Language Change: The Interplay of Internal, External and Extra-Linguistic Factors [Reprint 2011 ed.] 9783110892598, 9783110172027

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Language Change

W G DE

Contributions to the Sociology of Language 86

Editor

Joshua A. Fishman

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Language Change The Interplay of Internal, External and Extra-Linguistic Factors

edited by

Mari C. Jones Edith Esch

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York 2002

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co. KG, Berlin

© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress — Cataloging-in-Publication Data Language change : the interplay of internal, external, and extralinguistic factors / edited by Mari C. Jones, Edith Esch. p. cm. — (Contributions to the sociology of language ; 86) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 3 11 017202 X (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Linguistic change. 2. Languages in contact. I. Jones, Mari C. II. Esch, Edith, 1945III. Series. P142 .L2626 2002 417'.7-dc21 2002016694

Die Deutsche Bibliothek — Cataloging-in-Publication Data Language change : the interplay of internal, external and extralinguistic factors / ed. by Mari C. Jones ; Edith Esch. - Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 2002 (Contributions to the sociology of language ; 86) ISBN 3-11-017202-X

© Copyright 2002 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany.

Contents

Contributors

vii

Introduction Kimberley Farrar and Mari C. Jones

1

1. Levelling Dialect contact and koineization: the case of northern France David Hornsby

19

The depicardization of the vernaculars of the Lille conurbation Tim Pooley

29

Jordanian and Palestinian dialects in contact: vowel raising in Amman Enam Al-Wer

63

"Salience" as an explanatory factor in language change: evidence from dialect levelling in urban England Paul Kerswill and Ann Williams My Dad's auxiliaries Edith Esch

81 111

2. Convergence Mette a haout dauve la grippe des Angllais: convergence on the Island of Guernsey Mari C. Jones

143

Modern Greek: towards a standard language or a new diglossia? David Holton

169

Standard English and the lexicon: why so many different spellings? Laura Wright

181

Latin and Arabic evolutionary processes: some reflections Joseph Cremona

201

There's sheep and there's penguins: convergence, "drift" and "slant" in New Zealand and Falkland Island English David Britain and Andrea Sudbury

209

VI

3. Adaptive mechanisms Convergence in the brain: the leakiness of bilinguals' sound systems lan Watson

243

Language contact in early bilinguals: the special status of function words Margaret Deuchar and Marilyn May Vihman

267

4. Code-copying Contact-induced change in a code-copying framework Lars Johanson

285

Karaim: a high-copying language Eva Agnes Csato

315

Author index

329

Subject index

335

Contributors Dr. Enam Al-Wer Department of Language and Linguistics University of Essex Wivenhoe Park Colchester C04 3SQ Essex UK [email protected] Dr. David Britain Department of Language and Linguistics University of Essex Wivenhoe Park Colchester C04 3SQ Essex UK [email protected] Dr. Joseph Cremona Trinity Hall Cambridge CB2 1TJ UK [email protected] Associate Professor Eva Agnes Csato Johanson Department of Asian and African Languages Uppsala University Box 527 SE-751 20 Uppsala Sweden eva.csato-johanson@ afro.uu.se Dr. Margaret Deuchar Department of Linguistics University of Wales, Bangor Bangor LL57 2DG Gwynedd Wales UK [email protected]

viii

Contributors

Dr. Edith Esch School of Education Trumpington Street Cambridge UK [email protected] Dr. Kimberley Farrar [email protected] Dr. David Holton Selwyn College Cambridge CB3 9DQ UK dwhl [email protected] Dr. David Hornsby School of European Culture and Languages Cornwallis Building University of Kent Canterbury Kent CT2 7NF UK [email protected] Professor Lars Johanson Seminar für Orientkunde Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz DE-55099 Mainz Germany [email protected] Dr. Mari C. Jones Peterhouse Cambridge CB2 1RD UK mcjl [email protected] Dr. Paul Kerswill School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies University of Reading Whiteknights, PO Box 218 Reading RG6 6AA UK [email protected]

Dr. Tim Pooley London Guildhall University Department of Language Studies Old Castle Street London El 7NT UK [email protected] Dr. Angela Sudbury Department of Linguistics University of Canterbury Christchurch New Zealand Professor Marilyn M. Vihman School of Psychology University of Wales, Bangor The Brigantia Building Penrallt Road Bangor LL57 2AS Gwynedd Wales UK m.vihman@ bangor. ac .uk Dr. Ian Watson Christ Church Oxford 0X1 1DP UK [email protected] Dr. Ann Williams University of London UK Dr. Laura Wright Faculty of English West Road Cambridge UK

Introduction Kimberley Farrar and Mari C. Jones

1.

Preliminary remarks

The main aim of this volume is to provide evidence from a number of different languages and language families to counter the apparent tendency that has existed in the past to see the explanation of language change as a choice between "language-internal" (i.e. intra-systemic) and "language-external" factors (i.e. contact). Admittedly, demonstrating that, in many cases, more than one type of motivation may lie at the root of the language change is not, in itself, anything new - the notion of "multiple causation" was used and discussed by Thomason and Kaufman more than a decade ago (1988: 57). However, the present volume extends the work of Thomason and Kaufman by positioning these interacting forces at the very heart of the discussion and by broadening the frame of debate to encompass the written as well as the spoken language. Moreover, as well as considering the "traditional" dichotomy of "language-internal" and "language-external" motivations, the volume also examines the role of "extra-linguistic" (i.e. sociopolitical and economic) motivations in language change and their interactions with "language-internal" and "language-external" forces.

2.

Dangerous dichotomies

The question of why languages change has preoccupied linguists for a long time. One of the earliest attempts to resolve the question was made by the Neogrammarians who, in the 1870s, claimed that all regular sound change is internally motivated. Although influential, the views of the Neogrammarians were not the only ones to be heard on this subject in the nineteenth century. Hugo Schuchardt, for example, was one early advocate of the study of language contact: "Ich habe behauptet, daß unter allen Fragen mit welchen die heutige Sprachwissenschaft zu tun hat, keine von größerer Wichtigkeit ist als die der Sprachmischung" [ Ί have maintained that of all the questions contemporary linguistics must tackle, none is of greater importance than that of language mixing'] (1884: 3).

2

Kimberley Farrar and Mari C. Jones

However, Schuchardt's position with respect to language contact appears to have been a somewhat lonely one. Other influential linguists of the day were clearly opposed to this type of explanation: "Es gibt keine Mischsprache" ['There are no mixed languages'] (Müller 1861: 86), "Such a thing as a language with a mixed grammatical apparatus has never come under the cognisance of linguistic students: It would be to them a monstrosity; it seems an impossibility" (Whitney 1867: 199). To see language, however, as an independently-developing system would be to disregard a vital element in the equation - namely that language exists primarily for purposes of communication and that it is therefore being constantly manipulated by its speakers who, by this very action, are influencing its development. Despite the fact that many schools of linguistics, from the Neogrammarians, to the Structuralists, to the Generative grammarians, have tended to abstract away from the individual and to concentrate instead on the internal structure of language, it is clear that this approach does not account for the whole picture - to give one example, the work of Lesley Milroy in Belfast shows the speakers to be central to the process of linguistic change in their role as agents in spreading an innovation through the speech community (Milroy 1980). It therefore seems imprudent to discount either language contact or extra-linguistic factors from the equation completely. The second half of the twentieth century saw a growing realization that contact does play a significant role in language change, and views such as those of Müller and Whitney are now clearly in the minority. Works on contact such as those by Weinreich (1953) and Hymes (1971) broke considerable new ground in their day and a measure of the former's significance is that it is still included in many reading lists on language contact almost half a century after being published. Thus, more recently, we find contact-induced language change described as "in no way exceptional" (Giacolone Ramat 1992: 327) and even "commonplace" (Jeffers and Lehiste 1979: 138). We might therefore assume that external motivation has now taken its place alongside internal motivation in our "explanatory armoury" for language change. However, despite its increasing recognition as a trigger for change, contact still seems to be given second place behind internal motivation. It should also be pointed out that many general discussions of explanation attempt to justify neglecting extra-linguistic factors, which pertain to the social characteristics of situations in which speakers interact, in their account of language change. Roger Lass, for example, advocates that references to speakers and their circumstances be suppressed in explanations for language change. He writes: "Neither language-users, nor their internal states ought to be the main focus of attention, if our aim is to explain [...] change, since change itself is a

Introduction

3

built-in property of the kind of system that a human language [...] happens to be" (1997: 386). It is only, then, as a last resort, when no internal factor can be found, that elements external to a variety's linguistic system - whether in the shape of contact, or indeed extra-linguistic factors - have been sought. Change is seen as an internal feature of language, and therefore explanations can apparently ignore all other factors. To posit such a distinction between internal, external and extra-linguistic factors behind language change would seem to be imprudent insofar as it implies, firstly, that such a separation is possible and, secondly, that these factors are all mutually exclusive. That this is clearly not the case has been discussed by Farrar (1996), who formulates this tendency in relation to the first two of these factors in terms of what she calls the "Either-or" mentality.

2.1. "Either-or" mentality According to Farrar (1996), the factors invoked in explanations of linguistic change are often described as either "internal" or "external". Such a division, however, is not without its problems. In practice, it is often difficult to distinguish between different types of motivating factors - and even if this were possible, many now debate whether such a distinction is, in fact, a useful one. For example, in her 1982 book Socio-Historical Linguistics, Romaine clearly takes it for granted that an internal/external distinction is fruitful. She seems, however, to have subsequently changed her mind. In a 1995 paper, she argues, with hindsight, that separation is possible, but of little use, since it is too much of an abstraction (Romaine 1995). An implied division is indeed likely to prove harmful, since it suggests that we can understand change without relating it to language users, when language does not merely reflect their society, but is, of course, a social institution (Cameron 1990: 84). Despite these problems, the prevailing view is that the distinction made is a useful one in theory, even if it inevitably involves abstraction (see for example Labov 1994: 1-2, 300). However, linguists have often treated the internal/external distinction not merely as a descriptive tool for categorizing different factors, but as a strict dichotomy which requires either-or decisions to be made in explanation. Dichotomies can be dangerous beasts, as Nancy Dorian has pointed out: "Dichotomies have the effect of nudging us in the direction of an either/or discrimination. The responsibility for this may lie with the user of the dichotomy, but is certainly encouraged when the terms of the dichotomy are themselves antonyms, as is the case with internal and external in the phrases 'internally motivated change' and 'externally motivated change'" (1993: 132).

4

Kimberley Farrar and Mari C. Jones

We therefore seem to regard internal and external causation as mutually exclusive. This would no doubt be easy to justify if there were some basis for a complete separation: for example, if we could see that some types of change always resulted from internal causation and others were always the result of the influence of external factors. However, in practice, it is difficult to see how this could be the case. We might, for example, want to claim that contact always resulted in convergent processes between languages, in other words the changes motivated lead the languages to become more alike. The converse of this is that if divergent changes are found - changes whereby a language becomes less like its neighbours - then we should assume that it is the result of internal causation. However, it seems that divergence can also occur as the result of contact. Campbell and Muntzel (1989) for example, convincingly explain the heavy use of glottalization in Xinca as due to the contact situation between speakers of Xinca and Spanish in Guatemala. This is despite the fact that Spanish does not have such sounds. It seems that glottalization is overgeneralized precisely because it is not a feature of Spanish. The contact situation causes the languages to become even more different. It therefore seems difficult to separate out internal and external factors in terms of their results. And yet, some linguists still see them as mutually exclusive. Weimers is a good example of this, as the following quotation shows: "Some of the changes that have taken place in each [language] are internal [...]. Some of the changes, on the other hand, may be, and usually are, the result of external influence" (1970: 2). The "Either-or" mentality demands that we make a decision between internal and external motivations when seeking to explain language change. In practice, when such a decision is made, internal factors are considered in some sense superior and external factors usually lose out. A similar outcome also seems likely if internal factors are weighed against extra-linguistic ones. There is, therefore, evidence of what Farrar (1996) has termed the "If-in-doubt-dowithout" mentality at work. 2.2. "If-in-doubt-do-without" mentality There is an assumption in much historical linguistic work that the majority of changes a language undergoes are due to internal factors, and that therefore we should first concentrate on identifying these internal causes of change. Only if this proves unsuccessful, the argument runs, should we then widen our search to consider external or extra-linguistic motivating factors. Examining whether contact plays a role in change is therefore seen as a last resort, and "if in doubt" we should "do without" and simply not take this final step.

Introduction

5

This is clearly expressed as a general principle in many studies. John Ohala, for example, argues that it forms the basis of a sensible approach to the explanation of sound change. He writes: "One should first try all the phonetic explanations [...]. Only if they don't work [should one] seek an explanation in terms of social, psychological, or historical facts" (1974: 268, cited in Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 57). This "If-in-doubt-do-without" mentality is not only cited as a general principle - it also clearly underlies the approach taken in several case studies. To give an example, in his work on American varieties of German, Mark Louden notes a preference for constructions that are intertranslatable with those of American English (1994: 82). Moreover, Griffiths (1998) shows that many of the changes that have occurred in varieties such as Pennsylvanian German and Virginia German have resulted in structures remarkably similar to those of English. Interesting parallels can be seen here with documented cases of convergence elsewhere in the world. Gumperz and Wilson (1971), for example, wrote of intertranslatability between the varieties of Kannada, Urdu and Marathi spoken in Kupwar. The sociolinguistic circumstances in the case described by Louden might also be considered "ideal" for processes of convergence to occur - for example, there is widespread bilingualism, and English and German must both be used on a daily basis. This, therefore, might seem an obvious candidate for a contact-based explanation. However, there is a surprising reluctance to invoke contact as the cause of the growing structural similarity between American English and American varieties of German. Researchers instead point to what are often similar changes which can be shown to have occurred in European varieties of German. Here it is argued, there is no intense contact situation with English, therefore the language change must be internally motivated. They then conclude that if such change is internally motivated in Europe, then the motivation for the change in all cases must be internal. There are often clear statements to this effect, as the following quotation shows: "External factors, such as contact with American English, should not be utilized to explain changes which would be plausible in a context where such contact cannot be a factor" (Keel 1994: 93-94). The assumption is therefore that similar changes in Europe raise doubt, and therefore we can do without contact. It is interesting to consider what the reasons for our adherence to the "If-indoubt-do-without" mentality might be. One such reason is, undoubtedly, the fact that we consider internal explanations more scientifically acceptable. Ever since the Neogrammarians decided in the nineteenth century that historical linguistics should strive to become a scientific discipline, linguists have puzzled over how to achieve such a goal. The most common solution has been to argue

6

Kimberley Farrar and Mari C. Jones

that objectivity provides the key. Yet how can we obtain such objectivity in linguistics, where the subject of study is language, which is used and manipulated by inherently subjective human beings? The solution is clearly to focus not on the speakers but, rather, on the internal mechanism of a language. In so doing, the linguist can argue that change may be studied objectively and, as mentioned above, this is the strategy adopted by many of the schools of linguistics which have dominated research over the last 100 years. The desire for scientific respectability is therefore clearly one reason for the persistence of the "If-indoubt-do-without" mentality. A consequence of this mentality has undoubtedly been that more work has been done on internal factors than on external ones. This means that we can perhaps claim to have a greater understanding of the former than the latter: for example, there are a greater number of case studies to rely upon when attempting to make generalizations. Another important issue inherent in the "If-in-doubt-do-without" mentality is whether internal factors play a more frequent role than external ones in motivating change. There is an assumption that the majority of changes that occur in a language are due to characteristics of the linguistic structure it has inherited. The strong influence wielded by the family tree model of genetic development is partly responsible for this. Only if we assume that virtually all change occurs due to internal factors can we reliably employ the information given us by the family tree relationships of a language when using the Comparative Method. The fear is that if we accept Schuchardt's claims, and see all languages as essentially mixed to some degree, then not only will the family tree model be defunct, but so too will our most dependable method of linguistic reconstruction (Mühlhäusler 1980: 34). The efficacy of comparative reconstruction is therefore seen as justifying a concentration on internal factors. This is evident in, for example, Welmer's work, as the following comments clearly show: "The established principles of comparative and historical linguistics, and all we know about language history and language change, demand that [...] we seek explanations first on the basis of recognized processes of internal change" (Weimers 1970:4-5). It seems that the Comparative Method has given us so much insight into the workings and motivation of language change that we simply know internal factors play a greater role. However, a closer examination of the reasons behind Welmer's assertions betrays a rather different motivation. Far from justifying his claims with a clear demonstration of the rarity of externally motivated change and the predominance of internally motivated change, the reason for his preference seems to lie in convenience, more than anything else, as can be seem from the following extract:

Introduction

7

Neither Greenberg nor his followers, however, would for one moment deny the reality of external influence, nor its importance in the total linguistic history. As has been pointed out, however, language changes due to external influence are nonsystematic, and many of them in time become unrecoverable. It is possible to arrive at broad generalizations on the basis of phonetic and semantic similarities with which Greenbeig works; it is not possible to arrive at such generalizations on the basis of a study of proven or hypothetical instances of external influence (1970:3).

Thus although, in practice, it may not accurately reflect the motivations for change, the rejection of external causation is justified as necessary. Furthermore, our knowledge of internal structure and our methods of describing that structure, and the internal forces that act upon it, are considered to be more sophisticated than our understanding of extra-linguistic (sociocultural) factors and how they interact. Again, it is our pride in our understanding of the internal factors which leads to prejudice against the others. No evidence has been put forward to show that internal factors really do play a more important role in the process of language change. A further reason for the existence of the "If-in-doubt-do-without" mentality is our reliance on the Uniformitarian Principle. This is defined by Labov as follows: "The linguistic processes taking place around us are the same as those that have operated to produce the historical record" (1970: 101). Thus we extrapolate from what we know about present forces affecting language behaviour and make the same claims about the forces operating in the past to explain the changes that have occurred. Speakers in times gone by had the same vocal and neural apparatus, and this must determine the boundaries of possible language structure. Therefore, it is quite plausible that the internal factors that motivated changes may have been the same for the past as for the present. However, the same extrapolation seems implausible where external and extralinguistic factors are concerned, and Labov himself has acknowledged this (1994: 23). In the case of the latter, for example, many important cultural changes have occurred that have arguably greatly altered social factors and their potential impact, such as the spread of the mass media this century (Gerritsen 1992: 361-362). Furthermore, detailed sociological information about the period in which past changes occurred is often unavailable. This means that a concentration on possible internal factors may seem inevitable when a past change is being investigated. However, again it should not be assumed that that the changes in question could not have been motivated by social factors (Milroy 1992: 24n).

8

2.3.

Kimberley Farrar and Mari C. Jones

Summary

Three main issues stand at the heart of the discussion conducted in this chapter: (1) Language change is a complex phenomenon. This may seem like stating the obvious, but it has one important implication, namely that explanations for change will, and should, reflect this complexity. A full explanation for a change is therefore unlikely to involve citing one motivating factor but, rather, will invoke a large number of interacting factors, the relationship between which we may only be able to guess at, at least for the time being. If we continue to focus only on one of these factors, then we are surely missing an important part of the jigsaw. (2) The role of the internal-external dichotomy may well need reassessment. At present, it may well serve as a useful descriptive tool, but it is not sufficient as a theoretical explanation. Moreover, there may be room for a greater consideration of the role of extra-linguistic factors within this framework. The importance of the interaction between different motivating factors in shaping a change cannot be underestimated. It should therefore not be assumed that these will separate out nicely for us into discrete camps, even if it is perhaps comforting to have labels for the factors we adduce in our explanations. (3) Even if we use such a di- or trichotomy as a source of labels, we should not assign any of these a lower position on some unspoken hierarchy of explanatory adequacy. Yet, this is what we clearly have been doing in following, whether tacitly or otherwise, the "If-in-doubt-do-without" mentality. This opinion seems largely to have been born out of convenience, rather than of any real evidence that internal causation factors have a more frequent role to play than either external or extra-linguistic motivation. If such evidence exists, it may only be found if we first increase our knowledge of these other factors, and the typical circumstances in which they motivate change. Only then will we be able to give a reasoned judgement on how frequently such factors play a role. The problem, of course, is that linguists are stuck in a vicious circle: if our knowledge of social motivating factors is seen as naive, it is hard to see how it can progress further if we simply ignore them and consistently concentrate instead on finding internal motivation for change. Thus, the complaints of superficiality that are directed at external and extra-linguistic explanations are what Jim Milroy has called a "self-fulfilling prophecy" (Milroy 1992: 28).

Introduction

3.

9

Outline of the volume

The above discussion makes it clear that a pluralist approach to the explanation of all change is thus advocated. As mentioned in section 1. above, the papers in this volume will show how many instances of language change cannot be fully explained without considering the interaction between two or more of the factors under consideration. In order to show the pervasiveness of this complexity in explanation, each of the papers presented in the volume takes as its starting point an example of one of three types of well-known contact-induced language change, namely levelling, convergence and what we have termed adaptive mechanisms. These are all types of change where contact has regularly and justifiably been invoked as an explanation. However, whereas many previous accounts have limited themselves to a discussion of the contact situation without considering whether other forces have also played a role in motivating particular instances of these changes, the papers in this volume will demonstrate how internal and extra-linguistic factors can also come to bear even in such apparently "straightforward" situations of heavy contact. 3.1. Levelling In its "internal" sense, levelling consists of the complete or partial elimination of alternations within paradigms. This concept has, however, been extended by Trudgill to refer to the "reduction or attrition of marked variants" (1986: 98). This may occur between two varieties of unequal status, in which case the L ('low') variety will become more like the Η ('high') variety - in other words, the influence exerted is unidirectional. However, the process may also occur between varieties of equal status, which involves a "filtering out" of salient differences, leading to a generalized homogeneity of features in the direction of a lowest common denominator. It is, nevertheless, clear that the mere fact of dialects being in contact does not systematically precipitate change - the Hindi dialect continuum in India illustrates well the principle that such varieties can be in contact for many years without any levelling taking place. The chapters in this section will therefore examine the influence of socio-economic and political factors, together with forces internal to a particular variety's linguistic system, as possible catalysts for any such contact-induced change. Hornsby, for example, examines the interplay between extra-linguistic factors and internal processes of language change by investigating contact between dialect and standard French in northern France. By comparing his findings with a contact situation in northern Sweden, he is able to propose a modi-

10

Kimberley Farrar and Mari C. Jones

fication to Trudgill's (1986) theory of koineization, to the effect that a low-contact situation may favour levelling while a high-contact siutation may favour simplification. In other words, it is suggested that the extra-linguistic situation may have a bearing on the precise type of language change that occurs in certain contact situations. The chapter by Pooley also focuses on northern France. It examines the contact-induced levelling that has occurred between Picard, on the one hand and, on the other, standard and vernacular varieties of French within the Lille urban area, demonstrating how these linguistic developments can be mapped against sudden and significant (extra-linguistic) socio-political changes and specific historic periods. Al-Wer discusses the concept of levelling and regional koineization in conjunction with the emergence of the new Amman dialect, which is occurring due to contact between Jordanian and Palestinian forms. She demonstrates how some of the changes involved reflect internal tendencies, whereas others appear to be, additionally, influenced by extra-linguistic factors, namely the sociolinguistic connotations of some of the features in question. The notion of salience as an explanation for contact-induced language change is explored in the chapter by Kerswill and Williams, which examines data from a study of dialect levelling in England. They highlight the fact that, although internal factors are not without influence here, the salience of a particular feature is ultimately determined by extra-linguistic processes. It is suggested that the notion of salience may be a useful tool in our attempt to account for language change for, as this chapter demonstrates, it both straddles and combines the internal and extra-linguistic motivations that lie behind this process. The last chapter in this section attempts to establish whether levelling can be brought about through overt language planning. Esch presents a case study of the way in which the French education system seems to have successfully eliminated forms of an individual's idiolect in order to bring it in line with the standard language and demonstrates how successful language planning can militate against, and even prevent, an otherwise predictable internal development. 3.2.

Convergence

In cases of convergence, the linguistic influence exerted is always bi-directional. Unlike lexical borrowing, convergence may be perceived as a more insidious form of contact-induced change as the lexicons of the converging var-

Introduction

11

ieties are left mainly intact, while the change occurs primarily at the morphosyntactic level. It thus remains largely unobserved by most native speakers, to the point that, synchronically, the phenomenon may only be observed to have taken place should a form of the said varieties also be spoken outside the convergence area, in which case the structural differences in the converged forms may be witnessed. The chapters in this section reconsider the notion of linguistic convergence in order to gauge whether internal and extra-linguistic factors might also be present in this ostensibly contact-induced process. Jones discusses the interplay between internal and external motivations for language change by investigating a situation of apparent convergence between Guernsey Norman French and English that may, it is posited, have been a precursor to language death. She discusses the ambiguous nature of certain changes found, demonstrating that some admit both an internal and an external explanation. Holton examines the situation in Greece, where both the varieties in contact are, in fact, forms of the same language. Despite the fact that these forms of Greek had been in contact with each other for over a century and a half, the process of convergence, which had hitherto been significant, but limited, was greatly accelerated by extra-linguistic developments, in the shape of political change. Wright extends the discussion to the written language, examining the case of convergence in mixed-language business writing in Medieval England. This chapter demonstrates how extra-linguistic factors caused the emergence of a contact-induced script with its own system-internal principles. Finally, the papers by Cremona, and Britain and Sudbury attempt to act as a useful foil to some of the other contributions in this section (and indeed in the volume as a whole). They both present cases where, at a first glance, contact would seem to be the most likely explanation of the situation but which further analysis reveals not to be so. The phenomenon is examined with reference to one case where the varieties in question are related, and one where they are not. Cremona discusses the way in which broadly similar extra-linguistic factors in the case of Romance and Arabic vernaculars seem to have provided a setting for similar internally-motivated changes. He stresses, however, that although the linguistic processes involved may be accounted for as instances of parallel development, their end products are not the same and the languages remain typologically dissimilar. Finally, the chapter advises against being too hasty to interpret any instance of parallel development as convergence instead of seeking alternative explanations. Britain and Sudbury seek to explain the existence of apparent cases of convergence between two varieties of English spoken in isolated speech commu-

12

Kimberley Farrar and Mari C. Jones

nities thousands of kilometres apart and between which there has been very little contact. They demonstrate that, although the changes which have occurred may superficially appear to be contact-induced, in practice, they are explicable by internal factors. What we observe, therefore, is not convergence but, rather, parallel development, or a failure to diverge, in that similar linguistic changes have occurred in these communities not as a result of contact but, rather, due to the fact that similar linguistic constraints are in operation there. In both communities under study, the linguistic change examined is able to be correlated with extra-linguistic factors. 3.3. Adaptive mechanisms Cases of primary bilingual language acquisition are contact situations which are visible to us in real time. Thus, in this section, the interaction between internal, external and extra-linguistic factors is viewed in a different way from the traditional historical perspective. In such cases, the individual child can be said to be the locus of the contact, and his language reflects the way in which he handles dual language input, with one language exterting an "external" influence on the other, to use the terminology of the previous sections, and context ("extra-linguistic" factors) also having a role to play. The two studies presented here highlight the existence of highly flexible mechanisms which help bilinguals cope with different language systems and language contexts - at least at certain periods of their development - and which will be termed "adaptive mechanisms". The chapter by Watson centres around the claim that bilingual speech processing, where there is "contact" between languages, differs from that of monolinguals. It proposes a model to account for data which shows evidence that primary bilinguals exhibit cross-linguistic associations of similar phonological units while maintaining phonetic representations distinct across their two languages. In other words, we can see the relationship at work between "context" (extra-linguistic) and "system" (internal), where the phonetic representation corresponds to the latter and the phonological representation to the former. Deuchar and Vihman address the issue of the apparent division of labour between content words and function words in matching the immediate (extra-linguistic) language context in primary bilinguals. Their study of early two-word mixed utterances in children who are in the process of developing bilingualism suggests that function words are relatively language-neutral and thus available for use in both of the bilingual's linguistic systems, whereas content words seem to be more closely tied to the language of the context. It is suggested that

Introduction

13

analyses of this kind may ultimately enable us to clarify the link between language contact in early bilinguals and language change in bilingual adults.

3.4.

Code-copying

The final section offers a different approach to the description of contact-induced language change. By illustrating how concepts such as levelling, convergence and adaptative mechanisms may be dealt with under one "umbrella" by the descriptive framework of "code-copying". The chapter by Johanson presents an introduction to this framework and, by drawing on the studies discussed in the volume, demonstrates how code-copying can offer an integrative approach to the phenomenon of language interaction and can help to clarify the interconnections between various aspects of language change. The interplay of internal, external and extra-linguistic motivations for language change is also considered within the code-copying framework. The chapter by Csato uses the code-copying model to illustrate how contact-induced processes have changed the basic word order properties of the Lithuanian dialect of Karaim. This volume, therefore, aims to re-consider the nature of language change by examining the relationship between internal, external and extra-linguistic motivations within this field. It seeks to demonstrate that an interplay of complementary but ultimately reinforcing motivations may be present even in highcontact situations, where the motivation behind the change seems obvious, and that adopting an "either-or" approach to language change may ultimately prove detrimental to our progress in understanding this phenomenon.

References Cameron, Deborah 1990 Demythologizing sociolinguistics: why language does not reflect society. In: John E. Joseph and Talbot J. Taylor (eds.), Ideologies of Language, 79-93. London: Routledge. Campbell, Lyle and Martha C. Muntzel 1989 The structural consequences of language death. In: Nancy C. Dorian (ed.), Investigating Obsolescence: Studies in Language Contraction and Death, 181-196. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

14

Kimberley Farrar and Mari C. Jones

Dorian, Nancy C. 1993 Internally and externally motivated change in language contact settings: doubts about dichotomy. In: Charles Jones (eά.), Historical Linguistics: Problems and Perspectives, 131-155. Harlow: Longman. Farrar, Kimberley J. 1996 The role of contact in the explanation of syntactic change. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge. Gerritsen, Marinel 1992 Internal and external factors in the stabilization of verb-last order in Dutch infinitive clauses. In: Marinel Gerritsen and Dieter Stein (eds.), Internal and External Factors in Syntactic Change, 355-394. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Giacolone Ramat, Anna 1992 The pairing of structure and function in syntactic development. In: Marinel Gerritsen and Dieter Stein (eds.), Internal and External Factors in Syntactic Change, 316-339. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Griffiths, Lee 1998

German in the United States. Undergraduate dissertation, University of Cambridge.

Gumperz, John J. and Robert Wilson 1971 Convergence and creolization: a case from the Indo-Aryan/Dravidian border. In: Dell Hymes (ed.), Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, 151-167. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hymes, Dell (ed.) 1971 Pidginization and Creolization of Languages. London: Cambridge University Press. Jeffers, Robert J. and Ilse Lehiste 1979 Principles and Methods for Historical Linguistics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Keel, William D. 1994 Reduction and loss of case marking in the noun phrase in GermanAmerican speech islands: internal development or external influence? In: Nina Berend and Klaus J. Mattheier (eds.), Sprachinselforschung: eine Gedenkschrift für Hugo Jedig, 93-104. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Introduction

15

Labov, William 1970 The study of language in its social context. In: Joshua A. Fishman (ed.), Advances in the Sociology of Language, Volume 1, 152-216. The Hague: Mouton. 1994 Lass, Roger 1997 Louden, Mark 1994

Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal Factors. Oxford: Blackwell. Historical Linguistics and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Syntactic change in multilingual speech islands. In: Nina Berend and Klaus J. Mattheier (eds.), Sprachinselforschung: eine Gedenkschrift für Hugo Jedig, 73-92. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Milroy, James 1992

Linguistic Variation and Change. Oxford: Blackwell.

Milroy, Lesley 1980

Language and Social Networks. Oxford: Blackwell.

Mühlhäusler, Peter 1980 Structural expansion and the process of creolization. In: Albert Valdman and Arnold Highfield (eds.), Theoretical Orientations in Creole Studies, 19-55. New York: Academic Press. Müller, Max 1861 Ohala, John 1974

Lectures on the Science of Language. London: Longman. Phonetic explanations in phonology. In: A. Bruck et al. (eds.), Papers from the Parasession on Natural Phonology, 251-274. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.

Romaine, Suzanne 1982 Socio-Historical Linguistics. Its Status and Methodology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1995 Integrating the external with the internal in language contact. Paper given at the First International Conference on Linguistic Contact, Valencia, September 1995. Schuchardt, Hugo 1884 Slawo-deutsches und Slawo-italienisches. Graz: Leuschner and Lubensky.

16

Kimberley Farrar and Mari C. Jones

Thomason, Sarah G. and Terrence Kaufman 1988 Language Contact, Creolization and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Trudgill, Peter 1986

Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell.

Weinreich, Uriel 1953 Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems. New York: The Linguistic Circle of New York. Reprinted The Hague: Mouton [1963]. Weimers, William E. 1970 Language change and language relationships in Africa. Language Sciences 12: 1-8. Whitney, William D. 1867 Language and the Study of Language. London: N. Trübner and Co.

1. Levelling

Dialect contact and koineization: the case of northern France David Hornsby

Abstract This chapter attempts to understand contact phenomena in northern France by exploring the interplay between extra-linguistic (i.e. sociopolitical and socio-economic) factors and internal processes of linguistic change. A comparison with a contact situation in northern Sweden reveals very different outcomes which, it is argued, can best be explained by profound differences in social networks in the two cases. On the basis of these findings, a modification to Trudgill's influential theory of koineization is proposed. For, while levelling (taken here in Trudgill's 1986 sense) is usually seen as an inevitable concomitant of simplification, there is evidence to suggest that low-contact situations may favour the former and high-contact situations the latter.

When fieldwork for a study of dialect shift in the northern French mining town of Avion (Pas-de-Calais, northern France) was undertaken in 1988, quantitative or "Labovian" sociolinguistic methods were still comparatively unknown in France. Indeed, it is still the case that relatively little work within the paradigm has been done there, leading Gadet (1996: 89) to conclude: "II n'existe ä peu pres pas ä ce jour de sociolinguistique fran9aise" ['French sociolinguistics hardly exists at the present time']. It was felt, however, that quantitative methods might yield insights into some puzzling patterns of variation. For, while it was clear that some variants generally used by older speakers were popularly perceived as patois features, other marked non-standard variants were nonetheless perceived as being frangais 'French'. There seemed to be a general view that a variety called le vrai patois 'real patois' was dying, and/or spoken elsewhere, but there was no agreement on where this variety was spoken, nor indeed on where patois began and frangais ended. Analysis of the data revealed marked differences in the behaviour of two sets of variables. While one set of (phonological) variables had been shown in a pilot study (Hornsby 1987) to show sensitivity to extra-linguistic factors such as sex comparable with that seen in the classic urban variation studies (Labov 1966; Trudgill 1974), another set of (morpho-lexical) variables did not, the only relevant extra-linguistic variable here being age (see below).

20

David Hornsby

Avion had been chosen as it was well known to the researcher, who had lived there four years previously and remained in close contact with many of its inhabitants (the Avionnais). It was therefore possible to exploit connections with the town and collect data over a three-month period using the ParticipantObserver technique (Milroy 1987: 77-91). In all, about 14 hours' data were transcribed and analysed. 13 variables associated with the local dialect were selected for analysis: in each case, a Standard (S) and Dialect (D) variant were identified: Table 1. Dialect variables in Avion MicroVariable 1. (ELLE) 2. (DISJ) 3. (TU) 4a. (IMPF) 4b. (COND) 5. (LA) 6a. (£A) 6b. (C'EST) 7. (ON) 8. (UNE) 9. (MPOSS) 10. (FPOSS) 11. (RE)

η 877 969 674 2026 209 1003 1304 2346 1161 586 427 254 196

Standardvariant(s) εΐ mwa/twa/lqi ty -ε -ε la sa se 5 yn m5/t5/so ma/ta/sa R9-

n 320 565 341 1432 133 770 930 1656 786 331 222 138 76

Dialectvariant(s)

n

s%

al, a mi/ti/li te -o, -ot1 -o, ot (ε)1

557 404 333 594 76 233 374 690 375 255 205 116 120

64 42 49 30 36 23 29 29 32 44 48 46 61

Ja Je ε εη mc/tc/sc (c)m/(c)t/(c)s aR-

Key: ELLE: 3sg. subject clitic; DISJ: lsg., 2sg., 3sg. disjunctive pronouns; TU: 2sg. subject clitic; IMPF: imperfect tense verb endings; COND: conditional endings; LA: feminine singular definite article; £A: demonstrative 3sg. clitic; C'EST: demonstrative 3sg. clitic with etre 'to be'; ON: 3sg./lpl. clitic; UNE: feminine indefinite article; MPOSS: masculine possessive adjective; FPOSS: feminine possessive adjective; RE: verbal prefix The popular perception that the dialect was dying was supported by the clear generational shift in patterns of dialect use. Of 4332 dialect tokens, only 19 are used by informants in the young (0-30) age-group:

Dialect contact and koineization: the case of northern France Table 2.

21

Tokens by age group and sex (all variables)

Total

Overall

Tokens

S

Female

D

£>%

S

Male

D

D%

Young

730

711

19

3

203

1

Middle

6338

3843

2495

39

2017

1236

Senior

4964

3146

1818

36

2762

12032

7700

4332

36

4982

Total

S

0.5

D

D%

508

18

3

38

1926

1259

40

1504

35

384

314

45

2741

36

2818

1591

36

However, this did not mean that the speech of younger speakers had become indistinguishable from frangais standard 'standard French'. 2 The pilot study (Hornsby 1987), in which students at a local lycee (secondary school attended by pupils aged 15-18) were interviewed, had revealed the extensive use of a number of non-standard (phonological) variants associated with northern regional French as described by Carton et al. (1983: 24-27): Table 3.

Pilot study (regional French) variables

Variable

Standard variant(s)

Non-standard variant(s)

1. (dj/tj)

[dj/tj]

[d3/tf] [?]

Example radio [»ad3o] 'radio' metier [metJe] 'job' corps [koK]'body'

2. (R)/_##

[κ]

3. (o)

[3]

[o]

4a. (a)/_R

[a]

[se, ε]

4b. (e)/_R

[ε]

[e, e, i]

eher [cheK] 'dear'

5. (a)/_##

[a]

[Λ, ο, ο]

candidat [kädido] 'candidate'

polonais [polone] 'Polish' voir

[vwaeR]

'to see'

It is generally accepted that langue d'oil (northern French) dialects have been dying out in France since at least the end of the First World War (see Walter 1988: 117). The resulting linguistic situation is usually described in terms of a continuum or typology3 extending from standard to a notionally "pure" patois. Probably the most influential model of this kind is that of Carton (1981), which identifies two intermediate varieties, frangais regional 'regional French' and frangais dialectal ou local 'dialectal or local French', between the two "polar" varieties. In Carton's terms, the speech of even our broadest dialect user would be closer to Variete 3 'Variety 3' (frangais dialectal ou local) than to Variete 2 'Variety 2' (frangais regional). The assumption usually made in such models is that frangais regional represents merely a hard core of phonological or lexical

22

David Hornsby

features which have survived from the dialects, so that the difference between frangais regional and frangais dialectal turns on the presence of French morphology in the former but not in the latter (see, for example, Carton 1981: 17; Muller 1985: 59; Ager 1990: 23-24). The marked intergenerational shift observed here would seem to lend support to this view that loss of morphological variants from the community repertoire is the inevitable concomitant of dialect shift. It did, however, raise more fundamental questions: why do some variants survive better than others in contact situations in the French context, and is the distinction between regional French and dialectal French simply a matter of non-standard phonology vs. morphology? A comparable contact situation in many respects is described by Thelander (1976,1979,1982) and Kristensen and Thelander (1984) for Burträsk, northern Sweden. Like Avion, Burträsk is a small town which has depended for many years on a single industry (in this case agriculture), now in difficulty (Thelander 1976: 104) and, as in Avion, a local variety (burträskmäl) has been in competition for some time with a national standard. Thelander's variables which, like our own, were morphological or lexical, differed greatly in their capacity to resist standardization, dividing broadly into two groups. For those in the first, the Dialect Indicator, use of the standard variant was almost categorical among younger speakers, the marked D-variant generally being a reliable indicator of dialectal speech. For variables in the Standard Indicator, the S-variant represented the marked choice and the D-variant was equally categorically used by younger speakers (Thelander 1982: 72-75). These data led Thelander to conclude that variation in Burträsk is better understood in terms of a three-variety model. The fact that, in many cases, speakers avoided the marked variants of both S- and D-indicators was evidence for the existence of an intermediate variety which he labelled regional standard (RS). This third variety is made up entirely of unmarked forms, i.e. D-variants for the S-indicator and vice versa: Table 4.

TV SV d s s

d s s

Varieties in Burträsk DI ARE THEY d s s

d s s

SI WERE KV INF SC ITn ITnn NOT PRES Variety d d d d d d d d s d d d s d d d s s s s s s s s

Speech D RS S

(After Thelander, Figure 6; 1982: 75) Key: TV/SV/KV: word-initial tv-/sv-/kv-; INF: infinitive stems; SC: subject complements with plural subjects; ΓΓη: neuter third person pronoun; ITnn non-neuter third person pronoun; PRES: present tense verb endings. For explanation and examples see Thelander (1982: 69).

Dialect contact and koineization: the case of northern France

23

Thelander (1982: 72) suggests that "the most powerful basis for determining the vitality of a dialect variant in present-day Burträsk would seem to be its geographical dispersion in northern Sweden": the variants which have survived best being those which are most widely attested in the dialects of northern Sweden. Might this also offer an explanation for the survival of some variants in Avion? Certainly, there seems to be at least implicitly an appeal to levelling of this kind in Carton's schema, regional French variants being seen as more widely diffused than their dialect counterparts (Carton 1981: 17). To investigate this possibility, the distribution of both sets of variants was investigated using the Atlas Linguistique de la France (ALF) [Linguistic Atlas of France] (Gillieron and Edmont 1902-1910). The results initially seemed promising. The variable with the highest D-score in our sample (ELLE), was also quite comfortably the non-standard variant with the widest distribution according to the ALF\ [al] or the reduced form [a] being attested as far away as the Gironde department in the south and Aube in the east (Hornsby 1996: 222-224), while all the other dialect variants were restricted to Picard and occasionally Norman dialect areas. Levelling does not, however, appear to offer a convincing explanation for the vitality of the regional French variants. Three of the six non-standard variants (1,2 and 4b) described in Table 3 above are not attested at all in the ALF,4 while the non-standard variant of Variable 4a is found is attested in the Picard dialect area, but not, curiously, in the Pas-de-Calais or Nord departments.5 Two possible explanations suggest themselves for these absences. These regional French variants may be relatively new forms which have emerged since the ALF was published at the turn of the century, or they may be urban forms, which the ALF, compiled exclusively from data from rural villages, did not register. However, either way it seems unlikely that we can appeal to levelling alone as an explanation for the vitality of one group of variants but not another. The process of dialect shift in Avion thus seems rather different from that observed in Burträsk. A more convincing explanation for the emergence of regional French is the theory of koineization as developed by Trudgill (1986). Crucial to an understanding of dialect contact, he claims, are the difficulties of linguistic adaptation experienced by post-adolescent learners of a new variety (Trudgill 1986: 161). These are likely to give rise to four processes: (1) Simplification: the elimination of morpho-phonemically irregular forms (2) Levelling·, the selection of forms with the widest geographical or social diffusion. (Burträsk is in fact cited as an example: Trudgill 1986: 98) (3) Reallocation: geographical variants are reallocated as social class variants (4) The creation of interdialectal forms

24

David Hornsby

We shall focus primarily here on the first two processes, though evidence of all four can be adduced from the Avion data. In Avion, it would seem that it is simplification with respect to the frangais standard model which wins out over levelling, the prime factor in explaining the survival of non-standard variants in Burträsk. Compare the following sets of non-standard variants: Table 5.

Non-standard variants: Sets "A" and "B"

Variant

Standard Equivalent Examples Set A

l.[k, g]

LT, 3]

carbon 'coal', gardin 'garden' (Fr. charbon, jardin)

2.m 3. [έ]

[s] [S] Set Β

ch'est 'it is' (Fr. c'est) sintir 'to feel' (Fr. sentir)

4. [ae, ε] / R / # # 5. [0, o]##

[a] [a] [tj/dj]

voir [vwasR] 'to see'

6. [tj/d 3 ]

candidat [kadido] 'candidate' metier, radio [metje, rad3o] 'job', 'radio'

Unlike the non-standard forms in Set B, taken from Table 3 above, the variants in Set A are rare and not used at all by young people. Both sets are phonological, yet the variants in set A would be identified locally as patois variants, like the other dialect forms with which they co-occur (see Table 1), while those in set Β almost certainly would not. The most significant difference between the "A" and "B" variants above is that, for those in the latter group, a one-to-one relationship exists between the non-standard form and its frangais standard counterpart. Outsiders to the region can learn a simple, exceptionless rule by which the /-a/ ending offrangais standard is backed, raised and rounded in the bassin minier 'mining basin' to /-u/, /-o/ or even /-o/. The same does not apply for variation of the /έ/ - /α/ kind, where individual phono-lexical sets have to be learned. While dans 'in' and gens 'people' have the equivalents dins and gins [de] and [3ε] in dialect, the /a/ vowel is retained in canter (Fr. chanter) 'to sing' while the vowel /ε/ in the possessives min 'my', tin 'your', sin 'his/her' or the pronoun in 'one' corresponds not to /a/ but to /5/ in frangais standard. For the same nasal vowel inventory, one is thus obliged to learn a completely different distribution from frangais standard. It is thus an over-simplification to suggest that regional French is made up of non-standard phonological features from the dialect: only phono-

Dialect contact and koineization: the case of northern France

25

logical features showing distributional isomorphism with their frangais standard counterparts across the lexicon are retained. It is entirely unsurprising that post-adolescent learners of northern French, of the kind Trudgill describes, take as their model the variety which is most widely diffused and which has enjoyed the powerful support of a centralized state for over two centuries. Indeed, the role of standard French as lingua franca among mutually incomprehensible dialects has often been invoked to explain the decline of regional dialects, particularly since the First World War, as such factors as conscription began to foster interregional contact. As Encreve (1988: 279) notes, frangais standard today occupies a curiously asymmetrical position: "Ainsi, dans les conditions modernes de transmission de la parole, une langue minoritaire en locuteurs peut se trouver majoritaire en auditeurs." ['Thus, in modern conditions of transmission, a minority language in terms of numbers of speakers can be a majority language in terms of numbers of hearers']. Why, then, does levelling seem to have had such a powerful role in northern Sweden, but not in northern France? In both cases, a third variety seems to have emerged in the contact process, but whereas Thelander's RS is a genuinely intermediate variety, drawing on some traditional dialect features and rejecting others, regional French seems to be something entirely different in kind. Let us recall the differences between Burträsk as described by Thelander (1976: 104-105,1982: 68) and Avion. Burträsk is a small rural town which, while experiencing economic difficulties at the time the study was conducted, was nonetheless described as "relatively self-sufficient" by Thelander (1982: 68). Avion, by contrast, has undergone recent and profound change, engendered by the loss of the coal industry for which it was created. The population of Burträsk (6,000) is a third of that of Avion, and the town is 25 kilometres from the nearest major town (Skellefteä), while Avion forms part of a major conurbation (Lens). Furthermore, the population density in the two areas is strikingly different: a figure of 312 persons/km2 for the north of France contrasting with 4.1 persons/km2 in northern Sweden.6 Burträsk would seem on most counts, therefore, to meet Trudgill's description of a low-contact situation (Trudgill 1989: 231-234), while Avion conversely looks like a high-contact situation. Given the very different outcomes observed, it seems reasonable to ask whether contrasting extra-linguistic factors might have had differential effects on change in the two contact situations. Network-based studies (see especially Milroy and Milroy 1985; Milroy 1987; Trudgill 1986, 1989) suggest that the absence of "weak ties" with the outside world in a low-contact situation creates a powerful norm-enforcement mechanism which can resist the simplifying changes viewed as "natural" in

26

David Hornsby

the high-contact situations with which linguists, working for the most part in western urban societies, happen to be most familiar. In the latter case, the abundance of "weak ties" with the outside and the difficulties of learning new forms experienced by the post-adolescent learner favour simplification: only those forms which are easiest to learn are retained. In the low-contact situation, the survival of certain forms seems to run counter to the process of simplification. For example, Thelander's (ITnn-D) variant represents the retention of a masculine-feminine distinction for inanimates. One might expect that this distinction, which modern standard Swedish has abandoned, would represent an additional complexity to be abandoned by younger Burträskers. This, however, turns out not to be the case: the D% for this variable, 81 per cent, is the second highest for all of Thelander's variables. Trudgill (1989) notes that, in more extreme cases of geographical or social isolation, lack of contact may not only promote linguistic conservatism but actually favour complication in linguistic terms (he cites examples from Faroese, comparing these with modern Danish, and from German dialects in Waldeck). If contact is seen as a continuous variable, Burträsk would seem to occupy an intermediate point between Avion and the extreme isolation of the Faroe Islands. While showing a far lesser degree of "urbanness and publicness", in Thelander and Kristensen's (1984) terms, than a densely populated region of northern France, Burträsk's new economic and political circumstances (unemployment, the decline of a traditional industry, and the recent integration of the town politically into the Skellefteä region: Thelander, 1979: 124-125) have favoured contact with the outside on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Differences in the nature of extralinguistic factors (socio-economic and socio-political in this case), by virtue of their effects on local social networks, thus appear to have had important consequences for internal processes of change. We may therefore modify Trudgill's schema and suggest that, while all the koineization processes he identifies are likely to operate wherever dialect contact occurs, a low-contact situation may favour levelling while a high-contact situation is more likely to favour simplification.

