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This article details the methodology behind the Manchester Voices Accent Van, and the accompanying online Virtual Van. In 2021, the project travelled around Greater Manchester in a van converted into a mobile recording booth, asking people to climb aboard and take part in an unsupervised interview about language and identity in the region. Participants could also take part from their own home through a bespoke website, called the Virtual Van, which asked the same interview questions as the physical Van and recorded speakers through their computer/phone microphone. With a view to informing others who might want to use similar methods in the future, we present a detailed description of the methodology here, as well as an overview and sample of the data collected. We conclude with a reflection on the elements of the data collection that went well, and a discussion of improvements and considerations for future research using this methodology.

This article uses a mixed-methods approach to investigate the indexical fields of two variables, one phonological (rhoticity) and one morphosyntactic (past tense be), in oral history interviews with speakers from Oldham (Greater Manchester, UK), born between 1907 and 1929. In a quantitative analysis of the variation, we account for a range of linguistic constraints, and find some evidence suggesting that rhoticity does not tend to cooccur with nonstandard past tense be. To investigate this further, we employ a modified version of the Lectal Focusing in Interaction method (Sharma & Rampton 2015; Sharma 2018), allowing us to track the speakers’ variation in interaction. Using this method, we explore the indexical fields of the variables, which we suggest are potentially in conflict, perhaps explaining the observed pattern of non-cooccurrence. Overall, our analysis demonstrates how the status of rhoticity and past tense be in relation to prescribed standard English, as well as shifting and stable variables, influences their indexical potential in interaction.

This chapter explores the fascinating relationship between the way we speak (our accents) and who we are (our identities) by investigating the ways in which accent is used in The Archers in the process of characterisation. It begins by describing the link between accent and identity in everyday life, arguing for a perspective in which the way we speak is seen as contributing to the active performance of our identities rather than something through which our identities are passively reflected. The main part of the chapter describes two small studies into the ways in which The Archers both uses and reinforces existing language-based stereotypes in order to help in its presentation of clear and recognisable characters.

This article describes the swearing practices of a group of young people aged 14–16 in the UK. The young people are in a specific context – a Pupil Referral Unit catering for pupils who have been excluded from mainstream school. The study’s narrow focus builds on existing knowledge by providing a level of precision in terms of speaker and context not usually found in swearing research. 13 key words are examined in terms of meaning, structure, frequency, and use between genders. Shit and fuck, as the most common terms, are explored in more detail, with use of the latter compared to existing accounts based on the British National Corpus. Examining the swearing practices of this group of people adds detail to our knowledge of a particular style of English, paves the way for future research into the socio-pragmatic functions of teenage swearing, and helps us to better understand the linguistic behaviour of an often-marginalised section of society.

This chapter explores the potential and challenges of bringing together variationist and ethnographic approaches to sociolinguistic research, illustrated through reflection on the experiences of the authors, an ethnographer and a variationist, carrying out a research project focussing on urban language and identity with young people in a Pupil Referral Unit. It begins with an overview of the development of ethnographic and variationist traditions in sociolinguistics, identifying differences in the aims of the two approaches and in their underlying assumptions. Their different research methods are described, and the challenges of combining ethnographic and variationist data sets are identified. The chapter reviews a range of studies which have brought together elements from both approaches. It shows how terms like ‘identity’ or ‘communities of practice’, when used as analytic categories, can be understood quite differently from within the two traditions, and identifies specific challenges from a variationist perspective around working with the complex data sets generated by ethnographic research. A detailed example of the use of th-stopping is provided to illustrate the potential contribution of the two approaches, how they can be brought together, and where they are incompatible. The chapter ends with a reflection on the changes required to fruitfully combine the two approaches.

The language of young people is often viewed very negatively by some sections of the mainstream media and by some social commentators in the UK. While this is nothing new – older generations routinely despair of how the youth of today are ruining the language – what is different now is the added element of ethnicity, whereby young people of various ethnicities are perceived as using some kind of ‘ghetto grammar’ or ‘Jafaican’ which carry often explicit connotations of ‘sounding black’. This paper challenges the mainstream view by firstly introducing the linguistic take on this emerging Multicultural Urban British English, and then exploring the views of young people themselves on how they use language by taking qualitative data from a linguistic ethnography project involving 14–16-year-olds in a nonmainstream urban educational setting. The young people provide insights into their language that are in complete opposition to the views so often expressed in the media, and which instead suggest that linguistic features that were previously strongly associated with specific ethnicities are being used in new and innovative ways. Refreshingly, it would appear that for many young people ethnicity is simply not a consideration, at least in relation to language.

This article examines how voicelessth-stopping (e.g.tingforthing) is used by a group of adolescents in Manchester, UK. The data come from an ethnographic project into the speech of fourteen to sixteen year olds who have been excluded from mainstream education. Althoughth-stopping is often strongly associated with black varieties of English, multiple regression analysis finds ethnicity not to be a statistically significant factor in its production. Instead, conversational context and involvement in aspects of particular social practices—grime (rap) and dancehall music—emerge as potentially more relevant. Subsequent interactional analysis adds support to this interpretation, illustrating how the feature is being used more or less strategically (and more or less successfully) by individuals in this context in order to adopt particular stances, thereby enacting particular identities that are only tangentially related to ethnicity. I argue that use ofth-stopping in this context indexes a particular street identity that is made more available through participation in grime especially. (th-stopping, youth language, identity, ethnography, grime, hip hop)*

Made up almost entirely of extracts from ethnographic research diaries, this chapter has three purposes. Firstly, it gives some insights into the daily life of the PRU learning centres, an area of education provision that is often unknown or misunderstood. Secondly, it offers insights into the personal journey of ethnographic research by describing experiences of the researchers during their time in the centres. Thirdly, it illustrates the process of the research itself, in all its eventful unpredictability. Throughout the chapter, potentially interesting observations relating to either methodological or linguistic points will be commented and reflected on, with a summary of the key themes presented at the end.

