New Dialect Formation

This book details the development of eleven modal auxiliaries in late 18th- and 19th-century Canadian English in a framework of new-dialect formation. The study assesses features of the modal auxiliaries, tracing influences to British and American input varieties, parallel developments, or Canadian innovations. The findings are based on the Corpus of Early Ontario English, pre-Confederation Section, the first electronic corpus of early Canadian English. The data, which are drawn from newspapers, diaries and letters, include original transcriptions from manuscript sources and texts from semi-literate writers. While the overall results are generally coherent with new-dialect formation theory, the Ontarian context suggests a number of adaptations to the current model. In addition to its general Late Modern English focus, New-Dialect Formation in Canada traces changes in epistemic modal functions up to the present day, offering answers to the loss of root uses in the central modals. By comparing Canadian with British and American data, important theoretical insights on the origins of the variety are gained. The study offers a sociohistorical perspective on a still understudied variety of North American English by combining language-internal features with settlement history in this first monograph-length, diachronic treatment of Canadian English in real time.

Shetland dialect, the northernmost Scots variety, is something of a conundrum. Although most of its features place it at the end of the Northern Scots dialect continuum, some lexical, phonological and structural features resemble characteristics of more southerly Scots dialects; in particular those of the east central counties and the North-East. This essay approaches this problem from the point of view of recent work on new dialect formation, demonstrating that many of the features associated with this phenomenon -koinéisation, focussing, and the founder effect, among others -can be postulated for the development of Shetland dialect. Because this new dialect was formed further back in time than those previously studied, the pattern of development is rather more complex and difficult to describe than for those formed in the 19th century; moreover, the developing Scots dialect was for a lengthy period in contact with its close relative Norn in the islands. Because of the latter's associations with local identity, indeed, we could see this as a further founder effect. The essay demonstrates that present-day Shetland dialect was formed in the early 19th century from the supraregional koiné of the original 16th and 17th century Scots-speaking settlers and the heavily Norn-influenced Scots of the first and second generations of islanders who no longer had Norn as a mother tongue.

A study of modal auxiliaries in early Canadian English, with a focus on can/may, which argues for the increased adoption of heuristic methods in corpus linguistics. The alternatives are not very attractive: the present paper suggests that (in 2008) 16 additional specialist historical corpora would have been needed "to reach hard and fast conclusions" about the development of Canadian English in the 18th and 19th centuries. Today, that number has not been significantly reduced, despite the (exciting) big data methods that have come into use since this paper was published.

This paper discusses the development of medieval Irish English (MIrE) within the model of new-dialect formation (NDF) (Trudgill 2004). In particular, the processes of interdialect development, reallocation and focussing are discussed with respect to data from sixteen MIrE poems from Harley 913 (c.1330). The data show traces of NDF, especially with respect to dialect mixing and novel forms, but they also show a lack of focussing in comparison to the model of NDF and to contemporary Middle English poems. I suggest that this lack of focussing is due to the lack of a standardised variety of English in general. In addition, factors such as the amount of contact between the settlers and the identity of the old(er) versus the new(er) settlers might have played a role as well. Thus my paper hopes to contribute to the discussion on new-dialect formation in general, and the development of MIrE in particular.