Notes 1. Some speakers still maintain the dialectal distinction between third person singular and plural, e.g. il etot [ileto] vs. ils etottent [izetot], 2. Frangais standard is defined by Leon (1976) as "l'usage le plus frequent du parier de plus grand prestige et de plus grande extension" ['The most frequent usage of the

Dialect contact and koineization: the case of northern France

3. 4.

5. 6.

27

speech-variety with the most prestige and widest territorial expansion'], and is thus used as a yardstick for the comparison of non-standard varieties. The relative merits of typology and continuum models are discussed in Pooley (1996: 65-75). See, for example, the following ALF maps: for Variable 1: 255 (CHAUDIERE) 'boiler'; 288 (CIMETIERE) 'cemetery'; 468 (ENTIERE) 'whole'; for Variable 2: 82 (AVOIR) 'to have'; 198 (CANARD) 'duck' and for Variable 4b: 288 (CIMETIERE) 'cemetery'; 297 (CIVIERE) 'stretcher'; 468 (ENTIERE) 'whole'. See, for example, ALF maps 3 (A L'ABREUVOIR) 'at the drinking trough' and 82 (AVOIR) 'to have'. Sources: INSEE (1982): Recensement general de la population [General population census]; Swedish National Atlas (1971).

References Ager, Dennis 1990

Sociolinguistics and Contemporary French. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Carton, Fernand 1981 Les parlers ruraux de la region Nord-Picardie: situation sociolinguistique. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 29: 15-28. Carton, Fernand, Mario Rossi, Denis Autesserre, and Pierre Leon 1983 Les Accents des Frangais. Paris: Hachette. Encreve, Pierre 1988 La Liaison avec et sans enchatnement. Phonologie tridimensionnelle et usages du frangais. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Gadet, Frangoise 1996 Variabilite, variation, variete: le frangais d'Europe. Journal of French Language Studies 6/1: 75-98. Gillieron, Jules and Edmond Edmont 1902-1910 Atlas Linguistique de la France (13 volumes). Paris: Champion. Hornsby, David 1987 Sociolinguistic variation in a French mining community. M.Phil, dissertation, Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge. 1996 Dialect Shift: The Example of a French Mining Community. Ph.D. thesis, Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge. INSEE (1982)

Recensement general de la population de 1982. Paris: INSEE.

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David Hornsby

Kristensen, Kjeld and Mats Thelander 1984 On dialect levelling in Denmark and Sweden. Folia Linguistica 1-2: 223-246. Labov, William 1966 The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Leon, Pierre 1976

La Prononciation du frangais standard (second edition). Paris: Didier.

Milroy, James and Lesley Milroy 1985 Linguistic change, social network and speaker innovation. Journal of Linguistics 21: 339-384. Milroy, Lesley 1987

Language and Social Networks (second edition). Oxford: Blackwell.

Muller, Bodo 1985

Le Frangais d'aujourd'hui. Paris: Klincksieck.

Pooley, Tim 1996

Chtimi: The Urban Vernaculars of Northern France. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Thelander, Mats 1976 Code-switching or code-mixing? Linguistics 183: 103-123. 1979 Spräkliga variationsmodeller tillämpade pa nutida Burträsktal [Models of linguistic variation applied to the modern dialect of Burträsk]. Acta Universitatus Upsaliensis: Uppsala. 1982 A qualitative approach to the quantitative data of speech variation. In: Romaine, Suzanne (ed.), Sociolinguistic Variation in Speech Communities, 65-83. Oxford: Blackwell. Trudgill, Peter 1974 1986 1989

The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell. Contact and isolation in linguistic change. In: Lars Egil Breivik and Ernst Häkon Jahr (eds.), Language Change: Contributions to the Study of its Causes, 227-237. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Walter, Henriette 1988 Le Frangais dans tout les sens. Paris: Laffont.

The depicardization of the vernaculars of the Lille conurbation Tim Pooley

Abstract The principal aim of this study is to parallel the loss of Picard features in the vernaculars of the Lille metropolis from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century against socio-historical (i.e. extra-linguistic) developments. Sections 2. and 3. outline the socio-historical factors that seem to me to be of greatest sociolinguistic pertinence. Section 2. attempts to give an overview of how, since the mid-nineteenth century, Lille has been transformed from the largest city of an industrial region to the heart of an increasingly unified metropolis. Section 3. sketches the development of the conurbation since the French conquest in the seventeenth century. While Lille has undoubtedly served as a gateway for contact with Paris and the rest of France, industrial and demographic factors favoured the relatively independent but parallel development of other towns, particularly Roubaix and Tourcoing to the north east of the regional capital. Section 4. reviews how vernacular speech was perceived by historians at the time for which the earliest detailed and reliable accounts are available. These perceptions suggest strongly that, by the nineteenth century, use of Picard was largely restricted to the working classes, and that considerable geographical variation still existed. Lillois vernaculars had undergone far greater influence from French than other varieties, and to a lesser though describable degree, varieties identifiable with large towns compared to those associated with smaller less urbanized communities. Section 5. enumerates the corpora on which the main part of the analysis (sections 6. and 7.) is based. Taking 14 distinctively Picard features classified according to widely-accepted differentiation of levels of linguistic analysis - segmental phonology, phonotactics, morphology and syntax -1 trace their progressively-diminishing presence in the various corpora in chronological order, proposing case by case explanations of changes. Given that the two varieties in contact are so closely related, and the progressive erosion of the systemic autonomy of Picard, it is by no means straightforward to evaluate the importance of internal (within Picard) and external (contact with French) factors in the language change under study. The resistance or loss of features would seem, however, to be related to the degree of structural generalization, occurrence in frequent lexical items and perceptual salience. There are also clear indications that speaker perceptions vary over time in ways which are at variance in crucial respects with what one might call the historical facts -features of undoubtedly Picard historicity may be perceived as French; foreign immigrants have both more restricted access to the

30

Tim Pooley

most distinctive forms and show greater tolerance of the range of varieties which may be considered to be French. Indeed, the minority of historically Picard features to survive in the usage of young people at the end of the twentieth century are either those which were always common to (vernacular) French and Picard, or those which have come to be perceived as French.

1.

Introduction

The aim of this study is to map, as far as data sources allow, the progressive loss of characteristic Picard features in the vernacular speech forms of the Lille urban area against social changes since the mid nineteenth century. It would of course be simply foolhardy to attempt such a mapping other than in broad brush terms. While the linguistic material available for such an undertaking is undoubtedly sufficiently rich to ensure its viability - a detailed monograph completed in 1910 and four corpora of tape recordings, one of which was recorded in each decade from the 1960s to the 1990s - it nevertheless appears rather scanty when compared to the superabundance of information of a sociohistorical nature. The birth-dates of the subjects in these data (1850 to 1980), however, suggest a chronology that points very clearly to specific events and historical processes, which can be shown to parallel linguistic changes. The data may be seen as a series of synchronic snapshots, which allow the investigator to analyse how local vernacular varieties, which could be characterized as traditional forms of Picard, underwent a diachronic process of dedialectalization. In this perspective, the aims of the study may be seen to be threefold: first, to sketch the socio-historical changes through which Lille became the centre of the conurbation and served as a gateway for the spread of French forms in vernacular speech; second, taking as a starting point the most distinctive varieties for which oral evidence exists, to plot the stages of depicardization chronologically, bearing in mind the close genetic relationship between Picard and French varieties (vernacular as well as standard) and the obvious differentials in prestige; third, to analyse the internal factors discernible in the progressive loss of 14 features generally deemed to be distinctively Picard. It will be argued also that French-Picard language contact is of far greater significance than any contact between Picard and Flemish, whether caused by the geographical proximity of Netherlandic areas or the immigration of considerable numbers of Flemings into the Lille metropolis in the early part of the period under scrutiny.

The depicardization

of the vernaculars of the Lille conurbation

31

2. The development of the Lille conurbation While Lille is indisputably at the heart of a conurbation of around a million inhabitants (Figure 1; Table 1), the notion of the Lille metropolis is relatively recent. Although Lille was already a large town in the Middle Ages and one of the eight largest towns in France before the Industrial Revolution, it lies in close proximity to the second and third latest towns (Roubaix and Tourcoing) in the dipartement du Nord, which vied with Lille's traditional privileges under the Old Regime, and in the course of the nineteenth century accumulated economic and demographic strength equal to, and at times greater than, that of the regional capital. It was only in the latter half of the twentieth century with the decline of the dominant industry - textiles - and the progressive tertiarization of the regional economy and progressive integration of infrastructure developments that Lille has been transformed from a metropolis in fragments (Sueur 1971) to a polynuclear conurbation (Trenard 1977) to a "unified metropolis" (metropole rassemblee) (Cartouche 1998). Administrative changes introduced in the 1960s affirmed the pre-eminence of Lille. Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing was designated as a metropole d'equilibre 'couterweight metropolis' (Scargill 1983:37), an ORE AM 1 was set up in 1966 and the Communaute Urbaine de Lille 'Lille Urban Connurbation' (CUDL) consisting of 87 communes 'administrative districts' was set up in 1967. The DATAR2 committed to promoting the largest towns outside Paris to create metropolises that would truly serve to balance the overextended capital, favoured regional policies which promoted the tertiary sector in Lille and the proposed new town of Lille-Est (Villeneuve d'Ascq), while relying on the traditional industries of the textile centres (principally the north-eastern side of the conurbation) to ensure high levels of employment, effectively reducing them, to quote the words of Sueur (1971), to industrial suburbs (faubourgs industriels) (Figure 1). Regional development has been fostered by strategic infrastructure developments which have delivered a well-integrated public transport system consisting of bus, metro and tram services and, perhaps more importantly, a firstrate system of ring road and motorway links make virtually any part of the conurbation readily accessible. Geographically-static lifestyles (as depicted in Pierrard 1965) have given way to generalized mobility for all sections of the population, who frequently leave their town of residence for work, study and leisure. It is not only the development of the urban transport system but also the provision of leisure and shopping facilities that make Lille and Villeneuve d'Ascq the focal point of the metropolis. Moreover, Lille is the pivotal point of both the regional and national and indeed international transport system with

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Tim Pooley

high-speed train links to all parts of France and most parts of western Europe. The prestige of Lille has been further enhanced by high profile events such as the hosting of a G7 summit and a bid to stage the 2004 Olympic Games. Table 1.

Growth of population: Lille, Roubaix, Tourcoing

DATE

Conurbation

LILLE

1350

30,000

1789

63,000

1851

76,000 3

ROUBAIX

TOURCOING

8,000

12,184

34,656

27,615

100,299

58,008

1886

188,272

1900-1901

216,276

124,365

79,468

1975

975,000

189,942

109,230

102,239

1990

1,067,653

172,142

97,780

93,798

Sources: INSEE, Trenard (1972, 1974, 1977); Vanneufville (1997); Delattre (1998)

3.

The urban melting pot

It is undoubtedly true that social stability underpinned by a viable economic base is crucial for the maintenance of traditional varieties like Picard - the most frequently-observed cases being traditional agricultural communities. In urban centres, by contrast, speakers of diverse origins are thrown together in a linguistic melting pot (cf. Milroy 1992) which would be conducive to the adoption of varieties of wider geographical currency. Nor can there be any doubt about the significant difference of degree of contact between Lille and the surrounding areas with Parisian varieties (both standardized and vernacular) since the seventeenth century. Within three years of capturing Lille in 1667, Louis XIV had ensured that it was transformed into a fortress city with garrisons several thousands strong. Lille enjoyed direct road links with Paris from the early eighteenth century and benefitted from rail connections from the 1840s. The economic difficulties which occurred towards the end of that decade caused considerable numbers of Lillois to settle in Paris, mostly in the area around the Gare du Nord (Pierrard 1981: 161). While the demographic and economic expansion of Lille was undoubtedly remarkable - sufficient indeed for the ramparts to be partially dismantled in 1858 to allow the city to expand physically to accommodate new (engineering) and expanding industries (textiles) and the labour force who staffed them - it

The depicardization

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33

was outstripped by that of Tourcoing and Roubaix (particularly the latter), whose combined weight of population and productivity was greater than of Lille by the early twentieth century. The labour-intensive nature of the textile industry attracted first immigrants from the rural hinterland and increasingly huge influxes of Belgians including significant numbers of Flemish Belgians. From the time rail links first made it possible in the 1880s, cross-frontier commuting became common practice (Trenard 1977: 362). The interwar period saw the arrival of other immigrants - particularly Poles and Italians - and since the Second World War a steady trickle of southern Europeans and North Africans and, increasingly towards the end of the twentieth century, Asians and Black Africans. While the two World Wars arguably favoured the continuance of traditional industries and their concomitant demand for large numbers of low-skill jobs, the fact that the region was on both occasions a theatre of conflict and, for a time, under enemy occupation caused large-scale movement of populations which dismembered local communities (Pouchain 1998: 189). The progressive decline of the major industrial towns on the north eastern side of the conurbation was accelerated by the oil crisis in the 1970s - for example, half of the mills in Tourcoing were closed down in that decade (Lottin 1986: 340) only to be reduced still further in the 1980s (Pouchain 1998: 322-361). While it proved possible to adapt industrial and commercial premises to a now service-dominated economy, the renovation of the housing stock and living environment has proved to be a thornier problem, particularly given the proximity of more attractive areas within easy reach for workers with reasonable earning power. The poorer-quality housing serves to accommodate to unrepresentative levels unskilled workers and people of immigrant origin both categories relatively ill favoured in the changed labour market.

4.

Social and linguistic change

Historians' accounts confirm the perception that Lille played a leading role in the adoption of French and the concomitant abandoning of Picard. According to Lambin (1980: 259), the bourgeoisie, eagerly emulated by the petite bourgeoisie, had taken to use French as their exclusive means of everyday communication by the early eighteenth century, leaving Picard to the common people. By the mid nineteenth century, according to Pierrard (1972: 146), Picard was "terriblement abätardi, sans orthographe, penetre et deforme par l'argot et le mauvais fran9ais", 'terribly bastardized, without spelling rules, shot through and corrupted by slang and bad French'. In Tourcoing, by contrast, according to Van den Driessche [1928] 1977: 203), Picard was the main language of everyday communi-

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cation until well into the nineteenth century. Viez ([1910] 1978: 8) notes the enduring prevalence of Picard in Roubaix in the early twentieth century despite progressive francization favoured by urbanization and industrialization. The rapid urbanization of large numbers of rural speakers in sufficiently high concentrations, however, can result in what Bortoni-Ricardo (1985) calls rurban communities speaking rurban vernaculars. Such urbanization tended to be permanent - what appear to be, in retrospect, horrendous conditions in factories were preferable to the inadequate subsistence of a farm - and to produce low mobility populations - because of the lack of infrastructure. The linguistic consequences of such anarchic development are acknowledged in everyday language - the traditional patois pay sans 'peasant dialects' were transformed into patois ouvriers 'worker dialects'. From being an unfavourable factor, the particular form of industrialization and its concomitant urbanization actually favoured the preservation of (an albeit increasingly francofied) Picard in an urban environment for several generations. In areas where such factors were not present, Picard varieties which were presumably more conservative and indisputably more distinct from French have been noted. Arguably the most unfrancofied variety of Picard documented in the Lille conurbation was that of Gondecourt as described by Cochet (1933) and repeatedly cited by Flutre (1977). It is no coincidence that Gondecourt in the nineteenth century missed out on industrial development which enabled neighbouring communes to prosper, resulting in extreme poverty and high levels of mendicity (Pouchain 1998: 45). Where historians have commented on the linguistic effect of Flemish immigration (e.g. Pierrard 1965: 110) they have noted it as a factor favouring francization. Linguists studying comparable contemporary situations, e.g. Roche (1989: 1), have observed that foreigners are motivated to acquire a variety of wider geographical currency than a local vernacular. While, in the longer term, immigration was a factor in depicardization, the buoyancy of the region's staple industry was such that it guaranteed work for generations until well into the twentieth century and therefore served as an economic base for keeping together both the community and its traditional linguistic practices characterized by ordinary speakers as patois ouvriers as opposed to patois paysans. Seen in retrospect, the forces of diffusion (Bortoni-Ricardo 1985), i.e. those favouring depicardization, are clearly greater than those which nurtured the maintenance of Picard (focusing). What is perhaps remarkable is that the forces of focusing proved strong enough to resist the forces of diffusion for several generations.

The depicardization of the vernaculars of the Lille conurbation

35

5. The corpora The linguistic data used for this study are derived from oral sources: first, the monograph by Henri Viez on the phonology of the Roubaix vernacular which dates from 1910; second, a sample of the recordings made in the 1960s which are the basis for Carton (1972), with occasional cross-reference to the examples of northern accents recorded in 1977 and used in Carton et al. (1983); third, a corpus of spontaneous group conversations featuring 61 adult speakers recorded by Pooley in 1983 (Pooley 1988,1996); fourth, group recordings of 15 adolescents from a Section d'Education Specialisee 'Section for Educationally Special Needs' in Marcq-en-Baroeul in 1995 (Pooley 1996). The data admittedly raise some difficulties when one seeks to compare like with like. Both Viez and Carton worked within the dialectological tradition, where it was customary to seek out speakers who were archetypal exemplars of the vernacular speech of a particular locality. Moreover, while Carton's recordings were available for new analysis, Viez' account is an overtly acknowledged attempt to describe "pure patois" using mainly data from speakers who were born in Roubaix around 1850 at a time when the various areas of Roubaix, Tourcoing and Wattrelos retained much of their village-like character before the major socio-economic factors responsible for depicardization-compulsory education, urbanization, immigration and emigration - began to take effect. All the informants studied in Carton (1972) were born prior to the First World War (birth dates between 1874 and 1895) and were clearly selected as typical exemplars of regional vernacular speech. They were interviewed individually, although other members of the household who happened to be present were allowed to interact freely, invariably, as it turned out, in largely depicardized French. The recordings consist of short stretches (lasting between 90 seconds and 4 minutes) of mainly monologual discourse by seven speakers: two from Lille, one from Roubaix, two from Tourcoing, one from Wattrelos and one from Hem. Although speakers were encouraged to produce the patois of their youth, that is obviously only partially possible and code mixing could not be filtered out. Indeed, Carton himself clearly differentiates between the patois-dommmt speakers, all of whom lived on the north eastern side of the conurbation and the regional French-dominant subjects which include the most dialectal speakers from Lille. The data used in Carton et al. (1983) which were taken from a phone-in radio show, constitute relatively formal and largely depicardized speech from three Roubaix factory workers all of whom were born in 1911. The Pooley data were collected on Labovian principles but the dimension of social class was deliberately narrowed down in order to concentrate on what might be somewhat loosely called working-class speakers (employes and ouvriers). The

36

Tim Pooley

61 informants recorded in 1983 are almost exclusively adults recorded in self-selected gatherings in the homes of people contacted by the "friend of a friend" technique used with such great success by Lesley Milroy (1980) in Belfast. The strategy of making group recordings proved highly effective in overcoming the socalled observer's paradox, and the recordings represent a realistic sample of the spontaneous speech of those speakers at the time. While the application of Labovian techniques is generally based on the assumption of a single variety with internal variation, one of the most clear-cut results to emerge from the 1983 data was the significant difference in the use of Picard features by informants educated to the minimum level for their generation as opposed to those who had succeeded in passing the first major hurdle in secondary education. The 1995 corpus consists of recordings of teenage pupils attending the Special Needs Section (SES) of a school in the working-class area of Rouges-Barres in the reputedly bourgeois town of Marcq-en-Baroeul at the centre of the urban heartland of the Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing conurbation. The 15 SES pupils were selected as informants because they represent one of the least well (certainly in terms of overcoming educational hurdles) educated groups for their generation - despite being subject to compulsory schooling to at least the age of 16. The group described were in their third year of secondary education and aged between 13 and 15 at the time of the of the recordings. They were, without exception, from what would be traditionally described as strong working class backgrounds - their parents being qualified for only low skill or unskilled manual jobs. The recording of the pupils in single sex groups of friends again proved successful in eliciting spontaneous and highly vernacular output. Although the dates of the corpora clearly support a claim that the data cover the whole of the twentieth century, it is legitimate to argue, given the birth date of Viez' and indeed of Carton's oldest informants, that the material makes it possible to go back to the mid nineteenth century in apparent time. This material forms a series of synchronic snapshots which enable the investigator to attempt a realistic and detailed account of the process of dedialectalization by which the Picard features used in the vernaculars of Lille conurbation were levelled out over several generations.

6.

The Picard features

This section describes a list of 14 Picard features which are depicted as being used systematically in Viez, but which show various degrees of variability with French alternatives in the other corpora. Although these features can be sub-

The depicardization

of the vernaculars of the Lille conurbation

37

classified according to linguistic criteria, most are relatively difficult to attribute to a specific locality within Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing. The first stage of depicardization, however, is the levelling of highly localized forms mentioned by Viez. This author cites a number of (mainly phonological) features, which made it possible to distinguish speakers from Lille, Tourcoing, Roubaix and Wattrelos. He claims that traditional Lillois Picard could be differentiated from the varieties used in the north-eastern part of the present-day conurbation by two consonantal features: the yod and affricated consonants. In traditional Lille Picard, fete 'party', bete 'stupid', beau 'beautiful' were pronounced [fjet], [bjet], [bjo] whereas they were yodless in and around Roubaix and Tourcoing. In other contexts, yodless forms made the Roubaix-Tourcoing distinctive from their French and Lille equivalents [kaRti], [piR] and [di] quartier 'quarter', 'neighbourhood', Pierre 'Peter', Dieu 'God', cf. [kaRtje], [pjeR], [dj0]. A number of frequent lexical items are pronounced with [k] in Lillois and an affricated consonant [tfj in Roubaix and Tourcoing, e.g. Lillois [kä] quand 'when', [kje] chien 'dog', [kel] quelle 'which', Roubaix-Tourcoing [tja] [t/je] [tfel]. While the affricated variants are clearly more localized than the velar stops, the yodful forms might with equal, if not greater, plausibility be interpreted as vernacular French forms (cf. Lodge 1996). This interpretation becomes all the more persuasive when one looks at vowel variants. Even the most distinctive varieties of Lille Picard were considerably poorer in diphthongal variants than the varieties used in the north-eastern corner of the conurbation, e.g. in the sou, cou and tout series 'cent', 'neck', 'all'. What is more, Roubaix speakers could be distinguished from Tourcoing informants by their pronunciation of such items, i.e. [tiiu] (Roubaix) and [ t u j (Tourcoing) (Viez 1978: 25). The realization of [i] vowels made it possible to distinguish Roubaisians from the central areas of the town and the eastern quarters (Les Trois Ponts and Le Pile, cf. Figure 2 (Viez, 1978: 25) which were urbanized relatively late and where the locals maintained a pronunciation characteristic of the adjoining areas of Leers, Lys-lez-Lannoy and Wattrelos, e.g. ennemi 'enemy' was transcribed as [enm°i] for Roubaix and Tourcoing, compared to [enmoe'] with greater stress on the first part of the diphthong in Wattrelos. Viez observed that these geographically-localizable variants were characteristic of the rural varieties that could still be heard in the mouths of the older generation who had acquired their Picard before industrialization, urbanization and the introduction of compulsory primary education. The loss of these features was one of the early indications of linguistic levelling. The 1983 Pooley corpus includes examples of another form of levelling. The occasional use of Picard forms, particularly by Roubaisian speakers born between 1938 and

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Tim Pooley

1952, shows preference for Lillois over more local variants, e.g. yodful forms such as [jo] eau 'water' and [k] forms rather than affricated variants as in [kje] chien 'dog'. 6.1. List of Picard features Phonology - segmental features (1) vocalic features (1) (2) (3)

Diphthongization of close o, e.g. [k i e b^o] qu'il est beau! 'how handsome he is!'. [ε] for French [a] e.g. [me3e] manger 'to eat'. Denasalization, e.g. [afd] enfant 'child'.

Phonology - segmental features (2) consonantal features (4) (5) (6)

[J*] for French [s] as in [gaR/5] gargon 'boy'. The absence of the so-called I mouille ('palatalized Γ) e.g. [tRaval] travail 'work'. Word-final consonant devoicing, (WFCD) e.g. [saj] sage 'well-behaved'.

Phonology - linking features (7) (8)

Assimilation of the definite article, e.g. [b bil] la bile 'bile'. The so-called intrusive d, e.g. [i η d avo ηέ] il n'y en avait pas 'there weren't any'.

Grammatical features (1) morphology (9)

Use of Picard -ot ending in imperfects, conditionals and certain present tense forms e.g. [3 kono] je connais Ί know'. (10) Use of Picard possessives, masculine singular min, tin, sin (cf. standard French 'mon' 'ton' 'son'); feminine singular'm, 't, 's e.g. [me gaRjo] mon gargon 'my boy/son' [amfem] mafemme 'my wife'. (11) Use of pronouns mi, ti, Ii (moi, toi, lui 'me', 'you' 'him'). (12) Metathesis of reiterative prefix, e.g. [iz aRkmeft] ils recommencent 'they start again'. Grammatical features (2) syntax (13) Use of the negative particles nin and point. (14) Use of qu'elle in relative clauses, e.g. la femme qu'elle habite Ιά 'the woman who lives there'.

The depicardization of the vernaculars of the Lille conurbation

39

7. Tracing the changes Table 2.

Segmental vocalic features (1) to (3) in the various corpora

Corpus Viez (1910) born 1850-1860 Carton (1972i) born 1874-1891

(1) ο diphthongs

(2) [ό]-[έ]

(3) denasalization

Ρ

Ρ

Ρ

P/F

Ρ

P/F

d

Carton (1972ii) born 1892-1896

F

P/F

P/F

Carton et al. (1983) born 1911

F

F

F

Pooley born pre 1938

F

P/F

Fd

Pooley born 1938-1952

F

F

d

F

Pooley born 1953-1965

F

F

d

F

Pooley born circa 1980

F

F

4

F

Key: F: French form; P: Picard form; Fd: French form highly dominant but not exclusive

7.1. ο diphthongs A diphthongized form of close ο is one of the key features which make it possible to distinguish the traditional varieties of Roubaix-Tourcoing from that of Lille. Viez (1978: 7) notes two series of first elements in the pronunciation of his oldest informants, i.e. [bffio] bois 'wood', [pffio] pot 'pot', [Ις,ο] either coq 'cockerel' or coup 'blow' or chaud 'hot', [bleo] bloc 'block', [k veo] chevaux 'horses'. Even among such speakers, a certain degree of phonological levelling had taken place by the late nineteenth century, giving diphthongs with extremely weak but nonetheless discernible first elements - a phenomenon which Viez calls fracture vocalique 'vocalic fracture', e.g. [k'o]. The diphthongized variants considerable correlation with phonotactic distribution, occurring significantly more in tone-group final position, e.g. [έ bo lif] un beau livre 'a beautiful book', [k i e bffio] qu'il est beau! 'how handsome he is! \ While the influence of standard French would have favoured the neutralization of distinct lexical sets through vocalic fracture and eventual monophthongization and the opening of the ο triggered by the realization of the final consonant in items such as coq 'cockerel', analogical changes from within Picard might well have contributed to the loss of diphthongs. Several frequent endings e.g. [eto] etait 'was' (Feature 9) never seem to have been pronounced with diphthongized forms, perhaps not surprisingly, given that the verb etre 'to be' rarely occurs in

40

Tim Pooley

utterance-final position. Moreover, any influence from speakers of Picard varieties with fronted or raised variants, e.g. [k0] or [ku] coq 'cockerel' would presumably have favoured monophthongization. This highly localized and relatively infrequent variant is, not surprisingly, one of the first to be eliminated in the convergence process. The diphthongized variant is used in the majority of relevant cases in Carton (1972i) but is highly marginal in Carton (1972ii) and absent from the Pooley corpora. 7.2.

[α]-[έ]

Despite its stereotypical character, the Picard variant [ε] survived remarkably well. Its use in Carton (1972i) is systematic and it behaves as a Labovian style variable in the speech of subjects born between 1892 and 1938, albeit with diminishing frequencies and shrinking lexical ranges, [έ] moves increasingly towards lexicalization among the post Second World War generations in the 1983 Pooley data and has effectively disappeared from the speech of subjects born around 1980. Viez' examples (1978: 82) suggest that this phonologically conditioned small-set variable5 (cf. Milroy 1992: 70; Pooley 1996: 97) was starting to erode its traditional confines by assimilating some standard French words with [a], e.g. etranger 'stranger'. This apparent progress towards becoming a large-set variable was reversed during the first wave of industrialization and for the oldest speakers in the 1983 corpus, [έ] had become a lexically conditioned small-set variant (used in 47 items, with 28 of these occurring with more than 10 per cent [έ]). For the generations born post 1952, the lexical range of this variant has shrunk to such a degree that it is more realistic to speak of lexical alternatives containing either [ά] or [έ],

7.3.

Denasalization

The denasalization of [a] might be considered as part of the [α]-[έ] variable since it occurs only in a tiny subset of barely half a dozen items all of which are potential sites for the Picard [έ] variant, e.g. [afä] enfant 'child', [akoR] encore 'again', [atet] entendre 'to hear', [benatedy] bien entendu 'of course', [patalo] pantalon 'trousers', [aRjet] 'Henriette' and [dtazete] de temps en temps 'from time to time'; (sometimes pronounced [tezcted], Viez 1978: 87). Even so short a list is longer than of a number of other varieties where forms such as [efä] occur, e.g. Lateur (1951). That such items were assimilated into the [έ] set should come as no surprise, given the high degree of dialect contact in the Lille

The depicardization of the vernaculars of the Lille conurbation

41

conurbation. The levelling off of even small lexical subsets is, however, a step on the road to convergence, since it makes Picard more isomorphic with French.6 Table 3.

Segmental consonantal features (4) to (6) in the various corpora

Corpus

(4) [sHJ]

(5) / mouille

(6) WFCD

Ρ pd

Ρ

Carton (1972i) born 1874-1891

Ρ pd

P/F

Carton (1972ii) born 1892-1896

P/F

P/F

P/F

F

P/F

P/F

P/F

P/F

P/F

Viez (1910) born 1850-1860

Carton et al. (1983) born 1911 Pooley born pre 1938

d

Pooley born 1938-1952

P/F

F

P/F

Pooley born 1953-1965

F

F

P/F

Pooley born circa 1980

F

F

Fd

7.4.

[s]-m

Although this Picard variant of this variable is one of the most stereotypical (cf. the name Chtimi) it is not, unlike [ε], common to all Picard varieties. The history of the two features is otherwise very similar - a small-set variant occurring in contexts conditioned by its Latin roots (the so-called soft c, i.e. followed by e or /). Viez (1978: 120) lists examples which suggest that it was extending its lexical space and/or assimilating French words, e.g. [JitRo] citron 'lemon' and [piJe] pisser 'to piss'. Like [ε], it is used consistently in Carton (1972i) and variably within its traditional lexical range in Carton (1972ii). Speakers born prior to the Second World War in the 1983 Pooley data use it as a lexically conditioned small set variable, occurring in only 16 items and significantly more in three common grammatical items c'est 'it is', ςα 'that' and ici 'here' in contrast to lexical items such as gargon 'boy'. The 1983 corpus shows significant distributional differences among informants for these two lexical sets. Only the pre-1939 speakers show any real evidence of variability in the gargon lexical set. The generation of 1938-1952 clearly manifest this lexicalization, albeit variably, whereas it is highly marginal for the speakers born between 1953 and 1965 and it has effectively disappeared from the speech of those bora around 1980.

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Tim Pooley

7.5. I mouille Although historically the absence of palatalized I is a characteristic feature of Picard, it appears to have been perceived at least for a time as a mark of regional French, occurring in the examples presented in Carton et al. (1983: 23-27). An incident which occurred during my own fieldwork strengthens this point of view. One of my own informants having taken it upon himself to give the group a lesson in Picard vocabulary cited [butel] bouteille 'bottle' as a French form. Table 3 suggests that it was clearly a Picard variant in Viez and Carton (1972i), but showing variability which could be characterized as [Vj#]-[V1#], in Carton (1972ii), e.g. [eel] ceil 'eye', [tRaval] travail 'work', [fil] fille 'girl'. This curious lexical set is derived from a series of Latin words containing the sequence li, which became word-final as a result of the dropping of a weakened final vowel, e.g. FILIA. What is even more surprising is that some of the preceding vowels are clearly Picard, particularly the centralized i as in [fil] There may be a number of reasons why [Vj#]-[V1#] was perceived as French by speakers born in the early decades of the twentieth century: first, its low perceptual salience, second, the fact that it is a lexically-defined small-set variable affecting only items which may appear phonetically quite disparate, and third, most of the items affected are not lexically distinct from their French equivalents.

7.6. Word-final consonant devoicing (WFCD) Table 4.

Phonological linking features (7) and (8) in the various corpora

Corpus Viez (1910) born 1850-1860

(7) le assimilation

(8) linking d

Ρ

Ρ

Carton (1972i) born 1874-1891

P/F±g

pd

Carton (1972ii) born 1892-1896

Fd±g

F

Carton et al. (1983) born 1911

d

F

d

F

Pooley born pre 1938

F

Fd

Pooley born 1938-1952

F

F

Pooley born 1953-1965

F

F

Pooley born circa 1980

F

F

Key: as for Table 2; ±g: plus or minus audible gender marking

The depicardization of the vernaculars of the Lille conurbation

43

WFCD is one of the most persistent Picard phonological features, remaining authentically variable in the speech of subjects born in the 1950s and 1960s. It is, however, highly marginal in the 1995 corpus and the one speaker to make use of it7 was openly put down by one of his classmates and told "Parle fran9ais!" 'Speak French!' The persistence of WFCD may be explained by its wide lexical range and its low perceptual salience. Its lexical range includes any item ending with a voiced consonant which has a unvoiced correlative in French, i.e. [b], [d], [g], [v], [z] and [3]. Its low perceptual salience may be favoured by a number of factors: first, it is probably perceived by speakers as a much more disparate phenomenon that the rather abstract but elegant definition of [± VOICE] in word-final position; second, WFCD occurred over a narrower range of consonants in many Picard varieties, cf. Flutre (1977); third, it is perceived as a regional French feature in all varieties where speakers have been in contact with Germanic varieties (Baetens-Beardsmore 1971; Philipp 1985: 19-26; Carton 1987: 44). Certain common hyperdialectalisms suggest that speakers perceived WFCD as French, e.g. [eglij] eglise 'church' which has Picard [J] for a French [s] which occurs as the result of a very un-French devoicing, cf. [egliz]—[eglis]. 7.7. The assimilation of le Müller (1988:179) argues that preliterate speakers tend to stress accented syllables and reduce unstressed ones resulting in modifications - assimilations and elisions - particularly to frequent grammatical items that literate speakers who are more aware of the written form would tend not to make. Viez quotes a considerable number of assimilations and elisions. One of the most frequent is that of the singular definite article with the noun that it governs, e.g. [tu ν vilaj] tout le village 'all the village', [sy s sei] sur la chaise 'on the chair'. When not preceded by another closely linked grammatical element such as a quantifier or a preposition, metathesis often occurs, as in [appläje] le plancher 'the floor'. Such assimilations result in geminated consonants which may easily go unnoticed in fast speech, and in the neutralization of gender marking, as in [sy s sei]. Table 4 suggests that gender-marked forms appeared at a relatively early stage. All the subjects in Carton (1972) use such assimilations variably and the subjects in Carton (1972i) may have used distinguished more assimilated forms and gender distinctive forms than their counterparts in Carton (1972ii). Nor do the data corroborate Chaurand's claim (1968: 375) that consistent use of /-forms occurs with gender neutralization, e.g. [al pek] ά la peche 'fishing' is one of the principal markers of traditional varieties. While Carton et al. (1983)

44

Tim Pooley

curiously contains an assimilated form, comparable tokens proved to be extremely marginal even among the oldest informants in the 1983 Pooley corpus. 7.8.

Linking d

Unlike feature (6), linking d is a very restricted phenomenon occurring only in sequences of en + a form of avoir 'to have', e.g. [i η d avo po] il n'y en avaitpas 'there was not any'. This distributional restriction on linking d is in fact a clear indicator of levelling, since it could occur in previous centuries with a larger but presumably lexically-defined set of verbs with initial a. e.g. je vous d'apporterai 'I'll bring you some'. 8 That linking d does not occur in Carton (1972ii) is a little surprising but the 1983 Pooley data suggest that it is only used by the most picardisant 'Picard-dominant' speakers born before the Second World War. Table 5.

Picard morphological features (9) to (12) in the various corpora

Corpus

(9) -ot endings

(10) min, 'm possessives

(11) mi pronouns

(12) re prefix

Carton (1972i) born 1874-1891

Ρ pd

Ρ pd

Ρ Ρ

Ρ pd

Carton (1972Ü) born 1892-1896

P/F

P/F

P/F

P/F

F

F

F

Fd

Pooley born pre 1938

P/F

P/F

P/F

P/F

Pooley born 1938-1952

ρ

Pooley born 1953-1965 Pooley born circa 1980

Viez (1910) born 1850-1860

Carton et al. (1983) born 1911

Fd

F

d

Fd

F

Fd

Fd

F

F

F

F

F

7.9. Picard grammatical morphology Grammatical morphology is generally regarded as one of the main elements for identifying stretches of speech as belonging to one or other of two closely related varieties and in the French dialectological tradition the key factor in differentiating traditional dialects from regional varieties of French (Warnant 1973; Tuaillon 1977; Taverdet 1977; Eloy 1997). Some linguists, such as Wolfram (1969: 205), have argued that, while phonological variation tends to be quantitative, grammatical variation tends to be qualitative, i.e. speakers will opt

The depicardization of the vernaculars of the Lille conurbation

45

for one or other of two morphological systems. Table 5 suggests that while the Picard variants were dominant for the oldest generation, there was an extended period of variability with the French forms gaining ground over the subsequent generations, with speakers born after the Second World War, making but vestigial use of the Picard morphemes. The -ot endings seem to have been the first of these features to give way to its French equivalents. Even for the oldest speakers in Pooley (1983) they appear to be strongly lexicalized being mainly restricted to the most frequent verbs [eto] 'was', [avo] 'had' and [alo] 'went' even in the speech of the most picardisants 'Picard-speaking individuals'. Picard possessives show a similar chronological pattern, as well as considerable lexical restrictions in Pooley (1983). The more distinctive masculine forms, e.g. [me PCR] mon pere 'my father' are significantly more frequent than the weaker feminine and pre-vocalic forms, e.g. [am meR] ma mere 'my mother' [snasjet] son assiette 'his/her plate'. The feminine forms appear to be more strongly lexicalized occurring with a small set of nouns e.g. [am mezo] ma maison 'my house' and considerably less in the second person than either the first or third person (Pooley 1996: 150). Lexicalization seems to have reduced usage among the post 1938 generations largely to kinship terms e.g. [sn om] son homme 'her husband', [sfem] safemme 'his wife'. The singular disjunctive pronoun set mi, ti, li 'me', 'you', 'him' manifests considerable parallels with possessives. Apart from the fact that a few French possessives occur in Carton (1972i),9 the examples show comparable patterns of social distribution and levelling in the Pooley data. While mi and li were considerably more frequent than ti, there are a number of reasons why li in particular should be used more frequently. First, the name Chtimi accords stereotype status to ti and mi. Second, li may be used as a clitic as well as a disjunctive pronoun, e.g. je li ai dit Ί told her/him'. Third, it may occur as a reduced form of standard French lui, particularly in fast speech. Fourth the francofied forms of mi and ti, moi 'me' and toi 'you' are prime sites for the occurrence of the strong regional French marker, the back or velarized a (cf. Pooley, 1996: 132). 7.10. re- forms This variable is probably best seen as a matter of derivational morphology. Forms such as [iz aRkmet] ils recommencent 'they start again' could be construed as examples of metathesis rather like the examples of epenthetic e in strings such as [eppläje] leplancher 'the floor'. Such an interpretation fails to

46

Tim Pooley

account for the various degrees of openness indicated for the initial vowel, i.e. [aRkmeJe] [aeRkmefe] [cRkmefe] recommencer 'to start again', although the vowel in both the Carton and Pooley (1983) data is generally quite open. A more or less fully open realization raises the possibility of ambiguity after la, e.g. [i volaRmet] Us vont la remettre/l'armettre 'they're going to put it back'. Table 5 shows that the ar- prefix follows similar patterns of convergence to the features of grammatical morphology, although the factor that it occurs in Carton et al. (1983) might be taken as an indication that it has lower perceptual salience. The output of the oldest speakers in the Pooley 1983 corpus suggests significantly reduced distributional range both lexically (small number of frequent verbs) and grammatically (principally occurring in infinitival forms). 7.11. Negative particles Table 6. Syntactic features (13) and (14) in the various corpora (13) ninlpoint 'not'

(14) qu'eile relatives

P/F

Ρ

Carton (19721) born 1874-1891

P/F

P/F/N

Carton (1972ii) born 1892-1896

p/pio

F/N

F

P/F

d

P/F

Corpus Viez (1910) born 1850-1860

Carton et al. (1983) born 1911 Pooley born pre 1938

F

Pooley born 1938-1952

Fd

F

Pooley born 1953-1965

Fd

Fd

Pooley born circa 1980

F

F"

Table 6 indicates that negative particles were variable in the speech of Viez' informants, which suggests that [ηε] and [po] 'not' were perceived as equally Picard. Other markedly but not exclusively Picard particles occurred, particularly [mi] mie and [pwe] point (both 'not'), and indeed the latter is used most frequently by the Lillois speakers in Carton (1972ii). That pas 'not' may be considered as a Picard form certainly contributed to the marginalization of nin and point, but this particle also served as a kind of "Trojan horse" to promote the velarized a. The frequent velarization and rounding of the vowel of pas in all varieties, including the most standard, of French undoubtedly produced fruitful ground for code mixing.

The depicardization

of the vernaculars of the Lille conurbation

47

7.12. Subject relatives Traditional Picard varieties mark all relative clauses with que. To restrict the discussion to subject relatives these invariably conformed to the pattern que PROsubje.g. (1)

Cet homme qu'il est Ιά 'This man who is there'. (2) C'est eile qu'elle est responsable 'It's her who's responsible'. (3) Des gens qu'ils arrivent 'People who arrive'. (4) Des questions qu'elles seront jamais resous (sic!) 'Questions that will never be resolved'. Carton et al. and the 1983 Pooley data contain examples with que c'est or que ςα, which do not appear to be traditional Picard forms but ones inspired by the influence of vernacular French (cf. Pooley 1996: 193). Indeed, relative clauses are an extremely propitious area for convergence. Not only is the universal relative clause marker que shared with other langue d'oil (northern French) varieties, including vernacular forms of French, but also, and more significantly, there are a considerable number of cases - given the ubiquitous apocope of I - where it is impossible to be certain whether the speaker intended qu'il(s) 'that he/they' or qui 'who, that'. What is more, examples such as (4) are extremely rare (it is the only one in the Pooley corpora), since ils 'they' is both masculine and feminine in Chtimi as in other vernacular varieties. Distinctiveness for the masculine forms is thus restricted to pre-vocalic position, with the que-based forms being audible only through the linking consonant. In the plural, [z] shows considerable and indeed increasing vitality among the post Second World War generations, e.g. [le3ekizaRift] les gens qu'ils arrivent 'the people who are arriving' (Pooley 1996: 279). Pre-vocalic masculine singulars manifest a conflict of vernacularity. Vernacular que requires forms more associated with formal styles of the standard variety, i.e. I to be audibly discernible. Although there are occurrences of qu'il in the 1983 Pooley data, they are few in number and restricted to a single (and most frequent) context (before est 'is',). The only distinctive subject relative which is indicative of picardite 'Picardness' therefore is qu'elle 'that she', which shows social distributions not unlike those of the Picard morphological variants, despite the lack of data in Carton (1972ii). Subject relative clauses are a prime example of the way in which dialect contact can cause the structural systems of varieties to change without their fal-

48

Tim Pooley

ling into total disuse. Indeed, the qu'ils has thrived by, as it were, reinventing itself. From being part of a coherent syntactic system it now manifests itself purely as a rather strange linking consonant in a specific grammatical context.

8. The stages of depicardization Table 7 is an attempt to summarize the findings described in section 7. While, as in any tabulation, there are inevitably elements of (over)simplification, the broad outlines of the progressive loss of Picard features in apparent time emerge with both considerable clarity and structural plausibility. The Carton et al. (1983: 23-27) data which were selected as examples of regional French having been removed, the tabulation shows the degree of vitality of the 14 features discussed in section 7. on a four point scale: + ±

Picard variant used consistently variability with both Picard and French variants occurring with reasonable frequency m the Picard variant occurs but with less than five per cent frequency - French variants only Such a scale produces a left to right ordering of features that gives systematic use precedence over variable occurrence, and variable use over marginal occurrence. This tabulation is suggestive of the order in which the relevant parts of the Picard linguistic system were levelled out or replaced by their French equivalents and allows the formulation of a hypothesis concerning the sequence of events. The first Picard features to be "levelled o f f ' are the linking phenomena (assimilation of the definite article (7) and the linking d (8)) and the most localized phonological feature (ο diphthongs (1)). It is in fact surprising that ο diphthongs occur even marginally in Carton (1972ii), given that the speakers are Lillois rather than from the Roubaix-Tourcoing area and that Viez noted the regular use of weakened forms even among his most picardisant subjects. It might be argued that speakers became more word-conscious with the advent of compulsory primary education (Ferry Laws, 1881-1886) which came too late for the speakers in Carton (1972i) and just in time for those in Carton (1972ii). Such an argument must be set against the somewhat ambiguous evidence of relatively low rates of literacy in Lille (48 per cent in 1872, Pierrard (1965)) compared to (80+ per cent) in the Nord prior to the enactment of the Ferry legislation, and the fact that literacy levels actually dropped in the NordPas-de-Calais during the intense period of industrial expansion prior to the First World War (1892-1913) (Trenard 1977; Lottin 1986).

The depicardization of the vernaculars of the Lille conurbation

\o

+ -H

-H

-H -H -H S

+ +

-H

+1 -H ε

CM + +

-Η

-Η -Η 6

-η -η

-η

ε

ε

ε

+ +

-η

+ι

ι

ε

+ +

-Η

-Η ε I

+ +

-Η

-Η ε I

+ -Η

-Η

-Η ε I

+ +1

-Η

+1

+ +

-Η

+ +

-Η

-Η

+ -η

ή

ε

ON

υ

ε ο ••— ιI» ι— CS t— O Nvo O 00s eο 1 (S 'S Os oo u Χ

00 CO Os — ι1 oIi>

(Ν

ν© Ο

as ON 00 ON 7oo 7CO Λι

m ON a C G Β Ο Ο &

X Χ

JH ο "o Ο ο &H OH

υ .h υ ρ c ο X Χι ω ο Ο ο Ο OH ΟΗ V) ON1 C c ο

49

50

Tim Pooley

Of perhaps greater significance is the long-standing literary tradition of Lillois patois going back at least to Franfois Cottignies alias Brüle-Maison (1678-1740) which shows consistent use of I forms with gender neutralization (as in Chaurand 1968). It may be therefore that the assimilations so characteristic of the area to the north east of Lille were a relatively local feature comparable to ο diphthongs. Although linking d survives marginally in the 1983 Pooley data, it is somewhat vestigial and for the pre-Second World War generations something of a feminine feature. Three features occur in the speech of the oldest speakers in Pooley (1983) but are absent from that of speakers born between 1938 and 1952: [tRaval]-type pronunciations (5), [aR] reiterative prefixes (12) and denasalization (3). All three are small-set features which occur in a very restricted set of items, which can only be defined lexically. Such limited privileges of occurrence made them particularly vulnerable to further levelling. While it is perhaps a little curious that the Picard reiterative prefix did not appear to survive as long as the elements of grammatical morphology, two factors favouring relatively early convergence are worthy of note. First, occurrences of the vowel-first reiterative prefix in the 1983 corpus show clear signs of distributional restrictions - basically limited to infinitival forms - in a small and relatively disparate set of items; second, it was in competition with a majority of items which, from a relatively early stage, would have been only used in their French forms 12 (cf. Landrecies 1992: 72). The survival of the three features of grammatical morphology, -ot endings (9) mini'm possessives (10) and mil til li pronouns (11), albeit marginally, for an extra generation compared to some phonological features of a less stereotypical character, may be explained by the frequency of the items with which they occur. The Picard -ot affix survives longest in the most frequent verbs etre 'to be' and avoir 'to have'. Picard possessives cling on in locutions containing extremely frequent items including the most usual kinship terms, turning strings such as min garchon 'my boy' into set locutions. Apart from its obvious frequency, the disjunctive pronoun set may have been kept alive by possible confusion of li and lui 'him', although the greater vitality of first person forms compared to second person forms in the Pooley data is striking. The 1983 Pooley data give some credence to the belief that convergence affects morphology sooner and more radically than syntax. The features of grammatical morphology are both more frequent and of greater perceptual salience than the two syntactic features (14), (13). The apparent stereotypicality of the negative particles nin and point is belied by the fact that the former is the only item under consideration shown as variable in Viez.

