Two traditional principles have served as the basis for the involvement of linguists in social is... more Two traditional principles have served as the basis for the involvement of linguists in social issues, namely the vinciple of error correction and the principle of debt incurred (Labov, 1982). It is argued that an additional principle should motivate linguists to take a more proactive role in social issues, the principle of linguistic gratuity. One such proactive role is involvement in Language Awareness Programs, which are designed to provide an unde-standing of and appreciation for variety in language. This paper considers the rationale for and programmatic structure of two experimental language awareness programs, along with a discussion of some of the ethical issues that need to be considered in the implementation of such progyams. Ethical considerations include the ethics of persuasion and need, of presentation, of representation, of sociocultural change, and of accommodation. An example of a curriculum unit with a humanistic objective, sample exercises drmonstrating the scientific study of language patterning, an exercise with a sociohistorical objective, and an exercise promoting "island quaintness"-i.e., the lexical heritage of the North Carolinian island of Ocrakoke-are appended. (Contains 22 references.) (Author/JP)
Bahamian English: phonology Becky Childs and Walt Wolfram 1. Introduction The Commonwealth of The... more Bahamian English: phonology Becky Childs and Walt Wolfram 1. Introduction The Commonwealth of The Bahamas (henceforth The Bahamas) represents a unique geographic, demographic, and linguistic situation among the islands of the Caribbean and North Atlantic. The ...
University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 2003
Although stable Hispanic populations have existed in some regions of the United States for centur... more Although stable Hispanic populations have existed in some regions of the United States for centuries now (Pefialosa 1980, Fought 2003), rural regions in the Mid-Atlantic South are just beginning to witness the emergence of core Hispanic communities. For example, between 1990 and 2000, North Carolina experienced a higher percentage of growth in its Latin American population than any other state. This status is partly due to the fact that North Carolina, like much of the Southeast and some states in the Midwest, started out the decade with relatively few Hispanics compared to the rest of the country. During the last decade, more than 100,000 new Hispanic residents have moved to North Carolina from Mexico, El Salvador, and other countries in Central and South America. Many of the new residents who come directly from their country of origin have acquired English exclusively in the context of their new surroundings. Though some of the children in these communities now have been born and reared in the United States, Spanish is still their native language and the dominant language for communication in the community. The development of new Hispanic communities in the Southeast United States raises a number of important questions about the development of varieties of English. Who are the immigrants learning their primary English from and how does this affect the emerging English language variety? Is a new, regionally defined ethnic variety of Hispanic English developing in these settings? Do new Latino/a residents accommodate the local dialect traits of their cohort English-speaking communities, and if so, which community? What aspects of the local dialect are most prominent in their speech and how are they combined with other constellations of English language structures? Does the variety of English show a persistent substrate from 1 Research reported here was supported by the William C. Friday Endowment at North Carolina State University and by NSF Grant BCS No. 9910224. We are grateful to Ron Butters, Becky Childs, Christine Mallinson, Michael Oles, and Tanya Wolfram for assistance with some of the interviewing, and to the staff of the North Carolina Language and Life Project for reactions to an earlier version of this paper. Special thanks to Ron Butters for his collaboration in this project.
Despite extensive research over the past four decades, a number of issues concerning the historic... more Despite extensive research over the past four decades, a number of issues concerning the historical and current development of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) remain unresolved. This study utilizes a unique sociolinguistic situation – a long-standing, isolated, biracial community situated in a distinctive dialect region of coastal North Carolina – to address questions of localized dialect accommodation and ethnolinguistic distinctiveness in earlier African American English. A comparison of diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables for a sample of four different generations of African Americans and a baseline European American group shows that considerable accommodation of the localized dialect occurred in earlier African American speech. Nonetheless, certain dialect features – e.g., copula absence and 3rd person verbal s marking – were distinctively maintained by African Americans in the face of localized dialect accommodation; and this suggests long-term ethn...
