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rily consonantal innovations in England, one of the locations that has been the most resistant to the adoption of the new diffused or levelled forms is urban Liverpool, demographically England’s 4th largest city, but with a population that has halved since 19314. Recent work by Watson (e.g. 2006) has highlighted the divergent nature of many of the linguistic changes currently underway in this large and important city of northern England (see also Britain 2009), changes that do not appear to be spreading far beyond the city’s core sphere of influence. 5. The Urban Fetish It has to be admitted that this crucial point—that the important sociolinguistic processes are at their most visible and extreme in urban areas, possibly, but are not exclusive to them—has sometimes not been picked up, resulting in an urban fetishism that still pervades much of the discipline. Worryingly, I feel, in the context of the very clear stance taken by contemporary human geographers, some recent work in geographically-oriented dialectology has proceeded either to endow great powers to the urban, or to project it as engendering a special sort of process—‘linguistic urbanisation’—through which distinctive social and therefore linguistic processes may unfurl, as if there are sociolinguistic processes that are restricted to contexts of urbanization or urban centres. The most forceful arguments in favour of such a concept are made by the French sociolinguists Louis-Jean Calvet and Thierry Bulot, and the Moroccan linguist Leila Messaoudi (see Calvet 1994, Bulot 1999, 2002, 2004, Messaoudi 2001). Calvet argues forcefully for a sociolinguistics of the city, reiterating on a number of occasions the need to highlight what is specific and special about the urban: ‘la sociolinguistique urbaine ne peut pas se contenter d’étudier des situations urbaines, elle doit dégager ce que ces situations ont de spécifique, et donc construire une approche spécifique de ces situations’ (Urban sociolinguistics cannot be content to study urban contexts, it must tease out what is specific about these contexts and build a specific approach to these contexts) (Calvet 1994: 15). 4 See http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/data_cube_table_page.jsp?data_theme= T_POP&data_cube=N_TPop&u_id=10105821&c_id=10001043&add=N. Last accessed 17th March 2009.