The depicardization

of the vernaculars of the Lille conurbation

51

That qu'eile forms (14) rather than que PRO subject relatives were singled out is of course an indication of advancing francofication. Que PRO subject relatives are in any case an areal feature that the Picard of the Lille area shares with a number of other varieties. Some older speakers in Pooley (1983) use que ςα forms, which suggest influence from Parisian vernacular French. The apocope of the final / neutralized the distinction between qui, qu'il, and qu Us in pre-consonantal position (i.e. before the numerical majority of verbs and before clitics). The survival of qu'ils as signalled by the linking [z] is probably due to its occurrence before such frequent forms as ont, avaient and etaient 'have', 'had', 'were', which has enabled the variant to reinvent itself as a vernacular French linking phenomenon rather than as a grammatical marker which was its role in Picard. Seen in this light, qu eile becomes the one surviving feature of the Picard system that was not automatically neutralized, which increased its perceptual salience and made it more vulnerable to convergence. Its restriction to human nouns in the Pooley 1983 corpus is an indication that it underwent distributional restrictions before declining still further. The tenacity of [έ] (2) and [J] (4) may appear surprising, given their obviously stereotypical character. Their high perceptual salience is compensated by their high frequency, including occurrence in extremely common grammatical items. The only form to survive, albeit marginally, in the spontaneous use of the most recent generation is WFCD (6), which is a low consciousness variant, associated with several varieties of regional French. It may be that the disappearance of virtually all clearly Picard variants and its lack of pedigree in Parisian vernacular has increased its perceptual salience and made it more vulnerable to studied avoidance. Would Table 7 have been radically different if lexis had been included? If one were to take a set of common Picard items, which differed from their French equivalent other than by regular phonological alternation, e.g. [a/tceR] maintenant 'now' [tudi] toujours 'always' the situation could be characterized by Table 8. If such a tabulation is correct, this would justify the suggestion that the levels of structure critical for distinguishing varieties, i.e. grammar and lexis, reacted to the forces of convergence in fundamentally the same fashion. Another scrap of corroborative evidence may be adduced from the individual interviews conducted with the 1995 informants. When questioned about their latent knowledge of Picard, these young people scored eight per cent in their "active"13 vocabulary test, but this figure was greatly boosted by the indulgent scoring and the inclusion of items which show predictable phonological correspondences. If items manifesting such clear correspondences were excluded, the score would be reduced to around one per cent. Such low scores suggest

52

Tim Pooley

that Picard is now an unknown language for adolescents in the Lille metropolis, even among those who should form part of its natural constituency. These results also suggest that latent linguistic knowledge survives in the collective psyche in much the same way as in active use, as depicted in the presentation of data in Table 7. Table 8.

Assumed loss of distinct lexical items

Corpus

Distinctive Picard items

Viez (1910) born 1850-1860

+

Carton (1972i) born 1874-11891

±

Carton (1972ii) born 1892-1896

±

Pooley born pre 1938

m

Pooley bom 1938-1952

m

Pooley born 1953-1965 Pooley born circa 1980

-

Low as the scores were on such language tests, they nonetheless showed a significant difference between informants of French as compared to those of nonFrench parentage. Table 9 shows the results of a three-part language test (translation Picard - French; translation French - Picard; ability to say something in Picard) administered as part of a sociolinguistic interview to 172 school students in various parts of the Lille conurbation between 1995 and 1999. Table 9.

Comparison of Picard skills scores - French and "foreign" students

French (146)

23.8%

Non-French (26)

11.7%

χ 2 value 55.9 ρ < .01

In the course of the interviews, informants were asked to identify a number of varieties of Picard as French, patois or a foreign language. Table 10 shows the perceptions of Lillois Picard comparable to that described in Carton (1972ii). The significant differences in the scores in the first three columns in particular suggest very strongly that French subjects have a more restrictive view of what constitutes French. The majority of non-French subjects perceived the speech to be French whereas the opposite was the case for the French informants. That a significant minority of French informants should say that it was neither gives

The depicardization of the vernaculars of the Lille conurbation

53

further indication that the "foreign" informants had a more flexible view of what constitutes possible French. Table 10. Comparative perceptions of Lille patois - French and non-French subjects Variety

French

Patois

Other

French subjects (146)

21.2 (31)

55.5 (81)

12.3 (18)

non-French subjects (26)

57.7 (15)

34.6 (9)

0

Mixing 11 (16) 7.7 (2)

If such current results give any insight into the past, then they would suggest that the Flemish immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would have had greater tolerance towards Picard features and perhaps adopted them believing them to be part of "normal" French. Indeed, present perceptions of Lillois vernacular suggest that the areas where people of Flemish origin were known to be most numerous for several decades (Vanneufville 1997:178), were also those perceived in popular folklore as the most patoisant 'patois-speaking'. Pierrard (1965: 45) sees the traditional working-class quarter of SaintSauveur as the area where Picard was used most spontaneously. Carton (1972ii) has two Lillois informants, one from Saint Sauveur and one from Wazemmes and considers both of them to be speaking regional French mixed with patois (Carton 1972: 24-25), although the Saint Sauveur speaker uses a greater proportion of the 14 features that are the focus of this study. Paradoxically, in popular perceptions, it seems to be areas of "new Lille" resulting from the expansion of 1858 - e.g. Wazemmes and Fives - which appear to be the areas where patois was both most frequently spoken and spoken most spontaneously. The informants recorded in 1983 proffered this opinion regarding Wazemmes without prompting. The writer of popular historical novels set in the Nord, Marie-Paule Armand (1990: 73), describes the surprise of her heroine daughter of a railway worker at the broadness of the patois of factory workers from Fives. What is perhaps remarkable is the lack of clear indication of specific Flemish influence on the changes described in section 7. Even the relative durability of word-final consonant devoicing appears perfectly explicable without it (cf. Pooley 1994). This is not to say that temporary borrowings were not frequent as is the case for Arabic today in areas where young people of Maghrebine origins are present in sufficient proportions (the highly urbanized central areas and north-eastern corner of the conurbation). Indeed, many French informants in the 1995-1999 interviews would fare better in a vocabulary test on Arabic than Picard. This, however, does not mean that local varieties of French will undergo long term changes because of contact with Arabic speakers.

54

Tim Pooley

9.

Conclusion

The juxtaposition of the principal social changes and major historical events with the evolution in the use of Picard as evidenced by the bodies of data analysed permit some very clear-cut inferences. Before the First World War, a clearly distinctive and relatively consistent variety of Picard was commonly used in the Lille conurbation, particularly outside Lille itself, where there is evidence of considerable face-to-face contact with speakers of Parisian or generalized vernacular French from the seventeenth century. The Picard used was, however, clearly undergoing a steadily advancing process of contact-induced loss of distinctiveness from French. The forces of diffusion - urbanization, immigration, education, mobility - were counteracted by the forces of focusing - a stable economic base and a life style that could be lived out within a restricted geographical space. Spontaneous use of Picard variants by speakers born since 1952 varies between the extremely marginal (those born 1953-1965) and the virtually non-existent (those born around 1980). Although the World Wars arguably spared the industrial economic base from earlier decline, they broke up local communities to an extent that was beyond simple reconstitution. People who fled an occupied zone, deportees and soldiers who survived were immersed in population movements and plunged into situations where use of a marked variety of Picard was not an option. There were already indications in the 1930s, which were certainly strengthened by the severe economic difficulties of the time, that Picard had been displaced by French at the very core of its social constituency. The temporary recovery of the textile industry in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War was insufficient to counteract the forces favouring depicardization. This was a period of strong national feeling in an area that suffered very directly from the German Occupation. Aspirations of ordinary people rose considerably compared to the interwar decades, when, ambitions may have been thwarted by economic depression. It became more usual for persons of humble origins to aim for something other than following a low-skill manual tradition. Moreover, the lengthening of the process of compulsory education gave all young people more exposure to spoken and written forms of standard French. The diminishing importance of textiles and the diversification of the economic base, improved infrastructure, greater life opportunities and the need for mobility both within and without the conurbation, whose collective identity has been reinforced by numerous administrative measures and external perceptions - all favoured depicardization. Significant levels of immigration have further contributed to the elimination of the most localized and picardized speech forms.

The depicardization of the vernaculars of the Lille conurbation

55

Apart from these socio-historical factors, the data suggest also that the process of levelling was determined by internal factors, particularly the frequency and distributional range of items, extra-linguistic factors such as perceptual salience, and geographical spread and external factors, namely contact with both standard and vernacular varieties of French for which Lille has been the main gateway. A centre-periphery model justifiably places Lille as the centre of the conurbation and the gateway for the spread of more generalized forms, be they vernacular French such as yod in [bjo] beau 'beautiful' or more widespread Picard forms such as [kje] chien 'dog', as opposed to the affricated variant of the north eastern side of the metropolis. Roubaix and Tourcoing were significant centres of influence particularly up until the First World War. The retention of weakened diphthongs largely lost in the regional capital by the second half of the nineteenth century makes them appear peripheral compared to Lille, but central compared to nearby communes where greater numbers of vowels remained diphthongized until the early twentieth century. The data do not support the view that stereotypical features are the first to be eliminated, although they may be well have undergone lexicalization (i.e. restriction to frequent lexical items) sooner than other structurally generalized features. The degree of structural generalization and perceptual salience would appear to the crucial factors influencing, if not determining, the rate and order of loss, which may be characterized as follows: • • • •

lexically-defined small-set phonological features (including linking features) structurally-defined (generalizable) morphological features/syntactic features/ small-set phonological features lexicalized subsets of the above (usually the most frequent items) large-set phonological features.14

Of the features described, it is those which were definable in lexical terms from the mid to late nineteenth century (localized diphthongs and linking items could be fairly placed in the category of phonological features which occur with certain lexical items) which were among the first to disappear. The loss of Picard morphological features is clearly a crucial marker of the shift towards French, particularly given that syntactic items are generally regarded as areal features by no means specific to either of the main varieties in contact. While structurally-defined features of pronunciation appear to persist the longest, their frequency rates in the Pooley data are sometimes extremely low and considerable signs of lexicalization are apparent. Frequency of occurrence clearly served to maintain significant patches of linguistic hybridity.

56

Tim Pooley

The shift in dialectality described in this study should not be construed as a change in the degree of vernacularity in the speech of more recent generations. The Carton and Pooley corpora are comparable in vernacularity but this chapter has concentrated on the moving away from one set of vernacular norms and merely hinted, e.g. with qu'ils subject relatives, at the ways in which depicardized French vernacular norms have developed.

Notes 1. OREAM = Organisation d' etudes d' amenagement des aires metropolitans. An OREAM is an urban planning body that oversees the wider implications of proposed plans, particularly the space requirements of infrastructure developments such as the construction of roads, rail links, new towns or commercial centres outside the existing municipal boundaries. 2. DATAR = Delegation ä I'amenagement du Territoire et a Γ Action Regionale. A national planning body, part of whose responsibility was to ensure that a regional component was included in plans put forward either at ministerial or departmental level. DATAR actively supported the idea of "counterweight metropolises", metropoles d'equilibre, to offset the spread and dominance of Paris in national life. 3. In 1858 the ramparts were partially demolished to include neighbouring areas such as Wazemmes and Fives in the city of Lille. 4. One instance did occur, i.e. [flame]. Having been told off by his classmates, the speaker claimed that [flame] was the feminine of [üamä] flamand 'Flemish', which can arguably be construed as a form of lexicalization. 5. Viez (1978: 82) shows that Picard [ε] corresponds to standard French [ä] in items derived from Latin words containing e + η sequences in pre-consontal or word-final position. 6. The tendency to truncate [akoR] to [koR] encore 'again' corresponds to relatively high use of Picard variants whereas use of [fe] rather than [έίέ] enfant 'child' correlates more significantly with use of French variants. This is not surprising given that the form [afe] for enfin 'at last' is, as far as I am aware, not attested. 7. He pronounced [vinek] vinaigre 'vinegar'. 8. From La Vache au Moulin by the seventeenth-century songwriter Frangois Cottignies, Line 22, ed. Carton (1965). 9. Certain expressions, e.g. [m5 di] mon Dieu 'my God' usually occur with French possessives. 10. Includes occurrences of point 'not'. 11. In spontaneous speech of the group recording, only French forms occur. However, a small number of qu'eile forms occur in the interviews. 12. These may be compared with items containing the adverbial affix -ment, realized as [me] in Picard. Landrecies (1992) points out that many -ment forms used in Picard

The depicardization of the vernaculars of the Lille conurbation

57

were learned items, borrowed from French. The picardization of such items is a strong indicator that speakers are aiming at a variety highly distinct from French, as seems to be the case with Viez (1978)'s informants. 13. "Active" here means giving a Picard equivalent of a selected list of French words. 14. This applies if one concedes, as argued in Pooley (1996), that WFCD is a large-set feature. In any case, it is clearly less stereotypical than any other segmental phonological variant mentioned in this study.

References Armand, Marie-Paule 1990 La Couree. Lille: Presses de la Cite. Auer, Peter, and Aldo di Luzio, A. (eds.) 1988 Variation and Convergence. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Baetens-Beardsmore, Hugo 1971 Le Frangais regional de Bruxelles. Brussels: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles. Bortoni-Ricardo, Stella 1985 The Urbanization of Rural Dialect Speakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carton, Fernand 1965 Frangois Cottignies dit Brüle-Maison, 1678-1740, chansons et pasquilles. Arras: Societe de Diabetologie Picarde VII. 1972 Recherches sur l'accentuation des parlers populaires dans la region de Lille. Lille: Service de reproduction des Theses, Universite de Lille III. 1987

Les accents regionaux. In: Genevieve Vermes and Jacqueline Boutet (eds.), France, pays multilingue, Volume 1. Les Langues en France, un enjeu historique et social, 29-49. Paris: L'Harmattan.

Carton, Fernand, Mario Rossi, Denis Autesserre and Pierre Leon 1983 Les Accents des Frangais. Paris: Hachette. Cartouche (ed.) 1998 La Metropole rassemblee. Lille: Fayard. Chaurand, Jacques 1968 Les Parlers de la Thierarche et du Laonnais. Paris: Klincksieck. Cochet, Edouard 1933 Le Patois de Gondecourt. Paris: Droz.

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Delattre, Daniel 1998

Le Nord: les 653 communes. Delattre: Grandvilliers.

Eloy, Jean-Michel 1997 La Constitution du picard: une approche de la notion de langue. Peeters: Louvain-la-Neuve. Flutre, Louis-Ferdinand 1977 Du Moyen au picard moderne. Amiens: Musee de Picardie. Lambin, Jean-Michel 1980 Quand le Nord devenait franqais. Paris: Fayard. Landrecies, Jacques 1992 Un genre original: la litterature picarde du pays minier. Nord 19: 69-75. Lateur, Marius 1951

Lexique du parier populaire d'Artois. Paris: Ricour et Chevillet.

Lodge, R. Anthony 1996 Stereotypes of vernacular pronunciation in 17th-18th century Paris. Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 59: 439-465. Lottin, Alain (ed.) 1986 Histoire de Tourcoing. Dunkerque: Editions des Beffrois. Milroy, James 1992

Language Variation and Change. Oxford: Blackwell.

Milroy, Lesley 1980 Müller, Frank 1988

Language and Social Networks. Oxford: Blackwell. Uncodified code: a look at the dialects of Sicily and a presentation of one speaker. In: Peter Auer and Aldo di Luzio (eds.), Variation and Convergence, 176-194. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Philipp, Martha 1985 L'accent alsacien. In: Gilbert-Lucien Salmon (ed.), Le Franqais en Alsace, 19-26. Paris: Champion-Slatkine. Pierrard, Pierre 1965 La Vie ouvriere ά Lille sous le Second Empire. Paris: Bloud et Gay. 1972 Lille: dix siecles d'histoire. La Madeleine: Editions Actica. 1981 Lille: dix siecles d'histoire. Paris: Stock.

The depicardization of the vernaculars of the Lille conurbation Pooley, Tim 1988 1994

1996

59

Grammatical and phonological variation in the working-class of Roubaix. Ph.D dissertation, University of London. Word-final consonant devoicing in a variety of working-class French a case of dialect contact? Journal of French Language Studies 4: 215-233. Chtimi: The Urban Vernaculars of Northern France. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Pouchain, Pierre 1998 Les Mattres du Nord. Lille: Perrin. Roche, Jörg 1989

Xenolecte. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Salmon, Gilbert-Lucien. (ed.) 1985 Le Frangais en Alsace. Paris: Champion-Slatkine. Scargill, D. Ian 1983

Urban France. London: Croom Helm.

Sueur, Georges 1971

Une Metropole en miettes. Paris: Stock.

Taverdet, Gaston 1977 Le Franfais regional dans la cote bourgignonne. In: Gaston Taverdet and Georges Straka (eds.), Les Frangais regionaux, 35-42. Paris: Klincksieck. Taverdet, Gaston and Georges Straka (eds.) 1977 Les Frangais regionaux. Paris: Klincksieck. Trenard, Louis (ed.) 1972 Histoire des Pays-Bas frangais. Toulouse: Privat. 1974 Histoire des Pays-Bas frangais: documents. Toulouse: Privat. 1977 Histoire d'une metropole - Lille, Roubaix, Tourcoing. Toulouse: Privat. Tuaillon, Gaston 1977 Reflexions sur le fran9ais regional. In: Gaston Taverdet and Georges Straka (eds.), Les Frangais regionaux, 8-29. Paris: Klincksieck. Van den Driessche, Jules-Emmanuel 1977 Histoire de Tourcoing. George Frere: Tourcoing. Laffitte Reprints: Marseille [1928], Vanneufville, Eric 1997 Histoire de Lille. Paris: France-Empire.

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Vermes, Genevieve and Jacqueline Boutet (eds.) 1987 France, pays multilingue, Volume 1. Les Langues en France, un enjeu historique et social. Paris: L'Harmattan. Viez, Henri 1978 Warnant, Leon 1973 Wolfram, Walt 1969

Le Parier populaire de Roubaix. Marseille: Lafitte Reprints [1910]. Dialectes du fran9ais et fran9ais regionaux. Langue Frangaise 1: 100-125. A Sociolinguistic Description of Detroit Negro Speech. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.

The depicardization of the vernaculars of the Lille conurbation

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Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing Halluin

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62

Tim Pooley

ROUBAIX Tourcoing

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Jordanian and Palestinian dialects in contact: vowel raising in Amman Enam Al-Wer

Abstract This paper is based on ongoing research in the city of Amman, which investigates the linguistic features of the city's emerging dialect. In the modern history of Jordan, Amman is a new city. Strictly speaking, it had no native population and no native dialect. It became home to well over one million people, mostly of Jordanian and Palestinian origins, who spoke different, although mutually intelligible, dialects. The findings show that the youngsters in Amman are clearly not emulating the linguistic behaviour of their parents, nor that of other groups in the city. They are, rather, engaged in the making of a new dialect. A combination of internal, external and extra-linguistic factors is at work in the making of the new dialect. At the consonantal level, features already present in the original mix are used, but the combination offeatures which is most consistently used by the youth is an innovation. Some of these changes represent natural tendencies, such as the change from interdental to stop sounds, while others appear to be, additionally, influenced by external factors, such as processes of levelling and regional koineization and extra-linguistic factors, in the form of feelings of local identity. At the vocalic level, the contact results in the emergence of totally new features, some of which are phonetically intermediate in relation to the input dialects, while others are more advanced. In the majority of cases, the vocalic movements appear to be connected, showing a prototypical pattern of a chain shift, broadly in line with Labov's principles of chain shifting of vowels (Labov 1994:116). The (extra-linguistic) social correlates of these developments, although as yet based on a relatively small sample of speakers, are indicative of the pivotal role the female speakers play in advancing the use of the new forms.

1.

Introduction

This chapter is based on the preliminary results of ongoing research in Amman, the capital city of Jordan.1 Jordan is relatively unstudied; no descriptions of the dialects spoken in the country are available. To date, there are three quantitative sociolinguistic studies, none of which refer to variation in the use of vocalic features. In fact, the vast majority of variation studies on Arabic-speaking com-

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munities have focused on the consonants.2 To my knowledge, my research in Amman is the first empirical study of vocalic variation and change in an Arabic-speaking community. Amman is an ideal location for contact studies. It is a new city, which has had no native population and no native dialect. It was declared the capital city of Jordan in 1921, at which time it was a small village with 3,000-4,000 inhabitants. It is now home to over one million predominantly Arabic-speaking people (roughly one quarter of Jordan's total population). The vast majority of the city's inhabitants, possibly 95 per cent,3 are newcomers, who have moved into Amman mainly during the last forty years. They comprise two major groups: the "Jordanians", who are the sector of the population who lived on the east side of the River Jordan before 1948, and the "Palestinians", most of whom became Jordanian citizens in the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1967. Details of the breakdown of Amman's population in terms of ethnic or regional origins are not available (or at least not disclosed), but it is possible that those of Palestinian origin comprise half of the city's population. Thus, the input dialects include a wide range of Jordanian and Palestinian dialects. Although these dialects are mutually intelligible, and are clearly of East Mediterranean or Levantine type, there are considerable linguistic differences between them (see below). In addition, there are linguistic differences between the varieties within each group. The "Jordanian" population in Amman were originally migrants from northern and southern regions in the country who spoke different dialects. Among the Palestinians at least two major groups of dialects can be identified: urban and rural. Contact between Jordanian and Palestinian dialects is not new; the peoples on both sides of the River Jordan have always had close social and trade contacts. However, the novel aspect of their contact in Jordan is its context: they came together to form the population of a new city within the borders of a new political entity. And, for Jordan, this is not just any expanding and heterogeneous city: it is the country's capital, its largest and most prestigious city. Amman has also become one of the important urban and cultural centres regionally, on a par with Beirut and Damascus. In contact situations, various linguistic developments can be expected. For instance, very often certain linguistic features which are already present in the original input varieties can spread at the expense of others. Clearly, there can be a number of reasons as to why certain features win out over, for example, the demographic distribution of the sounds involved, their social correlates and their inherent linguistic characteristics (see Trudgill 1986: chapter 3). In other cases, and these are in many ways more interesting, contact can lead to the emergence of new linguistic features, or new combinations of features, not

Jordanian and Palestinian dialects in contact: vowel raising in Amman

65

present in the original dialects. It is difficult, however, to be certain of whether the emergence of the new features is contact-induced, or simply a language-internal linguistic development which the dialect in question could have undergone even had the contact not existed. The data from Amman, as will be explained, show examples of the various outcomes of contact, including levelling and koineization among and across the dialect groups, as well as the creation of new sounds (for a discussion of dialect levelling.and koineization see Trudgill 1986: 98-105; Britain 1997 and Kerswill 1996). To a large extent, the adult population of Amman, even those who were born in the city, continue to refer to themselves as "coming from somewhere else", namely, the place from which their forefathers came. The youngsters from both groups, on the other hand, maintain that they are "Ammanis",4 by which they mean that they are native to the city. By affiliating themselves with the city, these youngsters are giving Amman, for the first time in its modern history, a native population and a regional identity. The symbol of this new identity is represented in the youngsters' linguistic divergence from the dialects spoken by their parents. For instance, while the speech of the latter group can clearly be identified as Jordanian or Palestinian, in the speech of the current generation we find that regional or socially-marked linguistic peculiarities are largely levelled. It is important to point out that, for the "makers" of the Amman dialect, there is no linguistic metropolis to copy. They are constructing a new dialect, which itself is to become the linguistic metropolis of Jordan. The social and linguistic aspects of this process are compelling. In the next section, I provide a general and brief overview of the social determinants of variation and change in the Jordanian context, and the attested consonantal developments. Readers interested in a detailed analysis of the sociolinguistic situation in Jordan can refer to Al-Wer (1991) and Al-Wer (forthcoming).

2.

Jordanian and Palestinian dialects: the social determinants

The "classic" method by which sociolinguistic variation in Arabic-speaking communities is understood is through analyses of the competition between urban and rural social groups and their respective linguistic features. Broadly speaking, in the majority of cases the linguistic behaviour of the metropolitans, the dominant group, defines the characteristics of the linguistic norm to be followed by the upwardly-mobile groups or individuals. However, analysis of data from Jordan in terms of this general dichotomy would be inadequate. Be-

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fore Amman grew into a large city, Jordan did not have any large urban centres, nor a truly urban population to speak of. The socio-political and demographic shape of the country was largely determined by the displacement of one and a half million Palestinians (most of whom sought refuge in Jordan) in the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1967, and by the history of the Jordanian-Palestinian relations. The impetus for language change in Jordan's new urban centres was, in the first place, precipitated by the contact between Jordanian and Palestinian dialects and thus the competition between the linguistic features stereotypical of these dialects. This can clearly be seen by looking at the consonants which are involved in variation and change. Table 1 below lists these consonants. Table 1.

Competing forms and consonantal variation in Jordan's urban centres

J

Ρ

[g] [Θ]

[?]

[Ö]

[d] or [z]

[4]

[4] or [z]

[d 3 ]

[3]

[t] or [s]

The features listed under J are characteristic of all Jordanian dialects (as opposed to Palestinian), while the features listed under Ρ are characteristic of the Urban Palestinian dialects. These lists represent the principal linguistic alternations which have sociolinguistic meanings. For instance, the use of [g] in opposition to [?] symbolizes local and Jordanian identity in opposition to Palestinian identity; at the same time, the use of these variants correlates with gender: women, regardless of their ethnic origin, tend to use [?] rather than [g], whereas men prefer [g]. And, because political power (especially during the 1970s) was largely concentrated in the hands of the indigenous population (traditionally speakers of dialects which have the features listed under J), the local linguistic features also became a symbol of power. Therefore, the three extralinguistic factors of ethnicity, gender and power interact to influence the alternation between these sounds. An analysis in terms of urban versus rural or Bedouin cannot predict or account for this picture, but would simply label the features under J as Bedouin, old-fashioned, and a symbol of an outdated lifestyle, since these sounds are stereotypical of the Arabic dialects which are akin to the nomadic norm, thus neglecting the fact that the social meanings of the use of these sounds have been redefined (in response to the relevant sociopolitical de-

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67

velopments). It is clear that we need to account for the evolution in the social meanings of sounds in order to understand their patterns in social space. 2.1. Consonantal change The principal extra-linguistic (social) determinants of the linguistic characteristics of the emerging dialect in Amman can be summed up as follows: •

• •

Demographic factors, which involve the number of speakers representing the dialects in the mix. Here, the Jordanian and the Palestinian features are roughly equally represented. Factors related to local identity. Gender.

These factors can pull in opposite directions. For instance, the expression of local identity necessitates the use of [g] rather than [?], but for a female speaker in Amman, there is pressure in the opposite direction. In addition to these primary factors, regional koineization is clearly at work. It is noticeable that the dialects of the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine) share a large number of features at all linguistic levels. To outsiders, the urban dialects of the Levant are indistinguishable. As it happens, the consonants listed under Ρ in Table 1 are the same features which characterize all of the dominant urban dialects in the region, whereas the features under J tend to be more localized, and characteristic of the less dominant varieties at the regional level. Thus, although there are factors which work towards the maintenance of the features listed under J, those listed under Ρ have more chances of success. In the case of the consonantal features, the data from Amman show that, with the exception of [g], a change is in progress towards the features listed under P. This is particularly clear in the case of the interdental sounds; speakers whose native dialects maintain a split between interdental and stop sounds increasingly merge the interdentals with their stop counterparts (in line with the dialects under P). From a linguistic viewpoint, this is not surprising, given that the interdental sounds are relatively rarely found in human languages, and in languages which have them, they are often unstable, and are acquired relatively late by children (see Trudgill's (1986) comments on TH-fronting in East Anglia). The variant [g] is the most resilient; the data show stable variability, correlating mainly with gender and ethnic origin, in the use of [g] and [?]. The variant [g] is a stereotype, used as a marker of local identity; it is also used as a label for Jordanian dialects. In other words, it is laden with extra-linguistic (sociolinguistic) connotations, which might account for its resilience in the con-

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tact situation in Amman (see Al-Wer 1999 for a discussion of this and related issues). At the consonantal level, the emerging dialect in Amman is likely to have [g] and [?] (in stable variation), [t], [d], [4] or [z] and [3]. All of these features are present in the original mix (no new features), but the combination is new, hitherto unattested in Jordanian dialects. Thus, research on consonantal change in Jordanian cities has not found new consonantal sounds to have emerged as a result of the contact between Jordanian and Palestinian dialects, although new combinations of features already present in the input varieties appeared to be spreading. On the other hand, my current research in Amman identifies a number of apparently new vocalic features which are emerging as features characteristic of the speech of the Amman youth, as will now be shown.

3. The research As mentioned earlier, no descriptions of the original input varieties are available. In order to compensate for the lack of real-time data, the research started with speech samples across generation groups of two of the major original input varieties. These are the dialect of Suit (25 kilometres north west of Amman), as a representative of Jordanian dialects, and the dialect of the West Bank Palestinian city of Nablus, which represents urban Palestinian. A sizeable proportion of the early immigrants to Amman came from these localities. Historically, Suit and Nablus were prominent urban settlements with native populations and identifiable native dialects, which have also acted as local urbanized standards for their respective regions. The sample thus far includes 30 speakers, covering an age range of 12-70. They represent three generations (grandparents, parents and their children) of four families, of which two families originally from Nablus and two families originally from Suit. Eight of these informants (four from each town) are still resident in Nablus and Suit. These are the grandparents, and two uncles from Nablus. The rest of the informants live in West Amman. The parents are aged between 43 and 55, two of whom were born in Amman. Therefore, we have eight speakers to represent the grandparents' generation, eight speakers to represent the parents, and 14 speakers (six male and eight female) to represent the youngsters. In order to have comparable data from young people living outside Amman, a further six young speakers (three female and three male, aged 17-20 years) resident in Suit were interviewed. The speakers from the younger generation were interviewed separately. The parents and the grandparents were in-

Jordanian and Palestinian dialects in contact: vowel raising in Amman

69

terviewed in family groups; family group interviews lasted for about 90-120 minutes. In addition to these recordings, I have data from 45 women speakers from Suit, who were interviewed by myself for a separate study in 1987 (a total of approximately 23 hours of taped material). To ease reference, the informants who are originally from Nablus will be referred to as "the Palestinians" and their dialect as "Palestinian". Those originally from Suit will be referred to as "the Jordanians" and their dialect as "Jordanian". The sons and daughters of both groups will be referred to as "Ammanis" specifying, where necessary, the origins of their parents. Since the database is still relatively small, no statistical tests were carried out at this stage.

4.

The data

4.1. Variable (ah) In Arabic, the class of feminine nouns and adjectives is morphologically marked for gender by the ending /a/. The ending /a/ is also attached to adjectives which define the plural of inanimates. The variable (ah) concerns the raising of the ending /a/ to /ε/. Ancient Arabic dialects are variable with regard to this feature. According to Cantineau (1960: 143-166), Eastern Arabian dialects are typically raising dialects while Western Arabian dialects are nonraising dialects. Modern Arabic dialects are also variable in this respect. In standard Arabic, the orthographic representation of the feminine ending is consistently read as /a/ regardless of the dialectal background of the speaker. We have no linguistic records of the phonetic realizations of (ah) in the traditional dialects of Jordan. Analysis of the speech of the old Suit speakers (born between 1897-1927) who were interviewed in 1987 (presented in Al-Wer 1991) reveals that in this dialect /a/ is used in all environments except when it occurs after a coronal sound, in which case /ε/ is used. In other words, /a/ is the default variant. This is illustrated in the lexical items in (la) and (lb) below. (1) a. (ah):/a/ /hilwa/ 'pretty', Airwa/ 'a button hole', /yurba/ 'foreignness', /maglu:ba/ 'Magluba' (the name of a traditional recipe), /-fraima/ ('a taste', /yurfa/ 'a room', /mwaööaffa/ 'an employee', /xa-t-pa/ (velarized/r/) 'at one time', /basa4-a/ 'an onion', /Jara:ka/ 'companionship', /Jafaga/ 'mercy', /bi/Va/ 'ugly', /gus-sa/ 'a story', /larriha/ 'a glance', /ha-t-t-a/ a type of traditional head dress.

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b. (ah):/ε/ /madanjje/ 'a civilization', /hawijje/ 'identity', /?ummijje/ 'illiteracy', /kullijje/ 'a college', /fatte/ 'Fatte' (the name of a traditional recipe), /wahade/ 'a woman', /sid3d3a:de/ 'a carpet', /Ιΐθθε/ 'tooth gum', /midrase/ 'a school', /Jirse/ 'vicious', /?ad3a:ze/ 'a holiday', /md3awwaze/ 'married', /ΐΐιε/ 'a life', Aa:jje/ 'living', /daka:tre/ 'doctors', /ζγΐ:Γε/ 'young', /-t-ufu:le/ 'childhood', /risa:le/ 'a mission', Aa:mle/ 'doing', /san8/ 'a year', /sa:kn8/ 'living'. On the other hand, analysis of the data from the Nablusi speakers shows that (ah) is realized as /e/ except after velarized, emphatic and pharyngeal sounds, where /a/ is used, i.e. /e/ is the default variant, as illustrated in the lexical items in (2a) and (2b) below. (2) a. (ah): /e/ /hilwe/ 'pretty', /nadwe/ 'a seminar', /«a*we/ 'domination', /binnisbe/ 'concerning', /-saibe/ 'difficult', Aa:mme/ 'general', /mahkame/ 'a court', /mixtilfe/ 'different', /Jirke/ 'company', /ta:nje/ 'second', /3di:de/ 'new', /wahde/ 'one', /sija:se/ 'polities', /nawabilse/ 'Nablus people', /yazze/ 'Gaza', /mumta:ze/ 'excellent', /sane/ 'a year', /mustaw-t-ane/ 'a settlement', /kbi:re/ 'large', /marhale/ 'a step', /-twi:le/ 'tall', /lah3e/ 'a dialect', /sitte/ 'six'. b. (ah):/a/ /fat-pa/ 'a period', /man-tiqa/ 'an area', /ruxsa/ 'a licence', /eul-t-a/ 'an authority', /3a:mYa/ 'a university', /mariida/ 'ill'. Thus, the word /hilwa/ 'pretty' is /hilwa/ in Suit but /hilwe/ in Nablus; /3di:de/ 'new' is /3di:de/ and /3a:mYa/ 'a university' is /3a:m?a/ in both dialects. The distribution according to phonological environment exemplified by the lexical items in (2a) and (2b) was maintained by all of the Suit speakers above the age of 55. Similarly, the occurrence of /e/ everywhere except after velarized consonant, emphatics and pharyngeals was consistent in the case of the Palestinian speakers. The younger speakers from Suit, on the other hand, use /a/ and /ε/ variably after non-coronal sounds, i.e. the distribution maintained in the traditional dialect of Suit is not consistently maintained by the younger Suit speakers. Examples are listed in (3a)-(4b), which show that /ε/ can occur after both coronal and non-coronal sounds.

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(3) a. (ah): /a/, Female speakers 17-20 /hilwa/ 'pretty', /fatwa/ 'a fatwa', /xu4ba/ 'a sermon', Au-t-la/ 'a holiday', /mafru:ka/ 'rubbed', /4-alaba/ 'students', /muna-^d-ama/ 'an organization'. (3) b. (ah):/ε/ βiilwe/ 'pretty', /-taime/ 'a taste', /mafru:me/ 'chopped', /xu-t-be/ 'a sermon', /saVbe/ 'difficult', /basale/ 'an onion', /4-alabe/ 'students'. (4) a. (ah): /a/, Male speakers 17-20 /saTba/ 'difficult', /-fralaba/ 'students', /ftilwa/ 'pretty', /mfarraka/ 'Mfarraka' (the name of a traditional recipe), /huku:ma/ 'a government', /maglu:ba/ 'Magluba' (the name of a traditional recipe), /ma*lu:ba/ 'required', /mafku:ka/ 'loose'. (4) b. (ah): /ε/ /rahme/ 'mercy', /quwwe/ 'strength'. The data from the younger Suit speakers strongly suggest that the dialect of Suit itself is undergoing change with respect to the variable (ah), whereby local /a/ is raised to /ε/ according to the urban Palestinian phonological pattern. Apart from contact with urban Palestinian dialects, regional koineization is another factor which might have escalated the change after non-coronal sounds from /a/ to /ε/. We notice that, at the level of the Levant region in general, the non-raising dialects are generally peripheral, localized, non-urban dialects, whereas all of the socially dominant dialects are raising dialects, such as the dialects of Beirut, Damascus and Jerusalem.5 With respect to the Amman data, the Jordanian grandparents follow the traditional Suit pattern consistently. The parents behave similarly to the younger Suit speakers, with the mothers leading the change from /a/ to /ε/. The Ammanis, however, consistently follow the Palestinian phonological pattern, as in the examples in (6). (5)

/suhbe/ 'friendship', /dabke/ 'Dabke' (the name of a traditional dance), /?uwwe/ 'strength', /hilwe/ 'pretty', /?ahwe/ 'coffee', /s-uYu:be/ 'difficulty', /mja:rke/ 'participating', BUT /d3a:m?a/ 'a university', /ra:ha/ 'a rest'.

However, although the phonological pattern found in the data from Amman is identical to the Palestinian pattern, the phonetic property of the raised sound /ε/ is not. In the traditional Suit dialect, the variant /ε/ which is used after coronal sounds is phonetically [ε], while Palestinian /ε/ is [e] (raised [e]). There were no instances of Palestinian [e ] in the speech of any of the Suit youngsters, nor

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in the speech of the Ammanis with Jordanian parents. The Ammanis with Palestinian parents were variable in this respect. The percentages of the occurrence of Palestinian [e ] is shown in Table 2. Table 2. %[e] Ammanis of Palestinian parents Age

Sex

%[e·]

Ν

12

Μ

50

32

13

Μ

49

33

12

Μ

34

26

16

Μ

20

35

17

F

5

47

20

F

5

60

These figures indicate that [e ] is disfavoured by Ammanis of Palestinian parents. Without losing sight of the fact that we cannot discern reliable patterns from limited data, we notice a large difference in the figures between the male and the female speakers, which might indicate that the female speakers among the Palestinian group are leading in this change, or that they diverge more sharply from their parents' traditional dialect. However, an intriguing picture is displayed by the male group: here the younger boys conform to their parents' features more often than the older ones. If this is indeed a change in progress, one would have expected a reverse pattern according to age, i.e. we would expect the younger boys to be more innovative than the older boys. It could well be the case that, in Middle Eastern societies, children diverge from their parents' dialects at a later stage than in western societies, which might be connected with differences in socialization patterns. In Amman, for instance, preadolescents (12 and 13 year olds) are expected to spend most of their out-ofschool time with the family. They are generally allowed to hang about with their mates in clubs or on street corners only when they are well into their teenage. A further indication that the Palestinian close realization of this sound is a receeding feature is shown in the behaviour of the Ammanis of Jordanian parents. They consistently use [ε] (never [e ]), while following the Palestinian phonological pattern.

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4.2. Short vowel movement 4.2.1. Variable (ra) This variable concerns the phonetic quality of /a/ before or after /r/. The differences in the realization of this variable in Suit and Nablus varieties is one of "backness". In the Suit data, (ra) consistently occurs as [re], as in the examples in (6) below. (6)

/merrc/ 'once', /dzerrebit/ Ί have tried', /?ak0er/ 'more', /safer/ 'travelling', /fakkerit/ Ί have thought', /sahheru:na/ 'they kept us up late', /mferrBka/ 'Mfarraka' (the name of a traditional recipe), /sarfer/ 'he has travelled', /Jcrwa/ 'a purchase', /Jerg/ 'east'.

In the Nablus data, (ra) is consistently realised as [γα]. Some examples are listed in (7). (7)

/rAh/ Ί shall', /mjArrAdi:n/ 'lost', /rA?i:s/ 'president', fh\r/ 'hot', /YATAbi/ 'Arab', /rAhi:m/ 'merciful', /bAiTA/ 'outside', /mba:rAk/ 'Mubarak' (the Egyptian president), /πιαγγα/ 'once', /Ϊα/λτα/ 'ten', /rAfi:?o/ 'his friend', /rAwwih/ 'go home'.

In this environment, the variants of /a/ used by Ammanis are considerably fronter, as in the examples in (8). (8)

/baerdo/ 'also', /faekkaer/ 'he thought', /?sktaer/ 'more', /?amaer/ 'a moon', /raeh/ Ί shall', /?addaerraeb/ Ί shall practice', /maerto/ 'his wife', /l?aersife/ 'the pavement', Aae/ra/ 'ten', /maikaro:ne/ 'spaghetti', /sukkar/ 'sugar', /sa:faert/ Ί have travelled', /tfaerraeina/ 'we got separated', /yaerb/ 'west', Aaeraebijje/ 'Arab', /daeraes/ 'he has studied', /?aejraefijje/ 'Ashrafiyye' (the name of area in Amman), /trabbeina/ 'we were brought up', /muxtaebaer/ 'a laboratory', /maesraefijje/ 'banking', /mjaerbaej/ 'Msharbash' (a family name), /btityaejjaer/ 'it changes'.

Thus, to highlight these differences, a word like /ra/ Ί shall' (future marker) is [reh] in Suit, [rAh] in Nablus, and [rah] or [raeh] in Amman. 4.2.2. Variable (a) In both Suit and Nablus dialects, /r/ appears to have a backing effect on the preceding or following /a/. In other environments, the two dialects have fronter vowels, but the Nablus variants are notably closer. A word such as /Samma:n/

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'Amman' is [iamma:n] in Suit dialect but [Yemme:n] or [?amme:n] in Nablus. Examples from Suit and Nablus are in (9) and (10), respectively. (9)

/kaöa/ 'so', /bas/ 'enough', /Yammi/ 'my uncle', /xalli/ 'let', Aamma:n/ 'Amman'.

(10)

/mahelbti/ 'now', /zej/ 'like', /bes/ 'enough', /hae:da/ 'this', /nawaebilse/ 'Nablus people', /jeTni/ 'a meaning', /hellae?/ 'now', /mfekir/ 'he thought', /jitwellaeiha/ 'to take over', Aemme:n/ 'Amman'.

In this environment, Ammanis use [a], [ae] and, occasionally, [ε]. However, the most frequently-occurring variant is phonetically closer than Jordanian and lower than Palestinian. Some examples are listed in (11). (11)

Aammae:n/ 'Amman', /saebbarh/ 'a swimmer', /Jaejfi:n/ 'we have seen', /jeTni/ 'a meaning', /mitiaewdim/ 'accustomed', /kaelimae:t/ 'words', /maeiae:ki/ 'with you'.

Thus, in relation to their respective "source" dialects, Ammanis of both Jordanian and Palestinian parents have fronted /ra/, Ammanis of Jordanian parents raise /a/, and Ammanis of Palestinian parents have lowered /a/. 4.3. Long vowel movement 4.3.1.

Variable

(raa)

This variable concerns /a:/ before or after /r/. In the Suit dialect, (raa) consistently occurs as [ra:], as in the examples in (12). (12)

/gra:je/ 'studying', /wra:g/ 'papers', /?isra:?i:l/ 'Israel', /dra:se/ 'studying', /da:r/ 'a house', /d3a:rna/ 'our neighbour', /sa:far/ 'he has travelled', /Ja:r/ 'he has advised', /fa:ragna/ 'he has left us'.

On the other hand, in the Nablus dialect, the articulation of /a:/ in this environment is considerably backer and accompanied by pharyngeal constriction. Here we are using [d:] to designate this sound. Examples of the lexical items which occurred with this variant are listed in (13). (13)

/ro:di/ 'Radi' (aboy's name), /ro:mi/ 'he has thrown', /likbo:r/ 'the old' (as in 'the old people'), /bil?axbD:r/ 'on the news', /fidnr.lijje/ 'federal', /rorfiat/ 'she has gone', /sejjarort/ 'cars', /waro:/ 'behind him'.

The very back realizations of short and long /a/ in urban Palestinian have a particularly strong stereotype associated with their use. It is possible that this is re-

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lated to their marked phonetic backness and the accompanying pharyngeal constriction. In general, the data from young Ammanis show a clear trend towards levelling out marked features of the input varieties, as also occurs in the case of the variable (ah). In the case of (raa), the data show a markedly front realization [ra:] by Ammanis of both Jordanian and Palestinian parents. Examples of (raa): [ra:] are listed in (14). (14)

/qira:?a/ 'reading', /ti3a:ra/ 'a trade', /?inza:ra:t/ 'warnings', /?ayra:di/ 'my things', /ra:jha/ 'going', /ra:nja/ 'Ranya' (a girl's name), /marra:t/ 'sometimes', /kta:r/ 'many', /?ida:ra/ 'administration', /farrke/ 'have rubbed', /dra:se/ 'studying', /bilja:rdo/ 'billiards'.

Fronting of (raa) shows a sharp gender distinction with 90 per cent of [ra:] occuring in the speech of the female Ammanis. Male Ammanis of Jordanian parents never use Palestinian [d:], whereas the boys of Palestinian parents vary between Jordanian [a:] and Palestinian [d:]. In the Amman parents' data, the Jordanian fathers consistently use [a:] and the Palestinian fathers use [d:], whereas both Jordanian and Palestinian mothers vary between [a:] and [a:], and [d:] and [a:] respectively. It appears that fronting of (raa) is at a particularly advanced stage, and that women are considerably ahead of men in this innovation. 4.3.2.

Variable

(a:)

In other environments, the Suit traditional dialect has a front open /a:/, whereas in the Nablus dialect /a:/ is closer. Thus, the word for 'Amman' is [Tammarn] or [?ammae:n] in Suit, but in Nablus it is [Hemmern] or even [Yemmern]. Examples from Suit and Nablus are listed in (15) and (16) respectively. (15)

Aa:mil/ 'a labourer', /zja:de/ 'an increase', /d3a:d3e/ 'a chicken', /?id3a:ze/ 'a holiday', /?ama:ne/ 'trust', /sa:kin/ 'living', /ma:ddc/ 'a subject', /marlijje/ 'financial', /Yalarme/ 'a mark'.

(16)

/taernje/ 'second', /me:3id/ 'Majid' (a boy's name), Aemmetn/ 'Amman', /bi33ae:mTa/ 'in the university', /me:xdi:n/ 'we have taken', /lmune:fsi:n/ 'the competitors', /ne:s/ 'people', /hverhad/ 'one', /he:da/ 'this', Ae:di/ 'ordinary', /?aw?e:t/ /dabbabae:t/ /netinje:hu/ 'Netinyahu' (former Israeli prime Minister), /bitle:?i/ 'you find', /twe:fi?/ 'to agree'.

In this environment, the most frequently-used variants by Ammanis are [ae:] and [a], i.e. vowels which are generally closer than the Suit feature and lower than the Nablus one, as in (17).

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(17)

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/diru ba:lku/ 'be careful', /mae:xdi:n/ 'we have taken', /saerfart/ Ί have travelled', /mizae:nijje/ 'a budget', /maiee:ki/ 'with you', /fil3a:m?a/ 'in the university', /ka:nu/ 'they were', /lbana:t/ 'the girls', /?intixa:ba:t/ 'elections', /mumtae:ze/ 'excellent', /lataerlit/ 'up to the third (school grade)', /lmawa:d/ 'subjects', /la:zim/ 'must', /Jayla:t/ 'things', /binardi/ 'he calls'.

All of the Ammanis were variable with respect to this feature. Nevertheless, it is noticeable that those with Jordanian parents never used [ε:] or [e:] for /a:/, i.e. the variation in their speech mostly involves [a:] (the feature used by their parents consistently) and [ae:]; the boys and girls with Palestinian parents mostly used [as:] or [a:]. The few occurrences of [ε:] in the speech of Palestinian Ammanis occurred in the speech of the youngest boys, but none occurred in the speech of any of the girls from the same origin. To summarize the findings thus far, the following vocalic developments have been identified and will probably manifest themselves as features of the emerging Amman dialect: (1) (ah) is raised according to the Palestinian phonological pattern, but the phonetic property of the raised sound is identical to Jordanian [ε]. (2) (ra) is fronted, and /a/ is raised. (3) (raa) is fronted, and /a:/ is raised. 4.4.

Diphthongization

The vocalic movements of long /a:/ outlined above are generally unidirectional, ending somewhere within the phonological space of /ae:/ ~ /ε:/. The lexical sets which already had /ae:/ and /ε:/ are hence affected, possibly because of pressure in phonological space. In the dialects of Suit and Nablus, the lexical set of Poz'X/ 'a house', //ε:1/ 'carrying', /ze:d/ 'Zaid' (a boy's name), Λε:η/ 'an eye' have pure long half open or half close front vowels and are phonemically distinguished from the set of /bi:t/ 'stay', /Ji:l/ 'to carry', /zi:d/ 'to add', Ai:n/ 'to help', which occur with a pure close vowel /i:/. The Amman data show nonlinear movements of long high and mid front vowels, as in (18). (18)

/eaJ7 'what', /heak/ 'like this', /zeat/ 'oil', /leaf/ 'why', /beat/ 'a house', /Yeab/ 'shameful', /wean/ 'where', /keaf/ or /kiaf/ 'how', /mian/ 'who', /Jial/ 'to carry'.

