Bidialectalism or the continuum?

(In four different millennia)

ROGER WRIGHT

Native speakers manifest variation with themselves. This observation is probably true for
all languages; it is certainly true for any language spoken over a wide geographical area
in a heterogeneous society. Such inconsistency is not necessarily viewed in terms of
variation between dialects in a bidialectal competence; it is also normal, and probably
commoner, for it to be seen by linguists as language-internal. That is, the speakers
concerned can still be categorized as monolingual. If a speaker in Southern England
sometimes pronounces a word with initial [h-] and sometimes without, with no change in
meaning, or a speaker in Southern Spain sometimes pronounces a word with final [-s]
and sometimes without, with no change in meaning, this lack of consistency can be
naturally interpreted as being a case of internal variation between different styles,
registers or contexts, within one or more of several possible sociolinguistic continua. But
other analysts may find it more reasonable to classify such variation as a symptom of
bidialectalism rather than of internal variable continua, with each of the variants
encountered being classifiable as belonging to a different dialect of the same wider
language. This is in essence the same argument as that being waged between the modern
reconstructors of the ‘Proto-’Romance postulated as existing two millennia ago (e.g. De
Dardel 1996), who see each different reconstructable variant as attesting a different
Proto-Romance entity (such as ‘Proto-Gallo-Romance’), and the sociophilologists and
historical sociolinguists who prefer instead to envisage the Latin of that time as a
complex and variable, but still single, linguistic entity, and to regard the speakers as
monolingual (e.g. Wright 2003). This contribution considers whether there is a way of
adjudicating between the two diagnoses, or if the decision is destined to remain a matter
of opinion.
The qualification of ‘with the same meaning’ is important here, and such
synonymy may be as difficult to be sure about in these cases as it is for those who study
the sociolinguistic correlates of syntactic variation (e.g. Silva Corvalán 1988: 97-100).
Even so, if both [háws] and [áws] mean ‘house’ for a speaker in Southampton, and both
[atґá] and [atґás] mean ‘atrás’ for a speaker in Málaga, many linguists are likely to want
to envisage a single lexical entry for each such word within the speaker’s mental lexicon,
probably in these cases /atґás/ and /háws/, endowed with sociolinguistically conditioned
allophones for the realization of the same combination of phonemes, rather than
envisaging /atґás/ and /atґá/ (and /háws/ and /áws/) as being one of a huge series of
parallel lexical entries for words in different dialects that only vary from each other by
the presence or absence of /-s/ and /h-/ respectively and are all synonymous with the
equivalent entry in the other dialect. Under this perspective, the sociolinguistically
conditioned allophones are located within several continua inherent in the competence of
everybody in the community; thus despite the single phonemic representation of each
word involved, their phonetic characteristics are able to vary considerably, and the
community is in this way manifesting monolingualism, of a complexity which is entirely
normal, rather than bidialectalism (or, a fortiori, bilingualism). Within the Spanish
linguistic tradition, it has often seemed preferable to explain a speaker’s competence at
operating variables in terms of such continua; for example, in the South of Spain, the
variation between realizations of the /-s/ phoneme of a lexical entry as [-s], [-h] or ø, can
be positioned along a scale stretching from standard to non-standard; rather than in terms
of a mastery of separate distinguishable dialects. For those who take the former, more
traditional, perspective, Occam’s razor seems to require this diagnosis, of sociolinguistic
continua involving allophones rather than bidialectalism involving phonemes, whenever
plausible, or else every different pronunciation involving what seem to be
sociolinguistically conditioned rather than phonetically conditioned allophones would
require different phonemes, and thus necessarily different lexical entries, for each word,
with each entry belonging to a separate whole dialect, and the number of lexical entries
postulated overall for the mind of every speaker in southern Spain would balloon out of
all reasonable proportions. The decision taken in the traditional analyses to represent the
monolingual phonemic representation as /háws/ and /atґás/, with initial /h/ and final /s/
