Examples
The following are examples of new language features that are currently spreading throughout Britain. They are slowly taking the place of typical regional features. Estuary English has been added as an example of modern day dialect levelling because it is the well known result of dialect levelling that has been taking place on the Thames Estuary over the past twenty years.
-fronting in Britain. This is when the -th- is pronounced as or ” (Kerswill, 2003).
The following are the 13 most reported dialect features in the metropolitan regions of Blackburn, Birmingham, Cardiff, Nottingham, Glasgow, London, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Preston, Sheffield, Teesside, Coventry, Swansea, Brighton, Leeds and Bristol according to The Survey of British Dialect Grammar.
- Them as demonstrative determiner (Look at them big spiders),
- Should of (You should of left half an hour ago),
- Absence of plural marking (To make a big cake you need two pound of flour),
- What as subject relative pronoun (The film what was on last night was good),
- Never as past tense negator (No, I never broke that),
- There was with plural ‘notional’ subject (There was some singers here a minute ago),
- There’s with plural ‘notional’ subject (There’s cars outside the church),
- Perfect participle sat following BE auxiliary (She was sat over there looking at her car),
- Adverbial quick (I like pasta. It cooks really quick),
- Ain’t/in’t (that ain’t working/ that in’t working),
- Give me it (give me it, please),
- Perfect participle stood following BE auxiliary (And he was stood in the corner looking at it),
- Non-standard was (we was singing) (Cheshire, Edwards, & Whittle, 1989)
Estuary English is a new English variation found on the Thames Estuary. It is situated somewhere in the middle between popular London speech and received pronunciation. People arrive at it from above and from below. As people climb the social ladder they tend to correct their speech. They get rid of grammatically nonstandard features such as double negatives, the word ain’t and past tense forms such as writ for wrote and come for came. They also adapt their accent like pronouncing the
Read more about this topic: Dialect Levelling In Britain
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