Rate of Change

[Thomas McFadden]

> In modern times we have the opposite: notwithstanding rapid cultural
> change, we see a lot of convergence due to greatly improved
> communications and mass media, which act as linguistic role models,
> much more than any Académie ever did. Here in Flanders, e.g. we see
> the pretty fast breakdown of dialects, via a stage of 'intermediate'
> language or seriously locally colored standard language. In the
> Netherlands, by and large, this stage has already been passed.

actually, sociolinguistic work of the last few decades, especially by Bill
Labov and his students, has shown that this, which seems very plausible,
isn't quite right.  in spite of increased literacy and mass media, local
dialects are continuing to develop independtly and diverge from the
standard in a number of places.  of course in many other places the
dialects are disappearing or being brought closer to a standard language,
but what seems to be crucial in causing this is not literacy and standard
language media, but rather increased mobility of speakers.  in one study,
two immediately adjacent neighborhoods in the philadelphia suburbs were
examined, one of which had been around for some time and was inhabited
mainly by people who were born there or nearby, the other of which had
been recently built and was inhabited by and large by famillies that had
moved to the area from all over the country.  the children living in the
first neighborhood showed all characteristics of the philadelphia dialect,
even those few whos families had actually recently arrived, and in fact
they showed characteristics of changes currently in progress in the
dialect that were further differentiating it from standard american
english.  on the other hand, the children in the new neighborhood showed
markedly less of the characteristics of the philadelphia dialect in their
speech, even those few whose families had been in the area for a
while.  so the crucial factor here is not exposure to normalizing media
and education, but movement between dialect areas.  now, what this means
for the very different dialect situations of europe is less clear.  the
european dialects were of course much more diverse, and have clearly been
weakened in the recent past, but it still seems that mobility would be the
key.  another thing to consider is that many of the extinct or near
extinct dialects of Europe were, in distinction to the dialects of North
American English, not mutually intelligible with the standard language of
the country in which they were spoken (listen to a local dialect of
Austrian or especially Swiss German).  it may well be that such extreme
variation can be threatened by much lower levels of mobility, because not
just social interaction, but simple communication can be disturbed.  just
a thought.

> The biggest change in English, which makes Old English
> incomprehensible, has of course been Norman French.

the role that the influx of Norman French played in the massive
morpho-syntactic changes that occurred between old and middle english is
a matter of some controversy i think, and seems often to have been
overstated.  vocabulary aside, there is actually some evidence that the
influence of Scandinavian was of much more importance at that time.