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Lessons from a Survey of British Dialect Grammar*

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Lessons from a Survey of British Dialect Grammar* Links & Letters 5, 1998 61-73 Lessons from a survey of British dialect grammar* Jenny Cheshire Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE Viv Edwards provided by Diposit Digital de Documents de la UAB Faculty of Education, University of Reading September 1997 Abstract This article is intended for non-specialists interested in linguistic and educational issues associated with regional variation in grammar. It is based on the work of the Survey of British Dialect Grammar which entailed an unusual collaboration between linguists and school children. The findings of the survey have made it possible to provide a fuller pic- ture of the national distribution of nonstandard grammatical features and to generate hypotheses about dialect levelling in urban centres. They also provide interesting chal- lenges to educational policy and practice. Key words: British Dialects, Non-standard English, Sociolinguistics, Education. Table of Contents 1. Introduction 4. Resources for diversity 2. The survey of British dialect grammar 5. Conclusion 3. Some unexpected outcomes References 1. Introduction Regional variation in English has long been the object of scholarly attention. With the emergence of sociolinguistics as an independent discipline, schol- arly interest in this question has continued to flourish (Trudgill 1990; Trudgill and Chambers 1991; Milroy and Milroy 1992). However, coverage of the different parts of the British Isles remains extremely patchy with indi- vidual linguists tending to focus on their home territories. For many areas, popular publications such as Notts natter: how it is spoke (Wright 1986) and Son of Bristle: a second guide to what the natives say and mean in the heart of Wess Vinglun (Robson 1982) are the main sources of information. (*) The research reported in this paper was supported by ESRC research award no. C-00-23-2264. 62 Links & Letters 5, 1998 Jenny Cheshire; Viv Edwards To date there have been two national surveys of British dialects. The first, the Survey of English Dialects, grew out of the work of Harold Orton and his colleagues (1962–71) at the University of Leeds. Pre-dating as it does the advent of modern sociolinguistics, the focus is on lexis and phonology. The second national overview of regional variation, the Survey of British Dialect Grammar, was made possible by an Economic and Social Research Council Research award to Jenny Cheshire and Viv Edwards. As the title implies, there was a significant shift from lexis and phonology to grammar. Other changes in focus concerned methods of data collection. Traditional dialectol- ogists elicited information from elderly, male informants. In contrast the more recent survey focuses on school children in mainly city schools. A partnership between researchers and schools came into being for very practical reasons. The project’s shoestring budget was not sufficient to employ trained linguists to record and analyze authentic speech data in a wide range of settings. However, at the time the project was taking place, there was considerable interest in regional and social variation in schools. By providing stimulus material to teachers, it was possible to harness this interest in order to collect a wide range of interesting data, using school children both as informants and as researchers. We were also able to collect qualitative data on language attitudes from older informants: coverage of the survey in regional newspapers and local radio broadcasts resulted in many letters con- taining personal views on dialect. 2. The survey of British dialect grammar In the first stage of the project, we established a network of teachers through- out the United Kingdom. Some 87 schools distributed throughout the coun- try ultimately took part in the survey. While the coverage of rural areas was incomplete, urban areas were well-represented. Approximately 5,000 chil- dren took part. The number of participants varied from school to school: in some cases, teachers worked with one class, in other cases, they worked with several. Almost all the schools were comprehensive schools drawing on chil- dren from a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds and pupils between the ages of eleven and sixteen. For reasons of economy, the survey took the form of a questionnaire, which we sent to all the participating schools. The questionnnaire consisted of 196 linguistic features, drawn from the main areas of dialect grammar described in Edwards, Trudgill and Weltens (1984). We felt it essential that a period of preparatory work should precede the administration of the ques- tionnaire, in order to ensure that children provided reliable information, rather than the answers they assumed their teachers wanted. In order to rein- force this point, a series of lesson outlines and materials were sent to all par- ticipating schools. The lesson outlines covered topics such as multilingual Britain, language variation, language change, standard English, and ‘talking proper’. The questionnaire on local dialect usage was presented as the end Lessons from a survey of British dialect grammar Links & Letters 5, 1998 63 point of the work around social and regional variation in English, with the intention of consulting pupils as the experts on their local variety of English, and asking them to tell us whether the forms listed on the questionnaire were used locally. We suggested to teachers that classes working collaboratively should divide into three groups, each dealing with one page of the questionnaire, and that each group should report on the forms of dialect grammar listed on their page that were used in their community. If more funds and research staff had been available it would, of course, have been preferable to have based this part of the survey on audio recordings of a sample of speakers in different parts of Britain. We were, of course, acutely aware of the limitations of using questionnaires to collect linguistic data and we took steps to guard against these limitations, as far as possible. A pilot study was carried out in 1986 in the town of Reading, Berkshire, where a previous empirical study of morphological and syntactic variation had taken place (Cheshire 1982). In the pilot study, children’s appraisals of dialect forms regularly heard in Read- ing coincided closely with those which we know, from the previous study, actually do occur. Each completed questionnaire that we received during the survey itself was examined to see if any examples of dialect usage were reported which, on the basis of existing knowledge, were unexpected for the area. Such examples were infrequent but did occasionally occur. Our proce- dure was to write to the teacher concerned to query the feature and to ask for further examples of utterances in which it occured. This allowed us to judge for ourselves whether misreporting had taken place. Wherever possible, we also cross-checked examples of this kind with linguists working in that area of Britain. Several problems emerged during the data collection phase. Teachers were not able to cooperate as fully as we had hoped partly because of indus- trial action which they were taking on pay and conditions during this period and partly because of the pressures caused by the introduction of a new examination system. Two hundred questionnaires were distributed, and eighty-seven returned. Although this was a smaller number than we origi- nally expected, the completed questionnaires in fact covered all the major urban areas of England, Scotland and Wales with the exception of Edin- burgh, Newport and Portsmouth (see Cheshire, Edwards and Whittle 1989). The Survey of British Dialect Grammar therefore contrasts sharply with the Survey of English Dialects not only in its focus on syntax rather than on pho- nology, but also in its emphasis on urban rather than rural areas. This predominantly urban distribution of responses allowed us to make a contribution to the controversial question of dialect levelling. Earlier analyses of English dialects based on the Survey of English Dialects material (see, for instance, Wakelin 1984; Lass 1987) found it possible to define regional dia- lect areas in terms of the phonological features that occur in different parts of Britain, but could not identify any clearcut regions of England in terms of morphological features. Lass (1987: 234) suggests that this may be because 64 Links & Letters 5, 1998 Jenny Cheshire; Viv Edwards morphosyntax has remained relatively stable throughout its history; Hudson (1983) also draws attention to the fact that, on the whole, there is less syntac- tic than phonological variation in language. The massive social and demographic changes that have taken place since the Second World War, however, appear to have had an effect on this puta- tive stability. Urban dialectologists agree that the growth of cities has been accompanied by very rapid mixing of a number of different dialects from sur- rounding areas (see Milroy 1984: 214), as former rural populations become increasingly urbanized. Dialects of English are now usually thought of as fall- ing into two groups: traditional dialects, spoken by a probably shrinking minority of speakers living mainly in remote and long-settled rural commu- nities, and mainstream dialects, spoken in various parts of the English-speak- ing world, including most of the urban areas of Britain (see Trudgill and Chambers 1991: 2-3). Whilst traditional dialects may differ from each other and from standard English in unpredicable ways, mainstream urban dialects are thought to closely resemble one another and to have relatively few grammatical differ- ences from standard English. In other words, it is thought that in some cases dialect diversity is reducing and being replaced not simply by standard gram- matical forms but also by a development towards a levelled nonstandard dia- lect. This is a controversial question that can only be properly addressed by empirical investigations of actual usage, but the survey responses allowed us to make a preliminary, informed contribution to the question, by determin- ing those features that were reported most frequently as used in the urban centres of Britain.
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