Peter Trudgill

Peter Trudgill interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 20th November 2012

0:05:07 Born in Norwich in 1943; I know that all 32 of my great-great-great grandparents came from eastern Norfolk and I know pretty well where they all came from; mother's family came from northern Norfolk and my father's came from southern and eastern Norfolk; the Trudgill name originated in the Norfolk-Suffolk border area; it is an unusual, mono-genetic surname, so everybody called Trudgill is related; the name seems to go back to someone called William Trodgill or Trudgill who was living in Harleston, south Norfolk in the 1740's; it is fairly clearly a local name because its an East Anglian dialect form; the name goes back to Thredgold; it has taken me and my family a long time to work all this out - Thredgold is a not uncommon name and was given as a name to men who used to embroider clerical vestments, so they were indeed threading gold; there are a lot of people with variants of that name but the 'thr' to 'tr' was a particularly Norfolk-Suffolk dialect form; the Norfolk form of 'threshing' is 'troshen' to this day; all of those great-great-great grandparents were farm labourers and the like; I knew both maternal and paternal grandparents very well; my mother's family were living in various different villages in north Norfolk; my mother's father was initially a farm labourer, farm steward; my father's family grew up in Norwich; there was quite a big split between city people and country people as part of the local consciousness; my paternal grandmother came from a family that was very much a Norwich family and had been in the city for many generations, but my grandfather's family had moved into the city from southern Norfolk; they all lived into their eighties, and my maternal grandmother, into her nineties, so I had plenty of time to get to know all of them very well; my paternal great grandfather worked in various occupations in Norwich - at one time he was a coachman - but my grandfather was an industrial blacksmith; he used to work at a factory in Norwich called Boulton and Paul which made wire-netting, fences - when we went to a football match we would go passed a particularly long metal fence that he had made; he also made the gates between Spain and Gibraltar, and the factory was deliberately bombed by the Nazis during the war, these were all part of the stories I used to hear; my city grandmother had various working class occupations; she worked in a factory from time to time - nothing very grand

5:33:11 The city grandparents were very working class, and I think my grandmother grew up in considerable poverty, but they were very Socialist and influenced by the idea that working people had a right to a good education and good culture too; they used to read a great deal, and my grandfather would talk to me a lot about local history and even take me and my cousins on walks around the city and countryside to show us various phenomena; so I grew up in a house with lots of books; my mother left school at fourteen, father at sixteen, but there was the idea that books were important, music was important, art was important; my father became a rather well-known local artist and actually had some connections with King's College, Cambridge, where we are sitting now; he started sweeping floors in Jarrolds department store in Norwich and gradually worked his way up to become a department manager; one day the boss of the company, Mr John Jarrold, came along and said he wanted my father to start a new publishing business, because they had a printing business, a department store, and now he wanted to publish things printed by them; he particularly wanted my father as he knew of his artistic abilities; so my father, who had grown up in a very small terraced house in the middle of Norwich, ended up visiting King's College, for example, discussing guide books and postcards with the Fellows, for the Chapel

8:10:11 Although my parents had never had a chance themselves in education - my mother could have easily gone to a grammar school but her family couldn't afford it - they always wanted an education for me and my brother; I don't remember a time when it wasn't clear to us that the plan was that we were going to go to university; there was always learning in the house; my mother read enormously; she left school without having much of an education but she educated herself, and my father helped to educate her, also her parents in law were very keen there should be lots of books around; my mother who is still alive at the age of ninety-four, has until very recently done cryptic crosswords very well, so there was always this intellectual edge to this lower middle class household; the idea was that we were going to be educated and do as well as we could; my parents were very different - city and country, which in Norfolk was quite a big difference; my father was very creative, artistic, rather nervous and tense, but a lovely man; everybody when they remember him talk about him being very gentle; my mother was the organizer and would keep my father's feet on the ground when he was having some of his fanciful ideas; she had a husband and two sons but she was pretty much in charge; I was very fond of them both; my mother is still alive and I have become very close to her recently as she is unfortunately suffering from dementia; the important thing that I can do for her is to sit and talk to her about the old days because there are very few others around who can remember them; it's distressing but it is a great pleasure

11:28:13 My country grandparents were typical speakers of the Norfolk rural dialect whereas my other grandparents were typical speakers of the urban city dialect, and they were quite different; I dare say outsiders wouldn't hear the difference but we could; my mother used to talk about it a lot; she had moved in from the country to get a job in the city, met my father who took her home to meet his parents, and they would laugh at her for the way she spoke; there was a particular phrase they would use to tease her which was "hundruts and hundruts-a naket women"; a north Norfolk dialect feature was, and still is, that people say "hundrut" rather than "hundred"; she, on the other hand, despised them for the way they spoke but she was too young and too polite to tease them; she always used to say that Norwich people drop their aitches "h", which is quite true; you have this linguistic innovation spreading out from London which gets to the urban area but hasn't yet spread out into the countryside; whereas she said "hundret" they used to say "undred"; that was an early linguistic experience for me; I do remember experiences that I didn't understand at the time which have now become clear to me which are to do with language; at junior school at perhaps seven the teacher asked the class what language the Romans spoke and I said, Latin; I also remember a teacher correcting somebody when they were reading; the word was "road" and in Norfolk people say 'road' in a way which the teacher heard as meaning "rude"; she tried to change his pronunciation to "road" but we took this as meaning "rowed", to row a boat, so there was misunderstanding all round; I remember that; I had no idea what the misunderstanding was until later; I remember really getting interested in language when I was about twelve; that was at the end of my first year in grammar school; we had already been doing French but were about to start doing German; I was off school ill and the mother of one of my friends who lived round the corner lent me her German school book; I started reading the German and was absolutely fascinated because it was very clear that there were correspondences between English and German - "water" "wasser" etc. - and how did this come about; I found it truly fascinating and wanted to know more; I think it was the same year we actually went on holiday with my parents to north Wales; I was very much struck by the Welsh language, noticing that while English and German seemed to be similar, English and Welsh, though spoken in the same country, were utterly different; this set up the question in my mind as to why that was, so that was the beginning of an interest in language

16:42:18 I remember my primary school very well; I first went to real school when I was four in 1948; the school we went to was an outpost of a larger school about a mile away and was basically just a hut with two rooms in it; it seemed all right to me though I do remember wondering why it didn't have any curtains when I first went; I remember the first two years there and the next two years at the bigger school, then a new school opened nearer to where we lived so I went there; all three schools were in the same suburb of Norwich, Thorpe St Andrew; there was no real bullying for social reasons as people were pretty much from the same lower middle/working class territory; there were people who lived in council houses, and there were pupils in the late 1940's who didn't have very nice clothes, but there was not a broad social mix; I was very keen on football and cricket, particularly cricket, so those were my main interests; if you have grown up in Norwich you have to be interested in Norwich City, and I was and still am, but I was particularly fascinated by cricket and used to read lots of cricket books; one of my favourite books in the 1950s was about the body line test series in Australia 1932-3; I took the 11+, passed, although told that we mustn't say passed, it was just about sorting children into the most suitable form of education; we all saw through that, it was passing and failing; I remember thinking it was a hateful system because some of my friends were sent off to a school which we all knew was not as good as going to the grammar school; there were two boys' grammar schools in Norwich, one was a state grammar school that I went to - City of Norwich School - and the other was a direct grant school, the King Edward the Sixth School, but everybody in Norwich called it the grammar school; it did also take pupils who had not passed if they were able to pay; I was rather fortunate because in those days Norwich was an independent entity and I lived just outside the city boundary, so I was not strictly speaking eligible to go but the city did allow a certain number of county boys to go, and I was one of the lucky ones; it was single-sex, another thing that I regret; it was a very good school if you were very good; it was an elitist school; not only were we within the elitist grammar school system, but within the school there was lots of streaming and I do remember that the bottom two were called X and Y; if you were good at music there was an excellent school orchestra which I played in; if you were good at sport, lots of attention was paid to you; the old boys football team one year progressed rather a long way in the F.A. amateur cup; if your weren't very good, you weren't ignored, but I don't think you had such a good education; at my mother's urging I had piano lesson from eight to ten, but didn't enjoy them very much, but I did fall in love with classical music at about eleven; those deemed to be good at music were given the chance of learning an instrument; I chose the 'cello; it is a wonderful system that I don't think is available now; I was supplied with a 'cello, a teacher, had lessons every week, and ended up playing in the English Schools Music Association Orchestra in the 1960s; I regret that I no longer play; I used to pick it up once a year and play it, but last time I found I couldn't; my love of classical music has continued; on my desert island I would certainly have some Bach, Mendelssohn, Dvorak's 'cello concerto, but also some pop music, particularly from the late 1950s and early 1960s, things that remind one of one's youth; I find it inspires my work, in fact I like to have music on when I am reading, and like music on when I am writing; my wife is very different so we don't agree about that at all; when writing, I find that when I get to a tricky bit, I stop and listen to the music, gazing out of the window and letting my thoughts wander; in my teens I used to read, listen to music, play music, and follow cricket and football; I was very fortunate that when I was about ten, a local branch of the library was opened near where I lived; it was open all and every day, and in the evenings, and I used to go once a week to take books out, fiction and non-fiction; I do remember, again going back to the language theme, taking all the books on language out of the library, because I was just fascinated by the difference between languages; I actually compiled a notebook about them; I remember taking out books concerned with the war, particularly prisoners of war and escapes; when I was about fifteen our English teacher would talk to us about what we ought to read, and I remember reading Hemingway and Aldous Huxley with considerable enjoyment; in the sixth form, Laurence Durrell's 'Alexandria Quartet' was something I worked my way through

