English World-Wide - Volume 21, Issue 2, 2000

Traditional dialectology took region as its primary and often its only independent variable. Because of numerous social changes, region is no longer the primary determinant of language variation, and contemporary (sociolinguistic) dialectology has expanded the number of independent variables. In Dialect Topography, we survey a representative population, and that population inevitably includes some subjects born outside the survey region. We want to know how these non-natives affect language use in the community. Admitting them thus requires us to implement some mechanism for identifying them in order to compare their language use to the natives. The mechanism is called the Regionality Index (RI). Subjects are ranked on a scale from 1 to 7, with the best representatives of the region (indigenes) receiving a score of 1, the poorest (interlopers) a score of 7, and subjects of intermediate degrees of representativeness in between. I look at three case studies in which RI is significant: bureau in Quebec City, running shoes in the Golden Horseshoe, and soft drink in Quebec City. These results introduce a new dimension to the study of language variation as a regional phenomenon and provide a framework for the integration of regionality as one independent variable among many in dialect studies. The RI provides, perhaps for the first time, an empirical basis for inferring the sociolinguistic effects of mobility.

This paper proposes an investigation of New Englishes in a diachronic and typological-comparative perspective. It is suggested that the structural and functional constituents of these varieties can be accounted for by either of two processes, labelled diffusion (the largely unmodified transmission of earlier forms of English (dialectal and standard) through space and time), and selection (the choice of a new, typically indigenous item in a process of feature competition under language contact conditions); some tentative properties of these processes are discussed. Subsequently, the framework is applied to a documentation and interpretation of negation patterns as found in many New Englishes around the world.

In this article, I conduct a quantitative analysis of do absence in negative declaratives in the present tense in a dialect from the north-east of Scotland, Buckie. Analysis of nearly 800 contexts of use reveals that this variation is entirely conditioned by linguistic internal constraints. The most significant of these is person and number of the subject — 3rd person singular subjects and plural NPs have no do absence, while do is variable in the remaining pronouns. I argue that a syntactic explanation best accounts for this patterning of use. Where there is no overt -s inflection in the present tense (influenced by the “northern subject rule”), do is not obligatory in Buckie Scots. Frequency effects, lexical restrictions and processing constraints are called upon to account for the range of frequencies of do absence seen in the variable contexts. Lastly, there is no significant change in use of do across three generations of speakers, highlighting the community members’ relative immunity to prescriptive norms.

The Yamatji people of Western Australia, although largely monolingual speakers of English, maintain an Aboriginal English variety for purposes of intra-group communication. A corpus of forty oral narratives by young Yamatji speakers was analysed and interpreted by a cross-cultural research team. Thirty-three of the texts were isolated as informed by four schemas: “travel”, “hunting”, “observing” and “encountering the unknown”. One text of each type is reproduced here, and the discourse strategies and markers involved are discussed. It is argued that the maintenance of these schemas (and associated genres) is related to longstanding cultural survival strategies and represents a skill which should be taken account of in education.

This paper shows how a rapid taped survey is used to collect language samples from four New Zealand speech communities. It details the methodology in the study, and presents an analysis of one variable, (s) fronting. This variable is of special interest because, although phoneticians have noted that English speakers sometimes produce this sound in different ways (MacKay 1987: 98; Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996), the sociolinguistic literature does not mention (s) as a variable, apart from references to the homosexual community (Taylor 1998). The findings show that males and females in the majority New Zealand European community use different proportions of the fronted variant of (s), and that minority ethnic groups align themselves around these gender differences in various ways. The paper differs from most research on language and ethnicity in its focus on the similarities between the majority and minority groups, rather than on the differences.