new cambridge history of the english languagelan300/new_chel_vol_5_(eds... · 2020. 7. 16. ·...

New Cambridge History of the English LanguageVolume V: English in North America and the Caribbean

Editors: Natalie Schilling (Georgetown), Derek Denis (Toronto), Raymond Hickey(Essen)

I The United States

1. Language change and the history of American English (Walt Wolfram)2. The dialectology of Anglo-American English (Natalie Schilling)3. The roots and development of New England English (James N. Stanford)4. The history of the Midland-Northern boundary (Matthew J. Gordon)5. The spread of English westwards (Valerie Fridland and Tyler Kendall)6. American English in the city (Barbara Johnstone)7. English in the southern United States (Becky Childs and Paul E. Reed)8. Contact forms of American English (Cristopher Font-Santiago and Joseph

Salmons)

African American English

9. The roots of African American English (Tracey L. Weldon)10. The Great Migration and regional variation in the speech of African

Americans (Charlie Farrington)11. Urban African American English (Nicole Holliday)12. A longitudinal panel survey of African American English (Patricia

Cukor-Avila)

Latinx English

13. Puerto Rican English in Puerto Rico and in the continental United States(Rosa E. Guzzardo Tamargo)

14. The English of Americans of Mexican and Central American heritage (Erik R. Thomas)

II Canada

15. Anglophone settlement and the creation of Canadian English (CharlesBoberg)

NewCHEL Vol 5: English in North America and the Caribbean of 2

16. The open-class lexis of Canadian English: History, structure, and socialcorrelations (Stefan Dollinger)

17. Ontario English: Loyalists and beyond (Derek Denis, Bridget Jankowski andSali A. Tagliamonte)

18. The Prairies and the West of Canada (Alex D’Arcy and Nicole Rosen)19. English in Newfoundland (Kirwin, William, rev. Sandra Clarke and Raymond

Hickey)20. Canadian Maritime English (Matt Hunt Gardner)21. A (socio)linguistic aperçu of English as a minority language: the case of

Quebec (Shana Poplack)

III The Caribbean

22. Early English-lexifier creole in the circum-Caribbean area (Norval Smith)23. The Caribbean anglophone contact varieties: Creoles and koinés (Jeffrey P.

Williams)24. The development of English in Jamaica (Sylvia Kouwenberg)25. The anglophone Caribbean Rim (Angela Bartens)26. North American - Caribbean linguistic connections (Stephanie Hackert)


1Language Change and the History of American English

Walt WolframNorth Carolina State University

Abstract

This chapter covers the major changes in American English since its originalestablishment in North America. Both external changes in social and historicalcircumstances and internal linguistic mechanisms have driven change since the originalfounder effect that established the earliest regional and social varieties of NorthAmerican English. We consider both the external historical circumstances, such as theearliest cultural centers in Boston, Philadelphia, Jamestown, Charleston, and NewOrleans, to the effects of dialect divergence due to the Civil War, as well as differentmigratory periods and waves of movement and resettlement. For example, the earliersettlement was primarily from the east westward, a fact reflected in some of the majorregional boundaries of American English, but this has shifted in later migrations, suchas the great migration of African Americas from the South to the North and currentmovement of white populations southward. We also consider the effects of WorldWars and some of the critical linguistic changes that emanated from that period, aswell as current movements and the effect of the increase in global English. Linguistic-based changes rooted in the internal linguistic system per se have alsocreated differing regional clusters of American English, such as the systematicpush-pull effects of vowel systems, the regularization of formerly irregular patterns,and the restructuring of paradigmatic patterns in American English varieties. Forexample, one of the major vocalic shifts is the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, which iscentered in major Northern Cities such as Schenectady, Albany, Cleveland, Detroit, andChicago, has followed a cascading path of diffusion from large major metropolitanareas to smaller urban areas as it bypasses rural areas in between. At the same time,Southern varieties, which accelerated after the Civil War, are currently receding, withthe largest cities of the South leading this recession, as rural areas lag in the recessionof traditional Southern features. At the same time, newer regional dialect areas arearising on the West Coast in regions such as Northern California, Seattle, Portland andother areas carve out regional identities. In the process, a host of social, interactional,and agentive factors intersect in the dynamics of language change in the US over thecenturies, including social stratification, gender, ethnicity, social networks, style, andmodes of social interaction and agency. The resultant dynamics of dialect change in American society show (1) a core ofonce-remote varieties in historically isolated regions that are now endangered; (2) astable nucleus of sustained language varieties that still reflect the founder effect; and(3) a series of currently developing varieties that underscore the centrality of newercultural and regional areas in the United States. References (selected)


American Speech. Journal of the American Dialect Society. Durham, NC.Bailey, Guy (2001) The relationship between African American Vernacular English and

White vernaculars in the American South: A sociocultural history and somephonological evidence. In Sonja L. Lanehart (ed.), Sociocultural and HistoricalContexts of African American English. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins,53–92.

Bailey, Guy, Tom Wikle, Jan Tillery, and Lori Sand (1993) Some patterns of linguisticdiffusion. Language Variation and Change 5: 359–90.

Carver, Craig M. (1987) American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography. Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press.

Dictionary of American Regional English https://dare.wisc.edu/ Dictionary of Smoky Mountain and Appalachian English.

https://artsandsciences.sc.edu/appalachianenglish/node/807Dodsworth, Robin and Richard Benton (2020) Language Variation and Change in Social

Networks: A Bipartite Approach. New York: Routledge.Dubois, Sylvie, and Barbara Horvath (2003) The English vernacular of the creoles of

Louisiana. Language Variation and Change 15: 255–88.Eckert, Penelope (2000) Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Oxford: Blackwell.Eckert, Penelope, and Sally McConnell-Ginet (2013) Language and Gender, snd ed.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Eckert, Penelope, and John R. Rickford (eds.) (2001) Style and Sociolinguistic Variation.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Fought, Carmen (2003) Chicano English in Context. New York/Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan.Francis, Nelson W. (1983) Dialectology: An Introduction. New York: Longman.Fridland, Valerie, Tyler Kendall, Betsy Evans, and Alicia Wassink (2016) Speech in the

Western States: The Coastal Studies, Vol.1. Publication of the American DialectSociety. Durham: Duke University Press.

Fridland, Valerie, Tyler Kendall, Betsy Evans, and Alicia Wassink (2017) Speech in theWestern States: The Mountain West, Vol.2, Publication of the American DialectSociety. Durham: Duke University Press.

Gordon, Matthew J. (2001b) Small-Town Values and Big-City Vowels: A Study of theNorthern Cities Shift in Michigan. Publications of the American Dialect Society, 84.Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Green, Lisa J. (2002) African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. New York:Cambridge University Press.

Hartman, James W. (1985) Guide to pronunciation. In Frederic G. Cassidy (gen. ed.),Dictionary of American Regional English, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, Belknap, xli–lxi.

Kohn, Mary, Walt Wolfram, Janneke van Hofwegen, Jennifer Renn, and CharlesFarrington. (2020). African American Language: Development from Infancy toAdulthood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kroch, Anthony (1978) Towards a theory of social dialect variation. Language inSociety 7: 17–36.

Kurath, Hans (1939) Handbook of the Linguistic Geography of New England. Providence,RI: Brown University.

Kurath, Hans (1949) A Word Geography of the Eastern United States. Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press.

https://dare.wisc.edu/

https://artsandsciences.sc.edu/appalachianenglish/node/807


Kurath, Hans (1971) The origins of the dialectal differences in spoken AmericanEnglish. In Juanita V. Williamson and Virginia M. Burke (eds.), A Various Language:Perspectives on American Dialects. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 12–21.

Kurath, Hans and Raven I. McDavid, Jr. (1961) The Pronunciation of English in theAtlantic States. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Labov, William (1963) The social motivation of a sound change. Word 19: 273–307.Labov, William (1966) The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington,

DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Labov, William (1972b) Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press.Labov, William (1991) The three dialects of English. In Penelope Eckert (ed.), New

Ways of Analyzing Sound Change. New York: Academic Press, 1–44.Labov, William (1994) Principles of Linguistic Change, vol. 1: Internal Factors. Oxford:

Blackwell.Labov, William (2001b) Principles of Linguistic Change, vol. 2: Social Factors. Oxford:

Blackwell.Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg (2005) Atlas of North American

English. New York/Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Lanehart, Sonja L. (ed.) (2016) Handbook of African American Language.

Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins.LePage, R. B., and Andrée Tabouret-Keller (1985) Acts of Identity. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.McMillan, James B., and Michael Montgomery (1989) Annotated Bibliography of

Southern American English. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.Mencken, H. L. (1962) The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of

English in the United States, Supplement 1. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Montgomery, Michael B., and Joseph A. Hall (2004) Dictionary of Smoky Mountain

English. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Mufwene, Salikoko S. (2001) The Ecology of Language Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.Mufwene, Salikoko S., John R. Rickford, Guy Bailey, and John Baugh (eds.) (1998)

African American Vernacular English. London: Routledge.Pickering, John (1816) A vocabulary, or collection of words and phrases which have

been supposed to be peculiar to the United States of America. In M. M. Mathews(ed.) (1931), The Beginnings of American English: Essays and Comments. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.

Preston, Dennis R. (2003) Where are the dialects of American English at anyhow?American Speech 78: 235–54.

Rickford, John R. (1999) African American Vernacular English: Features, Evolution andEducational Implications. Oxford: Blackwell.

Reaser, Jeffrey, Eric Wilbanks, Karissa Wojcek, and Walt Wolfram (eds.) (2018)Language Variety in the New South: Contemporary Perspectives on Change andVariation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Rogers, Everett M. (1995) Diffusion of Innovations, 5th edn. New York: Free Press.Schilling-Estes, Natalie (2004) Constructing ethnicity in interaction. Journal of

Sociolinguistics 8: 163–95.Schilling-Estes, Natalie, and Walt Wolfram (1999) Alternative models for dialect death:

Dissipation vs. concentration. Language 75: 486–521.


Schneider, Edgar W. (2003) The dynamics of new Englishes: From identityconstruction to dialect birth. Language 79: 233–81.

Stanford, James N. (2019) New England English: Large-Scale Acoustic Sociophonetics andDialectology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Thomas, Erik R., ed. (2019) Mexican American English: Substrate Influence and the Birthof an Ethnolect. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Thomas, Erik R. (2001) An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Variation in New World English.Publications of the American Dialect Society 85. Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress.

Trudgill, Peter (1983) On Dialect: Social and Geographical Perspectives. New York: NewYork University Press.

Weldon, Tracey L. (2020) Middle-Class African American Speech. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Wolfram, Walt (1974) Sociolinguistic Aspects of Assimilation: Puerto Rican English inNew York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Wolfram, Walt (2003) Reexamining the development of African American English:Evidence from isolated communities. Language 79: 282–316.

Wolfram, Walt and Natalie Schilling (2016) American English: Dialects and Variation.Malden: Wiley/Blackwell.

Wolfram, Walt, and Donna Christian (1976) Appalachian Speech. Washington, DC:Center for Applied Linguistics.

Wolfram, Walt, Kirk Hazen, and Natalie Schilling-Estes (1999) Dialect Maintenance andChange on the Outer Banks. Publications of the American Dialect Society 81.Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Wolfram, Walt, and Erik R. Thomas (2002) The Development of African AmericanEnglish. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Yale Grammatical Diversity Project. https://ygdp.yale.edu/

Institutional address

Prof. Walt WolframEnglish DepartmentBox 8105North Carolina State UniversityRaleigh, NC 27695-8105USA

https://ygdp.yale.edu/


2The dialectology of Anglo-American English

Natalie SchillingGeorgetown University, Washington

Abstract

The study of the historical development of American English and its various dialectshas been approached from a variety of angles, using an array of data sources and datacollection methods, in the service of differing goals. This chapter presents an overviewof dialectology illuminating the diachronic development of American English. The focusis on the major dialect geographic projects that form the backbone of American dialectstudy, from the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada projects begun in theearly 1930s (e.g. Kurath 1949) to the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE)project launched in the early 1960s, to Labov, Ash and Boberg’s authoritative Atlas ofNorth American English (2006) and beyond. Methods and perspectives are consideredin light of their goals (e.g. obtaining data on historic forms, exploring recent andongoing linguistic change), data collection methods (e.g. written and audio-recordedsurveys, sociolinguistic interviews), target populations (e.g. linguistically conservativenon-mobile older rural men vs. younger women, held to be the leaders of languagechange), sampling method (e.g. random, judgment), and linguistic features of focus(lexical, phonological, grammatical). Representations of geographic dialect variationare examined as well, from traditional hand-drawn maps based on seemingly clear-cutisoglosses to more nuanced depictions of dialect layers (e.g. Carver 1987) tocomputer-generated maps showing density of dialect forms (e.g. DARE’s dialect mapswith U.S. states sized according to population density; dialect heat maps with densityindicated by color saturation). Also discussed are data sources that predate the adventof American dialectological study and provide invaluable pre-20th-century depth(Schneider 2013). These data include written sources such as commentary fromtravelers and grammarians, official documents like trial proceedings (e.g. the Salemwitchcraft trials; Rissanen 1997), and private correspondence by semi-literate writers(e.g. Irish emigrant letters; Montgomery 1995), as well as written transcripts and earlyaudio recordings from projects that were not dialectological in origin but which haveyielded important insight into the early development of American varieties such asSouthern American English (e.g. Tennessee Civil War Veterans’ Questionnaires;Maynor 1993) and African American English (e.g. WPA ex-slave recordings andtranscripts; Schneider 1989, 1997). Finally, the contribution of social dialectologicalstudies beginning in the mid-1960s, which are in large part the outgrowth of‘traditional’ dialect geographic studies, is noted as well, since in-depth surveys acrosssocial space in a given region have added immeasurably to our understanding of howdialect forms develop and diffuse across time and geographic space. Throughout, thechapter illustrates how different methods and data sources with their “complementarysources of error” (Labov 1972) can be fruitfully brought together to solve the difficult


problem of retracing historic pathways for inherently ephemeral spoken languageforms.

References

Carver, Craig M. 1987. American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography. Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press.

Cassidy, Frederic G. (editor-in-chief). 1985. Dictionary of American Regional English,vol. 1, A-C. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap. (see also volumes2-6)

Kurath, Hans. 1949. A Word Geography of the Eastern United States. Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press.

Labov, William. 1972. Some principles of linguistic methodology. Language in Society 1:97-120.

Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg, 2006. The Atlas of North AmericanEnglish. New York/Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Maynor, Natalie. 1993. Reconstructing nineteenth-century Southern White English:More evidence from the Tennessee Civil War Veterans’ Questionnaires. InWolfgang Viereck (ed.), Historical Dialectology and Linguistic Change: Proceedingsof the International Congress of Dialectologists, Bamberg, vol. 2. 180-190. Stuttgart:Steiner.

Montgomery, Michael. 1995. The linguistic value of Ulster immigrant letters. UlsterFolklife 41: 1-16.

Rissanen, Matti. 1997. “Candy no witch, Barbados: Salem witchcraft trials as evidenc ofEarly American English. In Heirich Ramisch and Kenneth Wynne (eds.), Languagein Time and Space. 183-193. Stuttgart: Steiner.

Schneider, Edgar W. 1989. American Earlier Black English: Morphological and sSyntacticVariables. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Schneider, Edgar W. 1997. Earlier Black English revisited. In Cynthia Bernstein,Thomas Nunnally, and Robin Sabino (eds.), Language Variety in the SouthRevisited. 35-50. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Schneider, Edgar W. 2013. Investigating historical variation and change in writtendocuments: New perspectives. In J.K. Chambers and Natalie Schilling (eds.), TheHandbook of Language Variation and Change, 2nd edition. 57-81. Malden/Oxford:Wiley-Blackwell.


Prof. Natalie SchillingGeorgetown UniversityLinguistics Department1437 37th Street, N.W.Poulton Hall 240Box 571051Washington, DC 20057-1051USA


3The roots and development of New England English

James N. StanfordDartmouth College

Abstract

With its legendary regionalisms like “r-dropping,” fronted palm vowels, “broad-a” bathvowels, and other features, New England has played a key role in the historicaldevelopment of English in North America. Historically, the six small states of NewEngland (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont)have had an outsized influence on American English, and their modern sociolinguisticand geographic boundaries still reflect colonial-era settlement patterns from centuriespast. In studying these patterns, modern linguists have access to almost 90 years offieldwork reports on regional New England dialect features: starting in the early 1930swith the Linguistic Atlas of New England (LANE, Kurath et al. 1939-43), then ageneration later in work by Laferriere (1977) and in Carver’s (1987) analysis of 1960sfield data in the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), and then more recentwork in various parts of New England, including Nagy (2001), Nagy & Roberts (2004),Roberts (2006, 2007, 2106), The Atlas of North American English (ANAE, Labov, Ash &Boberg 2006), Boberg (2001, 2005, 2018), Dinkin (2005), Villard (2009), Nagy & Irwin(2010), Johnson (2010), Wood (2011, 2014), Stanford, Leddy-Cecere & Baclawski(2012), Stanford, Severance & Baclawski (2014), and others. A recent large-scaleproject based at Dartmouth (Stanford 2019) provides acoustic sociophonetic analysesof 993 New Englanders, using both in-person field interviews and online audiorecordings. While many of these prior studies across New England have focused onphonological changes, regional grammatical patterns have also been examined (e.g.Wood 2014), as well as lexical variation and change (Carver 1987; Ravindranath 2011;Stanford 2019:126-37, 266-67) and the continuing influence of local Native Americanwords on English (Stanford 2019:68-71). Using this wealth of intergenerational datafrom such prior work, the present chapter takes a historical perspective that traces theroots and development of New England English into the present time. In the early 17th century, English speakers from southeastern England settled inthe Massachusetts Bay area, and this region would become the major sociolinguistic“hub” of New England English. As the language of the colonizers, English soon becamethe dominant language of the region, while Native American communities sufferedfrom European-imported disease, conflict, displacement, and genocide, and Indigenouslanguages dramatically receded. Within English, the influential early New EnglandEnglish settlements of eastern Massachusetts developed non-rhotic (“r-less”) speech,along with fronted palm vowels, “broad-a” bath vowels, and other features thatmirrored pronunciation patterns that were becoming standard in southeasternEngland during this time. The eastern New England (ENE) settlements maintainedrelatively close connections with that English homeland across the Atlantic, unlike themore isolated and diverse settlements in western New England (WNE). As a result,


sharp lines of regional dialect contrast soon developed between ENE and WNE. Thisenduring east-west contrast is a classic example of the Founder Effect (Zelinsky 1973;Mufwene 1996; Wolfram & Schilling 2016:29), and LANE observed this pattern amongspeakers born as early as the 1840s (Johnson & Durian 2017). The 1990s telephonesurveys (Telsur) of the ANAE reported on this overall ENE/WNE regional distinction inNew England, as well as evidence that non-rhotic speech is receding. The ANAE andJohnson (2010) also reported on another subregional distinction that has an isoglosstracing back to colonial-era boundaries: modern Rhode Island speakers are morelikely to have the low-back merger (merged lot/thought vowels) than speakers rightacross the border in eastern Massachusetts and much of northern New England. The Founder Effect has its limits, however, and recent studies show significantchanges in progress that are shifting New England English patterns away from theircolonial roots. Recent work (Stanford 2019) finds that many traditional New Englanddialect features are receding in current generations of speakers, including non-rhoticspeech, fronted palm, “broad-a” bath, north/force distinction, mary/marry/merrydistinctions, and other features. In northern New England, the traditional east-west lineof contrast is now receding eastward among the older speakers, while those east-westcontrasts are rapidly vanishing among younger speakers. Even in the metropolitaneastern Massachusetts hub, many such features are receding as well. Although sometraditional neighborhoods like South Boston maintain strong traditional ENE features,the forces of gentrification and other demographic changes are also affecting theseareas. This chapter also reports on ways in which African American speakers in someBoston communities are positioning themselves in relation to such features (Browne &Stanford 2018; Nesbitt & Stanford 2020). Finally, other regional New England featureslike nasal short-a (bat/ban contrast) and the low-back merger remain strong, andother new features are on the rise. The deep roots of New England English that wereestablished centuries ago still have a significant influence on modern speech patterns.But now in the current generations of speakers, new branches, leaves, and flowers arerapidly emerging from those historical roots.Selected References

Boberg, Charles. 2001. The Phonological Status of Western New England. AmericanSpeech 76: 3-29.

