New Cambridge History of the English Language Volume IV: Varieties of English in Britain, Ireland and Europe Editor: Raymond Hickey (also general editor) Introduction: Language Variation and Change 1. Sociolinguistic sources of change (Devyani Sharma) 2. Life-span changes and the history of English (Isabelle Buchstaller) 3. Vernaculars, supraregional varieties and standards (Raymond Hickey) 4. Historical divisions and perceptual dialectology (Chris Montgomery) English in England 5. Dialects, dialectology and the history of English (Warren Maguire) 6. The history of Received Pronunciation (Anne Fabricius) 7. Early London English (Laura Wright) 8. The recent history of London English (Susan Fox) 9. English in the South-West of England (Juhani Klemola) 10. English in East Anglia (David Britain and Rob Potter) 11. English in the Midlands (Esther Asprey and Natalie Braber) 12. English in Merseyside (Kevin Watson) 13. English in Tyneside (Adam Mearns) English in Wales 14. The history of English in Wales (Robert Penhallurick) English in Scotland 15. The history of Scots (Joanna KopacZyk) 16. The lexicography of Scots (Margaret Scott) 17. Taking stock of Scots and Scottish English in the early twenty-first century (Jane Stuart-Smith and Rachel Macdonald) 18. English in Orkney and Shetland (Peter Sundkvist) English in Ireland NewCHEL Vol. 4: Varieties of English in Britain, Ireland and Europe Page 2 of 61 19. English in the south of Ireland (Raymond Hickey) 20. English in the north of Ireland (Kevin McCafferty) English in Europe 21. English in the Channel Islands (Heinrich Ramisch) 22. English in Gibraltar (Elena Seoane and Cristina SuáreZ-Gómez) 23. English in Malta (Alexandra Vella) 24. English in Cyprus (Sarah Buschfeld) NewCHEL Vol. 4: Varieties of English in Britain, Ireland and Europe Page 3 of 61 1 Sociolinguistic sources of change Devyani Sharma Queen Mary, University of London Abstract The present-day shape of English, in all its diverse forms, is a layered record of the inexorable push and pull of social forces over its lifetime. This chapter reviews some of the major social sources of linguistic change in British English. We will see that, despite major social transformations over 1500 years, the underlying social processes that shape language are remarkably consistent. We will also see how present-day scenarios, which offer more plentiful data for close analysis, help us to speculate about the nature of linguistic processes and even social relations that obtained in the past. The chapter reviews a number of social factors in change, each illustrated with examples from historical and present-day varieties of English in the British Isles. One of the most well-established sociolinguistic sources of change in English is socioeconomic status. Less conscious and more regular change tends to diffuse upward through the socioeconomic hierarchy, whereas more conscious and often more arbitrary prestige norms tend to be imposed downward (Labov 2001). These processes of change interact in strikingly regular ways with gender (Trudgill 1974). Conscious and unconscious language attitudes can sustain such norms over long periods (Milroy and Milroy 1985; Montgomery 2012). At finer levels of community structure, social networks (Milroy 1987; Bergs 2005) almost always organiZe the diffusion of change, while peer group dynamics shape the social meanings of forms that feed into such networks of diffusion (Eckert 2000; Moore and Podesva 2009). This leads us from larger social structure down to the micro-interactional level. A long-standing challenge in sociolinguistics is to reconcile seemingly agentive shifts at this moment-to-moment level of spoken interaction with more mechanistic macro-social processes of change (Sharma and Rampton 2015). The chapter also briefly reviews further factors, such as the intriguing and possibly changing role of media influence (Stuart-Smith and Ota 2014). An integral part of all such factors is social context. The second half of the chapter turns to how wider social transformations in the UK — migration, conflict, technology —heightened or attenuated the operation of the above sociolinguistic factors, leading to such outcomes as dialect birth (Cheshire et al. 2011), koineisation (Kerswill and Williams 2005), and levelling (Britain 2002, in press). Historical and contemporary case studies from across the British Isles are used to illustrate situations of language contact and demographic change, and the types of linguistic change that these engendered. Language change is shown to be a powerful measure of prevailing social and ideological structures. In closing, I briefly reflect on the relationship between internally- and externally-driven linguistic change, placing sociolinguistic factors within the wider frame of language as a cognitive system. References NewCHEL Vol. 4: Varieties of English in Britain, Ireland and Europe Page 4 of 61 Bergs, Alexander. (2005) Social networks and historical sociolinguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Britain, D. (2002) Diffusion, levelling, simplification and reallocation in past tense BE in the English Fens. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 6(1), p.16-44. Britain, David, and Sarah Grossenbacher. (in press) Counterurbanisation, dialect contact and the levelling of non-salient traditional dialect variants: The case of the front short vowels in Eastern England. In Arne Ziegler, Stefanie Edler, Nina KlecZkowski and Georg Oberdorfer (eds.), Urban Matters. Current Approaches of International Sociolinguistic Research. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Cheshire, Jenny, Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox, and Eivind Torgersen. (2011) Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 15(2), p.151-196. Eckert, Penny. (2000) Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belton High. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Kerswill, Paul, and Ann Williams. (2005) New towns and koineiZation: linguistic and social correlates. Linguistics, 43(5), p.1023-1048. Labov, William. (2001) Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors. Volume 2. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Milroy, James, and Lesley Milroy. (1985) Authority in Language: Investigating Language Prescription and Standardisation. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Milroy, Lesley. (1987) Language and Social Networks. Second Edition. Oxford: Blackwell. Montgomery, Chris. (2012) Perceptions of dialects: Changing attitudes and ideologies. In T. Nevalainen and E. Traugott (eds) The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, 457–469. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moore, Emma, and Robert Podesva. (2009) Style, indexicality, and the social meaning of tag questions. Language in Society, 38(4), 447-485. Sharma, Devyani, and Ben Rampton. (2015) Lectal focusing in interaction: A new methodology for the study of style variation. Journal of English Linguistics 43(1): 3-35. Stuart-Smith, Jane, and Ichiro Ota. (2014) Media models, ‘the shelf’ and stylistic variation in East and West: rethinking the influence of the media on language variation and change. In Androutsopoulos, J. ed. The Media and Sociolinguistic Change. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp.127-70. Trudgill, Peter. (1974) The social differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Institutional address Prof. Devyani Sharma Department of Linguistics Queen Mary University of London Mile End Road London E14NS United Kingdom NewCHEL Vol. 4: Varieties of English in Britain, Ireland and Europe Page 5 of 61 NewCHEL Vol. 4: Varieties of English in Britain, Ireland and Europe Page 6 of 61 2 Life-span changes and the history of English Isabelle Buchstaller University of Duisburg and Essen Abstract Models of language change tend to rely on the critical period hypothesis which assumes that speakers’ linguistic habits stabiliZe after puberty. Under this hypothesis, post-adolescent speakers would not contribute to ongoing change, remaining essentially constant as younger generations around them push forward incoming forms. Panel research, which follows individual speakers through chronological time, puts to the test the assumptions of the critical period hypothesis and thus its fundamental tenet of intra-speaker stability. While panel studies remain relatively sparse – mainly due to difficulties involved in re-recording individuals across their life-span – Sankoff and Blondeau’s (2007) call for linguists to engage with this line of research has resulted in an increasing body of evidence that post-adolescent speakers contribute in socially differentiated ways to community-wide change. These panel studies have revealed that post-adolescent changes in language use occur in two broad patterns of instability: Life-span change, when individuals adapt their language use towards the direction of change and thus replicate patterns of the community-wide trend. Retrograde movement against the community-wide change, when post-adolescent speakers move away from ongoing change. Independently, later-life change whereby an individual picks up linguistic features characteristic of a community to which they have relocated has been found in second dialect acquisition. Notably, these two patterns of intra-speaker lability tend to have socio-economic correlates, with more highly educated speakers having been reported to pick up on incoming prestige standard forms. Upwardly mobile individuals and speakers in the higher socio-economic brackets have also been shown to eschew incoming tends away from the prescriptive standard, reverting