In this book, Stroik and Putnam take on Turing's challenge. They argue that the narrow syntax – the lexicon, the Numeration, and the computational system – must reside, for reasons of conceptual necessity, within the performance systems.
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 12:52:04 -0700 From: Stefan Dollinger <stefan.dollinger@univie.ac.at> Subject: Legacies of Colonial English: Studies in Transported Dialects
EDITOR: Hickey, Raymond TITLE: Legacies of Colonial English SUBTITLE: Studies in Transported Dialects SERIES: Studies in English Language PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press YEAR: 2004
Stefan Dollinger, University of Vienna
DESCRIPTION:
The present volume fulfils a much-felt need in the area of historical English linguistics for a one-volume compendium on the developments of the English language in colonial and postcolonial settings. While previous contributions, e.g. the monumental Cambridge History of the English language (CHEL), especially vol. VI: North America, V: English 1776-1997 (Algeo 2001), vol. V: English in Britain and overseas: origins and development (Burchfield 1994), and IV: 1776-1997 (Romaine 1998), provide a wealth of information on these varieties, the present volume unites contributions on Englishes from six continents, incorporating recent, and sometimes controversial lines of argument into a single volume. The contributions follow, by and large, three aims: first, they should "bring into focus just what input varieties were probably operative in individual colonies", second "examine the extent to which dialect mixing and/or language contact have been responsible for the precise structure of overseas varieties" and third, attempt an "evaluation of the different reasons for extraterritorial varieties having the form which they show" (Hickey, p. 1). These aims are met by all contributions of the volume, albeit from different theoretical perspectives.
Aimed at "scholars and students of English language and linguistics, particularly those interested in sociolinguistics, historical linguistics and dialectology" (cover blurb), the present volume unites recent approaches in a way that complements the CHEL volumes. The volume is organized into four parts, rounded off by three appendices, including a checklist of nonstandard variables, a very useful map section, a glossary of terms and three indices, which facilitate reference searches. The 21 contributions by in total 19 scholars bring together many of the internationally most renowned experts in the field.
Raymond Hickey's introduction sets the tone for both a quite comprehensive as well as inspiring volume that sets the standards for future work. While in one way or another, all contributions focus on the "core 200-year period" of English language emigration between the early 1600s and 1800s (p. 1), it is stressed from the beginning that "mainly regional forms" (ibid) of the lower social classes, with some limited input from the educated middle classes formed the base of what were to become colonial Englishes. The introduction serves as a theoretical backdrop, introducing major concepts, such as the founder principle, colonial lag, the concept of ebb and flow and the problems of false leads and folk dialectology in the study of colonial Englishes, and concludes with a discussion of three main types of language spread, contact (and all its subtypes), language shift and language internally motivated changes.
Part I: Out of Britain Part I features Hickey's "Dialects of English and their transportation", Caroline Macaffee's "Scots and Scottish English" and Hickey's "Development and diffusion of Irish English". Together, these three papers give a concise and clear account of the three main source regions of transplanted varieties of English (p. 33), presenting features that were transplanted, those that were not, others that were lost or are recessive, overseas mergers and the possibility of early adaptation in 'Ship English' on the overseas passage. The reader gets a detailed introduction to these source regions, their languages, sub areas, and varieties, such as Lowland and Highland Scots, Gaelic influences (Mcaffee, p. 61), Central and Ulster Scots (p. 69ff, p. 102, 108), the latter of which being of prime importance to much of the new world. Hickey's contribution on Irish English is not only a concise history of the development of Irish, but is backed by his grand-scale "Survey of Irish English Usage" that substantiates claims on earlier Irish English (p. 98f). This excellent section, as a whole, sets the linguistic background for the volume by documenting the emigration patterns from the British Isles and defining a great number of those features that were soon to be heard -- and developed further -- on shipping routes and in newly settled lands.
Part II: The New World The second part deals with varieties of English in North America and the Caribbean in a total of nine papers.
