J. K. Chambers

Chambers's dialect topography project is not the comprehensive it purports to be by any means, but it is an innovative way of presenting the results of many of the author's dialect topography studies in a browsable (BUT hard to use), interactive form. Basically what I'm saying is it's a series of maps showing how people say stuff around the Golden Horseshoe and other locales back east. I don't know about the focus on single lexical items ("chesterfield"), which I guess shows I am to some degree taking on the rule-craving prejudices of the linguist, as opposed to the novelty-craving ones of the dialectologist.… (meer)

Chambers and Trudgill between them account for at least 51% of non-urban dialectology at the present moment, so you know this is gonna be two guys that know their stuff. And they do, balancing advocacy, and a salutatory readiness not just to cite studies but to take us through them in all their fascinating parts, with an equally strong sense of its limits--the feebleness of the isogloss, the simultaneous reductiveness and over-refinement (!) of sociological class models when applied to language variation, the way spatial diffusion,much as we can represent it with an equation, is still basically a huge question mark as far as motivations are concerned. As luminaries of a niche discipline, they talk as much to their colleagues as to the students who will ostensibly be using this textbook, and it's fair criticism to say that this is gonna be steep going for a lot of the English students who are interested in this stuff (until, as C&T predict, dialectology gets wholly subsumed in variation theory and recognized as something you need a linguistics background to do with relevance. Nevertheless, it's ultimately usable as an undergrad textbook because it lays out its terms clearly (though in advanced language) and gives a thorough grounding in the canonical studies and disciplinary mythology, from Wenker and Gillieron in the 19th century to Kurath walking New England, the Milroys in disintegrating Belfast, Labov bugging moms in Saks, Wakelin's work on why Yorkshiremen say "motherloving gutterpunks" and "monkey's uncle" like that, Chambers himself and the search for "chesterfield", of all Canadianisms less lame only than "serviette" (which I actually heard a barista say the other day in Victoria! a young, attractive man!), the crazy sprachbund action in European languages, with uvular /r/ and affricated palatals (good ol'english "ch") splayed willy-nilly across linguistic boundaries, and,oh,plenty of more. But it's also a good text because it communicates the fun of this occasionally (for all its mighty and still-being-realized implications) less-than-momentous (see, again, "chesterfield") but endlessly amusing and whimsical corner of linguistic study.… (meer)

Leslie and James Milroy are kind of like linguistic superheroes, complete with an unnecessarily soap-operatic back story. Until now I mostly appreciated them for the "complaint tradition" that went into my SSHRC proposal, but Leslie's article in here about tracking social variation is certainly worthy of note as well. Starting from work by Labov, Romaine and others on class, prestige and social networks in language change, Milroy takes us up to what feels like "go" for the discipline, a multifaceted scale of valences that encompasses class, network, and "lifemode," which mostly but not entirely means mobility. These are concepts you can work with!

the rest of the book is prolly good too. whatever.

NB FOR READING GROUP. DID NOT READ COVER TO COVER ETC.

Later: I have employed Chambers's article on stable variation, age graded variation, and change, which lags in flash-bang but is a good overview, and has some important Canadian numbers on dialect change for my work. In Ontario some young people still say "serviette"!

Later still: Oh, and Anttila's partially ordered constraints article is in here too! (Not as good as Reynolds's floating constraints,but). I just keep coming back to this fucker.… (meer)