27:03:03 The system we had at our school was that you were supposed to choose three subjects at 'A' level and I selected French, German and music; the interest in music was clear; you asked about my hobbies, I should have said that when I was a teenager one of my hobbies was writing music; I used to demand music writing paper for every birthday and Christmas and I would write string quartets, concertos and so on; I wanted to do music, to study harmony and counterpoint, and the history of music; I studied French and German, I now realize, because I was fascinated with languages and that was all you could do; I could have done Latin but I was not very good at it, so I ended up in the sixth form translating from and to French and German, reading French and German literature, and I wasn't very good at any of those things but I got 'A' level marks that were good enough to be admitted to King's College, Cambridge as an undergraduate; as far as the music was concerned I had to take grade 8 on the 'cello and passed as part of the 'A' level exam; I had thought about going to the Royal College of Music to study the 'cello, but in the end decided I was not good enough, so went the university language route even though I had not really enjoyed 'A' level French and German; among teachers, I remember my English teacher up to the age of sixteen, Mr Geoffrey Carter; he was a very good teacher and told me that I was a good writer; that went to my head a little and I started to get a little self-indulgent, but he calmed me down; there was also a German teacher called Geoff Harvey, who treated us like adults, was an intellectual, and went on the assumption that we were as well; we discussed all sorts of issues like politics and society as well as the literature and language we were supposed to be studying; I look back on them very fondly; in the sixth form, we were not really treated with the freedom to work independently, but we were taught in smaller classes and there were sessions that were nothing to do with our 'A' level subjects with rather more discussion; and interesting thing that happened with my contemporaries and me was that it was a school tradition that if you wanted to go to Oxford or Cambridge you did three years in the sixth form; you did your 'A' levels and then you applied when you already had your results and you did entrance exams in the autumn following; this is what I did, and then you had six or seven months where you didn't have anything you had to do; you could have left school, but it never occurred to me as I was very happy; I played in the orchestra and other orchestras, went on hitch-hiking trips round Europe on my own with the permission of the headmaster; we used to sit in the prefects' room as we had no classes to go to unless something was arranged by the headmaster, and read and talk about what we were reading - poetry, drama, I learnt Italian to a certain extent - it was just a wonderful experience

32:40:06 My mother's country family had been good church-going people - Church of England - and they would go most Sundays, though I recall that my grandfather used to stay at home; when my mother moved to Norwich in the 1930s, I think she stopped going; my father's family were anti-religion; they saw organized religion as part of the social hierarchy; my father was born in 1916 but was not christened; my father was a kind of pantheist, he believed in something but wasn't quite sure what it was, and I think that my mother to this day, believes, but there was never much religion in the family; I think I remember my mother encouraging us to say prayers, and I do remember once some of my friends were going to Sunday school and I said I wanted to go; my father asked if I was sure, and he took me one day and waited outside; he asked when I came out if I had liked it and I said no, to which he said he did not think I would, so that was as far as it went; there were not religious experiences, we did not go to church, and it wasn't discussed very much; in my class at grammar school there were thirty-two of us; one boy was Jewish, two were Catholics, and of the rest of us, two got confirmed, and they were much ridiculed for doing this as we considered it an extremely odd thing to want to do, so it was not a religious environment that I grew up in; since then I don't have any feelings about it; I have never been interested in religion, it seems to me to be fairly preposterous and I have no religious beliefs; it would be nice to think there was an afterlife but I haven't persuaded myself; I am not anti-religious as such, I believe what Richard Dawkins says from the point of view of science is true and you cannot but help noticing the unfortunate consequences that religion is having around the world; it does have some good consequences, but there are far too many people around the world who one might call religious loonys having an influence on the way our world is going at the moment

