Hello, I'm David Hornsby from the English Language and Linguistics department and I'm a sociolinguist. As its name suggests sociolinguistics is the study of the relationship between language and society and it's a sub-discipline of linguistics, which we might describe as the scientific study of language. What I'm interested in is the way language varies. I think we're all aware of at least three ways in which language can vary. When I was growing up, for example, I noted that my mother who was from the west country pronounced the R in words like card and bar, whereas my father who was from East London didn't. Now, that's an example of geographical variation, it's affected by where you live. There's also social variation, most of us think that BBC newsreaders have a posh or a standard or a prestige accent, whatever you like to call it, whereas somebody like Dell Boy on Only Fools and Horses doesn't, that's social variation. A third kind of variation is stylistic variation and I was aware when I was quite young naturally that um the way I spoke to my aunts and uncles and the way I spoke to my friends was rather different and I didn't like it and I thought it was something wrong with me and it wasn't until I started to study this many years later that I realised that actually this is something that everybody does to some extent, we all talk in different ways at different times to different people and that's stylistic variation. 

I didn't actually know when I was observing differences in language that there were people who actually study this kind of thing, I didn't realise there was a study called sociolinguistics and what surprised me was that when linguistics came of age as a study in the early 20th century the study of variation was thought of as being rather uninteresting or unimportant. I think there are two reasons for that. The first was that there were people who went around who called themselves dialectologists and what they tended to do was to go and talk to elderly men in very, very isolated rural villages and in doing so they would get a flavour of older forms of language that were maybe dying out, particularly interesting and rich forms that wouldn't be around much longer was the thinking. And that was great but it really gave you a flavour of what a particularly atypical group of people were doing and it didn't tell us very much about language in general. 

The second problem was I think that the study of linguistics wanted to justify itself as a science, it wanted to be taken seriously as a discipline and the feeling was that if we start bringing social considerations into language that somehow we're diluting it. We've got to look at language in its own right, we can't start having other things interfere with that study. Now, by the time we get to the sixties people are beginning to question that assumption. We can't surely keep social information out of our study of language. I think I can demonstrate that quite easily when I have a room full of people I sometimes ask one of them to imagine that unfortunately they have to have a life-saving operation but that they have the choice of two surgeons. And I look at my victim as a surgeon number one comes up to you and says hmm the patient's in a bad way isn't she, I think I will need a scalpel and some saline water. Surgeon number two comes along and says the patient is in a bad way init, I think I'm gonna need some saline water and a scalpel. I then ask my victim which surgeon she would like and then I take a show of hands in the hall and nearly always it's unanimously in favour of surgeon one. Now, I don't need to remind you that I said
pretty much exactly the same thing I just said it in two different ways, the content hadn't changed but people's reaction to the way it's said, that did change. Assumptions seem to be that surgeon one was better educated than surgeon two. Maybe he was more reliable than surgeon two. 

Now I should remind you that's actually a prejudice, we should not in 2016 be making judgments on the basis of people on the basis of their accent but we can't help it we do. We are aware that certain forms are more prestigious than others. So, if we can't exclude social information from the study of language, then we'd better look at it and there's a very good reason why it's important that we do and it's this: every language that has ever been spoken anywhere has been subject to change. So how does that change happen? Logically there's only two possibilities, it could be that everybody changes at exactly the same moment, at exactly the same time in the way that, say, we put the clocks back, that seems pretty unlikely. More likely surely is that changes are picked up by some people first and then they spread to others, that then begs the question, who gets there first? Who are the innovators? Who are the people who pick up the change? who are the people who take longest to get it, and why? What kinds of words are affected and what kinds of words aren't affected immediately? Those are kind of questions that a variationist sociolinguist like myself would want to would want to ask.

