Segregation
and Variation in 1970s Belfast: A Study of Phonological Variation in Belfast
Urban Vernacular.
Sarah McLoughlin, © 2007.
This
article will examine English as it was spoken in inner-city Belfast in the
1970s, just after the commencement of the Troubles in 1969. Sporadic outbursts
of intercommunity hostility occurred before this date, but the severity of the
post-1969 conflict led to increased segregation, as people moved out of ‘mixed’
areas and into clearly demarcated communities. Did this diminished contact
between the ethnic communities of Belfast have an effect on the phonology of
inner-city speakers? I will address the
question of how variation in phonology is linked to social variation, for
example, differences in age, sex, and location in the city. I will focus on the
inner-city, and will refer to the variety of English spoken there as Belfast
Urban Vernacular (BUV), to distinguish it from more standardised varieties
spoken in the outer-city and suburbs.
Why urban
dialectology?
Why is it
so important, when discussing dialect in the UK, to include the cities? The
dialectologist is often imagined as someone who records rapidly-disappearing
rural forms of language for posterity, the very forms that are being eroded by
the spread of the cities. However, the cities themselves quickly develop their
own dialects, and although the types of English spoken in urban centres are
often among the most stigmatised varieties, even among their own users, urban
or suburban dwellers account for 80% of the population of England (J. Milroy
1981: 4). The figure is lower for Northern Ireland, but still significant.
According to the last census, carried out in 2001, 34% of the country’s
population of 1.6 million live in the Greater Belfast area. The sheer force of
numbers makes studying the dialect of Belfast integral to the study of Northern
Irish English. It is also easier to study the spread of phonological variants
in an area of high population density than it would be in, for example, a rural
area. In a city environment, members from different groups may be placed in
close spatial proximity to each other, whereas in rural settings they choose to
live in different towns and villages. They are also more mobile, and thus less
dependent on the norms of their immediate community to shape their language
practices. There are however, tightly-knit communities established in some
inner-city areas whose members are not mobile, and in this case members will be
much more strongly influenced by the linguistic norms of their immediate
network, rather than the institutional pressures to use ‘correct’ English. This
is a point which I will explore in more detail with reference to the ‘social
network theory’ developed using data from 1970s Belfast.
Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling Estes argue that all language is
pre-programmed for change, including phonological change. There is no reason
why the Great Vowel Shift should be regarded any differently from the
phonological variation in BUV. The only difference is that one is a completed
change and one is in progress (91). These changes spread more rapidly in cities
(J Milroy 1981: 5), and are thus easier to observe. The phonological variation
occurring in urban Englishes is often a movement towards some supra-local form,
i.e. dialect levelling, however this does not mean a movement towards the
national standard. For example in their study of the phonology of Tyneside
(Newcastle) English, Dominic Watt and Lesley Milroy conclude that the dialect
is moving towards a ‘northern standard’. However, this standard is very
different from RP, as is ‘Estuary English’, which is becoming a levelled
dialect in the south-east of England (Foulkes and Docherty 43). This
observation can also be applied to Belfast, which is sufficiently
geographically distant from the RP-speaking areas of England that the supposed
‘national standard’ is not regarded as a prestige form.
Why Belfast?
This mental
and geographical isolation of Belfast from England provides an opportunity to
study changes which are occurring from inside the community, rather than as an
attempt to emulate RP. This was reinforced by the effects of sectarian
violence. During the period under discussion, there was very little movement
into the inner-city communities from outside, as they were regarded as too
volatile. Immigration, and immigrant communities, a usual feature of larger
cities, and one which can have a linguistic influence on the local dialect,
were almost non-existent. In general, Belfast dialect is stigmatised, regarded
as inferior and incorrect, and it is the standard variety of Northern Irish
English that is taught in schools, associated with the middle and upper
classes, and presented as the key to social and economic advancement. BUV has
persisted despite these pressures. The static nature of these communities,
clearly demarcated, with little movement in or out, makes it much easier to
isolate phonological changes and pinpoint where they might be coming from.
