? + * 7 & ; +& & ) 4 ! 4 - @ * Valleys Voice or Wenglish, i.e. the anglophone dialect of the formerly heavily industrialised upland area of South Wales, is seen elsewhere in the U.K. as the (stereo-)typical manifestation of Welsh English tout court. However, within Wales itself the dialect, while positively valued on affective dimensions, has traditionally enjoyed a relatively low general prestige. It is viewed as a salient anglophone marker of Welsh identity, but at the same time has continued to be closely associated with the social semiotics of the communitarian industrial heritage. However, in the wake of political devolution and post-industrial late modernity (with ever-increasing demographic mobility and ethnic mixing), Valleys Voice is now being reconstructed, reconstituted and re-positioned in the ‘New Wales’. The present paper offers a sociolinguistic analysis of these processes with reference to the critical influence that the codification, mediatisation and ‘literarisation’ of the dialect plays. , & Whereas from a general U.K. perspective, the form of English in Wales associated with the previously heavily industrialised South Wales Valleys has been generally considered to constitute the typical Welsh English accent and as such the dominant ethnolinguistic marker of (anglophone) Welshness, from a within-Wales perspective, while Valleys Voice or Wenglish is typically perceived as ‘pleasant’, ‘warm’, ‘friendly”, ‘relaxed’, ‘reassuring’ or ‘trustworthy’ (Coupland et al. 1994, Garrett et al. 2003), it traditionally has low prestige and is superseded by the English of (south-) West Wales as the most favoured marker of “truly Welsh” identity (Coupland et al. 1994, Garrett et al. 2003). However, in the trail of the 1997 political devolution and now in what can be almost termed the $$$ - $ ' & $ + & $) ! " # $% # - @ * ‘post-post-devolution’ era there has been an unmistakeable re-mapping of the biand interlingual sociocultural and sociolinguistic space of Wales such that Valleys Voice has recently gained a new public presence, the beginnings of a new standing and, above all, a new social semiotics relative to the conditions of late modernity in the Principality. It will be the purpose of the present paper to trace and analyse the changing fortunes of Valleys Voice in the context of the sociocultural conditions of early 21 st century Wales, also especially highlighting the significance of codification, mediatisation and ‘literarisation’ processes for the sociocultural standing and interpretation of this emblematic Welsh form of English. A consideration of socioculturally transforming Valleys Voice in its local setting may also shed light on other sociolinguistic scenarios in which local vernacular varieties of English are being currently re-evaluated and re-valorised in the light of ever-increasing anglophone globalisation (James 2009). , ? + ; 9 ? + ; , ! While Welsh is of course the indigenous language of the country from earliest times, English has been used in Wales since the Norman incursions of the late 11 th century. Subsequent scattered anglophone settlement located in the lowlands of South Wales and the Marches border area with England since the 12 th century led to the later concentration of English speakers into selected boroughs of South and North Wales during the 14 th century. The Acts of Union of 1536 and 1542, which effectively annexed Wales to Tudor England, served to further institutionalise English as the language of government and law in the Principality. However, it was in the trail of the industrialisation of South Wales, with its massive immigration from the other home countries and in-migration of the 19 th and early 20 th centuries that English eventually came to replace Welsh as the majority language of the country. Census figures from the late 19 th century onwards mark the decline of the number of Welsh speakers in Wales from 54.5% of the population in 1891 to 20.8% in 2001. At the same time English was rigorously promoted as the language of schooling during the latter half of the 19 th century. The linguistic homogenising effects of the First World War, followed by the economic hardship of the 1920s and 1930s with its concomitant substantial emigration from Wales further enhanced the position of English to the detriment of Welsh in the country. While in the latter half of the 20 th century English continued to strengthen its position relative to Welsh, legal and practical provision for enhancing the status of Welsh in government, education and the media was implemented via the Welsh Language Acts of 1966 and 1993, the 1 # + 4 A establishment of the Welsh language television channel S4C in 1982, the setting up of the Welsh Language Board in 1993 and not least - as the consequence of devolution - the inauguration of the Welsh Assembly and constitution of the Welsh Assembly Government in 1998. All these measures have significantly bolstered the position and status of Welsh in the country. , + ! From the earliest presence of English in Wales there has existed considerable heterogeneity in the forms of the language used. For example, the historically anglophone areas of South Pembrokeshire, Gower and to a lesser extent the Vale of Glamorgan in South Wales