Segmental and suprasegmental change in North West Yorkshire – a new case of supralocalisation ?

• Main Author: Stephan Wilhelm
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cercle linguistique du Centre et de l'Ouest - CerLICO 2018-06-01
• Series: Corela
• Subjects: English; sociolinguistics; language variation and change; speech prosody; intonation; suprasegmentals
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/corela/5203

A number of phonetic and phonological changes have lately been observed in most geographical varieties of British English (e.g. Trudgill 1986 ; Foulkes & Docherty 1999 ; Britain 2002b ; Kerswill 2003 ; Stuart-Smith et al. 2004, 2007). This phenomenon seems to have been accelerated in the past decades by increasing social and geographical mobility (e.g. Kerswill 2003 ; Britain 2002a, 2002b ; Stuart-Smith et al. 2004).Based on a corpus mainly composed of recordings of spontaneous conversations between native North West Yorkshire (NW Yorkshire) speakers divided into age groups, this paper identifies and analyses a number of segmental and suprasegmental innovations observed in apparent time in both urban and rural settings. It discusses the sociolinguistic motivation behind some of these innovations and addresses the question of whether the same factors and principles operate in suprasegmental change – especially in the fields of intonation and voice quality – as in the diffusion of non-traditional segmental phonetic/phonological features. It also tackles the nature and status of diffusing intonational patterns such as the innovative use of rising tones in association with statements. The semantic/pragmatic value of these patterns is taken into consideration as well as that of a number of articulatory and phonatory adjustments characterising adolescent speech. It is suggested that the changes observed occur as a result of koineisation and supralocalisation processes (Siegel 1985 ; Kerswill and Williams 2000 ; Britain 2005, 2009), and that they testify to the emergence of new supralocal dialect areas in the north of England.