6 6 䡬 1040 01023008 log no. LSY 08028 1:28 PM Language in Society 37, 241–280. Printed in the United States of America DISCUSSION Language in Society 37 (2008). Printed in the United States of America DOI: 10.10170S0047404508080287 Colonial dialect contact in the history of European languages: On the irrelevance of identity to new-dialect formation PETER TRUDGILL Agder University 32 Bathurst Road Norwich NR2 2PP, U.K. peter.trudgill@unifr.ch ABSTRACT It is often supposed that dialect contact and dialect mixture were involved in the development of new colonial varieties of European languages, such as Brazilian Portuguese, Canadian French, and Australian English. However, while no one has denied that dialect contact took place, the role of dialect mixture has been disputed. Among those who do not accept a role for it, some have also considered the role of identity, especially new national identities, to be self-evident. This article argues for the role of dialect mixture and against the role of identity. It presents case studies from pre16th-century colonial expansions of European languages, an era when any role for national identities would be very hard to argue for. Instead, it suggests that dialect mixture is the inevitable result of dialect contact, and that the mechanism which accounts for this is quasi-automatic accommodation in face-to-face interaction. (New-dialect formation, dialect contact, dialect mixture, linguistic accommodation, colonial dialects, identity, behavioral coordination)* INTRODUCTION The period of European colonial expansion, starting in the 1500s, saw the transplantation of a number of European languages to other continents. The languages most involved in this process were Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, and English. In the fullness of time, this transplantation led to the development of a number of new national and local varieties of these languages, such that they were all clearly different from varieties in the metropolitan homeland. © 2008 Cambridge University Press 0047-4045008 $15.00 䡬 241 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 2040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 242 PETER TRUDGILL 䡬 Now if we ask why new varieties of these languages developed in the new locations, then we can cite a number of different factors, such as linguistic change, adaptation, and language contact. But it seems obvious that dialect contact and dialect mixture must also have been very important factors in determining the nature of colonial varieties of European languages, such as South American Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Afrikaans, Canadian French, and the colonial Englishes. Surely if you take English speakers from all over the British Isles and settle them in a single location on, say, the east coast of Australia, dialect mixture will be the inevitable result. In fact, it emerges that not everybody has always been happy to accept this rather obvious fact (see below). Dialect contact itself would appear to be accepted as a given, in view of the fact that in nearly all cases European settlers arrived from many different locations in the metropolitan homeland. But what does not seem to have been a given for some historical linguists is that dialect contact necessarily leads to dialect mixture and thus to new-dialect formation. Indeed, a number of them have rejected the importance of dialect contact in the development of European colonial dialects altogether and plumped for monogenetic origins for particular colonial varieties. To take some of them in chronological order: Rivard 1914 suggested that Quebec French is entirely due to the dialects of Normandy. Wagner 1920 was only one of a number of hispanicists who produced the andalucista theory that Latin American Spanish is in origin basically a form of transported Andalusian Spanish from the Iberian Peninsula. For English, Wall 1938 claimed that New Zealand English was simply transplanted Cockney. Hammarström 1980 made the same Cockney-origin claim for Australian English. Laurie Bauer has also argued more recently that “it is clear that New Zealand English derives from a variety of English spoken in the south-east of England” (Bauer 1994:391). He goes on to argue further that New Zealand English arrived as a ready-formed entity transplanted in its entirety from Australia: “The hypothesis that New Zealand English is derived from Australian English is the one which explains most about the linguistic situation in New Zealand” (1994:428). These two points are of course entirely consistent if one accepts that Australian English, too, arrived from the southeast of England. And Lass 1997 has argued that South African English is essentially southeast of England in origin. Perhaps one should not be too surprised if the role of dialect contact in leading to dialect mixture has been rejected by such writers. Dialect mixture is in many ways a more subtle phenomenon, and one that is more difficult to detect, than language contact; and, especially, it is also a good deal more mysterious in terms of its origins. It is really very clear why various forms of language contact should have the consequences that they do. But why exactly should dialect contact result in dialect mixture? It is not surprising if some linguists reject the one as necessarily leading to the other – because why should it? Why should speakers adopt fea242 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 3040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 243 C O L O N I A L D I A L E C T C O N TA C T I N E U R O P E A N L A N G U A G E S tures from dialects other than their own – something which obviously has to happen if mixture is to occur? If we define dialect contact as contact between language varieties that are mutually intelligible, then why would speakers modify their behavior at all in the presence of speakers of other dialects who are able to understand them perfectly well even if they do not modify? In fact, there are some explanations for this. The hypothesis which I advanced in Trudgill 1986, which seems to have received some acceptance (e.g., Tuten 2003), is that the fundamental mechanism leading to dialect mixture is accommodation in face-to-face interaction. Accommodation in face-to-face interaction is a concept developed by Giles 1973 and further refined in other publications such as Giles, Coupland & Coupland 1991. Tuten, in his brilliant book, says that “given that most contributing varieties in a prekoine linguistic pool are mutually intelligible . . . many of the alterations in speech that take place are not strictly speaking necessary to fulfil communicative needs.” He continues: “Trudgill’s emphasis on accommodation reveals rather novel assumptions about why dialect contact leads to change” (Tuten 2003:29). And it emerges that he agrees with my “novel assumptions.” But actually, of course, an acceptance of the role of dialect mixture, and thus of accommodation, simply leads to yet another question. Why is it, in fact, that speakers do accommodate to each other in face-to-face interaction? Why does that happen? Tuten has an answer: Given that most contributing varieties in a prekoine linguistic pool are mutually intelligible . . . many of the alterations in speech that take place are not strictly speaking necessary to fulfil communicative needs . . . Rather, speakers accommodate to the speech of their interlocutors in order to promote a sense of common identity. (Tuten 2003:29; my emphasis) Here I part company with Tuten. Although there clearly are sociolinguistic situations where identity plays a role, I see no role for identity factors in colonial new-dialect formation, and I have particular trouble with Tuten’s use of the phrase “in order to.” But I have to acknowledge that this sort of view about the motivation for accommodation and thus for the development of new colonial dialects is rather widely held. For example, the Australian lexicographer Bruce Moore (1999) has said, of the development of colonial Englishes: “With language one of the most significant markers of national identity, it’s not surprising that post-colonial societies like Australia, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, should want to distinguish their language from that of the mother tongue.” Schneider, in his article on new varieties of English (2003:238), also says of the development of these varieties by colonial “settlers in a foreign land” that “the stages and strands of this process are ultimately caused by . . . reconstructions of group identities.” 243 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 4040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 244 PETER TRUDGILL And Macaulay (2002:239) says: “I fully expect new dialects to develop in places where a sense of local identity becomes strong enough to create deepseated loyalty.” Perhaps most importantly, Hickey (2003:215) has written in a critique of Trudgill, Gordon, Lewis & Maclagan 2000 that New Zealand English is to “be seen as a product of unconscious choices made across a broad front in a new society to create a distinct linguistic identity.” He then goes on to argue that the selection of certain variants available in a dialect mixture “can be interpreted as motivated by speakers’ gradual awareness of an embryonic variety of the immigrants’ language, something which correlates with the distinctive profile of the new society which is speaking this variety.” In my view, we would do well to be a bit more skeptical than this about explanations for the formation of new colonial varieties couched in terms of identity. I share the kind of view expressed by Mufwene when he writes (2001:212) of the development of creoles that they were not “created” by their speakers but that they emerged “by accident.” I share, too, the skepticism expressed by William Labov on the importance of identity factors in leading to linguistic change. Labov’s famous Martha’s Vineyard study (1963) is often cited as a typical and very telling example of the important function of identity in producing language change. Strikingly, however, Labov himself does not agree. He writes: 䡬 The Martha’s Vineyard study is frequently cited as a demonstration of the importance of the concept of local identity in the motivation of linguistic change. However, we do not often find correlations between degrees of local identification and the progress of sound change. (Labov 2001:191) So what sort of evidence might there be that I could bring forward to support my skepticism about the thesis that issues of new national identity have played any role at all in the initial development of colonial varieties of European languages? I suggest that one of the clearest pieces of evidence in favor of my view is the fact that dialect mixture and new-dialect formation must have been of considerable importance for the development of new colonial varieties of European languages well before the period of European overseas colonial expansion that began in the 16th century. The point is that dialect mixture resulting from accommodation in dialect contact situations played a role in determining the nature of new colonial varieties of European languages at many periods of language history which predate the colonial expansion period, and at times when, and in places where, new, national colonial identity factors are most unlikely to have played an influential role. A number of examples follow. Note that I do not produce any positive evidence concerning the absence of any role for identity factors. I do not believe that that would be possible. Rather, my evidence is negative, which is why I make the argument at some length and on the basis of as many as five cases where, I suggest, no evidence in favor of the role of identity can be found. 244 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 5040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 245 C O L O N I A L D I A L E C T C O N TA C T I N E U R O P E A N L A N G U A G E S COLONIAL MIDDLE ENGLISH IN IRELAND The first place that English was exported to overseas was Ireland. It did not arrive in the Americas until the 1600s, while it arrived in Ireland centuries before that. My focus here is on late medieval English in Ireland as studied by Michael Samuels. Samuels (1972:108) shows that the colonial English of Ireland in the 14th and 15th centuries was clearly the result not only of dialect contact but of actual dialect mixture. First, he says that the dialect forms found in the available texts show that the English settlers “must have been predominantly from the West Midlands and South-West England.” Importantly, however, the language of the texts “tallies with the dialect of no single restricted area of England; it consists mainly of an amalgam of selected features from the different dialects of a number of areas: Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset, Devon, Shropshire, and to a lesser extent Cheshire, Lancashire, and possibly Wales.” Most of the forms are found in large parts of the West Midlands and Southwest, but they do not all have the same geographical provenance. For example, streynth ‘strength’ and throZ ‘through’ are from the West Midlands, while hyre ‘hear’ and ham ‘them’ are Southwestern in origin. He also focuses on a particular linguistic feature which is of special interest because it clearly constitutes a feature of the type I have referred to as an “interdialect” feature. In Trudgill 1986 I introduced the term interdialect to refer to forms of a number of different types which are not actually present in any of the dialects contributing to a dialect mixture but which arise out of interaction between them. Samuels focuses on a type which I labeled intermediate forms. He shows that in England, the Middle English form for ‘each’ was uch in the West Midlands, and ech in the Southwest. However, in the Anglo-Irish texts the norm is euch. It is true that there is a small area in England, intermediate between the West Midlands and the Southwest, just to the south of the towns of Worcester and Hereford, where this form also occurs. But the fact that it is the norm in Anglo-Irish texts is of course not because Ireland was settled from southern Herefordshire. Rather, euch was a form which developed in Ireland, or survived from England, or both, because it was intermediate between the two major competing forms in the mixture that developed in Ireland, uch and ech. It is clear, then, not only that the relevant areas of Ireland were settled by English speakers from a number of different dialect areas, but also that the outcome was a new, mixed dialect, consisting of a collection of forms from different dialect areas, plus interdialect forms arising out of interaction between speakers of different dialects. And I suggest that we would surely be struggling if we wished to argue that, at this period of history, this new, distinctive form of Irish English was in any way developed as a consequence of the medieval anglophone settlers in Ireland wishing to signal some kind of national identity separate from that of English speakers in England. 