Authors
Jenny Cheshire, Viv Edwards, Pam Whittle
Publication date
2014/6/3
Book
Real English
Pages
53-96
Publisher
Routledge
Description
This chapter identifies some grammatical features that appear to be shared by the urban dialects of the major centres of Britain. Urban dialectologists seem to agree that the growth of cities has been accompanied by very rapid mixing of a number of different dialects from surrounding areas (see Milroy 1984:214), as former rural populations become increasingly urbanized. Some writers have suggested that as a result dialect diversity in Britain is reducing and being replaced not by the grammatical forms of standard English but by a development towards a levelled non-standard dialect (see Edwards and Weltens 1984: 121–2). Some empirical analyses of the phonological consequences of urbanization have been carried out: Harris (1985) and Milroy (1982), for example, showed that one effect in Belfast was the rapid reduction of allophones. So far, however, there have been no comparable studies that focus on …
Total citations
19951996199719981999200020012002200320042005200620072008200920102011201220132014201520162017201820192020202120222023214214229926445544483645514423
Scholar articles
J Cheshire, V Edwards, P Whittle - Real English, 2014