To begin with the most northerly variety, two papers are dedicated to Canadian English (CanE). Jack Chambers's "Canadian Dainty: the rise and decline of Briticisms in Canada" provides not only an excellent account of the sociolinguistically highly interesting phase of massive 19th century British immigration to mainland Canadian, but also reveals the broader picture of English input, via the USA and Britain (p.225-28). Anecdotal 19th century evidence is complemented by data from Chambers's Dialect Topography of Canada, a project quite unique in its sample size, coverage and innovative file sharing, which makes the database publicly available for online searches (http://dialect.topography.chass.utoronto.ca/). Chambers's apparent-time data from the Ontario Golden Horseshoe, the metropolitan area around Toronto, are taken to document the decline of Briticisms in Ontario English over the last three-quarters of a century. Chambers shows while CanE loses some of its most distinct features that set it apart from American English, Dialect Topography research continues "to turn up numerous other variants which boldly mark Canadian and American differences" (p. 239). Canada is continuing to stand strong, linguistically, so to speak.
Sandra Clarke's "The legacy of British and Irish English in Newfoundland" introduces the 'other', quite distinct, dialect of CanE, which is a relic variety. The settlement history of Newfoundland has been documented "to a degree virtually unprecedented in the history of the New World" (p. 242), which allows us to reconstruct input features more precisely than in many other settings. Most striking is the case of non-focusing in Newfoundland English, as it "continues to reflect the major dialect division grounded in its two source dialects [Irish English and south-western British English]" (p. 250), leading Clarke to the conclusion that "in closed or peripheral communities [such as pre-WWII Newfoundland], dialect focusing may be remarkably slow to take hold" (p. 258). This finding seems to contrast with Wolfram and Schilling-Estes's conclusion (see below) that language change can take place fairly rapidly in peripheral dialect areas (p. 187), which is an indicator that more research is needed in this area (Clarke p. 258f).
Moving farther south, Merja Kytö's article "The emergence of American English: evidence from seventeenth-century records in New England" provides an inventory of linguistic features based her substantial pilot corpus of materials from the 1620s and 1720s, labelled the "Early American English Corpus", which includes speech-related texts such as trial depositions (p. 132f). While the informants mainly come from the educated sections of society, the Early American English Corpus also includes some texts by less-educated and "obviously untutored" writers (p. 133). The background of the settlers, mostly Puritan, is documented both geographically (p. 127) as well as sociodemographically. Of special interest is the information on Wiltshire emigrants from the 1630s, including detailed figures on the numbers and precise origins of emigrants (p. 128f). Kytö's inventory provides a very useful variable checklist serving as a "springboard for further work" (p. 124). By stating that the dialect features she discovered "rul[e] out the use of even partly normalized or modernized text editions" (p. 151), she arrives at a finding that would suggest a reconsideration of some practices of historical corpus compilation.
Raymond Hickey's contribution views the development of Caribbean Englishes from a somewhat unusual point of view: while all three possible developmental scenarios -- regional British input, early creolization and independent development -- are acknowledged, he attempts to "put the case for English input and so complement other views already available in the field" (p. 326). Barbados is the prime focus in his paper called "English dialect input to the Caribbean", which organizes Early Barbadian English into four periods between 1627-1900 (p. 334). Highlighting early British English immigration, including a sizeable Irish contingent (p. 336), Hickey attempts to trace forms of Caribbean English back to regional BrE. While discussing phonological, morphological and syntactical features, his focus is on the latter. Hickey concludes that lines of historical continuity do not emerge as clearly as has been stated previously (p. 351), and leaves us with a stock-taking of pros and cons of the input scenarios for habitual does (+ be) in Irish and Barbadian English, showing the complexity of the issue (p. 351f).
