The linguistic consequences of counterurbanisation
David Britain
Department of Language and Linguistics
University of Essex
dbritain@essex.ac.uk
In the developed and the developing world alike, we have become used to
urbanisation as a demographic and socio-economic process. In the search for a
better job, a better life, a better future, hundreds of millions of people around the
world have left the countryside for the city. Urbanisation has been the dominant
demographic trend of at least the past three or four hundred years. The linguistic
consequences of this urbanisation are, of course, well known (e.g. Bortoni-Ricardo
1985, Kerswill 1994).
However, much more recently, over the past half century or so, many northern
European and North American capitalist economies have been witnessing the
reverse trend – counterurbanisation, with the largest cities shedding population in
favour of (often relatively remote) rural areas (see, e.g. Champion 2001). Here I
examine some of the linguistic consequences of this conterurbanisation both for
rural areas that are expanding and for the urban areas that are depopulating. A
variationist examination of language change in a number of rural and urban locations
in East Anglia is presented which enables us to tease apart the urban hierarchical
influences of working class communities in cities from the counterurbanising
influences of more middle class city migrants.
I argue that these counterurbanisation developments force us to deconstruct methodologically, theoretically and epistemologically - some of the urbanist
assumptions about language variation and change that have emerged over the past
half-century.
References:
Bortoni-Ricardo, Stella (1985). The urbanization of rural dialect speakers. A sociolinguistic
study in Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Champion, Tony (2001). The continuing urban-rural population movement in Britain:
trends, patterns, significance. Espace, Populations, Sociétés 2001/1-2: 37-51.
Kerswill, Paul (1994). Dialects converging: rural speech in urban Norway. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.