Teachers of English Language A Level and GCSE

Have you seen our workshop on Analysing Spoken Language?

Why do young people say innit? (e.g. It's only an hour from Edinburgh and Newcastle, innit?) Or why do so many people use be like? (e.g. I'm like 'I was only joking'). What functions do these features have in spoken language? What is your reaction to these features when they are used? 

The workshop aims at disseminating to English Language teachers the insights obtained from scholarly research into language variation and change, and to provide teachers with an overview of databanks and resources available on-line for use in the classroom. The focus of the workshop is on the use of so-called discourse-pragmatic features, i.e., features such as innit, be like or dead (e.g. It was dead funny.). These features are often wrongly dismissed as mere fillers which contribute nothing to the content or communicative force of an utterance. Even worse, their use is often perceived to be a sign of inarticulateness, laziness or lack of intelligence.

In the first part of the workshop, we aim to break down persisting prejudices against the use and users of these features. We will demonstrate how these features develop, what communicative function they perform in interaction (e.g. to signal tentativeness or assertiveness, to facilitate speaker change, etc.), and how they change over time. We thereby hope to raise participants’ awareness of these features and to demonstrate that they play a vital role in interaction.

In the second part of the workshop, we provide teachers with an overview of currently available resources for working with spoken data in the classroom, focusing in particular on a demonstration of two projects specifically aimed at providing teachers with relevant resources.

Where?

Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, E1 4NS

When?

Wednesday 4th July, 2-7pm

Cost?

£25

What is included?

Workshop led by academics involved in current research on spoken language, lecture by leading sociolinguist Professor Jenny Cheshire, Resource Booklet with classroom materials.

There are only a few spaces left ........for more details of programme click here

Online booking

or contact Dr Sue Fox s.p.fox@qmul.ac.uk 

And we went to get some fish 'n’ chips

Fish, chips 'n' lemon

We probably say and more often than any other English word, but how often do we notice that sometimes we pronounce it as and, with the full vowel, and sometimes as n, with no vowel at all?  Sometimes too, we pronounce and as en or end, with a reduced vowel and, perhaps, no /d/.

Dagmar Barth-Weingarten points out that although English speakers happily substitute one pronunciation of and for another we are rarely aware of the fine phonetic details of our pronunciation. She also comments that although researchers have analysed variation in the pronunciation of and as well as variation in its different linguistic functions, the two kinds of variation haven’t yet been considered together.  She therefore did exactly this for and as used in the CallHome English corpus of telephone conversations between American friends and family members.  Her analysis revealed a strong relationship between how the speakers pronounced and and its function.

When and was linking two words related in their meaning, it was more likely to be reduced in form. So, speakers were more likely to say n or en in compound nouns like bed and breakfast (we slept in the bed and breakfast), or fish and chips  (let’s have fish and chips for dinner). On the other hand, they were more likely to give and its full pronunciation when it connected two separate clauses, as in we slept in the bed and we didn’t notice the lumps.

Barth-Weingarten found that the pronunciation of and can also help to organise turn-taking. For example, compare the two ands in A’s last turn in the example below, where B is asking how A spent the night on her holiday:

                        B:            you slept in the shed huh?

                        A:            no.  but when my cousins came up

                        B:            yeah

                        A:            they all slept out in the shed

                        B:            all? oh

                        A:            an of course see Ella couldn’t be left out so                                        she went n slept in the shed with them

The first and in the last part of A’s speech is relatively unreduced, (with only the [d] deleted), as turns out to be usual when and connects two separate events in a story (here, they all slept in the shed and Ella couldn’t be left out).  But the pronunciation of and here not only connects the story events. In addition, it acts as a turn-taking cue for speaker B, who realises that A is going to say more and so does not take a turn until later.  In contrast, the fully reduced n form of and connects the two verbs went and slept which are not only next to each other in the discourse but also cognitively connected, referring to a single event. 

Barth-Weingarten concludes that it is cognitive distance (and sometimes physical distance) which influences variation in the pronunciation of and.  She also notes the special status of and in and-um sequences, as these are unlikely to be reduced through either /d/ deletion or vowel weakening.  Even though she cautions that other factors come into play to affect the pronunciation of and (such as emphasis and the speed at which an utterance is spoken), and that the different pronunciations of and need to be seen in their context (situational, interactional and phonetic) she suggests that research like this shows that variation in the pronunciation of a word can make a difference.

