much greater in the case of Itl han in th case of Id/.
Shockey rightly makes the point, in attempting to explain this fact,
that students of accomm dation must recog iz that, in a d::o to the
sociopsychoiogical
factor
hicn lie at the root o accommodation
uch
as the desire not to be too 1 ieren , e eSlre to e 1l1te I ible is also
an Important factor. Amencan
an
Tl.IS
nglish, particularly the
more s an ar varieties, are very readily mutually intelligible, but difficuities o a ise f om tim to time. Shockey points out t at cornprehension of TV programmes fram across the Atlanti e ofter reie on context.
It is, moreover, in situations where no context is provided (and where
the Iistener has not had time to work out which variety t~ e speake is
using) that misunderstanding
occurs. These situations are often serviee
eneounters.
Shockey reports that vowel differences have led to her
receiving cherrics (EngEng [E1IZ)) in Engl nd whe
she asked for
carrots AmEng [ksrots], EngEng [kreratsj). She a!so reports, howev r,
that it is the flapping of i tervocalic Itl which seems t cause British
listeners the greatest compre, ension difficulties. Flapping of Id/, on the
other hand, i much less of a probiem beca use of the close phone ic
similarity of American [9] and Engiish [d]. The desire to make one elf
more easily understood is therefore at least art
responsibl
for the
1 erentlal
modific tion durin accommodation
of Id! and IU.
i
ere IS also evide ce for the obvious e ect of cornprehension
as a
factor in accommod ... : n to American English y speakers of English
English. 1 can attest that one factor that witho t doubt preeipitated the
introduetion of flaps into my own sp ech in America was the number of
people who thought, for example, if only for a second, that 1 wan ed a
pizza rather than that my name was Peter. And, while 1 did not
generally cha g la:1 to I~! in the exical set of dance ete., 1 did end up
saying words such as g/ass, hal], and bathroom with I~! i, service
encounters in s ops, bars, and restaurants, in order to avoid exchanges
of the type below:
Waiter: Would you care for another
Author: A ha f bottle, pIease.
Vaiter: Coffee?

ott

of wine?

The problem was of course that the la:1 in half sounded to the waiter
more like his own vowel in coffee than the expccted /~I vowel of half.
The accommodatio

process

\Ve ~ave argued that, ~t east in contact between American and English
English, accornmodation
follows a fix
route. Jf it is the ea e that

24

.f>

..

ACCOMMODATION

BETWEEN

ACCOMMODATION

DIALEcrs

rcgularities of th., sort are to be found in othcr accomm dation situations, then this opens up the possibility not only that 'e will be able
to make sensible generalizations about the accommodation
proc ss a a
wbole, but also that it might be po sible, gi en a comparison of two
varieties, to predict what for 1 accommodation
between the
\ViII take.
If this is so, then .i.!Jnight even be possible o predict and cxplain whiro
features will survive, or not, in dialect contact and dialect mixture
situations also (see chapter 3).
Further evidence on the regula ity of the accommodation
process
comes from the work of Nordenstam (1979). Nord nstam has examine
long-term
linguistic accommodation
by Swedish wornen living in
Bergen, Norway, to Norwegian. This is a situation somewhat comparable to that of British speakers residing in the USA. Swedish and
Norwegian have a very hrgh degree of mutual intelligibility, and Swedes
do not for the most part need to modify their speech greatly when
communicating with Norwegians in order to be unc!erstood. However, it
is clear that t e degree of intelligibility (see Haugen, 1966) depends on a
num er of factors - the variety of SwedishINorwegian
spoken, the
degree of edueation, the d gree of willingness to ccrnmunicate , and so
on - and is probably somewhat smalI r than that between at least
standard American and English English. It is al so apparent that the faet
that Norwegian and Swedish are two autonomous, separa te languages and are perceived as such by their speakers - is of some consequence.
Some of the Swedes studied by ordenstam, for exam le, were clearly
attempting
to keep the two languages apart and become bilinguai,
rather than introduce Norwegian features piecerneal into their Swedish.
This does not normalIy happen within the English-speaking
world,
except at times in the case of bidialectal children, since there is no
perception that, say, American and English standard English are di ci etely autonornous varieties and that they therefore ought to be kept
apart. Rather, the autonomy is shared (see Chambers and Trudgill,
1980).
.
Nordenstam's
study is mainly lexical and morphological, and indee9jj
is at these two levels that the two languages differ most. (Syntactic
alffcrences are very few, and pronunciation
differences between the
two, though clear enough to most Scandinavians,
are probably no
greater tha differences within the two languages.) This contrasts with
differences between English and American English, where there are
hardly any morp ological differences (and what there are are mostly
t ndencies
rather than absolute differences);
a number of important
syntactic and phonological differenees; and a very considerable number
of le .ical differences (se e Trudgill and Hannah, 1982).

BETWEEN

DlAlECTS

25

'

Nordenstam
fin~
it is at th
1 level that accommodation
begins
rst.
his is als obviously the case with EgIish/ American
ae ommodation.
It is also clear why this is the case. Lexical differences
are highly salient, and are readily apparent te all speakers of m
varieties concemed without an lin UIStlCtraining or analysls. They are
also mostly non-systematic,
and susce tI
o emg eamed one at a
time.
rucia y, t e can aJso cause severe an o VIOUS,comprehenslOn
difficu tieso Indeed, in both Scandinavia and the English-speaking
world
there is a fund of folk knowledge about le .ical differences which is
shared by most adults. It is widely known in Britain, for instance , that
certain lexical iterns and phrases are to be avoided when talking to
Americans, e.g. rubber (EngEng 'eraser', USEng 'condom'); te knock
up (EngEng 'to awaken y knocking', USEng 'to mak pregn~'
,. It is
sirnilarly widely known in Scandinavia that e.g. ro .g p"'eans 'pe ceful' in
Norwegian but 'arnusing' in Swedish. There are also, of course, many
other differences that are not known, but these are gene rally soon le rnt
when the new variety is encountered
(unless ambiguity is possible, e.g.
pavement (USEng 'roadway', Engf.ng 'sidewalk'j).
Jn
rdenstar;1's study, lexical accommodation
is followed by morphological accornmodatlOn. This is not the case with En lisrJAmerican
acc mmo ation, of course, where phono oglca accommodation
comes
~ext. E"nglish Engli h speakers in the USA, for instance, may end up
using forms such as gotten and dove (for dived), but this is usually
preceded by at least so me phonological modifications. We can probably
ascri e the situation described by Nordenstam
to the far greater
salience , due in turn to greater frequency, of morphological differe .ces
between Norwegian and Swedish, and/or to the relative lack of phonological uniformity within and differentiation
between Swedish and
Norwegian.
At a number of points. Nordenstam's
data s ows that h r Swedish
subjects do indeed follow a regular and common route towards Norwegian during morphological
accommodation.
The majo ity of her
informant , as the implicational scale of tab!e 1.1 shows, acquire Norwegian-style pronouns in the following order. First, Swedish jag fju! 'I'
is replaced by Norwegian jeg /jei/. Secor-dly, Swedish dom 'they'
is replaced by Norwegian de /di:/. Thirdly, Swedish honom 'him' is
replaced by hamo And finally, Swedish ni 'you (plural)' gives way to dere
fde:r:J/. (Many of the other pronominal
forms are identical or very
similar, such as vi 'we", hon (Swedish)/hun
(Norwegian) 'she'.) In the
88-eell table, only four are 'ineorrectly' ordered, although i must be
conceded that eight of the informants show no accommodation
at a11,so
perhap
we should say four out of 56. It is difficult, in view of the
o

26

ACCOMMODATION

similarity

BETWEEN DlALECTS

ACCOMMODATlON

or identity

of t e other forms in thc system, to at nmpt to

But the salience of the first-person singular is not
entirely un xpected, particularly since the phonetic fo m of the' wedish
jag could be interpretccl
by Norwegians in some contexts as ja 'yes',
while the delay in acquiring dere could well be due to the fact that ni is
the polite prono un of address in Swedish.

explain this ordering.

Taole 1.1

Norwegian

Fanny
Jenny
Katarina
Badil
Eva
Blenda
Charlotte
Henny
Carin
Stina
Barbro
Lisbeth
Alma
Na ley
Erna
El en
Inez
Helen
Mona
Nina
Linda
Lena

deldom
N

N
N
N
N

N
N

N
N
N

Ji
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S

N
N
>

N
N
N

N
N

N
N

--sr

.lL

S
S
S

S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S

derelni

-S- S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S

-SS
S
S
S

S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S

_.

Norwegian

and Swedish adjecti

Fanny
Jenny
Katarina
Bodil
Eva
Blenda
Charlotte
Henny
Carin
Stina
Barbro

al agreement
Neuter adj.
-igl-igl

Pred. a j, pl.
fJl-e-a

S
N
N

N
S

N
N
N

N
S
N

N
S

N
S
N
S
S

Lisbeth

Alma
Nancy
Er a
Elien
Inez
Helen
10na
Nina
Linda
Lena

N
S

N
N

S
S

N
S
N
S

N
S

N
N
N
N
S

N
N

N
N
N

N
S
S
S
S
S

N
S

Source: Nordenstam, 1979.

Source: Nordenstarn, 1979..

..

Table 1.2

Adverb
-igl-igt
hamlhonom

UIAL.c"".J

farligt > del el' [arlig, 1 . B rgen Norwegian, moreover: plural ad jecti~es
take -e nly in attributive position. Thu accornmodation
from Swedish
requires dom (ir fina> de er fin.

nd Swedish pronouns
jegljag

BETWEEN

At a number of other points, on the other and, it is difficuit to find

any regularity at all. This can be illustrated by table 1.2. Both Norwegian and
wedish express adjectival agreement
by suffixing -t to
neuter adjectives.
lural adjectives tal e Swedish -a, Norwegian -e. The
suffix -a/-e also occurs in th definite singular. e.g. den store mannen 'the
big man'. The neuter forms of adjectives also function as adverbs. There
is, however , a clifference concerning adjcctives with the common ending
-ig, e.g. Norwegian [arlig 'dangerous',
fattig 'poor', etc. In S vedi h
these are treated like any other adjective. In Norwegian, on the other
hand, they do not take neuter -t; thus accommodation
involves del r

Table 1.2 shows that those speakers who have accornmodated most to
N rwegian in tabl
1.1 are aIso for the most part those who have
accommodated
most here, and vice -ersa. However, there is no way in
which tabIe 1.2 can be reordered into anything approaching an irnplicational sca!e. There is no regularity h, re. It is perfectly possible, of
course, that we are grouping together three features which should not
be grouped together, but there are in Nordenstam's
work a nu ber of
other points at which the same type of phenomenon
occurs. In fact,
muc of her data suggests quite strongly that, while there are constraints
and regularities in linguistic accornrnodation,
there is also, as in child
language acquisition and in second-Ianguage
learning, plenty of room

28

ACCOMMODATIO

RETWEE

ACCOMMODATION

DIALECfS

for individual strategies. This is qui e comforting, in a way, but disturbing for o' r hypothesis that accommodation
takes place by means of a
fixed route.

Table 1.3 Main consonantal

3
4

It could be cIaimed, o course, tilat morphelogy and honolo!!

are
Ike!y to ehave differentiv in accommodation.
Unfortunately
for our
fixe -route h. pothesls, however, t ere is somc evidenee that even in
phonology reg arity is not (he whole story. For xample, we have data
on long-te m linguistic aceommodation
by children which shows vcry
dearly the extent to which individual routes can be followed. The
evidence is alJ the more striking because it comes from the Iinguistic
behaviour of twins. The data is as fo lows.
Debbie and Rie ard were born and grew up in Britain. At the age of
seven they went with their parents fron Reading, in the south of
England, wh ....re they had iived for a number of years, to Australia,
where they stayed for one year before r turning horne. In Australia,
recordings were rnade of their speech at monthly intervals for six
months by Inge Rogers of Macquarie University, and these reco dings
were subsequently kindiy rnade available to me.
The recordings make it possible to carry out a longitudinal study of
the accomrnodation
process through which the twins adapted their
Reading phonologj
to that of Australian English. (Doubtless
lexical accomrnodation
occurred also. Gramrnatical
differences between
Australian and English English are so few as to be irnpossible to study in
this way.)
ogers (1981) showed that the twins quite rapidly acquired the distinctively
Australian
high-rising
statement
intonation.
My own
researches (Trudgill, 1982) investigated their accommodation
at the
level of segmental phonology. The main consonantal and vocalie features
modified by the twins .uring the six-rnonth period were as in tab e 1.3.
Table 1.4 shows Richard's development
over the six-mo th periodo
Note the very regular pattern, and the almost entirely perfect implicational scaling. Table 1.5 shows the long-terrn aeeommodation
by
Richard's
twin sister Debbie. The contrast is quite striking. First,
Debbie has been much less regular than Richard. Secondly, the routes
the two <hildren have followed to acquiring an Austra ian accent have in
many respects been rather different. After six months they sound, at
least to a non-Australi: .1, very Australian,
but they have got to this
stage via different paths. Moreover, even though shc got off to a slower

..

better

-ltIlail
loul
leiJ
li:1
IAI
10:1
lu:1

Irregulari y in accommodation

and vocalic modifications

5
6
7

8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15

high
low

face
see
but

part
boot
bed
how
get
bat
there
David
hit

[E1
[cu]
-ltI
lrel
IEdl

Ii/
Irl

So urce: Trudgill,

Table 1.4
Month
1

/oul

ciJ

li:/

AB

AB

5
6

A
A
A

[rJ
[ai]
[re
[rei]

[t:]

[\1 ~]

[E]
[~u)

[e]

2J
[re]
[E:]

[t
[E]
le:}

Ir!

Idl

[11

[iJ

[dl1

[2/]
[a:1

[E

h]

Richard
/ail

[th 1
[~!]
[:}u]
[El1
[ti ]
[d]
[g:]

1982.

itl

2
3

Australian

(Reading)

Englis
1

29

BETWEEN DlALECfS

AB
A
A
A
A

la:!

lu:/

Id

/aul

-ltI

/3!f

IE';}I

fII

II/

AB

AB

AB

AB

iN

AB

AB

A"u

AB

AB

AB

AB

A
A
A

A
A
A

AB
A
A

AB
A
A

AB

AB

AB

A(B)

A(B)

AB

AB

AB

AB

A: Australian
B: British
AB: both forms
A(B), B(A): one instance

So urce: Trud;ill,

of form in parentheses

1 82.

start, Debbie has acquired some Australian features that Ri~hard has
noto The extent of this differenee is iIlustrated in table 1.6, which shows
the first month of acquisition by both children of eaeh feature.
It is of course possible to attempt to aceount for the different rate of
accommodation
by the children by noting the sex difference and obse.n:ins that, during their stay in Australia, the children's friends and acti 1ties differed quite considerably - as did their personalities.
The diff rent routes they followed during aceommodation,
how ver,
are more troubling. The fact that t e order of aequisition of Australia

ACCOMMODATION

30

Debbie

Table 1.5
Month -t-

lail

loul

13
13

2
3
4

5
6

ACCOMMODATION

BETWEEN D1ALECfS

B(t,) B

li:1

ItJ

B()

leif

lorJ

i~1

ff/

III

tU'1

Id

lauJ

-/ti

t,B
B

B
B

B(A)

Be)

10:1

AB

AB

AB

B AB
B(A) A

A(B)

A@

(13) B(A) AB

AB

A: Australian
B: British
AB: both Iorrns
A(B), B(A): one instance of form in parenthescs
Source: Trudg: 1, 1982.

Table 1.6

Mont

Feature
1

2
3
4
5
6
7

Key word
better
high
lo iV
[ace
s e

but

10

part
boot
bed
how

11
14

get

12

bat

13
14

there

8
9

15

..

of acquisition

David
hit

Debbie

Richard

3
3

1
1
4

3
4
5
5
5
6
6
6
6

1
2

3
2

2
2

3
5

6
5

Source: Trudgill, 1982.

"

featl:res was s?mewhat different for the two children is obviousJy a

considerable
difficu ty., for the fixed-route hypothesis
d'
.
,sju t as was Nor~enstam s data. Obviously, 111 both these cases there seems to be c1ear
potent:al for different
peakers to adopt different strategies of accornmodation.
f The fixed-route
1 ypothesis can, nevertheless,
be defended. In the
race of Nordenstam's
data we are able to retreat to a position which
confines the hypothesi
to phonology.
In the case of Debbie and

..