manifest an English with certain structural influences of south-west England varieties. Also the historical Englishes of The Marches borderland with England show strong influence of geographically adjacent south-west Midlands, Shropshire and Cheshire. Additionally, the urban English of Merseyside and to a lesser extent Greater Manchester have co-shaped the Englishes of North Wales, also in more recent decades via the large scale settlement of retirees from these regions in the coastal area. In South Wales, there is some detectable linguistic influence of urban Greater Bristol/ Avon speech in the English of the Cardiff-Newport conurbation and of adjacent Gloucestershire speech in the English of Monmouthshire. And on top of all these anglophone varieties, there is of course also the presence of a standard British/ English English in the professions, law, government, education, media, etc. However, by far the most Englishes in Wales are ‘contact varieties’ arising from the interplay of Welsh and English structural influences, reflecting the historical fact that such Englishes exist as the result of the language shift of cambrophone speakers and co-exist to a greater or lesser extent in actual geolinguistic space with Welsh itself. Moreover, in ‘virtual’ terms these Englishes always co-habit sociocultural space in Wales with the Welsh language and in general derive their social legitimacy to the degree that their form- phonological and lexical - directly reflects Welsh structural influence. This results in the situation that, with the provisos just described, the Englishes of Wales are increasingly more highly valued as the location of their use moves westand northward, i.e. into the traditional heartlands of the Welsh language, ‘Y Fro Gymraeg’ (Balsom 1985). Bilingual, rural, agricultural, north and west environments are therefore positively valued in contrast to the negatively valued monolingual, urban, industrial south and east contexts in establishing the sociocultural status of Englishes in Wales and in particular for the relative Welshness of such Englishes (Garrett et al. 2003). With regard to the Englishes of immigrants to Wales, while it may be claimed that the English-speaking worker immigrants to the 19 th century - @ * coal, iron and steel industries of South Wales did indeed co-shape the form of the developing anglophone Valleys Voice, in post-industrial Wales there is evidence that immigrants linguistically adjust to the anglophone (and cambrophone) varieties present (for immigrant Cardiff speech, cf. Giles and Bourhis 1975, Jordan 2005). In analyses of the increasing ethnocultural hybridity in Wales, linguistic interest has to date been more focussed on the fact of code-switching than on the nature of the whole code being used (e.g. Williams 2002). Finally, the designation of English(es) (pl.) as opposed to Welsh (sg.) in the present section signals not only the broadly accepted anglophone diversity in Wales but at the same time also reflects the unitary conception of cambrophony, as still perpetuated in much essentialist linguistically bipolar (Welsh vs. English) rhetoric of sociopolitical discourse in the country. In sociolinguistic reality there are, not surprisingly, various “Welshes” with the distinctions between northern and southern Welsh, colloquial spoken Welsh and standard literary Welsh being the most prominent. The present pluralisation of ‘English’ not only signals the pluricentric anglophony of Wales, but also at the same time the absence of any centring, potentially standard variety of Welsh English. In conclusion, one may distinguish six broad geographical varieties of English in Wales: South Wales Valleys (i.e. Valleys Voice), Cardiff-Newport, south-west Wales, Mid-Wales, north-west Wales, and north-east Wales (Garrett et al. 2003). , " & & ) & Structural, mainly phonological, descriptions of the Englishes of Wales have by and large focussed on the varieties of South Wales: Valleys - e.g. Rhondda, Port Talbot, Abercrave; Cardiff; Vale of Glamorgan; Gower; and West Wales - Carmarthenshire, (South) Pembrokeshire (cf. the analyses collected in Coupland 1990, Penhallurick 1994 and Walters 2001, 2003). Only Penhallurick (1991) offers an analysis of North Wales English. Parry’s comprehensive Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects (1977-1979, 1999) provides recordings and linguistic analysis of the English speech of mainly rural older generation speakers throughout Wales, the data now being available for consultation via the Archive of Welsh English at Swansea University. Thomas (1994) and Penhallurick (2008) analyse phonological, grammatical and lexical characteristics of most varieties of English in Wales in outline. However, it is in the pioneering sociolinguistic research of Coupland (e.g. Coupland 1988, 1990, 2006) that the structural choices and options within English in Wales have been analysed in relation to the social meanings they can express when exploited by speakers. This research explicitly links the (code) structure and (speaker) agentivity dimensions of language variation in a way compatible with Giddens’ (1984) social 1 # + 4 A theory of ‘structuration’. And while remaining within a variationist framework regarding the description