The linguistic studies of BUV in the
1970s were carried out at a time when ethnicity was becoming much more of a
concern in Belfast. As tensions between the Protestant and Catholic communities
grew, it became more necessary than ever to display ‘allegiance’, to know who
was part of your community and who was an ‘outsider’. Wolfram and
Schilling-Estes claim that periods like this, when language users are concerned
with issues of nationality and community, they will become much more aware of
their use of language and how this differs from others outside their community.
Awareness of dialect difference may be connected with “a growing self- or
group- awareness. Thus, members of a particular social group may seize upon
language differences as part of consciousness raising” (17). In 1970s Belfast,
language variations that had been mere regional markers began to be
reformulated as markers of ethnicity. Belfast in this period provides an
example of how an urban dialect can persist and undergo change, despite being
stigmatised and largely isolated from outside contact.
Ethnic self-identification of BUV speakers
First it
may be useful to clarify exactly what I mean in this article by ‘ethnicity’. We
are used to regarding ‘ethnicity’ as nearly synonymous with ‘race’, but this
meaning is redundant when discussing a country in which 99% of inhabitants
identified themselves as ‘white’ in the last census. Kevin McCafferty provides
a definition of ethnicity that can be applied to a Northern Irish context in
his book, Ethnicity and Language Change,
where he quotes from the sociologist T.H. Eriksen:
Ethnicity….should be taken to mean the systematic and enduring social
reproduction of basic classificatory differences between categories of people
who perceive each other as being culturally discrete (quoted in McCafferty 71).
In other
words, if the Protestant community and the Catholic community perceive themselves as being separate and
different from each other in terms of religion, politics, national allegiances
and cultural practices, and continually reinforce and reinscribe these
differences, then they are different
ethnicities. Ethnicity, in a Northern Irish context, refers to this complex web
of self-definition and group identification, rather than a simple divide based
on religious practice.
The patterns of ethnic division in
Belfast are largely a result of waves of immigration by different groups, from
different areas, at different times. It may seem facetious to discuss the
events of several hundred years ago in relation to linguistic behaviour in
Belfast in the last thirty years, but as Jonathan Bardon points out in his
history of Belfast, the community boundaries have hardly changed since they
first developed. Voting patterns are still shaped by the original settlement
and immigration patterns, so it seems reasonable to assume that linguistic
behaviour in different areas of Belfast will still be strongly influenced by
where the people in those areas originally came from (Bardon 12).
Origins of BUV speakers
Belfast was
founded at the mouth of the River Lagan by English and Scottish settlers in the
early seventeenth century. The crown saw plantation as a means to discourage
further rebellion and to diminish the possibility that Catholic Spain might use
Ireland as a base to attack England. By the 1660s, Belfast was the most
important port in Ulster (Bardon 18). Across the river was the town of
Ballymacarrett, which would eventually be absorbed into Belfast City (becoming
part of East Belfast). The town was peaceful compared to the rest of the
region, as Catholics were a tiny minority in Belfast, too few and too poor to
be considered a threat.
This situation changed with the population explosion of the city in the
industrial revolution. Belfast became a centre for industry, first for linen
weaving, then cotton, then shipbuilding and engineering. The inhabitants of the
surrounding countryside were drawn in by the possibility of work in the city
and the famine and destitution of the countryside. The population soared from
19,000 in 1801 to 70,447 in 1841 and the city pushed westwards. By 1840, a
third of the population was Catholic and tension grew between the two
communities as the city grew overcrowded. Segregated working-class districts
began to develop in the inner-city as the more prosperous inhabitants of
Belfast migrated to the suburbs. The penal laws preventing Catholics from
owning large amounts of land mean that the ‘prosperous’ were almost always
Protestant. This left the inner-city districts to be populated by the
remaining, poorer Protestants and Catholics. BUV as a dialect is a class-specific
accent: most of its speakers are working-class.