This suggests that the attested movements are connected, showing a prototypical pattern of a chain shift whereby long open vowels rise causing pressure in the phonological space of higher vowels which then either rise further or move

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11

in a non-linear fashion (thereby preventing mergers) (see Labov 1994: chapter 5). In the case at hand, the shift is possibly caused by fronting and raising of /a:/.

5.

Summary and conclusions

The vocalic data presented in this article have implications for two major areas in variationist work: (1.) The linguistic outcome of dialect contact. The youngsters in Amman are clearly not emulating the linguistic behaviour of their parents, nor that of other groups in the city. They are engaged in the making of a new dialect. At the consonantal level, features already present in the parents' dialects are used, but the combination of features which is most consistently used by the youth is an innovation. In its pattern, the new combination of consonants corresponds to the pattern of levelling reported in the literature, whereby localized, peripheral and marked features are reduced. At the vocalic level, the contact between Jordanian and Palestinian dialects results in the emergence of totally new features. Some of the new features are intermediate in their phonetic quality, as in the case of the variables (a) and (a:), while others are more advanced, as in (ra) and (ra:) or diphthongal. Thus, the emerging dialect diverges in a number of instances from (at least two of) the major input varieties. First, the new system leaves an empty slot in the low back space by the fronting of [a] and [a:] (to the space previously occupied by [a] and [a:], respectively). Second, the new system adds diphthongal sounds, which are absent from the input varieties. The change attested in the realization of the feminine ending, variable (ah), is particularly interesting: here, the youth adopt the phonological pattern characteristic of the Palestinian norm - and generally of Levantine urban dialects - but the phonetic quality characteristic of Jordanian dialects. This technical (not conscious) "compromise" can be seen as a "fudged form" (Trudgill 1986: 60-61). Given that a combination in the reverse order, i.e. Jordanian phonological pattern with Palestinian phonetic quality, is possible from a linguistic viewpoint, the fact that the pattern used by the Amman youth is similar to the pattern which is characteristic of the major Levantine dialects indicates that regional koineization, and levelling out of regionally localized features, play a role in the formation of the Amman dialect.

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(2.) The direction of vowel movements. Seen from the perspective of Jordanian dialects, the clockwise movement of the long vowels, [a:] => [a:]; [a:] or [ae:] => [ε:]; [ε:], [e:], [i:] => [εο, ia], shows a prototypical pattern of a chain shift, broadly in line with Labov's principles that govern the chain shifting of vowels (Principle I: long vowels rise, and Principle III back vowels move to the front; Labov 1994: 116). From the perspective of Palestinian dialects, the movement of long back [D:] to the front conforms to Principle III, but lowering of [e:] and [ε:] to [ae:] is at variance with Principle I (Labov cites a counterexample to Principle I from East Lettish lowering of [ε] to [a:]; Labov 1994: 137). For the short vowels, and in relation to Labov's Principle II (short vowels fall), the picture is the other way round: it is the Jordanian forms which are at variance with Labov's principle (New Zealand short vowel shift is cited as a counterexample to Principle II; Labov 1994: 138). Finally, a word on the social correlates of these developments. Although no firm generalizations can be made, since the data base is as yet relatively small, there are important indications to point to concerning gender differentiation in particular. Except for diphthongization, the female speakers use the new forms considerably more consistently than the male speakers. Looking at the developments in Amman as instances of linguistic change, this finding supports the already robust pattern reported in the literature, namely that female speakers lead most (but not all) major linguistic changes. In my data, male-female differences are most consistent in the cases of fronting of /a/ (short and long) in the vicinity of /r/, with the female speakers consistently using the fronter realizations more often than the male speakers.

Notes 1. A short paper based on these data appeared as Al-Wer (2000). 2. It is not clear why variationists working on Arabic data have ignored vocalic developments, but it is possible that this is partly related to the fact that consonantal variation happens to be sociolinguistically more significant, and perhaps easier to detect. 3. The remaining 5 per cent of the inhabitants of Amman are the Circassians. Originally, these came from the North Caucasus and have lived in Amman since 1876. First generation Circassians were monolingual in Circassian, and the successive generations acquired the Arabic of the native-speaker groups with whom they had contact. 4. In Arabic, they report that they are Ammaniyyiin. This is a derivation which Jordanians have never used before. Usually, people who live in Amman are referred to as

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sukkaan Amman 'the inhabitants of Amman', thus reflecting the way by which Jordanians viewed the city, namely that it does not have its own population. 5. The opposite is true in Egypt where it is the non-raising dialects which are dominant. In Cairene, Arabic /a/ is used in all environments. This is also the case in the dialect of the Palestinian city of Gaza.

References Al-Wer, Enam 1991

Phonological variation in the speech of women from three urban areas in Jordan. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex.

1999

Why do different variables behave differently?: Data from Arabic. In: Yasir Suleiman (ed.), Language and Society in the Middle East and North Africa, Studies in Variation and Identity, 38-57. Surrey: Curzon Press.

2000

Raising of /a/ and related vocalic movements in the emerging dialect of Amman. In: Manuel Mifsud (ed.), Proceedings of the Third International Conference of Association Internationale de Diabetologie Arabe, 77-82. Malta: Salesian Press.

forthcoming

Women, the Vernacular and Language Change: Variation and Change in Jordanian Arabic. Surrey: Curzon Press.

Britain, David 1997

Dialect contact, focusing and phonological rule complexity: the koineization of Fenland English. In: Charles Böberg, Miriam Meyerhoff and Stephanie Strassel (eds.), A Selection of Papers from NWAVE 25. Special Issue of University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 4/1: 141-170.

Cantineau, Jean 1966 Cours de Phonetique Arabe. Paris: Klincksieck. Kerswill, Paul 1996

Children, adolescents and language change. Language Variation and Change 8: 177-202.

Labov, William 1994 Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume I. Internal Factors. Oxford, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Trudgill, Peter 1986

Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell.

"Salience" as an explanatory factor in language change: evidence from dialect levelling in urban England1 Paul Kerswill

and Ann

Williams

Abstract This chapter considers the notion of "salience" as applied in the explanation of language change through dialect contact, focusing particularly on Trudgill's 1986 exploration of the idea. The chapter opens with a discussion of six studies which have explicitly used "salience" in an explanatory capacity. This leads to the conclusion that the factors involved in salience are many and varied. There follows a critique of Trudgill's salience model; while problems (mainly to do with circularity) are identified, Trudgill's model is considered to be testable. Data from a study of dialect levelling in England shows that, while language-internal factors play a part, it is in the end sociodemographic and other extra-linguistic factors that account for the salience of a particular feature. Finally, a three-component model of salience is presented: first, it is suggested that salience is only relevant in the case of dynamic linguistic phenomena (those involved in acquisition or change). Second, language-internal factors are listed, and third the all-important extra-linguistic factors are given. It is suggested that there are bidirectional causal links between the second and third components.

1. Introduction: dialect contact and language change A current theme in contact linguistics is the interplay between internal, external (contact-based) and a range of extra-linguistic factors in language change. Because of the uniqueness of every case of language change and the problem of finding controls, it is extremely difficult to predict, for a particular constellation of factors, exactly what the outcome will be. However, in assessing their role, there is a great deal to be gained by post hoc argumentation. This chapter explores some of these factors by appealing to a notion which seems to lie at the cusp of language internal, external and extra-linguistic motivation: that of salience, which we can provisionally define rather simply as a property of a linguistic item or feature that makes it in some way perceptually and cognitively prominent. Salience is a notion of some venerability, dating at least back to

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Schirmunski's (1930) notion of Auffälligkeit, which he used to try to explain the difference between ""primary" dialect features ([salient features] which are susceptible to change or loss) and "secondary" dialect features ([less salient features] which are relatively resistant)" (Hinskens 1996: 12). As our review in the next section shows, a salience-type concept has been adduced as an independent factor in a number of branches of linguistics; however, in the context of recent dialectology, it is in Trudgill (1986: 11, 37) that we find the most careful elaboration of "salience" and its most explicit application to language change. We take the view that salience offers sufficient insights for it to be a potential explanatory factor, while stressing that, without careful argumentation on the linguist's part, the concept all too easily lapses into circularity and mere labelling. Trudgill discusses salience in the context of dialect contact. Far from being a limited "special case" of language contact, dialect contact is a phenomenon typologically different from language contact because it does not involve speakers learning a new language, either wholly (giving rise to varying degrees of bilingualism) or in a restricted sense (typically resulting in lexical borrowing, but without any other changes). Instead, items can be mixed apparently at will and with minimal loss of intelligibility, without violating Poplack's "equivalence constraint" (Poplack 1980; Kerswill 1994: 17, Kerswill 2002). Moreover, it can be argued that dialect contact in fact lies at the heart of any language change that does not primarily involve contact between mutually unintelligible and structurally different varieties. If we accept, with James Milroy (1992), that innovations are spread (though not originated) through contact between individual speakers, then the centrality of dialect contact becomes clear: a speaker adopts, or rejects, a linguistic form (which may be an innovation) used by another speaker with whom he or she is in contact. The fact that dialects in contact are typologically very close means that innovations are free to spread within the large number of linguistic units which are structurally equivalent, especially phonemes and lexical items, following either a Neogrammarian route or else by lexical diffusion (McMahon 1994: 58). Contact cannot, however, explain the reason why a particular change happened at the particular time and place it did, and not at some other time or place when the linguistic and social conditions were similar. As Croft points out: "[T]he source of new variants is often external; but this can be argued to be propagation across dialect (or language) boundaries. But the question remains as to where the dialect diversity that is the source of variants came from in the first place" (2000: 55). Part of the reason for investigating salience is that, by trying to "unpack" this complex phenomenon, we may be able to shed light on the interplay of internal (language-structural) factors and the large range of

"Salience" as an explanatory factor in language

83

other factors which impinge on language change, including contact and those in the social psychological and sociodemographic domains. This can give us a window on the "why" of the source of the diversity mentioned by Croft. It is particularly in dialect contact that Trudgill sees the salience notion as applying. This, we would argue, is because restrictions on adoption caused by structural differences, as well as the more general difficulties speakers experience in learning new items, are of a much lesser order in dialect contact than in language contact. Instead, sociolinguistic factors, particularly social psychological ones, come to the fore in influencing the adoption or non-adoption of linguistic forms. As we shall see, salience attempts to combine both structural (language-internal) factors with sociolinguistic and psychological (extra-linguistic) factors in a single explanatory concept. The case study we will discuss here concerns the convergence of linguistic features in three English urban centres, this being a manifestation of a wider process of dialect levelling taking place in Britain. By choosing features from the discourse and grammatical levels as well as the phonological level, we can follow up Trudgill's implied injunction to look at features other than phonological ones (1986: 37).

2.

"Salience" as explanation in linguistics

There are a number of phenomena, particularly in language change, language acquisition and sociolinguistically-determined variation, for which it seems expedient to turn to some notion of "psychological prominence" when attempting an explanation. In what follows, we discuss six cases where the notion has been adduced in an explanatory capacity. It will become clear that, in order for salience to avoid having a circular definition or being a label, it must have recourse to extra-linguistic factors, which will be a combination of cognitive, social psychological or pragmatic factors. A rather straightforward, and circular, definition of "salience" as referring to "high frequency" is used by Bardovi-Harlig (1987) in her study of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners' acquisition of English preposition stranding, as in Who did John give the book to? This construction, she claims, is marked, yet is learnt far sooner than the unmarked construction exemplified by To whom did John give the book? The reason given is the massively greater frequency, or "salience", of stranding in the data available to the learners. We would add, however, that the salience of the construction in the target language may actually be caused by its very absence in the learners' Lis (first lan-

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guages), and that it is the resulting contrast effect coupled with high frequency that leads to its early adoption. Kerswill (1985) applies a definition of salience in terms of the sociolinguistic sensitivity of a feature, and suggests a link with phonetic discreteness. He proposes that, as the connected speech process of syllable-coda 1-vocalization in south-eastern English varieties becomes increasingly fossilized as the unmarked realization (i.e., a part of canonical speech, unrelated to factors such as speaking rate and attention), it becomes "sociolinguistically salient". Thus, speakers tend to produce film as [fium] in all circumstances. In Labov's terms, this vocalized pronunciation becomes the stigmatized variant of a linguistic "marker" with the non-vocalized velarized realization [4-] as the other variant. Kerswill hypothesizes that the salience is connected to the fact that, as 1-vocalization becomes fossilized, it ceases to be articulatorily and auditorily gradual, and takes on a phonetically distinctive variant, a vocoid [υ], which differs more sharply from the "clear" [1] used in pre-vocalic environments than did [4-]. It is, therefore, a moot point whether the development of distinct variants follows from salience, or is the cause of salience. Nolan, Kerswill and Wright (1991) find evidence for the sociolinguistic salience of the vocoid in some speakers' ability to avoid its use, hypercorrectly replacing it with the clear [1] in situations where there is social pressure to speak "correctly" or when disambiguation is necessary. Moreover, a perception experiment carried out by them showed that the presence of 1-vocalization leads listeners to downgrade the social acceptability of a speaker, again suggesting its sociolinguistic salience. Here, phonetic distinctness goes hand-in-hand with the evident social evaluation of the feature (its salience, as defined by these authors), revealed by speakers' and listeners' behaviour with respect to it. Using a rather more explicit definition of "salience", Mufwene (1991) uses this notion to explain the preference, in the pidgins and Creoles he has investigated, for analytic syntax and overt personal pronouns and other grammatical markers even in cases where the lexifier languages do not have these. Salience, for him, is used "strictly in perceptual terms for the unlikelihood of a marker to be omitted or missed even if it were reduced [...] salient markers may be stressed; their non-salient counterparts may not [...] e.g. the French T[ense] A[spect] inflections in their word-final position" (1991: 139). He goes on to refer to a semantic characteristic of salient items: "the role of salience in determining markedness values depends on whether the relevant salient forms are clearly associated with specific meanings" (1991:139). A further claim by Mufwene is important from the point of view of the argument to be developed in this chapter. When discussing the origin of particular pidgin and Creole features, he states that while some could be taken from different dialects, "these could have

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been selected because they were favored by the contact situation even though they are marked options in the lexifier" (1991:127-28). This is an allusion to his central contention that the exigencies of the contact situation are crucial in determining the outcome of pidginization and creolization, and that salience plays a prominent part. We shall argue, in a very similar vein, that sociolinguistic factors, including those arising from contact situations, can outweigh structural linguistic factors in influencing the adoption of a particular feature. Transparency in the form-meaning relationship, mentioned by Mufwene, is also adduced by Chapman (1995) in her exploration of two types of analogical change in Swiss German dialects, the analogical extension of umlaut (the frontback vowel alternation found in German morphology) and in the generalization of vowel lengthening in nouns from the base form to inflected and derived forms. She finds that in neither case is the productivity of the process determined by whether a particular alternation is located in the lexicon (as in derivation) or is a syntactic rule (for example, inflection) - the prediction being that productivity would be greater for syntactic rules. Instead, she claims that productivity is determined by "general semiotic and cognitive principles", which include "the transparency of the semantic relation between base and derivative and the uniformity and transparency of the formal means used to signal the semantic oppositions in question" (1995: 2). These combine to form "perceptual salience, defined as the interaction of semantic and formal transparency" (1995: 3). In all the definitions mentioned so far, we can detect an element of circularity: by labelling a feature as "salient", the authors claim to have explained its patterning. However, the circularity is broken especially by Chapman's appeal to factors outside a particular theory-based analysis of the linguistic system: the "general semiotic and cognitive principles" referred to above. Further support for a general notion of salience, with foundations outside linguistic structure, is provided by Yaeger-Dror's (1993) study of accommodatory behaviour by Israeli pop singers when being interviewed and when performing. YaegerDror was interested in the alternation of the mainstream Israeli koine pronunciation [R] for /r/ with the Mizrahi (Sephardic) and standard Hebrew [r] in the usage of singers of different ethnic origins and having different target audiences. Her operationalization of "conscious accommodation" versus "unconscious accommodation" is novel, though the classification itself seems to be related to Labov's distinction between indicators and markers (see below): she hypothesizes that conscious accommodation will take place in "cognitively salient positions" (1993: 203), while less conscious accommodation will be found in "relatively nonsalient environments". Citing a range of studies on linguistic and psychological correlates of "salience", she assesses the environ-

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ments in her data according to their salience versus nonsalience on the following three dimensions: phonetic prominence, lexical ordering and prosodic factors. Although these three dimensions are arguably "labels" and therefore not free of circularity, Yaeger-Dror's results suggest that the choice of factors was well motivated. She finds that, among the Mizrahi singers, whenever sociolinguistic factors (especially appropriacy in song) strongly suggest the use of [r] rather than [R], then this indeed occurs in the salient environments. Conversely, in nonsalient environments, the other variant [R], or a compromise "fudge" [rR], is more likely to occur, signalling the ethnolinguistic ambivalence of these individuals in a more unconscious way. While Yaeger-Dror's approach to salience involves a combination of linguistic and psycholinguistic criteria, Cheshire (1996,1999) applies a definition of salience which is more pragmatically based than any of those discussed so far. Cheshire focuses her attention on the particular patterning of syntactic variables, noting that their relative infrequency leads to their being less likely than phonetic variables to be used as identity markers (1999: 61). Their pragmatic and interactional function will be correspondingly more important. Thus, the form of BE in existential there is appears almost invariably in the singular form even with plural logical subjects (that is, there is is invariant), a fact which she interprets as deriving from the function of the construction as a means for taking the floor. Because of this, it is economical for there is to be a "prefabricated" phrase. The "salience" of particular pragmatic and interactional functions, as well as syntactic positions, is explicitly explored in Cheshire's (1996) discussion of variation in the frequency of a number of syntactic features. She argues (1996: 6) that interrogative and negative clauses are "inherently interactive syntactic environments" and she cites examples of the greater frequency of non-standard forms in these contexts. Similarly, she argues that prominence is related to foregrounding in discourse, and that this leads to the use of non-standard features there, too. The reason, in her view, for the salience of both negative/interrogative clauses and foregrounded material lies in the fact that "non-standard language is an essentially oral form of language", and therefore, "those environments that favour the occurrence of nonstandard variants will be those that are particularly important in spontaneous oral communication" (1996: 5). We can summarize the claims of the studies just mentioned as follows: • • •

Salient non-standard features may be hypercorrectly avoided. There may be negative social evaluation of speakers using a salient nonstandard feature. High frequency items are salient.

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• • • •

87

Grammatical markers which cannot be phonetically reduced, such as noncliticized pronouns, are salient, while affixes may be non-salient. Processes in derivational and inflectional morphology are salient if there is transparency in the form-meaning relationship. Phonetic features in prosodically prominent positions are salient. Grammatical (perhaps mainly syntactic) features in interactionally prominent positions are salient.

Salience, then, is a useful notion only if the definition adopted avoids circularity. As stated at the beginning of this section, this can only be achieved if it is defined against extra-linguistic criteria, which will be a combination of the cognitive, social psychological, pragmatic and interactional factors listed above. Later in this chapter, we will see that we need to add sociodemographic factors to this list. At the end of the chapter, we present a model which incorporates the approach to salience just presented. We turn now to the use of salience as an explanatory concept in language change, with particular reference to that resulting from dialect contact. Our attention focuses on the work of Trudgill, who (as we stated earlier) has applied the concept in an explicit way.

3.

Language-internal and extra-linguistic factors in language change through contact

In order to contextualize "salience" as applied in sociolinguistic studies of language change, we will briefly enumerate significant internal and extra-linguistic factors in change triggered by contact, as suggested by the work of Thomason and Kaufman (1988), Trudgill (1986,1994) and Siegel (1985). Between them, these authors seem to agree on emphasizing the importance of the following as factors affecting the outcome of contact: Language-internal factors • • •

Typological distance between varieties in contact (roughly equivalent to language vs. dialect contact). Transparency of equivalent constructions in the varieties in contact. Markedness vs. naturalness of features which are candidates for transfer.

Extra-linguistic factors • •

Social relations between the borrowing group and the group it is borrowing from. Time-scale and intensity of contact.

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• •

Are adults or children primarily involved in the contact? Does contact result in language shift or borrowing?

It is useful to think of these as "independent variables" in an experimental sense, though of course (for reasons given earlier) we can only make weak predictions about outcomes. As Thomason and Kaufman (1988: 59) say, "Since even the most natural changes often fail to occur, it is always appropriate to ask why a particular change happened when it did", in recognition of the need to look for multiple causes of any linguistic change. They in fact stress the importance, or even primacy of extra-linguistic factors. As we shall see, "salience" as normally conceived shows some confusion about the relationships between language-internal and other factors. The outcomes of dialect and language contact can be thought of as a set of "dependent" variables. These include: • •

•

• •

The linguistic component (level) affected. Simplification (vs. complication): a loss of irregularity in morphology and an increase in invariable word forms (Mühlhäusler 1977, cited in Trudgill 1986: 103; Mühlhäusler 1980, cited in Siegel 1985). Reduction (impoverishment): "Those processes that lead to a decrease in the referential or non-referential potential of a language" (Mühlhäusler 1980: 21), involving, for example, a reduced vocabulary or fewer stylistic devices. Admixture: the use of items (usually lexical, but also phonological, morphological or syntactic) from more than one variety. Levelling: the decrease in the number of variants of a particular phonological, morphological or lexical unit in a given dialect area, usually resulting from the loss of minority or marked forms found in the different varieties spoken.

As can be seen, these outcomes refer to a combination of language-internal and extra-linguistic factors: the first four refer to changes in the language structure, while the fifth refers to a purely sociolinguistic notion, that of the reduction in the amount of variability in a speech community.

4.

Trudgill's notion of "salience"

However, there is a further set of factors which affect the outcomes of dialect contact. Trudgill refers to these collectively as contributing to the salience of particular features. Trudgill's basic idea is that features which are adopted in

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dialect contact are salient. He takes as his starting point a brief analysis of "markers", defined by Labov as linguistic variables to which speakers can pay more or less conscious attention (as opposed to "indicators", to which speakers do not pay conscious attention). Trudgill lists the following as factors leading to variables becoming markers, and therefore salient (adapted from Trudgill 1986: 11): • • • • •

The variable has at least one variant which is overtly stigmatized. The variable has a high-status prestige variant reflected in the orthography. The variable is undergoing linguistic change. Variants are phonetically radically different. Variants are involved in the maintenance of phonological contrasts.

The importance of Trudgill's conception is that it attempts to explain why certain features are adopted, and others rejected, in dialect contact. Salience is a factor that is additional to the list of seven "independent" variables given above. It hints at psycholinguistic explanations, though it does not do so explicitly. In his discussion, Trudgill also covers attitudinal and sociodemographic factors which may lead to stigmatization. Trudgill takes the reader through a number of examples of features which are regularly adopted by speakers in dialect contact situations, and some which are not, the conclusion being that salient features are the ones acquired. There are, however, three provisos. First, features which are too "difficult" are acquired late (if, for instance, they involve the learning of a new contrast). Second, they are avoided if they result in homonymic clash in the speaker's original dialect. Finally, they are avoided if they have "extra-strong salience", that is, the features are (for the speakers) overly strong markers of the dialect being accommodated to. However, there are two related sources of circularity and therefore loss of explanatory power in Trudgill's argument. The first has been discussed by other authors, particularly Hinskens (1996), and concerns the idea of extra-strong salience. It appears that the very factors that lead speakers to notice and to adopt new features, including the five listed above, are precisely those that also lead to a feature being avoided. If we just look at features which are salient, there is no way of predicting, on purely linguistic grounds, which ones will be adopted and which avoided - there is no objective measure either proposed, or even possible (it seems to us) that can achieve this (on this point, see also the discussion in Kerswill 2002). Instead, we must have recourse to extra-linguistic information lying outside the stricter definition of salience. We argue later that it is these extra-linguistic factors that, in the end, are the decisive ones.

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But problems lie in the five factors themselves. All of these, Trudgill argues, lead to speakers becoming aware of a feature. However, even here it is possible to detect difficulties. We deal with the factors in reverse order. The only noncontroversial factor among the five is probably the last one: even though current phonological theories do not necessarily operate with the idea of "contrast", we are still dealing with differences that must be incorporated in the lexicon. This is an all-or-nothing matter, and the differences are potentially the bearers of semantic information - though semantic differences are by definition not allowable in the notion of the "linguistic variable" itself (Cheshire 1987). Because of the potential for semantic differentiation, awareness of the contrast is likely to be high rather than low. Despite this, the presence of a contrast is no guarantee of salience (see Auer, Barden and Grosskopf 1998). The fourth factor (phonetic distance) is relevant only for phonological features. It has psychoacoustic explanations, though the parameters have not been clearly established. However, for vowels, a formula for the establishment of "just noticeable differences" has been proposed (Rosner and Pickering 1994), and it has been applied in a study of phonetic changes in a speaker suffering from Foreign Accent Syndrome (Dankovicovä et al. 2001). Even though this technique is likely to tell us what the absolute minimum phonetic difference for salience might be, as we shall see from the example to be discussed later in this chapter, it is unlikely to help us predict whether a particular vowel difference will actually show salience (or, for that matter, extra-strong salience). The third predictor of salience (involvement in linguistic change) is circular if salience is to be used as part of an explanation of language change - which is surely Trudgill's intention. The way in which this factor can be maintained is if it is assumed that salience does not itself lead to change, and that it is the change itself that causes speakers to notice the feature involved. The first two criteria are essentially sociolinguistic in nature. They are incontrovertibly signs of salience, but are not explanations. Stigma (factor 1) and prestige (factor 2) are the result of a set of factors which lead to speakers becoming aware of the particular features and attaching to them socially negative and positive connotations, respectively. However, in setting out these two criteria for salience, Trudgill can be accused of resorting to circularity in his account: since we are attempting to explain both awareness of features (salience) and their "polarity" (i.e. whether negative or positive associations are involved), it is not enough to say that speakers are aware of the features because they have stigma or prestige (negative or positive polarity). In fact, Trudgill breaks out of the circularity by discussing certain features in terms of their wider social embedding - their geographical and social distribution. Expla-

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nations for stigma and prestige should, then, be sought in extra-linguistic (sociolinguistic) factors. Despite some problems, Trudgill's version of salience is a testable hypothesis which can be measured against new data, and this is done in the research to be reported in the next section. To anticipate our conclusions: first, there is a strong need to view individual linguistic features more explicitly and carefully in terms of their social embedding and evaluation (to use Labov's terms). This is because, even over a relatively short period of time, social embedding changes rapidly and in often unpredictable ways. Second, even within one community, embedding and evaluation may not be shared. Third, different linguistic features which are undergoing change vary in their social patterning in ways that may be related to their linguistic level (discourse, grammar or phonology), or sub-level (e.g. vowels or consonants). Differences related to linguistic level are not discussed by Trudgill; as Cheshire suggests, explanations for variation in grammatical, particularly syntactic, features may well be found in pragmatic and interactional factors. However, Trudgill believes factors 4 and 5, degree of phonetic difference and surface contrast (1986: 37), to be at the core of the salience notion, and we shall argue that these remain useful so long as they are seen as interacting with extra-linguistic factors.

5. The Dialect levelling project 5.1. Premises and structure The study reported here2 set out to investigate dialect levelling across urban centres in England. Its premises were the following: •

•

•

•

In areas of high population movement, there may be rapid changes in dialect and accent features, including levelling. The speech community is "diffuse". Membership of a close-knit, stable social network with strong local ties leads to linguistic conformity. This inhibits change, including that manifesting as levelling. The speech community is "focused". The distance of a town from a metropolis (in this case London) is inversely proportional to the degree to which the town adopts linguistic features from that metropolis (the gravity model: see Trudgill 1983). Language change is most visible through the comparison of teenage language with that of adults.

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The project investigated teenage speech in three towns, Milton Keynes, a new town lying 70 kilometres north-west of London and having a highly mobile population (Kerswill and Williams 2000), Reading, a well-established town lying 60 kilometres west of London, and Hull, a northern city with declining industries. The choice of southern towns (Milton Keynes vs. Reading) enabled us to assess the effect of geographical mobility vs. stability and open vs. closeknit social networks on dialect levelling, while the choice of Hull allowed us to investigate the presence of convergence or divergence between North and South. In order to find evidence of parallel trends across social classes, in each town two broadly defined social groups were investigated, "working class" and "middle class", sampled by targeting schools in different catchment areas. In each town, 32 14-15 year olds were recorded in interviews and group discussions. Additionally, in each town, four elderly working-class residents were recorded. The following variables were quantified: • • • • 5.2.

four vowels (those in the lexical sets of PRICE, GOOSE, GOAT and MOUTH 3 ). four consonants (τ-glottalling, fronting [Θ] -> [f], fronting [ö] -> [ν], Η-dropping). twelve non-standard grammatical (morphological and morphosyntactic) features. the focus marker like. Results

We now look in detail at the geographical and social spread of a number of these variables. In order to investigate the role of salience, we will first try to assess the possible reasons for the difference in their spread in relation to one of the internal factors mentioned in section 3., that of markedness vs. naturalness. Restricting the discussion to just this factor is because, in this project, all the remaining factors are constant, even if their values are not always known. Where this fails, we look at the language-internal salience factors (phonological contrast and phonetic distance), and then at other extra-linguistic (sociolinguistic/social-psychological) factors. 5.2.1.

Consonants

Figure 1 shows the distribution of τ-glottalling and Θ- and ö-fronting in the three towns, τ-glottalling refers to the replacement of [t] by [?] in intervocalic positions within a word, as in [le?a] for letter, θ-fronting refers to the variable (th), which concerns the replacement of /Θ/ by /f/, giving [fir)] for thing. ö-fronting refers to the (dh) variable, the equivalent process affecting non-in-

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itial /&/, which is replaced by /v/ in words such as brother. Together, the latter two changes are often referred to as TH-fronting. The distribution of all three is broadly similar in all three towns: the strongest factor is class, with middle class (MC) teenagers using far fewer of the innovative non-prestige variants than their working class (WC) peers. There is a decidedly unclear gender distribution, though there is a tendency for girls to use more of the prestige variants - a pattern reversed among WC children in Reading and Hull. (Ml

MCgifli

MCbtm

Milton K e y n e s

WCgirli

WCboys

MC girls

MCtays

WCgirls

WC boys

Reading

MC girl*

MC buy»

WC girl»

WCbovs

Hull

• % glottal stop for intervocalic IV • % Γ for (th) Ü % ν for (dh)

Figure 1. Non-standard variants of three consonantal variables (interview data)

These rather similar results in the three towns (especially evident in the scores for Hull and Reading) belie the very different recent histories of the features. All three features are at least a century old in London, and have been spreading throughout the South-east, though TH-fronting has been slower to spread than glottalling. In the North, all three are recent. In Hull, there is evidence that τ-glottalling in this intervocalic environment started among today's elderly generation, who use it but at a very low frequency, though in other regions it is more recent still (in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, some 150 kilometres to the north, it is relatively widespread among young middle-class females born since about 1970 - see Watt and Milroy (1999: 29)). In Hull, there is evidence that THfronting has only been common among working-class children since some time in the decade after 1980. In the case of these three consonants, then, there is complete levelling towards the southern pattern in the northern city of Hull and, we suspect, elsewhere too. We must consider reasons why this happened at the same time for all three variables. The first possible explanation is that they are all consonants, and

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therefore pattern differently from vowels, which, as we have argued elsewhere (Williams and Kerswill 1999), show no North-South convergence at all. To answer this question, we look at another consonantal feature, that of H-dropping in lexical words such as house, hard. All three towns lie in the large central belt of England where /h/ is dropped in traditional dialects and generally in working-class speech. This is, indeed, the pattern we find among our elderly speakers in all three towns, who in the interview used /h/ only between five and twelve per cent of the time. Figure 2 shows this pattern. However, it shows another extremely striking result: the apparent reinstatement of /h/ by the southern working-class teenagers, who, especially in Milton Keynes, use it up to 83 per cent of the time. There is, thus, a massive divergence between North and South on this variable, with the North retaining the traditional form. 100

- % [h] Milton Keynes - % [h] Reading - % [h] Hull

Elderly

Boys

Girls

Figure 2. Percent use of [h] in lexical words, Working Class speakers (interview data)

We must look for explanations for these patterns, beginning with naturalness. TH-fronting and Η-dropping are normally thought of as natural; both lead to a reduction in phoneme inventories and to the loss of a marked segment, τ-glottalling differs in that it is the straightforward replacement of one stop by another, with no loss of distinctions. Thus, naturalness fails to group these variables according to their sociolinguistic behaviour: it does not predict the fact that TH-fronting and τ-glottalling behave similarly, while Η-dropping shows a different pattern. We turn next to Trudgill's definition of salience to see if this serves to differentiate them. Trudgill's first two criteria do not differentiate the features at all: there is overt stigma attached to the non-RP (Received Pronunciation) vari-

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ant in each case, with overt correction by parents and teachers; in each case the prestige variant is reflected in the orthography. All the variables are undergoing change at the moment in that there are gradual changes in the frequency of use of existing variants. Trudgill's final two criteria, concerned with linguistic factors, do not help either, since they fail to group τ-glottalling and TH-fronting, differentiating them from Η-dropping: variants are phonetically radically different in the case of τ-glottalling and Η-dropping, but less so with TH-fronting. Η-dropping and TH-fronting both involve the loss of a phoneme, while τ-glottalling does not. We are left unable to explain why τ-glottalling and TH-fronting are spreading, while Η-dropping appears to be receding in the South. Yet the pattern we have observed in our data fits in very well with what is known about changes affecting these consonants in British English more generally. Glottalling, at least in environments other than the word-internal intervocalic one, is now very common among younger high-prestige speakers, even those whose speech is labelled as "posh" by lay listeners ("posh" is a colloquial term that can be glossed as 'upper class' or 'snobbish', and may be used derogatorily). Glottalling is therefore losing its stigma and, along with formerly non-standard features like the labiodental [υ] for /r/ is now fairly widespread among young English middle-class speakers (Foulkes and Docherty 2000; Williams and Kerswill 1999). TH-fronting is likewise spreading, though at a slower rate. On the other hand, Η-dropping is still extremely rare among middle-class speakers, including those who speak compromise varieties like so-called "Estuary English" (between RP and broader south-eastern speech) (Rosewarne 1994; Coggle 1993; Wells 1982). It could be said that Η-dropping has extra-strong salience as a low-prestige marker, which leads to a tendency to abandon it. But a converse extra-strong salience may be appealed to in order to explain its continued strength in Hull: it could be that it is heard as "southern" or "posh", both of which may be undesirable features among northern teenagers. Appealing to extra-strong salience is, as we have seen, a circular argument if we stick just to the linguistic correlates of salience. Also, this does not explain why the originally southern features of τ-glottalling and TH-fronting are adopted in the North with such rapidity. We need to look at large-scale attitudinal and identity factors affecting the North and the South differently, and which operate independently of phonetic difference and phonological contrast. Even though τ-glottalling and TH-fronting are southern in origin and are demonstrably spreading from the South, they apparently do not pose a threat to a northern identity - unlike the use of /h/. The condition for this seems to be that the southern features must at the same time have low prestige.

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We must still explain the reinstatement of /h/ in the South among speakers who remain quite strongly non-standard in their grammar and phonology. It appears that the evaluation of /h/ has changed among adolescent working-class speakers: it is as if it is no longer a marker of "poshness" for these speakers. It is tempting to seek an explanation in the greater social mobility in the region than in the North. However, for the Reading working-class adolescents this is not obviously the case, since they are resident in a district of the town which has very strongly local networks in the same way as the Hull working-class subjects (Kerswill and Williams 1999; Cheshire et al. 1999). If sociodemographic changes do turn out to differentiate the northern and southern teenagers, we must still explain the southerners' adoption and maintenance of other non-prestige features like TH-fronting and τ-glottalling. Having exhausted linguistic and social explanations for the adoption vs. non-adoption of particular features, we have to recognize that we may, ultimately, be dealing with linguistically arbitrary factors. The following is a summary of the results for the three consonantal variables:

5.2.1.1. Summary for

•

•

•

•

5.2.2.

consonants

Consonantal features spread from the South to the North. (We can add the increasing use of labiodental [υ] for /r/ in the North, following a southern innovation - see Foulkes and Docherty 2000.) The successful ones are those which (1) are natural and (2) have low prestige. Explanations in terms of a restricted definition of salience fail (1) because of the circularity of "extra-strong salience" and (2) because the factors of phonological contrast and phonetic difference do not serve to group consonantal features in terms of their sociolinguistic behaviour. Northern identity factors mean that southern features perceived as "posh" are not adopted in the North. There is less resistance to "posh" features in the South. We may ultimately not be able to explain why one feature is adopted while another is not; linguistically arbitrary factors may play a part. Vowels

In terms of vowels, the study showed no evidence at all of convergence between North and South. Instead, we see independent, relatively local developments leading in some cases to divergence, and in other cases the maintenance

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of very localized features (Williams and Kerswill 1999). The vowel of PRICE illustrates the difference between the regions. Table 1.

Percentage use of variants of /ai/ (PRICE), Reading Working Class, interview style [ai]

[gi]

[QI]

[31]

[AI]

[ΛΙ]

Elderly (2f, 2m)

0

12.4

47.8

21.8

1.7

15.7

Girls (n = 8)

2.8

21.2

45.1

21.1

4.3

5.1

Boys (n = 8)

0.6

19.1

63.7

13.7

2.7

0

Table 1 shows that, in Reading, there is a gradual loss of back-onset and central-onset diphthongs (last three columns) in favour of low-back-onset diphthongs [αϊ] (third column) - a levelling towards majority southern urban speech, presumably spread by diffusion through contact. In Hull and parts of the surrounding East Riding of Yorkshire, there is a striking allophonic difference between two variants of PRICE, a monophthong [a:] before voiced consonants, as in ride, and a diphthong, typically [ai], before voiceless consonants, as in bike. Table 2 shows the distribution among the Hull subjects: the allophonic distinction is largely maintained by the younger working-class speakers, with only one girl and one boy at times using diphthongs in the "monophthong" environment. Despite its localized nature, there is little convergence with the South on this vowel and, more interestingly, there is also little convergence with other northern accents, which do not have this feature. While the Reading PRICE vowel is being levelled, its Hull equivalent is maintaining a strongly localized pronunciation. Table 2.

The PRICE vowel with following voiceless and voiced consonants, Hull speakers

(a) with following voiceless consonant, e.g. bright % [ai] ~ [a:1]

% [a:]

WC elderly (n = 4)

100

0

WC girls (n = 8)

100

0

WC boys (n = 8)

100

0

MC girls (n = 8)

100

0

MC boys (n = 8)

100

0

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Table 2 (continued) (b) with following voiced consonant, e.g. bride % [ai] ~ [a:1]

% [a:]

0

WC elderly (n = 4)

100

WC girls (n = 8)

25.7

74.2

WC boys (n = 8)

17.5

82.5

100

MC girls (n = 8) MC boys (n = 8)

0

95.0

5.0

Note: Each adolescent read the following words: bright, knife, lighter, bike, whiter; bride, five, pint, smile, wider. Scores for the elderly are derived from the interview data; 20 tokens per speaker were transcribed.

Finally, we consider the vowel of MOUTH, which is undergoing rapid change in Reading. Table 3 shows the distribution of its variants among working-class speakers there. This shows a near-complete shift away from the traditional variant across two generations: among the adolescents, the old forms are only used sporadically. The figures do not show a striking facet of Reading speakers' behaviour with respect to this vowel: those speakers who use both old and new variants actually switch between these two, with no phonetically intermediate variant. To sum up: both Reading vowels are undergoing quite rapid change (dramatically so for MOUTH), while Hull PRICE remains relatively unlevelled, showing little convergence with southern or even majority northern variants. Table 3.

Percentage use of variants of /au/ (MOUTH), Reading Working Class, interview style [ευ]

SED informants

•

Elderly (2f, 2m)

53.5

[ει]

38.1

[ε:]

m

[aeu]

[au]

0.7

3.3

0

4.1

Girls age 14 (n = 8)

0

2.3

0

8.0

0

90.4

Boys age 14 (n = 8)

3.8

3.2

0

5.7

0

87.1

Let us now look more closely at these vowels in terms of the motivating factor of markedness/naturalness. There is no reason to suppose that any of the variants which are being lost (viz., Reading [EY]/[EI] for MOUTH, [ΟΙ]/[[ΛΙ]/[ΛΙ] for

"Salience" as an explanatory factor in language

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are less natural than the variants that are replacing them. On the other hand, the position for Hull PRICE is quite different. The allophonic distribution of the vowel was doubtless originally phonetically motivated, and hence natural, but that motivation has, presumably, long since been lost. Importantly, its continued existence in fact represents the maintenance of a complex, or more marked feature. This is a fact for which we must seek extra-linguistic explanations. Elsewhere (Williams and Kerswill 1999), we argue that this feature's maintenance is due to the relative geographical and social isolation of the Hull working-class speakers, leading to close-knit networks. Returning to the salience notion, we find that none of the variants is reflected in orthography, nor is there a phonological contrast at stake anywhere. However, there are differences with regard to phonetic distance. Both the Hull PRICE vowel and the Reading MOUTH vowel involve relatively large differences, with little tendency for intermediate variants. These facts are certainly reflected in the switching in Reading between the variants of MOUTH; users of the traditional Reading variant are often aware of it, and younger users often have their attention drawn to it by non-users, who may regard it as "old-fashioned" or "country". In Hull, we do not have sufficient information on speakers' awareness of the two allophones of PRICE, but it is a feature frequently commented upon by incomers to the city. The phonetic distance criterion applies in a rather less obvious way to Reading PRICE, the variants of which are distributed along a relatively small phonetic continuum. Despite this, the Reading vernacular vowel is quite strongly stereotyped in the South-east, and contributes specifically to the perception of Reading speakers as "rural" (see Kerswill and Williams 2002). Incomers to Reading frequently comment upon it and adolescent users may get teased for it. Yet there is a way in which the linguistic predictors of salience hold up: it may be that the older variants are heard by other speakers as the vowel of CHOICE - in which case we are dealing with a contrast. However, there is no merger for the Reading users of the back vowel, so far as we are aware. What we are left with is three highly salient features which fulfil the "phonetic difference" criterion for salience, but to differing degrees, and which turn out to pattern very differently in their degree of change and in whether the variants are discrete or placed on a phonetic continuum. None of this can easily be predicted by the two linguistic factors favouring salience. On the the other hand, as with consonants, sociodemographic factors play a part (though not the same ones: the maintenance of the complex Hull PRICE allophony can be ascribed to the relative isolation of this group of speakers rather than regional - i.e., North-South - identity factors). The position for vowels can be summarized in the following way: PRICE)

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and Ann

Williams

5.2.2.1. Summary for vowels •

•

•

The salience factors of phonological contrast and phonetic difference do not (i) correlate with degree of overt stigma or (ii) mirror sociolinguistic patterning in any clear way. All three vowels are overtly stigmatized, but only Hull PRICE and Reading MOUTH show discrete variants. Against expectations, it is with these vowels that no phonological contrast is at stake for either speakers or outsiders (Reading PRICE may be heard as CHOICE). Phonetic difference does, however, appear to cause (i) switching between discrete variants and (ii) a relatively sharp stratification in terms of class and/or age. Markedness/naturalness play no part in predicting the spread of vowel features.

5.2.3. Grammatical variables and discourse features Following Cheshire (1987), we distinguish between morphological variables, for which it is relatively easy to identify variants which do not affect any aspect of meaning, and syntactic variables, for which this is difficult or impossible, and where the notion of "variable" may be inapplicable anyway. In the study reported here, we focused on morphology. Morphological variables are likely to be salient in Trudgill's terms because they involve different lexical realizations of underlying grammatical categories. This component, or level, was not originally investigated by Trudgill, though he encourages others to do so (1986: 37). In addition to quantifying the frequencies of a number of variables, we also investigated their salience by asking the teenage subjects whether they thought particular grammatical forms could be heard locally. The majority of the non-standard features investigated have long been shared by all three nonstandard varieties. But there is some evidence of levelling between the three towns (that is, change leading to convergence) with respect to specific features. For example: • •

•

them as demonstrative adjective is being generalized (Hull them there, as in look at them there cars is absent from teenage speech). there is a reduction in frequency of two localized features - Hull zero definite article and Reading present tense -s - in favour of majority/standard forms. there is an increased use of clause-final tag innit, replacing [inti?], in Hull. In the two southern towns, the tag need not agree with its antecedent in number, person or modal verb.

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To this can be added a feature which is not a variable sensu stricto: the use of like as a focus marker, as in I'm like real tired when I get in and as a marker of reported speech or thought, as in He's like wow that's great. At the same time, there is a loss in all three towns of clause-final discourse marker like, which shares some of the functions of a tag, e.g. I've got a lot to do, like. The "grammar salience test" was administered as a questionnaire during group discussions with the adolescents. Sentences containing examples of 40 non-standard features were presented in printed form (following the practice adopted in Cheshire, Edwards and Whittle 1989/1993), and the subjects had to write down whether they thought the constructions could be heard in their town. Table 4 shows the recognition scores for some of these features. Below each score, the working-class subjects' actual usage is given, expressed as the percentage use of the non-standard form in the interviews. Four main patterns emerge. Pattern 1 shows that, for a number of features, medium or high usage among working-class speakers goes with a high recognition rate among both working-class and middle-class judges. Pattern 2 shows that the same is true for features particular to individual towns: non-standard done in the southern towns and non-standard was in Hull. Conversely, Pattern 3 shows that low linguistic scores can correspond to relatively low recognition rates. The results for Patterns 1-3 are in line with the assumption, stated earlier, that grammatical features are likely to be salient because their variants are distinct. However, there are other patterns which suggest that factors other than distinctness are at work. Pattern 4 suggests that some strongly localized features can receive a high recognition rate, even when their absolute frequencies are low. Both the Hull zero definite article and the Reading non-standard present tense -s are decreasing in frequency, yet they remain highly salient. Furthermore, within Patterns 2 and 3 we find a mismatch between recognition rates for the two groups of judges. Thus, in Hull, middle-class adolescents believed that preterite done was a characteristic of local speech (showing this by their "recognition" rate of 100 per cent), while the linguistic score (at eight per cent) demonstrated this was not the case - did is the local form. It is as if these judges are stereotyping local non-standard speech, attributing an otherwise widespread and stigmatized feature to Hull when it is in fact largely absent there. Conversely, in Reading, middle-class judges fail to recognise the present tense marker -s. These results suggest that, even within a single town, there can be a lack of shared knowledge of local norms, a fact which is very much in line with the results from a "dialect recognition" experiment reported in Kerswill and Williams (2002). It follows that salience, however defined and however caused, will be different for different social groups.

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Table 4. Association between recognition scores (per cent) and Working Class linguistic scores (per cent non-standard) for selected grammatical features Pattern 1. High recognition rate, moderate to high non-standard linguistic score in all towns Reading Item No. 1 2 3

Feature neg. concord ling, score n-s come ling, score n-s them ling, score

WC 94 37 75 82 50 67

Milton Keynes

MC 100 63 63

WC 69 34 88 57 81 56

MC 100 100 100

Hull WC 94 67 81

MC 100 71

73 100 25

88

Pattern 2. High recognition rate, moderate non-standard score, individual towns, with differences in recognition rates between classes Presence of feature in MK and Reading, near-absence in Hull: 4

pret. done 100 100 36 ling, score High frequency of feature in Hull, lower frequency 94 87 5 n-s was ling, score 29

69 100 31 56 8 in MK and Reading:

100

100 21

100

20

100 78

Pattern 3. Low to moderate recognition rate, low non-standard score, in all towns 6

relative what ling, score

25 4

50

0

0

3

6

0

26

Pattern 4. Low non-standard score, high recognition rate, individual towns Recessive Hull feature (absent in South): 7

zero def. article 6 38 50 ling, score 0 0 Recessive Reading feature (absent in MK and Hull): 8 pres. tense-i 100 13 0 ling, score 12 0

0

0

69 9.5 0 0

100

0

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Table 4 (continued) Pattern 5. Recognition of "old" discourse marker clause-final like and "new" focus marker medial like: Reading Item No.