__________________________________________________________

Barth-Weingarten, D. (2012) Of Ens ‘n’ Ands: Observations on the Phonetic Make-up of a Coordinator and its Uses in Talk-in-Interaction; Language and Speech 55:35-56

doi: 10.1177/0023830911428868

This summary was written by Jenny Amos

It's about THIS big

There are many ways we can communicate with each other.  During face-to-face conversation, we use more than words to communicate meaning and emotion.  For example, we can use different types of eye contact and use our hands to make a variety of gestures.

These types of non-linguistic communication, when taken together, are often referred to as ‘body language’.  But how does what we say relate to the gestures we use?  Do we sometimes modify our gestures, depending on the types of feedback we get from the person we’re talking to?

Judith Holler and Katie Wilkin designed an experiment which aimed to investigate what they call ‘co-speech gestures’.  These are gestures (i.e. hand and arm movements) which are directly related to what is spoken at the time they are used.  For example, when saying something like “he just drove away”, a gesture such as a hand sweeping away from the body may be used.   They wanted to investigate whether the amount of gestures increased when a speaker received feedback (such as questions) from the addressee during storytelling. In addition, the experiment was designed to look at how gestures might be modified following feedback.  For example, if describing an object, you might say “it was oddly shaped” while making a low, rough gesture with your hands to approximate what you’re describing.  However, if the person you’re talking to questions “how was it shaped?”, your gesture is likely to be repeated, but in a higher position and a more accurate way in order to give more detail and meaning to your description. Indeed, Holler and Wilkin identified four ways in which a gesture may be modified:

1)  Gesture precision (how precise it is in relation to what is being described)

2)  Gesture size (how much articulation space did the gesture ‘take up’)

3)  Gesture space (for example, where in the addressee’s eye-line was the gesture made?)

4)  Gesture viewpoint (was the gesture made, for example, from the story-teller’s or the character’s point of view?)

In addition to these, they wanted to investigate the use of ‘deictic markers’ and how their use relates to a speaker’s gaze.  For example, the use of ‘this’ in “it was this big” coupled with a shift in the speaker’s gaze to their own gesture signals to the addressee that they should also look at the gesture for the information it contains.

The experiment involved 28 British English females all telling a story relating to a silent film they were required to watch.  They then told the story of the film to one of the researchers (though they didn’t know who she was at the time), while the researcher asked four pre-planned questions at specific points of the story in addition to any natural behaviour and feedback.

The results showed that there were no differences in the amount of gestures before and after feedback, except when the pre-planned question was one which aimed to get confirmation from the speaker (i.e. a ‘yes’ answer).  In this context, the gesture rate decreased after the feedback.  In addition, 76% of gesture pairs before and after the four feedback questions were judged to be ‘more communicative’ after feedback with respect to the criteria above, particularly on the dimensions of precision, size and space.  These results, Holler and Wilkin suggest, show how gestures are designed for the recipient and are modified to give information which complements what is being said.

The results relating to eye gaze and deictic markers (such as ‘this’ and ‘that’) showed that there was an increase in the use of these markers relating directly to the gestures after feedback, as well as gaze shifting to the gestures.  Therefore, the increased accuracy and prominence of the gestures after feedback was directly linked to the linguistic descriptions, and these modifications were indicated to the addressee through a shift of the speaker’s gaze towards the gesture.  This shows how linguistic communication and gesture are closely linked in face-to-face interaction - not all meaning is carried by the words we say, as the more precise and ‘communicative’ our gestures, the more meaning they contribute.

__________________________________________________

Holler, J. and Wilkin, K. (2011) An experimental investigation of how addressee feedback affects co-speech gestures accompanying speakers’ responses; Journal of Pragmatics 43: 3522-3536

doi :10.1016/j.pragma.2011.08.002

This summary was written by Jenny Amos

Linguistic tails

Language has tails too!

Tails are grammatical structures added to the end of a clause, like wilt ref (‘will the referee’ in the Bolton English dialect) in example (1) in the box, this pub in (2), you are in (3) and that in (4).  

