Impact of language contact on language change

Argument 1: Individual bilingual speakers will transfer aspects from their one language into the other.

 Nancy Rourke: ASL at ease, 2011. Website.

What sort of forces cause language change? Summarise the article by Gregory R. Guy.

How does language change? Gregory R. Guy makes a distinction between three major types of causes. Firstly internal or spontaneous change, such as sound change, semantic broadening, narrowing or pejoration, coinages etc. This would happen even if the speaker community was entirely isolated from other languages.  The other two types both arise when the speaker community is not isolated, but is in contact with other language communities. In borrowing speakers of a given language (L1) import aspects of another language (L2) into their own. Imposition or interference entails that speakers of L1 inadvertently use rules and devices from L1 when speaking L2, thus affecting L2.

For both language contact causes there needs to be some degree of bilingualism of some percentage of the speaker community, here understood to mean that speakers speak at least a bit of more than one language, wether learned as a child or later on in life. In order to import words from another language one needs to have some sense of what they are used for in that language first.

Furthermore in contact situations, the relative size, dominance, prestige and degree of standardisation of the languages that are in contact have a lot of influence on the linguistic outcome. If one language has a much larger speaker community, the changes will take longer to filter through to each speaker, although a local variant can develop that shows a lot of influence from language contact in that locality. For a small community, language innovations can reach all speakers of the language more easily. Moreover the motivation for borrowing is often based on status. Therefore the direction of the borrowing will be mostly from the more prestigious language to the less prestigious one, e.g. from that spoken by the upper or ruling class to that spoken by lower and middle class people. Interference is usually not as conscious of a choice as borrowing, and therefore it is not status based. It occurs often in learning or shift situations, where one community has to adapt to the language of another, and where bilinguals are likely to be fluent in their native language but in the process of learning the language that the imposition happens to. However in cases of coexistence of two languages, or for balanced bilinguals, the interference can go both ways. Both languages will influence one another.

I am making a distinction between the dominance of a language and its prestige, dominance describing the status of the language in terms of being used for official purposes and spoken by people with more power. Prestige on the other hand is the "coolness" factor, which language is in fashion depending on current ideology. Often prestige and dominance go hand in hand, as with French in modern France, but social upheaval can lead to resistance against a dominant language and preference for another, which then gains prestige. Such would have been the case in Norway during the rise of Nynorsk, by way of protest against the Danish influence.

The degree of  standardisation of a language is important because a language for which there are authoritative reference guides for word meanings, spelling, grammar and pronunciation will be much less inclined to change.


How is the situation of Ulster Scots in Guy's terms?

Ulster Scots coexists in Northern Ireland mainly with English and also with Irish, although the communities that speak Ulster Scots and the ones that speak Irish can be expected to be fairly segregated, i.e. bilingual Ulster Scots and Irish speakers will be rare. There is a coexistence situation, that is, Ulster Scots has been spoken alongside of English for centuries and speakers are not coerced to shift. Yet English is clearly the more sizable and dominant of the languages, being spoken worldwide by about 340 million speakers as a native language and another 430 as a second language (Ethnologue: English). According to the Ethnologue there are 90,000 speakers of Scots in the United Kingdom and 10,000 in Ireland (Donegal), and there is no separate entry for Ulster Scots. Both in Ulster and in Scotland the language has been relegated entirely to the informal sphere, whereas English is used for education and all official purposes. Sheila Douglas writes: "Many Scots people are still half-stifled by a social environment that frowns on the use of Scots for anything more important than casual conversation." Of the people in the communities that speak Scots or Ulster Scots, 97% speak English as well (Ethnologue: Scots) which makes them bilingual speakers.

Due to the revivals of the past centuries Scots and Ulster Scots are gaining in prestige again. Children who speak the language in the playground would now not be beaten, although they might still be corrected. Ulster Scots has benefited from the Good Friday Agreement with considerable funding and some governmental endorsement, and it has been promoted as a marker of a distinct identity.


What can we, therefore, expect to find with regards to language change in Ulster Scots?

