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

SALIENCE IN LANGUAGE CHANGE
factor is class, with middle class (MC) teenagers using far fewer of the
innovative non-prestige variants than their working class (WC) peers. There is
a decidedly unclear gender distribution, though there is a tendency for girls to
use more of the prestige variants – a pattern reversed among WC children in
Reading and Hull.
These rather similar results in the three towns (especially evident in the
scores for Hull and Reading) belie the very different recent histories of the
features. All three features are at least a century old in London, and have been
spreading throughout the south-east, though TH-fronting has been slower to
spread than glottalling. In the North, all three are recent. In Hull, there is
evidence that T-glottalling in this intervocalic environment started among
today’s elderly generation, who use it but at a very low frequency, though in
other regions it is more recent still (in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, some 150 kms
to the north, it is relatively widespread among young middle-class females
born since about 1970 – see Watt & Milroy, 1999: 29). In Hull, there is
evidence that TH-fronting has only been common among working-class
children since some time in the decade after 1980. In the case of these three
consonants, then, there is complete levelling towards the southern pattern in
the northern city of Hull and, we suspect, elsewhere too.
We must consider reasons why this happened at the same time for all
three variables. The first possible explanation is that they are all consonants,
and therefore pattern differently from vowels, which, as we have argued
elsewhere (Williams & Kerswill 1999), show no North-South convergence at
all. To answer this question, we look at another consonantal feature, that of H-
dropping in lexical words like house, hard. All three towns lie in the large
central belt of England where /h/ is dropped in traditional dialects and
generally in working-class speech. This is, indeed, the pattern we find among
our elderly speakers in all three towns, who in the interview used /h/ only
between 5 and 12 per cent of the time. Figure 2 shows this pattern. However,
it shows another extremely striking result: the
100
80
60
% [h] Milton Keynes
% [h] Reading
% [h] Hull
40
20
0
77
Elderly Boys Girls