GRADO EN ESTUDIOS INGLESES

VARIACIÓN Y CAMBIO LINGÜÍSTICO EN LENGUA INGLESA

Dras. Senra y Barreiro

Unit 1: Introduction to Language Variation and Change. Historical

Sociolinguistics vs Synchronic Sociolinguistics.

The course Variación y cambio lingüístico en lengua inglesa aims to

provide a guide to the work done in the fields of Sociolinguistics and
Historical Sociolinguistics. This course will introduce students into the
field of Language Variation and Change and Historical Sociolinguistics,
encouraging further study and research in the area. We will mainly
focus on some of the insights that Variationist Sociolinguistics has
provided for the study of ongoing change in the language, but we will
also look at Sociolinguistics and the History of English, the linguistic
consequences of contact between speakers of different varieties, and
English in contact with other languages. Some of the topics studied in
the courses Sociolingüística inglesa and Variaciones fonético-fonológicas
de la lengua inglesa in the Grado will be revised and expanded. It must
be stressed that, even though the scope of the course is broad, time
limitations (it is a 5-credit course) makes it impossible to concentrate on
all issues related to language variation and change.
Unit 1 contains an overview of language variation and change on
the one hand, and (Socio-)Historical Linguistics and Sociolinguistics on
the other. The contents of the unit are (1) Language Variation and
Change; (2) Historical Sociolinguistics vs Synchronic Linguistics (please
keep in mind that the contents provided in the Guía de Curso for this
unit have changed slightly).

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1. Language Variation and Change

Language variation and change is the main topic of this course. We will
concentrate on how language variants appear and spread in the
community. Languages are not permanent entities. If we have a look at
the opening extract from the Lord's Prayer from different periods of the
English language or an extract from both a medieval and modern
version of Cantar de Mío Cid we see that languages can change a lot
over a period of time. In the case of the Lord's Prayer the English
language of the 21st century is very different from Old English or
Middle English.

Old English (c. 400 to c. 1100): Fæder ure, þu þe art on heofonum, si

þin nama gehalgod. To becume þin rice (West-Saxon).
Middle English (c. 1100-1500): Fader oure þat is i heuen. Blessid bi
þi name to neuen. Come to us þi kingdome0.
Early Modern English (c. 1500-1800): Our father which art in
heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come.
Modern English (from c. 1800): Our father who is in heaven, may
your name be sacred. Let your kingdom come.

A fragment from CANTAR DE MÍO CID (medieval version):

De los sos oios tan fuerte mientre lorando Tornaua la cabeça e estaua
los catando: Vio puertas abiertase vços sin cannados, Alcandaras uazias sin
pielles e sin mantos, E sin falcones e sin adtores mudados. Sospiro Myo Çid ca
mucho auie grandes cuydados. Ffablo Myo Çid bien e tan mesurado: Grado a ti
Sennor Padre que estas en alto, Esto me an buelto myos enemigos malos. Alli
pienssan de aguiiar, allisueltan las riendas: A la exida de Biuar ouieron la

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corneia diestra, E entrando a Burgos ouieron lasiniestra. Meçio Myo Çid los
ombros e engrameo la tiesta: Albricia Albar Ffanez ca echados somos de tierra.

(Modern version)
De sus ojos fuertemente llorando, de un lado a otro volvía la cabeza
mirándolos; Vio las puertas abiertas y contrapuertas sin candados, las
perchas vacías, sin pieles y sin mantos y sin halcones y sin azores ya
pelechados. Suspiró Mio Cid sumamente mesurado. ¡Bendito seas,
Señor Padre, que estás en lo alto! ¡Esto me han devuelto mis enemigos
malvados! Entonces deciden aguijar a riendas sueltas. A la salida de
Vivar vieron una corneja a la derecha, a la entrada de Burgos la vieron
a la izquierda. Se encogió Mio Cid de hombros y alzó la cabeza.
¡Albricia, Albar Fáñez, nos echan de nuestra tierra!

Languages change due to external and internal causes,

sociolinguistic factors and internal psychological factors that reside in
the structure of the language and the minds of the speakers. Language
change occurs due to variation within a language and/or because of
contacts with other languages.
It is not possible to predict language change, either internal or
external. However for centuries scholars have sought explanations for
why certain changes might have taken place or why certain elements
might be retained: (1) system internal explanations: language is a
system in which internal forces operate and lead to change; (2)
psychological explanations; (3) geographical explanations: some people
maintained that consonant changes begin in mountain regions due to
the intensity of expiration in high altitudes (Aitchinson 1991: 105); (4)
sociolinguistic explanations: language changes because the speakers
are social beings and use different linguistic variants depending on their
role in society. It has been demonstrated that social background, gender
and context may affect the way you speak and the way others perceive
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your speech. Society decides which language varieties are prestigious
and which are not. It has also been demonstrated that societal factors
can be strongly involved in determining or influencing the speed of
linguistic change (Trudgill 2011: 2).
Some research topics related to language change include local
dialects, standard languages, sociolects, difference between spoken and
written language, among others.
For language change to take place there must be two equivalent
linguistic forms, one giving way to the other eventually. Sociolinguists
distinguish between changes from above and changes from below.
They refer both to levels of conscious awareness as well as position in
the social hierarchy. Changes from below involve changes we are not
fully aware of, and also less prestigious varieties influencing more
prestigious ones. Changes from above refer to changes we are
consciously aware of and also to linguistic items, mainly new sounds
found in prestigious varieties and introduced by the dominant social
class.
The question now is What can change? Language change can
occur on every linguistic level. Speech sounds, morphology, and lexicon
can change. So we have phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical
and pragmatic changes. Some examples of change are: new words can
appear through loan (Modern Icelandic bíll 'car' from Danish bil), a word
can acquire new meanings (in Modern Icelandic the word sími 'long
thread' started to be use with the meaning 'telephone'). Linguistic
elements can also change their status within the linguistic system (eg.
English -ly, German -lich, Dutch -lijk, is now a suffix but it used to be a
full lexical noun in Gothic leik 'body'). This process of a lexical word
changing into a grammatical element is called gramaticalization.
Some important terms when studying language variation and
change are speech community, variation, high prestige and low prestige
varieties, social network, internal vs external change, standard language,

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sociolinguistic variable, conscious and unconscious change, lexical
diffusion, internally and externally motivated language change.

2. Historical Sociolinguistics vs Synchronic Sociolinguistics

The study of language change has altered its character in recent years.
Scholars have shifted from reconstructing the earliest stages of
languages (comparative method) and paying no attention to changes
currently taking place, to using Sociolinguistics methodology to study
changes that took place in the past.
In "Some principles of linguistic methodology" Labov classified the
different subfields of Linguistics according to whether their practitioners
were to be found working in "the library, the bush, the closet, the
laboratory ..... [or] the street" (99). Those working in the library were the
historical linguists, those in the bush were the anthropological
linguists, those at the laboratory the psycholinguists, and the closet
was the home of the theoretical linguists. In this section you will find an
overview of the subfields of Historical Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, and
Historical Sociolinguistics (including the benefit of Corpus Linguistics),
and their impact on the field of language variation and change.

2.1. Historical Linguistics

Linguistics as we know it today appeared at the beginning of the 20th

century and developed independently in Europe and America. On the
one hand, Europeans had a philosophical tradition and a knowledge of
the historical study of languages based on the 19th century
comparative philology. Studies focused mainly on the evolution of
classical languages and to a lesser extent on modern European
languages through the analysis of written testimony. The study of living
languages was considered secondary and it was limited to the study of
regional dialectology.

