ANGUAGE IN SOCIETY

-
GEl\: -RAL EDITOR:

Petcr Trudgill, Prof sso of Linguistic Science,

ialec s in Co tact
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

I
i

BASIL BLACKWELL

I
 Pcrer Trudgill 1986

First published 1986

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Acknowledgements
the publishcr.
VlI
Except in thc United States of America, this book is sold s bjeet to the condition Introduction
that it shall not , by way of trade or otherwise, be le t, re-sold, hired out, or
otherwise ci culated without the publi her's prior consent in any Iorrn o binding or
1 Accommodation between Dialccts 1
covcr other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
including his condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
39
2 Oialect Contact
British Library Cataloguing in Publica/ion Data
3 Dialect Mixture and the Growth ofNew Dialects 83
Trudgil!, Peter
Dialects in contacto
l. Dialeetology 2. Gramrnar, Cornparative and genera! 4 Koinization in Colonial English
127
I. Title
471'.2 P201 162
f rences
ISBN ~631-12691---D
169
SB '~31-12733-X Pbk ndex
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

..
 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 Uni-
versity 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.
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);
.. J 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 Ir') corcta.c

,~\JCl YorK. I Easll .BlacklNell
 2 A~LOMMODATION BET\VEEN DIALEcrs
very.well that, say '. ~merican English sidewalk corresponds to English
English pavement, u ISperfectly possible that the American will eventu-
ally 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~.
OneJJJeo: 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 them-
seives from or show disapproval 01 otners. Thcse processes o conver-
gence 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/diverg-
ence 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 behaviour-
In 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 diverg-
ence 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
..
ACCOMMODATIO:-l BETWEEN DIALEcrS 3
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
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 trust-
worthy 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 per-
ceived 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 accornmo-
dation 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
 4 ACCOMMODATION BETWEEN DIALECTS ACCOMMODATrON IlETWEEN D1ALECTS 5

all. It is apparent, however, that dctailed linguistic analyses of ihe clients grouped by social class. In faet, CoupJand writes that the percent-
accommodation process would bring with thern a number o bencfits for ages of variants in her s eech 'prove to b..: almost as good an indicator of
both social psychologists and, especially, linguists. For example thcy the socioeconomic class and e uca iona ac groun of her interlocu-
would permit, amongst other things: tor5 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
(1) An exact, rather than impressionistic, 9..uantification of degrce ~ the benefits of quantification in the study of accommodation.
Jinguistic accommodationj
(2) An examination of which linguistic features are and are not lOO~ c1ients assistant
changcd during accommodation, togcther with cxplanations for

n n
88.7
tn1s;
(3) A study
whethcr
place in
of whether accommodation
ljng~y
is a uniform proces~ or
dIfferent types of accommodation take
the case of different speakers, different situations, or
..
'~
",.
1:
"g'"'
80~

60
68.9 n
different relationships; ~
'"
(4) A study of .the limits of acccmmodaton, what are the Iinguistic ~
B
(as opposed to social and psychological) constraints 011accornmo- 'O 40
~
dation, and is it possibJe to accommodate totally to a new variety?
~
~
~
353 :'~31 fl'
I

lllilJ
~ 20r-- 16.7
[
Quantification of accornmodation
O1-.1.1 ..to:::::J......-L.;-_
1 1 1 ILL.I ..I...-.--:';M
1 1 1 1
We begin by dealing with the first of these benefits - that which arises II lIIN IlIM IV V
from exact rather than impressionistic quantification. We bear in mind occupational c1ass
in so doing that it has been one of the achievements of soeiolinguistics to
Figure 1.1 Variable (h): comparison of clients' use and assistant's use; c\ients
demonstrate that the quantification of !inguistic phenorncna can reveal
by occupation (fram Coupland, 1984)
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 A further example of this type of quantification is the following. In his
social psychologist. - initial paper, Giles (1973) argues that the process of accommodation
may lead to circularity in the researeh of sociolinguists. In a comment on
We can illustrate this particularly clearly by examining those situ-
Labov's work in New York City (Labov, 1966), Giles suggests that it
ations in which social psychologists have been most interested, namely
may be the case that when they are intervewing informants, socio-
those involving short-terrn' accommodation bctwcen speakers with
linguists expect the pronunciation of their inforrnants to correlate with,
socially different accents. For example, Coupbnd (1984), in a pioneer-
...
1
ing study of t' '. . odat'on of an assistant in a travel say, social class. The interviewing linguist therefore accomrnodates in
anticipation, as it were, and speaks wlth a 'broader', more Tegil
agency to customers, in Cardiff, Wales, investigates three ardif{
accent when interviewing lower-class speakers than when recording
E"nglish variables. These are:
higher-class inforrnants. The informants in the ace-to-face situation
(1) Ihl vs. 0 in house, hammer etc. tnen ac.commodat~ !Q. the intervICwer, producing the sort of language
(2) [t] vs. [9] in better, city etc. tiat \Vas expected and fu!filling the sociolinguist's erophecy. The results
(3) IUI vs. Inl in walking ; waiting etc. Prsome sociolinguistic surveys may terefore, aecording to Giles, be
somewhat suspect.
Figures 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3, frorn Coupland (1984), show a very c1ear ~sing SGciGlinguists WGuld, J believe, wjsh to reject thi
correlation between the assistant's pronunciation and those of 51 of her hx.pothesls rather strongly. Certainly my own feeling concerning my

..
 ACCOMMODATION BETWEEN DIALECTS 7
6 ACCOMMODATION BETWEEN DIALECTS

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

001-
clients assistant thTs easily and in a relatively automatic, subeonscious way. (In carrying
out linguistic interviews, as is well known, one wants as much a possible

60-
n n so.O

~'
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
2Q.O 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.
n.1 To investigate t e ex ccommodation occurred, 1 there-
20f- fore be an an anal sis of m own s eee a an m erviewer OiliTry
I~O orwieh tape recordings. Linguistic self-an Iysis by intervi~ers has
been carried out before, notably by Jahr (1979) in a paper in Norwegian
OL-~O~ __ ~~ IL-
1~~L_-L~L-~Ll~-LJ
v
entitled 'Er det snn jeg snakker?' (Do 1 speak like that?) (see also
l! 1Il N III M IV Jahr, 1978). Jahr analysed his use of a number o syntactie variables
occupational c1ass as an ir terviewer for Talmalsundersfjkelsen (investigation of spoken
Figure 1.2 Variable (t): comparison of clients' IS':: and assistant's use; clients language: abbreviated TAUS) i Oslo, He concludes that his syntax was
,y \lccupation (from Coupland, 1984) to a certain extent influenced by the sex of his informants and also by
their svntax.
Analysis of my own recordings revealed that aecommodation of a
1001- clients assistant I~O rather dramatic phonological sort did indeed take piace. Fig re 1.4

c:ee
;;
>
"2
801- n n 68)2.
7~0 73~
8~8 ~.7
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
]'" 601- mysel in interviews with eaeh of these informants.
55.7
~ The variable (t) refers to the pronunciation of intervocalic and word-
~
.5:!
o
<>
0.0

c:'"
401-
'Al nal /tI as in better and bet and has three variants:

(t)-l
(t)-2
= [t]
= [1]]
~ 20~ (t)-3 = [2]
<J
o.

.., OL-~o~~I~-L
fi
__ ~-L __ ~~ __ ~~~Ll~
Index scores are caJculated in such a way that they range frorn 0,
indicating consistent use of the prestige pronunciation [t], to 200 for
Ir 1lI N III M IV V consistent use of the low-prestige glottal-stop variant.
occupational c1ass
Figure 1.4 dcmonstrates a remarkable degree of eoincidence between
F:::ure 1.3 Variable (ng): comparison of clients' use and assistan"s use' clients
my seo res and those of my informants. Clearly, accommodation has
h .x'cupation (from Coupland, 1984) , 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
~':r\ y of the En..&lih spo~en in Norwich (Trudgill. 1974) W h t ~ccommodating to my informants [ather than vice versa. For two of the
ao, mmodation did indeed take lac ... oda'ed lir ~ informants, Mrs W. and Mrs B., my scores are the lower, i.e. 1 did not
. 1 to my 111 ormants rat h er t h an 10
. duci
ucmg t h ern to accomml ~UIS- use so many glottal stops as th y did. These are the two informants who
tI;.i_ V
. _ o d ate to
- ~ ---=--=-
 ACCOMMODATION BETWEEN DI LECfS 9
8 ACCOM.1DATION BETWEE. IALECTS
never have been revealed by impressionistic measures f degree of
accomrnodation. Figure 1.5 again compares my pronunciation ith that
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
140 part, path, ha , banana, etc. There are three variants:
1:0 (a:)-l = [o:]
0--
o__ e
100 (a:)-2 = [Q:-9:]
80 (1) inforrnant o (.. )-3 = [a.]
00
40
20

--o0

Indices are calculated in such a way that consistent

pronunciation (RP) back vowel :1 o
use of the received
low- resti e front

OL-~~~~~~~ __ ~ __ ~ __ ~ __ ~ __ ~ vanant
Mrs Mrs Mr Mrs Mrs Mrs Mrs Mr Mrs Mrs
W1 B U H W2 G J L L
200~o __ e
Figure 1.4 Variable (t): seleeted seores in author's Norwieh study (Trudgill,
1974) 180 r
/0_0
160
were lowest on the social scale and who used m st glottal stops. For the inforrnants
140
other eight info mants, the gr ph shows that 1 used more g ottal-stop
120 (a:)
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
100

8\ .--. o_o

o-
_._.~o"-....
author _
60r ~
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
~~L__-L__~ __~ L-__~ __~ __ ~oL"-....
__ ~ __ ~.
speakers. Mrs Mrs M Mrs Mrs Mrs Mrs Mr Mrs Mrs
Wl B U H v 2 G J L L R
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- Figure 1.5 Variable (a:): seleeted scores in author's Nor 'ich study (Trudgill,
.;.
ing in freq' ency, nd younger speak rs typically scorc hig Jer than older 1974)

.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 e. ~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 l'
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
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 DIALECTS
ACCO IMODATION BETWEEN DIALECTS ] 1

also gain some insights into the mechanisms that come into p.lay in (though see Bell, 1984). The same explanation obviously works for the
dialect contact situations of the sort that we shall be observmg in accommodation process: in contact with speakers of other lang age
subsequent chapters. 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
Explanations for modification 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 a-

tized in a articular communit . Very often, this oyen stigmatiz-
ation 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 or-
wich 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.

reading formal casual

passage specch specch

Figure 1.6 Variable (a:): by c1ass and style (fr '1 Trudgill, 1974) Long-term accornrnodation

But w y not? Simply to point out that (a:) is an indicator and (t) a \Ve are thus able to argue that, <1ltting accommodation to speakers who
marker is not to explain why this is so, or how this distinction arises in are members of the same immediate speech community, speake~
the first place. Labov suggests in fact that~arkers are relatively high in i'Odil'Y their pronunclatlOll of Iingulsdc vanables that are marke...
a s eaker' consciousncss as comparr>d to mdlcators. (Variables which wlthm the commumty. 1his 15 5ecause oi {he sal ence which attaches to
. ave an especiaJly high level of awarenes associated with them are marker~ and indeed turns variables in o arkers in the first place. Thi;
called stereorypes.) The high leve! of a 'areness associated with'a ma '.QL salience is, in turn, due to factors such a tose we have just outlined -
leads speakers to modify their pronunclahon ol It m sltuations (such as to do with stigmatization, linguistic chan:;, phonetic distance, and
10rmal occasions) where they are monitoring t eir speech m~t c10sely phonological contras:.,(see Timber ake, 1977; Kerswill, 1985) .
..
 12 ACCOMMODATiON BETWEEN DlALECTS ACCOMMODATION BETWEEN DlALECTS 13

