Preaspiration in Shetland Norn

Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 48–72 brill.com/jlc

Remco Knooihuizen Rijksuniversiteit Groningen [email protected]

Abstract The Shetland dialect of Scots does not contain preaspiration, a phonetic areal feature that is otherwise prevalent in languages around the North Atlantic Ocean. While it is understood that Shetland’s pre-language shift Scandinavian variety, Norn, did contain preaspiration, an analysis of phonetic transcriptions from Jakob Jakobsen’s An Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland, collected in the 1890s, shows a more complicated picture: preaspiration occurs in only 11% of relevant vowel-stop sequences, but in 92% of relevant sonorant-stop and sonorant- fricative sequences. This article provides a contact-based explanation of the gradual disappearance of preaspiration from Shetland. The proposed trajectory of change is made up of a series of language and dialect contact-induced sub-changes and reflects the influence of Norn as well as of successive waves of immigration from the Scottish mainland. In the first stage, during language shift, preaspiration in vowel-stop sequences disappeared as it (co-)signaled a phonemic contrast in Norn not necessary for Scots, but (non-phonemic) preaspiration in sonorant-stop/fricative sequences was retained. In a later stage, dialect contact after renewed immigration from the Scottish mainland caused voiceless stops to be unaspirated, removing the phonetic basis for preaspiration also in the remaining contexts. The study highlights the different susceptibility of phonetic and phonemic features in contact- induced change and calls for further integration of second-language acquisition study and variationist sociolinguistics into historical linguistics.

Keywords preaspiration; sonorant devoicing; Shetland Norn; historical linguistics; language contact

1. Introduction

Many linguistic studies aim to explain why obscure features occur in a language, or why very common features are absent from a language. This study is

* This paper would not have been possible without the contributions to data coding made by Anne-Mette Hermans. I have also benefited greatly from discussions with Warren Maguire, Miriam Meyerhoff, and Pieter Muysken on Shetland dialectology and contact linguistics. Conference audiences in Leiden and Groningen have given constructive feedback which has

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R. Knooihuizen / Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 48–72 49 somewhat of an anomaly in that it focuses on the absence from a language of a relatively uncommon feature. The paper has its roots in an overheard com- ment during the coffee break at a conference, where one of the attendees remarked to another that it was surprising there is no preaspiration in Shetland, where preaspiration would be expected. There was no quick answer at the coffee table, and as will be shown in this paper, there is no quick answer at all. Preaspiration in Shetland is complicated, but a discussion of the feature does allow us to address some interesting issues in the study of language contact, historical linguistics and historical sociolinguistics.

1.1. Shetland’s Linguistic History

Shetland is an archipelago in the North Atlantic, some 200 kilometres North of Scotland, to which it has belonged politically since 1469. The islands had previously been a (Dano-)Norwegian colony since they were settled from Norway in the 8th century. When Shetland became Scottish in 1469, the main language of the islands was Norn, a West Scandinavian language closely related to Faroese, Icelandic, and Norwegian. From the late 16th century, Scottish linguistic influence became greater in the islands, among other things through a mass immigration from the Scottish Lowlands (Donaldson, 1983). The integration of these migrants (Knooihuizen, 2008b) was one of the main triggers of a rapid language shift from Norn to Scots.1 The development of Shetland Scots is a complicated story that needs to account for influences from both Scottish immigrant dialects and Norn; Trudgill’s (2004) model of new-dialect formation appears to be able to give an adequate explanation (Millar, 2008; Knooihuizen, 2009; see Millar, 2010, for a parallel development in neigh- bouring Orkney). There are no clear and reliable sources of Norn as a living language much beyond the beginning of the 18th century (Barnes, 1998: 26; Knooihuizen, 2008a). helped improve this paper. I am also indebted to Chris McCully and to two anonymous review- ers for the Journal of Language Contact for their comments on an earlier version of the paper. For all the shortcomings this paper may have, it would have been all the worse without their suggestions. 1 The spoken dialect on hetlandS clearly has its roots in Older Scots (van Leyden, 2004: 16) but there has been influence from English on Scots writing in Shetland from an early date. Only later did this influence spread to the spoken language as well, first as a form of bidialectism, and later also influencing Shetlanders’ native dialect (Smith and Durham, 2011; 2012). For reasons of consistency, the Shetland dialect will be referred to here as a form of Scots, but this should not be seen to indicate Scots as an entity completely separate and independent from (other) varieties of English.

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50 R. Knooihuizen / Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 48–72

1.2. Preaspiration in Shetland

That Shetland can be an interesting laboratory for language contact and historical (socio-)linguistics may be clear from this brief sketch of the islands’ linguistic history; what role the absence of preaspriation plays in this, is no doubt somewhat more obscure. Preaspiration is often described as an areal feature of Northwestern Europe, as it occurs in language spoken around the North Atlantic Ocean (Hansson, 2001). This makes that it is in fact thelack of preaspiration in Shetland, not the occurrence of the feature elsewhere, that needs to be explained. Hansson (2001: 158–159) only makes a brief mention of Shetland in his account of preaspiration, but his contribution highlights a range of important questions. I cite it here in its entirety: Preaspiration proper is found in all dialects of the Insular Scandinavian languages (Icelandic and Faroese). There is also reason to believe that it existed in Shetland Norn, the extinct language once spoken on the Shetland Islands, judging from transcriptions in Jakobsen (1921). It should be emphasized, however, that Jakobsen is not describing Norn as such, but the etymologically Norse vocabulary of the 19th century local dialect of Scots English. Since it is unlikely that these words had an entirely unique phonetic character, preaspiration (including sonorant devoicing) must have been a general feature of 19th century Shetland English. The crucial question is then whether this was in fact a direct carryover from Norn, or simply ‘imported’ to the islands as a feature of Scots English itself. (Many Scots dialects have preaspiration as a Gaelic substratum feature.) Which explanation is more plausible remains a matter of further investigation. In this paper, I aim to chart how preaspiration was constrained in Shetland Norn, as the language was recorded in Jakobsen’s transcriptions of Shetland Scots. This allows us to discover where this preaspiration came from — Shetland Norn, or Scottish Gaelic — and why it disappeared, as noted at the coffee table. I will also briefly touch upon a possible ‘unique phonetic character’ of the Norn words in Shetland Scots, and discuss the implications of historical linguistic research on substratum data. I begin by outlining some of the practical and theoretical considerations and assumptions made in this study (§2). I give a brief introduction to preaspiration, explain the theory of language contact assumed in this paper, and make some preliminary remarks about the reliability of substratum data. I then give a more detailed account of the constraints on preaspiration in a range of relevant languages (§3). The study of preaspiration in Shetland Norn is presented in §4, followed by a discussion of the implications of the results (§5). A brief conclusion (§6) addresses the issues from Hansson’s research program cited above.

