Research on Tyneside English (Geordie) vowels has revealed levelling towards supralocal forms, with some speakers maintaining localised forms when performing locally relevant identities (Watt 2002). However previous findings have largely been based on apparent time analyses or induced from comparisons with legacy data. This paper is the first to explore the trajectories of face and goat realisations across the entire adult lifespan.

We report on a novel “dynamic” panel corpus of 12 speakers from the Tyneside region, designed to cover the life-stages that “give age meaning” (Eckert 1997:167). Speakers formed two cohorts—young and old—and were recorded either two or three times. We report on ~6,000 tokens of FACE and GOAT, combining auditory coding with acoustic measurements to facilitate analyses of both proportional use and phonetic implementation.

Results suggest that the two vowels do not change in lockstep (contra Watt 2002) across the lifespan. While young speakers show fewer changes, we observe class-based differences amongst the older speakers: working-class speakers show increasing preference for local features, while middle-class speakers follow a U-shaped trajectory (Downes 1998). Moreover, some speakers show parallelism between the proportional use of such forms and their phonetic implementation: diphthongs are more diphthongal during life-stages which are predicted to show greater prescriptive pressures. These results provide evidence that individual responses to changes in progress can be heavily mediated by individuated positioning to marketplace constraints (see Bourdieu & Boltanski 1975).

References

Bourdieu, P. & Boltanski, L. (1975). Le fétichisme de la langue. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 4:2–32.

Downes, W. 1998. Language and Society (2nd ed.). CUP.

Eckert, P. 1997. Age as a sociolinguistic variable. In The handbook of sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. 151–67.

Watt, D. 2002. “‘I don’t speak with a Geordie accent, I speak, like, the Northern accent’. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6(1):44–63.