Lexical variation among mobile speakers : A case study of words for bread in the United Kingdom

Bailey, George and MacKenzie, Laurel and Turton, Danielle (2025) Lexical variation among mobile speakers : A case study of words for bread in the United Kingdom. In: Sociolinguistic Approaches to Lexical Variation in English :. Routledge Studies in Sociolinguistics . Routledge, London. ISBN 9781032835259 (In Press)

Abstract

Lexical variables are typically the most easily acquired type of linguistic feature in cases of dialect contact (Chambers 1992; Siegel 2010). However, studies of dialect contact typically focus on a small number of speakers, meaning that we are missing a large-scale picture of how widespread contact-based lexical assimilation is and what sorts of constraints might govern the process. This chapter takes a first step in answering these questions by presenting data on lexical variation from a large-scale dialect survey carried out among residents of the United Kingdom. As we intend this chapter as a proof of concept of our method, we focus on one lexical variable in particular, which happens to be simultaneously highly variable, well known among members of the public, and understudied by dialectologists: words for a bread roll in British English. Drawing on data from over 20,000 individuals, our chapter answers the following research questions: