ENG303 Masteremne i engelsk lingvistikk I
Autumn 2005
Phonological variation in dialects of English
Kevin McCafferty
This course surveys recent work on phonological variation and change in the English of Great Britain
and Ireland, looking at widespread trends and more localised developments. The main textbook is:
Paul Foulkes and Gerard Docherty (eds.), Urban voices. Accent studies in the British Isles,
London, Edward Arnold, 1999. 281pp. (avaliable as print-on-demand, UK price £19.99)
This reading will be supplemented by a selection of articles published since 1999 (see list below).
Assessment: term paper (project), approx. 7500 words.
The term paper may take the form of in-depth exploration of the literature relating to topics discussed
in class or analysis of spoken language data from corpora that are available in the public domain, e.g.:
Raymond Hickey, A sound atlas of Irish English, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 2004.
Harold Orton and Eugen Dieth (eds.), Survey of English dialects, London, Routledge, 19621971.
Topics are to be agreed early in the semester.
Articles
(Available electronically at UB Bergen, apart from the two titles starred. UB has no subscription to English
world-wide, but these articles can be ordered via inter-library loan)
Dyer, Judy 2002. ‘We all speak the same round here’: dialect levelling in a Scottish-English
community. Journal of sociolinguistics 6:99-116.
Fabricius, Anne 2002. Weak vowels in modern RP: an acoustic study of happY-tensing and KIT/schwa
shift. Language variation and change 14:211-228.
*Fabricius, Anne 2002. Ongoing change in modern RP: evidence for the disappearing stigma of tglottalling. English world-wide 23:115-136.
Foulkes, Paul and Gerard J. Docherty 2000. Another chapter in the story of /r/: ‘Labiodental’ variants
in British English. Journal of sociolinguistics 4:30-59.
Kerswill, Paul 2000. Creating a new town koine: children and language change in Milton Keynes.
Language in society 29:65-115.
*Marshall, Jonathan 2003. The changing sociolinguistic status of the glottal stop in northeast Scottish
English. English world-wide 24:89-108.
Sangster, Catherine 2001. Lenition of alveolar stops in Liverpool English. Journal of sociolinguistics
5:401-412.
Torgersen, Eivind and Paul Kerswill 2004. Internal and external motivation in a phonetic change:
dialect levelling outcomes for an English vowel shift. Journal of sociolinguistics 8:23-53.
Watt, Dominic 2000. Phonetic parallels between the close-mid vowels of Tyneside English: are they
internally motivated? Language variation and change 12:69-101.
Watt, Dominic 2002. ‘I don’t speak with a Geordie accent, I speak, like, the Northern accent’: contactinduced levelling in the Tyneside vowel system. Journal of sociolinguistics 6:44-63.
Recommended reading
Wells, J.C. 1982. Accents of English 1. An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wells, J.C. 1982. Accents of English 2. The British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.