The next qucstion we would like to ask concerns the xtent to which In modifying their accents as they do, singers render their pronunciation
speakers accommodating to othcr speakers from otj",'speech communi- less like that of their British audiences, not more.
nes wIlI ot!ave in li,e saJile way (see Knops, 1981). ls! the case tfiat, Analysis of the pronunciation used by British pop singers, from tht;.
~commodabng to vanefies that are regionally different from th ir late 1950s to the late 1970s shows that the followin as ects of
own, speakers wil! also modif fcalures that for them are in some wa merican English oronuncia ion are widespread, normal or even com-
salient ( t IS not immediately clear tnat t .ey wi 1, since accommodatioD ~lsory (see Trudgill, 198':
beyond the speech community will often be a rather mrrerent
(1) Word such as life, my tend to be ~un with. a m~nophthon-
. rom ac ommodation within it. Accommodation \.ithin the s eech corn- gal vowel of the t pe [a-], alth ugh III spoken English English
mumty, as 111my Nor lch interviews, inyolve a tering the frequency of they are most usually pronounced with a diphthong of the type
usage o partIcular yanants ot yana51es oyer which the speaker airead
[al-m-Al] etc.
as control. Accommo atIon eyon t e speech communit on thTJ- (2) Words such as girl, more tend to be pronounced with an Irl even
~ther hand, may we 111volve the adoption of tata y n w fea ures '?!. by those Engli h English speakers (the majority) who do not have
pronuncianon.
non-prevocalic Irl in their speech.
We move now to nn investigaton of this issue, with particular refer- (3) Words such as body, top may be pronounced with unrounded [o]
ence to the question of whether It IS salient linguistic fea mes that are
instead of the more usual British [o].
modified in all types of accent convergence. We do this by examining a
(4) lt is not usual to pronounce words such as dance, last with the la:1
not uncommon type of long-term, ex ra-speech cornmunity accornmo- that is normal in the speeeh of south-eastern England. lnstead
dation in the English-speaking world, namelj accommodation by they are pronounced with the lrel of cal (as in the north of
speakers of English English to American English as a result of resldence
England, although the pronunciation is usually [re] rather than
in the United States.
northern [aJ). In addition, words such as hal] and can't, which are
In carrying out this investigation, we are naturally cone rned to
pronounced with la:1 by most northern English speakers, must
establish exactly what are the features of American English that are
also be pronounced with lre/. Thus:
most prominent in t e consciousness of English English speakers,
for whatever reason. This, in faet, is a rela ively simple task as far cat dance half
as phonology is concerned. Obviously the mas salient features of south-eastern England te! = [re] la:1 la:1
American En lish ronunciation, for trlglish pea le, are precisely northern England lrel = [a] lrel la:1
tose \'\'1 ich are reproduce during tmtatlOll. ost speakers o ng ish pop-song style lrel = [re] lrel lrel
English do not of course spend much of their lives imitating merican
(5) The pronunciation of intervocalic Itl in words like better as [t] or
English, but there are a number of speech events where this does
[2], which are the pronunciations most often used by most British
happen, such as the tellina of jokes invoh'in Americans, and the
speakers, is generally not used. In pop singing, a pronunciation of
p!aying of American roles by ng IS 1 actors Pcrhaps, however, the
the type [r-Q] - a voiced alveolar flap - has to be employed.
most obvious site for thestudy of the imitaton of American English by
English English speakers lies in the linguistic behaviour of Britsh pOD Q!hcr features of American English pronunciation do occur but th~
1
singer.s- are less freguent and less wide pread. Clear y, the above fiye features.
It can readily be noted that singers of this type of mus'c observe to a he most common in British pop-singng style because it is the~
remarkable extent a number of tules concerning the way in which the pronunciations which are most saliently characteristic of American
\vords of pop and rock songs should be pronounc~. The strength with accents for the sin ers and, presumabl , other British or at least
which these rules apply vares considerably from singer to singer and n Iish eo ie. As to w ritish ingers should want to imitate
time to time. but it is clear that most such singers employ different Americans, see Trudgill, 1983, chapter 8.)
accents when singing than when speaking. lt is also clear thar, whatever Why these features should be sa ient in this way is less easy to.
the s~eaking a~cent, the si~g~ng accent is one whi ? .s influenced by establish, but an exarnination of the rcasons suggested above for the
Amencan English pronuncianon. The process that 1 l. volved in this growth of markers in Norwich English does give us some clues. The
phenomenon, moreover . iously imitation and not accommodation. factor that has to do with ongoing linguistic change is not likely to be of

..
14 ACCOMMODATION 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
/hJ and i s absence, just as the Hughiwho (yu) variable involves alterna-
tion 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 phone-
mic 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, how-
ever, 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-
ACCO IMODATION BETWEEN DIALECTS 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,
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 accom-
modation 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 realiz-
ations 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 ~ pronunciatior of lail in their
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.
(2) Ir/: 0 > Ir/le p'
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 con-
sciously 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,
 ACCOMMODATION BETWEE' lALECfS 17
16 ACCOM. OOA TIO BETWEE~ DIALEas

as consistent 10 pronouncing Irl only in the vords [or, where, here, and (3) 10/: 101 > laJ. A& in there was no trace of any tendency 'n rny
are, and with a couplc of very rare exception p nounced non-pre- spe cl1 to madify the pronunciatian of hot, top etc. from [hot] to r ot],
vocalic Ir/ nowhere else, not even in aren 't. This is more dif cult to explain, since the chang could be interpreted as
It seems then, that Irl, though apparently salient, is not readil being a purely phon tic one invoIving no phonotactic constraints. It is
accommodated to. s . ,. othcsis inc t? The possibIe, however, that the answer to the question of why this modifi-
answer appcars to 'be that, while salience (as indicated by imitatio ) is cation was not made lies instead in the notion, wel! known to students of
indeed crucial, as we have argu d, it is not the whole story. Salient dialectology, of homonymic clash, English English already has a vowel
featmes \ViII be accommodated to unless o her factors inter ene to of the low back unrounded [aJ type in the exical set of heart, park,
iav. inhibit or even prevent accommodation. n IS particular case calm, half cte. It is true that this voweJ in my speech, approximately [a: J,
the i actor wou ear o e a onotactic constraint, Ion- 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 confu-
rhotic English English accents, obviously, have a p onotactic rule which
permits Irl to occur only before a vowei, and prevents its ocurrenc pre- sion, as in the e se of my Barb being interpre ed as American English
consonantally and pre-pau ally. Bob, mentioned above. Certainly, if I try to say hot i the Ame ican
Now there is plenty of evidence available to indicat that phonotactic manner, it feels to me as if I were saying heart. The wholesale adoption
constraints of thi type are very strong, and e use e nsiderable difficulty of the Am rican vowel wouId thus have led to the Ioss of contrast
in foreign language learning. Broselow (1984), for inst nce, argues that between pairs su has:
in second-language acquisition 'syllable structure re trictions are par-
ticulariy susceptible to transfer'. and suggests the following syll ble hot heart
structure transfer hypothesis: PO! part
cod card etc.
When the target language permits syliable structures which are no!
permittcd in the native language, 1 arners : ill make errors which Just as the possibility of the loss of contrast can prevent the occurrence
invol e altering these structures to those which wou!d be perrnit- of sound changes, o apparently can it infiuence accommodation. In
ted in the native language. ot ier vords, it is precisely the same characteristics of laI a make it
salient, and th refore a candidate for accommodation, that delay
Thus, English speakers who have no troublc at a1l pronouncing l J 1:1 (although not prevent - mergers do occur!) its accommodation. A
sing e c. have considerable difficulty \ ith word-initial [1J] in. say, Bur- similar phenomenon occurs in the Engli h of Belfast (J. MiIroy, per-
mese, and con -ert forms such as Nkomo [rjkomo] found in Africin sonal communication), where speak rs accommodating upw rds do not
la guages to forms such as [onkoumou] that conform to English pt- genera Jy change tei! [e:] to [el] in lane etc. because [el] already occurs as
terns. a realization of al! in Une etc.
There seems to be no reason at all why thesc difficulties should :.".1 There are, however, other factors one should per aps considero For
also apply to second-dialect acquisi io and to the eccommodacoa instance, t relationship etween English English 101 and US Englis
process. 1 can certainl a test that if 1 \ ant to ronounce sa ar. :lS 10/ is not entirely straightforward. In rr any varieties of U English ,
Ipartl I find it ver hard to do so in t e ow of con" rsation, and i: is some words which in English English have 101 actually have 1::11rather
ort y 01 note that even those British pop singers who appear to re than 10/: lost, long, off etc. Other words which have 101 in English
trying hardest to imitate American singers ncverthcless rarely achie.e English have IJ in US English: oj, what, was, etc. Successful accommo-
an Irl- pronunciation rate of higher than 50 per cent (see Trudgill, 19~':) dation would therefore be a somewhat complex process.
even though, one assumcs, thcy are usually performing songs that tz.ev Secondly, Labov has suggested (personal communication) that a
have rehcarscd ano sung many times before. We can clairn, theref :-;. further inhibiting factor in my own case may be that [a] is al so a
. tI at ~lthough non-prevocalic Irl is indeed a salient feature of Amen::w conservative , rural, low- tatus pronunciation i orfolk, the Englis
~ngJs 1 ~or Eoglish peop e, the phanotactic constraint present in t!1!;; county of which I am a native.
non-~hotlc acccnt prevents them from accornmodating to Am ri.::m The rcst of my data indicates, in any case, that while Eng . h English
Enghs on thls partIcular feature. speakers d in fact accommo ate on thi feature more readily than they

18 ACCOMMODATION BETWEEN DlALEcrS
. still
do on Irl, it . takes sorne considerable time be f ore a ccommodation
begins.
(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-: rno-
date 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 accornrno-
1
dation 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 acqui-
sition of this feature amongst those English English speakers who
accommodate lo US English. Introspection, however, suggests a socio-
psychological explanation, at least in my own case. Since this explan-
ation 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 between Itl and Idl is neutralized intervocalically,
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.
..
ACCOMMODATlON 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 condi-
tioned 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
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 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.
Sp~akers can either select the variant [t; . 1'::11 is sociai.ly ~arkc~ 7 s
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 conspi-
cuous intervocalic ItI.)
The overall picture,
then, is that the majority of English English
speakers accommodating 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 person-
ality 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:
(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 Accom-
modation 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
..
ACCOMMODATION BETWEEN D1ALECTS 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 accomrno-
dation 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 investi-
gated by Shockey (ms.) in her examination of long-ter m accommo-
dation 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 charac-
terized 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 ETWEEN DIALECTS ACCO MODATION BETWEEN DlALECTS 23

