'Reversed change' dialect borrowing

[Peter Trudgill]

Sally's example is very nice, but I think we'd 
agree that it's not exactly typical of what 
usually goes on, and that Andersen (2005) is 
mostly right....... Her example is reminiscent, 
though, of a development outlined in Ernst Håkon 
Jahr "Language planning and language change" in 
L.E. Breivik and E. H. Jahr (eds.) Language 
change: contributions to the study of its causes 
(1989), where he describes how a vigorously 
ongoing Icelandic sound change kown locally as 
Flámæli "slack-jawed speech" - in fact a merger 
of /i/ and /e/, /y/ and /ø/ - was successfully 
reversed between about 1945 and 1960 by what 
amounted to an official public campaign.

Developments which occur much further - I would 
guess - below the level of conscious awareness 
are captured by the term developed by the 
Norwegian dialectologist Amund B. Larsen who 
coined the label naboopposisjon "neighbour 
opposition". For example, in the Sogn dialect, 
items in the lexical set of bjørk changed to 
bjork etc as a result of the fact ( he 
hypothesised) that there was an opposition in a 
different lexical set involving items such as 
topp in the Sogn dialect which corresponded to 
tøpp etc in the neighbouring Hallingdal dialect. 
This is a kind of hyperdialectism which I give 
several example of in Dialects in Contact 
(Chapter 2).
-- 
Peter Trudgill  FBA
Adjunct Prof. of Sociolinguistics, Agder Univ., N
Adjunct Prof., RCLT, La Trobe Univ., AU
Prof. Emeritus of Eng. Linguistics, Fribourg Univ, CH
Hon. Prof. of Sociolinguistics, UEA, Norwich, UK

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