By berrt or by caaar? Bridging the divide of dialect perceptions in Grimsby and Hull

Repeatedly in sociolinguistic literature, an area defined as Humberside has been designated as the site of a distinct dialect region (Hughes, Trudgill & Watt 2003: 69-71; Wales 2006: 16; Trudgill 1999). This is surprising for two reasons: first, that the definition of this area as Humberside has proved contentious for locals, for whom it was briefly a local government area (LGBCE 1991; Roberts 1995), and more pertinently because of a series of significant attested linguistic differences between its two largest settlements of Hull and Grimsby (British Library 2012a, 2012b; Williams & Kerswill 1999). This dissertation establishes a perceptual grounding to complement these productive differences through the results of an online survey completed by 184 people from Hull and Grimsby. On the majority of occasions, informants were able to accurately differentiate single-word tokens of Hull and Grimsby speech as being either from their home location or not. This is supplemented by the finding that informants from the two places differed in their self-reported perceptual geographies: Hull informants associated their city with the North and North East more strongly than Grimsby informants did their town, and in turn, Grimsby informants were stronger in their associations of their town with the East and Midlands. Additionally, an element of priming was included in the study, with no strong evidence of its effect.