245 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 6040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 246 PETER TRUDGILL GERMAN COLONIAL DIALECT MIXTURE 䡬 English is, of course, not the only language to have been subject to pre-16thcentury colonial expansion. An early proponent of the importance of dialect mixture in the formation of new colonial dialects was Frings 1957, who, on the basis of an analysis of the German Linguistic Atlas materials, and of historical records, described the large-scale eastward colonial expansion of German into relatively less populated, formerly Slavic-speaking areas as leading to dialect contact and dialect mixture. Up until about 900 the border between Germanic and Slavic-speaking areas ran from the Baltic coast along the river Elbe as far south as Magdedurg and then along its southwestern tributary, the Saale, down as far as Hof. Thereafter, the “Ostkolonisation” saw the frontier between German and Slavic (and Baltic)speaking peoples move eastwards, from 900 to 1350, into what is now eastern Germany and then beyond, into what is now Poland and parts of modern Lithuania. The initial movement of this “east colonization” was across the river Saale to the middle Elbe. There were three major colonization routes. The first was from the Netherlands and northern Germany via Magdeburg and Leipzig (Slavic and Modern Polish Lipsk). The second was from central Germany via Erfurt and Leipzig. And the third was from southern Germany via Bamberg and Chemnitz (Slavic Kamjenica, Modern Polish Kamienica). Settlers arriving via the first route brought with them northern Low German dialects; the second stream brought Central German dialects, and the third Bavarian and other South German dialects. These three routes converged in what is now Saxony, the main focus of the convergence being Meissen (Slavic Misni, Modern Polish Mis’nia), which had been founded as a German city in 929. Meissen then formed the main jumpingoff point for German-speaking colonization farther east to Dresden (Slavic Drezdany, Modern Polish Drezno), which was a German city by 1206, and on into Silesia and beyond. It was in the area of Meissen that, according to Frings, a new colonial dialect developed during the 12th and 13th centuries. Because of the mixture of settlers from different areas, a new “kolonial Ausgleichsprache” was formed. Frings described the result as being a mixture of Dutch, Low German, Central German and Upper German dialect forms. (He also argued that this was later to provide something of a basis for written Standard German, but that is another issue.) This 14th-century Meissen “Ausgleichsprache” shows a mixture of regional forms from different areas to the west. These include northern he ‘he’ as opposed to central and southern er; and northern dit, dat ‘this, that’ as opposed to central and southern dies, das; the central German diminutive -chen rather than northern -kin or southern -lein; central Fund ‘pound’ as opposed to northern Pund, southern Pfund; the central and southern pronominal distinction between accusative and dative forms, for example mich ‘me (acc.)’ and mir ‘(to) me (dat.)’, 246 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 7040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 247 C O L O N I A L D I A L E C T C O N TA C T I N E U R O P E A N L A N G U A G E S which is absent from northern German; southern Ochsen rather than central and northern Ossen; and southern diphthongization in Haus as opposed to central and northern Hus (see especially Frings 1956:3:20). We can ask if the mixing and subsequent focusing which took place in the newly Germanized lands, and which led to the development of a whole new mixed dialect, took place as a consequence of any factors connected with some new colonial identity. Certainly we have no evidence that this was so, and it seems that the issue of German versus Slavic identity would have been of much greater importance. C O L O N I A L D I A L E C T M I X T U R E I N T H E F O R M AT I O N O F I B E R I A N S PA N I S H Similarly, Spanish too was subject to a form of colonial expansion, as described by Tuten 2003 himself, long before the settlement of the Americas, which also had important linguistic consequences. Along the northern edge of Iberia, from the Atlantic via the southern edge of the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean, there was, and still is, a dialect continuum with considerable linguistic variation and small dialect areas. Traveling from west to east, one encounters the IberoRomance varieties Galician, Asturian, Castilian, Aragonese, and Catalan. However, as one travels south toward the southern coastal areas of Andalusia and Murcia, the degree of dialectal differentiation diminishes and dialect areas become bigger. This is the result of dialect mixture processes which occurred during the reconquest of the peninsula by Ibero-Romance-speaking Christians, who took over from the Arabic and Mozarabic and Berber-speaking Muslim Moors. As Penny 1991, 2000 pointed out, the southward Iberian expansion and the dialect mixture that went with it account for a number of historical developments in the history of Spanish, and therefore for a number of the characteristics of the modern language. According to Penny’s thesis, there were three major phases in the development of Spanish during which dialect mixture led to koineization, and then rekoineization of already koineized varieties. As Tuten 2003 describes it, the first phase of southward colonial expansion lasted from the 9th century to the 11th and focused on the city of Burgos, in north central Spain, where Ibero-Romance speakers from all over northern Spain – but especially northern Castile, Asturias, Navarre, and Leon – came together as part of the southward expansion. The second phase of koineization took place between the 11th and 13th centuries and focused on the central city of Toledo. Here again, dialect mixture occurred on a large scale. Finally, the third phase, which took place between the 13th and 14th centuries, focused on the southwestern city of Seville. Once again, considerable dialect mixture occurred as populations speaking different dialects moved in from the north to replace the Moors. To cite just one relatively straightforward linguistic example of the consequence of these mixtures, the disappearance from Castilian of contracted forms 247 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 8040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 248 PETER TRUDGILL of prepositions plus definite articles, found in many Romance languages, is one of the most dramatic changes in the history of Spanish, and yet, Tuten says, it has been little discussed and never explained. His explanation is that in the mixture associated with southward expansion during the Burgos period, there would have been a large number of variants of, for example, en ⫹ los, such as Galician nos, Leonese enos, Aragonese ennos, and Riojan and northern Castilian enos. The Burgos post-koineization Castilian forms which emerged from the mixture were the simpler and more analytical, such as en los. It is well known that dialect contact can lead to regularization and more analytic structures (Trudgill 1986), and Tuten suggests that during koineization speakers would have selected or developed forms which were more easily analyzed and generated and “whose component parts also appeared regularly in other contexts” (2003:119). In other words, the Iberian Spanish varieties which were taken westward across the Atlantic, and which underwent dialect mixture processes there, were themselves already the result of several earlier stages of mixing and koineization. Three different new koines were formed in Spain at three different periods in three different places, as a result of colonial expansion, dialect contact, accommodation, dialect mixture, and new-dialect formation. But there seems no reason to suppose that issues of new colonial identity were involved in their formation. On the contrary, the colonial expansions each took an already existing nonArab, non-Muslim, Christian, and later Spanish identity southward with them. 䡬 VA L E N C I A N A S C O L O N I A L C AT A L A N A very similar kind of process appears to have happened in the case of Catalan. As a result of the Christian reconquest from the Moors, Catalan spread southward from its original homeland in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula into the province of Valencia (Baldinger 1958, Ferrando 1989). In the military struggle which led to the Christian victory, the Aragonese were predominant but the Catalans made significant contributions of money, men, and the ships required for provisioning the king’s army, making landings, and blockading the coast (Bishko 1975). The annexation was led by the Aragonese-Catalan monarch James I from his capital in Saragossa. The military campaign began in 1232 and ended in 1245, when James gained control of the east coast area right down to the borders of Murcia, which, it had been agreed, was going to Castile. Once again we can suppose that dialect contact occurred as the newly available lands were settled by incomers from the north, although the area of the northern Iberian dialect continuum from which the incomers came was much shorter geographically than in the case of Castilian, and we can therefore expect fewer dialects to have been involved. The major Romance varieties that penetrated into Valencia are usually agreed to have been, from west to east, Aragonese; Western Catalan, from the area around Lleida; and Eastern Catalan, from the area around Barcelona. 248 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 9040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 249 C O L O N I A L D I A L E C T C O N TA C T I N E U R O P E A N L A N G U A G E S In his chapter “La constitució del vocalisme catalá” Alarcos (1983:57–78) says that the outcome of this mixture was such that the new Valencian variety of the language came to resemble West Catalan. However, he argues that this is a kind of coincidence. Valencian resembled West Catalan but was not West Catalan, just as Canadian French is not Norman, South American Spanish not Andalusian, and Australian English not Cockney (Trudgill 2004), all of them being results of dialect contact and dialect mixture. For example, Alarcos (1983:75) claims that some aspects of the Valencian vowel system are “fàcilment explicable com un fenomen d’anivellament entre diversos estrats lingüístics simultanis.” A rather complex series of different changes in different places to the Western Vulgar Latin vowel system led to a situation where the Old Eastern Catalan threeway distinction 0e0, 0E0 and 0@0 – 0@ntQ@0 ‘within’ ; 0eQb@0 ‘grass’ ; 0tEr@0 ‘land’ – corresponded to an Aragonese two-way distinction between 0e0 and 0ie0: 0entQe0 BUT 0ieQba0 and 0tiera0 and a differently distributed Western Catalan two-way distinction between 0e0 and 0E0: 0entQe0, 0eQba0 BUT 0tEra0. Then, “en el necessari procés d’igualació entre uns parlants i altres, devien abandonar-se aquelles articulacions que només fes servir un dels grups” (1983:75). The forms which were abandoned were thus 0ie0 and 0@0, giving rise to the Valencian two-way distinction between 0e0 and 0E0: 0entQe 0 ; 0erba0 but 0tEra0, which, as Alarcos says, just happens to be the same as that of Western Catalan in this case. A similar new-dialect formation phenomenon occurred in the case of wordfinal unstressed 0a0, 0e0, which had been merged on 0@0 in Old Eastern Catalan, but maintained as distinct both in Aragonese and Western Catalan. Old Eastern Catalan 0@0: 0 @ntQ@0 - 0eQb@0 corresponded to both Aragonese 0a0 and Aragonese 0e0 – 0entQe0 - 0ieQba0 – as well as to Western Catalan 0a0 and 0e0, 0entQe0 - 0eQba0. The majority form won, giving rise to non-merged Valencian 0entQe0 - 0eQba0, which again just happened to be identical with Western Catalan. Alarcos says: “El valencià, doncs, coincideix amb el dialects occidental pel simple fet d’haver sorgit per un procés d’anivellament dialectal,” in which the variants common to the most varieties were “triumphant.” Although we can agree that a separate Valencian identity is important to many people in the area today, there is not much reason to suppose that this is anything except a fairly recent phenomenon, and no reason at all to suppose that it predated 13th- and 14thcentury new-dialect formation. OLD ENGLISH AS A COLONIAL MIXED DIALECT The Danish linguist Hans Frede Nielsen has argued that the earliest example of English colonial dialect mixture leading to new-dialect formation involves the actual development of English itself. We have evidence of various nonlinguistic sorts that southern and eastern England and southeastern Scotland were initially 249 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 10040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 250 PETER TRUDGILL 䡬 settled by Germanic speakers coming from all along the North Sea littoral from Jutland to the mouth of the Rhine – Jutes, Angles, Saxons, and Frisians – and it is reasonable to assume that they spoke different dialects. We also know that Germanic speakers also arrived from further inland, for example from placename evidence. Swaffham in Norfolk, for instance, was originally Swaefasham, which meant ‘home of the Swabians’, who were a non-coastal people. But did contact between these different Germanic dialects lead to dialect mixture? Can we say that Old English was in origin a mixed dialect, just as we are claiming for, say, modern South African English? Nielsen (1998:78–79) answers this question in the affirmative, and supplies the linguistic evidence. He argues that Old English was the result of a mixture of West Germanic dialects from continental Europe. He points out, for example, that it is because of dialect mixture that Old English had initially a greater degree of variability than the other Germanic languages where no colonial dialect mixture had been involved. He cites the following examples. (i) Old English (OE) had a remarkable number of different, alternating forms corresponding to Modern English ‘first’. This variability, moreover, would appear to be linked to origins in different dialects from the European mainland: ærest (cf. Old High German eristo); forma (cf. Old Frisian forma); formesta (cf. Gothic frumists); and fyrst (cf. Old Norse fyrstr). (ii) Similarly, OE had two different paradigms for the present tense of the verb to be, one apparently resembling Old Norse and Gothic, and the other Old Saxon and Old High German: 1sg. 2sg. Goth im is O.Norse em est O.English I eom eart O.English II beom bist O.Saxon bium bist OHG bim bist (iii) Old English also exhibited variation, in all regions, in the form of the interrogative pronoun meaning ‘which of two’. The form hwæD er relates to Gothic hvaþar and W. Norse hvaDarr while the alternative form hweder corresponds to O. Saxon hweDar and OHG hwedar. The suggestion, then, is that even if we did not know from other nonlinguistic evidence that southern and eastern Britain were initially settled from many different locations on the Continent, there would have been at least some linguistic evidence that would have pointed us in the direction of that supposition. We can thus suppose that Old English was a new colonial variety of West Germanic that resulted from a mixture of continental dialects. But can we suppose that the speakers who produced this new variety were motivated in any way by a sense of new colonial, quasi-national identity? It seems unlikely. CONCLUSION If the development of these earlier colonial varieties cannot be seen as having been motivated by the development of new national colonial identities, then the 250 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 11040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 251 C O L O N I A L D I A L E C T C O N TA C T I N E U R O P E A N L A N G U A G E S uniformitarian principle (Labov 1994:22), which states that “knowledge of processes that operated in the past can be inferred by observing ongoing processes in the present,” leads us to suppose that the same was true of the later and betterknown post-16th-century colonial expansion period also. I thus claim that new mixed colonial varieties can and do come into being without identity factors having any involvement at all. We do not need this as an explanatory factor at any moment in human history. Of course, since the heyday of European colonialism, new identities most certainly have developed in most of the colonies. French Canadians are no longer French; Australians