36:29:14 I am not sure who interviewed me at King's College but I think it might have been Broadbent; John Broadbent was Senior Tutor and Admissions Tutor; I remember being interviewed in the Gibbs Building but I don't remember very much about it; my director of studies here was Robert Bolgar and he directed me towards the French and German lectures that I should go to, and he was actually my supervisor during my first year here; I am very grateful to have been here for those three years, but I remember not feeling very much a part of the place it was such an alien environment; you come from a state grammar school in Norfolk and you end up here, and just about everybody on my corridor in the Garden Hostel were old Etonians; they were like an alien species as far as I was concerned - terribly nice, but there seemed to be nothing to talk about; there were the grammar school boys and the public school boys, and all my friends here were grammar school boys; there was some interaction, but not a great deal; 1963-4 was my first year here; I remember the same Geoff Harvey, my German teacher at City of Norwich School, saying that when I got to Cambridge I would find a lot of public schoolboys bouncing, and you much just let them bounce; there was more mixing by the end of the three years, but I suppose that was because we had got to know each other; I remember particularly fondly Edward Littleton, an old Etonian, from the Littleton family, who was a most delightful chap, and remember his friendship very well; I have to say that I didn't take advantage of what was on offer; I could have joined the College orchestra but never did; I didn't even enquire about it; I didn't feel integrated enough into the whole fabric of the place to do that; in the end, my friends and I, grammar school boys, ended up not going to Hall, going out to restaurants every night, going to the pub; we had our own little world and niche there with people we thought were normal; we certainly didn't think the public school boys were; on inspiring lecturers - to start with, no; this was my fault because I was very much a fish out of water academically; Robert Bolgar was a lovely man and very kind, and did his best with me; I remember, particularly with French literature, we would be given a novel or a play to read, and the following week we were supposed to go back with an essay written on this book, and I was hopeless; I was studying French because I was interested in languages, and there I was having to write essays on eighteenth century French novels; I had no idea what to do; I wasn't a good practical linguist, and my essays in French and German were poor, and so as far as the lecturers were concerned I was not doing particularly well; if I remember right, in Part I exams I think I got a lower second; then I discovered linguistics; it is probably hard for people to realize that now; I had been interested in linguistics all my life but I didn't know there was such a thing, and I certainly didn't know you could study it; at the beginning of my second year I happened to be wandering around the Modern Languages library and I saw a book lying on the table, open at a page with a dialect map; it caught my eye and I started reading it; it was 'A Course in Modern Linguistics'; I should have asked Bolgar for his advice, but I talked to other students and found there was a course called General Linguistics that could be done as a paper; I was thinking about this when Bolgar assigned me the novel by Huysmans called 'À Rebours' to read; I bought the book - you recall in those days very often with French books you had to slit the pages; I went back to my room at Newnham Terrace, slit the first two or three pages and started reading it; I was overcome with a powerful feeling that I did not want to read that book; I plucked up the courage to go and see Bolgar; I told him I was thinking of giving up French literature and he thought it a very good idea; I told him I would like to do general linguistics, and he sent me to someone with whom I started to have supervisions with; then I started to feel happy; John Trim in the Linguistics Department was my first supervisor; I went to lectures in linguistics and suddenly realized that there were other papers that I could do; I dropped all the literature papers that I could, and I ended up doing general linguistics, the history of the English, French and German languages; I ended up with just one literature paper - modern German literature - and for my finals I had to do German translations and a German essay; that was when my life turned when I discovered this thing called linguistics, and I really wish somebody had told me before; my teachers at school didn't tell me because they didn't know either; I got an upper second in finals and I think I did well in the linguistics papers; in those days we were not told the marks, but I guess that the German language and literature papers were not very good; I was told that I was absolutely hopeless at essays, but found a book 'How to write a German Essay'; I learnt a number of useful phrases by heart, and in the exam inserted them at intervals, and ended up with an essay which was not very good but at least looked as a German essay should; during this time I did not engage in politics or anything; I had a girlfriend in Norwich; we used to go to the cinema, but the most educational thing that we did was to sit around talking, listening to music, staying up all night listening to Muhammad Ali boxing; there were some very good teachers here but I think I learnt more from my fellow students; quite a lot of my friends here were Jewish, from London, Birmingham, very cosmopolitan and articulate; if I am at all articulate today I think it is because of them; a very good friend here, David Sweden, who sadly died a few years ago, was into politics and economics, and I think I learnt as much from him as anybody; another friend was Andrew Wernick, now a political theorist, who I am still in touch with, and also influenced me enormously; I remember sitting in a room in the Garden Hostel in my first year, and somebody came round on some kind of political campaign; they sent him away, and David looked at Andrew and said "Trot"; I had no idea what they were talking about; I was not ignorant or unsophisticated, but there were all sorts of things that I didn't know about but learnt about from them; I travelled in the vacations; on one occasion I hitch-hiked to Athens and came back by Vienna and Berlin; I really never talked very much to Fellows unless I had to; I remember talking to Dr Munby, the Librarian; Alec Vidler was the Dean, and he would have sherry parties, but we would sidle out quickly and go down to the pub; Ken Pollack was somebody I remember talking to with some pleasure, but in the end it was mostly the teachers of linguistics that I came to know; one particular person who really influenced me a lot was a Fellow at Clare College, a linguist of French, Jim Laidlaw, who later went on to Aberdeen; he did one very important thing for me; after Cambridge I went on to Edinburgh, and in the second year of my PhD I didn't have any money; I wrote to Jim Laidlaw to say that I had been accepted to do a doctorate in linguistics and that quite a lot of that was due to him; I must have said that I didn't have any money and he wrote back immediately suggesting that I wrote to King's and asked them for help; it had never occurred to me, but I wrote to Ken Polack and he said yes, of course, they would give a year's grant to work on my PhD and then hopefully, at the end of the year, Edinburgh University would find some money; if I am grateful to King's College, it is for that; I would not be sitting here if they had not helped and that was a wonderful thing to do; I used to see E.M. Forster in the quad, and he would always smile; some of my braver friends would talk to him; he was very charming