respectively, does not stem from a presumption that the standard must be the source of
the phonology in a lexical entry, but from a different presumption, that the allophonic
absence of any sound to correspond with a phoneme is a more likely phenomenon than
the prothetic allophonic addition of a specified sound to a sequence of phonemes that
lacks it; that is, explaining why [h-] is added to phonemic /áws/ and [-s] to phonemic
/atґá/ in formal contexts, rather than some other sound, is an awkward problem.
Bidialectalism certainly exists in the Iberian Peninsula, however, despite the
traditional line taken in Madrid, even between closely cognate dialects that have
historically originated within different areas located in the same continuum. So, of
course, does bilingualism. Catalan and Castilian are different languages, despite their
common origin, and those who speak them both are bilingual. Each of the languages has
been separately identified, by both their speakers and the linguistic analysts, and the
speakers’ status as bilinguals cannot be in doubt; the difficulty that arises of
distinguishing between bidialectalism and manifestations of continua does not arise in a
case of bilingualism. Catalan-Castilian and Galician-Castilian bilinguals, at least if they
are co-ordinate bilinguals in the terms of Weinreich (1953), have two separate mental
lexicons, one for each of their languages, containing different phonemic representations
for cognate words, which need not be synonymous, and there is no continuum between
the two. And through the north of the Iberian Peninsula between Galicia and Catalonia, in
the officially monolingual autonomías north of the Duero and the Ebro rivers
(disregarding for these purposes the bilingual Basque areas), where the bables of Asturias
and the Pyrenean speeches of Alto Aragón have all descended directly from Latin in the
same way as the Castilian dialects have, the many competent dialect speakers in Asturias
and Aragon who also speak Castilian well, as a result of their schooling, can undoubtedly
be described as bidialectal. This analysis implies that they too, like the bilinguals in other
autonomías, have a lexicon for each dialect and a separate phonemic representation
therein for each word, for all that their similarity can often lead to interferences in real
life. Speakers in practice don’t discriminate as neatly as linguists would like them to in
cases of bilingualism either, but the distinction between the two entities remains in place
even so; in bilingual Galicia, even though many conversations are held in castrapo,
which is Castilian heavily influenced by Galician, or picheleiro, which is Galician
heavily influenced by Castilian, it is usually clear to the participants and observers which
is the language being spoken, and there isn’t the kind of continuum-style gradation
between two extremes that would be found if each pair of cognate words had the same
lexical entry. On the whole this applies to the apparent Castilian-Asturian mixtures one
hears in Gijón and Llangreu as well.
The problem for the analyst only arises when one of the potentially separate
dialects spoken in the same place has descended historically from the other, as is
normally the case in the southern half of the Iberian Peninsula, rather than both sharing a
common ancestor, as happens in the north of the Peninsula where all the Romance
dialects derive from spoken Latin rather than any one from any other. The decision is
often a keenly debated political matter in the South, even if it seems pointless to an
outsider. There is no such angst in Southern England; it will be generally agreed that the
[h-]-less speakers of Southampton are still speaking a kind of English rather than
something else, and no political decision hangs on what their speech is called. But in
Valencia, if some speakers claim to be speaking an entity separate from Catalan, which
they wish to refer to as ‘Valencian’, and others claim, with reference to exactly the same
linguistic phenomena, to be speaking a kind of Catalan, then a fight can break out. And a
similar argument is arising now in Andalucía, as several local patriots, understandably
annoyed at being told for ages that Andalusians speak badly (mal) despite their
characteristic native wit and fluency, wish to claim that andaluz has its own integrity and
independence; that it is not just one or more regional forms of castellano, as Spanish
linguists usually categorise it (e.g. Narbona and Morillo-Velarde 1987), but a separate
entity (usually meaning by castellano not the speech habits of Castile itself but the
supraregional standard which all Spaniards learn in school; these are not identical). The
claim in part rests intellectually on the ideas, as easily dismissed by linguists in