Boberg, Charles. 2005. The North American Regional Vocabulary Survey: Renewingthe Study of Lexical Variation in North American English. American Speech80:22-60.

Boberg, Charles. 2018. Dialects of North American English. In The Handbook ofDialectology, edited by Charles Boberg, John Nerbonne, & Dominic Watt, 450-61.Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Browne, Charlene, & James Stanford. 2018. Boston Dialect Features in theBlack/African American Community. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers inLinguistics 24.2, Selected papers from NWAV 46.

Carver, Craig. 1987. American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography. Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press.

Dinkin, Aaron. 2005. Mary, Darling, Make Me Merry; Say You’ll Marry Me: Tense-LaxNeutralization in the Linguistic Atlas of New England. University of PennsylvaniaWorking Papers in Linguistics 11:73-90.


DARE. Dictionary of American Regional English. 1985-2013. Edited by Frederic Cassidy& Joan Houston Hall. 6 vols. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University.

Johnson, Daniel Ezra. 2010. Stability and Change along a Dialect Boundary: The LowVowels of Southeastern New England. Publication of the American Dialect SocietyNo. 95. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Johnson, Daniel Ezra, & David Durian. 2017. New England. In Listening to the Past:Audio Records of Accents of English, edited by Raymond Hickey, 257-97.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kurath, Hans, Bernard Hanley, Julia Bloch, Guy Lowman, & Marcus Hansen. 1939–1943. Linguistic Atlas of New England (LANE) (vols. 1– 3). Providence, RI: BrownUniversity.

Labov, William, Sharon Ash & Charles Boberg (2006). The Atlas of North AmericanEnglish. Berlin: Mouton.

Laferriere, Martha. 1977. Boston Short a: Social Variation as Historical Residue. InStudies in Language Variation, edited by Ralph Fasold & Roger Shuy, 100-107.Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

Mufwene, Salikoko. 1996. The Founder Principle in Creole Genesis. Diachronica13:83-134.

Nagy, Naomi. 2001. “Live Free or Die” as a Linguistic Principle. American Speech76:30-41.

Nagy, Naomi, & Patricia Irwin. 2010. Boston (r): Neighbo(r)s Nea(r) and Fa(r).Language Variation and Change 22:241– 78.

Nagy, Naomi, & Julie Roberts. 2004. “New England: Phonology.” In Handbook ofVarieties of English: The Americas and the Caribbean, edited by Edgar Schneider,Kate Burridge, Bernd Kortmann, Rajend Mesthrie, & Clive Upton, 270– 81. Berlin;New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Nesbitt, Monica, & James Stanford. 2020. Eastern Massachusetts Life and Language Project [ongoing field/online project].

Ravindranath, Maya. 2011. A Wicked Good Reason to Study Intensifiers in NewHampshire. Presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 40, GeorgetownUniversity, October 27-30.

Roberts, Julie. 2006. As Old Becomes New: Glottalization in Vermont. American Speech81:227-49.

Roberts, Julie. 2007. Vermont Lowering? Raising Some Questions about (ay) and (aw)South of the Canadian Border. Language Variation and Change 19:181– 97.

Roberts, Julie. 2016. Internal Boundaries and Individual Differences: / aʊ/ Raising inVermont. American Speech 91:34-61.

Stanford, James. 2019. New England English: Large-Scale Acoustic Sociophonetics andDialectology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Stanford, James, Thomas Leddy-Cecere, & Kenneth Baclawski. 2012. Farewell to theFounders: Major Dialect Changes along the East- West New England Border.American Speech 87:126-69.

Stanford, James, Nathan Severance, & Kenneth Baclawski. 2014. Multiple Vectors ofUnidirectional Change in Eastern New England. Language Variation and Change26:103-40.

Villard, Sarah. 2009. Postvocalic / r/ in the Upper Valley of Vermont and NewHampshire. Masters thesis, University of New Hampshire.

Wolfram, Walt, & Natalie Schilling. 2016. American English: Dialects and Variation (3rd


edition). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Wood, Jim. 2011. Short- a in Northern New England. Journal of English Linguistics

39:135-65.Wood, Jim. 2014. Affirmative Semantics with Negative Morphosyntax: Negative

Exclamatives and the New England So AUXn’t NP/ DP Construction. InMicro-Syntactic Variation in North American English, edited by Raffaella Zanuttini& Laurence Horn, 71-114. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Zelinsky, Wilbur. 1973. The Cultural Geography of the United States (revised edition)Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice.

Author’s institution address:

Prof. James N. StanfordProgram in Linguistics, HB 6220Dartmouth College6220 Anonymous HallHanover, NH 03755


4The history of the Midland-Northern boundary

Matthew J. GordonUniversity of Missouri

Abstract

Dialectologists working in the mid-twentieth century established a tripartite division ofUS regional dialects into North, Midland, and South. This work documented theretention of traditional usages and focused on lexical variation. The boundariesbetween the regions reflected early settlement histories in the Eastern half of thecountry. Thus, the Northern region stems from the movement in the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries of Yankees out of their New England colonial base and acrossupstate New York and the Great Lakes area. The Midland, on the other hand, grew outof Pennsylvania and represented a culturally distinct population from the earliestperiod of British settlement. Despite the grounding of this divide in centuries-oldsettlement and migration patterns, the boundary between the North and the Midlandremains relevant to regional variation in American English today. For example, theAtlas of North American English (Labov, Ash, & Boberg, 2005) documents isoglossesthat fall more or less precisely where the ones reported by Kurath (1949) and otherdialectologists fell. What is especially remarkable about this confirmation of earlierfindings is that the more recent studies are based on very different evidence as theytypically examine phonological variation with an emphasis on active sound changes. Inthis way, the boundary between the North and the Midland continues to influenceregional variation not just by preserving historical differences but also by shaping thedissemination of innovative usages. This chapter reviews the history of this remarkably stable boundary in Americandialectology. The colonial settlement of the two regions is sketched as are patterns inwestward migration. I review the evidence that supported the traditional dialectboundary from the early linguistic atlas researchers. Turning to the current status ofthis dialectological divide, I consider the evolving picture of variation on both sides ofthe boundary. For example, several of the large cities of the Midland region aredistinguished by local dialect forms that appear to be receding while broadersupra-regional forms are on the rise. The North has generally been more linguisticallyhomogenous especially at the phonological level. Of special relevance in this regard isthe vowel pattern known as the Northern Cities Shift, which, until recently, waswidespread across the region from New York to Minnesota. This shift figuredprominently in the construction of the North/Midland divide in the Atlas of NorthAmerican English. Nevertheless, in recent years several studies have documentedspeech communities moving away from these pronunciations. The chapter considersthe implications of these developments for the future stability of the boundarybetween the North and the Midland.

References


Kurath, Hans. 1949. A Word Geography of the Eastern United States. Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press.

Labov, William, Sharon Ash & Charles Boberg. 2005. Atlas of North American English.Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Labov, William. 2010. Principles of Linguistic Change, vol. 3, Cognitive and CulturalFactors. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Montgomery, Michael 2004. Solving Kurath’s puzzle. Establishing the antecedents ofthe American Midland dialect region. In Raymond Hickey (ed) Legacies of ColonialEnglish. Studies in Transported Dialects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,pp. 310-325.


Prof. Matthew J. GordonEnglish Department107 Tate HallUniversity of MissouriColumbia, MO 65211USA


5The spread of English westwards

Valerie Fridland Tyler KendallUniversity of Nevada University of Oregon

Abstract

This chapter examines from both a historical and contemporary perspective thedevelopment of several English varieties in the Western U.S.. We will trace the earlycolonization of the Western U.S., paying particular attention to Nevada and Oregon,bordering states that differed in terms of the type of early migratory influences duringthe early koineization period, but which, as of late, have shared more similarin-migration. Originally inhabited by Native American tribes who spoke variedindigenous languages such as Athabascan, Kalapuyan, Paiute, Penutian, Shoshone andWashoe, both Oregon and Nevada gained much of their non-indigenous populationduring 19th century Westward expansion via the Oregon and California Trails. Wealso examine how the settlement of California was related to development of dialectsin these two states.

Contemporary Oregon is part of the Pacific Northwest dialect region, and earlycolonization, often from Midland States, was centered on its rich natural resourcessuch as lumber, fishing, fur and agriculture (Reed and Reed 1972). In contemporaryspeech, we find states such as Washington and Oregon have a number of notabledialect features such as pre-velar raising in the /ɛ/ and /æ/ vowel classes and along-standing low back vowel merger (Becker (ed.) 2019, McClarty et al. 2016). UnlikeWashington, however, Oregon also shows more participation in features associatedwith California speech, such as /æ/ retraction (Becker et al. 2016). Nevada served asan early Mormon outpost, with many early Latter Day Saint (LDS) arriving by way ofUtah, but gained much of its population from California, as gold rush miners wereattracted by the discovery of the Comstock lode (Bright 1967). The often competinginterests between these groups resulted in the recall of LDS settlers to Utah afterNevada’s establishment as a state. As a result, many features of California English areshared by Nevadan varieties of English, such as a later onset for the low back merger/u/ and /o/ fronting and participation in the California Vowel Shift (Bright 1967,DeCamp 1953, 1959, Hinton et. al. 1987, Moonwoman 1987, Reed and Reed 1972,Fridland and Kendall 2017). The proximity of Nevada, Oregon and California indeedseems to permeate the types of vowel features that have been located across thesestates in contemporary speech (Fridland and Kendall 2019).

For our contribution to the present volume, in addition to surveying earlymigratory patterns in these three states, we will expand upon prior work (Fridlandand Kendall 2017) to more deeply explore contemporary Oregonian, California andNevada speech to characterize what constitutes the varieties of English spoken in thesestates. Focusing on the vowel classes that defined a unique Western pattern in earlierwork in the West (Fridland et al. 2016, 2017), we compare the realization of the lowfront and low back vowels as well as patterns of back vowel fronting among these


states, with particular attention to understudied dynamic and durational aspects thatmight demarcate micro-regional distinctions.References

Becker, Kara (ed.) 2019. The Low-Back-Merger Shift: Uniting the Canadian Vowel Shift,the California Vowel Shift, and short front vowel shifts across North America. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Bright, Elizabeth. 1967. A Word Geography of California and Nevada. PhD dissertation,University of California, Berkeley.

DeCamp, David. 1953. The Pronunciation of English in San Francisco. PhD dissertation,University of California, Berkeley.

Fridland, Valerie and Tyler Kendall. 2019. On the uniformity of the Low-Back-MergerShift in the U.S. West and beyond. In The Low-Back-Merger Shift: Uniting theCanadian Vowel Shift, the California Vowel Shift, and short front vowel shifts acrossNorth America, ed. Kara Becker. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 100-119.

Fridland, Valerie, Tyler Kendall, Betsy Evans, and Alicia Beckford Wassink (eds).2016. Speech in the Western States, Volume 1: The Coastal States. Durham, NC:Duke University Press.

Fridland, Valerie, Alicia Wassink, Tyler Kendall and Betsy Evans (eds). 2017. Speech inthe Western States Vol. 2: The Mountain West. Durham, N.C.: Duke UniversityPress.

Fridland, Valerie, Tyler Kendall and Charlie Farrington. 2014. Durational and spectraldifferences in American English vowels: Dialect variation within and acrossregions. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 136 (1): 341-349.

Hinton, Leanne, Sue Bremmer, Hazel Corcoran, Jean Learner, Herb Luthin, BirchMoonwomon, & Mary Van Clay. 1987. It’s not just Valley Girls: A study ofCalifornia English. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley LinguisticsSociety. 13: 117-127.

Kendall, Tyler and Valerie Fridland. 2017. Regional Relationships among the LowVowels of U.S. English: Evidence from Production and Perception. LanguageVariation and Change 29 (2): 245-271.

Labov, William, Sharon Ash & Charles Boberg. 2006. The Atlas of North AmericanEnglish: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. Berlin: De Gruyter.

McLarty, Jason, Tyler Kendall, and Charlie Farrington 2016. Investigating theDevelopment of the Contemporary Oregonian Vowel System. In Valerie Fridland,Tyler Kendall, Betsy Evans, and Alicia Wassink (eds.), Speech in the Western States:Volume 1: The Coastal States. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press,135–157.

Moonwomon, Birch. 1987. Truly awesome: (ɔ) in California English. In K.M Denning, S.Inkelas, F. McNair-Knox & J. Rickford (eds.) Variation in Language: NWAV-XV atStanford (Proceedings of the fifteenth annual New Ways of Analyzing Variationconference). Stanford: Department of Linguistics, Stanford University. 325-336.

Reed, Carroll E. and David W. Reed. 1972. Problems of English speech mixture inCalifornia and Nevada. In A. Davis (ed.), Studies in Linguistics in Honor of Raven I.McDavid. Auburn, AL: University of Alabama Press. 135-143.


Trudgill, Peter. 1998. The chaos before the order: New Zealand English and the secondstage of new-dialect formation. In E. H. Jahr (ed.), Advances in HistoricalSociolinguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 1-11.

Institutional addresses

Prof. Valerie FridlandDepartment of EnglishUniversity of NevadaReno, NevadaUSA

Prof. Tyler KendallDepartment of LinguisticsUniversity of OregonEugene, OR 97403-1290USA


6American English in the city

Barbara JohnstoneCarnegie Mellon University

Abstract

American cities are sites of social contact and social segregation, linguistic convergenceand divergence, standardization and colloquialization. The first English-speakingsettlers brought their native dialects with them, laying the foundation for the urbandialects of the eastern part of the U. S. While many subsequent European immigrantsadopted local whites’ ways of speaking, others isolated themselves and developeddistinctive styles. Residential and workplace segregation meant that the speech ofurban African Americans, who may have first learned a dialect similar to that ofsouthern whites, diverged from that of their white counterparts, while at the same timeassimilating some relatively non-salient features of local white dialects. For allAmericans, social and geographical mobility has led to standardization, but mobilityalso highlights differences among speakers and can lead to enhanced dialectawareness. In the early 21st century, some urban dialects have come to beideologically linked with their cities’ identities, but what it means to speak like a localcontinues to shift, contracting as a result of centripetal standardizing forces andexpanding as a result of centrifugal forces that lead to new combinations ofindexicalities. This chapter explores these apparent paradoxes, through an overviewof the variationist sociolinguistic literature on American cities and with a particularfocus on Pittsburgh, a post-industrial city in the U.S. northeast. References

Bailey, Guy & Natalie Maynor. 1989. The divergence controversy. American speech 64.12–39.

Baranowski, Maciej. 2007. Phonological variation and change in the dialect of Charleston,South Carolina (Publication of the American Dialect Society 92). Chapel Hill, N.C.:Duke University Press, for the American Dialect Society.

Bernstein, Cynthia, Thomas Nunnally & Robin Sabino (eds.). 1997. Language variety inthe South Revisited. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Coles, Felice Anne. 1997. Solidarity cues in New Orleans English. In Language variety inthe South revisited, 219–224. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Eberhardt, Maeve. 2009. The sociolinguistics of ethnicity in Pittsburgh. Language andLinguistics Compass 3(6). 1443–1454.

Eberhardt, Maeve. 2012. Enregisterment of Pittsburghese and the local AfricanAmerican community. Language & Communication 32(4). 358–371.

Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic variation as social practice. Oxford: Blackwell.Johnstone, Barbara. 2013. Speaking Pittsburghese: The story of a dialect. Oxford UK,

Cambridge USA: Oxford University Press.


Labov, Teresa. 1998. English acquisition by immigrants to the United States at thebeginning of the twentieth century. American speech 73(4). 368–398.

Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington,DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia, USA: University ofPennsylvania Press.

Labov, William. 2001. Principles of linguistic change: Social factors. Malden, MA; Oxford,UK: Blackwell.

Labov, William. 2014. The role of African Americans in Philadelphia sound change.Language variation and change 26(1). 1–19.

Montgomery, Michael & Guy Bailey (eds.). 1986. Language variety in the South:Perspectives in black and white. University of Alabama: University of AlabamaPress.

Picone, Michael & Catherine Evans Davies (eds.). 2015. New perspectives on languagevariety in the South: Historical and contemporary approaches. Tuscaloosa:University of Alabama Press.

Smakman, Dick & Patrick Heinrich (eds.). 2018. Urban sociolinguistics: The city as alinguistic process and experience. Routledge.

