Spinning New Yarns: an oral history and dialect study of the West Yorkshire textiles industry

The textiles and clothing industries helped to shape the identity of the West Yorkshire area in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and were major sources of employment. This study examines the changing status of the industries in the area, the consequences of their rise and decline for those who worked in them, and to what extent a worker’s role in the trades influenced their sociolect and idiolect, with a focus on local vocabulary and grammatical features. Two corpora of oral history interviews with former mill and clothing factory workers, five from the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture which were conducted in the 1980s, and eleven conducted by the researcher in 2018, formed the study’s primary data source. The pre-existing and new datasets were compared in order to track the progression of the industries over the course of the twentieth century, and to assess if they could provide any evidence of linguistic change. The project has an interdisciplinary focus, combining oral history with linguistics in its approach to the fieldwork and data analysis. The dense and multiplex network ties created by the industries had consequences for the identity and idiolect of the speakers in both corpora, with the study finding some evidence of trade-specific vocabulary. Analysing the interview data at the level of individual speakers highlights the importance of going beyond abstract patterns of language-use based on broad demographic categories, taking into account social networks, rapport and speaker attitudes. This study suggests that the industries’ affiliation with the area endures despite their decline in recent decades. Although the dense social network ties formed through the trades have been severed, some speakers still maintain friendships made in the mills and clothing factories