Manual of Romance Sociolinguistics 9783110370126

Table of contents :
Manuals of Romance Linguistics......Page 5
Acknowledgements......Page 7
Table of Contents......Page 9
0. Romance sociolinguistics: past, present, future......Page 15
1. Annotating oral corpora......Page 39
2. Quantitative approaches for modelling variation and change: a case study of sociophonetic data from Occitan......Page 71
3. Collecting and analysing creole data......Page 103
4. Fieldwork and building corpora for endangered varieties......Page 126
5. Romance dialectology: from the nineteenth century to the era of sociolinguistics......Page 146
6. Speaker variables in Romance: when demography and ideology collide......Page 185
7. Speaker variables and their relation to language change......Page 209
8. Variation and grammaticalization in Romance: a cross-linguistic study of the subjunctive......Page 229
9. Historical sociolinguistics and tracking language change: sources, text types and genres......Page 265
10. Speaker-based approaches to past language states......Page 292
11. Variation and prescriptivism......Page 319
12. Oral genres: concepts and complexities......Page 347
13. Register and text type......Page 374
14. New Media: new Romance varieties?......Page 398
15. Medium and creole......Page 417
16. Language policies in the Romancespeaking countries of Europe......Page 445
17. Linguistic diversity in Spain......Page 474
18. The languages and dialects of Italy......Page 506
19. Multilingualism in Switzerland......Page 538
20. Revitalization and the public space......Page 561
21. Revitalization and education......Page 582
22. Romance in contact with Romance......Page 607
23. Language contact between typologically different languages: functional transfer......Page 639
24. When Romance meets English......Page 664
25. Language contact in a rural community......Page 694
26. Code-switching and immigrant communities: the case of Italy......Page 714
27. The metropolization of French worldwide......Page 736
28. Transnational migration and language practices: the impact on Spanish-speaking migrants......Page 757
Contributors......Page 781
Index of concepts......Page 789
Index of names......Page 802

Citation preview

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Manual of Romance Sociolinguistics MRL 18

Manuals of Romance Linguistics Manuels de linguistique romane Manuali di linguistica romanza Manuales de lingüística románica

Edited by Günter Holtus and Fernando Sánchez Miret

Volume 18

Manual of Romance Sociolinguistics

Edited by Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Janice Carruthers

ISBN 978-3-11-037012-6 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-036595-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039433-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934550 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at: http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: jürgen ullrich typosatz, Nördlingen Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Manuals of Romance Linguistics The new international handbook series Manuals of Romance Linguistics (MRL) will offer an extensive, systematic and state-of-the-art overview of linguistic research in the entire field of present-day Romance Studies. MRL aims to update and expand the contents of the two major reference works available to date: Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik (LRL) (1988–2005, vol. 1–8) and Romanische Sprachgeschichte (RSG) (2003–2008, vol. 1–3). It will also seek to integrate new research trends as well as topics that have not yet been explored systematically. Given that a complete revision of LRL and RSG would not be feasible, at least not in a sensible timeframe, the MRL editors have opted for a modular approach that is much more flexible: The series will include approximately 60 volumes (each comprised of approx. 400–600 pages and 15–30 chapters). Each volume will focus on the most central aspects of its topic in a clear and structured manner. As a series, the volumes will cover the entire field of present-day Romance Linguistics, but they can also be used individually. Given that the work on individual MRL volumes will be nowhere near as time-consuming as that on a major reference work in the style of LRL, it will be much easier to take into account even the most recent trends and developments in linguistic research. MRL’s languages of publication are French, Spanish, Italian, English and, in exceptional cases, Portuguese. Each volume will consistently be written in only one of these languages. In each case, the choice of language will depend on the specific topic. English will be used for topics that are of more general relevance beyond the field of Romance Studies (for example Manual of Language Acquisition or Manual of Romance Languages in the Media). The focus of each volume will be either (1) on one specific language or (2) on one specific research field. Concerning volumes of the first type, each of the Romance languages – including Romance-based creoles – will be discussed in a separate volume. A particularly strong focus will be placed on the smaller languages (linguae minores) that other reference works have not treated extensively. MRL will comprise volumes on Friulian, Corsican, Galician, Vulgar Latin, among others, as well as a Manual of Judaeo-Romance Linguistics and Philology. Volumes of the second type will be devoted to the systematic presentation of all traditional and new fields of Romance Linguistics, with the research methods of Romance Linguistics being discussed in a separate volume. Dynamic new research fields and trends will yet again be of particular interest, because although they have become increasingly important in both research and teaching, older reference works have not dealt with them at all or touched upon them only tangentially. MRL will feature volumes dedicated to research fields such as Grammatical Interfaces, Youth Language Research, Urban Varieties, Computational Linguistics, Neurolinguistics, Sign Languages or Forensic Linguistics.  

 

 

 

 

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-202

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Manuals of Romance Linguistics

Each volume will offer a structured and informative, easy-to-read overview of the history of research as well as of recent research trends. We are delighted that internationally-renowned colleagues from a variety of Romance-speaking countries and beyond have agreed to collaborate on this series and take on the editorship of individual MRL volumes. Thanks to the expertise of the volume editors responsible for the concept and structure of their volumes, as well as for the selection of suitable authors, MRL will not only summarize the current state of knowledge in Romance Linguistics, but will also present much new information and recent research results. As a whole, the MRL series will present a panorama of the discipline that is both extensive and up-to-date, providing interesting and relevant information and useful orientation for every reader, with detailed coverage of specific topics as well as general overviews of present-day Romance Linguistics. We believe that the series will offer a fresh, innovative approach, suited to adequately map the constant advancement of our discipline. Günter Holtus (Lohra/Göttingen) Fernando Sánchez Miret (Salamanca) May 2018

Acknowledgements We would like to thank the following people who kindly offered us advice during the preparation of this volume: Adam Ledgeway, Mair Parry, Nigel Vincent and Christopher Pountain. A number of people helped with copyediting the text, bibliographical work, and translating the chapters by Manzano and Bergounioux/Jacobson/Pietrandrea: Sarah Brierley, Jessica Brown, Merryn Davies-Deacon, Daniel McAuley, Jessica Soltys, and particularly Aedín Ní Loingsigh. We are also grateful to the series editors, Günter Holtus and Fernando Sánchez Miret, and to the editorial team at De Gruyter, notably Gabrielle Cornefert. Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Janice Carruthers

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-203

Table of Contents Introduction Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Janice Carruthers 0 Romance sociolinguistics: past, present, future

3

Methodological issues Gabriel Bergounioux, Michel Jacobson and Paola Pietrandrea 1 Annotating oral corpora 27 Damien Mooney 2 Quantitative approaches for modelling variation and change: a case study of sociophonetic data from Occitan 59 Eeva Sippola 3 Collecting and analysing creole data

91

Lori Repetti 4 Fieldwork and building corpora for endangered varieties

114

Francis Manzano 5 Romance dialectology: from the nineteenth century to the era of sociolinguistics 134

Variation and change Nigel Armstrong and Ian Mackenzie 6 Speaker variables in Romance: when demography and ideology collide Mari D’Agostino and Giuseppe Paternostro 7 Speaker variables and their relation to language change

173

197

Shana Poplack, Rena Torres Cacoullos, Nathalie Dion, Rosane de Andrade Berlinck, Salvatore Digesto, Dora Lacasse and Jonathan Steuck 8 Variation and grammaticalization in Romance: a cross-linguistic study of the subjunctive 217

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Wendy Ayres-Bennett 9 Historical sociolinguistics and tracking language change: sources, text types and genres 253 Kormi Anipa 10 Speaker-based approaches to past language states Joan Costa-Carreras 11 Variation and prescriptivism

280

307

Medium, register, text type, genre Janice Carruthers 12 Oral genres: concepts and complexities Rodica Zafiu 13 Register and text type

362

Daniel Kallweit 14 New Media: new Romance varieties? Ralph Ludwig 15 Medium and creole

335

386

405

Linguae minores / Minoritized languages: status, norms, policy and revitalization Klaus Bochmann 16 Language policies in the Romance-speaking countries of Europe Fernando Ramallo 17 Linguistic diversity in Spain

462

Gaetano Berruto 18 The languages and dialects of Italy Matthias Grünert 19 Multilingualism in Switzerland

494

526

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Robert Blackwood 20 Revitalization and the public space

549

Anna Ghimenton and Giovanni Depau 21 Revitalization and education 570

Language contact Kim Schulte 22 Romance in contact with Romance

595

Anna María Escobar 23 Language contact between typologically different languages: functional transfer 627 Mairi McLaughlin 24 When Romance meets English

652

Barbara E. Bullock 25 Language contact in a rural community

682

Francesco Goglia 26 Code-switching and immigrant communities: the case of Italy Françoise Gadet and Philippe Hambye 27 The metropolization of French worldwide

724

Clare Mar-Molinero and Darren Paffey 28 Transnational migration and language practices: the impact on Spanish-speaking migrants 745

Contributors

769

Index of concepts Index of names

777 790

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Introduction

Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Janice Carruthers

0 Romance sociolinguistics: past, present, future Abstract: In this chapter we consider what it means to produce a Manual of Romance Sociolinguistics. We outline the development of Sociolinguistics and situate Romance Sociolinguistics within this, highlighting in particular its distinctive characteristics. We conclude by considering possible new directions for scholars working in the field, and argue that there needs to be more truly comparative work, which draws on the wealth and diversity of the data afforded by the very many genetically related dialects, regional varieties, minoritized and major languages of the Romance-speaking area. We contend that such studies will not only contribute to general theories of variation and change and the testing of so-called sociolinguistic universals, but also address important areas of language policy, including the maintenance and support of linguistic diversity at a time of high mobility and migration, as well as concerns about the effects of globalization and the dominance of English.  

Keywords: Romance sociolinguistics, sociolinguistics, recent and current trends, new directions  

1 Introduction What does it mean to produce a Manual of Romance Sociolinguistics? In particular, how does this differ from a Manual of Sociolinguistics in general? To answer this question, we will start by outlining some of the main areas and issues which have dominated sociolinguistics, particularly in the anglophone world, over the last fifty years, as well as considering some of the more recent and emerging fields of interest (section 2). We will then examine the extent to which these fields have been taken up by Romance scholars, and try to propose some explanations as to why certain subdisciplines are more represented than others (section 3). Crucially, in section 4, we will address what is distinctive about work in Romance sociolinguistics, and what this might in turn offer to the field more broadly. In a final section (5), we will suggest some possible new directions and fresh opportunities for scholars working in Romance sociolinguistics, whether we think of the major Romance languages or the linguae minores. This is particularly vital given the diverse sociocultural and linguistic landscape across the Romance-speaking world, and notably the changing population patterns in both urban and rural contexts. These rich and diverse data may serve not only to reinforce or further exemplify current theories and methodologies, but also to challenge assumptions and bring new questions into focus.  

 

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2 Trends in sociolinguistic theory and practice 2.1 Milestones and classics Sociolinguistics as a sub-discipline of linguistics has been thriving since the 1960s. The widely-acknowledged foundational figure is William Labov, whose work on American varieties of English (for example in New York City and Martha’s Vineyard) has had a profound influence internationally on our understanding of linguistic variation and language change, and on the methodologies used for speaker sampling, fieldwork and analysis (Labov 1966; 1972a; 1972b; 1994; 2001). The Labovian paradigm has been the catalyst for the development of large-scale linguistic corpora, many of which are stratified according to key speaker variables such as socio-economic status, gender and age so that statistical data can be generated and empirical evidence cited for the relationship between language variation and sociolinguistic variables.1 Labov also led the way in developing sociolinguistic interviewing techniques, particularly as regards the need to create as “natural” a context for interviewing as possible in order to attempt to obviate the observer’s paradox and to gain access to natural, everyday speech which he termed the “vernacular” and which is the desired type of speech for most early and many contemporary corpora.2 For example, Labov encouraged selection of a location where informants are relaxed such as their home (allowing “normal” life, even where it involves interruptions, to continue around the interview), and advocated the benefits of open questions that allow the interviewee to speak at length, as well as the use of techniques such as the “danger of death” question (“have you ever been in a situation where you thought you were in serious danger of being killed?” Labov 1972a, 92) in order to reduce the speaker’s self-consciousness. Linguistic data from natural speech can then be compared to more formal varieties of language or to written forms (both of which are easier to obtain than access to the vernacular), allowing quantitative work on questions of medium and register. Indeed, Labov’s early work incorporated a measure of stylistic variation, testing “vernacular” interview data against speakers’ pronunciation when reading prose, word lists and minimal pairs (1972a, 207–216). One of the key concepts to emerge from Labov’s work has been the “linguistic variable”, i.e. a linguistic feature whose behaviour varies according to social factors such as socio-economic status or gender, where that sociolinguistic variation can be measured, quantified and tested for statistical significance. The idea of a measurable linguistic variable implies that both “actual occurrences” and “possible occurrences”

1 The extent of Labov’s worldwide influence is evident in the multiplicity of variationist projects referenced in standard works on sociolinguistic theory and practice such as Trudgill (1974; 2002); Chambers/Trudgill/Schilling-Estes (2002); Milroy/Gordon (2003); Tagliamonte (2012); Bayley/Cameron/Lucas (2013); Wardhaugh/Fuller (2015). 2 Note, however, that the very concept of the “vernacular” is problematic: see Milroy/Gordon (2003, 49–50).

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of the variable can be identified and counted, since researchers will usually wish to establish to what extent a particular variable occurs relative to the number of times it could have occurred. The notion of “possible occurrences” makes the assumption that more than one linguistic variable is possible in a given context. In practice, this concept is relatively easily applicable to phonological variables, where we are dealing with different realizations of the same phoneme, e.g. Labov’s study of the realization or absence of post-vocalic “r” in New York speech (1966; 1972a, 43–69). Indeed, phonological variables dominate Labov’s early work and much of the pioneering work internationally in variationist linguistics (e.g. Labov 1966 looked at five phonological variables in New York speech; Trudgill 1974 explored three consonantal and thirteen vowel variables in his study of Norwich City).3 However, transferring the concept of a linguistic variable to the syntactic domain is much more complex, since two possible variants of a syntactic feature are rarely entirely semantically equivalent. For example, while we might consider occurrence or non-occurrence of the French negative ne as “meaning the same thing” (e.g. je sais pas usually means the same thing as je ne sais pas),4 the choice of je vais faire as opposed to je ferai is highly likely to involve temporal, aspectual and modal factors. The two options are thus not semantically equivalent and consequently problematic to consider straightforwardly as linguistic variables whose variation could be measured to show possible differences in behaviour according to speaker variables such as age, gender, socio-economic status, etc. Nonetheless, sociolinguists working in a Labovian paradigm have indeed taken the notion of the linguistic variable into the syntactic domain, using a variety of arguments to make the case that in some instances, the notion of a syntactic variable is entirely valid, thereby allowing empirical studies of a Labovian nature.5 The methodologies deployed when handling speaker and stylistic variables can also be complex and problematic. For example, it is notoriously difficult to measure socio-economic status, particularly given regional variations within societies and the different patterns found in different countries, and it is particularly tricky to score women for this variable.6 Discussions of key issues concerning speaker variables can be traced back to Labov, not least the question of whether significant differences between language usage in different age groups should be considered indicative of language change “in apparent time” or whether they simply indicate “stable variation” between the linguistic behaviour of different age groups, known as “age grading” (1972a, 1–42; 160–182), the latter suggesting that “real-time” data may be required in order to be

3 See Tagliamonte (2012, 177–205) for an update on more recent work on phonological variation. 4 Even in cases like this, linguistic factors, such as phonological considerations, can mean that not all variables are equally likely. 5 For an early discussion, see Sankoff (1980b). See also the broader discussion in Milroy/Gordon (2003, 169–197) and Tagliamonte (2012, 206–246). 6 See the discussion in Milroy/Gordon (2003, chapter 2).  

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certain that change is occurring.7 Moreover, the whole notion of stylistic variation is controversial, with a wide range of approaches developing after Labov’s early work. These range from Coupland’s (1980) innovative approach to style as “audience design” to highly quantitative work on register and genre, spearheaded by Biber (Biber 1984; Biber/Conrad 2009).8 From Labov onwards, there is also a clear understanding amongst sociolinguists that speaker and stylistic variables interact with each other in highly complex ways.9 A second influential approach in sociolinguistics is the methodology developed by James and Lesley Milroy in their pioneering research on Belfast speech (Milroy/Milroy 1978; Milroy 1987). Two aspects of their approach have been particularly influential. The first is the development in sociolinguistics of a research technique more widely used in anthropology, i.e. participant observation. Rather than interviewing speakers, with all the problems generated by the complexities of the observer’s paradox, the Milroys use participant observation, a technique whereby the fieldworkers get to know the speakers as individuals and as a community, to the point where they win the trust of the speakers they are recording and are able to leave the recording technology running in the background for long periods in the speakers’ homes, thereby gaining access to unguarded, natural speech. There are, of course, drawbacks to this type of fieldwork methodology, not least the fact that there will inevitably be sections of indecipherable discourse (e.g. due to noises or speaker overlap) and the fact that it is very time-consuming and therefore expensive. However, the losses in these respects are offset by the gains in terms of access to the vernacular. The second area of influence from the Milroys is their innovative concept of “linguistic networks”, whereby, in the case of their Belfast study, speakers in three localized inner-city communities (Ballymacarrett, Clonard and the Hammer) were scored according to the intensity of their everyday contact with, and amongst, members of their local community. Rather than measuring more standard variables such as age, gender and socio-economic status, the Milroys tested the strength of particular linguistic variables – in this case, marked features of Belfast speech – against the network scores of speakers, finding in general that the stronger the network score for a given speaker, the more likely that speaker was to use linguistic features strongly marked as belonging to Belfast. From the early major projects in sociolinguistic variation, a certain number of sociolinguistic universals have emerged which have shaped debate internationally over the last fifty years. Amongst these are the “gender paradox” regarding women’s speech and their tendency to adopt “perceived prestige” forms, which means that at times they lead linguistic change whilst at other times they resist it.10 Another key

7 For full discussions of these issues, see the texts cited in footnote 1. 8 See the discussion in Milroy/Gordon (2003, 198–222). 9 See Schilling-Estes (2002) and the comments on style, sex and social class in Tagliamonte (2012, 35). 10 See, for example, women’s avoidance of non-standard -n for -ing in Trudgill (1972) and their role in leading change in the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (Labov 2001, 285–290). For an excellent synopsis of  

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concept is that of “change from below”, where change is initiated below the level of consciousness, usually in the vernacular, and spreads throughout the linguistic system (Labov 1972a, 178–180; Trudgill 1974, 90–132).11

2.2 Recent and current trends We make no claim to give a comprehensive account of current trends in sociolinguistics. There are, nevertheless, some recent and ongoing developments which, in opening up fresh areas of research, merit mention because they have been taken up by scholars working on Romance varieties and are therefore represented in this volume. The fundamentals of sampling and fieldwork methodology have not undergone dramatic transformation in the past number of years, although there has been an increased emphasis, particularly in conversational analysis, on obtaining “authentic” oral data in naturally-occurring contexts, rather than creating “false” contexts through techniques such as interviews (see the discussion in Mondada 2005). One significant change is the current greater awareness of the ethical dimension to data collection. As recently as 10–15 years ago, it was still possible to collect language data while interviewees were largely unaware of the linguistic purpose of the exercise. There was a good reason for this widespread practice: making speakers conscious of the linguistic motivation increases the chances of the observer’s paradox coming into play and decreases the researcher’s chances of gaining access to the vernacular. Now, with greater awareness of the need to treat data respectfully and sensitively, and the requirement from the higher education sector and funders that ethical questions be handled properly, all researchers build an important ethical dimension into their data collection, and guidelines on good practice are widely available.12 Clearly, ethical issues are particularly acute when working with certain groups such as children or vulnerable adults, but the minimum level of ethical consent is now to give informants full details of the project in which they are participating (including details of personal metadata and linguistic data storage) and to gain their formal “informed consent”. This can impact on the question of preventing the observer’s paradox but other strategies, such as creating a maximally relaxed atmosphere, can be used to help mitigate the downsides. In contexts of naturally occurring oral data, ethical practice also involves getting to know those involved in the activity being recorded, and following up on data collection to mitigate against any potential sense of exploitation (Mondada 2005).  

the possible reasons for women’s tendency to opt for overtly prestigious forms, see Tagliamonte (2012, 32–34). Cheshire (2002) offers a discussion of more problematic elements of established sociolinguistic notions about women’s speech. 11 See the discussion in Wardhaugh/Fuller (2015, 214–216) and Tagliamonte (2012, 27–29). 12 See BAAL (2016) and LSA (2009).

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With the impact of the digital revolution, there has been a seismic shift in our approach to storing, accessing and annotating linguistic data. The widely-accepted norm currently is for corpora to be transcribed and digitized in a format such as XML, annotated using a variety of annotation systems (e.g. Part of Speech (POS) taggers, Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) conventions) and, where possible, to be made available online using a Creative Commons licence which allows wide access and citation for the purposes of scholarly research. The first chapter in this volume (↗1 Annotating oral corpora) discusses these developments in detail, but we note for now that one of the key goals in sociolinguistics in the last 20 years has been the development of digitization and annotations systems that are both compatible (and therefore comparable) internationally and fit for purpose in terms of long-term data preservation. It is a field where technology moves very quickly and where developments have facilitated the creation of a multiplicity of corpora – both synchronic and diachronic – worldwide, dramatically enhancing the range and reliability of both qualitative and quantitative sociolinguistic and historical sociolinguistic analyses.13 Quantitative methods have continued to develop with increasing sophistication (see ↗2 Quantitative approaches for modelling variation and change), using statistical modelling and toolkits such as Goldvarb, Rbrul and R.14 New developments in technology have not only facilitated the sophisticated digitization and annotation of corpora; they have also enabled the growth of oral corpora, with increasingly unobtrusive high-quality recording possibilities and easier access to publicly available oral material such as radio data. In complementing written corpora, new oral corpora have created the possibility of incorporating data of multiple genres, text types, media and registers into mega-corpora such as the BNC. What started as a discussion of the Labovian concept of “style”, has now opened up much greater possibilities for analysis of medium, register, text type and genre which have moved well beyond a simple “oral-written” dichotomy and into the field of multidimensional analysis (see Biber/Conrad 2009; ↗12 Oral genres). Given the digital nature of much social media, the explosion in communication through Facebook, Twitter, texting etc. has created a readily available dataset of new varieties, which are equally not easily classifiable in simple binaries such as oral and written. This renewed focus on questions related to Labov's original concept of “style” also sits well with what has been termed the “third wave” of sociolinguistics (Eckert 2012), where variations in stylistic practice are understood as having a clear social-semiotic value. These issues are mentioned in D’Agostino/Paternostro (↗7 Speaker variables and  

13 For just two of the best-known English-language digitized corpora, see the British National Corpus (BNC, http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk, last access 18.02.2018) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA, http://corpus.byu.edu/coca, last access 18.02.2018). For a wide selection of linguistic corpora, see the Oxford Text Archive (https://ota.ox.ac.uk, last access 18.02.2018). 14 For an excellent discussion of the issues, including recent “mixed effects” modelling, see Tagliamonte (2012, 120–161).

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their relation to language change, section 5) and in Zafiu’s contribution (↗13 Register and text type, section 2.1). In terms of innovatory trends in sociolinguistic analysis, a number of areas spring to mind. Two of these are connected to questions around regional varieties and linguae minores. First, new perspectives have been opened up around the concept of “dialect levelling”. Whereas in the past, sociolinguists interested in regional variation would be most likely to focus on the strikingly regional features of a given variety, subsequent research, set in the context of globalization, mass communication and increasing mobility, has explored “dialect levelling”, i.e. “the reduction or attrition of marked variants” (Trudgill 1986, 98).15 Second, the field of language revitalization has grown substantially. This is a vast field within sociolinguistics and involves political questions around language policy, particularly as regards linguae minores. Recent areas of interest include discussion of the issues raised by “new speakers” (i.e. speakers of “new” standardized, often urban varieties which can be linguistically distant from native speaker varieties)16 as well as the use of language in the public space, e.g. on signage, street names etc.17

3 Positioning Romance sociolinguistics To what extent has Romance sociolinguistics adopted these major trends seen in the broader field? In this section we will consider first the uptake of Labovian-style quantitative studies, before turning to the more recent themes and approaches outlined in the previous section.

3.1 The impact of Labovian-type approaches on Romance sociolinguistics Compared with work on English, there is a relative lack of major studies across the Romance domain which adopt a classic Labovian variationist approach, although as the chapter in this volume by D’Agostino/Paternostro shows (↗7 Speaker variables and their relation to language change), some of the key ideas in Labovian theory (e.g.

15 For explorations of dialect levelling in British English, see Williams/Kerswill (1999) and Kerswill (2003). 16 See for example the special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language (2015, vol. 231) containing a series of articles on new speakers of a range of minoritized languages. See also the New Speakers Network, funded by COST: http://www.nspk.org.uk (last access 18.02.2018). 17 Much research on language in the public space draws on Linguistic Landscape theory. See Landry/ Bourhis (1997); Kallen (2010); Blommaert (2013); the new journal, Linguistic Landscape (Benjamins); ↗20 Revitalization and the public space.  

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the gender paradox referred to above) can be discerned in earlier work on the Romance languages. That said, the variationist studies on Romance that do exist have made extremely important contributions to the field from the 1970s through to contemporary research across a range of linguistic variables, including phonological variation,18 morphosyntactic variation,19 stylistic variation,20 as well as issues around gender variation.21 Indeed, analyses of syntactic variation in both French and Spanish were crucial in early discussions of whether or not it was possible to measure syntactic variation.22 This volume showcases current research for which Labovian methodologies have been the springboard; Mooney’s chapter (↗2 Quantitative approaches for modelling variation and change) demonstrates how a Labovian quantitative paradigm can shed new light on a regional minoritized language; while Poplack et al. (↗8 Variation and grammaticalization in Romance) extend the strengths of this type of approach into comparative work across several Romance languages; and Armstrong/ Mackenzie (↗6 Speaker variables in Romance) interrogate the complexities of the relationship between certain speaker variables and the cultural context and ideologies in which they operate. Researchers working on the Romance languages drawing on the Milroys’ participant observation methodology are much less numerous, but have again made important contributions.23 One possible reason for the relative lack of research in these paradigms in the European countries where Romance languages are spoken may be linked to the availability of translations, since the primary methodological sources are all published in English. Nevertheless, it is important to note that, while fewer translations of the Milroys’ work are available, many of Labov’s key works have been translated into both French and Spanish. Other reasons seem more plausible. The first relates to the different concerns across the Romance-speaking nations, notably in Europe, which reflect the varying linguistic, historical and cultural traditions of those countries. Notable amongst these is the interest in dialects and regional languages, where the primary concern has been documentation and analysis of the multiple varieties rather than variation within “major” languages according to the type of speaker variables central to Labovian approaches, i.e. age, gender, socio-economic status etc. Indeed, this emerges strongly in the discussion in Jones/Parry/Williams (2016), where the 18 Important early work includes Cedergren (1973) on Spanish. For further discussion and recent examples, see the contributions on Spanish of Medina-Rivera (2011); Lipski (2011) and Samper Padilla (2011); see Carmo/Tenani (2013) for a recent Portuguese example. 19 See Poplack (2011) for a comparative Romance study; see Coveney (1996) and Ashby (2001) for French examples; and for recent examples from Spanish see Schwenter (2011); Bentivoglio/Sedano (2011); Serrano (2011). 20 For example, Armstrong (2001); Medina-Rivera (2011); Massot/Rowlett (2013); Kabatek (2016). 21 See for example Parry (1991); Fresu (2006); Holmquist (2011). 22 See the debate in Lavandera (1978); see also Sankoff/Vincent (1980) on retention and loss of negative ne in French; Sankoff/Thibault (1980) on avoir/être alternation. 23 See for example Pooley (1996); Klein (1989); Vietti (2002) and McAuley (2017).

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authors highlight the dearth of Labovian-type approaches in Italy (where interest in dialects and regional varieties is paramount), as well as the distinction in Spain between bilingual areas (where regional concerns are paramount) and monolingual areas (where the small number of Labovian studies are based). The Romance tradition of dialectology has strongly influenced the shape of sociolinguistics in the field and we will return to the importance of regional languages and dialects as a distinctive feature of Romance sociolinguistics in section 4 below. The second relevant factor, perhaps the most striking, is that where Labovian methodologies have been applied to Romance data, it has often been by scholars emerging from the anglophone tradition of sociolinguistic methodology, who either work, or received their research training, in Canada, the United States or the UK.24 In practice, the bulk of this Romance variationist research relates to French and Spanish. In view of Labovian methodology’s connections to these three countries, this may be because French is an official language in Canada (and crucially is the first language of Quebec); Spanish is widespread as a heritage language in North America which is of course positioned geographically “next door” to a continent where Spanish is the dominant language; and French and Spanish are by far the most widely taught and researched Romance languages in the UK university system.  

3.2 Recent and current trends in Romance sociolinguistics The newer sociolinguistic trends discussed in 2.2 above are also, not surprisingly, influencing current research on the Romance languages. As was the case regarding the influence of Labov, certain approaches have had more traction in the Romance field than others, and many of the chapters in this volume illustrate the trends that are currently shaping Romance sociolinguistics. Moreover, recent growth in some fields can be seen as seamlessly linked to Labovian concepts or, in some cases, as bringing together phenomena that have been discussed since the 1960s with the opportunities provided by new technologies, e.g. in work on spoken varieties, on creoles and endangered varieties, on new varieties, or on register, medium and text type. In terms of methodology, we can see the importance in contemporary research of building major corpora, both written and spoken, which are digitized and annotated using internationally-recognized good practice. In their detailed discussion of current methodological issues (↗1 Annotating oral corpora), Bergounioux/Jacobson/Pietrandrea cite many of the major digitized corpora of French, Spanish, Portuguese and

24 For example William Ashby, Zoe Boughton, Aidan Coveney, Beatriz Lavandera, Gillian and David Sankoff, Rena Torres Cacoullos, and a number of contributors to this volume.

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Italian. Corpora are also being created, digitized and annotated in the minoritized Romance languages,25 opening up new possibilities for research, particularly where there is a quantitative component in the analysis, as is evident from Mooney’s discussion (↗2 Quantitative approaches for modelling variation and change). New opportunities for comparative research have been created by the growth of largescale corpora: the contribution by Poplack et al. (↗8 Variation and grammaticalization in Romance), which looks at the evolution of the subjunctive across several Romance languages, is an excellent example of the superior level of analysis, both qualitative and quantitative, that can be achieved when large annotated corpora are available. Since there is now a considerable lapse of time since the early transcribed corpora in the 1970s, new corpora are being developed that allow “real-time” analysis of data, as opposed to Labovian “apparent-time” analysis, where evidence of linguistic change hinges on age differences. For example, the Orléans corpus (ESLO) that was originally created between 1968 and 1974 has now been supplemented by a contemporary corpus from 2008 onwards,26 where a number of speakers from the original corpus feature again, forty years later, thereby allowing real-time analysis of linguistic change. Similarly, the original Montreal corpus recorded in 1971 has been supplemented by corpora in 1984 and 1995, again allowing the possibility of real-time analysis.27 It is important, however, to note that we are still dealing with very short timespans for the tracing of major linguistic changes, as Ayres-Bennett points out (↗9 Historical sociolinguistics and tracking language change). As a result, those working in historical sociolinguistics are both exploiting existing corpora and creating new databases of textual sources which seek to meet the challenge of finding appropriate sources for what Labov famously termed the “bad data” problem (Labov 1972c, 98; 1994, 10–11). In Ayres-Bennett’s contribution, the focus is on the extent it is possible to exploit large-scale multi-genre databases and corpora to track innovation and the spread of change through different text types or genres. By contrast, Anipa (↗10 Speaker-based approaches to past language states) offers a different solution to the problem of sources for socio-historical linguistics, arguing for what he terms the micro-framework, which focuses on the linguistic usage of individual writers of literary texts. As mentioned in section 3.2 above, the growth in high-quality oral corpora around the world has led to a much larger volume of research on contemporary spoken varieties, which in turn has facilitated an increase in research on medium,  

25 For a pre-2003 list, see Pusch/Raible (2002). Recent corpora include, for Occitan http://redac.univtlse2.fr/bateloc (last access 18.02.2018); for Galician http://ilg.usc.es/gl/node/1016 (last access 18.02.2018); for Catalan http://nlp.ffzg.hr/resources/corpora/cawac (last access 18.02.2018). 26 See http://eslo.huma-num.fr (last access 18.02.2018). Ashby (2001) has also exploited two ‘realtime’ corpora from 1976 and 1995 to analyse the retention/loss of negative ne in French. 27 See for example Sankoff/Blondeau (2007).

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register and text type. This growth in oral corpora has impacted positively across the Romance domain. In addition to multiple studies of specific oral phenomena (lexical, morphosyntactic and phonetic/phonological) in particular Romance languages, we have seen the development of comparable oral corpora in several Romance languages (see Cresti/Moneglia 2005) and the analysis of specific phenomena across several Romance languages, such as Philippe Martin’s recent work on intonation in Romance (Martin 2015). Oral corpora have also been crucial for investigating creoles and endangered varieties, where spoken data are vital for full documentation. In such cases, particular methodological issues arise, such as the presence of multiple varieties and the paucity of speakers (see Repetti’s discussion of endangered varieties, ↗4 Fieldwork and building corpora for endangered varieties), the problematic and complex relationship (both politically and linguistically) with a standard language (see ↗4 Fieldwork and building corpora for endangered varieties, and also Sippola’s discussion of creole ↗3 Collecting and analysing creole data), and the question of the researcher’s status as “insider” or “outsider” (discussed in both these chapters). Changes in practice around research ethics in collecting oral corpora are also reflected strongly in the development of corpora of creoles and endangered languages, where standard research techniques such as interviews can pose particular problems, both cultural (see ↗3 Collecting and analysing creole data) and practical (see Repetti’s comments on elderly speakers, ↗4 Fieldwork and building corpora for endangered varieties). As noted, the growth of oral corpora has greatly enhanced research on media, register and genre. Carruthers (↗12 Oral genres) demonstrates how the availability of digitized Spanish corpora has been the catalyst for multidimensional work on style, genre and register and how corpora of oral French can shed new light on the concept of genre. Both Carruthers and Zafiu (↗13 Register and text type) touch on the problematic definitional issues in this field and on the complex relationships between genre, text type and register, with Zafiu discussing a series of case studies from Romanian. More broadly, research on medium, register and genre has great potential for future developments in several fields. For example, questions relating to oral and written media are central to the use and status of creole, as is clear in Ludwig’s discussion of Martinican and Guadeloupean creole (↗15 Medium and creole). Recent and current research also explores the complexities of new varieties that are emerging in electronic media, as reflected in Kallweit’s discussion of Spanish (↗14 New Media). It will be interesting to see how Romance sociolinguistics develops elements of the so-called “third wave” in sociolinguistics (see 2.2 above) in the ways in which it takes research forward on questions of style, medium, register and genre. A very significant area of growth, particularly for French and to some extent Spanish, involves the exploration of linguistic phenomena in superdiverse urban contexts where the “melting pot” represented by large cities raises fascinating linguistic issues relating not only to the influence of migration, multiculturalism and multilingualism, but also to questions of peer-group, community, identity and social

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cohesion.28 Gadet/Hambye (↗27 The metropolization of French worldwide) explore the complexities of metropolization, comparing linguistic patterns for French in Europe, North America and Africa. They demonstrate the importance of factors such as the level of plurilingualism amongst speakers, the status of the various languages in contact, as well as their social and educational position. These questions are further complicated by different types of migration patterns which produce a range of different permutations involving Romance languages: e.g. large urban contexts to which Romance speakers migrate where the main language of the city is a Romance one (e.g. a Mexican migrating to Spain); similar contexts where the main language is not Romance (a lusophone migrating to London); and Romance contexts where a variety of Romance and non-Romance languages are present through migration (a multicultural setting in Marseille where migrant languages include varieties of Arabic, sub-Saharan languages and possibly Occitan). As Mar-Molinero/Paffey explain (↗28 Transnational migration and language practices), this field is also leading to new theoretical developments, notably the emergence of concepts such as “translanguaging”, and “metrolingualism”, and the creation of large urban corpora and international collaborations.29 Mar-Molinero/Paffey also explore the further complexities connected to different stages of migration (e.g. the concept of “return” migrants or the possibility of secondary migration to one destination followed by another). The linguistic outcomes of immigration in Italy are examined by Goglia (↗26 Code-switching and immigrant communities), whose contribution exemplifies code-switching by immigrant speakers and its function in interactions with Italians, in “in-group” interactions, and where it involves Italo-Romance dialects. Schulte (↗22 Romance in contact with Romance) explores contact-induced structural change between Romance languages in three different situations; alongside recent migration-based contact, he considers long-term contact situations in Spain and in the New World. Finally, it is important to note that questions of language contact between Romance and nonRomance languages, so central to explorations of superdiverse urban settings, are also increasingly researched in other contexts. Indeed, Bullock (↗25 Language contact in a rural community) stresses the importance of not neglecting the rural context, particularly where we find isolated rural communities speaking what is effectively a minority language, even if elsewhere it is a major world language. Through the case study of Frenchville, a French-speaking community in Pennsylvania, she explores the high levels of inter- and intra-speaker variability in this setting. In her contribution, Escobar (↗23 Language contact between typologically different languages) considers

28 See, for example, Armstrong/Jamin (2002); Trimaille (2004); Trimaille/Billiez (2007); Pooley (2009); Gasquet-Cyrus (2004; 2009); Zentella (2009); Gadet (2013); Hambye/Gadet (2014); Padilla/ Azevedo/Olmos-Alcaraz (2015); Lynch (forthcoming). 29 For example, there is close collaboration and comparative work between the “London Multicultural English project” and Françoise Gadet’s project on Parisian speech (www.mle-mpf.bbk.ac.uk, last access 18.02.2018), both of which have generated substantial corpora of urban speech.

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functional transfer in highly bilingual communities in South America, between the Romance language of the colonizer/state, i.e. Spanish, and a non-Romance indigenous language, in this case Quechua. McLaughlin (↗24 When Romance meets English) investigates the differences in terms of the effects of language contact with English across different Romance languages, i.e. French, Spanish and Italian, and highlights the question of “Romance in contact with English” as a major area for future research, given the increasingly global status of English.

4 Distinctive features of Romance sociolinguistics In addition to the recent and current trends in Romance sociolinguistics discussed in the previous section, which might be viewed as emerging from major international developments since the 1960s, Romance scholars have developed their own distinctive approaches to the Romance languages, informed by the work of different linguists and paradigms. We will mention just three representative examples here. The first, “variational linguistics”, arose in the Scandinavian tradition. In this approach the language system of a community is described as a “language architecture” with different diasystems, including diatopic, diastratic, diaphasic, diamesic, as well as diachronic, varieties. The terms diatopic (spatial) and diastratic (social) variation were first introduced by the Norwegian linguist Flydal (1951) and, three years later, Weinreich (1954) proposed the term “diasystem”. Subsequently, to cite Völker (2009, 32), Coșeriu “a repris, unifié, modifié et surtout promu les instruments terminologiques proposés par Flydal et Weinreich en confirmant l’usage des termes diasystème, diatopique et diastratique […] et en introduisant une dimension nouvelle […] diaphasique”. The diaphasic is used to refer to variation according to different styles or registers used in different communicative settings (see, for example, Coșeriu 1981). The work of Coșeriu, who held a chair in Tübingen, has been especially significant for German Romanists and Hispanists, but it is also exploited in discussions of other Romance languages and varieties.30 In this volume, the influence of “variational linguistics” and the concept of diasystems can be seen, for instance, in ↗5 Romance dialectology; ↗7 Speaker variables and their relation to language change; ↗13 Register and text type; ↗18 The languages and dialects of Italy. The second, termed linguistic ecology,31 has been particularly influential in France. In his 1999 work, Pour une écologie des langues du monde, Calvet criticizes what he considers the dominant model in linguistics of considering language as an abstract system. For Calvet, language is rather “un ensemble de pratiques et de représentations” (1999, 165). As a result, the ecolinguistic approach consists in study-

30 See, for example, D’Achille (2008) on Italian or Verjans (2014) on French. 31 The term “ecology of language” is borrowed from Einar Haugen (see, for instance, Haugen 1972).

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ing “les rapports entre les langues et leur milieu, c’est-à-dire d’abord les rapports entre les langues elles-mêmes, puis entre ces langues et la société” (1999, 17). Emphasis then is placed on looking at the complex nature of the social and communicative dimensions of language. Linguistic ecology aims to explain social communication as a whole, considering the factors which explain the revitalization, maintenance or loss of languages. As Françoise Gadet (2009) notes, the umbrella term Écologie des langues aims to introduce a certain unity into a somewhat heterogeneous domain, comprising sociolinguistics, dialectology, creolistics, language contact, plurilingualism, etc. (many of which are represented in this volume), although it may itself run the risk of perpetuating the idea of norms and variations from the norm. Perhaps most important in the Romance context has been the emphasis on dialectology and the related field of the production of dialect atlases. In other words, the diatopic long held sway in Romance studies over other types of dia- variations. This is particularly true for Italy where, as Parry (Jones/Parry/Williams 2016, 616) observes, diatopic variation is the primary dimension of study in the case of sociolinguistic variation, the diverse dialects interacting everywhere with diastratic, diaphasic and diamesic variation. Starting from the last third of the nineteenth century, dialect studies became a vital part of historical-comparative studies of the Romance languages, and the atlases that were produced in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, such as the Petit Atlas phonétique du Valais roman by Gilliéron (1880), the Petit Atlas linguistique d’une région des Landes by Millardet (1910), and above all, the Atlas linguistique de la France (Gilliéron/Edmont 1902–1910), came to inspire a whole series of atlases of different Romance varieties in the period 1910– 1940.32 As Swiggers observes (2010), from the 1970s dialectology started to incorporate a sociolinguistic perspective, so that maps began to include information about the age, sex, social class and education of the speakers. Indeed, Manzano (↗5 Romance dialectology) demonstrates how important the field of dialectology has been since the nineteenth century in helping to shape the newer field of sociolinguistics. The study of diatopic variation in Romance – of dialects, regional varieties, regional and minoritized languages, etc. – has proved to be a particularly rich and productive area for consideration of a number of key issues, not least because of the genetic relationship between the languages and dialects across Romania. The volume of languages and speakers involved also makes the Romance-speaking area a particularly fruitful observatory for such issues, compared to other areas, where there may only be a constellation of two or three related languages (e.g. Frisian/Dutch/German; English/Scots). The chapters by Ramallo on Spain (↗17 Linguistic diversity in Spain) and Berruto on Italy (↗18 The languages and dialects of Italy) are particularly instructive in this regard, where the majority of the multiple languages and varieties attested are linguistically related to each other within the Romance family.

32 See Swiggers (2010); ↗5 Romance dialectology.

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Moreover, the richness of the linguistic landscape means that study of the Romance languages does not just give us an abundance of data, but also adds an additional layer of theoretical complexity. Manzano (↗5 Romance dialectology) and Berruto (↗18 The languages and dialects of Italy), for instance, both open up the thorny issues around what should be termed a language or a dialect, while Ramallo (↗17 Linguistic diversity in Spain) relates these issues to the status of the different languages and dialects in Spain. A number of scholars have in recent years re-opened the question of the definition of a regional variety,33 notably in relation to French. In terms of the analysis of Romance varieties, there are a number of clear trends. As we have already noted, there is growth in the related area of the study of dialect levelling, particularly with respect to French, Spanish and Italian. Discussions centre not only on the phenomenon of levelling but also on the complexities involved in different parts of Romania, with their differing histories in terms of the relationships between languages, dialects and regional varieties.34 There is also debate around dialect and standard convergence where minoritized varieties are concerned (see Cerruti/Regis 2014). In the light of the multiplicity of regional languages and dialects, study of the Romance-speaking area inevitably brings to the fore important questions about the status of languages, of linguistic ideologies and policies. We have placed particular emphasis in this volume on the linguae minores and important questions about their revitalization. Linked to revitalization is also the complex area of “new speakers” (see also 2.2 above) who speak varieties which can differ substantially from those spoken by native speakers and who, in some cases such as Galician and Rhaeto-Romance, constitute in fact the dominant group of speakers.35 The vulnerability of many of the minoritized varieties means that questions of language planning and policy are never far away.36 In this volume, a range of language policy issues are discussed, from policy within a single country where Romance languages and dialects dominate (Ramallo, ↗17 Linguistic diversity in Spain), to comparative policy across several countries (Bochmann, ↗16 Language policies in the Romance-speaking countries of Europe), to policy in countries where Romance languages are minoritized relative to other languages (Grünert, ↗19 Multilingualism in Switzerland). Two crucial areas of policy are discussed in individual chapters, notably educational policy (see Ghimenton/Depau’s discussion of practice in France and Italy, ↗21 Revitalization and education), and the question of “language in the public space” (see Blackwood’s discussion of Corsican and Niçois, ↗20 Revitalization and the public space, where “Linguistic Landscape” methodology is particularly productive; see also note 17 above). Conver-

33 For example, Boughton (2005); Hornsby (2006); Armstrong/Boughton (2009); Mooney (2016). 34 See Kabatek (2016). 35 For interesting recent and current discussions of the authority and legitimacy of new varieties, see Kasstan on Francoprovençal (2018) and O’Rourke/Ramallo (2013) on Galician. See also the discussion in Kabatek (2016, 632). 36 See García (2011); Mar-Molinero/Paffey (2011); Soria (2015); Mooney (2015) and Joubert (2015).

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sely, the role of standard languages and norms has been central to the debate in Italy with the questione della lingua, and in France with its tradition of prescriptivism and purism; in his contribution to this volume, Costa-Carreras (↗11 Variation and prescriptivism) discusses recent work on prescriptivism, a subject which has at times been considered unfashionable – or even shunned – by descriptive linguists.

5 Opportunities and new directions Romance linguistics as a discipline – and particularly, within this, Romance philology – has traditionally derived its strength and originality from the genetic relatedness of the Romance varieties studied and, consequently, the comparative perspective afforded by the data. This comparative approach has led to great advances in several areas of linguistics, including phonology, morphology, syntax, and, of course, historical linguistics, as well as in linguistic theory more generally (see, for instance, Maiden/Smith/Ledgeway 2011–2013; Ledgeway/Maiden 2016). It is therefore all the more striking that, as yet, a truly comparative Romance perspective is largely lacking in the field of Romance sociolinguistics. The vast majority of studies published to date consider an issue in relation to a particular Romance language or variety. Indeed, whilst for some chapters it was relatively easy to include data from a range of languages and to introduce a comparative dimension, in several instances this was difficult, or even impossible, because of the concentration of research by most scholars on one particular language. Our volume, then, reflects the fact that truly comparative work is, as yet, at a relatively early stage of development. One reason for this is that, for some languages, there is still a dearth of work on that individual language from a sociolinguistic perspective, and such work might be thought to be an essential prerequisite for comparative studies. The different level of treatment for the different Romance languages and varieties means that there is still a great deal of unexploited data, for instance in the case of Romanian. A second reason lies in the fact that, as we have noted, large corpora are needed for sociolinguistic research, and comparable corpora are needed for the different languages to facilitate comparative work. Ideally, there would be international cooperation in order to achieve a sufficiently high level of comparability in terms of speaker variables, annotation etc., so that we can be sure of comparing like with like, but the creation and annotation of databases is costly and time-consuming, and depends on the availability of funding as well as on a favourable intellectual and political context. A good example of a welcome initiative is the creation of comparable historical corpora for Spanish and Portuguese cited by Ayres-Bennett (↗9 Historical sociolinguistics and tracking language change), but there is tremendous potential for further development of a Romance perspective. We have already mentioned the benefits of comparative corpora that are evident in the contribution by Poplack et al. (↗8 Variation and grammaticalization in Romance) yet this chapter also highlights the varia-

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bility of the corpora which currently exist, and the challenges that this heterogeneity poses. We will cite just three cases of where the adoption of a comparative Romance perspective could be highly beneficial. First, a comparative study of dialect levelling across the Romance domain would seem to be highly desirable, particularly given the different status and vitality of the varieties, the varying strength of the substratum, etc. Second, a comprehensive comparative study of the richness and diversity of the linguistic landscape across the Romance area with its different dialects, regional varieties, regional languages, etc. and the large number of speakers involved makes it, in our view, a particularly fertile test bed for research in this area. Third, Romania, with its many minoritized varieties, would seem to be an excellent laboratory for examining different pathways of change, ranging from the traditional course of a dialect giving way to a regional variety, through the potential integration of regional features into new urban varieties, to the revitalization of a variety through new speakers (and the dangers this brings of alienating native speakers). Why are such comparative Romance sociolinguistic studies necessary? The wealth and diversity of the data afforded by Romance means that such studies can contribute importantly to the testing of the so-called sociolinguistic universals, as well as contributing to general theories of variation and change, etc. However, the implications and impact of such work goes well beyond the interest to academic specialists in sociolinguistics or language variation and change. At a time of high mobility and migration, increasing globalization and concerns about the dominance of English, the status and vitality of Romance varieties raises important questions concerning national, regional and local identity. Much work remains to be done on the impact that the high volume of population movements will have on the rich tapestry of dialects, regional varieties, regional and standard languages across the Romance-speaking area. Policy on language revitalization and the protection of linguistic diversity, for instance, needs to be underpinned by evidence-based research. Comparative data from a number of related languages and situations can only serve to strengthen the arguments in support of individual languages and dialects.

6 Bibliography Armstrong, Nigel (2001), Social and Stylistic Variation in Spoken French. A Comparative Approach, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Armstrong, Nigel/Boughton, Zoe (2009), Perception and Production in French Dialect Levelling, in: Kate Beeching/Nigel Armstrong/Françoise Gadet (edd.), Sociolinguistic Variation in Contemporary French, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 9–24. Armstrong, Nigel/Jamin, Mikaël (2002), “Le Français des banlieues”: Uniformity and Discontinuity in the French of the Hexagon, in: Kamal Salhi (ed.), French in and out of France: Language Policies, Intercultural Antagonisms and Dialogues, Frankfurt/Bern, Lang, 107–136. Ashby, William (2001), Un nouveau regard sur la chute du “ne” en français parlé tourangeau: S’agit-il d’un changement en cours?, Journal of French Language Studies 11(1), 1–22.  

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BAAL [The British Association for Applied Linguistics] (2016), Recommendations on Good Practice in Applied Linguistics, https://baalweb.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/goodpractice_full_2016.pdf (last access 20.02.2018). Bayley, Robert/Cameron, Richard/Lucas, Ceil (edd.) (2013), The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Beeching, Kate/Armstrong, Nigel/Gadet, Françoise (edd.) (2009), Sociolinguistic Variation in Contemporary French, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Bentivoglio, Paola/Sedano, Mercedes (2011), Morpho-Syntactic Variation in Spanish-Speaking Latin America, in: Manuel Díaz-Campos (ed.), The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics, Oxford, Blackwell, 168–186. Biber, Douglas (1984), Variation across Speech and Writing, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Biber, Douglas/Conrad, Susan (2009), Register, Genre and Style, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, Jan (2013), Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity, Bristol, Multilingual Matters. Boughton, Zoe (2005), Accent Levelling and Accent Localisation in Northern French: Comparing Nancy and Rennes, Journal of French Language Studies 15(3), 235–256. Calvet, Louis-Jean (1999), Pour une écologie des langues du monde, Paris, Plon. Carmo, Márcia Cristina do/Tenani, Luciani Ester (2013), The Pretonic Mid-Vowels in the Variety of the Northwest of São Paulo: A Sociolinguistic Analysis, Alfa: Revista Linguística 57(2), 607–637. Cedergren, Henrietta J. (1973), The Interplay of Social and Linguistic Factors in Panama, doctoral thesis, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University. Cerruti, Massimo/Regis, Ricardo (2014), Standardization Patterns and Dialect/Standard Convergence: A North-Western Italian Perspective, Language in Society 43, 83–111. Chambers, Jack/Trudgill, Peter/Schilling-Estes, Natalie (edd.) (2002), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, Oxford, Blackwell. Cheshire, Jenny (2002), Sex and Gender in Variationist Research, in: Jack Chambers/Peter Trudgill/ Natalie Schilling-Estes (edd.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, Oxford, Blackwell, 423–443. Coșeriu, Eugenio (1981), Los conceptos de “dialecto”, “nivel” y “estilo de lengua” y el sentido propio de la dialectología, Lingüística española actual 3, 1–32. Coupland, Nikolas (1980), Style-Shifting in a Cardiff Work-Setting, Language in Society 9(1), 1–12. Coveney, Aidan (1996), Variability in Spoken French. Interrogation and Negation, Bristol, Intellect. Cresti, Emanuela/Moneglia, Massimo (2005), C-ORAL-ROM: Integrated Reference Corpora for Spoken Romance Languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. D’Achille, Paolo (2008), Le varietà diastratiche e diafasiche delle lingue romanze dal punto di vista storico: Italiano, in: Gerhard Ernst et al. (edd.), Romanische Sprachgeschichte. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Geschichte der romanischen Sprachen, vol. 3, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 2334–2355. Díaz-Campos, Manuel (ed.) (2011), The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics, Oxford, Blackwell. Eckert, Penelope (2012), Three Waves of Variation Study: The Emergence of Meaning in the Study of Sociolinguistic Variation, Annual Review of Anthropology 41, 87–100. Flydal, Leiv (1951), Remarques sur certains rapports entre le style et l’état de langue, Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap 16, 240–257. Fresu, Rita (2006), “Gli uomini parlano delle donne, le donne parlano degli uomini”: Indagine sociolinguistica in un campione giovanile di area romana e cagliaritana, Rivista italiana di dialettologia 30, 23–58. Gadet, Françoise (2009), Sociolinguistique, écologie des langues, et cetera, Langage et société 129, 121–135.  

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Gadet, Françoise (2013), Collecting a New Corpus in the Paris Area: Intertwining Methodological and Sociolinguistic Reflections, in: Mari C. Jones/David Hornsby (edd.), Language and Social Structure in Urban France, Oxford, Legenda, 162–171. García, Ofelia (2011), Planning Spanish: Nationalising, Minoritising and Globalising Performances, in: Manuel Díaz-Campos (ed.), The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics, Oxford, Blackwell, 667–685. Gasquet-Cyrus, Médéric (2004), The Sociolinguistics of Marseille, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 169, 107–123. Gasquet-Cyrus, Médéric (2009), Territorialisation, stigmatisation et diffusion: L’Accent “quartiers nord” à Marseille, in: Thierry Bulot (ed.), Formes et normes sociolinguistiques (ségrégations et discriminations urbaines), Paris, L’Harmattan, 209–222. Gilliéron, Jules (1880), Petit Atlas phonétique du Valais roman (sud du Rhône), Paris, Champion. Gilliéron, Jules/Edmont, Edmond (1902–1910), Atlas linguistique de la France, 12 vol., Paris, Champion. Hambye, Philippe/Gadet, Françoise (2014), Contact and Ethnicity in “Youth Language” Description: In Search of Specificity, in: Robert Nicolai (ed.), Questioning Language Contact: Limits of Contact, Contact at its Limits, Leiden/Boston, Brill, 183–216. Haugen, Einar (1972), The Ecology of Language: Essays by Einar Haugen, edited by Anwar S. Dil, Stanford, Stanford University Press. Holmquist, Jonathan (2011), Gender and Variation: Word-Final /s/ in Men’s and Women’s Speech in Puerto Rico’s Western Highlands, in: Manuel Díaz-Campos (ed.), The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics, Oxford, Blackwell, 230–243. Hornsby, David (2006), Redefining Regional French. Koinéization and Dialect Levelling in Northern France, Oxford, Legenda. Jones, Mari C. (ed.) (2015), Policy and Planning for Endangered Languages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Jones, Mari C./Hornsby, David (edd.) (2013), Language and Social Structure in Urban France, Oxford, Legenda. Jones, Mari C./Parry, Mair/Williams, Lynn (2016), Sociolinguistic Variation, in: Adam Ledgeway/Martin Maiden (edd.), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 611–623. Joubert, Aurélie (2015), Occitan. A Language that Cannot Stop Dying, in: Mari C. Jones (ed.), Policy and Planning for Endangered Languages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 171–187. Kabatek, Johannes (2016), Diglossia, in: Adam Ledgeway/Martin Maiden (edd.), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 624–633. Kallen, Jeffrey (2010), Changing Landscapes. Language, Space and Policy in the Dublin Linguistic Landscape, in: Adam Jowalski/Crispin Thurlow (edd.), Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space, London, Continuum, 41–58. Kasstan, Jonathan (2018), Exploring Contested Authenticity among Speakers of a Contested Language, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, https://www.tandfonline.com/ doi/full/10.1080/01434632.2018.1429451 (last access 05.03.2018). Kerswill, Paul (2003), Dialect Levelling and Geographical Diffusion in British English, in: David Britain/Jenny Cheshire (edd.), Social Dialectology. In Honour of Peter Trudgill, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 223–243. Klein, Gabriella (ed.) (1989), Parlare in città: studi di sociolinguistica urbana, Galatina, Congedo. Labov, William (1966), The Social Stratification of English in NY City, Washington, DC, Center for Applied Linguistics. Labov, William (1972a), Sociolinguistic Patterns, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press. Labov, William (1972b), Language in the Inner City, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Methodological issues

Gabriel Bergounioux, Michel Jacobson and Paola Pietrandrea

1 Annotating oral corpora Abstract: Focusing primarily on oral corpora, this chapter examines annotation as a means of standardizing transcription, identification and categorization. Annotation is a sequence of characters inserted into a text to annotate a particular phenomenon. Annotation is performed at the start of an operational workflow in order to enrich and document the contents. This chapter identifies three types of annotation, based on the degree to which they interact with the base file: embedded/online; stand-off/standalone; multi-tiered/ interlinear. It also argues that sociolinguistic annotation suffers from an absence of consensus with regard to the categories that should occur as tags.  

Keywords: oral corpora, transcription, annotation, tagging, hearer variation  

1 Introduction Spoken language has been studied from two opposing directions: (i) the analysis of speech as a signal; experimental phonetics, for instance, is intrinsically linked to dialectology and to areal variation; and (ii) anthropological research which focuses on content (what is said) rather than on form (how something is said). The study of linguistic variation, at all levels, requires large sets of data and internal comparison of the data. As such, sociolinguistics has given rise to a methodology for languages with a written tradition that combines philological techniques of text collection with data collection methods from field linguistics. The corpus has been developed as the best way to present these collected resources in a systematic way. The range of different types of corpora has required standardization of the principles of transcription, of identification and of categorization. These principles have come to be standardized in the form of annotation as a technique for quantification and taxonomy. Although this chapter adopts a broad definition of annotation that includes transcription, we will examine the practice in a narrower sense, i.e. as the insertion of linguistic information in a corpus using standardized and explicit rules. To start with, we can distinguish three broad types of corpora: (i) written; (ii) multimodal; and (iii) oral. It is the research aims that govern the data format, which in turn conditions the type of representation chosen. Multimodal corpora are essential for studies on children’s language acquisition, whilst written corpora are necessary for philological studies. This chapter focuses on oral corpora.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-002

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Figure 1: Operational workflow  

The chart in Figure 1 can be completed (i) by considering the range of transcription forms with regard to the speech that has been produced, from IPA to logograms; and (ii) including the subsequent steps of tools, archiving, distribution and analysis. Understood in this way, annotation, along with transcription, can be taken both as a (more or less automated) technique and a (predominantly empirical) method that lies at the intersection of the humanities (surveys, fieldwork) and computer science, particularly Natural Language Processing (NLP, with regard to automation). From both a humanities and computer science perspective, it is necessary to explain the principles behind the annotation, i.e. the adoption of a procedure, if only to distinguish different uses that appear in the same form.  

Example 1: Three annotations for an utterance Transcription: “Y a pas de bug” Annotations: (i)

(ii)

(iii)

This article focuses, in turn, on (i) the creation and processing of corpora; (ii) the annotation itself, including the role of the researcher, the process, the tools and the typology used; and (iii) an evaluation of the current state of practice and suggestions for ways forward.

2 Principles of annotation 2.1 What is annotation? In the ordinary sense of the word, annotation is a sequence of characters inserted into a text, whether that text has been transmitted directly in written form or has been transcribed from oral data. In the first case, the act of annotation falls under the

Annotating oral corpora

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philological traditions of marginalia, glosses and scholia, i.e. of comments with variable functions such as correcting a word or adding a translation or opinion. In this respect, the annotation is a later addition to the document and remains separate from it. Transcription of oral corpora can in fact be considered as the first form of annotation of the source data. In languages with a written tradition, at least for the Romance languages, a very large number of speakers have direct access to this means of representation. In linguistics, annotation tends to have a rather more restricted meaning and is used to refer to a set of tags, located outside of the text itself but within the written document. There are two approaches to annotation. The first approach, inherited from editing, inserts the tags into the running text. Suppressing the annotations in this case does not prevent a return to the original text. The second approach, used for instance in relational databases, structures the document itself in such a way that the original content of the text can only be distinguished from the added comments once the tags have been interpreted.

2.2 Why annotate? Annotation is necessary whenever the editor of a written document or the producer of a transcription needs to make note of a particular phenomenon or to draw the reader’s attention to a particular phenomenon. Adding footnotes (or references) is the primary scientific tool used in philology, playing on a visual distribution that dissociates the text from the commentary. In oral corpora, preference is given to a multilinear notation that separates different levels – as Boas (1911) demonstrated for aligned translations – distinguishing the written representation of the utterance and the indications provided by the editor. This manner of proceeding, which is obligatory for languages with only an oral tradition was also implemented for the spoken form of written languages. In the preparation of sociolinguistic or dialectal corpora, the transcription of language acquisition data (in the mother tongue or as a learner) or data on language disorders meant compensating in writing for certain types of information that were lost in the conversion to graphical form, such as all the indications provided by the signal itself.

2.3 How to annotate Various developments in computer science such as: – proprietary languages such as IBM’s GML (Generalized Markup Language), – the normalization of a generic SGML format (Standard Generalized Markup Language) within ISO (the International Organization for Standardization),

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and lastly, in 1996 the appearance of the first XML specifications (eXtensible Markup Language)

enabled the separation of: – the logical structure of the document that can or must be defined within a schema such as DTD (Document Type Definition) for SGML, and – the representation (or physical structure) of the document whose derivational rules can be specified in a style sheet. This distinction between the two levels was intended to clarify, in the editing process, the respective roles of the different actors. Producing schemas and style sheets is the editor’s task in order to ensure better control over the validation and formatting processes. The use of these tools by the writers assists them in inputting the data. SGML gave birth to different applications. HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), EAD (Encoded Archival Description) and TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) are the most widely-used applications in digital humanities. XML is more readily compatible with the internet.

2.4 Metadata and annotations Annotating a text involves adding information expected to be lacking, but potentially useful or even necessary, for the intended audience. Linguistic practice has been transformed by digital file transfer. There are two complementary strategies: either (i) the information is given by the metadata, recorded in a separate file; or (ii) the information is inserted into the text itself. The distribution of data as either metadata or annotation is variable: if the encoded information relates to the whole of the corpus or text (e.g. speaker ID, situation, text genre), then it will generally be placed in the metadata. In contrast, if the information relates to a word (or a short sound sequence such as a click, filler, false start or idiom), then it will be encoded through annotation. The need to add certain information in a form that can be exploited (for example lemmatization or frequency statistics) led to the introduction of the notion of tagging in linguistics. An example of a written tagged corpus is the Brown corpus (Greene/ Rubin 1971), and an example of an oral tagged corpus is the LLC (London-Lund Corpus) taken from the Survey of English Usage Corpus (Crystal/Quirk 1964). In the field of Romance linguistics, the first example of tagging in an oral corpus was in Italian on the LIP corpus (De Mauro et al. 1993). The example below, taken from the digital version of the London-Lund Corpus, shows coding of information of different natures that can be considered as tagging. These tags are, in order of appearance on each line: Text category, Text within category, Identifier, Tone unit number […], Speaker identity […], Text. The transcription

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(Text) uses written conventions to indicate non-verbal elements (laughter, telephone ringing, etc.), pauses, intonation, etc. (for a list of conventions, see: http://clu.uni.no/ icame/london-lund/index.htm). Example 2 1 3 9 1420 1 1 b 1 3 9 1410 1 1(A 1 3 9 1430 1 1 A 1 3 9 1440 1 1 A 1 3 9 1450 1 1 A 1 3 9 1460 1 1 A 1 3 9 1470 1 1 A 1 3 9 1480 1 1 A 1 3 9 1490 1 1 A 1 3 9 1500 1 1 A 1 3 9 1510 1 1 A 1 3 9 1520 1 1 A 1 3 9 1530 1 1 A 1 3 9 1540 1 1 b 1 3 9 1550 1 1(A

20*[mhm]* / 11^th\en they _said# / 11well "^now that you`ve done th/ese# / 11and they`ve been "^s\o succ/essful# / 11we`d ^like you to do our s\uper# / 11^alpha:m\atic# / 11or ^s/omething# / 11and ^this is one of th/ese# / 11that ^goes s/ideways# / 11and ^fr/ontwards# / 11and em^br/oiders# / 11and *^d/arns# / 11and sews* ^b\uttons on# / 20*( - laughs) yes* / 11- - and I ^s=aid# /

In the example below, drawn from the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE: see http://ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/2542), the formatting of the text into lexical units or the markup on each unit of its form, lemma and part of speech uses XML syntax with conventions from the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), an international programme that standardizes the principles of formatting and exchange of digital texts within ISO standards. Example 3

it 's austria it 's very cold and it 's _0 hot

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enough _0

As we can see in these two examples, the annotation of a text or transcription takes the form of enriching the original information with new types of information that, depending on the era, have used different transcription conventions, such as structured text or XML syntax.

2.5 Range of approaches Proposals by computer scientists were not always easy to reconcile with the expectations of linguists, which explains certain delays (Léon 2015). Enabling researchers from mathematics (logic or calculus) or from electronics to collaborate with philologists or anthropologists was not always self-evident. In linguistics, the act of using corpora had a different meaning depending on whether the corpus was understood as the record of a culture or as a resource for linguistic analysis. Requirements for annotation differ noticeably depending on whether corpora are understood as a reservoir of examples or a set of data to explain, whether they are used to criticize theories or for empirical approaches such as the “usage-based model” in construction grammar. A further difference lies in the manner in which annotations are produced. Annotations can be produced manually, semi-automatically (pre- or post-edition) or automatically. Automatic annotation, whether a symbolic or machine-learning method is used, presupposes an underlying theory that provides the relevant tools for annotation and pre-annotation and allows the results to be evaluated (Fort 2012). Manual annotation is considered the most reliable but cannot be extended to large quantities of data and, if the effort is collective, raises problems of inter-annotator agreement. Automatic methods are primarily judged in terms of the number of corrections required when it comes to post-editing the results. For example, in order to transcribe the corpus Enquête Sociolinguistique à Orléans forty years after data collection, the cost of manual transcription was compared to that of automatic transcription plus post-editing. In the end, it was decided not to choose automatic transcription, because the time gained by automatic transcription was lost through the effort required during the manual post-editing stage. In the Enquête Sociolinguistique à Orléans corpus, organizing the work led to the definition of several levels of annotation: – Level zero (T0) uses minimal conventions and has as its main objectives: (i) to enable navigation within the signal (synchronized to enable multiple replays); and (ii) to suggest a transcription for each word, including false starts and disfluencies, with encoding similar to normal writing conventions in order to

Annotating oral corpora

–

33

make reading and editing easier. A rule in the Guide de transcription specifies that a transcriber must not listen to the same segment more than twice. Level one (T1) aims to produce a transcription that can be exploited for advanced linguistic analysis by providing a fine-grained written transcription including corrections and theoretical choices, adding specific coding for prosody, multitranscription, etc., and providing a multi-tiered annotation.

For annotation in T0, three transcriptions were systematically produced: – an A version, i.e. a raw transcription undertaken as quickly as possible (cost: 10 times the listening time); – a B version, i.e. rereading the A version by another transcriber (cost: 5 times the listening time); – a C version, i.e. correction of the B version by an experienced annotator (cost: 5 times the listening time). All three versions are preserved so that differences between individuals and groups can be studied. The difficulty of harmonizing the work of different researchers engaged with the same corpus can be found on a much larger scale as soon as it is a question of bringing together annotations across languages, countries and types of data. There is currently a debate between those who advocate good practice and those who support normalization driven by a priori universal principles such as how to define a standard respecting both the constraints of the object of study and scientific principles. For an example of standardization using current ISO norms under the auspices of the TEI, see Stührenberg (2012).

3 Key criteria in creating corpora Annotation is performed at the start of an operational workflow that gives rise to the enrichment of the contents and their possible exploitation (e.g. counting, analysis, patterning, collocation extraction, concordances). The consideration of examples and the running of training tests in NLP open up questions about the granularity of attributes and data sampling.

3.1 Size At what point can we consider that a sample of a language is representative of all its uses? This question, which has been raised for the lexicon (see for instance the creation of BASIC English, Ogden 1930; or of Français fondamental, Gougenheim et al. 1964) and for syntax, notably in generative grammar, took as points of reference

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frequency of use, the structure of the language and their correlation (Zipf’s law). Social variation, needing to integrate a range of parameters, i.e. dialectal, diaphasic and diastratic, proved to be less secure in its classification criteria and more demanding quantitatively. The quantitative aspect is the first one that should be considered, as it conditions all the other aspects. The increase in computer memory and the decrease in hardware costs have enabled the requirements in this domain to be progressively raised (see tables). Table 1: Written corpora  

Brown Corpus

1,000,000 words

1961

Frantext (French)

300,000,000 words

1975

British National Corpus

100,000,000 words

1995

CORIS-CODIS (Italian)

130,000,000 words

2001

Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual

160,000,000 words

2008

Reference Corpus of Contemporary Portuguese

300,000,000 words

2012

frTenTen (French)

10,000,000,000 words

2012

ESLO 1 and 2 (French)

7,000,000 words

1969

London Lund Corpus of Spoken English

500,000 words

1990

LIP (Italian)

500,000 words

1993

CLAPI (French)

2,500,000 words

2005

Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual

9,000,000 words

2008

Reference Corpus of Contemporary Portuguese

1,600,000 words

2012

Table 2: Oral corpora  

We could also mention the University of Barcelona’s Corpus de Català Contemporani, the SyMiLa Occitan corpora at the Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès and the Thesoc corpus at the Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis.

3.2 Balancing different considerations A second criterion relates to the balance between different practices and different contexts. As a general rule, a collection of written documents is less an absolute reflection of the language than of certain uses of that language, e.g. literary uses such as Frantext, or journalistic uses such as the corpus from Le Monde newspaper or the

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French corpus at the University of Leipzig (see Wortschatz/French Leipzig). The choice of resources is determined by accessibility. It is easier for instance to start by working on typed texts than on handwritten texts, and on documents that are understandable by those involved in processing the text rather than on medical texts for example, without actually excluding the less accessible texts from the investigation. Apart from music, most audio documents that are stored in sound archives relate either to exotic languages – where they compensate for the lack of written documents – or to official public speeches. Creating oral corpora has allowed techniques from field linguistics and dialectology to be applied to everyday urban conversations in a manner approaching sociological methods. The situation differs depending on the language and country. French corpora appear to be less varied than those of other Romance languages. Excluding some uses of a language reflects different power relations. Catalan and Spanish, European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, Italian and its dialects, the great difference between written and spoken French – all represent case studies that contribute to the discussion on how to define a reference corpus. The answers differ from one country to another and sometimes lead to paradoxical results. For instance, LIP (Corpus Lessico di frequenza dell’Italiano Parlato) which aimed to provide an inventory of the different uses of spoken Italian, in fact demonstrated a tendency towards standardization.

3.3 Conditions of use Availability of the corpus is a major obstacle, either because the researchers (or institutions) do not allow distribution of the corpus, or because no means of preservation has been guaranteed (see the investigations of the Groupe Aixois de Recherche en Syntaxe – GARS). Gaining authorization to access the text – whether that authorization falls under copyright or the protection of informants – is a particularly difficult obstacle to overcome in the case of spoken corpora as the possibility of vocal recognition infringes on anonymization and older studies did not seek the consent of the speakers recorded. The same goes for metadata. The possibility of matching recordings to speakers, situations, dates, etc. that are available in the form of a dataset puts gathering the information necessary to do research face to face with strict legal requirements. Another difficulty is inherent to the formats and tools used. Whether it is material or support, software or language, the obsolescence of equipment and systems remains a challenge. The choice of available and lasting formats and tools is even more complex in the case of audio documents where the primary source itself may disappear or become inaccessible.

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4 Uses of annotation In the usual understanding of the term, the secondary character of annotation and its interpolation distinguishes annotation on the one hand from transcription, and on the other hand from metadata. Leech (2005) has suggested characterizing annotation in terms of the opposing pairs {transcription vs annotation} and {representation vs interpretation}. In linguistics, the goal of annotation is to integrate information in the corpus using descriptors that make searches conducted for a particular piece of research either more efficient or, indeed, even possible (see example 4). Example 4: Annotation image

4.1 Transcription formats and instructions The first step in the annotation process is to specify the data involved in the working hypothesis. Certain types of data are more widely used than others, e.g. identification of Parts of speech (POS), of morphemes or of semantic properties. No type of data is obligatory or excluded as long as it records properties of the language. Once the type of data has been decided on, it is necessary to fix the conventions that put these data in a format that is simultaneously (i) distinctive, i.e. defines as many classes as required by the research; (ii) extensive, i.e. expands the annotation to the level of detail required; (iii) unitary, i.e. ensures that the same phenomenon is consistently described in the same way; (iv) economical, i.e. no element in the annotation is redundant or superfluous; and (v) explicit, i.e. every element of annotation has to be identified in an associated document. Encoding should (i) be limited in terms of number of characters; (ii) rank the information provided in a hierarchy; and (iii) be accessible, i.e. save time during the training process and during memorization. In practice, this last condition means using well-established abbreviations, e.g. /N = noun/ in POS tagging. Annotation is time-consuming. It can be undertaken by people other than the researcher due to its repetitive nature. The time spent in annotating is gained, however, during the exploitation phase, where the trend is for the speed of execution to be inversely proportional to the time of preparation as shown in the Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English (Kučera/Nelson/Carroll 1967) on the Brown Corpus, which explored a range of linguistic, psychological, statistical and sociological elements in the corpus, or the sociological analyses on the ESLO corpus  

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(Bergounioux 2016). The larger the corpus and the more the advantages of annotation can be used in other studies and by other researchers, whether linguists or not (e.g. statisticians, computer scientists, sociologists), the larger the profit. Also important is the definition of criteria that permit both critical analysis and a reassessment of earlier choices. The manner in which the tasks are carried out is defined by the research aims, the selection of data and of the properties associated with the data, and by the choice of strings of characters that index the data using tags. Annotating a corpus also requires writing a manual or a guide that makes explicit the rules followed when creating the corpus, and provides comments. An example of such a manual can be found at http://eslo.huma-num.fr/images/eslo/pdf/GUIDE_TRANSCRIPTEUR_V4_mai2013.pdf for the ESLO corpus.

4.2 Criticisms and sociolinguistic uses The first type of criticism that has been levelled against annotation concerns the access to documents. Annotation increases the file size and the finished product can be off-putting as annotations clutter up the text and break up the linearity of the original text. In particular, there is a great deal of variation from one programme to another – often the result of conflicting directions and approaches – and, within the same programme, from one annotator to another. Moreover, mistakes made in each of the phases reduce the reliability of the whole document, meaning that to improve the quality of the results, a further phase of post-editing and correction is required. However, this extra stage then reduces the comparative advantage in terms of time. Sociolinguistic annotations label characterizations linked to change (of language or dialect, of use or register), non-standard uses or uses that are innovative with respect to the norm and typical forms of a culture or subculture. These concern: (i) information about dialectal features, code-switching, etc.; (ii) details about register – as generally used in dictionaries or in uses that are characteristic of a social milieu or an age group, etc.; (iii) the marking of errors such as incorrect constructions or hypercorrection; (iv) the means by which subjective categories (positive and negative terms, classifications based on a particular social group) and expressions of identity are included; and (v) forms of address and reformulations, etc. There are two parameters at issue in all of these cases. The first parameter relates to the manner in which properties of the language are realized in speech. The second parameter focuses on how a social group expresses itself, i.e. in terms of its cultural properties. Whatever the content of the annotation, all encoding lies at the intersection of these two domains.

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5 Annotation instructions Certain types of annotation are specific to written language, e.g. spelling, and some to speech, e.g. liaison. Other types of annotation apply to both written and oral language, e.g. POS, modality, language register. Despite apparent distinctions, different types of annotation are homogeneous regardless of the type of data collection – from retrieving data of a widely-used language from the Web to short studies on small linguistic groups without a written tradition.

5.1 File generation Figure 2: File generation and the place of annotation  

As a general rule, annotation is conceived of as an operation that takes place a posteriori on a text or transcription, after metadata has been provided and before scientific analysis. This conception of annotation situates it at a later stage than data

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formatting and at a prior stage to the different types of analysis. The analyses, which are dependent on instrumentation, are achieved through a version of transcription that can continue to evolve in parallel (versioning). The division proposed by Habert (2005) between instruments and tools is arbitrated through the possibility of automating the annotation and the database management system (DMS). Correspondance between products can be achieved in the following manner (each different file is identified by the first number, different versions of the same file have an extra letter added, and enrichments are identified by means of a number after the letter). Table 3: Operation and production  

Operation

Product

gathering/digitizing of the signal

Digital audio file

cataloging/indexing/metadata

Text file 1

transcription/coding/aligning

Text file 2 (versioning 2A, 2B, 2C…)

annotation/instrumentation

Text file 2 annotated (ex. 2B1, 2C1, 2C2…)

tools/analysis

Research investigations

maintenance/distribution

Text files 1 and 2 (with a hyperlink to analyses)

5.2 Three types of annotation If it is possible to get to the point of analysing, archiving or distributing a corpus without carrying out annotation, is it possible to anticipate certain types of annotation when writing the metadata or transcribing the recordings? There is an intersection between annotation and what should be contained in the metadata. Thematic divisions (topics) can appear in a separate file or be inserted as an annotation. In general, metadata includes global external information such as the identity of speakers, the date of recording, digital formats or owners. In contrast, annotations primarily concern internal information that relates to short elements included in the signal (e.g. a noise, a click), and concerns units that range from false starts and words (with tagging and lemmatization) to the phrase (coreference, tree diagrams) or to a speech turn. We can distinguish three types of annotation, based on the degree to which they interact with the base file.

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Type 1: Embedded/online Example 5

alors ils faisaient comme ça euh et je me suis rendue compte que ça n'allait pas

parce que moi je je lisais et je lisais un rigue euh la première ligne

mot italien = ligne

(taken from http://ircom.huma-num.fr/wiki/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=myautolinks:exemples_codage_teiml.pdf  

Type 2: Stand-off/Standalone Example 6 alors ils faisaient comme ça euh et je me suis rendue compte que ça n’allait pas parce que moi je je lisais et je lisais un rigue euh la première ligne







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mot italien = ligne

 

Type 3: Multi-tiered/interlinear Example 7

Embedded annotation results in a self-sufficient document because the whole set of annotations are collected together within a single document. This can reduce legibility, however. In contrast, stand-off annotation increases legibility of the master document but makes the stand-off annotations dependent on the document that contains them. This dependency between the documents requires coordination and can make maintenance more complex. Indeed, dependency relies on logical links (positions or identifiers) that have to be preserved throughout any changes that might take place in the data. Multi-tiered or interlinear annotations are used when several points of view or levels of analysis are required for the same phenomenon within a single annotation.

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A non-phonetic transcription anticipates annotation, even if it is only by segmenting the signal into words or applying rules that are not representative of the orthography of the person being interviewed. For instance, is one justified in indicating plural agreement on the past participle in a phrase such as les soucis que ça m’a faits if the speaker has a low level of education? The answer depends on the principles that have been set out in the transcription manual corresponding to the corpus.

5.3 Instructions Annotating a corpus needs to meet a number of interdependent requirements: – Separating the file that is being worked on (transcription file and audio file) from the annotated files. Separability implies reversibility, i.e. it is necessary to be able to move between an annotated file and the preceding version. – Ensuring the replicability of files and their preservation in a state that allows validity, i.e. identity and legibility in the evolving formats of computer science. – Guaranteeing accessibility to data that need to be quickly retrievable, i.e. traceable, and available in a form that allows easy manipulation by prioritizing intuitivity and affordance. – Ensuring the longevity of the resource and its interoperability. – Facilitating the application of tools and instrumentation, and allowing incrementation. Conceived of in this way, annotation is a process that, at each stage, extends the resource by transforming it without ever erasing a previous state (versioning).

6 Annotation formats Annotation is an operation that is carried out with a particular aim in mind. It is never a primary state of the data. Rather, annotation is carried out on a resource that has already been specially prepared. Annotation can be visualized in different ways, often – but not exclusively – in written form, linear and segmented. The text file offers page layout, global volume (number of characters or spaces), metadata, etc. In this way, annotation is both a method of analysis and an NLP tool. The spectrum of representation formats goes from an analogue format (for phonetic analyses) to symbolic notations (for syntactic or stylistic studies). Sociolinguistic studies tend to favour aligning the transcription with the signal and providing extensive comments within tags. This compromise ensures maximum legibility by distinguishing between an orthographic tier and information that can be retrieved via queries in order to carry out analyses.

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6.1 Principles Leech (2005) laid down four principles on which corpus instrumentation should be based: (i) provide access to the metadata and the processing; (ii) make the choices underlying each operation explicit; (iii) ensure replicability of results, i.e. the instrument should, under identical conditions, enable the same conclusions to be reached; and (iv) be able to be verified through processes that are independent of the observer (a recurrent difficulty, one of the aims of which is to overcome inter-annotator disagreement). Annotation is executed following conventions defined within a repesentation format that specifies: (i) segmentation into elementary units; (ii) their organization within a document; and (iii) a reversible means of inserting metalinguistic information that can be exploited automatically. Generally, the term tag tends to be used to refer to technical aspects of the data processing, whilst annotation tends to refer to the researcher’s scientific options.

6.2 Encoding and content Annotation can be carried out in XML/TEI, a practice which is widely adopted today both for the document (file) and for the schema (see validation below) with a header that introduces either the corpus itself or one of its files. The hierarchy comprises different levels: (i) the file as a whole; (ii) the structure of the full document; and (iii) the division of the document into paragraphs. These levels give information about four items: (i) the description of the file, equivalent to a bibliographic reference; (ii) the indication of origin that stipulates the relation to the original text; (iii) the characterization of the text containing information relevant to its use (starting with the language in which the text is written); and (iv) the versioning. Example 8: Metadata TEI metadata extracted from CLAPI (http://clapi.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/V3_TEI.php)

Réunion de conception en architecture – mosaic ~ Mosaic – architecture ~ Mosaic – architecture – xml Detienne Françoise Traverso Véronique[…]

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collecté par Detienne Françoise Visser Willemien […]

préparé et balisé par CLAPI – Equipe Médiathèque

Groupe ICOR/ Plateforme CLAPI http://clapi.univ-lyon2.fr

Conditions générales d'accès pour ce document

Copyright © ICAR. Tous droits réservés.

Enregistrement vidéo d’une durée de 1h18m45s téléchargeable sous convention de recherche

Transcription mosaic – architecture – adaptée CLAPI au format doc en téléchargement libre

Transcription mosaic – architecture – clan au format clan – ca ou cha en téléchargement libre

Transcription requêtable par les outils librement

Agrément CNIL de Clapi numéro : 2-12064

6.3 Formatting, tagging and validation Formatting covers two operations: (i) pre-processing that aims to reduce as far as possible the risk of noise or silence, in the sense that these terms have in information theory, by cleaning and normalizing the data; and (ii) formulating all the instructions governing the annotation. Alongside the tagging used in processing the text, tagging that aims to label strings of characters adds information (phonetic, grammatical, semantic or sociolinguistic) and provides details that are automatically recoverable about these linguistic properties. Transcription and tagging of the corpus are linearly connected. It is not possible at this stage to insert a hierarchical annotation in tree form, which means that such a diagram must be executed at a later stage in the data processing.

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If the annotation is encoded in XML, a first level of syntactic validation can be carried out using standard validation tools that allow the document to be evaluated with respect to a model defining rules of grammar and vocabulary. Within the range of languages used to define these models, some examples include XML-Schema, RELAX NG Schema, Schematron and DTD.

6.4 Annotation and instrumentation As annotations respect the linearity of the information sequence, they have the advantage of allowing systematic exploration of data on all or part of one or more files by specific queries adapted to the file content. To extend the study, other forms need to be used, such as those that can be produced by tree banks, concordancers or by inference or unification (Semantic Web). Example 9: Concordancer Concordance of the word poêle – CoCoON http://cocoon.huma-num.fr/exist/crdo/

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To process corpora, it is necessary to have recourse to instrumentation. Once the type of document has been defined and the model chosen (EAD, TEI, CES, etc.), and depending on the type of transcription to be carried out (phonetic with Praat, for instance, or aligned with the speech signal with Transcriber), different annotation tools can be selected. Among most widely-used tools are: (i) ANVIL for video annotation; (ii) ELAN (Eudico Linguistic Annotator) for multimedia files; (iii) EXMARaLDA (Extensible Markup Language for Discourse Annotation) for oral corpora. EXMARaLDA is a tool that covers transcription, annotation, management, searching and analysis. Example 10: Representation under EXMARaLDA

The range of formats for corpora and the fact that they are more often produced by research teams rather than by institutions, raises essential questions about their compatibility and durability that go beyond questions of accessibility, availability and free use. A recurring question concerns the processes used to codify the metalanguage in such a way that elements with effects across different levels can be identified and used.

7 Annotation structure 7.1 Annotation, annotability, meta-annotation The choice of annotation depends on the types of analysis that it enables – or prohibits. The occurrences corresponding to the criteria defined (phonological, morphological, syntactic, sociolinguistic, etc.) are first identified. Starting from the data, and respecting pre-established conventions, the selected units are noted in a form that allows the data to be searched. Two operations are carried out at the same time:

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(i) demarcation, i.e. segmentation of the elements to be annotated (a linear string of symbols); and (ii) selection of a property of one of these elements, one of its attributes, i.e. a name/value pair. There are two methods, i.e. using a rule-based system or using a supervised learning system. We refer to the open set of properties that are available for this type of operation as annotability, also including under this term types of processing that make implementation easier, for instance segmenting an oral corpus into phrases. Annotability is, from a computer science perspective, equivalent to observability from a linguistic point of view. In the case of annotation of annotations, we speak of meta-annotation.

7.2 Operations Elements can be segmented at different levels, ranging from small constitutive units (letters, numbers, symbols, punctuation, spaces), to larger units such as morphemes, words, syntactic phrases, propositions and sentences, to extensive thematic units (topics). Nonetheless, the central unit remains the word, at least in non-agglutinative languages. We can distinguish three stages: (i) breakdown into character strings, i.e. tokenization. In the case of oral corpora, this involves repeating a task carried out by the transcriber; (ii) lemmatization, e.g. is avions the 1st person plural indicative imperfect form of the verb avoir or the plural of the noun avion? Unifying forms (the lemma aller for vont, aille or irions) and their ordering into parts of speech (POS) implicitly sketches out the morphological structure. The morphology of Romance languages, and in particular French, is more restricted in speech than in writing, as they inherited Latin writing conventions and are limited in their use of prosodic distinctions; and (iii) processing, i.e. starting from the linguistic representation of units, it is possible to determine coreferences, to identify named entities (Eshkol-Taravella et al. 2011) and to carry out parsing and semantic analysis, to structure the units into themes, etc.

7.3 Difficulties Amongst the possible difficulties are the compatibility of computer tools and of linguistic theories, in particular those theories that are less formalized such as sociolinguistics, and non-scriptural data, a recurring problem in NLP. Furthermore, if the researcher him/herself does not directly carry out the operations, further issues can arise that require supervision and checking. No consensus has been found on sociolinguistic annotations because of the controversial nature of sociological concepts. The use of sociolinguistic concepts to either criticize or condone the nature of a particular society (Bourdieu 1994) does not allow agreement to be established beyond statistical classifications by age, gender,

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income or educational level. A typical example of one such disagreement lies in the different definitions of professions and socio-economic categories across countries, making it difficult to adopt a unified classification in the metadata. Moreover, social judgments violate the requirement for objectivity. Therefore, assigning a form such as avoir le seum to urban youth goes beyond a characterization by age or place of residence. Since, in corpus instrumentation, an attribute is assigned a unique descriptor, a convention that defines social attributes in a consensual manner cannot be produced, as it will only reproduce bureaucratic classifications or validate a unilateral vision of the social world.

8 Types of annotation and levels of analysis Three elements influence the type of annotation: (i) the type of software used; (ii) the data input; and (iii) the conceptual framework which, depending on the type of annotation that has been chosen, can determine the quality of the search results. In linguistics, the type of query depends on the level of analysis chosen (Benveniste 1966) and the initial form of the data, e.g. text, speech, images or multimodal data. In this section, we first provide an example for written data, and then focus on the annotation of different units.

8.1 Written forms Work on manuscripts drew attention to the importance of orthographic forms and variants, abbreviations, ligatures and omissions. Initially, the aim was to produce a clean text without defects or interpolations, and to trace the different versions of an original state, whether known or unknown, that scholars tried to reconstruct beyond its various incarnations. For economic and social reasons, such as the prevalence of a particular religious stance or possible links with the Greco-Latin tradition, textual transmission in the Middle Ages was limited to reproducing a small number of works with heterogeneous written practices (copyist workshops). Written forms changed through the expansion of literacy and the decrease in cost of paper, as well as a change in the way information was exchanged, e.g. through the arrival of postal services, and general changes in behaviour. Studies moved away from codices towards corpora of texts written by less literate writers such as the 1789 register of grievances (Branca-Rosoff/Schneider 1994) or letters from infantrymen during the First World War (poilus, Steuckardt 2015). Preparing these sources required reconstructing the text in line with a standardized spelling and in some cases in line with Standard French.

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8.2 Phonetics, prosody, phonology IPA notation is often used on a small scale. Few large-scale corpora use IPA for all the transcriptions. The level of technicality required for the operation takes time, each choice can be debated (e.g. whether meuf has been produced with /œ/ or with /ø/), and the result is not as legible as a file using standard spelling. Whilst in the past semi-conventional notations were used, e.g. ch’crois for je crois, today priority is given to normalized transcriptions that are aligned with the signal, and where one is certain of being able to retrieve all the forms of a word. In the case of ch’crois for je crois, although the lemma je has only one variation, i.e. j’, a third option for ch’ should be added to avoid empty results to search queries for first person subject pronouns. Phonetic notation, whether relating to pronunciation, e.g. the realization of a schwa, or to prosody, e.g. in the Rhapsodie project, is included in the annotation whenever it is not predictable. The whole of the Perseval corpus (Gómez Molina et al. 2007) is segmented into prosodic groups and other examples include C-Oral Rom and Prieto/Roseano (2010). Phonology is a mental competence of speakers, unlike phonetics, which is directly accessible from the signal and objectively measurable through instrumentation, and unlike morphology, which remains on a metalinguistic level. Most uses of phonology therefore primarily concern surface processing linked to morphology, either by the realization of a phonetic marker (e.g. liaison in the Phonologie du français contemporain (PFC) or the placement of the tonic accent), or by collecting different pronunciations corresponding to the underlying form of a lexical unit (Bergounioux 2016). Annotation carried out directly on a transcription starts from the conventions that were used to produce the transcription, for instance in (i) the use or otherwise of punctuation marks, capital letters, italics; (ii) indicating vocal sounds, e.g. laughter, coughs; and (iii) noting pauses, disfluencies, etc. Some examples of the annotation of phonetic or phonological phenomena in sociolinguistics include: (i) identifying consonantal cluster reduction phenomena in varieties of Italian (Vallone/Caniparoli/Savy 2002); (ii) prosodic characterization of discourse genres in Italian (Giordano/Savy 2003) and in French (Beliao/Lacheret/ Kahane 2014); (iii) analysis of diatopic variation in European and South-American Spanish prosody (Prieto/Roseano 2010); and (iv) analysis of diastratic and diatopic variation in liaison in French (Durand et al. 2011).

8.3 Morphology, lexicon In NLP, the main object of analysis is the word. One of the first concrete applications of computer science to natural language was in quantitative linguistics, building on intuitions in Zipf (1935) to produce lexical statistics (frequency lists):

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TLF (Imbs/Quemada 1971–1994; Guiraud 1954), LIP (De Mauro et al. 1993), CoLFis (Bertinetto et al. 2005), NVDB (Chiari/De Mauro 2014), CLUL, Frecuencias del español CREA (Almela et al. 2005).

As the resources were developed, morphological and lexical annotations were enriched, particularly in the automatic construction of the lexicon and concordancers. One of the first instances of data exploitation was the creation of lemmatized lists organized by decreasing order of frequency and used for research in lexical statistics, to develop learning resources and to produce dictionaries for use in NLP as well as in sociolinguistic analyses. This type of access to corpora raises questions concerning both the value of units that are considered relevant and the elements of analysis. The status of the word as a scientific concept remains problematic. It is defined primarily in terms of writing, and therefore not very compatible with the idea of language as a verbal stream without fixed divisions. The scientific literature mentions: (i) floating morphemes, e.g. the prefix in repolir or non-agréer, or the suffix in ordinatouille (derived from ordinateur; attested on the internet); (ii) chunking into fixed phrases such as pour autant que and condition nécessaire et suffisante, and into expressions and into proverbs; and (iii) grammaticalization phenomena, for instance where je sais pas is equivalent to à peu près in y avait je sais pas moi sept ou huit personnes. Moreover, adapting to NLP the linguistic categories based on texts written in an alphabet within a logical tradition rooted in western Indo-European languages limits the extent to which annotations can be generalized and are relevant. An example of a task frequently performed in data mining and in automatic documentation for the purposes of constructing ontologies and contributing to the Semantic Web is the recognition of named entities, on the border between the lexicon and syntax. This application is particularly important in sociolinguistics where certain names make identification more difficult by providing indications about the relation between the speaker and the content of his/her discourse, e.g. le Président des riches, ma fifille à moi. Annotation of morphological and lexical phenomena allowed sociolinguistic analyses to be carried out that led to: (i) relativizing prejudice about the quantity of dialectal and regional forms in spoken Italian, which are much less frequent than previously thought (De Mauro et al. 1993); (ii) measuring the extent of grammatical variation in popular Spanish (Fernández-Ordóñez 2011); (iii) exploring lexical codeswitching phenomena between Spanish and Catalan in Spanish Catalonia (Martínez Díaz 2009). Other recent examples of morphological and lexical phenomena annotated from a sociolinguistic point of view are: (i) the distribution of colloquial words, of informal

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forms like tu and of polite forms of address in contemporary French (Beeching 2012); and (ii) lexical composition with diatopic and diaphasic differentiation in contemporary Italian (Chiari/De Mauro 2014).

8.4 Syntax Determining Part-of-Speech tags taking morphological relations into account makes a syntactic annotation of the propositions following a linear representation possible, a process similar to Hockett’s bracketing (Hockett 1954). When the data include units larger than the word (for instance speech turns), the segmentation is primarily based on projections from syntactic (and semantic) analysis. Treebanks are currently the most common means of representation. Some examples of Treebanks: Ancient Greek/Latin Ancient Greek and Latin Dependency Treebank (AGLDT) Catalan Cat3LB Spanish Cast3LB French French Treebank, Rhapsodie Italian ISST (Italian Syntactic-Semantic Treebank) Portuguese Projecto Floresta Sintá(c)tica Romanian RDT (Romanian Dependency Treebank) These resources and their websites can be found on the internet, e.g. on the ELRA catalogue: http://catalog.elra.info/index.php?language=fr. In addition to these syntactic treebanks, there is also the C-Oral Rom corpus (Cresti/Moneglia 2005) and the Rhapsodie corpus (Lacheret/Kahane/Pietrandrea, forthcoming) that include annotation of the macro-syntactic oral structures of French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese (C-Oral Rom) and of French (Rhapsodie). While the word can be considered as the basic unit for computer scientists, linguists tend to prioritize parsers. In addition to the macro-syntactic annotation in COral Rom and Rhapsodie, already mentioned, examples of linguistic and sociolinguistic uses of syntactic annotations can be found in the following work: (i) syntactic variation in the dialects of Romance languages (Dagnac/Sauzet/Sportiche 2015); (ii) analysis of diaphasic variation of dependency structures in spoken French (Pietrandrea, forthcoming; Kahane/Gerdes/Fleury, forthcoming); (iii) study of diaphasic variation in macro-syntactic structures in French, English, Spanish and Portuguese (Cresti/Moneglia 2005; Pietrandrea, forthcoming); and (iv) analysis of diastratic variation in certain syntactic structures, e.g. the déqueismo in Valencian Spanish (Gómez Molina/Gómez Devís 1995).

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8.5 Semantics Beyond what is de facto established, deliberately or not, by the transcription (the choice between en dix ans tout ça va mieux vs en disant tout ça va mieux), the first semantic intervention undertaken by annotations concerns the disambiguation, using POS, of homographic terms within the same category. Is vers, for instance, a preposition or a noun, and if a noun, does it refer to a metric unit or is it the plural of the lemma ver? Part of this task is made easier by indications, in the metadata, of the domain of specialization concerned or by a link established between the data and a terminology dictionary. Semantic annotations are also used for: (i) analysis of thematic roles, and verbal and nominal classes; (ii) organization of the temporal dimension; (iii) processing of modality or metaphors; (iv) study of argument structure; and (v) exploitation of information structure. Examples for modality include MODAL (Pietrandrea, forthcoming) in Italian and French, Avila (2015) for Portuguese, and the SenSem Corpus for Spanish and Catalan (Fernández-Montraveta/Vázquez 2014). Examples of semantic annotation in sociolinguistics include the analysis of methods of constructing shared epistemological knowledge in spontaneous conversations (Pietrandrea, forthcoming).

8.6 Discourse At the level of discourse, a hierarchical reorganization is required when it comes to annotating coreferential elements and associative anaphors. The discontinuity of the sound sequence that characterizes these elements and the indicators that allow them to be retrieved are problematic for automatic annotation. Adjacent units can no longer be grouped together, meaning that other conventions are required, for example coreference in the ANCOR-Centre (Schang et al. 2011). Whether the focus is on tagging speech turns or establishing a typology of language acts, annotation comes into play to characterize: (i) forms of dialogue and conversation (CID – Corpus of Interactional Data for French, PraTid for Italian); (ii) information structure (IPIC – Information Structure Database for Italian and Brazilian Portuguese); (iii) discourse relations (Annodis, French) and discourse markers (for an application to the Valibel, Clapi and Corpage spoken French corpora, see Bolly et al. 2015). The possibility of transposing annotation formats from one Romance language to another raises the question of an intermediary stage between the Indo-European languages and languages that operate differently on the morphophonological level, (e.g. agglutinative languages, tonal languages), or use other ways of expressing semantic relations (e.g. languages with derivational classes or vowel reduction); and within Indo-European languages, between the languages of the western group. With-

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in the stratum composed of Romance languages, certain differences can be observed, for instance the use of the neuter gender in Romanian or conjugation tables.

9 Criticism and perspectives Sociolinguistic annotation suffers from an absence of consensus – inherent to the discipline and its critical function – with regard to the categories to be used as tags. The question arises whether these categories are necessary, i.e. what sort of query results do they provide?, and whether they are relevant, i.e. what contribution do they make to linguistic description? Generic information, e.g. age, gender or profession, is in general placed in the metadata so that annotation is required only when it comes to a potentially repetitive phenomenon or variation between occurrences that may be due to differential distinctive uses.

9.1 Sociolinguistic annotations The observation of phenomena relevant to this category focuses on: (i) lexical units (professional terminology, youth speech or archaic forms, slang and language games such as verlan); (ii) certain syntactic turns of phrase, in particular weaker forms in the system that are used in a distinctive way (see Blanche-Benveniste/Martin 2010), e.g. relative constructions; (iii) collective representations (and self-representations) of agents and of their environment. In contrast, few sociolinguistic annotations focus on phonology and prosody, except those arising through other types of considerations as in the case of liaison (Encrevé 1988), where morphology and social variation come together. Regardless, sociolinguistic annotation provides additional information to grammatical annotation. The alignment of the transcription with the signal, designed to enable a more reliable analysis, has allowed the homogeneity created by standard spelling to be overcome, but the reader cannot help but add his or her judgments to the voices and speakers.

9.2 Effect of discipline-specific fields and annotating variation Amongst the obstacles to a unified approach are expectations regarding applications and the structure of research communities. The initial purpose of NLP was not to process language-internal variation but rather variation between languages based on constants, e.g. lexical count, phrase structure. Even when the wide variety of forms made it clear that there were great differences in production, notably in voice recognition, these differences were attributed mainly to inter-individual variation or, to a

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lesser extent, to geographical origins (Boula de Mareüil/Woehrling/Adda-Decker 2013). The academic training of computer scientists did not prepare them for collaborating with sociologists and vice versa. The result is that very few studies were carried out in this area until the availability of large quantities of data in oral corpora made it necessary to take variation into account. The instability of resources, of theories and also of transcription practices means that the variation found in the data tends also to be found, transposed, in the annotations. The result is a series of differences that are transmitted to the processing stage and give rise to difficulties in use and interoperability, i.e. to competing sets of solutions. It is therefore necessary to define evaluation criteria. At another level, sociolinguistic annotations can involve the types of difficulties encountered. These annotations can be made up of comments added by the transcribers, or, more often, of disagreements between annotators. In turn, these differences can be used as indications of hearer competence. Example 11: Hearer variation (speaker ESLO1/109) Transcription A euh en euh j’ai dû la regagner oui cette année c’est impressionnant les progrès quand même Transcription B euh en euh j’ai vu l’an dernier puis cette année c’est impressionnant les progrès quand même Transcription C euh en euh j’ai vu l’an dernier j’ai vu cette année c’est impressionnant les progrès qu’on a faits Whilst the earliest works in NLP saw variation more as a difficulty than a surplus of information, certain areas of linguistics, where data are based on comparison, were eagerly awaiting solutions on this issue. This is the case for studies in language acquisition (see CHAT, CHILDES), learner corpora or clinical linguistics. Other problems concern multimodal corpora, for instance in the annotation of video corpora that are indispensable for the study of sign languages.

10 Conclusion Annotation is the result of transformation in the practices of linguists when faced with the exponential increase in available resources through developments in computer science. To exploit these resources, it was necessary to master tools that, without being specific to linguistics (most of these tools are shared throughout digital humanities), nonetheless needed to be adapted, both when it came to data

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collection, especially for oral data, and when it came to processing and storing the data. A consensus in methods and a certain degree of standardization was achieved on the periphery of the field. For instance, all corpora adopt a process approach, use the same means of inserting elements of analysis into a file and share tasks between transcription, annotation and metadata. Differences between theoretical schools, the nature of the data and the size of the units (from the phoneme to the discourse) require a certain level of exchange. The flexibility of the corpus is limited by the orientation of the work, i.e. whether the approach is primarily linguistic or computational, and by differences in approaches between subdisciplines. Beyond these distinctions are those that result from the academic context in which the corpus is produced and on its linguistic specificities. The distance between oral and written practices, between the standard language and dialects, but also between dominant forms (diglossia), or competition between overseas varieties, have repercussions on the way that annotation is conceived and used. These consequences are more apparent in oral data that are, by nature, less homogeneous than written data.

11 Bibliography 11.1 Electronic corpora (selected; all last accessed 18.02.2018) Ancient Greek and Latin Dependency Treebank: http://www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo/projects/ancientgreek-and-latin-dependency-treebank-2-0 British National Corpus (BNC): http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk Brown Corpus (English): http://clu.uni.no/icame/manuals/BROWN/INDEX.HTM CORIS/CODIS (Italian): http://corpora.dslo.unibo.it/coris_ita.html Corpus ANCOR-Centre (French): http://tln.li.univ-tours.fr/Tln_Corpus_Ancor.html Corpora for Spoken Languages: https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/scl.15/main Corpus de Català Contemporani: http://www.ub.edu/cccub Corpus de Langue Parlée en Interaction (CLAPI): http://clapi.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA): http://corpus.rae.es/creanet.html Corpus e Lessico di Frequenza dell’Italiano Scritto (CoLFIS): http://linguistica.sns.it/CoLFIS/Home.htm Corpus Sensem (Spanish): http://grial.uab.es/sensem/corpus Enquête Sociolinguistique à Orléans (ESLO): http://eslo.huma-num.fr European Language Resources Association: http://www.elra.info/en Frantext: http://www.frantext.fr French Treebank: http://ftb.linguist.univ-paris-diderot.fr frTenTen Corpus (French): https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/frtenten-french-corpus IPIC (Information Structure Database for Italian): https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/ scl.61.05pan/details Italian Syntactic-Semantic Treebank (ISST): http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=887 Lessico dell’Italiano Parlato (LIP): http://badip.uni-graz.at/it

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London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English: http://clu.uni.no/icame/manuals/LONDLUND/INDEX.HTM Modèles de l’Annotation de la Modalité à l’Oral: http://modal.msh-vdl.fr/index.php/le-corpus Nuovo vocabolario di base della lingua italiana (NVDB): https://www.internazionale.it/opinione/ tullio-de-mauro/2016/12/23/il-nuovo-vocabolario-di-base-della-lingua-italiana Phonologie du Français Contemporain (PFC): http://www.projet-pfc.net Projecto Floresta Sintá(c)tica: http://www.linguateca.pt/floresta Reference Corpus of Contemporary Portuguese: http://www.clul.ulisboa.pt/en/10-research/713-crpcreference-corpus-of-contemporary-portuguese Rhapsodie (French): http://www.projet-rhapsodie.fr Syntactic Microvariations of the Romance Languages of France (SyMiLa): http://blogs.univ-tlse2.fr/ symila Thesaurus Occitan (Thesoc): http://thesaurus.unice.fr Treebank 3LB (Catalan, Spanish): http://www.dlsi.ua.es/projectes/3lb Universal Dependencies Treebank Romanian (UDTR): https://github.com/UniversalDependencies/ UD_Romanian Valibel (French – Belgium): https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/scl.61.05pan/details Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE): http://ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/2542 Wortschatz/French (Leipzig): http://corpora.uni-leipzig.de/de?corpusId=fra_mixed_2012

11.2 Printed sources Almela, Ramón, et al. (edd.) (2005), Frecuencias del español. Diccionario y estudios léxicos y morfológicos, Madrid, Universitas. Avila, Luciana Beatriz (2015), MASS – Modal Annotation in Spontaneous Speech: Semantic Annotation Scheme for Modality in a Spontaneous Speech Brazilian Portuguese Corpus, Veredas 19(2), 1–13. Beeching, Kate (2012), Sociolinguistic Aspects of Lexical Variation in French, in: Tim Pooley/Dominique Lagorgette (edd.), On Linguistic Change in French: Socio-Historical Approaches (Le Changement linguistique en français), Chambéry, Presses Universitaires de Savoie, 37–54. Beliao, Julie/Lacheret, Anne/Kahane, Sylvain (2014), Discourse and Prosody in Spoken French: Why, What and How Should One Count?, https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01066796 (last access 23.06.2017). Benveniste, Émile (1966), Problèmes de linguistique générale, Paris, Gallimard. Bergounioux, Gabriel (ed.) (2016), Linguistique de corpus. Une étude de cas, Paris, Champion. Bertinetto, Pier Marco, et al. (2005), Corpus e Lessico di Frequenza dell’Italiano Scritto (CoLFIS), http://linguistica.sns.it/CoLFIS/Home.htm (last access 23.06.2017). Blanche-Benveniste, Claire/Martin, Philippe (2010), Le Français. Usages de la langue parlée, Leuven/ Paris, Peeters. Boas, Franz (1911), Handbook of American Indian Languages. Part 1, Washington, Government Printing Office. Bolly, Catherine T., et al. (edd.) (2015), MDMA. Un modèle pour l’identification et l’annotation des marqueurs discursifs “potentiels” en contexte, Discours 16, http://discours.revues.org/ 9009?lang=en (last access 23.06.2017). Boula de Mareüil, Philippe/Woehrling, Cécile/Adda-Decker, Martine (2013), Contribution of Automatic Speech Processing to the Study of Northern/Southern French, Language Sciences 39, 75–82. Bourdieu, Pierre (1994), Stratégie de reproduction et mode de domination, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 105(1), 3–12.  

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Branca-Rosoff, Sonia/Schneider, Nathalie (1994), L’Écriture des citoyens. Une analyse linguistique de l’écriture des peu-lettrés pendant la période révolutionnaire, Paris, Klincksieck. Chiari, Isabella/De Mauro, Tullio (2014), Nuovo vocabolario di base della lingua italiana, Milano/ Roma, Sapienza Mondadori Education. Cresti, Emanuela/Moneglia, Massimo (edd.) (2005), C-ORAL ROM. Integrated Reference Corpora for Spoken Romance Languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Crystal, David/Quirk, Randolph (1964), Systems of Prosodic and Paralinguistic Features in English, The Hague, Mouton. Dagnac, Anne/Sauzet, Patric/Sportiche, Dominique (2015), Microvariation syntaxique dans les langues romanes de France. Projet SyMiLa, résultats, prospectives, paper presented at the SyMiLa workshop “La Microvariation syntaxique dans les langues romanes de France”, Toulouse, 11–12 June. De Mauro, Tullio, et al. (edd.) (1993), Lessico di frequenza dell’italiano parlato, Milano, Etas Libri. Durand, Jacques, et al. (2011), Que savons-nous de la liaison aujourd’hui?, Langue française 169, 103–135. Encrevé, Pierre (1988), La Liaison avec et sans enchaînement, Paris, Seuil. Eshkol-Taravella, Iris, et al. (2011), Un grand corpus oral “disponible”: Le corpus d’Orléans 1968– 2012, Traitement automatique des langues 3(2), 17–46. Fernández-Montraveta, Ana/Vázquez, Gloria (2014), The SenSem Corpus: An Annotated Corpus for Spanish and Catalan with Information about Aspectuality, Modality, Polarity and Factuality, Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 10(2), 273–288. Fernández-Ordóñez, Inés (2011), Nuevos horizontes en el estudio de la variación gramatical del español: el Corpus Oral y sonoro del Español rural, in: Germà Colón i Domènech/Lluís Gimeno Betí (edd.), Noves tendències en la dialectologia contemporània, Castelló de la Plana, Universitat Jaume I, 173–203. Fort, Karën (2012), Les Ressources annotées, un enjeu pour l’analyse de contenu: Vers une méthodologie de l’annotation manuelle de corpus, doctoral thesis, Paris, Université Paris 13, available at https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00797760v2 [last accessed 23.06.17]. Giordano, Rosa/Savy, Renata (2003), The Intonation of “Instruct” and “Explain” in Neapolitan Italian, International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 15, 603–606. Gómez Molina, José Ramón/Gómez Devís, M. Begoña (1995), Dequeísmo y queísmo en el español hablado de Valencia: Factores lingüísticos y sociales, Anuario de lingüística hispánica 11, 193–220. Gómez Molina, José Ramón (2007), El español hablado de Valencia. Materiales para su estudio. Nivel sociocultural bajo, Valencia, Universitat de València. Gougenheim, Georges, et al. (edd.) (21964, 11956), L’Élaboration du français fondamental: Étude sur l’établissement d’un vocabulaire et d’une grammaire de base, Paris, Didier. Greene, Barbara B./Rubin, Gerald M. (1971), Automatic Grammatical Tagging of English, Providence, Brown University Press. Guiraud, Pierre (1954), Les Caractères statistiques du vocabulaire, Paris, PUF. Habert, Benoît (2005), Portrait de linguiste(s) à l’instrument, http://www.revue-texto.net/Corpus/ Publications/Habert/Habert_Portrait.html (last access 23.06.2017). Hockett, Charles F. (1954), Two Models of Grammatical Description, Word 10, 210–234. Imbs, Paul/Quemada, Bernard (1971–1994), Trésor de la langue française. Dictionnaire de la langue du XIXe et du XXe siècle (1789–1960), Paris, Gallimard/CNRS. Kahane, Sylvain/Gerdes, Kim/Fleury, Serge (forthcoming), Statistical Analyses of Spoken French Syntactic Structures, in: Anne Lacheret/Sylvain Kahane/Paola Pietrandrea (edd.), Rhapsodie: A Prosodic Syntactic Treebank of Spoken French, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Kučera, Henry/Nelson, Francis W./Carroll, John B. (1967), Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English, Providence, Brown University Press.

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Lacheret, Anne/Kahane, Sylvain/Pietrandrea, Paola (edd.) (forthcoming), Rhapsodie: A Prosodic Syntactic Treebank of Spoken French, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Leech, Geoffrey N. (2005), Adding Linguistic Annotation, in: Martin Wynne (ed.), Developing Linguistic Corpora: A Guide to Good Practice, Oxford, Oxbrow Books, 17–29. Léon, Jacqueline (2015), Histoire de l’automatisation des sciences du langage, Lyon, ENS Éditions. Martínez Díaz, Eva (2009), Las motivaciones del cambio de código: Del español a la lengua catalana, Revista electrónica de estudios filológicos 18. Ogden, Charles Kay (1930), Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar, London, Paul & Co. Pietrandrea, Paola (forthcoming), Epistemicity at Work. A Corpus Study on Italian Dialogues, Journal of Pragmatics. Pietrandrea, Paola/Delsart, Aline (forthcoming), Macrosyntax at Work, in: Anne Lacharet/Sylvain Kahane/Paola Pietrandrea (edd.), Rhapsodie: A Prosodic Syntactic Treebank of Spoken French, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Prieto, Pilar/Roseano, Paolo (edd.) (2010), Transcription of Intonation of the Spanish Language, München, Lincom. Schang, Emmanuel, et al. (2011), Coreference and Anaphoric Annotations for Spontaneous Speech Corpora in French, in: Iris Hendrickx et al. (edd.), Proceedings of DAARC 2011. The 8th Discourse Anaphora and Anaphora Resolution Colloquium, Lisboa, Colibri Edições, 182–190. Steuckardt, Agnès (ed.) (2015), Entre village et tranchées. L’Écriture de poilus ordinaires, Uzès, Inclinaison. Stührenberg, Maik (2012), The TEI and Current Standards for Structuring Linguistic Data, Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative 3, https://jtei.revues.org/523 (last access 13.02.2018). Vallone, Marianna/Caniparoli, Valentina/Savy, Renata (2002), Una prima indagine su fenomeni di riduzione consonantica nella varietà napoletana nel corpus AVIP, in: Agostino Regnicoli (ed.), La fonetica acustica come strumento di analisi della variazione linguistica in Italia, Atti delle XII giornate di studio del Gruppo di Fonetica Sperimentale (GFS), Macerata, Calamo, 83–90. Zipf, George (1935), The Psychobiology of Language: An Introduction to Dynamic Philology, Cambridge, MA, M.I.T. Press.

Damien Mooney

2 Quantitative approaches for modelling variation and change: a case study of sociophonetic data from Occitan Abstract: This chapter presents and evaluates a variety of different statistical modelling techniques that have been used in variationist sociolinguistics to determine the linguistic and social factors that condition language variation and change, with the aim of operationalizing the central theoretical construct of the “variable rule”. Both continuous and categorical sociophonetic data from Occitan are analysed: formant measurements for the mid-vowels, and rhotic consonants. Beginning with a traditional VARBRUL analysis, the chapter presents a series of increasingly complex statistical models for the Occitan variables, illustrating the evolution of statistical practice in sociolinguistics over the past 30 years. The analyses presented highlight the primacy of mixed-effect (regression) models in the field, as the results of these analyses can be more reliably generalized to the larger population from which speakers have been sampled.  

 

Keywords: sociophonetics, Occitan, regression, variable rule, statistical analysis  

1 Introduction The “variable rule” has been a central theoretical construct in variationist sociolinguistics since Labov (1969) first introduced it in his analysis of African-American Vernacular English copula contraction and deletion (see also ↗6 Speaker variables in Romance; ↗8 Variation and grammaticalization in Romance). This construct has as its basis the notion of “orderly heterogeneity” (Weinreich/Labov/Herzog 1968, 100), or the postulate that language variation and language change are constrained by a combination of (potentially interacting) social and linguistic factors. Variable rules are “abstract optional rules” which form an integral part of a language variety’s structural description (Cedergren/Sankoff 1974, 333–334). The extent to which variable rules reflect actual linguistic competence at the level of the individual and of the “speech community” has been a matter of some theoretical debate (see, for example, Sankoff/Labov 1979); from the linguist’s perspective, however, the variable rule can be considered as “the probabilistic modelling and statistical treatment of discrete choices and their conditioning” (Sankoff 1988, 984). This chapter presents and evaluates different techniques, in the variationist sociolinguist’s toolkit, that can be used to undertake this statistical treatment, illustrating these quantitative methods with sociophonetic data from Occitan. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-003

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During the 1970s, variable rule analysis was further developed in studies of language variation and change and this included the development of the “variable rule program” (Cedergren/Sankoff 1974; Rousseau/Sankoff 1978), a statistical modelling package for sociolinguistic analysis which provided a means of estimating the parameters of variable rules (Johnson 2009, 359). The variable rule program was created as a response to the fact that existing statistical modelling techniques, such as “analysis of variance” ANOVA, were largely unsuitable for analysing spontaneous speech data, which are notoriously unbalanced in their distribution (Tagliamonte 2006, 130). The variable rule program has existed under many guises since its initial development (Tagliamonte/Baayen 2012, 136): Varbrul (Cedergren/Sankoff 1974); Goldvarb 2.0 (Rand/Sankoff 1990); Goldvarb X (Sankoff 2005); Goldvarb Lion (Sankoff/Tagliamonte/Smith 2005). These packages, often collectively referred to as VARBRUL , have allowed the sociolinguist to model statistically the distribution of two discrete linguistic variants, as well as the (collective) effect of social and linguistic factors that condition the variation observed. Tagliamonte/Baayen note, however, that the past 30 years have seen the development of more sophisticated statistical modelling techniques, which may be more appropriate for analysing language data (2012, 136). Packages such as Rvarb (Paolillo 2002), Rbrul (Johnson 2009) and R (R Development Core Team 2009) provide the analyst with the opportunity to implement a more advanced version of variable rule analysis; these approaches have the primary advantage of facilitating a higher level of generalizability to the wider population with respect to the results obtained. Traditionally, structured variability in Romance varieties has received relatively little attention when compared with the large body of variationist sociolinguistic literature on variable rule analysis in varieties of English; studies of the Romance languages have tended to examine low-level phonetic transfer and change, rather than investigating the social and linguistic constraints that govern these developments. There are some variationist studies, however, which have presented applications of the (traditional) variable rule program to varieties of French1 such as, for example, Ashby (1981) and Van Compernolle (2008) on negative particle deletion, Ashby (1982; 1988) on left- and right-dislocations, Ashby (1992) and Williams/van Compernolle (2009) on forms of address; Regan (1996) on second language acquisition, Moisset (2000) on variable liaison, and Temple (2000a; 2000b) on plosive devoicing. Variationist studies of Canadian varieties of French has been particularly progressive in using the variable rule program to analyse spontaneous speech data; for example, Paradis/Deshaies (1990) on stress alignment in Quebec, Poplack (1992) on the subjunctive, Nagy/Blondeau (1999) on double subject marking in Montreal, King/Nadasdi (2003) on future temporal reference in Acadia, Sankoff/Blondeau (2007) on rhotics in Montreal, King/  

1 Similar approaches have been applied to other Romance languages such as Spanish (see, for example, Sessarego/Tejedo-Herrero 2016), and Catalan (see, for example, Simonet 2010; 2011).

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Martineau/Mougeon (2011) on first-person plural pronouns, and Comeau/King/Butler (2012) on past-tense aspectual distinctions in Acadia. More recently, other researchers have taken advantage of the advanced modelling techniques offered by the R environment such as, for example, Roberts (2012) on future temporal reference in Martinique, Burnett/Tremblay/Blondeau (2015) on negative concord in Montreal, and Mooney (2016a; 2016b; 2016c) on dialect levelling in the phonological system of southwestern metropolitan French. To my knowledge, no studies of language variation and change have used the variable rule program on data from minority languages in the francophone context, the so-called langues de France, or regional languages. Some researchers have performed ANOVAs on France’s regional languages, such as Villeneuve/Auger (2013) on subject-doubling and negative particle deletion in Picard, Sichel-Bazin/ Buthke/Meisenburg (2012) on Occitan prosody, and Kennard/Lahiri (2015; 2017) on mutation in Breton; with the exception of Villeneuve/Auger (2013), the data presented in these studies were largely experimental and therefore more suited to ANOVA than studies of spontaneous speech (Tagliamonte 2006, 130).

Figure 1: Gallo-Romance languages (Mooney 2016b, 9)  

Figure 2: Gallo-Romance dialects (Mooney 2016b, 9)

The statistical analyses presented in this chapter model linguistic variation and change in the consonantal and vocalic systems of a local variety of the Occitan language. The most significant division within Gallo-Romance is between the dialect area in the north, the langue d’oïl, and the dialect area in the south, known as the langue d’oc (see Figure 1). The modern langue d’oc area is commonly divided into six main dialectal areas (see Figure 2): gascon in the southwest, including the Béarnais and Aranais sub-dialects; central Languedocien; Limousin and Auvergnat in the north; Provençal in the southeast, including the Nissart sub-dialect; Vivaro-Alpine or Alpine  

 

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Provençal above the Provençal region. In the second half of the twentieth century, the establishment of the Institut d’Études Occitanes led to the use of the term “Occitan” to refer to all langue d’oc dialects, collectively considered to be a single language. Indeed the term “Occitan” has become a source of ideological conflict in southern France, especially for those who consider local varieties of the langue d’oc to be languages in their own right (see Blanchet/Schiffman 2004; Moreux 2004; Mooney 2015 for discussion); nonetheless, I will use the term “Occitan” here for simplicity. The data presented in this chapter come from the Béarnais sub-dialect of Gascon, spoken in the region of Béarn or the historically Romance-speaking part of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques département in southwestern France. Like all Occitan dialects, Béarnais has found itself in an increasing state of language obsolescence from the late nineteenth century onwards. In the entire Gascon region, the highest concentration of speakers exists in Béarn, making Béarnais the principal surviving sub-dialect. Moreux (2004) suggests that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there were about 40,000 fluent native speakers of Occitan in Béarn, noting that the large majority of these speakers were over the age of 65 and rural dwellers. This chapter begins by describing the Occitan data set collected in Béarn, and by outlining the linguistic variables to be modelled statistically – the dependent variables (section 2): (i) rhotic consonants; (ii) front mid-vowel contrast. The social and linguistic factors expected to condition variation and change in the Occitan phonological inventory are then presented – the independent variables (section 3). The body of the chapter presents a series of (increasingly complex) statistical modelling techniques for the Occitan linguistic variables under consideration, beginning with a traditional VARBRUL -style analysis of the Occitan rhotics (section 4.1), before discussing interactions between independent variables and some methodological issues involved in including correlated social and/or linguistic factors in the analyses proposed (section 4.2). The front-mid vowels are submitted to an Rbrul analysis in section 4.3, using a technique previously unavailable in the VARBRUL suite. The Occitan data are then submitted to a series of the most up-to-date statistical modelling techniques available for variationist data (section 4.4), with the final section discussing some proposed statistical techniques for resolving on-going issues encountered with current modelling methodologies.  

 

 

 

 

 

2 Dependent variables: Occitan sociophonetic data In variationist sociolinguistics, the “dependent variable” is the linguistic variable whose distribution we are interested in analysing statistically. Dependent variables in sociolinguistic studies are usually either binary or continuous: binary variables have two discrete variants and are categorical in nature; continuous variables are characterized by having a range of variants on a gradient scale (Hay 2011, 200). The Occitan data presented in this section are sociophonetic in nature, meaning that it was

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collected using traditional Labovian sociolinguistic methods and that it was analysed using the acoustic phonetic techniques of laboratory phonetics. The data set contains examples of both binary and continuous dependent variables, the rhotic consonants and the front mid-vowels, respectively. The Occitan corpus contains high quality acoustic data, collected in 2012, for ten bilingual Occitan-French speakers, five male and five female, over the age of 65, and native to the region of Béarn. All informants participated in a wordlist translation task from French into Occitan and were recorded using a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz and a 16-bit PCM sample size on a Marantz PMD661 Solid State Sound Recorder. Subsequent acoustic analyses were performed in Praat version 5.2.21 (Boersma 2001; Boersma/Weenink 2012).

2.1 Categorical variables: Occitan rhotic consonants There are very few comprehensive analyses of the distribution of rhotic consonants in Occitan varieties. Most commentators agree, however, that Gascon has two historically appropriate rhotic consonants, the voiced apical trill [r], and the voiced apical tap [ɾ], which are in contrastive distribution in intervocalic position, e.g. poret /puˈɾet/ (‘chicken’) ~ porret /puˈret/ (‘leek’) (Bec 1973; Cardaillac Kelly 1973), and not contrastive in other contexts, such that “an archiphoneme could be set up for all other positions” (Cardaillac Kelly 1973, 32). The apical rhotics are not, however, in strictly complementary distribution in non-intervocalic contexts: the distribution of [r] and [ɾ] is somewhat constrained by their position within the syllable and with respect to word boundaries with a tendency for [r] to occur word-initially and as an onset after [n], and [ɾ] to occur in onset clusters and in the syllable coda, but this distribution is by no means categorical (Cardaillac Kelly 1973, 32; Mooney 2014, 345). Previous analyses of the Gascon rhotics have noted the transfer of dorsal rhotic consonants from French due to prolonged language contact. The phonological inventory of modern standard French contains one rhotic consonant phoneme, the voiced uvular fricative /ʁ/, which is often realized as a voiced uvular trill [ʀ] by older rural speakers. Cardaillac Kelly found that dorsal realizations [ʁ ʀ] occurred as variants of /r/ and /ɾ/ “in all positions as a consequence of bilingualism” (1973, 32), that when dorsal variants are used in intervocalic position, the phonemic distinction between /ɾ/ and /r/ is neutralized, e.g. poret ~ porret [puˈʁet], and that female speakers used more dorsal variants than male speakers. The analysis of the Occitan rhotic consonants considered contact-induced change of the place of articulation of the categorical dependent variable, (R), with binary variants [apical] and [dorsal], representing the historically appropriate and transferred forms, respectively. 466 tokens of the (R) variable were categorized on the basis of an auditory or impressionistic analysis, which was supplemented by visual inspection of the acoustic spectrogram; an equal number of token counts was extracted for both male and female speakers.

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2.2 Continuous variables: Occitan front mid-vowels Traditionally, Occitan distinguishes between two mid-vowels, /e/ and /ɛ/, in the front of the vowel space (e.g., peis /peʃ/ ‘fish’, pè /pɛ/ ‘foot’); these vowels are contrastive phonemes in Gascon, e.g., qu’ei /kej/ ‘he is’, qu’ai /kɛj/ ‘I have’. There is some evidence to suggest that this phonemic distinction is not maintained in certain varieties of Occitan (Séguy 1954–1973); the analysis of the front mid-vowels aimed to determine the extent to which this contrast is maintained in Béarn. Figure 3 presents the full Occitan oral vowel system.  

Figure 3: Occitan oral vowels (Mooney 2014, 346)  

While the phonemic distinction between the front mid-vowels is theoretically categorical, /e/ or /ɛ/, their phonetic realizations can be analysed as a continuous variable (E) by measuring the first two formant frequencies, F1 and F2, of each vowel token in the corpus; these formant values are located on a gradient scale in the acoustic vowel space. Formant frequencies are commonly held, in acoustic phonetic studies of oral vowels, to have general non-linear articulatory correlates: F1 exhibits an inverse correlation with vowel height; F2 exhibits a positive correlation with vowel frontness/ backness. The first and second formants were estimated in Praat using the LPC (Linear Predictive Coding) algorithm. The vowel onset and offset were first labelled in a Praat text grid and a script was used to automatically extract the value of F1 and F2 at the vowel midpoint; 253 tokens of the Occitan front mid-vowels were included in the analysis.

3 Independent variables: social and linguistic factors Independent variables are generally linguistic or social factors that we expect to influence the distribution of the dependent variable. In traditional variationist studies, independent variables are referred to as “factor groups” and their variants are referred to as “factors”. For example, an independent variable for speaker sex may be

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65

included in the analysis as a “sex” factor group with variants [male] and [female]. These terms are not used outside the context of the variable rule program; in general statistical practice, factor groups are referred to as “predictors” and factors are referred to as “levels”. For the categorical (R) variable, the analyses included five independent variables or predictors, two social and three linguistic (see Table 1). Speaker sex and the speaker’s place of origin were included in the analysis to determine the extent to which the distribution of apical and dorsal variants was influenced by a speaker’s gender and/or regional origin. Three linguistic predictors were also included; previous studies of the Gascon rhotics have suggested that their distribution is partially constrained by syllable type and by phonological context. For the latter, a general distinction has been drawn between front and back consonants and between front and back vowels for the “preceding phoneme” and “following phoneme” predictors, the hypothesis being that adjacent anterior articulations will favour apical realizations and that posterior articulations will favour dorsal realizations. In the statistical analyses that follow, the models include either “syllable type” alone or “preceding phoneme” and “following phoneme” together (see section 4.2 for discussion).  

 

Table 1: I ndependent variables included in statistical analyses of dependent variable (R)  

Predictor

Levels

Speaker sex

Male Female

Place

Gan Nousty Nay

Syllable type

Simple onset Complex onset Simple coda Complex coda

Preceding phoneme

Front vowel Back vowel Apical consonant Dorsal consonant Non-lingual consonant Pause

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Table 1: (continued)  

Predictor

Levels

Following phoneme

Front vowel Back vowel Apical consonant Dorsal consonant Non-lingual consonant Pause

For the continuous (E) variable, the analyses included seven independent variables or predictors: two social and four linguistic. Again, speaker sex and place or origin were included as social predictors. “Phoneme” was included as a predictor to determine the extent to which the historically appropriate phoneme (/e/ or /ɛ/) could predict F1 and F2 values when phonological context had been taken into account. Syllable type was also included in as an independent variable as the distribution of the front midvowels is heavily influenced by open and closed syllabic contexts in the local variety of French spoken in the region (Mooney 2016b). In the F1 statistical analyses, F2 was included as a predictor to investigate potential significant correlations between the formant frequencies; F1 was equally included as a predictor in the statistical models containing F2 as a dependent variable. Table 2: I ndependent variables included in statistical analyses of dependent variable (E)  

Predictor

Levels

Speaker sex

Male Female

Place

Gan Nousty Nay

Phoneme

/e/ /ɛ/

Syllable type

/Cv#/– Open final /CvC#/– Closed final /vCV(C)#/– Open medial

Preceding phoneme

Various

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Table 2: (continued)  

Predictor

Levels

Following phoneme

Various

F1 or F2

Continuous

4 Statistical modelling Before undertaking a statistical analysis of the formant frequencies (F1 and F2) extracted from vocalic data, it was first necessary to normalize the data set. This is because different speakers exhibit variation in the formant values they produce for a given phonological vowel because of physiological differences in their vocal tracts. Normalization aims to eliminate variation which is caused by anatomical differences while preserving variation that is sociolinguistically significant (see Mooney 2016b for methods used). Statistical modelling allows the sociolinguist to identify the various components of a variable rule using statistical inference. There are many statistical tests that can be used to examine the effect of an independent variable on the distribution of the variants of a dependent variable, such as a t-test or Spearman’s correlation (Hay 2011, 206–207), but these are largely inappropriate for sociolinguistic or sociophonetic data sets. This is because it is not possible to use these tests to consider the effect of multiple (potentially interacting) predictors on a dependent variable, the essence of a variable rule. In order to obtain “an assessment of the significance of each candidate predictor over and above any variation that can be explained by the other potential predictors” (Hay 2011, 207), we must use a statistical modelling technique known as regression: “Regression analysis is a statistical tool for the investigation of relationships between variables. […] To explore such issues, the investigator assembles the data on the underlying variables of interest and employs regression to estimate the quantitative effect of the causal variables upon the variable that they influence” (Sykes 1993, 1).

ANOVA is a special case of regression that has been widely used in experimental linguistic studies, but this method is not suitable for spontaneous speech data as it assumes an even distribution of the data across the cells of the data set and this is almost never the case in sociolinguistic studies (Tagliamonte 2006, 137). The regression models presented in this chapter have all been carried out in the R environment (version 3.2.3) using the Rbrul (version 2.3.2) text-based interface (Johnson 2009) which makes use of existing functions in the R environment. The remainder of this section presents a series of increasingly complex regression analyses for categorical and continuous dependent and independent variables. Where possible,

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the regression models have been presented as they appear in the Rbrul interface to familiarize the reader with R output. All models distinguish the following levels for statistical significance: p < .05 and p < .01, for which the probability of observing the effect returned by chance is less than 5 % and 1 %, respectively; p < .001 is highly significant; for p < .0001, the probability of observing the result returned is considered to be approximately zero (p ≈ 0), or 100 %.

4.1 Logistic regression models The statistical modelling technique most widely used in sociolinguistics is logistic regression, a type of “generalized linear model” (Agresti 2007, 67): logistic regression examines the effect of multiple predictors on a binary categorical dependent variable. The variable rule program, or VARBRUL analysis, allows the analyst to model the effect of categorical predictors (“factor groups”) on a categorical variable; the versions of VARBRUL that are currently available do not support continuous dependent or independent variables.2 The Occitan rhotic consonant data set is modelled statistically in this section using (i) a traditional VARBRUL -style binomial stepwise regression analysis, and (ii) a simple main effects one-level binomial regression analysis in Rbrul. The VARBRUL series of applications offers two options for data analysis (Tagliamonte 2006, 139): (i) binomial one-step and (ii) binomial step-up/step-down. The first option provides statistical information on all predictors included in the analysis, including those that are not determined to have a significant effect (p < .05) on the dependent variable. The second option, also known as stepwise regression, has been used most often in studies of language variation and change (Tagliamonte 2006, 140): “Stepping up, [the program] starts with no predictors and adds the most significant factor group, if there is one, before repeating the procedure. Stepping down, it starts with all possible predictors and removes the one that contributes least to the model, and then repeats this until all remaining predictors are significant” (Johnson 2009, 380).

When the stepwise procedure is complete, VARBRUL returns a logistic regression model that includes all “factor groups”, or predictors, that “affect the response variable of interest, in what direction and to what degree” (Johnson 2009, 359).

2 Varbrul 3 allows continuous variables to be included in the analysis but this version of VARBRUL analysis has not been made available on personal computers (Sankoff 2006, 1157; Johnson 2009, 360).

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Table 3: VA VAR RBRUL BRUL -style stepwise regression analysis of Occitan rhotic consonants, with [dorsal] as application value (Log likelihood = –193.429, degrees of freedom = 12, significance = 0.000, input = 0.107)  

 

 

 

Factor group

Factors

Place of origin

Following phoneme

Total N

% of total

Factor weight

Nay

145

32

0.708

Gan

231

22

0.615

Nousty

90

6

0.205

Pause

66

55

0.817

Apical consonant

77

27

0.569

Non-lingual consonant

43

26

0.510

214

12

0.402

9

11

0.348

Back vowel

57

12

0.313

Pause

17

41

0.869

Front vowel

215

29

0.658

Back vowel

89

28

0.560

Dorsal consonant

50

10

0.476

Non-lingual consonant

61

3

0.211

Apical consonant

34

3

0.203

Front vowel Dorsal consonant

Preceding phoneme

Table 3 presents the results of a typical VARBRUL -style3 stepwise logistic regression, using VARBRUL terminology for the categorical Occitan (R) dependent variable, with variants [dorsal] and [apical]. For binary categorical variables, one variant must be designated as the “application” or “response” value, or the “variant defined as the outcome of the variable rule” (Tagliamonte 2006, 263). The results returned by the variable rule program are relative to the application value. For example, the model presented in Table 3 included [dorsal] as the application value and so any significant effects shown to favour or disfavour the dependent variable are, in fact, shown to favour or disfavour dorsal variants. Four independent variables, or “factor groups” were  

 

3 The VARBRUL -style analysis was actually implemented in Rbrul, operating with different settings. Johnson has shown that, operating in a simpler mode, “Rbrul provided nearly identical output to the actual GoldVarb program” (2009, 381).

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included in the analysis (see Table 1): speaker sex, speaker place of origin, preceding phoneme, and following phoneme. With the exception of “speaker sex”, all factor groups were returned by the regression analysis as significant: place of origin (p ≈ 0); following phoneme (p ≈ 0); preceding phoneme (p ≈ 0). The model presented in Table 3 provides us with the following information: factor groups (“predictors”) and factors (“levels”); the total number of tokens considered per factor or level; the percentage of tokens in a given context that are represented by the application value; factor weights; log likelihood; degrees of freedom; significance level; input probability. The “% of total” column reports the percentage of dorsal tokens that occur at each level for a given predictor, e.g., 55 % of the tokens that occur before a pause are dorsal in the data set. Factor weights indicate the “strength and direction of the effect” (Hay 2011, 207); they can range from 0 to 1 and are anchored around the value of 0.5. Factor weights closer to 1 favour the application value, dorsal variants in this case, while factor weights closer to 0 disfavour dorsal variants. Factor weights are important for determining the social and linguistic constraints on the distribution of the variants of the dependent variable. For the (R) variable, dorsal variants, which have been transferred from French, are favoured by speakers from Nay, in pre-pausal and post-pausal position, and following front vowels. It is interesting to note here that dorsal variants are favoured before apical consonants, which may constitute some sort of dissimilatory effect on transfer from French. Apical variants are favoured by speakers from Nousty, before vowels and dorsal consonants, and after all consonant types. These factor weights allow us to interpret the relative strength of the factors across factor groups and, indeed, across sociolinguistic studies. The log-likelihood value indicates the “goodness of fit” of the regression model; it is interpreted relative to other log-likelihood values, with more positive values indicating a better fit of the regression model to the data set, or the extent to which the model can explain the variability observed. The degrees of freedom (df) refer to the number of parameters in the model that can vary: “the number of independent pieces of information available or used in the analysis of the observed data” (Paolillo 2002, 109). All factor groups included in the model are significant at the (p ≈ 0) level, as indicated by the p-value of 0.000. Finally, the “input” value refers to the input probability: the logistic regression model in Table 3 makes predictions about the proportion of dorsal and apical variants in each cell, given the factor groups included in the analysis; the input probability is basically an average of these predicted values, which “provides the baseline from which the model predictions are built” (Hay 2011, 209). The stepwise algorithm commonly employed in VARBRUL analyses is now “generally frowned upon in today’s statistical community” (Johnson 2009, 380) and outside of the discipline of sociolinguistics, the output presented in Table 3 is difficult to interpret because the terminology (factor groups, factor weights, input probability) are not in use elsewhere. Rbrul recommends using a binomial one-level logistic regression model for categorical variables, which takes into account all independent variables considered, including those that do not reach the required level of statistical  

 

 

 

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significance; this has the effect of improving the model’s goodness of fit. Rbrul has the initial advantage of providing regression output in the form of factor weights, while also presenting the results in log-odds; this facilitates interpretation of the results by sociolinguists who are well-acquainted with VARBRUL , and by researchers in other disciplines where log-odds are more commonly used to interpret the strength and direction of effects for independent variables. Table 4: Rbrul output for one-level simple main effects logistic regression model of Occitan rhotic consonants, with [dorsal] as application value  

ONE-LEVEL ANALYSIS OF RESPONSE Place of Articulation WITH PREDICTOR(S): Following phoneme (3.13e-06) + Preceding phoneme (0.00019) + Place of origin (0.000223) + Sex (0.184)

$Sex factor

logodds

tokens

DORSAL/DORSAL+APICAL

centered factor weight

F

0.184

233

0.275

0.546

M

-0.184

233

0.163

0.454

logodds

tokens

DORSAL/DORSAL+APICAL

centered factor weight

Nay

0.804

145

0.317

0.691

Gan

0.405

231

0.221

0.600

Nousty

-1.209

90

0.056

0.230

factor

logodds

tokens

DORSAL/DORSAL+APICAL

centered factor weight

Pause

1.945

17

0.412

0.875

FrontVowel

0.639

215

0.288

0.654

BackVowel

0.239

89

0.281

0.559

DorsalCons

-0.109

50

0.100

0.473

NonLingualCons

-1.328

61

0.033

0.209

ApicalCons

-1.385

34

0.029

0.200

factor

logodds

tokens

DORSAL/DORSAL+APICAL

centered factor weight

Pause

1.534

66

0.545

0.823

$Place of origin factor

$Preceding phoneme

$Following phoneme

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Table 4: (continued) ApicalCons

0.293

77

0.273

0.573

NonLingualCons

0.038

43

0.256

0.509

FrontVowel

-0.392

214

0.121

0.403

DorsalCons

-0.709

9

0.111

0.330

BackVowel

-0.763

57

0.123

0.318

$misc.1 n

df

intercept

overall proportion

centered input prob

466

14

-2.099

0.219

0.109

$misc.2 log.likelihood -192.545

AIC

AICc

Dxy

R2

413.089

414.021

0.628

0.388

Table 4 presents the Rbrul output for a one-level simple main effects model of the Occitan rhotic consonants, essentially replicating the VARBRUL -style analysis presented in Table 3 without using automated stepwise regression procedures. This logistic regression analysis returns the same predictors as significant: following phoneme (p = 3.13e–06; p ≈ 0); preceding phoneme (p = .00019; p < .001); place of origin (p = .000223; p < .001). Speaker sex is not returned as significant by the model (p = .184), indicating that speaker sex does not have an effect on the choice of dorsal or apical rhotics in this variety of Occitan. The constraint ranking, indicated by the centred factor weights, is identical to the VARBRUL output in Table 3, but the individual factor weight values have changed as a result of the inclusion of “speaker sex” in the model. Three new pieces of information are provided in the Rbrul output in Table 4: the intercept, log-odds values, and an R2 value. The intercept is similar to the input probability in that it is the baseline value used to built the regression model. Rbrul uses “treatment contrasts” or “treatment coding” as its default mode of reporting regression output. This means that, for each predictor, one level is chosen as the default; the estimate for the intercept is the mean log-odds for these default values (Tagliamonte/ Baayen 2012, 149). Where factor weights are anchored around 0.5 and range on a scale from 0 to 1, log-odds are anchored around zero and range on a scale from negative infinity to positive infinity (Hay 2011, 209; Tagliamonte/Baayen 2012, 148). Positive logodds favour the application value while negative log-odds disfavour the application value. For example, for the “following phoneme” predictor, following pauses strongly favour the transfer of dorsal rhotics into Occitan (log-odds = +1.534) while following  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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back vowels strongly favour the retention of apical rhotics (log-odds = –0.763, with [dorsal] as the application value). Values around zero, such as for non-lingual consonants (log-odds = +0.038) have a neutral effect on the dependent variable. An advantage of using the log-odds scale is that the analyst can simply add the log-odds together to obtain an overall prediction for any configuration of the independent variables (Johnson 2009, 361; Hay 2011, 210). For example, if we wanted to predict dorsal consonant use for a speaker from Gan saying a word such as tribalhar /tɾibaˈʎa/ where the phonemic apical tap is preceded by an apical consonant and followed by a front vowel, we simply add the log-odds for each of those levels, plus the value of the intercept (Johnson 2009, 361): Gan (0.405) + apical consonant (–1.385) + front vowel (–0.392) + intercept (–2.099) = –3.471, indicating that this configuration of the independent variables would strongly disfavour the use of a dorsal rhotic. Finally, the R2 value (0.388) reports the proportion of variation explained by the model, with higher values indicating a more robust explanatory capacity. As with log likelihood, the R2 value should be interpreted comparatively and relative to the equivalent value in adjusted or modified models of the data set.  

4.2 Collinearity and interactions For the regression analyses of the Occitan rhotic consonants presented in Table 3 (binomial stepwise) and Table 4 (binomial one-level), I noted that the “syllable type” factor group, or predictor, could not be included in the same model as “preceding phoneme” and “following phoneme”; this is because it exhibits a collinear relationship with these predictors. Collinearity refers to cases where two or more independent variables are correlated. One of the primary problems with generalized linear models, of which logistic regression is one, is that they assume independent variables not to be collinear. Due to the nature of the wordlist translation task used to collect the Occitan sociophonetic data, the “syllable type” predictor is correlated with both “following phoneme” and “following phonetic environment”, since for example, final open syllables (/Cv#/) always correspond to a pause for the “following phoneme” predictor. In any case, interdependencies such as those between independent predictors should never be considered together (Tagliamonte/Baayen 2012, 163): unsolvable computational problems often arise resulting in various kinds of error message. If the program is successful in returning an output for a model containing collinear predictors, the logodds estimates for the logistic regression will not be precise because of the difficulty experienced in parcelling out the effect of the collinear predictors on the dependent variable. In order to include “syllable type” as an independent variable, “preceding phoneme” and “following phoneme” must be excluded from the regression analysis. The resultant one-level simple main effects model is presented in Table 5, where “syllable type” (p ≈ 0) and “place of origin” (p ≈ 0) are returned as significant effects. The  

 

 

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constraints ranking for place of origin mirrors that of the models in Tables 3 and 4 (including preceding and following phoneme as predictors). For syllable type, dorsal realizations are shown to be favoured in simple syllable codas (log-odds = +1.116), e.g. mort [muʁ]), and disfavoured in complex onset clusters (log-odds = –1.182), e.g. trin [tɾĩ]. Complex codas and simple onsets had a neutral effect on the distribution of dorsal and apical consonants. To examine whether it is better to include syllable type as an independent variable in the regression model for the Occitan rhotics, we can compare it with the model including preceding phoneme and following phoneme (see Table 4). The best method for comparing the goodness of fit of two models is to undertake an “analysis of deviance” using a chi-squared test. The chi-squared test can be performed in Rbrul by entering the log-likelihood and degrees of freedom for the first model (Table 4) and the same information for the second model (Table 5); the resultant chi-squared statistic (χ²) takes into account the difference between the models’ log likelihood values and the difference in the number of degrees of freedom. Comparing the models in Tables 4 and 5, the increase in log likelihood from –192.545 (when phonological context is included) to –204.958 (when syllable type is included) follows a chi-squared distribution (χ² = 24.362) with 7 degrees of freedom. The p-value is .000984 (p < .001), indicating that the difference between the two models is significant and that the model in Table 4, containing “preceding phoneme” and “following phoneme” as independent variables, is capable of explaining more of the variation observed in the data set.  

 

 

 

 

 

Table 5: Rbrul output for one-level simple main effects logistic regression model (with “syllable type” as a predictor) of Occitan rhotic consonants, with [dorsal] as application value  

ONE-LEVEL ANALYSIS OF RESPONSE PlaceArt WITH PREDICTOR(S): Syllable type (1.8e-11) + Place of origin (0.000327) + Sex (0.253)

$Sex factor

logodds

tokens

DORSAL/DORSAL+APICAL

centered factor weight

F

0.151

233

0.275

0.538

M

-0.151

233

0.163

0.462

logodds

tokens

DORSAL/DORSAL+APICAL

centered factor weight

Nay

0.778

145

0.317

0.685

Gan

0.360

231

0.221

0.589

Nousty

-1.138

90

0.056

0.243

$Place of origin factor

Quantitative approaches for modelling variation and change

75

Table 5: (continued) $Syllable type factor

logodds

tokens

DORSAL/DORSAL+APICAL

centered factor weight

1.116

139

0.417

0.753

ComplexCoda

0.088

55

0.200

0.522

SimpleOnset

-0.022

116

0.190

0.494

ComplexOnset

-1.182

156

0.071

0.235

SimpleCoda

$misc.1 n 466

df

intercept

overall proportion

centered input prob

7

-1.779

0.219

0.144

$misc.2 log.likelihood -204.958

AIC

AICc

Dxy

R2

423.916

424.16

0.557

0.299

Johnson (2009, 380) notes that collinearity should not be confused with interactions between independent variables: “An interaction between two variables exists when the effect of the first variable on the dependent cannot be sensibly discussed or fully represented without reference to the second variable. […] If we are doing multiple regression, we would need to include this interaction in our model, otherwise we might be violating the assumptions of the model, which require that there are no unmodelled interactions in the data” (Hay 2011, 206).

The simple main effects logistic regression model presented in Table 5 considers the predictors, or independent variables, to be completely independent of each other. Simple main effects models ignore potential interactions between independent variables. These interactions are present in many sociolinguistic data sets but have been largely overlooked by VARBRUL -style analyses (cf. Sigley 2003). The exclusion of interactions from variationist analyses is primarily due to the fact that the VARBRUL series does not permit the inclusion of interaction terms in the regression analysis. Rbrul allows the inclusion of predictor interaction terms in the “same automatic procedure that identifies significant main effects” (Johnson 2009, 363).  

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Table 6: Rbrul output for one-level logistic regression model with interactions of Occitan rhotic consonants, with [dorsal] as application value  

ONE-LEVEL ANALYSIS OF RESPONSE PlaceArt WITH PREDICTOR(S): Place of origin (0.000434) + Sex: Syllable type (0.0199) + Sex [main effect, not tested] + Syllable [main effect, not tested]

$Sex factor

logodds

tokens DORSAL/DORSAL+APICAL

centered factor weight

vif

F

2.059

233

0.275

0.887

>20

M

-2.059

233

0.163

0.113

>20

tokens DORSAL/DORSAL+APICAL

centered factor weight

$Place of origin factor

logodds

Nay

0.774

145

0.317

0.684

Gan

0.350

231

0.221

0.587

Nousty

-1.124

90

0.056

0.245

tokens DORSAL/DORSAL+APICAL

centered factor weight

vif

$Syllable type factor

logodds

SimpleCoda

2.994

139

0.417

0.952

>20

SimpleOnset

1.857

116

0.190

0.865

>20

ComplexOnset

0.752

156

0.071

0.68

>20

ComplexCoda

-5.602

55

0.200

0.004

>20

tokens DORSAL/DORSAL+APICAL

centered factor weight

vif

$`Sex:Syllable type` factor:factor

logodds

F:ComplexCoda

6.158

30

0.367

0.998

>20

M:ComplexOnset

2.202

76

0.066

0.9

>20

M:SimpleCoda

1.992

70

0.343

0.88

>20

M:SimpleOnset

1.963

62

0.145

0.877

>20

F:SimpleOnset

-1.963

54

0.241

0.123

>20

F:SimpleCoda

-1.992

69

0.493

0.12

>20

F:ComplexOnset

-2.202

80

0.075

0.1

>20

M:ComplexCoda

-6.158

25

0.000

0.002

>20

Quantitative approaches for modelling variation and change

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Table 6: (continued) $misc.1 n

df intercept

466

10

overall proportion

centered input prob

0.219

0.026

-3.643

$misc.2 log.likelihood -200.032

AIC

AICc

Dxy

R2

420.064

420.547

0.575

0.81

Table 6 replicates the logistic regression model in Table 5 for the Occitan rhotic consonants, this time including an interaction term, which considers the relationship between speaker sex and syllable type (sex*syllable). This interaction term is returned by the regression model as significant (p < .05), showing that the constraint ranking for syllable type is significantly different for male and female speakers: for female speakers, complex codas favour dorsal variants, with all other contexts favouring apical variants; for male speakers, complex codas favour apical variants, with all other contexts favouring dorsal variants. The goodness of fit will always be better when interaction terms are included in the regression model “but the improvement is not always worth the complication” (Johnson 2009, 381). To determine if the increase in log likelihood from –204.958 in the simple main effects model (Table 5) to –200.032 in the model with the sex*speaker interaction term (Table 6), we must perform an analysis of deviance. This increase in log likelihood follows a chi-squared distribution (χ² = 9.8519) with 3 degrees of freedom (p < .05), indicating that this improvement in fit is statistically significant and that the model containing the interaction term should be favoured.  

 

 

 

 

4.3 Linear regression models Linear regression is the technique used to model the relationship between a continuous dependent variable, such as a vowel formant frequency, and multiple independent variables (which may be categorical or continuous). This type of analysis is impossible in the VARBRUL series (with the exception of unreleased Varbrul 3). It is particularly important, with continuous variables, to know how the data are distributed because the linear regression analysis will assume that is it normally distributed: “in a normal distribution, data are equally distributed around a mean value, and there are two long tails” (Hay 2011, 200). The main problem is that the distribution of many phonetic variables is not normally distributed, in which case it may be

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advisable to use an alternative, non-parametric test (see section 5) which makes no assumptions about normality (Hay 2011, 200–201). The first formant frequency for the Occitan (E) variable was modelled using simple main effects linear regression in Rbrul and the results of this analysis are presented in Table 7. The continuous dependent variable is normalized F1; one continuous predictor (F2) and four categorical predictors were included in the analysis. Three predictors were returned as significant: syllable type (p ≈ 0); phoneme (p < .01); F2 (p < .05). For the levels of each predictor, regression “coefficients” are returned by the analysis when the dependent variable is continuous; these coefficients are similar to log-odds in that they indicate the magnitude and direction of the effect identified, with positive values indicating that a level favours a high F1 value (a more open vowel) and negative values favouring a low F1 value (a closer vowel). Coefficients differ from log-odds, however, in that they are expressed in the units of the dependent variable (i.e. F1), rather than on a scale of positive infinity to negative infinity, anchored around zero (Johnson 2009, 380; Hay 2011, 211).  

 

Table 7: Rbrul output for one-level simple main effects linear regression model of F1; Occitan front mid-vowels  

ONE-LEVEL ANALYSIS OF RESPONSE F1 WITH PREDICTOR(S): Syllable type (3.26e-30) + Phoneme (0.00179) + F2 (0.0161) + Sex (0.105) + Place of origin (0.635)

$Sex factor

coef

tokens

mean

M

0.052

225

0.123

F

-0.052

217

0.066

coef

tokens

mean

Nay

0.042

138

0.113

Gan

-0.005

215

0.083

Nousty

-0.037

89

0.096

coef

tokens

mean

0.116

246

0.399

-0.116

196

-0.287

$Place of origin factor

$Phoneme factor EH E

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Table 7: (continued) $Syllable type factor

coef

tokens

mean

(_C#)

0.609

144

0.784

(_CV(C)#)

-0.260

140

-0.238

(C_#)

-0.349

158

-0.238

$F2 continuous +1

coef 0.136

$misc.1 n

df

intercept

overallmean

442

8

-0.021

0.095

$misc.2 log.likelihood -388.059

AIC

AICc

R2

794.118

794.535

0.414

For syllable type, high F1 values are favoured in final closed syllables (+0.609), while low F1 values are favoured in medial (–0.260) and final (–0.349) open syllables: openmid vowels occur in closed syllables; close-mid vowels occur in open syllables. For the phoneme predictor, /ɛ/ favours higher F1 values or more open vowels, while /e/ favours lower F1 values or more close vowels, which is the expected pattern. This finding indicates that the phonemic distinction between the Occitan front mid-vowels is maintained for these speakers. Finally, the significant effect for F2 indicates that F2 exhibits a positive correlation with F1 (+0.136): this single coefficient is “the value by which the log odds changes for every increment of 1 in the continuous variable” (Hay 2011, 210). Put simply, for every one unit change in the value of F1, there is a concomitant change of magnitude 0.136 in the value of F2: as the vowel becomes lower, it is also more front; as the vowel becomes higher, it is also more centralized. A linear regression model of the value of F2 for the (E) variable, including the same independent variables, returned two significant effects: syllable type (p ≈ 0) and F1 (p < .05). A non-significant result for phoneme (p = .86) indicated that the phonetic distinction between /e/ and /ɛ/ is not realized on the front-back dimension.  

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4.4 Mixed-effects regression models One of the assumptions underlying traditional regression analyses is that the individual observations in the data set are independent of each other (Johnson 2009, 363), or that each individual token of the dependent variable is an independent observation. In sociolinguistic data sets, however, tokens are grouped according to the speakers who have produced them: as soon as an individual speaker contributes more than one observation to the data set, they become a source of variation that must be accounted for in the statistical model (Tagliamonte/Baayen 2012, 143). Failure to account for the variation introduced into the data set by individual speakers can lead regression output to grossly overestimate the significance of extralinguistic effects, returning statistically significant results that are likely to be due to individual variation combining with chance (Johnson 2009, 363). Additionally, individual lexical items can potentially favour or disfavour a particular linguistic outcome. It is also necessary to control for this possibility by taking account of variation introduced to the data set by including tokens that have been segmented from a variety of different words. Taking account of variation introduced by differing lexical items leads to more accurate conclusions about internal effects such as phonetic/phonological context or lexical frequency (Johnson 2009, 378). This section presents mixed-effects logistic and linear regression models for the categorical (R) and continuous (E) Occitan variables. Mixed-effects models make a distinction between two types of predictor that can affect a dependent variable. Firstly, fixed effects are predictors that are replicable in another study, for example, speaker sex (male/female), stress (tonic/atonic), etc. Random effects, on the other hand, are predictors drawn from a larger population which are not completely replicable (Johnson 2009, 365), such as individual speakers and different lexical items. Including a speaker random effect in the regression analysis takes into account that some individuals may favour a given linguistic outcome while others may disfavour it (Johnson 2009, 365). The mixed model will only return a significant result for a given factor, such as speaker sex, if the effect is strong enough to rise above the inter-speaker variation in the model. Likewise, including lexical item as a random effect takes into account the variation introduced into the model by individual words and only returns a significant result for internal independent variables when their effect is large enough to outweigh inter-lexical-item variation. If individual speakers and individual words are not included in the regression model as random effects, the results of the analysis will only be relevant for the individuals and words sampled and p-values may be too small and misleading to generalize to the larger population (Tagliamonte/Baayen 2012, 143). The VARBRUL series of programs is not optimized for mixed-effects modelling, making it largely unsuitable for the statistical treatment of spontaneous speech data, given the theoretical and methodological advancements made in the field over the past forty years (Johnson 2009, 363). VARBRUL can only include individual speaker as a fixed effect in the stepwise regression, often leading to “speaker” being added as the

Quantitative approaches for modelling variation and change

81

most significant factor group when stepping up (Johnson 2009, 380), with the resultant model excluding potentially significant factor groups which would be returned as significant by a mixed model. Mixed-effects models take account of individual speakers who particularly favour or disfavour a variant of the dependent variable; the VARBRUL suite will always attempt to attribute disproportionate data of this type to an independent variable or factor group effect whereas a mixed model will “consider holding the speaker responsible” (Johnson 2009, 374). As such, Rbrul or direct coding in the R environment offer the best method currently available for the mixed-effects modelling of sociolinguistic data (cf. Tagliamonte/Baayen 2012, 143).

4.4.1 Mixed-effects logistic regression Table 8 presents the Rbrul output for a simple one-level mixed-effects logistic regression analysis of the Occitan (R) variable. “Speaker” and “word” (lexical item) have been included as random effects; fixed effects included were “speaker sex”, “place of origin”, and “syllable type”. The regression analysis returned only syllable type as a significant predictor of the distribution of dorsal and apical rhotics (p ≈ 0): dorsal rhotics are favoured in simple codas; apical rhotics are favoured in complex onsets. Including “speaker” as a random effect essentially involves assigning each speaker an individual intercept, or baseline, value, as can be seen in Table 8. This means that the input probability varies between individuals, or that each speaker has a different baseline preference for dorsal variants, and the mixed-model attempts to estimate the magnitude of that preference (Johnson 2009, 381): “this allows speakers to vary randomly with respect to one another, without influencing the overall significance of the investigated effects. The result is that no individual participant can dominate the significance of any reported effect” (Hay 2011, 212). For example, we can see that Speaker B particularly favours the use of dorsal rhotics, while Speaker I particularly disfavours their use. While random effects do not officially constitute formal parameters in the mixed-model (Johnson 2009, 365), as indicated by [random, not tested] in the first line of the output in Table 8, they behave in a similar way and can be interpreted in the same way as the output for fixed-effect predictors. Equally, including lexical item as a random effect (estimates not shown in Table 8), accounts for the possibility that individual words can favour or disfavour a dorsal variant due to “word specific phonetics” (cf. Pierrehumbert 2006).  

 

 

 

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Table 8: Rbrul output for one-level mixed-effects logistic regression model of Occitan rhotic consonants, with [dorsal] as application value  

ONE-LEVEL ANALYSIS OF RESPONSE PlaceArt WITH PREDICTOR(S): Speaker [random, not tested] and Word [random, not tested] and Syllable type (7.9e-08) + Place of origin (0.277) + Sex (0.357)

$Sex factor

logodds

tokens DORSAL/DORSAL+APICAL centered factor weight

F

0.349

233

0.275

0.586

M

-0.349

233

0.163

0.414

$Place of origin factor

logodds

tokens DORSAL/DORSAL+APICAL centered factor weight

Nay

0.878

145

0.317

0.706

Gan

0.205

231

0.221

0.551

Nousty

-1.083

90

0.056

0.253

$Syllable type factor

logodds

tokens DORSAL/DORSAL+APICAL centered factor weight

SimpleCoda

1.320

139

0.417

0.789

SimpleOnset

0.068

116

0.190

0.517

ComplexCoda

0.023

55

0.200

0.506

ComplexOnset

-1.412

156

0.071

0.196

$`Word (random) [...]

$`Speaker (random)` intercept std dev

tokens DORSAL/DORSAL+APICAL centered factor weight

0.925

466

0.219

...

...

...

...

...

...

B

1.405

47

0.447

0.789

J

0.942

44

0.295

0.702

H

0.822

51

0.392

0.677

F

0.312

45

0.067

0.557

83

Quantitative approaches for modelling variation and change

Table 8: (continued) G

-0.009

45

0.044

0.477

A

-0.037

49

0.204

0.47

D

-0.29

44

0.295

0.408

E

-0.384

43

0.163

0.385

C

-0.399

50

0.26

0.382

I

-1.521

48

0

0.167

$misc.1 n

df intercept

466

9

overall proportion

centered input prob

0.219

0.109

Dxy.total

R2.fixed R2.random R2.total

-2.1

$misc.2 log.likelihood

AIC

-192.872

403.744

AICc Dxy.fixed 404.139

1

0.761

0.308

0.197

0.505

Comparing this mixed-effects regression with the simple main effects logistic regression presented in Table 5, where speaker and word are not included as random effects, we can first note that the goodness of fit is significantly better for the mixed model (χ² = 24.172; df = 2; p = 5.64e–06). Additionally, “place of origin” was included as a significant predictor in the simple main effects model (p ≈ 0) (see Table 5), but this predictor is returned as non-significant by the mixed-effects analysis. When there is a lot of individual speaker variation in the data set, variation in the dependent variable that is occurring by chance can be wrongly interpreted by a simple logistic model as correlated to an independent variable (Johnson 2009, 365). Mixed-effects modelling in Rbrul reduces this possibility by only returning a significant result for independent variables when their effect is strong enough to rise above the variation between individual speakers. Rbrul is also capable of running mixed-effects logistic regression models with interaction terms or, put simply, a mixed-effects version of the regression analysis in Table 6. This also results in a significant improvement in goodness of fit (χ² = 27.912; df = 11; p = .00334) and in “place of origin” being excluded as a significant predictor of the transfer of dorsal rhotics from French (p = .374 versus p = .000434 in Table 6). Including a speaker sex*syllable type interaction term in the mixed-effects analysis does not, however, result in a significant improvement over the simple mixed-effects model presented in Table 8 (χ² = 13.592; df = 12; p = .328); in short, including the interaction term is not “worth the complication” in this case.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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4.4.2 Mixed-effects linear regression Table 9 presents the mixed-effects linear regression analysis of F1 for the Occitan (E) variable, including speaker and word as random effects. Three predictors are returned as significant: syllable type (p ≈ 0); phoneme (p < .01); F2 (p < .01). The strength and magnitude of the effects are comparable to those returned by the simple linear regression model presented for the same data in Table 7, where speaker and word were not considered as random effects; the constraints ranking is also identical for each predictor, though the individual coefficient values for each level vary slightly. The improvement in log likelihood from –388.059 (Table 7) to –376.342 (Table 9), when random effects are included, is significant, following a chi-squared distribution (χ² = 23.434) with 3 degrees of freedom and probability p = 3.28e–05. Again, mixedeffects modelling can explain more of the variation present in the data set and provides us with more accurate predictions for the independent variables included in the analysis.  

 

 

 

 

Table 9: Rbrul output for one-level mixed-effects linear regression model of F1; Occitan front midvowels  

ONE-LEVEL ANALYSIS OF RESPONSE F1 WITH PREDICTOR(S): Speaker.ID [random, not tested] and Word [random, not tested] and Syllable type (1.63e-17) + Phoneme (0.0045) + F2 (0.00466) + Sex (0.197) + Place of origin (0.718)

$Sex factor

coef

tokens

mean

M

0.045

225

0.123

F

-0.045

217

0.066

coef

tokens

mean

Nay

0.035

138

0.113

Gan

0.004

215

0.083

Nousty

-0.039

89

0.096

factor

coef

tokens

mean

EH

0.11

246

0.399

-0.11

196

-0.287

$Place of origin factor

$Phoneme

E

 

85

Quantitative approaches for modelling variation and change

Table 9: (continued) $Syllable type factor

coef

tokens

mean

(_C#)

0.552

144

0.784

(_CV(C)#)

-0.220

140

-0.238

(C_#)

-0.332

158

-0.238

$F2 continuous +1

coef 0.156

$`Word (random)[...]

$`Speaker (random)[...]

$misc.1 n

df

intercept

overall

mean

442

11

-0.017

0.095

AIC

AICc

R2.fixed

R2.random

R2.total

809.726

810.34

0.369

0.149

0.518

$misc.2 log.likelihood -376.342

5 Other quantitative approaches: non-parametric tests As previously noted, regression assumes that the data used in the analyses are normally distributed. Furthermore, mixed-effects modelling also assumes the normality of random effects (Johnson 2009, 381). The unbalanced nature of sociolinguistic data sets, however, often means that the data are not normally distributed, thus posing problems regarding the reliability of the results obtained from the regression output. One possible solution to this problem is submitting the data to a non-parametric statistical analysis, such as random forests, which make no assumptions about

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the underlying distribution of the data set (Baayen 2008, 77). These methods have the additional advantage of being able to consider independent variables that exhibit a collinear relationship with each other (see section 4.2). Random forests (Breiman 2001) are a form of CART (classification and regression trees) analysis, a non-parametric clustering technique used to model non-normal data. This technique allows many (potentially correlated) predictors to be considered in the analysis and gives a precise ranking of independent variable importance (Hay 2011, 213). Random forests aim to determine whether an independent variable is a significant predictor by dividing the data set into subsets; individual “conditional inference trees” are constructed for each independent variable on the basis of these subsets, which estimate the likelihood of a given value for the dependent variable (Tagliamonte/Baayen 2012, 159). When conditional inference trees have been constructed, each tree receives a “vote” regarding the most likely outcome for the dependent variable, which feeds into the final output for the model (Hay 2011, 213). The “party” package in the R environment makes it possible to construct forests of these conditional inference trees, but this technique is markedly more time-consuming than regression modelling (Tagliamonte/Baayen 2012, 165).  

6 Conclusion The application of quantitative statistical modelling techniques to data from Occitan, presented in this chapter, had the aim of providing an overview of the evolution of statistical practice in sociolinguistics. Beginning with the traditional sociolinguistic concept of the variable rule, the Occitan rhotic consonants were submitted to a VARBRUL -style logistic regression analysis using an automated stepwise algorithm which has since been discredited in general statistical practice (see Johnson 2009, 376). More recent statistical practice recommends the use of a one-level generalized linear model for logistic regression, which takes into account the influence of non-significant predictors on the distribution of the variation observed. One problem with this technique is that independent variables that are heavily correlated cannot be included in the same regression analysis; these correlations should not, however, be confused with interactions between independent variables. The inclusion of interaction terms, facilitated by the Rbrul package, can significantly improve the fit of a regression model, as demonstrated using an analysis of deviance test for the Occitan rhotic consonants. An additional advantage of using Rbrul was demonstrated in the analysis of the first two formant frequencies of the Occitan front mid-vowels using a linear regression analysis for continuous dependent variables, previously impossible using the VARBRUL series. The most important advancement in statistical practice for sociolinguistics has been the introduction of generalized mixed-effects models, which makes it possible to model subtle differences among internal and external independent variables (Tagliamonte/ Baayen 2012, 136), by considering the variability introduced into the data set by

Quantitative approaches for modelling variation and change

87

individual speakers and lexical items before calculating the direction and magnitude of effects for independent variables. For both categorical and continuous dependent variables, the analysis of the Occitan data showed that, in the majority of cases, mixedeffects regression results in an improved predictive model for the unbalanced data sets used in sociolinguistic studies: “mixed-model analysis using Rbrul gives better estimates not only for the significance (p-values) of external effects, but for their sizes (coefficients), as well” (Johnson 2009, 378). Nonetheless, issues such as collinearity continue to pose serious problems for mixed-effects modelling, with non-parametric techniques, such as random forests, providing a useful, if time-consuming, alternative to regression analysis. Quantitative approaches to modelling language variation and change should, of course, be interpreted in context; these techniques provide essential information on the sociolinguistic distribution of categorical and continuous variables but the output from these analyses should be integrated into a holistic analytical framework which makes use of both quantitative and qualitative approaches.

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Comeau, Philip/King, Ruth/Butler, Gary R. (2012), New Insights on an Old Rivalry: The “passé simple” and the “passé composé” in Spoken Acadian French, Journal of French Language Studies 22, 315–343. Fabricius, Anne H./Watt, Dominic/Johnson, Daniel E. (2009), A Comparison of Three Speaker-Intrinsic Vowel Formant Frequency Normalization Algorithms for Sociophonetics, Language Variation and Change 21, 413–435. Flynn, Nicholas (2011), Comparing Vowel Formant Normalisation Procedures, York Working Papers in Linguistics 11, 1–28. Flynn, Nicholas/Foulkes, Paul (2011), Comparing Vowel Formant Normalization Methods, Proceedings of the 17th ICPhS, 683–686. Hay, Jennifer (2011), Statistical Analysis, in: Marianna Di Paolo/Malcah Yaeger-Dror (edd.), Sociophonetics: A Student’s Guide, London/New York, Routledge, 198–214. Johnson, Daniel E. (2009), Getting off the Goldvarb Standard: Introducing Rbrul for Mixed-Effects Variable Rule Analysis, Language and Linguistics Compass 3, 359–383. Kennard, Holly J./Lahiri, Aditi (2015), Maintenance of the Breton Mixed Mutation, Proceedings of the 18th ICPhS, Paper 607. Kennard, Holly J./Lahiri, Aditi (2017), Mutation in Breton Verbs: Pertinacity across Generations, Journal of Linguistics 53(1), 113–145. King, Ruth/Martineau, France/Mougeon, Raymond (2011), The Interplay of Internal and External Factors in Grammatical Change: First-Person Plural Pronouns in French, Language 87, 470–509. King, Ruth/Nadasdi, Terry (2003), Back to the Future in Acadian French, Journal of French Language Studies 13, 323–337. Labov, William (1969), Contraction, Deletion and Inherent Variability of the English Copula, Language 45, 715–762. Llamas, Carmen/Watt, Dominic/Johnson, Daniel E. (2009), Linguistic Accommodation and Salience of National Identity Markers in a Border Town, Journal of Language and Social Psychology 28, 381–407. Lobanov, Boris M (1971), Classification of Russian Vowels Spoken by Different Speakers, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 49, 606–608. Moisset, Christine (2000), Variable Liaison in Parisian French, doctoral thesis, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania. Mooney, Damien (2014), Illustrations of the IPA: Béarnais (Gascon), Journal of the International Phonetic Association 44, 343–350. Mooney, Damien (2015), Confrontation and Language Policy: Non-Militant Perspectives on Conflicting Revitalisation Strategies in Béarn, France, in: Mari C. Jones (ed.), Policy and Planning for Endangered Languages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 153–170. Mooney, Damien (2016a), “C’est jeuli, la Gasceugne!” L’Antériorisation du phonème /ɔ/ dans le français régional du Béarn, French Studies 70, 61–81. Mooney, Damien (2016b), Southern Regional French: A Linguistic Analysis of Language and Dialect Contact, Oxford, Legenda. Mooney, Damien (2016c), Transmission and Diffusion: Linguistic Change in the Regional French of Béarn, Journal of French Language Studies 26(3), 327–352. Moreux, Bernard (2004), Béarnais and Gascon Today: Language Behaviour and Perception, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 169, 25–62. Nagy, Naomi/Blondeau, Hélène (1999), Double Subject Marking in L2 Montreal French, University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 6, 93–108. Nearey, Terrance M. (1977), Phonetic Feature Systems for Vowels, doctoral thesis, Edmonton, University of Alberta.  

 

 

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Paolillo, John C. (2002), Analyzing Linguistic Variation: Statistical Models and Methods, Stanford, CSLI Publications. Paradis, Claude/Deshaies, Denise (1990), Rules of Stress Assignment in Québec French: Evidence from Perceptual Data, Language Variation and Change 2, 135–154. Pierrehumbert, Janet B. (2006), The Next Toolkit, Journal of Phonetics 34, 516–530. Poplack, Shana (1992), The Inherent Variability of the French Subjunctive, in: Christiane Laeufer/ Terrell A. Morgan (edd.), Theoretical Analysis in Romance Linguistics, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 235–263. Rand, David/Sankoff, David (1990), GoldVarb: A Variable Rule Application for the Macintosh, Montréal, Centre de recherches mathématiques, Université de Montréal. R Development Core Team (2009), R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing, Vienna, R Foundation for Statistical Computing, http://www.r-project.org (last access 05.08.2016). Regan, Vera (1996), Variation in French Interlanguage: A Longitudinal Study of Sociolinguistic Competence, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Roberts, Nicholas S. (2012), Future Temporal Reference in Hexagonal French, University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 18, 97–106. Rousseau, Pascale/Sankoff, David (1978), Advances in Variable Rule Methodology, in: David Sankoff (ed.), Linguistic Variation: Models and Methods, New York, NY, Academic Press, 57–69. Sankoff, David (1988), Variable Rules, in: Ulrich Ammon/Norbert Dittmar/Klaus J. Mattheier (edd.), Sociolinguistics: An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, Berlin/ Boston, De Gruyter, 984–997. Sankoff, David (2006), Variable Rules, in: Ulrich Ammon (ed.), Sociolinguistics: An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 1150–1163. Sankoff, David/Labov, William (1979), On the Uses of Variable Rules, Language in Society 8, 189–222. Sankoff, David/Tagliamonte, Sali/Smith, Eric (2005), GoldVarb X: A Variable Rule Application for Macintosh and Windows, Toronto, Department of Linguistics University of Toronto. Sankoff, Gillian (2005), Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Studies in Sociolinguistics, in: Ulrich Ammon et al. (edd.), An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, vol. 2, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 1003–1013. Sankoff, Gillian/Blondeau, Hélène (2007), Language Change across the Lifespan: /r/ in Montreal French, Language 83, 560–588. Séguy, Jean (1954–1973), Atlas linguistique et ethnographique de la Gascogne, Paris, CNRS. Sessarego, Sandro/Tejedo-Herrero, Fernando (2016), Spanish Language and Sociolinguistic Analysis, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Sichel-Bazin, Rafèu/Buthke, Carolin/Meisenburg, Trudel (2012), The Prosody of Occitan-French Bilinguals, in: Kurt Braunmüller/Christoph Gabriel (edd.), Multilingual Individuals and Multilingual Societies, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 349–364. Sigley, Robert (2003), The Importance of Interaction Effects, Language Variation and Change 15, 227–253. Simonet, Miquel (2010), Dark and Clear Laterals in Catalan and Spanish: Interaction of Phonetic Categories in Early Bilinguals, Journal of Phonetics 38, 664–679. Simonet, Miquel (2011), Production of a Catalan-Specific Vowel Contrast by Early Spanish-Catalan Bilinguals, Phonetica 68, 88–110. Sykes, Alan O. (1993), An Introduction to Regression Analysis, Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics Working Papers 20, 1–33. Tagliamonte, Sali (2006), Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.  

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Tagliamonte, Sali/Baayen, R. Harald (2012), Models, Forests and Trees of York English: “Was/Were” Variation as a Case Study for Statistical Practice, Language Variation and Change 24, 135–178. Temple, Rosalind A. M. (2000a), Now and Then: The Evolution of Male-Female Differences in the Voicing of Consonants in Two Varieties of French, Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics 8, 193–204. Temple, Rosalind A. M. (2000b), Old Wine into New Wineskins. A Variationist Investigation into Patterns of Voicing in Plosives in the Atlas linguistique de la France, Transactions of the Philological Society 98, 353–394. Thomas, Eric R./Kendall, Tyler (2007), NORM: The Vowel Normalization and Plotting Suite, http:// lingtools.uoregon.edu/norm/norm1.php (last access 05.08.2016). Van Compernolle, Rémi A. (2008), Morphosyntactic and Phonological Constraints on Negative Particle Variation in French-Language Chat Discourse, Language Variation and Change 20, 317–339. Villeneuve, Anne-José/Auger, Julie (2013), “Chtileu qu’i m’freumereu m’bouque i n’est point coér au monne”: Grammatical Variation and Diglossia in Picardie, Journal of French Language Studies 23, 109–133. Watt, Dominic/Fabricius, Anne (2002), Evaluation of a Technique for Improving the Mapping of Multiple Speakers’ Vowel Spaces in the F1–F2 Plane, Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics 9, 159–173. Weinreich, Uriel/Labov, William/Herzog, Marvin I. (1968), Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change, in: Winfred P. Lehmann/Yakov Malkiel (edd.), Directions for Historical Linguistics: A Symposium, Austin, TX, University of Texas Press, 95–195. Williams, Lawrence/van Compernolle, Rémi A. (2009), “On” versus “tu” and “vous”: Pronouns with Indefinite Reference in Synchronous Electronic French Discourse, Language Sciences 31, 409–427.  

Eeva Sippola

3 Collecting and analysing creole data Abstract: This chapter discusses specific methodological concerns when working with creoles. We provide a survey of data collection techniques employed in the analysis of social variation and language use in Romance creole settings. A presentation of Romance creoles and previous sociolinguistic and dialectological research on them is followed by a discussion of central concepts in the study of creoles: diglossia, creole continuum, prestige asymmetry, and language endangerment. Best practices in the collection and analysis of creole data focus on ethical aspects and contextualization of research with creole communities, and access to data through participant observation, interviews, and surveys. The chapter ends with a case study of Chabacano perceptual dialectology that combines several sociolinguistic methods in the collection of data on variation and speaker perceptions in a multilingual setting.  

Keywords: creoles, prestige asymmetry, data collection, methods, ethics  

1 Introduction This chapter will discuss the specific methodological concerns in the sociolinguistic study of Romance creoles (see also ↗15 Medium and creole). Creoles are languages that arose in situations of intense contact, where people of diverse ethno-cultural and linguistic backgrounds came together, often under conditions of slavery or indentured labour, and formed distinct communities and languages. Social history is central in the definition of creoles (DeGraff 2005; Mufwene 2008), as structural definitions of creole languages are still under debate (cf. McWhorter 2005; Bakker et al. 2011). Romance creoles are contact varieties with a Romance lexifier language: French, Portuguese, or Spanish. There are no known creoles with other Romance lexifiers.1 Romance creoles were born in a contact situation where the lexifier language came in contact with other languages. These languages are called substrates, if they were present during the initial contact period but lost after the creolization process, or adstrates, when they continued to be spoken alongside the creole. Romance creoles are spoken in various settings around the world, ranging from Colombia and the Caribbean to Southeast Asia and the Pacific regions. These regions correspond to areas near the equator, where the Europeans established trade routes and colonies from the fifteenth century onwards. In connection to the colonial expansion, many

1 Restructured Italian in Eritrea has sometimes been mentioned (Holm 1988–1989, 609). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-004

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creoles arose in the context of slavery, indentured labour, and plantation economies, as for example the Caribbean and Indian Ocean creoles. Others had their origins in religious missions, such as Tayo, or in multilingual urban or fort settings, as for example many Indo-Portuguese creoles. Socio-historical issues are woven into the birth and the development of creoles, and studying the sociolinguistics of Romance creoles can help to address questions about how these creoles have developed and changed over time, either internally or in response to lexifier or adstrate influence. These developments have been shaped by the socio-historical contexts of the creoles as well as their speakers’ identities and ideologies. Beyond creole studies, the study of creole languages can contribute to research questions that are important for the development of other Romance languages, as they can serve as extreme testing grounds for models of sociolinguistic variation and change. In principle, creole languages should be studied using the same methods as any other natural languages. However, creoles have a social history that is tightly connected to colonialism, or other situations with unequal power relations, and they have often suffered a long history of stigmatization (Velupillai 2014, 45), which requires special attention to methodological approaches (on a related topic see also ↗5 Romance dialectology). Language contact and asymmetrical power relations in many creole communities are central to these methodological concerns. In this chapter, we will address methodological issues through a number of examples from a variety of language contact situations. Our focus will be primarily on methods of data collection during fieldwork, but we will also give an overview of other sociolinguistic studies of Romance creoles in section two. Romance creole languages vary greatly in vitality and social status, ranging from extinct languages (e.g. Batavia Creole) to languages of wider communication between different ethnic groups (e.g. Zamboanga Chabacano) and official languages with millions of speakers (e.g. Haitian Creole). Due to this diversity, it is challenging to give a comprehensive overview of the methods suitable for each sociolinguistic setting. However, in this chapter, we offer examples from a general perspective, encompassing a range of creoles with different lexifiers, geographical regions, and sociolinguistic situations. The chapter is organized as follows: section two gives a short introduction to the Romance creoles and their study from different sociolinguistic perspectives. Section three presents some central concepts in the study of creole languages that have an effect on sociolinguistic methodology. Section four presents a number of specific methodological concerns in the collection and analysis of spoken creole data. The final section provides an example of a study of perceptual dialectology in the Chabacano-speaking communities in the Philippines, combining a variety of approaches.

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2 Romance creoles and sociolinguistics Romance creole languages are spoken around the globe, mostly in tropical regions ranging from the South American mainland to the Pacific Islands. Table 1 presents the varieties generally classified as creoles with a lexifier from the Romance language family.2  

Table 1: Romance creoles in the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Structures (Michaelis et al. 2013)  

Language

Region

Number of speakers (ca.)

Haitian Creole (Haiti and diaspora)

Caribbean

11,000,000

Guadeloupean Creole

Caribbean

600,000

Martinican Creole

Caribbean

600,000

Guyanais

Caribbean

64,000

Louisiana Creole

North America

less than 10,000

Reunion Creole

Indian Ocean

800,000

Mauritian Creole

Indian Ocean

1,300,000+

Seychelles Creole

Indian Ocean

100,000

Tayo

New Caledonia

3,000

French-lexifier creoles:

Portuguese-lexifier creoles: Cape Verdean Creole (Santiago, Upper Guinea Brava, São Vicente)

555,000

Guinea-Bissau Kriyol

Upper Guinea

600,000

Casamancese Creole

Upper Guinea

10,000–50,000

Santome

Gulf of Guinea

100,000 (2001)

Angolar

Gulf of Guinea

5,000

Principense

Gulf of Guinea

less than 100

Fa d’Ambô

Gulf of Guinea

4,500–5,000

Diu Indo-Portuguese

South Asia

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2 This chapter focuses on the methodological challenges of studying the sociolinguistics of creoles. For structural, historical, and current information on Romance creoles we refer the reader to the descriptions in Holm (1988–1989) and in Volume II of the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures (Michaelis et al. 2013).

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Table 1: (continued) Language

Region

Number of speakers (ca.)

Korlai

South Asia

800+

Sri Lanka Portuguese

South Asia

unknown

Papiá Kristang

Southeast Asia

800

Ternate Chabacano

Philippines

~ 3,000

Cavite Chabacano

Philippines

4,000

Zamboanga Chabacano

Philippines

300,000

Papiamentu

Caribbean

300,000

Palenquero

South America

2,000–4,000

Spanish-lexifier creoles:

3

The Romance creoles include highly endangered varieties and vital languages with an official status. For example, the once-numerous Indo-Portuguese varieties are facing language death: the last speaker of the Indo-Portuguese creole of Cochin died in 2010. Very different situations are also common; for example, Mauritian Creole is vigorous with more than one million speakers, and Haitian Creole is comparable to other Romance languages with 11 million speakers in Haiti and in the diaspora. Many Romance creole languages carry low prestige, as creoles typically exist in functional complementary distribution with the lexifier or other standard languages. Of the languages listed in Table 1, only Haitian Creole, Seychelles Creole, and Papiamentu have an official status. Others are officially designated as regional or local languages, such as Cape Verdean Creole and Zamboanga Chabacano. Moreover, most Romance creoles have no standard orthography and are not as extensively used in writing as their lexifiers or ad-/substrate languages (see also Mühleisen 2005). Relatedly, they are generally not accepted as languages of education or the media, although there are some exceptions: Papiamentu is used in some preschools and primary schools in the Netherlands Antilles, and Seychelles Creole is the medium of instruction in primary schools in the Seychelles (Migge/Léglise/Bartens 2010). Language endangerment is a threat for some of the smaller Romance creoles (see also ↗4 Fieldwork and building corpora for endangered varieties). This correlates with the fact that many of them are rather poorly documented. It is therefore crucial to  

 

3 Papiamentu has significant input from Portuguese, but due to its current lexicon and proximity to Spanish-speaking Venezuela, it is classified here as a Spanish-lexifier creole.

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document the current state of these creoles, as this can offer greater insight into the linguistic diversity of contact situations and be useful for language planning and preservation purposes. The documentation includes not only descriptive studies but also sociolinguistic studies on the attitudes and ideologies that creole speakers have about their languages and others in the local, national, or global context. There are a number of studies assessing the sociolinguistic situation of Romance creole-speaking communities, especially in the Asian contexts, where language endangerment is a threat (see e.g. Cardoso 2009, 11–30 for Diu Indo-Portuguese; Lesho/Sippola 2013 for the Manila Bay varieties of Chabacano; Nordhoff 2013 for Sri Lanka Portuguese). In the Caribbean, the French creoles spoken in the Lesser Antilles are considered endangered in some locations, where speakers are shifting to another language, generally English or an English-lexifier creole (Ferreira 2009; Holbrook/Ferreira 2002). Similar situations are also seen elsewhere in small communities, although low speaker numbers do not necessarily mean inevitable language death. For example, the speakers of Fa d’Ambô form one of the smallest speech communities of Equatorial Guinea, but experts agree that due to its prestige, the vitality of the creole is not at immediate risk (Hagemeijer/Zamora 2016, 202). Apart from issues related to endangerment and documentation, questions concerning historical sociolinguistics, language variation and change, language attitudes, and applied sociolinguistics have received attention in the sociolinguistic study of Romance creoles. These approaches highlight various themes in creole studies, covering processes of creole origins and formation, diachronic and synchronic variation, as well as language attitudes, ideologies, policies, and planning. Due to the challenge of limited materials they all require methodological precision and a contextualization of the social settings where creoles were and are spoken. We will consider each of these approaches in turn. Historical sociolinguistics is at the core of creole studies, as it can help to answer questions about the formation and origins of these varieties. Most work describing the social composition of early Romance creole societies has been done from historical and archival sources (e.g. Baker/Corne 1982; Cardoso 2010; 2014; Chaudenson 1979; 2001; Clements 2014; Fernández/Sippola 2017; Ludwig/Telchid/Bruneau-Ludwig 2001; Singler 1995; Tomás 2009). The oral nature of many creole languages makes written data sources less prominent for current creole sociolinguistics. Old written texts are relatively sparse, although they are necessary for studying the diachrony and roots of sociolinguistic variation in these languages. When working with early sources, it is important to study and contextualize them carefully. Early written data cannot always be taken as evidence of simple diachronic progression (Cardoso 2014, 109) as they typically ignored certain registers or might not have been written by the speakers themselves but by outside observers. Today, through the rise of new online communication technology and mobile phones, creole languages have expanded to new written domains (e.g. Dupré 2013; Tobar Delgado 2014). The challenges associated with adapting written data to the needs of sociolinguists are shared across

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creole situations, and great methodological precision and transparency is necessary in the selection and treatment of data. Sociolinguistic variation studies have not been very prevalent for Romance creoles (for exceptions, see e.g. Clements 1990; 2014; Lipski 1986; Morton 2005; Valdman/Villeneuve/Siegel 2015), especially when compared to similar studies on English-lexifier creoles. In many cases, variation is often analysed using traditional geographic and sociolinguistic models and focuses on the larger creoles, such as Haitian and Cape Verdean. The shortage of studies in this area is probably connected to the fact that many Romance creole studies have small sample sizes and data sets, and thus the full range of dialectal or social variation is not represented. For example, Cardoso (2014, 107–108) points out that the failure to recognize sociolinguistic variation in the Indo-Portuguese creole communities may actually be an outcome of our incomplete knowledge of these under-researched languages. It is likely that more instances of sociolinguistic variation could be identified if more scholars were to focus on these communities and their speech production. Methods of traditional dialectology have been applied to the French creoles in the Caribbean and in the Indian Ocean. Linguistic atlases have been prepared for the islands of Haiti (Fattier 1998), Reunion and Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean (Carayol/ Chaudenson/Barat 1984–1995; Chaudenson/Carayol/Barat 1992), and for the Lesser Antilles (Le Dû/Brun-Trigaud 2011). Dialectal work for Cape Verdean Creole is also under way (Quint p.c.). These atlases have provided an extensive basis for further work on dialectal variation and processes related to it (e.g. Bollée/Nembach 2006). In addition, identity, language ideologies, and applied linguistics have received attention in the study of Romance creoles (e.g. DeGraff 2005; Hebblethwaite 2009; Schieffelin/Doucet 1994, and Valdman 2005 for Haitian Creole; Lipski 2001; 2010, and Sippola 2010 for Chabacano; Graham 2001 for Portuguese creoles in Africa; Garrett 2005 for St Lucian Creole). Studying issues related to these topics often includes research on attitudes and folk perceptions (e.g. Carayol/Chaudenson 1978 for Reunion; Léglise 2005 for French Guiana; Lesho/Sippola 2014 for Chabacano; Mitchell 2010 for St Lucian Creole). From the perspective of language planning and policy, there are numerous studies (e.g. Bollée 1993 and Fleischmann 2008 for Seychelles; Kremnitz 1983 for Mauritius; Schnepel 2004 for Guadeloupe; Hazaël-Massieux 1993 and 2002 for the Lesser Antilles). In addition, the contributions in Ludwig (1989) and Bavoux/Prudent/Wharton (2008) deal with several applied perspectives regarding the French-lexifier creoles.  

 

3 Central concepts in the study of creole languages This section introduces some central concepts that are useful analytical tools in the study of creole languages and outlines how they affect data collection and analysis in creole situations.

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3.1 Diglossia and the creole continuum Creole-speaking communities are often characterized by multilingualism and an asymmetric distribution of functions between languages. The concepts of diglossia and the creole continuum have been used in the study of social functions and variation in creole settings, and are thus essential in the collection and analysis of creole data. Diglossia refers to situations in which a speech community has two different codes that each have a functional and situational specialization (Wardhaugh 2006, 89). The codes or varieties are clearly separated, and there is little overlap between them and their functions. The variety with a superior status and prestige is labelled a “high” variety (H) and the other a “low” variety (L). The H variety is often codified, has a literary tradition, is used in school, and functions as a means of social advancement. Creoles are generally L varieties, meaning that they are vernaculars without any official or public functions. An example of creole diglossia is the situation in St Lucia, where English is the official language, and the majority of the population speaks a French creole. The French creole functions as the L variety and English as the H variety. The H variety can also be the lexifier of the creole, as is the case for example in Guadeloupe, where Guadeloupean Creole functions as the L variety and French as the H variety (Hazaël-Massieux 1978). The creole continuum refers to situations in which a creole language consists of a spectrum of varieties ranging from those most to least similar to the lexifier. The continuum is thus formed by gradations of variation that presuppose a social continuum between the different lects. The lect least similar to the lexifier language is called the basilect, and the one most similar to it is called the acrolect. Between these ends of the continuum, the various intermediate stages are called mesolects (Velupillai 2014, 212). It is often assumed in this model that the basilect represents the “original” creole, while other lects are the result of more recent developments and show a closer resemblance to the lexifier language. However, this should not be taken for granted, but should rather be based on diachronic evidence. A related concept is decreolization, a process in which the creole becomes more and more similar to the lexifier by the transfer of linguistic traits from the lexifier to the creole. However, in many French-lexifier creoles, there is little evidence that the decreolization continuum determines the variation in these languages even if they are in intensive contact with varieties of French (Valdman/Villeneuve/Siegel 2015, 3). Inverse developments could also have been possible in their formation, such that French became more creole-like with each generation of non-native learners (Chaudenson 2001; Bartens 2013, 76). Diglossia and variation can affect creole situations in various ways. Here we will look at examples from Cape Verde, the Indo-Portuguese communities, and Haiti. In the rural regions of the island of Santiago in Cape Verde, the speakers are under pressure from three different linguistic norms: the local oral village variety of Santiago  

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Creole; the urban oral variety of Santiago Creole, which basically corresponds to the dialect of the capital Praia located in the south of the island; and European Portuguese, the official language of the Republic of Cape Verde, both in its written and spoken forms (Quint 2014). The local variety is spoken in the villages and when talking to people from the neighbouring villages. The urban variety of the creole or an approximation of it is used when communicating with outsiders or in settings outside the realm of the local village. The use of this variety in the media, such as on radio and television, also reinforces its social function. Portuguese is the written norm used by the majority of the population, and it is employed exclusively by the administration, press, and media (especially for the news). In this situation, Portuguese can be described as the H variety, while the local oral variety of Santiago Creole functions as the L variety. Quint (2014, 86) stresses the importance of being conscious of these three norms when collecting data on the local varieties, because the methods of data collection influence the variety spoken by the Cape Verdeans. For example, when eliciting local oral dialectal forms, Quint and his creole-speaking collaborator could not use the urban creole forms in their questions, because it caused the speakers to accommodate towards the urban variety. To elicit more reliable data, they had to resort to indirect questions. Interestingly, comments about other varieties occasionally provided them with insights into the metalinguistic norms in the community and into the prestige relations between the varieties. For example, in a rural community in the northern part of the island, one of the informants gave the local form txóti [ʧɔti] for ‘sparrow’ and added that na purtugés é [ʃɔtɐ] (‘in Portuguese it is [ʃɔtɐ]’). Actually, this word does not exist in Portuguese. The invented form is a creation that reflects the prestige that both the urban variety and Portuguese have for the speaker: in the urban variety the form is txóta with a final mid-vowel, and in contrast to the local form, there exists no affricate in Portuguese, which motivated the use of [ʃ] (Quint 2014, 88). In the multilingual community of Diu in India, where besides the historical lexifier Portuguese, Gujarati, Hindi, and English exert prestige over the creole, there exists a common view of a continuum that ranges from the Indo-Portuguese creole to European Portuguese. This continuum also includes other varieties of Indo-Portuguese, and in comparison to the neighbouring creole spoken in Daman, the speakers perceive the creole spoken in Diu to be closer to Portuguese (Cardoso 2007, 175). In a similar vein, Daman Indo-Portuguese exhibits clear variation between the acrolectal and basilectal varieties where Portuguese is used as a reference point. Differences can be observed in the pronominal system and verbal paradigms, including features such as the presence/absence of the imperfect forms of various verbs and present third singular forms, as well as the formal/familiar distinction in second person pronouns and certain other forms in the pronominal paradigm (Clements 2014, 126–128). Yet a third Indo-Portuguese creole, that of Korlai, has features that can be classified as more archaic (e.g. a familiar second person pronoun derived from Ptg.

