The current state of World English varieties as revealed by new

The current state of World
English varieties as revealed by
new technologies
AUNT
source: The Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes
Bert Vaux
U of Cambridge
16 April 2009
Overview
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English dialectology seems in good shape!
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Labov et al. 2006
impending completion of DARE (?)
But we actually know very little…
Existing large-scale surveys of English dialects
A new survey paradigm and problems
Some results
Ongoing projects
The current state of
English dialect
geography
Traditional isoglosses
(Kurath 1949)
whiffletree
whipp
So
!
k
o
letree
Representative isoglosses showing
the boundaries of the North,
Midlands, and South of the US
z whiffletree,
h
il g
d
o
o
w
t
whippletree ‘swingletree’
z sook! ‘a cow call’
z lightwood ‘kindling’
What’s a whiffletree?
A pivoted horizontal crossbar to which the
harness traces of a draft animal are attached
and which is in turn attached to a vehicle or an
implement.
The Survey of English Dialects
and its descendants
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Undertaken in 1950s-60s
Fieldworkers visited 313 villages and interviewed about 1000 people
Source for:
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rhotic
Orton, Harold & W. Halliday, eds. 1962. Survey of English Dialects: The
Basic Material. Leeds: E.J. Arnold & Son Ltd.
Orton, H. et al. 1978 The Linguistic Atlas of England. London: Croom Helm.
Upton and Widdowson, Oxford Atlas of English Dialects (1996)
tic
o
h
r
tic
o
rh
The Dictionary of American
Regional English (DARE)
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Cassidy et al. 1960-1965
1002 communities across 50
states
TELSUR
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telephone survey of
sound changes
affecting the
English of North
America
phone recordings of
607 speakers
collected 1996
published 2006
The Harvard Survey, 2002-3
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First online survey
First survey with only familiar questions
122 questions, 50,000 responses
% 3 Maries from HDS
The UWM survey
2003-6
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Better wording of questions
Pictures
550 questions
More answer choices, based
on responses to first survey
http://www3.uwm.edu/Dept/F
LL/linguistics/survey/
1974 responses to beta
version
The Cambridge Survey
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2007-present (6000 responses thus far)
key innovation: dynamic Google mapping
The Cambridge Survey
1985
age
160
140
1200
120
1000
800
100
Problems
numbe r
80
600
60
400
40
0
0
sex
year
ye ar
z
z
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Lexical Qs generally work across the Englishspeaking world (modulo americocentrism), but
pronunciation Qs don’t
(Live) mapping
Getting respondents in addition to young
college-educated middle-class Caucasian
females
Dealing with the fact that respondents may not
have acquired all of their features in the postal
code they select at beginning of survey
Intra-speaker nuances
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female
male
200
20
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cf COSWE:
61%f, 39%m
1400
Register, I only use X with my mother, I hear X in
my area but don’t use it myself…
1600
1400
1200
1000
black
asian
hispanic
caucasian
800
600
400
200
0
race
1600
1400
1200
1000
L
M
U
800
600
400
200
0
1000
900
800
700
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
class
grammar
school
high school
college
graduate
degree
education
Some results
Settlement history
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Diffusion of methods of
wood construction
z Upper South: log
construction brought
from PA
z Lower South: frame
construction from
Southern Tidewater
hearth
z Upper North: frame
construction from New
England
z Lower North: post-log
construction, from PA
vis National Road
A descendant: crawfish
Terms used by respondents: crayfish, crawfish, crawdad(dy), crowfish, mud bug, mud
puppy, langostino, langosta, langoustine, lobster, baby/little/mini lobster, shrimp, prawn,
hermit crab, yabbie
Another: dirt dauber
Mud wasps are some of the most easily
recognised wasps due to their large size and bright
black and yellow colouring. These wasps have a long
thin waist and long slender legs and are usually seen
when they stop by puddles to collect mud which they
roll into a ball and carry off to construct a nest.
