Salience, Noticeability and Enregisterment of Dialect Features in Stoke-On-Trent English
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Salience, noticeability and enregisterment of dialect features in Stoke-on-Trent English Hannah Leach ([email protected]) Chris Montgomery ([email protected]) Headline findings Finding 1: Enregisterment of features as ‘dialectal’ is important for noticeability in real time Finding 2: Degree of non-standardness is unimportant for the noticeability of enregistered features Finding 3: Mismatch between data elicited in different ways reveals ideological standpoints relating to ‘home’ accent features Stoke-on-Trent Methods Overall patterns Rank Method 1 – Questionnaire Variable (examples of comments in brackets) Type Real- Sporadic prior linguistic attention (Poole Questionnaire time 1880; Nicholls 1934; Leach 2012; 2018). Online attitudes and feature-recognition survey undertaken in 2013. Targeted at people NURSE (way he pronounced 'first’) V 1 17 OOK (book…pronounced the same as…suit) V 2 1 Vowels of city and surrounding region who lived in Stoke-on-Trent. One specific question (Are there specific pronunciations and h dropping ('ad instead of had) C 3 5= PRICE (‘like’ is often elongated to sound like laaaik) V 4 2= described by Trudgill (1990) and Weiling, words that you would associate with the local accent? List any of these below) forms the FORCE (sure – shooer) V 5 5= MOUTH (rind = round) V 6 10 Shackleton and Nerbonne (2013: 35) basis of our questionnaire dataset. 157 respondents completed the questionnaire. STRUT (the way the word 'comes' was pronounced) V 7 18 FACE (say = sea) V 10= 11 Trudgill (1990: 42) Lexical set Transcriptions Method 2 – Real-time feature identification task (see also Montgomery & Moore 2018) GOAT (goo for go) V 10= 12 t (No 't' sound on 'went’) C 15 19 bait is pronounced like beat FACE [eɪ] → [i:] 113 listeners used an online click button interface to react to a Stoke-on-Trent speaker horsES (eeeet used instead of it) V 16 5= beat is pronounced like bait FLEECE [i:] → [eɪ] lateral (bow meaning ball) C 18= 2= t release (salt (strong accent on the t) C 18= 19 bought is pronounced like boat FORCE [ɔ:] → [ɔʊ] according to the following instructions: …listen to the voice sample and listen out for th (replacing a 'th' with an 'eff' sound) C 18 17 boat is pronounced like boot GOAT [ɔʊ] → [u:] GOOSE (SKUEL INSTEAD OF SCHOOL) V 23= 8= anything in the way this person sounds which makes you wonder where he is from (or NEAR (YEAR (YUUR)) V 24 22= boot is pronounced like bout GOOSE [u:] → [aʊ] confirms where you already think he is from) … When you hear something that sounds s (Buz instead of bus) C 25 4 bout is pronounced like bite MOUTH [aʊ] → [aɪ] DRESS (switching e and a … selling becomes salling) V 27 12= Figure 1: Stoke-on-Trent location FLEECE (see = say) V 28 8 bite is pronounced like ‘baht’ PRICE [aɪ] → [a:] distinctive, please click the button below the sound wave straightaway. TRAP (broad 'a' [...] in pronunciation of 'family.’) V 29 22= Table 1: Trudgill’s (1990:42) description of the vowel system. Shaded cells show Table 2: Features commented on by respondents in both tasks, with examples of features also identified by Weiling, Shackleton and Nerbonne (2013: 35) Listeners then reviewed all of their clicks and provided reasons for them. comments for each variable. Shading equals rank order of recognition in each task Pattern 1: Pattern 2: Pattern 3: high recognition in both tasks high recognition in questionnaire/ low recognition in questionnaire / Demonstrated by: PRICE (and –OOK) low recognition in real-time task high recognition in real-time task No linear relationship between degree of Demonstrated by: horsES Demonstrated by: NURSE diphthongization and noticeability of PRICE. Two fronter (more local, FLEECE-like) Two NURSE tokens in sample, both tokens, three backer (more standard, fronted but not merged with SQUARE The price vowel is variable KIT-like) (Leach 2012) as in Liverpool (Watson 2007) in many more dialects of the UK, perhaps giving it a Most clicked token was fronter No recognition in questionnaire, or higher noticeability and a → link between degree of non- by S-o-T respondents to real-time stronger indexical link to standardness and level of task Figure 2: F1xF2 plot of a selection of monophthongs from the real-time speaker’s recording regionality. As such, even recognition? ’less’ regional tokens are Results suggest the feature has high salience locally, but is not NURSE-SQUARE merger salient (Watson & Clark 2013) and strongly clicked. attended to as a non-standard feature by non-locals. The feature is linked to Liverpool English (Honeybone & Watson 2013). Despite only otherwise noted in varieties of West Midlands English (Clark lack of merger in Stoke-on-Trent, the link to Liverpool perhaps Broad recognition and lack & Asprey 2013), and not with the same linguistic spread as Stoke- provided isteners with a frame of reference for expected non- of ties to a specific region on-Trent. The feature seems to have a lack of national salience, standardness (cf. Preston 2011:12). Similarly, possible that the may also account for it hence only a more phonetically ‘extreme’ token being clicked. strong link between Liverpool and fronted NURSE discouraged being ‘claimed’ by residents Figure 3: PRICE vowels from the speaker’s recording Note: The second ‘extreme’ token went unclicked. However, it was claim/recognition of the feature by locals, who are not shorter than the first (0.6s:0.8s), and Leach (2012) points out the Liverpudlian – “Visitors from outside the area sometimes mistake Regionality, noticeability and what counts as a dialect feature seem link between fronted horsES and –es plurals. the accent for Scouse! How rude!” (questionnaire comment). to differ based on the feature itself, and who is evaluating it. References. Clark, Urszula & Esther Asprey. 2013. West Midlands English: Birmingham and the Black Country. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.\\ Honeybone, Patrick & Kevin Watson. 2013. Salience and the sociolinguistics of Scouse spelling: Exploring the phonology of the Contemporary Humorous Localised Dialect Literature of Liverpool English. English World-Wide 34(3). 305–340.\\ Leach, Hannah. 2012. The witch[i:z] watch [ɪt] - variable tense unstressed vowels in Stoke-on-Trent. University of York MA.\\ Leach, Hannah. 2018. Sociophonetic variation in Stoke-on-Trent’s pottery industry. University of Sheffield PhD.\\ Montgomery, Chris & Emma Moore. 2018. Evaluating S(c)illy Voices: The effects of salience, stereotypes, and co-present language variables on real-time reactions to regional speech. Language 94(3). 629–661.\\ Nicholls, R. 1934. Dialect words and phrases used in the Staffordshire Potteries. Hanley: Heap.\\ Poole, C. H. 1880. An attenmpts towards a glossary of the archiaic and provincial words of the county of Stafford. Stratford-upon-Avon.\\ Preston, Dennis R. 2011. The power of language regard: Discrimination, classification, comprehension and production. Dialectologia (Special Issue II). 9–33.\\ Trudgill, Peter. 1990. The Dialects of England. Vol. 1st. Oxford: Blackwell.\\ Watson, Kevin. 2007. Liverpool English. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 37(03)\\ Watson, Kevin & Lynn Clark. 2013. How salient is the nurse~square merger? English Language and Linguistics 17(02). 297–323. \\ Weiling, M., R. G. Shackleton & J. Nerbonne. 2013. Analyzing phonetic variation in the traditional English dialects: Simultaneously clustering dialects and phonetic features. Literary and Linguistic Computing 28(1). 31–41..