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vós, innovative irregular verb forms, or forms created by analogy) or as having more Indic influence (e.g. postpositions) than Diu and Daman Indo-Portuguese (Clements 2009; 2014). Comparing these three varieties, Diu and Daman are classified as more “acrolectal”, due to the more recent presence and influence of Portuguese, while the variety in rural Korlai is more “basilectal” due to a break from the Portuguese influence from 1740 onwards (Clements 2009; 2014; Cardoso 2014). Although the creole continuum and the notions of “basilect” and “acrolect” are useful concepts in trying to make sense of the variation in a creole community, from both the linguists’ and the speakers’ points of view, they cannot be directly applied to all cases. For example, discussing the complications in the description of sociolinguistic variation in Haitian Creole, Valdman/Villeneuve/Siegel (2015) conclude that the creole continuum is not applicable to their case. In Haiti, two opposed varieties of the creole can be identified. Kreyòl swa is the more prestigious variety, spoken by the better-off and socially prominent minority, who are also fluent in French. Kreyòl rèk or kreyòl pèp la ‘the creole of the people’, the variety of the rural, illiterate, monolingual masses, is at the other end of the sociolinguistic continuum. However, some characteristic grammatical features of kreyòl swa also appear in the speech of monolingual speakers, as for example in Isit miyò ke Pòtoprens ‘Here it’s better than in Port-auPrince’ (instead of Isit pi bon pase Pòtoprens). In addition, as the boundary between French and creole lexicon is permeable, even monolingual, rural speakers can have recourse to items from the French lexicon (Valdman/Villeneuve/Siegel 2015, 7). Baptista (2015) reaches similar conclusions about the suitability of a continuum model for the Cape Verdean varieties spoken in Santiago and São Vicente. Regarding the methodology used in the study of creoles, this social and functional variation means that it is essential to find out which languages the community members speak, and their degrees of competence in different varieties. The researcher should aim to find out where the speaker acquired the languages (e.g. at home, at school, or in the community), and what the functional divide between them is. It can also be helpful to inquire if the languages are a first or a second language.

3.2 Ideologies and low prestige Creoles have been marginal languages throughout their histories due to their relatively recent formation and their lack of autonomy. They are marginalized in political and economic terms, and often spoken in geopolitically remote areas, such as small islands and tropical coastlines (Garrett 2006, 178). The popular perception that creoles lack history is rooted in the ideologies and folk beliefs about creole speakers’ language(s) and the ethnohistories of their communities (Garrett 2006, 179). Due to colonial exploitation and slavery, creole-speaking communities often have their origins in transplanted communities. In Garrett’s view, the ethnic identities of the speakers of creole languages may therefore be less

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“focused” or more “diffuse”, using the terms of LePage/Tabouret-Keller (1985), and more open to negotiation and contestation than those of the indigenous group(s) from the area. In addition to these factors, the socio-political ideologies dominant in different territories can neglect the reality of the creole communities, as shown for example by the French’s alignment with the ideology of the French nation-state in French Guiana (Migge/Léglise 2012, 28). The lack of autonomy can be seen in that creoles have often been considered “broken” and “corrupted” versions of their lexifiers. Although it is widely recognized that creoles are their own distinct languages, many creole speakers think they speak a form of the lexifier language, which has higher prestige (cf. e.g. Lipski 2010; Lesho/ Sippola 2014, 21–23). This lack of autonomy manifests itself in other ways, as shown by the tendency of some scholars to refer to all of the world’s French-lexified creoles in the singular as le créole (Garrett 2006, 183) or to the different Chabacano varieties as Philippine Creole Spanish, although the speaker communities have separate formation histories. Language attitudes and ideologies have a significant effect on how fieldwork is carried out and what type of data is obtained in creole settings. This is the case especially in settings where there is continued contact with the lexifier, such as in the context of many Portuguese creoles in Africa, Haitian in Haiti, and Daman and Diu Indo-Portuguese creoles. Generally, due to practical reasons, the researcher is working with people who are fluent in both the standard language and the creole, and they might only get data from the standard as a default response. This is especially true if the researcher is a native speaker of the lexifier. In formal contexts such as interviews or data elicitation sessions it is normal to speak the standard, which can make it difficult to access creole data (see also Bowern 2010). In Diu, overt prestige is exclusively attributed to Portuguese, which leads to variation in the creole data because it facilitates the borrowing of lexifier material and (hyper)correction (Cardoso 2007, 2009). Reasons for using the prestige code range from the social profile of the interlocutor (e.g., when talking to a Portuguese-speaking outsider) to the desire to demonstrate one’s social standing. The social asymmetries implied by the contrast between the creole and the lexifier seem to cause linguistic insecurity: Diu Indo-Portuguese speakers may speak very cautiously or ashamedly, switch to another language, e.g. English, or even refuse to speak at all when interacting with a person associated with Standard Portuguese (Cardoso 2007, 175). The low prestige of Diu Indo-Portuguese is also reflected in how it is named. To distinguish it from Portuguese, the native speakers themselves use a variety of expressions, such as the neutral purtəgez də diw ‘Portuguese of Diu’, but also lĩg tɔrt ‘twisted language’, purtəgez kebrad ‘broken Portuguese’, and similar names (Cardoso 2009, 7). This type of naming is common in other creole contexts as well. Ideologies can also be connected to the perceived ethnic backgrounds of the creole communities. Quint (2014, 89) describes how perceptions of ethnicity and race are reflected in the use of Africanisms in Cape Verdean communities. In Santiago, one

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young speaker judged that the Africanism djanbu “feel compassion for someone” (Quint 2008, 102) could not be used on her island, because the population there had a Portuguese origin. However, Quint’s survey showed that djanbu is known and commonly used among elderly speakers of the island. In this case, the prestige of the different varieties and the socio-historical characteristics associated with them and their speakers affected the data collection.

3.3 Language endangerment Several small Romance creoles face language endangerment. For example, in the Lesser Antilles, French-lexified creoles are endangered on those islands where French has been displaced by English, such as Trinidad and Grenada, and to a lesser extent, St Lucia (Holbrook/Ferreira 2002; Garrett 2000; 2005; Mitchell 2010) and Dominica (Garrett 2006). This holds also for many situations in Asia, such as the Indo-Portuguese creoles and Papiá Kristang, which are spoken in multilingual communities without a strong lexifier presence. Fortunately, more encouraging experiences have also been observed. For example, in Palenque, Colombia, the revitalization of Palenquero appears to be producing noticeable results. The knowledge of the creole has grown considerably, and its use has become a manifestation of ethnic pride (Lipski 2012, 26). Language obsolescence presents a major problem for data collection in many endangered creole communities, such as the Malabar Coast in India (Cardoso p.c.), Cavite in the Philippines (Lesho 2013; Lesho/Sippola 2013), and some French creole communities in the Caribbean (Holbrook/Ferreira 2002). In these groups, many speakers no longer use the creole frequently and consequently lack fluency in the language. A break in intergenerational language transmission is common, meaning that the community is undergoing language shift, and the remaining fluent speakers are of the grandparental generation or older. A good example is Lesho’s (2013) sociophonetic study of Cavite Chabacano, where the language endangerment situation had an effect on the participant design. Chabacano is severely endangered in Cavite City (Lesho/ Sippola 2013), and equal numbers of participants were difficult to recruit in each demographic category. Only eight of the 47 participants were below age 50 at the time of recording (Lesho 2013, 105). Language obsolescence and a strong decrease in the size of the speech community also reduce the degree of internal variation found in the creole language data. This is the case, for example, in the Indo-Portuguese communities of Cannanore and Cochin (Cardoso 2014, 109).  

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4 Data collection and analysis in creole settings Creole societies are typically associated with the extensive linguistic variability that reflects the multiple, often conflicting, social and linguistic requirements imposed on creole speakers throughout their turbulent history. Creole societies that inherited this history still exhibit language continua that require accurate empirical methods of analysis if the complete span of the continuum is to be investigated (Escure 2008).

4.1 Ethical aspects in working with creole languages Sociolinguistics has long recognized the critical goal of conducting ethical research in the field and in speech communities (Trecher 2013). In creole studies, this aim has also been recognized (e.g. Rickford 1997), although it has not always been explicitly formulated. The power relations present in the field setting – either between the creole and the lexifier or other official languages, or between the researcher and the participants – should be carefully considered before embarking on a research project, as they may have an effect on the data and analysis as well as the status and situation of the community. Rickford (1997, 186) believes that researchers should get involved in the “application, advocacy, and empowerment” of marginalized contact varieties, because as researchers we owe it to the people whose data we use in the formulation of our theories and descriptions. The question of what counts as “authentic” creole data is a good example of the challenges associated with the role of the researcher in creole situations (Lacoste/Mair 2012; Lesho/Sippola 2014, 5). Sometimes researchers discard data, because they think they are not “authentic” or basilectal enough, but actually provide a study of the creole using their own metalinguistic systems through their own ideological lens (Mühlhäusler 1983; Gal/Irvine 1995). Answers to ethical questions are not clear-cut and vary from one setting to another, but researchers should reflect on ethics, sociopolitical relationships, and power dynamics at every stage of their research.

4.2 The creole community in context Many Romance creoles are situated in multilingual and multiethnic areas, and in such situations it is essential to have an understanding of the community in its social, historical, and cultural context (see also Bowern 2010, 340; Meyerhoff et al. 2012, 129). A case in point is French Guiana, a multilingual space where several Amerindian languages, English-based creoles, French-based creoles, European languages, and varieties of Hmong and Chinese are used (Migge/Léglise 2012, 43–45). French Guianese Creole (Guyanais) used to be the main lingua franca, but other lingua francas are

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also used in different parts of the country, e.g. Guyanais and Brazilian Portuguese in the East, a set of varieties of Surinamese creoles in the West, and French in both parts. Moreover, speakers regularly alternate between languages and varieties in their repertoires. This alternation can occur within the same context and the same situation, and it includes borrowing, code-switching, transfer and imposition, and convergence phenomena (Migge/Léglise 2012, 46). In such situations, it is difficult to isolate “a creole” from other multilingual practices of the community as reflecting the social behaviour of the speakers. Ethnographic methods and participant observation can give the researcher a better knowledge of the community and the language contact situation in general (Bowern 2010).

4.3 Outsiders’ access to creole data Due to their historical legacy, speakers of creole languages often have a vast repertoire of styles, varieties or lects, and sometimes languages, but the extent of an individual’s repertoire is not easily observable by casual outsiders because of the stigma that is still attached to creoles, especially in their basilectal forms. The creole is often reserved for spontaneous in-group interaction, and in talking with outsiders speakers naturally switch to some acrolectal variety that they know will be understood (Escure 2008, cf. 4.1). Researchers are rarely members of the communities they study, which can create challenges for data collection. Being a foreigner, of a different ethnicity, or a non-native speaker of the language will influence the relationship between the speakers and the linguist more generally (Briggs 1986; Meyerhoff et al. 2012, 129). In addition, the role of the researcher as a highly educated, Western or Northern outsider can be problematic in communities whose language has low prestige (cf. 3.2). First, the ethnic and physical characteristics of a researcher can hinder the collection of “authentic” data, as some speakers suppress their creole when faced with someone who is considered an outsider to the community. In a study of variation in Haitian Creole (Valdman/Villeneuve/Siegel 2015, 15), far fewer tokens of any possible variables appeared in interviews that were conducted by a white Canadian. A number of speakers seemed less talkative in a one-to-one setting with this interviewer, probably because they interpreted him to be an outsider. This happened despite the fact that the interviewer in question had near-native proficiency in the creole and his wife is a native of the city where the interviews were conducted. When the interviewer was a Haitian from Port-au-Prince, it was easier to conduct the interviews. In this particular case, the solution was to exclude the data from their analysis, due to the imbalance in the material. Second, as mentioned in 3.2, the normative pressure of the lexifier language is often problematic in these settings. Quint (2014, 88) provides a concrete example of the influence of the prestige variety on the creole data collected by interviewers who are seen as outsiders to the community. In the southern varieties of Cape Verdean (in

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Brava, Fogo, Maio, and Santiago), the affricate [ʧ] is used in the forms [kɐˈʧor, kɐˈʧol, kɐˈʧoj, kaˈʧor, ˈkaʧo] ‘dog’, which is retained from classical Portuguese cachorro [kɐ ˈʧorru]. However, when interviewed by the French researcher and his Cape Verdean colleague, some informants on the island of Maio accommodated towards the prestige variety by providing a form with the modern Portuguese sound [ʃ] instead of the affricate. Even the presence of a Cape Verdean interviewer, who came from a different part of the archipelago, did not prevent the influence of the prestige variety. Peers participating in the working session corrected the answers or other forms appeared later on, which lent support to the researchers’ initial suspicions about the data. Similarly, in multilingual French Guiana, where French functions as a lingua franca and is widely used in daily interactions, the presence of French-speaking researchers accentuates the use of French even further and hinders access to naturalistic data from multilingual interactions. To overcome this potential problem and elicit more reliable data from a variety of contexts and locations, such as interactions within the family or on school playgrounds, local community members record their own interactions without the presence of the researcher (Migge/Léglise 2012, 40; Léglise p.c.).

4.4 Participant observation and interviews Reliable results from creole settings require a wide range of methods and often a commitment to fieldwork over a long period of time (Lesho/Sippola 2013). Participant observation is needed, as other methods, such as surveys and interviews, might produce inaccurate responses (Escure 2008). For example, during data collection in a Chabacano-speaking town, some speakers first denied knowing the creole, but later proved to be fluent speakers after the researcher had gained more trust by spending more time living in the community and overheard them speaking the language several times. Also, in an initial language use questionnaire, a speaker claimed to have lived all his life in the same creole-speaking town, but later on during an interview he told lively stories about his teenage years in Manila (Lesho/Sippola 2013, 23). Similarly, Valdman/Villeneuve/Siegel (2015, 33) describe a situation where the interviewers attempted to elicit the use of a possessive construction with parts of the body, in order to determine the level of awareness of the variable constructions. In many cases, speakers produced the standard Haitian Creole variant in the elicited questions, even though the corresponding regional Capois variant occurred commonly in the rest of the guided conversation. For example, one of the participants, a rural adult male, who in the rest of the interview used the Capois variant X an mwen or Xanm ‘my X’ in a great majority of the cases, used the standard Haitian Creole form X mwen (e.g. figi mwen ‘my face’, je mwen ‘my eye’) in the elicited answers. Lesho/Sippola (2013, 22) see long-term participant observation as an especially useful tool for evaluating language vitality and for providing perspective on changes

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in the sociolinguistic situation over time. This methodology can also be applied where there are other goals. By becoming more integrated into the community over a longer period of time, the researcher is not limited to the language data or sociolinguistic information provided by only a few select language activists, but has access to more unguarded language-use situations in which people are not necessarily trying to promote one view of their language over another. As is well known from sociolinguistic research in general, in an interview situation, the presence of the researcher, the recording of the speech, and the nature of the task at hand can hinder the collection of creole data in natural discourse contexts. At the structural level, early claims of lexifier-like or decreolized varieties may actually have reflected formal interviews that excluded discourse contexts (Escure 2008). Several methods can be used to mitigate the effects of these problems (for an overview, cf. Meyerhoff et al. 2012, 132). Here we will focus on task types and topics. From the anthropological perspective, the interactional set-up of an interview requires a culturally marked format of communication, which means face-to-face interaction between the interviewer and interviewee and direct questions and answers to them. This format is not necessarily equally familiar to all sections of the population, as was the case in French Guiana (Migge/Léglise 2012, 14). In situations where an interview setting was not productive, data were collected during informal discussions while sharing people’s daily activities. In an interview situation, group sessions with many participants can make the situation less formal. Similarly, using community members as (co-)interviewers can help to lessen the effects of the presence of the interviewer. This method has been employed in several studies; for example, Quint (2014, 89) works in collaboration with a Cape Verdean interviewer, Sippola (2011) works with local assistants in Ternate, and Valdman/Villeneuve/Siegel (2015, 13–16) had native speakers of the regional variety as field interviewers. The selection of community members for data collection should be done keeping in mind the lectal variation and social prestige associated with it, as teachers, for example, can be more likely to produce more acrolectal forms and exert prestige and/or control over the linguistic production of other members in the community. A further difficulty of using group interviews or speakers as interviewers without the presence of the researcher is that the researcher has no control over the interview or its flow. The data obtained with large groups often includes overlapping speech and is harder to transcribe and process, especially if the transcriber was not part of the recorded interaction. The questions asked in a sociolinguistic interview have an important effect on the style and register of the interaction, and sometimes even the language. Some questions are likely to be suitable for most people in any community, such as family, childhood, dreams, etc., while others might be highly inappropriate (Meyerhoff et al. 2012, 134). As the settings of creole communities differ greatly, there is no clear answer as to what to ask in each community, but some possible pitfalls should be kept in mind. On the one hand, if the creole language is used mainly in informal settings and

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another language dominates in the public and official domains, the topics should be directed accordingly, as these very probably trigger the use of different codes and thus synchronic variation in the creole data. In Valdman/Villeneuve/Siegel (2015, 16), the topics with adult participants included means of livelihood, differences in life and culture between the past and the present, community events (festivals, religious ceremonies), and pastimes. With adolescents, the conversations were about favourite school subjects and games. The speakers also gave summaries of the telenovelas they watched on television. On the other hand, text types such as traditional stories are more likely to be memorized by rote, and can thus present more archaic forms, as shown by Clements (1990) for Korlai Indo-Portuguese.

4.5 Surveying creoles Sociolinguistic surveys have the advantage of gathering a large number of participants with a relatively quick response and collection time; however, they are limited in the type of data they can collect. For example, Fattier (1998) provides data on more than two thousand linguistic variables involving phonological, grammatical, and lexical features in Haitian Creole. Connecting this information to sociolinguistic variables other than geographical region might be a challenge, although generally background information about the consultants is given. The French creole atlases are based on dialectal surveys, collected orally with teams of local, often creole-speaking students and/or researchers and transcribed by the same. For example, in the case of the dialectal work in the Lesser Antilles, the data were collected from one main consultant in each location. However, the authors mention that family members and neighbours often participated and supported the consultant’s answers (Le Dû/Brun-Trigaud 2011). The questionnaires contained words and sentences organized into themes (e.g. weather, nature, social life, etc.). In addition to the description of the data collection, the atlas also provides an introduction to the sociocultural background and education level of the consultants, which allows the results to be contrasted with individual traits. Surveys about language use, attitudes, and perceptions can be conducted in different ways. Migge/Léglise (2012) carried out ten-minute interviews with 2,000 schoolchildren in French Guiana, Atchia-Emmerich (2005, 67) used both interview and written survey data from different age, ethnic, and social groups, and Lesho/ Sippola (2014) conducted an online survey about Chabacano speakers’ folk perceptions of each other’s varieties. However, an accurate assessment of speaker preference or competence in language production and comprehension cannot be based solely on subjective self-reported use. Surveys that rely on speakers’ beliefs and self-reported language use are valuable in the sense that they provide insights into local attitudes toward language use, but do not produce a comprehensive picture of the creole situation and should be complemented with other types of data (Escure 2008). What

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is common for all the studies mentioned here is that the survey data were contrasted and controlled against data obtained using other methods.

5 Chabacano folk perceptions This section presents a case study of perceptual dialectology in the Chabacano-speaking communities in the Philippines. It shows how combining a variety of approaches in data collection can help to minimize researcher bias in data analysis and to study creole sociolinguistics in a more comprehensive way. Chabacano is the common name used for several creole varieties that have Spanish as the lexifier and Philippine languages as the adstrates. Lesho/Sippola (2014) used folk linguistic methods to study the variation among the Chabacanospeaking communities and attitudes towards different languages spoken in them. They focused on the linguistic features that Chabacano-speakers identify as characteristic of the varieties, aspects of how this perceived variation is evaluated socially, and the relationships of each variety to Spanish, the Philippine languages, and English. They also evaluated the differences between linguist and speaker perceptions. The speakers’ folk perceptions do not always align with their documented production. However, the matches and mismatches between the two help to gain new insights into the ideologies that speakers have about different varieties spoken in their communities. Taking folk perceptions into account can help researchers reach a better understanding of what is considered “authentic” creole and the complex dynamics of creole-speaking communities in general (Lesho/Sippola 2014, 3–5). The study was based on a variety of qualitative sociolinguistic methods, including qualitative analysis of sociolinguistic interviews, interviews from a perceptual map task, and an online survey. The material collected using these methods was combined and cross analysed.

5.1 Methods of perceptual dialectology Lesho/Sippola (2014) conducted sociolinguistic interviews in Cavite City and Ternate over a period of ten years, and with occasional diaspora speakers in the USA. Participants had various backgrounds, although teachers, language activists, and other people interested in the histories of the communities formed a majority. A total of 108 native or near-native speakers were interviewed from traditionally Chabacanospeaking neighbourhoods. The age of the people interviewed ranged between 11 and 87 years, but different age groups were unequally represented due to the language endangerment situation, especially in Cavite City. The topics focused on language use and attitudes, such as the participants’ best and preferred language in different domains, the languages they used/understood when listening/reading/writing, the  

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linguistic history of their family, the future of the Chabacano language, and a variety of general topics. The majority of the interviews were conducted in Chabacano, with occasional switching to English and Tagalog, as codeswitching is common in these communities in everyday speech. Typical interviews lasted around 30–45 minutes. In addition, a map labelling task was conducted in Cavite City by Lesho with 27 participants, who were instructed to label where on the map people still speak Chabacano and to comment on how people speak in different areas (Lesho 2013, 122–123). The interviews and map labelling tasks were audio- or video-recorded, which proved useful for collecting examples of how participants imitate the pronunciation or intonation of other varieties. The results of the interviews were generally checked against participant observation. In addition to the interview and task sessions, systematic information was collected on the personal backgrounds, language use, and preferred languages in these two communities (cf. Lesho/Sippola 2013). Data from Zamboanga, the largest Chabacano-speaking community, came from an online survey with similar content to the interview data, but they were not contrasted with data from participant observation. Due to the variable types of data employed in the study, the treatment and the presentation of the analysed material aimed at transparency. All the examples and further information about the perceptions reported in the study indicate the age, sex, community, and language history of the participants, as well as the material types that were used, in order to contextualize the individual data points.

5.2 Chabacano speaker perceptions as a tool to explore creole dynamics Both the interviews and the survey results in Lesho/Sippola (2014) showed that the Chabacano speakers in each community consider the three varieties to be separate but mutually intelligible languages, differing mainly in terms of the lexicon and phonology. These linguistic differences were attributed to each variety’s perceived closeness to Spanish or the Philippine languages, with regard to geographical location, register, social class, and age. Language shift to Philippine languages was perceived as a threat, even in the most vital community of Zamboanga. The prestige of English seemed to protect it from negative perceptions. For historical reasons, Spanish was perceived as a prestige variety, with several positive linguistic and ethnic connotations. However, “pure” or “legitimate” Chabacano was considered to be distinct from Spanish, and it was tied to the local identities and contexts. When comparing the data gathered from the interviews, the map task, and the online survey, the outcomes were very similar. In all data types phonological and lexical variation were highlighted, with the latter explained by adstrate influence. Much less attention was drawn to grammatical elements, such as pronouns and prepositions. Some of the differences regarding lexical or phonological variation

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could probably be explained by more detailed studies about dialectal or stylistic variation in Chabacano. In general, compared to the other data types, the survey data seemed to present more examples of variation that matched linguists’ observations, which can probably be explained by the respondents’ interest in language issues and in taking the survey. Lesho/Sippola (2014) point out that creolists have often focused on theoretical discussions or historical problems, largely motivated by the explanation of the creolization process and centred on morphosyntactic phenomena, rather than on the types phonological or lexical features that are perceptually salient to the speakers. The perspectives of native speakers have often been lost as creolists impose their own metalinguistic systems onto their analyses. Long-term fieldwork including participant observation, together with elicitation methods from perceptual dialectology, is another way to minimize researcher bias and to explore the social dynamics of creole situations in a holistic, ethical way.

6 Conclusions This chapter has discussed some methodological challenges in the collection and analysis of creole data. As in the study of any other type of language, creoles need to be studied with carefully selected methods for each particular study. The sociohistories of many creole communities, the prestige asymmetries related to them, and their multilingual or -lectal nature create special requirements regarding the methods in the study of variation and change in creole languages. The collection and analysis of creole data has to be based on ethical principles and informed by participant observation or participatory research. The results obtained by different methods, such as questionnaires, interviews, and participant observation, can be contradictory, but these contradictions can also be seen as providing interesting insights into speakers’ metalinguistic systems and the general situation of creole-speaking communities. By combining and contrasting several methods and analysing the ambiguities in context, the researcher can gain access to relevant information on the language attitudes and ideologies that affect socially conditioned developments and variation in creoles. Acknowledgements: The author wishes to thank Angela Bartens, Hugo Cardoso, Anthony Grant, Philipp Krämer, Bettina Migge, Edward Mitchell, Isabelle Léglise, Marivic Lesho, and Nicolas Quint for their help and making many references available.

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Lesho, Marivic (2013), The Phonetics and Phonology of the Cavite Chabacano Vowel System, doctoral thesis, Columbus, OH, The Ohio State University. Lesho, Marivic/Sippola, Eeva (2013), The Sociolinguistic Situation of the Manila Bay ChabacanoSpeaking Communities, Language Documentation and Conservation 7, 1–30. Lesho, Marivic/Sippola, Eeva (2014), Folk Perceptions of Variation among the Chabacano Creoles, Revista de crioulos de base lexical portuguesa e espanhola 5, 1–46. Lipski, John M. (1986), The Reduction of /s/ in Philippine Creole Spanish and its Implications for Historical Hispanic Dialectology, Diachronica 3, 43–66. Lipski, John M. (2001), The Place of Chabacano in the Philippine Linguistic Identity, Sociolinguistic Studies 2(2), Shedding Light on the Chabacano Language, 119–163. Lipski, John M. (2010), Chabacano y español: resolviendo las ambigüedades, Lengua y migración 2(1), 5–41. Lipski, John M. (2012), The “New” Palenquero: Revitalization and Re-Creolization, in: Richard FileMuriel (ed.), Varieties of Colombian Spanish, Frankfurt/Madrid, Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 21–41. Ludwig, Ralph (ed.) (1989), Les Créoles français entre l’oral et l’écrit, Script-Oralia 16, Tübingen, Narr. Ludwig, Ralph/Telchid, Sylviane/Bruneau-Ludwig, Florence (edd.) (2001), Corpus créole. Textes oraux dominicais, guadeloupéens, guyanais, haïtiens, mauriciens et seychellois, Hamburg, Buske. McWhorter, John H. (2005), Defining Creole, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Meyerhoff, Miriam, et al. (2012), Sociolinguistic Fieldwork, in: Nick Thieberger (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Fieldwork, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 121–146. Michaelis, Susanne M., et al. (edd.) (2013), The Survey of Pidgin and Creole Languages, vol. 2: Portuguese-Based, Spanish-Based, and French-Based Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Migge, Bettina/Léglise, Isabelle (2012), Exploring Language in a Multilingual Context: Variation, Interaction and Ideology in Language Documentation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Migge, Bettina/Léglise, Isabelle/Bartens, Angela (edd.) (2010), Creoles in Education. An Appraisal of Current Programs and Projects, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Mitchell, Edward S. (2010), St. Lucian Kwéyòl in St. Croix: A Study of Language Choice and Attitudes, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Morton, Thomas Barry (2005), Sociolinguistic Variation and Language Change in El Palenque de San Basilio (Colombia), doctoral thesis, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania. Mufwene, Salikoko S. (2008), Language Evolution, London, Continuum. Mühleisen, Susanne (2005), Introduction: Creole Languages in Creole Literatures. Status and Standardization, Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 20(1), 1–14. Mühlhäusler, Peter (1983), Learning to Speak about Speaking in a Pidgin Language, in: Stephen Wurm (ed.), Papers in Pidgin and Creole Linguistics no. 3, Canberra, Australian National University, 93–103. Nordhoff, Sebastian (2013), The Current State of Sri Lanka Portuguese, Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 28(2), 425–434. Quint, Nicolas (2008), L’Élément africain dans la langue capverdienne/Africanismos na língua caboverdiana, Paris, L’Harmattan. Quint, Nicolas (2014), Décrire des langues et des variétés de langue peu étudiées. De quelques difficultés rencontrées sur le terrain, in: Gilles Forlot/Fanny Martin (edd.), Regards sociolinguistiques contemporains: Terrains, espaces et complexités de la recherche, Paris, L’Harmattan, 79–96. Rickford, John Russel (1997), Unequal Partnership: Sociolinguistics and the African American Speech Community, Language in Society 26(2), 161–197.  

 

 

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Schieffelin, Bambi/Doucet, Rachelle (1994), The “Real” Haitian Creole: Ideology, Metalinguistics and Orthographic Choice, American Ethnologist 21(1), 176–200. Schnepel, Ellen M. (2004), In Search of a National Identity: Creole and Politics in Guadeloupe, Hamburg, Buske. Singler, John V. (1995), The Demographics of Creole Genesis in the Caribbean: A Comparison of Martinique and Haiti, in: Jacques Arends (ed.), The Early Stages of Creolization, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 203–232. Sippola, Eeva (2010), Chabacano for Everyone? Chabacano Language Projects in Cavite City in Comparison with Other Chabacano Communities, in: Bettina Migge/Isabelle Léglise/Angela Bartens (edd.), Creoles in Education: An Appraisal of Current Programs and Projects, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 55–80. Sippola, Eeva (2011), Una gramática descriptiva del chabacano de Ternate, Helsinki, Unigrafia. Tobar Delgado, Eduardo (2014), Estudio de lingüística popular en redes sociales online en chabacano zamboangueño: una visión panorámica, Revista de crioulos de base lexical portuguesa e espanhola 5, 47–86. Tomás, Maria Isabel (2009), The Role of Women in the Cross-Pollination Process in the Asian Portuguese Varieties, Journal of Portuguese Linguistics 8(2), 49–64. Trecher, Sara (2013), Social Ethics for Sociolinguistics, in: Christine Mallinson/Becky Childs/Gerard Van Herk (edd.), Data Collection in Sociolinguistics. Methods and Applications, New York, Routledge, 33–45. Valdman, Albert (2005), Vers la standardisation du créole haïtien, Revue française de linguistique appliquée 10, 39–52. Valdman, Albert/Villeneuve, Anne-José/Siegel, Jason F. (2015), On the Influence of the Standard Norm of Haitian Creole on the Cap Haïtien Dialect. Evidence from Sociolinguistic Variation in the Third Person Singular Pronoun, Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 30(1), 1–43. Velupillai, Viveka (2014), Pidgins, Creoles and Mixed Languages. An Introduction, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Wardhaugh, Ronald (2006), An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Oxford, Blackwell.

Lori Repetti

4 Fieldwork and building corpora for endangered varieties Abstract: Loss of linguistic diversity is viewed by many as one of the great ecological disasters of the twenty-first century, and the Romance language family has not been spared. This chapter deals with unique challenges to the study and documentation of endangered Romance languages. We consider the question of language vs dialect, and the added problems faced by endangered varieties deemed “dialects”. The role played by the highly prestigious and structurally related national languages of the countries in which the endangered varieties are spoken is analysed within the fieldwork context, as speakers may possess a spectrum of linguistic abilities, from the national standard to an archaic local variety. Fieldwork methods and language documentation/description are discussed, along with the types of resources produced and their accessibility.  

Keywords: endangered Romance languages, “language” vs “dialect”, fieldwork, documentation, revitalization  

1 Introduction While linguistic diversity is diminishing across the globe, the situation is especially critical in Europe where education levels are high, and knowledge of the standardized languages is widespread. According to information retrieved from Ethnologue’s list of endangered languages and UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, dozens of endangered Romance languages are found throughout Europe, but also in North and South America, Africa, and Asia.1 The study of these endangered languages and the accessibility of data from them are particularly important and urgent. Unlike artifacts, language cannot be preserved in its natural form once there are no native speakers. It can only be preserved in written form and, more recently, in audio recordings.

1 The question of what counts as an endangered language can vary from context to context, and there are different types of endangerment and death (see Tsunoda 2005, 36–48). For reasons of space, I do not include endangered Romance-based creoles, such as Palenquero (a Spanish-based creole spoken in Colombia) and some dialects of Chavacano (a Spanish-based creole spoken in the Philippines). Other endangered Romance varieties that are not addressed include non-standard spoken varieties of the standard language, such as popular Brazilian Portuguese with its unique grammatical traits (Guy/ Zilles 2008, 55). Barbiers (2015) argues that endangered dialects should be included in discussions of endangered languages, and Tsunoda (2005, 5–6) discusses the differences between language death and dialect death. See also section 2.  

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-005

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This chapter deals with fieldwork and documentation of endangered Romance languages.2 The following Table provides a list of relevant languages. The information provided must be interpreted with care as it comes from only two sources – Ethnologue and UNESCO – and the calculation of number of speakers varies amongst these. The information is meant to provide an overview and rough estimate of the number of endangered Romance languages, the number of speakers, and the “degrees of endangerment” of each variety. Table 1: Endangered Romance languages  

Language

Location

Degree of # of Speakers Endangerment

Degree of # of Speakers Endangerment

 

 

Ethnologue

UNESCO

UNESCO

AlpineProvençal/ Vivaro-Alpine

France

Definitely Endangered

~200,000

Aragonese

Spain

6b. Threatened ~10,000/ ~20,000 L2

Definitely Endangered

~10,000

Aromanian

Greece, Macedonia, Albania

6b. Threatened ~114,340

Definitely Endangered

~114,340

Asturian/ AsturLeonese

Spain, Portugal

6b. Threatened ~110,000

Definitely Endangered

~150,000

Burgundian

France

Cajun French

United States (Louisiana)

7. Shifting

~25,600

Campidanese Sardinian

Italy

6a. Vigorous

~500,000

Champenois

France, Belgium

Corsican

France

4. Educational

Emilian, Romagnol

Italy

9. Dormant

Extremaduran

Spain

7. Shifting

Ethnologue

Severely Endangered

Definitely Endangered

~900,000

Severely Endangered ~31,000

Definitely Endangered

~160,000

Definitely Endangered

~2,000,000

~201,500

2 See Tsunoda (2005) for an introduction to conducting fieldwork among endangered languages.

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Language

Location

Degree of # of Speakers Endangerment

Degree of # of Speakers Endangerment

 

 

Ethnologue

UNESCO

UNESCO

Faetar

Italy

Definitely Endangered

~600

Fala

Spain

Franc-Comtois

France, Switzerland

Francoprovençal/ Arpitan

France, Switzerland, Italy

8a. Moribund

137.000

Definitely Endangered

~100,000

Friulian

Italy

4. Educational

~300,000

Definitely Endangered

~600,000

Gallo

France

Severely Endangered

~200,000

Gallo-Sicilian

Italy

Definitely Endangered

~65,000

Gallurese Sardinian

Italy

6b. Threatened ~100,000

Definitely Endangered

~100,000

Gascon

France, Spain

(see Occitan)

Definitely Endangered

~250,000

Guernésiais

British Crown dependency

8b. Nearly Extinct

~200

Severely Endangered

~1,327

Istriot

Croatia

7. Shifting

~400/~900 L2

Severely Endangered

~400/ ~900 L2

Istro-Romanian

Croatia

7. Shifting

~300/ ~1,100 L2

Severely Endangered

~300/ ~1,100 L2

Jèrriais/ Jersey French

British Crown dependency

8a. Moribund

~1,920

Severely Endangered

~2,000

Judeo-Italian/ Corfiot Italkian

Italy, Greece

8a. Moribund

~250

Critically Endangered

Judezmo/ Ladino/ Judeo-Spanish

Israel, Turkey, Greece

4. Educational

~112,130

Severely Endangered

Ladin

Italy

6b. Threatened ~31000

Languedocian

France

Ligurian

Italy, Monaco, France

6a. Vigorous

Ethnologue

~10,500 Severely Endangered

5. Developing

 

~505,100

Definitely Endangered

~31,000

Severely Endangered

~500,000

Definitely Endangered

~1,000,000

Fieldwork and building corpora for endangered varieties

Language

Location

 

 

Limousin

France

Logudorese Sardinian

Italy

Lombard

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Degree of # of Speakers Endangerment

Degree of # of Speakers Endangerment

Ethnologue

UNESCO

UNESCO

Severely Endangered

~400,000

6b. Threatened ~500,000

Definitely Endangered

~400,000

Italy, Switzerland

6a. Vigorous

~3,903,000

Definitely Endangered

~3,500,000

Loreto-Ucayali (Amazonic) Spanish

Peru

6a. Vigorous

~2,800

Lorrain

France, Belgium

MeglenoRomanian/ Meglenitic

Greece, Macedonia

7. Shifting

~5,000

Minderico

Portugal

8b. Nearly Extinct

~500

NapoletanoCalabrese/ South Italian

Italy

5. Developing

~5,700,000

Norman

France

Severely Endangered

Occitan/ Gascon/ Auvergnat

France, Italy, 6b. Threatened ~218,310 Monaco, Spain

Severely Endangered

Picard

France, Belgium

5. Developing

~200,000

Severely Endangered

~700,000

Piedmontese

Italy

5. Developing

~1,600,000

Definitely Endangered

~2,000,000

PoitevinSaintongeais

France

Romansh

Switzerland

4. Educational

Sassarese Sardinian

Italy

Sicilian Venetian/ Venetan

Ethnologue

Severely Endangered Severely Endangered

~5,000

Vulnerable

~7,500,000

Severely Endangered ~40,039

Definitely Endangered

~35,095

6b. Threatened ~100,000

Definitely Endangered

~120,000

Italy

5. Developing

~4,700,000

Vulnerable

~5,000,000

Italy, Croatia

5. Developing

~3,852,500

Vulnerable

~4,000,000

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Language

Location

 

 

Walloon

Belgium, France

Degree of # of Speakers Endangerment

Degree of # of Speakers Endangerment

Ethnologue

UNESCO

UNESCO

Definitely Endangered

~600,000

Ethnologue

6b. Threatened ~600,000

Degree of Endangerment Ethnologue 4. Educational: The language is in vigorous use, with standardization and literature being sustained through a widespread system of institutionally supported education. 5. Developing: The language is in vigorous use, with literature in a standardized form being used by some though this is not yet widespread or sustainable. 6a. Vigorous: The language is unstandardized and in vigorous use among all generations. 6b. Threatened: The language is used for face-to-face communication within all generations, but it is losing users. 7. Shifting: The child-bearing generation can use the language among themselves, but it is not being transmitted to children. 8a. Moribund: The only remaining active users of the language are members of the grandparent generation and older. 8b. Nearly Extinct: The only remaining users of the language are members of the grandparent generation or older who have little opportunity to use the language. 9. Dormant: The language serves as a reminder of heritage identity for an ethnic community, but no one has more than symbolic proficiency.

Degree of Endangerment UNESCO Vulnerable: most children speak the language, but it may be restricted to certain domains (e.g., home).  

Critically Endangered: the youngest speakers are grandparents and older, and they speak the language partially and infrequently. Definitely Endangered: children no longer learn the language as mother tongue in the home. Severely Endangered: language is spoken by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may understand it, they do not speak it to children or among themselves.

Romance varieties are increasingly becoming endangered for the same reasons that non-Romance languages become endangered: urbanization, education, increased mobility, social media, increased access and allegiance to standard varieties, language contact, tourism, etc. (Austin/Sallabank 2011). In this article, we will address

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problems that present unique challenges to the study and documentation of endangered Romance languages. In particular, we will consider the age-old question of “language” vs “dialect” within this context, and the added challenges faced by endangered varieties deemed “dialects”. Intimately connected to this issue is the role played by the highly prestigious and structurally related national languages of the countries in which the endangered varieties are spoken (section 2). The response to endangerment in the Romance-speaking world (if there is an organized response at all) has been varied, but efforts to promote literacy in the endangered variety have been hampered by the extreme variation among local varieties and, in many cases, the lack of a single variety to identify for standardization (section 3; see also ↗3 Collecting and analysing creole data). The core of this article deals with documentation efforts and challenges to documentation (section 4).  

 

 

2 “Language” vs “dialect” We often think of endangered languages as varieties spoken in isolated, perhaps inaccessible, and poor communities. This is generally not the situation found within the Romance context. What we do find in the Romance-speaking world, in Europe in particular, is a myriad of Romance varieties which are direct descendants of Latin, but which do not enjoy political and social prestige. This situation is most dramatic in Italy where Romance varieties blend from one to another with few sharp divisions distinguishing one variety from the next. For political and historical reasons these varieties are commonly referred to as “dialects”.3 For example, Emilian is the direct descendent of the Latin spoken in the Emilia region of northern Italy, which has as many subvariations as there are towns in the region. It is structurally strikingly different from Italian, and it is not mutually intelligible with Italian. Since it is neither a socially prestigious nor a politically protected variety, most children raised in Emilia do not learn to speak the local variety, resulting in its status as a “dormant” language (according to Ethnologue) or a “definitely endangered” language (according to UNESCO). What is the difference between a “language” and a “dialect”?4 There are at least two dimensions to the distinction relevant here: one linguistic, and the other sociopolitico-historic. The linguistic metric of mutual intelligibility distinguishes “dialects of a language” from “separate languages”: in short, if speakers of different varieties can understand each other, we refer to those varieties as “dialects” of the same language; if speakers of different varieties cannot understand each other, we refer to those varieties as separate “languages”. However, this is complicated by varying 3 See Loporcaro (2013) for an introduction to the linguistic situation of Romance varieties spoken in Italy, and Cravens (2014) for an excellent overview of the distinction between language and dialect in Italy, and the implications for endangered varieties. See also ↗18 The languages and dialects of Italy. 4 See Hinskens/Auer/Kerswill (2005) for a discussion of the definition of “dialect”.

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degrees of mutual intelligibility and by socio-politico-historic considerations. The latter factors are neatly summed up in the well-known quip that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”. The result is that the use of the term “language” or “dialect” to refer to a particular variety is the result of many considerations (see footnote 1). According to the linguistic metric, some so-called “dialects” should be considered separate “languages”, and some Romance varieties recognized as separate “languages” might be considered “dialects” of the same language. For example, we find an imperfect mapping with reference to the “dialects” in Italy, as illustrated in the case of Emilian above: although Emilian is considered a “dialect” of Italian, Italian speakers would not be able to understand Emilian. Similarly, Portuguese encompasses such extreme variation that speakers of Portuguese from different areas might not understand each other: Portuguese speakers from Brazil might have difficulty understanding speakers from Portugal. The categorization of Emilian as a “dialect” of Italian and of Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese as Portuguese “dialects” is based on socio-political and historical considerations. On the other hand, Spanish and Portuguese are clearly considered separate languages despite the fact that speakers of Spanish might be able to understand a good portion of Portuguese, and vice versa. Similarly, Piedmontese (spoken in Italy) is associated with Italian, even though it is grammatically more similar to Occitan (spoken in France), and Corsican (spoken in France) shares many grammatical features with Italian, but most lay people would not associate it with Italian.5 Here, too, socio-political and historical factors determine the classification. The distinction between “language” and “dialect” is not simply a terminological one, but has profound implications for language vitality: those varieties recognized as “dialects” could be ineligible for the resources available for endangered “languages”. In particular, “dialects” are not protected by the Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (see ↗21 Revitalization and education). The Charter, created by the Council of Europe in 1992, was designed to protect and promote minority languages (which are largely endangered) that are “traditionally used within a given territory of a state by nationals of that state who form a group numerically smaller than the rest of the state’s population”, and it explicitly excludes “dialects of the official language(s) of  

5 Another complication arises in the cases of Romance varieties spoken in non-Romance-speaking countries, such as Aromanian varieties spoken in Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, the Republic of Macedonia, and Albania: are they variants of Romanian, or do they belong to a separate language (Carageani 2002)? This situation is not unique to the Romance world. In Sweden and Norway, for example, the issue arises regarding the Finno-Ugric varieties: are they dialects of Finnish or independent languages? (see Huss 2008).

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the state” (conventions.coe.int/treaty/en/Treaties/html/148.htm).6 Hence, if a variety is deemed a “dialect” it does not receive the protection afforded other “languages”. The categorization of a variety as a “language” or “dialect” is left up to each member state, resulting, in some cases, in curious situations. For example, Italy, which signed the Charter in 2000 but has not yet ratified it, classifies some indigenous Romance varieties as “languages” and, therefore, covered by the provisions of the Charter, while others are “dialects”. For example, Sardinian is a “language”, while Sicilian is a “dialect”. Linguistically, there is no reason to consider Sicilian more of a dialect of Italian than Sardinian is, or, alternatively, there is no principled reason to consider Sardinian more independent of Italian (hence not a dialect) than Sicilian; the classification was somewhat arbitrary and historico-politically motivated. The relationship between a variety’s categorization as a “language” or a “dialect” has a profound effect on the responses to its endangered status, and, in particular for the purposes of this chapter, on its documentation.

3 Responses to endangerment/revitalization In all contexts of language endangerment, we usually see three types of responses from interested parties (native speaker community, politicians, intellectuals, lay people, linguists, etc.): non-interference, efforts in maintenance and revitalization, and documentation, the focus of this chapter (Romaine 2008, 8). All three responses have been adopted in various Romance contexts.

3.1 Non-interference Non-interference is perhaps the dominant response, and some of the most endangered Romance varieties have no overt revitalization efforts underway. For example, Sercquiais (spoken on the island of Sark) has no media presence, no learning/teaching opportunities, and no extra-curricular initiatives aimed at revitalizing the language (Jones 2014). The fact that, for many endangered Romance languages, there is little or no information available on any response to endangerment suggests this to be the situation in most cases. Some groups, such as administrators, educators, or members of the community, may actually welcome language death, arguing that local languages are not useful in the modern world, that language diversity reduces intercultural communication, and that revitalization efforts are a waste of effort and money (Crowley 2007; Sallabank

6 The Charter also describes the objectives and principles that ratifying states must follow to protect minority languages, and how states can assure the rights of minority languages.

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2013; Tsunoda 2005). Typical of this position is the following politician’s comments on Guernésiais (spoken on the island of Guernsey), reported by Sallabank (2013, 111): “there are some who don’t think it’s progressive, why should we go back, I’ve had one or two ‘why should we waste all our time in learning about Guernsey French?’…” These negative language attitudes grow out of negative experiences of Guernésiais children who had “unhappy experiences at school” (Sallabank 2002, 220) and overall felt ashamed of their language, making them “less likely to transmit the language to their children” (Sallabank 2010a, 70). Governments also expedite the demise of endangered languages by not supporting revitalization efforts, often justifying this by characterizing endangered varieties as “dialects” (as opposed to “languages”), thereby rendering them ineligible for certain types of support (see section 2 above). This type of attitude is portrayed in a series of popular videos produced in 2010 by RAI (Italy’s national public broadcasting company) to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy. In the fifteen short skits, people speak a “dialect” with another person who does not understand and appears perplexed and confused. The announcer then proclaims, “Se gli italiani fossero quelli di 150 anni fa, probabilmente comunicherebbero ancora così”. The reaction to this portrayal of the dialects as incomprehensible was largely negative, and perhaps partly in response to that reaction, the series of advertisements put out recently by Nutella have a very different approach to the dialects, celebrating their diversity and cultural importance, and providing material online of representative varieties.  

3.2 Revitalization efforts Many groups in the Romance world are actively involved in language maintenance and revitalization efforts.7 These efforts range from the creation of resources for learning and teaching endangered languages (for Occitan, see http://www.crdp-montpellier.fr/ languesregionales/occitan/ressources/sceren/dire_en_oc.html; for the use of new technologies for teaching and learning endangered languages, cf. Hugo 2015), to the promotion of literature in the endangered variety (for an Aragonese literary contest, the “Concurso de narratiba e poesía en aragonés”, see https://cultura.unizar.es/concursode-narratiba-e-poes%C3 %ADa-en-aragon%C3 %A9s), the use of the endangered variety in various media outlets (for example, Belgian state TV and radio provide a few hours of broadcasting in Walloon weekly), and courses and programmes designed to teach about the structure of endangered languages (for example, a course on Piedmontese was offered at the “Languages and Linguistics of the Mediterranean” 2016 summer school: http://llm.unica.it/events/piedmontese). An innovative approach to funding revitalization projects – crowdfunding – is described on the “Language Endanger-

7 See Wolfram (2008) for outreach efforts to support language diversity in general.

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ment: Revitalizing Minderico” webpage (https://hubbub.org/p/minderico). While these efforts are undertaken as proactive steps to language maintenance, some argue that they are nothing more than a requiem for the soon-to-be dead languages (Tamburelli n.d.). These initiatives, argues Tamburelli (n.d.), position the language as a museum piece destined to remain in theaters, poems, and the classrooms of those who study their history, but not to thrive as spoken and living languages. One of the unique and most exciting characteristics of the Romance context actually turns out to be one of its weaknesses in revitalization efforts. Since there is so much variation among endangered Romance languages, it is not always clear which variety should be the focus for standardization and revitalization. In other words, promoting standardization may actually hurt the vitality of the local varieties, perhaps even creating a prestige hierarchy where one did not exist. This situation is not unique to Romance, and is also found, for example, in Ireland where the creation of a written standard “has also led to a diglossic situation for the varieties of Irish in the Gaeltacht, where spoken Irish takes as its basis the regional dialect, while all forms of written language tend toward the standard, as this is what is to be found in textbooks and in most published material” (Ó hIfearnáin 2008, 125).8 The situation with Romansh (also spelled Romantsch, Rumantsch, Romontsch), known for its extremely rich local variation, is illustrative. The need for a single pandialectal standard has been felt at least since the nineteenth century (Williamson 1991, 54);9 however, it was not until the late twentieth century that such a standard, Rumantsch Grischun, was created from the many local varieties. Perhaps because of its artificial and hybrid nature, Rumantsch Grischun has met with “very considerable resistance” (Anderson 2016, 169). Romansh is, therefore, “unusual in being endangered both from without (by German) and from within (by an artificial standard perceived to have minimal relevance or utility)” (Anderson 2016, 169).

3.3 Documentation The third response to endangerment involves documentation of the endangered language.10 In section 4 we will consider some of the unique challenges to Romance  

8 In his discussion of Irish, Ó hIfearnáin (2008, 127) recommends that “creators of a national language policy should seek a compromise that would reinforce intergenerational transmission of the local variety through schooling so as to avoid conflict in the target variety and to encourage community language development”. 9 The Lia Rumantscha was founded in 1919 to address the growing threat of German as the lingua franca in the Romansh-speaking areas of Switzerland (Williamson 1991). 10 Some online resources to assist in documenting endangered languages include the following: An Crúbadán (corpus-building for minority languages) (http://crubadan.org, last access 18.02.2018); Endangered Languages Archive (preserving and publishing documentation on endangered languages)

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language documentation during fieldwork and in working with speakers, and then look at innovative use of modern technological tools in documentation and revitalization of endangered Romance languages.11 First, a word on what documentation involves and how documentation differs from description (Austin 2010). Language documentation is “discourse-centered” (Austin 2010, 20) and “aims to record the linguistic practices and traditions of a speech community, along with speakers’ metalinguistic knowledge of those practices and traditions” (Austin 2010, 18). It is multidisciplinary in nature, and crucially involves the active participation of the speech community in all aspects of the documentation process: the collection, analysis, and preservation of many types of language data to be made available for a wide range of users. Description, or the collection and analysis of linguistic data which are made available in grammars, dictionaries, specialized articles, etc., is just one component of documentation. “Documentation” and “Description” differ in their goals, their methodology, and the nature and role of data and metadata.

4 Documentation 4.1 Fieldwork Documenting the great linguistic variety found in the Romance-speaking world has a long and illustrious tradition. Perhaps the earliest recorded attempt to register the plethora of Romance varieties can be found in Dante’s early fourteenth-century De vulgari eloquentia. This work, as well as those that followed in the next five centuries, had a literary bent: Dante was searching for an “eloquent vernacular”, while subsequent scholars documented local variants of popular stories such as the first novella of the ninth day of the Decameron, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the Lord’s Prayer, the Gospel of Matthew.12 Documenting the lexicon of these languages through the translation of words and phrases in the national language picked up in the eighteenth century with the compilation and publication of numerous dialect dictionaries. This evolved into a more scientific study of Romance lexical variation and historical

(http://www.elar-archive.org/index.php, last access 18.02.2018); Endangered Languages Project (technology for those working to document, preserve, and teach endangered languages) (http://www. endangeredlanguages.com, last access 18.02.2018); Open Language Archives Community (network of language archives) (http://www.language-archives.org, last access 18.02.2018); Phoible (repository of phonological inventories from languages around the world) (http://phoible.org, last access 18.02.2018); etc. See also Assini (2014); Jones (2015), etc. 11 For more information on documenting endangered languages, see the many excellent articles in the journal Language Documentation and Description, Austin/Sallabank (2011), Jones (2015), etc. 12 See Pop (1950) for a thorough review of the history of the study of Romance variation.

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phonology in the late nineteenth century with groundbreaking work by Jules Gilliéron with his Atlas linguistique de la France (Gilliéron/Edmont 1902–1910), and by Graziadio Isaia Ascoli with his new journal the Archivio glottologico italiano (Ascoli 1873) whose goal is to promote “l’esplorazione scientifica dei dialetti italiani ancora superstiti” (Ascoli 1873, xxv). Note that Ascoli was already aware of the endangered status of these varieties (see also ↗5 Romance dialectology). These early methodologies (recording oral literature and conducting translation tasks) continue to be used today. Oral literature (myths, stories, nursery rhymes, lullabies, songs, etc.) is argued to be a particularly good source of data since it is “conceived in the language and not the product of translation or interpretation” (Bouquiaux/Thomas 1992, 56), and many community-based and non-professional efforts in language documentation include the publication of songs, poems, sayings, proverbs, etc. in the endangered language. However, this type of data has its limitations as a source of grammatical information (for example, some grammatical structures crystalized in oral literature are no longer productive), of sociolinguistic information (for example, the oral literature may not be widely known, and the information communicated may no longer be relevant in today’s society), and may be viewed as reflecting a stage of the community’s history that speakers no longer want to be associated with (Mosel 2006). Translation tasks continue to be the principal means of eliciting data for lexical and grammatical studies, including investigations of phonology (for example, to establish inventories), morphology (for example, to record paradigms), syntax (for example, to study variations in word order), etc. Problems with this methodology include the structural similarity between the endangered language and the language used during the task (which is usually the national standard, a closely related Romance language) which can lead to responses which conform to the structure of the national standard (see section 4.2). Other common methodologies within the Romance domain include the use of questionnaires or semi-structured elicitations, natural conversations, and non-structured interviews, which provide more sociolinguistic and pragmatic information. Additional advantages of spontaneous speech data for grammatical investigations include natural variation in pronunciation and syntax, and the avoidance of the problems associated with artificial speech produced in a laboratory setting or controlled context. Drawbacks include variations in speech rate which make comparisons difficult, and the lack of control over the structures produced. While most early studies focused on lexical variation and historical phonology, in the past few decades emphasis has shifted to other aspects of the language (syntax, sociolinguistics, etc.) and to new methodologies. Endangered Romance languages are particularly important in the field of micro-variation, or the study of minor differences among closely related languages in order to better understand the constraints on language variation and the ways in which a grammar can change over time. The great variation attested among endangered Romance languages provides us with as close to a natural laboratory to study language variation and change as we can ever hope to  

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find. The study of syntactic micro-variation has found particularly fertile ground in the Romance domain, and investigations of syntactic micro-variation within French varieties illustrate the usefulness of this approach (http://blogs.univ-tlse2.fr/symila). Innovative and experimental approaches to fieldwork on endangered Romance varieties began decades ago and continue today to enrich the field of linguistics. Uguzzoni (1971) was the first to apply the tools of phonetics to carry out an acoustic analysis of Emilian vowels (work which shed light on the evolution of Latin vowels), and now phonetic studies of endangered Romance languages abound. Endangered languages have been the subject of numerous neurolinguistic studies, including studies of the syntax of subject clitic pronouns of speakers with non-fluent aphasia (Chinellato 2004). A very recent innovation in fieldwork involves crowdsourcing language data, for example, for Abruzzese and Molisano data (http://www.abruzzesemolisano.it). Investigation of the sociolinguistic situation of an endangered language community, including language use and attitudes, requires different tools: self-evaluating questionnaires, observations by investigators, grammaticality tests to check sensitivity to language interference, etc. Heritage varieties spoken by the descendants of emigrants (Peyton et al. 2008), such as the varieties of Italo-Romance spoken in the United States (Haller 1993; Tortora 2014), Walloon in Wisconsin (NPR 2015), Friulian in Romania (Iliescu/Melchior 2015), Occitan in North Carolina (Pons 1990), or Veneto in Mexico (Sartor/Ursini 1983; Mackay 1992; Barnes 2009) are often the object of sociolinguistic studies.13 Intensive fieldwork with speakers of a Veneto variety spoken in Chipilo, Puebla, Mexico (Ursini 1988; Mackay 1992; Barnes 2009) has shown that language maintenance has been successful despite the lack of external support because of the social isolation of the community and because the language has come to symbolize ethnic solidarity and group identity. The Romance varieties of the Channel Islands of Jersey, Guernsey and Sark (Jèrriais, Guernésiais, and Sercquiais, respectively) are extremely endangered varieties: estimates vary widely, but sources agree that fewer than 3000 people speak Jèrriais, no more than 1500 speak Guernésiais, and there are a mere few dozen speakers of Sercquiais (States of Jersey Statistics Unit 2012; Jones 2014; Warren/Jennings 2015; UNESCO; Ethnologue). The sociolinguistic situation of these varieties is particularly well studied (Jones/Bulot 2009), and we know that, for example, Guernésiais is predominantly used in domestic environments, that it is no longer being passed on to children, and that code-mixing with English is frequent (Sallabank 2010b); these are all situations that bode very badly for a language’s vitality.

13 Endangered languages are often found in communities of recent immigrants, especially in large urban centres, such as New York City, where an estimated 800 languages are spoken, many of which are endangered. A unique organization in New York City, the Endangered Language Alliance (http:// elalliance.org, last access 18.02.2018), documents and describes the endangered languages spoken there, including many Romance languages.

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While the methods used for gathering data from endangered languages are the same as those recommended for healthy languages, there are some unique issues that arise in the documentation of endangered languages. Some of those issues do not present themselves as problematic for endangered Romance language fieldwork, such as the issue of a common language, but others are particularly problematic within Romance, such as the limited demographics of speakers, which is the topic of the next section.

4.2 Speakers Researchers working on endangered languages try to work with informants of both genders, of different ages, and with high levels of proficiency;14 however, the demographics of speakers of endangered languages can be quite limited, and the choice of an informant presents unique challenges in the Romance context.15 Fluent speakers of endangered Romance languages are usually elderly (a rule of thumb is that those born before WWII are the most fluent, with fluency levels dropping among those born from the mid-1940s onward). This could make it particularly difficult to find informants. For example, a linguist from Stony Brook University, Francisco Ordóñez, had difficulty locating speakers of Gascon in France, but had success in an assisted living facility in Aran (Spain) where he was able to find a number of fluent speakers of Gascon (Ordóñez p.c.). Furthermore, some elderly informants might have speaking difficulties due to missing teeth or cognitive impairment, and the most elderly might have low levels of literacy, rendering certain types of tasks difficult, if not impossible, and further limiting access to information. Given the small number of speakers of some varieties, and the lack of communities of speakers, fieldwork involving observation of speakers can be nearly impossible. A more uniquely Romance problem involves the language variety the informant uses. Since these endangered varieties are related to the national standards, speakers may have a range of linguistic abilities, from the national standard to an archaic local variety (see also footnote 15). As illustrated in Loporcaro (2013, 6–7) speakers of a southern Italian variety might have a repertoire that includes standard Italian, regional Italian (i.e., a version of the standard language with locally identifiable phonological and lexical characteristics), and the indigenous, local Romance variety (i.e., a variety with unique lexical items, syntactic structures, morphological characteristics,  

14 The structural changes found in language obsolescence constitute an interesting and growing area of research (Dorian 1992). In these studies, the grammar of speakers who might not be considered fluent in the most archaic variety of the language is the object of investigation. A common characteristic within the Romance realm is convergence between the local variety and the closely related “roof” language, resulting in a language continuum (Repetti 2014; Cerruti/Regis 2015). 15 For the typology of speakers of endangered languages, see Grinevald/Bert (2011).

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etc.). Because of the close genetic relationship among these varieties, speakers can move seamlessly across the spectrum of their languages. Informants may be reluctant to admit that they know a variety of the local language which is very different from the national language, since the local languages do not enjoy the high social prestige of the standard language. Hence, in different interview contexts, an informant might use different versions of his/her languages. With a researcher from the “inside” (for example, the same country), an informant might use a variety cleansed of its most local traits, so as to not appear too provincial. Alternatively, with a researcher from the “outside” these prejudices might not be felt so acutely. The opposite situation is also attested. The presence of other speakers of the endangered language can similarly have the effect either of encouraging use of the local variety, or of dictating the use of a more regionally neutral variety.

4.3 Accessibility of data The data that result from field research on endangered languages are valuable in all formats, from primary data (recordings, field notes, etc.) to the analysis of those data available in grammars, articles, dictionaries, etc. (Tsunoda 2005, 245–247). Endangered Romance languages have been studied for many decades, and data in many formats are abundant: dictionaries, grammars, descriptions, atlases, collections of texts, monographs, etc. There are gaps in the data, for example, annotated audio and video files are not available for most varieties, but the situation is indeed improving. Much of the progress in this area is made by the speech communities themselves. Audio and video recordings are available on many websites, and groups on social media regularly post information about their language. The issue addressed here is the use of digital resources (websites, databases, etc.) to make the data more widely accessible to two audiences: the community of speakers and the community of linguists. Tools for community-oriented initiatives need to be user-friendly and contain information for a wide range of interests. Hundreds of such tools exist for communities of speakers of endangered Romance languages. An excellent example can be found for Francoprovençal (Patois) (http://www.patoisvda.org/). This site contains information accessible to a wide audience on many aspects of culture and language, including resources for promoting and learning Francoprovençal and access to the “guichet linguistique” for assistance in these efforts. Evidence suggests that new resources such as these may indeed be helping the plight of endangered languages (Warren/Jennings 2015, 140). New technologies have also facilitated the work of professional linguists. Digital resources, though less durable, are more “portable” and accessible than older technologies (printed format). For example, the Atlante Italo-Svizzero (Jaberg/Jud 1928– 1940), an invaluable but cumbersome eight volume linguistic atlas, is now available in digital format (NavigAIS: www3.pd.istc.cnr.it/navigais), making access to it much

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simpler. The availability of large amounts of data from many languages, in the form of linguistic corpora or databases, has increased our understanding of human language. By accessing large amounts of organized and searchable language data, linguists have been able to discern patterns and make generalizations that were otherwise not noticed. This methodology has spawned a new field of study, Dialectometry, founded by Hans Goebl, which quantitatively analyses data from linguistic atlases to identify and study spatial regularity hidden in the mass of data (Dialektometrie Projekt: www.dialectometry.com). Within the Romance realm, we find many innovative approaches to digital data storage and sharing, allowing for broader access to data. These include wikis (such Edisyn, the European Dialect Syntax wiki: http://www.dialectsyntax.org), atlases (such as the Atles interactiu de l’entonació del català: http://prosodia.upf.edu/atlesentonacio), databases (such as the Clitics of Romance Languages (CRL): http://crl. linguistics.stonybrook.edu), etc. Some of these resources require registration while others do not, and some focus on a particular aspect of grammar, while others are broader in their approach. For example, the Clitics of Romance Languages database (Repetti/Ordóñez 2011) provides free access to a large corpus (both audio and text) of a particular grammatical structure (verb + post-verbal pronouns) among endangered Romance languages spoken in France, Italy, and Spain. The corpus consists of utterances containing a verb + pronoun phrase, which, in the languages investigated, have unusual stress patterns. The search function is designed to be easy to use, so that searches with various parameters can be conducted, and we see that the interaction between clitics (syntax) and stress (phonology) can be richer and more complex than had been assumed. There is a downside to digital formats: they become obsolete when software is no longer supported or different formats are incompatible. This can lead to information being lost when the technology for accessing it is no longer available (Bird/Simons 2003), and the need for “a network of repositories and centers for safeguarding and using this documentation” (Krauss 1992, 8), which is largely lacking.

5 Conclusion The tragic story of the last speaker of Dalmatian is well-known: his death in an explosion in 1898 deprived us of invaluable information on Eastern Romance, language change, language contact, language obsolescence, etc. (Maiden 2016b). Will this be the fate of endangered Romance languages today? I would rather not end on such an ominous note. In fact, there is hope. The languages themselves, with their well-studied history and structures and with easy access to native speakers, however small their numbers might be, could provide clues for ways to avoid language endangerment and prevent language loss. For decades we have heard the tolling of the death knell of the great linguistic variety present in many Romance-speaking contexts, but the variety has

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persisted despite the odds. How could Faetar, a Francoprovençal dialect spoken deep in southern Italy, have survived for centuries in linguistic isolation (Nagy 2000)? How did Istro-Romanian, an Eastern Romance language spoken in Croatia, resist the onslaught of Western Romance and Slavic languages (Maiden 2016a)? Why has Veneto persisted among immigrant communities in Mexico, when other Italian emigrants abandoned their language (Sartor/Ursini 1983)? What these communities have experienced can be a clue to help endangered languages thrive in the twenty-first century and beyond. Perhaps it is time to look at these languages as hugely successful, having thrived for generations, centuries, even millennia, despite their numerically inferior status. (See Mufwene 2002 for a shift in focus in studies of endangered languages, and Moriarty 2011 for a shift in the roles of endangered languages.) Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Wendy Ayres-Bennett, Janice Carruthers, José Elías-Ulloa, Lorenzo Filipponio, Olivia Mignone, Chiara Repetti-Ludlow, and Emily Romanello for helpful comments during the preparation of this chapter.

6 Bibliography Anderson, Stephen R. (2016), Romansh (Rumantsch), in: Adam Ledgeway/Martin Maiden (edd.), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 169–184. Ascoli, Graziadio I. (1873), Saggi ladini, Archivio glottologico italiano 1, 1–556. Assini, Alicia (2014), New Resources for Endangered Languages, MultiLingual October/November 2014, 28–30, http://www.multilingual.com (last access 13.02.2018). Austin, Peter K. (2010), Current Issues in Language Documentation, in: Peter K. Austin (ed.), Language Documentation and Description, vol. 7, London, SOAS, 12–33. Austin, Peter K./McGill, Stuart (edd.) (2012), Endangered Languages, 4 vol., London, Routledge. Austin, Peter K./Sallabank, Julia (2011), Introduction, in: Peter K. Austin/Julia Sallabank (edd.), The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1–24. Barbiers, Sjef (2015), European Dialect Syntax: Towards an Infrastructure of Documentation and Research of Endangered Dialects, in: Mari C. Jones (ed.), Endangered Languages and New Technologies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 35–48. Barnes, Hilary (2009), A Sociolinguistic Study of Sustained Veneto-Spanish Bilingualism in Chipilo, Mexico, doctoral thesis, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania State University. Bird, Steven/Simons, Gary (2003), Seven Dimensions of Portability for Language Documentation and Description, Language 79, 557–582. Bouquiaux, Luc/Thomas, Jacqueline M. C. (1992), Studying and Describing Unwritten Languages, Dallas, SIL. Carageani, Gheorghe (2002), Suggerimenti per un approccio sociolinguistico dell’aromeno, in: Gheorghe Carageani (ed.), Studi linguistici sull’aromeno, Cluj-Napoca, Clusium, 32–46. Cerruti, Massimo/Regis, Riccardo (2015), The Interplay between Dialect and Standard: Evidence from Italo-Romance, in: Eivind Torgersen et al. (edd.), Language Variation. European Perspectives V, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 55–68. Chinellato, Paolo (2004), Disturbi di sintassi nell’afasia non fluente: Un’analisi linguistica dell’agrammatismo italiano e dialettale, doctoral thesis, Padova, Università di Padova.  

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Cravens, Thomas D. (2014), Italia linguistica and the “European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages”, Forum italicum 48, 202–218. Crowley, Terry (2007), Field Linguistics: A Beginner’s Guide, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Dorian, Nancy (ed.) (1992), Investigating Obsolescence, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Ethnologue (n. d.), https://www.ethnologue.com/endangered-languages (last access 13.02.2018). Gilliéron, Jules/Edmont, Edmond (1902–1910), Atlas linguistique de la France, Paris, Champion. Grinevald, Colette/Bert, Michel (2011), Speakers and Communities, in: Peter K. Austin/Julia Sallabank (edd.), The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 45–65. Guy, Gregory/Zilles, Ana M. S. (2008), Endangered Language Varieties: Vernacular Speech and Linguistic Standardization in Brazilian Portuguese, in: Kendall A. King et al. (edd.), Sustaining Linguistic Diversity: Endangered and Minority Languages and Language Varieties, Washington, DC, Georgetown University Press, 53–66. Haller, Hermann H. (1993), Una lingua perduta e ritrovata: L’italiano degli Italo-Americani, Firenze, La Nuova Italia. Hinskens, Frans/Auer, Peter/Kerswill, Paul (2005), The Study of Dialect Convergence and Divergence, in: Peter Auer/Frans Hinskens/Paul Kerswill (edd.), Dialect Change: Convergence and Divergence in European Languages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1–48. Hugo, Russell (2015), Endangered Languages, Technology and Learning: Immediate Applications and Long-Term Considerations, in: Mari C. Jones (ed.), Endangered Languages and New Technologies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 95–110. Huss, Leena (2008), Scandinavian Minority Language Policies in Transition, in: Kendall A. King et al. (edd.), Sustaining Linguistic Diversity: Endangered and Minority Languages and Language Varieties, Washington, DC, Georgetown University Press, 129–143. Iliescu, Maria/Melchior, Luca (2015), Friulano nel mondo, in: Sabine Heinemann/Luca Melchior (edd.), Manuale di linguistica friulana, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 338–363. Jaberg, Karl/Jud, Jakob (1928–1940), Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz, 8 vol., Zofingen, Ringier. Jones, Mari C. (2014), Jèrriais and Sercquiais Today, BBC Voices, 23 Sept. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ voices/multilingual/jerriais.shtml (last access 19.07.2015). Jones, Mari C. (ed.) (2015), Endangered Languages and New Technologies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Jones, Mari C./Bulot, Thierry (2009), Sociolinguistique de la langue normande (pluralité, normes, représentations), Paris, L’Harmattan. Krauss, Michael (1992), The World’s Languages in Crisis, Language 68, 4–10. Loporcaro, Michele (2013), Profilo linguistico dei dialetti italiani, Roma, Laterza. Mackay, Carolyn J. (1992), Language Maintenance in Chipilo: A Veneto Dialect in Mexico, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 96, 129–145. Maiden, Martin (2016a), Romanian, Istro-Romanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Aromanian, in: Adam Ledgeway/Martin Maiden (edd.), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 91–125. Maiden, Martin (2016b), Dalmatian, in: Adam Ledgeway/Martin Maiden (edd.), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 126–138. Moriarty, Máiréad (2011), New Roles for Endangered Languages, in: Peter K. Austin/Julia Sallabank (edd.), The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 446–458. Mosel, Ulrike (2006), Fieldwork and Community Language Workers, in: Jost Gippert/Nikolaus P. Himmelmann/Ulrike Mosel (edd.), Essentials of Language Documentation, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 67–85.

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Mufwene, Salikoko S. (2002), Colonisation, Globalisation, and the Future of Languages in the TwentyFirst Century, International Journal on Multicultural Societies 4, 162–193. Nagy, Naomi (2000), Faetar, München, Lincom Europa. NPR (2015), Eau Claire Researchers Working To Save Dying Walloon Language, http://www.wpr.org/ eau-claire-researchers-working-save-dying-walloon-language (last access 20.09.2017). Ó hIfearnáin, Tadhg (2008), Endangering Language Vitality through Institutional Development: Ideology, Authority, and Official Standard Irish in the Gaeltacht, in: Kendall A. King et al. (edd.), Sustaining Linguistic Diversity: Endangered and Minority Languages and Language Varieties, Washington, DC, Georgetown University Press, 113–128. Peyton, Joy Kreeft, et al. (2008), Heritage Language Education in the United States: A Need to Reconceptualize and Restructure, in: Kendall A. King et al. (edd.), Sustaining Linguistic Diversity: Endangered and Minority Languages and Language Varieties, Washington, DC, Georgetown University Press, 173–186. Pons, Cathy R. (1990), Language Death among Waldensians of Valdese, North Carolina, doctoral thesis, Bloomington, Indiana University. Pop, Sever (1950), La Dialectologie. Aperçu historique et méthodes d’enquêtes linguistiques, Louvain, Université de Louvain. Repetti, Lori (2014), Where Did All the Dialects Go? Aspects of the Influence of Italian on Dialects, Forum italicum 48, 219–226. Repetti, Lori/Ordóñez, Francisco (2011), Clitics of Romance Languages, http://crl.linguistics.stonybrook.edu (last access 13.02.2018). Romaine, Suzanne (2008), Linguistic Diversity, Sustainability, and the Future of the Past, in: Kendall A. King et al. (edd.), Sustaining Linguistic Diversity: Endangered and Minority Languages and Language Varieties, Washington, DC, Georgetown University Press, 7–21. Sallabank, Julia (2002), Writing in an Unwritten Language: The Case of Guernsey French, Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 6, 217–244. Sallabank, Julia (2010a), Language Endangerment: Problems and Solutions, eSharp (Special Issue: Communicating Change: Representing Self and Community in a Technological World), 50–87, http://www.gla.ac.uk/esharp (last access 08.07.2015). Sallabank, Julia (2010b), The Role of Social Networks in Endangered Language Maintenance and Revitalization: The case of Guernesiais in the Channel Islands, Anthropological Linguistics 52, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41330796 (last access 09.06.2015). Sallabank, Julia (2013), Attitudes to Endangered Languages: Identities and Policies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Sartor, Mario/Ursini, Flavia (1983), Cent’anni di emigrazione: Una comunità veneta sugli altipiani del Messico, Treviso, Grafiche Antiga. States of Jersey Statistics Unit (2012), Jersey Annual Social Survey 2012, https://www.gov.je/Site CollectionDocuments/Government%20and%20administration/R%20JASS2012%2020121204% 20SU.pdf (last access 19.07.2015). Tamburelli, Marco (n. d.), I dialetti d’Italia: Cronaca di una morte annunciata?, http://www.dialettando.com/articoli/detail_new.lasso?id=10470 (last access 10.07.2015). Tortora, Christina (2014), Heritage Nation vs Heritage Language: Towards a More Nuanced Rhetoric of “Heritage” in Italian Language Pedagogy, Forum italicum 48, 268–291. Tsunoda, Tasaku (2005), Language Endangerment and Language Revitalization, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter. Uguzzoni, Arianna (1971), Quantità fonetica e quantità fonematica nell’area dialettale frignanese, L’Italia dialettale 34, 115–136. UNESCO (n.d.), http://webarchive.unesco.org/20160809104708/http://www.unesco.org/new/en/ culture/themes/endangered-languages (last access 13.02.2018).  

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Ursini, Flavia (1988), Veneto e spagnolo a contatto: Il caso Chipilo, in: Elementi stranieri nei dialetti italiani. Atti del XIV convegno del CSDI, Pisa, Pacini, 217–228. Warren, Anthony Scott/Jennings, Geraint (2015), Allant contre vent et mathée: Jèrriais in the TwentyFirst Century, in: Mari C. Jones (ed.), Endangered Languages and New Technologies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 127–140. Williamson, Robert C. (1991), Three Romance Languages: Past and Present, in: Robert C. Williamson (ed.), Minority Languages and Bilingualism: Case Studies in Maintenance and Shift, Norwood, Ablex, 50–67. Wolfram, Walt (2008), Language Diversity and the Public Interest, in: Kendall A. King et al. (edd.), Sustaining Linguistic Diversity: Endangered and Minority Languages and Language Varieties, Washington, DC, Georgetown University Press, 187–202.

Francis Manzano

5 Romance dialectology: from the nineteenth century to the era of sociolinguistics Abstract: In the late-nineteenth century, Romance and French dialectology was at the forefront of the geographic study of language diversity, most notably producing a substantial body of descriptions of local languages, atlases and analyses. The related questions concerning “laws” of language change, the geographical distribution of languages and the way in which communities react to change have constituted the template for a rich taxonomy which can be used for other regions of the world. We must nonetheless concede that it has since marginalized itself, on account of its often repetitive approach to variation. Absent from major disciplinary debates, it was one of the victims of the spread of “general” linguistics in the mid-twentieth century; whereas sociolinguistics in the 1970s assimilated certain methodological principles from it. Today a number of questions arise. Has dialectology, in the way it is described in this chapter, had its day, or is it possible that the insights and methods it provides will be significant once again in the construction of a unified theory of langue and parole in society?  

Keywords: dialectology, linguistic atlas, sociolinguistics, Romance linguistics, language variation  

1 The emergence of dialectology In the Romance-speaking area, the following is well-known: the original language (Latin); its main developments (Vulgar Latin, regional varieties of Latin); and the resulting languages, both contemporary (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.) and older forms (Old French, Old Occitan, Old Spanish, etc.). This knowledge allowed comparative Romance linguistics to begin during the nineteenth century, based on the formalization of the overall diachronic and geographical state of affairs. Given that the most fully documented of these languages was French, a dialectological approach developed particularly in France and nearby – Belgium, Switzerland and the Alpine regions of Italy – i.e. the French-speaking area in its broadest sense. From 1807 to 1831, Charles Étienne Coquebert de Montbret, aided by his son Eugène, conducted one of a number of “pre-dialectological” surveys. Regional prefects had requested that the parable of the Prodigal Son from the Gospel of St Luke be “translated” into regional languages. These languages still seemed to be widely spoken, but were losing prestige. This undertaking was an “enquête de notables” (Bulot 1989, 290): “Parce qu’ils considèrent les dialectes de tous ordres comme objets https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-006

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d’étude voués à la disparition […], Charles et Eugène Coquebert de Montbret ont participé à une pratique sociale glottopolitique: la minoration linguistique”. In around 1850–1870, the field of philology (i.e. the comparative synchronic study of ancient texts) instigated a positivist system of “sound change laws”, and identified new entities, such as Francoprovençal (cf. Ascoli 1874). Bergounioux (1984, 10) notes that languages (“languesˮ) are thereby “objectivées, ‘pensées comme des choses’, c’est-à-dire séparées des sujets parlants”. Old French was foremost in scholarship at the time and dialectology recognized its powerful link to the diachronic development of French. The first university posts were chairs in the French language (Bergounioux 1984, 41) held by philologists, dialectologists and toponymists: Léon Clédat (Lyon, 1878), Antoine Thomas (Toulouse, 1884), Achille Luchaire (Bordeaux, 1884), Paul Meyer (École des Chartes, 1878), Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville (Collège de France, 1884), and Auguste Longnon (École Pratique des Hautes Études, 1884). Walther von Wartburg’s Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch: Eine Darstellung des galloromanischen Sprachschatzes (hereafter FEW 1922–2002, continued by ATILF), subsequently consolidated this fundamental link between the French language and dialectal varieties. Described by its title as a French “etymological dictionary” derived from a “compendium of Gallo-Romance vocabulary”, its influence would be considerable. Although it has since fallen somewhat into obscurity, the pan-Romance remit of Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke’s (1911) Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch would also prove to be important. Around 1880, the French Republic instigated a voluntarist policy of “francization” through compulsory secular education. As a result, the demise of rural varieties, the patois, was deemed inevitable and their study was identified as urgent. Picoche (1973, 11) highlights an “attitude d’esprit d’un historien ou d’un archéologue” amongst many dialectologists: most did not see themselves as saviours of the languages they observed. Gilliéron (1918, 258) noted that French was a “langue claire qui [satisfait] nos besoins modernes et dont la supériorité a été reconnue par les étrangers”, and that: “dans leur pauvreté génétique, dans leur misère actuelle, les parlers – nous n’en exceptons pas la langue illustrée par Mistral – ont recours à la grande pourvoyeuse qu’est la langue littéraire et leurs emprunts sont moins souvent peut-être les effets d’une servilité à son égard que ceux d’une nécessité causée par l’engrenage des lois phonétiques qui provoquent un désarroi lexical, auquel ils ne savent plus remédier autrement que par l’emprunt” (Gilliéron 1915, 13–14).

Belgium and Switzerland, where “l’idéologie de l’usage exclusif de la langue nationale ne régnait pas autant qu’en France” (Picoche/Marchello-Nizia 1989, 32), formed another birthplace of dialectology, as evidenced by the publication of the Glossaire des patois de la Suisse romande (Louis Gauchat, Jules Jeanjacquet and Ernest Tappolet, surveys from 1899 onwards), which would later influence William Labov and the field of social dialectology (Labov 1976, 231, 234). Dialectology thus initially saw itself as complementary to general theories of Romance linguistics. Academics working on Romance languages were assisted by

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young teachers and intellectuals commissioned to conduct fieldwork. Working on “la strate la plus négativement marquée”, the dialectologists were affected by scientific “handicaps” (Bergounioux 1984, 27–28). They trained themselves, often in phonetics, either prior to collecting data or “on the job”, and had no great pretensions to the status of linguist. The leading form of linguistic science, comparative and historical, was the affair of “great” scholars: Friedrich Diez, Gaston Paris, Paul Meyer, Antoine Meillet. Dialectologists were thus more akin to the foot soldiers of Romance linguistics, an association which would frequently recur and eventually become attached to the field. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, an increasing number of local and regional studies were published. Picoche (1973) notes that this trend to produce monographs continued into the twentieth century. They brought together language, local culture and stories, often under the banner of “folklore”, producing a treasuretrove of in vivo observations that allowed both Romance linguistics and general linguistics to become established as social sciences firmly rooted in fieldwork. The term “dialecte” (from the Greek dialektos, “regional variety” of ancient Greek) is first used by Ronsard (1550, Odes, Suravertissement, according to the TLFi). He uses it without any pejorative connotations, as for example, in his Abrégé de l’art poëtique François (1565): “Tu sçauras dextrement choisir et approprier à ton œuvre les mots les plus significatifs des dialectes de nostre France, quand mesmement tu n’en auras point de si bons ny de si propres en ta nation; et ne se faut soucier si les vocables sont ‘Gascons, Poictevins, Normans, Manceaux, Lionnois’, ou d’autres païs, pourveu qu’ils soient bons et que proprement ils signifient ce que tu veux dire”.

Its French derivatives dialectal, dialectologie and dialectologue first came into use between 1870 and 1900 (TLFi). Dialectology was first taught in 1882, when Gilliéron took up a chair in Romance dialectology at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. With the help of school teachers, the German linguist Georg Wenker had also undertaken a similar “indirect” survey, its results published as the Sprachatlas des deutschen Reiches (1881), later expanded in 1926. However, the Atlas linguistique de la France was to have an entirely different impact. During Gilliéron’s era, the term géographie linguistique was frequently used; in the twentieth century, it was occasionally replaced by géolinguistique. The present chapter opts for “dialectology”, as this term immediately posits the field as a “science of dialects” that aims both to gather and describe geographic variation in Romance languages, with the double objective of mapping out the different languages in the field and establishing the sociogeographical and historical coherence of this remarkable family of languages.

2 The Atlas linguistique de la France (ALF) The first large “direct” linguistic atlas, the ALF was conceived towards the end of the nineteenth century and compiled and published between 1902 and 1910 (with a

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supplement for Corsica, 1914–1915). Several periodicals dedicated to Gallo-Romance patois also emerged around this time: Revue des patois gallo-romans (Gilliéron/ Rousselot, 1887–1892, 5 issues); Revue des patois (Clédat, 1887–1888); Bulletin de la société des parlers de France (1893–1899). However, none of these titles could truly rival the two pillars of French and Romance linguistics, Romania, established in 1872, and Société des anciens textes français, established in 1875.

2.1 Compiling the atlas The ALF visited 639 points of enquiry, eliciting 1920 items, resulting in the same number of maps. All of these maps have been made available online by the University of Tirol (Austria) and by the recent Cartodialect/Géodialect projects (France). The data were gathered from surveys conducted in the field. The sole fieldworker, Edmond Edmont (1849–1926), covered an area stretching from Belgium to the Pyrenees and Brittany to northern Italy, despite numerous material difficulties requiring him to travel using trains and bicycles. Moreover, Edmont was not a linguist but a businessman who had found his way to dialectology just as the geologist Gilliéron (1854–1926) had done. Both exemplify the questionable scientific status of dialectology mentioned above, but also highlight the ambition and extraordinary abilities of its earliest practitioners. Edmont was well-acquainted with the territory of the langue d’oïl (the northern half of France). Picoche (1973, 17) has deemed his Lexique Saint-Polois (1897) to be a “chef-d’œuvre du genre”. But he was required to familiarize himself with more “exotic” linguistic varieties such as the langue d’oc and Catalan (southern regions of France). To prepare, he consulted those dictionaries and monographs that were already available. Marie-Rose Simoni-Aurembou (1936–2012) reflects on the GilliéronEdmont partnership, a flexible one because Edmont was free to carry out fieldwork and displayed initiative; Gilliéron admired his exceptional ear, which he acknowledged was superior to his own (Simoni-Aurembou 2002, 66–68).

2.2 Criticism of the ALF 2.2.1 Quality of surveys and transcriptions: could objectivity be an illusion? Retrospectively, errors in transcription and even fabrications have been highlighted (Lerond 1968; 1970; 1973; Giacomo-Marcellesi 1973, 92–99). The founders of the ALW thus noted the lack of various details (cf. Remacle 1951), later expanded on by Goosse (1957, 177). Gino Bottiglioni’s (1887–1963) criticisms are even harsher. This episode shows that it is misguided to assume that collecting data through fieldwork is a purely internal and “scientific” process, which assumes this supposed objectivity to be a hallmark of dialectology. In the mid-1920s, Bottiglioni began his Atlante linguistico

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etnografico italiano della Corsica (ALEIC, 11 volumes, 1201 maps, 49 locations). Publication began in 1932 and was complemented by associated publications on Corsican dialectology and folklore. This was a response to the ALF-Corse (799 maps and 44 locations) produced in 1911–1912, published 1914–1915. With this in mind, GiacomoMarcellesi (1973) highlights Edmont’s inability to master certain vowel qualities in Sotta, southern Corsica, which might subsequently have morphological implications. However, she also acknowledges the suggestion of his particularly keen ear (cf 2.1 above), especially where consonants are concerned. Edmont was thus able to identify retroflexes (such as BELLA > [ˈbeḍḍa]), despite not always being able to place them, at a time when knowledge of such phonemes was limited. There are also errors in relation to the distribution of voiced and voiceless intervocalic consonants, such as [ˈpɔgu] instead of [ˈpɔku]. All parts of language appear to be affected: prosody, morphology, syntax and even lexicon. Calques and borrowings from Italian (such as [aˈdɛsu] < It. adesso, map 1275, MAINTENANT), and from French (such as [ˈlanupa ˈsatu] < L’AN PASSÉ, map 110) are numerous in Corsican due to pressure from both languages; from French (a result of the island’s annexation in 1768) and, in the longer term, from Italian. Pisa and Genoa had colonized the island in the Middle Ages, and central Italian had become a reference language, with the elite being educated in Tuscan even as late as the nineteenth century (Ottavi 2008). Dalbera-Stefanaggi (2002), compiler of the NALC (Carpitelli 2009), has since underlined certain qualities of the survey and Edmont’s work in this regard. However, for Bottiglioni, Edmont’s errors underscore his inability to gain an “inside” perspective on the language: he suggests that the Corsicans misled the Frenchman, a stranger to the island, by telling him what he wanted to hear. In any case, map 110 of the ALF shows French and Corsican to be in contact, the island’s language system already porous around 1900. Such facts can be used to defend or criticize Edmont’s methods. Bottiglioni’s ALEIC provides “corrections”, but in truth also reveals what might be thought of as a fascist linguistic science that believed the French to have no place in Corsica as, from the perspective of the Italian authorities, the island was Italian. The adjective italiano in the title of the ALEIC is not neutral and, as Pellegrinetti/Rovere (2004 III-C, Sur les chemins de l’irrédentisme) highlight, Bottiglioni was part of an irredentist campaign by Italian and Corsican intellectuals who, with their slogan “Corsica terra italiana”, sought political reunification with Italy. The introduction to the ALEIC notes that: “Il est désormais reconnu que les huit cents cartes consacrées aux dialectes de la Corse (par l’ALF), non seulement n’atteignent pas le but que s’étaient proposé Gilliéron et Edmont, mais elles sont bien loin de représenter les vraies conditions des dialectes de la Corse, qui ne pouvaient être provoquées par un questionnaire français et par un investigateur habitué à des formes linguistiques bien dissemblables aux formes foncièrement italiennes du langage corse”.

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At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was equally possible to detect hostility – at times explicitly so – towards German science. Several scholars highlighted a disproportionate German influence on Romance and French linguistics at this time. Bergounioux (1984, 36) cites Numa Fustel de Coulanges, director of the École Normale Supérieure from 1880, who observed that: “Toute science chez eux fut une arme contre la France. Ils inventèrent l’insoutenable théorie des races latines pour donner à leur ambition dynastique les faux dehors d’une querelle de races. Ils firent servir la philologie et l’ethnologie à démontrer que nos provinces les plus françaises étaient leur propriété légitime”.

The connection with the regular wars between France and Germany between 1870 and 1939 is clear here, at a time when colonialist conflict was also escalating in the Mediterranean – leading to the first “Moroccan crisis” in 1905–1906 – and in subSaharan Africa. Germany’s efforts to secure influence in Morocco caused great alarm amongst the British in neighbouring Gibraltar. The situation was eventually resolved by consolidating French and Spanish power in Morocco, and conceding part of the Congo to Germany in November 1911. How could scientific research remain immune to the realities of the outside world? Le Dû (2011, 8) indeed suggests that the ALF “a été conçu dans le cadre de la revanche”. Nor did field linguists remain immune to the situation. In 1906, the German academic Bernhard Schädel’s (1878–1926) keen interest in Catalan dialectology (1908; 1915) prompted him to undertake enquiries in Roussillon based on a more sharply delineated area than before (see Figure 4b, section 4.3.2.1). During the summer of 1906, he improved knowledge of the Catalan-Occitan border, conducting research alongside Antoni Alcover (1862–1932), who was later compiler of a famous Catalan dictionary (1951). He was accused of spying; for example, in Formiguères (Capcir). With Schädel’s encouragement, another researcher, Fritz Holle, undertook a largely “indirect” survey but ceased his investigations in 1907, explaining to Alcover that he too had been repeatedly taken for a spy when carrying out fieldwork between Leucate and Corbières in the Aude region (Holle 1908). Those in Narbonne were astonished that a French speaker wished to conduct research on patois, and found it difficult to believe. According to Costa (2009a; 2009b), this prompted Alcover’s assessment of the French Midi: “És ridicul que en tot alemany vegen sempre un espia!” (‘It’s ridiculous that in every German they always see a spy!’). This did not prevent Schädel from encouraging further research, notably that of Fritz Krüger (1889–1974), whose 1912 thesis remains a key reference for this region of the Romance-speaking area. Any literature that theorizes the ideal fieldworker profile, or the nature and precision of transcriptions, demonstrates that subjective opinion is fundamental and that decisions can thus be extremely variable. It is a weakness of dialectology that it does not recognize this sufficiently.  

 

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2.2.2 Who should gather data? As Marcellesi/Gardin (1974, 216) stress, “de l’idée que si l’on envoyait vingt dialectologues dans le même endroit on obtiendrait vingt résultats différents, Gilliéron avait posé comme principes: l’enquêteur unique; l’enquêteur non spécialiste; l’enquêteur non patoisant”. The lone field linguist is required to grasp “reality” as though capturing an instant, objective “image” that holds the truth. However, “on pourrait imaginer que, en posant le principe de l’unicité de l’enquêteur, J. Gilliéron théorisait l’impossibilité où il se trouvait d’en employer plusieurs” (ibid.). Pop (1950, II, 1145) examines the advantages of both approaches. While outsider field linguists cannot always distinguish specific phonemes, their auditory “neutrality” nonetheless permits the identification of particularities of which “native” researchers would be unaware. Over the years, however, the principe de l’enquêteur natif (Bottiglioni, NALF) would become the norm.

2.2.3 From whom should data be gathered? The choice of informants (or “witnesses”) is a source of constant debate. For the ALF, peasants and schoolmasters, young and old, men and women were interviewed alone and together. This was the result of whatever opportunities were available and/or constituted evidence of a period when local varieties were used by every member of the community of speakers, including schoolmasters and clergy who were already also using standard French. It was the First World War that led to the introduction in significant quantities of ordinary French amongst conscripts who had survived the slaughter of the trenches and thus brought the language back to their villages. After this point, the idea of a stable patois-speaking community, which underpins the ALF, would disintegrate. As Chaurand (1924–2009) notes, “les temps ont changé: les parlers vernaculaires sont en recul, tandis que les exigences de la synchronie sont devenues plus strictes” (1972, 189). It would fall to the NALF and sociolinguistics to study more effectively the variables of age, gender and socio-economic status, which are of unequal influence when personal experience, profession, the decline of the patois and the growth of “national” languages are taken into account. Fifty years after the compilation of the ALF, the notion of an informant representative of an entire linguistic community was definitely obsolete.

2.2.4 Order of maps A linguistic atlas is thus a collection of specimens, an alphabetic macro-dictionary compiled over some years from snapshots of the territory surveyed. The ALF was criticized for this. To go from Abeille (Map 1) to Aboyer (Map 2) illustrates an artificial

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situation, especially for rural dwellers who must have wondered where they were being led. This gave rise to the idea that questions should be asked in relation to categories of societal organization, ensuring that informants would cover all areas: farm work for peasants, fishing and coastal vocabulary for sailors, and so on. Louis Michel (1896–1968) is a forgotten representative of this type of dialectology, foundational for sociolinguistics, that focused on specific technical vocabulary. His works (1958; 1964) examine the transfer of words used in the ports of the LanguedocRoussillon coastline. Hadjadj (1983, 19–20), introducing his studies of the Auvergne region, recalls Michel’s simple observation that “la dialectologie est en puissance la plus sociologique des disciplines linguistiques”.

3 The influence of the ALF 3.1 Imitations, extensions, adaptations The existence of France’s colonial empire meant it was inevitable that research would turn to Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. André Basset’s 1929 doctoral thesis, Études de géographie linguistique en Kabylie, is a rare example of a dialectological approach to northern Africa, which focused on the study of Berber. Later, the development of dialectological projects in the area would be rare given tensions surrounding politics and identity that proved an obstacle to fieldwork. The only exception to date is the Atlas linguistique de la Tunisie. We know very little about the progress of this atlas but the reader can refer to articles by Salah Mejri (2011), Mosbah Saïd and Soundous Ben Hariz Ouenniche which are available online, and a special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, The Sociolinguistics of Tunisia, edited by Sayahi (2011), is also of interest (cf. also Barkat-Defradas/Motte-Florac 2011). Sever Pop (1950, II) details the numerous projects undertaken outside the Romance-speaking area. Pop/Pop (1959) also provide a list of Gilliéron’s many students and disciples, most of whom were foreign. Those taught by Gilliéron include Karl Jaberg, Albert Dauzat (1877–1955), and many more. This confirms the remarkable impact of dialectology at the time.

3.1.1 A Gilliéron-inspired tradition? Sever Pop (1901–1961), himself a student of Gilliéron, produced the first part of the Atlasul linguistic român (ALR I, 1938). We can think of this as direct influence from Gilliéron (approval and continuation). Yet the ALR also contains certain radicalizations, just as Saussure’s students would radicalize the theories of their teacher. Thus Pop tends to develop the idea of a dialectology that would rather be inclined towards the authentic and unquestionable. This is a typical motif in dialectology, which thus

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distances itself from language change and linguistic realities by its obsession with a handful of “good” and “genuine” informants who must be neither too old (Pop speaks of informants with no teeth and who lack “de patience et de spontanéité”), nor too young, as young people speak “patois mitigés”, “ont une tendance accentuée vers l’innovation et sont fortement influencés par l’école”. In a similar vein, Pop (1950, II, 950) opines on the work of Le Roux (1874–1975) in Brittany (ALBB, 1927) and the latter’s preference for “native” informants: “D’après Le Roux, on obtiendrait de meilleurs résultats si chaque parler était étudié par un indigène, doué d’une bonne oreille et capable de noter le plus exactement possible. Un deuxième enquêteur contrôlerait celui-ci. On devrait questionner plusieurs sujets d’âge différent et épier, sans qu’ils s’en doutent, les gens qui parlent patois”.

3.1.2 Jud, Jaberg and the Wörter und Sachen method With Jakob Jud (1882–1952), Karl Jaberg (1877–1958) and their Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz (AIS, 1928–1940, based on research beginning in 1908 and covering Italy and southern Switzerland), the debt to the ALF is acknowledged. However, it diverges in its ethnographic leanings, in what we might call its “empathetic” tendencies today. Jaberg makes numerous insightful remarks on the topic of Romance dialectology and its goals. Pop (1950, I, 560ss.) quotes an AIS researcher, Scheuermeier, who explains that the questionnaire: “doit être rédigé avec un grand sens pratique et la connaissance de la pensée et de l’âme du peuple […]. Les questions ne doivent pas sentir la théorie; il ne faut pas aborder des choses que le peuple ne connaît pas; il faut éviter des phrases qui ont été construites dans la tête d’un intellectuel, mais qui ne sortiront pas de la bouche de l’homme simple. Il ne faut pas demander des séries de mots qu’on range étymologiquement d’après l’intérêt qu’ils offrent à la phonétique historique (c’est le cas, ajoutons-nous, pour plusieurs monographies phonétiques). Les mots doivent être liés par le sens”.

Canobbio (2011) has recently noted Scheuermeier’s important creative role: along with the linguistic data he gathered, he also produced a remarkable collection of photographs, reproduced in two visually appealing books by Canobbio/Telmon (2007; 2008; see Figure 1). The link between the ALEIC and NALF and the theory of Wörter und Sachen (Rudolf Meringer, 1859–1931; Hugo Schuchardt, 1842–1927) is very clear. This approach can be summed up in a question posed by its founders: how can we write the history of words without writing the history of things?  

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Figure 1: Paul Scheuermeier with a shoemaker in Ostana (Canobbio 2011)  

3.1.3 Towards the south Antoni Griera (1887–1974) also borrowed and adapted ALF methods. For his Atlas lingüístic de Catalunya (ALC) he again depended on a single field linguist (himself, a native of the region and a Catalan speaker). He used informants of various ages and professions (one per location, aged 10–90, and largely male), a transcription system taken from the ALF, and a questionnaire inspired by the Atlas linguistique de la Corse, but enriched and made more detailed. The survey (carried out between 1912 and 1922) focused on 101 locations, with priority given to larger towns, and produced 1276 maps. Griera innovated with his decision to use “indirect” questioning that aimed not to name his objective directly. He used Catalan during his enquiries, a fact that highlights its vitality and, by extension, the weak influence of Castilian Spanish, even in towns. This again distinguishes the ALC from the ALF. Walther von Wartburg (cited in Pop 1950, I, 372) queried Griera’s choice of so-called “intelligent” informants. For him, Griera’s findings were skewed by a patois that was “trop embelli ou trop modernisé”. Wartburg argued in favour of grouping informants according to age, because he believed that behind such differences among informants lay patterns of language change, an idea later encountered in Labovian sociolinguistics. These remarks and others would lead to new approaches in Catalonia, such as

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those of the ALDC, conceived by Antoni Badia i Margarit and Germà Colón and then directed by Joan Veny. In the Catalan-language context, it is effectively possible to see how much changed in four decades: in this instance four atlases (ALC, ALPI, ALPO, ALDC) were involved, which is very unusual. Joan Veny (1978, 7–37), in La geolingüística als Països Catalans, outlines the developments that have occurred since 1912.

Figure 2: Isoglosses showing “yodization” in Catalonia (Veny 1978) Two similar zones are delineated by nine isoglosses, but these frequently intersect unsystematically. Only in the far north can a “bundle of isoglosses” be identified. The arrow indicates movement resulting from the colonization of the Balearic Islands from the continent.  

A “historico-atlantographic” approach became possible both in the French context (from the ALF to the NALF) and in that of Catalan. This made it possible to focus on certain diachronic facts for which the atlases, established on the basis of various available historical corpora, could provide interesting visualizations. For example, two maps by Veny (Figure 2) focus on isoglosses demarcating “yodization” (Catalan iodització), from a secondary Romance group (e.g. APĬC(U)LA > [əˈbejə] or PALEA > [ˈpajə]), whereas the Latin geminate (LL) became [ʎ] (e.g. GALLU > [gaʎ]). It was therefore expected that fieldwork would attest clearly differentiated pronunciations according to the etymon. However, the situation is often confused, with various fluctuations possible, such as [ˈpaʎə] – [ˈpajə], [ˈfuʎə] – [ˈfujə], etc. As Veny explains in detail, these  

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variants can be traced to an unclear situation in the medieval period when sociolinguistic representations played a significant role in dialect change. Veny is thus interested in the influence of the city of Barcelona regarding words that would be expected to contain [j]: the bundles of isoglosses appear to indicate a progressive valorization/increase in [ʎ], starting with words pronounced “à la barcelonaise” in the twentieth century (of the type [ˈpaʎə]) among the upper classes, young speakers, and so on, “yodized” pronunciation being stigmatized as outdated and a peasant practice. It is all the more interesting that some decades earlier, such fluctuations had been similarly widespread in Barcelona itself. This work, then, was a sign of a new turn towards sociolinguistics, as the spread of [ʎ] seemed to be linked principally to the normativizing spread of Catalan and the ways in which this was represented there.

3.2 Opposition to the ALF 3.2.1 The ethnographic tendency Other atlases took very different approaches. The ALEIC has been mentioned, but it is fair to say that in its opposition to the ALF’s approach, it developed new ideas which subsequently spread: respect for what the informant says and for their paraphrases, the study of the proverbs and “folk” customs of a region, the use of illustrations, a thematic structure built for example around “birth”, “marriage”, “death”, “rural labour”, etc. (cf. the 20 notional categories and their effects in the introduction to the ALEIC). In this way, the ethnographic dimension, also appearing elsewhere (cf. AIS, 3.1.2), was established, and would enrich the field.

3.2.2 Pointillism, phonetics and phonology A single volume of the unusual ALPI was published in 1962. It was based on surveys instigated by Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1869–1968) and carried out in 1931–1935 and 1947–1954. The research was undertaken by very competent linguists: Tomás Navarro Tomás (1884–1979), Francesc de Borja Moll (1903–1991), Manuel Sanchis Guarner (1911–1981). The atlas, however, appears to lag behind in comparison to developments in linguistics in the 1960s, for example, in respect of advances in structural phonology. Here, “surpassing” the ALF resulted in overly pointillist transcriptions. Even today, it is necessary to study the ALPI’s transcription system in advance before being able to consult the maps. Is this the right approach, even taking into account the structure of this region’s Romance languages? As Veny (1978, 35) highlights, there are 26 possible realizations of the sound (e) in the ALPI. The Catalan area was thus the source of two extremes: the transcriptions of the ALPI, described as “impressionnistes” by Veny, and the “très simplifiées” transcrip-

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tions of the ALPO (see below), which, focusing on langue rather than parole, are of a quasi-phonological nature. Where is the balance to be found between these two kinds of approach? This question is typical of dialectology. Is there a true advantage to making transcriptions more complicated, and if so, why not gradually come to the conclusion that there are as many “languages” as there are idiolects? On the other hand, what is the real value of a phonological atlas to the study of variation? Irresolvable contradiction.

3.3 The legacy of Gilliéron and Edmont For Brun-Trigaud/Le Berre/Le Dû (2005), the ALF is “un monument irremplaçable, rare témoignage d’une civilisation rurale millénaire, de type oral, qui achève de s’éteindre aujourd’hui”. What, then, should we retain from it?

3.3.1 A monument to linguistic diversity First and foremost, its role as an immense treasury of pre-“globalization” Romance. Discourse around “endangered languages and cultures” dates from the end of the twentieth century. Romance dialectology pre-empted this, even if most dialectologists believed the demise of local languages to be normal. Numerous regions across the globe would today be far better off with even a small proportion of what was documented in the Romance-speaking world.

3.3.2 Strength of Romance linguistics Dialectology has been a foundation of the explanatory strength of Romance linguistics. The vast number of forms gathered are connected to Latin by infinitely complex bundles of diachronic threads, marking both similarity (i.e. common features of neighbouring languages) and difference (divergent aspects). Nineteenth-century “laws” of phonetic evolution were thus amended and fine-tuned on the ground by dialectologists, the foot soldiers who ceaselessly worked to increase the rigour of the discipline.

3.3.3 “Laws” and their limits Based on the combination of known “laws”, a given signifier should be found in a given place. This was the central principle of the Neogrammarians (Junggrammatiker) that dialectologists were to query. The latter demonstrated that “accidents” are frequent, even ordinary, and that they require explanations with reference to history

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and society; in short, in terms of anthropology. By asking “why” there are such exceptions, Gilliéron transformed dialectology into a science that transcended mere data collection. An insistence on the relative nature of the laws of linguistic evolution, counterbalanced with multiple historical, political, geographic and social arguments, became one of the heuristic principles of dialectology. Pierre Guiraud (1912–1983) provided several illustrations of this explanatory power in one of his works (Guiraud 1978), through analysis of the words for abeille in the Gallo-Romance area, and words for coq in Gascony (based on the ALF), and by observing the different developments of Latin initial /k/ in Normandy (according to Wartburg).

3.3.4 Dialectology: an external, sociolinguistic approach Dialectology establishes the existence of a linguistic community that both transcends and connects its speakers and in which the system of language must remain functional. Tensions produced by a language’s own evolutionary dynamics are resolved slowly and subtly. “Verbal pathology” (the notion of a language weakened by its own dynamics) and the “verbal therapeutics” that follow are attested in the Gallo-Romance area, where there is an excess of signifiers, challenging André Martinet’s principe de discrétion in various ways. According to Gilliéron (1918, see Figure 3 below), although signifiers decrease in form due to a tendency towards monosyllables, communities create substitutes:  

a) through morphological reconstruction and diffusion within the community. Thus APĬS-EM, which would have become é, a, ès, and others, was progressively replaced by APĬCULA and then reintroduced into the changing linguistic system. The original forms retreated to peripheral areas (where they were found in 1900); b) through metaphoric substitution (such as mouche à miel) or various other types of mixed solutions (mouchette, avette, essette); c) through borrowing. In Old French, abeille is ef (or e or ep), written forms that reflect the phonetic erosion of the langue d’oïl. This persisted only until the late-thirteenth century. At this point (1268, according to TLFi), abeille appeared as a borrowing from the langue d’oc.

Gilliéron thus reasserted the strength of the link between diachronic change and dialectology in Romance, demonstrating that dialectology certainly benefitted from work in the diachronic tradition such as philology and glossary compilation, but at the same time reinvigorated historical lexicology and linguistics. According to Picoche (1973, 11–12), certain “bévues” committed by Edmont in the abeille map, and even some invented forms, mean that “dans ces conditions la démonstration s’effondre, et l’ouvrage ne présente plus qu’un intérêt historique”. Nonetheless, its overall impact holds, affirming and proving that society is of constant influence on the balance of a language system: this is the starting point for sociolinguistics. Picoche (ibid.) additionally concedes that Edmont’s “œuvre dépassait de très loin tout ce qui avait été fait précédemment dans ce domaine”. We can thus avoid

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Figure 3: Names for the bee in France in the early-twentieth century (Guiraud 1978, modified by the author) This is a very simplified map, but serves well as an example. In the ALF, Occitan in fact shows [aˈbeʎo] and similar forms, rather than abeille, which is a French-based transcription. The Francoprovençal area includes forms such as [aˈveʎa], [aˈveʎe], and various others, generally marked by the voicing of the intervocalic consonant, /p/ > /b/ > /v/; here they are amalgamated as aveille. To see the distribution of forms in full detail, refer directly to map 1 of the ALF.  

assessments such as that of Giacomo-Marcellesi (1973, 98) – “désormais l’ALF n’est plus qu’un monument historique” – in favour of Séguy’s (1973, 68) more nuanced view according to which “l’ALF n’était pas exempt de lacunes et de défauts. Chose bien pardonnable à une innovation totale et de cette ampleur”.

4 The era of the Nouvel Atlas linguistique de la France (NALF): continuity and renewal 4.1 NALF sources Albert Dauzat, one of Gilliéron’s successors, called for a Nouvel Atlas linguistique de la France or an ALF by region that would compensate for certain limitations of the

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ALF (NALF 1942). Data collection in some areas had already begun, and would continue in others during the German occupation. After the Liberation, institutional research activities resumed (with the support of the CNRS) and the publication of the atlases began in the 1950s. This concluded at the end of the twentieth century, meaning that some dialectologists had to find alternative ways to publish or abandon plans for publication entirely. For example, Jean Le Dû published his atlas of western Brittany in the region, in Brest; Brigitte Horiot has not yet succeeded in publishing the remaining 200 maps of the ALO. Certain plans are still being drawn up: Patrice Brasseur plans to produce a fifth volume of the ALN; Jean-Claude Bouvier a fourth volume of the ALPr; and Guylaine Brun-Trigaud aims to edit volume 3 of Simoni-Aurembou’s ALIFO. But dialectology no longer has its illustrious defenders. Recall Gaston Paris’s (1839–1903) defence, cited as a frontispiece to the ALF: “Cette moisson est à peine commencée sur notre sol, et déjà pour plus d’un coin on a laissé passer la saison favorable; les épis sont arrachés ou du moins bien éclaircis. Que tous les travailleurs de bonne volonté se mettent à l’œuvre; que chacun se fasse un devoir et un honneur d’apporter au grenier commun, bien drue et bien bottelée, la gerbe qu’a produite son petit champ” (G. Paris, Les Parlers de France, 1888).  

4.2 Methodological changes All authors and teams of investigators were granted some latitude for manoeuvre, but the NALF can in general be characterized by: (i) the greater density of survey areas. For example, in the Aube region, the ALCB focuses on 26 locations of enquiry in contrast to the seven of the ALF. In Ille-etVilaine, the ALBRAM increased the number of locations from nine to 24, and so on. The ALPO, an extreme case, surveyed all 382 communes within its area (of which 299 were Catalan-speaking, in both France and Spain, and 83 were Occitan). This practice remains exceptional, however; (ii) the involvement of specialists in local languages. Three examples are Pierre Gardette (1906–1973), who was born in the Rhône valley and knew the survey area of the ALLy well, Henri Guiter (1909–1994), from Vallespir (Pyrénées-Orientales), and Jean Séguy (1914–1973), from Toulouse and the Pyrenees. Their collaborators were also largely from the same regions. This aimed to avoid the approximations of the ALF. Knowledge of locations also meant questions could be categorized accordingly. This was done by Guiter, who increased the density of the mapping and decreased the number of maps; (iii) the decision to work frequently in teams of two or more investigators with a diverse skill-set. With the support of the CNRS, positions and tasks were created for researchers, specialists, and so on. Until the 1980s, teams of experts were formed around scholars such as those mentioned above;

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(iv) the fact that around a set of shared questions (to allow comparison with ALF or other atlases), new fields of enquiry and research directions were developed: vegetation, rural life, farming techniques, and so on, according to the same logic as the ecolinguistic and ethnographic trends mentioned above (cf. 3.2.1). Chaurand (1972, 179) discusses very clearly, and Fossat (1974) highlights the holistic approach of Jean Séguy: “naturaliste, botaniste, pionnier de l’ethnoscience…[qui] a instauré la dialectologie dans l’ordre de la science humaine”; (v) development in research methods. Direct questions posed in the researcher’s language (for example, comment dites-vous une vache? le petit de la vache?, etc.) put pressure on the informants. It was recognized that this needed to change, and Griera did so (cf. 3.1.3). Chaurand (1972) provides a number of recommendations: questionnaires with blanks to fill in, chalk boards, herbariums, photographs, and more. Any influence on the informant was to be avoided, even as pressure from dominant languages was becoming more obvious and in the 1950s–1970s many French forms had already infiltrated the patois; (vi) improved transcription methods due to the expertise of regionally-based researchers and the possibility of making recordings which could be played back. Thousands of hours of recordings from around the country became available and continue to be archived to this day (cf. Fossat 2011; Carton 2011). In this way, new sounds and phonemes can appear and enrich the sociolinguistic perspective. In Upper Brittany there is a specific pronunciation of -er infinitive endings that is usually transcribed as [ë] (CANTARE type > Fr. chanter [ʃãte], Gallo [ʃãtë]). This is a recognized feature (cf. Chauveau 1989 and ALBRAM) and a sociolinguistic marker fundamental to the identification of the region, in contrast with Lower Brittany and Normandy (cf. Manzano 1996; 2003). The geographic domain of Gallo also illustrates the way in which dialectology and sociolinguistics complemented each other between 1990–2000, at the time when the NALF was nearing completion (Manzano 2007).

4.3 Dialectological studies: key results, subsequent developments, and criticisms Four ways of characterizing such studies can be distinguished clearly from each other:

4.3.1 The ethnographic perspective The ethnographic perspective in dialectology (3.2.1) is usually akin to a curatorial practice that freezes objects in time and puts on display what is about to become extinct without any solid roots in general ethnographic or ethnological methods. Claiming an “ethnographic” perspective is thus very often a logical fallacy. Certain

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atlases (e.g. ALLy) justify this approach with illustrations and commentary that bear out the view of a rural society that has disappeared today. The ALBRAM, too, produced a series of appendices, maps, and paraphrases, relating to the plant species and agricultural practices of its conservative region. However, it is often necessary to go beyond atlases to find studies that are genuinely both ethnographic and dialectological, such as these three beacons of a rich tradition: René Lepelley (1925–2011, Les Pommes en Normandie, 1973), and, for the central Pyrenees, both Jean Séguy (Les Noms de plantes, 1953) and Alfons T. Schmitt (La Terminologie pastorale, 1934). Despite their obvious affinities, dialectology and ethnolinguistics did not join up. The disciplines remained almost completely sealed off from each other: Franz Boas (1858–1942), Edward Sapir (1884–1939), Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) and their disciples were regarded from the greatest possible distance by the dialectologists. Bernard Pottier was one of the few to envisage ways of developing a combined theoretical position capable of opposing the diktats of so-called “general” linguistics. This was during the 1970s when ethnolinguistics was being swallowed up by “generalism”, the former becoming a turnkey method for the synchronic structural description of exotic languages. Almost imperceptibly, linguists consequently became embedded within two distinct groups: on the one hand, those engaged in diachronic linguistics or dialectology, studying dead or moribund languages; and on the other, ethnolinguists researching unwritten Amerindian, African, Austronesian, and Oceanian languages. In between, to paraphrase Dalbera (2013, cf. also 5.2 below), were the “vraies langues”: English, French, and so on, which were in fact becoming the foundations of globalization.

4.3.2 Language boundaries and variation (qualitative and quantitative approaches) With different regional atlases, it is easier to distinguish languages and language varieties, sometimes even at village level. However, language boundaries are difficult both to theorize and to identify on the ground.

4.3.2.1 Qualitative approaches The first methodological option is a qualitative one. A boundary can be assumed to exist when isoglosses accumulate in a certain area. Where such accumulation is dense, we speak of “bundles of isoglosses”. We can see an example in Gerhard Rohlfs’s (1892–1986) map of Central Italy where a bundle in the north distinguishes “centro-meridional” Italian from northern, or Gallo-Italian, varieties. This is an area often called the “La Spezia-Rimini line” (Rohlfs 1937, Figure 4a). Other frontiers can similarly be identified: the “Joret line”, which crosses Normandy (cf. Joret 1883; Lepelley 1978); the upper section of the Garonne, which separates Gascon from Languedocian (cf. Bec 1968; Rohlfs 1935, see Figure 5); the Ebro, which sets apart Central Catalan, and so on.  

 

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Figure 4a: Isoglosses in central Italy (Rohlfs 1937) Note in particular the isoglosses that divide the western and eastern parts of the Romance-speaking area, e.g. isoglosses 1 (voiced intervocalic consonants in the north, voiceless ones in the south) and 2 (loss of final unstressed syllables in the north) which correspond with the so-called “La Spezia/Rimini line”. At the same time, there is an enclosed zone between northern and southern Italy, forming the area in which standard Italian emerged.  

Indeed, the entire Romance-speaking area can be divided up using such bundles of isoglosses as boundaries or frontiers; this is the fundamental principle of Romance dialectology. Such demarcations are connected to history and factors related to politics and identity. My own previously unpublished map (Figure 6) is based on research conducted a number of years ago on the spread of Catalan. The stages of military and political expansion by Catalans and Aragonese can be seen to correspond with the dialectal divisions of the Catalan region. For example, Central Catalan (or Northern Catalan, spoken around Barcelona and Girona) corresponds to the long fortification of the territories surrounding the Ebro by the Franks between 800 and 1000 against the Arab strongholds of Lleida and Tortosa; the area of the Valencian dialect became delimited between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the consolidation of the area of the dialect of Alicante was instigated by the Treaty of Almizra (1244), which defined the respective Castilian and Catalan/Aragonese spheres of influence. Of course, a dialect or language results from a far larger combination of factors, but the overall correlation remains clear. One of hundreds of maps of the Romance-speaking area, the map “Occitan dialectology” by Jacques Allières (2001) again provides a first glimpse of the division of the territory according to isoglosses that are well-known to Romance and Occitan specialists (see Figure 7).  

 

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Figure 4b: Linguistic boundaries in the Mediterranean Pyrenees as posited by dialectometry (Guiter 1973) Based on data from three earlier atlases (ALF, ALC, ALPI), Guiter proved the existence of a boundary between Occitan and Catalan, as well as a relatively substantial difference between Catalan varieties in France and in Spain. Also visible are transitional zones, both faintly marked (e.g. Cerdanya) and more strongly delineated (Andorra, Capcir). In the background can be perceived the effects of altituderelated variation from east to west: for example, from the area around Narbonne to Haute-Ariège (for Occitan), or from Cerdanya to Pallars (for Catalan).  

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Figure 5: Isoglosses in Gascon (Rohlfs 1935) The Gascon area is very sharply delineated around the headwaters of the Garonne and becomes less clearly marked in the northern and western areas (Bec 1968). This kind of issue would be tackled by the Toulouse school of dialectometry.  

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Figure 6: Political and dialectal evolution in Catalonia (Manzano unpublished) As a result of the geographical and linguistic system of the Mediterranean Pyrenees (PM) instituted by the Franks towards the end of the eighth century, the stages marked show a correlation between the spread of Aragonese or Catalan political identity and the major geolinguistic divisions of Catalan (central, western versus eastern, Valencià, Southern Valencià or Alicantí).  

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Figure 7: Occitan dialectology (Allières 2001) On a qualitative level, combining nine known isoglosses shows four subdivisions of the area: Gascon; Languedocian (the basis of modern standard Occitan); Provençal; and northern Occitan, from the Alpine area to Limousin. This aligns with the Occitano-Romance hypothesis (Bec), in emphasizing that, typologically speaking, southern Languedocian differs very little from Catalan (Roussillon).  

4.3.2.2 Quantitative approaches A second approach seeks to move beyond combining isoglosses by quantifying variation and boundaries. Two linguists and the atlases associated with them have served as models for this dialectometry: the ALG (Séguy) and the ALPO (Guiter). Möhlig (1986) notes that other researchers took this route, especially in Africa. In parts of the world where linguists lack diachronic reference points, quantitative methods can thus serve as tools for drawing conclusions (cf. Guarisma/Möhlig 1986).

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A key idea to be retained from Séguy’s seminal article (1971) and the work of his associates (Ravier 1973) is that while the homogeneity of a language results primarily from its morphosyntax and then from its phonetic structure, it is the lexicon that can create the most distance between speakers of different dialects given that it determines the presence or absence of mutual comprehension. Guiter achieved a considerable feat in not only confirming the existence of a linguistic boundary, but also identifying dialectal and subdialectal areas. Five decades after the ALF, his demonstration of these realities became pertinent and his dedication seemed to have borne fruit. With knowledge of the region and its language variation, his classification can barely be faulted (see Figure 4b above) and certain hypotheses (cf. 2.2.1 above) have been substantiated: for example, the existence of pockets such as Capcir, Vingrau, and elsewhere, that can be said to be mid-way between Occitan and Catalan. Examples of this type have frequently been uncovered, such as the Croissant, a transitional area between the langue d’oïl and the langue d’oc (cf. Brun-Trigaud 1990). The existence of such gradual transition zones will always be an obstacle to the development of any clear consensus on “boundaries”. The discourse of dialectometry has put off numerous linguists, many of whom have a literary background. Moreover, it invites various criticisms. Guiter was a convinced Catalanist at a time when Pierre Bec’s Occitano-Romance theory (1963; 1970–1971) was being developed. His writings (published in regional periodicals with low circulation) reveal that he was unhappy with what he deemed to be an attempt at “Occitanist” annexation. How were the 565 maps of the ALPO chosen? Would 2000 or 3000 maps have provided the same results? Is the “border” between Occitan and Catalan an impenetrable wall, or simply a specific permeable membrane within a macro-regional continuum? If the entire Romance area were to be considered, would such a clear division remain identifiable? It seems certain that this again depends on how the question is framed and on researchers’ opinions. In the end, it is the quantities of ingredients that are fed into the dialectometric machine that determine the end results.  

4.3.3 The realities of dialect divisions, zones and diasystems It has frequently been thought that by deepening the level of enquiry and asking more precise questions, dialectal realities would be better identified. The near-exhaustive ALPO has already been mentioned, but could this type of approach reasonably be extended to cover the geographical remit of the ALF or indeed the entire Romance area? It is unlikely that this elusive task will ever be achieved as linguistic evolution in Europe proceeds at an ever-faster pace. In its frequent recourse to this repetitive approach, dialectology has come to be seen as a never-ending circle: the more new elements are added, the more difficult it tends to be to see things clearly. With the dialectologist choosing which questions to ask and which isoglosses are to be

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proposed, we might wonder why he has proceeded as he has and we are back again to the illusion of “neutrality”. But where such choices are not made, the aim appears even more uncertain. As for dialectometry, which sought to circumvent the qualitative analysis of linguistic zones, it was unable to establish itself in the long term. In fact, the key questions had already been bluntly raised by Saussure (1857– 1913). A number of years after dialectologists had begun their work, he asserted that “quand [les] concordances sont suffisamment nombreuses on peut, par approximation, parler de dialectes” and even that “les langues n’ont pas de limites naturelles” (Saussure 1972, 278). We thus constantly, cyclically encounter the complex problem of defining what a dialect might be. Among hundreds of definitions, we may note the words of Fernande Krier in the opening of an article (2010, 61): “Qui dit dialecte dit recherche interdisciplinaire des variables historiques, écolinguistiques, sociolinguistiques, géolinguistiques et pragmalinguistiques. Un dialecte est un système linguistique qui a des traits phonétiques, grammaticaux et lexicaux caractéristiques et qui est subdivisé en sous-systèmes diatopiques plus ou moins différenciés”.

This is an even better explanation of dialectology’s potential disciplinary entrapment and the Sisyphean demand on dialectologists to continue verifying findings again and again in the field when the sheer number of variables makes it almost impossible to escape such a cycle. Faced with this impasse, the system of Romance dialectology appears to have been shifting since the last three decades of the twentieth century. The vital, foundational term of “dialect” (cf. 1 above) is in retreat, almost as though the concept were too far-fetched. In its place, the term “dialect area” has become more widely used, in tandem with the newer notion of “diasystem”. Pierre Bec is a founding thinker and teacher where this trend is concerned. His work has given rise to the “OccitanoRomance” theory, and his Éléments de phonologie romane and Classification des langues romanes (cf. 1970–1971, vol. 2, 419–473) remain highly influential. It is unclear what the destiny of the field will be; however, it seems probable that the futile hope of inscribing languages and dialects within clear boundaries will be abandoned. The term “dialect” in effect appears overly conclusive and limiting, whereas “dialect area” allows for a more flexible collation of features and isoglosses. In 1900, most speakers in France used one main language (their patois or local variety) within their villages, sometimes augmented by standard French. Today, most are monolingual French speakers, or in certain cases bilingual, trilingual or multilingual. The number of registers has increased across regions and socio-economic groups: there are regional varieties, varieties of the national language, influence in certain varieties from other languages of the world, and so on. All speakers are thus in contact with a wider range of language varieties, and so even the theory of the dialect, and especially of the patois, needs to be used with caution, as it brings with it the risk of following Pop’s mantra and seeking out the most isolated, “authentic” informant, who can provide only a language that will soon be confined to the past.  

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4.3.4 From lexical primacy to “endlessly going back to the beginning” in dialectology? The Toulouse school of dialectometry developed the notion of “lexical primacy” in the construction of spaces of mutual intelligibility, coherence and dialectal distortion. It reiterated the consistent observations of dialectologists, from the ALF to, for example, Simoni-Aurembou (1973, 127–133): namely, that local distinctions are primarily rooted in the lexicon and semantics. Séguy (1971, 351) writes: “tant que le dialecte est fonctionnel, c’est-à-dire sert aux communautés en contact […] la distance se tient au seuil de 50, où commence la difficulté”. When every other word is unintelligible, the entire message becomes unclear, even if phonological and morphosyntactic structures assure the retention of a degree of coherence by highlighting that the same language is being used. Yet beyond the value of this observation for a global theory of communication in natural languages, Séguy’s subsequent remarks (ibid.) must also be considered: “Sa grandeur [that of lexical distance] dépend d’un faisceau de facteurs qu’on n’est pas encore près de mettre en équations: montagne/plaine; hostilité/amitié; persistance des divisions tribales/effacement; unité ethno-culturelle/discontinuité; autarcie/économie ouverte; les diverses données historiques, géologiques, climatiques, etc.”.

This, of course, is dialectology’s irresolvable dilemma, which from a “point de vue externe” (Saussure 1972, 40–43) is nonetheless an essential element of the field and condemns it to endless investigation. Lexis is a central subject matter for dialectology but it is also a poisoned chalice. A similar situation pertains to the theory of substrates and superstrates. Recurrent in Romance linguistics, many scholars have now nonetheless moved away from it (cf. 4.3.3 above). However, it has bequeathed essential insights, mostly based on the lexicon, but also relating to phonetic and sometimes morphosyntactic arguments. We know that an Arab-Islamic superstrate heavily influenced the development of IberoRomance lexis and toponymy; Franco-Germanic linguistic relations (cf. 1 and 2.2.1 above) are also based on a Germanic superstrate in Romance languages, and so on. The entire Romance-speaking area appears to have been affected: languages supplant each other, disappear, and are renewed within a vast network of exchange built on constant lexical and cultural transfer. Once again, Romance linguistics has shown its strength here. In order to draw on substrate theory, linguists must master the diachronic rules of signifier formation within the language they are examining. Any anomalies uncovered will point to the cases where continuity can no longer be assumed. A hypothesis of language contact can then be outlined. To return to the case of retroflex consonants (cf. 2.2.1), Georges Millardet (1876–1953) suggests that a pre-Romance substrate explains these features, found only in certain locations of the Mediterranean Romance area (Millardet 1933). Multiple studies have similarly highlighted evidence from pre-Indo-European substrates to

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explain the dialectal originality of various Romance varieties. The authors of such works, many of which were disputed or rejected, deserve to be better remembered: among them, Romance linguists and toponymists such as Francesco Ribezzo (1875– 1952; Le origini … 1928), Vittorio Bertoldi (1888–1953; Problèmes de substrat, 1931), Alfredo Trombetti (1866–1929; Saggio di antica onomastica mediterranea, 1942), Johannes Hubschmid (1881–1966, pupil of J. Jud, author of Praeromanica, 1949). This tradition in fact dates from the Meillet era and was particularly influenced by Hugo Schuchardt, one of the founders of the theory of substrates and superstrates, and a key figure in the above-mentioned Wörter und Sachen movement. At the beginning of the present century, such work was still cited (cf. Posner 1996; Cravens 2002), but this has become rare. Their insights will undoubtedly be sought again in the context of sociolinguistic studies of language contact in the Mediterranean.

5 Conclusion: consequences and further considerations for dialectology 5.1 Romance dialectology: optimally comparative and diachronic? We are familiar with the clusters of typological features that link the Romance languages. This schema, passed on to us by our predecessors, completed by dialectology, confirmed through the observation of variation and change over several centuries, befits this language group. Where languages are unwritten and scarcely documented, however, and we know little of their history, hypotheses must be formed by recording and measuring differences and similarities. This is what Morris Swadesh (1909–1967) managed to do (lexicostatistics, glottochronology, cf. 1952; 1954; 1962) on the basis of a list of 207 fundamental words/concepts, unlikely to be borrowed in the case of contact: tree, head, numerals, grammatical morphemes etc. Yet following attempts to transfer his methods to the context of European languages, the diachronic reference points that were already available meant Swadesh’s glottochronological margin of error was called into question. This diachronic security of dialectology is also its weakness, as it has ensured that the field has remained diachronic, qualitative and philological, entailing the primacy of attestation and mistrust of hypotheses. As a result, it was always likely that statistical, dialectometric methods would find it difficult to establish themselves in the Romance area, especially in France.

5.2 Is dialectology in decline? Despite efforts to refine and adjust its methods, Romance dialectology has struggled to dissociate itself from a disciplinary identity that was determined more than a

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century ago (cf. Manzano 2011b, 372–373). Labov (1976, cf. 5.5) notes the field’s detachment from developments in linguistic theory and its less than positive reputation. Many see it as “une discipline vieillotte, passéiste, folkloriste, un savoir superflu, aucunement rentabilisable, au mieux un violon d’Ingres pour quelques originaux. Aux yeux des linguistes, une discipline mineure, l’étude de parlers locaux, le plus souvent moribonds auxquels on s’intéresse au détriment des grandes, des vraies langues” (Dalbera 2013).

Epistemological difficulties have been minimized with the help of the safety net of repetitive surveys to which many dialectologists have had recourse. But the resulting tendency towards ghettoization risked adding further weight to the criticisms outlined by Labov and Dalbera. By the end of the twentieth century, dialectologists were absent from key debates, unlike in the era of Ascoli, Gilliéron, Jaberg, Bottiglioni, Wartburg, and so on. This was a consequence of profound social change (cf. 4.3.3), but also of an inability on their part to fight in the face of structuralism/generativism which had easily gained dominance in university departments. With dialectology no longer holding institutional ground, sociolinguistics had to do so in its place. Another weak point concerns the fact that few dialectologists have worked outside the Romance-speaking area; exposure to other language families would on the other hand be a stimulating source of alternative points of view. Finally, in France at least, the foundational intersection of diachrony with dialectology, considered essential at the beginning of the twentieth century, has been eroded. Old French, once the primary object of study, struggles to survive, as the connection between dialectology and diachrony becomes less and less evident. There is no longer a Gaston Paris or a Walther von Wartburg to dynamize the field, resulting in a decline in student interest, fewer research centres, less funding, and fewer projects.

5.3 What future for dialectology? The field nonetheless has reason to be proud of the sheer volume of data it has gathered. Romance dialectology has constantly progressed in terms of the number of projects conducted and the parts of the world reached. Towards the middle of the twentieth century (Pop 1950), dozens of atlases were produced notably in hispanophone, lusophone, and francophone contexts, and outside Romance-speaking areas. Today, Romance dialectology still seems to have appeal in various northern European countries, although this is less true for those areas where it first emerged. In the USA, too, awareness of the achievements of Romance dialectology and diachronic study has been articulated within sociolinguistics. In the introduction to Atlas of North American English (ANAE), Labov/Ash/Boberg (2006) insist that “a major aim of the Atlas is the re-establishment of the links between dialect geography and general linguistics”. That said, the relationship of the objectives and methodology of the atlas

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to Romance dialectology as we have described it here, is largely one of principle, although fundamental dialectological concepts can be identified: the search for isoglosses, confirmation of coherent dialectal zones, and so on. It must be noted that in North America, diachronic methods tend to be less rigorous, and additionally the Labov/Ash/Boberg atlas is more unambiguously synchronic in its approach. Yet, as Labov has frequently underlined, synchrony is also fundamentally concerned with aspects of language change and, therefore, with diachrony. Romance dialectology itself has barely modified its fundamental methods, to the extent that it appears to be backing itself into a dead end. In recent years, however, the International Society for Dialectology and Geolinguistics, founded towards the end of the twentieth century and now directed by Maria Pilar Perea, has made efforts to bring together different “dialectologies” and their insights through the organization of conferences and the journal Dialectologica et linguistica, providing some grounds for optimism.

5.4 Dialectology and endangered cultures UNESCO has taken steps to promote endangered languages, particularly in its production of the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (http://www.unesco.org/culture/ en/endangeredlanguages/atlas). However, it shows barely any evidence of dialectological influence. This is a result of the double retreat of the field mentioned above: on the one hand, dialectologists have been unable to assert themselves in scientific debate (cf. 5.2). Their status is still weak and there are few attempts to solicit their opinions. On the other hand, dialectologists’ longstanding practice of “non-engagement” with the languages they study (cf. 1), partly in the name of a questionable desire for “objectivity” (cf. 2.2), has backfired. By the end of the twentieth century, a militant approach had instead gained favour, based on strong claims about identity which encouraged bypassing university-based approaches and, by extension, the dialectologists who continued to entrench themselves within them. More than twenty languages of France and many others in the Romance area are said to be “endangered”. On the front line are those “definitely endangered” languages such as Francoprovençal, Gascon and Corsican that are no longer used within the family at home. The next and largest category is “severely endangered” languages, including Languedocian, Breton, Norman and Gallo. These are spoken by grandparents, understood by their children, but not passed on to the youngest generation. Languages said to be merely “vulnerable”, where it appears that the language is spoken across all generations, include Alemannic (Alsatian in France), Moselle Franconian, Flemish, and Basque. What sources can we use? The Ethnologue database (Summer Institute of Linguistics), which is often not entirely satisfactory, but also regional sources, sometimes well documented but at other times quite vague, or even a simple article. Militant

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sources can also present politicized positions as fact (for example, the use of “Arpitan” for “Francoprovençal”), and should be treated with caution. It is evident that the involvement of dialectologists, Romance or otherwise, in such a crucial phase of language change would be of particular scientific interest.

5.5 Dialectology and sociolinguistics One of dialectology’s methodological shortcomings has been to reduce language contact to the simple historical linking of languages (cf. substrate/superstrate theory, 4.3.4). Nonetheless some dialectologists (Gilliéron and Wartburg, among others) developed arguments that were closer to synchronic perspectives and sociolinguistics. Gilliéron referred to clashes and substitutions in the context of the binary conflict between French and patois which was going to culminate in the victory of the national language, while Wartburg criticized Griera because the latter’s sample of informants aged from 10 to 90 seemed in itself to demonstrate language change. Wartburg’s demonstration that isoglosses dividing /ʃ/ and /k/ in Normandy follow different lines is a reminder that each word has a variable position between sociolinguistic pressure from French and the functional validity of the patois. Individual words can thus be considered akin to thousands of points on a scale where the position of the cursor is always liable to change. Edward Sapir (1921, 151) evoked a universal process, the “budding process” of languages: “And so the budding process continues, until the divergences become so great that none but a linguistic student, armed with his documentary evidence and with his comparative or reconstructive method, would infer that the languages in question were genealogically related”.

Faced by this fundamental truth that highlights the role of contact and diversification, many dialectologists remained convinced that their field had to select the language to be studied and the informants, and had to discover or rediscover the “pure” dialect. This and other forms of methodological isolation meant dialectologists failed to see that they were fundamentally sociolinguists; indeed, the founding figure of this field, Labov (1972, 160), pays them the greatest homage when he notes that dialectologists and comparative linguists asked numerous pertinent questions concerning language change. After referring to a statement by Antoine Meillet from 1905 (cited in 1921) and before asking five fundamental questions himself, he writes: “The problem as we face it today is precisely that which Meillet outlined over sixty years ago, for little progress has been made in ascertaining the empirical factors which condition historical change”, as if the pendulum were effectively swinging back into the same position, requiring sociolinguistics to start from there in order to find solutions. The withdrawal of dialectology from theoretical issues has been noted several times. Labov (1972, 268) expresses it thus: “But in the twentieth century, dialectology

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as a discipline seems to have lost any orientation towards theoretical linguistics, and dialect geographers have generally been content to collect their materials and publish them.” Although this claim appears to retain its validity for the most part, we must avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It is true that dialectology still features as the subject of chapters, or in comments, in contemporary manuals of sociolinguistics (cf. for example chapter 6 of Wardhaugh 2010), but is often viewed as a somewhat outdated “stage” of the discipline, augmented, in fact, from all angles, by methodological approaches that are better adapted to contemporary language systems. And yet almost all of the key areas of inquiry in current sociolinguistics are already encountered and treated by dialectologists – language contact, koinés and mixing, registers and social variation etc. – with all the limitations which we have highlighted in this chapter. The question that remains is whether the twenty-first century will allow Romance dialectology to find a stronger methodological foundation in sociolinguistics and the language sciences? Or whether the final page has already been turned?  

6 Bibliography 6.1 Atlases cited (each title is preceded by its corresponding acronym) Note: CNRS = Éditions du Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (Paris). AIS: Jaberg, Karl/Jud, Jakob (1928–1940), Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz, 8 vol., Zofingen, Ringier and other publishers. ALBB: Le Roux, Pierre (1927), Atlas linguistique de la Basse-Bretagne, 6 fascicules, Paris, Droz and other publishers. ALBRAM: Guillaume, Gabriel/Chauveau, Jean-Paul (1975–1983), Atlas linguistique et ethnographique de la Bretagne romane, de l’Anjou et du Maine, 2 vol., Paris, CNRS. ALC: Griera i Gaja, Antoni (1923–1924), Atlas lingüístic de Catalunya, Barcelona, Institut d’Estudis Catalans. ALCB: Bourcelot, Henri (1966–1978), Atlas linguistique et ethnographique de la Champagne et de la Brie, 4 vol., Paris, CNRS. ALDC: Veny, Joan (ed.) (2001–2014), Atlas lingüístic del Domini Català, 8 vol., Barcelona, Institut d’Estudis Catalans, http://aldc.espais.iec.cat (last access 13.02.2018). ALEIC: Bottiglioni, Gino (1933–1942), Atlante linguistico etnografico italiano della Corsica, 11 vol., Pisa/Cagliari, Università degli Studi. ALF: Gilliéron, Jules/Edmont, Edmond (1902–1910), Atlas linguistique de la France, 12 vol., Paris, Champion, http://diglib.uibk.ac.at/ulbtirol/content/titleinfo/149029; http://cartodialect.imag. fr/cartoDialect/carteTheme (last access 13.02.2018). ALF-Corse: Gilliéron, Jules/Edmont, Edmond (1914–1915), Atlas linguistique de la France: Corse, 4 fascicules, Paris, Champion. ALG: Séguy, Jean (1954–1973), Atlas linguistique et ethnographique de la Gascogne, Paris, CNRS. ALIFO: Simoni-Aurembou, Marie-Rose (1973–1978), Atlas linguistique de l’Île-de-France et de l’Orléanais, Paris, CNRS.  

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ALLy: Gardette, Pierre (1950–1976), Atlas linguistique et ethnographique du Lyonnais, Lyon, Institut de Linguistique Romane des Facultés Catholiques/Paris, CNRS. ALN: Brasseur, Patrice (1980–2011), Atlas linguistique et ethnographique normand, vol. 1–3, Paris, CNRS; vol. 4, Caen, Presses de l’Université de Caen. ALO: Massignon, Geneviève/Horiot, Brigitte (1971–1983), Atlas linguistique et ethnographique de l’ouest, 3 vol., Paris, CNRS. ALPI: Navarro Tomás, Tomás (dir.) (1933–1962), Atlas lingüístico de la Península Ibérica, Madrid, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC). (Available online at http://alpi.csic.es/) ALPO: Guiter, Henri (1966), Atlas linguistique des Pyrénées-Orientales, Paris, CNRS. ALPr: Bouvier, Jean-Claude/Martel, Claude (1975–86), Atlas linguistique et ethnographique de Provence, 3 vol., Paris, CNRS. ALR I: Pop, Sever (1938), Atlasul linguistic român, vol. 1, Cluj/Sibiu/Leipzig. ALW: Remacle, Louis/Legros, Élisée (1953–1955), Atlas linguistique de la Wallonie, 2 vol., Liège, Vaillant-Carmanne. [The ALW was subsequently continued by other scholars until the 1990s, along with two later volumes in 2006 and 2011 edited by Marie-Guy Boutier.] ANAE: Labov, William/Ash, Sharon/Boberg, Charles (2006), Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Sound Change – A Multimedia Reference Tool, 1 vol. and 1 CD, Berlin/ Boston, De Gruyter. NALBB: Le Dû, Jean (2001), Nouvel Atlas linguistique de la Basse-Bretagne, 2 vol., Brest, Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique. NALC: Dalbera-Stefanaggi, Marie-José (2007–2009), Nouvel Atlas linguistique et ethnographique de la Corse, 3 vol., Ajaccio, Piazzola/Paris, Éditions du Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques. NALF [Présentation]: Dauzat, Albert (1942), Nouvel Atlas linguistique de la France par régions, ou ALF par régions, Luçon, Pacteau.  

 

 

 

6.2 Other works cited Alcover, Antoni/Moll, Francesc de Borja/Sanchis Guarner, Manuel (1951), Diccionari Català-ValenciàBalear, 10 vol., Palma de Mallorca, Tallers Miramar. Allières, Jacques (2001), Manuel de linguistique romane, Paris, Champion. Ascoli, Graziadio I. (1878), Schizzi franco-provenzali, Archivio glottologico italiano 3, 61–120. Barkat-Defradas, Melissa/Motte-Florac, Élisabeth (2011), Dialectologie arabe et atlas linguistique: Les Apports du multimédia, in: Francis Manzano (ed.), Mémoires du terrain, Lyon, Publications du Centre d’Études Linguistiques, 315–331. Basset, André (1929), Études de géographie linguistique en Kabylie, vol. 1: Sur quelques termes berbères concernant le corps humain, Paris, Leroux. Bec, Pierre (1963), La Langue occitane, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France. Bec, Pierre (1968), Les Interférences linguistiques entre gascon et languedocien dans les parlers du Comminges et du Couserans: Essai d’aérologie systématique, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France. Bec, Pierre (1970–1971), Manuel pratique de philologie romane, 2 vol., Paris, Picard. Bergounioux, Gabriel (1984), La Science du langage en France de 1870 à 1885: Du “marché civil” au “marché étatique”, Langue française 63, 3–41. Bertoldi, Vittorio (1931), Problèmes de substrat, Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 32, 93–183. Bottiglioni, Gino (1933–1942): see ALEIC above. Brun-Trigaud, Guylaine (1990), Le Croissant, Lyon, Centre d’Études Linguistiques de Lyon.

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Brun-Trigaud, Guylaine/Le Berre, Yves/Le Dû, Jean (2005), Lectures de l’Atlas linguistique de la France de Gilliéron et Edmont: Du temps dans l’espace, Paris, Éditions du Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques. Bulot, Thierry (1989), L’Enquête de Coquebert de Montbret et la glottopolitique de l’Empire français, Romanische Philologie 2, 287–292, http://www.sociolinguistique-urbaine.com/IMG/pdf/ Coquebert_de_Montbret.pdf (last access 13.02.2018). Canobbio, Sabina (2011), Enquêtes (ethno-)linguistiques et mémoires du terrain: Le “Piémont des paysans” de Paul Scheuermeier, in: Francis Manzano (ed.), Mémoires du terrain, Lyon, Centre d’Études Linguistiques de Lyon, 269–286. Canobbio, Sabina/Telmon, Tullio (2007), Piemonte dei contadini: Paul Scheuermeier, il Piemonte dei contadini 1921–1932, vol. 1: La provincia di Torino, Scarmagno, Priuli & Verlucca. Canobbio, Sabina/Telmon, Tulio (2008), Piemonte dei contadini: Paul Scheuermeier, il Piemonte dei contadini 1921–1932, vol. 2: Le province di Alessandria, Asti, Biella, Cuneo, Novara, Verbano Cusio Ossola, Vercelli, Scarmagno, Priuli & Verlucca. Carpitelli, Elisabetta (2009), Marie-José Dalbera-Stefanaggi & Roger Miniconi – Nouvel Atlas linguistique et ethnographique de la Corse, vol. 2: Le Lexique de la mer (Review), Corpus 8, https:// corpus.revues.org/1773 (last access 13.02.2018). Carton, Fernand (2011), L’Exploitation et la valorisation des données de terrain dans le domaine picard, in: Francis Manzano (ed.), Mémoires du terrain, Lyon, Centre d’Études Linguistiques de Lyon, 97–109. Chaurand, Jacques (1972), Introduction à la dialectologie française, Paris, Bordas. Chauveau, Jean-Paul (1989), Évolutions phonétiques en gallo, Paris, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Coquebert de Montbret, Eugène (1831), Mélanges sur les langues, dialectes et patois: Renfermant, entre autres, une collection de versions de la Parabole de l’enfant prodigue en cent idiomes ou patois différens, presque tous de France, précédés d’un essai de travail sur la géographie de la langue française, Paris, Almanach du commerce. Costa, Jordi (2009a), L’Enquête linguistique de Monseigneur Antoni Alcover et Bernhard Schädel, en 1906, sur les terres nord-catalanes: Une expérience délicate, multiple et innovatrice, in: Michel Bourret (ed.), Mélanges offerts au Professeur Christian Camps, Perronas, Éditions de la Tour Gile, 159–176. Costa, Jordi (2009b), L’Enquête linguistique de Fritz Holle sur la frontière catalano-languedocienne en 1906, in: Christian Camps (ed.), Les relacions catalano-occitanes al llindar del segle XXI, Perronas, Éditions de la Tour Gile, 7–15. Cravens, Thomas D. (2002), Comparative Historical Dialectology, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Dalbera, Jean-Philippe (2013), La Trajectoire de la dialectologie au sein des sciences du langage: De la reconstruction des systèmes dialectaux à la sémantique lexicale et à l’étymologie, Corpus 12, https://corpus.revues.org/2390 (last access 13.02.2018). Dalbera-Stefanaggi, Marie-José (2002), La Langue corse, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France. Edmont, Edmond (1897), Lexique Saint-Polois, Saint-Pol, chez l’auteur. Fossat, Jean-Louis (1974), Un pionnier français de l’ethnoscience: Jean Séguy, Journal d’agriculture tropicale et de botanique appliquée 21(7–9), 247–250. Fossat, Jean-Louis (2011), Des données de terrain à leur traitement: 50 ans de recherche, in: Francis Manzano (ed.), Mémoires du terrain, Lyon, Centre d’Études Linguistiques de Lyon, 189–239. Gauchat, Louis/Jeanjacquet, Jules/Tappolet, Ernest (1924–), Glossaire des patois de la Suisse romande, Bern et al., Attinger/Droz/various other publishers, http://unine.ch/islc/home/presentation/gpsr.html (last access 13.02.2018). Giacomo-Marcellesi, Mathée (1973), Réflexions sur l’enquête d’Edmont à Sotta (point 88 de l’Atlas linguistique de la Corse), Langue française 18, 91–99.

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Variation and change

Nigel Armstrong and Ian Mackenzie

6 Speaker variables in Romance: when demography and ideology collide Abstract: In the present chapter we examine, from a broadly quantitative perspective, a range of variable linguistic phenomena in French and Spanish, including vowel raising in the Cantabrian highlands, schwa-deletion in the French Midi, devoicing of /ʒ/ in Buenos Aires and Alsace, affrication in the Parisian banlieue and the uvularization of /r/ in Quebec. We argue that statistical correlations between speaker categorizations and variable language are best understood with reference to localized ideologies. In this model, purely demographic variables such as class, gender and ethnicity are not theoretical primitives but serve to amplify or mitigate patterns which have their primary locus in geographical space.  

Keywords: variation, ideology, logistic regression, quantitative, Romance  

1 Introduction Since the publication of Labov’s seminal paper “The Social Motivation of a Sound Change” (Labov 1963), it has been recognized in linguistics that synchronic usage varies fairly systematically as a function of specific characteristics of speakers, characteristics which have come to be known as “speaker variables”. The most salient of these speaker variables are age, gender, socioeconomic class, regional origin, ethnicity and social network. Within the classic variationist paradigm established by Labov, language variation is correlated with speaker variables, usually on the basis of token counts (normalized as percentages) of the linguistic variables under study or, if the variables are continuous (as with vowel quality, for example), on the basis of index scores assigned as a function of the degree to which a given variant is present in the relevant speech samples. In any given experiment, interviewees are categorized according to the speaker variables just mentioned and statistical techniques are used to establish whether there is any meaningful relationship between the linguistic and the speaker variables. Good introductory discussions of the underlying methodology can be found in Milroy (1987) and Tagliamonte (2012). The Labovian paradigm has proven to be immensely popular among researchers, inspiring a vast number of studies of variable linguistic phenomena, not just in the Anglo-Saxon context but also with respect to a variety of other languages and language families, including Romance. Major advances stemming from this body of research include the finding that women simultaneously use the most innovative forms in their casual speech but the most standardized forms in formal speech (Labov 1972, 301–302), https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-007

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a more refined understanding of the relationship between language change and agegraded variation (Cedergren 1987; Wagner 2012) and a movement away from the traditional assumption that overt prestige drives change (Labov 2007). As has been observed by Cameron (1990), however, simply establishing statistical correlations between linguistic variation and speaker variables is essentially descriptive rather than explanatory. In addition, Milroy (2003) has implicitly questioned the dichotomy enshrined in the variationist model between “internal” (i.e. linguistic) and “external” (i.e. social/ speaker-oriented) factor. She has argued (ibid., 161) that some speaker variables, such as class, gender and ethnicity are “global”, implying that their effects may be similar across speech communities which are widely separated by space and time. In that respect, such variables are analogous to internal processes of language change, such as chain shifts and the like, which also operate without reference to local social structure (ibid., 166). These global triggers for variation and change contrast, in Milroy’s model, with triggers which are locally anchored and which map onto what she calls “local ideologies”. In our view, Milroy’s insight about the localized character of language ideologies offers a possible means of dissolving the correlational fallacy highlighted by Cameron (1990). By this we mean that if variation due to local or regional affiliation is understood as being a theoretical primitive – a brute fact of human nature – the observable statistical relationships between language and global demographic variables such as gender or class turn out to be epiphenomenal to a certain extent, surface by-products of relatively complex cultural interactions which have localized ideologies as their primary point of reference. From that perspective, a major task of the sociolinguist in any given study is to unpick the local–global nexus which underlies the relevant statistical correlations. Many of the data relating to variation in Romance languages are consistent with this approach, perhaps because regional affiliation in the Romance-speaking world enjoys quite a degree of vitality, particularly in southern Europe and Latin America, although sociolinguists have not tended to go much beyond establishing correlations of the type criticized by Cameron. Below we examine an array of quantitative case studies from French and Spanish using the approach just outlined. In so doing we attempt to cast fresh light on the social and human motivations which underlie the variation (see also ↗2 Quantitative approaches for modelling variation and change; ↗8 Variation and grammaticalization in Romance).

2 Regional origin and local ideologies Variation due to the regional origin of speakers has traditionally been studied within the framework of dialectology, the major outputs of which have been atlases such as the Atlas linguistique de la France (Gilliéron/Edmont 1902–1910) or dialect manuals such as the Manual de dialectología hispánica (Alvar 1996). Although such works explicitly deal with variation, they tend, as Weinreich (1954, 390) shrewdly observed,

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to divorce their linguistic data from any consideration of external issues and as such lend themselves fairly straightforwardly to a conception of dialectology as the study of “diasystems”, i.e. overarching systems built up from the various dialects of a language, each viewed as a discrete system in its own right. For Weinreich, given his pursuit of a so-called structural dialectology, this was a welcome state of affairs. It has the effect, however, of making conventional dialectology analogous in its approach to the analysis of standard languages, in the sense that origin, in principle a speaker variable, becomes subsumed within the more abstract concept of a “regional dialect”. Examining regional variation without due regard to the causal role of speakers runs the risk of providing an incomplete picture of how such variation comes into being and of how it can affect the longer-term development of the language itself. In particular, such an approach overlooks the rather striking fact that regional or geographic conditioning appears to operate quite differently in the linguistic sphere from the way it operates in other areas of social activity such as political affiliation. For example, the fact that some US states are traditionally “Republican” in presidential elections whereas others are “Democrat” does not imply the existence of a direct relationship between geographic space and political outlook. Rather, the way states vote is a function of the way in which global demographic categories are locally distributed. It is this global–local relationship which explains why state voting trends, as the pollster Nate Silver (2016) puts it, “move in tandem” with the national one. In contrast, the existence of regional linguistic variation – over and above variation due to class, gender or age – presupposes an essentially arbitrary mapping of language to geography, whereby, to varying degrees, speakers at particular points in geographic space gravitate towards specific linguistic realizations. The phenomenon is a mysterious one, presumably having to do with deep-seated human tendencies concerning group membership, tendencies whose overt manifestations Milroy (1980) famously attempted to quantify. Moreover, though rarely probed with any penetration, the concept has long hovered in the background to studies of language change. A picturesque allusion to it can be found, for example, in Foulet’s (1921) classic discussion of how certain non-standard interrogative structures came into existence in France. While accepting that many local patois have managed perfectly well on the basis of the resources provided by Standard French, Foulet (ibid., 336) states that “il paraît vraisemblable qu’en plus d’un village, soit manque de modèle à suivre, soit velléité d’indépendance, on a recouru à une forme autochtone”. Reinterpreting Foulet’s velléité d’indépendance in terms of the more modern concept of language ideologies (Silverstein 1979), the approach to regional variation that we wish to motivate here sees such variation as being intimately linked to “local ideologies” (Milroy 2003), understood as the language-facing dimension of the cultural space in which individuals mediate their relationship to their immediate environment. A broad initial distinction can be drawn between ideologies which are externally imposed and those which evolve organically through spontaneous practice within

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specific, localized speech communities. The prototype of the externally imposed ideology is the linguistic stereotype (cf. for example Lippi-Green 1997; Ronkin/Karn 1999), anchored in uncritical and usually inherited attitudes towards linguistic forms which are regarded, rightly or wrongly, as being emblematic of a specific category of speaker. A case in point is the traditional disdain reserved for Spanish ceceo (pronounced [θeˈθeo], which refers to a lisping, dental pronunciation of the letter s, as in [ˈθweloˈiɾaθeˈβiʝa] for suelo ir a Sevilla (‘I usually go to Seville’). The feature is a natural outcome of a late medieval merger in southern Iberia between two series of fricative consonants, viz. dental, represented in the Old Spanish orthography by c, ç or z, and alveolar, represented by ss or s. Castilian Spanish retains the dental–alveolar distinction, but Andalusian dialects do not, the single, merged fricative having tended historically towards a dental articulation (Lapesa 1981, § 925), although a more socially-acceptable [s]-like articulation – known as seseo – is also found, most notably in Seville city and in provinces that abut New Castile, as well as among many speakers who might be classified as well-educated or upwardly mobile. In the popular imagination, ceceo is a phenomenon that indexes backwardness, a lack of education, cultural poverty etc. (Alvar 1974, 18–19; Navarro Tomás 1975, 23– 60). The trope in fact has deep historical roots, fifteenth-century commentators instigating a tradition of referring to the feature using the verb çeçear,1 a term which Nebrija in his Lexicon hoc est Dictionarium ex sermone latino in hispaniensem of 1492 equated with both Spanish tartamudear ‘to stammer’ and Latin balbutio ‘I stammer/ lisp’. A telling instance of the deverbal form ceceo is found in the mock heroic poem Necedades y locuras de Orlando el enamorado, written by the seventeenth-century author Francisco Quevedo: “Vinieron [. . .] los Andaluzes de valientes, feos, cargados de patatas y ceceos.” (‘They came, the Andalusians, brave and ugly, weighed down with their potatoes and their lisps.’)

The reality in modern times is that ceceo enjoys a wider geographical distribution within Andalusia than seseo, and it appears to be dominant in some urban centres. For example, Carbonero et al. (1992, 23–25) report that in the city of Jerez, the fifth largest in Andalusia, the probability of ceceo in their sample overall is 0.47, compared with 0.44 for seseo and 0.09 for so-called distinción (i.e. the absence of merger). However, despite its impeccable linguistic pedigree, ceceo is and always has been enmeshed in negative stereotypes of the Andalusian. In short it has become ideologized.

1 A well-known instance is Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s observation in his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, apropos of a conquistador from Sanlúcar de Barrameda, that he ceceaba como sevillano ‘lisped like someone from Seville’ (Sáenz de Santa María 1982, 642).

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Notice that linguistic ideology in this sense does not necessarily imply a negative attitude. Kuiper (2005), for example, in an article investigating Parisian and Provençal speakers’ perceptions of regional varieties of French, found that while Parisian French was viewed by the majority of informants as being the most “correct” variety, Provençal was reported as being the most “pleasant”. Kuiper observes that the most common adjectives associated with Provençal speech, according to the Parisians, were chantant and rigolo and attributes this evaluation, in part, to a romanticized view of the simple country life associated with the region. On the other hand, a less charitable attitude appears to prevail in respect of French varieties that are closer to home. Thus in a study of language ideologies in “a multi-ethnic urban Europe”, Stewart (2012) reports a 15 % refusal rate among 136 Parisians who were asked to evaluate 21 towns in the greater Paris region according to desirability, reputation and linguistic correctness. Apparently such refusal did not reflect linguistic pluralism, but rather the more hegemonic stance according to which “one standard language unifies all areas [. . .] we have no linguistic ghettos” (Stewart 2012, 199). In the types of case just illustrated, a language ideology is the manifestation of a misconceived appreciation of the relevant linguistic reality, stemming either from prejudice or naivety or a combination of both.2 However, in a less retrograde sense, language ideologies may also be regarded as integral components of sociolinguistic space. Inspired by cases studies as diverse as click usage in the Nguni languages of southern Africa and vowel change in Martha’s Vineyard, Irvine/Gal (2000, 47) propose that the emergence of localized linguistic patterns may ultimately be fuelled by ideology, in the sense that they are dependent on “local images of salient social categories that [shift] over time”. In the Romance context, findings relating to midvowel raising in a small mountain village (Ucieda) in Cantabria reported by Holmquist (1985) can be interpreted as supporting this perspective. Holmquist investigated realizations of Spanish /-o/, identifying the four variants [o], [o̝ ], [u̞ ] and [u], to which he assigned numerical scores 0, 1, 2 and 3, on the basis of which an /-o/ raising index was determined for each speaker interviewed. The most interesting finding, in terms of the present discussion, is captured in Figure 1 below. As the figure shows, raising of /-o/ is greater among older speakers, suggesting that younger speakers are progressively gravitating towards the supraregional Castilian norm. However, the figure also reveals a strong correlation between high levels of /-o/  

 

2 It may be asked whether variables can ever be analysed independently of these ideologies. Variation probably cannot be detached from ideology; indeed, that is one of the central ideas of the paper. However, a distinction must be drawn between ideologies imposed from the outside, the linguistic stereotype being an exemplar, and ideologies to which speakers subscribe fairly naturally as part of the way they mediate their relationship to their immediate surroundings. The distinction is no doubt blurred in many instances, with ideologies in the latter sense often becoming “contaminated” by ideology in the former sense. Nevertheless, it seems to us that analysing variation in terms of language ideologies does not imply that stereotypes and the like are necessarily implicated as causal factors.

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Figure 1: /-o/raising in Ucieda by age and by ownership of mountain livestock (based on Holmquist 1985, 196)  

raising and owning or being a member of a family that owns mountain livestock, i.e. “ponies, longhorned cattle, sheep, and goats that are indigenous to the Cantabrian mountain region” (Holmquist 1985, 194). Indeed, Holmquist’s results imply that the livestock variable is a slightly better predictor of /-o/ raising than is age, the F-test statistics for the two variables being 22.13 (1 degree of freedom) and 4.04 (3 degrees of freedom) and the consequent p-value estimates of significance being 0.01 and 0.05 respectively. The explanation for this somewhat surprising pattern appears to lie in the way in which [u]-like pronunciations of /-o/ have become iconized among local speakers. Final /-u/ is a residue of spoken Latin that survives to varying degrees in local dialects in the far north of the Iberian Peninsula, with Castilian itself exhibiting complete loss of /-u/ (except in a handful of bookish words and one or two lexical borrowings). Within the dynamic of this long-term structural shift, [u]-like articulations of /-o/ have come to symbolize an affiliation to the older ways of life which are anchored in the local uplands. Holmquist (1985, 193) reports that statements such as Hablamos castellanu con la u ‘We speak Castilian with the u’ and El que no dice jacha, jachu, jigu y jiguera no es de mi tierra ‘He who doesn’t say jacha, jachu, jigu and jiguera3 isn’t from my land’ were common. 3 Holmquist does not supply a gloss for these terms, but they appear to be local pronunciations of hacha ‘axe’, hacho ‘small axe’, higo ‘fig’ and higuera ‘fig tree’. (The initial j in Holmquist’s local variants presumably indicates that these words have [h] at the beginning rather than no consonant at all, the letter h being silent in Castilian Spanish.)

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As the second of these two quotations suggests, talk of /-o/ raising spontaneously triggers the invocation of images relating to land-based work. In this regard it is interesting to note Holmquist’s (1985, 198) identification in Ucieda of “a lingering attraction to agrarian life that may be felt by individuals of all generations” and which is epitomized above all by the ownership of mountain animals, requiring long sojourns in the mountains, often in the company of “other hardy and often sentimental folk who seem to live as much in the past as in the present”. In contrast, individuals who left the village to work in relatively well-paid jobs in larger communities near the coast were mocked by some as living like princes and lacking the ability to do proper work (ibid., 197). A tendency to raise final /-o/ and ownership of mountain livestock can thus be seen as two aspects of the same cultural identity, and it is this circumstance which underlies the statistical relationship shown in Figure 1. Retention of the [u]-like articulation of final /o/ in Ucieda can be seen as being analogous to the high levels of centralization in the diphthongs /ay/ and /aw/ famously encountered by Labov (1963) in the close-knit Chilmark fishermen community on Martha’s Vineyard. In both cases, the distinctive vocalism indexes a local affiliation, adopted in the context of a changing sociocultural setting, be that the midtwentieth century influx of mainlanders to the Massachusetts island or the gradual erosion of the mountain way of life in the Cantabrian sierras. According to Milroy (2003, 166), “ideologically driven processes” of this type can act as “constraints on global changes”. In the Cantabrian case, the long term shift from Latin /-u/ to /-o/ can be interpreted as a global change in Milroy’s sense, one that is variably constrained by localized loyalty towards [u]-like pronunciations of /-o/. In what follows, we will see that global speaker variables such as gender and class occupy an analogous position to global linguistic changes within the matrix of factors which drive variation. By this we mean that they are not in themselves loci of ideologies but instead interact with local language ideologies, sometimes tending towards their erosion and sometimes acting as stimuli.  

3 Gender Arguably the most important gender-related finding to come from the quantitative research paradigm is the so-called sociolinguistic gender pattern or SGP (Labov 1990), which is summarized below: (I) In stable sociolinguistic situations, men use a higher frequency of non-standard forms than women. (II) In the majority of linguistic changes, women use a higher frequency of the incoming forms than men.

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The generalization in (I) accords fairly naturally with everyday experience, in the sense that female speakers tend to exhibit fewer markedly regional features than their male peers. This is rather clearly illustrated by the gender distribution of seseo and ceceo in Andalusian Spanish. Although both phenomena imply neutralization of the standard /s/ ~ /θ/ distinction, ceceo is strongly associated with Andalusia (see section 1 above), whereas seseo represents the pan-Hispanic norm outside of Castile, being found both in parts of Andalusia and throughout Latin America. For this reason, and also because ceceo has become iconized within negative Andalusian stereotypes, seseo is regarded as the “better” approximation to the standard. Given (I), therefore, it comes as no surprise that ceceo is strongly associated with males, while females gravitate more towards seseo. For example, in a study conducted in the Capuchinos district of Malaga city, Ávila (1994) found the ceceo rate among males to be 45 % while among females it was only 11 %. For seseo, the figures were largely reversed, with men exhibiting a rate of 11 % and women a rate of 50 %. As regards generalization (II), this seems to be consistent with (I) provided that the adoption of the incoming variant implies a shift towards the standard. This type of change is illustrated in Table 1 (based on Armstrong/Unsworth 1999), which suggests that younger female speakers in southern France are adopting the treatment of schwa that is characteristic of the northern standard variety. The data were collected in 1997 in the southern French Aude département, in Carcassonne and Lézignan-Corbières, both small country towns of about 10,000 inhabitants. The informants were aged 16– 25, differentiated by gender and social class.  

 

Table 1: Schwa deletion in $ ʒ/s_C(C), as in: $ jE crois; $ cE qui se passe  

Class/gender

% deletion

N

WC Females

34.9

58

MC Females

37.8

77

All females

36.4

135

Class/gender

% deletion

N

WC Males

21.3

83

MC Males

20.7

52

All males

21.0

135

The results in Table 1 show a consistent regularity both across and within gender and social-class groups. Even without the benefit of interpretative statistics, the scores show a striking pattern of gender differentiation, with no systematic social-class effect. An ANOVA single-factor test of the male–female differentiation pattern (with both male and female groups aggregated irrespective of social class) gives a p-value of 0.059, which is close to 5 %. High deletion rates of schwa are characteristic of the non-southern majority French norm, which is standard in the senses of being heard in the media, taught to foreigners and so on. In contrast, schwa-retention is a salient feature of southern  

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French varieties, one that can plausibly be regarded as having become ideologized. The female abandonment of schwa that is apparent in Armstrong and Unsworth’s survey can thus be conceptualized as tending towards the erosion of the localized ideological system to which the schwa variable belongs. This is confirmed to a certain extent by the results of a questionnaire that the southern French informants were asked to complete in order to measure their sense of regional attachment or loyalty. A score ranging from 0 to 3 was assigned to each response in the question set, the aggregate of each individual’s scores determining their regional attachment index. The maximum value was 15, indicating high attachment to the region, and the minimum 0, indicating little or no attachment to the region. In the sample, males and females (social-class groups aggregated) were very clearly differentiated by their respective average regional attachment index scores of 7 and 3.75 respectively, implying that any southern-facing language ideology is likely to be sustained primarily by male speakers rather than female ones. This finding is in fact consistent with the multitude of traditional dialect studies which show conservative rural dialects to be largely the preserve of “NORMs”: non-mobile older rural males (Chambers/Trudgill 1998, 29–30). This general picture is complemented by recent findings from English and other languages (e.g. Milroy et al. 1994) which have brought into sharper focus a pattern of urban dialectology that is comparable to the NORM pattern: young urban males also appear to resist the introduction of non-localized innovative linguistic variants, while females promote them. The apparently “outward-looking” propensity of female speakers has been attributed to the specific social situation in which women tend to find themselves, which can militate against their enrolment into tight, locally-based social networks and which may encourage women both to be more sensitive to “accepted” norms of behaviour and to signal their social status by how they appear and behave (cf. Chambers/Trudgill 1998, 84–85). Explanations along these lines help to account for the observed linkage between women and the use of standard linguistic features. But they account for only part of the SGP. For it is not always the case that female-led innovation tends towards the erosion of regional linguistic distinctiveness. This fact is strikingly demonstrated by the evolution of so-called žeísmo in Buenos Aires Spanish, also known as porteño Spanish. Historically, Castilian has distinguished between a voiced palatal fricative /ʝ/ and a palatal lateral /ʎ/, as in calle [ˈkaʎe] versus ayer [aˈʝeɾ]. In most parts of the Spanishspeaking world, the phonemes have merged, at the expense of the lateral, a phenomenon known as yeísmo. Žeísmo is the local Argentinian variant of yeísmo, whereby the outcome of the merger is the palato-alveolar fricative /ʒ/ rather than mid-palatal /ʝ/, resulting in pronunciations such as [ˈkaʒe] calle and [aˈʒeɾ] ayer. For many decades, žeísmo has been one of the most salient linguistic features of Argentinian Spanish, although since at least the 1950s a voiceless variant [ʃ] appears to have been attested in the porteño subdialect, primarily among younger speakers. Figure 2 below shows the quantitative profile of devoicing among young people in the late 1970s, according to  

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data supplied by Wolf/Jiménez (1979). The sample comprises 240 individuals arranged by age, gender and class (working, middle and upper), with a token count of 6,819.

Figure 2: Devoicing of /ʒ/ in porteño Spanish (based on Wolf/Jiménez 1979)  

Feeding the data visualized above into a multiple logistic regression model, we find that the “odds ratios” for devoicing in respect of gender, age and class are 8.55, 0.78 and 0.52, respectively (with p-values of less than 0.00005 for each variable). The odds ratio is the factor by which the odds of the phenomenon under study – in this case devoicing of /ʒ/ – increase per unit increase in the independent variable, a ratio of less than 1 implying that the odds in fact decrease. Thus, in Wolf/Jiménez’s sample of younger speakers, the odds of /ʒ/ being devoiced in female speech are 8.55 times higher than they are in male speech, while the odds decrease with greater age (by a factor of 0.22 per year) and also as a function of class (by a factor of 0.48 per class increment).4 A quantitative relationship between /ʒ/-devoicing and both gender and age was also highlighted by Fontanella de Weinberg (1978, 238), who found that the highest values for her devoicing index were associated with females in the under-30 age group.

4 This assumes that class is a continuous variable, with observed values 1, 2 and 3. An alternative would be to treat class as a three-level categorical variable.

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Data provided by Chang (2008), who investigated the devoicing of /ʒ/ in Buenos Aires in 2007, enable us to see how the phenomenon evolved over three decades. Chang’s data are summarized in Table 2 below.  

Table 2: Devoicing of /ʒ/ in porteño Spanish in 2007 (based on Chang 2008)  

Speaker Female

Male

Age

% [ʃ]

1

21

100.0

2

23

95.1

3

32

100.0

4

79

4.9

5

67

24.4

1

18

100.0

2

18

95.1

3

31

100.0

4

36

60.0

5

25

97.6

6

69

0.0

What is immediately apparent from the table is that among the younger speakers, say those aged 35 or under, /ʒ/ devoicing is almost categorical regardless of gender, as Chang himself notes (ibid., 62). Thus if we remove all the speakers aged over 35 from the logistic regression model – which for Chang’s data we construct on the basis of two rather than three independent variables, due to the absence of class-related information – the p-value for the gender variable becomes 0.7324, indicating that there is no statistically significant relationship between gender and devoicing among those aged 35 or less. Among the older cohort, however, the relationship is statistically significant (p-value: 0.0003) and the odds ratio is very high, viz. 60.43. While this high figure is presumably in part a by-product of the small size of the subsample, it does indicate that gender is still a factor among older speakers. This of course is to be expected, given that the many of these older speakers belong to the cohorts who in the studies of the late 1970s showed very high levels of gender-based variation. Comparing the two sets of data, we find that the modern situation contrasts markedly with the situation that obtained in the late 1970s. At that time, /ʒ/-devoicing was a notably female tendency and it was, moreover, a feature that was spurned by the upper classes (of both sexes). Three decades later, the effect of gender is confined to older speakers and thus is likely to be disappearing. In addition, although Chang does not provide data pertaining to class, he notes (ibid., 62) that younger speakers questioned now view the voiced variant as “provincial” or “unsophisticated”, sug-

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gesting that devoicing has lost the social stigma it once appears to have had. In quite a short space of time, therefore, female speakers appear to have normalized a linguistic innovation within the local speech community. The most interesting aspect of this change is that the innovation does not involve the replacement of a localized feature by one perceived to be more “standard”, but instead substitutes one highly localized variant for another, indicating that women’s propensity for linguistic change is not confined to eliminating diatopically marked forms. How can findings such as these be reconciled with women’s apparent preference for more standard linguistic features, i.e. part (I) of the SGP as stated at the beginning of this section? Part of the answer may lie in the fact that female speakers do not constitute a homogenous group. For example, it can be seen from Figure 2 that the upper class females in the sample, with the exception of the youngest age cohort, devoice /ʒ/ significantly less than their middle-class and working-class counterparts. This is reflected in an odds ratio of 0.43 (p-value < 0.00005) for the female/upper class interaction, implying that membership of that category actually decreases the likelihood of devoicing, against the general trend among women. Thus the claim that women as a whole were early adopters of the devoiced variant is somewhat misleading. More broadly, generalizations which do not discriminate between different categories of females are likely to result in expectations which do not necessarily match reality. The same issue emerges in data reported by Pipe (2014, 196–197), which coincidentally also relate to devoiced variants of /ʒ/, this time in French. Table 3 below shows percentage devoicing of final /ʒ/ in words like garage in Alsatian French, long an emblematic feature of the variety and having a clear causation: the absence of voiced final consonants in the Germanic substrate.  

 

Table 3: Devoicing (%) of final /ʒ/ in Alsatian French  

Age

Male MC

Female MC

Male WC

Female WC

Male rural

Female rural

18–30

11.90

20.55

14.68

21.56

12.67

8.51

31–60

7.22

9.77

14.98

N/A

N/A

N/A

12.89

17.97

25.75

23.80

52.90

18.99

60+

The most striking result here shows the rural females behaving as expected, i.e. in conformity with Labov’s principles set out earlier, but all other speakers running against the flow. It is plausible to see in these data the iconization of devoiced /ʒ/ as part of an emergent local ideology which constructs the urban community as distinct from the surrounding rural one. In this view, females are in the vanguard of the change, much as they were in the corresponding change in porteño Spanish. However, because the change is sensitive to (and indeed reinforces) the urban–rural distinction, the behaviour of rural females diverges sharply from that of urban females.

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4 Ethnicity A superficial (and refutable) view is that ethnic differentiation, being more marked or salient than other types, will in turn reflect more salient dependent features, including linguistic. A closer analysis suggests that the category, imposed from the outside, does not necessarily correspond to the experience of those so categorized. The corollary of this, as we shall see, is that ethnicity is more profitably conceptualized as operating in conjunction with certain other social variables. A good deal of attention has focused in recent years on the variable language spoken in the banlieues or cités surrounding several large French towns, and one is tempted to label this type of variation “ethnic”. In these housing estates, similarities with the American inner cities can be found in a high rate of unemployment, a concentration of ethnic minorities and low-quality housing stock. The contemporary connotation of the term banlieue, which now evokes social malaise of the kind associated with the socio-economic phenomena discussed above, is relatively recent and is illustrated in cinema by the change in the artistic treatment of French suburban life. The close-knit working-class communities of the period from the 1930s to the 1950s, depicted in films such as Duvivier’s La Belle Équipe (1936) and Renoir’s Partie de campagne (1936), contrast sharply with Kassovitz’s focus on drugs and violence, and the general impression of entrapment in La Haine (1990). With the beginning of the end of the Trente Glorieuses in the late 1970s and the ensuing economic recession, the banlieues, until then symbol of economic growth and modernity, became what Vieillard-Baron (1996) has called an “antimodèle”. Using a social network approach, Jamin (2004) measured the relationship between affrication of /t/ and /d/ – as in [ʒvødʒiːkʃəː] j’veux dire qu’ je…; [tʃydi] tu dis – and a speaker’s integration into street culture in La Courneuve, a banlieue défavorisée situated about three miles north of Paris in the Seine-Saint-Denis department.5 An individual’s social network is defined as the sum of relationships which he or she has contracted with others (Milroy 1980, 105), and varies in the quantity and quality of its ties. Networks can be dense (every individual involved in the network knowing every other individual) and multiplex (individuals knowing one another in several capacities, e.g. individuals being both workmates and neighbours). By contrast, a network can be weak (individuals knowing only one other member of the network) and uniplex (individuals having only one common activity or link). A set of indicators measuring multiplexity and density (see Milroy 1980, 141–142) can be assigned to each individual and the sum of these indicators gives a network strength score. The interest of this score is to show the degree of integration of an individual within a group or community. This is of sociolinguistic interest as it can explain how sensitive an individual is

5 Affrication is also capable of occurring word-finally after /k/ and /g/ (e.g. donkch for donc).

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to the normative linguistic pressure of the group or community in which s/he is integrated. The underlying hypothesis behind using this ethnological concept as a speaker variable was that close-knit social networks (i.e. very dense and multiplex ones) might act as norm-enforcement mechanisms, and hence explain the maintenance of peer-group vernacular norms within these lower-class communities (see Milroy 1980). Jamin used the criteria below – some of which are from Laks’s (1980) earlier study of adolescent speech in Villejuif (Paris) – to measure the strength of speakers’ social networks together with the degree of their integration into the street-culture: a) Lives in a H.L.M. within a grand ensemble. b) Goes to work/school within a grand ensemble. c) Does not go on holiday without her/his friends outside Paris. d) Has daily direct contacts with cité youth through work/school. e) Has her/his close friends within grand ensemble. f) Sees her/his close friends at school/work and outside school/work. g) Regularly spends time with friends on the streets at night. h) Present/past involvement in petty crime (theft, racketeering, drug dealing, etc.). i) Present/past problems with the police. j) Has difficulty in finding schooling /work. A value of 1 was attributed to each criterion when fulfilled by the informant, and a value of 0 when it is not met, with aggregates giving a street-culture index for each individual. A high index score (i.e. close or equal to ten) indicates a very close integration into street culture. Table 4 below aggregates speakers into five groups and shows the average affrication rates reported by Jamin for each group.  

Table 4: Affrication rate (%) and street-culture score: group results  

Group

A

B

C

D

E

Street culture index

0 –2

3 –4

5 –6

7 –8

9 – 10

Affrication

2.8 %

6.5 %

12.6 %

16.7 %

35.9 %

Table 4 shows a clear relationship between street index score and use of affrication. Based on these data, the odds of affrication increase by a factor of 1.37 (p-value < 0.00005) per unit increase in the street culture index. It therefore seems likely that the degree of informants’ integration or identification with the subculture influences their adoption of cités accent features. The density and multiplexity of a speaker’s social network seem to be powerful influencing factors here. The infrastructure of the grand ensemble reinforces the density and multiplexity of adolescent networks (all group members usually know each other and share a whole range of common activities). Table 4 gives dramatic confirmation of this observation.  

 

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When the relationship between street-culture score and ethnic origin is considered, the processes of adoption and maintenance of cités vernacular becomes clearer. The young beurs (born in Europe but of north African descent) who are the heaviest users of the linguistic features that characterize banlieue French are the most highly integrated in street-culture and possess the densest and most multiplex networks. What is less clear is how this ethnic differentiation should be theorized. Ethnicity equates more or less to race, but, as Trudgill points out (1995, 41), “there is no inherent or necessary link between language and race”. Thus, although social expectations may be violated when a white American with a black accent is encountered, there is no linguistic reason to rule this out. Similarly, there is no inherent link between ethnicity and banlieue French; the overwhelming majority of those who do speak it are of Maghreb origin, and their presence in these estates is due to the colonial history of France. Hence it is more accurate to say that the informants’ behaviour can better be explained by reference to their presence in a secular republic which refuses to recognize any ethnic or national identity other than French, whose official language is French and a great number of whose “narratives” exclude them almost totally from the mainstream. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that they should construct dense, multiplex networks which acquire a characteristic mode of linguistic projection. The development of cité vernaculars can thus be regarded as a specific instance of the process of ideology construction to which we have already referred. This suggests that the role of ethnicity per se in linguistic variation should be seen as being epiphenomenal rather than directly causal.

5 Social class Social classes have been with us for some time, but it is worth recalling that class is a way of imposing a conceptual organization on inequality. While it is real, inequality is not most usefully thought of in any unidimensional way, since the prestige that a superior social class confers is not the only type of prestige available. The Gallic approach in many areas of theory tends to reject the “Anglo-Saxon” model, preferring something closer to home and often derived from Marxism. Scholars like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Lacan are only among the more prominent. Marx’s idea of class conflict as a zero-sum game which one class will inevitably win has been falsified empirically, but the concept and its derivatives continue to hold sway in some sections of society, particularly in the academy. Bourdieu’s Marxist or Marxian sociological approach continues to attract attention (Bourdieu 1982); he was unusual among leading French intellectuals in quite often using empirical data to justify his theorizing. It seems suitable therefore that his theories should have led in turn to new methods of interpreting variable social behaviour. The conflictual Marxist view of class assumes in its extreme form a polarity between the possessors and the producers of capital. The notion of capital is of course central to the theory, and it has been modified by Bourdieu and his

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followers in various directions. Indeed, the phrase “social capital”, though not coined by Bourdieu, has now passed into everyday language, no doubt largely as a result of his work and that of his adherents and critics. Allied with the idea of capital in a nonconcrete sense is that of a symbolic market, where social and cultural capital can be traded for goods and services. Language is an obvious type of cultural capital, and this notion was adapted to the study of language variation to form the “Linguistic Market Index” and put into operation by the Canadian scholars Sankoff/Laberge (1978). The LMI is essentially a social-class index, based on a Marxist class analysis and designed to provide a more sophisticated measure than those more commonly used of the relation, on the one hand between the orientation of speakers towards the standard language and on the other their occupation. Social-class indices used by most Anglo-American sociolinguists are defined primarily by reference to “consensual” models of social class based fairly directly on occupational category, as well as other descriptors that are either in tension with occupation or derivative from it. The term consensual conveys the idea that there is broad if unreflecting agreement among non-specialists on the relative status of occupations. But any attempt to theorize the matter shows it to be rich in redundancies and contradictions: for example, type of housing has often been used as an element in the construction of social-class indexes, but evidently enough this will usually depend on income; type of occupation or level of income may be at odds with success in school or college; educational achievement may be hard to compare across generations, and so forth. There has nevertheless been a strong tendency to try to balance these elements the one against the other by producing weighted scores; Table 5 below shows Labov’s early attempt.  

Table 5: Weights of occupation, educational and income ratings combined (Labov 1966, 141)  

Occupational rank

Occupational rank

Occupational rank

Occupational rank

HIGH

LOW

IV Income Education HIGH

LOW

III

II

I

IV

III

II

I

IV

III

II

I

IV

III

II

I

IV

III

II

I

IV

9

8

7

6

8

7

6

5

7

6

5

4

6

5

4

3

III

8

7

6

5

7

6

5

4

6

5

4

3

5

4

3

2

II

7

6

5

4

6

5

4

3

5

4

3

2

4

3

2

1

I

6

5

4

3

5

4

3

2

4

3

2

1

3

2

1

0

The table shows a good deal of ingenuity in trying to cope with potential mismatches between education and income, organized horizontally in the table, and occupation, along the vertical dimension. The result is a ten-point social-class scale, ranging from

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9 to 0. Some of the results are rather curious: only those informants having a combination of most highly ranked occupation, graduate-level education and income in the highest bracket are capable of being assigned to the highest social class, and the same obtains mutatis mutandis for the zero score. Between these extremes the possibilities are multiple and the distribution of social-class scores is symmetrical, with 56 of the 64 figures in the table occupied by the scores from 7 and 2 inclusive, as the diagram shows: Social class (high)

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

0 (low)

Number of possibilities

1

3

6

10

12

12

10

6

3

1

A further odd result is the scattering of class scores across the four occupational groups. Thus an informant having a combination of most highly ranked occupation, graduate-level education and income in the lowest bracket for that occupation can be assigned the score 6, as can a combination of least highly ranked occupation, graduate-level education and income in the highest bracket for that occupational group. The comparison puts a strain on the imagination: one might suggest a poorly paid lawyer as against a well-educated waiter who can find no more highly remunerative employment. In contrast, the Linguistic Market Index is designed to explain the basic problem that the method shown in Table 5 fails to address, or simply masks: the quite often indirect relation between the remuneration of certain occupational groups who are numerically important in demographic terms (teachers, secretaries, service employees), and the “importance of the legitimized language in the socioeconomic life of the speaker” (Sankoff /Laberge 1978, 241). More plainly, the LMI aims to provide a closer fit between income level and ability or obligation to control the standard language; for our present purposes it can be viewed broadly as a social-class index, with the important qualification that it regards class membership in the Marxist way, namely in relation to the means of production. In an advanced economy we need to understand the term in several extended senses, in this case one covering the fact that the use of the standard language is expected in many public contexts. We can note in passing that the imaginary example discussed above, comparing a lawyer and a waiter, can be satisfactorily dealt with by invoking the linguistic market. The Bourdieusian model is capable therefore of at least offering an explanation beyond simple intuition why social class, as defined by occupation, should influence linguistic behaviour. Indeed, Sankoff/Laberge’s introductory sentence is as follows: “Though it is well known that the internal differentiation of spoken language is related to social class, the scientific study of this relationship poses a number of very difficult problems” (1978, 239). We can remark further that the Marxian analysis is resistant to the accusation of infinite regress, if we apply to it Saussure’s chess analogy (Saussure 1967, 125–126), which compares a linguistic situation with a chess game at a given stage. No know 

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ledge of the previous stages of the game is necessary for a snapshot analysis, and likewise we can simply accept without further enquiry the Canadian situation as it obtained at that time, by putting ourselves in the position of native speakers, for whom historical knowledge of the context is for the most part neither necessary nor available, in the sense of forming part of their immediate experience. Sankoff and Laberge obtained LMI scores by asking a panel of eight judges, all sociolinguists familiar with the French Canadian dialect pattern, to place each informant in one of four LMI categories. The judges did this after consulting a document describing the “socioeconomic life history” of the informant. A good deal of space in the Sankoff and Laberge paper is devoted to demonstrating the closeness of agreement between the members of the panel, and clearly a reliance on collective judgments is of little avail if these are not in close conformity. Table 6 below shows variable use of the consonant (r) according to the LMI of the Montreal speaker sample studied by Sankoff and Laberge and several others. The variation in question has to do with a linguistic shift accelerating in Montreal in the 1970s, the adoption of the European French uvular pronunciation of the /r/ consonant. [R]-users were defined as using the innovating variant more than 50 % of the time observed; similarly, [r]-users used the recessive variant at the same level.  

Table 6: Variable use of /r/ according to LMI of speaker (adapted from Clermont/Cedergren 1979)  

.00 –.12

.13 –.44

.45 –.74

.75 – 1.0

[R]-users

6.7

44.1

54.8

72.2

[r]-users

93.3

55.9

45.2

27.8

30

34

31

18

LMI

N

Logistic regression analysis of the data in Table 6, based on the mean value of the LMI for each of the four groups of speaker shown, indicates that the odds of a person being an [R]-user increase by a factor of 1.41 per decimal increase in the LMI (p-value < 0.00005). The data thus indicate that the innovating variant [R] was being adopted by speakers who were most highly placed socially. This is the more unusual type of linguistic change, since most occur “from below”, involving the adoption by middleclass speakers of working-class features. Social changes in the 1960s and 70s in French-speaking Quebec included a greater openness to the influence of France. An early piece of research on the changing pronunciation of /r/ (Vinay 1950) showed that the change was initiated in Quebec City, the cultural capital of the province and seemingly the town having closer links to European French. Greater openness to the French of the motherland seems to have resulted in a willingness to use the innovating pronunciation, in preference to the old-fashioned alveolar variant. One construction that can be put upon the pattern of data in Table 6 is that the speakers allocated the highest LMI, those in the rightmost column, have the attribute  

 

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commonly found in the middle classes, and often discussed in terms of social networks: what one might term a receptivity to social influences exerted outside the circle of immediate family and friends. It is clear enough that this propensity is related to the more public nature of many middle-class occupations, related in its turn to a requirement to master the standard language. Depending on the purposes of the enquiry, it can be necessary to take into account the structure of their social networks if one wishes to understand the behaviour of a social class. This forms a natural link in turn to the means of production, since working-class speakers typically have jobs that cause them to interact with other members of their class; further, the “close-knit community”, where all members know each other and have to do with each other in several capacities (neighbour, relative, workmate) is a working-class stereotype. And it is merely common sense that some working-class communities will form close ingroup bonds, to support their members materially and emotionally. Bonds of this type have been observed by many scholars to form barriers to exterior influence, including linguistic. So far, then, the Bourdieu Marxian model is reconcilable with certain notions central to sociolinguistics. What, though, of social capital and the linguistic market? Bourdieu defines social capital in the following way (Bourdieu/Wacquant 1992, 119): “Social capital is the sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition”.

The idea is summed up informally in the phrase “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. Bourdieu’s model connects the three types of capital, economic, cultural and social, to some extent in a dependency relation, since the possession of economic capital implies cultural (level of education and familiarity with high culture) and social, in the sense of useful connections, but the converse does not necessarily hold. Obvious exceptions concern those who work in education, where high levels of cultural capital often do not entail generous remuneration. The relation between economic and cultural capital is also symbiotic: as Bourdieu/Passeron (1970) argue at length, those who direct France are still drawn largely from the upper-middle classes, but the possession of inherited wealth and titles is no longer generally seen as sufficient qualification for accession to the heights of French industry or administration. Social privilege now requires the sanction of a high degree of educational attainment, typically in a grande école, a prestigious higher-education institution recruiting through competitive examination. This is because education, including to the highest level, is commonly perceived as being in principle open to all (there is of course in reality still a very strong correlation between the social-class background of students and their chances of admission to a grande école). One may suggest that the two-tier system of French higher education has considerable totemic force in France. Of modest origin, Bourdieu was himself a product of the École Normale Supérieure, one of the best known of the grandes écoles. Just as in the UK the persistence of class-

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consciousness is perpetuated through the continuing high profile of the monarchy and peerage which, as Adonis/Pollard point out (1997, 141): “underpins the perception of a rigid class system” (emphasis in original), so the highly organized and highly visible grande école system, with all its paraphernalia like the cramming classes (classes prépa) followed after the normal public examination at 18, can be presumed to represent for the French the double-edged meritocratic principle. Thus the French acronym ENA (École Nationale d’Administration) and its derivatives, notably énarque (a product of the school) and énarchie (“rule” by these products) refer to an area of cultural practice in the higher-education system that doubtless looms large for a good many French people. We can draw then a parallel between this view of social and cultural capital and what sociolinguists refer to as “overt prestige”. However, it is beyond doubt that prestige of the “covert” variety exerts considerable ideological power, perhaps increasingly so in cultures where anti-elitist ideologies are noticeable. We may add as a further refinement that ideologies of this kind are capable of being nation-specific. For example, in self-identification the French seem to be relatively at ease with the notion of belonging to the classes moyennes; a TNS-SOFRES survey published in 2005 found that 75 % of French people “avaient le sentiment d’appartenir aux classes moyennes”.6 The social and cultural capital model discussed above is difficult to square with that which sees prestige as subsisting in diverse forms and corresponding to conflicting social pressures. One is tempted to say that a metaphor needs to be safely dead before it can be used in a way that resists close examination, for, except in a technical sense irrelevant to social theory, only one form of capital is possible. To speak of “alienated capital” or “parallel markets” is either to strain the image to breaking point, or to evoke the parallel or black economy, which in turn has pejorative overtones. Lesley Milroy (1987, 100) remarks of the LMI model applied to language variation that it is “less easily operationalized than the stratificational one”. This is true in that categories like occupation and educational level are readily available for the researcher to correlate with language use, while as we saw the LMI was formulated using the judgments of individuals informed by the informants’ employment histories. As often, the preference of one grid over another depends on the purpose of the enquiry; for example, the LMI has the advantage of including what amounts to socialnetwork information, useful if an approach aiming to integrate the micro- and macrolevels is of interest. A more fundamental criticism of the LMI model is that it is onedimensional, or perhaps normative: a symbolic market is assumed, along with its concomitants, capital and goods. But the more recent development in cultural theory known as the “cultural turn” lays stress on the difficulty of disentangling the various social and economic elements in any cultural phenomenon under examination. The

6 http://www.tns-sofres.com/publications/les-francais-les-classes-moyennes-et-leurs-preoccupations-financieres (last access 18.02.2018).