(1) He’ll watch, wilt ref (he’ll watch, will the referee)

(2) You’re a nice set of buggers you are

(3) It holds the record, this pub, for growing celery, hard to believe

(4) It’s a serious picture that

Ivor Timmis analysed tails in the English spoken 70 years ago in Bolton, Lancashire (northeast England). He points out that although some of the tail structures – like wilt ref, where the verb comes before the subject – may be more common in northern English dialects, overall tails are common in all varieties of spoken English, and were just as common in the late 1930s as they are today. They are also typical of the spoken varieties of many other languages.

Why should tails be so long-lasting and so widespread? Timmis argues that the reason lies in the two main functions that they have in speech.

First, they have a psycholinguistic function. Tails help people to cope with the pressures of spontaneous speech, when they don’t have much time to plan ahead what they are going to say. As a result speakers may decide in the middle of an utterance that something they have just referred to needs to be explained better. Adding a tail allows them to add a clarification. Timmis illustrates this with an example from a spectator at a Bolton Wanderers football match (example (5) below. The speaker was first struck by the age of one of the players (33). Then in his enthusiasm the speaker reaches for a non-specific noun to refer to the player (feller), and eventually realises that he needs to make it clear exactly who he is talking about (this right back). As the examples in the box show, the pronoun or noun in the tail always refer to something or someone the speaker has already mentioned in the main clause.

(5) This feller must be well in the 33s, this right back

The other main function of tails is to convey the speaker’s evaluation of what they are saying, or to add emphasis. In (5) the speaker clearly thinks that the football player is doing well for his age. And tails often occur after clauses with evaluative adjectives like awful, shocking or nice (as in (2)), evaluative nouns like outrage, shame or nuisance or with swear words. Showing how they feel about what they are talking about helps speakers to relate well to each other. An additional social function comes from the fact that we recognise tails as markers of informality, so they can help us strike the right note in a conversation.

Timmis suggests that it is their combined psycholinguistic and social functions that have made tails so long-lasting in English. In his words, they are a “linguistic survival of the fittest”. As a result, he says, they deserve a proper place in the linguistic description of English and they should be included in the English Language teaching syllabus.

_____________________________________________________

Timmis, Ivor (2009) ‘Tails’ of linguistic survival. Applied Linguistics 31: 325-345.

doi: 10.1093/applin/amp028

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

Analysing Spoken English: A workshop for English Language teachers

Date of Event

4^th July 2012

Venue

Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, E1 4NS

Places Available

40

Cost

£25

Description

The workshop aims at disseminating the insights obtained from scholarly research into language variation and change, and to provide teachers with an overview of databanks and resources available on-line for use in the classroom. The focus of the workshop is on the use of so-called discourse-pragmatic features, i.e., features such as innit (e.g. It’s only an hour from Edinburgh and Newcastle, innit? – Oh, I’ve answered this one before, innit?), be like (e.g. And they were like, “we divn’t want you here.” And we were like, "why?") or dead (e.g.It was dead funny.). These features are often wrongly dismissed as mere fillers which contribute nothing to the content or communicative force of an utterance. Even worse, their use is often perceived to be a sign of inarticulateness, laziness or lack of intelligence. We aim to break down persisting prejudices against the use and users of these features. We will demonstrate how these features develop, what communicative function they perform in interaction (e.g. to signal tentativeness or assertiveness, to facilitate speaker change, etc.), and how they change over time.

For further details:

http://www.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/englishlanguageteaching/londonworkshop/

CLICK HERE TO BOOK YOUR PLACE

First or last: does final position make a difference then?

So coming first or last does make a difference then!

Which, in your opinion, is more typical of spoken English: example (1), where then is in initial position in the clause call him or example (2), where then is in final position?

       1)  Sharmila: If you like him, then call him

       2)  Ann: I like him

            Joe: call him then

Alexander Haselow points out that in final position connectors such as then are very frequent in spoken language, whereas in written language they are almost non-existent. This indicates, he explains, one of the essential differences between spoken and written language – the fact that spoken language is spontaneous and unplanned. In the initial position of a clause, as in (1), then explicitly links call him to if you like him and guides the listener to interpret call him as a consequence of if you like him. In (2), though, where Joe adds then to the clause after he has uttered it, each clause is presented as a separate idea. It is only after he has expressed these ideas that Joe shows how they are related.

Haselow analysed 1000 tokens of clause-final then in the spoken component of the ICE-GB corpus. He found that speakers use then in final position not only to relate two separate clauses, but also to strengthen the force of what they had just said and even to indicate a range of attitudes towards what they had just uttered.  For example, in (3), then strengthens the force of B’s question. In (4), the use of then implies that speaker B is impatient.

