This book presents a controversial theory about the formation of new colonial dialects, examining Latin American Spanish, Canadian French, and North American English, with a special focus on ...Australian, South African, and New Zealand English.
In the 17
century, the English region of East Anglia contained many of the major population centres of the British Isles, not least Norwich, England’s second city at that time. One might therefore ...predict that East Anglian dialects of English would have played a major role in determining the nature of the new colonial Englishes which were first beginning to emerge during this period. This paper considers some of the phonological and grammatical features of East Anglian English which can be argued to have been influential in this way.
In the last five hundred years or so, the English language has undergone remarkable geographical expansion, bringing it into contact with other languages in new locations. It also caused different ...regional dialects of the language to come into contact with each other in colonial situations. This book is made up of a number of fascinating tales of historical-sociolinguistic detection. These are stories of origins - of a particular variety of English or linguistic feature - which together tell a compelling general story. In each case, Trudgill presents an intriguing puzzle, locates and examines the evidence, detects clues that unravel the mystery, and finally proposes a solution. The solutions are all original, often surprising, sometimes highly controversial. Providing a unique insight into how language contact shapes varieties of English, this entertaining yet rigorous account will be welcomed by students and researchers in linguistics, sociolinguistics and historical linguistics.
The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, written by a distinguished international roster of contributors, reflects the vitality and growth of the discipline in its multifaceted pursuits. It is ...a convenient, hand-held repository of the essential knowledge about the study of language variation and change. Written by internationally recognized experts in the field. Reflects the vitality and growth of the discipline. Discusses the ideas that drive the field and is illustrated with empirical studies. Includes explanatory introductions which set out the boundaries of the field and place each of the chapters into perspective.
There is a challenging issue for linguistic typology which involves the relationships which might exist between societal type and aspects of linguistic structure. Linguistic-typological studies have ...provided us with insights into the range of structures available in human languages, but we do not yet have explanations for why, of all the possible structures available, particular languages select particular structures and not others. A legitimate sociolinguistic viewpoint would be that some social explanations may be available. The sociolinguistic factors suggested as being relevant are language contact versus isolation, and community size and network structure. This paper deals with this thesis from the point of view of Austronesian phonology, with particular reference to Polynesian phoneme inventories.
Speed of linguistic change is not constant: it differs as between different language and dialects, and between different chronological periods. These differences are, at least to some extent, ...conditioned by social parameters. Two major social factors are involved in producing these different rates of linguistic change. There is, first, the role of the relative degree of contact versus isolation which speech communities have experienced: a good example is provided by the contrast between Faroese and Icelandic as opposed to the continental Scandinavian languages. There is, secondly, an important role for relative social stability versus social instability in the histories of communities. There is considerable evidence to suggest that conservative language varieties generally tend to be the ones which are relatively more geographically isolated than rapid-change varieties, as well as being relatively more stable as this paper illustrates, through a study of the linguistic consequences of social upheavals involving different historical periods, different continents, and different languages.
It is often supposed that dialect contact and dialect mixture were involved in the development of new colonial varieties of European languages, such as Brazilian Portuguese, Canadian French, and ...Australian English. However, while no one has denied that dialect contact took place, the role of dialect mixture has been disputed. Among those who do not accept a role for it, some have also considered the role of identity, especially new national identities, to be self-evident. This article argues for the role of dialect mixture and against the role of identity. It presents case studies from pre-16th-century colonial expansions of European languages, an era when any role for national identities would be very hard to argue for. Instead, it suggests that dialect mixture is the inevitable result of dialect contact, and that the mechanism which accounts for this is quasi-automatic accommodation in face-to-face interaction.NOTE: Very many thanks for help with this article go to David Britain, Brian Joseph, Lesley Milroy, James Milroy, and especially Max Wheeler.
This pocket-sized alphabetic guide introduces popular terms used in the study of language and society. A central topic within modern linguistics, sociolinguistics deals with human communication and ...the use of language in its social context. This glossary provides full coverage of both traditional and contemporary terminology.
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