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R. Knooihuizen / Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 48–72 51

2. Practical and Theoretical Considerations

2.1. Preaspiration

The term ‘preaspiration’ is often used as an umbrella term for two phenomena that, following Hansson (2001: 157), will be referred to in this paper as ‘stop preaspiration’ and ‘sonorant devoicing’. Stop preaspiration involves a period of voicelessness typically before a voiceless stop; although the exact realisation varies, the canonical transcription is [hp ht hk]. In sonorant devoicing, a sonorant becomes voiceless when followed by a voiceless stop. Both stop preaspiration and sonorant devoicing are cases of regressive voicing assimilation, where the voicelessness of the stop spreads to the preceding vowel (for stop preaspiration, resulting in [h]) or sonorant. Despite this similarity, however, the occurrence of and constraints on stop preaspiration and sonorant devoicing do not have to run in parallel. Preaspiration is cross-linguistically an extremely rare feature. Helgason (2002: 43–104) and Silverman (2003) give extensive overviews of languages that exhibit some form of preaspiration. In Northwestern Europe, as men- tioned previously, it is very widespread: it occurs in Icelandic and Faroese, in Norwegian and Swedish dialects, Saami and Scottish Gaelic. It has also been attested in some varieties of English (see also §3.4 below). Outside Europe, preaspiration occurs in half a dozen languages from different language families in North and Central America. Silverman (2003: 593–595) also notes that (stop) preaspiration is a dia- chronically extremely unstable feature. He blames this on the lack of phonetic salience for preaspiration: ‘given the absence of a robust burst, the noise asso- ciated with “h” sounds is not so saliently present in the signal’ as is the case with post-aspirated stops (p. 594). When preaspiration disappears, it may leave traces in the form of fricative-stop clusters or vowel lengthening, or it may disappear leaving no trace at all.

2.2. Language contact

2.2.1. Preliminaries The terminology of language contact adopted in this paper is that of van Coetsem (1988; 2002). In his framework, the effect of language contact is the transfer of a feature from the source language (sl) into the receiving language (rl). Theagent in transfer is an individual speaker who is bilingual in both the source language and the receiving language. Van Coetsem further distin- guishes between two types of transfer, depending on the bilingual agent’s

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52 R. Knooihuizen / Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 48–72 proficiency in both languages. If an rl-dominant bilingual uses an sl feature in their rl, this is called borrowing; if the bilingual is sl-dominant, we talk about imposition. (Note that ‘dominance’ here does not necessarily refer to a speaker’s overall proficiency, but may as well indicate a pragmatic dominance of a language for a particular task, cf. Matras, 2009: 137–140.) Once a feature emerges in the speech of a bilingual, it is eligible to be taken up by other, also monolingual, rl speakers, and the feature may spread through the rl com- munity following standard sociolinguistic patterns of dialect contact. Any feature may in principle be transferred from one language into another, whether it is lexical or morphological, phonetic/phonological or syntactic. Different factors may influence the likelihood of a feature being transferred. These include the intensity of contact (Thomason and Kaufman’s ‘borrowing scale’, 1988: 74–75), word class (various hierarchies, cf. Matras, 2009: 153– 165), phonological status of the feature in the rl (Douaud, 1991), and similarities between sl and rl (e.g., Flege, 1987; Flege et al., 2003). This paper also aims to explain a case of language change. Three broad groups of factors are usually distinguished in language change: firstly,internal factors, i.e., factors within the language itself, such as analogy or vowel chain shifts; secondly, external factors, or language contact; and finally, extra- linguistic factors such as economic, political, or social change. Farrar and Jones (2002) note that explanations of language change often falsely assume that these three types of factors are mutually exclusive. Furthermore, they say, there appears to be an unfounded preference for system-internal explanations, a mentality of ‘if in doubt, do without’ external and extra-linguistic explanations. In this paper I aim to take all three types of factors into account, with no pre-stated preference for any type.

2.2.2. Uncovering Transfer In this paper I discuss the transfer of a feature from one language into another. Apart from the obvious precondition that the feature needs to be attested in both the putative sl and the putative rl, there are three conditions that need to be met in order to make a strong case for transfer: transfer must be sociohistorically plausible, the feature in question must behave similarly in sl and rl, and no ‘cheaper’ explanations should be available. Firstly, the condition that transfer must be sociohistorically plausible seems extremely obvious. The opposite has mockingly been called the ‘cafeteria principle’: pick the language that can serve as an sl for the feature under investigation as you would pick your lunch from a cafeteria menu, even if this language was not (or was only marginally) involved in the contact situation. As Siegel (2008) argues, however, the cafeteria principle holds to the extent that as long

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R. Knooihuizen / Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 48–72 53 as the language in question is demonstrably involved in the contact situation, and the mechanism of influence can be explained — Siegel mentions transfer and substrate reinforcement, but this need not be a complete list —, any language is a plausible source for transfer. It must be stressed again, however, that the involvement in the contact situation must be demonstrated. Secondly, the stronger the similarities between the behaviour of a feature in sl and rl, the stronger the case for contact-induced change. It has been suggested that maximum convergence between a bilingual’s two language systems requires the least amount of processing power (e.g., Matras, 2009: 235): it is easiest for a bilingual if features in both their languages work in exactly the same way; all they need to do is slot appropriate lexical and morphological items into their converged grammar. Meyerhoff (2009: 313), however, coming from a variationist background, argues that exact replication of constraints — linguistic and social — is mentally extremely taxing. She pro- poses a four-level categorisation of transfer. First, there is replication of form- only; second, there is weak transfer, where the same factor groups are significant in constraining the variation in the feature; third, strong transfer, where the same factor groups are significant, and their relative importance is the same; and finally, calquing, where the same factor groups are significant, their relative ordering is the same, and the ordering of factors within factor groups is the same (Meyerhoff, 2009: 303–304). This categorisation allows for rl innovation in language contact, or transformation under transfer (Meyerhoff, 2009: 313), for example by means of pivot-matching (Matras, 2009: 240–243). Thirdly, even if we find a possible case of strong transfer or even calquing in a situation where contact was sociohistorically plausible, there is still the possibility that we are dealing with two independent developments. This is the case especially with cross-linguistically common features — in Meyerhoff’s study, the role of discourse prominence in null objects and subjects (2009: 312). The question this raises, of what it means for a feature to be cross- linguistically common, goes beyond the scope of this paper, but in general terms this is something to be aware of.

