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 was 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.”
A couple of qualified folks got in touch, but unfortunately couldn’t get anything useful out of the data. Ah well.