are certainly not British; Afrikaners are very definitely not Dutch; and these new identities do have a strong linguistic component. But my suggestion is that if a common identity is promoted through language, then this happens as a consequence of accommodation; it is not its driving force. Identity is not a powerful enough driving force to account for the emergence of new, mixed dialects by accommodation. It is parasitic upon accommodation, and is chronologically subsequent to it. Identity factors cannot lead to the development of new linguistic features, and it would be ludicrous to suggest that Australian English speakers deliberately developed, say, wide diphthongs in order to symbolize some kind of local or national Australian identity. This is, of course, not necessarily the same thing as saying that once new linguistic features have developed they cannot become emblematic, although it is as well to be skeptical about the extent to which this sort of phenomenon does actually occur. Let us consult Labov again. His view is that, before one jumps to conclusions based on notions of identity, patterns of interaction should always be consulted for possible explanations. Labov’s main preoccupation in his writings on this topic has been with the diffusion of linguistic forms; but new-dialect formation, which depends just as much as diffusion on how individual speakers behave linguistically in face-to-face interaction, can be regarded in precisely the same way. Labov argues that “as always, it is good practice to consider first the simpler and more mechanical view that social structure affects linguistic output through changes in frequency of interaction” (2001:506). He bases his argument on Bloomfield’s assertion that: every speaker is constantly adapting his speech-habits to those of his interlocutors . . . The inhabitants of a settlement . . . talk much more to each other than to persons who live elsewhere. When any innovation in the way of speaking spreads over a district, the limit of this spread is sure to be along some lines of weakness in the network of oral communication. (Bloomfield 1933:476) Labov argues that it follows from this that “a large part of the problem of explaining the diffusion of linguistic change is reduced to a simple calculation” (2001:19). It is purely a matter of who interacts most often with whom – a matter of density of communication. Labov then develops the principle of density: 251 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 12040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 252 PETER TRUDGILL The principle of density implicitly asserts that we do not have to search for a motivating force behind the diffusion of linguistic change. The effect is mechanical and inevitable; the implicit assumption is that social evaluation and attitudes play a minor role. (Labov 2001:20) 䡬 But why, we can ask, is it “mechanical and inevitable?” What exactly is inevitable about it? I do have an answer to this question that I wish to propose. The answer is that it is inevitable because accommodation is not only a subconscious but also a deeply automatic process. It is, as I have argued in Trudgill 2004, the result of the fact that all human beings operate linguistically according to a powerful and very general maxim. Keller (1994:100) renders this maxim as “Talk like the others talk.” Keller’s maxim, in turn, is the linguistic aspect of a much more general and seemingly universal (and therefore presumably innate) human tendency to “behavioral coordination,” “behavioral congruence,” “mutual adaptation,” or “interactional synchrony,” as it is variously called in the literature. This is an apparently biologically given drive to behave as one’s peers do. There is a copious literature on this topic (see, e.g., Cappella 1981, 1996, 1997; Bernieri & Rosenthal 1991; Burgoon, Stern & Dillman 1995), which suggests that linguistic accommodation is not driven by social factors such as identity at all but is an automatic consequence of interaction. Pelech (2002:9), for example, says that “the innate biological basis of interactional synchrony has been established.” He then goes on to say that “the ability to establish interactional synchrony represents an innate human capacity and one of the earliest forms of human communication,” and that this capacity served, and serves, “the basic survival needs of bonding . . . safety, and comfort.” Cappella 1991 explores further the evolutionary and biological bases for the existence of adaptation processes in the human species. And in Cappella (1997:65) he says that “mutual adaptation is pervasive” and that it is “arguably the essential characteristic of every interpersonal interaction.” Linguistic diffusion and new-dialect formation are “mechanical and inevitable” because linguistic accommodation is automatic, because, as Cappella (1997:69) says, it is an aspect of “the relatively automatic behaviors manifested during social interaction.” My suggestion is therefore that it is this innate tendency to behavioral coordination, not identity, that is the very powerful drive that makes dialect mixture an almost inevitable consequence of dialect contact, to an extent that factors connected with identity would not and could not. And it is also this drive that led to the development of new, mixed colonial varieties of European languages. The actual linguistic characteristics of any new mixed dialect result from the relatively deterministic principles outlined in Trudgill 2004; and it is the new mixed dialect to which the founder principle – that the speech of the founding population of a colony determines what its dialect will be like (Mufwene 2001:28) – then applies. 252 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 13040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 253 C O L O N I A L D I A L E C T C O N TA C T I N E U R O P E A N L A N G U A G E S In fact, there is an increasing body of evidence that suggests that large-scale and prolonged dialect contact always leads to dialect mixture, and therefore in a sense requires no explanation, and certainly not one in terms of identity. It is true that Cappella says that the behavior involved in accommodation is only “relatively” automatic, the implication being that it can be overridden in the case of individuals. But behavioral congruence is the default; and prolonged largescale dialect contact will always lead inevitably to dialect mixture and to newdialect formation. NOTE * Very many thanks for help with this article go to David Britain, Brian Joseph, Lesley Milroy, James Milroy, and especially Max Wheeler. REFERENCES Alarcos, E. (1983). Estudis lingüístics catalans. 2nd ed. Barcelona. Baldinger, Kurt (1958). Die Herausbildung der Sprachräume auf der Pyrenäenhalbinsel. Berlin: Akademie. Bauer, Laurie (1994). English in New Zealand. In R. W. Burchfield (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language vol. 5: English in Britain and overseas – origins and development, 382– 429. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bernieri, F., & Rosenthal, R. (1991). Interpersonal coordination: Behavior matching and interactional synchrony. In R. Feldman & B. Rime (eds.), Fundamentals of nonverbal behavior: Studies in emotion and social interaction, 401–32. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bishko, Charles Julian (1975). The Spanish and Portuguese reconquest. In H. W. Hazard (ed.), A history of the crusades, vol. III. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bloomfield, Leonard (1933). Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Burgoon, J.; Stern, L.; & Dillman, L. (1995). Interpersonal adaptation: Dyadic interaction patterns. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cappella, Joseph (1981). Mutual influence in expressive behavior: Adult–adult and infant–adult dyadic interaction. Psychological Bulletin 89:101–32. _ (1996). Dynamic coordination of vocal and kinesic behavior in dyadic interaction: Methods, problems, and interpersonal outcomes. In J. Watt & C. VanLear (eds.), Dynamic patterns in communication processes, 353–86. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. _ (1997). The development of theory about automated patterns of face-to-face human interaction. In G. Philipsen & T. Albrecht (eds.), Developing communication theories, SUNY series in human communication processes, 57–83. Albany: State University of New York Press. Ferrando, Antoni (1989). La formació històrica del valencià. In A. Ferrando (ed.), Segon Congrés Internacional de la Llengua Catalana, vol. VIII, Àrea 7: Història de la Llengua, 399– 428. València: Institut de Filologia Valenciana. Frings, Theodor (1956). Sprache und Geschichte. Halle: Niemeyer. _ (1957). Grundlegung einer Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. 3rd ed. Halle: Niemeyer. Giles, Howard (1973). Accent mobility: A model and some data. Anthropological Linguistics 15: 87–105. _ ; Coupland, Justine; & Coupland, Nikolas (1991). Contexts of accommodation: Developments in applied sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hammarström, Göran (1980). Australian English: Its origins and status. Hamburg: Buske. Hickey, Raymond (2003). How do dialects get the features they have? In Raymond Hickey (ed.), Motives for language change, 213–39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keller, Rudi (1994). On language change: The invisible hand in language. London: Routledge. Labov, William (1963). The social motivation of a sound change. Word 19:273–309. _ (1994). Principles of linguistic change. Vol. 1: Internal factors. Oxford: Blackwell. _ (2001). Principles of linguistic change. Vol. 2: Social factors. Oxford: Blackwell. 253 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 14040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 254 SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE 䡬 Lass, Roger (1990). Where do extraterritorial Englishes come from? In S. Adamson, V. Law, N. Vincent & S. Wright (eds.), Papers from the 5th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, 245–80. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Macaulay, Ronald (2002). I’m off to Philadelphia in the morning. American Speech 77:227– 41. Moore, Bruce (1999). Australian English: Australian identity. Lingua Franca www.abc.net.au0rn0 arts0ling0stories0s68786.htm. Mufwene, Salikoko (2001). The ecology of language evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nielsen, Hans Frede (1998). The continental backgrounds of English and its insular development until 1154. Odense: Odense University Press. Pelech, William (2002). Charting the interpersonal underworld: The application of cluster analysis to the study of interpersonal coordination in small groups. Currents: New Scholarship in the Human Services 1(1):1–12. Penny, Ralph (1991). A history of the Spanish language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. _ (2000). Variation and change in Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rivard, A. (1914). Études sur les parlers de France au Canada. Quebec: Garneau. Samuels, Michael (1972). Linguistic evolution: With special reference to English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schneider, Edgar (2003). The dynamics of New Englishes: From identity construction to dialect birth. Language 79:233–81. Trudgill, Peter (1986). Dialects in contact. Oxford: Blackwell. _ (2004). Dialect contact and new-dialect formation: The inevitability of colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. _ ; Gordon, Elizabeth; Lewis, Gillian; & Maclagan, Margaret (2000). Determinism in newdialect formation and the genesis of New Zealand English. Journal of Linguistics 36:299–318. Tuten, Donald (2003). Koineization in medieval Spanish. Berlin: de Gruyter. Wagner, Max (1920). Amerikanisch-Spanisch und Vulgärlatein. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 40:286–312, 385– 404. Wall, Arnold (1938). New Zealand English: How it should be spoken. Auckland: Whitcombe & Tombs. (Received 15 November 2006; accepted 5 February 2007) Language in Society 37 (2008). Printed in the United States of America DOI: 10.10170S0047404508080299 Colonization, population contacts, and the emergence of new language varieties: A response to Peter Trudgill SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE University of Chicago Department of Linguistics 1010 E 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637 USA s-mufwene@uchicago.edu Peter Trudgill’s account of new-dialect formation is uniformitarian, a position I have embraced explicitly since Mufwene 2001. In Mufwene 2006, I show how similar the mechanisms involved are to those that account for the emergence of 254 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 15040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 255 R E S P O N S E S : I D E N T I T Y A N D N E W - D I A L E C T F O R M AT I O N creoles, the basic difference lying in the composition of the contact setting’s feature pool (see also below). The position I defend is even less moderate, as I argue that in the history of humankind language speciation has basically been a consequence of how internal variation within a language has been affected by migrations of its speakers and additionally by the different contacts the relevant populations have had among themselves (Trudgill’s position) and with speakers of other languages in their new, colonial ecologies (Mufwene 2005, 2007, 2008). The reader should not be surprised to see in this response comments that are primarily intended to support and complement the position of the target article. Migrants typically disturb the traditional internal dynamics of variation within their language, causing some variants to become over- or under-represented in the host setting, compared to the metropole. In the kinds of colonial communities Trudgill discusses, the new feature pool often sets in competition variants which did not compete directly or regularly with each other in the motherland, but which are contributed by dialects spoken in different and sometimes nonadjacent metropolitan communities. The colonial feature pool thus provides new competition dynamics that usually result in new varieties, as is obvious from Trudgill 2004, for instance. In my brand of uniformitarianism, I argue that such colonial settings, in which only dialects of the same language came in contact with each other, differ from those associated with the emergence of, especially, creoles and indigenized varieties of European languages in the fact that the feature pools of the latter settings contain also elements contributed by other languages. On the other hand, the kinds of colonial settings Trudgill has discussed are rare (e.g., the Falkland Islands), as one must factor in the contacts that the colonists have had with immigrants speaking other languages, as in Australia, South Africa, and white North America. Another important ecological difference between the colonial varieties that Trudgill focuses on and “indigenized” varieties in particular lies in the kinds of varieties the new speakers have targeted and in the mode of “transmission” – that is, vernaculars appropriated by the new speakers primarily through naturalistic language “acquisition” versus scholastic varieties appropriated primarily through books and the classroom. On this parameter, creoles also differ from indigenized varieties in being outcomes of naturalistic appropriation of typically nonstandard vernaculars. contact is such a significant factor because it makes the composition of the feature pool more heterogeneous. As this heterogeneity varies from one geographical setting to another, contact can cause the same language to evolve differentially. Contact with other languages increases the likelihood of speciation, as is particularly evident from the geographical expansion of several western European