Notwithstanding the popular stereotype of the American South as a uniform re- gion, the Southeast... more Notwithstanding the popular stereotype of the American South as a uniform re- gion, the Southeastern US represents one of the most diverse dialect areas in the Unites States. It is an area of robust dialect diversity, including a full range of ar- eal, social, and ethnic variation. At least three major dialect boundaries cut across the Southeastern states of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, including a seaboard region to the east, a highland region to the west, and an intermediate Coastal Plain and Piedmont region. Within the context of dialect di- versity in the South is a set of enclave dialect communities, that is, communities that have been set apart from mainstream populations and, in some cases, from the major dialect boundaries set forth in dialect surveys such as Kurath (1949), Carver (1987), and Labov, Ash, and Boberg (fc.). Admittedly, the notions of "enclave community" and "historical isolation" are diffi cult to defi ne in a prec...
The investigation of isolated African American enclave communities has been instrumental in refor... more The investigation of isolated African American enclave communities has been instrumental in reformulating the historical reconstruction of earlier African American English and the current trajectory of language change in African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This case study examines a unique enclave sociolinguistic situation – a small, long-term, isolated bi-ethnic enclave community in the mountains of western North Carolina – to further understanding of the role of localized dialect accommodation and ethnolinguistic distinctiveness in the historical development of African American English. The examination of a set of diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables for several of the remaining African Americans in this community supports the conclusion that earlier African American English largely accommodated local dialects while maintaining a subtle, distinctive ethnolinguistic divide. However, unlike the situation in some other African American communities, there is n...
Although sociolinguists have performed a valuable service in challenging folk theories about Afri... more Although sociolinguists have performed a valuable service in challenging folk theories about African American English (AAE), they also have unwittingly participated in the construction of sociolinguistic folklore about variation and change in AAE. Several examples of sociolinguistic myths are presented, including the supraregional myth, the change myth, and the social stratification myth. Data used to challenge the canon of AAE description include empirical studies of different types of rural Southern African American communities as well as ethnographic observation. Historical circumstance, social and professional enculturation, and academic exclusivity are considered in explaining the construction of these questionable axioms about AAE. The examination indicates that unchallenged assumptions, unilateral explanations, and imagined dichotomies need to be scrutinized more critically with regard to the canon of AAE description.
Moribund dialects threatened by the encroachment of healthy varieties of the same language have b... more Moribund dialects threatened by the encroachment of healthy varieties of the same language have been overlooked in establishing the language endangerment canon. Endan-gered varieties of languages as safe as even English exhibit structures not found in main-stream ...
Although stable Hispanic populations have existed in some regions of the United States for centur... more Although stable Hispanic populations have existed in some regions of the United States for centuries, other regions, including the mid-Atlantic South, are just experiencing the emergence of permanent Hispanic communities. This situation o¡ers an ideal opportunity to examine the dynamics of new dialect formation in progress, and the extent to which speakers acquire local dialect traits as they learn English as a second language.We focus on the production of the /ai/ diphthong among adolescents in two emerging Hispanic communities, one in an urban and one in a rural context. Though both English and Spanish have the diphthong /ai/, the Southern regional variant of the benchmark local dialect norm is unglided, thus providing a local dialect alternative. The instrumental analysis of /ai/ shows that there is not pervasive accommodation to the local norm by Hispanic speakers learning English. There is, however, gradient, incremental adjustment of the /ai/, and individual speakers who adopt local cultural values may accommodate to the local dialect pattern.
Several years ago, a couple of colleagues and I submitted a manuscript on language variation and ... more Several years ago, a couple of colleagues and I submitted a manuscript on language variation and education to a major national organization devoted to the teaching of English. One of the manuscript reviewers wondered how relevant our discussion would be since &dquo;today's hot issue is really language, not dialect, bilingualism, not bidialectalism ... the dialect issue has quieted&dquo; (anonymous manuscript reviewer). I found this response disturbing for a couple of reasons. For one, it suggested that concerns for language education issues are somehow driven by socioeducational faddishness rather than authentic educational need. The response further indicated a troubling detachment by members of the professional academy from the everyday struggles and concerns of practitioners. Certainly, the reviewer could not have witnessed the same classrooms I was observing or even listened to some of the casual conversations about language variation among my colleagues in the English department. In the mid-1990s, shortly before the controversial resolution of the Oakland Unified School District regarding Ebonics, I offered the following observation: My sociolinguistic experience over three decades, which includes the heyday of interest in dialects in the sixties and seventies, suggests that, at the grassroots level, we have not made nearly as much progress as we imagine with respect to dialect and education. The confrontational rhetoric may have subsided, but the issues encountered a couple of decades ago remain as relevant in today's schools as they were then. Furthermore, many of the socioeducational inequities that derive from the failure of the educational system to take into account dialect diversity continue to be perpetuated. Can we afford to dismiss or treat with benign neglect fundamental matters relating to dialects and education because they are no longer trendy? I hope not. (Wolfram 1995, 1) AUTHOR'S N01'E: Parts of this article were published in &dquo;Old Wine in New Bottles: Understanding the Oakland Ebonics Controversy,&dquo; Language Leaming and Education Newsletter 4 (1997): 3-8.
