In Turið Sigurðardóttir & María Garðarsdóttir (eds.), Frændafundur 8: Føroysk-íslendsk vísindaráðstevna á Fróðskaparsetrinum 24. – 25. august 2013. (pp. 267-279). , 2015
Norn, tað gamla norrøna málið í Orknoyum og Hetlandi, sum granskingarevni verður darvað av, at má... more Norn, tað gamla norrøna málið í Orknoyum og Hetlandi, sum granskingarevni verður darvað av, at málsligar heimildir tróta. Ein orðabók, sum føroyski málfrøðingurin Jakob Jakobsen gjørdi í Hetlandi í 1890-árunum goymir neyvar ljóðfrøðiligar transkriptiónir, men atfinningar hava verið gjørdar móti teimum fyri at vera ov nágreiniligar og tí hylja ljóðskipanina. Henda greinin leggur fram eina kvantitativa kanning av ljóðtilfarinum í orðabók dr. Jakobsens í royndini at avhylja ljóðskipanina, sum liggur aftanfyri. Kanningin fevnir um atblástur og sonorantavradding. Dáturnar vísa regluliga útbreiðslu av avradding av frammansettum sonoranti men ikki frammansettum sjálvljóði, t.e. tær vísa avradding av sonorantum men ikki veruligan atblástur; eina partvísa varðveitslu av skipanini, sum hon var undan tí tilhugsaða málskiftinum. Lýst verður ein møgulig broytingarfarrás, har ið bæði ljóðeyðkennini hvørva úr málinum í fleiri stigum umvegis eina røð av mál- og málførasambandi. Tær neyvu ljóðfrøðiligu transkriptiónirnar í orðabók dr. Jakobsens eru hent tilfar í søguligari málgransking, og hóast fyrivarni mugu takast viðvíkjandi álitinum í dátunum, so bjóða tær eitt virðismikið innlit í ljóðskipanina í hetlandsnorn og vesturnorrøn søgulig málvísindi.
Despite state-driven language policy against Danish linguistic influence, the Faroese language ha... more Despite state-driven language policy against Danish linguistic influence, the Faroese language has borrowed the Danish generic pronoun mann ‘one’. As in Danish, this pronoun varies with generically used tú ‘you’. An analysis of the variation in Faroese shows that Faroese tú is used more often than its Danish equivalent du (26% vs. 16.5%) and that although there is extensive inter-individual variation, different linguistic factors (inclusion of the addressee in the referent of the pronoun, use in a conditional construction and verb tense) and social factors (age, gender and peripherality of location; possibly also speech style) constrain this variation in Faroese and in Danish. This suggests that extensive bilingualism has not led to sociolinguistic convergence between Faroese and Danish. Inclusion of sociolinguistic analysis in language contact research can help further our understanding of contact processes and inform language policy.
It has been observed that language-shift varieties of English tend to be relatively close to Stan... more It has been observed that language-shift varieties of English tend to be relatively close to Standard English (Trudgill and Chambers 1991: 2–3). An often- used explanation for this is that Standard English was acquired in schools by the shifting population (Filppula 2006: 516). In this paper, I discuss three cases of language shift in the Early Modern period: in Cornwall, the Isle of Man, and Shetland. I offer evidence that the role of Standard English education was, in fact, fairly limited, and suggest that the standard-likeness of Cornish English, Manx English and Shetland Scots is most likely due to the particular socio- linguistic circumstances of language shift, where not only language contact, but also dialect contact contributed to a loss of non-standard-like features and the acquisition of a standard-like target variety. This atelic and non-hierarchical process is termed apparent standardisation.
Diachronic change regarding the Germanic verb shows a tendency away from strong and towards weak ... more Diachronic change regarding the Germanic verb shows a tendency away from strong and towards weak inflection, although the change is not unidirectional. Three production and acceptability experiments on nonce and existing verbs in Dutch unveil a clear hierarchy in potential productivity of inflection patterns. Weak in3ection has the highest potential productivity; within strong inflection, Classes I, II and III outrank the others. Speakers also regularly employ a productoriented schema based on the vowels /o/ and /c/, as well as, although to a lesser extent, on /i/ and /I/. We relate these findings to synchronic factors and to diachronic change.
