Phonological levelling, diffusion and divergence in Liverpool and its hinterland

Watson, Kevin (2017). Phonological levelling, diffusion and divergence in Liverpool and its hinterland. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: Economic and Social Research Council. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-851183

Data description (abstract)

It is widely reported in the UK media that English accents are becoming alike. In 2001 a Guardian article claimed "England's distinctive dialects may be doomed to disappear". Not just media hype, this has also been observed in linguistic research. In fact, this convergence, called 'levelling' by linguists, is attested across the country. However, England’s north-west has been largely ignored.
This project will investigate levelling (and its opposite, divergence) in three north-western localities - Liverpool, Skelmersdale and St Helens - which offer a unique vantage point. Liverpool is a major urban centre, so we expect features of Liverpool English to spread. Skelmersdale, once a mining town, was designated a new town in 1961 and saw mass migration from Liverpool, encouraging the adoption of Liverpool features. St Helens, once part of Lancashire, became part of Merseyside in 1974, much to the dismay of its inhabitants who affiliate strongly with Lancashire. This, unlike in Skelmersdale, may block the adoption of Liverpool features.
Shedding new light on how levelling works, this project integrates a quantitative analysis of production and perception data with attitudinal and identity-based data, in order to investigate the relationship between linguistic and geographical, social and perceptual factors in language change.

Data creators:

Creator Name	Affiliation	ORCID (as URL)
Watson Kevin	Lancaster University

Sponsors:

Economic and Social Research Council

Grant reference:

RES-061-25-0458

Topic classification:

Media, communication and language

Date published:

13 Jan 2014 20:52

Last modified:

13 Jul 2017 13:44

Coverage and Methodology

Collection period:

Date from:	Date to:
1 January 2010	31 December 2012

Geographical area:

Liverpool

Country:

United Kingdom

Data collection method:

There are three cohorts of speakers from each of three geographical localities: Liverpool, St Helens & Skelmersdale. The three cohorts are (1) archive speakers (born between 1890-1943); (2) older speakers (born between 1918-1952); teen speakers (born between 1992-1994).

The methodology for data collection was a loosely structured interview. For the archive cohort the speakers are giving oral history interviews and for the older and teen cohorts the data collection method is based on William Labov’s sociolinguistic interview design.

In the archive cohort, the topics in the interviews focus on growing up and working in Liverpool, St Helens and Skelmersdale, mostly from the period around the turn of the 20th century and around the period of the First World War. The audio data, although not the transcript, are stored at the North West Sound Archive, based in Clitheroe Castle. We thank the North West Sound Archive for making these data available for this project.

The data in the older and teen cohorts were specifically recorded as part of this project. The interview topics centred on speakers’ impressions of and beliefs about regions of north-west England and the accents spoken there (specifically, Liverpool, St Helens and Skelmersdale). This often includes a discussion of the linguistic features the participants believe are part of the corresponding accents, and the stereotypes which surround them.

The submitted dataset, which consists of tab-delimited text files, is sorted first by geographical location (Liverpool / Skelmersdale / St Helens) and then by speaker cohort (Archive / Older / Teen). The number of files in each dataset is as follows:
/Liverpool/Archive: 22 files
/Liverpool/Older: 6 files
/Liverpool/Teen: 11 files
/Skelmersdale/Archive: 6 files
/Skelmersdale/Older: 6 files
/Skelmersdale/Teen: 7 files
/St Helens/Archive: 10 items
/St Helens/Older: 7 files
/St Helens/Teen: 9 files
Total number of datafiles: 84

This corresponds to data from the followings numbers of speakers (since some speakers were recorded in pairs or groups of three, the same file may represent the interview data from two or three speakers):
/Liverpool/Archive: 22 speakers
/Liverpool/Older: 12 speakers
/Liverpool/Teen: 20 speakers
/Skelmersdale/Archive: 11 speakers
/Skelmersdale/Older: 10 speakers
/Skelmersdale/Teen: 14 speakers
/St Helens/Archive: 12 speakers
/St Helens/Older: 11 speakers
/St Helens/Teen: 16 speakers
Total number of speakers: 128

Observation unit:

Individual

Kind of data:

Numeric, Audio

Type of data:

Qualitative and mixed methods data

Resource language:

English

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