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 In America, on the other hand, linguistic research focused on
Amerindian languages for which no written records were kept, so that it
was impossible to develop an approach based purely on written texts. It
was decided, therefore, to carry out an anthropological study of
languages. Some of the most outstanding scholars in this field were
Franz Boas and Edward Sapir.
In the 19th century, there is a new perception into the study of
Linguistics influenced by Darwinian studies in which the language is
considered as an organized system. Besides, history and historical
comparison are introduced in Linguistics. Rasmus Rask, Franz Bopp
and Jacob Grimm are considered the precursors of historical-
comparative linguistics. Comparative studies between languages
promoted more scientific studies which sought regularities in order to
reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language.
The second half of the 19th century witnessed a major success of
historical-comparative linguistics, studied not only in Europe but also in
the U.S. At this time the Neogrammarian School was founded in
Germany. The Neogrammarians (Junggrammatiker) developed the theory
that language change is systematic and regular, and is governed by a set
of rules. It is based on two fundamental principles: 1) phonological
change takes place according to mechanical laws that have no
exceptions (principle of regularity), 2) importance of analogy in the
creation of new forms. Their attention focused mainly on diachrony.
However, limitations in Comparative and Historical Linguistics
were soon discovered, since not all exceptions can be explained. Despite
the benefits of comparative philology in Linguistics, many questions
remain unresolved. For example, Basque, Sumerian and Etruscan, have
no place within the Indo-European family since their relationship to any
other language either living or dead hasn't been proved. The method
assumes that when two languages are separated from the mother
tongue, they stop influencing each other, which is not entirely true.
Moreover, Comparative Linguistics is interested in spelling rather than

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sounds. In this sense, in the 20th century there was a reaction against
purely linguistic studies and in favour of the study of speech variation
(Dialectology or Geographical Linguistics).
Both the typological and the genealogical classification of languages
ignore the importance of the cultural relationship between languages,
the fact that languages influence one another by contact between them,
for example, with loanwords. Sometimes it is impossible to know if two
languages are similar because they share a common origin or because
of the contact between them. These limitations led to a new approach to
the study of languages, Structuralism, which studies language as a
structure, a system that allows changes.
1957 was the beginning of Generative Linguistics with the
publication of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures. Linguistics shifts
to a psycho-biological stage, with interest in the way in which children
acquire languages on the basis of an abstract universal grammar
common to all languages.

2.2. Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is a quite recent discipline whose aim is to study the

social uses of language, language as a social phenomenon, and also
language diversity/varieties. It started in the 60s as an opposition to
Chomsky's idea of abstracting language away from everyday context,
and of an ideal speaker/listener communication in a totally
homogeneous community. Sociolinguists is interested in language use
within human societies since it is believed that there is a close
relationship between language and society, and that language reflects
social patterns and divisions. Sociolinguists concentrate more on
synchrony.
In Europe, Sociolinguistics began with the study of Historical
Linguistics and Linguistic Geography, with three main areas of interest:
Dialectology, the study of regional languages, and the language

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situation of colonized countries. In America, on the other hand, the
study of Sociolinguistics arises from contact of linguists with other
disciplines such as Anthropology and Sociology. Sociolinguistics today
is divided into subfields such as Pragmatics, Studies of Pidgins and
Creoles, Planning Studies and Language Policy, Historical
Sociolinguistics, among others. Sociolinguistics is connected with the
social sciences, particularly Sociology, Anthropology, Social Psychology
and Education.
Sociolinguistics has fostered a new vision of linguistic variation and
change as inherent components of languages, and has a highly
interdisciplinary nature as it can be applied to various fields of
research. The interaction with other disciplines has resulted in new
fields among which are Sociology of Language, Linguistic Anthropology,
Social Psychology and Ethnography of Communication. Sociolinguistics
has also contributed greatly to the advancement of Historical
Linguistics, since the study of linguistic variation can help understand
historical phenomena and vice versa (Labov’s principle of uniformity
(1994), indicating that through linguistic phenomena studied in the
present we can explain those changes that took place in the past, that
is, you can use the present to explain the past). In this sense, Görlach
maintains:

Scholars who were convinced in the 1970s that historical

linguistics was dead and buried […] have come to realize that
such statements or predictions were premature. […] European
scholars were also foremost in the modernization of the
discipline until a new paradigm was created by Chomsky – but
others like Labov, Lass or Milroy stuck to sociohistorical
interpretation, now taken up with new vigour and
methodological precision. (2003: 1)

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Major sociolinguistic studies in recent decades have focused on
determining the social evolution of language variants. The study of the
social use of language began in 1963 when Labov presented the first
report of sociolinguistic research at the annual meeting of the Linguistic
Society of America and published "The social motivation of a sound
change". Labov has been the dominant figure in Sociolinguistics from
the beginnings of the discipline in the mid 60s. Disciple of Uriel
Weinreich at Columbia University, he was the founder of the
Sociolinguistics Program at the University of Pennsylvania. His research
project in 1963 on a sound change in progress in Martha's Vineyard
and his PhD in 1964 on the sociolinguistic stratification of the city of
New York introduced new techniques in sample surveys, natural
experimentation and quantitative analysis in linguistic research. Labov
later studied English vernacular African Americans in Harlem starting
in 1965. His work culminated in the Atlas of North American English
(2006) (https://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/home.html) with
computerized methods which have transformed modern
Dialectology. Labov studied for the first time language change in
progress. His research had an enormous impact on our knowledge of
the mechanisms and motivations of language variation and change
within a community. You will read more about this topic in Kiesling’s
book Linguistic Variation and Change.
In 1968 the linguists Weinreich, Labov and Herzog published
their article "Empirical foundations for a theory of language change" in
which they studied language change and proposed social motivation as
its most influential cause. Unlike previous trends centred on the
language system as an abstract entity, Sociolinguistics leaves a space
open to the individual who uses that instrument in their interactions
with others, not only to communicate but also to define themselves
socially. Language should be understood as a social phenomenon that
establishes a relationship between the speakers and their social
environment, and among other members of the linguistic community.

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 Two undeniable contributions of Sociolinguistics to the study of
language change are the careful and accurate observation of the present
variants, methods of data recording, and the analysis and evaluation of
the data using the latest technology. As mentioned above, these results
can be extrapolated to the past, following the uniformity principle
adopted from modern Geology.
The Labovian method was introduced in the UK by the linguists
Peter Trudgill, Lesley and James Milroy and Suzanne Romaine in the
70s and early 80s. From this date, Trudgill began to study language
contact, especially dialects in contact.
In this course we are concentrating on the variationist approach
to Sociolinguistics as presented in Kiesling’s book. The basic methods in
variationist studies are the following (Mesthrie, R. et. Al. 2012: 76):

1. Identify linguistic features that vary in a community.

2. Gather data from the community by selecting a suitable sample of
people.
3. Conduct an interview involving informal continuous speech as well as
more formal dimensions of language use like reading out a passage
aloud.
4. Analyse the data, noting the frequency of each relevant linguistic
feature.
5. Select relevant social units like age groups, sex, social class.
6. Ascertain significant correlations between the social groups and
particular speech.

2.3. Historical Sociolinguistics

Even though, as explained above, in this course we are going to expand

on the variationist approach to language change, it is important to pay
some attention to Historical Sociolinguistics. English Historical

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Sociolinguistics (Socio-historical Linguistics) is a discipline that
emerged in the 80s inspired by Labov's work, and which consists in
applying Sociolinguistic methodology to historical data, explaining
variation and change in the history of English.
Historical Linguistics is concerned with studying how languages
change over time and developing and implementing methods for
reconstructing early stages of a language based on written records that
have been preserved over the centuries. Present-day sociolinguistic
methodology can be employed to historical data, to explain variation
and change in the history of English.
Historical linguists are both historians and linguists. They are
responsible for collecting reliable data and evaluating the sources. They
often have to face the problem of studying periods for which historical
records are not documented. According to Lass:

their tradecraft combines those of both disciplines. As historians

they are bound by the standard constraints on all historians
(cosmologists, paleontologists, text editors, musicologists…); as
linguists by general linguistic theory of one kind or another. (1997:
xiv)

Historical Linguistics has changed considerably in recent years.

