regional dialect

Question 1

dialectical synonyms for alley

Answer 1

Plymouth - ‘ope’
Nottinghamshire - ‘twichell’
Shropshire (shrewsbury) - ‘shuts’

Question 2

dialectical synonyms for ‘bread roll’

Answer 2

london - ‘roll’
nottingham - ‘cob’
liverpool - ‘barm’
newcastle - ‘bun’

Question 3

dialectical synonyms for ‘furniture’

Answer 3

london - sofa
manchester - couch
birmingham - settee

Question 4

why is there wide ranging lexical variation?

Answer 4

• influence of different settlers
• discourse community - question of identity
• identity of a local community is invisibly bound up with the specific language features of that community

Question 5

what is dialect levelling?

Answer 5

the process by which language forms of different parts of the country converge and become more similar over time, with the loss of regional features and reduced diversity of language

Question 6

what does leslie milroy (2002) say dialect levelling is caused by?

Answer 6

the linguist leslie milroy (2002) argues that increased geographical mobility leads to the large-scale disruption of close-knit localised networks that have historically maintained highly systematic and complex sets of socially structured linguistic norms

Question 7

what cause of dialect levelling does paul kerswill support?

Answer 7

the reduction of rural employment and the subsequent construction of suburbs and new towns are supported by these statistics quotes by paul kerswill in his paper ‘mobility, meritocracy and dialect levelling’: the fading (and phasing) out of received pronunciation:
- 1831 - 34% lived in cities
- 1931 - 80% lived in cities
- 1991 - 90% lived in cities
- 1990s - 1.2% working in agriculture

Question 8

how does social mobility cause dialect levelling?

Answer 8

social mobility has increased, leading to, according to kerswill, ‘the consequent breakdown of right knit working class communities’

Question 9

how does increased interaction cause dialect levelling?

Answer 9

kerswill also cites the ‘increased interaction with people of other speech varieties’ as a possible cause of dialect levelling

Question 10

examples of dialect levelling survivors

Answer 10

• addition of present tense -s in some verb formations in south and south west of england - I likes
• multiple negation - ‘I didn’t do nothing’
• use of ‘ain’t’