36 The History of English

speakers, and certainly not at the same time. This means that change contributes to synchronic variation in a language system – old and new, and new and new, variants may co-exist at any one time in a speech community. It also has a diachronic effect – as some variants become dominant and are retained and as others are lost, the ‘linguistic character’ of the language (at least, of the language preserved in the textual record) also changes, as we will see in our narrative of English from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day (Chapters 3–6). But processes of change not only ‘move’ a language from one stage to another; they can also, given enough time and appropriate conditions, eventually result in the gradual emergence of a new language. Such lines of linguistic descent also constitute an integral part of a language’s diachronic narrative, and it is to a discussion of research in this area that we turn in Chapter 2.

1.7Study Questions

1.The following data illustrates a current vowel shift in American English – the Northern Cities Shift, which is taking place in the industrial inland North and is most strongly advanced in the largest cities including Syracuse, Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Chicago and Rockford:

How does this compare to the Southern Vowel Shift (Section 1.2)? You may find it useful to represent these movements as in Figure 1.1.

Useful sources: Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (1998), the Phonological Atlas of North America (http://www.lingupenn.edu/phono_atlas).

2.Many brand-names make use of the word-formation patterns discussed in Section 1.3. Which patterns are evident in the following examples?: Weetabix

(breakfast cereal), Nescafé, Microsoft, Windolene (window cleaner), Ricicles

(breakfast cereal), Lemsip (cold and flu medicine), Brightspace (media sales company).

3.What patterns of semantic change have affected the following words? Note that more than one pattern may be in evidence: hag, hacker, lame, glamour, crafty, harlot. An unabridged dictionary will be useful.

4.Trace the grammaticalization pattern for English affixes –hood and –less. An unabridged dictionary will be useful.

5.Are the following affixes productive or unproductive? The fewer derivations you can come up with, the more unproductive they might be: –ista (fashionista), –ism

(hedonism), un- (unhappy), dis- (disallow), re- (redecorate), –ness (whiteness). Can they each be used unequivocally with any member of the relevant word-class (for example, can un- be affixed to any adjective?), or do there seem to be limitations?

6.What languages do you think are currently major sources of borrowing for English? (Think about this in terms of your own variety, or one(s) with which you

English as a Changing Language 37

are familiar.) List as many examples as you can and try to determine what category of loans they are (for example, cultural and/or prestigious borrowings).

7. Lightfoot (1979) stated that one of the distinguishing features of modals (Section 1.6) is that they cannot occur consecutively. This is not the case, however, in varieties such as Hawick Scots and Tyneside English, examples of which are given below. What functions are the modals serving in each data set?

(a) Hawick Scots

He might can do it, if he tried He must can do it.

He should can do it

He would could do it, if he tried. Note: I would like to could swim

(b) Tyneside English

I can’t play on a Friday. I work late. I might could get it changed though.

The girls usually make me some (toasted sandwiches) but they mustn’t could have made any today.

He wouldn’t could’ve worked, even if you had asked him. A good machine clipper would could do it in half a day.

Useful reading: Beal (1996), Brown (1991).

Notes

1.There are numerous works which an interested reader may consult. For an excellent overview of theoretical, primarily historical linguistic, approaches to language change (as well as a useful bibliography) see McMahon (1994). Coupland and Jaworksi (1997) also provide a useful introduction and guide to sociolinguistic investigations of change.

2.The symbol ‘*’ is used here to denote a form which is not historically attested but which is linguistically plausible. We will return to the question of postulated linguistic ancestors and language families in Chapter 2.

3.The online Phonological Atlas of North America provides current updates on the progress of this and other shifts at http://www.lingupenn.edu/phono_atlas.

4.Pronunciations can be heard at Eckert’s webpage at http://www.stanford.edu/ eckert/ vowels.html.

5.Not all adolescents participate in this shift. Bucholtz (1996) argues for example that non-use of the shifting vowel qualities is one of the linguistic ways in which ‘nerd girls’ in California distinguish themselves from other groups.

6.Dates of first occurrence are taken from the Oxford English Dictionary.

7.Bird is used in British English as a colloquial term of reference for females.

8.See ‘This Year’s New Words’ (25 July 2003) at the Global English Newsletter site http://www.engcool.com/GEN/archive.php.

9.This is a highly simplified outline of Saussure’s argument. For a more detailed discussion, see Harris (1988).

38The History of English

10.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:English_plural; accessed 1 April 2004.

11.See Buchstaller (2002), however, who does not agree that the development of the new functions of like is best explained by a grammaticalization model. The latter, she argues, cannot easily account for the word’s synchronic multifunctionality. She therefore proposes instead a semantic field model, which essentially maps out the word’s synchronic functions in a linked structure which radiates from a shared core.