BETWEEN DIALECTS

31

Richard, we may retreat furthcr to a position which confines the hypothesis to adult , or per .aps more probably t p st-adolescents.
ClearIy,
accommodation
by chiidren may be a very di ferent kind of phenomenon frorn accommodation
by adults, This is par icularIy so giv~n the
enormously greater lingnistic . exibility of young childre ,especially up
to the age o approximately eight (see below). The speed of accommodation is greater, and of course so is thc degree. (Note, in fact, the very
large number of features accommodated
to by the twins as comp. re
with the our main features we noted for English adults in the USA.)
This suggests that thc constraints that delay accommodation
by adults,
and which thereby lead to the ordering of the acquisition of features, are
not, for children, constraints
at all - or at least not eriously so.
Therefore, the same phenomenon
of ordering does not occur. Just as
young children are not inhibited by, say, phonotactic
constraints in
Jearning a foreign language, so they are equaJly uni hibited in acquiring
a different di .ect. They therefore have much more freedom and scope
for accommodation,
and are much Iess likcly to conform to the same
fixed pattern.

Limits to accommodation
This discussion of accommodation
by young children leads us to another
important and in eresting question, especially since the role of young
children rnay be vital in dialect mixture and in new-dialect formation,
which we shali be looking at in la er chapters. The question is: what are
the limits on accommodation?
Specificaliy, is total accommodation
to a"
new variety possible in the 10n term?
ow the obvious place to look, if we are concerned with the limits on
long-term accommodation,
is precisely the linguistic ehaviour of young
children. As we have just noted, children are \Vell known tn b
c
more rapid and com tete accommodatOs t, an adu ts. The explanation
for L is may in part be sociopsychological,
ut is .rnost certainly mostly
linguistic, and is concerned with the nature of brain developli1ent and
the human I nguage faculty.
In any case, the conventional wisdom is that ~ng
children, unlikS
adults, are indeed capable of accommodating
to a y to the speech o
.0eir peers, as eb le an Ric ard seemed to be at least well on their
way to oing. t is a matter of common observation, and has often becn
noted by Labov and others, that children use the dialect and accent of
their friends, and not those of their parents or teachers. Indeed this
must necessarily have been the case for regionally distinct diaJects to
have survived in the face of geographical mobility .

32

There are, of course, qualifications that must obviously be made at

this point. A number of children of parent who speak a varie y different fro~ that?f the area in which they are living become bidialectal, and
speak like their parents as well as like their pcers; and .attitudinal fact
may retard or lirni
ccommodatio"
Moreover, isolated individuals _
~xtrem~ 'Iames' in Labov's sense (1972), wch as the Nathan B. discussed In some detail in Labov (1966 - may be relativelv '
peer roup pressurc o con orm SiOce they do not have a eer rou , For
example, j ew roox
turne up one inforrnant in his survey of the
English spoken in the Merseyside area of England w o had a considerable nurnber of Scottish features in his speech even though he had lived
al! hs life in the Merseyside crea, The explanation for this was that the
informant's mother was Scottish an , crucially, that the family belonged
to a c1osed, isolationist religious sect. Other linguists have similar
anecdotes - and 1 make no apology for cmploying anecdotes since if, on
a particular topic, we have many of them and : ey all point in the same
direction, then we cannot ignore them. 1 have heard recently, for
example, of a child born and raised in Iowa who had a strang foreign
accent; and of a child who had !ived all his life in Florida but who
hado a noticeable New York City accent. These people, however, are
obviously exccptions. In general we can accept that, at least in most
western cultures, children are known, in normal circurnstances, to adapt
at least to anoextent to the speech of their peers. (This is not necessarily
a cultural un ers~l, however: se Kazazis, 1970 for an important study
of the role of farnily and local pride in inhibiting change in Greece.)
However, we now have some evidence to indicate that while this
piece o~ conventional
wisdom is broadly speaking correct, the true
picture S actually a little more cornplicated. The fact is that recent
research has made available some studies which shov that there are
linguistic limits on the degree of phono!ogica
accornrnodation
achievable even in the case of young children. There are three studies that we
can mention here.
(1~ Chambers (1980) examines changes that are taking place in the
Enghsh of Tor?nto a~ ~ar ~s the nature of Canadian Raising is concerned, Canad:an R3Isl!1g ,IS the characteristic
of Canadian English
whereby the diphthongs /al/ and /au/ have mid-central first elements
before voiceless consonants and open first elernents elsewhere. as in out
loud r xut laud] and night time [nxrt tal m ] (for further discussion see
chapt~r 4), In his, study Chambers shows, amongst other things,' t' at
there IS now considerable franting of the first element of /au/, He also
studies the degree ~f adhe~e?ce by speakers to the Canadian Raising
pattern by constructmg a rarsmg index for his informants as follows:

..

ACCOMMODA TlON BETIVEE 'DlALECfS

ACCOMMODA TION BETWEEN DIALECTS

elsewhere
e.g. loud, now
[au=au=cu]
[eu=eu+xu]

before voiceless consonants

e.g. out
[EU-eu-Au]

(ou)-O
(ou)-l

33

[reu-au-ou)

As can be seen, the index is computed in such a way that a speaker

adhering strictly to the phonological rule of Canadian Raising, as most
Canadians do, will score O. On the o her hand, any s eaker who cc.isistently violated the rule and had open first elements in voiceless e virenments, and vice versa, would,'
C ambers's calculations, seo
100.
Figure 1.7 shows the raising indcx scores in three speech styles obtained by six Toronto adults in tape-recorded
interviews. Of particular

~I
lOl

Mr J

-o
e

_________

word lis!
style

Figure l.7

~MrH =====:MrsTMrsB}
MrsJ
MrT
c:::;;;;;,,===:;;::..--

reading pas age

style

interview
style

Index scores for Canadian Raising in three speech styles, Taranta

(from Chambers, 1980)

intere 't to us are the scores obtained by Mr J. Clearly, Mr J. is

doi g something wrong as far as Canadian Rr ising is concerned. Now
Chambers
indicates that otherwise Mr J. speaks perfectly normal
Toronto Englis , So why should he have trouble with Canadian Raising? The answer turns out to be that Mr J, was born in New York City
and moved to Toronto only at the age of 11, Since that time he has
accornmodated
totally to Canadian English - except at this one point,
where he mostly gets thir-gs right, but not entirely. W can suggest that
it is the difficulty of mastering the correct phonological
constraints
in olved in Canadian Raising that have prevented Mr J. from acquiring
the Toronto allophonic pattern complete y correctly.
Howe ver, it can easily be ar ued that, if we are interested in the limits
on accommod~y
children. then the age of 11 is simply too late,
believe we can agree with this up to a point. Labov (1972) has argued

34

ACCOMMODATION

DET\VEEN

DIALECTS

that, while children younger than eight appear to be certain to accornmodate totally, there can be no assurance that, after the age of eight,
children will become otally integrated into a new speech community. 1
would also add that, after the ag of 14, one ean be fairly sure that they
will not. The problem years are eight to 14, with the degree of integratio depending on many different social and individual factors.
(2) Some pioneering work in this field by a .ne (1976, 1980) ha:
irvicated that there is a close correlation betweeJl how Id speakers are
when they move to a n w area and the degree to whieh they accommoate succe
y.
ore 111eres 1I1gy, owever, her work also shows
that, in some respects, even children of ei ht ears oId may be toa oId to
aequire certain linguistie features during 10ng-term aeeommo ation.
Payne's researeh shows that eh/dren from New York Clty fiilies
who have moved to Philadelphia
aeeommodate
almost totally to the
Philadelphia sound system after residing there for a while, with the
younger children accommodating
more rapidly than the older. Close
linguistic analysis, however, of the ty? we were advocating earlier in
this ehapter, shows that there may be some inadequacies to this accornmodation. The children now sound as if they come from Philadelphia,
but this overall impression masks the fact that they have aetually failed
to master a few fine phonological dc.ails. Where the modifieation to be
made is purely phonetic, there are no problems for the children. For
e: ample, the istinctively Philadelphian
phonetie realizations of the
vowels lou/ as in boat, lu:1 boot, lau/ out, lail bite, andc/oi/ boy are all
readily acquired. However, in some cases where the modifieations
required are more complex phonologieally,
difficu ties may arise. The
New York City children, for instance, show no tende cy to merge the
vowels of ferry and [urry , as Philadelphia speakers do (and see further
below).
(3) Ciearly, then, the more complex the aru->mmodatjon linguistic;..
ally, the earlier the child has to be in in order to adapt suceessfully. Just
how ear y spea ers have to begin to aequire certam linguistic orms
turns out, however, to be rather surprising in at least some instanees. In
fact, astonishingly eno gh, .there is some evidence to suggest that c!I:.
tain t nes of honological differentiation
ma never be aceommodated
to successfully, however
oun a s eaker may be. le evidence i as
follows.
In the English of Norwich (se e Trudgill, 1974) the originally distinet
Middle English vowels Q and ou have been pr served as distinct, as they
have also in a number of other (mainly geographically peripher 1) are as
of Britain. The distinetion in Norwich English is as follows:

..

ACCOMMODATION

MEQ>

lu:1
moan
nose
rose

MEou>

sole

BETWEEN

DIALECT

35

IAUI
mown
knows
rows
soul ete.

However, it is probably also relevant for hat fol ows that the situation
is further e mplicated by the interaction of this contrast with other
vowels, especially IH:I and lu/, and o her lcxica set . Anyone wishi g to
acquire native-Iike Norwich pronunciation
has to note the exi tence of
at least seven different lexical sets (see furthe chapter 3):
IjH:/~/td
Itd

IH:~/u:1
lu:1
lu:/~/ul
lul
IAUI
They must learn, that is, that do, for example,

IdH:I = [d3H], while boot can be pranounced

[buu'P].

tune ete.
do etc.
boot etc.
school etc.
road etc.
pul ete.
OlVn etc.
can be pronouneed only
either b:tl or Ibu:tl =

Now, r search that I have carried out into Norwich English (see also
Trudgill, 1982) indicates that even people who were born and braught
Ut' in NOTWich and who otherwise
have perect .ocal accents do not
correctly master the lu:/-lAu/ distinction between moan, mown etc. if
their parents come from somewhere else, i.e. if their parents do not have
a Norwieh accent. (In some ea-es, it seems to be necessary for only the
mother to have had a non-r orwich aeeent for the distinction not to be
mastered. And in one case, the distinction had not been mastered by a
speaker both of whose parents did have a Norwich accent but who
himself had lived away frorn Norwich until the age of eight, bearing out
Labov's point above.)
In investigating
this phenomenon,
inforrnants from Norwieh ageu
3~0 were used, since it is possible (see chapter 2) that younger people
are now losing
e lu:/-/Aul distinction as a result of infiuence of the
London area and frorn RP. And although the researeh was prompted
initially by o servations of natural speeeh, the main evidenee carne from
tests where informants were required to repeat a sentence in 'a proper
G vic
accent'. This was neeessary
ecause the RP prestige accent, as
we have seen, does not rnake the phonologieal distinetion in question,
and 'correction'
towards the RP norm is sometimes indulged in by
(especially soeially upwardly mobile) Norwich speakers. Absenee of the

36

ACCOMMODATION
ACCOMMODATION

BETWEFN

distinction fro their actual speech does not therefore necessarily mean
at they hay not mastered it eorrectly.
Test sentences were of the form: Norwieh City seo red an own goal.
When asked to repeat this sentence in a 'proper
orwich accent',
informants
ad no difficulty at al! in cornprehending
what was required
of them, and produced a rendering that was as basilectal as they could
manage. A!I focused attention on producing City as [si?I] a id iany on
producing Norwieh as [nnnj] or [ncroj] rather than [nnnj]. The point of
interest for this research, however, was of course the pronunciation
of
own goal. Of the ten informants with Norwich parents, all produced the
correct Norwich pronunciation
of own goal /xun gu:l/. Of the ten with
non-Norwich
parents, none produced the correct response. In every
other respect their phonetics was perfect, but they all produced fAun
gxub', with the exception of one inforrr+nt who had some awareness o
the issue and reported that he was not sure whether goal should be Igu:U
or IgAul/, but that he was 'pretty certain' that it was /gxul (Interestingly, while for example (t) as in bettc: is, as we sa-v above (p. 10), a
sah~n~ variable in Iorwich English and therefore subject lo stylistic
vanation,
the vowel lu:1 in goal, moan etc. has at least until very
recen.tly been subject to very little variation on the part of (particularly
working-class)
speakers,
and has not bcen at all salient for local
speakers. It is, on the other hand, a feature which non-Iocais often
c~mment . n, since .t~e contrast between e.g. London [<e'-u] and Nor\\~lch (uu 11~ very striking, and Norwich speakers moving away from the
city are quickly made aware of t iis fact.)
It therefore appears to be the case that, probably because of the
complex w.ay in which the Norwich phonological system differs frorn
?ther, English systems at .this point, speakers are not capable of acquirmg tne correct underlying phonological
distinction unless they are
exposed to it from the very beginning, before they hemselves have even
be~un to s~eak .' Expos~~e to it in the speech o their peers frorn the age
of tour or nve lS, surpnsmg as this may seem, not sufficient.
This finding. frorn Nor:wich English tallies with a finding of Payne
(1976: made In fact before '11y own investigations,
a!though 1 was
regrettably not aware of this fact). However, her results are perhaps
s!J.ghtly less surp~ising than the Norwich results, sinee she was dealing
with a new hOUSIng are a with very many in-migrants, while my informant
ere all almost entirely surrounded in their early years by local
peoplc: She notes that the linguistic change whereby le! is being raised
phonetically to [::g-eg 1 causes particular problems for her New York
City family children in Philadelphia. The progressive raising of l<el from
[re.] through [E;)] even as far as [ro 1 is taking pla e (se e Labov, 1982), at

..

BETWEEN

D1ALECTS

37

D1ALEcrs

least in 1 rban areas, throughout the north-eastern United States, including Chicago, Detroit,
Cleveland,
Buffa o, Boston, New York, and
Philadelphia. lt is also spreading from one phonological environment to
another. In Buffalo, for example, raised vowels occur in all environments, while in New York City raising is confined to vowels that occur
before ImI, Inl, Is/, 18/, /fI, Isl, Ibl, Id/, Ig/. In Philadelphia, the changc has
no progressed so far, and raised vowels occur only before Im/, Inl, Isl,
18/, If/, and Id/. (There is also lexical diffusion in Phiiadelphia in the case
of the j--1dl environment,
with some words such as bad having clese
vowels, others such as dad having non-raised variants.)
ayne shows
that her informants ha e variable success in acquiring the correct
hiladelphia pattern of l<el -raising, success diminishing with age of arrival in
Philadelphia,
and that a11the originally New Yorl City children show
some tendency to have non-Philadelphia
raised variants of te! in smash,
bag , dad, grab . The only children investigated by Payne
ho consistently rai se <el in all and only the Philadelp la environments are precisely hose whose parents themselves came from Philadelphia. Again
we find that a complex phonological distirction is simply not acqurable
d ring accommodation.
Speakers appear to have to learn certain
phonologi al f at res from their parents. That is to say, there are c\ear
limits en phonological "ccommodation,
even in the case of children.