languages since the 15th century. A number of factors guide the speakers’ selections of features from the new feature pool. Where a language prevails over others, this is in itself a factor privileging a number of its features, because it is targeted by all other speakers, although it only wins a 255 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 16040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 256 SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE 䡬 Pyrrhic victory, as is evident from structures of creoles and indigenized varieties. Most of these are legacies of the colonial languages under xenolectal influence rather than mere apports from the new speakers’ former languages or mere innovations ex nihilo. Where the populations in contact assume they speak the same language, there are tacit feature negotiations, “mutual accommodations” in Trudgill’s discourse (see also Mufwene 2001), which drive the language toward a new norm. This is basically what Trudgill identifies as “dialect mixture,” a term which I hail over koinè(ization), as it can help us bridge the two research paradigms I have sketched so far. My main reason is that “koinèization” has unfortunately been ill defined as “dialect leveling” or “reduction to common denominator,” as if the different dialects simply got rid of all their differentiating features. If this were really the case, the “new dialects” Trudgill discusses here and in Trudgill 2004 would be too impoverished and reveal no or little variation. As Trudgill shows, just the opposite is the case. More adventurous minds like my own may want to explore speech continua in all the relevant colonial varieties, and not just where creoles are spoken. Trudgill is correct in positing dialect contact and mutual accommodations among speakers as central factors that account for “dialect mixture.” This is apparently the process that in colonial settings produced varieties that differ from those spoken in the motherland. One peculiarity I find particularly useful in this case is the way Trudgill uses “colonial” and, by implication, “colony.” I see in this a conflation of the usage of the terms in population genetics, in which they allude to geographical relocation, with that in the common parlance, which also conjures up the political and economic domination of an indigenous population by the conquerors. This peculiarity of his discourse should lead readers to realize that, from a language evolution perspective, what matters the most is the fact that populations speaking different language varieties tacitly negotiate the linguistic features that enable them to communicate. Sometimes, the competition and selection process leads to the prevalence of one single language over others, although its structures are influenced (to varying extents) by those of the languages it has displaced. At other times, as in the cases discussed by Trudgill, the process leads to the emergence of a variety where it is more difficult to tell that there is a winner; and “dialect mixture” or “language mixture” just sounds like a more adequate characterization. “Language mixture” can apply to Lingala, in central Africa, as it has been difficult to identify its lexifier unequivocally, owing particularly to the fact that the languages out of whose contact it emerged are genetically and typologically related. It can also apply to Old English, as it is not evident that the language varieties spoken by the Germanic colonizers of England were either mutually intelligible or dialects of the same language, probably no more than modern Danish, Dutch, and German are. On the other hand, the etymological association of English with the term Angles, the name of one of the colonizing populations, 256 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 17040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 257 R E S P O N S E S : I D E N T I T Y A N D N E W - D I A L E C T F O R M AT I O N suggests a situation similar to that of creoles, where one language variety won a Pyrrhic victory. These are all interesting research avenues that one should not discount a priori. I would not call the process “creolization,” as, to my knowledge, there are no structural features nor any global language restructuring process that can be identified by the term. However, I maintain that research on the development of creoles, at least in the way that I approach the subject matter (with much intellectual debt to Chaudenson 2001), suggests that we not assume a priori that creoles have evolved in their own exceptional way (see also DeGraff 2003). Trudgill is certainly correct is refuting the position that colonial identity drove the structural divergence of “new dialects” both from their metropolitan kin and from each other. This would be tantamount to claiming that evolution is goaloriented and the colonists had really planned to be different linguistically. They could have done a better job in selecting a language variety that simply had no genetic connection to their heritage language. On the other hand, the invocation of the Founder Principle and of mutual accommodations to account for their emergence is only part of the story. The speakers’ mutual accommodations are certainly the social aspect of the mechanisms by which selection from among the competing variants (and language varieties) proceeds. The Founder Principle also suggests that the composition of the feature pool is likely to vary at different stages of the development of a colony, as every wave of immigrants is likely to contribute its share of variants, native or xenolectal, to the colonial feature pool. There must also be some weighting mechanism that determines which variants are to be preferred in the relevant contact setting. This is when some metric, in the form of ecology-specific markedness or ranking (depending on one’s theoretical approach), becomes relevant. Frequency is just one of the factors that determine markedness values. Factors such as simplicity, perceptual salience, semantic transparency, regularity, and more familiarity to particular speakers, among a host of others (discussed in Trudgill 1986 and Mufwene 2001), bear on the selection process. Variation is typically not eliminated because the factors can conflict with each other and0or operate differently from one segment of the relevant population to another. While accommodation leaves open the possibility of discussing the tacit negotiations among speakers within one time period (as a synchronic process), the Founder Principle imposes a diachronic dimension where one must also factor in the age of the learners. The agency of children in selecting some variants into and out of their idiolects is certainly very significant; it extends the accommodation process over generations. I am not here suggesting the kind of overruling power Derek Bickerton has attributed to children in the development of creoles since his Roots of language, but rather the kind of position DeGraff 1999 hypothesizes. Some of the substrate features introduced into the colonial language variety by the adult xenolectal speakers would not be transmitted to 257 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 18040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 258 SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE 䡬 future generations of learners if the younger learners0speakers (i.e., children) did not integrate them in their idiolects. Conversely, the children act as an effective filter, as the features they avoid are less likely to become entrenched in the new vernacular or available to future learners. The restructuring equation in the evolution of a language is thus a complex one. There are certainly innovators, including those who introduce xenolectal features or initiate deviations from the current norm; but equally important are also the propagators, who certainly contribute significantly to the selection process, even if this amounts only to reducing the statistical significance of some variants within a population. While “talk[ing] like the others talk” is part of the factors that bring about change, one must remember that, by definition, mutual accommodations do not proceed unidirectionally. Speakers influence, and are in turn influenced by, different speakers in regard to different features. This multidirectional process makes more intriguing the question of how norms as population-wide convergences emerge. The “invisible hand” invoked by Keller 1994 bears as much on language evolution as in economic developments and other forms of cultural evolution. I am grateful to Trudgill for demonstrating that “common identity” is not part of the complex process that produce “new dialects”; it is a consequence or byproduct of it. If identity has a role to play, it must be in resisting influence from outside one’s community, which Labov 2001 illustrates with the way the Northern City Vowel Shift in the United States has proceeded, involving white but not African American speakers. REFERENCES Bickerton, Derek (1981). Roots of language. Ann Arbor: Karoma. Chaudenson, Robert (2001). Creolization of language and culture. London: Routledge. DeGraff, Michel (1999). Creolization, language change, and language acquisition: A prolegomenon. In Michel DeGraff (ed.) Language creation and language change: Creolization, diachrony, and development, 1– 46. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DeGraff, Michel (2003). Against creole exceptionalism. Discussion note. Language 79:391– 410. Keller, Rudi (1994). On language change: The invisible hand in language. London: Routledge. Labov, William (2001). Principles of linguistic change: Social factors. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Mufwene, Salikoko S. (2001). The ecology of language evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. _ (2005). Créoles, écologie sociale, évolution linguistique. Paris: L’Harmattan. _ (2006). “New-dialect formation” is as gradual as “creole-development”: A response to Trudgill (2004). World Englishes 25:177–86. _ (2007). Population movements and contacts: Competition, selection, and language evolution. Journal of Language Contact 1:63–91. _ (2008). Language evolution: Contact, competition, and change. London: Continuum. Trudgill, Peter (1986). Dialects in contact. New York: Blackwell. _ (2004). New-dialect formation: The inevitability of colonial Englishes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Received 13 June 2007) 258 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 19040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 259 R E S P O N S E S : I D E N T I T Y A N D N E W - D I A L E C T F O R M AT I O N Language in Society 37 (2008). Printed in the United States of America DOI: 10.10170S0047404508080305 Identity formation and accommodation: Sequential and simultaneous relations DONALD N. TUTEN Department of Spanish and Portuguese / Program in Linguistics Emory University Atlanta, Georgia, 30322, USA dtuten@emory.edu Trudgill argues cogently against identity and in favor of automaticity as the primary basis for accommodation in koine formation. I agree with the general thrust of his arguments, and below offer qualifications and evidence that support his arguments, but I also present caveats and alternative views, particularly with regard to the ordering relations between identity (or identity formation) and accommodation. First, Trudgill posits that a new national identity is largely irrelevant to shaping the outcomes of dialect mixing in colonial contexts, and that any linking of new national identity to the newly formed dialects occurs only after the formation of said dialects. To the extent that we limit Trudgill’s discussion of identity to new national identity (understood as a pre-imagined goal), it seems to me that his assertions are correct. The evidence of premodern dialect mixing that he reviews makes clear that these cases occurred in varied contexts and periods that preceded the rise of national ideologies0identities, and that national identities could therefore be linked to these varieties only after their development. Indeed, one of the goals of Tuten 2003 was to explore cases of dialect mixing in contexts where nationalism was unlikely to have had any significant effect on the process of dialect mixing and koine formation. Second, Trudgill also argues that new colonial identities are irrelevant to newdialect formation. If identity here is again understood as a preconceived goal, then I agree. However, we should consider the possibility that a new colonial (or local0regional community) identity could begin to arise at the same time that the first immigrants arrive and dialect mixing begins (i.e., simultaneously). All the premodern cases of dialect mixing that Trudgill describes occurred in frontier zones, where the newly arrived inhabitants often faced common human and natural threats. Such common threats to survival could well favor contact, cooperation, and the negotiation of common practices for purposes of defense and0or trade, within towns or regions, and thus could favor the development of a “frontier” identity in opposition to local “others” (e.g., Muslims in medieval Spain) as well as to distant “others” who remained in home communities. I would not 259 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 20040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 260 DONALD N. TUTEN 䡬 want to claim that the early creation of such a rudimentary community identity is necessary to the regional dialect leveling that often accompanies dialect mixing (similar inputs, contact, and originally weak social networks may suffice to explain this phenomenon), nor that it necessarily happens, but it may. And if it does, this early sense of community may reinforce accommodative behavior within a colonial community, first by adults and later by older children and adolescents. Third, Trudgill claims that accommodation – the process underlying dialect mixing and koineization – is a largely automatic and mechanistic process, and I am inclined to agree. Thus, I too would reject my earlier “explanation” that accommodation occurs primarily “in order to promote a sense of common identity” (Tuten 2003:29). Of course, the source for this view is to be found in early Speech (or Communication) Accommodation Theory (e.g., Giles 1973), first borrowed into sociolinguistics by Trudgill himself (Trudgill 1986). As Auer, Hinskens & Kerswill (2005:7) point out, accommodation theory was originally grounded on theories of “social action” and “rational action,” in which accommodation by speakers – whether convergent or divergent – was analyzed as the outcome of conscious goal-oriented linguistic choices on the part of rational social actors. In the context of dialect mixing, speakers were understood to avoid salient features of their dialects of origin and adopt those of their interlocutors in order to gain acceptance or cooperation – and to present a common or at least less divergent identity. However, in more recent formulations of accommodation theory (e.g., Gallois, Ogay & Giles 2005), convergence is taken as the norm and group identity is generally emphasized only when explaining cases of divergence. As Trudgill rightly points out, social and cognitive psychologists have called into question intentionality as the dominant explanation of convergent behavior and have argued increasingly in favor of a more mechanical or automatic view of processes of accommodation. A particularly interesting proposal in this line (not mentioned by Trudgill) is the interactive alignment model of Pickering & Garrod 2004, who propose that participants in dialogue automatically align their cognitive representations and production on a number of levels (situational, semantic, lexical, syntactic, and phonological-phonetic). Such automatic alignment is favored because it allows dialogue