Belfast developed into two areas, divided by the River Lagan: West
Belfast, which was predominantly Catholic and East Belfast (containing the
former town of Ballymacarrett), which was predominantly Protestant. It is
useful to bear these origins and ethnic divisions in mind as we examine the
scholarship published about BUV. Sectarian divisions do not produce variant
features, but they may reinforce them. East Belfast speech was heavily
influenced by the dialect of the area most of its inhabitants came from, which
was the Ulster-Scots of the mainly Protestant counties, Antrim and Down (see
map below). The Ulster-Scots dialect was a descendent of the dialect spoken by
Scottish settlers, which had been influenced by the surrounding Ulster English.
In fact, the geographical position of the city, sandwiched between these two
Ulster-Scots areas, would suggest that BUV should show much heavier
Ulster-Scots influence than it does. The immigration patterns of the
nineteenth-century are the reason it is more like the speech of Mid-Ulster. In
this period, most people living in the inner city were recent immigrants (in
the 1890s the population grew by a third, 60% of this was due to immigration)
mainly from the Lagan Valley area (J. Milroy 1981: 24). As a result, the speech
of West Belfast is heavily-influenced by the speech of the Lagan Valley, which
in turn was a linguistic descendent of the dialects of English settlers who
planted that area, rather than the
Scottish. John Harris notes that,
The influx of Catholics from the mid-nineteenth century onwards from
south and west Ulster, where the predominant non-Irish influence was English
rather than Scots….and an increase in pressures towards
standardisation…militated against the maintenance of strongly non-standard
Scots forms (Harris 140).
So, to
summarise: the phonology of West Belfast, which is a majority Catholic area, is
influenced by the dialects of the English who settled in the Lagan Valley, and
the phonology of East Belfast, which is a majority Protestant area, is
influenced by the dialects of the Scottish who settled in Counties Antrim and
Down. However, it is also important to note that ‘more influenced by
Ulster-Scots’ and ‘more influenced by Lagan Valley’ are labels to denote small
differences in what are very similar forms of language which would sound almost
identical to a non-speaker of NIE. It is perhaps more accurate to describe BUV
as a continuum along which these features fall, rather than two clear
‘varieties’. Speakers will be aware of all the variants, but will choose to use
those which most clearly represent their background or allegiance. As James
Milroy puts it,
Dialect is a property of the community, and every native speaker has
roughly the same kind of access to it and roughly the same knowledge about
it….the speakers..know how use the resources of variation available to them,
and they use them for many purposes, including the marking of varying social
roles and functions (J Milroy 1992: 75).
In Belfast, these functions include age, sex,
location within the city (i.e. West/East) and ethnicity.
The Milroy Study: Communities
James and
Lesley Milroy carried out a number of influential studies of Belfast English,
the first in 1977 in the inner-city, and a supplementary study in 1980 in two
outer-city (and lower-middle class rather than working class) communities. I am
focusing on this study as, although thirty years old, it was the last major
study of BUV phonology. It is the 1977 study with which I am mostly concerned
here, as this focused on BUV rather than the outer-city. Many other linguists
have used the data from this fieldwork for their research (for example John
Harris or Ellen Douglas-Cowie – see Bibliography), but none have written on it
as extensively as the Milroys. In this study, they gathered data from three
working-class Belfast districts. Two were in West Belfast (the Clonard - Catholic), and the Hammer - Protestant), and
one was in East Belfast (Ballymacarrett -
Protestant). Their hypotheses were that the tightly-knit, segregated
nature of these inner-city communities would place great pressure on their
members to conform to vernacular linguistic norms rather than aspiring to
standard usage.
In order to foreground the
sociolinguistic conclusions of this study, it is necessary first to outline the
ethnic boundaries and social conditions in the communities in question. As a
Protestant district in a Protestant part of the city, Ballymacarrett is unproblematic.