Conclusin
We have seen, then, that the quantitative
linguistic analysis of the
accommodation
rocess is a useful research tool. We have seen, too-;t iat it IS at least sometimes
possible to explain why some features of
some accents are salient for their speakers andlor for speakers of other
-accent . This salience appears to e ue to a number of factors, which
include contributi n to phonological
contrast, relationship to orthography, degree of phonetic difference, and different incidence of shared
phonemes. We can, moreover, perhaps reduce these factors to two ,
namely degree of phonetic difference and, more irnportantly, surface
phonemic contrast. Other factors presumably remain lO be detected,
but in any case the salience of features can often be deterrnined by an
examination of the process of imitation. During accommodation, it is
indeed salient features of the target varietythat are adjusted to exce t
that, in t e case of adu ts at east, a nu
er o actors combine to delay
this modification to different extents. These factors do not necessarily
apply to the iinguistic behaviour of children. Nor do they ecess rly
apply at linguistic levcls other than the phonological. These factors

38

ACCOMMODATION

BETWEE

DIALECTS

. '.lude p onotaetie eo strain~s,. hom~nymie cIash, and extra-stronp

sahenee (both of the latter agai involvng, typieaIly, surfaee phonemie
contrasts). Other factors, on the other hand, may accelerate accornmodation to particular features. Thcse factor- incIude comprehension difficulties and p~onological natural.ness. The prescnce of these inhibiting
and accelerating factors leads,
long-terrn <commodaton, to fi"prl
routes whereby all speakers accommodati g frorn one particular variet
to another, whatev~r th~ir speed of accommodatio , acquire featurc~
fra~ .t?e target van~ty 10 the samc order. The greater acquisitional
fexibi ity of young children means t at the are not subject to the effect
of inhibiting factors to t e same degr e, and that they therefore dernonstr~te greater variety ~n the routes that they folIow during accommodation. Even.youn~ chI!dre~, ho ver, are subject to limits on degree of
accomm~d:-on,. \~Jt~ certam more complex phonological contrasts and
allophonic Ond!tlOnm patterns not being acquired correctly unless
speakers have bcen exposed 10 them in the speech of their .arents.
r

2
Dialect Contac

40

DIALECf eONTACT

-!n any. cas~, we can assume

..1

..

th~t face-to-face interaction s necessary

beLore dlffuslOn takes place. preclsely because it is only during face-tof!,ce interaction that accommodation
occurs. In other words, the elec~('nic media are not very instrumental
in t le diffusion of iinguistic
inriovatons, in spite of widespread popula notions to the contrary. The
point about the TV set is that people, however much they watch and
listen to it, do not tal k to it (and even if they do, it cannot hear theml),
with the result that no accommodation
takes place. If there should be
any doubt about the vital roJe of face-to-face contact in this process, one
has only to observe the geographical patterns associated with linguistic
diffusion. Were nationwide radio and television the major so urce of this
diffusion, then the whole of Britain would be influeneed by a particular
innovation simultaneously.
This of course is not what happens: Londonbased innovations
reaeh Norwieh before they reaeh Sheffield, and
Sheffield before they reach Newcastle.
'[!lere are, f eourse, exeeptions to this. fertain highlv salient linsustic features, sueh as new words and idioms or fashionable
.

DIALECf eo

TACf

41

a ion s of individual words, may be imitated or copied from t levision

or radio (rather than accommodated
to).
is is today, for instance,
1 :obahly
the primo ry mechanism for the adoption of Ameri an English
features into British English. The phonology and grarnmar of modero
British English varieties remain a most totally unaffected by American
English, and indeed it is probable that, in terms of phonetics a?d
phonology, British and American varieties continue to diverge quite
rapidly. On the other hand, British English speakers are constantly
acquiring originally American idioms and Jexis. Strang (1970) lists a
considerable number of items that wer clearly 'Americanisms'
in the
1930s but which are an integral part of British English today. These
include: bakery, grocery, bingo, cheese-c oth, raincoat, soft drinks,
sweater, and toilet, The older British equivalen-e were: baker's shop,
grocer' s shop, housey-housey , butter-musli. r, mackintosh, minerals , pullover, and lavatory . More recent examples indude the following. From
about 1970 onwards, British English speakers have increasingly used
hopefully in the American manner, as a sentence adverbial, as in
Hopefully ir won't rain today. This usage was much attacked by selfappointed guardia n of the purity of British English in the earIy 1970s,
but is now very common indeed in the speech of a majority of British
speakers. Most British speakers used the word wireless at least until
1960, while today nearly everybody says radio. The early 1980s saw the
(possibly t :nporary) British a option of the American expressi n a
whole new ball game, even though ball game is never used (or even
understood proper y) in Britain in its literal sense. And there are also
signs that the American usage of through, as in Monday through Friday ,
is about to begin finding its way into British usage. Very many other
examples could be giv n. It has to be assumed that radio and especially,
television
la' ama 'or role in t e diffusion of innovations of t -s t, e,
o h of course written AmerIcan ~n~ sh and face-to-face contaq
with Americans will also be of imp rtanee. However, precisely becaus~
face-to-face contact with
mericans is a re!ati'ely rare event for most
Bntons, core phonology and s 'ntax remain uninfluenced.
. It is m:por ant to notice, though, that there is one situation where
core syntax a
p ono,ogy can e In .uence by the media. This is
where, fOI example, ther is considerable linguistic distance between a
national standard and local dialec s (such as in Italy), and individual
dialect speakers have made a conscious decision to acquire the standard.
Then they may use the language of the media lS a model: again, imitation
and copying is the mechanrsm Involved, and not accornmodation.

t.

42

DIALECT CONT ACT

DIALECT CONT ACT

43

Cromer
e

-r::

Great Yarrnouth
Lowcstoft

Table 2.1

Norwich

Class

variable

Word list
tyle

Reading
passage
stye

Formal
speech

000
000

000
000

001
000

003
000

004
000

014
002

011
001

055
008

011
023

019
027

044
068

060
077

029
025

02;
045

064
071

078
066

M
F

014
037

050
062

080
083

069
090

Sex

Middle middle

M
F

Lower middle

M
F

Upper

working

M
F

Middle working
Lower working

(o)

Casual
speech

Source: Trudgill, 1983.

sex differentiation,
with working-class
males hay! g more [o] than
working-class fem les, and yet rniddle-class f males having more [o]
than males of the same class. The conclusion to e draw frorn this is
that the newer rounde
vowel is coming into Norwich English (see map
2.1) frorn two different sourccs. First, it is entering as a prestige feature
(and herefore a particularly female feature) frorn the RP accent. The
R~-type pronunciation
i corningv in the first place, into rniddle-class
speech, precisely because it is rniddle-class Norwich people who have
most face-to-face contact with middle- and upper-class
P speakers
from Norwich and eIsewhere. Secondly, it i also coming into Norwich
as a non-prestige
feature (and therefore a particularly male feature)

Map 2.1

East Anglian towns

from the working-class acce ts of surrounding areas. The working-class

pronunciation
is entering Norwich, in the first instance, by means of
working-class
speech, precisely bec use it is working-class
Norwich
people v ho have most face-to-face contact with working-class speakers
from neighbouring towns.
Now, if it is the case that gcographicaI diffusion rcsults from accommodation, we would expect the factors note
in cnapt r 1 a being
operative during accommodation
to be found also at work in the case of
geographic: 1 diffusion. In particular, we would expec salient features to
be diffused rather than non-salient f atures. And e would expect so me
features to be diffused more quickly than others, depending on the
degree of salience and the number and strength of inhibiting and/or
accelerating factors, as discussed in chapter 1, that are relevant in each
case. (Geographical
diffusion models can, of course, tell us to expect
forms to diffuse out, ards fr m Iarge citics such as Phiiadelphia (Labov,
1982), Liverpool (Newbrook, 1982), and London (see below). But they

44

..,

..

DIALECf
DIALECf

CONTP,Cf

cannot pre ict which features : ill be diffused, and which not.) Is it then
the ea e that it actually is salient eatures which pread most rapidly? Is
10/, for example, a salient feature for speaker
in East Anglia - and is
that why the pronunciation
i~ changing?
The case of 10/, in fact, is . viously a r ther com lex one, and we wil!
attempt to tackle this kind of problem by exarnir .ig in some detail a
range of similar but simpler diffusion phenomena from our research in
East Anglia. The evidence that we shall employ in this examination is as
follows. During the period 1975-7, tape r cordings were made of casual
specch in 21 towns in the English counties of 1 orfolk, Suffolk, and
Essex (see map 2.1;, involving 348 individual spea ers. In addition, 60
spe .. .ers were recorded in 1968 in the original Norwich study (Trudgill,
1974); and 15 teenagers and young adults were recorded in a follow-up
study in Norwich in 1983. Analysis of these recordings, concentrating on
linguis ic changes taking place in this East Anglian area, have been
carried out employing the apparent-time
approach, which compares the
sp ech o younger and older informants.
This analysis reveals that in recent times the di fusin of pronunciation features outwards from London into adjacent arcas of East Anglia
has been quite dramatic. The general diffusion of linguistic features
frorn London is particularly
noticeable in the case of the towns of
Colchester,
Claeton, and Walton. In these towns the older spea cers
sound like East Anglians,
s an overall impression, while many younger
speakers, as is often noted by lay observers, sound like Londoners. (In
ac ual faet, close analysis f the speech of these younger people shows
that they do, ho vever, in many cases preserve a number of East Anglian
features: see below.)
One well-known and well-studied phonological feature that has been
diffused outwar s from London into East Anglia within the past 150
years or so is the loss of Ihl (see l. Milroy, 1983). As has been noted
bcfore (se e Trudgill, 1983). Iz-!e sness is well-known not to occur in the
traditionaJ rural accents of East Anglia (see map 2.2). Our research
shows, however , that h-dropping is now a well-established,
if variable,
featur
of working- lass urban speeeh in the entire East Anglian area.
The feature
is undergoing
geographical
diffusion outwards
frorn
London, and is also spreac!ing into rural varieties even in the north of
the region. At the moment, Ihl deletion is less frequent in J(ing's Lynn,
Great Yarrnouth, and Lowestoft than it is in 1 [orwich , and jess frequent
in Norwich than it is in the urban centres further south. (Note that 'less
frequent' he re means that the feature is found in the speech of fewer
individuals, and that it occurs less often in the speech of dlose who do
haveit.)

CONTAcr

45

(h) in hammer

Map 2.2 h-pronouncing areas in England (after Survey of English Dialects,

Orto n et al., 1962-71)
This widespread diffusion of h-dropping i no surprise. Our discussion
of accommodation,
and the relationship of aceommodation to diffusion,
leads us to regard h-dropping as a clear candidate for this type of rapid
diffusion.
f it is indeed featur s which are salient that are accommodated to - and thus subsequently diffused - then Ih/ and its absence are
cle rly highly salient. In Norwich English itself (Trudgill, 1974) (h) as a
linguistic variable is very much a marker (see p. 10), and of course lack
of h is a feature which is often commented on unfavourably and overtly
by teachers and others. This salience is obviously due to the phonemic
contrast factor noted in chap er 1, aIlied to the orthography of English
and social class dialect (see p. 11). In addi ion, it is intere ting to

46

DIALECT CONTACT

DIALECT CONT ACT

recisely those aspects of (h) which lead teachers to

notice and coudernn lack of h that actually speed the diffusion of this
same zero variant of the vr riable (cf. our discussion of American 10/,
p. 17). The loss of Ih/ is also undoubtedly acceierated by the phonologilo naturalness of a change that rernoves a glot al fricative frorn the
inventory (see Lass, 1984), especially when that consonant has a very
restricted privilege of oeeurrenee, i.e. syllable-initial only. The diffusion
of h-drapping outwards from London, t at is, does nothing to disabuse
us of the notion that diffusion results frorn aeeommodation.
We now, t .erefore, turn to an examination of other features undergoing diffusion in East Anglia, as revealed in analysis of our taperecorded data, to see if our hypotheses of diffusion througl accommodation and of salience are borne out. Four features stand out as being of
importance: three are listed in the following paragraphs, and the fourth
merits a special seetion.

47

su] pose that it is

(1) Cons rvativc rural East Anglian accents, at least in the north of
the area, do not (01' did not) have 'dark l' as a. allophone of 11/; that is,
hill, bel! were [hrl], [bel] rather than the more modern [hrl+ri], [bsl]. On
the other hand, the working-cJass aceents of London and the Home
Coun ies (the counties adjacent to London) vocalize Il/ in the typical
dark 1 environments to give hil!, milk [IOi!], [mro.sk] (see Wells, 1982).
Even middle-cJass speakers from these areas usually ha 'e very marked
velarization/pharyngealization and/or lip-rounding of [].
This London-area treatrnent of [t] has also led to various interesting
developments in the vowel system (see Wells, 1982). notably the merger
of vowels before Il/. For many Londoners, pairs such as the following
may no !onger be distinct:
doll: dole
pull : pool
fill : [eel

E~cn in midd!e-class speech, moreover, and even if complete vocalizI

.t>

ation of [1] does not occur, vowels may have radically different allo-

phones before Il/ as compared with elsewhere:

rude
code

rule
coal

[.lu:Ui]
[buui]

The interaction of the older East Anglian treatment of 11/with this

newer London and Home Counties system makes for a complex pattern
of change as the Home Counties system spreads. The current situation
appears to be as follows (see maps 2.3 and 2.4):

..

(a) Distinct allophones of lu:1 and loul before /11 occur in all the
towns investigatc ' except Cromer, Dereham, King's Lynn, Great
Yarmout,
Lowestoft, and Norwich. In Hadleigh and
St wmarket this feature is eonfined to younger speakers of
app oximate!y 30 and under.
(b) St ong velarization and labialization, but without complete
voealization, occur in Clacton, Walton, Colchester, Wive hoe,
Felixstowe, and Sudbury for al! speakers, and for younger
speakers in Bury, Harwich , Ipswich, Woodbridge, and Hadleigh.
(e) The complete merger of lul and lu:/, and of 101 and lo\> before IIl,
as in pull:pool, doll:dole, has taken place in Clacton and Walton,
as well as in the speech of people under 30 or so in Colcl e ter,
Wivenhoe, and Fclixstowe, and is variably present in yo mger
Sudbury peech.
(d) Complete vocalization of Il/ has occurred only in Clacton, and
there only for some speakers.
If, then, we wish to aseribe iffu ion to accommodation, we would
like o be in a position to argue that vocalizati n of [!] is for Eas
Anglians a salient feature of London and Home Counties English. It is
not in faet a linguistic feature that i often commented on overtly by
teachers or anybody el e. On the other hand, it is a feature which is
widely imitated when non-Londoners are copying London Eng!ish for
humorous or other purposes. It does not, of course, in its early stages
involve loss of surface phonemic contrasts, but in its later stages it
certainly does, leading, as we have seen, to a cornplex series of neutralizations and the development of a whole new set of diphthongs. We
cannot, therefore , be absolutely convinced that [-vocalization is a feature for which we would have predicted accommodation, but t ere is at
least some reason to suggest that the involv ment of surface phonemic
contrast do es lead to a degree of salience. We can also argue for the
phonological naturalness of this ehange, ince the vocaliza tion of dark !
to an [u]-like vowel (and of c1ear l to [iD is very well attested in the
world's languages.
(2) The towns in the northern part of the East Anglian region
- King's Lynn, Cromer, Dcreham, Norwich, Great Yarmouth, and
Lowestoft - have laul as in house as [ses]. All other towns have [EH) or
[eu], In the northern towns, the phonological process that \Vells (1982)
has labelled smoothing, whereby triphthongs consisting of diphthongs
plus shwa become monophthongs, gives lau/ + I-;I > [q:], as in tower
[tq.], ploughing [plq:n]. In middle-c1ass accent , this vowel is identieal

48

DIALECf

CONTACf

DIALECf

CONT ACf

49

(1

o
strong velarization
and labializauon

strong velarization
and labialization

i
Map 2.3
with thc 10:1 of arm, path, making tower and lar homophonous.
Working-class aeeents, on the other hand, have 10:1 as [a: J, and therefore
retain a distinetion between tar and tower even when smoothing has
taken place.
In faet, in these northern East Anglian tow is, smoothing is perhaps
m re widespread than anywhere else in England, involving not on.y [a:]
in tower and [a:] in fire, but also produeing player as [pla.], going as
[go:n], seeing as [ss:n], lower as [lo:], and doing as [ds:n]. It is probably
also part of a wider proeess that deletes post-vocalic l'dl, as in rhere [o E;)]
> [s.], sure [SH'd} > [sa.].
As map 2.5 shows, the smoothing of lou'dl to 10:1 and of other
triphthor
; is the only example the East Anglian study threw up of a
linguistie change in progre ss that is spreading in a southerly rather than
northerly
direetion:
while older speakers in Ipswieh, Woodbridge,
Stowrnarket,
and Hadleig
have tower [tEtlO ete., younger speakers
variably have the monophthonga!
forms, especially in the lexieal set of
fire and of sure and there. This diffusion of a Iinguistie innovation in the

Map 2.4

/\/, younger speakers, East Anglia

'wrang' direetion poses some problems for an explanation based on a

diffusion model that ineorporates
distanee and population parameters.
It is t se models that tell us to expeet the sta te of affairs that we mo t
often find with respeet to geographieal diffus- n in East Angra, namely
that forms spread out from London, which is broadly sp aking to say
frorn so th to north. It is not, in faet, yet clear why smoothing is
spreading southwards,
but it is likely that we will be able to seek
an explanation
in the faet th t smoothing already oceurs not only in
Norwieh, for example, but also with certain vowels in London, in the
midlands, and in the RP aeeent. Geographieal!y,
smoothing may have
originated in a num er of different locations.
Whe her smoothing. again, can be assigne a high degree of salience
such that
e would prediet that it would be accommodated
to, and
therefore diffused geographically,
is not c1ear. Again, it is not a feature
that appears to attraet much overt eomment. On the other hand, it is
probable that in Norwieh English at least it is a linguistie variable of the
marker type. And once again it certainly does in olve surface phonemic

DlALECf

50

DlALECf

Figure 2.1

'...,.--,,

, l.

