Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 4 (2000) - The University of ...

SOCIAL NETWORKS IN A RURAL SETTING
with high degrees of mental urbanisation will travel to the city more often to
go to the theatre, shops, and to visit friends. They will not only be exposed to
urban speech more, but also be more receptive to it. The linguistic features of
Aberdeen speech are, at least for middle-class speakers, close to the national
standard emanating from Edinburgh. The only differences are phonetic and
prosodic, with a few lexical items surviving. This is the norm to which northeasterners
look, and these are the features which are adopted.
Urban and rural speech communities, while sharing many important
features, are nevertheless different in many ways. In a recent paper,
Røyneland (2000) shows that language change in cities is endocentric, or
internally generated, while that in peripheral areas is exocentric, or contactinduced.
She writes that the role of adolescents differs in the two sorts of area:
in cities, adolescents are more non-standard than older generations, while in
exocentric ones they are more standard. While the Doric Study has not
focused on the role of adolescents, and on the effect of age generally, the data
analysis agrees with that of Røyneland, in that adolescents are leading the
changes towards the standard, at least as far as the males are concerned. What
is focused upon more here is the degree of mental urbanisation of a rural
speaker, regardless of age, and what implications this has for dialect
maintenance. However, fundamental differences between the two types of
community exist at all levels, and the implications of this are far-reaching in
terms of the different directions of change, different network structures, and
attitudes to change.
4.2 J. and L. Milroy 1985
The Milroys admit that social network analysis is limited by its superior
ability to handle close-knit ties as opposed to weak, diffuse types of network
structure, because of the fact that personal networks are in principle
unbounded. Their model suggests that ‘innovations flow from one group to
another through ‘weak’ network links’ (Milroy J. and L. 1985: 344). This
model offers a practical solution to an aspect of the actuation problem, and as
such is concerned with speaker innovation. Close-knit networks are located
mainly at the top and bottom of society (at least in Britain), with the majority
of socially and geographically mobile people located between these two
points. For close-knit, territorially defined groups, however, they claim that it
is possible to treat personal networks as if they were bounded groups, and
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