Introduction

The information in this book builds on the research conducted as part of my pit talk projects, which will be described in detail in this chapter. These were funded by Nottingham Trent University and also by the British Academy. I have carried out other work with coal miners and the arts as well as work on community engagement but these will not be discussed here. This chapter discusses the methodology used in the projects which have allowed for the data collection that forms the basis of this book.

As part of my research on general language variation in the East Midlands, I have interviewed local people to collect conversational data which allow me to examine different linguistic features. As the East Midlands falls between the salient ‘north’ vs. ‘south’ distinction in England, I was curious whether such speakers used particular vowel sounds associated with either region or that were part of a transition zone, for example, producing intermediate or fudged varieties of the foot/strut and bath/trap vowels. Furthermore, I also investigated features such as yod-dropping, velar nasal plus, as well as the happy and letter vowels. This research has suggested that the East Midlands does have distinctive linguistic features which make it a recognisable dialect area, such as continued yod-dropping following several phones such as /t/, /d/, /st/ and /n/. Some of these features are distinctly northern, such as the short bath vowel. There are linguistic features which appear to be changing due to novel forms occurring in the region and we can see new linguistic forms, such as /ɛ/ in happy words being increasingly used by younger speakers (for more details see Braber and Flynn 2015; Braber and Robinson 2018). Furthermore, when examined in more detail, it seems that other features are also in a process of change. Regarding the foot/ strut vowels, we have established that the changes do not concern the increasing distance between foot and strut as expected, but mainly foot-fronting in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire and strut-retraction in Derbyshire, which seems to be leading to an increase in overlap between foot and strut in all three counties (for more details see Jansen and Braber 2020).