Carmen Llamas

Linguistic Accommodation and the Salience of National Identity Markers in a Border Town

This study tests the extent of speakers’ linguistic accommodation to members of putative in-groups and out-groups in a border locality where such categorizations can be said to be particularly accentuated. Variation in the speech of informants in dialect contact interactions with separate interviewers is analyzed for evidence of speech accommodation in the form of phonological convergence or divergence. The data do not support a straightforward interpretation of accommodation, and findings are considered in terms of evidence required for such an account. Implications for the notion of salience in explanations of contact-induced language change are also considered, as is the significance of the “interviewer effect” in the compilation of data sets for use in quantitative studies of phonological variation and change.

Levels of Linguistic Accommodation across a National Border

The political border between England and Scotland has been claimed to coincide with the most tightly packed bundle of isoglosses in the English-speaking world. The borderland, therefore, may be seen as the site of discontinuities in linguistic features carrying socioindexical value as markers of “Scottishness” or “Englishness.” However, in an ongoing study of four border towns, the connection between inhabitants’ claimed national identities and their use of indexical features has been found to vary depending on whether the localities are at the border’s eastern or western ends, and on the speaker’s age. This article examines the accommodatory strategies of a female Scottish English-speaking field-worker in her interactions with younger and older male speakers from localities on either side of the border. The linguistic behavior of the field-worker is examined at the phonological, discoursal, and lexical levels, and variability in her speech is considered in light of (1) her interlocutors’ actual usage of the variables in question, (2) the interviewees’ perceived status as “older” versus “younger” and as “Scottish” versus “English,” and (3) the broader picture of the stability of usage of linguistic forms and of national identities in the localities in question.

Fricated realisations of / t / in Dublin and Middlesbrough English: an acoustic analysis of plosive frication and surface fricative contrasts

The frication of the voiceless plosives / p , t , k / in word-final intervocalic position in Dublin and Middlesbrough English is examined in controlled data, and the acoustic characteristics of fricated realisations of / t / are compared with other fricatives. The findings are that / t / is not the only plosive to be fricated in the data sample, but does appear to differ from other plosives in terms of the regularity of frication and its nongradient character for some subjects. The realisation of fricated / t / at both localities differs from that of other fricatives, and is probably perceptually distinct from other fricative contrasts at each locality, but is not identical across the two localities. On the basis of data presented here, it appears unlikely that fricated / t / in Middlesbrough English is a direct transfer effect from the language of Irish immigrants to Middlesbrough.

Sociolinguistic variation on the Scottish-English border

It is regularly asserted that the interface between the dialects of southern Scotland and those of the far north of England is still a relatively sharp one, and that it persists in coinciding closely with the political border in spite of the presence of conditions which, in other contexts, have been shown to promote linguistic convergence. In this chapter, we explore some of the phonetic evidence we have gathered in order to test these claims.

Scottish, English, British?: Innovations in Attitude Measurement

This paper reviews techniques used in the direct, quantitative measurement of attitudes, before discussing the advantages of employing Visual Analog Scales. Innovative uses of these methods were developed for utilization in the large-scale sociophonetic study Accent and Identity on the Scottish/English Border. The paper presents the ‘Attitude Analog Scale’ and the ‘Relational Analog Scale’, which were devised as a way of examining attitudes towards national identities among the inhabitants of this border region.

Estimating the Relative Sociolinguistic Salience of Segmental Variables in a Dialect Boundary Zone.

One way of evaluating the salience of a linguistic feature is by assessing the extent to which listeners associate the feature with a social category such as a particular socioeconomic class, gender, or nationality. Such ‘top–down’ associations will inevitably differ somewhat from listener to listener, as a linguistic feature – the pronunciation of a vowel or consonant, for instance – can evoke multiple social category associations, depending upon the dialect in which the feature is embedded and the context in which it is heard. In a given speech community it is reasonable to expect, as a consequence of the salience of the linguistic form in question, a certain level of intersubjective agreement on social category associations. Two metrics we can use to quantify the salience of a linguistic feature are (a) the speed with which the association is made, and (b) the degree to which members of a speech community appear to share the association. Through the use of a new technique, designed as an adaptation of the Implicit Association Test, this paper examines levels of agreement among 40 informants from the Scottish/English border region with respect to the associations they make between four key phonetic variables and the social categories of ‘Scotland’ and ‘England.’ Our findings reveal that the participants exhibit differential agreement patterns across the set of phonetic variables, and that listeners’ responses vary in line with whether participants are members of the Scottish or the English listener groups. These results demonstrate the importance of community-level agreement with respect to the associations that listeners make between social categories and linguistic forms, and as a means of ranking the forms’ relative salience.