The situation in West Belfast is more complex. The Clonard is situated on the
Falls Road, and the Hammer is situated on the Shankill Road. Both roads extend
outwards from the city centre, and are only “a few hundred yards apart” at the
inner-city end (J Milroy 1981: 41). At distances this minimal, we would expect
there to be little difference between the speech of the two communities, but it
is important to remember that the communities are segregated, both physically
and culturally. Fredrick Boal’s article, ‘Territoriality on the Shankill-Falls
Divide, Belfast’, provides a snapshot of segregation in the area in 1967-8.
Boal notes that these communities
are separated not only residentially (which is not unusual as “segregation on
the basis of both economic and ethnic characteristics is a feature of most
cities”, Boal 59) but also by ‘activity’, that is, as well as living separately
members do not interact with each other. It is perfectly possible to live in
one of these communities and never encounter members of ‘the other side’,
except in neutral areas such as the shopping districts of the city centre.
Boal’s study was carried out prior to the outbreak of the ‘troubles’ in 1969,
so it is likely this segregation has intensified, with people moving out of
previously mixed areas. One physical barrier that was not present at the time
of Boal’s original study was the “Peace Line”. Barbed wire fences began to be
constructed between the two communities after violent disturbances in 1969.
Today these have been replaced by brick or corrugated iron barriers.
The "Peace
Line", separating the Catholic and Protestant areas of West Belfast. Photo by Kiernan
Joliat, 02 Oct 2004, downloaded 18 Dec 2006 (http://www.pbase.com/sonasgael/image/34627230). Photo governed by
Creative Commons Licence.
Methodology of the Study
Previous
projects designed to gather Irish vernacular speech had been criticised for
their methods. One of these was the Tape-Recorded Survey of Hiberno-English
speech (1973-80). Much of this data consists of exchanges between one
fieldworker and one informant, in which the fieldworker holds the power,
controls the exchanges, sets the agenda and chooses the topics of conversation
(Kirk 68). The informant views the fieldworker as an authority figure, and thus
self-correction towards standard grammar and phonology (in order to seem
‘correct’) is likely. If self-correction occurs, many instances of vernacular
or dialect speech (which is what the study set out to record) will not be
evident, and a skewed picture of vernacular speech will be produced.
In designing the methodology of their projects, the Milroys set out to
address these problems, and minimise the effect of the fieldworker as much as
possible. The researchers relied on mutual acquaintance introductions to gain
access to and move through a community over an extended period. This instilled
some measure of trust and familiarity on the part of the informants and
minimised the self-correction of speech which might have taken place in the
presence of a researcher who was regarded as a complete outsider to the
community. It also avoided the ‘pre-selection’ of more ‘respectable’ (i.e.,
standardised) speakers that might have occurred had the researchers been
introduced through institutional channels (e.g. by teachers, clergymen or
social workers) (J Milroy 1981: 90).
The study consisted of a combination of interviews, reading of
word-lists, and recording of unprompted discussion among informants. This was
intended to capture both formal, interview style (closer to the standard) and a
more spontaneous style (tended to be more vernacular). These were labelled ‘IS’
(Interview Style) and ‘SS’ (spontaneous style). Group discussion was intended
to encourage each informant to speak as he or she normally would in the
presence of the others, i.e. in the vernacular, and to diminish the “perception
of the interview as a speech event subject to clear rules” (L. Milroy 1980:25).
The speech of eight-middle aged people and eight young people was recorded in
each of the three areas (Ballymacarrett, Clonard, Hammer), as well as a random
sample of forty-three households throughout the city, producing a corpus of
over one hundred participants. Additional constraints on the fieldwork
methodology were necessary because of what Lesley Milroy describes as the
“generally disturbed situation” in the city at the time of the research. As
well as forming a connection to the communities in order to establish trust,
the fieldworker had to be a woman and she had to enter the communities alone.