Feature

9

clause final like

10

focus marker like

Milton Keynes

Hull

WC

MC

WC

MC

WC

MC

0

13

0

0

13

25

100

100

75

100

94

100

Finally in this discussion of data from the English adolescents, we return to Cheshire's (1996) claim that some non-standard features occur in interactionally prominent, or salient positions, owing to the fact that non-standard varieties are developed in face-to-face interaction. The final feature we consider has a discourse function. It is not a variable as ordinarily conceived, because of the difficulty of establishing semantic or even functional equivalence for possible variants. This is the focus marker like, shown under Pattern 5 in Table 4. First, we can note the uniformly high recognition rate. It is a new feature, widespread in the English-speaking world, and not surprisingly it is used by all the adolescent groups in the sample (Cheshire et al. 1999). Anecdotal evidence suggests that it is commented upon, and criticized, by many adults. This marker has obvious interactional functions, including encoding the degree of importance to be placed on the proposition which it precedes, expressing the speaker's orientation towards and commitment to the truth of the proposition, and (in the form be like - see Tagliamonte and Hudson 1999) as a quotative. By contrast, the clause-final discourse marker like (e.g. I did that when I got home, like) has a very low recognition rate and, we can infer, low salience - despite the fact that it is present in all three towns, albeit as a recessive feature. It shares, however, some of the same functions of utterance-medial focus marker like especially in expressing commitment to the proposition. In utterances such as Did you see her, like? it has a clear interactional function. Therefore, it is surprising that it is barely recognized. Aside from the fact that it is increasingly rare, one reason for its apparent unfamiliarity may lie in the fact that it occurs in a position that may be both prosodically and pragmatically non-prominent. Thus, its post-tonic and utterance-final position leads to less phonetic prominence. Also, the propositions it modifies have normally not been foregrounded. This discussion must remain speculative at the moment. The following summarizes this discussion:

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5.2.3.1. Summary for morphological variables and the focus marker "like" •

These features are likely to be salient because they involve lexical differences. The generally high level of recognition bears this out. • But certain factors increase salience: (i) Localized features, though decreasing in use, remain highly salient. (ii) Discourse features may be salient if they occur in prosodically and pragmatically prominent positions (medial like)·, admittedly the evidence is unclear on this point. • Salience is not shared across the community: (i) Middle-class non-users of the features often do not recognize local features. (ii) Middle-class non-users may also resort to stereotyping, resulting in the reporting of features which are not, in fact, present. • Although strongly localized features are levelled, they may remain salient. • For morphological and discourse features, the a priori predictors of salience (phonological and phonetic distinctiveness) combine with sociodemographic and social psychological factors to produce varying levels of salience. In this respect, they do not differ from phonological features, though the details of the factors vary.

6. A model of salience Discussing salience in a way that divorces it from extra-linguistic factors leads to a failure to gain insights into the social patterning of linguistic features; at worst, to do so leads to circularity and labelling. If we suspect that a feature is salient for speakers because of its particular patterning (in terms of acquisition, change or variation), we start by checking for language-internal factors. But we must immediately look for extra-linguistic factors that might be linked to the salience. These factors, as we saw in the early part of this chapter, are extremely varied and sometimes complex. We argued that, of Trudgill's five factors, only the two language-internal ones (phonetic difference and phonological contrast) fully avoid circularity. It was also suggested that we cannot immediately say whether these two factors are a potential cause of salience, since they may also be a result of prior salience. The data from the Dialect Levelling Project shows that these two factors do not always lead to features becoming salient, and that features which do not fulfil the criteria for either factor (or

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show relatively small phonetic differences, like Reading PRICE) may nevertheless be salient. Thus, there are no necessary and sufficient conditions which must be met in order for a linguistic feature to be salient - barring the obvious one that differences between its presence and absence must be noticeable in a psychoacoustic sense. More explicitly, we see the social psychological property of "salience", which may be attached to a feature by language users, as being linked to internal and extra-linguistic factors as outlined in the following model. Any operationalization of the salience notion must involve a match between three components: (1)

The presence of a linguistic phenomenon whose explanation we suspect may be due to the salience of the linguistic feature or features involved. Typically, the phenomenon will be a particular pattern observed in language change, language variation, the variable behaviour of individual speakers, or the acquisition of a linguistic feature. In cases of language change and variation, the linguistic features are items being transferred from one language variety to another through diffusion; however, diffusion-type mechanisms may hold for the other types of phenomena as well. (2) Language-internal explanations, such as the presence of phonological contrast, great phonetic distance, internally-defined naturalness, semantic transparency, or a particular syntactic or prosodic environment. (3) Extra-linguistic cognitive, pragmatic, interactional, social psychological, and sociodemographic factors. Some have a natural link with the linguistic features being adopted (e.g., that between a syntactic feature and its pragmatic function), while others have an arbitrary relationship (e.g., the favouring of one vowel quality over another). Note that the list given under component (1) covers only a portion of what might be termed "linguistic phenomena". In particular, non-dynamic phenomena are excluded, such as grammatical or phonological theory and description (unless the focus is on a change from state A to state B), aphasiology and acquisition in relation to linguistic theory, descriptions of language changes where contact is not being discussed, much of articulatory phonetics, and some areas of psycholinguistic processing. The presence of at least one element taken from component (2) appears to be a precondition for salience. Certain elements are gradient, others categorical. Component (3) is essential if we are to avoid circularity, and is ultimately the cause of salience. Components (2) and (3) are linked in complex ways, sometimes natural, sometimes arbitrary. There

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Notes 1. We are very grateful to Peter Auer, Jenny Cheshire and Peter Trudgill for valuable comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 2. Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of Great Britain (ref. R000236180). See Cheshire (1999); Kerswill and Williams (1997, 1999, 2002); Williams and Kerswill (1997, 1999); Cheshire, Gillett, Kerswill and Williams (1999). 3. These words are used mnemonically, following Wells (1982).

References Auer, Peter, Birgit Barden and Beate Grosskopf 1998 Subjective and objective parameters determining "salience" in longterm dialect accommodation. Journal of Sociolinguistics 2: 163-187. Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen 1987 Markedness and salience in second-language acquisition. Language Learning 37: 385-407. Chapman, Carol 1995 Perceptual salience and analogical change: evidence from vowel lengthening in modern Swiss German dialects. Journal of Linguistics 31: 1-13. Cheshire, Jenny 1987 Syntactic variation, the linguistic variable, and sociolinguistic theory. Linguistics 25: 257-282. 1996 Syntactic variation and the concept of prominence. In: Klemola, Juhani, M. Kytö and M. Rissanen (eds.), Speech Past and Present: Studies in English Dialectology in Memory of Ossi Ihalainen, 1-17. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. 1999 Taming the vernacular: some repercussions for the study of syntactic variation and spoken grammar. Cuadernos de Filologia Inglesa 8: 59-80.

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Cheshire, Jenny, Viv Edwards and Pam Whittle 1989/1993 Urban British dialect grammar: the question of dialect levelling. English World Wide 10: 185-225. Also in James Milroy and Lesley Milroy (eds.), 1993 Real English: The Grammar ofEnglish Dialects in the British Isles, 54-96. London: Longman. Cheshire, Jenny, Ann Gillett, Paul Kerswill and Ann Williams 1999 The role of adolescents in dialect levelling. Ref. R000236180. Final report submitted to Economic and Social Research Council, June 1999. Coggle, Paul 1993 Croft, W. 2000

Do you speak Estuary? London: Bloomsbury. Explaining Language Change: An evolutionary approach. Harlow: Longman.

Dankoviöovä, J., J. M. Gurd, J. C. Marshall, Μ. K. C. Coleman, Jane Stuart-Smith, John Coleman and A. Slater 2001 Aspects of non-native pronunciation in a case of altered accent following stroke (Foreign Accent Syndrome). Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics 15/8: 195-218. Foulkes, Paul and Gerard Docherty 2000 Another chapter in the story of /r/: "labiodental" variants in British English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 4: 30-59. Hinskens, Frans 1996 Dialect Levelling in Limburg. Structural and Sociolinguistic Aspects. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Kerswill, Paul 1985

1994 2002

A sociophonetic study of connected speech processes in Cambridge English: an outline and some results. Cambridge Papers in Phonetics and Experimental Linguistics 4:1-39, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Cambridge. Dialects Converging: Rural Speech in Urban Norway. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Koineization and accommodation. In J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds .),A Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 669-702. Oxford: Blackwell.

Kerswill, Paul and Ann Williams 1997 Investigating social and linguistic identity in three British schools. In: U.-B. Kotsinas, Α.-Β. Stenström and A.-M. Malin (eds.), Ungdoms-

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1999 2000 2002

Mobility versus social class in dialect levelling: evidence from new and old towns in England. Cuadernos de Filologia Inglesa 8: 47-57. Creating a new town koine: children and language change in Milton Keynes. Language in Society 29: 65-115. Dialect recognition and speech community focusing in old and new towns in England: the effects of dialect levelling, demography and social networks. In: Daniel Long and Dennis Preston (eds.), A Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology, Volume 2. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Also in: Clive Upton and Katie Wales (eds.), (1999) Dialectal Variation in English: Proceedings of the Harold Orton Centenary Conference 1998. (Leeds Studies in English, New Series 20.) 205-241.

McMahon, April 1994 Understanding Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milroy, James 1992

Linguistic Variation and Change. Oxford: Blackwell.

Mufwene, Salikoko 1991 Pidgins, Creoles, typology, and markedness. In: Francis Byrne and Thom Huebner (eds.), Development and Structures of Creole Languages. Essays in Honor of Derek Bickerton, 123-143. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Mühlhäusler, Peter 1977 Pidginization and Simplification of Language. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. 1980 Structural expansion and the process of creolization. In: Albert Valdman and Arnold Highfield (eds.), Theoretical Orientations in Creole Studies, 19-55. New York: Academic Press. Nolan, Francis, Paul Kerswill and Susan Wright 1991 The interaction of sociophonetic features and connected speech processes. Final report submitted to the Economic and Social Research Council, Ref. R000231056. Poplack, Shana 1980 Sometimes I'll start a sentence in Spanish Y TERMINO EN ESPANOL: Toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics 18: 581-618.

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Rosewarne, David 1994 Estuary English: Tomorrow's RP? English Today 37: 3-8. Rosner, B. S. and Brian Pickering 1994 Vowel Perception and Production. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schirmunski, V. 1930 Sprachgeschichte und Siedlungsmundarten. Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 18: 113-122 (Part I); 171-188 (Part II). Siegel, Jeff 1985

Koines and koineization. Language in Society 14: 357-378.

Tagliamonte, Sali and Rachel Hudson 1999 Be like et al. beyond America: The quotative system in British and Canadian youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3: 147-172. Thomason, Sarah G. and Terrence Kaufman 1988 Language Contact, Creolization and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Trudgill, Peter 1983 1986 1994

On Dialect. Oxford: Blackwell. Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell. Language contact and dialect contact in linguistic change. In: UllaBritt Kotsinas and John Helgander (eds.), Dialektkontakt, spräkkontakt och spräkförändring i Norden. Föredrag fr an ett forskarsymposium [Youth language in the Nordic countries. Papers from a research symposium], 13-22. Stockholm: Institutionen för nordiska spräk, Stockholms universitet.

Watt, Dominic and Lesley Milroy 1999 Patterns of variation and change in three Newcastle vowels: is this dialect levelling? In: Paul Foulkes and Gerard Docherty (eds.), Urban Voices. Accent Studies in the British Isles, 25-46. London: Arnold. Wells, John 1982

Accents of English (3 Volumes). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Williams, Ann and Paul Kerswill 1997 Investigating dialect change in an English new town. In: Alan Thomas (ed.), Issues and Methods in Dialectology, 46-54. Bangor: Department of Linguistics, University of Wales, Bangor. 1999 Dialect levelling: change and continuity in Milton Keynes, Reading and Hull. In: Paul Foulkes and Gerard Docherty (eds.), Urban Voices. Accent Studies in the British Isles, 141-162. London: Arnold.

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Yaeger-Dror, Malcah 1993 Linguistic analysis of dialect "correction" and its interaction with cognitive salience. Language Variation and Change 5: 189-224.

My Dad's auxiliaries1 Edith Esch

Abstract The French educational policies of the Third Republic at the beginning of this century provide a good example of extra-linguistic factors leading to the merging of standard French and regional varieties of French via the medium of school instruction. This chapter, based on the analysis of a 510 page corpus of diaries and correspondence covering the period 1916-1991, examines the way in which my father, who was born in 1906 in Nancy, in the province of Lorraine (eastern France) acquired the use of 'etre' 'to be' and 'avoir' 'to have' as auxiliaries in French at school during the First World War and then went on to use these auxiliaries in his writings until his death. The study of the distribution of the auxiliaries 'etre' and 'avoir' in the compound verb-forms of this corpus illustrates the interplay of internal, external and extra-linguistic factors visά-vis the language of an individual and allows me to make the following three claims:

(1) The strength of resistance in the data to the norm taught by the school reflects the fact that, in standard French, the process of levelling of 'etre' as auxiliary for the compound tenses of a number of verbs is slowly but surely taking place. In other words, French appears to be behaving in the same way as all the other Romance languages. This language-internal development is occurring in spite of the existence of an elaborate and forceful policy aimed at preventing any levelling from taking place. (2) The fact that the children of the Nancy area had to learn the 'avoir! etre' distinction indicates that 'avoir' was the main auxiliary for the compound tenses of most verbs (including intransitive verbs such as 'tomber' 'to fall') in the regional variety of French spoken in the area of Nancy at the beginning of the century. One would expect that contact (a language-external factor) between the local variety and the standard variety would work against the levelling of 'etre' over time. (3) It is possible to slow down internally-motivated changes (in this case the levelling of 'etre') very effectively by means of the school system (an extra-linguistic factor) by the imposition of a standard variety. This is reflected in the corpus by the fact that the standard model of auxiliary selection was, by and large, learnt by my father quickly and effectively and then retained throughout his life.

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Edith Esch

Introduction

The teaching of the auxiliaries etre 'to be' and avoir 'to have' to French children needs to be considered in relation to the problem of the Romance auxiliary split. This internal change has been one of the most frequently debated examples of language evolution where periphrases have come to replace inflected forms, in this case those of Latin. The debate has concentrated on the grammaticalization of the form HABERE 'to have' + past participle for compound or perfect forms and of the form ESSE 'to be' + past participle for the passive and also as a marker of the perfect for a class of intransitive verbs called "unaccusative"2 such as tomber 'to fall' in French. Vincent (1982: 87), for example, analyses the complex interelations between HABERE, ESSERE (the latter being the Vulgar Latin form of ESSE) and the past participle in Classical and Vulgar Latin and shows how auxiliary selection causes a divide between the verbs of the various Romance languages. In Old French, there was a strong tendency to select HABERE + past participle to form all compound tenses in the active voice although the ESSE construction was still available. In modern French, the choice between etre and avoir is said to depend on whether the verb denotes state or action (Grevisse 1969: 602), but the tendency has been for more and more verbs to fall under the scope of avoir, so that the choice of auxiliary remains as the "fossilized residue of a grammatically active opposition" (Vincent 1982: 91) and the number of verbs where the opposition can still be made apparent is not only small but the form somewhat "frozen" as in (l)b. where the past participle of grandir 'to grow' i.e. grandi 'grown' has effectively become an adjective. (1)

a. //

a grandi

dans

une petite ville

He has grown up in a small town 'He grew up in a small town'. b. II

est

grandi.

He is grown 'He has grown'. The extent to which French children need to be taught the official "division of labour" between avoir and etre as auxiliaries in compound verb-forms is interesting in the context of this wider debate. It is in the hope that new light could be thrown on this old debate that I decided to undertake a case study of my father's writings after his death in 1991. He had kept diaries from the age of nine in 1916, when he lived in Nancy, Lorraine, in the East of France and these will be shown to constitute a valuable linguistic corpus.

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1.1. Contact between lefrangais populaire 'popular French' and the standard3 In modern French usage, the first set of issues to which auxiliary selection is relevant concerns the analogical levelling of etre in frangais populaire or 'popular French' together with the fact that there is a gradual erosion of the distinction between verbs requiring etre as an auxiliary in the compound tenses of the verbs and those requiring avoir. The use of etre in the present perfect in modern standard French is limited to a small number of intransitive verbs such as venir 'to come', aller 'to go' and all reflexives and pronominal verbs such as se souvenir 'to remember'. The use of etre as an auxiliary and, more particularly, the rules of agreement of the past participle in compound forms, is one of the key elements drummed into French children by the school from the primary level. It used to be and still is used as an emblem of a child's general competence in written French despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it is purely a formal matter of orthography since the distinction does not appear in the pronunciation.4 Thus, the pronunciation of the past participle is identical in the four following sentences: (2) a. Le livre que j'ai lu 'The book (noun + masculine + singular) that I have read.' b. La revue que j'ai lue 'The magazine (noun + feminine + singular) that I have read.' c. Les livres que j'ai lus 'The books (noun + masculine + plural) that I have read.' d. Les revues que j'ai lues 'The magazines (noun + feminine + plural) that I have read.' If the use of etre needs to be taught by the school as a disseminator of modern standard French, this suggests that the use of etre is more or less absent from popular French. Two questions will be asked in this study. First, whether there are signs that my father, and hence his parents and close family, was not using etre as an auxiliary when speaking but was rather using a form of French in which avoir was almost exclusively used as the auxiliary in compound tenses. Second, the extent to which my father learnt standard French through the school system will be considered. Are there significant differences between the early material in the corpus when he was a child and the late material in the corpus, when he was an adult? If my father was learning the use of etre, one would expect that his

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early diaries, started when he was nine years old, would reflect his nonstandard usage whereas his later writings would reflect the outcome of his learning and his fossilized adult usage. If the school system is not entirely successful and if it is clear that there are "etre-verbs" which are consistently used with avoir, then one needs to look at the possible factors which may influence the effect of school teaching on the use of auxiliaries with these verbs. These factors may be structural in nature, for example whether the verbs concerned have lexical counterparts or homophones which need to be conjugated with avoir. Other factors may be related to language use, such as the relative frequency of the verbs. 1.2. French linguistic conservatism and the imposition of the norm by the school The second set of issues to which auxiliary selection is relevant concerns the evolution of French in comparison with other Romance languages, together with the fact that French and Italian seem to be particularly conservative in their evolution in comparison with Spanish and Portuguese. In his study of the evolution of HABERE and ESSERE in Romance, Vincent (1982) showed that there exists an East - West continuum in the evolution of this syntactic parameter, along which the various Romance languages can be ordered from most conservative to most innovative. The point of interest here is his remark that "with regard to this dimension of change, French is not the one which has moved farthest from the Latin starting point. Indeed French in the matter of auxiliary usage shows itself to be one of the most conservative dialects" (Vincent 1982: 96). In this paper, Vincent draws attention to the fact that, while there is a closed list of 22 lexically bounded "etre-verbs" in modern French (discounting pronominal verbs), the list of verbs which are used with essere in Italian is open and covers many semantic fields (Vincent 1982: 88). On the other hand, in modern Spanish, ser 'to be' no longer survives as a temporal auxiliary and tener 'to have, lit. to hold' is offering an alternative to haber 'to have' while in Portuguese, "the cognate ter has completely replaced haver in all but the most literary registers" (Vincent 1982: 92). Canale, Mougeon and Belanger (1977:29) have argued that the main reason for the conservatism displayed by French in this area in comparison with the other Romance languages is the transmission of the norm inherited from Latin and mediated via the school system.5 In other words, the imposition of a standard norm would act as an effective brake to the evolution of the language and one could argue that, an extra-linguistic factor, the school, has been able to

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keep the evolution of the language in check for centuries. In my father's corpus, it is possible to consider that the difference between his adult usage and the standard, if any, is a measure of the extent to which this brake can be effective at the individual level. 1.3. Feasibility and desirability of linguistic engineering The third set of issues to which this type of corpus is relevant falls in the domain of applied linguistics and concerns the issue of the feasibility and desirability of linguistic engineering. More particularly, we are interested in assessing whether the imposition of a prescriptive norm via the school system can have desirable outcomes, as reflected in the writings of one individual's lifespan, given that acquisition is concomitant with socialization in a group. My father's case is particularly interesting in this respect for several reasons. 1.3.1. The national educational context My father's generation was a pure product of the egalitarian educational policies of the Third Republic. Proclaimed on September 4th 1870, the Third Republic introduced free, non-denominational and compulsory public instruction in 1881-1882. The much-debated separation of church and state took place in July 1905, a year before my father was born. Public instruction gave access to primary education for all and introduced the concept of state-controlled teacher training via the creation of the ecoles normales d' instituteurs 'state teachers' training Colleges'. Furthermore, the ecoles primaires superieures 'higher primary schools' were a new access road to higher education for poor children who could not expect to go to the lycee (fee-paying secondary school). Entrance to higher-level technical schools such as the Ecole des Arts et Metiers (which one could translate by 'School of Arts and Technology') (VermotGauchy 1965: 25, 70) was by means of concours 'competitive examinations'. My father won a place at the Ecole des Arts et Metiers of Chälons-sur-Marne in 1923. Of immediate relevance to us is the fact that under the Republic, primary education became characterized by its uniformity. As part of this process "immense emphasis was put on French language and culture, French history and geography, French national traditions and citizenship" (Thomson 1969: 144). It is interesting to see whether the policies of the Republic succeeded in the case of my father, particularly as other diaries have now been made available and make it possible to compare the usage of children from different social backgrounds.6

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1.3.2. The regional context The linguistic history of Alsace and Lorraine has been made particularly complicated by the wars of 1870 and 1914 between Prussia and France (Levy 1929). For individual families, the linguistic situation could be very awkward: in Alsace and the occupied part of Lorraine, the language of education changed to German after 1870 and then reverted back to French after 1918. These changes were accompanied by considerable population movement. My father's paternal grandparents moved from the occupied area of Metz to Nancy (which remained in France throughout the period) between 1870 and 1914 and Nancy had a strong community of displaced families from Alsace. An atmosphere of revenge in which the unity of France was symbolically and systematically associated with the French language was carefully maintained and engineered by the State. The French language was one of the main vehicles for building up national identity and as such, it is an extra reason for analysing whether my father associated the standard language with French identity. 1.3.3. The War as background My father's generation grew up during the First World War. It must be noted that, in the East of France, this had special significance because children experienced the War as an immediate ever-present physical event which transformed every aspect of their life. The very proximity of the battlefields, and in particular that of Verdun which could be heard from Nancy as a kind of uninterrupted distant rumbling, the necessity of staying at home because one could not play normally outside, the difficulty in going to school regularly and pressure to write to fathers who were away, all had an influence on children's writings. 1.3.4. The social and cultural context My father belonged to a very close network of people who spent the whole of their social life within a very restricted circle, namely the Mennonite community. In his diary, it is possible to trace almost from day to day the linguistic impact of his coming into contact with people coming from different groups. We expect to be able to show that Pierre Esch had developed a form of bidialectalism and that this was a positive outcome in so far as there is evidence of controlled use of his early life usage into adulthood for stylistic effect when interacting with his family. In the present study, I concentrate on the analysis of the auxiliaries etre and avoir in my father's writings and, more particularly, on the set of unaccusative verbs which are traditionally used + etre as described in the 1969 edition of Grevisse's descriptive grammar of French, Le Bon Usage.

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2. Description of the corpus and of the methodology used 2.1

Characterization of the corpus

The data consist of two types of texts: diaries and letters. The corpus may be split conveniently into five main sections corresponding to five distinct periods in my father's life in terms of his linguistic development, experience and social contacts. These five periods are represented below in Table 1. Table 1. Outline of the corpus Pierre Esch (born 19th September 1906, died 1 l,h July 1991) (1)

Years Text-Type

Ecole Primaire Superieure 1916-1923 Diaries

Place: Town and Departement Size

Nancy (Meurthe et Moselle) 113 pages

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

Arts et Metiers

Officer's Training

Prisoners' Camps

Last years

1923-1926 Correspondence

1926-1927 Correspondence

1986-1991 Diaries

Chalons s/Marne (Marne) 131 pages

Poitiers (Vienne)

1940-1942 Diaries & Correspondence (Germany)

53 pages

129 pages

93 pages

Vaucouleurs (Meuse)

Section 1. of the corpus consists of diaries, written in Nancy. It starts when Pierre was nine, on August 10th 1916, when he was living with his mother and his father was away as a soldier. It finishes in the spring of 1923. The diaries enA

able the reader to follow his progress through the Ecole Primaire Superieure until his admission to the Ecole des Arts et Metiers of Chälons-sur-Marne (see section 1.3.1. above). Linguistically, it is the most interesting part of the corpus because the text reflects Pierre's early attempts at recording his activities in writing and provides evidence of the way he was using French. Section 2. of the corpus is a collection of letters written in Chälons-surMarne when, as a Gadz'Art (school slang for Gars des Arts et Metiers meaning '[male] student of the School of Arts') and a boarder for three years, he wrote to his parents nearly every day, and, after his father's death in early 1925, he continued writing daily letters to his mother. Linguistically, this part of the corpus is characterized by his acquiring school slang and trying to make his par-

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ents share in his daily life and telling them about the school, the traditions and his friends. Section 3. consists of letters written to Pierre's mother from Poitiers, where he went after graduation as an engineer to be trained as an officer. It is the first time he has travelled far away from the East of France. Linguistically, the letters are full of explanations about his training and he uses a whole new vocabulary, but as with those he writes from Chalons, the letters are written in a familiar register. Section 4. consists of diaries and correspondence written at the start of the Second World War in 1940 which take the reader through the French defeat. He then writes as a prisoner of war from three different camps in Germany. These are interesting in that, for the first time, he is writing to some people outside the family, in particular to an engineer who was looking after his cast-iron foundry during his absence. This leads to a certain amount of professional talk. Section 5. is the collection of diaries written in Vaucouleurs between 1986 and 1991 when Pierre Esch was in his eighties. Linguistically, this part of the corpus makes it possible to observe whether the non-standard features which had been forgotten during my father's adolescence and adult life were coming back or whether the norms of standard French prevailed. 2.2. Methodology: remarks Can one justify using a written corpus in order to obtain evidence concerning the way people speak? I wish to argue, given the focus of this study, that this is indeed the case. First, much of the corpus is written in a conversational style. The familiar register associated with this style is particularly prominent in the family correspondence, where Pierre is addressing people he knows very well and to whom he talks often. It is a clear application of Bell's (1984) concept of language style as audience design according to which "speakers accommodate primarily to their addressee" whereas "third persons affect style to a lesser but regular degree" (Bell 1984: 145). The conversational style of many letters can also be explained by the purely functional nature of most messages. It may be useful to note here that a century ago, the post office was extremely efficient so that families used it as we would use the telephone today. If somebody travelled back from Nancy to Paris by train on a Sunday night, the Nancy family would expect a postcard on the Monday - posted on the Sunday night - confirming that the visitor was back home. Second, it is possible to establish criteria allowing one to say with confidence that what has been written is what would have been said. Most of the time, these criteria occur in combination.

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2.2.1. One criterion, co-ordination, is grammatical in nature. Co-ordination can be used as a grammatical diagnostic which allows us to generalize from items in one part of a co-ordination to those in the other part. When two written sentences are co-ordinated, one expects that both will be in the same style. But, when children are in the process of learning to write, their mastery over the language is incomplete and this results in a lack of control over lexical and syntactic choices in production. In cases where the form which is being learnt at school - as for example the auxiliary etre for a number of verbs - is in competition with the form which has been used by children in the home - as for example the auxiliary avoir for the same verbs - the task consisting in controlling auxiliary selection over two co-ordinated sentences is quite hard for children. So if a child aged ten writes ils sontpartis et j'ai reste au lit 'they left and I stayed in bed', with two co-ordinated sentences in which the appropriate auxiliary choice (i.e. etre in the 3pl. form sont) is made in the first sentence and the wrong choice (i.e. avoir in the lsg. form ai) is made in the second sentence, it is a sign that he or she may be in the process of learning but not yet able to prevent the form he or she is accustomed to use at home from appearing. 2.2.2. Another criterion concerns a property of the language, i.e. the occurrence of familiar expressions reflecting that what is written is a transcription of what was said in the situation described: For example, in (3) below, we see how Pierre is using both the form on7 for the pronoun nous 'we' as subject, which is typical of popular French, and the metaphorical expression abattre du boulot 'to work' or 'to achieve a lot' which is definitely familiar while being characteristically expressive since the verb abattre is the technical word for 'to fell a tree'. This supports the view that what he wrote closely reflected what he would have said or heard. (3)

(Letters 1, 1924) On s' est depeche au debut et on a abattu du boulot 'We got a move on and we got lots done.'

2.2.3. Third, there are metalinguistic criteria. For example, in the corpus, there are frequent quotes and devices such as the expression je l'entends d'ici' I can hear her from here' as in (4), which make it absolutely clear that what is written is a literal rendering of the way people talk. It is a letter written by Pierre to his mother while at Poitiers in which he explicitly evokes a neighbour's way of talking: (4)

(Letters 5, 1927) (writing about somebody who has just died) Madame Μ. α du encore etre impressionnee. 'Elle α έίέ vite partie, cette fille', je l'entends d'ici.

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'Madame M. must have been shaken. "She has gone quickly, that girl", I can hear her from here.' Applying the above criteria provides ways in which it is possible to check that the forms used in this written corpus are valid representations of the way in which Pierre Esch's family and friends talked and, in particular, used auxiliaries. Another argument supporting the validity of this view is the frequent occurrence of non-standard features in the diaries written by my father when he was attending primary school. This is the focus of section 2.3. 2.3. Non-standard features associated with a regional variety We will follow Tabouret Keller in specifying th&tfrangais regional means a regional variety of French. In other words, we are not referring to a langue regionale 'regional language' but to "varieties of French including terms and expressions from the regional language or which reveal a regional accent, or which, in general, deviate from the 'norm' of French, as ill-defined as this might be" (1981: 9). One of the most immediately noticeable features of non-standard usage in the corpus is the frequent use of the definite article with pepere 'grandad' and memere 'granny', as well as with Christian names. This is also characteristic of uneducated usage. This use of the definite article is helpful for our purpose because it can be used as an extra criterion or an indication of whether the phrases in which it occurs are representations of the way people would have said things or not. As in (5) below, it is typically associated with the use of avoir + ete Ί have' + past participle of 'to be'meaning aller 'to go'. Use of j'ai ete (literally Ί have been') for je suis alle Ί went' is supposedly non-standard but it is in fact very frequent in familiar speech and, according to Posner (1996: 17), increasingly replaces etre + alle throughout France. There also seem to be regular patterns in production reflecting the way my father or his family would have reported events in speech. One of these patterns, avoir + ete (+ infinitive) + chez + definite article + mimere or Christian name can be observed at the beginning of (5) in the sequence avons ete dine[rJ chez la mimere 'we went to Granny's for dinner'. (5)

(Diaries 1, 1917) Samedi 18 aoüt. 1110e.% Nous avons ete dtne[r] chez la mimere et avons soupe chez nous. Beau temps l'apres midi et le soir orage. Les taubes9 ne sont pas venus la nuit. Une carte de papa. L'apres midi, nous avons ete avec la grand'mere et la memere10 ά Tomblaine en voiture. Rien d'autre.

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Saturday 18th August. 1110th. We have been for dinner at (+ definite article) Granny's and had supper at home. Nice weather in the afternoon and in the evening, a storm. The 'doves' did not come last night. Postcard from ( - definite article) Dad. In the afternoon, we went to Tomblaine with (+ definite article) Great Grandma and (+ definite article) Granny with the horse cart. Nothing else. 'We went to Granny's for dinner and had supper at home. Nice weather in the afternoon and a storm in the evening. The 'doves' did not come last night. Postcard from Dad. In the afternoon, we went in the cart to Tomblaine with Great Grandma and Granny. That's it.' There are contrasts between "standard" and "non-standard" usage as in the following two examples: (6) is standard but the entry for the following day, (7), is not: (6)

(Diaries 1, 1918) Samedi 6 (1918) Sommes restes chez nous toute la journee. Le soir, Adrien, cousin Joseph et cousine Angele sont venus souper avec nous. Saturday 6th (1918) Stayed at home all day. In the evening, ( - definite article) Adrien, ( - definite article), cousin Joseph and ( - definite article) cousin Angele came to have supper with us. 'Saturday 6th (1918) Stayed at home all day. In the evening, Adrien, cousin Joseph and cousin Angele came for supper.'

(7)

(Diaries 1, 1918) Dimanche 7 (1918) Avons ete diner chez la cousine Angele. Sunday 7th (1918) We've been to dine at (+ definite article) cousin Angele's. 'Sunday 7th (1918) We went to cousin Angele's for dinner.' Three days later, two co-ordinated sentences with a switch between "school style" and "home style", reported below in (8), indicate that as a twelve-year old, my father has not yet mastered the standard language:

(8)

(Diaries 1, 1918) Mercredi 10 (1918) Apres souper, me suis amuse avec ( - definite article) Adrien et ai έίέ chez la cousine Angele en velo. Wednesday 10th (1918) After supper, enjoyed myself with ( - definite article) Adrien and went to (+ definite article) cousin Angele's on my bike. 'Wednesday 10th (1918) After supper, I played with Adrien and cycled to cousin Angele's.'

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We can conclude that my father was recording what was familiar to him, including the language used around him. We are consequently justified in considering that the corpus gives an accurate representation of the way uneducated people talked in Nancy at the time. More specifically, when Pierre uses a verb which is expected to be found + etre (such as tomber 'to fall' or sortir 'to go out') with + avoir we have good reasons to think that the form was alive in the French of Nancy at the time, particularly if it occurs in the same proposition as sequences typical of familiar language such as "definite article + Christian name". The strength of the argument lies in the fact that Pierre was obviously trying hard to write French "as it should be written"11 in his diaries and if he wrote a non-standard form because he got carried away it is critical evidence that that usage was sufficiently alive to resist the teaching of the school. 2.4. Methodology: analysis 2.4.1. Quantitative analysis For this preliminary analysis of the corpus, the concordance programme Microconcord was used. The use of the auxiliary in the list of etre-\trbs mentioned in Grevisse 1969 was compared to that in the corpus. The quantitative analysis is reported below in section 3. 2.4.2. Qualitative analysis Section 4. examines the distribution of the auxiliaries avoir and etre in my father's corpus and discusses the possible influence in the corpus of four linguistic factors mentioned by Canale, Mougeon and Belanger (1977) as possibly influencing the levelling of the distinction between verbs requiring etre and those requiring avoir in Ontarian French. These factors are: whether the verbs have lexical counterparts conjugated with avoir, whether the verbs can be used as adjectives with the copula, whether the verbs are frequent, and whether the verbs have special morphological properties.

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Quantitative study or "marking" of the diaries

3.1. Verbs which are to be conjugated + etre according to Grevisse (Grevisse 1969: 602, §656) 3.1.1. Pronominal verbs Pronominal verbs are used exclusively with etre in the corpus, as in standard French. Moreover, there is no reason to think this usage differs from Pierre Esch's everyday usage. (9) a. (Diaries 1, 1916-1923) (je) Me suis amuse (43 occurences in Diaries [1916-1923]) Ί played.' b. (Letters 2, 1924). Qa vient de ce qu'il s'est trompe 'It comes from the fact that he made a mistake.' c. (Diaries 9, 1990) II s'est trompe dans ses comptes hier 'He made a mistake in his accounts yesterday.' d. (Diaries 4, 1941). En y allant, je vois salle des informations la note suivant laquelle Ρέtain et Göring se sont rencontres hier dans la zone occupee O n my way, I see in the newsroom the note according to which Petain and Göring met yesterday in the occupied zone.' 3.1.2. Unaccusative verbs The corpus contains only a few unaccusative verbs. These are mostly verbs of movement or verbs expressing a change of state. A summary of the results of the quantitative analysis is given in Table 2. This table shows how 14 verbs which are supposed to be used with etre appear to be used with avoir in the corpus both in the early part of the corpus (first column) and in the remainder of the corpus (second column). The first column contains the number of occurences of the verb used with avoir compared to the number of overall occurences of the verb for section 1. of the corpus. The second column contains the number of occurences of the verb used with avoir compared to the number of occurences of the verb for the remainder of the corpus. Of course, these numbers exclude the occurences of the verbs in contexts where etre is not expected, i.e. transitive uses of the verb where avoir is the norm.

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Table 2.

Comparison of the use of avoir (in absolute numbers of occurences) as an auxiliary in the compound forms of 14 unaccusative verbs in section 1. of the corpus (from 1916 to 1923) and in the remainder of the corpus (from 1923 to 1991).

Verb

Early part of corpus

Remainder of corpus

% Resistance to change

(Use of avoir/occurrences of verb) Passer 'to spend time'

12/77

10/86

75

Rester 'to stay'

26/172

3/27

73

Dernenager 'to move house'

4/4

2/3

67

Rentrer 'to go in'

1/23

1/71

33

Partir 'to leave'

6/85

1/86

17

Sortir 'to go out'

3/11

2/93

8

Arriver 'to arrive'

1/59

0/44

0

Revenir 'to come back'

2/115

0/33

0

Retourner 'to return'

1/4

0/2

0

Entrer 'to enter'

1/2

0/5

0

Monter 'to go up'

2/19

0/18

0

11/11

0/9

0

Tomber 'to fall' Aller 'to go'

0/703

0/177

n/a

Descendre 'to go down'

0/21

0/13

n/a

The third column represents the resistance to change or the strength of the resistance of each verb to the norm. To take the verb sortir, 'to go out' as an example, the figure 8 in the third column (for sortir) is calculated as follows: The use of avoir (non-standard) in section 1. of the corpus shown in the first column is 27.3 per cent (three occurences of avoir out of eleven contexts where etre would be expected). In the remainder of the corpus (post 1923, shown in the second column) it is 2.2 per cent (two occurences of avoir out of 93 contexts where etre would be expected). This means that there is a shift from nonstandard to standard usage or drop in non-standard usage of 25.15 per cent between the two periods. This drop can be represented as a percentage of initial error (25.15: 0.27 = 92), which represents the degree of acceptance to change. Resistance to change is 100 minus acceptance, or 8.

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Discussion

Question 1: Had Pierre Esch already acquired the standard French use of auxiliaries in when he wrote his first diaries? Table 2 shows that my father's use of auxiliaries was clearly not standard when he started writing his diaries at nine years old. Even using crude measures, we can see that the first five verbs supposed to be used with etre are used with avoir in 25 per cent or more cases and that for tomber, 'to fall' and demenager, 'to move house' there is exclusive use of avoir. At the other extreme, it is interesting to note that for certain verbs such as aller 'to go', Pierre Esch's usage is standard, indicating that in contrast with the northern French data analysed by Pooley (1996: 155), aller + avoir was no longer a possible option in Nancy at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is worth noting here that in contrast to the 492 occurrences of je suis alle Ί went' in the early diaries, there are 364 occurrences of the more colloquial j'ai ete (or 42 per cent of the total), which I interpret as a measure of the extent to which the early diaries represented my father's way of talking (see section 2.3. above). For example, on July 4th 1918, the diary entry includes two examples of avoir + ete meaning 'aller'. It reads: (10)

(Diaries 1, 1918) 4. Jeudi. Temps couvert. Avons ete nous promener en velo. Avons fait 34 kms. Le soir, avons ete chez la cousine. C' est la Fete Americaine. '4,h. Thursday. Weather overcast. Went for a ride on the bike. Did 34 kms. In the evening, went to see our cousin. It is the American National Day.'

In sharp contrast, there are 163 forms of etre alii as opposed to eight of avoir ite (or 4.6 per cent of the total) in the diaries written in the last years of his life (section 5. of the corpus). We may interpret this as the success of the school in teaching the difference between written and spoken varieties of French. In the case of arriver 'to arrive' and revenir 'to come back', use of the auxiliary is almost exclusively standard and there is excellent evidence that the use of etre as the appropriate auxiliary was attributable to the school. Both verbs are used fairly frequently and usually, my father seems to choose the appropriate auxiliary but one occasion when, at 16 years of age, he makes a mistake is revealing. He is apparently very excited in telling a little anecdote about when he nearly missed two people that he wanted to see. Still in a state of some emotion, he uses two non-standard forms in writing:

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(Diaries 1, 1923) Mercredi 10 Janvier 1923 J'ai revenu en courant et f ai arrive presque en meme temps qu'eux. 'Wednesday January 10th 1923 I ran back home and arrived almost at the same time as them.' (the non-standard forms being avoir + revenir lsg. and avoir + arriver Isg).

I consider this to be a significant slip of the pen, revealing that avoir is not far below the surface. Nonetheless the choice of etre as auxiliary for revenir and arriver had been acquired and there are no other errors in the use of either auxiliary after 1923. Even if one discounts verbs which are not frequent, the fact remains that my father's usage was significantly different from that of the French taught, examined and valued by the school system. This makes apparent that the concerns expressed by Meillet in 1918 about the socially divisive effects of the classical and literary language of the lycee (fee-paying secondary schools, see section 1.3.1.) were justified. Meillet expressed the view that the growing gap between le parier de tous les jours 'everyday language' and le discours du secondare 'secondary school discourse' was working against working class and lower middle class children (Desirat and Horde 1988: 98). Question 2: Did Pierre Esch make good the mistakes he was still making? Was the "improvement" acquired for good? The analysis undertaken so far indicates that my father's success in learning standard forms seems to have varied according to the verb. In some cases, he is apparently able to learn to use the standard form, at least in writing, while in others he is losing the battle. More specifically, if we refer back to Table 2, one can see that certain verbs such as passer 'to spend time' and rester 'to remain' seem to be particularly resistant to change in comparison with sortir 'to go out', the use of which is nearly standard apart from during the early period. Moreover, it appears that verbs such as partir 'to leave' or rentrer 'to return', which are frequently used in a non-standard way in the early period, do conform to a certain degree but not nearly as much as one would expect. This state of affairs suggests the presence of independent linguistic factors associated with these verbs which are governing their usage. This will be examined in the following section.

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4. Possible role of other linguistic factors This section examines the independent factors which may influence the effect of the school system on auxiliary selection in the corpus. If my father acquired the norm at school, and there is lots of evidence that this was indeed the case, it is not obvious why certain verbs would have "resisted" more than others. In an attempt to explore this, the present section analyses the following four factors, which have been proposed as having an influence on analogical levelling in Ontarian French by Canale, Mougeon and Belanger (1977). These are (1) whether the verbs had lexical counterparts or homophones of the etre-vtrbs which need to be conjugated with avoir (2) whether the use of the etre-verb as an adjective + copula is acceptable, e.g. whether a sequence like elle est partie 'she is gone' meaning elle est morte 'she has gone' is part of current usage (3) whether the verb is frequent and finally (4) whether the verbs have particular morphological properties.

4.1. Are there lexical counterparts? Do etre-\erbs have homophones that must be conjugated with the auxiliary avoir or can they be used transitively? The idea is that if the verb in question has a homophone which is used with avoir, this could lead to or reinforce the use of avoir with the etre-ve rb. In other words, once the pattern avoir + past participle exists it is generalized on the basis of phonetic identity. Sortir 'to go out' and passer 'to spend time, to pass' provide examples of such verbs in standard French. They are etre-verbs as in Madame est sortie 'Madame is out' and le postier est passe 'the postman has been', but both can also be constructed with an object complement, in which case they have a different meaning and take avoir as auxiliary as in II a sorti son carnet de cheques, 'he pulled out his cheque book' and il a passe le pont 'he crossed the bridge'. There are examples of sortir and passer in the corpus and for both of them, examples can be found both at the beginning and at the very end of the corpus. Comparing the two verbs in the corpus is interesting because in Table 2 it can be seen that passer is the verb most resistant to change whereas in the case of sortir, my father's usage is effectively standard by the age of 16. In the case of sortir there are only two examples of legitimate transitive use of sortir with avoir in the first section of the diaries of the corpus, one of which is the following:

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(Diaries 1, 1923) Jeudi 22 fevrier 1923 Α 1h, je suis alle aux journaux en becane. J'ai sorti mon velo pour la premiere fois cette annee (etre + aller lsg.; avoir + sortir lsg.) nd 'Thursday 22 February 1923 At one o'clock, I went to fetch the newspapers on my bike (familiar register). I got my bike out for the first time this year.'

Both examples were written in January - February 1923 at the end of Pierre Esch's secondary school period at a moment when the range of constructions he is using in writing is expanding quickly. Later examples of transitive usage are rare and include: (13)

(14)

(Letters 2, 1924) J'ai sorti mon costume et je Γ ai mis Ί got my suit out and put it on.'

(avoir + sortir lsg.)

(Diaries 9, 1990) F. et Ο. ont sorti la salete du pare (avoir + sortir 3pl.) 'F. and O. have taken away the rubbish from the garden.'

Thus the evidence from the corpus is that the existence of lexical counterparts has not influenced my father's usage until the very end of his secondary schooling period. On that basis, one can argue that the lack of competing patterns may have made it easier for him to learn that sortir was to be used with etre when used intransitively. However, the relatively frequent use of the feminine noun sortie (56 occurrences in the whole corpus, including three in section 1.) meaning either 'outing' or, more frequently, 'leave from school or military obligations' could be used to counteract that claim since it provides evidence that the recurrence of sequences where a form of avoir followed by a noun which is isomorphic with the past participle of the verb sortir such as nous avons sortie, j'ai sortie 'we/I have leave' etc. may have played a part. If this were the case, the contrast between sortir and passer would be more difficult to explain. Passer occurs frequently in section 1. of the corpus both as a transitive and an intransitive (seven times more than sortir as an intransitive, see Table 2 above). Given that passer is the verb most resistant to change in the corpus, the comparison between passer and sortir seems to bring support to the argument proposed by Canale, Mougeon and Belanger (1977). The following examples illustrate the transitive use of passer with the meaning of 'to spend time' which is by far the most common in my father's usage:

My Dad's auxiliaries (15)

(16)

(Diaries 1, 1918) J'ai passe Γ apres-midi ά jouer Ί spent the afternoon playing.'

(avoir + passer lsg.)

(Diaries 9, 1990) J'ai passe une bonne nuit Ί slept well.'

(avoir + passer lsg.)

129

Other transitive uses of passer occur with a range of meanings: (17)

(Diaries 1, 1923) J'ai passe quelques lettres (avoir + passer lsg.) Ί skipped a few letters.' (talking about an exam in morse code)

(18)

(Diaries 9,1990) Sophie a passe le bac 'Sophie sat the baccalaureate exam,'

(19)

(avoir + passer 3sg.)

(Diaries 9, 1990) Elle a passe un cap difficile (avoir + passer 3sg.). 'She's had a difficult change of course.'

There are 41 occurences of the transitive use of passer with the auxiliary avoir in section 1. of the corpus vs. 25 instances of passer used intransitively with avoir as for example: Tante Nini et Andre ont passe le matin et ont repasse Γ apres-midi 'Auntie Nini and Andre dropped in this morning and dropped in again this afternoon'. The comparison of passer with sortir in the corpus indicates that frequency of usage may have a bearing in the matter, a point we pursue below. Three other etre-vtrbs which can also be used transitively should be mentioned in relation to the possible influence of lexical counterparts: rentrer 'to return', demenager 'to move house' and tomber 'to fall'. It is possible for rentrer to be used transitively in present-day French usage. For example, expressions such as rentrer la voiture au garage 'to put the car in the garage' and rentrer la cle dans la serrure 'to put the key in the lock' are frequent. However, no examples of this were found in the corpus. I also note that my father frequently uses the elliptic turn of phrase rentrer Rue de Serre lit. 'to return Rue de Serre' for rentrer ά la Rue de Serre, lit. 'to return to the Rue de Serre'. The frequent ellipsis of the preposition ά may have an influence here (Grevisse 1969: 903). A similar phenomenon seems to apply to the verb demenager 'to move house'. When my father writes on a demenage Rue de Serre, he means 'we have taken the furniture out of the flat on Rue de Serre and we have moved it to

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our new house' but it is ambiguous and could mean 'we have moved to the flat in the Rue de Serre\ Finally, tomber 'to fall' needs to be mentioned. The verb can be used transitively and I can remember my father used the expression tomber la veste 'to take off one's jacket' (either because it is hot or because one is going to do a hard job physically). However, the expression does not occur in the corpus. From what has been said above, it is possible that the existence of lexical counterparts may go some way towards explaining why the non-standard auxiliary avoir occurs frequently with passer and sortir. However, it is clear that this does not constitute in itself a sufficient explanation. 4.2. Adjectival use It has been argued that the use of avoir to form the compound tenses of the active voice might be limited to those verbs which can be used adjectivally with the copula (Benveniste 1966: 194; Sankoff and Thibault 1977). In this way, the compound past forms would be easily distinguished from the construction copula + adjective. In the case of sortir for example, use of the adjective with the copula is possible as in the phrase Madame est sortie 'Madame is out'. The argument is that this use of sortir with the copula would encourage the use of avoir in compound tenses as a mark of differentiation. If this were the case, one would expect that verbs that cannot be easily adjectivized such as reflexives, aller 'to go' and venir 'to come' should continue to be conjugated + etre. This is true in the corpus. Reflexives are used exclusively + etre, aller 'to go' is 99.75 per cent + etre, venir 'to come' is 100 per cent + etre. Both in Ontarian French and standard French, sortir 'to go out', partir 'to go away', arriver 'to arrive', rentrer 'to go in', revenir 'to come back'and tomber 'to fall', may be used adjectivally with the copula, but aller 'to go' rester 'to remain', venir 'to come' and reflexives may not be used in this way. The data from Pierre Esch's corpus are consistent with the view that the maintenance of the distinction between etre and avoir as auxiliaries has a fundamentally lexical function but again, it is clearly not a sufficient explanation for the difference in usage between verbs such as, for example, sortir and passer. 4.3. Frequency Analogical levelling tends to affect infrequent items more than frequent ones. This means that one can predict that infrequent etre-verbs may tend to be conjugated more often with avoir than frequent etre-verbs, a prediction borne out

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by the data from passer in comparison with sortir and rentrer (see section 4.1. above). It would also seem to follow that venir 'to come' and aller 'to go', the two most frequent etre-\&rbs according to the frequency dictionary by Juilland, Brodin and Davidovitch (1970), would be the last ones to change. Indeed in the corpus, both are exclusively used + etre. Incidentally, venir 'to come', is mentioned by Gertrude Aub-Buscher in her study of the parier rural 'local dialect' of the village of Ranrupt (Bas-Rhin, Vosges) as the only verb which maintains its compound tenses with etre, "et encore 'and that only just!' (Aub-Buscher 1962: 85). If we consider frequency of occurrence in the corpus, Table 2 shows that revenir 'to come back' and arriver 'to arrive', which are both very frequent in the corpus are used almost exclusively + etre, while passer 'to spend time', re ster 'to remain' and partir 'to go away', which are all frequent etre-ve rbs, show much more resistance. Tomber 'to fall', which is infrequent, shifts to + etre. This analysis of the bearing that the frequency of a verb can have on auxiliary selection is necessarily inconclusive due to the fact that many verbs do not occur often in the corpus. For example, for entrer 'to come in', there are only two examples in the diaries, one conjugated with avoir and one conjugated with etre. As for descendre 'to go down', the non-occurrence of examples + avoir is not convincing. One cannot help remembering the popularity of the children's rhyme J'ai (+ avoir) descendu dans mon jardin Ί have been down to my garden', as evidence that descendre + avoir does occur. To conclude, therefore, it seems that frequency may go part of the way towards explaining auxiliary selection but it is again clear that, in itself, it is not sufficient as an explanation. 4.4. Special morphological properties The last factor proposed as a possible explanation for the levelling of etre is the influence of morphological properties. 4.4.1. Canale, Mougeon and Belanger (1977: 32) point out that in Ontarian French, morphologically-derived forms often seem to be regularized more easily than non-derived forms. For example, in English, as discussed by Kiparsky (1973) the non-derived form cast continues to appear in the past tense whereas the derived forms broadcast and forecast have a regularized past tense in -ed. Although it is not clear how this factor would play a role in the levelling of auxiliaries, we considered whether compounds appeared to shift auxiliaries before their base verbs in the corpus. Three cases are worth mentioning: retourner 'to return', revenir 'to come back' and rentrer 'to go '/'to come in

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again' but in all three cases it is not possible to reach a definite conclusion as the number of occurences of the verbs is too small. It is certainly the case for retourner 'to return' which occurs only six times in the whole corpus (see Table 2 above). As for revenir 'to come back', its usage is almost exclusively + etre and is almost as resistant as that of venir 'to come' but we can only say that the example is not incompatible with the generalization. For the pair entrer 'to go'/'to come in' and rentrer 'to go'/'to come in again', it appears that rentrer is both more frequent and more resistant to change than entrer in the corpus, so it seems to be a counterargument particularly in view of the fact that rentrer is much more frequent than entrer in transitive constructions (Tresor de la Langue Frangaise 1979: 1248) which one would expect should favour a shift to + avoir. Nigel Vincent (personal communication) suggests that this may indicate that rentrer has now become a separate lexical item with special meanings of its own and that it is no longer thought of as a compound of entrer. 4.4.2. The possibility that verbs which are defective or rare were simply being avoided by my father was also considered. If this were the case, it could be argued that the habit might favour the use of etre + adjective as this would be the simplest way of avoiding the use of a verb form in discourse. For example, the easiest way to avoid as tu moulu le cafe? 'have you ground the coffee?' is to say le cafe est-il moulu? 'is the coffee ground?'. This may go some way towards explaining auxiliary selection for verbs like mourir 'to die', moudre 'to grind' and coudre 'to sew' although in the corpus, it seems that est parti 'is gone' for est mort 'is dead' is best explained as a euphemism. To conclude, in the corpus, it is not possible to isolate a single linguistic factor as being particularly determinant as regards the levelling of etre as an auxiliary and the distinction between verbs requiring etre and those requiring avoir. All the factors referred to appear to contribute to the erosion of etre and to the progress of avoir as an auxiliary.

