Peter Trudgill

Chambers and Trudgill between them account for at least 51% of non-urban dialectology at the present moment, so you know this is gonna be two guys that know their stuff. And they do, balancing advocacy, and a salutatory readiness not just to cite studies but to take us through them in all their fascinating parts, with an equally strong sense of its limits--the feebleness of the isogloss, the simultaneous reductiveness and over-refinement (!) of sociological class models when applied to show more language variation, the way spatial diffusion,much as we can represent it with an equation, is still basically a huge question mark as far as motivations are concerned. As luminaries of a niche discipline, they talk as much to their colleagues as to the students who will ostensibly be using this textbook, and it's fair criticism to say that this is gonna be steep going for a lot of the English students who are interested in this stuff (until, as C&T predict, dialectology gets wholly subsumed in variation theory and recognized as something you need a linguistics background to do with relevance. Nevertheless, it's ultimately usable as an undergrad textbook because it lays out its terms clearly (though in advanced language) and gives a thorough grounding in the canonical studies and disciplinary mythology, from Wenker and Gillieron in the 19th century to Kurath walking New England, the Milroys in disintegrating Belfast, Labov bugging moms in Saks, Wakelin's work on why Yorkshiremen say "motherloving gutterpunks" and "monkey's uncle" like that, Chambers himself and the search for "chesterfield", of all Canadianisms less lame only than "serviette" (which I actually heard a barista say the other day in Victoria! a young, attractive man!), the crazy sprachbund action in European languages, with uvular /r/ and affricated palatals (good ol'english "ch") splayed willy-nilly across linguistic boundaries, and,oh,plenty of more. But it's also a good text because it communicates the fun of this occasionally (for all its mighty and still-being-realized implications) less-than-momentous (see, again, "chesterfield") but endlessly amusing and whimsical corner of linguistic study. show less

This book has a good heart, and a few really solid essays--Dennis Preston (funny guy, incidentally) on prestige ranking of American accents and JK Chambers on TV's non-effect on language change (the reason I bought it originally, and while a little offended that a certain nameless someone referred me to the shibboleths book to prove the point, I am also convinced). Some of the others are definitely kindergarten, and I don't mean for language scholars, but surely even the gen-pub doesn't show more needto be told that some languages aren't intrinsically "harder" or "more expressive" or "faster" or "more primitive" than others, and that language change isn't language decline? Then I think about how quickly I can come up with five people who have said just the opposite on one of these matters in the last six weeks, and how stubborn they were, and I'm like "oh yeah." So there is definitely a place for this book, even if I suspect most of the prescriptivists and cavilers will require more convincing than it provides. And it's a quick read. show less

For academics in a discipline the basic approaches and insights of which are so thoroughly misunderstood by the general public, linguists carry around a surprising number of their own outdated pieties. Scholars of the English language who would never dream of stigmatizing a nonstandard pronunciation or correcting a split infinitive still work with a standard model the terms of which were largely defined by Saussure (d. 1913) and Jakobson (who did most of his important work before the Second show more World War). Even linguists who challenge and revise this high-structuralist approach in their own work still accept it as a starting place, good enough for undergraduate classes, and wink at the contradictions engendered thereby.


In phonology, despite decades of flourishing work on variation, textbooks still present the sounds of North American English as set down by Kurath (1939-43), treating dialectal and sociological divergence as deviation from a “standard” that is essentially the middle American dialect of the mid-20th century. (In Canada, one result is that every “History of English” class must have a moment of indignation when a bright student realizes that the phenomenon of “Canadian Raising” is actually no such thing, but a parallel development to the American pronunciation of the /aU/ and /aI/ diphthongs with its own pedigree and Old World sources).


University of East Anglia sociolinguist Peter Trudgill’s New-Dialect Formation: The Inevitability of Colonial Englishes is a salvo in the recent move to re-evaluate the “old model” of English sound change that has been spearheaded by Labov et al.’s Atlas of North American English (2006), the first large-scale phonetic survey of North American English since Kurath. While Trudgill represents his work as a low-key enquiry into the origins of New Zealand English, the bold and broad claim in the title indicates his awareness of its implications for other new-dialect Englishes (and indeed, he touches on its relevance for Quebec French and Latin American Spanish as well).
Trudgill’s book presents the results of his work with the corpus of the Origins of New Zealand English (ONZE) project at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. ONZE collects recordings of 325 first-generation New Zealanders born between 1850 and 1900. Trudgill compares the ONZE recordings to studies of other Southern Hemisphere Englishes in Australia, South Africa, the Falkland Islands and the mid-Atlantic island of Tristan de Cunha, and his main conclusion is that the similarities between them arise “not because of historical connections between them, but because they were formed out of similar mixtures according to the same principles” (back cover). He finds that new majority forms emerge in a three-stage process, in which the speech of the first generation in (and crucially, only in) a tabula rasa colonial situation does not significantly alter, but their children (Stage II) acquire variable forms (such as the distinction between 19th-century London TRAP vowel /ɛ/ and Scottish /a/) not from their parents but in demographically determined inventories, such that any one first-generation New Zealander’s pronunciation of trap is not predictable, but on aggregate, speakers will acquire forms in proportion to their numbers (so if 27% of their parents came from Scotland, 27% of first-generation speakers will pronounce trap with /a/, but they won’t necessarily be the speakers with Scottish ancestry).


