Dialect levelling is a form of standardisation whereby local variations of speech lose their distinctive, regional features in favour of a more urban or mainstream dialect. This means that the speech forms of different parts of the country are becoming more similar over time and this results in a reduction of language diversity. There are several factors involved in dialect levelling:
Geographical mobility results in greater dialect contact between commuters.
Social mobility and consequent breakdown of tight knit working class communities.
Increased interaction with people of other speech varieties.
Children are less likely to adopt their parents’ pronunciation as they come under peer pressure to conform to the linguistic norm of the group. Adolescents take on a vital role in language change.
Economic change lead to loss of rural employment and construction of suburbs and new towns.
World Wars meant a change in roles within society especially WWII when women went out to work and soldiers mixed with a wide range of geographical and social backgrounds which may never have previously clashed.
Traditional Dialect Features:
North/Midlands - ‘tha’ for ‘you’, ‘hissen’ for ‘himself’, ‘I is’ or ‘I are’ for ‘I am’, ‘reet’ for ‘right’
Southwest - ‘her’ for ‘she’, ‘I be’ for ‘I am’, 'umman’ for ‘woman’
Modern Dialect Features:
Multiple negation ‘I don’t want none’
Use of ‘ain’t’ for negative auxiliaries
Use of ‘them’ as a demonstrative adjective ‘Look at them big spiders’
Use of glottal stops for /t/ at the end and in middle of words ‘bu/?/er’ ‘le/?/ me’
Replacement of /th/ sounds by /f/ or /v/ so ‘thin’ becomes ‘fin’ and ‘brother’ becomes ‘bruvver’
Order of Spread of Levelling
London and surrounding area
Southeast
Central England – Midlands, East Anglia
Northern England
Northeast England and Scotland
The outcome of levelling is a convergence of accents and dialects towards each other. In some cases, this leads to southern features being adopted in the whole country contributing to the spread of Estuary English as a nationwide dialect.
Kerswill investigated the changes in dialect in Milton Keynes, Reading and Hull by interviewing local residents of different ages and studying their pronunciation of certain speech sounds. He generally used children of the ages 4, 8 and 12 (equally divided by sex) and one caregiver, usually the mother.
The recordings were from either specific tasks given to the children such as quizzes or spot the difference games or spontaneous speech obtained by interviews or playground recordings. The children’s caregivers were also interviewed.
Milton Keynes and Reading are both viewed as towns where social and geographical mobility is high as there are plenty of newcomers from all social classes expanding the economy of the areas. However, as Reading is a more established town the population is more stable and local they do not rely on commuters as much.
Hull is geographically more isolated and more economically depressed than the other two towns; cut off from the south by the River Humber and remote from other large metropolises, the town is less attractive to commuters. Social networks are closed as the city is largely working class while surrounding villages are middle class so working/middle class children attend different schools and teenagers living on the estate studied were often third generation locals.
Milton Keynes:
Older residents used vowel sounds typical of the traditional, local accent, newcomers (e.g. parents) spoke with a variety of regional accents, while children spoke like their parents/carers for the first 4 years ( school age – one child sounded Scottish at 4 yrs but had changed to local accent by 5 ½ yrs. before changing to a new Milton Keynes accent) which had developed into Estuary English (watered down cockney with some vowels closer to received pronunciation) and were typical of south-eastern speech.
Reading:
Gradual change as children were influenced by their local born-parents and grandparents. Some change was apparent with older residents pronouncing the post- vowel /r/ sound in ‘start’ and ‘nurse’ and young speakers replacing /t/ with a glottal stop /?/.
Hull:
Young speakers retained the northern accent of their older relatives, notable in vowel sounds such as /u/ in ‘but’. They differed again in the use of glottalling and /th/ fronting in words like ‘think’ and ‘brother’.
North/South Levelling:
Kerswill identified a gradual move among adolescent, Southern speakers towards the more standardised, less localised variations of speech. However, in Hull, the closed social networks encourage the continuation of traditional pronunciations, for example, dropping the /h/ was widespread in both old and young residents of Hull but far less so in Reading and Milton Keynes.