Laura Wright continues is some respect the input question to Caribbean English in her investigation of court depositions from people sentenced to early seventeenth century Virginia and Bermuda. Her paper, entitled "The language of transported Londoners: third-person-singular present-tense markers in depositions from Virginia and the Bermudas, 1607-1624", provides insights from the perspective of children and adolescents on the lower end of the social stratum. Wright uses manuscript data, telling the tales of "young vagrants, picked up on the streets of London to be deported" (p. 160). Unfortunately, these Court Minute Books do not directly document the speech of the children who were actually sentenced to overseas, but include the pleads and testimonies of witnesses from the same milieu. While these narratives are mostly in reported speech and very formal in style (p. 162), they may nevertheless allow some fascinating glimpses on approximations of early 17th century lower class varieties of English. Wright shows that the 3rd p. sg. present tense was marked by -s, - th, as well as zero, stressing the hitherto relatively neglected importance of the latter. Distinguishing between indicative and subjunctive uses and their subfunctions, she shows that these markers were overlapping (p. 168).
Michael Montgomery's paper "Solving Kurath's puzzle: establishing the antecedents of the American Midland region" draws attention to an hitherto empirically unresolved issue in American regional dialectology (Pedersen 2001: 270). The debate over the legitimacy of an American Midland variety is brought one step further towards a solution. The area was first proposed by Hans Kurath more or less by default as a result of the area's settlement history, while lacking substantial linguistic evidence, thus Kurath's 'puzzle' (p. 313f). Montgomery stresses the importance of early Ulster-Scotch/Scotch-Irish migration for the formation of a Midland region. Its linguistic features, however, do not become apparent in the areas of phonology or vocabulary, which have been traditionally used in linguistic atlas surveys, but only in morphology and syntax (p. 316-20). While his evidence is taken from reference books of regional English that would need to be further substantiated by empirical corpus studies, this article demonstrates nicely that the choice of linguistic levels may seriously influence one's search for linguistic connections.
Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes focus on relatively isolated coastal communities in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina in their paper entitled "Remnant dialects in the coastal United States". They describe the "development and maintenance of transported dialects in relative isolation" in seven mid-Atlantic speech communities (p. 172) which are defined by geographic remoteness, economic autonomy, dense, multiplex social networks and the existence of a historical core group of resident families (p. 174-77). Their condensed, highly stimulating discussion of their quest for potential BrE donor varieties in combination with the independent development of three phonological variables points to the problem of verification of the founder effect. They argue that empirical verification would necessitate complete dialect lineages of all varieties involved, which may be elusive in many cases (p. 182). Their analysis shows that even very conservative communities "are indeed dynamic and cannot be described simply by appealing to dialect conservatism" (p. 197). The final statements apply to all studies of transported dialects: "the possibility of multiple causality ought to caution us to be wary of unwarranted assumptions about how remnant dialects were formed and how they have been moulded and remoulded over time" (p. 197).
Edgar W. Schneider's article "The English dialect heritage of the southern United States" provides the broader picture of development in the American South (SAmE). Starting with popular notions of colonial lag in the American South, Schneider surveys linguistic features by matching them with possible donor areas in Britain. The phonological evidence reconfirms that the Southern source regions in "southern England, with the south- western component being by far the strongest of all" (p. 281). While the lexical survey is less conclusive, the study of grammatical features indicates that morphological and syntactical features of SAmE "represent more than a simple continuation of English structures" (p. 291), allowing some kind of drift, as well as independent developments. Based on these findings, Schneider introduces a distinction between two different types of Southern English, "Traditional Southern", associated with the antebellum South and "New Southern", which is "largely a product of the twentieth century" (p. 301).