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cultural turn is in contrast in our present argument to a Marxist approach that lays stress on the economic as underlying the social and on an “objective” view of any given situation, as against the false consciousness to which a social class may be subject. The later approach, which nonetheless runs alongside Bourdieusian thinking, holds that economic, social and cultural elements and effects can scarcely be separated out in a hierarchical way in the Marxist “base–superstructure” model. The unreconstructed view seems difficult to sustain in a strong sense because the perspective of an individual or community on their socio-cultural experience forms an integral part of that experience, and cannot be overridden by an objective viewpoint, as no theoretical or empirical argument strongly supports the theorist’s claim to that privilege. The remarks made earlier in relation to ethnicity apply here too; whatever social-class grid is imposed on a speaker sample, we need to be aware and sceptical of the underlying assumptions. The fact that the LMI dates from some decades ago hardly alters this, and in any event terms like social capital remain current.

6 Concluding remarks The foregoing discussion has attempted to problematize the principal speaker variables using Romance data for illustration. Among other things, we have argued that language acquires its indexical or iconic function through arbitrary linkages that crystallize in the spatial dimension. The primary nexus of the language ideology is thus locally or regionally defined, with reinforcement and maintenance often a function of the density of the relevant social network structure. In this model, the effects of gender and class are essentially reactive, in that they serve primarily to mediate speakers’ orientation with respect to localized practice. In this regard gender appears to be ambiguous, female speakers sometimes promoting more standard features and sometimes militating against them. This is no doubt due in part to the heterogeneity of gender as a demographic variable, class and other factors frequently serving to confound its quantifiable effect on individuals. Class, as we have just seen, predicts linguistic behaviour more reliably in the sense that the standard language is by definition the language of the middle and upper classes. However, for that very reason, non-circular definitions of class are difficult to formulate. The approach embodied by the LMI represents an important attempt at finessing this question but its reliance on the notion of capital entails a further array of problems, some of which we highlighted. Overall we have argued for a more nuanced analysis of the statistical relationships that have traditionally formed the backbone of quantitative sociolinguistics. Implicit in the grids imposed on data by the intersections of social variables are fundamental questions of theory and method: a pre-theoretical approach would allow the data to pattern itself, leaving the question of the primacy of given social categories to emerge at a later stage. If the resulting patterns were untidy, this would reflect the

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complex interplay of the relevant social variables with the situational variable of speech style, as informants engaged in often fluid “acts of identity”. Linguistic reality is likely to partake of this anarchic character rather more than one is led to believe by the neat correlations that are commonly reported in the literature.

7 Bibliography Adonis, Andrew/Pollard, Stephen (1997), A Class Act: The Myth of Britain’s Classless Society, London, Penguin. Alvar, Manuel (1974), Sevilla, macrocosmos lingüístico. Fonética y fonología según el Atlas Lingüístico y Etnográfico de Andalucía, in: Luis Quiroga Torrealba/Mario Torrealba Lossi/Pedro Díaz Seigas (edd.), Homenaje a Ángel Rosenblat en sus 70 años, Caracas, Instituto Pedagógico, 13–92. Alvar, Manuel (1996), Manual de dialectología hispánica, Barcelona, Ariel. Armstrong, Nigel/Unsworth, Sharon (1999), Sociolinguistic Variation in Southern French Schwa, Linguistics 37(1), 127–156. Ávila, Antonio (1994), La variación reticular e individual en el vernáculo urbano malagueño. Datos del barrio de Capuchinos, MA dissertation, Málaga, Universidad de Málaga. Bourdieu, Pierre (1982), Ce que parler veut dire. L’Économie des échanges linguistiques, Paris, Fayard. Bourdieu, Pierre/Passeron, Jean-Claude (1970), La Reproduction, Paris, Minuit. Bourdieu, Pierre/Wacquant, Loïc (1992), An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Cambridge, Polity. Cameron, Deborah (1990), Demythologizing Sociolinguistics: Why Language Does Not Reflect Society, in: John Joseph/Talbot Taylor (edd.), Ideologies of Language, London, Routledge, 79–93. Carbonero, Pedro, et al. (1992), El habla de Jerez. Estudio sociolingüístico, BUC, Cuadernos de Divulgación, Ayuntamiento de Jerez. Cedergren, Henrietta (1987), The Spread of Language Change: Verifying Inferences of Linguistic Diffusion, in: Peter Lowenberg (ed.), Language Spread and Language Policy: Issues, Implications and Case Studies, Washington, DC, Georgetown University Press, 46–60. Chambers, Jack/Trudgill, Peter (1998), Dialectology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Chang, Charles (2008), Variation in Palatal Production in Buenos Aires Spanish, in: Maurice Westmoreland/Juan Thomas (edd.), Selected Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics, Somerville, Cascadilla, 54–63. Clermont, Jean/Cedergren, Henrietta J. (1979), Les “R” de ma mère sont perdus dans l’air, in: Pierrette Thibault (ed.), Le Français parlé: Études sociolinguistiques, Edmonton, Linguistic Research, 13–28. Fontanella de Weinberg, María Beatriz (1978), Un cambio lingüístico en marcha: Las palatales del español bonaerense, Orbis 27, 215–247. Foulet, Lucien (1921), Comment ont évolué les formes de l’interrogation, Romania 47, 243–348. Gilliéron, Jules/Edmont, Edmond (1902–1910), Atlas linguistique de la France, 9 vol., Paris, Champion. Holmquist, Jonathan (1985), Social Correlates of a Linguistic Variable: A Study in a Spanish Village, Language in Society 14(2), 191–203. Irvine, Judith T./Gal, Susan (2000), Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation, in: Paul Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities and Identities, Santa Fe, School of American Research Press, 35–84. Jamin, Mikael (2004), “Beurs” and “accent des cites”: A Case Study of Linguistic Diffusion in La Courneuve, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 8(2), 169–176.  

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Kuiper, Lawrence (2005), Perception is Reality: Parisian and Provençal Perceptions of Regional Varieties of French, Journal of Sociolinguistics 9(1), 28–52. Labov, William (1963), The Social Motivation of a Sound Change, Word 19, 273–309. Labov, William (1966), The Social Stratification of English in New York City, Washington, DC, Center for Applied Linguistics. Labov, William (1972), Sociolinguistic Patterns, Philadelphia, University of Philadelphia Press. Labov, William (1990), The Intersection of Sex and Social Class in the Course of Linguistic Change, Language Variation and Change 2(2), 205–254. [Reprinted in: Jenny Cheshire/Peter Trudgill (edd.), The Sociolinguistics Reader, vol. 2, London, Arnold, 7–52]. Labov, William (2001), Principles of Linguistic Change, vol. 2: Social Factors, Oxford, Blackwell. Labov, William (2007), Transmission and Diffusion, Language 83(2), 344–387. Laks, Bernard (1980), Différentiation linguistique et différentiation sociale: Quelques problèmes de sociolinguistique française, doctoral thesis, Paris, Université de Paris VIII-Vincennes. Lapesa, Rafael (91981, 11942), Historia de la lengua española, Madrid, Gredos. Lippi-Green, Rosina (1997), English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States, London, Routledge. Milroy, James, et al. (1994), Glottal Stops and Tyneside Glottalization: Competing Patterns of Variation and Change in British English, Language Variation and Change 6(3), 327–357. Milroy, Lesley (1980), Language and Social Networks, Oxford, Blackwell. Milroy, Lesley (1987), Observing and Analysing Natural Language, Oxford, Blackwell. Milroy, Lesley (2003), Social and Linguistic Dimensions of Phonological Change: Fitting the Pieces of the Puzzle Together, in: David Britain/Jenny Cheshire (edd.), Social Dialectology: In Honour of Peter Trudgill, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 155–171. Navarro Tomás, Tomás (1975), Capítulos de geografía lingüística de la península ibérica, Bogotá, Instituto Caro y Cuervo. Pipe, Katharine (2014), Accent Levelling in the Regional French of Alsace, doctoral thesis, Exeter, University of Exeter. Quevedo, Francisco de (1670), Poesías de don Francisco de Quevedo, Bruxelles, Foppens. Ronkin, Maggie/Karn, Helen (1999), Mock Ebonics: Linguistic Racism in Parodies of Ebonics on the Internet, Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(3), 360–380. Sáenz de Santa María, Carmelo (ed.) (1982), Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Madrid, Instituto Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, CSIC. Sankoff, David/Laberge, Suzanne (1978), The Linguistic Market and the Statistical Explanation of Variability, in: David Sankoff (ed.), Linguistic Variation: Models and Methods, New York, Academic Press, 239–250. Saussure, Ferdinand de (1967), Cours de linguistique générale, Paris, Payot. Silver, Nate (2016), Election Update: Yes, Donald Trump Has a Path to Victory, http://fivethirtyeight. com/features/election-update-yes-donald-trump-has-a-path-to-victory (last access 08.03.2017). Silverstein, Michael (1979), Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology, in: Paul Clyne/William Hanks/Carol Hofbauer (edd.), The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels, Chicago, Chicago Linguistic Society, 193–247. Stewart, Christopher (2012), Mapping language Ideologies in Multi-Ethnic Urban Europe: The Case of Parisian French, Journal of Multicultural and Multilingual Development 33(2), 187–202. Tagliamonte, Sali (2012), Variationist Sociolinguistics: Change, Observation, Interpretation, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell. Trudgill, Peter (1995), Sociolinguistics, Harmondsworth, Penguin. Vieillard-Baron, Hervé (1996), Les Banlieues, Paris, Flammarion. Vinay, Jean-Paul (1950), Bout de la langue ou fond de la gorge?, The French Review 23(6), 489–498.  

 

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Wagner, Suzanne E. (2012), Age Grading in Sociolinguistic Theory. Language and Linguistics, Compass 6, 371–382. Weinreich, Uriel (1954), Is a Structural Dialectology Possible?, Word 10, 388–400. Wolf, Clara/Jiménez, Elena (1979), El ensordecimiento del yeísmo porteño, un cambio fonológico en marcha, in: Ana-María Barrenechea (ed.), Estudios lingüísticos y dialectológicos: Temas hispánicos, Buenos Aires, Hachette, 115–135.

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7 Speaker variables and their relation to language change Abstract: This chapter examines the relationship between variation processes, linguistic change and the “speaker variables” identified by Romance sociolinguistics. In particular, Romance sociolinguistics has focused on three key features: the sociobiographical characteristics of speakers, varieties related to social differences, and the relationship between social groups and linguistic repertoire. In this chapter, we study the socio-biographical characteristics that Anglo-American linguistics defines as “speaker variables”, analysing those variables more closely related in Romance studies to “diastratic variation” (age, sex/gender, social class). In certain cases, we show how these variables are linked to language change. We also take into account two other aspects related to speaker variables: space and social networks. We demonstrate how speakers today are individuals yet also belong to complex interconnected worlds (such as communities of practice, towns, neighbourhoods, settlements) that contribute to language change and variation.  

Keywords: speaker variables, social factors, variation and change  

1 Introduction This chapter discusses the relationship between variation processes, linguistic change and the “speaker variables” identified by Romance sociolinguistic studies. In the Romance tradition, the characteristics of the language and of the speaker at a social level are studied in terms of “diastratic variation”, based on the taxonomy created by the Romanian linguist Eugenio Coșeriu (1973). This concept derives from the Greek prefix dia (through) and the lexical root strata (layer). In the present context, it is used as a synonym of “social variation” and “social variable”. On a theoretical level, this concept has the advantage of highlighting the effects that variation factors have on language rather than simply studying the factors themselves (Gadet 2007). It has been observed that even within the same linguistic community there is some degree of variability among speakers and that such variability is related to factors inherent to the speakers (age, rural or urban dweller, educated or non-educated, male or female, farmer or artisan, etc.). Social variability began to be studied systematically only from the beginning of the twentieth century, when linguistic studies underwent major change. Coșeriu’s terminological systematization was an indirect but clear result of the focus on the relationship between language and society by both linguistic and social studies in Europe. One of the founding fathers of modern linguistics, Antoine https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-008

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Meillet, in his famous collection of theoretical papers (Meillet 1921), analyses the close relation between social structure and the synchronic functioning of the language as well as the relation between language change and changes in society. It is clear that Meillet’s work was influenced by the sociological ideas of Émile Durkheim, according to whom all social behaviours, if caused by human action, depend mainly on the society in which the individual lives (Durkheim 1979). Aside from the systematic analysis of the relationship between language and social groups by Meillet and his students, other important studies on this subject have emerged from dialectology and linguistic geography (on the relationship between dialectology and sociolinguistics, see also ↗5 Romance dialectology). These two disciplines base their studies on field research, empirical observation and data collection. Since the end of the nineteenth century (much earlier than the period when quantitative methods were elaborated in the United States for the analysis of the correlation between social stratification and linguistic variation), research in this area has focused on the key role of social variables (within linguistic communities and also individuals) in the processes of language variation and language change. These two disciplines have also been developed to overcome the idea that languages are entities governed by rules that are not influenced by speakers. In this sense, a fundamental figure is Hugo Schuchardt, who realized that language changes should also be conceived of as a social effect resulting from the relationship between speakers within a linguistic community. The importance of Schuchardt for the history of sociolinguistics is also shown by his pioneering work on pidgins and creoles (cf. Schuchardt 1909). Thanks to those early studies and the work of their authors, a fundamental fact emerges: not even the smallest social group is linguistically homogeneous. For example, Jean-Pierre Rousselot, a pioneer of variational studies based on field research, studied the linguistic change that occurred over generations in his family’s local patois, especially on the phonetic level (Rousselot 1892). Years later, by studying phonetic aspects, Louis Gauchat (1905) demonstrated how even the smallest village exhibited phenomena of variation and change, based mainly (but not exclusively) on the age of the speakers. Later, Benvenuto Terracini (1960, 13) would take care to “restituire in qualche modo unità a quel fascio di elementi eterogenei e oscillanti che si incontrano in un dato luogo, esattamente come noi concepiamo l’ideale unitario che stringe la struttura tanto più complessa di una lingua nazionale”. Local speech is kept unified by what Terracini called “sentimento linguistico”, a linguistic feeling that makes the speakers feel part of the same “speech community”. A specific awareness of the social aspects of linguistic variation can also be found in the two main linguistic atlases of the twentieth century: the Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz edited by Jaberg/Jud (1928–1940); and the Atlante linguistico italiano, founded by Matteo Bartoli and later edited by Benvenuto Terracini and subsequently Corrado Grassi. Grassi himself (1999, 191) observes that both of these projects show a particular sensitivity “sia pure a livello intuitivo e unicamente quale

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frutto dell’esperienza empirica, per quei comportamenti dei parlanti che la sociolinguistica avrebbe più tardi provveduto a interpretare e problematizzare”. Sociolinguistics as an independent discipline originated in the 1960s in the United States and established itself as an interpretative method in Great Britain in the early 1970s. Two of the most renowned scholars of the discipline are William Labov and Peter Trudgill. Using the seminal studies of these two authors, which included quantitative analysis as a fundamental component, much Anglo-American scholarship has analysed the relationship between social class and linguistic variation. The systematic differences that can be perceived on a phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical level among speakers from different social groups, though often barely substantial from a linguistic point of view, acquire a strong social meaning, as they become objects of judgment by other members of the community. Diastratic variation, therefore, is also perceived by the speakers themselves, though often on an unconscious level, and is used to identify the place of others within the community. It is still unclear if and how Romance linguistics (especially dialectology and linguistic geography) in the first half of the twentieth century has affected Labovian studies. However, beyond the reconstruction of the links between Labovian sociolinguistics and Romance linguistics, it may be noted that variationist sociolinguistics has not explicitly claimed those links. In particular, for Labov, spatial differentiation is not relevant in a layered social context like the urban one, which does not presuppose the isolation of linguistic layers: “On the contrary, groups living in close contact may participate in rapid linguistic changes which lead to increased diversity” (Labov 1972, 143). In other words, European dialectology and Labovian sociolinguistics have not only failed to interact meaningfully, but they have actually conceived the question of spatial variation differently. However, as Sobrero (2006) notes, the Anglo-American indifference to European geolinguistics is closely linked to the fact that the latter is based on a “functionalist” approach (which is, in fact, very similar to that of interpretative sociolinguistics). This approach is widely different from Anglo-American linguistics which uses a formalist descriptivism, relying on epistemology. Moreover, even some important Romance sociolinguists with a strong variationist bent (i.e. Labovian and Trudgilian) have demonstrated a certain tendency to underestimate the innovative and anticipatory aspects present in Romance studies in the first half of the twentieth century. For instance, Hernández-Campoy (1993) uses the label of “traditional dialectology” to refer to schools of thought and approaches often very different from one another. Diastratic variation can be studied from three different points of view. The first aims at identifying the characteristics of the speaker (and of groups of speakers) that can be linked to diastratic variation. The second perspective takes the variational architecture of a language as a starting point, aiming to identify which one of its varieties is more strongly related to social differences, thus acting as a marker of belonging to a class or

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group. The third approach takes into consideration the relation between social groups and linguistic repertoire. These three viewpoints interact strongly with each other. In this chapter, however, we will focus exclusively on the first approach that Anglo-Saxon linguistics defines as “speaker variables”, analysing those variables more strictly related in Romance studies to the diastratic variation (age, sex/gender, social class). Where relevant, we will show how these speaker variables might be linked to language change. Furthermore, we will take into account two other aspects related to speaker variables: space and social networks. In this way we will show how speakers today are individuals at the same time as they belong to complex, interconnected worlds such as communities of practice, towns, neighbourhoods, settlements.

2 Socio-demographic variables 2.1 Sex and gender Many studies on sex- and gender-based differences employ a theoretical model that analyses how conservation and innovation are enacted in women’s speech, both in terms of varieties used (dialect vs language) and of variants of the language (phonetic, morphological or lexical). In “The Woman”, a chapter in Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin, Jespersen expresses quite a radical perspective when he presents as a general thesis the argument that “women are more conservative than men, and they do nothing more than keep to the traditional language […] while innovations are due to the initiative of men. […] Men become the chief renovators of language” (Jespersen 1922, 247). Jespersen (ibid.) goes on to highlight certain linguistic elements as typical of women’s language: “The vocabulary of a woman […] is much less extensive than that of a man. Women move preferably in the central field of language, avoiding everything that is out of the way or bizarre, while men will often coin new words or expressions […]. Those who want to learn a foreign language will therefore always do well at the first stage to read many ladies’ novels, because they will there continually meet with just those everyday words and combinations which the foreigner is above all in need of, what may termed the indispensable small change of language”.

Jespersen’s model, though it may be seen as anticipating the contrast between restricted and elaborated code (Bernstein 1964) in terms of differences based on sex and gender, has never had much success in Romance dialectology and linguistic geography. This is because those disciplines are based on actual social-historical references and often find that the roles of men/women are quite the opposite. In their introduction to the Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz, Jaberg/Jud (1987, 242) show how middle-class women generally “sono le rappresentanti più affidabili del dialetto locale, poiché viaggiano meno, normalmente non partecipano alle migrazioni periodiche, sono meno soggette degli uomini agli influssi

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esterni, nelle Alpi spesso conoscono anche la terminologia agricola meglio degli uomini”. Other reports from dialectological research and atlas studies often highlight a similar situation, highlighting the fact that women appear to be less exposed to outside influences (e.g. national military service) that can have a dissolving effect on the local dialect. Gauchat, however, reached an opposing conclusion in 1905. When he analysed a concrete example of linguistic innovation he discovered that it appeared more frequently in the language of the women rather than that of the men who spent their days isolated in the fields: “Il est évident que la nouvelle façon de prononcer apparaîtra plus vite dans le langage de la femme que dans le parler plus rare et plus lent de l’homme” (Gauchat 1905, 44). Some decades later, the Italian linguist Carlo Tagliavini made a systematic study of the subject and discovered that innovation and conservation were both present in women’s language. “Apparentemente contrari l’uno all’altro, ma in realtà dovuti alla medesima causa che risiede nella condizione sociale della donna, hanno contribuito a differenziare, più o meno, la parlata dei due sessi: (a) un fenomeno di ‘conservazione’ per cui le donne [...] distanti dalla vita pubblica e dai contatti esterni, rifuggono, o perlomeno accolgono più tardi, le innovazioni che vengono dal di fuori; (b) un fenomeno di ‘innovazione’ per cui le donne, meno esposte all’influsso della scuola, della lingua letteraria e dei rapporti esterni, precorrono gli uomini nelle innovazioni spontanee” (Tagliavini 1938, 91).

About 15 years later (1952), in the first issue of the journal Orbis, a large section was dedicated to “Le Langage des femmes: Enquête linguistique à l’échelle mondiale”. Answering the call of the Centre International de Dialectologie Générale de Louvain, linguists from the Romance and Germanic areas convened to discuss the subject in order to “mettre en lumière dans quelle mesure le langage des femmes est conservateur ou innovateur par rapport à celui des hommes”. Within a highly differentiated framework, the figure of the woman stands out as the one who transmits the language on to younger generations. Parlangèli (1952) chose an interesting perspective when he focused his study not on how women use language, but on how they perceive and evaluate it. Since women are the ones who pass the language to the next generation, a negative evaluation of their language variety will rapidly lead to its disuse. Parlangèli’s focus, therefore, moved from the enacting of linguistic change to the conscious choices and evaluation of linguistic behaviours, following a line of research that would lead to important developments later on. Indeed, from the first years of the twentieth century, Romance linguistics, especially that which included fieldwork (as in the case of dialectology and geographical linguistics) seemed to intuit that, when they emerged, the different modes of speaking of men and women do not depend on biological sex but on reasons related to status and the social role occupied by women in a specific historical, social and cultural context. Nevertheless, the different conclusions that many studies reached on this argument may depend on the diverse contexts that these studies refer to. The varia 

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tions in these contexts affect the conditions that determine the differences (including linguistic) between men and women. From the 1970s onwards, the variables of sex and gender are thus inserted into the model of Labovian sociolinguistics that clearly identifies stable situations, on the one hand, and situations where a change is in progress on the other. “For stable sociolinguistic variables, women show a lower rate of stigmatized variants and a higher rate of prestige variants than men” (Labov 2001, 266); on the contrary, “in linguistic change from above, women adopted prestige forms at higher rate than men” (ibid., 293). Hence the gender paradox identified by Labov: “women conform more closely than men to sociolinguistic norms that are overtly prescribed, but conform less than men when they are not” (ibid.). In the same period, alongside the wave of demands associated with the feminist movement, the insights gathered in the Romance context find confirmation in the development of specific studies on the linguistic differences between men and women. Robin Lakoff’s (1973) research on women’s language represents a defining moment for the birth of gender and language study. Lakoff’s approach presumes that linguistic use is strongly influenced by a dominant male point of view. In other words, Lakoff views linguistic use as a space that reproduces social inequality between men and women. In the wake of this seminal study, the Romance context also gave rise to works that proposed to change radically the way in which language addresses gender differences. Aebischer/Forel (1983) in France and Sabatini/Mariani (1987) in Italy have declined to use masculine-gendered professional titles. The thrust of their work is that changes in the relations of power between men and women should stem from linguistic use and not vice versa. In the last two decades, a new approach to research has been developed that addresses speaker variables and the way in which this relates to linguistic change. According to this new approach, the focus should not be on sex in its biological essence but rather on its cultural value within a given society. The object of study, therefore, is no longer “sex” but “gender”. In this way, the perspective shifts from an essentialist one (where sex is inscribed in the biological nature of individuals) to a constructivist one (where masculine and feminine are constructed within society and its speech). According to the constructivist perspective, gender difference is not an independent variable. As a result, the focus is not the difference between men and women and the linguistic forms they use, but how language is employed to produce such a difference. A strong focus is on discursive strategies and interaction practices that constructed gender in a historically-defined way. Compared to the sociolinguistic studies of the sixties and seventies, this new research perspective is less interested in gender-related differences between groups, and more concerned with the strategies of interaction between historically-identified groups and with gender-related linguistic stereotypes, often also related to ethnic groups. This vein of study is part of the more general theoretical and methodological renovation that has enriched the Labovian paradigm, adding a more marked focus on

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linguistic practice in which social identity is constructed and expressed. From this perspective, language is no longer seen as a simple mirror of social reality, but as an instrument through which speakers “construisent et/ou déconstruisent le(s) genre(s), les sexualités et les rapports de domination en mobilisant une pluralité de ressources sémiotiques telles que la parole, les textes, les inscriptions graphiques les images, les conduites vocales, gestuelles, posturale, visuelles, etc.” (Greco 2014, 7). Despite a favourable theoretical terrain, there has not been widespread research in the Romance context to address this new perspective. Whilst in the United States, various possible expressions of identity (male identity, gay identity, transgender identity, etc.) have been explored in recent years, in Italy and France the focus is overwhelmingly concentrated on the female gender. In Italy, this has been emphasized above all by an analysis of linguistic stereotypes in which women are victims (see for example Bazzanella/Fornara 2005; Fusco 2009). In France, in recent years, Boutet/Maingueneau (2005, 23) note that: “la dimension sexuelle et sexuée a plutôt été analysée comme l’un des facteurs de la variation, avec l’âge, la position sociale ou l’origine géographique […] mais plus rarement dans le cadre théorique du genre”. As regards the Hispanic domain, Carvalho (2013, 257) observes that “there are a few Spanish-based small-scale ethnographic studies that do apply methods drawn from interactional sociolinguistics and consider micro approaches to the co-construction of styles and identities through language”. Holmquist (2011), for instance, studies in detail the role of gender in the distribution of word-final /s/ in Puerto Rican Spanish, reflecting on correlation between this distribution and other social and linguistic factors. However, Holmquist’s work treats gender as a mere variable, excluding complexities emphasized in recent gender research.

2.2 Age Age has been widely studied in Romance linguistics and is a factor that involves almost every dimension of variation. First of all, the effects of the age variable are instinctively linked to diachronic variation and, therefore, to linguistic change. It is possible to see the effects of time on language by analysing how it influences speech and the linguistic competence of individuals throughout their lives. Alongside the diastratic dimension (and partly also the diaphasic dimension), the age factor involves the diachronic dimension. This may be an obvious conclusion, as age is a variable that progressively changes over time. That is why it is also used as a methodological tool to capture the diachronic dimension within the synchronic one.1

1 Here, we focus on the relationship between variation in apparent time and change. It is important to remember, however, that variation between different age groups can also represent stable variation. See the discussion of age grading below.

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Age was probably the first social variable that dialectology and linguistic geography took into account as these fields developed an awareness of variability. Linguistic geography, for example, began to use age as one of the main criteria to select informants in areas being studied for linguistic atlases. In the search for the “ideal informant”, projects such as Gilliéron/Edmont’s (1902–1910) Atlas linguistique de la France preferred to interview elderly individuals who were born and remained all their lives in the place under analysis (cf. ↗5 Romance dialectology). The authors of such early atlases believed those informants were the custodians of more conservative dialectal forms. Later projects (such as the above mentioned Atlante linguistico italiano) considered age as only one of several factors to be taken into account. Regarding strictly dialectological analysis, in his work on the Francopovençal dialect of the Swiss village Charmey, Gauchat (1905) identified age (linked to gender) as the main agent of linguistic change, and women and youths as the main instigators of innovation. Gauchat’s work is a pioneering study on diachronic change in “apparent time”, i.e. research carried out by comparing speakers belonging to two different generations in the same moment in time. The basic assumption is that the two generations compared to each other represent two different stages in the development of the language. Although he never explicitly referred to Gauchat’s research, Martinet (1971) also performed a study in apparent time. In 1941, while in a prison camp, he decided to analyse possible phonological changes occurring in French over three generations. To this end he gave a questionnaire to a group of French officers in which he identified three age groups (seniors – aged 41 and older; moyens – aged between 31 and 40; juniors – aged under 31). Martinet established that some phonemic oppositions were respected more frequently in the groups representing those aged over 40 and under 30 and less so in the intermediate group. His explanation was quite evocative: all subjects in that age group had been ten during the Great War (1914– 1918), an event that greatly disrupted family life. Fathers were fighting in the war, mothers were busy with other occupations so that the education of children, including their linguistic education, lost priority and the natural tendency towards the evolution of language was less sanctioned. Beyond the methodological issues of this research (Martinet used a written questionnaire), a strong correlation between age and linguistic change was again identified. Twenty years after Gauchat’s research, Eduard Hermann (1929) went back to Charmey for a control study on the next generation. He used a two-sided control method: on the one hand, he re-interviewed the informants from the first study who were now in their old age; on the other, he interviewed younger, first-time informants. Hermann’s research broadly confirmed the results of the previous study, but also showed that it was not possible to link systematically linguistic innovation with young people and conservation with old people. In fact, Hermann discovered that some old people had abandoned the innovative forms they used in their youth to go back to the old ways of their parents, whilst others had changed their language in order to adapt to innovative forms they had previously ignored.

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Hermann’s control study was used by Labov to set up a prototypical example of a trend study, which combines analyses in apparent time with analyses in real time. In this kind of study, control takes place in the same context and the same community, but with different informants. Thanks to the control in real time, it was thus possible to verify that the results of the previous study in apparent time showed actual linguistic change. Researchers, in fact, needed to take many variables into account to determine whether the linguistic differences between subjects of different ages reveal an actual linguistic change. In this context, Labov (1994) proposed a distinction between generational change and age grading. Generational change refers to the actual linguistic change happening within the whole community and, from the post-adolescence period when competence in the first language is fixed, requires that speakers maintain stable linguistic behaviour. In this case, linguistic change takes place when younger generations start using innovative forms with increasing frequency (as Labov 1966 pointed out, this happened with post-vocalic /r/ in New York, which was used more frequently by young people than the elderly). Age grading (introduced in anthropology through the broader work of Charles F. Hockett) assumes that each generation goes through the same linguistic stages as the previous one. According to Labov (1994, 83), age grading is “an individual linguistic change against a backdrop of community stability”. This implies that people from different generations always use the same forms, which they later abandon in their old age. In other words, a speaker who uses form “x” when they are young would no longer use it when they are older, and a similar pattern would apply to their children and their grandchildren. In this case, we are not facing evolution but repetition. This process, though, cannot be generalized, as there are elderly people who continue to use the forms they used when they were young, or even more innovative forms than the ones used by the younger generation. Among the case studies of age grading, we find the distribution in apparent time of the suffix -ing. In an apparent time study, Labov (2001) showed a peak use of non-standard forms of -ing during the teenage years. A control study in real time confirmed that the innovative variant co-exists with the standard one for a long time without ever replacing it (cf. Labov 2011). That is because the same speakers who use the innovative form cyclically abandon it in order to revert to the standard variant. In her overview of the use of the notions of apparent time and real time in sociolinguistics, Wagner (2012, 377) notes that they “have already shown us that community change and individual lifespan change can be found in a number of different configurations”. The notion of age grading is the implicit theoretical basis for an important line of research in the Romance area: the language of young people. Such language is characterized by particular linguistic forms and the age of its speakers, but it is also influenced by specific contexts of social association and places (even virtual ones if we think of the communicative practices associated with the use of new media; cf. ↗14 New Media; ↗15 Medium and creole) where such linguistic forms are often used in order to build and express the speakers’ identity. An important role is also played

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here by factors outside the language system, both paralinguistic ones (such as gesture, mimics, proxemics) and extralinguistic ones (such as dress style, hair style, the use of tattoos and piercings, and so on). As non-linguistic factors acquire new importance in research terms, the communicative practices of young people’s language need to be addressed from a broader perspective that sees them as a “glocal” phenomenon. The cultural models influencing young people’s lifestyles (and therefore their communication styles) revolve around two different contexts: firstly, sociospatial meeting places (such as school, and public and urban spaces in general) that favour the emergence, or persistence, of substandard traits often marked on the diatopic level; secondly, contexts favouring linguistic homogeneity, such as the internet, music, cinema, arts and fashion trends, and so on. It would be excessive, however, to think that these linguistic and communicative practices are uniformly characteristic of all those who belong to a particular generational band situated between childhood and adulthood. As Còveri (2014, 109) has observed, “la lingua dei giovani è usata da tutte le giovani generazioni, ma non tutte le giovani generazioni usano (sempre, e in ogni occasione) i linguaggi giovanili”. Studies of these practices cannot ignore the experience that young people share within a community of practice where their identity is constructed and reconstructed according to the linguistic-discursive practices they use and the various social relations that they establish (Eckert 2000). In Romance contexts, studies on linguistic variation amongst young speakers demonstrate substantial convergence between identifying the most characteristic phenomenon and the linguistic levels most involved in the linguistic varieties of young people. These studies mark what Boyer (2005, 29) defines as “une réelle solidarité sociolinguistique générationnelle dans l’emploi systématique de certaines formes lexicales, repérées comme périphériques d’un point de vue normatif. Une solidarité générationnelle limitée cependant” (our emphasis). Generally, lexicon seems to be the level which is most involved. Above all, there is the over-production of new phrases or expressions, which is the most immediate indicator of the creativity with which users of youth varieties exploit the linguistic-communicative resources at their disposal. That creativity also manifests itself in the widespread growth of particular methods of word formation: parasitic suffixes (suffixes that are different from those expected in a given word, e.g. acidoso rather than acido, ‘acid’); clipping (raga rather than ragazzi, ‘guys’); puns (educazione tisica rather than educazione fisica, ‘physical education’), and so on. The weight of each of these mechanisms is distributed differently according to specific sociolinguistic realities (an example here concerns the morphological procedures which determine so-called verlanisations, one of the most common processes of new word construction in the language of French youth, cf. Boyer 2005). Loans from other languages (primarily English, but also from a Romance language like Spanish) have also had an effect. In general, phonetics is subject to so-called allegro pronunciation – a pronunciation that is a result of frequent occurrence in rapid speech. Some other features of youth

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pronunciation depend on specific sociolinguistic situations in different regions. Consider, for Italian, the lowering of the front vowels and the corresponding raising of the back vowels or the progressive lengthening of sibilant consonants between vowels in parts of the South, a phenomenon for which the youngest speakers seem to be the promoters. Regarding French, studies indicate the accentuation of the penultimate syllable. Other levels of analysis are less studied. As French scholars (cf. Gadet 2007) have demonstrated with respect to syntax, transitive verbs may come to be used intransitively (il assure, ça craint) or there may be a change of grammatical category (il est trop) or the use of non-conjugated verb forms (il a chourave de la bouffe). Almost all scholars make a distinction between the superficial aspects linked to style and more structural aspects which can affect the processes of linguistic change. Alongside these common features, national particularities, linked to the specific sociolinguistic conditions of the realities involved, can be identified. While there is a risk of oversimplification, three distinct sociolinguistic reasons for the spread of youth varieties can be identified across three countries. In France, the emergence of such a linguistic variety is closely linked to mass immigration from ex-colonies decades earlier than most other countries. Consequently, more than elsewhere, youth language has played a notable role as a protest against the dominant culture and its associated linguistic order. Studies of youth language in France are thus frequently linked to research on social marginalization and associated language practices such as slang or so-called français dissident (for a good synthesis, see Boyer 2005). It is possible to surmise that the perspective taken by certain French scholars regarding youth language is influenced by France’s particular “one nation, one language” policy. More often than not, this constitutionally-sanctioned attitude has resulted in a strenuous defence of the linguistic norm and a negative appraisal of any deviation from it. It has also created a strong opposition, both social and cultural, within the metropolitan space between the centre and the periphery. According to this perspective, the banlieues form the backdrop of a clichéd narrative in which young speakers, almost exclusively from an immigrant background, display linguistic behaviour associated with deviance, discontent and a lack of respect for authority. In Spain, the story of youth language is affected by the legacy of the Franco dictatorship. Until the second half of the 1970s, such language had a principally playful-expressive function that was employed against the middle and upper middle class groups linked to the old power (Capanaga/San Vicente 2005). During the phase between the end of the dictatorship and the consolidation of democratic rule, youth language become a symbol of the marginalized subculture of protest. In more recent years, it has become a fashionable and changeable practice. In Italy, the early works of scholars examined linguistic usage in the student world and its relationship with the lexicon and phraseology of the early youth

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subculture of the 1970s (the lexicon of drugs, alternative music and political protest, and subsequently passing trends linked to consumerism). Since the 1990s, however, scholars have paid more attention to the way in which young people participate in the internal reorganization of the Italian linguistic repertoire. In particular, the focus has been on the influence of local dialects and regional varieties of Italian on the linguistic practices of young people and what statistical evidence suggests is a “dialect resurgence” (cf. Berruto 2006; ↗18 The languages and dialects of Italy). Focus on the age variable has been stronger in those Romance contexts where the use of local dialectal variants has progressively reduced (or been almost abandoned, as in French), resulting in a general reorganization of the balance within the inventory of variants. According to this perspective, young people are considered to be the instigators of linguistic change that has its more radical form in the neglect of one code (the dialect) and the rise of another (the national language). The most innovative work on the subject, both on the methodological and the theoretical level, is that of Moretti (1999) on the Italian-speaking area of Switzerland. Moretti studied what he called “parlanti evanescenti”, or younger speakers who have a passive competence in the dialect that is mostly the first language of their parents. They are young speakers with a higher educational level than the previous generation, who use the dialect only when requested by researchers. Here, then, age emerges as both a diastratic and a diachronic factor.

3 Groups, social classes, cultural capital The identification of the social structure of a community as a crucial element for understanding its linguistic repertoire and the processes of its linguistic change was one of the main issues for linguistics at the beginning of the twentieth century. Two particularly important concepts are “social group” and “milieu”. Meillet (1904, 12) defines the first one in the observation that “Chaque groupe d’hommes utilise d’une manière particulière les ressources générales de la langue”, while Dauzat (1922, 128) defines the second one as follows: “le langage tend d’abord à se différencier en raison des milieux sociaux, du genre de vie, des professions. On n’aboutit à un morcellement sensible que dans les grandes agglomérations, ou les groupes sociaux ont une ampleur suffisante pour individualiser leur parler: là se constituent des langages, voire des argots de métiers”.

Vendryès uses the terms groupe and groupement to refer both to professional groups (“le jargon des tribunaux et l’argot des faubourgs”) and to the spaces where shared linguistic practices take place (“la langue des salons n’est pas celle des casernes”), as well as the differences between social classes (“bourgeois et ouvriers”). Vendryès’s studies focus mainly on how individuals cross paths, and languages, within different social groups:

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“La variété de ces langues tient à la complexité des rapports sociaux. Et comme un individu vit rarement enfermé en un seul groupe social, il n’y a guère de langue qui ne s’étende à des groupements différents. Chaque individu en se déplaçant porte avec lui la langue de son groupe et agit par sa langue sur celle du groupe voisin où il s’introduit” (Vendryès 1921, 286).

For Labovian sociolinguistics, social class is a key concept in quantitative models as it establishes a correlation between the use of “non-standard” variants and speakers’ socioeconomic status. The standard sociological measures of class employed in relevant studies are based on: (a) years of education; (b) the occupation of the family breadwinner; (c) family income. “Once these data are transformed into an index used to measure individuals’ places in the occupational hierarchy (and thereby approximate their social class), this information can be correlated with data from linguistic variables and tested statistically” (Mallinson 2007, 150). Many other research projects are based on alternative theoretical models focusing on how the “social construction” of the speaker’s characteristics is enacted. Bourdieu (1979; 1994), in particular, should be mentioned here. According to the French sociologist, each individual has three different types of capital: economic, social and cultural. For the purposes of studying the social variability of language, key concepts are social capital (i.e. the network of social relationships each individual can count on) and especially cultural capital (i.e. the cultural resources of the individual such as linguistic abilities, education and cultural practices); both partly inherited by the individual and partly constructed during his or her lifetime. The notion of cultural capital has often been used to understand how children’s good grades in school are a function of their parents’ level of education. In wide-ranging quantitative research studies in the Romance area, speakers have been classified into different groups according to their level of education, the social activities they carry out, their place(s) of birth and residence, and their first language. Studies, therefore, use one simple factor at a time, thus mitigating the strong criticism usually raised by the use of social class and the difficulty of using such a complex sociological measure, which also entails the creation of a complex index accounting for the cultural capital of each individual. More specifically, educational level and first language have been the variables that most identify the so-called “popular varieties” (italiano popolare, français populaire) and have been the subject of many studies in both Italy and France. Recent decades have seen a rise in the level of education in both countries and the very existence of “popular varieties” has been questioned. Popular varieties, though, are still central to sociolinguistic studies since they highlight one of the main issues of the debate: the relation between diaphasic and diastratic variation. From this point of view, an interesting finding is that no individual within the linguistic community is a native speaker of the higher linguistic varieties (formal language) of their own community repertoire. To this end, educational level is a fundamental factor in accessing the higher register of the language. For those whose low level of education prevents access to such a register, the only possible choices are the popular varieties, such as

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popular Italian and French, that are used both on formal occasions and for written production.

4 Spatiality as a speaker variable In recent decades, scholars have begun to reflect on the need to consider “spatiality” as one of the variables related to the speaker. Several contributions explicitly adopt this approach (cf. in particular, Krefeld 2002; Sornicola 2002; Krefeld 2004; Krefeld/ Pustka 2010; D’Agostino 2006; Auer 2013), taking as their starting point a critical analysis of models prevailing in different areas of linguistic research (geolinguistics, dialectology, sociolinguistics), where there is the tendency to regard language as intrinsically linked to space just as lakes or mountains are. Following the above-mentioned studies, this “naturalistic” model of the relationship between space and language is revealed as completely inadequate, from both a theoretical and heuristic point of view, in comprehending past linguistic phenomena and even more so, present phenomena that have to do with space. This inadequate vision can be overcome by considering the relationship between not just two elements (language and space) but three: language, speaker and space. In this way, spatiality in its various components becomes one of the variables related to the speaker. This type of analysis is aligned with a general awareness that mobility (which is a feature of the spatiality of the speaker) is one of the essential aspects of contemporary reality and one of the crucial aspects of language change. In particular, Blommaert/ Dong (2010, 383) believe that “the study of language and space requires a new conceptual apparatus and vocabulary, one in which mobility is central and in which effects of mobility on repertoires and interactional practices can be addressed in their full complexity. Language is traditionally seen as something that anchors people in a local context: it is described as something that belongs to a particular environment, is locked into local meanings and interactional dynamics. […] [I]t is a partial view, for language is also something translocal, it moves along with people across space and time, and it is being deployed locally in ways that reveal the translocal histories of the speaker’s resources. Language is not just a tool for the construction of locality, it is also a tool for mobility. […] It focuses not on language-in-place but on language-in-motions with various spatiotemporal frames interacting with one another”.

Many scholars have stressed the need for sociolinguistics to give a central role to the relationship between physical space and social space, that is, the linguistic space in which speakers live and build their multiple identities. In this regard, Krefeld (2002; 2004; Krefeld/Pustka 2010) constructs a three-dimensional model that distinguishes spatiality of language, spatiality of speakers, and spatiality of speaking. Regarding the spatiality of the speaker, Krefeld considers two central parameters: mobility and origin. The first parameter is used to compare speakers in relation to the “immigrant” categories (regional, from other national areas, commuters, and so on) vs “native”; the

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second parameter can be defined in very different forms, ranging from the placement of the speaker within urban organization (centre vs periphery, social class, district), to family origins in other regional or national areas, etc. One study that uses Krefeld’s model is that of Patzelt (2016) on the creole of French Guiana. A crucial feature in this study is the use of Krefeld’s modelling, and in particular the two variables related to the speaker: origin and mobility. Through a series of case studies, Patzelt shows how the place of origin (associated with the time spent in the new space) together with mobility (domestic and international) have a major impact both on the organization of the repertoire and on the varieties used, and ultimately on linguistic representations. In a recent series of important studies, the spatiality of the speaker is seen in terms of its relationship with a specific socio-demographic variable: age, especially among the youth. An example is the work conducted by Fagyal (2010) in a suburb of Paris with a sample of youth sharing the same socio-demographic background (working class) who grew up in the same town or in the vicinity, and are native speakers of the same dialect of the same language. All participants were aged between 11 and 15 years old and enrolled in the same middle school where the interviews were recorded. They were divided into two groups depending on their origin. The first group consisted of French speakers with French origins who had spoken French at home for at least two generations; the second group consisted of French speakers of North African origin. Thus, the speaker variable utilized is the place of origin (or national origin, or ethnicity). Fagyal’s goal was to study the rhythmic aspects of the variety of French spoken in the suburbs and their sociolinguistic role. To do so, she utilized the tools of sociophonetics within an interpretive approach. The research results help to delineate an inter- and intra-group, and the decisive role of some individuals as propagators of innovations (see also ↗6 Speaker variables in Romance; ↗27 The metropolization of French worldwide).  

5 The speaker’s position in the social network Within the studies referring to the model of diffusion of change between youth, the position of the speaker within his/her social network has often been used as a variable. Instead of focusing on the social characteristics of speakers (for instance age or social class), social network analysis concentrates on the relationships between speakers and shows how individuals align themselves into groups (friends, neighbours, colleagues) as well as how often the members of these groups are the same, and how often they are completely different. The significance of social networks emerges from early Labovian research. For example, Labov’s study of Martha’s Vineyard analysed the networks of the Chilmark fishermen characterized by higher level of (ay). Furthermore, in his research on Harlem he demonstrates how linguistic variation correlates with integration in a social network. Labov (1973) claims that within the vernacular peer groups, “core” members show the

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most regular or frequent use of characteristic vernacular rules of African American English (AAE) such as the deletion of is, while “lames” (isolated black men who accept parental influence, attend school regularly, etc.) do not use AAE features in the same way. Milroy/Milroy’s research in Belfast (1978) first systematically used social networks as the basis for analysing linguistic variation and change. They observed that there is a robust correlation between linguistic variables used by individuals and their degrees of integration into local social networks: “closeness to vernacular speech norms correlates positively with the level of integration of the individual into local community networks” (Milroy 1980, 133–134). Milroy/Milroy (1985) demonstrated that in a given speech community, speakers whose network ties are uniplex, weak and at the same time widespread are the most likely linguistic innovators. Milroy/Milroy formulated the general conditions for language change in the following hypothesis: “Linguistic change is slow to the extent that the relevant populations are well established and bound by strong ties, whereas it is rapid to the extent that weak ties exist in populations” (Milroy/Milroy 1985, 375). In general, network analysis as a sociolinguistic analysis tool has received relatively few applications in the Romance area. However, every time it was used it has given rise to research that has suggested very stimulating paths of interpretation. The work based on a network approach that has had the greatest success in the Romance field is the classic study of Bortoni-Ricardo (1985) on Brazil. The author analysed the changes that occurred in the speech of a group of individuals of the same social status who had immigrated to a suburb of Brasilia from a rural region. Notwithstanding that all the subjects were homogenous in their social class and place of origin, the subjects who were more integrated in their new urban context moved away from the original rural dialect. In network analysis terms, this means that they were involved in larger social networks than those who, on the contrary, were closer to rural customs. The linguistic variables correlated with two indexes: (a) an index of integration into the network and (b) an index of urbanization. The first one calculated the friendships of each of the investigated subjects. The second was based on seven indicators: education; work; spatial mobility; participation in urban events; exposure to the media; political information; circumstances in which friendship arose. Battisti/Pires Lucas (2015, 154) observe that the South American reality is characterized by a “perennial macro-structural instability and its significant social mobility [that] does not enable individuals to perceive their own social practices as class experiences, nor does it provide researchers with clear criteria for grouping individuals into classes”. Even though, since the 1970s, the variationist approach in South America has obtained interesting results, sociolinguistic studies have rarely taken social class into account. Consequently, it is hard either to make “cross-tabulations such as those between gender and class” or “to control effects, such as crossover, which emerge at the intersection of style and class” (ibid.).

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The South American sociolinguists have therefore had to look for alternative models of classification of speakers from a social point of view, partly in the European or Anglo-American tradition, partly in South America. The concept of “social class” was therefore abandoned and replaced by less structured concepts that refer to clusters, such as social networks, based on sharing common interests and practices of mobility. In recent years, there have been interesting applications of the social network approach in France in the field of studies on linguistic insecurity in migratory contexts. Biichlé (2011), for example, associates different forms of linguistic insecurity (especially of migrant women) with the dense structures and multiple social networks of belonging experienced by migrants and their social capital: “la comparaison entre les primo-arrivantes et les ex-primo-arrivantes montre que, plus que le temps passé en pays d’immigration, c’est la restructuration du réseau social qui confronte à la nouvelle société, ses membres, sa langue, et fait baisser l’insécurité linguistique. […] même s’il demeure difficile de définir si c’est l’insécurité linguistique qui génère la faiblesse du capital social ou l’inverse, les conséquences sont toujours similaires: réseau social dense et multiplexe, voire isolant, monolinguisme en langue d’origine, autonomie réduite, confrontations identitaires et représentationnelles réduites, et ségrégation ou marginalisation des personnes” (Biichlé 2011, 24).

To summarize, the multiplicity of social networks in post-modern societies is now allowing individuals to develop a polyhedric image of themselves and a multi-faceted creative behaviour, exhibiting different social identities for different purposes at different times, in different places, and in different contexts of social relations and interaction (cf. Hernández-Campoy 2014).

6 Concluding remarks Sociolinguistics in a changing world can no longer afford to work on individual contexts of occurrence (and therefore on individual variables), but must take into account how repertoires have become increasingly plural and mobile in recent decades. In particular, migratory phenomena that in recent years have also affected Europe are influencing its sociolinguistic physiognomy. For this reason, it will be interesting to study how the sociolinguistic variables dealt with in this chapter change their function in the new plurilingual repertoires. To meet this challenge, we need models of analysis that link the objective and pre-constructed memberships of speakers to their placement within the social space. This in turn will allow us to examine the links between speaker variables and language change in a more holistic context.

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Shana Poplack, Rena Torres Cacoullos, Nathalie Dion, Rosane de Andrade Berlinck, Salvatore Digesto, Dora Lacasse and Jonathan Steuck

8 Variation and grammaticalization in Romance: a cross-linguistic study of the subjunctive Abstract: Building on studies seeking to position the Romance languages on the cline of grammaticalization, this study targets the evolution of subjunctive into subordination marker in speech corpora of French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. By considering the conditioning of variation between subjunctive and indicative in complement clauses, we operationalize parameters of late-stage grammaticalization, and establish measures of productivity. Results show that, with the exception of Spanish, subjunctive selection is constrained neither by contextual elements consistent with its oft-ascribed meanings nor by semantic classes of governors harmonic with such meanings. Instead, in all four languages, lexical bias is the major predictor of subjunctive selection, abetted by structural elements of the linguistic context. The overriding processes are lexical routinization, which is language-particular, with cognate governors displaying idiosyncratic associations with the subjunctive, and structural conventionalization, which is cross-linguistically parallel, with languages differing merely in degree.  

Keywords: late-stage grammaticalization, language variation, cross-linguistic comparisons, subjunctive, conventionalization  

1 Introduction The Romance languages are often characterized as forming a continuum with respect to their common ancestor, Latin. Their differential evolution has been viewed in terms of increasing grammaticalization, the process by which items take on grammatical meaning and form. Recent work (e.g. Carlier/De Mulder/Lamiroy 2012b; Lamiroy/De Mulder 2011) proposes that not only are linguistic phenomena located at different points on the cline in different languages, but also that the languages themselves may be so positioned vis-à-vis each other. In this respect, there seems to be widespread agreement, based on a considerable number of linguistic features, that French is most advanced as compared to its sisters, Italian is intermediate, and Spanish most conservative, with Portuguese (albeit only sparsely studied) lagging even further behind. This is summarized in the hypothetical gramhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-009

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maticalization cline (adopted from Carlier/De Mulder/Lamiroy 2012a; Lindschouw 2011; Loengarov 2006, 23) in (1). (1)

In this chapter we contribute to the enterprise of cross-linguistic comparison by focusing on the linguistic structure of language-internal variability. Drawing on the framework of variationist sociolinguistics, we make use of the facts of variability to discern structure from the distribution and conditioning of variant forms. This structure, instantiated in the quantitative patterning of variants across elements of the context, can be converted into a diagnostic and compared across sister languages, offering a detailed view of their relative positions on the cline. Our focus is the Romance subjunctive, the topic of much prescriptive and (ostensibly) descriptive linguistic attention (see also ↗2 Quantitative approaches for modelling variation and change; ↗6 Speaker variables in Romance). While there is some quantitative support for claims of advancing grammaticalization of the subjunctive in Romance (e.g. Kragh 2010; Loengarov 2006; Lindschouw 2011), they have not yet been tested systematically on synchronic spoken usage data, nor has the variability inherent in each of the languages been given due consideration. In this chapter we fill this void by comparing subjunctive usage in complement clauses in spontaneous speech corpora of French (FR ), Spanish (SP ), Italian (IT ) and Portuguese (PTG ). The inherent variability characteristic of speech is incorporated into the comparative method of historical linguistics, by considering not merely attestation or frequency of a given variant, but also details of its co-occurrence and distribution. This allows us to gauge degree of grammaticalization (Poplack 2011; Torres Cacoullos 2012). Marshalling the tools of variationist sociolinguistics, we will show that the status of the subjunctive as more or less grammaticalized emerges from not one, but a series of interrelated measures. Moreover, the positioning of the languages relative to each other on the cline differs according to the measure adopted. However, despite crosslinguistic differences in overall rates of subjunctive usage – the measure on which clines such as that in (1) tend to be (implicitly or explicitly) based – the conditioning of subjunctive selection, which we take as a portion of the grammar underlying mood choice, turns out to be remarkably similar. Based on these findings, described in detail in ensuing sections, we propose a cline which bears some similarity to that in (1), but not for the same reasons. Instead we show that the subjunctive is lexically routinized across these Romance languages, with varying governors acting idiosyncratically as protagonists in each, but structurally constrained in similar ways, albeit to different degrees. In so doing, we illustrate how a comparative Romance approach based on synchronic variation patterns affords a view of a long-term process of grammaticalization now in its final stages.

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2 The Romance subjunctive The Romance subjunctive would seem to represent the ideal test case for a study of grammaticalization clines. Its many uses in Latin have been copiously described, and it appears to have been transmitted (in some form or another) to most if not all of its descendants, whose major representatives have also been amply studied. Interestingly, despite controversy over the precise nature of its linguistic function (whether syntactic or semantic, see especially Harris 1974; 1978), the general assumption is that the modal interpretation of the subjunctive was transmitted to Romance along with the form. This has certainly been the prescriptive take on the situation in the four languages we focus on here, as illustrated in (2). (2)

a.

FRENCH

“On met le verbe au subjonctif quand par ce verbe on veut marquer une chose qui tient du doute ou du souhait, sans affirmer absolument qu’elle est, étoit, a été, sera, seroit, ou auroit été” (Wailly 1768, 279). ‘We put the verb in the subjunctive when by that verb we want to mark a thing that is in doubt or wished for, without absolutely asserting that it is, was, has been, will be, would be or would have been.’1 b.

ITALIAN

“Il congiuntivo è il modo del desiderio, dell’opinione, della volontà” (Sobrero/Beccaria/Marazzini 1987, 416). ‘The subjunctive is the mood of desire, opinion, volition.’ c.

PORTUGUESE

“...as formas do subjuntivo enunciam a ação do verbo como eventual, incerta, ou irreal, em dependência estreita com a vontade, a imaginação ou o sentimento daquele que as emprega” (Cunha/Cintra 1985, 461). ‘Subjunctive forms state the verbal action as possible, uncertain or unreal, depending closely on the will, imagination or feeling of the one who employs them.’ d.

SPANISH

“El modo subjuntivo, que no expresa nunca por sí solo, como el indicativo, afirmaciones absolutas, y cuyo sentido es optativo, desiderativo ó condicional…” (Real Academia Española 1906, 64). ‘The subjunctive mood, which, unlike the indicative, never expresses on its own absolute assertions, and whose meaning is optative, desiderative or conditional…’ And this prescriptive position is essentially echoed in the bulk of the myriad contemporary theoretical linguistic treatments of the Romance subjunctive, where 1 Given the fact that we systematically compare data from four different languages throughout this chapter, we provide our own translations for ease of comprehension.

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much effort continues to be invested in characterizing its semantic contribution. But there is also a lexical angle to subjunctive selection. A robust prescriptive tradition aiming to identify the set of governors requiring a subjunctive in the complement clause has developed concomitantly, as illustrated with the few representative citations (spanning nearly three centuries) in (3). (3) a.

FRENCH

“On se sert encore du Conjonctif, avec la conjonction que. 1. Après les verbes suivants, vouloir, souhaiter, désirer, prétendre, commander, prier, permettre, défendre, persuader, dissuader, exhorter, craindre, apréhender, avoir peur, douter, s’étonner, être surpris, admirer ...” (La Touche 1730, 287). ‘We still use the subjunctive, with the conjunction que ‘that’. 1. After the following verbs …’ b.

ITALIAN

“Il congiuntivo si usa (quasi esclusivamente) in frasi dipendenti. In particolare si usa dopo questi verbi: volere che, ordinare che, non vedere l’ora che, decidere che, aspettare che, sperare che, desiderare che, augurarsi che, avere paura che, temere che, dispiacere che, essere contento che, non essere sicuro che, domandare se, credere che, pensare che, ritenere che, immaginare che, preferire che, chiedere se” (Tartaglione 2008, 40). ‘The subjunctive is used (almost exclusively) in dependent clauses. In particular, it is used after these verbs: …’ c.

PORTUGUESE

“Depois das formulas propositivas é possível, é necessário, é conveniente, é mister, é provável, é preciso, é justo, é crível, é fácil, é difícil, é presumível, é impossível, é bom, é vergonhoso e outras análogas, sempre se emprega, hoje em dia, o modo subjuntivo” (Ribeiro 1955, 598). ‘After the propositional formulas […] and other similar ones, these days the subjunctive is always used.’ d.

SPANISH

“El subjuntivo ... subordinándose o pudiéndose subordinar ... significa la cosa mandada, rogada, aconsejada, permitida, en una palabra, deseada ... Quiero/Deseo/Ruego/Te encargo/Permito/Te aconsejo/Te prohíbo – que estudies el derecho” (Bello 1847, § 457). ‘The subjunctive [...] subordinated or capable of being subordinated ... means the thing that is commanded, beseeched, advised, permitted, in a word, desired ...’ Many of these governors are the same across Romance (whether due to direct inheritance from Latin or imposition of its categories on its daughters), and their meaning is typically characterized as harmonic with the (presumed) meaning of the subjunctive, as illustrated in (3d) and (4). The twin requirements that the subjunctive be semanti-

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cally motivated and at the same time lexically mandated are thus not seen by most analysts as contradictory. (4) “O conjuntivo é o modo exigido nas orações que dependem de verbos cujo sentido está ligado à ideia de ordem, de proibição, de desejo, de vontade, de súplica, de condição e outras correlatas. É o caso, por exemplo, dos verbos desejar, duvidar, implorar, lamentar, negar, ordenar, pedir, proibir, querer, rogar e suplicar” (Mateus 1983, 148). ‘The subjunctive is the mood required in clauses embedded under verbs whose meaning is tied to the idea of order, prohibition, desire, will, appeal, condition and other related notions. This is the case, for instance, of the verbs ...’

3 Operationalizing parameters of advanced grammaticalization In this context, it is plain that the subjunctive lends itself particularly well to a study of grammaticalization in its final stages. Bybee/Perkins/Pagliuca’s (1994, 214) proposal for the grammaticalization path of the subjunctive is generally taken to be consistent with the Romance situation, albeit to different degrees depending on the language. In the scenario they outline, the subjunctive is first used in complement clauses with the same meaning it has in main clauses. As such uses increase in frequency, the semantic contribution of the subordinate mood weakens (presumably abetted by the redundancy of expressing modality twice), eventually leading to its (re-)analysis as a concomitant, if not a marker, of subordination. Once this has occurred, the subjunctive may spread to embedded clause types whose meaning is no longer harmonic with that of the matrix clause, and where it itself makes little or no semantic contribution. After this, the only development left is extinction. Departing from the above scenario, Lamiroy/DeMulder (2011) and Carlier/De Mulder/Lamiroy (2012a) offer the following justifications for their proposed grammaticalization cline in (1): 1) The subjunctive is less frequent in French than in Spanish or Italian (Lamiroy/De Mulder 2011, 312), and within French it is declining in favour of the indicative, thereby bringing it closer to the final stage, disappearance; 2) Subjunctive selection is often semantically motivated in Spanish and Italian (Loengarov 2006, cited in Carlier/De Mulder/Lamiroy 2012a, 291), while in French it is largely lexically determined by the governor.2

2 Lamiroy/De Mulder (2011) also invoke the greater syncretism between the forms of indicative and subjunctive in French, further blurring the distinction between them. Cf. our discussion in section 5.4 below.  

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To test these claims, we move beyond comparison of overall rates (which we will show to be grossly misleading) to privilege conditioning of subjunctive selection crosslinguistically. As will be seen in section 6, the subjunctive is used variably in all four languages, even in contexts that are typically construed as categorically subjunctive(and sometimes indicative-) selecting. Capitalizing on the variationist sociolinguistic framework, we make use of these facts to discern the structure of variability from the distribution and conditioning of variant forms (Poplack 2011). This structure can be converted into a diagnostic and compared across the sister languages, offering a detailed view of their relative positions on the cline. Assuming that the subjunctive was at least sometimes meaningful in Latin, if it can be established that it is currently used in contexts where it contributes no independent meaning in a given daughter language, the inference that this meaning has been lost is straightforward, a fortiori if its selection is dictated, solely or overwhelmingly, by structural elements of the linguistic context. This would position the language in question farther along the grammaticalization cline relative to another in which the subjunctive has “retained” its meaning. We operationalize hypotheses relating to two general concomitants of advancing grammaticalization: semantic bleaching, or desemanticization (Heine/Reh 1984, 36), and what has variously been referred to as ritualization (Haiman 1994), obligatorification (Lehmann 1995) and loss of “freedom” (Haspelmath 1998, 318). Here we invoke such notions under the label conventionalization, which we define as an increasing association between structural context and variant, and concomitant reduction or loss of “free” (semantically-motivated) choice amongst them. Desemanticization and conventionalization together imply decreased productivity. To the extent that subjunctive selection is determined by local linguistic context rather than meaning, we will infer that it has grammaticalized to a greater degree and become less productive.  

4 A benchmark for change In order to position the daughter languages along the cline, we must first establish the original state from which they have evolved. It is widely agreed that the source is Latin, but the situation of the subjunctive in the ancestor – at different stages and in different contexts – is subject to debate. The implication of most of the studies that treat this issue is that the Latin subjunctive was meaningful, at least in main clauses (e.g. Magni 2010, 204–206 and references therein). But Harris and others have provided cogent arguments that a large group of subjunctives (including the embedded complement clauses we focus on here) lost any association with the semantic value of the matrix verb (governor) and were “conditioned markers of subordination already in Latin – popular Latin at least” (Harris 1974, 175). The synchronic behaviour of the subjunctive in Romance described below is entirely consistent with this view, but pending systematic investigation of Latin texts (Digesto, in progress), we remain

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agnostic on the meaningfulness of the subjunctive in the benchmark. For the purpose of this chapter, however, which is to demonstrate what the study of inherent variability reveals about the relative position of the descendant languages with respect to each other, we assume an idealized state of the ancestor in which the subjunctive 1) made a semantic contribution, and 2) did so both consistently and categorically, i.e. whenever the conditions for its use were present. We stress that this is a heuristic only, and should not be taken as an endorsement of this position.

5 A variationist perspective The premise that the subjunctive was meaningful in Latin is no doubt at the root of the associated widespread assumption that it is meaningful in (at least standard varieties of) modern-day Romance as well. But with the notable exception of (Canadian) French, virtually absent from this literature is systematic study of how speakers actually use the subjunctive.3 Though much prescriptive attention has been lavished on usage rules, Poplack (1990; 1992), Poplack/Lealess/Dion (2013) and Kastronic (2016) showed for French that these are rarely if ever followed in the community; speakers abide by an entirely different set of (untaught) constraints instead. The current investigation will ascertain the extent to which the same holds true for the other languages.

5.1 Mood choice as a linguistic variable The core construct of the variationist framework is the linguistic variable, defined as the set of alternate ways of expressing the same thing (Labov 1972). In what sense can mood selection be considered a linguistic variable if its major variants (subjunctive and indicative) are typically construed as ways of expressing different things? As per the principle of neutralization-in-discourse (Sankoff 1988), in certain well-defined contexts, the distinct semantic contributions forms may make elsewhere are nullified. This is a well-documented phenomenon in language (witness the behaviour of the present tense in past and future temporal reference contexts, for example), and we have demonstrated elsewhere for French that it applies to the subjunctive in embedded complement clauses as well (Poplack 1990; 1992; 2001; Poplack/Turpin 1999). Our appeal to the linguistic variable as a heuristic captures the observation, illustrated in (5)–(8) below, that the same governor or apparent

3 As a study of complement clauses, Loengarov (2006) is most comparable to the present work, though it is more limited (e.g. to eight governors in one grammatical person [3rd] and one tense [present], according to two independent variables), and is based on internet data as a surrogate for speech.

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synonym, in the same language or cross-linguistically, may co-occur with different moods in the embedded clause, with no patently verifiable change in meaning. For this reason, in this study we circumscribe the variable context to verbs embedded under subjunctive-selecting governors, as defined in section 5.5 below. The working hypothesis of the variationist method is that within a given variable context, “competing variants will occur at greater or lesser rates depending on the features that constitute the context” (Poplack 2001, 405). Thus, if the variant forms do in fact make different semantic contributions, they should be observed in the aggregate to occur at higher or lower than average rates in certain (sub)contexts. We test this hypothesis in section 7 below.  

 

5.2 Data We noted above that mood selection has been the focus of extraordinary normative (and theoretical linguistic) attention. Its thrust has been to promulgate categorical selection of the subjunctive in certain contexts and to eradicate any appearance of variability in others by assigning to each variant a distinct function, but with little consensus as to what that function may be (Poplack et al. 2015; Poplack/Lealess/Dion 2013). Accordingly, we can expect its use in written sources to be tainted, in unknown and unpredictable ways, by adherence, or lack thereof, to (conflicting) prescriptive injunctions. Moreover, empirical studies (Poplack 1990; 1992; 2001; Poplack/Lealess/ Dion 2013) have shown, and the analyses to follow will confirm, that in actual usage, subjunctive selection is variable. No descriptively adequate account can fail to take this fact into consideration. We therefore privilege spontaneous speech as the data source on which we base this study. Spoken usage is the most hospitable to inherent variability, and to the extent that it is free from self-monitoring and the vagaries of superimposed rules, it offers the most systematic data for linguistic analysis (Labov 1984, 29).

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Table 1: Characteristics of the data used for the current study  

PORTUGUE SE PORTUGUESE

FR ENCH

ITALIAN

SPANISH

Corpus name

Amostra Linguística do Interior Paulista (Gonçalves 2003)

Corpus du français parlé à OttawaHull (Poplack 1989)

C-ORAL-ROM Integrated Reference Corpora for Spoken Romance Languages (subsample) (Cresti/Moneglia 2005)

Corpus sociolingüístico de la ciudad de México (subsample) (Martín Butragueño/Lastra 2011–2015)

N words

785,000

3.5 million

310,000

410,000

N speakers

152

120

198 (of 377)

36 (of 108)

Speaker DOB

1915–1996

1893–1965

Unspecified

1910–1981

Speaker age

8–89

17–89

18+

25–91

2000–2003

1997–2007

Various

Mexico City

 

4

Data collection

2003–2005

Early 1980s

Speaker geographic provenance

7 cities from São Ottawa/Gatineau Paulo State, Brazil Canada

The characteristics of the corpora exploited here are summarized in Table 1. All were collected within the same 25-year period, and contain a range of speakers of varying ages. Where different genres were available, only the spontaneous speech portions were included. Each of course deals with a limited geographical area; reference to them by hypernyms like “French” or “Italian” is therefore for convenience only. All four corpora were constructed according to the same broad sociolinguistic principles, deriving from the stated goal of documenting spontaneous speech. But they were gathered for different purposes by different fieldworkers, make use of somewhat different data collection methodology, and accordingly, differ somewhat according to speech style. Any of these discrepancies could theoretically give rise to differences in subjunctive usage, a problem that besets virtually all cross-corpus comparison, regardless of variable. But while rates of a variant are indeed sensitive to such factors, its distribution across contexts has been shown repeatedly to remain consistent across data sets (e.g. Poplack/Tagliamonte 2001, 92). This vitiates the corpus as explanatory of the cross-linguistic differences (and similarities) detailed below.  

4 Although the French corpus was collected approximately 20 years prior to the others, this does not explain the differences we will see French to display vis-à-vis the other languages. The same patterns obtain in a corpus of French collected in 2005–2007 (Poplack/Lealess/Dion 2013).  

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5.3 Extraction protocol The transcriptions retained from each corpus were concordanced, and every occurrence of a verb featuring unambiguous subjunctive morphology, regardless of the context in which it was realized, was identified and extracted. Depending on the language, this could involve a wide variety of forms. Portuguese features perhaps the richest inventory in this regard, with dedicated morphological inflections for the present, present perfect, imperfect, pluperfect, future, and anterior future subjunctive tenses. Italian and Spanish distinguish present, present perfect, imperfect and pluperfect, while at the other end of the spectrum, spoken French features only a present, and the occasional present perfect, subjunctive.

5.4 Locating the subjunctive Of course, studying the subjunctive in running speech requires being able to recognize it when it occurs. With the notable exception of Spanish, in each of the languages, albeit to very different extents, syncretism has resulted in forms whose morphological role is impossible to identify. In Portuguese, for example, such ambiguous cases are limited to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd p. pl. of the verb ir ‘go’ (nós vamos ‘we go’; vocês/eles vão ‘you-pl/they go’). In Italian, they are restricted to two contexts: 2nd p. sg. for the verbs of the first (-are) conjugation (e.g. tu ami ‘you love’), and 1st p. pl. across all three conjugations (e.g. noi am-iamo [-are] ‘we love’, scriv-iamo [-ere] ‘we write’, sent-iamo [-ire] ‘we feel’).5

5 Italian imperfect subjunctive is also homophonous with simple past in 2nd p. pl (e.g. voi amaste[P A S T , I M P S U B J ] ‘you loved’. There is also homophony in Italian, Portuguese and Spanish between (some) forms of the imperative and the subjunctive. But because these do not co-occur in the same constructions, there is no ambiguity.

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Table 2: Syncretism in French (shading indicates ambiguous SUBJUNCTIVE SUBJUNCTIV E / INDICATIVE morphology)  

1S T group (-er)

2N D group (-ir1)

3R D group (-ir2)6

manger ‘eat’

finir ‘finish’

sentir ‘feel/smell’

INDICATIVE

SUBJUNCTIVE

INDICATIVE

SUBJUNC TIV TIVE E

INDICATIVE INDIC ATIVE

SUBJUNCTIVE

mange

mange

finis

finisse

sens

sente

manges

manges

finis

finisses

sens

sentes

mange

mange

finit

finisse

sent

sente

mangeons

mangions

finissons

finissions

sentons

sentions

mangez

mangiez

finissez

finissiez

sentez

sentiez

mangent

mangent

finissent

finissent

sentent

sentent

French displays far more syncretism than the other languages. As depicted by the shading in Table 2, verbs of the most frequent first conjugation class (-er) are ambiguous in all persons but the rarely used 1st and 2nd p. pl.7 Also morphologically ambiguous are 3rd p. pl. forms of verbs from the second conjugation (-ir1) and one subclass of verbs from the third (-ir2). Importantly, all cases in which the morphology does not distinguish subjunctive from indicative were excluded from ensuing analyses, limiting this study to unambiguous instances of subjunctive selection in each language.8 The remaining data were then scrutinized to isolate and retain only the tokens that fell within the variable context, initially characterized as tensed clauses governed by a (subjunctive-selecting) matrix verb + complementizer (que/che/Ø).9 As such, subjunctives occurring in other contexts (differentially according to language) are not considered here: main-clause  

6 The French 3rd conjugation contains a number of endings (e.g. -re, -oir) and irregular verbs (e.g. aller). Ambiguous in this context are -ir verbs whose present participles are not conjugated with -iss(referred to here as -ir[2] verbs), such as sentir in Table 2). 7 1st p. pl. pronoun nous, which is all but absent in Canadian French, has been replaced with 3rd p. sg. on, and formal 2nd p. sg. vous is rare. 8 Syncretism affects data extraction insofar as potential governors may not be identifiable. Thanks to the protocols employed here, we could establish that approximately 50 % of the French tokens that would otherwise have qualified as falling under the variable context were morphologically ambiguous. This situation reflects the experience of actual language users, for whom the interpretation of ambiguous morphology is unknown. Indeed, some (e.g. Lamiroy/De Mulder 2011) specifically implicate morphological syncretism in the decreasing vitality of the French subjunctive. 9 Complementizer deletion is variable in French and Italian (occurring at a rate of approximately 15 % [and applying to fewer than one third of the governors in the latter]), rare in Portuguese (2 %, restricted to coordinate clauses) and (virtually) non-existent in spontaneous spoken Spanish beyond some formulaic uses (Silva-Corvalán 1994, 137). There were no cases in this corpus.  

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subjunctives, those governed by adverbial or other non-verbal expressions, and those in relative clauses, protases of hypothetical si-complexes, and indirect questions.

5.5 Identifying subjunctive-selecting governors Tokens remaining after these exclusions were further examined to identify the “subjunctive-selecting” governors in each language. The implication of both the linguistic literature and the prescriptive enterprise is that these constitute a readily identifiable set. But as detailed in Poplack/Lealess/Dion (2013), nothing could be farther from the case. Linguistic analyses tend to focus on a small cohort of “interesting” matrix verbs and verb classes. Grammarians, on the other hand, cite hundreds, but with little consensus amongst them. This constitutes a real problem for any meaningful empirical account of the situation, since, by the principle of accountability (Labov 1972, 72), we must ascertain not only where speakers selected a subjunctive, but also where they could have even if they did not. This requires being able to delimit the pool of potential subjunctive governors, an endeavour complicated not only by the above considerations, but by the fact that contrary to what is implied by the grammaticalization cline in (1), these turn out to differ from one Romance language to the next. For example, the descendant of Lt. crēdere ‘believe’ co-occurs in the affirmative with subjunctive robustly in Italian (79 %, N = 100), rarely in Spanish and Portuguese (1 %, N = 291 and 13 %, N = 15, respectively), and never in French (see Table 7 below). Following earlier studies (Poplack 1990; 1992; Poplack/Lealess/Dion 2013), here we take a pragmatic approach to this problem. For each token featuring unambiguous subjunctive morphology in each corpus, we noted the governor under which it occurred. The set of “subjunctive-selecting” governors thus identified was taken to be the locus in which subjunctive selection was a possibility. The constitution of this set differs from one language to another (ranging from 37 members in French to 111 in Spanish), since at the first step, a token was only extracted if it contained a subjunctive. On a second pass, all verbs embedded under each matrix verb having governed at least one subjunctive were exhaustively extracted, regardless of the variant selected (subjunctive vs indicative).10 By determining the identity of potential subjunctive governors, this procedure not only yields an accountable – and importantly, comparable – circumscription of the locus of variation, it also enables us to assess the propensity of each governor to select for a given variant in each language, as well as its frequency in running speech. Both of these measures will prove pivotal in the analyses to follow.  

10 Not surprisingly, the variants embedded under subjunctive-selecting governors also differ crosslinguistically. For example, embedded conditionals figure rather prominently (approximately 8 %) in French, largely following matrix verb conditionals, though these are quite rare in Spanish (N = 20), Italian (N = 12) and Portuguese (N = 5). Here we simply distinguish variants as indicative (including conditional) and subjunctive.

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As a result of these considerations, the variable context, determined corpusinternally, can now be formulated as every tensed clause governed by a matrix verb that triggered the subjunctive at least once in a given corpus.11 This resulted in a data set of nearly 5000 tokens, of both subjunctive and indicative, distributed crosslinguistically as in Figure 1.  

6 Results A first observation is that every one of the languages displays robust variability, with rates of subjunctive – under subjunctive-selecting governors! – ranging between 37 % and 76 % (Figure 1). The prediction of the Romance grammaticalization cline in (1) is that the lowest subjunctive rate should obtain in French, as the language having strayed farthest from the (idealized) Latin model, or the most grammaticalized of its sisters (De Mulder/Lamiroy 2012, 208). However, measured in terms of overall rate of competing variants, it is Spanish, at only 37 % subjunctive, that appears most advanced, while Italian and French seem most conservative by far, as in the revised grammaticalization cline in Figure 2.  

 

 

Figure 1: Rate of subjunctive by language.  

Figure 2: Grammaticalization cline based on overall subjunctive rate.  

11 One exception to this rule involved governors whose co-occurrence with one or a few subjunctives was vastly outnumbered by hundreds of occurrences with the indicative. An illustrative example comes from Portuguese achar ‘think, find’. Achar is by far the most frequent governor in the corpus, constituting on its own 77 % of the entire governor pool, but it only occurred with the subjunctive 0.7 % of the time (N = 11), and these occurrences in turn were largely formulaic. When achar is included in the governor pool, the overall rate of subjunctive in Portuguese drops to 13 %; without it, it is 55 %. The vastly disproportionate frequency of achar, coupled with the non-productive nature of its use, led us to exclude this governor from the quantitative analyses to avoid unwarranted skewing of the results.

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Note that this variability obtains not only across languages, but also within them, since the same matrix verb can co-occur with both subjunctive and indicative in the same context, as exemplified in (5)–(8) with the governors descending from Lt. crēdere ‘believe’ in the four languages. (5) a. Je crois pas que ce soit[SUBJ] la fin du monde. (FR .060.195)12 ‘I don’t think that it would be the end of the world.’ b. Je crois pas que l’âge a[IND] tant à faire que ça. (FR .003.189) ‘I don’t think that age has that much to do with it.’ (6) a. Eu acredito que vá[SUBJ] sair. (PTG .143.356) ‘I believe that it will come out.’ b. Eu acredito que ele devia[IND] ter em torno de setenta anos de idade. (PTG .099.148) ‘I believe that he must be around seventy years old.’ (7) a. Credo che tutti lo sappiate[SUBJ]. (IT .438.218) ‘I believe that everyone knows it.’ b. Credo che tutto ritorna[IND]. (IT .511.264) ‘I believe that everything comes back.’ (8) a. No creo que le vayas[SUBJ] a entender mucho. (SP .014.528) ‘I don’t think you’re going to understand it much.’ b. No creo que hay[IND] que firmar. (SP .086.555) ‘I don’t think you have to sign.’ The key question, to which we turn in ensuing sections, is what constrains this variability?

12 Transcription conventions are reproduced from those adopted in the respective corpora. Codes in parentheses refer to language, speaker number, and line number of the utterance in our concordance of the corresponding corpus (speaker turn number, in Spanish).

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7 Semantic conditioning Many would claim that subjunctive is selected as a function of the meaning to be conveyed. A crucial caveat is that most of the meanings proposed arise from the analyst’s construal of the beliefs, wishes and feelings of the speaker, and as we have detailed elsewhere (Poplack 1990; 1992; Poplack/Lealess/Dion 2013), there is no objective way to determine what these are, let alone operationalize and test them. On the other hand, the assumption that the meaning of the subjunctive is entirely embodied in its form is circular. Accordingly, here we investigate the semantic contribution of the subjunctive by identifying explicit cues of irrealis modality in the discourse independent of the morphology of the embedded verb. Though cognizant of claims that the forms themselves are the sole carriers of the meaning, we assume that, given the redundancy characterizing other grammatical domains, at least some tokens of the forms will co-occur with congruent contextual elements. We make use of these co-occurrence facts (whether clause-internal or elsewhere in the larger discourse) to ascertain whether and to what degree the irrealis modality meanings said to motivate variant choice are operative in speaker usage, if at all.

7.1 Structure of the matrix clause One set of contextual elements resides in the structure of the matrix clause. If the subjunctive signals “non-commitment of the speaker” (De Mulder/Lamiroy 2012, 210, among many others), negated, interrogative and conditional matrices – “non-assertive contexts [...] which do not claim the truth of the corresponding positive statement” (Haspelmath 2003, 220) – should favour its selection more than their affirmative (or more assertive) counterparts. Negation, often associated with the subjunctive, is “more apt to be tinged with an attitude” (Bolinger 1974, 465), functions to deny states or events (Thompson 1998) or is generally associated with irrealis or presupposition rather than assertion (Chafe 1995; Givón 1978). Yet subjunctive and indicative alternate under the same negated governor, as illustrated in (9)–(10). (9) a. Jamais imaginava que a moça fosse[SUBJ] … embora do jeito que foi. (PTG .142.100) ‘I never imagined that the girl would leave the way she did.’ b. Mas eu num imaginava que lá era[IND] o extremo do extremo do extremo. (PTG .087.387) ‘But I didn’t imagine that it was the end of the end of the end.’

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(10) a. Ma non credo che il comitato abbia[SU BJ ] bisogno di portavoci. (IT .427.52) ‘But I don’t think that the committee needs spokesmen.’ b. Ma non credo che ce li ha[IND] sfusi. (IT .106.221) ‘But I don’t think that he has them in bulk.’ Interrogatives (11) should also favour subjunctive choice because they “serve the interactional function of questioning” (Thompson 1998, 331) and, like negatives, do not assert.13 (11) a. Cê qué(r) que eu ensine[SU BJ ]? (PTG .021.204) ‘Do you want me to teach?’ b. Então você qué(r) que dá[I N D ] as características? (PTG .028.96) ‘So you want me to give the features?’ Table 3 and Figure 3 show that this hypothesis is not supported for three of the languages. If anything, in French and Italian, “irrealis” matrices actually impede the subjunctive. Only in Spanish do such contexts favour its use.  

 

Table 3: Contribution of structure of the matrix clause to the selection of the subjunctive (shading indicates contexts that promote subjunctive use)  

PORTUGUESE

FR ENCH

14

ITALIAN

SPANISH

%

N

%

N

%

N

%

N

Neg/Cond/Int

56

53/94

44

223/502

60

102/169

74

167/226

Affirmative

55

183/330

60

237/398

75

447/599

28

263/927

Total

56

236/424

51 460/900

71

549/768

37 430/1153

13 Likewise, insofar as it conveys uncertainty, subjunctive should be selected when the realization of the situation depends on the satisfaction of a previously expressed condition, as when the matrix clause is part of a conditional complex. 14 When governor falloir (overwhelmingly il faut) is included: Neg/Int/Cond = 52 % (N = 378/727); Affirmative = 86 % (N = 1575/1832).  

 

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Figure 3: Contribution of structure of the matrix clause to the selection of the subjunctive  

7.2 Other indicators of non-factual modality We might also expect, by the principle of redundancy, that any meaning expressed by the subjunctive would be echoed elsewhere in the discourse. We assessed this possibility by identifying other components of the context which could contribute to a non-factual reading, whether expressed lexically by elements such as epistemic (‘maybe’, ‘probably’) and valuative (‘hopefully’) adverbs (Givón 1994, 271), modally (by auxiliaries, for example) (12), or through tense-mood selection in the matrix (future, conditional, subjunctive) (13), and may therefore be predicted to favour subjunctive selection. (12) a. Quindi può darsi che nel prosieguo di questa missione questa diventi[S U B J ] la missione più pericolosa. (IT .556.45) ‘So it may be that in the pursuit of this mission this turns out to be the most dangerous mission.’ b. Può darsi ce l’ha[I N D ] anche il Neri questi filini. (IT .105.268) ‘It may be that Neri also has them, these little threads.’ (13) a. Eu gostaria[CO CON ND D ] que todos os cômodos da casa tivesse[S U B J ] porta de corrê(r). (PTG .099.229) ‘I wish all the rooms in the house had sliding doors.’ b. Porque se você tiver[S U B J ] esperança de que um dia o país vai[I N D ] melhorar... você vota no ‘sim’... (PTG .045.395) ‘Because if you have hope that one day the country will get better…you vote “yes”…’ The variability depicted in (12–13), coupled with the results in Table 4 and Figure 4, together demonstrate that this measure again lends no support to the semantic  

 

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hypothesis for Portuguese, French and Italian. In these languages, utterances featuring explicit indicators of non-factual modality are no more likely to trigger a subjunctive than those with none. Again, Spanish is the odd man out: here the subjunctive is about twice as likely to surface in such contexts as not. Table 4: Contribution of other indicators of non-factual modality to the selection of the subjunctive (shading indicates contexts promoting subjunctive use)  

PORTUGUESE

FRENCH

15

ITALIAN

SPANISH

%

N

%

N

%

N

%

N

Presence

54

31/57

49

110/223

72

90/125

59

115/194

Absence

56

205/367

52

350/677

71

459/643

33

315/959

Total

56

236/424

51 460/900

71

549/768

37 430/1153

Figure 4: Contribution of other indicators of non-factual modality to the selection of the subjunctive  

7.3 Semantic class of the governor Another recurrent claim is that the semantic features activating the subjunctive in the embedded clause are embodied in the governor. If so, a number of predictions should hold true. First, governors identified as “subjunctive-selecting” should trigger that mood categorically. The results in Table 5 show that for Portuguese, French and Italian they do not, even in volitive verbs, widely touted as the wellspring of subjunctive morphology. Spanish again displays a different profile: here the prototypical volitive querer ‘want’ governs the subjunctive each of the 65 times it surfaces as a  

15 French has proportionally more cases of matrix verbs in the conditional and displays tense concordance (embedded verbs not in the subjunctive tend to agree with the tense of the matrix) (Poplack 1992, 253). When falloir is included: Presence = 57 % (N = 257/452); Absence = 80 % (N = 1696/ 2117).  

 

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governor, as exemplified in (14). In fact, all Spanish volitives of moderate frequency trigger the subjunctive categorically or nearly so. (14) Quisieran que fuera[SUBJ] abogado/pero no que estudiara[SUBJ] literatura. (SP .026.162) ‘They would like him to be a lawyer, but not that he study literature.’ Table 5: Subjunctive rates under governors meaning ‘want, desire’  

%

N

querer

76

71/93

French

vouloir

91

249/273

Italian

volere

92

22/24

Spanish

querer

100

65/65

LA NGUAGE

GOVERNOR

Portuguese

Second, every member of each semantic class (volitive, epistemic, etc.) of subjunctiveselecting governors (assuming that these can be identified – but cf. Poplack 1990, 25) should co-occur with a subjunctive. This is not the case for Portuguese, French or Italian. Consider for example the epistemic verbs in Table 6: PTG acreditar has a rate of only 31 % subjunctive, but pensar almost never triggers one (15). Even in Spanish, subjunctive rates vary wildly within the “class” of epistemic governors: compare ser posible, categorically associated with the subjunctive, with the others, as illustrated in (16).  

Table 6: Subjunctive rates under epistemic governors in Portuguese and Spanish  

LA NGUAGE

GOVE RNOR

GLOSS

%

N

Portuguese

acreditar

‘believe’

31

22/70

crer

‘believe’

13

2/15

pensar

‘think’

5

3/55

ser posible

‘be possible’

100

11/11

suponer

‘suppose’

6

2/33

imaginar

‘imagine’

4

1/26

sentir

‘feel’

9

1/11

Spanish

(15) a. Eles ainda acredita que eles podem[IND] í(r) mais longe ainda com a peça deles. (PTG .037.184) ‘They still believe that they can go still further with their play.’

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b. Ele num sabia que a mandioca dava no chão (risos)... ele pensava que mandioca dava[IND] na árvore. (PTG .129.87) ‘He didn’t know that cassava grew in the ground (laugh)…he thought that cassava grew on trees.’ (16) a. Yo supongo que no sea[SUBJ] fácil administrar. (SP .073.681) ‘I suppose it’s not easy to administer.’ b. Supongo que en esas épocas/él estaba haciendo[IND] su tesis de doctorado. (SP .036.129) ‘I suppose that at that time, he was doing his doctoral thesis.’ Third, we might expect that the same verb should trigger the subjunctive across the board, but this does not hold cross-linguistically either. For example, verbs meaning ‘fear’ yield decidedly different subjunctive rates in the four languages: while IT avere paura and SP temer (though admittedly rare in speech) are categorically associated with the subjunctive, the rate for FR avoir peur is much more modest, at approximately two-thirds, and PTG ter medo only triggers a subjunctive in about one third of cases (17). (17) a. Sì però avevano paura che diventasse[SUBJ] proprio completamente cieca. (IT .442.029) ‘Yeah, but they were afraid that she would actually become completely blind.’ b. Porque o que eu tenho medo... que acontece[IND] alguma coisa. (PTG .132.92) ‘Because what I fear [is] that something will happen.’ c. Lo que temía el doctor que/se le paralizara[SUBJ] el intestino. (SP .067.407) ‘What the doctor feared [was] that his intestine would get paralysed.’ d. J’ai peur que ça vient[IND] contre nous autres. (FR .041.1960) ‘I’m afraid that it’ll go against us.’ Likewise, the same context should yield comparable subjunctive rates across sister languages. But, as illustrated in Table 7 with verbs meaning ‘believe’, subjunctive shows up only in the affirmative in Portuguese, is all but restricted to the negative in French and Spanish, while in Italian polarity has no effect.  

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Table 7: Rate of subjunctive under governors meaning ‘believe’ by language  

LA NGUAGE

GOVERNOR

Portuguese

crer

French

croire

Italian

credere

Spanish

creer

AFFIRMATIVE A FFIRMATIVE

NEGA NEGATIV TIV E

%

N

%

N

13

2/15

–

–16

–

–

13

3/24

79

79/100

75

9/12

1

4/291

77

17/22

And finally, synonyms or quasi-synonyms should feature the same rate of subjunctive. Synonymous governors are unfortunately too rare to allow for meaningful comparisons, but the data in Table 8 nonetheless suggest that, given more data, this hypothesis would be disconfirmed as well.  

Table 8: Rate of subjunctive under (quasi-)synonymous governors by language  

LA NGUAGE

GOVE RNOR

GLOSS

%

N

Portuguese

acreditar

‘believe’

31

22/70

crer

‘believe’

13

2/15

se rappeler

‘remember’

20

1/5

se souvenir

‘remember’

100

3/3

essere convinto

‘be convinced’

20

1/5

essere sicuro

‘be sure’

67

4/6

French

Italian

7.4 Summary Summarizing, instead of consistent, categorical subjunctive selection, we observe variability at every level, both within and across languages. We noted above that variability is sometimes acknowledged in the literature, but it is ascribed to semantic differences. In this section we tested this possibility explicitly, and failed to confirm it for three of the languages. With respect to the criterion of desemanticization, then, we would place them at roughly the same point on the cline. Spanish remains more conservative in this respect. Note, however, that although subjunctive morphology

16 The dash indicates that no subjunctives occurred under governors crernegative and croireaffirmative.

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does seem to be consistent with irrealis meaning on the criteria we have examined, variability persists here as well.

8 Lexical routinization If semantics makes little or no contribution to variant choice for most of the languages, how should we interpret the observed rate differences, both overall crosslinguistically and from governor to governor within each language? The disparate behaviour reported above suggests that other factors may be operative. Accordingly, in this section, we focus on the second major determinant of variant choice in the literature: the governor. We have already seen that the general prediction that “subjunctive-selecting” governors should co-occur categorically with a subjunctive holds only sporadically. As we will confirm below, subjunctive is categorical for only four of 15 governors in Spanish, two of 12 in Italian, and none of eight and 14 in Portuguese and French, respectively (Figure 5). This suggests that the lexical identity of the governor contributes to subjunctive selection independent of any meaning to be expressed. To confirm this hypothesis, we adopt Poplack/Lealess/Dion’s (2013) tripartite analysis of the role of the governor, involving, as independent measures: 1) the overall rate of subjunctive associated with each governor 2) the proportion each governor represents of the entire governor pool 3) the amount of subjunctive morphology accounted for by each.  

The higher the score on each of these measures, the more lexically routinized and the less productive – i.e. the more grammaticalized – mood selection may be said to be in the language in question.

8.1 Rate of subjunctive associated with particular governors (RATE SUBJ ) We first note (Figure 5) that in all four languages, individual governors trigger the subjunctive at dramatically different rates, ranging from very low to very high, with few in the middle. Exemplifying with Spanish, the language closest to the Latin ancestor by the measures of semantic import considered thus far, we see that 6/15 frequent governors display subjunctive rates ranging from 85 % to 100 %, while those for another five are below 10 %. The same may be said, to varying extents, of the other languages.  

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Figure 5: Rate of subjunctive across frequent (10+ occurrences) governors by language (RATE SUBJ )  

Note that although these are all “subjunctive-selecting” governors, some trigger it (nearly) all the time; others rarely so. Such lexical bias does not leave much room for conditioning of a semantic or structural nature, beyond that embodied in the governing verb itself. This confirms that the identity of the governor is a primordial factor in determining mood selection in the embedded clause.

8.2 Proportion of the data accounted for by particular governors (% GOV ) Another crucial, though rarely documented, fact is that governors not only feature idiosyncratic subjunctive rates, they also turn out to have idiosyncratic likelihoods of occurring altogether. Figure 6 shows that in each language, just a few of them make up a disproportionately large part of the entire governor pool, and the rest are very rare.  

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Figure 6: Proportion frequent (10+ occurrences) governors represent of the governor pool by language (% GOV )  

For example, although 93 Italian governors selected a subjunctive at least once, a full half of the governor pool is made up by only five. Such disproportionate distributions are even more glaring in Portuguese – of 43 governors, a single one (querer ‘want’) accounts on its own for a fifth of the pool, rising to half when the top three are considered. The two most frequent governors of the 111 in Spanish account for half the data! But the situation is most extreme in French, where only one of the 37 governors (falloir ‘be necessary’) represents nearly two thirds of the governor pool, and the top two account for three quarters. Examples of subjunctives under such frequent governors are given in (18). (18) a. Ma veramente, sembra c’abbia[SUBJ] quattordici, quindic’anni. (IT .072.227) ‘Seriously, it seems like she is fourteen, fifteen years old.’ b. Ele queria que ela usasse[SUBJ] saias... LONGAS... sabe? (PTG .042.150) ‘He wanted her to wear long skirts… you know?’ c. Aunque sean buenos/yo no digo que que que tengan[SUBJ] que ser malos. (SP .007.501) ‘Even if they are good, I’m not saying that, that, that they have to be bad.’ d. Moi je veux pas mon appartement ait[SUBJ] un méchant nom, tu sais? (FR .022.140) ‘I don’t want my apartment to have a bad name, you know?’ Thus, despite a reasonable number of potential governors, a small cohort is disproportionately frequent. And these again differ cross-linguistically, as revealed by comparing the verbs of necessity in Table 9: falloir accounts for two thirds of the  

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French governors, but semantically equivalent bisognare represents only 5 % of Italian data, and Portuguese precisar and the Spanish equivalents only occurred a couple of times each. And the same could be said about many other governors. Table 9: Proportion that governors expressing ‘necessity’ represent of the governor pool by language (% GOV )  

%

N

1

3/424

65

1669/2569

bisognare

5

40/768

necesitar/es necessario

0

4/1153

LA NGUAGE

GOVERNOR

Portuguese

precisar

French

falloir

Italian Spanish

8.3 Dispersion of subjunctive morphology across governors (% SUBJ MORPHO ) A third measure of the lexical contribution to variant choice calculates the proportion of all subjunctive morphology accounted for by each governor (% SUBJ MORPHO ). The idiosyncratic subjunctive rates associated with different verbs, coupled with their disproportionate distributions, crucially affect this amount. Figure 7 illustrates.  

Figure 7: Dispersion of subjunctive morphology across governors by language, as measured by proportion frequent governors represent of the governor pool (% GOV ) and proportion of subjunctive morphology they account for (% MORPHO )  

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Nowhere are these disproportionate distributions more dramatic than in French: because falloir is so frequent and so highly associated with subjunctive, it alone is responsible for more than three quarters of all subjunctive morphology in the corpus! The addition of vouloir ‘want’ brings the count to 89 %. Subjunctive morphology is also restricted in Portuguese, albeit to a much lesser extent: querer ‘want’ makes up nearly a quarter of the governors, but because it also favours subjunctive, it accounts for more of the subjunctive morphology than its frequency would warrant. In Italian, in contrast, due to generally high subjunctive rates and fewer disproportionate distributions, the dispersion of subjunctive morphology across governors is basically as expected from the proportion each governor represents overall. Spanish presents a different profile, as evidenced by the reversal of the relative height of its columns in Figure 7. While two of the frequent Spanish verbs (querer ‘want’, hacer ‘make-cause’) favour the subjunctive and consequently account for a larger proportion of subjunctive morphology than their overall preponderance in the governor pool would predict, the two most frequent governors (creer ‘believe’ and decir ‘say’) strongly disfavour it. Thus although these verbs constitute a large proportion of the governor pool, they represent a much lesser portion of subjunctive morphology, increasing the dispersion of subjunctive morphology across governors. (Indeed, the frequency of these governors and their scant associations with subjunctive together go a long way towards explaining the low overall rate of subjunctive in Spanish depicted in Figure 1.) It is now clear that the combination of governor frequency and idiosyncratic variant associations crucially affect the way subjunctive morphology is dispersed across governors. But we also note that the number of embedded verbs that actually receive subjunctive morphology is extremely limited. Any embedded verb occurring in a subjunctive-selecting context is of course eligible to take the subjunctive. And there were in fact many of them in all of the languages. But due to the same kinds of disproportions we saw for the governors, most subjunctive morphology is concentrated in just a few (Figure 8). In both French and Italian, more than half of all occurrences of the subjunctive are with only three verbs. Even in Portuguese and Spanish, four or five verbs account for a full third of subjunctive morphology. Most are irregular, a further indication of ritualization (Haiman 1994; Poplack 2001, 413). Examples of subjunctive selection with such favourable embedded verbs are given in (19) below. Note that despite some overlap, as with the governors, these are not necessarily the same cross-linguistically. The fact that the subjunctive mostly manifests on only a handful of embedded verbs (under a restricted set of governors) weakens the inference that it is productive in these languages.  

 

 

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Figure 8: Distribution of subjunctive morphology (% SUBJ MORPHO ) across embedded verbs  

(19) a. Non mi risulta che Berlusconi sia[SUBJ essere] ancora il capo del governo. (IT .562.033) ‘It doesn’t seem to me that Berlusconi is still the head of the government.’ b. Eles queriam que eu fosse[SUBJ ir] com eles no velório. (PTG .105.134) ‘They wanted me to go with them to the funeral.’ c. No es que haya[SUBJ haber] agua ahí. (SP .001.487) ‘It’s not that there is water there.’ d. Bien ça, fallait tu fasses[SUBJ faire] ton huit heures par jour. (FR .043.924) ‘Well there you had to do your eight hours a day.’

9 Summary Table 10 summarizes our findings with respect to the relative positioning of the Romance languages according to the grammaticalization measures we have operationalized and tested. Recall that the implication behind such positioning is distance from Latin, represented here, as in the grammaticalization clines in the literature, in its idealized (and possibly fictionalized) state.  

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Table 10: Relative positioning of languages according to grammaticalization measures  

Measure

{Latin}

Most conservative

>

Most advanced

No No FR No PTG

Semantic contribution

Yes

Overall SUBJ rate

100 %

Dispersion of data across govs

Yes

Average SUBJ rate by gov

100 %

SPN

IT

In part FR

IT

P TG

SP

76 %

71 %

55 %

38 %

IT

PTG  

 

 

IT

Median SUBJ rate by gov

100 %

N govs

Many

Dispersion of SUBJ morpho across govs

Yes

Dispersion of morpho across embedded verbs

Yes

 

83 % 83 %

SP

FR

Top gov = 27 % Top 2 = 48 %

Top gov = 65 % Top 2 = 89 %

P TG

FR

78 %

63 %

 

 

100 % 100 % PTG 100 %

 

 

IT

FR

SP

67 %

111/~410K wds 93/~300K wds

SP

P TG

FR

IT

43/~750K wds

37/~2.5M wds

P TG

FR

SP

IT

Top 5 = 38 %

Top 5 = 50 %

Top 3 = 50 %

SP

PTG

IT

 

SUBJ

SP

Top gov = 15 % Top gov = 22 % Top 5 = 50 % Top 3 = 50 %

Top 4 = 28 %  

 

Top 4 = 35 %  

 

FR

Top 1 = 76 %  

Top 1 = 40 %; Top 3 = 56 % Top 3 = 54 %; Top 4 = 67 %  

 

 

 

To the extent that the subjunctive has advanced on the grammaticalization path, its presumed semantic contribution should no longer be determining its selection. In fact, our results show that desemanticization has gone to completion in Italian, Portuguese and French. We can infer this from the fact that the factors operationalized to capture semantic effects are not operative (sections 7.1 and 7.2). The identity of the governors does not predict mood consistently either, whether within or across these languages (section 7.3). Based on these same measures, Spanish shows up as more conservative. Even if use of the subjunctive is not semantically motivated, it may still be productive in other ways, for example as a marker of subordination. How can this be gauged? Overall rate is often recruited as a measure of productivity. Assuming an earlier idealized stage of categorical subjunctive realization, rate differences would place French and Italian closest to the source, with Portuguese far removed and Spanish even more so (Figure 2), contra standard characterizations. But as we have been at pains to demonstrate, rates can be deceptive, here because of the strong lexical bias embodied in the governor and in the proportion that each  

 

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one represents overall. We have seen that rates differ dramatically across individual governors in all four languages (Figure 5), and that in each one, a handful accounts for at least half of the governor pool (% GOV ; Figure 6). In this respect, French shows the most dramatic restriction. Because the disproportionately frequent French governor falloir is also favourable to selection of the subjunctive, while the two mostfrequent Spanish governors strongly disfavour it, overall subjunctive rates for these two languages are most misleading. The rate measure considers every token equally. In the case at hand, this is problematic, because some governors account for disproportionate amounts of the data (Figure 6) while also featuring idiosyncratic associations with the subjunctive (Figure 5). We can mitigate this problem by assigning equal weight to each governor regardless of the amount of data it represents. But the average rate thus obtained is silent on the dispersion of subjunctive morphology across governors. Does an average rate of 30 % mean that each governor hovers around 30 %, or is it the product of amalgamating some governors with very low rates with others featuring very high ones? The median rate, that of the governor occupying the mid-point of the range, clarifies how rates are distributed across governors. Table 10 shows that three of the four languages have median rates of 100 %: more than half of their governors cooccur with subjunctive categorically (due in turn to the preponderance in them of hapax legomena whose sole occurrence happened to be in the subjunctive). When we control for disproportions among governors in frequency of occurrence and rates of subjunctive by averaging governor rates and calculating the median, we discover that it is again French that is most advanced, while Spanish is far more conservative than overall rates would have suggested. We also tested the productivity of the subjunctive in terms of the number of governors that trigger it (which we construe as a measure of type frequency (Bybee/ Torres Cacoullos 2009, 207–212)). At 111 and 93, Spanish and Italian again appear closest to the presumed source. They display more than twice as many governors as Portuguese, although the corpora from which they were drawn are less than half the size. Least productive is French: despite more than three times the amount of data, far fewer verbs governed a subjunctive even once. The fact that such a large proportion of all subjunctive morphology can be accounted for by such a small cohort of governors in all four languages (Figure 7) also militates against productivity, but here again, French is most advanced and Spanish most conservative. Independently of this, the cohort of embedded verbs carrying subjunctive morphology is extremely restricted in both French and Italian as well (Figure 8). Although some Spanish and Portuguese embedded verbs are also disproportionately frequent, they are the most productive on this measure. Summarizing, in at least one respect our results confirm previous proposals: the French subjunctive is in fact the most advanced on the cline of grammaticalization, despite featuring the highest rate of subjunctive of any of the languages studied. The positions of the other languages are reversed with respect to the received wisdom: it is  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Spanish that turns out to be most conservative, even though its low overall rate suggested the opposite. This points up how misleading reliance on simple rates of occurrence can be as a measure of grammaticalization and emphasizes the primacy of conditioning of variant selection, which has identified lexical routinization and structural conventionalization as the processes at work. We stress, however, that their relative positions on the cline should not obscure the fact that all of these languages are quite distant from the presumed source, meaning that they are all highly grammaticalized, including Spanish, albeit to a lesser extent. In terms of desemanticization, three of the languages have reached completion, as emerged from the finding that factors operationalized to capture semantic effects did not constrain variant selection. In this respect, then, they are located at the extremity of the cline (Figure 9). The subjunctive does seem to be meaningful in Spanish, at least to some degree, but because it nonetheless occurs variably in purportedly irrealis-meaning-bearing contexts, it too is remote from the idealized earlier state. In any event, its use is not solely semantically motivated – as with its sisters, mood choice is simultaneously subject to lexical and structural constraints.  

Figure 9: Desemanticization cline  

As a counterpart to desemanticization, what has developed in all these languages is lexical bias, although the identity of the items recruited to act as governors, their preponderance in their respective languages, and the rates of subjunctive associated with each were all seen to differ substantially from one language to the next. The process that is still ongoing is conventionalization, which we have defined as the extent to which the subjunctive is associated to a given structurally-defined context. On this measure, with near-categorical subjunctive selection under only a few governors and embedded verbs, French is indisputably the most advanced. Italian is lagging behind, as evidenced by the distribution of the subjunctive over a much wider array of governors, even if not to express different meanings. The three most desemanticized languages are clearly situated at the far pole of the structural conventionalization path, but Spanish is a willing participant as well. This is again evidenced by the lexical idiosyncrasies all four languages display: potential governors are either highly or rarely associated with the subjunctive, with the most variability occurring amongst governors and not within. Moreover, rather than choose freely from the pool, speakers of each language over-use just a few governors, such that the task of subjunctive selection is restricted to only a small – and again, distinct! –

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cohort. In addition, subjunctive morphology is further restricted to a few embedded verbs, even though every verb in the language is eligible to carry it. What about Spanish? Classifying complement-clause subjunctives in the Corpus sociolingüístico de la ciudad de México studied here into those dictated by the linguistic context (e.g. in volitives, or with governors such as gustar ‘like’) and ones where it varies with the indicative, Lastra/Martín Butragueño (2012, 121) report that the large majority fall into the first category. This bolsters our finding that the lexical and structural features of the context are powerful determinants of subjunctive selection. On the one hand, Spanish is the language in which the subjunctive is least variable under individual governors: more than one third (11/31) of moderately frequent governors display a subjunctive rate of 100 %, close to one third (9/31) feature subjunctive rates under 20 %, while fewer than a quarter (7/31) show robust variability, with subjunctive rates between 20 % and 80 % (see also Figure 5 for more frequent governors). On the other hand, Spanish is most sensitive to matrix clause structure (Table 3 and Figure 3). While subjunctive “triggers” such as negation are often taken to reflect a semantic contribution (questioning the truth value of the subordinate clause proposition; e.g. Real Academia Española 2010, 480), they are also undeniably structural. For example, it would be difficult to prove that the subjunctive under the negated governor in (20) qualifies the truth value of the proposition any more than the indicative does under the same governor in the affirmative.  

 

 

(20) Yo no pensé que fuéramos[SUBJ] a salir/¿eh?/yo pensé que íbamos[IND] a estar en la casa eh. (SP .056.1081) ‘I didn’t think that we were going to go out, eh? I thought we were going to stay home, eh.’ Spanish is also more sensitive than the other languages to governor tense: subjunctive is highly favoured in the complement clause when the matrix verb is itself in the subjunctive or the conditional (82 %, N = 28). Thus, while Spanish clearly lags behind the three other languages on the scale of desemanticization, its advanced structural conventionalization would seem to place it on a par with them, as schematized in Figure 10.  

Figure 10: Conventionalization cline  

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10 Conclusion This study contributes to recent work attempting to position the Romance languages along the cline of grammaticalization with usage data on a key diagnostic: the choice between indicative and subjunctive in embedded complement clauses. While mood selection is widely assumed to be semantically motivated, typological studies adopting a diachronic perspective suggest that subjunctives grammaticalize into concomitants of subordination, entailing “vacuous” variability and lower rates of subjunctive morphology en route to eventual loss. We addressed these alternative perspectives via two major parameters of advancing grammaticalization: desemanticization and conventionalization. Results show robust variability, not only in overall rates of subjunctive selection across languages, but also within them, since matrix verbs display a range of subjunctive rates. Moreover, contrary to received wisdom, semantic considerations play a minor role, if any, in variant choice. With the arguable exception of Spanish, subjunctive selection is constrained neither by contextual elements consistent with its oft-ascribed meanings nor by semantic classes of governors harmonic with such meanings. On this basis, we were led to place Italian, French and Portuguese farther along the desemanticization path than Spanish. But in all four languages, lexical bias was found to be the major predictor of subjunctive selection, though the same governor (whether determined etymologically or as translation equivalents) does not display consistent associations crosslinguistically. A variety of other measures designed to gauge the productivity of the subjunctive only bolstered this result: in each language, a handful of governors accounts for a large proportion both of all governors and of all subjunctive morphology. In addition, the cohort of embedded verbs featuring subjunctive morphology, though theoretically unrestricted, turned out to be limited as well. With near categorical subjunctive selection under the smallest number of governors and embedded verbs, the subjunctive is indisputably the least productive in French. But the usage facts militate against productivity in all four languages, with potential governors either highly or rarely associated with subjunctive, and more variability occurring among governors than within. Importantly, these associations are community-specific and not a function of meaning or inheritance from the common ancestor. The conservative positioning of Spanish with respect to the other languages on the cline of desemanticization should not obscure the fact that by these measures, it too displays structural conventionalization: its associations with elements of the linguistic context limit semantic motivations for subjunctive selection. We conclude that, although situated at different points on the cline of grammaticalization, all four languages are quite distant from the presumed source, and are all well embarked on the overriding processes of lexical routinization and structural conventionalization. The former is language-particular, with different governors displaying idiosyncratic

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associations with the subjunctive in different languages. Along the latter path, however, the languages differ merely by degree. These insights emerge thanks to cross-linguistic comparison which relies on the data of variability inherent in spoken language. Such findings diverge in a number of ways from previous accounts. We suggest that this is because, in contrast to them, we focused here on speakers’ actual spontaneous usage of the subjunctive. This forced us to confront, rather than evade, the facts of inherent variability, and encouraged us to go beyond potentially misleading rates of occurrence to seek the explanatory factors embodied in variant conditioning. Only in this way could we debunk idealizations about mood choice and lay bare the fundamental role of governor frequency and idiosyncratic associations with subjunctive morphology. This is what enabled us to evaluate its actual productivity in cross-linguistic perspective. Acknowledgements: The research on which this article is based was generously supported by grants to Poplack from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Poplack holds the Canada Research Chair (I) in Linguistics. Berlinck acknowledges support from FAPESP (2014/02414-0) and CNPq (311294/20138). We thank audiences at the Canadian Linguistics Association (May 2015), New Ways of Analyzing Variation 44 (October 2015), Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages 46 (April 2016) and Sociolinguistics Symposium 21 (June 2016) for useful feedback on earlier iterations of this work. We are particularly grateful to Bernd Heine, Christian Lehmann and Jan Juhl Lindschouw, as well as to the editors, whose perspicacious comments were so instrumental to our thinking on these issues (though they would not necessarily agree with all the views expressed here).

11 Bibliography Bello, Andrés (1847), Gramática de la lengua castellana destinada al uso de los americanos, in: Obras completas. Tomo Cuarto, Caracas, La Casa de Bello. Bolinger, Dwight (1974), One Subjunctive or Two?, Hispania 57, 462–472. Bybee, Joan/Perkins, Revere/Pagliuca, William (1994), The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Bybee, Joan/Torres Cacoullos, Rena (2009), The Role of Prefabs in Grammaticalization: How the Particular and the General Interact in Language Change, in: Roberta L. Corrigan et al. (edd.), Formulaic Language, vol. 1: Distribution and Historical Change, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 187–217. Carlier, Anne/De Mulder, Walter/Lamiroy, Béatrice (2012a), Introduction. The Pace of Grammaticalization in a Typological Perspective, Folia linguistica 46(2), 287–302. Carlier, Anne/De Mulder, Walter/Lamiroy, Béatrice (edd.) (2012b), The Pace of Grammaticalization in Romance, Special Issue, Folia linguistica 46(2). Chafe, Wallace (1995), The Realis-Irrealis Distinction in Caddo, the Northern Iroquoian Languages, and English, in: Joan Bybee/Suzanne Fleischman (edd.), Modality in Grammar and Discourse, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 349–366.

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Cresti, Emanuela/Moneglia, Massimo (edd.) (2005), C-ORAL-ROM. Integrated Reference Corpora for Spoken Romance Languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Cunha, Celso/Cintra, Lindley (1985), Nova gramática do português contemporâneo, Rio de Janeiro, Nova Fronteira. De Mulder, Walter/Lamiroy, Béatrice (2012), Gradualness of Grammaticalization in Romance. The Position of French, Spanish and Italian, in: Kristin Davidse et al. (edd.), Grammaticalization and Language Change: New Reflections, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 199–226. Digesto, Salvatore (in progress), Verum a fontibus haurire. Variationist Analysis of the Subjunctive from Latin to Italian, doctoral thesis, Ottawa, University of Ottawa. Givón, Talmy (1978), Negation in Language: Pragmatics, Function, Ontology, in: Peter Cole (ed.), Syntax and Semantics, vol. 9: Pragmatics, New York, Academic Press, 69–112. Givón, Talmy (1994), Irrealis and the Subjunctive, Studies in Language 18, 265–337. Gonçalves, Sebastião Carlos Leite (2003), Banco de dados Iboruna: Amostras eletrônicas do português falado no interior paulista, http://www.iboruna.ibilce.unesp.br (last access 15.02.2018). Haiman, John (1994), Ritualization and the Development of Language, in: William Pagliuca (ed.), Perspectives on Grammaticalization, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 3–28. Harris, Martin (1974), The Subjunctive Mood as a Changing Category in Romance, in: John M. Anderson/Charles Jones (edd.), Historical Linguistics II: Theory and Description in Phonology (Proceedings of the First International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Edinburgh, 2–7 September, 1973), Amsterdam, North-Holland Publishing Company, 169–188. Harris, Martin (1978), The Evolution of French Syntax: A Comparative Approach, London/New York, Longman. Haspelmath, Martin (1998), Does Grammaticalization Need Reanalysis?, Studies in Language 22, 315–351. Haspelmath, Martin (2003), The Geometry of Grammatical Meaning: Semantic Maps and CrossLinguistic Comparison, in: Michael Tomasello (ed.), The New Psychology of Language, vol. 2, Mahwah/New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 211–242. Heine, Bernd/Reh, Mechthild (1984), Grammaticalization and Reanalysis in African Languages, Hamburg, Buske. Kastronic, Laura (2016), A Comparative Variationist Approach to Morphosyntactic Variation in Contemporary Hexagonal and Quebec French, doctoral thesis, Ottawa, University of Ottawa. Kragh, Kirsten Jeppesen (2010), Le Remplacement de l’imparfait du subjonctif par le présent du subjonctif considéré dans une perspective de grammaticalisation (Études romanes 60), Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum Press. La Touche, Nicolas de (1730), L’Art de bien parler françois, qui comprend tout ce qui regarde la grammaire & les façons de parler douteuses, Amsterdam, Wetsteins & Smith. Labov, William (1972), Sociolinguistic Patterns, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press. Labov, William (1984), Field Methods of the Project on Linguistic Change and Variation, in: John Baugh/Joel Sherzer (edd.), Language in Use: Readings in Sociolinguistics, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 28–54. Lamiroy, Béatrice/De Mulder, Walter (2011), Degrees of Grammaticalization across Languages, in: Bernd Heine/Heiko Narrog (edd.), The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 302–307. Lastra, Yolanda/Martín Butragueño, Pedro (2012), Aproximación al uso del modo subjuntivo en el corpus sociolingüístico de la ciudad de México, Boletín de filología 47(2), 101–131. Lehmann, Christian (21995, 11982), Thoughts on Grammaticalization, München, Lincom. Lindschouw, Jan (2011), Étude des modes dans le système concessif en français du 16e au 20e siècle et en espagnol moderne (Études romanes 61), Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum Press.  

 

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Loengarov, Alexander (2006), L’Alternance indicatif/subjonctif dans les langues romanes. Motivation sémantico-pragmatique et grammaticalisation, doctoral thesis, Leuven, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Magni, Elisabetta (2010), Mood and Modality, in: Philip Baldi/Pierluigi Cuzzolin (edd.), New Perspectives on Historical Latin Syntax, vol. 2, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 193–275. Martín Butragueño, Pedro/Lastra, Yolanda (edd.) (2011–2015), Corpus sociolingüístico de la ciudad de México (CSCM), México, El Colegio de México, http://lef.colmex.mx/Sociolinguistica/CSCM/Corpus.htm (last access 15.02.2018). Mateus, Helena Mira (1983), Gramática da língua portuguesa: Elementos para a descrição da estrutura, funcionamento e uso do português actual, Coimbra, Livraria Almedina. Poplack, Shana (1989), The Care and Handling of a Mega-Corpus, in: Ralph Fasold/Deborah Schiffrin (edd.), Language Change and Variation, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 411–451. Poplack, Shana (1990), Prescription, intuition et usage: Le Subjonctif français et la variabilité inhérente, Langage et société 54, 5–33. Poplack, Shana (1992), The Inherent Variability of the French Subjunctive, in: Christine Laeufer/Terrell Morgan (edd.), Theoretical Analyses in Romance Linguistics, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 235–263. Poplack, Shana (2001), Variability, Frequency and Productivity in the Irrealis Domain of French, in: Joan Bybee/Paul Hopper (edd.), Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 405–428. Poplack, Shana (2011), Grammaticalization and Linguistic Variation, in: Bernd Heine/Heiko Narrog (edd.), The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 209–224. Poplack, Shana/Lealess, Allison V./Dion, Nathalie (2013), The Evolving Grammar of the French Subjunctive, Probus 25, 139–193. Poplack, Shana/Tagliamonte, Sali (2001), African American English in the Diaspora, Malden, MA, Blackwell. Poplack, Shana/Turpin, Danielle (1999), Does the FUTUR Have a Future in (Canadian) French?, Probus 11, 133–164. Poplack, Shana, et al. (2015), Searching for Standard French: The Construction and Mining of the Recueil historique des grammaires du français, Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 1, 13–55. Real Academia Española (1906), Gramática de la lengua castellana. Nueva edición, Madrid, Perlado, Páez y Compañía. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2010), Nueva gramática de la lengua española. Manual, Madrid, España. Ribeiro, Ernesto Carneiro (61955, 11890), Serões grammaticaes ou nova grammatica portugueza, Salvador, Livraria Progresso Editora. Sankoff, David (1988), Sociolinguistics and Syntactic Variation, in: Frederick Newmeyer (ed.), Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 140–161. Silva-Corvalán, Carmen (1994), Language Contact and Change. Spanish in Los Angeles, Oxford, Clarendon Press. Sobrero, Alberto A./Beccaria, Gian Luigi/Marazzini, Claudio (1987), Lingua italiana: La pratica e la grammatica: manuale di educazione linguistica, Torino, Società Editrice Internazionale. Tartaglione, Roberto (2008), Grammatica italiana. Regole ed esempi d’uso, Firenze, Alma Edizioni. Thompson, Sandra (1998), A Discourse Explanation for the Cross-Linguistic Differences in the Grammar of Incorporation and Negation, in: Anna Siewierska/Jae Jung Song (edd.), Case, Typology and Grammar: In Honor of Barry J. Blake, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 309–341.  

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9 Historical sociolinguistics and tracking language change: sources, text types and genres Abstract: Historical sociolinguistics is a rich and promising field, which provides scope to deepen our understanding of linguistic variation and change through the analysis of long-term real-time data. However, whilst there has been considerable progress in the field over the last thirty years, the analysis and interpretation of past written texts still requires considerable refinement. A key issue concerns the choice of appropriate textual sources or the so-called “bad data” problem. After reviewing different approaches to the question, we consider the extent to which it is possible to use large-scale multi-genre databases and corpora to track the spread of change through different text types or genres. Some of the issues are illustrated through case studies from the history of French: clitic climbing; agreement with la plupart; and the competition between après, par après and en après. More studies of this kind and more data are required before we can draw firm conclusions either about the way changes spread through different text types, or as to which genres in the past are closer to speech than others.  

Keywords: historical sociolinguistics, language change, sources, text types, genres  

1 Introduction Historical sociolinguistics is a thriving and now well-established discipline. Thirty years after the publication of Suzanne Romaine’s seminal work, Socio-Historical Linguistics: Its Status and Methodology (1982), the standing of the subject was confirmed by the publication of the first handbook devoted to it (Hernández-Campoy/ Conde-Silvestre 2012) and its own dedicated journal, the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics (2015–). Yet scholars working on the Romance languages have on the whole been slower to embrace this approach than those working on Germanic languages,1 and notably on English.2 Conversely, work published in Romance languages is typically not well known by anglophone scholars. A brief glance at the 2012 handbook

1 Note, however, that Gimeno Menéndez already called for a sociolingüística histórica in an article published in 1983. 2 Studies on English far outnumber those on other languages, but there are also some important studies of German and Dutch (see, for instance, Elspass et al. 2007; Rutten/Vosters/Vandenbussche 2014). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-010

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underlines this point: in several chapters all the examples offered are from English, and no justification is offered for this narrow focus. In the chapter on the use of linguistic corpora by Pascual Cantos, for instance, virtually all the corpora mentioned are of varieties of English (Hernández-Campoy/Conde-Silvestre 2012, 121–122). Likewise, examples from Romance languages feature only very spasmodically, for example in the chapter discussing convergence and divergence in world languages, or as instances of phonological variation and change. The field of historical sociolinguistics can be construed in a number of different ways, ranging from any historical study which considers the role of social and political factors in the history of a language to studies inspired by Romaine’s work which aim either to reconstruct past language states – and their variability – within their socio-cultural contexts or to use the findings of sociolinguistics to inform our understanding of language change. Nevalainen/Raumolin-Brunberg (1996, 4), for instance, identify two main strands in the sociolinguistic study of the history of English: one represented by broad, non-technical social histories of the language which stems from critical awareness of the relevance of social and political issues in language maintenance and change; the other, corpus-based studies of individual language changes in their linguistic and extra-linguistic contexts.3 Regarding the first type, the social aspects of language change have long been a concern of historians of the Romance languages and predate the emergence of historical sociolinguistics as a modern discipline. Work of this type has traditionally been seen through the lens of the distinction between internal and external history. Whilst priority may have been given to internal history, external histories of the Romance languages are very common. A classic example of such an approach is Ferdinand Brunot’s (1905–1953) monumental history of the French language. The new emphasis on sociohistorical approaches has, however, placed the analysis of social factors centre stage. Examples include Lodge’s (2004) sociolinguistic history of Parisian French, Francisco Moreno Fernández’s (2005) social history of the languages of Spain,4 or Ronnie Ferguson’s (2007) structural and social history of Venetian. Other studies, such as Ayres-Bennett (2004), aim to reconstruct past language states – and their variability – within their socio-cultural contexts. Social histories of the Romance languages and varieties have often concentrated on the macro-level, focussing on questions of language contact, multilingualism, language attitudes and standardization. For example, the history of the standardization of the Romance languages has been treated in numerous studies; these predomi-

3 Tuten/Tejedo-Herrero (2011, 285) identify three, rather than two, main types: (i) sociology of language, including studies of diglossia, bilingualism, and sociocultural aspects of standardization; (ii) interactional sociolinguistics, which looks at, for instance, how writers use orate and literate registers and how they communicate within different genres and discursive traditions; (iii) variationist approaches. See also Rubio (2016). 4 On the political history of Spanish, cf. Valle (2013).

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nantly concern the major languages (e.g. Joseph 1987; Lodge 1993; Armstrong/Mackenzie 2013), but there are also some historical studies of the linguae minores (for example, on Catalan, Badia i Margarit 1975; Ferrando 2016).5 Language attitudes, and especially purism, have equally been the subject of a number of recent publications, although the focus has often been on French (e.g. Paveau/Rosier 2008; Walsh 2016). Certain minoritized Romance languages are discussed in Brincat/Boeder/Stolz (2003). Another area which has naturally preoccupied Romanists is the emergence of the Romance languages from Late Latin, notably by the Hispanist Roger Wright (e.g. 1982; 1994; 2002), who has proposed a method of study he calls “sociophilology”, which combines philological and sociolinguistic insights (cf. Banniard 1997). In the case of Italy, emphasis has traditionally been focused on dialectal variation (↗18 The languages and dialects of Italy), and the distinctive feature of Italian historical sociolinguistics is its link with dialectology and the so-called questione della lingua (Dardano 1999). Studies of koineization or dialect mixing have also flourished; indeed, Penny (2006) views this as the most important contribution sociolinguistics can make to the history of Spanish (cf. Lodge 1993 on French; Penny 2000 on Spanish). Dialect mixing has also been invoked to explain the origins of American Spanish by scholars such as Fontanella de Weinberg (1992) or Parodi (2001) (cf. Mougeon/Beniak 1994; Fournier/Wittmann 1995 for similar discussions of the origins of Canadian French). This chapter focuses on studies which adopt a sociolinguistic approach to the study of language change with a view to understanding better the processes of language change in general. Whilst there are indeed studies of this kind for Romance, they have frequently been conducted by anglophones familiar with work on English, and notably with the Labovian variationist tradition, and scholars working on their own Romance language have typically tended to gravitate more towards the first kind of study.

2 Explaining language change Sociohistorical studies which seek to explain how language changes are an essential complement to those conducted in apparent time by modern sociolinguists. In terms of real-time studies for contemporary sociolinguistic studies, the time scale is still relatively short. For instance, the earliest corpus of spoken French, collected in Orléans between 1968 and 1974, now supplemented by a corpus collected from 2008 onwards, gives us a time depth of fewer than fifty years.6 On the other hand, for past

5 For a recent overview of the standardization of the Romance languages, cf. Pountain (2016a). In the case of Italian there is a major language shift whereby the mainly written code of an elite based on fourteenth-century Tuscan becomes in the space of a century a widely spoken language (De Mauro 1963). 6 This is the ESLO (Enquêtes SocioLinguistiques à Orléans) corpus (http://eslo.huma-num.fr, last access 03.10.2016).

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periods we can use data covering a much longer chronological span and therefore track changes more effectively. Studies of Romance languages and varieties falling under this narrower definition of sociohistorical linguistics are equally less numerous than those on English, and for certain languages, notably Romanian, there is very little work at all.7 It is also notable that much of this type of analysis is being carried out in North America, for example on Canadian French, where the influence of Labovian sociolinguistics is much stronger than in continental Europe. A leading figure working in the Labovian paradigm on Canadian French is Shana Poplack, whose work on the history of the subjunctive, for instance, is ground-breaking (Poplack/Lealess/Dion 2013; ↗8 Variation and grammaticalization in Romance). As yet, there are few, if any, truly comparative studies which benefit from a comparative Romance perspective.8 Within this type of sociohistorical linguistics, we can equally identify sub-types. Some scholars concentrate on the role of speaker variables, such as social status, gender, education and occupation, in linguistic variation and change, and the interaction between them (↗10 Speaker-based approaches to past language states).9 Other studies focus more on the spread of changes through different genres and their establishment as part of an emerging norm; this is the approach we will present here. Such work addresses questions of transmission and diffusion, that is, how language change spreads and becomes embedded. In the rest of the chapter I will concentrate principally on French, but will refer, where appropriate, to relevant work on other Romance languages, notably on Spanish and Portuguese.10 In the next section, I will look at the thorny issue of the sources for historical sociolinguistics and the so-called “bad data” problem (3.1): I will discuss, first, different approaches to finding textual sources which best reflect spoken usages in the past (3.2), before considering the creation of multi-genre databases and corpora (3.3). In section 4, I will explore the extent to which it is possible to use these largescale corpora to track the spread of change through different text types or genres. In the following section (section 5), I will illustrate some of the issues through case studies from the history of French.  

 

7 I am grateful to Martin Maiden for this information. 8 Brownlees’s (2012) study of English and Italian diplomatic correspondence is typical in that it has a relatively short analysis of the structure and tone of Italian diplomatic letters from 1690, which largely piggy-backs on work on English to add a first comparative dimension. 9 Social standing is considered, for example, in Martineau (2009) and King/Martineau/Mougeon (2011). 10 For an overview of the historical sociolinguistics of Italian, cf. Parry (2010) and Jones/Parry/ Williams (2016).

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3 Sources for historical sociolinguistics 3.1 The “bad data” problem It has become almost obligatory for any discussion of sources for historical sociolinguistics to refer to Labov’s “bad data problem”. Labov laments the fact that historical linguists have no control over their data and that it is a matter of accident which texts survive. As a result, he concludes that “the great art of the historical linguist is to make the best of this bad data” (Labov 1972, 98; 1994, 10–11). Clearly the data available for the historical sociolinguist offer particular challenges compared with those used by sociolinguists working on a contemporary language. Since the amount of data may be relatively small, there is a question of the extent to which they are representative. For instance, the further back we go, the fewer sources by women and the middle and lower ranks of society tend to be available.11 We typically have less information about the speakers and, as a result, it may be more difficult to unpick the effect of the different factors which contribute to a speaker’s complex identity (age, gender, socio-economic status (SES), occupation, education, etc.). In considering the representation of variation in written texts, we need to take account of the role of the ideology of the standard, as well as questions of authorship (e.g. use of an amanuensis), particularly in periods of widespread illiteracy. Romaine (1988, 1454) has argued that historical data are only “bad” if an invidious comparison is made with data from authentic spoken language and she argues that instead historical written data should be considered as valid in their own right. It has nevertheless been the case that historical sociolinguists have been concerned to find written sources which are closest to speech. We are therefore dealing with two, albeit interrelated, questions: (i) the search for texts which best reflect the spoken language of the time;12 (ii) the analysis of variation in written language, which merits its own study, for instance, concerning the difference between genres and the way change spreads through them. In both cases there is an acute need to create reliable databases comprising source materials suitable for sociolinguistic investigation, underpinned by sound philological expertise in editing and interpreting texts. We will discuss each of these issues in turn.

11 This is sometimes termed “history from below” (see Elspass 2005). The centrality of such material depends, of course, on the type of change being investigated, since alongside “change from below”, there is also “change from above” (cf. Labov 1994, 78). 12 Scholars have not always avoided the very real danger of conflating register variation seen in texts with the difference between written and spoken usage, and notably of equating low-register usage with spoken usage.

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3.2 Sources approximating to the vernacular In an early paper looking at sources for spoken French in the past, Gerhard Ernst (1980) proposed a number of possible sources for accessing seventeenth-century spoken French.13 This was part of a debate, notably amongst German Romanists, about the “age” of spoken French, that is, whether features of contemporary spoken French are longstanding, or whether they already existed in previous centuries, but had been hidden through the concentration of traditional histories on the literary usage of upper-class men, etc.14 Those supporting the latter position argued for the need to have better access to appropriate sources reflecting as far as possible spoken usage in the past.15 We may perhaps identify three broad approaches to this question, the first two of which have been applied especially to the history of French. First, there is the approach outlined by Ernst (1980) and developed, for example, by Ayres-Bennett (2004). According to this approach, a range of different text types are consulted and, where possible, convergence between the different sources is sought. Ernst (1980, 3) lists the following possible sources: 1. Historical transcriptions of authentic speech; 2. Model dialogues in didactic texts; 3. (a) (Fictitious) direct speech in theatre; (b) (Fictitious) direct speech in other genres, and particularly in narrative texts; 4. Metalinguistic texts (grammars, observations and remarks, etc.); 5. Comparative data derived from considering the development of spoken French beyond France. Each of these sources has its advantages and disadvantages, as outlined in AyresBennett (2004; 2014). For instance, the dialogues represented in didactic texts often lack spontaneity and they are transcribed using the conventions of written language;16 speakers are made to utter complete sentences and there are very few pauses, false starts or hesitations, which we know to be characteristic of unplanned speech. Other difficulties include the fact that the majority of the speakers are young, aristo-

13 See also Aquino-Weber/Cotelli/Kristol (2009). For a discussion of different types of textual sources for Italian, see D’Achille (1990; 2008). D’Achille divides texts into three levels, those closest to speech, those in the “middle”, and those of an elevated register, and adds to these five internal pragmatic parameters: the private character of the text; the spontaneity of the writing; the degree of proximity to speech; the relationship with the intended reader; and subjectivity. Methodological issues are also discussed in Vàrvaro (1984). 14 The debate is well summarized by Schweickard (1983) and Hausmann (1992). 15 For Spanish we may point to the work on lo hablado en lo escrito spearheaded by Wulf Oesterreicher (2005). 16 See, for example, Radtke (1994) who looks at French and Italian dialogues.

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cratic and male, placed in stereotypical situations such as arriving at an inn. Moreover, the authors of these dialogues are often foreigners who do not themselves always have a complete command of French. A second solution has been to concentrate on the analysis of direct speech in literary texts, and to compare the usage in this with usage in the narrative passages. This is what Marchello-Nizia (2014), for example, calls “oral représenté”, which she views as a privileged site for language change. Interestingly, most of the studies adopting this approach analyse Old French texts (e.g. Marnette 2006; Guillot et al. 2015), and there is much less on other periods of the history of French, when there are fewer texts destined for oral performance and for which there are, as yet, fewer suitably annotated corpora. A third strategy is the one which has been led by researchers on Germanic languages, and notably on English. This approach privileges “ego-documents”, and especially personal correspondence, which is frequently viewed as the “next best thing” to authentic spoken language (Nevalainen/Raumolin-Brunberg 2012, 32).17 The term “ego-document” was coined around 1955 by the Dutch historian, Jacques Presser, who used it to refer to writings in which the I – the writer – is continuously present in the text as the writing and describing subject (Van der Wal/Rutten 2013, 1). The genre thus comprises letters and autobiographical works such as memoirs, journals and travel accounts. Ideally corpora of “ego-documents” should contain social information about the writer, including, where possible, life dates, gender, social status, education, career, social networks, etc. Some of the studies have focused on the private correspondence of literate individuals, who thus tend to be male and from the higher classes. Pioneering studies for English include the analysis of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence18 by Nevalainen and others (e.g. Nevalainen/RaumolinBrunberg 1996; 2003). More recently, there has been a push to identify letters by lower-class and semi-literate authors. A good example for Dutch is the corpus known as Letters as Loot.19 Work on building historical corpora of letters has now begun in earnest, as least for some of the Romance languages. For French, France Martineau and her team are currently constructing a Corpus de français familier ancien to comprise some 20,000

17 See also Elspass (2012), and Schneider’s useful table which characterizes different text types according to their relative proximity to speech (Schneider 2013, 61). Vaugelas, author of Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647), already makes this association in the manuscript for this text, where he writes, “Aussi seroit ce en une lettre familiere ou j’userois plustost de comme quoy que dans un stile historique, parce que le stile des lettres familieres doit estre le plus approchant de la façon ordinaire de parler” (Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, manuscript 3105, fo 14vo). 18 http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/domains/CEEC.html (last access 03.10.2016). 19 http://www.brievenalsbuit.nl (last access 03.10.2016). This includes some 2,000 of the 15,000 private letters held in the National Archives at Kew in England; the letters are by men, women and even children of all social ranks from the second half of the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century.

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family letters, diaries and account books from France and francophone North America, dating from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century.20 It is notable that letters written by the middle and lower classes are available only from the end of the seventeenth century on, and remain very scarce for the earlier periods.21 As Martineau argues (2010, 619–620), the most stigmatized grammatical variants rarely appear in texts before the nineteenth century when writing became “democratized”.22 An equally ambitious project, P.S. Post Scriptum,23 is underway for Portuguese and Spanish, which aims to collect and publish Portuguese and Spanish contextualized informal letters, written during the early modern period (from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century) by people from different social backgrounds. Once again the aim is to construct a corpus of early modern letters “containing a close-to-conversational register” (Marquilhas 2015, 213). Studies using the Portuguese letters are already producing interesting results. For instance, Marquilhas (2015, 220) notes that a parallel for the social climbers who play an important role in language change in England barely existed in Portugal, since in early modern Portugal social mobility was almost never seen. As regards other types of ego-documents, an early example of research on peulettrés for French was provided by Branca-Rosoff/Schneider (1994) who examined their usage during the Revolutionary period.24 One of the main corpora currently available for French is the collection edited by Gerhard Ernst and Barbara Wolf of Textes français privés des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Ernst/Wolf 2005).25 The editors

20 The corpus has been transcribed and is partially online at http://www.polyphonies.uottawa.ca (last access 03.10.2016); it also includes plays (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and interviews (twentieth and twenty-first centuries). For a study of linguistic change based on different types of corpora, cf. Martineau (2011a). 21 For studies based on usage in theatre and lower-class writers’ correspondence, cf., for example, Martineau/Mougeon (2003) and Martineau (2011b; 2012). 22 Emphasis has understandably been placed on finding private letters written in informal style. Our appreciation of what constitutes informal style will, however, undoubtedly be enhanced by comparing these with the usage in two electronic corpora of diplomatic letters which are currently being constructed. Antonella Amatuzzi (University of Turin) is researching the diplomatic correspondence of Albert Bailly (1620–1690), bishop of Aosta, whilst Annette Gerstenberg (Free University of Berlin) is compiling a corpus of about 1000 diplomatic letters concerning the negotiations around the signing of the Peace of Westphalia. 23 http://ps.clul.ul.pt (last access 03.10.2016). This incorporates the earlier CARDS – Cartas Desconhecidas (Unknown Letters) project (see, for example, Marquilhas 2012; 2015). The corpus of Spanish and Portuguese early modern letters by socially identified writers is tagged both at the morphosyntactic and the syntactic level. The site also has a list of publications by the Post Scriptum team. 24 Bruni (1992/1994) contains a wide range of text types ranging from private letters and popular writings for eighteenth-century Piedmontese through to twentieth-century Venetian texts by semiliterate authors. Here again the focus is on a polycentric picture of Italy, looking at the development of local varieties into written regional forms. 25 See also Ernst (1999; 2010; 2011) for discussion of these texts.

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selected texts of a private nature, where possible by people of a simple status or only weakly literate, for whom writing was not their occupation. Examination of the texts chosen reveals, as the editors themselves observe, just how challenging it is to find texts which satisfy all these criteria. For instance, Marguerite Mercier, author of a livre de raison (1650–1661), does not come from the lower strata of society, but from a family of Huguenot intellectuals, and her first husband was equally from a noble Huguenot family. Even the private journal of the sayette weaver Pierre Chavatte was probably not written down on a daily basis, but rather composed at the end of his life (cf. Lottin 1979). The texts also come from a very wide range of regions, from Guingamp in Brittany to Bert-en-Bourbonnais in the Auvergne, and Poligny in the Jura, making simple comparison of them difficult. Ernst (2010, 60) thus rightly warns against considering them as a coherent corpus: “il serait dangereux de considérer la totalité de ces textes comme un corpus sur lequel ou sur la langue duquel on pourrait faire des affirmations généralisantes, même si ce serait relativement facile du point de vue technique, surtout pour le lexique”.26 Ernst and Wolf stress the importance of looking at private documents written by the less well educated, arguing that they constitute the most authentic documents for sociolinguistic research. As a result, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the linguistic usage in the best-known French memoirs and journals of the period, which tend to be written by the high-ranking and famous, and chronicle for others their deeds within the context of contemporary events, including military campaigns and political acts.27 There are, however, some examples in the corpus Modéliser le changement: les voies du français (Corpus MCVF 2005–2010), compiled by France Martineau and her team, which comprises literary and non-literary texts from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, predominantly from France but also from North America.28

3.3 Exploring variation within the written record The creation of large-scale multi-genre databases and corpora has permitted a growth in quantitative studies which examine variation within the written record. As we shall see, results arrived at through quantitative analysis have to be interpreted with care, and they need to be complemented by qualitative studies which seek to explain

26 In their analysis of nineteenth-century French Canadian private documents – letters and journals – Martineau/Tailleur (2014, 224) speak of “written hybridity” because these documents reveal an intricate relation to local vernaculars and supra-local features alike. 27 For a recent study of Santa Teresa’s Libro de la vida in the light of the debate as to whether her writings correspond to everyday speech or rather contain cultured and literary features, with the ‘vulgar’ features being used deliberately to avoid affectation and erudition, see Pountain (2016b). 28 http://www.voies.uottawa.ca (last access 03.10.2016). There are also examples in the Corpus FRAN discussed below.

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anomalous patterns created, for example, by the presence of one or two individuals with anomalous patterns of usage.29 Research of this kind typically focuses on the analysis of different genres, and considers whether these are more or less progressive in terms of language change (and possibly whether they correlate with more or less informal usage, or approximate more or less closely to spoken usage). In the case of English, the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts was the first historical corpus and is very widely used. It has the advantage of being created by specialists in diachronic linguistics, and is a structured, multi-genre diachronic corpus with text samples, classified by period, from Old, Middle and Early Modern English.30 It has been complemented by a wide range of other corpora.31 There is thus a long tradition for English of tracking change through different genres, or indeed through different subgenres, as in the case of Stein’s (1985) analysis of usage in the different types of Shakespeare plays. Here, too, the building of corpora for the Romance languages has been slower. The principal database still used for the analysis of the history of French usage is Frantext32 which was initially created as a source of examples for a major reference dictionary of modern French, the Trésor de la langue française, and thus comprised mainly nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary texts. It has subsequently been greatly expanded to cover pre-classical and classical French,33 but there remain problems regarding the choice of editions and the rather unsystematic way in which it has developed. Another important resource is the above-mentioned corpus created by France Martineau and her collaborators, Modéliser le changement: les voies du français34 (Corpus MCVF, 2005–2010), and other corpora are being built as part of her project Le français à mesure d’un continent: un patrimoine en partage (Corpus FRAN, 2011–), which is looking at the history of French in North America.35 These corpora have the advantage of being designed by historical linguists with the appropriate tagging and sociolinguistic information. More specialized databases are available for Medieval French: the Base de français médiéval (ninth-fifteenth centuries) contains 153 texts covering a range of genres including literature, history, hagiography, law

29 See, for example, Tristram/Ayres-Bennett (2012) on the way data from one or two ‘aberrant’ authors can skew the data, particularly where the number of tokens is relatively low. 30 http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/HelsinkiCorpus (last access 03.10.2016). The earlier “Quirk Corpus”, created as part of the Survey of English Usage, covers only the period c.1955–1985; cf. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/about/history.htm (last access 03.10.2016). 31 For a list, see Nevalainen (2014, 125–126). 32 http://www.frantext.fr/ (accessed October 2016). 33 At the time of writing (October 2016) it comprises 4746 texts and nearly 235 million words. 34 http://www.voies.uottawa.ca/corpus_pg_en.html (last access 03.10.2016). 35 http://continent.uottawa.ca/fr/corpus (last access 03.10.2016). The corpus covers the period from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century and includes family correspondence, mostly from middle and higher social classes, and interviews.  

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and science,36 whilst the Nouveau Corpus d’Amsterdam includes about 200 different texts with tagging for the parts of speech and other morphological categories.37 Whilst Spanish lacks to date a database similar to the Helsinki corpus for English or large-scale corpora specifically designed for historical sociolinguistics, a number of other corpora have been exploited for cross-genre historical studies. Two of the most widely used are Mark Davies’s Corpus del español38 and the Royal Spanish Academy’s Corpus diacrónico del español (CORDE),39 which contain texts from the 1200s to 1975, complemented by CREA for the period 1975–2004 and the ongoing CORPES XXI for the period 2001 onwards.40 Tuten/Tejedo-Herrero (2011, 290) cite Conde Silvestre (2007, 51–52), who argues that their value for the historical sociolinguist is limited, since the majority of texts are literary, many are anonymous, and the information about the authors is often extremely limited, making the reconstruction of social variables problematic, if not impossible. However, the investigation of register variation as it relates to genre is possible in CORDE, CREA and CORPES XXI, albeit with some effort required for CORDE, which nevertheless does permit precise chronological searches. The Corpus del español is subdivided for genre only for the twentieth century, but has a sophisticated search engine.41 A similar corpus built by Mark Davies for Portuguese permits the analysis of historical changes and genre-based variation in Portuguese.42 Many other Romance languages and varieties now have invaluable electronic corpora for historical research.43 36 http://bfm.ens-lyon.fr (last access 03.10.2016). 37 http://www.uni-stuttgart.de/lingrom/stein/corpus (last access 03.10.2016). 38 http://www.corpusdelespanol.org (last access 03.10.2016); this has been massively expanded recently to enable the study of dialectal variation in Modern Spanish. 39 http://corpus.rae.es/cordenet.html (last access 03.10.2016). 40 http://www.rae.es/recursos/banco-de-datos/crea; http://www.rae.es/recursos/banco-de-datos/ corpes-xxi (last access 03.10.2016). 41 I am indebted to Christopher Pountain for information about these and other Hispanic historical corpora. These include: Digital Library of the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison (http://www.hispanicseminary.org/textconc-en.htm); Archivo Digital de Manuscritos y Textos Españoles (ADMYTE: http://www.admyte.com/admyteonline/home.htm); Corpus Hispánico y Americano en la Red: Textos Antiguos (CHARTA: http://www.corpuscharta.es); Corpus de Documentos Españoles Anteriores a 1800 (CODEA: http://corpuscodea.es); Biblia medieval (http:// www.bibliamedieval.es); Corpus Diacrónico y Diatópico del Español de América (CORDIAM: http:// www.cordiam.org). There are other, more specific, projects underway such as the Corpus diacrónico del español del Reino de Granada (1492–1833) (http://www.corderegra.es), as well as the editing of administrative and other related documents to broaden the range of text types available (all websites last accessed 03.10.2016). 42 http://www.corpusdoportugues.org (last access 03.10.2016). For a corpus of Medieval Portuguese texts, see http://cipm.fcsh.unl.pt/gencontent.jsp?id=4 (last access 03.10.2016). 43 See, for example, for Catalan, the Corpus Informatitzat del Calalà Antic (http://www.cica.cat, last access 03.10.2016) or, for Italian, the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (http://www.ovi.cnr.it/index.php/ it/il-corpus-testuale/interroga-le-banche-dati, last access 03.10.2016). There are also important corpora of dictionaries and grammars which allow sophisticated searches of metalinguistic texts, for

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4 Text types and genres and the spread of language change The existence of large-scale multi-genre corpora has allowed scholars to seek correlations between register variation and language change, and notably to distinguish changes which come from literate and more learned genres from those which come from the colloquial (and possibly more oral) end of the continuum. As noted, it also helps address questions around transmission and diffusion in giving us insights into how changes spread and become embedded. There are a number of advantages which historical sociolinguistics has over sociolinguistic studies of the contemporary language. Not only are we able to study change over a longer historical period, but by analysing historical data through the lens of “change in progress”, and comparing this with the results of analysis of “change in real time”, we can assess the validity of the former for modern sociolinguistics. We are also able to test hypotheses about language change which are thought to apply to all periods, since past studies allow us to verify them in very different socio-cultural contexts. Historical studies are also free of the “observer’s paradox”, although we do always have to bear in mind the effect of the ideology of the standard on written texts. There are, however, equally a number of potential pitfalls and difficulties associated with such research. We will mention just two here.44 First, what Labov (1994, 21) terms the Historical Paradox; as he explains, “[t]he task of historical linguistics is to explain the differences between the past and the present; but to the extent that the past was different from the present, there is no way of knowing how different it was”. This leads to the second related difficulty, that of anachronism. Not only do genre conventions change, but the “same” construction may have a different value over time. A good example is provided by the history of on for nous in French, which was one of the features much discussed in the debate about the “age” of spoken French.45 In simple terms, on, the indefinite third person subject pronoun, is used in contemporary French as an alternative informal pronoun for the first person plural nous. Scholars such as Hunnius (1981) who take an “anti-evolutionist” position, i.e. who

instance, for French, the Grand Corpus des grammaires françaises, des remarques et des traités sur la langue (XIVe–XVIIe siècles) (Colombat/Fournier/Ayres-Bennett 2011). 44 Certain other issues, such as the difficulty of researching syntactic variables (see, e. g., Lavandera 1978, Romaine 1981), are not peculiar to historical sociolinguistics, although they may be more acute for studies of past variation where we have little or no access to speakers’ judgments about functional equivalence or whether related constructions mean the same thing (see Ayres-Bennett 2004, 10–11). Labov (2001, 28–29) argues that we should not expect structural patterns to be subject to the same kind of social conditioning as phonemes and morphemes. However, Nevalainen (2006, 572), for example, cites evidence from the history of multiple negation in English, which often functions as a social-class marker. 45 See also Coveney (2004) and King/Martineau/Mougeon (2011).  

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believe that such informal usages have a long history, hidden through the lack of suitable textual sources, argue that on for nous is not a recent innovation and point to examples, dating from the twelfth-century Roman d’Alixandre onwards, which seem to illustrate this usage. One of the most frequently cited examples (e.g. by Moignet 1965; Hunnius 1981) is taken from the fourteenth-century Miracle de Notre-Dame where the first person plural reference is unambiguous: “La ou on le visitera / Moy et vous, chacune sepmaine”. On the other hand, evolutionists assert that in earlier periods on was used not only in place of nous, but also as a substitute for other persons of the verb. Moignet (1965, 132) records examples of on for je as early as Old French, for ils and nous from the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries on; usage for the second person occurs somewhat later. In other words, as Marchello-Nizia (1979, 176) notes, commenting on the example from the Miracle de Notre-Dame, on for nous does not have privileged status in Middle French; rather the pronoun has, to quote Moignet’s (1965, 132) term, “un caractère omnipersonnel”, so that there are equally examples of on as equivalent to a first person singular or third person plural pronoun. Such usage of on as a substitute for other pronouns in earlier periods, it is argued, was a marked, stylistic one, and therefore does not have the same value as the quasimechanical usage typified in contemporary French by an example such as nous, on se marie. In short, simply finding a parallel example in the past is not sufficient; its place within the whole linguistic system also has to be carefully evaluated. Whilst, then, the tracking of language change through different genres or text types seems a productive avenue to explore how change spreads and the relative importance of “changes from above” and “changes from below”, there remain methodological uncertainties. There is therefore a need for many more case studies, and we turn to some examples in the next section.

5 Case studies 5.1 Tracking innovation through genres If, as has been argued, the majority of changes arise in speech, then we might expect changes to be attested first in genres which are considered closest to speech, such as correspondence, direct speech in theatre and other genres, etc., and to show up latest in more literary and “artificial” genres such as poetry. Two case studies we have conducted to date on the history of French belie, however, this simple hypothesis.46 In the first study (Ayres-Bennett 2004, 209–219), we analysed the spread of the change of the position of the clitic pronoun in the structure finite verb + infinitive. In

46 Cf. work on the Castilian discourse traditions by, for example, Johannes Kabatek and Daniel Jacob (Kabatek 2005; Jacob/Kabatek 2001).

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Old French, clitic climbing was usual, i.e. clitic pronouns appeared before the matrix verb rather than the infinitive as in the following example: Je le veux I it-OBJ want-PRS. 1SG

faire do-INF

In Modern French this is no longer standard, and the clitic must be placed before the infinitive: Je veux I want-PRS. 1SG

le it-OBJ

faire do-INF

In the sixteenth century the older construction still dominated: excluding those cases where the word order is influenced by the versification, it is used in 88 % of possible constructions by Rabelais in Pantagruel (1532), 100 % by Du Bellay in Les Regrets (1558), 82 % by Montaigne in his Essais (1572–1587), and 77 % by Régnier in his Satyres (1603–1613) (Galet 1971, 48–54). In a ground-breaking study, Galet (1971) traced the progress of the change by tracking the frequency of usage of the older construction in a corpus of texts of different genres in both prose and verse for the period 1600–1700. It is important to note that, although there is clear evidence of the overall decline of the older construction, the change does not occur in a simple straight line of development as the century progresses, and there is variation both between the usage of different authors and indeed within the different works of a single author’s oeuvre (see Ayres-Bennett 2004, 211–212).47 For example, La Fontaine, typically conservative, still uses both constructions almost equally in the late 1670s, while Molière seems to prefer the modern construction from about 1661 onwards. Nevertheless, whilst different authors remain committed to the older construction for different lengths of time, Galet (1971, 323) concludes that it is in the second half of the century that the modern pattern takes over: “Quel que soit le genre de l’oeuvre, tragédie ou comédie, lettre, oraison funèbre, fable, quel que soit le style propre à l’auteur, la constuction pronom + verbe régent + infinitif régime est archaïque à la fin du siècle”. It appears that, early on in the century, writers already attributed different sociostylistic values to the variants, as is suggested by the data furnished by SancierChâteau’s (1995, 271–272) study of Honoré d’Urfé’s corrections to the text of L’Astrée between 1607 and 1610. What she notes is that, contrary to what we might expect, where the modern order is used in 1607, it is systematically replaced by the older order in 1610. For example:

47 We leave aside here the question of the influence of linguistic features such as the choice of verb discussed elsewhere, cf. Ayres-Bennett (2004, 219).

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on doive se contenter (1607) → on se doive contenter (1610) There is also one example of this change between 1619 and 1620: qu’ils vinssent le trouver (1619) → qu’ils le vinssent trouver (1620) Sancier-Château argues that the new order arose in non-literary language, and that this therefore led to the characterization of the older order as literary and elegant. When, however, we analyse Galet’s data according to the genre of the text in which the examples occur, the results are more mixed. Whilst theatre was indeed more progressive than oratory or fables written in verse, Mme de Sévigné’s letters, the majority of which were written to her daughter, are slower to show the predominance of the new construction than theatre.48 Moreover, within theatre it is Pierre Corneille, all of whose tragedies and comedies are written in verse, rather than Molière, whose comedies are often cited as a good source of “more spoken” usage or of the vernacular, who leads the way. In a second study (Tristram/Ayres-Bennett 2012), we used corpus data to try and track changing agreement patterns with la plupart. La plupart is a syntactically singular noun which refers to an entity made up of a number of individual units. It is used to designate the majority of a larger whole, as in the following example: La plupart des gens aiment la musique Whereas in earlier periods there was variation between singular and plural verbal agreement with collective nouns, in contemporary French la plupart (unlike other collective nouns such as la majorité) canonically occurs with a plural verb. In order to trace the spread of this plural agreement with la plupart, we conducted a series of complementary analyses of its agreement patterns, analysing the data by date of publication, author date of birth, genre and subgenre. Searches for tokens of agreement with la plupart were conducted in Frantext for each decade from 1500 to 1750, with a particular focus on the period 1500–1699, since plural agreement becomes categorical from 1700 onwards. When the data were organized according to the genre of the texts in which the examples of la plupart occurred, the results were once again mixed, with some findings more predictable than others.49 Amongst the results which followed expectations were correspondence and poetry. Correspondence, following claims that it is close to speech in its informal, rela48 The letters are, therefore, relatively informal. It should, however, be noted that, by 1673, the letters were being copied and circulated and had become “semi-public” documents. 49 We will omit here genres for which there are few data, such as Éloquence (sermons) and Pamphlets; for full details, see Tristram/Ayres-Bennett (2012).

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tively spontaneous nature, does not include any tokens of singular agreement in any period in which it occurs. On the other hand, poetry is conservative in the first two periods in which it occurs, hovering around 80 % plural agreement in the usage of authors born 1500–1549 and 1550–1599, before rising to 100 % by authors born 1600– 1649. Less predictably, agreement for tokens which come from the genre Roman is consistently above 90 % plural agreement, even in the earliest period, making this the genre (excluding correspondence) which seems to have exhibited the change to plural agreement the earliest. This is perhaps surprising: we might have predicted, following Ernst, that theatre would be amongst the earliest genres to exhibit a high proportion of plural agreement, given its high content of dialogue. In fact the opposite is true: theatre is the most conservative genre, in all periods in which it occurs. It preserves the singular longer than any other genre, and even when other genres have converged on over 95 % plural agreement, theatre is still below this at nearer to 90 %.50 Also curious were the results for the genre Mémoires and Récits de voyage. Whilst these showed plural agreement at 100 % in the earliest period, they dip down to around 70 % plural agreement in the 1500–1549 period, before rising back up again. The number of tokens in the first period, covering the usage of authors born between 1450–1499, is very low for these two genres, however, and all come from the same author, Fonteneau. It may well be therefore that it is the results for this first period which are anomalous, rather than the “dip” back down to 70 % plural agreement in the second period. If this first period is excluded for memoirs and travel accounts, then these two genres show a very similar development to the Traité genre.51 Plural agreement rises from around 70 % in the first period to above 90 % for the next two periods, and then to 100 % in the latest period examined here (though again here the number of tokens is low (8)). In short, once again the spread of the change through different genres does not correspond with what we might have predicted in terms of register, style and formality, and the argument that dialogue in theatre may be assumed to be more representative of spoken language looks questionable. Based on the results discussed here, we end up with a continuum of genres52 as shown in Figure 1 below:  

50 It is important to note that for some periods, the number of tokens is very low; e.g. for the period analysing the usage of authors born between 1550 and 1599, there are just 6 tokens (3 singular and 3 plural). 51 We include in this category works classified in Frantext as Essai; Traité ou essai; and Traité. 52 On the question of a continuum of genres, from the point of view of “language of proximity”/ “language of distance”, see Koch/Oesterreicher (1985).

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Figure 1: Continuum of genres for la plupart + plural agreement  

The fact that these results are mixed and in some quarters quite unexpected led us to conduct a further, more fine-grained analysis to see whether some of the broad genre categories we used were heterogeneous. Notably, theatre was initially considered as a single genre, without separating out usage in different subgenres, to avoid making any a priori assumptions, especially given the mixed results we had found when conducting a similar analysis in relation to the loss of clitic climbing. In particular we considered whether there was a difference in terms of agreement patterns between comedy and tragedy and between prose and verse. A disaggregation of the different types of works within the theatre category suggested that this is the case: although in the earlier period there does not seem to be a great difference between comedy and tragedy or verse and prose (since roughly equal numbers of singular tokens are found in all the different types of work), in the later period the singular tokens occur only in tragedy in verse. Thus verse would seem to be more conservative than prose, and tragedy more conservative than comedy, within the broader genre category of theatre. This fits with what we saw above, where poetry retained a higher proportion of singular agreement until relatively late on.

5.2 Tracking loss of variability through genres Most of the research tracking change through genres to date has focused on analysing the rise of new variables or on innovation. In this section we consider whether insights are also to be gained by looking at whether there is any patterning in the genres within which linguistic features going out of usage are last retained. For this study, we examined the case of par après and en après which were alternative expressions for après in earlier periods of French, notably in adverbial contexts. Writing in the middle of the seventeenth century, Vaugelas notes in his Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647, 223) that “Ces façons de parler ont vieilli, & l’on dit apres tout seul”. If we track usage through Frantext (Figure 2),53 we can see  

53 For each period, we searched using the spellings apres, aprés and après.

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that en après in fact peaked in frequency in the fourteenth century and was indeed in quite advanced decline in the seventeenth century, with very few attestations post 1700. Par après, on the other hand, is little attested before the second half of the sixteenth century, becomes fashionable in the seventeenth century – contrary to Vaugelas’s judgment – and then declines rapidly in currency in the eighteenth century. For this reason, we decided to concentrate our analysis of genre to the period 1500–1799 (a corpus of 1343 texts and 47,977,235 words). We analysed the distribution of each form using eight genre categories, which are broadly the categories proposed within the corpus.54 The distribution of the forms is given in Table 1. A number of features are striking about this analysis. First, throughout the period, these are extremely rare forms. Second, if we discount genres for which there are fewer than 10 occurrences overall, their usage clusters in just three genres: in the case of en après, Traité/Essai, Roman/Nouvelle and Mémoire/Journal/Récit de voyage, and in the case of par après, Traité/Essai, Roman/Nouvelle and Rapport/ Pamphlet.  

Figure 2: Frequency of occurrence of en après and par après in Frantext (by 50 year periods).  

 

54 Here, again, we made some minor modifications, including amalgamating Traité, Essai and Traité ou essai into one category and assigning a genre to those texts for which none was indicated in the database.

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Table 1: Analysis of the distribution of the forms in Frantext (1500-1799) by genre

If we focus on the three principal genres for each of the expressions, we find the following distribution of these forms between genres over time (Figures 3 and 4).

Figure 3: Distribution of en après by genre (1500–1799)  

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Figure 4: Distribution of par après by genre (1500–1799)  

What becomes clear from this analysis is that it does not make sense here to think in terms of whether this is a change “from above” or “from below”, since we have a mixture of more formal genres (Traité/Essai) and those which are often considered more informal because of their personal nature (Mémoire/Journal/Récit de voyage). Rather, it seems that these expressions are associated with genres where the sequence of events or the sequence of arguments is vital, notably in treatises or essays, and then to a lesser extent in memoirs, journals, travel accounts, novels, etc. Unsurprisingly, then, the forms survive longest in their core genre, Traité/Essai.

5.3 Discussion These case studies have shown that, whilst it is indeed possible to use written corpus data to track the diffusion of change, the results are not always as we might predict. We need more data, particularly in the form of properly structured and annotated corpora, and more such studies before we can draw firm conclusions about the way changes spread through different genres and text types. Above all, it is important to avoid making simple assumptions or assertions as to which genres are closer to speech than others, since analysis of changes in the past suggests that the situation may be more complex than it might at first seem. In the cases we looked at in section 5.1, our predictions about how change might spread through the different genres were not always borne out by the analysis. Much more research needs to be done before we can be confident about using genres to differentiate “changes from above” from “changes from below”. In short, as Nevalainen (2006, 566) noted, it is not always possible to determine the directionality of a linguistic change in progress by a simple register analysis. Analysis of contemporary data has shown that a straightforward division into (more)  

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oral and literate genres oversimplifies register differences (for a detailed discussion of these issues, ↗12 Oral genres); the multidimensional nature of register variation means that genres may be hybrid and that different linguistic features can combine in different proportions in different genres. Moreover, as we have seen in 5.2, linguistic features are often closely tied to the communicative function of the genre or text type in which they occur. It is also important to note that, currently, most diachronic studies rely on broadbrush genre categories rather than the more complex types promoted by Biber and others (e.g. Biber/Conrad 2009), where the situational characteristics include not just questions of medium (oral/written) but also of composition (e.g. narrative/non-narrative; elaborated/situation-dependent; abstract/non-abstract). On the one hand, the uniformitarian principle should lead us to analyse genres in the past in the same nuanced way as we do contemporary varieties. On the other hand, we should not assume that genres in the past had the same values or characteristics as they do today, since genre conventions also vary over time.

6 Conclusion Historical sociolinguistics is a rich and promising field, which provides scope to deepen our understanding of linguistic variation and change through the analysis of long-term real-time data, rather than relying on the “apparent time” construct. Whilst there has been considerable progress in the field over the last thirty years, our analysis and interpretation of past written texts still requires considerable refinement. The building of electronic corpora for the different Romance languages, which is currently being undertaken, will undoubtedly transform the field, especially since these corpora are now being constructed by historical linguists specifically for diachronic studies. Historical sociolinguistics has been conceived and conducted somewhat differently in relation to the different Romance languages, and much of the work published in the Romance languages remains poorly known by non-Romance scholars. Whilst there is now a substantial body of work on French and exciting new developments for Spanish and Portuguese, there remains, for instance, little or nothing on Romanian. Moreover, there are, as yet, very few comparative studies looking at the issues we have discussed in this chapter from a Romance perspective. Just as looking at past variation and change is allowing us to test – and in some cases challenge – certain generalizations about variation and change which have been made by sociolinguists working on the contemporary Romance languages, so adding a comparative Romance dimension should allow us to enrich our understanding of the way changes diffuse through different genres and of the differences between changes “from above” and changes “from below”. Whilst comparative work is difficult and time-consuming, it should also help sharpen our understanding of methodological issues. Much remains to be done.

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Acknowledgements: I am extremely grateful to a number of colleagues for reading and commenting on a first draft of this chapter, John N. Green, France Martineau, Mair Parry, Christopher Pountain, Rita Marquilhas and Roger Wright. All errors and omissions, of course, remain my own.

7 Bibliography 7.1 Electronic corpora (selected; all last accessed 03.10.2016) ADMYTE: http://www.admyte.com/admyteonline/home.htm Base de français médiéval (BFM): http://bfm.ens-lyon.fr Biblia medieval: http://www.bibliamedieval.es CARDS – Cartas Desconhecidas (‘Unknown Letters’): http://www.clul.ulisboa.pt/pt/23-investigacao/ 706-cards-cartas-desconhecidas CHARTA: http://www.corpuscharta.es CODEA: http://corpuscodea.es CORDIAM: http://www.cordiam.org CORPES-XXI: http://www.rae.es/recursos/banco-de-datos/corpes-xxi Corpus de français familier ancien: http://polyphonies.uottawa.ca/fr Corpus del español: http://www.corpusdelespanol.org Corpus diacrónico del español: http://corpus.rae.es/cordenet.html Corpus diacrónico del español del Reino de Granada (1492–1833): http://www.corderegra.es Corpus FRAN (2011–): http://www.continent.uottawa.ca Corpus Informatitzat del Català Antic: http://www.cica.cat Corpus Informatizado do Português Medieval: http://cipm.fcsh.unl.pt/gencontent.jsp?id=4 Corpus MCVF (2005–2010): http://www.voies.uottawa.ca Corpus of Early English Correspondence: http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/domains/CEEC.html CREA: http://www.rae.es/recursos/banco-de-datos/crea Digital Library of the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison: http://www.hispanicseminary.org/textconc-en.htm ESLO (Enquêtes SocioLinguistiques à Orléans): http://eslo.huma-num.fr Frantext: http://www.frantext.fr Helsinki Corpus of English Texts: http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/HelsinkiCorpus Letters as Loot: http://www.brievenalsbuit.nl Nouveau corpus d’Amsterdam: http://www.uni-stuttgart.de/lingrom/stein/corpus O corpus do português: http://www.corpusdoportugues.org Opera del Vocabolario Italiano: http://www.ovi.cnr.it/index.php/it/il-corpus-testuale/interroga-lebanche-dati P.S. Post Scriptum: http://ps.clul.ul.pt

7.2 Printed sources Aquino-Weber, Dorothée/Cotelli, Sara/Kristol, Andres (2009), Sociolinguistique historique du domaine gallo-roman. Enjeux et méthodologies, Bern, Lang.

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Kormi Anipa

10 Speaker-based approaches to past language states Abstract: Romance has always been an integral part of historical sociolinguistics (the hybrid of historical linguistics and sociolinguistics), as the relationship between Romance languages and Latin has provided an optimal theoretical framework for both parent fields. Whilst thriving within sociolinguistics, Romance also has had to share in the burden of problems (as well as efforts at resolving them) that have dogged the mother-field, especially theoretical ones, which generations of sociolinguists have drawn attention to, e.g., Romaine’s (1982, 110) characterization of William Labov’s assumption about the homogeneity of linguistic behaviour as “a convenient post hoc justification […], which affect[s] most sociolinguistic research”. The first part of this chapter, therefore, addresses speakers’ sociolinguistic behaviour, the main driving force behind perpetual variation, overwhelming continuity and relatively restrained instances of change. The second part reviews some studies on Romance, mostly conducted within the traditional, change-orientated framework, but with very interesting results.  

Keywords: sociolinguistic behaviour, tug-of-war theory, variation, continuity, change  

1 Introduction “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” Niels Bohr

The notion of speaker variables in language usage predates the advent of sociolinguistics as an academic discipline. Similarly, liberal attitudes towards linguistic variation can be traced back many centuries, contrary to the belief by some that such attitudes began with Joseph Priestley, in eighteenth-century England (see Baugh/Cable 1994, 280). The difficulties involved in applying modern sociolinguistic insights to historical states of languages have been well known and discussed by many historical sociolinguists over the decades (see, for example, Romaine 1982; Milroy 1992; Milroy/Milroy 1999; Raumolin-Brunberg 1991; Crystal 2002; Anipa 2012); but such discussions have remained disparate, to the extent that it is difficult to figure out a set of comprehensive and organic theoretical-methodological constructs which can be applied to the historical study of any given language. Obviously, the problem affects Romance languages as well, even though, in terms of methodology, studies in Romance have contributed immensely to the discipline. Díaz-Campos (2011, 1), for example, reports, in his “Introduction” to the Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics, the extensive development of https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-011

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sociolinguistic research in Hispanic languages and the useful contributions that it has made to the spread of new methodologies in the field (see also Serrano 2011, 187). The first part of this chapter will, therefore, review some of the problems and suggested solutions related to the application of present-day sociolinguistic constructs to historical states of languages, including Romance. The aim is to contribute to theoretical efforts as well as to our understanding of speaker variables in the past. Attention will be drawn to the fact that two well-established concepts – change and variation – which appear to be uncontroversial, have remained theoretically problematic, and that theorizing about variation remains unfinished business. The core of the theoretical argumentation is encapsulated in the following statements from Posner (1997, 131): “It is commonplace, I repeat, to say that ‘Languages are constantly changing’: I rephrase this as ‘Innovations are continually being introduced into usage’. But I insist that such innovations may be ephemeral, and that ‘change’ can properly be said to occur only when an innovation ousts an earlier feature or process from the language system. […] [We] cannot predict what will happen in the future”.

In principle, this should not be contentious. However, in my view, the issue at stake is not that of a mere “rephrasing” (as Posner expressed it) but rather a major theoretical matter. I believe that highlighting the provisions for theoretical refinement would be a worthwhile contribution towards the development of the field. My concerns regarding theoretical issues – which are not necessarily shared by other contributors to this volume – do not mean that studies in Romance historical sociolinguistics have been fruitless. In the second part of the chapter I will revisit a number of studies on the history of Castilian and French, which were conducted within the traditional, changeoriented theoretical parameters, with interesting results.

2 Theoretical problematics As implied in the quotation from Posner cited above, it is clear that historical (socio)linguistics has always operated on a post hoc basis (Lass 1980, 89–90; Posner 1997, 26) and that present-day sociolinguistics has mostly played “an ambitious role of linguistic forecasting” (Anipa 2012, 174). Both of these issues affect Romance, like any other language. Posner notes implicitly that her assertion must be contentious, as she describes it as controversial: “I have already controversially maintained that study of language change depends on the assumption that some things have not changed: […] we shall look at linguistic change, but also point out absence of change” (1997, 21). This idea will be taken up, indirectly (because Posner’s expression of it is only one modern formulation of a long-standing problem that dates back at least to Ferdinand de Saussure), in the rest of this section. In an incisive article on the relationship between historical linguistics and sociolinguistics, Tuten/Tejedo-Herrero (2011) present Weinreich/Labov/Herzog’s (1968) pro-

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posed five overlapping problems that must be addressed in the description and explanation of linguistic change as tasks of the historical sociolinguist. First, the identification of universal constraints on change, and how traditional historical linguistics made great advances in the area, for example, the impact of articulatory tendencies on phonological change. Second, the issue of transition, which considers the time and place of replacement of particular forms or structures by innovations; the discrepancy between traditional historical linguistics and historical sociolinguistics consists in the simplistic approach of the former and the novel approach of the latter (giving much more prominence to variation, a guiding principle for linguistic change). Third, the issue of embedding (see Andersen 2001; ↗9 Historical sociolinguistics and tracking language change), i.e., the manner in which linguistic changes progress through speech styles within speech communities, until they become embedded in the linguistic system. Fourth, the nature and evolution of speakers’ evaluation of competing variants, and the effects of that on the usage of the features in question (↗6 Speaker variables in Romance). And fifth, the actuation problem (i.e., the origins of linguistic change), which involves efforts to ascertain the reason(s) why specific linguistic changes occur in a given language at a given time, but not in other languages with the same features, and why not in the same language at other times (see McMahon 1994; Hickey 2003). Tuten/Tejedo-Herrero proceed to outline the views of other sociolinguists as regards these fundamental problems, as well as efforts and contributions that have been made towards their possible solution (2011, 287), noting, along the way, that there is some difference of opinion with respect to the relative importance of the problems and the feasibility of resolving them. For example, they cite Nevalainen/Raumolin-Brunberg as having stated that reconstructing how linguistic changes diffuse socially is one of the major tasks for historical linguists, and that a great deal has been learned about transmission, embedding and evaluation of linguistic changes, but that the actuation problem has remained intractable. More interesting is their report on the work of Milroy (1992). James Milroy, who acknowledges the centrality of actuation in historical sociolinguistics, produced one of the most convincing sets of arguments and explanations on the subject. He argues for the need to distinguish between speaker and system, on the one hand, and between innovation and change, on the other, if any substantive headway is to be made in the resolution of the actuation problem. He points out the difficulties created by focusing on the effect of linguistic systems on speakers, more than the effect that speakers have on the system. Speakers are constantly introducing innovations into languages, but a large proportion of them never catch on and fade away; when, for various reasons, an innovation has been adopted by other speakers of a language, then, we have the starting point of change in progress that might, or might not, end up becoming change in the linguistic system, in the future.1

1 The main exposition of Milroy’s (1992) theoretical contribution comes from an earlier work, Milroy/ Milroy (1985).

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Milroy’s theoretical-methodological construct is, by some margin, the most plausible and practical in the field when it comes to conceptualizing the complicated phenomena of language variation, continuity, and change, since it puts the individual and his/her usage at the heart of the matter. There is, nonetheless, room for refinement. The conviction that an innovation has “become a change in the system” (Tuten/ Tejedo-Herrer 2011, 287) when many people have adopted it, is not scientifically valid; this is because what actually happens, when many people have adopted an innovation, is that an advanced variable system is created, which might, or might not, eventually lead to genuine change. The way Milroy expresses it is as follows: linguistic change would have taken place once an innovation “has been agreed on and adopted by some community, however small the community may be” (Milroy 1992, 221). Unfortunately, this is a massive concession to the system-based way of viewing language and, being a contra-system effort, as it were, renders it counter-productive. Thus, there remain difficulties concerning the conceptualization of linguistic change, as opposed to linguistic variation. In essence, what Milroy brings to the table is the fact that the traditional way of understanding and treating linguistic change is problematic, particularly as there is no guarantee whatsoever that a given innovation will proceed to become an instance of change in the linguistic system. “If we accept Labov’s and Bailey’s views”, Romaine (1982, 201) wrote, “then in the case of variation in the relative system[,] we have an instance of linguistic change”. Baugh/Cable (1994, 116) rightly observe: “As we look back over any considerable stretch of history we are likely to experience in the perspective a foreshortening that makes a period of 150 years seem relatively small, and we fail to realize that changes that seem sudden are in reality quite natural in the course of a lifetime or a succession of generations” (see, also Sampson 2011, 201–202). The broad statistics on the proportion of innovations that end up as change are staggering. Milroy/Milroy (1985, 381) point out that only 10 % of all innovations introduced into a language successfully spread and become real change. Thus, about 90 % of innovations get defeated by the force of continuity. In terms of vocabulary alone, Culpeper (2005, 42) reports that one estimate puts the proportion of original new words in English over the last fifty years at less than 0.05 %. That is minimal, indeed.2 Another corroborative statistic is produced by Crystal (2008), who reports just under 10 % change in Shakespeare’s grammar, in four centuries, and just 5 % change in vocabulary. He concludes (2008, 15): “All fluent modern English speakers, native or non-native, have an immensely powerful start, in that they already know over 90 % of the language that Shakespeare uses”. And, discussing the reconstruction  

2 Traditionally, linguists treat phonological and grammatical features differently from lexical ones; however, that practice is not acceptable to all sociolinguists: “As far as sociolinguistics is concerned, there is no difference among them [i.e., lexical, phonological and syntactic items], as much the same kinds of social variation and social links are possible in each case; but non-social linguists generally treat them very differently in their theoretical models of how language ‘works’” (Hudson 1996, 21).

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of earlier periods of French, Posner (1997, 5) works on the “assumption that most features of the language have not changed over time” (emphasis in the original). The issue at stake is a sociolinguistic universal, due to human linguistic behaviour: in linguistic matters, we have an irresistible propensity to retain existing features. Saussure (1972, 109) expressed, in the clearest terms, the relative power of the force of continuity, faced with innovation: “Ce qui domine dans toute altération, c’est la persistance de la matière ancienne; l’infidélité au passé n’est que relative. Voilà pourquoi le principe d’altération se fonde sur le principe de continuité”. All this raises the question as to why most variation studies in sociolinguistics are heavily tilted towards the phenomenon of change, a mere 10 % potential of the languages that we study, to the detriment of the 90 % aspect of it. Romaine (1982, 200) rightly characterized this awkward situation as a danger to sociolinguistics: “A very dangerous line of argumentation seems to have developed within sociolinguistics […] with respect to the nature of variation and change. For some, the implicational relationship between the two holds equally well in both directions so that not only does change imply variation, but also variation implies change. Most sociolinguistic studies in recent years are looking for, and usually report, instances of change in progress on the basis of different rates of variation for age groups, social classes, etc., while relatively few studies have devoted themselves to the analysis of situations in which change does not occur”.

Indeed, whilst change implies prior variation, variation does not necessarily imply change (see also Moreno Fernández 2011, 55), and that is the domain in which the bulk of languages operate; in other words, that is the state of affairs that creates the startling statistics being discussed here. The pertinence of this discussion is that, well over three decades after Romaine’s warning about the development of serious danger, no substantive progress has been made, regarding over-reporting of change (which is the same thing as the under-reporting of continuity) in sociolinguistic studies. Sampson (2011, 195), who uses the word “unchange” for continuity, rightly refers to the rarity of one study in Romance languages “which specifically addresses the phenomenon of unchange” and reports that the article in question appeared to elicit no response from fellow Romanists. Building up a robust theoretical basis for the phenomenon of “unchange” might eventually alter the situation in the future. The “different rates of variation” (noted by Romaine), which are the basis on which change is normally reported, can be easily reversed by the forces of continuity; and instances of the said reversal can go on for decades, if not centuries. The best term for describing the situation is Raumolin-Brunberg’s (1991, 23) use of “markedness features” of the variants of linguistic variables: “Linguistic innovations and older forms frequently live side by side, often so that the new form is marked and the old unmarked. As time passes, and the new form slowly becomes better and better established in the language, it gains more ground, and the markedness features change

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places. The new form becomes the unmarked one, and the old form is confined to special uses until it is perhaps dropped out of the language completely”.

It is quite obvious from this succinct description of language variation that change does not occur before the markedness features of an innovation and old form of a variable have changed places. It is my contention that change does not necessarily occur, even after the markedness features change places, until the old form drops out of the language completely. The key players of this state of affairs are the speakers and their sociolinguistic behaviour. Nothing is certain, and there is no guaranteed linearity to the complex processes involved. In practice, the markedness features of a variable may change places back and forth, potentially several times, within an indefinite period of time, easily beyond the lifespan of one linguist. Examples from Gallo-Romance include the vicissitudes that characterized the assibilation of [r] into [z] (as in Paris/Pazi) that lasted a couple of centuries, and the centuries-long [a]/[ɑ] variation (as in patte/pâte), both discussed by Sampson (2011). Another example from the history of French is the phenonemon of ouisme. Despite the apparent monophthongization of [ou] into [u], as early as the fourteenth century, the markedness features of the variable continued to change places, with the variation lasting for centuries thereafter (see Anipa 2016). In Hispano-Romance, the word maguer seriously declined, almost to extinction, by the fourteenth century, replaced by como quiera que. Nonetheless, three centuries later, the markedness features of the variants changed places, giving maguer a strong resurgence which lasted, until the end of the nineteenth century (see Corominas/Pascual 1980– 1991 s.v. Maguer). The reason why (historical) sociolinguistics has yet to incorporate into its theory the notion of markedness features of linguistic variants is the overwhelming focus on change as a unidirectional phenomenon; that, invariably, leads to the practice of ignoring linguistic variants considered to be unimportant: “The difference in competing linguistic theories lies not so much in the denial or admission of the existence of variation per se (as one might believe from reading the work of Labov, for example), but rather in disagreement about which types of variation can and are to be included within the scope of linguistic theory as fundamental to an understanding of questions which are indisputably linguistic. The remaining variation, i.e. the non-fundamental, is then excluded as irrelevant, or, at worst, non-existent” (Romaine 1982, 11).

2.1 Sociolinguistic entanglement, interference and decoherence In an argument in favour of the complexity of sociolinguistic behaviour and of the need for a micro-framework, in order to obtain better results in the field, I noted (Anipa 2012, 178) how physicists now openly compare the behaviour of atoms and subatomic particles, in terms of being hard to predict with certainty, to that of humans and that they declare that in the quantum world common sense is frequently violated. I quoted Stephen Hawking’s observation in A Brief History of Time that “[a]t the very tiny level,

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our universe is like a crazy dance of waves […] Particles appear and disappear at random; and at this level, nothing is certain, not even existence”. I concluded that sociolinguistics would benefit in turn from comparing linguistic behaviour to the erratic behaviour of particles, and proceeding to build into its framework “the theory of the very small” (again, Hawking’s phrase) and the concept of randomness. The notion of sociolinguistic behaviour as a universal (i.e., not language specific) directly mirrors that of quantum entanglement (Faye 2014; Bub 2015), i.e., the interconnectivity of particles in the universe, irrespective of distance, since changes are observable in recurring linguistic patterns in unrelated languages (Bybee 2010), due to the fact that “speakers of all languages share a common cognitive makeup” (Fløgstad 2016, 3). The “trouble” begins, when the entanglement is perturbed by the sociolinguistic equivalence of quantum interference and decoherence (Bacciagaluppi 2012). In sociolinguistics, these two forces are best conceptualized in the following explanation by Hudson (1996, 11), which merits quoting extensively: “The uniqueness of each person’s sociolinguistic past is not the only source of differences between speakers […]. We can imagine a person constructing a more or less unconscious mental map of the community in which they live, in which the people around them are arranged in a ‘multi-dimensional space’, i.e. showing similarities and differences relative to one another on a large number of different dimensions or parameters. Some of these dimensions involve linguistic differences – such as how some particular word is pronounced – and the map consequently covers linguistic parameters as well as variables of other types. The particular map which each individual draws will reflect their own personal experience, so people with different sociolinguistic backgrounds will be led to construct correspondingly different maps relevant to language and society. […] However, the individual is not simply a ‘social automaton’ controlled by this map, nor is the map itself just a direct and unselective record of past experience […]. Rather individuals filter their experience of new situations through their existing map and two people could both hear the same person talking, but be affected in different ways. […] From this point of view, we may expect differences in existing maps to lead to differences in later ones, even where the experience on which the changes are based is objectively the same in both cases”.

Milroy’s distinction of speaker-innovation is an important movement towards the micro-pole of sociolinguistic behaviour. That ushers in the Uncertainty Principle (Hilgevoord/Uffink 2014), since human behaviour, as a whole, and sociolinguistic behaviour, specifically, like subatomic particles, can be random and unpredictable. Sampson (2011, 201–202) uses the term “indeterminacy” to characterize situations whereby linguistic innovations that may “persist through many generations in the usage of some speakers” and are “neither successful nor unsuccessful change”. This needs to be factorized into sociolinguistic theorizing and practice. The overall effect of that is that there is no guaranteed linearity in the relationship between speakerinnovation, linguistic variation and linguistic change. Rebecca Posner offers a perceptive discussion of linearity/directionality and cyclicity of linguistic change: “I have been insisting that linguistic change is linear and irreversible. However, it is often maintained that there is no decided direction in language change, but rather a cyclic movement, with features disappearing and then later reappearing” (1997, 120); she

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acknowledges that, at the micro-level, “directionality is hard to discern, and threatened changes can still be reversed” (ibid., 26). Consequently, I would argue, Labov’s concepts of innovators, resisters, and early adopters can be refined, because the Uncertainty Principle, generated by the intricate relationship between entanglement, interference and decoherence, creates the incredibly complicated phenomenon that we call a language. According to Moreno Fernández (2011, 54), “sociolinguistic studies […] have had a hard time finding suitable theoretical frameworks for the study of linguistic variation”. Inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure’s forceful and telling declaration that the principle of change must be built on the principle of continuity, together with the intriguing statistics discussed above, I have previously illustrated the situation with a Tug-of-War theory of linguistic variability, as a contribution to the speaker-innovation-based theoretical framework (Anipa 2001). The essence of this theory is that “each individual is a battle-field for conflicting linguistic types and habits” (Martinet, in Weinreich 1953), to the extent that linguistic innovators do not necessarily remain innovators all along in their linguistic behaviour; even the innovator of a linguistic variant cannot always resist choosing the old variant (since the process occurs largely below the level of conscious awareness); similarly, a resister cannot always resist choosing a new variant. I concluded: “At any given point in time, one and the same speaker can be both an innovator and a resister of the same variable at the same time” (Anipa 2001, 34). Simply put, it is a tug-of-war with a clear winning side, but for whom, at the same time, victory is not definitive (see Figures 1 and 2 below, adapted from Anipa 2001, 31). Although these figures are self-explanatory (the vertical centre line of Figure 1 between the two forces involved in the tug-of-war cutting through the whole picture, including the speaker, and the thickness of the opposing arrows reflecting the respective percentages, etc.), it is worthwhile pointing out, in particular, that in Figure 2 I indicate how a given language, which is in a perpetual state of variation, is continually fed by the following four tributaries: successful innovations, failed innovations, successful resistance, and failed resistance. On a practical level, the illustration demonstrates the essential barometers of variation, including the key concept of (non-sequential) alternations in the markedness features of variants.  

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Figure 1: Perpetual tug-of-war between forces A and B  

Figure 2: How the tug-of-war creates linguistic variation  

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3 The micro-approach solution Proceeding from the largely theoretical problematics, reviewed in the previous section, we can now consider the methodological innovations or refinements that have been proposed as solutions to the problems I have highlighted. To do this I will recapitulate the key theoretical points: (a) Linguistic variation entails speaker-resistance (which ensures continuity) and speaker-innovation. (b) Distinguishing speaker–innovation from linguistic change is fundamental. (c) Changes in the markedness features of variants of linguistic variables do not constitute completed changes per se in a linguistic system. (d) All other things being equal, only a tiny proportion of speaker-innovations in a given language succeed in spreading amongst speakers; the rest are stifled by the force of speaker-resistance. (e) Universality (= quantum entanglement), idiosyncrasy, randomness and unpredictability (= quantum decoherence), and multidimensionality (= quantum interference) in sociolinguistic behaviour, within the Uncertainty Principle, explain the level of complexity we are dealing with; hence the intriguing innovator-resisterearly adopter combination in one and the same speaker of a given language.  

 

 

3.1 “Wonderfully clean data” The phrase “wonderfully clean data” is a description used by Hudson (1996) in his discussion of a potential micro-approach that could resolve a number of the problems of sociolinguistics. We have had studies within what Eckert (2005) has called the “Third Wave” of variation analysis that now focuses on the speech of small groups or even that of a single speaker, which allow more in-depth social analysis of usage. Eckert believes that the micro-end of sociolinguistic practice is the future of the field. Hudson goes further in dissecting some of the key concepts in sociolinguistics – speech community, the delimitation of languages, the locus of languages, varieties of languages, and the formal-informal stylistic dichotomy, etc. – and concluded that none of them could stand the rigour of scientific scrutiny. His conclusion is that “[a]ll that exists are people and items, and people may be more or less similar to one another in the items they have in their language” and that “although unexciting, this conclusion is at least true” (1996, 39). Hudson (1996, 21) tellingly draws attention to the fact that human linguistic behaviour is much more complex than many of us linguists think although it may well be that those with less professional commitment to linguistics will find that their current common-sense view of language fits the facts quite well (ibid.). The ideal approach Hudson envisages is that variation should be studied within individual speakers of a language and with reference to specific linguistic variables; however, he

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sees an insurmountable difficulty in such a promising enterprise: that of the potential length of the repertoire of an individual. This is how he puts is: “Armed with the individual’s vocabulary list, we can then ignore any words in which they never use [a given variant], thereby guaranteeing that our figures really do show the proportion of real choices that they make in favour of each variant. The result would be wonderfully clean data, but of course there is a fundamental flaw in this programme: it is simply impossible because the individual inventories would take too long” (Hudson 1996, 173).

In my view, this constitutes the real beginning of an excellent and workable approach to be adopted in historical sociolinguistics. In a section entitled “Challenges and Advantages of Historical Sociolinguistic Research”, Tuten/Tejedo-Herrero (2011) present a good summary of problems in the field. They begin with the infamous Labovian proclamation about “bad data”, and mention the following constraints on the historical sociolinguist (see also Ernst 1980; McMahon 1994; Ayres-Bennett 2004; ↗9 Historical sociolinguistics and tracking language change): (1) S/he cannot gather new data whenever needed, but must rely on existing documentation, normally written texts from past centuries preserved by chance. As a result, s/he has access to a restricted set of written genres and styles, and only indirect access to colloquial, spoken language. Sound changes must be studied through written forms. (2) Fully representative samples of language from across an entire speech community are not available, since most often only a literate elite, predominantly male, prepared written texts. (3) Written, particularly printed texts from more recent centuries are especially subject to the effects of standardization and, thus, less likely to reveal variation. (4) For manuscripts, we often know little about the social characteristics and relations of the writer(s) or recipient(s) of texts, or whether we possess an original or copy. (5) S/he rarely has the time and resources to prepare original transcriptions of entire collections of manuscripts, and must rely on transcriptions of texts done by other scholars according to varied criteria, which can make comparison across texts or collections difficult. (6) S/he has no personal or first-hand contact with the social contexts in which the language was produced and received and, in using the present to explain the past, can fall into anachronisms. Tuten/Tejedo-Herrero then present a number of strategies that could help alleviate the effects of these problems, including Nevalainen/Raumolin-Brunberg’s (1996) conviction that the historical sociolinguist should “make the best use of the data available”, the need for expertise in philology, and Romaine’s (1982) view that language must be studied via two different media, i.e., spoken and written forms.

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Hudson’s theoretical-methodological model is perfectly suited to historical sociolinguistics, because, by the nature of its source of data, the only flaw he sees in an otherwise perfect approach (in present-day sociolinguistics) is eliminated; and that allows us to produce “wonderfully clean data”: “We have a fairly clear idea of the limits of the usage of the individual(s) we set out to investigate, because our main source of data is written language (literary or otherwise). And although the writings of a given individual constitute just a tiny fraction of their entire language use, that is the only material available to us, for obvious reasons. Thus, unlike speech, written records are not open-ended. Even for prolific writers like Cervantes or Shakespeare, the record of their language is closed-ended, and investigating it is made even easier with modern electronic software. Thus, wonderfully clean data, impossible in present-day sociolinguistics, is perfectly obtainable in historical sociolinguistics, even for several individuals in the course of a single project. The micro-model, therefore, sticks out as ideal for historical sociolinguistics, as it does away with most of the inherent and inherited problems that the subfield has been grappling with” (Anipa 2012, 177).

Hudson points out that both sociologists and sociolinguists would agree on the need to keep individuals firmly in the centre of interest, whilst talking about large-scale abstractions and movements. He compares the importance of the individual in sociolinguistics to the individual cell in biology, whereby if we do not understand how the individual behaves, we shall not be able to understand how collections of individuals behave either. He specifies that, unlike the individual cell, the individual speaker is moulded much more by experience than by genetic make-up. Comparing this argument with that employed in the physical sciences, it is not difficult to find that working at the cell level would be equivalent to working with elements (in the Periodic Table); in other words, proceeding from the identification of an element to its atomic structure is one step forward; and from the atom, one needs to go one step further, to the primary subatomic particles (protons, neutrons and electrons). But that still falls short of advanced levels of human scientific progress; within quantum mechanics, we have to take into account hadrons, in order to account for protons, for example. And, in order to account for hadrons, we have to study quarks. At the quantum level, matter and energy behave very differently from what much of everyday experience would lead us to expect, as some of the properties of subatomic particles cannot be measured exactly. The thinking behind the above details is that even Hudson’s notion of the biological cell (in consideration of sociolinguistic behaviour) can be refined.

4 Some case studies on Romance The starting point for a speaker-based approach to variation study in the past is the acceptance of the fact that a given language is the sum total of the usages of every single individual that speaks it, and not of a select few (Milroy 1992, 13). As Martinet (in Weinreich 1953, vii) rightly characterizes it, “[w]hat we heedlessly and somewhat

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rashly call ‘a language’ is the aggregate of millions of […] microcosms many of which evince […] aberrant linguistic comportment”. In the early seventeenth century, Correas (1954, 144) provides this cogent exposition of linguistic variability: “Ase de advertir que una lengua tiene algunas diferenzias, fuera de los dialectos particulares de provinzias, conforme a las edades, calidades, i estados de sus naturales, de rrusticos, de vulgo, de ziudad, de la xente mas granada, i de la corte, del istoriador, del anziano, i predicador, i aun de la menor edad, de muxeres, i varones: i que todas estas abraza la lengua universal debaxo de su propiedad, niervo i frase: i a cada uno le está bien su lenguaxe, i al cortesano no le está mal escoxer lo que parece mexor a su proposito como en el traxe: mas no por eso se ha de entender que su estilo particular es toda la lengua entera, i xeneral, sino una parte, porque muchas cosas que él desecha, son mui buenas i elegantes para el istoriador, anziano, i predicador, i los otros”. (‘It must be noted that a language has some varieties beyond specific regional dialects, which relate to age groups, ranks and status of its speakers, such as the speech of rustics, vulgar people, urban dwellers, more important people, courtiers, the historian, the third age, and the preacher, and even the youth, women, men: and that all these comprise the language as a whole in all its functions. And every speaker loves his own language, and the courtier will choose what seems to him best suited to his needs, like choosing garments; but this does not imply that his specific style is the entire language, but only a part of it, because many things that he rejects are very good and elegant for the historian, the preacher, the elderly and the rest’.)