54:45:14 The thing about linguistics at that time was that although I studied as much as I could while I was in Cambridge, that was not very much really of actual modern linguistics; the typical thing then for students who were doing linguistics was to go on and do a one year taught M.A. to get up to scratch with what would have been degree level really; I applied for a state studentship to do an M.A. in London, which is where I wanted to go as all my friends were there, and another application to do an M.A. in Edinburgh, the difference being that London was a two year course and Edinburgh, one year; I was only given a one year grant so I had to go to Edinburgh; although disappointed, it was the best thing for me as the linguistics department in Edinburgh was probably the best in the country; John Lyons was there and I had taken lectures from him here in Cambridge; when I started doing linguistics he had just left and gone to Edinburgh, but there was a period when he came down once a week and gave lectures; his were the lectures that I actually remember here; he was lecturing on Chomsky at that time and he continued in Edinburgh; I was not active politically in terms of doing anything but used to talk about it all the time, and felt we were part of the anti-war movement; I remember by the time I got to Edinburgh, taking part in demonstrations, for example, against the South African rugby tour, but I have never been very much of an activist; I had another interesting experience here, just after I graduated, in Heffers book shop; I came across a book called 'Sociolinguistics' by Arthur Capell; it was very much an anthropological take on sociolinguistics which I found a bit disappointing; it was interesting, but not what I thought it was going to be; in Edinburgh I then had another book shop experience; I came across another book with the same title, but without a hyphen, edited by William Bright; it was the proceedings of a conference which had been held a couple of years earlier at UCLA; it was a collection of papers including one by William Labov, and that really captured my imagination; it was about social mobility, up and down, and its effect on linguistic behaviour, with numbers - he had actually counted this - and I thought this really fascinating; one week John Lyons gave us the task of writing an essay on anything we liked, so I wrote on this particular aspect of sociolinguistics; Lyons found it very interesting, not having known anything about it, as at that time linguistics was quite new and sociolinguistics unheard of; then I discovered that Labov had done this PhD study of the English spoken in New York City, the social stratification of English there; I got his book at enormous expense; it was an urban dialect study where he tried to bear in mind that you can't really do an urban dialect study by just taking one person and investigating their speech; encouraged by John Lyons' suggestion that my essays were quite good, I asked him if I could stay on in Edinburgh and do a PhD, and he said yes; he asked what I wanted to do and I said I had been inspired by Labov and wanted to do something rather like that; as I was in Edinburgh I thought I should do my urban study there, but I was worried that Scotland was foreign to me