of phonological variables, Coupland extends the interpretation of their social significance considerably beyond the original Labovian static pre-given social categories of class membership, level of style, etc. to a fine-grained moment-to-moment assessment of the changing identity and style values of a speaker’s structural choices in performance. The identity and style parameters explored are those of types and degrees of ‘Welshness’ as expressed via English. One major motivation for this research has been to demonstrate empirically the myth of any ‘standard Welsh English’ and to convincingly show evidence for much greater variation in use of English in Wales than previously assumed (Coupland 1990). In this respect, Coupland (2006) interprets the structural variation in ‘phonological acts of [Welsh] identity’ within their ‘discursive framing’ as ‘sociocultural’, ‘generic’ and ‘interpersonal’ communicative events, i.e. at the levels, respectively, of speech community talk, genre talk and local talk. He is thus able to reveal the great differentiation and semiotic subtlety of structural choices in the sound repertoire in use and with it, the multifarious shades of anglophone Welsh identities thus displayed. Coupland analyses variously the manifestation of different shades of Welsh identities and associations with Welshness in speeches by local political figures (1990), in Cardiff travel agency discourse (1988, 2006) and in Valleys pantomine performance (2006). In the 2006 study, shifting anglophone Welsh ethnolinguistic identities are realised via the choices of variants of the well established sociophonological variables available in the particular Welsh English lect involved: e.g. the variable (a: ) as in star ving realisable in Cardiff English as variants [a: ], [æ: ] or [ : ], or the variable (iw) as in you in Valleys English as variants [iw], [jiw] or [ju: ]. It is argued that the local social semiotics of one or the other phonological variant derives from the particular discursive framing in place at the time, i.e. according to whether the thus signalled acts of identity are interpretable within speech community talk, genre talk or interpersonal talk contexts. Thus the Cardiffian Welsh identities expressed by the travel agency assistants are realised predominately within the ‘generic’ and ‘interpersonal’ frames of reference, whereas the Valleys Welsh identities expressed by the male ‘Dame’ character in the Christmas pantomime are realised largely within ‘speech community’ and ‘generic’ frames of reference. And whereas much more could be commented on regarding these data and the analysis, suffice it to confirm here that the structural codes that constitute English(es) in Wales provide a rich source for the expression of variable social meanings and that these meanings convey degrees of identification with ethnolinguistic Welshness(es). At the same time, this is not to deny that there are also other, more global social semiotic parameters (e.g. social grouping, life seniority, gender) whose values may be manifested via Welsh English(es). - @ * ,1 $ & * + Attitudes to Welsh English(es) figured quite prominently in the earlier socio-psychological matched guise technique (MGT) research of Giles and associates on accents of English (e.g. Giles 1970, Bourhis and Giles 1976, Bourhis 1977, Price et al. 1983; for reviews see Giles 1990 and Garrett et al. 2003: 67ff.). In a large number of experiments involving mainly Valleys and Cardiff English as judged both inside and outside Wales, one overall conclusion is that “WE [= Welsh English] varieties are downgraded on competence traits generally but upgraded on those of social attractiveness within Wales” (Giles 1990: 275). However, by far the most comprehensive study of attitudes in Wales to the English(es) of Wales has been carried out by Garrett et al. (2003), who gathered secondary school teachers’ attitudes to the six regional varieties of English in Wales mentioned under 2.2. above, and the attitudes of secondary school teachers and pupils to the same varieties, as employed in recorded narratives of fifteen-year-old speakers. In the first questionnaire study, 129 teachers responded to both closed (seven-point semantic-differential scale) and open evaluative questions eliciting attitudes to the six English varieties of Wales plus a ‘Cambridge’ variety. They were formulated in terms of the dimensions ‘well-spoken’, ‘prestigious-sounding’, ‘likeable-sounding’, ‘pleasant-sounding’, ‘dynamic-sounding’, ‘lively-sounding’, and ‘truly Welsh-sounding’, (closed questions), and the question as to which single Welsh accent has wide social acceptability within and outside Wales (open question). In the second ‘narrative study’, 14 narrative extracts representing the six regional forms of English in Wales (plus Cheltenham RP) were played to 169 fifteen-year-old pupils and 47 (primary, secondary and university) teachers. All informants were asked to identify the local origin of the speakers and to evaluate the speakers/ narratives on the scales ‘you like [him/ her]? ’, ‘good at school? ’, ‘like you? ’, ‘make friends [with]? ’, ‘how Welsh? ’, ‘good laugh? ’ and ‘interesting story? ’. The six varieties investigated were represented by speakers from