Traditionally linguists engaged in reconstructing the earliest stages of
the language and describing phonological changes over time. They did
not pay much attention to changes from a synchronic point of view, to
syntactic changes, to pidgin and creole languages, language death, or
sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic factors underlying many alterations
or changes. In the last thirty years all these issues that had been
abandoned in the past are receiving a lot of attention. In this sense,
Historical Linguistics has experienced a methodological and conceptual
transformation in recent decades, and it has been enriched by
contributions from other disciplines such as Sociolinguistics, Corpus

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Linguistics, studies in language change, and Contact Linguistics.
According to Tejada Caller:

La actual LH [Lingüística Histórica] y, por tanto, la actual

historia de la lengua inglesa no queda reducida a la pura
sistematización estructural de la lengua a través del tiempo, a
las curiosidades que pueda ofrecer la etimología de las palabras
individuales ni desde luego a la erudición complaciente del
análisis filológico de ciertos textos canonizados. Esta disciplina
vuelve a erigirse, casi como en el siglo pasado, en centro de la
investigación lingüística y social contemporánea, con
perspectivas renovadas, nuevas preguntas que resolver y nuevos
conceptos centrales, establecidos sobre todo a través de la
investigación interdisciplinar. (1999: 67-8)

Historical Sociolinguistics appears as a new discipline with similar

aims to those of Sociolinguistics, although scholars working in this field
have focused on the sociopolitical context of the evolution of languages
rather than on a descriptive and detailed documentation of the
individual forms a language. The main difference with Sociolinguistics
lies in that the application of methods of comparative and internal
reconstruction are essential in Historical Linguistics, but not in studies
of variation. Synchronic Sociolinguistics often focuses on the study of
variation and change at the phonological level, while Diachronic
Sociolinguistics often focuses on the grammatical levels.
Among its most outstanding representatives are Suzanne Romaine,
James and Leslie Milroy, Matti Rissanen, Michael Samuels, Peter
Trudgill, Richard Hogg, Jeremy Smith, Manfred Görlach, Einar Haugen,
Jacek Fisiak, and Roger Lass. These authors have focused on applying
the principles of Sociolinguistics to the study of historical records.
Historical Sociolinguistics has advanced dramatically in the last
twenty years with a special mention to the Finnish linguists Merya Kyto

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Finnish linguists, Terttu Nevalainen, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Irma
Taavitsainen, Arja Nurmi and Anneli Meruman-Solin who have been
applying the principles of Sociolinguistics to English historical studies
since the 90s. In 1991, the Academy of Finland funded a project entitled
"Sociolinguistics and Language History" directed by professors Tertu
Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg whose aim main was to
compile a corpus to facilitate sociolinguistic research applied to the
history of English.
This project resulted in the Corpus of Early
English Correspondence (https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/varieng/
corpus-of-early-english-correspondence) whose objective was to apply
sociolinguistic methods to historical data. This corpus is composed
of letters that were selected systematically between men and
women, young and adult, from different social strata (although given
the high level of illiteracy among women in the Renaissance,
the corpus contains more letters written by men than by women).
They also attempted to cover all the regions of England,
although most of the rural population was illiterate. The corpus is
based on four regions: London, East Anglia, the North and the Court
(royal family, officials, those who lived in Westminster). Attention was
also paid to the contents of the letters, ranging from love letters to
family or business matters.
Historical Sociolinguistics, unlike synchronic Sociolinguistics,
faces a number of problems. The data available to historical
sociolinguists consists mainly of texts written in the past that have been
preserved by chance. As Lass explains:
The historical dialectologist’s workspace can be likened to an
archaeological dig or a crime scene. All three are venues whose
detailed history needs to be reconstructed. It is a commonplace
in archaeology and forensic praxis that as far as possible (a) the
scene must not be contaminated by material brought in by the
investigator or anyone else, and (b) the chain of custody (the

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 sequence of provenances of all objects found on the scene) must
be immaculate. (2004: 21)

According to Lass (2004), no text should be considered as a

historical witness if it contains emendations, modernizations (replacing
letters thorn, eth, yogh, etc.), alteration of the scribe’s punctuation, any
attempt at reconstruction through several versions, or any form of
standardization of spelling variables. In this sense, Laing (2004: 49)
states that the study of any past stage of a language is problematic,
because the only witness is the written text. These texts present
variation and occasionally the textual language is not necessarily
equivalent to the spoken language of the scribe. Furthermore, the texts
are often incomplete and isolated from the context in which they
originated. Moreover, in many cases not all styles, registers or varieties
are represented in the texts preserved.

2.3.1. Corpus Linguistics in (Socio-)Historical Linguistic Research

Corpus Linguistics as we know it today emerged in the late 60s with the
Survey of English Usage (SEU) promoted by Sir Randolph Quirk, and
with the famous Brown University Corpus compiled by Nelson Francis
and Henry Kucera in 1964. Text corpora offer many possibilities to
researchers: we can count a word frequency in one or various texts, we
can search different types of collocations, etc.
English Historical Linguistics has echoed the usefulness of
Corpus Linguistics and for more than a decade has been benefiting
from its potential. There is now a clear interest among historical
linguists in the use and creation of electronic corpora for research
because they see them as a source of information to study the changes
in the language over time, for example, comparing the use in a given
period with the use at a later time, or by diachronic studies of regional
varieties of English. For a long time the main problem for researchers

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was the lack of representative historical corpora that could be used in
the diachronic study of language. However, today the number of
computerized text corpora is growing rapidly. This seems to be a natural
evolution as historical linguists have always based their research on
collections of texts from early periods to document or study language
change. As a result many historical linguists have shifted their focus of
attention to research based on electronic corpora.
Historical linguists need corpora containing texts from different
genres and periods. Diachronic corpora allow a large number of
investigations since they can be used to study lexical, grammatical,
dialectological and registers features (eg. how the language of men and
women has changed over the centuries, or which linguistic features of a
text are or are not in other texts from the same period). The
computerized corpora are one of the most widely used tools in modern
Dialectology.
The University of Helsinki is one of the centres of expertise for
Corpus Linguistics whose main objective is to show how you can work
with English diachronic corpora structured according to discourse types
and text genres.
The best know English historical corpus is the Helsinki Corpus of
English Texts (http://kh.aksis.uib.no/icame/manuals/HC/index.htm)
containing about 1.6 million words dating from the Early Old English
period (850) until the end of the Early Modern English period (1710),
arranged in periods of 100 years. The corpus covers a wide range of
genres (legal texts, scientific, sermons, newspapers, plays, etc.), regional
variations and sociolinguistic variables such as sex, age, education and
social class. This project began in 1984 under the leadership of Matti
Rissanen and Ossi Ihalainen at the University of Helsinki. Although this
corpus is not tagged, each text contains information about the author,
date of composition, and dialect. The Helsinki Corpus was inspired by
the post-Labovian philosophy and was explicitly designed to facilitate
quantitative and stylistic studies.

