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Varieties of English

Using dialect resources

Dr. Emma Moore

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Contents

Using dialect resourcesWhat are they?How can we use them?

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Recommended resources

1. Dialect collections on-line http://sounds.bl.uk/BrowseCategory.aspx?

category=Accents-and-dialects2. University of Edinburgh’s Sound

Comparisons site http://www.soundcomparisons.com/

3. British Library’s Sounds Familiar? pages http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/

index.html4. BBC Voices project

http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/

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1. Dialect Collections on-line

British Library CollectionSurvey of English Dialects Millennium Memory Bank

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Survey of English Dialects (SED)

1948ff: Eugen Dieth and Harold Orton Research: 1950-1961Published: 1962-1978

• Basic materials & Maps

Four regions: N, E Midlands, W Midlands & S

• 313 locations surveyed

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The urgency…

“Harold Orton often told us that it was the eleventh hour, that dialect was

rapidly disappearing, and that this was a last-minute exercise to scoop out the last remaining vestige of dialect before it died out under the pressures of modern movement and communication.” (Ellis,

1992: 7).

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The locations

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The informants…

NORMs (Chambers & Trudgill 1998: 30): Nonmobile

• “to guarantee their speech is characteristic of the region in which they live”

Old• “to reflect the speech of a bygone era”

Rural• “because urban communities involve too much mobility and flux”

Male:• “because in the western nations women’s speech is considered to

be more self-conscious and class-conscious than men’s”

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Data elicitation

Questionnaires (1300 questions) Using diagrams and pictures to obtain

local names and terminology Spontaneous speech (informant's

opinions, personal reminiscences, occupational details etc.)

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Questionnaires

“The interviews can thus be conducted by different fieldworkers and under wildly varying circumstances, and still elicit a common core of linguistic data” (Chambers and Trudgill 1998: 21). Collecting vocabulary, pronunciation

and (limited) syntax

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Direct vs. indirect questioning Direct questioning:

What do you call a cup? Indirect questioning

NAMING: What do you call this? TALKING: What can you make with milk? REVERSE: What’s the barn for, and where is

it? COMPLETING: You sweeten tea with…? CONVERTING: A tailor is a man who … suits

You ask a tailor to … a suitThat’s a nice suit. Tell me

who … it

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SED ‘interpretative’ maps

Simplifying & combining similar words

Focusing upon etymology

Isoglosses are not ‘absolute’ dividing lines

Nonetheless, incredibly useful data…

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The Millennium Memory Bank (MMB)

A joint project between BBC Local Radio and the British Library Sound Archive

“to create an archival ‘snapshot’ of ‘ordinary’ Britons’ opinions and experiences at the turn of the century” (British Library’s Sounds Familiar website).

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The Century Speaks radio series During 1998 and 1999, forty BBC local

radio stations recorded personal oral histories from a broad cross-section of the population Sixteen themes including ‘where we live’,

‘getting older’, ‘beliefs and fears’ Focus on local, everyday experiences

640 half-hour radio documentaries, 5429 interviews on minidisks

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Informants

Recruited from established groups within the community, such as local history societies, or chosen from respondents to appeals broadcast over the radio.56% male; 44% femaleAges: 5 to 107 years old Backgrounds: diverse ethnic and

socio-economic profiles.

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Utility

The speakers in the MMB archive were not selected for the purposes of a dialect survey Nonetheless there is a similar geographic

spread to the SED 300 extracts available online

“speakers who are representative of their respective speech communities. Precedence was given to passages demonstrating particularly noteworthy linguistic features” (British Library’s Sounds Familiar website).

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The SED and MMB onlinehttp://sounds.bl.uk/BrowseCategory.aspx?category=Accents-and-dialects

This website contains both SED and MMB

recordings.

If you search here, you should select either the

‘Survey of English dialects’ or the

‘Millennium Memory Bank’ collection

If you search here, both SED and MMB recordings come up. You should

ensure you know which survey you are looking at!

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Browsing by county…

Browsing by county is probably the easiest

way to search for your assessment.

If you click on ‘Browse by county’, an

alphabetic list will appear

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An example search: Cornwall Lots of suitable recordings

may appear for the county you are looking for. You’re not

expected to search all of these, but you may want to

look at one from the SED and one from the MMB to

compare change over time.

Let’s imagine I’ve selected this one from Altarnum. What

happens when I click on it?

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Altarnum, Cornwall

This page contains the audio file

Biographical information on the speaker and information

about the data collection

A link to linguistic information about the

sound file

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Comparing SED and MMB sound files

Notice that this file for ‘Nittings Down’ states

“(cf. SED Altarnum)”. This suggests that its an MMB file that we can compare

with the original SED data.

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Nittings Down

This confirms that it’s an MMB file.

We get all the same information as with

the SED file, including the link to

the linguistic information.

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Decoding the linguistic information You’ll notice that the phonological

information is given using weird symbols This is SAMPA: a transcription system that

can be used if one doesn’t have IPA fonts To read the SED, and MMB notes, you will

need to ‘translate’ the SAMPA fonts into IPA fonts:

• http://sounds.bl.uk/resources/ASR%20Accents%20and%20Dialects%20Glossary.pdf

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Translating SAMPA: an example

The symbols correspond with the RP pronunciations, so V = RP /ʌ/ in the word STRUT

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Dialects Collection On-line

SummaryContains recordings and linguistic

information on the SED and MMBCan be used to research the dialects

you have been asked to study for your assessment

The phonological information will require ‘decoding’ before you can use it.