So theoretically apt is this holistic description that it is no exaggeration to view it as well ahead of its time. The quotation merits some analysis. First, Correas acknowledges linguistic variability (“una lengua tiene algunas diferenzias”). Second, he draws attention to diatopic variation (“los dialectos particulares de provinzias”). Third, he considers an impressive range of speaker and stylistic variables (“conforme a las edades, calidades, i estados de sus naturales, de rrusticos, de vulgo, de ziudad, de la xente mas granada, i de la corte, del istoriador, del anziano, i predicador, i aun de la menor edad, de muxeres, i varones”). Fourth (and most crucially), he recognizes parity between all varieties of his language, irrespective of the presence of a prestige variety (the language of the court, in his day),3 the fact that the language variety used by courtiers is only one component of the language (“no por eso se ha de entender que su estilo particular es toda la lengua entera, i xeneral, sino una parte”), that every speaker is happy with his language usage (“i a cada uno le está bien su lenguaxe”), and that every language is the aggregate of all the identifiable varieties of which it is comprised (“toda la lengua entera, i xeneral”). For the modern historical sociolinguist, the key question is how to be able to identify various speaker and stylistic variables, in order to study their correlations with linguistic variants in usage. The difficulties involved in trying to apply largescale social variables to historical states of languages have been outlined above. Of course, making systematic use of the information that social historians can offer, as Nevalainen/Raumolin-Brunberg (1996) have done, are very useful methodological

3 This roughly equates to a standard variety in modern times.

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contributions to the historical sociolinguistic enterprise. Other worthwhile efforts and contributions include the use of personal letters and diaries (Elspass 2012), official and monastic documents (Esteban-Segura 2012), early advertising and newspapers (Percy 2012), and literary sources (Romaine 1982; see also Wright 2000; Tuten 2003; Anipa 2005a; 2012).

4.1 Literary sources Fictional literature, as a whole, is a legitimate source of sociolinguistic research, as argued by Romaine (1982, 21), who states that “the linguist will be interested in the language as such in the first instance, whilst the literary critic is interested in the language as literature”. A study by Anipa (2005a) of two of Cervantes’s (1613) Novelas ejemplares, shows incredible variation in Cervantes’s linguistic behaviour, at six different levels: (a) within the draft version (generally called the Porras manuscript) of one text; (b) within the draft version of the second text; (c) between the draft versions of the two; (d) within the definitive version of one text; (e) within the definitive version of the second text; and (f) between the definitive versions of the two. Overall, the amount of graphophonological variation that was extracted from the rather modest size of data from Cervantes’s written language is fascinating.4 In summary: 1. “a” versus “ua”: casi and cuasi 2. “de” + “e” versus “de” + Ø: de estos and desa 3. “e–” versus “Ø”: esecutor and Secutor 4. “e” versus “ee”: verá and vee 5. “e” versus “i”: cuestión and quistión 6. “eo” versus “o”: teologías and tologías 7. “ié’’ versus “iyé’’: Riéronse and Riyéronse 8. “u” versus “o”: Repulido and Repolido 9. “Ø” versus “-t”: San Salvador and Sant Salvador 10. “t” versus “ct”: efeto and respecto 11. “c” versus “sc”: pareció and paresció 12. “d” versus “bd”: duda and dubda 13. “f” versus “h”: foja and hoja 14. “h” versus “g”: ahora and agora 15. “c” versus “g”: camuza and gamuza 16. “l” versus “ll”: mil and mill 17. “n” versus “mp”: suntuosidad and sumptuosidad 18. “mp” versus “p”: pompa and popa

4 This is an experimental work that focused largely on grapho-phonological variation; there is a great deal of variation at morphological, syntactic and lexical-sematic levels, which, if taken into consideration, will substantially increase the amount of variability in Cervantes’s written language.

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19. “rl” versus “ll”: ejercitarlos and guisallo 20. “-zero’’ versus “-s’’: tisera and tiseras 21. “t” versus “pt”: escrito and escripto 22. “u” versus “un”: mucho and muncho 23. “j” versus “s”: ejecutor and esecutor

The analysis shows that Cervantes did not systematically move from the so-called non-standard variants to those perceived (especially today) to be more prestigious. Rather, he strongly exhibited the tug-of-war principle, by switching back and forth, throughout, within and between the texts, a testimony to the sociolinguistic truism that no speaker uses language in the same way all the time; this can be done consciously or subconsciously, as is apparent from contrasting the Porras manuscript (i.e., the draft version) and final version of the novellas. Therefore, the expression “Cervantes’s language” is an abstraction. More important is the fact that Cervantes’s contemporaries would read and understand his writing; this implies that his language usage was a good reflection of the picture of Castilian at the time. Communication being a two-way process, interlocutors are able to understand a piece of writing or speech automatically; that confirms that the language variety in question is an integral part of the interlocutor’s linguistic repertoire; “Individuals will frequently have as part of their repertoire more than one norm: their communicative competence” (Posner 1997, 109). Now, within broad fictional literature, there are genres or specific pieces of writing, across various cultures in literary history, that deliberately attempt – albeit with a degree of artificiality – to represent spoken language. Two typical examples are the picaresque genre and drama pieces (comedias, entremeses, etc.) in Spain and the Agréables conférences, in France. In Romance historical sociolinguistics, there have been some productive studies, based on the picaresque, of spoken Castilian, as represented in these literary writings. One of them, focused on lexical items, is Alonso Hernández’s (1977) extensive study of criminal slang in the Golden Age. Even though this is an important part of language use in that period of the language’s history, recent sociolinguistic studies have sought to expand their foci and look beyond the limits of his work. I wish to draw on the following studies, in order to illustrate this point: Anipa (2001), Medina Morales (2005a; 2005b), and Díaz Bravo (2009). Anipa (2001) combines five picaresque tales and a number of Golden-Age grammarians,5 in the study of a set of linguistic variables from a micro-perspective (i.e., focusing mainly on the pragmatic and intra-personal types of variation). Amongst the interesting results obtained are the social, pragmatic and psychological factors (age, gender, social status, flattery, accommodation, politeness, sexism, pretence, anxiety, grammatical constraints, mitigation, hypocrisy, persuasion, disambiguation, etc.)

5 See section 4.2, below, for discussion of the grammarians.  

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that condition both inter-personal and intra-personal variation amongst speakers. I provide, here, a few, but representative, examples, relating to the tú-vos-él-vuestra merced-bare verb form variations (see Anipa 2001, ch. 8, for detailed explanations). a) Socio-Psychological Effects. A switch from regular use of vuestra merced to that of vos, between an upper-middle-class person and a low-class interlocutor. The situation was caused by the open expression of love sickness and pledges of commitment, etc., by the former to the latter: “Mi señor, yo iré de muy buena voluntad donde vos, mi señor, me mandáredes”. b) Flattery (with the aim of achieving support) causes a surprising vos-vuestra merced intra-personal variation, which draws this reaction: “¿Habéis visto? ¡Qué lengua, qué saber! Si a ésta le faltaran partidos, decí mal de mí”. c) Pretence about having a sexual relationship with a minor causes this intrapersonal vos-tú variation: “¡Sois muy muchacho y no querría haceros mal!” vs “¿mochacho eres tú?” d) Anxiety, caused by a stumble and fall, forces a vos-tú intra-personal variation, in the same communicative context: “¡Válaos Dios!” vs “¡Válate el diablo!” e) The urge to persuade a client forces a shopkeeper to change from vuestra merced to vos to tú, back to vos and, then, back to vuestra merced, in a very brief conversation between the two.  

Medina Morales (2005a, 13), for her part, conducted a sociolinguistic study of the vocabulary of picaresque tales. She states: “En el plano del léxico, lo picaresco consiste en aprovechar todos los niveles lingüísticos, es decir, incluir en piruetas lingüísticas tanto voces cultas, coloquiales, vulgares o bien de la germanía y todo ello encaminado a sacar siempre el máximo partido de la realidad o bien al servicio de […] locuacidad crítica”. She argues that “al estudiar el léxico del pícaro tendremos que considerar un campo más amplio que el que se reduce a las voces específicas de la germanía, únicas hasta ahora consideradas por algunos filólogos” (ibid.). Within the limitations of large-scale social constructs (as discussed above), Medina Morales has endeavoured to take a variationist stance in her study, paying attention to linguistic change in both apparent and real time. In another study, Medina Morales (2005b) amplifies the use of the picaresque tale in historical sociolinguistic investigation into Golden-Age Castilian. She chooses seventeen picaresque tales, across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as her database and relies on the social history of Spain to identify the major speaker variables of the day for her study. She identifies as many as twenty-two social classes – “la nobleza”; “el clero”; “los soldados”; “los labradores”; “los mercaderes”; “los vendedores ambulantes”; “los taberneros”; “los bodegoneros”; “los pasteleros”; “los venteros”; “los despenseros”; “los médicos”; “los criados”; “las criadas”; “los mendigos”; “los estudiantes”; “los poetas”; “los músicos”; “los abogados”; “las prostitutas”; “los bravos”; “los pícaros” – in addition to race or ethnic group (“castellano-viejo”, “negros importados como esclavos”, “moriscos”, “judíos”, “gitanos”,

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etc.), level of education (rated on the basis of profession, with some overlap with social classes: “caballeros”, “obispos”, “mercaderes”, “financieros”, “abogados”, “despenseros”, “médicos”, “algebristas”, “ensalmadores”, “escribanos”, “poetas”, “estudiantes”, “menestrales”, “curas”, “frailes”, “sacristanes”, “criados”, “pregoneros”, “verdugos”, “corchetes”, “soldados”, “ladrones”, “bravos”, “prostitutas”, “rufianes”, and “pícaros”), and geographical origins (Córdoba, Fuenfrida, Morrorido, Medina del Campo, Salamanca, Seville, the highlands [“Montaña”], Segovia, Valencia, Madrid, Gallician living in Italy, etc.). Another interesting work on sociolinguistic variation in the picaresque genre is one by Díaz Bravo (2009). She specifically sets out to study the representation of speech-like language in La Lozana andaluza. In a similar way to Medina Morales, she establishes a wide range of speaker variables for her variation study (“estamento: privilegiados [nobles, clero], no privilegiados”; “nivel económico [rico, pobre]”; “nivel de instrucción [letrado, analfabeto]”; “prestigio social”; “profesión o tipo social”; “procedencia u origen geográfico”; “edad [anciano, adulto, joven, niño]”; and “sexo [mujer, hombre]”). It is apparent that, even compared with speaker variables used in present-day variation studies, the above are a spectacular range; and that should not come as a surprise, because pre-modern societies were much more finely socially stratified than those of today. The multiplicity of speaker variables is the optimal approach to be adopted for correlational sociolinguistic study. Another worthwhile observation is that such a wide range of speaker variables, in correlation with linguistic variables in picaresque tales, is evidence that, in this genre of tales (just as in most other genres), we are dealing with a cross-section of the Spanish society of the day; in fact, the pícaro (the protagonist of the tale) ends up being just a small piece of that mesmerizing tapestry. In other words, the language behaviour depicted in picaresque tales is much more diverse, complex and variegated than the average person is able to conceive, especially based on the generic label that we are commonly familiar with. Obviously, the problem of over-generalization, which is typical of large-scale approaches, remains, both in present-day and historical studies; but, in the light of the ingrained “bad data” problem in historical sociolinguistics, a study like the ones conducted by Medina Morales and Díaz Bravo are excellent examples of the level of productivity of speaker variables in past states of languages. One important issue to be noted about the use of literary data for sociolinguistic studies is that, whilst fictional literature can portray the linguistic choices that various characters make, it is, at the same time, the language use of whoever is the author. Anipa (2012, 181) has cautioned against the attribution of language use in literary texts to fictional characters, on the grounds that doing so shifts attention away from the author who actually creates the story; moreover, it becomes tricky, when literary characters happen to be non-humans. Obviously, outside the realms of fiction, animals neither have nor use human languages. Thus, the range of linguistic variants of

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variables that can be extracted from a literary text are, indeed, an integral part of the author’s linguistic repertoire, irrespective of his social standing, geographical origins, etc. As a microcosm of society, a single individual – an author – is capable of using a wide range of linguistic items (e.g., standard, non-standard, slang, taboo, etc.), as clearly manifested in the language of the picaresque genre. Every historical sociolinguist, whether or not s/he is aware of the fact that knowledge of gang slang is essential for the understanding of a number of Golden-Age written Castilian – including all within the picaresque genre (such as La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzmán de Alfarache, Historia de la vida del Buscón), Francisco Delicado’s La Lozana andaluza, Cervantes (such as the Novelas ejemplares and Don Quijote de la Mancha), and Lope de Vega’s innumerable comedias – would acknowledge that criminal gang slang, whether portrayed to be used in Andalusia, Castile, Galicia, etc., was an integral part of the Castilian language (Correas’s “lengua entera, i xeneral”). The same can be said of all written texts, in any language, which purport to imitate lower-class speech, like the Agréables conférences, in seventeenth-century France. It is not difficult to see that, since those were satirical pamphlets against the political establishment of the day, particularly the first minister Mazarin (hence their collective name of the Mazarinades), they were written by well-educated intellectuals, and for the consumption of the educated classes. Lodge (2004, 155) remarks that “it needs to be said that the low-status speech-forms here are not themselves being ridiculed but are being used to ridicule the current holders of power”. Even if those low-status varieties of French were being ridiculed, that would not change the fact that the authors of the pamphlets knew and used them, and their readership knew them, at least. Any other way of conceptualizing language would be immensely counter-sociolinguistic or, at best, should belong to lay discourse. As Cameron (1995, x) observes, “[t]he linguistic questions laypeople care most about are questions of right and wrong, good and bad, ‘the use and abuse of language’”, that “most everyday discourse on language is above all evaluative discourse”, and that “[t]his overriding concern with value is the most significant characteristic that separates lay discourse on language from the expert discourse of linguists”[…] [a]s scientists, professional linguists aspire to objectivity and not to moral or aesthetic judgement”.

4.2 Early modern grammarians The writings of the grammarians (the assorted group of linguistic thinkers, poets and other intellectuals, who commented on various aspects of the language of the day) have a great deal of potential to boost significantly variation studies in the past. This fact was aptly observed early on by Thurot (1881–1883, i): “[j]e n’ignore pas qu’il est d’autres témoignages; mais ils ne peuvent être interprétés qu’au moyen des témoignages des grammairiens. Ceux-ci donnent en quelque sorte une lumière directe;

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la lumière des autres n’est que réfléchie’’. Secondly, using sociolinguistic principles, the grammarians become legitimate subjects of study; scrutiny of their linguistic attitudes and behaviours becomes an integral part of the explanation and analysis of the linguistic variables that we study. Third, using the micro-framework, each and every grammarian can be studied separately (not necessarily by one and the same historical sociolinguist), with regard to a given linguistic variable, and, then, the various studies could eventually be coalesced into an aggregate source of knowledge of various aspects of the history of a given language. On another level, some of the grammarians normally exhibit prescriptive attitudes to their language, others proscriptive attitudes, others liberal attitudes (more inclined towards simply describing usage and, therefore, more accommodating to language variation), and others exhibit a combination of two or all three of those attitudes. It is not uncommon to find grammarians who expound the doctrine of usage variation with admirable clarity, but who violated it in their own usage. There is no shortage of examples of such grammarians, in the history of Romance. Perhaps a typical example, in France, is Vaugelas (one might add Tabourot, Henri Estienne, etc.). In Spanish, the quintessential example is Juan de Valdés (although we might also cite Villalón and Texeda). There is pervasive inconsistency, not only amongst the grammarians, but also within the writings of each one of them. They splendidly exhibit the tug-of-war principle of going back and forth between innovations and older variants of the linguistic variables that they discussed. Moreover, they contradict themselves and, in many cases, despised the varieties of a language that (erroneously, most of the time) they believed are only used by others – including fellow grammarians – but not by themselves. All this chimes with the sociolinguistic behaviour of present-day speakers of languages (see Labov 1966, 471 on an incident of self-report that he later characterized as “other perception and self-deception”). Yet another level of usefulness of the writings of the grammarians – which has largely been neglected in historical sociolinguistics – is the degree to which their prescriptive and proscriptive comments can be harnessed to the maximum (see, for example, Ayres-Bennett/Seijido 2011). In other words, in addition to any objectively described linguistic variants, a great deal of latent knowledge can be found in their deontic acts, i.e., what they prescribe and proscribe (see Anipa 2007, 114–115); and taking their condemnation of linguistic forms – usually ideologically driven – to be the ultimate yardstick for gauging the state of a language, as has always been the case, is a serious flaw. “The grammarian set himself up as a lawgiver […] He was not content to record fact; he pronounced judgment. It seems to have been accepted as self-evident that of two alternate forms of expression one must be wrong” (Baugh/ Cable 1994, 272; see also Milroy 1992). It is common knowledge that the mere act of prescribing a linguistic variant means that the variable to which it belongs experiences more than one variant. Needless to say, in general, one does not proscribe a linguistic form that is non-

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existent; as a result, all proscribed variants should on the whole be taken by the sociolinguist as part and parcel of speakers’ linguistic repertoire. For example, when a grammarian says “that is incorrect language, used only by peasants”, or “that word is no longer in use; it was abandoned a long time ago”,6 the sociolinguist should be aware that s/he is dealing with sociolinguistic value judgments, a type of linguistic behaviour that portrays a certain attitude to language variation (usually fed by the ideology of the standard language); and just as present-day sociolinguists conduct research into language attitudes and sociolinguistic behaviour, so must we do for past states of languages, if we are lucky to have records of the grammarians available. “En verdad, si el objetivo del lingüista es llegar a comprender y explicar este objeto que llamamos ‘lenguaje humano,’ no se justifica, en principio, eliminar del análisis nada que contribuya a la comunicación” (Silva-Corvalán 2001, 3). This is echoed by Bybee (2010, 10): “In usage-based theory, where grammar is directly based on linguistic experience, there are no types of data that are excluded because they are considered to represent performance rather than competence”. These are not some optional way of tapping knowledge and information from the grammarians, but, rather, the quintessential and necessary approach that should be adopted, in order to yield important results that should boost the historical sociolinguistics enterprise. That being the case, we can have a look at a couple of examples from early-modern Spanish and early-modern French, as illustrations of the points being discussed. Both early-modern and modern scholars of the history of the Castilian language have had at their disposal a special work of the humanist Juan de Valdés (c. 1509– 1542). The work, entitled Diálogo de la lengua (1535) can hardly be more prescriptive and proscriptive than it is. Anipa (2001; 2005b; 2007; 2014; Anipa/O’Reilly 2014) has studied extensively Valdés’s sociolinguistic behaviour and has brought to light a wide range of rather startling results, both about his famous Diálogo and his personal letters. Even though Valdés reiterated the notion of usage throughout his work, it does not take much effort to realize that what he really meant was usage of the ruling elite (more of the royal Court of Toledo than of the kingdom of Toledo or even the city of Toledo). But, since he was part of the elite, one would have expected that his own usage, especially in the very work in which he expounded his usage rules, to conform consistently to what he prescribed and proscribed. That is not the case, as he displayed spectacular tug-of-war in his own usage, throughout the work. It has been ascertained that, overall, in his own metalanguage in the Diálogo, Valdés made use of the features that he proscribed in the very same Diálogo, significantly more than of those that he ascribed to himself and prescribed: a 91 % deviation from all the grapho-

6 It is perfectly understandable that Silva-Corvalán (2001, 37) notes obliquely that the use of the term archaism, in reference to linguistic features that still persist in a language, however restricted or marginal they might be, is inappropriate, since no linguistic feature is intrinsically archaic, and that it is a subjective notion, on a par with such judgmental words as “correct” and “incorrect”.

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phonological, morphological, morphophonological, morphosyntactic, and syntactic features that he proscribed, in the very work in which he proscribed them is no trivial matter. The highly surprising discovery is corroborated by a similar statistic of 88 % deviation in his personal letters. Of course, that is virtually identical to the sociolinguistic behaviour of present-day speakers; and it is self-evident that discoveries of this kind are only possible via the micro-framework, which scrutinizes language use by the individual. In contrast with Valdés is Gonzalo Correas, who was incredibly liberal and rather open to variation, as mentioned above. A similar state of affairs can be ascertained amongst grammarians in earlymodern France (see, for example, Thurot 1881; 1882; Brunot 1906; 1947; Rosset 1911; Dauzat 1930; Fouché 1956; Pope 1934; Holder 1970; Ayres-Bennett 1987; 1990; 1996; 2004; Ayres-Bennett/Seijido 2011; Rickard 1992; Lodge 1993; 2004; Posner 1997; Fournier 2007; Boudreau 2009; Cichocki/Beaulieu 2010; Keating 2011),7 for example, in their discussions of the phenomenon of ouisme – a pejorative term applied to the use of ou, in place of o, in a number of French words, such as amour, assoupir, beaucoup, Bourdeaux, chouse, goudron, Roume. There has been absolute unanimity amongst modern historians of the language that the old diphthong [ou] had monophthongized in the fourteenth century and that the spelling ou, used during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was pronounced /u/. However, an examination of the grammarians shows that the feature continued to be variable, with [ou] and [o] as variants, throughout the early modern period. Moreover, the sociolinguistic behaviour of the grammarians shows that, contrary to received knowledge that there were two opposing camps of ouistes and non-ouistes, the usage picture was much messier than that. Each grammarian exhibited the tug-of-war phenomenon in his metalanguage. Just as in the case of Castilian, one particular grammarian of French (Louis Meigret) was liberal and open to variation and was more interested in describing usage than prescribing and proscribing variants, although that made him a common target for his prescriptivist and proscriptivist contemporaries. “They did not realize, or refuse to acknowledge, that changes in language often appear to be capricious and unreasonable – in other words, are the result of forces too complex to be fully analyzed or predicted. Accordingly they approached most questions in the belief that they could be solved by logic and that the solutions could be imposed upon the world by authoritative decree. Hence the constant attempt to legislate one construction into use and another out of use. In this attempt little or no recognition was shown for the legitimacy of divided usage (my emphasis)” (Baugh/Cable 1994, 281).

7 Studies on early modern French grammarians and disagreement amongst them in their value judgments on the social status of various linguistic features abound in the literature on Romance (see, for example, Rickard 1992; Lodge 1997; 2004; Ayres-Bennett 1990; 2004), even though, to the best of my knowledge, those specifically on intra-personal variation in individual grammarians, which scrutinize their object language (what they describe/prescribe/proscribe) against their metalanguage (their own usage) are rare.

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5 Concluding remarks Even though historical sociolinguistics has achieved a degree of maturity, it remains a relatively young subfield; hence, theoretical-methodological reflections continue to be vital in underpinning its objective knowledge basis. It was Herrmann (1982, 124) who cautioned that “[l]anguage is such a difficult problem with such widespread ramifications that it should not be dealt with in terms of any single science, any single scientific ‘school’ or even any one source of references to relevant work. We still know so little about language that a pluralism of scientific approaches and avoidance of premature reduction to one science, one method or one theory appear to be advantageous”.

The theoretical underpinning of the young subfield is far from complete, and the more scientifically sound our theoretical ideas the better. In this chapter, I have drawn on constructs from quantum mechanics (especially those of entanglement, interference and decoherence, embedded in the Uncertainty Principle) to explain the idiosyncratic and unpredictable nature of speakers’ sociolinguistic behaviour (ideas based on Hudson’s most informative discussion of speakers’ individualism and conformity), as a result of which a case has to be made for the recognition of non-linearity in the potential of linguistic change. The chapter has also discussed a number of methodological approaches in historical sociolinguistics, some of which have been put into practice before by various scholars (such as reconstruction of the social histories of the languages we study in order to discern the much-needed social and speaker variables for analysing historical data; using certain genres of written language as sources of data in order to maximize results). It has shown that it is possible to track the influence of speaker variables – a wide range of them – when studying earlier periods in the history of Romance; the two dozen variables identified by Medina Morales is testimony to its feasibility. Without neglecting the traditional large-scale approach in historical sociolinguistic studies, the micro-framework (which focuses on individual speakers and the linguistic items that they use) has been presented as having another, hitherto little exploited, layer to it: incorporating contrastive studies between the testimonies and metalanguage of the grammarians from early-modern times of languages into historical sociolinguistic variation studies. Although virtually all the grammarians were male and from the intellectual class, the resulting lack of diversity in terms of speaker variables of gender, age and social class is conveniently compensated by the sheer fact that their observations are the best that there can be (“une lumière directe”). As Rickard (1992, vii) has put it, the modern editor “cannot share their experience of it, save through a glass darkly; he cannot live it as they did; and their vocabulary (for instance) had overtones and associations which are only partially available to us today, or not at all” (emphasis in the original). When we start off with the knowledge

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that each grammarian was a battlefield of conflicting linguistic types and habits (in the words of Martinet), that a tug-of-war – in fact, many different tugs-of-war – is/are perpetually going on in him, we are, then, able to split the “direct light” of each one of them into many waves, including invisible (but discernible and inferred) ones. And the aggregate of all the waves of all the grammarians of a given historical period of a given language speaks for itself. Another long-standing theoretical-methodological problem discussed in this chapter is that of reporting change in the markedness features of linguistic variants as linguistic change. This is an inherited problem that is as old as the discipline of sociolinguistics itself. And it is a serious one. When Labov (1975, 827, cited by Lloyd 1992, 201) remarked that “long-standing problems of historical linguistics can be resolved only if we are willing to use general principles drawn from phonetic and sociolinguistic research”, he might not have thought of a range of problems in present-day sociolinguistics, which would become “long-standing” ones a decade on and then be inherited by historical sociolinguistics. As mentioned above, Romaine characterized the over-reporting of change as a very dangerous development in sociolinguistics. Historical sociolinguists do not have to wait for some solution to be found from present-day general sociolinguistics (English language based, usually). The problem can be resolved in the Romance field, and be adopted by general sociolinguistics; that would be a worthwhile contribution. Perhaps a simple change in nomenclature may be all that is needed. In other words, if we can boldly say change in the markedness features of variants, rather than “linguistic change”, then some of the issues might begin to disappear. This is because change in the markedness features simply equals linguistic variation. And variation equals speaker-innovation + continuity. And continuity universally dominates the scene and takes the lion’s share of the variation paradigm, as acknowledged by many, including by Ferdinand de Saussure, well before the emergence of sociolinguistics as a formal sub-discipline of linguistics.

6 Bibliography Alonso Hernández, José L. (1977), Léxico del marginalismo del Siglo de Oro, Salamanca, Universidad de Salamanca. Andersen, Henning (ed.) (2001), Actualization: Linguistic Change in Progress, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Anipa, Kormi (2001), A Critical Examination of Linguistic Variation in Golden-Age Spanish, Frankfurt, Lang. Anipa, Kormi (2005a), A Study of Intra-Personal Linguistic Variation in Cervantes (Grapho-Phonology), in: Roger Wright/Peter Ricketts (edd.), Studies in Ibero-Romance Linguistics Dedicated to Ralph Penny, Newark, DE, Cuesta, 277–298. Anipa, Kormi (2005b), “Diálogo” versus “Cartas”: A Probe into Juan de Valdés’s Linguistic Behaviour, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 106(3), 315–336.

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Anipa, Kormi (2007), The Grammatical Thought and Linguistic Behaviour of Juan de Valdés, München, LINCOM Europa. Anipa, Kormi (2012), The Use of Literary Sources in Historical Sociolinguistic Research, in: Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy/Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre (edd.), The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 170–190. Anipa, Kormi (ed.) (2014), Diálogo de la lengua by Juan de Valdés, Cambridge, Modern Humanities Research Association. Anipa, Kormi (2016), A Holistic Sociolinguistic Perspective on the Grammarians and “ouisme” in the Phonetic History of French, Revue roumaine de linguistique 61(4), 335–359. Anipa, Kormi/O’Reilly, Terence (2014), Valdés, Juan de, in: Springer Encyclopaedia of Renaissance Philosophy, 1–18, http://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-028484_134-1 (last access 15.02.2018). Ayres-Bennett, Wendy (1987), Vaugelas and the Development of the French Language, London, Modern Humanities Research Association. Ayres-Bennett, Wendy (1990), Variation and Change in the Pronunciation of French in the Seventeenth Century, in: John N. Green/Wendy Ayres-Bennett (edd.), Variation and Change in French: Essays Presented to Rebecca Posner on the Occasion of her Sixtieth Birthday, London, Routledge, 151–179. Ayres-Bennett, Wendy (1996), A History of the French Language through Texts, London/New York, Routledge. Ayres-Bennett, Wendy (2004), Sociolinguistic Variation in Seventeenth-Century France: Methodology and Case Studies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Ayres-Bennett, Wendy/Seijido, Magali (2011), Remarques et observations sur la langue française. Histoire et évolution d’un genre, Paris, Classiques Garnier. Bacciagaluppi, Guido (2012), The role of decoherence in quantum mechanics, in: Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/ qm–decoherence (last access 13.04.2016). Baugh, Albert/Cable, Thomas (1994), A History of the English Language, London, Routledge. Boudreau, Annette (2009), La Construction des représentations linguistiques: Le Cas de l’Acadie, La Revue canadienne de linguistique 54(3), 439–459. Brunot, Ferdinand (1906), Histoire de la langue française des origines à 1900, vol. 2: Le seizième siècle, Paris, Colin. Brunot, Ferdinand (1947), Histoire de la langue française des origines à 1900, vol. 4: La langue classique (1660–1715), Paris, Colin. Bub, Jeffrey (2015), Quantum entanglement and information, in: Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/qt-entangle (last access 13.04.2016). Bybee, Joan (2010), Language, Usage and Cognition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Cameron, Deborah (1995), Verbal Hygiene, London/New York, Routledge. Cichocki, Wladyslaw/Beaulieu, Louise (2010), Factors Contributing to the Retention of Traditional Phonetic Features in Acadian French, in: Piotr P. Chruszczewski/Zdzisław Wąsik (edd.), Languages in Contact, Wrocław, Philological School of Higher Education, 37–46. Close, Anthony (2000), Cervantes and the Comic Mind of his Age, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Corominas, Joan/Pascual, José Antonio (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, Madrid, Gredos. Correas, Gonzalo de (1954, 11625), Arte de la lengua española castellana, edited by Emilio Alarcos García, Madrid, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Crystal, David (2002), Broadcasting the Nonstandard Message, in: Richard Watts/Peter Trudgill (edd.), Alternative Histories of English, London/New York, Routledge, 233–244.

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Crystal, David (2008), “Think on my Words”: Exploring Shakespeare’s Language, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Culpeper, Jonathan (2005), History of English, London/New York, Routledge. Dauzat, Albert (1930), Histoire de la langue française, Paris, Payot. Díaz Bravo, Rocío (2009), Estudio de la oralidad en el Retrato de la Loçana andaluza (Roma, 1524), doctoral thesis, Málaga, Universidad de Málaga. Díaz-Campos, Manuel (ed.) (2011), The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics, Chichester, WileyBlackwell. Eckert, Penelope (2005), Variation, Convention, and Social Meaning, paper presented at the LSA, Oakland, 7 January. Elspass, Stephan (2012), The Use of Private Letters and Diaries in Sociolinguistic Research, in: Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy/Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre (edd.), The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 156–169. Ernst, Gerhard (1980), Prolegomena zu einer Geschichte des gesprochenen Französisch, in: Helmut Stimm (ed.), Zur Geschichte des gesprochenen Französisch und zur Sprachlenkung im Gegenwartsfranzösischen. Beiträge des Saarbrückes Romanistentages 1979, Wiesbaden, Steiner, 1–14. Esteban-Segura, Laura (2012), Medical, Official, and Monastic Documents in Sociolinguistic Research, in: Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy/Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre (edd.), The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 140–155. Faye, Jan (2014), Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, in: Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/qmcopenhagen (last access 13.04.2016). Fløgstad, Guro Nore (2016), Preterit Expansion and Perfect Demise in Porteño Spanish and Beyond: A Critical Perspective on Cognitive Grammaticalization Theory, Leiden, Brill. Fouché, Pierre (1956), Traité de prononciation française, Paris, Klincksieck. Fournier, Jean-Marie (2007), La Généralité dans les théories du son à l’âge classique, Histoire épistémologie langage 29(1), 85–103. Hawking, Stephen (1988), A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, London, Bantam. Herrmann, Theo (1982), Language and Situation: The Pars Pro Toto Principle, in: Colin Fraser/Klaus R. Scherer (edd.), Advances in the Social Psychology of Language, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 123–159. Hickey, Raymond (ed.), (2003), Motives for Language Change, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Hilgevoord, Jan/Uffink, Jos (2014), The Uncertainty Principle, in: Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/qt-uncertainty (last access 13.04.2016). Holder, Maurice A. (1970), L’Ouisme au seizième siècle: Causes et résultats, doctoral thesis, Toronto, University of Toronto. Hudson, Richard A. (1996), Sociolinguistics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Keating, Kelle Lyn (2011), Le Centre culturel Aberdeen: Minority Francophone Discourses and Social Space, doctoral thesis, Austin, University of Texas at Austin. Labov, William (1966), The Social Stratification of English in New York City, Washington, DC, Center for Applied Linguistics. Labov, William (1975), On the Use of the Present to Explain the Past, in: Luigi Heilmann (ed.), Proceedings of the Eleventh International Congress of Linguists, August 28 September 2, 1972, Bologna, il Mulino, 825–851. Lass, Roger (1980), On Explaining Language Change, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

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Lloyd, Paul M. (1992), On Conducting Sociolinguistic Research in the Middle Ages, in: Samuel G. Armistead/E. Michael Gerli/Harvey L. Sharrer (edd.), Hispanic Medieval Studies in Honour of S. G. Armistead, Madison, Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 201–210. Lodge, R. Anthony (1993), French: From Dialect to Standard, London, Routledge. Lodge, R. Anthony (1997), Le Français. Histoire d’un dialecte devenu langue, translated by Cyril Veken, Paris, Fayard. Lodge, R. Anthony (2004), A Sociolinguistic History of Parisian French, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Martinet, André (1953), Preface, in: Uriel Weinreich, Languages in Contact, New York, Linguistic Circle of New York. McMahon, April (1994), Understanding Language Change, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Medina Morales, Francisca (2005a), El léxico de la novela picaresca, Málaga, Universidad de Málaga. Medina Morales, Francisca (2005b), La lengua del Siglo de Oro. Un estudio de variación lingüística, Granada, Universidad de Granada. Milroy, James (1992), Linguistic Variation and Change: On the Historical Sociolinguistics of English, Oxford, Blackwell. Milroy, James/Milroy, Lesley (1985), Linguistic Change, Social Network and Speaker Innovation, Journal of Linguistics 21, 339–384. Milroy, James/Milroy, Lesley (1999), Authority in Language, London/New York, Routledge. Moreno Fernández, Francisco (2011), Internal Factors Conditioning Variation in Spanish Phonology, in: Manuel Díaz-Campos (ed.), The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 54–71. Moreno García del Pulgar, Manuel (2009), La princesa de Salerno y algunas damas de la corte del Adelantado de Murcia. La obra poética de Acevedo en LB1, in: Joseph Snow/Roger Wright (edd.), Late Medieval Spanish Studies in Honour of Dorothy Sherman Severin, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 74–85. Nevalainen, Terttu/Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena (edd.) (1996), Sociolinguistics and Language History. Studies Based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, Amsterdam, Rodopi. Percy, Carol (2012), Early Advertising and Newspapers as Sources of Sociolinguistic Investigation, in: Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy/Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre (edd.), The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 191–210. Pope, Mildred K. (1934), From Latin to Modern French with Especial Consideration of Anglo-Norman: Phonology and Morphology, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Posner, Rebecca (1997), Linguistic Change in French, Oxford, Clarendon Press. Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena (1991), The Noun Phrase in Early Sixteenth-Century English. A Study Based on Sir Thomas More’s Writings, Helsinki, Société Néophilologique. Rickard, Peter (1992), The French Language in the Seventeenth Century: Contemporary Opinion in France, Cambridge, Brewer. Romaine, Suzanne (1982), Socio-Historical Linguistics: Its Status and Methodology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Rosset, Théodore (1911), Les Origines de la prononciation moderne étudiées au XVIIe siècle d’après les remarques des grammairiens et les textes en patois de la banlieue parisienne, Paris, Colin. Sampson, Rodney (2011), Change, Unchange and Indeterminacy in the Phonological History of Parisian French, in: Tim Pooley/Dominique Lagorgette (edd.), On Linguistic Change in French: Socio-Historical Approaches. Studies in Honour of R. Anthony Lodge, Chambéry, Université de Savoie, 195–208. Saussure, Ferdinand de (1972, 11916), Cours de linguistique générale, critical edition with notes by Tullio De Mauro, Paris, Payot.

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Joan Costa-Carreras

11 Variation and prescriptivism Abstract: This chapter provides an up-to-date overview of research on the relationship between variation and prescriptivism in the Romance languages. The particular focus of the arguments developed here is on Catalan and other minoritized varieties, although examples from a range of Romance varieties are also referenced. The chapter provides a summary of the concepts of variation, Romance varieties and prescriptivism in the first instance. The prescriptive practices and ideologies associated with the social roles of “users”, “agents” and “theorists” of variation are subsequently analysed according to the four steps of the most accepted model of standardization, proposed by Haugen (1983): (a) selection, (b) codification and (c) implementation of a language norm, and (d) functional elaboration. The chapter suggests that the practices and the ideologies of each of these three groups are identifiable in specific ways.  

Keywords: corpus planning, folk linguistics, linguistic ideology, prescriptivism, variation  

1 Overview of the concepts of variation, Romance varieties and prescriptivism The aim of this chapter is to provide an up-to-date account of the research that has been carried out on the relationship between variation and prescriptivism in the Romance languages.1 We will illustrate our arguments from a range of Romance varieties, but will place particular emphasis on Catalan and other minoritized varieties.

1.1 What is meant by “variation”? According to Gregory/Carroll (1978, 10), variation can be classified into dialectal (geographical, historical and social) varieties and diatypic (stylistic, functional, related to the communicative situation) varieties. Regarding diatopic varieties in the Romance languages, the distinction established by Coșeriu (1988) between “primary”, “secondary” and “tertiary” dialects is relevant (see McKenzie/Osthus 2011, 107; Cerruti 2011, 9–

1 The bibliographic selection has been compiled mainly by consulting Metzeltin (2004; 2007); Genis et al. (2012); Costa (2016b). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-012

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10; Cerruti/Regis 2014; Metzeltin 2004; 2007). As for social variation, it is useful to deal with prescriptivist behaviours and attitudes following the tripartite distinction of speakers into (a) theorists (scholars working on a language), (b) “agents”/“experts” (prescriptive grammarians, language teachers, etc.) and (c) “non-linguists”. The first two groups are language professionals whilst group (c) includes all non-professional language speakers, i.e. laypeople. At the same time, however, the three roles can be classified according to their ability to perform metalinguistic or epilinguistic activities.2 Hence, when referring to language use with a more or less conscious “purpose”, a register (functional) perspective should not be ruled out. Besides dialectal and diatypic varieties, there is also an explicitly codified variety in modern complex societies: “the standard”. As for language change, two concepts from Labov (1994, 78) have to be borne in mind: “changes from above”3 and “changes from below”. In brief, it could be said that the relative stability of variation as described by Gregory/Carroll (1978) is the result of the unceasing conflict between change as described by Labov (1994) and Metzeltin (2004, 25) and “centripetal” forces like “koineization” (Metzeltin 2007, 155), the “creation of national languages”/“standardization of regional languages” (Metzeltin 2007, 148) and “standardization” (Haugen 1983).

1.2 What is meant by “Romance languages”, “dialects” and “varieties”? To answer this question, the definition of language variation provided by Gregory/ Carroll (1978) is relevant. We can assume that official national languages (with many speakers, many usage domains – ranging from vernacular to standard varieties – and a large territory) are likely to have a maximum of variation in all senses, whereas nonofficial languages (with few speakers, few usage domains and a small territory) do not have as much diversity. Taking these assumptions into account, Metzeltin (2007) provides a classification of Romance languages4 into “National” and “Regional”.

2 According to Paveau (2011, 52, note 12), epilinguistic activities “refer to a non-objectified, nonformulated (not articulated) and non-formalized competence of speakers in relation to their language productions. In the introspective method, the faculty shifts toward metalanguage, whether spontaneous or erudite”. 3 “Changes from above are introduced by the dominant social class, often with full public awareness. Normally, they represent borrowing from other speech communities that have higher prestige in the view of the dominant class. Such borrowing do not immediately affect the vernacular patterns of the dominant class or other social classes, but appear primarily in careful speech, reflecting a superposed dialect learned after the vernacular is acquired” (Labov 1994, 78). 4 Metzeltin (2004) provides a third group: “others”. In this chapter, these “other” languages (Aromanian, Francoprovençal and Milanese) and other primary dialects (like the “langues d’oïl” or the “dialetti italiani”), not mentioned by Metzeltin, will be treated occasionally.

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1.3 What is meant by “prescriptivism”? 1.3.1 Related concepts A standard variety is established in modern complex language communities. In the most accepted model of standardization, proposed by Haugen (1983), the standard variety is the result of a four-step procedure: (a) selection, (b) codification and (c) implementation of a language norm, and (d) functional elaboration.5 Some brief remarks about the relationship between prescription and variation in this scheme are relevant here: a) Steps (a) to (b) entail a selection of variants or varieties. b) Sometimes when interferences from other languages are rejected they are replaced by words from a geographical dialect or by archaic words in the language. It can be said then that prescription draws on current variation. c) In functional elaboration, the standardizer shapes a variety to allow the speakers to satisfy new communicative needs. d) Paradoxically, then, the result of standardization is more variation, since a new variety and new styles are added to the already existing repertoire. The term prescriptivism leads to the fields of socially heterogeneous practices of a language community and ideology (Spolsky 2009). We must take into account that in most communities speakers can be classified into “users”, “agents” and “theorists” – the prescriptive practices and ideology of each of these three roles showing up in specific ways. As for ideology, the definition used in this chapter is Ricento’s (2013, 528): “the shared framework(s) of social beliefs that organize and coordinate the social interpretations and practices of groups and their members”. More specifically, the concept of language ideology adopted here follows the definition provided by Cavanaugh (2013, 46): “how speakers understand, view, and use language”. Moreover, his reflections will be taken into account regarding “methodological foundation of ethnography [and] other more linguistic methods, such as extensive taping of everyday interactions, interactive transcription with native language-speaking consultants, attending to media, and document collection, but always [with] ongoing and acute attention to language in use”.

5 This step mainly consists in providing specialized terminology for the new registers in which the language is used.

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1.3.2 Definition of “prescriptivism” Milroy/Milroy (1991, 1) note that: “The study of linguistic authoritarianism is an important part of linguistics, and as linguists we feel an obligation to attempt to close the gap between specialist and non-specialist views on the nature and use of language. One reason for that is that attitudes to language have practical consequences […]. But the best reason for studying prescription is simply that it is interesting in itself”.

Widespread critical interest means that understanding of the term “prescriptivism” is well-developed within sociolinguistic discourse, and we adopt the most common definitions here. For instance, Brousseau (2011, 4) states that “par définition, le prescriptivisme linguistique prescrit et proscrit” (see also Crystal 2010, 2). One useful approach for dealing with this attitude is to define prescriptivism as a kind of acculturation. Paveau (2000, 21, note 6) adopts this concept from Bourdieu/Passeron (1985, 37), defined as “le fait que […] les aptitudes mesurées au critère scolaire tiennent […] à la plus grande affinité entre les habitudes culturelles d’une classe et les exigences du système d’enseignement”. If linguistic skills and habits are among the main ones targeted by school education, then there is “language acculturation”. Consequently, prescriptivism is both a practice and an ideology. The reference to “ideology” makes it necessary to analyse the relationship of prescriptivism to other concepts. Beginning, therefore, with this notion, Cavanaugh’s (2013, 46, 48) “language ideology” will be applied to prescriptivism; it could be defined as “understanding, viewing, and using language on the basis that only some varieties or variants of the language are correct”. And (still following Cavanaugh), the ways in which theorists, agents and laypeople understand, view and use language depend on language contexts. The second concept closely connected to prescriptivism is purism (for a definition, see Brousseau 2011, 4). The assumptions surrounding this ideology can be characterized as follows: (a) there is a pure language variety, (b) its purity must be maintained; and (c) purists are often uncompromising in their attitudes to language. The third concept to be borne in mind is standard language ideology. According to Ricento (2013, 530), such an ideology “elevates a particular variety of a named language spoken by the dominant social group to a (H)igh status […]. The standard language is, in effect, ‘the language’ […] idealized in dictionaries and grammar books” (see also Milroy/Milroy 1991, 22). Now that a definition of prescriptivism has been provided, it is necessary to outline some of the assumptions made about this notion in the chapter. When dealing with the relationship between variation and prescriptivism, we assume that there might be variation without prescriptivism, but there cannot be prescriptivism without variation. Linguistic variants are not classified into “right” and “wrong” unless there are at least two which are used to convey the same meaning (see Brousseau 2011, 5). Then, as variation is a natural part of any language, it is plausible that prescriptivism is, too.

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Another important assumption about prescriptivism is expounded by Hagège (1983, 20): “la réforme est une intervention directe sur le cours [de la langue], qu’elle ne se contente pas de planifier, mais qu’elle entend même modifier”. Turning now to the consequences and challenges associated with prescriptivism, it should be recalled (Milroy/Milroy 1991, 1) that “prescriptive requirements” are “imposed from ‘above’ by ‘society’, not by ad hoc agreement amongst [people] themselves”, and that “they are also arbitrary”. As a result they often prompt opposition, and they have to face challenges such as those described by Milroy/Milroy (1991, 176–177): “most […] states [have] a sizeable multi-cultural and multilingual population, whose needs for access to the standard language will have to be met by a policy worked out in full recognition of those needs and of community language repertoires. A simple demand for cultural and linguistic assimilation characteristic of the standard ideology is not adequate”. As the sociolinguistic reality of societies changes, the prescription of the standard often needs adaptation. Given this situation, the question is whether prescription is needed. The answer provided by Milroy/Milroy (1991, 175–176) for all “complex, large scale societies” is adopted in this chapter: “a standard language remains as necessary as ever in a complex, large scale society such as ours, and needs to be available as a resource to all […] speakers”. The next relevant issue is how prescriptivism manifests itself in the three social groups that we are using in this chapter. As a social practice closely related to an ideology, we assume that it is developed and disseminated by certain powerful groups and it is accepted, or not, by laypeople. “Agents” establish the need for a standard variety for the population and are in charge of its spread. Besides (or among) them sometimes there are “experts”, such as professional writers, who are given some authority in language matters. As for “non-linguist speakers”, they are the receivers of what agents or experts prepare for them on the basis of theorists’ knowledge; this very often includes language ideologies. Regarding prescriptivism among language theorists, the first issue to be addressed is that several different specialities can be identified, and there is a theoretical and descriptive approach that does not express a preference for any given variety above the others. However, this assumption has been largely discussed, for instance by Ricento (2013, 527), who warns that the objectivity associated with descriptive or theoretical viewpoints is not always clear, “as the grammatical intuitions of generative linguists tended to be based on the standard, prescriptive variety that they had acquired and used”. Other academics explicitly address variation. Thus, sociolinguists analyse the relationship between language use and social or communicative variables; research on folk linguistics analyses nonlinguists’ activities, and language-corpus-planning theorists analyse whether to intervene in linguistic use, and, if so, how. To conclude this section, we must address the issue of which disciplines study the prescriptivist practices, attitudes and ideologies of each of the three groups identified. Sociolinguistics and language ideology studies analyse agents’, theorists’ and users’

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prescriptivism; social psychology, sociology of language and language-corpus planning descriptions study that of agents and users; studies in metalinguistic activities and grammatical discourse analysis describe that of agents and theorists; the history of linguistics explains that of theorists; and users’ prescriptivism is dealt with by folk linguistics.

2 Research in variation and prescriptivism in Romance languages In this section, we present current research in variation and prescriptivism, following the distinction made between theorists, agents and users. Within each of these categories, the information is classified according to general topics. We adopt this approach because in a more general way prescriptivism is deeply ingrained in the societies discussed but it manifests itself in a distinctive way in each of these three groups. The approach adopted allows, therefore, both a general and a specific view on prescriptivism.

2.1 Research in theorists’ prescriptivism To begin with, a brief overview of key theoretical engagements with prescriptivism is useful. In the first instance, this will involve presenting key theorists in the field. It will also enable a number of essential concepts to be drawn out before turning, in a second section, to the issue of the practical application of these theories.

2.1.1 Methodological issues The work of McKenzie/Osthus (2011, 101–112) provides a comprehensive review of the methodologies used in this field: the matched-guise technique, the verbal-guise technique, perceptual dialectology, sociological analysis (cf. Bourdieu 1982), the social and ideological framing of metalinguistic concepts, studies on folk knowledge concerning ingroup and outgroup varieties, quantitative and qualitative interviews, social psychology, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, macro-level and micro-level research, and longitudinal folk linguistic studies. Moving to specific methodologies, Hack (2011) reflects on the use of interviews: she believes that Romansh speakers, when interviewed, suspect they are being tested in their competence in standard varieties, which can lead to linguistic insecurity (a feeling of not knowing what is “right” or “wrong”) or a feeling of incompetence. The role that description, stylistic distribution of variants, and the attitudes the norms provoke when standardizing is

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discussed by Gonçalves (2005) in relation to Mozambican Portuguese. As for the perception of varieties, Moreno Fernández claims that “el estudio de la percepción de las variedades geolectales de una lengua requiere el ensamblaje teórico o metateórico de diversos modelos, para dar cuenta de una realidad compleja donde lo psicolingüístico y lo sociolingüístico tienen tanto protagonismo como las unidades y procesos de la lengua. Las propuestas teóricas que sirven para enmarcar este trabajo proceden de la dialectología perceptiva, de la sociolingüística cognitiva, para las que el concepto de percepción es capital, y de la sociolingüística de la globalización” and that he has applied “una encuesta global, referida a la similitud percibida entre el español propio y el de todos los países y territorios hispánicos, desde los considerados históricos o tradicionales hasta los percibidos como más periféricos” (Moreno Fernández 2015, 219).

Finally, variational linguistics is explained and applied by Holtus (1992) to the description of Asturian, and a “meta-analysis of the evolution of normative discourse” is performed by Poplack/Malvar (2006, 173).

2.1.2 The need for a standard variety Several linguists address the basic issue of whether a standard variety is really needed. The reason most often provided for establishing a standard is that it is indispensable for the survival of a language: this claim is made by the Servisc de Planificazion y Elaborazion dl Lingaz Ladin, hereafter referred to as SPELL (2015, ‘Thesis 4’) regarding Ladin, by Sánchez Vidal (2010, 17) for Galician, by Navarro (2003, 106, 111) for Mirandese and Francoprovençal (or Arpitan), and by Ramos Corrada (2009, 106) for Asturian. After this, modernization is the second reason offered for standardizing a language: Lafont (1983, 368) argues this for Occitan, Duval-Valentin (1983, 469) for Rumantsch Grischun, and Nolan (2011, 105) for Gallo (spoken in Brittany and Normandy).

2.1.3 The ideology of the standard Given that insistence on the need for a standard is a direct result of the ideology of the standard, it is important that this line of thinking be addressed. A number of works question the ideology of the standard: in relation to Spanish, Moreno Cabrera denounces “los fundamentos lingüísticos, míticos e ideológicos de lo que se podría denominar autoridad unificadora y correctiva de las academias de la lengua en general y de la RAE en particular” (2011, 157) and he provides “una reflexión sobre algunas de las cosas que hacen las academias y sobre otras cosas que […] deberían hacer” (ibid., 163). Subirats Rüggerberg (2014, 107), for his part, states that the Spanish Academy neglects “las necesidades de la lengua española […], ya sea en relación con la influencia de los nuevos medios globales de comunicación electrónica

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o con el impacto de la ciencia y la tecnología en la evolución del léxico de especialidad”. On the other hand, Quemada (1983) describes how the French state has been the language standardizer par excellence.

2.1.4 “Tertiary dialects” “Tertiary dialects” are “varieties resulting from the geographical differentiation of the standard language after its social diffusion” (Cerruti 2011, 9–10). In the case of Spanish, Sinner (2004) presents a very systematic study of the tertiary dialect of Spanish spoken in Catalonia. His methodology is basically “lingüística variacional”, the main instruments of which were “dos series de entrevistas realizadas en Barcelona y Madrid acerca de la aceptabilidad de determinados fenómenos supuestamente distintivos del castellano de Cataluña”. Another notable work on Catalan Spanish is Vann (2009), who provides an introduction to methodologies for the collection and labelling of spoken corpora. According to the author, Catalan Spanish has been omitted from traditional Spanish dialectology for a variety of reasons, mainly political and ideological. In the case of Italian, Cardinaletti/Munaro (2011, 7) establish that the presence of an “italiano dell’uso medio” is becoming apparent, and this is confirmed by Cerruti/Regis (2014).

2.1.5 Prescription in linguistics On the issue of theoretical linguists’ prescriptivism, the main issue concerns the status of the so-called “ideal speaker-hearer”. According to Méndez García de Paredes (2008, 1372), Sánchez Vidal (2010, 12), Moreno Cabrera (2011, 162) and Subirats Rüggerberg (2014), this “ideal speaker-hearer”, who is the basis for description, usually belongs to a well-established standard language. The second issue dealt with is the boundaries between description and prescription: Martins (2005) and Reinke/ Ostiguy (2005) play down these differences, regarding the latter as merely a more explicit evaluation. In contrast, Gonçalves (2005) and Bernal (2005) make a clear commitment to objectivity in description, which can be free from prescription. As a consequence, a proper relationship between description and prescription is called for by Gonçalves (2005), who argues that there are still not enough descriptive works to serve as the basis for well-founded prescription. Reinke/Ostiguy (2005) also plead for a complete description as a basis for adequate prescription. As for prescriptivism among theorists on corpus planning, Costa (2016b) deals with the relationship between prescriptivism and variation.

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2.1.6 The concept of language correctness “Correctness” is the basic concept underpinning the ideology of standard language. Costa (1996a; 1997; 2010) analyses the extent to which language-corpus planning can benefit from the concepts of Labov’s variationist theory. Two other articles (Costa 2000; 2005) deal with the notion of linguistic norm, mainly as a state of unstable equilibrium between two linguistic stages. Costa (forthcoming) “presents a proposal of what should be a general plan about research in Catalan prescriptive grammar”. Adopting an original approach, Payrató analyses “the relationship between pragmatics and prescriptive grammar” (2016, 12). The fundamental importance of correctness means that non-prescribed variants are consequently seen as incorrect. Benincà/Penello (2011, 13) assume that it is useful to describe these variants mainly for didactic purposes. Through the analysis of a considerable amount of information, they aim to answer the following questions: “perché l’errore ha questa forma precisa su che cosa si basa? e inoltre, c’è dietro un problema della lingua regolata dalla norma?” (ibid., 14).

2.1.7 Standardization models Standardization relates in general to official politics. And just as there are different models of States, so it is for standardization models. Ginebra et al. (2012) provide a general account within the scope of language planning and they then apply it to Catalan. For this language, Montoya (2006) provides the most common view (Haugen’s 1983 model with Lamuela’s 1994 contributions), and the Catalan language academy (Institut d’Estudis Catalans, henceforth IEC) organized three conferences to discuss this (Argenter 2000; Marí 2000; Mallafrè 2002). For Aragonese, Segura Malagón (2010) provides a very well-founded reflection on how this language is being standardized. As for Mirandese, Martins (2005) analyses its standardization according to Haugen’s (1983) model.

2.1.8 The distinction between prescriptive works and standardization Very often the stage of codification is not distinguished from the general process of standardization. The former is the second step of the latter, which does not end until the codified norm is adopted by the population. However, as this norm is not adopted by all the speakers and there are continuous changes in language uses, standardization is a never-ending activity. The Catalan standard is defined by IEC (2001a; 2001b) as a register which should be in a stylistic relationship with the geographic and social varieties: each speaker should have a formal style of his/her dialect available. According to Sánchez Rei (2011, 181), the situation is the same for Galician.

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2.1.9 How prescription can profit from current variation To conclude this first section, we end with an apparently contradictory issue: the way in which prescription can profit from current variation. This is what Costa (2009) explains in relation to Pompeu Fabra’s work: the latter used to turn to archaisms (for example “ostatge”) to replace an ‘interference’ (for example “rehén”) into Catalan. Navarro (2003, 98) similarly explains how this is proposed for Aragonese.

2.2 Research into agents’ prescriptivism The relegation of this group to the second section of the current chapter is no indication of its overall importance: agents are in fact the main social set involved in creating, implementing and managing prescriptivism.

2.2.1 General approach towards agents’ prescriptivism Costa (2016b) provides a comprehensive overview of language-corpus planning for Catalan in which the following issues deal with the relationship between prescriptivism and variation.

2.2.2 Diasystematicity and monocentrism or pluricentrism in language codification The discussion about diasystematicity and monocentrism (whether there is only one centre codifying the language or more than one) has been increasingly present in academic circles, in relation to both minority and well-established languages. For the former, the most discussed question is the preservation of the diatopic varieties. In Catalan it has been constant (cf., for instance, Julià 2008; Pradilla 2011); IEC (2016, XXII–XXVI) describes the extent to which its codification is based on all of the Catalan dialects. The Academia de la Llingua Asturiana (2001, 10) – as well as Ramos Corrada (2009, 101) – states that the Asturian standard should not replace the dialects. As for Corsican, Arrighi (2008) explains that a spelling norm was established in 1971 which respects every dialect and that the concept of “polynomic language” (Arrighi 2008, 516: “a language regarded as the sum of its dialects, each respected for its variety”) applies to this language. Regarding Ladin, SPELL (2015, ‘Thesis 2’) states that all of its varieties have “la stessa ed identica dignità”. Going further, a “continuity” from the different “intragroup” norms to general prescriptive norms, the aim being to achieve a situation called diaglossia, is called for in the case of Galician by Sánchez Vidal (2010, § 2.2.7). Moving to Aragonese, Segura Malagón (2010) proposes that standardization be diasystematic and polymorphic. In the case of Francoproven-

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çal (or Arpitan), Navarro (2003, 111) explains that the norm is not intended to replace the dialects. Pluricentrism is also discussed in many cases. For example, in relation to Catalan, Pradilla (2015) proposes a unified management of its codification by promoting interaction among all the speakers. This question is also discussed for Mirandese and Astur-Leonese (Martins 2005; Navarro 2003, 106), Galician (Monteagudo 2005; Fernández Rei 2009) and Mozambican Portuguese in relation to Portuguese (Gonçalves 2005); for Abidjan French (Ploog 2005) and Québécois French in relation to French (Reinke/Ostiguy 2005; Bigot 2011; Brousseau 2011); and for Moldavian-Romanian (Bojoga 2005). As for Occitan, Bec (2009, 82) describes how the most important grammar for this language was based on Provençal and on Gascon; Cerruti/Regis (2014) refer to Sumien’s (2006) proposal for a pluricentric Occitan and note a concordance between Cisalpine Occitan standardization in Piedmont (Italy) and an Occitanist approach. As for well-established languages, Fernández Carballido (2014) analyses how some Portuguese foreign language textbooks deal with the concept of lusofonia. Also concerning lusofonia, Barradas (2014, 149) analyses the understanding that a Portuguese writer had of the “Acordo Ortográfico” in all the Portuguese-speaking countries. Méndez García de Paredes (2008) discusses the need to establish an Andalusian-based standard for the media and schools within the general Spanish diasystem. As for Italian, Cerruti/Regis (2014, 84) explain that “it has […] been suggested that Italian may be considered as a partially pluricentric language, because of the standardization of Swiss Italian”.

2.2.3 The dissemination factors of codification Once a norm has been codified, it has to be disseminated to the population. In the perspective of language standardization evaluation, Costa (2016b) develops the concept of “frame of favourable sociolinguistic conditions”. Moving to specific contexts, one of the most researched areas in the spread of prescriptive forms is language teaching. In Catalan, the review Treballs de Sociolingüística Catalana (2010) and Vila (2010) provide an up-to-date account of this field. The effect of the didactic procedures in language teaching on the dissemination of the norm is further analysed by Subirats (2000). Another topic that has been explored is the effect that the diversity of language schooling models has within the same territory. This is the focus of Baldaquí et al. (2010) and Baldaquí (2011) in relation to Catalan; Mas (2008) deals with diversity in standard language models for society more broadly. The manifestation of “standard language ideology” among teachers is denounced by Sánchez Rei (2011, 122) in the case of Galician, and, in general, by Sánchez Vidal (2010, 9–10). Paveau (2000, 21) presents a case of language acculturation.

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Regarding Québécois French, Reinke/Ostiguy (2005) explain that teachers’ spoken standard register admits colloquial features in order to promote self-esteem and respect for diversity among students. As for implementing codification in the media, Foata (2005) claims that, for Corsican, “les productions radiophoniques illustrent les différents facteurs extralinguistiques auxquels on peut référer la variation linguistique […]”.6

2.2.4 Functional elaboration Functional elaboration is presented in fourth place in Haugen’s (1983) standardization model, but it can be undertaken as soon as the standardization process begins because the extension of the uses of the language being standardized entails new communicative needs. From a broader general perspective, the works of Heinemann (2011) for the elaboration of Friulian, Segura Malagón (2010) for Aragonese, and the efforts of the SPELL team to develop a standardized grammar and spelling for Ladin, must be highlighted. Concerning elaboration in the mass media, the fundamental reference for Catalan is the research group Llengua i Mèdia at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (http://filcat.uab.cat/llenguaimedia), which has been working on fiction and nonfiction genres (see Bassols/Segarra 2009). As regards non-fiction, in Catalan there is the book-length issue of Quaderns del Consell de l’Audiovisual de Catalunya (2007). Reinke/Ostiguy (2005), analysing the literature on this topic, conclude that written media by and large follow the prescriptive model, whereas spoken media admit a lot of ‘colloquial’ features, which is controversial. As for fiction, the most important problem for Catalan is to set up a colloquial register for fiction without too much interference from Spanish (Izard 1999; Jornades sobre llengua i creació literària 1991; Bassols/Segarra 2009). Regarding French, Gasquet-Cyrus (2013) analyses the efforts some writers have made to represent speech in literature. With respect to functional elaboration in translation and in dubbing, in Catalan there is the miscellaneous work edited by Díaz Fouces/García González/Costa (2002), in which the reflections of Alsina (2002) stand out. Due to its social impact, the daily bilingual Catalan-Spanish edition of two of the most important newspapers in Catalonia must also be highlighted (cf. Fité 2000). Moving to the relationship between norm and translation, Ainaud/Espunya/Pujol (2003) is a key reference. As for studies on dubbing, Zabalbeascoa (1993) must be mentioned and, regarding subtitling, Bartoll (2012). Finally, works on the translation of colloquial fiction are Andújar/Brumme

6 No page numbers are available in the electronic version of the article.

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(2010) and Cunillera Domènech/Resinger (2011). An instance of an analysis of a writer’s style is Pérez-Saldanya (2008).

2.2.5 Implementation of different codifications for the same language As we have seen in section 2.2.2, several languages are standardized on a pluricentric basis. Besides this situation, there is the fact that, when solutions are urgently needed, mass media language advisers (as Costa 1996b explains) may resolve issues in an ad hoc, provisional manner. However, given that some of these media have easily accessible websites, they can become sources of information for many speakers. The consequence of this is that private norms become public norms, resulting in a great deal of confusion. Costa (2008) compares a corpus of three different Catalan newspapers and concludes that the gap between this corpus and normative grammar and any normative dictionary is nonetheless not too wide. The situation in Quebec is explained by Reinke/Ostiguy (2005). Regarding Occitan, Lamuela (2011–2012, 44–45) explains that there is an explicit norm for Languedocian (1935) and one for Aranese. Ruzica (2006, 6) outlines the situation of Aromanian.  

2.2.6 Codification updating Once a language is standardized, updating is required whenever a significant gap between language use and the norm appears. In this sense, Ramos Corrada (2009, 106) points out that “el proceso de estandarización y actualización de una lengua no concluye nunca”. As for Catalan, Pla (2010) proposes an adaptation of the norm to colloquial speech, even if this leads to regional standardizations. Regarding contemporary Italian, Cerruti (2011, 13–14) and Cerruti/Regis (2014, 86) describe what seems to be a non-explicit “restandardization process […] caused by the mutual interrelation between spoken and written language […]. This new emerging standard variety […] is termed ‘neo-standard Italian’”. These scholars apply concepts and methodologies like Coșeriu’s dialect classification, contact linguistics, sociolinguistics (mainly Labovian), sociology of language, folk linguistics and perceptual dialectology. Iacobini/ Masini (2011) ask for the “verbi sintagmici” to be included in the “norma grammaticalizzante”, as they belong to the Italian “system” (in Coșeriu’s sense). In relation to Peruvian Spanish, Escobar (2014), following Weinreich/Labov/Herzog (1968), assumes that the study of language change “consiste en el estudio de la formación de nuevas normas lingüísticas”, and she presents a case of change from below that should be accepted in codification.

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2.2.7 Stylistic variation within codification This section refers to either synonymy in official dictionaries or polymorphism in prescriptive grammars, functional elaboration not being treated here. The most salient concept in this field is diaglossia. Cerruti/Regis (2014, 86) specify that diaglossia (Auer 2005; cf. also Bellmann 1997; dilalia in Berruto 1989) seems to represent the most widespread type of linguistic repertoire; indeed, in a diaglossic repertoire, “the standard variety may […] increasingly tolerate regional features” (Auer 2005, 25). Cerruti/Regis think (ibid., 27) that this “may also be applied to the ‘circumstantial’ developments of Piedmontese”. Works sharing this perspective are, for Catalan, IEC (2001a; 2001b), which explain that stylistic variation is applied in its “proposals for a spoken standard”, and IEC (2016), which explains that it is applied in its grammar. For Asturian, the Academia de la Llingua Asturiana (2001, 10) also adopts this perspective. As for Italian, Cerruti (2011, 13–14; cf. also Scaglione’s forthcoming publication) states that the emerging “neo-standard” rests upon a “fuzzy categorization of the concept of standard language itself”.

2.2.8 The relationship between language practices, language beliefs and language management Language management is needed when there is a conflict between community members’ practices and their or others’ beliefs. In this sense, Guerini (2011, 109–110) researches “language policy and ideology in present-day Italy by adopting a domain approach, i.e. an approach examining the interrelation among language practices, language beliefs and language management activities in specific domains of language use” (Spolsky 2009; cf. also ↗18 The languages and dialects of Italy). Guerini’s conclusion (2011, 119–120) is that “Italo-Romance dialects came to be associated with lack of education, linguistic deprivation and low socio-economic status, thereby instilling feelings of linguistic insecurity (Labov 1966) and inferiority in those who could not master a spoken variety of Italian”.

2.2.9 Polymorphism in language codification As linguistics provides a better knowledge of linguistic reality than traditional grammar, works upon how prescription should manage variation have appeared. For Catalan, Solà et al. (2002) is a three-volume attempt at an exhaustive description of all the Catalan standard varieties. Dessì Schmid (2011) thinks that IEC’s El català de l’Alguer: un model d’àmbit restringit [The Catalan of Alghero: a model for a restricted domain 2003] “è […] una risposta che ha finalmente messo da parte sterili diatribe ideologiche, motivazioni irrazionali e ricercato soluzioni equilibrate”. As for Roma-

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nian, Serban (1983, 236) states that “la langue littéraire s’est constituée sur le parler de Valachie, sans en garder toutes les particularités, et tout en profitant d’une remarquable contribution des autres parlers”. Moving to Aragonese, Segura Malagón (2010) proposes that its standardization should be polymorphic.

2.2.10 The relationship between official and non-official codifications As we have seen in section 2.2.5, more than one codification can be implemented for the same language. In the field of the relationship between official and non-official norms, in Catalan IEC (2001a; 2001b) admits that its Philological Section took advantage of the criteria drawn up by several media linguistic advisers and by certain university researchers; and the grammar of the IEC (2016) was produced with the assistance of several grammarians and linguists. Regarding Mauritian Creole, Carpooran (2005, 34) presents a successful attempt to introduce a “graphie harmonieuse” as a result of a “souci de compromis entre les différents codes qui existaient déjà”.  

2.2.11 The Ausbau languages question As Segura Malagón (2010) explains, Ausbau languages are those linguistic systems belonging to a wider diasystem, but which turn out to be considered as independent languages due to an elaboration process carried out by their speech community. Examples of this situation are Galician, for which Monteagudo (2005) and Fernández Rei (2009) provide a very detailed summary of the situation of this language’s standardization, presenting the official “isolationist” policy from Portuguese as well as the opposing view, that of “reintegrationists” towards Portuguese. The case of Moldavian is explained by Bojoga (2005).

2.2.12 Agent prescriptivism and language change: relevant studies In French, Paveau (2000) provides a case of purism that ignores historical change. As for Catalan, Costa (2009) explains how Pompeu Fabra managed language change, always prioritizing the interests of standardization.

2.3 Research in folk prescriptivism Following consideration of agents’ prescriptivism, it is now necessary to turn to folk prescriptivism. Lay people are the target of any kind of intervention on language behaviour, and this is important because they constitute the majority of the population.

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2.3.1 Folk attitudes As a general reflection on this topic, the work of McKenzie/Osthus (2011) merits detailed comment. The authors begin with the assumption that “the collective identification of language diversity largely determines the ways in which individuals regard the categorization of their own (and others) linguistic uses as belonging to a specific social and/or regional variety” (2011, 100). As for methodology, they propose a multidisciplinary approach, combining sophisticated qualitative methods of discourse analysis, social network analysis and linguistic attitude with perceptual dialectology. Another important work on folk language attitudes is Cavanaugh (2013), which deals with the attitudes of Bergamasco (Italy) speakers. Working within the scope of “ethnographic and linguistic anthropological fieldwork” (2013, 46), Cavanaugh concludes that “[Bergamasco] speakers often explicitly and implicitly reflect on their own and others’ language use, linking certain ways of speaking to specific types of cultural, socioeconomic, and political selves”. However, “speakers’ attitudes towards language do not easily predict their language use”. An essential conclusion of this work is that “familiar axes of language evaluation based on prestige versus authenticity, or status versus solidarity […] frame language discussions in Bergamo” (Cavanaugh 2013, 50). In the Spanish domain, Méndez García de Paredes (2008, 1372) describes how folk norms and attitudes have been established implicitly. Villena-Ponsoda/Vida Castro (2003) assess the effect of social prestige on speech variation in Spanish from the South of Spain on the basis of optimality theory and Labov’s variationism (1994). Marcos Marín (1983, 439) makes an interesting comment to explain why “la reforma nunca ha sido absolutamente impuesta”; “el problema es también de tipo educativo: [l]a confusión de la enseñanza de la lengua con la de la gramática puede tener buena parte de la culpa”. In 2014, Fernández-Juncal/Amorós-Negre gave a test to some university students asking them to judge the correctness of certain items on a differentiation semantic scale and relate a number of social variables to the answers. The main result (Fernández-Juncal/Amorós-Negre 2014, 250–251) was that “existe esa propensión a juzgar los fenómenos de lengua en términos dicotómicos”. These findings provide a very interesting comment on how ideology is spread (ibid., 251). As for Catalan, Costa/Labèrnia (2014) and Costa (2015) are yet to fully analyse the results of a similar type of test given to 26 university students. Regarding Portuguese, Carvalho/Cabecinhas/Magalhães (2014) present an analysis of the representations of Brazilian and Portuguese university students of the Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement, using the methodology of focus groups. Gonçalves (2005) provides a very clear account of the sociolinguistic situation of Mozambican Portuguese. As for Galician, Sánchez Rei (2011, 122, 153) argues that speakers associate “a process of increased uniformity” with a “well-established” language. He goes on to note that most of them overstate the distance between their

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varieties and the codified variety (ibid., 532), and then develop negative attitudes to the latter. A similar situation pertains for Rumantsch Grischun; Hack (2011), for example, discovers that its codification is not accepted by Romansh people. As for Asturian, Ramos Corrada (2009, 101, 106) explains how its users feel uncomfortable with its codification. In the case of Italian, Cardinaletti/Munaro (2011, 9) describe how Paolo Chinelatto (2011) gave a test of acceptability to twenty individuals according to their age and to what they spoke (Italian/dialect) and concluded that “alcune strutture del dialetto veneto siano ormai interpretate in italiano non come la traduzione del dialetto con parole italiane, ma come nuove strutture italiane di un registro parlato colloquiale”. The study carried out by Cheshire/Nortier/Adger (2015) is a pioneering examination of ‘ethnolects’ (including French) but provides few references to folk attitudes towards them.

2.3.2 Purism The Corsican situation is dealt with by Jaffe (2005), who notes that “la relation entre un corse ‘traditionnel’ et un corse qui est en voie d’élaboration”, with the aim to “montrer […] la manière dont [les pratiques langagières dans les médias] sont évaluées par les auditeurs, [et] éclairer le sens social de la variation linguistique dans des situations de revitalization des langues minorées”.7 Working within the framework of the “anthropologie linguistique de la ‘performance’ et la sociologie interactionnelle d’Erving Goffman”, she got Corsicans to “écouter une série d’enregistrements des informations corses”, seeking to “noter leurs réactions et évaluations”. Due to the observer’s paradox, she considers she had “un succès mitigé”. Her main conclusions were that there existed: “ambivalences […] issues de la même idéologie puriste. Cette idéologie […] donne lieu […] à des jugements métalinguistiques du genre ‘c’est un gallicisme, et donc pas du bon corse’. Mais ce purisme se trouve aussi à l’origine des critiques des néologismes: là, il s’agit d’une image figée d’un corse pur qui n’existait que dans le passé. Dans tous les cas de figure, on conçoit les langues comme des entités à frontières fixes – que ce soit historiquement ou structurellement”.

2.3.3 Dialect convergence In the Sardinian domain, Marzo (2011, 118), having determined that there was a failure to establish a standard variety, states that, in spite of that, “les Sardes du Nord et les

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Sardes du Sud[,] lorsqu’ils se parlent en sarde, ils convergent dans leurs manières de s’exprimer”. The explanation offered is the principle of “convergence naturelle”.

2.3.4 Attitudes towards “new speakers” Mayeux (2015, 3) “is a corpus-based study of the morphosyntax of N[ew] S[peaker] L[anguage] of Louisiana Creole”. He states (ibid, 10) that “empirical studies of the nature of new speaker language remain scarce”, and refers to Jaffe (2005) as one of the most salient pioneers in the study of the attitudes traditional speakers have towards NSL.

3 Final remarks The aim of this chapter has been to show the breadth and originality of current research on variation and prescriptivism in relation to the Romance languages. We have tried to cover as many different Romance varieties as possible, with particular attention to the linguae minores. Key to the chapter has been a consideration of how prescriptivism deals with variation and the effect of prescriptivism on the language, i.e. prescriptivist reaction to diversity, change and contact. Since it is impossible to give an exhaustive account of every study on all Romance languages, we began by discussing methodologies, definitions (especially that of prescriptivism), provided an overview of work being done, and then offered some more detailed case studies. This account has been structured following the four steps of Haugen’s (1983) standardization model and the separation of speakers into agents, theorists and lay users. The result is a presentation of various relevant studies focusing on different Romance languages. Moreover, what is true for a certain language can frequently be applied to others. We have also tried to offer an overview of the motivations, assumptions, hypotheses, ends, theoretical frameworks, methodologies and results of the studies dealing with the relationship between variation and prescriptivism. In the end, if we have chosen to devote more space to the prescriptivism of agents and theorists (and particularly to the former), it is because they emerge as responsible for the diffusion of prescriptive behaviours and attitudes.

4 Bibliography Academia de la Llingua Asturiana (2001), Gramática de la llingua asturiana, Uviéu, Academia de la Llingua Asturiana. Ainaud, Jordi/Espunya, Anna/Pujol, Dídac (2003), Manual de traducció anglès-català, Vic, Eumo.

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Serban, Felicia (1983), Modernisation de la langue roumaine, in: István Fodor/Claude Hagège (edd.), Language Reform: History and Future/La Réforme des langues: Histoire et avenir/Sprachreform: Geschichte und Zukunft, vol. 3, Hamburg, Buske, 219–238. Servisc de Planificazion y Elaborazion dl Lingaz Ladin (2015), Undici tesi per una politica linguistica interladina, in: http://www.spell-termles.ladinia.net/11teses-it.htm (last access 31.08.2016). Sinner, Carsten (2004), El castellano de Cataluña. Estudio empírico de aspectos léxicos, morfosintácticos, pragmáticos y metalingüísticos, Tübingen, Niemeyer. Solà, Joan, et al. (edd.) (2002), Gramàtica del català contemporani, Barcelona, Empúries. Spolsky, Bernard (2009), Language Management, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Subirats, Andreu (2000), La variació lingüística i l’aprenentatge de la llengua, in: Jornades de la secció filològica de l’IEC a Tortosa (4 i 5 de juny de 1999), Barcelona, Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 29–38. Subirats Rüggerberg, Carlos (2014), ¿Qué hace una lengua como el español en una Academia como ésta? La institucionalización del atraso en la lingüística española, in: Klaus Zimmermann (ed.), Prácticas y políticas lingüísticas. Nuevas variedades, normas, actitudes y perspectivas, Madrid, Iberoamericana, 105–128. Sumien, Domergue (2006), La Standardisation pluricentrique de l’occitan: Nouvel enjeu sociolinguistique, développement du lexique et de la morphologie, Turnhout, Brepols. Treballs de Sociolingüística Catalana (2010), Llengua i ensenyament 20. Van Dijk, Teun A. (1998), Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach, London, Sage. Vann, Robert E. (2009), Materials for the Sociolinguistic Description and Corpus-Based Study of Spanish in Barcelona: Toward a Documentation of Colloquial Spanish in Naturally Occurring Groups, Lewiston, Mellen Press. Vila, F. Xavier (2010), La recerca sociolingüística educativa escolar als països de llengua catalana: elements per a un balanç, Treballs de Sociolingüística Catalana 20, 202–221. Villena-Ponsoda, Juan Andrés/Vida Castro, Matilde (2003), The Effect of Social Prestige on Reversing Phonological Changes: Universal Constraints on Speech Variation in Southern Spanish, in: Lena Bergström Gunnarsson et al. (edd.), Language Variation in Europe, Uppsala, Uppsala University, 432–443. Weinreich, Uriel/Labov, William/Herzog, Marvin I. (edd.) (1968), Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change, Austin, University of Texas Press. Williams, Glyn (1999), Sociology, in: Joshua A. Fishman (ed.), Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 164–180. Zabalbeascoa, Patrick (1993), Developing Translation Studies to Better Account for Audiovisual Texts and Other New Forms of Text Production: With Special Attention to the TV3 Version of “Yes, Minister”, doctoral thesis, Lleida, University of Lleida.  

Medium, register, text type, genre

Janice Carruthers

12 Oral genres: concepts and complexities Abstract: This chapter explores the notion of “genre” in the oral medium. Despite the importance of style and of situational factors in sociolinguistics, genre has not been central to sociolinguistic debate, particularly as regards spoken discourse. Moreover, most research on oral genres relates to the English language: with the exception of Spanish, the Romance languages have not featured strongly. After a discussion of theoretical and methodological issues, the core of this chapter will explore the complexities around the concept of “oral genres” through a series of case studies from French. Analysing a range of features across several corpora of different varieties of oral French, it will focus, in particular, on the notion of “hybridity”, widely acknowledged as a core property of spoken genres, and on the relationship between genre, register and medium. The chapter will end with a discussion of future avenues for research.  

Keywords: orality, oral genres, medium, register, hybridity  

1 Introduction This chapter explores the concepts and complexities associated with the notion of “genre”, with particular reference to genre in the oral medium. The vast bulk of research on oral genres focuses on the English language; the Romance languages feature much less in published work, although there has been considerable research more recently on Spanish. Moreover, despite the fact that, as we shall see, the notion of genre has social and situational factors at its core, it has not featured prominently in sociolinguistic research. As Biber and Conrad point out (2009, 264), it is mainly the concept of “style” that has been applied to situational variation in quantitative studies and its Labovian application in variationist work has been primarily concerned with “the differences among the spoken tasks included as part of a sociolinguistic interview (e.g. telling a personal narrative, providing personal demographic information, and reading word lists)”. Biber and Conrad also point to a highly problematic issue which has undoubtedly contributed to the marginalization of genre in sociolinguistics, i.e. the fact that sociolinguistic variables are assumed, albeit not unproblematically, to be semantically equivalent (e.g. two phonological realizations of the same phoneme), whereas genre-related differences are, by definition, semantically meaningful. As Biber and Conrad put it, “these choices are explicitly not meaning preserving, and they are explicitly functional” (2009, 265). These functional underpinnings of genre-related features will be in evidence throughout the chapter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-013

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Section 2 will give an overview of some of the key theoretical approaches to categorizing and analysing genre from a linguistic perspective, while section 3 will focus on the concept of genre in the spoken medium and the specific complexities that arise, the latter acting as the springboard for the research questions (end of section 3) and the detailed analysis in sections 4 and 5. Both sections 2 and 3 will contextualize research on genre in French and Spanish. Sections 4 and 5 respond to the research questions through a series of case studies from French: data from four oral corpora will be used, including conversational spoken French, sports commentary, traditional oral narrative and new storytelling.1 Section 4 will explore in depth the question of hybridity in the oral medium, asking what it might mean in this context and what the consequences are for the concept of “oral genres”. Finally, section 5 will examine the complex interface between genre and medium, looking at specific linguistic features (notably temporal and negative structures) and asking how they might correlate with questions of genre and/or medium. Section 6 offers some conclusions and future research directions.  

 

 

 

2 Defining, categorizing and analysing “genre” The impetus for many of the issues currently under discussion in research on genre can be traced back to Bakhtin and his seminal paper on speech genres, in which he states: “we speak only in definite speech genres, that is, all our utterances have definite and relatively stable forms of construction of the whole […]. We learn to cast our speech in generic forms and, when hearing others’ speech, we guess its genre from the very first words […]. If speech genres did not exist and we had not mastered them […] speech communication would be almost impossible” (1986, 78–79).

The core properties of speech genres emerge clearly from Bakhtin’s comments. First, speech genres are rooted in communicative situations: they are sets of linguistic conventions which are deployed in particular communicative contexts and understood cognitively as appropriate to that context by all parties involved in the communication. Second, speech genres involve linguistic forms: there are distinctive linguistic patterns in a given speech genre. Third, there is a certain stability in the linguistic forms: it is the fact that the linguistic patterns occur on a regular basis in particular situational contexts that consolidates the speech genre as something we recognize as such. Although Bakhtin’s influence more broadly is probably most strongly felt in literary studies rather than in linguistics, his definition of speech genres captures the key components in virtually all subsequent theories: both situational and linguistic factors are crucial and “genre” involves the correlation between the two.

1 For details on the corpora see note 18.

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Beyond these core properties of speech genres, there is little agreement on other aspects of their definition, categorization and analysis. This is, at least in part, due to the “extreme heterogeneity” of speech genres, a factor also mentioned by Bakhtin who goes as far as to describe their “wealth and diversity” as “boundless” (1986, 60). This generic heterogeneity arises in part from the limitless nature of the communicative contexts involved and highlights the fundamental tension at the heart of the notion of genre, i.e. that genres are simultaneously stable and fluid. The regularities, both situational and linguistic, are what make them stable, but their inherent heterogeneity points equally towards fluidity. In terms of the definition of genre, this tension raises problematic issues which affect every level of the discussion, including the categorization of genres, the terminology deployed, and the nature of the linguistic features that can be said to correlate with particular situational contexts. In the literature on the subject, genres are rarely defined exclusively in terms of extremely broad categories; the dominant trend is towards specificity, although most models allow for the possibility of having broader categories with multiple sub-categories. As this theoretical and definitional eclecticism would suggest, there is no single dominant theory of genre, and certainly no dominant approach in the case of the Romance languages. Given that it is not possible here to cover a wide range of theoretical approaches, this discussion is necessarily selective, focusing on one major international theory and one which has been particularly influential in the case of French, the language at the heart of the analysis in sections 4 and 5. Internationally, the most influential figure is unquestionably Douglas Biber (Biber 1988; Biber/Conrad 2009), whose theoretical framework and multidimensional methodology have been adopted worldwide. The overwhelming majority of research in this framework has been carried out on English but Biber’s work has also strongly influenced research on one of the Romance languages, i.e. Spanish – peninsular, Latin American and as a “heritage language” in the USA.2 Indeed, the vast bulk of research on genre in Spanish is strongly influenced by Biber. It is important to note from the outset that, as far as terminology is concerned, Biber uses the term “register” for the concept that most linguists consider to be “genre”.3 For Biber, as for most researchers working in the field, register-genre has two key components – a situational context and a set of linguistic features (lexical and/or grammatical). The linguistic features are not only statistically correlated with the situational context but they are also “functional”, in that they have particular communicative purposes that are associated with the communicative goals of the discourse. For Biber and Conrad,

2 See also Biber/Conrad (2009, 256–260) for a discussion of Korean and Somali. 3 For Biber and Conrad, genre concerns the whole text (as opposed to register which can apply only to sections of the text) and involves construction features that often occur only once in the text, e.g. Biber/Conrad (2009, 17) cite the example of a business letter which has a particular set of opening and closing conventions. All instances of Biber’s concept of “register” used in the same sense as “genre” elsewhere will be labelled “register-genre” for the purposes of this chapter.

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the situational characteristics are more basic than the linguistic ones and embrace a wide range of elements (see Figure 1), some of which concern questions of medium (oral vs written discourse) and composition (e.g. narrative vs description vs elaboration etc. – see section 4 below; see also ↗13 Register and text type):  

 

Figure 1: Situational Characteristics of Registers and Genres (Biber/Conrad 2009, 40)  

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So, for example, in terms of the statistical correlation of linguistic features with situational factors, adjectives and stative verbs are associated with discourse where the communicative purpose is “description”; noun-noun sequences, prepositional phrases and past and present participial clauses are associated with the communicative purpose of condensing information; vague nouns, hedges, pronouns, contractions, ellipsis, repairs and incomplete utterances are associated with the production circumstances of real-time discourse; possibility adverbs, personal pronouns and mental (thinking) or desire verbs are associated with a “personal stance” (Biber/ Conrad 2009, 68). Particular linguistic features can be firmly associated with a particular register-genre when the grammatical or lexical features can be said to be both pervasive (in the sense of occurring throughout the discourse) and frequent (ibid., 53). Biber’s methodology also allows him to consider particular sets of cooccurring linguistic features as characteristic of particular “dimensions” (e.g. oral vs literate discourse, procedural vs content-focused discourse, narrative vs non-narrative discourse), with polarities at either end of each continuum-based dimension and the possibility of scoring different register-genres for their strength on a particular dimension. This in turn allows Biber to measure the correlation of different linguistic factors with different dimensions, whether in a general corpus (Biber 1988) or within more specialized register-genres, such as “newspapers” or “university registers” (Biber/Conrad 2009). Within university register-genres, for example, the “positive” end of the “procedural vs content-focused” dimension (i.e. strongly procedural discourse) is characterized by the co-occurrence of modals, verbs of causation and activity, 2nd person pronouns, group nouns, to-clauses that are controlled by particular verbs, and conditional adverbial clauses; the negative end of the continuum (i.e. more content-focused discourse) is characterized by the co-occurrence of rare technical terminology, verbs marking simple occurrence, adjectives denoting size, toclauses controlled by probability verbs and passives (Biber/Conrad 2009, 228). Note that in Biber’s approach, there is no absolute distinction between speech and writing: there are differences between more oral and more literate register-genres but the multidimensional nature of the model means that some features of particular registergenres can be shared across oral and written varieties, while others are particularly frequent in register-genres that are distinctly oral rather than written (or vice versa). Amongst the Romance languages, as noted above, it is Spanish that has been explored through multidimensional analysis, inspired by Biber’s approach. This research has focused on a wide range of register-genres. For example, Biber/TracyVentura (2007) discuss eleven spoken and nine written genres, ranging from face-toface and telephone conversations to fiction and encyclopaedias. Other studies focus on particular register-genres; for example, Parodi (2007b) explores 65 linguistic features across three corpora of technical and non-technical discourse, while Ciapuscio (2007) looks at spoken academic discourse genres and Parodi’s (2010a) volume contains a series of chapters on different academic genres – both written and oral – across a range of disciplines (e.g. Parodi 2010b; 2010c). The comparative dimension

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opened up by this research on Spanish has allowed discussion of the question of possible linguistic universals relating to genre. For example, Biber/Tracy-Ventura (2007) point to the emerging universal dimension of “narrative discourse”, both written and oral, where certain linguistic features are attested across languages, notably the use of two particular past tenses (preterite and imperfect) alongside 3rd person pronouns and adverbials. Equally importantly, this research has also brought out certain features that are distinctive in particular languages. For example, “informational reports of past events” is a dimension which has a specialized function and is linguistically distinctive in Spanish, involving a preterite which occurs with nominal features associated with an informational focus (e.g. proper nouns); similarly, the way in which spoken irrealis discourse functions in Spanish is distinctive and directly related to the structural position of the subjunctive in the language. Biber’s is thus a highly flexible model, with the capacity for both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Register-genre is never fixed: rather, a set of situational criteria and continuum-based dimensions allows different parameters to be combined for particular types of discourse and linguistic correlations to be measured accordingly, creating the possibility of mapping out the linguistic characteristics of register-genres, whether the latter are broad or narrow, and comparing them across languages. In other models, the focus is distinctly textual and centred on compositional components in different types of text. In the francophone tradition, one of the most influential textual models is that of Jean-Michel Adam (Adam 1999; 2005; 2011; Adam/Heidmann, 2006). Adam/Heidmann (2006) argue that every discourse participates in the notion of genre. More precisely, Adam and Heidmann opt for the terms “genericity” and “genericity effects”, reflecting the fluidity and creativity of the concept of genre: genericity informs all texts and most are heterogeneous, containing more than one genre. As for Bakhtin and Biber, the socio-situational context of the discourse is of key importance for Adam – genres are normative practices, both socially and cognitively: “le caractère relativement stable et normé des genres est une des conditions de possibilité des interactions socio-discursives et du fonctionnement de la langue en discours” (Adam/Heidmann 2006, 27). Adam also stresses the dynamic and fluid nature of genres which is reflected in his articulation of the linguistic regularities as “faisceaux de régularité” (2001, 14) rather than fixed sets of features, and the genres created as closer to “airs de famille” than to straightforwardly prototypical textual forms. One of the most significant elements of Adam’s approach is his incorporation of the notion of compositional sequences (“séquences”) into the characterization of genre (2001, 16–19). Throughout his work, Adam has deployed the concept of five different types of sequence – or series of clauses – to characterize different units of text. Adam posits sequences that are narrative, descriptive, argumentative, explicative and dialogal, each with different linguistic and textual properties. These have a great deal in common with – but are not exactly the same as – what Carlota Smith terms “discourse modes” (2003), which she labels Narrative, Report, Description,

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Information and Argument, each of which has a particular set of linguistic properties. Sequences also share properties with Segmented Discourse Representation Theory’s “discourse relations”, such as Narration, Explanation, Elaboration, Occasion, Result (Lascarides/Asher 2003), where clauses are said to have a particular discourse relation with a previous “site” in the discourse. Sequences, therefore, concern larger units of discourse and not just the occurrence of particular grammatical or lexical features. For Adam, use of particular configurations of sequences can form an important part of the linguistic patterning characteristic of a particular genre, although this is not compulsory. Thus, for example, a fictional narrative is likely to contain substantial quantities of narrative sequences and, in all probability, significant quantities of descriptive sequences.4 Adam’s influence is most strongly felt in the francophone sphere and in literary studies; I will draw on his concept of “sequences” in section 4.1 below.  

3 Oral genres The majority of publications on genre relate to written forms of language but spoken genres have increasingly formed part of the debate over the last ten to fifteen years, particularly as larger numbers of digitized oral corpora become available. As with work on genre more generally, much of the published research on spoken genres relates to English, but both French and Spanish have also featured. Research drawing on Biber’s multidimensional approach tends to analyse both oral and written genres and the oral genres explored in relation to Spanish include, as mentioned in section 2, technical and non-technical discourse (Parodi 2007b), spoken academic genres, including formal lectures and interviews as well as popular science talk (Ciapuscio 2007), and a range of widely-attested spoken genres such as face-toface conversation, debates, telephone conversations and interviews, amongst others (Biber et al. 2006; Davies 2007; Biber/Tracy-Ventura 2007). Amongst the oral genres explored in French, from a variety of different theoretical perspectives, are sports commentaries (Deulofeu 2000; Bres 2007), TV news programmes (Gadet 2007), radio interviews (Anderson 2007), radio political interviews (Blasco/Cappeau 2012), and teleshopping programmes (Fèvre-Pernet 2007). In certain cases, rather than focusing on the correlation of sets of pervasive linguistic features as multidimensional approaches do, research on oral genres explores the marked use of particular linguistic features in particular genres, in some cases comparing these in terms of frequency to other genres. Thus, for example, Branca-Rosoff (1999) identifies “micro-particularités de langue” in specific genres,  

4 See Adam (2001) for a discussion of the compositional features of a range of “textes qui disent de/ comment faire”.

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e.g. the frequent use, for particular purposes, of prepositional phases such as compte tenu de or suite à in social workers’ administrative reports. Ciapuscio (2007) examines particular lexico-grammatical markers of epistemic modality in “disseminating science” talks in Spanish, which play a crucial role in conveying both the individual’s epistemic value judgments and those of the scientific community. For both Deulofeu (2000) and Blasco/Cappeau (2012), statistics on specific linguistic features in particular genres are compared with those in other types of discourse in order to be certain that they can be attributed to a given genre. So, for example, Deulofeu comments that the syntactic structures that are characteristic of sports commentary (see 4.2 below) have a particular function in that genre and occur more frequently than in conversational French or other types of television discourse: “le reportage sportif télévisé ne révèle pas de structures syntaxiques spécifiques, mais bien des usages particuliers de structures attestées par ailleurs” (2000, 295). And in proposing that radio political interviews can be said to constitute a genre, Blasco/Cappeau (2012) analyse the use of distinctive linguistic features to achieve particular effects, such as attenuation or distance (e.g. pairs of conjunctions such as car vs parce que, par contre vs en revanche, un certain nombre de vs plusieurs or beaucoup de). Crucially, Blasco/Cappeau compare statistically the distribution of these features in oral political interviews to their use in oral French more generally (using the Corpus de Référence du Français Parlé), and to their use in a written corpus of political speeches and in written journalistic political discourse, concluding that “le français parlé en contexte politico-médiatique se constitue bien en empruntant des traits à la parole privée (rarement), à la parole publique (assez régulièrement) et à l’écrit” (Blasco/Cappeau 2012, 39). In other cases, the use of particular features is compared across different types of genres or across different media: Sánchez-Muñoz (2007) examines the use of discourse particles such as like/ como in three different oral genres (conversation, interviews and oral presentations) in the context of Spanish as a heritage language in the USA where it is in contact with English; Sedano (2007) compares the use of simple and compound futures in Spanish across the written press and interactive conversation, looking at the relationship between choice of future form and factors such as the expression of epistemic modality and temporal distance; and Davies (2007) shows how the subjunctive in Spanish is used more frequently in conversation and in fiction relative to other genres, due to the “people-oriented” nature of these genres and the widespread expression of feelings and attitudes. In terms of theoretical models of how oral genres operate and the particular complexities that arise, one of the most important models has been developed by researchers working on conversational analysis in French, i.e. Kerbrat-Orecchioni/ Traverso (2004). They distinguish two types of genre which they label G1 and G2. G1 concerns the socio-situational context of a speech act, the “événements de communication ou types d’interaction” (2004, 43) and encompasses “catégories de textes plus ou moins institutionnalisées dans une société donnée” (2004, 42), such as a dinner party, a reality TV show, or a job interview. G2 is more abstract and concerns

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“types de discours, ou mieux, d’activités discursives” and is characterized by “certains traits de nature rhétorico-pragmatique, ou relevant de leur organisation discursive” (2004, 42), including questions of composition (e.g. narration, description etc.), pragmatic categories such as “complaints”, “greetings”, “routines” and “scripts”, as well as the use of very specific linguistic features such as particular tenses, connectors or other syntactic structures. In other words, while the focus of G1 is socio-situational (external), the focus of G2 is fundamentally linguistic (internal) and in that sense, Kerbrat-Orecchioni and Traverso’s definition reflects the core features of genre we have already seen in other definitions. G1s are composed of G2s, although a given G2 can constitute an entire, generically homogeneous G1. One of the most striking features noted by Kerbrat-Orecchioni and Traverso as characteristic of much oral discourse is the very high level of generic hybridity, or “métissage générique”, relative to written genres. This is particularly true in terms of precisely how a given example of a G1 is composed of different G2s but it is also the case that in the context of natural discourse, a G1 itself can be a fluid concept, open to changing category in the course of a given communication.5 This is particularly the case, but by no means exclusively, where communication involves spontaneous interaction between people, where the direction of the interaction can be unpredictable. Generic hybridity also interacts in complex ways with questions of medium, “niveau de langue” (or level of formality), questions of attitude/point of view, and the spontaneity versus preparedness of the discourse. These sets of relations can be extremely complex in some varieties of oral discourse, particularly where a straightforward oral-written divide is not applicable. For example, in the case of Television News (Journal Télévisé), Gadet (2007) shows convincingly the linguistic fluctuation between the prompted sections of the discourse (which may indeed be read from a script) and the natural, spontaneous sections, where the news presenter enters into an exchange with an interviewee or a journalist. As a result, the hybridity of the discourse demonstrates linguistic elements of both informal, natural spoken language (e.g. fillers such as hein, donc, bon, ben, as well as high levels of syntactic detachment) and also elements of more formal, even written discourse, such as high levels of negative ne- retention or even stereotypical prefabricated phrases that would not normally emerge in natural discourse (e.g. “opération de charme”, “aller sur le terrain” – Gadet 2007, 235). Indeed, this fluctuation and hybridity is very much the desired outcome in the case of the television news, where a programme based on a prepared script is made more appealing to the public by the introduction of apparently ‘natural’ discourse. There can also be fluctuation at the level of the speaker’s attitude or point of view which produces significant differences in linguistic patterning (see, for example, Bilger/Cappeau 2004; Anderson 2007) and in any case, most conversation is very

5 See also Bilger/Cappeau (2004).

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much the outcome of an unplanned negotiation process in terms of exchange and turn-taking.6 In the light of the issues discussed above around the concept of genre and the particular complexities regarding genre in oral discourse, I propose in this chapter not to apply a particular model to a particular genre, or to compare genres, but rather to explore in depth, through a series of case studies from French, two under-researched aspects of the complexity of oral genres. First, in section 4, I will explore the nature of generic hybridity in the oral medium: what is generic hybridity? How does it interact with questions of spontaneity versus planned discourse? To what extent is hybridity a result of natural exchange? Or is it a key component of the definition of a particular genre, and therefore in some respects, planned? Second, section 5 will ask: how do linguistic features at Kerbrat-Orecchioni and Traverso’s G2 level interact with questions of medium (e.g. degree of orality or the relation with written discourse) and with “niveau de langue” (level of formality)? It is hoped that the issues raised in these case studies could act as a catalyst for future research on the hybridity of oral genres in other Romance languages, complementing the research on Spanish inspired by Biber’s approach and generating new analyses of other oral varieties of Romance.  

 

4 Hybridity in oral genres In this section, I propose to explore the nature of generic hybridity in two different types of oral discourse. The first could be classed broadly as “conversation” (Biber/ Conrad 2009), or more narrowly as a “conversational narrative of personal experience”: the discourse always relates to the speaker’s personal experience, is dominated by one speaker (there is little exchange between speakers) and is centred on events in the speaker’s past, such as memories of earlier parts of his/her life, narratives of travel or tales of wartime events. My observations in relation to conversational narrative of personal experience are based on a corpus of narratives drawn from CORPAIX and the more detailed qualitative analysis relates to two extracts from CORPAIX published in Blanche-Benveniste/Rouget/Sabio (2002), i.e. La Fleuriste and Le Saumon.7 The sports commentary data are drawn from a corpus of radio and television rugby commentary (Thompson 2012).

6 See Kerbrat-Orecchioni/Traverso (2004) for a discussion of how conversational exchange and turntaking relates to the concept of genre. 7 Data from CORPAIX were collected with kind permission from the late Prof. Claire Blanche-Benveniste. Full details can be found in Carruthers (2005).

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4.1 Conversational narratives of personal experience The compositional hybridity of this type of oral discourse is already well established (Laforest/Vincent 1996; Vincent 1996; Carruthers 2011) but the nature of that hybridity has not yet been explored. It relates primarily to the distribution of sections of discourse that can be labelled “Story” and those that can be labelled “Report”.8 Both involve accounts of events in the past but they differ in a number of important respects.9 Structurally, Stories tend to follow a particular pattern, articulated first by Labov/ Waletzky (1967), involving an Orientation (which sets the descriptive context), a Complication (the heart of the story), a Peak, an Evaluation (the point of the story) and a Resolution. The Evaluation is particularly important, as it constitutes the reason why the story is told, or in Labovian terms, its ‘recountabililty’. Stories tend also to have performance features such as laughter, noises, and substantial quantities of direct speech. They are dominated by narrative clauses (“séquences narratives” in Adam’s terms (see section 2 above)), with a default order of temporal sequence and a high use of parataxis or connectors that are compatible with sequence, though rarely connectors that explicitly mark sequence, precisely because sequence is assumed by the listener. Events on the narrative line are related anaphorically to each other and there is well-attested tense-switching between past and present tenses which creates particular expressive, textual, expressive and metalinguistic effects in the discourse (see Fleischman 1990; Carruthers 2005). Reports, on the other hand, are structured episodically, with one episode succeeding another without a sense of a narrative peak or an evaluation. If the episodes succeed each other temporally, then connectors such as après, puis or ensuite are normally used to mark temporal sequence, while within episodes, there is a wide range of sequences, discourse relations and modes, including narrative, description, argumentation, elaboration and information, with events situated deictically in relation to the moment of speech, rather than anaphorically in relation to each other, as is the case with Stories. Most past events are marked using the passé composé.10 In most narratives of personal experience, whether Stories or Reports, there are also significant sections of description: in Stories, these are particularly frequent in Orientation sections, or in embedded Orientation, i.e. descriptive sections that occur outside the opening Orientation section. In Reports, they could occur in any episode and could be short or long.  

8 A variety of terminology can be found in relation to this distinction. I am using Fleischman’s distinction (1990) between “Story” and “Report”. Smith opts for “Narrative” vs “Report” (2003). In French, Bres (1999) uses “récit” vs “témoignage”; Vincent/Perrin (2001) use “récit” and “compterendu”. 9 See Carruthers (2012) for a more detailed discussion. 10 For a fuller discussion, see Carruthers (2012) and Vincent/Perrin (2001).

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In terms of compositional hybridity, the interesting issue with narratives of personal experience is the nature of the alternation between Stories and Reports. Indeed, as has been pointed out (Vincent 1996; Vincent/Perrin 2001; Carruthers 2012), it is more appropriate in the context of conversational discourse to speak of a continuum, with the two polarities representing pure Story and pure Report at either end of the continuum. I would argue that hybridity works in two different, but related ways. First, while it is certainly possible to identify passages that correspond clearly to the definition of Story or Report, these are often embedded in a broader, more heterogeneous discourse context, such that Stories and Reports are juxtaposed within the same conversational narrative of personal experience: this heterogeneity has been explored by Vincent/Perrin (2001) and Carruthers (2012). Second, the more Report features attested in a given discourse, the more complex the issue of hybridity becomes; not only can a discourse contain a mixture of Story and Report segments, but also, the Report episodes themselves can be hybrid in terms of composition, and different hybrid episodes can be juxtaposed with each other. To explore the complexity of this hybridity, I propose to analyse how it operates in two narratives from CORPAIX. The first of these, Le Saumon (4430 words), has strong Story features and is the speaker’s account of his attempts over several years, to catch his first salmon. The second, La Fleuriste (8073 words), is the speaker’s account of years in her former job as a florist in Paris and has strong Report features. In both cases, as we shall see, the nature of the hybridity is variable and complex and goes well beyond the alternation of sections of Story and Report. Despite the strong presence of Story features, Le Saumon is episodic in structure. An introductory section contains both Report and Description and most episodes are then structured around the speaker’s various attempts to catch his first fish. The first two of these begin “première année” and “deuxième année” respectively, in both cases co-occurring with a narrative present (NPR): (1)

je prends ma carte et puis je pêche

(2)

je recommence…[…]…je pêche…

Both episodes begin, therefore, with a Story feature (early use of the NPR: see Carruthers 2005, 47) but both immediately become Reports: e.g. (3) j’ai eu une touche – une touche en trois semaines – c’était pas beaucoup – je l’ai loupée d’ailleurs not least because they constitute unsuccessful attempts on the part of the speaker and therefore there is literally no story to tell, regardless of the fact that in the second episode, there is one Story feature in the form of an NPR with the verb dire. The third episode, beginning “troisième année”, is much more clearly a Story, with a discern-

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ible Complicating Action leading to a Peak (where the narrator catches a fish but loses it) and an Evaluation: (4) quand ça commence mauvais ça finit mauvais. This is followed by a Resolution. There are also widespread Story features such as noises (e.g. paf) and tense switching between the passé composé and narrative present: (5) j’ai senti ses gros coups de tête su- dans cette eau j’ai dit ça y est il est au bout – je bride ce poisson il monte je le vois monter…. In the episode beginning “la quatrième année”, which is the one where the fish is finally caught, Story features are dominant (tense switching, high quantities of direct speech, noises) and there is a clear sense of Peak and Evaluation: (6) un jour ou l’autre on y arrive. The following episode, commencing “et puis des fois” and recounting subsequent attempts, is largely Report but with some Story features, notably tense switching to NPR with dire. “La huitième fois” is again largely Report, but with two direct speech exchanges containing considerable tense switching with dire. This episode transitions into a further episode which is dominated by Story features, including widespread tense switching into the NPR: (7) je pompe je le lève le saumon monte il arrive en surface crac – il le ramasse – il me le sort – il me le tue. There are also expressives (“oh là là là là là là”), and a clear Evaluation section ending with: (8) c’est bien la loi des séries. The nature of the hybridity in terms of Story and Report features in this conversational narrative of personal experience is thus variable and complex and is directly linked to the content of the different episodes; the more banal the episode, the more likely that Report features will dominate. When low levels of Story features are introduced into a section that otherwise would be classified as Report, they are most likely to be tense switches to the NPR, particularly with the verb “dire”. La Fleuriste, by contrast, consists predominantly of Report rather than Story. Again, the structure is episodic, the episodes in this case centred around periods of the narrator’s life or around particular aspects of her work (e.g. certain clients or

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specific types of flower). Where there is a temporal progression between episodes, these are introduced by a combination of connectors and temporal adverbials, e.g.: (9) (10) (11) (12)

à l’âge de quatorze ans puis après quand j’ai été plus grande et puis au bout d’un moment et puis après.

Past events are marked, as we would expect, by the passé composé: (13) c’est ma première patronne qui m’a appris le métier ben elle m’a appris à épiner les roses elle m’a appris appris à monter les œillets.11 Habitual actions or descriptions, are marked by the imperfect, as we would expect: (14) les Halles il y avait tout quand j’allais il y avait pas que les fleurs il y avait la viande il y avait le poisson il y avait – alors on on avait des on prenait nos paquets chez les gens où on les achetait. Indeed, relative to Le Saumon, this narrative contains substantial sections of Description (including habituals) and is therefore dominated in temporal terms by the imperfect tense. Embedded within the Report is one clear Story about a particular client who is looking for flowers for Allan Kardec’s grave at Père-Lachaise on a day when there are no fresh flowers (Blanche-Benveniste/Rouget/Sabio 2002, 85). It begins with a well-attested story feature, i.e. the framing adverbial une fois, and continues with expressives (oh là là) and high levels of tense switching, both with dire and with other verbs, at the Peak of the Story: (15) elle me dit il est pas frais ce bouquet de violettes elle le prend par la tête des violettes puis les queues mouillées elle me les passe sur la figure. Moreover it has a clear Story structure, including a Complicating Action, Peak, and Evaluation: (16) il y avait tout ça pour son Allan Kardec hein pour aller au Père Lachaise.

11 Repetitions such as “appris” are transcribed where they occur in natural speech. Note that the oral corpora cited in this chapter contain many features that are typical of natural speech such as repetition, truncation and ellipsis.

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It then ends with a Resolution. Elsewhere in the narrative, there are two moments where there are some Story features, but no clear Story. In one case (BlancheBenveniste/Rouget/Sabio 2002, 87), we find the framing adverbial un jour which frequently occurs at the beginning of a Story’s Complicating Action (Carruthers 2011), followed by a short section with high levels of direct speech, but no other Story markers, i.e. no tense switching and, crucially, no Evaluation. In another case (Blanche-Benveniste/Rouget/Sabio 2002, 94), a Story feature (the NPR with the verb dire) launches a section which contains a number of Story features, notably a Peak where we find high levels of tense switching and the onomatopoeic baf: the narrator is delivering flowers to an actress with the Comédie Française and pulls the cord switch too strongly in the lift in her apartment block: (17) alors j’ai posé ma corbeille par terre puis j’ai s- tiré cette corde – mais l’ascenseur il voulait pas monter – d’un seul coup je tire la corde plus fort – baf je tombe en arrière je casse une fleur dans la corbeille…. It is debatable, however, whether the Evaluation and Resolution are strong enough for this to be considered a fully-fledged Story in the Labovian sense: (18) j’ai livré quand même ma corbeille – oui – il arrivait des histoires comme ça. This episode is certainly more Story than Report, but it is not a clear-cut Story. In short, in the case of conversational narratives of personal experience, compositional hybridity in terms of Story and Report features is not just a question of juxtaposing the two (as has previously been noted), but also of mixing the two in sections within the discourse. Hybridity is very much a function of the spontaneous nature of the discourse and is directly related to the content – to its communicative purpose and its level of banality or recountability. The nature of the hybridity is therefore highly unpredictable and can take a range of forms which cannot be captured by any single model or indeed by a set of statistics comparing the frequency of particular linguistic features. For example, statistical counts of the frequency of the passé composé would not tell us anything useful (even though tense usage is a key generic element in this case) since it is a core tense for both Stories and Reports: it is the way tenses are used that differs, not their frequency. Frequency counts of the use of the present tense would equally not help, since this tense is attested with a number of different functions, marking both past and present time.

4.2 Sports commentary Compositional hybridity in sports commentary is, by contrast, a predictable, indeed an integral feature of the structure of this oral genre. Much of the published research

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(e.g. Deulofeu 2000; Bres 2007) concentrates on the properties of the most interesting part of the commentary from a linguistic perspective, i.e. the segments where the commentator reports on the events taking place in real time in the match, e.g.: (19) encore une fois un groupé pénétrant – qui avance – qui progresse dans les vingtdeux mètres des Blacks ils maîtrisent à merveille – et ils vont peut-être perdre le ballon les Bleus – non va sortir pour Julien Dupuis – qui écarte sur François Trinh-Duc – Trinh-Duc plaqué – peut donner à Damien Traille – et l’attaque française bloquée – par la montée défensive violente des Néo-Zélandais – et ce ballon qui ressort pour Cowan – pressé par Dupuis… (Thompson 2012, 271). These segments have a very specific set of linguistic properties, notably high use of structures other than finite verbs to denote events (e.g. past participles, nominalizations, proper names), examples of particular syntactic structures such as pro-drop verbal clauses (e.g. “va sortir”) or N qui… (as in “ce ballon qui…”), an extremely high use of the present tense relative to other tenses and predominantly paratactic relations between clauses (Deulofeu 2000; Bres 2007; Thompson 2012). Deulofeu (2000, 279) puts the quantity of “noyaux12 à formes remarquables” at 40 % of the total number of potential verb phrases, whereas they constitute less than 10 % in his reference corpus of oral French (CORPAIX). However, as Thompson has shown, these segments, for which he adopts Fleischman’s label (1990) of “Current Report”, are in fact embedded in a much broader discourse context where they are interspersed with segment types which he labels “Re-play of the match” (RPM), “commentary on the match generally” (CMG) and “commentary outside the match” (COM)’:

Figure 2: Segment types in rugby commentary  

12 The “noyau” is the core constituent of the clause: “il peut être réalisable par une construction verbale ou tout autre syntagme modalisable” (Deulofeu 2000, 278).

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RPM only occurs in television data, as it involves replay of sections of the match. Broadly speaking, CMG segments involve commentary that is directly related to the match other than the real-time account of events (e.g. talk about the pitch or the weather or the score or a particular player/team): (20) l’équipe de France tenez-vous bien mène ici à Dunedin dix-sept à trois (Thompson 2012, 139) (21) pour l’instant les Bleus sont infranchissables et surtout les Bleus ne commettent pas de fautes ils sont bien disciplinés (Thompson 2012, 139). COM, on the other hand, involves commentary on events that are more removed from the match itself, such as a player or a team’s performance earlier in the season or in the previous season (Thompson 2012, 131): (22) les Blacks n’ont pas perdu à domicile depuis une victoire des Australiens il y a deux ans (ibid., 143) (23) aussi on n’a pas eu le temps de vous en parler avec le retour à la bonne vieille règle du ballon porté du maul qu’on a plus le droit de l’écrouler (ibid., 143). As Thompson admits, the line between CMG and COM is not always clear cut (2012, 130). In any case, as far as compositional hybridity is concerned, the fundamental alternation in sports commentary is that between segments of Current Report and the rest of the discourse: whereas Current Report concerns events in real time, indeed it creates the illusion that the events are actually simultaneous with the commentator’s commentary, this is not the case for CMG and COM. In terms of how the different segment types interact with each other within the sports commentary, Thompson notes that the segments can be of differing lengths, from the very short to the relatively long, depending largely on the distribution of the Current Report segments: non-Current Report segments, i.e. mainly CMG and COM, fill the spaces in between Current Report which, in Thompson’s corpus, ranges in quantity between 15 % and 35 % of the discourse. The only observable pattern is that alternation is normally between segments that are “only one degree apart from each other in terms of distance from the core events of the match”, i.e. between Current Report and CMG, and between CMG and COM (2012, 154). The precise way in which the alternations operate in any commentary is unpredictable and depends on the course of the match itself. Moreover, there is also hybridity within certain types of segment. Current Report segments are the least hybrid: as we have seen, it is possible to map out the core linguistic features of these segments and it is these features that are found consistently in most segments of Current Report. However, segments other than Current Report are extremely hybrid in terms of their composition since they constitute, in

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practice, a conversation between commentators on a range of topics centred largely on the present but with the possibility of including the past and even the future. Unsurprisingly, they are made up mainly of Smith’s modes of Description, Information and Argument (Thompson 2012, 184) but, as with conversational narratives of personal experience, a purely statistical count of a major linguistic feature such as tense usage, would not necessarily expose the fundamental linguistic differences between Current Report and other segment types: for example, Thompson’s statistics suggest that the present tense dominates globally in sports commentary, as well as in Current Report and in other segment types, ranging from over 58 % to 70 % of tenses used, whereas its function differs substantially in different types of segment, i.e., it is most heavily used to mark the events of the match as they evolve in Current Report but has a range of functions including marking atemporal presents and omnitemporal presents in other types of segment. In the case of sports commentary, then, compositional hybridity is a key structural property of the genre. The precise patterning of Current Report and other segment types is dependent on the course a given match takes and the content of the nonCurrent Report sections, while often revolving around particular themes, is unpredictable in terms of how it operates in a given match. However, similar types of segments are found in all match commentaries and the distinctive linguistic properties of the Current Report segments are well established. In that sense, key features of the segment patterning are very much a predictable part of the linguistic description of the genre.

5 Genre, medium, level of formality13 Genre enjoys a complex relationship with questions of medium and level of formality and nowhere is this more the case than within the oral medium. For Biber/Conrad (2009), the fact that a register-genre is oral forms part of its situational characteristics; as can be seen in Figure 1 above, factors around “channel” (e.g. whether the discourse is speech or writing) and the specifics of the medium, such as taped, email, face-toface, radio etc. appear in the list of possible situational factors. Much spoken discourse for Biber and Conrad falls under “conversation” which is highly interactive, takes place in real time, involves two or more participants sharing the same temporal context and physical space,14 and can range over almost any topic (Biber/Conrad 2009, 37, 87). However, Biber notes that there are many subcategories of conversation (e.g. telephone conversation, workplace conversation (2009, 86)) and of course, a  

13 The alternative term “register” is often used to refer to “level of formality” but I shall use the latter here so as not to cause confusion with Biber’s use of “register”. 14 Note that factors regarding distance and proximity are particularly important in Koch and Oesterreicher’s model of situational factors (2001).

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wide range of other oral register-genres, such as sermons, prayers, lectures etc. In his seminal Variation across Speech and Writing (1988), Biber tests six dimensions (e.g. abstract vs non-abstract information, narrative vs non-narrative, involved vs informational production) in a wide range of register-genres and finds that there is no “absolute difference between speech and writing” and that “it is possible, within each mode, to override the salient situational characteristics of the mode” (1988, 161). In other words, genre-based factors are, in many instances, stronger than factors relating to medium, in determining the linguistic patterns attested. The inadequacy of a binary divide between oral and written discourse is particularly clear in recent work on radio, television and electronic genres. As BlancheBenveniste puts it, speaking of radio and TV discourse, “le partage habituellement accepté entre oral et écrit convient mal ici, parce qu’il semble que les médias brouillent ces frontières traditionnelles” (2007, 31). In the case of radio and TV, no one model of medium can capture the nature of the oral-written relation, since different types of programme vary (e.g. TV news vs chat shows vs phone-ins), as do individual presenters’ styles (Blanche-Benveniste 2007, 32–33). In any case, as Gadet has shown (2007), many TV and radio genres demonstrate a complex configuration of compositional hybridity as well as hybridity in terms of medium, level of formality and factors relating to spontaneity vs preparedness: “c’est ainsi la fluidité dans le mélange des genres qui caractérise ce Journal Télévisé, produit à la fois par le mélange de niveaux de langue, la circulation entre segments informatifs et évaluatifs, la tension du présentateur entre deux attitudes, être crédible et plaire/amuser, et les facilités de langue que sont les expressions toutes faites” (2007, 238).15 In this section, I propose to explore aspects of the complex relationship between genre, medium and level of formality through a brief analysis of linguistic features associated with temporality on the one hand and the question of the retention or loss of negative ne on the other. The corpus for this section consists of three sub-corpora of oral narrative, one of conversational narratives, one of traditional storytelling and one of new storytelling. The conversational sub-corpus is drawn from CORPAIX and consists largely of conversational Stories, although inevitably, due to the compositional hybridity of the genre, as discussed above, there are elements of Report in some of the narratives.16 The traditional stories are drawn from the Aubrac corpus, a collection of recorded and transcribed narratives recounted by traditional storytellers who form part of an oral tradition.17 The new storytelling data are taken from stories

15 See also the discussion in Branca-Rosoff (2007). 16 For details on the corpus, see Carruthers (2005). For the statistics on negation, a further story was added to this corpus, i.e. Le Saumon from Blanche-Benveniste/Rouget/Sabio (2002), in order to achieve more comparable quantities for comparison between the three sub-corpora. 17 See Tenèze (1975) and Carruthers (2005).

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recounted mainly at the Conservatoire de Littérature Orale in Vendôme.18 All the data analysed can therefore be said to constitute “oral narrative”: in terms of sociosituational properties, they all involve accounts of past-time events by a narrator in a naturally-occurring oral context and all have a structure that corresponds broadly to Labov and Waletzky’s model (1967), discussed in 4.1 above. However, the nature of the orality in question varies greatly: the conversational stories have no relationship with written data, are entirely spontaneous, informal and one-to-one; the traditional stories have a structured, memorized storyline but are otherwise performed spontaneously and relatively informally in a relaxed home setting, with no relation to a written text; the new storytellers also memorize the storyline and perform the stories spontaneously, but they generally glean their stories from written texts and perform them in front of larger audiences in a more formal context with a greater communicative distance between narrator and audience. These situational factors in the three sub-corpora are summarized in Figure 3 below:  

Conversational

Traditional

New

Story vs Report

Story (Report elements) Story

Story

Relationship to written language

–

–

Written sources

Level of spontaneity

Totally spontaneous

Storyline memorized

Storyline memorized

Level of formality

Informal

Relatively informal

Relatively formal, highly performed

Distance speaker/ other participants

Very close

Relatively close

Relatively distant

Figure 3: Situational factors in the three sub-corpora  

As far as temporal structures are concerned, analysis by Carruthers (2005) has shown that there are clear parallels between the patterns attested for these different types of oral narrative. This is the case both in terms of key features of tense usage and the types of structures deployed between narrative clauses. So, for example, across all three types of narrative, backed up by quantitative analyses, we find:

18 These data are cited with kind permission from the Artistic Director of the CLIO, Bruno de La Salle. Here the data employed for the temporal and negation analyses are different. The data used for the temporal section are from Carruthers (2005). The publication of the French Oral Narrative Corpus (Carruthers 2013) allowed a more recent corpus to be used for the negation analysis and this was designed to compare in size to the conversational and traditional corpora and to reflect the diversity of story types and storytellers in the corpus.

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Tense switching between past and present tenses for a variety of purposes such as foregrounding particular events, increasing subjectivity, structuring the narrative, changing section; Large quantities of direct speech which are also a site for tense switching; A default interpretation of temporal sequence between narrative clauses;19 Very low quantities of explicit markers of sequence between narrative clauses and correspondingly high quantities of parataxis and structures that are compatible with sequence (e.g. alors, et, et puis).

There are, of course, some differences between the three sub-corpora. For example, the rate of tense switching is higher in the more informal varieties (in the conversational and the traditional stories) and the passé simple is not attested in the conversational data at all.20 If we look at the linguistic features that appear in Biber’s “narrative versus nonnarrative” dimension, we can see that associated with the “narrative” end of the spectrum are the use of past tense and perfect aspect verbs, as well as the use of communication verbs such as verbs of speech (Biber 1988, 135–142; Biber/Conrad 2009, 247). Characteristic of the “oral” (vs “literate”) end of the spectrum (Biber/ Conrad 2009, 116) are linking adverbials such as so and when. The genre of “oral narrative” thus brings together certain “narrative” and certain “oral” features, but also has distinctive features of its own, notably tense switching, the particular patterning of parataxis and use of certain types of connectors. In other words, as far as temporal features concerned, both the “oral” and the “narrative” components of this genre are important: for example, the understanding of temporal sequence is a product of the narrative status of the discourse but the use of particular linking adverbials or of parataxis is characteristic of the oral medium. All the evidence suggests that we can talk about distinctive temporal features in the genre of “oral narrative”, irrespective of the nature of the orality in terms of its level of formality, its relation to written forms of discourse, or its spontaneity versus preparedness. Most of these features have key communicative functions in the discourse, notably those connected with structuring, saliency, performance and subjectivity (see Carruthers 2005). If we look, by contrast, at a feature such as the retention or loss of ne in negative constructions, we see that here, questions around medium and level of formality are paramount and the genre of oral narrative cannot be said to have distinctive patterns.

19 Narrative clauses mark perfective events on the narrative timeline, e.g. (1) she went out, (2) opened the car door and (3) turned on the engine. For discussion, see Carruthers (2005, 13). 20 Note that in the traditional stories, the passé composé is the most frequent marker of past time events but some storytellers have a preference for the passé simple, possibly due to the influence of the Occitan substratum on their French. In the new storytelling corpus, some storytellers use the passé simple in certain contexts but this is quantitatively much lower than the passé composé (see Carruthers 2005).

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Rather, the patterns attested are highly dependent on the nature of the orality in question and the formality or informality of the communicative context. The retention or otherwise of negative ne has been the topic of a vast amount of recent research,21 not least in sociolinguistics, and the purpose of raising the issue here is not to add to that debate as such, but rather to contrast the position of negation with that of temporal structures in terms of constituting – or not – key features of a particular genre. The non-retention of negative ne in French is strongly associated with the oral medium and specifically with questions of formality/informality: the more informal the discourse, the less likely it is that ne will be retained. Previous research has also highlighted the importance of a number of linguistic factors: for example, pronoun subjects are much more likely to be associated with non-retention than nominal subjects; ne is more likely to be dropped with the particle pas than with other negative particles; ne is more likely to be retained with the verbs avoir, être or the modals pouvoir or devoir; ne is more likely to be dropped in frequently used phrases such as je (ne) sais pas. In the case of our corpus of oral narratives, although all narratives are oral in terms of their delivery, they differ substantially in terms of their relationship with written language and in terms of their formality, as indicated in Figure 3 above. If we look at the retention or loss of negative ne, we find that the patterns across the three sub-corpora differ substantially, in precisely the way we might expect, given the findings of previous research. At one end of the spectrum there is a high rate of loss of ne (84.2 %) in the most spontaneous and informal of the oral varieties, i.e. the conversational data, and a lower rate in the storytelling from the oral tradition (57.6 %), with the lowest rate in the most formal ‘new’ storytelling corpus, where the sources and training of the storytellers are such that there is a strong influence from written texts (44 %):22  

21 See Coveney (1996); Armstrong (2001); Ashby (2001); Armstrong/Smith (2002). 22 The total number of negative constructions analysed was 203 for CORPAIX, 139 for Aubrac and 229 for the CLIO corpus. One Aubrac story is particularly long, therefore potentially skewing the results; however, the statistics with and without inclusion of this story did not show significant variation. Negatives in embedded direct speech were excluded (since the ne could be dropped in this context to “imitate” a feature of direct speech) as were contexts where it was not clear whether the ne was retained or dropped (e.g. in cases such as on (n’)a pas) and fixed phrases such as n’est-ce pas.

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Figure 4: Ne deletion in oral narratives  

Even in the case of new storytelling, the oral context is the dominant influence, in that retention, at 56 %, is far from the 100 % normally found in written storytelling. This sub-corpus was deliberately balanced across different types of story and different storytellers but there is some evidence that individual storytellers may have particular preferences and/or that the story “mood” may have a role to play, with the more humorous, relaxed storylines increasing the likelihood of non-retention. This would, however, have to be verified by more research. The linguistic patterns also follow previous research: for example, the non-retention percentages are heavily dominated by pronominal subjects (98.25 % for CORPAIX, 98.7 % for Aubrac and 95 % for new storytelling). In short, the two sets of syntactic features, i.e. temporal patterns (tense and connectors) and negation (retention or loss of negative ne), operate quite differently in terms of their relationship with the concept of genre in the case of oral narrative. Temporal patterns show distinctive trends which hold across the three different subtype of oral narrative; while there are some differences (e.g. the frequency of tense switching, use of the passé simple), the similarities are compelling (e.g. the nature of tense switching, the way in which it operates, the cognitive understanding of how narrative works, patterns between clauses in terms of temporal sequence) and can, in my view, be said to constitute features of the genre. By contrast, the retention or loss of negative ne is, as previous research would suggest, tightly connected to questions of medium and level of formality, and of little or no relevance to the question of genre in this case. To return to the question, raised in the opening paragraph, of genrerelated features and meaning, we can say that temporality is a linguistic area of defining importance for narrative discourse and the way in which temporal structures operate is highly “meaningful” in terms of speakers’ interpretation of the discourse.

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On the other hand, retention or loss of negative ne is not “meaningful” in terms of defining the genre of oral narrative relative to other genres. In another context, however, loss or retention of negative ne could indeed be meaningful: as Gadet shows for the Journal Télévisé (see section 3 above) this variable could be one of the features that fluctuates in different sections of the discourse, sending different signals about level of formality and spontaneity and thereby forming a significant part of the hybridity at the core of that particular genre.  

6 Conclusions and future avenues for research The notion of genre is certainly important for sociolinguistics, since it is concerned with the relationship between socio-situational context and language use. The heart of this chapter has attempted to explore, through a series of case studies in French, certain factors that make the analysis of oral genres particularly complex, i.e., the question of compositional hybridity and the relationship between genre, medium and level of formality. The discussion in this chapter suggests that hybridity itself is a complex notion: it can represent a fundamental characteristic of a given genre, with regular discernible patterns that can be mapped out or modelled. Alternatively, it can emerge in unpredictable ways from the spontaneous nature of much oral discourse. In the case of oral discourse, the notion of genre enjoys a complex relationship with the socio-situational variables of medium and level of formality: some linguistic features are distinctive in particular genres, while other linguistic features have no particular relation to genre, with variation entirely dependent on factors around medium and level of formality. The more “meaningful” a linguistic feature is in terms of its role in the genre, the more likely it is that the feature will constitute a distinctive feature of that genre, across different levels of formality and media. However, in spite of the central role of socio-situational context in the concept of genre, explorations of the complexities and linguistic properties of oral genres do not feature widely as part of mainstream sociolinguistics, for the reasons articulated at the outset of the article. Nor are they numerous in linguistic research across the Romance languages. With the rapid development of more digitized and annotated oral corpora, there is now considerable scope for research on oral genres in most Romance varieties, including further research on the nature of hybridity and on relations with medium and level of formality. There is also great opportunity to apply Biber’s multidimensional approach to Romance languages other than Spanish. Such research could also serve to develop further our knowledge of potential linguistic universals in the field of genre.

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7 Bibliography Adam, Jean-Michel (1999), Linguistique textuelle. Des genres de discours aux textes, Paris, Nathan. Adam, Jean-Michel (2001), Types de textes ou genres de discours? Comment classer les textes qui disent de et comment faire?, Langages 141, 10–27. Adam, Jean-Michel (2005), La Linguistique textuelle. Introduction à l’analyse textuelle du discours, Paris, Colin. Adam, Jean-Michel (2011), Genres de récits. Narrativité et généricité des textes, Louvain-La-Neuve, Academia. Adam, Jean-Michel/Heidmann, Ute (2006), Six Propositions pour l’étude de la généricité, La Licorne 79, 21–34. Anderson, Hanne-Leth (2007), L’Interview comme genre médiatique: Sous-catégories pragmatiques et leurs traits linguistiques caractéristiques, in: Mathias Broth et al. (edd.), Le Français parlé des médias, Stockholm, Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 449–462. Armstrong, Nigel (2001), Social and Stylistic Variation in Spoken French. A Comparative Approach, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Armstrong, Nigel/Smith, Alan (2002), The Influence of Linguistic and Social Factors on the Recent Decline of French “ne”, Journal of French Language Studies 12(1), 23–41. Ashby, William (2001), Un nouveau regard sur la chute du “ne” en français parlé tourangeau: S’agit-il d’un changement en cours?, Journal of French Language Studies 11(1), 1–22 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1986, 11979), The Problem of Speech Genres, in: Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by Vern W. McGee; edited by Caryl Emerson/Michael Holquist, Austin, University of Texas Press, 60–102. Biber, Douglas (1988), Variation across Speech and Writing, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Biber, Douglas/Conrad, Susan (2009), Register, Genre and Style, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Biber, Douglas/Tracy-Ventura, Nicole (2007), Dimensions of Register Variation in Spanish, in: Giovanni Parodi (ed.), Working with Spanish Corpora, London, Continuum, 54–89. Biber, Douglas, et al. (2006), Spoken and Written Register Variation in Spanish: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis, Corpora 1(1), 1–37. Bilger, Mireille/Cappeau, Paul (2004), L’Oral ou la multiplication des styles, Langage et société 109, 13–30. Blanche-Benveniste, Claire (2007), Normes anciennes et nouvelles dans le langage des médias, in: Mathias Broth et al. (edd.), Le Français parlé des médias, Stockholm, Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 31–48. Blanche-Benveniste, Claire/Rouget, Christine/Sabio, Frédéric (edd.) (2002), Choix de textes de français parlé, Paris, Champion. Blasco, Mylène/Cappeau, Paul (2012), Identifier et caractériser un genre, Langages 187, 27–40. Bouquet, Simon (2004), Linguistique générale et linguistique des genres, Langages 153, 3–14. Branca-Rosoff, Sonia (1999), Des innovations et des fonctionnements de la langue rapportés à des genres, Langage et société 87, 115–129. Branca-Rosoff, Sonia (2007), Nouveaux Genres et déplacement de normes en français. À propos des interviews politiques sur les radios généralistes et des émissions de “libre antenne” sur les radios-jeunes, in: Mathias Broth et al. (edd.), Le Français parlé des médias, Stockholm, Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 63–82. Bres, Jacques (1999), Textualité narrative orale, genres du discours et temps verbal, in: Jeanne-Marie Barberis et al. (edd.), Le Français parlé: Variétés et discours, Montpellier, Université de Montpellier, 107–133.  

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Bres, Jacques (2007), Le Discours médiatique sportif aux prises avec le temps (verbal). Deux ou trois petites choses sur le commentaire en direct d’un match de football, in: Mathias Broth et al. (edd.), Le Français parlé des médias, Stockholm, Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 83–96. Carruthers, Janice (2005), Oral Narration in Modern French. A Linguistic Analysis of Temporal Patterns, Oxford, Legenda. Carruthers, Janice (2011), Temporal Framing in the “conte”. From Theoretical Debate to Oral Story Performance, French Studies 65, 488–504. Carruthers, Janice (2012), “Histoire” et “témoignage”. Catégories problématiques pour l’analyse de la narration conversationnelle, in: Sandrine Caddéo et al. (edd.), Penser les langues avec Claire Blanche-Benveniste, Aix-en-Provence, PUP, 157–167. Carruthers, Janice (2013), French Oral Narrative Corpus, www.frenchoralnarrative.qub.ac.uk (last access 15.02.2018). Ciapuscio, Guiomar (2007), Epistemic Modality and Academic Orality. Pilot Study for COTECA, in: Giovanni Parodi (ed.), Working with Spanish Corpora, London, Continuum, 90–105. Coveney, Aidan (1996), Variability in Spoken French. Interrogation and Negation, Bristol, Intellect. Davies, Mark (2007), Towards a Comprehensive Survey of Register-Based Variation in Spanish Syntax, in: Eileen Fitzpatrick (ed.), Corpus Linguistics beyond the Word. Corpus Research from Phrase to Discourse, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 73–85. Deulofeu, José (2000), Les Commentaires sportifs télévisés sont-ils un genre au sens de la “grammaire des genres”?, in: Mireille Bilger (ed.), Corpus. Méthodologie et applications linguistiques, Paris, Champion, 271–295. Fèvre-Pernet, Christine (2007), Du “barrage aux insectes” au “lifteur immédiat”: Gros plan sur quelques fonctionnements linguistiques du genre télé-achat, in: Mathias Broth et al. (edd.), Le Français parlé des médias, Stockholm, Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 171–186. Fleischman, Suzanne (1990), Tense and Narrativity, London, Routledge. Gadet, Françoise (2007), Mélange des genres dans un JT “innovant”, in: Mathias Broth et al. (edd.), Le Français parlé des médias, Stockholm, Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 221–241. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine/Traverso, Véronique (2004), Types d’interaction et genres de l’oral, Langages 153, 41–51. Koch, Peter/Oesterreicher, Wulf (2001), Gesprochene Sprache und geschriebene Sprache (Langage parlé et langage écrit), in: Günter Holtus/Michael Metzeltin/Christian Schmitt (edd.), Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik, Tübingen, Niemeyer, I.2, 584–627. Labov, William/Waletzky, Joshua (1967), Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience, in: June Helm (McNeish) (ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts: Proceedings of the 1966 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 12–44. Laforest, Marty/Vincent, Diane (1996), Du récit littéraire à la narration quotidienne, in: Marty Laforest (ed.), Autour de la narration, Québec, Nuit blanche, 13–28. Lascarides, Alex/Asher, Nicolas (2003), Logics of Conversation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Malrieu, Denise/Rastier, François (2001), Genres et variations morphosyntaxiques, Traitement automatique des langues 42(2), 548–577. Parodi, Giovanni (ed.) (2007a), Working with Spanish Corpora, London, Continuum. Parodi, Giovanni (2007b), Variation across Registers in Spanish. Exploring the El Grial PUCV corpus, in: Giovanni Parodi (ed.), Working with Spanish Corpora, London, Continuum, 11–53. Parodi, Giovanni (ed.) (2010a), Academic and Professional Discourse Genres in Spanish, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins.  

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Parodi, Giovanni (2010b), Academic and Professional Genres. Variations across Disciplines, in: Giovanni Parodi (ed.), Academic and Professional Discourse Genres in Spanish, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 65–82. Parodi, Giovanni (2010c), University Academic Genres. A Miscellaneous Discourse, in: Giovanni Parodi (ed.), Academic and Professional Discourse Genres in Spanish, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 83–99. Potowski, Kim/Cameron, Richard (edd.) (2007), Spanish in Contact. Policy, Social and Linguistic Inquiries, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Sánchez-Muñoz, Ana (2007), Style Variation in Spanish as a Heritage Language, in: Kim Potowski/ Richard Cameron (edd.), Spanish in Contact. Policy, Social and Linguistic Inquiries, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 153–171. Sedano, Mercedes (2007), Future Tense Expressions in Several Spanish Corpora, in: Giovanni Parodi (ed.), Working with Spanish Corpora, London, Continuum, 132–144. Smith, Carlota (2003), Modes of Discourse, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Tenèze, Marie-Louise (1975), Aubrac V: Littérature orale narrative, Paris, CNRS. Thompson, Jonathan (2012), Discourse Structure and Temporal Patterning: The Case of French Rugby Commentary in the Media of Television and Radio, doctoral thesis, Belfast, Queen’s University Belfast. Vincent, Diane (1996), La Racontabilité du quotidien, in: Marty Laforest (ed.), Autour de la narration, Québec, Nuit blanche, 29–45. Vincent, Diane/Perrin, Laurent (2001), Raconter sa journée. Des histoires de conversations dans la conversation, Revue québécoise de linguistique 29(1), 179–201.

Rodica Zafiu

13 Register and text type Abstract: This chapter examines the concepts of “register” and “text type” as conceived in several theoretical models, signalling some terminological difficulties and certain differences between various research traditions. Two main uses of the concept “register” are distinguished, both illustrating the idea of a language variety in a given communicative situation: register (often called “style”) may be understood either as a variety on the formal‒informal scale or as a variety which corresponds to a specific field. In the latter meaning, registers (for which recurrent and pervasive linguistic peculiarities are decisive) are related to text types or discourse genres (for which what matters is the internal structure of the text), and certain language varieties may be defined as sub-registers or as text types. In the largest section of the chapter, variation across register and text type is analysed, with a central focus on Romanian. The chapter also sketches some general directions for the diachronic investigation of register and text type, and draws some directions for further research.  

Keywords: register, style, text type, discourse genre, variational sociolinguistics  

1 Introduction The notions of register (or style) and text type (or discourse genre) are used in a complementary way and play a role in how variation is determined by the communicative situation, which is crystallized in cultural patterns of interaction. Register variation depends on the situation of use, which determines the selection of the linguistic means either on the axis of formality (formal vs informal), or with respect to fields of activity. Text types reflect cultural practices of oral and written communication, routinized structures which have been historically constituted, depending on the specific domain and purpose. Registers and text types pertain to the speaker’s repertoire: registers are language varieties characterized by clusters of phonological, lexical and grammatical features; text types are individualized especially by their internal structure (Biber/Finegan 1994). They are historically constituted and may be identified at several levels of generality/specificity (Biber/Conrad 2009, 10). Variation according to register and text type (i.e. diaphasic variation) is the result of a choice, and that differentiates it from variation manifested through sociolects, which depends on social class, level of education and culture of the speakers (diastratic variation). Registers are not independent from sociolects (less prestigious non-standard social dialects tending to be deliberately used in more informal registers), and they are also prototypically associated with the oral vs written medium. Diaphasic variation has https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-014

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been analysed on the basis of the Romance languages from different perspectives and from many methodological angles: stylistics, text linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics.

2 Theoretical models and terminological difficulties 2.1 Research history Initially, the typical investigation of linguistic variation in Romance covered only the regional dialects (for the development of linguistic geography with reference to the Romance languages, see Pop 1950, I). Especially in Italy and Romania (states which attained national unity at a very late date) diatopic variation aroused the greatest interest (but see also, for the Hispanic field, Díaz-Campos 2011). The sociolinguistic analysis of styles and registers gained ground more slowly; in France, the slow development of proper sociolinguistic investigation has been attributed to the prestige of standardization and of the consequent lack of interest in non-standard varieties (Ayres-Bennett 2004, 1). The sociolinguistic approach advanced even more slowly in Romania (Ciolac 1989; 1999; Olariu 2016), initially because the country was influenced by the ideological French model of the national standard language, and then, in the second half of the twentieth century, because of political pressure which imposed the ideology of homogeneity, rendering the authoritative linguistic norms absolute and drastically limiting sociological investigations. Variation according to speech situation was initially the object of study for a number of different approaches – notably French stylistics (initiated by Bally), Prague School functionalism, and Coșeriu’s structuralist model – before the more general adoption of the concepts and methods developed by systemic functional theory and Anglo-American sociolinguistics. Different research traditions have led to different terminologies in the Romance-speaking world. For instance, variation across register and text type is denoted in the model of Coșeriu (1988) by the unique global label of diaphasic variety (distinct from the diastratic, diatopic and diachronic varieties, i.e. from sociolects, regional dialects and historical varieties). On the other hand, English terminology uses in a quite free and sometimes confusing way key-terms such as register, style, and genre (Ferguson 1994; Biber 1995, 7–9; Lee 2001), especially as a result of the interferences between Labovian sociolinguistics and Halliday’s functionalism, which is closer to European structuralism. Halliday’s theoretical model (1978) presents register as depending on field (domain of social activity and knowledge), mode (spoken and written channel), and tenor (relationship between speaker and audience). Various uses of the concept focused on the tenor (and the formal-informal axis) or, more often, on the field (domain-specific orientation). The notion of speech style (Labov 1972) was mainly related to sociolects and levels of formality, and the notion of register (Halliday 1978) to the domains of use; and yet, each term has been

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used for the other types of variety too, or as a generic label. Style has been described as larger and less stable than register (Eckert/Rickford 2001), as a choice determined not only by the situation, but also by accommodation to the audience and to the speaker’s design to construct or combine identities (Coupland 2007). There are notable differences between stylistic and sociolinguistic schools in the Romance area: for the concept of style or register as a selection between levels of formality, French prefers the terms niveau de langue and registre (Gadet 2003a), Italian registro (Berruto 1993b), Spanish registro, Portuguese registo, Romanian limbaj, stil and registru (Irimia 1986; Zafiu 2001), etc.1 It is even more difficult to find equivalents for the concept of register as a variety which is specific to a domain. Some of the registers correspond to what French and Italian applied linguistics call langues de specialité, respectively linguaggi settoriali or speciali (languages for specific purposes) and Romanian functional stylistics calls stiluri funcţionale (a larger class, which includes literature too; Coteanu 1973; Irimia 1986; Zafiu 2001; Milică 2014); but none of these labels encompasses, for instance, the register of face-to-face conversation (Ionescu-Ruxăndoiu 1995). The concepts of text type and the relatively similar discourse genre (inspired by Bakhtin 1986 and elaborated by Swales 1990, Bhatia 1993 etc.) are translated without difficulty or serious ambiguity in many languages. Linguistic features of variation on the formality scale were studied early in French in the theoretical framework of stylistics created by Bally (1905; 1909); stylistic uses of vernacular varieties have been described by Dauzat 1928, Guiraud 1965); in the last decades of the twentieth century the considerably increased interest for the spoken language (Gadet 1989; Blanche-Benveniste 1990) contributed to the description of “low” registers (see also Armstrong 2001 and, for French, Italian and Spanish, Koch/ Oesterreicher 2011). In Italy, numerous studies on oral communication and the relationship between the vernacular and the local dialect appeared in the 1980s–1990s (Berruto 1987; Bazzanella 1994). Even earlier, some major registers received detailed linguistic descriptions: Italian newspaper language (in the pioneering book of Dardano 1973), the language of advertising (Cardona 1974), and the advertising slogan (Reboul 1975). Beccaria (1973) brought together essays on several register varieties of Italian (linguaggi settoriali): newspaper language, language in TV, politics, advertising, sport, science and technology, literary criticism.2 Focusing on differentiated text types according to predominantly internal criteria (structure and purpose), text linguistics of the 1970s–1990s provided very general and exhaustive typologies, with a small number of basic types: narrative, descriptive, argumentative, expositive, instructive texts (Werlich 1975), or narrative, descriptive, argumentative, explicative, dialogic texts (Adam 1992; 1999). Sociolinguistic typolo-

1 Issues around the definitions of these terms are also discussed in ↗12 Oral genres, as is the relationship between concepts such as formality, register and genre. 2 For a similar approach, see also Cortelazzo (1990); Sobrero (1993b); Serianni (2003); Trifone (2006).

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gies of discourse genres are based on both internal and external criteria (cultural tradition, communicative situation), being therefore less systematic, and more open to the possibility of adding new types. For instance, Biber (1989) lists expository texts (“scientific exposition”, “learned exposition”), narrative texts (“general narrative exposition” and “imaginative narrative”), situated reporting, involved persuasion, including also interactive genres (“intimate interpersonal interaction”, “informational interaction”).

2.2 Romanian schools of stylistics In Romania, Bally’s stylistics became a model for Iordan (1944), who described some linguistic features of orality, illustrating them through examples from realistic narrative fiction, press articles, but also everyday conversation. After WWII, research was influenced by Russian formalism and by Prague School functionalism and manifested itself, in the dominant structuralist framework, as functional stylistics (Coteanu 1973; Irimia 1986). A large number of articles were published in this paradigm in the 1960s– 1970s, the debate being excessively focused on the “stylistic system”: an ideal model which interpreted social variation in terms of register variation (popular ‘vernacular’ vs literar ‘cultivated’) and drew up a closed list of stiluri ‘styles’ or limbaje ‘languages’. The status of “style” was conceived as conditioned by a stable cluster of linguistic features (not exclusively the lexical ones), i.e. by their high frequency, pervasiveness and stability, and by the dominance of a specific function. At that time, there were numerous controversies around the number of “styles”, requiring precise definitions and a stricter typology.3 Functional styles were defined as varieties differentiated by the preference for certain linguistic features (phonological, lexical, grammatical and textual) and by their specialization for certain domains of social and occupational activity. Even though this research is still useful, due to the detailed description of some language varieties (especially the scientific and legal registers), the theoretical premises (of an exhaustive description and of a symmetric and abstract stylistic model) are obviously outdated. Furthermore, variation on the formal/informal axis remained essentially unexplored, probably because it interfered with social dialects, whose investigation was deemed unworthy of study because it ran the risk of contradicting the official ideology of “social homogeneity”. On the basis of the survival of a traditional rural culture, Coteanu (1973) proposed a twofold scheme, with vernacular language and “literary” language as the two main branches, where the vernacular included, as a second cultivated sub-variety, the

3 For a summary of the various systems, see Gheţie (1982, 148–174).

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folkloric register.4 The “style system” of Romanian functional stylistics attributed a central position to literature (“the artistic style”), conceived as a complex register, defined by the intrinsic property of “literariness”, one of the favourite topics of Russian formalism and the Prague School.

3 Diachronic perspectives 3.1 Survey of register and text types Registers and text types are historically constituted cultural objects, and their emergence and development has been a legitimate theme for diachronic linguistics. The study of Romance languages has especially always paid particular attention to the role of the varieties of Latin in their formation and change (see Adams 2013; Vàrvaro 2013). Generally, Romance languages continue the non-standard varieties of Latin (“Vulgar Latin”), but when they created their own standard varieties, they borrowed from, and imitated, Classical Latin and were influenced by Medieval Latin as a cultural (religious and scientific) vehicle. For the western Romance languages, Latin remained for centuries the language of culture and state power (used in church, law, and administration), imitated and eventually replaced by novel idioms. In the particular case of Romanian, the medieval language of culture was Old Church Slavonic, a Slavic variety influenced by Greek; Greek itself played an important role as a cultural and official language in the eighteenth century. In Transylvania, Latin was the chancellery language, but it did not influence the Romanian spoken by rural communities. Therefore, before the nineteenth century, Romanian did not use Latin as a source of lexical enrichment. The cultural tradition of medieval rhetoric passed on the idea of a register hierarchy; taken from Rhetorica ad Herennium and applied to the oratorical genre, or fixed by Virgil’s wheel diagram (rota Vergilii) and applied to literary genres, this threefold stratification differentiated the low style (humilis) from the middle one (mediocris) and from the high one (gravis) (Curtius 1953, 232; Mortara Garavelli 1997, 280–281). The standardization of the Romance languages generally assumed this hierarchy, i.e. the required difference between the low speech of commoners and the high cultural usages of the language. It is incumbent on historical linguistics to take into account diaphasic variation, since the presence of old linguistic features can differ according to register and text type. The diachronic study of social and register varieties of Romance languages is not very well represented (for Spanish, see Pountain 2006). French has received more attention from a sociolinguistic perspective, focused on change in social varieties, but

4 See also Irimia (1986; 1999).

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implicating registers as well (Lodge 1993; 2004; Ayres-Bennett 1996; 2004). The historical variation of registers is better described for Italian, for instance in Serianni/ Trifone (1994). As for Romanian, there are some sociolinguistic observations in Ivănescu (1980) and in Niculescu (1990), and there is research on the development of three main registers (legal, scientific, literature) in Chivu (2000).

3.2 Registers and text types in the history of Romanian The oldest texts preserved in Romanian are rather late, dating from the sixteenth century; they are religious and legal texts. At first, there are differences only between an “official” register (in formulaic legal documents and collections of laws), numerous types of religious texts (biblical translations, liturgies, prayers, sermons) and a few personal letters. Starting with the seventeenth century, the repertoire is completed by translations of bestiaries, sapiential texts, and legends (Romance of Alexander, The story of Barlaam and Josaphat, etc.), chronicles, plus the first allegorical literary text in Romanian (The Hieroglyphic History by Dimitrie Cantemir). Some text types show significant similarity between registers, in the absence of explicit standardization. Nevertheless, there are also tendencies to “monumentalize” a learned variety of the language, mainly by imitating syntactic patterns and rhetorical figures of Latin, Greek, and even Arabic classical texts (Moldovanu 1997). Other varieties, e.g. the scientific, journalistic and political registers, appear only in the nineteenth century, as a consequence of social and cultural modernization, under Western influence. The main source for lexical borrowing was Latin and the Romance languages (especially French and Italian), and the process of changing the standard was dubbed “reromanization” or “relatinization” (Puşcariu 1940; Niculescu 1978). The intense modernization of the new standard language and of the high registers led to a profound split between the vernacular varieties and the cultivated ones. In the twentieth century, school and mass media gradually filled the gap, by disseminating the modern standard. In present-day Romanian, the distinction is even more reduced due to the intense presence of the vernacular in mass media and especially in digital media.

4 Registers (or styles) on the axis of formality 4.1 Formal vs informal varieties The term “register” is sometimes used for all situational varieties (Biber 1995; Biber/ Conrad 2009; Sanchez-Stockhammer/Schubert 2016), other times only for the subtype dependent on a domain (Trudgill 1974), and more rarely – in competition with the term “style” (Coupland 2007) – only for the subtype determined by the formality scale (Ayres-Bennett 2004).

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The formality scale is a linear model which can be described by means of the polar terms (formal vs informal), or of several intermediate degrees, as those that have been initially proposed for English (frozen – formal – consultative – casual – intimate, Joos 1961), or those used by the French lexicographic tradition: cultivé – courant – familier – populaire – vulgaire (Lodge 1993, 255–257), or soutenu – littéraire – courant – familier – populaire – vulgaire – argotique (Lodge 2004, 235). All these scales are questionable, since there are no clearly delimited boundaries between labels, and, in the case of the French scales, social and situational criteria interfere. Levels of formality depend on the situation, i.e. on the relationship between participants in a communicative act, and on the more or less structured nature of the discourse genre. The situational parameter intersects with the social parameter (which reflects a social and cultural stratification), and with the parameter of oral vs written medium (informal choices being more frequent in orality). The same linguistic features can point to inclusion in a social group, as markers of the social dialect, or can be chosen by the speaker in order to adapt to the situation, to the audience, or to construct his/her identity. The linear model of the formality scale can be converted into the non-linear model of domains and text types. For instance, instead of the “colloquial register”, we can speak of “register (or genre) of the informal urban conversation”. However, the scale corresponds to a descriptive tradition and to public perception, and therefore there is some argument for preserving it. The diaphasic opposition between formal and informal varieties refers to the selection operated by the speaker, while the diastratic opposition between vernacular and cultivated language signals the speaker’s group membership. Terms such as Fr. populaire, It. popolare, Rom. popular are only partial equivalents of Engl. vernacular, since they can designate both a sociolect and a register. There are differences between the three forms: Fr. populaire is usually an urban vernacular (Gadet 2003b) and a quite low register; It. popolare, a transitional phase between local dialects and national standard (Berruto 1993a; 1993b; Cortelazzo 2001); while Rom. popular is sometimes understood as an abstraction, used for describing the “rural vernacular”, i.e. the common features of more local dialects, without considering the differences between them (Vulpe 2004, 61–71). The structuralist description of the varieties of Romanian had to deal with the ambiguity of the term popular. Like French populaire (Gadet 2003b), the Romanian term is commonly used, but difficult to define within a sociolinguistic model. In contrast to the French term, the Romanian one has rather positive connotations, as a result of the nineteenth-century ideology of “romantic ethnicity” (i.e. regarding the ordinary people as the essence of the nation), recycled by the communist nationalistic regime in the twentieth century. Therefore, the vernacular register – an idealized, traditional and rural variety – has been seen as the positive facet of condemned nonstandard language (conceived as a predominantly urban and modern sociolect). Informal registers are permeable to orality phenomena, to regional linguistic features and to non-standard linguistic features (cf. Holtus/Radtke 1986, and the

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concept of “immediacy” or “proximity”, in Koch/Oesterreicher 2011). Rural nonstandard varieties are not as homogenous as is sometimes believed. Italian sociolinguistics stratified the vernacular (linguaggio popolare, Berruto 1993b); Romanian functional stylistics introduced some distinctions between the register of the rural everyday conversation and a ceremonial register (Coteanu 1973), including several folkloric genres (in verse or in prose, with specific subgenres: epic verse, charms, proverbs, tales, riddles, etc.). Formulaic language, versification, and archaisms differentiate the language of folklore from the language of rural everyday conversation (Vulpe 2004, 388–392). It is also legitimate to consider that the specific terminologies of traditional occupations (sheep breeding, beekeeping) can be defined as registers within the vernacular. Urban non-standard varieties are also displayed on the vertical axis of formality. Lower informal registers (levels of extreme informality) are those permeated by two lexical inventories: “vulgar language” and “slang”. The former includes many forms of aggressive language: violent speech acts, like insults, curses, and usage of taboo (obscene) words (Guiraud 1975). The latter converts a social dialect – the code of marginal, antisocial groups – into a register, so that the equivalents of cant and slang (Fr. argot, Rom. argou, Sp. germanía, Port. calão) provide material for stylistic choice, this becoming an extremely informal way to communicate in modern urban contexts. Italian gergo plays essentially the same role but is much more dependent on regional dialects. On this scale, the colloquial register (Fr. langage familier, Rom. limbaj familiar or colocvial, etc.) appears as a less informal urban variety, closer to the standard, which uses offensive words in a rather attenuated and conventionalized way. Yet there are differences between the English non-technical label “colloquial”, which is applied to a large range of non-standard varieties (Clackson 2010) and its Romance equivalents, equally ambiguous, but referring to a more restricted range of varieties. Even though colloquial is supposed to be one of the most specific register terms, since it clearly indexes the situation of use, and not the social class of the speakers, the traditional equivalent Romance terms remain more dependent on social factors. Rom. colocvial or familiar, for instance, tend to be applied only to the conversational speech styles of educated speakers, who are able to avoid the pure vernacular. The informal situation allows more linguistic creativity in colloquial discourse, more expression of affectivity (Florescu 2006), a playful disposition and ironical formulae. Informal registers (or “styles”) are normally viewed as relating to everyday conversation, therefore to non-specialized situations of use. In fact, they can combine with languages for special purposes, being used in specific fields as the colloquial variants of technical and scientific registers, to which the non-technical term “jargon” is sometimes applied. These mixed codes, which create variants for official terminology, by means of metaphor, abbreviations, etc., are generally used in the workplace. The neutral level of communication, the less marked register (Fr. langage courant) is sometimes called “standard”, although the standardized language obviously covers

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not only the medium level of formality, but also the highest ones. The high formal varieties generally include elements pertaining to official, administrative, and academic registers, using a learned inventory of words and syntactic structures; it is not uncommon for them to preserve and recycle archaic linguistic features.

4.2 Features of informality: the Romanian example Informal registers of Romanian exhibit phonological, lexical and grammatical features which illustrate the more general characteristics of spoken varieties, but also specific forms which simply have not been selected by the official norm. They have been described by linguists who study orality and non-standard language (see above, 2.2). In the spoken mode, phonological features of informality include reduction of consonant clusters, avoidance of hiatus, clitic contraction (mi-e ‘(to) me is’ vs formal îmi e; n-o ‘not her’ vs formal nu o), apocopes (poate să ‘may that’> poa’să; trebuie să ‘must that’ > tre’să); the enclitic definite article –ul ‘the’ is systematically pronounced -u (omu ‘the man’ vs omul, cf. Sánchez Miret 2017). These forms and similar ones are transcribed as such in written informal texts. At the grammatical level, informal registers can select three equivalent types of future (o să fac, am să fac, oi face ‘(I) will do’), while only the fourth is accepted by the standard (voi face). Demonstrative pronouns have shorter informal variants (ăsta, asta ‘this’, instead of acesta, aceasta); there are informal variants for some numerals as well (doişpe ‘twelve’, treişpe ‘thirteen’, etc., instead of the formal doisprezece, treisprezece). Formal written registers privilege complex sentences, subordination, specialized connectors, complex relatives; relative clauses introduced by a relative pronoun in the dative or the genitive – [casa] a cărei fotografie ai văzut-o – ‘[the house] whose photo you have seen’ – are practically absent from the informal register. Certain rules of differential object marking fluctuate between pure informality and social stigma: the pe-marking of the relative pronoun (cartea pe care ţi-am dat-o ‘the book I gave you’) is obligatory according to the norm, but pe is systematically omitted in vernacular variants (Vulpe 1980). The prepositional constructions that replace dative and genitive complements (îi scriu la un prieten ‘(I) write to a friend’; casa la o vecină ‘the house of a neighbour’) are also informal and socially marked, in contrast to their inflected variants (îi scriu unui prieten; casa unei vecine). At the lexical level, informal registers of Romanian are dominated by old borrowings from Slavic languages, Turkish and Modern Greek, which entered vernacular usage. Condemned by the purist standardization of the nineteenth century and replaced by modern Latin and Romance (mainly French) borrowings, words from the first category became even more expressive and connotative, gaining ironical and deprecatory meanings. Some French forms, typically borrowed through direct contact and in the spoken form (e.g. bonjur < Fr. bonjour; mersi < Fr. merci), entered directly into informal registers in the nineteenth century, and the same happened with twentieth-century English borrowings (OK, bye, job). At the

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pragmatic level, informal registers make substantial use of specific address forms, of discourse markers, hedges and boosters. The epistemic future or presumptive (o fi ‘maybe it is’) is often employed to convey uncertainty and hesitation. There are several specific markers of interpellation (Manu Magda 2013, 592), all of which are colloquial, but which mark different levels of informality and convey different degrees of aggression: măi, bre, mă, bă(i), fă (măi omule ‘hey man’; măi ‘hey you’). The presence of diminutives also signals the informality of a register in Romanian: true diminutives (as opposed to the lexicalized ones, which are no longer perceived as such) are considered markers of informal speech, conveying affectivity (bunicuţă ‘little grandma’), irony and deprecation (doctoraş ‘little doc’) or functioning as politeness hedges (aşteaptă un minuţel ‘wait for a little minute [just a minute]’; daţi-mi bănişorii ‘give me the little money’). Vernacular Romanian derives diminutive forms quite easily, not only from nouns, but also (as a means of gradation) from adjectives and adverbs (frumuşel < frumos ‘beautiful’, binişor < bine ‘well’), and – with affective intentions – even from interjections (aolică ‘oh boy!’). But even the more denotative diminutives (indicating small objects or degrees of a quality) are avoided in formal speech.

5 Variation across register and text type Present-day sociolinguistics and applied linguistics currently uses the term register for designating domain-related varieties (special languages or “languages for special purposes”). With this meaning, registers are preponderantly written cultivated varieties, deriving from the standard language by specialization, mainly through the creation of new terminologies. Certainly, there are also spoken registers (radio broadcasts, conversations) and informal registers (some forms of workplace communication), but most of these varieties seem to have been developed by the written cultural tradition. The sociolinguistic concept of “text type” or “discourse genre”, defined as a specific structuring of the message, specialized for specific communicative purposes in a specific society, intersects with the concept of “register”; this is why it is appropriate to treat both categories together. Registers and text types are not organized in a homogenous system and they do not make up a closed inventory; therefore, their description requires a multidimensional approach. Both entities can be identified at different levels of generalization. The label “register” can apply to the more general academic register, but also to the particular register of linguistics, and further to the “register of phonology” (and maybe even to the register of a specific phonological school). Equally, a real text can pertain to the genre of the literary chronicle or, more generally, to the genre of the chronicle and of the journalistic article. A register often manifests itself through several text types: the academic register is represented by the research article, review article, monograph, conference; the legal register is present in

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the text of the law, but also in less prototypical text types, such as the journalistic commentary on a law, a legal parliamentary debate or an attorney’s plea. Conversely, a text type (e.g. a letter or an article) can be written in many different registers. Some genres correspond to a unique register (and this explains why register and genre are sometimes confused), but in other texts several registers interact (e.g. science popularization articles show features of both scientific and journalistic registers). Some registers have been examined more in detail, as a result of their status as “major varieties”: legal and administrative, scientific (academic) and technical, religious, artistic, journalistic, political registers, advertising. Less importance has been given to other registers (often subsumed under the major varieties): e.g. sports, fashion, recipes, weather forecasts, horoscopes, etc. This section will present registers through case studies from Romanian by synthesizing the main characteristics relating to the typical situation of communication and social functions, and by providing some specific examples. Linguistic data from other Romance languages will be mainly invoked through bibliographical references.

5.1 Legal and administrative registers The legal register has a discourse genre as its prototypical example, i.e. the text of the law, usually included in large codes. The discourse of Law has specific social purposes, i.e. to impose rules and to regulate society, being dominated by the intention of influencing the behaviour of the receiver (the “conative function” of the language, in Jakobson’s model, or, more specifically, Halliday’s “regulatory function”). Legal texts make specific use of the “metalingual function” of language (Jakobson 1963, 217–218), providing internal definitions and delimitation for their specific concepts. Negative definitions – centred on what is not mapped by a concept – are typical for legal texts. The register of Law is based on an intrinsically institutional use of language, which has the effect of changing social reality. The communicative situation is equally specific: the message is delivered by an impersonal author, an objectivized and anonymous speaker, endowed with institutional authority, and is addressed (in theory) to the largest possible audience, according to the principle that “nobody is thought to be ignorant of the law”. The legal register is characterized by a permanent tension between the requirement of accessibility and the need for precision (through a unified and non-ambiguous terminology), “between all-inclusiveness and determinacy” (Bhatia et al. 2005, 9). There exists a similar tension between abstract and concrete language, between generalization and enumeration of as many particular situations as possible. Hesitation between contradictory requirements lies at the heart of many interpretations, disputes and critical evaluations of the legal texts. It is acknowledged that legal language has a degree of inherent vagueness (Endicott 2000). The legal register is generally conservative, admitting few lexical innovations, but it is increased and renewed through the coin-

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age of numerous idioms. Its terminology includes old words specialized for legal meanings, though they have become obsolete or are perceived as vernacular with respect to the present standard; in Romanian, for instance, pârât (from pârî < Slavic p (ĭ)rĕti), ‘defendant’, or poprire (from popri < Slavic poprĕti), ‘detainment’. There are also many current words with special meanings. These lexical peculiarities confer a deceptive aspect on legal language, lending the specific terminology a false familiarity. Romanian words such as crimă ‘crime’, lege ‘law’, parte ‘part’ and ‘party’ belong to the standard language, but have specific meanings in law. The syntax of the legal register is characterized by a “nominal style” (frequent usage of nominalizations and extended nominal phrases, for which a handful of verbs play only the role of copulas). For instance, in the translation of a European legal document, the Romanian version uses a complex nominal phrase, with three successive nouns in the genitive, introduced by the verb are ‘has’ – “are drept scop facilitarea integrării pieţei serviciilor posttranzacţionare” (Official Journal of the EU, L134, p. 24); cf. the English version – “aims to facilitate post-trading integration”. Legal texts contain numerous passive and impersonal constructions, and complex sentences that express relations of cause, purpose, condition, concession, etc. Laws are formulated using generic sentences, verbs in the generic present or prescriptive future; deontic modality is well represented, expressing obligation, interdiction, or permission. Texts are rigorously organized and use a specific system of internal references. Apart from legislative texts, the legal register is present in academic discourse about justice, in research articles, in didactic communication, in courtroom practices – court sentences and reports, attorneys’ pleas, etc. Only elements of the main characteristics of the law (generally, the terminology and the system of references) manifest themselves in these various discourse genres. There are similar studies on the legal register in specific Romance languages: Romanian (Stoichiţoiu-Ichim 2001), Italian (Serianni 2003, 107–122), Spanish (Chierichetti/ Garofalo 2010), and many others. The register of administrative texts is close to the legal register, sharing roughly the same terminology, a large use of impersonal constructions and the tendency to be conservative in its vocabulary; it nevertheless displays some specific features, being more concrete, descriptive, enumerative and extremely formulaic. The Italian administrative register (pejoratively called burocratese) is perceived as quite distant from the standard and different from legal language, especially due to its old-fashioned syntax (Serianni 2003, 123–139). An interesting aspect of the legal and administrative field is the recent tendency to translate and unify European Union legislation, a development that is not without effects in each of the languages. The most obvious changes are to be found in the vocabulary, especially in idiomatic phrases; for example, the Rom. word bunăstare, which is generally used in strictly human contexts currently (and meaning ‘enjoying a materially good, prosperous status; prosperity’) is beginning to appear in loan translations such as the syntagm bunăstarea animalelor (‘animal welfare’); cf. French le bien-être des animaux, Italian il benessere degli animali, Spanish el bienestar de los animales, etc. (Official Journal of EU, C49, 2006).  

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5.2 The scientific (academic) register The scientific (or academic) register is a general concept, particularized in practice according to the rather different branches of formal, natural or social sciences, including or not the humanities. In some models, scientific fields are associated with their technical applications (“scientific and technical languages”). The category of “language for special purposes” used to include even legal or journalistic registers together with the scientific ones. The scientific register (for which the prototypical text is the research article) is also related to “professional communication” and to jargons. What links most of these aspects is their social function and setting. The primary function of the scientific register is cognitive (“referential”, in Jakobson’s model), and this implies the specific requirements of truth, objectivity and novelty. For scientific registers, terminologies are essential, which implies a metalinguistic activity, oriented towards a maximum of precision in the meaning of words. In the constitution of Romanian scientific terminology, there has been oscillation, historically, between choosing to graft new meanings on older (and usually polysemic) words of the language, or borrowing new terms, ideally having a restricted number of meanings and associations. Whereas semantic loans were originally preferred, subsequently the need for precision called for numerous loans (Ursu 1962): acrime (‘sourness’) got replaced by a scientific term, aciditate (‘acidity’), cădere (‘befalling’), by caz (‘case’), curgere (‘leakage’), by curent (‘current’) etc. Speakers are individuals (or teams) but endeavour to appear as objective as possible; the typical audience is selected and specialized (except for some didactic variants). Nominal syntax and modern vocabulary, based on borrowings, special rules for quotations, and special use of the first person plural are some of the linguistic and pragmatic features of scientific or academic language. Technical registers display a more descriptive and concrete vocabulary. Romanian functional stylistics and semiotics has especially investigated the scientific text (Rovenţa Frumuşani 1995), focusing, in addition to the signifying mode, on the discourse components: coherence features, argumentative and pragmatic factors. More recently, researchers have focused on workplace communication (Măda/Săftoiu 2012), identifying specific speech acts and forms of address, as well as mitigation markers.

5.3 The religious register The religious register encompasses a large range of text types, but also many cultural varieties according to specific religions and churches (Fishman 2006). Sacred texts influence this register very significantly, contributing, through intertextual references, citations and paraphrases, to the archaic and frozen character of the religious language used in ritual or in text explanation and commentaries. Liturgical language is often characterized by solemnity, by intentional differentiation from everyday

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language (Crystal/Davy 1969, 147). In the past, diglossia was the rule for the Christian church, the liturgy being conducted in Latin (in Western Europe), in Old Church Slavonic or Greek (in Romanian society). Differentiation occurs through conservatism, through the conservation of the lexis and old grammatical structures. The tension between accessibility and solemnity is subject to controversy, the preference for one or the other varying according to the text type (the religious service is solemn, while the sermon is more accessible and more subjective), but also according to the decisions and strategies of every religion and church. In Romanian, different traditions and ideologies have led to several varieties, for instance a conservative, archaizing religious language (of the Eastern Orthodox Church), a more modern and accessible one, permeable to lexical borrowings (of Protestantism, especially of NeoProtestant movements); the registers used by the Catholic church or by other religions generally occupy intermediate positions on the axis of conservative vs innovative vocabulary. Referentially synonymous terms become differentiating emblems with specific cultural connotations: Rom. duh ‘spirit’ (an old loan from Old Church Slavonic duhŭ) is specific for Orthodox ecclesiastical language, in opposition to the Rom. spirit (which is a modern loan from the Latin spiritus), in use by Catholics; ispită vs tentaţie (‘temptation’), spovedanie vs confesiune (‘confession’), slavă vs glorie (‘glory’), etc. are in a similar etymological and stylistic relation. Some religious text types – for example the prayer or the incantation – are dedicated to a special communicative situation, where the addressee is the supernatural and the language has a conative and even a “magic” function (Jakobson 1963, 217).5 Prayers are texts that admit a high level of subjectivity; sermons can be subjective as well, using pathos as a persuasive strategy (manifested by evaluative and emotional terms, emotive scenarios, paralinguistic markers). Theological texts are based on pervasive intertextuality and appeal to the argument from authority. The religious field also includes other types of texts: educational, journalistic, legal or administrative, which combine features of two or more of the main registers. For Romanian, there are several recent monographs investigating the lexical and grammatical features of the Eastern Orthodox Church (Teleoacă 2016) or religious eloquence (Guia 2014). Teleoacă (2016) considers that the religious register is a specialized discourse and isolates a number of lexical tendencies for renewal in the Orthodox Church. Guia (2014) focuses on ecclesiastical persuasive discourse types and goes as far as to identify extreme subdivisions related to particular situations (“sermon occasioned by the visit to the parish of the superior ecclesiastical rank”); he lists the most frequent types of argumentation (based on authority, on facts, on examples).

5 For a longer list of social functions performed by the religious language, see Crystal (1990).

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5.4 Literary texts The existence of a literary register is subject to controversy; it is, however, possible to see it as a discursive macro-genre set at a high level of generality. French and Romanian poetics and stylistics of the 1960s–1970s were in search of “literarity”; Genette (1979; 1991) proposed, instead of a unique category, a double one, differentiated for prose (“fiction”, with the convention of imaginary worlds) and for poetry (“diction”, with formal properties like versification). Obviously, the discourse of literature is the most complex and mixed one, encompassing mimetic representations of other registers and speech styles. Nevertheless, a register of literature can be defined in the same way as other registers are defined, with reference to its social functions and the characteristics of the communicative situation. Literature is a social practice with complex cultural conventions. The speaker is prototypically individualized and subjective; the audience is extremely large; the texts are simultaneously intended to provoke aesthetic pleasure (which corresponds to Jakobson’s “poetic function”), to express subjectivity (the “expressive function” of the language) and to explore more cognitive spaces (the “cognitive” or “referential” function). Particular literary sub-registers and even individual styles can be investigated by focusing on the mimesis of other registers (even the most informal ones) or on their own conventions and linguistic features. For instance, fictional prose is generally signalled by “unspeakable sentences” (Banfield 1982) in free indirect style and, in most Romance languages, by narrative tenses (such as the simple past, tense of récit, as opposed to the compound past, Weinrich 1964). The register of literature has a large range of specific genres, carefully studied by historical and critical approaches; it is impossible to list here the enormous amount of relevant studies.

5.5 The newspaper register The journalistic register is problematic as well, because it uses different language varieties on the axis of formality, with a clear preference for the standard. Its individuality is however determined by the association with its more specific functions and by the prototypical communicative situation. Mass media is socially assigned an informative (i.e. cognitive, referential) function; apart from this, there is often a hidden persuasive function (that may be a normal effect of a subjective point of view, but may lead to bias and propaganda). It can be said that there is a third function that dominates media communication: the phatic (in Jakobson’s model) or the interactional (in Halliday’s model) function. Mass communication is focused on maintaining contact with the audience, and this becomes an end in and of itself, giving more and more space to entertainment. Speakers are normally known, but somehow anonymized (by the idea that they are in charge of transmitting non-biased information); there are also exceptions, such as well-known and deliberately subjective journalists.

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The audience may be very large, in newspapers, especially in tabloids, or more restricted. The discourse of the press tends to use multimedia communication; the amount of images and sounds depends on the specific channel, but is visibly increasing nowadays. Text types are differentiated according to the medium: print media publish news, interviews, editorials, reviews, etc. In addition, broadcast media use talk-shows and digital media stimulate readers’ comments, etc. The specific communicative situation is defined by rapidity and transience and by a high dependency on the immediate context; all these factors determine specific linguistic features: a careless style, high frequency of deictics, more implicit meanings, abbreviations and allusions. Aiming at a large degree of accessibility and at a strong relationship with the audience, the contemporary newspaper register uses standard language, but also more colloquial varieties. Clichés are typical means of obtaining an easy understanding, while innovations (lexical creations, word plays, recent borrowings) and codeswitchings (for instance, from standard to slang) are ways of attracting the audience’s attention. Lexical creativity was manifested on a large scale in Romanian post-1989 newspapers via derivations using suffixes and pseudo-suffixes – for example (in imitation of olimpiadă ‘Olympic Games’): mineriadă (miner ‘miner’ + -iadă, ‘the miners’ rally for attacking the Bucharest street-protesters’); ciolaniadă (ciolan ‘bone of contention’ + -iadă, deprecative term for political competition); zvoniadă (zvon ‘rumour’ + -iadă) etc. Journalistic clichés are generally exhausted metaphors with international circulation (caracatiţa corupţiei ‘the corruption octopus’; rechinii tranziţiei ‘the sharks of the transition period’; dinozaurii din politică ‘the dinosaurs of politics’ etc.), or overblown hyperboles (incendiar, ‘blazing’; devastator ‘devastating’; teroare ‘terror’; şoc şi groază ‘shock and awe’ etc.). The press is also one of the channels that borrows and imposes recent, modish anglicisms which refer to fashion, to entertainment, or sports: styling; hairstyle; make-up; show; stand-up comedy; challenge etc. General features of the newspaper register are very similar in different languages (for French, see Charaudeau 1997; Lee 2003; for Italian, Dardano 1973; Serianni 2003, 169 184, etc.), but there are different traditions, noticeable, for instance, in the syntactic structure of headlines (the Italian nominal and elliptical pattern is described by Dardano 1973). Romanian newspapers have a preference for using narrative tabloid titles: “Un fost mut şi-a tăiat un deget cu toporul” (‘Former Tongue-Tied Man Chops Off Finger With Axe’). Romanian stylistics analysed early on (Irimia 1986) a rather atypical variant of newspaper language, i.e. the official press, which was completely controlled by political power in the 1960s 1980s, and therefore dominated by its propaganda function and written in a very formal register (which combined political, administrative and literary styles). The post-1989 newspaper register has been consequently studied (Zafiu 2001; Dumistrăcel 2006) with special attention to quotation strategies, headlines or specific genres, such as the editorial (Cvasnîi Cătănescu 2006). Quoting has recourse to distancing strategies and truncations that manipulate meaning; editorials tend to offer high degrees of subjectivity and linguistic expressiveness.

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At the intersection of journalistic discourse with specific fields of experience, there are some “minor” but quite specific registers, for example the register of sports broadcasting (for Romanian, see Guţu Romalo 1983), or the register of the weather forecast.

5.6 Political discourse The political register does not have very specific lexical and grammatical features, but it is well defined on the basis of its domain and social practices. The specific purpose of this type of communication is persuasive: the speaker intends to modify the opinion and/or to convince the audience to act in a specific manner. The speaker typically represents a group, which explains the preference for the first person plural, and the audience can be very large (e.g. in electoral discourse) or more limited. The political register uses many elements from standard language and interacts with the journalistic register, with which it is in a permanent state of communication; for example, political speeches are reproduced by the media, but the media also provides themes and clichés for political discourse. The present tendency, common to many democratic countries and languages, is to bring the language of politics closer to conversational style, to the colloquial register. Politics uses a specific terminology only to a certain extent, and this terminology is not even very precise; many words are evaluative, ambiguous and connotative, and merely function as markers of group identity: fascist, communist (as political insults), peace-and-quiet, change (as key-words in slogans), etc. There are many links between the political register and the language of law (in parliamentary communication) and administrative language (in governance texts). The main text types which display the political register are campaign speeches, parliamentary debates, political journalism, academic research in the field of political sciences, etc. A special sub-register, characterized by a high degree of formality and the frequency of euphemisms, is the language of diplomacy. Political discourse became the object of numerous studies, especially in Italy (e.g. Desideri 1984), in France (Charaudeau 2005), in Latin America (Verón et al. 1987; Lavandera et al. 1987; García Negroni/Zoppi Fontana 1992), in Portugal (Marques 2000), etc. In Romania, apart from some historical research (Bochmann 1980), this subject was avoided until 1989, because it was subject to ideological constraints. After the fall of the totalitarian regime, its political language was the first to be described, especially under the label limba de lemn, from the French langue de bois, a deprecatory term for a frozen official language, transmitting ideology and propaganda, and which had been generalized in the public space for forty years. This was a kind of political language characterized by excessively vague, abstract semantics, as in the abuse of terms like elemente ‘elements’, aspecte ‘aspects’, through generalization – with repetition of words like tot/toţi ‘whole’/’all’, întreg ‘entire’, fără excepţie ‘unexceptionably’, through an impersonal style – se va realiza ‘is to become materialized’,

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and through frequent use of markers of deontic modality – trebuie, ‘has/need to’, este necesar ‘it is necessary’, etc. Subsequently, research has focused on present-day political discourse (Zafiu 2007; Tomescu 2009) and on parliamentary discourse (Ionescu-Ruxăndoiu 2012).

5.7 The advertising register The register of advertising is problematic as well. Advertisements are merely a discourse genre, encompassing a large variety of registers, as does literature. But in this case too, the social function and the prototypical situation of communication permit a characterization of advertising as a very general register. The persuasive purpose of the discourse subordinates the informative function and the generation of aesthetic pleasure (in other words, the conative function of the language dominates and instrumentalizes the referential and the poetic functions). Generally, the real producer of the text is hidden, and the message features a fictional and often anonymous speaker: an impersonal instance of authority or a group. The audience is large, often selected by the message itself, through its theme and its formal/informal register. Advertising is typically multimodal, the text often representing only a small part of the message. The text type is structured according to relatively fixed patterns, including a sequence which can be interpreted as a separate sub-type, i.e. the slogan, which is based on various figures of speech (chiasmus: Campionul imaginii oferă imaginea campioanei, ‘The image champion offers the lady champion’s image’; euphemism – Un pic mai bine pentru dumneavoastră, ‘Something slightly better for you’; rhyme – Tehnologii inovative pentru case passive, ‘Innovative technologies for passive houses’; wordplay and lexical creations). Texts often use the standard language, in order to be maximally accessible, but also different language varieties: the spoken vernacular (as a means of communication with a large audience), local dialects (as a proof of authenticity), languages for special purposes (in experts’ opinions), slang (for targeting the youngest part of the audience), etc. The discourse of advertising therefore displays several types of plurilingualism, using different codes of the same language, but also mixing different languages, in order to connote exoticism and innovation (Ai puterea să faci binging nelimitat în Supernet – ‘You are empowered for unlimited binging in the Supernet’). An important direction of research is the study of the ideologies embedded in advertisements and manifested in the language of evaluation. The Italian advertising register was extensively investigated from a linguistic point of view in the 1970s–1980s (Cardona 1974; Medici 1986).6 In Romanian culture, this discourse genre was rediscovered after 1989, as an effect of the emergence of the free market (Robu 2015; but see, for personal ads, Popovici 1985).

6 For Portuguese, see Pinto (1997).

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5.8 Other registers/text types Some typical communicative events would be better described in terms of text types, since they are particularized merely by their structure, and not by pervasive linguistic features. Recipes illustrate a type of technical language, and they may be also considered a specific register, in which we find ellipsis and a special type of anaphoric continuity (“evolutive anaphora”: it refers to an egg even after this has become an omelette). At the same time, they pertain to the category of prescriptive texts, preferring some verbal moods and tenses displaying a specific structure. Several Romanian studies have focused on folklore genres organized in a literary paradigm; from a sociolinguistic perspective, more interesting studies are those concerned with practical or magical interactions, such as the genre of charms (folk texts for use in healing diseases, Golopenţia 2007). New forms of digital communication stimulate a sort of “written spoken language” (Crystal 2001) and consequently a new possibility of written informality. New text types such as e-mails, text messages, or online chats, have general communicative features but also specific linguistic manifestations in every language.7 The presence of Romanian slang elements in internet communication has been described by Milică (2009), while Moise (2013) has conducted a sociological investigation of teenagers’ text messages and noted their linguistic features (the absence of diacritics and of some punctuation marks, abbreviations taken from English – u = you, pls = please, or codes created in Romanian – k = că ‘that’, dc = de ce ‘why?’, etc.), alongside the use of emotive and ludic communication strategies.  

 

 

 

6 Further research Research on register as a form of language for special cultural domains and on text types is rich in the Romance area. Even if the perspectives are often eclectic, in research that is presented as “semiotic” or “pragmatic”, sociolinguistic insight is almost always present. The other aspect of the register model, concerning variation on the axis of formality, is much less widely investigated, especially where it intersects with sociolects. Part of the research on spoken and written codes provides insight in this direction, but there is more to do in order to describe specific variation and especially to try to separate social from situational variation. The need for more quantitative investigation, for the use of corpus linguistics, is also universally recognized. It would also be desirable to find more terminological equivalences between descriptions across the Romance languages and between these and Anglo-Saxon

7 For Italian, see Tavosanis (2011), Ferrari/Lala (2011); for French, Develotte/Kern/Lamy (2011). See also the discussion in ↗14 New Media.

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terminology. Terms have special meanings and particular connotations in every language, despite their apparent similarity. Typologies are also very different, depending on tradition and the descriptive model employed. It would be useful to investigate specific text types in every language and to compare them across languages and cultures. Diachronic research on the foundation and spread of register and text types would also greatly enrich the field.

7 Bibliography Adam, Jean-Michel (1992), Les Textes. Types et prototypes. Récit, description, argumentation, explication et dialogue, Paris, Nathan. Adam, Jean-Michel (1999), Linguistique textuelle. Des genres de discours aux textes, Paris, Nathan. Adams, James Noel (2013), Social Variation and the Latin Language, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Armstrong, Nigel (2001), Social and Stylistic Variation in Spoken French. A Comparative Approach, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Ayres-Bennett, Wendy (1996), A History of the French Language through Texts, London/New York, Routledge. Ayres-Bennett, Wendy (2004), Sociolinguistic Variation in Seventeenth-Century France, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1986, 11979), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by Vern W. McGee; edited by Caryl Emerson/Michael Holmquist, Austin, University of Texas Press. Bally, Charles (1905), Précis de stylistique, Genève, Eggimann. Bally, Charles (1909), Traité de stylistique française, 2 vol., Heidelberg, Winter. Banfield, Ann (1982), Unspeakable Sentences. Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction, London, Routledge. Bazzanella, Carla (1994), Le facce del parlare. Un approccio pragmatico all’italiano parlato, Firenze, La Nuova Italia. Beccaria, Gian Luigi (ed.) (1973), I linguaggi settoriali in Italia, Milano, Bompiani. Berruto, Gaetano (1987), Sociolinguistica dell’italiano contemporaneo, Roma, Carocci. Berruto, Gaetano (1993a), Le varietà del repertorio, in: Alberto A. Sobrero (ed.), Introduzione all’italiano contemporaneo. La variazione e gli usi, Bari, Laterza, 3–36. Berruto, Gaetano (1993b), Varietà diamesiche, diastratiche, diafasiche, in: Alberto A. Sobrero (ed.), Introduzione all’italiano contemporaneo. La variazione e gli usi, Bari, Laterza, 37–92. Bhatia, Vijay K. (1993), Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings, Harlow, Longman. Bhatia, Vijay K., et al. (2005), Introduction, in: Vijay K. Bhatia et al. (edd.), Vagueness in Normative Texts, Bern, Lang, 9–23. Biber, Douglas (1989), A Typology of English Texts, Linguistics 27, 3–43. Biber, Douglas (1995), Dimensions of Register Variation. A Cross-Linguistic Comparison, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Biber, Douglas/Conrad, Susan (2009), Register, Genre, and Style, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Biber, Douglas/Finegan, Edward (edd.) (1994), Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register, New York/ Oxford, Oxford University Press. Blanche-Benveniste, Claire (1990), Le Français parlé. Études grammaticales, Paris, CNRS Éditions.  

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Bochmann, Klaus (ed.) (1980), Soziolinguistische Aspekte der rumänischen Sprache, Leipzig, Verlag Enzyklopädie. Cardona, Giorgio Raimondo (1974), La lingua della pubblicità, Ravenna, Longo. Charaudeau, Patrick (ed.) (1984), La Presse: Produit, production, réception, Paris, Didier-Érudition. Charaudeau, Patrick (1997), Le Discours d’information médiatique: La Construction du miroir social, Paris, Nathan. Charaudeau, Patrick (2005), Le Discours politique. Les Masques du pouvoir, Paris, Vuibert. Chierichetti, Luisa/Garofalo, Giovanni (edd.) (2010), Lengua y derecho: Líneas de investigación interdisciplinaria, Bern, Lang. Chivu, Gheorghe (2000), Limba română de la primele texte până la sfârşitul secolului al XVIII-lea. Variantele stilistice, Bucureşti, Humanitas. Ciolac, Mariana (1989), Rumänisch: Soziolinguistik/Sociolinguistique, in: Günter Holtus/Michael Metzeltin/Christian Schmitt (edd.), Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik, vol. 3, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 85–197. Ciolac, Mariana (1999), Sociolingvistică românească, Bucureşti, Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti. Clackson, James (2010), Colloquial Language in Linguistic Studies, in: Eleanor Dickey/Anna Chahoud (edd.), Colloquial and Literary Latin, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 7–11. Cortelazzo, Michele A. (1990), Lingue speciali. La dimensione verticale, Padova, Unipress. Cortelazzo, Michele A. (2001), L’italiano e le sue varietà: Una situazione in movimento, Lingua e stile 36, 417–430. Coșeriu, Eugenio (1988), Sprachkompetenz. Grundzüge der Theorie des Sprechens, Tübingen, Francke. Coteanu, Ion (1973), Stilistica funcţională a limbii române. Stil, stilistică, limbaj, Bucureşti, Editura Academiei R.S.R. Coupland, Nikolas (2007), Style – Language Variation and Identity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Crystal, David (1990), Liturgical Language in a Sociolinguistic Perspective, in: David Jasper/Ronald Jasper/Claud Dudley (edd.), Language and the Worship of the Church, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 120–146. Crystal, David (2001), Language and the Internet, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Crystal, David/Davy, Derek (1969), Investigating English Style, London, Longman. Curtius, Ernst Robert (1953), European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, New York, Pantheon Books. Cvasnîi Cătănescu, Maria (2006), Retorică publicistică. De la paratext la text, Bucureşti, Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti. Dardano, Maurizio (1973), Il linguaggio dei giornali italiani, Bari, Laterza. Dauzat, Albert (1928), Les Argots: Caractères, évolution, influence, Paris, Librairie Delagrave. Desideri, Paola (1984), Teoria e prassi del discorso politico: Strategie persuasive e percorsi comunicativi, Roma, Bulzoni. Develotte, Christine/Kern, Richard/Lamy, Marie-Noëlle (2011), Décrire la conversation en ligne. Le Face à face distanciel, Lyon, ENS Éditions. Díaz-Campos, Manuel (2011), Introduction, in: Manuel Díaz-Campos (ed.), The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 1–5. Díaz-Campos, Manuel (ed.) (2014), Introducción a la sociolingüística hispánica, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell. Dumistrăcel, Stelian (2006), Limbajul publicistic românesc din perspectiva stilurilor funcţionale, Iaşi, Institutul European. Eckert, Penelope/Rickford, John R. (2001), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

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Endicott, Timothy A.O. (2000), Vagueness in Law, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Ferguson, Charles A. (1994), Dialect, Register, and Genre: Working Assumptions about Conventionalization, in: Douglas Biber/Edward Finegan (edd.), Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 15–30. Ferrari, Angela/Lala, Letizia (edd.) (2011), Variétés syntaxiques dans la variété des textes online en italien: Aspects micro et macrostructuraux, Verbum 33 (1–2). Fishman, Joshua A. (2006), A Decalogue of Basic Theoretical Perspectives for a Sociology of Language and Religion, in: Tope Omoniyi/Joshua A. Fishman (edd.), Explorations in the Sociology of Language and Religion, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 13–25. Florescu, Cristina (2006), Consideraţii cu privire la limbajul familiar românesc, Bucureşti, Editura Academiei Române. Gadet, Françoise (1989), Le Français ordinaire, Paris, Colin. Gadet, Françoise (2003a), La Variation sociale en français, Paris, Ophrys. Gadet, Françoise (2003b), “Français populaire”: Un classificateur déclassant?, Marges linguistiques 6, 103–115. García Negroni, María Marta/Zoppi Fontana, Mónica Graciela (1992), Análisis lingüístico y discurso político: El poder de enunciar, Buenos Aires, Centro Editor de América Latina. Genette, Gérard (1979), Introduction à l’architexte, Paris, Seuil. Genette, Gérard (1991), Fiction et diction, Paris, Seuil. Gheţie, Ion (1982), Introducere în studiul limbii române literare, Bucureşti, Editura Ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică. Golopenţia, Sanda (2007), Limba descântecelor româneşti, Bucureşti, Editura Academiei Române. Guia, Sorin (2014), Discursul religios. Structuri şi tipuri, Iaşi, Editura Universităţii “Al. I. Cuza”. Guiraud, Pierre (1965), Le Français populaire, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France. Guiraud, Pierre (1975), Les Gros Mots, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France. Guţu Romalo, Valeria (1983), Particularităţi ale organizării sintactice a comentariului sportiv, Limba română 32 (5), 471–477. Halliday, Michael A. K. (1978), Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning, London, Arnold. Holtus, Günter/Radtke, Edgar (edd.) (1986), Sprachlicher Substandard, Tübingen, Niemeyer. Ionescu-Ruxăndoiu, Liliana (1995), Conversaţia: Structuri şi strategii. Sugestii pentru o pragmatică a românei vorbite, Bucureşti, All. Ionescu-Ruxăndoiu, Liliana (ed.) (2012), Parliamentary Discourses across Cultures: Interdisciplinary Approaches, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Iordan, Iorgu (1944), Stilistica limbii române, Bucureşti, Editura Ştiinţifică. Irimia, Dumitru (1986), Structura stilistică a limbii române contemporane, Bucureşti, Editura Ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică. Irimia, Dumitru (1999), Introducere în stilistică, Iaşi, Polirom. Ivănescu, Gheorghe (1980), Istoria limbii române, Iaşi, Junimea. Jakobson, Roman (1963), Essais de linguistique générale, Paris, Éditions de Minuit. Joos, Martin (1961), The Five Clocks, New York, Harcourt. Koch, Peter/Oesterreicher, Wulf (22011, 11990), Gesprochene Sprache in der Romania: Französisch, Italienisch, Spanisch, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter. Labov, William (1972), Sociolinguistic Patterns, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press. Lavandera, Beatriz, et al. (1987), Análisis sociolingüístico del discurso político, 2 vol., Buenos Aires, Instituto de Lingüística, Universidad de Buenos Aires. Lee, David Y.W. (2001), Genres, Registers, Text Types, Domains, and Styles: Clarifying the Concepts and Navigating a Path through the BNC Jungle, Language Learning and Technology 5(3), 37–72.  

 

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Sobrero, Alberto A. (1993b), Lingue speciali, in: Alberto A. Sobrero (ed.), Introduzione all’italiano contemporaneo. La variazione e gli usi, Bari, Laterza, 237–277. Sornicola, Rosanna (1981), Sul parlato, Bologna, il Mulino. Stoichiţoiu-Ichim, Adriana (2001), Semiotica discursului juridic, Bucureşti, Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti. Swales, John (1990), Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Tavosanis, Mirko (2011), L’italiano del web, Roma, Carocci. Teleoacă, Daniela (2016), Semiotica discursului religios. Probleme de poetică, stilistică şi retorică, Bucureşti, Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti. Tomescu, Domniţa (ed.) (2009), Limbajul politic românesc actual, Ploieşti, Editura Universităţii PetrolGaze. Trifone, Pietro (2006), Il linguaggio burocratico, in: Pietro Trifone (ed.), Lingua e identità. Una storia sociale dell’italiano, Roma, Carocci. Trudgill, Peter (1974), Sociolinguistics: An Introduction, New York, Penguin. Ursu, Neculai A. (1962), Formarea terminologiei ştiinţifice româneşti, Bucureşti, Editura Ştiinţifică. Vàrvaro, Alberto (2013), The Sociology of the Romance Languages, in Martin Maiden/John Charles Smith/Adam Ledgeway (edd.), The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages, II: Contexts, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 335–360. Verón, Eliseo, et al. (1987), El discurso político. Lenguajes y acontecimientos, Buenos Aires, Hachette. Vulpe, Magdalena (1980), Subordonarea în frază în dacoromâna vorbită, Bucureşti, Editura Ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică. Vulpe, Magdalena (2004), Opera lingvistică, vol. 1: Dialectal, popular, vorbit, Cluj-Napoca, Clusium. Weinrich, Harald (1964), Tempus. Besprochene und erzählte Welt, Stuttgart, Kohlhammer. Werlich, Egon (1975), Typologie der Texte. Entwurf eines textlinguistischen Modells zur Grundlegung einer Textgrammatik, Heidelberg, Quelle und Meyer. Zafiu, Rodica (2001), Diversitate stilistică în româna actuală, Bucureşti, Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti. Zafiu, Rodica (2007), Limbaj şi politică, Bucureşti, Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti.

