Transcript The University of Sheffield: PowerPoint template

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
22/07/2015 © 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
22/07/2015 © 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
22/07/2015 © 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
Wilfred J.
Halliday
Martin
Arnold
22/07/2015 © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
Stanley
Ellis
Harold
Orton
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).
22/07/2015 © 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
22/07/2015 © 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”
22/07/2015 © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
The locations…
22/07/2015 © 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.)
22/07/2015 © 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?
22/07/2015 © 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
22/07/2015 © 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’
22/07/2015 © The University of Sheffield / Department of Marketing and Communications
100
Years
Of
Excellence.