Sussex by the sea: a descriptive analysis of dialect variation in the South East of England based on English Dialect App data Article (Published Version) Jansen, Sandra, Robinson, Justyna A, Cahill, Lynne, Leemann, Adrian, Blaxter, Tamsin and Britain, David (2020) Sussex by the sea: a descriptive analysis of dialect variation in the South East of England based on English Dialect App data. English Today, 36 (3). pp. 31-39. ISSN 0266- 0784 This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/93516/ This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher’s version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and reuse: Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University. Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available. Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Sussex by the sea SANDRA JANSEN , JUSTYNA A. ROBINSON, LYNNE CAHILL, ADRIAN LEEMANN, TAMSIN BLAXTER AND DAVID BRITAIN A descriptive analysis of dialect variation in the South East of England based on English Dialect App data 1. Introduction Sandra Jansen is a Senior Dialects in the South East of England are very Lecturer in English linguistics at the University often perceived as one homogenous mass, without of Paderborn, Germany. Her much regional variation. Rosewarne introduced the research focuses on notion of Estuary English and defined it as ‘variety language variation and of modified regional speech [ . ] a mixture of change, Cumbrian English, non-regional and local south-eastern English pro- sociophonetics and variation nunciation and intonation’ (Rosewarne, 1984). in production and perception of L2 varieties of English. However, studies such as Przedlacka (2001) and Recently, she edited a volume on Sociolinguistics in Torgersen & Kerswill (2004) have shown that, at England (Palgrave; with Natalie Braber) and a least on the phonetic level, distinct varieties exist. volume on Processes of Change. Studies in Late Nevertheless, very few studies have investigated Modern and Present-Day English (John Benjamins; language use in the South East and even fewer in with Lucia Siebers). Email: sandra.jansen@ the county of Sussex. It is often claimed that there unipaderborn.de is no distinct Sussex dialect (Coates, 2010: 29). Even in the earliest works describing the dialect Justyna A. Robinson is a Senior Lecturer in English of the area (Wright, 1903) there are suggestions Language and Linguistics at that it cannot be distinguished from Hampshire in the University of Sussex, the west and Kent in the east. United Kingdom. Her Only two recent studies of accent and dialect use research focuses on semantic in Sussex are known to the authors. Coates (2010) variation and change, is based on Survey of English Dialects (SED) data sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics to provide an insight into dialect use in Sussex in th and how these interact. Her the middle of the 20 century. The data is quite recent work on a collaborative AHRC-funded project limited in that mainly non-mobile older rural ‘Linguistic DNA. Modelling concepts and semantic males (NORMS; Chambers & Trudgill, 1998) change’ is available here https://www.linguisticdna. were recorded. The aim of the study was to pre- org/. Email: [email protected] serve a record of ‘traditional dialect, genuine and old’ (Orton, 1960: 332). Lynne Cahill is a Senior Lecturer in English A more recent study investigates the process of Language and Linguistics at regional dialect levelling in Hastings, a town in the the University of Sussex. Her east of Sussex (Holmes–Elliott, 2015). Holmes– previous work mostly Elliott uses a language variation and change frame- focusses on lexical work to study changes in the GOOSE and MOUTH representation of vowels and in the use of /θ/. While changes morphology and phonology and the connections between in the MOUTH vowel are described for different orthography, phonology and parts of the South East (Kerswill & Williams, doi:10.1017/S0266078420000218 English Today 143, Vol. 36, No. 3 (September 2020). Printed in the United Kingdom © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University DownloadedPress. from This https://www.cambridge.org/core is an Open Access article, distributed. IP address: under the82.27.86.76 terms of the, on Creative 03 Sep 2020 Commons at 14:55:04 Attribution, subject licence to the (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/termsby/4.0/), which permits unrestricted. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078420000218 re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 31 morphology. In recent years she has focused on the Adrian Leemann did his PhD relationship between spelling and pronunciation, in 2009 at the University of with a particular interest in variant spellings in Bern on the Intonation of contexts as diverse as medieval legal documents Swiss German dialects. As a and computer mediated communication. She has postdoc, he worked on a worked on accent change alongside students, number of projects in including a study of the diphthongs in Mick forensic phonetics and Jagger’s speech over 50 years. She is the author dialectology at the of the textbook Discovering Phonetics and Universities of Zurich and Phonology and has been a Sussex resident for Cambridge. During this time, – – nearly 40 years. he with various teams developed dialect apps for typologically diverse languages. In 2017 he was appointed Assistant Professor of Sociolinguistics at David Britain has been Lancaster University. Since September 2019 he has Professor of Modern English his own research group at the University of Bern, Linguistics at the University investigating language variation and change in of Bern in Switzerland since German-speaking Switzerland. 2010, having previously worked in New Zealand and the UK. His research interests embrace language 2005; Holmes–Elliott, 2015), TH-fronting along variation and change, with L-vocalisation and T-glottalling have been varieties of English identified as features which are diffusing across (especially in Southern England, the Southern the country (cf. Torgersen, 1997; Britain, 2009; Hemisphere and the Pacific), dialect contact and Flynn, 2012; Jansen, 2018). attrition, dialect ideologies, and the dialectology- human geography interface, especially with respect In this paper we present a recent description of to space/place, urban/rural and the role of features and variation as found in the county of mobilities. He is co-author (with Laura Rupp) of Sussex. Based on English Dialect App Corpus Linguistic perspectives on a Variable English (EDAC) data (Leemann, Kolly & Britain, 2018), Morpheme: Let’s Talk about –s (Palgrave, 2019), we provide information about the geographical editor of Language in the British Isles (Cambridge distribution of dialect features across the county, University Press, 2007), co-editor (with Jenny divided into coastal and inland regions, urban and Cheshire) of Social Dialectology (Benjamin, 2003), and co-author of Linguistics: An Introduction rural areas, main administrative centre and other (with Andrew Radford, Martin Atkinson, Harald areas and East Sussex vs West Sussex vs Mid Clahsen and Andrew Spencer) (Cambridge Sussex. In many cases we also include information University Press, 2nd edn., 2009). David was about the use of features by age group as this can be Associate Editor of the Journal of Sociolinguistics an indicator for change. between 2008 and 2017. 2. Sussex Tamsin Blaxter did her BA Linguistics at the University Sussex is situated in the South East of England, of Essex, MPhil General stretching along the south coast from Chichester Linguistics and Comparative in the west to Rye in the east and reaching north Philology at the University of to Crawley. The area known as Sussex also Oxford, and her PhD in includes the unitary authority of Brighton and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD used Hove. In 1974 the county was divided into the spatial evidence to explore two administrative parts, East and West Sussex. the role of contact in The area traditionally had a largely rural popula- simplificatory change in the history of Norwegian. tion. The south-coast towns developed as tourist She is currently undertaking a Research Fellowship centres after the Prince Regent, later King George at Gonville & Caius College. Her research interests IV, adopted Brighton as his holiday home in the include spatial aspects of language change and language variation, mathematical models of 1820s and tourism is now a significant source of change, Scandinavian historical linguistics, and employment in these towns. During the second th English dialectology. half of the 20 century the area began to attract workers in the service industries, so that by 2011, 32 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 82.27.86.76, on 03 Sep 2020 at 14:55:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078420000218 ethnicity and place of residence. Table 1 provides Table 1: Age group distribution and number of participants per age group the overall distribution of the participants by age group.