ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the concept of nonmobile older rural males (NORMs), often employed by sociolinguists to designate the sample of informants in the network of 313 localities in England and Wales investigated in the Survey of English Dialects (SED) between 1950 and 1961. It focuses primarily on data from an urban area to illustrate the dangers of over-generalisation and oversimplification inherent in the characterisation of SED data exclusively in terms of NORMs. It explores that with the modification of rural to urban, the concept of NORMs/NOUMs serves a useful purpose in characterising the ideal informant originally sought by the SED and similar surveys which focused primarily on the usage of older conservative speakers. It demonstrate that there is much to be gained by comparing the language of older conservative speakers with that of other age groups, and by exploring variation not only over time but also taking account of such factors as locality, gender and social class.