Second Part

0:05:07 My assumption was that a student at Edinburgh University should study Edinburgh speech; Keith, E.K. Brown, one of the lecturers, and later a colleague of mine at Essex, suggested I do a study of Norwich as that was where I was from; it had never occurred to me but thanks to him I spent three years doing a PhD thesis on the urban dialect of Norwich; it was eventually published as 'The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich'; I was inspired by Labov and followed some of his methodology, but it turned out to be the first sociolinguistic urban dialect study of anywhere in the British Isles; it was quite ground-breaking, but I hadn't any idea that it was at the time; there was a difficulty finding a supervisor and nobody had done anything like this before; I was really the first person to do anything in sociolinguistics at all in this country; what I should have done is write to Labov, but that never occurred to me either; I was supervised to start with by John Lyons but he knew nothing about this, so he gave me two supervisors, Bill Jones, a dialectologist who had done work on Yorkshire dialect, and Jim Mather, who was part of the survey of Scottish dialects, but they didn't know anything about what I was doing either; so I pretty much wrote it by myself, and it shows; the whole methodology was very different, it was a revolution that Labov introduced; the idea was that you couldn't write a proper description of the speech of a large urban area by just taking one informant, recording them and analysing their speech, which is what traditional dialectologists had done investigating rural dialects; you go to a village and find some older person there who speaks some conservative form of the local dialect, you interview them and describe what you hear; my thesis was based on taking a random sample of the population of the city, I recorded interviews, and then I spent a whole year listening to the tapes, analysing and counting things which were variable, which was the innovation that Labov had introduced; the study which most people know about is his study of the pronunciation of 'R' in New York City English, so whether the 'R' was pronounced in 'cart' and 'farm' and 'bird', which is typical of most American English, or whether it was omitted, as is typical in most New York City English; what he discovered was that it was variable, but if you counted the variables it correlated with social class, that upper-class people pronounced most of the 'R' and lower-class, least; that is what I started doing and then looked at the patterns that were to be uncovered in that material; Basil Bernstein, working in London, introduced the terms 'restricted code' and 'elaborated code', and there was a controversy between people like him and people like Labov and me, mostly because I think his work was misunderstood, though I must say that is not surprising as it is very hard to understand; the thing that it took me some time to understand was that he wasn't really talking about language at all; what he said was that people of working-class background in places like London were at a linguistic disadvantage because of the way they spoke; he did not mean anything to do with their accent or dialect, but it was misunderstood by educational psychologists, particularly in the United States, who took him to be saying that working-class children were verbally deprived, they couldn't think properly because they did not have the right kind of language; that was complete and pernicious nonsense; I do blame him for talking about actual linguistic characteristics, relative clauses, pronouns, and so on, which he didn't know anything about really, but basically, when he says restricted code its a very useful notion; it is when people take background information for granted when they shouldn't; small children will assume that everybody knows whom they are talking about when they don't; he was saying that people who are used to moving in different social circles can supply the exact amount of background information when they are talking to others, and people who live in more restricted social groups don't do that; that was not sociolinguistics nor linguistics, it was language stratification, but he was interested in what people said whereas linguists are interested in how people say things, which is not the same thing at all