process that occur during accommodation in the opposite direc- English, from a presurncd original score of 100 per cent in both cases,
t.on, suggesting that the contrast be ween [o] and [a], which is but the reduction is much greater in the case of Itl han in th case of Id/.
inde d phonetically one of the sharpest differences between the Shockey rightly makes the point, in attempting to explain this fact,
two varietie , is salient for both sets of speakers. Degree of that students of accomm dation must recog iz that, in a d::o to the
phonetic distance betwecn phones must sur Iy e a factor con- sociopsychoiogical factor hicn lie at the root o accommodation uch
tributing to salience (see above; and Thelan er, 1979, p. 108). as the desire not to be too 1 ieren , e eSlre to e 1l1te I ible is also
However, unlike the change in the reverse direction, f e change an Important factor. Amencan an Tl.IS nglish, particularly the
by American speakers from [o] to [o] produces no Iikelihood of more s an ar varieties, are very readily mutually intelligible, but diffi-
homonymic clash. cuities o a ise f om tim to time. Shockey points out t at cornprehen-
(3) The intervocalic flap [Q] is modified t [t] in the set of latter and to sion of TV programmes fram across the Atlanti e ofter reie on context.
[d] in the set f ladder. Shockey has some interesting data on this It is, moreover, in situations where no context is provided (and where
feature frorn recordings of her own speech: the Iistener has not had time to work out which variety t~ e speake is
using) that misunderstanding occurs. These situations are often serviee
percentage [Q] Itl Id!
eneounters. Shockey reports that vowel differences have led to her
after si. months in England 100 100
receiving cherrics (EngEng [E1IZ)) in Engl nd whe she asked for
after three years in England 66 77
carrots AmEng [ksrots], EngEng [kreratsj). She a!so reports, howev r,
She points out that even after three years her scores are higher that it is the flapping of i tervocalic Itl which seems t cause British
than those of her informants (se e below), and suggests that listeners the greatest compre, ension difficulties. Flapping of Id/, on the
accommodation must be a slow, ongoing process which is not other hand, i much less of a probiem beca use of the close phone ic
completed for a number of years. Note also that Shockey was similarity of American [9] and Engiish [d]. The desire to make one elf
much slower in losing flaps than 1 and my English informants more easily understood is therefore at least art responsibl for the
were in acquiring them. This points to another factor whic. must 1 erentlal modific tion durin accommodation of Id! and IU.
be of importance in influencing the rate of accornmodation on i ere IS also evide ce for the obvious e ect of cornprehension as a
particular featur s: the relative naturainess of a phonetic/ hono- factor in accommod ... : n to American English y speakers of English
logical change. The voicing of intervocalic voicel ss stops, as in English. 1 can attest that one factor that witho t doubt preeipitated the
moving frorn British to American English, is a very well-attested, introduetion of flaps into my own sp ech in America was the number of
natural and ph netically rnotivated type of sound change. The people who thought, for example, if only for a second, that 1 wan ed a
reverse process, as in moving from American to English English, pizza rather than that my name was Peter. And, while 1 did not
whereby voiced stops becorne voiceless in intervocalic contexts, is generally cha g la:1 to I~! in the exical set of dance ete., 1 did end up
neither natural nor we!! known as a Iinguistic change. It is saying words such as g/ass, hal], and bathroom with I~! i, service
therefore not surprising if English-to-Arnerican ae ommodation encounters in s ops, bars, and restaurants, in order to avoid exchanges
takes place much earlier with resp ct to this feature than of the type below:
Arnerican-to-English aecommodation.
1
Waiter: Would you care for another ott of wine?
." ow Shockey's al alysis of tape-recorded interviews with her infor- Author: A ha f bottle, pIease.
mants shows that all of them are variable with respect to this feature, Vaiter: Coffee?
and interestingly tha , as in her own speech, Itl and Id! are affected
The problem was of course that the la:1 in half sounded to the waiter
differently:
more like his own vowel in coffee than the expccted /~I vowel of half.
percentage ftaps /tI Id!
informant 1 17 61
inforrnant 2 37 58 The accommodatio process
informant 3 41 67
inforrnant 4 39 68 \Ve ~ave argued that, ~t east in contact between American and English
F aps have been reduced, as a result of accommodation to English English, accornmodation follows a fix route. Jf it is the ea e that
 24 ACCOMMODATION BETWEEN DIALEcrs
rcgularities of th., sort are to be found in othcr accomm dation situ-
ations, 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 compar-
able 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). . wegian during morphological
Nordenstam's study is mainly lexical and morphological, and indee9jj
,
.f>
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).
..
ACCOMMODATION BETWEEN DlAlECTS 25
Nordenstam fin~ it is at th o 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 T rdenstar;1's study, lexical accommodation is followed by mor-
phological 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 phono-
logical 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 Nor-
accommodation. The majo ity of her
informant , as the implicational scale of tab!e 1.1 shows, acquire Nor-
wegian-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
 26 ACCOMMODATION BETWEEN DlALECTS ACCOMMODATlON BETWEEN UIAL.c"".J _.

similarity or identity
of t e other forms in thc system, to at nmpt to farligt > del el' [arlig, 1 . B rgen Norwegian, moreover: plural ad jecti~es
explain this ordering. But the salience of the first-person singular is not take -e nly in attributive position. Thu accornmodation from Swedish
entirely un xpected, particularly since the phonetic fo m of the' wedish requires dom (ir fina> de er fin.
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 Table 1.2 Norwegian and Swedish adjecti al agreement
the polite prono un of address in Swedish.
Adverb Neuter adj. Pred. a j, pl.
Taole 1.1 Norwegian nd Swedish pronouns -igl-igt -igl-igl fJl-e-a

jegljag Fanny N S
deldom hamlhonom derelni
Jenny N N N
Fanny N N N Katarina S N N
Jenny N N N Bodil N N
Katarina N N Eva N S N
Badil N N N --sr Blenda N N N
Eva N >
. .lL S Charlotte N N
Blenda N N S Henny S N S
~

-
Charlotte N N S N Carin N S N
Henny N N S -S- Stina N N N
Carin N S S Barbro N S N
Stina N S Lisbeth N N N
~ S
Barbro N S -S- - S Alma N S N
Lisbeth S S S Nancy S S N
Alma S S S Er a N N S
Na ley
Ji S S S Elien N S S
Erna S S S Inez S S S
S
El en S S S Helen N N S
S
Inez S S S 10na N N S
S
Helen S S S Nina S S N
S
Mona S S S Linda N S
S
Nina S S S Lena S S S
S
Linda S S S S
Lena S Source: Nordenstam, 1979.
S S S
Source: Nordenstarn, 1979..
,
Table 1.2 shows that those speakers who have accornmodated most to
At a number of other points, on the other and, it is difficuit to find N rwegian in tabl 1.1 are aIso for the most part those who have
any regularity at all. This can be illustrated by table 1.2. Both Nor- accommodated most here, and vice -ersa. However, there is no way in
wegian and wedish express adjectival agreement by suffixing -t to which tabIe 1.2 can be reordered into anything approaching an irnplica-
neuter adjectives. lural adjectives tal e Swedish -a, Norwegian -e. The tional sca!e. There is no regularity h, re. It is perfectly possible, of
suffix -a/-e also occurs in th definite singular. e.g. den store mannen 'the course, that we are grouping together three features which should not
big man'. The neuter forms of adjectives also function as adverbs. There be grouped together, but there are in Nordenstam's work a nu ber of
is, however , a clifference concerning adjcctives with the common ending other points at which the same type of phenomenon occurs. In fact,
-ig, e.g. Norwegian [arlig 'dangerous', fattig 'poor', etc. In S vedi h muc of her data suggests quite strongly that, while there are constraints
these are treated like any other adjective. In Norwegian, on the other and regularities in linguistic accornrnodation, there is also, as in child
hand, they do not take neuter -t; thus accommodation involves del r
.. language acquisition and in second-Ianguage learning, plenty of room
 ACCOMMODATION BETWEEN DlALECfS 29
28 ACCOMMODATIO RETWEE DIALECfS

for individual strategies. This is qui e comforting, in a way, but disturb- Table 1.3 Main consonantal and vocalic modifications
ing for o' r hypothesis that accommodation takes place by means of a Englis (Reading) Australian
fixed route.
-ltI- better [th 1 [rJ
1
lail high [~!] [ai]
2
loul low [:}u] [re U
]
Irregulari y in accommodation 3
leiJ face [El1 [rei]
4
5 li:1 see [ti ] [dl1
It could be cIaimed, o course, tilat morphelogy and honolo!! are [d] [2/]
6 IAI but
Ike!y to ehave differentiv in accommodation. Unfortunately for our part [g:] [a:1
7 10:1
fixe -route h. pothesls, however, t ere is somc evidenee that even in lu:1 boot [t:] [\1 ~]
8
phonology reg arity is not (he whole story. For xample, we have data bed [E] [e]
9 [E1
on long-te m linguistic aceommodation by children which shows vcry 10 [cu] how [~u) [E U
]

dearly the extent to which individual routes can be followed. The -ltI get 2J [th]
11
evidence is alJ the more striking because it comes from the Iinguistic lrel bat [re] [E]
12
behaviour of twins. The data is as fo lows. 13 IEdl there [E:] le:}
David Ir! Idl
Debbie and Rie ard were born and grew up in Britain. At the age of 14 Ii/
15 Irl hit [11 [iJ
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, So urce: Trudgill, 1982.
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 Table 1.4 Richard
were subsequently kindiy rnade available to me. /oul ciJ li:/ iN la:! lu:/ Id /aul -ltI /3!f IE';}I fII II/
Month itl /ail
The recordings make it possible to carry out a longitudinal study of
B B B B B B B B B B
the accomrnodation process through which the twins adapted their 1 A AB AB B B
A"u AB B B B B B B B B
Reading phonologj to that of Australian English. (Doubtless lexi- 2 A AB AB AB A
A AB AB AB AB AB AB AB B B B B B B
cal accomrnodation occurred also. Gramrnatical differences between 3 A
AB AB AB A AB AB B B B B B
4 A A A A
Australian and English English are so few as to be irnpossible to study in AB A AB A A A(B) B B B
5 A A A A A A
this way.) A AB A AB A A A(B) B B B
6 A A A A A
ogers (1981) showed that the twins quite rapidly acquired the dis-
tinctively Australian high-rising statement intonation. My own A: Australian
researches (Trudgill, 1982) investigated their accommodation at the B: British
AB: both forms
level of segmental phonology. The main consonantal and vocalie features A(B), B(A): one instance of form in parentheses
modified by the twins .uring the six-rnonth period were as in tab e 1.3. So urce: Trud;ill, 1 82.
Table 1.4 shows Richard's development over the six-mo th periodo
Note the very regular pattern, and the almost entirely perfect impli- start, Debbie has acquired some Australian features that Ri~hard has
cational scaling. Table 1.5 shows the long-terrn aeeommodation by noto The extent of this differenee is iIlustrated in table 1.6, which shows
Richard's twin sister Debbie. The contrast is quite striking. First, the first month of acquisition by both children of eaeh feature.
Debbie has been much less regular than Richard. Secondly, the routes It is of course possible to attempt to aceount for the different rate of
the two <hildren have followed to acquiring an Austra ian accent have in accommodation by the children by noting the sex difference and obse.n:-
many respects been rather different. After six months they sound, at ins that, during their stay in Australia, the children's friends and acti 1-
least to a non-Australi: .1, very Australian, but they have got to this ties differed quite considerably - as did their personalities.
stage via different paths. Moreover, even though shc got off to a slower The diff rent routes they followed during aceommodation, how ver,
are more troubling. The fact that t e order of aequisition of Australia

..
 ACCOMMODATION BETWEEN D1ALECfS
ACCOMMODATION BETWEEN DIALECTS 31
30
Table 1.5 Debbie Richard, we may retreat furthcr to a position which confines the hypo-
thesis to adult , or per .aps more probably t p st-adolescents. ClearIy,
Month -t- lail loul leif li:1 ItJ 10:1 tU'1 Id lauJ -/ti lorJ i~1 ff/ III
accommodation by chiidren may be a very di ferent kind of phenome-
1 B B 13 B() B B B B B t,B B B B B B non frorn accommodation by adults, This is par icularIy so giv~n the
2 B(t,) B 13 B B B B(A) B B B Be) B B B B enormously greater lingnistic . exibility of young childre ,especially up
3 B B A B B B AB B B A B B B B B to the age o approximately eight (see below). The speed of accommo-
4 B AB A B B B A B AB A B B B B B dation is greater, and of course so is thc degree. (Note, in fact, the very
5 B AB A A B B A B A A B B A A(B) B large number of features accommodated to by the twins as comp. re
B(A) A A A A A A@ A A (13) B(A) AB A A AB
6 with the our main features we noted for English adults in the USA.)
A: Australian
This suggests that thc constraints that delay accommodation by adults,
B: British and which thereby lead to the ordering of the acquisition of features, are
AB: both Iorrns not, for children, constraints at all - or at least not eriously so.
A(B), B(A): one instance of form in parenthescs Therefore, the same phenomenon of ordering does not occur. Just as
Source: Trudg: 1, 1982. young children are not inhibited by, say, phonotactic constraints in
Jearning a foreign language, so they are equaJly uni hibited in acquiring
Table 1.6 Mont of acquisition a different di .ect. They therefore have much more freedom and scope
for accommodation, and are much Iess likcly to conform to the same
Feature Key word Debbie Richard
fixed pattern.
1 better 1
2 high 3 1
3 lo iV 3 4
Limits to accommodation
4 [ace 4 1
5 s e 3 2
This discussion of accommodation by young children leads us to another
6 but 4 3
important and in eresting question, especially since the role of young
7 part 5 2
children rnay be vital in dialect mixture and in new-dialect formation,
8 boot 5
5 which we shali be looking at in la er chapters. The question is: what are
9 bed
10 how 6 2 the limits on accommodation? Specificaliy, is total accommodation to a"
11 get 6 2 new variety possible in the 10n term?
14
12 bat 6 3 ow the obvious place to look, if we are concerned with the limits on
13 there 6 5 long-term accommodation, is precisely the linguistic ehaviour of young
14 David 6 children. As we have just noted, children are \Vell known tn b c
15 hit 5 more rapid and com tete accommodatOs t, an adu ts. The explanation
Source: Trudgill, 1982. for L is may in part be sociopsychological, ut is .rnost certainly mostly
..
" linguistic, and is concerned with the nature of brain developli1ent and
featl:res was s?mewhat different for the two children is obviousJy a the human I nguage faculty.
In any case, the conventional wisdom is that ~ng children, unlikS
considerable
d' difficu ty., for the fixed-route hypothesis
. ,sju t as was Nor-
~enstam s data. Obviously, 111 both these cases there seems to be c1ear adults, are indeed capable of accommodating to a y to the speech o
potent:al for different peakers to adopt different strategies of accorn- .0eir peers, as eb le an Ric ard seemed to be at least well on their
modation. way to oing. t is a matter of common observation, and has often becn
f The fixed-route 1 ypothesis can, nevertheless, be defended. In the noted by Labov and others, that children use the dialect and accent of
race of Nordenstam's data we are able to retreat to a position which their friends, and not those of their parents or teachers. Indeed this
confines the hypothesi to phonology. In the case of Debbie and must necessarily have been the case for regionally distinct diaJects to
have survived in the face of geographical mobility .