And in the early days, in the 60s and the 70s, the kind of thing that a sociolinguist would do would be to take a cross-section of the population and look at a number of speech variables, these are things that are known to be variable in that particular community. A very famous study in Norwich, for example, looked at the ing ending in words like hunting, shooting, fishing. Now this is a variable in Norwich because some people say hunting shooting and fishing and others say huntin' shootin' fishin' and Peter Trudgill in his famous study took a cross-section of the Norwich population, so balanced for gender, different age groups and all the social classes, and he looked at the number of times people used these Norwich hunt and shoot and fishing type pronunciations and the result there you can see on the graph and what we see is that there's a pretty perfect, pretty much perfect correlation between people's social class and their use of these Norwich forms. The more working-class you are, that's the lower working-class line at the top there, the more of these Norwich pronunciations you use. There's something we need to add to that. When people have an opportunity literally to watch their P's and Q's, when they're given a list of words to read, the number of these Norwich pronunciations goes down for all classes, that's why that graph slopes quite dramatically particularly at the top. So, when people have an opportunity to monitor their speech the number of these Norwich pronunciations goes down, that's an example of stylistic variation for you. 

Another finding from the early studies was that where there is a prestige form or a standard form, women tend to use more of them than men do and there have been a lot of theories as to why that's the case. One theory is that men, while they may not admit it, secretly rather like low status forms, the ones that don't have much prestige, because they're associated with working-class speakers and being working-class may be more attractive to a male than to a woman. There's a lot more to it than that and certainly the picture with regard to gender has changed over the years we've realised that very often when it comes to leading changes, paradoxically, again it's women that lead. That led us to ask questions about how language changes generally and where and whether the kind of community that you're living in has some bearing on that. And one important finding was that most of the languages which we're familiar with seem to be getting slightly easier to learn. Now that may come as a shock to anybody who's tried learning a foreign language, most adults find it a difficult thing to do and certainly if you've ever tried to wrestle with cases in German and genders in French you may be a bit sceptical about that but languages do the languages that we're most familiar with in the Western world certainly seem to have been simplifying. A good example of that is Old English when compared with Middle English. Old English nouns had gender they were masculine, feminine or neuter and adjectives had to agree with them but hang on they also had to agree with them for number whether they were singular or plural and they agreed for case, that's the role of the noun within the sentence, whether it's a subject, so nominative, the object, accusative, or whether it was genitive or dative. So that was 24 agreements that you had to make in Old English for your adjectives. And for an adjective like dola for example there were six forms that fitted into those slots, adjective dola means silly. Compare that with modern English, modern English for the word for silly is, well silly, and it has just one form, you don't need to worry about singular and plural, you don't need to worry about case because we don't have it, agreements simply aren't a problem. How did we go from a highly complex language to a grammatically much simpler one. 

The answer seems to be that a great deal of contact between speakers of different varieties has gone on in the history of English. In particular in the Old English period you had Anglo Saxon speakers speaking an early form of German if you like, speaking with Old Norse speakers which was related but probably closer to something like Swedish or Danish or Norwegian. With a bit of effort you could make yourself understood but the first thing that went was the stuff that makes language complicated, endings agreements, things like that, those things tended to get ironed out because there was a lot of contact. We can see the effects of contact and isolation in another example. Faroese and Danish are two descendants of Old Norse, they would have been the same language 800 years ago and if we look at Old Norse, this is the paradigm of the verb to be, and we can see it's really quite complicated. You've got six different forms to learn, that's the I, you, he, she, we, and so on forms. You've got six different forms in the present and six different forms in the past. Faroese, well it's simplified things a bit, we now have just a single present, plural form and a single past, plural form but some of those differences from Old Norse still remain and they haven't changed very much. Danish, however, has simplified things quite dramatically. Essentially, you have a verb paradigm which goes: I is, you is, he is, we is, they is, easy. Why is there such a difference between Danish and Faroese. The answer again seems to be to do with contact. Danish has a great deal of contact with the other Scandinavian nations, there are a lot of people moving about, it's densely populated and that degree of contact has ironed out some of the difficult bits of language. Faroese, however, is probably one of the most isolated spoken languages within Europe. It's a long way from anywhere, it's difficult to get to, the speakers all speak Faroese and they don't really have to negotiate with outsiders that much. Communities like that can hang on to the complicated bits of language. 