This investigation attempts to determine the social distribution and contextual shifting of Afric... more This investigation attempts to determine the social distribution and contextual shifting of African American English (AAE) within rural Southern African American communities. The study compares selective diagnostic AAE variables and features of speech rate and pause in the speech of three recognized sociopolitical leaders in public presentations and sociolinguistic interviews. The results show that there are not significant shifts in the use of AAE from the sociolinguistic interview to the public presentation settings and that leaders do not necessarily align their speech with their age and sex cohorts in terms of vernacular AAE usage. The authors conclude that the relative autonomy of the community, its endocentric versus exocentric orientation, the primary public service constituency of the leader, the different social affiliations and divisions within the community, the speaker’s personal background and history, and the socialized demands and expectations for public presentation ...
Abstract: Discusses Ocracoke English as an endangered dialect, examining the social responsibilit... more Abstract: Discusses Ocracoke English as an endangered dialect, examining the social responsibility linguists and dialectologists should assume in documenting and disseminating information about the state of moribund dialects and describing a ...
... of black-white speech relations (Wolfram 1974b; Bailey and Bassett 1986; Montgom-ery 1994); (... more ... of black-white speech relations (Wolfram 1974b; Bailey and Bassett 1986; Montgom-ery 1994); (3) its historical derivation in terms of donor language sources (Rickford 1986; Bailey and Maynor 1987; Montgomery and Mishoe, forth-coming; Montgomery and Kirk 1996); and (4 ...
Great linguistic diversity existed at the time Africans were brought to North America, both in th... more Great linguistic diversity existed at the time Africans were brought to North America, both in the ancestral languages of West Africa and in the developing English language in the Americas. The earliest waves of slaves from Africa spoke different native languages, represented different levels of proficiency in English, and interacted linguistically in quite varied contact situations, depending on their geographic location and social situation. There is thus no reason to think that there was a seamless transition to a homogenized variety of English in the United States. The issue is not the existence of diversity in earlier African American speech but the nature of the variation and the delimitation of relevant sociolinguistic, sociohistorical, and sociocultural factors that might have accounted for it. Wolfram, Thomas, and Green (forthcoming) use a unique sociolinguistic situation involving a long-standing insular biracial community in coastal North Carolina to demonstrate how earlier African Americans might have accommodated to the distinct regional variety associated with Outer Banks English (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1995, 1996; Wolfram, Hazen, and Schilling-Estes 1999) while, at the same time, maintaining selective ethnolinguistic markers that set apart the African American community from its European American cohorts. Such evidence points to regionally based variation in speech norms among different groups of African Americans. This investigation considers a different but equally important dimension of variation in earlier African American speech: the role of intracommunity, individual differences. To what extent did speech vary among African Americans within the same community? Another important question is the role of individual variation in small, historically isolated communities. To what extent do individuals show distinctive speech in communities where "everybody knows everybody"? Recent research by Dorian (1994)
Dialectologists traditionally assume that language change in historically isolated, enclave commu... more Dialectologists traditionally assume that language change in historically isolated, enclave communities is more conservative than that in more widely dispersed, mainstream populations. 1 Though they acknowledge the potential for independent, internal linguistic change in such language varieties, the role of innovation tends to be overlooked in favor of the relic assumption, namely, that dialect forms in peripheral dialects will remain relatively static and resistant to language innovation. Indeed, Andersen (1988) maintains that this assumption has led researchers to slight the role of system-internal innovations in language in peripheral communities in favor of explanations grounded in hypothetical (and often unlikely or even impossible) contact situations resulting in the diffusion of change from outside areas. Andersen notes, there are internally motivated innovations which arise independently of any external stimulus. These too have an areal dimension and may appear to spread merely because they arise in different places at different times. [54]
