The Spoken Core of British English: A Diachronic Analysis Based on the BNC

Abstract

Our research focuses on two aspects of the evolution of contemporary spoken core vocabulary in British English based on a frequency analysis carried out using the demographic-spoken section of the spoken subcorpus of the British National Corpus (BNC) which contains 4 million words (the whole BNC contains over 100 million words). On the one hand, we examine the impact on the core of contact with other languages and, on the other, lexical innovation throughout the history of the English language. Ours is a quantitative study that uses as its starting point contemporary British core vocabulary. We define core as opposed to non-core by looking exclusively at the frequency of a word as several linguistic studies have proposed. Our analysis, which, to a certain extent, follows up on that carried out in Fuster (2007) questions the hypothesis, in several diachronic studies, that the spoken core is immune to linguistic contact, or that it is quite impermeable to innovation and resists change.

Keywords

• core vocabulary
• corpus
• diachrony
• contact
• frequency