8:25:16 My Phd thesis was hardly a best-seller but is still referred to, and that's because it was the first and I think it was only the second in the world in that kind of paradigm published after Labov's New York City book; people also know me because of my Penguin book, 'Sociolinguistics: an introduction' which came out in 1974; it was the first ever introductory book on sociolinguistics and is still being used as a text book in colleges and universities; another book that made a bit of a splash came out in 1975 called 'Accent, Dialect and the School' where I was putting forward orthodox views from the point of view of linguists, namely that accents and dialects are equal and there is nothing wrong with them as such; that teachers should pay attention to the language that children take into the classroom; there is an echo there of my experience with my school teacher who didn't understand rude and road; that was quite controversial because people said I was trying to get everybody to use bad grammar when all I was saying that it was not bad but different grammar; I like to think it was an important book because it was adopted in many teacher training colleges; it is a battle that has to be fought in every generation and I think we are back to square one again now; I don't think that Michael Gove would agree with me whatsoever about this even though he is wrong and I am right; as far as the more theoretical books are concerned there are three; the first came out in 1986 called 'Dialects in Contact'; there had been lots of work previously on languages in contact, what happens where one languages comes into contact with another, with bi-lingual communities what influence can one language have on another historically speaking; I was interested where dialects of the same language come into contact, and I developed particular theories of things that happened, such as simplification; I got interested in what actually happens when a whole new dialect develops; a good example would be Milton Keynes, an area where there were very few people living, then large numbers of people come from all over Britain bringing their dialects with them and establish a new community, what's their English going to be like; I didn't actually talk about Milton Keynes, though my friend and colleague, Paul Kerswill, subsequently has; that led onto the book that perhaps I most enjoyed writing, 'New-Dialect Formation: The Inevitability of Colonial Englishes', published in 2004; this came about because I was invited to work on a research project in New Zealand by my friend and colleague, Elizabeth Gordon, who was very interested in why New Zealand English is as it is; you can ask the same about America, Australia etc.; you take people from the British Isles and plonk them down in New Zealand where English had never been spoken before, and eventually a whole new variety of English grows up which is recognizably from New Zealand; she being a good social networker discovered that the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation had an archive of recording that were made in the 1940s of elderly New Zealanders; they started making recordings in what was called the Mobile Recording Unit, and used to drive round New Zealand and interview people in particular communities, singing songs, telling stories or life history; the programmes were originally to allow people to send messages to their family overseas, but in the late 1940s they went over to just broadcasting the programmes; it was a bit like the BBC programme, 'Down Your Way', which you and I will remember; these recordings of people in their nineties, eighties, seventies, in New Zealand, and of course emigration did not really get underway until the 1840s, the first large number of native anglophones were not being born until the 1850s, so some of these people on these recordings were amongst the very first in New Zealand to speak English; Elizabeth got the recordings, they were digitised, and she got grants for them to be studied; she wanted me to be in on it as I knew about British Isles' dialects, and had also done theoretical work on dialects in contact; for many years I flew out to New Zealand, for obvious reasons trying to go in February, and listened to these tapes; listening to them for the first time was absolutely astonishing because here were these people who had lived all their lives in New Zealand, and they didn't sound like anything at all, they didn't sound like each other and they certainly didn't sound like New Zealanders; they sounded a bit English, Irish, Scottish, a bit West Country and North of England, and I gradually came to understand that these people each spoke a mixed dialect but had all come up with different individual mixtures; I developed a theory of new dialect formation and came up with the idea that it was very deterministic, that if you knew enough about what the input to the new dialect was, how many people there were from London, Bristol, or whatever, you would be able to predict what the new dialect was going to be like; it was only in the next generation that you began to get a recognizable form of New Zealand English; it is a rather strong claim to make and many people have disagreed, but I don't think that anyone has actually been able to disprove it; I don't think that you can work backward from the present dialects to roots in the past; it is not a matter of the number of people but the competing dialect forms and how many of them there were; anyway, that is something I am pleased with and people are applying it elsewhere, for example, Canadian English; the most recent book that came out in 2011 is called 'Sociolinguistic Typology: Social Determinants of Linguistic Complexity'; the idea is that when I first started studying linguistics here in Cambridge, one of the things that John Lyons was keen to point out to us was that all languages are highly complex; in those days, and maybe even today, you need to tell lay people that, and it doesn't matter if they are spoken in Papua New Guinea or metropolitan Paris; then it went a bit further because there was this message, all languages are equally complex, and that very first linguistics textbook, that I saw lying on the table in the Modern Languages library, had that particular message in it; all languages are equally complex and if something happens in one part of the language to simplify it there will be a compensatory complexification somewhere else; now sociolinguists and people working on contact find it hard to accept that, in fact they know it is wrong; one of the things that happens in language contact and in dialect contact is that languages get simplified; that is not a value loaded term, we are not saying they are getting worse, it is just to do with the structure; the route I have taken in studying linguistic complexity is to ask how hard is it for an adult to learn as non-native speaker because obviously small children will learn anything; adults and adolescents are not very good language learners, and the sort of things that cause difficulty are irregularities; in situation of new dialect contact formations you tend to see complexities like that disappear, and that also happens in situations of language contact; if you take Afrikaans, for example, we know it is a variety of Dutch that was taken to South Africa but has been enormously influenced by the fact that it has been learnt by massive numbers of non-native speakers; Afrikaans, a perfectly adequate language, perfectly normal, but if you compare it to Dutch it is simpler, it is more regular, and it has other forms of simplification that have gone on; you can say that those forms of simplification are due to the fact that not only have adults learnt it as a foreign language, but their foreigner language has had an effect because of demographic factors on the language of the main stream native speaking communities; there is a sense in which native speakers of Afrikaans today are native speakers of some non-native variety of Dutch; it is obvious that if a language can get simpler through time, if the same language can be more or less simple at different points in time, then different languages can be more or less simple at the same point in time, so some languages are simpler than others; what I have been trying to do in this book is to work out what we can say about simplicity and complexity in language from that sociolinguistic point of view; what I have realized is that languages which have been subjected to lots of adult learning through language contact tend to be simpler; languages, on the other hand, which have been subjected to a different sort of contact will turn out differently, so if you put two or more languages together and leave them together for many centuries in the same geographical area so that children become bi-lingual, you find languages influencing each other even though they are not necessarily very closely related; a well-known area in Europe is the Balkans; there are very many similarities between Albanian and Greek, Rumanian and Macedonian Bulgarian, even though they are not closely related; over the centuries they have grown more like each other because of the large number of people who are bi-lingual or tri-lingual in these languages; in that situation language can get more complex because they will start borrowing stuff from other languages; there are two different types of language contact, those with adult language contact which produce simplification, and then long term co-territorial bi-lingual situations where children have been learning the other languages which can lead to complexification because people borrow from other languages; that leaves you with the question of where complexity came from in the first place; the answer has to be that it doesn't happen in an kind of contact situation because, on the one hand
you will get simplification, and on the other additive complexity where you take already existing complexity and add it to your own language; in what sort of community do you get linguistic complexification developing, and my answer is that you are more likely to get it in small relatively isolated communities with not very much language contact, with a large amount of social information with dense networks, where nothing happens to destabilize that community for many generations; that allows for various linguistic changes to take place which will produce irregularity, new grammatical categories; my feeling is that if you leave languages alone they will gradually get more and more complex, and its only if you start getting large scale language contact and social upheaval, that you'll get simplification coming in; if we want to know where linguistic complexity came from we say it came from small, stable communities with low contact, and those sorts of communities are getting fewer and fewer; my prediction is that we are going to get less and less linguistic complexity in the languages of the world; the moral of that is that if we want to know as linguists what the possibility of human languages are, we need to go out and study languages spoken in small communities in places like the Amazon jungle, in Papua New Guinea, and in the Himalayas, before they disappear because it looks like they are going to in one of the biggest tragedies to befall human culture; the languages that are going to be left behind are going to be relatively simple and very atypical of how human languages have been throughout human history; the languages that people are going to be studying in future centuries are not going to tell them anything at all about what languages used to be like ten thousand years ago