2Language Families and the Pre-History of English

2.1 Introduction

In February 2002, the Daily Telegraph (a British newspaper) reported that space agencies such as NASA are contemplating the possibility of human interstellar travel and colonization in the not-too-distant future. Pioneer crews will be multinational, multi-lingual, and on a one-way ticket: the journey to the nearest habitable star will take about one hundred years.

Imagine that you are one of these pioneer astronauts. You will spend the rest of your life on your spaceship and will never again be part of a community on Earth. You will have to adapt to life in outer space, and you will experience the world in ways in which those left behind could only begin to imagine. Some aspects of your life will of course unfold along familiar lines – you will make friends, fall in love, and possibly have children and grandchildren. But overall, your new home, your new life, as well as that of any offspring you have, will be forged in a new environment and with a new community.

Now think about your language situation. You and the crew have to be able to communicate effectively from the start, or your trip will be in serious trouble. You and some of the other members may speak only English; others may have Russian, or Swahili or Spanish as their native tongues. What language will unite you all? When you eventually set up home with your native Russian-speaking partner, what language will you use with each other and with your children? What will the latter speak with the other children on board?

If such a scenario ever came to pass, Sarah Thomason (Daily Telegraph 16 February 2002) predicts that, given its modern global status, English would play a primary role for pioneer crews and their offspring. Not only would it be a likely lingua franca for an Earth-launched crew but also, consequentially, a possible native language for the subsequent generations born on the journey. So, in theory, if after about two hundred years, descendants of the original crews returned to Earth, they would be able to converse easily with any remaining English speakers here. Or would they?

As long as English continued to have thriving communities of speakers on Earth and elsewhere, it would undergo processes of change such as those described in Chapter 1. In its migratory journey into outer space, which might eventually lead to total isolation from contemporaneous Earth-based English speakers, the language would very likely change significantly. In the first instance, an original multinational crew might have varying levels of competence in different ‘Englishes’ (such

40 The History of English

as Russian English, or Indian English), and the contact among these could produce a koiné distinct from the English varieties on Earth. Within the space of a few generations, especially if contact with Earth was broken, sounds could be lost or added, grammatical inflections disappear, ‘new words . . . coined and some familiar words fall by the wayside’ (ibid.). Words retained from terran Englishes could also undergo semantic change in adaptation to the new environment. In addition, and in the best tradition of sci-fi drama, if any of our generations of space crew made and sustained contact with an extra-terrestrial culture and language, then ‘Space Crew English’ might very well come to incorporate linguistic influences from that interaction. Overall, if our Earth-bound and Earth-free ‘English’ descendants ever came into contact in the distant future, they might, unsurprisingly, regard each other’s usage as quite alien indeed. In addition, this linguistic gulf could be exacerbated by SCE speakers’ perceptions of themselves as a separate group: Thomason points out that they might come to identify themselves as a culturally and linguistically distinct community, separate from their Earthling kin.

You probably find yourself wondering at this point about the feasibility of such predictions of language change. After all, the existence of Space Crew English is only a distant possibility at the moment, and we have no way of forecasting exactly what English will be like in say, 50 years time, let alone two hundred. However, the assumptions about change and native speaker attitudes that linguists such as Thomason make for the development of English in an extra-terrestrial setting are firmly based on what we have managed to observe right here on Earth. As mentioned earlier in this chapter (and in Chapter 1), linguistic change through inter-generational transmission seems to be a sure and steady process. We therefore have no reason to believe that this would not continue with SCE speakers. In terms of contact, we know, from the evidence of historical records and modern occurrences, that it is a phenomenon that speech communities frequently undergo, and that it can have various linguistic impacts. For example, the current widespread adoption of English as a second language (L2) around the world has led to the emergence of new Englishes such as Indian English and Nigerian English.1 As their names imply, these are currently perceived as varieties of English influenced by the native tongues of each particular region. Alternatively, there have been cases where the adoption of one language by a non-native speech community has eventually resulted in a new language altogether. French and Spanish, for instance, may have had their beginnings in the contact between the Vulgar (or common) Latin spoken by garrisoned soldiers of the Roman Empire and the Germanic languages of the subjugated Franks and Visigoths, respectively. In addition, contact can result in language states that are difficult to classify: Thomason and Kaufman (1988), for example, cite the case of Ma’a, spoken in Tanzania, which now shows such extensive structural influence from Bantu (with which it has been in sustained contact), that its status as an ‘independent’ language has become a matter of extensive debate. Finally, in relation to speaker perceptions about language use, we again know from current and historical evidence that socio-political considerations often influence linguistic classifications. For example, Scots, which is spoken in Lowland Scotland, is defined as a variety of English by some, and as a separate language by others who maintain cultural, political and linguistic autonomy from