Diachronic change regarding the Germanic verb shows a tendency away from strong and towards weak ... more Diachronic change regarding the Germanic verb shows a tendency away from strong and towards weak inflection, although the change is not unidirectional. Three production and acceptability experiments on nonce and existing verbs in Dutch unveil a clear hierarchy in potential productivity of inflection patterns. Weak inflection has the highest potential productivity; within strong inflection, Classes I, II and III outrank the others. Speakers also regularly employ a product- oriented schema based on the vowels /o/ and /ɔ/, as well as, although to a lesser extent, on /i/ and /ɪ/. We relate these findings to synchronic factors and to dia- chronic change.
Although Faroese exhibits extensive linguistic variation and rapid social change, the language is... more Although Faroese exhibits extensive linguistic variation and rapid social change, the language is near-uncharted territory in variationist sociolinguistics. This article discusses some recent social changes in Faroese society in connection with language change, focusing in particular on the development of a de facto spoken standard, Central Faroese. Demographic mobility, media and education may be contributing to this development in different ways. Two linguistic variables are analysed as a first step towards uncovering the respective roles of standardisation, dialect levelling and dialect spread as contributing processes in the formation of Central Faroese: morphological variation in -st endings and phonological variation in -ir and -ur endings. The analysis confirms previously described patterns of geographically constrained variation, but no generational or stylistic differences indicative of language change are found, nor are there clear signs that informants use Central Faroese. The results may in part be due to the structure of the corpus used.
The Shetland dialect of Scots does not contain preaspiration, a phonetic areal feature that is ot... more The Shetland dialect of Scots does not contain preaspiration, a phonetic areal feature that is otherwise prevalent in languages around the North Atlantic Ocean. While it is understood that Shetland’s pre-language shift Scandinavian variety, Norn, did contain preaspiration, an analysis of phonetic transcriptions from Jakob Jakobsen’s An Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland, collected in the 1890s, shows a more complicated picture: preaspiration occurs in only 11% of relevant vowel-stop sequences, but in 92% of relevant sonorant-stop and sonorant- fricative sequences.
This article provides a contact-based explanation of the gradual disappearance of preaspiration from Shetland. The proposed trajectory of change is made up of a series of language and dialect contact-induced sub-changes and reflects the influence of Norn as well as of successive waves of immigration from the Scottish mainland. In the first stage, during language shift, preaspiration in vowel-stop sequences disappeared as it (co-)signaled a phonemic contrast in Norn not neces- sary for Scots, but (non-phonemic) preaspiration in sonorant-stop/fricative sequences was retained. In a later stage, dialect contact after renewed immigration from the Scottish mainland caused voiceless stops to be unaspirated, removing the phonetic basis for preaspiration also in the remaining contexts.
The study highlights the different susceptibility of phonetic and phonemic features in contact-induced change and calls for further integration of second-language acquisition study and variationist sociolinguistics into historical linguistics.
Widespread minority language shift in Early Modern Europe is often ascribed to restrictive langua... more Widespread minority language shift in Early Modern Europe is often ascribed to restrictive language policies and the migration of both majority- and minority-language speakers. However, without a sociohistorically credible account of the mechanisms through which these events caused a language shift, these policies lack explanatory power. Inspired by research on ‘language histories from below,’ we present an integrated sociohistorical and linguistic account that can shed light on the procresses taking place during a case of language shift in the 17th and 18th centuries. We present and analyze demographic data on the immigration and integration of French speakers in previously Dutch-speaking Dunkirk in this period, showing how moderate intermarriage of immigrants and locals could have represented a motive and a mechanism for language shift against a backdrop of larger language-political processes. We then discuss the modern language-shift dialect of Dunkirk in comparison with different dialects of French. The linguistic data suggests a large influence from the dialects of migrants, underlining their role in the language shift process. The combination of sociohistorical and linguistic evidence gives us a better understanding of language shift in this period, showing the value of an integrated ‘from below’ approach.
