A cognitive approach to quantitative sociolinguistic variation 309LC: mm
N: no I would have said it was em, no more of a Fife way of saying it
LC: do you think so?
N: or a lazy way
LC: a lazy way
N: //but I-I’ve never thought English people said itAlso, because TH-Fronting (as with other consonantal changes including l-
vocalisation, t-glottaling and the use of labiodental /r/) is being driven by
adolescents, this has led several researchers (e.g. Foulkes and Docherty
1999a: 15, Milroy and Gordon 2003: 134) to suggest that these changes
may represent a new set of ‘youth norms’ that are associated with ‘trendy
and hip London lifestyles’ and ‘youth culture’ (Dyer 2002: 108). These
‘youth norms’, although originating in the south of England, are no longer
associated with geographical or regional space but arguably exist in cultural
or ideological space (i.e. ‘spatiality’, see Britain 2002) and represent a set
of features which adolescents can orientate towards (Anderson 2000, cited
in Stuart-Smith, Timmins, and Tweedie 2007). However, not all younger
speakers are behaving in the same way in this regard. In other words, sim-
ply labelling this feature as a ‘youth norm’ tells us nothing about the type
of youths who are driving this change forward.
When the speakers themselves were asked how they view the variation
in TH-Fronting, many of them found it difficult to articulate their metalin-
guistic awareness, however the term ‘rough’ was used repeatedly to de-
scribe both TH-Fronting and other ‘bad Scots’^16 dialect features:
(4a) Scots
N: the wans that have been in the band for a while or a couple e
years anyway an they talk rough like
LC: what dae ye mean talk rough?
N: [laughing] a know it’s guid coming fae me but they talk real rough
[laughs]
(4b) English
N: the ones that have been in the band for a while or a couple o
years anyway, and they talk rough like
LC: what do you mean ‘talk rough’?
N: [laughing] I know it’s good coming from me but they talk real rough
[laughs]