2.3. Working with an Ill-Defined Substrate

The Shetland Norn data discussed in this study dates from well after any plausible date for the language’s death, and should properly be identified as Shetland Scots. By analysing this ‘Norn’ data, we aim to describe a feature in the substrate, and the transfer of this feature to the superstrate, when the only information that is available on the substrate consists of whatever elements

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54 R. Knooihuizen / Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 48–72 have transferred into the superstrate. In other words, we investigate Shetland Norn through a filter of Shetland Scots, and our analysis of the substrate is obscured by the features that have not transferred to the superstrate at all, or that have transformed under transfer. In addition, the form of Shetland Norn visible in the Shetland Scots may have been affected by language attrition in language death, which could lead to a range of unpredictable changes (Campbell and Muntzel, 1989) and to considerable inter- and intra-speaker variation (Dorian, 1994; 2010). Lehiste’s (1965) study of Estonian as it is represented as a substrate in a non- native German text signals what is the main problem with this type of research: it is possible ‘to reconstruct the absence of a [superstrate] feature [in the substrate]; the reconstructions failed completely when the substratum contained more oppositions or a more complicated system than the superstratum’ (p. 69). Whereas Lehiste’s substrate language, Estonian, did not die out, and she could check putative substrate features against a living language, Shetland Norn died without leaving behind a wealth of detailed information about the language. But even though the details of Shetland Norn are still a mystery, we do know a considerable amount about related West Scandinavian languages and about other languages in the area, which allows for the trian gulation of the data set up in the next section. It is therefore still possible to present a reliable analysis of both the substrate feature and its transfer into the superstrate.

3. Stops and Preaspiration in Relevant Varieties

In order to discover where the patterns of preaspiration in older Shetland Scots originate — in Scandinavian, in Scottish Gaelic (via English), or in independent development — we need to compare the Shetland data (§4) with relevant other varieties. In this section I give an overview of the systems of fortis and lenis stop consonants and the constraints on preaspiration in present-day Shetland Scots, in Faroese and other Scandinavian languages, in Scottish Gaelic and varieties of English with a Gaelic substratum, and in RP and early 21st-century urban varieties of English where there is evidence of preaspiration due to an independent development.

3.1. Shetland Scots

Traditional Scottish dialects until the 1930s or 1940s did not typically have aspiration in their fortis stop series /p t k/. This means that the distinction

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R. Knooihuizen / Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 48–72 55 between these fortis stops and the lenis stops /b d g/ was made by means of voicing, the lenis stops being voiced and the fortis stops unvoiced. Since then, under influence from English (§3.4), Scottish dialects have changed to distinguish the fortis and lenis series by means of aspiration instead (Johnston, 1997b: 505). The present-day Shetland Scots dialect appears to be particularly conservative in this respect, as Sundkvist’s (2007) study of middle-class speakers from the capital, Lerwick, shows. Although the target variety in elicitation was Scottish Standard English, i.e., a potentially more English-like variety than the local dialect, Sundkvist found that the lenis series was ‘fully voiced’, while the fortis series was ‘voiceless with little or no aspiration’ (p. 17). Further instrumental work on stops among younger speakers from the Westside of Shetland shows that although the aspirating system is predominant, the traditional Scots voicing system is still in use, especially among those that have two Shetland parents (Scobbie, 2005; 2006). Based in this data, it seems reasonable to assume that the traditional Scots dialect of Shetland contrasted voiceless unaspirated /p t k/ with voiced /b d g/. As perhaps could be expected based on the lack of aspirated stops in the traditional dialect in the first place, none of the discussion of the phonology of Shetland Scots make any mention of preaspirated stops, nor of sonorant devoicing. This includes work on Shetland Scots in the Older Scots period (Johnston, 1997a), the edited data from Shetland in the Linguistic Atlas of Scotland (Mather and Speitel, 1986) and related manuscript fieldwork notes (Warren Maguire, p.c.), as well as work on the current dialect (see references above). The assumption is that preaspiration and sonorant devoicing are notable enough features to name in a comprehensive account of the dialect’s phonology; that nothing is found even in studies focusing on the exact context where preaspiration would occur (van Leyden, 2004) suggests it is, and was, not there.

3.2. Faroese and Other Scandinavian Languages

Faroese uses aspiration to distinguish between the fortis and lenis stop series, although there is dialectal variation and especially in Southern dialects of Faroese, which has often been described as being most closely related to Norn (Barnes, 1984: 360–362), the lenis stops may be partly voiced (Árnason, 2011: 118). Preaspiration is normatively present in all dialects of Faroese, but what contexts are appropriate for preaspiration differs between dialects (Helgason, 2002: 54–60; Thráinsson et al., 2004: 47–50). Stop preaspiration occurs in all

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56 R. Knooihuizen / Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 48–72 dialects before long (or geminate) stops following a short vowel: [hpː htː hkː htʃː].2 Short stops following a long vowel or a diphthong may be preaspirated only in Northeastern dialects, and only then if the vowel is non-high. In Southern dialects, these stops may be (weakly) voiced. Sonorant devoicing occurs in all dialects of Faroese, with no dialectal variation. It affects reflexes of Old Norse m, n, l and r, including the allophones [ʎ ɲ ŋ], and is triggered by /p t k tʃ s/. The inclusion of /s/ as a trigger for sonorant devoicing is unique to Faroese (Helgason, 2002: 59). The patterning of preaspiration in Faroese, then, offers some idiosyncracies which, if found in our Shetland data, would be telltale signs of Scandinavian influence. It is important, however, to be able to distinguish the Scandinavian patterns from those that, as Hansson suggests, might have come to Shetland from Gaelic via Older Scots. For comparison, we note that a similar stop inventory — aspirating and not voicing — occurs in Norwegian (Kristoffersen, 2000), Danish (Basbøll, 2005), and Icelandic (Árnason, 2011). Both types of preaspiration occur in Icelandic and dialectally in Norwegian, sonorant devoicing being more widespread than stop preaspiration.

3.3. Scottish Gaelic and Hebridean English

The preaspiration found in Scottish Gaelic is often linked to that in Scandinavian (Hansson, 2001: 170). There are, in any case, strong parallels between how preaspiration is constrained in Faroese and in Scottish Gaelic, although the match is not perfect. Stop preaspiration occurs in reflexes of Common Gaelic p, t and k — Clement (1984: 321) adds ‘geminate’ here in brackets —, while sonorant devoicing is triggered by reflexes of Common Gaelic and Old Norse p, t and k (Helgason, 2002: 96–98). As Common Gaelic voiced stops have become devoiced in Scottish Gaelic, (pre-)aspiration carries a phonemic distinction in the language (Clement, 1984: 321). The phonetic realisation of Scottish Gaelic stop preaspiration is subject to considerable dialectal variation (Helgason, 2002: 96): in many dialects, especially in mainland Scotland, it may take the form of fricative-stop clusters [xp xt xk] rather than properly preaspirated stops [hp ht hk]. Peripheral dialects, moreover, may only preaspirate k, or have show no preaspiration at all. Bosch (2006–2007) discusses the geographical distribution of stop

2 Faroese /tʃ/ is the palatalised reflex of Old Norse /k/; in terms of preaspiration, it seems reasonable to regard it as a type of /k/.

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R. Knooihuizen / Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 48–72 57 preaspiration and its phonetic realisation in great detail, based on data collected in the 1950s and early 1960s for the Survey of the Gaelic Dialects of Scotland (Ó Dochartaigh, 1994–1997). Of particular importance to our argument is the fact that preaspiration is absent from those areas most relevant for contact between Shetland and mainland Scotland: Sutherland near (formerly Scandinavian) Caithness in the far north, which is geographically closest to Shetland, and the eastern part of Perth and Kinross, bordering on Angus from where many Scottish settlers to Shetland came in the 16th century. The pattern of sonorant devoicing in Scottish Gaelic is less clear, with detailed data only available for Lewis. Here, Oftedal (1956: 137) found that /l/ is always devoiced in the relevant contexts, while nasals and /r/ can, but need not, be voiceless. Phonetically, a devoiced /r/ is [r̥] before /p k/, and [ʂ] before /t/. The literature suggests sonorant devoicing is more widespread on Lewis than it is elsewhere in Gaelic, but the exact patterns have not been described. Looking then at Gaelic-influenced English, we can see that stop preaspiration has been transferred from Gaelic into English. As in Gaelic, stop preaspiration occurs in Hebridean English only before voiceless, not voiced, stops after stressed vowels (Shuken, 1984: 157). The phonetic realisation of stop preaspiration also matches the local Gaelic patterns (Shuken, 1985: 153). However, whereas stop preaspiration is described as a normative, invariable process in Gaelic, it is anything but in Hebridean English. It is most widespread in rural Lewis (Shuken, 1984: 157) but even there preaspiration occurred in only 20% of tokens, competing with pre-glottaled and glottalised variants (beat [biʔt], [biʔ]; Shuken, 1985: 154). The information on sonorant devoicing in Hebridean English is extremely summary, but it appears that devoicing of nasals occurs only in Lewis (Shuken, 1984: 185). The other variety of Gaelic-influenced English is Highland English, defined as ‘the English of native speakers influenced by contact with Gaelic’ (Clement, 1997: 301). This variety is underresearched, but Clement writes that preaspiration is not found in the Highland English spoken by ‘monoglot Mainlanders’ (p. 304), suggesting that preaspiration is an imposition feature from Gaelic, but that it may not have been borrowed by non-Gaelic speakers.

3.4. RP and Other Englishes

As hinted at earlier, the distinction between fortis and lenis consonants in varieties of British English is normally one of aspiration rather than voic ing proper. For Received Pronunciation, Roach (2004: 240) states that the ‘voicing of so-called voiced consonants [i.e., /b d g/] is often very weak or

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58 R. Knooihuizen / Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 48–72 undetectable’ and that the fortis plosives are aspirated. This is an important difference from traditional dialects in Scotland. Preaspiration has recently been attested in varieties of English in Northeast England and Lowland Scotland, where transfer from a substrate or contact language is unlikely. These varieties may give us an insight into the ways preaspiration may pattern when it develops independently. The first of these varieties is Tyneside English, spoken in the area around Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Docherty and Foulkes (1999: 66) have found ‘extensive frication’ of word-final pre-pausal /t/ in the speech of young adult working class females. Foulkes et al. (1999: 1626) clarify that ‘extended frication’ should be understood as stop preaspiration, viz. ‘as a period of high-frequency frication before the voiceless stop “gap”, or as a breathy continuation of a preceding vowel’. The feature is entirely absent from older age groups, but a small study of four children between two and four years old, whose mothers have stop preaspiration, shows common stop preaspiration in this position. The two boys have even extended preaspiration to some of their intervocalic /t/s (Foulkes et al., 1999). Stop preaspiration has also been found in Middlesbrough, geographically quite close to Tyneside (Jones and Llamas, 2003). Preaspirated allophones occur here for the voiceless sounds /t s ʃ/ in word-final position, as in Newcastle predominantly in female speakers. Although there is frication throughout, also in /t/, the spectograms provided clearly show a preceding [h]-type sound, giving evidence for preaspiration rather than simply frication. Jones and Llamas focus on acoustic detail, for which we have no comparative data from Shetland, rather than on phonotactic occurrence. Finally, preaspiration is also found in Edinburgh Scottish Standard English (SSE) (Gordeeva and Scobbie, 2010). However, although Edinburgh is geographically in between two areas where stop preaspiration does occur — Tyneside to the south, and the Gaelic-speaking Highlands to the north — preaspirated stops were not found in SSE (p. 170); instead, voiceless stops were often glottalised. Gordeeva and Scobbie’s study on preaspirated voiceless phrase-final fricatives shows considerable speaker and contextual variation, but the feature is shown to consistently correlate with phonological voicing contrasts, similar to e.g. glottalisation in voiceless stops (see also Gordeeva and Scobbie, 2011).

