'Reversed change' dialect borrowing

[Sally Thomason]

About Peter's comment:

Well...I actually think we need to consider
carefully whether we "agree that it's not exactly typical 
of what usually goes on".  One thing that has struck
me again and again over the past ten years or so, ever
since I got interested in this whole issue of
deliberate change, is that we merely *assume* that
most changes are non-deliberate throughout their
history.  We have very little evidence on this point.
I first heard about people making their dialects
more different from the dialect of the guys next door
when I read Peter's Dialects in Contact.  But ever
since I started giving talks here & there on deliberate
change, people have come up with new examples for me;
one such example was a case of deliberate dialect 
divergence from Peru -- the people told the 
fieldworker that they wanted to make sure they 
retained their differentness from the people just
around the mountain from them, and so they deliberately
distorted the pronunciation of their own words in
a rule-governed way.

I do still believe that most linguistic change must
be non-deliberate.  That's the easiest way to account
for (for instance) regular sound change.  But I
also think that claims that the vast majority of
linguistic change is subconscious are on shaky
ground, as long as they lack evidence of any kind.
(I admit that I haven't the faintest idea how one
might go about gathering evidence.)

  -- Sally Thomason
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