Since the speaker community of Ulster Scots consists mostly of balanced bilinguals who use Ulster Scots for informal registers (provided the other speaker understands it) and English for more formal ones, it can be expected that there will be a lot of cross-influence from Ulster Scots on the local variety of English and from English on Ulster Scots.  Due to the great intensity of the language contact this influence can be expected to be quite far-reaching, affecting all aspects of Ulster Scots i.e. phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon etc. The influence on English as a whole will be small because of English' giant speaker base, and its high degree of standardisation will mean that the local influence is limited to less formal registers as the standard variety is preferred for the more formal ones.

It may be hard to tell apart the effects of borrowing and intereference. Because the speakers are such balanced bilinguals (fluent in both languages) no useful distinction can be made between their L1 and their L2. The only distinction that is then left between borrowing and interference is whether the innovator made a conscious choice to use a certain aspect from the one language in the other, or whether it was a "mistake". Yet this may show variation on a case by case basis - the one's mistake may be another's conscious choice.

Theory

1. Individual bilingual speakers will transfer aspects from their one language into the other.

2. If a large percentage of a community that speaks a particular language also speaks a particular second language, features of the second language will become a common part of the community's native speech.

3. The overwhelming majority of Ulster Scots speakers are fluent in English as well.

4. Therefore a lot of aspects of English have found their way into Scots.

5. Writing down a mostly oral language creates a reference point for correct use of the language and causes or facilitates standardisation. 

6. When spoken language is written down, changes that have occured in the language will be locked in.

7. Revival authors write down a language that is mostly oral and under threat, often in an attempt to save it from going extinct.

8. Through revival literature the influence of the English language on Ulster Scots becomes standardised.

Proposed research project

Semi-structured interviews with second generation immigrants in their teens and twenties about language innovations and language-related social standing.

Rules of interaction with Mocros: do not imitate them because they will laugh at you. Source: Partyflock.

Why this group?

As second generation immigrants will normally be fairly balanced bilinguals, they are likely to be primary agents of language innovation within their own community and beyond. This makes them an excellent group to test and elaborate on theories of contact-induced language change with, concerning borrowing and interference and the spread of these features throughout the community. Particular types of language innovations are known to be mostly done by teenagers, but an extension of the research could include contrastive interviews with adult members of the same community.

An example of such a group would be children of Morrocan immigrants in the Netherlands. At one hand their use of the Dutch language shows imposition (interference) of their first language, e.g. the application of determiners “deze” and “die” differs significantly from that of non-bilingual Dutch speakers (*wat is deze v. wat is dit; *die meisje vs dat meisje.) At the other hand it can be expected that their use of their first language would include borrowed items from Dutch. The social evaluation of such language innovations may add to or decrease the social standing of those who use them frequently: among second generation Moroccan immigrants a language variety dubbed Mocro has emerged, which has spread to Dutch natives of the same age. Its spread beyond the community indicates that it is seen as "prestigious": whoever speaks it is fairly cool.

Topics to discuss would include:

• To what extent are the interviewees conscious of their own language behaviour?
• Can they give examples of their L1 influencing their L2 and vice versa? How would they explain these language choices?
• Do bilingual speakers within the immigrant community have a better social standing? (This tests a theory posed by Gregory R. Guy (1990:4) that linguistic innovation in language contact situations usually takes place in the “upper stratum of the borrowing group” e.g. the L1 speakers with the highest social standing.)
• How are community members seen that do not make any of the imposition-related language “mistakes”, i.e. who speak the host language fluently? (Following the theory by William Labov that certain language changes are motivated by a sense of solidarity or local prestige, community members who speak the host language fluently can be expected to be regarded
  by other community members as lacking solidarity or as making an attempt to disassociate themselves from the community.)

Choosing a qualitative method rather than a quantitative one will allow for insight into the “why” and “how” of language change rather than just the “if”; through interviews the researcher can explore the deeper motivations of language choices in detail, which would not be possible or at least much harder through questionnaires with Likert-scale questions. The interviewees will benefit from the interviews in that their awareness of their own language behaviour and their own attitudes about social status will increase.

Using poetry as a resource for historical linguistics.