Andalucía as it is in Valencia, and as they will be in the Algarve if anybody in Portimão
wishes to propound them, that (a) a thousand years ago the Ibero-Romance speech of
Muslim Spain (mozárabe) was intrinsically distinctive from Northern Ibero-Romance,
with thick isogloss bundles along the frontier, and (b) that that mozárabe underlies the
post-Reconquest development of Ibero-Romance in the South of the Peninsula. Actual
linguists see most or all Andalusian, Valencian and Algarve speech habits as having
developed from the northern speeches brought south at and after the time of the
Reconquest, often in Andalucía through a kind of interdialectal koineization of separate
Northern habits (illuminatingly analysed by Tuten 2003); even in Granada, reconquered
as late as 1492, the only elements of local speech which seem definitely to descend from
distinctively mozárabe features of an earlier date are toponyms.
The argument is not going to go away, however, because of the politics. Some
serious linguists in the South of Spain do not want to envisage continua in most speakers’
competences there, with the standard at one end and the most distinctively local
phenomena at the other end (as Castilian linguists would prefer), but bidialectalism on
the contemporary northern Ibero-Romance model, with one local dialect and the standard
as the two separate dialects in question in any one place. This instinct is accompanied by
a desire to hypostatize the collectivity of the local features with its own geographically-
based name; e.g. in Murcia (which has somewhat accidentally become a separate
relatively small autonomía, rather than being located within Andalucía), to use the word
murciano as a noun, that is, as the name of a distinguishable dialect, or even language,
resorting not just to el español de Murcia, or el castellano de Murcia, or the adjectival el
español murciano, which have long been used, but el murciano. These local patriots
probably do not realize it, but this sequence is similar to the developments which led to
castellano becoming a language name at the end of the thirteenth century. What was
thought of as romance at the start of that century, a geographically undifferentiated label
which Berceo gave to the language of his own works, could be split into geographically-
based fragments a few years later; one of these was called el romance castellano in the
early reign of Alfonso el Sabio, and el castellano by its end, with reference to almost
exactly the same linguistic phenomena throughout (Wright 2003). So the current
tendency to use murciano (etc) as a noun may be the start of a similar process; if serious
observers continue to use the word as a noun, as if referring to a conceptually and thus an
ontologically distinct entity, then such a distinct entity may come into existence after all
(as castellano eventually did), and as a result the use of such nouns may seem generally
more acceptable, even among linguists in Madrid, than it does now.
This example has been chosen here because of the recent fascinating
collaborations between Peter Trudgill, one of the founders of modern sociolinguistics,
and Juan Manuel Hernández Campoy from Murcia. In their joint article in Folia
Linguistica Historica (Trudgill and Hernández 2002), written in English, they sometimes
refer to ‘Murcian’, apparently thereby adopting a bidialectal view of Murcian as a
separate entity from Spanish, but also to ‘Murcian Spanish’, apparently thereby adopting
a continuum-type view of the speech of the region as fitting inside a single multivariable
‘Spanish’ whole. Subsequently Trudgill’s A Glossary of Sociolinguistics (2003) has been
translated and expanded into a valuable Diccionario de Sociolingüística by Hernández
Campoy (2007), and in the Spanish adaptation many of the examples involve murciano.
In one respect, this is most surprising. Sociolinguists in the 1970s, including
notably Peter Trudgill (e.g. in Trudgill and Chambers 1980), worked hard to establish
that a dialect is a political construct rather than a naturally existing entity; that dialect
boundaries are mythical; that the isogloss is a truer reality (even if it is often in practice a
transition zone); that isoglosses do not naturally bundle; in short, that continua exist and
dialects do not. Many entries in this new Diccionario present that now standard view
with convincing clarity: e.g., under área focal (43), we read that ‘… las isoglosas
raramente coincidían unas con otras … los dialectos no son entidades discretas en
absoluto …’. Quite so; Trudgill convinced me of that in the 1970s, Ralph Penny (2000)
subsequently convinced me that it is also true in the Ibero-Romance context (particularly