Daniel Kallweit

14 New Media: new Romance varieties? Abstract: The present chapter examines the possible emergence of new language varieties in computer-mediated communication (CMC). Over the course of the chapter, several authentic examples of CMC-texts from different Romance languages are analysed in detail with a particular focus on alternative spellings or “neographies”. Neographies, it is shown, are used as graphematic markers of colloquial meanings but also as evidence for an emerging new written register. Some of the strategies analysed here include new correspondences between phonemes and graphemes, logographic or syllabographic grapheme-uses, or the alternative use of diacritics. The “cybernetic register” (i.e. the electronic written register) described here seems to develop simultaneously with the standard written register amongst digital natives, which also has implications for language teaching.  

Keywords: alternative spellings, neography, computer-mediated communication, CMC, electronic written register  

1 Introduction The present chapter discusses the use of the Romance languages within the context of New Media. In what follows I discuss the extent to which new varieties of the Romance languages can be said to be developing in New Media or, properly speaking, within computer-mediated communication (henceforth referred to as CMC). If new varieties are indeed emerging, many of these (with the exception of media such as vlogging and video) will take a written rather than spoken form and it is on written forms of CMC that this chapter will concentrate. However, as I will demonstrate, this does not necessarily mean that we are dealing with Romance varieties that conform to the orthographic standard of the languages in question. Moreover, it is of course possible that spoken language will have some influence on the written forms in question: I will return to this briefly in the concluding section of the chapter. Of course, restrictions of space mean it is not possible to present a full account here of the emergence of new varieties across all the Romance languages. Instead, my extensive study on alternative spellings in Spanish chat-channels (cf. Kallweit 2015) forms the basis of this chapter’s primary focus on the Spanish language. However, discussion of this specific context is intended to be more broadly representative and, throughout, references and examples from other languages in the Romance family are used to indicate broader trends in the thesis developed. Furthermore, we, as linguists, have to be cautious about giving generalizing information, especially when writing about the internet and CMC. Following Dürhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-015

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scheid (2003), it is necessary to distinguish between forms of communication (“Kommunikationsformen”, Dürscheid 2003, 40) on the one hand, and types of text (“Textsorten”, ibid., 40s.) on the other – and sorts of discourse (“Diskursarten”, ibid., 41s.). For the sake of simplicity I will use the English term CMC-genre, although it is slightly less precise than its German counterparts. While forms of communication are determined exclusively by text-external factors, such as the direction of communication (monologue vs dialogue), the number of communicants, or the temporal dimension of the communication (synchronous vs asynchronous), in the definition of CMC-genres text-external and -internal factors play a role (cf. ibid., 40). The most important difference between forms of communication and CMC-genres is that the former are multifunctional, whilst the latter always have a function regarding their subject. It is important that linguists avoid generalizations when writing about the internet and CMC. A straightforward example illustrates the distinction: when we talk about e-mail in general, i.e. without naming the function or the subject of a concrete e-mail, we are talking about e-mail as a form of communication; but when we consider certain emails, which have a common subject and/or function, e.g. informal love e-mails, we are talking about a particular CMC-genre. Given the huge range of different CMC-genres that New Media users use every day, discussion of the emergence of new varieties of the Romance languages in New Media is challenging. Indeed, any conclusions that are drawn here must necessarily be seen as partial, and also, given the speed at which technology develops, subject to ongoing revision. Nonetheless, despite the vastness of the digital world and the exponential rate of technological change, it is possible to identify certain recurring language-based characteristics that are key to understanding developing communication strategies. These allow us to extrapolate the features of language usage in CMC and to draw some conclusions regarding the emergence of new Romance varieties.

2 Phenomena that indicate the emergence of new Romance varieties In the following section, different examples of language use in New Media will be discussed in order to demonstrate that Spanish, like other Romance languages, is clearly experiencing changes that may ultimately lead to new written varieties. As the predominant code used in New Media is written, my approach is to analyse the spellings of New Media users when they write messages. In my view neither lexis nor syntax have the same potential to demonstrate the emergence of new varieties as alternative spellings. My focus on spellings here can also be justified by a possible connection to spoken forms of communication, an issue to which I return later in the chapter. Finally, spellings form the most obvious linguistic level of written communication so they can be analysed most easily.

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2.1 Alternative spellings as markers of non-standard meanings With the rise of Web 2.0 and most CMC-genres, Romance orthographies adapted to the needs of internet users and were simplified to make the process of text production quicker, easier and more economical.1 Anis (2003; 2007) terms these alternative spellings “neographies”; they are used “as shorthand to designate unconventional spelling[s]” (Anis 2007, 89) and “s’écartent délibérément de la norme orthographique” (Anis 1999, 86). He further explains that “neography is a dynamic phenomenon based on local combinations of general mechanisms” that do not conform to “a standard, but [to] a set of procedures writers use in particular communication situations, while writing a specific message, and under pressures from various constraints” (Anis 2007, 88). These procedures comprise various uses of graphemes to depict the oral language as truly as possible, i.e. to emulate a spoken, mostly colloquial variety of the language in question, as well as graphematic reductions which go far beyond the categories of conventional abbreviations – to make the writing process quicker and easier.2 Neography is a phenomenon that is not limited to one Romance language, but can be found in the three main Romance languages, Spanish, French,3 and Italian,4 as well as in Catalan5 and Portuguese, for example. This common mechanism can be understood as the most visible expression of a new variety of language. At the same time, it can be read as strong evidence that beyond specific linguistic contexts, New Media users perceive associated communicational settings in a similar way, and that they adopt similar, even identical strategies in order to adapt their use of written language accordingly.

1 In the early days of short message service (SMS), economization at the orthographic level was underpinned by two key factors: on the one hand, the use of shorter alternative spellings helped users to type messages more quickly; on the other, saving characters helped not just to make the specific message shorter but also, crucially, made them cheaper (since one text message was limited to 160 characters, users were charged for more if they surpassed that limit). These two factors of speed/time and financial economy were strongly interrelated. Nowadays, as almost everyone has flat rates, the monetary advantage has decreased, but the economization of the writing process remains relevant. 2 For detailed information on the various mechanisms of Spanish neography in internet relay chats, cf. Kallweit (2015). 3 Anis (1999; 2003; 2007) describes the procedures French users apply in SMS and chats while Michot (2008) analyses the use of non-standard spellings in French blogs; Frank-Job (2008; 2009) examines the forms and consequences of those alternative spellings; Winter-Froemel (2009) scrutinizes the abbreviations used by French internet users and Müller-Lancé (2004) compares graphematic variants in French and Spanish chats. 4 Gerstenberg (2004) describes language use in Italian chats and dedicates a short section to alternative spellings; cf. also, Lorenzetti/Schirru (2006) for analysis of “la scrittura elettronica” in SMS, emails and chats. 5 The examples used by Galindo Solé/Pons Moll (2000) and by Pons Moll (2002) show that neographies can also be found in Catalan chat messages.

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In all of the languages just named, the repertoire of alternative, unconventional spellings include graphemes that are rare in the Romance languages, namely and . In Spanish, the latter of these two graphemes is often used as an alternative to the complex grapheme combination or , which, in the orthographic standard, transcribe the phonetic sequences [wa] and [we], respectively. As I demonstrate in another study referring to the Spanish writing system (cf. Kallweit 2015), alternative spellings that use the letter are not mere variants of the orthographic sequences (in the sense of simple allographs which can be exchanged for other regardless of context), but are employed by users to mark a specific colloquial meaning of a lexical item in contrast to its neutral, unmarked meaning. The following examples serve to illustrate this. The Spanish word guarra originally means ‘female pig, sow’, but is additionally used in a colloquial, derogatory way to refer to a ‘disgusting’, ‘coarse’ or ‘filthy’ female (cf. DRAE 2001, 1171, s.v. guarro, rra). In the corpus I analysed with regard to neographies used on the internet relay chat platform www.irc-hispano.es,6 only the neographic form warra could be found, as in the following examples:7 (1) (2)

que son un 30 %(muy warras tragan lexe asturiana)un 50 % (warras faciles de mojar el xurro)en que porcentaje estais??? por q no sn tan warras q se follan al jurao?

Whilst it is unlikely that a chat discourse which includes the lexeme guarra with its unmarked meaning ‘female pig’ will be found, chat users do want to give an additional graphematic clue to their partners that the lexical item in question is used in a colloquial and certainly also somewhat pejorative way to designate a female. They do so by choosing the alternative spelling with . Two other examples of the use of the neographic letter can be seen in these chat messages: (3) alomejor tienes mas adominales pero no mas polla weso (4) Chatter193 pues ponte cremita en los webos jajajaja In example (3), the Spanish noun hueso, originally meaning ‘bone’, is now also used with a colloquial meaning to designate an unpleasant person with whom it is difficult to get along (cf. DRAE 2001, 1236, s.v. hueso as well as VOX 2002, 1002, s.v. hueso). The Spanish standard word for ‘eggs’, huevos, is written in example (4) in its alternative neographic form webos, to denote ‘testicles’ in an informal and colloquial way (for

6 For more detailed information on this corpus, cf. Kallweit (2015, 30–41). 7 Other than the characters being discussed, which are printed in bold, all the examples here are reproduced as their original authors wrote them. Unless otherwise stated, the examples used in the present chapter are taken from my own corpus.

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this non-standard meaning, which is also marked as “malsonante”, i.e. indecent and offensive, cf. CLAVE 2001, 962, s.v. huevo). Both cases illustrate that New Media users apply neographic spellings to convey to their chat partners that the lexical item in question is not being used according to their neutral, standard meaning, but rather in a colloquial way. A similar means of marking colloquial meanings via the use of neographic spellings can be seen in the following example: (5) [chatter2131]:( xe que no mastique yo que no tengo dientes y engullo vale, pero tu? peazo de vaga The alternatively spelled word peazo shows a very common neographic strategy, which is the omission of the intervocalic , used to emulate the spoken variety of Spanish, in which the originally plosive phoneme is weakened and becomes a fricative sound when occurring between two vowels or even disappears (cf. Navarro Tomás 1918, 75–78). The original meaning of the standard word pedazo, ‘(big) piece’, does not apply to the context of the sentence seen in (5), so that the neographic form peazo has to be interpreted as the colloquially used intensifier of the noun connected by the preposition de. Again, the alternative spelling is used as a clue or signal for the recipient that the word in question is not to be understood with its standard meaning (cf. also Kallweit 2015, 113s.). A last example for this phenomenon features in the following message from chat channel #barcelona: (6) lo dl piso descartao, tan okupaos This message is the answer of Chatter17 towards his interlocutor within a sequence in which these two chatters contemplate the possibilities of having a date. While Chatter17 proposes meeting at a bar, his opposite suggests an apartment, which leads to the reaction seen in (6). Chatter17 rules out this possibility because all the apartments are okupaos (occupied). By using the alternative spelling with the highly unusual, in Spanish, grapheme and the omission of the seen in the previous example, Chatter17 alludes (directly or indirectly) to the occupying movement okupa which was, and remains, quite active in the Catalan capital (cf. García 2006 and Oms 2013). The use of the neographic spelling makes two interpretations possible: either the adjective is used in a neutral, unmarked way, meaning ‘inhabited’, or Chatter17 is saying that the space is ‘occupied’, but specifically by squatters. Since there is no more context to this chat extract, it is not possible to make a clear decision on which meaning is intended by Chatter17, but there is some evidence – the combination of neographically used and the omission of the – that suggests it may be the latter one. The widespread use of unconventional, alternative spellings to mark non-standard and, for the most part, colloquial meanings in computer-mediated discourse

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makes this a clearly identifiable CMC-related language phenomenon.8 Moreover, the practice is directly related to perceptions around computer-mediated discourse held by its users. As several authors claim (cf. e.g. Storrer 2001, 439; Herring 2001, 614), the majority of New Media users do not perceive this communication as asynchronous or quasi-synchronous, but share the impression of a synchronous discourse in praesentia.9 Mancera Rueda/Pano Alamán (2013, 11) summarize the situation in the following way: “Baron (2008) habla de estar ‘siempre conectados’, en la medida en que el intercambio de roles entre hablantes y oyentes en un mismo canal, siendo cada vez más frecuente, se percibe como inmediato, o como si fuera en presencia”. This feeling of permanent connection, of always being online, is currently increased by the widespread use of smartphones that mean the internet is almost always available, as the two Spanish authors claim several pages later: “Hoy en día el acceso a las redes sociales, sobre todo a través de móvil, refuerza la sensación de apertura constante del canal y de instantaneidad en el intercambio de mensajes, hecho que no solo obliga a que el otro esté en la Red, sino también a que responda inmediatamente […]. Se cuenta con el interlocutor al instante, y el emisor espera ser atendido de forma inmediata, de ahí que […] las manifestaciones de la modalidad coloquial de la lengua sean numerosas en estos enunciados” (Mancera Rueda/Pano Alamán 2013, 27).

The resulting perception of computer-mediated discourse means most users tend to choose an informal and/or colloquial register when writing their messages to people they ‘know’ – and, here, ‘know’ is to be used advisedly as it does not necessarily mean knowing interlocutors personally; users of particular CMC-genres such as chats, various online debate platforms, or social networks only know each other from the digital environment. The frequent usage of colloquial language in New Media is a phenomenon that pertains to all Romance languages, as different commentators have shown. For example, Antonelli (2009) mentions the colloquial nature of the language used in Italian SMS, while Lorenzetti/Schirru (2006, 81) describe language use in Italian CMC as “molto disponibili ad accogliere fenomeni provenienti dalle varietà italiane meno prestigiosi: i dialetti locali […], ma anche le forme tipiche degli usi più colloquiali o della lingua popolare […]”. For French SMS, Hunkeler (2011, 83) characterizes the register used as “familier”, i.e. colloquial.

8 Mancera Rueda/Pano Alamán (2013, 50) demonstrate this by citing the words of the Spanish politician Sigfrid Soria, who on his Twitter account wrote the word hostia (which in a religious context refers to the host, but, colloquially, is used as an expletive meaning ‘oh shit’ or ‘fuck’) without its initial mute grapheme : “No lo escribe con ‘h’ [sic] pues no quiero semejanza alguna con la de la principal acepción de la RAE”. 9 Classifying an online chat as a synchronous ‘communication form’ is inaccurate since there are always short delays between the moment of sending a message and the moment of its reception (cf. Dürscheid 2003, 44).

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Does this mean that the language used in New Media is a mere transcription of the users’ colloquial register and is, therefore, not to be considered as a new variety? In fact, to describe the phenomenon in this way is to simplify the real nature of written language usage in New Media. As Mancera Rueda/Pano Alamán (2013, 47s.) demonstrate, the communicative context plays an important role in the choice of either orthographic or neographic spellings as well as in the choice of register in which the respective message is written, i.e. formal or informal. To illustrate this, the Spanish scholars analyse different types of social media and find more neographic spellings in the now defunct Spanish social network Tuenti10 than in comparable11 Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. According to Mancera Rueda/Pano Alamán (2013, 48) this difference can be explained by the fact that on Tuenti an individual’s posts could only be seen by their ‘friends’, i.e. those people the profile owner knowingly, actively ‘befriended’. On Facebook the content placed online by the profile owner in question can be viewed not just by their ‘friends’ but by ‘friends’ of ‘friends’ as well. Since an account on Twitter is maximally public, the use of alternative spellings here tends towards zero: “Sin embargo, no podemos decir lo mismo [i.e. with regards to the use of neographies] de los mensajes redactados en Twitter, donde el respecto a las normas ortográficas es más patente. Tal vez porque sus usuarios son más conscientes de que en la mayor parte de los casos se dirigen a internautas para los que resultan desconocidos y para los que […] su carta de presentación son las palabras” (ibid.).

A further comparison of the use of verbal politeness on these three social networks leads to results that are in fact more complex: the less public the personal profile is, the more ‘mock impoliteness’ is utilized by the young users;12 but the more anonymous the account is, i.e. maximally public combined with a pseudonym, such as on Twitter, the more real verbal aggression can be found (cf. Mancera Rueda/Pano Alamán 2013, 52s.). This appears, then, to demonstrate that there is a clear correlation between the communicative context in which a CMC message is written and the actual linguistic form it is given by the respective sender. This suggests that New Media users are highly aware of the existence of different communicative settings with different communicative rules to which they tend to adapt their written messages, i.e. in order to ensure the adequacy of the register used.

10 Tuenti was shut down in March 2016 due to a decline in number of users and the new strategy of its Spanish owners to focus on the mobile telephone sector (cf. Otto 2016 and Muñoz 2016). 11 Comparable here means personal profiles of young Spanish users of the same age. 12 Zimmermann (2003; 2005), using the term anticortesía, shows that adolescents make use of lexical items that, from an adult point of view, would be classified as impolite, but which within the peer group lose their impolite character and function as markers of group identity and even as expressions of affection and friendship.

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2.2 Innovative grapheme usages As indicated above, Romance neographies make different use of graphemes included in the respective orthographic system, sometimes creating new correspondences between phonemes and graphemes. In the majority of cases, these correspondences are more direct, i.e. New Media users try to use only one letter for one phoneme, which leads to the elimination of digraphs such as or in Spanish, or in French, and in Italian, which are all replaced by single graphemes, namely and in Spanish, and in French, and in Italian: (7) [^Chatter1276] stubiste muxo rato anoxe? (8) weno yamamos a los socorristas (9) Si t na vréman rien a faire (Anis 2007, 98) (10) Moi G repri le cour oci (ibid.) (11) Giovedi matt andiamo al merc?Vengono anke altre amike mie.fammi sapé (Santillán 2009, 189) Concerning the last neographic grapheme, i.e. , all the Romance languages examined show an identical development by applying this letter for the voiceless velar plosive /k/. This parallel process is not surprising at all, since every Romance language has at least two different orthographic options for transcribing this phoneme, whose distribution depends on the vowel that follows the plosive: before back vowels, i.e. /a, o, u/, the Romance systems of orthography use the grapheme , inherited directly from their Latin origin. Before front vowels, i.e. /i, e/, Spanish and French orthography opt for the digraph , while the Italian system chooses the already mentioned grapheme combination . By eliminating one of these options, the users create a direct relation between the phoneme /k/ and the grapheme , which, in many cases, is generalized so that is also replaced by , as in the following examples (Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan): 13 (12) [Chatter927]kreo ke vas ekibokado aki nadie echa sin motivo (13) Slt komen va tu? (Anis 2007, 97) (14) SmeKa e k vuol dire la song di vasco k dice: vorrei possederti sulla poltrona di kasa mia kon il rewind :| (Santillán 2009, 189) (15) ^eLvamPI^: plicam ki ez?PepMa_: com va?buckup-: kagon!!!^eLvAmPi^: aki fent el zerdu (Galindo Solé/Pons Moll 2000, s.p.)

13 In these examples, only the cases in which replaces are set in bold type. The other occurrences of show the substitution of or in the Italian example.

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In each case, the orthographic system of the Romance language in question becomes shallower,14 i.e. its predominant point of reference is the phonic surface structure of the concerned language (cf. Meisenburg 1996, 263) instead of morphological regularities (cf. Dürscheid 2006, 139). Furthermore, the complexity of the grapheme system decreases because of the substitution of digraphs, which in turn causes another economization of the typing process for the users, both on the cognitive and the motor level.15 Another very typical strategy of the Romance neographies is the use of logograms and syllabograms, i.e. of graphemes as representations of entire words or of syllables. While logograms are defined as characters with a fixed meaning, which means that they are based on the inseparable relation between the character and a concept (cf. Meisenburg 1996, 65), syllabograms are mostly based on homophony or phonetic similarity (cf. Meisenburg 1996, 67s.; Kallweit 2012, 42). Although every Romance writing system is a primarily alphabetic one, the existence of logograms is not completely alien to writers of the Romance languages: the use of numerals (Arabic as well as Roman ones) is deeply rooted in tradition, as is also the use of mathematical operators, such as , , or . Furthermore, special characters with abbreviating functions such as for “Euro” or for “percent” can be counted among regular features of many users’ everyday grapheme repertoire (cf. Kallweit 2015, 257). In the context of New Media, users also tend to adopt logographic and syllabographic strategies while writing their messages. Concerning logograms, practically every Romance neography makes use of the mathematical operators, however, not in the context of any calculation, but because of their technical meaning, which is transferred to other, non-technical meanings of the words as they are articulated. Strictly speaking, this neographic use of mathematical operators is based on the polysemy of the lexical item for which the respective operator stands (cf. WinterFroemel 2009, 88, fn. 40), like for Spanish por, for French plus, and and for Italian più and per as in the following examples: (16) buenos dias x la mañana (17) dans sa + tendre enfance il piquait le biscuit des filles (Anis 1999, 89) (18) K fai ?Ci sent +tardi x dom !TVB (Santillán 2009, 190) The economizing effect of the logographic usage is evident: instead of typing three to four characters users only have to press one key, which makes the writing process much faster, above all in the case of Italian più, where the orthographic version

14 On the notion of shallow vs deep orthographies, cf. Günther (2004, 1917–1919) or Sampson (1985, 43s.) 15 For more information on this double economizing effect, cf. Kallweit (2015, 71ss.).

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requires the use of a diacritic accent. If not using an Italian computer keyboard, which includes a special key for , this graphic accent means more effort. In the case of syllabograms, users of New Media take a character because its name in the respective Romance language is homophonous (or phonetically similar) to a word in the same language, so that they do not have to type the whole word, but can shorten it to one character. This strategy is often referred to as rebus strategy. As will be shown in the following example, syllabographic forms do not constitute abbreviations in the traditional sense, i.e. the shortening of one word to its initial letter: (19) (20) (21) (22) (23) (24)

s verdad s verdad aquiioii n casa je croi ke g un don... (Volckaert-Legrier/Bernicot/Bert-Erboul 2009, 171) é le foot c une passion pr moi ! (ibid.) Allora non c 6 andate alla mostra eh ? (Santillán 2009, 190) tcr: ciao a10 (Galindo Solé/Pons Moll 2000, n.p.)

The grapheme in example (19) represents the third-person form of the Spanish verb ser in the simple present, i.e. es, which is homophonous with a part of the letter name in Spanish, namely ese. The final [e] of the character’s designation is elided so that the shortened form matches the verb form es. The same strategy can be seen in example (20), where the Spanish designation of the grapheme , namely ene, is shortened by eliding the final vowel to make it homophonous with the Spanish preposition en. In the two French examples, the syllabographically used graphemes and represent the lexical items j’ai and c’est. While the first one is completely homophonous with the French designation of the letter , namely [ʒe], the second one is phonetically very similar to the French letter name [se], only differing in the degree of opening, being higher than the lexical form c’est [sε]. The Italian example in (23) shows the syllabographic use of the letter and the Arabian number , exploiting the homophony of the letter’s designation and the Italian pronoun ci, namely [tʃi], as well as the phonetic identity of the number’s designation and the Italian verb form sei, namely [sεːi̯]. The last example shows a neographically written farewell in a Catalan chatroom: in (24), the Catalan name of the number , which is deu [dεu], is taken as a part of the Catalan goodbye adéu [adeu] because of the phonetical similarity that exists between these two items. As with the French example in (22), only the degree of opening of the first vowel differs. Obviously, this is a negligible factor for users of New Media, since the phonetic similarity is sufficient for recognizing the syllabographically written words. The above examples show that speakers of Romance languages are creative when using New Media, making innovative use of the graphemes their orthographic systems offer them. In some cases this means creating new correspondences between graphemes and phonemes – which in the majority of the cases are inspired by correspondences existing either in internationally well-known languages, like English, or in contiguous languages with which the language in question stands in contact. In others,

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it involves the use of characters, i.e. of letters, numerals, mathematical operators, and so forth, either because of their homophony to words or parts of words in the respective language (syllabograms) or because of the polysemy of the lexical item they represent (logograms). The fact that the same strategies are found in more than one Romance language is a clear sign of a pan-Romance, even a universal tendency, that speakers of languages with alphabetic writing systems apply in the New Media digital context.16

2.3 Alternative usages of diacritics Many studies on the usage of written language in CMC emphasize that diacritics – which play an important role in the Romance languages – are used either very sparsely or not used at all, explaining this lack of diacritic accents with the economization achieved by omitting them (cf. e.g. Müller-Lancé 2004, 204; Anis 1999, 86; Anis 2007, 90; Alba de Diego 2003, 927; Kristo/Papa 2015, 77; Bonomi 2010, 28). But to state that New Media users simply do not utilize diacritics, i.e. accents and dieresis, is inadequate, because there are several users who in fact make use of those signs in a quite unconventional, creative, and thereby neographic way. Of course, the statement that the use of diacritics is an exception in CMC is true in a general way. Most users put neither the grave nor the acute above the respective vowel, not to mention the dieresis or the circumflex. The explanation lies, once again, in the effect of economization of the typing process: when using a normal QWERTYkeyboard, some Romance CMC-users have to press an additional key to generate the diacritic sign before pressing the key for the vowel in question.17 By omitting the diacritics, one can write faster and more effectively. Nevertheless, several examples can be found, in which French and Spanish users do put accents above vowels:18 (25) Moi G repri lé cour oci (Anis 2007, 98) (26) Si t na vréman rien a faire (ibid.) (27) VS ME MANKÉ MÉ GRAV. (ibid., 102) The orthographic equivalents of the neographic forms in these three examples are les, vraiment, manquez and mais, all of which have more characters so that the use of the diacritic accent means certain economization of the writing process. In (25) and (27) the grapheme is used because of its standard correspondence to the phoneme /e/, which coincides with the realization of the replaced graphemes in les [le] and man-

16 Looking to English textisms to prove this hypothesis, one finds examples such as C U l8er which takes advantages of the given homophonies to produce the syllabographic version of see you later. 17 In the case of most smartphones, the generation of an accented vowel is comparably laborious, not to mention the alphanumeric keyboards of older mobile phones. 18 It is very interesting that in Italian CMC parallel phenomena cannot be observed.

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quez [mãke]. Since the phoneme transcribed by in (26) and in the second neographic form in (27) is the open /ε/, the explanation has to be a different one: if the respective writers had put a normal , i.e. without the diacritic accent, it could have been interpreted as the graphematic representation of the weakened, i.e. unstressed /e/, namely [ə], just as in the majority of French words spelled according to the orthographic standard. To avoid this misinterpretation – and any possible misunderstanding –, the users opted for the accented grapheme, as it is the standard representation of a phoneme that is closer to the original realization of the replaced graphemes than the grapheme without the diacritic accent. Once again, pronunciation – more precisely homophony – is the guiding principle of a neography. In the following Spanish examples, the accented graphemes are also used because the resulting neographic forms constitute homophones of standard Spanish items: (28) pos sin curá, cremosillo pa untá (29) con la caló ke hace?? (30) ui, que raros sois verdá? Since in spoken Spanish final /r/, above all in infinitives and in the Andalusian dialect,19 is elided (cf. Navarro Tomás/Haensch/Lechner 1970, 89; Jiménez Fernández 1999, 63; or Alvar 1996, 234, 248), many CMC-users omit the grapheme in their computer-mediated messages, like in the examples (28) and (29). The usage of the diacritic accent has to be seen as a clue for the recipient of the respective message that the word stress is not changed, but still lies on the last syllable. Furthermore, the accented vowels fulfil a disambiguating function, since the neographically written forms in (28) could be misinterpreted as verb forms of the 3rd person (cura ‘he/she/it recovers or cures’; unta ‘he/she/it smears or greases’) or, in the first case, as the Spanish noun cura ‘cure’, if they were written without the graphic accents. Although the use of the diacritic means more typing effort, it is very likely that the accented neographic forms require less cognitive potential on the side of the recipients than the possible – and actually existing – forms without the accents.20 The neographic form in the following example is also to be understood as a marker of unchanged word stress despite the graphematic omission of an intervocalic , which, again, corresponds to the realization in spoken Spanish (cf. Kallweit 2015, 95s.): (31) la que hablan de salíos ven las pelis pornos hasta el final para ver si el muchachito se casa con la muchachita...xD

19 Interestingly enough, the Andalusian dialect has an exemplary function for many Spanish neographic forms (cf. Kallweit 2015). 20 Psycholinguistic studies on the processing of neographic spellings constitute a future topic of research.

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Similar to the cases seen above, the graphic accent excludes the interpretation as the Spanish adjective salios, i.e. [saljos], used to designate the members of an old Frankish tribe of Northern Germany, which certainly does not fit the context of the chat in general nor the particular communicative context of the phrase shown in (31). So this graphic accent also intends to be a support for an easy and quick decoding and processing of the computer-mediated message in order to enable the recipient to answer as quickly as possible. The examples analysed in this section of the chapter demonstrate very clearly that some New Media users do use diacritics, although not according to the orthographic norms of the respective language, but according to a new, CMC-intrinsic norm that it seems is currently developing.

3 Discussion and conclusion All the phenomena shown in the course of this chapter have in common that they deviate from the orthographic standard of the respective Romance languages and that they are applied deliberately, i.e. they are not just typographic errors or the consequence of the user’s deficient linguistic skills. By showing those two characteristics, the strategies described in the previous pages have to be taken as very clear indications of a new linguistic variety, namely, more precisely, a new register. Registers are classically “defined as a variety of language according to the use” (Ferrara/Brunner/ Whittemore 1991, 10, with reference to Halliday/MacIntosh/Strevens 1964, 87), i.e. “appropriate for a particular situation” (ibid.). According to this, Biber/Conrad (2001, 3) state that registers are language varieties “defined in terms of a particular constellation of situational characteristics” (for further discussion, see ↗12 Oral genres). Registers thereby constitute sets of sometimes “very different linguistic items to express more or less the same meaning on different occasions” (Hudson 1996, 45s.), which means that each speaker – or, in the context analysed in this chapter, writer – chooses their linguistic signs on the basis of non-linguistic factors, “including the speaker’s purpose in communication, the topic, the relationship between speaker and hearer, and the production circumstances” (Biber/Conrad 2001, 3). Samaniego Aldazábal (2003, 259) draws the same conclusion when defining the “cybernetic register” as dependent upon the situation of communication as well as the communication canal: “Entre estos últimos [i.e. the different styles in accordance with concrete situations of communication] podría incluirse el ‘registro cibernético’ de la lengua, el que se maneja en el ‘chateo’ por medio de internet [sic] o por telefonía celular. No pasaría de ser, por lo tanto, más que un nuevo registro de lengua al que se recurriría para esos efectos y en ningún caso para otros, asociado en este caso tanto a una situación específica de comunicación como a un soporte o canal material específico, fuertemente condicionante”.

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Following Ferguson (1982, 57fs.), one characteristic of a given register is its variability of the degree of its distinctiveness (cf. Ferrara/Brunner/Whittemore 1991, 11). The degree of differentness of the neographic strategies explained here also varies: the new correspondence between phoneme and grapheme given in the case of the Spanish neographic representing /tʃ/ is surely more different from the orthographic standard than the generalized usage as graphematic representation of the phoneme /k/; but in either case, the difference from the written standard variety is clearly perceivable and apparent.21 As several studies on the use of alternative spellings have shown (cf. e.g. Kemp 2010, 63; Rosen et al. 2010, 435), the mostly young users of CMC perceive this difference in a very clear way: “[…] most college students recognize a distinction between communication with friends and communication with instructors and also believe that text speak is not appropriate for more formal contexts of written communication” (Drouin/Davis 2009, 57). This means, that the users of CMC identify the communicational context, i.e. the circumstances of the production of their messages, the topic, the valid norms in the respective CMC-genre and the social and communicational roles of themselves as well as of their partners (cf. Lewis/Fabos 2005, 484), and adapt their written language usage on the basis of this knowledge. By doing so, they also display a high awareness of the suitability or the inappropriateness of the new, computer-mediated register described in this chapter. Dürscheid/ Wagner/Brommer (2010) proved this fact as part of their long-term study on possibly negative effects of computer-mediated writing on the language performances of Swiss pupils. They come to the conclusion that “[die] meisten Schüler wissen ja ohnehin zwischen den verschiedenen Produktionssituationen des Schreibens (Freizeit/Schule) zu unterscheiden” (‘in any case most of the students know how to distinguish between the different situations of written production [leisure/school]’) (ibid., 229). Because of this knowledge, there are only very few cases in which neographic forms appear in non-CMC texts that are subject to the norms of standard orthography. Besides the possible negative consequences on the writer’s image,22 the communicational setting of the CMC-genre itself has to be seen as a reason for the restrictedness of the register, as Parrilla (2008, 134) puts it: “Porque fuera de esos entornos [digitales], las estrategias y rasgos vistos pierden la coherencia, situacionalidad y aceptabilidad que tienen dentro del contexto en el que vieron la luz”. And Santillán (2009, 160s.) states that the varieties emerging in CMC would lead to an inefficient, equivocal communication, if used in a broader, i.e. non-digital context. This aspect matches the

21 As Ferrara/Brunner/Whittemore (1991, 11) explain, “[this] variation in degree of distinctiveness from other registers or an unmarked ‘neutral’ variety may itself be used as a marker of adjustment and eventually become conventionalized”. 22 Whilst users of neographic forms may be considered by some to be orthographically poor writers, numerous studies have proved that there is no statistically relevant correlation between the use of neographies and standard writing ability (cf. for example Gómez Camacho 2007, 161; VolckaertLegrier/Bernicot/Bert-Erboul 2009, 174).

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basic idea, “that the structural properties of any register follow from the circumstances of use” (Ferrara/Brunner/Whittemore 1991, 18). Taken together with the differences from the orthographic standard, these facts make very clear that language use in CMC constitutes a new written register of the Romance languages. Picking up one of the five working assumptions Ferguson (1982, 57s.) outlined, it should be emphasized that “competence in register variation is acquired as part of the language development” (Ferrara/Brunner/Whittemore 1991, 11) of every speaker – and of every writer. At the same time, speakers/writers acquire the norms for the respective register from other users while using it (cf. ibid., 10). This means that the users of CMC recognize the practices, which are characteristic for a certain CMC-genre, and imitate them in their own contributions, following the pragmatic rules of interaction. As Volckaert-Legrier/Bernicot/Bert-Erboul (2009, 179) show, “adaptation to the interlocutor is one of the first variations observed” in the oral modality of language and, therefore, undoubtedly also at work in CMC. Another indication of this way of acquiring the new electronic written registers is the fact that interlocutors in dialogues align their linguistic representations with each other (cf. Pickering/Garrod 2004); as shown above, many CMC-genres are perceived as synchronous forms of communication in praesentia, which makes it only logical that the processes of alignment of spoken dialogues are applied in written interaction. Since registers are acquired successively (cf. Volckaert-Legrier/Bernicot/Bert-Erboul 2009, 165), the electronic written register is certainly acquired and evolves during the early youth of most of the CMC-users at the same time as the standard written register develops, namely between the ages of 9 and 17 (cf. ibid., referring to Berman 2005; Berman/Verhoeven 2002; Nippold 1998). This indicates that practically every digital native grows up acquiring several written registers simultaneously as well as competence in register variation, which, in turn, means an interesting field for future studies on literacy skills in general and on the use of the electronic written register in particular. In the final analysis, to assume that the electronic written register of the Romance languages emerged ex nihilo, i.e. in the frame of the computer-mediated communication itself, would be short-sighted. Martin (1983, 36) has shown that “registers are developed not by acquiring structures but by adjusting, appropriate to the context, the probabilities attached to features in already developed systems”. As it has been shown in the course of this chapter, New Media users adapt the given alphabet and the parameters of their orthographic system to the computer-mediated situation, making use of alternative spellings that resemble the spoken colloquial register of the respective Romance language. In that sense, features of the spoken language varieties also form part of the new electronic written register.23 Most of the neographic forms

23 This is also the reason why many studies on CMC emphasize the hybrid character of the language used, which is often described as somewhere between written and spoken language (cf. for example Ferrara/Brunner/Whittemore 1991; Dürscheid 2003; Lorenzetti/Schirru 2006).

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involve a shortening of graphematic items, so that the electronic written register can be counted amongst the reduced registers, such as note-taking, telegraphese or postcardese (cf. Ferrara/Brunner/Whittemore 1991, 12, 21). Some of the neographic strategies in New Media written language can even be traced back to ancient times, such as the reduction of highly frequent words to their initial letter, e.g. instead of que, which was a common procedure in Roman manuscripts, known as litterae singulares or litterae singulae (cf. Frenz 2010, 19; Steffens 1909, XXX). Other strategies display interesting parallels with other writing systems, like the use of logo- and syllabogramms, both of which are integral parts of the Japanese writing system (cf. Dürscheid 2006, 79; Mosterín 1996, 87–93).24 The electronic written register thereby combines several possibilities of the writing system to which it belongs and, consequently, meets all requirements to be considered as a new variety of the Romance languages. To analyse these new Romance varieties in more detail constitutes a fruitful and promising area of research for Romance linguists as well as for linguists investigating written language in general or its processing from a perceptual point of view.

4 Bibliography Alba de Diego, Vidal (2003), Los mensajes de texto en el teléfono móvil, in: José Luis Girón Alconchel et al. (edd.), Estudios ofrecidos al profesor José Jesús de Bustos Tovar, vol. 2, Madrid, Universidad Complutense, 921–935. Alvar, Manuel (1996), Andaluz, in: Manuel Alvar (ed.), Manual de dialectología hispánica. El Español de España, Barcelona, Ariel, 233–258. Anis, Jacques (1999), Chats et usages graphiques, in: Jacques Anis (ed.), Internet, communication et langue française, Paris, Hermes Science, 71–90. Anis, Jacques (2003), Communication électronique scripturale et formes langagières, in: Jacques Anis (ed.), Actes des quatrièmes rencontres Réseaux humains/Réseaux technologiques. Poitiers, 31 mai et 1er juin 2002. “Documents, actes et rapports pour l’éducation”, Paris, Commission nationale du débat public, 57–70. Anis, Jacques (2007), Neography: Unconventional Spelling in French SMS Text Messages, in: Brenda Danet/Susan C. Herring (edd.), The Multilingual Internet: Language, Culture, and Communication Online, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 87–116. Antonelli, Giuseppe (2009), Il linguaggio degli SMS, in: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana (ed.), XXI Secolo, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/il-linguaggio-degli-sms_%28XXI-Secolo%29 (last access 27.06.2016). Baron, Naomi S. (2008), Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Berman, Ruth A. (2005), Introduction. Developing Discourse Stance in Different Text Types and Languages, Journal of Pragmatics 37(2), 105–124. Berman, Ruth A./Verhoeven, Ludo (2002), Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on the Development of TextProduction Abilities: Speech and Writing, Written Language and Literacy 5(1), 1–43.  

24 For further information on the traditions of Spanish neography, cf. Kallweit (2012).

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Biber, Douglas/Conrad, Susan (2001), Introduction. Multi-Dimensional Analysis and the Study of Register Variation, in: Susan Conrad/Douglar Biber (edd.), Variation in English: Multidimensional Studies, New York, Longman, 3–12. Bonomi, Ilaria (2010), Tendenze linguistiche dell’italiano in rete, Informatica umanistica, http://www. ledonline.it/informatica-umanistica/Allegati/IU-03-10-Bonomi.pdf (last access 04.08.2016). CLAVE 2001 = Maldonado González, Concepción (ed.) (42001, 11997), Clave. Diccionario de uso del español actual, Madrid, SM. DRAE 2001 = Real Academia Española (222001, 11780), Diccionario de la lengua española, Madrid, Espasa Calpe. Drouin, Michelle/Davis, Claire (2009), R U Texting? Is the Use of Text Speak Hurting Your Literacy?, Journal of Literacy Research 41, 46–67. Dürscheid, Christa (2003), Medienkommunikation im Kontinuum von Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit. Theoretische und empirische Probleme, Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik 38, 37–56. Dürscheid, Christa (32006, 12002), Einführung in die Schriftlinguistik, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Dürscheid, Christa/Wagner, Franc/Brommer, Sarah (2010), Wie Jugendliche schreiben. Schreibkompetenz und neue Medien, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter. Ferguson, Charles A. (1982), Simplified Registers and Linguistic Theory, in: Loraine K. Obler/Lise Menn (edd.), Exceptional Language and Linguistics, New York, Academic Press, 49–66. Ferrara, Kathleen/Brunner, Hans/Whittemore, Greg (1991), Interactive Written Discourse as an Emergent Register, Written Communication 8(1), 8–34. Frank-Job, Barbara (2008), “Putain, vivent les fautes.” Le Passage à l’écrit de l’immédiat communicatif dans les nouveaux médias et son impact sur les conventions du français écrit, in: Jürgen Erfurt/ Gabriele Burdach (edd.), Standardisierungsprozesse im Französischen und Spanischen im 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt, Lang, 63–81. Frank-Job, Barbara (2009), Formen und Folgen des Ausbaus französischer Nähesprache in computervermittelter Kommunikation, in: Stefan Pfänder/Rolf Kailuweit/Vanessa Cousin (edd.), FrankoMedia: Aufriss einer französischen Sprach- und Medienwissenschaft, Berlin, Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 71–88. Frenz, Thomas (2010), Abkürzungen. Die Abbreviaturen der Lateinischen [sic] Schrift von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Stuttgart, Hierseman. Galindo Solé, Mireia/Pons Moll, Clàudia (2000), La col·loquialitat en els xats: Aspectes fonètics i interlingüístics, http://www.ub.edu/lincat/cmo-cat/galindo-pons.htm (last access 06.07.2012). García, Jesús (2006), Barcelona, capital “okupa”, 9 Diciembre, El País, http://elpais.com/diario/ 2006/12/09/espana/1165618815_850215.html (last access 05.07.2016). Gerstenberg, Annette (2004), “Digitare in piazza”: Zur Sprache im italienischen Chat, in: Wolfgang Dahmen et al. (edd.), Romanistik und neue Medien. Romanistisches Kolloquium XVI, Tübingen, Narr, 309–326. Gómez Camacho, Alejandro (2007), La ortografía del español y los géneros eletrónicos, Comunicar 15 (29), 157–164. Günther, Hartmut (2004), Schriftsysteme, in: Geert Booij et al. (edd.), Morphologie. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Flexion und Wortbildung, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 1915–1923. Halliday, Michael A. K./MacIntosh, Angus/Strevens, Peter (1964), The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching, London, Longman. Herring, Susan C. (2001), Computer-Mediated Discourse, in: Deborah Schiffrin/Deborah Tannen/Heidi E. Hamilton (edd.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Malden, MA, Blackwell, 612–634. Hudson, Richard A. (21996, 11980), Sociolinguistics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Hunkeler, Hervé (2011), Langage SMS et orthographe au collège, Enjeux 81, 81–102. Jiménez Fernández, Rafael (1999), El andaluz, Madrid, Arco Libros.  

 

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Kallweit, Daniel (2012), Die Tradition(en) der Neografie. Wie alte Verfahren im Web 2.0 neue Verwendung finden, in: Kristina Bedijs/Karoline Henriette Heyder (edd.), Sprache und Personen im Web 2.0. Linguistische Perspektiven auf YouTube, SchülerVZ & Co, Münster, LIT, 37–58. Kallweit, Daniel (2015), Neografie in der computervermittelten Kommunikation des Spanischen. Zu alternativen Schreibweisen im Chatnetzwerk www.irc-hispano.es, Tübingen, Narr. Kemp, Nenagh (2010), Texting versus Txting: Reading and Writing Text Messages, and Links with Other Linguistic Skills, Writing Systems Research 2(1), 53–71. Kristo, Renata/Papa, Mirela (2015), Il linguaggio degli SMS – Una minaccia per le lingue nazionali tradizionali?, Anglisticum Journal (IJLLIS) 4(1), 76–81. Lewis, Cynthia/Fabos, Bettina (2005), Instant Messaging, Literacies, and Social Identities, Reading Research Quarterly 40(4), 470–501. Lorenzetti, Luca/Schirru, Giancarlo (2006), La lingua italiana nei nuovi mezzi di comunicazione: SMS, posta elettronica e Internet, in: Stefano Gensini (ed.), Fare comunicazione. Teoria ed esercizi, Roma, Carocci, 71–98. Mancera Rueda, Ana/Pano Alamán, Ana (2013), El español coloquial en las redes sociales, Madrid, Arco Libros. Martin, James Robert (1983), The Development of Register, in: Jonathan Fine/Roy O. Freedle (edd.), Developmental Issues in Discourse, Norwood, Ablex, 1–40. Meisenburg, Trudel (1996), Romanische Schriftsysteme im Vergleich. Eine diachrone Studie, Tübingen, Narr. Michot, Nicolas (2008), Les Représentations graphiques du lexique dans les pratiques atypiques écrites des jeunes, in: Jacques Durand/Benoît Habert/Bernard Laks (edd.), 1er Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française – CMLF ’08, Paris, Institut de Linguistique Française, 1175–1189. Mosterín, Jesús (1996), Teoría de la escritura, Barcelona, Icaria. Müller-Lancé, Johannes (2004), Originalität versus Fremdbestimmung: Graphievarianten in französischen und spanischen Chats, in: Markus Müller/Sabine Klaeger (edd.), Medien und kollektive Identitätsbildung. Ergebnisse des 3. Franko-Romanisten-Kongresses (26.09. bis 29.9.2002 in Aachen), Wien, Praesens Verlag, 196–213. Muñoz, Ramón (2016), Así puedes ya recuperar de golpe todas tus fotos de Tuenti, El País, http://economia.elpais.com/economia/2016/03/01/actualidad/1456852991_064682.html (last access 09.07.2016). Navarro Tomás, Tomás (1918), Manual de pronunciación española, Madrid, Centro de Estudios Históricos. Navarro Tomás, Tomás/Haensch, Günther/Lechner, Bernhard (1970), Spanische Aussprachelehre, München, Hueber. Nippold, Marilyn A. (21998, 11988), Later Language Development: The School-Age and Adolescent Years, Austin, PRO-ED. Oms, Javier (2013), Familias desahuciadas y okupas toman un edificio de viviendas en Nou Barris, http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2013/03/29/barcelona/1364552389.html (last access 05.07.2016). Otto, Carlos (2016), Tuenti cerrará su red social: Sus 20 millones de usuarios no son rentables, http://www.elconfidencial.com/tecnologia/2016-02-01/tuenti-cerrara-su-red-social-sus-20millones-de-usuarios-no-son-rentables_1141970 (last access 09.07.2016). Parrilla, Ernesto Antonio (2008), Alteraciones del lenguaje en la era digital, Comunicar 15(30), 131–136. Pickering, Martin J./Garrod, Simon (2004), Toward a Mechanistic Psychology of Dialogue, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27, 169–226. Pons Moll, Clàudia (2002), Els xats: La ludoteca de la llengua, Interlingüística 13(3), 273–281.

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Rosen, Larry D., et al. (2010), The Relationship between “Textisms” and Formal and Informal Writing among Young Adults, Communication Research 37(3), 420–440. Samaniego Aldazábal, José Luis (2003), Lenguaje y cibernética. ¿Es el lenguaje cibernético un riesgo para el idioma en la sociedad globalizada?, Onomázein. Revista semestral de lingüística, Filología y traducción de la Facultad de Letras de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile 8, 257–260. Sampson, Geoffrey (1985), Writing Systems: A Linguistic Introduction, London, Hutchinson. Santillán, Elena (2009), Digitale Jugendkommunikation in der Informationsgesellschaft. Spanisch, Italienisch und Deutsch im Vergleich, Wien, Praesens. Steffens, Franz (21909, 11903), Lateinische Paläographie. 125 Tafeln in Lichtdruck mit gegenüberstehender Transkription nebst Erklärungen und einer systematischen Darstellung der Entwicklung der lateinischen Schrift, Trier, Schaar & Dathe. Storrer, Angelika (2001), Getippte Gespräche oder dialogische Texte? Zur kommunikationstheoretischen Einordnung der Chat-Kommunikation, in: Andrea Lehr et al. (edd.), Sprache im Alltag. Beiträge zu neuen Perspektiven in der Linguistik, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 439–465. Volckaert-Legrier, Olga/Bernicot, Josie/Bert-Erboul, Alain (2009), Electronic Mail, A New Written Language Register: A Study with French-Speaking Adolescents, British Journal of Developmental Psychology 27, 163–181. VOX 2002 = Lahuerta Galán, Javier (ed.) (2002), Diccionario de uso del español de América y España, Barcelona, SPES. Winter-Froemel, Esme (2009), Frs kmi und a +: Kürzungen in frühen romanischen Schriftzeugnissen und in der Internetkommunikation, in: Lidia Becker (ed.), Aktualität des Mittelalters und der Renaissance in der Romanistik. Akten der Tagung vom 13.–14. Oktober in Trier, München, Meidenbauer, 67–99. Zimmermann, Klaus (2003), Constitución de la identidad y anticortesía verbal entre jóvenes masculinos hablantes de español, in: Diana Bravo (ed.), La perspectiva no etnocentrista de la cortesía: identidad sociocultural de las comunidades hispanohablantes. Primer Coloquio del Programa EDICE, Stockholm, Stockholms universitet, 47–59. Zimmermann, Klaus (2005), Construcción de la identidad y anticortesía verbal entre jóvenes, in: Diana Bravo (ed.), Estudios de la (des)cortesía en español. Categorías conceptuales y aplicaciones a corpus orales y escritos, Buenos Aires, Programa EDICE-Editorial Dunken, 245–271.  

Ralph Ludwig

15 Medium and creole Abstract: The relationship between creole languages and medium is approached here through a theoretical framework that links sociolinguistics with the concept of linguistic ecology and focuses on critical debates regarding media, orality and literacy. The chapter outlines the evolution of creole orthography – a key issue where use of creole in different media is concerned – and provides an overview of different medial representations of creole that extend from traditional written media to modern digital media. Throughout, media are understood as frames that condition the evolution of creole languages through processes of preservation, innovation, and hybridization.  

Keywords: linguistic ecology, orality, literacy, creole, hybridization  

1 Sociolinguistics and linguistic ecology: the theoretical framework The role the media play in the development of creole languages – particularly in relation to the parameters of orality and literacy1 – is the focus of this chapter’s sociolinguistic investigation. Calls to open up sociolinguistics towards linguistic ecology can be heard with increasing regularity (cf. e.g. Gadet et al. 2009). Considering the importance of an explicitly linguistic, ecological approach within modern creole studies, this theme must be addressed at least briefly. From the beginnings of sociolinguistics and the first important conferences in the 1960s to the present day, this discipline has investigated the functional relation between language and the social historical frame and the variational consequences (↗6 Speaker variables in Romance; ↗7 Speaker variables and their relation to language change).2 The investigation of the various parameters which influence language has thus assumed new dimensions. As recent

1 The German term Schriftlichkeit as well as French scripturalité are translated here, and at many points in the chapter, as “literacy” following Ong’s usage of “orality” and “literacy” in his seminal work which traces the cultural shift from oral cultures to literate cultures (Ong 1982). At certain points in the chapter, where the emphasis is more on written or textual form, the term “writing” is used. 2 The 1960s, and the contribution of Dell Hymes and William Labov in particular, are considered to have consolidated the foundations for contemporary sociolinguistics. However, as early as the second half of the nineteenth century, Whitney talks of language as a social institution, and the term fait social is clearly established in the work of Antoine Meillet (cf. Whitney 1875; Meillet 1921; Koerner 1995). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-016

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literature and the present volume testify, critical awareness of the multiplicity of these parameters has continued to grow steadily and the diversity of differentiated linguistic disciplines has also increased. The corpus-based investigation of varieties, for example, is often understood as being sociolinguistic, although the demarcation between conversation and dialogue analysis is hazy. This is all the more so when not only language in a strictly typological sense is considered, but when the investigation also adopts a multimedia approach. Phonetic data are then correlated with situated data, documented through the media film. This approach is adopted systematically by some advocates of interactional linguistics (cf. Mondada forthcoming). The difficulty of defining disciplinary demarcations also becomes evident when geographic variations of language are taken into account. Traditional Spanish studies, for example, investigate the development of Spanish variations in the sociolinguistic discipline of dialectology. French variations are treated similarly (see also ↗5 Romance dialectology). In both, however, other disciplines which have gained in importance, such as cognitive linguistics and contact linguistics, also play a role. These disciplines also investigate the influence of languages, which in typological terms are quite different. Social dependence is increasingly understood as being only one of many potential parameters for interdependence. Two developments are crucial in this respect. It is difficult, for one thing, to assign one language to another. That Camfranglais and French are historically related (cf. Gadet/Ludwig 2015, 95ss.; Schröder/Rudd forthcoming) is manifestly evident. But is it correct to say that this is a “variety” of a “Romance” language? Thomason/Kaufman (1988) have rightly defined “unbroken transfer” as a condition for traditional language genealogy. Social structures and stratifications have indeed become very complicated; globalization, and all the accompanying countermovements, make it very nearly impossible to demarcate social strata clearly (cf. Blommaert 2010). Turning our attention now to theoretical orientations in creole studies, two tendencies have emerged in recent years. One, more formal, approach has taken on the task, amongst others, of producing grammars which can be processed by computer technology; an example is Aboh (2009; 2015). The other is the development of an ecological approach, which describes the history of creolization and its situation to date; Mühlhäusler (1996; forthcoming a; forthcoming b) and Mufwene (2001; 2008) can be mentioned here. Mühlhäusler focuses on English creole and contact languages in the Pacific, whilst Mufwene investigates English and French creoles from Africa to the Americas. A further suggestion for creating and applying models in linguistic ecology is made by Ludwig/Mühlhäusler/Pagel (forthcoming). Briefly outlined, this theory argues that language can only be understood if a whole variety of parameters, which are reciprocally dependent, are taken into account. What is crucial here is that the relevance of single parameters and their relation to one another vary according to the language constellation. According to the reasoning underlying Husserl’s (1913) model

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of wholes and parts, the axes of dependence are both horizontal and vertical. Therefore, epistemologically, we have, for example, a vertical diversification of analytical levels from micro to macro, that is from the level of discourse to a global – for example, francophone – level. The phenomena of language contact are also important for this ecological model, that is the horizontal axis. Consequently, the concept of a functional correlation of language and other parameters is one crucial focus in this chapter; this general correlational concept also plays an important role in sociolinguistics. On the other hand, the linguistic importance of those factors which play an important role in sociolinguistics must be closely scrutinized.

2 Creole languages: language contact, language typology, language genetics, language attitudes Developing an ecological theory that concentrates on differences in creole language contact constellations is appropriate at this point. Where all creole languages are concerned, it is possible to advance the following: (1) creole languages developed from language contact situations; and (2) creole languages are found in situations of language contact today (cf. also ↗3 Collecting and analysing creole data). For creole languages traditionally considered to be typical (in the Caribbean: Haitian Creole, Guyanais and Martinican Creole; in the Indian Ocean: Mauritian and Seychelles Creole), the creolization phase – that is, the phase which culminated in the emergence of a creole language, is divided historically into two stages: the Société d’habitation and the Société de plantation (see Ludwig forthcoming). The first phase of this process is linked to a strongly macro-space related communication. Colonial languages are subjected to a process of simplification, and a pragmatic knowledge of communication is formed based on the use of hybrid techniques. These forms of communication were often strongly symmetrical and therefore not hierarchical (cf. Klimenkowa 2017). The arrival of large numbers of black African slaves caused an enormous demographic increase in the second phase. The resulting communication problems encouraged the processes of simplification, contact and grammaticalization, which in turn led to the emergence of creole languages. This is accompanied by a decrease in archipelagic communication and a concentration on single island colonies. Insular language situations become hierarchical: the slaves and farmhands only use creole, while the white owners speak both creole and their own colonial language. Creole languages are, therefore, not the only language spoken in their environments, even in the present day. Creole society can be classified, even still, according to contact constellations. This can be illustrated, for example, in the franco-creolophone Caribbean, to which I will, in general, limit my observations. French creole is

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spoken in Haiti, Martinique and Guadeloupe alongside the colonial language French, which dominates in formal written communication and administration. Since Haiti has been independent since 1804 however, and Martinique and Guadeloupe were still French colonies until 1946, the further development has varied. In Haiti, even today, the large majority of the (rural) population are monolingual creolophone (Valdman 2015). In the French Départements d’outre-mer, the French educational system and greater material wealth have generalized the bilingual situation, despite apparent competence deficits in French and also in creole. The media certainly play an important role in regulating contact (see examples below). In other creole societies, other contact constellations prevail. The island of Dominica, situated between Martinique and Guadeloupe, was initially a French colony, long enough for a Société de plantation characterized by French to develop and to allow the emergence of a creole based on French. Dominica then became British, so that today English and French creole exist side by side, whereby informal spoken contact is characterized not only by French creole but increasingly by informal English. In the Indian Ocean, we have a similar situation in both Mauritius and the Seychelles. Colonization by France, the development of French creole, and a transition in colonial power led to a situation where French creole and the administrative language English exist side by side. However, French has retained a privileged position here. Various works on creole languages and their dissemination are available such as Holm’s introductory volumes (1988–1989) and most recently the very broadly conceived Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online (APiCS) (Michaelis et al. 2013b) at the Max Planck Institut in Leipzig. This project has produced a dataset for pidgins and creoles, in which international specialists outline certain structural typological characteristics using the same detailed list in each case. The same specialists also describe the languages historically, sociolinguistically, and typologically in a further three volumes; a fourth volume contains comparative articles. The central question “What are creole languages?” is not, however, solved by APiCS, which focuses strongly on the internal system of languages. Both McWhorter and Mufwene have addressed this issue. Whilst McWhorter (1998; 2004) contends that a certain type of creole language is determined by a configuration of structural characteristics, Mufwene (1998) contradicts this vehemently (see Aboh 2015 more recently on this issue). APiCS cannot solve this question since a maximalist approach led to the inclusion of many pidgin, creole and other contact languages. Therefore the selection of creole languages through a certain empirically-given, smallest common denominator of internal linguistic characteristics is not possible.3 Certain similarities in creole structures, however, cannot, in my opinion, be denied (cf. for example Gadet/Ludwig 2015, 103ss.). If nothing else, they can be

3 For a discussion of this issue and a suggested solution, cf. Pagel (2015).

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explained by the common characteristics of orality and language contact processes under oral conditions during the creolization process. How can we define these, and their significant proximity to mediality? If we concentrate for the time being on a historical perspective, we can see that creole languages first emerge in the Société de plantation, so that the development of written creole, in both a social and a linguistic sense, then becomes possible. As I mentioned above, in this second phase of a historical creolization, a definite social stratification of the linguistic constellation emerges (cf. Ludwig forthcoming). A widespread social evaluation of the language develops. This sociolinguistic consequence of historical creolization is important for our eco-linguistic approach. The creole language is only used in areas which, in colonial and official opinion, are characterized by close social and interpersonal contact, informal and private areas, perhaps for folklore such as the carnival. According to Ferguson’s terms (1959, cf. the overview in Gadet/Ludwig 2015, 51s.), creole becomes the “low variety”. The area of official “high” literature, formal situations and the official Christian church is reserved in general for the colonial language – the “high” variety. For creole languages this applies to French, Portuguese, Spanish, English and Dutch. Ferguson demonstrated this along the lines of Haitian Creole vs French. This theory elicited criticism from the beginning. Fishman (1967) revoked Ferguson’s restriction of his concept to two clearly different varieties of one language. This is important for the continuing genealogical debate on creole. Even more important in this context are the arguments which refer to the social interpretation of linguisticsocial creole constellations. As far as Haiti is concerned, a classification of the predominantly monolingual creole speakers to a purely “low variety speaker” would exclude them from all higher, cultural domains. This would not do justice to the role played by creole in rural society and in voodoo. Creole in Haiti is also not homogenous; forms which are more strongly influenced by French language contact are apparently more appropriate for literacy (cf. Valdman 2015 for the situation in Haiti). In the Lesser Antilles, we not only find current examples of a more or less interlectal type of creole; we also have a particular Antillean French which does not fit in with the bon usage concept of a lexifier language. Hazaël-Massieux (1978) had accordingly considered using the term “triglossic” very early on (cf. Ludwig 1996, 20ss.; Ludwig/ Bruneau-Ludwig 2012). In Martinique and Guadeloupe, young people today are fascinated by spoken French, so that the traditionally intimate, private area is no longer reserved exclusively for creole (cf. Ludwig 2015). The concomitant and related social evaluation of language can be described as “language ideology”, a concept that requires further historical explanation. In the course of the European standardization of language, the development of a prestige variety is characteristic, that is an especially exemplary bon usage. This bon usage was oral in the French seventeenth century so that the “façon d’escrire de la plus saine partie des Autheurs du temps” was considered a secondary, subordinate characteristic by Vaugelas (Vaugelas 1647, Preface, II.3). At the turn of the seventeenth and

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eighteenth century, the written form took pride of place. This prestige code was now based on what was seen as “classical literature” (above all, Racine) and became the fundamental element of national identity, termed “cultural memory” by Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann (J. Assmann 1992; 2008; A. Assmann 2008; see also Ludwig/ Schwarze 2012 on this development). In the terminology of Irvine/Gal (2000), an “iconization” of a fine literary, Parisian French norm variety took place, which was quickly adopted by the Antilles as the preface to the novel Outre-Mer (1835) by Martinican béké Louis de Maynard de Queilhe demonstrates impressively: “Je crois inutile de me justifier de n’avoir pas employé le patois des nègres. On me saura gré au contraire de ne pas avoir troublé la belle limpidité du langage français de tous ces mots barbares, qui y seraient tombés comme autant de pierres” (Maynard de Queilhe 1835, vol.1, iv).

In fact, Maynard de Queilhe provides here a clearcut prototypical example of an Irvine/Gal (2000, 38) “erasure”: “Erasure is the process in which ideology, in simplifying the sociolinguistic field, renders some persons or activities (or sociolinguistic phenomena) invisible. Facts that are inconsistent with the ideological scheme either go unnoticed or get explained away. So, for example, a social group or a language may be imagined as homogeneous, its internal variation disregarded. Because a linguistic ideology is a totalizing vision, elements that do not fit its interpretive structure – that cannot be seen to fit – must be either ignored or transformed”.

The strong iconization of the prestige language can, however, lead to its suppression. Maynard de Queilhe pointedly excludes creole as patois des nègres from the identifying representative literate culture of the Antilles.4

3 Media and the “functional-cognitive-textual” and “orality-literacy” debates The following hypothesis underpins this chapter: the parameter “media” (in a broad sense) is important for the development of creole languages as far as an ecological concept is concerned. Indeed, this means that, according to the theory of language

4 A summary of Irvine/Gal’s theory (2000) is provided in Jansen (2015, 74s.): “iconization describes the social process through which it becomes natural for people to associate certain linguistic forms with social groups in ways that seemingly reflect the group’s fundamental and inherent nature; fractal recursivity refers to the phenomenon in which the same distinctive traits appear at different levels of analysis, for example, in the construction of intra- and intergroup relations; finally, erasure involves the negation and concealing of information which is inconsistent with the discursive representations that configure a particular language ideology.” (Irvine/Gal’s “fractal recursivity” has not been considered here.)

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ideology drawn by Irvine/Gal in 2000, the more creole is used in public areas, the more it is overtly present in media such as the book or in modern digital media (see below) in general, the more it avoids and overcomes “erasure”. What, then, are “media”? The orality-literacy theory, associated with Koch and Oesterreicher in the mid-1980s, differentiates “medial” and “conceptional” orality and literacy.5 The emphasis of the definition lies on the conceptual side, which results in a specific textual character. This is not linked to the phonic or graphic medial realization; so, for example, a political speech can be medially realized in a phonic form but its deeper textual style, or “conception”, is literal. Oral texts are characterized by the use of unmarked words and a casual, principally aggregative syntax and contain discontinuities, changes of plan, etc. They comply with the conditions of “conceptional orality”: individual proximity, lack of plan, acquaintance and intimacy with the communication partner and the situation, to name a few. For “conceptional literacy” the opposite characteristics apply. Very often they are realized in the appropriate medium – that is, phonetically or graphically. This is not always the case: a comic strip, for example, can portray conceptionally oral texts graphically, or a politician’s speech distributed phonetically conveys conceptional literacy. In conceptual terms, the scale ranges between the poles of orality and literacy with many shades in between; medially we have binary opposites. According to this definition, the human voice and graphic script are – in a broad sense – media. No objections can be raised against this definition at least at this stage, and it is still used today with varying nuances.6 Despite this, the theory must be supplemented, if not re-evaluated in some respects. Without doubt modern electronic media, memory cards and transmitters of all sorts of communication have developed greatly. Two fundamental consequences of this development can be named, which rehabilitate these media: (1) The heightened scientific ascertainability of the medium. The elementary semiotic media, sound and literacy, in particular the human voice, can be ascertained with all their complex, reciprocal, gesticulatory and spatial multimediality, in a quite different way than in the past. Lorenza Mondada (forthcoming) uses this multimodal, interactional approach, synchronizing picture, audio and graphical transcription in her analysis, often using several recorders at the same time. The use of the term multimodal, instead of multimedial, is justified here since the voice, in all its facets and in its ability to offer an oral message in its entirety, can be understood as a medium in a broad understanding of Koch/Oesterreicher. This is not the case for gestures, eye

5 For general considerations on models, see Koch/Oesterreicher (1985; 1990); Ludwig (1996); on orality and literacy in creole languages see Ludwig (1996); Kriegel (1998); for French varieties influenced by contact, see Stäbler (1995). 6 For a good, current overview of definitions for “medium”, see Schmitz (2015); for an extensive summary of Koch/Oesterreicher’s theory, see Sinner (2014).

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movements, etc. which accompany communication. Gesture as a mode of communication must be differentiated from gesture in sign language for deaf mutes, which must be considered a “medium”. Such an approach to a precise analysis of oral language in all its varying coherent reciprocal modi also applies to the CIEL-F-Corpus (Corpus International Écologique de la Langue Française). This underlies the Praat system in an epistemically profitable manner, which is only made possible by modern technical developments (cf. Gadet et al. 2012). (2) New communicative possibilities. This first consequence of technical development therefore increases the capacity of the medium to be understood scientifically, above all of the voice. The second consequence concerns the new possibilities for communication through these media: with the development of digital media, new text forms, new forms of reception and new ways of communication arise. Digital media, in particular, enable productive communication. The production and reproduction of the voice is linked to specific medial applications and conditions: telephone conversations, film, music, SMS, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc. This development blurs the borders between “medium” and “conception” and may even create language forms and styles which will become, or have already become tradition. They are characterized by the media and elude a conventional correlation, based on a more or less preempirical intuition, to a particular point on an orality-literacy scale (for example hybrid SMS, which can demand a high degree of multilingualism). Media characteristics create typical forms of expression which are beyond the normal orality-literacy debate, and question the traditional correlation of “typical mediality” and “typical conceptionality” (e.g. the typical letter as a typical transitional form between conceptual orality and literacy), even if this traditional correlation remains valid for many texts in our daily routine. Media, especially modern media, therefore produce new options. Skype and some smartphone functions can overcome geographical distance pictorially, unlike the traditional telephone. Communicative co-encoding and co-decoding of various modal (according to Mondada forthcoming) or medial levels and channels, and the increasing importance of images as electronic carriers for communication over longer geographical distances (whereby voice and correlated pictures are sent and received electronically with virtually no delay, in comparison to face-to-face communication), make high cognitive demands on people. It seems as if the traditional competence in reading and writing of many young people in classical alphabet societies is declining, while their competence in modern digital media is increasing as a result of the pictorial and auditive influences and the manifold synchronic impulses received and sent. These new forms of communication, which are characterized by the media, thus create new norms and language attitudes. Code choices such as hybridization, short forms, and the use of icons, etc. become communicative requirements. We have discussed the existing tension in the definition of “medium” and transitions in the issue of orality and literacy. A solution for this issue cannot be attempted in this framework. Since it is our task to discuss “mediality – orality – literacy in

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creole languages”, we cannot simplify the corrections for the sake of definition, without simplifying the field unacceptably. The following factors cannot be dissociated: – media as (phonetic) voice and (graphic) written form – media as the recent digital media described above, which broaden the scale of communication modi – medial language as the language expressed in the described media, including traditional genre. We are concerned here with “text traditions”, more exactly with “medial text traditions”. Indeed, particular text traditions imply particular media: for example, (professionally made) music uses the media of radio, television and CD; the text tradition “novel” implies the traditional medium “book” or the new digital medium “tablet”. Traditional “orality” in basilectal creole is understood first as the language which was (and sometimes still is) reserved for more informal areas, as a result of social conditions and the dominant language ideology. On the other hand, the text-internal aspect – the functional typological structure – corresponds better to such a framework (described as “aggregative” by Ludwig 1996). All in all, we can register a further consequence of medial presence for creole: the more creole is present in the media, the more it is also present in new digital media, the stronger the developmental impulses for this language are. This will become clear in a comparison of older and newer examples of creole.

4 The historical development of the medium of writing in creole languages – the orthography debate Early textual traces of an emerging Caribbean French creole can be found in travel chronicles, which focus on the Société de plantation in the late seventeenth century, for example the famous account by Père Labat (1742, cf. Ludwig 2017 forthcoming). The first written text, which certifies the existence of a Franco-Antillean Creole that is coherent, grammaticalized and comparatively basilectal, appears to be La Passion de Notre Seigneur selon Saint-Jean en langage nègre, first discovered in the 1980s and which can be dated to the first half of the eighteenth century (the text is available in Hazaël-Massieux 2008, 75–83). Hazaël-Massieux (2008, 60) attributes it to the Jesuit Pierre Boutin. She narrows the date of its origin to between 1720 and 1740 – around 1730. This evangelical missionary text has a very particular medial and, at the same time, “conceptional written” character. It assumes intertextual knowledge of the biblical text. Indeed, intertextuality is a very particular phenomenon of literacy, for it implies the cognitive ability to draw on a global textual tradition.

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An often quoted early Caribbean Creole text with a significant medial character is the song “Lisette quitté la plaine”.7 Moreau de Saint-Méry quotes it in his Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle de Saint-Domingue, but gives a date forty years earlier (1797, 65): “Et pour qu’on ne prétende pas que je crée des merveilles imaginaires, je vais rapporter une chanson bien connue, qui fera voir si le langage créol est un jargon insignifiant & maussade. Elle a été composée, il y a environ quarante ans, par M. Duvivier de la Mahautière, mort Conseiller au Conseil de Port-au-Prince. J’en présente, en même-tems, la traduction versifiée par un créol, qui, aux dépens de son amour-propre, n’a cherché qu’à conserver, presque ligne pour ligne, le sens littéral qu’une imitation libre aurait empêché de saisir”.

These are the opening lines of the song as transcribed by Moreau de Saint-Méry (ibid.): “Sur l’air: Que ne suis-je la fougère! Lisette quitté la plaine, Mon perdi bonher à moué; Gié à moin semblé fontaine, Dipi mon pas miré toué. La jour quand mon coupé canne, Mon songé amour à moué; La nuit quand mon dans cabane, Dans dromi mon quimbé toué. [...]

Lisette, tu fuis la plaine, Mon bonheur s’est envolé; Mes pleurs, en double fontaine, Sur tous tes pas ont coulé. Le jour, moissonnant la canne, Je rêve à tes doux appas; Un songe dans ma cabane, La nuit te met dans mes bras. [...]”.

A central writing problem which has characterized the debate on creole languages becomes evident here: orthography. Significantly, it is the text of a creole song which has been put into written form. The early form found in Moreau de Saint-Méry still has etymological notation. We find “plaine” instead of “plèn”, “pas” instead of “pa”, “songé” instead of “sonjé”. The pursuit of etymology results in a false morphologicalgrammatical interpretation: Moreau writes “la plaine” instead of “laplèn“, “la jour” instead of “lajounen” and “la nuit” for “lannuit” (cf. Valdman 1981; 2015); in Caribbean Creole, the French articles are agglutinated and have lost their original grammatical function. At the same time, the medium of writing demands reflection on the difference between French and creole. Many creole characteristics cannot be traced back to French, for example the lack of a predicate of the être type in unmarked creole constructions such as “La nuit quand mon dans cabane”, which can be translated literally as “La nuit quand je suis dans (ma) cabane” (cf., for example, Colot/Ludwig

7 For the various versions of this text and their philological issues, cf. Hazaël-Massieux (2008, 87– 125).

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2013). This medium also forces a decision concerning spacing, which necessitates reflection on creole's grammatical independence. Haitian orthography, and indeed Caribbean French creole orthography in general, arose from a more or less phoneticphonological Haitian principle, which was initiated by Ormonde McConnell and Frank Laubach at the beginning of the 1940s (cf. Valdman 2015, 95–138 for discussion of their work). After further work by the Haitian Office national d’alphabétisation et d’action communautaire, it has assumed its current form (cf. also Strobel-Köhl 1994). In the 1970s, the Martinican Jean Bernabé (1976; 1977a; 1977b; 1980) and Dany BébèlJislè (1975) from Guadeloupe built on this. These much-discussed systems resulted in the emergent creole lexicography8 and led to a common but not rigid practice with individual variations (cf. Reutner’s critical review 2005). Hazaël-Massieux (1993), for example, suggested a revised system and Bernabé (2001) has also attempted to refine the Martinican principle. The French creole languages in the Indian Ocean emerged later than those in the Caribbean. The first textual indications by Labat (1742) for the existence of a genuine Caribbean French creole language point to the last decade of the seventeenth century. However, Chaudenson (1981, 3) names a first – not quite reliable – reference to a sentence in Reunion Creole in a quotation from 1714–1723, which an Île Bourbon scholar inserted into a report on a juridical verdict. An early example of Spanish-Portuguese creole is found in the oldest known Papiamentu text – a letter written by a Sephardic Jew from Curaçao – from 1776 (printed in Salomon 1982, 367). As far as the written form is concerned, we find here also an etymologically inspired procedure. The phonological orientation described above has now, after several other suggestions (Bollée/D’Offay 1978, cf. for the early debate in Mauritius, in particular, Stein 1982, 169s.), reached the Indian Ocean. Based on the phonological concept conceived by Vinesh Hookoomsing and others, the Grafilarmoni was developed in Mauritius. Incorporating various previous systems, it led finally to the “Lortograf Kreol Morisien” which formed the basis for Carpooran’s monolingual dictionary (2011; cf. in particular the foreword by Hookoomsing 2011).

5 Current developments: Medial, oral and written creole – medial text traditions It is no accident that certain medial text traditions have undergone significant development in the last twenty years and that creole is very much present in these media. The established, and indeed historically justified opinion, that creole is a more or less oral language in its text internal structure, is conjured up by this medial usage. It is

8 For the Lesser Antilles, see Confiant (2007); Ludwig et al. (1990).

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equally certain that this characteristic makes it especially adequate for certain medial traditions (e.g. music or children’s books). At the same time, these medial forms follow their own internal rules and logic and the resulting text forms no longer correspond to these generalized classifications (cf. early critical comments by Reutner 2005, 241–266).

5.1 Creole in current politics In recent decades, political discussion – particularly during elections – has become a medial text tradition. The current form of this discussion is greatly characterized by the technical means offered by modern media, which can only be fully mastered through multimodal decoding and analysis. Where formerly, electoral candidates confronted each other phonetically face-to-face, today all election meetings are affected by the potential electronic memory capacity and medial diffusion, and this characterizes their language. The election campaigns in Martinique and Guadeloupe depend on the combination of both types: on the one hand, old-fashioned traditional forms of orality – faceto-face communication during speeches and meetings; on the other hand, through the production and reproduction of discussion through electronic media. Creole plays an important role; precisely because it is the language of intimacy in a social sense, it can be used in digital communication, thereby avoiding “erasure”. However, this dissemination also leads to hybridity (for forms of hybridity cf. Kriegel/Ludwig/Salzmann forthcoming), as can be seen on election posters. Two details from posters from the Conseil régional elections in Martinique in December 2015 are notable in Figures 1 and 2 below. The party mottos in creole are conspicuous: “An nou ba péyi-a an chans” (‘Let us give this country a chance’) and “Tout moun sé moun! Nou tout kapab” (‘We are all equal! We all possess abilities’). It is apparent that established phonological orthography is generally respected. However, in addition to splitting “an nous” (instead of “annous”) and the capitals in “Ba Péyi-a” (evidently meant as a focus), it is the use of an apostrophe on the second poster after “tout” which is non-standard (for this detail and Bernabé’s 2013 suggestion of using the double consonant “tt” in this position, see 5.3). It is evidently a concession to the reader’s competence in French and intends to accentuate the pronunciation of the /t/ at the end of the word. True for both posters (the bottom halves are not visible) is that the creole passages stand next to French elements.9

9 The photographs were taken by the author on the streets of Fort-de-France during the election campaigns in December 2015.

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Figure 1: Campaign poster for Yan Monplaisir, © R. Ludwig  

Figure 2: Campaign poster for Nathalie Jos, Martinique citoyenne, © R. Ludwig  

On the other hand, the poster for Sergy Letchimy of the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais (Figure 3) – Président du Conseil Régional as his party had won a majority in the previous election – completely omits creole.  

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Figure 3: Campaign poster for Serge Letchimy, Parti Progressiste Martiniquais, © R. Ludwig  

5.2 Literature Despite the importance of present-day media, in conventional text traditions – established medial text traditions (the book and its normative concepts, and the conditions for its reproduction and distribution) –, representative patterns can be observed as early as the nineteenth century, even if their form is perhaps not yet quite so distinct and elaborate (see the broad panorama in Ludwig 2015). Today, there is a wide spectrum of unadulterated creole text productions in all (French) creole societies in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. One of the important genre and text traditions is based on the creole version of the fables of La Fontaine, which originated on Mauritius in the nineteenth century with Chrestien (1820; second, enlarged edition, 1831), Héry on Reunion (1828), Marbot on Martinique (1846) and the Haitian Sylvain (1901). Various modern works are based on these, such as Léotin’s adaption (2011) of La Fontaine, Fab bò kay/Fables en case créole. Other works use a French that is saturated with creole: this is notably the case in writing by Raphaël Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau (cf. Ludwig 2008, 150–153 on Texaco by Chamoiseau 1992; Ludwig/Poullet 2002 on Confiant’s Le Nègre et l’amiral, 1988). Also of note in this regard are various works in which passages in French alternate with shorter passages in creole, such as Céco’s (2013) La Mazourka perdue des femmes-couresse. In these texts, French and creole are counterpointed so that a

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particularly authentic, almost basilectal form of creole finds expression here (for more on this topic, cf. Ludwig 2015).

5.3 Creole in children’s books In recent years, creole in children’s books has revealed an astonishing medial presence. This has nothing to do with literacy constraints, such as marked vocabulary or integrative syntax. The wealth of children’s books in Martinique appears to reflect the desire to preserve the creole language for the youngest members of society. The following excerpt is taken from a completely Antillean booklet; the French and creole texts and drawings on facing pages are all produced in the Antilles. The tale Sokanbleu-le rescapé by Josette Bardury-Rotsen is translated into creole by Térèz Léotin. It records the typical Antillean fate of the “crabe de terre”, which are caught for the traditional Easter meal “matoutou de crabes”. It is characteristic that this form of written creole, initiated by the group formed around Jean Bernabé, is widely accepted. As in the slogans on election poster 2 above, the written form of the creole /tut/ as “tout” is considered misleading in relation to the French pronunciation /tu/. This non-creole interpretation is compensated for in the children’s text by doubling the ending “t”, that is “toutt”, “lilett”, “fett”, etc. (on poster 2, an apostrophe is used). This orthographic practice corresponds to the last innovation proposed by Bernabé (2013) for Martinican French; it is generally not followed in Guadeloupe. Children’s books in creole (generally paralleled with a French version) are commercially quite successful. This is illustrated by the fact that stories from the European tradition are also produced, as the following example shows. The fairy tale La belle au bois dormant by Charles Perrault (1981) forms the very abridged basis: Bel manzel-la ki té ka dòmi anfon bwa-a (Perrault/Della Malva/Boukman 2015) – but here, unlike in the fable tradition, the cultural adaptation is lacking. Nonetheless, the emphasis here is on creole: first a longer monolingual version is presented and then a bilingual version in a smaller typeface follows.

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Figures 4 and 5: Text and illustrations from Sokan-bleu-le-rescapé, © Éditions Exbrayat 2014

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Figures 6 and 7: Text and illustrations are from Bel manzel-la ki té ka dòmi anfon bwa-a, © Éditions Auzou 2015

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5.4 Music Popular music is one of the most important medial representatives of creole. It is no accident that one of the oldest creole texts is a song, “Lisette quitté la plaine”. This medial text tradition, which is greatly influenced today by the parameters of electronic diffusion, is an oral text form, both in the somewhat aggregative character of the underlying texts and in the final medial realization. Despite this, the global classification “oral” falls short here: the text is globally oriented, complex and formulated over a long period of planning. Song texts are often monolingual creole, as in most of the Haitian Compas texts and the Souk texts from Martinique and Guadeloupe, or the Maloya and Séga songs from the Indian Ocean. The following is an excerpt from the song “Mandela” by Danyel Waro from the Reunion Island, which was initially written and sung in creole: Kwé i lé Granmounté Mandela? Kwé i lé Granmounté? Amont amwin Kinm in kalot oté Mandela Twé la pa mèt dan la gèl banna Twé la pèt amwin. Kwé i lé la Dinité Mandela? Kwé i lé la Dinité? Amont amwin Kaminm i pouléré Mandela Non twé la pa souplé Twé la mèt amwin.

Qu’est ce donc que la Sagesse Mandela? Qu’est ce que la Sagesse? Enseigne-la-moi Même une claque Mandela Tu ne leur auras pas rendue. C’est moi qui l’ai reçue. Qu’est ce donc que la Dignité Mandela? Qu’est ce que la Dignité? Enseigne-la-moi. Tu n’as ni gémi Mandela Ni pleuré, ni supplié. Je te tire mon chapeau! Respect!

We also find hybrid text forms: a prominent example is the song “We are” by E.sy Kennenga from Martinique (cf. his CD Ek trip 2, Kennenga 2013). It is characterized by complex literary strategies with alternations and copies, oscillating between French, creole and English (original punctuation and orthography are respected below):

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We are West Indian, Caribbean More than a nation Je me sens Lamentinois Martiniquais et puis Antillais Caribéen, français descendant d’Africain Je m’exprime en créole, en français aussi en anglais. Je ne suis qu’un échantillon car en effet Chez nous les couleurs se mêlent Plus de nuances que dans un arc-en-ciel Un héritage commun plutôt complexe Mais qui aujourd’hui fait notre richesse

Refrain Pas’ an vérité Diféran kilti ki soti même koté An pé ké las répété ansanm pou nou lité

in reality various cultures of the same origin I am not tired of repeating that we must fight together

goumen pou linité, plis fraternité Istwar la lé kè nou divisé nou décrédibilisé Fok nou sèten di sa nou ka visé pas o fon nou pé pa konté anlè sa ki oprésé nou, blésé nou trennen nou an la bou malmennen nou dan le pasé Fok nou organisé Pou mesaj la difisé Fok nou mobilisé pou monté wo kon fisé

fight for unity, and brotherhood history has separated us we have lost our credibility we must know what we want for we cannot rely on what has suppressed us, and wounded us dragged us through the mire misguided us in the past we must organize ourselves and get the word out we must uprise and soar on high like a rocket (translated from creole by Ralph Ludwig and Marion Salzmann)

5.5 SMS, internet forums, Twitter, Facebook Creole can be found on all the modern web pages on the net. It is hard to estimate how great its share is in comparison to French and English, etc. Two things, however, are clear: creole is well represented and, in addition, various hybrid forms can be found. The study by a research team headed by Frédéric Anciaux on SMS youth language in Guadeloupe (Anciaux 2013; 2016) illustrates this. We find dominant groups in monolingual creole, in bilingual French and multilingual SMS (Anciaux 2016, n.p.):

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(a) pure creole: Siw tann on moun ka chèchè sa di mwen (‘If you hear that someone is looking for it, tell me’); (b) French creole: En ka diw li franchement tu me gave (‘I’m telling you straight up, I’ve had enough of you’); (c) Antillean French with creole influence: Oui oui. Et toi? Excuse du retard. J’ouvrais le linge (‘Yes, yes. And what about you? Sorry I am late; I was hanging up the washing’); (d) multilingual: Non mè mwa jpx pa now... px etre plu tar ou an lot jou (‘No, not now … perhaps later or another time’).

Anciaux (2016, n.p.) then defines more specific groups, for example due to the particular use of onomatopoeia and interjection or, as in the following example, because of acronyms: akmkr = An Ka Mo Ka Ri (‘I’m nearly dying with laughter’), as in: my shoupi je te call after g un truc ouf a te raconter rien que d’y penser akmkr!!! (‘my love, I’m calling you after I did a thing phew I must tell you about when I think about it I die with laughter’).  

As an example of a web page, we have here a characteristic internet layout from the Conseil Départemental de la Guadeloupe; the tendency towards hybridization discussed above is evident:

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KRÉYÒL AN MOUVMAN! LAKARAYIB: NOU KA SANM SAN SANM Écoutez categories Culture - Sport / Manifestations culturelles et sportives / date Du 01 octobre au 31 octobre 2015 le 02 octobre teaser fal media files Chak lanné, dipi 2009, pannan tout mwa òktòb la, Konsèy Dépatmantal Gwadloup pwan labitid voyé kilti é lang kréyòl la monté ho. Sé konsa, sélébrasyon tradisyonnèl a jouné entènasyonnal a lang kréyòl sizé adan on opérasyon, KRÉYÒL AN MOUVMAN, byen anchouké andidan mès-é-labitid a péyi-la.

main text Karé-sòl a mouvman-lasa, sé PWA N TIBAN-LA SIZÉ, ki li menm a’y sé on manifèstasyon ki, chak lanné, ka mèt kont kréyòl douvan-douvan. (http://www.regionguadeloupe.fr/actualites-et-agendas/tout-lagenda/detail/actualites/kreyol-anmouvman-lakarayib-nou-ka-sanm-san-sanm, consulted 25.2.2016) Figure 8: Webpage from internet site of the Conseil Départemental de la Guadeloupe  

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Creole is used here in the official presentation of Guadeloupe to portray the island as the Conseil Départemental intends it to be seen. It sends a message to the global world (we also find a general portrait of the island in creole on the internet); it also provides a symbol with which the members of the island community themselves can identify. It is striking that a web page of this kind allows carefully chosen characteristics of traditional creole to be represented (voyé kilti é lang kréyòl la monté ho, literally: ‘let the creole language and culture climb up high’; mèt kont kréyòl douvan-douvan, literally: ‘let the creole narrative be put in the very front’). However, in this modern form of creole we also see lexis which is copied from French (such as pwan labitid, correspondingly ‘prendre l’habitude’, ‘acquire the habit’). The presence of other languages, French and also English, is repeatedly visible, at least in the structural framework which the digital text form prescribes (“media files”, “main text”). The parallel presence of phonetic language is also interesting (“écoutez” for the choice of soundtrack); on Facebook and Twitter, short news videos with audio tracks are used frequently to convey central messages.

6 Conclusions – literacy and hybridization Modern medial forms of what was historically considered – conceptually and medially – to be an oral language form a complex context where the development of creole languages and critical engagement with this phenomenon play out. Media make a huge contribution to the public presence of creole. They can inject vitality into creole languages and engender a desire to develop and promote them. This is particularly true of new and emerging medial text forms and is of great importance where issues of literacy are concerned. The relevance of these developments for the debate on language contact and decreolization is also evident. Medial text forms are often accompanied by practices of linguistic hybridization. Indeed, hybridization in media language, from SMS and social networks, to web presentations, is a global phenomenon, although frequently it is either ignored by observers or perceived as a threat. Studies of current developments in creole must not ignore its uses in the media. It is clear that “media” within this context has an interdependent relationship with the development of language structure, speaker competence and education. An investigation of this complex connection between media and language must, therefore, form a vital field of enquiry for linguistic ecology. Acknowledgments: General discussions with my colleagues † Peter Koch and Wulf Oesterreicher have shaped my thinking in important ways. With regard to the present chapter, I wish to thank Sibylle Kriegel, Hector Poullet and Frédéric Anciaux for their help. I also owe my gratitude to Marion Salzmann for her assistance and patience in producing the English version.

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7 Bibliography Aboh, Enoch O. (2009), Clause Structure and Verb Series, Linguistic Inquiry 40(1), 1–33. Aboh, Enoch O. (2015), The Emergence of Hybrid Grammars: Language Contact and Change, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Anciaux, Frédéric (2013), Le Langage SMS des jeunes en Guadeloupe. Rapport de recherche, Paris, DGLFLF – Ministère de la culture et de la communication. Anciaux, Frédéric (2016), Créole et médias: Le Cas des SMS, unpublished manuscript. Assmann, Aleida (2008), Canon and Archive, in: Astrid Erll/Ansgar Nünning (edd.), Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 97–107. Assmann, Jan (1992), Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen, München, Beck. Assmann, Jan (2008), Communicative and Cultural Memory, in: Astrid Erll/Ansgar Nünning (edd.), Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 109–118. Bardury-Rotsen, Josette (2014), Sokan-bleu-le-rescapé – Sodan-blé-chapé-bel-la, Fort-de-France, Exbrayat. Bébèl-Jislè, Dany (1975), Kèk prinsip pou ékri kréyòl, Paris, L’Harmattan. Bernabé, Jean (1976), Propositions pour un code orthographique intégré des creoles à base lexicale française, Espace créole 1, 25–57. Bernabé, Jean (1977a), Écrire le creole – Première partie: Écriture et phonétique, Mofwaz 1, 11–29. Bernabé, Jean (1977b), Écrire le creole – Deuxième partie: Écriture et syntaxe, Mofwaz 2, 11–20. Bernabé, Jean (1980), Écrire le creole – Troisième partie: Présentation de la base syntaxique de l’écriture du creole suivie d’une tentative d’évaluation de la socialisation de ce système orthographique après quatre années d’existence, Mofwaz 3, 9–15. Bernabé, Jean (2001), La Graphie créole, Guadeloupe, Ibis Rouge. Bernabé, Jean (2013), Obidjoul. Approche écologique et cognitive au service du mieux lire-écrire le créole, Martinique, Le Teneur. Blommaert, Jan (2010), The Sociolinguistics of Globalization, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Bollée, Annegret/D’Offay, Danielle (1978), Apprenons la nouvelle orthographe, Cologne/Mahé, chez les auteurs. Carpooran, Arnaud (22011, 12009), Diksioner morisien. Premie diksioner kreol monoleng, Sainte Croix, Les Éditions Le Printemps. Céco, Mérine (2013), La Mazurka perdue des femmes-couresse, Paris, Éditions Écriture. Chamoiseau, Patrick (1992), Texaco, Paris, Gallimard. Chaudenson, Robert (1981), Textes créoles anciens (La Réunion et Île Maurice). Comparaison et essai d’analyse, Hamburg, Buske, Kreolische Bibliothek. Chrestien, François (21831, 11820), Les Essais d’un bobre africain, Île Maurice, Imprimerie de G. Déroullède et Cie/Imprimerie du Gouvernement. Colot, Serge/Ludwig, Ralph (2013), Guadeloupean Creole and Martinican Creole, in: Susanne Michaelis et al. (edd.), The Survey of Pidgin and Creole Languages, vol. 2: Portuguese-Based, Spanish-Based, and French-Based Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 205–219. Confiant, Raphaël (1988), Le Nègre et l’amiral, Paris, Grasset. Confiant, Raphaël (2007), Dictionnaire créole martiniquais-français, Matoury, Ibis Rouge. Ferguson, Charles A. (1959), Diglossia, Word 15, 325–340. Fishman, Joshua A. (1967), Bilingualism with and without Diglossia, Diglossia with and without Bilingualism, Journal of Social Issues 32, 29–38.

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Gadet, Françoise/Ludwig, Ralph (2014), Introduction: French Language(s) in Contact Worldwide. History, Space, System, and Other Ecological Parameters, Journal of Language Contact 7(1) (Special Issue: French Language(s) in Contact Worldwide), 3–35. Gadet, Françoise/Ludwig, Ralph (2015), Le Français au contact d’autres langues, Paris, Ophrys. Gadet, Françoise, et al. (2009), Sociolinguistique, écologie des langues, et cetera, Langage et société 129, 121–135. Gadet, Françoise, et al. (2012), Un grand corpus de français parlé: Le CIEL-F. Choix épistémologiques et réalisations empiriques, Revue française de linguistique appliquée 27(1), 39–54. Hazaël-Massieux, Guy (1978), Approche socio-linguistique de la situation de diglossie français-créole en Guadeloupe, Langue française 37, 106–118. Hazaël-Massieux, Marie-Christine (1993), Écrire en créole. Oralité et écriture aux Antilles, Paris, L’Harmattan. Hazaël-Massieux, Marie-Christine (2008), Textes anciens en créole français de la Caraïbe, Paris, Publibook. Héry, M. Louis (1828), Fables créoles dédiées aux Dames de l’île Bourbon, Saint-Denis, La Réunion. Holm, John A. (1988–1989), Pidgins and Creoles, 2 vol., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Hookoomsing, Vinesh Y. (2011), Preface, in: Arnaud Carpooran (22011, 12009), Diksioner morisien. Premie diksioner kreol monoleng, Sainte Croix, Les Éditions Le Printemps. Husserl, Edmund (21913, 11859), Logische Untersuchungen II/1: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, Tübingen, Niemeyer. Imo, Wolfgang (2015), Interaktionale Linguistik und die qualitative Erforschung computervermittelter Kommunikation, Interaktion-Sprache-Arbeitspapierreihe, Arbeitspapier Nr. 56, 11/2015, http:// arbeitspapiere.sprache-interaktion.de (last access 16.02.2018). Irvine, Judith T./Gal, Susan (2000), Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation, in: Paul V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, Santa Fe, School of American Research Press, 35–84. Jansen, Silke (2015), Ethnic Difference and Language Ideologies in Popular Dominican Literature: The Case of Haitianized Speech, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 233, 73–96. Kennenga, E.sy (2013), EK Trip 2, CD, BCaribbean Musical Productions. Klimenkowa, Alla (2017), Sprachkontakt und lexikalische Innovation in der karibischen Kontaktzone: die Beispiele “bozal”, “cimarrón” und “criollo”, Hamburg, Buske. Koch, Peter/Oesterreicher, Wulf (1985), Sprache der Nähe und Sprache der Distanz. Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und Sprachgeschichte, Romanistisches Jahrbuch 36, 15–43. Koch, Peter/Oesterreicher, Wulf (1990), Gesprochene Sprache in der Romania: Französisch, Italienisch, Spanisch, Tübingen, Niemeyer. Koerner, E. F. Konrad (1995), Toward a History of Modern Sociolinguistics, in: E. F. Konrad Koerner (ed.), Professing Linguistic Historiography, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 117–134. Kriegel, Sibylle (1998), La Suppression de l’agent entre l’oral et l’écrit: L’Exemple de deux langues créoles françaises, in: Hans Geisler/Daniel Jacob (edd.), Transitivität und Diathese in romanischen Sprachen, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 141–154. Kriegel, Sibylle/Ludwig, Ralph/Salzmann, Tabea (2016), Reflections on Discourse Ecology and Language Contact: The Crucial Role of some Scalar Terms, in: Ralph Ludwig/Peter Mühlhäusler/ Steve Pagel (edd.), Linguistic Ecology and Language Contact, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 179–213. Labat, R.P. Jean-Baptiste (1742), Nouveau Voyage aux isles de l’Amérique, 8 vol., Paris, Delespine. Léotin, Marie-Thérèse (2011), Fab bò kay/Fables en case créole, Paris, L’Harmattan.

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Ludwig, Ralph (ed.) (1989), Les Créoles français entre l’oral et l’écrit, Tübingen, Narr. Ludwig, Ralph (1990), Dictionnaire créole, Paris, SERVEDIT. Ludwig, Ralph (1996), Kreolsprachen zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit. Zur Syntax und Pragmatik atlantischer Kreolsprachen auf französischer Basis, Tübingen, Narr. Ludwig, Ralph (2008), Frankokaribische Literatur. Eine Einführung, Tübingen, Narr. Ludwig, Ralph (2015), Littératures des mondes créoles – des débuts aux questionnements actuels, Études créoles 1, 92–141. Ludwig, Ralph (forthcoming), Diachronies française et créole: Rapports épistémiques, in: Wendy Ayres-Bennett et al. (edd.), Nouvelles Voies d’accès au changement linguistique, Paris, Classiques Garnier. Ludwig, Ralph/Bruneau-Ludwig, Florence (2012), Langue(s) et communication en Guadeloupe: Vers une approche écolinguistique, Cahiers de linguistique 38(2) (Special Issue: Construction des connaissances sociolinguistiques. Du terrain au positionnement théorique edited by Françoise Gadet), 139–166. Ludwig, Ralph/Mühlhäusler, Peter/Pagel, Steve (edd.) (forthcoming), Linguistic Ecology and Language Contact, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Ludwig, Ralph/Poullet, Hector (2002), Langues en contact et hétéroglossie littéraire: L’Écriture de la créolité, in: Robert Dion/Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink/Janós Riesz (edd.), Écrire en langues étrangères. Interférences de langues et de cultures dans le monde francophone, Québec, Nota Bene, 155–183. Ludwig, Ralph/Schwarze, Sabine (2012), Ein erneuter Blick auf Entwicklungen der französischen Sprachkultur: Zur Vernetzung von sprachlicher Normierung und literarischer Kanonisierung im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert, Romanistisches Jahrbuch 62, 98–136. Marbot, François-Achille (1846), Les Bambous. Fables de La Fontaine travesties en patois créole par un vieux commandeur, Fort Royal (Fort-de-France), E. Ruelle/Ch. Arnaud. Maynard de Queilhe, Louis de (1835), Outre-Mer, 2 vol., Paris, Eugène Renduel. McWhorter, John H. (1998), Identifying the Creole Prototype: Vindicating a Typological Class, Language 74, 788–818. McWhorter, John H. (2004), Defining Creole, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Meillet, Antoine (1921, 11906), L’État actuel des études de linguistique générale, reprinted in: Antoine Meillet, Linguistique historique et linguistique générale I, Paris, Champion, 1–18. Michaelis, Susanne M., et al. (edd.) (2013a), The Survey of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 6 vol., Oxford, Oxford University Press. Michaelis, Susanne M., et al. (edd.) (2013b), Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online, Leipzig, Max-Planck-Institut für evolutionäre Anthropologie, http://apics-online.info (last access 16.02.2018). Mondada, Lorenza (forthcoming), An Interactionist Perspective on the Ecology of Linguistic Practices: The Situated and Embodied Production of Talk, in: Ralph Ludwig/Peter Mühlhäusler/Steve Pagel (edd.), Linguistic Ecology and Language Contact, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 77–108. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric L. É. (1797–1798), Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’Isle de Saint-Domingue, Philadelphie, chez l’auteur. Mufwene, Salikoko S. (1998), What Research on Creole Genesis Can Contribute to Historical Linguistics, in: Monika S. Schmid/Jennifer R. Austin/Dieter Stein (edd.), Historical Linguistics 1997. Selected Papers from the 13th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Düsseldorf, 10–17 August 1997, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 315–338. Mufwene, Salikoko S. (2001), The Ecology of Language Evolution, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

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Mufwene, Salikoko S. (2008), Language Evolution: Contact, Competition and Change, London, Continuum. Mühlhäusler, Peter (1996), Linguistic Ecology: Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific Region, London, Routledge. Mühlhäusler, Peter (forthcoming a), Contact between Typologically Different Languages, in: Ralph Ludwig/Peter Mühlhäusler/Steve Pagel (edd.), Linguistic Ecology and Language Contact, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Mühlhäusler, Peter (forthcoming b), Theoretical and Practical Aspects of Ecological Language Planning, in: Ralph Ludwig/Peter Mühlhäusler/Steve Pagel (edd.), Linguistic Ecology and Language Contact, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 323–341. Ong, Walter J. (1982), Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London/New York, Methuen. Pagel, Steve (2015), Beyond the Category: Towards a Continuous Model of Contact-Induced Change, Journal of Language Contact 8(1), 146–179. Perrault, Charles (1981, 11696), Contes, edited by Jean-Pierre Collinet, Paris, Gallimard. Perrault, Charles/Della Malva, Éléonore/Boukman, Daniel (2015), Bel manzel-la ki té ka dòmi anfon bwa-a, dapré an kont Charles Perrault, Paris, Éditions Auzou. Reutner, Ursula (2005), Sprache und Identität einer postkolonialen Gesellschaft im Zeitalter der Globalisierung. Eine Studie zu den französischen Antillen Guadeloupe und Martinique, Hamburg, Buske. Salomon, Herman P. (1982), The Earliest Known Document in Papiamentu Contextually Reconsidered, Neophilologus 66, 367–376. Schmitz, Ulrich (2015), Einführung in die Medienlinguistik, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Schröder, Anne/Rudd, Philip W. (forthcoming), Language Mixing and Ecology in Africa: Focus on Camfranglais and Sheng, in: Ralph Ludwig/Peter Mühlhäusler/Steve Pagel (edd.), Linguistic Ecology and Language Contact, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 214–233. Sinner, Carsten (2014), Varietätenlinguistik. Eine Einführung, Tübingen, Narr. Stäbler, Cynthia K. (1995), Entwicklung mündlicher romanischer Syntax. Das “français cadien” in Louisiana, Tübingen, Narr. Stein, Peter (1982), Connaissance et emploi des langues à l’île Maurice, Hamburg, Buske. Strobel-Köhl, Michaela (1994), Die Diskussion um die “ideale” Orthographie. Das Beispiel der Kreolsprachen auf französischer Basis in der Karibik und des Französischen im 16. und 20. Jahrhundert, Tübingen, Narr. Sylvain, Georges (1901), Cric? Crac? Fables de La Fontaine racontées par un montagnard haïtien et transcrites en vers créoles, Paris, Ateliers Haïtiens. Thomason, Sarah G./Kaufman, Terrence (1988), Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics, Berkeley, University of California Press. Valdman, Albert (1981), Haitian Creole – English – French dictionary, 2 vol., Bloomington, Indiana University. Valdman, Albert (2015), Haitian Creole. Structure, Variation, Status, Origin, Sheffield, Equinox. Vaugelas, Claude Favre de (1647), Remarques sur la langue françoise utiles à ceux qui veulent bien parler et bien escrire, Paris, Veuve Jean Camusat/Pierre Le Petit. Whitney, William D. (1875), The Life and Growth of Language: An Outline of Linguistic Science, New York, D. Appleton & Co.

Linguae minores / Minoritized languages: status, norms, policy and revitalization

Klaus Bochmann

16 Language policies in the Romancespeaking countries of Europe Abstract: This chapter discusses a concept of “language policy” in Romance-speaking countries informed by consideration of statuses of minority languages and language varieties, formal and official intervention in language standardization measures, and language practices within public discourse. Another key focus is the relevance of historical language policy to contemporary contexts. From the linguistic and political centralism that had emerged in France by the sixteenth century, to policies in Spain that have subjected large allophone provinces to Castilian domination, and to an Italian context where voluntary and arbitrary solutions to linguistic standardization have impacted negatively on dialects and minority languages, the chapter shows that there is continuity in linguistic and political attitudes that reaches back in history. In fascist Italy and communist Romania, repressive state interventions are also shown to have affected aspects of language policies. Finally, Moldova illustrates the ultimate failure to isolate a community linguistically.  

Keywords: language policy, language planning, normalization, purism, minority languages  

1 Preliminary considerations To begin with, we must establish a clear and consistent definition of the term “language policy”, taking into account the meanings of the constituent terms “language” and “policy”. Amongst the questions to be considered are: is language to be understood as a general faculty of speech, as linguistic behaviour, as a particular variety of a given language, or as a combination of all varieties of the language taken together, be it an official language, a national language, or a minority language? And what is meant by policy – does it refer to formal government practices, such as laws and statutory orders, or to the (very often self-contradictory) actions of a range of political agents? Poorly developed theoretical awareness leads to a restricted interpretation of “language policy” according to which the term is understood as either a normative process or a governmental protocol towards minority languages. Such an understanding overlooks essential aspects of political activity concerning linguistic structures, linguistic behaviour and linguistic varieties, including the handling of dialects and languages spoken by migrants and diaspora communities, education, culture and media, attitudes towards foreign languages, the spreading of one’s own language in https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-017

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foreign countries, as well as language-based norms and conventions, such as nomenclatures, name-giving, and the defining of relevant political terms. This variation in the political handling of the different language phenomena prompted us to formulate a definition of “language policy” as “the intervention of political agents in the linguistic and communicative practice of social communities” (Bochmann 1991b, 1600; 1993, 7–16). This definition took into account work by Catalan (Vallverdú 1979; Kremnitz 1979) and French (Marcellesi/Guespin 1986) sociolinguists, as well as scholars of the (West) German group working within OBST (i.e. Osnabrücker Beiträge zur Sprachtheorie, cf. Glück/Wigger 1979; Maas 1980; 1989). The above definition shifts the focus from the hazy term “language” to linguistic communication, a concept which broadly refers to the social real-life implementation of all linguistic phenomena. The latter include forms of discourse and conversations, varieties, and language standards, such as the role allocation of varieties within the highly evaluated communication domains of privileging, discrimination, and marginalization. Additionally, such a concept of language policy broadens the scope of political agents to include not only official government bodies like cabinets, parliaments, public boards or regional councils and their representatives, but also civil agents (groups or individuals) who directly impact decisions related to language policies. These civil agents can act either along with, or against, the language policies of state committees. Without the inclusion of, for instance, language societies, academies, campaign groups, influential authors and so on, language policies – in whatever form – cannot be properly evaluated. Building on the definition above, language policies can be further divided into four main areas, in accordance with the typology of Language Planning (Tauli 1968; Ferguson 1977; Haugen 1983): (1) Language status planning: the policy of social attribution of functions towards languages and socio-linguistic varieties; (2) International language policies: the dissemination of one’s own language in foreign countries (domestic attitudes and policies towards foreign languages should be treated as a separate issue); (3) Language corpus planning: standardization of languages and their varieties: the policies of naming, nomenclatures and so on; (4) Conventions of speech and discourse as public (and academic) discourses and terminologies controlled by political interests and hegemonial states. The most immediate form of language governance in these contexts comes from political parties and governments, but is ultimately practiced by every regime as a phenomenon based on a more or less tacit and ideologically fundamental agreement. The attribution of social functions and normativization serves as a focal point in the following presentation of the extraordinarily wide field of language policy in real life. In some cases, it is necessary to examine language regimes – particularly when dealing with the fascism of Italy and of Franco’s Spain, and communism in Ceaușescu’s

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Romania. The preparation, implemenation, and effects of language policies are exemplified through such real-life case studies. The subject matter is addressed in historical stages that focus on language policy in the European countries which are primarily Romance-speaking. For this reason, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland are not considered. Portugal is also excluded from the discussion, due to the farreaching congruence between the monolingualism of the state and the actual language situation (Kraus 2004, 116).

2 Language policy from the early modern period on Language policy is not unique to the modern era. Ever since hierarchical and social power structures came into being, language has been used as an instrument of hegemony and control. The episode of the Old Testament, at the centre of which the Shibboleth can be found, is probably the earliest evidence. Although there is evidence of language policy decisions in Romance-speaking countries since the early Middle Ages – for instance in the form of the so-called Carolingian Renaissance or in the language policy of the Castilian king Alfonso X el Sabio (Niederehe 1987, 125ss.) –, noteworthy endeavours in using language systematically as a political instrument were first noted in the early modern era. A prime example of this type of language policy is the decision of the Spanish monarchy, following the union of Castile-León and Catalonia-Aragón, to designate Castilian as the sole national language. The project of the Florentine sovereign Lorenzo de Medici to spread the Florentine tongue as the language of literature among all Italian courts is primarily of a domestic nature, aimed at creating a civil and social WE-community (Maaß 2002), but it could also be seen as an attempt to secure the cultural hegemony of Tuscany over Italy (Bochmann 1998). The ensuing debate in the sixteenth century about the Italian questione della lingua is a phenomenon of language policy that was supported by civil and social agents – intellectuals and artists – and had a high degree of sustainability. The Italian case is example of the emerging initiatives in all European countries (not only in Romance-speaking countries), from the Renaissance onwards, to form and enforce an official language based on a variety of the vernacular speech. In Italy, this trend is very well documented, as nearly all notable writers recorded their opinions on the matter. In sixteenth-century France, François I started a multidimensional systematic language policy, consistently pursued by the French monarchy in subsequent centuries. When fighting against the particular interests of the high nobility, he – as one of the first absolutist rulers – had found allies in the civil servants of bourgeois origins, who did not know Latin – the hitherto dominant written language. The transition to French as an official language was appropriate not only for this reason, but also because of the multilingualism of the kingdom, which included not only dialectal

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varieties of French, but also dialects of Occitan and, following the affiliation of Brittany in 1532, dialects of Breton. In 1530, the King opened the predecessor to the modern Collège de France, thereby designating French as the teaching language for higher studies. The most sustainable and best-known measure, the royal Ordonnance of Villers-Cotterêts (1539), was directed towards the replacement of Latin with French as the language of all legally binding acts of the central administration. This act also served as the basis for ousting competing languages, both then and later. This measure was supported by the work of writers of the Pléiade group, who emphasized the literary role of French over Latin and Italian; their most important expression of language reform was Joachim du Bellay’s book Deffence, et illustration de la langue francoyse (1549). The spread of the French language received additional strengthening through intellectuals who wrote their scholarly works in French, including amongst others, Ambroise Paré in medicine, Jacques Lefèbvre d’Étaples in theology and mathematics, Jean Calvin in theology, Pierre de la Ramée (Petrus Ramus) in philosophy, and Jacques Amyot in history. These literary and scholarly publications are examples of how civil society and the monarchy worked together in an effort to make French the language of all important public communication sectors (cf. Brunot 1906; Rey/Duval/Siouffi 2007; Lodge 2004). The process of establishing French as the dominant language of public communication continued into the seventeenth century with the elaboration and consolidation of linguistic standards for the French language. Responsibility for this process, which was accompanied by intensive discussion about language issues in courtly salons, was conferred upon the Académie Royale (later Académie Française), founded in 1637. Though initially conceptualized as a standard for the language of the courtly nobility and the higher genres of literature only, it nevertheless became a model for a high-level language that was appropriated by all educated people and finally became the language of the nation during the French Revolution. The language policy of absolutist rulers was characterized by the intent to enforce the usage of the language of the central power throughout their entire domain. Following the expansionist policy of Louis XIV, several non-French-speaking territories came into the possession of the crown (Alsace from the 1640s onwards, Roussillon in 1659, Flanders between 1659 and 1678, and Lorraine in 1670). Decrees were eventually issued which imposed French as the official language of all these territories. The decrees primarily concerned the acts of central administrations and, to a lesser degree, local administrations and law courts. The mandates did not affect the traditional day-to-day life of the individuals living in these territories, leading to diglottic circumstances in which different languages were used concurrently across different hierarchically arranged levels of social life. This situation also prevailed in Spain. However, here rigorous measures were taken against the Catalan countries after they had allied themselves with the Habsburgs in the wars of the Spanish Succession. Following military defeat, the Catalan language was prohibited in all public areas: in Valencia in 1707, in Catalonia in 1714,

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and in the Balearic Islands in 1715. In the 1760s, additional language decrees were issued against the use of the Catalan language (Ferrer i Gironès 1986, 33), and in 1768, it was mandated that teaching throughout the kingdom had to be done in the Castilian language (Rodríguez 1976, 227); likewise court decisions were not allowed to be formulated in Latin, but exclusively in Castilian (Ferrer i Gironès 1986, 36). Finally, in 1773, the University of Cervera (formerly Barcelona) was forbidden from printing Catalan books and, in 1801, Prime Minister Godoy prohibited the use of languages other than Castilian in Spanish theatres (Ferrer i Gironès 1986, 60).

3 Language policies during the French Revolution and in the nineteenth century 3.1 France The language policy implemented during the French Revolution (cf. Brunot 1927; Certeau/Julia/Revel 1975; Vecchio 1982; Schlieben-Lange 1981; Plötner 1993; Erfurt/ Müller 1993) looks like a continuation of the former absolutist practice, in terms of its outer forms and its centralist stance. It incorporates, however, several new qualities. The policies were aimed at the entire nation, rather than only aristocratic circles and central administrations, and were the result of a public debate that led to a broad social consensus through to the lower working classes. The language policy of the French Revolution is referred to as “Jacobin” in the public discourse of today (for criticism of the term cf. Bochmann 1991a) because it was debated and decided at the time of Jacobin rule in 1793–1794. This policy has been pursued by all succeeding regimes until the present day, apart from some limitations and disruptions. Its most spectacular aspect was the fight against minority languages and dialects stigmatized as patois. In the first period after the outbreak of the Revolution, decrees were translated into every language spoken throughout the country. This soon turned out to be impracticable for its complexity and cost, and moreover, due to the fact that there was neither sufficient knowledge about the existing varieties nor discursive experience within most of them. Under the pressure of the internal Frondes and external threats of intervening European monarchies, the Jacobins, who had come into power in February 1793, directed their attention to regional languages and dialects. These languages had turned out to be impediments to the application of government decisions and ideas of hegemonial groups and had been denounced in the public debate as a stronghold of feudal and clerical reaction. The call for a united French language was supported by Abbé Grégoire in his great speech in the National Convention of the French Revolution on 4 June 1794, when he talked of the “nécessité et les moyens d’anéantir les patois et d’universaliser l’usage de la langue française” (Certeau/Julia/Revel 1975, 300ss.). Abbé Grégoire argued that

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the République une et indivisible should also be united linguistically, and that knowledge of one’s national language should be seen as a commitment to nation and revolution. According to a survey he conducted, in fact only about half of all Frenchmen were able to use their language fluently and more or less correctly. To end this situation, it was decreed that schools should be established in all communities in France with the primary aim of introducing the population to the French language. Even though this plan turned out to be unrealistic in the short term, due to both the overthrow of the Jacobins in September 1794 and the fact that many communities did not have suitable teachers with sufficient knowledge of French, its aim has nevertheless determined the educational policies of France in subsequent periods. Directoire and Empire pursued the target in a less strict way (cf. Busse 1986) while Napoleon had furnished cantonal schools with French as the exclusive language of instruction (cf. Erfurt 1993). Apart from educational measures, additional actions were taken in support of the advancement, consolidation and propagation of normative aspects of the national language. Never before had dictionaries, grammar books and school books been published in such a short time as during the years of the Revolution (cf. Guilhaumou 1987; Schlieben-Lange 1985; 1987). Both the Société des amateurs de la langue française and the first linguistic periodical, the Journal de la langue française, directed by the Jacobin Domergue (Busse 1981), served the public language debate. A defensive attitude against all attempts at simplifying the norms and approaching the vernacular conflicted with this process of democratizing standardized French. The prestige of bon usage that the writers of the Enlightenment and even the heads of the Jacobins had paid unlimited homage to was so high that no compromises were accepted. The Jacobins had probably not anticipated the fact that mastery of the linguistic norm was to become an effective instrument for controlling public discourses and maintaining social elites. French language policy witnessed a further high point during the Napoleonic wars of conquest. In all areas in Northern Italy, the Netherlands and Germany that were attached to the Napoleonic Empire, French was introduced as the official language (Bochmann 2013), though only at the highest administrative levels. The only exception was Piedmont, where French had been used for a sustained period along with Piedmontese and Italian, and where the general transition to this language was well within the realms of possibility (cf. Bochmann 2002). Within France, Jacobin language policy was implemented only in the ‘heat’ of the revolutionary phases of the nineteenth century, while in periods of restoration Jacobin language planning concerned the dissemination of a national language (Erfurt 1993, 239ss.). Only the trauma of defeat in the German-French War, which led to a decisive intent on a renaissance nationale, brought compulsory education and the establishment of a school system that covered the entire country. The first task of the new school system was declared to be the dissemination of the French language and the pushing back of dialects and regional languages (cf. ↗5 Romance dialectology). The

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laws and regulations of 1881 to 1886, connected with then minister of education Jules Ferry, prohibited the use of any language or variety other than French in the classroom. The growing criticism up to World War I concerning the harsh nature of this policy and pleadings for the preservation of languages with an important literary tradition like Occitan, supported by renowned linguists like Michel Bréal and Jules Ronjat (cf. Escudé 2013) and politicians like Jean Jaurès (cf. Brummert 1990), had no effect on official language policies.

3.2 Italy Up to the emergence of the kingdom in 1860, the territories of a politically fragmented Italy were connected with each other only through the ties of the language of literature. The life of the common people, and in a large part also that of the administration, took place in dialects and minority languages (Sardinian, Friulian, Francoprovençal etc.). Nevertheless, the idea of political unity had been alive among the intellectual elites of Italy, at least since the time of Machiavelli. In the second half of the eighteenth century it was increasingly expressed in the writings of Enlightenment philosophers in the form of searching for an effective linguistic unity, no longer based exclusively on a language of literature hardened by the purist rigour of the predominant Accademia della Crusca and accessible only to a narrow stratum of intellectuals. The Neapolitan economist Antonio Genovesi called for the development of a language common to educated people and lower classes that would serve as the basis for the emergence of a national consensus. Jurist Cesare Beccaria argued that linguistic unity, the formation of a stratum of intellectuals mediating between the ruling class and subordinate masses, and a systematic education of the people were necessary prerequisites for generating a social consensus (cf. Formigari 1984). After the French Revolution and the intervention wars in Italy, the new arising republics faced a similar dilemma. They had followed the ideas, projects, discourses, and slogans of the French revolutionaries as the only model of political change. They were unable to reach the citizens and peasants who could understand neither the standardized language used in revolutionary speech nor the abstract terms contained within it. The measures taken by the revolutionaries in Naples, Bologna, Tuscany and Piedmont were unsuccessful. In contrast, the conservative and clerical counter-revolutionaries who made use of popular ways of expressing themselves in their speeches and handouts were more successful. In this respect, the influence of the FrenchJacobin language policy had disastrous results (Bochmann/Brumme 1989, 244). An attempt to unify Italy linguistically was made under the rule of Napoleon in 1809. He issued a decree that called for the preservation and unification of literary Italian (in which he himself had been socialized as a Corsican and moreover as a son

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of the Italian secretary to the Corsican independence head Pasquale Paoli) and the establishment of a school system based on these provisions (Bochmann/Brumme 1989, 244). At that time, socio-cultural and political prerequisites were not included in the decree. In the course of the Risorgimento, and after the emergence of a centralized Italian state, however, it looked as if the time had come for elaborating and implementing a modern unified national, or ordinary language, respectively. In the debate arising directly after 1860 about the language question, two positions were crystallized. One belonged to the well-known prose writer Alessandro Manzoni who, as chairman of a linguistic and school policy committee of the Ministry of Education, presented a programme to the public in 1868, in which he gave priority to the language of the Florentine middle classes. The other position was espoused by the linguist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, editor of Archivio Glottologico Italiano, who assumed that the common language would prevail over time, analogous to the gradual cultural equilibrium that the national unity was supposed to create among the various language zones in Italy (Melli Fioravanti 1993, 301). In addition to the elaboration of a normative dictionary that replaced the traditional norm of the Accademia della Crusca (which had preserved the state of Renaissance language), Manzoni’s programme provided several practical measures. Amongst the proposed measures were the following provisions: teachers from Tuscany were to be placed in primary schools all over Italy; individuals with teaching experience were to receive additional schooling in Florence; the best pupils were to be offered a school year in Florence to consolidate their language skills; the grammar and lexicon of all public announcements was to be checked by competent people; Florentine-coined nomenclatures were to prevail in working life, science and technology. The effects of Manzoni’s language policy were small, and in the first decades of the twentieth century, the approach used in the school system was thus referred to as Dal dialetto alla lingua (cf. Còveri 1981–1982). It is remarkable that in spite of its meagre practical success, the language policy based on Manzoni’s plans reached its climax in the twenty dark years of fascism, when the political ideal was a linguistically homogeneous nation without a socially relevant usage of dialects and minority languages (cf. ↗18 The languages and dialects of Italy).

3.3 Spain From the eighteenth century, language policy in Spain was almost exclusively concerned with enforcing Castilian as the language of the monarchy in those parts of the kingdom that were not castilophone. Whereas Basque was hardly used in public communication despite being given a written form in the sixteenth century, and Galician was reduced to oral use by peasants and fishermen since the fifteenth century, only the Catalan-speaking areas were significantly affected by this policy. In Catalonia, and even more so in Mallorca and Menorca, which were subject to the British Crown,

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Catalan still had the status of a tolerated majority language and was used by the middle classes and in some areas of public communication. This changed in the eighteenth century with the aforementioned prohibition of the use of Catalan in public. This historical heritage was to have disastrous effects on the subsequent history of Spain. The liberal middle classes succeeded neither in the course of the Spanish War of Independence from 1806 to 1812 nor in the whole Spanish cycle of nineteenthcentury revolutions in securing a nationwide minimal consensus between the social movements. They also failed to reach consensus with regards to the interests of historical nationalities like Catalans, Basques and Galicians. The Cortes of Cadiz, convened in 1812 to prepare a new constitution, were not at all concerned with the question of the different languages; on the contrary, the passages about education aimed explicitly at linguistic uniformity. All subsequent educational laws retained the Castilo-centred course that had already characterized absolutism (Bochmann/ Brumme 1989, 246s.). The insistence on Castilo-centred politics finally brought about the situation that, from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, saw four nationalisms competing within the territory of one state. Castilian nationalism, which lay claims to the entire state territory, basically denied others the right to exist, as these nationalisms challenged the Castilian demand for authority throughout the country (Kremnitz 2015a, 4). Against the background of these contradictions and the strengthened economic dominance of both Catalonia and the Basque country within Spain, movements for a national rebirth developed in these regions, with the original, predominantly cultural character soon transformed into political movements and programmes. Catalan Renaixença began in 1833, and with the revolution of 1868, the cultural and regional movement became a political one, while in Valencia this change was delayed by the local oligarchy. The increasingly strengthened political organizations, ranging from the Jove Catalunya founded in 1869 and the Centre Català to the Unió Catalanista of 1891, were aimed at achieving the autonomy of Catalonia, which had been demanded in the “Bases de Manresa” of 1892. Under the leadership of Enric Prat de la Riba, in 1914 the four provinces of Catalonia that had been established in 1833 were administratively united, with the goal of taking significant steps in the furtherance of Catalan language, culture and economy. Language policies developed from the initially literary and cultural events of the Jocs Florals and the beginnings of contemporary literature in the Catalan tongue to the implementation of Catalan in all important spheres of communication. As early as 1900, six of the eighteen newspapers appearing in Barcelona were in Catalan, which prevailed in the Catalan provinces, and a similar situation applied even to specialist medical literature. In the educational field, the 1906 foundation of an institution for the training of teachers of Catalan, the Estudis Universitaris Catalans, cleared the way for an educational system that so far had exclusively been reserved for Castilian. Academic, cultural and scientific institutions also began to use Catalan.

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The decisive step in standardizing the language was taken in 1906 when the Institut d’Estudis Catalans, which operated as an academy of language, was founded. The task of creating a normative grammar and an appropriate dictionary was assigned to the chemist Pompeu Fabra who accomplished this endeavour in an exemplary way with Normes ortogràfiques (1913), various editions of a grammar book and finally the Diccionari general of 1932 (Fuster 1978, 33ss.; Comas i Pujol 1980, 549ss.; ↗11 Variation and prescriptivism). From the point of view of language policy, the development of Basque and Galician resemble that of Catalan in many ways, even though the movements for the defence and emancipation of both languages came into being later and were less effective. Since the eighteenth century a remarkable literary and philological-historical tradition had come into being, on which the rebirth movement of the nineteenth century could fall back. Basque Floral Games, which took place in the late the 1870s, philological and literary magazines like the long-lasting Euskal-Erria (1880–1918), language associations like Euskaltzaleen Biltzarra (1901) and the first congress on Basque Studies (1918) created an intellectual climate that, in 1918, led to the foundation of the Royal Academy of the Basque language. In contrast to Catalonia, the local vernacular in the Basque region did not gain acceptance in public spheres of communication (Torrealday 1977, 216ss.). Galicia, which was economically weak and dominated by big Castilian landowners and which, since the beginning of the modern era had an extremely poor population of peasants and fishermen who did not possess enough language awareness, was the last to join the emancipatory movements of the nineteenth century. The region had lost its own written tradition in the sixteenth century after the original heyday of Galician literature in the High Middle Ages and it had become necessary to build up a new written and literary language. In 1853, the Rexurdimento started with the first printed book in Galician, A gaita gallega, written by Antonio Vilar Ponte. Above all, it was poetry that asserted Galician again: Rosalía de Castro presented her Cantares gallegos in 1863, encouraging her compatriots to imitate her. Other writers followed. The first political speech in Galician was given by Manuel Murguía on the occasion of the Xogos Floraes of Tuy in 1891, which led to a gradual spreading in public discourse of Galician civil society. The foundation of a Galician language academy, however, was the work of Galician emigrants who launched such a facility in Havana, Cuba. In Galicia itself, the Irmandades da fala, that had come into being from 1916 onwards, demanded autonomy for the region and official recognition of Galician, but were unsuccessful until the Second Republic (Losada Castro 1976, 230ss.; Bochmann 1989a, 155ss.).

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3.4 Romania The Romanian nation state emerged in 1859 from uniting the two principalities of Walachia and Moldavia which had been under Turkish supremacy since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, respectively. The country that was now known as the Kingdom of Romania only became independent in the aftermath of the last RussianTurkish War of 1877–1878. The first measure of the united principalities in terms of language policy was the conversion of Romanian writing from Cyrillic to Latin letters, which was introduced in Walachia in 1860 and in Moldavia in 1863 by royal decree. The exact nature of spelling was decided on 28 October 1871 when the Ministry of Education prescribed spelling rules according to etymological principles. A moderate etymological orthography emerged from the debates that had been held in the Romanian Academy, which was founded in 1866, from 1879 to 1881. This spelling system became obligatory for schools and textbooks due to the royal decree of 17 May 1881. A version that was more in tune with the phonemic principle was produced in 1903 and was introduced in 1907 by another royal decree (cf. Bochmann 1989b). Other measures, for example language status policies, were not necessary at the time because there were no noteworthy minorities of other languages in the country up to the end of World War I.

4 Language policies in the twentieth and twenty-first century As far as further developments in the language policies of Romance-speaking European countries are concerned, general historical breaks were of central importance: World War I with its geopolitical consequences, in particular for Italy and Romania (territorial gains with minorities of other languages); the emergence of fascist countries; the process of European unification after World War II; political changes in the 1970s in Spain and Portugal, as well as in 1989–1990 in Romania and Moldavia; and the Charter for Regional or Minority Languages adopted by the Council of Europe on 5 November 1992.

4.1 France The treatment of regional languages, officially called langues régionales, but which are generally known as patois, a slightly derogatory term for minority languages, remained the biggest challenge of language policy in France. Following the principles of the Third Republic and its Jacobin tradition, these languages were seen as barriers

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to the political and cultural unity of the nation and as remnants of a backward-looking culture. Up to the present day, the groups concerned have struggled to change the predominant view towards minority languages, although there have been many initiatives, ever since the Second Empire, to grant state support to minority languages. The most important one is probably the request of three deputies of Brittany and the Basque country in 1870, addressed to the legislative authorities, to instruct pupils in the language of the provinces (cf. Martel 2013, 305; Bergounioux 2013, 132). The defeat of 1871 with the loss of Alsace and Lorraine to the new German Empire not only caused this idea to sink into oblivion but kindled the fear of weakening national unity through further special linguistic endeavours. Nevertheless, initiatives to preserve and develop regional cultures and languages increased towards the end of the nineteenth century, including the Provençal Félibrige movement that spread through the entire Occitan area (Martel 2013) and the groups gathered around the Breton magazine Feiz ha Breiz and the Corsican Tramuntana (cf. Marchetti 1989). The overtly nationalist Parti national breton had a distinctly political nature. The long history of legislative initiatives of representatives, originating mostly from the Occitan area (Molinier 2013), began around 1902, but did not produce any tangible results up to World War II (Martel 2013, 305s.). One of the reasons was certainly that such initiatives were not backed by regionally rooted economic powers (unlike, for instance, the Catalan economy within Spain). French regions with nonFrench-speaking populations were, without exception, represented by a less developed periphery. The only changes to language policy took place in Alsace after its reintegration into the French Republic after 1918. After a period of radical attempts at “Frenchification”, aimed at a relatively strong Germanized population after forty years of German rule, and drastic cutbacks to the social and religious privileges of this population, German lessons were reintroduced in primary schools alongside French in 1927 – following protests and the entry of autonomous Alsatian representatives into Parliament. Between the wars, political movements and parties in almost all affected regions sought autonomy and the teaching of regional languages. Apart from Alsace, these groups, which were split by ideological heterogeneity and oscillated between rightand left-wing, Catholic and secular, conservative and liberal, monarchist and republican, could not succeed on a national level. The situation changed, in part, during the German occupation. The Vichy government adopted a positive stance towards regionalism. The Carcopino decree of 1941, for example, tolerated Occitan in lessons, however without any practical success worth mentioning. In Corsica, a previously positive disposition towards autonomy shifted towards resistance and commitment to France after the Italian occupation of the island. But there were also examples of autonomous circles collaborating with the

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occupants, mainly in Brittany. In Alsace, which was again annexed to the Reich, a rigorous policy of Germanization took place and young men were forced to serve in the Waffen-SS. As a consequence, the protection and furthering of regional languages was not seen as opportune straight after the war (cf. for all Martel 2013, 310ss.). In 1951 France experienced a serious, if only partial, breakthrough in politics when four regional languages (Basque, Breton, Occitan and Catalan) were allowed to be taught on an optional basis due to the so called Loi Deixonne. More languages were added: Flemish in 1970–1971, Corsican in 1974 – now officially an independent language and no longer an Italian dialect – the Alsatian languages (Alemannic and Franconian) in 1988, and the local Moselle dialects of Lorraine in 1991. Nonetheless, the position of regional languages within the educational system remained optional and marginal and was confined to only a few lessons per week. For this reason, these languages were barely passed on from parents to children any more. The situation of these languages was improved when Mitterrand became President. With the Circulaires Savary of 1982, the languages became subjects with a firm position in the educational system and appropriate teachers were to be trained in the universities. The teaching of certain subjects in regional languages, however, was not enforced in the public educational system, even though they had been permitted in the Circulaires Savary. This was reserved for regional language-oriented Écoles maternelles that had been established on a private level from the 1960s onwards: the Basque Ikastolak (1969), the Breton Diwan (1976), the Catalan Bressola (1976), the Occitan Calandreta (1979), the Lorraine Kinderlade and its Alsatian counterparts (1991) (cf. for all Alén Garabato 2013, 322ss.) Similar to lessons in the regional language, constitutional resistance was, and still is, a bar to the public use of regional languages. In 1992, the French Constitution was supplemented by Article 2 in which French was declared to be the language of the Republic. With the law on the use of the French language of 4 August 1994 (the socalled Loi Toubon), it was specified that French was the language of education, work and public services. The originally envisaged regulations of the law to replace English loanwords with French neologisms, however, only gained partial acceptance (for example, in computer science). The deeply-rooted distrust of promoting the regional languages, both within the political establishment and in large parts of the population, became more acutely manifest when, in 1999, the Jospin government wanted to endorse and ratify the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML). In the preliminary stages, the linguist Bernard Cerquiglini had been commissioned to elaborate a list of “the languages of France”. The so-called Rapport Cerquiglini (Cerquiglini 1999) listed 75 languages, among them: the regional languages, the languages of all major groups of immigrants, the langues d’oïl, or the traditional French dialects, the diaspora languages of Yiddish and Romani, and many more. The high number can also be accounted for by the fact that the languages of the French overseas departments and territories were also included.  

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France endorsed the Charter on 7 May 1999. Its scheduled ratification in 2000, however, failed due to the resistance of the Constitutional Council (cf. Woehrling 2013). Even the envisaged constitutional amendment of 2008, which had been prepared under President Nicolas Sarkozy, and which declared the languages of France to be part of the national heritage, did not materialize, as both the Constitutional Council and the Académie Française opposed the proposal. The ideology of monolingualism has remained dominant as a guarantor of the unity of the French Republic (cf. Boyer 2013), such that even in the last few years, new proposals related to the handling of minority languages have not been successful.

4.2 Italy The First World War, with territorial gains in Tyrol and in multilingual territories with Slovene and Croatian populations (Istria, Triest, etc.) brought new linguistic minorities into Italian national territory. Furthermore, Italy had conquered the Greek Dodecanese islands in the southern Aegean Sea in 1923. This required a minority policy for which, before the war, there had seemed to be no necessity in spite of the existence of consolidated groups of speakers of Sardinian, French, Friulian, Greek and Albanian, as well as small language islands in Southern Italy. Whereas the civic governments of the immediate post-war era had been insecure in deciding matters of language policy, the fascist regime enforced a rigorous policy of Italianization from the outset. In 1922 the public use of German and of Slavonic languages was prohibited, and in 1923 the place names in South Tyrol were replaced by Italian neologisms, including the name of the country, which became Alto Adige – a natural continuation of the Italian middle and lower valley of the Adige (Etsch). School lessons in German, as well as German newspapers, were forbidden. In 1924 Italian became the only official language in kindergartens, in 1925 the only court language, and from 1927 onwards German language tombstones were prohibited (cf. Egger 1977, 28ss.). Simultaneously, efforts were made to motivate Italians to take up residence in South Tyrol, which gradually increased the proportion of Italians to roughly one third of the population in the post-war era. Incidentally, the reprisals of the regime also affected the Ladin minority in South Tyrol (cf. Zappe 1996). In 1939 the so-called option was agreed between the Axis Powers, i.e. South Tyroleans were either to emigrate to the German Reich or to renounce their linguistic and cultural identity. Until the beginning of the war 77,772 optants left their homelands (Salvi 1975, 236ss.; cf. also Freiberg 1990). Similar repressive measures were applied to about 92,800 Croatians as well as about 267,000 Slovenes, but they encountered strong resistance particularly from the latter group and were therefore enforced with the utmost severity. The Slovene school system, the publishing sector and the press, which were well developed by 1918, were

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destroyed, and from 1925 onwards a systematic policy of Italianization was practiced (Salvi 1975, 213ss.). As a consequence, the resistance of Slovenes and Croatians turned into military action in the course of the Second World War, in close alliance with Tito’s Yugoslav Partizans. Speakers of Francoprovençal from the Aosta valley had French as their school language up to 1879 including in upper schools and up to 1911 in all primary schools. The Mussolini government banned the public use and the teaching of French in 1925 (Bochmann 1989a, 105). In the Greek Dodecanese islands, Italian became the only language permitted in public after 1924. The language policies of Italian fascism could also be seen in a series of normative measures and political regulations. The ideological discourse of the regime, pointed towards the cultural greatness of the nation, blatantly contravened the fact that the official language (la lingua) was spoken only by a small part of the population; according to De Mauro (1979, II, 40), as late as 1951 two thirds used their dialect in every situation. For these populations, there was neither a necessity to use la lingua nor were there sufficient opportunities to learn it. The proportion of children who did not go to school at all had gone down from 47 % in 1906 to 25 % before the First World War, and yet the rate of illiteracy was high and remained so even until the period after the Second World War (De Mauro 1979, I, 71s.). In the first phase of fascist rule, the school programme Dal dialetto alla lingua was enacted by the liberal minister of education Giovanni Gentile at the suggestion of the educationalist Giuseppe Lombardo-Radice. This programme used dialects as the basis for learning the standard language. Later on (1931), Mussolini revoked the programme, which ran counter to his aim of creating a linguistically homogeneous nation without dialects, or rather, without a socially relevant use of dialects and minority languages. All references to dialects were banned in schools by the 1934 de Vecchi school reform (cf. Ebert 1993, 364–377). The anti-dialect campaign was accompanied by a purist one, which was geared towards the elimination of foreign words in public, particularly from English and French. The efforts to eliminate foreign influences in the public sphere were a continuation of bourgeois government policies, such as the 14 June 1873 law that regulated the taxation of foreign language elements in signposts and business advertisements for industrial and commercial purposes. A similar decree was issued on 11 February 1923. From 1926 to 1940 laws were enacted which prohibited the use of foreign words in public signs and shop windows, in the names of public restaurants, in firms and in advertising (Klein 1986, 53ss.) The Reale Accademia d’Italia was founded in 1926, though it only began taking action in 1929. It soon claimed the leading role in developing new terminologies, not only in public life but also in general language matters. Many newspapers and renowned intellectuals were involved with these efforts A new phase of political influence on language began in 1935 with the newly created Ministero di Cultura Popolare which intervened in the political discourse,

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fighting for “linguistic autarchy”, in the words of the linguist Bruno Migliorini, and against dialects. Press instructions, so-called veline, published by the Ministero di Cultura Popolare stipulated how to report in a “politically correct” way and made any reference to dialects and minority languages illegal. In 1938 another language policy campaign was introduced in which the polite form of address Lei was to be replaced by Voi, the common form in South Italy (Simonini 1978, 211–215). The liberation from fascism was simultaneously the liberation from its patronizing language policy. The standard language was open to all international influences from then on, which allowed anglicisms to prevail due to the enormous influence of the United States. The policy towards minorities only changed gradually after the war. South Tyrol obtained a special status in 1948, although with limited linguistic rights for the German-speaking population. Between 1954 and 1969, this brought about acts of resistance that had some terrorist aspects. After long negotiations between Italy, Austria and the South Tyrolean People’s Party, an agreement was reached in 1972. This “package”, as it was called, extended linguistic freedom tremendously: German was recognized as the official language alongside Italian. Education and culture were henceforth subject to the administration of the province of Bozen and separate schools were established for the three constituent parts of the population (Germans, Italians and Ladins). German pupils are taught in German from nursery schools through to the upper levels and learn Italian as a second language; the same pattern applies to Italian pupils in reversed analogy. According to the principle of ethnic proportional representation, 62.9 % Germans, 33.3 % Italians and 3.7 % Ladins can be found in national offices (Bochmann 1989a, 100s.; Zappe 1996). The Aosta Valley, which had liberated itself in April 1945, became autonomous on 7 September 1945. French became co-official with Italian and was taught accordingly in schools, but was only marginally used in actual teaching. Francoprovençal, as the original native language of the region, was not given official status or a role in education. Civil society organizations have been advocating on behalf of Francoprovençal up to the present day. One particular group caused something of a stir for quite some time in the 1970s when they designed a valid orthography for the “Arpitan tongue”, a name which referred to the language of the Francoprovençal population of the Aosta Valley, Savoy and Valais. The supporting communities of all other Italian minority languages were confined to the activities of civic societies which, from the 1960s onwards, became more and more successful (cf. Bochmann 1989a, 93–186). As a result of these efforts, in August 1981 Sardinian was given equal status to Italian by the regional parliament of the island, which had been autonomous since 1948. The practical implementation of this decision has since suffered from the fact that discussions about a binding standard form of Sardinian have yielded no generally acceptable result (cf. Mensching/Grimaldi 2005). In the small Sardinian town of

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Alghero, the Catalan language is supported as well, though these efforts are aided by Catalonia (cf. Simon forthcoming). The main obstacle to the preservation and promotion of languages in Italy is related to the lack of a nationwide legislation to protect and encourage minority languages. This seems to be the reason, too, why the country did not ratify the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. As late as 15 December 1999, a bill for the protection of historical linguistic minorities (Norme di tutela della minoranze linguistiche storiche) was passed, though it has not yet had an effective outcome. The twelve languages specified in Article 2 of the bill – Albanian, Catalan, German, Greek, Slovene and Croatian, French, Francoprovençal, Furlan, Ladin, Occitan and Sardinian – are not accepted in their standard form by the speaker groups involved, but are only adopted in their local variant.  

4.3 Spain In the twentieth century, Spain went through two dictatorships which meant a great deal of frustration for its historical nationalities with regards to the maintenance of their linguistic and cultural features. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, Basques, Galicians and Catalans have set out, with various degrees of commitment, to emancipate their languages and cultures and have formed civil society structures for furthering them. The military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923–1930) disrupted the process towards the autonomy of Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque country. It was the formation of the Second Spanish Republic in 1931 that secured far-reaching support for the three languages concerned, right up to supporting a co-official existence for Catalan and Basque. This process was interrupted again for more than forty years by the civil war caused by the coup of General Francisco Franco. After the death of Franco, the democratic constitution of 1978 once again granted extensive rights to the population with regards to linguistic and cultural self-determination (cf. also ↗17 Linguistic diversity in Spain). With the proclamation of the republic and the developing debate about the autonomous status of Catalonia (1932), the Castilo-centred right wing started a propaganda campaign against the left wing and republican powers on the one hand and the nationalities striving for autonomy on the other. Right-wing military officers, clerics, estate owners and upper classes united behind the simplifying dichotomies of “unity of the nation” or “Spain vs separatism”. Greatly over-used terms like nación and España, or rather nacional and español, very quickly prompted autonomist counter-movements either to use these terms in a distancing way or to avoid them altogether (Brumme 1993, 387ss.). In response, the word Castilian (castellano) is now used in the public discourse of historical nationalities instead of the internationally common term Spanish. With the outbreak of the civil war between 1936 and 1939 and the immediate occupation of Galicia and the Basque country, the autonomy by-laws that had just been passed for these areas were annulled and strong censorship was introduced concerning

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both the public use of the two languages and public speech itself. For the latter, a Dirección General de Propaganda was set up. Non-Castilian languages now appeared under the epithets dialectos, dialectitos or even as jergas (jargons) in government publications (Brumme 1993, 396). This propaganda, in which linguists like Dámaso Alonso (1943) were also involved, served to disparage non-Castilian languages. The measures for oppressing these languages were particularly impactful in Catalonia, where the official use of Catalan had advanced far. The co-official status of a regional language alongside Castilian had been decreed with the Statute of Autonomy for Catalonia in 1932. This statute became a model for the Basque country and Galicia as well. In contrast to these two languages, however, Catalan had established linguistic norms and had been used in various types of texts, including academic literature. Immediately after occupying Catalonia, the Franco regime prohibited Catalan education at all levels. All Catalan teachers and university lecturers were dismissed; all Catalan public book inventories were destroyed, as were some private libraries. Likewise, all hints at Catalan identity in public signs, street names, periodicals etc. were forbidden (Ferrer i Gironès 1986, 180, 186ss.). In the first few months after the fall of Barcelona, severe punishments had been pronounced for the use of Catalan in public (Benet 1973, 165ss.; Brumme 1993, 398ss.). Much in the same way as Italian fascism, the Franco regime, too, launched a linguistic purism that was aimed above all at the replacement of French and English loanwords (Brumme 1993, 399ss.). The manifold consequences of a repressive language policy, as referred to by Georg Kremnitz (2015a), led to the loss of many text types, the disruption of passing on written norms to the next generation, gradually emerging illiteracy in one’s own language, a new dialect fragmentation of the common language and much more. The escape of many intellectuals, who went into exile in Latin America and France after World War II, however, made it possible for the elaboration of non-Castilian languages to continue. Undoubtedly, exile literature was a great help in regaining linguistic and political terrain after the death of the dictator, although the significant losses in the ability of the larger population to communicate in their original language could not be redeemed. The constitution of 1978, in which Spain assumed the political standards of Western Europe, granted far-reaching rights for linguistic self-determination to Basques, Galicians and Catalans, who were recognized as “historical nationalities”. The three Autonomous Communities (Catalonia and the Basque country in 1979, Galicia in 1981) gained co-official status for their languages, although judicial norms and linguistic and political practice varied tremendously. Once again, Catalonia was in a leading position (Gimeno Ugalde 2015). Soon after the statutes were issued, laws for normalizing the various languages were passed in the three regions and the task of determining linguistic practice was passed on to special governmental bodies for language policies. Catalan sociolinguists had played a prominent role in the academic preparations of this process. From the 1960s onwards, they provided analytical instruments, among

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them the term “normalization” itself, which was understood as the union of measures that aimed at achieving a “normal” position for previously suppressed languages by spreading them through social communication and by giving them norms in order to develop them into fully functional means of communication in the community (cf. Vallverdú 1979). In Catalonia, the Normalization Law was passed in 1983, a General Directorate for language policies was created, and both the public administration and the educational system were adjusted to the use of Catalan alongside Castilian. The press, the publishing industry and the media followed. In the País Valencià and in the Balearic Islands, the autonomy statutes were oriented towards officializing Catalan (which, in the region of Valencia is referred to as Valencian, a lasting effect of Franco’s language policy that was aimed at reducing the languages to the status of dialects) (cf. Kremnitz 2015a, 7). Furthermore, in the autonomous communities of Aragón and Asturias the local languages Aragonese and Asturian-Leonese respectively (also called Bable) have been supported ever since, although the effect is limited due to the small demographic background in these regions. Last but not least, Catalan language legislation opened up the possibility for the Aran valley, situated in Catalonia, to make its Gascon variety of Occitan the official language – a unique opportunity for this language that is marginalized in France, where it is most widespread. The fact that the language policy of Catalan governments focused on rolling back Castilian in public life in a much more decisive and successful way than other communities has challenged the resistance of unitary forces in the Spanish state, who also relied on a minority in Catalonia speaking Castilian. In particular, the governments led by the post Franquist Partido Popular tried to obstruct certain language policy measures of the Generalitat de Catalunya through constitutional actions. This became eminently clear when in 2006 Catalonia decided on a new statute of autonomy, the preamble of which described Catalans as a nation. It took four whole years before the statute could become effective, however, in terms of language policy (cf. Nagel 2015, 19s.). As a result, Catalan civil society radicalized after recognizing that a satisfying compromise solution could not be expected from the Spanish state. While only a very small percentage of Catalans (2 % according to Kremnitz 2015b, 70) opted for independence during the constitutional process of 1978, by 2010 half of the population supported independence (Nagel 2015, 22). Anyone who judges this radicalization to be nationalist, reactionary, and economically egoistic not only mistakes the fact that it was provoked by the central government, but also ignores the history of the relation between Castilian upper classes and minorities during the Franco dictatorship. This relationship, which is present in the consciousness of every Catalan, climaxed in the destruction of Catalan, and likewise Basque and Galician, culture. In Galicia, Galician was supposed to have equal rights with Castilian in the administrative and educational system, according to the normalization bills of 1983. The Secretería Geral de Política Lingüística, subjected to the regional government

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Xunta de Galicia, was established as the highest linguistic and political authority, and the Real Academia Galega was declared responsible for normative questions. It was only in 2004 that a plan was agreed upon to normalize Galician linguistically, with about 400 measures proposed to support Galician in the public arena (for details see Becker 2015, 57–61; Monteagudo/Bouzada 2002). The results, however, were rather modest. Two factors are mainly responsible for this. Compared to speakers of Catalan and Basque, the galegophone population has traditionally had a lower awareness of the language. There were harsh disputes about the norms of Galician between those who supported a move towards Portuguese norms (the so-called reintegracionalistas) and the dominant powers within the language policy of the Xunta who accepted the Castilian formation of Galician as the standard norm (cf. Bochmann 1985). Ever since the victory of the Castilo-centred Partido Popular in Galicia in 2009, individual measures of normalization have been withdrawn and the overall process is threatened with stagnation. In the Basque country, a bill for the normalization of the use of Basque was accepted in 1982, which included a broad appropriation of Basque in the entire social life of the Autonomous Community. In Navarre, where Basque has an even smaller presence than in the Basque country, such aims have had a more modest dimension. The use of Basque in nursery schools (Ikastolak) which, had been run illegally since the 1960s, has had overall positive effects, as has the elaboration of a Basque standard (euskera batua) by the Royal Academy of the Basque language, Euskaltzaindia (cf. Euskaltzaindia 1979; Torrealday 1977; Rotaetxe 1985). In contrast to Galicia, this process has been promoted by all Basque regional governments so far with great intensity and at a rapid pace. In this way, a tiered programme for the implementation of Basque in the educational system brought about a school model in which Basque is the language of education and Castilian is taught only as a separate subject. The use of Basque by public service staff has further advanced the aim, set at the beginning of the normalization process and now almost achieved, that every citizen can apply to the authorities in any of the two official languages (cf. Wikipedia, Baskische Sprachpolitik, last access 18.03.2016).

4.4 Romania In the wake of the First World War, Romania was able to almost double its territory. In the peace treaties of Trianon (1919), it obtained the far Austrian and Hungarian territories of Transylvania, Banat and Bukovina and in 1920 Bessarabia, which had been part of the Russian Empire up to 1812, was annexed. All of these territories had strong non-Romanian-speaking populations. According to the census of 1930, Romanian was the mother tongue of only 73 % of the citizens, of which 1,556,000 were Hungarians, 760,000 Germans, 646,000 Ruthenians, 452,000 Russians, 518,000 Jews and 362,000 Bulgarians (Les minorités 1946, 46, 53).

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From the very beginning, the language policy in what was henceforth the Kingdom of Greater Romania was aimed at the Romanianization of the populations concerned. Correspondingly, the Constitution of 1923 (Art. 126), which was enforced everywhere, names Romanian as the only official national language. The language rights of minorities were only addressed in the laws concerning the educational system, which came into being from 1925 onwards. Undeniably, rights were therein granted to minorities, but the spreading of Romanian remained paramount at their expense. Around the mid-thirties observers noted a reinforced Romanianization of public life. This, in turn, increased the resistance of the minority language communities. Under pressure from the “home countries” of the minorities, particularly Germany and Hungary, more extensive language rights were eventually conceded to minority language groups in the era of royal dictatorship (1938–1940). Amongst other things, the Ministry of Education granted the implementation of German, Hungarian, Russian and Serbo-Croatian languages as subjects in nine teacher training colleges (cf. Bochmann 1989b, 255). This, however, could not prevent Romania’s surrender of the North of Transylvania, which was mostly settled by Hungarians and Szekler, to Hungary in the Second Vienna Award of 1940. Furthermore, in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1940, the Soviet Union occupied Bessarabia and proclaimed the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. After the Second World War, Romania regained North Transylvania. To appease tensions with Hungary, an autonomous Hungarian region (Regiunea Autonomă Maghiară) was set up in 1952 under pressure from Stalin, in which Romanian and Hungarian were co-official. This region, which existed up to 1968, was renamed as Regiunea Mureș – Autonomă Maghiară in 1960. In general, Romania pursued a more liberal policy towards minorities after the end of the war. The nationality law, passed in February 1945, granted them broad possibilities in the usage of their languages in public. All territories in which the nonRomanian-speaking population represented at least 30 % of the total population were allowed to use their own language along with Romanian in schools, in administration, in court and in politics. The principles of this nationality law are also included in the constitutions of 1948, 1952 and 1965, though in slightly changed form (cf. Bochmann 1989b, 257s.). As long as Romania was under the tutelage of the Soviet Union, these regulations, although by no means generally accepted, were basically observed, though the tendency by ethnic Romanians to patronize minorities should not be overlooked. This was changed from 1965 onwards after Ceaușescu’s takeover and his new course of “national communism”. Formally, minority rights remained untouched, but in social reality they were restricted. This started in 1968 when the autonomous Hungarian region was dissolved on the pretext of reorganizing the country administratively. In all administrative units and political offices, the representatives of minority populations generally found themselves placed in subordinate positions. Apart from this, new industries were established in the regions mainly settled by Hungarians, which

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drew a large workforce from other parts of the country. Not least because Ceaușescu and West Germany had established an agreement with financial concessions towards Romania, the emigration of Germans gave rise to the extinction of this large minority, which for almost 800 years had decisively contributed to the history and culture of Transylvania. After the overthrow of Ceaușescu, Romania, in the course of preparing its entry into the European Union, adapted its policy on minorities to meet European norms. The relevant charter was ratified in 1995, but only became applicable in 2008 as there were considerable problems in coordinating concrete measures, particularly with Hungary (cf. Dahmen 2012, 230). In general, however, the charter’s regulations are observed (cf. Tichy 2013). With regard to the language corpus planning, much more happened in Romania than in the Romance-speaking countries of Western Europe between the end of the war and the overthrow of 1989. To overcome illiteracy, which is still present to some extent, and to raise the general level of education, orthography was further simplified by the reform of 1953, in which the etymologically based distinction between î and â disappeared (this was later revised by Ceaușescu to exclude the unique ethnonym român and its derivations, among them the country’s name România). Linguistic research was seen as an eminently important task and was promoted accordingly. Three newly founded linguistic academy institutes worked on the preparation of normative dictionaries and grammar books. An Institute for Standardization undertook the elaboration of nomenclatures in all branches of industry and other trades, which were then published in a normative technical dictionary comprised of seven volumes between 1949 and 1966 (see Bochmann 1989b, 259). Although the attempts at controlling the language in such a way may well have been in the background, the political discourse was under the tutelage of the communist party leadership since the proclamation of the People’s Republic in December 1947. Vocabulary, phraseology and forms of discourse were “passed down”, so to speak, from the top members of the party to the lowest strata of the political system, which caused the implementation of that langue de bois (limbaj de lemn in Romanian) that was characteristic of all communist regimes. Among the peculiarities with which Ceaușescu thought to control the standardization process, is the regulated replacement in 1977 of the forms of address domnule, doamnă, domnişoară with tovarăș, tovarășă (Romanian for “comrade”), which found little acceptance in the public sphere (cf. Munteanu/Șuteu 2006, 1442). The change of regime in 1989 brought with it the liberation from all fetters of linguistic paternalism, although not all of the consequences were positive. Critics deplore the brutalization of language in the media (cf. Bochmann 2011). The revocation of essential aspects of the 1953 orthography reform, in particular the reintroduction of the two-fold spelling î/â in medial vowels, was also controversial. This was based on a decision by the Romanian Academy which was enforced in spite of the opposition of all renowned linguists (cf. Ortografia 1992).  

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4.5 Republic of Moldova Ever since the detachment of this north-eastern half of the former principality of Moldova from Russia (1812), the territory, which only became independent in 1991, has been known by various names. Under Russian rule, it was called the Bessarabia Governorate, then, in 1918, it became the short-lived Democratic Republic of Moldova, which in 1920 was united with the Romanian Kingdom, but later reclaimed by the Soviet Union. Language policy was reduced to the enforcement of the ruling language, Russian, in public life and to the exclusion of Romanian from the educational system. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, resistance arose from a small group of intellectuals. The incorporation into the Kingdom of Greater Romania was accompanied by a vigorous policy of Romanianization in the new province of Basarabia. In the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop-pact, the Soviet Union constrained its restitution in 1940; the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was established, which lasted until independence, but was interrupted by the war years 1941–1944. In order to prepare the reincorporation of Bessarabia on a long-term basis and to oppose Romania’s claims to the region with linguistic and cultural arguments, in 1924 the Soviet Union, established the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic beyond the border river Dnjestr in the Ukraine area. A consistent Moldovan minority that so far had not been part of a Romanian state formed the demographic basis for this area. In the same year it was decided that “Moldovan” should be established as the independent language of a “Moldovan nation”, which was to be transferred to Bessarabia later. The right of Moldovans to exist had to be substantiated historically, ethnologically and linguistically – a research programme that was pursued until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. To differentiate themselves plausibly from Romanian, the authors of the various standard works leaned on the most conspicuous peculiarities of local idioms both phonetically and in terms of grammar. They elaborated a modern vocabulary based in part on unconventional neologisms or on Russian borrowing, and, most strikingly, they resorted to the Cyrillic alphabet (cf. Negură 2012). After the war, the authorities enforced the new linguistic programme in the entire Moldovan Republic. The gradually growing discontent of Moldovan intellectuals with this imposed alienation from Romanian and with the predominance of Russian was expressed in numerous publications at the time of perestroika (cf. Heitmann 1991) and culminated in a mass demonstration on 31 August 1989. As a result, Romanian (in Latin spelling) became the national language by law, which was eventually enshrined in the 1991 declaration of independence. In the constitution of 1994, Moldovan was again declared as the name of the official language, which was in line with the Romanian standard, but in 2013 the constitutional court overturned the 1994 decision and declared that the national language would be called “Romanian”. Officially, only the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (which is not recognized internationally) and certain Ukrainian areas adhere to the use of the name “Moldo-

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van” (cf. Bochmann 2015, 60–62), but according to Anna-Christine Weirich (2015), in the Republic of Moldova, many citizens continue to refer to their national language as “Moldovan”.

5 Conclusion As we have seen, the differences in the language politics in today’s European Romance-speaking countries can be traced back to certain attitudes and processes, the roots of which lie far back in the past. The modern-day language policies in each of the countries are incomprehensible without taking into account historical and comparative considerations. This is most notable in relation to the political ideologies and practices regarding the handling of languages and dialects that were in competition with the ruling languages or which were in opposition to the linguistic homogeneity of the countries. The extent to which centralization endeavours could succeed depended decisively on the actual balance of power. In France, as early as the sixteenth century, the absolutist royalty was successful in making the language of Paris the administrative language and the language of intellectual elites within the strictly centralized organization of the country. The French Revolution culturally and linguistically engendered a political consensus of a broad majority of the population which remains to this day. Such a national consensus was never considered in Spain, as from the very start the rule of the Castilian-speaking monarchy was founded on the repression of the subjected allophone parts of the country, which – undoubtedly in modified ways – is still pursued in the present politics of Madrid, particularly towards Catalonia and the Basque Country. In Italy, which was politically unstable up to 1861, the linguistic and political voluntarism with which the literary language was to be grafted on the regions dominated by dialects, had brought about insufficient results and was spared after the ending of fascism – it was only with the modern consumerist society with radio and television that linguistic union was accomplished. The Romanian national state, established in 1859, had no problems of this kind until the enormous territorial gains after the First World War made it necessary to deal with large ethnic minorities. The growing fascisization in the 1930s led to a stronger linguistic repression against the minority groups, which in Communist Romania was only withdrawn half-heartedly until it resurged under Ceauşescu. The ways in which political domination can make use of the instrument of linguistic isolationism could later be seen in the example of the Moldovan language under Soviet rule in Moldova, which was directed against the Romanian language, considered a competitive and political menace. The linguistic interventionism of providing norms, nomenclatures, namings etc. and controlling language and discourse is less evident than the handling of competing languages. Here, national traditions are indeed at work, for instance when the linguistic and nationalist purism of France is compared with the linguistic and

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political laissez-faire attitudes of Italy. The leading role, however, is played by the respective political regime: the more unitary and dictatorial the government is, the more rigorous the attempt at using language as an instrument of political dominion. Even though at present, interventions concerning norms etc. are due more to practical motivations, it is equally clear that decisions about political and, to some extent, scientific language and discourse regulations, however spontaneous they seem to be, ultimately follow the ruling ideology to a great extent.

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Les Minorités ethniques en Europe centrale et balkanique (1946), Paris, Presses universitaires de France. Lodge, R. Anthony (2004), A Sociolinguistic History of Parisian French, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Losada Castro, Basilio (1976), La literatura, in: Gustavo Fabra et al. (edd.), Los gallegos, Madrid, ISTMO, 214–318. Maas, Utz (1980), Sprachpolitik. Grundbegriffe der politischen Sprachwissenschaft, Sprache und Herrschaft 6(7), 18–77. Maas, Utz (1989), Sprachpolitik und politische Sprachwissenschaft. Sieben Studien, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp. Maaß, Christiane (2002), La lingua nostra patria. Die Rolle der florentinischen Sprache für die Konstitution einer florentinischen WIR-Gemeinschaft im Kreis um Lorenzo de’ Medici, Münster, Nodus. Marcellesi, Jean-Baptiste/Guespin, Louis (1986), Pour la glottopolitique, Langages 83 (Special Issue: Glottopolitique), 5–34. Marchetti, Pascal (1989), La Corsophonie: un idiome à la mer, Paris, Albatros. Martel, Philippe (2013), Combats pour les “langues régionales” depuis 1870, in: Georg Kremnitz (ed.), Histoire sociale des langues de France, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 303–319. Melli Fioravanti, Grazia (1993), Italien: Sprache und Literatur in der Kultur des italienischen Risorgimento, in: Klaus Bochmann (ed.), Sprachpolitik in der Romania. Zur Geschichte sprachpolitischen Denkens und Handelns von der Französischen Revolution bis zur Gegenwart, Berlin/ Boston, De Gruyter, 301–326. Mensching, Guido/Grimaldi, Lucia (2005), Limba Sarda Unificada. Zu den jüngsten Bestrebungen der Standardisierung des Sardischen, in: Carsten Sinner (ed.), Norm und Normkonflikte in der Romania, München, Peniope, 59–87. Molinier, Olivier (2013), La Politique linguistique au Parlement: De la IIIe République à la loi Deixonne, in: Georg Kremnitz (ed.), Histoire sociale des langues de France, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 291–301. Monteagudo, Henrique/Bouzada, Xan de (edd.) (2002), O proceso de normalizacion do idioma galego 1980–2000, vol. 1, Política lingüística: Análise e pespectivas, Santiago de Compostela, Consello da Cultura Galega. Munteanu, Eugen/Șuteu, Flora (2006), Sprachplanung und -pflege: Rumänisch, in: Gerhard Ernst et al. (edd.), Romanische Sprachgeschichte. Histoire linguistique de la Romania, vol. 2, Berlin/ Boston, De Gruyter, 1429–1445. Nagel, Klaus-Jürgen (2015), Katalonien – vom Autonomismus zum Separatismus?, europa ethnica (Zeitschrift für Minderheitenfragen Special Issue), 17–30. Negură, Petru (2012), Nationaler und kultureller Aufbau in der Moldauischen Autonomen Sowjetrepublik. Das Beispiel eines gescheiterten Nationalismus, in: Klaus Bochmann et al. (edd.), Die Republik Moldau. Republica Moldova. Ein Handbuch, Leipzig, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 78–86. Niederehe, Hans-Josef (1987), Alfonso el Sabio y la lingüística de su tiempo, Madrid, De Librería. Ortografia limbii române – trecut, prezent, viitor (1992), Iași, Institutul European. Pirazzini, Daniela (2012), Die ECRM im Licht der Debatte um das Sprachgesetz Nr. 482, in: Franz Lebsanft/Monika Wingender (edd.), Die Sprachpolitik des Europarats. Die “Europäische Charta der Regional- oder Minderheitensprachen” aus linguistischer und juristischer Sicht, Berlin/ Boston, De Gruyter, 73–83. Plötner, Bärbel (1993), Die Bewältigung des Spachkonflikts in der Revolution, in: Klaus Bochmann (ed.), Sprachpolitik in der Romania. Zur Geschichte sprachpolitischen Denkens und Handelns von der Französischen Revolution bis zur Gegenwart, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 63–99.  

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Raffaelli, Sergio (1983), Le parole proibite. Purismo di Stato e regolamentazione della pubblicità in Italia (1812–1945), Bologna, il Mulino. Renzi, Lorenzo (1981), La politica linguistica della Rivoluzione francese, Napoli, Liguori. Rey, Alain/Duval, Frédéric/Siouffi, Georges (2007), Mille ans de la langue française. Histoire d’une passion, Paris, Perrin. Rodríguez, Francisco (1976), La lengua, in: Gustavo Fabra et al. (edd.), Los gallegos, Madrid, ISTMO, 219–240. Rotaetxe, Karmele (1985), Glottopolitique en Euskadi, Cahiers de linguistique sociale 7, 67–70. Salvi, Sergio (1975), Le lingue tagliate. Storia delle minoranze linguistiche in Italia, Milano, Rizzoli. Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte (1981), Die Französische Revolution und die Sprache, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 41, 90–122. Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte (1985), Die Wörterbücher in der Französischen Révolution (1789–1804), in: Rolf Reichardt (ed.), Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich (1680–1820), vol. 1–2, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 149–196. Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte (1987), “Tu parles le vieux langage…” Le “dictionnaire Républicain et Révolutionnaire” de Rodoni, citoyen de Geneve, LINX 15, 77–97. Schlösser, Rainer (ed.) (2015), Sprachen im Abseits, Jena, AVM. Simon, Sophia (forthcoming), Identità linguistica e culturale degli algheresi. Un approccio biograficolinguistico, Wien, Praesens. Simonini, Augusto (1978), Il linguaggio di Mussolini, Milano, Bompiani. Tauli, Valter (1968), Introduction to a Theory of Language Planning, Uppsala, Almquist & Wiksell. Tichy, Ellen (2013), Die Europäische Charta der Regional- oder Minderheitensprachen – Anwendung und Umsetzung in Rumänien am Beispiel “Bildung” für die deutsche Minderheit, Germanistische Beiträge 32, Sibiu, Universitätsverlag. Torrealday, Joan Mari (1977), Euskal Idazleak, gaur. Historia social de la lengua y literatura vascas, Oñati-Arantzazu, Jakin. Vallverdú, Francesc (1979), Die Normalisierung des heutigen Katalanisch, in: Georg Kremnitz (ed.), Sprachen im Konflikt. Theorie und Praxis der katalanischen Soziolinguisten, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 139–147. Vecchio, Sebastiano (1982), Il circuito semiotico e la politica. Linguaggio, nazione e popolo nella rivoluzione francese, Acireale, Galatea. Weirich, Anna-Christine (2015), Einige Gedanken zu aktuellen Entwicklungen des Glottonymstreits in der Republik Moldova, Quo vadis Romania 46, 106–126. Woehrling, Jean-Marie (2013), Histoire du droit des langues en France, in: Georg Kremnitz (ed.), Histoire sociale des langues de France, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 71–88. Zappe, Manuela (1996), Das ethnische Zusammenleben in Südtirol. Sprachsoziologische, sprachpolitische und soziokulturelle Einstellungen der deutschen, italienischen und ladinischen Sprachgruppe vor und nach den gegenwärtigen Umbrüchen in Europa, Frankfurt, Lang.

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17 Linguistic diversity in Spain Abstract: This chapter uses a sociolinguistic and glottopolitical approach to examine the Romance languages in Spain. The theoretical framework positions language conflict as an analytical instrument, to the extent that the current language distribution is considered not to be a result of consensus but one of control by authority that gives way to a four-tier linguistic hierarchy: official language, co-official languages, protected languages and unprotected languages. A critical evaluation of the situation for each language in the different territories in which they are spoken is presented, and the chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the emergence of the minority language “new speaker”, a social (and political) subject who, with their praxis, is responsible for the future of some of these languages.  

Keywords: minority languages, language policy, European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, new speakers, Spain  

1 Introduction Spain is a plurinational and plurilingual state with certain features that make it unique within the European context. Besides Spanish, the only official language in all of territorial Spain, there is a large group of languages, the presence of which, in most cases, precedes the current configuration of the Spanish state. These are languages that have undergone a process of linguistic minoritization as a result of the historical changes that have taken place within the Iberian Peninsula, as well as Northern Africa, over many centuries. The different languages are as follows (in alphabetical order):1 Aragonese, Aranese, Astur-Leonese, Basque, Ceutan Arabic (Darija), Catalan (Valencian), Galician, Portuguese and Tamazight. Along with these territorialized languages, we must add the Spanish and Catalan sign languages and the Romani Caló, which was spoken at the beginning of the fifteenth century by the Romani community and is currently undergoing a process of revitalization.2

1 Like almost everything that refers to the political dimension of languages, the glottonyms used in this chapter are not exempt from controversy. In any case, the fact that a language has multiple autoglottonyms may be due to many different reasons, although in general, it is wise not simply to create languages just because there are different names for dialectal varieties spoken in different territories. In the case of Catalan in the Valencian Country and Murcia, I use both Catalan and Valencian interchangeably. 2 The ethnolect spoken mostly by the Romani population in present-day Spain is a mixed variety paraRomani with phonological and grammatical structures from Spanish (Spanish Caló), Catalan (Catalan https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-018

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Although the diversity of Spain’s minority languages is similar to that of other European states, there are two features which together help to characterize its linguistic situation: the total number of speakers of these languages, and the fact that they are not major languages in neighbouring states. Some languages boast a total number of speakers much higher than the average for European minority languages (and even majority languages in some cases), such as Catalan, Galician and Basque. On the other hand, with the exception of Portuguese and Ceutan Arabic, none of the other minority languages is a majority language in another state as is frequently the case in Central and Eastern Europe, with the exception of Catalan in Andorra, where it is the only official language. From a legal standpoint, the treatment given to linguistic diversity as a whole, and particularly to minority languages, is uneven. While some of these languages hold official status in their corresponding territories, others, including the most vulnerable, lack even the slightest protection and their use is becoming increasingly marginalized. In this chapter I will present a very general panorama of the sociolinguistic situation for the Romance languages spoken in Spain.3

2 Romance languages in Spain 2.1 Historical context The gradual expansion and evolution of Vulgar Latin throughout the Iberian Peninsula gave way to the type of linguistic diversity that can be seen in other territories once under Roman control. The contact between Latin and other local vernaculars was favourable for the flourishing, consolidation and, in some cases, the expansion of the following Romance languages in Spain (in alphabetical order): Aragonese, Aranese, Astur-Leonese, Catalan, Galician and Spanish. The fact that Portuguese is spoken in some towns in Extremadura and Castile and Leon can be explained by the continual border tensions between the neighbouring states. A sociolinguistic analysis of the Romance languages currently spoken in Spain must begin with an interpretation of the different political processes that empowered certain languages to the detriment of others (Andreose/Renzi 2013; Klump/Kramer/ Willems 2014; Vàrvaro 2013). Such processes stretch from the Arab conquest in the

Caló) or Basque (Errumantxela), and with numerous lexical elements and some morphological features from Romani (see Gamella et al. 2011; Krinková 2015). 3 This chapter does not aim to provide a linguistic description of the Iberian Romance languages, such as the linguistic consequences of the contact between languages, diatopic variation or the standardization process. On these questions, see, for example, Frías Conde (2007), Gargallo Gil/Bastardas (2007) and d’Andrés Díaz (2013). For a historical perspective on the standardization of Romance languages, see Metzeltin (2004). For a sociolinguistic introduction to the minority Romance languages, see Fernández Rei/Santamarina Fernández (1999).

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eighth century all the way to the latter half of the twentieth century with the fall of the Franco dictatorship. Throughout this long period, the success of the different Romance languages was quite uneven. After an initial southward expansion by AsturLeonese, Aragonese, Spanish, Catalan and Galician(-Portuguese) there was a progressive strengthening of Spanish as the language of power which began at the end of the Middle Ages and has lasted up to the present day (Kabatek 2013).4 There have been periods of resistance to this hegemony that have attempted to empower the other Romance languages, especially Catalan and Galician, with uneven results. In any case, the predominance of Spanish over the other languages led to strong discrimination against the groups with a first language other than Spanish, a discrimination which has continued to the present day (Medina/Del Valle/Monteagudo 2013). There thus came a point when only Spanish remained ideologically connected to ideas of modernity, progress and reason, forcing the other languages to remain in the realm of traditions and emotions; in other words, considered informal and only useful within the family context. In fact, the Romance languages other than Spanish – some of which had even been the languages of kingdoms, boasting a prominent literary tradition and social and cultural prestige with standardized usage in their respective societies (Vàrvaro 2013) – began to decline once excluded from written use (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), only to partially recover their status when the written language was revived in the nineteenth century, a period generally referred to as the Renaissance (Sanson 2013; ↗16 Language policies in the Romance-speaking countries of Europe). It is important to bear in mind that the fact that these languages were relegated to oral use did not mean a loss in terms of vitality. In fact, most Romance languages had become the most spoken languages in their respective territories by the beginning of the twentieth century, although transformations from that point onward led to their rapid decline. With the specific goal of stopping that decline, the most relevant legal changes occurred during the Second Republic (1931–1939, cf. Monteagudo 2013) and after 1975 when the situation for the minority languages began to change, although not always in a satisfactory or favourable way. It is important to note that the Spanish Constitution of 1978, and the subsequent creation of the Autonomous Communities within Spain, could have been a good opportunity for the minority languages to recover their status. However, the Constitution contributed to the minoritization of these languages, and as a result Spanish remains in a very privileged position to the extent that it is the only language that all Spaniards are required to know (Vernet i Llobet 2007). Other languages received their status through the recognition mandated at the regional level, but not all were as lucky. Languages such as Astur-Leonese in Asturias and Castile and Leon, Aragonese 4 Furthermore, I should mention the disappearance of Mozarabic, the Romance language spoken by non-Muslims and converts in the area of the peninsula under Muslim control. Its extinction was not so much due to the pressure from Muslim authority in Al-Andalus as it was to the linguistic shift that occurred thanks to the expansion of Spanish once the Reconquista began (Sayahi 2014, 210).

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in Aragon, Catalan in Aragon and Murcia, Galician in Asturias, Castile and Leon and Extremadura, and Portuguese in Castile and Leon and Extremadura never earned coofficial status.5 It should not, however, be forgotten that this co-official status as a result of the Constitution has inevitably led to the question of territoriality, which, among other things, has caused the issue of linguistic diversity to be redirected to the territories with more than one language. This has allowed the Spanish government to downplay its responsibility with respect to a nation-wide language policy aimed at the strategic promotion of minority languages within the country, despite the commitments it made upon ratifying the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML) in 2001. On the other hand, the principle of territoriality is not uniform in its application, as it depends on whether the language in question is Spanish (in which case speakers’ rights apply to the entire State territory) or one of the co-official languages (in which case speakers’ rights are limited to their territories). Thus, a Galician or Catalan speaker, despite the right to freely choose his or her language, cannot expect public institutions to use what they consider to be their own language outside of the territory in which these languages have achieved co-official status (Caamaño 2014, 247).

2.2 Sociolinguistic classification of the languages As a result of historical events and the political decisions accompanying them, the current sociolinguistic situation for the Romance languages spoken in Spain is one of inequality. In order to carry out a comparative analysis of each language, I have created the sociolinguistic status6 variable which takes into account the following four factors: intergenerational transmission; legal protection and recognition; level of institutionalization (the language’s presence in areas such as education, the media, public services and the legal system); and social prestige, which is understood as the value of a language in relation to social mobility (Williams 2005). I have assigned one of the following values to each criterion: zero (0), very low (1), low (2), intermediate (3), high (4) and very high (5).7 The results for each language and context are shown in Table 1:  

5 Amongst the languages of non-Roman origin, Basque is an official language in the Basque Country and in part of Navarre. Neither Ceutan Arabic in Ceuta nor Tamazight in Melilla has official status. 6 This variable was inspired by the scales proposed in Euromosaic (see Nelde/Strubell/Williams 1996), the pioneer study on minority linguistic groups that served as the basis for some of the linguistic policies carried out by the EU in the last twenty years. 7 I am aware of the risk of simplification that results from classifications combining quantitative and qualitative data from different sources. However, it should be noted that I chose, whenever possible, to use variables employed in sources with official data, such as the 4th Report on Spain’s compliance with the ECRML (Council of Europe) adopted by the Committee of Experts in March 2015 (Committee of Experts 2015). See Table 2.  

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Table 1: Sociolinguistic status of each of the Romance languages in Spain  

CRITERIA IntergeneraLegal protectional transmis- tion and sion recognition

Level of institutionalization

Social prestige

Sociolinguistic status

Spanish

5

5

5

5

20

Catalan (Catalonia)

4

4

4

3

15

Catalan (Balearic Islands)

4

4

3

3

14

Catalan (Valencia)

3

4

3

3

13

Galician (Galicia)

3

4

3

3

13

Aranese

3

4

2

2

11

Astur-Leonese (Asturias)

3

3

3

1

8

Catalan (Aragon)

4

2

1

0

7

Aragonese

3

2

1

0

6

Galician (Extremadura)

4

0

1

0

5

Galician (Asturias)

3

1

1

0

5

Galician (Castile and Leon)

3

1

1

0

5

Astur-Leonese (Cas- 1 tile and Leon)

1

1

0

3

Portuguese (Extremadura)

1

1

1

0

3

Catalan (Murcia)

3

0

0

0

3

Portuguese (Castile and Leon)

1

0

0

0

1

We can put the languages into five different groups according to their sociolinguistic status score: 1. Excellent: Spanish 2. Good: Catalan in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencia, and Galician in Galicia 3. Acceptable: Aranese in Catalonia 4. Deficient: Astur-Leonese in Asturias, Catalan in the area of Aragon that still speaks it (La Franja) and Aragonese

Linguistic diversity in Spain

5. 6.

467

Very deficient: Galician in Extremadura, Asturias and Castile and Leon Negligible: Astur-Leonese in Castile and Leon, Portuguese in Extremadura and Castile and Leon, and Catalan in Murcia

At one extreme we find Spanish, the only official language in the entire State territory, and at the other extreme we find the remnants of Portuguese spoken throughout various towns in Castile and Leon, Catalan in Murcia, Portuguese in Extremadura and Astur-Leonese in Castile and Leon, all in limited situations and in urgent need of protection and promotion. On an imaginary line between these two extremes, we find all the other languages. Catalan, which is present in a substantial portion of the regions along the Mediterranean, is the most widely spoken minority language, with a high level of institutionalization in Catalonia and an intermediate level in the Valencian Country and the Balearic Islands, and an intermediate level of social prestige (Catalonia, Balearic Islands, Valencian Country). Nevertheless, Catalan is in a dire situation in eastern Aragon and, as I previously mentioned, in Murcia (specifically in the area of El Carxe), both being territories in which the amount of protection is low or non-existent. Galician in Galicia shows intermediate levels of intergenerational transmission, institutionalization and social prestige, along with a high level of legal recognition. Yet, its viability is most compromised in the western region of Castile and Leon, the western region of Asturias and in the three towns in Extremadura where a variety of Medieval Galician-Portuguese has been spoken since the Reconquista. Aranese, spoken in the Aran Valley in the Catalonian Pyrenees, is an official language in Catalonia despite only having a few thousand speakers. Due to its only recent legal recognition, challenges regarding institutionalization and social prestige still lie ahead. Astur-Leonese has a good number of speakers in Asturias, although it suffers from a lack of protection and inadequate promotion. It is worst off in certain areas of Castile and Leon where the number of speakers is very low. Aragonese is spoken in the Pyrenees valleys of Aragon and only as of 2016 have the first steps been taken towards its protection. As for the co-official languages (Catalan in Catalonia, Balearic Islands and Valencian Country; Galician in Galicia; Aranese in Catalonia), Table 2 includes some of the commitments made by Spain when it ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (see Committee of Experts 2015).  

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Table 2: Evaluation by the Committee of Experts of a selection of the commitments made by Spain with regards to the official languages in the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages  

Domain

Undertaking

Catalan (Catalonia)

Catalan Valencian Galician Aranese (Balearic (Valencian (Galicia) (Catalonia) Islands) Country)

Art. 8. Education

– to make available pre- Fulfilled school, primary, secondary education in the relevant regional or minority languages

Partly fulfilled

Partly fulfilled

Not fulfilled

No conclusion (pre-school) Fulfilled (primary) Not fulfilled (secondary)

– to make available tech- Fulfilled nical and vocational education in the relevant regional or minority languages

Not fulfilled

Partly fulfilled

Not fulfilled

Not fulfilled

– to set up a supervisory Fulfilled body or bodies responsible for monitoring the measures taken and progress achieved in establishing or developing the teaching of regional or minority languages and for drawing up periodic reports of their findings, which will be made public

Not fulfilled

Fulfilled

Not fulfilled

Partly fulfilled

Art. 9. – in criminal, civil and Partly Judicial administrative proceed- fulfilled authorities ings: to provide that the courts, at the request of one of the parties, shall conduct the proceedings in the regional or minority languages

Partly fulfilled

Partly fulfilled

Partly fulfilled

No conclusion

– to make available in the Fulfilled regional or minority languages the most important national statutory texts and those relating particularly to users of these languages, unless they are otherwise provided

Fulfilled

Fulfilled

Partly fulfilled

Partly fulfilled

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Table 2: (continued)  

Domain

Undertaking

Catalan (Catalonia)

Catalan Valencian Galician Aranese (Balearic (Valencian (Galicia) (Catalonia) Islands) Country)

Art. 10. Within the administrative Partly Administra- districts of the State fulfilled tive autho- – to ensure that the rities and administrative authoripublic serties use the regional or vices minority languages

Partly fulfilled

Partly fulfilled

Partly fulfilled

No conclusion

– to make available widely Partly used administrative fulfilled texts and forms for the population in the regional or minority languages or in bilingual versions

Partly fulfilled

Partly fulfilled

Partly fulfilled

Partly fulfilled

With regard to – Regio- Fulfilled public services nal le– to ensure that vel the regional or – State Partly minority lanlevel fulfilled guages are used in the provision of the service

Partly fulfilled

No Partly conclusion fulfilled

No conclusion

Partly fulfilled

No Partly conclusion fulfilled

No conclusion

Fulfilled

Fulfilled

Fulfilled

Fulfilled

Partly fulfilled

Partly fulfilled

Partly fulfilled

Not fulfilled

– recruitment – Regio- Fulfilled and, where nal lenecessary, vel training of the – State Partly officials and level fulfilled other public service employees required

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Table 2: (continued)  

Domain

Undertaking

Catalan (Catalonia)

Art. 11. Media

To the extent that radio Fulfilled and television carry out a public service mission: – to ensure the creation of at least one radio station and one television channel in the regional or minority languages

Fulfilled

Not fulfilled Fulfilled

No conclusion

– to encourage and/or Fulfilled facilitate the creation of at least one radio station in the regional or minority languages

Fulfilled

No Partly conclusion fulfilled

No conclusion

– to encourage and/or Fulfilled facilitate the creation of at least one television channel in the regional or minority languages

Fulfilled

No Partly conclusion fulfilled

Partly fulfilled

– to encourage and/or Fulfilled facilitate the production and distribution of audio and audiovisual works in the regional or minority languages

Fulfilled

Fulfilled

Fulfilled

– to encourage and/or facilitate the creation and/or maintenance of at least one newspaper in the regional or minority languages

Fulfilled

No No conclusion conclusion

Fulfilled

Catalan Valencian Galician Aranese (Balearic (Valencian (Galicia) (Catalonia) Islands) Country)

Fulfilled

No conclusion

Linguistic diversity in Spain

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Table 2: (continued)  

Domain

Undertaking

Catalan (Catalonia)

Catalan Valencian Galician Aranese (Balearic (Valencian (Galicia) (Catalonia) Islands) Country)

Art. 12. – to foster the different Fulfilled Cultural ac- means of access in other tivities and languages to works facilities produced in regional or minority languages by aiding and developing translation, dubbing, post-synchronization and subtitling activities

Fulfilled

Fulfilled

Fulfilled

Fulfilled

– to encourage direct Fulfilled participation by representatives of the users of a given regional or minority language in providing facilities and planning cultural activities

Fulfilled

Partly fulfilled

Fulfilled

No conclusion

– to encourage and/or Fulfilled facilitate the creation of a body or bodies responsible for collecting, keeping a copy of and presenting or publishing works produced in the regional or minority languages

Partly fulfilled

Fulfilled

Fulfilled

Fulfilled

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Table 2: (continued)  

Domain

Undertaking

Catalan (Catalonia)

Catalan Valencian Galician Aranese (Balearic (Valencian (Galicia) (Catalonia) Islands) Country)

Art. 13. Economic and social life

– to include in their Fulfilled financial and banking regulations provisions which allow, by means of procedures compatible with commercial practice, the use of regional or minority languages in drawing up payment orders (cheques, drafts, etc.) or other financial documents, or, where appropriate, to ensure the implementation of such provisions

No conclusion

Not fulfilled

Partly fulfilled

No conclusion

– in the economic and social sectors directly under their control (public sector), to organize activities to promote the use of regional or minority languages

Fulfilled

No conclusion

Fulfilled

Fulfilled

No conclusion

– to ensure that social Fulfilled care facilities such as hospitals, retirement homes and hostels offer the possibility of receiving and treating in their own language persons using a regional or minority language who are in need of care on grounds of ill-health, old age or for other reasons

Partly fulfilled

Not fulfilled

Partly fulfilled

No conclusion

– to ensure by appropriate Partly means that safety fulfilled instructions are also drawn up in regional or minority languages

Fulfilled

Fulfilled

Not fulfilled

No conclusion

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3 Languages and policy The language policies that have been implemented since the country returned to democracy have had varied results throughout different domains of the Romance languages. The relationship between language and society cannot be explained without discussing the political dimension therein and the power relations derived from it. In this section I will present a sociolinguistic description of each Romance language spoken in Spain, and in the case of the co-official languages, I will briefly refer to the four criteria that make up the sociolinguistic status variable (see § 2.2).

3.1 The situation of Spanish Spanish (also known as Castilian) is the language with the greatest number of speakers and dialectal variety, the most widespread geographically, and the most expansive outside of the peninsula (Moreno Fernández 2015). It is a language without problems in terms of intergenerational transmission; on the contrary, thanks to its prestige, it is continuously gaining more speakers whose mother tongue is a language other than Spanish. These speakers may come from immigrant communities or have been born speaking a minority language, such as Galician, Asturian, Aragonese, etc. It boasts a level of protection and promotion unrivalled by the other languages to the extent that it is the privileged language of the Spanish Constitution (1978), as article 3.1 states that “el castellano es la lengua española oficial del Estado. Todos los españoles tienen el deber de conocerla y el derecho a usarla”. In order to guarantee this duty and this right, the teaching of Spanish is mandatory throughout Spain at all educational levels. In legal terms, we would say that the personality principle, i.e. the guarantee of linguistic rights regardless of territory, applies to native speakers of Spanish. Being the predominant language with the most speakers, its level of institutionalization and social prestige is very high. It is this privileged position of one language over all others that justifies using the paradigm of language conflict (Darquennes/Mac Giolla Chríost 2015) as an analytical tool to examine the sociolinguistic situation of the Romance languages in Spain. This conflict arises whenever one group carries out measures to increase its capital in all its forms and is met with resistance from other people or groups who benefited from the previous status quo. This is the basis of inequality and social division, and it is from this perspective that we can understand how Spain’s linguistic situation is one of conflict and irresolution – indeed, it has been a cause of continuous political debate from often divergent ideological positions (Kabatek 2007; Moreno Fernández/Ramallo 2013).  

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It is in this way that the construction of Spanish as a “common language” has had a permanent influence over the way the other languages are valued and has led to a state of constant tension as to how linguistic diversity is managed in territories with their own languages, particularly concerning the duties and rights of the population. It is an ideology with a long history that has been maintained since its origins through offensive-expansionist nationalism designed to circumvent the linguistic and cultural diversity by means of marginalization and abatement (Senz 2011). According to López García (2009), the idea of a “common language” is the result of a historical necessity for communication between communities which speak different languages. The idea of Spanish as a koiné has garnered much criticism (see Garrido 2010; Moreno Cabrera 2011). In any case, if there is a common language, it is the result of renunciation and relinquishment, which, although generally unnoticed, has been taking place since Spanish was identified and empowered as the common language. If there has been an astonishing rise in the number of Spanish speakers in the last few centuries, it is not only a matter of reproduction, but also of production in that it is a language which actively gains speakers for whom it is not a first language. This “common language” ideology has been justified as a way of criticizing the “imposition” of the minority languages within their territories. However, this myth of imposition is a topos, an ideologeme that is supported by an idealized naturalness of the common language – that which unites, identifies and binds us together, as those who support this claim would say (cf. Narvaja de Arnoux/Del Valle 2010). For Moreno Cabrera (2008), it is a “destructive ideology” which transformed a language into the common language based on a strategy of expansion and domination (cultural, economic, symbolic), which is how the so-called international languages have expanded and continue to do so (Del Valle 2011; 2013). In contrast to this viewpoint, Moreno Fernández (2015) describes this history of the Spanish language as a “marvellous” adventure. Beyond the academic debate, this conflict is a feature of everyday life in territories that have native languages other than Spanish, to the extent that identity – and language as one of the few criteria that can be inferred objectively in its formation (Hobsbawm 1992) – emerges as a key framing symbol of imagined communities (Anderson 1983). This has given way to endless newspaper articles, civil movements and popular books from both sides (those in defence of a “common language” and those in favour of diversity); this demonstrates the contention and the inequality between social groups who speak different languages.

3.2 The situation of Catalan/Valencian Catalan is an official language in Catalonia, the Valencian Country and the Balearic Islands, but not in Aragon (La Franja) or Murcia (El Carxe). It is also spoken in Andorra as an official language, southern France (Northern Catalonia) and in Alghero

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(Sardinia). Thus, it is spoken in four European states in an array of situations, demographics, and sociolinguistic and glottopolitical contexts. In terms of overall numbers, Catalan is one of the minority languages with the largest demography in Europe. With approximately 13 million people who understand it and 10 million able to speak it, Catalan has more speakers than languages like Finnish, Danish or Lithuanian, to name just a few examples of official languages within the EU. Thus, if we place Catalan on the majority-minority continuum based strictly on demographics (and Galician among the other Romance languages in Spain), it is an example of a medium-sized language (Boix-Fuster 2015). Around 60 % of its total numbers of speakers live in Catalonia, 29 % in the Valencian Country, and 8 % in the Balearic Islands. However, beyond demographics, the figures indicate that the language is far from being in an ideal situation. On the one hand, knowledge of the language is uneven. Thanks to its proximity to Spanish, speakers of these two languages experience few problems in terms of comprehension. However, the ability to speak Catalan varies depending on the territory. In Catalonia, 80.4 % of people aged fifteen and older are able to speak it (53 % among foreigners, Direcció General de Política Lingüística 2015); the same figure applies in the Balearic Islands (Melià 2015); that number is reduced to 51 % in the Valencian Country (Direcció General de Política Lingüística 2016). In the area of Aragon where it is still used (La Franja) but lacks adequate legal protection, 80 % are able to speak it (Sorolla 2015). The figures showing competence in the written language are significantly lower in all the Catalan-speaking territories. In order to understand these figures, we should not forget that there is large immigrant population in the Catalan-speaking countries, reaching 20 % in the Balearic Islands and 50 % throughout the different towns in the Valencian Country, with notable increases in recent decades, especially amongst those aged between 15 and 44 (Domingo i Valls 2014; Comellas 2016). The arrival of a particularly superdiverse immigrant population (Vertovec 2007) is moving the traditional sociolinguistic order in an uncertain direction. On the one hand, it is clear that it enriches the linguistic situation. According to data from Grup d’Estudi de Llengües Amenaçades, there are over 300 languages in Catalonia (GELA 2016). On the other hand, the praxis of the allophone community with respect to the languages of those taken in is quite varied, which includes new speakers of Catalan and Spanish, or those who do not speak either language. According to Comellas (2016, 155), in the case of Catalonia (in the other territories the dynamics are different), the recent “immigration, much more than language shift, has been the leading cause behind the drop in the percentage of the population whose first language is Catalan”. This means looking beyond the framework of bilingualism in order to explain the sociolinguistic complexity of the contemporary Catalan-speaking society. On the other hand, the figures regarding first language and the language of everyday use vary significantly by territory (Table 3). Thus, in Catalonia, Catalan is the  

 

 

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first language of only a third of the population – reaching 51 % for those born in Catalonia – while over half learned to speak Spanish. The percentage of people claiming that their language of everyday use is Catalan reaches 36 %. There has been a minoritization in the number of first language Catalan speakers in recent years, due both to changing demographics and sociolinguistic reasons (Sorolla 2015). The situation is similar in the Valencian Country and the Balearic Islands. The figures change substantially once birthplace is taken into account. For example, the figure reaches 64 % for those born in the Balearic Islands who predominantly speak Catalan (Melià 2015). In La Franja (approximately 47,000 inhabitants), the prevalence of Catalan as a first language is greater (Table 3). However, the language in this territory of the Aragon border finds itself in a difficult situation due to both a stagnation in its linguistic vitality compared to only a few decades prior and the area’s changing demographics, with a significant increase in the allophone population (Sorolla 2015). We must also factor in the historical abandonment of public policies and the lack of legislation aimed at promoting and safeguarding the language. Viewed this way, it is no exaggeration to say that Catalan is severely endangered in Aragon (Seminario Aragonés de Sociolingüística 2015, 10). In his interactional analysis of linguistic choices by the youth in La Franja, Sorolla (2016) identifies the first signs of language shift in the in-group rules among the Catalan-speaking youth. A southern variety of Catalan has been spoken in the administrative region known as El Carxe – an enclave within the Spanish-speaking Autonomous Community of Murcia – since the mid-nineteenth century as a result of the repopulation of these lands by Catalan-speaking populations from the Valencian Country (Montoya 2014). Here, the language is in sharp decline and lacks any type of protection; it is not even used in the educational system. In recent years, El Carxe has seen a decrease in the number of native inhabitants together with the arrival of people from elsewhere who show no interest in the language. In his sociolinguistic analysis, Montoya (2014, 205) concludes that 77 % of the native population speaks Catalan while that number falls to 57 % among the native youth. Furthermore, the native population shows no interest in the revitalization of the language, in part due to an emic lack of awareness that they are members of a linguistic enclave. The greatest contributor to the decline in the language’s intergenerational transmission is the rise in linguistically mixed couples who prefer to educate their children in Spanish rather than Catalan. In the cases of Catalan-speaking Aragon and Murcia, we could directly apply one of the recommendations made in 2016 by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe to Spanish authorities upon the release of the 4th Report monitoring Spain’s compliance with the commitments made in the ECRML (see Committee of Experts 2015). It recommends to “consider extending the recognition of those regional or minority languages with a co-official status in six Autonomous Communities to other  

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Autonomous Communities provided that there is a sufficient number of users of the regional or minority languages involved”.8 Table 3: Macro-sociolinguistic data for Catalan  

First Language

Everyday Language

Catalonia

Valencian Country*

Balearic Islands

La Franja

El Carxe

Catalan

31

N/A

38

52

42

Spanish

55

N/A

49

34

29

Bilingual

2

N/A

4

2

29

Catalan

36

24

37

50

N/A

Spanish

51

46

50

41

N/A

Bilingual

7

27

10

6

N/A

*Valencian-speaking area Sources: Direcció General de Política Lingüística (2015); Direcció General de Política Lingüística (2016); Melià (2015); Sorolla (2015); Montoya (2014)

Differences between the territories can also be observed by examining how Catalan is used within the family (intergenerational transmission). At the conclusion of his study, Torres-Pla (2014, 180) identifies three groups within the territories where Catalan is spoken: a) Those that show noticeable advancements: Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Andorra b) Those that neither advance nor retreat: Valencian Country and La Franja c) Those witnessing the consequences of a break in intergenerational transmission: Alghero and Northern Catalonia In their research, Montoya/Mas i Miralles (2011) identify the main problems associated with the complex situation of the language’s intergenerational transmission since the nineteenth century in the Valencian Country. On the one hand, there are practical and ideological reasons which have led many families to break this transmission. On the other hand, the revernacularization that has taken place in Valencian society as a process of production and not of reproduction has contributed to the emergence of a new social subject, the new speaker (see § 4).