Institution address

Prof. Barbara Johnstone429 1st Ave Apt 3Pittsburgh PA 15219USA


7English in the Southern United States

Becky Childs Paul E. ReedCoastal Carolina University University of Alabama

Abstract

This chapter considers the English of the Southern United States with a focus on theways in which past and present settlement histories, social structures, and economicrealities are reflected in the language of the region. Despite persisting ideas ofgeographic and social insularity, the American South is a large region that has and hasalways contained great diversity. We begin the chapter looking at early settlementpatterns of the region examining early migration to this broad geographic region aswell as movement within the region during this early period with a focus on the donordialects brought to the South during this period and the ways in which they coalesce inthe formation of Southern American English varieties. This discussion will includeinsights gained from early work on the various subregions that comprise the SouthernUnited States acknowledging that the boundaries of what is considered to be theSouthern United States are highly contested. Moving from the discussion of early workon subregions and settlement, the chapter then looks at recent sociolinguistic workthat highlights the ways that the South continues to be a region with active populationmovements and settlement patterns, highlighting the ways in which modern settlementpatterns are reshaping the ways in which Southern English, broadly constructed, isviewed. Proceeding from a discussion of settlement practices (a more dialectologicalapproach), the chapter then moves to more recent sociolinguistic work that hasconsidered in tandem the complex social frameworks and linguistic variables thatconstruct Southern American English. In this section we consider core social conceptsthat have been examined in sociolinguistic research on Southern American English,specifically we look at ethnicity, notions of rural and urban, gender, social structureand social alignment and the ways in which Southern English interacts with andimpacts education in the South, and also how regional affiliation intersects andinteracts with each of these concepts. Looking at work on ethnicity across the regions of the South, research on AfricanAmerican, Native American and Latinx residents of the region has shown the ways inwhich language moves beyond reflecting only regional factors to indexing the complexintersection of different social groups within and across the region. Within each ofthese large and diverse ethnic groups, one can see how certain speech features havecome to index membership and participation, as well as regional affiliation. We look at the ways in which rural and urban areas in the South havedistinguished themselves linguistically and the ways in which rural and urban identitiesand the interplay, and also the tension, between the two underlie the various notionsof what it means to be Southern. As the urban South has grown, some traditionalfeatures, such as the Southern Vowel Shift, have become less prominent among urbanspeakers. Paradoxically, other features, including aspects of the Southern Shift, have


become relatively more frequent among rural speakers. What was previously aregional difference may have now become what Fridland (2012:187) calls an‘ecological distinction’, highlighting the difference between the urban and rural South. When considering gender, research on societal roles and expectations, and therecognition of different constructs of gender, have shown how both males and femalesas well as members of the LGBTQ community position themselves and theirSoutherness through their speech practices. Some long-standing differences, such asvowels, are reflected to a degree in Southern speech. However, other features showthat gender and sexuality interact with other social features to lessen the expectedgender difference. Education has long been considered the great leveler of regional and sociallanguage variation, being inversely correlated with the presence of regional features.And, for many speakers in the South, this truism is a reality. However, education doesnot categorically influence all linguistic features equally, as certain productions andstructures appear in the speech of speakers across the educational spectrum. Theseunaffected features and structures, at some level, index the complex interchange ofregional identity and affiliation and education, where using certain features marksboth education and Southernness. As one can see, the interlinkage of regional affiliation and regional identity withthe social concepts above is crucial to understanding linguistic variation in the South.Within the region, research has demonstrated that affiliation to particular areas in theSouth, whether local to a community level or broad to the region as a whole, caninfluence language from high-level discourse practices down to the phoneticimplementation of a vowel. Thus, regional affiliation serves to undergird many of thecharacteristics of Southern US speech.

References

Bloomquist, J., Green, L., & Lanehart, S. (Eds.). (2015). African American Language andIdentity: Contradictions and Conundrums. In The Oxford Handbook of AfricanAmerican Language. : Oxford University Press.

Fridland, Valerie. (2012). Rebel Vowels: How Vowel Shift Patterns are ReshapingSpeech in the Modern South. Language and Linguistics Compass, 6(3): 183-192.

Hazen, Kirk (Ed.). (2020). Appalachian Englishes in the Twenty-First Century.Morgantown, WV: WVU Press.

Montgomery, M., & Johnson, E. (Eds.). (2007). The New Encyclopedia of SouthernCulture: Volume 5: Language. University of North Carolina Press.

Nagle, S. J., & Sanders, S. L. (Eds.). (2003). English in the Southern United States. Studiesin English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Reaser, J., Wilbanks, E., Wojcik K., & Wolfram, W. (Eds.). (2018). Language Variety in the New South: Contemporary Perspectives on Change and Variation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.


Prof. Becky ChildsDepartment of English


Coastal Carolina University PO Box 261954Conway, SC 29528

Prof. Paul E. ReedDepartment of Communicative DisordersUniversity of AlabamaBox 870242Tuscaloosa, AL 35487


8Contact forms of American English

Cristopher Font-Santiago and Joseph SalmonsUniversity of Wisconsin – Madison

A long tradition tends to treat language history from a perspective in which contact isat least implicitly the marked way of accounting for change, somehow a deviation fromthe social and structural factors at work within a language community, as observed byHickey (2010) and others. While we reject a simple dichotomy between contact andnon-contact change (Dorian 1993), this chapter starts from a very different position,assuming a profound role for language and dialect contact in the history of AmericanEnglish. Varieties of English spoken across the United States reflect chronic andprofound contacts of every sort from the arrival of English in the western hemisphereto ongoing waves of refugees and immigrants speaking countless languages. Theresulting pool of variation has driven the distinctly American patterns and shaped howthey continue to develop today. In many cases, the most interesting insights come fromhow contact patterns and endogamous patterns fit together. From this vantage point, we treat a broad set of patterns across major Americandialect areas, with an eye on often overlooked and understudied features. WhileSalmons & Purnell (forthcoming) review familiar and mostly well-established cases oflanguage contact in the U.S., we focus on possible contact effects in and fromunexpected places in American English. After a brief look at lexical material, we drawdata primarily from phonetics and phonology, syntax, and pragmatics. In someinstances, the evidence for origins in contact is compelling, and in others it is not, butthere is also a broad gray zone of uncertainty. For features with origins in contact, weprobe the conclusion of Salmons & Purnell (forthcoming) that if a feature gets into asystem by contact, it can take any possible path and trajectory later in history. A fewexamples follow to indicate the kinds of data and approaches we’ll explore in the fullchapter. Even non-linguists interested in American English often know examples ofloanwords in American English from sources that non-specialists may find surprising,such as the many Dutch loans (van der Sijs 2009, 2011) or words for flora and faunaborrowed from Algonquian languages (many compiled in Cassidy & Hall 1985-2017).Fewer know the complex trajectories some words have taken, though, such as GulfCoast lagniappe ‘something extra given for free with a purchase’, immediately fromLouisiana French where it came from Spanish la ñapa and ultimately, apparently, fromQuechua. Similarly, hooch ‘illegal or low quality hard liquor’ has made its way fromTlingit (Na-Dene, Alaska) into broad American usage (s.v. Cassidy & Hall 1985-2017). In sound patterns, the Inland North region (e.g., Labov et al. 2006) is oftendefined by the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), a vowel chain shift centered in urban areasfrom central New York to the Great Lakes. The development of the NCS has beenattributed to a combination of several waves of migration and settlement (Labov2010) as well as sociodemographic changes (Van Herk 2008), starting in the latenineteenth century (Gordon & Streluff 2017) and continuing to the present day(McCarthy 2011). We evaluate here how language and dialect contact appear to


interact with other social and structural factors in the spread (and now retreat) of asound change. Less commonly considered in this context is the phonology of Native placenames,though names like Apalachicola and Ticonderoga figure prominently in the literature onmetrical phonology (e.g. Halle & Vergnaud 1987). Beyond such reflections of settlercolonialism, the (non-)integration of French and Spanish names in some regions isnotable, as well as social and regional variation in names like Feinst[ai]n vs Feinst[i:]nor Schmidt with [ʃ] vs [s]. (We plan to gather some data on these issues.) In syntax, clear contact origins of American features have proven more difficultto establish. We review first several examples of patterns that are not well known inthe literature, but which are likely immigration-sourced and then some better-knownones, which are probably not directly from contact. The former type is illustrated byYooper English (Michigan’s Upper Peninsula) where constructions like ‘let’s go mall’,lacking a preposition and determiner, are understood as Finnish-sourced (Remlinger2017:51-52), but this may have ties to broader regional patterns of the type ‘I drivetruck’. Just to the west, in Minnesota’s Iron Range — an area of broadly similardemographics —, other patterns are associated with immigration, such as copuladeletion (‘he late’) and unusual word order patterns (‘you play with five cards just’)(Loss 2014:29). The latter type — where the case for contact origins is weak —includes Southern double modals of the ‘might could’, ‘should oughta’ type, whichhave been discussed as possibly connected to similar patterns in the British Isles(among many others, Nagle 1994, Fennell & Butters 1996.) We conclude that English in the United States has been more broadly and moredeeply shaped by contact than is sometimes widely appreciated. Striking is howregionally and socially variable these patterns prove, especially those beyond thelexicon. The resulting picture suggests a need to reorient our thinking about thehistory of American English.References

Cassidy, Frederic G. & Joan Houston Hall (eds.). 1985-2017. The Dictionary of AmericanRegional English. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Dorian, Nancy. 1993. Internally and externally motivated change in language contactsettings: Doubts about the dichotomy. In Charles Jones (ed.): Historical Linguistics:Problems and perspectives. London: Longman, 131-155.

Fennell, Barbara & Ronald Butters. 1996. Historical and contemporary distribution ofdouble modals in English. In Edgar Schneider (ed.), Focus on the USA. Amsterdam:John Benjamins, 265-288.

Gordon, Matthew J. & Christopher Strelluf. 2017. Evidence of American RegionalDialects in Early Recordings. In Raymond Hickey (ed.) Listening to the Past,232–256. UK: Cambridge University Press.

Halle, Morris & Jean-Roger Vergnaud. 1987. An Essay on Stress. Cambridge: MIT Press.Hickey, Raymond. 2010. Language contact: Reconsideration and reassessment. In

Raymond Hickey (ed.) The Handbook of Language Contact, 1–28. Malden, MA:Wiley-Blackwell.

Labov, William. 2010. Principles of Linguistic Change: Cognitive and cultural factors, vol.3. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Labov, William, Sharon Ash & Charles Boberg. 2006. The Atlas of North American


English: Phonetics, phonology and sound change. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Loss, Sara S. 2014. Iron Range English reflexive pronouns. In Raffaella Zanutttini &

Laurence R. Horn (eds.), Micro-syntactic variation in North American English. NewYork: Oxford University Press.

McCarthy, Corrine. 2009. The Northern Cities Shift in real time: Evidence fromChicago. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 15(2). 99–110.

McCarthy, Corrine. 2011. The Northern Cities Shift in Chicago. Journal of EnglishLinguistics 39(2). 166–187.

Nagle, Stephen J. 1993. The English double modal conspiracy. Diachronica 11.199-212.Remlinger, Kathryn A. 2017. Yooper English: Dialect as Identity in Michigan's Upper

Peninsula. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Salmons, Joseph & Thomas Purnell. Forthcoming. Contact and the development of

American English. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), The Handbook of Language Contact. 2ndedn. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

van der Sijs, Nicoline. 2009. Cookies, Coleslaw, and Stoops: The influence of Dutch on theNorth American languages. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

van der Sijs, Nicoline. 2011. Dutch Words in American English. In Gajus Scheltema &Heleen Westerhuijs (eds.), Exploring Historic Dutch New York: New York City,Hudson Valley, New Jersey, Delaware, 219-220.

van Herk, Gerard. 2008. Fear of a black phonology: The Northern Cities Shift aslinguistic White Flight. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics14(2). 157-161.


Dr. Cristopher Font-Santiago Prof. Joseph SalmonsEnglish Language Sciences6101 Helen C. White Hall 1150 Van Hise Hall600 North Park Street 1220 Linden Dr.University of Wisconsin – Madison University of Wisconsin – MadisonMadison, WI 53706 Madison, WI 53706USA USA


9The Roots of African American English

Tracey L. WeldonThe University of South Carolina

Abstract

The origins of African American English (AAE) have been the subject of debate amonglinguists for nearly a century now. Dialectologists in the early 1900’s proposed thatAAE descended from British English roots, similar to other American English varieties,including Southern American English, but retained certain features of 17th and 18thcentury British English that other American English varieties had since lost (see e.g.,Krapp 1924, Kurath 1928). Such arguments formed the foundation of theDialectologist (or Anglicist) Hypothesis. This perspective was later challenged by researchers who observed the retentionof African features in the language and culture of many Black Americans (see e.g.,Herskovits (1941), Turner (1949), Dalby 1971, Dunn 1976, Van Sertima 1976, andDebose and Faraclas 1993). Over time, a position known as the Creolist Hypothesisbegan to attribute such influence to a period of creolization in the history of AAE,noting a number of striking similarities between AAE and creole varieties with which itseemed to share a "deep structural relationship" (see e.g., Bailey 1965). From thisperspective, AAE was said to have derived from a creole variety spoken by personsenslaved on the North American plantations, which, in turn, was said to have derivedfrom a pidgin English that developed out of the contact between English and variousWest African languages brought together by the Atlantic slave trade (see also Stewart1967, 1968, and Dillard 1972). Many supporters of the Creolist Hypothesis argued thatGullah, an African American variety spoken along the coasts of South Carolina andGeorgia, represented a fairly direct descendant of the creole spoken on the NorthAmerican plantations, which preserved much of its creole structure because of thegeographical and social isolation of the Sea Islands. In this paper, I provide an overview of the on-going debate over the origins anddevelopment of African American English, with a focus on some of the sociohistoricaland linguistic evidence that has been brought to bear. In particular, I discuss the roleof the copula as a hallmark feature in the origins debate, noting especially thesignificance of following grammatical environment on patterns of copula variability inAAE and Caribbean English Creoles. And I discuss some key features of the tense,mood, and aspect system, as they have been taken up by supporters of theNeo-Anglicist Hypothesis, which proposes that many of the distinctive features ofAfrican American English once thought to be retentions of an earlier creole are, in fact,20th century phenomena brought about by modern-day patterns of isolation andsegregation (see e.g., Dayton 1996, Labov 1998, Poplack 2000). Finally, I consider how present-day dynamics between African American andEuropean American varieties might require us to re-evaluate some of our earlierassumptions about the nature of language contact from both ecological and ethological


perspectives (see Whinnom 1971; Rickford 1987). And I discuss how futureinvestigations of the African American linguistic trajectory might begin to shift thenature of this debate accordingly.References

Bailey, Beryl L. (1965). Toward a new perspective in Negro English dialectology.American Speech, 40(3), 171-77.

Dalby, David. (1971). Communication in Africa and the New World. In Walt Wolframand Nona H. Clark, eds., Black-White Speech Relations. Arlington, VA: Center forApplied Linguistics, 99-138.

Dayton, Elizabeth. (1996). ‘Grammatical categories of the verb in African-AmericanVernacular English,’ Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.

Debose, Charles and Nicholas Faraclas. (1993). An Africanist Approach to theLinguistic Study of Black English: Getting to the Roots of theTense-Modality-Aspect and Copula Systems in Afro-American. In SalikokoMufwene and Nancy Condon, ed., Africanisms in Afro-American LanguageVarieties. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 364-87.

Dillard, Joe L. (1972). Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States, NewYork: Random House.

Dunn, Ernest F. (1976). The Black-Southern White Dialect Controversy: Who Did Whatto Whom? In Deborah S. Harrison and Tom Trabasso, ed., Black English: ASeminar, 105-22.

Herskovits, Melville J. ([1941] 1970). The Myth of the Negro Past, Gloucester, Mass:Peter Smith.

Krapp, George Philip. (1924). The English of the Negro. American Mercury, 2, 190-95.Kurath, Hans. (1928). The origin of dialectal differences in spoken American English.

Modern Philology, 25(4), 285-95.Labov, William. (1998). Coexistent Systems in African-American Vernacular English. In

Salikoko Mufwene, John R. Rickford, Guy Bailey, and John Baugh, eds., AfricanAmerican English: Structure, History, and Use. London and New York: Routledge,110-53.

Poplack, Shana, ed. (2000). The English History of African American English, Oxford, andMalden: Blackwell.

Rickford, John. ([1987] 1999). Are Black and White Vernaculars Diverging? AmericanSpeech 62(1), 55-62. Reprinted in African American Vernacular English: Features,Evolution, Educational Implications. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell. 252- 60.

Stewart, William. (1967). Sociolinguistic factors in the history of American Negrodialects. The Florida FL Reporter, 5(2), 11, 22, 24, 26, 28.

Stewart, William. (1968). Continuity and change in American Negro dialects. The FloridaFL Reporter, 6(1), 3-4, 14-16, 18.

Turner, Lorenzo Dow. (1949). Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect, New York: Arno Press.Van Sertima, Ivan. (1976). My Gullah Brother and I: Exploration Into a Community's

Language and Myth Through its Oral Tradition. In Deborah S. Harrison and TomTrabasso, eds., Black English: A Seminar. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence ErlbaumAssociates, Inc., 123-46.


Whinnom, Keith. (1971). Linguistic hybridization and the ‘special case’ of pidgins andcreoles. In Dell Hymes, ed., Pidginization and Creolization of Languages.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 91-115.