..
 32 ACCOMMODA TION BETWEEN DIALECTS
ACCOMMODA TlON BETIVEE 'DlALECfS 33

There are, of course, qualifications that must obviously be made at before voiceless consonants elsewhere
this point. A number of children of parent who speak a varie y differ- e.g. out e.g. loud, now
ent fro~ that?f the area in which they are living become bidialectal, and (ou)-O [EU-eu-Au] [au=au=cu]
speak like their parents as well as like their pcers; and .attitudinal fact (ou)-l [reu-au-ou) [eu=eu+xu]
may retard or lirni ccommodatio" Moreover, isolated individuals _
~xtrem~ 'Iames' in Labov's sense (1972), wch as the Nathan B. dis- As can be seen, the index is computed in such a way that a speaker
cussed In some detail in Labov (1966 - may be relativelv ' adhering strictly to the phonological rule of Canadian Raising, as most
peer roup pressurc o con orm SiOce they do not have a eer rou , For Canadians do, will score O. On the o her hand, any s eaker who cc.i-
example, j ew roox turne up one inforrnant in his survey of the sistently violated the rule and had open first elements in voiceless e viren-
English spoken in the Merseyside area of England w o had a consider- ments, and vice versa, would,' C ambers's calculations, seo 100.
able nurnber of Scottish features in his speech even though he had lived Figure 1.7 shows the raising indcx scores in three speech styles ob-
al! hs life in the Merseyside crea, The explanation for this was that the tained by six Toronto adults in tape-recorded interviews. Of particular
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
~I
lOl
-o
e
Mr J

hado a noticeable New York City accent. These people, however, are
obviously exccptions. In general we can accept that, at least in most ~MrH =====:MrsTMrsB}
western cultures, children are known, in normal circurnstances, to adapt
o _________
MrsJ
c:::;;;;;,,===:;;::..--

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 achiev-
able 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 con-
cerned, 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:
MrT
word lis! reading pas age interview
style style style
Figure l.7 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 Rais-
ing? 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, r
believe we can agree with this up to a point. Labov (1972) has argued

..
 34 ACCOMMODATION DET\VEEN DIALECTS 1 ACCOMMODATION BETWEEN DIALECT 35

that, while children younger than eight appear to be certain to accorn- MEQ> lu:1 MEou> IAUI
modate totally, there can be no assurance that, after the age of eight, moan mown
children will become otally integrated into a new speech community. 1 nose knows
would also add that, after the ag of 14, one ean be fairly sure that they rose rows
will not. The problem years are eight to 14, with the degree of inte- sole soul ete.
gratio depending on many different social and individual factors.
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
(2) Some pioneering work in this field by a .ne (1976, 1980) ha:
vowels, especially IH:I and lu/, and o her lcxica set . Anyone wishi g to
irvicated that there is a close correlation betweeJl how Id speakers are
acquire native-Iike Norwich pronunciation has to note the exi tence of
when they move to a n w area and the degree to whieh they accommo-
ate succe y. ore 111eres 1I1gy, owever, her work also shows at least seven different lexical sets (see furthe chapter 3):
that, in some respects, even children of ei ht ears oId may be toa oId to IjH:/~/td tune ete.
aequire certain linguistie features during 10ng-term aeeommo ation. Itd do etc.
Payne's researeh shows that eh/dren from New York Clty fiilies IH:~/u:1 boot etc.
who have moved to Philadelphia aeeommodate almost totally to the lu:1 school etc.
Philadelphia sound system after residing there for a while, with the lu:/~/ul road etc.
younger children accommodating more rapidly than the older. Close lul pul ete.
linguistic analysis, however, of the ty? we were advocating earlier in IAUI OlVn etc.
this ehapter, shows that there may be some inadequacies to this accorn-
modation. The children now sound as if they come from Philadelphia, They must learn, that is, that do, for example, can be pronouneed only
but this overall impression masks the fact that they have aetually failed IdH:I = [d3H], while boot can be pranounced either b:tl or Ibu:tl =
to master a few fine phonological dc.ails. Where the modifieation to be [buu'P].
made is purely phonetic, there are no problems for the children. For Now, r search that I have carried out into Norwich English (see also
e: ample, the istinctively Philadelphian phonetie realizations of the Trudgill, 1982) indicates that even people who were born and braught
vowels lou/ as in boat, lu:1 boot, lau/ out, lail bite, andc/oi/ boy are all Ut' in NOTWich and who otherwise have perect .ocal accents do not
readily acquired. However, in some cases where the modifieations correctly master the lu:/-lAu/ distinction between moan, mown etc. if
required are more complex phonologieally, difficu ties may arise. The their parents come from somewhere else, i.e. if their parents do not have
New York City children, for instance, show no tende cy to merge the a Norwieh accent. (In some ea-es, it seems to be necessary for only the
vowels of ferry and [urry , as Philadelphia speakers do (and see further mother to have had a non-r orwich aeeent for the distinction not to be
below). 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
(3) Ciearly, then, the more complex the aru->mmodatjon linguistic;.. himself had lived away frorn Norwich until the age of eight, bearing out
ally, the earlier the child has to be in in order to adapt suceessfully. Just Labov's point above.)
how ear y spea ers have to begin to aequire certam linguistic orms In investigating this phenomenon, inforrnants from Norwieh ageu
turns out, however, to be rather surprising in at least some instanees. In 3~0 were used, since it is possible (see chapter 2) that younger people
fact, astonishingly eno gh, .there is some evidence to suggest that c!I:. are now losing e lu:/-/Aul distinction as a result of infiuence of the
tain t nes of honological differentiation ma never be aceommodated London area and frorn RP. And although the researeh was prompted
to successfully, however oun a s eaker may be. le evidence i as initially by o servations of natural speeeh, the main evidenee carne from
follows. tests where informants were required to repeat a sentence in 'a proper
In the English of Norwich (se e Trudgill, 1974) the originally distinet G vic accent'. This was neeessary ecause the RP prestige accent, as
Middle English vowels Q and ou have been pr served as distinct, as they we have seen, does not rnake the phonologieal distinetion in question,
have also in a number of other (mainly geographically peripher 1) are as and 'correction' towards the RP norm is sometimes indulged in by
of Britain. The distinetion in Norwich English is as follows: (especially soeially upwardly mobile) Norwich speakers. Absenee of the

..

36 ACCOMMODATION BETWEFN D1ALEcrs
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
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 (Interest-
ingly, 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 acquir-
mg 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 infor-
mant 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
..
ACCOMMODATION BETWEEN D1ALECTS 37
least in 1 rban areas, throughout the north-eastern United States, includ-
ing 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 environ-
ments, 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
of
vowels, others such as dad having non-raised variants.) ayne shows
that her informants ha e variable success in acquiring the correct hila-
delphia 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 consis-
tently rai se <el in all and only the Philadelp la environments are pre-
cisely 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 ortho-
graphy, 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 accornmo-
2
dation to particular features. Thcse factor- incIude comprehension diffi-
culties and p~onological natural.ness. The prescnce of these inhibiting
and accelerating factors leads, long-terrn <commodaton, to fi"prl
Dialect Contac
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
r

of inhibiting factors to t e same degr e, and that they therefore dernon-

str~te greater variety ~n the routes that they folIow during accommo-
dation. 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.

I
 40 DIALECf eONTACT
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 , pull-
over, 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 self-
appointed 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

-!n any. cas~, we can assume th~t face-to-face interaction s necessary

beLore dlffuslOn takes place. preclsely because it is only during face-to-
f!,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
..1
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: London-
based innovations reaeh Norwieh before they reaeh Sheffield, and
Sheffield before they reach Newcastle.
'[!lere are, f eourse, exeeptions to this. fertain highlv salient linsus-
tic features, sueh as new words and idioms or fashionable
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,
t. 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.
.

..
42 DIALECT CONT ACT DIALECT CONT ACT 43

Cromer
e

-r:: Great Yarrnouth

Lowcstoft

Table 2.1 Norwich variable (o)

Reading
Word list passage Formal Casual
Class Sex tyle stye speech speech

Middle middle M 000 000 001 003

F 000 000 000 000
Lower middle M 004 014 011 055
F 000 002 001 008
Upper working M 011 019 044 060
F 023 027 068 077
Map 2.1 East Anglian towns
Middle working M 029 02; 064 078
F 025 045 071 066
Lower working M
from the working-class acce ts of surrounding areas. The working-class
014 050 080 069
F 037 062 083 090 pronunciation is entering Norwich, in the first instance, by means of
working-class speech, precisely bec use it is working-class Norwich
Source: Trudgill, 1983.
people v ho have most face-to-face contact with working-class speakers
from neighbouring towns.
sex differentiation, with working-class males hay! g more [o] than Now, if it is the case that gcographicaI diffusion rcsults from accom-
working-class fem les, and yet rniddle-class f males having more [o] modation, we would expect the factors note in cnapt r 1 a being
than males of the same class. The conclusion to e draw frorn this is operative during accommodation to be found also at work in the case of
that the newer rounde vowel is coming into Norwich English (see map geographic: 1 diffusion. In particular, we would expec salient features to
2.1) frorn two different sourccs. First, it is entering as a prestige feature be diffused rather than non-salient f atures. And e would expect so me
(and herefore a particularly female feature) frorn the RP accent. The features to be diffused more quickly than others, depending on the
R~-type pronunciation i corningv in the first place, into rniddle-class degree of salience and the number and strength of inhibiting and/or
speech, precisely because it is rniddle-class Norwich people who have accelerating factors, as discussed in chapter 1, that are relevant in each
most face-to-face contact with middle- and upper-class P speakers case. (Geographical diffusion models can, of course, tell us to expect
from Norwich and eIsewhere. Secondly, it i also coming into Norwich forms to diffuse out, ards fr m Iarge citics such as Phiiadelphia (Labov,
as a non-prestige feature (and therefore a particularly male feature) 1982), Liverpool (Newbrook, 1982), and London (see below). But they
 DIALECf CONTAcr 45
44 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 pronuncia-
tion 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.) G (h) in hammer
One well-known and well-studied phonological feature that has been
diffused outwar s from London into East Anglia within the past 150 Map 2.2 h-pronouncing areas in England (after Survey of English Dialects,
years or so is the loss of Ihl (see l. Milroy, 1983). As has been noted Orto n et al., 1962-71)
bcfore (se e Trudgill, 1983). Iz-!e sness is well-known not to occur in the
This widespread diffusion of h-dropping i no surprise. Our discussion
traditionaJ rural accents of East Anglia (see map 2.2). Our research
of accommodation, and the relationship of aceommodation to diffusion,
..,
shows, however , that h-dropping is now a well-established, if variable,
leads us to regard h-dropping as a clear candidate for this type of rapid
featur of working- lass urban speeeh in the entire East Anglian area.
diffusion. f it is indeed featur s which are salient that are accommo-
The feature is undergoing geographical diffusion outwards frorn dated to - and thus subsequently diffused - then Ih/ and its absence are
London, and is also spreac!ing into rural varieties even in the north of cle rly highly salient. In Norwich English itself (Trudgill, 1974) (h) as a
the region. At the moment, Ihl deletion is less frequent in J(ing's Lynn, linguistic variable is very much a marker (see p. 10), and of course lack
Great Yarrnouth, and Lowestoft than it is in 1 [orwich , and jess frequent of h is a feature which is often commented on unfavourably and overtly
in Norwich than it is in the urban centres further south. (Note that 'less by teachers and others. This salience is obviously due to the phonemic
frequent' he re means that the feature is found in the speech of fewer contrast factor noted in chap er 1, aIlied to the orthography of English
individuals, and that it occurs less often in the speech of dlose who do and social class dialect (see p. 11). In addi ion, it is intere ting to
haveit.)