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2. The Uni. of Edinburgh’s Sound comparisonsproject http://www.soundcomparisons.com/

A study exploring methods for measuring the degree of phonetic similarity between, for instance, accents of English

Why? “ What linguists have not been very good at

up until recently, however, is measuring the degree of difference, or of similarity, between accents.  In other words, linguists are very good and highly experienced at showing how accents differ; but there are no agreed ways of measuring how different accents are” (Sounds Comparisons website).

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Informants

An ‘opportunity’ sample Concentration of varieties in Northern

Ireland, northeast England and southern Scotland “Indicative of the origin, place of residence,

and place of employment (respectively) of the chief data collector, Warren Maguire” (Sound Comparisons website)

• Some areas are under-represented• Unequal balance of varieties

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Data

Data collected from informants reading word lists Informants organised according to whether their

dialect is: ‘Typical’ = a representative sample of the dialect

concerned, usually characteristic of native working-class speakers between the ages of 30 and 60.

‘Traditional’ = the still extant traditional dialect pronunciations of the location, most characteristic of older working-class males.

‘Emergent’ = a representative sample of the local pronunciations of younger speakers (typically working-class between the ages of 16 and 25)

Not all of the survey dialects have all three ‘types’ represented.

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Outcomes: Network maps

A network map showing more similarity between ‘modern’ dialects

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2. The Sound comparisonswebsite http://www.soundcomparisons.com/

You can select

varieties here

Wherever there is phonetic

transcription, you will hear

the transcribed words by

rolling your mouse over

them

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An example: LondonClicking on a

variety, brings up the full word list

that you can hear by rolling

your mouse over each word

The variety was selected here

If you don’t know where somew

here is, you

can click on a map here

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Mapping the varieties

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Utility There are word lists from specific

locations.(e.g. in the North: Morley, Yorkshire and Holy Island, Northumberland)

(e.g. in the South: North Devon and Somerset.

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The Sound Comparisons website Summary

Contains transcripts of word lists from the areas you have been asked to research

Is useful only for phonological featuresThe transcriptions use the IPA

(although you might not be familiar with some of the more narrow transcriptions).

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3. British Library’s Sounds Familiar? pageshttp://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/index.html

Teaching and learning resource created by the British Library

Contains:Sound recordingsTranscriptionsDiscussions

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Data

Taken from the SED and MMB resources Considers ethnic variation in addition

to ‘traditional’ dialectsDescribes variation, considers

changes in progress, provides tasks

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The Sounds Familiar? website http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/index.html

Use these tabs to navigate

around different kinds of

information

The website makes good use of interactive

maps. In particular, this one can be used

to view data from different areas and

different generations of speakers

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The Sounds Familiar? map

Different colours refer to different collections and different types of data

Clicking on a ‘person’ will take you to a relevant sound

recording. Variable amounts of additional

information is supplied.

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Examples…Clicking on

‘Whitehaven, Cumbria’ takes you to

a “Modern dialect recording” (from the

MMB); but there is no commentary.

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Examples…Clicking on ‘Banbury,

Oxfordshire’ takes you to a much more comprehensive

page

There’s even a transcript of the recording.

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Resources

A lot of this material duplicates what’s available in the Dialect Collections on-line archive But there are some

additions features here

• Transcripts

• Commentary

• Links/wider discussions

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The Sounds Familiar? website

SummaryA lot of useful material here, so spend

some time exploring the site• Specific info on certain dialects• General info on trends in British dialects

Can be used in conjunction with the Dialect Collection On-Line website.

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4. BBC Voices projecthttp://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/

Set up in early 2000s to obtain more information on language use in the UKProfessor Clive Upton (University of

Leeds) is the ‘consultant’ for the website

There is a large proportion of academic input

• But much of the site contains input from by non-linguists (journalists and the general public, for instance)

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Academic contributors….

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BBC Voices projecthttp://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/

Possible to listen to voice

recordings collected by the

BBC

There is a word map showing current lexical variation in the

UK

There are features/articles

covering language issues

You can also search

‘regional pages’

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Voices recordings

Read about them here:http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/

yourvoice/voices_recordings.shtml Recorded by BBC journalists between

2004-2005 Uses the Survey of Regional English

(SuRE) methodology developed by the Universities of Leeds and Sheffield

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Voices recordingshttp://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/recordings/index.shtml

Clicking on the map takes you to the

recordings for different areas.

This is the location for ‘Barrow-in-Furness,

Cumbria’.

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Voices recordings

You are given information on the speakers.

A series of voice clips are provided. Typically,

these have been selected because they

highlight language issues.

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Voices recordings

There may also be interviewer notes.

And a commentary provided by Jonnie Robinson from the

British Library.

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Word maps http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/results/wordmap/

The Voices project also collected

information from the British public on

lexical variation. You can search all of this

here too.

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Language issues/discussions http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/yourvoice/

There are a number of features and

articles. Take care with these, though – only some of them

are written by academics!

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Regional pages http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/wil/

Either by clicking on the map, or on the list of

regions, you can access the ‘regional’ pages for

the Voices project.

Do take care with this, as these are pages

produced by journalists in the BBC regions, so

vary in their quality.

For example, if you wanted to know about the Oxford region, you would click here or on

the map.

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Example…

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BBC Voices

SummaryWide range of different resourcesData is mixed due to combination of

academic/journalistic inputPotentially useful resource if used

cautiously• Data• Discussions• Maps