Urban Voices: Accent Studies in the British Isles (review)

The term ‘accent studies’ used in the subtitle of this book is intended by the editors to mark out a new territory ‘which intersects (at least) dialectology, sociolinguistics, phonetics and phonology’ and in which ‘accent variation can be seen as a pursuit in its own right, rather than being an issue towards the periphery of numerous separate academic traditions’ (6). This proposed new discipline builds on concrete phonetic data but gives ample room for abstract phonological analysis. The field incorporates studies in language variation, especially as understood in urban settings where issues of conflicting prestige norms, social class, gender, age stratification, and ethnicity assume greater prominence than they might elsewhere. Investigation into language variation naturally leads to questions on language change. To include these themes in accent studies, however, is not to include everything. The field which Foulkes and Docherty delimit in their introduction would not include dialectological approaches to the lexicon, morphology, or syntax, and it de-emphasizes or excludes broader problems in sociolinguistics such as the modeling of social class and social network, conversational analysis, and the social and political context of language usage.

Most of the fifteen papers are divided into two parts: an introductory phonetic overview and a more detailed treatment of a problem in accent studies. The phonetic introductions follow a roughly standard pattern. Lexical sets adapted in varying degrees from those of Wells (1982) provide a common point of reference for vowels while consonantal variation is described phonemically under orthographic labels such as T (for stops in words such as time, butter, and hat) or TH (variably realizable as θ, ð, f, v, t, d, etc. in words such as thin and breathe). Most of the overviews are necessarily brief. Their common form facilitates regional comparisons, but the format sometimes makes it difficult or impossible to present community-wide variation in sufficient detail. Given these limitations, it is the variety of methods used to investigate specialized problems that provides the most striking feature of the book.

The strand in accent studies which relies on instrumental phonetics is represented by Gerard J. Docherty and Paul Foulkes in comparing data from Derby and Newcastle, Jane StuartSmith in examining voice quality in Glasgow, and James M. Scobbie, Nigel Hewlett, and Alice Turk in a critical re-appraisal of the Scottish vowel length rule that shows it to be more limited in scope than is generally assumed. The paper by D&F has far-reaching methodological implications; as it demonstrates the use of instrumental methods to detect fine phonetic differences that are not auditorily very salient but which nevertheless show socially-conditioned patterns of distribution.

Quantitative approaches which presuppose a correlation between accent and socially significant nonlinguistic factors such as age, gender, socioeconomic class, and ethnicity are well-represented. Many of these papers also address questions of accent leveling and divergence. Thus Dominic Watt and Lesley Milroy give a convincing quantitative analysis of the tension between local and supraregional norms in Newcastle, using age, social class, and gender as the major determinants; Anne Grethe Mathisen similarly looks at features in Sandwell in the West Midlands, considering too the role of style in conditioning the realization of linguistic variables; Ann Williams and Paul Kerswill examine dialect convergence in relation to social change and mobility in the noncontiguous areas of Milton Keynes, Reading, and Hull; Kevin McCafferty gives valuable empirical evidence on the controversial topic of ethnicity and social class in (London) Derry English (incidentally drawing attention to the need for more scholars to grapple with ethnicity and English in Britain); and Inger M. Mees and Beverley Collins present a real-time study of change in Cardiff English which focuses on female speakers and examines variation...