Merthyr Tydfil (Valleys), Cardiff, Carmarthen (S.W. Wales), Newtown (Mid-Wales), Bangor (N.W. Wales) and Wrexham (N.E. Wales). Concerning some of the main results of the study relevant for the present purposes, mention has already been made in 1. above of some of the positive values attributed to Valleys Voice and to the relative prestige accorded to the English of south-west Wales. Concentrating on the reactions to Valleys English, in teachers’ responses it is the most frequently identified and labelled English accent/ dialect area of Wales, viewed indeed positively, but at the same time acknowledged as a clichéd stereotypical variety, i.e. “what foreigners expect Welsh English to sound like” with reference to the popular Richard Llewellyn novel How Green Was My Valley (1939) and images of “boyo, beer and rugby” (Garrett et al. 2003: 120-121). With both teachers and pupils, in the evaluations of the narra- 1 # + 4 A tives, Valleys Voice scored very highly on the dimension ‘how Welsh? ’ and low on ‘like you? ’. Extrapolating further from the results, one might conclude that while there is broad agreement that Valleys Voice represents an ethnolinguistically very Welsh identity, both within and outside Wales, it is an anglophone demotic ‘image identity’ strongly associated with the social semiotics of the urban, industrial, mining and steelmaking dominated, male-defined, ‘work hard - play hard - drink hard - sing hard’ working class communities of an immediately past age. As such, it is a ‘heritage identity’ that the informants recognise but actually distance themselves from. And whereas Valleys Voice is upheld as the Welsh English of the popular imagination, it is the English of south-west Wales, while equally expressing a very Welsh identity (as well as, like Valleys Voice, scoring high on dynamism and social attractiveness) that is much more highly regarded as far as prestige is concerned (2003: 135-136). It is the Welsh accent with the widest social acceptability within and outside Wales. The fact that the English of south-west Wales manifests greater overt phonetic and lexical influence of the Welsh language than Valleys English does and is associated with a rural agricultural region are undoubtedly strong factors in its favour in this respect (see also the discussion under 2.2. above). , 4 ! 4 ) ; It has been noted that Valleys Voice can be said to constitute a ‘heritage dialect’ within the Principality, and as such must be defined relative to other, perhaps historically less loaded anglophone varieties of contemporary Wales as well as to current and historical cambrophone varieties. In this connection it is interesting to observe that the traditional South Wales dialect of Welsh itself, Gwenhwyseg, commonly referred to as Cymrâg (‘Cymreig’, ‘Welsh’), is now equally treated as a heritage dialect associated with the industrial age and is indeed rapidly fading in sociolinguistic and sociocultural significance as its remaining older generation speakers in the Valleys fail to pass it on. However, still with its one million speakers, Valleys English is under pressure to re-position itself as a still strong marker of ethnolinguistic identity under the conditions of late modern Welsh society. To the extent that this society is no longer partitioned along traditional class lines, is characterised by increasing socioeconomic mobility, at least along ‘the M4 corridor’, i.e. in the urbanised ribbon development of the South Wales coastal area, shows a new sociopolitical and sociocultural confidence of expression via the Welsh language itself, manifests ethnocultural hybridities on a hitherto unprecedented scale, and not least witnesses the markedly increased metropolitan focus of both anglophone and cambrophone socio-economic and sociocultural activity, then Valleys English indeed faces serious challenges in - @ * asserting itself and re-defining itself within the current re-constituted fabric of Welsh society. As Coupland (2009: 298) reminds us, “Late modernity tends to disembed voices from the social matrices we have taken to be primary […] and infuse new meanings into them as they are recontextualised.” A central factor in this set of changing sociocultural scenarios is the conceptualisation and significance of ‘community’. As has been already noted, Valleys Voice is strongly associated geographically as the dialect of the area immediately to the north of the coastal area in South Wales, coinciding with the historical dimensions of the traditional coalfield, and socially as the sociolect of the largely working class community engaged in the former coal and steel industries. The ethnolinguistic ‘acts of identity’ traditionally expressed via Valleys Voice have also been commented on above. Wenglish indeed was the linguistic marker of a mega-community, and in sociolinguistic terms (following Halliday 1978) constituted the dialect (variety according to user, showing lexicophonological characterisitics) as well as the register (variety according to use, showing lexicosemantic characteristics) of that community. Additionally, it constituted the genre of the community (variety according to using, showing lexicogrammatical characteristics, after James 2008, 2010). In other words, Valleys English