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References

Aitchinson, J. 1991. Language Change: Progress or Decay? Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.
Chomsky, N. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague and Berlin: Mouton
de Gruyter.
Görlach, M. 2003. Topics in English Historical Linguistics. Heideblberg:
Carl Winter.
Labov, W. 1972. "Some principles of linguistic methodology." Language
in Society 1: 97-120.
Laing, M. 2004. “Multidimensionality: Time, Space and Stratigraphy in
Historical Dialectology”. En Dossena, M. y R. Lass (eds.) 2004.
Methods and Data in English Historical Dialectology. Bern: Peter
Lang. 49–96.
Lass, R. 1997. Historical Linguistics and Language Change. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lass, R. 2004. “Ut custodiant litteras: editions, corpora and
witnesshood”. En Dossena, M. and R. Lass, Roger (eds.) 2004.
Methods and Data in English Historical Dialectology. Bern: Peter
Lang. 21-48.
Mesthrie, R. et al. (eds.) (2nd edition). 2009. Introducing
Sociolinguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Tejada Caller, P. 1999. El cambio lingüístico: Claves para interpretar la
lengua inglesa. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.
Trudgil, P. 2011. Sociolinguistic Typology. Social Determinants of
Linguistic Complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Assignments

1. Give two examples, from a language you know well, of variants which
are increasingly being used. Choose an example of a lexical variant and
one of a variant from a different linguistic area.
2. Have young people got a special role in the process of language
change? Does change always start with them? What is the role of the
other social groups in language change? What could be the function of
the media (TV, radio and internet) in language change?
3. What is phonological change?
4. With your family and friends, can you trace linguistic changes across
the generations? Where is this easiest to see: with lexis, phonology, or
structure?
5. Identify a characteristic variable in the variety spoken where you
come from. Is its use seen positively by (a) insiders and (b) outsiders?
6. Go to the BBC Learning English website
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/newsenglish/
witn /2009/01/090102_new_words.shtml) and read the article about
new words in English.
7. Go to the Atlas of North American English
(http://www.atlas.mouton-content.com/). Click on “The
Organization of dialect diversity in North America” and read the text by Labov.
8. Go to the Corpus of Early English Correspondence website
(https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/varieng/corpus-of-early-english-
correspondence) and read the general introduction to understand
how the compilation took place.
9. Go to Professor Hickey's website (http://www.uni-
due.de/~lan300/HICKEY.htm), click on "Studying the history of
English" and read the section on language change.

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 Chapter 7

Acquisition of variation

H OW IS V AR IAT IO N LE AR N ED ?
Although the question of how variation is acquired is a central one – it is the
transmission problem for WLH – surprisingly little work has been done on exactly
how children acquire variation, and what patterns they show as they develop their
linguistic systems. While not non-existent, studies of the acquisition of variation
are fairly rare compared to the studies of adult speakers. Labov (2001a) proposes a
model of transmission that has language learning in the early years – from the car-
egiver, who he notes is usually female – as central, so it is important to uncover the
processes and constraints in this transmission process.
ere are several crucial questions we must answer:
1. When do children begin acquiring variation? Do they have a ‘categorical’
period and then start to vary, or is there variation from the beginning?
2. When does the in uence of peers take over and what form does that in u-
ence take?
3. To what extent is variation changeable over the lifespan?
.

4. Do children acquire all constraints for a variable (social and structural) at the
same time?
5. What do children actually hear from caregivers?
6. Does what children do with language actually re ect the input they hear?
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7. How do children learn social constraints? Is it through overt talk, implicitly,

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or both?
8. Are all variables acquired in the same way and at the same speed?
We will consider these questions as we view four di erent developmental stages:
early childhood, the emerging peer group, adolescence, and adulthood.
2011. E

E A R LY C HILDH OO D
Children’s production from early on is necessarily variable, in fact more variable
than adult speech. Much of this variability, however, is probably part of the learning
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process as children re ne their linguistic systems and in fact narrow the variability.

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 120 Linguistic Variation and Change

Figure 7.1 Coronal stop deletion (CSD) by age and following environment
(adapted from Labov 1989: 93)

One of the challenges of studying childhood variation is determining what part of

the variation is developmental – related to the process of acquisition – and what part
is part of the system they are acquiring. If a longitudinal view of individual children
is taken, then the di erence will appear over time. However, little work of this sort
has been done.
Despite these di culties, it is clear from the research so far that children learn
variation as an integral part of the language acquisition process. e earliest age that
has been reliably reported is about three, and the studies that have been performed
show that some fairly complex patterns of variation already appear. A classic early
work in this area is Payne’s (1980) study in a suburb of Philadelphia. She found
.

that the young children in her corpus whose parents were native to the area had
acquired the complex pattern of /æ/-tensing characteristic of the area, but that those
with parents from other dialect areas had not mastered it. us, it appears that early
exposure to phonemic categories is crucial in acquiring at least this complex system
.A

(or it may be that such complex patterns need lots of input to form).
Roberts (1997) analyses the variation patterns for coronal stop deletion (CSD)
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among 3- and 4-year-old children in Philadelphia, and nds that they have mostly
acquired the following environment and morphological constraints. e results for
following segment are shown in Figure 7.1. It can be seen the children closely match
the adult pattern, with the exception of the vowel category, which diverges slightly.
Labov (1989) shows that the structural constraints on CSD and (ing) are already
2011. E

present in the speech of a 7-year-old boy in Philadelphia, and also shows that the
relevant constraints are present – including the grammatical conditioning of (ing).
Foulkes et al. (1999) similarly showed that children aged between 2 and 4 were
learning the complex glottalisation patterns in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England.
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Kerswill (1996), however, working in a dialect contact situation, shows that fairly

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 Acquisition of variation 121

young children are active in creating the new dialect. In other words, they are
already deviating from the language of their caregivers and towards a new com-
munity norm. is result suggests that even at a young age, if children have contact
with other children, these peers will have some in uence on the development of
variable patterns. However, a later analysis (Kerswill and Williams 2005) shows that
the youngest (4-year-old) children have the closest correlation with their caregiv-
ers, while older (8- and 12-year-old) children correlate less with their caregivers,
showing that there is an in uence of caregivers that is greater at the younger stage
than at the older.
One of the most important recent studies in this area is Smith et al.’s study
(2007) of 2-to-4-year olds. ey discover how two di erent variables in Buckie,
Scotland, are acquired in di erent ways. ey recorded caregiver–child pairs in
natural settings, and then measured rates of variation for two local variables. One
was ( υ), the use of [u: ] for a set of words where the standard has /aυ/, as in out or
house, while the other was the use of verbal -s in third person plural contexts. Both
variables are represented in the phrase in the title: My trousers is fa’in doon. Note
that it is only the second token of ( υ) in the title that shows [u: ]; this is because
there are lexical constraints on this variable. Smith et al. show that the structural
constraints on both variables are present in children from a young age. We might
predict that in general, the more regular constraints and patterns seem to be adopted
at an earlier age, while more complex, speci c, and abstract patterns show up later;
but this is not always the result.
Smith et al. also show that the caregiver has a di erent e ect on the children’s use
of each variable. ey found a very signi cant e ect for both structural and social
patterns for ( υ), but no such e ect for (-s). Moreover, the caregivers’ patterns
matched that of the wider community (which Smith et al. also had data from) for
(-s), but they found that the caregivers used less [u: ] for ( υ) than the community
when speaking to their children. So for some variables caregivers adjust their child-
.

directed speech, while for others they don’t. It remains to be discovered under
what condition each occurs, but it is a reasonable hypothesis that it is related to the
indexical status ( rst- or second-order) of the variable; ( υ) is a more stereotyped
feature of Scottish speech than plural -s.
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In addition to the structural patterning at a young age, the social use of varia-
tion is also present at this age. Labov (1989) shows regular intraspeaker patterning
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for CSD and (ing) for a 7-year-old in Philadelphia. Such patterning is di cult to
detect, since most young children’s speech is not collected in extended interviews
with opportunities for di erent forms of speech activity. Smith et al.’s study is again
important in this regard. ey coded their data by speech activity: play, teaching,
routine, and discipline. For ( υ), they found a stunning correlation between caregiv-
2011. E

ers and children, as shown in Figure 7.2.