3.5. Summary

As this brief survey has shown, preaspiration is an extremely diverse phenomenon, one that occurs only in varieties that distinguish fortis and lenis stops by means of aspiration, not voicing. There are many similarities, but also some

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R. Knooihuizen / Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 48–72 59 striking differences between the constraints on preaspiration in Scandinavian, Scottish Gaelic (including Gaelic-influenced English), and English. It is these differences in particular that may help us uncover patterns in the history of preaspiration in Shetland. They include quantity and quality of the preaspirated stops (and fricatives), quality and quantity of the vowel preceding preaspiration, and the range of stops that may trigger sonorant devoicing. In addition, it is clear that the phonological role of preaspiration — purely allophonic as in the case of Tyneside, Middlesbrough and Edinburgh English, or bearing the weight of phonemic distinctions as in Faroese and Scottish Gaelic — is an important difference. Finally, the patterns in Scottish Gaelic suggest that etymology may also play a role. To the extent that the data allow this, these findings will guide the study of Shetland preaspiration in the following section.

4. The tudyS

4.1. Data

Because Shetland Norn died out during the 18th century, there are no living informants or speech recordings on which to base our analysis of preaspiration in the language. A scattering of written sources survives (see Barnes, 1998: 9–21 for an overview and linguistic analysis), but the main source of information on the language is Jakob Jakobsen’s An Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland (1928–1932). This Dictionary will also be the source of the data used in this study; for reasons of convenience, the English translation was used here, which is equivalent to the Danish original (Jakobsen, 1921). Jakobsen (1864–1918) was a Faroese linguist and philologist, with a keen interest in phonetics. He was involved in language planning activities in the Faroe Islands, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Copenhagen in 1897 on research into Shetland Norn. This research was based on a vast collection of remnant Norn words in the Shetland Scots dialect, systematically gathered during fieldwork in the years 1893–1895 and published posthu- mously in the Dictionary in both Danish and English (Dahl, 2010). A typical lemma in the Dictionary looks like this:

habagoitlek [hab‧agȯi‘t‧‧lək], sb., a miserable dwelling, a hut; a miserable h. Yn. A compd. The second part goitlek is prob. a derivative, formed from O.N. kot, n., a hut, and the dim. ending -lek; cf. høslek, “small house”, as a tabu-name (sea-term) for booth, fisherman’s hut. The first part haba- is poss. an abbr. of an

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Eng. word, beginning “habit-” in sense of a dwelling, such as: habitacle, habi- tance, habitation. This is, of course, a conventional dictionary lemma, with a headword, definition, and usage notes. Of particular interest to this study is the infor mation given on phonetic realisation, geographical localisation, and etymology. Each headword is listed with one or more relatively narrow phonetic transcriptions in a pre-IPA transcription system explained in the preface to the Dictionary and used earlier by Jakobsen in his phonetic transcriptions of Faroese (Hammershaimb, 1891: vol. 1, 439–460). Both stop preaspiration and sonorant devoicing are indicated in this system by an inverted comma [‘] preceding the preaspirated stop or devoiced sonorant, as in the example above. This means that we can study the presence or absence of these features, but not their precise phonetic qualities. As Jakobsen was a native speaker of Faroese, we can expect him to have been sensitive to preaspiration; on the other hand, his familiarity with the feature may have led him to misidentify it, in particular if his informants used not preaspiration, but a different feature with which it co-occurs in Faroese. However, as Jakobsen was extensively trained in phonetics and his transcriptions have even been criticised in a wider context for being too precise — as ‘phonetics run riot’ (Stewart, 1964: 172) — we take his indication of the occurrence preaspiration at face value.3 Phonetic transcriptions are coded for geographical provenance: ‘Yn.’ for North Yell in the example above. Again, these codes are explained in the preface. There is considerable variation in the specificity of these geographical codes. Some transcriptions are linked to a single village, others to a parish, an island, or even a larger region. A minority of transcriptions is listed as ‘common’ or lacks information on geographical provenance. Finally, the vast majority of lemmas contain etymological information con- sisting of either a form from Old Norse or cognate lexical items from contem- porary Scandinavian languages. This etymological information is relevant because of the possibility that predictable phonetic triggers for preaspiration in Old Norse have become unpredictable after sound changes from Old Norse to Norn. This information is not available for all lemmas.

3 Jakobsen’s transcriptions are explicitly phonetic, and despite an attempt made by Barnes (1984: 358–359), the phonology of Shetland Norn is unclear. Any use of phonological notation in the analysis of Jakobsen’s data is tentative and for sake of brevity, and should not be inter- preted as a statement about Shetland Norn phonological contrasts.

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4.2. Methods

Our analysis is based on the H, I, and J sections from the Dictionary; these sections were randomly chosen. We gathered all tokens from these sections where, based on the constraints on preaspiration in Scandinavian and Scottish Gaelic, preaspiration could potentially occur, i.e., all tokens with post-vocalic singleton or geminate /p t k/, or a sonorant [m n nj ŋ l lj r] followed by one of these stops or /s/, in stressed syllables. When sonorant devoicing was also found to occur before /f/, this context was added to the potential occurrences; as no devoicing of vowels was marked before /s f/, the contexts for stop preaspiration were kept to /p t k/. In order to include the token, the potential preaspiration context should occur in either the Shetland Norn or the Old Norse form of the word. The tokens were then put in a database with separate entries for each phonetic realisation/geographical provenance pair. In total, the analysis is based on 1056 entries in the database, covering 539 different headwords. In addition to geographical location and the presence or absence of preaspiration, the entries in the database were also coded for the type of preaspiration (stop preaspiration or sonorant devoicing), the segment causing preaspiration (one of /p t k s f/), the segment affected by preaspiration (in cases of sonorant devoicing), and preceding and following segments. This information was recorded both for the Shetland Norn and the Old Norse forms of the word. Because some of the geographical information was fairly coarse, we then re-coded the data into seven geographical groups. The Northern Isles (Unst, Yell, and Fetlar) and the island of Foula were obvious distinct entities; we further divided the Shetland Mainland and surrounding minor islands into five areas: Northmavine, the Westside, and Northern, Central, and Southern Mainland.4 The items without geographical information were also included in the database, but were excluded from any geographical analysis.

