Migration, new-dialect formation and sociolinguistic refunctionalisation:reallocationas an outcome of dialect contact (original) (raw)
Related papers
New Dialect Formation and Contact-Induced Reallocation: Three Case Studies from the English Fens
International Journal of English Studies, 2005
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 the emerging speech communities of post-colonial settings, such as the English in Australia and New Zealand (Trudgill 1986; Trudgill 2004; Britain, in press); oras a result of, say, New Town development (Omdal 1977; Kerswill and Williams 1992, 2000; Dyer 2002; Britain and Simpson, forthcoming); indentured labour schemes (Barz and Siegel 1988; Siegel 1987, 1997; Moag 1979, Domingue 1981, Mesthrie 1992); or land reclamation (Britain 1991, 1997a 1997b, 2002a 2002b), the accommodation can become routinised and permanent, and, through the process of koineisation, a new dialect can emerge when children acquire accommodated language as their Ll . These new dialects are characteristically less 'complex', show evidence of intermediate 'interdialect' forms, 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 historical and contemporary speech communities around the world, the dialects of which have developed from long-term contact and linguistic accommodation. We then focus on examples of phonological, morphological and lexical reallocation in one speech community affected by dialect contact, the Fens of Eastern England.
The heterogeneous homogenisation of dialects in England.
Taal en Tongval 63: 43-60., 2011
As a result of high levels of mobility in contemporary England, one outcome of the resultant dialect contact that has been regularly highlighted in the literature is supralocalisation – the success of dialect variants that have a wide geographical currency at the expense of those which are much more locally restricted. This article begins by presenting the case for the existence of supralocalisation, but then goes on to problematize it, thereby suggesting where we must look in order to fully understand the linguistic consequences of present-day social and geographical mobility. I begin by pointing out that supralocal forms mentioned in the literature are often still minority forms in their communities, but suggest that this is understandable given the multiscalar nature of our own mobilities. Secondly, I argue that whilst mobility is often portrayed as a democratising force that is driving linguistic convergence, contemporary mobilities themselves are extremely socially differentiated. I suggest, consequently, that this diversity needs to be taken into consideration when we examine the linguistic consequences of movement – we need to ask who is mobile. Finally, I propose that we need to socialise studies of supralocalisation, which, until now, have largely ignored the dynamics of the social indexicality of supralocal forms. Both supralocalisation and mobility have been depicted as forces of convergence – this article attempts to show that the diversity of the latter undermines a simplistic view of the former.
2001
One of the principal advances sociolinguistics has brought to the study of language change has been in trying to answer what Uriel Weinreich, William Labov and Marvin Herzog in their groundbreaking paper Empirical foundations for a theory of language change (1968) termed the embedding problem, namely the route linguistic changes take both through the language as well as through the speech community that uses that language. They convincingly argued that ‘the problem of providing sound empirical foundations for the theory of change revolves about...this embedding’ (1968:185). Once changes are underway, some of the most
Dialect Change: Convergence and Divergence in European Languages
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2007
When asked by an interviewer what he thought of sociolinguistics, Noam Chomsky responded that whereas such work might have value for dispelling misconceptions and prejudice about non-standard language varieties, the study of the relation between social class and linguistic variables has no more scientific interest than butterfly collecting. "If you like butterflies, that's fine, but such work must not be confounded with research, which is concerned to discover explanatory principles of some depth" (Language and Responsibility, Noam Chomsky, with Mitsou Ronat, Pantheon Books, 1979:57). The two books under review would appear to afford a vantage point for assessing the relation between sociolinguistics and formal grammatical theory three decades later. The collection Dialect Change, according to its editors, is offered as evidence that there is more science to sociolinguistic lepidoptery than meets the eye: "The overall aim is to proceed from the idiographic level, i.e. the level of the description of unique, particular, situation-specific findings regarding single dialect features, to the nomothetic level, the level of general, preferably universal, principles" (p. 48). David Lightfoot, for his part, intends his How New Languages Emerge to show butterfly-collectors how science is really done. Dialect Change comprises 13 chapters by 17 researchers, many of them participants in an international research network on "The Convergence and Divergence of Dialects in a Changing Europe." The four papers in the first section of the volume examine dialect convergence or divergence from the standpoint of linguistic structure. It is here that the interest of dialect studies for formal theories of language is made explicit, although for the most part the studies carried out by the authors only serve to point out the limitations of these frameworks in accounting for the outcomes of dialect-contact and dialect-change phenomena. According to Jeffrey Kallen's discussion of mutations undergone by /t/ in dialects of English (pp. 51-80), Optimality Theory-which represents phonological processes in terms of hierarchies of output constraints-can account for the range of attested pronunciations, but in each speech community the actual trajectory of change depends on the "social embedding of norms" (pp. 54-55, 79-80). Gaetano Berruto's study of the interaction between local dialects and regional and national standard varieties of Italian (pp. 81-95), reveals that the influence is not always unidirectional. Alongside the "Italianisation of dialect," Berruto notes that the "dialectisation of Italian" can also occur, giving rise to regional varieties of the national language (italiano popolare, p. 83). He also critiques linguistic models of code-switching and code-mixing phenomena, since his data call into question the concept of a "matrix language" which governs the morphosyntactic frame into which elements from the second code are inserted (pp. 87-93). Leonie Cornips and Karen Corrigan's chapter (pp. 96-134) aims to reconcile the "Internalist" linguistic theories of formalists with the "Externalist" models used by variationist sociolinguists. The authors' data on "middle" constructions (the equivalents of This shirt washes easily and similar sentence types) in Dutch dialects reveals evidence for an Aspect parameter of the type postulated by Lightfoot for the internal grammar ("I-language") of the individual speaker, which provides an elegant account for the distribution of superficially dissimilar syntactic constructions in the dialects under investigation (p. 127). The claim has been made that the formalists base their representation of language principally upon the evidence of syntactic phenomena, whereas sociolinguists construct their models of the correlation between linguistic behavior and socioeconomic factors almost entirely on phonetic data-rather like the blind men and the elephant. Jenny Cheshire, Paul Kerswill, and Ann Williams ask the question whether "generalisations concerning the spread of sound change apply equally well to other types of language change," such as syntax (pp. 135-167). Their study of speech recorded in British urban centers uncovers some intriguing instances of syntactic variation, such as the use of pronominal tags (e.g., I don't like it me, p. 159), but these give rise to more questions than answers for the analysts. The five chapters in the second section are concerned with "macrosociolinguistic motivations" such as language standardization (Inge Lise Pedersen, pp. 171-195), migration, and urbanism.
New-dialect formation, as conceptualised by Trudgill and others (e.g. Britain and Trudgill 1999; Trudgill 2004), refers to the emergence of distinctive, new language varieties following the migration of people speaking mutually intel-ligible dialects to what, to all intents and purposes, is linguistically 'virgin' territory. 1 As such, it is an extreme, and often very rapid, form of dialect con-vergence. Examples probably abound in world history, but only a few have been described in detail. There seem to be two main scenarios in which new-dialect formation takes place: the settlement of a relatively large territory, either pre-viously uninhabited or in which a previous population is ousted or assimilated; and the formation of a new town in a geographically delimited area in which relatively intense interpersonal communication can take place. Examples of the former are the settlement of New Zealand largely by English speakers in the nineteenth century, and the transport of i...