Not coincidentally, it is in rural and working-class communities where the most local forms of speech are still most strongly preserved today, in those parts of society furthest removed from literate traditions. Residents of areas of cities which have long been typically working class are better able to preserve the strongest form of urban dialect. Sociolinguistic research in Belfast has provided a model for understanding change based on the idea of social network. Change is accounted for as speaker innovation which spreads from one network to another through weak ties. This model also makes some predictions about rate of change. More specifically, it is claimed that change is slow to the extent that the relevant populations are well established and bound by strong ties. It is rapid to the extent that weak ties exist in populations (Milroy & Milroy 1985: 375; Milroy 1992). The terms 'rapid' and slow' are of course relative. Certainly, the early Modern English and subsequent period did not experience the social upheaval which must have accompanied the Viking and Norman conquests.

A substantial body of research into changes affecting varieties of urban speech in major cities on both sides of the Atlantic such as New York, Detroit, Glasgow, Belfast, etc. have shown that social factors such as social class, ethnicity, gender, network structure, age and style and other such 'social variables' are implicated in change (see Weinreich, Labov & Herzog 1968). Major urban centres around the globe are likely to become even more fertile ground for investigation of change. The end of the twentieth century will witness an unprecedented change in patterns of human settlement world-wide, when for the first time in history more people will live in cities and towns than in rural areas. Furthermore, the rise of urbanisation is connected with an increase in social stratification which in turn is reflected in linguistic variation.

While London once provided a point of origin for the diffusion of Standard English, now it has become an increasingly diverse city through the influx of overseas migrants from the Caribbean and Asia. As many as fifty different languages may be spoken in parts of the city. Similarly, Melbourne, once primarily a monolingual town, now has the largest concentration of Greek speakers in the world. Miami is now predominantly Hispanophone.

Mass literacy as a cultural development made possible by universal schooling also has to be reckoned with as a factor having major impact on language in the modern period. The spread of literacy has taken place only in the most recent centuries of the evolution of human language. Two or three centuries ago, most speakers of English were semi - or pre-literate. Until modern times it was largely only the gentry who were educated. The introduction of compulsory schooling in England in 1870 eventually made the majority of people literate. Over time, literacy acts as a brake on linguistic change and lessens the distance between the upper and working classes. The rate of literacy was higher in London than elsewhere in the country during the early Modern English period; even 70 per cent of servants in the city could sign their names by 1700. Nevertheless, at that time it was probably only the professional and merchant classes, i. e. men who had had an education, who were fully literate. As many as 98 per cent of all books printed in England emanated from the capital. Over half the booksellers were established there and a large proportion of the reading public. The burgeoning of the magazine trade in the Victorian era with roughly 25,000 circulating periodicals has been seen as the 'verbal equivalent of urbanism' (Shattuck & Wolff 1982: xiv).

The spread of literacy also meant an increase in private correspondence in the form of letters, diaries, etc. These provide a rich source of information on less carefully monitored styles since most of these were not intended for publication. Biber and Finegan (1989) have demonstrated what historians of the language have long intuited, namely that personal letters are among the most involved and therefore oral of written genres. They constitute good evidence for what Labov (1966) calls 'change from below', i. e. below the level of conscious awareness and associated with lower classes in the social hierarchy (see Denison, this volume).

Just as Standard English once diffused out from the London merchant class, now vernacular London speech is spreading to other cities like Norwich, where many young people now say bovver and togevver instead of bother and together. Cockneys have used these forms for generations. There is evidence that the change from /th/ to /v/ is spreading by face-to-face contact rather than via the media since areas closer to London have adopted these features more quickly than areas farther away, though the television programme East Enders has made some features of Cockney accessible to millions. Not even the Royal Family has been immune to change from below. The British press has charged Prince Andrew with sounding like a Cockney, and Princess Anne has been accused of 'linguistic slumming'. The Daily Telegraph (Harris 1987), accused the Duchess of York of taking 'miwlk' rather than 'milk' in her tea and noted that the Princess of Wales believed she was married in a place called 'St. Paw's Cathedral'. Increased glottalisation has also been making headway among middle-class speakers, with the Princess of Wales heard noting, 'There's a lo? of i? abou?' (Rosewame 1994: 3). Glottalisation has now been reported from other parts of the English-speaking world such as New Zealand (Holmes 1995). 'Change from above', by contrast, is conscious, and is associated with the middle class, supposedly more sensitive to the overt prestige norms of the standard variety.

Sociolinguistic research of modern urban areas has, if anything, given us a revealing picture of the standard's uneven diffusion as it illustrates how social-class boundaries act in similar ways to geographical ones in terms of their ability to impede or facilitate the spread of linguistic features. The spread of the 'newfangled English' was also at first uneven. The standards of the highest class of speakers were not necessarily those of the new self-constituted authorities on correctness of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Wyld (1920: 283) assures Modern English speakers that we would no doubt consider that educated persons of that period spoke 'in a reprehensible manner'. He (1920: 282-3) cites, for example, the dropping of final t/d as widespread among all classes of speakers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see Romaine 1984a). Pope, for instance, rhymed neglects with sex. Similarly, Marshall (1982: has noted of the late eighteenth century that 'even the gentry thought it no disgrace to speak with a provincial accent'. While the term 'King's English' was used by the end of the sixteenth century to label normative forms of English, not all royalty have been considered good exemplars of it. Actor John Kemble, for instance, advised King George IV when he was Prince of Wales that 'it would become your royal mouth much better to pronounce the word oblige, and not obleege' (cited in Bailey 1991: 3).

Thus, it was not initially the highest-ranking social groups of the day but instead the nouveau riche or bourgeoisie who eagerly sought the refinements the grammarians had to offer as signs of their emergent status as educated persons. As this newfangled English became available to an increasing portion of English society, the markers of upper-class linguistic etiquette shifted from syntax to accent. This change can be seen in nineteenth-century novels in which innumerable shibboleths unmask social climbers (see Phillips 1984 and Mugglestone 1995). By 1864 Henry Alford warned of the open and merciless laughter which awaited 'any unfortunate member if he strews the floor with his "aitches"'. George Bernard Shaw's Pygmaiion (1916) and the popular musical made from it, My Fair Lady, attest to the English preoccupation with accent (and its power for social transformation). The Cockney flower seller, Eliza Doolittle, is trained by the phonetics professor, Henry Higgins (modelled on Henry Sweet), to speak like a 'lady' with an RP accent. Sweet (1890: vi-vii) described all too well the anxiety bound up with validating one's social place through accent when he said:

The Cockney dialect seems very ugly to an educated Englishman or woman because he - and still more she - lives in a perpetual terror of being taken for a Cockney, and a perpetual struggle to preserve that h which has now been lost in most of the local dialects of England, both North and South.

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