Prof. Tracey L. WeldonDepartment of EnglishThe University of South CarolinaColumbia, SC 29208USA


10The Great Migration and regional variation in the speech of AfricanAmericans

Charlie FarringtonUniversity of Oregon

Abstract

Over a half century of sociolinguistic work has addressed various aspects of thespeech of African Americans, often called African American Language (AAL) or AfricanAmerican English (AAE). The current chapter focuses on the twentieth centurydevelopment of AAL, using examples from the Corpus of Regional African AmericanLanguage (CORAAL; Kendall & Farrington 2020), a publicly available corpus ofconversational speech, with data from several African American communities, such asAtlanta, GA, Manhattan, NY, Princeville, NC, Rochester, NY, Valdosta, GA, andWashington D.C., to highlight regional sound patterns. We begin by focusing on the Great Migration, the population movement ofAfrican Americans out of the rural South between 1915 and 1970, considered by manyto be one of the most important historical and sociological population movements inNorth America (Tolnay 2003; Wilkerson 2010). When sociolinguists began publishingwork on what is now called AAL, they were often funded by the U.S. Department ofEducation and showed that this non-mainstream variety of English exhibited overallsystematicity. This work, which was done across non-Southern urban locales such asNew York City (Labov et al. 1968), Detroit, Michigan (Shuy et al. 1967, Wolfram 1969)and Washington D.C. (Fasold 1972), overlooked variation across communities in favorof shared linguistic features. Importantly, the generation of speakers analyzed in thistime period represent an important generational cohort in the development of AAL,the generation coming of age in this era at the height of the Great Migration. Viewingthe research in this context can lead us to reframe and reinterpret results as cases ofintra-ethnic dialect contact and new dialect formation. The topic of regional variation in the study of AAL has only been addressed, inearnest, within the last fifteen years (Wolfram & Kohn 2015; Yaeger-Dror & Thomas2009), despite the fact that such variation has always been apparent to speakers andlinguists (Wolfram 2007). These regional patterns are due to several factors includingmigration (where individuals were coming from as well as whether there was anAfrican American community prior to migration), community location anddemographics, as well as segregation (Thomas 2001). Using CORAAL, we focus onseveral vocalic and consonantal patterns, such as the African American Vowel System(Thomas 2007; Kohn 2014) and word final fricative deletion. The regional soundpatterns are more predictable when taking into account migration, communitysegregation, and contact, giving us a richer picture of how AAL has developed asspread over the twentieth century.

References


Fasold, Ralph W. 1972. Tense Marking in Black English. Arlington, VA: Center forApplied Linguistics.

Kendall, Tyler and Charlie Farrington. 2020. The Corpus of Regional African AmericanLanguage. Version 2020.05. Eugene, OR: The Online Resources for AfricanAmerican Language Project. http://oraal.uoregon.edu/coraal.

Labov, William, Paul Cohen, Clarence Robbins, and John Lewis. 1968. A Study of theNon-Standard English of Negro and Puerto Rican Speakers in New York City.Philadelphia: U.S. Regional Survey.

Shuy, Roger W., Walter A. Wolfram, and William K. Riley. 1968. Linguistic Correlates ofSocial Stratification in Detroit Negro Speech. Final Report. US Dept. of Health,Education, and Welfare, Office of Education, Bureau of Research.

Thomas, Erik R. 2001. “An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Variation in New World English.”Publication of the American Dialect Society 85. Duke University Press.

Thomas, Erik R. 2007. “Phonological and Phonetic Characteristics of AAVE”. Languageand Linguistics Compass 1: 450-75.

Tolnay, Stewart E. 2003. “The African American ‘Great Migration’ and Beyond. AnnualReview of Sociology 29.1: 209-232.

Wilkerson, Isabel. 2010. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s GreatMigration. New York: Vintage Books.

Wolfram, Walter A. 1969. A Sociolinguistic Description of Detroit Negro Speech.Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Wolfram, Walt, and Mary E. Kohn. 2015. “The regional development of AfricanAmerican English.” In The Oxford Handbook on African American Language, editedby Sonja Lanehart, 140-159. Oxford.

Yaeger-Dror, Malcah, and Erik R. Thomas (eds.). 2009. African American EnglishSpeakers and Their Participation in Local Sound Changes: A Comparative Study.Duke University Press for the American Dialect Society.


Prof. Charlie FarringtonDepartment of Linguistics1290 University of OregonEugene, OR 97405-1290USA

http://oraal.uoregon.edu/coraal


11Urban African American English

Nicole HollidayUniversity of Pennsylvania

Abstract

African American English (AAE) is arguably the most well-studied variety of English inthe United States, and much of the formative work on the variety took place in cities,setting the stage for the direction of sociolinguistics as a whole in late 20th and early21st centuries. This chapter will provide an overview of the important early work onAAE in urban environments including Philadelphia, New York City, and Detroit, as wellas some more recent studies in places such as Washington D.C. and Rochester, NewYork. Alongside a discussion of what we have learned about the variety from studies inthese cities, the chapter will also explore the ways in which the methods of study andthe variables themselves have evolved over time. In particular, it will chronicle howearly studies focused on larger descriptions of morphosyntactic features employed byAfrican American speakers, while more modern research has begun to also explorephonological and phonetic variation. The chapter will also include a discussion of themyth of homogeneity of AAE, and a resulting discussion of differences betweensub-varieties of AAE that are conditioned not only by region, but also by finer-grainedaspects of community and individual identity including class, age, gender, and racialidentity itself. In the last decade especially, the focus on a wider scope of variables, aswell as speakers who were previously overlooked, has allowed for a more detaileddiscussion of AAE not as a static variety, but as a flexible and evolving linguistic toolkitthat speakers may use to construct and perform identities. Finally, the chapter willconclude with a discussion of the most recent studies that have advanced ourunderstanding of what it means to be a speaker of AAE, and how the variety fits intothe larger tapestry of variation in the United States.

References (selected)

Baugh, John. (1983). Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure, and Survival. Austin:University of Texas Press

Baugh.John. (1985). Linguistic diversity and justice in America: growing complexity in atraditional national paradox. Urban Resources, Vol. 3, No. 3: 31-34, 61.

Blake, R. (2014). African American and Black as demographic codes. Language andLinguistics Compass, 8(11), 548–563.

Carter, P. M. (2013). Poststructuralist theory and sociolinguistics: Mapping thelinguistic turn in social theory. Language and Linguistics Compass, 7(11), 580-596.

Eckert, P. (2012). Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in thestudy of sociolinguistic variation. Annual review of Anthropology, 41, 87-100.

Holliday, N. R. (2019). Multiracial identity and racial complexity in sociolinguistic


variation. Language and Linguistics Compass, 13(8). Holliday, Nicole. (2017). “My Presiden(t) are Firs(t) Lady Were Black”: Style, Context,

and Coronal Stop Deletion in the Speeches of Barack and Michelle Obama”.American Speech 92:4.

Holliday, N. (2016). Intonational variation, linguistic style and the Black/Biracialexperience (Doctoral dissertation), New York University.

Labov, W. (1972a). Language in the inner city: Studies in the Black English vernacular.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

McLarty, J., (2018). African American Language and European American EnglishIntonation Variation Over Time in The American South. American Speech: AQuarterly of Linguistic Usage, 93(1), pp.32-78.

Morgan, Marcyliena. (1994). Theories and politics in African American English. AnnualReview of Anthropology 23: 325±35.

Rickford, J.R. and McNair-Knox, F., (1994). Addressee-and topic-influenced style shift: Aquantitative sociolinguistic study. Sociolinguistic perspectives on register,pp.235-276.

Scanlon, M. and Wassink, A.B., (2010). African American English in urban Seattle:Accommodation and intraspeaker variation in the Pacific Northwest. AmericanSpeech, 85(2), pp.205-224.

Spears, Arthur. (1988). Black American English. In Johnetta B. Cole (ed.). Anthropologyfor the Nineties: Introductory Readings. New York: Free Press. 96-113.

Tarone, E. E. (1973). Aspects of intonation in Black English. American Speech, 29–36.Thomas, Erik. (2015). “Prosodic Features of African American English.” In Sonja

Lanehart (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of African American Language. OxfordUniversity Press. 420-438.

Thomas, Erik R., Norman J. Lass, and Jeannine Carpenter. (2010). “Identification ofAfrican American Speech.” In Dennis R. Preston and Nancy Niedzielski (eds.), AReader in Sociophonetics. Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs 219. New York: De Gruyter Mouton. 265-85.

Wolfram, W. (2007). Sociolinguistic folklore in the study of African American English.Language and Linguistics Compass, 1(4), 292–313.

Wolfram, Walt and Ralph W. Fasold. (1974). The Study of Social Dialects in AmericanEnglish. Englewood Clifs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.


Prof. Nicole HollidayDepartment of LinguisticsUniversity of Pennsylvania3401-C Walnut StreetSuite 300, C WingPhiladelphia, PA 19104USA


12A longitudinal panel survey of African American English

Patricia Cukor-AvilaUniversity of North Texas

Abstract

Although most of the defining research on African American Vernacular English(AAVE) was conducted in the urban North (cf. Fasold, 1972; Labov, 1968; Wolfram,1968) AAVE was a rural Southern variety for most of its history. As late as thebeginning of World War II, most African Americans lived in the rural South, and eventhough the Great Migration brought a dramatic demographic shift in the AfricanAmerican population (Bailey and Maynor, 1987; Farrington this volume), substantialnumbers of African Americans remain in the rural South today.

This chapter explores the history of rural AAVE both as the variety from whichurban AAVE developed and as a variety that more recently has been influenced byurban innovations (Cukor-Avila and Bailey, 2015). It does so by examining linguisticfeatures that have remained stable over its history and others that emerged during thecourse of the 20th century. The data for this analysis come from a panel survey thatevolved out of a larger survey of a rural Texas community, “Springville,” which beganin 1988 and is on-going. The larger survey was designed to document both theevolution of AAVE and to explore fundamental issues of language change. The oldestcommunity member recorded in the survey was born in 1893 and the youngest in2002, providing an apparent time perspective of more than a century. The Springvillepanel survey includes interviews over thirty-two years with nineteen African Americanresidents (roughly a third of those in the larger survey) born between 1912 to 1996;many of them were interviewed multiple times per year in a variety of interviewcontexts (individual, peer group, site study, and recordings in which individualpanelists were the fieldworkers), and with a wide range of interlocutors (44 totalincluding the two fieldworkers) of different ages and ethnicities (Anglo, Latino, AfricanAmerican). This chapter also discusses how the AAVE data from the Springville corpuscontribute to the study of transmission and diffusion of linguistic features, age-grading,and language change over the lifespan.

References

Bailey, Guy and Natalie Maynor. 1987. Decreolization? Language in Society 16:449-473.

Cukor-Avila, Patricia and Guy Bailey. 2015. Rural Texas African American VernacularEnglish. In Sonja Lanehart (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of African American Language.Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fasold, Ralph W. 1972. Tense Marking in Black English. Arlington, VA: Center forApplied Linguistics.


Labov, William, Paul Cohen, Clarence Robbins, and John Lewis. 1968. A Study of theNon-Standard English of Negro and Puerto Rican Speakers in New York City.Philadelphia: U.S. Regional Survey.

Wolfram, Walter A. 1969. A Sociolinguistic Description of Detroit Negro Speech.Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.


Prof. Patricia Cukor-AvilaUniversity of North TexasDepartment of LinguisticsUniversity of North Texas1155 Union Circle #311068Denton, TX 76203-5017


13Puerto Rican English in Puerto Rico and in the continental UnitedStates

Rosa E. Guzzardo TamargoUniversity of Puerto Rico

Abstract

The development of Puerto Rican English in Puerto Rico (PR) and in the continentalUnited States (US) is based on their social, economic, and political relations. In 1898,after being a Spanish colony for four centuries, PR was ceded to the US at the end ofthe Spanish-American War. The moment in which PR became a US territory markedthe beginning of significant English influence on the Island. Since 1952, PR has been aself-governing US Commonwealth—it has authority over internal affairs while the USretains control over state-level affairs. Since 1917, Puerto Ricans are considered UScitizens, although those living on the Island lack full citizenship rights (Duany, 2002).

A fierce debate revolves around PR’s political status, which, in turn, affects thelanguage situation and policy on the Island. Among the three main political parties, oneendorses PR as the 51st US state, another prefers that the Island remain aCommonwealth, and the other advocates for PR’s development as a free country.Recent referendums have obtained limited participation and have generatedinconclusive results, demonstrating how divided Puerto Ricans are on this issue. PR’sofficial language tends to vary every time the political party in power changes. Whilethe Commonwealth party defends Spanish as the sole official language in PR, thepro-statehood party favors Spanish and English as co-official languages (Nickels,2005), as is currently the case. English and Spanish coexist in the Island’s linguistic landscape (e.g., street signs,business names, product labels) and in many aspects of daily life (e.g., media outlets,entertainment; Bullock et al., 2016; Fayer, 1988, 2000; Fayer et al., 1998; Nickels, 2005;Santos, 1996; Schmidt, 2014; Torres González, 2002). Despite this, Puerto Ricans’actual use of and proficiency in English varies greatly. According to current censusdata, slightly over half of the population speaks English at different levels ofproficiency, while nearly half does not speak any English at home (US Census Bureau,2014). Puerto Ricans with the highest levels of English proficiency tend to reside in thecapital, San Juan, and its surrounding metropolitan municipalities (Schmidt, 2014),although there are pockets of proficient bilinguals in other areas of PR (Pousada,2000, 2009). They often belong to higher social classes, and work in sectors such asbanking, medicine, law, engineering, and tourism, in many cases, maintaining closeworking and professional ties with the US (Flores Pabón, 2010; Uber, 2000).

English is also present in the PR school system. It was the obligatory languageof instruction during the early decades of the twentieth century. The language policy inschools changed frequently from one Education Commissioner to the next. Nowadays,English is a required second language course from kindergarten to twelfth grade in allpublic and private schools. While the quality of English courses may vary (Hermina,


2014), all students in PR have some degree of exposure to English at school, and evenin courses in which Spanish is the medium of instruction, the textbooks and assignedreadings are often in English. There are also bilingual schools and English-immersionschools on the Island. Most of the research related to English in PR has focused on the effect that thelanguage contact situation has had on the inhabitants’ use of their first language,Spanish, in terms of pronunciation (e.g., use of retroflex /ɻ/, Dauphinais Civitello, 2018;Ramos-Pellicia, 2007), word order and morphosyntactic structures (Morales, 1981,1988, 1989, 2000). To our knowledge, scarce linguistic research has been conductedon the specific characteristics of the Puerto Rican English in PR; several studiesapproach the topic from a second language acquisition perspective (e.g.,Chan-Rodríguez, 1974; Kryston-Morales; 1997; Mahdavi Emamy, 2017; Santiago Pérez,2017), and refer to transfer and interference from Spanish, occasionally equating it toa nonnative institutionalized variety of English, based on a distinct set lexicon andsemantic particularities produced by literal translations from Spanish (Dayton & Blau,1999; Schweers, 1999). The English spoken in Puerto Rico can certainly not bedescribed as uniform; the different levels of English proficiency of Puerto Ricans in theIsland lead to subtle subvarieties of English that merit further examination. There are,however, more studies on the lexical influence of English, regarding the use of Englishwords and phrases with phonological and morphological adaptation (Anglicisms) or inunadapted form in otherwise Spanish discourse (Bullock et al., 2016; Cortés et al.2005; Delgado, 1974; Echandy, 2013; Hernán, 2017; Holmquist, 2013; VillanuevaFeliciano, 2009), as well as studies on the use of Spanish-English code-switching(Jiménez-Lugo, 2007; Nash, 1970, 1971; Vélez Avilés, 2018) and translanguaging inacademic environments (Mazak & Herbas-Donoso, 2014; Mazak et al., 2016). Despite the strong US influence and the presence of English on the Island, PuertoRicans claim a separate culture from that of the US and a very strong Island-specificcultural identity (Duany, 2003). As a result of PR’s relations with the US, its inhabitantshave developed linguistic attitudes towards Spanish and English. Therefore, anotheravenue of inquiry comprises Puerto Ricans’ ideologies and opinions regarding thelanguage situation in PR, particularly the presence of English in the PR school system.A review of the research on this topic evinces a shift in Puerto Ricans’ approach toEnglish. Earlier work reports Puerto Ricans’ strong rejection of English in defense oftheir Spanish proficiency and their Hispanic heritage (Algren, 1987; Alvar, 1986;Clachar, 1997a; López Laguerre, 1989; Rodríguez Bou, 1984; Schweers & Vélez, 1992),leading to covert resistance as students struggle to learn English (Pousada, 1999;Resnick, 1993). More recent studies document a possible attitudinal change involvingacceptance of English and code-switching, and an expanded view of Puerto Ricanidentity as fluid and multifaceted (Domínguez Rosado, 2015; Guzzardo Tamargo et al.,2018; Guzzardo Tamargo & Vélez Avilés, 2017; López Hernández, 2007; Lugo, 2002;Mazak, 2012; Pérez-Casas, 2016). This change in attitudes is likely to bring about amodified acquisition of English, in turn, affecting the characteristics of Island PuertoRican English.

Puerto Ricans’ US citizenship and the Island’s proximity to the US have broughtabout a fluid bidirectional migration, which fluctuates depending on the livingconditions in PR and the U.S. economy. Nearly five million Puerto Ricans haverelocated to the US Mainland, representing almost 2% of the US population and almost10% of the Latino population (Román, 2018). Migration from PR to the US began early


in the twentieth century and has been steadily increasing. A large portion of PuertoRicans have settled in New York City, particularly in East Harlem, but Puerto Ricancommunities have also grown in other US cities, mostly in the Northeast and theMidwest (Duany, 2002, 2017). More recently, the Island’s economic crisis, severe debt,and natural disasters have led to more Puerto Rican migration, especially to Florida(Duany, 2017). Moreover, beginning around the 1960s thousands of Stateside PuertoRicans have returned to the Island and maintain a steady circulation, reinforcingSpanish-English bilingualism among them (Duany, 2011, 2017; Kerkhof, 2001). Research on Puerto Rican English in the continental US, as a result of severalwaves of migration from PR to the Mainland, primarily addresses bilingual practices,such as code-switching (Poplack, 1980, 1987; Zentella, 1982, 1997). Some studies alsodocument the shift from Spanish to English with each successive generation, influencedby further contact with other speech communities in the US. The English used byimmigrants and that used by later generations who are born and raised in the US byPuerto Rican families displays a clear change (Shousterman, 2015; Torres, 2010).Additionally, studies reveal the influence of return migrants on both language use andlanguage attitudes in PR (Clachar, 1997b, 2007; Pousada, 1994). In sum, Puerto Rican English, both in the Island and the Mainland, represents arich and dynamic combination of different varieties, based on Puerto Ricans’experiences with English, their different levels of proficiency in English, and theirlanguage attitudes towards English, which are, in turn, influenced by the complexrelation between PR and the US, and Puerto Rican’s status in PR, where Spanish in themajority language and English is a second or foreign language, and in the US, whereEnglish is the majority language. Although the research presented spans differenttopics related to language, there is still need for more systematic and precisedescriptions of the specific traits of Puerto Rican English.

References

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Chang-Rodríguez, E. (1974). Transculturación e interferencia lingüística en el PuertoRico contemporáneo 1898-1968. The Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingüe, 1(2),201-202.