Two traditional principles have served as the basis for the involvement of linguists in social is... more Two traditional principles have served as the basis for the involvement of linguists in social issues, namely the vinciple of error correction and the principle of debt incurred (Labov, 1982). It is argued that an additional principle should motivate linguists to take a more proactive role in social issues, the principle of linguistic gratuity. One such proactive role is involvement in Language Awareness Programs, which are designed to provide an unde-standing of and appreciation for variety in language. This paper considers the rationale for and programmatic structure of two experimental language awareness programs, along with a discussion of some of the ethical issues that need to be considered in the implementation of such progyams. Ethical considerations include the ethics of persuasion and need, of presentation, of representation, of sociocultural change, and of accommodation. An example of a curriculum unit with a humanistic objective, sample exercises drmonstrating the scientific study of language patterning, an exercise with a sociohistorical objective, and an exercise promoting "island quaintness"-i.e., the lexical heritage of the North Carolinian island of Ocrakoke-are appended. (Contains 22 references.) (Author/JP)
Bahamian English: phonology Becky Childs and Walt Wolfram 1. Introduction The Commonwealth of The... more Bahamian English: phonology Becky Childs and Walt Wolfram 1. Introduction The Commonwealth of The Bahamas (henceforth The Bahamas) represents a unique geographic, demographic, and linguistic situation among the islands of the Caribbean and North Atlantic. The ...
University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 2003
Although stable Hispanic populations have existed in some regions of the United States for centur... more Although stable Hispanic populations have existed in some regions of the United States for centuries now (Pefialosa 1980, Fought 2003), rural regions in the Mid-Atlantic South are just beginning to witness the emergence of core Hispanic communities. For example, between 1990 and 2000, North Carolina experienced a higher percentage of growth in its Latin American population than any other state. This status is partly due to the fact that North Carolina, like much of the Southeast and some states in the Midwest, started out the decade with relatively few Hispanics compared to the rest of the country. During the last decade, more than 100,000 new Hispanic residents have moved to North Carolina from Mexico, El Salvador, and other countries in Central and South America. Many of the new residents who come directly from their country of origin have acquired English exclusively in the context of their new surroundings. Though some of the children in these communities now have been born and reared in the United States, Spanish is still their native language and the dominant language for communication in the community. The development of new Hispanic communities in the Southeast United States raises a number of important questions about the development of varieties of English. Who are the immigrants learning their primary English from and how does this affect the emerging English language variety? Is a new, regionally defined ethnic variety of Hispanic English developing in these settings? Do new Latino/a residents accommodate the local dialect traits of their cohort English-speaking communities, and if so, which community? What aspects of the local dialect are most prominent in their speech and how are they combined with other constellations of English language structures? Does the variety of English show a persistent substrate from 1 Research reported here was supported by the William C. Friday Endowment at North Carolina State University and by NSF Grant BCS No. 9910224. We are grateful to Ron Butters, Becky Childs, Christine Mallinson, Michael Oles, and Tanya Wolfram for assistance with some of the interviewing, and to the staff of the North Carolina Language and Life Project for reactions to an earlier version of this paper. Special thanks to Ron Butters for his collaboration in this project.
Despite extensive research over the past four decades, a number of issues concerning the historic... more Despite extensive research over the past four decades, a number of issues concerning the historical and current development of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) remain unresolved. This study utilizes a unique sociolinguistic situation – a long-standing, isolated, biracial community situated in a distinctive dialect region of coastal North Carolina – to address questions of localized dialect accommodation and ethnolinguistic distinctiveness in earlier African American English. A comparison of diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables for a sample of four different generations of African Americans and a baseline European American group shows that considerable accommodation of the localized dialect occurred in earlier African American speech. Nonetheless, certain dialect features – e.g., copula absence and 3rd person verbal s marking – were distinctively maintained by African Americans in the face of localized dialect accommodation; and this suggests long-term ethn...