e gure shows that the caregivers have a regular intraspeaker shift between roles
in which they are creating a clear authoritative persona (teaching and discipline) and
ones that create less di erence between them and the child. Most importantly, the
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children match this di erence exactly. is result hints that the early acquisition of

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 122 Linguistic Variation and Change

Figure 7.2 Percentage of monophthongisation by speaker and speech activity

(adapted from Smith et al. 2007: 75)
.
.A

Figure 7.3 Percentage verbal (-s) by speaker and speech activity (adapted
P

from Smith et al. 2007: 84)

social variation is related to the di erent prototypical roles played by parents and
children. Notice that the roles in which power di erences are highlighted are those
in which the most ‘standard’ ( υ) is used, while more equal, solidary situations have
2011. E

a higher ‘vernacular’ use. is pattern is a view into the dialectic between the pattern
of the wider community and its use as a stance index, and shows how the indexi-
cal relationships in the community are recreated in new generations from early on.
Note, however, that (-s) did not show such a pattern, as shown in Figure 7.3.
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So in terms of both structural and social constraints, and age of acquisition,

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 Acquisition of variation 123

variables di er considerably. It is not clear at this point what is important in deter-

mining these di erences. Some possibilities are the level of abstractness or complex-
ity involved in the variable, the frequency with which tokens of the variable are
present, the indexical order of the variable, the di erence in rates of caregiver use
(i.e., whether caregivers make big shifts as in the ( υ) variable in Buckie, or small
ones as for (-s)), and how that is related to the indexical order. Finally, note that one
of the important general ndings about language acquisition from these studies is
that caregivers do not use one kind of speech to children, but can shift considerably
depending on the situation.

O L DER C HIL DRE N A ND A DO LE SCEN T S

Older children have been much less studied than both young children and adoles-
cents. However, it is clear that this stage of life is important. While cultures di er in
this respect, this tends to be the age range (about 6 to 12 years old) when children
spend less time with caregivers and more with peer groups. In fact, in most studies
it is not seen as a stage at all. Of course, life stages are social organisations of age,
but in societies where there is a clear adolescent stage, the one before it is a mystery.
Kerswill and Williams (2005), however, do include 8-year-olds (along with 4-
and 12-year-olds) in their sample in Milton Keynes. ey nd that for their (ou)
variable (the fronting of the vowel in words like goat), the youngest group is cor-
related with caregivers, while this correlation disappears for the 8- and 12-year-olds.
is result provides clear evidence that it is at this young stage that children begin
to move to the variation norms of their peer group, and that this is probably where
the incrementation of change begins to take place.
Eckert’s study of two elementary schools in northern California is one of the only
studies to investigate this stage. She shows that it is at this stage that children begin
to enter what she calls the heterosexual marketplace as they build a ‘peer-based social
.

order’. is social order

emerges in the course of fth and sixth grades in the form of a heterosocial crowd,
which is an alliance of smaller friendship groups of kids who have emerged as
popular through early elementary school. e crowd brings boys’ and girls’ net-
.A

works into a collaboration, combining social status and resources and yielding a
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su ciently large social aggregate to dominate the local scene and to contrast with
the other kids’ small friendship groups. (2008b: 31)
is crowd is concerned especially with heterosexual pairs, and the girls are the
organisers of the pairing (or ‘trading’). Eckert shows how this heterosexual market
becomes a linguistic one, and how linguistic variants become involved in the kinds
2011. E

of stances that girls and boys take in order to be successful on this market. It is
clear from this work that at this point, the ‘kids’ are not so much reproducing the
variation that they learned from their parents as using that variation as a resource
for social work in this crowd. Eckert shows especially how di erences in resources
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in the two schools – which di er in their dominant ethnicity and class background

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 124 Linguistic Variation and Change

– mean that di erent patterns of linguistic variation appear in each, and that di er-
ent ‘ethnolects’ are maintained. Her work shows that this stage sees the beginning
of the emergence of each generation’s adolescent contribution to language change.
It is clear from many studies that the adolescent stage is when most language change
happens. Labov (2001a) shows that there is a peak of use for ‘vernacular’ variants
in adolescence. Eckert’s (2000) groundbreaking study of peer groups and variation,
discussed in Chapter 4, showed how these changes are embedded into the social
structure and practice of adolescents in high school. Central to that practice is
the creation of what Eckert calls a persona, and most important for some kids is a
persona that is distinctive. As one group moves to create the most distinctive stylistic
practice (in Eckert’s work, generally the burnouts, but that oversimpli es consider-
ably), they increment changes further away from more ‘conservative’ speakers. ese
speakers don’t experience themselves as incrementing a change, but as aligning
themselves with certain stances and personae that are indexed by the most extreme
variants, and in the process increment the change.

ADUL TH O OD
Adulthood, as Eckert (2000) points out, is often not thought of as a developmen-
tal stage, but it is, and in fact one can identify di erent adulthood stages as well.
However, linguists (variationists included) have often viewed adulthood as the end-
point of acquisition. While this may be the case for some variables (such as mergers),
it is clear that changes do take place over the course of speakers’ adult lives. For
example, Guy and Boyd (1990) investigated whether CSD constraints changed over
speakers’ lifetimes. ey found that most constraints remained constant, but that
many speakers changed their analysis of the irregular past verb class that includes
told and slept. ese researchers argue that this shows that speakers continue to
develop grammars across the lifespan.
.

ere are also likely to be changes in adulthood as adults move into new speech
situations and roles. Here again, there is very little work on how, for example,
moving from being an unmarried 25-year-old to a 35-year-old parent changes the
variable patterns a person uses, and what variables are sensitive to such a change.
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T R ANS M IS S IO N AN D IN C RE ME NT AT IO N O F C HAN GES

What then is the role of children in the transmission and incrementation of
changes? Transmission refers to the passing of the change from one generation to
the next, while incrementation is the advancement of the change in the same direc-
tion by the next generation. Labov (2001a: 437) proposes that children learn the
2011. E

language of their caregivers, at least at rst, and that they develop stylistic di erences
such that they associate a new or vernacular variant with ‘nonconformity’, which he
argues is central in the incrementation or ‘moving forward’ of changes as well. From
the research described above, this hypothesis seems sound at a very general level:
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some variables are di erentiated by style (or speech activity, or stance) early on, and

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 Acquisition of variation 125

children match their caregiver’s pattern. However, we don’t see all variables being
learned in this way; some are more complex, or they are not used by the caregivers to
di erentiate stance or speech activity. But it is clear that some variability is learned
by children from caregivers.
Of course, it is what they do with that variability as they grow up and then grow
old that is of central interest to a theory or model of change. For we have seen that
children actively learn and sometimes create new ways of speaking in their peer
groups. In most cases, this appears (at least once it is completed) to be a mechanical
process in that many people move in the same direction – all the cities in the wide
Northern Cities dialect area, for example, advance vowels in the same way. But
observing this mechanical process does not provide us with an understanding of it.
Rather, this incrementation seems to happen because the variability is a resource for
social meaning locally and (it appears to each speaker at least) individually. e term
‘acquisition of variation’ is thus problematic, because at rst children acquire only
a general variation pattern; later on they actively create their own patterns of varia-
tion, thus moving a change forward, or reversing or recycling it.
.
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2011. E
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GRADO EN ESTUDIOS INGLESES

VARIACIÓN Y CAMBIO LINGÜÍSTICO EN LENGUA INGLESA

Dras. Senra y Barreiro

UNIT 5: Languages and Dialects in Contact

Unit 5 concentrates on some issues connected to language and dialects

in contact. The main goal of this unit is to explore in some detail the
methodological frameworks and theoretical issues that relate to the
origins and development of various outcomes of language contact. The
coverage will include pidgin and creole formation.

