One foot in the grave? Dialect death, dialect contact, and dialect birth in England* DAVID BRITAIN Abstract I survey here some of the recent evidence of dialect attrition from sociolin- guistic and variationist studies carried out in England. In doing so, and by highlighting the origins of some of the ongoing changes in English dialects, I hope to make three claims in particular: firstly, that dialect death is inex- tricably linked to dialect contact — in order to understand how dialect death has changed the dialectological landscape of England, we need to ap- preciate the linguistic consequences of contact more generally; secondly, and apparently in contrast with some other speech communities, the attri- tion process has not led to a widespread shift toward RP or standard English. I argue, thirdly, that while some dialects are undoubtedly under- going attrition, new varieties are emerging, driven by both expansion and relocation di¤usion, and shaped by contact between local, regional, interre- gional, and other, including standard, varieties. Although the developments currently a¤ecting English dialects in England are not necessarily particu- larly new, they are proceeding on an unprecedented spatial scale, a scale that has resulted from some rather wide-ranging social and economic devel- opments that have accelerated contact between speakers of structurally dis- tinct dialects. 1. Introduction The dialect landscape of England has changed substantially over the course of the past century. There has been such considerable and ongoing dialect attrition that the language use reported across the country by Ellis’s survey of 1889 seems, in many cases and in many places, quite alien to that spoken just over one hundred years later. Later in this arti- cle, I survey some of the recent evidence of this attrition from sociolin- guistic and variationist studies carried out in England. In doing so, and 0165–2516/09/0196–0121 Int’l. J. Soc. Lang. 196/197 (2009), pp. 121–155 6 Walter de Gruyter DOI 10.1515/IJSL.2009.019