“big bright lights” versus “green and pleasant land”
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addressed geographical variation within the city specifically in the analysis of (ō) (the reflexes of Middle English /ō/ in words such as ‘boat’ and ‘goat’), showing that in the suburb with areas of newest housing—Lakenham—peripheral to the urban centre, more diphthongs were found than in other suburbs, when social class was held constant. And the important work of James and Lesley Milroy (e.g. L Milroy 1987, J Milroy 1992) in urban Belfast—examining three different sub-communities of the city—demonstrated that the differential effects of socio-economic factors such as unemployment levels and gendered socialisation and working patterns on the three city locales led to distinct patterns of sociolinguistic variation and change in each. It is dialectologists of the Arab world who have tended to be most sensitive to the internal sociolinguistic geographies of cities. As Miller (2007) makes clear, large-scale urbanization in Arabic-speaking countries has been recent and dramatic. Its recency has enabled dialectologists not just to carefully plot the development of koineised new urban varieties (e.g. Al-Wer 2003, 2007), but also to examine urbanization and migration in the context of social and geographical differentiation within the city itself (e.g. Messaoudi 2001, El Himer 2001, Ismail 2007). In the preamble to the Social Stratification of English in New York City –THE key text of early variationism—Labov (1966, 2006) contrasted his earlier work on largely rural Martha’s Vineyard (Labov 1963/1972a) with the 1966 research on the Lower East Side of New York City (NYC), making it clear that the latter represented ‘a much more complex society’ (Labov 2006: 3), despite the fact that ultimately NYC was distilled down to the variables of age, class, ethnicity and gender, factors, which, as is made very clear (Labov 1972a: 4-6) are also some (but not all) of the key pivots of social diversity in Martha’s Vineyard too. There, in this largely rural community, in addition to a large population of ethnically English inhabitants, residents of Portuguese, Native American and other miscellaneous ethnicities make up half if not more of the population (Labov 1972a: 6), even before we take into consideration a small resident population coming originally from the Mainland and the large numbers of tourists who flock to the island each summer. Furthermore, these populations are not distributed geographically evenly across the island, and are, naturally, engaged in a range of economic activities. As the results of Labov’s analysis demonstrated, the community showed