participants to establish an “implicit common ground,” favoring mutual understanding, and because it reduces cognitive load, favoring rapid interaction. Pickering & Garrod (2004:183; also Clark 1998) propose that the interactive alignment process may be responsible for fixing routines in the language or dialect of a community of speakers, since it has been found in experimental research that groups of adult maze game players show high levels of alignment. Although the applicability of this model to adult speech may be more limited than what Pickering & Garrod claim (e.g., because adults may not be able to alter their production or because they are heavily socialized to perform in certain ways), there is evidence that the model is very highly predictive of the behavior of younger 260 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 21040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 261 R E S P O N S E S : I D E N T I T Y A N D N E W - D I A L E C T F O R M AT I O N children. Indeed, Garrod & Clark 1993 found that 7-year-old children who participated in a maze game experiment could not circumvent the automatic alignment process, whereas older children and adults could adopt a strategy of nonalignment when appropriate. Pickering & Garrod (2004:180) explicitly claim that strategic processes of nonalignment are overlaid developmentally on the basic interactive alignment mechanism, which tends to dominate all dialogic interaction, but which does so most clearly in children. It is, therefore, probably no accident that children have been identified as the primary agents of koine formation (though “agency” here is primarily nonintentional). Still, Kerswill 1996 and Kerswill & Williams 2000 have shown in their Milton Keynes study that it is not very young children who first display the changes associated with new dialect formation, but rather older children and adolescents. As Kerswill explains, this is due to the changing social orientation of the children. The 4-year-olds tended to orient toward their parents and reproduce variants found in their parents’ speech. However, 8-year-olds and especially 12-yearolds, increasingly oriented toward their peer groups, showed movement to a new convergent norm. Is the fact that children change their social orientation away from their parents and toward their peers (found in many studies) independent of identity factors? Why do older children choose to follow peers rather than parents? We might ascribe this only to changing frequencies of interaction, but it also seems to be linked to children’s growing awareness of physical and other similarities between themselves and other children, and a growing identification with these similar others. Even though identity-as-preconceivedtarget is likely irrelevant to accommodation, it may be that accommodation (or automatic interactive alignment) and identity formation (among older children and adolescents) are closely linked. The clear preference for accommodation by older children to peers favors their integration into groups and even the creation of the very groups into which they integrate, and these groups in turn help to shape their personal and social identities. In this sense, a universal tendency toward accommodation would seem to be part and parcel of the identity-formation process. If this is so, then we may want to claim not that the formation of community identity is a consequence of koine formation, but rather that community identity formation and koine formation are simultaneous and mutually dependent processes. REFERENCES Auer, Peter; Hinskens, Frans; & Kerswill, Paul (2005). The study of dialect convergence and divergence: conceptual and methodological considerations. In Peter Auer, Frans Hinskens, & Paul Kerswill (eds.), Dialect change: Convergence and divergence in European languages, 1– 48. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Herbert H. (1998). Communal lexicons. In Kirsten Malmkjoer & John Williams (eds.), Context in language learning and language understanding. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press. 261 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 22040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 262 E D G A R W. S C H N E I D E R Gallois, Cindy; Ogay, Tania; & Giles, Howard (2005). Communication Accommodation Theory. In William B. Gudykunst (ed.), Theorizing about intercultural communication, 121– 48. Los Angeles: Sage. Garrod, Simon, & Clark, Aileen (1993). The development of dialogue co-ordination skills in schoolchildren. Language and Cognitive Processes 8:101–26. Giles, Howard (1973). Accent mobility: a model and some data. Anthropological Linguistics 15(2):87– 109. Kerswill, Paul (1996). Children, adolescents and language change. Language Variation and Change 8:177–202. _ , & Williams, Ann (2000). Creating a new town koine: Children and language change in Milton Keynes. Language in Society 29:65–115. Pickering, Martin, & Garrod, Simon (2004). Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27:169–226. Trudgill, Peter (1986). Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell. Tuten, Donald (2003). Koineization in Medieval Spanish. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. (Received 29 June 2007) Language in Society 37 (2008). Printed in the United States of America DOI: 10.10170S0047404508080317 Accommodation versus identity? A response to Trudgill E D G A R W. S C H N E I D E R Department of English and American Studies University of Regensburg D-93040 Regensburg, Germany edgar.schneider@sprachlit.uni-regensburg.de 䡬 Peter Trudgill’s essay raises important issues, some of which are uncontroversial while others are less convincing, partly because of a narrow concept of identity and partly because of an infelicitous choice of case studies. For him, the denial of identity seems axiomatic, while I suggest that what his criticism boils down to is the relationship between accommodation and identity, and the question of when and how identity as a social concept is effective, specifically in processes of colonial and postcolonial dialect formation. W H I C H F O R C E S W H E N ? A C R I T I C A L L O O K AT T R U D G I L L’ S ARGUMENTS Trudgill begins by insisting on the overall importance of dialect mixture, caused by dialect contact and leading to new-dialect formation. I couldn’t agree more. I also agree that monogenetic explanations of colonial dialect evolution are unconvincing; in fact, I suspect this should be largely uncontested in present-day scholarship. Most of the examples of such positions that Trudgill quotes date from the early 20th century, and the two recent ones qualify their statements: Bauer and Lass argue for an “essentially” southeastern basis of some Southern 262 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 23040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 263 R E S P O N S E S : I D E N T I T Y A N D N E W - D I A L E C T F O R M AT I O N Hemisphere Englishes, but I cannot see them denying any impact of dialect mixture or any influence, albeit weaker, from other regions. I also wholeheartedly subscribe to his point that accommodation is the fundamental mechanism in dialect mixture – though I think that the relationship between accommodation and identity deserves to be looked at more closely. While Trudgill concedes that identity is a viable sociolinguistic concept, it is not clear what kind of an effect he is willing to assign to it and how he sees its role restricted. He agrees that “there clearly are sociolinguistic situations where identity plays a role.” What kind of role could that be other than strengthening select forms as sociolinguistic markers of a specific group identity (and thereby contributing to dialect evolution, dialect change, and also, depending upon the nature of input components, dialect mixture)? Actually, his denial is more restricted, applying to “colonial dialect formation” and emerging “new national” identities only, and to a goal-directed interpretation of identity directly causing certain forms to be used more prominently, as implied by Tuten’s phrase “in order to.” To make his points, Trudgill occasionally constructs oppositions and interpretations that are slightly idiosyncratic. For instance, Mufwene’s belief that creoles are not “created” but emerge “by accident” is presented as arguing against identity, which it is not, with Trudgill implying an understanding of the effects of identity as deliberate and conscious, an idea that is worth noting but open to discussion. The same applies to Labov’s qualification of customary interpretations of his findings from his well-known Martha’s Vineyard study as proof of the role of identity. It is true that Labov rejects too generic an interpretation along these lines, but he does not say (as Trudgill implies) that the Martha’s Vineyard study fails to show such a correlation; it does, pace Labov, though the implication is that it may be exceptional in that respect (we “do not often find” such a correlation, he says). Further down, to document the relevance of his historical case studies for the evolution of new colonial varieties, Trudgill adduces but turns around Labov’s “uniformitarian principle.” This is putting the cart before the horse, however: The uniformitarian principle was postulated to project deductions based on familiar, well-studied present-day situations into a dark past about which much less is known; here, however, we are expected to assess the well-documented and brightly lit present day by using the dim torch of medieval studies. Trudgill’s case studies convincingly document the effect of dialect mixture in newly emerging dialect contact situations involving European languages, but they all relate to the Middle Ages. Trudgill himself concedes that they do “not produce any positive evidence concerning the absence of any role for identity factors,” and I agree this would hardly be possible given the huge differences in historical settings and sociolinguistic circumstances. Much of this is reminiscent of the well-known documentation of new-town dialect emergence (e.g., in Milton Keynes in England), but not indicative of, by Trudgill’s own restriction, the 263 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 24040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 264 E D G A R W. S C H N E I D E R formation of new national dialects, given that in those days the concept of nation in a modern sense simply wasn’t applicable. Hence, arguing on that basis that identity cannot have been the driving force of but is rather “parasitic upon” accommodation is logically not possible. O N T H E R E L AT I O N S H I P B E T W E E N A C C O M M O D AT I O N AND IDENTITY 䡬 However, this juxtaposition raises the issue of what the relationship is between accommodation and identity, an issue that is clearly at stake also in Trudgill’s discussion of Tuten. In a process of accommodation, individuals approach each other’s speech behavior by adopting select forms heard in their environment, thus increasing the set of shared features. It is a process of linguistic approximation with the social goal of signaling solidarity by diminishing symbolic distance; it contributes to group formation and group cohesiveness. Identity, in contrast, represents an individual stance with respect to the social structures of one’s environment, an attitude that also contributes to group formation and group delimitation through establishing an “us vs. them” construct of human alignments and through establishing relationships of similarity or difference – that is, social classification and individual affiliation (Jenkins 1996). Accommodation is one of the mechanisms of expressing one’s identity choices. Both are closely related, but not quite the same; the two notions emphasize different aspects of similar constellations and processes, different sides of the same coin. If Trudgill accepts accommodation (as he does) it is hard to see how he could deny any impact of identity altogether. Accommodation only works within groups, through group definitions and delimitations, and these are defined on the basis of an individual’s identity choice as a prime constituent of group cohesiveness. Of course, identities can be multiple and dynamic; they need to be negotiated, and they may change in the course of time and vary from one social context to another. Linguistic accommodation, on the other hand, is commonly viewed as a rather long-term, goal-directed process, fueled by one constant identity projection. Trudgill’s underlying explanation of these processes, via Keller’s maxim “Talk like the others talk,” which in turn is motivated by a more general biologically motivated principle of “behavioral congruence,” is perfectly to the point: Humans are social beings, and in a potentially hostile world group cohesiveness contributes to an individual’s chance of survival. But given the above definitions, this principle in fact underlines the importance of identity as a driving force in linguistic evolution. Language choice is both an expression and a manipulation of social bonds, of relationships of power and solidarity, and identity decisions operate in both directions – either strengthening accommodation as an expression of solidarity or increasing differences caused by socially dissociating decisions. Under these circumstances it is difficult to subscribe to Trudgill’s argument that acknowledges the existence of new identities and their linguistic 264 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 25040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 265 R E S P O N S E S : I D E N T I T Y A N D N E W - D I A L E C T F O R M AT I O N correlates and the connection between identity and accommodation, but views identity as not the driving force but as “a consequence of accommodation” (Trudgill’s emphasis), chronologically subsequent to it. This strikes me as unconvincing: It suggests that speakers who for no obvious social reason have been mutually adjusting their speech behavior become aware of this fact and then, based on their recognition of linguistic similarities, decide to increase their social bonds. Trudgill may be right in arguing that identity may not be “the” driving force of new-dialect formation – that is, the only or the main such force. Other such forces play a role (demography, for instance, as well as power relationships), and a strong one as well – no question. But identity is one such force, and depending on individual contexts it clearly may be a strong one. And one of the contexts in which this applies, even if it is not the only and perhaps not the primary one, is sociolinguistic cohesiveness on a national scale. THE CHANGING ROLE OF IDENTITY IN DIF FERENT EVOLUTIONARY PHASES OF POSTCOLONIAL ENGLISHES The assumption that Trudgill rejects is primarily that of speakers expressing a new national identity by specific linguistic choices. However, identity effects operate in all directions and cannot be restricted like this. In the emergence of postcolonial Englishes as described in my “Dynamic Model” (Schneider 2003, 2007), the stage of nation building, involving identity redirections with linguistic effects, comes fairly late, while the impact of conservative or other identity decisions in earlier stages can be observed as well – but with different consequences. In phases 1 and 2, the foundation and stabilization of a colony, settlers’ mental alignments with the former mother country cause exonormative attitudes and behavior.1 In phase 3, “nativization,” this traditional identity is shaken; correspondingly, there is room for vibrant change and innovation, as the evolutionary direction is no longer predetermined by overarching and externally imposed social alignments. In phase 4, nation building leads to “endonormative stabilization” – and yes, at this stage a national identity may play a