8 All of the recommendations made by the Committee of Ministers are available at http://www.coe.int/ t/dg4/education/minlang/Report/Recommendations/SpainCMRec4_en.pdf (last access 18.02.2018).

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In Catalonia, Catalan is a language with prestige, backed by highly implemented legislation at the regional level. The approval of the modified Statute of Autonomy in 2006 created a normative instrument that boldly proposed a model that would dignify the language by giving it priority over Spanish in Catalonia and creating a more transparent description of the rights and duties that arise from the legislation. Nevertheless, the Spanish Constitutional Court, in a controversial decision in 2010, undermined some of the most ambitious articles in the Statute by ruling them unlawful, such as the article that prioritized Catalan over the other official language (see Sánchez Miret 2011; Pons Parera 2013).9 Catalan in Catalonia boasts the highest level of institutionalization among the minority Romance languages. It has a firm presence in the media with dozens of TV channels and radio stations that broadcast daily in Catalan. It is also the most commonly used language within public administration and education. However, there are shortcomings when it comes to the legal system and certain social services such as healthcare and assistance for the elderly (see Table 2 and Committee of Experts 2015). Of course, the educational system is recognized as being one of the most beneficial ways the language has been promoted. Since the 1960s, it has been designed as a progressive and exemplary model to guarantee prestige, vitality and standardization for Catalan without preventing complete fluency in Spanish. In recent years, this model has been called into question by state legislators and a variety of Catalonian civic associations (Pradilla Cardona 2016). With regards to social prestige, knowing Catalan in Catalonia represents a type of recognized social capital. Knowing and speaking the language affords access to more job opportunities and slightly increases the possibility of employment (Alarcón 2011). A significant number of companies use Catalan as the language of business for all their activities, from production and distribution to customer service or advertising. Conversely, there are many companies that do not use Catalan as their language of business either in Catalonia or in any other Catalan-speaking areas (Plataforma per la Llengua 2015). In the Valencian Country, the modified Statute of Autonomy, adopted in 2006, proclaims Valencian as the official language but also states that public policies will take the Spanish-speaking territories into special account as specified in the Law of Use and Education of Valencia (1983). This distinction between territories has had consequences in language policies regarding education. In the Valencian-speaking areas, the language is compulsory in education, with different bilingual programmes

9 Given the current political circumstances, it is not inconceivable to imagine an independent Catalonia in the medium term. In this context, the key question is how linguistic diversity will be handled in a hypothetical new European state. Although this is not the place to speculate on these possible circumstances, the issue has given rise to a very enlightening discussion on how identities, loyalties, power, democracy, cohesion and conflict are all constructed in present-day Europe. For further information, see Sendra/Vila (2016).

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available, including Catalan immersion. In the Spanish-speaking area, Valencian is optional and the decision is left to the families. In fact, it is possible for Valencian not even to form part of the curriculum. Furthermore, just as in the Balearic Islands (and in Galicia), the educational system is considering strengthening English as part of a model aimed at trilingualism, which tends to create both academic and social controversy in contexts where a minority language is involved (Mas Castells/MestreMestre 2015). The level of institutionalization in Valencia is lower than that in Catalonia, although they share the same previously mentioned shortcomings when it comes to the legal system and certain social services. However, there is an alarming decline in the use of Catalan in the media, especially in television and public radio (Committee of Experts 2015). The language’s social prestige is also lower, to the extent that it is less effective for achieving social mobility within the community. Yet, as in Catalonia, there are a number of companies that use Catalan in business. In the Balearic Islands, the base framework for its language legislation is the Law of Linguistic Normalization (1986, partially modified in 2016). Just as in other areas with a co-official language (except Catalonia), it was drawn up at a moment in history when it was necessary to lay the foundations for the protection and promotion of Catalan. The implementation of this law has experienced a fair amount of controversy, leading to problems for the Catalan language. One such case is the passing of Decree 15/2013 regarding the integrated treatment of languages in non-university education. This law created a trilingual educational model to be applied universally (across the entire population), equating a foreign language (preferably English) to a minority language. This system has received a strong social backlash, both from teachers and families (Observatori de la Llengua Catalana 2015). Besides the problems within the educational system, the language is also in a delicate situation when it comes to the legal system, administration and public services (Committee of Experts 2015). Therefore, as noted in Table 1, its level of institutionalization is intermediate. In terms of social prestige, it is in a delicate situation, in part due to constantly rising numbers of non-immigrants who come from outside the territory and lack a strong interest in learning the language. In some parts of the islands, English is becoming relevant to an extent previously unknown.  

3.3 The situation of Galician Galician finds itself in a very uneven situation throughout the different territories where it is spoken, both in legal terms and in the level of institutionalization and everyday use. As a result, the challenges it faces are quite different. In Galicia, it has a good level of formal protection, to the extent that it is the official language and has the legal backing of the Law of Linguistic Normalization (1983). Nevertheless, the legislative implementation of the law has been unsatisfactory insofar as, except in a

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few areas, the sections dealing with linguistic content are very scarce, especially compared to Catalonia or the Basque Country (Ferreira Fernández et al. 2005). In 2004, the General Plan for the Normalization of the Galician Language was passed, considered the most important instrument in terms of language policy but whose implementation has been slower than originally hoped. Despite its decline in recent decades, Galician continues to be the most widely spoken language in Galicia, particularly in non-urban areas. Nevertheless, it is heading towards a major setback. From 2003 to 2013 Galician lost vitality and, if it continues along this path, it will not be long before it loses its status as the most widely spoken language in Galicia (Seminario de Sociolingüística 2016). Note the changes in first language and everyday language in Galicia in Table 4 (2003–2013):  

Table 4: Macro sociolinguistic data for Galician in Galicia  

First language

Everyday language

2003

2013

Difference (in percentages)

Galician

52

41

-21 %

Spanish

30

31

+3 %

Bilingual

16

25

+56 %

Galician

43

31

-28 %

Spanish

20

26

+30 %

Bilingual

37

42

+13 %

Source: Instituto Galego de Estatística (2014).

Thus, the process of language shift continues to be a reality in Galicia.10 Although the shift is more apparent in cities, it is also occurring in rural areas that have traditionally been monolingual in Galician. Monolingualism in Galician fell from 72 % to 54 % from 2003 to 2013 in towns with less than 10,000 inhabitants while the level of bilingualism rose from 23 % to 35 % in the same period. This can be seen as traditional language shift taking place through transitional bilingualism. In other words, given that it is not necessary to change languages in order to have a completely satisfactory conversation in Galicia, the movement toward bilingualism by traditionally monolingual Galician speakers can be seen as evidence for language shift. Nevertheless, if we look at what

10 A crucial moment for such a process of linguistic shift occurred during the Franco dictatorship, a period when Galician speakers – like those of other minority languages in Spain – experienced great linguistic repression (Freitas Juvino 2008) carried out by ideological institutions such as the educational system, the Catholic Church and the media. The dramatic consequences of that period explain why, when the time came to change the rules of the game in 1978, the language was in serious decline, although with a good demographic foundation.

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has happened in those cities where bilingualism seems to have reached a standstill while monolingual language use has risen (more so in Spanish than in Galician), we can reach a different conclusion: in the decades to come, Galicia will be comprised of a receptively bilingual and actively monolingual population. The language has an intermediate level of institutionalization with a healthy presence in audio-visual media and the internet, but without a daily printed newspaper. Furthermore, as with Catalan, Galician lacks a presence in the legal system and public administration, especially in administrative offices pertaining to the Spanish State in Galicia (See Table 2 and Committee of Experts 2015). In Galicia bilingual education is based on a 50 % Spanish – 50 % Galician model, regardless of the context of the individual schools, except in early childhood education where the students’ predominant language is used. This model aims at an ideal balance between the languages within society that is far from reality (Vila/Lasagabaster/Ramallo 2017). This model has also been heavily questioned at the political and social level to the extent that it has been considered ineffective at stopping the current linguistic shift. On the other hand, trilingualism has also become more prevalent in the Galician educational system, notably with English as a third language. Therefore, the “4th Report from the Committee of Experts” from the ECRML (see Committee of Experts 2015) has concluded that the commitments made by Spain with respect to the use of Galician in the educational system have not been upheld in Galicia (see Table 2). In recent years, the language has lost value as a reference point for social mobility, insofar as public employment has dropped considerably and the requirements for becoming a civil servant have become less restrictive. Although it is a language of everyday use in the private sector, it is rarely even considered in job offers. The autonomous government has enacted the Plan for the Galician Language in the Economic Fabric with measures aimed at different sectors (the hotel industry, banking, commerce, marketing, etc.) for the period of 2015 to 2020. In the other territories where Galician has been historically present (Asturias, Castile and Leon and Extremadura),11 the situation is much more delicate as they lack the necessary protection that allows for an intervention in the declining populations that speak so-called “exterior Galician” (Frías Conde 1999).  

11 As is the case with other border Romance languages (Gargallo Gil 2014), the dialectological classification of the Extremaduran speech varieties by Valverdi du Fresnu, Sa Martín de Trevellu and As Ellas continues to be a subject of debate, both for its nomenclature and its relationship to a linguistic diasystem, along with the proper direction for creating a standard. These speech varieties are often recognized as having originated from Galician (Frías Conde 1997; Fernández Rei 2007; Costas González 2013) although there is not a consensus on the issue (González Salgado 2009; Carrasco González 2010; Álvarez Pérez 2014). From an emic point of view, the local population prefers to refer to its language using the generic term fala (Ramallo 2011).

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In Asturias, Galician is spoken in 18 different towns within the Eo-Navia region located in the westernmost part of the autonomous community along the Galician border.12 These different municipalities are comprised of about 70,000 people, 70 % of whom consider themselves Galician speakers. Here the language lacks any type of basic protection that can ensure its medium-term viability.13 The status of these different speech varieties has led to differing positions, not only politically but also academically. Thus, while some Asturian Romance scholars, including the Asturian Language Academy (Academia de la Llingua Asturiana), consider the language spoken in western Asturias to be a transition between Galician and Asturian (Academia de la Llingua Asturiana 2006; 2007; d’Andrés Díaz 2011), Galician philologists and dialectologists, including the Galician Language Academy (Real Academia Galega), have no doubt that these varieties are a dialectal variant of eastern Galician (Babarro González 2003; Frías Conde 2005; Asociación Abertal del Eo-Navia 2006; Costas González 2011). In Castile and Leon, Galician is spoken throughout different western regions. The language is in a vulnerable situation to the extent that it lacks any protection, is spoken by an ageing population and intergenerational transmission has been broken. The modified Statute of Autonomy, adopted in 2007, recognizes Galician as a language of the territory and guarantees respect and protection for it. However, there has not been any legislation in this regard. Unlike other border regions, the collaboration between those in charge of language policy in Galicia and Castile and Leon has borne some fruit. Most worthy of mention is a bilateral agreement to strengthen Galician within the educational system of the Castilian-Leonese regions where it is spoken. Since 2001, Galician has been present in the educational system either as part of the curriculum or as an extracurricular activity. The recommendation made by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe as described above is applicable to Galician in both Asturias and Castile and Leon. Compliance with this recommendation would lead to a substantial change in the language’s status in Galicia’s neighbouring territories. In Extremadura, local varieties are used by most of the population, although there has been a perceived rise in Spanish over the last few years. Unlike other enclave situations, fala shows favourable signs in terms of conservation, especially due to the stability of the resident population, low levels of immigration into the region, an agriculturally-based economy, geographic isolation until only recently, and the fact

12 Galician-Asturian is the official name recognized in Asturias (although not by the speakers) and has also been the glottonym chosen by the Spanish government when it ratified the ECRML; this is why it is referred to as such in the reports by the Committee of Experts. The Asturian Language Academy (Academia de la Llingua Asturiana) also used eonaviego as the glottonym. 13 In 2016, the Asturian township of Veiga declared Galician-Asturian as an official language. Although linguistic competencies are decided upon by the Autonomous Community and not by the townships, this gesture has helped to dignify and facilitate the day-to-day life of the people who express themselves in that language.

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that the community has valued the language and never stopped passing it down through the generations (Ramallo 2011). However, with the changes that the region is currently undergoing (economically, demographically, etc.), a language policy is required that aims to promote a fala within the school system.

3.4 The situation of Aranese Aranese is a variety of Occitan spoken in Vall d’Aran, an administrative region in the Catalonian Pyrenees. It receives a high level of legal protection despite having a reduced number of speakers and being a minority language even in the region where it is most spoken. In fact, as of 2006 it is considered the native language of its territory, and more importantly on a functional level, it is an official language in Catalonia (as of 2006), making it a trilingual territory. In 2014, the Institute of Aranese Studies gained Academy status and became the Aranese language authority. It is responsible for establishing and updating a language standard for Aranese along with making recommendations regarding the language. Recently, it presented the first fruits of its labour, Gramatica basica der occitan aranés (‘Basic grammar of Occitan Aranese’, Acadèmia aranesa dera lengua occitán 2016) and Per escriure l’occitan (‘To write Occitan’, Taupiac 2015). The basic figures regarding the knowledge and use of the language are as follows (see Direcció General de Política Lingüística 2015, 70): – Among those 15 and older, 81 % describe themselves as having good oral comprehension of the language and 56 % claim to be able to speak it. Comprehension is greater among older groups. – However, only 21 % have it as a first language (cf. 16 % Catalan and 44 % Spanish) and it is the everyday language of 18 % of the population in the Aran Valley (cf. 16 % Catalan and 55 % Spanish). Between 2003 and 2013, there was a significant drop in favour of Spanish due to the arrival of non-natives to the Aran Valley. – Spanish is the dominant language in the realm of public services and in commerce, including the administrative departments of the Catalonian government. The Language Policy Law of Catalonia (1998), the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia (2006) and especially the Law of Occitan (2010) serve as the main instruments for linguistic policy, regulating the use of Occitan as it pertains to the civil service, the media and the educational system, among other areas. According to the ECRML, Aranese is a part III language, on a par with Catalan (Valencian), Galician and Basque. This means it deserves a high level of recognition, although it also requires a commitment by Catalonian authorities to promote the language in many of the areas covered by the ECRML. Thus, in the “4th Report” (see Committee of Experts 2015) a series of challenges were identified for the Aranese language in order to deliver the commitments made by Spain (see Table 2).  

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3.5 The situation of Astur-Leonese Astur-Leonese is the autochthonous Romance language that is spoken in the area between the Galician-Portuguese-speaking and Spanish-speaking territories in the western peninsula (García Gil 2008). Although an estimated 500,000 people speak Astur-Leonese, it is a language whose vitality is under threat in the medium term due to its low level of intergenerational transmission and the fact that it lacks a language policy strong enough to overcome the historical minoritization it has experienced for centuries in the areas where it still exists today. It is strongest in Asturias (where Asturian is the dominant language) while it is on the path to extinction in the northern and western parts of Castile and Leon (known as Leonese, see González Riaño/García Arias 2011) and in the north of Portugal, where it is known as Mirandese and is the only place where the language is officially recognized (Merlan 2009; Gómez Bautista 2013). The weakening of Astur-Leonese in Spain can be viewed from three different angles: first, as a minority language with respect to Spanish; second, as a language without a legal policy to promote and protect it and to make it an official language in Asturias and Castile and Leon; lastly, on account of its stigmatized and ideologically marked depiction, in line with Spanish linguistic traditions, as a dialect within the classifications of linguistic diversity in the peninsula, as it is still to a certain extent considered today (see d’Andrés Díaz 2012). Asturian is not an official language in any territory, although the Statutes of Autonomy of Asturias and Castile and Leon mention its protection and promotion. Furthermore, in 1998, Asturias passed a law specifying the use and promotion of the language, and in Castile and Leon, the Statute of Autonomy (2007) states that Leonese (auto-glottonym) will receive specific protection and assumes a commitment to the implementation of its own legislation. The consequences of the language lacking official status are clear in areas such as education, the media and public services. Furthermore, its low legal status has strengthened a tradition that has historically considered Asturian as a language lacking value and prestige compared to Spanish. In the Asturian educational system, Asturian Language can be chosen as an elective at an hour and a half a week. In public education, approximately half of all primary school students take this subject, but that percentage drops significantly among secondary school students and is non-existent in pre-primary education, even for native speakers (Selfa Sastre 2014). In terms of language promotion, a language policy geared toward teaching Asturian at all levels is urgently needed, one that goes from teaching the language to teaching in the language (Hevia Artime 2013). A new dialectal variety known as Amestáu has arisen in Asturian cities. Although its status as a dialect is still a matter of debate, it is considered a form of Asturian that is heavily influenced by Spanish. In the words of Teso (2015, 25), it is the “rostru llingüísticu más conocíu d’Asturies” (‘the most well-known linguistic face in Asturias’).

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3.6 The situation of Aragonese Unlike in its golden age, when it expanded toward the south and the east of the Iberian Peninsula, the only place where Aragonese has survived throughout the centuries has been in its place of origin located in the Ansó and Benasque valleys of northern Aragon (Nagore Laín 1999). The total number of speakers is unknown due to the lack of any up-to-date census specifically designed to gather such data. Estimates place the figure in the range of 25,000–30,000 speakers, approximately 2 % of the total population of Aragon. This percentage rises in areas where it is spoken by the majority, although even in these cases it is far behind Spanish in terms of overall use (Seminario Aragonés de Sociolingüística 2015). It is generally spoken by an ageing population, although recent years have seen the emergence of new speakers in the main cities (López Susín 2013). If we add to this the fact that it lacks any type of coherent language policy that takes into account the heritage value of the linguistic diversity in the region, it becomes clear that Aragonese is one of the most endangered Romance languages, not only in Spain but in Europe (Gimeno/Sorolla 2014).14 It is hard to imagine a viable future for Aragonese without a structural change that is fully committed to both an ideological transformation of the social subject and creating new legislation and emancipatory public policies. We must begin with the fact that in many languages with a very reduced number of speakers, there reaches a point where the efforts of the population alone are not enough to save them. Regardless of how many centuries the languages have survived, as is the case of Aragonese, they have become much more vulnerable in modern societies due to the social, geographic, economic and ideological mobility associated with them. Therefore the efforts of speakers to transmit Aragonese need to be supported by public policy. Cases like this remind us that these languages, besides being a subject of political rhetoric, are a way of life, and public policy should firmly work to preserve them in order to facilitate the historical desire of the speakers to pass the language on to future generations. Advances in educational policy are a necessary first step. Since 1997, Aragonese has been available in the education system, although as an elective taught outside

14 The current Law of Use, Protection and Promotion of Languages and Linguistic Modalities of Aragon (Ley de Uso, protección y promoción de lenguas y modalidades lingüísticas de Aragón) (2013) ended up diminishing the language through a strategy of marginalization, invisibility and the delegitimization of the auto-glottonym. Thus, Aragonese came to be termed the “Aragonese Language Specific to the Pyrenees and Pre-Pyrenees” (Lengua Aragonesa Propia del Pirineo y Prepirineo), popularized as lapapyp. The same has happened with Catalan in Aragon, which came to be called the “Aragon Language specific to the Eastern Area” (Lengua Aragonesa Propia del Área Oriental), popularized as lapao. In other words, the law simultaneously manages to make linguistic diversity in Aragon invisible and unify it, two complementary effects, undesired and highly questioned both outside and within Aragon (see Garcés Sanagustín 2015; López Susín 2015). In 2016, a legal modification allowed the formal recovery of the original glottonyms of the minority languages of Aragon: Aragonese and Catalan.

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normal school hours and not graded (Campos Bandrés 2015). As a language in clear danger of extinction, its presence at all levels within the education system is of great urgency, from pre-primary up through secondary, first and foremost in the places where it is spoken but also in urban school districts that might also play a role in safeguarding the language. The media is also a key factor, although results have been unsatisfactory up until now (Ramos 2014). Finally, a language plan is necessary that is directed toward non-speakers of Aragonese with the aim of eliminating preconceptions and building a new appreciation of the cultural and linguistic wealth inherent in linguistic diversity. It is important to keep in mind that Aragonese has undergone a certain devaluation within the fields of linguistics and philology due to the neverending, and therefore sterile, debate on the difference between languages and dialects (cf. Kabatek 2006; Moreno Cabrera 2012).

3.7 The situation of Portuguese Portuguese survives with great difficulty in some of the towns along the Luso-Hispanic border, forming a dialectal continuum that spreads throughout the southeast part of Salamanca (province of Castile and Leon) and Extremadura. Below I will examine the situation of Portuguese in the towns of Olivenza, Táliga, Herrera de Alcántara, Valencia de Alcántara, Cedillo and La Codosera, all located in Extremadura. The origins of Oliventine Portuguese (found in Olivenza and Táliga) can be traced back to the Treaty of Alcañices, which drew up the borders between Spain and Portugal at the end of the thirteenth century. At that time, many Castilian towns had been given over to the Portuguese. Portuguese control of Olivenza lasted until the end of the eighteenth century, returning briefly to Spanish control on occasions. This period was the community’s golden age, since it was when the Portuguese monarchy granted the town certain privileges that led to population growth and economic development. Spain took back control of Olivenza with the Treaty of Badajoz in 1801. Despite the historical events that have determined this territory’s fate, Oliventine Portuguese has continued to the present day without any real interruption, although it is currently undergoing a process of continual language shift that began in the midnineteenth century (Carrasco González 2006); it also lacks any structured language policy focused on its protection and promotion. It is considered an Alentejan variety of Portuguese with its own characteristics and a clear influence from the Spanish superstrate. Although no official data exist, it is estimated that there are around 200 speakers. According to a study done by the Além Guadiana cultural association (2013), Portuguese is spoken almost exclusively by those aged over 70 in Olivenza and Táliga, with hardly any young or middle-aged speakers. Nevertheless, there is a clear interest in the language’s preservation and revitalization among speakers, families and local authorities: steps have been taken to include it in the school curriculum, teach it to adults, use it for place names, and document it with aim of creating a

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register of Oliventine Portuguese that could serve as a reference point for current and future language revitalization projects. From a different standpoint, many recent studies have looked at the attitudes and linguistic competences within Extremadura regarding Portuguese, examining both border territories and those areas in the interior of the autonomous community. Ossenkop (2010) looked at Portuguese in the small towns of Cedillo, Valencia de Alcántara and La Codosera along the Portuguese border, taking a qualitative approach to studying linguistic attitudes and providing an analysis of the formal consequences resulting from the contact between languages in these three towns. Although there were positive attitudes toward Portuguese, the historical stigmatization of its speakers has allowed Spanish to enter into traditional areas previously reserved for Portuguese. This language shift has reached a point of no return and has been moving toward the Spanish monolingualism that the society has been immersed in for decades. As for the inhabitants of Extremadura, attitudes towards Portuguese have improved substantially in recent years (Amador Moreno 2016). This should contribute not only to strengthening measures aimed at improving trans-border communication, but also to strengthening the linguistic diversity of the region. However, this last point is still far from reality. In fact, although article 71 in the Statute of Autonomy of Extremadura (2011) gathers together new perspectives on the dissemination and promotion of Portuguese language and culture, the Committee of Experts from the ECRML has reiterated its concern for the situation of Portuguese in Extremadura. In its 2015 report monitoring the languages in Spain, it stated, “the Portuguese language is endangered. It urges the Spanish authorities to take resolute action to protect the Portuguese language in Extremadura, by inter alia contributing to the current revitalization process based on private initiatives” (2015, 16).  

4 Conclusion: “new speakers” of minority Romance languages One matter that is of great interest to communities with minority languages is the new speaker, that is, someone who has joined the language community as an active speaker once s/he has learned the language through secondary socialization. In the case of Spain, a prototypical new speaker is someone who grew up speaking Spanish and then goes on to learn a minority language, becoming an active user of that language. This phenomenon, referred to as “linguistic ‘mude’” by Pujolar/González (2012), has become a relevant object of sociolinguistic study in the realm of European minority languages (Hornsby 2015; O’Rourke/Pujolar/Ramallo 2015; Smith-Christmas et al. 2018). Its importance lies in the fact that these people are key to the future of minority languages, insofar as their language habits create a change in the sociolinguistic

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order that has governed the traditional relationships between conflicting linguistic groups. In other words, through his or her disregard for the majority language, the new speaker breaks an ideological tradition that has come to represent the movement toward modernity, progress and social mobility – the transfer of speakers from a minority language to a majority language. This is a rupture in a normative habitus, moulded by a social structure that associates minority languages with the role of personal identity, traditions and emotions, and therefore leads to acquired dispositions (ways of feeling, acting and seeing the world), albeit in constant tension, toward the languages, the speakers and the varieties. For this reason, thanks to the mude, the praxis of the new speaker activates the practical function that connects the language to social mobility, prestige, innovation and progress (Williams 2005; May 2011). As a result, this type of cleft habitus (Bourdieu 2000) shows a contradiction that strengthens the tension inherent in the appearance of this new social subject. To the extent that his or her actions are conscious and non-reproductive, s/he breaks the embodied dispositions down to the subjectivity of the individual, which often results in the displacement of the new speaker into a type of no man’s land. On the other hand, the mude has led to a complete readjustment in the linguistic indexicality that traditionally operated within the Romance languages. This story is a familiar one: the praxis of the minority language speaker had always lacked symbolic capital and had been devalued and shunned by the existing power structures which control access to economic and cultural resources. Given that control of such resources is maintained by an “authority” that has the official language already inherent within itself, all capital (economic, cultural, social and symbolic) was indexically distributed according to one’s spoken language. The consequences of this historical process of linguistic minoritization are well-known within the production and reproduction of the minority Romance languages. Thus arises the extraordinary significance of the mude. Furthermore, the mude allows us to re-examine the complexity of linguistic diversity from new perspectives, such as the relationship between language and identity, the new legitimizations of what it means to be the speaker of a language, the crisis of linguistic authority or new purist forms that are reactivated as a form of control over new speakers. As Pujolar/González (2012) point out, changing languages is not just adopting a new way of speaking, but also marks a performative change that is fundamental to the identity of the new speaker.

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Moreno Cabrera, Juan Carlos (2008), El nacionalismo lingüístico. Una ideología destructiva, Barcelona, Península. Moreno Cabrera, Juan Carlos (2011), “Unifica, limpia y fija”. La RAE y los mitos del nacionalismo lingüístico español, in: Silvia Senz/Montserrat Alberte (edd.), El dardo e la Academia, vol. 1, Barcelona, Melusina, 157–314. Moreno Cabrera, Juan Carlos (2012), El aragonés, la lingüística y el imperialismo filológico, Alazet 24, 59–75. Moreno Fernández, Francisco (2015), La maravillosa historia del español, Madrid, Instituto Cervantes/ Espasa Libros. Moreno Fernández, Francisco/Ramallo, Fernando (2013), Las lenguas de España a debate, Valencia, Uno y Cero. Nagore Laín, Francho (1999), O aragonés, in: Francisco Fernández Rei/Antón Santamarina Fernández (edd.), Estudios de sociolingüística románica: Linguas e variedades minorizadas, Santiago de Compostela, Universidade de Santiago, 155–212. Narvaja de Arnoux, Elvira/Del Valle, José (2010), Las representaciones ideológicas del lenguaje: Discurso glotopolítico y panhispanismo, Spanish in Context 7(1), 1–24. Nelde, Peter/Strubell, Miquel/Williams, Glyn (1996), Euromosaic: The Production and Reproduction of the Minority Language Groups of the EU, Bruxelles, European Commission. Obserbatorio de l’aragonés (2015), Informe añal sobre a situazión d’a luenga aragonesa, Zaragoza, Fundación Gaspar Torrente. Observatori de la Llengua Catalana (2015), VIII Informe sobre la situació de la llengua catalana, Barcelona, Observatori de la Llengua Catalana. O’Rourke, Bernadette/Pujolar, Joan/Ramallo, Fernando (edd.) (2015), New Speakers of Minority Languages: The Challenging Opportunity, Special Issue, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 231. Ossenkop, Christina (2010), Contacto de lenguas en la frontera luso-extremeña: La situación del español y del portugués en la franja fronteriza de Cedillo, Valencia de Alcántara y La Codosera, in: Mª Jesús Fernández García/Silvia Amador Moreno (edd.), Al límite. I congreso de la SEEPLU, Cáceres, Avuelapluma, 5–14. Plataforma per la Llengua (2015), Català i empresa, Barcelona, Plataforma per la Llengua. Pons Parera, Eva (2013), The Effects of Constitutional Court Ruling 31/2010 Dated 20 June 2010 on the Linguistic Regime of the Statute of Catalonia, Catalan Social Sciences Review 3, 67–92. Pradilla Cardona, Miquel Àngel (2016), El model lingüístic educatiu a Catalunya. Crònica glotopolítica d’una involució, Estudis romànics 38, 295–310. Pujolar, Joan/González, Isaac (2012), Linguistic “Mudes” and the De-Ethnicization of Language Choice in Catalonia, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 16(2),138–152. Ramallo, Fernando (2011), O enclave lingüístico de Xálima: Una análise sociolingüística, Estudos de lingüística galega 3, 111–135. Ramos, Rubén (2014), L’aragonés y os media…¿Una historia d’amor imposible?, in: Chabier Gimeno/ Natxo Sorolla (edd.), Actas II jornadas de sociología aragonesa, Zaragoza, Gara d’Edizions, 121–138. Sánchez Miret, Fernando (2011), El estatus de las lenguas romances de España en los Estatutos de Autonomía (1932–2010), in: Anja Overbeck/Wolfgang Schweickard/Harald Völker (edd.), Lexikon, Varietät, Philologie. Romanistische Studien Günter Holtus zum 65. Geburtstag, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 243–253. Sanson, Helena L. (2013), The Romance Languages in the Renaissance and After, in: Martin Maiden/ John Charles Smith/Adam Ledgeway (edd.), The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages, vol. 2: Contexts, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 237–282.  

 

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Sayahi, Lotfi (2014), Diglossia and Language Contact: Language Variation and Change in North Africa, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Selfa Sastre, Moisés (2014), Lengua y escuela: Hacia un modelo de conjunción en la escuela asturiana, Lletres Asturianes 111, 171–184. Seminario Aragonés de Sociolingüística (2015), El censo de 2011 en Aragón. Avance de resultados sobre el aragonés y el catalán, Zaragoza, Seminario Aragonés de Sociolingüística. Seminario de Sociolingüística (2016), Lingua e sociedade en Galicia. A evolución sociolingüística 1992–2013, A Coruña, Real Academia Galega. Sendra, Montserrat/Vila, F. Xavier (2016), L’estatus de les llengües a la República Catalana: Una breu anàlisi del desenvolupament del debat, Els Marges 108, 33–50. Senz, Silvia (2011), Una, grande y (esencialmente) uniforme. La RAE en la conformación y expansión de la “lengua común”, in: Silvia Senz/Montserrat Alberte (edd.), El dardo e la Academia, vol. 2, Barcelona, Melusina, 9–302. Smith-Christmas, Cassie, et al. (edd.) (2018), New Speakers of Minority Languages: Ideologies and Practices, London, Palgrave Macmillan. Sorolla, Natxo (2015), El català a la Franja. Any 2014, Llengua i ús 57, 75–88. Sorolla, Natxo (2016), Tria de llengües i rols sociolingüístics a la Franja des de la perspectiva de l’anàlisi de xarxes socials, doctoral thesis, Barcelona, Universitat de Barcelona. Taupiac, Jacme (2015), Per escriure l’occitan, Val d’Aran, Acadèmia aranesa dera lengua occitana. Teso, Enrique del (2015), L’amestáu urbanu. Cuestiones de normativa y llingua escrita, Lletres Asturianes 113, 11–26. Torres-Pla, Joaquim (2014), Està assegurada la transmissió lingüística?, in: Direcció General de Política Lingüística (edd.), II jornada sobre llengua i societat als territoris de parla catalana, Barcelona, Generalitat de Catalunya, 170–183. Vàrvaro, Alberto (2013), The Sociology of the Romance Languages, in: Martin Maiden/John Charles Smith/Adam Ledgeway (edd.), The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages, vol. 2: Contexts, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 334–360. Vernet i Llobet, Jaume (2007), El pluralismo lingüístico, in: Jaume Vernet i Lobet/Ramón Punset, Lenguas y Constitución, Madrid, Iustel, 17–60. Vertovec, Steven (2007), Super-Diversity and its Implications, Ethnic and Racial Studies 29(6), 1024–1054. Vila, F. Xavier/Lasagabaster, David/Ramallo, Fernando (2017), Bilingual Education in the Autonomous Regions of Spain, in: Ofelia Garcia/Angel M. Lyn/Stephen May (edd.), Bilingual and Multilingual Education, London, Springer, 505–517. Williams, Glyn (2005), Sustaining Language Diversity in Europe. Evidence from the Euromosaic Project, Basingstoke, Palgrave.  

 

 

Gaetano Berruto

18 The languages and dialects of Italy Abstract: This chapter provides a critical overview of the sociolinguistic situation in Italy focusing on the relationships between the standard language and the many Italo-Romance varieties that contribute to the linguistic landscape. Following discussion of terminology, recent developments concerning the status, spread and vitality of the dialects are examined using a variety of quantitative and qualitative data. This method highlights how in many regions the use of traditional Italo-Romance dialects has strongly decreased at the same time as dialects have remarkably improved their position as far as attitudes and representations are concerned. Dialect has a particular use in the new domains of digital communication. Using Auer’s Cone model and referencing different diglottic relationships, types of linguistic repertoires existing in present day Italy are also illustrated. Certain contact phenomena between Italian and dialects are also explored. Finally, a tentative evaluation of the endangerment/vitality degree of some dialects is sketched out.  

Keywords: contact, dialect use, Italo-Romance, repertoires, vitality  

1 Introduction: how many languages and dialects are spoken in Italy? The linguistic landscape of Italy is extremely rich and varied, with an amount of variation difficult to find in other European countries: “Italy holds especial treasures for linguists. There is probably no other area of Europe in which such a profusion of linguistic variation is concentrated into so small a geographical area” (Maiden/Parry 1997, 1). Besides the national language, standard Italian, which is a continuation of the Florentine of the fourteenth century and is based upon the literary language used by great authors (the so-called tre corone fiorentine: Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio), there are at least fifteen regional or sub-regional Italo-Romance dialect varieties, “sisters” of Florentine, each with numerous local sub-varieties. All of these dialects grew out of Latin and continued to be spoken in the different Italian regions, all being “roofed” (Kloss 1978; Ammon 1989) by standard Italian. In addition to these linguistic systems, there are about a dozen non-Italo-Romance language varieties spoken by (often small) communities settled in various areas of the country, i.e. the traditional, historical-territorial minority languages. Since the 1980s, Italy has become a popular destination for immigrants, with sizable populations from Eastern Europe and many non-European countries. There is no nationwide count of the migrant languages spoken in Italy, but a survey by Chini https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-019

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(2004) on immigration in the provinces of Turin and Pavia (North-West Italy) counted no fewer than fifty different immigrant languages (including the dialects of each of the languages), while in the Tuscan province of Siena, Bagna/Barni/Siebetcheu (2004) found immigrants from 128 countries, with dozens of different languages (cf. also ↗26 Code-switching and immigrant communities). In short, it is practically impossible to establish an exact number or an exhaustive list of the languages present in Italy today. Italy is thus – perhaps a little surprisingly when considering the standard monolingual ideology dominant in the country during the twentieth century – a conspicuously multilingual country. In today’s Italy, standard Italian, its primary and secondary (Italo-Romance) dialects (cf. below, section 2.1), and many minority languages coexist, along with different kinds of societal bilingualism. Since the unification of Italy in 1861 and the formation of the Italian National State, the political establishment has long ignored the multilingual situation. The ideology of the standard, founded on the post-Romantic affirmation of the national identities in Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century, together with the need for a common language for the whole country, led to a total disregard for the linguistic plurality of the new unitary state (for an up-to date overview, cf. Guerini 2011; for a wider discussion, cf. Tosi 2001; 2008). Dialects were strongly stigmatized and minority languages were simply not acknowledged. It was only in 1999 that the National Parliament passed a law concerning minority languages (Law 482/99, “Norme in materia di tutela delle minoranze linguistiche storiche”). With the exception of Sardinian and Friulian (cf. section 2.1 below), the law takes into account the non-Italo-Romance languages only, disregarding the Italo-Romance dialects altogether. This chapter examines the sociolinguistic situation of endogenous multilingualism in Italy, focusing on the relationship between Italian and Italo-Romance dialects with regards to their historical roots and geographical distribution. First of all, I will briefly discuss definitional issues and terminological distinctions that are important for a better understanding of the Italian situation. The subsequent sections will focus on the status, spread and vitality of the Italian dialects with insights about their future survival. The following themes and research questions will be addressed: How has the compresence of standard Italian and dialects changed in the last century? How do people actually use the dialects in their everyday speech? What social variables influence the variation in the use of the dialects? Do peoples’ attitudes about language reflect the dramatic regression in dialect use? What types of repertoire are found in present-day Italy? What are the structural consequences of the co-presence of standard language and dialects? How can the vitality of dialects and the present trend towards their abandonment be evaluated? Non-Italo-Romance minority varieties will only be discussed in passing while the “new” multilingualism related to recent immigration will not be considered at all.  

 

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2 The sociolinguistic situation of Italian and Italo-Romance dialects 2.1 Definitional issues All Italo-Romance dialects are Italian “primary dialects”, as per Coșeriu’s (1980) use of the term (for a more recent discussion of this issue, cf. Krefeld 2011), i.e. linguistic systems originating in the early Middle Ages from the evolution of Latin in different areas. One of these, the Florentine dialect, increasingly gained prestige in the fourteenth century and was codified in the sixteenth century in its written, literary form as the (standard) Italian language. Abruzzese, Calabrian, Campanian, Emilian, Ligurian, Lombard, Lucanian, Piedmontese, Sicilian, Tuscan, Venetan, and so on, are sister languages of standard Italian, to which they are genetically closely related. The structural distance between the Italo-Romance dialects (chiefly in phonetics and lexicon, but also in morphosyntax and pragmatics), as well as from standard Italian, is widely comparable to the distances between the “full” or “great” Romance languages. Pellegrini (1970), taking up an essay by Muljačić (1967), compared fifteen Romance varieties (among them, the major Romance languages like Italian, French, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish and some dialects like Lucanian and Cadorino [Veneto]), on the basis of 40 phonetic and morphosyntactic features. He found out, for example, that the distance between both Lucanian and Italian, on the one hand, and Lucanian and Cadorino on the other, is greater than the distance between Italian and Spanish or Portuguese. A particular case is Florentine (and other Tuscan dialect varieties) and Romanesco, two dialects whose structural distance from Italian is, for various reasons,1 smaller than that of the other Italo-Romance dialects. Both are also perceived by their speakers as closer to standard Italian. Another peculiar situation is that of Sardinian and Friulian, which are often considered to be autonomous Romance languages, separate from Italian,2 although their linguistic characteristics, their history and their sociolinguistic position in relation to standard Italian are fully comparable to the (other) Italo-Romance dialects. A similar problem can be stated for Ladin, which Pellegrini (1977) considers to be a non-Italo-Romance dialect, as it is (genetically) more closely related to Rhaeto-Romance. Regarding the 40 features examined in Pellegrini (1970), the distances between Italian and both Sardinian and Friulian are smaller than that between Lucanian and Italian. Both Sardinian and Friulian are treated as ItaloRomance dialects by Pellegrini (1977). Members of Sardinian and Friulian speech 1 The affinity between Tuscan and Italian is tautological. Romanesco underwent a process of Tuscanization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Trifone 2008). 2 Sardinian and Friulian are, in fact, included in the list of the minority languages protected by Law 482 mentioned above.

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communities are said to perceive a sense of “cultural otherness,” which warrants a unique identity different from the common national culture (Toso 2008, 89–91). Such a distinct self-perception is also felt by the Ladin community; however, some other Italo-Romance speech communities, for example Piedmontese or Sicilian, are alleged to feel similarly. This perception of cultural uniqueness can also be related to an actual historical or perceived affinity with a foreign language or culture (German for Ladin, French for Piedmontese). The average situation of the Italo-Romance repertoire lingua cum dialectis can thus be defined through the formula “endogenous community bilingualism with relatively low structural distance and dilalia” (Berruto 1993, 5). The concept of dilalia was introduced by Berruto (1987b; 1989a) in order to capture the cases in which a clear functional differentiation exists (with a High variety and a Low variety), as in (classic) diglossia, but unlike diglossia, there is a functional overlap in spoken domains, with both L and H varieties used in ordinary conversation and primary socialization. It is worth stating that, from a social viewpoint, Italo-Romance dialects and the non-Italo-Romance language varieties existing in Italy could easily be dealt with together (cf. Toso 2008, 89–90), as “regional or minority languages”, both, in fact, fulfilling the two criteria proposed by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (Council of Europe 1992), i.e. being (i) “traditionally used within a given territory of a State by nationals of that State who form a group numerically smaller than the rest of the State’s population” and (ii) “different from the official language(s) of that State”.3 This would be quite reasonable, although the same Charter explicitly does not include “dialects of the official language(s)” among regional or minority languages, hence overlooking the important distinction between primary versus secondary/tertiary dialects. A consolidated research tradition, however, tends to deal with Italo-Romance dialects and minority languages separately, and in this chapter we conform to it. Furthermore, regional Italo-Romance dialects can reasonably be considered to be linguae minores (German kleinere [romanische] Sprachen, a term used with reference to the Italo-Romance branch). Even more appropriately, another term could be applied, i.e. langues collatérales, a term introduced for designating the character of some regional varieties (in particular, Picard) in France. Italo-Romance dialects show both of the features that define a collateral language, that is to say, being structurally close to the roofing language dominant in the territory and sharing its historical development (Eloy 2004b, 6–9).

3 The Charter does not distinguish between “regional” and “minority” languages: it would however be helpful to make such a distinction (cf. Dell’Aquila/Iannàccaro 2004, 105–107).

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2.2 Use of Italian and dialects 2.2.1 Developments in the twentieth century De Mauro (2014, 111) effectively synthetizes the basic sociolinguistic change occurring in Italy in the last decades as follows: “La diffusione dell’uso della lingua comune è il cambiamento più vistoso della realtà linguistica italiana nell’età della Repubblica”. The most evident development in the sociolinguistic history of Italy since Unification (1861) is the shift from a situation in which the dialects were largely the most common (if not the only) vehicle of everyday spoken communication while Italian was used almost only in written domains, to a situation in which the dialects are normally used only in informal and in-group situations, mostly by lower socio-economic classes and by older people (indeed, with considerable differences between the regions). To the detriment of dialects, Italian has increasingly gained domains as well as “true” native speakers. Quantitative and statistical data about “who speaks what language with whom” in the Italo-Romance area are available only from the 1980s. However, on the basis of general sociocultural considerations and the data concerning school education and the diffusion of literacy, De Mauro (1963) calculated that in the years of the Unification only 2.5 % of the entire population of the new State (about 25,000,000 people) had mastered Italian. According to Castellani (1982), having somewhat adapted De Mauro’s criteria, the number of speakers with at least a passive knowledge of Italian reached a percentage four times as high (8.7 % or, extending the criteria yet further, about 10 %). At that time, however, the number of Italian-speaking people represented a small minority, concentrated within the socio-educational elite, while an Italo-Romance dialect was the normal means of communication for the vast majority of the population in nearly all circumstances. This does not mean that a large proportion of the population with newly-acquired Italian citizenship did not have any knowledge of Italian at all. On the contrary, in most regions it is conceivable that many people were able to use at least a markedly substandard form of Italian in the circumstances requiring it (and in writing: the numerous texts in so-called popular Italian from the past centuries furnish evidence of this).4 It is by no means surprising that 150 years later, the situation is completely different. Since 1987–1988, ISTAT (Italian National Institute for Statistics) has carried out surveys on language use with representative samples of the entire population,  

4 The presence of Italian in the past among low-class speakers has been stressed by some historians of the Italian language. Cf. for instance Testa (2014), who appropriately speaks of a “hidden Italian” (italiano nascosto), and several works by Sandro Bianconi concerning the particular situation of Italian-speaking Switzerland (cf. Bianconi 2003; 2013).

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based on the self-evaluations of the respondents. The results of the ISTAT (2012) survey are shown in Table. 1.5 Table 1: Use of Italian and dialect in two different spoken contexts; % data  

within the family

addressing strangers

only or mainly Italian

53.1

84.8

only or mainly dialect

9.0

1.8

32.2

10.7

both Italian and dialect

The vast majority of the Italian population (85.3 % to 95.5 %) normally speaks Italian today, although in a third of cases it is alternated with a dialect in intra-familial uses. If we consider the domain where the dialect is fostered most, i.e. its use within the family, we can outline the development in Table 2, presenting the data of the five ISTAT reports available so far.6  

Table 2: Use of Italian and dialect within the family, % data7  

1987–1988

1995

2000

2006

2012

only or mainly Italian

41.5

43.2

43.3

44.8

53.1

only or mainly dialect

32.0

23.7

18.8

15.0

9.0

both Italian and dialect

24.9

29.5

34.0

34.0

32.2

More than half of the Italian population is firmly Italian-speaking today, and the decline of dialect within only a quarter of a century is dramatic. The rise of Italian, accelerated in the last period, corresponds with a real collapse of the dialect, which has lost nearly three quarters of its residual speakers within a single generation. It is interesting, however, that a third of the respondents state that they use both Italian

5 Data taken from ISTAT (2012), L’uso della lingua italiana, dei dialetti e di altre lingue in Italia. 6 The first statistical data in this field date back to the 1970s: in 1974, a survey of the Doxa Institute with a national, but very small sample reported the following values for “only Italian”, “only dialect” and “both Italian and dialect” respectively (within the family): 25 %, 51.3 % and 23.7 % (Berruto 1994, 27). Within forty years dialect and Italian have reversed their positions in community self-reported uses. 7 The percentage numbers vary slightly in different ISTAT Reports. For instance, in the 2006 Report, one reads 44.4, 44.1 and 45.5 for “only or mainly Italian” for 1995, 2000 and 2006 respectively. In the present chapter we follow the data for 2006 that are available as part of the ISTAT (2012) Report.

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and dialect (alternatively or together?),8 a proportion remaining constant in the new millennium. This trend is the final segment of a hyperbola-like curve (Table 3) reconstructed by De Mauro (2014, 113), based on his own evaluations for 1861 and 1955 and, for the following decades, based on his reworking of the Doxa (1974 and 1982) and ISTAT (2006) data:  

Table 3: General use of Italian and dialect, % data  

1861

1955

1974

1982

2006

always Italian

1.6

18

25

29.4

45.5

always dialect

97.5

64

51.3

36.1

5.4

0.9

18

23.7

34.6

44.1

both Italian and dialect

The great social expansion of Italian is self-evident. The crucial point in that shift from a mainly dialect-speaking to a mainly Italian-speaking community falls in the period between 1950 and 1970. It is in this interval that Italian people began to abandon their use of dialects. The demographic relationship between dialect and Italian has been inverted, Italian becoming the most spoken and most widespread vehicle of communication among extensive strata of the Italian population and the preferred language of primary socialization. Among the generations born during this period, Italian has thus begun to represent the actual mother tongue: for the first time in history, the majority of the Italian people are true native speakers of Italian.

2.2.2 Use of dialects today: regional differences The present situation can thus be roughly sketched out as follows: 40 %–45 % of Italian people are monolingual in Italian; about 25 % are Italian/dialect bilingual with Italian dominance; about 25 % are dialect/Italian bilingual with dialect dominance; a very small number (1–5 %?) are still monolingual in dialect. These proportions are, however, distributed very differently in different areas. A striking fact of the Italian situation from this viewpoint is indeed the great diversity among the regions: Table 4  

8 Of course (and unfortunately, from the viewpoint of linguists), “both Italian and dialect” can mean different things: random code-choice, or code-choice depending on addressee or discourse topic (that is, code-switching), or code-mixing, or frequent lexical borrowing from a system into the other, or the use of an intermediate variety. Even the very notion of “dialect” can be misleading for “the man in the street”, possibly meaning, for instance, a variety of Italian with (heavy) dialect interferences. Answers thus strongly depend on what people mean by dialect.

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shows the overall differences between regions where dialect is still substantially vital and regions where dialect is spoken very little. Table 4: Use of Italian and dialect within the family, % data, ISTAT 20129  

North-Western

North-Eastern

Central

Southern

only or mainly Italian

58.8

36.3

63.7

27.9

only or mainly dialect

8.1

22.6

6.1

21.2

26.3

29

25.3

47.5

both Italian and dialect

The ISTAT data from 2006 (available ISTAT 2012) are more informative because they are separated by administrative region. Some significant data are presented in Table 5.  

Table 5: Use of Italian and dialect within the family in seven regions, % data, ISTAT 2006  

Piedmont

Liguria

Veneto

Latium

Campania

Abruzzo

Sicily

only or mainly Italian

59.3

68.5

23.6

60.7

25.5

37.1

26.2

only or mainly dialect

9.8

8.3

38.9

6.6

24.1

20.7

25.5

25.4

17.6

31

28.4

48.1

38.3

46.2

both Italian and dialect

Differences between regions are mirrored in facts like, for instance, the learning and use of local dialect by immigrants, which occur significantly in, for example, Veneto, Sicily and Sardinia. The spread of Italian as a common ordinary language and the corresponding decline of dialect use are by far most noticeable in the Gallo-Italian areas, while, on the other hand, the region where the dialect best maintains its vitality is Veneto. Southern regions are characterized by a frequent alternation and mixing of Italian and dialect. The case of Latium (and a fortiori of Tuscany) is special, due to the reasons mentioned above. In North-West Italy, therefore, the numbers regarding Italian and dialect use estimated above can be expected to increase substantially, with 50–60 %

9 In the ISTAT (2012) Survey, North-Western Italy includes the following administrative regions: Piedmont, Aosta Valley, Lombardy, Liguria (the case of Aosta Valley is however particular, because the vernacular dialect is Francoprovençal, i.e. a Gallo-Romance dialect, and is still widely spoken; cf. below). North-Eastern Italy: Friuli, Trentino Alto Adige, Veneto, Emilia Romagna (whereas Alto Adige/ South Tyrol is a bilingual Italian/German province; and Emilia Romagna, where a Gallo-Italian dialect is spoken, as in Piedmont, Lombardy and Liguria, presents sociolinguistic conditions very similar to the ones of North-Western Italy: including it in the North-Eastern section is therefore mistaken). Central Italy: Latium, Tuscany, Marche, Umbria. Southern Italy; Campania, Abruzzo, Calabria, Basilicata, Molise, Puglia, Sicily, Sardinia.

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for only-Italian speakers, 25–30 % for bilinguals with Italian dominance, and 15–20 % for bilinguals with dialect dominance. From the viewpoint of the relationship between Italian and dialects, the changes that occurred in the last century represent a shift from diglossia to dilalia.

2.2.3 How many Italians speak a dialect? An interesting issue is how many effective, active speakers of Italo-Romance dialects there are today. Using the ISTAT data, and considering as “active speakers” the sum of those who have answered “only or mainly dialect” or “both Italian and dialect”, we can tentatively state that today the number of dialect speakers should be about 23,700,000.10 Using the same criteria, one can even tentatively outline a profile for any single regional or subregional dialect, as in Table 6.  

Table 6: Active dialect speakers11  

Dialect Piedmontese Lombard Ligurian

Active speakers’ number

Percentage of active speakers

12

35.2

13

~3,700,000

35.7

~430,000

25.9

~1,200,000

10 41.2 % (9 % + 32.2 %) out of 57,500,000: the population of Italy at the end of 2013 according to ISTAT, i.e. 60,782,668 minus a presumptive rounded number of recent immigrants and minority (nonItalo-Romance) language speakers. 11 The absolute number of active dialect speakers in Italy resulting from adding up the numbers for all regional dialects is about 28,900,000, i.e. notably higher than the aforementioned number of about 23,700,000. Such a discrepancy is substantially due to the dramatic decrease of self-claiming active speakers within the ISTAT Surveys of 2006 and 2012 (once again, we are referring to 2006 data presented in ISTAT 2012): 49 % at the national level in 2006 (from which the data disaggregated by regions are taken; 48.5 % according to the 2006 Report, cf. footnote 7) and 41.2 % in 2012. Such a decrease, however, is also in part due to the fact that the sample of the 2012 Survey excludes the age group 4 mil.

20,000

30,000

250,000

?

2–3

4

2–3

4

3

1

4. Trends in Existing Language Domains

2

3

3

4

2

1

5. Response to New Domains and Media

2

2 (?)

1

3

0

1

6. Materials for Language Education and Literacy

2

2

2–3

4–5

2

2

7. Governmental and Institutional Language Attitudes and Policies Including Official Status and Use

2–3

2–3

3–4

5

3

3

8. Community Members’ Attitudes toward their Own Language

3

3

2

4

3

2

9. Amount and Quality of Documentation

4

4

3

4

4

3

~2.4–2.8

~2.9–3

~2.3–2.7

~4–4.1

2.5

~1.9

1. Intergenerational Language Transmission 2. Absolute Number of Speakers 3. Proportion of Speakers within the Total Population

Average Index30

30 Indexes for Piedmontese and Campanian are from Berruto (2007a), for Alpine Provençal from Regis (2012b), for Ladin from Berruto (2007b), for Gascon and Cornish from Lewis (2005). The decimal average indexes are rounded up to one decimal place.

518

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The average Index for Piedmontese and Campanian being between 2.4 and 3, both dialects can undoubtedly be considered endangered languages. The values 3 and 2 correspond, roughly speaking, to a characterization of a language as respectively “definitely endangered” and “severely endangered” on the vitality scale of Brenzinger et al. (2003). Campanian is, however, more vital than Piedmontese; both seem to be more vital than the two non-Italian minority varieties considered here, a little more vital than Gascon and clearly more than Cornish, but distinctly less vital than Ladin (a value close to 4 for the latter, meaning “unsafe” but not “endangered”). The vitality of Piedmontese is comparable to that of Alpine Provençal. As for intergenerational transmission, it is worth noting that new habits of language acquisition for non-standard languages have developed in the last decades. It is not unusual that children and adolescents do not learn dialect directly from their parents or within the immediate family, but instead from their grandparents or even from the surrounding milieu. They may also learn dialect via the internet. In general, such a process leads to an imperfect, fragmentary mastery of the dialect as an L2, often resulting in semi-competent speakers who use dialect (mainly in an Italianized form) as a subsidiary code intermingled with Italian, for playful purposes and/or when speaking with native dialect speakers. More generally, Moretti (1999, 9) has introduced the notion of parlanti evanescenti for designating “le persone che (di solito) non parlano dialetto”. For these fading speakers, who have little more than a passive dialect competence, interactions with active speakers can reinforce the presence of dialect. Another very important point here is criterion 5: “Response to New Domains and Media”. Around the end of the twentieth century, the widespread use of the internet and computer-mediated communication, together with a massive increase in the general relevance of the mass media in communication in today’s society, has meant a profound change in the communicative role of the dialects. The typical domain for dialect used to be the informal, private conversation while written use of dialect was usually confined to literary production. Now, the important technological innovations of the digital wave, and especially the spread of Web 2.0 social networks and mobile phones, have brought about a completely new modality of communication, variously called “written speech”, “electronic discourse/language”, “internet language”, “conversational writing”, “Netspeak”, parlato digitato (‘punched-in speech’) and so on. This has opened new spaces for dialect. On the one hand, some (especially young) people have begun to communicate electronically using dialect; on the other hand, elitist activists have increasingly taken to producing websites in dialect. The web has “allowed several oral language varieties to become online written varieties, thus reflourishing as written languages after centuries of non- or very low-level literacy” (Miola 2013a, 91). This phenomenon has also touched Italo-Romance dialects, significantly combined with an overall change in the attitudes towards dialect and the widespread tendency towards glocalization, as well as the growth of political ideologies promoting local, particularized identities and values in contraposition to national, generalized ones.

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As a consequence of this new image of dialect, since the 1990s, the emergence of dialect use can be observed, albeit often mixed with Italian or limited to small insertions or textual fragments, not only in chats, newsgroups, blogs, social networks, dedicated websites, Wikipedia, and generally in free public linguistic space (Patrucco 2003; Grimaldi 2004; Fiorentino 2006; Casoni 2011; Dal Negro/Vietti 2011; Miola 2013a, 2013b), but also in written domains such as songs (Sottile 2013), signboards and other items belonging to the Linguistic Landscape (Coluzzi 2009; Guerini 2012), in advertising and commerce (Pandolfi 2005; Goria 2012), in written announcements, banners, inscriptions and graffiti (Depau 2005; Guerini 2011) and even, though only sporadically, in comics (Berruto 2006b). These written usages of dialects raise the interesting problem of orthographic conventions. Italian people are usually not literate in dialect. Although many dialects can boast a certain degree of standardization (Regis 2013) and a certain amount of literary production, in some cases even abundant, including prose texts and plays (e.g. Piedmontese, Lombard, Venetan, Ligurian, Romanesco, Neapolitan, Sicilian), the majority of dialects have no traditional shared, codified, unitary written norm. When a traditional normalized writing system exists (as, for example, for Piedmontese, Ligurian, Venetan, cf. Sanga 1980; Miola 2013b) or graphic forms are proposed, they are not mastered by typical speakers, who are by no means accustomed to reading or writing dialect texts. Therefore, when writing dialect, web-users adopt several different, often merely personal solutions (Miola 2013a; 2013b; on the whole issue, cf. Dal Negro/Guerini/Iannàccaro 2015). All things considered, one must proceed with caution in emphasizing the relevance of these multifarious forms of dialect emergence or resurgence (Berruto 2006a), as evidence of a currently ongoing process of reversing language shift or even as evidence of dialect revitalization. We have to keep in mind, that the more conspicuous of these emergences (e.g. websites) are the work of elites or small groups of highly motivated activists or dialect promoters and have little to do with the communicative needs of society as a whole. These usages promote the use of dialect in domains outside the field in which dialect use might actually be “vital” and functional (and perhaps irreplaceable; i.e. the ordinary informal, non-technical in-group conversation about local topics) in the daily life of small communities; in such domains dialect has uneven competitors: Italian (and English). Dialect use might have no other value than a merely symbolic one. It is often a matter of an “artificial” and often intentionally ideological use (“a ‘controlled’ use of dialects […] apt to contextualize speech without requiring a full linguistic competence”, Dal Negro/Vietti 2011, 74) rather than a “natural” social development aimed at restoring the dialect as an indispensable tool in communicative practices.

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5 Concluding remarks In the previous sections, we have examined the main aspects of the present sociolinguistic situation of the dialects in Italy: dialect use by the speakers in different contexts, dialect position within the repertoire, and the relationship of dialects with the standard language. Since the mid-twentieth century, the vitality of the dialects has substantially and continuously decreased and weakened. The recent signs of resurgence in the field of new media ensures neither intergenerational transmission nor the maintenance of the spoken domains in which the dialect played a very important role in the past. Attention must also be paid to the real function of the “new” emergences of dialect in many domains, which may simply represent a niche phenomenon. In Berruto (2006a), I sketched out four different values ascribable to the dialect in order to assess its maintenance and, perhaps, revitalization (cf. Dal Negro/Vietti 2011). Ranging from the most significant value to the least important one for the purpose of revitalization, the use of dialect can be: (i) actual/effective (when it is instrumental to basic daily interaction for all needs); (ii) expressive/playful (when it conveys particular effects of expressivity, such as jokes, humorous creativity, and so on); (iii) symbolic/ideological (when it is fundamentally a means of representing or emphasizing a particular identity or evoking a given cultural world); (iv) folkloric/museum-like (when the dialect appears as an object exhibited for documenting and witnessing a cultural heritage). In the new resurgence of dialect, values (ii–iv) seem to be particularly applicable, but there is very little evidence of a dialect revival as a means of communication in ordinary conversation. In Moretti’s perspective (cf. above), values (ii-iv) of dialect usage seem to be typical of fading speakers; on this basis Moretti (2006) argues that, in the present situation, there are two different prototypes of dialect, one (“dialect 1”) consisting in the dialect as L1 spontaneously used in family interactions by older peasants, the other (“dialect 2”) consisting in the dialect as L2 intentionally used in digital communication by high-school youth. Dialect 1 (the old dialect) seems to be dying out, while dialect 2 (the modern dialect) seems to be growing. The dynamic between dialect 1 and dialect 2 is not easy to understand fully. Finally, manifest and possibly long-term consequences of the present (re-)diffusion of dialect in common usage, due to the success of political movements aimed at the populist exaltation of all that is “local”,31 have likewise not yet been demonstrated. The sum of all these considerations, however, makes it very difficult to give a clear opinion about the future of dialects. It is therefore reasonable to be cautious on this topic. Currently, dialect turns out to be used much less than it was in the past. Although it is more visible in the public domain, its value within the linguistic market has not substantially increased.

31 Political movements and parties like the Lega Nord naturally support and promote (the use of) dialect with a purpose of contraposition and protest against the unity of the national State.

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Matthias Grünert

19 Multilingualism in Switzerland Abstract: This chapter deals with the two Romance languages which are officially recognized as minority languages of Switzerland, Romansh and Italian, and with Francoprovençal and French dialects spoken marginally in the francophone area of Switzerland. Romansh, the language that has gained new recognition in the process leading to the quadrilingual Swiss Confederation, is considered in most detail. The comparison of the Romance minorities shows the different starting conditions from which they have developed and the various initiatives undertaken to organize them at private and state levels. The last decades have been characterized by concerns about maintaining language territories, development of mass media in minority languages as well as promotion of minority languages in education. The trend towards a more ethnolinguistic conception of Switzerland has recently been counterbalanced by the greater attention paid to the promotion of minority languages outside their traditional areas.  

Keywords: Romansh, Italian, Francoprovençal, minorities, Switzerland  

1 Introduction As the Swiss Confederation encompasses four traditional language areas, multilingualism can be understood in a territorial and societal sense, i.e. as the coexistence of four language groups related to the clearly defined geographical areas shown in Map 1 below (cf. also Lüdi/Py 1984, 4). However, the large majority of Swiss usually speak only one of the four national languages in everyday life. Multilingual proficiency and the practice of individuals (mostly in the form of bilingualism) with reference to the Swiss national languages is more frequent near the French-German language border and in the trilingual canton of Grisons (GR1), where all Romansh speakers and a considerable proportion of Italian speakers are at least bilingual with German (cf. Map 2 below). As far as individual multilingualism is concerned, the position of nonnational languages spoken by immigrants and their descendants is an important aspect (cf. Grin et al. 2015), which is nonetheless beyond the scope of the present chapter. A further conception of multilingualism, besides the territorial/societal and the individual types, is related to institutions. Multilingual institutions address citi-

1 Here, and later in this chapter, the abbreviation refers to the cantons mentioned and allows their localization on Map 1 and Map 2. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-020

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zens in more than one language, respecting the autochthonous languages of a given territory. This means that citizens living in a multilingual state or even in a linguistically mixed area are allowed to use, in their contacts with public administration, the official language of their choice. Multilingualism in the institutional domain can be observed in three bilingual cantons (French-German: Valais (VS) and Fribourg (FR); German-French: Bern (BE)) and in the trilingual canton of Grisons (German, Romansh and Italian). It is evident primarily at the level of cantonal administration, and in some cases at the level of local administration as well. As regards the Swiss Confederation, it does not function as a quadrilingual state, although four autochthonous languages are recognized as national languages. The status of a national language does not imply its (equal) official use. The official use of Romansh is limited to certain types of texts and the use of Italian is quite restricted in comparison with the use of the two stronger languages, German and French.

Figure 1: Swiss national languages spoken in local communities, 2000  

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Figure 2: Inhabitants speaking two or more Swiss national languages in everyday life, 2000  

The present contribution will first outline the historic development leading to the quadrilingual Swiss Confederation, as it has been understood since 1938 (sections 2.1–2.2). Romansh, the language gaining new recognition in this process, will be considered in more detail than the other languages/varieties of small minorities in Switzerland, i.e. Italian (2.3) and the dialects of the French-speaking area, which for the most part are classified as Francoprovençal dialects (2.4). The comparison between the minorities will show the different starting conditions from which they have been developing, the different initiatives to organize them at private and state levels, and their different presence as subjects of public discourse. A further series of sections (3.1–3.5), devoted to the sociolinguistic situation from the post-war period to the present, will deal with the same three minorities, describing the tendency towards declining use of Romansh and the dialects of the French-speaking area, concerns about maintaining language territories, development of mass media in minority languages as well as the promotion of minority languages in education. The final two sections will mention changes in language legislation adopted in the 1990s and in the first decade of the new millennium (4), and some current issues of language policy (5). In this last period, a rudimentary legislation was replaced by an

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elaborated legal framework and a more ethnolinguistic conception of Switzerland arose, which has been counterbalanced, however, by the greater attention paid to the promotion of minority languages outside their traditional areas. French, the second language of Switzerland by number of speakers (more than a fifth of the population), will not be examined in detail, as it does not belong to the category of minoritized languages according to the Council of Europe’s 1992 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (SR 0.441.2, part II; cf. also ↗21 Revitalization and education). In its area, French is almost unchallenged in public domains and in some domains it is challenged by English rather than by German, the majority language of Switzerland.

2 Historical overview 2.1 From the German-dominated Old Confederation to trilingual Switzerland Until 1798, when the French Revolutionary Army invaded the Old Confederation, German was the only official language. Apart from Fribourg, the thirteen cantons forming the Confederation up to that moment were ruled by German-speaking authorities (Bickel/Schläpfer 2000, 49). However, since its accession to the Confederation (1481), Fribourg promoted the use of German under pressure from its German-speaking allies. Except for Fribourg, Romance languages were spoken only in subject and associated territories of the Confederation. The Helvetic Republic imposed by France (1798–1803) consisted of equal cantons. The Romance population formed some cantons of its own (Léman, Bellinzona, Lugano) or was part of multilingual cantons (Fribourg, Valais, Raetia). The centralized character of the new state led to a number of publications having to be provided in German, French and Italian. Whereas the members of the executive authority, who belonged to the cultivated class, were proficient in several languages and had no difficulty in communicating with each other, the lack of language proficiency amongst the parliamentary deputies required an interpreting service. Rulings on multilingualism ceased to be necessary after the breakdown of the Helvetic Republic in 1803, when the old order was restored and the powers of the Confederation were reduced (Bickel/Schläpfer 2000, 55). In 1848, when Switzerland acquired a constitution that conferred more powers to the central state, the need for regulating the use of languages again arose. The first draft of the language article reveals a practical motivation: apart from recognizing the three main languages, German, French and Italian, as official ones, it specifies that minutes of sessions, laws and decisions be written in German and French. The definitive version no longer mentions the privileged use of two languages, but limits itself to declaring the three main languages of Switzerland national languages (Widmer et al. 2004, 58–60).

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Romansh, which was not taken into account, still influenced the wording, determining the qualification of the other three languages as main languages (Büchi 2015, 172s.). It is noteworthy, furthermore, that a description of Switzerland as a country with more than three languages can be found before the discussions about the language article. In a schoolbook published in Grisons (KSG 1837, 264s.), Switzerland is presented as being virtually divided into three nations that adjoin the neighbouring states where the same languages are spoken. A fourth language, Romansh, is identified in Grisons, and another one, very similar to it (classified nowadays as Francoprovençal), in the cantons of Fribourg and Valais.

2.2 From trilingual to quadrilingual Switzerland: the path to the recognition of Romansh Only one of the two Romance minorities that had not been taken into account in the first language article of 1848, the Romansh of Grisons, later achieved the status of a recognized language group at the federal level. Within its own area, Romansh had been used for official purposes from the end of the sixteenth century, mainly at the communal level and mostly after a period of use of German (cf. Darms 2006, 1456; Liver 2010, 103). In two of the three confederations of communities which emerged in the territory of Grisons in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, the Romansh population was dominant. However, in the Free State of the Three Leagues, which united these three confederations from 1471 to 1798, German was usually the only official language at the upper level of administration. Acts that had to be published in the Romansh and Italian areas were at least translated. In 1794, under the influence of the French Revolution, the Federal Assembly of the Three Leagues decided to recognize four languages, i.e. German, Italian and two varieties of Romansh, Surselvan and Engadinese (cf. Richter 2005, 878s.; Darms 2006, 1456). From 1803, when Grisons became a canton of the Swiss Confederation, the pressure of German on the two Romance languages increased. The equal status of the indigenous languages, which had been stipulated in the last years of the existence of the Three Leagues, was not maintained. Laws still had to be published in Romansh and Italian, but German was declared the main language for official purposes (Coray 2008, 80). The status of German did not yet reflect its spread in the population of Grisons as a mother tongue, for the Romansh group was still the largest, amounting to more than half of about 73,000 inhabitants, whereas a good third was German-speaking and a seventh Italian-speaking (Furer 2005, 13). During the nineteenth century Romansh lost its demographically dominant position in Grisons, ceding the first place to German: according to the Swiss census of 1900, 46.7 % of the population were German speakers, 34.9 % Romansh speakers and 16.8 % italophones (Coray 2008, 86). The development of trade routes and tourism

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had contributed to a decline of Romansh after a period of relative stability between the Reformation and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, in 1900, the two Romance minorities still represented more than half of the population of Grisons, but the dominant role of German, due to its high status in political, economic and cultural life, was uncontested. The nineteenth century was a period of decline for Romansh, but it was also marked by a series of activities in favour of the threatened language. Romansh began to be described and codified in grammars and dictionaries (Lutz/Dazzi/Gross 1989, 886s., 892s., 902–905). A Romansh press was founded in the two main regions, Surselva (from 1836) and the Engadine (from 1843; cf. Deplazes 1990, 16–35). After a period when Romansh schoolbooks were published through private initiatives, the canton of Grisons began to provide such editions from 1846 (Deplazes 1990, 9). In 1885, a supra-regional society for the promotion of Romansh, the Societad Retorumantscha, was founded (Coray 2008, 110–112). A project responding to the intent of the society to collect and conserve Romansh literature was realized by Caspar Decurtins (1855–1916), who edited, in thirteen volumes published from 1896 to 1912, printed and handwritten texts from the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth century as well as tales and proverbs gathered from the people (cf. Deplazes 1990, 50). A further project was the edition of a historical dictionary of the Romansh dialects begun in 1899, publication of which began in 1939 (Dicziunari Rumantsch Grischun, DRG). The activities of the supra-regional Societad Retorumantscha concentrated on documentation and research. The promotion of language in social life, which figured among the aims of the society at the beginning, was later taken over by regional associations, founded between 1896 and 1921. They were all subordinated to the umbrella association Lia Rumantscha (‘Romansh League’) founded in 1919. The regional associations took care principally of periodical publications in their Romansh varieties and organized, together with the Lia Rumantscha, local action programmes. The Lia Rumantscha was authorized to submit requests to the canton of Grisons and to the Confederation for financial support for projects favouring Romansh (Lechmann 2005, 102–107, 221–310). In the period when these cultural and political activities favourable to Romansh started, the legal backing for languages was slight: whereas the Federal Constitution of Switzerland ignored Romansh, the canton of Grisons was only given a constitutional article concerning its languages in 1880. It was, however, an absolutely minimalist article that did not regulate the use of the official languages, but seemed rather an attempt to state the trilingual cultural identity (Richter 2005, 881): “The three languages of the canton are guaranteed as official languages” (Richter 2005, 874, our translation). The activities deployed in favour of Romansh in the second half of the nineteenth and in the first third of the twentieth century are often covered by the term Renaschientscha rumantscha (‘Romansh Renaissance’). Whilst the starting point of this

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period is debatable, its end point is generally tied to the recognition of Romansh as a national language in 1938 (Valär 2013, 22–24). The political discussion leading to this symbolic act and to the construction of a new national identity for Switzerland as a “quadrilingual country” is tightly linked to the scientific and political discussion called questione ladina, concerning the classification of Romansh. The founder of Italian dialectology, Graziadio Isaia Ascoli (1829–1907), postulated in his Saggi ladini of 1873 that Romansh of Grisons, Ladin of the Dolomites and Friulian form a language type (called favella ladina) which is separable from the Northern Italian dialects (cf. Goebl 1990, 220; Liver 2010, 16). Ascoli’s thesis was rejected by the Italian dialectologist Carlo Battisti (1882–1972) and the Italian-speaking Swiss dialectologist Carlo Salvioni (1858–1920), who both adopted a political position by claiming the Romansh area of Switzerland and the South Tyrolean area of the Dolomites for the Italian state. Swiss linguists and exponents of the Romansh movement opposed this position, defending the autonomy of Romansh on the basis of language data (cf. Liver 2010, 17) and considerations regarding the political and cultural affiliation of the Romansh group (cf. Valär 2013, 188–206). In 1935 the government of Grisons submitted a request to the Swiss government concerning the recognition of Romansh as a national language. This request, which had been under preparation by the Romansh movement since 1931, was presented as a reaction to the decline of Romansh. Later, the threat of the Italian irredentist movement, which reclaimed “unredeemed” Italian-speaking areas, forced the question of a new status for Romansh (Widmer et al. 2004, 146–152). After a major campaign in favour of the legal bill, 91.6 % of Swiss voters approved the revised language article in 1938, which defined German, French, Italian and Romansh as national languages of Switzerland, limiting the function as official languages to the first three (Coray 2008, 90). With this change Romansh received primarily symbolic recognition as part of the cultural heritage of Switzerland (Widmer et al. 2004, 152– 164; Büchi 2015, 275s.).

2.3 Italian as a recognized and neglected official language Italian, the third language of Switzerland by number of speakers, was included as a recognized national language in the first language article of the Swiss Confederation of 1848. In the Old Confederation that existed until 1798, the Italian-speaking territories of the present cantons of Ticino and Grisons were submitted to different political systems. Ticino was a subject territory consisting of bailiwicks administered by different member states of the Confederation, whereas the four Italian-speaking southern valleys of Grisons – Val Calanca, Val Mesolcina, Val Bregaglia and Val Poschiavo – formed several communities characterized by a high degree of autonomy within the Free State of the Three Leagues, an associated territory of the Confedera-

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tion. As for Ticino, the confederate German-speaking bailiffs respected the use of Italian in local administration. In the Free State of the Three Leagues, where German was the official language at the upper level of administration, Italian was used for administration within the Italian-speaking communities (cf. HLS, Italiano). During the nineteenth century Italian (predominantly in its dialectal varieties) was the mother tongue of less than 6 % of the population of Switzerland, remaining far behind French, which was spoken by more than a fifth (Coray 2008, 84). Before the end of the nineteenth century, when immigration from Italy to the whole of Switzerland became widespread, the Italian-speaking population of Switzerland was concentrated in its traditional areas. Due to the relatively small percentage of Italian speakers in the Swiss population, this language is easily neglected at the federal level if special efforts are not undertaken. This was already revealed by the fact that Italian, in the draft of the first language article of the Confederation of 1848, was not included among the languages that had to be used for certain texts. It was a representative of the largest linguistic minority in Switzerland, the French-speaking minority, who called attention to the question of languages that led to the recognition of three national languages, one of them Italian (Widmer et al. 2004, 58, 61). The more centralized character of the Swiss Confederation after the revision of the constitution in 1874 and the opening of the railway tunnel under the Gotthard Pass in 1882 reinforced the connection of Italian-speaking Switzerland to the German-speaking part of the country, weakening its ties to neighbouring Italy. The private railway company that managed the Gotthard railway line until 1909 imported German into Ticino by positioning its German-speaking employees there and by using German for signs (Bianconi 2001, 164s.). Motivated by a fear of Germanization, politicians and proponents of Italian culture in Ticino submitted the rivendicazioni ticinesi to the Swiss government in 1924–1925. These claimed economic support and measures in favour of Italian. Subsequently German schools were closed and a cantonal law about public signs was passed (Bianconi 2001, 169; HLS, Italiano). Another factor which reinforced the barrier between Italian-speaking Switzerland and Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century was the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 and subsequent related irredentism (Bianconi 2001, 164). However, a pro-irredentist position was defended by the Italian-speaking Swiss dialectologist Carlo Salvioni, who participated in the above mentioned questione ladina. With regard to the canton of Ticino and the Italian-speaking valleys of Grisons, he defended Italian against the economic and cultural penetration of German. In 1912 he founded the periodical Adula, which fought for this position until it was closed by the Swiss government in 1935, when connections with propagandists of Italian irredentism had been detected (Valär 2013, 220–223). In insisting on the defence of Italian in public debates, Carlo Salvioni set aside the object of his own scholarly research, Italian dialects (Bianconi 2001, 167s.). It was, however, he who had founded an important lexicographic project in 1907, the Vocabolario dei dialetti della Svizzera

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italiana (VDS), completing the series of national dialectal dictionaries that already consisted of three projects, the Schweizerisches Idiotikon, the Glossaire des patois de la Suisse romande and the Dicziunari Rumantsch Grischun. A notable initiative concerns Grisons: in 1918, one year before the foundation of the Lia Rumantscha, the Pro Grigioni Italiano (Pgi), an organization for the promotion of Italian, started its activity. It strove to unite the three non-contiguous parts of Italian-speaking Grisons, which up to then had been barely linked to one another (HLS, Pro Grigioni Italiano). From the end of the nineteenth century immigration from Italy played an important role in quantitative considerations about Italian in Switzerland. At the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth, the percentage of Italianspeaking inhabitants increased considerably, due to the immigration of Italian workers, who were engaged in the construction of railway lines and in industrial enterprises (cf. HLS, Immigration). The share of the Italian-speaking population, which amounted to 5.3 % in 1888, reached 8.1 % in 1910. At the beginning of World War I, most of these immigrants left Switzerland, a fact reflected in the low percentage of Italian-speaking inhabitants (6.1 %) in the 1920 census (Coray 2008, 84).

2.4 Francoprovençal and French dialects in the Suisse romande The dialects originally spoken in a large part of today’s French-speaking Switzerland have been attributed to a specific language variety situated between the French and Occitan areas. This variety, called Francoprovençal, was described by the same dialectologist who stipulated the Ladin type, Graziadio Isaia Ascoli (1829–1907), in his Schizzi franco-provenzali (cf. Goebl 1990, 220). Unlike the questione ladina reported above, discussion about Francoprovençal was restricted to academic circles. The concept of Francoprovençal was not even popularized later among the speakers of these dialects. Francoprovençal was used in certain literary genres starting from the sixteenth century in Geneva and Vaud and from the eighteenth century in the other cantons. Older documents may contain dialectal features, as shown in texts written in the chancellery of Fribourg in the fifteenth century, but official texts were never composed consciously in dialects (Bickel/Schläpfer 2000, 148). The suppression of dialects in the Suisse romande is a process that started first in the Protestant towns (being completed in Geneva as early as the seventeenth century), in an ideological context of discrimination against language varieties, which was intensified after the French Revolution (Bickel/Schläpfer 2000, 152s.). When data were collected for the lexicographic project of the Glossaire des patois de la Suisse romande from 1899 to 1924, it was a challenge to document the dialects of some areas (GPSR 1, 8). It was only in a few isolated areas that Louis Gauchat, the founder of the Glossaire, observed a relative vitality of dialects (Gauchat 1942, 2s.): primarily in lateral valleys in the canton of

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Valais, additionally in Ajoie and in the valley of Delémont in the Northern Jura. In the Southern Jura and in the zone of Gruyère, in the canton of Fribourg, dialects tended to be used by older people. In Vaud, where dialects were hardly spoken any longer, there were still literary activities (Bickel/Schläpfer 2000, 159s.). The few residual groups of dialect speakers at the moment of dialectological recordings no longer formed a language community. The linguistic fragmentation was not counterbalanced by an institutional union in that period, as was the case for the Romansh and Italian communities in Grisons. Even folkloristic associations, which valorized patois by performing plays and organizing literary competitions in the interwar period, operated locally and regionally (cf. Fluckiger 2009, 58).

3 The sociolinguistic situation from the middle of the twentieth century until the present 3.1 Language shift and bilingualism in the Romansh area In the post-war period a subject of great concern was the shift from Romansh to German taking place in Sutselva, an area of central Grisons. The leading figure in the revival campaign initiated by the Lia Rumantscha in this area was the Italian philologist Giuseppe Gangale (1898–1978), who was particularly interested in minority languages. In the 1940s he created a written standard on the basis of Sutselvan dialects, defending the idea that the Romansh speakers of Sutselva needed a written form of their own which was nearer to spoken usage than traditionally adopted Surselvan. Furthermore, he established Romansh kindergartens in the area where schools were predominantly in German (Joël 2006, 101–104; Weinreich 2011, 292). His concept of Romanizing children by alienating them emotionally from their families and their home language, i.e. German, and by favouring their attachment to Romansh teachers trained by himself, was controversial and led to his dismissal in 1949 (Joël 2006, 119s.; Weinreich 2011, 294s.). In the same year that the language promoter Gangale left his sphere of action, the linguist Uriel Weinreich (1926–1967) came to Switzerland for field research on language contact, in order to collect the data for his thesis Research Problems in Bilingualism, with Special Reference to Switzerland (1951, edited in 2011, cf. Weinreich 2011). In his study, Weinreich characterizes the linguistically mixed society of Sutselva by integrating observations of language selection and practice and various data concerning language, geography, political organization and economy. Swiss census data allowed him to follow the decline of Romansh as a mother tongue in the different communities of Sutselva, whereas data collected by the Lia Rumantscha in 1945 revealed degrees of bilingualism (Weinreich 2011, 224–227, 250–257). It is notable how the notion of mother tongue, implying the attribution of each person to one language,

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is questioned by Weinreich: “Since the two languages overlap in certain functions, there is a real bilingual speech community. […] children often learn both languages from the same persons, namely their parents” (Weinreich 2011, 301). The consideration of bilingualism, initiated by Weinreich, only began to enter studies and discussions on Romansh in the 1970s and 1980s. Three theses should be mentioned in this connection: Bernard Cathomas’s study (1977) on the bilingualism of Romansh speakers settled in Chur, the German-speaking capital of Grisons; Solèr’s research (1983) on language use in the Romansh village of Lumbrein; and Kristol’s exploration (1984) of language contact and multilingualism in the village of Bivio, which is situated in a zone where Romansh and Italian varieties meet. Cathomas shows that language proficiency is not dependent on whether a person is bilingual or not, but on his/her level of education. Proficiency in Romansh and German of a group of Romansh speakers was compared to that in German of a monolingual German-speaking group. Within each language group a significant difference between the results of two subgroups, defined on the basis of levels of education (higher/middle vs lower), could be observed, whereas no significant difference was verifiable when the informants belonging to the same level of education in the two language groups were compared (Cathomas 1977, 148s., 169s.). In a later publication, Cathomas (1981, 105) notes the positive attitude of Romansh speakers towards Swiss German. Concerning the relation between proficiency in, and attitude towards, languages, Cathomas states that Romansh speakers with a lower proficiency in Swiss German have a greater tendency to abandon Romansh, perceiving their first language to be a handicap. This leads to the conclusion that the better a person speaks Swiss German, the more s/he is willing to cultivate and preserve Romansh (Cathomas 1981, 113s.). In a period when German was still seen as an inevitable evil by many members of the Romansh movement, Cathomas’s statement that “the future of Romansh is bilingualism” marked a trenchant position (Cathomas 1981, 112, our translation). Solèr describes bilingualism in a Romansh community on the basis of recordings made between 1976 and 1982. According to the Swiss census of 1980, the village of Lumbrein, situated in the Romansh-speaking Val Lumnezia in Surselva, had 417 inhabitants, of whom 410 (i.e. 98.3 %) indicated Romansh as their mother tongue. The study revealed a bilingual reality under the monolingual statistical surface: Romansh inhabitants of Lumbrein, who were all proficient in German, selected that language with unknown interlocutors, whereas their use of Romansh was limited to interaction with well-known dialogue partners speaking a not too distant Romansh variety. As for communication practice in families in Lumbrein, it is notable that two thirds of the inhabitants had German-speaking relatives. The presence of a German-speaking sonor daughter-in-law provoked linguistic interaction in German even between Romansh-speaking family members (Solèr 1983, 109). Kristol’s exploration of the situation in Bivio is declared to be a “sober description of the final phase of a multilingual society”, which counted 249 people at the time

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(Kristol 1984, 14 and 72, our translation). Besides the Romansh local dialect, the Italian dialect of Val Bregaglia, imported from the fifteenth/sixteenth century, has a historic presence in Bivio. Adding the further varieties used in the village, i.e. the dialect of the neighbouring Romansh villages of Surmeir, Lombard dialects, standard Italian (used at school, in local administration and in church), Swiss German and standard German, a total of seven varieties can be counted (Kristol 1984, 15s.). At the time of recording, the largest group (more than two fifths) was formed by people indicating an Italian variety as the language transmitted to them by their mother, whereas the smallest group (one fifth) indicated a Romansh variety. Swiss German, named by a third, was however the variety learnt most often by the speakers of other languages (Kristol 1984, 102–111). Multilingual proficiency, which was still well attested in the 1950s (Kristol 1984, 39), diminished in the following period, when the development of tourism reinforced the orientation of the village towards Germanspeaking Switzerland. Kristol was interested particularly in the dynamics within families: among the 36 families domiciled for at least three generations in Bivio, he counted 18 in which a German-speaking person had triggered the shift to German (Kristol 1984, 155s.). Concerning statistical recording of Romansh speakers, an important step was taken when the Federal Statistical Office replaced the question about mother tongue with three new questions in 1990: besides the language of best command, the language(s) used regularly at home and at work (or school) had to be indicated. The resulting data allow a distinction to be made between a core of Romansh speakers and a larger group of Romansh users, most of whom speak this language in addition to at least one other language. Table 1: Swiss census data (Coray 2008, 84, 86) Switzerland

Grisons

Total

Romansh best command

Romansh spoken

Total

Romansh best command

Romansh spoken

1990

6,873,687

39,632 0.6 %

66,356 1,0 %

173,890

29,679 17.1 %

41,067 23.6 %

2000

7,288,010

35,095 0.5 %

60,816 0.8 %

187,058

27,038 14.5 %

40,168 21.5 %

The proportion of speakers domiciled outside the traditional area is considerable: not only must the Romansh living outside Grisons be taken into account (a third of all Romansh speakers in 2000), but also the Romansh living in Grisons outside the Romansh area. The results reveal that 44 % of all Romansh speakers lived outside the traditional area in 2000 (cf. Grünert et al. 2008, 39–49).

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As for language transmission, the census data analysed by Furer (2005, 118, 122) show interesting facts and tendencies. Among the children living in the traditional Romansh area in 1990, only 30 % had two parents whose language of best command was Romansh; in 2000, the proportion of such children had dropped to 24 %. Almost all children growing up in families where both parents were most proficient in Romansh considered themselves to be most proficient in that language. As soon as one parent’s best-known language was German, the proportion of children indicating Romansh as their best-known language decreased sharply (53 % in 1990 and 57 % in 2000). As for bilingualism in the family, it is remarkable that in 2000, 10 % of the children growing up in families where both parents were most proficient in Romansh, and living in communities where Romansh is the medium of instruction, regularly used German in the family. The more in-depth analysis permitted by the census data of 1990 and 2000 is relativized by the fact that only one language of best command could be indicated. This constraint, which puts bilinguals on the spot, means an overestimation of the commitment to one language in a social context characterized by different degrees of bi- and multi-lingualism. In the random tests carried out by the Federal Statistical Office since 2010, this constraint has been abolished, which explains the increased number of nearly 40,000 people indicating Romansh as (a) language of best command in the data collected from 2011–2013 (cf. BAK 2015, 2). However, as censuses requiring all inhabitants to contribute their data no longer take place, it has become impossible to gather reliable quantitative data for each local community as was done for the last time in 2000 (cf. Maps 1 and 2 above).

3.2 The territoriality principle Whoever perceives the complementarity of Romansh and German is at least sceptical of calls for the territorial protection of Romansh. Bernard Cathomas, who proposed bilingual (Romansh and German) instruction from the first grade in Romansh communities on the basis of his study reported above, commented that “it has yet to be clarified to what extent legally well-founded sanctions, such as the jus soli, may be applied in Grisons in the context of language maintenance programmes” (Cathomas 1977, 107, our translation). This scepticism is also justified by the fact that the territoriality principle can work against Romansh, as it did in 1974, when an inhabitant of the German-speaking community of St. Martin was not allowed to send his children to the Romansh school of the neighbouring communities Tersnaus and Uors without assuming the costs himself (cf. Richter 2005, 916–920). The first proposal to enshrine territorial protection of Romansh in a cantonal law was submitted by the Lia Rumantscha in 1947. The draft was judged negatively by the lawyer Pieder Tuor (1876–1957), who pointed out that the canton of Grisons, where communal autonomy is firmly anchored, “could not [legally] force Romansh commu 

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nes either to introduce a Romansh school curriculum, or even to retain a Romansh school curriculum which [a majority in the commune] might want to reject” (Weinreich 2011, 291, square brackets from the quoted edition). After the lawyer Rudolf Viletta (1978, 319s., 328–330) had advocated the implementation of the territoriality principle, the Lia Rumantscha submitted, in 1981 and 1985, draft laws attributing communities to a German, a Romansh, an Italian and a bilingual (German and Romansh) territory. Both proposals were rejected after public consultation (Grünert 2012, 474). What failed at the cantonal level was pursued at the other levels of state government. On the one hand, in 1985 a deputy of Grisons in Federal parliament, Martin Bundi, submitted a motion requiring that “the Confederation sustain, in cooperation with the respective cantons, measures for maintaining the traditional language areas of threatened minorities” (Widmer et al. 2004, 258, our translation). On the other hand, starting from 1995, communities in the principal Romansh areas joined together to form territories where Romansh was the official language (Grünert 2012, 474). Martin Bundi’s motion eventually led to the revision of the language article of the Federal Constitution, where the territoriality principle was enshrined in 1999 (Widmer et al. 2004, 261; cf. below section 4).  

3.3 Media, school and standardization of Romansh The use of mass media has always been considered important for language promotion. The Romansh press, founded in the 1830s and 1840s as a regional weekly (cf. above section 2.2), became a daily in 1997, when the two main bi-weekly newspapers fused into La Quotidiana. This supra-regional press output, however, faces the competition of two regional outputs that meet the needs of part of the public, who are not interested in information about more distant Romansh regions, but are content with combining a regional (bi)-weekly Romansh newspaper with a daily newspaper in German (cf. Cathomas 2014, 108s.). Radio broadcasting in Romansh started in 1925. In 1946 the union Pro Radio Rumantsch (renamed in the following year as Cumünanza Radio Rumantsch) was founded. The first television broadcast was made in 1963. Important steps were taken in 1991, when the Cuminanza rumantscha radio e televisiun became an independent regional company of the SRG SSR (Swiss Broadcasting Corporation), in 1999, when the news broadcast of Televisiun rumantscha started being offered every weekday, and in 2008, when Radio Rumantsch began full-time broadcasting (LIR, Radio e televisiun, RTR, Istorgia). School is an essential domain for language promotion. In the regions where Romansh was more vital, so-called Romansh schools were instituted, where two types of immersion have been established according to the linguistic affiliation of pupils: from grades 1–6 instruction is given in Romansh, which means immersion for allo 

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phone pupils; from grade 3–6 German is taught as a second language; and from grade 7–9 German replaces Romansh in most lessons, which entails immersion in German for Romansh pupils (cf. Cathomas 2005, 169–171). Rico Cathomas (2005, 232–235) provided a justification of this type of school by showing that the proficiency in German achieved in Romansh schools does not differ significantly from the proficiency in German achieved in schools where German is the only medium of instruction. In the Upper Engadine, Romansh schools have been replaced by a new type of bilingual school since 1996, where Romansh and German are used in parallel from grades 1–9. This change has increased acceptance of Romansh in a social context where German is dominant (cf. Grünert et al. 2008, 93–97). Bilingual classes have also been introduced in communities where the traditional medium of instruction is German (in Chur, Ilanz/Glion and Domat/Ems). A further means of language promotion is the bilingual baccalaureate, which provides for one to three subjects to be taught in Romansh, besides Romansh lessons. The most incisive measure in the language policy of the last decades is the development of the supra-regional written variety Rumantsch Grischun (RG) starting from 1982, when Bernard Cathomas, general secretary of the Lia Rumantscha, charged Heinrich Schmid, professor of Romance Philology at the University of Zurich, to design the fundamentals of a Romansh standard language (Coray 2008, 137s.). RG, based on a compromise between three regional written varieties, was promoted for texts targeting the whole Romansh population. Quite soon the new standardized language was established in private companies and in institutions willing to use Romansh. In 1986, the Confederation decided to publish Romansh texts exclusively in RG and, in 2001, the canton of Grisons followed suit (Coray 2008, 133–141). In 2003, the parliament of Grisons decided to publish teaching material exclusively in RG, whereupon a plan for introducing this written language in the schools was worked out (Coray 2008, 192). Implementation started in 2005, without a legal basis that would have permitted the canton of Grisons to force communities to adopt RG. Opposition to the standardized language, which had been expressed since the beginning of its promotion (cf. Coray 2008, 132s.), began to be organized politically from 2011, when associations for the promotion of the regional varieties (Pro Idioms) were founded. The pressure of these associations led to a compromise which leaves the choice open between a regional written variety and RG (cf. Bisaz/Glaser 2015, 9s., 71). As a result, many communities that had begun to introduce RG returned to their traditional written variety.

3.4 The situation of Italian Unlike the Romansh territory, the Italian-speaking territory of Switzerland is not endangered. Nevertheless, concern was expressed about the continuous decrease of Italian as a mother tongue in the territory between 1880 and 1980 from 99 % to 83.9 %.

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The figures regarding the language of best command in 1990 and 2000, 82.8 % and 83.1 % respectively, can be interpreted, however, as an indicator of stability. In the same period the share of German dropped from 9.8 % to 8.3 %, whereas the share of non-national languages rose from 5.4 % to 6.8 % (Bianconi/Borioli 2004, 24; BFS 2003, 130s.). German remains, at any rate, the strongest non-territorial language in Ticino. In 2000 it was used regularly by 19.5 % of the population (Bianconi/Borioli 2004, 82). In the Italian-speaking area of Grisons, which consists of non-contiguous parts, the percentage of Italian as language of best command varies widely: whereas the two districts of Val Poschiavo showed 90.4 % in 2000, Bregaglia had only 75 % (Bianconi/ Borioli 2004, 45). Two special cases in Grisons are the above-mentioned village of Bivio and the village of Maloja (situated between Italian-speaking Val Bregaglia and the traditionally Romansh, but nowadays German-dominated, Upper Engadine). In Maloja, Italian is anchored somewhat better than in Bivio, being indicated by 52.9 % as language of best command in 2000 (Bivio: 29.4 %; cf. Grünert et al. 2008, 201, 220). A supporting factor in Maloja is the administrative affiliation with Val Bregaglia, where pupils attend grades 7–9. The censuses of 1990 and 2000 also document the decline of dialects and the spread of standard Italian, two trends that have been going on at different speeds in Ticino and in Grisons. In Ticino the share of dialect speakers fell from 42 % (in 1990) to 31.8 % (in 2000), whereas the share of speakers of standard Italian increased from 70.5 % to 75.1 % (Bianconi/Borioli 2004, 48). In Grisons the fragmentation of the Italian-speaking area may have contributed to maintaining better dialects. In 2000, 43.5 % of the population spoke dialect exclusively with the family (in Ticino: 14.7 %) and only 17.5 % spoke standard Italian exclusively (in Ticino: 43.1 %; cf. Bianconi/ Borioli 2004, 97). As for the presence of Italian in the whole of Switzerland, the substantial immigration of Italian workers between 1950 and 1970 is reflected in the significant increase in Italian as a mother tongue, from 5.9 % to 11.9 % (Coray 2008, 84). Due to decreasing immigration from Italy in the following period and assimilation of the second and third generations in German- and French-speaking Switzerland, the position of Italian has weakened ever since (cf. Bianconi/Borioli 2004, 115). However, the different criteria used for the censuses in 1990 and 2000 do not allow a simple comparison. The decline in the core of more proficient speakers (7.6 % in 1990 and 6.5 % in 2000) is relativized by the presence of a larger community of users of Italian, which, however, is also diminishing (14.8 % in 1990 and 13.3 % in 2000; cf. Coray 2008, 84). In terms of mass media, the Italian-speaking community is well provided for. As for newspapers, a distinction has to be made between Ticino and Grisons. In Ticino, the first newspaper was founded in 1746. The high number of six daily newspapers that existed simultaneously between 1926 and the end of the 1980s has been reduced to three. Grisons has had, since 1852, only weekly periodicals in Italian (HLS, Stampa).

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The radio broadcasting station for Italian-speaking Switzerland was founded in 1931. A second and a third programme were added in the 1980s. Television broadcasting started in 1961, and has offered two programmes from 1997 (Mäusli 2009, 277–279). Besides Swiss public broadcasting (Radiotelevisione svizzera), public broadcasting from Italy as well as Swiss and Italian private broadcasting all contribute to an ample provision. In the field of education an important goal was achieved in 1996, when the Università della Svizzera italiana opened. It includes faculties of economics, communication sciences and informatics as well as an academy of architecture (HLS, Università della Svizzera italiana).

3.5 The situation of the Francoprovençal and French dialects In the areas where Francoprovençal and French dialects were still used, according to Gauchat (1942, 2s.), the last young generation of speakers of patois are to be found in the mid-sixties. Most of these speakers did not transmit their dialect to their children, except in one village in Valais, Évolène, where the local dialect is still passed on to a small part of the younger generation (Grüner 2010, 11). In Valais, where dialects are more in use than elsewhere, members of the aforementioned mid-sixties generation can be found in most places (Grüner 2010, 4). In order to benefit from this group for language documentation, Andres Max Kristol in 1993 launched the project of the Atlas linguistique audiovisuel du francoprovençal valaisan (ALAVAL), which is located at the Centre de dialectologie et du français regional of the University of Neuchâtel. Activities associated with the patois movement were revitalized in the post-war period. In 1954 the supra-regional Conseil des patoisants romands and its periodical, the Nouveau conteur vaudois, were founded. In 1960 the Conseil was renamed Fédération romande des patoisants and began to function as an umbrella organization, in which the local and cantonal patois associations were represented. Literary competitions have taken place every four years since 1961. In addition, festivals have been organized, quite often jointly with folkloristic groups. On these occasions contacts with associations from the Aosta Valley, Piedmont, Savoy and Franche-Comté were cultivated, which provided the impulse to organize activities on an interregional level. Accordingly, the umbrella organization was renamed Fédération romande et interrégionale des patoisants (FRIP) in 1991 (Fluckiger 2009, 59–61). Radio has played an important role in sensitizing the public to patois. An archive of programmes in and about patois, transmitted from the 1950s to the present, is available online (AS). In the canton of Jura (JU), promotion of patois has had a legal basis since 1977 (when the canton was founded by secession from the canton of Berne), but it was only in 1995 that patois lessons were introduced at school (Bickel/Schläpfer 2000, 163). In 2011 the canton of Valais started teaching patois as well (cf. Elmiger/Barmaz/Pannatier 2013).

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4 Development of a legal framework at the turn of the twenty-first century Language legislation, which was rudimentary in Switzerland until towards the end of the twentieth century, was developed as a result of the discussion provoked by the motion of Martin Bundi, member for Grisons in the Swiss Federal parliament, who had demanded territorial protection in 1985 (cf. section 3.2 above). Another contribution to the debate was made by a member from the canton of Zurich (ZH), who in 1987 submitted a proposal concerning exchange between linguistic communities. To several observers, linguistic communities seemed to be drifting apart due to lacking proficiency in other national languages and due to excessive use of Swiss German (instead of standard German) by the majority group (Widmer et al. 2004, 279s.). In the parliamentary debates from 1992 to 1995 regarding the revision of the language article, the defenders of the territoriality principle, who considered language to be part of cultural heritage, opposed advocates of less top-down control, who insisted on the communicative function of language (Widmer et al. 2004, 290s., 326–369). Agreement was eventually achieved by omitting from the law the two principles proposed by the government, i.e. the territoriality principle and freedom of language choice. The version approved by Swiss voters in 1996 contains, according to Coray (in Widmer et al. 2004, 385), a remarkable innovation, however: it no longer stipulates only languages but also speakers and introduces an ethnolinguistic conception of Switzerland in referring to “linguistic communities” and in declaring that the Confederation communicates in Romansh with “persons who speak Romansh” (cf. SR 101, art. 70, al. 1 and 3). In 1999, when the Federal Constitution was totally revised, an article guaranteeing the freedom of language choice was added (SR 101, art. 18) and in the language article a new paragraph circumscribing the territoriality principle was included (SR 101, art. 70, al. 2; cf. Widmer et al. 2004, 260s.). This new paragraph contains the notion of minorities, which was previously avoided in Swiss legislation (Widmer et al. 2004, 267s.). When signing the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in 1993, the Swiss Confederation recognized Romansh and Italian as less widely-used official languages to which selected stipulations of the Charter were to be applied (SR 0.441.2, part III). When the canton of Grisons revised its constitution in 2002, its language article was adapted to the stipulations of the new Federal language article. The territoriality principle, however, was enshrined, taking into account the traditional communal autonomy of Grisons. So there is no top-down control, but communities “shall decide on their official and school languages within their competences and in cooperation with the canton” (BR 110.100, art. 3, al. 3, our translation). The principles formulated in the constitution of Grisons, which came into force in 2004, were specified in a language law implemented in 2008. As for the territoriality  

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principle, the law classifies communities on the basis of census results. Communities where at least 40 % of the population speaks a minority language in everyday life are declared “monolingual communities”, where the local language is to be used as the official language and as the medium of instruction at school (grades 1–6). Communities where less than 40 %, but at least 20 % of the population speaks a minority language are declared “multilingual communities”, where the local language is to be considered in a commensurate manner for official use and at least as one of the languages of instruction (cf. BR 492.100, art. 16–21). At present, the efficacy of the law is minimal because communities are not obliged to change their practice if the criteria prescribed by the law have not been fulfilled up to now (cf. Grünert 2012, 477). Furthermore, the administrative merging of communities is creating situations that are not covered by the law (cf. BAK 2015, 19; Etter 2016, 180). And specific census data are not currently available (cf. section 3.1). At the federal level, language legislation has been concluded by the adoption of a language law (which entered into force in 2010) that specifies regulation of the official languages of the Confederation, promotion of exchange between the linguistic communities, support for multilingual cantons in their special tasks in education and administration, as well as support for the cantons of Grisons and Ticino in their measures in favour of Romansh and Italian (SR 441.1.).  

5 Further issues of language policy After the territoriality principle had been enshrined in legislation, more attention was paid to the promotion of minority languages outside their traditional areas. This is shown, for example, by the stronger commitment to improving the representation of the Romance communities in the Federal authorities. Guidelines for a just representation of minorities have been developed since 1950. From the end of the twentieth century, this endeavour has been combined with the promotion of individual and institutional multilingualism among the staff. A provision which is based on the above-mentioned federal language law (SR 441.11) specifies reference percentages of speakers that should by striven for within all offices and especially in high level positions: 68.5–70.5 % for German, 21.5–23.5 % for French, 6.5–8.5 % for Italian and 0.5–1.0 % for Romansh (Coray et al. 2015, 22–30, 222, cf. BAK 2015, 10). The recent research of Coray et al. (2015, 58–63) documents the underrepresentation of French-, Italian- and Romansh-speaking persons in the great majority of the administrative units and especially in high level positions. Furthermore, the numerical proportions between the language groups and the leading position of German in the linguistic hierarchy influence practices of personal recruitment unfavourably for applicants who speak a Romance language. This particularly concerns italophones, who mostly have to communicate in the two other official languages, German and French (Coray et al. 2015, 197).

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In the public administration of the trilingual canton of Grisons, where italophones are also underrepresented, no measures for promoting the language minorities have been taken to date (cf. Grünert et al. 2008, 267, 273s.). Another example showing the need for language promotion outside the traditional territory is the recent introduction of Romansh lessons in Zurich and Basel for children growing up in Romansh families (cf. Bisaz/Glaser 2015, 164). The Confederation is about to consider whether these local initiatives will be supported from 2021. An issue concerning the Romansh group at present is its representation by the Lia Rumantscha. The above-mentioned associations Pro Idioms, which fought successfully for the recognition of the traditional written varieties at school, have questioned the legitimacy of the Lia Rumantscha, which had been promoting the supra-regional written variety exclusively, despite strong protests from the Romansh population. Romedi Arquint, former president of the Lia Rumantscha (1977–1984), remarks (in Bisaz/Glaser 2015, 161s.) that the status of the Lia Rumantscha as a private-law association, which was adequate in the early period of its existence, seems to be problematic now, when state authorities play a more important role in cultural policy. Moreover, the organizational structures of the Lia Rumantscha, with its assembly of delegates and its executive board representing affiliate associations (cf. Lechmann 2005, 117–120, 139–141), as well as the dominant role of the intellectual and culturally-aware elite, are factors which mean that this association does not qualify as representing the whole Romansh population. In the current discussion, lawyers and specialists in minority policy are examining undemocratic shortcomings in recent language policy and are reflecting on alternative organizational forms that would permit representation of the Romansh group (cf. Bisaz/Glaser 2015).

6 Conclusion In the period considered here, Switzerland saw the recognition of multilingualism at the upper level of state government, a revival movement for Romansh, the emergence of the myth of quadrilingualism, as well as language promotion by cultural initiatives, media and education. At the same time, however, the autochthonous Romance minority languages have continued to be marginalized. Current linguistic dynamics in Swiss society are determined to a greater extent by increasing language diversity due to the presence of numerous non-national languages than by language shift in the communities of the endangered minority languages. Supportive public discourse about individual multilingualism has increased the self-confidence of speakers of the minority languages. The instruments of language policy applied up to now, however, have not succeeded in reversing the decline of these languages. As regards the territoriality principle, which was a focus of attention

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during the recent development of a linguistic legal framework, there is a growing consensus that minority languages cannot be successfully fostered by concentrating efforts on this legal instrument. Indeed, several commentators are demanding measures that support the numerous speakers of minority languages living outside the traditional areas (Arquint 2014, 138–144).

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Romanistischen Linguistik, vol. 3: Die einzelnen romanischen Sprachen und Sprachgebiete von der Renaissance bis zur Gegenwart. Rumänisch, Dalmatisch/Istroromanisch, Friaulisch, Ladinisch, Bündnerromanisch, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 886–912. Mäusli, Theo (2009) (ed.), Storia della Radiotelevisione Svizzera di lingua italiana, Locarno, Dadò. Richter, Dagmar (2005), Sprachenordnung und Minderheitenschutz im schweizerischen Bundesstaat. Relativität des Sprachenrechts und Sicherung des Sprachfriedens, Berlin, Springer. RTR, Istorgia = L’istorgia da nossa chasa, http://www.rtr.ch/interpresa/istorgia (last access 16.02.2018). Solèr, Clau (1983), Sprachgebrauch und Sprachwandel. Eine theoretische Faktorenanalyse und die Pragmatik der Sprachbehandlung bei den Rätoromanen von Lumbrein. Mit einem Vergleich der Germanisierung in Präz und Sarn, Zürich, Zentralstelle der Studentenschaft. SR = Systematische Sammlung des Bundesrechts, https://www.admin.ch/gov/de/start/bundesrecht/systematische-sammlung.html (last access 16.02.2018). Valär, Rico Franc (2013), Weder Italiener, noch Deutsche. Die rätoromanische Heimatbewegung 1863– 1938, Zürich, hier+jetzt. VDS = Vocabolario dei dialetti della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Mazzuconi, 1952ss. (now: Bellinzona, Centro di dialettologia della Svizzera italiana) Viletta, Rudolf (1978), Abhandlung zum Sprachenrecht mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Rechts der Gemeinden des Kantons Graubünden, vol. 1: Grundlagen des Sprachenrechts, Zürich, Schulthess. Weinreich, Uriel (2011, 11953), Languages in Contact. French, German and Romansh in TwentiethCentury Switzerland. With an Introduction and Notes by Ronald I. Kim and William Labov, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Widmer, Jean, et al. (2004), Die Schweizer Sprachenvielfalt im öffentlichen Diskurs/La Diversité des langues en Suisse dans le débat public, Frankfurt, Lang.  

 

 

 

 

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20 Revitalization and the public space Abstract: In this chapter, the revitalization of minority Romance languages is explored through the public and visible production of the written forms of these languages in the Linguistic Landscape (LL). This sphere of life has emerged as a domain of necessity in language revitalization. Within a French national context, the possibility for the revitalization of minority languages in the LL is disputed, and the built environment is both a space for whose control speakers of languages compete and a medium through which ideologies and attitudes are displayed and challenged. Since revitalization is an on-going rather than a fixed-term process, we use here the LL for a diachronic evaluation of the visibility of Corsican and Catalan. Moreover we seek to discern the main actors in the emplacement of minority Romance languages in the LL, arguing that it is possible to disambiguate the actors involved in language revitalization. In particular, we establish the role played in language revitalization by civic authorities, private enterprise, and individuals, who may or may not self-identify as language activists.  

Keywords: Corsican, Catalan, linguistic landscape, revitalization  

1 Introduction Research into the use of languages in the public space has been organized recently around the (sub)field of sociolinguistics referred to as the Linguistic Landscape (henceforth LL), in which the visibility of written languages, especially those in competition with other languages, is evaluated and assessed. From the first widely cited reference to the LL in a publication by Landry/Bourhis (1997) on ethnolinguistic vitality in linguistically contested areas, research into the emplacement of what are broadly described as ‘signs’ in the public space has flourished over the last decade. Not all research in this area concentrates on the questions allied to language revitalization, but there is an emerging body of work which sees the LL as an integral part of the normalization, acceptance, and extension of minority languages in multilingual communities. Gorter/Aiestaran/Cenoz (2012, 161) conclude that “a strong presence” in the LL can contribute to the survival of a minority language. From the perspective of language revitalization, and based on the examination of several minority languages in France – Romance, Celtic, Germanic, Austronesian – the LL has, we argue, become what Edwards (2007, 244) refers to as a domain of necessity, whereby maintenance and revival cannot be achieved without a clear presence of the minority languages in their written forms in the public https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-021

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space.1 There are significant theoretical challenges to this understanding of language in the public space, not least in the agreement on concepts such as domains, or in the intense debates over the writing, standardization, and contestation of the form of minority languages. These are important issues, but a close exploration of these particular debates – which are fundamental – are not at the heart of this chapter. Instead, we will focus on the issues pertaining to the potential of the public space as the site of enquiry for the revitalization of two Romance varieties, where we understand the LL to be, in the words of Gorter/Aiestaran/Cenoz (2012, 159), “part of a larger social context in which tensions between languages exist”. The geographic space on which this discussion centres is France, and in particular the territory known as Northern Catalonia (which is the area within the French State that has been traditionally linked with Catalan cultural and linguistic identity) and Corsica.2 In both spaces, a minority Romance language has been associated with the territory for longer than the dominant language, French, but the dominated minority language has not only undergone a process of minorization, through language shift,3 but is now also identified with a numeric minority within a larger nation-state. Based on empirical studies in both areas, we will explore here the scope for the public space to act as a forum for language revitalization. Given the national context, which we will discuss more fully below, the possibility for the normalization of minority languages in the LL of France is disputed, and the built environment is both a space for whose control speakers of languages compete and a medium through which ideologies and attitudes are displayed and challenged. Since revitalization is an on-going rather than a fixedterm process, we use here the LL for a diachronic evaluation of the visibility (and, by extension, vitality) of minority languages.4 This approach is underpinned by the recording of data in the same streets, squares, and boulevards of towns in Northern Catalonia and Corsica on two occasions. 1 We go further than Gorter/Aiestaran/Cenoz (2012, 162) who suggest that the LL only “may” become a domain of necessity. 2 Work on language revitalization on Romance languages is not limited to Corsican and Catalan. Amos (2017) looks at Occitan in Toulouse whilst Tufi considers Genoese, Neapolitan, Sardinian, and Sicilian in her exploration of the LL of the Mediterranean (Blackwood/Tufi 2015). In the same volume, we consider Nissart, Monegasc, and Provençal in the LL of French coastal towns and cities. Coluzzi (2009; 2012) examines the revitalization of Friulian and Milanese in the LL of two northern Italian cities. On the Iberian peninsula, Dunlevy (2012) and Järlehed (2015) discuss different aspects of the revitalization of Galician, whilst Comajoan/Long (2012) and Bruyèl-Olmedo/Juan-Garau (2015) consider Catalan, and Lado (2011) looks in particular at Valencian. See also ↗21 Revitalization and education. 3 See Judge (2007) for a sociolinguistic overview of the position and status of Catalan (77–83) and Corsican (100–105). 4 Pavlenko (2010) identifies the scope for diachronic studies of the LL with her overview of Kyiv. Unlike her work, however, this examination covers a much smaller timeframe (no more than seven years, in comparison with Pavlenko’s twelve centuries), and the corpus is not reconstructed from material from various historical and contemporary sources but, rather, has been captured by the author.

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The methodology follows the pattern established for a wider project exploring the use of the written forms of France’s regional languages in the public space (Blackwood 2011), whereby fifty-metre stretches of twenty streets in each location are exhaustively surveyed in order to achieve a quantitative overview of the languages used. From this quantitative starting point, it is possible to drill down and identify trends and tendencies; not only does this approach permit an exploration of the use of languages by various actors, but it provides data for the better understanding of the range of language beliefs of a given community. On Corsica, we first recorded the LL of twenty sites in 2007, and returned again in 2010 (of which one particular aspect is discussed in full in Blackwood 2014). In Northern Catalonia, the first surveying of the public space was undertaken in 2008 (from which the preliminary findings are discussed in Blackwood 2010), and the same sites were revisited in 2014. This chapter compares the emplacement of Catalan and Corsican in the public spaces of the respective areas, highlighting the evolution in language ideologies and the transformation of the nature of power in language revitalization. As such, we address three explicit research questions; the first asks to what extent the LL serves as a space for language revitalization. Second, we seek to discover who the main actors in the emplacement of minority Romance languages in the LL are. Third, this chapter tests the potential for diachronic approaches to LL studies as a means of understanding better changing language beliefs and practices.

2 The Linguistic Landscape: a brief overview 2.1 A Linguistic Landscape canon? Although the term Linguistic Landscape was coined in 1997, this is not necessarily the starting point for research in this area. Backhaus (2007) in his landmark case study of Tokyo – the first monograph devoted to the LL of a given area – dedicates an entire chapter to earlier works which, whilst they explore issues of multilingualism in the public space, do not refer to the LL. Without calling it such, Spolsky/ Cooper (1991) grappled with issues pertaining to the LL in their exploration of the languages of Jerusalem, and they posited three rules to explain how the authors of signs in the public space make decisions about their language choices. These rules, whilst not explicitly referencing the potential for the LL to contribute to language revitalization, include the act of writing in a language the author knows; writing in a language that the presumed or intended audience is expected to be able to read; and writing in a language with which the author seeks to be identified. Starting with the contributions by Spolsky/Cooper, Landry/Bourhis, and Backhaus, questions of vitality, contact, knowledge, and identification are some of the key issues with which research into the LL has grappled as it establishes itself within sociolinguistics.

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Within what might be understood as the canon of LL research, the earliest major contributions focussed on multilingualism as a lived experience in the public space. Ben-Rafael et al. (2006) conceptualize the public space in sociolinguistic terms as a “symbolic construction”, contending that the presence and absence of languages on the walls of towns and cities point not to an accurate representation of what Spolsky (2004) describes as “language practices”, but rather to a construct which reflects the fluctuations in the linguistic market (Bourdieu 1991). When presented as resources unequally distributed amongst any given population, languages are ascribed value which, according to Appadurai (1986, 3), is “not an inherent property of objects, but is a judgment made about them by subjects”. The value of languages is inevitably contested, and where two or more languages are used in competition within a community, this contestation becomes increasingly acute. Framed in terms of presence and absence, or visibility and invisibility, the public space is the backcloth onto which language revitalization in towns and cities is projected. As such, the LL becomes the most visible and widely accessible arena for language revitalization. In this respect, language revitalization in the public space echoes debates around the concepts of dominant and dominated languages, as well as diglossia. Invariably, and as attested by the series of case studies outlined by Gorter/Marten/Van Mensel (2012), the LL is a site where speakers and supporters of a dominant language, often the national standard with all its ideological connotations, resist – to greater or lesser extents – incursions into the public space by minority languages. This is particularly the case in Europe, where nineteenth-century models of nation, structured in part on the equation of one nation with one language, persist. In some communities, the minority language in question might well be a majority language elsewhere – as indeed is the case of Northern Catalonia discussed here – and whilst this reference point beyond the traditional, arbitrary national borders might well constitute a source of encouragement, solidarity, and even linguistic resources, the focus here is not on the relationship between speakers of a minority language in a given community and their counterparts. Dal Negro (2009, 216) highlights in South Tyrol, where German as a minority language enjoys widespread visibility, that the LL points to power relations between communities, and that these relations are aggregated by questions of politics, economics, and demographics. Initially, much LL research5 engaged with the binary power distinction of top-down versus bottom-up, where public authorities find themselves in competition with bottom-up activists, both seeking to control a finite space, be that an entire city centre, a side street, a shop front, or even just a noticeboard. Leeman/Modan (2009) amongst others critique this division of agency in managing the LL, especially given the nature of ownership of the public space in late modernity. They argue (2009, 334) that “the

5 For example, Part Two (comprising five chapters) of Shohamy/Ben-Rafael/Barni (2010) is devoted to studies focussing on top-down LLs.

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distinction between top-down and bottom-up signage practices is untenable in an era in which public-private partnerships are the main vehicle of urban revitalization initiatives”. Beyond urban management and regeneration projects, public-private partnerships extend into domains such as local transport, where private enterprise works in conjunction with civic authorities in order to discharge the responsibilities of local councils, a point to which we return below.

2.2 Symbolic and functional attributes in the LL In terms of understanding revitalization of minority languages in the public space, the symbolic and functional representations of languages can be differentiated, although it is important to highlight that the boundary between the two roles is often blurred, and “signs” frequently perform multiple functions. Given the general acceptance that the LL is a symbolic construct, it is possible to code virtually all signage in minority languages as purely emblematic rather than as serving a practical function. However, it is this capacity to serve as a forum for the use of the minority language which points to the potential of the public space for revitalization. As noted in the conclusion for our study of language policy on Corsica (Blackwood 2008), the revitalization of the minority language has been sustained during its leanest years by its place within education, but the next stage of the revitalization process is the establishment of a practical, functional role in daily life. When Corsican or Catalan are deployed to inform customers of opening times, to instruct them to pull open, rather than push, the door, and to advise them of action to be taken in the event of a fire, the minority language surpasses its perceived role in, inter alia, adding local colour and serves a utilitarian purpose. A further aspect of a more functional revitalization of minority languages in the public space is the circulation of material culture. On one level, material culture – which, as Aronin/Ó Laoire (2012) outline, includes books, clothing, stamps, architecture, and of course signage – has a clearly symbolic function in that it speaks of the culture in which it is inscribed, conveying notions of identity, tradition, moral codes, and world views, amongst many other concepts. In Fishman’s Graded Intergenerational Dislocation Stages (1991, 395–404), what he refers to as “cultural interaction” in the minority language appears long before a stable position for the language within a diglossia has been achieved.6 On a second level, the production and consumption of material culture which indexes the minority language contributes actively to its revitalization, since the distinct world views of the minority cultures are not only conveyed but sustained by the artefacts in the public space. In both Northern Catalo-

6 Although the model of diglossia has been critiqued and revised considerably since its inception, the concept to which Fishman (1991) refers is useful since it serves as shorthand for a notion with which most linguists are familiar.

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nia and Corsica, we explore the potential for this kind of matter, which we argue is not merely ephemera that clutter the built environment, to play a part in the extension of the minority language into domains beyond the symbolic.

2.3 France as a context An examination of the LL as a lens for considering the revitalization of Romance varieties assumes another level of significance when the public space is in France. France is, in the words of Spolsky (2004, 63), “the paradigmatic case for strong ideology and management”, and as such, the role of language policy in the analysis of revitalization plays a particularly important role. As discussed elsewhere (Blackwood/Tufi 2012; 2015), language policies are particularly salient in evaluations of the LL of French villages, towns, and cities. Although the nature of language management strategies in France has fluctuated, at some points explicitly enshrining the supremacy of French in the daily lives of its citizens, at other points actively limiting the potential for using languages other than French, the aim has been consistent: the ensuring of the hegemony of the French language. Of particular note from the perspective of language revitalization in the public space is the Toubon law of 1994, pertaining to the use of the French language. In the provisions of the law, in commercial activity, and in aspects of public life managed by civic authorities, the French language is to be used when possible. Although Article 21 of the law explicitly notes that the provisions are not designed to limit the use of France’s regional languages, the law requires the provision of all information used in the public space in French, thereby delegitimizing the written use of minority languages in commercial activity, education, employment, and public services. At the same time, the examination of the revival of Catalan and Corsican in France is notable because there are no remaining monolingual speakers of regional languages. Clearly, there are those who do not speak French but are fluent in a nonterritorial language that, within the boundaries of France, is numerically a minority language, but the precariousness of the regional languages is a highly prominent factor in any exploration of language revitalization in the LL. In a French context, in order to access services, to consume, to move about, there are no individuals left in France for whom the regional minority language is their only code; in other words, the speakers, semi-speakers,7 or new speakers of minority languages in France all have recourse to French in order to live their daily lives, and France – with its long tradition of privileging the national standard language over all other languages – accommo 

7 By semi-speaker, we are guided by the definition from Grinevald/Bert (2011, 50) which “includes all members of the community with appropriate receptive skills in the language, but varying levels of productive skills”.

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dates its citizens by constructing the shared public space in French. There are, of course, exceptions to this visual dominance by French, and occasionally we encounter places where French – for a variety of reasons – is omitted, but these spaces are often privately managed, or, when they are public, are never beyond the reach of the French language. This saturation of the LL by the French language has been achieved by aggressive language management strategies and is sustained today by the weight of tradition, the wide acceptance of long-standing ideologies, and the practical demands of catering for a public which is almost completely francophone.

3 Minority language revitalization in the public space To analyse more closely the potential for the LL to serve as a space for language revitalization, it is helpful to differentiate between the different actors who seek to govern towns and cities. Eschewing the top-down/bottom-up binary, we discern three discrete categories of individuals and bodies responsible for the emplacement (or omission) of minority languages. First, there are the civic authorities (discussed in 3.1) who are disambiguated from another top-down entity, namely private enterprise, which we explore second in 3.2. Within this category, we privilege the issue of language commodification. The third category, outlined in 3.3, we refer to as the proponents of guerrilla revitalization, a concept we discuss more fully below. This rethinking of authorship takes its inspiration from the visual frames approach, proposed by Kallen (2010, 42). He reconceptualizes the LL as “a confluence of systems, observable within a single visual field but operating with a certain degree of independence between elements”, and moves the discussion beyond the rather blunt distinction between topdown and bottom-up forces. Each section below is discussed on the basis that changes in the visibility of Catalan and Corsican between the surveys are indicators of changing attitudes towards these Romance varieties. In order to identify the evolution in the revitalization of minority languages in the LL, we favour a mixed economy in terms of data collection, with a traditional quantitative approach married to an evaluation premised on the appreciation of the public space through visual frames.8

3.1 Civic authorities and language revitalization The visibility of Corsican and Catalan in the LL has increased since 2007–2008, something which we can argue based on quantitative studies of the public space

8 See Blackwood (2015) for a full justification of this approach.

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across southern Corsica and Northern Catalonia. Proportionally, the extent to which these minority languages figure in the LL is slight, but they are still more visible quantitatively than, for example, Provençal in Marseille, Nissart in Nice, or Flemish in the Westhoek. Between the first and second fieldtrips, regional authorities in both areas, plus the city council in Perpignan, published public commitments to the respective minority languages. As such, this diachronic approach to data collection in the LL spans a period during which public policy towards the revitalization of languages in the public space was articulated for the first time, with clear and unambiguous pledges to the use of the regional languages in the domains of public life for which they are responsible. Where this has an impact on language revitalization is in places where the public authorities have adopted what is often referred to as a charter for the minority language. Within France, this is the case both in Northern Catalonia and on Corsica, where the local authorities, be they councils at city, departmental, or regional level, have devised and implemented a policy that includes a statement of commitment to the minority language (usually on the basis of its historical significance to the community), a list of aims and objectives, and a set of targets or milestones for those social actors who adopt the convention. In Northern Catalonia, the general council for the département adopted in December 2007 such a charter committed to the Catalan language, which was followed in 2010 by a similar document, implemented by Perpignan city council. This second charter, given the different areas of responsibility for towns and regional authorities, focuses in particular on the scope for the revitalization of Catalan in the public space through increased visibility in the minority language in signage, communications, equipment, and infrastructure. The commitment to emplacing the Catalan language through this charter is the yardstick by which the city’s citizens can measure the activities of the local authorities in deploying the minority language. On Corsica, the Charter for the Corsican Language was published in 2009, based on one of the conclusions of the action plan devised and adopted in 2007 by Corsica’s island-wide governing body, the Collectivité Territoriale de Corse (hereafter the CTC). After its formal adoption in 2010, the Charter for the Corsican Language was supplemented by a list of targets and action points in a document that sets out the ways in which local communes in Corsica can be awarded different levels of certification for their commitment to increasing what the regional authorities refer to as “the institutional visibility” (CTC 2007, 7) of the minority language. This approach has been replicated elsewhere, such as in Scotland, where the Scots Language Centre administers the Scots Toun Prize, an award whereby communities, local councils, and volunteer groups are rewarded financially for their use the minority language, Scots, as widely as possible in the public space.9 On Corsica, rather than a

9 In 2014, the town of Keith won the top prize of £6000 from the Scottish Government for the further promotion of the Scots language in the town.

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monetary prize for further investment in the revitalization of the language, community councils are awarded different levels of certification in recognition of their compliance with commitments set out by the Charter. These include targets such as bilingual headed notepaper, bilingual invitations to events, and recognition for competency in Corsican in the recruitment process to jobs. Where this has a direct impact on revitalization of the minority language in the LL are the commitments to bilingual street signs, bilingual signage on town halls and local offices, and bilingual Christmas decorations, amongst other targets. The insistence on using both French and Corsican in these domains of normalization and revitalization is, of course, to comply with national legislation which demands the use of the standard language in all signs in the public space, in addition to another language, which from the perspective of this chapter are the regional languages. In Northern Catalonia, visible changes are evident in the introduction of Catalanlanguage signage across Perpignan; these signs were not part of the LL in 2008, but have since appeared. It suffices to outline a few examples before noting the nature of this change in arrangement of the public space, one of which is the Avenue du Général de Gaulle, which runs from Perpignan’s railway station towards the city centre. On this street in 2007, there were only two signs out of over 400 which featured the minority language: one was the logo for the city council, and the other was a street sign indicating the direction to the city centre, both of which were bilingual with French at the top and Catalan below. By 2014, Perpignan City Council has replaced all of the traditional blue French-language signs found at street corners with monolingual Catalan signs reading Avinguda General de Gaulle. Elsewhere, along the street, there are French-language signs informing the pedestrian, cyclist, and motorist of the street name in the national standard language, but it is striking that a street named after the man who embodied the French State in its incarnation as the Fifth Republic, in a street in the south-west of France, is written in Catalan. Bilingual signage has also been emplaced along the street, such as directional signs, where pedestrians – as indicated by the icon for a person on foot – are informed in French (in the upper position) and Catalan (below) of the walking times to the town centre and the railway station. One of the most eye-catching additions to the street furniture of Perpignan has been the erection of information boards, which appear as pairs of back-to-back, tall but narrow panels containing details about sites of architectural merit, plus a handful of images. These boards have been created by Perpignan city council working in conjunction with the central-government scheme Les Villes et Pays d’Art et d’Histoire, overseen by the Ministry for Culture and Communication. The pairs of boards contain four information panels, each conveying the same information on the aspect of architectural interest, produced in French, English, Castilian, and Catalan, something we contend increases the status of Catalan given its emplacement alongside prestigious and global standard languages. On the Avenue du Général de Gaulle, there are two pairs of panels: one for the home (and small factory) of the Bardou family, responsible for JOB cigarette papers, and the other for the railway station. In terms of

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the linguistic market, the finding of a space for Catalan is striking, and contributes to the normalization of the language for a domestic audience, as well as for those visiting from Catalunya. From the perspective of a code preference hierarchy, Catalan appears above Castilian, and is thereby given greater prominence. On the same street, the operators of the city’s bus network have, since 2008, installed an electronic ticket machine that has a digital display screen. Replicating the approach of parking meters in Ajaccio (as discussed in Blackwood 2014), the ticket machine has a rotating series of messages for the potential traveller, with information provided in French, English, Catalan, and Castilian. On Corsica, the language management strategies which have been put in place between the 2007 and 2010 focus squarely on the public space as governed by the civic authorities, or what Kallen (2010) would refer to as “the civic frame”. However, given that the 2007 LL survey of Corsica (discussed in Blackwood 2011) noted the visibility of the Corsican on buildings, walls, and signage for which elected representatives are responsible, the extent to which the civic authorities on the island have been engaged in language revitalization eclipsed the comparable use of Catalan in Northern Catalonia in 2008. The evolution in the development of charters for the minority languages also varies between the two sites, since Northern Catalonia does not have, either at the level of the département or the city, a target-list in the style of an à la carte menu for increasing the visibility of the minority language. In comparative terms, in 2007 a relatively limited place was attested for the Corsican language within the island’s linguistic market, and this was dwarfed proportionally by the extent to which French appeared. Corsican was deployed across the civic frame, although with varying levels of penetration (from its frequent omission in the space managed by the State to its occasional use by Ajaccio city council), but it was in private commercial activity that the minority language achieved its greatest prominence (albeit very marginal in comparison with the national standard language). By 2010, the minority language was used much more consistently by the island’s regional government and, in particular, the local authorities in the island’s capital. With the launch of the Charter for the Corsican Language, the CTC printed thousands of stickers to be used by businesses and the different levels of civic authorities, calling for people to use the Corsican language. The emphasis of this sticker from the CTC is notable in that it, through its tagline, “A lingua hè viva... ci tocca à parlà” (‘The language is alive... it’s up to us to speak it’), calls upon Corsican speakers to sustain the language by using it. The CTC, therefore, has embarked upon a concerted campaign to encourage the spoken use of the Corsican language through its visibility in the public space, but not merely through the estate of the civic authorities.

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3.2 Private enterprise and commodification as revitalization As the examples from the Avenue du Général de Gaulle highlight, a place is found for Catalan in the public space of Perpignan by the various civic authorities; however, the minority language is in competition in this sub-corpus of signs with Castilian Spanish, which enjoys prestige as a national standard language across Spain. This valuing of Castilian replicates the French ideology of endowing the standard language of a state with significance on the basis that it is enshrined in the constitution as the national language. When we explore the use of Catalan by other social actors not identified with France’s civic authorities, Castilian disappears from view. At the same time, the visibility of Catalan also declines with far less widespread or consistent usage of the minority language by private enterprises or individuals. Across the Ligurian Sea, in general, businesses which are part of wider companies which operate beyond Corsica (in other words, in mainland France and abroad) find no space for the minority language in their signage. A second level of language revitalization in the public space therefore falls within the purview of small- and medium-sized businesses, to which we turn our attention. In Northern Catalonia, an example of both the potential for the revitalization of the minority language and, simultaneously, the scope for reproducing the language ideologies of dominance and minorization can be found at the bakery Meunier Catalan on the place Jean Payra in Perpignan. As it is immediately clear from the name of the business, the bakery defines itself as Catalan, although it does so in French rather than in the minority language. The signage around the bakery makes explicit reference to the Catalan-ness of the business activity, with signs on all façades of the building proclaiming – in the national standard language – that the bakery specializes in the production of Catalan fougasses. In terms of the semiotic landscape (Jaworski/Thurlow 2010) of the premises, the design of the bakery exploits the connotations of the senyera, the Catalan flag of four red stripes on a yellow background. Not only is the senyera hung in the windows and inside the bakery, but illustrations on the exterior walls of the building feature a man, wearing a barretina (a traditional hat, associated with the northern Mediterranean seaboard, including Catalunya) and waving the senyera. Collectively, the imagery of the bakery clearly speaks of interaction that indexes a Catalan cultural identity, but the glaring omission from this representation of Catalan-ness is the minority language. All the language artefacts in the signage associated with the bakery are in French, not in Catalan; as such, the Meunier Catalan exemplifies the clash between the symbolic and the functional potential of material culture. Visually and symbolically, a Catalan cultural identity governs the small corner of the place Jean Payra occupied by this bakery. Functionally, the French language dominates the bakery, marginalizing to the point of exclusion the Catalan language. This is a pattern replicated across both Northern Catalonia and Corsica, whereby the cultural identity is strongly represented but the presence of the language is visibly very weak, and often absent. To return to Fish-

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man’s terminology (1991), in both minority language settings, Xmen operate largely through Yish. There are exceptions to the general omission of Catalan by private businesses in Perpignan, such as the t-shirt shop Esperit Català on rue Mailly, or the bookshop La Llibreria on the place Jean Payra. In both these premises, Catalan assumes a dominant position visually and functionally. Not only are the shops named in the minority language, but Catalan is deployed on its own for practical reasons, such as publicizing the opening times or confirming the place of manufacture of the goods on sale. Quantitatively, these businesses are very much a minority, and almost all shops, cafés, and businesses in Perpignan’s city centre present themselves to the public in French. A handful of companies fetishize the minority language, deploying it to provide some local colour, or a Catalan accent,10 with a word of welcome in the minority language (such as above the door to the supermarket Casino on the boulevard Félix Mercader) or a short instruction (as in the sign indicating pedestrian access to the Q-Park car park on the boulevard Thomas Wilson). Framing these splashes of the minority language as language fetishes is not to dismiss them, since they perform an important role in providing a visible role for Catalan in the public space. On Corsica, the revitalization of a minority language is not a cause espoused by groups such as French retailers like Celio, The Kooples, or Petit Bateau, or international companies including the Swiss-owned Intersport and Bata, or the US-registered Timberland, all of which have premises along Ajaccio’s main street, the cours Napoléon. None of these businesses places Corsican in the signage in or around their premises. This is possibly to be expected in these private enterprises; as managers of the public space with headquarters far removed from Corsica and with preoccupations other than sustaining the vitality of a minority language, it is unsurprising that Corsican does not feature in their signage, not least because for most of these chain stores, the presentation of the shop front conforms to the corporate image set outwith the island. It is noteworthy that the majority of local small businesses, many of which are owned locally, such as the cafés, chemists, and boutiques which punctuate the cours Napoléon, also omit the minority language from their signage. The space which is managed by Corsicans, many of whom – as attested by research discussed elsewhere (Blackwood 2008) – identify as speakers or semi-speakers of the minority language, is not perceived as somewhere where the revitalization of the Corsican language takes place. There are exceptions to this, such as the barbers on rue Bonaparte in Ajaccio, which features an aging sticker on the door reading Quì si parla corsu (‘Corsican spoken here’). This is a monolingual sign that pre-dates the campaign undertaken by the CTC from 2009 onwards. Regardless of the authorship and the shifting emphasis, both

10 The concept of “a Catalan accent” is encouraged by the département of Pyrénées-Orientales which styles itself in the council’s tagline as “L’accent catalan de la république française”.

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designs of sticker play a small but significant role in the revitalization of the regional language and, although not widespread across the island, they are designed to nurture the revitalization of Corsican by using a written sign to encourage language practices. At the delicatessen and gift shop U Stazzu (meaning ‘the sheepfold’), on the rue Bonaparte in Ajaccio, the doormat is monolingual in Corsican and bidirectional. Those entering the shop are greeted in Corsican with the slogan Benvinutu a u Stazzu (‘Welcome to U Stazzu’), and when leaving the shop, the same mat, but with the legend facing the other direction, proclaims Ringraziamentu di u Stazzu (‘Thank you from U Stazzu’). Although only one artefact, this doormat plays a part in the establishment of Corsican as a language of practical utility on the island. Whilst we should not read too much into a doormat bearing a phatic expression, Jaworski (2015, 215) reminds us that these kinds of signs entextualize values, and in this case, the Corsican language performs an act of welcoming potential consumers into the shop. This performance is undertaken not in the national standard language but in the minority language. Here, whilst it might be argued that (given the nature of the premises as a gift shop) this use of Corsican might merely provide some local colour, we contend that the minority language assumes a function that goes beyond the indexing of a specific linguistic or cultural identity, and which plays a part in conferring authenticity, which we explore from the perspective of consumables. One area where the revitalization process is underway within private enterprise is in the commodification of Corsican in products, especially consumables such as water, beer, and wine. This is in no sense replicated to the same extent for Catalan in Northern Catalonia. The commodification of Corsica in this aspect of the public space resonates with the discussions of language in late capitalism to which Heller/Duchêne (2012) make a significant contribution. Heller (2003, 474) first argues that, in a globalized economy, language acts as a key marker of authenticity, and this assertion nourishes Heller/Duchêne’s later discussion of the commodification of languages. Here, they outline five processes for the shift in understanding of language (and culture) in economic terms that became most prominent at the end of the twentieth century (2012, 8–9), and they summarize this as a reconceptualization of languages – and, from the perspective of this discussion, minority languages in particular – through the prism of pride and profit. This framework underpins our discussion of the role played by the increased visibility of Corsican in the food and drink markets as part of a wider revitalization of the regional language. Unlike Catalan, which is rarely used in the labelling of local products in Northern Catalonia, Corsican is used across a wide range of consumable products which are in circulation on the island’s economic market. The use of Corsican is most striking in the sale of soft drinks (in particular carbonated drinks and water) and beer, although this also extends into local delicacies, such as canistrelli biscuits, cured meats, and wine. This use of minority languages in the public space can, we argue, be graded, from the use of terms in the regional languages to designate a particular foodstuff, through the deploying of proper names in labels, up to the various levels of translation in product labelling.

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3.2.1 Naming cultural artefacts The first level we propose is the using of the minority language to name local specialities, in an echo of the conclusion by Fishman (1991, 24) that a language is linked to its culture in a part-whole fashion. This use of the minority languages can be attested in the LL of both Northern Catalonia and Corsica, and is the phenomenon of introducing the public – in terms of both a local and a wider audience – to a local speciality using its original designation in the minority language, often followed in an adjacent space by an explanation in the dominant language, French. This can often be attested in menus outside restaurants where local dishes, such as the Catalan escalivada (grilled pepper and aubergine), crema catalana (custard tart), or mel i mató (cheese and honey) are designated first in the minority language, and then explained in French (and occasionally other languages for tourists). This phenomenon is associated with most cuisines11 and is usually limited to a handful of visual frames (Kallen 2010), such as the catering industry and tourism. In Catalunya, the regional government campaigned to include Catalan in menus as far back as 1983, but in Perpignan, this phenomenon remains limited to restaurants and cafés aimed at a tourist market. Moreover, Bagna/Machetti (2012, 223) argue that text genres such as menus are not averse to exoticisms, as exemplified by terms for local dishes. These examples of the minority languages in the public space, such as the use of Corsican and Catalan in menus, are a further example of what Thurlow/Jaworski (2011) refer to as “banal globalization”, or what Kelly-Holmes (2005, 184) calls “fake multilingualism”. In other words, the use of these terms does not contribute meaningfully to language revitalization, in that they do not extend significantly the use of the minority languages by new or semi-speakers but instead they give an impression of multilingualism often not matched by the language practices of those working or living in the area.

3.2.2 Proper nouns as normalization The designation of localized culinary practices in the minority language can be differentiated from the use of proper nouns, usually the names of the producer or manufacturer, which we identify as a second level of commodification. This, we contend, plays a more significant role in the normalization of a minority language, rather than its revitalization. We argue that this use of proper nouns as brand names, especially when closely identifiable with a distinct minority language (largely for morphological reasons) sustains the process of normalization, whereby the visibility

11 See Bagna/Machetti (2012) for the use of Italian culinary terms such as pizza, cappuccino and pasta in the LL.

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of a minority language is rendered more ordinary and commonplace by its appearance on supermarket shelves, in bars, and on café terraces. Examples of this on Corsica include the most popular brand of sparkling mineral water, Orezza, named after the village where the source is located; honey labelled Valentini, using the apiculturist’s surname; and chestnut flour known as Vincensini, which takes the producer’s name. This approach is notable in particular with the use of proper names in the labelling of wines, especially given the significance of wine as articulated by Barthes (1957). Names which clearly resonate as Corsican, given the morphological markers such as word-final -u, play a role in the emplacement of the minority language in the public space and, when visible on products to which value is attributed – such as wine – enhance the prestige of the language.

3.2.3 Minority languages as practicable resources The third stage of revitalization through commodification is where the minority language transcends its symbolic character in product labelling and designation and assumes a functional role. As we discuss elsewhere (Blackwood, forthcoming) with reference to carbonated drinks, seeking to give a minority language a practical use in labelling is an important step in exceeding the more widespread role of adding local colour and a certain level of authenticity. We note in particular the use of the Corsican language in the soft drinks made by the producer Pietra, based in Bastia, in northern Corsica. The company’s two main soft drinks, Corsica-Cola and Limunata Carina, are on sale across the island and are visible in the public space in both retail and catering domains. The producer’s decision to deploy the minority language – to differing degrees – contributes to the wider debate around language revitalization, but again is not a pattern replicated in Northern Catalonia. If we analyse the cans of Corsica-Cola using Reh’s (2004) typology of LL translations, we are able to distinguish between the different approaches adopted by the same manufacturer. For Corsica-Cola, a cursory glance at the cans by the (potential) consumer suggests a duplicating approach to language use, where the information that is provided in French is also given in the minority language. Instructions such as how to serve the cola drink, and information on its expiry date are listed in both French and Corsican. Closer inspection of the product points to a translation strategy that is not parallel, but is actually closer to what Reh (2004, 10) describes as fragmentary: storage advice and the list of ingredients are given in French alone. As a consequence, the primacy of the French language as an ideology is replicated, and the consumer requires French to understand all the information provided on the cans.

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3.3 Musicians, action groups, and individuals: guerrilla revitalization Beyond the parts played by civic authorities and businesses in minority language revitalization in the public space, there is evidence from the fieldwork on Corsica across the surveys of engagement by individuals and groups. As with many of the examples of commodification of language in consumables, the trend on Corsica is not replicated in Northern Catalonia. This approach to revitalization is not sponsored by elected representatives with funding raised by taxation, nor by businesses who perceive an economic advantage to deploying the regional language. It is to this end that we refer to this activity as guerrilla revitalization, modelled on guerrilla marketing, with its reliance on unconventional approaches (including innovation and humour) and its low-cost amplification, designed to obtain widespread exposure. By this term, we do not seek solely to imply a transgressive aspect to this language use. Examples of this approach include artefacts produced in Corsican, such as books, anthologies of poems, DVDs, and CDs, which are in circulation across the island and which are consumed by both a domestic and a tourist public. Linked to these outputs are the material associated with cultural activity, such as posters and leaflets. This kind of matter is different, we argue, from the signage produced by local museums and civic cultural bodies, in terms of authorship and motivation. For example, the Museum of Corsica, in the town of Corte, is owned and managed by the CTC, who classify it as an ethnographic museum. Answerable to the regional civic authorities, who have committed themselves to using the minority language in signage, these kinds of examples of the use of Corsican in cultural activity are, we argue, different from the employment of the regional language in posters and flyers for publicizing cultural outputs. Examples abound around the island, from city centre streets to rural telegraph poles, of the use of Corsican in signage, often homemade posters printed from desktop computers and photocopied non-professionally, linked with song, poetry, or another kind of artistic performance. For example, a mass produced poster for the folk group I Muvrini was found on lampposts, noticeboards, and other permanent street furniture during the 2010 survey. The A4-sized black and white poster, featuring one of the group’s preferred logos – a Moor’s head which echoes the island’s symbol (see Blackwood 2014) – provides the background onto which a small, coloured sheet of paper featuring the details of the performance is stapled. The combination of the languages used is notable in that there is no replication of information in both French and Corsican; the start time of the concert is given in French, but the location of the venues is in the minority language, and even the towns where the group will be performed are given in their Corsicanized versions, rather than using the French toponyms. Here, we argue, the use of the minority language points to a different approach of revitalization. Instead of the duplication of information as required by law and as identified as a formally agreed target for the various arms of the island’s civic authorities, the use of Corsican by I Muvrini points to a different level of engagement with language

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revitalization, and one that is premised on cultural identity and added value, rather than an agreed commitment to the minority language. This kind of use of Corsican is not limited to music groups, but also extends to local cultural activity, such as the traditional poetry competitions Chjam è Rispondi, and social action, such as a demonstration called to protest against the supply of illegal drugs. As attested elsewhere, for instance in Nice (Blackwood/Tufi 2015, 53– 54), minority languages can be appropriated by fans of sports teams, especially football, and in particular, by ultras, the younger and highly committed supporters of clubs (Louis 2008). This emplacement of the minority language is adopted on Corsica by ultras known as Paese Turchinu (‘the Blue Nation’) supporting Sporting Club de Bastia, whose stickers can be found on lampposts, street signs, shop windows, and other surfaces with slogans proclaiming sentiments such as Quì se sustene U Sporting (‘Here we support Sporting’). In comparison with the posters discussed above, this deployment of the minority language is transgressive, inasmuch as the emplacement of the stickers is not authorized and usually involves private or civic property. It points to a role for the minority language in the sustaining of local cultural identity, set up in opposition to national (i.e. French) identity, and is echoed on Corsica by graffiti. Whilst not particularly widespread, and not always in Corsican, the production of graffiti can serve as an act of language revitalization; Pennycook (2009, 307) reminds us that graffiti “confront the lines of authority around the public space” and to this end, the use of the minority language challenges not only ownership of space, but also the ideologies of those who control that space.

4 Conclusions In considering the revitalization of minority languages in the public space, we exploit the potential of the Linguistic Landscape to analyse meaningfully the act of writing in Catalan and Corsican in two parts of France. This production of minority languages in a specific mode, public writing, is in contrast with traditional perspectives on revitalization, which have privileged acquisition, speech, and writing for what we might refer to as private purposes. Here, instead, we discuss the revitalization of minority languages from the specific starting point of very public and visible production. In adopting this approach, we do not presume that the act of emplacing signs in a minority language equates to revitalization. Language acquisition is not achieved by populating the public space with examples of a given language. However, the revitalization process is enhanced and furthered by the appearance of a minority language in towns and cities in that the visibility of Corsican or Catalan, to take our examples, indexes both the validity and the utility of these languages in a market which has been successfully dominated by French, as the national standard language, in late modernity. Much effort is devoted by language activists, committed teachers, parents, pupils, and new speakers to teach and learn minority languages in France, but, as noted on

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Corsica (Blackwood 2008, 146) this process will stall if there are no viable forums in which to use Corsican (and, by the same measure, Catalan in Northern Catalonia). As such, the emplacement of minority languages in the public spaces acts as a fillip to language beliefs and to the attitudes held by both speakers and non-speakers. In answer, therefore, to the first research question, the LL, whilst not a guarantee of revitalization, is a domain of necessity if revitalization is to be successful. In both settings explored in this chapter, it is possible to disambiguate the actors involved in language revitalization. We discern here the role played by the various levels of civic authorities, by private enterprise, and by individuals who may or may not self-identify as language activists. The civic authorities can be perceived as the most significant stakeholder in the revitalization of minority languages in the public space, not because they manage the largest estate within the public sphere, but because they govern (to varying degrees) the language management strategies that dictate the language practices of others. In this respect, we note that Paris, as shorthand for the national government and the country’s elite, continues to define language policy for the entire country, and ensures that minority languages remain in an unequal competition with French on the linguistic market. At a local level, language management is more fluid and tailored to the cultural and linguistic specificities of the region, département, or city, and we note above the different approaches, adopted by elected locals in Northern Catalonia and Corsica, to language revitalization via the public space. In town and city centres, more physical space is occupied and managed by private enterprise than by the civic authorities, and here we identify several different strategies employed by businesses in terms of their language use. Based on our fieldwork, national and transnational companies tend not to deploy the minority languages in their premises, and so it is correct to assert that the more localized the business, the more likely they are to display Catalan in Northern Catalonia or Corsican on Corsica. However, there is no direct correlation between the size of the business or their market reach and their use of a minority language; more often than not, local businesses do not use Catalan or Corsican in the arrangement of their premises. We identify notable exceptions to this, in particular when the minority language is commodified as a “guarantee” of authenticity; more infrequently, the minority language can assume a practical function, but these cases, such as the use of Corsican on cans of CorsicaCola, are the exception rather than the rule. The data discussed in this chapter, therefore, suggest that the primary actors in language revitalization are the civic authorities – we contend that local government (in its various guises) plays the most significant role in revitalization in the LL. Finally, the individual plays a restrained if significant part in revitalization in the public space. On the one hand, the wider public, made up of the individuals who inhabit, work in, or pass through our cities, is the addressee of the LL, and they engage either passively or actively with the signs in Catalan or Corsican that are sprinkled throughout the space through which they make their way. On the other

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hand, some individuals are engaged in language revitalization, occasionally transgressively, by their shaping of the public space through homemade signs, handwritten notices, or spray-painted graffiti. Power in language revitalization in the LL can be claimed by individuals but the nature of the management of the public space means that agency is concentrated in the hands of local civic authorities. As such, we conclude that the public space is a highly important domain in minority language revitalization, not merely on the grounds of its visibility in daily life, but also in terms of its accessibility: physically, visually, and in terms of intervention by various levels of actors. Whilst we have contrasted two different minority Romance varieties in this chapter, we posit that despite the differences in their presence in the LL, there are commonalities to be discerned. In particular, we highlight that action by local public bodies, including town and regional councils, are central to the revitalization efforts, even though private enterprise occupies more physical space in our towns and cities. From a methodological perspective, the LL offers researchers the potential to argue with confidence about increased/decreased usage of languages in the public space. The identification of survey areas and their examination at intervals (which range in this chapter from three to six years) provide evidence for the changing visibility of minority languages such as Catalan and Corsican which, in turn, index evolving language beliefs amongst those who govern or engage with the public space. In other words, the diachronic potential of the public space as approached through LL studies opens up the possibility of evaluating minority language revitalization with a view to better understanding practices and the capacity for towns and cities where Romance varieties are spoken to act as forums for language revival.

5 Bibliography Amos, H. William (2017), Regional Language Vitality in the Linguistic Landscape: Hidden Hierarchies in Street Signs in Toulouse, International Journal of Multilingualism 14(2), 93–108. Appadurai, Arjun (1986), Commodities and the Politics of Value, in: Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 3–63. Aronin, Larissa/Ó Laoire, Muiris (2012), The Material Culture of Multilingualism, in: Durk Gorter/Heiko F. Marten/Luk Van Mensel (edd.), Minority Languages in the Linguistic Landscape, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 299–318. Backhaus, Peter (2007), Linguistic Landscapes: A Comparative Study of Urban Multilingualism in Tokyo, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters. Bagna, Carla/Machetti, Sabrina (2012), LL and (Italian) Menus and Brand Names: A Survey Around the World, in: Christine Hélot et al. (edd.), Linguistic Landscapes, Multilingualism, and Social Change, Frankfurt, Lang, 217–230. Barthes, Roland (1957), Mythologies, Paris, Seuil. Ben-Rafael, Eliezer, et al. (2006), Linguistic Landscape as Symbolic Construction of the Public Space: The Case of Israel, International Journal of Multilingualism 3(1), 7–30.

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Blackwood, Robert (2008), The State, the Activists, and the Islanders: Language Policy on Corsica, Amsterdam, Springer. Blackwood, Robert (2010), Marking France’s Public Space: Empirical Surveys on Regional Heritage Languages in Two Provincial Cities, in: Elana Shohamy/Eliezer Ben-Rafael/Monica Barni (edd.), Linguistic Landscape in the City, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 292–306. Blackwood, Robert (2011), The Linguistic Landscape of Brittany and Corsica: A Comparative Study of the Presence of France’s Regional Languages in the Public Space, Journal of French Language Studies 21(2), 111–130. Blackwood, Robert (2014), The Top-Down Revitalization of Corsican: Considering the Reversal of a Language Shift in the Linguistic and Semiotic Landscapes of Ajaccio, French Studies 68(1), 61–77. Blackwood, Robert (2015), LL Explorations and Methodological Challenges: Analysing France’s Regional Languages, Linguistic Landscape 1(1/2), 38–53. Blackwood, Robert (forthcoming), Chestnut Beer, Corsica-Cola, and Wine Bottles: The Commodification of Corsican in the Linguistic and Semiotic Landscapes of the Island’s Drinks Industry, International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Blackwood, Robert/Tufi, Stefania (2012), Policies vs Non-Policies: Analysing Regional Languages and the National Standard in the Linguistic Landscape of French and Italian Mediterranean Cities, in: Durk Gorter/Heiko F. Marten/Luk van Mensel (edd.), Minority Languages in the Linguistic Landscape, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 109–126. Blackwood, Robert/Tufi, Stefania (2015), The Linguistic Landscape of the Mediterranean: French and Italian Coastal Cities, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Bourdieu, Pierre (1991), Language and Symbolic Power, London, Polity Press. Bruyèl-Olmedo, Antonio/Juan-Garau, Maria (2015), Minority Languages in the Linguistic Landscape of Tourism: The Case of Catalan in Mallorca, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 36(6), 598–619. Coluzzi, Paulo (2009), The Italian Linguistic Landscape: The Case of Milan and Udine, International Journal of Multilingualism 6(3), 298–312. Coluzzi, Paulo (2012), Multilingual Societies vs Monolingual States: The Linguistic Landscapes in Italy and Brunei Darussalam in: Durk Gorter/Heiko F. Marten/Luk van Mensel (edd.), Minority Languages in the Linguistic Landscape, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 225–242. Comajoan, Llorenç/Long, Ethan (2012), The Linguistic Landscape of Three Streets in Barcelona: Patterns of Language Visibility in Public Space in: Durk Gorter/Heiko F. Marten/Luk van Mensel (edd.), Minority Languages in the Linguistic Landscape, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 183–202. CTC (2007), Rapport du Président du Conseil exécutif de Corse relatif au plan stratégique d’aménagement et de développement linguistiques pour la langue corse 2007–2013, Ajaccio, Collectivité Territoriale de Corse. Dal Negro, Silvia (2009), Local Policy Modeling the Linguistic Landscape, in: Elana Shohamy/Durk Gorter (edd.), Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the Scenery, London/New York, Routledge, 206– 218. Dunlevy, Deirdre (2012), Linguistic Policy and Linguistic Choice: A Study of the Galician Linguistic Landscape, in: Christine Hélot et al. (edd.), Linguistic Landscapes, Multilingualism and Social Change, Frankfurt, Lang, 53–68. Edwards, John (2007), Back From The Brink: The Revival of Endangered Languages, in: Marlis Helinger/Anna Pauwels (edd.), Handbook of Language and Communication: Diversity and Change, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 241–269. Fishman, Joshua A. (1991), Reversing Language Shift, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters. Gorter, Durk/Aiestaran, Jokin/Cenoz, Jasone (2012), The Revitalization of Basque and the Linguistic Landscape of Donostia-San Sebastián, in: Durk Gorter/Heiko F. Marten/Luk Van Mensel (edd.), Minority Languages in the Linguistic Landscape, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 148–163.  

 

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Gorter, Durk/Marten, Heiko F./van Mensel, Luk (edd.) (2012), Minority Languages in the Linguistic Landscape, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Grinevald, Colette/Bert, Michel (2011), Speakers and Communities, in: Peter Austin/Julia Sallabank (edd.), The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 45–65. Heller, Monica (2003), Globalization, the New Economy, and the Commodification of Language and Identity, Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(4), 473–492. Heller, Monica/Duchêne, Alexandre (2012), Pride and Profit: Changing Discourses of Language, Capital and Nation-State, in: Alexandre Duchêne/Monica Heller (edd.), Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit, London/New York, Routledge, 1–21. Järlehed, Johan (2015), Ideological Framing of Vernacular Type Choices in the Galician and Basque Semiotic Landscape, Social Semiotics 25(2), 165–199. Jaworski, Adam (2015), Welcome: Synthetic Personalization and Commodification of Sociability in the Linguistic Landscape of Global Tourism, in: Bernard Spolsky/Ofra Inbar-Lourie/Michal Tannenbaum (edd.), Challenges for Language Education and Policy: Making Space for People, London/ New York, Routledge. Jaworski, Adam/Thurlow, Crispin (edd.) (2010), Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space, London, Continuum. Judge, Anne (2007), Linguistic Policies and the Survival of Regional Languages in France and Britain, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Kallen, Jeffrey L. (2010), Changing Landscapes: Language, Space and Policy in the Dublin Linguistic Landscape, in: Adam Jaworski/Crispin Thurlow (edd.), Semiotic Landscapes. Language, Image, Space, London, Continuum, 41–58. Kelly-Holmes, Helen (2005), Advertising as Multilingual Communication, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Lado, Beatriz (2011), Linguistic Landscape as a Reflection of the Linguistic and Ideological Conflict in the Valencian Community, International Journal of Multilingualism 8(2), 135–150. Landry, Rodrigue/Bourhis, Richard Y. (1997), Linguistic Landscape and Ethnolinguistic Vitality: An Empirical Study, Journal of Language and Social Psychology 16, 23–49. Leeman, Jennifer/Modan, Gabriella (2009), Commodified Language in Chinatown: A Contextualized Approach to Linguistic Landscape, Journal of Sociolinguistics 13(3), 332–362. Louis, Sébastien (2008), Le Phénomène ultras en Italie, Paris, Mare et Marin. Pavlenko, Aneta (2010), Linguistic Landscape of Kyiv, Ukraine: A Diachronic Study, in: Elana Shohamy/Eliezer Ben-Rafael/Monica Barni (edd.), Linguistic Landscape in the City, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 133–150. Pennycook, Alastair (2009), Linguistic Landscapes and the Transgressive Semiotics of Graffiti, in: Elana Shohamy/Durk Gorter (edd.), Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the Scenery, 302–312. Reh, Mechthild (2004), Multilingual Writing: A Reader-Oriented Typology – with Examples from Lira Municipality (Uganda), International Journal of the Sociology of Language 170(1), 1– 41. Shohamy, Elana/Ben-Rafael, Eliezer/Barni, Monica (edd.) (2010), Linguistic Landscape in the City, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters. Spolsky, Bernard (2004), Language Policy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Spolsky, Bernard/Cooper, Robert L. (1991), The Languages of Jerusalem, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Thurlow, Crispin/Jaworski, Adam (2011), Banal Globalization? Embodied Actions and Mediated Practices in Tourists’ Online Photo-Sharing, in: Crispin Thurlow/Kristine Mroczek (edd.), Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 220–250.

Anna Ghimenton and Giovanni Depau

21 Revitalization and education Abstract: This chapter focuses on the revitalization of Romance minority languages and language education policies. After briefly defining language planning and revitalization, we analyse the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, focusing in particular on its goals concerning the implementation of measures for the valorization of minority/regional languages. We then review the educational policies of two of the countries that have not yet ratified the Charter, namely France and Italy, in order to better understand the ways in which their political and historical backgrounds may influence the decision to ratify the Charter or not. In the last section, we draw attention to the ways in which geopolitical and linguistic borders interact with the minority language education policies and measures of revitalization. The observation of local, national and supranational language education policies affords further evidence to show that the steps of revitalization are the fruit of both top-down and bottom-up processes.  

Keywords: revitalization, language education policies, language minorities, transnational and interregional borders  

1 Introduction: context and research questions Language revitalization and education issues concern various levels of implementation, contributing to their complexity as an object of study. The very concept of “minority language” is the subject of considerable debate and the arguments put forward depend on the ideologies and representations its speakers and decision makers have of these languages. Hence, their interpretation and the associated language planning actions will vary from one state to another. Given the large spectrum of sub-topics covered by the broad subject “revitalization and education”, we will focus on specific issues within the European Romance context. Our contribution opens with a general discussion of the terminology used and of the issues concerning language contact and multilingualism within a Europe that aims to promote language diversity in different domains, in particular via education policies (Darquennes 2010). We will concentrate on the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (1992), and on how it was received by the different European countries. The Charter has indeed been the first and most significant political step made on a European scale with regards to the debate on minority languages. This will lead us to take into consideration the impact of State borders in the recognition of language minorities and in the different types of actions taken to https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-022

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promote minority languages as an object of study and as a medium of instruction. Adopting a comparative approach, we will highlight different political measures implemented for the safeguard of linguistic diversity. What are the elements at stake when it comes to defining a successful language revitalization policy? How is the concept of “minority language” taken into consideration by the different social actors (decision makers, militant associations, etc.) at different scales (national/international)? The chapter concludes with the presentation of different sociolinguistic situations (Corsican, Francoprovençal, Catalan, and Sardinian) that illustrate the complexity of these research questions and, more generally, of policy implementation, especially when it comes to education. The chapter is organized so as to shed light on some of the main issues involving language revitalization. Border issues are particularly pertinent because they show the impact of the historic and socio-political specificity of each country. In addition, this approach allows for the observation of the very delicate equilibrium between different languages in the same geopolitical space and thus the ways in which radically different policies can be implemented for the same languages (e.g. Francoprovençal/French respectively in France, in Switzerland and Italy).

2 Theoretical issues concerning language planning and revitalization When dealing with language policies that aim at language revitalization on an institutional level, it is important to take into consideration the sociolinguistic research conducted on the languages concerned as well as their speakers. The cross-fertilization of sociolinguistic and political reflections gives rise to greater efficiency when it comes to the institutional actions taken for the safeguard of language minorities. Moreover, linguistic research should provide the terminological and theoretical apparatus for the political debate concerning this issue. Fishman’s Reversing Language Shift (RLS) model (Fishman 1990; 1991), as well as many others that have followed (see Darquennes 2007 for a presentation of some of these models), focus on language revitalization measures. In Fishman’s model, and in particular, in his Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS), aiming to estimate the survival capacity of a minority language, education constitutes a pivotal point where a threatened language moves towards a situation of shift reversal, as “education issues” figure in 4 of the 8 steps of the scale (cf. Lagarde 2007, for a discussion of the GIDS model in the French context). However, policy implementation needs to take into account several aspects of which acquisition planning is one of three fundamental parameters, following Hornberger’s (2006) tripartite language planning schema: 1) Status, 2) Corpus and 3) Acquisition (see Hélot 2007 for a detailed discussion of this point). Status planning concerns the consideration of functional and formal aspects of a language within its community in order to increase the language’s social status. A

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typical approach based on status planning deals with toponymy in the local language (cf. Landry/Bourhis 1997; Shohamy/Ben-Rafael/Barni 2010, for more on the linguistic landscape see ↗20 Revitalization and the public space) or the promotion of the minority language as a medium for scientific publications or for advertising purposes (see Gobbo 2009 for further exemples). In corpus planning, issues of normalization are addressed. These concern three main dimensions: orthography, standardization and elaboration of the language’s structure in order to maximize its coverage of different domains of usage. Finally, acquisition planning deals with the extension in terms of quantity and quality of the language acquisition/learning, thus including the number of its speakers. As has been underscored by numerous studies, these three points are interdependent and thus cannot be dissociated when elaborating political policies concerning minority languages. Minority language education necessarily concerns all of these three dimensions. Indeed, it seems logical that education matters are embedded in acquisition planning. Yet, in order to tackle issues of status, it is essential to work on the speakers’ representations of the minority language. In addition, issues of corpus planning also have to be addressed, for instance, when dealing with the question of the variety to be taught at school both as a medium and object of instruction as well as the language used in textbooks and other pedagogical material. In the following sections, we explore concrete examples of language revitalization measures and education policies, taking into consideration different European countries in order to see how the elements of revitalization mentioned above can apply to different sociolinguistic and national contexts.

3 The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages 3.1 A brief overview of the Charter In 1992, the European Council drew up the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (henceforth ECRML),1 composed of twenty-three Articles divided into five parts: I) General provisions; II) Objectives and principles; III) Measures to promote the use of regional or minority languages in public life; IV) Application of the Charter; V) Final provisions.

1 http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/EN/Treaties/Html/148.htm (last access 30.09.2015).

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The approach adopted in the Charter favours interculturalism and multilingualism, which is particularly appropriate in the European context where diversity is viewed as an asset. Whilst the ECRML places considerable importance on the achievement of “greater unity between its members”,2 this is seen as possible only if the different States’ ideals and principles are respected and considered as a “common heritage”. Furthermore, Europe’s historical regional or minority languages are perceived as valuable assets for the protection and development of Europe’s “cultural wealth and traditions”; respect for “principles of democracy and cultural diversity within the framework of national sovereignty and territorial integrity” is thus guaranteed. Unlike the majority of international treaties granting rights to individuals, the ECRML focuses on cultural rights rather than on individuals through the implementation of political measures that focus on the preservation of regional or minority languages as an important part of Europe’s cultural resources (Alén Garabato 2013; Varennes 2008; Woehrling 2005; 2013): “[…] The Charter does not claim to deal with individuals at all: its object is cultural rather than ’human’. […] its aim is to preserve languages as part of the European cultural heritage, rather than to address the protection of individuals who are speakers of a regional or minority language” (Varennes 2008, 26–27).

Consequently, the Charter aims to oblige the European states to act in the minority languages’ best interests, thus underscoring their heritage value. Yet, it does not favour minority languages by placing them in opposition to the national languages. This is evident in the document’s Preamble: “Stressing the value of interculturalism and multilingualism and considering that the protection and encouragement of regional or minority languages should not be to the detriment of the official languages and the need to learn them”.

Moreover, Varennes (2008) pinpoints another difference between this Charter and previous treaties: the language used is less vague and less open to interpretation. This means that countries that have signed and ratified the Charter are obliged to follow the recommendations for the safeguard of the minority languages spoken in their territory. As Dunbar (2008, 38) points out, the ECRML “is generally much more detailed, precise and comprehensive in its provisions – particularly those of Part III – than other treaties and other international legal instruments of relevance to linguistic minorities”. As Woehrling (2005; 2013) states, adopting a political stance that does not repress language minorities is not sufficient, because the states are obliged to ensure a positive approach towards cultural promotion and to guarantee active support of the minority languages. There is thus a movement from the typical treaty that guarantees rights to one that states specific obligations:  

2 The quotations refer to statements extracted from the Charter’s Preamble.

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“On passe d’une logique des ‘droits’ (pour les personnes et les groupes) à une logique de ‘devoirs’ et d’obligation d’action (pour les états et les pouvoirs publics)” (Woehrling 2013, 227).

Perhaps it is precisely because the Charter insists on these obligations that certain countries seem to be reluctant to sign and ratify it.

3.2 Education issues: the Charter’s position on teaching minority or regional languages Issues concerning education are mentioned in parts II and III of the Charter. In Part II (Objectives and Principles) under Article 7, it is specified that countries should provide “appropriate forms and means for the teaching and study of regional or minority languages at all appropriate stages”. Hence, countries that have ratified the Charter are expected to give themselves the (financial and pedagogical) means to ensure tuition in and on the minority or regional languages. There is space for flexibility in the interpretation of this point, in particular, in the use of the adjective “appropriate” which leaves it open to the good will of the decision makers. Interestingly, importance is also placed on each minority/regional language’s diamesic variation “potential” as an efficient form of promotion: “[…] the facilitation and/or encouragement of the use of regional or minority languages, in speech and writing, in public and private life”. Hence, issues concerning writing could act upon the minority language’s status since a (minority) language used in both its spoken and written forms is likely to be more valorized than a language that is used in only its spoken form (Hornberger’s 2006 “status”). Yet these very issues could potentially spark conflicting views on normalization. Another point worthy of attention concerns “the provision of facilities enabling non-speakers of a regional or minority language living in the area where it is used to learn it if they so desire”. Returning to Hornberger’s language planning schema, this point concerns the “acquisition” dimension in that the regional/minority language must be made available, not only to the autochthonous speakers, but also to any speaker wanting to learn the language, thus increasing its diffusion. In addition, focus is also placed on giving the regional/minority languages the resources to become the object of study in tertiary education (“at universities or equivalent institutions”). In Part III of the Charter, entitled Measures to Promote the Use of Regional or Minority Languages in Public Life, Article 8 is centred more specifically on Education. Tuition in the regional/minority language should be “made available” at all levels of education, from pre-school to tertiary education depending on the speakers’ demands. There has to be a critical mass of demands for education in a regional/ minority language to be viable: “to those pupils whose families so request and whose number is considered sufficient”. Moreover, the Charter does not only focus on the teaching of the language itself. It also mentions the teaching of the cultural and  

 

 

 

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historical background of the regional/minority language. Finally, for greater efficiency, these measures should be supervised by professionals who are meant to analyse learners’ levels of achievement. These supervising bodies are to follow the progress made and to publish the results of their surveys. As can be seen in the conditions above, the Charter presents numerous challenging issues to be addressed once the countries have ratified it. These issues present budgetary constraints and need to be adequately dealt with because they require a well-organized infrastructure.

3.3 To ratify or not to ratify, that is the question: ratification and education policy The Charter specifies clear safeguard measures by which the adhering countries are expected to abide. Below, we have drawn up a simplified version of the table available on the European Union’s website3 showing which countries have signed and/or ratified the Charter. We have selected the main countries in which Romance minority languages are spoken4. Table 1: Ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages  

Country

Date of signature

Date of ratification

Entry into force

France

7 May 1999

–

N/A

Italy

27 June 2000

–

N/A

Spain

5 November 1992

8 April 2001

1 August 2001

Switzerland

8 October 1993

23 December 1997

1 April 1998

All four countries signed the Charter between 1992 and 2000. However, only Spain and Switzerland ratified it, respectively in 2001 and 1997. In both countries, it has already entered into force. France and Italy have yet to ratify the Charter. It is for this reason that we focus on these countries in the rest of the chapter.

3 http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/Commun/ChercheSig.asp?NT=148&CM=8&DF=&CL=ENG (last access 15.09.2015). 4 Mention should be made of the fact that among the other main European countries where Romance languages are spoken in their territory, neither Belgium nor Portugal has signed or ratified the Charter, whilst Moldova signed it in 2002 but still has not ratified it and Romania ratified it in 2007. We will not tackle the issue of Romance minorities within non-Romance countries (e.g. Romanian in Hungary, etc.).

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3.3.1 French language planning measures and education The adoption of languages other than French is often seen in France as a “deviant language practice” to be treated with suspicion, a position which creates tensions between the state and defenders of minority languages: “La crispation de l’état à ne pas céder d’un pouce exaspère ceux qui défendent les autres langues, au point que les tensions augmentent et que de part et d’autre on recourt à des moyens qui ne sont pas toujours élégants. Le monolinguisme français est devenu doctrine d’état, quiconque s’y oppose devient (idéologiquement) suspect” (Kremnitz 2013, 25).

Looking back over the history of French language policy since 1539, with the Ordonnance de Villers-Cotterêts, French replaces Latin as the language used in law and administration (for an introduction, see Kremnitz 2013). The monolingual idealistic vision of a French people unified through the French language is well illustrated by the Abbé Grégoire’s Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d’anéantir les patois et d’universaliser l’usage de la langue française (1794), claiming the exclusive diffusion of French via the annihilation of the local patois. Progressively, French gained territory and became the language spoken and used at school, in particular under the Third Republic, as a consequence of Jules Ferry’s education bill, leading to the right for all individuals to have access to free schooling in 1881–1882 (Alén Garabato 2007). Under the Fourth Republic the situation seems to change for France’s minority languages, in particular with the Law n. 51-46 (Loi Deixonne) passed in 1951. This law concerns the role of France’s regional and minority languages in the education system. As Gardin (1975) remarks, the Loi Deixonne is an important step in the language planning history of France, as specific measures are taken towards the inclusion of the regional/minority languages as optional subjects in the education system. In fact, it is the only law in France concerned with regional/minority language teaching (Alén Garabato/Cellier 2009). Two Romance languages – Occitan and Catalan – are affected by this law, along with two non-Romance languages, Breton and Basque. However, the Loi Deixonne was supplemented in 1975 by Law n. 75-1349 (Loi Bas-Lauriol), which does not consider issues of language diversity, as its focus is on French and its exclusive usage (Chansou 1997; Määttä 2005), proscribing all usage of “foreign terms”.5 It is worthy of note that the French patois were considered to be “foreign languages” (Vigier 1979). In the 1980s, increasing pressure was placed on decision makers concerning the recognition of the minority/regional languages in France, pushing the President of the French Republic, François Mitterrand, to consider the issue and to commission Henri 5 “Le recours à tout terme étranger ou à toute expression étrangère est prohibé lorsqu’il existe une expression ou un terme approuvés dans les conditions prévues par le décret n° 72–19 du 7 janvier 1972 relatif à l’enrichissement de la langue française” (Law 75-1349, Art. 1); cf. http://www.avenir-languefrancaise.fr/articles.php?lng=fr&pg=246 (last access 18.02.2018).

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Giordan to find further solutions to multilingualism in France (Kremnitz 2013). Soon after, the ECRML was drawn up and France was confronted with the recognition of its multilingualism, although this excluded the languages spoken by the migrant communities living on its territory (Alén Garabato 2013). But the drawing up of the Charter did not prevent the passing of Law n. 94-665 (Loi Toubon) in 1994 which states that French is the Republic’s language and is a fundamental element of France’s personality and heritage as well as the language to be adopted in schools, work and public services (“Langue de la République en vertu de la Constitution, la langue française est un élément fondamental de la personnalité et du patrimoine de la France. Elle est la langue de l’enseignement, du travail, des échanges et des services publics”).6 In the terms used, the Loi Toubon clearly adds a psychosocial and affective dimension to the language planning measures, imposing French as the language that expresses a common cultural heritage and identity, and thus marginalizing any form of language diversity and multilingualism. As Martel (2010) points out, it seems paradoxical to see that France, inherently multilingual, adopts a resolutely unilingual stance when it comes to language planning and education. This law, still in force today, constitutes one of the major impediments to the endorsement of the ECRML (Woehrling 2001). It is important to note that the ECRML did not engender only negative reactions to language diversity. In fact, Bernard Cerquiglini’s Rapport,7 “Les Langues de la France”, published in 1999, enumerates 75 minority/regional languages present in France,8 to which the government should assign different forms of recognition, according to the indications given in the Charter (cf. Parts II and III). The Rapport was commissioned by the French Ministry of Education and aims to list the languages that are part of the French linguistic heritage. Contrary to the Charter’s definition of “regional” or “minority” languages, Cerquiglini includes languages spoken by the migrant communities living on French territory and who are historically linked to France, for example Berber, dialectal Arabic, Armenian, Yiddish, etc. Education issues are briefly taken into consideration in this Rapport. According to the latter, should the government decide to provide tuition in the minority/regional language, issues of orthography and, more generally, writing systems must be addressed appropriately for each language.9 6 http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=LEGITEXT000005616341 (last access 18.02. 2018). 7 http://www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/rapports-publics/994000719/index.shtml (last access 22.09.2015). 8 The Romance languages that figure in the list are: Catalan, Corsican, Francoprovençal, Occitan (Gascon, Languedocien, Auvergnat-Limousin, Alpin-Dauphinois); the langues d’oïl (Franc-Comtois, Wallon, Picard, Normand, Gallo, Pointevin-Santongeais, Bourguignon-Morvandiau, Lorrain). To this list, we can add the French-based and Anglo/Portuguese-based creoles. 9 Another sign of change in France’s institutional attitude vis-à-vis regional languages, is the transformation of the DGLF – Délégation Générale à la Langue Française – into the DGLFLF – Délégation Générale à la Langue Française et aux Langues de France – in 2001. Amongst the DGLFLF’s primary

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Besides technical difficulties on the juridical front, ratification of the ECRML has been the subject of an on-going political debate in France. Lionel Jospin, the socialist Prime Minister under Jacques Chirac’s presidency, signed the Charter, but his attempts to ratify it were in vain. In Chirac’s second mandate and during Sarkozy’s presidency, the prospect of ratification was not considered. During his presidential campaign in 2012, François Hollande declared that the ECMRL’s ratification would figure in his political agenda, should he be elected President of France. In 2015, he reopened the issue by stating his intention to ratify the ECRML to Christiane Taubira, Minister of Justice, which would result in a constitutional amendment in order to adhere to the measures specified in the Charter (cf. French constitution, Articles 2 and 75-1). Ratification is undoubtedly a very controversial issue, given France’s historical and political background (Wright 2000). Indeed, in October 2015, the French Senate voted for the withdrawal of the proposal of ratification made by the Minister of Justice, mainly because it was seen as a factor which might potentially damage national unity. Regardless of the political debates concerning the Charter’s ratification mentioned above, some of France’s Romance minority languages are represented in the education system. In November 2013, Vincent Peillon, Minister of the French National Education, drew up a reference document, Apprendre et enseigner les langues et les cultures régionales dans l’école de la République, for the teaching of minority languages from pre-school to Baccalauréat. Indeed, among the seven languages included in the CAPES (Certificat d’Aptitude Professionnelle à l’Enseignement Secondaire), three – Catalan, Corsican, and Occitan – are Romance languages to which we can also add French-based creole. To complete this section dealing with minority languages within the French schooling system, it is important to mention the diffusion of the Calandreta (Occitan school) and the La Bressola (Catalan School), two examples of educational associations that are recognized by the French National Education Ministry.10 There are 63 Calandreta schools in 18 French departments11 and seven La Bressola schools (6 primary schools and 1 secondary school) grouped in one French department situated in Northern Catalonia (Pyrénées Orientales department).12 Despite the regional educational initiatives mentioned above, recognized by the national government and in many cases integrated into an institutional public frame 

goals is the valorization of the regional languages in different domains, including education, as well as taking into account the debate on the ECRML, cf. the 2013 official report Redéfinir une politique publique en faveur des langues régionales et de la pluralité linguistique interne, see http://www.culturecommunication.gouv.fr/Politiques-ministerielles/Langue-francaise-et-langues-de-France/Politiques-de-la-langue/Langues-de-France/Langues-regionales/Rapport-du-Comite-consultatif-pour-la-promotion-deslangues-regionales-et-de-la-pluralite-linguistique-interne-2013 (last access 18.02.2018). 10 They are the equivalent of the Diwan (Breton) and the Ikastolak (Basque). 11 Confederacion de las Escòlas Laïcas Calandretas: http://calandreta.org (last access 18.02.2018). 12 http://www.bressola.cat (last access 18.02.2018).

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work, French resistance to the ratification of the Charter remains strong, due to ideological reasons concerning the importance of sharing a single language – French – as a means of guaranteeing French national unity (Klein 2013).

3.3.2 Italy’s language planning measures and education Italy’s multilingualism has been the object of study for many researchers. This multilingualism, generated by the contact between the national language – Italian – and the numerous Romance and non-Romance varieties (Berruto 1987a; 1987b; 2005; De Mauro 1976, ↗18 The Languages and dialects of Italy), presents a challenge to the elaboration of education policies. The challenge lies especially in finding measures that reconcile the ideological (language attitudes and representations of language status and education, etc.) and the practical (teaching methods, curricula planning, etc.). As Costanzo (2003, 9) remarks in her Reference Study on language education in Italy, “traditional language teaching neglects learners’ existing language, the ‘linguistic baseline’ formed by a dialect or other minority mother tongue”. Language education policies should work hand-in-hand with the local social actors in the teaching field in order to find ways to circumvent the dangers of installing teaching methods and attitudes that disregard learners’ language repertoires. Linguistic education in Italy, from the start (De Mauro 1983; Gentile 1966), was born out of a reaction to this traditional view of teaching (Costanzo 2003). Unlike the French Constitution, the Italian one – dating back to 1947 – considers minority languages as part of the linguistic landscape characterizing the Italo-Romance area and states that the Italian republic is ready to make the necessary provisions to safeguard them (Art. 6). In 1999, National Law n. 482/1999, Norme in materia di tutela delle minoranze linguistiche storiche13 was passed aiming to safeguard the historical minority languages in the Italian territory through the implementation of special provisions, including education, as mentioned in Article n. 4. Thus, just one year before the ECRML was signed, this law prepared the ground for the recognition and the safeguarding of the following twelve minority languages, spoken in the Italian territory, among which seven are Romance languages: Albanian, Catalan, Croatian, French, Francoprovençal, Friulian, German, Greek, Ladin, Occitan, Sardinian and Slovene. However, Italy’s numerous regional languages were not considered in National Law n. 482/1999: “So whereas minority languages now enjoy some degree of protection in Italy thanks to Law n. 482/1999, regional languages as we have defined them do not, apart from the little that the regional laws mentioned above can provide. Italian regional languages are still very much alive, but language shift is in progress, as all surveys on the subject clearly show” (Coluzzi 2004, 16).

13 http://www.camera.it/parlam/leggi/99482l.htm (last access 25.09.2015).

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Thus, Italy has provided for and worked towards language planning when it comes to historical language minorities. Yet, the ratification of the Charter necessitates also taking decisive language planning actions as regards the regional languages. Let us return to the actual education measures recommended by Law n. 482/1999. These are stated clearly in Article n. 4: schools should provide bilingual tuition, meaning that the minority language should be taught together with Italian. The law recommends a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach in elementary and secondary schools: the minority language is also to be used as the language of instruction. It is left up to the parents to register their children in the minority language programmes available in the schools. Adult education is also recommended and financial support is available for the implementation of pedagogical projects promoting the language minorities mentioned in the law. This is as far as the law goes, yet as it has been noted by many scholars, the implementation of these recommendations is somewhat more complicated on the local level, due to limited financial support, lack of proper infrastructure and human resources, etc. Two reports commissioned by the education ministry have been published since the law was passed, respectively in 2006 and 2010.14 These reports present the programmes that have been implemented on a local level. For instance, in the autonomous region of Val d’Aosta, the school system is essentially open to the languages in contact in the area, namely Italian, French and Francoprovençal, and sets a portion of the budget for pedagogical activities in line with European language evaluation systems, such as the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) (Traversa 2006). As noted in Iannàccaro’s (2010) report, Italy’s regional educational projects provide a fragmentary view of the revitalization steps undertaken.15 Despite these measures and initiatives, Italy has not yet ratified the Charter. However, the ratification project was presented to the Italian parliament on April 28th, 2015 and is currently under scrutiny. Italy’s reluctance to ratify the Charter has been the focus of political pressure at a European level, with a motion to urge Italy to ratify the ECRML.16

14 The two reports are: Le minoranze linguistiche in Italia nella prospettiva dell’educazione plurilingue. La legge n. 482/1999 sulle minoranze linguistiche nel settore scolastico. Bilancio dei primi sei anni di attuazione (2006) and Lingue di minoranza e scuola. A dieci anni dalla Legge 482/99. Il plurilinguismo scolastico nelle comunità di minoranza della Repubblica Italiana (2010). 15 See the MIUR site (http://hubmiur.pubblica.istruzione.it/alfresco/d/d/workspace/SpacesStore/ 2325926c-89e0-4369-af15-a4f3002d4fba/all2_prot12680.pdf, last access 18.02.2018) for an overview of all the ongoing projects financed by National Law 482/1999. 16 See the Motion for a European Parliament resolution on Italy’s ratification of the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, last updated on June 30th, 2015, on the European Parliament site: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+MOTION+B8-2015-0653+0+D OC+XML+V0//EN&language=en (last access 18.02.2018).

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4 Borders, (minority/regional) languages and inter-linguistic connections: the impact of different policies The concept of minority language, as we have seen in the previous sections, is ambiguous in that its interpretation depends on the different historical, social and political situations in which the language is spoken. Consequently, the status of minority language may be attributed differently according to the viewpoint adopted, and this may influence the policies elaborated. The case of Catalan spoken in France (Catalunya del Nord) illustrates this very point, as Marley (1995, 11) has shown: “Le fait que le Catalan soit langue minoritaire en Espagne autant qu’en France est à la fois un avantage et un inconvénient pour les Catalans de nationalité française: en Espagne, l’usage en fût interdit sous Franco mais depuis le retour de la démocratie en 1975, le catalan est redevenu d’usage quotidien ‘normal’, au point que sa situation est considérée comme un succès de renversement de substitution (Fishman 1991: 287–336). L’avantage pour les activistes catalans de la Catalogne française est qu’ils peuvent compter sur un certain soutien de la Catalogne du Sud dans leurs efforts en faveur du catalan. Les moins engagés peuvent s’encourager du fait que le catalan a fait tant de progrès au Sud des Pyrénées. Par contre, le succès de la langue en Catalogne du Sud est si bien documenté qu’on ne s’occupe guère de la situation de la Catalogne du Nord, et souvent les gens ne savent même pas que cette langue existe aussi du côté français de la frontière”.

Moreover, the definition of Language Education Policy is intrinsically linked to questions of ideology and power: “Language education policy (LEP) refers to a mechanism used to create de facto language practices in educational institutions, especially in centralized education systems. LEP is considered a form of imposition and manipulation of language policy as it used by those in authority to turn ideology into practice through formal education” (Shohamy 2005, 76).

Educational matters are thus linked to the general perceptions and representations of the minority language status (Agresti/Gioia 2012; Jaffe 1999; 2003). The case of the Corsican language provides an example of this (Ottavi 2013). In fact, the recognition of Corsican as a language distinct from Italian (Tuscan), was the object of a political and linguistic debate and it was only included as a language of France in the Loi Deixonne in 1974 (Ettori 1975; Tabouret-Keller 1997). As Ottavi (2010) shows, considering Corsican as a language in its own right, and thus not a “mere Italian dialect”, has provided an important sociolinguistic basis for its integration as a language of France and not a foreign language. It is in this perspective that the issue of borders is also particularly pertinent. The geographical distance and, being an island, Corsica’s distinct borders isolating it from the peninsula have contributed to a heightened perception of the linguistic distance between Corsican and the Italian language. Hence, Corsican has “created” a sociolinguistic border vis-à-vis Italian/Tuscan and

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this has contributed to its integration into the French geopolitical space, in terms of its recognition as one of the Langues de France. These sociolinguistic “border shifts” did not prevent the adoption of a polynomic norm (Marcellesi 1984; 2013), meaning that diatopic variation within the Corsican language system is commonly accepted; polynomic languages are defined by Marcellesi as: “[…] langues dont l’unité est abstraite et résultent d’un mouvement dialectique et non de la simple ossification d’une norme unique et dont l’existence est fondée sur la décision massive de ceux qui la parlent de lui donner un nom particulier et de la déclarer autonome des langues reconnues” (Marcellesi 1984, 314).

The adoption of this norm is particularly salient in the education system (Jaffe 2005). As Ottavi (2014) points out, the polynomic norm is a particular concern for language teaching, as both teachers and learners are free to use their language variety without sanctions. This favours a more lenient attitude towards variation both in classroom settings and in the evaluation of language production. Moreover, language variation is integrated into the pedagogical material available and it is up to the user to adapt it to his/her language preferences (cf. Ottavi 2014, 23–26, for examples of pedagogical material).17 Languages’ varying “diglossic conditions” due to their inherently social/societal nature can be illustrated by the case of Francoprovençal. Unlike Corsican, Francoprovençal is a language with international diffusion, being historically present in three sovereign states that share a common geopolitical border in the Alps area: France, Italy and Switzerland.18 However, Francoprovençal does not constitute a homogenous linguistic area and has not undergone formal language elaboration (Tuaillon 2007). Hence, it is a very fragmented complex of local varieties with a low level of structural convergence and has not been the subject of many standardization initiatives (Bert/ Costa 2009; Tuaillon 2007). Likewise, despite the existence of certain recognized forms of orthography, the graphic realizations remain fragmented and have as a reference the respective national graphic norms. Concerning the official recognition of Francoprovençal as a specific language, it is necessary to point out that this language has never been the object of political nationalist claim. Only recently (since the 1970s) has a form of linguistic militant activity developed in an attempt to create a more cohesive speech community.19 From

17 However, as Ottavi (2014) remarks, the imminent constitution of a Language Council in Corsica could create new scenarios concerning language codification, particularly in view of the current request of a status of co-officiality of Corsican and French formulated by the local Assemblée Territoriale. 18 Francoprovençal is also spoken in Faeto and Celle San Vito, two small localities in Puglia, a Southwestern region of Italy (cf. Nagy 2000). 19 The glossonym Arpitan, in particular, is strongly linked to a unified community, Arpitania, referring to the mountain pastures representing a common geographic environment characterizing the Francoprovençal geolinguistic community. Arpitan was created out of an analogy with the already

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the point of view of educational policies, Francoprovençal does not benefit from the same status in the different countries in which it is spoken. In fact, in Switzerland, Francoprovençal is considered an indigenous language, but does not count as one of its minority languages and its teaching is not envisaged. Moreover, it does not figure in the ECRML list of Switzerland’s minority languages ratified by the Confederation in 1997. On the other side of the Swiss border towards Italy, Francoprovençal received official recognition in 1999 through National Law n. 482, and in 2005 through Regional Law n. 18 of the Autonomous region of Val D’Aosta (North-Western Italy). Moreover, in this region, Francoprovençal enjoys a certain vitality, being the language spoken in the family and in daily activities (Cavalli 2003; Traversa 2006). In this context, educational approaches favour multilingual practices. As the annual Report published in 2013 by the Val d’Aosta Regional Council states,20 Francoprovençal (also called patois as is customary in the Francoprovençal area) has been integrated into the pre-primary, primary and secondary schools as an optional subject matter, to be taken as an extra-curricular activity. Language tuition is focused on activities that promote the knowledge of the language and culture of the Region: “Les cours ont exposé les élèves à la langue, principalement par des activités ludiques et d’animation, dans les écoles maternelles et primaires, et par des activités centrées sur la réflexion, l’observation et la comparaison entre les différents codes linguistiques, propres à la didactique d’approche plurielle des langues, à l’école secondaire, où l’apprentissage du Francoprovençal a offert la possibilité d’approfondir la connaissance de la culture valdôtaine” (Rapport Annuel 2013).

In France, Francoprovençal is spoken in the Rhône-Alpes region. Linguistic issues concerning the language have become a matter of interest only in the last decade. An in-depth study of the regional languages in Rhône-Alpes, Occitan and Francoprovençal was published (Bert/Costa 2009), inspiring the Rhône-Alpes’ Regional Council deliberation n. 09.11.450 Reconnaître, valoriser, promouvoir l’occitan et le francoprovençal, langues régionales de Rhône-Alpes adopted by the Rhône-Alpes Council in 2009. So far, the teaching of Francoprovençal in public schools has not been envisaged, as it is not recognized on a national scale: it is not a language eligible for the CAPES and it cannot be a subject for assessment in the final school examination (Baccalauréat). However, the Region’s political language planning actions are introducing changes into the current school system. This is also due to pressures from militants demanding the teaching of Francoprovençal (Bron 2011). A convention between the Rhône-Alpes region and the national government’s education bureau in

existing glossonym Occitan. See the site of the Arpitania association: http://www.arpitania.eu/index. php/langue-arpitan-francoprovencal (last access 30.09.2015). 20 See http://www.regione.vda.it/rapportoannuale2013/file/rapport_istr_47.html (last access 30.09. 2015).

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Grenoble and Lyon was planned for 201521 in order to make the necessary provisions for the promotion of Francoprovençal (and Occitan) in the region’s public school system.22 This convention did not take place, mainly because of the reorganization of France’s regional borders, which brought new priorities to the regional institutional agenda. However, the pro-active political stance of the Rhône-Alpes region vis-à-vis Francoprovençal is manifest in the recent Charte de coopération interrégionale et transfrontalière de développement de la langue francoprovençale, established on May 28th, 2015, aiming to define a linguistic policy with its interregional/transnational partners, Val d’Aosta (Italy) and the Canton Valais (Switzerland), in order to safeguard and valorize Francoprovençal in all domains of usage. In the Charter, the education domain is a priority.23 As we have seen, the language education policies do not only depend on the actual language status per se as a minority language. It is part of a socially shared space that defines the status of a minority language according to the perceptions of the local communities. Border issues can also be illustrated by considering the particular situation of Catalan, present in four different European countries: Spain, France, Italy and Andorra. Catalan is a language that enjoys different linguistic statuses in areas which are close together: official language in the Principality of Andorra; co-official language in the Autonomous Community of Catalonia; regional language in France, and a protected historical minority in Italy (Alghero area). From the point of view of the language education policies, it is important to examine linguistic continuity in the initiatives to give status to Catalan across the geopolitical borders separating these linguistic areas. We will focus on the areas in which Catalan does not benefit from a nationally wide official status, so that the case of Andorra is excluded from our contribution. We notice that the vitality of Catalan in the marginal areas (Catalunya Nord and l’Alguer) is linked to the prestige associated with Spanish Catalan, considered a rare example of a minority language that has managed to reverse language shift (Marley 1995). From the point of view of language education policies, this aspect is particularly important as Escudé (2013, 347–348) underlines: “Force est de constater que la réalité de l’enseignement des LCR [Langues et Cultures Régionales] en France dépend également de la conscience des citoyens à une appartenance identifiable ainsi qu’à la vitalité du réseau social. […] Les forts réseaux culturels bretons, l’adossement roussillonnais à Barcelone, […] sont enfin de solides encrages sociaux qui permettent de stabiliser ou de diffuser plus largement la présence civile de la langue”.