The inconvenient thing about the past is that it is impossible to set up an experiment, for instance to evoke exactly the type of utterances that are needed for a language study. Instead one has to make do with whatever source material is available. Although (self-conscious) Ulster Scots was not used for official written purposes, a good number of Ulster Scots poems from the 18th Century survive and they can be compared to Lallans and Doric poetry from around the same time as well as to modern Ulster Scots poetry and writing. But some things need to be taken into account when using poetry as a linguistic resource. The language used in poetry does not per se reflect "naturalistic" speech of the time that it was written; it is just another register with words used because they are deemed to sound poetic, or abbreviated to make the sentence run better. However, even if it is written and not recorded, poetry is a surprisingly good source for figuring out how speech would have sounded around the time of writing. 


The study of Old English has learnt a lot from studying the poetry of Chaucer (1343-1400); about the vocabulary and grammar of the language but also about the way it was pronounced.  The latter can be found out by comparing words that would be expected to rhyme - if Chaucer rhymes melody and eye this shows that his pronunciation of either one or the other must have differed from that today. For this reason poetry is even "likely the best source" for how historical speech sounded, says Linde Lunney (2006: 51). She notes that it is especially important to analyse Ulster Scots poetry or "the poetry written in what purports to be a written version of the Ulster-Scots spoken dialect", because "in this sub-genre the poet's awareness of the sounds of speech, and his efforts to recreate them in written form, are as important to the 'message' as they are to the 'medium'." Ulster-scots poetry usually contains nonstandard spellings that are intended to reflect how the word would actually be pronounced by Ulster-Scots speakers.

It should be noted that identifying the vocabulary from the poem is not as easy as it may seem at first glance. Words used in poetry do not always (or: often don't) reflect the "normal" vocabulary at that time as authors may choose words that sound more learned or beautiful instead of words people would usually have used. There are some periods in which it was common for poets to be very innovative with their language use. An obvious example is Shakespeare, who is credited with significantly expanding the language by using existing verbs as nouns and adjectives and vice versa, and coining a great deal of words too, for instance compulsive. (see OED: "compulsive"). Andrew Zurcher notes about studying an innovative poet such as Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) that

"it becomes very difficult to register exactly which parts of his verse qualify as innovative. What looks convincingly like archaism to us today might not, to an Elizabethan, have seemed strange at all. By contrast, words that we now accept as standard, or quasi-standard, might have seemed unfamiliarly archaic to Elizabethan readers." (Zurcher 2005)

This problem is very much true for Ulster Scots poetry as well. Out of such motivations as protectivism of the language, the poets would often have sought to use as "pure" Ulster Scots as possible with the most un-english words they could find, no matter whether these would have sounded unusual to the casual speaker. A recent example, William Forbes Marshall (1888-1959) is described as "an aficionado of Ulster Scots and an avid collector of words and phrases." (**: 361)

the Discourse-Historical approach

Picture from a cool article by T. Mills Kelly at The Conversation

In the chapter "Linguistic Analyses of Language Policies", Ruth Wodak suggests that a discourse analysis method can be helpful in studying language policies (2006: 170-193), so I decided I would try to implement this in my research. To prepare, I read How To Do Critical Discourse Analysis by David Machin and Andrea Mayr (2012).

One thing that has become clear from reading the book is that Wodak's approach is much more extensive and thorough than that described by Machin and Mayr. They see her work as an extension of an approach that is already a bit wider than the "common" critical discourse analysis (CDA) method, namely Van Dijk's socio-cognitive approach. In the "common" method, as described by Machin and Mayr, a few texts are picked out that are deemed representative of a particular kind of discourse by the analyst. He or she then analyses what semiotic choices are made that conceal the underlying ideology of the text. The purpose of CDA is to bring out and challenge hidden power relations, which they believe are created and reinforced through language and through specific discourses.

In my post on "discourse dissemination across social boundaries" I  talked about some of my hesitations with this approach, such as that it did not take into account who produced the text for which kinds of readers, and how those readers react to it. The conclusion of Machin and Mayr's book actually goes into these kinds of criticisms; that it does not consider the background and context of the production and consumption of the texts, on the one hand, and that it is too selective and subjective on the other hand.

In the discourse-historical approach described by Wodak, these issues are resolved to an extent. Background reasearch and ethnography are used to provide the actual context and history of certain discourses, to understand how they come about and what function they serve. Because of the large amount of data that are gathered, the selection problem of CDA is less acute of a problem. CDA becomes less of a focus on its own and more of a tool used to show how the discourses work in practice. It is also suggested that quantitative analysis (e.g. Corpus-based) be integrated, which would make the interpretation less subjective.