     3)  A: oh he’s fairly happy

          B: why do you think he doesn’t write then

     4)  B: and you were going apparently he would uhm say choo choo choo                  choo or something

          A: I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about

          B: well you have to listen to the tape then

When then relates two separate clauses to each other in these ways it helps to organise the discourse. Sometimes, though, speakers in the corpus used then in clause-final position not to link two separate clauses but instead to link an utterance to an idea that was implied rather than actually uttered. Approximately 20 per cent of final then tokens were of this kind in the ICE–GB corpus and all occurred in information–seeking questions beginning with a wh-word, such as what or why. For example, asking a friend what have you been up to today then may not relate to anything that has been previously uttered but may instead simply introduce a topic of conversation, implying that the speaker expects their friend to have been doing something and that the friend will be willing to talk about it.

Haselow concludes that then has developed from a time adverb (and then he kissed me) to a discourse marker (as in examples (2), (3) and (4)) and then to a modal particle (as in what have you been up to today then?), with all three functions coexisting in spoken English today.

__________________________________________________________

Haselow, Alexander (2011) Discourse marker and modal particle: The functions of utterance-final then in spoken English. Journal of Pragmatics 43:3603-3623

doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2011.09.002

This summary was written by Jenny Amos and Jenny Cheshire

No Way!

no, not me, no way, no how!

It’s well known that negation is more frequent in spoken language than in writing. This is hardly surprising: after all, speech acts such as denials, refusals and rejections are typical of face-to-face interaction. It seems more surprising, though, to learn that in spoken English teenagers use negatives more frequently than adults do.

This is what Ignacio Palacios Martínez discovered in his analysis of the Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT). He compared the use of negation in the teenage corpus with adult speech, mainly using the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English. Whereas the teenagers used about 33 negative words and structures in every 1000 words, the adults used only about 23 – a difference that was statistically significant.

The reason, Martínez suggests, lies at least in part in the nature of teenage language. About one third of the teenagers’ negatives occurred in imperatives, commands, orders, strong suggestions, directions, instructions and refusals. Martínez argues that this is because teenagers like to be direct, straightforward and spontaneous when they are talking to each other.  The adults, by contrast, tended to use more roundabout expressions to carry out the same kinds of speech act, which resulted in a lower number of negatives overall. The teenagers were just as direct when expressing an opinion, and this also often led to their using negation. Adults were more inclined to hedge their opinions using indefinite or vague expressions.

A further characteristic of the teenagers’ speech was the use of several negatives in a string, which increased the force of the negation. The example in the first box shows a string of this kind.

this geezer from Bedlam yeah got stopped the other day in this car, yeah, he was pissed, he was tripping and he was speeding yeah, no not, no licence; no tax, no ruddy insurance yeah

The second box contains an example of another tendency found in the teenage corpus: this is the use of negatives as a kind of ritualized play, where one speaker immediately contradicts the other.

S: no I never

J: yes you did

S: <laughing> I never

J: he saw your body

S: I never

J: and ever since then, face it S!

S: no shut your mouth! Shut up!

Although both adults and teenagers sometimes used fixed negative expressions to strengthen the negative force of what they were saying, the particular expressions differed. Adults tended to use not at all as a stronger term than no, whereas teenagers preferred no way. Teenagers also used idioms such as I couldn’t give a toss, and negative forms such as nope, nah and dunno. They also used innovative forms like uncool (meaning the opposite of being trendy or fashionable). Negative concord (e.g. I didn’t get no matches) was more frequent in the teenage corpus too, as was nonstandard never (e.g. Vernon never called for me yesterday), though Martinez points out that this may reflect the social class or regional origins of the speakers, which he could not take into account in his analyses.  Social factors such as these may interact with the psychological development of adolescents, which accounts for their tendency to be direct and to experiment and play with language, but all these issues need further investigation.

 _________________________________________________________

Martínez, Ignacio M. Palacios (2011) The expression of negation in British Teenagers’ Language: A Preliminary Study. Journal of English Linguistics 39: 4-35.

doi 10.1177/0075424210366905

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

Okay, that's my cue

Will computers sound completely human-like in the future?