This chapter explores (and challenges) the role of ethnicity in the language of the young people at the two learning centres by focusing on a particular feature, TH-stopping (‘ting’ for ‘thing’), which has strong associations with black varieties of English. More than anywhere else in the book, this is where insights from the two approaches—variationist sociolinguistics and ethnographically informed interactional sociolinguistics—come together. Quantitative statistical analysis and qualitative interactional analysis are combined to make the argument that TH-stopping is being used more or less strategically (and more or less successfully) by individuals in this context to align themselves with a particular ‘street’ identity made available through association with grime music.

With this research being an ethnographic study, the researchers became a part of the spaces they were researching, and their presence had an effect. This chapter explores those effects by reflecting on the roles and identities they each inhabited, noting how this changed depending on the centre. It discusses the challenge of striking a balance between the young people and the staff, with the aim of locating some middle ground in which the researchers would be accepted by both groups, and illustrates the tension between the intended roles and identities and the reality of how they were perceived by the young people.

This chapter describes the speech of a small group of adolescents (14–16 years old) in inner-city Manchester following an ethnographically informed sociolinguistic pilot study carried out in 2013. The young people had all been excluded from mainstream schools and so were being educated in two learning centres within Manchester’s Pupil Referral Unit. The chapter has two aims: firstly, to provide a description of the linguistic features that make up the current spoken language of a small group of young people in a particular context in Manchester. The description will involve comparison to existing accounts of Manchester English, in addition to work carried out in London. Secondly, to explore some of the social factors behind the observed variation, highlighting problems with looking at social categories such as gender and ethnicity, before going on to suggest a practice-based approach. In achieving this second aim, some reference is made to the subsequent follow-up study which is still in progress at the time of writing. The chapter is intended to offer an introduction to this area of ongoing research while outlining future directions.

Pupil Referral Units (PRUs) are a type of alternative educational provision, catering for young people who, for whatever reason, are prevented from attending mainstream school. Often, this is due to the fact that they have been temporarily or permanently excluded on the basis of bad behaviour, although the bad behaviour itself is likely to be a symptom of much more complex reasons for an individual finding it difficult to adapt to the requirements of a mainstream school environment. This chapter provides some background into the PRU system in the UK, before describing in detail the two PRU learning centres that are the context for this ethnographic, sociolinguistic project into urban youth language. Finally, it introduces the young people themselves.

This paper investigates the role of orthographic representation in the production of the local variant of the STRUT vowel in the speech of Polish migrants living in Manchester. A previous study (Drummond 2013) showed that acquisition of the local variant depended on various social factors, yet this only took into account conversation data, leaving some word list data unexplored. Comparing the two data sets reveals a difference in degree of acquisition, with the word list data producing more of the local vowel. This is explained not as a case of dialect acquisition as such, but more as an effect of orthography triggering a connection to the L1 phonology, the particular nature of which mimics acquisition of the local variant.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity provides a clear and comprehensive survey of the field of language and identity from an applied linguistics perspective. Authored by specialists from around the world, each chapter introduces a topic in language and identity studies and provides a concise, critical survey in which the importance and relevance to applied linguistics is explained.

This paper explores the linguistic and social factors behind the acquisition of glottal variation in English /t/ by native Polish speakers living in Manchester, UK. It investigates the speech of 40 Polish adults of varying levels of English language proficiency, who have been in Manchester for varying lengths of time, in order to establish what might be encouraging or prohibiting the acquisition of this widespread linguistic feature. Using quantitative sociolinguistic methods, factors such as level of English, length of residence, age, gender, motivation and attitude are considered in accounting for the variation in acquisition. Findings suggest that in addition to level of English and length of residence effects there is a fairly robust gender difference, with women tending to use glottal variants more frequently than men. This gender difference is explored in more detail with reference to a gender as practice type approach.

This study investigates the acquisition of a local variant of the STRUT vowel in the speech of Polish migrants living in Manchester, United Kingdom. While the local accent has no distinction between STRUT and FOOT, the incoming Polish speakers arrive using something close to the standard pedagogical model of British English pronunciation, which clearly separates the two. Measuring the change in production toward the local variant along with corresponding social factors suggests that, in addition to the experiential factors of length of residence and having a native-speaker partner, attitude toward Manchester also affects the degree of vowel change, with a more positive attitude encouraging a greater degree of acquisition. The results are discussed in the context of individuals’ attitudes and use of the STRUT vowel as part of the process by which they position themselves in relation to the target community.

This study uses variationist methods in an L2 context to investigate ING variation in the English speech of UK-based Polish migrants. The results suggest that such variation is as consistent in an L2 context as it is in an L1 context, with several of the expected L1 factors emerging as statistically significant constraints. However, two social factors emerge as particularly worthy of further discussion: the reversal of the typical gender pattern (in this case women are more likely to use the alveolar variant than men), and the question of whether the speaker intends to return to Poland in the future. Gender is discussed from the perspective of contexts of language use (occupation), and future plans is discussed in terms of its role in the construction of identity. There is a strong indication that the intention to return to Poland encourages the use of an ING variant, [ɪŋk], that signals this allegiance to the L1 identity.