ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies some grammatical features that appear to be shared by the urban dialects of the major centres of Britain. Urban dialectologists seem to agree that the growth of cities has been accompanied by very rapid mixing of a number of different dialects from surrounding areas (see Milroy 1984:214), as former rural populations become increasingly urbanized. Some writers have suggested that as a result dialect diversity in Britain is reducing and being replaced not by the grammatical forms of standard English but by a development towards a levelled non-standard dialect (see Edwards and Weltens 1984: 121–2). Some empirical analyses of the phonological consequences of urbanization have been carried out: Harris (1985) and Milroy (1982), for example, showed that one effect in Belfast was the rapid reduction of allophones. So far, however, there have been no comparable studies that focus on morphology and syntax, and the question of whether there has been a reduction of grammatical variation as a result of urbanization has yet to be addressed. Although this is a question that can only be properly addressed by empirical investigations of actual usage, we were able to make some preliminary statements about the dialect features that are shared by the urban centres of Britain, within the context of a Survey of British Dialect Grammar.
