Summary Details
| Query: |
Young People's Varieties
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| Author: | Claire Bowern | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Historical Linguistics
Sociolinguistics Anthropological Linguistics |
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| Summary: |
Regarding query: http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/17/17-679.html#1
Some time ago I sent a query to the list about the existence of so-called ''young people's varieties'' - that is, cases of rapid language change among fluent speakers of particular languages. The phenomenon is particularly associated with the last generation of speakers of certain Australian Indigenous languages. I received responses from the following people, plus two others who asked not to be included here. Many thanks to everyone who emailed me. ---- Susan Burt: immigrant Hmong (in Wisconsin) Susan referred me to two papers of hers involving language shift: ���How to Get Rid of Unwanted Suitors: Advice from Hmong-American Women of Two Generations.��� Journal of Politeness Research, vol 1, no. 2, pp. 219-236, 2005. ���Growing Up Shifting: Immigrant Children, Their Families and the Schools��� (with Hua Yang) in Kristin Denham and Anne Lobeck (eds). Language in the School Curriculum, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Pp. 29-39. 2005. [I suspect that some of these young people's varieties are 'shifted' varieties, but it's not clear to me that all are. CB] ---- Brian �� Curn��in: Irish I think Schmidt's 'Young people's Dyirbal' is a great work. Very similar phenomena are found in Irish. Traditional acquisition is very different to modern acquisition, lowest common denominator effects, bilingualism, code-switching, massive reduction in native vocab, etc., I have a forth-coming monograph which deals with some of these issues 'The Irish of Iorras Aithneach' 2006. ---- Peter Daniels suggested this is a characteristic of language death (as suggested by Nancy Dorian). [My impression from reading Nancy Dorian's work is that she was as much concerned with intra-generation variation as with variation between age-groups. Indeed, she was able to rule out age as a factor for the variety of Scots Gaelic she worked on. There's quite extensive variation in the last generation of some Australian languages but this is not exactly what I'm thinking of here.] ---- Gil`ad Zuckermann: Israeli The case of Israeli is interesting since there are obviously AETALECTS, inter alia due to Americanization and inter alia due to the extensive prescriptive and puristic attempts, which were partially successful with the older generations. ---- Richard Hudson pointed me in the direction of his discussion of 'age grading' in his sociolinguistics text (CUP, 2nd Ed. 1996, p 14-15) and Peter Unseth mentioned Lithgow, David. 1973. ''Language change on Woodlark Island.'' Oceania 44: 101-8 ---- Thus in summary, it's fairly clear that severe age-related differences are found around the world, and that it is not necessarily associated with language death, although it certainly can be. It's also clear that the more extreme examples are all in situations of intense language contact (although we expected that). -------------- Dr Claire Bowern Linguistics, Rice University Houston TX |
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| LL Issue: | 17.1142 | |
| Date Posted: | 17-Apr-2006 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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