It is not until the second generation born in-country (Stage III), Trudgill argues, that old-country minority forms disappear (leveling), are simplified into the majority forms (unmarking), or develop new functions (reallocation), majority forms establish dominance, and new interforms develop—in short, that a new standard emerges. If a direct line can be drawn from the old-world dialect mixture to the new dialect, then colonial Englishes in combination with demographic data can say far more than has been supposed about past traditional dialects in the British Isles, and Trudgill provides notes to this effect dealing with New Zealand English.


Although Trudgill downplays the radical implications of this three-stage scheme, there are at least three standard assumptions about language change that he strongly challenges. Traditional assumptions about prestige- and stigma-driven change may make for poor sociology, but they have persisted in more sophisticated form in (e.g.) Labov’s focus on ethnic, socioeconomic, and linguistic identities in variant selection. Trudgill argues convincingly that in tabula rasa situations, prestige considerations simply do not apply: focusing especially on H-Dropping and the /æ/ and /a/ vowels in dance, he uses ONZE data to demonstrate that from the first generation, development in New Zealand followed a separate path with no reference to English English. With regard to in-country prestige arguments as well as identity/ideology-based explanations generally, he shows the sufficiency of demographic data to explain the eventual New Zealand standard.


The monogenesis shibboleth, exemplified in e.g. Poirier’s (1994) derivation of Quebec French from Norman dialects or the andalucista theory tracing Latin American Spanish to the Andalusian dialect (Lipski 1994), Trudgill demolishes with examples from throughout the Southern Hemisphere Englishes, with a detailed focus on the absurdity of arguing a monogenetic origin for New Zealand English, which in the period covered by the ONZE data had a combination of features found together in England only in rural Essex, which of course contributed next-to-none of the initial group of settlers. Trudgill demonstrates that more intuitive arguments based on dialect mixture are adequate and preferable.


Only after deftly supporting his broader theoretical point with data does Trudgill shyly bring it forward, saying “I have argued that the new-dialect formation which resulted from the mixture of dialects brought from the British Isles to New Zealand . . . was not a haphazard process, but, on the contrary, deterministic in nature” (149). The ONZE data consistently bear out this conclusion, which will be anathema to upholders of the conventional wisdom, that language change is unpredictable: at least in tabula rasa situations, majority forms win out, minority forms that fall below a certain threshold disappear, and forms used by a plurality or large minority settle into interforms in the news standard, but only after a period of flux (Stage II) in which all forms are available to all speakers. Here, Trudgill draws on grammatical as well as phonetic evidence, noting the survival in New Zealand of nonstandard forms that are common throughout the English world (such as preterit come and done) and not of forms used even by large minorities in the initial immigrant mix, such as Irish English progressive after and English-southwest present-tense be (123).


Despite the broad application of its New Zealand data in other colonial contexts and the challenge it raises to several aspects of sociolinguistic and phonological conventional wisdom, New-Dialect Formation stops short of being a revolutionary project or rallying cry; to his credit, Trudgill stresses the untestedness of his contentions in non-tabula rasa colonial contexts and beyond the second generation. Nevertheless, the book impresses as a detail-oriented study that still manages to assert controversial general principles in a way that is seemingly hard to refute, and in so doing speak against the lazy adoption by present-day scholars of dated but as yet mostly unproblematized dicta from a bygone age. show less

Ah, good old Trudgill. Reliable, though a little dated at the edges (even the most recent reissue talks about languages maybe not making it into the new millennium).

The book is a well-written introduction to the field, penned by a renowned expert who handles the subject matter with great confidence and experience. For a text dealing mainly with varieties of English, it features a balanced range of languages to draw examples from.

The organization is not always as tight as it could have show more been: several chapters do tend to meander a bit, and the selection and arrangement of information could have tended a little more towards the analytical. On the other hand, by not rigidly adhering to a structure, the book reads less as a textbook to be learnt by heart and more like an informed discussion of people's attitudes towards languages, dialects, and the people who speak them.

In all, this book serves eminently as a textbook for first year undergrads. I enjoyed teaching from it. show less