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

J. MARSHALL
Pedersen therefore, like Milroy, has searched for other ways of
grouping speakers in an attempt to explain the phenomenon. She believes that
urbanisation is the major factor determining language or register choice, even
more than social stratification. She uses this term in the sense of ‘mental
urbanisation’, i.e. the spread of a specifically urban pattern of behaviour that
extends beyond physical urbanisation (Pedersen 1994: 87). She relies upon the
nature of the network in order to measure the degree of urbanisation, since it is
a common assumption that the networks of those who live in cities are of a
different nature than the networks found in rural societies. However, at the
level below the network, that of the individual, she finds this concept to be
inadequate. She relies on the notion of life mode as an analytical tool to show
that language variation at the individual level can be accounted for as ‘an
expression of the tensions which exist between the person’s life mode and his
or her objective social status’. In the Doric study, this concept has proved
particularly useful. Before the building of transport links such as the railway
line from Aberdeen to Inverness and the A96, many villagers seldom, if ever,
journeyed into Aberdeen, whereas many do nowadays. The friction of
distance 4 has been reduced, and people may be more open to mental
urbanisation. Their earlier conceptions of cities and their inhabitants may
change as a result of this mobility, and they may become less resistant to the
social behaviour patterns emanating from the city. The resulting process of
mental urbanisation may mean that the individual becomes less resistant to
urban speech norms, and even come to favour them over local norms, which
may take on increased connotations of rural backwardness. Those individuals
who resist such mental urbanisation have proved to be more resistant to
linguistic influence from the city as well, as will be shown in section 7.
Pedersen believes that urbanisation, in the mental sense, has been
transmitted by means of mass communication, like the television, to the
population in the rural areas 5 . Cultural uniformity has been advanced as the
culture of the city/metropolis has spread and dissolved the rural communities
with their local ties (Pedersen 1994: 88). She has compared this degree of
mental urbanisation with the linguistic variation that is found in communities
which were once purely rural, and found a correlation, although she has not
quantified this. In this study, mental life mode has been quantified and used as
an independent variable for the analysis of the linguistic data.
4 A term often used by geolinguists.
5 Although, for a view on the transmission of linguistic change, see Trudgill (1986).
142