Glasgow 25

Glasgow is a city and broader metropolitan area in the West Central Lowlands of Scotland.

Based on mid-2014 estimates, it has a population of around 600,000 people, making it the most populous city in Scotland (National Records of Scotland 2014) and the fourth most populous in the UK (Jones 2014). Glasgow has an industrial heritage whereby textiles, engineering, iron/steelworks and coalmining formed prominent industries in the 19^th century (Butt 1996: 96). After the economic depression of the 1930s and throughout the rest of the 20^th century, however, the prevalence of heavy industry declined (Pacione 1981: 193).

Nowadays, Glasgow scores highly in the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation, having contributed the highest national share of datazones in the top-10% most deprived areas in Scotland (The Scottish Government 2012).

The variety of English spoken in Glasgow and the surrounding area is often referred to as the

‘Glasgow dialect’ or ‘Glaswegian’. The dialect can be considered a variety of Scottish English, which itself has been understood as forming a continuum from ‘Broad Scots’ to

‘Scottish Standard English’, with the former associated more with working class speakers (Miller and Brown 1982: 4). As the distinctions between Broad Scots, Scottish Standard English and English English ‘are not discrete, but fuzzy and overlapping’ (Stuart-Smith 2008:

48), I use neutral terminology, ‘Glasgow dialect’, the ‘variety spoken in Glasgow’ or

‘Glasgow English’ to refer to this speech variety spoken in Glasgow and the surrounding area.

2.2.2. Tyneside

Tyneside is an urban area in the North East of England, consisting of the city of Newcastle upon Tyne and the districts of Gateshead, North Tyneside and South Tyneside. Although the city of Newcastle upon Tyne is small compared to Glasgow (with c.280,000 residents), the Tyneside area as a whole has a population of around 775,000, making it the 7^th most populous built-up area in England (Office for National Statistics 2011a). Like Glasgow, Tyneside is steeped in industrial history. The region is particularly famous for its coalmining and shipbuilding in the 18^th to 20^th centuries (Purdue 2012). It also scores highly on the English government’s Indices of Multiple Deprivation 2015. Newcastle upon Tyne is ranked 30^th of

26

326 local authority districts in terms of the proportion of neighbourhoods it contributes to the top-10% most deprived areas in England (Office for National Statistics 2015).

The variety of English spoken in Tyneside is commonly referred to as ‘Geordie’ (also a name for its native residents) or ‘Tyneside English’. Tyneside English shares many linguistic features with other varieties spoken in the North East of England, i.e. those spoken in Northumberland, Wearside, County Durham and Teesside, which is why these varieties are often studied together as ‘North East English’ (Beal 2004a; Griffiths 2004; Beal et al. 2012).

North East English is linguistically distinct from dialects spoken elsewhere in the North of England (Trudgill 1990), but there are additional linguistic differences within areas of the North East of England (see Beal 2000: 352), which is why this thesis focuses on the language of Tyneside only rather than the North East of England as a whole.⁸

2.2.3. Salford

Salford is a city and broader metropolitan area in the North West of England with a

population of around 235,000 (Office for National Statistics 2011b). The area forms part of Greater Manchester, which is the 2^nd most populous built-up area in England with c.2,555,000 residents (Office for National Statistics 2011a). From the late 19^th century up to the late 1960s, industry in Salford was thriving at Salford Docks, a major port (Raco et al. 2007: 125).

However, Salford suffered the same decline in industry that Glasgow and Tyneside suffered.

As a result of ‘changing shipping technology and trade patterns’ (Raco et al. 2007: 125), the docks closed in 1982. The docks area has, however, undergone major regeneration since then – ‘Salford Quays’ now hosts commercial, residential and recreational facilities (Roodhouse 2006: 82) and is also home to the MediaCityUK site used by companies including national television channels and the University of Salford (Media City UK 2016). On the English Indices of Multiple Deprivation 2015, Salford ranks similarly highly (16^th) to Newcastle (30^th) out of the 326 local authority districts in terms of the proportion of neighbourhoods it

contributes to the top-10% most deprived areas in England (Office for National Statistics 2015).

8 People from parts of the North East other than Tyneside, especially Sunderland (Wearside), also may not necessarily identify with the ‘Geordie’ identity that is so intrinsic to Tyneside (Beal 2004b; Burbano-Elizondo 2008: 106; Pearce 2009).

27

‘Salford English’ as a variety is rarely discussed in its own right, but Salford resides in the Greater Manchester area in which the Manchester dialect, also called ‘Mancunian’ or ‘Manc’, is spoken. Findings from perceptual dialectology indicate that Greater Manchester comprises several sub-areas that have distinctive linguistic characteristics and identities. Carrie and Drummond (2015) asked participants from Greater Manchester to draw lines on a map of the county to indicate where they thought that people spoke differently and to write down words that described their opinions of each area. The Salford area was one of five major parts of Greater Manchester that were distinguished, with the words ‘rough’, ‘broad’, ‘strong’,

‘common’ and ‘scally’⁹ used to describe it. The findings led Carrie and Drummond (2015) to conclude that the perceived language variation within Greater Manchester is influenced by social stereotypes about speakers living in the different areas. Because of these potential linguistic and identity differences between Salford and other parts of Greater Manchester, in this thesis I refer to the variety of English spoken by people from Salford as the ‘Salford dialect’, the ‘variety spoken in Salford’ or ‘Salford English’ rather than ‘Manchester English’.

Comparing the three varieties of English spoken in Glasgow, Tyneside and Salford is

illuminating because they share certain linguistic properties as Northern UK dialects but there is potential for variation in the realm of negation in particular. For example, Scottish varieties of English have distinctive features of negation not found in other Northern English dialects (e.g. no meaning “not” and –nae as a cliticised negator like n’t (Anderwald 2003)), as does Tyneside (e.g. divn’t, Beal et al. 2012).

2.3. The corpora and samples

Having summarised the socio-historical and linguistic background of Glasgow, Tyneside and Salford, I now introduce the corpora that were used for the analysis of negation in the three localities. These are the Sounds of the City corpus (Stuart-Smith & Timmins 2011-14), the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (Corrigan et al. 2010-12) and the Research on Salford English corpus (Pichler 2011-12). These three independent electronic corpora contain recordings of informal conversation with native speakers of the respective local dialects. An essential part of any comparative work of this nature is to maximise

comparability between the different datasets (D’Arcy 2011) and, as such, socially-stratified

9 Scally is a dialect word that refers to a ‘young working class person’, particularly ‘a roguish, self-assured male’ who is ‘typically regarded as boisterous, disruptive, or irresponsible’, or even ‘a chancer’ or ‘a petty criminal’ (“scally, n.”, OED Online).

28

samples of speakers were selected from each corpus in a principled way. Sample selection was guided by my research questions which focus on the linguistic constraints on negation and its distribution according to external factors in the different dialects. The samples are stratified according to speaker age for its potential to reveal ongoing linguistic change as well as speaker sex as a possible correlate of linguistic variation (see section 2.5.2 for full details of the choice of external factors). This section explains the background of these corpora, the demographic of the speaker samples, and their comparability.