1. Language contact

Language contact studies variation between different language varieties

(both languages and dialects) and the influence they receive from each
other. The main objective is to describe language as both a stable and a
changing reality. Some of the disciplines which study language contact
are Sociolinguistics, Social Psychology of Language, and Applied
Linguistics.

One of the main reasons why languages change is that they

come into contact with other languages. This contact typically involves
bilingual speakers, i.e., people who speak the two (or more) languages
involved. The languages of such individuals may act upon and influence
each other in a wide range of ways (eg. in the adoption of features of
pronunciation, the borrowing of words, or the modification of grammar).
(Schendl 2001: 55).
It can be said that virtually all languages have been influenced at
one time or another by contact with other languages. For thousands of
years, human beings felt the need to communicate with other human
beings for the purpose of the exchange of goods and trade. It was very

1
common for a few members of the tribes/communities in contact to
acquire some knowledge of each other’s languages.
Whenever people speaking different languages come into contact,
there is a natural tendency to find ways to communicate with very
different results: from vocabulary loan to the creation of new languages.
Old English, for example, only had about three per cent of borrowed or
loan words, while 70 per cent of modern English is said to consist of
loan words from more than 80 different languages, primarily Latin and
French (Schendl 2001). These possible outcomes depend not only on
linguistic but also on social and psychological factors.
There are several large contact languages (lingua franca) in the
world. English is at present the most widespread contact language.
Formerly French was also a widespread contact language (it was the
major European lingua franca in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries), but it has now lost its role to English.

1.1. Linguistic outcomes of language contact

The consequences of language contact have been studied since the

nineteenth century. For over a century the mainstream of Historical
Linguistics focused on the motivations and internal mechanisms that
produce language change, as the Comparative Method, which assumed
that virtually all linguistic changes arise due to intrasystemic reasons.
No one took into consideration mixed languages, since it presupposed
influence of other languages. However, the study of Pidgins and Creoles
led to other studies on language changes that result from language
contact. According to Thomason and Kaufmann:

[…] there are indeed mixed languages, and they include pidgins and
creoles but are not confined to them; mixed languages do not fit
within the genetic model and therefore cannot be classified
genetically at all; but most languages are not mixed, and the
traditional family tree model of diversification and genetic

2
 relationship remains the main reference point of comparative-
historical linguistics owing to the fact that it is usually possible [..] to
distinguish mixed languages, whose origins are nongenetic, from
languages whose development has followed the much more common
genetic line. (1988: 3)

Weinreich investigated languages in contact in his 1953 book,

especially with regard to the bilingual speaker. In the twentieth century
Weinreich and Haugen emphasized the importance of language contact
from both a linguistic and a social perspective. Contact Linguistics has
become a subdiscipline of Linguistics that in recent years has been
reinforced by the work of Thomason and Kaufman reflected, among
others, in their book Language Contact (1988) in which they study
various phenomena of language change and try to lay the groundwork
for the typology of the outcomes of language change.
Thomason and Kaufmann (1988) object to the structuralist view
since they believe that the history of a language is the history of its
speakers and not an independent phenomenon that can be studied
without reference to the social context in which they are immersed.
Likewise, they oppose the linguistic constrains postulated by authors
such as Meillet, Sapir, the linguists of the Prague school or Weinreich
himself who maintained that language structure defines or decides what
can happen due to external influence. According to Thomason and
Kaufmann, these assumptions are invalid, and argue that any linguistic
feature can be transferred from one language to another. Their theory of
linguistic interference is summarized as follows: “[…] it is the
sociolinguistic history of the speakers, and not the structure of their
language, that is primarily determinant of the linguistic outcome of
language contact” (1988: 35). The most extensive case study carried out
in their book is the one related to English in contact with other
Germanic languages, in an attempt to establish the types of linguistic
changes caused by language contact in the Old, Middle and Early
Modern English periods.

3
 Historical linguists study language caused by contact between
languages or dialects. Different methodologies are used for language
contact and dialect contact. In dialect contact primacy is given to the
social process, while in language contact primacy is given to linguistic
factors. However, as noted by Thomason (2003), in both dialect and
language contact, linguistic and social factors must be taken into
account in any explanation of linguistic change as dialects of the same
language may have more different structural points than analogous
structures in languages genetically related. Moreover, in many language
communities contact with other languages is more frequent than
contact with other dialects geographically distant. In this sense
Thomason maintains: “In my view, contact between languages (or
dialects) is a source of linguistic change whenever a change occurs that
would have been unlikely, or at least less likely, to occur outside a
specific contact situation” (2003: 688).
Most linguistic processes that take place through language
contact are the result of bilingualism situations in which there is a
need to communicate with speakers of languages that are not mutually
intelligible.
We can in general distinguish three broad kinds of contact
situations: (1) those involving language maintenance, (2) those involving
language shift, and (3) those that lead to the creation of new contact
languages. Language maintenance refers to the preservation by a
speech community of its native language from generation to generation.
The language can change but only by small degrees and owing to
internal developments and/or (limited) contact with other languages
(Thomason and Kaufmann). Language shift takes place when contact
with other languages can lead to the partial or total abandonment of a
group’s native language in favour of another. In some cases, the
minority language may preserve its L1 for certain functions, while
acquiring the dominant language for other uses. Finally, under
particular circumstances, intensive language contact may result in the
birth of new types of contact languages, new languages which include

4
bilingual mixed languages, pidgins and creoles. In this unit we are
concentrating on pidgin and creole languages. Most cases of language
contact can be assigned clearly to one or another of these categories.
However there are many situations that cannot be classified so readily.
Some important terms in language contact are:
1) Borrowing: According to Thomason and Kaufman (1988: 37): “the
incorporation of foreign features into a group’s native language by
speakers of that language.”
2) Convergence: The process whereby languages become structurally
more similar to each other (Schendl 2001: 124).

1.2. Language birth: Pidgins and Creoles

The study of language contact has given way to other linguistic

subfields, such as Pidgin and Creole Linguistics or Creolistics. In this
regard it is worth mentioning the existence of societies devoted to the
study and documentation of pidgin and creole languages worldwide, as
well as the study of contact with other languages or dialects such as the
Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics
(https://sites.google.com/a/umich.edu/spcl/home) or the Society for
Caribbean Linguistics (http://www.scl-
online.net/). At present there are about 200 pidgins and creoles
worldwide, most of which are spoken in West Africa, the Caribbean and
the South Pacific.
The study of pidgin and creole languages has accelerated
since the 60s and 70s thanks to studies of variation and social
groups contact, and it is often defined as a subfield of Linguistics
within the theory of language contact. In turn, within this
discipline there are others such as, for example, Applied
Creolistics described as "the application of the theories, methods,
or findings of pidgin and creole linguistics (or Creolistics) to the
solution of practical problems" (Siegel 2002: 7).

