Social Dialectology: In Honour of Peter Trudgill (review)

This volume pays tribute to one of the most influential figures in sociolinguistics. Peter Trudgill’s influence stems from his decades of innovative research into a broad range of linguistic topics. Fittingly, this collection honors his contributions to the field with a diverse set of papers from leading scholars. While the breadth of research contained here is remarkable, the volume is more cohesive than many festschriften due to the editorial decision to limit the scope to work in social dialectology. The book comprises twenty specially commissioned papers as well as an introductory essay from the editors and a list of Trudgill’s publications.

Dialect contact has been central to Trudgill’s scholarly interests for much of his career, and several of the papers in this collection examine this line of research. Dennis R. Preston investigates contact between northern and southern phonologies in Michigan by detailing accommodation (and lack thereof) among African Americans and the descendants of Appalachian immigrants. Arabic dialects in contact are the focus of Enam Al-Wer’s paper, which examines the development of a pronominal suffix in Amman, Jordan. This work considers the mechanisms involved in new-dialect formation as do two other papers, Margaret Maclagan and Elizabeth Gordon’s analysis of phonological variation among the first generation of anglophone New Zealanders, and Daniel Schreier’s discussion of the development of Tristan da Cunha English (focused on verbal inflection).

Dialect contact in Trudgill’s native England is also examined. Using data from his studies of the Fens, David Britain considers two individuals whose speech distinguishes them from their communities. Paul Kerswill adopts a wider geographical focus in his paper, which explicates the process of dialect leveling and considers its role in the spread of several features across England.

The geographical diffusion of linguistic forms is also addressed by William Labov who examines the ‘cascade model’ of change using data on phonological and lexical variables in American English. Similar concerns are taken up by Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy in his study of the growing influence of Castilian forms on Murcian Spanish. A diffusion scenario is considered but rejected by Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes in their comparative study of copula variation in several communities along the American Atlantic coast.

Language attitudes are examined by Sharon Millar in an intriguing study of normativity among Danish schoolchildren. Henry Widdowson and Barbara Seidlhofer treat normative attitudes of a different sort as they review various conceptions of ‘The virtue of the vernacular’. Miklós Kontra explores how a sense of place affects language usage by considering patterns of toponymic variation in Hungarian.

Papers such as J. K. Chambers’s comparative exploration of the sociolinguistics of immigration, Jan Terje Faarlund’s detailing of the relationship between the Nynorsk standard language and regional dialects of Norwegian, and Maria Sifianou’s review of linguistic variation in Greece all offer a macro-level focus on language in society. By contrast, social dynamics on a more local scale are investigated in contributions from Richard J. Watts and Ernst Håkon Jahr, who discuss possible cases of ‘anti-languages’ within a Swiss German youth movement and the Norwegian town of Mandal, respectively.

Though they present empirical data, almost all of the papers succeed in drawing connections to larger theoretical issues. Lesley Milroy, for example, uses data from several different sociolinguistic settings to delineate the role of ideology in phonological change. Jim Milroy also considers the nature of sound change focusing on the fundamental question of when and how a change begins. Theoretical as well as methodological issues are examined by Jenny Cheshire as she considers the sociolinguistic functioning of...