Generations of London English: Language and Social Change in Real Time

在英国，标准和方言一直是社会地位和社会流动性的基石之一。伦敦一直是“高”和“低”注册英式英语口语形式的发源地，在过去的25年里，在新一波移民和社会接触的推动下，伦敦发生了特别戏剧性的变化。这些新的伦敦品种的第二代扬声器的最近可用性代表了一个独特的机会，以解决理论和现实世界的挑战。这些变化可分为三大领域：(i)大规模变化，（ii）个体认知，（iii）感知和偏见。由于伦敦的新语音变体最近才出现，因此到目前为止还无法进行大规模的实时分析（不像美国、新西兰和澳大利亚的多代方言工作）。随着时间的推移，方言的特点有时会传播并成为新的标准，但在其他情况下，仍然受到社会的限制，可能会产生社会刻板印象或边缘化。前两代新伦敦方言形式的可用性是一个独特的机会来检查这些大规模的社会和语言变化。大规模社会分析可以推进的理论争论包括语音、韵律和语法变化的正式语言模型，不同年龄组在语言变化中的作用，以及评估复杂社会环境中变化的竞争模型。在较小的范围内，个体方言认知是一个较新的、了解较少的领域。我们跨年龄组的实时数据为解决这一“变异社会语言学的研究空白”提供了新的潜力（Schreier 2021）。我们对个体认知的研究可以解决的未解决的理论问题包括，人们对方言特征有多大的控制，是什么决定了这种控制，以及个体如何在一生中发展他们的语言储备，这是社会流动性的一个关键因素。我们对一个尚未得到充分研究的问题特别感兴趣，即儿童是否在很小的时候就学会了语言形式的环境社会意义。最后，我们的纵向视角不仅可以对语言使用进行更深入的调查，还可以对这些说话者的看法进行更深入的调查，这对公平获取和生活结果有影响。研究计划为了记录这些平行轨迹的实时变化——包括代际和寿命——我们在所有主要年龄组中追求三种不同的语言数据类型（自然的、感知的和实验的）。自然主义数据将来自三种采样格式，其中前两种是实时的：面板数据（重新采样15年前记录的发言者），趋势数据（记录同一年龄组的新样本）和表观时间数据（当前不同年龄组的数据）。自然数据还将包括跨情景记录，以重点关注个人曲目的发展。收集到的数据将记录不断变化的社会对重音形式的看法以及不断变化的语法判断。最后，实验数据将采用新颖的设计来研究成人、青少年和儿童的控制和回忆（例如，口音刻板印象是否会导致对一个人的选择性回忆）。这三种数据类型将并行收集，利用研究团队在社会语言学访谈、儿童语言实验和语料库构建方面的互补专业知识。我们的顾问小组包括来自主要教育和文化利益相关者团体的代表：小学，SENCOs，中学和大英图书馆。研究结果将通过会议、研讨会和文章传播给学术同事；通过教师研讨会、在线无意识偏见建议和“改变伦敦英语节”向利益相关者提供建议；并通过该项目和伦敦英语语料库网站向公众开放。

RATIONALEStandard and vernacular speech have long been among the cornerstones of social status and social mobility in the UK. London has always been a source of both 'high' and 'low' register British English speech forms, and the last 25 years have been a particularly dramatic period of change, spurred by new waves of migration and social contact. The recent availability of a second generation of speakers of these new London varieties represents a unique opportunity to address both theoretical and real-world challenges. These fall into three broad areas: (i) large-scale change, (ii) individual cognition, and (iii) perception and bias. Due to the recency of new London speech varieties, it has so far been impossible to conduct large-scale, real-time analysis (unlike multi-generational dialectological work in the US, New Zealand, and Australia). Vernacular features sometimes spread and become the new standard over time, but in other cases remain socially restricted, with potential social stereotyping or marginalisation. The availability of the first two generations of new London dialect forms is a unique opportunity to examine these large-scale social and linguistic changes. Theoretical debates that the large-scale societal analysis can advance include formal linguistic models of phonetic, prosodic, and grammatical change, the role of different age groups in language change, and assessing competing models of change in complex social environments. At a smaller scale, individual dialect cognition is a newer and less well-understood area. Our real-time data across age groups offers new potential to address this "research lacuna in variationist sociolinguistics" (Schreier 2021). Unresolved theoretical questions that our study of individual cognition can address include how much control people have over dialect features, what determines that control, and how individuals develop their speech repertoire over their lifespan, a crucial factor in social mobility. We take a particular interest in the under-studied question of whether children pick up on ambient social meanings of speech forms at a very young age. And finally, our longitudinal perspective allows a deeper investigation of not just language use but (un)changing perceptions of those speakers, with implications for fair access and life outcomes. RESEARCH PLANIn order to document real-time change along these parallel tracks - both generational and lifespan - we pursue three distinct linguistic data types (naturalistic, perceptual, and experimental) across all the main age groups available. Naturalistic data will derive from three sampling formats, the first two of which are real-time: panel data (resampling speakers recorded 15 years ago), trend data (recording a new sample of the same age group), and apparent time data (different age groups at the present time). Naturalistic data will also include cross-situational recordings for the focus on individual repertoire development. Elicited data will be gathered to document changing social perceptions of accent forms as well as changing grammaticality judgements. Finally, experimental data will be gathered using novel designs to study control and recall (e.g. whether accent stereotypes lead to selective recall about a person) in adults, adolescents, and children. These three data types will be gathered in parallel, drawing on the complementary expertise of the research team in working with sociolinguistic interviews, child language experiments, and corpus construction. Our advisory panel includes representatives from key educational and cultural stakeholder groups: primary schools, SENCOs, secondary schools, and the British Library. Findings will be disseminated to academic colleagues via conferences, seminars and articles; to stakeholders through teacher workshops, online unconscious bias recommendations, and a Changing London English festival; and to the general public via the project and London English Corpus website.