A team of linguists is re-recording the same Norwich residents 56 years after they first had their speech analysed, to track how individual accents change across a lifetime. Most studies of language change compare different generations at a single moment, not the same people over decades. This leaves a critical gap: no one knows whether adults actually shift their vowels and consonants as they age, or whether their speech remains fixed after adolescence. The researchers are repeating the UK’s first-ever sociolinguistic survey—Peter Trudgill’s 1968 study of Norwich English—to capture both individual lifespan changes and community-level shifts across five generations. This is fundamental curiosity-driven research into how and why dialects evolve, level, or survive. It has no immediate practical application. But a deeper understanding of language change could eventually inform speech recognition systems, forensic linguistics, or educational tools that respect regional diversity. The project will also create an open-access East Anglian Voices Corpus, giving future researchers a rare long-term dataset. School workshops and public engagement aim to raise awareness that regional accents are cultural assets worth documenting, not signs of decline.
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Language change is a natural and inevitable process. Social and demographic shifts in recent decades have accelerated change across regional English varieties, which are ‘levelling’ to lose their distinctive features (Kerswill & Williams, 1999). The local industries that once played a vital role in cultivating regional culture, identity, and linguistic diversity are disappearing in post-industrial Britain. Ironically, meanwhile, attitudes towards linguistic diversity have themselves shifted; traditional/regional varieties are increasingly being recognised as vital cultural assets warranting preservation. This has motivated linguists to question the role of individuals in such changes, asking: can individuals change their accents and/or dialects over their lifespan? A growing body of longitudinal ‘panel’ studies, comparing the same speakers at different points in time, has recently emerged in response to this question (see Sankoff, 2018, 2019 for an overview). Findings show that either i) linguistic changes do advance over the lifespan, but at a much slower rate than the community, ii) they regress, with speakers becoming slightly more conservative than they were in earlier life, or, iii) change across the lifespan is absent. Outcomes vary depending on the linguistic feature and community being studied, with most evidence drawn from studies concerning morphosyntactic or consonantal features. To fully understand lifespan change, additional longitudinal data on gradient linguistic features, such as vowels, from a diverse range of individuals and communities is necessary. This project is a rare and time-sensitive opportunity to address this gap. We will conduct a replication of the UK’s first ever sociolinguistic investigation of linguistic change, namely Peter Trudgill's well-known survey of Norwich English (1974, data collection 1968). We will re-record as many of Trudgill’s original participants as possible as part of a panel study over 56 years, making it possible to evaluate lifespan changes to individuals’ speech production and perception for the first time. We will collect new samples from the present-day Norwich community for comparative ‘trend’ analysis with Trudgill’s corpus, tracking community-level change across five generations. Our deep longitudinal perspective will significantly improve understanding of the causes and mechanisms behind complex community-level linguistic shifts, as our methods capture the dynamic nature of social, cultural and economic factors that influence dialect change, loss, and survival. Objectives: Test the stability of individuals’ speech production and perception over the lifespan Evaluate historical predictions of language change against contemporary realities in light of social and spatial phenomena of the past century Better understand how and why linguistic changes are accepted, modified, or rejected within communities Examine the social and linguistic factors that accelerate/decelerate linguistic change Evaluate received methodologies This research stands to enhance sociolinguistic methodologies and benefit researchers in related fields in a transdisciplinary way. Active engagement of local communities in the data collection process and a series of school workshops will facilitate diverse public impact by heightening public awareness about linguistic heritage and diversity. This extension of Trudgill's work will provide an updated resource for local educational entities. Sharing the resulting dataset in line with open science best practice will enhance models of language evolution based on real-world outcomes, while creating an East Anglian Voices Corpus will lay the foundations to extend this research in the future. As an embodiment of the social, historical and cultural milieu of the time, all interview recordings/transcriptions generated by the project will engage researchers and the wider public in the long-term.
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