--

l_"' ....
.r-.._ '\....

I
'\..J

.>

'-

----,

U\

contrasts,
Iences:

.1
.e,

Monophthongization

\....._-- ...._-<.~:::::-::::::

of laudl etc .. East Anglia

ince we ge , in northern

East Anglia, the following equiva-

tower

lou!

fire

loi!
Itl:1

+ Idl > 10:1

+ Idl > 10:1
+ Idl > 13:1

Itldl
lu:1

+ Idl >

do ir
pure
going

/_

tJ"''',,\

... _--_/

I
I

Map 2.5

>

/3:1
/:):1

as
as
as
as
as

in tar
in [ar
in dirt
in purr
in lawn

\3) The boundary between East Anglia, which has IN and lu/ distinct,
as 10 cud and could, and the midlands, which in vernacular speech has
only lul, runs to the west of King's Lynn through the Fenland, close to
the Norfolk-Lincolnshire
border (see Ch mbers and Trudgill, 1980).
Nevertheless, in our East Anglian data there is a clear phonetic gradicnt
in the actual realization of the IN vowel (see figure 2.1; map 2.6).
Wisbech has [r], and King's Lyr.n [1>],while 01 er rural Norfolk speakers
in most of the county have the back vowel [Al (i.e. unrounded
[oj).

..

51

IAI in East Anglia

~v----- ....
-)

'J"

--

CONT ACT

CONTACf

lorwich , Cromer, Dereham, Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft, and Stowmarket a11 have an RP-like central [B 1 for al! age groups. Th other
urban centres in the so th of the region, however, are undergoing
change in the realization of IN, in that the fronting of this vowel, which
is typical of London and Borne Counties speech, is on the increase.
These towns, that is, have vowel qualities for iN ranging from [B] to [a!L]
depending on the age of the speaker
nd the proximity of the town to
London.
This is a serious problem for the approach we have been adopting.
We have no evidence that front realizations of IN are particularly salient
for East Anglian speakers, and there seems to be no particular reason
why they should be. The change is a gradual and phonetic one, with no
phonemic oppositions involved. And he phonetic distance between the
different regional variants would no appe r to be sufficient to draw
attention to this vowel. Yet, the evidence is ciear that diffusicn is taking
place. We are forced, therefore, to take the posi ion that in this case a
non-salient feature is being di fused and therefore, we assume, being
accommodated
to, as mor northerly East A glian speal ers come into
contact with more sou hern speakers. lf this is the case, then it may be
that the explanation for the succes of this fronting of IN may lie in an
accelerating factor alone , narnely that of phonological naturalness - in
this case of the chain-sl.ift type, having to do with pressures in phonological space (Martinet, 1955) (see figure 2.2). That is, the same impetus
that led to tl e beginnings of this change in London itself is sufficiently
strong to encourage its spread geographically also.
Nevertheless,
we must concede that any initial optimism about our
ability to predict precisely which Iinguistic features wiIl be diffused from
one variety to another is a little dampened by the phenomenon
of the
fronting of IN in East Anglia. It is therefore comforting
o note that the
principies that we adopted in chapter 1 are of some considerable value
when we come to an exarnination of those London features
hich could
have been diffused out into East Anglia but which, so far at least,
actually have not been .

52

DIALECf CONTACf

DIALECf CONTACf

(e) l'dl in water as ['d] rather than [:]

(d) l'dl in horses, wanted ete. rather
p. 135).

[y]

~
(

-,

.,.J

\/

.. 1

_1Il__

((

r
~-

"

>~ \..O,..,.. --'\

'-J

~
~t)

V\

Map 2.6

\._--- ........ ...;.~~;::,

IAI in East Anglia.

We noted above that in southern East Anglia younger urban speakers

's und like Londoners,
but that closer linguistic analysis s o S that
they do preserve a number of non-London, East _' nglian features.
These features include:

...,

(a) la:1 inJar ete. as [a:,] rather than [a:] (se e also chapter 4, p. 136)
(b) li:! in meat as [] rather than [';JI]

..

Phonological pressures leading io IAI fronting

4,

These features constitute, for the linguist, striking

ifferenccs between
London and East Anglian phonology. They are, on the other hand, very
slow indeed to dif use into East Anglia, if indeed th y diffuse at al!.
Note, therefore, that feature (a) is a pure y phonetic difference that we
wouId not exp et to be salient, and that it is the same feature that we
saw in chapter 1 to be not even aeeommod ted to within a single speeeh
eommunity. Featur
(b) is similarly a purely p onetie ifferenee of very
low salienee. Features (e) and (d) both involve un ressed syllable but
could be argued to be of so me potential salience, sinee in feature (e)
London [e] is identical to East An lian IA/, while in feature (d) alternation between two phonernes is involved - normally a sure sign th t a
difference will be alient. It is therefore gratifying to note that in both
cases we cal point to the presenee of the same strong inhibiting factor
w noted in the case of accommodation
in chapter 1: phonotactic
constraints. If London [:] is indeed identified with East Anglian IN, it
can nevertheless not be tra rsrnitted as such into East Anglian English
since IN, one of the hecked vowels that occurs in closed syllabJes only,
obviously cannot occur in word-final position. And unstressed III is
unlikely, for many East Anglian speakers, to replace I';JI . n it ms such as
horses and wanted since their accents have a phonotactic
rule which
allows l'dl as the only vowel which may occur pre-consonantally
in
unstressed syllables. Thus David la;:eiv';Jd/-/Cle:v';Jd/,
village Mi';J]1 etc.
Indeed, conservative East Anglian accents, at least in the north of the
region, have a rule which permits l'dl a the only unstressed vowel in any
unstressed syIlable, inc1uding word-final position:
money
very

Im'An'dl
Iv'Erd!

window

/w'rndo/

Tuesday

/t'u.zda/

etc.

Phonotactic constraints may change of course, as they have in

ore
innovati g East Anglian accents, vhich now permit final -/i:1 in money
etc. and -/u:1 in window etc. But in the meantime they may have a very
inhibiting effect on accommodation
to other dialects and, as a consequence, on the proce s of diffusion.
Diffusion through

Figure 2.2

than /JI (see also ehapter

53

accommodation:

ro

em

Ther
is still one featu e subject to diffusion into East Anglia from
London that we have not yet discussed. This is the variable merger of 18/

_4

DlJ\LECf

vith If/, and of 101with idl (word-initiall ,) and Ivl (elsewhere), w tic
is a well-known eatu e of London English (see WeJls, 1982), In the
East Anglian study, these mergers provide a striking and challenging
example of the geographical
spr ad of linguistic innovations.
In the
speech of informants in the region aged over 30, hese mergers are not
found at all anywhere, except for a small number of speakers in Clacto ,
I the speech of informants aged under 25, on the other hand, and most
strikingly in the speech of teenage informants, we find these merg rs in
the accents of all the urban centres except Dereham,
Cromer, and
King's Lynn. It is, however, for most speakers a very variable feature,
and is much more common with lel than with iol, (It is also relatively
unusual in the speech of middle-class inforrnants.)
The extraordinari!'
rapid
eo ra hical diffusion of this articular
linguistic
ealure i one tllat requires examination
an ex lallation.
Our ata show that the merger is tota y a sent from the speech of even
l l-year-olds in the 1968 Norwich survey, but that it is very common
indeed in the speech of working-class I-year-olds in the 1983 Norwich
survey. That is, speakers born in 1957 do not nave it at al!, while
speakers born in 1967 have it extensively (see map 2,7), The probl m
th n is thi . If we are claiming that accommodation
is crucial to th
geographical
diffusion of linguistic .nnovations,
and if we are a150
claiming that face-to-face interaction i essential for accommodation
to
take place, then how do "ve explain the prevalence of this merger in
N rwich adolescent speech? The London-based
innovation is making its
way into Norwich and other East Anglian centres. but it is found for the
most part in the speech of exactly those people who, probably, have
~.ast face-to-facc contact with Londoners - .amely teenagers. \Ve have
no figures for face-to-face contacts, but it does seem lik ly that conversations with the working-class Londoners who have this merger are most
often earried out by adu/t working-class Norwich people who travel to
the London area or meet Lon oners in the course of their work.
A number of explanations,
all of them s eculative, can be advanced
for his phenomenon.
For instance, we can argue for the importanc
of
attitudina! factors, and c1aim that the desirability of Cockney for adolescent males, with its stereotyped image of street-sophisticated
toughness,
is more important here than accommodation
in face-to-face contact.
(Casual observers have in fact argued here for the impact of te evision
programmes
such as the very popular 'Minder ' in which the main
charaeters spea Cockney. If this were the only influence, however.
e
would expect to find lel being mergec with Ifl ali over Britain. This is
definite!y not what we do find ,
ather we find a c1ear pattern of
geogr:lphical spread, with towns nearer to London being influenced

lo

DlALECf CONTACf

CONTACf

55

\
\~.~

"

"

\
\
f

'..'--,
"-,

\.",.

1',,-,,;

\.l' .....
"")
(-

I
I

>~ __-,

r,,~,\
....._J

"",,--

"\

I._-,--,_-<e~~~

older
speakers

i
Map 2,7

Merger of lel and IfJ, East Anglia

before those further away, and those even further away not being
influenced at all. Televisin may be part of a 'softening-up'
process
leading to the adoption of the merger, but it does not cause it.) W,; can
also argue, instead or as wel!, that face-toface contacts do take place"
but perhaps in
orwich rather than in London, with tourists, inmigrants or even vsitin footbalI supporters bringing new lin uistic
, orms in with t ",
ne can even argue that the spread of the loss of the
IfI-/el contrast might be due to an increasing failure by adults in Nor vich
to correct If/ for lel as an infantilismo This in turn would be due to
increasing familiarity with - and therefore increased tolerance of - this
London feature
n the pan of adults as a result of their face-to-face
contaets with Londoners.
Ho w ever, it eems unlikely that any of these factors on their own can
seriously be advanced as the major explanation. In particular, tourists in

DIALECT CONT ACT

56

DIALECT

Norwich tend to be of the middle-c ass, cathedral-visiting,

18/-pronouncing type. and in any case the threshold hypothesis that we developed
above suggests that occasional e ntacts with temporary visitors are
unlikely to have any strong influence. It i possible, however, that some
or all of these factors in cornbination may be of so me relevance.
There are also, however, two other potentially important ways i
which East Anglian .cenagers might have extend d face-to-face contacts
with speaker
of London English withou themselves actually leaving
their own arca. 1 both cases, the bearers of the London-type forrns are
in a very srnall minority, and so we must assume considerable inftuenc
frorn attitudin IIactors; but at least we can point to genuine ace-io-face
contact, and thus accommodation.
First, we can recall frorn chapter 1
that it has now become clcar that there may be speakers who hay lived
al! their lives in a particular area who have failed, at some points, to
acquire the local accent correctly. We saw that Norwich speakers whose
parents a
not natives of the arca fail to acquire the normal moan
-mown distinction hat the majority of local people ave. This of course
opens up the possibility that Norwich English will eventual!y lose this
distinction,
not only as a result of accommodation
by speakers
o
speakers of RP, London, and other external forms of English, but also
through accommodation
to these 'fifth columnists' who appear to speak
the local dialect, but who in Iact do not exactly do so. We have no
evi .....
nce that this is what has happened in th e se of [m-thin , but t i at
least a possibility.
Secondly, we can look at another group of individuals who may have
an influence out of all proponion to their percentage in the p pulation.
The American lingu ist and dia!ectologist Gary Underwood reports (personal communication)
from his childhood in the rural American south
that childri ..n who moved with their families to urban areas such as
Memp iis ai.d then returned, say, two years later, having acqui ed the
urban dialect , were very inftuential in spreading urban speech forms to
their rural friends. These indivi uals were known and considered still to
be locals, insiders, Their langua e was therefore not ignored or rejected
as being foreign and alen as it would have been had they been genuine
outsiders. They were therefore accommodated
to, particularly since
thev were felt to e more sophisticated
than the stay-at-homes.
The
sarne point is ma e by the pioneering Norw gian social dialectologist
Anders Stcinsholt. In his study of the dialect of Hedrum, southern
Norway, and the inftuence on it of the dialect of the neighbouring town
f Larvik, Steinsholt (1962) develops he notion of the sprkmisjoncer or
'language missionary'. He writ s (my tran lation):
The urban dialect spreads into Hedrum partly as a result of the
influence of particular individuals living in different parts of the

..

57

'TACT

area. S ..' indivi uals - we can call them 'lang age missio aries'may be village people who have been particularly
heavily
influenced by the urban dialect. The most important language
missionaries are first the young girl wh e me horne after livi g
for a while in the town, and secondly the whalers.
Factors such as these cannat
e incorporu.ed
readily into explanatory
diffusion models. They do nevertheless stress the importance of linguistic accommodation
in the dif usion process. If the attitudinal factors are
right, and particularly if individuals are p rceived as being insiders by a
certain group of speakers even though they are linguistically distinct,
then they can have a considerable linguistic influence through face-toface contact in spite of being heavily out umbered. This is to say that,
while a number of different factors have probably been at wo k in
bringing about the drarnatic introduction
of the /f/-/81 me ger to
Norwich (and other centres), a very important feature may well have
been the in-migration
of a relatively small nurnber of families and
ir ividuals into the city from the London afea, and the return to
Norwich o families temporarily resident in this sarne area. Cert inly,
in-rnigration fr m the Horne Counties to Norfolk has been heav . in tire
past 25 years,
The Ift-/el merger are also, of course , not at al! surprising frorn t le
perspectiv
of saiience and accommodation.
The mergers, obviously,
involve a loss of contrast between phonemic units (with orthography
perhaps having some influence ~, and as such must be highly salient.
There is, it is true,
ome possibility of delay due to the inhibiting
inftuence of homonymic clash, but the functional load in English of 191
and 101 i rather low ( ee Gim on, 1980), and minimal pairs such as
thinfin, lather.lava are rather hard to come by. And set against that
there is the considerable
acce erating infiuence of the high degree of
naturalness of the loss of lei and 10/. Both are, of course , unusual in the
world'
languagcs, acquired late by children. and subject to loss or
change in many varieties of English. T ey are ph nologica!ly mar ed.
and good candidates for variable merger and eventual loss.

Part al accommodati

on in contact sltuations

We hay
n ar uing, then, that accommodation.
with its constraints
and herefore its regularities,
1S an essentla
part o t e geograp-hica.l
diffusi n of at least hon o ical forms. For a complete understanding,
however, of what happens in contact between dialects, it is necessary to
notice an important complication. This is that the linguistic form which
is, as it were, transmitted frorn the ori inatin diaiect, is not '1ecessarily

58

DlALECf

CONTACf

DlALECf CONTACf

pit
pet

//

par

1l1!1 101 pot

IEI

lul
ItJ

59

put
but

accents distinguish could and cud, put and putt. Northern

accents do ot, having lul throughout.
Dialectological
research by the Survey of English Dialects based at
Leeds University (Orton et al., 19 2-71), and by others (see Chambers
and Trudgill, 1980), shows that whiJe there are large areas of orthern
and southern England where the fivc- and six-vowel systems respectiveIy are found, there is also a tra isition zone of some considera l~ s~le
between the two wh re intermedia te varieties occu . These are vaneties
which have the contrast between lul and lA!, but only to a certain extent.
The south rn six-vowel system is gradually spreading northwards, and
in this transition zone (depending also on phonological environment,
frequency of occurrence, formality of style, and so on) so me speakers
have transferred or are transferring particular words from the lul pronunciation to the lA! pronunciation
(see table 2.2). Dialects which are of
this sort we can caJl mixed dial cts. Clearly, the speakers of these
dialects are not accommodating
to the southern vowel system as such,
but changing their pronunciations
of individual lexical items.
Southern

Table 2.2

Transition in mixed dialects

pul

Northern
Mixed

pit

111

lul

pet

lE!