Women were much less likely to be attacked than men, and since male
strangers were at the time viewed with considerable suspicion in many parts of
Belfast, they were likely to be in some danger if they visited one place over a
protracted period. (L. Milroy 1980:44).
Social Network Theory
One of the
questions the Milroys attempted to address in their research was why BUV
persisted against these standardising pressures. The solution they presented to
this problem was that speakers of BUV were experiencing pressures from inside their own community which
operated in the opposite direction from the ideas of prestige and social
improvement that were being imposed from above. Standardising pressures from
the education system and the media were being opposed by counter-prestige that
favoured and enforced vernacular norms. They called this idea ‘social network
theory’.
Pressure to
maintain the vernacular is likely to be strongest in small communities where
almost everyone knows everyone else (a ‘dense’ network), and knows each person
in the network in several capacities (a ‘multiplex’ network). For example,
person A knows person B not only as a friend, but works with him, is related to
him by marriage and lives on the same street. Under these social pressures,
speakers will prefer the solidarity expressed by use of the vernacular, to the
status they might gain by using a more standardised form.
City life is particularly conducive to the formation of strong networks,
as new residents experience an urge to gravitate towards and form ties with
those similar to them. The close-knit network is a form of protection (A.
Giddens, The Constitution of Society,
1984 quoted in J. Milroy and L. Milroy 1992: 7).We might expect this urge to be
even stronger in a city such as Belfast, in which two antagonistic communities
live at close quarters, each feeling threatened by the other. In fact, the
anthropologist Thomas Horjup argues that some degree of insecurity is necessary
in order for strong networks to be formed,
The solidarity ethic would collapse and network ties become weaker if
economic and political conditions allowed workers to feel secure (T Horjup,
quoted in J. Milroy and L. Milroy, 1992: 20).
Dense and multiplex networks are
most likely to form in working-class areas with little turnover in population,
where the inhabitants work together and have ties of kinship L. Milroy and S.
Margrain 48). These factors were taken into account as part of the Milroys’
research, and each informant was assigned a ‘network strength score’ from 0-5
which measured their integration into local networks. A score of zero
represented a person with few strong ties to the local community, whereas a
score of 5 represented someone whose networks within the community were dense
and multiplex (L. Milroy 1980: 139). It is easier for “normative consensus” to
be imposed on speakers who are members of dense, multiplex networks, so these
networks tend to maintain the vernacular and impede linguistic change, whereas
weak networks encourage change and the abandonment or alteration of vernacular
language features (L. Milroy and S. Margrain 48, J. Milroy 1991: 76). In a
dense, multiplex community, using the vernacular is construed as a symbol of
community loyalty, whereas using standard forms is considered
self-aggrandizing, artificial, and a way of disavowing association with the
community and its values.
Conclusions of the Milroys’ research:
phonological variation in Belfast
Now that I
have outlined the methodology and theory behind the research, I will discuss
several phonological features which the Milroys identified as subject to
variation, and question what social trends can be seen as responsible for these
changes in phonology.
The effects of gender roles and community loyalty
on BUV phonology
Ellen
Douglas-Cowie proposes that although both sexes may have the same language
resources in their linguistic repertoire, women engage in more marked
style-shifting and avoid using the vernacular in formal situations. Male
speakers are more likely to cleave to vernacular forms. From this,
Douglas-Cowie suggests that we can categorise women as more innovative in
adopting changes in language, whereas men are more conservative in their
language habits (543). Of course this does not apply to every individual man
and woman, but it is visible as a general trend when the speech of large
numbers of people is analysed. We would expect from this line of thought, that
linguistic change in Belfast would be spearheaded by women.