5.

Conclusion

This preliminary analysis allows us to make the following points: (1)

There is strong evidence that my father was not using auxiliaries according to the rules of the standard when he started writing his diaries. More specifically, the variety of French he was using before going to school was a variety in which the levelling of etre as an auxiliary, a language-internal development, was far more advanced than in the standard.

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(2)

There is a lot of evidence that people around him were not using auxiliaries in a standard fashion either. In other words, as one might have predicted, my father had acquired the variety of French he heard around him. It suggests that the extent of levelling of etre in French - a language-internal factor - would be much more advanced without the effect of the school - an extra-linguistic factor - reinforcing the effects of the contact with standard French - a language-external factor. (3) My father learnt standard usage quite efficiently at school - an extra-linguistic factor - but there is evidence that some of the verbs were more resistant to change than others. In other words, language-internal factors cannot be overridden easily, even when a powerful extra-linguistic factor such as the school system reinforces the effects of the contact with the standard, a language-external factor. (4) The rules my father learnt at school were retained throughout his life. This suggests that the effects of extra-linguistic factors are long-lasting, at least when they reinforce those of language-external factors, in this case, contact with the standard. Overall, even at this early stage of the analysis of the corpus, this case study supports the hypothesis that, in France, the transmission of the norm via the school system acts as a brake to the speed of change at least in the domain of auxiliary selection. In other words, it is possible to argue that an extra-linguistic factor may go some way to explain the resistance of French to auxiliary levelling in comparison with other Romance languages. In order to test the validity of this claim, I examined auxiliary selection in the writings of Nancy school children in 1998-1999, nearly 80 years after my father started writing. The analysis provided strong supportive evidence that the imposition of the standard variety by the school system is very effective in slowing down internally-motivated change in the area where my father lived as a child. In a sample from five local primary schools (four from Nancy and one from Pont-a-Mousson) in which 136 children aged between eight and ten wrote a variety of essays and unguided compositions, I found only one example of a non-standard form: Tai monte Ί went up'. 12 In the conclusion to his book La Langue de Saint Pierre Fourier, Derreal (1942: 380-381) expresses the view that the language used by Saint Pierre Fourier, who was born in Pont-a-Mousson in 1565, is generally archaic. According to him, the French of the Duchy of Lorraine would be about one generation behind the French from France.13 400 years later, the data concerning the use of auxiliaries in my father's corpus do not invalidate this description.

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Notes 1. This research would not have been possible without the patient and accurate transcription work carried out by Francine Wild since 1991. My thanks are also due to many colleagues. First to Mari Jones, Nigel Vincent and Christoph Zähner for their detailed comments on the first draft and to Wendy Ayres-Bennett, Christopher Pountain, J.C. Smith and Laura Wright for their encouragement. Finally, I would like to thank Genevieve Mortin and the children in the Cours Elementaire 2 'Year 3' and the Cours Moyens 1 et 2 'Year 4 and Year 5' of the Ecole St Jean Baptiste de La Salle 'St John the Baptist of La Salle's School (Nancy), the Doctrine Chretienne 'Christian Doctrine' (Nancy), the Ecole Notre Dame 'The School of Our Lady' (Pont-a-Mousson), the Ecole St Dominique 'St Dominic's School' (Nancy) and the Ecole St Lion 'St Leon's School' (Nancy) and their teachers for providing me with essays. 2. Unaccusative verbs are intransitive verbs whose subject originates as an object. For example, the verb break in the sentence the vase broke is understood to mean 'X broke the vase'. 3. The terms 'popular French' and 'standard French' are used here as if they were not problematic. For the purpose of this study, and given the nature of my data and of my approach, I will accept Valdman's remark that "these two terms cover the arbitrary definition of two idealized linguistic varieties which are at opposite poles of a continuum of variation" (Valdman 1983: 670). 4. The following example seems typical. In his Christmas message of December 26th 1914, Commandant Henri Benard writes from the trenches to his young daughter: Ma chere Nonette, j'ai regu ta gentille lettre du 20 decembre. Encore quelques fautes d'orthographe mais tres peu. Ce sont toujours tes participes passes conjugues avec avoir ou etre. 'My dear Nonette, I received your kind letter of the 20th December. Still some spelling mistakes, but very few. It's always your past participles with 'to have' or 'to be'' (Benard 1999: 77-78). 5. The influence of the norm would have been strengthened during the French Revolution, when the credo of equality via linguistic uniformity (advocated by the Jacobins who controlled the Convention) replaced the policy of linguistic diversity which had been adopted by the Constituent Assembly (Valdman 1976: 14). 6. The diary of the famous Roman Catholic theologian Yves Congar (Audouin-Rouzeau 1997) is particularly informative because it is published with all the errors and spelling mistakes of the original. Yves Congar, who was two years older than my father, came from a family of notables 'influential family' in the Ardennes. His path crossed with that of my father in the winter of 1942 when both were prisoners of war in the same camp in Saxony in Hoyerswerda (Oflag IV D) and my father attended Yves Congar's lectures.

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7. On is an indefinite pronoun in standard French. The use of on meaning 'we' is typical of popular French and I remember my father had been taught not to use it in writing. 8. For nearly each entry during the War, my father would write down the number of days the country had been at war immediately after the date. Here, it is the 1110th day of the War. 9. taubes = 'enemy planes dropping bombs on the town' (from German Taube 'dove'). 10. In my father's usage, la grand'mere = 'great grandmother' and la memere = 'grandmother'. 11. There is a determined and often schoolboyish effort on Pierre's part to forge his own written style. This can be detected through the use of "cut and paste" devices from newspaper titles into his text. Thus we find: (Diaries 1, 1923) Mercredi 17 janvier Le gouverneur de l'Indochine, M. Maurice Long, est mort a Ceylan. 'Wednesday January 17th The Governor of Indochina, Mr Maurice Long, died in Ceylon' and even more clearly: (Diaries 1, 1923) Hier, c'etait ά Paris Γenterrement de la grande tragedienne Sarah Bernhard qui est morte lundi. 'In Paris yesterday there took place the funeral of the great tragedian Sarah Bernhard, who died on Monday' or: (Diaries 1,1923) Le general Maunoury est decide subitement avant-hier 'General Maunoury died suddenly the day before yesterday.' 12. Along withpartir 'to go away', entrer 'to go/to come in', sortir 'to go/to come out' and demeurer 'to inhabit', monter 'to go up' was precisely one of the verbs which Saint Pierre Fourier (born in Pont-ä-Mousson in November 1565) is reported to have used either with etre or with avoir in order to mark the difference between the action expressed by the verb or the resulting state (Derreal 1942: 240-241). This tendency, Derreal tells us, was "attacked by Vaugelas" and later was "equally condemned by the Academy, in spite of Menage's sensible observations" (my translation). This opens up the possibility of interpreting the present data as the last vestige of tendencies apparent in the sixteenth century but which were condemned in the seventeenth century. 13. It will be recalled that Lorraine did not become part of France until the middle of the eighteenth century. The Duchy of Lorraine was annexed by France in 1766 on the death of Stanislas Leszczynsky.

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References Aub-Buscher, Gertrud 1962 Le Parier rural de Ranrupt (Bas-Rhin), essai de dialectologie vosgienne. Paris: Klincksieck. Audoin-Rouzeau, Stephane 1997 L'Enfant Yves Congar: journal de la guerre 1914-1918. Paris: CERF. Bedard, Edith and Jacques Maurais (eds.) 1983 La Norme linguistique. (Conseil de la langue fran9aise, Collection l'ordre des mots.) Paris: Le Robert. Bell, Allan 1984

Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13: 145-204.

Benard, Commandant Henri 1999 De la Μort, de la boue, du sang: lettres de guerre d'un fantassin de 14-18. Paris: Editions Jacques Grancher. Benveniste, Emile 1966 "Etre" et "avoir" dans leurs fonctions linguistiques. In: Problemes de linguistique generale, 187-208. Paris: Nouvelle Revue Fran9aise, Gallimard. Canale, Michael, Raymond Mougeon and Monique Belanger 1977 Analogical levelling of the auxiliary etre in Ontarian French. (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education). Recherches Linguistiques ά Montreal!Montreal Working Papers in Linguistics 9: 23-41. D6rr6al, Helene 1942 La Langue de Saint Pierre Fourier. Paris: Droz. Desirat, Claude and Tristan Horde 1988 La Langue franqaise au 20e siecle. Paris: Bordas. Grevisse, Maurice 1969 Le Bon Usage (ninth edition). Gembloux: Duculot and Paris: Hatier. Harris, Martin and Vincent, Nigel (eds.) 1988 The Romance Languages. London: Croom Helm. Juilland, Alphonse, Dorothy Brodin and Catherine Davidovitch 1970 Frequency Dictionary of French Words. The Hague: Mouton.

My Dad's auxiliaries Kiparsky, Paul 1973

Levy, Paul 1929 Pooley, Tim 1996

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Productivity in Phonology. In: Michael Kenstowitz and Charles Kisseberth (eds.), Issues in Phonological Theory, 169-176. The Hague: Mouton. Histoire linguistique d'Alsace et de Lorraine. Volumes 1 and 2. Paris: Societe d'edition Les Belles Lettres. Chtimi: The Urban Vernaculars of Northern France. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Posner, Rebecca 1996 The Romance Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sankoff, Gillian and Pierette Thibault 1977 L'alternance entre les auxiliaires avoir et etre en fran5ais parte ä Montreal. Langue Frangaise 34: 81-109. Tabouret-Keller, Andree 1981 Introduction. Regional languages in France: current research in rural situations. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 29: 5-15. Thomson, David 1969 Democracy in France Since 1870 (fifth edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tresor de la langue frangaise: dictionnaire de la langue du 19eme et du 20eme siecles 1979 Volume 7. Paris: Centre National de la Recherce Scientifique. Valdman, Albert 1976 Introduction to French Phonology and Morphology. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. 1983

Normes locales et francophonie. In: Edith Bedard and Jacques Maurais (eds.), La Norme Linguistique, 667-706. Gouvernement du Quebec, Conseil de la Langue Fran9aise.

Vermot-Gauchy, Michel 1965 L'Education nationale dans la France de demain. Monaco: Editions du Rocher. Vincent, Nigel 1982

The development of the auxiliaries habere and essere in Romance. In: Nigel Vincent and Martin Harris (eds.), Studies in the Romance Verb, 71-97. London: Croom Helm.

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Further reading Blanche-Benveniste, Ciaire 1977 L'un chasse l'autre. Le domaine des auxiliaries. Recherches sur le frangais parle, Volume 1; 100-148. Publications de Γ Universite de Provence. Blanche-Benveniste, Claire and Colette Jeanjean 1987 Le Frangais parle. Transcription et Edition. Paris: INALF. Bynon, Theodora 1977 Historical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guiraud, Pierre 1965 Le Frangais populaire. Paris: Presses Universitäres de France. Green, John N. 1982 The status of the Romance Auxiliaries of Voice. In: Nigel Vincent and Martin Harris (eds.), Studies in the Romance Verb, 97-139. London: Croom Helm. Harris, Martin 1982

The past simple and the present perfect in Romance. In: Nigel Vincent and Martin Harris (eds.), Studies in the Romance Verb, 42-71. London: Croom Helm.

McMahon, April M.S. 1994 Understanding Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mougeon, Raymond and Edouard Beniak 1991 Linguistic Consequences of Language Contact and Restriction: the Case of French in Ontario, Canada. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Salmon, Gilbert-Lucien 1991 Variete et variantes du Frangais des villes etats de I'est de la France. Bulletin of the Faculte des Lettres de Mulhouse 17, Paris-Geneve: Champion-Slatkine. Straka, Georges 1983 Problemes des franfais regionaux. Bulletin de la classe des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques 69: 27-66. Thibault, Pierette and Gillian Sankoff, 1975 L'alternance entre les auxiliaries avoir et etre dans le francais parle ä Montreal. Mimeo, Montreal: Departement d' anthropologic, Universite de Montreal.

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Van den Branden,Yves 1983 Elements pour une analyse linguistique et sociolinguistique du fran$ais parle: le cas des francophones de Gand. Undergraduate disssertation, University of Gand. Wolf, Lothar 1983

La normalisation du langage en France: de Malherbe ä Grevisse. In: Edith Bedard and Jacques Maurais (eds.), La Norme Linguistique, 105-135. Gouvernement du Quebec, Conseil de la langue fransaise.

2. Convergence

Mette a haout dauve la grippe des Angllais: convergence on the Island of Guernsey Mari C. Jones

Abstract For much of the twentieth century, there existed an asymmetrical dominance relation between English and the dialect of Norman spoken on Guernsey (Guernesiais). This occurred in conjunction with largely uni-directional (English > Guernisiais) interlingual influence which, when coupled with a decrease in speaker numbers and a concomitant increase in territorial contraction, are indicative of language death. However, an examination of the Norman and English spoken on Guernsey reveals that not only have they developed significant differences from their corresponding Mainland varieties but, moreover, their respective structures also display a high degree of isomorphism. This chapter suggests that such structural similarities may be explained by positing a period of convergence prior to the onset of obsolescence, when a period of relatively stable bilingualism may have resulted in more bi-directional influence. By its very definition, convergence is a type of language change found only in high-contact situations and, although in some cases contact with English seems to be the only possible motivation behind the changes in contemporary Guernesiais, it is also demonstrated that some of the data could be accounted for by an internal explanation. This paper, therefore, additionally seeks to highlight the fact that, despite the temptation to identify all the observable changes found in this high-contact situation as purely contact-induced, this course of action, reminiscent of the "Either-or" mentality described in the Introduction, may lead us to overlook certain aspects of a potentially complex situation.

1.

Introduction

A dialect of French has been spoken on the Island of Guernsey for more than a thousand years. The Channel Islands formed part of the Duchy of Normandy when William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066 and remained so until 1204, when King John "Lackland" lost the Duchy to King Phillippe-Auguste II of France. However, at this juncture, the Channel Islands did not revert to the French Crown but instead opted to continue their allegiance to England, for which they were granted many privileges, including the right to self-government. There was, however, no subsequent Anglicization - indeed, their pro-

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ximity led to the maintenance of extensive economic, legislative and linguistic ties between the Channel Islands and mainland Normandy for many centuries, the former remaining part of the diocese of Coutances until 1569. Despite the fact that France was now the enemy, which resulted in the Islands suffering frequent attacks at the hands of the French during the Hundred Years' War (1339-1453) and during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the archipelago remained predominantly francophone up until the first half of the twentieth century and it is only really within living memory that English has replaced Guernesiais as the dominant language of Guernsey. Despite enhanced trade links with Britain in the nineteenth century, a period which also marked the beginning of Guernsey's tourist industry, English only really started making inroads in the Island at the turn of the twentieth century and did not begin to gain a firm foothold among the ordinary people until several decades later. Although English was the only variety used in school throughout the twentieth century, at the outbreak of the Second World War Guernesiais was still commonly used by the local population within the family and with friends. The War was, however, to play a decisive role in the fate of the dialect. After its decision to demilitarize the Channel Islands in the expectation of a German invasion in 1940, the British Government offered the Islanders the possibility of being evacuated to England for the duration of the hostilities. This offer was taken up by 17,000 Guernsey folk (representing 41 per cent of the population of the Island at that time), most of whom were children who spoke the dialect as their mother tongue. The evacuees remained in England until 1945 and, on their return to Guernsey, it was apparent that many had either forgotten their Guernesiais or had started to turn their back on it, seeing English as the door to a prosperous future. The dialect was never to recover from this blow and during the post-War period its situation has not been helped by the development of the Island as both a financial centre and a tax haven, which has had the effect of attracting large numbers of predominantly English-born immigrants. Needless to say, intermarriage between Guernsey-born and Englishborn individuals has not increased numbers of dialect speakers. The net result of this has been that, despite its long implantation on the Island, in 1996, the last date for which there are estimates available, there remained only 3,000 speakers of Guernesiais (representing some five per cent of the total resident population) (Domaille 1996: 25). Although the case of Guernesiais may, at first, seem a typical example of language death, its path towards obsolescence is not the usual one. Although Guernesiais was not wiped out overnight but rather underwent a gradual process, lasting most of the twentieth century, whereby it saw a reduction both in its domains and speaker numbers, its decline amongst the young was more

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sudden when, during the Second World War, many potential speakers of Guernesiais were prevented from learning the native language of their parents. For many, their formative years of language acquisition were spent in a country with a different native tongue and even those children whose mothers were evacuated with them had no choice but to learn English. As mentioned above, on their return to Guernsey in 1945 English continued to be spoken by a majority of the children, some because they could do no other, having forgotten or failed to acquire the dialect, and others because of the prestige which came to be associated with English, prestige which Guernesiais was felt to be lacking. Pre-War diglossia with bilingualism now led to what was virtually a case of sudden death (Campbell and Muntzel 1989: 182-183) for the dialect among many of the Island's children and teenagers. Half a century further on, there is no evidence of the gradual decline of the dialect through the generations as the intergenerational chain of transmission eventually peters out - there are many hundreds of native speakers of Guernesiais in their sixties and seventies but only a handful in their forties and I was only able to find one native speaker in his thirties. When it eventually came, the decline was abrupt and sudden. At the beginning of the twenty-first century therefore, Guernesiais is undergoing language obsolescence. However, since for the majority of the remaining speakers English was their second language, learnt at schools but never really used at home until after the War, there has been ample opportunity for bi-directional influence. Therefore, their native Guernesiais influenced the English spoken on the Island for, as Thomason and Kaufman (1988:42) point out, a target language will not be immune to changes resulting from imperfect learning, especially if the shifting group is numerically strong. However, in addition to this, due to the decreasing possibility of speaking their native language and the increase in contexts for speaking English, speakers of Guernesiais commonly seem to be replacing native features with those borrowed from English.

2.

Guernesiais influence on the English of Guernsey

The influence of Guernesiais on the English spoken on Guernsey has been examined in detail by Ramisch (1989) and Barbe (1995). It will only be outlined briefly here in order to demonstrate the bi-directionality of the inter-lingual interference attested on the Island, typical of linguistic convergence. It should be stressed that these - and other features of the English of Guernsey - are generally to be found to some degree in the unguarded, casual speech of all of the Guernsey-born local population, regardless of their ability to speak Guernesiais. Thus, what may have been at the outset simple transference phe-

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nomena have become an integral part of the variety of English spoken on the Island serving to distinguish it from mainland English.1 2.1. The definite article (Ramisch 1989:113-124) As Ramisch notes (1989: 113), the definite article appears in contexts in which it is not normally used in standard English: a. With names of languages (Ramisch 1989: 113-114): (1)

My father knew the good French and the English and the patois

(2)

They never did the Guernsey French at school

b. With adverbials of direction and position (especially in combination with street-names) (Ramisch 1989: 114) (3)

He's got a chain ofh'm shops in the, in the Fountain Street

c. With adverbials of time expressing a regular repetition (Ramisch 1989: 115): (4)

He gives the news out on the wireless in h'm in patois on the Friday

(5)

And we go the Saturday evening like - old time dancing

d. Before plural noun phrases with generic reference (Ramisch 1989: 115): (6)

As a whole I believe the Guernsey people are h'm friendly and they work together

(7)

The children, they'll pick up languages very quickly

e. Before the noun 'school' and in the idiomatic expression 'to go by bus' (Ramisch 1989: 116): (8)

But I mean that [Guernsey French] wasn't helpful in the school, you see

(9)

It was always by the bus we went

All the above represent contexts where Guernesiais would have a definite article and therefore may be considered as transference into English.

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2.2. Positional 'to' (Barbe 1995: 706-707) The preposition 'to' is used in the English of Guernsey to describe motion towards a location but also to specify static location: (10)

There's some of them candles to the Forest museum (Barbe 1995: 706)

(11)

He is to town (Tomlinson 1981:18)

(12)

He bought it to Creasey (Tomlinson 1981: 18)

Although Barbe points out that positional 'to' is not exclusive to Guernsey, it seems to her "very likely that contact with G[uernsey] F[rench] has been instrumental in the adoption of this usage" (1995: 706). This has been further argued by Ramisch, who demonstrates that the preposition 'to' has several equivalents in Guernesiais, which can be employed to denote both position and destination (1989: 137): POSITION

DESTINATION

[39 dmoer a sai pjer par] Ί live in Saint Peter's Port' [39 dmcer ο serk] Ί live on Sark'

[39 ve a sai pjer por] Ί go to Saint Peter's Port' [33 ve ο serk] Ί go to Sark'

[3akat si la r i f ]

[33 ve si b r i j ]

' I buy at Le Riehe's'

Ί go to Le Riehe's'

In the case of the last example, there is often a deletion of 's in the local genitive: I go to Le Riehe, cf. We used to go to Burton (Ramisch 1989: 152). Tomlinson attributes this to influence from Guernesiais (1981: 18).

2.3. Present tense used instead of present perfect Although in standard English, the present perfect must be used for an action which began in the past and which has continued up to the present (/ haven't seen him for 30 years; He's been dead for ten years), in the English of Guernsey, the present tense is used in utterances conveying this notion (Ramisch 1989: 150). (13)

There's nearly a thousand years we are British

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(14)

I'm in charge of it for 24 years

(15)

That's h'm what over 30 years she is dead.

This is clearly due to influence from Guernesiais where, as in standard French, the present tense is used for actions which began in the past and which have continued up to the present: (16)

I y a v'chin quasi mille aens que nou-s-est Britanniques 'There's nearly a thousand years we are British.'

3. English influence on Guernesiais As outlined above, studies such as Ramisch (1989) and Barbe (1995) indicate that some of the grammatical structures of the English of Guernsey demonstrate a high degree of isomorphism with those of Guernesiais. In July 1997,1 carried out a period of research on the Island in order to determine whether this influence was bi-directional: in other words, was Guernesiais also being influenced structurally by English? 65 informants participated in interviews intended to elicit free conversation and thus casual speech. Manipulation of the questions asked, however, made it possible to elicit certain grammatical constructions, which I had decided beforehand to examine for evidence of convergence.

3.1.

'No-one'

As in Mainland Norman (Universite Populaire Normande 1995: 112), the pronoun 'no-one' (autchun) historically requires a plural verb in Guernesiais. Although this rule was being observed in 67 per cent of cases examined (60 tokens), a singular verb was used in one third of all cases. Thus, although the construction does not itself appear ungrammatical, the statistical frequency of the historically appropriate verb form is decreasing and ground is being gained by a construction isomorphic with English. 3.2.

Dates

Guernesiais and English differ syntactically in the constructions used for dates. Whereas English either uses the construction:

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149

month + definite article + ordinal: September the fifteenth or definite article + ordinal + of + month: the fifteenth of September De Garis (1983: 352) attests that the pattern current in Guernesiais is definite article + cardinal + of + month {Ιέ tchinze d' estembre). This is the same pattern as is found in Mainland Norman (Universite Populaire Normande 1995: 245). Although this pattern was confirmed by my data (48 tokens) to be the most prevalent (63 per cent of all cases), the pattern month + definite article + cardinal was also found in 21 per cent of cases. Thus although, once again, the pattern does not represent a direct calquing of English elements, with the Norman preference for cardinal rather than ordinal numbers being maintained, the emerging construction does resemble closely English word order.

3.3.

'When'

Although the tenses used in English and Guernesiais are, on the whole, quite similar, they do differ after the relative adverb when/qudnd when expressing future time reference. In English, the present tense is generally used: I will tell you when I come back, whereas the Guernesiais rendering would contain the future tense: Je vous dirai quänd j'r'viandrai (De Garis 1983: 347). The data (63 tokens) indicated, however, that the present tense was being used in 54 per cent of such contexts, with the future tense only being retained in 46 per cent of contexts.

3.4. The verbal system: lexical semantics Although nouns in one variety may often be considered the equivalent of nouns in another variety, this is less often the case with verbs. For example, although both English to run and standard French courir convey the idea of progressing quickly on foot, English 'to run' also has a figurative meaning of 'to manage, to conduct operations' - as, for example, in the phrase to run a school, where this meaning is not matched by courir. In Guernesiais, however, it is clear that verbs have taken on new functions, which has resulted in them matching more closely those of the corresponding English word: (17)

L' eghise est courai'e par la paraesse 'The church is run by the parish'

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(18)

Chenafait /'affaire pus difficile 'That makes the thing more difficult'

(19)

L's jonnes n'etaient pas trop emporta'is dative Γ idee 'The young people weren't too carried away with the idea'

(20)

La langue va 'The language is going' - i.e. 'disappearing'.

In the case of saver and counnitre, where Guernesiais makes a distinction found in standard French (savoir and connaitre) but not in English,2 the distinction was starting to be eroded in Guernesiais: (21)

Nou sait l's fermiers 'We know the farmers.'

Such usage would not be readily understood by speakers of Mainland Norman. Sometimes, this extension of meaning had clearly been precipitated by the formal similarity between the English and Guernesiais verbs: (22)

Not' desnai'rfut attendu par 230 persaonnes 'Our dinner was attended by 230 people' (in Guernesiais, attendre has the meaning of 'to wait for') (23)

J'ai supportai la Societe Guernesiaise Ί supported the Guernsey Society' (in Guernesiais supportai'r has the meaning of 'to put up with, endure') although it is only the Guernesiais form that has extended in meaning. In Guernsey English, the English verb does not carry all the connotations of the Guernesiais form. It was often common to find Guernesiais verbal constructions being used according to English syntax: (24)

J'te manque Ί miss you' (rather than the historically appropriate dative construction Tu mi mänques 'you to me miss') This was especially salient in the case of a reflexive verb such as s'lavai 'to wash'. Whereas the traditional pattern would be i s'lave les möins 'he washes his hands', (with the same syntax as in standard French - i.e. use of the reflexive verb and the definite article instead of the possessive pronoun) the data revealed that in modern Guernesiais there was now exclusive use of the syntactic caique i lave ses möins (100 per cent of cases examined, 65 tokens in all - one for each interviewee).

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Caiques

Although a certain number of Guernesiais caiques are attested in the English of Guernsey: (25)

I met Mr. Pope yesterday - Is it? ('Est-che?') (Barbe 1995: 707)

(26)

I'm always starving, me ( T a i terjous foim, me') (Barbe 1995: 704)

these are far outnumbered by the English caiques fround in Guernesiais. These range from the literal translations of idioms: (27)

Le penrti qua'i 'The penny dropped'

(28)

Nou c'mmenche les gens jonnes 'We start people young'

to other contexts where English and Guernesiais historically differ in terms of word order: (29)

La piaeche oueque Γ hotael est 'The place where the hotel is'

(30)

I pouvaient ouir l's grands conaons tirai'r 'They could hear the big cannons firing'

(31)

Je ne pouvais pas ouir autchun Ί couldn't hear anyone.'

Clearly, here speakers were doing little more than inserting Guernesiais lexical items into the slots of an underlying English syntax. 3.5.1. Calquing of prepositions The data also revealed evidence of prepositions being used in contexts with which they were not historically associated: a.

Pour

(32)

Payer pour 'To pay for'

(33)

I d'mandit pour enne dorai'e d'burre 'He asked for a piece of bread and butter'

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(34)

J'fus civil servant pour 25 onnai'es Ί was a civil servant for 25 years'

(35)

J'passis pour la grammar school Ί passed for the grammar school'

(36)

Nou n'a pas eta'i en Serk pour longtemps 'We haven't been to Sark for a long time'

b.

Hors

(37)

Chena mit l's efdnts hors 'That put the children out'

(38)

Copai'r hors 'To cut out'

(39)

J'fus hors Ί went out'

(40)

Nou n'savaitpas qu'alle 'tait horte 'We didn't know that she was out'

(41)

Hors de six Ο levels, il avait passai riocque daeux 'Out of six Ό ' levels, he'd only passed two'

(42)

Nou n'pouvait pas faire hors tch'est-ce qu'i voulait 'We couldn't make out what he wanted'

Hors is also used with the meaning of English 'off': (43)

Le switch est hors 'The switch is off'

(44)

Nou 'tait mux hors 'We were better off'

(45)

I gardit Ιέ jour hors 'He took the day off'

c.

Bas

(46)

J'mettrai Ιέ naom bas 'I'll put the name down'

(47)

/'me met bas a la Rocqoine 'He puts me down at la Rocqoine'

Convergence on the Island of Guernsey (48)

Μ' η pere a copa'i bas I'arbre 'My father has cut down the tree'

(49)

I qua'i bas 'He fell down'

d.

Haout

(50)

/ ' a bailli a haout /' ecole 'He's given up school'

(51)

Mette a haout dauve me 'To put up with me'

(52)

I Γ a fait a haout 'He's made it up'

(53)

Nou la gardit a haout 'We kept it up'

e.

153

Others

(54)

Li Condor nou lesse avaout 'The 'Condor' lets us down'

(55)

J'sis raide interessi dans la chänt'rie 'I'm very interested in singing'

(56)

Nou depend dessus la mai'r ichin 'We depend upon the sea here'

(57)

I prinrent part dans le programme 'They took part in the programme'

(58)

Sus la televisiaon 'On the television'

There is no doubt that the use of these prepositions in the above contexts represent caiques of English usage. In itself, this is not particularly remarkable since, as mentioned above, calquing is frequently attested in situations of language death (Jones 1998: 256). 3 However, in Guernesiais not only is calquing of prepositions in this way extremely common (attendu pour was used 54 per cent of the time to express 'to wait for' [65 tokens] and pour was used 63 per cent of the time to express duration [59 tokens]) but in many of the above cases the caique represents the only means by which the concept may be expressed. There is no question of the above caiques merely representing alternatives to

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more idiomatic renderings. Furthermore, they would not be at all stigmatized (as often occurs in situations of lexical borrowing [Dorian 1981: 101] ) - but rather represent the everyday usage of Guernesiais-dominant bilinguals. Needless to say, the above examples would be meaningless to a speaker of Mainland Norman. In this section, therefore, English influence seems to be the only possible explanation to account for the change in usage. 3.6. Adjectives In both Mainland Norman and Guernesiais, unmarked qualificative adjectives, especially those of colour, often precede the noun, whereas other types of adjectives are generally postposed (Universite Populaire Normande 1995: 37; Tomlinson 1981: 47). Examination of the data (152 tokens) revealed that in modern Guernesiais, 70 per cent of all adjectives were preposed with only 30 per cent postposed, as would historically be found in the dialect.4 The tendency to prepose adjectives in Guernesiais was so strong that even compound adjectives, which are usually longer and therefore more likely to follow the noun in Mainland Norman (Universite Populaire Normande 1995: 36), are being preposed: (59)

Ses anti-rouoyallstes principes 'His anti-royalist principles'

(60)

Ches prumiere generatiaon Methodistes 'Those first-generation Methodists'

This included the superlative of an adjective such as 'cheap' in which the order (61)

CK est la millaeux marchi maisaon qui nou-s-a vaeux 'It's the cheapest house the we have seen'

was used in 60 per cent of contexts (65 tokens in all). The fact that adjectives are preposed in English seem to provide an obvious contact-motivated explanation for this tendency in Guernesiais. However, the situation may in fact be more complex than it first appears. As suggested in the Introduction, we should be wary about being to ready to adopt an "either-or' mentality regarding language change: indeed, discussion of this "mentality" undertaken in that chapter revealed the folly of precluding contact as an explanation for language change simply due to the presence of internal motivating factors. Clearly, the converse is also true and despite the inclination to attribute

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the tendency towards pre-posing adjectives in Guernesiais to contact with English, unlike section 3.1. to section 3.5. above, the data in the present section also conceivably admit an internal explanation in that we cannot overlook the fact that this order already exists in the dialect, albeit in a restricted context (mainly with adjectives of colour).5 Many studies have demonstrated that where a variety expresses a particular function by means of two patterns, one of these is often generalized at the expense of the other through the process of simplification (Dorian 1981: 136; Mougeon and Beniak 1991: 91; Jones 1998: 250-251). It could be, therefore, that the simplificatory change from having two possible adjective positions to only one is an internal change in progress in the dialect and that the fact that preposing of adjectives is the strategy also used by English may be a factor favouring the "winning out" of preposed over postposed adjectives as part of this process (cf. Lass 1997: 200). In this case, we have two possible explanations for the change or, what is also likely, two mutually-reinforcing processes. Despite the fact, then, that adjective placement in Guernesiais does seem to be moving towards the "English" pattern (and in view of the current socio-political situation of Guernesiais, contact may indeed prove a likely explanation for the change), it may not be altogether imprudent to acknowledge at least the possibility of multiple causation here (Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 51).

3.7. The passive As typologically related languages, English and standard French (and, we may add, varieties thereof) show a high degree of structural overlap (Mougeon and Beniak 1991: 196-197). This is especially evident as regards the formation of the passive voice which, in both languages, is generally formed with the verb to be and past participle, where, in standard French, (and Guernesiais) the latter agrees in gender and number with the patient. However, in terms of usage there exist several discrepancies between the two languages. For example, although an English sentence such as The boy gives the man a book may be made passive as The man is given a book by the boy, no direct equivalent to this transformation is possible in traditional Guernesiais. Le gargaon bailie enn livre a I'haomme cannot be rendered as *L' haomme a etai'bailli enn livre par le gargaon. In other words, the indirect object of the active sentence cannot become the patient of the passive sentence. However, in modern Guernesiais this restriction does not apply and the use of the Guernesiais passive construction (ete 'to be' plus past participle) has been expanded to yield a more complete mapping of its English equivalent:

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(62)

Nou n'a pas jomais etai'dit combian de gensfurent blessai's 'We have never been told how many people were wounded'

(63)

Les terres etaient bian souvent baillies Ιέ naom des families 'The lands were often given the names of the families'

(64)

Les membres du coumite avaient eta'i d'mandais de[...] 'The committee members had been asked to [...]'

(65)

Nou soulait ete dit [...] 'We used to be told [...]'

The above examples, then, effectively represent syntactic caiques of the English constructions. However, as seen in section 3.6. above, it is also possible to argue that internal simplification has taken place due to the fact that in modern Guernesiais - as in English - one construction now exists to express the passive, regardless of whether the active sentence contained a direct or indirect object. There has, therefore, been a qualitative change in the distribution of the passive structure of ete plus past participle in Guernesiais that may, once again, be attributable to internal or external motivation or - what is probably more likely - a bit of both, with the fact that the English and Guernesiais constructions already match closely in function facilitating the expansion of the former in contexts where Guernesiais would not historically adopt this strategy. 3.8. Affirmation Unlike English (but like standard French) Guernesiais has two words for 'yes': oui, the unmarked form, and si, the more restricted form, which is used only as an affirmative response to a question or statement expecting a negative reply as in, for example: I don't think it's bigger than my house - Yes, it is. Analysis of the data (43 tokens) revealed that si was only being used in 74 per cent of those contexts where it would historically be required, with oui being used the other 26 per cent of the time. It therefore seems to be that the lack of an equivalent structure in English is adversely affecting its frequency in Guernesiais although, once again, elimination of this marked form by internal simplification may also be a contributory factor.

Convergence on the Island of Guernsey

3.9.

157

'With'

Guernesiais has two different forms of the preposition 'with'. Dauve, which is the unmarked form (Counnis-tu chatte belle garce dauve I's bllus iaers? 'do you know that pretty girl with the blue eyes?') and atou, used when expressing an instrumental function such as J'ai copaile poin atou le coute Ί cut the bread with the knife'. 6 This differs from both English and standard French, where one preposition (with/avec) is used for both functions. The data revealed a widespread simplification of the system in this context, with only two tokens of atou yielded in 65 interviews (three per cent of contexts) despite the fact that, in all cases, informants had been asked one question to which they had to respond using instrumental 'with'. The loss of this preposition may be seen either as convergence to the English prepositional system or as evidence of internal change, with the simplification of a complex distribution pattern.

3.10. The subjunctive Although still in use in the dialect, the subjunctive mood no longer appears in all of the contexts in which it was historically attested in Medieval Norman (Jones 2000). Not only is there uncertainty regarding its forms (Jones 2000: 190-193) but, in an increasing number of contexts in speech, it is being replaced by the conditional as in, for example, A' veurt que t'irais la veies 'she wants you to go and see her'. Given the near absence of the subjunctive mood in English and the strong association between the conditional forms and the notion of hypothesis and doubt traditionally associated with the subjunctive, the influence of English may well have come to bear here also. However, since non-use of the subjunctive and conditional substitution may also be attested in low register and some regional varieties of French (Gadet 1992: 89; Brunot and Bruneau 1969: 320; Cohen 1965: 63; Grevisse 1988: §869), an internal explanation is not impossible here either.

3.11. Verbs of perception In English, the verb to be able to is usually used with verbs of perception such as to see, and to hear as in, for example, I can see the flowers. This represents another structural difference from Guernesiais since, like standard French, the dialect historically does not admit the modal verb in this context: Je veis les flleurs, (cf.Je η'veis pas Ιέ Henri, Ί can't see Henry', De Garis 1983: 327) al-

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though it would do so in a marked sentence where the ability to see was being stressed: Ιέ η' peux pas veies les flleurs Ί am not (physically) able to see the flowers'. The dialect, therefore, historically admits both structures but these have different distributions, the unmarked form being the one without pouvier 'to be able to'. Examination of the data collected in my study (58 tokens) revealed, however, that pouvier was being used in 90 per cent of all constructions involving verbs of perception. Although it is difficult to determine with a high degree of accuracy whether any of these were in fact intended as marked forms, emphasizing the ability to perceive, it is extremely unlikely that marked constructions were being selected in 90 per cent of cases. Given that the use in this context of what was historically the marked pattern means that Guernesiais is no longer able to distinguish between merely seeing/hearing something and being able to see/hear something, the change in progress may be interpreted as a case of internal reduction, or the "actual loss of some part of the language - or more precisely a loss of some part of a component of the grammar without resulting complication of another component to make up for this loss" (Miilhäusler 1974: 22). It is also clear, however, that an external explanation is possible, namely that the Guernesiais construction may be being remodelled due to influence from English. 3.12. Summary The changes attested in section 3.1. to section 3.5. may all be interpreted unambigously as developments attributable to contact with English. This, when taken together with the evidence of the structural influence of Guernesiais on the English of the Island, demonstrated in section 2., yields a synchronic linguistic situation which is reminiscent of a convergence area (Gumperz and Wilson 1971). This will be discussed further in section 4. It has been demonstrated, however, that even in such an ostensibly clear-cut high-contact situation, the types of change found were not all unequivocally attributable to influence from English. Although each of the changes discussed in section 3. did result in greater statistical frequency of a pattern more isomorphic with the structure of English to the detriment of the more traditional construction, in some of the cases examined, the emergent form was already to be found in Guernesiais (sections 3.6., 3.7., 3.8., 3.9., 3.10.). Such a rise of one pattern already attested in the dialect at the expense of another may be seen as internal simplification, defined by Mühlhäusler as "an increase in regularity" in a language (1974: 73) and which is commonly found in all types of language - both "healthy" and obsolescent. As has been discussed, despite the fact

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that they are taking place in a heavy contact situation, it is possible that the changes described in section 3.6. to section 3.11. do, in fact, have a complex explanation and that both the "external" and "internal" motivations suggested may be reinforcing one another, resulting in a situation termed by Thomason and Kaufman as "multiple causation" (1988: 57) and by Mougeon and Beniak as "ambiguous change" (1991: 218). Moreover, although contact may be seen as the only possible motivation for some changes (as in section 3.1. to section 3.5.), internal developments do not cease to operate in dying languages and therefore this does not preclude other changes in the same linguistic setting from having a more complex explanation (as in section 3.6. to section 3.11.).

4.

Conclusion

As has been outlined in this chapter, the Island of Guernsey is interesting linguistically in that both the English and the Norman dialect spoken there differ significantly from the varieties spoken in mainland England and Normandy. Moreover, this study, together with those of Ramisch (1989) and Barbe (1995) has demonstrated that, at times, the structure of both varieties displays a high degree of isomorphism - indeed, although the two varieties are perceived as distinct entities by their speakers (including the Guernesiais-English bilinguals), close examination reveals that, in fact, there exists between them a high degree of word-for-word - if not yet morph-for-morph - translatability (cf. Gumperz and Wilson 1971: 165). In other words, processes of linguistic change are making the English and Norman French of the Island of Guernsey more similar to each other and, simultaneously, more distant from the mainland varieties and, although Norman French was in close and prolonged contact with Middle English (Baugh 1959: 127-149), it seems more probable that the contemporary linguistic situation has arisen through convergence rather than common inheritance. That is not to say, however, that the situation on Guernsey is directly analogous to that described for Kupwar (Gumperz and Wilson 1971), the Balkans (Bynon 1977: 246-248) or other so-called linguistic areas in that they differ considerably in terms of their sociolinguistic situations: on Guernsey, one variety is obsolescent and the other is dominant whereas in the aforementioned Sprachbund the varieties are of more equal status. It should also be pointed out that, despite the considerable amount of isomorphism of structure that exists between the varieties, there is not yet a systematic mapping of surface structure so that a difference is still maintained between, for example the English phrase

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I am ten years old with the auxiliary to be and its Guernesiais equivalent J'ai dix ans, where the auxiliary is aver 'to have'. These points are significant in that they raise the question of whether the linguistic change observed on Guernsey represents no more than that which we would expect in most situations of language death and whether we are at all justified in speaking of "convergence" in this context. Some of the structural changes described were clearly attributable to contact with English (e.g. the calquing of prepositions) and are undoubtedly due to extensive bilingualism. Indeed, the structural borrowing has been so great that it has even affected the inflectional morphology of Guernesiais, that was found - albeit in a minority of cases - to borrow the English genitive's, and that despite Givon's assertion that "it is relatively unlikely for languages to borrow grammar" (1979: 26) due to its disruptive effects on the system of the borrower language. Although many of the changes attested in this study were clearly due to contact, others were shown to be more ambiguous in that they could admit both an internal or external motivation (sections 3.6., 3.7., 3.8., 3.9., 3.10. and 3.11.). It is therefore necessary to ask whether these are changes which would have occurred anyway, as part of the seemingly inherent tendency of language towards simplification or whether they are the result of contact with English - or indeed both, with one reinforcing the other. Although both convergence and language death are undoubtedly found in high-contact situations and therefore contact is admittedly a highly plausible motivation for the changes described, it is impossible for us to disprove conclusively the internal theory since even the fact that Mainland Norman does not show a certain development surely cannot preclude the possibility of that development having taken place in the variety spoken on Guernsey. Admittedly, the changes described are not untypical of language death (Jones 1998: 247-257) but, crucially, neither are they alien to "healthy" languages. As has been stated many times the difference between the former and latter is principally one of rate rather than nature. "Healthy" languages undergo constant selective simplification (Jones 1998: 81) either via internal motivation or as a result of contact with other "healthy" languages (Hock 1991: 488-491) with what is perceived to be the simpler system winning out (cf.Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 233-238 on the finite verbal system of Mednyj Aleut). Although there are no linguistic changes exclusive to language death, what is noteworthy is the unidirectionality of the changes for, within the framework of language obsolescence, the structural changes, caiques and lexical borrowing are all generally precipitated by the dominant variety and undergone by the obsolescent one (Campbell and Muntzel 1989: 193-194; Dorian 1981: 100). This is what sets the situation in Guernsey apart from archetypal situations of

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language death and positions it within the framework of linguistic convergence - for, although this paper has set out numerous examples of the influence of English on Guernesiais, other studies, such as Ramisch (1989), Barbe (1995) and Tomlinson (1981), have also established that Guernesiais has exerted a high degree of structural influence on the English of Guernsey, which sets it apart from the varieties spoken on the mainland. Not only do the two varieties show a high degree of structural isomorphism but, significantly, these features are to be found in the everyday speech of most Guernsey folk (cf. Mougeon and Beniak 1991: 180). Admittedly, English-medium education and the importance attached to being proficient in standard English has, on Guernsey as elsewhere in the British Isles, contributed to some conscious homogenizing of speech, with the eradication of salient dialectal traits, but nevertheless several of the features outlined in section 2. above, and in studies such as Ramisch (1989) and Barbe (1995), are apparent in the unguarded speech of many of the Island's fluent English speakers regardless of whether or not they also speak Guernesiais (although see also note 1.). Furthermore, the features highlighted in section 3. abounded in the speech of all the dialect speakers, with no significant difference recorded in the degree of convergence with respect to the age, sex or parish of the speaker, or indeed the frequency with which they spoke the dialect. Again, this differs from typical situations of language death where it is usual to find age-grading, with the age of informants inversely correlated with the degree of interference from the dominant language (Jones 1998: 79-81). It is also important that we should not overlook the rather unique sociopolitical situation of Guernesiais, which differs from "classic" situations of language death. Two of the tell-tale characteristics of language death are territorial contraction and speaker reduction. Although Guernesiais is, admittedly, declining in speaker numbers, the situation is not analogous to that of obsolescent languages such as Breton or Irish since, above the age-threshold of about 65, nearly everyone is able to speak the dialect, whereas below an agethreshold of about 45 no more than a handful of speakers remain. There is no question of Guernesiais gradually petering out. The demise is relatively abrupt. In other words, taking into account natural wastage and emigration, the numbers of speakers of Guernesiais among generations currently aged 65 and over have not diminished significantly. They have merely stopped speaking Guernesiais to the generations below them on the age-continuum and also their numbers have been seen to shrink as a proportion of the population in general due to the large influx of British-born immigrants who settled on the Island in the post-War period.