strong role in strengthening symbolic linguistic forms, but at this stage the process of linguistic evolution is no longer “new.” Finally, in phase 5, dialect fragmentation correlates with an increasing role of group identities, as in present-day Australia or Canada, where regional and social accents are emerging or gaining in importance. Thus, the notion of identity reflects social attitudes throughout the history of an emerging variety, but to varying extents and with varying impact, and not, as Trudgill seems to imply, as a goal-directed reinforcement of new forms symbolizing new nations only. Furthermore, the impact of speakers’ identity choices is indirect: They determine social relationships, which, in turn, shape communicative ecologies, and these then translate into feature uses. Another issue is the question of the “development of new linguistic features,” rejected by Trudgill. It is certainly true that Australian wide vowels were not 265 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 26040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 266 E D G A R W. S C H N E I D E R caused by Australians suddenly feeling like Australians rather than like expatriate Brits. But which socially diagnostic linguistic variable (certainly, phonetic variable) was ever created afresh? The low back diphthong onsets of Wolfram’s hoi toider O’cockers (Wolfram & Schilling-Estes 1997) and the centralized diphthong onsets produced in Canadian Raising and by Labov’s Martha’s Vineyarders definitely existed as phonetic variants in the community before; but they were functionalized to become socially diagnostic, and possibly redistributed to specific phonological environments in the new context. And they certainly were strengthened, in terms of frequency and regularity of use and symbolic value attached, by their identity-marking role – just as some diagnostic features of new national varieties are. Trudgill’s case studies represent situations comparable to phases 1 or 2 in the Dynamic Model at best, and so they cannot test a process that is strongest at phase 4. Of course, there are linguistic forms considered diagnostic of individual postcolonial Englishes, and it is difficult to see how precisely these forms rather than any others should have been selected on a purely deterministic basis, excluding national identity as a factor. The strongest argument for the impact of identity in these processes is the observation that the origin and0or recognition and spread and0or scholarly documentation of these forms typically fall into periods of heightened national or social awareness. Cases in point ( just a small selection) include 2 䡬 • Canadian Raising or the recently discovered Canadian sound shift, both of which occurred in the later 20th century, at a time when Canadian nationhood was at stake; • New Zealanders’ 0e0 raising, 0I0 centralization or diphthong mergers of the late 20th century, when they had set themselves off from Britain but were determined not to be mistaken for Australians; • the emphasis on a distinctive American English after the War of Independence, promoted by Noah Webster and others; • and, currently, the emergence of a pan-ethnic Pasifika dialect in Auckland (Donna Starks and Allan Bell, p.c.). Designing a study that will test a straightforward connection between sociopsychological attitudes (including national identity) and the use of specific linguistic forms in these contexts will clearly be a worthwhile task. NOTES 1 In New Zealand, for example, settlers desired “to make a new Britain in the South Pacific” (cf. Schneider 2007:128–29). 2 For evidence for the first three examples, including more detailed references, see Schneider (2007:244– 47, 131–33, and 275–81, respectively). 266 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 27040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 267 R E S P O N S E S : I D E N T I T Y A N D N E W - D I A L E C T F O R M AT I O N REFERENCES Jenkins, Richard (1996). Social identity. London: Routledge. Schneider, Edgar W. (2003). The dynamics of New Englishes: From identity construction to dialect birth. Language 79:233–81. _ (2007). Postcolonial Englishes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolfram, Walt, & Schilling-Estes, Natalie (1997) Hoi toide on the Outer Banks: The story of the Ocracoke Brogue. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. (Received 24 July 2007) Language in Society 37 (2008). Printed in the United States of America DOI: 10.10170S0047404508080329 The delicate constitution of identity in face-to-face accommodation: A response to Trudgill NIKOLAS COUPLAND Cardiff University Centre for Language and Communication Research Colum Drive CF10 3EU Cardiff, Wales, UK coupland@cardiff.ac.uk 䡬 In sociolinguistics, where identity tends to be our first explanatory resource, Peter Trudgill’s claim that identity is “irrelevant” as a factor in his area of interest is particularly striking. There are at least three questions here. The first is Trudgill’s direct concern: whether identity considerations impinged on the development of new national colonial varieties. The second is the underlying question of whether identity, in itself and in general, can stand as a motive for sociolinguistic action and change. The third is whether face-to-face linguistic accommodation, which Trudgill invokes as the core process through which new dialects come to be, can and does function in the absence of identity considerations. I will not comment on the first question, other than to make one obvious point. Even if we reject the consolidated motive of “wanting to signal a national identity” as a plausible explanatory factor for new-dialect formation, this does not rule out other motivational and identity-related considerations from being relevant to the same processes of change. Trudgill’s skepticism – asking how disparate people could possibly have formed an identity pact to represent themselves indexically as a community through a new way of speaking – certainly seems well founded. But to rule out all issues of identity, particularly in circumstances of demographic movement and cultural mixing, seems unnecessarily restrictive. In relation to the second question, I would want to agree strongly with Trudgill that there are dangers in running too freely to causal explanations around identity. Sociolinguistics has suffered from reductive theorizing around identity, 267 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 28040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 268 NIKOLAS COUPLAND 䡬 in simplistic purposive accounts of identity-as-motive (“people use variety x in order to mark their allegiance to community x”), in much the same way as biology has sometimes overinvested in functional explanations (“mammals developed wings in order to fly”). I would want to go further and argue that it is inadequate to construe identity as an independent variable that either does or does not determine language change in particular settings. Trudgill appears to accept the principle of causal determinism (that identity can cause change) when he argues vociferously that this isn’t what is happening in the colonial case. But his argument that identity is likely to be as much a consequence as a cause of sociolinguistic practice is convincing, and I come back to this shortly. So what about accommodation and identity? In 1986, when Trudgill theorized dialect contact and change in terms of interpersonal accommodation, I commented in a review that this was a valuable rapprochement between variationist sociolinguistics and sociopsychological approaches to interaction. It opened a perspective on human agency and relational processes underlying linguistic change. It acknowledged that it is people, not merely dialects, that are in contact, and that interpersonal and intersubjective dimensions of language use are where explanations for change must lie. In the present essay, Trudgill still finds an explanation for linguistic change in “how individual speakers behave linguistically in faceto-face interaction,” but, even more than in the 1986 book, he empties out the human and agentive values of interaction by arguing that interpersonal accommodation is automatic and mechanistic, and indeed genetically preprogrammed. In contrast, since Howard Giles’s first (1973) conceptualization of accommodation theory, human motivations and identities have been among its focal concerns. Meyerhoff 1998, for example, suggests that communication accommodation theory (CAT) mainly exists to address the interactional nature of identity construction, and this is closely echoed in other reviews (cf. Coupland & Jaworski 1997). We might even think that CAT has tended to be over-explicit about the motivations underlying accommodation and about the identity management strategies that are entailed. A typical formulation of CAT’s core predictive claims is that people will converge to each other’s speech characteristics if and when they want to improve communication effectiveness and0or to boost social attractiveness (cf. Giles, Coupland & Coupland 1991). This sort of rubric sets up categories of people and of circumstances where motives are variably held in relation to relationships, and mainly the contrast between people wanting to get on with others versus people wanting to symbolize their distinctiveness from others. Speakers linguistically “move closer” to their speaking partners if they want closer relationships, and so on. Identity is central to claims like these, for example because “boosting social attractiveness” means presenting a self that is more attractive to another person. Identity goals and relational goals are reflexes of the same intersubjective processes in social interaction, and Howard Giles developed accommodation theory very much in tandem with his theoretical work on social identity. 268 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 29040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 269 R E S P O N S E S : I D E N T I T Y A N D N E W - D I A L E C T F O R M AT I O N So CAT has certainly not assumed that accommodation (in the sense of mutual linguistic convergence) is automatic and mechanistic. When Trudgill writes that “accommodation is not only a subconscious but also a deeply automatic process,” he is challenging the fundamental claims of the model. Accommodation theory is a model of strategic operations around linguistic and communicative styling, committed to building predictive claims about the links between identity and relational aspirations0priorities and styles, and then between styles and social consequences. This is why we can call accommodation theory a “rational action” model (Coupland 2001:10). It invests social actors with a degree of control over their linguistic actions, and a degree of awareness and understanding of their probable social outcomes. This is not to say that CAT hasn’t considered the claim that accommodation is automatic. At least, there has been consistent recognition that there is a general “set” to converge – an overall propensity for people to “move closer.” But we don’t have to interpret this tendency as mere automaticity, whatever that might mean. Literatures on social interaction have regularly formulated their own versions of the set to converge, from preference organization in CA (e.g., the preference for agreement) to Malinowski’s phatic communion (talk in the fulfilment of a basic sociality) to Bell’s audience design (stylistic adaptation for audiences). Mutuality and convergence in social interaction are – as a very gross generalization – the default design principle for social encounters, even though this design is resisted in many particular circumstances, which CAT labels “divergence.” But the very fact that we recognize the social impact of divergence, of dispreferred interactional moves, and so on, is sufficient to establish that even predictable and normative convergence is relationally meaningful. When the distinguished cognitivist Joseph Cappella writes that interactional synchrony meets the basic survival needs of bonding and comfort, he opens a window onto the strategic functioning of accommodation. He makes us realize that even when interactional stances and designs are “pervasive” and “relatively automatic,” they can nonetheless be designed around social outcomes. The apparent contrast between “automatic” and “strategic” practice is blurred. All the same, Trudgill usefully shakes up our assumptions about rational action models and their handling of identity. There are certainly occasions when people purposively and rationally target identities for themselves in talk, and when people target specific relational outcomes of the sort that CAT deals with. Dialect is a rich resource for stylistic operations that can work toward these ends (Coupland 2007). But identity is often less coherent, less rationalized, more elusive, more negotiated, and more emergent than this. Identities are known to be often multiple and contingent. Constructionist epistemology has it this way as a matter of dogma, although it might be better to distinguish analytically between cases of greater or lesser rationality, emergence, and so on, on a case-by-case basis. But we will also need to analyze identity in its multiple dimensions, which we might summarize as “knowing, feeling, and doing.” The current theoretical vogue is to 269 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 30040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 270 L AU R I E BAU E R interpret identity as practice – as a form of doing and discursive achievement – and this is echoed in Trudgill’s comment that identity might be seen as a consequence of accommodation rather than its “driving force.” But we should not ignore the dimensions of “knowing how to be”0competence, and feeling0affect too. Ben Rampton, for example, runs with Raymond Williams’s interpretation of class identity as a structure of feeling. Identity, as Frederick Barth said, is often more a matter of establishing boundaries – sensing and displaying who we are not, rather than who we are – and accommodation often works negatively, in the strategy of “avoiding being different.” And if (as I have argued elsewhere) our selves are largely relational, then what we hold on to as “our own identities” is not clearly separable from how we believe others construe us. These and other complexities mean that the sociolinguistics of identity will need to nuanced, to catch the delicacies of interactionally constructed selves and relationships. And by implication, identity will rarely if ever be irrelevant. REFERENCES 䡬 Coupland, Nikolas (2001). Introduction: Sociolinguistic theory and social theory. In Sociolinguistics and social theory, 1–26. London: Longman. _ (2007). Style: Language variation and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. _ , & Jaworski, Adam (1997). Relevance, accommodation, and conversation: Mdeling the so- Q1 cial dimension of communication. Multilingua 16:235–58. Giles, Howard (1973). Accent mobility: A model and some data. Anthropological Linguistics 15:87– 109. _ ; Coupland, Justine; & Coupland, Nikolas (1991). Accommodation theory: Cmmunication, context, and consequence. In Howard Giles, Justine Coupland, & Nikolas Coupland (eds.), Contexts of accommodation: Developments in applied sociolinguistics, 1– 68. New York: Cambridge University Press. Meyerhoff, Miriam (1998). Accommodating your data: The use and misuse of accommodation theory in sociolinguistics. Language and Communication 18:205–25. (Received 30 July 2007) Language in Society 37 (2008). Printed in the United States of America DOI: 10.10170S0047404508080330 A question of identity: A response to Trudgill LAURIE BAUER Department of Linguistics Victoria University of Wellington P.O. Box 600 Wellington, New Zealand Laurie.Bauer@vuw.ac.nz I shall begin this