‘Deregisterment’ and ‘fossil forms’: the cases of gan and mun in ‘Yorkshire’ dialect

Abstract

Recent work in sociolinguistics has illustrated that language features can become explicitly linked with numerous and multiple social values for certain speakers1. These language features can include pronunciations, words, or phrases, and the kind of associated social values can include social class or geographical region, notions of aesthetics or correctness, or more abstract concepts like ‘authenticity’ or ‘friendliness’. When speaker awareness leads to the linking of language features with social values in this way, the features may have undergone enregisterment, defined by Agha (2003: 231) as ‘processes through which a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognized register of forms’. I will focus here on the explicit association of a geographical location, Yorkshire2, with a distinct set of language features.

Dialect in the Making

“…Research on this phenomenon in historical contexts, though, has received less attention. Relevant examples are Asprey (2020), Beal (2009Beal ( , 2012Beal ( , 2016Beal ( , 2020, Cooper (2013Cooper ( , 2016Cooper ( , 2020, Beal and Cooper (2015), Ruano-García (2012, 2021, and Schintu (2020), who have explored older varieties of British English. Further works on historical enregisterment include Picone (2014), Amador-Moreno and McCafferty (2015), and Paulsen (2022), which have been concerned with Irish and American dialects.…”

“…As such, dialect writing not only offers fertile ground for the exploration of enregistered dialect features at a particular point in time. Rather, it is also "a rich, though complex, source to attest to" "indexicalisation changes" (Asprey, 2020: 48) over prolonged periods and across changing populations, as form-meaning connections are always subject to (re)interpretation on the part of speakers, which often results in enregistered items undergoing indexical shifts as their social meanings are negotiated by changing speaking communities (see Cooper, 2013Cooper, , 2016Ruano-García, 2020). Dialect writing can therefore be understood as a conscious indexical process in which writers' linguistic choices imbue dialect items with social and regional values, thereby leading to the enregisterment of the forms they represent.…”