The dialect of Scots spoken in the Shetland Islands has been variously described as a language sh... more The dialect of Scots spoken in the Shetland Islands has been variously described as a language shift variety, acquired when the islanders abandoned their native Norn for Scots from the sixteenth century onwards, or a continuation of the dialects brought to Shetland by Scottish immigrants in the same period. More recently, Millar (2008) discussed the origins of Shetland Scots in a theory of new-dialect formation (Trudgill 2004), which allows for a combination of earlier explanations. In this article, I give a systematic analysis of the phonetics and phonology of Early Shetland Scots in comparison to Norn and mainland Scots dialects. The Shetland Scots data are largely consistent with theoretical expectations, lending further support to the new-dialect reading of the dialect's diachronic development.(Received September 25 2007)(Revised June 29 2009)
There has been considerable debate about when Norn, the Scandinavian language formerly spoken in ... more There has been considerable debate about when Norn, the Scandinavian language formerly spoken in Orkney and Shetland, died as a community language in the islands. Arguments thus far have focused primarily on second-hand commentary from travel and census reports, sparking disputes about the credibility of these sources. Linguistic evidence, although very little survives, is seldom used systematically in the debate about when Norn died. I argue that a list of thirty Norn words collected in 1774 can tell us about the state of the language at the time, and can thus be used as evidence in this debate.†
Like other Germanic languages, West Frisian has both strong and weak verbal inflection. Despite a... more Like other Germanic languages, West Frisian has both strong and weak verbal inflection. Despite an overwhelming diachronic tendency for change towards weak inflection, strong inflection patterns are available synchronically to speakers to form the past tense and past participle of new or nonsense verbs. Using a measure for ‘potential productivity’ developed by Knooihuizen & Strik (2014) for Dutch, we investigate the relative strength of available patterns in Frisian in an elicitation and an acceptability judgment experiment. Despite a fragmented strong verbal inflection system, strong inflection makes up 35% of the elicited nonce forms; these forms cannot all be explained by analogy. Analogically formed strong inflections of nonce verbs receive relatively high acceptability ratings at 4.2 on a 7-point scale. The elicitation experiment also produced many weak forms (12% of participles) that are not normatively possible with the -e infinitives in the elicitation prompt. These alternative weak forms were not included in the acceptability judgment experiment. We discuss the experimental results in the context of diachronically attested language change in Frisian and of intensive language contact with Dutch.
NOTE: An updated version of this paper has been published as "Variation in Faroese and the develo... more NOTE: An updated version of this paper has been published as "Variation in Faroese and the development of a spoken standard: in search of corpus evidence", Nordic Journal of Linguistics 37.1 (2014) 87–105.
One of the areas in which Scandinavian influence is apparent in the traditional Shetland Scots di... more One of the areas in which Scandinavian influence is apparent in the traditional Shetland Scots dialect is the distribution of vowel length: Shetland Scots generally follows the Scottish Vowel Length Rule, but also shows the complementary distribution of consonant and vowel length known from modern North Germanic languages.
During the earliest development of Shetland Scots, three different systems of vowel length can be argued to have been in contact:
1. (Nearly) unconstrained vowel length, as in Old Norse 2. Scandinavian combinatory vowel length 3. The Scottish Vowel Length Rule
All these systems were in the process of change in our time period, with System 1 giving way to System 2 across Scandinavia, and the SVLR also developing at about the same time. In both System 2 and the SVLR, we also observe the rise of an interaction between vowel quantity and ‘tense/lax’ quality. Thus, the system in Shetland Norn presents a set of interesting questions for the study of historical dialectology, language contact and historical phonology.
We give a detailed account of the distribution of vowel length in a 2m000-token sample of Jakob Jakobsen’s dictionary of Shetland Norn, and compare it to the contact systems. We show that clear traces of all three systems, as well as local innovations, are found in the data. We also place the Shetland Norn data in the context of both Scots and Scandinavian historical phonology.
Note that the handout has more detail than the slides.
In Turið Sigurðardóttir & María Garðarsdóttir (eds.), Frændafundur 8: Føroysk-íslendsk vísindaráðstevna á Fróðskaparsetrinum 24. – 25. august 2013. (pp. 267-279). , 2015
Norn, tað gamla norrøna málið í Orknoyum og Hetlandi, sum granskingarevni verður darvað av, at má... more Norn, tað gamla norrøna málið í Orknoyum og Hetlandi, sum granskingarevni verður darvað av, at málsligar heimildir tróta. Ein orðabók, sum føroyski málfrøðingurin Jakob Jakobsen gjørdi í Hetlandi í 1890-árunum goymir neyvar ljóðfrøðiligar transkriptiónir, men atfinningar hava verið gjørdar móti teimum fyri at vera ov nágreiniligar og tí hylja ljóðskipanina. Henda greinin leggur fram eina kvantitativa kanning av ljóðtilfarinum í orðabók dr. Jakobsens í royndini at avhylja ljóðskipanina, sum liggur aftanfyri. Kanningin fevnir um atblástur og sonorantavradding. Dáturnar vísa regluliga útbreiðslu av avradding av frammansettum sonoranti men ikki frammansettum sjálvljóði, t.e. tær vísa avradding av sonorantum men ikki veruligan atblástur; eina partvísa varðveitslu av skipanini, sum hon var undan tí tilhugsaða málskiftinum. Lýst verður ein møgulig broytingarfarrás, har ið bæði ljóðeyðkennini hvørva úr málinum í fleiri stigum umvegis eina røð av mál- og málførasambandi. Tær neyvu ljóðfrøðiligu transkriptiónirnar í orðabók dr. Jakobsens eru hent tilfar í søguligari málgransking, og hóast fyrivarni mugu takast viðvíkjandi álitinum í dátunum, so bjóða tær eitt virðismikið innlit í ljóðskipanina í hetlandsnorn og vesturnorrøn søgulig málvísindi.
Despite state-driven language policy against Danish linguistic influence, the Faroese language ha... more Despite state-driven language policy against Danish linguistic influence, the Faroese language has borrowed the Danish generic pronoun mann ‘one’. As in Danish, this pronoun varies with generically used tú ‘you’. An analysis of the variation in Faroese shows that Faroese tú is used more often than its Danish equivalent du (26% vs. 16.5%) and that although there is extensive inter-individual variation, different linguistic factors (inclusion of the addressee in the referent of the pronoun, use in a conditional construction and verb tense) and social factors (age, gender and peripherality of location; possibly also speech style) constrain this variation in Faroese and in Danish. This suggests that extensive bilingualism has not led to sociolinguistic convergence between Faroese and Danish. Inclusion of sociolinguistic analysis in language contact research can help further our understanding of contact processes and inform language policy.
It has been observed that language-shift varieties of English tend to be relatively close to Stan... more It has been observed that language-shift varieties of English tend to be relatively close to Standard English (Trudgill and Chambers 1991: 2–3). An often- used explanation for this is that Standard English was acquired in schools by the shifting population (Filppula 2006: 516). In this paper, I discuss three cases of language shift in the Early Modern period: in Cornwall, the Isle of Man, and Shetland. I offer evidence that the role of Standard English education was, in fact, fairly limited, and suggest that the standard-likeness of Cornish English, Manx English and Shetland Scots is most likely due to the particular socio- linguistic circumstances of language shift, where not only language contact, but also dialect contact contributed to a loss of non-standard-like features and the acquisition of a standard-like target variety. This atelic and non-hierarchical process is termed apparent standardisation.
Diachronic change regarding the Germanic verb shows a tendency away from strong and towards weak ... more Diachronic change regarding the Germanic verb shows a tendency away from strong and towards weak inflection, although the change is not unidirectional. Three production and acceptability experiments on nonce and existing verbs in Dutch unveil a clear hierarchy in potential productivity of inflection patterns. Weak in3ection has the highest potential productivity; within strong inflection, Classes I, II and III outrank the others. Speakers also regularly employ a productoriented schema based on the vowels /o/ and /c/, as well as, although to a lesser extent, on /i/ and /I/. We relate these findings to synchronic factors and to diachronic change.
Diachronic change regarding the Germanic verb shows a tendency away from strong and towards weak ... more Diachronic change regarding the Germanic verb shows a tendency away from strong and towards weak inflection, although the change is not unidirectional. Three production and acceptability experiments on nonce and existing verbs in Dutch unveil a clear hierarchy in potential productivity of inflection patterns. Weak inflection has the highest potential productivity; within strong inflection, Classes I, II and III outrank the others. Speakers also regularly employ a product- oriented schema based on the vowels /o/ and /ɔ/, as well as, although to a lesser extent, on /i/ and /ɪ/. We relate these findings to synchronic factors and to dia- chronic change.
Although Faroese exhibits extensive linguistic variation and rapid social change, the language is... more Although Faroese exhibits extensive linguistic variation and rapid social change, the language is near-uncharted territory in variationist sociolinguistics. This article discusses some recent social changes in Faroese society in connection with language change, focusing in particular on the development of a de facto spoken standard, Central Faroese. Demographic mobility, media and education may be contributing to this development in different ways. Two linguistic variables are analysed as a first step towards uncovering the respective roles of standardisation, dialect levelling and dialect spread as contributing processes in the formation of Central Faroese: morphological variation in -st endings and phonological variation in -ir and -ur endings. The analysis confirms previously described patterns of geographically constrained variation, but no generational or stylistic differences indicative of language change are found, nor are there clear signs that informants use Central Faroese. The results may in part be due to the structure of the corpus used.
The Shetland dialect of Scots does not contain preaspiration, a phonetic areal feature that is ot... more The Shetland dialect of Scots does not contain preaspiration, a phonetic areal feature that is otherwise prevalent in languages around the North Atlantic Ocean. While it is understood that Shetland’s pre-language shift Scandinavian variety, Norn, did contain preaspiration, an analysis of phonetic transcriptions from Jakob Jakobsen’s An Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland, collected in the 1890s, shows a more complicated picture: preaspiration occurs in only 11% of relevant vowel-stop sequences, but in 92% of relevant sonorant-stop and sonorant- fricative sequences.
This article provides a contact-based explanation of the gradual disappearance of preaspiration from Shetland. The proposed trajectory of change is made up of a series of language and dialect contact-induced sub-changes and reflects the influence of Norn as well as of successive waves of immigration from the Scottish mainland. In the first stage, during language shift, preaspiration in vowel-stop sequences disappeared as it (co-)signaled a phonemic contrast in Norn not neces- sary for Scots, but (non-phonemic) preaspiration in sonorant-stop/fricative sequences was retained. In a later stage, dialect contact after renewed immigration from the Scottish mainland caused voiceless stops to be unaspirated, removing the phonetic basis for preaspiration also in the remaining contexts.
The study highlights the different susceptibility of phonetic and phonemic features in contact-induced change and calls for further integration of second-language acquisition study and variationist sociolinguistics into historical linguistics.
Widespread minority language shift in Early Modern Europe is often ascribed to restrictive langua... more Widespread minority language shift in Early Modern Europe is often ascribed to restrictive language policies and the migration of both majority- and minority-language speakers. However, without a sociohistorically credible account of the mechanisms through which these events caused a language shift, these policies lack explanatory power. Inspired by research on ‘language histories from below,’ we present an integrated sociohistorical and linguistic account that can shed light on the procresses taking place during a case of language shift in the 17th and 18th centuries. We present and analyze demographic data on the immigration and integration of French speakers in previously Dutch-speaking Dunkirk in this period, showing how moderate intermarriage of immigrants and locals could have represented a motive and a mechanism for language shift against a backdrop of larger language-political processes. We then discuss the modern language-shift dialect of Dunkirk in comparison with different dialects of French. The linguistic data suggests a large influence from the dialects of migrants, underlining their role in the language shift process. The combination of sociohistorical and linguistic evidence gives us a better understanding of language shift in this period, showing the value of an integrated ‘from below’ approach.
The dialect of Scots spoken in the Shetland Islands has been variously described as a language sh... more The dialect of Scots spoken in the Shetland Islands has been variously described as a language shift variety, acquired when the islanders abandoned their native Norn for Scots from the sixteenth century onwards, or a continuation of the dialects brought to Shetland by Scottish immigrants in the same period. More recently, Millar (2008) discussed the origins of Shetland Scots in a theory of new-dialect formation (Trudgill 2004), which allows for a combination of earlier explanations. In this article, I give a systematic analysis of the phonetics and phonology of Early Shetland Scots in comparison to Norn and mainland Scots dialects. The Shetland Scots data are largely consistent with theoretical expectations, lending further support to the new-dialect reading of the dialect's diachronic development.(Received September 25 2007)(Revised June 29 2009)
There has been considerable debate about when Norn, the Scandinavian language formerly spoken in ... more There has been considerable debate about when Norn, the Scandinavian language formerly spoken in Orkney and Shetland, died as a community language in the islands. Arguments thus far have focused primarily on second-hand commentary from travel and census reports, sparking disputes about the credibility of these sources. Linguistic evidence, although very little survives, is seldom used systematically in the debate about when Norn died. I argue that a list of thirty Norn words collected in 1774 can tell us about the state of the language at the time, and can thus be used as evidence in this debate.†
Like other Germanic languages, West Frisian has both strong and weak verbal inflection. Despite a... more Like other Germanic languages, West Frisian has both strong and weak verbal inflection. Despite an overwhelming diachronic tendency for change towards weak inflection, strong inflection patterns are available synchronically to speakers to form the past tense and past participle of new or nonsense verbs. Using a measure for ‘potential productivity’ developed by Knooihuizen & Strik (2014) for Dutch, we investigate the relative strength of available patterns in Frisian in an elicitation and an acceptability judgment experiment. Despite a fragmented strong verbal inflection system, strong inflection makes up 35% of the elicited nonce forms; these forms cannot all be explained by analogy. Analogically formed strong inflections of nonce verbs receive relatively high acceptability ratings at 4.2 on a 7-point scale. The elicitation experiment also produced many weak forms (12% of participles) that are not normatively possible with the -e infinitives in the elicitation prompt. These alternative weak forms were not included in the acceptability judgment experiment. We discuss the experimental results in the context of diachronically attested language change in Frisian and of intensive language contact with Dutch.
