Studying accents and dialects

1. Studying accents and dialects

2. What we’ve learnt so far: • People make judgements about language that aren’t always reliable or fair • The criteria that people use to judge dialects change from person to person • So to study language, we have to develop methods which allow us to be objective © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications

3. Aims • To consider how people have studied dialects: Methods • To think about what they found out: Results & Findings © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications

4. What we’ll achieve by the end of today’s class • You’ll know how early dialect work was undertaken • You’ll start to think about the benefits or drawbacks of this work © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications

5. Why did people start studying dialects? • Dialects have been studied since the 1800s, but in the 1950s, there was a surge of interest in England Stanley Ellis Wilfred J. Halliday Harold Orton Martin Arnold © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications

6. The urgency… “Harold Orton often told us that it was the eleventh hour, that dialect was rapidly disappearing, and that this was a last-minute exercise to scoop out the last remaining vestige of dialect before it died out under the pressures of modern movement and communication.”(Ellis, 1992: 7). © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications

7. The Survey of English Dialects (SED) • From 1950 to 1961, a team of fieldworkers collected data in 313 localities in England © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications

8. The informants… • NORMs (Chambers & Trudgill 1998: 30): • Nonmobile • “to guarantee their speech is characteristic of the region in which they live” • Old • “to reflect the speech of a bygone era” • Rural • “because urban communities involve too much mobility and flux” • Male: • “because in the western nations women’s speech is considered to be more self-conscious and class-conscious than men’s” © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications

9. The locations… © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications

10. The data • 1300 questions • Diagrams and pictures were used to obtain local names and terminology • Spontaneous speech (informant's opinions, personal reminiscences, occupational details etc.) © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications

11. Examples of questionnaire technique • How could you find out what someone calls this? • How many types of question can you think of? © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications

12. An example from Cornwall • SED online: • John Goldsworthy (b.1882) • Male • Retired farm worker and tin miner • From Gwinear © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications

13. What can you hear? Examples? • SOUND • lot: laht /ɑ:/ (vs. RP lot /ɒ/) • start: staart / ɑ:r/ (vs. RP staht /ɑ:/) • RHOTICITY • GRAMMAR • Thee for you= I don’t know what best to tell thee • WORDS • Clonk: ‘to swallow something large or heavy’ • Gay: ‘broken piece of china’ © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications

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