Phoenix from the ashes?: The death, contact and birth of dialects in England

The dialect landscape of England has changed substantially over the course of the past century. There has been such considerable and ongoing dialect attrition that the language use reported across the country by Ellis’ survey of 1889 seems, in many cases and in many places, quite distinct from that spoken just over one hundred years later. Later in this article, I survey some of the recent evidence of this attrition from sociolinguistic and variationist studies carried out in England. In doing so, and by highlighting the origins of some of the ongoing changes in English dialects, I hope to make three claims in particular: firstly, that dialect death is inextricably linked to dialect contact, and hence to understand how it fits into the overall picture of language change in England we need to appreciate the linguistic consequences of contact more generally; secondly, and apparently in contrast with some other speech communities, the attrition process has not led to a wholescale shift by the populace in the direction of RP (the traditional standard pronunciation of English in England) or Standard English. I will argue here, instead, that the dominant trend is towards a number of new socially and regionally based, koineised, ‘compromise’ dialects, shaped by contact between local, regional, interregional and other, including standard, varieties. Finally, the developments currently affecting English dialects in England are not necessarily particularly new (see below and Ellis 1889, Nevalainen 2000, Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2000), but are noteworthy because of their spatial scale, a scale that has resulted from some rather wide-ranging social and economic developments which have accelerated contact between speakers of structurally distinct dialects. I will argue that from the ashes of the many dialects