R-labialisation data

What I wrote in the video: “If anyone’s doing research on r-labialisation, email me”.

Unfortunately, literally hundreds of people read that as: “If you’ve got a vague interest in anything linguistic, even completely unrelated knowledge from years ago, email me”.

My inbox has been a disaster zone. I deeply regret even mentioning the r-labialisation question in the video. I even more deeply regret summarising it as “the results are boring”. Here’s what I should have written:

“The question was an attempt to roughly track the spread of r-labialisation across the UK and over time. However, the exact wording had to be massively oversimplified because of the polling company’s character limits. The raw data is therefore extremely messy and dull, there appears to be no useful conclusion to draw from it, and it may be misleading and worse-than-useless if interpreted badly. However, someone qualified and actively researching the exact subject might be able to get something out of it, so if your current, academic, precise field of study is r-labialisation, email me and I’ll send you the data.”

If that does describe you, please do email me, but be aware that two qualified people are already looking at the data.

If that doesn't describe you, thank you for your interest, but please do not get in touch!