One of my BA dissertation students is planning to conduct interviews within families,
recording their speech and probably also conducting some semi-structured interviews
with them, at a later time, about their dialect usage and differences between the
generations of their family. Now, walk into any collection of sociolinguistic
research and you'll immediately be tripping over studies of intergenerational dialect
differences within communities, but variation within individual families... that I'm
not so sure is very well covered. I recall Paul Kerswill and Eivind Torgersen's 2004
article in JoS referencing James Hurford's 1967 PhD thesis examining one East London
family's language use. I've also since found this paper http://goo.gl/JwQfl3, which
isn't quite what I'm after but does have useful discussions of the role of family.
There's a fair bit of research within families discussing language *shift*, but not
as much (that I can find) about dialect variation. Surely this has had more
coverage... Anyone? Ideally I'm looking for stuff on British English dialects, but
from a general methodological and theoretical point of view, studies from anywhere
would be useful.

Please reply to me off the main list and I'll report back with the responses.

Thanks,
Dave