with reference to the supposed distinction between Galician and Asturian in Western
Asturias), and I stay convinced. As the Diccionario shows, however, for the case of
murciano at least, Trudgill has nuanced his view and to some extent changed his mind;
he believes that murciano exists as more than part of a convenient political fiction of
separatists. Perhaps this is partly because the sociolinguistic aspects of the speech habits
of people in Murcia have changed over the last thirty years; which indeed they have. It is
not the case that Hernández’s translation misrepresents Trudgill, for it is clear that
Trudgill shares Hernández’s belief that murciano is not just a loose collective label for
phenomena at the informal end of the continua of styles and registers that co-exist inside
Spanish in that region (which is what I would say), but a distinguishable and separate
dialect in its own right.
In one passing comment in their 2002 study, which concentrated on the presence
and absence of [-s] and other final consonants in Murcia, and the relatively closed vowels
that usually accompany the absence of [-s] there (and now sometimes, apparently, even
its presence), the two make their bidialectal diagnosis explicit. Castilian linguists, even
when they visit Murcia or Eastern Andalucía, tend to find the distinction between
standard [a] in the second syllable of a word such as mientras (phonemically /mjéntґas/)
and the Eastern Andalusian and Murcian [æ] hard to perceive, but the latter certainly
exists there in cases where the final phonemic /-s/ of a lexical entry in /-as/ is not
represented phonetically as an [-s] and the preceding /a/ is therefore in practice word-
final. Trudgill and Hernández do not see the [æ] in these cases as being a sociolinguistic
allophone of /a/, as many Castilian linguists seem to (although Ralph Penny doesn’t), but
as a separate /æ/ phoneme, found in many entries in the mental lexicons of a different
dialect with its own name; that is, they argue that when somebody in Murcia says
[mjéntґas] the phonemes in the lexical entry are /mjéntґas/ and they are speaking
Spanish, but when the same speaker says this word with a final [æ] the phonemes in the
lexical entry are /mjéntґæ/ and he or she is speaking a different dialect, murciano, which
has separate lexical entries from their Spanish even though related entries are always
synonymous; variation between the two being therefore under this perspective a
symptom of bidialectalism and not of variability within a continuum. In fact, Murcian,
under this analysis, is given a phonological system of eight vowels (as a consequence of
the loss of syllable-final [-s]). Trudgill and Hernández’s only argument in favour of the
bidialectal diagnosis looks circular: ‘of course, we do not mean to suggest that no native
speaker of Murcian ever employs /s/, but when this does occur it is accompanied by
many other features which make it clear that dialect-switching to Standard Castilian is
occurring and that Murcian Spanish is no longer being spoken’ (37); a circularity which
is unfortunate when the article as a whole is so impressive. Circular arguments do not
necessarily lead to wrong conclusions, but at the moment (2008) that one seems to have,
and in my view such phenomena (as the production of [-as] rather than a more common
[-æ]) are instead probably best analysed, along with the ‘many other features’ referred to,
as symptoms of a higher style in the network of sociolinguistic continua inherent within a
single linguistic entity which we can still call ‘Spanish’. The linguists in Murcia are in
general aware of the divergence of views, naturally, and some see it as a mere difference
of opinion (or are able to take both views at once): in the words of Gómez Ortin (2004: 7,
in an article included under the collective heading of Actitudes lingüísticas en
dialectología. Estudios sociolingüísticos del dialecto murciano), “En España, los
principales dialectos de la lengua española son el andaluz, el extremeño, el murciano y el
canario … para algunos, más que dialectos, se trata de modalidades de habla del idioma
español”.
There is no universal principle of dialect-standard relations to appeal to here (cp.
Auer 2005). In the history of Romance, politically-inspired conceptual fragmentations of
this type have occurred before, which might mean that Trudgill and Hernández’s analysis
will seem more justifiable in the future. Spanish linguists working further North and
West (even including dialectologists in Granada such as Mondéjar; e.g. 1991) have been
likely to see this development as undesirable, naturally, but they also tend to doubt
whether it is actually happening, an analysis which is far less clearly accurate.

