Counterurbanisation, dialect contact and the levelling of non-salient traditional dialect variants

Abstract

Abstract Earlier investigations of the linguistic consequences of mobility in largely rural East Anglia in Eastern England showed a quite dramatic decline in the use of the salient traditional dialect variants. In this chapter, we present a variationist sociolinguistic analysis of a relatively unsalient linguistic characteristic of the traditional dialect of this region – the use of the /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ vowels in a small set of lexical items that take /ɛ/ and /æ/ respectively in the standard – in order to assess the extent to which salience is implicated in the levelling process. We find evidence of considerable levelling of the traditional forms nevertheless, but not to the extent that we had found for more salient variables, suggesting salient linguistic variables may indeed be more vulnerable to attrition in contexts of intensive dialect contact.

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