A Real-Time Approach to Understanding Language Variation and Change: The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich Revisited

Language change is a natural and inevitable process. Social and demographic shifts in recent decades have accelerated change across regional English varieties, which are ‘levelling’ to lose their distinctive features (Kerswill & Williams, 1999). The local industries that once played a vital role in cultivating regional culture, identity, and linguistic diversity are disappearing in post-industrial Britain. Ironically, meanwhile, attitudes towards linguistic diversity have themselves shifted; traditional/regional varieties are increasingly being recognised as vital cultural assets warranting preservation. This has motivated linguists to question the role of individuals in such changes, asking: can individuals change their accents and/or dialects over their lifespan?
A growing body of longitudinal ‘panel’ studies, comparing the same speakers at different points in time, has recently emerged in response to this question (see Sankoff, 2018, 2019 for an overview). Findings show that either i) linguistic changes do advance over the lifespan, but at a much slower rate than the community, ii) they regress, with speakers becoming slightly more conservative than they were in earlier life, or, iii) change across the lifespan is absent. Outcomes vary depending on the linguistic feature and community being studied, with most evidence drawn from studies concerning morphosyntactic or consonantal features. To fully understand lifespan change, additional longitudinal data on gradient linguistic features, such as vowels, from a diverse range of individuals and communities is necessary.
This project is a rare and time-sensitive opportunity to address this gap. We will conduct a replication of the UK’s first ever sociolinguistic investigation of linguistic change, namely Peter Trudgill's well-known survey of Norwich English (1974, data collection 1968). We will re-record as many of Trudgill’s original participants as possible as part of a panel study over 56 years, making it possible to evaluate lifespan changes to individuals’ speech production and perception for the first time. We will collect new samples from the present-day Norwich community for comparative ‘trend’ analysis with Trudgill’s corpus, tracking community-level change across five generations. Our deep longitudinal perspective will significantly improve understanding of the causes and mechanisms behind complex community-level linguistic shifts, as our methods capture the dynamic nature of social, cultural and economic factors that influence dialect change, loss, and survival.
Objectives:

Test the stability of individuals’ speech production and perception over the lifespan
Evaluate historical predictions of language change against contemporary realities in light of social and spatial phenomena of the past century
Better understand how and why linguistic changes are accepted, modified, or rejected within communities
Examine the social and linguistic factors that accelerate/decelerate linguistic change
Evaluate received methodologies

This research stands to enhance sociolinguistic methodologies and benefit researchers in related fields in a transdisciplinary way. Active engagement of local communities in the data collection process and a series of school workshops will facilitate diverse public impact by heightening public awareness about linguistic heritage and diversity. This extension of Trudgill's work will provide an updated resource for local educational entities. Sharing the resulting dataset in line with open science best practice will enhance models of language evolution based on real-world outcomes, while creating an East Anglian Voices Corpus will lay the foundations to extend this research in the future. As an embodiment of the social, historical and cultural milieu of the time, all interview recordings/transcriptions generated by the project will engage researchers and the wider public in the long-term.