28:29:14 It does not seem to me that the development of the sort of complexity that I am thinking of is something that just happens regardless of the function to which the language is put; it doesn't have any benefit and there is no dis-benefit if languages get simpler; complex doesn't mean better or worse, and it does mean more difficult for adults to learn, but so what; I don't actually see any connection to the uses to which language is put; obviously factors will have a direct impact on vocabulary of a language, if it is being used for ritual, for political power, for all those things, so you could have a larger and more complex vocabulary; I haven't said very much in my book about vocabulary because I don't know much about it and in one sense it is rather obvious and uninteresting; if the Saami in northern Norway have a large number of words for snow, then its useful for them, but I am more intrigued by the syntactic structure, the grammatical structure of sentences, the grammatical structure of words, the phonological systems, the sound systems, and how they come to be like they are; I think that all communities at one period in human history would have had really rather complex linguistic systems, and the way they get less complex is though contact and larger communities; that raises the interesting question of why are languages so complex, what is the point of this linguistic complexity, and there doesn't seem to be much point really; a very brilliant Swedish linguist, Östen Dahl, has talked about cross-linguistically dispensable phenomena, so things that languages don't need; if you start thinking about it, languages don't need most of the things that many languages have, so what is the point of grammatical gender, English used to have grammatical gender but we lost it; what consequences did that have, none whatsoever; so why does French, German and Greek preserve masculine, feminine and neuter, what's the point of taking nouns and grouping them together in different classes which behave differently? There are some advantages from time to time but mostly they are just there and seem to be things which happen; it is a very interesting question; what is the point of having irregular verbs, if you were inventing a language you would never invent a language where the present tense is 'go' and the past, 'went'; these things happen, and if you let language go along without interfering with them that is the sort of thing which happens, but whether there is any point, or whether it has any functions in a particular community, I don't know; what is interesting is that it tells us what the nature of human language is like and perhaps what the nature of the human language faculty is like; it tells us that human beings will learn and use, given enough opportunity as children, languages with an enormous amount of complexity; perhaps this is a different way of looking at the study of the human brain to the way in which Chomsky and others have been trying to do it, I don't know

34:20:14 My wife, Jean Hannah, is American, and she is in linguistics as well which I must say has been a joy to me because we can talk about the same things, we share the same values when it comes to language, and every single thing I write, she reads, and corrects and improves; we met at the University of Illinois in the summer of 1978 when I was invited to teach on the Linguistic Society of America Summer school; that was another highly important linguistic event that happened to me; the Professor there, Braj Kuchru, was a sociolinguist and invited me to be one of the faculty on this six week summer school in Champaign, Urbana, and Jean was one of the graduate students there, and these students were told that they had to look after the visiting faculty; Jean looked after me and has been doing so every since; we are this perfect combination, she had a car and no money and I had money and no car, and after the summer school was over we set of on a three week trip all around the United States; we have written a linguistics book together which is called 'International English' which is designed to be used by foreigners learning English at a rather advanced level; the idea is to point out differences between the main national varieties of English; the core of the book is what are the differences between American English and English English; still even today there will be a word that she will use that I have never heard or don't know what it means, and vice versa, and there may be some usage that I've never heard before and will ask her if they really say that; then of course, being academics, we write it down. We share a love of language, and an interest in language - and it's been very nice.