Clachar, A. (1997a). Resistance to the English language in Puerto Rico: Toward atheory of language and intergroup distinctiveness. Linguistics & Education, 9(1),69-98.

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Clachar, A. (2007). Negociación de identidades a través de la estructura lingüística y laopción lingüística: migrantes puertorriqueños de retorno en compañíasamericanas en Puerto Rico. Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana,5(2), 147-162.

Cortés, I., Ramírez, J., Rivera, M., Viada, M., & Fayer, J. (2005). Dame un hamburger plaincon ketchup y papitas. English Today, 21(2), 35-42. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078405002051

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Dayton, E. & Blau, E. (1999). Puerto Rican English: An acceptable non-native variety?.Milenio: Revista de Artes y Ciencias, 3, 176-193.

Domínguez-Rosado, B. (2015). The Unlinking of Language and Puerto Rican Identity:New Trends in Sight. Cambridge Scholars.

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Flores Pabón, J. (2010). English in the nursing profession in Puerto Rico: Needs, uses andcurriculum. (Publication No. 1487533). [Master’s thesis, Universidad de PuertoRico, Mayagüez]. ProQuest LLC.

Guzzardo Tamargo, R. E., Loureiro-Rodríguez, V., Acar, E. F., & Vélez Avilés, J. (2018).Attitudes in progress: Puerto Rican youth’s opinions on monolingual andcode-switched language varieties. Journal of Multilingual and MulticulturalDevelopment . doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2018.1515951

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writing of Hispanic ESL learners. Milenio: Revista de Artes y Ciencias, 3, 149-175.Schweers, C. W. Jr. & Vélez, J. A. (1992). To be or not to be bilingual in Puerto Rico:

That is the issue. TESOL Journal, 2(1), 13-16. Shousterman, C. (2015). Speaking English in Spanish Harlem: Language change in Puerto

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de la alternancia de códigos español-inglés entre jóvenes universitariospuertorriqueños [Unpublished Master’s final monograph]. University of PuertoRico, Río Piedras.

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Zentella, A. C. (1997). Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York.Blackwell.


Prof. Rosa E. Guzzardo TamargoDepartment of Hispanic StudiesGraduate Program of LinguisticsUniversity of Puerto Rico Río Piedras CampusP.O. Box 23351San Juan, PR 00931-3351

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078410000143

http://www.census.gov


14The English of Americans of Mexican and Central American heritage

Erik R. ThomasNorth Carolina State University

Abstract

The English of Americans with ancestry from Middle America, especially Mexico,represents a classic example of a subordinate immigrant group who learned thelanguage of the dominant group. In fact, it probably constitutes the case with thelongest continuous span of scholarly study, beginning with Lynn (1940) and markedby several book-length overviews (Peñalosa 1980; Penfield and Ornstein-Galicia 1985;Fought 2003; Thomas 2019). Its parallels with other instances of immigrant languageshift around the world, except as outlined in Thomas (2019), are little explored,however. In general, it follows the model of interference (Thomason and Kaufman1988) or source language influence (Van Coetsem 1988) in which a group that shiftsits language retains considerable phonological/phonetic and morphosyntacticinfluence from its heritage language in its realization of the target language.

The development of English by Mexican and Central American groups, however,is not as simple as the transfer of linguistic features. In different communities, avariety of outcomes is possible. The proportion of the population with a MiddleAmerican heritage can play a large role; greater proportions allow stronger substrateeffects. The local social ecology can influence the outcome, as a history of ethnicconflict engenders a greater need to express ethnic identity and language is a crucialexponent of identity. Cross-regional solidarity can also enter the picture. The degreeof contact with African Americans affects a number of variables. However, theinfluences of Spanish language maintenance and of dialectal differences in Spanish arenot yet clear.

Most of the variables associated with the English of these groups have a director indirect derivation from Spanish. Descriptions of their speech often focus on suchfeatures as confusion of /tʃ/ and /ʃ/, devoicing of /z/, and failure to distinguish certainvowels (mainly fleece/kit, goose/foot, and dress/trap). These descriptions largelypertain to the speech of second-language learners of English, however. Individualswho speak English as a first language tend to have a different set of features, one thatstill shows Spanish influence but in ways that, usually, are not easily representedorthographically and thus not targeted by teachers. Thus, speakers with a MiddleAmerican heritage who grew up in the United States in areas with a large Latinocontingent nearly always make all the contrastive vowel distinctions that Anglos make,but they ordinarily show less fronting of the goose vowel and little if any fronting ofthe goat diphthong, and they often lack the raising of the trap vowel that typifies U.S.Anglo varieties. They make a relatively clean distinction of /tʃ/ and /ʃ/, but they maylack the velarization that U.S. Anglos exhibit in syllable-onset /l/. They commonly showsome prosodic influence from Spanish. Except for negative concord, morphosyntacticfeatures are less studied and less can be said about them. Where people of Mexican


and Central American heritage form only a small contingent of the population, theirspeech tends to differ in subtler ways from the matrix dialects.

The picture as a whole, however, shows that U.S. natives with a MiddleAmerican background have developed distinctive and durable varieties of English. These new dialects are not uniform, instead encompassing a mosaic of varieties thatare shaped by local social conditions. Some individuals aiming to assimilate to Angloculture reject them entirely. Nevertheless, the ethnic dialects serve their speakers byproviding a vehicle for expressing their identity, just as any dialect can. Theseethnolects seem likely to persist in the U.S. and should provide linguists with a templatefor the development of immigrant-based ethnolects in other parts of the world.References

Fought, Carmen. 2003. Chicano English in Context. Basingstoke, U.K.: PalgraveMacmillan.

Lynn, Klonda. 1940. A phonetic analysis of the English spoken by Mexican children inthe elementary schools of Arizona. Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University.

Peñalosa, Fernando. 1980. Chicano Sociolinguistics: A Brief Introduction. Rowley, MA:Newberry.

Penfield, Joyce, and Jacob L. Ornstein-Galicia. 1985. Chicano English: An Ethnic ContactDialect. Varieties of English around the world 7. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Thomas, Erik R., ed. 2019. Mexican American English: Substrate Influence and the Birthof an Ethnolect. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Thomason, Sarah Grey, and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization,and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Van Coetsem, Frans. 1988. Loan Phonology and the Two Transfer Types in LanguageContact. Dordrecht: Foris/Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.


Prof. Erik R. ThomasDepartment of EnglishBox 8105North Carolina State UniversityRaleigh, NC 27695-8105USA


15Anglophone settlement and the creation of Canadian English.

Charles BobergMcGill University, Montreal

Abstract

In the broadest terms, my chapter will introduce the section on Canada, including theindividual chapters on specific regions that follow it, by bringing together elements ofmy own monograph on Canadian English (The English Language in Canada, 2010, CUP)that highlight five themes:

27)the current status of the English language in Canada;28)the history of English-speaking settlement that led up to this current status;29)the main lexical and phonological features of Standard Canadian English that

resulted from (2);30)the main regional differences in these features across Canada; and31)the most important previous studies of Canadian English.

The discussion in (1) will rely on data published by Statistics Canada. That in (2) willcite historical government reports on immigration and population, to trace the mainsources of Canada’s English-speaking population at different periods of its history andin different regions of the country. In particular, the contributions of pre-Loyalist andLoyalist immigration will be considered, followed by those of 19th-centuryimmigration from Britain and early 20th-century immigration from Britain, Europe andthe United States, as well as internal migration from eastern to western Canada. Thatin (3) will highlight the combination of British, American and unique Canadianwordstocks in the Canadian vocabulary and describe the most important features ofCanadian English pronunciation in a comparative perspective, especially highlightingthe Low-Back Merger, Canadian Raising and the Canadian Vowel Shift (now known asthe Low-Back-Merger Shift). That in (4) will briefly motivate the division of CanadianEnglish into 6 major regions (BC, the Prairies, Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes andNewfoundland), citing lexical and phonological features associated with each (e.g., therelative advancement of the /ahr/ of START and the nucleus of raised /aw/ inMOUTH). That in (5) will briefly review the history of research on Canadian English,beginning with the earliest studies (Ahrend, Ayearst, Geikie, Lighthall, McLay, McLean,Munroe) and what they can tell us about early 20th-century speech, then progressingthrough the major surveys of mid-century (Avis, Gregg 1957, Hamilton, Scargill &Warkentyne) and the work on Canadian Raising (Joos, Chambers), to thesociolinguistic surveys and sociophonetic studies of the late 20th century (Gregg 1992,Woods, Clarke et al, Boberg).References


Ahrend, Evelyn R. 1934. Ontario speech. American Speech 9/2: 136–139.Avis, Walter S. 1954–1956. Speech differences along the Ontario–United States

border. Journal of the Canadian Linguistic Association 1/1: 13–18 (Vocabulary);1/1 (Regular Series) 14–19 (Grammar); and 2/2: 41–59 (Pronunciation).

Ayearst, Morley. 1939. A Note on Canadian speech. American Speech 14/3: 231-233.Boberg, Charles. 2010. The English Language in Canada: Status, History and

Comparative Analysis. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.Canada. Dominion Bureau of Statistics. 1949-1971. Report of the Dominion Bureau of

Statistics. Ottawa: Government of Canada.Chambers, J. K. 1973. Canadian Raising. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 18/2: 113–135.Clarke, Sandra, Ford Elms and Amani Youssef. 1995. The third dialect of English:

Some Canadian evidence. Language Variation and Change 7: 209–228.Geikie, Rev. A. Constable. 1857. Canadian English. The Canadian Journal of Industry,

Science, and Art 2/11: 344-355.Gregg, Robert J. 1957a. Notes on the pronunciation of Canadian English as spoken in

Vancouver, B.C. Journal of the Canadian Linguistic Association 3/1: 20-26.Gregg, Robert J. 1957b. Neutralisation and fusion of vocalic phonemes in Canadian

English as spoken in the Vancouver area. Journal of the Canadian LinguisticAssociation 3/2: 78-83.

Gregg, Robert J. 1992. The Survey of Vancouver English. American Speech 67/3:250–267.

Hamilton, Donald E. 1958. Notes on Montreal English. Journal of the Canadian LinguisticAssociation 4/2: 70–79.

Joos, Martin. 1942. A phonological dilemma in Canadian English. Language 18:141–144.

Labov, William, Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg. 2006. The Atlas of North AmericanEnglish: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. Berlin: Mouton/De Gruyter.

Lighthall, William Douw. 1889. Canadian English. The Week 6/37: 581-583.McLay, W. S. W. 1930. A note on Canadian English. American Speech 5/4: 328–329.McLean, John. 1889. The Indians: Their Manners and Customs. Toronto: William

Briggs.Munroe, Helen C. 1929. Montreal English. American Speech 5/1: 21.Scargill, Matthew Henry, and Henry J. Warkentyne. 1972. The Survey of Canadian

English: A report. English Quarterly 5/3: 47–104.Statistics Canada. 1905-2001. Canada Year Book. Ottawa: Dominion Bureau of

Statistics [Statistics Canada].Urquhart, Malcolm Charles, and Kenneth Arthur Haig Buckley. 1965. Historical

Statistics of Canada. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.Woods, Howard B. 1999. The Ottawa Survey of Canadian English. Kingston, ON: Strathy

Language Unit, Queen’s University.Institutional address

Prof. Charles BobergDepartment of LinguisticsMcGill University1085 Dr. Penfield Ave.Montreal, QC H3A 1A7


Canada


16The open-class lexis of Canadian English: History, structure, andsocial correlations

Stefan DollingerUniversity of British Columbia

Abstract

Chaque mot a son histoire – ‘every word has its own history’ – is probably the reasonwhy words are the Cinderella in English sociolinguistics: barely studied, often belittled,simply overlooked. Jules Gilliéron’s famous dictum (or Hugo Schuchardt’s, seeCampbell 2004: 212-13), which expresses the idea that open class vocabulary has verylittle system, lots of idiosyncrasy, seems to lie behind this sociolinguistic neglect ofvocabulary (Dollinger In press). This chapter looks at the open class of words inCanadian English from historical, structural and social points of view, all of which willbe couched in the history of the discipline in Canada. It attempts to give a reasonablycomprehensive overview of the available work, organized along three domains.

The historical angle puts at its centre the evolution of Canadian English words,dates in real-time the various phases in which Canadian identities – local,super-regional and national – may have become conceivable entities and socialconstructs. Anchoring around Dollinger (2008) and Reuter (2017), both older andnewer work on the history of Canadian English is comprehensively reviewed. Theaccount will critically review the dating of phases in Canada in Schneider’s (2007:238-50) famous model, highlighting a number of obvious mismatches for the Canadiancontext.

The structural angle offers an analysis of terms that have originated or“distinctively characteristic of Canadian usage” (Avis 1967: xiii), which is rooted inanalyses of DCHP-1 and DCHP-2, the latter of which within a six-tier typology ofCanadianisms (Dollinger and Fee 2017: Introduction). These findings are based on12000+ lexical items of the open class order. It will be shown, among other things, thatmultiplex items have since the 1600s, i.e. over the course of the development ofCanadian English, formed the most distinct element of Canadian open-class lexis,followed by borrowings. Since the second half of the 20th century, however, multiplexcompound nouns seem to have lost some of their vitality and productivity, giving riseto new, apparently more “urban” formation patterns, such as neologisms, blends,clippings and the like.

Finally, a sociolinguistic assessment of the open class lexis will be attempted.While some lexical items, especially intensifiers (so, much, very) and general extenders(and stuff, things) have received great attention (e.g. D’Arcy 2015), it is fair to say thatbeyond these few items – some of theme not open class - a dearth of lexical studiesexist in the social framework (but see, e.g., Boberg 2005, Chambers 2008, Dollinger2012, Denis 2015, Jankowski & Tagliamonte 2019). As a result, any general assessmentwill be tentative and necessarily heuristic, focussing on a number of representativeCanadian items such as parkade ‘car park’, garburator ‘in-sink disposal’, gong show


‘chaos’, double double ‘two servings of milk and sugar’, or, in these (post)-Covid-19times, caremongering ‘showing public concern for others, esp. essential workers’. A(long) list of desiderata in the social study of open class items, together with somerecommendations will round off this overview. References

Boberg, Charles. 2005. The North American Regional Vocabulary Survey: newvariables and methods in the study of North American English. American Speech 80:22-60.

Campbell, Lyle. 2004. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Chambers, J. K. 2008. The Tangled Garden: relics and vestiges in Canadian English.

Focus on Canadian English, ed. Matthias Meyer. Special issue of Anglistik 19: 7-21.D’Arcy, Alexandra. 2015. Stability, stasis and change: The longue durée of

intensification. Diachronica 32(4): 449-493.DCHP-1 = Avis, Walter S. (ed.-in-chief), Charles Crate, Patrick Drysdale, Douglas

Leechman, Matthew H. Scharill, and Charles L. Lovell (eds). 1967. A dictionary ofCanadianisms on historical principles. Toronto: Gage. Online at www.dchp.ca/dchp1

DCHP-2 = Dollinger, Stefan (chief editor) and Margery Fee (associate editor). 2017.DCHP-2: The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, Second Edition. Withthe assistance of Baillie Ford, Alexandra Gaylie, and Gabrielle Lim. Vancouver:University of British Columbia. www.dchp.ca/dchp2

Denis, Derek. 2015. The development of pragmatic markers in Canadian English. Ph.D.Diss. University of Toronto.

Dollinger, Stefan. In press. English Lexicography: A global perspective. In The Handbookof English Linguistics, 2nd ed. Ed. by April McMahon, Bas Aarts and Lars Hinrichs.Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (proofs returned 14 Apr. 2020).

Dollinger, Stefan. 2012. The western Canada-U.S. border as a linguistic boundary: theroles of L1 and L2 speakers. World Englishes 31(4): 519-533.

Dollinger, Stefan. 2008. New-dialect Formation in Canada: Evidence from the EnglishModal Auxiliaries. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Jankowski, Bridget L. and Sali A. Tagliamonte. Supper or Dinner? Sociolinguisticvariation in the meals of the day. English World-Wide 40(2): 169-200.

Reuter, David. M. 2017. Newspaper, politics, and Canadian English: a corpus-basedanalysis of selected linguistic variables in early nineteenth-century Ontario newspapers.Heidelberg: Winter.

Tagliamonte, Sali A. and Bridget L. Jankowski. Golly, gosh, and oh my God!: What NorthAmerican dialects can tell us about swear words. American Speech 95(1): 1-40.


Prof. Stefan DollingerUniversity of British ColumbiaDepartment of English Language and Literatures397-1873 East MallVancouver BC V6T 1Z1Canada

http://www.dchp.ca/dchp1

http://www.dchp.ca/dchp2


17Ontario English: Loyalists and beyond

Derek Denisa, Bridget Jankowskib, and Sali A. Tagliamonteb

University of Toronto Mississaugaa and University of Torontob

Abstract

A remarkable characteristic of Canadian English is its generally uniform dialect(Priestly 1951, Chambers 2006, Boberg 2010); from the western border of theprimarily French speaking province of Quebec to the Pacific Ocean, Canadian English isrelatively homogeneous lexically, phonologically, and grammatically. The province ofOntario, and Ontario English, is centrally important to this homogeneity. AlthoughEnglish-speaking settlers had been present in eastern parts of the country(Newfoundland, parts of the Maritimes) prior to United Empire Loyalist settlement inOntario, this early Ontario speech community is the antecedent of the contemporaryhomogeneous CanE (Bloomfield 1948, Chambers 2004). These early English-speakingOntario settlers were British-aligned, American refugees fleeing the AmericanRevolutionary War. These Loyalists and their descendants spread westward, bringingtheir dialect with them. The result over time was parallel transmission of the samesource dialect across several thousand kilometers. However, a caveat of allobservations of CanE homogeneity is its limited scope: CanE “is remarkablyhomogenous across the vast expanse of the country. Except for Newfoundland, urban,middle-class Canadians speak with much the same accent in Vancouver, and Ottawa,Edmonton and Windsor, Winnipeg and Fredericton” (Chambers 2010: 19, ouremphasis). Across this expanse, 18th and 19th century immigration of a newer layerof settlers from across the British Isles and Europe resulted in dialectal diversitythroughout the vast non-urban areas of the country, particularly Ontario. This chapterexposes the consistent dialectal diversity that has been present in the province sinceEnglish-speaking settlement. As a Settler Colonial English (Denis and D’Arcy 2018), itsnature is not a result of contact with the many different Indigenous languages, alreadypresent for millennia in different parts of the province. Rather, dialect differentiationwithin Ontario stems from the transplantation of distinct Scots, Irish and Englishdialects from across the British Isles. In this chapter, we demonstrate dialectal variation in Ontario by way of ananalysis of general extenders in data from early Ontario English. General extenders areclause-final pragmatic markers that serve a core set-extending function as in (1).