One long-standing feature of Belfast dialect where the differences between male and female linguistic behaviour can be observed is the distinctive BUV rounded vowel. Vowel rounding means that the standard Northern Irish English [ü], becomes
[ʌ], causing words such as ‘pull’ to be pronounced
to rhyme with ‘dull’, rather than ‘pool’, and words such as ‘shook’ to be
pronounced to rhyme with ‘luck’. David Patterson mentions words with this
variable in his pamphlet; The provincialisms of Belfast pointed
out and corrected
(1860). Although it is a feature that originally entered Belfast speech from
rural dialect, this pronunciation was actually more frequent among young men
than older speakers at the time of the Milroys’ study. James Milroy suggests that
they “feel it is a prominent marker of Belfast dialect, and they use it as a
symbol of community loyalty” (J. Milroy 1981: 30). Perhaps the need to express
allegiance to an inner-city community was strengthened by the severe disruption
caused by the Troubles (which started in 1969) to these communities.
The Milroys gathered data for four groups: men 40-55, women 40-55, men
18-25 and women 18-25. In the older age group, women use the ‘dull’
pronunciation more than men, in both Interview Style (IS) and Spontaneous Style
(SS), however in the 18-25 age group men use the dialectal variant much more
than women. This gender difference is particularly strong in SS, with only 20%
of utterances by women aged 18-25 using the ‘dull’ pronunciation, compared to
61% of those by men in this age group (J. Milroy 1981: 95). So, what was seen
as a stigmatised dialectal variant has become a marker of community identity,
but only for men; why might this be?
James Milroy indicates that both variants may be present in the linguistic
repertoire of the informant, and that the speech of the inner-city shows a high
incidence of “phonolexical alternation” between possibilities (J, Milroy 1991:
78). This can be demonstrated by referring back to the figures for the PULL
variable; in every age and sex grouping, the vernacular pronunciation is used
significantly more in SS than in IS. This suggests that informants are capable
of realising both variants, and which one they select is the result of a choice
based on the formality of the situation, who they are speaking to, who else is
present and the topic of conversation. The alternative choices can also be used
to send social signals, with the vernacular variant encoding “messages of
social nearness” or community with the addressee, whereas the standard variant
encodes “social distance” (J Milroy 1991: 79). Women, however, are much more
likely to use a variant closer to the standard. Every speaker will ‘correct’
his or her speech towards what is perceived to be ‘standard’, but women will do
it to a much greater extent than men. There is no certain explanation for why
this occurs, but James Milroy offers a suggestion:
This is a general truth – not confined to Belfast or any single place.
It may be interpreted to mean that women are more linguistically aware or that
they are better at languages generally: certainly, they do make a greater
effort to use the pronunciation they judge appropriate to the circumstances in
which they are speaking (J. Milroy 1981: 38).
Another variant which is used much more heavily by men than my women is
the deletion of ð, e.g. dropping the ‘th’ sound from words such as ‘mother’ and
‘brother’, so that they become ‘mo’er’ and ‘bro’er’. In the inner-city areas
used in the study, virtually everyone uses this variant to a greater or lesser
extent, but as with the PULL variable, men use the vernacular variant more
often than women in all age groups and styles, and the younger men use it more
than the older men. If we looked solely at the difference between usage by young
men and older men, we might conclude that use of the vernacular form was
spreading, and that today, almost thirty years after the study was carried out,
dropping of ð would be higher still if we were to test it.
However, Milroy points out that by looking at the female scores, we can
tell that ‘th’-dropping is actually stable overall in the community: younger
women use it almost as much as older women. He suggests that the increased use
of the vernacular variant among young men, is a consequence of this group’s
social attitudes. They admire the ‘roughness’ of the vernacular and wish to use
it, but as they grow older and “begin to define their role in society
differently” (e.g. as they get married, become householders and are fully
employed) they shift towards using more standard forms; in this case,
pronouncing ‘th’ (J. Milroy 1981: 36-7). The vernacular pronunciation will
always be used more by young men, but it is not spreading to other groups. This
feature is very strongly sex-marked: when relevant words were spoken, young men
dropped the ‘th’ 80% of the time in SS and 89% in IS, whereas young women only
dropped it 47% of the time in SS and 30% in IS.