..

46 DIALECT CONT ACT
su] pose that it is 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 phonologi-
lo 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 under-
going diffusion in East Anglia, as revealed in analysis of our tape-
recorded data, to see if our hypotheses of diffusion througl accommo-
dation 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.
(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 vocaliz-
I
.t> ation of [1] does not occur, vowels may have radically different allo-
phones before Il/ as compared with elsewhere:
rude rule [.lu:Ui]
code coal [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):
..
-
DIALECT CONTACT 47
(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 neutral-
izations and the development of a whole new set of diphthongs. We
cannot, therefore , be absolutely convinced that [-vocalization is a fea-
ture 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 i
Map 2.3
Map 2.4 /\/, younger speakers, East Anglia
with thc 10:1 of arm, path, making tower and lar homophonous. Work-
'wrang' direetion poses some problems for an explanation based on a
ing-class aeeents, on the other hand, have 10:1 as [a: J, and therefore
diffusion model that ineorporates distanee and population parameters.
retain a distinetion between tar and tower even when smoothing has
It is t se models that tell us to expeet the sta te of affairs that we mo t
taken place.
often find with respeet to geographieal diffus- n in East Angra, namely
In faet, in these northern East Anglian tow is, smoothing is perhaps
that forms spread out from London, which is broadly sp aking to say
m re widespread than anywhere else in England, involving not on.y [a:]
frorn so th to north. It is not, in faet, yet clear why smoothing is
in tower and [a:] in fire, but also produeing player as [pla.], going as
spreading southwards, but it is likely that we will be able to seek
[go:n], seeing as [ss:n], lower as [lo:], and doing as [ds:n]. It is probably
an explanation in the faet th t smoothing already oceurs not only in
also part of a wider proeess that deletes post-vocalic l'dl, as in rhere [o E;)]
Norwieh, for example, but also with certain vowels in London, in the
> [s.], sure [SH'd} > [sa.].
midlands, and in the RP aeeent. Geographieal!y, smoothing may have
As map 2.5 shows, the smoothing of lou'dl to 10:1 and of other originated in a num er of different locations.
triphthor ; is the only example the East Anglian study threw up of a
Whe her smoothing. again, can be assigne a high degree of salience
linguistie change in progre ss that is spreading in a southerly rather than
such that e would prediet that it would be accommodated to, and
northerly direetion: while older speakers in Ipswieh, Woodbridge,
therefore diffused geographically, is not c1ear. Again, it is not a feature
Stowrnarket, and Hadleig have tower [tEtlO ete., younger speakers
that appears to attraet much overt eomment. On the other hand, it is
variably have the monophthonga! forms, especially in the lexieal set of
probable that in Norwieh English at least it is a linguistie variable of the
fire and of sure and there. This diffusion of a Iinguistie innovation in the
marker type. And once again it certainly does in olve surface phonemic

.
 DlALECf CONT ACT 51
50 DlALECf CONTACf

'...,.--,, Figure 2.1 IAI in East Anglia

1 , l.
~v----- ....
-)
l_"' ....
--
.r-.._ '\....
... _--_/
/_
lorwich , Cromer, Dereham, Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft, and Stow-
market 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
'J" I change in the realization of IN, in that the fronting of this vowel, which

t-
I
is typical of London and Borne Counties speech, is on the increase.
I
These towns, that is, have vowel qualities for iN ranging from [B] to [a!L]
J"''',,\ .> ----, depending on the age of the speaker nd the proximity of the town to
-- '\..J '- o e
U\ London.
I
\....._-- ...._-<.~:::::-:::::: 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
Map 2.5 Monophthongization of laudl etc .. East Anglia 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
contrasts, ince we ge , in northern East Anglia, the following equiva- accommodated to, as mor northerly East A glian speal ers come into
Iences: 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
tower lou! + Idl > 10:1 as in tar accelerating factor alone , narnely that of phonological naturalness - in
fire loi! + Idl > 10:1 as in [ar this case of the chain-sl.ift type, having to do with pressures in phono-
do ir Itl:1 + Idl > 13:1 as in dirt logical space (Martinet, 1955) (see figure 2.2). That is, the same impetus
.1
.e,
pure Itldl > /3:1 as in purr that led to tl e beginnings of this change in London itself is sufficiently
going lu:1 + Idl > /:):1 as in lawn
strong to encourage its spread geographically also.
\3) The boundary between East Anglia, which has IN and lu/ distinct, Nevertheless, we must concede that any initial optimism about our
as 10 cud and could, and the midlands, which in vernacular speech has ability to predict precisely which Iinguistic features wiIl be diffused from
only lul, runs to the west of King's Lynn through the Fenland, close to one variety to another is a little dampened by the phenomenon of the
the Norfolk-Lincolnshire border (see Ch mbers and Trudgill, 1980). fronting of IN in East Anglia. It is therefore comforting o note that the
Nevertheless, in our East Anglian data there is a clear phonetic gradicnt principies that we adopted in chapter 1 are of some considerable value
in the actual realization of the IN vowel (see figure 2.1; map 2.6). when we come to an exarnination of those London features hich could
Wisbech has [r], and King's Lyr.n [1>],while 01 er rural Norfolk speakers have been diffused out into East Anglia but which, so far at least,
in most of the county have the back vowel [Al (i.e. unrounded [oj). actually have not been .

..
 -
52 DIALECf CONTACf DIALECf CONTACf 53

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

(d) l'dl in horses, wanted ete. rather than /JI (see also ehapter 4,
p. 135).
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
[y] 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) alter-
( -,

\/
.,.J

.. 1
nation between two phonernes is involved - normally a sure sign th t a
/ _1Il__ 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
r "
'-J
>~ \..O,..,.. --'\
\
~ w noted in the case of accommodation in chapter 1: phonotactic
~- ~t)
V\ 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.
Map 2.6 IAI in East Anglia. 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
We noted above that in southern East Anglia younger urban speakers unstressed syIlable, inc1uding word-final position:
's und like Londoners, but that closer linguistic analysis s o S that
money Im'An'dl
they do preserve a number of non-London, East _' nglian features.
very Iv'Erd!
These features include:
window /w'rndo/
(a) la:1 inJar ete. as [a:,] rather than [a:] (se e also chapter 4, p. 136) Tuesday /t'u.zda/ etc.
..., (b) li:! in meat as [] rather than [';JI]
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 conse-
quence, on the proce s of diffusion.

Diffusion through accommodation: a ro em

Ther is still one featu e subject to diffusion into East Anglia from
Figure 2.2 Phonological pressures leading io IAI fronting
London that we have not yet discussed. This is the variable merger of 18/

..
 _4 DlJ\LECf CONTACf DlALECf CONTACf 55

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 \~.~
r
, .
speech of informants in the region aged over 30, hese mergers are not I"
found at all anywhere, except for a small number of speakers in Clacto , " f
I the speech of informants aged under 25, on the other hand, and most \
\
f

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 ~

1',,-,,;
\

\.l' .....
"")
linguistic ealure i one tllat requires examination an ex lallation.
I
o
Our ata show that the merger is tota y a sent from the speech of even (-
I

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 ....._J

r,,~,\
J
\
>~ __-, "",,-- ~ e
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 I._-,--,_-<e~~~
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 older
speakers
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
i
~.ast face-to-facc contact with Londoners - .amely teenagers. \Ve have Map 2,7 Merger of lel and IfJ, East Anglia
no figures for face-to-face contacts, but it does seem lik ly that conver-
sations with the working-class Londoners who have this merger are most before those further away, and those even further away not being
often earried out by adu/t working-class Norwich people who travel to influenced at all. Televisin may be part of a 'softening-up' process
the London area or meet Lon oners in the course of their work. leading to the adoption of the merger, but it does not cause it.) W,; can
A number of explanations, all of them s eculative, can be advanced also argue, instead or as wel!, that face-toface contacts do take place"
for his phenomenon. For instance, we can argue for the importanc of but perhaps in orwich rather than in London, with tourists, in-
attitudina! factors, and c1aim that the desirability of Cockney for adoles- migrants or even vsitin footbalI supporters bringing new lin uistic
cent males, with its stereotyped image of street-sophisticated toughness, , orms in with t ", ne can even argue that the spread of the loss of the
is more important here than accommodation in face-to-face contact. IfI-/el contrast might be due to an increasing failure by adults in Nor vich
(Casual observers have in fact argued here for the impact of te evision to correct If/ for lel as an infantilismo This in turn would be due to
programmes such as the very popular 'Minder ' in which the main increasing familiarity with - and therefore increased tolerance of - this
charaeters spea Cockney. If this were the only influence, however. e London feature n the pan of adults as a result of their face-to-face
would expect to find lel being mergec with Ifl ali over Britain. This is contaets with Londoners.
definite!y not what we do find , ather we find a c1ear pattern of Ho w ever, it eems unlikely that any of these factors on their own can
geogr:lphical spread, with towns nearer to London being influenced seriously be advanced as the major explanation. In particular, tourists in

lo

56 DIALECT e 'TACT
Norwich tend to be of the middle-c ass, cathedral-visiting, 18/-pronounc-
ing 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
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
nce that this is what has happened in th e se of [m-thin , but t i at
evi .....
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 (per-
sonal 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
..
DIALECT CONT ACT 57
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 linguis-
tic 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-to-
face 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,
o 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 59

pit // lul put

pet IEI ItJ but
par 1l1!1 101 pot
Southern 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 respec-
tiveIy 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 pro-
nunciation 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.

Table 2.2 Transition in mixed dialects

pul bui! pusii but up cup butter love come

Northern u u u u u u u u u
ulA
Mixed
{~ u
u
u
u
u
u
u
U/A
u
A A
A
A
A
A

Southern u u u A A A A A A

Sources: Orton el 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
pit 111 lul put, b would expect, make for a certain degre of salience, and explain why
pet lE! 1:')1 por the isogloss continues to move northward to the extent it does.
par la! 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
while southern varieties have the six-vowel system: (see chapter 1) out from the Lond n area into East Anglia. The contrast

..
 60 DIALECT CONTACT DlALECT CONTACT 61

between pair such as nose.knows , sole:soul, road:rowed is disappear- Table 2.4 Transition in fudged dialects
ing, and the way in which it is disappearing in some areas is a mirror pus IIp cup butter love come
put bull bu!
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 Northern u u u u u u u u u
incomplete) aceomrnodation to speakers of dialect which have the
rnerger, re effceting the merger i their o n speech by transjerring
Fudged

Soiuhern
{ ~
u
1{

u
u
1{

u
u
1{

u
/1.
1{

'i
1\
1{

y
1\
y

Y
/1.
1{

1{

/1.
1{

1\

/1.
words, individually, from the lu:1 set to the ,'Au! set. Table 2.3 sumrnar-
izes t e type of diachronic proeess involv d. Stages 2 and 3 repr sent So urce: Chambers and Trudgill, 1980.
mixed di al cts. F. further exarnples of the same phenomenon, see
Milroy (1978). 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
Table 2.3 Transition by word transfer stage 2 shows, the forrns produced may be intermediate between t ose
of the original and target dialects: original [u:] > interme iate [ou] >
Stage 1 tage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4
target [eu], parallel to the [u] > ['d (> [A]) cas above. U tirnately,
road lu:1 lu:1 lu:1 IAuI however, sine this is a merger and not a split as in the lsl-hs! case, the
moan lu:1 lu:1 IAUI h,uI end result, if the process goes to comple ion, may also be a vow 1
boat lu:1 IAUI lsu! l\ul int rmediate between the origi al dialect's formerly distinct vowels.)
low Il\uI /hul Ihul Ihul
Stages 2 and 3 are typical of fudged dialects. Note that fudged diale ts
know 1t.U1 Il\ul hui Il\ul
force a redefinition of lexical diffusion whieh, in that it focuses on the
old IAUI IAuI II\UI Il\uI
spread of changes through the lexicon, is usually characterized (see
Sources: Orton el al., 1962-71, Chambers and Trudgill, 1980. Wang, 1969) as being 'phoneticalIy sudden but lexically gradual'.
Clearly, fudging is both phonetically and lexically gradual.