Another interesting study is Shana Poplack and Sali Taglimonte's paper "Back to the present: verbal -s in the (African American) English diaspora" (AAE), which discusses the much-disputed origin of the role of verbal -s in AAE. Their study is based on their own Samana material as well as Elisabeth Godrey's rural Devon English data (p. 203). While Samana English (Dominican Republic) goes back to the early 19th century, it has been "in minimal if any" contact with other English varieties (p. 209). Their findings produce convincing evidence that "verbal -s variability was already inherent in the language transported" to the New World (p. 220). Their results show that not only the variables' forms, but also their distribution and, by implication, the underlying constraints, match surprisingly closely in both varieties (e.g. p. 213). This strong evidence allows the conclusion that verbal -s variability must have been present in a common British ancestor variety prior to departure (p. 219).
Part III: The southern hemisphere Six contributions discuss the development southern hemisphere Englishes: "South African English", by Roger Lass, "English input to Australia", by Scott F. Kiesling and "English input to New Zealand", by Elizabeth Gordon and Peter Trudgill, discuss the three major varieties. Two highly interesting case studies on "English on the Falklands" by Andrea Sudbury and "English transported to the South Atlantic Ocean: Tristan da Cunha" by Daniel Schreier, provide the developmental picture of two, quite distinct, less widely used varieties of long standing. The picture is rounded off by Suzanne Romaine's paper on pidgin and creole languages, entitled "English input to the English-lexicon pidgins and creoles of the Pacific".
Elizabeth Gordon and Peter Trudgill's contribution is in many ways blessed with a superior database of tape recordings from the 1940s, featuring the speech of elderly New Zealanders. As shown in other recent publications, they are in the position to compare actual speech in an apparent time perspective and draw important theoretical conclusion in their paper "English input to New Zealand" (e.g. Trudgill 2004). Focussing on Pakeha (as opposed to Maori) English, i.e. the English of the descendents of European settlers, one of the most important conclusions of their studies may be the increase of importance of exact demographics and what may be called a more mechanistic approach to language change, by merging the principles of majority input, markedness and founder effect into a coherent theory. They, therefore, ascribe "the similarities between Australian and New Zealand English to the fact that they were formed from similar mixtures consisting of similar British Isles dialects in similar proportions", which also accounts for the internal homogeneity of New Zealand English (p. 453). This bring a certain element of linguistic determinism into the formation of new varieties that seems to have, in its very careful application, great potential to vastly improving our knowledge of the processes involved (cf. Trudgill 2004: 113-28).
Roger Lass's article "South African English" takes a somewhat different approach to the genesis of his variety than the one expressed by Gordon and Trudgill, and thus provides much food for thought. After outlining the settlement history of South Africa and the southern trichotomy, i.e. the southern hemisphere's three English sociolects, and its application to South African English (SAE) (Conservative SAE, Respectable SAE and Extreme SAE (p. 373)), the phonological features of SAE are detailed. The morphosyntax of the variety seems to show "nothing that can be treated systematically" (p. 380) and therefore does not take up much space, while only some examples of the rich stock of loanwords in SAE are illustrated. In the light of yet uncollected material from the 1820-70s (p. 383), which as such calls for some scholarly attention, Lass concludes with a necessarily speculative ontogeny of SAE, which needs to be empirically verified once the data is made available.
Most striking in the context of the present volume, however, is Lass's thesis that "All ETE's [extra-territorial Englishes]" were "swamped by southern [English English], though relics may remain" (p. 368). This south [eastern] English "swamping", which is claimed to have supplanted most features of earlier non-southern English English migrations, first outlined in Lass (1990), does not comply with Trudgill's process of new- dialect formation (2004) and both ideas constitute a prime dispute in the field. It remains to be seen which view, or what kind of a combination of both, may prevail.
