Accent Change in the Wake of the Industrial Revolution: Tracing Derhoticisation Across Historic North Lancashire

Abstract

This article applies a social model of historical dialect evolution in 19th-century Britain to the analysis of sociophonetic data. Our aim is to assess where new dialect formation is likely to occur, and where it is not. Using recordings from 27 speakers, we first analyse coda rhoticity in north Lancashire, UK. The speakers were born 1890–1917 in three urban settlements which contrast in social makeup and history. The quantitative analysis shows strong maintenance of rhoticity in speakers from Preston, less so in Lancaster, and almost no rhoticity in Barrow-in-Furness, an industrial boom town. We then use historical census data to analyse population origin, growth, occupation and fertility rates to argue that new dialect formation occurred in Barrow during the late 19th century, leading to accelerated derhoticisation. Overall, our analysis supports a model of urban historical dialect change which includes population origins, social networks and population dynamics.