The project collected data from performers across the Black Country – poets, singers and stand-up comedians, as well as from local archives. It examined the notion that within a speech community, speakers may evaluate a non-standard variety differently than outside that community. This is particularly relevant to the Black Country, where the associated speech variety is linked in media and UK wide perceptions to lower social status and lack of intelligence. Our data show that performers, using as they do a variety by definition refined and rehearsed and thus, one can argue, consciously deployed as a meaning-making resource, can choose aspects of their local speech variety depending on audience, purpose, location and other situational and social factors. The linguistic features they use to create meaning are not always those which a UK-wide view of Black Country dialect might suggest. Interviews with performers discussing their own views about language reveal sophisticated and complex metalinguistic beliefs about the intrinsic value of their own variety and its suitability as a vehicle for performance. The variants comedians discuss at interview are not necessarily those they draw on in creating humour. Thus while metalinguistic data can add to the sum of our knowledge about a speaker’s beliefs surrounding their variety, it is objective, and the semi-structured interview method may not be the only tool for gleaning attitudinal data from informants. Discusssions with audience members suggest that where they align with the performers’ own social background and can access the same worldview, their linguistic judgments often also tally.The objective of this research is to increase understanding of the relationship between use of dialect and sociocultural identity. To this end, it looks at discourse practices in the Black Country region. The project looks at the relationship between traditional dialect forms which are typical of the Black Country, and the ways in which performers in the region use these forms. It examines the possibility that language can be used to construct a certain identity, doing so by reference to the notion of indexicality; this being the idea that language features can mean different things to different people in the community. The project will record two live performances and transcribe these. Interviews with members of the audience at these performances will then be conducted. Analysing this data in the light of what is already known about the social values of linguistic features to the wider community will provide an inroad into looking at the values which these features have for performance artists, and the way in which they use these features in their shows. The project will also mark the start of the creation of a web resource titled 'Midlands English: Speech and Society'.

Semi-structured interviews with performers and audience members: audio recordings and transcriptions. Audio recordings of performers at performance venues.