• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Search for abstracts --- authors title abstract

---

Abstract ID: 1059

Part of Session 157: Dialect Perceptions in the City (Other abstracts in this session)

Dialect Perception and Identification in Nottingham

Authors: Braber, Natalie
Submitted by: Braber, Natalie (Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom)

Linguistic variation in the city of Nottingham (in the East Midlands) has long been neglected. Although Wales (2000) comments that the East Midlands may be the geographical centre of England, it is not in any sense the perceived centre of England. It is an area which can be hard to locate and is referred to by Wales (2000:7/8) as ‘neither here nor there’, and by Montgomery (2007: 352) as a ‘no-man’s land’. There has been no survey of dialect in the region since the Survey of English Dialects in the 1950s. It is, moreover, striking that existing publications that aggregate the findings of earlier surveys and more recent localised studies to present an overview of regional speech in the UK either lack up-to-date research data from this area or simply ignore the region completely. Despite this lack of empirical evidence, anecdotally it appears that language in Nottingham remains distinctive and locals insist there is considerable difference, for instance, between speech in the major urban centres of Nottingham, Derby and Leicester (see for example Scollins and Titford 2000).

 

The focus of this study is the examination of dialect perception and identification within the city of Nottingham. Although the East Midlands doesn’t have an official regional capital, Nottingham is treated by many as such. However, it seems that local accents are not easily recognised by young people who live there (Braber, in process). This seems to contradict theories showing that people are more accurate at recognising local accents (Wells 1982; Williams et al. 1999). This study examines perception of local language varieties with 200 sixth-form students, male and female, rural and urban in the city of Nottingham. The question being asked here is whether lack of recognition could be to do with the lack of cultural salience of this particular area. Furthermore, this study has also shown that these speakers have very negative attitudes towards their own linguistic variety. Could these two aspects be related? Are young Nottingham speakers misidentifying local accents as part of a ‘denial’ phenomenon (see Montgomery & Beal 2011; Williams et al. 1999).

 

References

Braber, N. (in process) A perceptual dialectology of the East Midlands.

Montgomery, C. (2007) Northern English Dialects: A Perceptual Approach. Unpublished PhD Thesis, The University of Sheffield.

Montgomery, C. & Beal, J. (2011) Perceptual Dialectology. In: Analysing Variation and Change, edited by Warren Maguire and April MacMahon. Cambridge: CUP.

Scollins, R. & Titford, J. (2000) Ey up mi duck! Dialect of Derbyshire and the East Midlands. Newbury: Countryside Books.

Wales, K. (2000) North and South: An English linguistic divide? English Today 16(1), 4-15.

Wells, J.C. (1982) Accents of English 1. An Introduction. Cambridge: CUP.

Williams, A.; Garrett, P.  & N. Coupland. (1999) Dialect Recognition. In Dennis Preston (ed.) The Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology, volume 1, 345-358. Philadelphia: Benjamins.