Scott F. Kiesling's "English input in Australia" provides settlement information and aims to explain the homogeneity of Australian English. Listing salient features of Australian English at different points in time, he discusses English English, Irish English and Scottish English influences. It is unfortunate in this context that no advantage was taken from some work on early Australian English, e.g. sections in Leitner (1984), Fritz' (1998). On the whole, this contribution is heavily focussed on social criteria and concepts, some of which lend themselves well to circular explanations. It may be doubted that children in early Australia "would have noticed that the prestige variety in the colony was that of south-eastern English" and that "For the children of the Irish the consequence would have been a choice in favour of the socially preferred [south-eastern English] variety" (p. 428). Rather, it seems that children growing up in early Australia would adopt to the dialect of the majority of their peers (cf. Chambers 1995: 167f). Kiesling includes a section on Aboriginal English, which is most welcome in its effort to provide a comprehensive picture of Australian English.
Andrea Sudbury and Daniel Schreier both deal with less-widely used varieties of colonial English, albeit very different ones. Sudbury's article on Falkland English investigates the question why Falkland Island English (FIE) has not yet focused to the extent witnessed in other colonial varieties. Making the best of an unfortunately poorly documented settlement history (p. 403), she documents features of Falkland Island English, providing a detailed checklist for cross-comparisons, concluding that while the formation of this variety has differed from other colonial varieties, "a number of features in modern-day FIE may well be relic features, retained from the founding dialects" (p. 415).
Schreier's paper on Tristan da Cunha may, in contrast, draw from the very well documented extralinguistic history of this South Atlantic island. Settled in 1815 by the English (p. 389), with a current population of around 300, this location is "most unusual" (p. 387) in many respects. Most importantly for the historical linguist, truly unusual, yet exciting information is provided in three tables (p. 394, 395) listing the origins of all 16 settlers on the island in the 19th century and all five nonanglophone settlers. For eleven years, only one woman lived on the island, before six women from St. Helena (p. 397), potential pidgin speakers, arrived. After outlining the settlement history and the island's almost complete isolation till the mid-1900s, Schreier details some characteristics of Tristan da Cunha English, and concludes that at the present stage of analysis, "even though [Tristan da Cunha English] demonstrates restructuring and mixture, it never creolised as a pidgin" (p. 399).
The role of pidgins and creoles is focussed on in Suzanne Romaine's article, which covers the vast Pacific area. Romaine introduces the terminology by providing a fascinating look at various pidgin and creole varieties. She concentrates on Melanesia and Polynesia and the three main varieties in their main settings: Melanesian Pidgin English -- Tok Pisin, Bislama and Solomon Island Pidgin, as well as Hawai'i Creole English and Pitcairn-Norfolk (p. 457), the latter of which the legacy of the famous HMS Bounty mutineers. The origin issue and the role of Pacific Jargon English, a possible 18th century source, is discussed and illustrated. The discussion lends support to the theory that the emergence of stable pidgins seems to be rare in situations were only two languages are involved (p. 467), which may explain why the role of pidgins in Australia, New Zealand, but possibly also early America and Canada is often below our radar. While Romaine points out that in the data "no clear boundaries emerge between grammar/syntax and the lexicon" (p. 469), a host of linguistic features of pidgins and creoles is nevertheless discussed along standard linguistic levels. When establishing historic links to pidgins and creoles, Romaine points out that much depends on the perspective of the researcher or the nature of the data, which largely comes from European observers and it thus prone to skew our perspective (p. 469). The list of lexical and grammatical/syntactical phenomena is quite extensive and serves as a reminder of the complex interplay of lexical features on their way along grammaticalization paths.
Part IV: English in Asia This final section deals with non-settler derived Englishes in Asia, with some consideration of respective African varieties. Raymond Hickey pens all three contributions on these varieties, which are largely the result of English in the educational systems of various countries. As such, this section reinforces the most welcome link to the field of World Englishes (New Englishes), and extends into English as a lingua franca (cf. Burchfield 1994 for an earlier example). Besides terminological considerations and a general characterization of Asian Englishes, a focus is provided on South Asian English (singular), focusing on India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka in one paper and on South-East Asian Englishes (plural) in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Hong Kong in another paper. The singular and plural uses of English reflect different sociolinguistic backgrounds in these two regions: while English has been geographically contiguous in Southern Asia, this has not been the case in South-East Asia (p. 559).