As a whole the approach probably makes for a PhD-size project per proper implementation. The next step for me is to think about how I could realistically integrate this into my own project. I'm now interested in ethnography and corpus linguistics though, and I'll be reading up about those. Also for next week I will try to apply my new CDA knowledge onto some of the articles I posted on here before.

Die Urmutter von Kartoffeln

Picture by Jim Richardson taken from AMNH

Das Kartoffel wurde im 16. Jahrhundert von Spanischen Seefahrern in Süd-Amerika entdeckt. Dort wurde es schon viele Jahrhunderten kultiviert, ebenso wie Maïs, Bohnen, Zwiebeln, Tomaten und Schokolade. DNA-Forschung hat gezeigt, dass alle Kartoffeln in Europa von einem Pflanz aus Süd-Peru abstammen: nur einem Pflanz, der wirklich die Urmutter von Kartoffeln geworden ist. Seitdem entstanden viele verschiedene Rassen. Aber im Süd-Amerika gibt es dennoch viel merkwürdiger Varianten: Rot, Schwarz, geformt wie ein Halbmond oder mit Beulen überall.

Als der Kartoffel in Europa introduziert war gab es zuerst viel Misstrauen. Die Kartoffel ist nicht in der Bibel erwähnt und die Menschen waren sich nicht sicher das sie von Gott zugelassen worden. Sie waren auch zögerlich, wurzeln zu essen von einen hochgiftigen Pflanz. Für zwei Jahrhunderten wird das nur von die armsten Leuten und von Schweine gegessen. Aber weil die Kartoffel in raue Bedingungen überleben kann und auch nicht slecht schmeckt, hat es sich langsam mehr akzeptiert. Heute isst der Welt Jahrlich etwa 200 Millionen Tonnen Kartoffeln.

Das besondere von der Kartoffel ist, das es in unendlich vielfältiger Weise angewendet werden kann. Mann kan es kochen, backen, braten, oder zu Suppe oder Brei machen. In Europa kennen wir natürlich alle Pommes Frites, Bratkartoffeln und Kartoffelsalat. In Nord-Irland macht man auch Brot von Kartoffeln; man fügt einfach etwas Mehl im Kartoffelbrei zu und backt es einige Minuten in einer Pfanne. In Schweden hat ein Hotel der “Hasselback”-Kartoffel erfunden: ein Bratkartoffel, aber geschnitten wie ein Fächer, mit ein knüspriges Resultat zu gefolg. Und im eigentlichen Nährboden, Süd-Amerika, isst man gerne Kartoffel-überasschungsknödeln, aus Kartoffelbrei mit scharfen Soße in der Mitte.

Discourse dissemination across social boundaries

Picture by brooklynpix

Having embarked on the mission to find out how to do Critical Discourse Analysis, it was nice to find out that one of the staff of the School of English and a former teacher of mine, Dr Mayr, has recently brought out a book with exactly that as the title. I've borrowed it from the library (a hassly affair as it is only available as a short loan, which has me running to the library through the rain at 3:45pm to return it before I get fined at exactly 4pm) and eventually decided to purchase it as it's useful and because I feel a sense of pride at owning books from people who have taught me.

The book intends to show precisely how the "semiotic choices" authors make (authors here referring to journalists and writers as well as photographers, singers, visual editors and whoever engages in communication) are influenced by and feed into discourses, or frameworks of interpretation, which are in turn ways to obscure the ideology of the text. These ideologies form the hegemony of the higher classes, and eventually serve to convince the lower classes that the way the higher classes control and oppress them is in fact legitimate. 

Let me first say that the book does a really good job of showing how these semiotic choices work. I will be writing more on this later as I will most likely be basing a lot of the analysis I'm going to do on what's explained in the book. As of yet I am working my way through it to form a sort of plan for how to do the analysis. 

So although I really do admire the minute detail they go into when analyzing texts, some of the underlying ideology shall we call it irks me to the max. The idea that - even in a democracy - the higher/educated/managerial classes, the ABC, control the lower and working classes, the DE, through the media (such as the Daily Mail which a lot of the examples in the book are drawn from) is in fact almost belittling as it implies that the lower classes have very little agency of their own. 

