This study provides a sociolinguistic account of speech variation in Wilmslow, Cheshire, a town in the northwest of England. This town is home to both a highly mobile and predominantly middle-class commuter population and a traditional working-class overspill estate of residents originally from nearby Manchester. These groups remain maximally segregated until contact occurs in adolescence at the high school. Their lives subsequently diverge again beyond their school years. This study therefore provides the
perfect environment in which to investigate the outcomes of mobility-induced dialect contact and the linguistic consequences of isolation and exclusion.
A central component of this research is an investigation into the mechanisms of dialect contact. An important concern is the adoption of innovations from outside as well as the loss or maintenance of existing forms. This study further investigates the extent to which dialect contact processes can be described as typical, universal and ongoing and the extent to which they are locally specific and changing. The analysis reveals that an investigation into such dialect contact processes should be guided by the specificity of the locality in which they are enacted.
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