provided a blanket set of linguistic resources for the expression of ‘community’ at the three levels of ‘speech community’ (via dialect), ‘discourse community’ (via register) and ‘action community’ (via genre), i.e. for the purposes, respectively, of ‘identification’, ‘representation’ and ‘action’ (Fairclough 2003, James 2008). In a modern interpretation of ‘community’, the language co-defining it was taken to provide the all-purpose code for the expression of its social semiotics at the levels of speaker-oriented communication, i.e. dialect, message-orientated communication, i.e. register, and listener-oriented communication, i.e. genre. This conception of community language is amply demonstrated in the discussion above (2.3.) of Coupland’s research on the manifestation of Welsh identities via Valleys Voice and Cardiff English at the levels of ‘sociocultural’ (i.e. dialect), ‘generic’ (i.e. register) and ‘interpersonal’ (i.e. genre) talk. However, by contrast in late modernity such all-encompassing singlecommunity semiotics are the exception rather than the rule and it is indeed also increasingly the case in Wales that the expression of various shades of ethnolinguistic subjectivity now typically draws selectively on linguistic resources associated with a variety of shifting, co-existing partial ‘communities’, which in Wales may of course also involve bilingual practices. Thus although code variability, as Fairclough’s ‘interdiscursivity’ (2003), is as such nothing new in anglophone expression in Wales, the extent of use of, and readiness to employ sociolinguistically diverse, including interlingual, linguistic resources has never been greater. Valleys Voice may be restricted to dialect, register or genre ‘purposes’ of expres- 1 # + 4 A sion singly or employed in different combinations with other anglophone or cambrophone ‘community’ varieties. At the same time, through these sociolinguistic processes of late modernity, Valleys Voice itself is being re-defined and re-constituted in complementary sociocultural space, while the three-way social semiotics it traditionally affords is also now being made more explicit. 1, & 4 ! 4 1, 4 A 5 + 5 + It might be noted now in passing that the here preferred designation Valleys Voice is meant to highlight the individual dimension of language use, as opposed to the more traditional geographical term for the variety, Valleys English or the hybrid, potentially pejorative appellation Wenglish (cf. analogous to Denglish, Singlish, Spanglish, etc.). It is also consistent with a late modern view of sociolinguistic patterning that recent dialect corpora, for instance, are labelled Urban Voices (1999) or Voices of the UK (2010). And while of course particular media voices are often taken to be emblematic for particular varieties (e.g. the entertainer Max Boyce for Valleys English of the 1970s and 1980s; the radio presenter Chris Needs for Valleys English of the 2000s to date - see also below), the notion voice here also incorporates reference to the performative aspect of late modern language use. It is through the voice that an individual’s (life-)style and image is articulated, but also one’s multiple identities and shifting subjectivities are expressed. However, the local social semiotics of individual voice is only interpretable with reference to a framework of the ‘sedimented’ linguistic substance of repeated performance (via Giddens’ (1984) key process of ‘structuration’, i.e. a matching of structure and agency) and as such this framework is amenable to linguistic description and codification. And while codification conventionally takes the form of a dictionary and a grammar of a ‘variety’ in the first instance as dialect, the ‘variety’ itself may be promoted via its mediated use in broadcasting, perhaps in the first instance as register. Furthermore, the ‘variety’ might to some extent be ‘canonised’ via its employment in literature, in the first instance as genre. 1, ( A major step in anchoring a new consciousness of Valleys Voice (Wenglish) in late modern post-devolution Wales has been its codification in the form of a reference work on the variety by Robert Lewis (2008), incorporating a linguistic introduction to the dialect, a glossary/ dictionary of - @ * some 2,250 entries and an extensive grammar, complete with exercises. With this work, Lewis wishes “to stimulate a keener interest in and a better appreciation of Wenglish” (2008: 10) and “sets Wenglish in its rightful place as an authentic regional dialect” (2008: 10), celebrating the differences from Standard English “of which Valleys communities should be rightly proud” (2008: 10). By offering serious linguistic description and analysis, Lewis consolidates and considerably extends the previous more ‘popular scientific’ 620 word Wenglish glossary of Edwards (1985). It is an exercise in sociolinguistic legitimisation, appropriately bolstering the status of Valleys Voice in the ‘New Wales’ of post-devolution. Indeed, Lewis comments that a number of post-devolution developments (e.g. the ‘Cool Cymru’ (Cool Wales) sociocultural phase of the late 1990s when a number of Welsh pop bands gained considerable popularity in the whole of the U.K. performing in Wenglish as well as Welsh) have facilitated