The role of Dutch in the development of East Anglian English

2013

Dutch speakers may or may not have contributed a certain amount of lexical material to modern East Anglian dialects. There is a much stronger case to be made, however, for arguing that Dutch speakers did have a rather profound infl uence on the morphology of East Anglian English, dating from the time when almost forty percent of the population of the capital of East Anglia, Norwich, were refugees from the Low Countries. That infl uence was indirect, and mediated through mechanisms of linguistic change associated with language contact.

Diffusion, drift, and the irrelevance of media influence

2014

A Tale of Two Copulas: Language-Contact Speculations on First-Millennium England

2011

English Dialect “Default Singulars,” Was versus Were, Verner's Law, and Germanic Dialects

2008

A current suggestion in the variationist literature is that the predominance of forms like we was in nonstandard varieties of English is predictable in that was-generalization represents a case of the “default singular.” I argue that while the principle of the default singular is a sound one, it is not appropriate as an explanation for was-generalization. What is involved is not a matter of singular versus plural but of r-forms of the past tense of to be versus s-forms, with forms like were, war , wor representing the r-variant and was, wiz , wus the s-variant. The ancient Germanic s/r alternation has been leveled out in most dialects over the past millennium. Examination of Germanic dialec…

The Anthropological Setting of Polysynthesis

2017

Abstract A sociolinguistically oriented study of polysynthesis literature reveals one rather striking observation. Varieties often cited as being incontrovertibly polysynthetic include languages from many different language families and different areas of the world. But many of these languages have a number of social characteristics in common: they are spoken in relatively small, traditional, non-industrialized communities, over relatively small territories. This chapter suggests that this is not a coincidence. There seems to be considerable agreement in the literature, for instance, that polysynthetic languages are ‘highly’, ‘extremely’, or ‘extraordinarily’ complex. And the literature on …

Hickey Raymond (ed.) 2012. Areal Features of the Anglophone World Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. viii+500.

2013

The Spread of English

2013

English descends from a set of Germanic dialects spoken 4,000 years or so ago in a small area of the far south of Scandinavia. The arrival of Germanic speakers on the island of Britain a millennium and a half ago led to the growth of the language we now call English. This language remained confined to this island for most of its history and, indeed, was not spoken in all parts of the island until extremely recently. During the last five centuries native-speaker English also spread to the Western Hemisphere and then to the Southern Hemisphere, leading to the development of new varieties of the language in the colonised areas, but also to the massive loss of indigenous languages in the Americ…

On the sociolinguistic typology of linguistic complexity loss

2012

Published version of an article in the journal: Language Documentation & Conservation. Also available from the publisher at: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/4521 Open access. The nature of the human language faculty is the same the world over, and has been so ever since humans became human. This paper, however, considers the possibility that, because of the influence which social structure can have on language structure, this common faculty may produce structurally different types of language under different sociolinguistic conditions. Changing sociolinguistic conditions in the modern world are likely to have the consequence that, in time, the only languages remaining in the world will be sever…