(1) a. And the second one helped my mother around the house, and gardening andall the rest of it. (D-9, 1907)

b. Of course you always had hay if you had a cow and horses and so on. (N-23,1898)

c. Oh well I'd be like plowing or the likes of that, I was about eighteen orsomething like that. (E-01, 1891)

d. We might get, um, lemonade or something of that nature. (B-01, 1901)


e. I could play two games, one after another when some of them were prettywell pooped out you know and that sort of thing (T-01, 1904)

f. here had to be a guy there to show the cable off the road, to keep it back. Totry to get it behind stumps and trees and stuff. (PS-25, 1911)

g. The girls learn to sew and bake and all that sort of stuff. (OV-15, 1899)

Due to their high degree of surface variability and regional differences, generalextenders are an optimal feature to investigate dialect diversity (Tagliamonte 2015;Denis and D’Arcy 2019). The data we consider come from multiple historicalrecordings of Ontario English put together from a variety of sources. These include theFarm Work and Farm Life Since 1890 Oral Histories which include data from NiagaraRegion, Eastern Ontario, Dufferin County, and Temiskaming Shores (Denis 2016), anumber of archival sources compiled in the Ontario Dialects Project (Tagliamonte2008-present; Tagliamonte and Denis 2014), which includes materials from theLinguistic Survey of the Ottawa Valley (Pringle and Padolsky 1983) and otherrecordings from elsewhere in the province (e.g, Belleville, Parry Sound, Kirkland Lake,Cobalt). All of these data were recorded in the 1970s and 1980s, often with elderlyspeakers born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, giving us insight into an earlystage of the language in each community. A critical comparison is that some of thesecommunities, e.g. Niagara, Eastern Ontario, and Belleville were first settled by Loyalists;while others, e.g. Dufferin County, Ottawa Valley, and Parry Sound were settled laterand mostly by settlers who came directly from different areas of the British Isles,particularly northern varieties from Scotland and Ireland. We intend to present a picture of dialect diversity within the province of Ontario,rooted in variegated settlement histories (cf. Tagliamonte and Denis 2014). By usinghistorical corpora, we can turn back the clock (Tagliamonte 2006, 2014) and explorethe state of the CanE at an early stage. References

Bloomfield, Morton W. 1948. Canadian English and Its Relation to Eighteenth CenturyAmerican Speech. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 47 (1): 59–66.

Boberg, Charles. 2010. The English Language in Canada: Status, History, andComparative Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chambers, J.K. 2004. Canadian English: 250 Years in the Making. In Katherine Barber(ed.), Canadian Oxford Dictionary, 2nd ed., pp. ix–x. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

Chambers, J. K. 2010. English in Canada. In Elaine Gold and Janice McAlpine (eds.)Canadian English: A linguistic reader (Occasional papers). pp. 61-37. Kingston, ON:Strathy Language Unit, Queen's University.

Denis, Derek. 2016. Oral histories as a window to sociolinguistic history and languagehistory: Exploring earlier Ontario English with the Farm Work and Farm Lifesince 1890 Oral History Collection. American Speech 91(4): 513–6.

Denis, Derek and Alexandra D’Arcy. 2019. Deriving homogeneity in a Settler ColonialEnglish. American Speech 94(2): 223–58.

Priestly, F. E. L. 1951. Canadian English. In Eric Partridge and John W. Clark (eds.),British and American English since 1900, pp. 72–79. New York: Greenwood.

Pringle, Ian and Enoch Padolsky. 1983. The linguistic survey of the Ottawa Valley.


American Speech 58(4): 325–344.Tagliamonte, Sali A. (2006). Historical change in synchronic perspective: The legacy of

British dialects. In van Kemenade, A. & Lou, B. (eds.), Handbook on the history ofEnglish. pp. 477-506. Malden and New York: Blackwell.

Tagliamonte, Sali A. (2014). System and society in the evolution of change: The viewfrom Canada. In Green, E. & Meyer, C. (eds.), Variability in Current WorldEnglishes. pp. 199-238. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter

Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2015. Antecedents of Innovation: Exploring General Extenders inConservative Dialects. In Heike Pichler (ed.), Discourse-Pragmatic Variation andChange in English: New Methods and Insights, pp. 115–38. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Tagliamonte, Sali A. and D. Denis. 2014. Expanding the transmission/diffusiondichotomy: Evidence from Canada. Language 90(1): 90-136.


Dr. Derek DenisDepartment of Language StudiesUniversity of Toronto MississaugaMaanjiwe nendamowinan, 4th floor3359 Mississauga Road Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6Dr. Bridget JankowskiDepartment of LinguisticsUniversity of TorontoSidney Smith Hall, 4th floor100 St. George StreetToronto ON, M5S 3G3

Prof. Sali A. TagliamonteDepartment of LinguisticsUniversity of TorontoSidney Smith Hall, 4th floor100 St. George StreetToronto ON, M5S 3G3


18The Prairies and the West of Canada

Alexandra D’Arcy Nicole RosenUniversity of Victoria University of Manitoba

Abstract

The western region of Canada is beginning to emerge as one of rich linguistic variation.Lexical differences have long been acknowledged (e.g., bunny hug, gitch, jam buster),but distinctions in other areas of synchronic grammar are less frequently reported.More recent work uncovering nuanced differences in the realizations of key vowelsets, however, suggests that the area from the west coast (British Columbia) throughthe Prairies (Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba) is not wholly monolithic. Indeed,the Atlas of North American English (ANAE; Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006) proposed thatthe province of British Columbia constituted one of three Canadian dialect areas,though the Prairies were subsumed within the Inland region, an area that includedOntario. The subsequent Phonetics of Canadian English project (PCE; Boberg 2008,2010) partitioned off Ontario and proposed a large bipartite dialect region, the West,consisting of British Columbia on the one hand and the Prairies on the other. In thischapter we first review the predictions of settler colonialism in the context ofwestward expansion (cf., Denis & D’Arcy 2018) and the well-entrenched rhetoric ofwidespread dialectological homogeneity in the literature on Canadian English (e.g.,Priestly 1951; Chambers 2004). As part of this discussion, we raise establisheddifferences within the West and discuss why they are limited to lexicon. We thendiscuss contemporary descriptions of western dialects, concentrating on evidencefrom sociophonetics. We first review the features of the West in general (Boberg 2008,2010), before turning to details from more specific locales. For this part of thediscussion, although we include discussion of the full Prairie region, we concentrate onthe peripheries of the West: the south coast of British Columbia (e.g., Pappas & Jeffrey2013; Roeder et al. 2018) and the south east of Manitoba (e.g., Onosson et al. 2019).These areas are maximally separated from each other within the western region,representing the boundaries of British Columbia and the Prairies respectively, thusproviding an ideal baseline for illustrating both ongoing entrenchment of urbanCanadian dialect similarities and emergent dialect differentiation. Much of the workupon which we report reveals that variation is primarily ethnic, within a variety, ratherthan regional, across varieties (Onosson et al 2019; Rosen 2019; Rosen et al 2019;Rosen & Skriver 2015). We therefore round out the discussion by touching onperceptual studies that illustrate how listeners are able to cue into these differences toidentify the ethnicity of talkers (e.g., Wong & Babel 2017). We conclude the chapter byhighlighting the pervasive and ongoing effects of settler colonialism in dialectologicaloutcomes, while also highlighting the gains to be made by exploring diversity withinlocal varieties.

References


Boberg, C. 2008. Regional phonetic differentiation in Standard Canadian English.Journal of English Linguistics 36. 129–154.

Boberg, C. 2010. The English language in Canada: Status, history and comparativeanalysis. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Chambers, J.K. 2004. Canadian English: 250 years in the making. In K. Barber (ed.),Canadian Oxford Dictionary, 2nd ed., ix–x. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Denis, D. & A. D’Arcy. 2018. Settler Colonial Englishes are distinct from PostcolonialEnglishes. American Speech 93. 3–31.

Labov, W., S. Ash & C. Boberg. 2006. The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics,phonology, and sound change. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Onosson, S., N. Rosen & L. Li. 2019. Ethnolinguistic differentiation and the CanadianShift. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain & P. Warren (eds.), Proceedings of the19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019,368–372). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and TechnologyAssociation Inc.

Pappas, P.A. & M. Jeffrey. 2013. Raising and shifting in BC English. In A. Barysevich, A.D’Arcy & D. Heap (eds.), Proceedings of Methods XIV: Papers from the fourteenthInternational Conference on Methods in Dialectology, 2011, 36–47. Frankfurt amMain: Peter Lang.

Priestly, F.E.L. 1951. Canadian English. In E. Partridge & J.W. Clark (eds.), British andAmerican English since 1900, 72–79. New York: Greenwood.

Roeder, R., S. Onosson & A. D’Arcy. 2018. Joining the western region: Sociophoneticshift in Victoria. Journal of English Linguistics 46. 87–112.

Rosen, N. 2019. Visualizing complex linguistic variation in the Canadian Prairies:Applying the Nunaliit framework. In D.R.F. Taylor, E. Anonby & K Murasugi (eds.),Further developments in the theory and practice of cybercartography: Internationaldimensions and language mapping. Modern Cartography series Volume 9. SanDiego: Elsevier Press.

Rosen, N., I. Genee, J. Ankutowicz, T. Pekter & J. Shapka. 2019. A comparative analysis ofrhythmic patterns in settler-heritage English and Blackfoot English in SouthernAlberta Canadian Journal of Linguistics 64. 538–555.

Rosen, N & C Scriver. 2015. Vowel patterning of Mormons in Southern Alberta, Canada.Language and Communication 42:104-115.

Wong, P. & M. Babel. 2017. Perceptual identification of talker identity in VancouverEnglish. Journal of Sociolinguistics 21. 603–628.


Prof. Alexandra D’ArcyDepartment of LinguisticsUniversity of VictoriaPO Box 1700 STN CSCVictoria BC V8W 2Y2, Canada

Prof. Nicole RosenDepartment of LinguisticsFletcher Argue BuildingUniversity of Manitoba


Winnipeg MB R3T 5V5, Canada


19English in Newfoundland

William Kirwin†, Sandra Clarke Raymond HickeyMemorial University, St. John’s University of Duisburg and Essen

Abstract

The chapter on Newfoundland English by William Kirwin (1925-2016) in the firstedition of the Cambridge History of the English Language (2001) was a seminal studyof English in this province of Canada, examining the regional inputs from South-WestEngland and South-East Ireland (Hickey 2002) and considering the resultant variety ofvernacular Newfoundland English. Taking this study as a point of departure, the present chapter will re-assessKirwin’s achievement in identifying the dialectal input to Newfoundland and offer aconsideration of the sociolinguistic status of the early English-speakers on the islandand the development of independent forms of English with the advent of permanentsettlement there. The geographical distribution of settlers will also represent a focus ofthe chapter with the concentration of speakers in the capital St John’s and on thesurrounding parts of the Avalon Peninsula. Features from all linguistic levels – pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary – willbe scrutinised. Pronuciation traits of Newfoundland English include alveolar fricative[ṱ] for /t/ (also shared with Cape Breton, Nova Scotia), monophthongal realisations ofmid vowels, unrounded /ɒ/ and alveolar / velarised /l/ (depending on input variety).Morphosyntactic features in particular from South-East Irish English are salient inNewfoundland English and their continuity in the latter variety will be considered, thissection resting on the essential research by Clarke (2004, 2008b, 2010, 2012). For theexamination of vocabulary the Dictionary of Newfoundland English (Story, Kirwin andWiddowson 1998-9 [1990]) will be consulted with a view to determining the probableBritish/Irish sources of Newfoundland-specific lexis, independent developments in thispart of Canada notwinthstanding. References

Clarke, Sandra 1997a. ‘The role of Irish English in the formation of New WorldEnglishes. The case from Newfoundland’, In Jeffrey L. Kallen (ed.) Focus onIreland. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 207-225.

Clarke, Sandra 1997b. ‘On establishing historical relationships between New and OldWorld varieties: Habitual aspect and Newfoundland Vernacular English’, In EdgarSchneider (ed.) Englishes around the world. 2 Vols. Amsterdam: John Benjamins,pp. 277-293

Clarke, Sandra. 1997c. ‘English verbal -s revisited: The evidence from Newfoundland’,American Speech 72,3: 227-59.

Clarke, Sandra 2004. ‘The legacy of British and Irish English in Newfoundland’, in:Raymond Hickey (ed.) 2004. Legacies of colonial English. Studies in transporteddialects. Cambridge University Press, pp. 242-261.


Clarke, Sandra 2008a. ‘Newfoundland English: phonology’, in: Schneider (ed.), pp.161-180.

Clarke, Sandra 2008b. ‘Newfoundland English: morphology and syntax’, in: Schneider(ed.), pp. 492-509.

Clarke, Sandra 2010. Newfoundland and Labrador English. Edinbrugh: University Press.Clarke, Sandra 2012. ‘From Ireland to Newfoundland: What’s the perfect after doing?’,

in: Migge and Ní Chiosáin (eds), pp. 101-130.Hickey, Raymond 2002. ‘The Atlantic edge. The relationship between Irish English and

Newfoundland English’, English World-Wide 23.2: 281-314. Kirwin, William J. 2001. ‘Newfoundland English’, In Algeo, John English in North

America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 441-455.Kirwin, William J. & Robert Hollett 1986. ‘The West Country and Newfoundland: Some

SED evidence’, Journal of English Linguistics 19.2: 222-239.Mannion, John J. 1974. Irish settlements in Eastern Canada. Toronto: University of

Toronto Press.Mannion, John J. (ed.) 1977. The peopling of Newfoundland. Essays in historical

geography. St. John's: Memorial University of Newfoundland.Paddock, Harold (ed.) 1982. Languages in Newfoundland and Labrador. Second edition.

St. John’s, Newfoundland: Memorial University of Newfoundland.Schneider, Edgar W. (ed.) 2008. Varieties of English. Vol. 2: The Americas and the

Caribbean. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Shorrocks, Graham. 1997. ‘Celtic influences on the English of Newfoundland and

Labrador’, In Hildegard L. C: Tristram (ed.) The Celtic Englishes, Heidelberg:Winter, pp. 320-361.

Story, G. M , William J. Kirwin and John D. A. Widdowson 1998-9 [1990]. Dictionary ofNewfoundland English. Second edition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Online edition: https://www.heritage.nf.ca/dictionary.


Prof. Sandra ClarkeDepartment of LinguisticsMemorial UniversitySt. John’s, NewfoundlandCanada

Prof. Raymond HickeyDepartment of Anglophone StudiesUniversity of Duisburg and Essen45141 EssenGermany

https://www.heritage.nf.ca/dictionary


20Canadian Maritime English: Choosing from multiple shelves

Matt Hunt GardnerKU Leuven

Abstract

This chapter sketches a broad summary of descriptive dialectological and variationistsociolinguistic work on the English language in Canada’s Maritime provinces, with afocus on the particular features that set Canadian Maritime English apart from inland“mainstream” Canadian English. This ranges from the early dialect surveys completedas an adjunct to The Linguistic Atlas of New England to my own fieldwork completed in2010. This will show the important influence of early New England and black Loyalistsas well as Scottish and Irish (Newfoundland) immigrants to the incidence of certainspeech features and also the patterning of diachronic change. This chapter aimsfurther to provide a unified account of how young speakers from across Nova Scotia,New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island blend traditional speech features from thevarious input populations with region-external/anglo-versal vernacular forms to crafta new East Coast identity untethered to a specific heritage other than “Maritimer”.These young speakers adopt features “off the shelf” (Milroy 2007) as needed, andoften employ them innovatively. But young speakers have additional “shelves” theymust choose from in order to satisfy the requirements of being a modern Maritimer.Young speakers must adopt region-external novel changes and overtly aim tocommand inland Canadian norms in order to maintain and/or raise social status. Thispush-and-pull of sounding both local and non-local results in a form of fluidbidialectalism that offers a unique window for studying language variation, change,and identity. This chapter draws specifically (but not exclusively) on quantitative andqualitative data collected by the author for Gardner (2010, 2017) and over 2,500surveys completed as part of an ongoing class project at Saint Mary’s University inHalifax, N.S. This chapter will also make reference to linguistic representations of thenew East Coast identity via linguistic artefacts, The Trailer Park Boys, YouTube musicvideos, etc. References

Boberg, Charles (2010). The English Language in Canada. Status, History andComparative Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Childs, Becky and Matt Hunt Gardner (2011). “Staking Claims: Two communities andone salient local marker” (Linguistic Society of America). Pittsburgh, PA.

Emeneau, Murray B. (1935). “The Dialect of Lunenburg”. Language 11.2, 140–47. Falk, Lilian (1984). “Regional Varieties of English in Nova Scotia”. Papers from the

Eighth Annual Meeting of the Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association, 33–41.Falk, Lilian (1989). “Regional usage in the English of Cape Breton Island”. Journal of

the Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association 3-5, 121–35.


Falk, Lilian and Margaret Harry, eds. (1999). The English Language in Nova Scotia.Lockeport, NS: Roseway.

Gardner, Matt Hunt (2010). “Exodus: iconic speech features and identity amid CapeBreton Island’s rapid population decline” (University of Southampton).Southampton, UK.

Gardner, Matt Hunt (2013). “The acoustic and articulatory characteristics of CapeBreton fricative /t/.” Dialectologia et Geolinguistica 21.1, 3–19.

Gardner, Matt Hunt (2017). “Grammatical Variation and Change in Industrial CapeBreton”. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Toronto.

Johnstone, Barbara (2010). “Indexing the local”. Handbook of Language andGlobalization. Ed. by Nikolas Coupland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 286–405.

Keifte, Michael and Elizabeth Kay-Raining Bird (2010). “Canadian Maritime English”. The Lesser- Known Varieties of English. Ed. by D. Schreier, Peter Trudgill, and P.Schneider. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kinloch, Murray and Fazilah M. Ismail (1993). “Canadian Raising. /au/ in Fredericton,New Brunswick”. Linguistica Atlantica 15, 105–14.