1:')1 por

par
while southern

..

varieties

put, b

la!

have the six-vowel system:

up

cup

u
u

ulA

U/A

{~

u
u

u
u

el

butter love come

but

Southern
Sources: Orton

bui! pusii

al., 1962-71, and Chambers and Trudgill, 1980.

Notice that we would expect this change to be spreading northward

rather
lowly since, as we saw in chapter 1, the lA! vowel of southern
accents is not especially salient for northern speakers because, f r t ern,
it is not involved in any phonological contrast. (The whole change, of
course, .onsists of the acquisition of the relevan! contrast.) \Ve would
therefore expect relatively little accommodation
to occur, and hence
relatively slow diffusion. On the other hand, the large phonetic distance
between high back rounded lul and low central unrounded lA! will, we
would expect, make for a certain degre of salience, and explain why
the isogloss continues to move northward to the extent it does.
The ..rne sort of process, but in reverse, can be een at work (see
Trudgill, 1983) i 1 the difft-sion of the loss of the moan:mown cont ast
(see chapter 1) out from the Lond n area into East Anglia. The contrast

60

DIALECT

DlALECT

CONTACT

between pair such as nose.knows , sole:soul, road:rowed is disappearing, and the way in which it is disappearing in some areas is a mirror
image of the process illustrated in table 2.2. Working-class speakers in
the southern part of East Anglia, .. 5 a result of contact with and
incomplete)
aceomrnodation
to speakers of dialect which have the
rnerger, re effceting the merger i their o n speech by transjerring
words, individually, from the lu:1 set to the ,'Au! set. Table 2.3 sumrnarizes t e type of diachronic proeess involv d. Stages 2 and 3 repr sent
mixed di al cts. F. further exarnples of the same phenomenon,
see
Milroy (1978).

..

Table 2.3

Transition by word transfer

Stage 1

tage 2

Stage 3

Stage 4

lu:1
lu:1
lu:1
Il\uI
1t.U1
IAUI

lu:1
lu:1
IAUI
/hul
Il\ul
IAuI

lu:1
IAUI
lsu!
Ihul
hui
II\UI

IAuI
h,uI
l\ul
Ihul
Il\ul
Il\uI

road
moan

boat
low

know

old

Sources: Orton el al., 1962-71, Chambers and Trudgill, 1980.

--3>

Interrnediate forrns
l\ ixed dialects are varieties where accommodation
is takin
lace but
lere 1 las not gone to comp etlOn.
e note now, however, that th re
are oth '-r ways in which accommo ation can also be partial. Mixed
dialects are lexically partially accommodated.
In other v~rieties
hich
followin
ham ers see
am ers an
ru gll ,
we can ca l
fudge dialects, the accommo atlOn IS !Deom Jete b be!Da artlal
p onetica y.
a' IS involve
15 the development
in dialect contact of
orms that are phoneticaf/y intermediate between those of the riginal
and target dia ects. Table 2.4, for example, shows the sort of situation
that OCCur5 in fudged dialects in the lu/-IA! transition zone between
northern and southern England, in which con act between varieties with
thc vowel lA! and vari eties with only the vowel lul have given rise to an
intermediatc
vowel quality [Y] .
Similarly, in the case of the East Anglian moan:mown rnerger, some
speakers, partieularly those in the north of the rea who come from
middle-class
backgrounds
and have face-to-fac
contaets with RP
speakers, are completing the merger by a process of approximation,
which again involves the development
of phonetically
interrnediate
W

.'

Table 2.4

Northern
Fudged
Soiuhern

61

CONTACT

Transition in fudged dialects

put

bull

pus

bu!

IIp

cup

1{

1{

1{

1{

1{

1{

1{

'i

1{

1\

/1.

1\

1\

/1.

/1.

/1.

butter love

come

So urce: Chambers and Trudgill, 1980.

forms. The lu:1 vowel and the IAul vowel are both gradually modified
phonetically until they
eet, as in tabIe 2.5. (In the first instance, as
stage 2 shows, the forrns produced may be intermediate between t ose
of the original and target dialects: original [u:] > interme iate [ou] >
target [eu], parallel to the [u] > ['d (> [A]) cas above. U tirnately,
however, sine this is a merger and not a split as in the lsl-hs! case, the
end result, if the process goes to comple ion, may also be a vow 1
int rmediate between the origi al dialect's formerly distinct vowels.)
Stages 2 and 3 are typical of fudged dialects. Note that fudged diale ts
force a redefinition of lexical diffusion whieh, in that it focuses on the
spread of changes through the lexicon, is usually characterized
(see
Wang, 1969) as being 'phoneticalIy
sudden but lexically gradual'.
Clearly, fudging is both phonetically and lexically gradual.
Table 2.5

Transition by approximation
Stage 1

Stage 2

Stage 3

Stage 4

[u:]

[Ou]

boat
low
know

lu:!
I :/
u:/

Irm!
Irm/

[g ]
[ou]

[ou]
[eu]
[eu]
[eti]
[eu]

old

/m!

[eu]

[gu]

leul
leul
leul
leul
leul
laul

road
moan

[ou]

Source: Chambers and Trudgill, 1980.

In the East Anglian case, it is clear why the t 'o different strateges of
transfer and approximation
are emp oyed, and why the two different
types of dialect - mixed and fud ed - result. Middle-class East Anglian
speakers are accommodating
to oth-r rniddle- or upper-class speakers,
including those present in their own cornmunity,
ho already have
P
or near-RP accer t in which the vowel o boat, low ete. is in fact [eu] or
something close to it. The working-class speakers in the south, on the
other hand, are accomrnodating
to other working-class speakers resident in geographieally adjacent areas who, as is typical of the London
region, have a vowel of thc type [tm- u] in boat, low etc. In bot : cases

62

DIALECf

the end result is phono ogical: a mcrger of two formerly

istinct vowels
and, at least in the next generatio,
of speaker,
the reduction of the
inventory of vowels by one. The impetus for the el ange is al so phonological: accornmodation
takes place because this feature has to do with
phonemic contra t and is therefor
salien.
'ut in both cases, the
immcdiate motivation is phoi eti - the acquis.tion of a pronunciation of
a particular word (and, subsequently,
an increasingly large group of
words) phonetically similar to that of the target accent. This motivation
will, of course, also be operati e even in cases where no phonological
e l nge resu!ts: there are East Anglia
accents, for instance, where lu:1
has changed to /eul in the set of boat, road etc. under the infl ience of
Por other varieties, but where fAul in low, know etc. is still distinct.
Accornrnodation,
therefore,
may be incomplete in three different
ways. Speakers may reduce pronunciation
di similarities with
ther
speakers (a) by alternating their own variant of a form with that of the
othcr soeakers; (l ) by using the other speakers' variant in some words
bu! not others (transfer/rnixed
dialects); and (e) by using pronunciations
intermediate
between
those
of the
vo accents
in contact
(approxima ionlfudged dialects). Of course, all three rnav occur in
conjunction with each other.
Inter

ialect

DIALECf

CONTACf

CONTACf

63

be regarded as being phoneticaily interrnedicte between 10:1 and loml,

ut this vowcl did not develop as a result of (social) dialcct contact. It
was already in existence, in words such as Ig0yl 'fun'. What happened
was simply that words were reallocated to this vowel that formerly had
10:1 or Ia:.tl/, and the selection of this vowel took place beca use it was
phonetically intermediate.
The label 'intermediate'
can also be a lied to interdiaJect wore
forms, SUC1 as tose studied by Rekdal (1971; cited in ens, 1982).
Rekdal invcstigated long-term accomrnodation
by speakers frorn Sunndal,
orway, to Os10 Norwegian, after residence in Oslo offrom one to
five years. She noted the occurrence of a number of 'hybrid' forms in the
speech of her informants that are found in neither Os! nar Sunndal
'Norwegian. Ex mples incIude:

'to work'
'the matches'

Sunnda
Ijubl
Ify~tibJ1J

Osio
/joba/
Ify~(bngl

interdialect
/jubo/
Ir. Hikanl

Developments
of this sort have, of course, long been noted by dialect
geo ;"'phers as occurrincr in gf'ograpbical
djalect cautact arcas and
resulting in permanent
interdialect
forms in transition zones. At the
lexica
evel, for instance, t ere IS the \ 'e - n
n dialect
exarnple where an area in which 'patato' is Grundbirne 'ground pear' i
separated from an area where it is Erdapfel 'earth apple' by an intervening area i which the fa mis Erdbirne. A modern British example of the
same phenomenon
is the usage of take away in central and southern
England to refer to Chinese and other evtablishments from which hot
food can be bought for consumption
off the premises. This southern
area of Britain is divided from a northern arca (rnostly Scotland and
Norther: Ireland), where the term carry out is used. by an intermediate
area (part of northern England) in which the intermediate form take out
is employed.
It is impor ant to note, howe er, that interdialect forms, defined ::lS
forms arising out of dialect contact whicn do not occur in the origina.!....
chalects tat are or were 10 contact, do not necessanly have fa b~
mtermeamte 10 an sirn le or straightforward way. In the complex series
o interactions that may arise in la ect contact situations, interdia!ect
forrns may arise out of accornrnodation
1hat is 'imperfect' in ways othe~,
~an by slmply being 'ncomp!cte,
A good grammatical example of this ype of accornmodation
is provided by Cheshire (1982) on the speech of working-class adolescen s in
Reading, England. She observes a confusing situation in her taperecorded data with respect to present-tense
forms of the verb do: one
finds in her data not only 1 do and he does, a in standard English, but

64

DIALECT CONTACT

DIALECT CONTACT

also 1 does and he do, as well as 1 dos and he dos (/du:z1). It does not
appear possible to correlate these forms satisfac orily with any social
tactors. Cheshire notes, howe er , that it is sensible to recognize that do
is in faet two verbs in English, the main verb and the auxiliary. The same
is true , of course, of have. In Reading English, the non-standard
form
has is used with al! persons of the ve b, a. d indeed, as in many other
south-western dialects, the local dialcct has -s as the marker of the
present tense throughout the paradigm for al! verbs: l Izas, we goes, they
likes etc. Note, however, the percentage of non-standard has employed
by the three groups of t e agers Cheshire investig ted when tokens of
ha ve are divide into auxiliary and main verb:
percentage

non-standard

group A
group B
group C

main verb
43
100
52

'has'
auxiliary
O
O

The form has, that is, is only used for the ful! verb have. Where have is
thc auxiliary, forms without -S occur: ~ e has a good time vs. We've dono
ir. The sarne hing turns out to be true, although in a rather more
complicated
vay, of do. If we distinguish between main verb and
auxiliary categories, and als look separately at scores for third-person
singular, which behaves irregularly in standard English, then Cheshire's
data gives liS the percentage of do, does, and dos forms given in table
2.6.
Table 2.6

Forms of do in Reading English (per cent)

1, 2, 3 plural
3 singular
,1

do

Main verb
dos

does

do

36t
14

*7
*43

t57
t43t

*99+
"68

Auxiliary
dos
O
O

does
1

32t

Source: Cheshire. 1982.

We interpret the figures in table 2.6 as follows. The original Reading

dialect (and indeed this is confirmed by observations of the speech of
elderly Reading speakers) distinguished between do for all persons as
the auxiliary and dos for all persons as the main verb: he forms labelled
* are the original dialect forms. The next stage, represented in the tab e
by the sign t. in volved the replacement of the dialcct forrn dos by the
standard English form does. Note, however, that we assume at this stage
merely the importation of s andard forms, not function: the distinction
remained one between auxiliary and rnain verb, and not one between

..

65

third-person
singular and other per ons. Now the final stage of the
process involves the im orration frorn standard English of this person
distinction: standard English forrns are signalle
in the table by the
sign :j:. Note that auxiliary dos, whieh oceurs in neither the original
Reading dialeet nor standard English, seo res O per cent. Note also that
first-, second-, and third-person plural auxiliary do, which occurred in
both dia!ects, scores 99 per cent, while l ird-p rson singular main verb
does, when combined with the similar forms dos in the same context,
scores 86 per eent. The other standard forms - first-, second-, aad [hirdpersoi plural main verb do (36 per cent) and third-person
singular
auxiliary does (32 per cent) - are doing quite well, but non-standar
dialect forms are doing even better: fi st-, second-, and third-person
plural main verb does at 57 per cent, and third-person singular auxiliary
do at 68 per cent, aithough the former, as a result of standard influence,
has almost replaced the original form dos (7 per cent). Finally, the 1 per
cent figure under first-, second-, and third-person plural auxiliary does is
probably so low as to be irnpossible to discuss with any confidence.
What, howev r, of the figure of 14 per cent under third-person singular
main verb do? This is a real puzzle because, while it does not occur in
either of the two original dialects, it is nevertheless used 14 times out of
every 100 by young Reading speakers, thus:
standard English
1 do it, do I?
He does it, does he?

original Reading
1 dos/does it, do I?
He dos/does it, o he?

younger Reading
1 does/ o it, do I?
He do/dosidoes it,
do/does he?

It can be argued, 1 believe, that the form he do . has developed an

occurs as an interdialect formo It is a forro that occurs in neither the
original Reading dialect nor in standard English, but arises out of
interaction between the . It is not really, of course, a fudged or an
intermediate form, but it is a form that has arisen out of dialect contact.
The mechanism is presumablv hypercorrection
or some other form of
hyp radaptation (see below), but straightforward
confusion in a rather
complex situation - involving three forms, only one of which does not
occur in the standard, and a switch-over from an auxiliary/main verb
distinction to a person distinction - cannot altogether be ruled out. In
any case, the main lesson we can draw from this - and it is an important
one, since we shall be dealing in later chapters with dialect mixtures
where more than two contact varieties are involved and whe
genuinely
intermediate forms are therefore less likely - is that dialect ontact va
accommodation,
with or without diffusion, is a complex pracess. We
must be alert to interaction among dialects, rather than straightfor ward
infiuence, as being instrumental in the development of interdialect.

DlALECf

66

DlALECf

changed. In the case of north of England

tations, examples might include:

Hyperdialectsms
Gi 'en that interdialect
fo s can rise out of interaction,
as well as
compromise,
between dialects, 'we may now note further example of
ir, eraction of different types, and at diffe ent linguistic levels. The
example from the grammar of Reading Engli h that we have just . cen
discussing involved contact between social ialects, and t e social diffusion of linguistic fonns through accommodation.
Equally interesting are
similar interdialect forms that have arisen out of the geographical diffusio. of linguisti features of the sort we discussed earlier in this chapter.
lf we think about this type of diffusion in mi!itary terms, as it is often
tempting to do, then it is perhaps not too fanciful to say that many urban
centres in the south of England are, as it were, under attack linguistically frorn London, Our recent research in Norwich (se e above) has
demonstrated
quite c1carly that London-based forros such as the merger
of IV and 181are making their way into the English spoken there. It also
shows, however, that in this state of siege a number of speakers of
Norwich English appear to be actively engaged in fighting back. They
are mostly younger working-class men, and the form their action against
Home Counties and London incursions takes is a interesting one for
historical linguistics and the study of linguistic cnange generally.
\Ve can perhaps best describe the forro that this linguis ic rearguard
action is taking by the labe! hyperdialectism,
Hyperdialectism
is a form
of hyperadaptation,
the best-kno vn form of \'x;hich s, of course, h ercorrection. 1-ypercorrecnons
consist o at empts to adopt a more pr stigous variety of speech which, throughovergeneralization,
eads to t <>
roduction o orms w le
o not occur in the target resti e varie . A
well-known
ntish example of this is provi e by north of England
speakers' attempts to acquire a south o Englan
pronuncia ion:
'correction' Ibutl
hypercorreetion
Ibubl

> Ibll.tI but

> /btl;gl butcher

In a.n importa~t p~p'.'r, Knowles (1978) has pointed out that hypercorrection (and this will In fact be true of any form of hyperadaptation)
is of
t:",o different typ~s. In the first type, .speakers perpetrate hvpercorre.c.::..
tlO11Sbecause as It were the do 110tknow .
b
. their anal ses of
t e arget variety are faulty. In the second, speakers do have a correct
ana ysis of the target variety, but they make mistakes 'in the heat of the
mament' as performance errors which they may notice and may correcto
In the flow of connected speech, the a 1 a conversion rule in an
~correet envirQ!l.ment, Knowles points out that this is particularly likely
to bappen where two tok ns of a segment that is a candidate for change
occur in close proxirnity, but where only one of them sbould be

..