4.3. Results

In the introduction to the Dictionary, Jakobsen (1928–1932: ix) gives an overview of his informants’ vowel and consonant inventories. He describes the /p

4 The division ofparishes on the Shetland Mainland is as follows: Northern Mainland — Nesting, Lunnasting, Delting, Whalsay and the Out Skerries; Westside — Walls and Sandness, Sandsting, Aithsting, and Papa Stour; Central Mainland — Whiteness and Weisdale, Tingwall, Lerwick, Noss, and Bressay, Burra and Quarff; Southern Mainland — Dunrossness, Sandwick, and Cunningsburgh. Northmavine is a single parish.

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62 R. Knooihuizen / Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 48–72 t k/ series as ‘almost as strongly aspirated as in Danish,’ and the /b d g/ series as ‘half-voiced’. As Jakobsen used very similar terms in his early phonetic descriptions of Faroese (Árnason, 2011: 118), we can interpret this to mean that the distinction between fortis and lenis stops in 1890s Shetland Scots was one of aspiration, not of voicing. We initially analysed preaspiration as a single feature, but it soon became clear that stop preaspiration and sonorant devoicing behave entirely differ- ently in Jakobsen’s Norn data. Table 1 shows the raw numbers of the occurrence or non-occurrence of stop preaspiration and sonorant devoicing, separated by region. Although there is variation, which will be discussed below, one obvious crude generalisation can be made from this table and from Figure 1, which shows the same data: stop preaspiration generally does not occur in the data (i.e., it is found in only 11% of occurrences of the relevant

Table 1 Occurrence of stop preaspiration and sonorant devoicing, by region. stop preaspiration sonorant devoicing proportion total n proportion total n Central Mainland 0.000 1 1.000 2 Foula 0.091 11 0.909 44 Northern Mainland 0.000 13 0.944 36 Northern Isles 0.107 159 0.896 250 Northmavine 0.048 42 0.935 62 Southern Mainland 0.171 41 0.976 41 Westside 0.072 14 0.954 65 Total (incl. no location) 0.112 349 0.922 613

stop preaspiration sonorant devoicing 1 0.8 0.6 0.4

Percentage 0.2 0

Foula Total C Main N Main N Isles S Main N’mavine Westside

Figure 1. Occurrence of stop preaspiration and sonorant devoicing, by region.

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R. Knooihuizen / Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 48–72 63 context), while sonorant devoicing does (92% of possible occurrences). This difference was so clear that further statistical comparison between the two types was not deemed necessary. For neither type of preaspiration did we find differences in geographical distribution: although some of the numbers are extremely low, chi-square tests returned non-significant results (p = 0.6409 for stop preaspiration, p = 0.4899 for sonorant devoicing). Despite the general absence of stop preaspiration in our Shetland Norn data, some generalisations can be made about where it does occur. Firstly, not all stops are liable to preaspiration to the same extent: it occurs only with [p] (7 of 150 cases) and especially [t] (32 of 135 cases), but never with [k] (150 cases) or [tj] (8 cases); the difference between the occurrence of stop preaspiration with [p t k] is significant (chi-square test, p = 1.4 × 10-12), but it is unclear why this should be the case. Moreover, the 39 cases of stop preaspiration show a clear pattern with regard to the preceding vowel: in 29 of these cases the preceding vowel was [oɪ],5 the other preceding vowels being [a] (9 cases) and [eɪ] (once). All these vowels, however, also occur frequently in non-preaspirated examples. The preaspirated examples with [a] tend to go back to Old Norse forms with -akk- and -att-, and the majority of those with [oɪ] stem from Old Norse -átt- or -ótt-. Again, these etymological forms do not always result in stop preaspiration in Shetland Norn. Unlike stop preaspiration, sonorant devoicing is very frequent in Shetland Norn, at 92% of possible occurrences, but also this feature is constrained by a number of linguistic factors (Table 2). First of all, the different sonorants are affected by devoicing to different extents. In particular, [n] (80%) and [nj] (70%) are devoiced much less often than the other sonorants, while [ŋ] is devoiced in all occurrences of the variable context. There is also a difference in the extent to which different segments trigger devoicing of the preceding consonant: t (85%) and p (89%) occur in devoiced clusters slightly less often than average. Apart from these and k (93%), also s (95%) and even f (100%, all /rf/ clusters) trigger sonorant devoicing. Crucially, sonorant devoicing depends on the morphological structure of the word. It generally does not occur across morpheme boundaries in com- pound words: only 14% of sonorant-plus-trigger sequences across morpheme boundaries lead to sonorant devoicing, while this figure is 97% for non- compounds. In this light it is important to note that where in total, 6% of

5 Because of the ‘phonetics run riot’ problem in Jakobsen’s Dictionary, these IPA transcriptions of these vowels are idealised conflations of a range of slightly different transcriptions in Jakobsen’s system; for [oɪ], these are ɔi, ɔi, oi, oi, ȯi, åi, and åi. As with phonological notation elsewhere, we have combined them here for sake of ease.

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64 R. Knooihuizen / Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 48–72

Table 2 Occurrence of sonorant devoicing, by sonorant and triggering segment. /p/ /t/ /k/ /s/ /f/ Total % n % n % n % n % n % n [l] 89% 18 88% 57 93% 15 89% 64 89% 154 [lj] 70% 10 100% 28 100% 4 93% 42 [m] 100% 27 0% 2 99% 94 98% 123 [n] 78% 37 0% 6 97% 31 80% 74 [nj] 100% 13 0% 4 33% 3 70% 20 [ŋ] 100% 98 100% 22 100% 120 [r] 50% 8 100% 5 100% 34 100% 17 100% 12 95% 80 Total 89% 57 85% 122 93% 187 95% 235 100% 12 92% 613 our data involves a morpheme boundary, this percentage is much higher for [n] (15%) and [nj] (35%) — exactly the two sonorants that showed the lowest frequencies of devoicing. No patterns were found with regard to the preceding vowel. As an aside, we can mention that sonorant devoicing is not restricted to words of Old Norse etymology. It also occurs in words of (part-)English origin, e.g., horse-høv [hå‘rs‧hø̄v] ‘marsh-marigold’, and horsgok [hå‘rs‧‧gȯk‧] (etc.) ‘snipe’ (from Old Norse hrossagaukr, but according to Jakobsen likely with horse modelled on the Scots form). These are two of very few non- Scandinavian forms in Jakobsen’s dictionary, but they seem to confirm Hansson’s claim that the Norn and Scots vocabularies did not have distinct ‘phonetic characters’; the picture of Norn painted here is also likely to apply to the Shetland Scots of the period.