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Even more significant is the fact that studies of language obsolescence have shown that the variety of older speakers may often differ structurally from that of younger speakers (Dorian 1981: 153). A typical scenario would be where, in the first instance, speakers of Language A acquiring Language Β (and hence becoming Language Α-dominant bilinguals) would display evidence of structural transfer from Language A in their variety of Language B, although their Language A will remain unaffected (apart from maybe a few Language Β borrowings). Significant amounts of structural transfer into Language A will only begin to appear in the Language A of Language Β-dominant bilinguals, who usually represent a different generation from the Language Α-dominant bilinguals. However, what we have in Guernsey are fluent speakers of Guernesiais who show both English influence in their Guernesiais and Guernesiais influence in their English. Moreover, as stated above, there appeared to be no significant correlation between the degree of English influence in a speaker's Guernesiais and their age or ability to speak the dialect. All this, then, seems to be leaving us with apparently conflicting tendencies. On the one hand, the current sociopolitical situation of Guernesiais suggests a scenario of language obsolescence. However, such widespread bi-directional structural influence is more typical of convergence between two varieties of equal status. An examination of what information there is on the lexis of the Island's two varieties seems to provide yet more conflicting information in that it is quite clear that, in this domain, the influence cannot really be described as bidirectional. Although some syntactic caiques exist, they are far from abundant and indeed, apart from terms traditionally connected with local administration and culture, the number of lexical borrowings from Guernesiais in the English of Guernsey is, in the words of Ramisch, "decidedly limited" (1989: 179). However, both my data and a perusal of the Dictiounnaire Angllais-Guernesiais (De Garis 1982) revealed that quite the opposite was true of the number of English lexical borrowings in Guernesiais, where English words were used in all domains and, as my corpus revealed, even when there existed an indigenous equivalent (and also where, later in the conversation, an informant sometimes revealed that he or she knew this indigenous equivalent). Such phenomena have been documented in cases of language obsolescence (O'Dochartaigh 1984: 304) and fit in with McMahon's statement that lexical borrowing "often involves influence of a more prestigious on a less prestigious language" and is typically unidirectional (1994: 213). This, then, differs from convergence, which "requires the participating languages to be perceived as socially equal" and which involves mutual influence, primarily in terms of structure (McMahon 1994: 213). The lexical evidence, therefore, seems to suggest a case of language obsolescence.

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I believe that some light may be shed on this situation if we look again at the recent sociopolitical history of Guernsey. As mentioned in section 1., the Island maintained strong links with Mainland Norman for many centuries after leaving French control in 1204. This is not to say, however, that no English presence was felt there at all. Granted, in the Middle Ages, the number of English soldiers based on the Island to defend it against the French was relatively small (Ramisch 1989: 24) but there is one account which puts the number of soldiers on the Island in 1798 at almost 6,000 men. On an Island measuring only 62 km2 and which, in 1821, was recorded as having only 20,302 inhabitants (Guernsey Census 1981: 9, Table 1), the presence of the English garrison would certainly have meant that many of the tradesmen - and most of the inhabitants of the Island's capital, St. Peter Port - would have come into contact with English, and this contact was increased in the nineteenth century with the introduction of a regular steamboat service between Great Britain and the Channel Islands, increasing trade links between the two, and also the beginnings of Guernsey's tourist industry. Indeed, in a book on the Channel Islands published in 1893, it is noted that "During the present century, the English language has both in Guernsey and Jersey, made vast strides, so that it is difficult now to find a native even in the country parishes who cannot converse fairly well in that tongue" (Nicolle 1893: 387). In 1898, English was admitted - alongside standard French - into the sessions of the Island's Parliament and, since 1900, it has been the sole language of instruction (Ramisch 1989: 37), with children ridiculed by teachers for speaking Guernesiais at school (Domaille 1996: 13). During this period, and in the first decades of the twentieth century, Guernesiais/English bilingualism undoubtedly existed and there was probably a state of diglossia with bilingualism, with English and Guernesiais in non-competitive contact. Although never perceived as being equal in status by officialdom at the turn of the twentieth century and especially in subsequent decades, both varieties were probably being used by many people. The twentieth century would even have seen the emergence of English-dominant bilinguals in more Anglicized parts of the Island. For the most part, however, English-Guernesiais bilingualism is likely to have been stable and long-lived enough for convergence to occur. It is a great pity that no records exist of the speech of the parents of those now aged 70 and above in order for us to try to obtain, via apparent time, a more exact approximation of the time-frame involved here. If convergence did occur, then it was halted by the change in sociopolitical and economic (i.e. extra-linguistic) factors that occurred during the twentieth century, which have been outlined above, One of the most salient of these was the Second World War. With the return of the evacuee children in 1945, many

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Guernesiais-dominant bilinguals who had previously spoken Guernesiais with their children must have found that this was no longer possible due to their children having forgotten much of their Guernesiais. Even where children had not lost the ability to speak Guernesiais, they began to teach their parents English and, in many families, it became the norm to speak a mixture of English and Guernesiais (Domaille 1996: 13). There was, therefore, no straightforward re-adjustment back to Guernesiais on the part of many evacuees and it seems that, in the post-War period, many of the children who had not been evacuated also turned more and more to English, seeing their friends who had spent the War in England as "sophisticated" and worthy of imitation (Domaille 1996: 12). Instantaneously, therefore, English became far more central to the lives of almost all the Guernsey folk than it had been hitherto. There was a huge impetus for many people (including the Guernesiais-dominant bilinguals) to increase dramatically the amount of English they spoke and, as the language of many households began to change, there was simultaneously far less opportunity to speak Guernesiais. Due to extra-linguistic factors in the shape of the dramatic social events precipitated by the War, therefore, the linguistic practices of most common Guernsey folk were dramatically altered. Although the presence of English on Guernsey was both well established and widespread before 1940, the events of the Second World War undoubtedly served to accelerate the process of Anglicization on the Island (Ramisch 1989: 44) and to hasten the decline of Guernesiais. During the second half of the twentieth century, the influence of English grew increasingly pervasive due to other extra-linguistic factors such as a huge influx of British-born immigrants (7,846 between 1951-1971, Domaille 1996: 14, n. 26), increased tourism and, from the 1970s onwards, the extensive development of the Island as a centre for offshore banking, which still brings in thousands of short-term settlers annually.7 By sheer weight of numbers, therefore, immigrants have served to marginalize still further the speakers of Guernesiais; indeed Tomlinson (1981) estimated that only 6,000 people (out of the then population of 53, 313) could speak the dialect (i.e. eleven per cent of the total resident population). In 1996, his revised estimate was that, due to natural wastage, no more than 3,000 speakers were left (Domaille 1996: 25) out of a population of 58,873 (five per cent).This seems to imply that if the decline continues at the present rate, there will be no native speakers of Guernesiais left by, at best, the middle of this century. Since the War, then, there has been an asymmetrical dominance relation between English and Guernesiais, coupled with a large discrepancy in population size and unequal cultural pressure (cf.Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 19) and with it, I suggest, a shift from bi-directional to unidirectional (English > Guer-

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nesiais) interlingual influence. It also seems likely that this period has seen an increase in lexical borrowing and calquing from English to Guernesiais - although the dearth of information available on the dialect makes it impossible to substantiate this claim to any significant degree. Nevertheless, by viewing the linguistic situation in this way, positing a period of convergence prior to obsolescence, it is possible to account for some of the apparently conflicting types of change attested in the varieties spoken in Guernsey and outlined in section 3. This paper, therefore, leaves two issues to ponder. The first relates to the role of internal motivations for language change in high-contact situations. The second is the question of how common it is for convergence to precede the onset of language obsolescence.

Notes 1. Ramisch did find, however, that a few of the Norman substrate features in Guernsey English were less frequent in the speech of younger monolingual speakers of English even though they were indigenous to Guernsey and had lived all their lives on the Island (1989: 97-98, 123, 139, 150-152,152-153). 2. In its simplest terms, this distinction is between 'to know a fact' and 'to know a person'. 3. Jones (1998: 43-44; 184-185) gives several instances of English prepositions which have been calqued into Welsh and which parallel some of the examples cited here. 4. Adjectives that historically precede, rather than follow, the noun in Guernesiais, such as grand 'big' or petit 'small' were not included. Since these are normally preposed (and are statistically quite common) their inclusion would have skewed the data by artificially inflating the number of preposed adjectives attested. Adjectives that had clearly been preposed for the sake of emphasis, and were therefore marked, were also discounted. 5. This is similar to the situation in Mainland Norman, where colour adjectives also tend to be preposed (Universite Populaire Normande 1995: 37). 6. Jerriais, the Norman dialect of Jersey, and Mainland Norman both have a third preposition, acante (J), (d') aquant (et) (M.N.), to denote a comitative function with verbs of motion, hence J'm'en vais acante lyi 'I'm going with her' (Birt 1985: 166; cf. Universite Populaire Normande 1995: 128). However, no evidence of a cognate form was found in Guernesiais. 7. Between 1979-1991, 2041 people came to the Island to work in the financial sector (Domaille 1996: 15, n.31). The Island's population at that time was some 53,000 (Domaille 1996: 15, n.30, 31).

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References Barbe, Pauline 1995

Guernsey English: my mother tongue. Report and Transactions of La Societe Guernesiaise 23/4 [1994]: 700-723.

Baugh, Albert C. 1959 A History of the English Language (second edition). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Birt, Paul 1985

Li Jerriais Pour Tous. A Complete Course on the Jersey Language. Jersey: Don Balleine Trust.

Brunot, Ferdinand and Charles Bruneau 1969 Precis de grammaire historique de l'ancien frangais. Paris: Masson. Bynon, Theodora 1977 Historical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Campbell, Lyle and Martha C. Muntzel 1989 The structural consequences of language death. In: Nancy C. Dorian (ed.), Investigating Obsolescence, 181-196. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, Marcel 1965

Le subjonctif en frangais contemporain (second edition). Paris: SEDES.

De Garis, Marie 1983 Guernesiais: A grammatical survey. Report and Transactions of La Societe Guernesiaise 21: 319-353. 1982 Dictiounnaire Angllais-Guernesiais. Chichester: Phillimore. Domaille, David R.F. 1996 Analyse sociolinguistique du Guernesiais. M.A. dissertation, Department of French, University of Bristol. Dorian, Nancy C. 1981 Language Death. The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gadet, Frangoise 1992 Le Frangais populaire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Givon, Talmy 1979

Prolegomena to any sane creology. In: Ian F. Hancock (ed.), Readings in Creole Studies, 3-35. Ghent: Story-Scientia.

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Grevisse, Maurice 1988 Le Bon Usage (twelfth edition). Paris/Gembloux: Duculot. Gumperz, John J. and Robert Wilson 1971 Convergence and creolization: a case from the Indo-Aryan/Dravidian border. In: Dell Hymes (ed.), Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, 151-167. London: Cambridge University Press. Hock, Hans H. 1991 Jones, Mari C. 1998

2000 Lass, Roger 1997

Principles of Historical Linguistics. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Language Obsolescence and Revitalization. Linguistic Change in Two Sociolinguistically Contrasting Welsh Communities. Oxford: Clarendon Press. The subjunctive in Guernsey Norman French. Journal of French Language Studies 10/2: 177-203. Historical Linguistics and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McMahon, April M.S. 1994 Understanding Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mougeon, Raymond and Edouard Beniak 1991 Linguistic Consequences of Language Contact and Restriction. The Case of French in Ontario. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mühlhäusler, Peter 1974 Pidginization and Simplification of Language. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. Nicolle, E. Toulmin 1893 The Channel Islands (by David T. Austen and Robert G. Latham) (third edition). London: Allen and Co. O'Dochartaigh, Cathair 1984 Irish. In: Peter Trudgill (ed.), Language in the British Isles, 289-305. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ramisch, Heinrich 1989 The Variation of English in Guernsey, Channel Islands. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

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States of Guernsey 1981 Guernsey Census 1981. Guernsey: States of Guernsey. Thomason, Sarah G. and Terrence Kaufman 1988 Language Contact, Creolization and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Tomlinson, Harry 1981 Le Guernesiais - etude grammatical et lexicale du parier normand de l'ile de Guernesey. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Edinburgh. Universite Populaire Normande 1995 Essai de grammaire de la langue normande. Periers: Garlan.

Modern Greek: towards a standard language or a new diglossia? David Holton

Abstract This paper seeks to examine the current state of the Greek language, following the dismantling of formal diglossia (with the official abolition of the high form, katharevousa) in 1976. Although Greek was never a "typical" case of diglossia, the two forms were more or less functionally distinct. Moreover, contact between the high and low forms since the nineteenth century had already led to considerable interpenetration. Today, the everyday spoken and written language of Greek-speakers of moderate education is no longer the traditional demotic, but bears considerable traces of katharevousa influence in phonology, morphology and lexicon. This "Standard Modern Greek" (SMG) is thus the result of intra-lingual convergence (or, in the terminology used in the Introduction, an "external" factor), in the sense that, while its structure remains basically that of demotic, it has acquired certain specific features that once characterized katharevousa. This process has certainly accelerated since 1976, partly as a result of the need to use the standard language in domains that were formerly the prerogative of katharevousa (i.e. an "extra-linguistic" factor). The influence of katharevousa on SMG is significant but not systematic, in that the importation of katharevousa phonology and morphology is to a great extent word-specific or morpheme-specific, and it is mainly limited to more formal registers. A descriptive grammar needs to take account of this enlargement of the grammatical system. What is interesting and unusual about the Greek case is that, arguably, a form of what may be described as convergence (see discussion below) has taken place between two forms of the same language, one an artificial construct which was nobody's mother tongue, the other a vernacular (which had already undergone some standardization in urban and literary use). The process was accelerated by political change and, although the situation remains fluid, a return to formal diglossia is unlikely.

The aim of this paper is to offer some reflections on the current state of the Greek language, from a broadly sociolinguistic perspective. Many commentators have drawn attention to the very rapid pace of change in language use since 1976, when a major reform took place in official policy, and the resulting confusion felt by some users of the language (see, e.g. Kazazis 1993). The "language question" has been an abiding concern in Greek public life, edu-

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cation, politics and culture essentially since the foundation of the modern Greek state in the 1830s (Mackridge 1990). In fact, the issue has a very much longer history than that (Horrocks 1997), but that need not concern us here. The modern phase of the language question dates from the institutionalization of a form of Greek different from the spoken language as the official language of the state and its institutions. This official language, known as katharevousa (literally "purifying", and referred to hereafter as "K") was introduced for the wholly laudable purpose of providing a standard national language which would overcome the problems of communication among speakers of widely divergent dialects. It was intended as a compromise, a "middle way" between the spoken vernaculars and the highly archaizing forms of Greek used by scholars and the Church hierarchy. But in time, its users gave way to their excessive zeal for things with respectably classical associations - in large measure a consequence of the claim to direct descent from the Greeks of classical antiquity and the creation of a modern identity which bore witness to that claim. So, in the course of the nineteenth century, the gap between the written language, used for all formal purposes and much literary production, and, on the other hand, the spoken language became ever wider. The reaction, the movement for the use of the vernacular for written, and especially literary, purposes, took shape in the 1880s and had some success. But in 1911, a new constitution enshrined Κ as the official language of the state by the simple insertion of a clause specifying that the language of the state is the language in which the constitution was written. In this way the official status of Κ was recognized de jure after almost a century in which it had had that status de facto (Horrocks 1997: 359). Apart from a few short-lived reforms swiftly countermanded by incoming conservative governments, this remained the position until 1976. This was the situation which Charles A. Ferguson observed when in 1959 he produced his classic definition of diglossia, and had no hesitation in treating Modern Greek as one of the "defining languages" for the phenomenon. Let us remind ourselves of Ferguson's initial definition: diglossia is "one particular kind of standardization where two varieties of a language exist side by side throughout the community, with each having a definite role to play" (1959: 325). The definition relies on distinctions of high (H) vs. low (L), formal vs. informal, prestigious vs. non-prestigious. Despite later attempts to refine the definition of diglossia, Ferguson's approach remains a "useful notion" for a particular kind of variation within the same language (Daltas 1994). However, the application of Ferguson's definition to Modern Greek raises considerable problems (Petrounias 1978), first because the high form of the language was never completely standardized, nor could it be characterized as the language of a respected body of literature (as is Classical Arabic, or stan-

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dard German for Swiss-German speakers). Rather it is demotic (D) that has been the literary language of Greece since the last decade of the nineteenth century and indeed, as far as poetry is concerned, from even earlier; furthermore, D became considerably more standardized, in the hands of writers of the "generation of the 1930s", than Κ ever was. Second, the definition implies the existence of two separate forms of the language - a high one for official purposes and a low one for everyday and conversational purposes - whereas the reality is that there had always been, since the early nineteenth century, considerable interpenetration of the two forms. Even to talk of two (and only two) forms is to beg many questions. In fact, there have been many forms of Κ and many forms of D, and the situation was far more fluid and complex than the "standard" definition of diglossia allows for (Alexiou 1982). However, the situation was perceived by Greek-speakers in terms of a binary opposition: Κ versus D. Κ was the language of officialdom, the law, science and much of the educational system; it also had a considerable influence on journalism and the broadcast media. D was the language of oral communication, informal writing, poetry and novels. Κ was largely impenetrable to people without secondary schooling. It required considerable linguistic skill to handle it successfully, convincingly, and with a sense of style. Its grammatical system was a rather random selection of elements taken from Classical or Hellenistic Greek, but alongside many modern features (for example, the modern third person plural verb ending -oun as well as the classical -ousi). In terms of phonology, it followed the written forms of Ancient Greek (AG), but with the modern phonetic values of the letters. Thus, for example, the cluster/^ was (and is) pronounced [fq], whereas in demotic words it had undergone manner dissimilation to [ft], and in AG it had actually been pronounced as [pt11]. In morphology, there were considerable differences between Κ and D in the declension patterns of nouns and adjectives, and the verb conjugations of Κ were much more complex than in D, with different endings for certain forms, obligatory use of the augment (either a prefixed vowel or a "lengthened" initial vowel in past tenses), and a range of participles no longer in use in D. The vocabulary of Κ admitted very few words of non-Greek origin, and instead made use of either AG words or nineteenth-century and later neologisms, based on Classical roots, e.g. yeomilon, literally 'earth-apple', pomme de terre, rather than the "vulgar" (and non-Greek) everyday wordpatäta, 'potato'. The following example illustrates some of the salient differences between the two varieties. It is taken from two different editions of the official government statistical yearbook. First the edition of 1983-1984, which still used Κ - "for technical reasons" - almost a decade after the language reforms had

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been officially enacted (a simple phonemic transcription is used here for Greek examples): (1) Perilamvänonde, plin ton orikhion, metalion, latomion ke alikon, Are-included apart-from the mines, pits, quarries and salterns, ke e voithitike tüton monädhes, os ta grafia, e apothike kip. and the auxiliary of-them units, such-as the offices, the warehouses etc. In the 1998 edition the same sentence appears as follows: (2) Perilamvänonde, ektos αρό ta orikhia, metalia, Are-included, apart from the mines, pits, latomia ke tis alikes, ke i voithitikis monädhes afton, quarries and salterns, and the auxiliary units of-them, opos ta grafia, i apothikes kip. such-as the offices, the warehouses etc. 'In addition to the mines, pits, quarries and salterns, their auxiliary units, such as offices, warehouses etc., are also included.' The main differences between the two versions are as follows: a)

b) c) d)

e)

In place of the Κ preposition plin 'except' + genitive, the D/SMG formulation uses the prepositional phrase ektos αρό 'apart from' + accusative. Because the last noun of the series is feminine (the previous three all being neuter), the appropriate different form of the accusative feminine plural article is added: tis. The Κ form of the feminine nominative plural definite article e is replaced by the D form i, before the nouns monädhes and apothikes. The genitive plural pronoun tüton is replaced by the more D afton, with a change of word order. There are different terminations in Κ and D for the nominative plural of feminine adjectives and nouns: voithitike vs. voithitikes, apothike vs. apothikes. The Κ word os 'such as' is replaced by opos.

In the space of one short sentence we observe a significant number of morphological and lexical differences. One difference in the two texts which is obscured by the transliteration is their accent systems: Κ (and indeed D, apart from pioneering attempts by a few writers and scholars to introduce radical simplification) employed the complex AG system of three accents and two "breathings". Since 1982, the simplified "monotonic" system has been officially recognized and school-children no longer have to spend countless hours

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learning the traditional system; a single accent (the acute) indicates the stressed syllable of words of more than one syllable and the redundant "breathings", which originally indicated aspiration or the lack of it before initial vowels, have been dropped. Separate normative grammars existed for the two varieties. The very influential grammar produced in 1941 by a committee led by Manolis Triandafyllidis had the title Modern Greek Grammar (of Demotic). This grammar, with its later abridgements and adaptations, has been widely used in schools and universities and is often referred to as the "state grammar" or "official grammar". It has not yet been superseded. In 1976 the new (conservative) government, which had replaced the Colonels' dictatorship, swept away Κ and declared that the official language of the state was "Modern Greek (demotic)", further qualified as a form of Greek "without extremes or peculiarities" (Landsman 1989: 171-174). Diglossia officially ceased to exist, since the high form had been de-institutionalized, dislodged from its position of status, prestige and power. Demotic became the language of all forms of written communication, of the law courts, parliament, education and the media, in all of which Κ had previously had either exclusivity or at least preferential status. Most writers on the Greek language now use the term Standard Modern Greek (SMG) or Common Modem Greek (CMG) rather than "demotic" to refer to the language which is spoken and written by urban Greeks of at least moderate education. The main reason for this is that D has undergone considerable influence from Κ over a period of more than 150 years. This influence has affected all domains of the language: phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon: my impression is that it is the morphology and the lexicon that have undergone the greatest influence. Thus, today's Greek is not that of the militant demoticists and neo-grammarian theorists of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Equally, it is not that of the prescriptive and normative grammars of demotic that were produced in the middle years of this century. Triandafyllidis, in the foreword to his 1941 grammar, claimed that his work was descriptive, but then stated that it was "founded on the basis of the folk songs and of recent literature". The standard two-volume work on the syntax of demotic by Tzartzanos (second edition, 1946-1953) includes many examples taken from folk songs and other poetry. This idealized demotic is a far cry from the language actually used today. Κ and D co-existed for a long period. Since everyone had one of the varieties (the second one) as their mother tongue, possibly in a regional or dialectal form, and as almost all the population had some contact with the official language even if they could not write it effectively themselves, it is not surpris-

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ing that considerable interpenetration took place. Although there was at one time a variety that was called "mixed", it was usually a simple matter to decide whether a given text or utterance was in the high or the low form. I would argue, therefore, that the degree of convergence between the two forms was significant but limited. Although it increased over time, there were no signs that one of the two would succumb to a natural death, as long as each had its own political, social and cultural domain. What accelerated the process was the Colonels' dictatorship of 1967-1974. The people's dislike for the Colonels' repressive, backward-looking and boorish policies could not but be linked with their inept and often laughable use of K, which they had reimposed on the educational system, undoing the modest reforms of the previous government. It was thus inevitable that the restoration of democracy, rule by the people, should quickly legitimize the language of the people, demotic, and abolish the puristic language, now tainted once and for all by the military dictatorship. Euphoria soon gave way to disappointment. Purists rail about the impoverished vocabulary of the young, the decline of linguistic standards especially on radio and television, the uncontrolled importation of loanwords especially from English, the use of the Latin alphabet in commercial signs and advertising, and ultimately the dangers that all this allegedly poses for the survival of the Greek language. More reasoned criticism has been aimed at the failure of the state and the legal establishment to adapt to the new language policy, or at the increasing use of cliches, lexical items and morphological elements from Κ in texts written in SMG. There is, then, considerable dissatisfaction about the current state of the language, uncertainty about where it is heading - if indeed it has a future - and no shortage of advice on how to put it right (for recent overviews see Kakava 1997; Frangoudaki 1997). Against this background, two colleagues and I set out to compile a descriptive reference grammar of current spoken and written Greek, primarily for the use of adult learners of Greek as a foreign language. At the same time we had hopes that such a grammar might also serve the needs of Greeks themselves, since no comparable up-to-date reference work existed. (A new grammar is now being published in Greece; so far the parts covering the noun and the verb have appeared [Klairis and Babiniotis 1996-].) The English edition of our comprehensive grammar appeared in 1997 (Holton, Mackridge and Philippaki-Warburton 1997). A Greek translation is ready for publication. In our grammar the emphasis is on usage. Thus, we indicate, wherever possible, whether a form or a syntactic structure is formal or informal. We also sometimes label a particular usage as colloquial. It is strange that there are no widely accepted one-to-one equivalents in Greek for the terms formal, informal and colloquial.

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In the past, such differences have been categorized formalistically as Κ or D. Now that these labels do not have any synchronic validity, other terms will have to be found to indicate the context in which a particular form or usage is likely to be regarded as appropriate. Much of the material at the formal end of the spectrum in fact derives from K. Now, it must be seen as part of SMG and the descriptive grammar must be enlarged accordingly. In our grammar, we have found it necessary to add a number of noun, adjective and verb paradigms that are not found in most (if any) of the other grammars of "demotic Greek". One example is the declined participles which were so widely used in AG and in K. In traditional demotic, only the passive perfect participle survived. SMG now makes considerable use of the passive present participle and, to a lesser extent, of the active present participle. Both of these are used mainly adjectivally and correspond to English participles in -ing or French ones in -ant etc.; for example, to kivernon koma 'the ruling party', i ergazomeniyineka 'the working woman', or substantivized as in ο grafon 'the writer', i etusa 'the applicant' (feminine). Other verb forms of Κ origin have entered the standard language through officialese and journalism. Prepositions which derive from AG, but had not survived in D, are used in a range of expressions, mostly figurative and relatively fixed, e.g. dia vias 'by force', ekprotis opseos 'at first sight', enpdsi periptosi 'in any case' - the last probably a caique from French. The problem that faced us was whether all this more formal material of Κ origin could simply be incorporated in the grammar without differentiation. We came to the conclusion that it cannot, because usage distinguishes it. For example, there are two distinct sets of endings of the passive simple past, one of D and one of Κ origin. The D one has to be given as the norm as it is available for almost all passive verbs. There is a very limited number of verbs, used in mainly formal contexts, which have the Κ endings: to attempt to adapt them to D morphology would nowadays meet with disapproval (if not ridicule). Thus sinelifthi 'he/she was arrested', where D would be expected to produce siliftike. What we have here is borrowing from Κ into SMG. Such influence of the learned language is no new thing, and although it may have increased since 1976, it did not start then. But literature tended to stick to an idealized kind of D, with occasional use of Κ for ironic or documentary purposes. In 1963, there was published a novel entitled The Third Wedding by Costas Tachtsis. It appeared to mix Κ and D elements in the narration and direct speech in a way that some found shocking. A more common response, however, was "that's just how my mother/ grandmother/aunt speaks". In other words, speakers of the language have long made use of Κ words, phrases, and cliches, to indicate a shift of register, for purposes of irony, self-mockery or solidarity, or simply because the Κ feature filled a gap in the resources of D.

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Is this convergence? It has been argued that "convergence only occurs in cases of widespread and stable bilingualism, and requires the participating languages to be perceived as socially equal, since if one gains significantly in prestige it is likely to cause the death of the others" (McMahon 1994: 213). In the case of Greek, the pre-existing situation was diglossia rather than bilingualism. Moreover, one of the varieties has been killed off by government fiat rather than natural death, although its demise may perhaps have been accelerated by loss of prestige. However, it is extremely difficult to fit Greek into any sociolinguistic typology. The language has never lost contact with its own past because its speakers have always had some acquaintance with older forms of Greek: at the very least the New Testament, and the liturgy of the Orthodox Church. For the more educated, the range is huge, from Homer, via Attic tragedy, to nineteenth-century prose fiction written in K. There is even some twentieth-century literature, such as surrealist poetry, which makes extensive use of Κ and is barely intelligible to the uneducated. I do not think that convergence would have occurred while diglossia continued to function. But with the end of diglossia, paradoxically, some kind of convergence is taking place. It has certainly occurred already in phonology: the separate systems of Κ and D have merged so that, in the case of certain consonant clusters, for example, the phonology is word-specific or morpheme-specific, not systemic. Demotic converted combinations of two fricatives or two plosives to fricative and plosive: [pt] and [fq] both became [ft], by dissimilation in the manner of articulation. Thus AG and Κptokhos 'poor' became ftokhos in demotic and SMG. But the cognate noun ptokhefsi 'bankruptcy' obligatorily retains the older phonology. Other consonant clusters found in SMG which were "alien" to traditional D include: [fs], [nö], [sq], [sx], [kt] and [xq]. In terms of morphology, it is less easy to see what is happening. Two separate systems have reached some sort of symbiosis, but (as with phonology) register and lexis are the determining factors. Some of the morphological borrowings from Κ go back to the nineteenth century and are now irreversible, e.g. plurals like erotisis 'questions' or the genitive singular of neuter nouns such as prdgmatos 'thing'. In other cases, the situation is: if you use this verb (and it applies particularly to verbs) you must use Κ morphology. We can best accommodate these difficulties by specifying a core grammar which describes and systematizes most utterances in everyday usage, and a series of peripheral grammatical features which may be used for certain words and almost entirely in formal contexts. The situation is thus somewhat more complex than the likely development of Greek "over the next two centuries" which Ferguson predicted 40 years ago: "Full development to unified standard based on L of Athens plus heavy admixture of Η vocabulary" (1959: 340).

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To conclude: Greek has ceased to be diglossic because the high variety Κ has been ousted from those public linguistic domains in which it was required before 1976. But Κ continues to have an influence, even though very few people now use it as an autonomous system. Elements of Κ are available as a formal register within SMG and constitute a part of the rich linguistic heritage available to speakers and writers. Apart from its access to Κ remnants, SMG also still possesses a good deal of polymorphy of its own, for example four morphological variants for the verb form 'they were coming': erkhondan, erkhondan, erkhondane, erkhondousan, with different degrees of formality or informality. SMG is in consequence not a standardized language by any means, but it can now be seen as a standard language encompassing a wide range of registers (Kazazis 1993: 22). Its varieties are no longer those of a diglossic system as was once the case (though one that did not exactly fit the pattern of other "typical" diglossias). The high and low varieties have not simply merged into SMG: SMG is the direct successor of D, while Κ has disappeared as a separate and autonomous system. The Greek case is not a typical case of convergence, for one thing because the two languages involved are both forms of Greek. Nor is it easy to relate the Greek case to specific typological criteria for convergence or "borrowing" (e.g. Hymes 1971: 75, or Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 74-76). But since the present state of SMG cannot be described and systematized synchronically without some recourse to grammatical, phonological and even syntactic patterns that were once associated with the artificial, archaizing form of Greek called katharevousa, one way of viewing the situation is as a convergence between D and certain features of its long-term rival K. As for prophecies: will the Κ material just enrich the more formal registers of SMG, or might their accumulation lead to the emergence of a new diglossia? I doubt it: for that to happen, it would need a bunch of fanatics to take control of the education system and probably a group of disaffected right-wing colonels to seize power. Fortunately, that is very unlikely in the present European political context. What is more likely is that, as a knowledge of English becomes increasingly essential to communication and personal advancement, bilingualism will become a widespread phenomenon.

References Alexiou, Margaret 1982 Diglossia in Greece. In: William Haas (ed.), Standard Languages, Spoken and Written, 156-192. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Daltas, Periklis 1994 The concept of diglossia from Ferguson to Fishman to Fasold. In: Irene Philipppaki-Warburton, Katerina Nicolaidis and Maria Sifianou (eds.), Themes in Greek Linguistics. Papers from the First International Conference on Greek Linguistics, Reading, September 1993, 341-348. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Ferguson, Charles A. 1959 Diglossia. Word 15: 325-340. Frangoudaki, Anna 1997 The metalinguistic prophecy on the decline of the Greek language: its social function as the expression of a crisis in national identity. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 126: 63-82. Holton, David, Peter Mackridge and Irene Philippaki-Warburton 1997 Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language. London/New York: Routledge. (Reprinted with corrections 1999.) Horrocks, Geoffrey C. 1997 Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers. London/New York: Longman. Hymes, Dell (ed.) 1971 Pidginization and Crealization of Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kakava, Christina 1997 Sociolinguistics and Modern Greek: past, current, and future directions. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 126: 5-32. Kazazis, Kostas 1993 Dismantling Greek diglossia. In: Eran Fraenkel and Christina Kramer (eds.), Language Contact - Language Change, 7-26. New York: Peter Lang. Klairis, Christos and Georgios Babiniotis 1996Grammatiki tis Neas Ellinikis. Domoleitourgiki - Epikoinoniaki [Grammar of Modern Greek. Structural-Functional-Communicative] Athens: Ellinika Grammata. Landsman, David M. 1989 The Greeks' sense of language and the 1976 linguistic reforms: illusions and disappointments. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 13: 159-182.

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Mackridge, Peter 1990 Katharevousa (c. 1800-1974): an obituary for an official language. In: Marian Sarafis and Martin Eve (eds.), Background to Contemporary Greece, 25-51. London: Merlin/ Savage; Maryland: Barnes and Noble. McMahon, April M.S. 1994 Understanding Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Petrounias, Evangelos 1978 The Modern Greek language and diglossia. In: Speros Vryonis Jr. (ed.), The "Past" in Medieval and Modern Greek Culture, 193-220. Malibu: Undena Publications. Thomason, Sarah Grey and Terrence Kaufman 1984 Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley/ Los Angeles: University of California Press. Triantafyllidis, Manolis 1941 Neoelliniki Grammatiki (tis Dimotikis) [Modern Greek Grammar (of Demotic)]. Athens: Organismos Ekdoseos Scholikon Vivlion. (Reprinted with corrections Thessaloniki 1988.) Tzartzanos, Achillefs 1946-1953 Neoelliniki Syntaxis (tis Koinis Dimotikis) [Modern Greek Syntax (of common demotic)] (second edition). Athens: Organismos Ekdoseos Scholikon Vivlion.

Standard English and the lexicon: why so many different spellings? Laura Wright

Abstract Milroy (1997) questions traditional assumptions about the separateness of different languages, and points out that this assumption leads to a privileging of system-internal explanations for language change over system-external ones (note that here, the term "system-external" is used to include both "external" factors [i.e. contact] and "extralinguistic" ones). This chapter looks at contact-induced change via the development of the English spelling system. Three languages, Middle English, Anglo-Norman, and Medieval Latin were routinely and systematically mixed in certain genres of late medieval British writing (see Schendl 1996). One text-type, mixed-language business writing, is discussed here. Etymology, word order of nouns and modifiers, number and gender agreement in the noun phrase, and prepositions are examined. It is demonstrated that the mixing of languages within this text-type was orderly, and it is claimed that this text-type had considerable influence on the multiplicity of spellings in presentday English.

1.

Introduction

This chapter will attempt to account for something that is not usually thought to require much explanation: the many ways of spelling English sounds. Present-day English spellings mainly stem back to the Middle English, Anglo-Norman and Medieval Latin writing traditions, and crucially for our present-day orthographical system, there was a long written tradition of systematically mixing those languages together. I will focus on one text-type, that of the writings of merchants and accountants keeping track of ingress and egress of money. The extra-linguistic factors that caused Anglo-Norman and English, and Medieval Latin and English, to become mixed together (that is, the economics of trade) resulted in a new, orderly written tradition of integrating the three languages, with its own system-internal principles. We continue to feel its effects in the present-day multiplicity of letter-graphs to phonemes, and woe betide anyone who fails to grasp them, as readers will judge their written English as uneducated.

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The mixed-language business text-type

Learning to spell in present-day English is a long and difficult process. A quiz of the people in the room as I write this elicited the following examples of looming pitfalls: • • • • •

always (one / or two?) each other (one word or two?) lovely (the e before or after the /?) wicker (with or without an A?) disappear (how many s's and p's?)

and readers will be able to supply their own personal list of words they never can get right, no matter how often they look them up in a dictionary. The reason for our complicated spelling system is that it reflects how words sounded at earlier points in history, and it reflects the spelling systems of various contributory languages which have donated words to English. But why didn't standard English evolve a tidier spelling system, to which older and foreign words could be adapted? Why did spelling get left out, when such matters as morphology and vocabulary were being standardized? To answer this question, I will look at what was used in place of standard English before standard English had evolved; that is, the kind of writing system that was used for professional purposes. I will outline the business writing system that existed from the time of the Norman Conquest until the rise of standard English, which was used all over Britain and which did not, in its fundamental structure, vary regionally. Such business writing incorporated Medieval Latin and Anglo-Norman and, I submit, forms the basis for the myriad spelling forms we now regard as standard. The body of the argument presented here is devoted to demonstrating various kinds of variation (lexical, morphological, syntactic), so that thefinalsection on spelling will be seen in the greater context of variation in the text-type. Keeping accounts is crucial for anybody in business, both to keep track of monies in and out, and for public demonstration. Accounts are written for the present owners of the business, for the auditors a year or so later, and then kept as a matter of record for ever after. This is why such large numbers from the medieval period still exist in archives. Accounts in Britain before the sixteenth century were not usually written in English, but in a mixture of either Medieval Latin + English or Anglo-Norman + English. The mixing was not random, but orderly, as detailed below, and made use of the medieval abbreviation and suspension system. The main data looked at in this paper is of the Medieval Latin + English variety and comes from the archive of London Bridge, a perpetual institution which maintained a large workforce:

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(1) Empc" necessari ϊί Wittmo Cooke de Westham ρ MtMtarundm ab ipo empfp cooptufnoui opis lapidei pontis xvjs. it Petro Burgeys pro xiij corijs equinis ab ipe empf& expn in factufvnius Swerde ρ tractur'de le gybet Ramme ptc'pec'ijs - xxvjs. It pro ν lagenis pinguedinis pedü bouiü empfin vncoe corioap pfdictosp tfCcuiustt lagerte xjd ob - iiijs ixd ob it ρ ν petri cepi empf& expn in vnctoe lej gynnes & ρ line crestettg indefiencj. £3petri vd - ijs jd. ftp iiij01 peces de Basteropes empfp tractuf de le gybet Rani - ijs iiijd. It ρ iij paribj sufflonü empfp Cementari - vijd. It ρ iij Crebf empfp calce & jabulo crebranrf - xijd. It pro j pec* de lyne empf confix fathom -xviijd It ρ j lode herdelles empfp scaffolde inde fiend? - vjs viijd ItJohi mars ham ρ j pecie de Telte empfp cooptur" cacabi cü Cemente - iijs. It Johi One de Swyneshede ρ xvijC xxij tb ropes ab ipd empfp opibj pontis ptc'cuiustt Cne ixs - vij ti xiiijs ixd. It ρ ponderac"eoapdm ad tralem regnl london - ijs iiijd. hp cariageospdm a le Weyhous infra Ciuitatem londofi usqjle Brughous in Suthwerk-viijd. It Rico Braybroke & Rico Aubrey pro vno lapide molari posifin molendiö iuxta Stratford atte Bowe - Cvjs viijd. It Witlo Corbet pro ij lapidibj molaribj posif in molendino bras' in ten vocaf the Croun - viijs. It pro ij rothers ijs vijd jyeletüne xijs j Clensyng seve ijs vjd jfonett viijd j wort tyne viijd j barett vjd j waterfatte vjd empf& reman in eodrh tenemento - xixs vd. 'Necessary Purchases: And to William Cooke of West Ham for 2000 reeds from him bought for covering the new stone work on the bridge, 16s. And to Peter Burgeys for 13 horse hides from him bought and spent in making one sword for hauling the gibbet ram, price per piece 2s, 26s. And for five gallons of neatsfoot grease bought in greasing the hides aforesaid, price of each gallon 11 l/2d, 4s 91/2d. And for five stone of tallow bought and spent in greasing the gins, and for making line cressets therefrom, price of each stone 5d, 2s Id. And for four pieces of Basteropes bought for hauling the gibbet ram, 2s 4d. And for three pairs of bellows bought for the masons, 7d. And for three sieves bought for sieving chalk and gravel, 12d. And for one piece of line bought containing 60 fathoms, 18d. And for one load of hurdles bought for making scaffolds therefrom, 6s 8d. And to John Marsham for one piece of tilt bought for covering the cement pot, 3 s. And to John One of Swyneshede for 17 hundredweight and 22 lb of ropes bought from him for bridge work, price of each hundredweight 9s, £7 14s 9d. And for weighing of them at the king's beam in London, 2s 4d. And for carriage of the same from the Weigh House within the City of London to the Bridge House in Southwark, 8d. [fo 57] And to Richard Baybroke and Richard Aubrey for one mill stone positioned in the mill near Stratford at Bow, 106s 8d. And to William Corbet for two mill stones positioned in

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the malt mill in the tenement called The Crown, 8s. And for two rudders 2s 7d, one gyle tun 12s, one cleansing sieve 2s 6d, one funnel 8d, one wort tyne 8d, one barrel 6d, one water fat 7d, bought and remaining in the same tenement, 19s 5d.' Corporation of London Records Office MS Bridge House Rental, Volume 3, fo 56v-57, 1462x63.· This is written in Medieval Latin + English, but the two languages are not randomly distributed. English is variably used for the content words (nouns, adjectives, stems of verbs, -ing forms), and Medieval Latin is compulsorily used for the function words, and variably for all other parts of speech. 2.1.

Vocabulary

Words of non-Latin etymology in the above example are: Swerde < Old English, Ramme < Old English, line < Old English, fathom < Old English, lode < Old English, herdelles < Old English, Telte 'kind of cloth' < ?Middle English, ropes < Old English, Weyhous < Old English + Old English, Brughous < Old English + Old English, rothers < Old English, yeletüne < Dutch + Old English, Clensyng seve < Old English + Old English, wort < Old English, water < Old English, fatte < Old English gybet 'forked stick' < Anglo-Norman, gynnes 'machines' < Anglo-Norman, crestette 'basket to hold grease, tar, oil' or 'fire-basket, torch' 2 < Anglo-Norman, peces < Anglo-Norman, Basteropes 'to sew together' < Anglo-Norman + Old English, scaffolde < Anglo-Norman, Crom < Anglo-Norman, fonett < ?Anglo-Norman, tyne < Anglo-Norman. We can assume that these words could have been rendered into Latin had the scribe so wished, because of the proximity of caiques: consider Crebr", crebrancl and seve; peces and pecie. The scribe knew how to write in monolingual Medieval Latin, but used both languages. There are also some words which function in both languages, either because they are cognate terms, or because English has borrowed the word via AngloNorman French, and the French form has been taken into the Medieval Latin lexicon: necessari 'necessary', barett'barrel', cariag'carriage', 'pieces', reman 'remaining', ten 'tenement'.

Cemente 'cement',pec?

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Compare peces, which is morphologically English, with pecie, which is morphologically Medieval Latin. By contrast, / ^ f u n c t i o n s simultaneously in both languages, because the morphological information which would assign it as a lexeme in one or other language is suppressed. Similarly, tenemento is Medieval Latin, but ten can be read as either Medieval Latin, or English, or both. Thus the use of the abbreviation and suspension system serves to blur the distinction between the two languages, and creates a group of words which are neither uniquely English nor uniquely Latin, but both at once.3

2.2. Word order and agreement As well as a mapping of one language onto the other lexically, the ordering and agreement rules of both languages are found in this text-type. Example (2) is taken from the same volume of accounts as Example (1): (2) It eidm pro ν doß & dl gold pap* ρ q doß xiiijd - vjs ... It ρ vj lb white lede - ixd... It ρ j reme de papiro albo - ijs vjd ...It pro j pece de bokeram p^pul - iijs iiijd. It pro ij virg& dJ de purputt bokeram - xxd. 'And to the same for five dozen and a half gold paper, for which dozen 14d, 6s. And for 6 lb white lead, 9d. And for one ream of white paper, 2s 6d. And for one piece of purple buckram, 3s 4d. And for two yards and a half of purple buckram, 20d.' Corporation of London Records Office MS Bridge House Rental, Volume 3, fo 94v, 1464x65. In Example (2) the Romance word order4 occurs, with the modifier after the noun, bokeram p^pul, and the Germanic word order occurs, with the modifier before the noun, purputt bokeram. 'White' and 'albo' are calqued in close proximity, and notice how papiro is Medieval Latin, but in the noun phrase gold pap0', the abbreviated form pap* can be read as both English and Latin. Romance nouns are marked for grammatical gender; English nouns, by the fifteenth century, were not. Classical Latin did not have articles as such, but Medieval Latin used le (which agreed with masculine nouns), la (which agreed with feminine nouns), and invariable plural les or lej to agree with plural nouns. How, then, is gender assigned in a Medieval Latin text which obligatorially contains much English vocabulary? The answer is that the default article for English words was le singular, les or lej plural. This matches the English system, which marks plurality but not gender. However, this was a system that changed over the centuries,5 and la was also used, as well as le + plural nouns and lej+ singular nouns, although always with a lower frequency.

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2.2.1. Gender of nouns To ascertain the increasing use of la, I have surveyed the Bridge House accounts for two years, 40 years apart from each other. Taking the financial year 1420-1421 in MS Bridge House Weekly Payments, first series, Volume 2, there are no tokens of la at all. Le occurs 37 times, qualifying Briggehous 13 times, showte (a type of boat) seven times, loke (the name of a meadow) four times, jfreyght twice, one token each of nouns denoting places Tilehous, Tilkylne, dongeon, Lee, Weyhous; and one token each of nouns ladyng, lod, lathe, vernisshing, jfother, C (meaning 100). Qualifying plural nouns, les occurred twelve times, four times qualifying Geauntes ('giants', for a parade over the bridge), and one token each of les Tides, les kogges, les Shouteman6 and les weres. In the instances of lestathelynges (3) and lestokkes, the article has been elided with the noun, due to its initial /s/ (incidentally, this also happened in the spelling of fifteenth-century English texts in this archive, where the definite article was elided visually with words beginning with a vowel, eg for 'the organs'). By the financial year 1460-1461 in the same archive, MS Bridge House Rental, Volume 3, le occurs 36 times, but there are also 22 tokens of la, and 25 instances of lej, always followed by a plural noun. Tenement names account for most of the occurrences of both le and la. Tenements with le: Exmew, Cheker, Brughous (8 tokens), Castell (7 tokens); wharves: le brughous Wharf, gardens: le Moote; woods: le westwode. Other nouns taking le: plomer, stadell, limekylne, Gryndeston, Pompe Iron (i.e. 'the iron pump', with Romance word order, although the lexemes are English), gynne (3 tokens), waterdraught, Tideman (2 tokens), gybet gynne, hangyng, Ram. Tenement names taking la: Castell (4 tokens), Croun (11 tokens), Cristofre, Horn, logge. Other nouns taking la are: Scomer, Millespyndell, lymekylne and Reede. Thus Castell and lymekylne are qualified by both le and la in the year 1460-1461. It may be that sometimes a given lexeme provokes la because of an underlying Latin feminine form. Thus one could argue that as Latin la corona is feminine, English crown has attracted the feminine article. Or where there are several Latin words which could caique an English word, one could argue that the scribe had the feminine caique in mind. For example, in 1461x62 'reed' takes feminine la: (3) It ρ cariag& wharfag de la Reede pro cooptuf diet logge- iijd ob 'And for carriage and wharfage of the reed for roofing the said lodge, 3 l/2d.' Bridge House Rental, Volume 3, fo 40v, 1461x62 (emboldening mine and hereafter) which could be expected if the underlying Latin form were feminine arundo as in Example (1), line 1. But this kind of argument would not account for those

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words which take both le and la. It is less easy to suggest what feminine Latin form is underlying brest 'breast' (this word is never rendered into Latin, so far as I am aware, in this archive) in the 1463-1464 entry: (4) It SimoT Smyth ρ Mt Mt Mt vj lb de rosen jfCcuiustt Cne iijs - iiij Ii xs iijd ab ipis empf& expn infactufCementi occupafin posicöe fundamenti de la brest ex parte boriali noui opis lapidei hoc anno de nouo construct 'And to Simon Smyth for 3007 lbs of rosin, price of each 100 3s, £4 10s 3d, bought from them and spent in making the cement used in placing the foundation of the breast on the northern side of the new stone work of the bridge, newly built this year.' Bridge House Rental, Volume 3, fo 76v, 1463x64. Especially as the pier which the breast was part of was masculine: (5) It pro bromes empf& expend ρ Cementar"in repacöe & emencj le pere sub tentis Thome Crulle & Johis fisshelake - ijd 'And for brooms bought and used by masons in repairing and mending the pier under the tenements of Thomas Crulle and Thomas Fisshelake, 2d.' Bridge House Rental, Volume 3, fo 139, 1467x68. Indeed, on folios 273 and 274v (1476x77) 'breast' appears with the masculine article (le Breste, le brest). It is easier to present a post hoc explanation for some words than for others. In the financial year 1462-1463 there is some "transgression" of the number markers, that is, le occurs with a plural noun: (6) It pro cariagxiij lodes luti a le clay pittes in leuesham usqj tenia Thome Gossyp & Thome Waspeρ quatt lode iijd- iijs iijd 'And for carriage of 13 loads of clay from the clay pits in Lewisham to the tenements of Thomas Gossyp and Thomas Wasp, for each load 3d, 3s 3d.' Bridge House Rental, Volume 3, fo 245, 1474x75. It may be argued that as le clay pittes constitutes a place, this can be regarded as a singular concept. This argument can even be stretched to encompass such plural entities as the gulleys between the bridge, and the starlings (< Old English stapol 'foundation') which surround the piers: (7) It Thome Wombewett ρ ij batellaf calcis ab ipö empf & expn in le goleys - xviijs 'And to Thomas Wombewell for two boatloads of chalk from him bought and spent in the gullies - 18s.' Bridge House Rental, Volume 3, fo 75, 1463x64.