brief contribution with a small amount of self-justification, since I appear to have become picked out as one of the “bad guys” in Trudgill’s 270 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 31040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 271 R E S P O N S E S : I D E N T I T Y A N D N E W - D I A L E C T F O R M AT I O N thesis. I shall then go on to agree with some of Trudgill’s points, but not with all. In particular, I shall conduct a small thought experiment on the link between accommodation and the development of new dialects. I am quoted by Trudgill as saying that “New Zealand English derives from a variety of English spoken in the south-east of England” (Bauer 1994:391), and also as saying that “New Zealand English is derived from Australian English” (Bauer 1994:428), something which Trudgill interprets as meaning that “New Zealand English arrived as a ready-formed entity transported in its entirety from Australia.” In more recent papers (Bauer 1999, 2000) I have retreated slightly from the first claim here, showing that there are many phonological and lexical features of New Zealand English (NZE) that come from places other than the southeast of England. But even so, it would clearly have been absurd if I had claimed that NZE was derived from Tyneside English or Lowlands Scots. The whole phonological system of NZE is so close to the systems found in the southeast of England and so distant from that of lowland Scots that it seems unlikely that similarities on such a scale could arise purely by chance. Of course, the two are not identical. And it is for that reason that my text says “derived from” rather than “is”: There are changes to the system, and to the phonetics of the system, caused by a number of factors, including the ones that Trudgill discusses. For the same reason, I reject Trudgill’s interpretation of what I say about Australian English (a comment, incidentally, made as much on the basis of vocabulary similarities as on phonological choices): “Derived from” does not mean “transported in its entirety from.” This excuse may not be sufficient to remove me from the list of people who got it wrong, but it may clarify the situation slightly. While I am not an expert in any of the various examples of colonial expansion which Trudgill adduces as indicating that identity was not a major factor in the formation of the new varieties, I am, in general, happy to concede that point. Trudgill provides no evidence for his claims on this point, but I think that some is probably available, at least in more modern instances. In New Zealand, for instance, Britain was referred to as “Home” (note the initial capital), even by people whose parents and grandparents had been born in New Zealand, well into the second half of the 20th century. Any people who consider a country 25,000 kilometers away to be “home” are unlikely to feel a strong pull to create a new identity based on a different country. I suspect that social historians could provide many examples pointing in the same direction. While it is difficult to know what percentage of the population in the 1950s really thought that their home was half a world away, the fact that such phraseology persisted over a century after settlement indicates that unity with Britain rather than difference from Britain had been a defining perception for many New Zealanders of an earlier generation. Trudgill cites Moore 1999 as claiming that identity is an important factor in the development of “colonial dialects,” but Moore is specifically talking about “post-colonial societies” rather than about the society at the time of settlement, a very different situation. Perhaps Moore is not one of the bad guys, either. 271 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 32040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 272 L AU R I E BAU E R 䡬 Trudgill talks about dialect mixing as beginning in accommodation (Giles 1973), where speakers attempt to “talk like the others talk” (Keller 1994:100). We can begin by accepting the reality of accommodation, and the force of trying to talk like others. But not everybody is equally good at accommodation. We do not know what might cause the differences, but we all know people who accommodate a lot, and other people who appear to accommodate very little. At one time in my life, the moment I traveled north of Berwick-upon-Tweed I became rhotic and used monophthongs for the “face” and “goat” vowels, and yet after nearly 30 years in New Zealand, I still show remarkably little accommodation to the New Zealand accent (despite a host of favorable social reasons why I might have accommodated). In one place, at one time, I accommodated greatly; in another place at another time I accommodate relatively little. The same must be true for other speakers (the uniformitarian hypothesis demands it). So what does accommodation lead to? It cannot lead directly to a mixed dialect, as Trudgill appears to believe, because different speakers will accommodate to different degrees, and, in any case, will accommodate to the interlocutor of the moment. What it does is provide variation between alternative versions of the “same” linguistic unit within a single speaker. I suspect that accommodation is sporadic and starts with places where the systems of the two interlocutors differ in salient ways and in ways that speakers can imitate to some degree. What causes the salience and what speakers can imitate are surely questions worthy of further investigation, but this is not the place to look into them. I would like to suggest, as a part of this thought experiment, that variation between alternative realizations of the same element within a single speaker gives children who are learning the language around them something of a problem, and something of a solution. The solution part comes about because they can tell from repetitions provided by the same speaker what the range of options available to them is at any point in the system; the problem is in determining which of those options to adopt. The problem here may well be solved by adopting the numerically superior form, as Trudgill proposes elsewhere. But now we have a situation where the numerically superior form is not numerically superior simply because more of the people in the founder generation happen to have it as part of their normal repertoire, but because some people for whom it is not a part of their normal repertoire are also using it in a (more or less accurately) copied form. In other words, I should like to suggest that it is not the accommodation as such that leads to dialect mixing; rather, it is the use that accommodation is put to by the next generation that leads to dialect mixing. However, if we accept this view (and ideally we would like some experimental evidence to support it), we can come back to the question of identity, and ask with whom the new generation is going to identify. The obvious answer, where there are sufficient children together, is with peers. That is, the numerical superiority of a given form has to be present not only in the experience of the individual child, but also in the group experience of a set of children (who may all have parents from different original 272 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 33040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 273 R E S P O N S E S : I D E N T I T Y A N D N E W - D I A L E C T F O R M AT I O N dialect areas) in order to be passed on. So any calculation of numerical superiority really requires a computational model of great sophistication if it is to provide a realistic answer to why one variant rather than another becomes adopted in a particular community. And at the same time, no calculation can totally ignore the notion of group identity; we just have to ask what complex kinds of identity are being expressed in the choice of a particular phonetic variant. It will not be as simple as feeling that one is “British” or “New Zealand”; it will be much more local and much more specific. REFERENCES Bauer, Laurie (1994). English in New Zealand. In R. W. Burchfield (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language, vol. 5: English in Britain and overseas, origins and developments, 382– 429. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. _ (1999). On the origins of the New Zealand English accent. English World-Wide 20:287–307. _ (2000). The dialectal origins of New Zealand English. In Allan Bell & Koenraad Kuiper (eds.), New Zealand English, 40–52. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins; Wellington: Victoria University Press. Giles, Howard (1973). Accent mobility. A model and some data. Anthropological Linguistics 15:87– 105. Keller, Rudi (1994). On language change: The invisible hand in language. London: Routledge. Moore, Bruce (1999). Australian English. Australian identity. Lingua Franca www.abc.net.au0rn0 arts0ling0stories0s68786.htm. (Received 11 June 2007) Language in Society 37 (2008). Printed in the United States of America DOI: 10.10170S0047404508080342 Contact is not enough: A response to Trudgill JA N E T H O L M E S Department of Linguistics Victoria University of Wellington P.O. Box 600 Wellington 6140, New Zealand PAU L K E R S W I L L Department of Linguistics and English Language Lancaster University L A1 4YT, UK p.kerswill@lancaster.ac.uk There is much that any sociolinguist would agree with in Peter Trudgill’s essay. It is written in his usual lucid style, and supported by a wealth of detail, reflecting his extensive knowledge, research, and scholarly expertise. However, it is 273 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 34040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 274 JA N E T H O L M E S A N D PA U L K E R S W I L L stimulatingly provocative on the issue of why particular variants win out in dialect contact situations. Our response falls into two sections: (i) the identity issue, and (ii) the New Zealand situation. I D E N T I T Y A N D N E W D I A L E C T F O R M AT I O N 䡬 Trudgill rejects the notion that the social factor “identity” plays any role in colonial new-dialect formation, arguing that new dialects emerge deterministically from the demographic mix of input varieties, and that it is only later that the distinctive features of a dialect become emblematic. In support of his position he cites Labov (2001:191) on his Martha’s Vineyard study, interpreting Labov’s comment as indicating skepticism about the importance of “the concept of local identity in the motivation of linguistic change.” But in its context Labov’s comment is rather arguing for the importance of paying further attention to local identity. The very next sentence reads: “Hazen 2000 is an impressive advance toward providing empirical support for the concept of local identity.” And while it is true that Labov is pointing out that the correlation between identity and sound change may not be as frequent as has been assumed, he is also arguing that, in order to understand linguistic change, we should pay attention to “local” identity as opposed to expanded identity, and to the “changes in social preferences and attitudes” that give rise to changes in “interlocutor frequencies” (2001:191). We would argue that these socially influenced frequencies have the power to shape, though not to determine, the path taken by linguistic change. We pick up this important point below. In fact, the “identity” issue is a red herring. There is little doubt that demographic factors will always be important (see below), but the challenge for sociolinguists working on new dialect formation must be to identify the range of social reasons why people adopt one linguistic form rather than another. Social identity is only ever likely to be one of several contenders, and national identity, as Trudgill suggests, is likely to emerge later rather than earlier – if at all. Nonetheless, as Labov indicates, awareness of the associations of particular forms with local identity may turn out to be important. But to imply, as Trudgill seems to be doing, that “national identity” can stand for all types of identity deflects our attention from the real sociolinguistic issues. He is attacking a straw person. Two further reservations concern Trudgill’s deliberately negative argumentation, and his dependence on pre-16th-century sources. Focusing on negative arguments and evidence means that Trudgill fails to demonstrate that the reasons for the emergence of the forms he cites were not social. He merely describes what emerged and accounts for it by citing dialect mixture as the reason, rather than seeking social explanations. Trudgill’s focus on pre-16th-century data makes it difficult to provide counterevidence. We have no recordings from those times. Trudgill refers to the “uni274 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 35040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 275 R E S P O N S E S : I D E N T I T Y A N D N E W - D I A L E C T F O R M AT I O N formitarian principle” (Labov 1994) to justify applying what we know about the distant past (pre-16th century) to explain the more recent past (19th century). But this is the opposite of what Labov was arguing. Labov suggested we use our knowledge of present processes, which we can observe, to infer what happened in the past. We find Trudgill’s argument somewhat perverse. T H E F O R M AT I O N O F N E W Z E A L A N D E N G L I S H While we agree with Trudgill that it is implausible that people in the early stages of new-dialect formation make linguistic choices in order to promote a sense of common or national identity (Tuten 2003:29; Hickey 2003:215), we would nevertheless argue that there is no stage in the process of new-dialect formation when social factors are irrelevant. Turning to the formation of New Zealand English, we face a host of questions, most of which we cannot answer except speculatively, since the crucial empirical data are not available. New Zealand was certainly no linguistic tabula rasa (as suggested in Trudgill 2004). People bring sociolinguistic knowledge, including attitudes to varieties, to any social situation, and those who came to New Zealand brought a range of regional and social identities that they did not completely discard as they stepped off the boat (see Kerswill 2007). This is directly relevant to Trudgill’s argument because he identifies “accommodation in face-to-face interaction” as “the fundamental mechanism leading to dialect mixture.” 1 By this it subsequently emerges he means a “biologically given drive to behave as one’s peers do.” Thus Trudgill favors biological rather than attitudinal and social factors in resolving the dilemma of who accommodates to whom. In our view this seems misguided. Elsewhere, Trudgill 2004 has paid attention to demographic factors in dialect mixture, pointing out that the sheer number of people using some variants best accounts for the emergence of a preferred variant. But this cannot account for situations where no particular variant is numerically dominant; and this is where social factors are likely to play a part. Why would one person accommodate to another’s speech rather than the other way around? Trudgill does not address this issue, perhaps because it is implausible that the answer would be biologically based. It seems sociolinguistically axiomatic that a desire to be like the other person in a range of possible social respects (status, social group, social role, etc.) is one fundamental explanation. But, as we noted above, non-demographic social factors bear directly on frequencies of interaction. Because people bring to each encounter their personal and social identities, as well as knowledge and beliefs about intergroup relations and about the social marking of linguistic variants, interactions with certain social groups will be sought out or avoided. Thus, social factors influence both the frequency of interactions and the direction of accommodation. In both of these ways, the direction of change is influenced. 