/A/ backing, is a another phonological feature which is strongly
affected by gender roles and community ties. In this feature, the pronunciation
of /a/ is moved backwards in the mouth, so for example, ‘hand’, man’ and lad
become ‘haund’, ‘maun’ and ‘laud’. At the time of the study, /a/ backing was
most prevalent among East Belfast males, however it was spreading to West
Belfast. The discovery that men use the vernacular variant more is not
surprising. Ballymacarrett is an area that was heavily influenced by the
shipyards. In this community unemployment was low, gender roles were clearly
differentiated (hence the corresponding lack of use of backed /a/ by women) and
most families had been in the area for generations. Most of the men in the area
were employed in shipbuilding, and according to the social network theory these
conditions are exactly those which tend to create strong, multiplex networks
(the men lived in the same area and worked together). The stronger and more
multiplex the network, the more pressure to maintain vernacular forms. Backing
of /a/ was being used to encode meanings of informality, social proximity and
male identity. One question worth addressing in any future studies of
Ballymacarrett is whether the decline of the shipyards as an employer in the
area (from over 30,000 employees in the 1970s in to 130 in 2003, BBC News) has
led to a weakening of networks and an erosion of vernacular language features.
The Spread of Vernacular Features across the
City.
The figures
provided by John Harris (221) show that among older men, ‘th’ dropping is much
more prevalent in Ballymacarrett. Here 89% dropping occurs in SS, as opposed to
56% in the Hammer and 62% in the Clonard. On the basis of these figures, we
might conclude that it is a feature of East Belfast dialect, however among
young men it is equally prevalent in all three areas. This suggests that the
feature started in the East of the city and has spread from East to West. The
situation becomes more interesting when we compare female scores across the
three areas. Although scores for young women are lower than those for young men
in all cases, the scores for young women in the Clonard are significantly
higher than those for young women in Ballymacarrett (SS: B 15%, H 57%, C 70%).
This confuses the theory of ð deletion as a clearly East Belfast feature. What
we can say is that it is a feature that in East Belfast is heavily used by men,
and it has spread to young West Belfast men and women, with disproportionately
high figures among young women in the Clonard. Might this be because young
women were the group who introduced the feature to West Belfast, and why might
they be particularly likely to be linguistic innovators? I will return to this
question in more detail after a discussion of whether language features vary
based on ethnicity.
Phonology and Ethnicity – can they be linked?
One of the
features that is often identified as Catholic is palatalisation, i.e.
pronunciation of a ‘y’ sound after initial ‘k’ and ‘g’ sounds, i.e. ‘car’ is
pronounced as ‘kyar’, and gas as ‘gyas’. However, Milroy argues that the origin
of the speech community is more important in determining whether speakers
palatalise or not than the ethnicity of the speaker. In Northern Ireland, some
areas have a majority of Catholics and some have majority of Protestants. As I
mentioned earlier in this article, the Ulster-Scots, from which the people in
East Belfast mainly came, are heavily Protestant, so Ulster-Scots features will
lead a listener who is aware of these regional divides to hypothesise that the
speaker is Protestant. Likewise, West Belfast was mainly populated from the Lagan
Valley and west and south Ulster, where there are more Catholics and
palatalisation is more common. Thus, palatalisation might lead a listener to
guess that the speaker is Catholic. Linguistic clues can be used to guess at
ethnicity, but this is not to say that ethnicity produces phonology, simply that knowing the phonology of different
regions, and the ethnic make-up of those regions, can lead the listener to an
educated guess. As James Milroy puts it,
There is a fairly high probability that you will be right if you
identify a South Armagh speaker as a Catholic and a North Down speaker as a
Protestant, but this is obviously only a probability and not a certainty (J
Milroy 1981: 42).
A minority
Catholic speaker from an Ulster-Scots area will still use Ulster-Scots
phonology, although this is associated with Protestantism.
