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Sociolinguistics in England pp 297–331Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Peripheral Communities and Innovation: Changes in the goose Vowel in a West Cumbrian Town

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Abstract

The chapter discusses changes in the goose vowel in Maryport, a peripheral community in West Cumbria. Sociolinguistic studies often focus on variation and change processes in urban areas, but peripheral areas are frequently neglected. goose-fronting has been described as innovation in various urban communities in England with strikingly similar constraints across varieties. However, in Maryport, the goose vowel is not fronting and constraints which are widespread such as the inhibiting /l/ following the vowel are not found. On the other hand, a strong sex constraint exists with women using fronter /uː/ than men and the difference is maintained across age groups. While we do not observe changes on the F2 dimension, on the F1 dimension an opposing trend is noticeable. Women are raising the vowel, while men are lowering it. These strong differences in the realisation between the sexes lead to the conclusion that the vowel indexes sex in this community.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Variation between dark and light /l/ exists.

  2. 2.

    Kerswill (2015; based on Andersen and Røyneland) discusses four types of communities: Type 1 are endocentric closed communities, i.e. they are geographically peripheral and self-contained. Type 2 are endocentric open communities, which are urban and innovative. Because of their openness due to high external contact, features may diffuse outwards. However, they are resistant to outside features. Type 3 are exocentric closed communities, where linguistic norms are pervious to outside influence, but contact is slight. Type 4 are exocentric open communities, which are often rural, and unlike Type 1, they are not protective of local norms. Instead, they are strongly affected by incoming features, diffusing from local urban centres.

  3. 3.

    All four participants who had joined the armed forces for a while told me that they had to ‘tone down’ their accent, otherwise the others in their battalion would not have been able to understand them; this could become a crucial detail in life-threatening situations. This clearly has repercussions on their long-term use of dialect but also on the dialect contact situation in the town.

  4. 4.

    A modified version of the BEEP dictionary for British English (FAVEalign, Rosenfelder et al. 2011) was used.

  5. 5.

    Stop words are function words which are most likely to have reduced vowels. A list of stop words was automatically excluded from the measurements by FAVEalign.

  6. 6.

    fleece was deliberately not chosen as one of the ‘corner vowels’ as it has a strong diphthongal quality.

  7. 7.

    Flynn (2011) shows that for northern English varieties, the Watt and Fabricius normalisation method (Fabricius et al. 2009) is preferable.

  8. 8.

    Cf. Beal et al. (2012) and Ferragne and Pellegrino (2010) for Newcastle and Deterding (2003) for Singapore.

  9. 9.

    Though Jasmine Warburton (Turton p.c.) finds that goose is somewhat fronting in Newcastle.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany

    Sandra Jansen

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  1. Sandra Jansen
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Arts & Humanities, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, United Kingdom

    Natalie Braber

  2. Department of English and American Studies, University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany

    Sandra Jansen

Additional information

This research was supported by the Rising Star Grant from the University of Brighton. I would like to thank the two reviewers for their valuable comments which greatly improved this chapter. I would also like to thank Laurel Mackenzie and Anne Fabricius for their patience when helping me to understand FAVE and Daniel Ezra Johnson for his help with statistics. Of course, I am responsible for any shortcomings.

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Jansen, S. (2018). Peripheral Communities and Innovation: Changes in the goose Vowel in a West Cumbrian Town. In: Braber, N., Jansen, S. (eds) Sociolinguistics in England. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56288-3_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56288-3_12

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