This section is largely comprised of external history and a description of distinct variables on various linguistic levels, including brief sections on pragmatics and stylistics in some South-East Asian varieties (e.g. p. 565, 579)
Checklist of nonstandard features and map section Appendix 1 is a checklist that identifies nonstandard features of English, which prove to be crucial in the formation of colonial Englishes.
The map section, appendix 3, is most useful and makes the volume stand out in user-friendliness in comparison to the CHEL volumes, especially CHEL IV and VI. For some reason, however, a map of the British counties, a map showing the Bermudas and a complete map of Canada are missing in an otherwise excellent map section.
EVALUATION: SOME CONCEPTS
Founder principle, New-dialect formation vs. Swamping
As indicated above, there seems to be an imminent dispute between Trudgill, Gordon et al.'s new-dialect formation theory, arguing largely from numbers, and Lass' notion of swamping, stating that "southern dialect types [...] win out over (or 'swamp': Lass 1990[]) more 'provincial' northern or western or far southern ones", resorting non-southern English linguistic behaviour to relic status (Lass, p. 367f). Moreover, swamping has been claimed to have taken place in all colonial Englishes "regardless of what other types are represented in the settlement history." (Lass 1990: 267). The incompatibility of these two approaches is directly addressed in Trudgill (2004: 115) and a discussion is pending.
Moreover, perhaps an even more basic discussion centers around the notions of founder principle vs. swamping. The founder principle (Mufwene 1996: 122f) states that contact situations are determined to a large extent by the first settlers occupying the land, while swamping resorts this effect to merely residue status. Not only in the light of neo-Darwinian studies of language change (cf. Ritt 2004), Mufwene's point of view seems to have great potential (1996, 2001). If I tried to pigeonhole the contributions in this volume -- for merely illustrative purposes, without any strong claims concerning the individual scholars' theoretical stances -- the following contributions seem to support, at least implicitly, the notion of the founder principle in one way or another: Gordon and Trudgill (p. 443), explicitly in Chambers (p. 227f), to some extent Kytö (p. 125, 133), Wright (p. 163, 168), Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (p. 182), implicitly by Poplack and Tagliamonte (p. 210), Clarke (p. 244), to some extent by Hickey (p. 333f) -- the notion does seem to come up in Romaine's article on pidgins and creoles. On the other hand, notions of swamping, in one way or another, seem to be propagated, apart from Lass, by Kiesling and Sudbury; Schneider's (p. 301, 271) and Montgomery's (p. 317) contributions are perhaps reflecting a somewhat intermediate position between the two theories. It therefore seems clear that the founder principle has become the view of a majority in the discipline and it remains to be shown over the next years if, and to what extent, the present 'minority view' may revive or influence the prevailing opinion. A most fascinating race seems to have been called on.
Demographics and sociolinguistic concepts
It may be that Occam's Razor, the principle that gives priority to simpler concepts where more than one may explain a phenomenon, might prove useful in sociohistorical linguistics. In the light of Trudgill's theoretical reasoning (1986, 2004), a possible solution seems close at hand: demographics. While Gordon and Trudgill's contribution include social factors in their contribution from the start, they seem to have taken a new approach: instead of starting with social factors in their explanations, they start with detailed demographic information on the immigrants and their input varieties. For levelling processes this would mean that "the loss of demographically (i.e. sociolinguistically marked) variants" (p. 451) is the result of a given variant being used by a minority. Only in a later stage of analysis, key sociolinguistic concepts like prestige, change from above and below come into play. This procedure, outlined in detail in Trudgill (2004: 148-65) is more prone to avoid circular lines of argumentation and is, I find, some kind of Occam's Razor -- keeping complex sociolinguistic concepts out of the game until one cannot move further without them.
