ABSTRACT
[ … ] Our participants fell into two sharply distinguished groups, from geographically distinct areas and having somewhat different ways of life. Those we call group A lived in a recently constructed industrial suburb of a middle-sized country town. Their parents worked in a very large factory where ‘industrial relations’ were bad. Many families in this suburb had emigrated from other parts of Britain but not usually in the lifetime of our participants. Without detailed sociological investigation, it is difficult to make sweeping statements about the parental society of group A participants, but we think it can be said safely that the result of the mixing of markedly different British sub-cultures was a fairly anomic and bland common sociality. Our participants attended a large comprehensive school, which had been built at the same time as their industrial suburb. The speech of our group A participants tended to a widespread use of glottal stops, of unstressed consonants and non-standard vowels, though only one spoke in a marked regional dialect. Most of them were not taking exams at the time of their discussion with us but they had made some attempt on the examination system in the past, at the CSE level, one having succeeded in as many as eight subjects.