the positive re-appraisal of a previously somewhat maligned popular dialect (2008: 18-19). In other words, the sociopolitical climate of post-devolution Wales has permitted an overt celebration of the diverse bilingual heritages of the newly self-governing nation in a greater plurality and diversity than ever before and in the course of this ‘re-awakening’ traditional cultural artefacts such as Wenglish are re-evaluated and re-valorised. Thus Valleys Voice achieves a new public interpretation and status both by its employment in a music genre previously closed to it and now by being ‘officially’ codified in ‘prestigious’ dictionary and grammar form. The codification is of the variety as dialect in the technical sense introduced above, as an identificational linguistic code/ semiotic resource for its users. And despite the considerable attention given to grammatical description in the volume, it is indeed the lexis and phonology of Wenglish that distinguish it most clearly from other varieties of English as dialect. Concerning lexis, of the 2,250 dictionary entries some 20% are direct borrowings from Welsh itself (e.g. the widely used bach ‘dear’, ‘little’, cariad ‘darling’, crachach ‘posh people’, cwtch ‘storage’, ‘cuddle’, didoreth ‘sloppy’, hwyl ‘spirit’, twp ‘stupid’, etc.). Interestingly, this figure exactly mirrors the percentage of speakers of Welsh (20.8%) of the total - anglophone - population of the country. Indeed this considerable lexical influence together with the phonological (and some grammatical) effects of Welsh clearly show the status of Valleys Voice as a contact variety, confirming the popular observation that “they speak Welsh in the valleys - but now, they speak it through the medium of English” (Edwards 1985: 4). In other words, part of the late modern revaluation of Wenglish is the explicit celebration of its very structural hybridity, deriving historically from the ethnographically and ethnolinguistically hybrid social contexts of its original genesis in the 19 th century. It has already been pointed out above (2.3.) in the brief discussion of Coupland (1990, 2006) that variation within Valleys English as a strong ethnolinguistic and sociopolitical marker can be deliberately exploited by 1 # + 4 A ‘performers’ for both political and comic use. And whereas Coupland limits himself in this research to the systematic analysis of phonological variables, lexical variation is equally significant for the shades of identificational expression afforded by the dialect, as in fact Coupland (1996) concedes in separate analysis of the “culturally rich points” in Welsh English as signalled by the use of Welsh lexical items, where “the perceptible richness of such forms […] hinges on the interaction between their referential semantics and their phonetic semiosis” (1996: 315). The social meanings of identification ‘performable’ via lexical and phonological choices in Valleys Voice can thus be seen to pertain to the quintessentially late modern semiotic dimensions of authenticity and ludicity. Finally, and significantly for the present discussion, the individualisation of Valleys Voice finds its confirmation on the cover of Lewis’s volume, where the title Wenglish. The Dialect of the South Wales Valleys is headed by the statement As spoken by Chris Needs. 1, / Mention has already been made above (4.1.) of the media voice of Chris Needs being taken as emblematic for Valleys English in the new millennium. The Chris Needs Show is a hugely popular late night music and chat programme on BBC Radio Wales, broadcast between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. every weeknight, with an estimated regular audience of 40,000 to 50,000 listeners. Most of the listeners who call in to talk to the host presenter are members of “The Chris Needs Friendly Garden Association”, known simply as “The Garden”, and as such are often referred to as the flowers in the garden. Chris Needs himself unabashedly employs Valleys Voice, as do the overwhelming majority of the participant audience; as Coupland (2010) formulates it “the basic indexicalities of his own and most callers’ voices are South Wales Valleys, which provides a vocal semiotic of ‘ordinariness’” (2010: 109). In the ‘Garden’ key topics are e.g. the disclosure of personal hardship, intimate and public frames for the negotiation of coping, social support, self-help and self-improvement (cf. Coupland 2010: 110), i.e. a mediatised representation of human issues typically associated with the context of under-privileged social communities and as such a media ‘community of practice’ as microcosm of the social community ‘out there’. Factors of social hardship, but also of community support and shared social values and linguistic mode of expression constitute of course at the same time some of the prominent sociocultural characteristics of the traditional industrial mega-community of the Valleys. In The Chris Needs Show this traditional community, to the extent that it still is in effect as a functioning social entity, finds a late modern manifestation as a mediatised discourse community, consistent with the contemporary predilections for individualisation and media revelation and intimacy. The horticultural metaphorisation of