Words like okay, alright and right pose a particular challenge for automatic speech recognition because they have a wide range of functions in conversation.  As a result, words with such a variety of uses can be ambiguous in their interpretation.  In natural conversation, their meaning can be interpreted through their position in the utterance and, importantly, various auditory and acoustic cues, such as the intonation pattern.  However, in computational systems such as TTS (Text-to-Speech), how can the correct intonation pattern be assigned to a word such as okay if the system cannot decide which function it is serving in the utterance?

Agustin Gravano, Julia Hirschberg and Štefan Beňuš analysed a group of words classified as Affirmative Cue Words (ACWs) for their acoustic and prosodic similarities and differences, to see how these properties could help with computational disambiguation. The functions of ACWs include showing agreement, showing interest and signalling the beginning or end of a topic. Gravano, Hirschberg and Benus found ten potentially different functions of ACWs , though only okay and alright are versatile enough to be used in all ten ways. 

The data they used came from a recorded corpus known as the Columbia Games Corpus which represents 13 Standard American English speakers.  They identified 5,456 ACWs which represented 7.8% of the speech. Of these, the 6 most common were alright, okay, yeah, mm-hm, uh-huh and right.   However, in order to make sure the data wasn’t dominated by one speaker (and therefore skew the results), the data was levelled so that it represented all speakers as equally as possible.

Looking at the position of the words, they found that alright and okay were used in similar positions in the utterance, and that mm-hm and uh-huh also showed similar distribution patterns (frequently when there was a pause either side of the word so that it stood alone), with their primary functions either as backchannels (showing that the listener was following) or to show agreement.  They suggest that this means that the members of each pair can be used interchangeably.

In addition to position and function, they looked at factors such as intonation pattern, intensity, duration, pitch and voice quality.  In doing this, they could identify the acoustic and prosodic features which were more likely to indicate a particular function of a single ACW.

Using this data, the researchers conducted a number of experiments which tested the ability of computational systems to recognise and correctly classify the function of the ACWs in their data.  They noted that their approach allowed for the inclusion of a wide range of available information, which led to greater accuracy in classification.  However, of all the factors incorporated into the experiments, data related to the ACW’s position in the intonational phrase turned out to be the most important factor in disambiguating the function of these words. For example, right was the only ACW that could be used with a checking function (e.g. through its use in tags – “it’s there, right?”) and this was one of the few instances where an ACW could be found at the end of an intonational phrase.

They conclude that, by analysing and incorporating a wide range of acoustic and prosodic characterisations in computational testing and subsequent programming, spoken dialogue systems (such as those which aim to both recognise and produce speech) will be able to improve their performance and take one step closer to emulating human speech.

__________________________________________________

Gravano, A., Hirschberg, J. and Beňuš, Š. (2012) Affirmative Cue Words in Task-Oriented Dialogue. Computational Linguistics 38:1-39

Doi:10.1162/COLI_a_00083

This summary was written by Jenny Amos

How four-year-olds use language to make friends

How do children initiate friendships?

Research studies have shown that friendships are important to children and that they offer them emotional support. Some studies have shown that children who have good quality friendships have higher self-esteem, better peer interactions generally and do better at school. But how do children as young as four years old know how to initiate and maintain friendships? What linguistic strategies do they use? Amanda Bateman has been looking at the way children use pro-terms ‘we’ and ‘us’ in the co-construction of new friendship networks when they first start primary school.

Bateman’s study took place in Wales, where children start school at four years old. The research was conducted approximately three weeks after the children’s first day at primary school. Thirteen four-year-old children (6 girls, 7 boys) were videoed and recorded during their morning playtime, one child per morning over a three-week period. Interactions in which the children used the words ‘we’ and ‘us’ in their social alignments with each other were transcribed and analysed.

In one example, Bateman demonstrates how a four-year-old girl initiates a friendship with a boy firstly using the collective pro-term ‘we’ ‘why don’t we just..’ and then follows with the use of a possessive pronoun to invite him to her party ‘will you come to my party’ successfully achieving her desired affiliation with him as he accepts her offer.

Bateman also shows how once friendships have been initiated, they are protected and maintained, as in the following example:

Emma:                       kerry do you want to play mums and dads

Kerry:                        no we’re playing families

Kathy:                        no

In this interaction Emma approaches the other two children and asks Kerry if she wants to play mums and dads. Kerry rejects the offer and uses the collective pro-term ‘we’ to show that she is already affiliated to Kathy. This establishes Kerry and Kathy as an exclusive friendship, from which Emma is excluded. Kathy’s use of emphatic ‘no’ also serves to protect their exclusive friendship.

