The study has two broad objectives. The first is to describe the regional and sociooccupational
language varieties and communicative styles used locally through the
collection of empirical data. The second is to explore the extent to which the various
components of such language function as markers of social identity for certain individuals.
It is an ethnographic, synchronic study looking at the complex link between language and
identity, and is cross-disciplinary, drawing on the knowledge already generated via research
in sociolinguistics, anthropology and folklore. It is argued that such an eclectic approach
will provide profitable insights and reveal new possibilities, both in the description of
regional and occupational language varieties and in their role of local identity construction.
The concept of someone having a particular social identity or 'self in this study
refers not only to geographical, territorially-based group affiliations, but to locally-based,
social categories. The study group comprised men and women from the village of Royston
and neighbouring communities in South Yorkshire, who have, until recently, relied on
coalmining as a way of life and as their major source of income. Undoubtedly, as with all
people, each individual is affiliated to different, overlapping and sometimes conflicting
social groups, which they can enter and leave easily.
Subjective feelings of identification to a geographical region or a social group are
not necessarily expressed via language behaviour. This study however, argues that, among
many people still living in communities such as Royston, Grimethorpe and Darfield in
South Yorkshire, the coalmining industry has been a significant factor in their lives, and
continues to be an important retrospective resource, which in certain contexts, can be
manipulated symbolically for the display of a distinctive local social identity.
The study emphasises that language is not simply an emblem of membership to a preexisting
group, but rather these affiliations and boundaries are constituted, maintained and
negotiated through the process of interaction.