A comparative study of language change in Northern Englishes

This 3-year project investigates language change in five urban dialects of Northern England—Derby, Newcastle, York, Leeds and Manchester. The main goal of the project is to assess evidence for claims in recent literature concerning the extent to which these dialects are becoming increasingly alike or dissimilar over time. Much recent research has suggested that distinctive features of Northern English dialects are being displaced by competing Southern forms, or lost as a consequence of contact among neighbouring Northern dialects. In addition, this study will examine how individuals’ attitudes toward language use in the context of local social and economic factors may shape change in these dialects. In addressing these questions, the research team will quantitatively examine language use in corpora of conversational speech from each of these cities, and examine these results alongside data on speakers’ perceptions of language usage. The first four dialects were chosen as varieties for which the research team has access to existing corpora. Manchester was included as a major urban variety for which no carefully sampled corpus of spoken English currently exists. In studying these five varieties, this project will contribute to current research, a large-scale comparative investigation of language change in Northern England.

本为期三年的研究项目聚焦英格兰北部五座城市方言的语言演变，涉及的方言分别为德比（Derby）、纽卡斯尔（Newcastle）、约克（York）、利兹（Leeds）与曼彻斯特（Manchester）。本项目的核心目标是验证近年学术文献中提出的相关论断的佐证依据，以探明这些北部英语方言随时间推移究竟是愈发趋同还是愈发分化。近年诸多研究指出，英格兰北部方言的特色语音与语法特征，正被与之形成竞争的南部英语变体所取代，或是因北部邻方言间的语言接触而逐渐流失。此外，本研究还将探究：在本地社会与经济因素的影响语境下，语言使用者对语言使用的态度，会如何塑造这些方言的演变轨迹。为解答上述研究问题，研究团队将对五座城市的会话语音语料库（corpus）开展量化分析，并将分析结果与使用者的语言使用认知数据进行对照研究。前四种方言之所以入选，是因为研究团队已掌握其现有语料库；而曼彻斯特作为重要的城市方言变体，目前尚无经过严谨抽样的英语口语语料库，因此被纳入本次研究范畴。本次针对这五种方言变体的研究，将为当前英格兰北部语言演变的大规模比较研究提供重要学术支撑。