Table 2.5 Transition by approximation

--3> Interrnediate forrns
Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4
l\ ixed dialects are varieties where accommodation is takin lace but lu:! [u:] [ou] leul
road
W lere 1 las not gone to comp etlOn. e note now, however, that th re moan I :/ [Ou] [eu] leul
are oth '-r ways in which accommo ation can also be partial. Mixed boat u:/ [ou] [eu] leul
dialects are lexically partially accommodated. In other v~rieties hich low Irm! [g ] [eti] leul
followin ham ers see am ers an ru gll , we can ca l know Irm/ [ou] [eu] leul
fudge dialects, the accommo atlOn IS !Deom Jete b be!Da artlal old /m! [eu] [gu] laul
p onetica y. a' IS involve 15 the development in dialect contact of Source: Chambers and Trudgill, 1980.
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 In the East Anglian case, it is clear why the t 'o different strateges of
that OCCur5 in fudged dialects in the lu/-IA! transition zone between transfer and approximation are emp oyed, and why the two different
northern and southern England, in which con act between varieties with types of dialect - mixed and fud ed - result. Middle-class East Anglian
thc vowel lA! and vari eties with only the vowel lul have given rise to an speakers are accommodating to oth-r rniddle- or upper-class speakers,
intermediatc vowel quality [Y] . including those present in their own cornmunity, ho already have P
.' Similarly, in the case of the East Anglian moan:mown rnerger, some or near-RP accer t in which the vowel o boat, low ete. is in fact [eu] or
speakers, partieularly those in the north of the rea who come from something close to it. The working-class speakers in the south, on the
middle-class backgrounds and have face-to-fac contaets with RP other hand, are accomrnodating to other working-class speakers resi-
speakers, are completing the merger by a process of approximation, dent in geographieally adjacent areas who, as is typical of the London
which again involves the development of phonetically interrnediate region, have a vowel of thc type [tm- u] in boat, low etc. In bot : cases
 62 DIALECf CONTACf DIALECf CONTACf 63

the end result is phono ogical: a mcrger of two formerly istinct vowels be regarded as being phoneticaily interrnedicte between 10:1 and loml,
and, at least in the next generatio, of speaker, the reduction of the ut this vowcl did not develop as a result of (social) dialcct contact. It
inventory of vowels by one. The impetus for the el ange is al so phono- was already in existence, in words such as Ig0yl 'fun'. What happened
logical: accornmodation takes place because this feature has to do with was simply that words were reallocated to this vowel that formerly had
phonemic contra t and is therefor salien. 'ut in both cases, the 10:1 or Ia:.tl/, and the selection of this vowel took place beca use it was
immcdiate motivation is phoi eti - the acquis.tion of a pronunciation of phonetically intermediate.
a particular word (and, subsequently, an increasingly large group of The label 'intermediate' can also be a lied to interdiaJect wore
words) phonetically similar to that of the target accent. This motivation forms, SUC1 as tose studied by Rekdal (1971; cited in ens, 1982).
will, of course, also be operati e even in cases where no phonological Rekdal invcstigated long-term accomrnodation by speakers frorn Sunn-
e l nge resu!ts: there are East Anglia accents, for instance, where lu:1 dal, orway, to Os10 Norwegian, after residence in Oslo offrom one to
has changed to /eul in the set of boat, road etc. under the infl ience of five years. She noted the occurrence of a number of 'hybrid' forms in the
Por other varieties, but where fAul in low, know etc. is still distinct. speech of her informants that are found in neither Os! nar Sunndal
Accornrnodation, therefore, may be incomplete in three different 'Norwegian. Ex mples incIude:
ways. Speakers may reduce pronunciation di similarities with ther
Sunnda Osio interdialect
speakers (a) by alternating their own variant of a form with that of the
'to work' Ijubl /joba/ /jubo/
othcr soeakers; (l ) by using the other speakers' variant in some words
bu! not others (transfer/rnixed dialects); and (e) by using pronunciations 'the matches' Ify~tibJ1J Ify~(bngl Ir. Hikanl
intermediate between those of the vo accents in contact Developments of this sort have, of course, long been noted by dialect
(approxima ionlfudged dialects). Of course, all three rnav occur in geo ;"'phers as occurrincr in gf'ograpbical djalect cautact arcas and
conjunction with each other. - resulting in permanent interdialect forms in transition zones. At the
lexica evel, for instance, t ere IS the \ 'e - n n dialect
Inter ialect exarnple where an area in which 'patato' is Grundbirne 'ground pear' i
separated from an area where it is Erdapfel 'earth apple' by an interven-
ing 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 pro-
vided by Cheshire (1982) on the speech of working-class adolescen s in
Reading, England. She observes a confusing situation in her tape-
recorded 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 65
also 1 does and he do, as well as 1 dos and he dos (/du:z1). It does not third-person singular and other per ons. Now the final stage of the
appear possible to correlate these forms satisfac orily with any social process involves the im orration frorn standard English of this person
tactors. Cheshire notes, howe er , that it is sensible to recognize that do distinction: standard English forrns are signalle in the table by the
is in faet two verbs in English, the main verb and the auxiliary. The same sign :j:. Note that auxiliary dos, whieh oceurs in neither the original
is true , of course, of have. In Reading English, the non-standard form Reading dialeet nor standard English, seo res O per cent. Note also that
has is used with al! persons of the ve b, a. d indeed, as in many other first-, second-, and third-person plural auxiliary do, which occurred in
south-western dialects, the local dialcct has -s as the marker of the both dia!ects, scores 99 per cent, while l ird-p rson singular main verb
present tense throughout the paradigm for al! verbs: l Izas, we goes, they does, when combined with the similar forms dos in the same context,
likes etc. Note, however, the percentage of non-standard has employed scores 86 per eent. The other standard forms - first-, second-, aad [hird-
by the three groups of t e agers Cheshire investig ted when tokens of persoi plural main verb do (36 per cent) and third-person singular
ha ve are divide into auxiliary and main verb: auxiliary does (32 per cent) - are doing quite well, but non-standar
percentage non-standard 'has' 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
main verb auxiliary
do at 68 per cent, aithough the former, as a result of standard influence,
group A 43
has almost replaced the original form dos (7 per cent). Finally, the 1 per
group B 100 O
cent figure under first-, second-, and third-person plural auxiliary does is
group C 52 O
probably so low as to be irnpossible to discuss with any confidence.
The form has, that is, is only used for the ful! verb have. Where have is What, howev r, of the figure of 14 per cent under third-person singular
thc auxiliary, forms without -S occur: ~ e has a good time vs. We've dono main verb do? This is a real puzzle because, while it does not occur in
ir. The sarne hing turns out to be true, although in a rather more either of the two original dialects, it is nevertheless used 14 times out of
complicated vay, of do. If we distinguish between main verb and every 100 by young Reading speakers, thus:
auxiliary categories, and als look separately at scores for third-person
standard English original Reading younger Reading
singular, which behaves irregularly in standard English, then Cheshire's
1 do it, do I? 1 dos/does it, do I? 1 does/ o it, do I?
data gives liS the percentage of do, does, and dos forms given in table
2.6. He does it, does he? He dos/does it, o he? He do/dosidoes it,
do/does he?
Table 2.6 Forms of do in Reading English (per cent) It can be argued, 1 believe, that the form he do . has developed an
Main verb Auxiliary occurs as an interdialect formo It is a forro that occurs in neither the
do dos does do dos does original Reading dialect nor in standard English, but arises out of
interaction between the . It is not really, of course, a fudged or an
1, 2, 3 plural 36t *7 t57 *99+ O 1
3 singular intermediate form, but it is a form that has arisen out of dialect contact.
14 *43 t43t "68 O 32t
The mechanism is presumablv hypercorrection or some other form of
Source: Cheshire. 1982. hyp radaptation (see below), but straightforward confusion in a rather
,1
complex situation - involving three forms, only one of which does not
We interpret the figures in table 2.6 as follows. The original Reading occur in the standard, and a switch-over from an auxiliary/main verb
dialect (and indeed this is confirmed by observations of the speech of distinction to a person distinction - cannot altogether be ruled out. In
elderly Reading speakers) distinguished between do for all persons as any case, the main lesson we can draw from this - and it is an important
the auxiliary and dos for all persons as the main verb: he forms labelled one, since we shall be dealing in later chapters with dialect mixtures
* are the original dialect forms. The next stage, represented in the tab e where more than two contact varieties are involved and whe genuinely
by the sign t. in volved the replacement of the dialcct forrn dos by the intermediate forms are therefore less likely - is that dialect ontact va
standard English form does. Note, however, that we assume at this stage accommodation, with or without diffusion, is a complex pracess. We
merely the importation of s andard forms, not function: the distinction must be alert to interaction among dialects, rather than straightfor ward
remained one between auxiliary and rnain verb, and not one between infiuence, as being instrumental in the development of interdialect.
..
 DlALECf CONTACT 67
66 DlALECf CO TAcr

changed. In the case of north of England to south of Engla: d adap-

Hyperdialectsms tations, examples might include:
Gi 'en that interdialect fo s can rise out of interaction, as well as north south hypercorrect
compromise, between dialects, 'we may now note further example of gas-f,wsk Ig<esm<eskl /gesmc.sk/ /go:smo:skl
ir, eraction of different types, and at diffe ent linguistic levels. The cup-hook Ikuphukl /kxphuk/ Iki\phi\kI
example from the grammar of Reading Engli h that we have just . cen
and of CO"13e forms such as Igo:sm<eskl and /kuphxk/ may also occur.
discussing involved contact between social ialects, and t e social diffu-
The hyperdiale .tisms that we are dealing with here ail appear, impor-
sion of linguistic fonns through accommodation. Equally interesting are
tantly, to be of th first, msanalys.s, type. The for 1 that the I yperdia-
similar interdialect forms that have arisen out of the geographical diffu-
!ectism takes in Norwich is as follows. Parallel to the contras! bet .een
sio. of linguisti features of the sort we discussed earlier in this chapter.
East nglian lu:1 moan and fAul mown (see above), older ari ties of
lf we think about this type of diffusion in mi!itary terms, as it is often
East Anglian English also preserve the original Middle English and ai
tempting to do, then it is perhaps not too fanciful to say that many urban
monophth ng/diphthong contrast as in, for examp e:
centres in the south of England are, as it were, under attack linguisti-
cally frorn London, Our recent research in Norwich (se e above) has daze Ide:zJ = [devz]
demonstrated quite c1carly that London-based forros such as the merger days Id<eizJ = [deiz]
of IV and 181are making their way into the English spoken there. It also
TI at is, words uch asface, gate, plate, mane, made etc. have le:/, while
shows, however, that in this state of siege a number of speakers of
words such as play, way, plain, main, maid ete. have l<eil. The loss of
Norwich English appear to be actively engaged in fighting back. They
this distinction in East Anglia predates the 105s of the hs.l-Is! distinc-
are mostly younger working-class men, and the form their action against
tion considerably, and in Norwich in 1968 (see Trudgill, 1974) it was a
Home Counties and London incursions takes is a interesting one for
distinction that was retained on y vestigial!y, and especialy by older
historical linguistics and the study of linguistic cnange generally.
speakers, although most natives of the city were familiar with the
\Ve can perhaps best describe the forro that this linguis ic rearguard
pronunciation. In eed, Kkeritz (1932) pointed out that, of the rural
action is taking by the labe! hyperdialectism, Hyperdialectism is a form
Suffolk localities he investigated, the dialect 'as spoken by elderly
of hyperadaptation, the best-kno vn form of \'x;hich s, of course, h er-
people, clearly dis inguishes between words such as name (pronounced
correction. 1-ypercorrecnons consist o at empts to adopt a more pr sti-
vith .,::] and nail [p onounced with [<el] or [El] which in standard
gous variety of speech which, throughovergeneralization, eads to t <>
English are pronounced alik ' (p. 55), but he also poi ted out that this
roduction o orms w le o not occur in the target resti e varie . A
distinction, even then, was dying out under the infiuence of RP and
well-known ntish example of this is provi e by north of England
Cocknej , with younger pea pIe genera!izing [<el-El-el] to both groups
speakers' attempts to acquire a south o Englan pronuncia ion:
of items. Similarly, in the records made by the American dialectologist
'correction' Ibutl > Ibll.tI but Guy Lowman in the 1930s (se e Trudgill, 1974), a vowel of the type [<et]
hypercorreetion Ibubl > /btl;gl butcher 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.
In a.n importa~t p~p'.'r, Knowles (1978) has pointed out that hypercor-
However, the word chamber has [as] rather than [e-e] i most of the
rection (and this will In fact be true of any form of hyperadaptation) is of
localities, and in the Suffolk village of Martlesham the words bracelet,
t:",o different typ~s. In the first type, .speakers perpetrate hvpercorre.c.::..
relations , make, apron all have [<et-a] alternating with [e-o], which is
tlO11Sbecause as It were the do 110tknow . b . their anal ses of
labelled as 'older'. The 1950s Survey of English Dialects Norfolk
t e arget variety are faulty. In the second, speakers do have a correct
recor s, made by W. Nelson Francis (ms.), show many cases of the l<ei/-
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 le:! distinction preservcd, but Francis writes in his notes under the
village of Ludham that ME { has 'several different variants, perhaps
In the flow of connected speech, the a 1 a conversion rule in an
indicative of change - [E-e] no longer than half-long with lax high off-
~correet envirQ!l.ment, Knowles points out that this is particularly likely
glide - forms with [a] may show phanemic shift with refiex of ME ai,
to bappen where two tok ns of a segment that is a candidate for change
ei', The extent to which the le:1 vowel had become a relic form in
occur in close proxirnity, but where only one of them sbould be
..
 DlALECT CONTACT 69
68 DlALEcr CONTACT

