Please join us at the Research on Language & Linguistics at Sussex seminar series:
Wednesday, 30 September 2015, 13.00
Fulton 214, University of Sussex
The influence of coalmining vocabulary on variant usage in Durham English
Tom Devlin, University of Sussex
This
research investigates the influence of coalmining vocabulary on variant
usage by testing the claim that mining communities preserve distinctive
and conservative phonological
patterns (Wales 2006: 124). The study explores the degree of advancement
of vowels belonging to the START
lexical set (Wells 1982) in mining and non-mining words in the speech
of sixteen older male
speakers from former colliery villages in East Durham in the North East
of England. The results show that regardless of the speaker's
relationship to coalmining, START
vowels are shifted to significantly
backer realisations in mining words than in non-mining vocabulary, close
to traditional pronunciations noted in historical dialect literature.
This outcome is upheld even in identical lexical items with different
meanings in mining and non-mining speech.
Wales, K. 2006. Northern English: A Social and Cultural History.
Cambridge: CUP.
Wells, J. 1982. The Accents of English.
Vol. 2: The British Isles. Cambridge: CUP.
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