Homogeneity of colonial Englishes
This approach would also answer the question of origin of the internal homogeneity in many colonial varieties, such as Australian, New Zealand, mainland Canadian or some American English varieties. Gordon and Trudgill explain the comparative regional uniformity of New Zealand English" as "formed by similar mixtures [...] in similar proportions"(p. 453), which would have to be tested on other colonial varieties. While Trudgill et al.'s broader theory may have the potential to unite much of the existing research under one empirical framework, one caveat remains that its adaptation to pidgin and creole languages is pending.
Variables and correspondences
The case studies in this excellent volume have repeatedly pointed out a number of crucial issues: it is often not enough to identify merely formal correspondences between potentially related varieties, but also their distribution, and, maybe more importantly, their functions or 'constraint hierarchies' (Poplack and Tagliamonte, p. 219) need to be considered. That the choice of linguistic levels and variables is crucial for the endeavour is shown by Montgomery's evidence: what was not detected in phonology or lexis, was found in grammar, which confirms the necessity of morphological and syntactical studies in the colonial context.
Overall assessment
The volume comes very close to the "comprehensive treatment of colonial English" (Hickey, xx) that it aspires to be; an achievement which may be a little marred by the lack of a contribution on African Englishes outside of South Africa. While the respective literature is quoted (Hickey, 6f) and the African second-language background is briefly explored (Hickey, p. 527-30), it would have been nice to include paper dedicated to the varieties of an otherwise often neglected continent, perhaps focusing on the long-standing varieties of Sierra Leone or Liberia. On the other hand, Hickey's forays into Englishes in Asia (part IV) represent an accessible starting point for future research, an endeavour that is admirable in the light of the "unavailability" of other scholars (Hickey, xx).
The amount and quality of information that is packed into the compact format of the present volume, complementing volumes IV, V, and VI of the Cambridge History in important ways, is truly remarkable. It is beyond doubt that Hickey's compilation is bound to become a standard reference work for anyone working on (post)colonial Englishes for many years to come.
REFERENCES
Algeo, John. (ed.) 2001. The Cambridge history of the English language. Vol. VI: English in North America. Cambridge: CUP.
Burchfield, Robert. (ed.) 1994. The Cambridge history of the English language. Vol. V: English in Britain and overseas. Cambridge: CUP.
Chambers, J. K. 1995. Sociolinguistic theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Fritz, Clemens. 1998. "Letters from Early Australia -- Linguistic Variation and Change", Dialectologia et Geolinguistica 6: 25-42.
Lass, Roger. 1990. "Where do extraterritorial Englishes come from? Dialect input and recodification in transported Englishes" -- in: Adamson, Sylvia et al. (eds.) Papers from the 5th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 245-80.
Leitner, Gerhard. 1984. "Australian English or English in Australia: linguistic identity and dependence in Australian broadcast media". English World-Wide. 5/1: 55-85.
Mufwene, Salikoko S. 1996. "The founder principle in creole genesis". Diachronica. 13: 83-134.
Mufwene, Salikoko S. 2001. The ecology of language evolution. Cambridge: CUP.
Pederson, Lee. 2001. "Dialects" -- in: Algeo, John (ed.), 253-90.
Ritt, Nikolaus. 2004. Selfish Sounds and linguistic evolution: a Darwinian approach to language change. Cambridge: CUP.
Romaine, Suzanne. (ed.) 1998. The Cambridge history of the English language. Vol. IV. 1776-1997. Cambridge: CUP.
Trudgill, Peter. 2004. New-dialect formation: the inevitability of colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in contact. Oxford: Blackwell.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Stefan Dollinger's research interests include the history of English, with
a focus on Late Modern English, sociohistorical linguistics and
computational linguistics. He is currently completing his PhD dissertation
on early Ontario English, entitled "The development of Canadian English,
Ontario 1776-1850. A diachronic study of the modal auxiliaries, with a
chapter on standard Canadian English variables from a sociohistorical
perspective" at the University of Vienna, Austria.