Notwithstanding the popular stereotype of the American South as a uniform re- gion, the Southeast... more Notwithstanding the popular stereotype of the American South as a uniform re- gion, the Southeastern US represents one of the most diverse dialect areas in the Unites States. It is an area of robust dialect diversity, including a full range of ar- eal, social, and ethnic variation. At least three major dialect boundaries cut across the Southeastern states of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, including a seaboard region to the east, a highland region to the west, and an intermediate Coastal Plain and Piedmont region. Within the context of dialect di- versity in the South is a set of enclave dialect communities, that is, communities that have been set apart from mainstream populations and, in some cases, from the major dialect boundaries set forth in dialect surveys such as Kurath (1949), Carver (1987), and Labov, Ash, and Boberg (fc.). Admittedly, the notions of "enclave community" and "historical isolation" are diffi cult to defi ne in a prec...
The investigation of isolated African American enclave communities has been instrumental in refor... more The investigation of isolated African American enclave communities has been instrumental in reformulating the historical reconstruction of earlier African American English and the current trajectory of language change in African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This case study examines a unique enclave sociolinguistic situation – a small, long-term, isolated bi-ethnic enclave community in the mountains of western North Carolina – to further understanding of the role of localized dialect accommodation and ethnolinguistic distinctiveness in the historical development of African American English. The examination of a set of diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables for several of the remaining African Americans in this community supports the conclusion that earlier African American English largely accommodated local dialects while maintaining a subtle, distinctive ethnolinguistic divide. However, unlike the situation in some other African American communities, there is n...
Although sociolinguists have performed a valuable service in challenging folk theories about Afri... more Although sociolinguists have performed a valuable service in challenging folk theories about African American English (AAE), they also have unwittingly participated in the construction of sociolinguistic folklore about variation and change in AAE. Several examples of sociolinguistic myths are presented, including the supraregional myth, the change myth, and the social stratification myth. Data used to challenge the canon of AAE description include empirical studies of different types of rural Southern African American communities as well as ethnographic observation. Historical circumstance, social and professional enculturation, and academic exclusivity are considered in explaining the construction of these questionable axioms about AAE. The examination indicates that unchallenged assumptions, unilateral explanations, and imagined dichotomies need to be scrutinized more critically with regard to the canon of AAE description.
Moribund dialects threatened by the encroachment of healthy varieties of the same language have b... more Moribund dialects threatened by the encroachment of healthy varieties of the same language have been overlooked in establishing the language endangerment canon. Endan-gered varieties of languages as safe as even English exhibit structures not found in main-stream ...
Although stable Hispanic populations have existed in some regions of the United States for centur... more Although stable Hispanic populations have existed in some regions of the United States for centuries, other regions, including the mid-Atlantic South, are just experiencing the emergence of permanent Hispanic communities. This situation o¡ers an ideal opportunity to examine the dynamics of new dialect formation in progress, and the extent to which speakers acquire local dialect traits as they learn English as a second language.We focus on the production of the /ai/ diphthong among adolescents in two emerging Hispanic communities, one in an urban and one in a rural context. Though both English and Spanish have the diphthong /ai/, the Southern regional variant of the benchmark local dialect norm is unglided, thus providing a local dialect alternative. The instrumental analysis of /ai/ shows that there is not pervasive accommodation to the local norm by Hispanic speakers learning English. There is, however, gradient, incremental adjustment of the /ai/, and individual speakers who adopt local cultural values may accommodate to the local dialect pattern.
Several years ago, a couple of colleagues and I submitted a manuscript on language variation and ... more Several years ago, a couple of colleagues and I submitted a manuscript on language variation and education to a major national organization devoted to the teaching of English. One of the manuscript reviewers wondered how relevant our discussion would be since &dquo;today's hot issue is really language, not dialect, bilingualism, not bidialectalism ... the dialect issue has quieted&dquo; (anonymous manuscript reviewer). I found this response disturbing for a couple of reasons. For one, it suggested that concerns for language education issues are somehow driven by socioeducational faddishness rather than authentic educational need. The response further indicated a troubling detachment by members of the professional academy from the everyday struggles and concerns of practitioners. Certainly, the reviewer could not have witnessed the same classrooms I was observing or even listened to some of the casual conversations about language variation among my colleagues in the English department. In the mid-1990s, shortly before the controversial resolution of the Oakland Unified School District regarding Ebonics, I offered the following observation: My sociolinguistic experience over three decades, which includes the heyday of interest in dialects in the sixties and seventies, suggests that, at the grassroots level, we have not made nearly as much progress as we imagine with respect to dialect and education. The confrontational rhetoric may have subsided, but the issues encountered a couple of decades ago remain as relevant in today's schools as they were then. Furthermore, many of the socioeducational inequities that derive from the failure of the educational system to take into account dialect diversity continue to be perpetuated. Can we afford to dismiss or treat with benign neglect fundamental matters relating to dialects and education because they are no longer trendy? I hope not. (Wolfram 1995, 1) AUTHOR'S N01'E: Parts of this article were published in &dquo;Old Wine in New Bottles: Understanding the Oakland Ebonics Controversy,&dquo; Language Leaming and Education Newsletter 4 (1997): 3-8.