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(8) It eidfh ρ clauis vocaffyvestroke naittponder"iiij™ xj lb Tcuiustt lb ijdjtvs ijd expenc/ in conclauacöe lej plankes ad le Stadelynges ρ custodia & saluacöe estoiiij infra posit 'And to the same for nails called fivestroke nails, weighing 91 lbs, price of each lb 2d, 15s 2d, spent in nailing the planks to the starlings for the care and safety of the wood placed beneath.' Bridge House Rental, Volume 3, fo 256v, 1475x76. There were many gulleys and starlings but the article is singular in these instances (le goleys, le Stadelynges), although elsewhere in this archive they both usually take the plural article lej. The overall impression, however pertinent such explanations may be in individual circumstances, is one of variation. Essentially, both the presence and absence of gender and number rules were accommodated, in the same way that the word order rules of both languages were accommodated in this text-type. 2.3. Gerundial forms Multiple ways of doing much the same thing can also be demonstrated by looking at the representation of the gerundial activity which occurs so frequently in this text-type: for the payment to somebody for the doing of something. In fourteenth-century London, the English suffixes which rendered the presentday -ing form were -ingl-yng, -and(e, and to a lesser extent -end(e and -indie.1 The Medieval Latin suffixes included -am/, -enrf·, -iencl, -ur1, -one, - an?, -ent-, -ient-, as shown by the instances in Example (3), taken from the accounts of St. Paul's Cathedral8 and the Bridge House accounts. Thus there was an overlap in the fourteenth century between the English abbreviated suffixes -amj, -encl, and the Medieval Latin abbreviated suffixes -an4, -encl, although the English forms died out in the fifteenth century when they were overtaken and replaced by -ing. However, their memory was kept alive by English verb stems taking the suffixes -an4, -encl, as in squarrancl andplantanclin Examples (9)-(l 1). Squarrancl and plantancl are simultaneously Latin and old-fashioned English by this date, 1413 and 1418 (see Wright (1995b) for fourteenth-century examples), because the stems are English, and the suffix is both Latin and Middle English. Both stems are derived from Latin, but not from Medieval Latin. Plantancl is derived from Old English plantian, which is derived from Latin plantäre. Squarrancl is derived from Anglo-Norman esquarrer, which is derived from Latin ex 'out' + quadra 'square'. Both stems take the -ami suffix: -ir- and -erverbs constituted a smaller class in Latin, so most English verb stems took an -and- suffix when Latinized:

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(9) li in cor4 empty ad Loup tractanrf - Hjd 'And in cord bought for hauling the loop, 3d.' Guildhall Library, London, MS 25,125/1, 1315x16. (10) Itm sotThom System Carpenf conduct ρ vj dies ad squarrancf RaftrS apud Siluam voc" Cruse ρ diem vijd / Smσ iijs vjd 'And paid to Thomas System, carpenter, guiding for six days at squaring rafters at the wood called Cruse, per day 7d, sum 3s 6d.' Corporation of London Records Office MS Bridge House Weekly Payments, first series, Volume 2, p. 31, 1413x14. (11) Itm iijb3 höibj conduct ρ vj dies ad faciencl sep & plantanrf salice & at apud Depforrf & apud Horsedoune - vijs vjd 'And to three men guiding for six days at making hedges and planting willows and others at Deptford and at Horsleydown, 7s 6d.' Corporation of London Records Office MS Bridge House Weekly Payments, first series, Volume 2, p. 347, 1418x19. Yet more ways of indicating the gerundial function are given in Examples (12)—(16) below: (12) In factuf vnius loupe cü plumbo ad eunc} -xd 'In making one loop with lead for the same (houses).' Guildhall Library, London, MS 25,125/1, 1319x20. (13) Itm in bor4 empi ρ repacdne guttef ini domos sei Pauli & Stephi Le Blound - ijs vjd 'And in bord bought for repairing gutters between the houses of St Paul's and Stephen Le Blound, 2s 6d.' Guildhall Library, London, MS 25,125/1, 1319x20. (14) Itm soluto pauator'p xxxiiijor Teyses pauani vijs jd 'And paid to the paviour for paving 34 teyses, 6s Id.' Guildhall Library, London, MS 25,125/1, 1319x20. (15) If sot ρ le ladynge dicfxvij loci videj ρ quott locf ijd Sm"" ijs xd 'And paid for the loading of the said 17 loads, viz for each load 2d, sum 2s 10d.' Corporation of London Records Office MS Bridge House Weekly Payments, first series, Volume 2, p. 446, 1420x21. (16) It eidrh opanfin latthyng & tegulacde vnius dom9 hoc anno de nouo construct apud depford stronde ρ sex dies capienfpro se & suo labora f p diem xijd - vjs. 'And to the same working in lathing and tiling one house this year

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newly built at Deptford Strand, for six days, taking for himself and his labourer per day 12d, 6s.' Corporation of London Records Office MS Bridge House Rental, Volume 3, fo 246, 1474x75. So to indicate nominal usage of verbs a scribe could choose from the suffixes -ing, -an4 (and the variants -enrf, -ieruj, for -er- and -ir- verbs); -uf, -one, - ani (and, again, -ent- and -ient- for -er- and -ir- verbs); not to mention the numerous graphic forms created by use of the abbreviation and suspension system. -ing forms could take an article: le ladynge (15), or not: in latthyng (16) The text-type of Medieval Latin + English business texts is characterized by its multiplicity of options in both languages, and the abbreviation and suspension system enabled a merger of the Latin -and- group and the English -and- group, until the English variants dropped out of English altogether (c.1400 in London writing).

2.4.

Prepositions

There is also variation in prepositional usage in the Medieval Latin + English business variety. First, let's look at presence vs. absence of de\ Example (17) shows presence and absence of the preposition de when referring to amounts of commodities. Sometimes de is used, and sometimes not: (17) it pro succicl viij lodes stakes & edders de bosco pontis apud leuesham expendifin cepitfdicfpro quatt lode ijd-xvjd[...] ItStephi Godewyfi depekham pro viij lodes de Edders & stakes ab ipö empf& expfi in factuf cepis circa clausuni iuxta loke Brugge in tenuflaurencij hynclyfp/Ccj lode iijs iiijd - xxvjs viijd 'And for cutting down eight loads stakes and edders from the Bridge wood at Lewisham, used in the aforesaid hedge, for each load 2d, 16d. [...] And to Stephen Godewyn of Peckham for eight loads of edders and stakes bought from him and used in making a hedge round the close next to the Bridge Lock [the name of a meadow] in the tenure of Laurence Hynclyf, price of each load 3s 4d, 26s 8d.' Corporation of London Records Office MS Bridge House Rental, Volume 3, fo 125, 1466x67. Similarly, Example (18) shows that [de + article] is sometimes contracted to del, and sometimes not:

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(18) Itm sotJohi Cariofh Brewer ρ cariag ν lorf petf del brigho9 vsqj Stoke ijs jd Itm ρ cariag iij loci borrf & Rallies &Cde lestokke vsqj Brigho9 - xijd Itm ρ cariag χ lo4 de rubusß de lestokke empf&c"- xxd Itm Walto Brembittp cariag ij loc[ petfde le Brigho9 vsqj Stokke xd 'And paid to John Cariom, brewer, for carriage of five loads of stone from the Bridge House to the Stocks, 2s Id. And for carriage of three loads of board and rails, etc., from the Stocks to the Bridge House, 12d. And for carriage of ten loads of rubble bought from the Stocks, etc., 20d. And to Walter Brembill for carriage of two loads of stone from the Bridge House to the Stocks, 10d.' Corporation of London Records Office MS Bridge House Weekly Payments, first series, Volume 2, p. 72, 1413x14. The combinations of when the Bridge House and the Stocks do or do not take an article, and whether or not that article combines with de, are: del brigho9 vsqj Stoke, de lestokke VSR3 Brigho9, de le Brigho9 vsqj Stokke. As with all grammatical categories looked at so far, there is not only variation, but variation in close proximity. Examples (19)-(22) show some of the variation in the 'from... to' construction: (19) Itm sot ρ batellagde London vsqjdepfor^p negoc"Ponte & cu atexpnß vjd 'And paid for shipment from London to Depford for Bridge business and with other expenses, 6d.' Corporation of London Records Office MS Bridge House Weekly Payments, first series, Volume 2, p. 249, 1417x18. (20) Itm sot ρ cariag vni9 lorf lathes de hert a Croidon vsqj London - xxijd 'And paid for carriage of one load of heartlaths from Croydon to London, 22d.' Corporation of London Records Office MS Bridge House Weekly Payments, first series, Volume 2, p. 260, 1417x18 (same scribe as fo 249). (21) Ifvnlhoip cariagde tegut& zabut del Bryghous vsqj Pathos tfowe ρ fcüra vni9 latrine faC iijs iijd 'And one man for carriage of tile and gravel from the Bridge House to Paternoster Row for making one latrine, 3s 3d.' Corporation of London Records Office MS Bridge House Weekly Payments, first series, Volume 2, p. 394, 1420x21. (22) ItJohi haccher pro cafij lodes vlnia Croydon ad domü p/dicf- iijs iiijd. It eidm pro caf vnius magne pecie meremij quercf a Croydon usqj domü ptdicf- iijs iijd

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'And to John Haccher for carriage of two loads of elms from Croydon to the aforesaid house, 3s 4d. And to the same for carriage of one great piece of oak timber from Croydon to the aforesaid house, 3s 3d.' Corporation of London Records Office MS Bridge House Rental, Volume 3, 125v, 1466x67. de... vsqj, a... vsqj, a... ad, all indicate 'from... to', and Bridge House Rental, Volume 3, fo 303v (1478x79) has de... ad and ab ... ad as well. The Bridge House Weekly Payments entries for the early 1400s show that the default construction in that manuscript was de + usque, and the 1420s to 1470s entries in the Bridge House Rentals show that the default construction was a + usque in that series.

3.

The parameters of spelling variation

The above descriptions all point to a highly-developed, sophisticated writing system, to the extent that it still functioned (in a barebones way) even if the English-speaking reader had a very small grasp of Medieval Latin. Variation enables the rules of all three language systems (English, Medieval Latin, Medieval Latin + English) to function at once, and the text can be read (partially, but potentially optimally: that is, a trader could glean whatever he needed to know) as Medieval Latin, as English, or as Medieval Latin + English. This text-type depends upon variable spelling, and use of the medieval abbreviation and suspension system. If words had a single spelling, and could not have their inflectional endings rendered by a symbol, then the text-type could not function as it did, effectively stretching the boundaries of each language. The radical thing about the newly emerging standard form of written English was its decreasing tolerance of variation, so that twentieth- and twenty-first-century standard written English is as invariant as it has ever been. As demonstrated above, it is not the case that variation equals a lack of structure or free-for-all. On the contrary, what we see is an application of three sets of principles: those that govern English, those that govern Medieval Latin, and those that govern the mixed variety, including: • • •

do not write in monolingual Latin, but include English nouns, stems of verbs, adjectives and -ing forms, variably use both Germanic and Romance word order use a multiplicity of suffixes to indicate gerundial purpose

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• •

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use a variety of prepositions visually merge any material that can be merged, using the abbreviation and suspension system, variably.

3.1. Spellings for the word ' tile' Let's now turn to the constraints on writing a single word, in both the Medieval Latin + English variety and the Anglo-Norman + English variety. The word 'tile' is a suitable candidate for study, because it referred to a commodity frequently purchased in all sorts of accounts, and occurs with several modifiers. It is derived from Latin tegula. Four archives were used as data for this study, from 1315-1462.9 Gybon Maufield's account book of 1390-1394 is written in Anglo-Norman + English, the St. Paul's Cathedral accounts and the two Bridge House accounts are written in Medieval Latin + English. Starting with the Medieval Latin + English texts, in the Weekly Payments for 1420-1421, there are 16 English tokens and 51 Latin tokens. The English words are Tilmaker (4 tokens), Tilmakere (3 tokens), Tilkylne (3 tokens), Tilhous, pavyntilt, Briktilt, houstilt. The Latin words are Tegulator"'tiler' (30 tokens), Tegulatori 'tiler' (3 tokens), Tegulatoribj 'to the tilers' (3 tokens), Tegulatodp 'of the tilers', Tegulaf 'tiler'; tegut (13 tokens). Thus 'tile' occurs in both languages, and English tiland Latin tegul- are kept visually separate by presence or absence of a graph. In the London Bridge yearly accounts for 1461-1462, there are 13 Latin tokens and five English tokens, again separating the Latin forms from the English forms without : Tegulaap 'of tiles' (5 tokens), tegulacöe 'tiling' (3 tokens), tegulatori 'tiler' (twice), Tegulatoap 'of the tilers', Tegulaf 'tiler', tegulac"tiling', roftiles (twice), rofetile, tilepynnes, Tyler. In the St. Paul's Cathedral accounts 1315-1405 there are 69 compound tokens of the English word 'tile' and 85 instances of Latin 'teg-'. 10 Calqued doublets occur: tegut flandf and flaundrisshtytt 'flandrish tiles'; tegut canitt and holughtil 'drainage tiles'; plan tegut, tegtisplants andplayntille 'plain tiles'. In the last group, modification appears both before and after the noun. Turning to the Anglo-Norman + English text, Gybon Maufield wrote seven tokens: tyeghle de colchestre, Rofftyeghle, Mt de bons Tyegles, tyllej, Tyelt, tygles, tygles de flandrs\ He spelled 'tile' in five ways, and compounded in English once. He retains etymological in five tokens, and renders the spelling to reflect lack of /g/ twice; that is, five tokens have their Latin etymology playing in the background, two tokens look English. So writers could choose to distinguish between the languages (by retaining the consistently when writing Latin, and omitting it

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when writing English), or to use both and non- spellings in the same variety.

4.

Present-day English spelling

Standard English itself ends up with some vocabulary that obeys English phonology whilst hiding the etymology (tile), some that displays now-unpronounced etymology (cf. the h in anarchist, spaghetti, night), and some which displays a spurious or back-formed etymology (debt, delight). There is no predictive rule, as standard English spelling is now, to a large extent, lexically marked.11 The reason for this wide range of spelling practices is usually held to be due to the various waves of influence and borrowing from other, mainly European, languages (especially Anglo-Norman French). At the risk of stating the obvious, Anglo-Norman French and other foreign lexemes influenced written English by virtue of their frequent inclusion in texts written by English speakers in Britain. Apart from the mixed-language business varieties, no other text-type had such a wide authorship, from the private individual to the professional employee of the City or court. There were other text-types which employed Anglo-Norman and Medieval Latin, but these had a smaller reader/writership and were monolingual,12 so they exerted less pressure on written English. In Middle English there was a wide pool of spelling variants; what the mixed-language business varieties did was to add to that pool all the Latin and French-spelled variants too. 500 years' worth of mixing in business writing helps to account for the huge diversity of spelling in standard English, and the flood of eighteenth-century printed dictionaries contributed to establishing which spelling finally became the standard form. What needs further explanation is the mechanism by which a particular variant became the standard one. It is not the wide range of spelling that is remarkable (in this small survey, the late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English spellings for the word 'tile' are discovered to include tyeghle, Tyegle, tylle, Tyelt, tygles, Tyl, til, teyel, Till, Tyle, tyit, titt, tile, tit, tyel, tille), but the subsequent reduction to single, invariant standard spellings. There have been several previous attempts to chart the history of standard English spelling (for a summary, see Sandved (1981)). Until recently the most accepted model has been that of the influence of "Chancery Standard", whereby the spellings of some standard English words are held to have their origins in fifteenth- century documents written by clerks in the court of Chancery (see Samuels (1963); Fisher (1977); but see Wright (2000) for a reconsideration of this model). But the "Chancery Standard" model has

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only been claimed to account for a small lexical set,13 so even if it were the case that the writings of the clerks of the Court of Chancery influenced which spellings of this set were subsequently adopted into the standard dialect,14 it does not account for the rest of the lexicon. By contrast, the numerous spellings and calquings for single lexemes found in mixed-language business writing had a pragmatic force, because showing the French or Latin behind the English form (whether or not reflected in contemporary pronunciation) was of great advantage to traders (from different language backgrounds), and comes from a long historical tradition. In this way, standard English ends up with a variety of standard spellings per phoneme. Milroy (1997) points out that we have inherited unquestioned at least two characteristics of nineteenth-century comparative linguistics; "the first is the methodological emphasis on monolingual states and the separateness of different languages. This has many consequences, including the idea that changes are normally internally motivated. The second is the emphasis on uniformity." (Milroy 1997: 313). Late medieval business writing in London was not monolingual, the languages were not kept separate, and uniformity was not an ideal - yet scribes maintained control over which components belonged to which language and, when writing other text-types, they did keep the different languages separate. Although the mixed-language business variety gave English so many different kinds of spellings, over subsequent centuries, the standardization process settled which particular spelling should be deemed correct, not via a process of levelling, but simply by individually marking each word. So what started out as a contact-induced variety eventually gave rise to a remarkably closed spelling system.

Notes 1. My grateful thanks to Jonathan Hope and Herbert Schendl for criticizing earlier drafts of this paper. The χ notation means that the document is dated internally. The financial year ran from 29th September to 29,h September. 2. Or could line crestette be 'live cressets', as in 'live coals'? 3. See Wright (1992, 1995a, 1997a and b, 1998, 2001) for further descriptions of the switching rules of mixed-language business writing. 4. See Wright (1997b, 1998) for further description of word order rules in mixed-language business varieties. 5. In keeping with the gradual encroachment of English on this text-type, see Wright (1998) for a description of how this happened.

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6. At this date, the second element in a compound with a mutated vowel plural was treated as though it were Latin, and if required a morpheme was appended, with the vowel left unmutated: cf. Tidemannosp 'of the tidemen', same volume. 7. I have discussed convergence between the Latin and English -and- forms in Wright (1995b). 8. Thanks to Colin Taylor for transcription of St. Paul's Cathedral Dean and Chapter Account Rolls 1-46. 9. The four samples are taken from: 1. Public Record Office, London, MS E101/509/19, Gybon Maughfeld, A Merchant's Book of His Debts, 1390-1394. 2. Guildhall Library, London, MS 25,125, St. Paul's Cathedral, Dean and Chapter Rental and Accounts, 1315-1405. 3. Corporation of London Records Office MS Bridge House Weekly Payments, first series, Volume 2, pp. 443-497, 1420x21. 4. Corporation of London Records Office MS Bridge House Rental, Volume 3, fos 25-42v, 1461x1462. The two years sampled from the Bridge House archive are published in translation in Harding and Wright (1995). 10. The tokens numbers are: tegut42, tegtis 15, tegt 6, tegtator'6, tegulis 3, Tegtatoribj2, tegutt 2, tegtazp 2, tegulafl, tegtatori, tegtar", tegtaf, tegular1 tegulatof; Tylpynnes 10, tilpynnes 7, tylepynnys 4, Tilpinnes 2, tylpyns 2, tilpyn, teyel pynnes, tilpynnej, tylpynnys, tylpynys, tylpynnej, tilpynn?, tilpynn, Tillpynnes, Tylepynnye; Roftytt 5, R of tiff 3, Roftitts 3, Roftits, Roftyle, rooftytt, roftyls, roftyl; holtil, holghtil, holughtil; Flaundrchstiles,flaundrichtits,flaundrisshtytt; tyelscherdes, tilscherdes; playntille. 11. See Wright (1997c) for some spelling outcomes in standard English for Old English /y(:)/. 12. That is, written in discrete passages of one language (which may then be translated contiguously into another). Many legal texts are trilingual, but the Latin, AngloNorman and English occur in discrete monolingual passages and are unlike the mixed-language business varieties. John H. Fisher makes this point (1977: 894) "The truth of the matter is that written literature (poems, plays, tales, sermons, treatises) bulked as small in the lives of most people in the fifteenth century as they do now. Furthermore, in an age of patronage, such belles lettres were likely to be addressed to a localized audience. The writing that an ordinary person would most often read, and the sort of writing most likely to carry a sense of national authority would be bureaucratic (licenses, records, etc.), legal (inheritance, transfer of property), or business (bills, agreements, instructions)." I would add that the latter constituted the category most likely to be written as well as read. 13. In Samuels' original 1963 paper, spellings for just eight words were cited. Samuels' Type IUI checklist of words are: 'gave', 'not', 'but', 'such', eir(e,/>aire(e, her> 'their', 'these', orow(e>, 'through', 'should'. I have gleaned the following checklist of Chancery spellings from Fisher (1977: 884): ; cthey, them, their> with

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as minor variants; ; past participles take an suffix and never take a prefix; adverbs take a suffix, past tenses take , negative particles occur after the finite verb; occurs for historic voiced and voiceless palatal/velar fricatives; occurs rather than ; 'which' was seldom spelled ; was seldom spelled ; as written; third person singular present tense suffix ; 'are' occurs as ; 'land', stand' ; 'any' ; 'show' ; 'again' ; 'give' ; 'from' ; 'one' ; 'between' . 14. Smith (1996: 74, especially Figure 4.4); Blake (1997: 22-23); Davis (1983); Christiansen (1989); Heikkonen (1996) and Taavitsainen (2000) have not found Chancery practices to be unquestionably influential and certainly not unidirectional; conversely, no survey to date has categorically supported the Chancery Standard model. Whatever the influence of the Chancery clerks, it is unlikely that they could account for the spellings of all standard English words.

References Manuscripts Corporation of London Records Office MS Bridge House Rental, Volume 3, 14601484. Corporation of London Records Office MS Bridge House Weekly Payments, first series, Volume 2, 1412-1421. Guildhall Library, London, MS 25,125 St. Paul's Cathedral Dean and Chapter Rental and Accounts, 1315-1405. Public Record Office, London, MS E101/509/19, Gybon Maughfeld, A Merchant's Book of His Debts, 1390-1394. Printed works Blake, Norman F. 1997 Chancery English and the Wife of Bath's prologue. In: Terttu Nevalainen and Leena Kahlas-Tarkka (eds.), To Explain the Present: Studies in The Changing English Language in Honour of Matti Rissanen, 3-24. (Memoires de la Societe Neophilologique de Helsinki 52.) Helsinki: Societe Neophilologique. Christianson, C. Paul 1989 Chancery Standard and the records of old London Bridge. In: J. B. Trahern (ed.), Standardizing English. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

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Davis, Norman 1983 The language of two brothers in the fifteenth century. In: E. G. Stanley and Douglas Gray (eds.), Five Hundred Years of Words and Sounds: A Festschrift for Eric Dobson, 23-28. Bury St. Edmunds: Brewer. Fisher, John H. 1977

Chancery and the emergence of Standard Written English in the fifteenth century. Speculum 52/4: 870-899.

Harding, Vanessa A. and Laura C. Wright (eds.) 1995 London Bridge: Selected Accounts and Rentals, 1381—1538. (London Record Society 31, for the year 1994). London: London Record Society. Heikkonen, Kirsi 1996 Regional variation in standardization: A case study of Henry V's Signet Office. In: Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg (eds.), Sociolinguistics and Language History: Studies Based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, 111-127. Amsterdam/ Atlanta: Rodopi. Milroy, James 1997

Internal vs. external motivations for linguistic change. Multilingua 16/4: 311-323.

Samuels, Michael Louis 1963 Some applications of Middle English dialectology. English Studies 44: 81-94. Reprinted in Angus Mcintosh, M. L. Samuels and Margaret Laing (eds.), 1989 Middle English Dialectology: Essays on some Principles and Problems, 64-80. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Sandved, Arthur O. 1981 Prolegomena to a renewed study of the rise of standard English. In: M. Benskin and M. L. Samuels (eds.), So Meny People Longages and Tonges: Philological Essays in Scots and Mediaeval English Presented to Angus Mcintosh, 31-42. Edinburgh: Middle English Dialect Project. Schendl, Herbert 1996 Text types and code-switching in medieval and Early Modern English. Vienna English Working Papers 5/1 and 2: 50-62. Smith, Jeremy J. 1996 An Historical Study of English: Function, Form and Change. London: Routledge.

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Taavitsainen, Irma 2000 Scientific language and spelling standardization. In: Laura C. Wright (ed.), The Development of Standard English 1300-1800: Theories, Descriptions, Conflicts, 131-154. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, Laura C. 1992 Macaronic writing in a London archive, 1380-1480. In: Matti Rissanen, Ossi Ihalainen, Terttu Nevalainen and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), History of Englishes, 762-770. (Topics in English Linguistics 10.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 1995a A hypothesis on the structure of macaronic Business Writing. In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Medieval Dialectology, 309-321. (Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 79.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 1995b

1997a

1997b 1997c 1998

2001

Middle English -ende and -ing: a possible route to grammaticalization. In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Linguistic Change under Contact Conditions, 365-382. (Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 81.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Medieval Latin, Anglo-Norman and Middle English in a civic London text: an inquisition of the River Thames, 1421. In: Stewart Gregory and David A. Trotter (eds.), De Mot en Mot. Aspects of Medieval Linguistics: Essays in Honour of William Rothwell, 223-260. Cardiff: University of Wales Press and the Modern Humanities Research Association. The records of Hanseatic merchants: ignorant, sleepy or degenerate? Multilingua 16/4: 337-349. More on the history of shit and shut. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 32: 3-16. Mixed-language business writing: five hundred years of codeswitching. In: Ernst Häkon Jahr (ed.), Language Change: Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 99-118. (Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 114.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Models of language living: Code-switching versus semicommunication in Medieval Latin and Middle English accounts. In: Dieter Kastovsky and Arthur Mettinger (eds.), Language Contact in the History of English, 363-376. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Wright, Laura C. (ed.) 2000 The Development of Standard English 1300-1800: Theories, Descriptions, Conflicts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Further reading Kurath, Hans and Sherman McAllister Kuhn (eds.) 1952Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Latham, Ronald E. (ed.) 1965 Revised Medieval Latin Word-List from British and Irish Sources. Oxford/London: The British Academy. Latham, Ronald E. and David R. Howlett (eds.) 1975Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. Oxford/London: The British Academy and Oxford University Press. Murray, James A. H. et al. (eds.) 1884-1933 A New English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rothwell, William, Louise W. Stone and T. B. W. Reid (eds.) 1992 Anglo-Norman Dictionary. London: Modern Humanities Research Association in conjunction with the Anglo-Norman Text Society.

Latin and Arabic evolutionary processes: some reflections Joseph Cremona

Abstract This chapter attempts to show, ab absurdo, that some linguistic changes that give the appearance of being contact-induced (i.e. "external" ) may in effect be no more than the result of internally-motivated changes, given the existence of broadly similar socio-linguistic and political backgrounds to the changes. Developments affecting the Romance and Arabic vernaculars are then briefly compared with developments that have taken place in the Balkan Sprachbund. The chapter therefore demonstrates how the interaction of internal and extra-linguistic factors can give rise to a situation ostensibly produced by contact. It attempts to act as a useful foil to some of the other contributions to this volume by presenting a situation where the "If-in-doubt-do-without" mentality seems to be justified - and this, paradoxically, in the very circumstances where contact, in the form of convergence, might have seemed a likely explanation for these similar developments.

1.

Introduction

In an article on Arabic in Bernard Comrie's The World's Major Languages, the American linguist Alan Kaye states the following: There are many remarkable parallels in the development of the modern Arabic dialects and the development of the Romance languages from a Latin prototype, the most notable of which is a general grammatical simplification in structure (i.e. fewer grammatical categories). Three such simplifications are: (1) loss of the dual in the verb, adjective and pronoun, (2) loss of case endings for nouns and adjectives, and (3) loss of mood distinctions in the verb (Kaye 1987: 667). To this list one could add a concomitant development: the general increase of analytical structures in the syntax of both languages (Holes 1995: 22). I am not, of course, thinking of the developments listed by Kaye in terms of convergence. They are not changes due to the phenomenon known in historical linguistics as linguistic convergence, but examples of parallel development, as Kaye himself points out. In historical linguistics, it is not possible to speak of

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convergence in cases like the history of Latin and Arabic. By definition, convergence can take place only when two or more languages share one area (a Sprachbund) and one stretch of time, thus allowing widespread and fluent plurilingualism to operate. Latin and Arabic evolve in substantially different parts of the world. There is also an important time differential in the spread and evolution of the two languages. How large this time differential was, it is not easy to tell: three to four centuries at least at a conservative estimate. I shall ignore for the purposes of this paper the role that Greek may have played as an intermediary of high prestige between the two language groups and also the influence that Late Latin or Early Romance may have had in the development of some of the Arabic vernaculars, particularly those of northwest Africa. Despite the lack of contact in the history of the two languages, I believe it is worth exploring a little further the similarities and dissimilarities in their development, and see whether we may extract any conclusions that could throw light on problems connected with the notion of convergence.

2.

"Internal" considerations

The simplifications in structure listed by Kaye should not, of course, be taken to apply too literally to the evolution of Latin and Arabic. It is true that the system of case endings for nouns and adjectives disappears in most of the Romance languages as well as in Arabic. There is a clear parallel to be seen, for instance, between the analytical structure of noun phrases of the type (French) la voiture de mon oncle; (Italian) la macchina di mio zio, and that of Moroccan (Rabat) ssiya.ra dyal 'ammi: 'the car of my uncle' ('my uncle's car') (Holes 1995: 170), examples in both cases of prepositional constructions taking over older synthetic genitive constructions of the Latin LIBRUM PETRI 'Peter's book' type. An instance of what used to be described in information-theory terms, but not very accurately, as the reduction in the number of items in a paradigm at the expense of an increase in the number of items in a syntagm. On the other hand, there is nothing in Romance to correspond to the dual in Arabic. The reduction in the category of number in Arabic may be equated, however, to the reduction in the category of gender in the Romance noun, where the three genders of Latin were reduced to two in most Romance languages with the absorption of neuter nouns by the other two genders. In Latin, it is the noun that is affected whereas in modern standard Arabic it is the grammatical categories other than the noun that are. In the modern Arabic vernaculars, however, the use of the dual exponent is reduced in the noun too (Fischer

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and Jastrow 1980: 89), and is no longer productive in some of the peripheral dialects of Arabic (e.g. for Maltese, see Mifsud 1995: 156). Although the two phenomena, reduction in gender, reduction in number, may at first sight appear quite distinct, it is possible to view them as the outcome of one and the same process, a reduction in the rules of syntactic agreement. In the modern Arabic vernaculars, the noun alone carries the exponent of the dual: elements that accompany the noun (adjectives and verbs) no longer do so, thus eliminating redundant morphological elements. In Latin, since the function of grammatical gender seems to have been largely one of marking syntactic agreement, the elimination of the neuter in the vernaculars again reduces the number of rules of agreement between nouns, adjectives and pronouns. In the case of both languages, the result is a simplification of the rules of agreement. Similarly, for the verb, the modern Arabic vernaculars have lost the category of mood and replaced it by analytical constructions, whereas Romance has tended on the whole to maintain mood in most vernaculars, although much reduced in form and function. In the case of the passive voice, on the other hand, it is Romance that has eliminated the Latin synthetic passive forms, replacing them with analytical constructions, whereas the Arabic core vernaculars have generally preserved the synthetic passive as it is found in the classical language. It is again in some of the peripheral Arabic dialects (e.g. Maltese) that analytical constructions of the Romance type appear to have gained a foothold in the expression of the passive. I am, of course, simplifying a great deal for the sake of clarity. There are exceptions that do not fit these sketchy outlines and several of the vernaculars on either side of the Mediterranean behave or have behaved idiosyncratically.

3.

"Extra-linguistic" considerations

Despite their separation in space and time, there are some remarkable similarities in the external history of the two languages. The canvas is a large one so that it is difficult to be succinct without sounding superficial or simplifying to the point of distortion. Both languages spread through conquest over a very wide area, peopled by speakers of different languages, sometimes very different languages. In both cases the towns were affected first and served as springboards or foci for the spread of the language to the countryside (Holes 1994: 191). In both cases the modern spoken vernaculars appear not to be directly descended from their classical predecessors. Romance is taken back to Vulgar Latin, not to the language of the classical authors, and, similarly, the modern

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Arabic vernaculars are taken back to a spoken language distinct from the language of the pre-Islamic poets and the Arabic of the Koran, the 'arabi.ya (Holes 1995:14). In a sense, this is hardly surprising: in both cases we have the contrast between a polished literary language, cultivated in learned milieus, and the spoken language of everyday occupations, varying considerably, as with all "natural" languages, with place, time and social stratum. A great many of the changes that we tend to associate with the modern vernaculars were already taking place at an early period in the evolution of both languages. Also remarkable are the differences in the external history of the two languages. The main one, I suppose, is the fact that Arabic spread over a territory which, though vast in area, was politically more or less loosely unified for much of its history. In contrast, the area over which Latin spread broke up politically, and to some extent linguistically, as a result of invasions on the part of Germanic and Slav tribes and the Arabs themselves. Wide areas over which Latin had spread were lost to the invaders (Britain, the Low Countries, Illyrium, North Africa) and in the remaining areas linguistic superstrata affected differentially and to a greater or lesser extent the development of the spoken language (Germanic, Slav, Arabic). Latin also never supplanted Greek in the eastern parts of the Empire. In the western Latin-speaking half of the Empire, Greek remained a high-status rival until the fall of Rome and, in Italy itself, long after that. A further difference in the development of the two languages arose as the result of the far-reaching linguistic consequences for the history of Arabic of the authority and prestige of the language of the Koran. This has tended to keep to this day the literary language conservative and unified. Modern standard Arabic, the modern literary language, is still substantially one language throughout the Arab world, contrasting with the wide differences found in the lower registers of the spoken vernaculars. This has led to widespread diglossia in the Arab world, at all levels of society. In the Romance world similar levels of diglossia are nowadays encountered rarely and mainly, if I am not mistaken, in parts of Italy. The historical dissimilarities I have been outlining, relative political unity or disunity and the presence in one of the languages of a relatively unchanging acrolect buttressed by the Koran, have resulted in a striking contrast of the end products: a much fragmented area for Romance as against the relative unity of the Arab world, at least as far as the upper echelons of society are concerned. In the words of the Persian historian of the fourteenth century, Rasi:d al-Di:n: "The Franks [i.e. western Europeans] have 25 languages and no people understands the language of the other. All they have in common is the calendar, the writing system and the numbers" (cited in Minervini 1996: 231). Another con-

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sequence of this differentiation has been the high status ultimately accorded to the vernaculars, to some of them at least, within the Romance areas (French, Italian, Spanish, etc.) as against the low status of all vernaculars in Arab territory. These have hardly ever been written down, very few documents are extant and it is only comparatively recently that their description is being undertaken (and then mainly by non-Arabs). As a result little of what we know of their past history is known through direct sources.

4.

Conclusion

Despite the dissimilarities in the circumstances of the evolution of the two languages, we see that there have been a number of similar developments, developments which we have called parallel developments. The end products have become alike as far as one of the examples quoted by Kaye is concerned, the case system, and it might seem appropriate to apply the term "convergence" in this context. The end products are disparate, however, in the mood/voice example for the verb or the gender/number example for the noun. What is in fact common to all three examples are the linguistic processes involved, not the end products. In other words, the two language groups remain typologically dissimilar. The processes involved are: (1)

The preference for analytical over synthetic structures, leading to the elimination of the case system in both languages, and the elimination of morphological exponents for mood in Arabic and for voice in Latin. The result is the elimination of morphological categories and a general simplification of the morphology and of the rules of agreement. (2) The elimination of redundant elements in the morphology, leading to the elimination of the neuter gender in Latin and of the reduction in the number of exponents for the dual in Arabic. The result is again the elimination of morphological categories and a general simplification of the morphology and of the rules of agreement. (3) Levelling (or analogy). We haven't said much about this, but the phenomenon is well attested in the history of the grammar of both languages, though I suspect it to have been more active in the history of Romance than in that of Arabic.

These processes, you will rightly say, are essentially linguistic universale, universal forces acting on all languages at all times. True. What is interesting about these forces in the history of Latin and Arabic (and it is in this that the two languages have developed in parallel fashion) is that they appear to have

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conspired so as to act early in the history of the expansion, rather faster, perhaps, in the case of Arabic than in the case of Latin. The overall picture is one of increased rhythm of development produced by the fact that large numbers of speakers of different languages were learning to speak the language of a foreign ruling power, perhaps systematically selecting when possible the easier learning paths, the analytical constructions, whether or not these were present in their first language. By the way, in the history of neither language is there any evidence of pidginization and subsequent creolization. A serious attempt has recently been made to see in the modern vernaculars of Arabic the result of a process of decreolization, but this interpretation of their history has not been accepted by specialists in the field (Versteegh 1984; Holes 1995: 19-24. For Latin, see, for example, Adams 1994: 90). If we now examine the data given as evidence in support of that classic example of convergence in Europe, the Balkan Sprachbund, we can see that some of them could be interpreted as the result of those very processes we have seen operating in the history of Latin and Arabic. One example is the analytical way in which the comparative of adjectives is formed: Rumanian, mai bun, lit. 'more good' versus French meilleur, Italian migliore etc. 'better' - an instance of internal motivation. Then there is the formation of an analytic future tense, where a number of Balkan languages have selected a verb of volition to act as auxiliary: Latin VOLERE 'to want' in Rumanian (voi cänta, Ί will sing') versus HABERE 'to have' for much of the rest of the Romance world (French je chanterai, Italian canterd Ί will sing' etc.); but VOLERE is also used to form the future outside the Balkans in a number of north Italian dialects and, sporadically, elsewhere in Italy (Rohlfs 1968: 337); here we have an instance of internal and external motivations acting together. Other characteristic developments of the Balkan Sprachbund, on the other hand, such as the use of the preposition spre 'on' in forming the numerals from 11 to 19 (Rumanian un-sprezece 'one on ten'), must clearly have been the result of direct interlinguistic influence, i.e. to have been externally motivated. We should perhaps try and sort out better those convergence phenomena that are clearly the result of the existence of a Sprachbund from those that have more diffuse, extra-linguistic motivations.

References Adams, James Noel 1994

Latin and Punic in Contact? The Case of the Bu Njem Ostraca. Journal of Roman Studies 84: 87-112.

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Fischer, Wolfdietrich and Otto Jastrow 1980 Handbuch der Arabischen Dialekte. (Porta Linguarum Orientalium, New Series 16.) Wiesbaden: Otto Harassowitz. Holes, Clive 1994

1995 Kaye, Alan 1987

Arabic. In: Ron E. Asher (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Volume 1, 191-194. Oxford/New York/Seoul/Tokyo: Pergamon Press and Aberdeen University Press. Modern Arabic. London/New York: Longman. Arabic. In: Bernard Comrie (ed.), The World's Major Languages, 664-685. London/Sydney: Croom Helm.

Mifsud, Manwel 1995 The Productivity of Arabic in Maltese. In: Joseph Cremona, Clive Holes and Geoffrey Khan (eds.), Proceedings of the Second International Conference of L Association Internationale pour la Diabetologie Arabe, Cambridge, 10-14 September 1995, 151-160. Cambridge: Faculty of Oriental Studies. Minervini, Laura 1996 La lingua franca mediterranea. Medioevo Romanzo 20-22: 231-301. Rohlfs, Gerhard 1968 Grammatica Storica della Lingua Italiana e dei suoi Dialetti, Volume 2. Morfologia. Turin: Einaudi. Versteegh, Kees 1984 Pidginization and Creolization: The Case of Arabic. (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 33.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

There's sheep and there's penguins: convergence, "drift" and "slant" in New Zealand and Falkland Island English1 David Britain and Andrea Sudbury

Abstract By looking at the historical development of a grammatical change in two post-colonial varieties of English, we examine convergence not from the perspective of the development of shared linguistic norms in contexts of language contact, but by asking why varieties do not diverge in contexts of language isolation. The two varieties we consider are the Englishes of New Zealand and the Falkland Islands which have witnessed very little contact with each other since settlement from Britain in the mid-nineteenth century. We should expect linguistic divergence in such circumstances, and phonologically this is the case. We show, however, that in the case of plural existentials, both varieties have, over time, "drifted" towards a near categorical use of singular verb forms (there's sheep and there's penguins) following very similar patterns of grammatical constraint. Like many forms undergoing grammatical convergence, this feature is unsalient in the speech community, as evidenced by the relatively small differences in the social constraints on variability which we analyse here. This failure to diverge, and the common route of the change through speech communities thousands of miles apart, is discussed using the notions of "drift" and "slant" as applied by Sapir and Malkiel.

1.

Introduction

In this chapter, we tackle the issue of linguistic convergence, looking not at the development of shared norms in circumstances of language (including dialect) contact (see Trudgill and Britain 2001), but at the lack of divergence in circumstances of language isolation. In other words, why do we find situations where similar linguistic changes occur, guided by similar linguistic (and even social) constraints, in communities that are socio-geographically isolated from each other? We would, as Sapir explains, expect the opposite: "it would be too much to expect a locally diversified language to develop along strictly parallel lines. If once the speech of a locality has begun to drift on its own account, it is practically certain to move further and further away from its linguistic fellows. Fail-

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ing the retarding effect of dialectic interinfluences [...] a group of dialects is bound to diverge on the whole, each from all the others" (1921 [1979]: 152). Labov (1994: 9), many years later, reiterated the point rather more directly: "Geographical separation naturally and inevitably leads to linguistic separation". Yet examples of lack of linguistic separation in contexts of geographical isolation are not uncommon. Here, we use Sapir's own notion of "drift", and recent applications of the term by Trudgill et al. (2000b) to analyse a change presently underway in most (all, even the standard?) varieties of English: the use of singular forms of the verb to be in existential clauses preceding plural nouns: there's sheep and there's penguins. We look at two particular varieties: the Englishes of New Zealand and the Falkland Islands, and demonstrate that, despite the lack of contact between the Falklands and New Zealand since the arrival of anglophone settlers in the two communities in the mid-nineteenth century, the two varieties are slowly but relentlessly marching English along a path to singular verb forms in accordance with the same linguistic constraints. Following our analysis of variation and change in existential verb forms, we question whether this is indeed a true case of "drift".

2.

Drift: Parallel development and failure to diverge

The notion of "drift" as a process of language change dates back to Sapir in 1921. In that volume,2 he claimed that "language moves down time in a current of its own making. It has a drift" (1979: 150) "[...] the momentum of [...] drift is often such that languages long disconnected will pass through the same or strikingly similar phases. In many cases it is perfectly clear that there could have been no dialectic interinfluencing" (1979: 172). He cites examples from Germanic to demonstrate his point, the most detailed of which is a discussion of the parallelism in certain English and German plural formations - foot -feet: Fuß - Füße; mouse - mice: Maus - Mäuse - which did not exist in what he calls "primitive" Germanic, but developed later in a number of its "offspring". In essence, he is arguing that language varieties that have derived from some common source may evolve linguistically in similar directions as a result of the inheritance of a shared tendency to develop in a similar way. In most cases in the historical linguistic literature, and this is true of some of Sapir's own writings, "drift" has been used either to refer to diachronic developments within a single speech community, or to parallel developments in languages belonging to the same language family. Recently, however, Sapir's notion of drift has been applied to the context of post-colonial dialect formation, and to the

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explanation of parallelism in a number of geographically dispersed varieties with the same parent, but with little subsequent contact between the siblings. Peter Trudgill and his collaborators at the University of Canterbury have, in particular, adopted "drift" to help explain two types of development in presentday New Zealand English (Trudgill et al. 2000b). The first type, which we will call Type 1 changes, refers to a number of changes that involve the continuation of trends inherited from the British Isles when settlers colonized New Zealand in the nineteenth century. Some of these were in their relative infancy in Britain at the time of colonization, others were more advanced. Three examples will suffice here: (1)

The loss of rhoticity: Despite claims by Strang (1970: 112) that "in postvocalic position, finally or pre-consonantally, /r/ was weakened in articulation in the seventeenth century and reduced to a vocalic segment early in the eighteenth century", Trudgill et al.'s (2000a) analysis of mid to late nineteenth century New Zealand English demonstrated that over 90 per cent of speakers were rhotic, 30 per cent of them consistently so.3 Today, except for a small area of the south of New Zealand's South Island, the country is non-rhotic.4 Originally, Trudgill (1986) had claimed that the lack of rhoticity of the Southern Hemisphere Englishes was due to the fact that these countries were settled by immigrants largely from non-rhotic areas. In the light of the evidence from the ONZE corpus, however, Trudgill et al. (2000b) claim that New Zealand English didn't inherit lack of rhoticity, but gained instead an ongoing process of loss that was also underway in England (and which continues to this day, see, for example, Orton and Dieth (1962-1971); Simpson and Britain (forthcoming); Vivian (2000); Sullivan (1992); Dudman (2000); Williams (1991)). This shift towards /r/ loss is still not entirely complete in the Falkland Islands, where some speakers retain variable levels of rhoticity (Sudbury 2000, 2001,2002). No doubt this drift towards loss was encouraged by differing social evaluations of the r-less and r-ful forms which were transported to the Southern Hemisphere. (2) Changes in rising diphthongs: The diphthongs /au ai ei ou i: u:/ have been undergoing changes affecting their onsets in a number of varieties of English. Labov (1994: 202) has labelled this series of changes "Southern Shift" (affecting, approximately, southern England, the southern USA and the Southern Hemisphere).5 The changes involved are: the falling and centralization of the onsets of /ei/, /ou/, /u:/ and /i:/; the raising and backing of the onset of /ai/; the raising and fronting of /au/. Trudgill et al.'s (2000b) analysis of the ONZE recordings suggests that a

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majority of speakers of early New Zealand English had some Southern Shift, particularly of /au/, and Britain's (2001, in preparation a) analysis of nineteenth-century British dialects found that large areas of southern England - the main area of origin of migrants to New Zealand in the mid-nineteenth century - had variants of /au/ that were already midopen.6 However, the set of changes appears to have proceeded much further in the Southern Hemisphere than in Britain. The tendency for southern shift was inherited from Britain, but has advanced at a more rapid pace. (3) /Λ:/ The vowel in the STRUT lexical set has been a historical wanderer. From having been back and close (and part of the FOOT set) in British English 350 years ago, it is now, in some varieties, including New Zealand and London Englishes, quite open and front. Trudgill et al. (2000b) claim that New Zealand English has inherited the movement of the STRUT vowel from British English, but that at the time of settlement it was still a relatively back/mid-back and not fully open vowel. Since settlement, it has continued on its path towards a more open and front vowel and at a pace exceeding that in most British varieties (with the possible exception of London). The second type of development involves a number of changes that have taken hold in New Zealand, other Southern Hemisphere countries and, for the most part, in Britain too, but which were not underway in Britain at the time of settler migration to New Zealand in the nineteenth century. Among this group, Trudgill et al. (2000b) include HAPPY-tensing - the shift from [i] to [i:] in the final syllable of words such as "happy", "merry", etc.; glide weakening - the reduction of the offglide of rising diphthongs, particularly of /au/, from [eu] to [ea] to [ε:]; and NURSE rounding - the liprounding, fronting and raising of /s:/ to [0:]. Their analysis of the ONZE recordings shows that these features were not present in the speech of their oldest informants, but were found in the speech of those born later, suggesting to them that the innovation had begun locally, and not been imported. In this chapter, we wish to investigate what appears to be a similar process in a grammatical feature, which, we claim, is one of Trudgill's Type 1 changes - one which was inherited from the United Kingdom, but which has continued to "drift" in the same direction as it reaches near-completion. The feature under examination is the use of singular verb forms of BE in existential clauses followed by a plural noun, as in "there's sheep and there's penguins". In accounting for the historical development of these existential verb forms, we will contrast two of Sapir's notions: "drift", and, following Malkiel's fascinat-

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ing (1981) discussion of the terminological waverings both of Sapir and his historical linguistic followers, "slant".

3.

Research on BE in existentials

In many respects, THERE + BE + Plural noun - henceforth (there's) - is not the most exciting of linguistic features to study. It appears to be variable in every English-speaking speech community. Table 1 highlights just some of the studies which have recognized the existence of such variability. Some of these studies merely note the existence of variability, others provide quantitative evidence. It has been diachronically variable for centuries (Jespersen 1954; Denison 1998; Meechan and Foley 1994; Tagliamonte 1998). It is therefore not an innovation, and not a feature which appears to be tied up in the linguistic construction of personal identity - factors which usually trigger interest among variationists (see Labov 1972, for example). However, it has provoked interest within grammatical theory, particularly concerning the assignment of case and the control of agreement (see Meechan and Foley 1994 for a full discussion). The struggles in recent models of syntax7 to reconcile concord in existentials has provided additional support for variationist pleas for the acceptance of variable as opposed to categorical grammars. In addition, recent research by Cheshire (1999) has highlighted the general absence of variability in (there's) in the written standard, but widespread use of singular verb forms in the spoken standard. She uses (there's), as well as a number of other grammatical and discourse features, to highlight the fact that different social, discourse and processing constraints on the spoken word as opposed to the written will result in different strategies of linguistic organization, and thus different grammars. It is, however, the universality of variability in (there's) which provides the motivation for this study. It enables us to assess whether the diffusion of (there's) variability across the anglophone world has proceeded in the same way in each speech community, i.e. does (there's) pattern in the same way in New Zealand as it does in the Falklands or in Canada? Are the linguistic constraints on variation the same or different? Has the socio-geographical distance between the various outposts of the English speech community caused divergence (as Sapir has suggested we should expect) or has the feature "drifted" along the same linguistic path, irrespective of the widely differing sociolinguistic contexts in which it was planted? For (there's), enough variationist studies of other English-speaking countries exist (in particular, Meechan and Foley (1994) for Canada, and Tagliamonte (1998) for York, England, though

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