arise out of their interaction one with the other. They are therefore
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. interdialect forrns.
A very early observation of interdialcct form of this hyperdialectism
In spite of this relatively low evel of usage, however, 1 argued in my
type comes frorn the work of the Norwcgian dialectologi t. Amund B.
report on the 1968 survey (Trudgill, 1974) that native speakers of
Larsen, who must have been one of the first linguists in the worlcl to
Norwich Engli h nevcrtheless had distinct . nderlying vowels for the sets
have carried out researc into urban dialects. His publications incIude
of name and nail, and/or that they had access to so me form of commu-
Kristiana Byml (the urban dialect of Christiana-Oslo) (1907) and, with
nity diasystem, hich preserved this distinciion. The evidence was, in
other authors, Bergens Byml (1~11-12) and Stavanger Byml (1925).
part, that speakers who norrnally never made the di tinction were able
1 Larsen (1917) he develops the notion of nabo-opposisjon, lit rally
to do SO, without error, if e ey wished to do so for humorous or other
'neighbour opposition', to refer o a type of hyperdialectal phenome-
purposes. Indeed, during t e 1968 survey, a number of younger infor-
non. He notes the following dialect fo ms in the speech of the inn r
mants who did not have the di tine ion were able to produce it, con .is-
tently and correctly, when asked to read aloud a passage as they thought Sogn area of Norway (see map 2.8):
older speakcrs would read it. This distinguished them from outsiders standard
who, in imitating the local dialect, often introduced the distinctive /e:/ Sogn Norwegian
vowel into words where it did not belong. As far as local Norwich Ibj rkl /bj0rkl 'birch'
speakers were concerned, however, even if II speakers did not make 19':)tl /r;rtJt/ 'meat'
the surface contrast, they did all have access in. ome sense to a cornmon Ism':)!'1 Ism0r/ 'butter'
set of distinct underlying forms. The Sogn forrns are unusual, unexpected, and impossible to explain
1 am now persuaded (see Trudgill, 1983) that thi . 'community diasys- histo ically. Larsen explains their occurrence by pointing out that there
tem' view is in any case wrong. But it also appears that the situation in are a larg number of other wo ds wher Sogn dialect (and standard
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
,I
two lexical sets. The fact is that a nurnber of 1 orwich speakers - .~
~~~ i
especially, as we saw above, younger working-cJass males - are w .~Hya~ge:J s/
using the vowel le:/ in the wrong lexical set, and employing pronunci- ~~~L.
.~~~<C'
ations such as day Ide:1 etc. .'ltO~,..ognefford~ in~r
We can suppose a development as follo s. Contact between dialects .~~ Sogn
s leading to the dying out of original East Anglian forms in the face of .~fj
Berg'~: L ..j1,
invading London and standard forros. In this dialect death situation
younger speakers no longer acquire the correct, original, phonological
vowel distinction. They nevertheless
differences
retain a know!edge of phonetic
between the older local dialects. Favourable attitudes
~rHr
S4~'-
~~
ordaland

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:
London Norwicn
days Idrelzl Idreizl :? Ide:zI
daze Id<r.lzI /de:zI

The new forms occ r in neither of the two dialects in contact, and yet Map 2.8 Sogn a.id al ingdal. Norway

..
 -
70 DIALECT eo TACT DIALECT eONTACT 71

Norwegian) have h/ as a normal historical development, and where the competition from other diale L, v t as a result of contact with these
neighbouring Halling dialect h s the vowel /0/ (a development which dialects the e rrect sernantic distinction is no longer retained. The non-
does have an historical explanation). \Ve thu have the development: standard habitual form hr s been generalized, as a hyperdialec ism, into
context where the original dialect would have had punctu 1 forms such
Hallin Sogn
as 1 seen it last night, It therefore seerns Iikely that if the typical south-
bircn /bjerk/ /bjerk/ ~ /bjork/
western forrns with unstressed do ai d did survive, they may actually
top /t0p/ /t';)p/
increase in frequency but at the expense of the loss of the tradi .ional
The regularity of the /0/-/,;)/ correspondences between the Sogn and diaiect dis inction. Dialect contact ill have led not to the loss of a
1 = lIing dialects was so salient for Sogn spcakers that they were led to particular dialect form, but to the Ioss of a grammatical distinction.
i: troduce the vowel typical of Sogn, as opposed to Hailing, even into
lexical ite s where they did not belong. Interaction between two dia- . (2) Similarly, it is well known that many dia!ects of English have
lects led to the development of forms that did not originally occur in restored the singular-plural distinction in second-person pronouns. This
either of them. distinction was lost when originally plural you was extended in olite
Larsen's paper may be the first report of the phenornenon of hyper- usage to the singular and subsequently, except in a number of rural
dialectism. Once one has become alerted to this phenomenon, however, dialects in Britain, replaced thou altogether. Well-attested exarnples
it becomes apparent that it is probably a not uncommon consequence of (see Francis, 1967) of plural second-person pronouns (contrasting w. .. \
certain sorts of dialect contact. 1 cite three more examples from recent singular you) include you-all, y'all (southern USA); you'uns, youseyins
work on dialects of English English. (Scotland and elsewhere); you ... together (East Anglia, e.g. Come
(1) In south-western English and southern Welsh traditional dialects, you on together! = Come on!). Irish English in many of its varieties has
there is an interesting aspectual distinction unknown in most other a singular-plural distinction you-youse which is categorical for very
varieties of English. It is of the f llowing type: man speakers. (Lesley Mi roy, 1984 reports that she caused confusion
by greeting a group of women in Belfast with How are you?) This you-
punetual habitual youse distinction is not known in that form anywhere in Britain, except
1 went ther last night. 1 did go there every day. whe e it has been introduced through large-scale immigration from
1 go to Bristol tomorrow 1 do go there every week Ireland, such as in G sgow and Liverpool. From the inner-city areas of
In the habitual forms, the did and do are unstressed, and in fact the do is Liverpool, however, it has now spread out into the surrounding areas of
most often pronou iced /ddl. (Indeed, it is highly probable that this is the rseyside , as have many other features of Liverpoo! English. In thi
so urce of the /de= da' habitua!Jprogressive marker that is found in the dialect contact situation, however, it is apparent that hyperdialectal
English-based Atlantic Creoles.) usage ha become established. ewbrook (1982) reports that the non-
Iha ainen (1976) has shown that in the south-west of Enzland b ,
the standard, originally plural form youse is now widely used by speakers in
habitual/punctual aspect distinction is best preserved in the speech of the Mers yside are a as a singular pronoun, as in Hello John, how are
older dialect sp akers. That is o say, very many middle-ag d and youse? A similar development appears to have taken place in parts of
younger speakers no longer make the distinction. We can, once again, the USA (Keith Walters, personal communication) where y'all has
assume dialeet contaet in which traditional south-western dialect forms become singuiar (as well as plural) for some speaker; (although this has
are being replaced by forms from the south-east and/or from the stand- been disputed; see also Spencer, 1975). In both cases, he non-standard
ard. It is therefore interesting to observe that the recent research of Bert form is not only retained but ext nded into grammatical contexts where
Weltens has shown (see Edwards et al., 1984) that non-standard pasr- it does not be long as a result of dialect contact.
tense 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. (3) In English accents around the world, a number of interesting
Weltens (ms.) al so found, however, that the same speakers are also phenomena occur concerning non-prevocalic Ir/ - the Irl in the lexical ser
using constructions such as 1 did see ir last night. They are, that is, using of cart, ear ete. Some of these phenomena are r lated to dialect contact ,
the no -standard habitual forms with punctual meaning. The non- and some noto It is useful to distinguish between these diff re t phcn -
standard south-western grammatical forrn is retained in the face of mena in as accurate a manner as possib e .

..
 72 DlALECf eo TACf
DIALECf eONTAcr 73

As is well known, English accer ts fa 1 into two main types with intrusiv Irl and linking Irl insertion rule (they are of course thc
respect to this feature: the non-rhotic or 'r-less' varieties, which do not same rule, the ter .inological dis inction being a purely diachro-
have non-prevocalic Ir/; and the rhotic or 'r-ful' accents, which do (see nic and/or prescriptive one) is e nfine o environments following
Wells, 1982; and chapter I}. tho e vowels. Indeed, south-eastern English English accents can
now be said to have four distinct vowel subsystems:
The non-rhotic varietics demonstrate the folJowing features:
(a) Linking Ir This is not found in so me varieties o South African (i) Those which produce a following Irl when word- r mor-
and Black American English, but is normal in other r-l ss pherne-final and when another vowel follows:
accents. Words such as car are pronounced without an Irl except II';JI as in beer
when followed by another vord or morpheme beginning with a IE'd1 bear
vowel. The Irl which occurs in this en ironment is known as 13:1 [us
linking Ir!. 10:1 car
(b) Intrusive Ir! Words such as bra are pronounced without an Irl i'J:1 for
except when followed by another word or morpheme beginning l'dl letter
\ -ith a vowel. The Irl which occurs in this environrnent is known
as intrusive Irl - 'intrusive' b cause it is not 'historically justified' Only Ir':11as in idea; 10:1 as in bra, chacha-ing; i'J:I as in law,
or present in the orthography. Most accents which have linking Irl drawing; and l'dl as in America, banana-is can be sad to produce
also have intrusive Irl, at least in some environments, but it is intrusive Irl, since IE'd1and 13:1 deri e only from historical V + ltl .
regarded as undesirable by s me purists.
The evelopment and occurrence of intrusive Irl is norrnally (ii) 'owels which produce a following Iwl when word- or mor-
explained in the following ay, Non-rhotic accents are r-less ''', eme-fnal and another vowel follows:
because of a sound change, which appears to have begun in the
lu:1 as In you
south-east of England, in which Irl was lost before a consonant, as
lou/ know
in cart, or before a pause, as in caro In words where a vowel lauJ how
followed, such as carry and rat, the Ir! remained. As a con se-
quence, words such as car, where the originallrl was word-fin 1, (iii) Vowels which produce a following Ij/:
actually acquired wo pronunciations, one without an Irl, as in
li:1 as in me
new car, car port, and one with an Irl, as in cal' insurance. The
lei! play
sound change
c
{~F
loi! le
Irl> 0/- IJil boy
thus led to alternating forms such as Ika:rl and Iko:/, depending (iv) Vowe s which cannot occur word-finally - the 'checked'
on the environment. This eventually became reinterpreted
vowels:
synchronically, by analogy, not as a ruJe deleting Irl before a
consonant, but rather as its mirror image - a rule inserting Irl /I as in pit
before a vowel: IsI pet
0> Irl / _ V lrel pat
lul put
(where preceded by an appropriate vowel - see below). Words IAI putt
such as bra thereby also acquired two pronunciations - one with a IDI pot
final/r/, as in bra advert, and one without, as in new bra - and
thus rhymed with car in al! envir nments. As we shall see below, this historical explanation for the develop-
By the time this change took place, only a certain number of ment of intrusive Irl, while surely correct, may not be he whole
English vowels occurred before Ir/, and thus the operation of the 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 hyper-
eorrection. 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
Clearly, hyperadaptive Irl is a dialeet eontaet phenomenon.
The rhotic varieties of English, in their turn, dernonstrate the following
features:
(a) Analogical Ir! In the rhotic aeeents of, for example, the south-
west 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.
i
.;. (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 pre-
consonantally. Note that it is regionally restricted even within the
rhotic area. We discuss the origin of this feature below.
.
DIALECf CONTACf 75
(e) Hyperdialec al Ir! We now return to the subject of hyperdialect-