NOTE: An updated version of this paper has been published as "Variation in Faroese and the develo... more NOTE: An updated version of this paper has been published as "Variation in Faroese and the development of a spoken standard: in search of corpus evidence", Nordic Journal of Linguistics 37.1 (2014) 87–105.
One of the areas in which Scandinavian influence is apparent in the traditional Shetland Scots di... more One of the areas in which Scandinavian influence is apparent in the traditional Shetland Scots dialect is the distribution of vowel length: Shetland Scots generally follows the Scottish Vowel Length Rule, but also shows the complementary distribution of consonant and vowel length known from modern North Germanic languages.
During the earliest development of Shetland Scots, three different systems of vowel length can be argued to have been in contact:
1. (Nearly) unconstrained vowel length, as in Old Norse 2. Scandinavian combinatory vowel length 3. The Scottish Vowel Length Rule
All these systems were in the process of change in our time period, with System 1 giving way to System 2 across Scandinavia, and the SVLR also developing at about the same time. In both System 2 and the SVLR, we also observe the rise of an interaction between vowel quantity and ‘tense/lax’ quality. Thus, the system in Shetland Norn presents a set of interesting questions for the study of historical dialectology, language contact and historical phonology.
We give a detailed account of the distribution of vowel length in a 2m000-token sample of Jakob Jakobsen’s dictionary of Shetland Norn, and compare it to the contact systems. We show that clear traces of all three systems, as well as local innovations, are found in the data. We also place the Shetland Norn data in the context of both Scots and Scandinavian historical phonology.
Note that the handout has more detail than the slides.
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Kanningin fevnir um atblástur og sonorantavradding. Dáturnar vísa regluliga útbreiðslu av avradding av frammansettum sonoranti men ikki frammansettum sjálvljóði, t.e. tær vísa avradding av sonorantum men ikki veruligan atblástur; eina partvísa varðveitslu av skipanini, sum hon var undan tí tilhugsaða málskiftinum. Lýst verður ein møgulig broytingarfarrás, har ið bæði ljóðeyðkennini hvørva úr málinum í fleiri stigum umvegis eina røð av mál- og málførasambandi.
Tær neyvu ljóðfrøðiligu transkriptiónirnar í orðabók dr. Jakobsens eru hent tilfar í søguligari málgransking, og hóast fyrivarni mugu takast viðvíkjandi álitinum í dátunum, so bjóða tær eitt virðismikið innlit í ljóðskipanina í hetlandsnorn og vesturnorrøn søgulig málvísindi.
This article provides a contact-based explanation of the gradual disappearance of preaspiration from Shetland. The proposed trajectory of change is made up of a series of language and dialect contact-induced sub-changes and reflects the influence of Norn as well as of successive waves of immigration from the Scottish mainland. In the first stage, during language shift, preaspiration in vowel-stop sequences disappeared as it (co-)signaled a phonemic contrast in Norn not neces- sary for Scots, but (non-phonemic) preaspiration in sonorant-stop/fricative sequences was retained. In a later stage, dialect contact after renewed immigration from the Scottish mainland caused voiceless stops to be unaspirated, removing the phonetic basis for preaspiration also in the remaining contexts.
The study highlights the different susceptibility of phonetic and phonemic features in contact-induced change and calls for further integration of second-language acquisition study and variationist sociolinguistics into historical linguistics.
[PDF to follow when published]
Despite a fragmented strong verbal inflection system, strong inflection makes up 35% of the elicited nonce forms; these forms cannot all be explained by analogy. Analogically formed strong inflections of nonce verbs receive relatively high acceptability ratings at 4.2 on a 7-point scale. The elicitation experiment also produced many weak forms (12% of participles) that are not normatively possible with the -e infinitives in the elicitation prompt. These alternative weak forms were not included in the acceptability judgment experiment.
