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Surviving 'Estuary English': Innovation diffusion, koineisation and local dialect differentiation in the English Fenland

I explore here the extent to which a number of linguistic innovations, characteristic of the Englishes of the South-East of England, have diffused to a rural area to the north-west of East Anglia, known as the Fens. In doing so, I assess whether diffusion models in the literature to date adequately account for the outcomes of diffusion, as demonstrated in the casual speech of 18 adolescents from three dialectally distinct parts of the Fens. I argue that the diffusion of linguistic innovations is inextricably tied to dialect contact – the meeting of the innovation with the local traditional form – and as such we should conceptualise diffusion not as a simple ‘sequence of distributional changes’ in the dialectological landscape, but as an outcome of contact-based processes, such as interdialect formation, simplification and reallocation (see Trudgill 1986, Britain 1997a, b, 2001a; Trudgill and Britain forthcoming). I draw extensively on the critique of spatial diffusion models drawn by the human geographer Derek Gregory (1985), and suggest some future directions for research on geolinguistic diffusion. I demonstrate the validity of parts of Gregory’s critique through an analysis of eight linguistic variables, one variant of each representing a vigorously spreading innovation from the south-east of England and/or London.