Sorry, forgot to forward this to main list.
RL
-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Sayers [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 07 April 2013 03:45 PM
To: Roger Lass
Subject: Re: Academics 'talk posh' to protect their careers
Thanks for this Roger; did you copy the main list as well? I didn't see it
on there, and I'm sure many list members would like to read this.
Dave
--
Dr. Dave Sayers
Honorary Research Fellow, Arts & Humanities, Swansea University Visiting
Lecturer (2012-2013), Dept English, Åbo Akademi University MA Dissertation
Advisor, Laureate Online Education & University of Liverpool
[log in to unmask] http://swansea.academia.edu/DaveSayers
On 04/04/2013 17:09, Roger Lass wrote:
> Just an anecdotal observation, but over a period of about a decade. I
> seem to be noticing among younger British academics, especially from
> the North and North Midlands, precisely the opposite. Younger
> postgrads and beginning lecturers up to their mid 30s seem to be
> shedding any RP like stigmata they may have borne, and losing the
> STRUT/FOOT split and going back to the older distribution, and
> recovering local intonation patterns, and recovering lowish long
> monophthongs (sometimes with central offglides) for FACE and GOAT.
> I've heard some metacommentary from especially Geordies on this;
> educated Geordies not only losing the stigmatisations they learned in
> school, but deliberately pillaging their grannies' lexicons and
> extracting words that were familiar to me as a Middle English
> specialist, but whose last vestiges (I thought) could be found in the
> SED from speakers who were in their 70s in 1950. I set up a kind of
> questionnaire on ethnic identity (again informal: I'm an American
> who's spent time in the NE, and been very close friends with people
> from Tyneside). The question (all this took place in the best place to
> do academic research, a pub) was given a set of criteria, what
> hierarchy would you construct for a self-description). And the answer
> turned out to be in the order Geordie Northeasterner > estuary name
> if relevant. One term that I put in the list was English, and the
> result in this group was no, that's not what they are, they're
> Geordies, or sometimes they used the term Northeasterners. The one of
> this group of civil servants whom I'd known for over a decade was much
> more local than the last time I'd seen her a couple of years before.
> Certain things though were not
> readopted: NURSE/NORTH merger and uvular /r/. They must have seemed
> (my
> guess) too rural and recessive.
>
> For what it's worth -- observation, no numbers.
> RL
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Variationist List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Dave Sayers
> Sent: 04 April 2013 03:27 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Academics ‘talk posh’ to protect their careers
>
> Just a press report for now on this (unpublished! handle with care!)
> research: http://goo.gl/N2df1.
>
> I'm left unsure about the method as it's (admittedly sketchily)
> presented here. Are these interviews with "more than 30 people at a
> Russell Group university" about their self-reported language practices
> really the totality of the evidence? We'll have to wait and see --
> until tomorrow if you're attending BSA, or until it's published otherwise.
>
> Meanwhile, here's a peer-reviewed study I found from last year into
> the same sort of thing (though not in academia):
> http://wes.sagepub.com/content/26/2/331.short
>
> But anyway, aren't there some proper decent respectable quantitative
> variationist studies into this?
> Have we not gazed sufficiently at our own navels? I feel like I've
> seen or heard something along these lines before, and I know there's
> plenty of studies using university students (and sometimes
> staff) as research subjects to interrogate other dialect issues; but
> nothing springs to mind specifically about purposive
> dedialectalisation and/or levelling by academics. I've tried searching
> my own collection of articles (thankyou Hulbee desktop search!), and
> Google Scholar, and by this point I've probably hoisted myself into an
> abysmally embarrassing position, ignorant or some significant body of
> variationist work on exactly this point. Can anyone untangle me out of
> my misery? I have article revisions to get on with, and this is the
> sort of thing that could fuel my procrastinations to a career-damaging
extent.
>
> Thanks,
> Dave
>
> --
> Dr. Dave Sayers
> Honorary Research Fellow, Arts & Humanities, Swansea University
> Visiting Lecturer (2012-2013), Dept English, Åbo Akademi University MA
> Dissertation Advisor, Laureate Online Education & University of
> Liverpool [log in to unmask]
> http://swansea.academia.edu/DaveSayers
>
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