English Language and Culture

Remco Knooihuizen is a postgraduate student in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh, focusing on the sociolinguistics of minority languages in Early Modern Europe. As such he has a keen interest in the (population) history of this period, which can be extremely relevant to linguistic developments

Widespread minority language shift in Early Modern Europe is often ascribed to restrictive language policies and the migration of both majority- and minority-language speakers. However, without a sociohistorically credible account of the mechanisms through which these events caused a language shift, these policies lack explanatory power. Inspired by research on ‘language histories from below,’ we present an integrated sociohistorical and linguistic account that can shed light on the procresses taking place during a case of language shift in the 17th and 18th centuries. We present and analyze demographic data on the immigration and integration of French speakers in previously Dutch-speaking Dunkirk in this period, showing how moderate intermarriage of immigrants and locals could have represented a motive and a mechanism for language shift against a backdrop of larger language-political processes. We then discuss the modern language-shift dialect of Dunkirk in comparison with different dialects of French. The linguistic data suggests a large influence from the dialects of migrants, underlining their role in the language shift process. The combination of sociohistorical and linguistic evidence gives us a better understanding of language shift in this period, showing the value of an integrated ‘from below’ approach.

The Shetland dialect of Scots does not contain preaspiration, a phonetic areal feature that is otherwise prevalent in languages around the North Atlantic Ocean. While it is understood that Shetland’s pre-language shift Scandinavian variety, Norn, did contain preaspiration, an analysis of phonetic transcriptions from Jakob Jakobsen’s An Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland, collected in the 1890s, shows a more complicated picture: preaspiration occurs in only 11% of relevant vowel-stop sequences, but in 92% of relevant sonorant-stop and sonorant- fricative sequences.

This article provides a contact-based explanation of the gradual disappearance of preaspiration from Shetland. The proposed trajectory of change is made up of a series of language and dialect contact-induced sub-changes and reflects the influence of Norn as well as of successive waves of immigration from the Scottish mainland. In the first stage, during language shift, preaspiration in vowel-stop sequences disappeared as it (co-)signaled a phonemic contrast in Norn not neces- sary for Scots, but (non-phonemic) preaspiration in sonorant-stop/fricative sequences was retained. In a later stage, dialect contact after renewed immigration from the Scottish mainland caused voiceless stops to be unaspirated, removing the phonetic basis for preaspiration also in the remaining contexts.

The study highlights the different susceptibility of phonetic and phonemic features in contact-induced change and calls for further integration of second-language acquisition study and variationist sociolinguistics into historical linguistics.

[PDF to follow when published]

Although Faroese exhibits extensive linguistic variation and rapid social change, the language is near-uncharted territory in variationist sociolinguistics. This article discusses some recent social changes in Faroese society in connection with language change, focusing in particular on the development of a de facto spoken standard, Central Faroese. Demographic mobility, media and education may be contributing to this development in different ways. Two linguistic variables are analysed as a first step towards uncovering the respective roles of standardisation, dialect levelling and dialect spread as contributing processes in the formation of Central Faroese: morphological variation in -st endings and phonological variation in -ir and -ur endings. The analysis confirms previously described patterns of geographically constrained variation, but no generational or stylistic differences indicative of language change are found, nor are there clear signs that informants use Central Faroese. The results may in part be due to the structure of the corpus used.