This investigation attempts to determine the social distribution and contextual shifting of Afric... more This investigation attempts to determine the social distribution and contextual shifting of African American English (AAE) within rural Southern African American communities. The study compares selective diagnostic AAE variables and features of speech rate and pause in the speech of three recognized sociopolitical leaders in public presentations and sociolinguistic interviews. The results show that there are not significant shifts in the use of AAE from the sociolinguistic interview to the public presentation settings and that leaders do not necessarily align their speech with their age and sex cohorts in terms of vernacular AAE usage. The authors conclude that the relative autonomy of the community, its endocentric versus exocentric orientation, the primary public service constituency of the leader, the different social affiliations and divisions within the community, the speaker’s personal background and history, and the socialized demands and expectations for public presentation ...
Abstract: Discusses Ocracoke English as an endangered dialect, examining the social responsibilit... more Abstract: Discusses Ocracoke English as an endangered dialect, examining the social responsibility linguists and dialectologists should assume in documenting and disseminating information about the state of moribund dialects and describing a ...
... of black-white speech relations (Wolfram 1974b; Bailey and Bassett 1986; Montgom-ery 1994); (... more ... of black-white speech relations (Wolfram 1974b; Bailey and Bassett 1986; Montgom-ery 1994); (3) its historical derivation in terms of donor language sources (Rickford 1986; Bailey and Maynor 1987; Montgomery and Mishoe, forth-coming; Montgomery and Kirk 1996); and (4 ...
Great linguistic diversity existed at the time Africans were brought to North America, both in th... more Great linguistic diversity existed at the time Africans were brought to North America, both in the ancestral languages of West Africa and in the developing English language in the Americas. The earliest waves of slaves from Africa spoke different native languages, represented different levels of proficiency in English, and interacted linguistically in quite varied contact situations, depending on their geographic location and social situation. There is thus no reason to think that there was a seamless transition to a homogenized variety of English in the United States. The issue is not the existence of diversity in earlier African American speech but the nature of the variation and the delimitation of relevant sociolinguistic, sociohistorical, and sociocultural factors that might have accounted for it. Wolfram, Thomas, and Green (forthcoming) use a unique sociolinguistic situation involving a long-standing insular biracial community in coastal North Carolina to demonstrate how earlier African Americans might have accommodated to the distinct regional variety associated with Outer Banks English (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1995, 1996; Wolfram, Hazen, and Schilling-Estes 1999) while, at the same time, maintaining selective ethnolinguistic markers that set apart the African American community from its European American cohorts. Such evidence points to regionally based variation in speech norms among different groups of African Americans. This investigation considers a different but equally important dimension of variation in earlier African American speech: the role of intracommunity, individual differences. To what extent did speech vary among African Americans within the same community? Another important question is the role of individual variation in small, historically isolated communities. To what extent do individuals show distinctive speech in communities where "everybody knows everybody"? Recent research by Dorian (1994)
Dialectologists traditionally assume that language change in historically isolated, enclave commu... more Dialectologists traditionally assume that language change in historically isolated, enclave communities is more conservative than that in more widely dispersed, mainstream populations. 1 Though they acknowledge the potential for independent, internal linguistic change in such language varieties, the role of innovation tends to be overlooked in favor of the relic assumption, namely, that dialect forms in peripheral dialects will remain relatively static and resistant to language innovation. Indeed, Andersen (1988) maintains that this assumption has led researchers to slight the role of system-internal innovations in language in peripheral communities in favor of explanations grounded in hypothetical (and often unlikely or even impossible) contact situations resulting in the diffusion of change from outside areas. Andersen notes, there are internally motivated innovations which arise independently of any external stimulus. These too have an areal dimension and may appear to spread merely because they arise in different places at different times. [54]
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Papers by Walter Wolfram