Milroy, Lesley (2007). “Off the Shelf or Under the Counter? On the social dynamics ofsound change”. Studies in the History of the English Language III: Managing Chaos;Strategies for Identifying Change in English. Ed. by Christopher M. Cain andGeoffrey Russom. Berl Mouton de Gruyter, 149–72.

Poplack, Shana and Sali A. Tagliamonte (1991). “African American English in thediaspora: Ev idence from old-line Nova Scotians”. Language Variation andChange 3.3, 301–39.

Poplack, Shana and Sali A. Tagliamonte (2001). African American English in theDiaspora. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Pratt, T. K. (1988). Dictionary of Prince Edward Island English. Toronto: University ofToronto Press.

Roeder, Rebecca and Matt Hunt Gardner (2013). “The Phonology of the Canadian ShiftRevisited: Thunder Bay and Cape Breton”. U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics19.2: Selected Papers From NWAV 41, 161–70.

Wanamaker, Murray Gorham (1980). “The language of King’s County, Nova Scotia”. Journal of the Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association 2, 48–55.


Dr. Matt Hunt GardnerDepartment of LinguisticsKU LeuvenB-3000 LeuvenBelgium


21A (socio)linguistic aperçu of English as a minority language: the case ofQuebec

Shana PoplackUniversity of Ottawa

Abstract

The unparalleled success of Quebec’s “language laws” (Bill 101; 1977) hasfundamentally altered the relationship of English and French in the province. In itsunfamiliar role of minority language, English is now subject to discourse typical ofother minority situations, which characterizes it as threatened and distinctive,purportedly due to intense contact and convergence with French. Both popular andacademic support for these claims comes almost entirely from catalogues of“gallicisms” (e.g. autoroute, vernissage): incorporations from French held to beincomprehensible outside of the province.

Contrasting speaker perceptions with actual usage, this chapter offers anempirical assessment of the impact of French on Quebec English, as instantiated inborrowing, code-switching and grammatical convergence. The approach adopted isvariationist and comparative. Findings are based on systematic quantitative analysis ofa large corpus of informal conversations recorded amongst 164 Anglophones bornand raised in Montreal or Quebec City. Participants were further divided among thosewho acquired English prior to the passage of Bill 101, and those who acquired it after1977, when French became the sole official language of Quebec. To the extent thatminority status plays a role, influence from French should be greatest among theyouth of Quebec City, where anglophones constitute a tiny minority (2% vs. 15% inMontreal).

Analysis of speaker perceptions with respect to the role of French in theirdiscourse reveals a high level of agreement with the reigning ideology. Mostparticipants not only claim to speak French, but also characterize themselves asbilingual, with young Quebec City speakers, as expected, in the lead on both measures.More of the latter also report having learned French through daily exposure,consistent with the ubiquitous nature of that language in the city. A strong majority,regardless of age, year of acquisition or place of residence, concurred that French hadinfluenced English, pinpointing the lexicon as the single most important area ofinfluence.

Such attitudes are consistent with both the received wisdom and prevailinghypotheses based on language status and the ratio of francophones to anglophones atthe local and provincial levels. But systematic quantitative analysis shows that theybear little resemblance to the actual use these same speakers make of French in theirspontaneous English speech. French-origin words, whether borrowed orcode-switched, are vanishingly rare, constituting less than 0.1% of the total lexicon forall participants. More tellingly, when compared to a monolingual mainstream CanadianEnglish benchmark, the behaviour of a number of morphosyntactic variables also fails


to support claims of influence from French at the core grammatical level, despite theoccasional superficial resemblance. These results highlight the gulf, especially prevalent in minority-languagesituations, between language ideology and language use, and enjoin analysts to gobeyond the surface in assessing minority-language linguistic structure.

Selected references

Grant-Russell, Pamela. 1999. The influence of French on Quebec English: Motivationfor lexical borrowing and integration of loanwords. LACUS Forum 25:473–486.

Hamilton, Donald E. 1975. Notes on Montreal English. In Canadian English: Origins andstructures, ed. J.K. Chambers, 46–54. Toronto: Methuen.

Manning, Alan, and Robert Eatock. 1983. The influence of French on English in Quebec.LACUS Forum 9:496–502.

McArthur, Tom. 1992. Quebec English. In The Oxford companion to the Englishlanguage, ed. Tom McArthur, 832–833. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Palmer, Joe D. 1995. Notes on Quebec English. Verbatim 22:2–9. Poplack, Shana. In press. A variationist perspective on language contact. In Adamou,

Evangelia & Matras, Yaron (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Language Contact. NewYork & London: Routledge.

Poplack, Shana & Levey, Stephen. 2010. Contact-induced grammatical change. In Auer,Peter & Schmidt, Jürgen Erich (eds.), Language and Space – An internationalhandbook of linguistic variation: Volume 1 – Theories and methods. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 391-419.

Poplack, Shana, Walker, James & Malcolmson, Rebecca. 2006. An English “like noother”?: Language contact and change in Quebec. Revue canadienne delinguistique/Canadian Journal of Linguistics 51, 2. 185-213.


Prof. Shana PoplackDepartment of LinguisticsUniversity of Ottawa70 Laurier EastOttawa, ON K1N 6N5Canada


22Early English-lexifier creole in the circum-Caribbean area

Norval SmithUniversity of Amsterdam

Abstract

Section 1My discussion of the form of early English-based Creole in the Caribbean (moreprecisely in the circum-Caribbean area) will be based on three theses. (1) All creole varieties in this area have an ultimate common origin (2) The early removal of English linguistic influence provides us with better evidence

on what the original creole looked like(3) It wasn’t an inability to learn English that gave rise to the creole(s) but the

necessity to create a linguistic code that the oppressors could not understand.What Jourdain (2008) terms a “language of resistance.”

We have basically two causes of “distancing” that gave rise to the situation in (2).

(4) i. The English(-speakers) ceased to rule the plantation colony after a shortperiod;ii. The slaves fled from the colony, to become maroons.

In both cases the English-speaking rulers and their slaves “parted company.” In the case of Surinam, all creole languages spoken there fall under (4 i). In the case ofJamaica, the maroon creoles fall under (4 ii). In Smith (2017: 252–253) I identify Krio(Sierra Leone) as a transported version of the original Western Maroon Creole ofJamaica. I follow Bilby (1983, 1992) and Harris (1995) for the status of the MaroonSpirit Language of the Eastern Maroons as derived from their former creole language.Section 2Most circum-Caribbean creole languages did not follow the two paths mentioned in(4), but remained under English/British control (sometimes unofficially) untilcomparatively modern times. This led to about 350 years of continous Englishinfluence. Colonization in the circum-Caribbean area in the early 17th century rapidlyresulted in economies based on plantations. The relationships between the variousEnglish-based creoles mirrored the expansion of English colonization. This began inthe 1620s on Barbados and St Kitts in the Caribbean. On St Kitts colonization started in1624 and on Barbados (much larger) in 1627. The further process involved mostly expansion by island-hopping starting fromBarbados and St Kitts: from St Kitts to Nevis, Montserrat, and Antigua by 1632; from


Barbados, St Kitts, Nevis, and Montserrat to Surinam in 1651; from Barbados and StKitts to Jamaica in 1655; from Barbados to Carolina in 1670; and so on. What is sometimes not realised is that the clock of creolization did not startticking anew every time a new colony was founded. So when Jamaica was colonizedfrom Barbados and St. Kitts, slaves from these two places were brought to Jamaica. Weshouldn’t calculate the development of creole on Jamaica from 1655, but from the1620s when Barbados and St. Kitts were colonized. This follows from thesis (1) above.References

Alleyne, M.C. 1980. Comparative Afro-American. Ann Arbor MI: Karoma Publishers, Inc.Arends, J. 2017. Language and Slavery. A social and linguistic history of the Suriname

creoles. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/cll.52Bilby, K. 1983. How the ‘Older Heads’ talk. A Jamaican Maroon spirit possession

language and its relationship to the Creoles of Suriname and Sierra Leone. NewWest Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indisch Gids 57: 37–88. doi:10.1163/221373-90002097

Bilby, K. 1992. Further observations on the Jamaican Maroon spirit language. Paperpresented at the annual meeting of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics,Philadelphia.

Hancock, I.F. 1969. A provisional comparison of the English-based Atlantic creoles.African Language Review 8: 7–72.

Hancock, I.F. 1987. A preliminary comparison of the Anglophone Atlantic creoles withsyntactic daa from thirty-three representative dialects. In Pidgin and CreoleLanguages. Essays in memory of John E. Reinecke, G.G. Gilbert (ed.), 310–397.Honolulu HI: University of Hawaiʻi Press. Open Access ISBN: 9780824882150(PDF)

Harris, Col. C.L.G. 1994. The True Traditions of my Ancestors. In Maroon Heritage.Archaeological Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives, E. K. Agorsah (ed.), 36–63.Kingston, Jamaica: Canoe Press.

Smith, N.S.H. 1987. The Genesis of the Creole Languages of Surinam. Unpublishedthesis, Universiteit van Amsterdam. doi: 10.13140/RG.2.2.10158.20801

Smith, N. 2006. Very rapid creolization in the Framework of the Restricted MotivationHypothesis. In L2 Acquisition and Creole Genesis. Dialogues, C. Lefebvre, L. White &C. Jourdan (eds), 49–65. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Smith, N. 2015. Ingredient X: The shared African lexical element in the English-lexifierAtlantic Creoles, and the theory of rapid creolization. In Surviving the MiddlePassage. The West Africa-Surinam Sprachbund, P. Muysken & N. Smith (eds),67–106. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter.

Smith, N. 2017. Krio as the Western Maroon Creole language of Jamaica, and the /na/isogloss. In Language Contact in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas, C.Cutler, Z. Vrzić & P. Angermeyer (eds), 251–273. doi: 10.1075/cll.53.11smi

van den Berg, M. 2007. A Grammar of Early Sranan. Zetten: Manta.Private address

Prof. Norval SmithCapistrangasse 2-24


1060 ViennaAustria


23The Caribbean anglophone contact varieties: creoles and koinés

Jeffrey P. WilliamsTexas Tech University

Abstract

In a region with a total land mass of less than 10% of the state of Texas, the insularCaribbean hosts approximately 60 different varieties of English (Williams 2012). Thequestion for historical linguists and sociolinguistics interested in change and variationis how did we arrive at a place of immense linguistic diversity that is typically obscuredby the use of macro-terms like ‘Caribbean’ or ‘West Indian?’ While we might feelcomfortable in our use of the phrases such as ‘English in the Caribbean,’ ‘CaribbeanEnglishes,’ and ‘English varieties’ in discussing the Anglophone linguistic landscape ofthe Antillean Caribbean and its near insular neighbors in the Atlantic, we have yet tofully define and delimit what bundle of linguistic structures distinctively portrays theAnglophone Caribbean. And more importantly for this volume, what are the historicaltrends and trajectories that give rise to an enormous amount of sociolinguisticvariation? This chapter will examine the contemporary sociolinguistic landscape of theAnglophone Caribbean. Instead of focusing on the isolation of these islandenvironments, I adopt a connectionist analysis such as that elucidated by Rainbird(2007) for island archaeology in which islands form part of larger maritimeenvironments. Maritime communities such as those we find in the Caribbean regionare linked to each other via known seaways that traverse the textured seascape(Rainbird 2007, 47). This is not to say that isolation cannot form a part of the socialand cultural, and implicit linguistic history of islands; however, the intervening bodiesof water served equally as conduits to diffusion, when and where conditionspermitted. Instead of assuming a priori that each island was a world unto itself, thischapter reconstructs the contact histories that conjoin islands within the Caribbeanarea to fully understand the spatial distribution of sociolinguistic features.

References

Rainbird, Paul. 2007. The archaeology of islands. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Williams, Jeffrey P. 2012. English varieties in the Caribbean. In Raymond Hickey, (ed). Areal features of the Anglophone world. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, pp. 133-160.

Institution address

Prof. Jeffrey P. WilliamsDepartment of Sociology, Anthropology & Social WorkTexas Tech University, 2500 Broadway AvenueLubbock, TX 79409, USA


24The development of English in Jamaica

Silvia KouwenbergUniversity of the West Indies, Jamaica

Abstract

This chapter surveys both the myriad ways in which English has been and is present inJamaica, and its ambiguous status as an entirely Jamaican language for some, anentirely foreign language for others. Its presence in modern times encompasses atleast four forms: To begin, there is Jamaican English (JE), a variety with characteristics(phonological, lexical, semantic, syntactic) which distinguish it from other Englishes,both within the Caribbean and elsewhere, but which has not been codified as aseparate standard variety. Secondly, English is the primary lexifier of Jamaican Creole(JC), which co-exists with JE in a complex relationship which involves blurredboundaries, intermediate varieties constituting a Creole Continuum, and some aspectsof diglossia. Thirdly, there is Rasta Talk (RT), perhaps best described as a lexiconembedded in JC or any of the intermediate varieties of the Creole Continuum, which isthe product of conscious manipulation of English and English-based forms. Finally,English is present through daily (traditional and non-traditional) media-drivenexposure to non-Jamaican, chiefly North American varieties, a situation whichcontributes to the perception of English as a foreign language. In this chapter I will argue that although JE has emerged as a distinct, indigenousvariety over more than three hundred years in Jamaica, its modern sociopoliticalstatus bears the hallmarks of its development out of the colonial language of a rulingelite. For very many Jamaicans, it is a language with which they have little dailyinteraction, which is not learned until their entry into formal education, and which islargely perceived as foreign. Despite its indigenized characteristics, JE is the nativelanguage of a minority only, and the lack of meaningful access to JE for large segmentsof the population has resulted in the situation where even students at the tertiary leveloften have a relationship with English which remains utilitarian, lacks emotionalconnection, and is marked by anxiety over their technical competencies in thelanguage. Despite its low status in the diglossic relationship with JE, JC derives covert statusfrom its functions as the language of family and community and its role as the mediumof cultural expression. Predictions made around the time of independence that JCwould gradually merge with JE and disappear from the linguistic landscape haveturned out to be spectacularly wrong. Instead, JC has begun to penetrate contextspreviously reserved for JE and is increasingly seen as acceptable in those contexts.Furthermore, it has become a language of international currency in certainsubcultures. Nevertheless, standard language ideology pervades the society andinforms attitudes towards language in situations ranging from primary schoolclassrooms to government pandemic press briefings, where JE continues to be seen asthe only suitable variety. Additionally, new research reveals how standard language


ideology results in differentiated views of varieties of JC within the creole continuum,with clear evidence of hidden bias towards varieties closer to the acrolectal end. The belief that English does not “belong” has resulted in the emergence of newlinguistic practices among rastafarians, who seek to reject English, a language whichthey consider to be deceptive and manipulative. Novel word formation patterns haveemerged from their communal corrective actions, including replacive I-prefixation andphono-semantic matching, the latter a type of folk reanalysis, with antonymsubstitution of word parts which do not have actual morphological status. This chapter will survey the language situation and varieties outlined in thepreceding, consider the historical context from which it emerged, and attempt toaccount for the development of the creole continuum, addressing the questionwhether it resulted from variable access to English language models in the hierarchicalslave society, or from post-independence socioeconomic differentiation. It will alsoconsider JC’s current status as a transnational language with considerable prestige notonly or perhaps even primarily in diasporic Jamaican communities, but in otherdiasporic Caribbean communities and in non-Caribbean descended populations. Throughout, I will draw on research carried out at The UWI which reveals thecomplex, ambiguous status of English in Jamaica, and which shows that despite itsdistinctive local form, it lacks the functional range that would truly make it anindigenous language in the sense of Schneider’s dynamic model.References

Alleyne, Mervyn C. 1971. Acculturation and the cultural matrix of creolization. InPidginization and Creolization of Languages, ed. by Dell Hymes, 169-186.Cambridge: CUP.

Alleyne, Mervyn C. 1988. Roots of Jamaican Culture. London: Pluto Press.Allsopp, Richard. 1996. Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage. Oxford: OUP.Beckford Wassink, Alicia. Historic low prestige and seeds of change: Attitudes towards

Jamaican Creole. Language in Society 28, 57-92.Beckford-Wassink, A. 2001. Theme and variation in Jamaican vowels. Language

Variation and Change, 13(2), 135-159.Bernard, André K. 2015. Contextualizing Jamaican twitter discourse. Kingston, Jamaica:

Unpublished M.A. Thesis, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus.Cassidy, Frederick. 2007 [1971]. Jamaica Talk. Three hundred years of the English

language in Jamaica, 2nd ed. Kingston, Jamaica: UWI Press.Cassidy, Frederick & Robert LePage. 1968. Dictionary of Jamaican English. Cambridge:

CUP.Christie, Pauline. 2003. Language in Jamaica. Kingston: Arawak Publishers.DeCamp, David. 1971. Toward a generative analysis of a post-creole speech

continuum. In Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, ed. by Dell Hymes,349-370. Cambridge: CUP.

Deuber, Dagmar. 2011. The creole continuum and individual agency. Approaches tostylistic variation in Jamaica. Variation in the Caribbean:from creole continua toindividual agency, ed. by Lars Hinrichs and Joseph T. Farquharson, 133-161.Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Devonish, Hubert. 2003. Language advocacy and ‘conquest’ diglossia in the‘Anglophone’ Caribbean. The Politics of English as a World Language: New horizons


in postcolonial cultural studies, Ed. by Christian Mair, 157-177. Amsterdam:Rodopi.

Devonish, Hubert. 2006. The Anglophone Caribbean / Die anglophone Karibik. In U.Ammon, N. Dittmar, K.J Mattheier, & P. Trudgill (Eds.), Sociolinguistics /Soziolinguistik, vol. 3, 2083 -2095. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Devonish, Hubert, & Otelemate Harry. 2004. Jamaican Creole and Jamaican English:Phonology. In B. Kortmann & E. W. Schneider (Eds), A Handbook of Varieties ofEnglish, 450-480. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Farquharson, Joseph T. 2007. Folk linguistics and post-colonial language politricks inJamaica. In Linguistic Identity in Postcolonial Multilingual Spaces, ed. by Eric A.Anchimbe, 248-264. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.

Farquharson, Joseph T. 2015. The black man’s burden? Language and politicaleconomy in a diglossic state and beyond. Zeitschrift für Anglistik undAmerikanistik 63(2), 157-177.

Farquharson, Joseph T. 2016. Linguistic ideologies and the historical development oflanguage use patterns in Jamaican music. Language & Communication 52, 7-18.

