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Studying accents and dialects. What we’ve learnt so far:. People make judgements about language that aren’t always reliable or fair The criteria that people use to judge dialects change from person to person So to study language, we have to develop methods which allow us to be objective. Aims.
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What we’ve learnt so far: • People make judgements about language that aren’t always reliable or fair • The criteria that people use to judge dialects change from person to person • So to study language, we have to develop methods which allow us to be objective © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
Aims • To consider how people have studied dialects: Methods • To think about what they found out: Results & Findings © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
What we’ll achieve by the end of today’s class • You’ll know how early dialect work was undertaken • You’ll start to think about the benefits or drawbacks of this work © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
Why did people start studying dialects? • Dialects have been studied since the 1800s, but in the 1950s, there was a surge of interest in England Stanley Ellis Wilfred J. Halliday Harold Orton Martin Arnold © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
The urgency… “Harold Orton often told us that it was the eleventh hour, that dialect was rapidly disappearing, and that this was a last-minute exercise to scoop out the last remaining vestige of dialect before it died out under the pressures of modern movement and communication.”(Ellis, 1992: 7). © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
The Survey of English Dialects (SED) • From 1950 to 1961, a team of fieldworkers collected data in 313 localities in England © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
The informants… • NORMs (Chambers & Trudgill 1998: 30): • Nonmobile • “to guarantee their speech is characteristic of the region in which they live” • Old • “to reflect the speech of a bygone era” • Rural • “because urban communities involve too much mobility and flux” • Male: • “because in the western nations women’s speech is considered to be more self-conscious and class-conscious than men’s” © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
The locations… © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
The data • 1300 questions • Diagrams and pictures were used to obtain local names and terminology • Spontaneous speech (informant's opinions, personal reminiscences, occupational details etc.) © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
Examples of questionnaire technique • How could you find out what someone calls this? • How many types of question can you think of? © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
An example from Cornwall • SED online: • John Goldsworthy (b.1882) • Male • Retired farm worker and tin miner • From Gwinear © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
What can you hear? Examples? • SOUND • lot: laht /ɑ:/ (vs. RP lot /ɒ/) • start: staart / ɑ:r/ (vs. RP staht /ɑ:/) • RHOTICITY • GRAMMAR • Thee for you= I don’t know what best to tell thee • WORDS • Clonk: ‘to swallow something large or heavy’ • Gay: ‘broken piece of china’ © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications