Analyzing the BBC Voices data: Contemporary English dialect areas and their characteristic lexical variants

摘要

This study investigates data from the BBC Voices project, which contains a large amount of vernacular data collected by the BBC between 2004 and 2005. The project was designed primarily to collect information on vernacular speech around the UK for broadcasting purposes. As part of the project, a web-based questionnaire was created, to which tens of thousands of people supplied their way of denoting thirty-eight variables that were known to exhibit marked lexical variation. Along with their variants, those responding to the online prompts provided information on their age, gender, and-significantly for this study-their location, this being recorded by means of their postcode. In this study, we focus on the relative frequency of the top ten variants for all variables in every postcode area. By using hierarchical spectral partitioning of bipartite graphs, we are able to identify four contemporary geographical dialect areas together with their characteristic lexical variants. Even though these variants can be said to characterize their respective geographical area, they also occur in other areas, and not all people in a certain region use the characteristic variant. This supports the view that dialect regions are not clearly defined by strict borders, but are fuzzy at best.