5
 One of the pioneers in this field of study was Hugo Schuchardt
who in the late nineteenth century showed several arguments against
the theory that languages do not mix, and against traditional ideas
about the genetic relationship of languages which allowed little change
induced by language contact. Schuchardt and scholars such as William
D. Whitney presented numerous examples of changes resulting from
language contact in bilingualism situations, in the formation of Pidgins
and Creoles, etc. This fact represented a challenge to the Stammbaum
theory and the idea of one parent language for all languages. It was
concluded that, although the genetic model is valid for most languages,
many others have experienced changes induced by contact at some
point in their history. There is a large number of mixed languages
whose subsystems cannot go back to one single language, as is the case
of Pidgins and Creoles. For most of the twentieth century, the study of
Pidgin and Creole languages was rooted in the historical-comparative
tradition. However, it has now turned towards a more sociolinguistic
orientation.
The advocates of the family-tree model accepted the apparent
splitting of daughter languages from their parent language. However, in
actual observation, no speech community is completely uniform. Some
scholars did not accept the Neogrammarian opinion that sound change
is regular and exceptional, but rather opposed this and the family-tree
model. The slogan was "each word has its own history". The alternative
to the family-tree model was the Wellentheorie 'wave theory' usually
attributed to Johannes Schmidt and Hugo Schuchardt. According to
this theory, linguistic changes spread outward concentrically like
waves, which become progressively weaker with the distance from their
central point.
Of the approximately 6000 living languages in the world, half
have less than 10,000 speakers and a quarter less than 1,000 (Wurm
2001: 1). This amount of small languages has led to widespread
bilingualism and multilingualism and many large languages are used as
contact languages.

6
1.2.1. Pidgins

A category of contact languages are the so-called pidgin languages.

These developed in situations of minimal and rudimentary
communication requirements between two groups of people, one usually
superior to the other in economic and political power (Wurm 2001). In
these cases, a pidgin language normally has in its initial stage a limited
vocabulary containing words from the language of the dominant group,
usually with a pronunciation reflecting the language(s) of the locals,
plus words from the language(s) of the latter, and a simple grammatical
structure, with mostly only short sentences, which reflect features of
the language(s) of the locals (Wurm 2001: 5). If that pidgin language
continues to be used for a long time it becomes more and more
sophisticated. A pidgin language can become the children’s first
language. Such a language is referred to as a creole which has
developed from an original pidgin language through the process of
creolization.
By definition, pidgins have no native speakers and it is always a
reduced language. The grammar is always simpler than the grammar of
the source language. Most European trading pidgins were based on the
languages of the seafaring nations. For example, a Basque-Icelandic
pidgin existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and
Russenorsk was used along the northern coast of Norway, Finland and
Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These pidgins died
out when the contact no longer took place (Wright 2004).
Some definitions of pidgins are:
"Pidgins result from the communicative strategies of adults who
already have a native command of at least one language. Pidgins
have therefore been called 'auxiliary' languages because they are
needed by their speakers in addition to their own native language,
to bridge a communicative gap with speakers of some other
language (Sebba 1997: 149).

7
 "A pidgin is an auxiliary language with a reduced structure and
lexicon which develops to meet the communicative requirements
of speakers of mutually unintelligible languages, mainly for
certain rudimentary transactions in trade, seafaring, or the
management of labour in general" (Schendl 2001: 59).

1.2.2. Creoles

European colonial expansion during the fifteenth to nineteenth

centuries led in many cases to the creation of new communities of
people that were brought from distant regions of the world. For
instance, slaves were brought from West Africa to the plantations of the
New World. Contact between them and European settlers led to the
emergence of Creole languages. The term ‘creole’ refers to the locally
born descendants of slaves in the colonies. In the process of
creolization, the simple structures of pidgins get elaborated in a variety
of ways: morphology and syntax become more complex, the vocabulary
increases, and pronunciation becomes more stable (Schendl 2001: 61).
Some examples of Creoles include Sranan Tongo, Jamaican and
Guyanese Creole, Haitian Creole, and Curacao. Creoles also emerged in
the Indian Ocean where European colonies were established, for
example, Isle of France Creole. The characteristics of Creole languages
such as classification, origins and sources, etc. remain a matter of
controversy.

1.3. Language death

According to Schendl (2001: 63), the term 'language death' applies to

the extinction of a language, its complete disappearance without trace,
or with traces only in recorded form. Languages can cease to be spoken
for two reasons: 1) a language dies because its speakers do for various

8
reasons (disease, natural disaster or genocide, e.g. Tasmanian); 2) the
second kind of language death has to do with intensive language
contact. One group in contact with a second group disappears because
it makes the shift to the other group's language. The reasons can be
positive (such as marriage, economic advantage, etc.) or negative
(imbalance of economic and political power) (Wright 2003: 230).
Languages can be endangered due to contact with one or more
dominant languages, normally after an extended period of bilingualism,
which threaten the existence of the minority languages, in many cases
leading to their disappearance. People survive but their language does
not. Some contact languages have become endangered and some even
extinct. The reasons for this are often oppression by monolingual
speakers of dominant languages.
Romaine (2002) explains the four main reasons why so many
languages are in an endangered position:

Fewer than 4 per cent of the world's languages have any kind of
official status in the countries where they are spoken ... most
languages are unwritten, not recognised officially, restricted to
local community and home functions and spoken by very small
groups of people (2002: 1).

2. Dialect contact

The difference between languages in contact and dialects in contact is

typically defined as involving contact between non-mutually intelligible
as opposed to mutual intelligible varieties. The interaction of dialects
with one another has received a lot of attention from Peter Trudgill
especially in his 1986 study Dialects in Contact.

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2.1. Dialects in contact and the history of English

About 700 million people have English as their first language, and in
total as many as 1500 million may be fluent speakers of English
(Crystal 2006). English is the majority language in Britain and the USA,
but also in Australia and New Zealand, and a national language in both
Canada and South Africa. In other countries it is a second language
and in others (Pakistan, Ireland or the Philippines) it is an official
language or the language of business. All these modern varieties of
English derive from one ultimate source, namely, the Germanic
language-variety spoken by the Anglo-Saxon invaders who came to
England in the 5th c. A.D. from the lands across the North Sea. They
spoke a dialect of the Germanic branch of Indo-European which
eventually became a distinct language, English, which developed in the
British Islands up to the 16th c. During the centuries of imperial
expansion, English was taken to other parts of the world.
The native inhabitants of the island were Celts, speaking various
forms of Celtic. With the departure of the Romans from Britannia, as
they called it, in the 5th c., Germanic tribes settled on the island.
Germanic is the term used to describe a group of languages which share
a set of characteristics unique to them some of which are still
observable in Present-Day English (PDE). Old English (OE) was a West
Germanic language together with Old High German, Old Frisian and
Old Saxon; Old Norse was a North Germanic language, whereas Gothic
was East Germanic. The most important present-day languages which
are of Germanic origin are English, Frisian, Dutch, German, Danish,
Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Faroese. Germanic, in turn, belongs to a
larger language family known as Indo-European which also includes
Indic, Greek, Romance, Slavic, Baltic and Celtic, among others.
English has changed over the centuries and it has been
influenced by other languages such as the Scandinavian languages
spoken by the Viking raiders who invaded England between the 8th c.
and 11th c., the French spoken by the Normans in the 11th c., or Latin

10
which was the language of the church for centuries. Therefore, when
studying the history of the English language, it is important to know the
languages English has been in contact with.
As has already being explained, languages are not static, they are
constantly changing. Old English is very different to Middle English
(ME) or to Present-Day English. Linguistic change can be produced by
internal and external causes. On the one hand, the internal structure of
languages is dynamic and can change for internal reasons. On the other
hand, the external causes for language change are diverse. Languages
can change, for example, because their speakers come into contact with
the speakers of other languages.
Various periods are recognised in the history of English although
the precise boundaries are still a source of debate. These periods are
characterised by certain historical, language-external events: Prehistoric
Old English (aprox. 450-650/700) is the period before written records;
Old English (aprox. 700-1066). There are difficulties in assessing the
dialect situation in Old English. Most Old English which has come
down to us is written in the West Saxon dialect, since the power was
centred in the South-Western kingdom of Wessex. However, there is
evidence for at least three other dialect-groupings: Old Mercian, Old
Northumbrian and Kentish; Middle English (1066-1476). The beginning
of this period is marked by the Norman Conquest and the end by the
coming of printing in Britain; Early Modern English (from 1476 to the
early 18th c.); Later Modern English period (from the early 18th c. to the
present day).