This is a quote from the book:

Power comes from privileged access to social resources such as education, knowledge and wealth, which provides authority, status and influence to those who gain this access and enables them to dominate, coerce and control subordinate groups. (...)

Power can be more than simple domination from above; it can also be jointly produced when people are led to believe that dominance is legitimate in some way or other. (...)

Power, at least in democratic societies, needs to be seen as legitimate by people in order to be accepted, and this process of legitimation is generally expressed through language and other communicative systems. (Machin and Mayr, 2012: 25)

To do a little analysis here; in the second part of the quote "people" are an object of a passive verb: they are led to believe that the dominance is legitimate rather than that they just believe it, which would imply more agency on their part. Who is the implied actor here? Who leads them to believe it? With reference to the first part of the quotation, it is suggested that "those who gain this access" are the ones who lead the "people" on and who are apparently not "people" themselves. Also, "dominance" could have been phrased in a more neutral manner, as "reign", "regime" or "government". Dominance is a very charged word which implies that the one group is controlling the other. The rather explicit suggestion throughout is that those who have money and who are educated are controlling and coercing the poor and the uneducated.

However if we are talking about how the higher classes control the lower through ideology, then it makes no sense that most of the examples in the analysis are from a paper (the Daily Mail) that espouses views almost exclusively held by the lower classes, as opposed to the Guardian or the Times, which communicate ideas more popular with the higher and middle classes. Clearly there is a question here about who actually writes the articles; who communicates these ideologies and why is it in their interest to do so. Also, one needs to know what the actual readership of the articles is like.

I am under the impression that the Daily Mail is written for and by people from working class environments and communicates ideas held by some people in this group, though certainly not all. The ideology of the educated classes is more so represented by papers like the Guardian, which is also written by people who come from ABC environments. (I should warrant that I am working on impressions, but I would be surprised if I were proven wrong.A research project to back up this hypothesis could take the form of a survey for journalists of the various papers, to ask about their and their parents' education, type of work and income and their political leanings.)

Now, if both groups actually read papers written by their own group, then where does the transfer of ideology happen?

Another source of material analysed in the book is the Cosmopolitan. Machin and Mayr show how its imagery and articles paint a streamlined, idealised and kind of vapid picture of what women's lives are or should be like, and then promote the accesoires that belong with such a lifestyle. It is very entertaining to read their minute analysis of the high-pitched lighting and absolute absence of any clue as to what type of work the stylishly dressed women are doing.

A question that they leave open, which is fair enough to them I suppose, is "who actually buys this crap?" Who are these women spending actual money to read the magazine? Who takes the barely obscured sales pitches and laughable advice serious? Now beside all the people who read the magazine for a laugh, although that may very well be a majority of the readership, I believe that the intended audience of the newspaper is a group of girls and women who do in fact have an image of what their own lives are or should be like that matches the image sketched in the Cosmopolitan. They buy the magazine because they would actually like some advice on what make-up products are available and how they could go about wooing a man, in the same way that I bought the How To Do Critical Discourse Analysis book because I wanted to know precisely that.

If this is true it means that the group who reads the magazine does so because they already share its ideology. The same may be true for the newspaper choice; the Daily Mail readership shares its fairly explicit racism, its sense of humour and its obsession with "crazy murder beasts" who batter little children. The Guardian readership would indeed like to be informed about the latest developments in the NSA debacle or what's on show in the country's modern art museums. That's why they buy the paper.


In conclusion, ideological hegemony via newspapers may not work in the way the authors seem to suggest - ideas "produced" by a powerful group that serve to prolong their domination over the less powerful group. In a democracy, this theory belittles the wit and agency of those supposedly subordinate groups. Rather, each group communicates their ideology to other members of the same group, who are not "led to believe" new discourses but who in fact already agree, which is the premise that their voluntary consummation of the information is based on. Within the groups discourses develop organically, but they will be slower to filter down from the one group to the other.

Rather than media, education may be a key to how some discourses are communicated across social boundaries. Again it should be asked who decides on the content, who communicates it to the children, and how much of it the children actually believe and internalise.