A Corpus-Based Study of Some Aspects of the Notts Subdialect

Abstract

Rural dialects are slowly disappearing and giving way to larger, more generalised ways of speaking (Trudgill 2004; Kortmann 2008; Beal 2010; Braber 2015). This paper is concerned with the study of the specific subdialect of Nottinghamshire, known as ‘Notts’ or ‘Nottinghamese’, and aims at describing its linguistic features. For the purpose, a personalised corpus of approximately 26,000 words has been compiled. The corpus consists of oral texts, which have been transcribed, from a TV show set in the area. The analysis is focused on three facets of the dialectal variation surrounding the county of Nottinghamshire, namely relating to the linguistic levels of phonology, morphosyntax and lexis. Several conclusions have been reached, including the /æ/ phoneme as an indicator of a northern dialect, the usage of the velar nasal plus cluster, as well as the pronunciation of continuous forms and past tense irregularities. In terms of lexical analysis, a justification for the evolution of language use in the area is provided.