CONTACT

67

CO TAcr

gas-f,wsk
cup-hook

north
Ig<esm<eskl
Ikuphukl

to south of Engla: d adap-

south
/gesmc.sk/
/kxphuk/

hypercorrect
/go:smo:skl
Iki\phi\kI

and of CO"13e forms such as Igo:sm<eskl and /kuphxk/ may also occur.
The hyperdiale .tisms that we are dealing with here ail appear, importantly, to be of th first, msanalys.s, type. The for 1 that the I yperdia!ectism takes in Norwich is as follows. Parallel to the contras! bet .een
East
nglian lu:1 moan and fAul mown (see above), older ari ties of
East Anglian English also preserve the original Middle English and ai
monophth
ng/diphthong contrast as in, for examp e:
daze Ide:zJ = [devz]
days Id<eizJ = [deiz]
TI at is, words uch asface, gate, plate, mane, made etc. have le:/, while
words such as play, way, plain, main, maid ete. have l<eil. The loss of
this distinction in East Anglia predates the 105s of the hs.l-Is! distinction considerably, and in Norwich in 1968 (see Trudgill, 1974) it was a
distinction that was retained on y vestigial!y, and especialy by older
speakers, although most natives of the city were familiar with the
pronunciation.
In eed, Kkeritz (1932) pointed out that, of the rural
Suffolk localities he investigated,
the dialect 'as spoken by elderly
people, clearly dis inguishes between words such as name (pronounced
vith .,::] and nail [p onounced with [<el] or [El] which in standard
English are pronounced alik ' (p. 55), but he also poi ted out that this
distinction, even then, was dying out under the infiuence of RP and
Cocknej , with younger pea pIe genera!izing [<el-El-el] to both groups
of items. Similarly, in the records made by the American dialectologist
Guy Lowman in the 1930s (se e Trudgill, 1974), a vowel of the type [<et]
is found throughout.
orfolk and Suffolk in eight, pail, they , way, while a
vowel of the type [e-a+eo+ee] occurs in paper, lane, apron, make etc.
However, the word chamber has [as] rather than [e-e] i most of the
localities, and in the Suffolk village of Martlesham the words bracelet,
relations , make, apron all have [<et-a] alternating with [e-o], which is
labelled as 'older'. The 1950s Survey of English Dialects Norfolk
recor s, made by W. Nelson Francis (ms.), show many cases of the l<ei/le:! distinction preservcd,
but Francis writes in his notes under the
village of Ludham that ME { has 'several different variants, perhaps
indicative of change - [E-e] no longer than half-long with lax high offglide - forms with [a] may show phanemic shift with refiex of ME ai,
ei', The extent to which the le:1 vowel had become a relic form in

68

DlALECT
DlALEcr

Norwich in 1968 is indicated by the fact that it vas used by only 11 out of
60 informa ts and that all of them were aged 45 or over.
In spite of this relatively low evel of usage, however, 1 argued in my
report on the 1968 survey (Trudgill, 1974) that native speakers of
Norwich Engli h nevcrtheless had distinct . nderlying vowels for the sets
of name and nail, and/or that they had access to so me form of community diasystem,
hich preserved this distinciion. The evidence was, in
part, that speakers who norrnally never made the di tinction were able
to do SO, without error, if e ey wished to do so for humorous or other
purposes. Indeed, during t e 1968 survey, a number of younger informants who did not have the di tine ion were able to produce it, con .istently and correctly, when asked to read aloud a passage as they thought
older speakcrs would read it. This distinguished them from outsiders
who, in imitating the local dialect, often introduced the distinctive /e:/
vowel into words where it did not belong. As far as local Norwich
speakers were concerned, however, even if II speakers did not make
the surface contrast, they did all have access in. ome sense to a cornmon
set of distinct underlying forms.
1 am now persuaded (see Trudgill, 1983) that thi . 'community diasystem' view is in any case wrong. But it also appears that the situation in
Norwich is now no longer what it was ir. 1968. It is now no longer
necessarily the case that members of the local speech comrnunity can be
distinguished from outsiders in their ability to differentiate between th
two lexical sets. The fact is that a nurnber of 1 orwich speakers especially, as we saw above, younger working-cJass males - are
w
using the vowel le:/ in the wrong lexical set, and employing pronunciations such as day Ide:1 etc.
We can suppose a development as follo s. Contact between dialects
s leading to the dying out of original East Anglian forms in the face of
invading London and standard forros. In this dialect death situation
younger speakers no longer acquire the correct, original, phonological
vowel distinction. They nevertheless
retain a know!edge of phonetic
differences
between the older local dialects. Favourable
attitudes
towards the old variety and/or unfavourable attitudes towards the new
invading variety lead to the maintenance
of the lder phonetic forrn
a d, crucialIy, its extension
into words where it is n01 historically
justified. Hyperdialectisms
of the type days Ide:zI thus arise out of
da ect interaction:

days
daze

London

Norwicn

Idrelzl
Id<r.lzI

Idreizl

The new forms occ r in neither

..

CONTACT

69

CONTACT

arise out of their interaction one with the other. They are therefore
interdialect forrns.
A very early observation of interdialcct form of this hyperdialectism
type comes frorn the work of the Norwcgian dialectologi t. Amund B.
Larsen, who must have been one of the first linguists in the worlcl to
have carried out researc
into urban dialects. His publications incIude
Kristiana Byml (the urban dialect of Christiana-Oslo)
(1907) and, with
other authors, Bergens Byml (1~11-12) and Stavanger Byml (1925).
1 Larsen (1917) he develops the notion of nabo-opposisjon, lit rally
'neighbour opposition',
to refer o a type of hyperdialectal
phenomenon. He notes the following dialect fo ms in the speech of the inn r
Sogn area of Norway (see map 2.8):

standard
Sogn
Ibj rkl

Norwegian

19':)tl
Ism':)!'1

/bj0rkl

'birch'

/r;rtJt/

'meat'
'butter'

Ism0r/

The Sogn forrns are unusual, unexpected,

and impossible to explain
histo ically. Larsen explains their occurrence by pointing out that there
are a larg number of other wo ds wher Sogn dialect (and standard

,I

.~

~~~

s/

.~Hya~ge:J

~~~L.
.~~~<C'
.'ltO~,..ognefford~
.~~

.~fj

Berg'~: L

in~r
Sogn

..j1,

~rHr

S4~'-

ordaland

~~

:? Ide:zI

/de:zI
of the two dialects in contact,

and yet

Map 2.8

Sogn a.id

al ingdal. Norway

70

DIALECT

eo

DIALECT eONTACT

TACT

have h/ as a normal historical development, and where the

Halling dialect h s the vowel /0/ (a development
which
does have an historical explanation).
\Ve thu have the development:
Norwegian)

neighbouring

bircn
top

Hallin
/bjerk/
/t0p/

Sogn
/bjerk/ ~ /bjork/
/t';)p/

The regularity of the /0/-/,;)/ correspondences

between the Sogn and
1 = lIing dialects was so salient for Sogn spcakers that they were led to
i: troduce the vowel typical of Sogn, as opposed to Hailing, even into
lexical ite s where they did not belong. Interaction between two dialects led to the development
of forms that did not originally occur in
either of them.
Larsen's paper may be the first report of the phenornenon of hyperdialectism. Once one has become alerted to this phenomenon,
however,
it becomes apparent that it is probably a not uncommon consequence of
certain sorts of dialect contact. 1 cite three more examples from recent
work on dialects of English English.
(1) In south-western English and southern Welsh traditional dialects,
there is an interesting aspectual distinction unknown in most other
varieties of English. It is of the f llowing type:

punetual

habitual

1 went ther last night.

1 go to Bristol tomorrow

1 did go there every day.

1 do go there every week

In the habitual forms, the did and do are unstressed, and in fact the do is
most often pronou iced /ddl. (Indeed, it is highly probable that this is the
so urce of the /de= da' habitua!Jprogressive
marker that is found in the
English-based Atlantic Creoles.)
Iha ainen (1976) has shown that in the south-west of Enzland
the
b
,
habitual/punctual
aspect distinction is best preserved in the speech of
older dialect sp akers. That is o say, very many middle-ag d and
younger speakers no longer make the distinction. We can, once again,
assume dialeet contaet in which traditional south-western dialect forms
are being replaced by forms from the south-east and/or from the standard. It is therefore interesting to observe that the recent research of Bert
Weltens has shown (see Edwards et al., 1984) that non-standard
pasrtense forrns of the type 1 did see ir every de; are still widely used by some
groups of younger working-class speakers in the Somerset-Wiltshire
area.
Weltens (ms.) al so found, however, that the same speakers are also
using constructions such as 1 did see ir last night. They are, that is, using
the no -standard
habitual forms with punctual meaning. The nonstandard south-western
grammatical
forrn is retained in the face of

..

71

competition from other diale L, v t as a result of contact with these

dialects the e rrect sernantic distinction is no longer retained. The nonstandard habitual form hr s been generalized, as a hyperdialec ism, into
context where the original dialect would have had punctu 1 forms such
as 1 seen it last night, It therefore seerns Iikely that if the typical southwestern forrns with unstressed do ai d did survive, they may actually
increase in frequency but at the expense of the loss of the tradi .ional
diaiect dis inction. Dialect contact
ill have led not to the loss of a
particular dialect form, but to the Ioss of a grammatical distinction.
. (2) Similarly, it is well known that many dia!ects of English have
restored the singular-plural
distinction in second-person pronouns. This
distinction was lost when originally plural you was extended in olite
usage to the singular and subsequently,
except in a number of rural
dialects in Britain, replaced thou altogether.
Well-attested
exarnples
(see Francis, 1967) of plural second-person
pronouns (contrasting w. .. \
singular you) include you-all, y'all (southern USA); you'uns, youseyins
(Scotland and elsewhere); you ... together (East Anglia, e.g. Come
you on together! = Come on!). Irish English in many of its varieties has
a singular-plural
distinction you-youse which is categorical for very
man speakers. (Lesley Mi roy, 1984 reports that she caused confusion
by greeting a group of women in Belfast with How are you?) This youyouse distinction is not known in that form anywhere in Britain, except
whe e it has been introduced
through large-scale immigration from
Ireland, such as in G sgow and Liverpool. From the inner-city areas of
Liverpool, however, it has now spread out into the surrounding areas of
rseyside , as have many other features of Liverpoo! English. In thi
dialect contact situation, however, it is apparent that hyperdialectal
usage ha become established.
ewbrook (1982) reports that the nonstandard, originally plural form youse is now widely used by speakers in
the Mers yside are a as a singular pronoun, as in Hello John, how are
youse? A similar development appears to have taken place in parts of
the USA (Keith Walters, personal communication)
where y'all has
become singuiar (as well as plural) for some speaker; (although this has
been disputed; see also Spencer, 1975). In both cases, he non-standard
form is not only retained but ext nded into grammatical contexts where
it does not be long as a result of dialect contact.
(3) In English accents around the world, a number of interesting
phenomena occur concerning non-prevocalic Ir/ - the Irl in the lexical ser
of cart, ear ete. Some of these phenomena are r lated to dialect contact ,
and some noto It is useful to distinguish between these diff re t phcn mena in as accurate a manner as possib e .

72

DlALECf

eo

DIALECf

TACf

As is well known, English accer ts fa 1 into two main types with

respect to this feature: the non-rhotic or 'r-less' varieties, which do not
have non-prevocalic Ir/; and the rhotic or 'r-ful' accents, which do (see
Wells, 1982; and chapter I}.
The non-rhotic

varietics

demonstrate

the folJowing features:

(a) Linking Ir This is not found in so me varieties o South African

and Black American
English, but is normal in other r-l ss
accents. Words such as car are pronounced without an Irl except
when followed by another vord or morpheme beginning with a
vowel. The Irl which occurs in this en ironment is known as
linking Ir!.
(b) Intrusive Ir! Words such as bra are pronounced without an Irl
except when followed by another word or morpheme beginning
\ -ith a vowel. The Irl which occurs in this environrnent is known
as intrusive Irl - 'intrusive' b cause it is not 'historically justified'
or present in the orthography. Most accents which have linking Irl
also have intrusive Irl, at least in some environments,
but it is
regarded as undesirable by s me purists.
The evelopment and occurrence of intrusive Irl is norrnally
explained in the following
ay, Non-rhotic accents are r-less
because of a sound change, which appears to have begun in the
south-east of England, in which Irl was lost before a consonant, as
in cart, or before a pause, as in caro In words where a vowel
followed, such as carry and rat, the Ir! remained. As a con sequence, words such as car, where the originallrl was word-fin 1,
actually acquired
wo pronunciations,
one without an Irl, as in
new car, car port, and one with an Irl, as in cal' insurance. The
sound change
Irl>
thus led to alternating forms
on the environment.
This
synchronically,
by analogy,
consonant, but rather as its
before a vowel:
0>

0/-

c
{~F

such as Ika:rl and Iko:/, depending

eventually
became reinterpreted
not as a ruJe deleting Irl before a
mirror image - a rule inserting Irl
Irl / _ V

(where preceded by an appropriate vowel - see below). Words

such as bra thereby also acquired two pronunciations - one with a
final/r/, as in bra advert, and one without, as in new bra - and
thus rhymed with car in al! envir nments.
By the time this change took place, only a certain number of
English vowels occurred before Ir/, and thus the operation of the

..

eONTAcr

73

intrusiv Irl and linking Irl insertion rule (they are of course thc
same rule, the ter .inological dis inction being a purely diachronic and/or prescriptive one) is e nfine
o environments following
tho e vowels. Indeed, south-eastern English English accents can
now be said to have four distinct vowel subsystems:
(i) Those which produce a following Irl when wordpherne-final and when another vowel follows:

II';JI

as in

IE'd1
13:1
10:1
i'J:1
l'dl

r mor-

beer
bear

[us
car
for
letter

Only Ir':11as in idea; 10:1 as in bra, chacha-ing; i'J:I as in law,

drawing; and l'dl as in America, banana-is can be sad to produce
intrusive Irl, since IE'd1and 13:1 deri e only from historical V + ltl .
(ii) 'owels which produce a following Iwl when word- or mor''', eme-fnal and another vowel follows:
lu:1 as In
lou/
lauJ
(iii) Vowels which produce
li:1
lei!
loi!
IJil

as in

(iv) Vowe s which

vowels:

cannot

/I
IsI
lrel
lul
IAI

IDI

as in

you
know
how
a following Ij/:
me
play
le
boy
occur

word-finally

- the 'checked'

pit
pet

pat
put

putt
pot

As we shall see below, this historical explanation for the development of intrusive Irl, while surely correct, may not be he whole
story .

74

DIALECf CONTACf

(e)

Hyperadaptive Irl In hose parts of th USA where the ma jority

of the popula ion are r-Iess but where rhotie accents are held to
be prestigious,
such as, increasingly,
parts of eastern New
England as well as in American Black English, non-prevocalic Irl
may occur in words where it does not 'belong', through hypereorrection.
Similarly, English pop singers (see Trudgill, 1983)
and actors imitating American aceents (and indeed rhotic British
and Irish aceents) can a1so be hcard to employ 'hyper-American
Irl' in these sume lexical sets. The environment
in which thi
occurs ~~e after the vowels listed in (b )() above (or their
American equivalents)
for linking and intrusive Irl, but also
before a eonsonant, as in dawn, bought, palm, or before a pause,
as in law, America etc. That is, Bostonians who say Chinar and
Japan are employing an intrusive Irl hich is part of their native
accent; while if they say Japan and Chinar, they are indulging in
hypercorrection.
Similarly, British a tors imitatng Americans by
saying dawn /do.rn/ are perpetrating
hyper-American
Ir/.
Clearly, hyperadaptive
Irl is a dialeet eontaet phenomenon.

The rhotic varieties

features:

i
.;.

DIALECf CONTACf

of English, in their turn, dernonstrate

the following

(a) Analogical Ir! In the rhotic aeeents of, for example, the southwest of England, individuallexieal
items oecur from time to (me
wi h non-prev calic Irl where no Irl wo Id be expected. This
occurs with neologisms and proper names as a rcsult of faulty
analyses of eorrespondences
b tween rhotic and non-rhotic
varieties. For instanee, the word Dalek from the BBC TV
programme
'Dr Who' \ as frequently pronounced
/da.rlsk/ by
children fr m the south-west of England who were familiar with
the faet tha RP and south-eastern
10:1 often corresponds
to
south- vestern la:r/. (Similarly, khaki can be heard as Ikarkil in
both Canada and Northern Ireland.) This is again, cJearly, a
dialect contact phenomenon.
(b) Phonotactic Irl In a number of south-western
English cities,
incIuding Southampton
and Portsmouth, words such as banana;
vanilla, America are pronounced with finallrl. This appears to be
a ph nomenon different from analogicallrl, since it is widespread
and normal as an integral feature of literate adult speeeh and
occurs in well-established
lexical items. Moreover, it occurs only
in word-final position. Neither is it to be confused with intrusive
Irl, since phonotactic
Irl oceurs pre-pausally
and preconsonantally.
Note that it is regionally restricted even within the
rhotic area. We discuss the origin of this feature below.

75

(e) Hyperdialec al Ir! We now return to the subject of hyperdialectisms. The urvey of English Dia' ...ets (SED) materials (Ortcn et
al., 1962-71) show a number o interesting occurrences of what is
obviou Iy hyperdialectal
Irl in rhotic areas. This is particularly
clearly illustrated in a number of the maps in the Linguistic Atlas
of England (L,'\E) (Orton et al., 1978), one f which - the map
f r last - i reproduecd here as map 2.9. This shows clearly that
there is a small area of Shrop hi e where the pronuncia tia n of the
.ord last in a number of localities is not the usual [lest], [last], or
[la.st], but [la.Ist]. Map 2.10, the LAE map for arm, shows that
this sarne area of Shropshire,
at the level of traditional rural
dialeet, is right at the boundary between rhotie and no -rhotic
areas.
Again, we can assume that the meehanism that is at work here
is hyperadaptation.
In the border dialeet contact situation, local
speakers observe that their lo:rl in items such as arm corresponds
to neighbouring non-rhotic 10:/. The r-ful pronunciation therefore
becomes a local dialeet symbol, and he use of that pronunciation
a way of indicating dialect and local loyalty.
It i also important to observe that hyperdia e tal Irl is not
confined to Shropshire.
The SED materials give transcriptions
such as
walk

[wo.Ik]

ealf

[ko.If'+ka.Jf]

straw

[S;):J)
[da.Ital-vdo.Ital]

daughter

in other r otie/non-rhotic
bar er areas of Herefordshire,
Monmouthshire, Worcestershire,
and to a lesser extent Oxfordshire.
War ickshire, Berks ire, and Buckingharnshire.
It is significant
that there are no such hyperdialectisms
in the rhotic heartlands
sueh as Devon and Somerset.
Presumably the psychological mechanism involved here is he
same as that dealt with by Labov in his work on Marthas
Vineyard (1963). As is well known, Labov showed that those
Vineyarders who identified strongly with the island and wished to
remain there had more centralized realizations of the first elements of ail and lou/, which -ere typical of the loca! dialeet. than
speakers who did not so identify. The latter, on the eontrary, had
more open first elements, typicaI of the mainland. It seerne
probable that loyal Vineyarders not only were not partieipating in
sound changes of the type [~!l)> [al], but also were aetually
reversing them, as [ 1] > [~I] .

76

DIALECT

DIALECT

eONrACT

eo

fTACT

77

r~
I

.-'

a:

Map 2.9

We can regard hyper ialectal Irl on the rhotic side of the rhoticl
non-rho ic border arcas as a way of reacting to and resisting new,
non-r otic pronunciations,
since it is obvious that throughout
England rhotic pri.nunciations
are receding quite rapidly in the
face of non-rhotic. We can also regard them - since multiplc
causation is always likely in linguistic change - as a r sult of
dialect contact lending to a dialect deatn p ocess, with a consequcnt loss of knowledge by local people of how exacrly the local
dialect is spoken.
Similar developments
are reported to have occurred (Keith
Walters, personal comrnunication)
in rhotic/non-rhotic
border
areas in the United States, such as parts of North Carolina and
T xas. In these areas, items such as walk and daughter may be

~i

1\

last (from Linguistic Atlas of England, Orton et al., 1978)

Map 2.10

arm (rom Linguistic Atlas of Engl.: d, Orton et al., 1978)

pronounced
vith Ir/. In this case, however, we must note that in
most are as of the USA rhotie pronunciations
are more statusful
than non-rhotic and are spreading at their expense. We cannot,
therefore, adopt the 'reaetion' explanation for the occurrence of
this feature in the USA. It may, in fact, be an example either of
hypercorrect
Irl, or of hyperdialeetal
Irl, or of both. If it is
hyperdialectal
Ir!, then it can be due only to the dialect death
factor.
In any case, it is interesting 10 note that in England it is not just
actors, pop singers, and other outsiders who misanalyse the
occurrence of Ir! in rhotic aecents. Local dialect speakers thernselves, particularly if under attack from outside, may also overdo
things in fighting back, and/or may lose track, in a dialect death

78

DIALECT eo

situation,
tisms.

TACf

of the rules of their diale

DIALECf

and pro uce hyperdialec-

Interdialect,
then, may take the form of intermediate vowels, hyperdialectisms, or other form that did not exi t in any of the original
contact dialects. Note, however, that the notion of interdialect, as this
arises in dialect contact, takes s beyond the notion of accommodatio
as such. It is probable, as we have suggested with our 'fighting back'
analogy, that it is actually divergence rather than convergence that is the
relevant mechanism i the case of hyperdialectisms.
As Giles has
argued, speakers who wish to show disapproval of others will make their
speech more unlike that of their interlocutors.
In the case of at least
some o" the hyperdialectisms
cited above, speakers may do this to the
extent of introducing elements of the insiders' dialect into environments
or lexical s ts here they ormerly did not occur. Notice also, however,
that divergence , just as much as convergence,
affects forms that are
salient, Both of the phonological hyperdi lectisms we have cited involve
surface phonological oppositions: in the Norwich days.daze case, the
presence vs. absence of a contrast; and in the hyperdialectallrl
case, the
presence vs. absence of a shared phonological unit.

Long-term

hypera

ap ation

As we saw above, hyperdialectisms

are but oue manifestation
of th~
contact phenomenon o yperadaptation,
the best-known manifestation
~f whIch IS hypercorr ctlOn. The hypercorrections
that most often
attract attention are those of the butcher Ibl\bl type that we mentioned
above, a. d that seem to be either temporary or to affect only individuals. Occasionally, however. jt js c!ear that hypercorrection
gives rise
to large-scale linguistic change and 'results in interdiaiect forms becornIn&-an ifegrai part of a particular dialect. It is possible, for example,
that he midwestern USA pronunciation
of wash etc. with rsl arase in
this way.
O:1e such origina 'y interdialect phenomcnon in Britain is the 'Bristol
1', an accent feature which is wel! known to students of English English
accents (see Wells, 1982) and to many English people ge erally. The
term 'Bristoll' refers to the fact that in the working-class speech of the
major city of Bristol, and in certain irnmediately neighbouring
rural
dialects, words such as Amrica, banana, idea are pronounced with a
finalll!. That is, ideal and ii'ea, evil and Eva, normal and Norma, aerial
and area are hornophonous.
This pronunciation
feature is referred to in
a number of po ular pub!ications
(e.g. Robinson,
1971). And the
Survey of EngJish Dialects materials (Orton et al., 1962-71) show the

..

eONT ACf

79

locality of Weston, Bath, Somerset

(now Avon), near Bristol, as
occasionally having [t] after final I-';}/.
It is instructive to attem t to provi e an ex Ianation for the development of this feature. It is after al! unusual and not repeated, to the best
of my knowlcdge, anywhcre else in the English-speaking worId. (There
are, it is truc, similar features: speakers of the oId Isle of Wight dialect
have drawling for dr wing, and some USA diaIects have 1 sawl it ather
than 1 saw ir (Erik Fudge, Walter Pitts, personal communication);
but
these are linking, sandhi phenomena,
whereas t e BristoI 1 is not. The
Bristoll, a!though confined to word-final position, does n t depe d on
whether a consonant, vowel, or pause follows.) Altho gh Lis
and 1
vocalization are very well known indeed in the history of the world'
languages, 1 addition is not common, to say the least.
A very plausible explanation for the historical addition of 11/lies in
hypercorrection.
WeIls (1982) writes:
lntrusive 111is not -andhi phenomenon:
it can apply equally to a
word which is sentence final or in isolation, and it varies allophonical!y between clear and dark according as the following segment is
or is not a vowel. ... Its origin must pres mably le in hypercorrection after the !oss of final 11/ after I';}/, a hypothetical ['repg] for
apple. When the 11/ was restored under pressure from standard
accents, it was added analogically to al! words ending in [;}J.
In other words,

'C

have a scenario

evil
Eva

as follows:

lloss
li .vol/ > li:v';}l
li.v!

correction
> li:v:J1/
> li:vdll

This explains this somewhat peculiar development

in terms of dialect
contact and, perhaps, imperfect accommodation
leading to an interdialect formo
There i , however, another fac or whic we ought to acknowledge.
Observe, first, that it is possible to point to a number of difficulties with
the hypercorrection
cxplanation. One is, of course, that while a number
of Eng ish varieties demonstrate 11/10ss, only Bristol has the Bristol/l/.
Why is this?
nother i that Bristol English does not have law */b:l/,
paw */p::>:lI afte the pattern of wall, pall. It is perfectly possibJe, of
course, for a variety to lose 11/ only in final unstressed syllabJes, but most
varieties that have 111 Joss or vocalization do so in all syllable-final
positions. Similarly, Bristol English does not have intrusive II! in items
such as medicine, cavity, finery etc. after the pattern of meddlesome,
[aculty , cavalry, hostelry etc., where again one would expec - although

80

OIALECf

CONTACf

this do es not inevitably follow -lloss to occur if it were occurring wordfinally in items such as medal, tackle, ravel, hostel. The facts are,
however, that medilcine, cavilty , andfinelry do not occur.
An additional factor that might account for this fact - that hypercorrection affect d only word-final Ig! - is a phonotactic ene. Nearly all the
words which have the Bristo! Il/ in the Bristol accent are words ending
orthographically
in -a, and are relatively recent arrivals in English.
Many of them are extremely recent, such as Tanzania, Zambia, Coca
Cola. Others are relatively recent, such as Canada, Arizona. And even
those which have been established in English for a few hundred years,
sueh as idea, India, China, are medieval or post-medieval
borrowings
into English and not part of the indigenous Old English, Scandinavian,
or Frenen vocabulary. Now, as these words were being introduced into
English ~nd spr ading from learned into general usage, it is probable
that there
as an ar a of south-eastern
England where they were not
p ionotacti ally odd, since from the seventeenth century or so onwards
varieties there had already lost final/rl in words like finer /faino/, so that
new words like Chii,a /aino/ were no problem. In other parts of
e
English-sp aking worId, however, where non-prevocalic
Irl had not
been lost, such as western England, Scotland, and North America,
words such as China, Canada, America must have been phonotactically
odd, because there
ere no words in the indigenous vocabulary with
final -/g/#. Different rhotic varieties therefore adopted different methods of adapting these n w words to their phonotactic structure, since, as
we sa v in chapter 1, phonotactic
constraints may be powerful and
difficult to overcome. Some of these methods are as follows:

..

(1) As vee saw above, Wells has reported that so me south-western

Eng'ish Eng ish dialects have converted these new words into an
acceptable pattern by the addition of phonotactic Irl. A word like
China is no longer phonotactically
difficult because it is pronounced Icain'Jr/. Similarly, there are many American varieties
(in addition to those where hypercorrect Ir! occurs) where words
such as idea are consist ntly pronounc d with Ir/ in a11 environments.
(2) There are also many varieties of English where wo d-final -a is
realized as li:1 or /I as in very, money. For example, soda is
commonly pranounced
Isoudi:1 in rural American dialects, and
many other such words either still preserve -ii:1 in rural nonstandard speech, or else formerly had such pronunciations,
some
of which are still preserved in songs and/or folk memory: Virginny
= Virginia, Ameriky = America, and so on. Butters (1980) cites,
in Appalachian dialects, extry = extra, soJy = sofa, chiny = china,

OIALECT

CONTACf

81

Nevady = Nevada. Similar pronunciations

are also reported from
Ireland.
(3) Sccttish va.ieties of English, or at least some of them, a e able to
avoid thi problem by employing the vowel of pat word-finally in
these words. This is the result of the fact that all vowels in Scots
English, with the cxception of hl, lel, and IN, are able to occur in
open syllables. Tn-re is, for example, no contrast between the
lexical ets 1 pul' and pool, with the result that the luI of hood
can al so occur in who. Similarly, there is no contrast between the
sets of COl and caught, so that t I~I of lot can also occur in law.
And, finally, there is no contrast between the vowels of the sets of
Pam and palm, with the la! of pat occurring also in pa. Thus,
words like China may end in -/a/, and words like algebra e n begin
and end with the same vowel (Milray, 1981 on Belfast).
(4) Bristol Engli h, in its turn, has accommodated
the phonotactically uncomfortable
!oan words into it phonotactic system by the
addition of final -/l/. Our argun ent is, in other words, that while
the initia! mpetus for the development
of the Bristol l wa
hypercorrection
induced by dialect contact, this was reinforced again noting the value of multiple causation as accounting for vhy
a particular change, out of al! possible changes, actually took
place - by the addition over the years to the vocabulary of English
of words that would, unmodified,
have been phonotactically
acceptable only in non-rhotic accents.
There are, of course, some difficulties with these explanations.
We
have , for example, no reasonable way of accounting for the fact that it is
only Bristol English that has solved this prablem in this particular way.
And there are difficulties with widespread reports that Bristol English
has final -I'dll al so in words such as tango, window, 1 have myself no
evidence of thi , and if these forms do occur they may be hyperdialectisms. t y data, taken frorn tapes supplied by Bristol Broadsides and
employed by them in studies of local folk history, has older Bristol
speakers employing word-final 111in area, Eva, Australia, extra, idea,
Victoria, cholera, gala, swastika etc. There is, however, not a single
occurrence of 111with items such as window, barrow, calico, narrow,
borrow, piano, widow, fellow, radio, tallow, beano, potato. It is, however , certainly the case that the name of the town itself used to be
Bristow, frorn n earlier Brycgstow 'site ofthe bridge' (Ekwall, 1960). In
spite of these difficulties, however, it is c1ear that any explanation for
the development o: the 'BristoII' that did not look
some degree to the
role of dialect contact would ignore
hat is obviously a major causal
factor .

82

D1ALECT

Concluslon

CONT ACT

3
Dial ct Mixture and
the Growth of New Dialects

We have just seen that dialect contact may lead to the development of
interdialect forms, including intermediate form . \Ve have discussed this
evelopment
in atomsiic terms,oting
how ~e process of partia!
accommodation
ma lead, in phonology, to alternatIOn between vanant
pronunciations
of the same vowel or consonant,; to eXlcal diffusion;
and/or to the rowth of vowels
r co sonants that are phonetlcall~
mtermediate betwe
t e vanants in con act.
We now turn to a more holistic approach to dialect contact phenomena, i which we note that dialect mixture ma
ive rise to whole new_
interdialectal varieties (or interdialects), including new interm diate diaec s. ~, emerges t at 1 IS partleularly rewarding to investigate this type
Ofe"velopment
in divergent dialect commu ities (see below) and in
situations involving dialect transplantation,
since in these cases the
degr e o dialect difference between the varie ies involved tends to be
greater than in straightf rwar
geographical
dif usion and contact in
well-establis ed areas, as diseussed in chapter 2. This is because in the
latter, as a result of perhaps centuries of diffusion, the dialects that are
in contact tend to be very similar anyway, with li tle room therefore for
v hoJe new intermediate varieties to develop. \Ve aceor ingly now b gin
to tackle the problem of new-dialect [ormation by eoncentrating
n
situations where transplantation
of som form has occurred.

