Introduction

In linguistic terms, the city of Belfast (like many other areas in the British Isles) is what Johnston (1985) has called a ‘divergent dialect’ community. Not only is the city vernacular highly divergent from what we usually call ‘standard English’, but also the range of variation within the city is very wide. In such communities, many of the patterns observed are discontinuous, and these do not fit comfortably into unidirectional scales of variation corresponding with the socioeconomic class of the speakers (of the kind used by Labov, 1966, in New York City). For example, whereas in Belfast back-vowel realisations of /a/ (pronouncing, e.g., man as ‘maun’) are favoured at one level of the social hierarchy (and people are moving towards back /a/), a higher status level reverses the trend and favours fronting of /a/ (J. Milroy 1982). Thus, the socioeconomic class pattern revealed is not unilinear, but is a zig-zag pattern, incorporating a reversal of evaluation. Lower status speakers are moving away from front values of /a/ towards back values, whereas the middle to upper status groups are reverting again to front values.

There are other respects in which the variation revealed fails to conform with the predictions of the Labov model (1966, 1972). The zig-zag pattern, for example, is frequently replicated in the stylistic continuum.