21 This was announced at the Fête du patois (2015 edition) in Reigner-Esery (Haute-Savoie, France) by Mr Belkacem Lounès, former Rhones-Alpes regional Councillor for language teaching and education. 22 Cf. See Law passed n. 2005-380 (Loi Fillon): “Un enseignement de langues et cultures régionales peut être dispensé tout au long de la scolarité selon des modalités définies par voie de convention entre l’État et les collectivités territoriales où ces langues sont en usage”. 23 In 2012, the Région Rhône-Alpes established a similar charter for Occitan, between France, Italy and Spain.

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If in Catalonia, Catalan is taught at all levels of education as a compulsory subject in the school curricula (Alén Garabato 2010; Burban 2010),24 as is expected in the framework of the ECRML, we cannot say the same thing for Catalan in Catalunya Nord and in Sardinia. In the French Catalan domain, the teaching of Catalan language and culture is optional in the public education system, as regards primary and secondary school levels. However, this option is not present in all schools, meaning that Catalan tuition is not evenly distributed in this area. Bilingual French-Catalan tuition is offered at different levels in educational associations like La Bressola schools. It is also important to observe how the relations created between French and Spanish Catalonia impact adult education and teacher training programmes (Puig Moreno 2007). In fact, the active participation of the Omnium Cultural and the Generalitat de Catalunya favours the development of a network involving French institutions and associations for Catalan education. From this networking, the important linguistic issue of standardization arises in Northern Catalunya (Peytavì Deixona 2007): which variety should be used in formal school settings? This issue has not been fully addressed. On the one hand, the use of Spain’s Catalan, a standardized variety, is usually adopted in schools and in written pedagogical material. On the other hand, the specificities of the Roussillonnais dialect are not precluded and, on the contrary, they may be encouraged as they add a local identity to the language practices (Puig Moreno 2007). Another case pertaining to the issues of the relations between varieties and their “roofing” language, in this specific case Spain’s Catalan, is Algherese, spoken on the Italian island of Sardinia. Algherese Catalan is recognized as an historical minority language by the Italian National Law n. 482/1999 and as a language of Sardinia by the Sardinian Regional Law n. 26/1997 (Depau 2007). Matters concerning language education are linked to the existing relations between the Alghero municipality and, on the one hand, the Italian and Sardinian institutions and, on the other hand, the Spanish institution, the Generalitat de Catalunya (Arnau/Vila 2013). In fact, the protection afforded by the Sardinian Regional Law n. 26/1997 to the local variety provides political and financial support for the development of pedagogical activities implemented in the local schools (Depau 2007). Although this regional law does not allow for the financing of long-term language planning measures within the education system, concrete pedagogical actions and initiatives are provided by the local (public and private) organizations in collaboration with Catalan institutions, for example the Omnium Cultural, the Centre de recursos pedagògics Maria Montessori (a cultural centre in Alghero created by a convention established between the Sardinian university of Sassari and Omnium Cultural), etc. all of which receive support from the Generalitat de Catalunya. Collaboration between these various institutions has re-

24 See also the Institut de Sociolingüística Catalana’s internet site, hosted by the Euromosaic website: http://www.uoc.edu/euromosaic/web/document/catala/an/i1/i1.html#3.1 (last access 30.09.2015).

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sulted in the realization of the Joan Palomba Project providing language courses in primary and secondary schools in Alghero interested in the valorization of Algherese (Argenter 2008).25 As in the case of French Catalan, the transnational and at the same time national affiliation has consequences in the educational measures adopted locally for the revitalization and valorization of Algherese Catalan. Issues concerning the choice of the reference variety emerge. More particularly, the relations between the Generalitat de Catalunya and the municipality of Alghero have promoted the teaching of Catalan in Alghero. These agreements create a favourable environment for the adoption of the Spanish Catalan variety as the standard (Argenter 2008). However, these relations may be interpreted by the Algherese community as a form of pressure that may threaten the local “Sardinian Catalan” identity. Besides this, the maintenance of a local identity is necessary for the development of activities within the framework of Regional Law n. 26/1997 for the recognition of Algherese as a minority language of Sardinia. As we have seen, there are tensions exerted from both sides of the border. The potential revitalization of Algherese is thus related to the capacity of the local community to find an equilibrium in its plural identity, making this a critical component in the implementation of balanced and bilateral language education policies. Sardinia offers an excellent vantage point for the study of language minorities and language education policies. It is one of the autonomous regions of the Italian Republic. Sardinian is traditionally considered as a separate language system in the Romance languages’ family, i.e. a Dachlos language, as considered by Kloss (1967) (cf. Iannàccaro/Dell’Aquila 2011). Its recognition as an autonomous system has not required, as was the case for Corsican, an effort of distanciation from a roofing language (namely Italian), nor, as in the case of Algherese, an allegiance to a foreign identity. Its recognition as an historical minority language by Law n. 482/1999 has thus not been a matter of debate. Even before this, Sardinian was the object of recognition and valorization in the framework of the Regional Law n. 26/1997. However, contrary to Corsican’s integration into the French school system, the Sardinian language does not benefit from long-term official language education planning. Border issues are pertinent when considering Sardinian, as it is Sardinia’s main regional language and Italy’s principal language minority. Standardization, especially when educational matters are concerned, is a much debated issue: which variety should be used in public administration and institutions, the Logudorian or the Campidanian variety (Depau/Ghimenton 2009; Depau/Zucca 2005)? As noted by Wright (2007), the history of linguistic rights in Italy is associated with issues of standardization. She points out that seven of the twelve minority languages recognized by the National Law n. 482/1999 have a written standard as they are official/

25 See also the Corpus Oral de L’Alguerès internet site, http://prosodia.upf.edu/coalgueres/en/index. html (last access 18.02.2018).

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national languages in other countries. The case of Sardinian is different in that it did not have a written standard at the time the law was passed. However, a normalized variety was proposed in 2001, the LSU (Limba Sarda Unificada ‘The Unified Sardinian Language’) elaborated by an expert group commissioned by the Sardinian Regional Council. This one was not adopted as it was identified by many as a form of imposition of the Logudorian Sardinian variety (spoken in the northern part of the island) on the Campidanian variety (southern part). The LSC (Limba Sarda Comuna ‘The Common Sardinian Language’), proposed in 2006, is currently adopted by the Regional Administration for institutional communication.26 The teaching system concerning Sardinia is based on the National Law n. 482/1999 and on the Regional Law 26/1997. As previously mentioned for Algherese, the use of Sardinian as a medium of instruction and/or Sardinian language teaching depends on local projects initiated by public and private schools.27 In these cases, the variety adopted is the local one and not a normalized form, like the LSC. Although the Regional Council finances these projects, Sardinian language teaching is not integrated into the compulsory curricula; hence education involving Sardinian is on precarious ground. A law aiming for the introduction of Sardinian in the school curricula in pre-primary and primary schools was proposed in 2015 and is currently under consideration in the Sardinian Council. The inclusion of Sardinian is optional and does not imply that it will be a compulsory subject. However, this law would provide further protection for Sardinian compared to Regional Law n. 26/1997 in that its teaching would not depend on extemporary projects but it would guarantee a certain continuity in the language learning trajectories. In sum, in this section, we have seen through the four examples chosen (Corsican, Francoprovençal, Catalan and Sardinian), that issues concerning language education policies are linked to both “internal” (e.g. the degree of standardization of a language’s written form) and “external” factors, such as a country’s historical specificity and governmental organization. As we have shown, these factors also impact on the definition of the status of the languages spoken in a given country and thus, the steps taken towards revitalization.

5 Conclusion Minority language policies are a major issue in the field of language planning. Many factors come into play in a government’s design of educational policies, a fortiori, when these concern minority/regional languages. In fact, the criteria adopted in the defini-

26 http://www.sardegnacultura.it/linguasarda/limbasardacomuna (last access 30.09.2015). 27 See the current regional law for the assignment of financial support for projects presented in 2015: http://www.regione.sardegna.it/documenti/1_19_20150701125920.pdf (last access 18.02.2018).

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tion of a minority language are fundamentally extralinguistic in nature. More generally, border issues can play a critical role in this definition. We have discussed these issues by taking into consideration a set of Romance minority languages that present divergent characteristics and that enjoy multiple statuses according to the sociolinguistic contexts in which they are spoken. Despite the variety of situations, five characteristics appear to recur in the development of language education policies: (1) the critical role of standardization in the elaboration of pedagogical material and learner evaluation systems; (2) the nature of financial support (private/public/religious, short vs long-term education planning); (3) the variety of the curricula elaborated: optional/compulsory, integrated in the school system/short-term projects, curricular/extra-curricular activities, minority language as an object of study/as a means of instruction; (4) the importance of a roofing language; (5) networking and community involvement. This list is not exhaustive and other criteria may come into play when dealing with minority language revitalization. What should be underscored is that these characteristics are closely interrelated in language planning measures of revitalization, as they represent the three parameters of corpus, status and acquisition (cf. Hornberger 2006). Moreover, we have also observed how the synergy between the different social actors from public institutions and private associations engenders revitalization actions that are the fruit of an interactive top-down and bottom-up process. This is the case for the activities promoted by regional bodies, spurred on by militant associations defending their minority language (e.g. Calandretas for Occitan and La Bressola for Catalan in Southern France). From this point of view, it will be interesting to observe the ways in which language education policies evolve in France, in view of the recent regrouping of the regional borders, as is stated in the National Law n. 2015-991 that mentions regional language education. This new territorial reorganization may change the internal configurations related to the presence of, and measures to safeguard, the minority languages recognized within the former regional borders, for example Occitan and Francoprovençal in the new Rhône-Alpes/Auvergne region. Finally, it is difficult to list the ingredients for the recipe for successful revitalization. But the examples of language minorities developed in this chapter show that, should a state want to adopt revitalization measures, it has to manage the three factors – acquisition, status and corpus – in a balanced way. More specifically, in education, it should bring the minority language into the school curricula (cf. acquisition); it should at the same time break away from language folklore and include the minority language in the speaker’s communicative daily reality (cf. status and acquisition), thus rendering both possible and necessary the evolution of the language’s oral and written repertoires (cf. corpus, status and acquisition).

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To conclude, the valorization of Romance minority languages has an added value in the context of a multilingual and united Europe. This aspect emerges from the principles stated in the ECMRL and can find fertile ground in the context of interregional and transnational collaborations, based on a shared cultural and linguistic heritage. These bilateral collaborations encourage the development of common language education policies between the trans-border regions, creating new sociolinguistic dynamics and challenging the established national language educational policies.

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Jaffe, Alexandra (2003), Talk around Text: Literacy Practices, Cultural Identity and Authority in a Corsican Bilingual Classroom, in: Angela Creese/Peter W. Martin (edd.), Multilingual Classroom Ecologies: Inter-relationships, Interactions, and Ideologies, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 42–60. Jaffe, Alexandra (2005), L’Éducation bilingue corse et la polynomie, Marges linguistiques 10, 282–300, http://www.revue-texto.net/Parutions/Marges/00_ml102005.pdf (last access 16.02.2018). Klein, Pierre (ed.) (2013), Les Langues de France et la ratification de la Charte européenne des langues régionales ou minoritaires. Actes du colloque de Strasbourg (31/05–01/06 2013), Huttenheim, Association Initiative citoyenne alsacienne pour plus de démocratie. Kloss, Heinz (1967), “Abstand” Languages and “Ausbau” Languages, Anthropological Linguistics 9(7), 29–41. Kremnitz, Georg (2013), Introduction, in: Georg Kremnitz (ed.), Histoire sociale des langues de France, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 23–39. Lagarde, Christian (2007), L’Institution scolaire face à la diversité linguistique, in: Crystelle Burban/ Christian Lagarde (edd.), L’École, instrument de sauvegarde des langues menacées?, Perpignan, Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 11–24. Landry, Rodrigue/Bourhis, Richard Y. (1997), Linguistic Landscape and Ethnolinguistic Vitality: An Empirical Study, Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16(1), 23–49. Määttä, Simo K. (2005), The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, French Language Laws, and National Identity, Language Policy 4(2), 167–186. Marcellesi, Jean-Baptiste (1984), La Définition des langues en domaine roman: Les Enseignements à tirer de la situation corse, in: Jean-Claude Bouvier (ed.), Actes du congrès de linguistique et de philologie romanes, vol. 5: Sociolinguistique, Aix-en-Provence, Université d’Aix-en-Provence, 309–314. Marcellesi, Jean-Baptiste (2013), Le Corse, in: Georg Kremnitz (ed.), Histoire sociale des langues de France, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 465–474. Marley, Dawn (1995), Parler catalan à Perpignan, Paris, L’Harmattan. Martel, Philippe (2010), L’École et les langues régionales, aperçu historique, Les Langues modernes 4(1), 13–20. Nagy, Naomi (2000), Faetar, München, Lincom. Ottavi, Pascal (2010), U Corsu: Une langue de la rue à l’école, Les Langues modernes 4(1), 27–31. Ottavi, Pascal (2013), Corse: La Construction problématique d’une identité collective dans une société multiculturelle, Cahiers internationaux de sociolinguistique 4(2), 139–158. Ottavi, Pascal (2014), Corse: L’Élaboration linguistique à l’épreuve du terrain, in: Jean-Michel Eloy (ed.), Standardisation et vitalité des langues de France, Paris, L’Harmattan, 15–29. Peytavì Deixona, Joan (2007), Quelle langue (re)apprendre? Catalan standard, dialecte roussilllonnais et enseignement en Catalogne du nord, in: Chrystelle Burban/Christian Lagarde (edd.), L’École, instrument de sauvegarde des langues menacées?, Perpignan, Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 149–165. Puig Moreno, Gentil (2007), Pour un enseignement généralisé de la langue catalane à tous les élèves de Catalogne Nord, in: Chrystelle Burban/Christian Lagarde (edd.), L’École, instrument de sauvegarde des langues menacées?, Perpignan, Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 83–96. Rapport Annuel de la Région Autonome de la Vallée d’Aoste: Le Patois à l’école (2013), http://www. regione.vda.it/rapportoannuale2013/file/rapport_istr_47.html (last access 16.02.2018). Shohamy, Elana G. (2005), Language Policy: Hidden Agendas and New Approaches, London/ New York, Routledge. Shohamy, Elana G./Ben-Rafael, Eliezer/Barni, Monica (edd.) (2010), Linguistic Landscape in the City, Bristol, Multilingual Matters.

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Tabouret-Keller, Andrée (1997), Les Langues régionales comme objet d’écriture dans les textes législatifs français, entre 1951 et 1983, in: Normand Labrie (ed.), Études récentes en linguistique de contact, Bonn, Dümmler, 376–384. Traversa, Andrea M. (2006), Il sistema scolastico della regione autonoma Valle D’Aosta. L’educazione bi/plurilingue, in: MIUR, Annali Della Pubblica Istruzione 5–6/2006, Le minoranze linguistiche in Italia nella prospettiva dell’educazione plurilingue, Firenze, Le Monnier, 68–77. Tuaillon, Gaston (2007), Le Francoprovençal: Définition et délimitation. Phénomènes remarquables, vol. 1, Aosta, Musumeci. Varennes, Fernand de (2008), Language Protection and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages: Quo vadis?, in: Dónall Ó Riagáin (ed.), The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages: Legal Challenges and Opportunities, Strasbourg, Council of Europe Publishing, 25–36. Vigier, Philippe (1979), Diffusion d’une langue nationale et résistance des patois en France au XIXe siècle, Romantisme 9(25), 191–208. Woehrling, Jean-Marie (2001), Le Droit constitutionnel français à l’épreuve des langues régionales, Revista de llengua i dret, 35, 79–88. Woehrling, Jean-Marie (2005), La Charte européenne des langues régionales ou minoritaires: un commentaire analytique, Strasbourg, Éditions du Conseil de l’Europe. Woehrling, Jean-Marie (2013), Droit des personnes, droit des minorités, droit des langues: Les différentes techniques juridiques de protection de l’expression linguistique, in: Carmen Alén Garabato (ed.), Gestion des minorités linguistiques dans l’Europe du XXIe siècle, Limoges, Lambert-Lucas, 217–229. Wright, Sue (2000), Jacobins, Regionalists and the Council of Europe’s Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 21(5), 414–424. Wright, Sue (2007), Il diritto di utilizzare la propria lingua: Alcune riflessioni su teoria e pratica, in: Carlo Consani/Paola Desideri (edd.), Minoranze linguistiche: Prospettive, strumenti, territori, Roma, Carocci, 32–47.

Language contact

Kim Schulte

22 Romance in contact with Romance Abstract: This chapter examines three contact situations between Romance languages: (a) a long-term contact situation, between Spanish and the Valencian variety of Catalan, that has been ongoing for centuries, (b) a recently established, migrationbased contact situation between Romanian on the one hand and Spanish as well as Valencian on the other, and (c) an established contact situation involving Portuguese and Spanish in the New World, on the border between Uruguay and Brazil. In addition to providing relevant sociohistorical and sociolinguistic information, the main focus lies on contact-induced structural changes, given that the structural similarity of (closely) related languages is likely to facilitate such processes.  

Keywords: language contact, Romance languages, Spanish, Valencian, Romanian, Uruguayan Portuguese  

1 Contact between related languages Contact between related languages has traditionally not been the main focus of studies on language change or the resulting synchronic varieties, mainly due to the fact that the phylogenetic “family tree” model, the very foundation of modern historical linguistics, focuses on diversification from a single ancestor language. While there is no doubt that this model, developed in the nineteenth century and popularized by Schleicher (1853), accurately accounts for the emergence of language families, their branches and sub-branches, it can lead to an oversimplification when it comes to accounting for all the features of a language: as recent studies have shown (cf. e.g. Epps/Huehnergard/Pat-El 2013), contact between related, often closely related, languages or varieties has a significant effect on their structure as well as their phonological, morphological and lexical inventory. Contact among the Romance languages has existed ever since their emergence as varieties of Vulgar Latin. The types of historical and present-day contact situations are as numerous as they are varied; in this chapter, three different, more or less prototypical cases will be illustrated. The most common scenario for contact between related languages is one of geographical and cultural proximity between two speech communities (↗23 Language contact between typologically different languages). Within the dialect continuum of which most of the Romance languages form part, neighbouring languages or varieties are generally very similar to begin with, which makes it particularly easy for them to adopt elements and structures from each other. In fact, it can often be https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-023

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problematic to determine whether a particular feature found in contiguous varieties is the result of joint inheritance or the outcome of borrowing, and it may indeed be difficult or impossible to clearly distinguish between the two paths (cf. Schmidt’s 1872 Wave Theory). Another very frequent type of contact situation is diglossia, i.e. the use of two different languages or varieties for distinct social functions. In cases where both the colloquial and the formal variety are considered to belong to the same language, the distinction between diastratic variation and diglossia is somewhat blurred, but if the formal H-language coincides with, or is similar to, a more prestigious language or variety from a different geographical region, then we are undoubtedly dealing with a case of contact between the colloquial and the prestige language. What is special about diglossic situations is that they do not involve contact between members of different speech communities, but take place within a single speech community and even within individual speakers. The first contact scenario analysed in this chapter combines these two situation types. In the Valencian Community, situated on the eastern coast of Spain, the local varieties of Catalan have coexisted with Castilian Spanish for many centuries. On the one hand, native Spanish speakers were always close at hand due to geographical proximity and migration from the neighbouring regions, while Spanish has, on the other hand, also served as the official and prestige language for several centuries (cf. ↗17 Linguistic diversity in Spain). In addition to extensive lexical influence, this has led to some significant structural alignment between the two languages, especially in the spoken varieties of the region. The second contact scenario examined is, in some respects, diametrically opposed to the first, as it involves two Romance languages that have only very recently come into contact after almost two millennia of separation, due to geographical distance as well as political and cultural separation. Romanians have been migrating to Spain in considerable numbers since the beginning of the twenty-first century, forming an increasingly bilingual community in which a new contact variety may be emerging. The data are drawn from a case study carried out in Castellón, where between 15 % and 20 % of the population have Romanian as (one of) their native language(s). Further complexity is added to this contact situation by the fact that there are not two, but three languages involved, as both Spanish and Valencian are commonly used in Castellón. Finally, moving to the Americas, Fronteiriço, a New World Romance variety resulting from contact between Spanish and Portuguese, spoken near the BrazilianUruguayan border, will be examined. Perhaps best classified as a sister language of present-day Brazilian Portuguese, Fronteiriço has incorporated a considerable number of features from Spanish. What makes this variety particularly interesting here is that it is under the influence of two competing prestige languages: Uruguayan Spanish, the official language used in administration and education on the one hand, and urban Brazilian Portuguese, the cultural prestige variety to which Fronteiriço speakers have access via the media, primarily television, on the other.

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It must be emphasized that the three contact situations presented in this chapter are in no way exceptional; on the contrary, they merely illustrate common processes of contact-induced change in a large number of settings in which speakers of two or more Romance languages communicate with each other on a regular basis.

2 Contact between Valencian and Spanish Valencian is a cover term for a number of Catalan varieties spoken in the Valencian Community, i.e. along much of the south-eastern Spanish Mediterranean coast and in the mountainous hinterland. According to the traditional classification (Milá y Fontanals 1861, 462), Valencian belongs to the Western Catalan dialect group; it differs markedly, both in terms of phonology and morphosyntax, from Eastern Catalan as spoken in most of Catalonia. It is important to distinguish standard Valencian from the vernacular varieties spoken in the Valencia region; many widespread vernacular features of Valencian are considered non-standard and are thus stigmatized, occasionally causing speakers to feel self-conscious about the use of their native language. Whilst some of these nonstandard, vernacular elements are features that have disappeared from other varieties of Catalan but which have been preserved in Valencian and others are the result of more recent language-internal innovation, the continuing close contact with Spanish over the centuries has also had a considerable influence on the lexical inventory, phonology and morphosyntactic structure of vernacular Valencian.1 It is these elements that this section will focus on.

2.1 A very brief external history of the linguistic situation in the Valencian community The history of Valencian can be said to begin with the conquest of the region from the Almohads, the Moorish rulers of the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula, in the first half of the thirteenth century and the subsequent repopulation of the area by a mix of settlers from Catalonia and Aragon (cf. Guinot 2002); Old Valencian thus had input from two closely related Romance languages. There is also a highly controversial theory regarding the contribution of Mozarabic, the Romance language spoken under Moorish rule until the thirteenth century, which in its extreme form claims that Valencian is not a dialect of Catalan, but a continuation of the local variety of Mozarabic (Peñarroja Torrejón 1990).

1 Contact-induced features are, of course, also present in the variety of Spanish spoken in the region (cf., amongst others, Blas Arroyo 1992; 1993).

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Contact between Valencian and Spanish is multidimensional, with different types of contact scenarios coexisting. Spanish is both an adstrate, the prestige or Hlanguage in a diglossic situation and, through a reversal of attitudes in recent years in some sectors of society, the less prestigious or L-language in certain contexts.

2.1.1 Spanish as adstrate The expulsion of the Arabic-speaking Moriscos in 1609, who made up around one third of the population, triggered large-scale immigration of Castilian Spanish speakers, especially agricultural labourers. This partial population replacement presumably contributed to the shift to Spanish in many inland areas of the Kingdom of Valencia, in which varieties closer to Aragonese (and thus also more similar to Spanish) had previously been spoken. In coastal areas, the varieties that were closer to Catalan were not under threat of language shift, but were nevertheless influenced by the influx of Spanish speakers, particularly since there was (and still is) a high degree of mutual comprehensibility between the two languages, which means that bilingual conversations, with each speaker communicating in their respective native language, are likely to have been the norm rather than the exception. Another wave of immigration of Spanish speakers, though far less extreme in terms of the proportion of the population, took place in the twentieth century, due to internal migration from economically disadvantaged areas of Spain such as Andalusia, at a time when speaking Valencian was stigmatized and the majority of Valencian speakers were at least partially bilingual. In this sociolinguistic context, the influx of monolingual Spanish speakers almost certainly contributed to an increase in the use of Spanish in everyday situations outside the closest circle of family and friends. While the use of Valencian, or of Spanish with obvious Valencian features, was not socially accepted in formal settings and among speakers with a high degree of formal education (see section 2.1.2 below), the frequent switch to Spanish in everyday conversations, paired with the fact that the mass media were only available in Spanish, lead to a situation in which native Valencian speakers incorporated an increasing number of Spanish features into their language. In fact, it is remarkable that, at a time when philologists were trying to establish the rules of “correct” Valencian, actual native speakers were hardly aware of the distinction between the two languages, engaging in a complex combination of code-mixing and code-switching. Despite a certain degree of urban/rural divide, with the cities of Valencia and Alicante tending strongly towards the use of Spanish whilst Valencian is the first language in most rural areas, it is important to keep in mind that many speakers who grew up before Valencian acquired the status of a co-official language in the 1980s simply did not make a clear distinction between the two languages; their colloquial variety permitted mixing elements and structures from both.  

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2.1.2 Spanish as prestige/H-language As early as the mid-fifteenth century, the Valencian aristocracy adopted Castilian (cf. Duarte/Massip 1981, 86–87), turning it into the primary language of culture. This was followed by a more general shift to Castilian by the upper social classes and the clergy in the sixteenth century; crucially, sermons began to be delivered in Castilian (Palomero 2006). Following the War of the Spanish Succession at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Castilian became the official language for all official and administrative purposes, leading to an increasing number of situations in which speakers were exposed to the language. Furthermore, the prohibition of the use of Catalan (including Valencian) in all schools turned Castilian into the only language of education, thereby further entrenching its status as the prestige language. Until the 1980s, standard Spanish clearly remained the prestige language, used by the educated classes, in the education system and the media, in official settings, and more generally in the cities (Valencia, Alicante), while the vernacular language was a varying mix of Spanish and Valencian, with the proportion of elements from the respective languages corresponding to a complex multidimensional continuum; Figure 1 is a greatly simplified illustration of some of the relevant factors.  

Figure 1: Factors influencing the proportion of Spanish and Valencian features in everyday speech  

In many respects, the resulting linguistic situation is typical of diglossia (cf. Ferguson 1959), in that a single speech community uses two varieties for different social functions, typically a colloquial (L) and a formal (H) variety. Whilst the term is most commonly applied to situations in which two varieties of the same language are used for different social functions, the arbitrariness of the distinction between varieties and languages must be kept in mind; what is important in this context is the degree of lexical and structural similarity between the H- and the L-variety. This long-standing and fairly stable diglossic situation, in which two closely related languages are spoken by a more or less bilingual population, provides ideal conditions for large-scale interference, transfer, and ultimately even for possible hybridization; as mentioned above, until the late twentieth century, most Valencian speakers perceived their (mixed) vernacular as little more than their local nonstandard variety, and the use of Spanish lexemes and morphosyntactic structures was not generally stigmatized within the community.

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2.1.3 Valencian/Catalan as the new prestige language Since the 1980s, Valencian has had the status of co-official language and plays an increasingly important part in the education system; the proportion of Valencians considering themselves literate in Valencian has increased from 7 % in 1986 to 35 % in 2015, and 51 % of the population now feel confident speaking Valencian (Generalitat Valenciana 2015). This shift towards Valencian in educational and official settings has turned it into the new prestige language for certain sectors of society, particularly the established local middle classes. While mutual influence between Spanish and Valencian is nothing new, and is indeed the main focus of this section, the recent and relatively quick reversal of H- and L-status is noteworthy. A typical characteristic of H-languages is that they are nobody’s native variety in the region where they function as H-language. This is also the case of the present-day Valencian standard, which was established with strong influence from eastern Catalan2 (i.e. the Catalan spoken in most of Catalonia), as mentioned at the beginning of this section. The distance between the autochtonous varieties and standard Valencian is exacerbated by the fact that standard Catalan features are accepted in official settings, whilst many non-standard variants are considered incorrect, leading to a stigmatization and self-stigmatization of non-standard speakers for their use of so-called “barbarisms”, i.e non-standard and contact-induced features; a phrase commonly heard from native Valencian speakers is Jo parle molt malament, ‘I speak very badly’. The clear separation of Spanish and Valencian as two distinct languages with official standards has put pressure to learn standard Valencian on both dialectal Valencian speakers and native Spanish speakers. This has led to a novel situation in which the increasing use of Valencian by native Spanish speakers, who tend to opt for structures (also) present in Spanish, has created a pathway for additional convergence between the two languages by boosting the frequency of these features in Valencian.

2.2 Linguistic outcomes The influence of contact on colloquial Valencian can be observed at all levels of linguistic description, especially, though not exclusively, in urban areas. In this section, this will be exemplified with regards to phonology, lexicon and phraseology, discourse-regulating elements, and morphosyntax. It is, however, important to keep

2 The replacement of an existing Valencian standard by the “dialect of Barcelona” is decried by critics of the new Valencian standard, such as Puerto Ferre (2006).

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in mind that spoken Valencian varies a great deal from region to region and from speaker to speaker, and none of the features described here is shared by all Valencian speakers.

2.2.1 Phonology The vowel system of spoken Valencian is increasingly assimilating to that of Spanish, which has five vowels (/i, e, a, o, u/), both in stressed and in unstressed position. In stressed position, the inherited seven-term vowel system of Catalan, including Valencian, distinguishes /i, e, ɛ, a, o, ɔ, u/, but an increasing number of Valencian speakers no longer distinguish open /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ from closed /e/ and /o/. On the other hand, the standard Catalan reduction from five unstressed vowels (/i, e, a, o, u/) to three (/i, ə, u/) has not taken place in Valencian, probably under the influence of the more symmetrical Spanish system. In the sibilant system, a loss of voicing opposition is gradually spreading, with /z, ʒ, dʒ/ being devoiced and merging with /s, ʃ, tʃ/. This is a well-established phenomenon in some areas, notably in the so-called “apitxat” variety spoken in and around the city of Valencia; it is generally accepted that the influence of Spanish, which has no voiced sibilants, is an important factor favouring this phoneme merger. Spanish also is the model for other wide-spread phoneme mergers such as that of the palatal lateral /ʎ/ with the palatal approximant /j/ (realized as /j/), and that of /b/ and /v/; both these mergers are the norm in standard Spanish but not in most other Catalan varieties.

2.2.2 Lexicon and phraseology The majority of lexical items are cognate in Spanish and Catalan (including Valencian), with around 80 % of basic vocabulary items sharing the same Latin root.3 Adding to this shared lexical stock, borrowing from Spanish into colloquial Valencian is ongoing and frequent. While many older loanwords have become an established part of the lexicon and are not easily identifiable, given the general lexical overlap between the languages, more recent loans are, unsurprisingly, stigmatized by purists. The process of borrowing can involve straightforward phonological adaptation, such as Spanish /θ/ > Valencian /s/, as well as changes triggered by analogy. For instance, instead of Catalan grandària ‘size’, many Valencian speakers regularly use

3 Different lists of basic lexical items provide varying cognacy percentages; according to one of the most recent ones, CoBL: A New Breed of Databases on Cognacy in Basic Lexicon, 78 % of items in a basic 200-word-list are cognate.

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the word tamany, from Spanish tamaño; this is an analogical formation based on existing cognate pairs that end in -año /-aɲo/ in Spanish and in -any /-aɲ/ in Catalan, such as año–any ‘year’, baño–bany ‘bath’ and engaño–engany ‘deception’. On the other hand, some pragmatic elements are borrowed without any phonological adaptation, maintaining a pronunciation that is theoretically incompatible with the Valencian phonological system. For instance, jo! [xo] (‘crikey!’, ‘blimey!’) retains the Spanish velar fricative [x] despite the fact that it is not part of the Catalan/Valencian phonemic inventory. In addition to single-word lexemes, numerous expressions and phraseological units are shared between the two languages; the examples in Table 1 below are all normatively accepted. Whether they are the result of calquing or of ongoing close contact is difficult to determine. In any case, their absence in some or all of the surrounding Romance sister languages suggests that they are probably not jointly inherited but are common innovations in Spanish and Catalan; in the final example, joint inheritance can, in fact, be ruled out as propósito/propòsit is a fourteenth-century learned loan from Latin.  

Table 1: Calqued or jointly developed expressions and phraseological units  

Spanish

Catalan

English gloss (in parenthesis)/ translation

en lo que va de año

en el que va d’any

(“in that which goes of year”) ‘so far this year’

al fin y al cabo

al cap i a la fi

(“at the end and the end”) ‘in the end, after all’

darse por vencido

donarse per vençut

(“to give oneself for defeated”) ‘to admit defeat’

a propósito

a propòsit

(“to intent”) ‘on purpose’

As observed by Matras (1998, 326), “‘discourse-regulating grammatical elements’ are usually borrowed from the dominant language in a contact situation, i.e. the language used for communication with those outside a linguistic minority group”. This is certainly true for Catalan, and even more so for Valencian. As exemplified in Table 2, discourse markers (DM) are frequently borrowed from Spanish (cf. Vila 1996, 201), whilst the Catalan cognates are often used as the corresponding content words (CW).  

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Table 2: Discourse markers borrowed from Spanish  

Spanish CW & DM

colloquial Valencian DM

Valencian CW

normative Valencian DM

Notes

bueno CW: ‘good’ DM: ‘well, ...’

bueno ‘well, ...’

bo(n) ‘good’

bé ‘well’

pues/pos CW: ‘because’ DM: ‘well, then...’

pues/pos ‘well, then...’

doncs ‘so’

doncs ‘so’

vale CW: ‘it is worth’ DM: ‘ok’

vale ‘ok’

val ‘it is worth’

Final /-e/ in entesos lit. ‘understood.P L ’ 3rd sg. clearly marks loan.

Diphthong /we/ clearly marks loan.

Example (1) illustrates the natural use of borrowed discourse markers, even in the context of a discussion of “good Catalan usage”; while speakers are advised against the use of d’acord, probably because of its similarity to Spanish de acuerdo, the even more obviously borrowed discourse markers pues and vale, the latter a synonym for entesos, are used to comment this prescriptive rule. (1) Es recomana dir “entesos”, enlloc de “d’acord”. Pues, vale. It is recommended to say entesos instead of d’acord. Well, ok then.

2.2.3 The functional range of the past tenses: joint developments in Spanish and Valencian The contexts triggering the use of the have-perfect are virtually identical in Spanish and Catalan (including Valencian), setting them apart from surrounding Romance languages such as French on the one hand and Portuguese, Galician, and Asturian on the other.4 The functional range of the non-perfective past tenses is also identical in both languages. While the synthetic preterite has been replaced by the analytic anar + infinitive (‘go + INF ’) construction in all but the most conservative varieties of Catalan,

4 While French follows the central European areal pattern of generalizing the use of the have-perfect in the spoken language and relegating the other past tenses to formal registers and the written language, the western Ibero-Romance languages have either not developed this periphrastic tense at all, or they use it in very specific semantic contexts only. In Portuguese, for example, the functional range of the [ter + past participle] construction is far more restricted; it is used only for events that have begun in the past but are still ongoing (Tenho estudado todo o dia. ‘I’ve been studying all day.’).

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the functional contrast of this tense with the imperfect, as well as with the haveperfect, is exactly equivalent to that of the Spanish preterite. Both Spanish and Catalan thus distinguish three past tenses based on precisely the same aspectual distinctions. Taking into account that neighbouring Romance languages have not developed in the same way, it is more than likely that contact and bilingualism have played an important part in this joint development.

2.2.4 Convergence in the pronominal system (a) Syntax: clitic pronoun position The position of clitic pronouns, i.e. whether they appear in pre- or post-verbal position, has evolved in exactly the same way in Spanish and Catalan (including Valencian) since the Middle Ages, in contrast to the neighbouring Romance languages French and Portuguese. It is determined exclusively by whether the verb form is finite or not; thus, all non-finite verb forms (infinitive, imperative and gerund) require unstressed pronouns to be enclitic, whilst finite verb forms have proclitic personal pronouns. Historically, this system spread from Catalan to Castilian (Fernández Ordóñez 2011), which goes to show that the process of convergence is by no means unidirectional. (b) Clitic pronoun allomorphy Spoken Valencian does not adopt the standard Catalan allomorphy within the clitic pronoun system (1 SG , 2 SG , 3 SG / PL REFL , 1 PL ), resisting pressure from the “metropolitan standard”, instead preserving the pattern shared with Spanish, as shown in Table 3.  

Table 3: Lack of pronominal allomorphy in Valencian5  

Standard Catalan

Spoken Valencian

Spanish

proclitic

enclitic

proclitic

enclitic

proclitic

enclitic

1 SG

em

-me

me

-me

me

-me

2SG

et

-te

te

-te

te

-te

3 SG / PL REFL

es/se

-se

se

-se

se

-se

1 PL

ens

-nos

mos

-mos

nos

-nos

5 For the sake of clarity, the forms of these pronouns in contractions have not been included in this table.

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Whilst it is, of course, perfectly possible for a variety such as Valencian not to have participated in this innovation without any influence from Spanish, there is textual evidence that the morphological differentiation between pro- and enclitic pronouns of standard Catalan was also emerging in medieval Valencian; for instance, in Tirant lo blanc (Martorell, 1490), a famous chivalric romance written in Valencian in the second half of the fifteenth century, both variants can be found in preverbal position, in apparent free variation. So why, then, did this change not become generalized in the same way that it did in standard Catalan? It stands to reason that the Spanish model, in a largely bilingual environment, was a factor, in particular because the standard Catalan pattern is somewhat complex, as the choice between the allomorphs is determined (a) by the position in relation to the verb, and (b) by the initial phoneme of the verb, as shown in the following examples: sense repetir-se no es pot no se sap no s’espera /se/

“without repeat-3 SG S G . REF L ” “not 3 SG . REFL can.3S G ” “not 3 SG . REFL know.3SG ” “not 3 SG . REFL expect.3SG ”

‘without repeating himself’ ‘you can’t; it’s forbidden’ ‘it is not known’ ‘it is not expected’

Whilst complexity is, in itself, certainly no barrier for structural change, the continuing presence of a less complex alternative pattern (that of Spanish, in this case) may have tipped the balance in favour of the latter. (c) Reorganization of the pronominal system (plural indirect objects) Both Spanish and Catalan distinguish direct and indirect object pronouns to some extent. However, while in standard Spanish, accusative lo, la ( M / F SG ), los, las (M / F PL ) contrast clearly with dative le (M + F SG ), les (M + F PL ), the system is less transparent in standard Catalan, where the masculine and feminine plural forms of the indirect object pronoun coincide with the masculine plural form of the direct object pronoun, shown in bold type in Table 4.  

Table 4: Direct and indirect object pronouns in Catalan, Spanish and colloquial Valencian  

standard Catalan

Spanish

colloquial Valencian

masculine

feminine

masculine

feminine

masculine

feminine

direct obj. sing.

el (-lo)

la (-la)

lo

la

el/lo (-lo)

la (-la)

direct obj. pl.

els (-los)

les (-les)

los

las

els/los (-los) les (-les)

indirect obj. li sing.

li

le

le

li

li

indirect obj. els (-los) pl.

els (-los)

les

les

lis

lis

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While there is a clear form–function correspondence in Spanish, the standard Catalan system is somewhat opaque. On the one hand, the relationship between the singular and plural indirect object pronouns (li–els) is not transparent, as they have less in common than the masculine singular direct object pronoun with the plural indirect object pronouns (el–els). Furthermore, the fact that the feminine plural indirect object form (els) coincides with the masculine plural direct object pronoun (els), but not with the feminine plural direct object pronoun les, highlights the opacity within the standard Catalan system. Colloquial Valencian remedies this lack of transparency by following the Spanish model, replacing the plural indirect object pronouns with lis, i.e. adding the plural marker /-s/ to the singular forms. It should be noted that this is not an instance of straightforward borrowing, as the morphological material is Catalan/Valencian; what has been imported from Spanish is the greater degree of systeminternal clarity, in which functional relatedness is reflected by formal similarity.

2.3 Some observations on Spanish-Valencian contact Whilst lexical loans between the two languages are pervasive, wholesale borrowing of syntactic structures together with the corresponding morphology is not the norm. Instead, a certain degree of genuine hybridization, in which features from both languages are combined, can be observed in specific areas; a good example of this is the reorganization of the personal pronoun paradigm. Furthermore, a process of analogical assimilation, leading to the alignment of the functional range of structures in the two languages can be observed, as in the case of the three past tenses (section 2.2.3). To some extent, the outcome of this alignment process resembles that of syntactic or structural calquing (cf. Molnár 1985, 54–57), but the fact that the corresponding structures are present in both languages to begin with means that this is a distinct phenomenon. In fact, it is generally difficult to identify in which of the two languages the respective pattern originated, as its propagation is often virtually simultaneous in both languages. It is, furthermore, noteworthy that there is no need for a pair of semantically/functionally aligned structures to be cognate (or even similar) in terms of their internal morphosyntax, as seen in the case of the preterite tenses, which have exactly the same functional range in both languages, although the Spanish form is a continuation of the Latin perfect tense, whilst contemporary Catalan (including Valencian) uses an idiosyncratic periphrastic construction. A further insight from the data presented here is the fact that contact between related languages appears to favour the reduction of opacity within paradigms, at least if a more transparent or less complex model is available in the H-language, as in the case of the move towards a more transparent pronoun paradigm, in which syncretism is reduced by copying a structural feature from Spanish, without borrowing the actual morphological material.  

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Finally, it remains to be seen what the effects of the recent (partial) inversion of the H/L-language relationship between Spanish and Valencian will be. As mentioned above, the fact that an increasing number of native Spanish speakers now use Valencian in various everyday situations may contribute to further convergence.

3 Contact between Ibero- and Daco-Romance In contrast to the contact situation examined in the previous section, in which the respective languages have coexisted in the same area or in close proximity over a long period of time and there is a history of diglossia and bilingualism, in this section a very different scenario will be analysed. Romanian and Spanish have only quite recently come into intense contact, due to large-scale immigration of Romanian speakers to Spain.6 A further factor that makes this contact situation interesting is the fact that it involves three Romance languages, namely Romanian, Spanish and the Valencian dialect of Catalan (“Valencian” hereafter), which, it will be shown, interact with each other in a complex way.

3.1 Sociohistorical background of the contact situation An increasing number of Romanians began to move to Spain from the beginning of the millennium, and immigration reached its peak in the run-up to Romania joining the European Union in 2007, at a time when the Spanish economy was rapidly expanding and, in some regions, in need of additional workforce. One such region was the province of Castellón, located on the Mediterranean coast just north of Valencia, where a large number of Romanians found work and settled with their families in the early years of the 21st century. The exact number or proportion of inhabitants of Romanian origin in the capital of the province, Castellón de la Plana, where the data presented here were collected, is not easy to determine, due in part to the unbureaucratic freedom of movement within the European Union, and also because many have chosen to acquire Spanish citizenship, which means that they no longer appear in the immigration statistics. According to the latest available numbers provided by the Spanish National Statistics Institute, in 2012 some 26,000, i.e. one in seven of the 180,000 inhabitants registered in the city, were of Romanian or Moldovan nationality (INE 2012), though the actual proportion of the population they represent is probably somewhat higher, as not all Romanians are officially registered; it can be estimated that up to a fifth of the population of Castellón has a Daco-Romance background. Despite the deep economic

6 This includes migrants from both Romania and the Republic of Moldova.

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crisis that hit Spain in 2008, only a relatively small percentage of this population has decided to leave Spain (Viruela 2013), where they have established their homes and social networks. Apart from the favourable economic conditions, an important factor for many Romanians’ choice of domicile within the European Union is their cultural and linguistic affinity with Spain, due to their shared Romance heritage.7 In particular, the fact that the two languages are related and thus comparatively similar means that a speaker of Romanian can acquire a basic understanding of Spanish in a matter of days, which greatly facilitates social integration and the possibility of economic success. As a high degree of bilingualism generally favours contact-induced language change, and bilingualism within a migrant population, in turn, depends to a large extent on social integration, the degree of integration of the migrant population is of crucial importance. Whilst this cannot be measured mathematically and is not uniform throughout the migrant community, the following brief overview of some relevant factors provides a general impression of the degree to which Romanians are integrated in Castellón. In economic terms, the fact that a considerable number of Romanian speakers in Castellón have acquired property with a continuing mortgage is a strong indicator that they intend to stay. The employment situation is somewhat volatile since the beginning of the economic crisis, with short-term and unregulated jobs being commonplace. Nonetheless, returning to Romania, where the economic situation is no better, is considered only by a small proportion of migrant families. Socially and culturally, the Romanian population is generally keen to adapt, often to the extent of trying to hide their origin. The younger generation is fully integrated within the education system, with comparatively few social, cultural or linguistic barriers between migrant and local children. On the other hand, the size of the Romanian community has also facilitated the emergence of services and institutions aimed specifically at this sector of the population, ranging from a network of shops selling Romanian food to the establishment of a Romanian Orthodox church and parish. This combination of integration and regular contact with the local population on the one hand, and maintenance of cultural identity and social networks, ensuring the retention of Romanian culture and language on the other, provides ideal conditions for the emergence of bilingualism with linguistic interference and transfer.

7 Romanian and Spanish are sister languages that emerged as regional varieties of popular Latin, but there has been almost no contact between them since the Romans withdrew from the province of Dacia in 217 A.D., due to the geographical distance and long-lasting cultural separation between the Balkans and the Iberian Peninsula. Ibero- and Daco-Romance did come into contact in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, when there was an influx of Judeo-Spanish speakers into the Balkans, but there is no evidence of this causing any significant changes in Romanian.

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3.2 Sociolinguistic observations Due to the lexical and morphosyntactic similarities between Romanian and Spanish, most Romanian speakers8 acquire a high level of proficiency in Spanish in a comparatively short time, especially when compared to migrants from other linguistic backgrounds. Young female adults in full-time employment are usually fluent and approaching bilingualism within two to three years of arriving in Castellón, whilst male informants tend to be somewhat less proficient after a comparable time. At primary school, the majority of children whose mother tongue is Romanian reach approximately the same level of proficiency as their non-migrant classmates within a year, in both Spanish and Valencian if enrolled in a bilingual school.9 Among this group, a clear gender difference can be observed regarding fluency in Romanian: whilst many boys in this age group tend to be Spanish-dominant bilinguals, preferring to speak Spanish even to their parents and manifesting a considerable amount of interference when speaking Romanian, most girls of the same age are best described as balanced bilinguals who make a conscious effort to avoid interference, including self-correction. Despite the co-official status and gradually increasing prestige of Valencian (see section 2), the vast majority of Romanians in Castellón choose to learn and use Spanish rather than Valencian, though there is an awareness that Valencian is, in some respects, more similar to Romanian.10 The exposure of children to Valencian through the education system and its wide-spread presence in everyday situations does, however, mean that most adult Romanian speakers have a good passive knowledge of Valencian and occasionally use Valencian words and expressions when speaking Spanish, not unlike the local population. In this social context, at least two different currently emerging contact varieties may eventually establish themselves: (a) a variety of Romanian with features from Spanish and Valencian, and (b) a variety of Spanish with Romanian features. That the host country language can influence and change the structure of the native language in immigrant communities has been discussed for other contact situations (e.g. Doğruöz 2007; 2009), and it will be seen here that there is some evidence of such changes taking place in the Romanian spoken in Castellón.  

8 Most of the sociolinguistic information and linguistic data presented in this section is drawn from a series of thirty-three semi-guided bilingual interviews (half in Spanish and half in Romanian) with adult informants as well as groups of primary school pupils, carried out by the author as part of a research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust. 9 The source of this information is personal communication with primary school teachers at the Enric Soler i Godes Primary School in Castellón de la Plana. 10 An oft-quoted example is the sentence A fugit un bou (‘An ox has run away’), which is pronounced exactly the same in Romanian and Valencian.

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The existence of a variety of Spanish with Romanian elements, on the other hand, is more problematic to pin down. In the speech of first-generation immigrants, any Romanian features in the Spanish they speak will normally be attributed to imperfect L2 acquisition and linguistic interference. Second-generation speakers, on the other hand, are generally almost balanced bilinguals with a (near) native command of both languages, which they clearly distinguish and use appropriately depending on the situational context. However, within groups of friends with the same second-generation migration background who are used to speaking Spanish to each other in the school environment and in the presence of non-Romanian classmates, the use of Spanish with a sprinkle of Romanian words, expressions and calques can frequently be observed. This rumañol (rumano+español) functions as a kind of insider language, affirming its speakers’ group identity; whether it will eventually become an established sociolect remains to be seen. Castellón Romanian (CR hereafter), on the other hand, is a currently emerging variety of Romanian with a mix of features from Spanish and Valencian that may become the shared language of the Romanian community in Castellón in the near future. Whilst the most visible feature is the spontaneous insertion of Spanish and Valencian lexical and phraseological elements, instances of linguistic transfer of a more systematic nature can also be identified.

3.3 Linguistic features 3.3.1 Phonetics and phonology The most significant transfer from a phonological point of view is the neutralization of the opposition between the palato-alveolar affricate /ʧ/ and the alveolar affricate /ts/ in the Romanian of some young female speakers, especially those with very high proficiency and fluency levels in Spanish. Whilst standard Romanian distinguishes these two phonemes, as shown by the minimal pair cine (/ʧ/) ‘who’ vs ţine (/ts/) ‘to hold’, these speakers pronounce both phonemes as [ts]. The loss of this phonological opposition is due to a phonetic change that is currently taking place in Spanish, especially among young female speakers, which is leading to an increasingly alveolar pronunciation [ts] of the phoneme /ʧ/. As the two sounds are allophones in Spanish, this is a purely phonetic change; however, when transferred to Romanian, the substitution of /ʧ/ by /ts/ affects the phonological system, effectively eliminating one phoneme.

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3.3.2 Lexicon and phraseology The lexical inventory tends to be the most easily permeable part of a language, and the presence of numerous lexical loans, both systematic and spontaneous (nonce borrowings) is perhaps the most visible result of contact. Given that the native and the borrowed lexemes can, and generally do, coexist as synonyms, a clear distinction between nonce borrowings and loanwords cannot be made; in any case, no attempt will be made here to quantify the number of lexical loans. Instead, the focus will lie on what motivates lexical loans, which of the contact languages they are borrowed from, and how they are integrated morphologically. Two of the most common motivations for borrowing a Spanish word (or, indeed, a Valencian one, as we shall see below) into the Romanian variety spoken in Castellón are (a) linguistic economy, or (b) clarity, i.e. the reduction of potential ambiguity to avoid misunderstandings. The contribution of both of those factors is visible in the case of the verb a plancha ‘to iron’, borrowed from Spanish planchar into the Romanian variety spoken in Castellón. In standard Romanian, the corresponding notion is usually expressed by the verb a călca, which literally means ‘to step on’; as a result of this polysemy, there is a potential for ambiguity, for instance in a sentence such as ‘I’ve ironed/stepped on the table cloth’, at least in the absence of any further contextual information. Romanian offers a way to resolve any such ambiguity by using the more precise expression a călca cu fierul (lit. ‘to step on something with the iron’). Nevertheless, the loan verb a plancha (or a plancea, with Romanian orthography), is less ambiguous than a călca, and at the same time more economical than a călca cu fierul, which is why this loan from Spanish has become an established lexical element for many Romanians in Castellón. Another reason why Spanish lexical items or collocations become established elements of the Romanian variety of Castellón is the absence of exact semantic or pragmatic correspondence between the respective word or expression and its Romanian counterpart. A frequent example is the use of de/en/a los chinos (lit. ‘from/at/to the Chinese’) to refer to a type of (usually Chinese-owned) shop selling a wide range of cheap items, which are extremely common in Castellón and other Spanish towns but far less widespread in Romania. The literal translation into standard Romanian, de la chinezi, has a rather different meaning, as it does not refer to a particular kind of shop, but to people of Chinese origin. (2a) Colloquial Spanish

lo he comprado en los chinos in the Chinese-PL it have.1SG bought (2b) Castellón Romanian l-am cumpărat en los chinos. in the Chinese-PL it-have.1SG bought ‘I have bought it from the Chinese five-and-dime store.’

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(2c) Standard Romanian l-am cumpărat de la from at it-have.1SG bought ‘I have bought it from the Chinese.’

chinezi. Chinese-PL

It should further be noted that it is not merely the entire prepositional phrase that has been borrowed into Romanian in this case, but rather the construction [[PREP ] los chinos], where the [PREP ] slot can be filled by the prepositions de, en or a. Though the sentence in (2b) appears to be half Romanian and half Spanish, it would, nevertheless, be inappropriate to speak of code-switching in this case, as we are dealing with a lexically established, regularly occurring loan construction with its own, distinct meaning that has become part of CR. Lexical loans from Spanish are usually fully integrated into the phonological system of Romanian. For instance, the CR loanword sită11 from Spanish cita ‘appointment’, as in am o sită ‘I have an appointment’, frequently used by Romanian speakers in Castellón instead of the standard expressions am o întâlnire, exemplifies the adaptation of the initial dental fricative /θ-/ of the Spanish word cita, changing it to an alveolar fricative /s-/, the most similar phoneme in Romanian. Furthermore, a morphophonological adaptation of the final vowel can be observed, changing it from /-a/ to central /-ə/, the typical final vowel of Romanian feminine nouns without the enclitic definite article. If the original Spanish final /-a/ were retained, the noun would automatically be analysed as definite, causing an irresolvable conflict with the indefinite article o that precedes the noun in the above example. (3a) Spanish (3b) Castellón Romanian (3c) Standard Romanian

tengo una /θita/. have-1SG INDF . ART date[ INDF ] am o /sitə/ have.1SG INDF . ART date[ INDF ] am o întâlnire have.1SG INDF . ART date[ INDF ] ‘I have an appointment.’

Similarly, verbs borrowed from Spanish are fully integrated into the morphosyntactic system of Romanian (“direct insertion”, cf. Wohlgemuth 2009). For instance, the verb a regala ‘to give as a gift’ from Spanish regalar, often used as a synonym for standard Romanian a dărui in CR, follows the inflectional paradigm of the Romanian first conjugation (infinitives ending in -a), and a pedi ‘to order’ from Spanish pedir, a CR synonym for standard Romanian a comanda, follows the paradigm of the Romanian fourth conjugation (infinitives ending in -i).

11 The existence of the noun sită meaning ‘sieve’ in standard Romanian does not appear to affect the acceptance of this loanword.

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This morphological integration of borrowed verbs into the existing paradigms furthermore appears to facilitate the adoption of Valencian verbs, due to a certain degree of morphological overlap in the inflectional paradigms of Romanian and Valencian. Thus, the morphology of participles and first person plural forms frequently coincides in Romanian and Valencian, as in Rom. a copia, Val. copiar ‘to copy’, which share both the participle copiat and the 1st pl. copiem, or Rom. a oferi, Val. oferir ‘to offer’ with the shared participle oferit and 1st pl. oferim. The overlap of the verbal paradigms in certain forms makes it particularly unproblematic for speakers to transfer the respective Valencian verb into Romanian in these forms, without any need for morphological adaptation, and subsequently expand its use to the rest of the paradigm. A typical example of this is Val. recollir ‘to pick up’, which is occasionally used in CR in place of the less specific Romanian verb a lua ‘to take, to fetch, to pick up’, as seen in example (4). (4) Am recollit -o de PRF.1SG pick.up-PTCP OBJ .3 SG . F from ‘I’ve picked her up from the airport.’

la at

aeroport. airport

In addition to the fact that the participle form recollit is the same in the source and the target language, the choice of the Valencian verb instead of cognate Spanish recoger is also favoured by the absence of a Romanian conjugation that could unproblematically accommodate Spanish verbs in -er (cf. Schulte 2012, 344). What has been shown in this section is that lexical borrowing is subject to a complex combination of semantic and structural factors; one of these factors is the ease with which a borrowed element can be incorporated into the recipient language. While most linguists agree that “anything can be borrowed” (Haase/Nau 1996, 7), the examples provided here suggest that borrowing is facilitated by formal and structural similarity and compatibility between the donor and recipient languages.

3.3.3 Morphosyntax: contact-induced changes in usage frequency As mentioned above (3.3.1), contact-induced structural changes can and do occur in the language of immigrant communities. In this section, it will be illustrated how the structural similarity between related contact languages can be an important factor in this process: constructions that are rare or even marginal in standard Romanian but highly frequent in Spanish and Valencian are shown to have gained ground among CR speakers, and a similar process can also be observed in the Spanish of some Romanians living in Castellón. One such change is a marked increase in the use of prepositional constructions instead of morphological genitive and dative inflection. To assess this phenomenon correctly, it must be borne in mind that the respective prepositional constructions

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(with the prepositions de and la) do exist in Romanian, but in the standard language they are rare except in specific syntactic constructions in which morphological case marking is not possible. In the Ibero-Romance languages, on the other hand, morphological case marking is restricted to the pronominal system, so that possessor and non-pronominal beneficiary are always marked prepositionally (with de and a, respectively). Both in normal speech and in elicitation tasks, the prepositional construction is considerably more frequent in Castellón Romanian than in the standard language, in the speech of both first- and second-generation migrants. Even in set expressions that always appear with the genitive case in standard Romanian, over 50 % of informants opt for the prepositional construction instead (example 5b). (5a) Standard Romanian:

Ministerul Învățământului ministry educación.- DEF - GEN ‘Ministry of Education’ (5b) Castellón Romanian: Ministerul de Învățământ ministry of educación ‘Ministry of Education’ A similar shift can be observed regarding the use of the infinitive instead of finite subordination. As a general rule, subordinate clauses in standard Romanian are formed with finite verb forms, even when they have a coreferent subject; in the case of adverbial subordinate clauses introduced by a preposition, however, the infinitive is also available as an alternative. Following the example of Spanish and Valencian, where same-subject subordinate clauses must obligatorily be infinitival, CR strongly favours infinitival subordination in these contexts. In the opposite direction, an extension of the temporal range of the ‘have’-perfect can be observed in the Spanish spoken by Romanians in Castellón. Whilst colloquial Romanian uses this tense for all past events, in standard Spanish it cannot normally occur when accompanied by a time adverb referring to a completed period of time, such as ayer ‘yesterday’. Nevertheless, this rule is occasionally violated for specific pragmatic purposes, particularly and increasingly in journalistic register (e.g. Ayer se ha producido un accidente, ‘Yesterday an accident has taken place’). Probably under the influence of the wider functional range of the ‘have’-perfect in Romanian, there is a tendency among Castellón Romanians to further expand the use of this tense in their variety of Spanish, as seen in (6). (6a) Romanian:

(6b) Transfer to Spanish:

Ieri mi-au spus că... that yesterday to.me-have-3 PL told ↓ Ayer me han dicho que... that yesterday to.me have-3 PL said

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(6c) Standard Spanish:

615

Ayer me dijeron que… yesterday to.me say-3 PL . PST that ‘Yesterday they told me that…’

3.4 Summary The selection of examples presented in this section illustrates some of the mechanisms involved in the transfer of linguistic features between related languages that have come into contact as a result of migration. The migrant community’s original language was shown to be subject to certain innovations at the phonological, lexicophraseological and morphosyntactic levels, and whilst it is too early to say whether these contact-induced changes are the first step in the development of a fully-fledged, stable contact variety, they certainly indicate what such a new variety of Romanian might be like. The presence of a third Romance language, Valencian, adds complexity to this contact situation. On the one hand, it is not the primary contact language for most Romanian speakers, but on the other hand its morphological similarity to Romanian makes it particularly easy to borrow from. The transfer of Romanian features into Spanish should not be forgotten. In the Spanish spoken by first-generation immigrants, these features are largely due to interference as part of the language acquisition process; however, it appears that second-generation speakers may be developing their own contact variety of Spanish that they use for specific social purposes. Finally, whilst there is currently no evidence of Romanian influencing the language of the local non-migrant population, and it is indeed unusual for the socially dominant language to be structurally affected by contact (Matras 1998, 326), studies of longer-established migration-based contact situations have shown that the migrant population’s variety of the local language can eventually gain prestige, leading to the adoption of some of the salient features of the migrant sociolect by certain parts of the indigenous population (cf. Deppermann 2007).

4 Spanish and Portuguese in contact in the New World: the case of Fronteiriço Fronteiriço, also known as Uruguayan Portuguese (UP), is spoken in northern Uruguay, in the area around the town of Rivera, close to the Brazilian border. Whilst it is occasionally also referred to as Portuñol (a portmanteau of português and español, i.e. Portuguese and Spanish), it differs significantly from most other mixtures of Spanish and Portuguese used along the Brazilian border in that it is

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the native language of a considerable number of speakers,12 not merely a lingua franca.

4.1 A very brief sociohistorical overview of the linguistic situation Though Spain and Portugal agreed, in the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, on splitting South America between them along a north-south line, this division remained very imprecise. As a result, the area in which Fronteiriço is spoken today was initially settled by the Portuguese, but eventually became part of the Spanish empire and, after Uruguayan independence, of a Spanish-speaking country. Nevertheless, the population of the area remained the same and continued speaking Portuguese, almost exclusively so until the end of the nineteenth century, albeit with certain influence from Spanish. Whilst the native language of the locals thus remained a variety of (Brazilian) Portuguese, Spanish gradually acquired an increasingly important role as official language of education and administration, with the consequence that nowadays virtually all UP speakers are bilinguals. The result is a classic diglossic situation in which Fronteiriço (the L-language) is used in everyday familiar settings, whilst Spanish (the Hlanguage) is the language of choice in more formal or official settings; the proficiency level in the H-language depends on the individual’s amount of exposure to it and is closely related to the level of formal education. The L-language, for its part, is subject to lexical, structural and phonological change due to the influence of the H-language, with the effects going beyond simple, straight-forward borrowing; it will be shown, in this section, that some genuine hybrid structures have emerged. In many ways, the present-day situation of Fronteiriço resembles that of Valencian before it received the status of co-official language. There are, however, a few important differences. For one thing, no serious attempt has been made to create a standard variety of Fronteiriço, and its use as a language of literature is recent and very limited. Valencian, on the other hand, has a literary tradition that goes back to the fifteenth century, and efforts to create a modern standard began more than a hundred years ago. Nevertheless, the orientation of normative Valencian towards the prestigious standard of Catalonia at the expense of local features is, in many ways, similar to the way that Fronteiriço speakers consider urban Brazilian Portuguese (BP) features more prestigious and strive to adopt them (Carvalho 2004). The fact that both Valencian and Uruguayan Portuguese speakers tend to perceive their native variety as inferior and, crucially, incorrect shows that the awareness of a prestige variety of their native language has a negative effect on linguistic self-perception and ultimately endangers the survival of genuinely local features, as certain groups of speakers,

12 Estimates of the number of speakers vary considerably, ranging from 100,000 to more than 500,000.

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especially the urban middle classes with social aspirations, try to emulate the more prestigious standard, which leads to the avoidance and substitution of features that are perceived to be characteristic of the non-standard local variety (Carvalho 2004).

4.2 Linguistic features of Fronteiriço Like any variety that has not been artificially standardized, Fronteiriço is not uniform. On the one hand, there is a diatopic continuum: roughly speaking, the further away from the Brazilian border, the more Spanish-like features speakers tend to incorporate. Nevertheless, even along the border itself, which is several hundred kilometres long, features vary between different towns and regions. The best-studied variety, which will also be discussed here, is that of the city of Rivera, located right on the border; it forms a single urban area with the adjoining Brazilian city of Santana do Livramento. On the other hand, there is a diastratic continuum, with the more educated classes tending towards bilingualism, albeit with a certain degree of interference between the two languages, whilst a lower level of education tends to go hand in hand with a greater degree of linguistic hybridization. However, the situation is dynamic in that many native speakers of Uruguayan Portuguese make an effort to adjust their language, in particular their pronunciation, to urban Brazilian Portuguese, as a reflection of their desire to belong to the culture they are in daily contact with via the mass media, primarily television. As shown by Carvalho (2004), one characteristic feature of Brazilian Portuguese gaining ground in Uruguayan Portuguese as the result is the palatalization of alveolar stops followed by a high front vowel, i.e. the pronunciation of /ti/ and /di/ as [tʃi] and [ʤi], respectively. Whilst not a “linguistic feature” in the classical sense, a characteristic property of Fronteiriço is the ease with which it permits code-switching (Pountain 2017, 271), facilitated by the fact that almost all Uruguayan Portuguese speakers are bilingual to a certain extent, which makes it possible for lexical items from Spanish and Portuguese to be used as interchangeable synonyms, with no clearly identifiable preference of one or the other. Beyond the mere lexical level, Lipski (2006) observes that in Portuñol (used as a cover term for a variety of Spanish-Portuguese contact situations, including Fronteiriço), generally established rules regarding where in a sentence a switch from one language to the other can take place are frequently violated. For instance, code switches are usually not permitted between a subject pronoun and the following verb (e.g. *you vas ‘you go’ in Spanglish), but this restriction does not hold for Spanish–Portuguese code switching, as shown by the following example, in which the subject pronoun is Portuguese but the predicate is Spanish.

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(7) o que bocês entienden por the what you.PL understand.3PL by ‘What do you mean by shit?’

mierda? shit

(underlined: Spanish)

(Lipski 2006, 12) Lipski interprets such otherwise unlicensed switches as evidence that speakers are not, in fact, switching between two distinct grammars, but that both languages have a “single psycholinguistic representation” (Lipski 2006, 12) for those bilingual speakers.

4.2.1 Lexicon In addition to code-switching, which is here understood to include instances of nonce borrowing, i.e. the occasional or sporadic, unsystematic use of a word from the other language, there are also different types of genuine lexical loans and contact-induced lexical changes. Carvalho (2003, 138–141) distinguishes loanshifts, loanblends, established loans and sporadic loans. An example of a loanshift is buscar ‘to look for’ in Uruguayan Portuguese (Carvalho 2003, 138). The same verb exists in standard Brazilian Portuguese as well, where it is more commonly used to mean ‘fetch’, whereas the BP default verb for ‘to look for’ is procurar. Though buscar can also be used to mean ‘to look for’ in Portuguese, its generalized use in this meaning in UP is likely to be due to the fact that buscar is also the default verb for ‘to look for’ in Spanish. Loanblends are perhaps more interesting, as they require an awareness of the phonology and/or morphology of the source language in order to blend a borrowed and a native word. An example of an established phonological loanblend is /koza/ ‘thing’, in which the voiced /z/ of BP /kojza/ is preserved, but the diphthong disappears due to the influence of Spanish /kosa/; it should be pointed out that the voiced pronunciation of the sibilant is not due to phonetic adaptation of the Spanish word to Portuguese phonology, as Portuguese has a voiceless /s/ in its phonemic inventory. A morphological loanblend is the noun jubilação /xubilasãw̃ / ‘retirement’, which is based on Spanish jubilación /xubilaθjon/ with the same meaning, whereas the corresponding Brazilian Portuguese noun is aposentamento. Due to the fact that there is a categorical correspondence between the Spanish nominalizing suffix -ción and Portuguese -ção, the replacement of the Spanish ending by the Portuguese one is a clear case of morphological loanword integration. At the phonological level, the initial velar fricative /x/ is preserved from Spanish, despite not being part of the Fronteiriço phonemic inventory, whilst the nasal diphthong in the suffix is not an available phoneme in Spanish. This means that jubilação is a genuine morphological and phonological hybrid lexeme. The established loans are primarily lexical items belonging to the semantic fields of administration, education, and the media, due to the influence from the central government and the national media. What is, perhaps, more surprising is the consis-

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tent use of the Spanish names for the days of the week, which may also be due to their use in administrative and educational contexts.

4.2.2 Phonology Phonological features are among the most commonly mentioned traits of Fronteiriço. For instance, Uruguayan Portuguese differs from the Brazilian urban standard in that syllable-final /-l/ is not vocalized to /-w/, and the palatal lateral approximant /ʎ/ in intervocalic position is delateralized and merges with /j/, a phenomenon known as yeísmo in Spanish, where this pronunciation is widespread. These features tend to be explained by the influence of Spanish on UP, but this is an oversimplification of the facts. While it is true that the -l > -w change does not occur in Spanish, it is a relatively recent change in Brazilian Portuguese that has, nevertheless, spread across almost the entire country and has become the norm even in formal BP. The early settlers of both present-day Brazil and the area in which Fronteiriço is spoken, however, certainly did not fully vocalize final /-l/, so the absence of this later innovation is primarily a conservative feature that can be attributed to the cultural separation of UP from BP, though it may well be speculated that the influence of Spanish, where this change does not occur either, has contributed to the preservation of the original pronunciation. With regards to the delateralization of intervocalic /ʎ/, the influence of Spanish is perhaps even less clear, as the pronunciation of this phoneme is [ʃ] in Uruguayan Spanish, and recent research suggests that the approximant pronunciation [j] of /ʎ/ was probably never more than a sporadic phenomenon in Uruguay, with a palatoalveloar fricative pronunciation [ʒ] and [ʃ] appearing around the same time as the merger of /ʎ/ and /j/ (Canale/Coll 2016). On the other hand, the delateralization of intervocalic /ʎ/ is, in fact, a widespread and widely stigmatized feature of rural Brazilian Portuguese in general, which goes to show how a feature that at first sight appears to be attributable to the influence of the contact language is, in fact, the result of a language-internal innovation. A further much commented phonological feature of UP is the denasalization of nasal vowels in unstressed word-final syllables. While nasal vowels are, indeed, one of the most obvious features that distinguish Portuguese from Spanish, their absence in just one very specific phonotactic environment is unlikely to be solely the result of contact with Spanish. Rather, given that similar denasalization also occurs in several rural southern Brazilian varieties (Carvalho 2004, 131), it is more likely that we are dealing with a regional feature of Portuguese, which may have been reinforced by the absence of nasal vowels in Spanish. An interesting side effect of this process of denasalization is that it has led to the emergence of word-final palatal nasals, which exist neither in Spanish nor Portuguese. Thus, the Portuguese nasal diphthong /-ẽj/̃ in word-final unstressed position, such as the 3rd person plural present tense forms of verbs in -er and -ir, becomes /-eɲ/, with the palatal component shifting from the nasal

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vowel to the nasal consonant. For example, standard PB bebem /'bebẽj/̃ ‘they drink’ becomes /'bebeɲ/ in Fronteiriço.

4.2.3 A selection of structural features The structural differences between Uruguayan Portuguese and the Brazilian standard are far too numerous to provide a full inventory in this section. Instead, a few structures will be presented to exemplify some of the different types of interaction between Portuguese and Spanish in this particular contact situation. Structural features of Portuguese that do not exist in Spanish are an obvious starting point; here a brief look will be taken at the future subjunctive and the inflected infinitive. Does their absence in Spanish affect their use in Uruguayan Portuguese? The best answer to this question is probably “a bit”, as slight changes in usage patterns and frequencies can be detected. Carvalho (2007, 73) observes that the future subjunctive, which in Portuguese appears obligatorily in temporal subordinate clauses with future time reference, is in Fronteiriço occasionally replaced by the present subjunctive, the normal choice of tense for this type of subordinate clause in Spanish. Nevertheless, the future subjunctive is maintained in these contexts in most cases by most speakers, showing that the influence of Spanish is limited. The situation regarding the personal or inflected infinitive is slightly different. In Portuguese, the identity of the subject of subordinate infinitive clauses can be clarified or disambiguated by means of a person/number inflection on the infinitive, as seen in the Fronteiriço example (8). In addition to this inflection, the infinitive can also have an overt nominal or pronominal subject under certain syntactic and pragmatic circumstances. calle é fácil de nós acharem. (8) Na find.INF .3PL In.the street is easy COMP us ‘In the street it’s easy for them to find us.’ (Carvalho 2003, 132)

(underlined: Spanish)

Spanish, on the other hand, does not allow infinitives to be inflected, but it does permit the appearance of overt subjects in infinitival clauses, though to a far lesser extent than Portuguese, and almost exclusively for pragmatic purposes such as contrastive focus (Schulte 2007, 150–170). Overt subjects in Spanish infinitival clauses generally appear postverbally, whilst they tend to appear in preverbal position in Portuguese. According to Carvalho (2003, 132; 2014, 271), the inflected infinitive is generally maintained in Uruguayan Portuguese, though it is possibly somewhat less frequent than in BP. An interesting example she provides is the following, uttered by the same speaker as example (8) above.

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(9) O avião tava pá sair, pá nós the plane was for leave.INF for we ‘The plane was about to leave, for us to go.’

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ir. go.INF

In this example, the infinitive has an overt subject (nós) but no person inflection (-mos), which makes it morphosyntactically more similar to the corresponding Spanish construction. However, in Spanish it would be highly unusual for an overt subject to appear in this sentence because there is no indication of contrastive focus; in any case, the subject pronoun would almost certainly appear after the verb. To some extent, example (9) is, thus, a genuine hybrid construction in which Portuguese morphosyntax has been modified due to the influence of Spanish.13 A more specific case of contact-induced structural innovation is the merger of the Spanish and Portuguese constructions involving the verb gustar/gostar ‘to like’. In Spanish, the person who likes something is the indirect object and the thing he or she likes is the subject of the construction; in BP, on the other hand, the “liker” is the subject and the “liked” is the complement (linked by the prepositional complementizer de in the standard language, which is, however, frequently omitted in informal speech), as shown in examples (10a) and (10b), respectively. (10a) Spanish:

Me

gusta IOBJ .1SG like.3SG ‘I like to read.’ (10b) Portuguese: Eu gosto SUBJ .1SG like.1SG ‘I like to read.’

leer. read.INF [de] [COMP

ler. ]read.INF

In addition to the two Portuguese variants, Fronteiriço also has a third construction, used more than sporadically, that combines elements of the Spanish and the Portuguese construction (Elizaincín 1992, 133), as illustrated in example (10c), taken from Sturza (2006); it is basically the Spanish construction with the de of its Portuguese counterpart inserted. (10c) Fronteiriço: A mí me

gusta

de

hablar

brasileiro.

(underlined: Spanish)

to me IOBJ .1SG like.3SG COMP speak.INF Brazilian ‘Me, I like speaking Brazilian.’ (Sturza 2006, 73)

13 Also regarding the use of the inflected infinitive, Gutiérrez (2015, 125–127) notes that this construction is used extensively in UP, even when the subject of the main clause is identical to that of the infinitive, leading her to the conclusion that this is a case of extension or “hypergeneralization”.

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What makes this hybrid construction particularly interesting is that it is structurally fundamentally different from both its Spanish and Portuguese counterparts in terms of its valency, as it lacks a subject slot, making UP gustar an impersonal verb with two arguments. As neither of the source languages has such ditransitive impersonal verbs, this can be seen as a genuine structural innovation. While the previous examples have shown how contact with Spanish causes structural innovation in Uruguayan Portuguese, there are also cases in which it appears to slow down language change by supporting the preservation of features that are receding in Brazilian Portuguese. An example of this is the passive or impersonal se-construction, which is extremely common and the default way of omitting the agent in Spanish, whereas it is increasingly being replaced by a simple 3rd person verb form without a reflexive pronoun in Brazilian Portuguese (González 1994). According to a study carried out by Gutiérrez (2015), Uruguayan Portuguese does not follow the Brazilian trend, with more than 90 % of impersonal constructions of this type using the reflexive pronoun se. A slightly different case is the widespread use, both in working- and middle-class Uruguayan Portuguese, of um ‘one’ as an impersonal pronoun (Carvalho 2007, 62), in a way very similar to Spanish uno. At first sight, this impersonal construction would thus appear to be a straight-forward borrowing from Spanish, as it is not used in present-day Brazilian Portuguese. However, it is also possible that it survived in Fronteiriço, probably with the support of the parallel Spanish construction, from an earlier stage of the language, as the productive use of um as an impersonal pronoun is attested in Portuguese until the sixteenth century (Teyssier 2001, 82–83) and may still have been part of the linguistic inventory of the first Portuguese-speaking settlers in northern Uruguay in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As has been shown in this section, not only the sociolinguistic situation, but also the types of contact-induced change, are to some extent similar to the SpanishValencian scenario presented in section 2. That both contact languages were brought to the New World as part of colonization appears to be less relevant than the fact that they are very closely related and share a great deal of lexical and morphosyntactic material. This similarity facilitates contact-induced change beyond mere borrowing of sounds, words and constructions, as the presence of synonymous and structurally similar constructions in the two languages opens the door for the emergence of new hybrid structures in which components of both the source constructions are combined. While Fronteiriço is generally classified as a variety of Portuguese, these unique structures that exist in no other variety of Portuguese or Spanish also justify characterizing it as “an emergent hybrid language variety with an identity of its own” (Pountain 2017, 271).  

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5 Conclusions Though quite different in terms of their historical background and sociological parameters, the three contact situations examined in this chapter have all had a profound effect on the languages involved, affecting not only their lexical inventory, but also their phonology and morphosyntax. The types of structural changes presented here range from contact-induced shifts in usage frequency (e.g. more prepositional case marking in Romanian, fewer inflected infinitives in Fronteiriço) on the one end of the spectrum to the emergence of genuinely hybrid constructions and paradigms (e.g. the spoken Valencian object pronoun paradigm, the gostar-construction in Fronteiriço) on the other. Furthermore, some examples have been provided in which language contact may have the effect of preserving an older feature that has been subject to change in other varieties of the same language (e.g. the lack of pronominal allomorphy in spoken Valencian, the impersonal constructions in Fronteiriço), though it is, of course, never possible to be certain whether these varieties would have preserved the older features in the absence of the contact language. The ease with which the languages involved affect each other structurally is, at least in part, due to the fact that we are dealing with contact between sister languages that are structurally comparatively similar to begin with. Whilst the view that structural similarity between donor and recipient language is a necessary precondition for syntactic borrowing (Weinreich 1953, 25; Sørensen 1957, 133; Moravcsik 1978) must be refuted in the light of recent typological data (Comrie et al. 2011), the examples presented here do lend support to the somewhat weaker claim that there is a certain correlation between structural similarity and the likely amount of contact-induced change (Haig 2001, 218–222). The smaller the structural differences between two languages are, the less cognitive effort is involved in inserting constructions and other elements, combining paradigms, and using constructions, tenses etc. that are present in both languages in increasingly more similar ways. An example in which the role of cognitive effort is evident is the way in which Romanian easily inserts Spanish verbs into the corresponding conjugations, but generally resists borrowing verbs for which no exactly equivalent conjugation exists in Romanian (cf. 3.3.2). The closer the contact languages are in structural terms, the more likely it becomes for speakers not to have completely separate cognitive representations of the different languages involved (as pointed out in 4.2 with regards to code-switching in Fronteiriço); for bilingual speakers of two languages that have a high degree of lexical and structural overlap, it is natural for the distinction to become blurred. In diglossic settings, the use of the H-language is required in, but not necessarily limited to, certain specific social contexts and situations; the L-language, on the other hand, is also typically used in a set of specific contexts, but the lack of an established standard paired with some speakers’ social aspirations means that the insertion of elements from the H-language is common and generally not stigmatized, as seen both in the case of Fronteiriço and of Valencian before it acquired the status of co-official

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language. The rather unusual present-day situation in the Valencian Community (and in other Catalan- and Galician-speaking areas of Spain), in which standardized versions of two closely related languages function as parallel H-languages, adds further complexity to the effects of diglossia on the colloquial, spoken language(s). The case of Romanian in contact with Spanish and Valencian shows that even a comparatively short period of intense contact between Romance languages can cause changes to the native language of a migrant population, once again facilitated by the (partial) structural overlap between the respective languages. It is, however, too early to say whether a stable local Romanian contact variety will eventually become established, or indeed whether Romanian features may, in time, creep into the local variety of Spanish. The contact situations presented in this chapter were chosen with the aim of exemplifying the linguistic outcomes of different sociohistorical scenarios involving speakers of two or more Romance languages. The fact that borrowing and structural transfer has led to a certain degree of linguistic convergence in all three cases suggests that similar developments may be expected wherever Romance languages are in close contact, but it should be kept in mind that this will always depend on the social parameters of the contact situation.

6 Bibliography Blas Arroyo, José Luis (1992), Consecuencias del contacto de lenguas en el español de Valencia, Español actual 57, 81–100. Blas Arroyo, José Luis (1993), La interferencia lingüística en Valencia (dirección catalán-castellano). Estudio sociolingüístico, Castellón, Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universitat Jaume I. Canale, Germán/Coll, Magdalena (2016), Historia y presente del yeísmo (rehilado) en el Uruguay, Lexis 14(1), 5–40. Carvalho, Ana Maria (2003), Rumo a uma definição do português uruguaio, Revista internacional de lingüística iberoamericana 2, 125–150. Carvalho, Ana Maria (2004), “I Speak like the Guys on TV”: Palatalization and the Urbanization of Uruguayan Portuguese, Language Variation and Change 16, 127–151. Carvalho, Ana Maria (2007), Diagnóstico sociolingüístico de comunidades escolares fronterizas en el norte de Uruguay, in: Nicolás Brian/Claudia Brovetto/Javier Geymonat (edd.), Portugués del Uruguay y educación bilingüe, Montevideo, Administración Nacional de Educación Pública, 44–76. Carvalho, Ana Maria (2014), Sociolinguistic Continuities in Language Contact Situations: The Case of Portuguese in Contact with Spanish along the Uruguayan-Brazilian Border, in: Patrícia Amaral/ Ana Maria Carvalho (edd.), Portuguese/Spanish Interfaces, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 263–294. Comrie, Bernard, et al. (2011), Introduction, in: Matthew S. Dryer/Martin Haspelmath (edd.), The World Atlas of Language Structures, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1–8. Deppermann, Arnulf (2007), Stilisiertes Türkendeutsch in Gesprächen deutscher Jugendlicher, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 37(148), 43–62. Doğruöz, A. Seza (2007), Synchronic Variation and Diachronic Change in Dutch Turkish: A Corpus Based Analysis, Tilburg, Tilburg University.

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Doğruöz, A. Seza (2009), Innovative Constructions in Dutch Turkish: An Assessment of Ongoing Contact-Induced Change, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 12(1), 41–63. Duarte, Carles/Massip, Maria Àngels (1981), Síntesi d’història de la llengua catalana, Barcelona, Magrana. Elizaincín, Adolfo (1992), Dialectos en contacto. Español y portugués en España y América, Montevideo, Arca. Epps, Patience/Huehnergard, John/Pat-El, Na’ama (edd.) (2013), Contact among Genetically Related Languages, Journal of Language Contact 6, 209–219. Ferguson, Charles A. (1959), Diglossia, Word 15, 325–340. Fernández Ordóñez, Inés (2011), La lengua de Castilla y la formación del español, Madrid, Real Academia Española. Generalitat Valenciana, Conselleria d’Educació, Investigació, Cultura i Esport, Subdirecció General de Política Lingüística (2015), Coneixement i ús social del valencià 2015, València, Generalitat Valenciana. González, Neide T. Maia (1994), Cadê o pronome? O gato comeu. Os pronomes pessoais na aquisição/ aprendizagem do espanhol por brasileiros adultos, doctoral thesis, São Paulo, University of São Paulo. Guinot, Enric (2002), El repoblament aragonés: Colonització i llengües (segles XII i XIII), Caplletra: Revista Internacional de Filologia 32, 85–94. Gutiérrez, Silvia Etel (2015), O contínuo linguístico na região fronteiriça Brasil–Uruguai. O entreberado esa língua que inbentemo aqui, Porto Alegre, Simplíssimo. Haase, Martin/Nau, Nicole (1996), Einleitung: Sprachkontakt und Grammatikalisierung, Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 49(1) (Special Issue: Sprachkontakt und Grammatikalisierung), 3–8. Haig, Geoffrey (2001), Linguistic Diffusion in Present-Day East Anatolia: From Top to Bottom, in: Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald/Robert M. W. Dixon (edd.), Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance: Problems in Comparative Linguistics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 195–224. INE Instituto Nacional de Estadística (2012), Encuesta de población activa, http://epa.com.es/datosdemograficos/pais-de-la-nacionalidad-extranjera (last access 17.04.2017). Lipski, John M. (2006), Too Close for Comfort? The Genesis of “Portuñol/Portunhol”, in: Timothy L. Face /Carol A. Klee (edd.), Selected Proceedings of the 8th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, Somerville, MA, Cascadilla Proceedings Project, 1–22. Martorell, Joanot (1490), Tirant lo Blanch, Valencia, Nicolau Spindeler. Matras, Yaron (1998), Utterance Modifiers and Universals of Grammatical Borrowing, Linguistics 36, 281–331. Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1925), Das Katalanische: Seine Stellung zum Spanischen und Provenzalischen sprachwissenschaftlich und historisch dargestellt, Heidelberg, Winter. Milá y Fontanals, Manuel (1861), De los trovadores en España, Barcelona, Verdaguer. Molnár, Nándor (1985), The Calques of Greek Origin in the Most Ancient Old Slavic Gospel Texts. A Theoretical Examination of Calque Phenomena in the Texts of the Archaic Old Slavic Gospel Codices, Weimar, Böhlau. Moravcsik, Edith A. (1978), Language Contact, in: Joseph H. Greenberg/Charles A. Ferguson/Edith A. Moravcsik (edd.), Universals of Human Languages, vol. 1, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 93–123. Palomero, Josep (2006), Valenciano y castellano en la comunidad Valenciana, in: Pedro Luis Barcia (ed.), III Congreso Internacional de la lengua española: Identidad lingüística y globalización, Buenos Aires, Academia Argentina de Letras, http://congresosdelalengua.es/rosario/ponencias/aspectos/palomero_j.htm (last access 17.02.2018).  

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Peñarroja Torrejón, Leopoldo (1990), El mozárabe de Valencia: Nuevas cuestiones de fonología mozárabe, Madrid, Gredos. Pountain, Christopher J. (22017, 12003), Exploring the Spanish Language: An Introduction to its Structures and Varieties, London/New York, Routledge. Puerto Ferre, Teresa (2006), Lengua valenciana: Una lengua suplantada, Valencia, Diputación de Valencia. Schleicher, August (1853), Die ersten Spaltungen des indogermanischen Urvolkes, Allgemeine Monatsschrift für Wissenschaft und Literatur, 876–887. Schmidt, Johannes (1872), Die Verwandtschaftsverhältnisse der indogermanischen Sprachen, Weimar, Böhlau. Schulte, Kim (2007), Prepositional Infinitives in Romance: A Usage-Based Approach to Syntactic Change, Frankfurt/Bern, Lang. Schulte, Kim (2012), Daco- and Ibero-Romance in Contact: On the Origin of Structural Similarities between Related Languages, Revue roumaine de linguistique 57(4), 331–354. Sørensen, Knud (1957), Latin Influence on English Syntax. A Survey with a Bibliography, Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague 11, 131–155. Sturza, Elian Rosa (2006), Línguas de fronteira e política de línguas: Uma história das idéias lingüísticas, doctoral thesis, São Paulo, Universidade Estadual de Campinas. Teyssier, Paul (22001, 11980), História da língua portuguesa, São Paulo, Martins Fontes. Vila, F. Xavier (1996), Transcodic Markers and Functional Distribution in Catalan, in: Mercè Pujol Berché/Fermín Sierra Martínez (edd.), Las lenguas en la Europa Comunitaria II: Las lenguas de minorías (Diálogos hispánicos 19), Amsterdam/Atlanta, Rodopi, 195–212. Viruela, Rafael (2013), Entre dos crisis económicas. Estrategias de los rumanos en el mercado de trabajo español, Política y sociedad 50(3), 981–1009. Weinreich, Uriel (1953), Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems, New York, Linguistic Circle of New York. Wohlgemuth, Jan (2009), A Typology of Verbal Borrowings, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter.

Anna María Escobar

23 Language contact between typologically different languages: functional transfer Abstract: The study of contact-induced phenomena between typologically different languages has focused primarily on borrowing of phonological material through lexical and grammatical borrowing. Fewer studies have treated grammatical influence, also referred to as functional transfer, which has been explained as “less accessible to speaker consciousness”, more “tightly integrated to the linguistic system”, and requiring the establishing of “equivalence relations” between the two languages (Mithun 2013, 244–246). In this chapter, the grammatical influence of an Amerindian language (Quechua) on Spanish is presented to exemplify a case of functional transfer by analysing possession in both languages, and by proposing the grammatical parallels that lead to the innovative construction found in Andean Spanish. The chapter calls for considering the study of Romance languages, especially the global languages of Spanish and French, as a rich area of study to help uncover functional transfer in unrelated languages due to the many and diverse contact scenarios they represent.  

Keywords: functional transfer, grammatical influence, typologically non-related languages, possession, Romance language  

1 Introduction Structural similarity between languages in contact is often cited in the literature as a facilitator of contact-induced phenomena (Thomason/Kaufman 1988, 50; Thomason 2001, 71), possibly leading to further structural congruence (cf. Matras 2007; Bowern 2013; Law 2013). These phenomena, apparently involving languages of similar typology (Matras 2009; Campbell 1993), seem to suggest that contact-induced phenomena are less common between non-related languages. These views seem to be at odds with observations from second-language acquisition, where typological differences between the two languages are regarded as fostering, rather than inhibiting, instances of first-language influence, while similarities (lexical cognates, for example) would facilitate acquisition (cf. Odlin 2005). In an effort to better understand the complexities of language contact, researchers call attention to the need to incorporate more prominently in contact models the parameter of speaker interaction, since “any type of language change will begin at the level of the individual utterance in discourse” (Matras/Sakel 2007, 848; cf. Croft 2000; Weinreich 1953). Thomason/Kaufman’s assertion (1988, 4) that “linguistic factors can https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-024

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be overridden by social factors pushing in the opposite direction” (cf. Thomason 2001, 77) is supported when proposing social factors as particularly relevant in “predicting” linguistic outcomes in language contact, such as widespread bilingualism, the intensity of speaker contact (for example, through migration and increase of urbanization), and the presence of second-language speakers (cf. Kerswill/ Williams 2005; Kerswill 2012; Mufwene 2001; 2008). In this chapter, contact phenomena are presented from a scenario in which two non-related languages are in intense contact and where there is widespread bilingualism. We argue that the contact scenario that they represent helps analyse contact-induced phenomena in contact between non-related languages under a different light. The particular contact scenario of a Romance language, Spanish, with the most spoken Amerindian language in the Americas, Quechua, suggests a rich and diverse area of research for theorizing about linguistic influence in contact between typologically different languages, and about the contact scenario. Two types of contact outcome are discussed in the literature as common and as dependent on the contact scenario: borrowing of phonological material (lexical and grammatical) and transfer of non-phonological material (semantic and grammatical). Thomason/Kaufman’s research (1988; cf. also Thomason 2001) finds that borrowing can take place in scenarios with little bilingualism. Transfer of non-phonological material (semantic and grammatical), on the other hand, requires widespread bilingualism and intense contact, and that the “bilingual speaker” be a native speaker of the source language and, at the same time, a second-language speaker of the recipient language (source language agentivity; van Coetsem 2000). Within borrowing of linguistic matter, grammatical borrowing is considered more resistant than lexical borrowing. Within grammar, on the other hand, morphology is considered the most resistant, both in borrowing and transfer of non-phonological material (Thomason/ Kaufman 1988; cf. Thomason 2001; Tadmor/Haspelmath/Taylor 2010; Mithun 2013). In contact between non-related languages, borrowing of grammatical expressions is widely found in Amerindian languages in contact with Spanish (e.g. Hekking/ Muysken 1995; Bakker/Gómez-Rendón/Hekking 2008), but is less commonly found in the Spanish varieties (that are in contact with the same languages). The social standing (hegemonic or minoritized) of each of the languages in contact seems to play an important role in setting the social conditions that can favour the specific type of contact phenomena. Nonetheless, transfer of non-phonological material (semantic and grammatical) can be found in the hegemonic language when intense contact situations with widespread bilingualism occur, as is the case in Spanish in contact with Quechua (cf. Escobar 2011), which in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, represents a special case of contact scenario between non-related languages. Similar circumstances can be hypothesized for Guarani-Spanish in Paraguay, Mayan-Spanish in Guatemala and Southern Mexico, and Basque-Spanish in the Basque Country. Regarding morphological influence, specifically, Mithun (2013, 244–246; cf. also Ross 2013) explains that this apparent resistance in language contact takes place

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because this type of influence depends on, most importantly, the speaker first establishing equivalence relations between the two languages in contact. Mithun further suggests that “morphology may be less accessible to speaker consciousness than larger constructions [i.e. syntactic and discourse structures], particularly in the case of unwritten languages” (ibid., 244), mainly because it is more tightly integrated into the linguistic system. She adds that extra-linguistic factors, such as the literacy level of the speaker and her propensity to analyse language, might also intervene in her establishment of the equivalencies between the two languages (ibid., 246). We suggest here, that it requires bilinguals with high dominance in both languages. Siegel (2012, 189) defines functional transfer as “applying the grammatical functions of a morpheme from one language (the SL [source language]) to a morpheme in another language (the RL [recipient language]) that does not normally have these functions”. Focusing on grammatical influence and using Siegel’s definition of functional transfer as a starting point, we argue for a more refined semantic/functional perspective in interpreting Mithun’s “equivalence relations” (or grammatical parallels) in language contact in order to better identify functional transfer and achieve a deeper understanding of the grammatical influence process. This chapter focuses on a specific construction that falls within the morphological semantic concept of possession in order to exemplify how “equivalences” between non-related languages are not always apparent, potentially skewing our analysis.

2 Spanish-Quechua contact Although Spanish and Quechua have been in contact since the sixteenth century, Andean Spanish (henceforth AS), as a (contact) dialect, did not emerge until the twentieth century, when the required social conditions for the emergence of this new dialect were in place. In Peru, the intensity of contact derived from heavy waves of internal migration, from rural to urban, and from Quechua-speaking regions to other regions. The resultant social ecology favoured the emergence of a larger bilingual Quechua-Spanish community, next to monolingual speakers of AS, and particularly in urbanized areas. In 2010, in the Peruvian capital, situated in a non-Andean dialect region, 57 % of the population are Andean migrant or of Andean descent (Arellano/ Burgos 2010). Only 12.7 % of the Lima population are descendants with two or three generations born in Lima. The Peruvian Quechua-Spanish bilingual community is composed of second language speakers of Spanish, as well as an important presence of native bilinguals (which includes simultaneous and early sequential bilinguals, also described as 2L1 speakers), and more recently, an emerging Spanish-speaking community relearning the heritage language of their parents. Speakers of AS varieties are found mainly in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador (in descending order). However, smaller communities are also found in N. Argentina, N.E. Chile, S.W. Colombia, and in the eastern Amazon region.

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Among its dialectal features, AS presents examples of both borrowing (lexical and grammatical) and functional transfer attributable to contact with Quechua, although more in-depth studies uncovering the trajectories of the influence are needed (cf. Escobar 2011). Most Quechua lexical borrowings entered Spanish during the colonial period (sixteenth-eighteenth centuries; cf. Mejías 1980). New lexical borrowings and grammatical borrowing are found in modern varieties of AS. However, these have entered the norms of specific subregions, and are not present in all varieties of AS. For example, more examples are found in Ecuadorian and Bolivian Spanish norms, than in Peruvian ones. What is interesting to note, nonetheless, is that the vast majority of these borrowings express similar functional meanings, including the suffixes for plurality (nominal, -kuna), focus (-ga), diminutive (-cha), and vocative (-y). In contrast, Spanish lexical and non-lexical borrowings are found in all varieties of Quechua (although more comparative work is needed in this respect as well; cf. Muysken 2000), as is the case with other Amerindian languages in contact with Spanish (e.g. Hekking/Muysken 1995; Bakker/Gómez-Rendón/Hekking 2008; Haspelmath/Tadmor 2009; Bakker/Hekking 2012; Seifart 2015). What this evidence further suggests is that locally-varying social (or extra-linguistic) factors of the contact scenario play an important role in helping us better understand the processes and the induced linguistic outcomes in these types of contact situations. Although functional transfer is found in AS, its status is not without controversy. Among the most widely accepted contact features in AS is the innovative evidential function of the present perfect, although variation is found in the type of evidential meaning expressed depending on the region where it is used. In Ecuadorian Spanish it is used to express reported information (Bustamante 1991; Dumont 2013), while in the Peruvian (and Bolivian) region it refers to the speaker’s experience (Escobar 1997; Jara Yupanqui 2013; Crespo/Escobar 2016). Differences suggest independent development, thus influence of the social constraints. Among the AS contact features that have caused most controversy is the so-called “redundant” use of the third person singular possessive determiner in possessive constructions of the type “Poss N de N” (Escobar 1978, 108). Although this “redundancy” is also found in other grammatical persons, the third person is the most widely used among native speakers of Andean Spanish (Escobar 1994). This marker is found with both human (1) and inanimate (2) nouns in the possessor position.  

(1) a.

sus hermanas POSS. 3-PL sister-FEM-PL lit. ‘POSS sisters of Alina ‘

b. su casa de POSS. 3-SG house GEN lit. ‘POSS house of Alina ‘

de GEN

Alina Alina

Alina Alina

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(2) a.

su pata de POSS. 3-SG leg GEN lit. ‘POSS leg of the table’

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la mesa DET.DEF-FEM-SG table

b. su pueblo de Ayacucho POSS. 3-SG town GEN Ayacucho lit. ‘POSS town of (the department of) Ayacucho’ Examples with the genitive construction first, and constructions with inanimate possessors, are considered proper of Quechua dominant bilingual speakers (Rodríguez Garrido 1982). Notwithstanding, constructions with both inanimate and human possessors are found in all speakers of Andean Spanish, and have also been found in university-educated speakers of Ribereño Spanish (Escobar 2014). The controversy regarding contact phenomena status stems from the fact that “redundant” constructions are also found in sixteenth-century Spanish brought to the region by the Spanish colonizers, although in constructions with only animate possessors (pronominal and nominal). Examples of this “redundant” construction are also found in other modern Spanish varieties, including Mexican, Paraguayan, and New York City Spanish, as we discuss later. Examples with an inanimate possessor as in (2) seem to go unnoticed in the literature, but are found in Peruvian Andean Spanish. We argue that this “possessive construction” represents a case of contact-induced structural change, that falls under what is known as functional transfer (Siegel 2012) or conceptual transfer (Heine/ Kuteva 2005), defined as “the transfer of grammatical information from one language to another without involving any linguistic forms [which] is perhaps more widespread than has previously been thought” (Heine/Kuteva 2005, 79). This semantic concept of possession is a universal conceptual domain in human language (Seiler 1983, 17; Lakoff 1987; Heine 1997a; 1997b; a semantic prime Wierzbicka 2007; Goddard/Wierzbicka 2007; Aikhenvald/Dixon 2013) that has been found to appear early in child language acquisition (Brown 1973, 196; Heine 2001). Therefore, the “accessibility” of the morphological concept to the speaker’s consciousness, as a factor in disfavouring the influence, is weakened. Possession is a biocultural domain expressed in different levels of the linguistic system (lexical and grammatical) (Seiler 1983). Moreover, this conceptual category is found in all languages of the world and is expressed both lexically and grammatically, which might help explain why possession-related contact phenomena are commonly found in contact between non-related languages (cf. Heine/Kuteva 2002; 2005). We focus on nominal attributive possession.

3 Quechua nominal possession The possession association between two Quechua nouns is marked in most varieties with two suffixes, a genitive –pa that follows the possessor, and the third person

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possessive marker –n, that follows the possessed, in that order. Although double marking in the nominal phrase is not common in languages of the world (Krasnoukhova 2014), many Quechua varieties still use double marking, such as the Peruvian Andean, the Amazonian Napo, and the Bolivian Andean varieties. Other Quechua varieties only use the genitive marker, such as the Ecuadorian Kichwa, the Colombian Andean, and other Amazonian varieties (Adelaar/Muysken 2004, 208). Possessive constructions fall under three broad semantic categories of inalienability, following Aikhenvald/Dixon (2013): ownership of property, part-whole relations (such as body and plant parts), and blood (kinship) and affinal human relationships, presented from more alienable to more inalienable relations. Possession is understood, similar to other concepts, as a continuous category that can be represented in an inalienability cline, such as the one shown in Table 1.  

Table 1: Inalienability cline of Quechua possessive noun constructions (Escobar/Soto forthcoming; adapted from Seiler 1983; Haiman 1985; Heine 1997b; Croft 2003; Nichols 2003; Aikhenvald/Dixon 2013)  

Semantic category

Example

Translation

[-alienable] POSSESSOR [+ human] Kinship

turay-pa brother-GEN

wawa-n child-POSS.3.SG

‘of my brotherj POSSj son’

Attribute

Juan-pa John-GEN

suyñu-n dream-POSS.3.SG

‘of Juanj POSSj dream’

Origin

Qusqu-pa Cusco-GEN

runa-n man-POSS.3.SG

‘of Cuscoj POSSj man’

Non-Blood/Social relationship

llamkaq-pa worker-GEN

masi-n neighbor-POSS.3.SG

‘of the workerj POSSj colleague’

Body-Part: Human

Paulina-pa Paulina-GEN

ñawi-n eye-POSS.3.SG

‘of Paulinaj POSSj eye’

pisqo-pa bird-GEN

tupsa-n beak-POSS.3.SG

‘of the birdj POSSj beak’

Whole-Part: Object

wasi-pa house-GEN

perqa-n wall-POSS.3.SG

‘of the housej POSSj wall’

Whole-Part: Flora

sacha-pa tree-GEN

kallma-n branch-POSS.3.SG

‘of the treej POSSj branch’

POSSESSOR [- human, + animate] Body-Part: Animal POSSESSOR [- animate]

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Table 1: (continued)  

Semantic category

Example

Translation

Whole-Part: Nature

urqu-pa mountain-GEN

siki-n foot-POSS.3.SG

‘of the mountainj POSSj base’

Whole-Part: Geography

provincia-pa province-GEN

llaqta-n town-POSS.3.SG

‘of the provincej POSSj town’

Whole-Part: Social Institution

yachay-wasi-pa wawa-n-kuna knowledge-house-GEN child-POSS.3-PL

‘of the schoolj POSSj children’

[- animate]

yachay-wasi-pa libru-n-kuna knowledge-house-GEN book-POSS.3-PL

‘of the schoolj POSSj books’

[- human, + animate]

llama-pa llama-GEN

qora-n grass-POSS.3.SG

‘of the llamaj POSSj grass’

turiy-pa brother-GEN

antara-n ‘of my brotherj POSSj trumpet-POSS.3.SG trumpet’

PROPERTY/ BELONGING

[+alienable] [+ human]

Categories presented in Table 1 follow inalienability and possessor animacy distinctions, that help detail (in)alienability nominal associations in Quechua (cf. Cusihuamán 1975; Soto 1975; Cerrón Palomino 1987; Zárate Pérez 2012; Escobar/Soto forthcoming). As animacy is relevant in possession (Seiler 1983), categories with a human possessor include kinship, body part, and property, but also “attributes” as another broad category (cf. Heine 1997b, 85; Seiler 1983). In this last group are included events (trip, work), physical state (strength, height) mental state (fear, happiness), place of origin, as well as other individual attributes (voice, name, appearance). A further distinction made in the cline separates non-blood social relationships (colleague, partner, neighbour) from kinship. All categories except “property” are usually considered inalienable. Although, in some languages, cultural entries such as canoe, arrow, flute, can be considered inalienable as well (Aikhenvald/Dixon 2013). Following Table 1, Escobar/Soto (forthcoming) created an oral questionnaire in Quechua with 182 entries representing examples of all of the possible N-N relationships found in the proposed (in)alienability cline. The same noun associations were presented with and without the genitive –pa and the possessive –n markers, since N-N is productive in Quechua. The acceptability judgments of ten native speakers of Ayacucho Quechua (Southern dialect) were recorded. Participants were university-educated, 40 years of age or older, and used Quechua currently. Participants were asked to give information on whether a specific N-N relationship was acceptable with the use of –pa/-n, and, later,  

 

 

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whether it was acceptable to use it without the markers. Entries were discussed one at a time. Each interview took between two and three hours. In some cases, participants gave copious information on details of the meaning, additional uses, etc. The analysis centres on the acceptability patterns of the N-N relationships with (analytic expression) or without (synthetic expression) the markers, based on 1,310 judgments. The judgments as to whether the analytic or synthetic expression were acceptable in Quechua, and whether the meanings were equivalent or not were investigated because of two characteristics of Quechua. The first refers to a structural feature connected to the productivity of compounding as a lexicalization process. Compounding derived from noun reduplication can express mass concepts (as in 3), while other Noun-Noun compounding can lead to a new nominal concept (as in 4) (Cusihuamán 1975; Soto 1975; Cole 1982; Cerrón Palomino 1987; Floyd 2011; Zárate Pérez 2012; Escobar/Soto forthcoming). (3) a.

rumi rumi stone stone ‘stony terrain’

b. sacha sacha tree tree ‘forest’ (4) a.

wasi masi house colleague ‘neighbour’

b. tayta mama father mother ‘parents’ The first noun, however, can also acquire an adjectival function in some compounds, derived from an attributive relationship, as in (5). (5) a.

rumi wasi stone house ‘stonehouse (N)’

b. rumi chaka stone bridge ‘stonebridge (N)’ In some pairs, the attributive relationship can lead to conversion, as in this case, to adjectival function (6).

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(6) a.

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piki chaki lice foot ‘agile (Adj)’

b. chiri sunqu cold heart ‘indifferent (Adj)’ Conversion is highly productive in Quechua (Floyd 2011), as opposed to Spanish, which has few nouns that without affixes can also function as an adjective (e.g. joven ‘young’, viejo ‘old’). Floyd (2011, 48) argues that Quechua is a “flexible” language in that overlaps can be found not only between nouns and adjectives, but also among all major word classes. The hypothesis of the Quechua study is that an analysis of the interaction between animacy and inalienability can help explain the semantics of Quechua possession. The fact that Quechua N-N can lead to different semantic relationships, including attribution, make the study of third person possession marking especially relevant, since possession and attribution are connected cross-linguistically, and in grammaticalization processes of semantic change (Heine 2001; Heine/Kuteva 2002; 2005). The responses to the questionnaire showed a clear distinction between constructions with a human or with an inanimate possessor. Figures 1–4 present the relative percentage of the acceptance of analytic and synthetic expressions within specific (in)alienable categories. The results in Figure 1 clearly show that constructions with a [+ human] possessor are preferred in its analytic expression, as opposed to constructions with an inanimate possessor. Non-human animate possessors approximate more inanimate-possessor constructions than human-possessor ones. The results suggest that animacy alone does not explain the data, but that humanness is highly relevant in Quechua (in)alienable associations.

Figure 1: Positive preference of analytic and synthetic expressions of N-N constructions depending on the type of possessor  

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Figure 2 displays the acceptance of analytic and synthetic expressions of N-N constructions with only [+human] possessor. The analytic construction is strongly preferred for property (‘brother trumpet’), body (‘Paulina eye’), attribute (‘John dream’), and kinship (‘brother son’), but also for origin/belonging (‘father town’), although the synthetic expression option was slightly higher in this last category. Non-blood social relationships (‘doctor patient’), on the other hand, show a higher acceptance percentage of synthetic expressions. This might suggest that possible lexicalization processes are involved, which requires further research.

Figure 2: Positive preference of analytic and synthetic expressions of N-N constructions with [+human] possessors

Figure 3 focusses on possessors that are animals. It is clear from the graph that with animal body parts (‘cow leg’) and property (‘pig house’), synthetic expressions are accepted more frequently than when the possessor is human (Figure 2). Again, here, this might be related to lexicalization processes that are beyond the focus of this chapter.

Figure 3: Positive preference of analytic and synthetic expressions of N-N constructions with [-human, +animate] possessors

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What is, nonetheless relevant for our purposes here is that these results suggest a strong distinction in Quechua between humans and other animates, and, especially, inanimates, as Figure 4 further illustrates. With an inanimate in the “possessor” position, analytic and synthetic expressions compete in all the categories: origin (‘Cusco man’), social relationship (‘house neighbour’), part-whole object (‘table leg’), nature (‘lake water’), flora (‘tree branch’), geography (‘province town’), social institution (‘school students’), and property (‘school book’).

Figure 4: Positive preference of analytic and synthetic expressions of N-N constructions with [-animate] possessors

Social relationships have a higher acceptance percentage rate of synthetic expressions. This could be due to the fact that the expression wasi masi ‘house neighbour’ was included in the questionnaire, and is considered by some Quechua speakers as a lexicalized compound meaning ‘neighbour [+human]’ (especially among older Quechua speakers, as clarified in personal communication with Clodoaldo Soto). However, in discussions with the younger respondents, some interpreted it as a ‘neighbouring house’. That is, while for older Quechua speakers, ‘masi’ must have the [+human] semantic property, for other speakers of modern varieties of Quechua, masi refers to a [-animate] ‘neighbour’. What is interesting here is that this last meaning of masi resembles Spanish vecino (‘neighbour/neighbouring’). This Spanish word can have a nominal or adjectival function. In its adjectival function, it can appear with a human or an inanimate noun. Clearly, further research on cases like this is needed.

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4 Andean Spanish nominal possession Uses of nominal possession constructions with possessive determiners are less common in Spanish than in French, English, and German (Van Peteghem 2012). Nonetheless the use of the Spanish third person possessive determiner su is frequent in AS, and examples can be found in the literature to illustrate all categories within the inalienability cline, as shown in Table 2 (cf. A. Escobar 1978; Rodríguez Garrido 1982; Escobar 1994; 2000; Cerrón Palomino 2003; Garatea 2004; Risco 2012; Godenzzi 2010; Escobar/Soto forthcoming).  

Table 2: Inalienability cline of Andean Spanish possessive noun constructions  

Semantic category [-alienable]

Example

Translation

Kinship

suj hijo de mi hermanoj POSS.3-SG son GEN POSS.1-SG brother

‘POSSj son of my brotherj’

Abstract Attribute

suj sueño de Juanj POSS.3-SG dream GEN Juan

‘POSSj dream of Juanj’

Origin

‘susj habitantes de Cuscoj‘ POSS.3-PL inhabitants GEN Cusco

‘POSSj inhabitants of Cuscoj’

POSSESSOR [+ human]

Non-Blood/ suj colega de Paulinaj Social Relation- POSS.3-SG colleague GEN Paulina ship Body-Part: Human

suj ojo de Paulinaj POSS.3-SG eye GEN Paulina

‘POSSj colleague of Paulinaj’ ‘POSSj eye of Paulinaj’

POSSESSOR [- human, + animate] Body-Part: Animal

‘POSSj beak of the suj pico del pájaroj POSS.3-SG beak GEN-DET.DEF.MASC-SG bird birdj’

POSSESSOR [- animate] Whole-Part: Object

suj pata de la mesaj POSS.3-SG leg GEN DET.DEF.FEM-SG table

‘POSSj leg of the tablej’

Whole-Part: Flora

suj rama del árbolj POSS.3.SG branch GEN-DET.DEF.MASC tree

‘POSSj branch of the treej’

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Table 2: (continued)  

Semantic category

Example

Translation

Whole-Part: Nature

suj agua del lagoj POSS.3.SG water GEN-DET.DEF.MASC lake

‘POSSj water of the lakej’

Whole-Part: Geography

suj pueblo de la provinciaj POSS.3.SG town GEN DET.DEF.FEM-SG province

‘POSSj town of the provincej’

Whole-Part: Social Institution

susj niños de la escuelaj POSS.3.PL children GEN DET.DEF.FEM-SG school

‘POSSj children of the schoolj’

[- animate]

susj libros de la escuelaj POSS.3.PL books GEN DET.DEF.FEM-SG school

‘POSSj books of the schoolj’

[- human, + animate]

‘POSSj grass of suj pasto de los animalesj POSS.3.SG hay/grass GEN DET.DEF.MASC-PL the animalsj’ animal-PL

[+ human]

‘POSSj trumpet of suj trompeta de mi hermanoj POSS.3.SG trumpet GEN POSS.1.SG brother my brotherj’

PROPERTY/ BELONGING

[+alienable]

Spanish is described as a language that favours the possessive marker with alienable nouns (property/ownership: house, book, trumpet), and favours the definite article with inalienable nouns (kinship, body parts) (Demonte 1988; Gili Gaya 1972; Picallo/ Rigau 1999; Butt/Benjamin 2004). In Old Spanish, su could appear in possessive constructions with human possessors only “to disambiguate the referent of ‘su’” (Keniston 1937; Gili Gaya 1972). (7) suj hermano de Paulinaj (no de Rosa) lit. ‘POSSj brother of Paulinaj (not of Rosa)’ This function is still found in all varieties of Spanish, but because of its specific function its frequency in the language is low. In a quantitative sociohistorical study of modern Mexican Spanish possession, Huerta Flores (2009) finds that the su N de N construction appears frequently regardless of the ambiguity of the “possessor” referent, but is restricted to kinship relationships. The author suggests that this construction is a remnant of Old Spanish, but does not explain the loss of the disambiguation function. Mexican Spanish is until now, the only known case of a monolingual, non-contact variety of Spanish that presents the use of su with inalienables for non-disambigua-

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tion (restricted to kinship constructions). The only other detailed study on the use of possessive markers in a monolingual non-contact Spanish variety is that of Costeño Spanish, a northern coastal variety of Colombian Spanish. Orozco (2010) finds that this variety follows the general tendency presented for Spanish in the literature. In this dialect, the definite article is favoured with inalienables (only body part and kinship are included in this study). These studies, however, do not answer the question of why AS presents an extended use of the su construction with all categories in the inalienability cline. A study on New York City Spanish finds possessive constructions with inalienables. In this variety of Spanish in contact with English, Montoya (2011) finds that first-generation New York City-born, children of Spanish-speaking immigrants, make frequent use of the su construction with inalienables, while their parents, longresident immigrants (20 years or more), also show some use of the possessive marker with inalienables, although more restrictively. In both cases, disambiguation is also not involved. Among those born in the USA, first-born children and those in whose houses English was allowed, the possessive construction was used even more frequently (2011, 128). Researchers have suggested that influence from English is behind the favouring of possessive markers with inalienable nouns in US Spanish (cf. SilvaCorvalán 1994). More in-depth linguistic studies are still needed, however. The origin of the functional influence that led to the emergence of what we are calling the AS su construction seems to lie within specific semantic (and syntactic, as we will argue) parallels between Quechua and Spanish, despite the fact that we are working with a semantic category that is found in all languages of the world. Consequently, we propose features of these semantic (and syntactic) parallels that underlie this contact-induced innovation in Andean Spanish.  

5 Grammatical change Grammatical change shows regularities that have been documented cross-linguistically (cf. Heine/Claudi/Hünnemeyer 1991; Bybee/Perkins/Pagliuca 1994; Heine 1997b; Heine/Kuteva 2002; 2005; Hopper/Traugott 2003; Traugott/Dasher 2005). Specific trajectories of change have been proposed for possession, and can be found in the development of both monolingual and contact varieties (Heine/Kuteva 2005). In the trajectory of the emergence of a new function of a grammatical construction, a rise in the frequency of the construction is seen in the early stages of the grammaticalization process (cf. Heine/Kuteva 2005; Matras/Sakel 2007). In the case of the Andean su construction, we find a rise in the frequency of a known minority construction (or pattern; Heine/Kuteva 2005; cf. Goldberg 2006) of the Spanish language. This rise in frequency seems to be accompanied by a change in the grammatical meaning of the construction, from a relational or possession association meaning to an attributive one (cf. Heine 1997a; 1997b; Heine/Kuteva 2002), as seen above with inanimate posses-

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sors. Parallel to the change in function, the use of the construction is extended to new contexts, such as from alienable constructions, to kinship relationships, to other inalienable categories, and from human to inanimate possessors. How the trajectory of semantic change evolves exactly, step by step, is still unclear. However, some macro-stages can be hypothesized (presented in Table 3).  

Table 3: Grammaticalization of the Andean Spanish su construction  

Stage

Semantic property

Syntactic property

1

disambiguation > non-disambiguation

alienable constructions > kinship constructions

2

non-disambiguation possessive association

other constructions with human possessors

3

possessive association > attributive

other constructions with inanimate possessors

The extension of the non-disambiguation function from kinship constructions to all constructions in the (in)alienability cline with human possessors and, later, to inanimate possessors show more advanced grammaticalization stages, as well as more abstract associations between the nouns (cf. Heine/Kuteva 2005; Traugott/Trousdale 2013). The grammaticalization of possessive to attributive is a further stage in the grammaticalization process of this construction, which is commonly found crosslinguistically (Heine/Kuteva 2002; 2005). Further research is needed, however, for a close-up of how this process exactly evolves in this contact dialect of Spanish. Notwithstanding, in the following we highlight some properties of Quechua and Spanish that seem to point to parallel semantic and syntactic properties in the partwhole category with inanimate possessors that need further research. In Figure 4, analytic and synthetic expression of Quechua N-N part-whole associations with inanimate possessors showed strong competition with each other. Partwhole constructions in languages can have both relational (body parts, kinship) and non-relational associations, such as in el paté de hígado lit. ‘the paté of liver’, and la sortija de matrimonio lit. ‘the ring of matrimony/wedding’ (Müller 2001, 176). Müller suggests that in Spanish, the type of association found between these noun pairs is dependent on the head noun (or the possessum, or N1), since nouns denoting body parts (arm) and kinship (daughter) are inherently relational. However, not all inanimate part-whole relationships are relational, which suggests, according to the author, that some associations could be interpreted in an ambiguous way, explaining the competition found in Figure 4 between synthetic and analytic expressions of these constructions with inanimate possessors. Müller (2001) further explains that the presence of an inanimate noun in the genitive phrase of a non-relational construction favours the reading of the construction as referring to one “entity”. Nonetheless, the Quechua study found that not all part-whole constructions with inanimate possessors accepted the synthetic expression easily. For example, wasi

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perqa lit. ‘house wall’ or ‘wall of a house’ was preferred over wasi-pa perqa-n (with the genitive and possessive suffixes), which is only possible, according to the respondents, when referring to a wall that was standing alone after the house fell. Life experiences seem to be involved here, in the sense that it is less likely for speakers to see the ‘wall’ on its own, than to see the ‘wall’ as part of a house. Other noun pairs within the part-whole macro-category also showed variation in the respondents’ synthetic/analytic preference, and also seemed to be connected to life experiences. While qocha yaku (‘lake water’), yunga wayta (‘Yunga region flower’), and llaqta plasa (‘town plaza’) showed preference for the synthetic expression; sacha-pa ruru-n (‘of the treej POSSj fruit’), and urqu-pa siki-n (‘of the mountainj POSSj base’) showed preference for the analytic construction. A third set of noun pairs accepted almost equally both types of expressions: qocha(pa) pata(n) (‘lake shore’), and sacha(pa) llaqe(n) (‘tree leaf’). Variation in the preference for the synthetic or analytic expressions was found mainly when the noun associations referred to nature, flora, and geography, but also when referring to part-whole objects (wall, for example) and social institutions such as with school. For example, ‘school-children’ was accepted more frequently with the synthetic expression than was ‘school-teacher’. Semantically, it could be argued that since school children in Peru use uniforms, they might be more “identifiable” in daily life than school teachers. However, this particular pair is also a reminder of a nonfrequent feature of Spanish grammar that could be interpreted as a parallel grammar feature. While in Spanish one can translate the first Quechua noun pair to niños escolares, that is, with a Noun+Adjective construction; this is not possible with ‘teacher’, *maestros escolares, where only the analytic construction is acceptable, maestros de la escuela. Noun-Noun expressions in Quechua can be compounds with an attributive association, where the first noun (in the possessor position in Quechua) can acquire an adjectival reading (rumi wasi ‘stone house’), as seen earlier. A Quechua compound such as ‘school children’, however, highlights an area of possible grammatical parallels between Quechua and Spanish. First, while in Spanish niños escolares ‘school children’ (lit. ‘children scholars’), the noun niños is followed by a denominal adjective, the reading is similar to some of the N-N attributive associations found in Quechua. Second, in contexts of inanimate possessors, the Spanish equivalent of the Quechua adjectival noun is possible in the form of a Spanish denominal adjective of an inanimate noun (such as escuela ‘N: school’ > escolar ‘Adj: pertaining to school’). However, these cases are cited as rare in Spanish (Bosque 1998, 108–111; cf. also Picallo/Rigau 1999; Bosque/Gutiérrez-Rexach 2009, 624–625). Third, although compounding is somewhat productive in Spanish, it is not as productive as in Quechua, and it is less productive than Spanish derivation (cf. Lang 1990; Moyna 2011). Fourth, connected to the previous feature of Spanish grammar, few Spanish nouns can also function as adjectives without derivation (vecino ‘neighbour, next to’, joven ‘lad, young’), as mentioned earlier. Finally, although the genitive/possessive markings can

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appear with all constructions in the (in)alienability cline in Quechua, the possessive su only appears with alienables in most non-contact varieties of Spanish. That is, in almost all cases, the grammatical parallels highlight a minority tendency in Spanish, albeit a possible parallel. The semantic and syntactic features described in Table 4 are all productive in Quechua, while they all have low productivity in Spanish. Nonetheless, the properties of Spanish grammar connected to possessive constructions suggest semantic and syntactic parallels with Quechua. AS su constructions represent a more grammaticalized construction that can have attributive function, as some constructions in Quechua, but different than most Spanish varieties. We argue that both semantic and syntactic properties of Quechua possession enable a functional transfer that gives rise to the Andean Spanish su construction described in this chapter.  

Table 4: Grammatical parallels between Quechua and Spanish  

Parallels

Quechua

Spanish

Attributive

NN

N + denominal Adj

+

+

N-poss [-anim] N

N + denominal Adj [-anim], rare

+

+

Compounding

productive

less productive

+

Conversion

N > Adj, Adj > N

few without derivation

+

Inalienability cline possession markers in all constructions

possession markers in alienable constructions

+

Function of possessive markers

possessive

+

possessive and attributive

Morphosemantic Morphosyntactic

+

The grammaticalization of the AS su construction suggests that in both Quechua and Spanish, attributive or phrasal possession associations are expressed as a conceptual category that comprises both morphosemantic and morphosyntactic properties, underlying the grammatical parallels. This case of apparent metonymy seems to underlie the contact-induced trajectory giving rise to this Peruvian Andean Spanish feature. Siegel (2012) distinguishes two types of functional transfer, both from a grammatical morpheme of the source language to either a lexical or a grammatical morpheme in the recipient language. The first is a case of morphological augmentation (or complexification, cf. Trudgill 2011), due to the emergence of a new grammatical morpheme (from a lexical one), where both semantic and syntactic properties of the source language are involved. The second type is viewed as functional alteration (that

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is, either a semantic extension or contraction), that involves only semantic properties of the source language, since the morpheme already exists in the recipient language. This last type of transfer is described as more frequently found in contact varieties developed in ex-colonial regions, such as the region discussed here. Following Siegel’s definitions of the two types of functional transfer, the innovation discussed in this chapter would seem to fall under functional alteration, since no new material is created in the language. However, I would argue that a new function has developed in a minority construction of Spanish. This new function (thus, complexification) derives from a reanalysis of Spanish semantic and syntactic properties connected to attributive meaning and to possessive constructions. These Spanish properties are parallel to properties of Quechua possession, which are more grammaticalized. Further analyses of these parallels will help explain in more detail the process of emergence of the innovative AS construction discussed in this chapter. We thus propose that the AS su possessive construction is a case of functional complexification, since both semantic and syntactic properties of both languages are involved, and represents a case not covered under Siegel’s definition of functional transfer. The resultant change from the Spanish disambiguation function to non-disambiguation, from alienable and kinship categories to all categories within the inalienability cline, and from possession/belonging to attributive function (particularly in constructions with inanimate possessors), are all examples of congruence in the “domain of complex constructions” (Matras/Sakel 2007, 842). The transfer in this case includes two processes. The first is connected to what is called replica grammaticalization (Heine/Kuteva 2005), and entails a reanalysis from possessive to attributive function (cf. Traugott/Trousdale 2013). The second process is a case of pattern replication (Heine/Kuteva 2005; Matras/Sakel 2007), where a Spanish minority pattern becomes a majority pattern in Andean Spanish, possibly as a consequence of analogy with the Quechua construction, which is used in all categories within the (in)alienability cline. Both processes together represent a case of complexification which distinguishes Andean Spanish from other varieties of Spanish. Possessive/genitive constructions represent an area of convergence that is not uncommon in languages of the world (Matras/Sakel 2007, 843–844; Heine 1997b; Heine/Kuteva 2002). The type of contact-induced phenomena presented here, called conceptual or functional transfer (Heine/Kuteva 2005; Siegel 2012), is possible when bilingual speakers identify constructions in both languages that carry the same or similar grammatical meaning (Matras/Sakel 2007, 833–834; Mithun 2013). We argue, however, first, that since equivalence between languages might not always be apparent, speakers might be more prone to look for and identify semantic and functional parallels between non-related languages, when these refer to concepts and functions found in all languages of the world, as is the case in possession. Second, the identification of equivalencies between two languages is more likely when the speakers have a high dominance in both languages. Moreover, I argue that this is especially the case when the languages are typologically non-related. Therefore, an important

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presence of bilinguals who have been exposed to both languages since childhood, in cases of widespread bilingualism, is essential for functional transfer to take place in contact between non-related languages. The study of contact influence between typologically non-related languages must consider characteristics of the contact scenario, particularly, the intensity of the contact, the presence (or not) of widespread bilingualism, and, most importantly, the type of bilingual speakers. As a global language with an ex-colonial history, Spanish in contact with typologically non-related languages in the Americas presents a rich area of study to uncover the details of functional transfer and help uncover the processes of metonymy (and metaphor) that “seem to be the most common strategies that lead to semantic change in languages of the world” (Taylor/Littlemore 2014, 11).

6 Functional transfer between other Romance languages and a non-related language As another global language, French is in contact with non-related languages outside of Europe and Quebec, in post-colonial contact regions in the Caribbean, South America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, where new French varieties have emerged. In the Americas, French is in contact with Amerindian languages (in French Guiana and Surinam). In Canada, it gave rise to a mixed language known as Michif, based on the French nominal system and the Cree verbal system. In the Middle East (Syria, Lebanon) and in North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco), French is in contact with Arabic. In Sub-Saharan Africa, French is in contact with various Niger-Congo languages, particularly in Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Gabon, Cameroon, Republic of the Congo, among others. In the Indian Ocean (Madagascar, Mauritius, Reunion and Seychelles), Southern Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), and Polynesia (French Polynesia and New Caledonia), French is in contact with Malay and other indigenous languages of the region. No doubt a case can be made for comparative studies of contact-induced phenomena in these French varieties. However, the particular social ecologies of French and the indigenous languages in these regions have also given rise to various creoles, such as Mauritian Creole, Seychelles Creole, and Haitian Creole (cf. Villeneuve/ Siegel/Valdman 2013). This important difference from Spanish (but similarity to English) suggests the need for further study into the ecologies of the different empires and colonization types, that could help explain the different contact outcomes between the three global and ex-colonial languages. Studies that focus on contact-induced phenomena in French/non-related languages contact have focused predominantly on the influence of French in the indigenous languages, mainly in reference to lexical borrowing and code-switching (cf. the examples of Gabonese, Ella 2013; Kinyarwanda in Rwanda, Kayigema/Mutasa 2014;

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Dagara in Burkina Faso, Beyogle 2015; Wolof-French and Fongbe-French of the NigerCongo family, Poplack/Meechan 1995; Tunisian Arabic, Poplack et al. 2015). More recently, however, studies have also focused on grammatical contact features in French varieties in contact with non-related languages outside of Europe. Some examples are the influence of the Sango tonal system in Central African French (Bordal 2013), and the influence of Niger-Congo languages, pragmatic and discourse conventions in Cameroonian French (Drescher 2014) and in Ivory Coast French (Boutin 2014). In European French, contact studies have focused more often on ethnolects, such as in the study of phonetic features found in Parisian verlan derived from its contact with Arabic in the banlieue (Fagyal 2010). Other French contact studies have been in contexts where French is in contact with a Germanic or Romance language (cf. Treffers-Daller/Mougeon 2005; Martineau/Nadasdi 2011). Most studies have focused on contact with English in Quebec (cf. Blondeau 2008; Friesner 2010), Acadia (cf. King/Nadasdi 1999), English-dominant-speaking regions of Canada (Kaminskaïa/Tennant/Russell 2016; Mougeon/Nadasdi/Rehner 2005; Levey/Groulx/Roy 2013), or in Louisiana (Dubois 2014; Dajko/Carmichael 2014; Blainey 2016). However, there are also studies with other Germanic languages, including Dutch (cf. Belgian French, Treffers-Daller 1994; Alferink/Gullberg 2014), German (cf. Glaser 2013), and Luxembourgish (Gilles/Trouvain 2013). A large number of studies, however, have also focused on French in contact with minority languages within France, mainly with the two Romance languages of Occitan (cf. Meisenburg 2013; Sichel-Bazin 2016) and Picard (cf. Auger/Villeneuve 2008; Auger 2011). Other Romance languages (Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, and Romanian, in particular) also present various contact scenarios that need to be studied comparatively to better understand contact between a Romance language and a non-related language.

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Seifart, Frank (2015), Does Structural-Typological Similarity Affect Borrowability? A Quantitative Study on Affix Borrowing, Diachronica 5(1), 92–113. Seiler, Hansjakob (1983), Possession as an Operational Dimension of Language, Tübingen, Narr. Sichel-Bazin, Rafèu (2016), Le Français du Midi: Une varieté de français à accent lexical, Langue française 191(3), 47–63. Siegel, Jeff (2012), Two Types of Functional Transfer in Language Contact, Journal of Language Contact 5, 187–215. Silva-Corvalán, Carmen (1994), Language Contact and Change: Spanish in Los Angeles, Oxford, Clarendon. Soto, Clodoaldo (1975), Gramática Quechua: Ayacucho-Chanca, Lima, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Tadmor, Uri/Haspelmath, Martin/Taylor, Bradley (2010), Borrowability and the Notion of Basic Vocabulary, Diachronica 27(2), 226–246. Taylor, John R./Littlemore, Jeanette (2014), Introduction, in: Jeanette Littlemore/John R. Taylor (edd.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive Linguistics, London, Bloomsbury, 1–25. Thomason, Sarah G. (2001), Language Contact: An Introduction, Washington, DC, Georgetown University Press. Thomason, Sarah G./Kaufman, Terence (1988), Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics, Berkeley, University of California Press. Traugott, Elizabeth C./Dasher, Richard (2005), Regularity in Semantic Change, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Traugott, Elizabeth C./Heine, Bernd (1991), Approaches to Grammaticalization, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Traugott, Elizabeth C./Trousdale, Graeme (2013), Constructionalization and Constructional Changes, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Treffers-Daller, Jeanine (1994) Mixing Two Languages: French-Dutch Contact in a Comparative Perspective, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter. Treffers-Daller, Jeanine/Mougeon, Raymond (2005), The Role of Transfer in Language Variation and Change: Evidence from Contact Varieties of French, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 8(2), 93–98. Trudgill, Peter (2011), Sociolinguistic Typology: Social Determinants of Linguistic Complexity, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Van Coetsem, Frans (2000), A General and Unified Theory of the Transmission Process in Language Contact, Heidelberg, Winter. Van Peteghem, Marleen (2012), Possessives and Grammaticalization in Romance, Folia linguistica 46(2), 605–634. Villeneuve, Anne-José/Siegel, Jason/Valdman, Albert (2013), Morphophonological Variation in Haitian Creole: The Case of 3SG, University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 19(2), 203–213. Weinreich, Uriel (1953), Languages in Contact, New York, Linguistic Circle of New York. Wierzbicka, Anna (2007), Bodies and their Parts: An NSM Approach to Semantic Typology, Language Sciences 29, 14–65. Zárate Pérez, Adolfo (2012), Los compuestos N + N en quechua. Estructura y clasificación, UniverSOS 9, 177–194.  

Mairi McLaughlin

24 When Romance meets English Abstract: This chapter examines the effects that contact with English has on the Romance languages. It adopts an innovative approach by exploring the effects of contact in a comparative dimension across three languages: French, Italian and Spanish. Most of the work concerns the European standard languages or varieties of these languages spoken as a result of colonization and/or migration in North America. The chapter begins with an overview of the history and nature of contact between English and the Romance languages. There follow two sections devoted to, first, the effects of contact at the lexical level and, second, the effects of contact at all other levels. The chapter illustrates the benefits of adopting a comparative approach in contact linguistics. In particular, this new approach allows us to capture larger generalizations about language contact both within this family and cross-linguistically.  

Keywords: language contact, anglicisms, structural borrowing, media, sport  

1 Introduction Recent studies of language contact in general linguistics tend to start by highlighting the rapid growth of the field in the 1990s and 2000s in the wake of the publication of Thomason/Kaufman’s (1988) Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. The recent expansion can be illustrated by the proliferation of general introductions to language contact (Thomason 2001; Winford 2003; Matras 2009) and by the publication of The Handbook of Language Contact (Hickey 2010) as well as the founding of the Journal of Language Contact in 2007. When it comes to the Romance languages in contact with English, there is a long tradition of scholarly research. As early as the 1930s, there were studies of borrowing from English into French: Orr (1935) examined borrowing from English in the area of sport, and Mackenzie (1939) charted borrowings between the two languages over time. For the three languages at the centre of the present study, namely French, Italian and Spanish, this interest continues on and off throughout the twentieth century, although it is not always easy to draw a line between prescriptive and descriptive works.1 As in the general field, this research area expands in the 1990s and 2000s, and today the liveliest areas of research into contact

1 Among the most influential early treatments are works by Étiemble (1964); Klajn (1972); Pratt (1980). Further references can be found throughout this chapter. See also Görlach (2002a). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-025

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with English concern not the European standard languages but varieties of French and Spanish in contact with English, as well as other languages, in the post-colonial context.2 The aim of this chapter is to examine in a comparative perspective the outcomes of contact between the Romance languages and English. In order to maximize the possibility for close comparative analysis, I examine three standard languages: French, Italian and Spanish. The primary focus is on the European standards but I turn at times to varieties of these languages spoken outside the Romance-speaking world either in the post-colonial context or as a result of migration.3 Although there has been a considerable amount of work on each of these three languages in contact with English, there have only been a few comparative studies of the outcomes of contact across the different Romance languages. Some of the most useful studies include an early analysis of lexical borrowing by Rey-Debove (1998); Görlach’s (2001; 2002b; 2003) work on European anglicisms; Scholz’s (2004) study of anglicisms in hip-hop culture; and McLaughlin’s work on syntactic borrowing (McLaughlin 2011; 2013).4 The present chapter builds on this previous research by adopting a trilingual comparative approach to examine the effects of contact with English at all linguistic levels. The work presented here is not an empirical investigation but rather a metastudy based on existing studies. In order to mitigate the obvious problems linked to the coverage and quality of previous research, the scope of the analysis varies depending on the availability of reliable studies; the most fruitful comparison at times involves aligning just two studies or just two languages. The chapter starts in section 2 with a brief overview of where, when, why and how the Romance languages come into contact with English. The effects of contact are then considered at the lexical level in section 3, and at all other levels in section 4.  

 

 

2 Romance in contact with English Today, whether historical or synchronic in scope, almost all general introductions to the individual Romance languages include a section on contact with English. This reflects the fact that, at least in the case of the standard languages, English tends to be

2 For Spanish, see Silva-Corvalán (1994); Klee/Lynch (2009); Lipski (2010); Otheguy/Zentella (2012). For French, see Brasseur/Falkert (2005); Gadet/Jones (2008); Martineau/Nadasdi (2011); Gadet/Ludwig (2014). 3 Cf. also ↗25 Language contact in a rural community; ↗27 The metropolization of French worldwide; ↗26 Code-switching and immigrant communities; ↗28 Transnational migration and language practices. 4 Other useful publications which involve some comparative work on the Romance family include Braselmann (2002); Rosenhouse/Kowner (2008a); Heinold (2009); Chesley (2010); and Romaine (2010). See also Görlach (2002a, Part I).  

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the most dominant external influence today. Histories of the individual languages trace the history of this contact for each country. The longest history is between French and English which were first brought into contact in the eleventh century with the Norman conquest of England. From then until the middle of the fourteenth century, French and English were in a situation of diglossia in England where French had the high functions as the language of the court, of nobility and of government (Walter 2001, 12). This situation led to lexical borrowing on a massive scale from French into English, such that Walter (2001, 13) can characterize English as “la plus latine des langues germaniques”. Kowner/Rosenhouse (2008, 120) put the number of borrowings from French into English in the tens of thousands. As we will see, this has important consequences for the nature of the contact that takes place between these two languages today. Between the mid-fourteenth and the seventeenth century there is little contact between French and English but the situation changes in the eighteenth century as a result of the growing prestige of England. From the late 1700s onwards, English is the most important source of borrowings in French.5 The factors which explain the importance of English are multiple, including the prestige of English philosophy, culture and politics, as well the English contribution to scientific and technological progress and to the Industrial Revolution. For these same reasons, it is also at this point that Italian and Spanish start to demonstrate the effects of contact with English. However, their situation is slightly different because English was not the only major source of borrowings. In fact, French remained the most important source of borrowings in both Italian and Spanish as late as the early twentieth century (Pulcini 2002, 152; González 2002, 133). The different histories mean that a good number of the early borrowings from English into Italian and Spanish actually came through French.6 The histories of contact between English and all three Romance languages begin to converge after the Second World War with the emergence of the United States as an economic and political superpower, and the global spread of Anglo-American culture. Penny’s (2002, 277) overview of the Spanish situation captures some of the main changes affecting the nature of contact with English for all three European standards. “Until the middle of the twentieth century, almost all English words borrowed by Spanish were of British English origin, and were usually transmitted through writing, often via French. From the 1950s onwards, the main source of such borrowing has been American English, and anglicisms have been transmitted partly through written media (especially newspapers, translation of scientific works, etc.), but increasingly through the oral media (dubbing of American films, TV programmes, etc.)”.

5 Of course, Latin and Greek also remain a significant source of new lexical material during this period, especially, but not exclusively, in the fields of science and technology. On the influence of Latin and Greek, see Ayres-Bennett/Carruthers/Temple (2001, 337–339). 6 For Spanish examples, see Lapesa (1980, 457) and comments by Dworkin (2012, 213–216); for Italian, see Migliorini/Griffith (1966, 345–346, 400–401).

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Today, the three languages are in very similar situations of contact with English. Rather than the widespread societal bilingualism that is found in other contact situations, most of the contact with English takes place indirectly through what Blommaert (2003, 609) calls the “mediating institutions” of globalization such as the media, cinema, the music industry and, more recently, the wide array of forms of digital communication. Most of the bilingualism on the ground is restricted either by location (the Channel Islands, Gibraltar, Malta), by sector (science, technology) or by demographics (the social elite, communities of British retirees now resident in France and Spain). However important the influence of English may be on the national standards in Europe, this is only one type of contact situation obtaining today between English and Romance. The period of colonialism which began in the fifteenth century brought speakers of varieties of French and Spanish into contact with English speakers outside Europe. Today, there exists a wide range of different types of contact situation involving English and Romance in different areas of the world. This diversity is well illustrated by Gadet/Ludwig/Pfänder’s (2009) article on “La Francophonie et typologie des situations”. Contact is a primary factor for their typology and they do not hesitate to underscore the complexity of the factors involved: “Il est certain que, dans un monde globalisé, marqué par des mouvements migratoires et la multiplication des contacts sociaux et linguistiques due non seulement à la mobilité locale, mais aussi aux médias électroniques, il ne convient plus (si toutefois cela a jamais convenu) d’en rester à l’idée d’un système linguistique fixe, homogène et plus ou moins fermé, de variétés locales ou sociales bien délimitées, de frontières géolinguistiques claires, etc.” (ibid., 159).

It is impossible to give full representation here to each of the different kinds of contact situation between Romance and English that exist in the world today so the analysis presented in sections 3 and 4 will focus on Canada and the United States. These countries were chosen because all three of the Romance languages under analysis are in contact with English here and there is a good amount of scholarly research, particularly concerning French and Spanish. The highest concentration of French speakers in North America today is found in Quebec where almost 80 % of the population are native speakers of French.7 However, a great deal of scholarly attention has focused on varieties of French spoken elsewhere where English is more dominant, particularly in the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Ontario and Prince Edward Island, as well as in Louisiana. The United States is of course home to a large Spanish-speaking population: estimates place the current figure between 40 and 50 million (Klein-Andreu 2010, 175; Instituto Cervantes 2015, 7–8) and speakers are particularly – but in no way exclusively – concentrated in Florida, New York and  

7 See the results of the 2011 census (https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/as-sa/ fogs-spg/Facts-pr-eng.cfm?Lang=eng&GK=PR&GC=24, last access 20.09.2015).

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states across the south-west (Pharies 2007, 226). A unique feature of the contact situation that obtains between Spanish and English in the USA is the constant arrival of new Spanish speakers from central and south America. This feature helps distinguish the situations involving Spanish and Italian:8 the mass emigration that brought large numbers of speakers of Italo-Romance to the United States (and to a lesser extent Canada) no longer takes place and, as is typical in the context of immigration, Italian speakers tended to shift to English in three generations. Today, De Fina/Fellin (2010, 195) estimate the number of people using Italian as a home language in the USA at near 800,000.

3 Lexical borrowing 3.1 Frequency Almost all general introductions to French, Italian and Spanish include a discussion of the impact that contact with English has on their lexis. Authors frequently comment on the high salience of lexical anglicisms which have been the target of criticism in France, Italy and Spain, albeit to different degrees. France is renowned for its strong prescriptive tradition and the administrative effort to counter anglicization through the legal system and the prescription of internal neologisms supplied by the extensive terminology commissions. In comparison, attitudes in Italy are considered to be fairly permissive. Italy’s reluctance to follow the French legislative model is often understood in the historical context because borrowings from English were famously banned during the fascist period. In Spain, although concern has certainly been voiced about English influence, it is often suggested that the real focus of interest today is the unity of the Spanish language around the world (Braselmann 2004, 235). Both scholarly and more popular texts tend to contrast the strength of negative reactions to borrowings with their relatively low frequency in dictionaries and, where previous research exists, in natural language corpora. A survey of figures for the frequency of borrowings in dictionaries indicates that the frequencies are in the same general range in all three languages. Ayres-Bennett/ Carruthers/Temple (2001, 236) note that the figures range from 2 % to 6 % for French; Laviosa (2007, 124) cites the slightly lower figure of 1.7 % for Italian; and Pountain (2003, 269) finds 358 anglicisms in the 21st edition of the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (DRAE) which represents 0.45 % of all items. These figures might at first glance suggest that there is a difference between the three languages. However, the numerous problems associated with using dictionaries to access the impact of

8 The same applies to varieties of French spoken in the USA. For an overview of these communities, see Valdman (2010).

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lexical borrowing mean that it is impossible to draw any firm conclusion in this respect.9 For example, the Spanish DRAE is notoriously conservative when it comes to the inclusion of anglicisms and the figure cited by Pountain (2003, 269) does not include words coined first in English but composed of Latin or Greek etymological material. We also note other clear similarities between the languages. For example, analyses of all the borrowed words found in the three languages today tend to report that around half come from English.10 Similarly, studies that focus on only the most recent neologisms consistently find that anglicisms represent a sizeable proportion of all new terms.11 Studies of everyday language, both written and spoken, tend to reveal that borrowings in general, and anglicisms in particular, appear just as infrequently in this type of language as they do in dictionaries.12 The same seems to apply when it comes to varieties of Romance in direct contact with English. Although there are more anglicisms in varieties of Spanish spoken in the US than in standard European Spanish, Klee/Lynch (2009, 231) cite a number of studies which highlight the relatively low frequency of anglicisms in actual usage. Similar results are reported for Canadian French by Poplack/Sankoff/Miller (1988, 57). The fact that scholars keep insisting on the relatively low frequency of anglicisms indicates that their general salience in the Romance languages should not be understood to reflect their overall frequency. There have been a number of studies of anglicisms in the press because the media is considered a likely channel for both the creation and the diffusion of borrowed items. Studies of national daily newspapers such as Le Monde and La Repubblica indicate that anglicisms are just as infrequent in this text type as they are in spoken everyday language: their frequency can be as low as 1 %.13 However, there is considerable variation in the way in which anglicisms are used by different publications so it now seems unlikely that the results of these studies provide sufficient information to really understand the potential role played by the media today.14 The problems with interpreting these studies of daily newspapers are clearly highlighted by a cursory glance at the French, Italian and Spanish websites of a mainstream magazine like ELLE. Table 1 shows the distribution of anglicisms found in just the rubrics listed in the navigation bars of each website.  

9 For a discussion of the problems associated with frequency counts, see Ayres-Bennett/Carruthers/ Temple (2001, 326). For a broader perspective on the treatment of borrowings in dictionaries, see Steuckardt et al. (2011). 10 See, for example, Müller (1985, 55); Lepschy/Lepschy (1990, 53); Pulcini (2002, 157); González (2002, 130); Tesi (2005, 244); Laviosa (2007, 124). 11 See Pratt (1980, 19); Lepschy/Lepschy (1990, 53) and Tesi (2005, 245). 12 See González (2002, 130); Tesi (2005, 244); Hagège (2006, 41). 13 See Müller (1985, 55); Moss (1992, 133). Also see discussions of surveys by Moss (1992, 131–132); Ayres-Bennett/Carruthers/Temple (2001, 326); González (2002, 130); Bochmann (2013, 760). 14 See, for example, Moss’s (1992, 133) comparison of different Italian magazines and newspapers where the figures range for 0.22 % in Famiglia Cristiana to 1.01 % in Grazia. Bochmann (2013, 760) also makes the important point that many of these studies are now out of date.

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Table 1: Anglicisms and other items in the navigation bars of ELLE’s websites  

Website

Anglicisms

Other

http://www.elle.fr

people, ELLE run, wakeup

à la une, mode, beauté, culture, ELLE à table, astro

http://www.elle.it16

shopping, beauty, magazine, showbiz, blog, network ELLE

sfilate, moda, sposa, oroscopo, ELLE à tavola, ELLE decor

15

http://www.elle.es17 star style, living, love, blogs, videos moda, pasarelas, belleza, deco, gourmet, viajes, astro, revista, tienda

This very quick survey of just one international magazine throws a different light on the significance of borrowings from English.18 Not only are they more frequent here than in daily newspapers, they play a primary role in the digital presentation of the magazine not just as labels indicating the content of each section but also as labels that will attract the reader’s attention and make the content more appealing.19 Scholz’s (2004) study of hip-hop magazines reveals interesting differences between the use of anglicisms in the three languages that concern us here. Scholz examines a sample of 20 pages from one hip-hop magazine from each of four countries, France, Italy, Spain and Germany. He classifies each lexical borrowing from English according to its level of specificity: terms used in everyday language, terms used in the field of popular music in general, and terms specific to hip-hop. The results of his comparison for the Romance languages are summarized in Table 2 where the figures refer to types as opposed to tokens.  

Table 2: Anglicisms in hip-hop magazines (Scholz 2004, 269)  

Domain

French

Italian

Spanish

Everyday

24

51

17

Popular music

42

58

29

Hip hop

29

48

30

Total

95

157

76

15 Last access 03.10.2015. 16 Last access 03.10.2015. 17 Last access 03.10.2015. 18 Table 1 also serves to remind us that English is not the only source of borrowings; in the field of fashion in particular, there is a concentration of borrowings from French in both the other Romance languages and in English. 19 On the use of anglicisms in Italian headlines, see Rogato (2008).  

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The results of Scholz’s study suggest that, at least in this text type, Italian makes the greatest use of anglicisms, Spanish the least, with French lying in the middle. Although these are the results of just one relatively small comparative study, they are in line both with previous findings and with the consensus that attitudes in Italy are more permissive.20 Interestingly, Scholz (2004, 269–270) also notices a qualitative difference between the borrowings found in Spanish and those found in French and Italian. In Spanish, borrowings tend to be motivated by referential need whereas in French and Italian this kind of borrowing is found alongside items which do not correspond to a lexical gap. This may reflect a difference in language attitudes in the different countries – Scholz (ibid., 269) sees the Spanish journalists as more loyal to their language – but he also points to different levels of knowledge of English as a factor, especially when it comes to explaining the much higher frequency of borrowings that he found in the German magazine. Although the results of this study seem clear, Scholz (ibid., 270) himself remarks that we will need far more comparative studies of this type before it will be possible to make wider generalizations about the differences between the languages and about the nature of what he terms (post-)modern contact. In the absence of this comparative research focused on such differences between the languages, the most useful conclusion to draw here is that levels of borrowing from English are of a similar order of magnitude in all three Romance languages. This is particularly evident if we take a wider cross-linguistic perspective and compare the Romance standards to a language like Japanese which contains upwards of 30,000 loanwords, most of which come from English (Kowner/Rosenhouse 2008, 12).

3.2 Fields Lexical borrowings from English into Romance tend to be concentrated in particular fields. Historically, the fields most associated with English influence are politics (eighteenth century), sport (nineteenth century), and railway transport (nineteenth century).21 The effect of contact in these areas was the creation of series of parallel borrowings across all three languages, as illustrated by Table 3.  

Table 3: Pan-Romance borrowings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries  

English

French

Italian

Spanish

club

club

club

club

golf

golf

golf

golf

20 See, for example, Rey-Debove (1998, 177). 21 Discussions of historical contact can be found in general works on each language such as Migliorini/Griffith (1966); Walter (2001); Dworkin (2012).

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Table 3: (continued) English

French

Italian

Spanish

tennis

tennis

tennis

tenis

train

train

treno

tren

tunnel

tunnel

tunnel

túnel

vote

vote

voto

voto

Today, some of the most commonly cited fields in which anglicisms are concentrated are science, technology, sport, the media, and popular culture. A recent list provided for French by Schöntag (2009, 23) draws attention to the open-ended nature of such lists since its ends with “toutes les informations transmises par les média (journaux, radio, télé, internet)”; it is hard to think of an area of modern life that could be excluded from online communication. We can understand this apparently limitless potential scope of English influence on the lexis of the Romance standards in the context of globalization. It is useful to refer here to the position of English across the world’s languages as what Piller (2003, 175) terms “a general symbol of modernity, progress, and globalization”. In this context, alongside motivations for borrowing which are related to the basic need to name new referents, socio-cultural factors also play an important role. Recent research on language and identity indicates that the use of English terms in an example such the one involving ELLE magazine discussed in section 3.1 can be understood because they index the social stereotype linked to modernity, progress and globalization described by Piller (2003).22 The combination of both referential and socio-cultural motivations for borrowing should be considered an important distinguishing feature of the contact situation obtaining between the Romance languages and English from the second half of the twentieth century onwards. It helps to explain the volume, spread and concentration of borrowings, and it also helps us to understand both their salience (they are frequently the target of purism and prescriptivism) and also their usage (for example in youth discourse). It is impossible to examine each field in detail so the rest of this section will focus on sport. The lexis of sport was one of the earliest fields to be affected by English influence and the dominance of anglicisms in this field pre-dates the rise of globalized Anglo-American culture in the mid-twentieth century. Instead, it can be traced back to the role of the British in the standardization and codification of sports in the nineteenth century.23 The influence of English is illustrated iconically by the lexical  

22 See also Kowner/Rosenhouse’s (2008, 12–14) discussion of the motives, means of dissemination and determinants of anglicisms at the global scale. 23 See, for example, Bernard-Béziade/Attali (2012, 121).

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item sport itself, since it is the source of the term used right across the Romance family: Fr. and It. sport, Sp. deporte. This one example also speaks to the long history of contact between French and English because the English term itself comes from the Old French word desport which meant ‘plaisir, divertissement’.24 The existence of socalled “aller-retour” borrowings – words of French origin re-borrowed from English – is a particular feature of the contact situation that obtains between French and English. Out of all of the Romance languages, it is only French that had a strong enough influence on the development of English for such examples to be frequent today.25 Other examples from the world of sport are challenger, record and tennis.26 Recent research on anglicisms in sport suggests another reason for the concentration of borrowings in this field, namely the fact that referential and socio-cultural motivations for borrowing come together in this area. This is highlighted by two recent investigations of the lexis of sport by Bernard-Béziade/Attali (2012) and Russell Webb (2012). Although both studies concern French, there is nothing to suggest that a similar result would not be reached for Italian and Spanish; in fact, a number of the borrowings discussed in these studies can also be found in other Romance languages. Bernard-Béziade/Attali (2012, 121) examined articles published by the French sports newspaper L’Équipe during the 2004 Olympics held in Athens. They looked exclusively at articles on athletics and swimming since these sports have been cited as examples of domains which are almost totally unaffected by anglicisms. What they find, however, is that journalists do make ample use of borrowings from English such as the examples listed in (1). (1) challenge, head coach, hurdleuse, no show, rookie, (starting) blocks, sprinteur, supporteur (Bernard-Béziade/Attali 2012, 127–128). Russell Webb (2012) examined a completely different kind of sport and discourse: the use of English in the discourse of the niche sociolinguistic community of practice involved in the Ironman France competition. Like Bernard-Béziade/Attali (2012), Russell Webb (2012, 452–453) found numerous examples such as those listed in (2). (2) briefing, clean, finish, leader, qualifier, race, stand infos. A common finding of these studies is that anglicisms are used even in cases where an internal equivalent exists. Examples cited in both studies include coach instead of entraîneur, finish instead of (ligne d’)arrivée, and qualifier instead of qualifiant. Where the two studies differ, however, is in their interpretation of the results. Bernard24 Trésor de la langue française informatisé (http://atilf.atilf.fr, last access 01.09.2015). 25 Klajn (1972, 19) can cite only a handful of examples for Italian. 26 See etymologies provided by the Oxford English Dictionary (http://www.oed.com, last access 01.09.2015).

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Béziade/Attali (2012, 132) linked anglicisms to the technical nature of the discourse, whereas Russell Webb (2012, 463) found that they were used for their “connotative and associative values”. This difference is almost certainly a function of the different approaches and corpora used. Reading the studies together strongly suggests that both technical/referential and connotative/socio-cultural factors combine and perhaps even reinforce each other in this field. This is underscored by Bernard-Béziade/ Attali’s (2012, 121) discussion of the general factors that explain the concentration of borrowings in the domain of sport; they cite the technical nature of the lexis, the fact that many sports were codified in anglophone countries, and the fact that sport is one of the only areas of human activity where all participants follow the same unique model. We can therefore usefully contrast sport with, for example, scientific discourse, where it would seem that borrowings are primarily used for their denotative and not their connotative functions. Focusing on sport also highlights the cultural salience of this particular field both within and across cultures. Comparing the history of reactions to borrowings in France, Italy and Spain, one cannot fail to notice that the lexis of sport has been the target of corpus planning and linguistic prescriptivism in all three countries. In the fascist periods in both Italy and Spain, football was targeted, presumably because of its mass appeal.27 Efforts in Italy were more successful than they were in Spain and this purist intervention certainly makes Italian stand out in the Romance languages today as the only language with an internally derived term for football: Italian uses calcio where French uses the abbreviated foot and Spanish uses fútbol. A number of alternatives were proposed in Spain such as balompié, bolopié, bolapié and piebalón, but none was successful (Dworkin 2012, 219).28 Once again, however, examining language in use underscores the limited reach of such measures. For example, the Italian sports newspaper, the Gazzetta dello sport, uses a whole host of other sports names borrowed from English such as those listed in (3). (3) basket, tennis, rugby, golf, poker, football americano29 Moreover, the success of the internally-derived terms calcio and calcio d’angolo (Eng. corner) in Italian does not exclude the possibility of borrowings also being used. On the social networking platform, Twitter, for example, there is a conventionalized usage of the two hashtags #football and #calcio together, reflecting the global reach of this platform where users do not just engage with a monolingual audience. The basic search facility of the Gazzetta dello sport’s website also provides some insight into the long-term success of the internal neologisms because corner appears four times as 27 On this period, see Cartago (1994, 743–744); González (2002, 131–132). 28 Cf. successful alternatives for Eng. match (Sp. encuentro) and Eng. back (Sp. defensa) (González 2002, 132). 29 http://www.gazzetta.it (last access 06.09.2015).

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often as calcio d’angolo.30 These examples highlight an interesting outcome of corpus planning because in neither case has the prescribed native item fully replaced the borrowing. In this way, corpus planning can be seen to contribute to an expansion of the lexis. Where both the internal and external terms remain, there are two common scenarios: either the two items refer to the same referent but have different connotative functions, or they each specialize with a different denotative meaning. This doubling effect in the lexis is more visible in French than in either Spanish or Italian because the strength of prescriptive efforts in France, and also in Quebec. Before examining different types of lexical borrowings in section 3.3, it is important to consider one aspect of contact between Romance and English which the case study of sport does not bring out. In the fields of science and technology in particular, a large number of borrowings from English are composed either fully or partially of lexical material from Latin and/or Greek. This is illustrated by the examples in Table 4 all taken from the Dictionary of European Anglicisms (Görlach 2001).  

 

Table 4: Learned terms coined in English in the domains of science and technology  

English

French

Italian

Spanish

internet

internet

internet

internet

converter

convertisseur

converter

convertidor

megabyte

méga-octet

megabyte

megabyte

video (tape)

(bande) vidéo

video (tape)

video (tape)

The borrowings containing Latin material are of particular interest to us here, not just because of the frequency with which they are introduced in the fields of science and technology, but because they consistute a very particular kind of “aller-retour” borrowing. In the case of the Romance languages, it is widely believed that the integration of Latin-based borrowings is less problematic because of their structural familiarity.31 This certainly seems plausible but thus far my research indicates it has yet to be shown empirically. Moreover, the results of a study by Chesley (2010) which showed that anglicisms are more durable than borrowings from any other languages suggest that social factors may far outweigh the linguistic in this case. The fact that borrowing from English in technical fields can lead to the reintroduction of Latin material into Romance is probably most importantly a consideration to take into account if we want to under-

30 A search carried out on 6.9.2015 gave the following figures: corner is used 8,028 times whereas calcio d’angolo is used 1,732 times. We can assume that word length is a factor which could favour the use of the anglicism in this instance. 31 This view is expressed, for example, by Cartago (1994, 733); Ayres-Bennett/Carruthers/Temple (2001, 337); Pountain (2003, 268–269).

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stand the effects of borrowing from English from a typological perspective. There has been a focus on contact between genetically related languages in recent years, partly because of the methodological difficulties raised by this kind of contact. As Epps/ Huehnergard/Pat-El (2013, 210) point out, “if we trace language relationships far enough back in time, we find that the distinction between internally and externally motivated change essentialy disappears”. The same principle explains why attitudes to learned borrowings are generally more positive in even the most stringent of purist discourses. However, there is no doubt that the reintroduction of learned forms through borrowings from English plays an important role in contributing to a layering effect on the lexis of the Romance languages whereby inherited and re-introduced forms exist side-by-side. The frequency of learned borrowings is a very singular feature of the Romance languages and it is interesting to note that English plays such an important role in the maintenance of this feature today.32

3.3 Types Until now, the terms “borrowing from English” and “anglicism” have been used in their most general sense to refer to English lexical items that have been incorporated into Romance.33 It is of course also possible to distinguish between different types of borrowings. They can be classified according to the grammatical category of the borrowed item, or according to the kinds of internal and external processes used to create them. The latter distinction is of more interest in this comparative study because there is more variation between the different languages and varieties. At least for the standards, comparing the languages according to grammatical categories of borrowings serves only to confirm general borrowability hierarchies such as the fact that, as we would expect from a typical case of language maintenance, the vast majority of borrowings are lexical nouns. In order to distinguish between different types of borrowings, many studies use the three-way classification developed by Haugen (1950, 213–215). This model distinguishes between “loanwords” (or direct borrowings) where the signifier is introduced with the signified, “loan shifts” which include both calques and semantic borrowings, and “loan blends” which combine native and foreign elements.34 All three types are widely attested for each of the standards under analysis and most studies find that loanwords are the most frequent type of borrowing from English.35 For the purpose of our present chapter, however, it

32 Pountain (2011) calls for more work to be done on the influence of Latin on written Romance. 33 There is no space here to address the difficulties associated with defining the notion of a borrowing. See Ayres-Bennett/Carruthers/Temple (2001, 324–325). 34 Ben-Rafael (2008, 46–47) offers a useful summary of other classifications. 35 Görlach (2002c, 3) makes this general claim for all of the languages in the Dictionary of European Anglicisms (Görlach 2001).

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is the loan shifts which prove to be the most revealing because they foreground the role of internal factors. As Penny (2002, 309) remarks, semantic borrowing “is particularly evident in the case of paronyms” which are “pairs of words, one belonging to each of the two languages, which are obviously related in form but which have different meanings”. He cites examples in Spanish such as crucial instead of crítico for Eng. crucial; firma instead of empresa for Eng. firm; and proceso instead of procedimiento for Eng. process. The list provided by Penny is slightly longer than lists typically seen for French where the same few examples tend to be recycled.36 Taking Penny’s list as a starting point, it is possible to compare the workings of semantic borrowing in Spanish and French. There are certainly cases where cognate items have undergone parallel developments because of contact with English. An example of this is the use of the paronyms of the English verb to ignore (Fr. ignorer, Sp. ignorar) with the meaning not take into account instead of the native Romance alternatives (Fr. ne pas tenir compte de, Sp. pasar por alto). Interestingly, however, Penny also includes a number of items where semantic borrowing has taken place in Spanish but could not have taken place in French because there is already a close overlap in the meaning of the French and English terms. This includes, for example, the use in Spanish of honesto instead of honrado for honest; the use of simple instead of sencillo for Eng. simple; and the use of verificar instead of comprobar for to verify. This comparison between Spanish and French shows that the possibility of semantic borrowing is foreclosed by the semantic overlap of the cognates in English and French and this overlap can in turn be attributed to the long history of contact between French and English. This contrast therefore reveals a very singular feature of the relationship between English and French. It also suggests that semantic borrowing might be more frequent when there is sufficient formal proximity but also a sufficient degree of semantic difference. Both semantic borrowing and calques prove interesting from a comparative perspective if we compare the European standards with varieties spoken in North America. Like semantic borrowings, calques are certainly found in the European standards and can even be found in use across the family (e.g. Eng. skyscraper > Fr. gratte-ciel, It. grattacielo, Sp. rascacielos). However, both of these processes seem to be more common in varieties of Romance in direct contact with English. It is not difficult to find series of examples of both types of process in research on contact varieties in Canada and the USA. If we consider just calques, Maiden (1995, 268) provides examples for Italian in North America such as guardare bene and prendere vantaggio. Vinet (1996, 171) cites Quebec French examples such as prendre une marche for to take a walk, and the example parker/parquer son char for park your car is very often commented on in both scholarly and lay circles. Examples from Spanish in the Southwestern states in the USA include: va a reenlist instead of va a alistarse de nuevo

36 Commonly examples include réaliser for se rendre compte and opportunité for occasion.

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and los están busing a otra escuela for los transportan a otra escuela en autobús (Pharies 2007, 229). Work carried out on US Spanish over the last few decades has highlighted the complexity of this phenomenon (Otheguy/García 1988; Otheguy/ García/Roca 2000).37 Presumably due to their high level of salience for bilingual speakers, calques have been shown to play a role at the level of identity construction. They are also subject to varying judgments on the part of speakers, linguists and prescriptivists.38 This was highlighted by Walsh (2014) in a comparison of attitudes to various kinds of borrowings from English in France and Quebec. Her results showed in general that there are stronger negative attitudes towards anglicisms in Quebec and that, in this context, calques and what she terms “loan renditions” are favoured more in Quebec than they are in France (Walsh 2014, 440, Fig. 7).39 This corresponds to a difference in usage that can be illustrated by comparing the discourse of multinational corporations operating in both regions. For example, the fast food chain, McDonald’s, sells Le cheeseburger in France but the Quart de livre avec fromage in Canada,40 and the technology giant Apple invites French users to “regarder le keynote” whereas its French Canadian users are invited to “regarder la présentation”.41 This apparently banal comparison is useful because it underscores the role of language attitudes and ideology in determining both the kind and extent of changes brought about by contact. This Romance example is in line with findings in the general field about the importance of language attitudes in determining the outcomes of contact (Blommaert 2003, 609; Gadet/Jones 2008, 245; Rosenhouse/Kowner 2008b, 277–278, 286; Thomason 2010).

4 Borrowing at other levels 4.1 Phonetics, phonology and orthography When viewed from a comparative and historical perspective, the effects of English influence on the sound systems of the standard Romance languages appear to be minimal. In most cases, anglicisms are either pronounced with the closest corresponding sound (e.g. Sp. [xoldin] < Eng. holding company, González 2002, 135) or

37 See also a discussion of this work by Klee/Lynch (2009, 233–235). 38 Görlach (2002c, 3) observes that calques are more frequent in purist societies although they are never as frequent as are direct borrowings. 39 Walsh (2014, 429) defines loan renditions as “The part translation of a foreign word or phrase, where one part is exactly translated and one part is created or freely translated into the native language”. 40 https://www.mcdonalds.fr/produits/petite-faim; http://www.mcdonalds.ca/ca/fr/menu/full_menu/sandwiches.html (last access 13.09.2015). 41 http://www.apple.com/fr/ipad; http://www.apple.com/ca/fr/ipad (last access 03.10.2015).

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using a Romance-based interpretation of the spelling (e.g. Fr. standard [stɑ̃ daʁ], Ayres-Bennett/Carruthers/Temple 2001, 327). However, there are a number of contexts in which neither strategy is employed and this means that scholars have posited the introduction of “new sounds or new combinations of sounds” (Pountain 2003, 270) as a potential long-term effect of lexical borrowing. A widely cited example is the velar nasal [ŋ] which is now used in standard French as a result of borrowings with the suffix -ing (e.g. camping, brushing, parking). Even in this case, however, not all scholars agree that this is a new French phoneme because it is not found outside the context of this particular morpheme. Its realization as [ŋ] is also not uniform: it can also be realized as [n], [ɲ] or [ng] (Coveney 2001, 38). Something similar applies to palatals, another locus of difference between the sound systems of English and the Romance languages. Pountain (2003, 271) notes that there is some use of new palatals [ʃ] and [(d)ʒ] in borrowings in Spanish such as show and jeans. Once again, however, this pronunciation is not stable and the native phonemes [tʃ], and [x] or [ʝ] are common alternatives.42 There are other perspectives from which we can fruitfully consider borrowing and the sound system. The comparative perspective highlights the workings of internal factors. An obvious difference between the standard Romance languages involves the assimilation of borrowings beginning with [s] + consonant because this is not an acceptable onset in Spanish. This leads to the addition of an initial epenthetic vowel which results in a greater level of integration in this language, something which also tends to be represented orthographically (e.g. Fr., It. snob, Sp. esnob). Similarly, internal phonological rules explain why in this same example, the unvoiced [s] is retained in both French [snɔb] and Spanish [esnob] but not in Italian [znɔb] (Klajn 1972, 45). It is also interesting to consider why the velar nasal [ŋ] is used for the -ing suffix in French whereas native equivalents are found in Spanish ([in]) and Italian ([ing]). It is tempting to link the difference to the existence of word-final [ŋ] in regional varieties of French but the comparative angle casts doubt over this idea because it is also found in this position in varieties of Spanish spoken both in Spain and elsewhere (Hualde 2005, 176). Perhaps the most promising angle for research into contact and the sound systems involves considering the pronunciation of borrowings as a locus of variation. The lack of scholarship on the sociolinguistics of borrowings has been noted on a number of occasions. In this context, it is useful to compare varieties of Romance spoken in Europe to those spoken in direct contact with English in North America. It is clear that borrowings are not integrated in exactly the same way in different varieties of the same language. In general, it is thought that anglicisms are integrated more fully to the Romance phonological system in varieties which are in direct contact with

42 Further information on the pronunciation of anglicisms can be found in the relevant chapters of Görlach (2002b).

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English. Maiden (1995, 268–269), for example, cites the Italo-American example la giobba, le giobbe which illustrates phonological, morphological and orthographic integration. This can be compared to the equivalent il job, i job used in Italy. This trend to integrate in situations of direct contact is certainly not exceptionless. For example, Neumann-Holzschuh (2014, 142) notes that whereas in Canadian French, “English loanwords have a strong tendency toward morphological and phonological integration […], in Louisiana balanced bilinguals tend to insert uninflected English items into their speech”. In the same edition of the Journal of Language Contact, Papen (2014) also identifies a pattern of non-integration in Chiac, a hybrid code “spoken by teenagers or young adults in the Greater Moncton area of southeastern new Brunswick” (2014, 159; ↗27 The metropolization of French worldwide). Papen (ibid., 161) explains that in this hybrid code “most English forms are pronounced according to English phonology and all French forms are pronounced according to (Acadian) French phonology”. It is worth noting in passing that unlike in Louisiana French, English verbs in Chiac are assimilated into the French morphological system. In both of these cases, the authors attribute the lack of integration of English items to the existence of widespread bilingualism. Papen (ibid., 163, 179–180) also underscores the importance of identity as a factor whereby Chiac as a mixed code lets speakers index both the francophone and anglophone parts of their identity. He places Chiac in the wider context of “other urban, youth-oriented, hybrid codes” such as those involving Spanish and English in the American South-West, and those involving French in Africa such as Camfranglais (ibid., 180). Another quite different kind of contact effect which also impacts the phonological systems of Romance varieties spoken in the USA and in Canada is dialect levelling. Although this levelling should be considered to be an indirect rather than a direct outcome of contact, its influence on the sound system is significant. Today, it is of course Spanish which is affected the most by dialect levelling in situations of contact with English.43 There is evidence of dialect levelling affecting various features in different locations, such as the realization of /s/ and /n/ in both Houston (Aaron/Hernández 2007; Hernández 2009) and in Los Angeles (MacGregor Villarreal 2014). The most detailed investigation of levelling and contact phenomena is Otheguy/Zentella’s (2012) study of New York Spanish which focuses on syntax. Considering the effects of borrowing on the sound systems of Romance naturally raises the question of orthographic integration. Comparative lexical analyses of borrowings across the Romance languages all point to the fact that anglicisms in Spanish undergo more changes than they do in either Italian or French. This is illustrated by Rey-Debove’s (1998) comparison of anglicisms in dictionaries across the 43 Potowski/Carreira (2010, 66) highlight the singularity of Spanish in the US because it is “the most commonly spoken non-English language” and also “the non-English language that hails from the greatest number of different countries”. Historically, varieties of Italian spoken overseas were also affected by levelling (Maiden 1995, 268).

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Romance family; she calls the level of assimilation in Spanish “assez remarquable” (ibid., 18). Table 5 illustrates this point by aligning some of the examples she cites for Spanish with their equivalents in French and Italian.  

Table 5: Orthographic integration44  

French

Italian

Spanish

base-ball

baseball

beisbol

brandy

brandy

brandi

knock-out

knockout

nocaut

leader

leader

líder

snob

snob

esnob

The same picture emerged from Scholz’s (2004) usage-based comparison involving hip-hop magazines. Scholz classified the borrowings as either direct or in some way assimilated either through orthographic, morphological or syntactic integration, or through calquing. In Spanish, 56.6 % of all borrowings (types) were in some way integrated whereas the figure is 30.6 % for Italian and 23.1 % for French (Scholz 2004, 269). The principal explanation for this difference between the languages concerns the nature of their orthographic systems. Spanish has a fairly phonemic orthography which means that assimilation is more likely and/or more widely accepted. In contrast, there is less pressure to integrate items in French with its notoriously difficult, conservative and etymological orthography. Italian occupies a middle ground in both respects: it integrates more than French but less than Spanish, and its orthographic system is not quite as phonemic as that of Spanish. From a traditional comparative and historical perspective, the effects of contact on orthographic systems tend to be considered trivial. However, in the context of globalization where English has acquired a prestigious symbolic value, it is essential to take this level into account. In many contexts cross-linguistically the graphic form of English has an important symbolic function; this is what explains the use of English, or pseudo-English, on clothing, in branding and in advertising.45 This, coupled with increasing levels of knowledge of English, also explains why the tendency to integrate appears to be declining in all of the languages.

44 Note that there is considerable variation in the use of both hyphens and accents in all three languages (e.g. base-ball/baseball in French and beisbol/béisbol in Spanish). 45 On English in advertising, see Piller (2003).

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4.2 Morphology As was the case with phonetics and phonology, high numbers of lexical borrowings could be considered disruptive to the Romance systems if their introduction were to lead to restructuring. It is quite clear that in the case of the European standards, the effects of borrowing on morphological systems remain minimal. In this section, we explore the integration of borrowed nouns (the largest category of borrowed items) because of what they can tell us about the interaction between internal and external factors in the integration of new lexical material.46 The Romance languages differ from English in having noun classes which are distinguished by grammatical gender. This means that borrowed nouns, like all new nouns, need to be assigned to either the masculine or feminine class. Borrowed nouns tend to be assigned to the masculine class in French, Italian and Spanish because it is the default class internally. Examples of this from recent technological developments include drone, iPad and smartphone which are masculine in each language. There are however many exceptions and linguists working on the Romance languages invoke analogy to explain the assignation of feminine gender based, for example, on the form of a borrowed item or on the existence of a feminine native equivalent.47 Cases where the Romance languages differ from each other therefore serve to highlight the role of the internal factors which condition the effects of analogy.48 The same thing can be seen across different varieties of the same Romance language as illustrated by the example of job/ giobba in section 4.1; intriguingly Ben-Rafael (2008, 61) actually evokes the same contrast for job which is masculine in metropolitan French and feminine in Quebec French.49 Such examples underscore the mixture of factors involved in gender assignment in the Romance family and they draw attention to the social nature of this kind of fixing. Number marking is another feature to consider because of the difference between Italian’s vocalic plural and the syntagmatic plural that is shared, at least historically and in the written form, by French, Spanish and English. As Ayres-Bennett/Carruthers/Temple (2001, 331) explain, most nouns borrowed into French take the regular plural marker -s which, following the phonological rules of French, is only realized orally in certain contexts. In most cases then, the orthographic plural in French coincides with the form in English.50 Things are slightly different in Spanish because although it shares a syntagmatic plural with French, the form is realized most often as  

46 For a treatment of other word classes, see the relevant chapters in Görlach (2002b). 47 See, for example, González (2002, 138–139); Humbley (2002, 116); Pulcini (2002, 159). 48 For example, the Apple Watch is assigned to the masculine class in Italian and Spanish but to the feminine class in French because the native equivalent montre is feminine. 49 Ben-Rafael (2008, 61) notes that the reverse is true of interview which is masculine in Quebec but feminine in France. 50 For exceptions, see Ayres-Bennett/Carruthers/Temple (2001, 331).

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/s/ when the word ends in a vowel and as /es/ when it ends in a consonant. Pountain (2003, 272) notes that this leads to variation in plural marking for anglicisms ending in a consonant: older borrowings tend to assimilate to the Spanish system while newer borrowings follow the English model (e.g. cócteles, líderes vs jeeps, pósters). Pountain suggests that if newer borrowings are not eventually integrated into the Spanish system, then “plurals will follow a separate rule and the rule for pluralization in Spanish will be correspondingly complicated” (ibid.). No such suggestion can be made for French because the alternation does not exist. It is of course impossible to predict whether such a change will take place in Spanish so the main interest of this example in the present chapter is theoretical: the structural contrast between French and Spanish shows that even a very small distinction between very closely related languages can have relatively important implications for the possible effects of contact.51 Adding Italian into the mix makes this point even more sharply because Italian does not share the same -s plural marker. This probably explains why, as Repetti (2003, 31) notes, borrowed nouns tend to be invariable in Italian so that where French and Spanish use the plural jeeps, Italian uses jeep. This is a revealing contrast because it lends support to the idea that structural similarity has bearing on the effects of contact with loanwords being integrated more fully when there is structural congruence. The final morphological feature worth examining at least briefly is the nominal suffix -ing because it has acquired some degree of productivity in all three standards.52 Taking French as an example, it can be found in direct borrowings (jogging), in pseudoanglicisms (shampooing, footing, matching) and, as noted by Heinold (2009, 77), even in a limited number of internal neologisms (bronzing, frotting, ramping).53 Klein-Andreu (2010, 172–173) identifies what must be the explanation for the frequency of this suffix in the Romance languages. She explains that “words used in English compounds or phrases as modifiers of a following element […] are commonly reinterpreted in Spanish as the element being modified” (original emphasis). The ‑ing suffix frequently appears as the modifier in English compounds and so is interpreted as the head in Romance to create borrowings such as el esmókin < smoking jacket, holding < holding company, and casting < casting call. Many of the examples cited by Klein-Andreu are also found in French and Italian such as holding and smoking, presumably because many of the early examples were borrowed through French (Penny 2002, 278). This is yet another example which draws attention both to the intertwined histories of the Romance languages in their contact with English and also to the similarity of the outcomes of contact across the Romance family. Moreover, this

51 The same observation can be made based on comparisons of different varieties of the same language. See, for example, Repetti’s (2003, 41) comparison of anglicisms in standard Italian, ItaloAmerican and pre-modern Italian. 52 The -man suffix is also widely reported but its use is far less extensive (e.g. tennisman, recordman). 53 For examples of internal neologisms using -ing in Spanish, see Klein-Andreu (2010, 173).

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example speaks to English influence at a wider level because the -ing suffix is also found in anglicisms used outside the Romance family, as highlighted by Heinold’s (2009) comparative study of -ing in French and German.

4.3 Syntax There is disagreement and uncertainty in the scholarly literature about whether contact with English can lead to syntactic change in Romance. This is partly a reflection of the methodological difficulties faced in general by scholars wishing to identify and prove a specific case of contact-induced syntactic change. However, there is considerable overlap in the previous literature as regards the constructions that are considered candidates for influence in the standard Romance varieties spoken in Europe. This includes, but is not limited to, the preposing of the adjective; adverbial use of the adjective; the passive; progressive constructions; preposition choice; and the determiner-determinant order in compound words.54 The question of syntactic borrowing is also treated in studies of varieties spoken in North America. Gadet/Jones (2008, 240–244) discuss hypotheses for the following features in varieties of French: auxiliary selection; absence of the subjunctive; the realization of pronouns; preposing of the adjective; infinitival constructions with expressed subjects; preposition choice; preposition stranding; que deletion; the borrowed particle back; and uses of comme linked to English like. Klee/Lynch (2009, 235–252) offer a more detailed account of a range of hypotheses made about contact features in US Spanish, including: a decrease in use of the subjunctive; a decrease in use of the conditional; an increased rate of expression of the subject pronoun; preposition choice; and pa(ra) atrás calqued on English back. It is interesting to compare these lists at a macro-level because they highlight several important features of language contact in general and of Romance contact with English in particular. First, there are both similarities and differences between the hypotheses made for the different languages. There tend to be obvious reasons for the differences; for example, the expression of the subject pronoun is only a candidate for influence in pro-drop languages such as Spanish (and Italian) and not in French.55 Preposition choice stands out quite clearly as the only feature which appears in all three lists. Otherwise, lists for varieties of French and Spanish in North America have a number of features in common which do not appear on lists for the standards, including a decrease in the use of the subjunctive, and calqued or borrowed versions of the English particle back. The second observation that can be made based on these 54 On previous hypotheses for French see McLaughlin (2011, 8–10); for Italian, see McLaughlin (2013, 444–445); for Spanish, see Pountain (1994). 55 See however Gadet/Jones (2008, 241, 242) on the realization of pronouns and expressed subjects in infinitival constructions in varieties of French.

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lists is that contact hypotheses often concern areas of the grammar which are already loci of variation. This has not gone unnoticed by scholars working on the individual languages; Gadet/Jones (2008, 239), for example, invoke Jakobson and Martinet’s idea that a grammar consists of a “hard core” as well as “weak points”, namely “those displaying variation, where reconfigurations are more or less constant” and they raise the question of whether these areas are more likely to be affected by contact (ibid., 239–240). This probably explains the recurrence of features such as preposition choice, subject pronoun expression and progressive constructions. Perhaps because of their status as loci of variation, scholars tend to note that it is often possible to propose very plausible internal explanations for changes posited at the level of syntax. Although this aligns with a wider trend in the general field of contact linguistics to recognize multi-causation, it can feel frustratingly inconclusive. For this reason, and because long lists of candidates for syntactic borrowing have already been provided, what follows below concerns just two areas where there is good potential for comparison. First, I return to my own comparative work on syntactic borrowing in French and Italian which aimed to test the hypothesis that syntactic innovations could enter the language through the translation of international news (McLaughlin 2011; 2013).56 The project was based on a combination of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in international news agencies and the linguistic analysis of a corpus of news dispatches both in the original English versions and in their translations into French and Italian. The study focused on three types of constructions: preposed adjectives, prototypical and impersonal passives, and constructions involving the verbal -ant/-ndo forms equivalent to the -ing form in English. I used comparative linguistic analysis to draw up as wide as possible a range of hypotheses about the kinds of syntactic influence that the original English could have on the translated texts.57 I was able to make a number of general observations by comparing the results of the parallel investigations of French and Italian (McLaughlin 2013, 454–455). The two main observations underscore ideas already emphasized in the current chapter. First, the existence of internal variation appeared to facilitate external influence from the original English dispatches in cases where one of the variants aligned more closely with an English structure. Second, despite the fact that French and Italian are very closely related languages in very similar contact situations with English, they were affected by influence from English in different ways. For instance, there was no evidence that English influence affected adjective position in French whereas it did affect it in Italian. And, vice versa, the verbal -ndo forms in Italian seemed to be untouched by English influence whereas in French, the current strong tendency to prefer the gérondif over the present participle 56 This factor is explicitly evoked for syntactic borrowing by, among others, Braselmann (2002, 967); Pountain (2003, 268); Schöntag (2009, 23). 57 Influence of this kind is widely illustrated in corpus-based translation studies where it is referred to as the under-representation of features which are unique to the target language (Laviosa 2011, 23).

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was totally reversed under influence from the English dispatches. It is also possible to place the results of this work in a broader comparative context. We note, for example, the frequency with which the verbal ant/-ndo/-ing forms are linked to English influence in Romance both historically and today. In the Romance family, these forms and the constructions in which they appear seem to be a locus of variation which is particularly sensitive to influence of this type. It is also interesting to observe that there is no evidence of a new construction modelled on English to be being emerging in either French or Italian despite the fact that the emergence of the estar siendo construction in Spanish is widely attributed to contact with English. It remains unclear why that construction emerged in Spanish but not in the other Romance languages (McLaughlin 2013, 455). Finally, this comparative work raises an interesting question about the specific type of contact effect which alters the frequency of an existing form. The fact that this effect touches the verbal -ant forms in French but not the verbal -ndo forms in Italian can be explained on the grounds that French, unlike Italian, shares with English the form whose frequency increases. This suggests that this kind of frequential influence might be a phenomenon that is more germane to closely related languages. Such an argument could usefully contribute to the lengthy and on-going debate in contact linguistics about the role of relatedness as a factor in language contact.58 It is also useful to compare the use of back and pa(ra) atrás in North American varieties of French and Spanish. The verbal particle back has been attested in a number of different varieties of French spoken in North America, most notably in Chiac and in Louisiana French. It is used instead of the French prefix re- to express the meaning of repetition or return: venir back meaning to come back (Fr. revenir) and faire back for to do it again (Fr. refaire) (Romaine 2010, 39; King 2011, 196). As Romaine explains, the same phrasal verb pattern is found as a borrowing in US Spanish but in these varieties the item is translated using the Spanish preposition pa(ra) atrás (Eng. behind): te llamo pa’trás for I’ll call you back. A certain amount of controversy surrounds the status of both back and pa(ra) atrás as contact phenomena. We might cite Lipski’s (2010, 558–559) position as relatively moderate: he admits that pa(ra) atrás constructions “are not simple word-for-word calques” but insists that they only arise with “the backdrop of a panoply of English verbal constructions with back”. A similar position can be taken for French: it is certainly true that back is not simply borrowed and used as it is in English but it is also quite clear that it only arises in situations of relatively extensive contact with English. Comparing the literature on back and pa(ra) atrás, even briefly, lets us see both phenomena from a slightly different perspective. First and foremost, it reinforces that part of the moderate position which insists on the need for the English backdrop for this form to arise since it is attested in more than one Romance language in direct contact with English but

58 For a recent example, see Bowern (2013).

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not, so far as we can tell, in other contexts. Second, it prompts us to consider why it is that back is borrowed into French where Spanish uses a calque. The fact that the difference is systematic suggests that this is not just a vagary of language contact. We should therefore look to internal and/or external differences to understand the difference. For example, might back be preferred over a calque such as en arrière since closed monosyllables are a preferred word-type in French? Perhaps the most valuable outcome of comparing the literature in this area is that it highlights an asymmetry whereby back can have both the meaning of ‘return’ and repetition whereas the iterative meaning seems to be excluded for pa(ra) atrás.59 This aligns with King’s (2011) interpretation of the data for back across different varieties according to which the ‘return’ meaning represents the first stage. In the absence of more extensive theoretical and empirical comparisons, it is impossible to offer a firm conclusion on this point. These open questions emphasize the need for more comparative work on contact with English across the Romance languages.

4.4 Other levels Scholars interested in the effects of contact with English traditionally focused their work on the inventories of the different linguistic subsystems (phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexis). As part of wider changes in the field, there has been an increased interest in the effects of contact at other levels. Hypotheses have been made for all three of the languages under analysis here as regards both the European standards and also varieties spoken outside Europe. The most diverse list of features is found in Braselmann’s (2002) work on globalization which focuses on French, Spanish and German. She links the spread of a wide range of features to globalization, including gestural features (“thumbs up” or the “high five”), epistolary formulae and greetings conventions, general changes involving politeness, typographic conventions affecting the placement of commas and full stops, and the spread of the American date format (month/day/year).60 Since scholars have only recently become interested in the effects of contact on other linguistic levels, there is little scope for comparative analysis at this stage. For the moment, then, the most that can be done here is to signal the potential importance of contact at other levels, especially the discourse pragmatic, and to call for more research both on the individual languages and from a comparative perspective.

59 For example, each of the tokens cited by Lipski (2010, 556–558) has the meaning of ‘return’. 60 See also Tosi (2006, 165–168); Klee/Lynch (2009, 252–258); Boutin (2014); Drescher (2014).

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5 Conclusion The aim of this chapter was to explore from a comparative perspective what happens when the Romance languages come into contact with English. The use of previous research to compare the levels and types of borrowing at every linguistic level allows us now to consider some fundamental questions about this contact situation and about language contact in general. The first question concerns the significance of contact with English for the Romance languages. It is quite clear that contact with English appears to be more significant today than it was a decade ago as a result of the move away from considering inventories of features in standard languages towards usage-based sociolinguistic studies of a much wider range of varieties. Future scholarship in this field certainly needs to continue in this direction because our understanding of the workings of certain factors – such as gender and identity – and of certain levels – such as discourse pragmatics – remains very shallow. The second question to consider is whether the Romance languages are all affected by contact with English in the same way. It was seen quite clearly that the situation obtaining between English and French differs in a number of ways from that which obtains with both Italian and Spanish. This, for the most part, can be attributed to the linked factors of length of contact and relatedness; we can now underscore the significance of these factors in language contact in general. The third and final question concerns the extent to which what is happening in Romance can be understood as an outcome of globalization parallel to changes taking place cross-linguistically. Research on anglicisms in other languages both in Europe (Görlach 2001) and beyond (Rosenhouse/Kowner 2008a) suggests that a large part of the effects are shared. The main differences concern the length of contact which for Romance pre-dates the global impact of Anglo-American culture, and the diversity of types of contact situation obtaining between varieties of Romance and English which can be in both indirect and direct contact. Despite the very large volume of research already carried out in this field, it is quite clear that more work is needed to address some of the most pressing questions about English influence both cross-linguistically and within the Romance family. Alongside usage-based sociolinguistic studies and work on a wider range of varieties, an urgent question needs to be addressed about the impact of the dramatic increase in competence in programming languages around the world.61 There is also a clear need for more comparative research. Comparative studies remain the minority but the

61 A list of so-called “Hello World” programs such as http://helloworldcollection.de (last access 25.10.2015) shows that these languages tend to be based on English. As these languages move ever closer to natural language, they are becoming a vehicle for the transmission of features at all levels from orthography and lexis to morphology, syntax and discourse-pragmatics.

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disadvantages involved in aligning different contact situations are far outweighed by the potential benefits that allow us to begin to capture larger generalizations. Acknowledgments: I would like to thank the following people for their feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter: the editors of the volume; the members of the Romance Linguistics Working Group at the University of California, Berkeley; and Justin Davidson. Any remaining errors are my own.

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Barbara E. Bullock

25 Language contact in a rural community Abstract: In this chapter, it is proposed that language contact in rural language communities provides linguists with an opportunity to investigate the effects of language contact independent from those of dialect contact. In such situations, linguists are also able to investigate linguistic variation in communities estranged from the types of socio-economic hierarchies that lead to the social stratification of variants in the majority language setting. Data from a French isolate, spoken until the twenty-first century in a rural US setting, indicate that when these conditions are met features of morphosyntactic and phonetic variation exist and persist between and within speakers that are not correlated with any appreciable social significance.  

Keywords: rural vs urban divide, attrition, French language, discontinuities, phonetic change  

1 Introduction In the mid-20th century, Uriel Weinreich (1953) and Einar Haugen (1950, 271) envisioned a field of language contact founded on “the behaviour of living observable speakers”, which would be attentive to the sociocultural setting of the bilinguals under study. In laying out their views on bilingual communities, Haugen documented the language practices of Norwegian Americans in agricultural Wisconsin, and Weinreich observed the contexts of language and dialect contact in Switzerland that resulted from the movement of rural speakers seeking land or work. Their focus on variation in contact settings originated from a close consideration of scenarios where different languages and/or dialects had come to co-exist in largely pastoral settings. Today, it appears that there has been a profound reorientation toward viewing language contact as an urban phenomenon, perhaps because sociolinguists are attracted to large and diverse populations. In this chapter, we return to the rural roots of language contact, focusing on the patterns of variation observed among bilinguals from a French linguistic isolate in the United States, Frenchville (Pennsylvania), to demonstrate that we still have much to learn when we “chase contact” (Britain 2012) far from the excitement of the metropolis. In particular, we wish to contribute support to Dorian’s (1994) claim that in rural, minority language communities, a great deal of variation can exist and persist between and within speakers without any appreciable social significance. This chapter is organized as follows: section 2 provides an overview of recent sociolinguistic work on the effects of language and dialect contact in the city and  

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-026

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echoes the calls of Britain (2009; 2012) that we should not neglect rural communities. In section 3, we focus on the notion of the speech community in the minority language context, whose members may share a language but not necessarily share norms. The Frenchville speakers, their personal histories and the context in which they lived and interacted is summarized in § 4 and a description of the small corpora of data collected from them is presented. The similarities and the discontinuities observed between and within speakers are described in § 5. In the conclusion we return to the central concerns presented by language contact in rural settings and the implications they hold for linguistics.  

2 The urban–rural divide in relation to language contact In introducing the re-edition of Uriel Weinreich’s (1951) Columbia University dissertation, Kim/Labov (2011, xxi) observed that “contact linguistics is one of the liveliest and fastest growing areas of linguistics”. This appears to hold in large part because sociolinguists have become especially attentive to the language variation that accompanies mobility, globalization, and urbanization in late modernity. Hickey notes that “contemporary investigations of contact, either interlinguistic or extralinguistic, are frequently of urban scenarios” (Hickey 2012, 6), and a survey of works devoted to the effects of contemporary language contact scenarios, most targeting youth languages and/or ethnolects, bears this out: in Norway (Kerswill 1994), Denmark (Quist 2008), France (Jamin/Trimaille/Gasquet-Cyrus 2006), the United States (Silva-Corvalán 1994), Belgium (Blommaert 2014), England (Kerswill 2013), Sweden (Magnusson/ Stroud), Senegal (Ngom 2003; Swigart 2000), Germany (Keim 2002), and China (Lefort 2012). A related strand of research addresses the linguistic consequences of in-migration from rural to urban centres on dialect convergence: in Norway (Kerswill 1994), Syria (Habib 2014), Morocco (Hachimi 2012), The United States (Otheguy/Zentella/ Livert 2007), Ireland (Hickey 2005), and France (Hornsby 2006). The “rural slant” (Johnstone 2011) that once typified studies of dialectal variation and that was based on data provided by non-mobile older rural males, the so-called “NORMs” (Chambers/Trudgill 1980), appears to have tipped considerably toward a more youthful, urban bias in sociolinguistic investigations of contact.1 Britain offers a critique of the urban vs rural gaze in dialectology and variationist sociolinguistics, arguing that there are no processes at work in the city that are not also in effect in other locales (Britain 2009; 2012). He maintains that if linguists accept  

1 This is not to say that noteworthy sociolinguistic work on variation and ethnic identity in rural settings is not conducted (see Hazen 2002; Purnell/Salmons/Tepeli 2004).