isms. 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
Ir/. 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)
daughter [da.Ital-vdo.Ital]
in other r otie/non-rhotic bar er areas of Herefordshire, Mon-
mouthshire, 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 ele-
ments 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 eONrACT DIALECT eo fTACT 77

r~ I
.-'

\ a

a:

Map 2.9 last (from Linguistic Atlas of England, Orton et al., 1978) Map 2.10 arm (rom Linguistic Atlas of Engl.: d, Orton et al., 1978)

We can regard hyper ialectal Irl on the rhotic side of the rhoticl pronounced vith Ir/. In this case, however, we must note that in
non-rho ic border arcas as a way of reacting to and resisting new, most are as of the USA rhotie pronunciations are more statusful
non-r otic pronunciations, since it is obvious that throughout than non-rhotic and are spreading at their expense. We cannot,
England rhotic pri.nunciations are receding quite rapidly in the therefore, adopt the 'reaetion' explanation for the occurrence of
face of non-rhotic. We can also regard them - since multiplc this feature in the USA. It may, in fact, be an example either of
causation is always likely in linguistic change - as a r sult of hypercorrect Irl, or of hyperdialeetal Irl, or of both. If it is
dialect contact lending to a dialect deatn p ocess, with a conse- hyperdialectal Ir!, then it can be due only to the dialect death
~i
I
1\
qucnt 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
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 thern-
areas in the United States, such as parts of North Carolina and selves, particularly if under attack from outside, may also overdo
T xas. In these areas, items such as walk and daughter may be things in fighting back, and/or may lose track, in a dialect death

.
 78 DIALECT eo TACf DIALECf eONT ACf 79
situation, of the rules of their diale t and pro uce hyperdialec- locality of Weston, Bath, Somerset (now Avon), near Bristol, as
tisms. occasionally having [t] after final I-';}/.
Interdialect, then, may take the form of intermediate vowels, hyper- It is instructive to attem t to provi e an ex Ianation for the develop-
dialectisms, or other form that did not exi t in any of the original ment of this feature. It is after al! unusual and not repeated, to the best
contact dialects. Note, however, that the notion of interdialect, as this of my knowlcdge, anywhcre else in the English-speaking worId. (There
arises in dialect contact, takes s beyond the notion of accommodatio are, it is truc, similar features: speakers of the oId Isle of Wight dialect
as such. It is probable, as we have suggested with our 'fighting back' have drawling for dr wing, and some USA diaIects have 1 sawl it ather
analogy, that it is actually divergence rather than convergence that is the than 1 saw ir (Erik Fudge, Walter Pitts, personal communication); but
relevant mechanism i the case of hyperdialectisms. As Giles has these are linking, sandhi phenomena, whereas t e BristoI 1 is not. The
argued, speakers who wish to show disapproval of others will make their Bristoll, a!though confined to word-final position, does n t depe d on
speech more unlike that of their interlocutors. In the case of at least whether a consonant, vowel, or pause follows.) Altho gh Lis and 1
some o" the hyperdialectisms cited above, speakers may do this to the vocalization are very well known indeed in the history of the world'
extent of introducing elements of the insiders' dialect into environments languages, 1 addition is not common, to say the least.
or lexical s ts here they ormerly did not occur. Notice also, however, A very plausible explanation for the historical addition of 11/lies in
that divergence , just as much as convergence, affects forms that are hypercorrection. WeIls (1982) writes:
salient, Both of the phonological hyperdi lectisms we have cited involve
surface phonological oppositions: in the Norwich days.daze case, the lntrusive 111is not -andhi phenomenon: it can apply equally to a
presence vs. absence of a contrast; and in the hyperdialectallrl case, the word which is sentence final or in isolation, and it varies allophoni-
presence vs. absence of a shared phonological unit. cal!y between clear and dark according as the following segment is
or is not a vowel. ... Its origin must pres mably le in hypercor-
rection after the !oss of final 11/ after I';}/, a hypothetical ['repg] for
Long-term hypera ap ation apple. When the 11/ was restored under pressure from standard
accents, it was added analogically to al! words ending in [;}J.
As we saw above, hyperdialectisms are but oue manifestation of th~
contact phenomenon o yperadaptation, the best-known manifestation In other words, 'C have a scenario as follows:
~f whIch IS hypercorr ctlOn. The hypercorrections that most often
attract attention are those of the butcher Ibl\bl type that we mentioned lloss correction
above, a. d that seem to be either temporary or to affect only indi- evil li .vol/ > li:v';}l > li:v:J1/
viduals. Occasionally, however. jt js c!ear that hypercorrection gives rise Eva li.v! > li:vdll
to large-scale linguistic change and 'results in interdiaiect forms becorn-
In&-an ifegrai part of a particular dialect. It is possible, for example, This explains this somewhat peculiar development in terms of dialect
that he midwestern USA pronunciation of wash etc. with rsl arase in contact and, perhaps, imperfect accommodation leading to an interdia-
this way. lect formo
O:1e such origina 'y interdialect phenomcnon in Britain is the 'Bristol There i , however, another fac or whic we ought to acknowledge.
1', an accent feature which is wel! known to students of English English Observe, first, that it is possible to point to a number of difficulties with
accents (see Wells, 1982) and to many English people ge erally. The the hypercorrection cxplanation. One is, of course, that while a number
term 'Bristoll' refers to the fact that in the working-class speech of the of Eng ish varieties demonstrate 11/10ss, only Bristol has the Bristol/l/.
major city of Bristol, and in certain irnmediately neighbouring rural Why is this? nother i that Bristol English does not have law */b:l/,
dialects, words such as Amrica, banana, idea are pronounced with a paw */p::>:lI afte the pattern of wall, pall. It is perfectly possibJe, of
finalll!. That is, ideal and ii'ea, evil and Eva, normal and Norma, aerial course, for a variety to lose 11/ only in final unstressed syllabJes, but most
and area are hornophonous. This pronunciation feature is referred to in varieties that have 111 Joss or vocalization do so in all syllable-final
a number of po ular pub!ications (e.g. Robinson, 1971). And the positions. Similarly, Bristol English does not have intrusive II! in items
Survey of EngJish Dialects materials (Orton et al., 1962-71) show the 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 word-
finally 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 hypercor-
rection 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 the initia! mpetus for the development
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 meth-
ods 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 pro-
nounced 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 environ-
ments.
(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 non-
standard 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 phonotacti-
cally uncomfortable !oan words into it phonotactic system by the
addition of final -/l/. Our argun ent is, in other words, that while
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 hyperdialect-
isms. 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, how-
ever , 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 CONT ACT

Concluslon
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 pheno-
mena, i which we note that dialect mixture ma ive rise to whole new_
interdialectal varieties (or interdialects), including new interm diate dia-
ec 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 new-
dialeet formation very clearly is that which is found in the Brazil-
Uruguay 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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Rogers, I. (1981) The infuence of Australian English intonation on the speech
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Rona, J. (1963) La frontera lingistica entre el portugus y el espaol en el norte
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. Rona, J. (1965) El Dialecto 'Fronterizo' de Norte del Uruguay. Montevideo:
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1 r Selinker, L. (1972) Interlanguage. IRAL 10, 209-31.
Shockey , L. (ms.) A pih'lh'.c'gicai change in Eastern Transatlantic English.
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Shukla, S. (1981) Bhojpuri Grammar. Washington: Georgetown University.
Spencer, N. (1975) Singular y'all. American Speech.
Steinsholt, A. (1962) Mlbryting i Hedrum. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
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Thelander, M. (1979) Sprkliga Variationsmodeller Tilliimpade pa Nutida Bur-
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Turner, G. (1966) The English Language in Australia and New Zealand. Lon-
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168 REFERENCES
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Wang. W. (1969) ~::::;,e:ing changes as a cause of residue. Language 45.9-25.
Weinreich, U. (19:-_'1 Languages in Contact . New Yo r.k' L'mgUlstlC
" C'Ire1e.
Wells, J. (1982) Aeee1l!!' 01 English three volurnes London: C brid U'
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Index

accommodation, 1-38: hierarehy in, 161; Scottish English in, 141-2;

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,
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 focused varieties, 8s-{)
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
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
focusing, 96-7,101,107,126; along
social dialect continua, 91-4
Francis, W. Nelson, 67-8, 112
Fronteirico, 83-5
Fudge, Erik, 79
INDEX 171
tudged dialects. 6(~2. 9~ hyperiaiectisms. 66-78. 82
GVS, see Great Vowel Shift lcelandic, 130
Galician,84 Ihalainen, O., 70
Gerstaecker, F .. 142 imitation, not accommodation, 12-14,
Giles. Howard: accent convergence 37.40-1
in-rnigration: from London to
and divergence, 2, 78;
accommodation theory, 2, 39; on Norwich, 55, 57; from rural areas
dangers of circularity in research, to Norwich, 110-19; see also
5; on human beings, viii sprkmisjontzr
Gordon, E., 138-9 indicators, 10-11: dialect, 93;
Great Vowel Shift (GVS), 134, 15s-{) standard, 93
Greece, 32 interdialect, 62-5, 68-9, 78, 82-3: in
Gregg, R., 157 Colonial English, 142, 151, 161;
Gujerari: in East Africa, 100 as a result of borrowing, 101; as a
Guyana: Hindi in, 100; post-Creole result ofhyperadaptation, 123; as
continuum,87 a result of systemic pressures, 101
interlanguage (Se1inker), 62
Hallingdal dialect, 70 intermediate dialect variety, 93
Hammarstrrn, c.: Australian English intermediate forms, 60-2, 82: in
as unmixed nineteenth-century Australian English, 142
London Englisti, 130-7, 144; on Irish: role in formation of Irish
sociolects in Australian English, English, 149-52
153 lrish English, 81,127: in Australia,
Hammer, the, Belfast, 121-2 139-41; in Newfoundland, 129;
Hardwick, M., 146 role of language contact in,
Harris, J., 149 149-52; second person pronouns
Hedrum, Norway, 56 singular/plural distinction, 71,
Hensey, F., 85 140; see also Belfast English
Hindi: in Fiji, 101; new dialects Isle of Man, 127
resulting from transplantation, Italy, 41
106; outside India, 100; standard
in Fiji, 100-2; in Trinidad, 106-7;
Jahr, E. H., 7, 8
see also Bhojpuri
Hindustani, 100 Kazazis, K., 32
Home Counties English, 46-7; Knowles, G., 66-7
compared with Australian koinization, 106, 107-10, 126: in
English, 131, 134-5 Colonial English, U7-<i1; see
homonymic clash, 17, 21, 38, 57 also levelling; simplification
Hordaland,95 Kokeritz, H., 67,112
Heyanger, 95-9: dialect
transplantation in, 95-7; levelling LAE, see Linguistic Atlas 01 England
in, 98; simplification in, 102-<i Labov, W.: on accommodation in
hyperadaptation, 66, 75, 123: in Irish children, 32, 34; on markers and
English, 151; long-term, 78-81 indicators, 10; on Martha's
hypercorrections, 66, 82: misanalysed, Vineyard, 75; on mergers, 105,
66,67; performance errors, 66 119; New York City work, 5, 91;
1 2 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
rnid-Ulster 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
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
INDEX 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: non-
standard 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 Australian English, 141; no
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
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