Speech Science Forum - Amanda Cole (University of Essex)

Abstract:

There is currently much inconsistency and imprecision in the demarcation of accents in Southeast England based on linguistic and social factors. In this talk, I understand a linguistic variety as being, firstly, spoken by a group of speakers with some shared characteristics and, secondly, being linguistically coherent. Working with this definition, I present findings from the speech of a corpus of south-eastern speakers to address the questions: what are the accents spoken in Southeast England? who speaks them? And how do we demarcate the boundaries of distinct accents? In particular, this talk focusses on the impact of the Cockney diaspora – the large-scale relocation of East Londoners to Essex in the 20th century – on the structure of linguistic variation in Southeast England.​