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Variation in the use of ain't in an urban British English dialect

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

Jenny Cheshire
Jenny Cheshire
Affiliation:
School of Modern Languages, University of Bath
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Abstract

Ain't occurs as a sociolinguistic variable in working class speech in the town of Reading, England. The phonetic realizations of ain't in Reading English do not accord with traditional etymologies, depending more on the syntactic environment in which ain't occurs than on the standard English forms from which they are usually assumed to derive. The phonetic variants are also marked for semantic function in tag questions. Variation in the use of ain't can be explained as reflecting an ongoing linguistic change (sociolinguistics, dialectology, language change, theoretical linguistics).

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , December 1981 , pp. 365 - 381
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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