Rural dialect speakers in an urban speech community: the role of dialect contact in defining a sociolinguistic concept

This article discusses the applicability of the notion of speech community in urban centres where considerable dialect mixing takes place. The model examined is that of Labov, whose views on the speech community have remained remarkably constant. The reason for the choice of this model is its testability. Four speech community criteria, derived from Labov's work, are examined; these are (1) the nativeness of speech community members; (2) the presence of uniform patterns of linguistic variation; (3) the shared evaluation of linguistic features; and (4) the close relatedness of the varieties on all linguistic levels. The test bed is Bergen, in western Norway, a city with a strongly localised language variety and a linguistically clearly identifiable (and stereotyped) rural migrant minority. A range of approaches to the linguistic data are taken, including a dialect perception test. The data for both the ‘native’and the rural migrant groups show that each forms a separate speech community according to some or all of the criteria. Moreover, it is also shown that the rural migrants’language variation is only interpretable against the background of the group's relationship with the host community. This leads to the presentation of a two‐tiered speech community model. The higher tier subsumes all the groups found in a particular population centre; this tier is not necessarily ‘Labovian’according to any of the criteria listed, but the language variation found within it will be interrelated in some way. The lower tier consists of a number of ‘Labovian’communities, which will include the ‘natives’of an area along with various distinguishable subgroups.