HG4020 Wk 6 - 9

‘Broken transmission’ (Thomason & Kaufman 1988)

Young generation acquires a language not handed down by parent generation

No single ancestor

Comparative method draws on a combination of sources

Lingua franca

Any language used for interethnic communication

Koiné

A lingua franca specifically among related dialects — involves levelling, inputs are all

mutually intelligible, so no ‘broken transmission’

Foreigner talk

An improvised, ad hoc register — unless it conventionalises, which is itself the start of

pidginisation

Contact language

Structurally new e.g. Nigerian Pidgin English

Pidgin characteristics

• No native speakers

• Restricted functions (trade, work)

• Typical settings

• Built from repertoires

• A makeshift lingua france

Balanced pidgins

• Equal partners

• Vocab pooled from all groups

• Rare - needs parity of power

Unbalanced pidigns

• Labour pidgins: employer castes vs mixed labourers

• Colonial trade pidgins: base in the colonial language

• Dominant repertoire = lexifier

Pidgin life-cycle

1. Jargon

Experimental, unstable, adjusted through feedback

2. Stabilised pidgin

Shared, functionally limited repertoire

3. Expanded pidgin

Referential and grammatical domains grow to a language in its own right

When does a pidgin gets native speakers?

when a population consistently shifts to a pidgin, which then serves as the principal

input for the next generation’s first language = creole

Creole

full native language, acquired by children from birth

Basilect

the creole itself — home, informal, everyday life

Mesolect

varieties influenced by the standard — semi-formal, often urban

Acrolect

the standard, written lexifier — public, formal domains

Phonology and lexicon of creoles

1. Small vowel systems: typically five vowels

2. Consonant cluster reduction

3. Calques on substrate patterns

4. Reduplication : for emphasis, intensity or repetition

Tense, modality, aspect of creolss

Small set of preverbal particles, usually grammaticalised from motion/state verbs in a fixed order

Serial verbs and other hallmarks of creoles

1. Serial verb constructions

Sranan mi teki fisi seri [I take fish sell] ‘I sold the fish’ — directional,

aspectual, argument-introducing

2. Inclusive/exclusive pronouns

Top Pisin yumi (we incl) vs mipela (we excl)

3. Grammaticalised preposition

Melanesian Pidgin long covers ‘in’, ‘about’, ‘than’ (one form, many uses)

Negation and possession

Single preverbal negator; possession by simple juxtaposition9

McWhorter’s ‘creole prototype’

1. No inflectional morphology (-s, -ed)

2. No non-compositional derivation

the whole meaning cannot be predicted from its parts (e.g. butterfly cant be broken up into butter + fly)

3. No meaningful tone

Theory 1 of why creoles look like that: unguided L2 learning

Unguided L2 learners focus on referential vocabulary and leave grammar to makeshift constructions

Deficit view towards creole

Goal = native-speaker target grammar

Reduction = failure, limited access

Efficient view towards creoles

Goal = communicative success in this context

Reduction = an innovative strategy, not an accident

Theory 2 of why creoles look like that: one shared ancestor?

all pidgins and creoles ultimately trace back to a single historical source

• Medieval Lingua Franca → West African Portuguese pidgin → Relexified worldwide

Theory 3 of why creoles look like that: Bickerton’ Bioprogram (Phylogenesis hypothesis)

Creolisation as first-language, not second-language, acquisition: children, faced with impoverished pidgin input, fill the gaps from innate Universal Grammar

• Mechanism: children transfrom patchy pidgin input into full grammar using innnate linguistic abilities

• Prediction: creoles resemble each other cause they all refllect the same UG

Theory 4 of why creoles look like that: grammaticalisation

Pidginisation driven by pragmatic need. Salient referential items transfer directly, abstract grammatical items get rebuilt through grammaticalisation

• What transfers directly": numerals, quantifiers, most pronouns

• Gets rebuilt: abstract operators: grammaticalised anew

• Typical sources: reflexives from pronouns or body/head/skin nouns

Substrative approach

Many creole features trace to the native languages speakers carried into the contact situation

Three ways to explain the split

1. Bakker: ‘language intertwining’

   [NEW – ABRUPT]

2. Myers-Scotton: Matrix Language

   Turnover

   [STRUCTURAL SHIFT]

3. Matras: functional turnover

   [SELECTIVE PRESERVATION]

Bakker: ‘language intertwining’ [NEW – ABRUPT]

A conscious, abrupt act of creation, tied to identity formation in small, crystallising communities

Myers-Scotton: Matrix Language Turnover [STRUCTURAL SHIFT]

A population shifts its Matrix Language, and the old ML survives as the new Embedded Language

Matras: functional turnover [SELECTIVE PRESERVATION]

The old language becomes emblematic rather than everyday —triggering ‘selective replication’, targeting mainly the lexicon

e.g. Srilankan Malay (some Malay words, Srilankan pattern)

A cline of function

Symbiotic · narrow function

• Variety of non-mixed neighbour language

• Users speak non-mixed form fluently

Autonomous . full function

• Independent from either source language’s rules

• Sometimes a whole community’s only language

Preservation, or acculturation?