The study shows that the pro-terms ‘we’ and ‘us’ help children to verbally affiliate themselves with another child in order to establish a friendship. Equally, though, the same pro-terms can also be used to exclude other children who are not accepted as being part of the friendship group. Interestingly, the study aligns with findings from studies conducted years and countries apart, leaving Bateman to suggest that children worldwide use the same strategies when co-constructing social alignment on an everyday basis. The researcher also concludes by drawing attention to the creativity and social competencies in social organization processes in children as young as four years old.

 _______________________________________________________

Bateman, A. (2012). Forging friendships: The use of collective pro-terms by pre-school children. Discourse Studies14 (2): 165-180.

DOI: 10.1177/1461445611433630

This summary was written by Sue Fox

I got oot of the car and I gied inside this tiny, peerie hoose! *

The Shetland Islands provide an interesting site for studying dialect death

What is happening to the Shetland Islands dialect? Is this distinctive dialect dying out along with many other traditional dialects as research on British varieties in recent years has indicated? Researchers Jennifer Smith (University of Glasgow) and Mercedes Durham (University of Aberdeen) conducted a sociolinguistic study in order to test such claims as they relate to the Shetland Islands, focusing specifically on the main town of Lerwick, the commercial and industrial centre of Shetland.

The Shetland Islands are situated in the North Sea, between Norway to the east and Scotland to the south. The Vikings invaded Shetland in the 9^th Century and while the dialect is described as a variety of Scots, there are still traces of the Viking language, Norn, in evidence. The dialect has a number of features which are unique to the Shetland Isles but also others which are used more widely throughout Scotland.

Thirty adults were sampled in the study (15 male, 15 female), divided equally into three different age groups - 17-21 years, 45-55 years, and 70+ years old – to represent three generations of speakers. The study used spontaneous speech, elicited during sociolinguistic interviews lasting 1-2 hours conducted in each participant’s home.

The researchers report on six features. The first two are lexical items, peerie (a Shetland-specific word to mean small, tiny, little as in the title above) and ken (a Scotland-wide word to mean know). The second pair of features are grammatical structures: the Shetland-specific use of the verb Be as in ‘they were been coopers as well’ where standard English would have the verb Have i.e. ‘they had been coopers as well’, and secondly, the more Scotland-wide use of yon to mean that, as in the example ‘what’s yon?’ Finally, the researchers consider two phonological features: the Shetland-specific use of [d] to replace the <th> in words such as that, then, those and the use of the more Scotland-wide feature of pronouncing words such as all, ball and call as a’, ba’ and ca’.

The results of the analysis of all six features reported on in this paper showed that there is a steady decline in the use of the local, traditional forms in favour of more standardised forms across the three generations of speakers. The results therefore seem to confirm reports that the local dialect is disappearing in the Shetland Islands. However, there is an interesting twist in the tale. The speakers in the two older generations of speakers all seem to pattern in the same way but the younger speakers show a sharp divide; some of the younger speakers show high rates (in some cases even higher rates than the older generations) in the use of local forms while other young speakers have very high rates of the newer, standard forms. The researchers considered all kinds of reasons why this might be the case, for example gender, networks, time spent away from the island and attitudes towards Lerwick and the Shetland Isles generally but none of these influences seemed to provide the answer as to why there was such a split among the young speakers. These results highlight the fact that a complex array of factors are involved in the process of language change and dialect attrition and the change does not neccesarily follow a regulated or gradual pattern. More and more, sociolinguists are focusing on the use of language by individuals in the community and this study would seem to highlight further need for this kind of close investigation. In fact, the researchers suggest that future research by way of a more in-depth ethnographic study of the Shetland Isles may reveal the reasons for the split among the younger age group. It would also provide close monitoring of a dialect undergoing attrition while it is actually happening.

* The title of this article can be glossed as ‘I got out of the car and I went inside this tiny, little house’

Smith, J. and Durham, M. (2011). A tipping point in dialect obsolescence? Change across the generations in Lerwick, Shetland. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15/2: 197-225.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2011.00479.x

This summary was written by Sue Fox