Urban varieties of English in the United Kingdom

Abstract

The investigation of urban varieties is founded in the remit of sociolinguistics: to investigate the social context(s) of language. A sociolinguistic investigation of an urban variety primarily focuses on internal (those governed by the language itself) and external factors (those governed by social factors) to try and answer these key questions: how does language vary in this variety?; how has it changed/will change?; and ultimately, do the patterns of variation and change observed in this variety mirror that of other investigations? The overall aim of answering these questions is to understand the mechanisms that motivate language variation and change. The study of urban varieties will be explained in the context of Labovian investigations in the US, which largely pioneered sociolinguistic investigation, before turning to investigations carried out in the UK