Language

transplantation:

F onterico

One situation that makes the point about transplantation

and newdialeet formation very clearly is that which is found in the BrazilUruguay border area. On the Iberian peninsula, as is well known, there
is a geographical dialeet eo tinuum (see Matias, 1984; Kurath, 1972)
where dialeets of Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese merge gradually
into one another, and where the number of 'Ianguages' recog. ized as
being spoken depends on the number of au onomous, standard varieties

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Index

accommodation, 1-38: hierarehy in,

20-1,38; irregularity in, 28-31;
limits to, 31-7; long-terrn, 11-21,
161:panial. 57-60. 62-5.Q4:
proeess, 23-8, 126; quantification
of, 4-10, 37; short-term, 3-4
accommodation theory (Giles), 2-3,
39
Adelaide,145
Aitken, A. J., 157
Aitken's Law, see Scottish Vowel
Length Rule
allophonie variants, 125, 126
American Black Vernacular English,
15,145
American English, 127:
accommodation of English
English speakers to, 12-20;
contact with English English,
1-2,41; idioms and lexis, 41;
rhotic pronunciations, 14, 15-16,
20,76-7; simplification in, 147-8;
of Whites in South, 15
Andrsen, B. S., 132
Appalachian dialects, 80-1, 145
approximation process, 60-1, 94
areal variants, 121, 126
attitudinal factors in accommodation,
39,54-7
Australian English: conservative
nature of, 130-1, 133;
interdialect in, 142; lrish English
in, 139-41; levelling in, 143-6;
mixing, 129-42; reallocation in,

161; Scottish English in, 141-2;

theories about, 130-42; twins
from Reading accommodate to,
28-31
Bahamas, the, 127, 160
,
Ballymacarett, Belfast, 121-2
Belfast English: allophonic variation
in, 159; homonymic cJash in, 17;
reallocation in, 119-25
Belize,86
Bergen, 24-8, 95
Bermuda, 127, 160
Bernard, J., 136, 145
Bhojpuri, 100: in Fiji, 100-2; in
Mauritius, 108-10
Bickerton, D., 87, 90-1
bidialectalism, 1
bilingualism,l
Blair, D., 142, 144
Bokml, 96--8,103-5
Botany Bay, 136
Bradley, D., 145-6
Brazil: Portuguese in, 84-5
Bristol Broadsides, 81
Bristoll, 78-80, 81
Broselow, E., 16
Burtrask.Rl-a
Butters, R., 80-1
California, 21
Canadian English, 127: cornpared
with Scottish English, 157-8;
ethnic origins cut across social

170

INDE:\

class. :':':- ...~\ elling in, ]46; a

mixed dia.ect , 159; see also ,
Canadian Raising
Canadian Marrames dialect, 145, 155
Canadian Raisag. 32-3,153--61
Cardiff Eng!i,::' rravel agency study.
4-5
Caribbean: Eagish in, 127, 160
Catalan dialects. 83-4
Central Amrica: English in, 127
Chambers. J.: on Canadian Raising,
158; on Ieveling in Canadian
English. 1~: on Toronto
English.3:-3
Cheshire, l ..~5
children: limns to total
accomz.ccacon in, 34-7, 38;
long-term linguistic
acco mmodarion, 28-31;
occasionaly bidialectal, 32; use
dialect o peers, not adults, 31
Clonard, Belfas; 121-2
Collins, l.: 00 Anstralian English,
130, 13/-S. i44
Colonial Engisa: koinization in,
127-<il: realJocation in, 152-3,
161; sUnpttcarion in, 147-8,161
'community~m'
view, 68
comprehe~~.21-3,38
Cooper, V.: on St Kitts and Nevis,
87-90
Cornwall: Engtisb in, 127; westem,
145
Coupland, N.: travel agency study in
Cardiff,4-5
Creole: in Belize, 86; Mauritian
French, 106, 108; post-Creole
contimmm, g, 90-1; in
Trinidad. 106
creolization pidginization, 107, 145
decreolizarion.
g
dialect boundaries: in Belfast Irish,
.
119; 5- and ~vowel systems, 58-9
dialect contaa..l.
39-82; or language
.
contact, 106, 147; long-term, 161
dialect death sirnarions, 68, 76-8

INDEX

dialect mixture. 83-126; see also

mixng, dialect
dialects, fudged, 60-2, 94; mixed, see
mixed dialects; new, 83-126
dialect-switching, 91-3
diffusion: dernographic factors. 39.
126,161; examples of, 42-53;
geographical factors, 39, 58-9;
habituation process in, 40;
outward from large cities, 43;
through accommodation,
53-7;
varieties, 85-91
divergent dialect communities, 83,
91-4
Dixon, J., 142
Domingue, N., 108-10

Early.Modern English, 111: effect on

Irish English, 150-1
East Africa: English in, 127; Gujerati
in, 100
East Anglian English: in Australia,
134, 136; features undergoing
diffusion, 46-57; h-dropping in,
44-<i; hyperdialectisms
in, 67-8;
realization of intervocalic /tI, 19 .
Elizaincn, A., 85
English English: accommodation
by
Americans living in England to,
21-3; in USA; 15-16

face-to-face interaction, vii, 39-40, 82,

126, 161
Falkland Islands: Canadian Raising
in, 160; English in, 127, 128, 144;
loan words from Spanish in, 128
Ferguson, c., 103
Fiji: Hindi in, 100-2, 106; levelling,
99-102
Fjordane dialect, 95-9
focused varieties, 8s-{)
focusing, 96-7,101,107,126;
along
social dialect continua, 91-4
Francis, W. Nelson, 67-8, 112
Fronteirico, 83-5
Fudge, Erik, 79

171

tudged dialects. 6(~2. 9~

hyperiaiectisms.

GVS, see Great Vowel Shift

Galician,84
Gerstaecker, F .. 142
Giles. Howard: accent convergence
and divergence, 2, 78;
accommodation
theory, 2, 39; on
dangers of circularity in research,
5; on human beings, viii
Gordon, E., 138-9
Great Vowel Shift (GVS), 134, 15s-{)
Greece, 32
Gregg, R., 157
Gujerari: in East Africa, 100
Guyana: Hindi in, 100; post-Creole
continuum,87

lcelandic, 130
Ihalainen, O., 70
imitation, not accommodation,
12-14,
37.40-1
in-rnigration: from London to
Norwich, 55, 57; from rural areas
to Norwich, 110-19; see also

Hallingdal dialect, 70
Hammarstrrn,
c.: Australian English
as unmixed nineteenth-century
London Englisti, 130-7, 144; on
sociolects in Australian English,
153
Hammer, the, Belfast, 121-2
Hardwick, M., 146
Harris, J., 149
Hedrum, Norway, 56
Hensey, F., 85
Hindi: in Fiji, 101; new dialects
resulting from transplantation,
106; outside India, 100; standard
in Fiji, 100-2; in Trinidad, 106-7;
see also Bhojpuri
Hindustani,
100
Home Counties English, 46-7;
compared with Australian
English, 131, 134-5
homonymic clash, 17, 21, 38, 57
Hordaland,95
Heyanger, 95-9: dialect
transplantation
in, 95-7; levelling
in, 98; simplification in, 102-<i
hyperadaptation,
66, 75, 123: in Irish
English, 151; long-term, 78-81
hypercorrections,
66, 82: misanalysed,
66,67; performance errors, 66

66-78. 82

sprkmisjontzr
indicators, 10-11: dialect, 93;
standard, 93
interdialect, 62-5, 68-9, 78, 82-3: in
Colonial English, 142, 151, 161;
as a result of borrowing, 101; as a
result ofhyperadaptation,
123; as
a result of systemic pressures, 101
interlanguage (Se1inker), 62
intermediate dialect variety, 93
intermediate forms, 60-2, 82: in
Australian English, 142
Irish: role in formation of Irish
English, 149-52
lrish English, 81,127: in Australia,
139-41; in Newfoundland,
129;
role of language contact in,
149-52; second person pronouns
singular/plural distinction, 71,
140; see also Belfast English
Isle of Man, 127
Italy, 41
Jahr, E. H., 7, 8
Kazazis, K., 32
Knowles, G., 66-7
koinization,
106, 107-10, 126: in
Colonial English, U7-<i1; see
also levelling; simplification
Kokeritz, H., 67,112
LAE, see Linguistic Atlas 01 England
Labov, W.: on accommodation
in
children, 32, 34; on markers and
indicators, 10; on Martha's
Vineyard, 75; on mergers, 105,
119; New York City work, 5, 91;

1 2

INDEX

INDEX

on 'observer 's paradox', 7, 17: on

Philadelphia, 158; on tense
vowels rise, 133
language contact: or dialect contact,
106,147; 'interference' in, 1;
problem of, 148-52
ianguage death, 106-7
Languages in Contact (Weinreich), 1
Lanham, L. W., 139
Larsen, Amund B., 62, 69-70
Larvik, Norway, 56
Le Page, R.: focused and diffuse
varieties, 85-6
levelling, 98-102, 107,126: of
regionally marked forms, 98,
101; of socially marked forms,
101: in southern hemisphere
English, 143--6,161
lexical differences, 24-5
lexical diffusion: phonetic motivation
in,58-Q1
liberia, 127
Linguistic Atlas of England (LAE) , 75
linguistic change, 11
London English: comparison with
Australian English, 130--7;
infiuence on East Anglia, 46-57;
intervocalic ItI, 19
Lowman, Guy, 67,112
Ludham,67
Mac\aran, R., 121, 122
markers,lO--11: salience of, 11,45
Martinet, A., 51
Martlesham, 67
Mauritius: Bhojpuri in, 108-10;
French Creole, 106,108; Hindi
in, 100, 106; stylistic variation,
119; variability in mixed dialects,
108-10
media: role in diffusion, 40--1
Melboume, 145-6
Melchionne, Tom, 128
mergers: and American English, 148;
in East Anglia of 161 and 1ft, 53--7;
in contact situation, 105, 119
Middle English, 34-5, 67, 112, 155-6

English. llY. 121-3

Milroy, J., 17.119. 120. 123--5
Milroy, Lesley, 71,120,121-2
Miranda, R., 101
mixed dialects, 59-60: growth o, 94;
variability in, 108-10
mixing. dialect: in Australian Engiish,
129-42;process,127-8
Moag, R., 101, 106
modification, 10--11,37
morphological differences, 24-5
Mhlhausler, P., 103
rnid-Ulster

nabo-opposisjon ('neighbour
opposition'), 69
naturalness, phonological, 22, 38, 46,
51. 161
Nevis, 87-90
New York City, 5, 91: children from in
Philadelphia, 34, 36-7
New Zealand: compared with
Australian English, 143-4;
English in, 127, 161: h-Iessness,
138-9; mixing in, 129, 131;
Scottish English in, 141-2
Newbrook, M., 32, 71
Newfoundland: English in, 128-9,
155; lrish English in, 129; south. westem English in, 129
non-rhotic varieties of English, 72~
Nordenstam, K., 24-8
Norwegian: accommodation of
Swedish in Bergen to, 24-8;
dialects, 69-70, 95-9; interdialect
in, 62-3; Oslo Norwegian, 62-3,
95
Norwich English: case of 101(1983),
42~; h-dropping in, 110--11;
reallocation in, 110--19, 125-6;
studies (1974, etc), 6-11, 34-7,
110--12
Nynorsk, 96-8, 103-5
'observer's paradox' , 5, 7, 17
Orndal, H., 95
Ontario, 146
orthography, 37, 45

Pan iabi dialec in Britam. JOO

Payne , A.: on ev. York children in

Philadelphia. 34, 36-7

Philadelphia, 21: New York children
in. 34. 36-7
phonemic contrast , 14,20--1,37,38
pnonetic distan te. L. 1~. 37
phonological accornrnodation, 24-5
phonological contrast, 11, 14,37,38
phonotactic constraints, 16,21,38,53,
80--1
pidginizationlcreolization, 107,145
Pitts, Walter, 79
pop singers, British imitate American,
12-14
Port Stanley, 128, 144
Portuguese: Brazilian. 84-5: dialects,
83-5
Pulham, 112
Irl non-prevocalic in English English,
71-8: analogical, 74;
hyperadaprive, 74;
hyperdialectical, 75; intrusive,
72-3; linking, 72; phonotactic,
74,80
RP (received pronunciation), 21, 35,
42, 6G-2, 111
Reading: English use of 'do' in present
tense forms, 63-5; twins from
accommodate to Australian
English,28-31
reallocation, 110--26:in Colonial
English, 152-3, 161
received pronunciation, see RP
regional standard (Thelander), 93-4
regional variants, 110
Rekdal, 0.,63
rhotic varieties: of American, 76-7;
different methods of adapting
new words to phonotactic
structure, 80--1; of English, 74-6
Rogers, Inge: study of Reading twins'
accommodation to Australian
English,28-31
SED, see Survey o English Dialects

173

.Saba: Canadian Raising in. 160

SI Helena. 127. 160
St John's, ewfoundland.129
St Kitts. 87-90
salience. linguistic: attaches to
markers. 11. 45: extra-strong,
1&-19.2 . 3b: iactors in. 11. 37.
43; inhibits accommodation, 125,
161
Scots: compared with Canadian
English, 157-8
Scottish English, 81: Aitken's Law,
157,158; in Australia, 141-2; of
Highlands, 127, 145
Scottish Vowel Length Rule, 157, 158
self-analysis, linguistic, 7, 15
Selinker , L. 62
sex: infiuence on Iinguistic variables,
7,8,29
Shockey, L, 21-3, 58
Shopen, T., 8
simplification, 102-7, 119, 126: in
Colonial English 147-8, 161;
increase in morphological and
lexical transparency, 103;
increase in morphophonemic
regularity, 103
smoothing, East Anglian, 47-50
social c\ass variants,l18-19, 121, 126
social dialect: diffuse continuum,
86-91; focusing along continua,
91~
social psychologists, 2~
sociolinguists: accommodation to
interviewees' speech, 5;
quantification analysis of
accommodation, 4
Sogn dialect, 69-70, 95-9
South Africa: English in, 127,129,
135,139; infiuence of Afrikaans,
144; reallocation in English of,
161
South America: English in, 127;
language transplantation in, 83-5
South Carolina, 154
south-eastem English, 73
south-western English: adds

174

INDEX

phonotactic Irl, 80; in

Newfoundland, 129: nonstandard past tense forms, 7Cf-1
Spanish: in Belize, 86; dialects, 83-5;
loan words in Falklands, 128;
Uruguayan,84-5
sprkmisionar (language missionarv),
56-7
Steinsholt, Anders, 56-7
stereotypes, 10, 18
stigmatization, overt, 11
Story, G., 129
Strang,B.,41
stylistic variants, 109-10, 121, 125, 126
Suffolk,67
Sunndal,63
Surinam: Hindi in, 100; Sranan, 106
Survey of English Dialects (SED):
Bristoll, 78-9; on East Anglian
English, 132, 134; hyperdialectal
Ir/, 75; Norfolk records (1950s),
67-8; Pulham (1950s), 112; on
transition zone between 5- and
6-vowel system areas, 59
Swedish: in Burtrask, 91-4; in Bergen,
24-8
Sydney,145
syllable structure transfer hypothesis
(Broseiow),16
syntactic differences, 24
Tabouret-Keller, A., 85
Talmlsundersekelsen i OsIo (T A US),

7
Tamil,l00
Thelander, Mats, 91-4
Toronto, 32-3, 146
towns, new, 95-7
transfer, word: process, 59-{j(),94
transition: by approximation, 60-1,
94; in fudged dialects, 6(}-1;by
word transfer, 60; zone where
intermediate varieties occur, 59

transplantation: dialect. 95-7.100:

languagc.B-S

Trinidad: English Creole in, 106;

English in, 106: Hindi in, 100,
106-7; simplification in, 106-7
Tristan da Cunha.127, 160
Ulster Scots, 119, 121-3
Vnderwood, Gary, 56
United States of America, see
American English
urbanization, linguistic, 110; see also
towns, new
Urdu, 100
Uruguay: Spanish in, 84-5
Vancouver, 146
variability in mixed dialects. 108-10.
121, 123-{;see also reallocation
variant-switching (variantviixling)
(Thelander), 91-2
variety-switching (Thelander), 91-2
Virginia, 15, 154
Wales: English in, 19, 127 - North,
145, South, 7(}-1
Walters, Keith, 71, 76
Weinreich, Vriel, 1
Wells, J.: Australian and London
diphthong shift, 134; on Colonial
English, 144; on glottal stop, 132;
on hypercorrection with intrusive
/1/,79; on Irish compared with
Australian English, 141; no
divergent traditional dialects,
145; on phonotactic Ir/, 72, 80; on
regional variants in Britain, 152;
on smoothing East Anglian laul,
47-50; on social class variants in
Australian English, 153
Weltens, Bert, 7(}-1
Zimbabwe: English in, 127