Farquharson, Joseph T., Clive Forrester & Andrea Holllington. 2020. The linguistics ofJamaican swearing: forms, background and adaptations. Swearing and cursing:Contexts and practices in critical linguistic perspective, ed. by Nico Nassenstein &Anne Storch, 147-164. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Hinrichs, Lars. 2006. Codeswitching on the Web: English and Jamaican Creole ine-communication. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Irvine, Alison. 2004. A good command of the English language: phonological variationin the Jamaican acrolect. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 19: 41-76.

Irvine-Sobers, Alison G. 2018. The Acrolect in Jamaica: The architecture of phonologicalvariation. Studies in Caribbean Language 1. Berlin: Language Science Press.

Jamaican Language Unit. 2005. The language attitude survey of Jamaica: Data analysis.Unpublished report. Kingston, Jamaica.

Kennedy, Michele M. 2017. What do Jüamaican children speak? A language resource.Kingston, Jamaica: UWI Press.

Kouwenberg, Silvia. 2009. The demographic context of creolization in early EnglishJamaica, 1655-1700. In: Selbach, Rachel, Cardoso, Hugo and van den Berg, Margot(eds.) Gradual Creolization. Studies celebrating Jacques Arends.Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 327-348.

Kouwenberg, Silvia. 2016. Nineteenth-century creolist work and its reflections onlanguage and community [Review Article]. Historiographia Linguistica 43(1),209–222.

Kouwenberg, Silvia, with Winnie Anderson-Brown, Terri-Ann Barrett, Shyrel-AnnDean, Tamirand De Lisser, Havenol Douglas, Marsha Forbes, Autense France,Lorna Gordon, Byron Jones, Novelette McLean and Jodianne Scott. 2011.Linguistics in the Caribbean: Empowerment through creole language awareness[Guest Column]. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 26 (2), 387–403.

LaCoste, Veronique. 2012. Phonological variation in rural Jamaican schools. Amsterdam& Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Lalla, Barbara &N Jean D’Costa. 1990. Language in Exile. Three hundred years ofJamaican Creole. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

LePage, Robert B.(196). Jamaican Creole: An historical introduction to Jamaican Creole.London: Macmillan.


McPherson, Burnadette S. 2020. Chat bad, chat good: The perception of location inJamaican speech communities. Unpublished M.Phil. Thesis. Kingston, Jamaica:University of the West Indies, Mona Campus.

Montoya-Stemann, Elisabeth. 2016. Language confidence and competence: issues inthe oral use of the standard by Jamaican future performers. Unpublished M.Phil.Thesis. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies, Mona Campus.

Mühleisen, Susanne. 2002. Creole Discourse: Exploring prestige formation and changeacross Caribbean English-lexicon Creoles. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: JohnBenjamins.

Patrick, Peter. 1997. Style and register in Jamaican Patwa. In Englishes around theWorld, vol.2, ed. by Edgar W. Schneider, 41-55. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: JohnBenjamins.

Patrick, Peter. 1999. Urban Jamaican Creole: Variation in the mesolect. Amsterdam &Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Patrick, Peter & Bonnie McElhinny. 1993. Speakin’ and spokin’ in Jamaica: Conflict andconsensus in sociolinguistics. Proceedings of the nineteenth annual meeting of theBerkeley Linguistic Society: General session and parasession on semantic typologyand semantic universals, 281-290. Available athttp://linguistics.berkeley.edu/bls/proceedings.html.

Pollard, Velma. 1983. The social history of Dread Talk. In Studies in Caribbeanlanguages. Lawrence D. Carrington, with Dennis Craig, Ramon Todd Dandaré(eds.). St. Augustine, T&T: Society for Caribbean Linguistics, 46-62.

Pollard, Velma. 1994. Dread Talk. The language of Rastafari. Kingston, Jamaica: CanoePress.

Pollard, Velma & Samuel Furé Davis. 2006. Imported topics, foreign vocabularies:Dread Talk, the Cuban connection. Small Axe 10(1), 59-73.

Rickford, John R. 1983. Standard and non-standard language attitudes in a creolecontinuum. In Occasional Paper (Society for Caribbean Linguistics) no. 16, 1- 27.

Sand, Andrea. 1999. Linguistic variation in Jamaica: A corpus-based study of radio andnewspaper usage. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.

Schneider, Edgar W. 2007. Postcolonial English: Varieties around the world. New York:CUP.

Schrenk, Havenol M. 2017. Rasta Talk as a tool for self-elevation: Amorpho-phono-semantic analysis. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Kingston,Jamaica: University of the West Indies, Mona Campus.

Shields-Brodber, Kathryn. 1992. Turn-talking and code-switching in radio talk shows inJamaica. Pragmatics 2(4), 487-504.

Tomei, Renato. 2015. Jamaican speech forms in Ethiopia. The emergence of a newlinguistic scenario in Shashamane. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.

Walters, Kadian. 2016. “I got what I wanted but how did they make me feel”. Theanatomy of linguistic discrimination in a diglossic situation. Kingston, Jamaica:Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus.

Whyte, Tina. 2016. Jamaican children’s perception of Jamaican English phonemes.Unpublished M.Phil. Thesis. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies,Mona Campus.

Institutional address:

http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/bls/proceedings.html


Prof. Silvia KouwenbergDepartment of Language, Linguistics & PhilosophyUniversity of the West IndiesMona, Kingston 7, Jamaica


25The anglophone Caribbean Rim

Angel BartensUniversity of Turku

Abstract

This contribution deals with the implantation of English in the Caribbean Rim reachingfrom the Sea Islands over Belize to Guyana and Suriname, as well as ensuing languagecontacts and linguistic varieties, and their current sociolinguistic status. The starting point is a (socio)historical overview. As far as the Central Americanregion is concerned, the Miskito Coast of present day Nicaragua was settled by theEnglish during the 1630s, becoming one of the first colonies in the Americas (Holm,1978: 5). English Puritans settled the islands of San Andrés and Old Providence(Colombian since 1822) in 1631, but the colonies were short lived. Over the followingcenturies, an intricate pattern of colonization, both during and after English/Britishrule, emerged in the Central American region in which San Andrés and Old Providenceare included (Bartens, 2013: 102). For example, during its short existence until 1641,the Puritan colony of Old Providence traded with the Miskito Coast and it seems likelythat the first African group to be incorporated by the Nicaraguan Miskito nation wasconstituted by African slaves who fled from the island as a result of Spanish conquest(Holm, 1978: 178-180). In 1787, a forced exodus of the British and their slaves fromthe Miskito Coast to Belize took place for the same reason (Escure, 2013: 92). SanAndrés, colonized for a second time from Jamaica and other Caribbean Islands around1730 (and, to a lesser degree, Old Providence), served as a springboard for thecolonization of the Nicaraguan Corn Islands by 1810, and Pearl Lagoon, Nicaragua, aswell as Bocas de Toro, Panama, during the early 19th century. Back and forthmigrations in the region have led to a high amount of similarity and intelligibilitybetween the Western Caribbean varieties (Bartens, 2013: 102). These include thevarieties of Limón, Costa Rica. While Limonese Creole is usually cited as an offshoot ofJamaican (Farquharson, 2013: 81), the historical influence of colonization throughJamaica goes far beyond San Andrés and Limón (see Parsons, 1954: 6). The presentday Anglophone population of the Bay Islands migrated from the Cayman Islands inthe mid-19th century (Graham, 1997: xi). The English initiated the settlement of the northern part of the Anglophone Rim,essentially consisting of the Sea Islands and adjacent coastal areas of what are now theUnited States, with the foundation of the South Carolina Colony in 1670 by bringing insmall cohorts of whites settlers and their slaves from Barbados. Subsequently,migration to the area occurred from other parts of the Anglophone Caribbean, theBritish Isles, and Africa (Klein, 2013: 140). British planters and their African originslaves from the Leeward Islands and Barbados migrated to the then Dutch coloniesEssequibo, Demerara, and Berbice towards the end of the 18th century (cf. Devonishand Thompson, 2013: 49), and the three separate colonies were united as BritishGuiana in 1831. Surinam was first settled by the English in 1651, but effectively


administrated by the Dutch only from 1668. An important milestone was alsoconstituted by the arrival of Jews with their Portuguese Creole–speaking slaves fromCayenne in 1665 (and ultimately northeastern Brazil; Veenstra, 2012: 292). Migrationto both countries of the southern Anglophone Rim has continued to the present, notonly from other parts of the Caribbean and the colonial metropoles, but also Asia: theBritish Raj in the case of Guyana (from 1838 onwards; Rioopnarine, 2011) and Java,Indonesia (from 1890 onwards; van der Kroef, 1951). After discussing the settlement history of the Anglophone Caribbean Rim, weturn to the language contacts, which have shaped the linguistic outcomes in the area.Input from certain British dialectal regions dominated in specific areas, e.g., Scotlandand Ireland in the case of San Andrés and Old Providence. Scottish is important alsofor, e.g., the more acrolectal varieties of Bay Islands English. The same applies tocertain African languages such as the Akan cluster (and, more widely, Gbe languages)which dominated in certain early slave populations both numerically and culturally (cf.the Founder Principle; Mufwene, 1996). Language contacts with Amerindian languageshave largely been restricted to lexical borrowings in restricted semantic areas, e.g.,ishili ‘a lizard species’, wowla ‘boa constrictor, a snake’ from Miskito by Miskito Coastand San Andrés Creole as well as local varieties of English (cf. Holm, 1983: 14; Bartens,2009: 306) or Sranan pagara ‘basket’ (Grant, 2012: 258). This is highly region-specificvocabulary, which may surface in local Englishes as well as the creoles. Finally, we shall turn to the linguistic outcomes of the spread of English to theCaribbean Rim and the current use of distinct varieties, which are intrinsicallyintertwined. All areas belonging to the Caribbean Rim present a creole continuum paceBickerton (1975), either as a result of the fact that variation has existed since thebeginning of English/British colonization (D’Costa & Lalla, 1989: 5-6), or recentreinforcement (formal and informal). Scenarios obviously vary in the countries orregions where Spanish or Dutch is the official language and main language ofschooling, i.e., all Central American countries (with the exception of Belize), San Andrésand Old Providence, and Surinam. In addition, speakers are frequently unable to drawa neat border between local varieties of Standard English and Creole. By consequence,we need to consider the following English-lexifier creoles alongside with English:Gullah/Geechee and Afroseminole (United States, Mexico), Belizean Creole, Bay IslandsEnglish/Creole (Honduras), Miskito Coast and Rama Cay Creole (Nicaragua), LimoneseCreole (Costa Rica), Colon Creole and smaller varieties of Panama, San Andrés andProvidence Creole (Colombia), Sranan, Saramaccan, and Nengee (Suriname), Creolese(Guyana). We will give a brief overview of the present sociolinguistic situation of thepertinent geographical areas. Likewise, we shall present some examples of contrastinglinguistic structures (English – Creole) to illustrate the concept of the creolecontinuum. This is also crucial for such Anglophone varieties as the ones of the BayIslands in the case of which it is actually questionable whether we speak of one or twospeech communities (Graham, 1997: 331). Albeit being varieties of English in their ownright in the sense of World Englishes (cf. Kachru, Kachru & Nelson, Eds. 2006;Mauranen 2018), the Anglophone Caribbean Rim varieties go beyond EFL andlanguage contact phenomena for their intrinsic connection and blending intoCaribbean Creole Englishes.

References


Bartens, Angela. 2009. A comparison of the English-based Creoles of Nicaragua andSanAndrés and Old Providence. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 3 CX, 299-318.

Bartens, Angela. 2013. San Andres Creole English. In Susanne Michaelis, PhilippeMaurer, Magnus Huber, Martin Haspelmath (Eds.), The Survey of Pidgin & CreoleLanguages. Volume 1. English-based and Dutch-based Languages (pp. 101-114).Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bickerton, Derek. 1975. Dynamics of a Creole System. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

D’Costa, Jean and Barbara Lalla (Eds.) 1989. Voices in Exile. Jamaican Texts of the 18thand 19th Centuries. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.

Devonish, Hubert and Dahlia Thompson. 2013. Creolese. In Susanne Michaelis, PhilippeMaurer, Magnus Huber, Martin Haspelmath (Eds.), The Survey of Pidgin & CreoleLanguages. Volume 1. English-based and Dutch-based Languages (pp. 49-60).Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Escure, Geneviève. 2013. Belizen Creole. In Susanne Michaelis, Philippe Maurer,Magnus Huber, Martin Haspelmath (Eds.), The Survey of Pidgin & CreoleLanguages. Volume 1. English-based and Dutch-based Languages (pp. 92-100).Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Farquharson, Joseph T. 2013. Jamaican. In Susanne Michaelis, Philippe Maurer, MagnusHuber, Martin Haspelmath (Eds.), The Survey of Pidgin & Creole Languages.Volume 1. English-based and Dutch-based Languages (pp. 81-91). Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Graham, Ross. 1997. Bay Islands English: Linguistic Contact and Convergence in theWestern Caribbean. PhD diss., University of Florida.https://archive.org/details/bayislandsenglis00grah/mode/2up

Grant, Anthony P. 2012. Elements of American Indian origin in Caribbean Creolelanguages. In Angela Bartens and Philip Baker (Eds.), Black Through White.African words and calques in Creoles and transplanted European languages (pp.249-271). London: Battlebridge Press.

Holm, John A. 1978. The English Creole of Nicaragua’s Mískito Coast: Its sociolinguistichistory and a comparative study of its lexicon and syntax. PhD diss., University ofLondon, University College.

Holm, John A. 1983. Central American English: An Introduction. In John A. Holm (Ed.),Central American English (Varieties of English around the world, Vol. 2, (pp. 7-27). Heidelberg: Julius Groos.

Kachru, Braj B., Yamuna Kachru and Cecil L. Nelson. (Eds.) 2006. The Handbook ofWorld Englishes. Blackwell: Malden, MA.

Klein, Thomas B. 2013. Gullah. In Susanne Michaelis, Philippe Maurer, Magnus Huber,Martin Haspelmath (Eds.), The Survey of Pidgin & Creole Languages. Volume 1.English-based and Dutch-based Languages (pp. 1039-147). Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Mauranen, Anna. 2018. Second Language Acquisition, world Englishes, and English as aLingua Franca. World Englishes, 37, 106-119.

https://archive.org/details/bayislandsenglis00grah/mode/2up


Mufwene, Salikoko. 1996. The Founder Principle in Creole Genesis. Diachronica, 13:1,83-134.

Parsons, James J. 1954. English Speaking Settlement of the Western Caribbean.Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, 16, 3-16.

Roopnarine, Lomarsh. 2011. Indian migration during indentured servitude in BritishGuiana and Trinidad, 1850–1920. Labor History, 52:2,173-191.

van der Kroef, Justus M. 1951. The Indonesian Minority in Surinam. AmericanSociological Review, 16:5, 672-679.

Veenstra, Tonjes. 2012. Saramaccan. In Bernd Kortmann and Kerstin Lunkenheimer(Eds.), The World Atlas of Varieties of English (pp. 291-301). Berlin: Mouton deGruyter 291-301.


Prof. Angela BartensInstitute of Languages and TranslationFaculty of the HumanitiesUniversity of TurkuFI-20014 Turku


26North American – Caribbean linguistic connections

Stephanie HackertLudwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Abstract

This chapter deals with the interrelationships between forms of American English andCaribbean English and creoles, both past and present. Almost from its earliest days ofsettlement, there have been close demographic and socioeconomic links between theNorth American mainland and what was to become the anglophone Caribbean. TheBahamas, for example, became part of a Carolinian colony in 1670; between 1783 and1785, thousands of loyalists and their slaves flocked to the archipelago in the wake ofthe American Revolution, taking along not only non-standard dialects of English butalso creolized forms of the language as they had emerged earlier in the coastal areasof Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia (cf. Hackert & Huber 2007). In other colonies,such as Jamaica or Trinidad and Tobago, American linguistic influence is more limitedhistorically and involves the presence of U.S. troops during World War II, occasionalvisits or migration for work or education, and, even more recently, tourism and theimportation of TV programs and commercials (cf. Winer 1993: 48-9). During thepresent age of globalization, American English has extended its range and impactconsiderably, worldwide as well as in the Caribbean (cf., e.g., Schneider 2006: 67; Mair2013: 261). At the same time, individual Caribbean creoles such as a Jamaican havealso influenced the development of English in North America, by way of thecoming-into-being of diaspora communities in, e.g., New York or Toronto (cf. Hinrichs2014), the global success of cultural forms and practices such as reggae, dancehall, orRastafarianism, and the use of “Cyber-Jamaican” on the web (cf., e.g., Moll 2015). All ofthese developments have turned Jamaican Creole into one of a handful of“super-central varieties” of English that have acquired the potential to influence othervarieties and speakers outside of their traditional territorial bases (Mair 2013: 261-2).In sum, forms of American English have not only contributed to the formation ofvarieties of English in the Caribbean and have long exerted “epicentral” influence, inthe sense of a regionally dominant model influencing linguistic developments inneighboring areas (cf. Peters 2009: 108), but recently, and crucially influenced bypostcolonial patterns of migration and the globalization of pop culture andcommunication, the flow of linguistic resources has become a two-way street.

References

Hackert, Stephanie, and Magnus Huber. 2007. Gullah in the Diaspora: Historical andLinguistic Evidence from the Bahamas. Diachronica 24.2: 279-325.

Mair, Christian. 2013. The World System of Englishes: Accounting for the TransnationalImportance of Mobile and Mediated Vernaculars. English World-Wide 34.3:253-78.


Moll, Andrea 2015. Jamaican Creole Goes Web. Sociolinguistic styling and authenticity ina digital 'Yaad'. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Peters, Pam. 2009. Australian English as a regional epicenter. In Thomas Hoffmann &Lucia Siebers, eds. World Englishes: Properties, Problems, Prospects. Amsterdam:Benjamins, 107-24.

Schneider, Edgar W. 2006. English in North America. In The Handbook of WorldEnglishes, edited by Braj B. Kachru, Yamuna Kachru, and Cecil L. Nelson. Oxford:Blackwell, 58-73.

Winer, Lise. 1993. Trinidad and Tobago. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Institutional address

Prof. Stephanie HackertInstitut für englische PhilologieLudwig-Maximilians-Universität MünchenGeschwister-Scholl-Platz 180539 MünchenGermany

new cambridge history of the english languagelan300/new_chel_vol_5_(eds... · 2020. 7. 16. ·...

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