Now when we start talking about contact and isolation that begs the question we are a lot more mobile than we used to be what happens when speakers come together? what happens when lots of dialects come into contact? And that's something that I'm particularly interested in at the moment. A good example where some very interesting work has been done is New Zealand. Now, we know that most of the migrants came from different parts of Great Britain in the early to mid-19th century and we know that a single variety emerged from contact between those speakers. That variety has a
different vowel in foot and strut as I do in my variety of English but where a northern English speaker would not, they would have foot and strut. New Zealand English doesn't pronounce the R in words like cart and bar in the way that a West Country speaker would Lennon and Lenin would both come out as Lennon in New Zealand and New Zealand has a fronted a in start so stacked rather than start. Now, if we were to take a 19th-century English dialect that corresponded to that we would probably have to go to somewhere like mid-Essex but it seems very, very unlikely that all today's New Zealand speakers are descended from people who came from rural Essex, that's unlikely. What is more likely Trudgill suggests is the forms that emerged were majority forms from the input dialect mix, when you put all these people together the majority forms that emerged in the 19th century were those. He also claims that this new dialect, which has emerged which we call a 'koinŽ' and we call the process of this creation of a new dialect 'koinŽization'. It takes two generations, it's not the first indigenous generation that acquires a new dialect, their varieties is very very mixed, they will be mixing northern forms with southern forms with west country forms with East Anglian forms. It's the second generation, that's the grandchildren of the first settlers, who begin to settle down and have a focus dialect, which is largely based on those majority forms. 

Well, so much for the theory, the great thing about living in Kent is that we have a lovely test case for this right on our doorstep in the Kent coal field. People sometimes forget that until the 1980s East Kent had its coal mines and what's interesting about the coal mines is that the people who worked in them either came from or descended from people who came to Kent in the 1920s pretty much from anywhere in the UK where there was a coal field. So we have people who have South Walesian heritage, Scottish heritage, Midlands, Somerset, Lancashire, Yorkshire and so on. There are very very few people who live in the village of Aylesham, which is where I'm looking at at the moment, which served the quarry of Snowdown, there are very few people who from traditional Ayleshamers, very few traditional Ayleshamers who have a connection with the mining industry who do not have a heritage from somewhere else. So what kind of dialect did they end up speaking? Again we found that from this very, very heterogeneous mix a new focus dialect seems to have emerged. And some of the forms we hear in Aylesham are quite surprising. Ayleshamers was for example don't say bath or past they have the same vowel in trap bath in the same way as northern English speakers do. They have definite article reduction, this is where the definite article 'the' is reduced to a glottal stop so on't surface down't pit, we find Ayleshamers who do that and the source of that seems to be Lancashire or Yorkshire. They have a very fronted vowel and a very rounded vowel in words like work, work or hurt that probably reflects the South Wales influence, and finally nobody in Aylesham uses the word alley, they would refer to a jitty and that seems to come from Nottinghamshire and the East Midlands. Now in the case of bath and past we can pretty much tell why they don't say bath and past in the way that I and most southern English speakers do and that was quite simply that the input dialects, almost none of the input dialects in the 1920s, had this 'r' phoneme in their speech so Ayleshamers just never acquired it and they still don't use it. But what's more puzzling is why here are South Wales form as one, there and Nottingham share form as one and in other cases we can ascribe the form that has emerged in the new dialect as coming from Yorkshire or Lancashire. And at the moment we can only offer partial answers to those questions how and why did this new dialect emerge. Whatever the answers may be though as a sociolinguist I have to start from the simple observation that language is about people. The question I have to ask is, who is talking to whom and when and in what circumstances. You really do have to be a people person to do sociolinguistics. I enjoy doing it, it's what gets me up in the morning and there are plenty of questions we still need to answer. 

Thanks very much