We discuss the experimental results in the context of diachronically attested language change in Frisian and of intensive language contact with Dutch.
During the earliest development of Shetland Scots, three different systems of vowel length can be argued to have been in contact:
1. (Nearly) unconstrained vowel length, as in Old Norse
2. Scandinavian combinatory vowel length
3. The Scottish Vowel Length Rule
All these systems were in the process of change in our time period, with System 1 giving way to System 2 across Scandinavia, and the SVLR also developing at about the same time. In both System 2 and the SVLR, we also observe the rise of an interaction between vowel quantity and ‘tense/lax’ quality. Thus, the system in Shetland Norn presents a set of interesting questions for the study of historical dialectology, language contact and historical phonology.
We give a detailed account of the distribution of vowel length in a 2m000-token sample of Jakob Jakobsen’s dictionary of Shetland Norn, and compare it to the contact systems. We show that clear traces of all three systems, as well as local innovations, are found in the data. We also place the Shetland Norn data in the context of both Scots and Scandinavian historical phonology.
Note that the handout has more detail than the slides.
Kanningin fevnir um atblástur og sonorantavradding. Dáturnar vísa regluliga útbreiðslu av avradding av frammansettum sonoranti men ikki frammansettum sjálvljóði, t.e. tær vísa avradding av sonorantum men ikki veruligan atblástur; eina partvísa varðveitslu av skipanini, sum hon var undan tí tilhugsaða málskiftinum. Lýst verður ein møgulig broytingarfarrás, har ið bæði ljóðeyðkennini hvørva úr málinum í fleiri stigum umvegis eina røð av mál- og málførasambandi.
Tær neyvu ljóðfrøðiligu transkriptiónirnar í orðabók dr. Jakobsens eru hent tilfar í søguligari málgransking, og hóast fyrivarni mugu takast viðvíkjandi álitinum í dátunum, so bjóða tær eitt virðismikið innlit í ljóðskipanina í hetlandsnorn og vesturnorrøn søgulig málvísindi.
This article provides a contact-based explanation of the gradual disappearance of preaspiration from Shetland. The proposed trajectory of change is made up of a series of language and dialect contact-induced sub-changes and reflects the influence of Norn as well as of successive waves of immigration from the Scottish mainland. In the first stage, during language shift, preaspiration in vowel-stop sequences disappeared as it (co-)signaled a phonemic contrast in Norn not neces- sary for Scots, but (non-phonemic) preaspiration in sonorant-stop/fricative sequences was retained. In a later stage, dialect contact after renewed immigration from the Scottish mainland caused voiceless stops to be unaspirated, removing the phonetic basis for preaspiration also in the remaining contexts.
The study highlights the different susceptibility of phonetic and phonemic features in contact-induced change and calls for further integration of second-language acquisition study and variationist sociolinguistics into historical linguistics.
[PDF to follow when published]
Despite a fragmented strong verbal inflection system, strong inflection makes up 35% of the elicited nonce forms; these forms cannot all be explained by analogy. Analogically formed strong inflections of nonce verbs receive relatively high acceptability ratings at 4.2 on a 7-point scale. The elicitation experiment also produced many weak forms (12% of participles) that are not normatively possible with the -e infinitives in the elicitation prompt. These alternative weak forms were not included in the acceptability judgment experiment.
We discuss the experimental results in the context of diachronically attested language change in Frisian and of intensive language contact with Dutch.
During the earliest development of Shetland Scots, three different systems of vowel length can be argued to have been in contact:
1. (Nearly) unconstrained vowel length, as in Old Norse
2. Scandinavian combinatory vowel length
3. The Scottish Vowel Length Rule
All these systems were in the process of change in our time period, with System 1 giving way to System 2 across Scandinavia, and the SVLR also developing at about the same time. In both System 2 and the SVLR, we also observe the rise of an interaction between vowel quantity and ‘tense/lax’ quality. Thus, the system in Shetland Norn presents a set of interesting questions for the study of historical dialectology, language contact and historical phonology.
We give a detailed account of the distribution of vowel length in a 2m000-token sample of Jakob Jakobsen’s dictionary of Shetland Norn, and compare it to the contact systems. We show that clear traces of all three systems, as well as local innovations, are found in the data. We also place the Shetland Norn data in the context of both Scots and Scandinavian historical phonology.
Note that the handout has more detail than the slides.