One speaker, two dialects: bidialectalism across the generations in a Scottish community

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Socio-economic changes over the past 100 years in the British Isles are said to have led to 'dialect levelling', where local dialect forms are replaced by more standard or 'supra-local' forms. For example, in a Scottish dialect, forms such as 'hoose', 'ken' and 'aye' may be replaced by 'house', 'know' and 'yes' over time. One result of this process is gradual loss of traditional dialects spoken in rural areas, and eventual 'dialect death' across these hitherto distinctive varieties. While such dialect attrition is well documented, a largely neglected scenario in this changing dialect landscape is the increase in 'bidialectalism', where instead of dialect loss, the indigenous variety is maintained alongside a more standard variety in a community of speakers. This scenario is said to have increased so much that monolectal traditional dialect speakers are the exception in modern day life, especially amongst younger speakers. However, very few studies have directly addressed this parallel use of local and standard, thus a number of important questions on bidialectalism remain unanswered, including:1) can all speakers use two varieties - local and supralocal - in their linguistic repertoire?2) are younger speakers more bidialectal than older speakers? 3) does the bidialectal speaker demonstrate fluent switching between local and supralocal varieties or there mixing between the two? 4) are particular linguistic forms (e.g. lexical vs grammatical) 'easier' to switch than others? 5) what part does bidialectalism play in dialect levelling, dialect attrition and language change more generally? In the proposed research, I will attempt to answer these questions through a sociolinguistic study of a small community of speakers in Buckie, north east Scotland, who are noted to employ both local dialect and more standardised variety in their repertoire. In this community, the local dialect is used the majority of the time, with a variety approximating Standard Scottish English (SSE) mostly circumscribed to school and talking to outsiders. However, our previous research in this community lead us to conclude that the use of the two varieties may be age- and form-dependent. The older generations appear to have little ability in the standard variety, with switching restricted to a handful of words; the middle-aged speakers can switch across a wider range of forms; the younger speakers are much more flexible in utilising both local and standard varieties in particular contexts of use. However, even in this younger generation, speakers systematically switch between local and standard with lexical and phonetic forms, but not with grammatical forms. In other words, bidialectalism may only be partial. This research will investigate these observations further through an quantitative sociolinguistic analysis of bidialectalism across the generations in Buckie. I will collect a corpus of data from 64 speakers, divided by age and gender. The speakers will be recorded in conversation with 1) a community 'insider' and 2) an 'outsider'. This will test for possible bidialectalism as the speakers will be expected to switch to a more standard variety with an outsider as interlocutor. From these recordings, I will create a text to sound synchronized searchable database of speech. I will then conduct a series of quantitative analyses of the forms - lexical, phonetic, grammatical - known to vary between standard and dialect in this community and compare these across the two recordings. This will allow me to identify if, where and when speakers switch forms. This, in turn, will contribute to questions surrounding bidialectalism and language change more generally in the 21st century British Isles.