the media community is completely consist- - @ * ent with its sociolinguistic status as manifesting a register variety (i.e. of use as opposed to user) , characterised indeed by lexicosemantic salience (see above). It is a linguistic code with a social semiotics of representation, with existing words, as lexicosemantic complexes, being given a new contextual interpretation as they represent a particular alternative or complementary discourse ‘world’. The vocal semiotic of ‘ordinariness’ referred to is consistent with the somewhat self-deprecatory reflexive style of traditional Valleys Voice, with elements of potential ludicity. However, Chris Needs himself re-valorises the ‘ordinariness’ of Valleys Voice by displaying as an ‘ordinary celebrity’ his homosexuality, his love of bling, disco, sun-worshipping and camp as being consistent with his use of Wenglish, a variety in industrial ‘Old Wales’ strongly associated with traditional manual-work-based masculinities (see 2.4. above). At the same time there is not the slightest doubt concerning the authenticity of the Valleys Voice he uses. Coupland (2010: 110-111) concludes that: The Chris Needs Show gives us an instance of discursive practice functioning simultaneously to create community-as-value and to critically deconstruct and reformat the social footings on which community is based. In his self-presentation Chris deauthenticates himself relative to old certainties of class and gender, but proposes new criteria that might be more valid in the shifted social circumstances of Valleys life in the twenty-first century. 1,1 # The representation of Valleys Voice in Welsh writing in English is first and foremost associated with the speech of characters in the Great Industrial Novels of the 1930s, which depicted working and living conditions in the 19 th century and early 20 th century coalfield. Indeed, to a greater or lesser degree Wenglish is used as the language of the working class characters in novels such as Rhondda Roundabout (1934) by Jack Jones, Times Like These (1936) by Gwyn Jones, Cwmardy (1937) and We Live (1939) by Lewis Jones, and famously in How Green Was My Valley (1939) by Richard Llewellyn. As a continuation of this social realist tradition, also more recent fiction writing represents Valleys English as the speech of the socially deprived, e.g. as in the novel The Fugitive Three (2008) by Mike Jenkins, which depicts the lives of underprivileged teenagers in a Valleys community. However, in all such writing Valleys Voice is represented as a relatively monochrome variety, essentially invariable and typified above all by its lexicogrammatical characteristics, i.e. in the present framework constituting a variety of using, a genre, for actional (interand transactional) purposes, for doing things with the language. However, it is in the burlesque novel Yeah, Dai Dando (2008) by Meic Stephens that Valleys Voice is most clearly positioned in the centre of 1 # + 4 A post-devolution, late modern Welsh society. In a densely intertextual, intermedial and interlingual text thick with very local and very Welsh cultural references, the novel depicts the life of the hero in his twenties, Dai Dando, as he tries to make sense of the bafflingly diverse contemporary society he finds himself in. He attempts to navigate his way through this Welsh urban jungle with its conflicting and confusing dichotomies of Cardiff (where he works) vs. Valleys (where he comes from), Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nationalist Party) vs. Old Labour, Welsh vs. English, Cymro (cambrophone Welshman) vs. Taffy (anglophone Welshman), North Walians (‘Gogs’) vs. South Walians, ‘Cymreig’ (standard Welsh) vs. ‘Cymrâg’ (South Wales dialect), etc., but also global (cosmopolitan and immigrant) vs. local (indigenous) cultural influences in the public life of Cardiff. More or less all of these dichotomies, are associated, respectively, with the opposition between ‘New Wales’ vs.’ Old Wales’, i.e. between late modern and traditional Wales. In his own words, the protagonist’s wish is indeed “To understand myself, to find out who I am” (2008: 93), because, significantly, “there’s more ways than one of bein’ Welsh” (2008: 211). This severe disorientation felt by Dai Dando in the shifting, re-aligning and re-constituting sociocultural confusion of contemporary urban Welsh society requires him to re-position and to complement the identity he has inherited via his socialisation in the Valleys. Also sociolinguistically he is constantly forced to reflect on where in the New Wales his Valleys Voice has its place. This ambiguity and confusion in identity is well mirrored in the many intertextual references to A.E. Houseman’s (1896) A Shropshire Lad, the poet himself hailing from the Marches border area between Wales and England and, it is claimed, of ambivalent sexual orientation. Also the hero himself is variously identified as Dai, Dave, David or even Dafydd through the novel. However, as a corrective to this uncertainty and by way of historical legitimisation of a particular Welsh identity, Dai and especially his father covet the memory of the Ancient British warrior hero of south-east Wales, Caractacus (which happens to be Dai’s second forename), and that of