To return to Belfast, on the basis
of the immigration patterns that formed the areas we would predict that East
Belfast pronunciations would be identified as Ulster-Scots-influenced and
therefore Protestant, whereas West Belfast pronunciations would be identified
as influenced by west and south Ulster, and therefore more likely to be
Catholic. However, it is necessary to remember that there are communities of
Protestants living in West Belfast, the Hammer being one of them. Do these
Protestants palatalise or not? Are they more like the Catholics who live in
close proximity to them in West Belfast, or like the Protestants across the
river?
The answer is that they are
somewhere between. Harris notes that palatalisation is a recessive feature that
is “now almost entirely restricted to older male speakers” (214). Accordingly,
the older men in the Clonard are the ones that use it the most (62% of times
when reading a word-list), while Ballymacarrett men in this age group do not
use it at all. Men from the Hammer use it much less than their neighbours in
the Clonard (14%). There are no figures available to measure whether men in the
Hammer have been palatalising less over time, but it is likely that the
presence of the “Peace Line” dividing them from the Clonard might have caused
divergence between the communities since the time of the research. However, the
Hammer men are palatalising, whereas
men in Ballymacarrett are not doing it at all, which would seem to suggest that
it is a West Belfast feature rather than solely a ‘Catholic’ one. Also, neither
the Milroys nor Harris provide any figures for palatalisation in IS. It is
possible that the feature, which is stigmatised as rural, might appear more in
unguarded, spontaneous speech.
How ‘weak’ ties facilitate language change
I mentioned
that the backed /a/ feature originated in Ballymacarrett. Only one group in
West Belfast were using backed /a/ more
than their counterparts in Ballymacarrett: the young women in the Clonard (J.
Milroy 1992: 186). This group of women appeared earlier as possible innovators
in connection with the variable ð. Women in this area are actually using the
vernacular variant more than young men in the same area. Why might this be? How
could young Catholic women be picking up a stereotypically Protestant, male
pronunciation when the “Peace Line” divides their communities?
James Milroy’s answer to this is to refer to Mark Granovetter’s theory
of how weak ties operate. Granovetter argued that although strong ties maintain
vernacular norms within a community, weak ties are a “crucial bridge” between
communities. Weak ties connect us to people different from ourselves, outside
our immediate community, and are a conduit through which linguistic change may
be spread (Granovetter 106, 108). Social conditions in the Clonard and Hammer
(which also shows a high incidence of female /a/ backing, although not as high
as the Clonard) were quite different at the time of the study from those in
Ballymacarrett. There was no cohesive industry, and male unemployment rates
were around 35%. Lesley Milroy claims that “women were much more inclined than
men to look for work outside the locality”, often earning the family wage. As a
result, gender roles were much less clearly marked than those in Ballymacarrett
(L. Milroy 1982: 162). The women often found jobs outside the community at
city-centre shops, were they were in weak-tie contact with “large numbers of
people from all over the city, both Catholic and Protestant” (J. Milroy 1992:
187). East Belfast phonologies picked up from the many weak contacts they might
have in their employment could then be spread back into their own community.
Conclusions
These
studies demonstrate that in the Belfast of 1977, phonological variants were
clearly being used as social markers. To choose a vernacular variant over a
standard one was an expression of solidarity with a particular local identity.
Which variants speakers used depended on their sex, their age, their location
within the city, the origins of their speech community and the strength of the
networks in their area. There was stronger pressure in East Belfast to adhere
to vernacular norms, particularly among young men, but the greater mobility of
young women within the city meant that they were the speakers who carried
linguistic change over barriers between the communities. As much as this
research can tell us about BUV phonology, it is almost thirty years after the
research was carried out. It is reasonable to assume that it is now outdated,
and new research is needed to investigate the effects thirty years of
segregation have had on these communities and their speech. This research might
investigate whether gender differences are still clearly marked in BUV, and
whether the diffusion of features from one side of the city to the other has
continued at the same rate or been slowed down by segregation.
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