4.4. Discussion

The pattern that emerges from the Shetland Norn data in Jakobsen’s Dictionary is clear: allowing for a few exceptions, we can say that the language normatively employed sonorant devoicing before voiceless obstruents, but not preaspiration before voiceless stops (and fricatives). Although the two features are closely linked, sonorant devoicing has a much wider geographical distribution than stop preaspiration also in Mainland Scandinavia, which may be indicative of earlier widespread stop preaspiration which was later lost (Kortlandt, 2003: 7). In combination with the occasional occurrence of preaspirated stops in Jakobsen’s data, the normative occurrence of sonorant devoicing suggests that stop preaspiration occurred at an earlier stage of

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Shetland Norn, but that it was lost by the 1890s, either from Shetland Norn, in transformation under transfer, or post-transfer from Shetland Scots. The linguistic constraints in Shetland Norn on stop preaspiration (all cases of which go back to Old Norse geminates) and sonorant devoicing (which is triggered by voiceless fricatives /s f/ as well as voiceless stops /p t k/) bear more similarities to those in Faroese than to the Scottish Gaelic patterns. This allows us to answer Hansson’s ‘crucial question’ from the citation in §1.2: it is extremely likely that the preaspiration in Jakobsen’s Dictionary carried over directly from Shetland Norn, and was not a separate import from Scottish English or Scottish Gaelic. Scottish English does not traditionally show aspiration at all; in Scottish Gaelic, preaspiration works in a different way, and moreover, the areas with which Shetland is most likely to have been in contact with are exactly those in which preaspiration does not occur. Hansson’s question, however, was based on the assumption that the Shetland variety recorded by Jakobsen employed both stop preaspiration and sonorant devoicing, an assumption that closer analysis of the data has shown to be erroneous. But the analysis does raise a new ‘crucial question’: why did stop preaspiration disappear from the language while sonorant devoicing remained? Or, if we assume the divergent development to be a contact- and shift-related phenomenon, why was sonorant devoicing transferred to the target-language phonological system, while stop preaspiration was not? Preaspiration, as Silverman (2003) writes, is an unstable feature, and the examples from Mainland Scandinavia of sonorant devoicing without stop preaspiration suggest this is not an unlikely outcome of language change. Language-internal triggers, such as weak perceptual salience, likely played a role in the disappearance of stop preaspiration from Shetland. However, we cannot reconstruct the exact phonetic detail for earlier forms of language and we do not have phonetic production and perception studies from the time that could help identify these language-internal triggers and processes. Another part of the explanation may be found in language contact; the remainder of this paper will focus on the role of language and dialect contact in the gradual disappearance of preaspiration from Shetland. Douaud (1991: 186), writing on the transfer of stop preaspiration from Scottish Gaelic to Hebridean English and the non-transfer of the feature from Cree to Cree-influenced English, suggests that the phonemic status of a feature may be crucial to whether it will be transferred or not: ‘speakers have better control over an overt phonemic process than over a covert phonetic one.’ Because speakers attend to features that carry meaning distinction, they can avoid imposing such features on a second language; non-phonemic features fly below the radar, and speakers cannot avoid imposition of these

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66 R. Knooihuizen / Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 48–72 features. Although Douaud’s argument in his case is problematic because of his indecisive stand on the role of preaspiration in Scottish Gaelic — he sees it as sub-phonemic even though it is ‘instrumental in maintaining a distinction between phonemically close series’ — the different phonemic or phonetic status of stop preaspiration and sonorant devoicing in (reconstructed) Shetland Norn may be an important part of the explanation. In the Scandinavian (e.g., Faroese) incarnation of stop preaspiration, it is one of the features that play a role in distinguishing singleton and geminate fortis stops. (Other important features in this distinction are an inverse relation between vowel and consonant duration and, in some cases, vowel quality.) Sonorant devoicing, on the other hand, is a purely ornamental effect of voicing assimilation. In other words, where there is a three-way distinction [ht] – [t] – [d] for stops, there is only a two-way distinction [ ̥nt] – (*[nt] –) [nd] for sonorant-stop sequences. Scots, the language that speakers of Shetland Norn were acquiring during language shift and the formation of early Shetland dialect, does not distinguish between singleton and geminate stops. Learners would have to go from a language with a three-way distinction to a language with a two-way distinction. As preaspirated stops are marked, and moreover are linked to geminate stops — which do not exist in Scots — it can be expected that the preaspirated stops were selected not to be carried over into Shetland Scots.6 Sonorant devoicing, as a purely phonetic process, was outside learners’ control and was duly carried over into Scots. Such was the situation around 1890, when Jakobsen did his fieldwork. This leaves a further issue to be cleared up, however: the disappearance of sonorant devoicing between Jakobsen’s time and the present day. Given that sonorant devoicing is dependent on a system containing aspirated stops, this disappearance must be linked to a further development apparent in Shetland Scots language history, viz. the shift from a fortis-lenis distinction through aspiration to one through voicing. Clear data on this shift is not readily available, but that it must have occurred is apparent from the difference between Jakobsen’s 1890s transcriptions and the (recessive) system in Sundkvist’s

6 The oler of vowel length may also be important here. Although in both Scandinavian and Scots vowel length is allophonic, the languages work in different ways. In Scandinavian, vowel length is dependent on consonant length: only VCː, VCC and VːC syllables are allowed. In Scots, vowel length is morphophonologically constrained: before [p t k], vowels are always short. Although the present-day Shetland dialect does show a slightly toned-down inverse correlation between vowel and consonant duration (van Leyden, 2004), the constraints on vowel length are more or less consistent with the Scots system (Knooihuizen, 2009: 496–497). Future work on vowel length in Jakobsen’s Dictionary will have to shed more light on this issue.