the Silures tribe of the same (now Valleys) area. The novel thus highlights a whole range of issues relevant to an understanding of post-devolution late modern Wales. The questions of identity and identification are central, but also ambivalence and ambiguity, hybridity and indeed liminality. Moreover, Dai is crucially concerned with matters of authenticity (with regard to himself, but also with regard to the many other Welshnesses manifested by characters in the plot), and he shows a constant sociocultural reflexivity in his actions. Linguistically there is a dazzling array of different Englishes and Welshes employed differentially by the characters, indicating the pluralistic realities of late modern language use, particularly in the metropolis. Dai maintains his Valleys Voice, but also variously adopts more Cardiff forms and more standard forms of English selectively. He also maintains his school Welsh. In this dense version of lived sociolinguistic reality, Valleys - @ * Voice has its place indeed predominantly as genre, i.e. as a variety for getting things done, for acting and doing in everyday contexts. By way of illustration, the back cover text of the novel in which Dai introduces himself reads thus: Hiya, I’m Dai Dando. From up the Coeca estate in Ponty. Work down year in Cardiff at the Gwalia. Love it down ere in Cardiff, I do. The City on the Bay. I got a poncy brother who’s a lecturer up England way. I do go out most nights for a few bevvies with the lads. Then we go on the pull in the clubs. Nah, aven’t ad any since comin back from Lanzarote. That Eleri Vaughan Jones was somethin else though. Called me Dafydd, Nearly ad it off with er up on the Garth. I dunno about er, mind. She do do my ead in, like. Speaks Welsh she does, like that poxy Peredur, my line-manager, a North Walian git who carn pronounce the letter z. Nah I don speak it, but I gorra GCSE in it. While remembering that this text is a purely fictional version of Valleys Voice, but checking the novelist’s linguistic reproduction accuracy by confirming its authenticity with Lewis’s reference description, it can be observed that the variety is indeed most saliently characterised by lexicogrammatical choices as genre: e.g. the use of the do verb form to express habitual meaning (“I do go out most nights”, “she do do my ead in”), right dislocation or ‘tailing’ as in “Love it down ere in Cardiff, I do”, “Speaks Welsh she does”, the use of utterance-final discourse particles mind and like, the prepositional phrases “From up the Coeca estate”, “up England way” and the idiomatic “on the pull”, as well as ellipsis of utterance-initial subject pronoun as in “Work down year”, “Love it down ere”, “aven’t ad any”, “Speaks Welsh.” And while these structural features are also found in other spoken varieties of English, this particular combination characterises Valleys Voice. Whereas the lexical choices Hiya, poncy, bevvies, poxy, git are typical of general young male slang, there is also some indication in the orthography of phonological characteristics of Valleys Voice such as year for standard here, ‘h-dropping’ in ere and er, nah for standard no and gorra for standard got a. Concerning the content of the passage, Dai here positions himself as a reflexive working classstyle ‘ordinary’ Valleys lad, professionally located and socially active in the metropolis (commodified as “The City on the Bay”), confronted by other Welshnesses as ‘performed’ by his emigrated brother and the cambrophone Eleri and North Walian Peredur [in the body of the novel Pryderi - another ambiguity? ], as well the remnants of his own cambrophony as learned in school. ( & The sociolinguistic situation of Valleys Voice is paradigmatic for the situation of other regional varieties of English, whether in the historically anglophone countries themselves or in postcolonial contexts worldwide. 1 # + 4 A Under the sociocultural, socioeconomic and sociopolitical pressures of globalisation resulting in a tendency to linguistic homogenisation such varieties have to be seriously revaluated, re-valorised and re-positioned in the ever more competitive sociolinguistic space they occupy. On the other hand, as has been argued in James (2009), linguistic globalisation can equally take the local forms of structural heterogenisation and hybridisation, and this applies as much within the historically anglophone countries as in the postcolonial or even historically non-anglophone environments (cf. also Pennycook 2010). However, in the case of Wales the conditions of late modernity are compounded by the sociocultural effects of political devolution which has led to the re-positioning of all indigenous lects of the country, anglophone as well as cambrophone. In this ‘New Wales’, the ethnolinguistic expression of identity and community is now via a plurilithicity as well as partiality of codes and resources, which have been re-constituted in the wake of de-industrialisation and metropolitanisation. As such, Valleys Voice now has its place sociolinguistically not only in the Valleys themselves, but also in the metropolis, while Cardiff English, the metropolitan variety, has a new sociolinguistic pulling power in the Valleys. 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