2.1.1. The Old English Period

In this unit we are very briefly going to analyse one case study, namely
the Old Norse influence on Old English. The Anglo-Saxons had been
living in England in relative peace for some three centuries when they
began to be disturbed by their northern relatives. Old Norse belonged
together with Anglo-Saxon to the same branch of the Germanic family.

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Some major linguistic changes due to contact with Old Norse were: (1)
the displacement of basic Anglo-Saxon terms by Norse equivalents; (2)
the establishment of Norse terms regionally in the Danelaw; Some 1400
place-names of Scandinavian origin occur in England. Some 600
contain the Old Norse element by, meaning a town or settlement:
Derby, Whitby, Denby (‘town of the Danes’). (3) the semantic changes
undergone by Anglo-Saxon terms which have adopted the meaning of
the Norse cognate. The Norse form survives in the Danelaw, while the
Saxon alternatives are to be found in the south. Examples of semantic
changes undergone by native terms as a result of the Norse influence of
cognate forms are OE dwellan ‘to lead astray’ under the influence of ON
dvelja ‘to live’ took the sense of dwell; OE dream ‘joy’ took the sense of
‘dream’ under the semantic influence of ON draumr.
Some important issues when studying the contact of Old Norse
with Old English are 1) did the Anglo-Saxons learn to speak Norse or
the Scandinavians learn to speak English; or where there something of
both? If so, was such bilingualism widespread? We still do not have
adequate understanding of the degree to which these peoples were
mutually intelligible, or what language and languages were involved.
There are some Anglo-Saxon texts which show information relating to
Anglo-Norse contact: ‘The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan’ in the OE
Orosius, deriving from the reign of Alfred in the late ninth century (cf.
Fernández Cuesta and Senra Silva).
Some scholars have suggested that there was simplification of the
Old English grammar through contact with Old Norse. They believe that
inflexions were non-functional in communication between speakers of
the two languages, and the consequence for English was the loss of
inflexions and the development of a fixed word-order, observable in
Middle English. This has led some scholars to maintain that early
Middle English can be regarded as a creole arising from Anglo-Norse
contact. In this sense, Fernández Cuesta (2004) maintains:

12
 ‘[….] those who attribute Middle English morphological simplification
to Scandinavian (or French) influence tend to forget that the
morphological system of the Northern varieties of Old English was
already much simpler than that of the other dialects (West Saxon, for
example), and that the changes that make Northern varieties of
Middle English appear more ‘progressive’ or ‘advanced’ in the
direction of linguistic change started long before the Scandinavian
influence could be felt in the north’ (235).

There is a three-century gap between Northern Old and Middle English,

since no other texts are found until the 13th c. However, there are
patterns of regional continuity in these varieties, especially at the
morphological level. This, and the fact that the morphological
simplification of Northern English started before the Scandinavian
influence could be felt in the North, seems to go against the creolization
hypothesis.

13
References

Fernández Cuesta, J. 2004. “The (dis)continuity between Old

Northumbrian and Northern Middle English”. Revista Canaria de
Estudios Ingleses, 49: 233-244.
Fernández Cuesta, J. and I. Senra Silva. 2000. "Othere and Wulfstane:
One or Two Voyagers at the Court of King Alfred?" Studia
Neophilologica, 72: 18-23.
Romaine, S. 2002. "The impact of language policy on endangered
languages". MOST Journal on Multicultural Societies 4(2):1-28.
Schendl 2001. Historical Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sebba, M. 1997. Contact Languages, Pidgins and Creoles. London:
MacMillan.
Siegel, J. 2002. "Applied creolistics in the twenty-first century". In
Pidgin and Creole Linguistics in the Twenty-first Century, G. Gilbert
(ed.), 7–48. New York NY: Peter Lang.
Thomason, S. G. 2003. “What motivates changes that occur in emerging
pidgins and creoles?” Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 18/1:
107-120.
Thomason, S. G. and T. Kaufman. 1988. 1992 (2nd edition). Language
Contact, Creolization and Genetic Linguistics. Berkely: University of
California Press.
Trudgill, P. 1986. Dialects in Contact. New York: Basil Blackwell.
Weinreich, 1953. Languages in Contact. Findings and Problems. Mouton:
The Hague.
Wright, S. 2003. Language Policy and Language Planning. From
Nationalism to Globalization. Houndsmills: Palgrave MacMillan.
Wurm, S. A. 2001. “Contact languages and the preservation of
endangered languages”. Estudios de Sociolingüística 2 (2): 1-12.

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Internet resources

Here you can find internet resources related to the topic of unit 5,
mainly, pidgins and creoles, minority and endangered languages and
dialects of English.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/routesofenglish/index.shtml: The Routes of English

was a programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Presented by Melvyn
Bragg, it explored many aspects of the English language throughout the
world, particularly variations in pronunciation and the sociolinguistic
significance of such variations.

http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/: The website Sounds

Familiar? Accents and Dialects of the UK is one of the British Library
online learning resources. It is dedicated to the study of British accents
and vocabularies, from a contemporary and historical perspective.
Users can investigate recent trends in pronunciation, such as ‘upspeak’
or ‘T-glottaling’, or discover how the English of British Asians is
influenced by their bilingual status. The resource includes a selection of
over seventy audio recordings and more than 600 short audio clips from
the British Library Sound Archive. Some of the materials were recorded
in the 1950s and others almost half a century later, between 1998
and1999. The resource consists of five main sections: Regional Voices;
Changing Voices; Your Voices; Case Studies; and Activities.

https://www.coe.int/en/web/language-policy: Website of the Language Policy

Division of the Council of Europe.

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https://www.ecoi.net/en/source/11064.html: Website of the Council of
Europe’s Secretariat of the Framework Convention for the Protection
of National Minorities (FCNM).

http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/saoghal/mion-chanain/en:
This site provides access to links on about 80
European languages.
http://www.unesco.org/languages-atlas/ UNESCO Atlas of Endangered Languages

http://www.ethnologue.com/: Ethnologue: An encyclopaedic reference

work cataloguing all of the world’s 6,912 known living languages.

Organisations:

https://www.coe.int/en/web/portal: Council of Europe.

http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/langmin.html: European Union.

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 www.un.org: United Nations.

http://www.efnil.org/: European Federation of National

Institutions for Language.

http://www.unhchr.ch/minorities/: United Nations High Commissioner

for Human Rights.

http://www.ecmi.de: The European Centre for Minority Issues

(Germany).

https://www.linguisticsociety.org/: The Linguistic Society of America,

with information on endangered languages.

www.bbc.co.uk: BBC website. You can find an enormous amount of

information on minority languages in this website. Here are just some
examples:

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4536450.stm
“Are indigenous languages dead?”

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 http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/yourvoice/language_ecology.shtml
“Language ecology.”

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/highlands_and_i
slands/7396013.stm
“Minority languages could be lost.

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2615363.stm
“Microsoft embraces Nynorsk language.”

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/3181551.stm
“Tory attacks archdruid over language.”

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7131768.stm
“Councils urged to translate less.”

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Documents:

http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/Commun/QueVoulezVous.asp?NT=1
48&CM=2&DF=8/11/2008&CL=ENG: European Charter for Regional or
Minority Languages.

http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/Commun/QueVoulezVous.asp?NT=1
57&CM=2&DF=8/11/2008&CL=ENG: European Convention for the
Protection of National Minorities.

Pidgin and Creole languages

www.creolica.net: Creolica: Online journal of the Groupe Européen de

Recherches en Langues Créoles with articles in English and French,
and useful links.

www.radioaustralia.net.au/tokpisin: ABC radio Australia: Tok Pisin

service. Here you can listen to live streaming in Tok Pisin.

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