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(2007) and Scobbie’s (2005; 2006) older speakers. An explanation for this change, that brought the Shetland dialect more in line with traditional Mainland Scottish dialects, can likely be found in the demographic history of Shetland in the second half of the 19th century. As the Shetland population decreases in this period through emigration, there is also continuing (in part seasonal; see Fenton, 1972: 139) immigration from Mainland Scotland, in particular from the East Coast fishing villages and from the Central Belt (O’Dell, 1933: 509, 514); meanwhile, whereas all rural areas and Shetland as a whole who a population decline from c. 1870 on, the town of Lerwick sees steady population growth, in part due to immigration from the mainland (O’Dell, 1933: 506; Coull, 1967: 161). These changes in the population make-up of the islands and in the resultant dynamics of dialect contact will have been a further ‘scotticisation’ impulse to the Shetland dialect, in which, following Millar (2008: 264), Norn influence gradually lessened as the dialect focused from c. the 1820s onwards. The occurrence of a residual, arguably relatively non-salient feature as sonorant devoicing in the speech of older rural speakers in the 1890s is consistent with this social history, but these speakers will have been the last generation to have employed the feature. As aspirated stops became unaspirated in the latter half of the 19th century, the phonetic basis for sonorant devoicing disappeared from the dialect. In sum, the disappearance of preaspiration from Shetland seems to show intricate interplay of external factors (language and dialect contact) and internal knock-on effects.7 The preaspiration of voiceless stops may have already been lost from Shetland Norn in the islands’ pre-Scottish period — the linguistic data necessary to ascertain this is, unfortunately, unavailable — but a language contact scenario in which stop preaspiration was not transferred to the developing Shetland Scots variety, and sonorant devoicing was, is entirely plausible. In a further contact-induced change, perhaps already underway but in all likelihood strengthened by increased dialect contact with mainland Scots varieties from the 1870s, the traditional Scandinavian-like fortis-lenis distinction based on aspiration was replaced with one based on voicing, with which sonorant devoicing as a phonetic process was lost.

7 The third type of explanations for language change in Farrar and Jones’ (2002) overview, extra-linguistic factors — sociopolitical and economic factors, but equally, issues of sociolinguistic identity — is likely to also have played a role in the process. Unfortunately, the historical record is too patchy to do any more than speculate about the significance of Jakobsen’s Dictionary containing words reflecting Scandinavian-heritage culture collected predominantly from older speakers in peripheral communities.

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5. Implications

The data presented in this paper and its suggested interpretation have a number of implications for the study of language contact and for language contact explanations in historical linguistics. First of all, they underline the importance, previously stated by Douaud (1991), of the phonemic or phonetic status of a possible transfer feature. The phonemic status of distinctions is known to influence reliable production and perception of categories in a second language: following the Equivalence Classification Theory (Flege, 1987; Flege et al., 2003), second-language learners will have greater difficulty with fine phonetic detail in second-language sounds that are similar to sounds form their first language. At the same time, the consequence of analysing phonetically slightly different sounds from first and second language as equivalent is that second-language interference in the first language is more likely to occur in these sounds than in sounds that are considered different. That phonetic detail can carry over into a language-shift variety undetected, while a parallel feature carrying phonemic weight is not, should therefore not come as a surprise. For post-hoc explanations of historical contact-induced sound change, however, the importance of non-phonemic features may pose a problem. This type of feature is seldom marked in the historical (written) record, for example. Moreover, historical linguistics, with its focus on structural changes, has traditionally not had much interest in non-phonemic change, contact-induced or otherwise (Campbell, 2004: 19). It is therefore as yet not clear whether generalisations about non-phonemic contact-induced change can be made, or whether such generalisations would carry explanatory value. Also the interaction with extra-linguistic factors, such as the intensity of contact or the social meaning of a feature in sl or rl, remains a matter for future investigation. Secondly, the trajectory of change suggested in this paper forces us to qual- ify the notion of ‘transformation under transfer’. In her original study, Meyerhoff (2009) has evidence from bilingual speakers, and can therefore directly compare the constraints on a feature in sl and rl. In the case of Shetland preaspiration, on the other hand, the disappearance of the feature in multiple stages and with both language and dialect contact explanations obscures any direct comparison between the two different systems at either end of the change. Although present-day Shetland Scots and Shetland Norn both distinguish their stop series by means of aspiration, it would be erroneous to compare the two varieties directly, as we have evidence for an intermediate stage where voicing rather than aspiration was the distinguishing feature. The multiple stages that we have been able to identify in this case tell a different

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R. Knooihuizen / Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 48–72 69 history than would have been reconstructed on the basis of a straight comparison. As Meyerhoff (2009: 313–314) also states, more work combining variationist and contact linguistics is needed in order to clarify different pathways of change. This, in turn, may inform the historical study of language change.

6. Conclusion

The history of preaspiration and sonorant devoicing on Shetland offers an excellent opportunity to investigate the interplay of language and dialect contact-induced change. Data from Jakobsen’s Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland, in all likelihood reliable although dating from well after the language shift, allows us to establish that (conservative) Shetland Scots in the 1890s employed sonorant devoicing, but not stop preaspiration. This is a qualification of Hansson’s (2001) assumption that preaspiration in general occurs in the variety recorded in Jakobsen’s Dictionary. In further response to the issues raised by Hansson, the few non-Scandinavian words in the Dictionary do not offer evidence of separate phonetic systems for words of Norn and Scots origin. Finally, the constraints on sonorant devoicing found in the data are so similar to those in Faroese that Scandinavian, rather than Scottish Gaelic, origins for the feature are indisputable. To account for the differences between preaspiration in Faroese and in the Dictionary’s Norn, we proposed an explanation in which stop preaspiration was lost before or during language shift. Preaspirated and non-preaspirated voiceless stops contrasted phonemically, but devoiced sonorants did not contrast with voiced sonorants before voiceless stops. As merely a phonetic correlate of the following voiceless stop, sonorant devoicing was carried over ‘under the radar’ into the language shift variety. Further dialect contact with other varieties of Scots in the later 19th century caused sonorant devoicing to be lost, too, but the trigger for this change — the loss of all aspiration — is obscured by dialect contact in the course of the 20th century, when aspiration was reintroduced. The study signals the importance of phonemic versus non-phonemic status of features transferred in contact-induced change. It raises the question of how this distinction can be employed in explanations of historical language change for which the written record is patchy or phonetically underspecified. Furthermore, the current situation in Shetland is the result of a series of some- times mutually counteractive changes, reminding us that an overly simplistic straightforward comparison between two stages of a change may not necessarily give an accurate picture of events.

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In order to come to a better understanding of contact-induced change, also when it concerns non-phonemic changes, more cooperation and integration is needed not only with variationist sociolinguistics, but especially with studies of second-language acquisition and interference. By overcoming its aver- sion to non-systemic change, and engaging with the type of small changes in language that may also carry social significance, historical linguistics can open up interesting new avenues of research.

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