275 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 36040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 276 JA N E T H O L M E S A N D PA U L K E R S W I L L 䡬 Trudgill 2004 argues that the critical generation for new-dialect formation is that of the children of the first settlers. Central to his argumentation against any influence of social factors is the claim that these children select variants from the dialect mix at will, as in a supermarket (2004:151–57). But even in early colonial New Zealand, children would have been linguistically socialized in specific ways; the immigrants were not sociolinguistic tabulae rasae. To understand the kind of sociolinguistic parameters at work in the new communities, we need more information about the places where the distinctive New Zealand dialect developed. In fact, the places that have been the source of most speculation on how the NZ accent developed are relatively small townships, which are in many respects very atypical: gold-mining settlements with a rather odd mixture of people, usually poverty-stricken and often transient. More valuable would be data on the speech of people in urban centers where a range of social factors as well as shared attitudes to language might be expected to play important roles in the development of a new dialect. Those who controlled the development of the urban centers sought “respectful hard-working rural labourers and cultured men of capital” or “industrious immigrants of the labouring class” (quoted by King 2003:173) – hence those who were neither destitute nor aristocratic. These working- and middle-class people fit into the category of those who are described as “linguistically insecure” by Labov 1966, 2001, though a preferable description might be most linguistically innovative and open to the influence of others. It is thus very likely that their attitudes to dialect features (acquired in Britain, on the ship, or in New Zealand) influenced their choice of preferred linguistic variants in the new speech community. Attitudinal factors must inevitably have played a part in the emergence of the particular patterns of linguistic variation that distinguished different social groups in particular urban New Zealand centers. And it is at this local level, we would argue, that identity issues seem likely to be relevant. Rather than searching for evidence of the development of a “New Zealand” identity at the early stages of dialect mixing, we should be looking for evidence on what it would mean to sound (locally) acceptable within any particular new, socially diverse community. As we have said, language attitudes would be influential, alongside the social activities of influential individuals in the new communities, the “saccadic leaders” (Labov 2001:383). The children of the first settlers did not exist in a sociolinguistic vacuum: Even though they had a lot of work to do in figuring out how to talk, they did not have to make up their own linguistic norms from scratch. In conclusion, there is clearly a role for demographics, and perhaps even biology, in accounting for new dialect formation. But the picture is more complex than Trudgill suggests and requires us to look at social factors at every stage. NOTE 1 Though it is interesting that elsewhere (Trudgill 2004), Trudgill argues that neither accommodation nor other social factors have any influence on the speech of the second generation of New Zealanders 276 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 37040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 277 R E S P O N S E S : I D E N T I T Y A N D N E W - D I A L E C T F O R M AT I O N REFERENCES Hickey, Raymond (2003). How do dialects get the features they have? On the process of new dialect formation. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), Motives for language change, 213–39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kerswill, Paul (2007). Review of Trudgill (2004). Language 83(4). King, Michael (2003). The Penguin history of New Zealand. Auckland: Penguin. Labov, William (1966). The social stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics _ (2001). Principles of linguistic change. Volume 2: Social factors. Oxford: Blackwell. Trudgill, Peter (2004). New-dialect formation. The inevitability of colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tuten, Donald (2003). Koineization in medieval Spanish. Berlin: de Gruyter. (Received 23 May 2007) Language in Society 37 (2008). Printed in the United States of America DOI: 10.10170S0047404508080354 On the role of children, and the mechanical view: A rejoinder PETER TRUDGILL There is nothing controversial about Keller’s assertion that human beings operate according to a powerful maxim which he renders as “Talk like the others talk.” 1 This is self-evidently true (although we could of course discuss precisely who “the others” might be). If it were not true, there would be, say, no local dialects. The fact that everyone who has grown up in the same community speaks in the same way therefore, in a sense, needs no discussion. It is always the case, as near enough as makes no difference. Local dialects maintain themselves, subject to linguistic change, even in the face of the arrival of outsiders in the community – up to a certain demographic point. Adult arrivals accommodate to the dialect to varying degrees, ranging from almost total to hardly at all; but in the long run this is unimportant, since young child arrivals accommodate totally, and contribute together with the rest of the community to transmitting the dialect to future generations. Since this is what always happens, we can suppose that it is the result of something like a universal of human behavior. I have suggested that this universal is even broader than that posited by Keller, namely the more general principle of behavioral coordination which is found not only in humans but also in other primates. This is due, as Pelech says, to “the innate biological basis of interactional synchrony.” A number of the commentators have alluded to a link between identity and accommodation; but normal coordinatory behavior, including linguistic accommodation, is so automatic – children do not operate it “at will,” as Holmes and Kerswill believe – that I do not believe that identity is 277 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 38040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 278 PETER TRUDGILL 䡬 required as an explanatory factor. Nik Coupland agrees with me “that there are dangers in running too freely to causal explanations around identity;” and my emphasis on the automaticity of linguistic accommodation and its link to primate behavior generally is indeed intended to warn against the too ready recourse to identity as our “first explanatory resource,” as Coupland calls it. If “identity” explains everything, it explains nothing. Because it is innate, this kind of behavioral coordination is the unmarked case. Where exceptions to the norm of “Talk like the others talk” occur – for example, Labov’s New York City Nathan B, or Newbrook’s (1986) Scots Scouser – they do genuinely need discussion and explanation, and it is possible that identity factors may well be found to have played a role. This is nicely alluded to by Donald Tuten when he points out that in recent formulations of accommodation theory, “convergence is taken as the norm and group identity is generally emphasized only when explaining cases of divergence.” New-dialect formation by children in tabula rasa, new-dialect formation scenarios is a fascinating phenomenon, but it is clear that it too is totally predictable in the same way. There is no known case of it not happening. Dialect contact of this type always leads to dialect mixture, which always leads to newdialect formation. It is obviously then the result of the same kind of automatic and0or universal coordinatory aspect of human behavior which leads to local dialect maintenance. We need look no further for explanations of why this is so. The fascinating difference with these scenarios is that there is no alreadyestablished dialect for speakers to converge on. The question for us linguists is therefore not at all why this form of linguistic convergence happens – it is inevitable – but why the linguistic outcomes are precisely what they are. Janet Holmes and Paul Kerswill believe that we must look for the social reasons for the nature of these linguistic outcomes. There must be, they say, social reasons for why one language variant is selected over another. I do not believe that there are any in colonial new-dialect formation (see below). And in any case, we do not need social reasons in order to explain what happens. I have argued, and shown on the basis of data from New Zealand English, that there are linguistic and arithmetical explanations readily to hand: The numerically superior variant – other linguistic things being equal – is always the survivor. “But what if there is no such variant?” they ask. This is only extremely rarely the case in the New Zealand data I have examined. But I have actually answered this question: Generally, where there are two or more major variants at approximately the same level of occurrence in the dialect mixture, then both variants survive, according to the principles of reallocation as explored in some depth in Britain & Trudgill 1999, 2005. Holmes and Kerswill have rightly noted from my other writings the importance I attach to the role of children in these scenarios. And Salikoko Mufwene has also understood that “the agency of children in selecting some variants into and out of their idiolects” is very significant. But I did not highlight in my essay 278 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 39040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 279 R E S P O N S E S : I D E N T I T Y A N D N E W - D I A L E C T F O R M AT I O N as I should have done the crucial role played by children in the kind of colonial dialect mixture situations I have been focusing on. The Berwick-on-Tweed and New Zealand adult accommodation experiences of Laurie Bauer (a very “good guy” from whose work – not least the current commentary – I have learnt a great deal on this topic!) are very important and revealing, but they are not relevant to the issue at hand as I see it. All the data I analyzed in my book (Trudgill 2004) indicated that the initial “work” of new-dialect formation in these situations is performed by the small children of the first two generations, which is why the social factors which Holmes and Kerswill would like to look for do not come into play. The adult settlers in any colony, of course, bring all the baggage of “the social marking of linguistic variants” (Holmes & Kerswill) with them, although Belich (1997:330) and Britain 2005 make it clear that in New Zealand they discarded a very great deal of it of it. But this kind of baggage is not relevant to 7-year-old children in the colonial situation – which is precisely why the mixing of variants from different dialects of different regional origin and different degrees of social status, with a mass of different associations and connotations, always takes place. The challenge is to work out why, in the children’s idiolects, some features are acquired and preserved, and others not. Holmes and Kerswill argue that “children would have been linguistically socialised in specific ways.” But we know very well that children do not speak like their parents, and there is no more reason to suppose that parents were more influential in colonial New Zealand than they are anywhere else, especially since they came collectively from a range of different regions and backgrounds. Crucially, we also have in the New Zealand data siblings who differ considerably from one another in the variants they have adopted out of those available. (Of course, if other scholars can come up with a feature-by-feature social-reasons account – of the type I have provided for my deterministic accounts – for why a new colonial dialect has the phonological and grammatical shape that it does, then I will have to rethink my position.) The point about the role of children is also relevant to a comment of Edgar Schneider’s: I did not intend to imply, as Schneider supposes, that the role of identity was not relevant in the Martha’s Vineyard situation. It obviously was. What I pointed to was Labov’s assertion that identity is “not often” involved in this way, and that we should always think of the “mechanical view” as our first explanatory resource. Important for me here, in any case, is the fact that on Martha’s Vineyard small children were not the crucial locus of linguistic change. Enormously helpful on the role of children is Tuten’s exposition of the interactive alignment model of Pickering & Garrod, who propose that “participants in dialogue automatically align their cognitive representations and production on a number of levels”; Tuten tells us that there “is evidence that the model is very highly predictive of the behavior of younger children” (my emphasis). Holmes and Kerswill also ask, “Why would one person accommodate to another’s speech rather than the other way around?” But the fact is that in the 279 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 䡬 6 6 LSY37(2) 08028 40040 01023008 䡬 1:28 pm Page: 280 PETER TRUDGILL tabula rasa situation everyone (i.e., all the children) is accommodating to everybody else. To demonstrate this fact was one of the purposes of my focus on Irish English, Colonial German, Southern Iberian Spanish, Valencian, and Old English, where I directed attention as much as I was able to actual linguistic details, illustrating the fact that the new dialects were obviously the result of multidirectional accommodation. This is why, say, Valencian colonial Catalan was from the very beginning a mélange of Eastern Catalan, Western Catalan, and Aragonese forms. (To the – in my view perverse – objections to my invocation of the uniformitarian principle, by the way, I concede that “using the past to explain the present” may be more risky than vice versa, as Schneider rightly says, but if the principle operates in one direction it must necessarily operate in the other as well.) In the end, however, I am very willing to concede that the actual complexities and subtleties of what really happens when speakers of different dialects come into contact with one another on a long-term basis in a new land still largely continue to elude me; and I am very happy to acknowledge that my thinking and writing have benefited, and will continue to benefit enormously, from the contributions of my seven kind and expert commentators. NOTE 1 I am extremely grateful to the editor for proposing this exchange; and I owe a very large debt of gratitude indeed to my seven commentators for their diligence, thoughtfulness, and insight. Very many thanks too to David Britain and Jean Hannah for their help with this response. 䡬 REFERENCES Belich, James (1997). Making peoples. Auckland: Penguin. Britain, David (2005). Where did New Zealand English come from? In A. Bell, R. Harlow, & D. Starks (eds.), The languages of New Zealand, 156–93. Wellington: Victoria University Press. _ , & Trudgill, Peter (1999). Migration, new-dialect formation and sociolinguistic refunctionalisation: Reallocation as an outcome of dialect contact. Transactions of the Philological Society 97:245–56. _ , _ (2005). New dialect formation and contact-induced reallocation: Three case studies from the Fens. International Journal of English Studies 5:183–209. Newbrook, Mark (1986). Scot or Scouser? An anomalous informant in outer Merseyside. English World-Wide 3:77–86. (Received 18 September 2007) 280 Language in Society 37:2 (2008) 䡬 View publication stats