Preservation

• ‘old’ language is endangered or shifting

• Speakers selectively replicate it as an in-group act

Acculturation type

• Community language is stable, not shifting

• Outer language imported selectively, often for prestige

Defining ‘language attitude’

Baker (1992): attitudes are learned, enduring, and related to — though not simply predictive of —

behaviour. Three components:

1. Cognition - what people say about a language or variety

2. Affect - what people feel about it

3. Readiness for action - how it disposes people to behave

Direct methods of rating an accent

• Likert scale

• Risk: social-desirability bias

Indirect methods of rating an accent

• Matched-guise/verbal-guise technique

• Same content, different voice/language

• Difficult to fake a ‘correct’ answer

Matched-guise test

One bilingual speaker reads same text in multiple languages/accents

Verbal-guise test

• Different speakers, one per variety

• More natural-sounding, but voices aren’t perfectly matched

Status traits of varieties

intelligent, ambitious, educated — standard/prestige varieties rate higher

Solidarity traits

kind, friendly, likeable — local/non-standard varieties often rate higher

Three waves of method

1. Social stratification

Large-scale surveys, macro correlations — this is where matched/verbal-guise studies mostly sit

2. Social agency

Ethnography, social networks, communities of practice — e.g. Eckert’s Jocks vs Burnouts (Detroit)

3. Stylistic practice

Small-scale, close-up — how ONE speaker uses variation to build a persona, moment to moment

Accommodation theory (Giles 1973)

• Convergence (move toward the interlocutor)

  • Accentuates commonality

  • Default, cooperative move

• Divergence (away from interlocutor)

  • Accentuates differences

  • Can signal dis-identification

Attitudes

individual or small-group — often unconscious evaluations

Ideologies

societal, constructed — overarching belief systems about language

Why is there a need to study interethnic language attitudes?

Interethnic language attitudes reveal interethnic group perceptions

• Language is a marker of social group membership

• important in Singapore, where there is heavy emphasis on racial harmony

Why do we sometimes use VGT over MGT?

• Ensures that guises produced are authentic and representative

• Unlikely to find a speaker who can produce all guises

Linguistic loyalty

penalising ingroup members for using an outgroup code

New Englishes

nativised L2 varieties, especially in Africa and Asia; stresses their recent emergence

World Englishes

neutral umbrella, covering L1, L2, and lingua￾franca uses alike

Postcolonial Englishes

foregrounds the shared colonial contact history

ESL / Outer Circle

The former trade and exploitation colonies where English holds official second-language status

Kachru’s Three Circles (1985)

• Inner circle: ‘norm-providing’

  • English as the primary language - US, UK, Australia

• Outer Circle: ‘norm-developing’

  • Institutionalised vs colonial contact - SG, India, Nigeria

• Expanding circle

  • English as foreign language, no official role - China, JP, KR

Kachru’s Three Circles (1985)

1. Settlement: dialect contact (inner circle)

2. Trade: goal-oriented, short-lived; jargons and pidgins

3. Exploitation: rule by a small elite

4. Plantation: imported labour, many substrates; pidginization and creolization

Unilateral bilingualism

• Seected members of indigeneous group learned English

• To translate and mediate

A torn identity

Intermediaries ebded up between the groups, fully claimed by neither

Assymetric by design

unequal status, interest and power meant the burden of adjustment fell on the indigenous side

Who actually carried English in?

1. Mission-school staff

British heads, Irish priests and nuns

2. South asian clerks

Earliest teachers and civil servants

3. Eurasians & Peranakans

Local elities who shifted to English early

The fifth: postcolonial attraction

English now spreads due to globalisation

Transfer

cross-linguistic influence in individual minds (Siegel) — a main mechanism of contact-induced change (Thomason)

‘Untutored SLA’

: indigenised Englishes resemble classroom interlanguages — but native-speaker English need not be the target

Vulnerable subsystems

Williams (1987): some parts of English grammar are inherently hard for learners, and give way first

Which subsystems give way?

1. Vowel length

2. Consonant clusters

3. Dental fricatives

4. Articles

Categories that get flattened

• Count vs mass - uncountable nouns get pluralised

• Stative vs dynamic - stative verbs take progressive

• Tag questions - polarity-matched tags replaced by invariant forms - isn’t it? (Indian English)

Preservers and deleters

Preservers:

• Retainand overtly mark constituents

• ‘anti-deletion’

• e.g. let him to speak, discuss about it

Deleters:

• Omit recoverable constituents

• Chinese-substrate zero subjects/objects

• e.g. Can or not?; Must buy Ø

Schneider’s Dynamic Model

1. Foundation

English arrives, settler dialect contact

2. Exonormative

British norms rule; indigenous bilingualism begins

3. Nativisation

Strongest contact

4. Endonormative

Local norm codified and accepted as identity

5. Differentiation

New standard splits into internal dialects

How loanwords enter?