He suggests an economic factor – the prosperity of southern towns makes social mobility and achievable goal for young people, however, the high levels of unemployment in northern towns such as Hull makes children unconvinced of the value of education as a passport to social mobility and therefore reject the pressure from authoritarian systems such as the educational one to modify their accents. Why the /th/ fronting and glottalling in Hull then, as this is common in Reading and Milton Keynes as well.
Kerswill says that these linguistic variations are associated with youth culture rather than social class as they are spread though the media and celebrity culture popular with adolescents. Hull teenagers can signify their allegiance to their region and class by maintaining the traditional northern accent as well as identifying themselves with their peer group by adopting new phonemes popular with youth culture which may still be working class but not traditionally northern.
So tired, first day back after having to take a break from school due to health issues. Mostly better now but I have a psychology test tomorrow and I had ice skating after school so I didn't get home until 7pm and then had to eat dinner. So after that useless ramble...
11th October - What is your favourite autumn drink?
Hot chocolate with whipped cream and marshmallows.
12th October - What is your favourite autumn scent?
After rain scent on leaves as you're walking under trees.
13th October - What is your favourite autumn movie?
I don't really know any.
I've been making spider diagrams with colourful pens to help me pick up key information on the topics for the test tomorrow.
On the bright side I'm all caught up in HSC which makes me feel better about missing so much school.
me opening my results and getting bad results knowing full well i treated online lessons like a cooking show and put more effort into finding Taylor swift Easter eggs but lived through a global pandemic and terrible mental health without a laptop or my own room
Theorem: Take a circle, the area of this circle is the same as area of a right triangle that has one leg equal to the radius and one leg equal to the circumference of the circle..
A long time ago in a faraway land people led simple lives by the means of agriculture. There was plenty of food to eat and to be merry. They had roofs on their head and fresh river water flowing nearby. Life seemed perfect but it was not. Every year when the rains 🌂 began, the river nearby would flood into the village and destroy their lands and homes. The people in the village would move to a nearby village for shelter with their cattle. When the rain stopped they used to come back and each time they came back they found their place in destruction. Their houses had to be rebuilt and their lands had to be outlined again. Fights were a common scene on how the outline was before the water washed it away. So the concept of the area came to maintain peace.
Finding areas of lands made with straight lines was easy but how to find the area of a land that is a curve ?
Firstly instead of taking a land made up of crazy curves let's take a land made up of the simplest curve, the circle.Draw a circle and fill in its area. Then divide it into large equal parts and arrange them in a rectangle.
It's not yet a perfect rectangle.So divide the circle in parts and try arranging these sections into a rectangle.You'll get a thing that starts looking like rectangle.
Now as you divide the circle more and more and try to arrange those parts you'll get a more nice rectangle. This more and more is nothing but the concept of limits in calculus.
So the area of the circle is the area of the rectangle.The area of the rectangle is Base×Height. Here the height of the rectangle is the radius of the circle and Base is equal to twice the area of the circle. So cut up the rectangle diagonally and you'll get a right-angled triangle with a Base as the radius of the circle and height as the circumference of a circle.
Some dihybrid cross work for your Tuesday afternoon - module six isn’t on our mock but I still enjoy the topic as it’s very interesting (even if I hate herbology 🪴)
It's almost 10 pm here and I'm getting ready to go to bed.My day didn't really start well.I was panicking for my coming exams lol but it got better after my classes started at 9.The schedule was very hectic today and I was almost out of energy by 3 when the classes finally got over.I had my lunch and practised my French lessons on duolingo.Later in the evening my boyfriend sent me this beautiful video named as Slow life in French countryside and I loved every bit of It😇.Here is the link if anyone wants to watch it.
Later in the evening after having some fruits for snacks I studied the following stuff
Chemistry half a chapter
Group Theory (Quaternions and Matrix Groups)
10 problems on group theory
I also sat and decorated by bujo planner and planned out my next maths course, Linear algebra.
The day started out on a not so high note but it did end well.
Just hoping that everything works out well in the end.I wish the same to you too as well ♡