For fragmentation happens. It is not inevitable. In the modern English-speaking

and French-speaking worlds there are widely variable and apparently unfragmenting
continua of variation; also in the Spanish-speaking world of the Americas. Yet English,
French and Spanish themselves are all examples of fragmentations that happened in the
past, to Old Germanic and Early Romance. There seem to be two main scenarios which
lead to fragmentation: firstly, great geographical separation between communities that
originally spoke the same language, as in the Proto-Indo-European case; and secondly,
even where there is no such separation, the establishment of politically-inspired new
writing systems, as in the Medieval Romance case (Wright 2003). We can see the
different possibilities for the resolution of the present uncertainties by looking at the
history of Romance one, two and three millennia ago.

Three millennia ago (c.1000 B.C.) there were a large number of languages spoken
in Europe, each by a small number of people. As Tore Janson (2004) and others have
argued, this was the norm all over the world until recently, as it still is in New Guinea;
that is, before the last two thousand years, and the development of colonialism,
imperialism, and world languages (the last two thousand years have certainly been rather
unusual.) Many of these languages spoken in Europe in 1000 B.C., though not all, were
of Indo-European origin, descending from the common (even if variable) ancestor which
we now call Proto-Indo-European. We know that now, but they could hardly have known
that then; after two or three thousand years of physical separation the languages were
usually not mutually intelligible, and the cognate relationships could not have been
suspected by their speakers when they did meet each other. Even the so-called Italic
languages are thought now not to have been mutually intelligible in the first millennium
B.C. (see the excellent discussion in Clackson and Horrocks 2007: chapter 2). Definitive
fragmentation had certainly occurred in that case.

Two millennia ago (the first century A.D.) the situation could hardly have been
more different. It has sometimes been thought - or assumed, rather than argued - that the
process of fragmentation as exemplified by the Indo-European languages must be the
default scenario, and that other attested fragmentations must necessarily have operated in
a similar way. The comparative technique used to reconstruct their history has been
adopted to study the early development of Romance, for example, and the discoveries
made using this method led to the hypothesis of separate geographically-distinguished
‘Proto’-Romance languages such as ‘Proto-Gallo-Romance’, supposedly co-existing with
both standard Latin and each other; in other words, a hypothesis of bidialectalism (Latin-
Romance) in every distinguishable area of the Roman Empire of two thousand years ago.
But such methods of analysis and such conclusions seem misguided now. The two cases
have almost nothing in common. Unlike the previous Proto-Indo-European speakers, the
speakers of the Roman Empire were perpetually moving about their speech area and
coming into contact with Latin-speakers from elsewhere; Clackson and Horrocks (2007:
235-36) quote an estimate that as many as 40% of the inhabitants of the Empire were
located at any one time in somewhere different from the region in which they were born.
And the inhabitants of the Roman Empire all had a single written language available, and
a related formal style which they could shift towards as a supraregional sociolect at one
end of their continua of variability. It is true that, as the Proto-Romance
reconstructionists illuminatingly established, many of the individual traits which we now
think of as belonging to ‘Romance’ rather than ‘Latin’ were already in existence two
thousand years ago, mainly as variants available for use in particular styles, contexts and
registers, probably varying with the more Latinate-seeming features according to
sociolinguistic patterns of a kind which we would regard as normal in these post-
Labovian days, but which can hardly be examined in close detail now. Adams’s recent
(2008) exhaustive study of regional diversification in Latin makes it clear that there was
indeed variation within Latin of a geographical as well as a social and stylistic kind, as
one would expect, but also that that variation was not enough to impede communication
between speakers from different regions in the period concerned (see also Herman 2000);
the idea expressed by the more intense of the Proto-Romance reconstruction specialists
that both Latin-Romance and Romance-Romance fragmentation were already well under
way two thousand years ago is hard to accept any more. In effect, they had misdiagnosed
continua as bidialectalism. Yes, many of the individual features which we want to call
‘Romance’ already existed, but the previous apparently competing phenomena had
usually not died out of speech - e.g. genitive cases still survived in speech long after the
semantic change of de had occurred to express the same meaning - and as a result the two
features operated together as variants within the normal elastic networks of continua
rather than as elements in a bidialectal relationship. The assumption of those who carried
out the reconstructions was that the demonstrated co-existence of two variants in that
speech community also thereby necessarily demonstrated bilingualism, or at the least
bidialectalism, but many historical sociolinguists would now prefer to see such co-
existence as evidence of one or more of the usual continua. The Latin-Romance and
Romance-Romance fragmentations were still well in the future at that time.
 One millennium ago (in the eleventh century A.D.), Romance fragmentation was
under way. Medieval Latin had by then been constituted as a distinct written, and
sometimes distinctively spoken, entity separate from Romance, at least in France, and
Romance vernacular was acquiring a separate conceptual validity bolstered by the initial
attempts at creating a new way of writing for the vernacular styles. Rumanian is a
separate case from the speeches of the West, possibly best categorized as having broken
from them by this point, because of its relative physical isolation; otherwise, the
fragmentation between the eventually separate Romance languages started later and took
longer than the split between Latin and Romance (Wright 2003). It has seemed in
retrospect to be a natural and even inevitable development. It could perhaps have been
avoided, if the different political kingdoms and their rulers had not wanted to stress (or
invent) separate national identities; but given, for example, Alfonso X’s instinctive
Castilian nationalism, the fragmentation into separate Romance and then Ibero-Romance
languages was probably bound to occur. The previous complex monolingual Latin-
Romance ‘ensemble’ (to quote Banniard 1989) of stylistic, sociolinguistic and
geographical continua had had great practical advantages (as the present complex
worldwide Castilian monolingual ensemble of styles has now); and these were lost. From
a sociolinguistic perspective, the features of what we now call Latin and Romance as
separate entities, with reference to the thirteenth century, had until recently been located
at the two ends of a wide monolingual continuum, or ensemble of continua, of varying
styles; and similarly, the features of what we now call Spanish and Portuguese were once
located in two parts of one multivariable geolinguistic continuum; a dialect continuum
which is in fact still there now in the present millennium (as Ralph Penny keeps pointing
out: e.g. Penny 2000).

