Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1142

Part of Session 135: The sociolinguistics of football (Other abstracts in this session)

Football talk and language change - a variationist perspective

Authors: Walker, Jim
Submitted by: Walker, Jim (Université Lumière Lyon 2, France)

Dr. Jim Walker

Université Lumière Lyon 2

Despite the huge cash flows generated by the business that football has become and the immense wealth afforded to star players, it remains a quintessentially working class sport, one that is furthermore unusual in its geographic spread in the United Kingdom. No other team sport comes close, either socially or geographically. Rugby Union, for instance, maintains associations with the upper middle class and is little played in northern England.

These characteristics mean that "football speak" - that is, the language used by managers and players, as well as the varieties used by commentators, sports journalists and people discussing matches at work - is a rich seam for sociolinguists, both quantitatively and qualitatively, inasmuch as it provides extensive data for dialect research.

In previous work on football register (Walker 2008, 2011), I have not only explored the extent to which lexical and phraseological elements of football language permeate the general vernacular, but a more elusive hypothesis: that the popularity of football and its media exposure has led to an increase in an unusual, some would say anomalous, use of the Present Perfect in British English to narrative a sequence of past events, as in the following example from a football manager in a post-match interview, where a non-standard Preterit is followed by an arguably anomalous Perfect and a standard Preterit:

He done really well to last the 90 minutes and he's nearly scored with a header near the end, you know, it hit the bar.

It will be shown that this usage is associated, in people's minds, with football, and using the fact that almost every dialect of British English is well represented in the footballing fraternity, we will be trying to unpick the tangle: has football speak been responsible for this innovation, if indeed it is one, or merely for its popularisation? In so doing, we will be setting our paper within a wider context of reflections on the effect of media and cultural phenomena on long-term language change of the most profound syntactic kind.

References

Walker, Jim. 2011. From football cliché to syntactic change: remarks on the phraseology of footbal". In Blandine Pennec & Olivier Simonin. Fixed Phrases in English. Les Locutions de l’anglais. Perpignan, Presses Universitaires de Perpignan.

Walker, Jim. 2008. The footballer's perfect - are footballers leading the way?". In Lavric, Eva/Pisek, Gerhard/Skinner, Andrew/Stadler, Wolfgang (eds.), The Linguistics of Football, Language in Performance, Band 38, pp. 24-38

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

Football talk and language change - a variationist perspective