Space, diffusion and mobility

Given its origins in traditional dialectology, and given advances in our understanding of the social embedding of language variation, it is paradoxical that space should be one of the categories that has received least attention of all in variationist sociolinguistics. Until recently, space has largely been treated as an empty stage on which sociolinguistic processes are enacted. It has been unexamined, untheorized, and its role in shaping and being shaped by variation and change untested. One function of this chapter, therefore, is to assert that space makes a difference, and to begin, in a very hesitant way, to map out what a geographically informed variation analysis might need to address. It also examines variationist interactions with the related concept of mobility. It might be reasonable to think that human geographers would provide some clues on how to proceed. As we will see, they have engaged in a great deal of soul searching about the goals of their discipline, its very existence as a separate field of enquiry, and the directions it should take. Indeed there are remarkable parallels between the recent history of human geographic thought, and interest in language variation across space. Although space has been undertheorized in variation studies, a number of researchers, from the traditional dialectologists through to those interested in the dialectology of mobility and contact, have, of course, been actively engaged in research on geographical variation and language use. Their work will be contextualized here to highlight both the parallels with theory-building in human geography, but also some of the criticisms of earlier approaches which have fed through to human geography, but remain largely unquestioned in variationist practice. The chapter therefore presents a brief theoretical background to space and mobility, before exemplifying these concepts in variationist research through an examination of, for example, the spatial diffusion of linguistic innovations, the spatial configuration of linguistic boundaries and initial steps to examine the consequences of mobility for variationist research.

The role of mundane mobility and contact in dialect death and dialect birth

Urry begins his 2007 book, Mobilities, by throwing some quite stunning statistics at his readers: in 2010, there were one billion legal international arrivals at ports and airports; in 1800 people in the US travelled on average 50 metres per day, today it is 50 kilometres per day; 8.7% of world employment is in tourism; and, at any one time, there are 360,000 passengers in flight above the United States (2007: 3-4). But very many of these mobilities for the individuals concerned are or have become rather unexceptional – a flight to a holiday in Majorca or Florida, a journey on a crowded commuter train into Madrid or Tokyo, a cross-Channel ferry to Calais in France to pick up some cheap wine and a camembert. Whilst much of the theoretically influential dialectological literature on mobility reports on long-distance, often permanent, often dangerous migrations, I turn our attention here to the dialectological consequences of this unexceptional everyday movement. I will argue here that, just as more dramatic and long-distance mobilities can trigger linguistic change, so too can the much more mundane movements we engage in in everyday life. I demonstrate that the linguistic consequences of that contact are similar if not the same – perhaps less dramatic, perhaps involving the convergence of an initially less divergent array of variants – but typologically of the same ilk. And I demonstrate that because these mobilities have been long-term, intensive and ongoing, their consequences on the dialect landscape have been highly significant. Important to remember, however, is that these mobilities are socially stratified and unevenly distributed. As Wolff put it: “the suggestion of free and equal mobility is … a deception, since we don’t all have the same access to the road” (1993: 253).

Geographical Dialectology

This chapter examines how linguists have investigated the very obvious fact that different places house different dialects. We will not look at the results of such work nor how they have been used to answer linguistic and sociolinguistic questions (see Britain 2009, in press). Here we simply examine the steps dialectologists take and have taken to conduct multi-locality research on language variation. In order to do so, five studies from different time periods are presented and critiqued, examining a number of key methodological elements in each: 1. The aim of geographical dialectology is to examine variation across space, in different places. How do dialectologists then decide which places in that space to analyse? Why choose one village and not its neighbour? Why avoid that city? This question goes to the very heart of the geographical motivation of the research. 2. What sorts of speakers will be sampled from these locations? 3. What type of data is to be collected from these speakers? 4. In what circumstances is that data to be recorded? Who will collect it, in what setting and how will the voices of the speakers be captured for later analysis? As we will see, dialectological methodologies always involve compromises, no approach is ever flawless. Ultimately, a good number of difficult practical decisions have to be taken – how long can this research take, and what are the financial restrictions on the project? As we will see geographical dialectology is probably the most expensive and the most time consuming of all forms of language variation research.

Falkland Island English

This chapter examines some of the grammatical variability and non-standardness found in the English of the Falkland Islands. The Falklands are an archipelago of over 700 islands located in the western South Atlantic Ocean, 480km off the east coast of Argentina. Although the population is small – around 3000 - the islands cover an area of over 12000km2 – slightly larger than Jamaica and half the size of Wales, making them, after Greenland, the most sparsely populated political entity in the world. In political terms, the Falklands are an Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom. In contrast to the rural isolated image that the Falklands perhaps conjure up, the community is, in demographic terms, an urban and diverse one. Over 85% of the population living in the capital Stanley. The 2006 census (Government of the Falkland Islands 2007: 6) shows that 55% of the population were not born on the Islands, with the largest migrant groups coming from the UK, St Helena (another British Overseas Territory, located in the eastern South Atlantic), Chile and Australia. It also highlighted the fact that people born in 62 different countries were resident on the islands at the time (Pascoe and Pepper 2008: 38). By way of a comparison, only Monaco and Andorra, in Europe, have a higher proportion of their populations made up of migrants. In addition to the local Falkland population, there is a large military presence on the islands at the Royal Airforce Base at Mount Pleasant, 50km south-west of Stanley. The Head of State is the monarch of the UK, who is represented on the islands by a governor. The democratically elected 11-member Legislative Assembly is responsible for day-to-day government of the islands. The Falklands are perhaps most famous because of their 74 day occupation by Argentina in 1982. It is not appropriate here to go into detail about the dispute between the UK and Argentina about the sovereignty of the Islands. What is undisputed is that there has been a continuous Anglophone speech community on the islands since the early 1830s, making it one of the most recently developed ‘Inner Circle’ (Kachru 1985) Englishes in the world. This chapter examines the grammatical characteristics of Falkland Island English, drawn from a transcribed corpus of over 500,000 words of informal conversational speech, collected by Andrea Sudbury both in Stanley and in ‘Camp’ (the local name for the rest of the islands) (see Sudbury 2000, 2001 for more details about the methods used in the survey).