1. Toponyms

2. Flora & Fauna

3. Culture

4. All else

Substrates lift the ceiling for why Englishes can look un-English

• Unrelated families

• Substrate over lexifier: substrate matters more than input variety or transmission type for features that emerge

• No typological ceiling: if one feature is dominant in the feature pool, the new English can take it

Politeness travels

1. Address norms: first-naming clashes in American-Chinese business encounters

2. Speech acts: ritual insults, verbal games and ‘apparant rudeness’ in AA and Caribbean varieties

3. An open frontier

Contact before colony

Some ‘Asian English’ words never came straight from local language - travelled a chain, usually through portuguese first

Contact beyond the colony

New sites generate new features, spreading horizontally between Asian - and African - Englishes:

• CMC ‘add oil’ jiayou - spread from online chat back into speech

• Sino-African trade - Chinese and African traders innovative reduplication; chop-cop re-semanticised to ‘eat’

• Teaching industry - SG as an education hub

Why policy decides the outcome

• SG & India

  • English as neutral inter-ethnic language

  • Accessed by all through school system

  • nativised → endonormative stabilisation

• MY and Sri Lanka

  • Own language as national medium

  • English left to small minority

  • Eng never nativised in a stable way

Standard English vs Singlish

• Overt vs Covert - SSE in ‘high’ domains, SCE with covert prestige

• Speak Good English Campaign

• Malaysia’s U-turns: English medium for science reintroduced 2003, abandoned 2010

Exonormative

• British/American English as norm

• High status, low local solidarity

• Formal, official domains

Endonormative

• Nativised variety as its own norm

• High solidarity, contested status

• Identity, authenticity, the home

Borrowing

Words cross, both languages stay

Bilingualism

Two languages side by side

Shift

Dominant language takes over

Death

Last speakers stop/die

Language maintenance

Community keeping its language despite a regionally or socially more powerful rival

Shift and Death

• Often travels togethwe with some exceptions

  • Cornish: shift and death

  • Norwegian in US: shift without death

  • Tasmanian: death without shift - speakers wiped out

  • Hebrew: death then revival

What languages count as dead?

• Not ‘dead’ - Latin, Sanskrit are transmitted continuously into daughter languages

• Truly dead - no unbroken line to any living speech community (Gothic, Pictish)

• Revived - Hebrew dead everyday language brought back to daily use

Borrowing is not switching

• Adapted, not inserted: loan reshaped to borrower’s sound and grammar

• No bilingualism needed: can use loanword without speaking donor language

• Becomes yours: once borrowed, word belongs to the borrowing language

Resisiting loanwords

Some communities meet new things by mining their own grammar to make new terms (resistance)

Four factors behind a shift

1. Economic

2. Status

3. Demographic

4. Institutional

Ethnolinguistic vitality

• Status, demography, institutions

• High vitality → maintenance; low → shift

Social networks

• dense, multiplex, in-marrying ties conserve

• weak ties and mobility carry the shift

• ‘concentration & endogamy help’ is this, named

What is the prime mover of language?

Economics

• Contact of communities usally set up by trade, work, migration or invasion

Do numbers matter?

• Yes, but there is no ‘critical mass’ that guarantees survival

• Distribution matters more than headcount

• Concentration helps

• Endogamy (marriage within the group) helps as it improves the odds of passing the language to children

Institutions and status

• Religion

• Status is relative: Ararbic high in middle east, low in europe (immigrant)

• Literary prestige

Four ways a language dies

1. Gradual

2. Sudden

3. Radical

4. Bottom-to-top: lost as everyday talk but kept in ritual

The course of a shift

1. Bilingual bridge - both in use

2. Public domains go - work and admin switch first

3. Home holds out - family and religion last

4. Transmission stops - children raised in new language

When competence recedes

1. Young fluent speakers: native command, with dsubtle drift from older speakers’ norms

2. Passive bilinguals: understand but can’t produce

3. Semi-speakers: speech flawed and halting, yet still productive

How does a language decay?

1. Vocabulary narrows: lexicon shrinks; inflections simplified or over-generalised

2. But no collapse: no wholesale breakdown, no drift toward uniform word order

3. Boots still on

The frame turns over

1. Old frame - receding language is ML

2. Composite ML - frame draws on both

3. New frame - dominant language is ML

Does the matrix language hold?

Turnover only works if a Matrix Language can be pinned down