27 juin - Paul Kerswill (Lancaster) - Dialect contact and innovation

[Isabelle LEGLISE]

Dans le cadre du programme "Langues en contacts" de la Fédération CNRS 
Typologie et Universaux Linguistiques
Axe : "Typologies, appareils théoriques et méthodes : propositions dans 
le domaine du contact de langues"
(Responsables : Isabelle Léglise et Bettina Migge)

Nous recevrons *Paul Kerswill* (Lancaster U.), le vendredi 27 juin, de 
9h30 à 12h.

*Dialect contact and innovation *(cf. résumé ci-dessous)*
**
Les personnes intéressées sont les bienvenues,

*Plan d'accès au campus CNRS de Villejuif : 
_http://www.vjf.cnrs.fr/celia/Fr/Plan.htm
___ <http://www.vjf.cnrs.fr/celia/Fr/Plan.htm>
**************************************
Dialect contact and innovation

Paul Kerswill
Department of Linguistics and English Language
Lancaster University

vendredi 27 juin*
*Campus CNRS de Villejuif,
Batiment D. salle 511 (5e etage)

Contemporary language change can, in my view, usefully be approached
from (1) a variationist sociolinguistic and (2) a dialect contact point
of view. Taking such a view brings me close to William Labov, in both
his New York City work (1966) and the dialect geography he has engaged
in more recently (Labov, Ash and Boberg 2006), and Peter Trudgill, from
his variationist roots in Norwich (1974) via his specific interest in
dialect contact in his 1986 book to his later, almost
anti-sociolinguistic work on the formation of New Zealand English
(2004). Like Trudgill, but unlike Labov, I see dialect contact as a
crucial motivator of some but not all language change, and human
mobility in turn as the major cause of dialect contact. My first contact
study was in Norway in the early 80s, where I looked at the long-term
accommodation of rural speakers who had migrated to the city of Bergen
(Kerswill 1994). The second study was of the New Town of Milton Keynes,
north of London, in which we found that adolescents (rather than younger
children or adults) were in the lead in focusing on a new accent
(Kerswill & Williams 2000). The third study (Williams & Kerswill 1999)
viewed the emergent dialect in Milton Keynes in the context of the
dialect geography of Britain. This led to a model of dialect diffusion
and dialect levelling, reported in Kerswill (2003). The issue of a model
which could include innovation became pressing, and led to the fourth
contact study which investigated the speech of young working-class
people of different ethnic backgrounds in London (Cheshire et al. 2008
in press; Kerswill et al. 2008 in press). Finally, our fifth contact
study (2007-2010) is investigating the sociolinguistic patterning of the
emergence and maintenance of multicultural varieties of English in London.

My talk will concentrate on our first London project. I will deal mainly
with phonetic/phonological variation, arguing that rapid linguistic
change in Western Europe, at least in phonetics/phonology, is being
propelled by the massive immigration to the metropolitan areas of
Europe. This leads to surprising phonological changes, and a complex
interplay of innovation, dialect levelling and dialect diffusion.


References

Cheshire, Jenny, Fox, Sue, Kerswill, Paul & Torgersen, Eivind (2008 in
press). Ethnicity, friendship network and social practices as the motor
of dialect change: linguistic innovation in London. Sociolinguistica 22.
Special issue on Dialect Sociology, edited by Alexandra Lenz and Klaus
J. Mattheier.
Kerswill, Paul (1994). Dialects converging: rural speech in urban
Norway. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kerswill, Paul (2003). Dialect levelling and geographical diffusion in
British English. In D. Britain and J. Cheshire (eds.) Social
dialectology. In honour of Peter Trudgill. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 223--243.
Kerswill, Paul, Torgersen, Eivind & Fox, Susan (2008 in press).
Reversing 'drift': Innovation and diffusion in the London diphthong
system. Language Variation and Change 20.
Kerswill, Paul & Williams, Ann (2000). Creating a new town koine:
children and language change in Milton Keynes. Language in Society 29:
65--115.
Labov, William (1966). The social stratification of English in New York
City. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Labov, William, Ash, Sharon and Boberg, Charles (2006). The Atlas of
North American English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Trudgill, Peter (1974). The social differentiation of English in
Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Trudgill, Peter (1986). Dialects in contact. Oxford: Blackwell.
Trudgill, Peter (2004). New-dialect formation: The inevitability of
colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Williams, Ann & Kerswill, Paul (1999). Dialect levelling: change and
continuity in Milton Keynes, Reading and Hull. In Paul Foulkes & Gerard
Docherty (eds.) Urban voices. Accent studies in the British Isles.
London: Arnold. 141--162.

--------------------
Isabelle Léglise
UMR CNRS CELIA
01 49 58 38 08
leglise at vjf.cnrs.fr
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/parislinguists/attachments/20080617/ce7f2382/attachment.htm>