At the start of this present millennium, the same questions are arising as arose a
thousand years ago at the start of the previous one. A student of the medieval
developments acquires a weary sense of déjà-vu when looking at the arguments over the
separate status of Andaluz, Aragonese and so on, which are similar to those that could
have been heard during the first stages of the splits which led to the separate
metalinguistic and conceptual establishment of Castilian, Catalan and Portuguese. I have
often argued that the previous Early Romance continua were preferable to the separate
establishment of conceptually distinct dialects and languages in the early part of the last
millennium (e.g. Wright 2003: chapter 25), so it is at least consistent of me to feel
depressed at the change of heart which Peter Trudgill seems to have undergone, and at
his apparently explicit support for the politically-shaded determination to normalize
murciano as a distinct entity henceforth to be seen as located outside the multivariable
Spanish continua which still work well in practice in Cuba, Bolivia, Mexico, Santander
and so on. It is an unnecessary sledgehammer to crack a genuine nut. Unpoliticized
Murcians just want their way of talking to have prestige at last, as that of the inhabitants
of Castile has, so they can stop being criticized for speaking badly.
The title of this contribution was inspired by a sentence in Trudgill’s illuminating
book about the English of New Zealand (Trudgill 2004: 90): ‘The greater linguistic
distance between such dialects and General English … opens up the possibility of
bidialectalism, dialect switching, and the maintenance of two systems as separate rather
than constituting points on a continuum’. The point at issue may in the event lie in the
meaning we give to the word ‘systems’. Languages and dialects are not, in my admittedly
minority view, ‘systems’ in any strict sense, but composed of essentially accidental
conglomerations of contingentially concomitant details and potentially multiple variants
(Wright 2003: 305); oversystematizing, in this case envisaging one single systematic
entity which we can call murciano and another, similar to the standard, called castellano,
rather than a lively but turbulent mix of all the features concerned within a complex
monolingual ensemble, seems to me to be one of the most unhelpful aspects of the
tendency of language planners in practice to make things worse. Both the envisaged
scenarios are possible, however, and in the same way as New Zealand English now
apparently qualifies to be seen as a separate Colonial dialect of English (being separated
by a thousand miles or more from any other kind of related dialect in an almost Proto-
Indo-European manner) Murcian Spanish may one day be generally conceded to have
acquired the same status (even though it isn’t).
There are thus several available resolutions of the problems inherent in
diagnosing bidialectalism or continua, exemplified by four millennial synchronic cuts in

 In the tenth century B.C, fragmentation had led to multilingualism among

the history of Ibero-Romance:

 In the first century A.D., fragmentation was not happening, and multiple variation
cognate Indo-European languages, largely because of physical separation.

within normal continua remained internal to the Latin language, much to the

 In the eleventh century A.D., the continua were in the process of fragmenting into
advantage of everybody in that complex wide-ranging speech community.

multidialectalism, involving Latin and Romance and then separate Romance

 In the present twenty-first century A.D., the continua within Spanish are in
languages, a process aided by the invention of separate ways of writing.

similar danger of fragmenting into dialects in a few peninsular areas, for political
reasons.
In short, the present dilemma concerning the respective merits of envisaging continua or
bidialectalism is not new.**

**
I wish to thank Fernando Tejedo and Peter Trudgill for their help with this contribution; the errors and
defects are, of course, my own.
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