Miriam Meyerhoff

Hitting an Edinburgh Target: Immigrant Adolescents’ Acquisition of Variation in Edinburgh English

Since the 1980s, very little sociolinguistic research has been conducted on Edinburgh English. We know next to nothing of how the variation documented by Speitel and Johnston (1983), Romaine (1975) and Miller and Weinert (1998) has played out in real time. This chapter addresses that gap in our knowledge by describing the structured patterns of variation in the speech of Edinburgh adolescents with respect to three variables: word-final (t), (ing) and the verbs used to introduce reported speech and thought (i.e. quotatives). We present data from conversations and reading passages by 21 Edinburgh teenagers, showing how these Edinburgh teenagers are aligning with several qualitatively different variables found throughout British English.

‘But is it linguistics?’: Breaking down boundaries

Book reviewed in this article: Rajend Mesthrie (ed.), Concise Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics

Extending ELAN into variationist sociolinguistics

Abstract Prior to the implementation of ELAN (tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan, Wittenburg et al. 2006), it was common for sociolinguists to use multiple software applications, and consequently multiple formats, along the route from recording participants to conducting statistical analyses of the data. We present a method which allows for transcription, extracting, coding, preparation for statistical analysis, calculation of some basic frequency statistics, and creation of a concordance all within one program. ELAN is well established as a valuable tool for language documentation. ELAN is frequently used for transcription and multi-tier mark-up illustrating levels of linguistic structure as well as translations and glosses. We hope that this crossover introduction will encourage the efficiency of documentary linguists among sociolinguists and increase the interest in documenting variation among documentarians. After providing an overview of ELAN’s utility, we focus on extracting (or marking) and coding tokens of linguistic variables for quantitative analysis in the variationist sociolinguistic framework. This seamless connection between recording, transcript and coding of dependent and independent variables improves consistency, efficiency, utility, reliability and the accountability of our coding to the original recording. We illustrate a range of benefits and include step-by-step instructions accompanied by downloadable sample files and video clips to illustrate each step of the process (Extending ELAN tutorial files.zip). We also include instructions on importing existing (legacy) transcripts into ELAN.

An end of egalitarianism? Social evaluations of language difference in New Zealand

Abstract New Zealand has traditionally prided itself on an ethos of casual egalitarianism – a value system with positive and negative implications. The well-known linguistic homogeneity of the islands and general lack of regional dialect differences (Trudgill, Peter. 2004. New-dialect formation: The inevitability of colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press) is consistent with this ethos but also clearly reflects the cultural homogeneity of New Zealand’s more recent settlers. This assessment of linguistic homogeneity requires reappraisal now for two reasons: (1) many New Zealanders claim there are speech markers that identify where a New Zealander comes from, and (2) recent significant changes in the demographics of the country mean that new ethnic varieties are plausibly emerging. The very few pronunciation and lexical stereotypes that are associated with particular regions cannot explain all the claims we hear about (1), and as long-standing shibboleths, they say nothing about awareness of recent demographic changes. Our paper highlights how comments about ethnicity, social class, and rural/urbanness emerge as salient factors in aesthetic evaluations, and may point to specific features that merit detailed and linguistically informed analysis (Niedzielski, Nancy A. & Dennis R. Preston. 2000. Folk linguistics. Berlin and New York, NY: Mouton de Gruyter).

Ageer Padang Women

The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project ‘Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song’, a project carried out by researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of their ‘Beyond Text’ programme. The project aimed to understand the interplay between traditional Dinka musical forms and the Dinka language (which distinguishes words not just by different consonants and vowels but also by means of rhythm, pitch and voice quality), and to learn more about the way the song tradition responded to the disruptions of the long Sudanese civil war. In this context, we aimed to record a large collection of Dinka songs for preservation in a long-term sound archive. This collection is the result of that effort. It presents song material from 36 Dinka singers and groups of singers. Further details can be found in the readme file. The collection is accompanied by an index, which is explained in the readme file.

Uncovering hidden constraints in micro-corpora of contact Englishes

This paper explores the effect of language contact on English and considers the subtle effects of variable input from one or more languages on contact varieties of English. It uses corpus data to assist in this and takes a sociolinguistic approach to variation. It considers how contact between English and indigenous languages in Vanuatu (SW Pacific) has shaped properties of current day Bislama, focusing on the fact that variable input often results in variable output. It proposes some general principles of contact-induced replication of variation, and identifies parallels between the creole data and migrants’ acquisition of English in the UK.1