Carbonated beverages
tonic!
Based on c. 290K
responses
≥50% pop responses by county
≥50% soda responses by county
≥50% coke responses by county
Vaux, Bert. 2003. Harvard Dialect Survey.
http://cfprod01.imt.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/linguistics/dialect/
McConchie, Alan. 2002. The Great Pop vs. Soda
Controversy. http://www.popvssoda.com/.
also dope, cocola
sweetened carbonated drinks
The 2nd plural pronoun
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original system: sg thou, pl you
StdE uses you for both, but most dialects don’t
what’s used in the UK?
Doodlebugs
no word
in NEng
po
t at
ob
ug
pill bug
roly poly
doodlebug
woodlouse (England), wood bug, slater (Aus/NZ), millipede (Singapore)
Other American terms:
• sow bug, baseball bug, basketball bug, twiddle bug, roll-up bug, tickle
bug, centipede, ball bug, water bug, slug bug, isopod, carpenter beetle,
beetle, pill box, cement bug, june bug, curly bug, curl up bug, basement
bug, roly bug, grubbie, mud bug, armadillo bug, trilobyte, ant lion [sic]
Ongoing projects
Multidimensional scaling
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With Lifeng Zhu, Centre of Chemometrics, University of Bristol
Google News
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ginnel, snicket, twitten,
jigger, pend…
Automated isogloss generation
(with Yuri Ostrovsky, MIT)
cot/caught merger with
Ostrovsky/Vaux algorithm
(blue/red) and Labov
isoglosses (yellow)
Correlation with cultural boundaries:
The western NY boundary
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Finger Lakes
Phelps-Gorham Purchase, 1788
Buffalo (wNY) vs. NYC (vs. upstate
NY)
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Erie Canal/Great Lakes, TV ranges, Bills
vs. Giants…
New York State Association of Municipal Purchasing Officials
www.nysampo.org/chapters/sampo/regionmap.cfm
World English: Pattern 1
World English: Pattern 2
Rain + sun = ?
80. What do you call it when rain
falls while the sun is shining?
a. sunshower (36.02%)
c. the devil is beating his wife (6.14%)
h. I have no term or expression for this
(54.07%)
Some English options elsewhere:
• foxes’ wedding (England, Wales)
• monkeys’ wedding (South Africa, parts of
England)
• monkey’s in labour (Sierra Leone)
• the monkeys' dance (Wales)
• donkeys’ wedding (India)
Dialect contact
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Mutual Exclusivity Constraint
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kids’ L1 acquisition
American dialects in contact
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crawfish in UWM survey:
ƒ
ƒ
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some use crayfish for live and crawfish for cooked
ƒ cf. cow/beef, pig/pork, etc.
some use crawfish as sg and crayfish as pl
AmE and BrE in contact
Markman, Ellen. 1989. Categorization and naming in children: problems in induction. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Conclusions
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Our knowledge of current English variation across
the world is surprisingly spotty, but there is hope!
Preliminary results suggest that:
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variation is alive and well; AmE isn’t taking over.
AmE is making interesting inroads in the UK, but…
BrE remains dominant on the world scene
Thanks for
coming!
Vowel problems
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Rachel Brown: “my 2nd crayon vowel rhymes with
my don, on, off, moth, cloth, bother, sock... It’s the
rotated a symbol [ɒ] but isn't the vowel I have in
dawn [ɔ:].”
Americocentrism
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Often impossible to predict regional and individual
variants; answer options limited to what I’ve received
previously
z Calling dibs on the front seat of a car:
ƒ
dibs 1032, call 545, shotgun 282, shot, shotty 58, fives 41, seat check 41,
yoink 38, bags, bagsy, bagsies 26, tabs 17, (quack quack) seat back 16,
dips 12, hosey 9 , no joust 6, tens 4, squatters 4, hags 3, slaps 3, dubs 3,
jack 2, book 2, forties 2, scooby 1, deuces 1, king’s cross 1…