Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 157

Thematic Session (Papers belonging to this Thematic Session)

Dialect Perceptions in the City

Authors: Cramer, Jennifer; Montgomery, Chris
Submitted by: Cramer, Jennifer (University of Kentucky, United States of America)

The notion of place has been the main concern of dialectology throughout its history as a field. This type of research has traditionally aimed to present a picture of some dialect landscape, using phonological and lexical items as the basis for dialect groupings, with place being a physical, objective, and bounded entity. In doing so, traditional dialectology has ignored a “socially rich” (Britain 2009, 142) interpretation of space and place and has largely disregarded perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs nonlinguists have about connections between language, space, and place.

Perceptual Dialectology (PD) is a branch of folk linguistics that attempts to redress the balance somewhat by focusing on what nonlinguists think, say, and understand about linguistic variation. This includes where they think variation comes from, where they think it exists, and why they think it happens. Thus, in this tradition, place becomes less objective; it is not only geographic or political facts that guide nonlinguists’ ideas about language but also their social realities. PD allows researchers to question the assumptions often made about the close connections between place, language, and identity. It can also provide support or contradicting evidence for the ways in which traditional dialectology divides the linguistic landscape.

As a field of inquiry, then, PD provides the right tools for understanding how place conditions nonlinguists’ thoughts about language. PD can aid in our understanding of how people in cities view the linguistic landscape in ways that are often different from but sometimes similar to people outside of city limits. Previous research in New York City (Preston 1989), along with further cites in the United States (e.g. Fridland and Bartlett 2006; Cramer 2010) and others across the globe (e.g. Romanello 2002; Bijvoet and Frauru 2011), has exemplified the ways in which PD can be used to determine how city dwellers view their own way of speaking as well as that of nearby communities.

Research in the UK outwith cities has highlighted the importance of urban areas in perception (Montgomery and Beal 2011). The important role that these urban areas play in the perceptual picture of the country appears to tally with the increasing role of such areas in the development of supra-regional linguistic features (cf. Watt 2002). As countries become increasingly urbanized, the role of cities and their inhabitants will be of further interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, and perceptual studies should not neglect this important development.

Key discussion questions in this thematic session will include the following:

· How do city dwellers perceive their linguistic landscapes?

· How are these perceptions different from/similar to those of people outside of cities?

· What effect does life in a city have on dialect perceptions?

· How are city dwellers perceived by outsiders?

· Do the perceptions of nonlinguists align with the production data from traditional dialectology studies?

The session's aims are to address the specific theoretical and methodological issues associated with the examination of dialect perceptions in and of cities, drawing on current advances in PD to examine how the urban setting influences those perceptions. Its objectives are to present new work looking at dialect perceptions in and of cities, and to use such work to provoke discussion about new ways of investigating this important area of research.

Key references

Bijvoet, Ellen, and Kari Frauru. 2011. Language variation and varieties in contemporary multilingual Stockholm: an exploratory pilot study of young people’s perceptions. In Young Urban Swedish: Variation and change in multilingual settings, ed. Roger Källström and Inger Lindberg, 1-34. Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg.

Cramer, Jennifer. 2010. The Effect of Borders on the Linguistic Production and Perception of Regional Identity in Louisville, Kentucky. Unpublished PhD thesis, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Fridland, Valerie, and Kathryn Bartlett. 2006. “Correctness, Pleasantness, and Degree of Difference Ratings across Regions.” American Speech 81 (4): 358-386.

Montgomery, Chris, and Joan Beal. 2011. Perceptual Dialectology. In Analysing Variation in English, ed. April McMahon and Warren Maguire, 121-148. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Preston, Dennis R. 1989. Perceptual dialectology: Non-linguists’ view of aerial linguistics. Dordrecht: Foris.

Romanello, Maria Teresa. 2002. The perception of urban varieties: Preliminary studies from the south of Italy. In Handbook of perceptual dialectology, ed. Daniel Long and Dennis R. Preston, 329-349. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

Dialect Perceptions in the City