Talk:Peter Trudgill

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Possibly worth noting that Trudgill is pronounced Trud-gill with a hard g (as in the gills of a fish). It should not be pronounced as Trudjill. Someone with more knowledge than mine might like to include stuff on Dale Spender's attack on his work, and his defence.

Would be nice to have the IPA, I'll see what I can do - also yes, the article could do with fleshing out. - FrancisTyers 16:48, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

"Dale Spender's attack"? Please provide a pointer; I can find no such thing in a quick web search. Not that I couldn't imagine there may have been some debate at some point in which both were engaged - after all, they both have published widely in sociolinguistics. But an outright "attack" on "his work" as a whole? -- The IPA would be ˈtɹʌd.ɡɪl, I guess. Lukas 17:02, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Sorry. I'm just drawing on distant memories of Professor Trudgill's visit to Otago University in New Zealand in 1982. As I recall, Spender had recently published her "Man Made Language", in which she somewhere responds negatively to statements in Trudgill's writings. Trudgill was evidently smarting over it at the time, and it dominated his two lectures. (It was in the Linguistics I class that Dr Ray Harlow introduced him with the correct pronunciation of his name.)

The particular instance I remember him citing was where he had compared the use by a man of a feminine form of speech to his wearing a dress - something that would be generally seen by the culture as inappropriate. Spender chose to interpret this as an implication by Trudgill that women's speech was socially inferior to men's. She seems (by Trudgill's account, anyway) to have been one of those prickly feminists who take it for granted that when men categorize something as feminine, they are implicitly categorizing it as inferior. Trudgill's defence was along the lines that he didn't in fact equate feminine with inferior; that he wasn't saying that men shouldn't use feminine modes of speech if they wanted to — that he didn't see why they shouldn't wear dresses if they chose to — simply that people generally respond to either behaviour as outside the social norms.

I have read little of either writer's works, apart from Trudgill's introduction to sociolinguistics, which was one of our textbooks. It simply seemed to me at the time that it was a major issue for both of them. Trudgill wasn't taking issue with Spender for disagreeing with him (though she evidently did), but for misinterpreting his position and casting him as a male chauvinist.

Cheers — Neil Copeland

Thanks for this. Well, I don't really think that episode is significant enough in the context of his whole life-work to warrant inclusion in the article. Just a routine disagreement between two academics over one area (which isn't even terribly central to his work). Nothing that has affected the course of his further work, or the development of the field as a whole, to any significant extent, as far as I can see. -- When I find time, I might add a few more things about his work. He's quite prominent in the field I work in myself, so I should easily be able to collect a few things to summarize. Lukas 16:59, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

When I see him I'll ask for a photo. - FrancisTyers 17:12, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Hope Peter and this community will forgive me if I'm intruding, and in quite the wrong place: you see for years I've been wanting to find someone to unburden to...

In the mid to late 1990's I started going fox-hunting (please don't shoot me for that) with a countrywoman. People who follow a hunt ("supporters") used to be called foot-followers; nowadays they mostly "follow" in cars. However, the important point here is that they aren't toffs, they're nearly all ordinary country people.

And what gradually dawned on me, going to hunts from the south to as far as Cumbria, was that there is a fault line running diagonally across England - dividing the rhotic speakers in the west from the non-rhotics to the east. What was most startling was to find that this fault line seems pretty well to lie along the border between Alfred's Wessex and the Danelaw. Rhotic country people can certainly be found in Shropshire, even north of the Severn, possibly up to Cheshire (the Dee may be the divider here).

What has bothered me is that rural accents in England are vanishing. In north-west Hants, for example, Estuary English has swamped the old tongue, due to the 1950s designation of Andover as a London Overspill town. Estuary English has also spread over most of Herts and much of Beds.

Does this matter? Well to me it does. I just hope there's a field-worker who can investigate this fault line before all the elderly speakers die out. Can it really be that a border that vanished a thousand years ago can still be detected in the sound of the country people? Edetic 04:22, 25 March 2006 (UTC)