The effect of geographic mobility on the retention of a local dialect (original) (raw)
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New Dialect Formation Through Language Contact
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Transactions of the Philological Society, 1999
When mutually intelligible, but distinct dialects of the same language come into contact, linguistic accommodation occurs. When this contact is long-term, for example in post-colonial settings, such as the English in Australia and New Zealand (Trudgill 1986; Trudgill et al forthcoming); or as a result of, say, New Town development (Omdal 1977; Kerswill and Williams 1992, forthcoming; Britain and Simpson forthcoming); indentured labour schemes (Barz and Siegel 1988; Siegel 1997); or land reclamation (Britain 1991; Scholtmeijer 1992), the accommodation can become routinised and permanent through the process of koineisation, and a new dialect can emerge. These new dialects are characteristically less`complex' and contain fewer marked or minority linguistic features than the dialects which came together in the original mix. In this paper we wish to highlight another possible outcome of koineisation, namely reallocation. Reallocation occurs where two or more variants in the dialect mix survive the levelling process but are refunctionalised, evolving new social or linguistic functions in the new dialect. We provide a range of examples of social and linguistic reallocation, from a number of speech communities around the world, the dialects of