Regional dialect levelling

Regional dialect levelling is the process whereby local dialects become less distinctive as a result of mixing with other local dialects. This involves the spread of non-standard dialect features, for example in British English, TH-fronting as in 'fink' for 'think'.

This should be contrasted with dialect standardisation, whereby local dialects adopt features from the standard language; for example, the loss of /w/ for /v/ (as in 'winegar' for 'vinegar') in most dialects of English.

D. Britain defines regional dialect levelling as "the eradication of marked or minority forms in situations of dialect competition, where the number of variants in the output is dramatically reduced from the number in the input" (Britain, 2001:1). Torgersen and Kerswill define it as "the reduction in the number of realisations of linguistic units found in a defined area, usually through the loss of geographically and demographically restricted, or ‘marked’, variants, and the closely related notion of dialect convergence, by which two or more varieties become more alike through convergent changes" (Torgersen & Kerswill, 2004:24, orig. emphasis).

Because regional dialect levelling is associated predominantly with non-standard dialect features, it is usually explained as the result of contact between speakers of different dialects. By contrast, dialect standardisation is more readily explicable as the result of literacy, and access to standardised written materials.

References

Britain, D. (2001). ‘Dialect contact and past BE in the English Fens’. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics, 38. www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/papers/errl_38a.pdf. Accessed: 18 July 2007.

Torgersen, E. & P. Kerswill (2004). ‘Internal and external motivation in phonetic change: Dialect levelling outcomes for an English vowel shift’. Journal of Sociolinguistics 8(1): 23-53.