Me/My Variation in Tyneside English

1. Me/My Variation in Tyneside English Nadia Takhtaganova York University TULCON 2019

2. Presentation Overview • Research Question • Community & Corpus • Hypothesis • Variables • Results • Discussion

3. Research Question & Dependent Variable What social and linguistic factors condition the realization of the determiner my as [mi:] or [maɪ] ?

4. The Community • Northeastern England, c. 1970 • Local ”Geordie English” vs. superordinate Received Pronunciation (RP) • Tyneside: Region on Tyne River, south of Northumberland • Near Scottish Border • Heavy industry • Unique regional identity

5. The Corpus • Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (Corrigan et al, 2019) • https://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte/toon/index.html • Audio interviews and transcriptions with people in NE England since 1960s until 2010s • Interviews from the 1970s: • 37 interviews • 20 women, 17 men • Age range: 17-76 • Various occupations and social classes

6. Hypothesis and Independent Variables • Age and occupation most important, followed by gender • History of 20th century • Linguistic Marketplace Index (LMI), Social Networks • Covert prestige, social roles • Contrastive stress may play a role

7. Results: Social Variables *** Extremely significant ** Very significant * Significant ns Not significant

8. Results: Contrastive Stress

9. Discussion • Gender more significant than LMI; age not significant • Covert prestige (Trudgill, 1972) • Stylistic requirements of certain professions (e.g. school cook, secretary) • Lack of significance of age: • Data bias (instances of contrastive stress) • Social Networks in the workforce • Standard deviation: substantial idiosyncrasies • Next Steps: • Speech waveform analysis for prosodic features and vowel quality • Diachronic scale • Higher number of tokens, especially younger speakers

10. Acknowledgements  • LING 4400 class – Sociolinguistic Research - Winter 2019, York University • Professor Ruth King, York Univesity, for supervising the project • Gerry Turner, York University, for help with quantitative analysis

11. References Bourdieu, P. and L. Boltanski. (1975). Le fétichisme de la langue. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 4.2–32. Corrigan, K. P., I. Buchstaller, A. Mearns and H. Moisl. (2012-2018). The Talk of the Toon. Newcastle University. http://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte/toon Corrigan, K. P., I. Buchstaller, A. Mearns and H. Moisl (2012). The Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English. Newcastle University. http://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte Johnson, D.E. (2009). Getting off the Goldvarb Standard. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3/1: 359–383.

12. References, Cont’d Meyerhoff, M. (2014). “Variation and Gender”. In S. Ehrlich, M. Meyerhoff, & J. Holmes, eds. The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality, 87-102. Wiley Blackwell. Menzer, M., G. Mazeroff and H. Porter. (2000). The Great Vowel Shift. Furman University. Pearce, M. (2009) 'A Perceptual Dialect Map of North East England', Journal of English Linguistics, 37 (2): 162-192. Sankoff, D. & S. Laberge. (1979) "The linguistic market and the statistical explanation of variability". In D. Sankoff (ed.), Linguistic Variation: Models and Methods (pp. 239-250). New York: Academic Press. Szynalski, T. (2003). Antimoon Forum: Why do they pronounce “me” as “my” [Online Discussion page]. Posted to: http://www.antimoon.com/forum/2003/2319.htm Trudgill, P. (1972). “Sex, Covert Prestige, and Linguistic Change in the Urban British English of Norwich.” Language in Society, 1: 179 – 195. Wales, K. (2006). ‘Northern English: A Social and Cultural History’. New York, Cambridge University Press.