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

SALIENCE IN LANGUAGE CHANGE
compromise varieties like so-called ‘Estuary English’ (between RP and
broader south-eastern speech) (Rosewarne 1994, Coggle 1993, Wells 1982).
It could be said that H-dropping has extra-strong salience as a lowprestige
marker, which leads to a tendency to abandon it. But a converse
extra-strong salience may be appealed to in order to explain its continued
strength in Hull: it could be that it is heard as ‘southern’ or ‘posh’, both of
which may be undesirable features among Northern teenagers. Appealing to
extra-strong salience is, as we have seen, a circular argument if we stick just
to the linguistic correlates of salience. Also, this does not explain why the
originally southern features of T-glottalling and TH-fronting are adopted in the
north with such rapidity. We need to look at large-scale attitudinal and
identity factors affecting the North and the South differently, and which
operate independently of phonetic difference and phonological contrast. Even
though T-glottalling and TH-fronting are southern in origin and are
demonstrably spreading from the south, they apparently do not pose a threat
to a northern identity – unlike the use of /h/. The condition for this seems to
be that the southern features must at the same time have low prestige.
We must still explain the reinstatement of /h/ in the south among
speakers who remain quite strongly non-standard in their grammar and
phonology. It appears that the evaluation of /h/ has changed among adolescent
working-class speakers: it is as if it is no longer a marker of ‘poshness’ for
these speakers. It is tempting to seek an explanation in the greater social
mobility in the region than in the north. However, for the Reading workingclass
adolescents this is not obviously the case, since they are resident in a
district of the town which has very strongly local networks in the same way as
the Hull working-class subjects (Kerswill & Williams 1999; Cheshire et al.
1999). If sociodemographic changes do turn out to differentiate the northern
and southern teenagers, we must still explain the southerners’ adoption and
maintenance of other non-prestige features like TH-fronting and T-glottalling.
Having exhausted linguistic and social explanations for the adoption vs. nonadoption
of particular features, we have to recognise that we may, ultimately,
be dealing with linguistically arbitrary factors.
The following is a summary of the results for the three consonantal
variables:
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