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Neoliberalism Sociolinguistics in England
Natalie Braber and Sandra Jensen
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018 Hardcover. xxii+398 p. ISBN 978-1137562876. £95
Reviewed by Elizabeth Peterson University of Helsinki
The editors of Sociolinguistics in England explain in Chapter 1, An Overview of Sociolinguistics in England, that the impetus to create the volume was a natural progression after the similar volumes Sociolinguistics in Scotland (Lawson 2014), Sociolinguistics in Ireland (Hickey 2016) and Sociolinguistics in Wales (Durham and Morris 2016). The book holds on the promise in its title: it is a sociolinguistics overview, a fresh departure from the relative wealth of information published from a regional dialect perspective. It contains chapters on several different sociolinguistic approaches, including variationist sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, language attitudes, interactional sociolinguistics and ethnography (among others). The resulting collection is diverse, maybe even surprisingly so. In books on UK Englishes, regions other than England tend to be emphasised, probably because of their perceived difference from Southern Standard British English. In this volume, of course, those varieties of English are not included. As it turns out, there is plenty to talk about in England alone. Because of its diversity in scope, there is no obvious order to the chapters--as the editors themselves state. The book, comprising 14 chapters, begins with an overview from the editors, then moves on to a compelling historical overview of third-person singular endings in written records from four locations throughout England (Anita Auer). This is the only contribution to the volume that is situated entirely in historical English. Chapter 3 (Anne H. Fabricius) brings us to the modern era, with an overview of quantitative studies of contemporary phonetic variation in Received Pronunciation. Chapter 4 (Rob Drummond) offers a preview of a larger body of work which has subsequently appeared (Drummond 2018). In what he calls “ethnographically informed” work (p. 70), Drummond describes the vowels, quotatives and various other features of Multicultural Manchester English. Chapter 5 (Ben Rampton) also uses an ethnographic approach, making use of previous data which apparently has been on Rampton’s mind for some time. He looks at two pairs of contrasting styles of youth language data from the 1980s and 1990s, observing how speakers engage in social and ethnic styles—never once mentioning superdiversity. Chapter 6 (Chris Montgomery) offers a steadfast overview of perceptual dialectology in England, or what Montgomery (citing Preston 2011) prefers to call “language regard”. The overview begins with Giles (1970), then moves on to the author’s own work, as well as others. This chapter is one of the most comprehensive in the volume, and it is a valuable and up-to-date resource for anyone interested in language attitudes in England. In Chapter 7 (Adam Schembri, Rose Stamp, Jordan Fenlon, Kearsy Cormier), the authors inform us that British Sign Language is used by 0.1 percent of the population of England. Their multivariate analysis shows that age is the highest predictor of using regional variants in BSL. Although their study applies to a tiny portion of speakers in England, it is a welcome and intriguing addition to this collection. The volume would not be complete without a chapter on Multicultural London English, yet it appears quite late in the volume: Chapter 8 (Sue Fox and Eivind Torgersen). This contribution looks back on previous work on MLE (Jenny Cheshire is an obviously missing voice in this volume) to find out if similar features show up in younger speakers who live in other regions of the Greater London Area. The next chapters move on to locations more in the periphery of England. Chapter 9 (Isabelle Buchstaller and Adam Mearns) offers a contribution on Tyneside English by means of a longitudinal study exploring language shift across the lifespan. This study is unusual for many reasons, not least because it uses spoken English data across a 100-year span. Chapter 10 (Natalie Braber) is one of two chapters focusing on lexical variation, this one on a social variety known as “Pit Talk,” or in other words mining talk, from locations in the East Midlands. This is Braber’s first published report on this British-Academy funded project, and it is one of the more richly detailed and personal accounts in the book, totaling over 30 pages of text and figures. Chapter 11 (Claire Nance, Sam Kirkham, Eva Groarke) explores intonation in Liverpool English, focusing on phrase-final rises that seem typical in northern cities. The main question is whether Liverpool English patterns with other northern cities—which, to some extent, it does. Fronting of the GOOSE-vowel is a timely topic in contemporary sociophonetics, and it merits attention in this volume. Chapter 12 (Sandra Jensen) reports on rural communities in Cumbria, addressing the relevant question to what extent do rural varieties parallel the GOOSE-fronting phenomenon of urban areas. Through a multivariate analysis, Jensen finds that GOOSE-fronting is not particularly prominent in these rural communities. Chapter 13 (Rhys J. Sandow, Justyna A. Robinson) is the second in the volume to focus on lexical variation, this time with relation to just one lexical variable, ‘lunchbox,’ which has four variants in Anglo-Cornish English. Using an innovative “spot-the-difference” picture elicitation task, the authors find that speakers perform local identity through using the most local variant. Through interview data, they were able to come up with some indexicalities for local Anglo-Cornish terms. In the final chapter (William Barras), the author gives an overview of r-sandhi in two regions: East Lancashire and Oxfordshire. As a scholar who teaches and researches English in an international setting, this volume was a welcome addition to the available resources, offering up-close and contemporary insight into the language I am supposed to be an expert on. The contributions to this volume offer precisely the sort of description that help us keep a fresh perspective on this rich language, especially in its region of initial incubation. The volume highlights that nothing stands still in terms of language on this island, and nothing ever will. In addition, it ticks a lot of the right boxes: there are chapters from an array of scholars, both new and more well-established, as well as scholars working both in the UK and elsewhere. References Drummond, Rob. 2018. Researching Urban Youth Language and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan. Durham, Mercedes and Jonathan Morris (eds.). 2016. Sociolinguistics in Wales. Palgrave Macmillan. Giles, Howard. 1970. ‘Evaluative reactions to accents’. Educational Review 22 : 221-227. Hickey, Raymond (ed). 2016. Sociolinguistics in Ireland. Palgrave Macmillan. Lawson, Robert (ed.) 2014. Sociolinguistics in Scotland. Palgrave Macmillan. Preston, Dennis R. (2011). ‘The power of language regard : discrimination, classification and, comprehension and production’. Dialectologia (Special Issue 2) : 9-33.
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