Abstract
In this article we assess the extent to which we can collect plausible data about regional dialect variation using crowdsourcing techniques – the BBC Future Survey – without explicitly gathering any user metadata, but relying instead on background information collected by Google Analytics. In order to do this, we compare this approach with another crowdsourced survey, operated from a smartphone application, which examines the same site – the British Isles – but which explicitly asks users to submit detailed social background information – the English Dialects App (EDA) (Leemann et al. 2018). The EDA has the disadvantage that there is a considerable user drop-off between completing the dialect survey and completing the social metadata questionnaire. The BBC Future Survey, however, only collects information on where users are physically located when they complete the survey – not where they are from or even where they live. Results show that the BBC Future Survey produces a plausible snapshot of regional dialect variability that can complement other more sophisticated (expensive, time-consuming) approaches to investigating language variation and change. We suggest the approach constitutes a digital-era rapid anonymous survey along the lines of Labov (1972), serving similar aims, with similar success, but on a much much larger scale.
References
Bamman, David, Jacob Eisenstein & Tyler Schnoebelen. 2014. Gender identity and lexical variation in social media. Journal of Sociolinguistics 18(2). 135–160.10.1111/josl.12080Search in Google Scholar
Blaxter, Tamsin. 2019. Ther varom mid j hia: Tracing linguistic diffusion in the history of Norwegian using kernel density estimation. Dialectologia et Geolinguistica 27(1). 5–34. DOI: 10.1515/dialect-2019-0002.10.1515/dialect-2019-0002Search in Google Scholar
Blaxter, Tamsin & Richard Coates. 2019. The TRAP-BATH split in Bristol English. English Language and Linguistics. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S136067431900008X.10.1017/S136067431900008XSearch in Google Scholar
Britain, David. 2013. Space, diffusion and mobility. In Jack Chambers & Nathalie Schilling (eds.), Handbook of language variation and change (2nd edn.), 471–500. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.10.1002/9781118335598.ch22Search in Google Scholar
Britain, David. 2014. Where North meets South?: Contact, divergence, and the routinisation of the Fenland dialect boundary. In Dominic Watt & Carmen Llamas (eds.), Language, borders and identity, 27–43. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.10.1515/9780748669783-006Search in Google Scholar
Britain, David. 2016a. Up, app and away?: Social dialectology and the use of smartphone technology as a data collection strategy. Plenary presentation at Sociolinguistics Symposium 21, Universidad de Murcia, Murcia, Spain.Search in Google Scholar
Britain, David. 2016b. Sedentarism, nomadism and the sociolinguistics of dialect. In Nikolas Coupland (ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical debates, 217–241. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781107449787.011Search in Google Scholar
Britain, David, Marie-José Kolly & Adrian Leemann. 2018. Using impact to make impact? Experiences from a dialect crowdsourcing project. In Dan Macintyre & Hazel Price (eds.), Applying linguistics: Language and the impact agenda, 83–98. London: Routledge.10.4324/9781351055185-7Search in Google Scholar
Champion, Tony. 2005. Population movement within the UK. In Roma Chappell (ed.), Focus on people and migration, 92–114. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.10.1007/978-1-349-75096-2_6Search in Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. 2012. Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation. Annual Review of Anthropology 41. 87–100.10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145828Search in Google Scholar
Horvath, Barbara. 1985. Variation in Australian English: The sociolects of Sydney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Kerswill, Paul. 1993. Rural dialect speakers in an urban speech community: the role of dialect contact in defining a sociolinguistic concept. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 3. 33–56.10.1111/j.1473-4192.1993.tb00042.xSearch in Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic patterns. Oxford: Blackwell.Search in Google Scholar
Leemann, Adrian, Marie-José Kolly, Ross Purves, David Britain & Elvira Glaser. 2016. Crowdsourcing language change with smartphone applications. PLoS ONE. 11(1). [e0143060].10.1371/journal.pone.0143060Search in Google Scholar
Leemann, Adrian, Marie-José Kolly & David Britain. 2018. The English Dialects App: The creation of a crowdsourced dialect corpus. Ampersand 5. 1–17.10.1016/j.amper.2017.11.001Search in Google Scholar
Orton, Harold et al. 1962–1971. Survey of English dialects: Basic materials: Introduction and 4 volumes (each in 3 parts). Leeds: E. J. Arnold & Son.Search in Google Scholar
Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511611759Search in Google Scholar
© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston