New dialect formation and contact-induced reallocation: three case studies from the english fens

Abstract

When mutually intelligible, but distinct dialects of the same language come into contact, linguistic accommodation occurs. When this contact is long-term, for example in the emerging speech communities of post-colonial settings, such as the English in Australia and New Zealand (Trudgill 1986; Trudgill 2004; Britain, in press); oras a result of, say, New Town development (Omdal 1977; Kerswill and Williams 1992, 2000; Dyer 2002; Britain and Simpson, forthcoming); indentured labour schemes (Barz and Siegel 1988; Siegel 1987, 1997; Moag 1979, Domingue 1981, Mesthrie 1992); or land reclamation (Britain 1991, 1997a 1997b, 2002a 2002b), the accommodation can become routinised and permanent, and, through the process of koineisation, a new dialect can emerge when children acquire accommodated language as their Ll . These new dialects are characteristically less 'complex', show evidence of intermediate 'interdialect' forms, and contain fewer marked or minority linguistic features than the dialects which came together in the original mix. In this paper we wish to highlight another possible outcome of koineisation, namely reallocation. Reallocation occurs where two or more variants in the dialect mix survive the levelling process but are refunctionalised, evolving new social or linguistic functions in the new dialect. We provide a range of examples of social and linguistic reallocation, from a number of historical and contemporary speech communities around the world, the dialects of which have developed from long-term contact and linguistic accommodation. We then focus on examples of phonological, morphological and lexical reallocation in one speech community affected by dialect contact, the Fens of Eastern England.