Co-variation and social meaning: the implicational relationship between (H) and (ING) in Debden, Essex

This paper investigates to what extent the differing social meanings held by linguistic features result in an implicational relationship between them. Rates of (H) and (ING) are investigated in the casual speech of 63 speakers from a Cockney community: Debden, Essex. The indexicalities of h-dropping in Debden (signalling Cockney heritage) are superordinate to and incorporate the indexicalities of g-dropping (working-class speech). This paper hypothesises that the features’ distinct but overlapping social meanings result in an implicational relation in terms of clustering effects at the within-speaker level and rates of co-variation at the between-speaker level. This hypothesis is confirmed: h-dropping implies g-dropping, but g-dropping can occur independently of h-dropping. The features’ differing social meaning are also related to rates of change. Young speakers are shifting away from linguistic features which index the community’s Cockney heritage (h-dropping; the [-Iŋk] variant of -thing words) in favour of more general, south-eastern, working-class norms (g-dropping).