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ideologies that juxtapose the innovative, youthful, multicultural, exciting city to the conservative, homogenous, aging, and staid countryside, then we predispose ourselves to look for variation only in certain types of sites. But as the social factors at work in the city are largely the same as those in effect in more rural settings, the same types of linguistic variation and change should be found no matter the locale. Importantly, Britain sees contact as the catalyst for the types of changes that are imputed to constitute urban innovations even though contact, as he notes, is not restricted to the city. Nonetheless, the notion persists in academia in general that there is something uniquely “superdiverse” about the city (Blommaert/Rampton 2011). Yet, when we consider the exportation of the Romance languages by European conquistadors, colonists, refugees, and immigrants in the pre-modern world we need to acknowledge the fact that, with few exceptions, these languages were often originally implanted directly into settings that were undeniably rural and also linguistically diverse. For instance, the observations of an historian during the 19th century (Day 1843, 12), informs us of the potential for language contact in the rural, very sparsely populated county at the time that the French colony was founded in Frenchville: “The county is still but partially settled, the population in 1840 being only 5 to the square mile. The inhabitants are chiefly from other parts of the state, but there are several distinct colonies of Yankees, Germans, and French. Until near the close of the last century, Clearfield Co. remained an unbroken wilderness, with the exception perhaps of here and there an Indian cornfield”.2

Today in the Americas, Romance languages are found from Nunavut (Canadian Arctic) to Patagonia and they have co-existed variously with indigenous, African, creole, and other immigrant and colonial languages throughout their history in the New World. It is not difficult, then, to imagine that the diversity of voices and cultures that the transplanted Romance speakers encountered in the rural forests, plains, jungles, islands, mountains, and bayous of the Western Hemisphere rivalled what we see today in the modern metropolis, even if the concentration of individuals was on a much smaller scale. The variation internal to each of the three dominant Romance languages as spoken in the New World and their salient divergence from their European roots derives as much from language contact as it does from their separation in time and space from their source dialects. While we agree with Britain that the same social processes are at work in the city and the countryside, and that rural speakers show the same range of linguistic variation as urban ones do, rural minority-language communities can provide us with insights that are obscured in urban settings. Minority language speakers in rural communities are more linguistically isolated than their urban (or border-dwelling)

2 “Yankee” in this context presumably refers to New Englanders or those who lived in the northeast of the USA.

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counterparts, who experience continued contact with speakers of the minority language and enjoy the opportunity to refresh the minority language via dialect contact. Thus, in rural language communities, we have the opportunity to investigate with confidence the effects of language contact independent from dialect contact. We are additionally able to investigate linguistic variation in communities estranged from the types of socio-economic hierarchies that lead to the social stratification of variants in the majority language setting.

3 Investigating variation in minority language communities In her seminal research on Gaelic in East Sutherland (ESG), Scotland, Dorian observed what she termed “personal pattern variation”, or the use of variants that did not correlate with the familiar social factors that in other circumstances are presumed to confer an “orderly heterogeneity” on linguistic structure (Dorian 1994; Weinreich/ Labov/Herzog 1968). Dorian (1994, 694) surmised that the patterns of variation that she observed in her Gaelic data had not been noticed elsewhere, in part, because of an “increasing lack of familiarity with small and isolated populations in rural areas” among academics in general. She proposed that the personal pattern variation in East Sutherland Gaelic would be mirrored in other small, isolated rural communities marked by illiteracy in the minority language and distance from linguistic standardization and prestige norms. One of the repercussions of our shifted gaze toward the city is that there are few studies of variation in isolated, rural contact settings that can match the scope of Dorian’s long-term fieldwork on ESG (especially Dorian 1992). Fewer still are studies of minority languages in rural settings that match the large surveys conducted in urban settings (Otheguy/Zentella 2012; Poplack 1989). The present case of Frenchville is no exception; the data to be reported on here are too sparse and the speakers too few to be reliably analysed using robust quantitative methodologies. However, as we will see, the data support Dorian’s contention that ESG is not an anomaly; personal pattern variation within and between speakers appears to be a characteristic of Frenchville French, as Dorian would have predicted. Mougeon/Nadasdi (1998) find personal pattern variation, which they refer to as patterns of discontinuity, in the French spoken as a minority language in Ontario. The French speakers of their study were all anglophones enrolled in a French-language medium high school and all had also completed their primary schooling in French. The consultants differed in the extent to which they used French outside the school settings with some using much more English than French (restricted speakers), others using roughly equal amounts of English and French (moderately-restricted speakers), and still others using French significantly more than English (unrestricted speakers).

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The results demonstrate that the minority language speakers in Ontario showed considerable discontinuities in their variable usage and the constraints that regulate them even though they arguably formed a single speech community. These discontinuities took two general forms; first, there was a loss of vernacular features or of social-stylistic constraints, and second, there was variation due to simplification and/ or to transfer from English. While the loss of vernacular features was confined to the most restricted speakers (i.e., those who were exposed to and used French mostly in the school setting), the second type of discontinuity was also found among fluent, moderately-restricted speakers, indicating that “restriction in French need not be drastic for the emergence of such innovations to take place” (Mougeon/Nadasdi 1998, 52). The authors conclude that the notion that members of a speech community must share an invariant structural base may need to be revised in minority language communities. It is to be noted that Mougeon/Nadasdi’s consultants were all literate in French and all were fluent speakers who had at least one French-speaking parent. Nonetheless, they showed variation between them that could not be accounted for by social or stylistic constraints but was attributable instead to their use of French relative to English.

3.1 The question of attrition in minority language communities In minority language communities, particularly those undergoing shift like Frenchville, it is tempting to attribute some of the linguistic innovation observed to language attrition. However, in the absence of longitudinal data it is impossible to know how much an individual may have lost if we have no measure of his/her linguistic abilities at an earlier stage. We might be able to address the issue of attrition at the community level in real time by comparing differences across generations, as was done by Dubois/Noetzel (2005) for Cajun French speakers. But in practice it is usually difficult to classify individual variables as ensuing from reduction, simplification, or complexification because these are systemic processes and with the small corpora with which we have to work, we usually do not have enough data to establish whether or not a paradigm has truly been disrupted, transformed, or “forgotten” or only certain exemplars within it, and even then, possibly only by certain individuals. Dubois/Noetzel’s (2005) work on locative prepositions in a relatively large corpus of over 100 multigenerational speakers of Cajun French constitutes one of the few large-scale variationist studies available on rural contact communities. The study is informative with regard to the gradient introduction of forms that diverge significantly from the vernacular grammar, what they call “attritional forms,” into the minority language speech community. They demonstrate that older restricted speakers, who are fluent but self-described as “out of practice” in French (Dubois/Noetzel 2005, 134), are the speakers who are responsible for introducing most of the attritional changes in the locative prepositions (e.g., en école ‘in school’ rather than à l’école). The innova-

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tions contributed to the language by these fluent bilinguals are transmitted to, and used by, younger speakers, irrespective of whether they are fluent or restricted speakers. Attritional innovations in a minority speech community, then, are cumulative over generations and many, if not most, variants appear to be transmitted to, rather than innovated by, younger or less fluent speakers in the context of minority language shift. It is not surprising that the rules or constraints of vernacular forms of a language are relaxed in minority language communities in a contact setting. Schmidt (1985) remarks that the dominant assumption of a vertical transmission of language from older to younger speakers may not be appropriate for shifting communities. In her work on Young People’s Dyirbal, she showed that the horizontal network, where younger, more restricted speakers interact with one another in Dyirbal, is stronger than the vertical one, because younger speakers wish to assert an “in-group identity” that, in part, avoids the purism and conservatism of their elders (Schmidt 1985, 227). The Frenchville case, to be discussed below, adds evidence to the claims reviewed above that members of a minority speech community may not share the same linguistic rules or constraints. As we will see, variation is attested between and within speakers that does not appear to be socially structured but nor does it appear to be conditioned by linguistic restriction. What is particularly clear in the case to be overviewed is that the speakers of French in Frenchville constituted a speech community under any definition of the term since they were communicatively isolated and had only one another to speak to in French, a situation that endured for 175 years. They were much more geographically concentrated and more homogeneous in their family backgrounds and in their linguistic experiences than the consultants of any of the studies of minority language communities discussed above. Nonetheless, as we will see, they show a good deal of individual variation, or discontinuity, in their French.  

4 Background to the study: a brief history of Frenchville, PA The village of Frenchville is located in rural Covington Township, Clearfield Country, Pennsylvania and situated in hilly terrain. Its primary industries are agriculture and surface coal extraction and it is known as a venue for hunting, especially for hosting an annual coyote hunting competition. The entire township in which Frenchville is situated occupies a territory of 52 square miles (136 km2) and has a population of about 526 residents (US Census Bureau) or about 12 people per square mile. A third of the residents reported French ancestry in the 2010 census. According to local historians, the French settlement began in the area in 1830 with the emigration of 40 families from the departments of the Haute-Marne and the Haute-Saône. They purchased lands from the land developer, John Keating (1760–

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1856), a devout Catholic who had been raised in France and who was known for facilitating the establishment of French Catholic colonies in the frontiers of Pennsylvania, all of which failed except Frenchville. According to Day (1843, 233), the French colonists of Frenchville “have not increased much of late years, the reports of their success not having been sufficiently favourable to induce further emigration”. As it turned out, Frenchville, which achieved a French population of around 200 families at its zenith, saw little new immigration from France after the 1840s and so became a linguistic isolate. The French of Frenchville is unique in North America; it is distinguished from all other French varieties in North American by the relative lateness of its arrival and by the point of origin of its speakers, who came from eastern France rather than northand central-western France, the source regions of emigration to Canada, Louisiana and the Antilles (Valdman/Auger/Piston-Hatlen 2005). Thus, it is the most isolated French-speaking community in North America, both linguistically and geographically. In Frenchville, a historical marker just off the Frenchville–Kartaus highway reads, “a pure strain of the French language was spoken here until the 1960’s”, announcing the villagers’ pride in their French linguistic heritage and their preoccupation with its attrition. The pattern of the three-generation language shift for immigrants today is well documented. However, it may be the case that rural communities in nineteenthcentury America provided a propitious environment for long-term immigrant language maintenance. In the case of Frenchville, there was a sizeable enough population of immigrant families to permit several generations of endogamous marriages, and many of them seemed to express a strong allegiance to their heritage language. For instance, a 1964 interview project documenting the oral histories of lumber rafters in Pennsylvania contains a written record of a short conversation with 89 year-old Desra Billotte, of Frenchville, and his wife (cf. Samuel King Lumber Rafting Oral History Collection). The interviewer noted: “Discussing the day-by-day use of French in the home, his wife explained that the two children living in Clearfield were forgetting how to speak the language but were still able to understand it”. The record continues with a direct attestation from Mrs Billotte that, “you’d come home and talk French and keep it that way”. The theme of language loyalty within certain families is echoed by my own consultants who recount that their paternal grandfather, who lived with them and who was bilingual, refused to speak English at home, even if English monolinguals were present. As the exchange in (1) illustrates, the brothers were expected to comply with the “French only” rule enforced in their home:  

(1) NB: KB: NB:

Interview between brothers, NB and KB, and the author (BB), in 2002 Je parlais français tout le temps, tout le temps. Tout le temps. C’est tout ce que je parlais à la maison.

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BB: C’était une règle? Qu’est ce qui se passe si vous parlez anglais à la maison? NB: Eux3 te gardaient pas. They wouldn’t look at you, you know. In addition to the prescribed use of French at home exercised by some families, their religion also played a significant role in their language retention. The fact that they were Catholic in a largely Protestant region meant that they maintained a local parish and, at times in their earlier history, they hosted clergy from France. The church also encouraged large families and since the immigrants had land to clear and farms to establish, it appears that they complied. For instance, the maternal grandmother of my consultants was said to be one of 22 children. Local primary and secondary schooling also indirectly perpetuated their language maintenance, even though it was in English. Local schooling insulated the children from the teasing and bullying that was to befall the younger generations when the local schools closed and the children were sent to larger, regional schools. Many of the individuals with whom I spoke during my fieldwork, whether they were French speakers or not, recollect the taunts of “downriver rats” directed at them because of their linguistic and cultural difference and their rural isolation. That all residents received their schooling in English meant that transmission of the minority language was exclusively oral. According to what residents and former residents of the area have told me, researchers had often visited Frenchville to gather video and audio tape recordings. However, to my knowledge, prior to the empirical works that have appeared in this millennium, there are only two published linguistic sources on the French of Frenchville; one is no longer accessible (Caujolle 1972) and the second is a grammatical sketch of the structural properties of French isolates in North America that includes data from Frenchville (Valdman/Chaudenson/Manessy 1979). To preserve the small amount of data that we do have, we intend to create a publicly accessible corpus.

4.1 The consultants and their data The data for the present study come from two sources, a series of interviews I conducted between 2002 and 2007 with two brothers, NB (b. 1930) and KB (b. 1933) and data reported on by Mougeon/Uritescu (2006), which comprise analogue recordings with two individuals, EV (b. 1903), and her brother, FP (b. 1909) who were interviewed by a French-speaking linguist, with the linguist’s wife as a participant, in 1988.4 The tran-

3 Eux is the third person plural pronoun used categorically in Frenchville. While eux-autres is attested as a subject pronoun in other North American varieties, eux is unique to Frenchville (Mougeon/Uritescu 2006). 4 My research on these individuals, based on genealogical records, indicates that these are the correct years of birth; these dates are different from those given in Mougeon/Uritescu (2006), which records EV as 81 and FP as 80 in 1988.

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scripts of the 1988 interviews total over 21,700 words. This figure includes the speech of interviewers as well as interviewees and stretches in English. The transcription of the 2002–2007 corpus totals about 13,700 words of French, including my contributions as the interviewer. The earliest of my interviews in 2002 was made on a Marantz analogue recorder using an omnidirectional microphone and the 1988 recording was also analogue, although I have no metadata on how it was made. I redigitized all analogue recordings at a sampling rate of 44.1kHz, 16-bit quantization for their preservation in digital form and to format them for acoustic analysis. My last fieldwork recordings in Frenchville, with NB only, were digitized directly to a Marantz PDM recorder. The siblings I recorded, NB and KB, were the first cousins of those from the 1988 recordings. According to my consultants, it had been the custom in their family to always speak French with other francophone speakers in the village (see also Bullock/Nichols 2017). All four speakers reported on here were literate only in English, although EV (the eldest) claimed to have taught herself to read a bit of French from a Catholic missalette that belonged to her grandmother. FP and EV had each travelled once to France, FP as an interpreter during WWII and EV as a tourist. The members of the younger generation, NB and KB, had never been to a francophone country and had very little exposure to French speakers other than those who lived in Frenchville. FP is considered a more restricted speaker than his sister, EV, who had married another French speaker from the village and had continued to use French at home all her life (Mougeon/Uritescu 2006). NB and KB would also be considered more restricted speakers than EV, because that they, too, had each married monolinguals and switched to English in the home. Since they were born a generation later than their older cousins, they had little interaction with fluent francophone speakers in their peer age group; but whether NB and KB were, in fact, more restricted in their French use than FP is impossible to determine. Sadly, none of the speakers reported on here are still alive and as far as I have been able to determine, they were the last speakers of this variety left in the area.

4.2 Overview of structural properties Each of the four Frenchville speakers in the sample displays features that are characteristic of other varieties of French in the Americas. It is likely that these properties were acquired as part of the vernacular that their parents/grandparents imported with them. These features include syncretism of the demonstrative articles ce(t), masc., and cette, fem., to [st] (or its allomorph [ste] before consonants), variable neutralization of the feminine indefinite article une with its masculine counterpart un, the almost exclusive use of puis (‘then’), reduced to pi’, as the conjunction for listing and narrating, and the lack of the non-referential subject pronoun, il, with the impersonal verb falloir, excepting its use in the collocation comme il faut ‘as one should’.

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The regional origins of the source variety of Frenchville French are apparent from its lexicon. Lexical items like une galendure ‘a wall’ (cf. un mur), un bacul ‘a hunting cabin’ (cf., une cabane), un hurlot ‘a guy’ (cf., un type, un mec), la ouenne ‘oats’ (cf., l’avoine) and fermer (cf., tenir une ferme ‘to have/hold a farm’), are all attested in Franche-Comté as well as the eastern variants septante ‘seventy’ and nonante ‘ninety’ for soixante-dix and quatre-vingt-dix. Minority language isolates often contain borrowings or semantic extensions that compensate for missing technological terms. In Frenchville, though, the lexicon also includes borrowings in unexpected semantic domains. For instance, agricultural terms like log, stump, corn, shed, have been morphologically and phonologically integrated into French and appear to replace the native terms that must have been in use at the time of their ancestors’ migration from rural France to work as loggers. And where borrowing or code-switching might be expected to occur to reference to novel technologies or flora and fauna specific to their new home, speakers instead show evidence of calquing (e.g., une machine à quatre roues (cf. French VTT, quad)) or a mix of semantic extensions, borrowings, and calques. For instance, in reference to the woodland animals that are prevalent in the region, we find un biquet ‘a lamb’ (cf., faon), un beuc (cf., un cerf), un beuc à six points ‘a six-pointed buck’ (cf., un cerf à cornes ramifiés). Thus, the patterns of borrowing vis-à-vis calquing or switching do not sort neatly according to semantic domain. In previous work, we have demonstrated how isolation and language contact has led to structural, as opposed to lexical, innovations that were unlikely to have been present in the source variety. This includes considerable variability in nominal and verbal morphology (Bullock/Toribio 2006), the presence of English-like prosodic features, particularly with regard to placing stress in situ on contrastively focused elements such as subject pronouns (Bullock 2009), and the convergence of the front rounded mid vowels series into an American English-like rhoticized vowel (Bullock/ Gerfen 2004; 2005). What we focus on here is the personal pattern variation attested in the corpus with attention to both morphosyntactic and phonetic properties. An analysis of these speakers’ lexicons would undoubtedly also prove instructive with respect to idiosyncratic vs patterned variation, but most word types in a corpus are hapax whereas structural features are recurrent throughout an utterance. In our case, we have fewer than 33,000 words across the Frenchville corpora, too few to reveal multiple tokens of any but the most frequent lexemes.

5 Discontinuities between individuals and between generations Mougeon/Uritescu (2006) undertook an investigation of some of the salient features of Frenchville that differentiate it from its vernacular and regional roots and from other contact varieties in North America. Among these, they analysed the deletion of /l/

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from the subject pronouns il/ils/elle/elles, a feature of nineteenth-century popular French, and attested in the Haute-Marne and the Haute-Saône for the masculine series before consonants. They find that FP retains the Franche-Comté system well, even producing a difference between impersonal il, where the /l/ is generally intact before a vowel initial verb, and personal il, where deletion is total in all contexts. In contrast, EV demonstrates a looser linguistic conditioning for the impersonal pronoun, deleting the liquid even before vowel initial verbs. Moreover, she also deletes /l/ from elle one third of the time in her utterances. The authors propose that the difference between the brother and sister might be accounted for by FP’s relative restricted use of French. In this sense, they see him as more conservative, adhering to the norms of the Franche-Comté, than his sister who is more innovative. Whatever the explanation for the difference might be, we can see this as an example of Dorian’s (1994) personal pattern variation observed between siblings of roughly the same age. It is worth comparing some of the results from Mougeon/Uritescu’s primarily morphosyntactic analysis with the data from the later corpora, as it may help to clarify the role of restriction in preserving more conservative forms in a small minority language community. We first explore two examples of morphosyntactic variation that permit a comparison of variation across, as well as between, generations: the use of the auxiliary verbs avoir and être with unaccusatives and de-pronominalized verbs, and the reduction in relative pronoun usage.5 These we survey briefly because the data are sparse and, thus, only suggestive. We then engage in a between-generation comparison of the acoustic innovation studied in prior work (Bullock/Nichols 2017), examining the patterning of schwa relative to the phonetic reflex of the mid front rounded vowels realized by the older and younger generations.

5.1 Auxiliary usage: avoir and être French unaccusative verbs, such as mourir, naître, venir, and reflexive verbs, like se marier, tend to select the auxiliary, être, rather than avoir in standardized varieties. But vernacular varieties of French frequently level auxiliary use in favour of avoir. This is a frequent internally-motivated reduction, attested in non-contact settings, in bilingual settings in which French is the majority language, and in communities where it is the minority tongue (Russo/Roberts 1999; Sankoff/Thibault 1977). Mougeon/Uritescu (2006) studied the extension of the avoir auxiliary in the 1988 corpus of EV and FP and found dramatic differences between the speakers. For the restricted speaker, FP, there was not one incidence of être used as an auxiliary verb in any verbal context. His levelling of the auxiliary system to avoir is complete. His sister,

5 De-pronominalized verbs are those that are reflexive in conservative varieties but that lack the reflexive pronouns in Frenchville.

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by contrast, maintains auxiliary être variably, most strongly with naître/mourir and to a lesser extent with de-pronominalized verbs. But être appears to have ceded almost entirely to avoir in her speech as an auxiliary for verbs of movement. Our speakers from the later generation show different patterns from both FP and EV. The data from KB are too sparse to know if he differs substantially from his brother in this regard.6 NB and KB differ from FP in that they still use être. They differ from EV in selecting être categorically with the verbs naître/mourir. There is no evidence of the trend toward levelling shown by EV in their auxiliary selection with these verbs. But like EV, NB shows more variation with the de-pronominalized verbs than with the other categories, using être just as often as avoir. The data are most varied between speakers with respect to auxiliary selection with verbs of movement. EV rarely uses être for this category and NB shows a wide range of different auxiliary choices, which include, in descending order of preference: avoir > zero > être. Although the corpora are modest, it is evident that these speakers make different choices with regard to auxiliary selection. These are presented in Table 1 for speakers FP, EV, and NB. FP has levelled totally in the direction of avoir. EV shows variation for naître/mourir that no one else does, and NB shows a unique, three-way choice in auxiliary usage for verbs of movement. The only variable used by all three consultants is avoir with verbs of movement. The variation in auxiliary choice among these speakers does not correlate in any straightforward way with either generation (FP/EV vs NB) or with language restriction (FP/NB vs EV).  

Table 1: Auxiliary preferences for verbs selecting être in normative French  

Speaker

De-pronominal Verbs

Naître/Mourir

Movement verbs

être

être

être

FP

avoir x

EV

x

NB

x

x x

x

avoir

avoir

zero

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

5.1.1 Individual variation in morpheme shape While KB’s token counts were insufficient to determine his auxiliary preferences for most of the verbal categories shown in Table 1, it is worth noting that he and his brother, NB, show considerable variation in the form of the past participle they employ for the verb mourir. NB variably uses two different variants, the conventional  

6 He only used five instances of these verbs.

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participle mort, although syncretic for gender (e.g. elle est mort [cf. morte]), and an innovative form mouru, a mix of the infinitive stem, mour-, and the participle ending, -u, which is normally affixed to regular -re and -ir verb stems of the third conjugation. KB uses an innovative form distinct from his brother’s, meuru, which is built from the stressed variant of the stem. It is important to note that they used all these forms in a conversation together with me about the death of their sister, while I used the conventional participle inflected for gender, morte (e.g., votre soeur, elle est morte?).

5.2 Relative pronoun usage The reduction of French relative pronouns in oral speech is well established (Gadet 1992). In the earlier Frenchville recordings, EV and FP are observed to replace all relative pronouns with que, consistent with popular varieties of French, or to eliminate them altogether, using paratactic constructions, a common feature of spoken vernaculars. However, NB and KB have retained a distinction between the subject relative pronoun, qui, and the object pronoun, que.7 The corpora reveal semantically and structurally similar utterances distinguished by the older speakers’ complete generalization of que, as exemplified in (2a) juxtaposed with a token of the more conventional relativized subject pronoun qui in (2b) and an innovative que in (2c), both produced by NB of the younger generation: 2a. il y en a en masse de monde que pouvait pas parler français (Mougeon/Uritescu 2006, 126) 2b. s’il est quelqu’un à la maison qui parlait pas le français (NB, 2007) 2c. s’il y avait quelqu’un là que parlait pas le français (NB, 2007) When we systematically examine the data for NB, who has produced most of the speech for the later Frenchville corpus, we find that he uses qui categorically following conservative French norms, but occasionally (about 16 % of the time in this corpus) he overextends que as in (2c). The counts for all his instances of relativized subjects and objects are shown in Table 2.  

Table 2: NB’s relative pronoun usage  

Relativized Subject

Relativized Object

qui

que

qui

que

12

6

0

31

7 Although there are very few instances, the brothers also use the pronouns où and avec qui. As in most spoken varieties, they replace dont by que.

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Here, then, we have a situation in which a member of the younger generation, one who is arguably as restricted or more so than his older cousin, FP, alternates between conservative and innovative variables, whereas both the restricted and non-restricted speakers of the previous generation show only the innovative form. The possibility that language restriction contributes to accounting for the presence of a conservative variant, then, cannot hold. It is unlikely that generation is a factor either, because the speaker of the younger generation shows unmerged subject relative pronouns, while his older cousins had categorically neutralized them. It is more likely that these speakers were exposed to different variants within their homes, even if they come from the same family and the same speech community.

5.3 Variation in vowel systems Bullock/Gerfen (2005) argued that the front mid rounded vowels of French /ø, œ/ have converged to an American English (AE)-like rhoticized schwa [ə˞] in the speech of NB and KB. We observed that the vowel in words like neuf has a rhotic perceptual quality ([nə˞f]), similar to the quality found in AE, surf [sə˞f]. However, the brother’s schwa productions in French did not converge on [ə˞], so that the vowel of the preposition de, when not elided, contrasts with the vowel in deux ([dø] de vs [də˞] deux). While the vowel classes are normally distinguished orthographically, representing schwa and the full vowels, they cannot be reliably distinguished by native speakers (Bürki et al. 2011; Hall/Hume 2013). That these words constitute minimal pairs based on vowel quality in Frenchville, rather than on elidability, is remarkable because it appears that the brothers had reversed a phonetic near merger, something argued to be impossible in the absence of literacy or of contact with a dialect that maintains a robust contrast between vowels (Hickey 2004; Manaster Ramer 1996). It was unlikely that NB and KB would have encountered speakers in Frenchville with a salient contrast since the data from European varieties of French demonstrate very little perceptual difference between these categories (Bürki et al 2011). The rhoticization of /ø, œ/ (and even /œ̃ /) is attested among native speakers in Quebec (Lamontagne/Mielke 2013; Mielke 2013) but NB and KB acknowledge having little experience with that variety. Bullock/Gerfen (2005) reasoned that language contact with AE, which has an unstressed, schwa-like vowel and a stressed [ə˞], might have facilitated the demerger in our consultant’s French. Under this view, we proposed that NB and KB could have perceptually merged the unreduced, mid front rounded vowels to [ə˞], a mid vowel also produced with lip rounding. So one way in which a demerger (or phoneme split) could have come about in default of dialect contact or literacy would be that schwa and the mid, front rounded vowels were not completely neutralized acoustically in the input variety available to NB and KB, but remained distinct at a fine-grained sub-phonemic level. In this case, Frenchville French constituted a case of near-merger where cate-

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gories were not entirely overlapping, even if the phones that serve to undergird a phonological contrast cannot be reliably distinguished from one another by native speakers (Di Paolo/Faber 1990; Faber/Di Paolo 1995; Labov/Karen/Miller 1991). In the speech of EV and FP, the vowels /ø, œ/ have no percept of rhoticity. They are closer to the vowel qualities associated with their French source variety than are the vowels of KB and NB, who appear to be innovators (or, at least, adopters of an innovation). In order to confirm whether the vowels of EV and FP are qualitatively different from those of KB and NB, Bullock/Nichols (2017) conducted an acoustic analysis of the vowels of the earlier generation to compare with the results of the younger generation, published in Bullock/Gerfen (2005). At issue is whether EV and FP show any evidence of rhoticization, in which case they could be the source of innovation, or whether they show any signs of a separate acoustic categories for /ø, œ/ vs schwa. If they do show signs of separate categories at a subphonemic level then it is possible that this difference supported the clear phonemic split observed in the speech of KB and NB. The results reported by Bullock/Nichols demonstrate that neither EV nor FP show any signs of rhoticization in their vowel. Rhoticization is reflected acoustically by a sharp drop in F3, but neither speaker showed any drop at all in the third formant; in fact, the third formant values rose slightly for both speakers. EV and FP pattern alike in not rhoticizing their rounded vowels but, in this, they are very different from their cousins, KB and NB, whose F3 trajectories for the /ø, œ/ series is sharply dropping. EV and FP do make small but statistically significant phonetic distinctions between the mid front rounded vowels and schwa, producing the former with a significantly higher F1 than schwa, thereby locating it slightly lower in vowel space. In other words, they produce schwa as more closed than they do /ø, œ/. This result matches that of KB and NB, who also produce a schwa that is higher in the vowel space than their more centralized, stressed [ə˞] and it is convergent with the phonetic results from the Metropole (Fougeron/Gendrot/Bürki 2007; Malécot/Chollet 1977). In sum, there are clear differences in vowel quality between these two generations, with the older one maintaining more conservative vowels and the younger speakers using more innovative ones. It may be the case that variation such as this, while salient to listeners external to the speech community, might not be noticeable within it. Mielke (2013) and Lamontagne/Mielke (2013), for instance, report on experimental evidence that French–English bilinguals in Canada are less likely to notice rhoticized vowels than are English speakers who do not speak French. They suggest that the innovation in Canada might indicate a change from below, one that passes below the level of a speaker’s consciousness. It may be the case that the speakers from Frenchville did not notice the difference between the rhotic and non-rhotic variants produced around them, although anecdotal evidence suggests that NB perceived the difference in his pronunciation of soeur, [sə˞], and mine, which I produce with no rhotic segment at all, but instead something akin to [sœh]. The relevant exchange is reproduced in (3).

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(3) Rhotic discussion between NB and the author BB: Vous m’avez dit l’autre fois quand on avait parlé avec KB que vous avez eu deux soeurs. You had two sisters. NB: Oh oui, deux soeurs. On dit “soeurs” [sə˞]. Vous dîtes comment? BB: Soeurs [sœh]. NB: Soeurs [sə˞]. La même, la même chose. While we cannot know exactly how he perceived the difference between his utterance and mine, this anecdote suggests that the phonetic variation in the mid front vowels that circulated in Frenchville and that differentiated his and his brother’s vowels from those of his older cousins might not have escaped their notice.

6 Discussion and conclusion: language at a remove from social evaluation We have presented morphosyntactic and phonetic evidence in support of Dorian’s (1994) observation that there is a great deal of variation in rural, isolated contact communities, such as Frenchville or East Sutherland, that fails to correlate neatly with socio-economic or socio-indexical factors. Neither generation, nor language restriction appears to account for the variation encountered within and between these corpora. In Frenchville, speakers manifest variability in their choice of auxiliary verb, converging only on the use of avoir as a variant with verbs of motion. EV, for instance, uses être while her brother categorically selects avoir, and NB is unique in displaying three different variants (être, avoir and no auxiliary) with verbs of movement. EV, arguably the least restricted of the four, uses innovative avoir with naître/mourir, but the more restricted NB and KB categorically select être. With regard to the use of relative pronouns, the members of the older generation show signs of innovation, a syncretic que, that the younger speakers do not. The younger speakers show only partial innovation in the pronouns, overextending the use of que. The phonetic results, on the other hand, point to the younger speakers as the innovators in that their mid front rounded vowels have converged with an AE-like rhoticized vowel while their older cousins retain a vowel quality more faithful to conservative varieties of French. Frenchville constitutes a community where speakers cannot be assumed to share a structural base in their minority language. There is variation present that defies a straightforward account based on social-heterogeneity. It is unlikely that a shift in language dominance is responsible for variability because EV participates in more morphosyntactic innovation than NB and KB although she remained an unrestricted speaker of French all her life, unlike the others. The role of language contact, in general, is indeterminate. The phonetic innovation in the speech of NB and KB might have been induced by their exposure to the speech of more English-dominant bilin-

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guals in Frenchville during their childhood than were present during EV and FP’s childhood, but this is information that we do not have. In the end, the inter- and intra-speaker variability observed in Frenchville is probably not unusual in isolated minority communities for the same reasons that Dorian (1994) advanced: the lack of literacy and schooling in the minority language, the remove from any prestige variety, and the absence of social evaluation of competing linguistic variants. Although few in number, extant empirical sociolinguistic studies on other rural minority language Romance communities where literacy and schooling in the minority language is absent appears to bear this out: Faetar (Francoprovencal) in Apulia, Italy (Nagy 2000), Isleño Spanish (Lestrade 2002; Lipski 1987) and Cajun French (Dubois/Noetzel 2005) spoken in the parishes of Louisiana, and Spanish in contact with Luiseno and English in rural southern California (Moyna 2009) all show signs of such significant variation in minority speech communities. Work on variation in rural communities reminds us that innovations appear to be introduced by fluent bilinguals, not by restricted speakers, and that they are transmitted to and used by fluent, non-restricted speakers of the minority language. If this is the case, an individual speaker’s choice to use one or several of the variants in use in the speech community is ratified when fluent speakers produce these same variants and when the choices made evade social evaluation. As long as the same social effects obtain, contact in rural communities should not differ from contact in urban ones. Thus, we should also be seeking discontinuity, or variability without social conditioning, in minority languages in the city as well as in the countryside. Only continued research in rural and urban minority language communities can confirm whether the factors attendant with linguistic isolation are responsible for personal pattern variation.

7 Bibliography Blommaert, Jan (2014), Infrastructures of Superdiversity: Conviviality and Language in an Antwerp Neighbourhood, European Journal of Cultural Studies 17(4), 431–451. Blommaert, Jan/Rampton, Ben (2011), Language and Superdiversity, Diversities 13(2), 3–21. Britain, David (2009), “Big Bright Lights” versus “Green and Pleasant Land”? The Unhelpful Dichotomy of “Urban” versus “Rural” in Dialectology, in: Enam Al Wer/Rudolph de Jong (edd.), Arabic Dialectology: In Honour of Clive Holes on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, Leiden, Brill, 223–248. Britain, David (2012), Countering the Urbanist Agenda in Variationist Sociolinguistics: Dialect Contact, Demographic Change and the Rural-Urban Dichotomy, in: Sandra Hansen et al. (edd.), Dialectological and Folk Dialectological Concepts of Space, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 12–30. Bullock, Barbara E. (2009), Prosody in Contact in French: A Case Study from a Heritage Variety in the USA, International Journal of Bilingualism 13(2), 165–194. Bullock, Barbara E./Gerfen, Chip (2004), Phonological Convergence in a Contracting Language Variety, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 7(2), 95–104. Bullock, Barbara E./Gerfen, Chip (2005), The Preservation of Schwa in the Converging Phonological System of Frenchville (PA) French, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 8(2), 117–130.  

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Purnell, Thomas/Salmons, Joseph/Tepeli, Dilara (2004), German Substrate Effects in Wisconsin English: Evidence for Final Fortition, American Speech 80(2), 135–164. Quist, Pia (2008), Sociolinguistic Approaches to Multiethnolect: Language Variety and Stylistic Practice, International Journal of Bilingualism 12(1–2), 43–61. Russo, Marijke/Roberts, Julie (1999), Linguistic Change in Endangered Dialects: The Case of Alternation between “avoir” and “être” in Vermont French, Language Variation and Change 11(1), 67–85. Samuel King Lumber Rafting Oral History Collection, 1873–1975 (bulk 1963–1965) Collections # HCLA 1635 (n.d.), The Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University. Sankoff, Gillian/Thibault, Pierrette (1977), L’Alternance entre les auxiliaires “avoir” et “être” en français parlé à Montréal, Langue française 34, 81–108. Schmidt, Annette (1985), Young People’s Dyirbal. An Example of Language Death from Australia, London, Cambridge Studies in Linguistics. Silva-Corvalán, Carmen (1994), Language Contact and Change: Spanish in Los Angeles, Oxford, Clarendon. Swigart, Leigh (2000), The Limits of Legitimacy: Language Ideology and Shift in Contemporary Senegal, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 10(1), 90–130. Valdman, Albert/Auger, Julie/Piston-Hatlen, Deborah (2005), Le Français en Amérique du Nord: État présent, Québec, Presses de l’Université Laval. Valdman, Albert/Chaudenson, Robert/Manessy, Gabriel (1979), Le Français hors de France, vol. 2, Paris, Champion. Weinreich, Uriel (1953), Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems, New York, Linguistic Circle of New York. Weinreich, Uriel (2011), Languages in Contact: French, German and Romansh in Twentieth-Century Switzerland, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Weinreich, Uriel/Labov, William/Herzog, Marvin I. (1968), Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change, Austin, University of Texas Press.  

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26 Code-switching and immigrant communities: the case of Italy Abstract: This chapter is an overview of the study of code-switching in immigrant communities in Italy. The immigration context in Italy offers a unique opportunity to study how complex linguistic repertoires are reshaped and how old and new patterns of code-switching are used in daily interactions. Examples from different case studies and my own research on Igbo-Nigerians are presented and different communicative functions of code-switching are discussed both in conversations with local Italians and with members of the immigrant communities. All studies have focused on the first generation of immigrants. Special attention is given to the first studies which mention initial results on the use of code-switching within families. A further goal of this chapter is to discuss the still not fully investigated role of Italo-Romance dialects in the linguistic repertoire of immigrants.  

Keywords: code-switching, sociolinguistics of immigration, Italo-Romance dialects, multilingualism, complex linguistic repertoires  

1 Introduction Twentieth-century Italy was a country of emigration until the early 1970s, and mass immigration is a relatively recent phenomenon compared to other European countries. Several studies have already explored the linguistic outcomes of immigration from a variety of angles. A major focus has been on immigrants’ acquisition and use of L2 Italian (Bernini/Giacalone Ramat 1990; Giacalone Ramat 2003) and descriptions of the L2 Italian varieties of members of individual immigrant communities, including Chinese (Banfi 2003), Igbo-Nigerians (Goglia 2004), Peruvians (Vietti 2005) and Moroccans (Mori 2007). First attempts at macro-level descriptions of multilingualism, language practices and attitudes towards immigrant languages include Bagna/Barni (2005) on multilingualism in two towns in Rome province; Chini (2004) on language choice, use and attitudes among both children of immigrant origin and adult immigrants in Pavia and Turin; D’Agostino (2004) on multilingualism in Palermo; and Vedovelli/Villarini (2001) on immigrant languages in Italy. The study of multilingualism and code-switching in immigrant communities is very recent, reflecting the development of immigration into a more permanent phenomenon and language maintenance within immigrant communities. The immigration context is the ideal setting for the study of emergent patterns of multilingualism and multilingual language practices, including code-switching. Contrary to situations https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-027

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of stable multilingualism, the immigration setting offers a unique opportunity to investigate how immigrants reshape their often complex linguistic repertoires in the host country and engage in multilingual language practices which are not conventionalized. This reshaping typically involves adding the language(s) of the host country to the language(s) immigrants already speak – acquired in their country of origin and/or in countries of intermediate immigration. Immigrants find that when they settle in the host country the domains and functions of the language varieties in their linguistic repertoires become restricted. In Italy, immigrant languages cannot be used in conversations with Italians, with the exception of some pluricentric varieties of French, English and Spanish, which are part of the linguistic repertoire of some immigrant communities. However, immigrants’ linguistic repertoires are also enriched by the addition of the standard language Italian and also the Italo-Romance dialect spoken in the area where they settle. Italo-Romance dialects are in fact separate codes that developed from Latin, much like other Romance languages. Studies on multilingualism and code-switching in immigrant communities often do not take into account Italo-Romance dialects, focusing instead on the use of Italian L2 and the immigrant languages. As far as I have been able to ascertain, there are no studies on the use of Italo-Romance dialects among immigrants at the micro-level of conversations. This chapter will explore immigrants’ complex linguistic repertoires and their use of code-switching as a communicative strategy in conversation. Examples will be drawn from my own research on Igbo-Nigerians in Padua and other studies that have either focused on code-switching or offer useful insights into this linguistic phenomenon within different immigrant communities. The chapter opens with a discussion on the theoretical approach to the study of code-switching in immigrant communities. It then presents an outline of recent immigration to Italy, and describes immigrants’ linguistic repertoires. The following sections review studies of code-switching in immigrant communities in Italy and examine examples of code-switching and their functions in interactions with Italians and with in-group members. The final section focuses on studies of code-switching involving Italo-Romance dialects.

2 The study of code-switching as a conversational strategy In the 1970s, John Gumperz’s pioneering work on communicative and sociolinguistic aspects of code-switching played a key role in stimulating research on the phenomenon. Gumperz’s theory is situated between sociolinguistics and conversational studies and is the result of long experience in the field (Gumperz 1982). Auer (1998) explicitly confirms Gumperz’s conception of code-switching as a “specific resource” available for bilinguals and further develops the study of code-switching as an actual interac-

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tion process. According to Auer, the occurrence of a switched item must be interpreted with reference to a particular conversational interaction. Every utterance or turn can change in the communicative situation and each code-switching instance must be interpreted locally. This approach provides a way to give an account of variation in code-switching, even in the speech of the same speaker, and offers a micro-level analysis of individual instances of code-switching. In order to understand a codeswitching instance, attention must be paid to the “conversational turn immediately preceding it, to which code-alternation may respond in various ways and [to] the following utterance by [the] next participant [, which] reflects his or her interpretation of that preceding utterance” (Auer 1995, 116). Auer (1984; 1995) introduces a basic dichotomy between “discourse-related” and “participant-related” code-switching. The former refers to code-switching due to change of topic, change of mode of interaction, change in participant constellation, and so on, while the latter is connected to the speaker’s preference for one or other of the languages in question. Following Auer, many linguists have adopted a conversation approach to code-switching (e.g. Sebba/Wootton 1998; Wei 1998; Moyer 1998). Gumperz’s innovative approach combines communicative and sociolinguistic aspects, and seeks to explain the social motivations for code-switching. Even Auer (1984) and Li (1998), who stress the importance of analysing code-switching at a micro- or interactional level, and who strongly criticize an analysis of code-switching dictated by social domains, do not preclude the influence of social aspects on codeswitching behaviour. Gumperz’s approach continues to be a constant reference for all researchers who take a sociolinguistic approach to code-switching (e.g. Myers-Scotton 1993; Sebba/Wootton 1998). Gumperz introduces a distinction between “situational” and “conversational” code-switching. The former represents “a shift in topic and in other extralinguistic context markers that characterize the situation” (Gumperz 1982, 98) and is constrained by social norms. The latter is not related to social norms, but rather to the communicative intentions of the speakers. Gumperz’s situational codeswitching does not imply that this kind of code-switching is predetermined. He also stresses that the speakers’ “main concern is with the communicative effect of what they are saying” (Gumperz 1982, 61). Among the major contributions of this approach are the following: (1) social meanings play an important role in the production of code-switching (situational code-switching); (2) even socially-influenced code-switching is ultimately subject to speakers’ creativity; and (3) code-switching is a communicative strategy that bilinguals have at their disposal in addition to those available to monolingual speakers, such as style shifting (Gumperz 1982, 69).

3 Recent immigration in Italy The 1980s and particularly the 1990s saw the arrival of increasing numbers of immigrants to Italy. The trend has continued, and Italy has rapidly become a highly

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multicultural and multilingual country. This is in contrast to other European countries where mass immigration started earlier, in the 1950s and 1960s, and has proceeded at a slower and steadier pace. The rapid rise in the number of immigrants in Italy since the 2000s is clear from official figures. In 2003, first-generation immigrants numbered around one and a half million; by January 2015 their numbers had increased to around five million (Caritas Migrantes 2015). Five immigrant communities represent 50 % of the total: Romanians, Albanians, Moroccans, Chinese and Ukrainians (Caritas Migrantes 2015). The remaining immigrants come from a variety of countries, making the picture of immigration in Italy highly varied. Figure 1 shows the largest immigrant groups according to nationality in Italy.  

Figure 1: Largest groups of immigrants according to nationality in Italy, 1 January 2015 (Caritas Migrantes 2015). Each figure denotes the percentage of the overall immigrant population  

National statistics only provide information on the nationalities of immigrants; they fail to tell us about the languages used in their linguistic or ethnic subgroups. For example, the Nigerian community in Italy is not represented in the top 15 immigrant communities, but it is one of the largest immigrant groups in the city of Padua, where I conducted my research (cf. Goglia 2006; 2011). Furthermore, immigrant groups sharing the same nationality are not homogeneous, but are often composed of several ethnic, religious and linguistic subgroups. Nigerian immigrants in Italy, for example, belong to several ethnic groups (mainly Yoruba, Edo and Igbo) who speak completely different languages. Indian immigrants in Italy come predominantly from two Indian states: the northern state of Punjab (80 % of Indian immigrants), and the southern state of Kerala. Indians from Punjab speak Punjabi, while Indians from Kerala belong to the Malayali ethnic group and speak Malayalam as their main language (Rohan Junghare, personal communication, 2017).

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In recent years, the process of family reunion has increased the number of children and teenagers of immigrant origin, and the number of children born in Italy whose parents are first-generation immigrants. According to Italian law, children born in Italy of foreign parents hold their parents’ citizenship (ius sanguinis) until the age of 18 when they can acquire Italian citizenship. Media and institutions refer them as the seconda generazione. This second generation may maintain the languages spoken by their parents, start a process of language shift or engage in code-switching practices in interactions with family members and members of the same immigrant community. Another relevant feature of contemporary immigration is transnationalism. Many immigrant groups are part of a wider network of cross-border immigration and they are more connected than before through ease of travel, the internet, and the mobile phone. This is the case for significant immigrant communities such as Moroccans, Turks and Indians, but more so for smaller and less “visible” immigrant groups such as the Igbo-Nigerians (Goglia 2011; 2015) or the East Timorese (Goglia/Afonso 2012).

4 The linguistic repertoires of immigrants in Italy Many immigrants arrive in Italy with already complex linguistic repertoires, including local languages and more widely used national languages in their country of origin. In the case of former European colonies, linguistic repertoires may also include a variety of a European language and a pidgin (or creole). This is the case, for example, of Ghanaians (Ghanaian English and Ghanaian Pidgin), Nigerians (Nigerian English and Nigerian Pidgin English), Cape Verdeans (Portuguese and Cape Verdean Creole). Mioni (1998) suggests a three-level diglossic relationship to describe the complex linguistic repertoires of immigrants from African countries, with high, middle and low language(s). This is exemplified by the linguistic repertoire of Nigerians (Goglia 2011). Figure 2 shows Nigerian English as the high language, Igbo/Yoruba/Hausa and possibly other regional lingua francas as middle functional language(s) and Nigerian Pidgin English as the low language.  

Figure 2: The Nigerian linguistic repertoire  

Mioni (1988, 302) calls this linguistic repertoire “the average type” in the African context. Indeed, complex linguistic repertoires of this kind are very common in African (cf. Guerini 2006a; Haust/Dittmar 1997; Meeuwis/Blommaert 1998) and Asian postcolonial countries with a high degree of multilingualism, for example in India (Bauer

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2008) and in East Timor (Goglia/Afonso 2012). Mioni (1988) also stresses the additive feature of this kind of multilingualism: it provides speakers with a more complex repertoire, rather than the substitution of one language for another. The diglossic relationship of the languages in the repertoire does not need to be conceived of as a neat compartmentalization. At the micro-level, speakers may choose a particular language according to a variety of factors, including semantic needs, sociolinguistic norms, participants and preferences. Beyond language choice, contact among languages in the repertoire can take the shape of code-switching. In many multilingual societies, code-switching is very common and represents the norm rather than the exception. On their arrival, immigrants come into contact with the Italian repertoire. Although the number of monolingual dialect speakers is decreasing and regions vary as to the vitality of the local dialect, around half of the population speaks both Italian and an Italo-Romance dialect, with passive understanding of dialect more widespread (Parry 2010; ↗18 The languages and dialects of Italy). Italian and dialects are considered to co-exist in a situation of dilalia, with Italian as the high language also entering informal domains such as the home in which the dialects are traditionally used (Berruto 1987). In the immigration context, the kind of Italian with which immigrants are likely to come into contact is above all spoken, hence highly variable and less constrained by norms. Written Italian does not represent a priority for the first generation of migrant workers, who are more concerned with everyday effective oral communication. The acquisition of written Italian either takes place later by speakers with a more integrative attitude, or does not take place at all. The language to which migrant speakers are likely to be exposed also has geographical and social features. Furthermore, depending on the regions, dialects are very likely to appear in the linguistic contexts in which immigrant workers find themselves, such as factories and local shops. For example, in the Veneto region, the use of the Veneto dialect is very widespread and Italian-Veneto code-switching is very frequent among people who speak both languages. Figure 3 represents the enriched linguistic repertoire of Nigerians in the Veneto region where the widely used Veneto dialect is likely to become a useful code for immigrants’ everyday life:  

Figure 3: The linguistic repertoire of Nigerians in the Veneto region  

The role of dialects in immigrants’ linguistic repertoires will vary according to the regions and cities where immigrants live, the kind of work they take up, and their level of integration into the host society. However, studies of multilingualism and

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code-switching in immigrant communities have often not taken dialect use into account or have claimed that code-switching with dialect is infrequent or non-existent. Only a few studies so far have focused on the use of Italo-Romance dialects among immigrants, and these will be discussed in section 6.  

5 The study of code-switching in immigrant communities in Italy Recent research has focused on code-switching as a communicative strategy in a variety of recently established immigrant communities in Italy, following the conversational approach. Guerini (2006a) produced a comprehensive analysis of the functions of codeswitching in spontaneous interactions among first-generation Ghanaian immigrants living in Bergamo and members of the local Italian community. The linguistic repertoire of the speakers comprises Twi, Ghanaian English, Ghanaian Pidgin English, Italian and Bergamasco. Goglia (2006; 2011) analysed code-switching as a communicative strategy in both in-group and out-group conversations of adult Igbo-Nigerians in Padua, Veneto. The Igbo linguistic repertoire (described in section 4) comprises Igbo, English, Nigerian Pidgin English, Italian and Veneto. Mazzaferro (in press) discusses multilingual language practices among the Philippine community in Turin, Piedmont, whose linguistic repertoire consists of Tagalog, English, local Philippine languages and Italian (the author does not mention the presence of the Piedmontese dialect). Other studies have focused on the linguistic repertoires of immigrants and have provided insights into, or examples of, code-switching. Berruto (2009), for example, examined the restructuring of complex linguistic repertoires in three immigrant communities in northern Italy (Nigerians in Turin, Ghanaians in Bergamo, and Pakistanis in Milan), and discussed various examples of code-switching. Bonomi (2010) studied the use of Italian and Spanish among Ecuadorian and Peruvian immigrants in Milan, and gave several examples of code-switching. Chini (2003) focused on the immigrant family and its linguistic repertoire, and examined code-switching differences between the first and second generations in 13 immigrant families of different countries of origin. Several researchers have explored multilingualism in Palermo within different immigrant communities (among others Amoruso 2002; D’Agostino 2004; Amoruso/Scarpello 2005). Mosca (2006) studied conversations between Senegalese immigrants and Italians in Vercelli, and revealed insights into the use of Piedmontese/Italian code-switching.  

6 Code-switching in interactions with Italians This section explores in more detail how immigrants use code-switching into other languages as a communicative strategy when speaking Italian. The conscious use of

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words from previously acquired languages with speakers who understand them may help to keep communication going in L2. This kind of code-switching involves vocabulary gaps and is different from the code-switching that takes place among balanced bilinguals. Example (1) comes from the L2 Italian of Igbo-Nigerians (Goglia 2006). Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and the set language was Italian. In this corpus, code-switching into English or Igbo represents a rational choice by the speaker to deviate from Italian in order to keep the conversation going. The majority of instances of code-switching are insertions, whether single words or larger units, and do not have the power to modify the language of the interaction. In example (1), the topic is Nigerian cuisine. Informant L is explaining how to prepare plantain and the various options for eating it. At the time of the interview she had been in Italy for five years; she switched often, using English words to fill her lexical gaps. The word plantain was used by the informant at the beginning of the excerpt and, because it was accepted by the interviewer, she continued to use it. The insertion pot is of a different type. The speaker neither hesitates at all nor waits for the interviewer to accept the insertion, as was the case with plantain. The word pot appears to be inserted as part of a mixed vocabulary, perhaps because the word plantain was accepted by the hearer earlier. A third insertion, stew, is self-repaired, but this time after a short pause the speaker manages to recall the word in Italian, so she reformulates it in Italian. A fourth insertion, egg, appears to be of the same kind as plantain and pot, although the Italian equivalent was provided by the interviewer. The English insertions are highlighted in bold. tu prendi plantain, tu tagli due, tu mette in acqua, tu prende quello acqua e pot mette sopra di gas quando finito di cucinare tu prendi, tu vuoi mangiare con tuo stew, tuo sugo, quando tu non vuoi mangiare con sugo, tu vuoi mangiare con egg Int: Uova cotte? L: No… L: you take plantain, you cut it in two, you put it in water, you take that water and the pot and put them on the hob, when it is cooked you take, you want to eat with your stew, your stew, if you do not want to eat with stew, you can eat with eggs Int: Boiled eggs? L: No…

(1) L:

This excerpt shows how variable the use of switches can be. Since there was no reaction by the hearer to the switch stew, the speaker could have gone on without any

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hesitation, as she did with the previous two switches. However, the word stew is different. The Igbo often use the Italian word sugo ‘sauce’ to describe Nigerian dishes. It is a recurrent item, part of a basic Italian vocabulary among Nigerians in Italy. There are also cases in which the switch cannot be accounted for by a lack of vocabulary. Consider Example (2) (Goglia 2006). Informant C is talking about the Nigerian city of Onitsha, the location of one of the largest markets in Nigeria. In the first line, she uses the Italian word mercato, but later she uses the English switch with no hesitation, nor any attempt to reformulate it. (2)

C:

C:

Okè, Onitsha c’è una grande mercato, anche c’è un po’ mafia, quella market alle sei nessuno no puoi camminare con borsa così, perché c’è tanti gente con pistola… Ok, Onitsha there’s a big market, also there’s a little bit of mafia, in that market at six nobody can walk with a bag like this, because there are many people with guns…

Example (2) shows the speaker using an English word although she knows the Italian equivalent. The environments where the two words mercato and market appear are quite different and can help us to understand why the speaker does not use the Italian word the second time. In the first line, grande mercato ‘big market’ is used to describe a feature of the city of Onitsha, which is associated with the market. In line 3, quella market ‘that market’ (= Onitsha market) the switch market is preceded by the demonstrative adjective quella ‘that’ and speaker C creatively uses Italian and English material to create an anaphoric effect. Studies of different immigrant communities whose linguistic repertoires include a European language also reveal a high rate of code-switching to such varieties in Italian discourse. Example (3) is taken from a study of Pakistani immigrants in Milan whose linguistic repertoire includes English, Urdu, Punjabi and Italian (Riva 2006 cited by Berruto 2009, 18), while example (4) is taken from a study of Senegalese immigrants in Rome whose linguistic repertoire includes French, Wolof and Italian (Smith 2013, 153).  

(3) ehm ho imparato cooking… cucinare… cucinare circa Chinese foods, anche Pakistani foods, ma solo imparato… ehm I have learnt how to cook… cook… cook Chinese food also Pakistani food, but I only learnt… (4) Ma i miei meilleurs amici… But my best friends…

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In immigrants’ reshaped linguistic repertoires, the European variety may be a useful source for code-switching, particularly with Italians who understand these languages. This is the case in studies where data were collected by a researcher who also speaks English or French. In the immigrants’ countries of origin, English and French are used for communication outside the ethnic group. In the new immigration context these two languages are appropriate to use when speaking with Italians, even if limited to code-switching. The use of code-switching involving a high European language and a local middle language (Igbo in Nigeria, Wolof in Senegal, Urdu/Punjabi in Pakistan, Hindi in India) is very common in immigrants’ countries of origin, and in most cases it represents an unmarked way of speaking. It can be argued that this already existing pattern of code-switching is replicated in the immigration context with the use of code-switching to the high language when speaking L2 Italian. A similar view is put forward by Riva (2006, as referred to by Berruto 2009) who suggests that English/ Italian code-switching used by Pakistani immigrants in communications with Italians may have the role of a lingua franca. Examples of such insertional code-switching can also occur the other way round, with Italian words inserted into the immigrant language. Bonomi (2010) discusses the case of Italian insertions in the Spanish of Ecuadorian and Peruvian immigrants in Milan. In this situation, the typological similarities between the two languages trigger more frequent examples of code-switching. Bonomi’s interviews were conducted in Spanish and the Italian insertions are used to express concepts that are part of life in the host country. Examples (5) and (6) illustrate Italian insertions magazziniere and una casa di cura, which are related to the interviewees’ work and the workplace of a family member (Bonomi 2010, 63). (5) Eh, trabajo de magazziniere Eh, I work as a warehouseman (6) Ehm, mi mami trabaja en una casa di cura Ehm, my mom works in a nursing house Other immigrant communities in Italy have a Romance language in their repertoire. Romanians, the largest immigrant community, are a good example. This is also the case of immigrant communities from African countries where a Romance language is the national language due to past colonization. For example, the linguistic repertoires of the Senegalese, Moroccan, Tunisian and Ivorian communities may also include French. The complex linguistic repertoire of African immigrants may also include a Romance-based pidgin or creole. This is the case for the Cape Verdeans who speak Portuguese and Cape Verdean Creole. Code-switching may also involve alternations within a conversation. Guerini (2006b) discusses several instances of code-switching in spontaneous interactions and interviews with Ghanaian immigrants and Italians in Bergamo. Her findings show

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that code-switching fulfils different communicative functions, such as a change in participants’ interlocutors, change of topic, and reporting direct speech. Code-switching can be used to report something that was said using the original language of the utterance, often distinguishing different voices in the narrative. Example (7) is from a conversation between the interviewer and speakers R and G conducted in Italian. Speaker R reports a dialogue that took place between an Italian lady and her Ghanaian care worker, keeping it in the original English (Guerini 2006b, 255). (7) R:

Senti questa, eh, questo qui è molto interessante. C’è una signora italiana, no? Quelle che mi hanno portato qua, allora lei la prima volta che è venuto in Ghana, c’è eh, houseboy, maggiordomo no? Allora questo qui è andato a chiedere madame, can you give me some cheese? Mamma mia, questa qui si è arrabbiata, perché sua mamma. G: Perché sua mamma R: Suo marito non c’era, no? Allora lei si è arrabbiata, cheese, cheese, madame, cheese! Madame, no kiss, cheese! Int: Ah, ho capito! R: Hai capito? Lei ha capito dare un bacio, no? R: Listen to this, eh, this is very interesting. There is an Italian lady, you know? The one who took me here, so, the first time she came to Ghana, she has a houseboy, a butler no? So this guy went to ask madame, can you give me some cheese? My God, this lady got angry, because his mother G: Because his mother R: Her husband was not there you know? So she got angry, cheese, cheese, madame, cheese! Madame, no kiss, cheese! Int: I understood! R: Did you understand? She understood give a kiss, you know?

Multilingual speakers vary in their perception of their code-switching behaviour. In example (8), a Latin American immigrant in Milan stresses how languages are kept separate in the conversation, while producing an interesting Spanish/Italian hybrid form me [raβio] (‘I get angry’, It. mi arrabbio, Sp. me enfado) (Bonomi 2010, 61). (8) y yo me [raβio], porque si hablamos español, hablamos español. Si hablamos italiano, hablamos italiano. and I get angry, because if we speak in Spanish, we speak in Spanish. If we speak in Italian, we speak in Italian. Igbo-Nigerians make great use of English/Igbo code-switching in their everyday conversations. However, in example (9) speaker H insists that the language she uses in in-group communication is Igbo with occasional English code-switching.

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Parliamo Igbo. Non parlate in inglese? No qualche volta esce qualcosa in inglese, però non è… parliamo solo igbo. We speak Igbo Do you speak in English? No sometimes we say something in English, but it is not… we speak only Igbo.

7 Code-switching in in-group conversations This section explores some examples of code-switching produced by immigrants in interactions with members of their own immigrant group. In these interactions, the languages of the community’s linguistic repertoire are used and speakers are likely to reproduce typical language choice and code-switching patterns. However, in the new immigration context, the community’s linguistic repertoire and multilingualism are enriched by Italian and dialects, making innovative patterns of code-switching likely to emerge. These kinds of language practices are more difficult to observe and record as they take place in spontaneous conversations among members of a community. They require either a researcher who speaks the languages and is accepted within the community or a member of the community to collect the data. Furthermore, when speakers are aware that are being observed and recorded, they tend to be more conscious of their language practices – the observer’s paradox. For these reasons, studies of code-switching in in-group interactions in the Italian context are rare. The corpus of my study on code-switching among Igbo-Nigerians was collected by a Research Assistant (RA) who was a member of the Igbo community and had the task of conversation facilitator. Example (10) is from a conversation between the RA and speaker 2 (Sp2), an Igbo woman who had been in Italy for one year. The conversation is in English, Igbo (in bold) and Nigerian Pidgin English (underlined). The speakers are talking about basmati rice, which is being cooked by the RA. Speaker 2 shows that she likes the smell of the rice. (10) RA: Sp2: RA: Sp2: RA: Sp2: RA: Sp2:

It seems you like this eem... plaintain and rice? It’s appetising. Appetising? Yes. In what sense? Ah! Ọtọkanụ now. Ọ ya ka m rinụ Mana etu isi me ọnụ, amarọm na ọ tọọ gị ụtọ Ah, why not? Ọ tọọnụ ụtọ. Ke otu ichebu ka m si mee ọnụ m before Ị maa na ọ tọọ m ụtọ RA: Is it because it’s eem... steamed plaintain with eeh eeh basmati rice?

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Sp2: RA: Sp2: RA: Sp2: RA: Sp2: RA: Sp2:

Hmm, basmati. That’s what I eat. I so much like it. It seems you like this eem... plaintain and rice? It’s appetising. Appetising? Yes. In what sense? Ah it’s very delicious now that’s what I ate But from the way you move your mouth, I didn’t know it’s delicious Ah, why not? It’s delicious. How do you want me to move my mouth before you will know it’s delicious RA: Is it because it’s eem… steamed plaintain with eeh eeh basmati rice? Sp2: Hmm, basmati. That’s what I eat. I so much like it.

Although the conversation is taking place in English, the question by the RA in line 5 (‘In what sense?’) surprises Sp2 who decides to answer in Igbo to make herself understood. This choice allows her to reiterate and specify what, apparently, has not been understood by the RA. This triggers the RA’s change of code to Igbo. In line 8, Sp2’s surprise is marked by her use of English ‘Ah why not?’, but the turn continues in Igbo mixed with I maa na ‘you will know’ in Nigerian Pidgin English. The language of the conversation, English, is re-established by the RA in line 9. The rest of the conversation is held mainly in English or English/Nigerian Pidgin English with sporadic switches in Igbo for different functions. The RA chooses English as the language of the conversation and Sp2 chooses to accommodate to him in speaking English. The use of Igbo fulfils a clarifying and repetition function (Gumperz 1982, 78). Italian code-switching can also be used by speakers in in-group interactions in the same way as the other languages to convey particular meanings. Example (11) reproduces part of a conversation conducted in Nigerian English, Igbo (in bold) and Italian (italics). The example illustrates how speaker 1 (Sp1) makes use of the four languages in his linguistic repertoire in the same conversation (Goglia 2011, 331). He speaks in an Igbo-English switched code and the majority of switches have no conversational function. There are no long pauses between the switches: the informant is simply speaking in a switched code, as often happens in everyday conversations among Nigerians. (11) Sp1: Na comune ebe m bi, enwe ndị, that is every five years, changie government, ọbụlụ ndị leghista then fa ebido problem… ebido problem, a little problem, so, mụ nwa we jee one day jekwụ the mayor m sị ya look io sono cittadino, ho giurato fedeltà, ho la fedeltà a questo paese… basta. I finished everything… so from then up to this day they respect me Sp1: In the local government where I live, there are people, that is every five years, when the government is changed, if it is the Lega Nord then they start a problem… start a problem, a little problem. So, I myself then went one day went

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up to the mayor and said to him look I am a citizen, I swore allegiance, I am loyal to this country… that’s all. I finished everything… so from then up to this day they respect me The conversation also shows the use of Italian in the new context, for example, the Italian insertion comune ‘city council’ and leghista ‘member of the Lega Nord party’, an adjective used as a noun. The latter example is a reminder that the Italian used by the Igbo-Nigerian community is an interlingual variety. Both these switches use lexical items or expressions particularly associated with the Italian context. They show how the speaker’s already complex code-switching practices are further enriched by Italian. The longer switched sentences in Italian that follow function as quotations. The speaker uses the English discourse marker look to introduce the quotation io sono cittadino, ho giurato fedeltà, ho la fedeltà a questo paese… basta, a marker he also uses elsewhere in the conversation for the same function. In the last decade, with the growing number of family reunions and secondgeneration children of immigrant origin, the focus has started to shift towards the study of multilingualism in immigrant families and the maintenance of immigrant languages. The second generation’s linguistic repertoires are different from those of the first generation. Children of immigrant origin have Italian as their first language or have acquired Italian and/or a dialect at an early age if not born in Italy. This new situation provides the opportunity to study code-switching among different generational members of the family and by different generations within the immigrant community. There are a small number of studies describing multilingualism within immigrant families which reveal useful information on the use of different languages in code-switching practices (e.g., Chini 2003; 2009; D’Agostino 2005). As mentioned above, Mazzaferro (in press) discusses multilingual language practices among the Philippine community in Turin. Their linguistic repertoire comprises Tagalog, English, local Philippine languages and Italian (the author does not mention the presence of Piedmontese dialect). Example (12) shows a brief conversation between a mother, father and their three-year old son at dinnertime. The family’s local Philippine language is Visaya. The example shows how communication between the parents and son takes place in Italian, while the parents use their preferred codes English and Visaya among themselves. After speaking to her son in Italian, the mother switches to Visaya in a comment meant for her husband. He responds with a mixed utterance in English and Visaya and the Italian word pasta as an insertion. In the last turn, the mother addresses her son in English with a rephrase in Italian: in fact, she favours the use of English over Italian with her child (Visaya is in bold, English in italics). (12) Mother: Ti piace questo? Son: No mamma. Mother: Dahil hindi masarap

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Father: Mother: Son: Mother: Son: Mother: Father: Mother: Sono:

I prepare jaon ija pasta dakan makakaon sija. Come and eat pasta… Vieni e mangia la pasta. Buona mamma Do you like this one? No, I do not mum Why, is not that good? I cook pasta so he can eat Come and eat pasta… Come and eat pasta It is good, mum

This example shows how the first and second generations have different linguistic repertoires. The preferred code of the second generation is Italian, while immigrant languages are maintained in conversations among parents within the family. It is often the case that not all languages in the repertoire of the parents are maintained. Local languages are not passed easily to children, who prefer to use Italian (cf. Chini 2003), while parents also prefer communicating with their children in more widely used languages in their linguistic repertoire or in Italian. In the case of this Philippine background family, English is used with the son together with Italian, but Tagalog and Visaya are not.

8 Code-switching involving Italo-Romance dialects This section discusses what we know so far about the use and knowledge of dialects by immigrant speakers, their awareness of the sociolinguistic situation of such languages in the Italian linguistic repertoire, and their attitudes towards these codes. In Italy generally, the use of dialects in a monolingual mode is decreasing, but the use of both dialect and Italian is increasing. The presence of Italo-Romance dialects in the Italian linguistic repertoire remains significant in some regions and social contexts, and we can therefore safely assume that they are also part of the linguistic repertoire of immigrants. However, to my knowledge, there are no in-depth studies on their use of Italo-Romance dialects. There is a clear need for different data collection techniques to shed light on the actual use of dialects by immigrants. The most obvious evidence of the presence of dialects in immigrants’ linguistic repertoires comes from the kinds of jobs that many do (e.g., factory workers, carers for the elderly, builders, cleaners, nurses) that require them to learn and use dialects as part of their linguistic capital, at least in some parts of Italy. A carer in a retirement home in the Veneto region would not be able to communicate effectively with the residents without any knowledge of Veneto or the ability to switch between Italian and Veneto when needed. In such situations, the target language of immigrants would not be Italian, but either the local dialect or a mixture of Italian and the local dialect. The use of dialects would not be a sign of

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delay in the acquisition of Italian, or the inability to distinguish between Italian and dialects, but a clear sign of achieved acquisition of an unmarked multilingual mode already present in some social contexts in Italy. In examples (13) and (14) from Amoruso/Scarpello (2005, 178), two Tamil immigrants in Palermo who work as a waiter and a cook respectively state that it is necessary for them to learn Sicilian in order to communicate with locals: (13) io pure esco, qualche parola deve parlare I also speak, some words I have to speak (in dialect) (14) perché sta vivendo in questa zona questa […] loro non capiscono quando parlano in italiano, però dicono oh parliamo in siciliano! because I live in this area…they do not understand when we speak Italian, but they say oh let’s speak in Sicilian! Immigrants are not only aware of the presence of dialects in the Italian linguistic repertoire, they also understand dialects’ sociolinguistic relationship with Italian. IgboNigerians in my study show some knowledge of Veneto and other dialects if they have spent time in another region. All informants refer to Veneto as a local and lower status language. They show their understanding of the parallels between the Nigerian and Italian linguistic repertoires by labelling the Igbo language dialetto. Indeed, the Veneto dialect and Igbo share a similar status and each coexists with a high language (Goglia 2006). Some studies report on the negative attitudes adult immigrants express towards the Italo-Romance dialects (Bernini 2001; Cuzzolin 2001); others reveal a positive attitude and use of dialect code-switching (Chini 2003; D’Agostino 2004; Amoruso 2002). These opposing views mirror the conflicting attitudes of Italians themselves towards dialects. On the one hand, they are perceived as substandard varieties of Italian, not to be used and linked to a backward or rural way of life; on the other, they are important markers of regional identities, worth maintaining and in some regions still proudly used in everyday conversations. Occurrences of dialect code-switching also depend on the kind of research that is conducted. In a study on the Italian language conducted via interviews, it is very unlikely that code-switching in dialect will occur. In my corpus of interviews in Italian with Igbo-Nigerians, occurrences of code-switching in dialect were only gathered when I asked informants about their knowledge of dialects. In example (15), speaker A wanted to illustrate his knowledge of Neapolitan with some examples (dialect is in bold). At the time of the interview, he had just arrived in Padua after six years spent in Naples where he also attended high school and where he seemed to be integrated (Goglia 2006). In the last line he also stated that he was trying to learn the Veneto dialect.

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(15) Int: A: Int: A: Int: A: Int: A: Int: A: Int: A:

Hai detto che sei stato sei anni a Napoli, conosci il dialetto napoletano? Come, lo parli. Mi dici qualcosa in napoletano? Mazz e panella fanno o figlie belle, e cose buone se fanne verè, cioè è un detto. Il dialetto Veneto lo conosci? Non ancora, sto cercando di impararlo, qua sono sarà sei mesi, sette mesi. Did you say that you have been six years in Naples, do you know Neapolitan dialect? Of course I speak it Can you tell me anything in Neapolitan? Beating and bread make your children nice, the good things can be seen, which is a saying Do you know the Veneto dialect? Not yet, I am trying to learn it, I have only been here for six months, seven months.

Examples such as (15), in which the researcher asks for the use and knowledge of dialects, reveal immigrants’ awareness and use of code-switching in more than one dialect due to different periods spent in different cities. However, in order to have a clear picture of the actual use of dialects and code-switching, we need to record spontaneous, everyday conversations between Italians and immigrants in dialectspeaking areas. The use of dialects and the perception of their usefulness amongst immigrants varies according to the latters’ attitudes towards integration, their experience of life and work in Italy, whether Italy is perceived as the final destination of the migration project, and personal choice. Amoruso/Scarpello (2010) focused on the use and perception of dialects in three immigrant communities in Palermo, Sicily: the Maghreb (Tunisians and Moroccans), Ivorian and Tamil communities. The study revealed distinct patterns in use of, and attitudes towards, Sicilian in each community. The Ivorians tended to associate the local dialect with the working class, low levels of education, and impoliteness, and reported that they did not speak it. The Tamils tended to isolate themselves and viewed their stay in Palermo as temporary, and they were therefore not willing to use the local dialect. Maghreb immigrants, on the other hand, stated that they knew and used Sicilian, and that knowledge of Sicilian was perceived as a sign of integration into the host society. The use of dialect codeswitching can also be interpreted as a sign of successful integration in the host society. This is the case of a Tunisian family in Pavia, Lombardy, mentioned in Chini (2003, 237) in which Italian is the preferred code together with code-switching occurrences. Example (16) is an extract from an interview conducted in Italian with the father. He switches to Lombard to signal reported direct speech for a question he and his wife asked themselves (Lombard is in bold).

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(16) c’era da scegliere far su famiglia o andare sempre avanti eh e niente con, poi è stato diciamo sta ragazza qui ma no state qui ma qui ma no va ben abbiamo valudato che poi c’era il lavoro, c’era la casa e qui e là e quindi i conti li abbian fatti io e lei s’è ca fuma? E siamo rimasti we could choose whether to raise a family or go always ahead eh nothing, then it was let’s say this girl here but no stay here but here it’s ok we thought that we had work, had a house and here and there and so we thought of it my wife and I what shall we do? And we stayed A further study that focuses on dialect use by immigrants is by Mosca (2006). She analysed the use of the Piedmontese dialect by two Senegalese immigrants in conversation with Italians. Vercelli is a small city where the local dialect is still widely used, in contrast to Turin and other areas of Piedmont. Mosca collected data via interviews and recorded conversations between Senegalese and local Piedmontese interlocutors. The use of dialect varies according to the social networks of the speakers, but also according to the degree of use of Piedmontese by the Italian interlocutors. Example (17) is from an interaction between a Senegalese seller (H) and a Piedmontese student (D) (Piedmontese is in bold) (Mosca 2006, 231). (17) D: H: D: H: D: H: D: D: H: D: H: D: H: D:

bello però…e colane qué ch’an gh’hai? Coss-chì varda lì coss-chì c’est parèj a quella di Roberta questa sì, c’est parèj mh perché noi Vals parëcc! eh mh anche parèj noi diciamo in Valsesia nice this one…and what necklace have you got? this one, look here, this one it is the same as Roberta’s this one yes it is the same mh because we from Valsesia the same! eh mh also the same we say in Valsesia

In this extract, the student switches into Piedmontese when talking to the Senegalese seller, who carries on in Piedmontese. The student then switches back to Italian. The Senegalese seller is not familiar with the Piedmontese word parèj and suggests what he believes is the right word parëcc. The students then explains in Italian that parèj is the Valsesia Piedmontese variant.

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There is a need to investigate in greater depth the role of these dialects in the linguistic repertoires of immigrants and the second generation, and their actual language practices. So far, studies on multilingualism among the second generation have mainly used surveys that reveal attitudes and knowledge of dialects, but no indepth analysis of qualitative data (Chini 2004; Scaglione 2013). Amoruso (2007) included questions on the use of Sicilian in her survey, reporting that 41 of 60 young Tunisians surveyed considered Sicilian to be a difficult language. However, 13 informants (nine of them boys) chose to indicate Sicilian as their first or second favourite language in their repertoire. According to Amoruso, “il siciliano assume per alcuni di loro il ruolo di lingua alternativa alla regola, lingua del divertimento e della libertà contro l’oppressività normativa dell’italiano” (Amoruso 2007, 51). In her study of second-generation and immigrant languages in Verona, Massariello Merzagora (2004, 364) mentions very briefly the presence of the Veneto dialect in the linguistic repertoire of her informants. The majority of the informants in her study (218 out of 265) answered that they were aware of the presence of the dialect in the local linguistic repertoire, and 155 informants said that they understood it. Goglia/Fincati (in press) studied the use of dialect among secondary school pupils in the Veneto region. In line with Massariello Merzagora they also found that half of their 149 respondents were aware of the presence of the Veneto dialect in the local linguistic repertoire and more than a third even reported speaking it. The majority of respondents stated that they spoke the Veneto dialect with Italian friends and classmates. These results seem to indicate that the dialect even if mixed with Italian belongs to the linguistic repertoire of the second generation in the Veneto region.

9 Conclusion In this chapter, we have seen how complex immigrants’ linguistic repertoires are and how code-switching is employed in conversation to fulfil several communicative functions. In interactions with Italians, the main source languages for code-switching are Italian, Italo-Romance dialects and post-colonial varieties of European languages. In interactions with members of the immigrant community, the languages of the country of origin are still active, at least among first-generation immigrants, and with them old patterns of code-switching. Code-switching in Italian and dialects may also be employed and provide speakers with new patterns of code-switching. More in-depth studies on code-switching in immigrant communities in Italy are needed based on actual language use, moving beyond the rather limited semi-structured interview or the sociolinguistic questionnaire. These techniques cannot provide a clear picture of the forms and functions of code-switching in interactions among members of immigrant groups. Furthermore, studies on code-switching need to focus on the role of dialect code-switching and its role in immigrants’ linguistic repertoires. Key areas of future research include code-switching and language maintenance

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among the second generation and how different communities reshape patterns of code-switching from the second generation onward.

10 Bibliography Amoruso, Chiara (2002), La comunità ivoriana a Palermo. Frammenti stranieri di una imagine urbana, in: Mari D’Agostino (ed.), Percezioni dello spazio e spazio della percezione. La variazione linguistica fra nuovi e vecchi strumenti di analisi, Palermo, Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani, 111–133. Amoruso, Chiara (2007), La seconda generazione (mancata) dei tunisini di Mazara del Vallo: Ritardo linguistico ed esclusione sociale, Rivista italiana di dialettologia 31, 29–60. Amoruso, Chiara/Scarpello, Iolanda (2005), Dialetto, integrazione, esclusione. Percorsi immigratori urbani, in: Gianna Marcato (ed.), Dialetti in città, Padova, Unipress, 171–184. Amoruso, Chiara/Scarpello, Iolanda (2010), Il dialetto nei discorsi degli immigrati: Intrecci di sistema e scelte d’uso, in: Maria Iliescu/Heidi Siller-Runggaldier/Paul Danler (edd.), XXVe Congrès international de linguistique et de philologie romanes (Innsbruck, 3–8 septembre 2007), Berlin/ Boston, De Gruyter, 3–12. Auer, Peter (1984), Bilingual Conversation, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Auer, Peter (1995), The Pragmatics of Code-Switching: A Sequential Approach, in: Lesley Milroy/Pieter Muysken (edd.), One Speaker, Two Languages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 115–135. Auer, Peter (ed.) (1998), Code-Switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction and Identity, London/ New York, Routledge. Bagna, Carla/Barni, Monica (2005), Spazi e lingue condivise. Il contatto fra l’italiano e le lingue degli immigrati: Percezioni, dichiarazioni d’uso e usi reali. Il caso di Monterotondo e Mentana, in: Cristina Guardiano et al. (edd.), Lingue, istituzioni, territori. Atti del XXXVIII congresso internazionale di studi della Società di Linguistica Italiana, Modena 23–25 settembre 2004, Roma, Bulzoni, 227–255. Banfi, Emanuele (2003), Italiano/L2 di cinesi. Percorsi acquisizionali, Milano, Angeli. Bauer, Selket (2008), The Sociolinguistics of English-Hindi Code-Switching: A Case Study from India, Saarbrücken, VDM Verlag Dr. Müller. Bernini, Giuliano (2001), Varietà di apprendimento di italiano L2 e varietà del repertorio dei nativi italofoni, Plurilinguismo 8 (Special Issue: L’italiano e le regioni), 53–69. Bernini, Giuliano/Giacalone Ramat, Anna (edd.) (1990), La temporalità nell’acquisizione di lingue seconde, Milano, Angeli. Berruto, Gaetano (1987), Lingua, dialetto, diglossia, dilalìa, in: Günter Holtus/Johannes Kramer (edd.), Romania et Slavia Adriatica. Festschrift für Žarko Muljačić, Hamburg, Buske, 57–81. Berruto, Gaetano (2009), Ristrutturazione dei repertori e “lingue franche” in situazione immigratoria. Appunti di lavoro, Studi italiani di linguistica teorica e applicata 38(1), 9–28. Bonomi, Milin (2010), Hablamos mitá y mitá. Varietà linguistiche di immigrati ispanofoni in Italia, in: Maria Vittoria Calvi/Giovanna Mapelli/Milin Bonomi (edd.), Lingua, identità e immigrazione, Milano, Angeli, 53–69. Caritas Migrantes (2015), XXV Rapporto Immigrazione 2015, http://www.caritas.it/caritasitaliana/ allegati/6472/Sintesi_OK%20(1).pdf (last access 26.02.2017). Chini, Marina (2003), Rapporti fra italiano e lingue d’origine nel repertorio di immigrati in area lombarda: Un sondaggio qualitativo, in: Ada Valentini et al. (edd.), Ecologia linguistica, Roma, Bulzoni, 223–246.

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Chini, Marina (2004), Plurilinguismo e immigrazione in Italia. Un’indagine sociolinguistica a Pavia e Torino, Milano, Angeli. Chini, Marina (2009), Scelte di lingua e atteggiamenti di immigrati a Pavia e Torino: L’incidenza della variabile del genere in famiglie di minori stranieri, Studi italiani di linguistica teorica e applicata 38(1), 107–133. Cuzzolin, Pierluigi (2001), Percezione del contatto di lingue: Arabo classico, arabo moderno, italiano, dialetto, in: Massimo Vedovelli/Stefania Massara/Anna Giacalone Ramat (edd.), Lingue e culture in contatto. L’italiano come L2 per gli arabofoni, Milano, Angeli, 89–107. D’Agostino, Mari (2004), Immigrati a Palermo. Contatti e/o conflitti linguistici e immagini urbane, in: Raffaella Bombi/Fabiana Fusco (edd.), Città plurilingui. Lingue e culture a confronto in situazioni urbane, Udine, Forum, 191–211. D’Agostino, Mari (2005), Nuove condizioni linguistiche. Gli effetti dell’immigrazione, in: Franco Lo Piparo/Giovanni Ruffino (edd.), Gli italiani e la lingua, Palermo, Sellerio, 70–92. Giacalone Ramat, Anna (ed.) (2003), Verso l’italiano. Percorsi e strategie di acquisizione, Roma, Carocci. Goglia, Francesco (2004), The Interlanguage of Igbo Nigerians Immigrated in Italy, with Particular Attention to the Interference with English Language, in: Siegfried Baur (ed.), Il soggetto plurilingue, Milano, Angeli, 23–120. Goglia, Francesco (2006), Communicative Strategies in the Italian of Igbo-Nigerian Immigrants in Padova (Italy): A Contact Linguistic Approach, doctoral thesis, Manchester, University of Manchester. Goglia, Francesco (2011), Code-Switching among Igbo-Nigerian Immigrants in Padua (Italy), in: Eric Anchimbe/Stephen Mforteh (edd.), Postcolonial Linguistic Voices: Identity Choices and Representations, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 323–342. Goglia, Francesco (2015), Multilingual Immigrants and Language Maintenance: The Case of the IgboNigerian Community in Padua, in: Sara Gesuato/Maria Grazia Busà (edd.), Studi in onore di Alberto Mioni, Padova, Cleup, 701–710. Goglia, Francesco/Afonso, Susana (2012), Multilingualism and Language Maintenance in the East Timorese Diaspora in Portugal, Ellipsis (Journal of the American Portuguese Studies Association) 10, 97–123. Goglia, Francesco/Fincati, Veronica (in press), Immigrant Languages and the Veneto Dialect in the Linguistic Repertoires of Secondary School Pupils of Immigrant Origin in the Veneto Region, Studi italiani di linguistica teorica ed applicata 45. Guerini, Federica (2006a), Language Alternation Strategies in Multilingual Settings. A Case Study: Ghanaian Immigrants in Northern Italy, Frankfurt, Lang. Guerini, Federica (2006b), La commutazione di codice come strategia discorsiva in interazioni plurilingui: Qualche dato sulla comunità di immigrati di origine ghanese in provincia di Bergamo, in: Emanuele Banfi et al. (edd.), Atti del 5° congresso internazionale dell’Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Applicata, Roma, Guerra Edizioni, 245–259. Gumperz, John (1982), Discourse Strategies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Haust, Delia/Dittmar, Norbert (1997), Taxonomic or Functional Models in the Description of Codeswitching? Evidence from Mandinka and Wolof in African Contact Situations, in: Rodolfo Jacobson (ed.), Codeswitching Worldwide, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 79–89. Massariello Merzagora, Giovanna (2004), Le “nuove minoranze” a Verona. Un osservatorio sugli studenti immigrati, in: Raffaella Bombi/Fabiana Fusco (edd.), Città plurilingui. Lingue e culture a confronto in situazioni urbane, Udine, Forum, 353–376. Mazzaferro, Gerardo (in press), Kung nagkamix na Taglish na pasensya ka’. The Relocation of English (es) in Migratory Contexts. The Case of the Filipino Community in Turin (Italy), in: Cecilia Boggio/

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Alessandra Molino (edd.), English in Italy: Linguistic, Educational and Professional Challenges, Milano, FrancoAngeli. Meeuwis, Michael/Blommaert, Jan (1998), A Monolectal View of Code-Switching: Layered CodeSwitching among Zairians in Belgium, in: Peter Auer (ed.), Code-Switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction and Identity, London/New York, Routledge, 76–98. Mioni, Alberto (1988), Standardization Processes and Linguistic Repertoires in Africa and Europe: Some Comparative Remarks, in: Peter Auer/Aldo di Luzio (edd.), Variation and Convergence. Studies in Social Dialectology, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 294–320. Mioni, Alberto (1998), Gli immigrati in Italia. Considerazioni linguistiche, sociolinguistiche e culturali, in: Giuliano Bernini/Pierluigi Cuzzolin/Piera Molinelli (edd.), Ars linguistica. Studi offerti da colleghi e allievi a Paolo Ramat, Roma, Bulzoni, 377–409. Mori, Laura (2007), Fonetica dell’italiano L2: Un’indagine sperimentale sulla variazione nell’interlingua dei marocchini, Roma, Carocci. Mosca, Monica (2006), Varietà dialettale piemontese nelle esperienze linguistiche di immigrati senegalesi, in: Emanuele Banfi et al. (edd.), Atti del 5° congresso internazionale dell’Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Applicata, Roma, Guerra Edizioni, 221–243. Moyer, Melissa (1998), Bilingual Conversation Strategies in Gibraltar, in: Peter Auer (ed.), CodeSwitching in Conversation: Language, Interaction and Identity, London/New York, Routledge, 215–236. Myers-Scotton, Carol (1993), Social Motivations for Codeswitching. Evidence from Africa, Oxford, Clarendon Press. Parry, Mair (2010), Sociolinguistics in Italy, in: Martin J. Ball (ed.), Handbook of Sociolinguistics Around the World, London/New York, Routledge, 327–340. Riva, Alberto (2006), Discorso plurilingue come lingua franca? Un’indagine sui pakistani in Brianza, doctoral thesis, Torino, University of Turin. Scaglione, Stefania (2013), Bilingual Pupils and Parents in Italian Schools: An Opportunity for the Educational System, in: Sandro Caruana/Liliana Coposescu/Stefania Scaglione (edd.), Migration, Multilingualism and Schooling in Southern Europe, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 177–223. Sebba, Mark/Wootton, Tony (1998), We, They and Identity: Sequential versus Identity-Related Explanation in Code-Switching, in: Peter Auer (ed.), Code-Switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction and Identity, London/New York, Routledge, 262–289. Smith, Maya Angela (2013), Multilingual Practices of Senegalese Immigrants in Paris and Rome: A Comparative Study of Language Use and Identity Construction, doctoral thesis, Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley. Vedovelli, Massimo/Villarini, Andrea (2001), Le lingue straniere immigrate in Italia, in: Caritas (ed.), Immigrazione, dossier statistico 2001, Roma, Nuova Anterem, 222–229. Vietti, Alessandro (2005), Come gli immigrati cambiano l’italiano. Italiano di peruviane come varietà etnica, Milano, Angeli. Wei, Li (1998), Banana Split? Variations in Language Choice and Code-Switching Patterns of Two Groups of British-Born Chinese in Tyneside, in: Rodolfo Jacobson (ed.), Codeswitching Worldwide, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 153–175.

Françoise Gadet and Philippe Hambye

27 The metropolization of French worldwide Abstract: In the increasingly multicultural and multilingual environments of global cities and metropolises, vernacular varieties of standard languages often emerge as distinct sociolinguistic objects. This reality is strongly influenced by the ecological conditions in which languages are spoken, particularly language contact phenomena. The French language is no exception: its presence in very distinctive urban settings – with specific historical, economic or political features – means it takes on multiple guises. In this chapter, the situation of French in several European, African and North American cities is compared, and the main ecological factors which condition the status and shape of French in these specific environments are identified. The “newness” of the varieties of French and the so-called “youth languages” which develop in these contexts is also discussed.  

Keywords: language ecology, mixed languages, youth language, Chiac, Nouchi, Camfranglais  

1 To what extent does contact between languages produce radical “newness”? It is highly unlikely that ecological factors have no impact on the language(s) spoken in a communicative area, a country or a city. Consequently, it can be assumed that new socio-historical conditions produce linguistic effects on different languages or varieties. Throughout the world, mass migration is being driven by different social, economic and environmental factors. As a result, big cities and metropolises are becoming ever more multicultural and multilingual, a reality that has consequences on all the languages spoken in these constellations. Some areas receive a great number of newcomers. When migrants stay, they usually assimilate sooner or later to the majority language, but they often contribute to modifications in its evolution (cf. chapters in the present volume: ↗22 Romance in contact with Romance; ↗23 Language contact between typologically different languages; ↗24 When Romance meets English; ↗26 Code-switching and immigrant communities; ↗28 Transnational migration and language practices). Depending on the ecological conditions in which languages are spoken, these contact situations may have quite different linguistic effects. Among the possible outcomes of contact, we can mention borrowing and interference, diglossia, code-switching (or mixing), and hybridization of languages (Poplack/Levey 2010; Thomason 2001; Matras 2009; Winford 2003; Gadet/Ludwig 2014 and 2015 for French). The notions of “mixed languages” (Matras/Bakker 2003; Bakker 2003) or “new varieties” (Kerswill https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-028

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2013) raise several questions including how far the term “variety” makes sense. Both the linguistic forms and the ecological factors of emergence for these “new varieties” or mixed languages require further investigation. Without necessarily endorsing the theoretical implications of these notions (see section 4 below), our objective is to discuss the possible “newness” of the practices and forms emerging in certain particular contact situations as well as the ecological conditions shaping their emergence.1 In such an approach, French emerges as an interesting case study. It has even been suggested that the French language can be considered as a form of laboratory that allows comparisons between quite different urban settings in countries with different ecological conditions, different histories, different languages in contact – different in number, in type(s) of language(s) involved, and in the intensity, duration and stability of contact –, as well as different roles for the relevant states with respect to language policy and language norms. Like all multi-site languages, French is involved in several different constellations, giving rise to quite different outcomes. The only other Romance languages with a comparable scope of interest are Spanish (albeit with probably lesser diversity), and, to a lesser extent, Portuguese. But from a historical point of view, one can think back to the differentiation of Latin that gave birth to the various Romance languages (see Posner 1996; Herman 2006). The study of French can also take advantage of detailed documentation in relation to linguistic structures and also in respect of an historical point of view (see Lodge 1993; 2004). When, and under what conditions, could contact lead to ways of speaking that diverge from the dominant language enough to be thought of as something “new”, beyond the evolution of an existing variety? The linguist is certainly not in a position to decide on structural grounds whether a new variety has appeared, for it is difficult to think of qualitative or quantitative criteria that would allow one to decide on a threshold indicating that we are faced with another variety instead of changes within the same language. In preference to structural criteria, the intuition of speakers can be called on: for a “new variety” to emerge, a process of “distancing”, in which subjective attitudes play a crucial role, should have taken place. These attitudes can of course be grounded in the objective distance between the potential new variety and former ones, but they may also ignore the relative lack of significant differentiation. A key feature is that the supposedly “new variety” should convey specific social meanings and therefore signal a social distance that is claimed and recognized as a social fact. It can then be given a specific name (especially a grassroots name) and be associated with a given population. Supposed “new varieties” can give birth to an identity claim (“we are speakers of the language/variety X”; “we differ from non-speakers of the language/ variety X”). In other words, the emergence and denomination of a “new variety” imply social recognition not only by the speakers of the variety but also by other members of the community who do not speak that way (or who do not admit to doing so). The “new  

1 This study does not address the emergence of pidgins and creoles.

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variety” is then perceived as distinct from and as cohabitating with the old one(s), and speakers can consider themselves as being bi-/pluri-lingual. Various social groups are able to produce or are likely to undergo such a process of sociolinguistic differentiation. Older children and adolescents figure among potential linguistic innovators, as they turn their back on their parents’ generation and try to forge their own identity (Kerswill 2010). More crucial than age is the social organization of young people in close-knit networks. This means that the usual cover term “youth language” is misleading. The role of young people’s vernacular is such that when there is a large young population, language developments and changes occur more rapidly (Kerswill 2010; Matras 2009). Our aim in this chapter is to discuss what is usually called “urban youth languages” or, in order to avoid the idea of youth, “Contemporary Urban Vernaculars” (Rampton 2011). Within worldwide French outside Europe, there are at least three cases2 where there are solid grounds for considering the emergence of a new variety. The first of them is spoken in North America (Canada), the other two in Africa: – Chiac is spoken in Eastern Canada (New Brunswick and more particularly in the city of Moncton). Chiac involves French as the basic language and English for numerous lexical items. The dominant language of New Brunswick is English, but English and French are now co-official. For general presentations of Chiac, see several papers by Perrot, among which Perrot (2005) and Boudreau/Perrot (2010) (cf. also King 2008; Pöll 2009; Papen 2014). – Nouchi is spoken in Ivory Coast, particularly in the city of Abidjan. Nouchi involves French as the grammatical basis and several other languages (mostly, but not only, African) depending on the linguistic resources a speaker possesses. Nouchi is probably the most widely studied of these urban vernaculars. For general presentations of Nouchi, see Kiessling/Mous (2004; 2006), Ahua (2006; 2007), Queffélec (2007), Kouadio N’Guessan (2006), Newell (2009), Kerswill (2010). – Camfranglais is spoken in Cameroon, probably the most multilingual country in Africa, where French is co-official with English, but the most widely spoken

2 Historically, other mixed languages involving French developed and still exist more or less – but French was/is not their base language. Two of them developed in America as trade languages: Michif in Western Canada, attested from the nineteenth century, due to contacts between French-speaking fur traders and native American women. Michif is based on Cree with some French lexis (see Pöll 2009; Papen 2014). The other American language was Chinook (or Chinook Jargon), which used to be spoken in Western United States and Canada (from Alaska to Oregon, especially in British Columbia). Both are nowadays dead or close to death (especially Chinook), and for both we have only rather unreliable documentation. Another language existed in Africa: Indoubil (or Hindoubill) which used to be spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1960s (Congo-Kinshasa, see Edema 2006; Kiessling/Mous 2006; Queffélec 2007). It was based on Lingala with some French lexis. Indoubil also mostly disappeared when the social conditions for its emergence vanished. However, according to Kiessling/Mous (2004), it then spread eastwards with Swahili becoming the grammatical basis, while keeping some words originally from French (of which the speakers are not aware).

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language is Pidgin English. Camfranglais has French as its grammatical basis and it is spoken mostly in the two biggest cities, Yaounde and Douala. For general presentations of Camfranglais, see Kiessling/Mous (2004; 2006), Queffélec (2007), Feussi (2008), Féral (2010; 2012), Kerswill (2010). All three languages are French-based for grammar (especially syntax), with a highly unstable lexicon that varies intra-speaker, inter-speakers and in time. Because of this instability, all the examples identified in published work as well as in corpora, even recent ones, may already be obsolete. They have grassroots names and they are spoken in big cities. Although Chiac is still stigmatized as a hybrid or non-language (albeit less and less), it has also gained explicit value among some social groups, while both Nouchi and Camfranglais are increasingly recognized by a majority of people in their country as part of the national linguistic landscape. They involve different languages for the lexicon: only English for Chiac, several languages (mostly African but also some words of languages learned at school) for Nouchi and Camfranglais, depending on the languages the speaker is more or less acquainted with, and in addition, English and Pidgin English for Camfranglais. All of them also contain English items from youth culture and music (associated with an American lifestyle).

2 French in contact in extra-European constellations 2.1 Chiac in New Brunswick Chiac is spoken in the Moncton area, the largest conurbation of the province of New Brunswick in the South-East of the province (about 140,000 inhabitants for the greater Moncton conurbation) where the population is roughly two-thirds English-speaking and one-third French-speaking, both languages having been imported through colonization in the sixteenth century. Until recently, the French-speaking population experienced notable anglophone domination, with no right to speak French in official and public situations and no institution defending the language. This changed recently, however, even though French speakers still have to be bilingual (nearly 90 % of them in Moncton) whereas most English speakers are not (only 24 %). Chiac developed amongst the French-speaking population as an effect of intensive contact between English and French (Boudreau/Perrot 2010), but there is no convincing explanation of the origin of the name. It is even not known whether Chiac is a grassroots term or not. The French researcher Marie-Eve Perrot collected two successive corpora in Moncton, the first in 1991 among secondary school pupils and the second in 2000 with more or less the same type of population. The time lapse (see her 2005 paper for a comparison) allowed her to observe an evolution: hybridization did not increase significantly but there was a more acute perception of a specific bicultural identity.  

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Extract 1: non / but je crois que c’est back supposé venir on là comme au mois de septembre but c’est comme le deuxième livre là / y a deux livres / but oh j’aurais assez aimé ça là / pi moi des shows de même qui sont about le vieux temps ou des / anything about le vieux temps j’aime assez ça / moi ça oh / j’aime right ça là (Perrot 2005, 325, corpus Perrot-CRLA 1991) (‘But I think they’re supposed to be putting it back on again in September but / it’s based on the second volume / there are two volumes / I’d have liked that a lot / me I like shows like that about old times / anything about old times I like that so much / oh I really like that’) Extract 2.: j’aime le TV / but / je m’assis pas comme vingt quatre heures sur vingt quatre à watcher le TV / le moment que je peux prendre / comme une heure ou deux à watcher je le ferais / which qui est rare / la seule affaire que je watch vraiment dans la semaine / je suis une femme hein / je tape les soaps le jour / je watch le soir avant de me coucher (‘I like TV but I don’t just sit and watch twenty four hours a day whenever I have an hour or so I watch which is not that often the only thing I really watch during the week since I’m a woman it’s soaps I’ve taped I watch them before going to bed’) From these two extracts (where words in italics are in English in the original) it can be observed that English items are not only lexical words (such as show, watch, or tape) but also often grammatical words. Some adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and different types of linking words are English (but, on, about, or right and even which). Some aspects of the grammar of Chiac are innovative (neither French nor English, or at the same time French and English), as in the first extract with the preverbal position of iterative back in c’est back supposé venir on (literally “they are supposed to be putting it back on again”). Some interferences are difficult to identify, such as the use of comme (‘like’) in Extract 2. Most speakers of Chiac are young, and young people are the main innovators. It would be misleading, however, to consider it a “youth language”, as the influence of English on French can also be perceived outside Moncton, throughout bilingual areas in New Brunswick as well as on Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia (and this has probably always been the case). Given that the linguistic products are quite similar in these places, concern speakers of all ages, and are found in both rural and urban areas, it would be more accurate to think in terms of the effects of intensive contact. The presence of recent immigrant languages with no recognized status so far can be downplayed, but this could change in the near future. The vitality of Chiac nowadays is high. It is used proudly and creatively in several artistic practices such as the music of singers or groups like 1755, Radio Radio, Marie-Jo Thério or Lisa Leblanc; Dano Leblanc’s comic books and films featuring Acadieman3

3 See http://www.acadieman.com/acadieman/les-personnages (last access 18.02.2018). Acadieman, the “first Acadian superhero ” is a speaker of Chiac.

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from 2005 onwards; the novel Pas pire published in 2014 by the successful author France Daigle which is written in French but includes sections in Chiac. (Both Leblanc and Daigle are from Moncton.)

2.2 Nouchi in Ivory Coast Ivory Coast is a multilingual country where approximately 60 African languages are spoken. Nouchi is mostly spoken in Abidjan, the sprawling capital (currently over 3 million inhabitants) where a great number of languages are in competition (especially Jula, Baule, Bete), in addition to French, the official language, which recently became a native language in Abidjan for a small part of the population, and is often used as a lingua franca. In the following examples (from Kouadio N’Guessan 2006 and Ahua 2007 respectively) linguistic features of note appear at the morphological, lexical and syntactic levels:  

Extract 1. On a brêqué les gos, elles ont accepté. Donc samedi là non, on devait bingouler en boîte. Quand les pei gos sont arrivées, le mogo a commencé à mouiller. (‘We chatted up the girls, and they accepted. So, that Saturday, we had planned to go out. When the little girls arrived, the guy started being afraid’.) Extract 2: Y’ê di: “gninrin qéchia? Y’a dra sur monhan, ye swi dan chêrchéman, lê pos vé mé dja, fo damé!” Il di: “foorcé, y’ê qa mêtr dan son pwa. An-mêm-tan, y’ê bonbé bwa, y’ê daba laŸ-laŸ, dawon, épwi y’ê chié sur lwi, épwi y’ê pri foum.4 (‘I told him: “My friend what’s up? I have problems the police are looking for me they will shoot me let me go!” He said he would force me to give him money. So I took a piece of wood and I struck him till he fell down. I left him and disappeared’.) Both extracts raise the difficult question of how to spell a mostly spoken language (see Ahua 2007) and make different choices. This is not an easy matter to solve, as was shown many years ago in debates in the francophone Caribbean concerning the written forms of creole languages: depending on the choices made, different aspects of the language are highlighted (for example je suis vs ye swi; or faut vs fo). Deviations from traditional French spelling are a way of distancing the language from standard French, as in ki for qui or keshia for qu’est-ce qu’il y a. Overall, extract 1 looks like

4 Ahua (2007) gives a more or less equivalent description in French: “Je lui ai dit: ‘mon ami, qu’y a-til? J’ai un problème, je suis poursuivi par la police, elle va m’abattre, laisse tomber!’ Il me force de lui passer de l’argent (de le dépanner). Aussitôt, j’ai ramassé un morceau de bois, je l’ai assommé de ce côté là, à terre; je l’ai abandonné et j’ai disparu”. Trying to give a more or less standard equivalent of non-standard utterances is particularly difficult and the result often seems awkward.

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French, but this is not the case for Extract 2, where the nearly phonetic spelling appears opaque to a French reader. The main features in Extract 1 are lexical: we observe borrowings from English (brêquer ‘to chat up’ < to break) or Dioula (go, mogo) and French words with nonstandard meanings (mouiller ‘to soak’ here in the sense of ‘sweating with fear’). Extract 2 is more basilectal than Extract 1 and contains more African words. It also shows lexical innovations like the noun cherchéman (‘searching’) from the verb chercher and the suffix -ment (here written -man). The English suffixes -ing and -man are particularly frequent (for example: grouilling from argotic French grouiller, ‘to hurry up’), but Dioula morphemes are also attested elsewhere – e.g. bradrwaya (from the French expression bras droit, ‘right-hand man’ + Jula suffix -ya used to derive names of quality), which means ‘friendship’ (Ahua 2006). Simplification is also at work in phonology (with petit ‘small’ > pei in Extract 1) and with the non-conjugation of verbs, which often keep the same form for all persons and tenses (daba from Jula can mean ‘I strike’, ‘I struck’ or ‘to strike’ – see je l’ai daba ‘I struck him’ in Extract 2). In general, Nouchi is quite well documented. The first items showing hybridizations of French date from the country's independence in the 1960s (the evolution from “français de Moussa” to Nouchi through “Français Populaire Ivoirien” occurred quite rapidly – see Newell 2009 among others), and the ongoing processes of increasing hybridization can be followed up to the present day. The speakers themselves consider that there are two types of Nouchi: one more opaque, spoken by social dropouts and delinquents; the other spoken by urban youth connoting an urban lifestyle and modernity (Ahua 2006). Nouchi has been spread by powerful means such as Zouglou music from the 1990s (Julien Goualo, Petit Denis, les Côcôs) and by more recent musical genres like mapuka and coupé-décalé. Some radio and TV programmes are made in Nouchi, and the humorous weekly magazine Gbich! as well as the site Gbich. com are both written in the language. Nouchi is the most widely spoken language by young people but it currently appears to be in the process of acquiring connotations of national identity or “ivoirité” that transcend any ethnic and social specificity (Newell 2009). As such, it is no longer restricted to use by young people but is sustained by growing urbanization.

2.3 Camfranglais (or Francanglais) in Cameroon With nearly 250 languages Cameroon is also a distinctly multilingual country. Camfranglais is said to be slightly different in the two biggest cities of the country, Douala (the economic capital) and Yaoundé (the political and intellectual capital), especially as the local African languages of these respective locations are different (Bamileke, Ewondo, Douala). Camfranglais differs from Nouchi in that the role of English and Pidgin English is more important as both languages are recognized as national languages alongside French. Pidgin English is used as a lingua franca in both French-speaking and English-

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speaking areas in the country. The following two extracts are taken from a corpus of naturally occurring data gathered by Eloundou/Feussi (2012, 157, 159): Extract 1: Je wanda sur le pays-ci le pays ndem trop les gens il faut que je go vitesse je vais go chez les wat (‘I wonder about this country. This country makes people flee. I must go quickly I will go to Europe’ (literally ‘home of the Whites’)) Extract 2. Regarde go un peu au lage à la night tu vas ngné les wa (‘Go and look at the village at night you will see the prostitutes’) As can be seen from both extracts, the different languages are closely intertwined, even if French mostly features here as the frame language, but with a lot of English (or Pidgin English) and some simplifications: je (‘I’) and vitesse (‘speed’) are French words but their syntactic combination is hardly French. Hybridization can also be measured at the morphological level where root and affixes often come from different languages, as in gban-man or gban-eur, ‘drug addict’, from Jula gban ‘heat’ and a suffix in English or in French (Kiessling/Mous 2004). Camfranglais is largely transmitted at school among peers (“at school” is the most frequent answer to the question “where did you learn Camfranglais?”). It has also been popularized by music and popular singers, like Koppo, well-known for his rap song Si tu vois ma ngo dis-lui que je go (‘If you see my girl-friend tell her that I go’). Like Nouchi, Camfranglais is in an ongoing process of spreading throughout the whole country and among speakers of all ages and all conditions, indexing thereby a national Cameroonian identity.

2.4 Ecological and linguistic perspectives on new extra-European varieties Consideration must be given to the linguistic and socio-historical conditions under which these urban vernaculars emerged, are spoken, and spread. Whereas Kiessling/ Mous (2004; 2006), Queffélec (2007; 2009) and Kerswill (2010) provide general reflections and comparisons on youth languages in Africa, here we consider urban vernaculars from ecological and linguistic perspectives.

2.4.1 Ecological factors From a socio-historical point of view, the most influential ecological factors differ according to whether we are dealing with the North American context or the context of the two African varieties. First, however, it is worth noting factors that pertain to all three varieties:

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The situation is relatively stable, with long-standing and highly intense contact between the languages involved; There is no local standard for the French-based variety, and no, or very little, standardization is imposed by the State (or by any official body charged with regulating language norms); The speakers often feel insecure in their ability to speak French “properly” in its international form and there is strong pressure from the ideology of the standard form. Speakers often prefer the hybrid form so as not to invite criticism (see Boudreau 2016 for an interview with a young female speaker of Chiac who says she often pretends to be a native speaker of English for fear of being judged as a poor speaker of French); Nevertheless these varieties enjoy a covert prestige among their young speakers, and this prestige is becoming more and more overt. This is true even for Chiac, although to a lesser extent than is the case for Nouchi and Camfranglais.

Another factor is relevant for all three varieties but is much more relevant for Nouchi and Camfranglais than for Chiac: – Among the languages involved in societal bi/multilingualism, only languages imported from Europe are relevant in New Brunswick as indigeneous languages have mostly disappeared. Ivory Coast and Cameroon are much more multilingual with only French (and English in Cameroon) being an imported language. Other factors radically distinguish Chiac from Nouchi and Camfranglais: – In terms of diglossia, the domains of language use differ. The position of French is high in Africa, and low in Canada. In Moncton the position of English is high, and in Africa the position of the African languages is low; – Starting from an urban lower class subculture or even criminal groups (especially for Nouchi), a socially well identified group (young people) considers itself strong and numerous enough to impose its own norms. As a social force, the young have little to gain by following the international norms of the official language. In Africa, given their social and economic marginalization and their de facto exclusion from participation in civil society, young people distance themselves from three other groups: the older generation, the rural population with its traditional ethnic way of life in the village, and the elites who master ‘good French’. They thus create a new modernity, in strong contrast to the modernity conveyed by international French, that differs from the ethnic languages and bridges ethnic differences; – The two African varieties are both post-colonial, with exoglossic linguistic policies: French (the official language) was imported by the former colonial power, and it is still considered by many to be a colonial language. As Kiessling/Mous (2006, 374) argue, African cases “represent a creative effort of appropriation of the official ex-colonial language […] undermining linguistic norms and habits handed down from the colonial past”;

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Even among people who do not speak Nouchi or Camfranglais themselves, these language practices are spreading and are recognized when heard. As long as processes of vernacularization continue, Nouchi and Camfranglais are felt to transcend ethnicity and to connote a national identity in the making5 and they are increasingly acquiring the status of a medium of wider communication in highly multilingual cities.6 This situation contrasts with Chiac. Beyond the young or marginal populations, people in New Brunswick would not consider Chiac to be a linguistic symbol of their community. This role is traditionally devolved to Acadian French, although according to Perrot (2005), this is slowly changing; For speakers whose L1 is an African language, both English and French are foreign languages.

2.4.2 Linguistic level: frequency of formal and semantic manipulations Chiac can also be contrasted with the African varieties from a linguistic point of view. In Chiac, there are none of the playful manipulations which characterize Camfranglais and Nouchi. The heavy borrowings and the few grammatical innovations are not sufficient to think of it as a typical “youth language”, i.e. a very innovative form of speech, even if young people like to consider it emblematic of their young mixed culture. If they were sufficiently motivated, all bilingual Monctonians could understand Chiac, whereas knowing the languages involved for Nouchi and Camfranglais is not sufficient for understanding. With Nouchi and Camfranglais what can be witnessed is a high degree of flexibility and freedom in the integration of linguistic material from different languages and in the manipulation of forms and meanings in order to extend and renew the speakers’ repertoire: for example, in Nouchi, bateau can apply to all means of transport, and not specifically to a ‘boat’. Flexibility is particularly obvious at the lexical level, with users adopting playful, competitive and provocative stances. The most common phonological manipulations are truncations such as po from French poser or taise from French foutaise (‘stupidity’) in Nouchi, metathesis (especially with verlan, such as sitac for ‘taxi’ in Camfranglais) and substitution of phonemes. The syntax is often simplified and tends to invariability compared to the source languages, and the morphology exhibits numerous hybridizations with elements from different languages (often different from that of the root),

5 See the role of internet sites and participative dictionaries devoted to these forms of speech. For Nouchi, see http://www.nouchi.com (last access 18.02.2018) where an online participative dictionary, Le petit nouchi illustré, can be found as well as the Petit dico ivoirien published in Gbich!. For Camfranglais, see the site http://decouverte.cameroun.free.fr/parler-camerounais.html (last access 18.02.2018). 6 Nouchi and Camfranglais thus contrast with the destiny of Indoubil which remained a street language (see Edema 2006).

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such as larguing in Camfranglais, from French larguer ‘to fire’ and the English suffix -ing; or Nouchi zraman, ‘drug user’, from Jula sara, ‘tobacco’ and English suffix -man, or truncations with a dummy affixation (such as Nouchi mando, ‘order’, from French commander). In conclusion, it is important to underline how misleading geo political considerations like extra-European can be: there are significant differences between African and American varieties (for the latter, a comparison should be conducted between Moncton and Montreal). As we demonstrate below, European situations do not distinguish themselves completely from extra-European ones, but the various parameters involved interact and combine differently to form a kind of continuum.

3 French in contact in European countries For several years, remarkable language practices developing in many European cities have been the object of attention from the media and laypersons as well as researchers. As Gadet/Hambye (2014) show, the descriptions of these ways of speaking often link them to young people with migrant backgrounds and characterize them as non-standard and as “heteroglossic”, “hybrid” or “mixed languages” (cf. for example Rampton 2011). In francophone Europe, this particular urban vernacular has been studied more or less extensively in different cities and on several different levels: Rouen (LehkaLemarchand 2007), Grenoble (Billiez 1992; Trimaille 2003), Marseille (Gasquet-Cyrus 2009), and the Paris area (Gadet/Guerin 2012; Gadet/Wachs 2015; Jamin 2004) in France; Brussels (Audrit 2009; Declercq 2008) and Liège (Hambye 2009; Hambye/ Siroux 2008) in Belgium. Jamin/Trimaille/Gasquet-Cyrus (2006) and Jamin/Trimaille (2008) also sketch comparisons between different French-speaking cities.7 In all these contexts, the prototypical users of these so-called “youth languages” are workingclass youngsters whose ancestors migrated to Europe from post-colonial countries, principally from the Maghreb and Sub-Saharan Africa and brought their family languages into the local linguistic landscape. Population movements are one aspect of the ecological conditions of European French that is shared with African settings. Indeed, in the cities listed above (and probably in other places not yet investigated), urban settings are characterized by migration movements at an unprecedented level from all over the world during the past fifty years – much higher in some areas (for example, in the banlieue of Clichysous-Bois, six kilometres from Paris, 75 % of the population is of foreign origin, a 7 Very little seems to have been written on “youth languages” in the Romance-speaking parts of Switzerland (Geneva or Lausanne – an exception is Singy 2014), and the studies that do exist are not based on extensive fieldwork (for example, Singy 2014 is a perceptual study, not a corpus-based study and there is practically no direct language observation).

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statistic that also applies to its département of Seine-Saint-Denis). Processes of social marginalization in these locations can prompt certain social groups to distance themselves from standardized French. However, research on French “youth language” and fieldwork carried out by us respectively in Paris and Liège support our conclusion that the differences between what can be observed in Europe and outside Europe are greater than the similarities. First of all, in European francophone cities, French is overwhelmingly dominant. Educational institutions exert a significant effect of linguistic assimilation on newcomers and their children, even though schools are highly heterogeneous and do not provide equivalent experiences of language socialization for all students. French is de facto the usual language of almost every young person born in Belgium/France or who arrived before school age and was therefore socialized and educated in French. This contrasts with the situation in African countries where provision in Frenchlanguage teaching is frequently uneven, and in some instances entirely absent. Moreover, for people in Belgium/France with a multilingual repertoire, multilingualism is quite different in scope, in nature, and in the domains of application, compared to speakers in Moncton, Abidjan or Yaounde. First, the status of heritage languages in this particular European context is quite different from that of English in New Brunswick or in Cameroon. They are associated with the private sphere and their domain of use is limited to interactions within the family and more often with elders and care-takers than with siblings and close friends. They are also often viewed as illegitimate languages, as simple dialects, that do not deserve to be used in the public sphere. Hence there are few opportunities to use both French and heritage languages in the same interactional setting (in the same places, with the same speakers). As a result, code-switching is far less frequent than in the African/Canadian contexts described above. This is true for both Paris and Brussels, even if the actual linguistic diversity of both cities is high and still increasing – more than a hundred languages are spoken by Brussels’ inhabitants according to a recent survey (Janssens 2014). Only a few heritage languages – with Arabic occupying a privileged position – are used outside intimate circles and contribute to a “feature pool” (Mufwene 2001) which speakers may draw upon to renew their French vernacular. Language contact will therefore not have the same outcomes in European cities as in the contexts described in section 2 above. In their survey of “youth languages” in Belgium and France, Gadet/Hambye (2014) – where references to other languages in other European countries can also be found – show that the effects of contact between French and heritage languages, and especially Arabic, are mostly limited to lexical borrowings, or to insults and swear words used in ritualized practices with an enlarged and simplified meaning and which do not require a high level of proficiency in the source language. It should be mentioned that use of these Arabic words is not limited to young people of Maghrebian heritage. The same points are also made by Rampton (2011) in relation to borrowings from Punjabi in the UK and by Pooley (2012) studying a school in Lille. There does not seem to be an obvious grammatical  

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influence and possible transfers at the phonological and prosodic levels are still a matter for debate. Consequently, we can observe that: – very few transfers concern grammatical morphemes (no adverbs, no linking words). We find only some Arabic discourse markers such as wesh (‘what’), zaama (‘like’) or biheh (‘quiet’) as in examples (1), (2) and (3) – note that the precise meaning of these terms does not say much about their uses; the transfer of prepositions, as in example (4) for taa ‘like’ from Algerian Arabic, is quite infrequent; – lexical borrowings are mostly phonologically integrated (there is no transfer of new phonological material) and only partially morphologically integrated; – the most numerous borrowed lexical terms are nouns (hass, seum, heps ‘jail’). Instances of borrowed verbs in our data mostly belong to three languages: Romani verbs which traditionally are not conjugated (poucave ‘denounce’, pillave ‘drink’, bedave ‘smoke’, bouyave ‘make love’ and several others all heard in the Paris area, though it is uncertain whether they would be heard elsewhere in France or in Belgium); Arabic verbs (ken ‘make love’, a verlanized form of the verb niquer borrowed from Arabic, zaaf ‘irritate’, chouf ‘look’, kif ‘like’ or ‘love’) – only a very few of them can be conjugated, e.g. kiffer which has entered dictionaries – see example (5); English verbs, most of which are conjugated, such as liker, and phonologically closer to French than English; – some common expressions are translated/calqued from Arabic, see (3) or nique ta race (‘you motherfucker’, literally ‘fuck your family’). wallah je les ai pas traités je leur parlais normal wesh (MPF, Wajih48 = I swear I didn’t insult them I spoke normally, well – wallah and wesh are Arabic words) (2) en fait zaama si tu es en train de t’embrouiller avec quelqu’un et tout ça et après zaama tu as vu tu as tu as pas envie de tu as pas envie de parler du tout tu fais (tchip) zaama (MPF, Nacer2 = no in fact like if you are having trouble with someone and stuff like that and afterwards like you have seen you have you don’t want to speak at all you do (mouth noise) like) (3) biheh je vais casser la jambe à quelqu’un / faites les malins fils de chien (Liège, École Citadelle, Youssef = quiet I’m gonna break someone’s leg / keep mocking you bastards) (4) je me suis amusée taa les oufs (MPF, Marion1 = I had fun like crazy people) (5) Tu zaâf et tu zaâf tout le monde là (feature film L’Esquive9 = you are irritated and you irritate everybody) (1)

 

 

 

 

 

8 Examples from the Paris corpus (MPF) are given with the name of the researcher and the survey number. For the Liège corpus, all examples come from fieldwork in a secondary school, called L’École Citadelle here, and give the speaker’s pseudonym. For a brief presentation of the two corpora, see Gadet/Hambye (2014). 9 This film by the Franco-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche was shot in 2004, which is an indication that these types of borrowings are not that new. However, in Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995

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Very few emergent grammatical phenomena can be observed: the non-conjugation of verbs is probably the only one. Non-conjugation occurs not only with borrowed verbs, but also with other categories: verlan verbs as in (6), (7) and (8), old argotic terms which were previously conjugated in français populaire, as in (9), to which can be added the verb taro of unknown origin as in (10); the only category lacking seems to be standard verbs (in MPF, we met only one exception, je me fais contrôle ‘I was controlled’). (6) tu sais quoi je l’ai pécho mais vas-y va la pécho (MPF, Adeline2 = you know what I hit her but go on hit her) (7) je suis tèj de la formation c’est tout j’aurai juste un certificat (MPF, Nacer3 = I am excluded from the course that’s all I will just have a certificate – tèj is the verlanized form of jeter, ‘to exclude’) (8) les racailles elles vont pas en boîte de nuit parce qu’elles se font recale (MPF, Baligh1 = scum don’t go to night-clubs because they’re not allowed in) (9) les gens quand ils sont asthmatiques on leur donne de l’air pas à graille (MPF, Nawal1 = people when they are asthmatic you give them air not to eat) (10) Et nous on est là et on leur dit oh putain font ièch (MPF, Nacer3 = we we are there and we tell them oh shit they make shit – ièch is a verlanized form of argotic chier ‘to shit’) (11) tu la chopes mais tu sais pas encore et euh finalement tu la taro peut-être peutêtre pas (MPF, Adeline2 = you seduce her but you don’t know yet and finally perhaps you make love to her perhaps not)  

 

 

 

 

 

Another noticeable phenomenon where the influence of other languages is debatable concerns the semantic extension of certain verbs (and sometimes also their construction): calculer quelqu’un ‘consider someone’, manger as in se manger une claque ‘to receive a slap’ or in example (11), gazer, afficher (both ‘to be publicly ridiculous’), or the creation of verbs derived from nouns whose meaning has been extended, as in (13). (12) tu aimais pas les iphones mais tu t’es mangé une sauce par ta sœur (MPF, Marion = you didn’t like iPhones but you were influenced by your sister) (13) ils te gazent parce que tu es jamais parti au bled (MPF, Wajih4 = they make fun of you because you never returned to your home country) (14) ouais mais monsieur eux ils mythonent tout le temps (Liège, École Citadelle, Jamal = yeah but sir they lie all the time)  

 

 

film, La Haine, which is also set in the Parisian banlieues, there are hardly any borrowings from Arabic.

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Arabic appears to be by far the most influential language and many languages do not provide any new forms for vernacular French, even when they are spoken by a substantial group of people, as is the case for Turkish for instance (more so in Belgium than in France). In fact, the vernacular French of young speakers of working-class and immigrant descent is above all a kind of ‘advanced French’ (français avancé in the sense of Frei 1929, or français populaire), which concentrates and reinforces processes that are already widespread in ordinary spoken French or at least in certain forms of popular French. The linguistic practices of these young speakers are marked by innovative features (manipulations such as truncations or verlan), strong semantic and pragmatic fluidity (subversions and distortions), and forms of language levelling (e.g. morphological simplification). Contrary to what labels such as (multi-)ethnolects would suggest, this vernacular is more the result of particular social conditions than the consequence of the multilingual practices of a very linguistically diverse population whose language maintenance may function as a way of extending and reaffirming ethnic affiliations (see Gadet/Hambye 2014). In conclusion, the French vernacular spoken in multilingual and multicultural neighbourhoods of European French cities does not objectively appear to be radically different from other forms of vernacular French, but is just a variant of ordinary/popular French situated at the extreme of the standard vs vernacular/non-standard continuum. Nonetheless, it is clear that this linguistic practice is subjectively understood as a distinct variety of French both by its users and by those who would never consider adopting it. This practice functions as a we code in close-knit peer groups who feel in general locked into their own neighbourhoods and who often overrate the specificity of their vernacular as a sign of isolation and ghettoization. They frequently think they created elements of their language, even when in fact they use old argotic terms or features of a broad youth culture spread through hip-hop, rap and American cultural icons. This linguistic practice represents a marked usage not so much because of its objective distance from standardized French, but rather because it conveys social meanings that polarize individuals on either side of critical social boundaries: the choice to adopt, or not, this linguistic practice symbolically positions the speaker as dominant or dominated in terms of class, ethno-racial categories as well as colonizer vs colonized divides. It is, therefore, not surprisingly the object of explicit judgments and public (media) discourse (Fagyal 2004), and it is clearly stereotyped: it has given rise to caricatures and imitations, and typical extracts of this practice are perceived to be ethnically and socially marked, even if it remains unclear which features allow for such a perception (or even whether these are linguistic features, see Paternostro 2016). While subjective distance could favour the perception of the above linguistic practices as a “new variety” of French, its lack of legitimacy pushes in the opposite direction. Inner-city speakers view themselves as, and objectively form, a dominated social group. They have neither the resources nor the subjective disposition to resist the pressure towards linguistic self-deprecation and assimilation to standard norms.

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They also lack the influence to claim the legitimacy of their linguistic practices, or to spread them through legitimate mainstream media, except maybe in some peripheral symbolic markets of (non-mainstream) hip-hop culture. Consequently, they are not in a social position to transform their stigmatized variety into a distinct variety that could serve as a recognized emblem.

4 Concluding remarks The sociolinguistic situations discussed above make it possible to grasp the different processes that language practices may undergo in contemporary metropolises. These situations are in general characterized by high immigration rates (from both within and outside the country). A direct result of this is the presence of relatively multilingual and multicultural populations, and an often demographically large young population facing social and economic difficulties in times of heightened competition for resources. We have seen that within a common framework, crucial ecological factors have key impacts on local sociolinguistic dynamics. While it is obvious that migration produces language contacts, outcomes differ greatly from one context to another. Regarding the cases where French is involved, conditions of language acquisition and appropriation are the first factor worth mentioning. Indeed, it is quite a different matter to come into contact with a language through education at school or through socialization in an environment where it is the dominant language – as is the case with English in Moncton and French in Brussels/Paris – and to learn it in African situations where it functions as a lingua franca, along with other vehicular languages, and where it is neither the main nor the only language of most of the population. Language status is also crucial: it is no accident that in all cases, the borrowingssupplier languages (e.g. Arabic in Europe, Dioula in Ivory Coast, English everywhere) have a certain prestige. In that respect, the potential effects of francophone European cities’ linguistic diversity is counterbalanced by the low status of the majority of idioms composing the language landscape. These factors shape the distribution of languages among speakers and domains of use. Plurilingualism is quite common in Africa, where often a great number of languages are involved in the same configuration, with speakers maintaining a plurilingual repertoire and using their vernacular languages alongside their adoption of “new varieties”.10 By contrast, in Europe (and in Canada), migrant languages have no stability: with nuances between different heritage languages, the second genera10 Such is the most frequent case. However, in the “Mixed Language Debate”, Michif occupies a specific position, as, according to Matras/Bakker (2003), it is the only known language in which the majority of speakers master none of the languages involved in the mixing, neither Cree nor French. This makes it unquestionably a mixed language.

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tion is often bilingual (or a passive carrier of the heritage language), but this happens more seldom in the third generation, to say nothing of later generations. As a result, multicultural youth in Europe often do not know from which language a borrowed word they use comes. While urbanization and migratory movements have key sociolinguistic effects, these are not limited to language contact. They are often parallel to social processes that have dramatic consequences on linguistic change. Indeed, urbanization and immigration are also often related to processes of social marginalization, and social groups adopting a new language in urban settings are objectively maintained outside the conditions which would allow them to acquire knowledge of, and familiarity with, the norms of the standard language. Vernacularization then often accelerates simplification and koineization processes (and levelling at a phonological level), but also, when speakers distance themselves from the standard, it may lead to the kind of flexibility and playful manipulations we described above. We saw that in Africa and in Europe alike, young speakers play a crucial role in this distancing process, giving birth to distinctive linguistic practices. Those who lead this process share an admiration for, and seek to imitate, American youth culture and lifestyles associated by them with modernity. They also appear to have a certain taste for street culture with its share of brutality and crudeness, as well as its pleasure at playing with words and competing in linguistic creativity. Yet, the demographic and social importance of youth is by no means similar in both situations. In Africa, in particular, young people are so numerous that they have become a social power. This is not the case in America and in Europe where, despite the shared difficulties of entering adult social life, young people, even when demographically numerous, still have more to gain by adopting standard international French than by marking their marginality through the way they speak. To understand fully the factors differentiating the two geographical cases, the weight of normative pressures also has to be taken into account. While centrifugal or diverging forces are in place both inside and outside Europe, the dynamics of European French are still oriented by centripetal or converging forces that tend to limit dramatically the extent to which social processes accelerate linguistic change in the French language. The ideology of the standard is still dominant. On the contrary, in Africa, standardizing institutions do not always exist and the fragility of school systems (strong or weak, well or badly organized, depending on the place) is often a reflection of the weakness of the State. Moreover, in African post-colonial constellations, the imported official language is not always considered fully indigenous: it can be the object of the distant respect due to foreign languages, but also of a more carefree attitude when it is not regarded as a heritage that should be maintained in its purest guise. In this respect, speakers of Chiac can be situated somewhere between their peers in Europe and Africa. These differences explain the speakers’ relative power to make of their specific linguistic practice a distinct variety. While they are by no means members of dominant groups, speakers of Chiac, Nouchi or Camfranglais have more power than youth in

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European inner cities: some of them are lower- to middle-class speakers who recognize their linguistic differences and who situate their “variety” as a legitimate alternative vis-à-vis more traditional forms of vernacular speech (for instance through legitimate cultural forms, in literary and musical production), within the framework of the more general competition for material and symbolic resources they are engaged in with other groups. In other words, the speakers of extra-European varieties compete in the (linguistic) market once dominated by other forms of vernacular and other social groups, in particular older generations. These varieties then appear as new and may be preferred to other forms of local French, while the vernacular French of marginalized European urban areas seems to be considered more as a form of popular French which is only suitable for speakers on the margins of the social hierarchy. Following Kiessling/Mous (2004), this is reminiscent of Castells’ model (1997), which distinguishes between a resistance identity (in active opposition to the mainstream) and a project identity (a construction of its own). In most contact situations discussed here, expressed identities do not go further than a resistance identity with provocative attitudes and the promotion of masculinity. It is only in Africa that this attitude was able to develop into a project identity in opposition to, and disrespectful of, the established order. The social meanings conveyed by contemporary vernacular varieties of French in Africa and the social position of their speakers make them more likely to have an influence on the French of the majority of the speakers in their environment. This comparative study has shown that African situations are the most appropriate context in which to speak of the emergence of “new varieties”. African varieties have well-identified indigenous names by which they are known to all (speakers or not), whereas contemporary European vernacular forms of French have neither been categorized with a single emblematic label nor have they been assigned grassroots names by their speakers. Speakers tend to use vague labels like français/langue de la rue, as do outsiders who prefer terms like parler/langage jeune, i.e. labels which reduce the specificity of the practice denoted. When more specific terms are used, they tend to be derogatory, in particular ethnic or socio-spatial labels, thereby reinforcing an association between the variety and the margins (see Gadet/Hambye 2014 for more examples). Yet, our comparison also shows that a complex nexus of factors influences the way French evolves in a given situation and that we have no wellidentified criteria to decide whether actual linguistic changes are giving birth to “new varieties”. Notions which imply the idea of a threshold between “old” and “new” forms of speech may not be very useful, since the best we can do is situate cases relatively, according to parameters which form a continuum. What can be witnessed in different constellations is mostly not a difference in nature (especially on the linguistic level where the processes are largely similar), but a difference in degree due to significant differences in ecological conditions.

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5 Bibliography Ahua, Blaise Mouchi (2006), La Motivation dans les créations lexicales en nouchi, Le Français en Afrique 21, 143–157. Ahua, Blaise Mouchi (2007), Élaborer un code graphique pour le nouchi: Une initiative précoce?, Le Français en Afrique 22, 183–198. Audrit, Stéphanie (2009), Variation linguistique et signification sociale chez les jeunes Bruxelloises issues de l’immigration maghrébine. Analyse socio-phonétique de trois variantes phonétiques non standard, doctoral thesis, Louvain-la-Neuve, Université Catholique de Louvain. Bakker, Peter (2003), Mixed Languages as Autonomous Systems, in: Yaron Matras/Peter Bakker (edd.), The Mixed Language Debate, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 107–150. Billiez, Jacqueline (1992), Le “Parler véhiculaire interethnique” de groupes d’adolescents en milieu urbain, in: Elhousseine Gouaini/Ndiassé Thiam (edd.), Des langues et des villes, Paris, Didier, 117–126. Boudreau, Annette (2016), À l’ombre de la langue légitime. L’Acadie dans la francophonie, Paris, Classiques Garnier. Boudreau, Annette/Perrot, Marie-Ève (2010), “Le Chiac c’est du français”, représentations du mélange français/anglais en situation de contact inégalitaire, in: Henri Boyer (ed.), Hybrides linguistiques, Paris, L’Harmattan, 51–82. Castells, Manuel (1997), The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, vol. 2.: The Power of Identity, Oxford, Blackwell. Declercq, Karolien (2008), Une ethnographie sociolinguistique de deux classes multiculturelles, doctoral thesis, Louvain-la-Neuve, Université Catholique de Louvain. Edema, Atibakwa-Baboya (2006), L’Hindoubill a-t-il été un laboratoire des particularismes lexicaux du français de Kinshasa?, Le Français en Afrique 21, 17–40. Eloundou, Venant/Feussi, Valentin (2012), Camfranglais et termes d’adresse: Une construction socioidentitaire, in: Thierry Bulot/Valentin Feussi (edd.), Normes, urbanités et émergences plurilingues (Parlers (de) jeunes francophones), Paris, L’Harmattan, 147–167. Fagyal, Zsuzsanna (2004), Action des médias et interaction entre jeunes dans une banlieue ouvrière de Paris. Remarques sur l’innovation lexicale, Cahiers de sociolinguistique 9, 41–60. Féral, Carole de (2010), “Pourquoi on doit speak comme les white?”. Appropriation vernaculaire du français chez les jeunes au Cameroun, in: Martina Drescher/Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh (edd.), La Syntaxe de l’oral dans les variétés non hexagonales du français, Tübingen, Stauffenburg, 53–64. Féral, Carole de (2012), Parlers jeunes: Une utile invention?, Langage et société 141, 21–46. Feussi, Valentin (2008), Le Francanglais comme construction socio-identitaire du “jeune” francophone au Cameroun, Le Français en Afrique 23, 381–396. Frei, Henri (1929), La Grammaire des fautes, Genève, Slatkine. Gadet, Françoise/Guerin, Emmanuelle (2012), Des données pour étudier la variation. Petits gestes méthodologiques, gros effets, Cahiers de linguistique 38(1), 41–65. Gadet, Françoise/Hambye, Philippe (2014), Contact and Ethnicity in “Youth Language” Description: In Search of Specificity, in: Robert Nicolaï (ed.), Questioning Language Contact. Limits of Contact, Contact at its Limits, Leiden, Brill, 183–216. Gadet, Françoise/Ludwig, Ralph (2014), French Language(s) in Contact Worldwide. History, Space, System, and other Ecological Parameters, Journal of Language Contact 7(1), 3–35. Gadet, Françoise/Ludwig, Ralph (2015), Le Français au contact d’autres langues, Paris, Ophrys. Gadet, Françoise/Wachs, Sandrine (2015), Comparer des données de corpus: Évidence, illusion ou construction?, Langage et société 154, 33–49.  

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Gasquet-Cyrus, Médéric (2009), Territorialisation, stigmatisation et diffusion. L’accent “quartiers nord” à Marseille, in: Thierry Bulot (ed.), Formes et normes sociolinguistiques. Ségrégations et discriminations urbaines, Paris, L’Harmattan, 209–222. Hambye, Philippe (2009), Hétérogénéité et hybridité dans les pratiques linguistiques de jeunes élèves francophones. La Mixité du discours comme construction, interrogation et réaffirmation de frontières symboliques, in: Bernard Pöll/Elmar Schafroth (edd.), Normes et hybridation linguistiques en francophonie, Paris, L’Harmattan, 123–156. Hambye, Philippe/Siroux, Jean-Louis (2008), Langue et “culture de la rue” en milieu scolaire, Sociologie et société 40(2), 217–237. Herman, József (2006), Du latin aux langues romanes II. Nouvelles Études de linguistique historique, Tübingen, Niemeyer. Jamin, Michael (2004), “Beurs” and “accent des cités”: A Case Study of Linguistic Diffusion in La Courneuve, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 8(2), 169–176. Jamin, Michael/Trimaille, Cyril (2008), Quartiers pluriethniques et plurilingues en France: Berceaux de formes supra-locales (péri-)urbaines?, in: Michaël Abecassis/Laure Ayosso/Elodie Vialleton (edd.), Le Français parlé au XXIe siècle. Normes et variations géographiques et sociales, vol. 1, Paris, L’Harmattan 225–246. Jamin, Michael/Trimaille, Cyril/Gasquet-Cyrus, Médéric (2006), De la convergence dans la divergence: Le cas des quartiers pluri-ethniques en France, Journal of French Language Studies 16(3), 335–356. Janssens, Rudi (2014), Le Multilinguisme urbain. Le cas de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, Racine. Kerswill, Paul (2010), Youth Languages in Africa and in Europe: Linguistic Subversion or Emerging Vernaculars?, http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/doc_library/linguistics/kerswill/Kerswill-African-Studies-19-10-10.pdf (last access 18.02.2018). Kerswill, Paul (2013), Contact and New Varieties, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.), The Handbook of Language Contact, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 230–251. Kiessling, Roland/Mous, Marteen (2004), Urban Youth Languages in Africa, Anthropological Linguistics 46(3), 303–341. Kiessling, Roland/Mous, Marteen (2006), “Vous nous avez donné le français, mais nous sommes pas obligés de l’utiliser comme vous le voulez”. Youth Languages in Africa, in: Christa Dürscheid/ Jürgen Spitzmüller (edd.), Perspektiven der Jugendsprachforschung/Trends and Developments in Youth Language Research, Frankfurt, Lang, 361–377. King, Ruth (2008), Chiac in Context: Overview and Evaluation of Acadie’joual, in: Miriam Meyerhoff/ Naomi Nagy (edd.), Social Lives in Language: Sociolinguistics and Multilingual Speech Communities, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 137–178. Kouadio N’Guessan, Jérémie (2006), Le Nouchi et les rapports dioula-français, Le Français en Afrique 21, 177–191. Lehka-Lemarchand, Irina (2007), Accent de banlieue. Approche phonétique et sociolinguistique de la prosodie des jeunes d’une banlieue rouennaise, doctoral thesis, Rouen, Université de Rouen. Lodge, R. Anthony (1993), French, from Dialect to Standard, London, Routledge. Lodge, R. Anthony (2004), A Sociolinguistic History of Parisian French, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Matras, Yaron (2009), Language Contact, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Matras, Yaron/Bakker, Peter (2003), The Study of Mixed Languages, in: Yaron Matras/Peter Bakker (edd.), The Mixed Language Debate, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 1–20. Mufwene, Salikoko (2001), The Ecology of Language Evolution, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Newell, Sasha (2009), Enregistering Modernity, Bluffing Criminality. How Nouchi Speech Reinvented (and Fragmented) the Nation, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19(2), 157–184.  

 

 

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Papen, Robert A. (2014), Hybrid Languages in Canada Involving French: The Case of Michif and Chiac, Journal of Language Contact 7(1), 154–183. Paternostro, Roberto (2016), Diversité des accents et enseignement du français. Les Parlers jeunes en région parisienne, Paris, L’Harmattan. Perrot, Marie-Ève ( 2005), Le Chiac de Moncton: Description synchronique et tendances évolutives, in: Albert Valdman/Julie Auger/Deborah Piston-Hatlen (edd.), Le Français en Amérique du Nord. État présent, Québec, Presses de l’Université Laval, 307–326. Pöll, Bernhard (2009), Formes d’hybridation et typologie des normes linguistiques: Quel rapport? Le Chiac et le mitchif en comparaison, in: Bernhard Pöll/Elmar Schafroth (edd.), Normes et hybridation linguistiques en Francophonie, Paris, L’Harmattan, 183–201. Pöll, Bernhard/Schafroth, Elmar (edd.) (2009), Normes et hybridation linguistiques en Francophonie, Paris, L’Harmattan. Pooley, Tim (2012), Code-Crossing and Multilingualism among Adolescents in Lille, Journal of French Language Studies 22(3), 371–394. Poplack, Shana/Levey, Stephen (2010), Contact-Induced Grammatical Change: A Cautionary Tale, in: Peter Auer/Jürgen E. Schmidt (edd.), Language and Space. An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 391–419. Posner, Rebecca (1996), The Romance Languages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Queffélec, Ambroise (2007), Les Parlers mixtes en Afrique francophone subsaharienne, Le Français en Afrique 22, 277–291. Queffélec, Ambroise (2009), Normes et parlers hybrides en Afrique francophone, in: Bernhard Pöll/ Elmar Schafroth (edd.), Normes et hybridation linguistiques en Francophonie, Paris, L’Harmattan, 45–66. Rampton, Ben (2011), From “Multi-Ethnic Adolescent Heteroglossia” to “Contemporary Urban Vernaculars”, Language and Communication 31, 276–294. Singy, Pascal (2014), Le Parler “jeune” en Suisse romande: Quelles perceptions?, Lausanne, Institut de linguistique et des sciences du langage, Université de Lausanne. Thomason, Sarah G. (2001), Language Contact: An Introduction, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. Trimaille, Cyril (2003), Approche sociolinguistique de la socialisation langagière d’adolescents, doctoral thesis, Grenoble, Université Stendhal Grenoble 3. Winford, Donald (2003), An Introduction to Contact Linguistics, Malden, MA, Blackwell.  

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28 Transnational migration and language practices: the impact on Spanish-speaking migrants Abstract: In this chapter we explore the impact of transnational migration on language use. We investigate the linguistic capital of transnational migrants and the ways in which this affects job opportunities and experiences of the workplace or school. The case studies and data we use to illustrate our discussion are taken from research on returnee Mexican migrants from the US and Latino migrants in London. We argue that in the current era of globalization, migrants operate in environments that are complex, transnational and superdiverse. Many migrants cross more than one national and linguistic border in their migrant trajectory and those who make return journeys have a circular trajectory. This constant, complex movement of peoples has destabilized conventional concepts, including language, that in the past were considered fixed. Transnational migration means identities and networks shift and adapt to new power structures, ideologies and understandings of cultural/social capital. In these situations, patterns of mixing, translanguaging, and complex multilingualism emerge as key features.  

Keywords: transnational migration, superdiversity, London Latinos, Mexican returnees, urban multilingualism  

1 Introduction In this chapter we seek to explore the impact of transnational migration on language use and attitudes towards it. We also examine the ways in which transnational migration can influence language policy, particularly in the context of education. We investigate the linguistic capital that transnational migrants bring with them (consciously or unconsciously) and how it affects them in relation to job opportunities, the workplace, school, etc. The case studies and data we use to illustrate our discussion are taken from research on returnee Mexican migrants from the US, and Latino migrants in London, especially those who have arrived via Spain. We begin the chapter with a brief overview of the main theoretical concepts that underpin this discussion, in particular the relationship between transnational migration and language use. We then focus on this phenomenon in two particular contexts: its role in the modern (often global) city, and, secondly, the impact of returnee migrants’ language practices when they arrive “home”. Recent discussions regarding https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-029

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language and (transnational) migration have developed new ways of describing the linguistic practices and use of linguistic resources among such migrants in an environment of so-called “linguistic superdiversity”. We therefore make brief reference to these concepts in understanding contemporary multilingualism produced by transnational migration. Although our examples and discussion focus on data collected from Spanish speakers, it must be noted that many parallel studies are being conducted on other Romance languages and the ways in which they are affected by or affect language practices in the context of transnational migration. This research ranges from the diverse multilingual and multicultural environments of French-speaking cities (Armstrong/Jamin 2002; Trimaille 2004; Trimaille/Billiez 2007; Gasquet-Cyrus 2009; Hambye/Gadet 2014); to Portuguese (Fürstenau 2005; Koven 2004; 2013; Silva/da Silva/ Sardinha 2014) or Romanian (Marcu 2011) transnational migrants crossing Europe; to the impact on Southern Europe, especially Italy, of the recent surge in refugee migrants from Africa and the Middle East (Del Percio 2015; Perrino 2013; ↗26 Codeswitching and immigrant communities). We explore some of the implications for Spanish in the case of Latino migrants in London of different Latin American backgrounds, some of whom have reached the United Kingdom via Spain. We also look at returnee migrants in Mexico who have crossed the border from the US, and whose linguistic resources are very varied and extend from no knowledge of Spanish (only speaking English) to mastery of a variety of US Spanish, to a relatively competent level of (usually only spoken) Mexican Spanish. In both cases we are interested to see how the speakers of Spanish manage and value their linguistic resources in a highly diverse and globalized world, on the one hand, and the reaction of the host populations and policy makers to the challenges of this multilingualism, on the other. Questions that arise from this investigation seek an understanding of the conflicting ideologies and tensions between, for example, standard languages, hybrid languages, code-switching, language statuses, lingua francas and global languages. We do not claim to answer these questions in this short space, but rather aim to raise awareness for further work. Throughout, there is a desire to understand the transnational migrant’s language identity and the factors that influence this. The data that are discussed here have all been collected using a qualitative approach, such as open-ended interviews seeking to hear our informants’ life stories and language biographies (De Fina/Baynham 2005; Stevenson/Carl 2010), and through ethnographic observation and study of the surrounding linguistic landscape (Blommaert 2013). This approach is supported with broad reference to available secondary sources by others working in the field. Our aim is to identify emerging patterns in the spread and use of Spanish across the world as the movement of peoples challenges the orthodoxies of “national” languages, “standard” languages and language borders.

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2 Theoretical framework and key concepts 2.1 Transnational migration, globalization and linguistic practices The widespread use of the terms “transnational” and “transnationalism” to describe the migration process means these concepts are largely left unproblematized and their meaning taken for granted. However, transnational and transnationalism have been discussed and debated in the literature for many years, with some commentators seeing them as relatively new late twentieth-century/early twenty-first century phenomena, and others identifying them as a process that has always co-existed with migration. As far back as 1999, when a flurry of publications on transnationalism and transnational migration (e.g., Hannerz 1996; Levitt 2001; Portes/Guarnizo/Landolt 1999; Vertovec 1999) provoked contemporary engagement with these terms and concepts, Portes/Guarnizo/Landolt (1999, 218) noted: “In some writings, the phenomenon of transnationalism is portrayed as novel and emergent, whereas in others it is said to be as old as labour immigration itself. In some cases, transnational entrepreneurs are depicted as a new and still exceptional breed, whereas in others all immigrants are said to be participants in the transnational community. Finally, these activities are sometimes described as a reflection and natural accompaniment of the globalization of capital, whereas in others they are seen as a grass-roots reaction to this very process”.

In the intervening years, transnationalism has become an increasingly accepted way of describing contemporary migration. It describes a “grass-roots reaction” that motivates the movement of peoples on very significant scales to migrate in search of self-improvement from the socio-economic and political contexts in which they find themselves, contexts that are frequently fuelled by the “globalization of capital”. Current global migration can be motivated by a variety of “push and pull” factors including the desire for economic betterment, refuge and asylum, “ex-pat” retirement opportunities, or a combination of some or all of these. We would argue that transnational migration is a more intense and complex form of the kind of migration that has always existed and is a product of the highly interconnected world that modern technology has created. A range of definitions of transnationalism serves to underpin this description. For example, a workshop on “Migration and Transnationalism” held in 2010 by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) framed its discussion thus: “Definitions vary, but generally centre on exchanges, connections and practices across borders, thus transcending the national space as the primary reference point for activities and identities”. In an earlier publication, the IOM describes transnational identity and transnationalism as: “the process whereby people establish and maintain socio-cultural connections across geopolitical borders” (International Organization for Migration 2010, 500). One of the key commentators on transnationalism, Vertovec (2005, 3–4), offers the following explanation of transnationalism:

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“When actual exchanges of resources or information, or marriages or visits, take place across borders between members of a diaspora themselves or with people in the homeland, we can say these are transnational activities; to be transnational means to belong to two or more societies at the same time. At that moment, the diaspora functions as a transnational community. When such exchanges do not take place (sometimes over many generations), but people maintain identification with the homeland and co-ethnics elsewhere, there is only a diaspora. In this way, not all diasporas are transnational communities, but transnational communities arise within diasporas”.

What emerges from these definitions of transnationalism is the existence of exchange and connections by the migrant across one or more national or geopolitical borders. Such connections are aided by the ever-increasing opportunities created by technological advances from basic communication such as rapid transportation, telephones, to conventional media, the internet, and, especially, now, social media. Such transnational connections have the potential to make a significant impact on language use and behaviour. In a seminal discussion of the sociolinguistics of globalization Coupland (2003, 467) identified four key processes that have emerged as impacting on language as the result of globalization: “interdependence, compression across time and space, disembedding and commodification”. These key concepts are also produced by transnational migrants’ use of their linguistic resources both in their host countries and in relationships “back home”. Spanish, in common with other Romance languages, has experienced the impact of these sociolinguistic changes. As we have argued elsewhere: “The spread of Spanish means that the global interdependence of Spanish-speaking communities to one another and to other parts of the world system has a significant impact on the language itself. [They] share media and cultural production, in particular those available through fast technological forms of communication such as television, film, recorded music, and the internet. Increasingly, there are signs that the Spanish-speaking language community responds collectively to new linguistic needs and creates or borrows new words and terms. […] [E]lectronic communications make geographical distances insignificant. Furthermore, the concept of ‘disembedding’ […] arises with the transfer of culturally specific speech items originated in one Spanish speech community to another and their consequent adaptation or re-embedding” (Mar-Molinero/ Paffey 2011, 752).

These key concepts and their impact on the use of Spanish are evident in our two examples below. More recently, the environment created by transnational migration and globalization has been described as “superdiversity” (Vertovec 2007; Blommaert 2015; Rampton et al. 2015; Creese/Blackledge 2010). Those that propose this term see it as a way of describing contemporary contexts where constant migration gives rise to an intensity and complexity of population diversity and layerings. These superdiverse environments “generate complex multilingual repertoires in which often several (fragments of) ‘migrant’ languages and lingua francas are combined” (Blommaert/Dong 2010, 370). This is particularly the case in the modern city as we see below.

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Among the linguistic practices that Blommaert/Dong (2010) are referring to, translanguaging (García/Wei 2014), transidomatic practices (Jacquemet 2005) and metrolingualism (Pennycook/Otsuji 2015) have been proposed to describe these transnational and superdiverse repertoires. In order to reflect the increasing complexity and diversity referred to above, these concepts build on those such as code-switching and mixing that have long been used to discuss multilingual contexts. Stevenson (2017, xvi) has referred to these practices as: “[...] blending features of different languages-in-contact in particular urban settings to create new language varieties; to innovative styles of language use (‘translanguaging’), spontaneous mixing of different languages to achieve particular communicative effects, both in face-to-face interaction and in mediated forms; and to improvised strategies for bridging gaps in shared language knowledge”.

Limitations of space prevent us from discussing examples of these practices in detail. Nonetheless, their general impact on linguistic repertoires and role in the linguistic capital that transnational migrants carry is central to our informants. In the case of “translanguaging”, García/Wei (2014, 22), leading proponents of this concept, claim that: “Translanguaging differs from the notion of code-switching in that it refers not simply to a shift or a shuttle between two languages, but to the speakers’ construction and use of original and complex interrelated discursive practices that cannot be easily assigned to one or another traditional definition of language, but that make up the speakers’ complete language repertoire”.

Translanguaging importantly invites us to question the very concept of a named discrete language so often associated with a specific nation state. It is one of the ways that transnationalism challenges the bounded sense of nation, national language and those to whom a language is said to belong. When an Ecuadorian lives in Spain and communicates through Spanish, then moves to London and discovers an even more diverse Spanish-speaking population, Spanish becomes increasingly de-territorialized and de-nationalized. When a Mexican born in the US returns to live in Mexico, their US variety of Spanish clashes with the national variety that the home nation regards as “acceptable”. The transnational Spanish speaker is living the realities of contemporary linguistic uprooting both within a language (here, Spanish) and across different languages. In the following section we will discuss how these language varieties and practices, created in sites where transnational migrants mix, can also be influenced and moulded by attitudes to them as the result of language ideologies and different levels of policy.

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2.2 Language ideologies and cultural capital Castells (2002, 557) writes that “ultimately the meaning of cities depends on the governance of cities”, and the negotiation of meaning in cities with significant transnational migrant groups is especially dependant on the approach that authorities take to governance and policy. Likewise, we argue that the meaning of language varieties depends on the understanding and governance of language varieties. Such an argument invokes questions of who carries out that governance (i.e. policy-makers, language academies, educationists), what agency speakers have in the governance of their own language practices, and to what extent does that agency empower them to contest or even resist widespread, ideologically-driven attitudes towards the use and value of particular language varieties in any given space. These attitudes, or language ideologies focus on the “intersections of language and human beings in a social world” (Woolard 1998, 3), and are rarely, if ever, about language alone. Instead: “language ideologies are constructed on the basis of not only linguistic but also social, political and historical factors which relate dialectically: that is, language ideologies emerge from and equally transform particular real-world perceptions and situations” (Paffey 2012, 45).

Indeed, these questions are even more urgent when they relate to the use and value of a language that is not seen as “official” or “native” to a given territory, such as Spanish in the UK or English in Mexico. Through language ideology, speakers become convinced of the merits of a “planned and centralized regulation of language” (Joseph 1987, 14) and therefore of the value of a form of language use “which lies beyond all the variability of usage in offering unity and coherence to what otherwise appears diverse and disunited” (Crowley 2003, 84). In a transnational context, as will be seen in our two case studies below, this affects speakers’ evaluation of both their own mother tongue and its role within the linguistic hierarchy of the migrant context. It can also affect the perceived desirability of the hegemonic or official language. In both cases, the ability to speak one or more specific language(s) or language varieties can be viewed as a form of capital, the value of which fluctuates depending on the context in which it is “deployed”, therefore influencing the linguistic choices migrants make in their everyday negotiations. Furthermore, it is those who govern the production of the ideology of standardization who determine the perceived linguistic value transnational migrants attribute to language through raising or lowering the status of that language variety. As Gal (2006, 17) argues: “Standardization is not primarily a matter of speaking but rather of exhibiting loyalty towards a denotational code whose high status and norms of correctness are created and supported by powerful institutions such as universal education, language academies, press capitalism, linguistic science, and linguistic markets that instil in speakers a respect for the norm. It is what Bourdieu (1981) has called the ‘legitimate languages’ whose acceptance as correct even by those who do not know it produces symbolic domination”.

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Language ideologies link to Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital whereby people attribute specific – and often unequal – values to the ability to speak specific language varieties. Cultural capital, as defined by Bourdieu (1991, 14) is the “knowledge, skills and other cultural acquisitions, as exemplified by educational or technical qualifications”, and those who acquire cultural capital do so in order to have a measure of success in life. The linguistic capital upon which many of our migrant participants reflect is a form of cultural capital and relates specifically to the linguistic skills acquired in order to communicate with people in their immediate environment. There is also evidence that migrants reflect on linguistic capital as a means of acquiring other types of capital (and indeed the lack of it represents a potential barrier), such as economic capital, through, for example, securing paid work. This returns us to the central question of what impact migration and mobility have on the language practices of transnational migrants, and our exploration of the issues of language ideologies of dominant “autochthonous” versus migrant languages which lead speakers to make judgments on their communication skills and potentially their likely future language or even migratory practices. Equally, it is important to remember that “[e]very migrant can be an agent as well as a subject of transnationalism, engaging in transnational activities and practices to a greater or lesser degree” and that “[t]ransnationalism is often as much about the people who stay behind as it is about those who move” (International Organization for Migration 2010, 2). In this context we will explore attitudes, behaviour and policy implications of both the migrants and the host communities in our discussion of the case studies below.

2.3 Return migration and issues of language It is not only the impact of transnational migration on the superdiverse (mainly urban) contexts in which migrants live and/or pass through, that interests us when examining this phenomenon among Spanish speakers, but also, how the particular and increasing experience of transnational return migration affects language use, attitudes and behaviour. In our second case study we will explore this with US-Mexico returnees. Here we will consider some of the key concepts this involves. As we have discussed elsewhere (Mar-Molinero, in press), there are many kinds of return migration, and many different meanings of “home”. Sometimes return is permanent; often it is temporary and then becomes circular or a continuing transnational journey. For some, it is forced (such as deportation); for others it is voluntary. There are further, less conventional ways of considering return (cf. also Appadurai 2013; Guerra 1999):

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“[...] virtual return through constant links via social media and other technological interconnectivity; [or] aspirational or imagined return: the dream that one day the migrant will ‘go home’, which is very common in first-generation migrants” (Mar-Molinero, in press).

The different forms of return and conceptions of home will influence the way in which language plays a role in this process. The actual, virtual or aspirational act of return may well be reflected in the degree to which the “home” language has been learned and sustained. Nonetheless, there has been relatively little research on the specific nature of language use and language resources in return migration compared to the much more extensive literature on other areas of return such as economic, social, cultural, and even psychological factors (Dustmann 1996; Cassarino 2004; Levitt 2004; Flores 2008; King/Christou/Givati-Teerling 2009). Those studies that do investigate language issues, often specifically in the educational context, will be referred to in the discussion below about Mexican returnees.

2.4 Language in the city Whilst return migration may occur anywhere within the “home” country, returnees very often move to cities where supportive services and employment are likely to be relatively more available. We therefore turn now to the site that most typically represents the environment to which transnational migration gravitates: the city. Many of the defining features of cities, such as the nature of connections and differentiations between people, the particular activities and rhythms of urban life, and the ways that the city is ordered both geographically and socio-politically, give rise to Timms’ description of the city as a “mosaic of social worlds” (Timms 1971, 1). One of the effects of this mosaical juxtaposition of worlds is the challenge to negotiate different ethnic identities, including language communities, within the shared space of the city. In many cases, the intensity of these differences and the scale of complexity or superdiversity can generate tensions in how these different groups interrelate. There is also a challenge to negotiate what Mac Giolla Chríost (2007, 27–32) calls “social and spatial division”, the existence of migrant districts, linguistic zones, and in the example of Spanish in London, a potential barrio latino. In the particular case of London, because of its status as an international financial, commercial and cultural centre, and the fact that Appadurai’s (1990) five global cultural flows (ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes) are all abundantly present, it convincingly meets the definition of world/ global city. The resulting transnationality of lives and migration trajectories can be witnessed in cultural and linguistic practices, social relationships, economic activity and political views which reflect the pluralistic ways in which people identify themselves due to those intense connections between their multiple homes. Language, then, is the vehicle with which speakers negotiate their inclusion and their role in the

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city’s diverse localities. Yet language can also be brandished as a tool by which speakers of any language other than the approved, official, or hegemonically dominant language(s) are excluded from participation and empowerment in society. Language ideologies are key in informing both official top-down and grassroots bottom-up attitudes towards languages and therefore the practices that speakers engage in (or avoid). We explore this further below.

3 Spanish-speaking migrants in London Over recent years, sociolinguists have sought to reflect the new global reality whereby over half the world’s population now lives in urban areas. This has entailed focusing on what this means for the status and development of language varieties and the linguistic repertoires of speakers. In particular, where language practices have not only been shifting due to the mobility of their speakers, but have also been subject to differing ideological and policy regimes, scholarly research around issues such as linguistic vitality, code-switching and translanguaging, linguistic landscape studies and linguistic superdiversity has become evermore important in interrogating the often complex relationship between language and transnational migration. In London, Spanish is the eighth most spoken language. The presence of the language’s estimated 190,000 speakers is due to the historic presence of Spaniards in London as well as the considerable growth of the Latin American population in the United Kingdom’s capital city (and throughout the country) since the 1970s. The economic, social, and migratory realities of Spanish and Latin American migrants have been explored by Pes (1993), Block (2008) and McIlwaine/Camilo/Linneker (2010), with Márquez Reiter/Martín Rojo (2015b) shifting attention onto the sociolinguistics of Spanish in London. Prevalent conceptual frameworks have progressed from considering the “national” to the “global” and “transnational” and then to the more “local” again, drawing out how meaning is linguistically, discursively, and practically constructed (cf. Sassen 2005) using often shifting linguistic resources in complex global cities. Any consideration of London must recognize that “superdiversity”, whilst a debated and even contentious term, nevertheless provides a pertinent and fruitful framework for understanding how and where the multiplicity of identities and languages in such a hub of complex migration patterns are manifested. In this section, we begin with an overview of recent migration of Spanish speakers to London, before considering the linguistic and contextual factors that determine (a) how these transnational migrants use Spanish symbolically and instrumentally, and (b) how speakers reflect upon – and formulate attitudes towards – the value of their language practices in achieving these social goals.

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3.1 Secondary/transnational migration: from Latin America to Europe to the UK Population figures show that more than 8 million people now live in Greater London (Greater London Authority 2015), with one in three Londoners born outside the UK (Office for National Statistics 2015), without counting so-called “irregular” or undocumented migrants, nor British-born ethnic and linguistic minorities. The city’s superdiversity is reflected in the complex diversity of connections, countries of origin, transnational practices, languages (some 233 languages are spoken in its schools; cf. Mehmedbegović et al. 2015), religions, migration channels, access to employment, and human capital present among migrants. The sum of these diverse factors gives rise to Vertovec’s claim that “London is the predominant locus of immigration and it is where superdiversity is at its most marked” (Vertovec 2007, 1042). By “documenting” the presence of specific languages through the linguistic landscape (Paffey, in press), as well as in the personal reflections of our informants, we can appreciate how concentrated or widespread particular nationalities or languages are in the city, and the extent to which languages are used in conjunction with the de facto national language, English (or with other non-English languages too). Language use in the visual environment represents not only “the most visible marker of the linguistic vitality of the various ethnolinguistic groups living within a particular administrative or territorial enclave” (Landry/Bourhis 1997, 34), but language also has a “privileged position [...] as a tool for detecting features of superdiversity” (Blommaert 2013, 6; cf. also Cadier/Mar-Molinero 2014). Language use in London also evidences something of the transnational lifestyles of migrant and minority ethnic/ linguistic communities such as Spanish speakers, because social and linguistic features are “dialectic, i.e. co-constructive and, hence, dynamic” (Blommaert 2013, 7). In many cases though, the United Kingdom is not the first destination in the trajectory of Latin American migrants. Many travel to Spain first which then serves as a “gateway” country for their immigration to the UK. Whilst previously the US had been the favoured destination for Latin American migrants, more stringent immigration controls there have led many to look towards Europe instead when fleeing political or economic instability, particularly because migration to Spain is understood to carry less of a linguistic and – to an extent – cultural challenge to Latin Americans who already speak Spain’s official national language. Hence this first stage of what for many becomes a “secondary migration” is common practice among Ecuadoreans, Colombians, Peruvians, and others who live in London today (McIlwaine/Camilo/Linneker 2010; McIlwaine/Bunge 2016). Spain’s economic crisis of 2011 onwards was undoubtedly a factor in the decision of many to move on to not just the UK but France and Germany too. This applies not just to Latin Americans, but also to Spanish economic migrants to London, two-thirds of whom have arrived since 2011. Drawing on latest estimates from the UK Census (2011) and McIlwaine/Bunge’s (2016) detailed profile of Latin Americans, the number of Spanish-speaking Latin Americans  

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in London stands at around 94,000, with a further 96,000 Spaniards, totalling some 190,000 Spanish speakers currently in the UK’s capital city. Our data were collected before the 2016 UK referendum that voted for so-called Brexit, for the UK to leave the European Union. This event will undoubtedly have an impact on migration patterns from Spain which are not reflected in the present discussion. How these transnational migrants use language is, as mentioned above, related to how space within the city itself is governed; in other words, language practices reflect the negotiation of space and the positioning of Spanish speakers within London’s space. Or, as Sassen (2005, 38–39) writes: “One way of thinking about the political implications of this strategic transnational space anchored in global cities is in terms of the formation of new claims on that space […]. The ‘denationalizing’ of urban space and the formation of new claims by transnational actors, raise the question: whose city is it?”

Issues of perceived ownership and residency within the city’s space not only underlines how and why London is construed as a global city, but also how linguistic practices of Spanish speakers living there account for the “claims” that can be made upon geographical and conceptual “transnational spaces”. When Spanish-speaking Latin Americans arrive in London, they are often directed to the Elephant and Castle district of the city’s south bank. This advice is given on the basis that they will find a familiar space with access to services, accommodation, other migrants, cultural events, and language use which will “fit” their profile, that is, a part of the city perceived to be “theirs” and where they might discover they belong. Initial evidence from the visual environments of various Hispanic transnational spaces around London has shown that the Spanish language can be seen across a range of social realms (Franco Rodríguez 2009), covering the areas of food, vehicles, beauty and personal care, education, entertainment, hobbies and leisure time, religion and beliefs, restaurants and catering, health care, legal and professional services, clothing and apparel, home, financial services, and communication (Paffey, in press). Hence the linguistic landscape not only reveals the transnational social, economic, and cultural practices of Spanish speakers in London, but also the linguistic transactions in which migrants engage in their daily lives. Furthermore, it demonstrates sufficient demand in London for a section of the city’s economy that provides, say, Peruvian food, Colombian fashion, Ecuadorian hair stylists, and services for money transfer, property acquisition in countries of origin, and legal services all in Spanish. UK English language dominance is not driven by any formal linguistic policy, but instead by a hegemonic de facto use of English in public life, and a naturalized public discourse that suggests there is no alternative. In recent years, the UK government has introduced a British Citizenship Test for which applicants must prove their knowledge of the English language. Policies have also been implemented that require migrants’ spouses to demonstrate a requisite level of proficiency in English prior to having their visa approved to allow them to enter the UK. There are, in addition, almost perennial

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calls from mostly (but not exclusively) right-wing media outlets for immigrant communities to speak English as the only way of ensuring community cohesion. In this context, therefore, the inclusion of Spanish (and other non-English languages) in a superdiverse context suggests a challenge to this linguistic hegemony, the accommodation of multilingualism, and perhaps even the existence of de facto “hyperlocal” co-official languages whose value and visibility is spurred on by alternative, informal, local language ideologies. It is possible that the importance of Spanish might soon be reflected in officially-produced street signage on a new Latin Boulevard or Calle Latina in Elephant & Castle, where hundreds of Latin American businesses operate. Coordinated by the Latin Elephant community organization, which seeks to give voice to the Spanish-speaking and other ethnic minority groups and include these in the Elephant & Castle regeneration plans, these grassroots proposals for bilingual street signs note that “[they] are used in many cities to reflect the presence of ethnic communities in the area, provide more accessible information and a sense of ownership and recognition” (Latin Elephant 2016). Such plans will of course be subject to approval by local authority planners and developers, whose subjacent language ideologies will impact upon the final outcome.

3.2 Transnational migrants’ linguistic capital From a series of interviews carried out with Spanish and Latin American migrants living in London in 2015 and 2016, we draw on the specific narratives of those whose trajectory took them from Latin America firstly to Spain and then, at a later stage, to the UK. We highlight illustrative excerpts which serve to explore key aspects of the migrants’ narratives. They also point to wider observations on some of the issues raised in this data collection as well as related scholarship. A number of patterns emerge from the data that help to organize migrants’ reflections on their migration trajectory, specifically with regard to how useful the Spanish and English languages have been to them during the different stages of their migration. Our observation is that regardless of whether transnational migrants speak English or not, they consistently frame the ability to speak this language as positive cultural capital. As mentioned above, linguistic capital is a form of cultural capital. Transnational migrants can also use it to acquire other types of capital. Sonia is an Ecuadorian-born migrant who emigrated with her family to Spain after leaving school and subsequently moved to London when the Spanish financial crisis hit. She believes the need to learn English as an adult is paramount, saying that “anyone who wants to learn, or adults at least, leaves the Latino circle or gets themselves English classes seven or eight hours a day minimum”. Sonia’s view is that in order to make progress with English one has to break out of the “Latino circle”, which is framed as in some way limiting. She evaluates English as positive cultural capital.

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For some participants, this sense of distancing themselves from other Spanishspeaking migrants or at least those who are compatriots and share a national variety of Spanish is evident. Carmen is another Ecuadorian who was educated in Spain in order to achieve a highly-valued European degree which her native knowledge of Spanish made possible. However, this linguistic capital was also perceived as leading to further migratory opportunities. Here Carmen explains: “if I have a degree from Spain, it’s a European country, with that I can go anywhere and my degree would be the same. It’s not the same if I have a degree from Ecuador, it doesn’t represent that much but if I have a degree from Spain I can go anywhere. And it was easier if I have from one European country, you can travel and have a work anywhere in Europe and stay there”.

Having come to the UK first to study English and then to work as a nurse, she talked of having no Ecuadorian friends in either Spain or London. Instead, her associative practices mostly tended to revolve around Spanish, British and Portuguese friends and colleagues. In Spain she lived close to the Portuguese border, and it was here that as an Ecuadorian living in Spain she was recruited in Portugal by a British agency to work in the UK – a clear example of transnational employment practices which capitalize on transnational migrants’ multilingual skills. The degree to which migrants associate within their own circle of nationals in diverse contexts is of course very varied, meaning that Carmen’s position is not uncommon (see also Block 2008), and in fact points to the use of English in securing social relationships not just with “autochthonous” British nationals but also her Portuguese friends and colleagues, who share a transnational migratory experience and status. This is echoed by Sonia and others, who note that the linguistic capital they have acquired in London allows them to negotiate their position and identities in their new migratory contexts, and participate in social and labour networks with people from many different nationalities. In turn, these transnational networks are seen as a means to maintain the linguistic capital they have gained, as seen in Sonia’s reflection that “entonces para no perder, yo tengo que tener mis relaciones para mantener mi inglés al día”. We can see here how English as London’s dominant language is seen as crucial in preserving the social capital gained by associating with speakers of that dominant language. We observed a consequent tacit warning against disinvesting in linguistic (and related) capital from Sonia, who remarked that “once you’ve learned it, it’s yours for life and it’s for everyone’s benefit”. For those migrants who lack English proficiency, the impact of migrating from Spain to the UK is acutely felt, both in the value of their existing linguistic capital and the potentially more limited opportunities this brings, and also in the sense of belonging to social networks (or lack of them). Mario is a Peruvian who lived in Spain for ten years and ran his own delivery business until it collapsed when the financial crisis hit. Having lived in London for several months, he viewed the biggest impact of moving to a city where he has limited English language skills as the social isolation he felt as a result:

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“lo que más…no que me preocupe sino me mortifique es la soledad, la soledad, no poder comunicarte con la gente, cada quien está en su mundo, en su propio mundo, en su propio universo, cada quien está enfocado en lo suyo”.

Mario’s lack of linguistic capital was linked to his few social connections among the dominant English language community, which meant isolation for him. Yet this is not to say that those who cannot speak English or access English tuition are excluded from the labour market. Many Latin Americans in London gain low-skilled work for which English is not necessary by “relying on their intraethnic contacts as their primary means of gaining mobility” (Márquez Reiter/Martín Rojo 2015b, 84). Language proficiency is framed as a tool for improving one’s cultural and social capital in terms of being linked to perceived social mobility. As Sonia explains: “es que tienes más posibilidades, es que es así, es que las mejores obras literarias vienen en inglés, las mejores cosas vienen en inglés, todo lo que tú quieras viene en inglés, el español está muy limitado en todo” .

There is a clear contrast here in the perceived value of the two languages not just in terms of language use for communication purposes, but also broader (almost hyperbolic) reference to the value of English as cultural capital, indeed “everything you want”. Such a view is underpinned by a top-down language ideology in the UK promoting British English as the only means for migrants to achieve social integration and economic progress, and is exemplified in recent comments by the former Prime Minister David Cameron where he draws a correlation between limited English proficiency and the economic inactivity of some migrants (Lowe 2016). A common thread running through the experiences of our participants is the use of transnational migrants’ linguistic resources not only to acquire linguistic capital (in many, though not all cases), but also to leverage related social, economic, and cultural capital. The different languages and language varieties have differing values: for those seeking higher-skilled work and upward mobility within the British social class system, English is required and is “worth” more; and for monolingual Spanish speakers, this language gives access only to low-status work, and its value is limited. It appears that top-down ideology is reflected at grassroots level among migrants: English is considered to carry more weight, ideological prestige, and therefore practical application. Consequently, language matters, and London’s labour market is “stratified by language” (Márquez Reiter/Martín Rojo 2015b, 90). This in turn shows how value is attributed to the perceived superdiversity of London itself, not just in terms of the space it allows for expression of migrants’ own identities and practices, but also in terms of the value of the opportunities available to know and experience other international identities and cultures as they are expressed in the city. The ability of linguistic capital, in this case speaking English, to serve as a lingua franca and therefore provide an enriching experience in London is mentioned by a number of participants, who reflected upon how

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their linguistic capital allowed them to relate to people from many different nationalities. Of course for many, these language practices are not binary or exclusive, and migrants’ linguistic repertoires allow them to use Spanish or English – and indeed specific varieties of Spanish or English – as required in order to leverage labour or social opportunities. Deploying specific standard or non-standard varieties in their daily lives adds up to a set of hybrid linguistic practices of the kind we mention above which, as Márquez Reiter/Martín Rojo (2015a, 6) note, are “linked to sociolinguistic emblems in the enactment of identities framed within deterritorialization and reterritorialization processes in urban spaces”. As we explain above, one of the key processes of globalization impacts upon language by allowing for linguistic practices to be decoupled from their original territorial setting and take on new values and meanings in new, transnational migrant contexts. What the London context shows us is that the linguistic landscape in specific localities is making Spanish more visible (McIlwaine/Camilo/Linneker 2010). This suggests, however modestly, that Spanish speakers are having an impact on the social, linguistic, professional and labour fabric of pockets of this superdiverse city. Nevertheless, at grassroots level, the use and value of the Spanish language continues to be overshadowed by the hegemonic position of English, bolstered by its instrumental value as cultural and linguistic capital for securing better-paid jobs and negotiating a more prestigious social position, but also by virtue of its role as a lingua franca to remove social barriers and allow connections across different nationalities and language communities.

4 US-Mexico return migration In discussing the case of Mexican returnees, we again concentrate on those areas we have highlighted above as typical consequences of transnational migration for language experiences, both for the migrant returnees and for the receiving country. That is, we note and comment on examples of language ideologies that are intolerant to “difference”, as well as comment on the varying value placed on migrants’ linguistic capital. As with the study in London, the two principal languages competing for space in the lives of many of the returnees are Spanish and English, and attitudes towards the use and competence that returnees have in either or both of these is mixed. In this case, Spanish is the dominant national language of the migrants’ home context, although English holds much of the cultural and economic capital as the global lingua franca noted in the London example. Mexican immigration to the US has risen steadily since the nineteenth century, with a particular rapid increase from the early 1960s. In 2014 the number was nearly 11.7 million Mexican-born migrants living in the US (Migration Policy Institute 2016). However, it is interesting to note that between 2010 and 2014 there was a small but  

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significant drop in the number of Mexican-born migrants living in the US. This points to the fact that recently there have been more Mexicans returning to Mexico than those emigrating from Mexico to the US (González-Barrera 2015). The phenomenon of return is not new, but has been heightened by such things as more stringent US border controls and the economic recession of 2008. It is also notable that recent return migration to Mexico has tended to be both more likely to involve whole families and to become permanent, rather than the previously common cyclical patterns. Because the language issue is particularly evident and often influential in the lives of returnee schoolchildren, language policies (or lack thereof) in education are especially significant. Education is fundamental not only, of course, in supporting a child’s language(s) development, but in general, to integrate them into the national community and to foster social cohesion. Santos Zavala et al. (2010, 3), commenting on the Mexican situation, claim that education takes on a particularly core role: “cuando se trata de la educación de menores que han regresado al país luego de haber emigrado a otro, por la especial dificultad que genera convivir en dos culturas distintas, con diferencias en ideas religiosas, políticas, sociales, y muchas veces, con problemas de carácter económico”.

Based on interviews with Mexican teachers who have returnees in their classes, a study by Rodriguez McKeon (2013) notes some of the negative behaviours returnee children are perceived to bring to the classroom. These include a “different way of speaking” that is frequently viewed by the teachers as impolite and disrespectful, for example “hablar de ‘tú’ a los maestros” (Rodriguez McKeon 2013, 7). It is apparent that returnees who have learnt to speak Spanish whilst in the States not only have a different variety of Spanish from Mexican (children’s) Spanish, but also lack, or do not understand, the appropriate register required in the Mexican school context. Equally, it is evident from various studies that the Mexican teachers have not had the kind of training or support that will prepare them to manage these unfulfilled expectations. They often do not recognize that these returnee children have oral competence in a US variety of Spanish but having been educated until then in English, lack literacy skills in Spanish. This may lead to an unfair assessment that these children are generally underperforming when in fact they cannot operate at their real level of educational attainment because of their inappropriate linguistic resources (cf. Zúñiga 2013). In her study of returnee schoolchildren, Medina (2011, 36) also notes this lack of understanding and tolerance towards their language skills: “the language conversion was one of the greatest difficulties for children attending classes. Parents urged local municipality educators to have patience with their children because of their lack of Spanish skills”. In interviews that we carried out in the city of San Luis Potosí between 2009–2011, adult returnees remembered their initial experiences on arriving in Mexico as children. It is interesting that our informants chose which of English or Spanish they preferred to be interviewed in. One of them, Xamara, returned at the age of fourteen and recounts her difficulties because of language issues in the following extract:

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“Xamara: I had to get into school and then uh they I remember because they had to we have to apply… not apply, they give us an admission test or exam for school I went to a school the name was OTON and I remember one of my mother’s cousins said well she needs to prepare for the exam I said okay and uhm, he said she can come to my house and I’ll give her some books and she can study. My mom said OK so I go to his house and he sends me to a room where he has lots of books and I am sitting at the table and he just shoves a big pile of books in Spanish and I’m like OK. I mean I know how to speak Spanish I understand you but don’t expect me to read and write because, I mean my mom taught me how to read but it was maybe like five words per minute you know hehehehe. And he, and they expected me to pass an exam in Spanish and I was like come on get serious, hahaha. And uhm, well I felt ridiculous I felt ridiculous even going to that exam Interviewer: But you did? Xamara: I had to. I didn’t, I wasn’t admitted obviously but then another cousin another uncle spoke to the principal of another school private school and that’s where I was admitted Interviewer: You didn’t have to do a test? Xamara: I didn’t have to do a test and they were aware that I was coming from the States that I knew how to speak and I could read but, like, maybe first year elementary student you know”.

Although it is no longer necessary to take an entrance test to be admitted to a state school, this experience nonetheless demonstrates the sense of embarrassment and failure that Xamara was made to feel due to the particular linguistic resources she held. It also meant that, at that time, a solution for such experiences was to attend a private school – an option few returnee families could afford. The feeling of inadequacy and shame that was provoked in these returnee children with linguistic resources that were perceived as inappropriate in a Mexican school environment are evident in many of the interviews we carried out. Elena, for example, tells us how when she did not know a word in Spanish, she would say it in English, and was rapidly labelled the Inglesita. Such use of code-switching would have been far more common in Chicago where she had lived for over fourteen years. It is also, as we have seen, very common practice among transnational migrants, but alien in the extreme monolingual climate of the “home” she had returned to. Even being described as “bilingual” upset her, and she says: “Me dice bueno dice igual tú cómo te consideras, eres bilingüe? No, le digo. Yo nada más sé hablar español e inglés hehe […] yo no me considero ni bilingüe ni, ni nada por el estilo. Yo me considero una persona normal normal normal”. Many of our interviewees actively hid their English competence on returning, as not only were they mocked, but there are examples of how they were seen as a threat by their Mexican teachers of English, who on occasion corrected their (fluent) English and sought to undervalue their competence. It is evident that both in terms of the migrant returnees’ English and Spanish repertoires, linguistic ideologies about the appropriate variety, register and use operate to challenge and often undermine the returnees.

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However, in the case of adult returnees, and younger returnees when they enter adulthood, there are examples of increasing opportunity and benefit of having a linguistic repertoire of a translanguaged, bilingual kind. On the one hand, we observed among our informants a high level of sensitization to language and linguistic resources which could potentially widen their horizons socially, culturally and economically, and on the other hand, specifically, a competence in English was usually an asset in seeking employment. Many of our informants were employed as English language teachers or worked in the tourist sector, using their linguistic resources. Despite this, Mexican society could benefit far more from the linguistic skills of its returnees. The Mexican government has made it a priority to expand the learning of English throughout the public education system and is investing significant funds in this, and yet it still remains bureaucratic and difficult for adult returnees with a high level of English to be given employment as English teachers. A typical report of this problem is found in an article in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada quoting a disgruntled returnee: “‘Hay problemas aquí para conseguir empleo, no es fácil ni siquiera cuando se tiene experiencia; al contrario, es es más difícil. Me dedico a dar clases particulares de inglés, asesorías, traducciones, pero todo lo que aprendí no lo puedo ocupar aquí’. Aunque habla fluidamente inglés, para reconocerle el nivel le piden un diploma o título que avale el dominio de la lengua. ‘Aquí me exigen tomar los cursos de principio a fin. Unos amigos me habían dicho que con sólo presentar un examen me podían reconocer el dominio del idioma, pero en Tlaxcala me dicen que no tienen ese examen, porque nadie lo ha solicitado antes’” (Pérez Silva 2013).

It is often the experience of transnational migrants, whether returnees or not, that their language issues are not recognized by the host (or “home”) communities, and that the assistance they need is not forthcoming or supported by official policy. In the specific case of Mexico, this has been noted by Santos Zavala et al. (2010, 49) when they note: “[...] se confirma que las necesidades educativas de los menores migrantes de retorno es un problema de invisibilidad, el cual no ha logrado llegar a la agenda gubernamental como política pública, sino solo como una demanda que requiere ser atendida de manera aislada, sin establecer acciones conjuntas intergubernamentales”.

It should be acknowledged that in recent years there are examples of more training and support for teachers and awareness of the language difficulties and differences facing returnee children in Mexican schools (Zúñiga/Hamann/Sánchez García 2008). These efforts will need to embed the underlying sociolinguistic conditions of the linguistic experiences and practices of transnational returnee migrants if they are to succeed, and not just impose language policies or attitudes that reflect the familiar dominant language ideologies of the de facto monolingual public sector: Mexico’s constitution pays lip service to its huge linguistic diversity and its many “national” languages. There will also need to be a recognition of the importance of proficiency in English across the population if Mexico is to progress as a player on the global economic and political stage. However, without an understanding of the challenges to

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conventional language attitudes and beliefs that transnationalism, globalization and superdiversity have brought to contemporary Mexican society, and which are particularly evidenced by the struggles of returnees to adjust to their new home, the policies and investment will remain largely ineffectual.

5 Concluding remarks We have argued here that in the current era of globalization, migration is pushed/ pulled towards (often urban) environments that are complex, transnational and superdiverse. Many migrants cross more than one national and linguistic border in their migrant trajectory, and others return making this trajectory circular. This constant, intense and complex movement of peoples has destabilized many of the conventional labels that in the past have been considered permanent. Identities and networks shift and adapt to their surroundings, recognizing power structures, ideologies and the value of varied cultural and social capital of the context they find themselves in. A significant label that we argue shifts and adapts in transnational migration is that of “language”, particularly discrete standard national languages. Just as migrant identities merge and shift during a transnational journey, so too do languages and linguistic practices. These can be positive, creative resources that enable social contact and advancement, or they may be negative contestations within linguistic ideological hierarchies. In the case of Spanish we have examined two situations of Spanish-speaking transnational migration. In both of these, two global languages are in competition, Spanish and English. This is less common given that in the majority of transnational migration it is much more likely that the migrants’ linguistic capital is heavily undervalued compared to the dominant host environment’s language or languages. Nonetheless, in all these situations, whether it is two global languages that compete (or collaborate) for their space, or whether a more unequal hierarchy is quickly established, patterns of mixing, translanguaging, and complex multilingualism occur. Acknowledgements: We wish to acknowledge here the valuable contribution of Daniel Morales who carried out some of the London-based interviews as part of his doctoral research project. Mexico-based interviews were carried out in San Luis Potosí between 2009–2011 by members of the Centre for Mexico-Southampton Collaboration: Clare Mar-Molinero, Darren Paffey, Alicia Pozo-Gutiérrez and Irina Nelson.

6 Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun (1990), Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy, Theory, Culture and Society 7(2), 295–310.

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Appadurai, Arjun (2013), The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition, London, Verso Books. Armstrong, Nigel/Jamin, Mikaël (2002), “Le Français des banlieues”: Uniformity and Discontinuity in the French of the Hexagon, in: Kamal Salhi (ed.), French in and out of France: Language Policies, Intercultural Antagonisms and Dialogues, Bern, Lang, 107–136. Block, David (2008), The Increasing Presence of Spanish-Speaking Latinos in London: An Emergent Community?, Journal of Language Identity and Education 7(1), 5–21. Blommaert, Jan (2013), Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity, Bristol, Multilingual Matters. Blommaert, Jan (2015), Commentary: Superdiversity Old and New, Language and Communication 44, 82–88. Blommaert, Jan/Dong, Jie (2010), Language and Movement in Space, in: Nikolas Coupland (ed.) The Handbook of Language and Globalization, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 366–385. Blommaert, Jan/Rampton, Ben (2012), Language and Superdiversity, Diversities 13(2), 1–22. Bourdieu, Pierre (1991), Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge, Polity. Cadier, Linda/Mar-Molinero, Clare (2014), Negotiating Networks of Communication in a Superdiverse Environment: Urban Multilingualism in the City of Southampton, Multilingua 33(5–6), 505–524. Cassarino, Jean-Pierre (2004), Theorizing Return Migration: The Conceptual Approach to Return Migrants Revisited, International Journal on Multicultural Societies 6(2), 253–279. Castells, Manuel (2002), Local and Global Cities in the Network Society, Tijidschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 93(5), 548–558. Coupland, Nikolas (2003), Introduction: Sociolinguistics and Globalization, Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(4), 465–472. Creese, Angela/Blackledge, Adrian (2010), Towards a Sociolinguistics of Superdiversity, Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft 13(4), 549–572. Crowley, Tony (2003), Standard English and the Politics of Language, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. De Fina, Anna/Baynham, Michael (edd.) (2005), Dislocations/Relocations: Narratives of Displacement, Manchester, St Jerome. Del Percio, Alfonso (2015), Gateways to Europe: Language and the Management of Transnational Migration Project, University of Oslo, http://www.hf.uio.no/multiling/english/projects/postdocprojects/alfonsde/index.html (last access 04.03.2018). Durand, Jorge (2004), Ensayo teórico sobre la migración de retorno. El principio del rendimiento decreciente, Cuadernos geográficos 35, 103–111. Dustmann, Christian (1996), Return Migration: The European Experience, Economic Policy 22, 215–250. Flores, Juan (2008), The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning, New York, Routledge. Franco Rodríguez, José Manuel (2009), Interpreting the Linguistic Traits of Linguistic Landscapes as Ethnolinguistic Vitality: Methodological Approach, Revista electrónica de lingüística aplicada 8, 1–15. Fürstenau, Sara (2005), Migrants’ Resources: Multilingualism and Transnational Mobility. A Study on Learning Paths and School to Job Transition of Young Portuguese Migrants, European Educational Research Journal 4(4), 369–381. Gal, Susan (2006), Migration, Minorities and Multilingualism: Language Ideologies in Europe, in: Clare Mar-Molinero/Patrick Stevenson (edd.), Language Ideologies, Policies and Practices: Language and the Future of Europe, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 13–27. García, Ofelia/Wei, Li (2014), Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

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Contributors Kormi Anipa is Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews. He works on the historical sociolinguistics of early modern English, French and Spanish. In addition to articles in leading journals, and chapters in books, he is the author of A Critical Examination of Linguistic Variation in Golden-Age Spanish (2001) and The Grammatical Thought and Linguistic Behaviour of Juan de Valdés (2007), and editor of Juan de Valdés’s Diálogo de la lengua (2014). Nigel Armstrong is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Leeds. His current teaching and research focus on two related subject areas: sociolinguistic variation in contemporary spoken French; and the study, from a translation perspective, of how language is used in popular culture. Previous publications include Translation, Linguistics, Culture (2005) and (with Ian Mackenzie) Standardization, Ideology and Linguistics (2012). Wendy Ayres-Bennett is Professor of French Philology and Linguistics, University of Cambridge. She works on the history of the French language and the history of linguistic thought, particularly in seventeenth-century France. Her major research interests include questions of standardization and codification, linguistic ideology and policy, variation and change, from the sixteenth century to the present day. She is currently Principal Investigator on a major research project funded by the AHRC (2016–2020) under the Open World Research Initiative, Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies (MEITS). Recent publications include Sociolinguistic Variation in SeventeenthCentury France (2004), Remarques et observations sur la langue française, histoire et évolution d’un genre (with Magali Seijido, 2011), Bon Usage et variation sociolinguistique: Perspectives diachroniques et traditions nationales (with Magali Seijido, 2013) and L’Histoire du français: État des lieux et perspectives (with Thomas Rainsford, 2014). Gabriel Bergounioux is Professor of French Linguistics at the University of Orléans and Director of the Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique (LLL). His current research addresses three areas: corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics and phonology. Previous publications include Le Moyen de parler (2004) and Linguistique de corpus. Une étude de cas (2016). Gaetano Berruto was Professor of Italian Linguistics at the University of Zurich (1981–1995) and Professor of General Linguistics and Sociolinguistics at the University of Turin (1995–2016). His research focuses on sociolinguistics, semantics, plurilingualism and language contact, Italian linguistics and dialectology. He has published more than 250 papers and 15 monographs on these topics. Key publications include La sociolinguistica (1974); La semantica (1976); Sociolinguistica dell’italiano contemporaneo (1987); Fondamenti di sociolinguistica (1995); Saggi di sociolinguistica e linguistica (2012). He is a member of the Accademia delle Scienze, Turin. Robert Blackwood is Reader in French Sociolinguistics at the University of Liverpool. His primary research interests are within the broad field of sociolinguistics, including language policy, linguistic landscapes, and language in new media. In addition to publishing widely on these areas, he is the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-030

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author of The State, the Activists, and the Islanders: Language Policy on Corsica (2006), and co-author with Stefania Tufi of The Linguistic Landscape of the Mediterranean: French and Italian Coastal Cities (2015). Klaus Bochmann is Professor of Romance Linguistics at the University of Leipzig, President of the Moldova-Institut Leipzig and member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences. His research interests are centred on historical linguistics and sociolinguistics, language politics and political discourse in Italian, French and Romanian-speaking contexts. His key publications include Der politisch-soziale Wortschatz des Rumänischen (1821–1850) (1979); Einführung in die rumänische Sprach- und Literaturgeschichte (with Heinrich Stiehler, 2010); Antonio Gramsci, Gefängnishefte, vol.1–10 (edited with Wolfgang F. Haug, 2012); Sprachpolitik in der Romania (edited with Vasile Dumbrava, 1993); Dimitrie Cantemir. Fürst der Moldau, Gelehrter, Akteur der europäischen Kulturgeschichte (edited with Vasile Dumbrava, 2008). Barbara E. Bullock is Professor of French and Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. She is co-editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-Switching (2009) and author of numerous articles on code-switching and on phonetic convergence in language contact that appear in The Journal of French Language Studies, Lingua (Glossa), Probus, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, International Journal of Bilingualism, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Interspeech, and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Janice Carruthers is Professor of French Linguistics at Queen’s University Belfast. She is currently Leadership Fellow for Modern Languages with the AHRC and the Sociolinguistics strand lead on the Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies (MEITS) project (AHRC: 2016-2020). She is also director of a Marie Skłodowska Curie project (EXPRESSIONARRATION) on temporality in French and Occitan. Her primary research interests are in orality, temporality, corpus linguistics, variation in French, sociolinguistics and language policy. She has published widely in these areas and recent outputs include Oral Narration in Modern French. A Linguistic Analysis of Temporal Patterns (2005) and the French Oral Narrative Corpus (2013). Joan Costa-Carreras holds a doctorate in Catalan Philology from the University of Girona (2005). He is Lecturer in the Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Pompeu Fabra University (Spain). His research focuses on language corpus planning and sociolinguistic variation (mainly in the Catalan context), evaluation of the implementation of normative grammar, discourse analysis of normative grammar, analysis of the linguistic norm, language variation, language change and teaching of grammar. He is co-ordinator of the team Avalnorm (https://avalnorm.wordpress.com) that is working on the evaluation of the implementation of the norm. He has published more than 50 works in Catalan, English and French. His main publications include La norma sintàctica del català segons Pompeu Fabra (2009), the edition of Pompeu Fabra (1868–1948) and The Architect of Modern Catalan: Selected Writings (2009). Mari D’Agostino is full Professor of Italian Linguistics at the University of Palermo and is the author of numerous works on the Italian linguistics repertoire. In particular, she deals with the relationship

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between language and society in Sicily. She is the coordinator of the sociolinguistic section of the Linguistic Atlas of Sicily. In her current capacity as director of the School of Italian as a Foreign Language at the University of Palermo, she is working on the teaching and learning of Italian as a second language. Rosane de Andrade Berlinck is Professor at the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Sciences and Arts, São Paulo State University, Araraquara, Brazil. Her main research interests include sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, syntax, Portuguese and other Romance languages. She is author of The Portuguese Dative (1996); Brazilian Portuguese VS Order: A Diachronic Analysis (2000); Predicação (Gramática do Português Culto Falado no Brasil, vol. 2, 2015) and editor-in-chief of Alfa – Revista de linguística (Brazil). Giovanni Depau is Associate Professor at the Université Grenoble-Alpes (GIPSA-lab UMR 5216). His research focuses on language contact, Romance dialectology and sociolinguistics, with a particular interest in regional languages in Italy (Sardinian) and France (Francoprovençal). His research findings have been published in different languages as book chapters and as journal articles in a number of peer-reviewed journals. Salvatore Digesto is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the University of Ottawa and a member of the Sociolinguistics Laboratory directed by Shana Poplack. His research applies variationist principles to the study of language variation and change with a focus on Romance languages. His dissertation examines subjunctive variability in Italian from a synchronic and diachronic perspective, as well as its original usage in Latin. He has published with Shana Poplack the article Le Français canadien, un français comme les autres. At the Sociolinguistics Laboratory, he has collaborated on several research projects related to language contact, morphosyntactic variation in French and Italian as well as linguistic change over the lifespan. Nathalie Dion is Research Coordinator of the University of Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory, and collaborator on several projects investigating different aspects of language variation and change, especially in bilingual and minority language contexts. She has published on a variety of topics relating to the linguistic manifestations of language contact, as well as on the relationship between grammatical prescription and everyday language use. Anna María Escobar works at the University of Illinois at Urbana. Her present project is on the factors that explain the emergence and diffusion of Andean Spanish, using both colonial and modern documents. She is also co-editor, with Salikoko Mufwene (University of Chicago), of the Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact (in progress), leads the CLoTILdE Project on uncovering trajectories of linguistic change from Quechua to Spanish, and directs the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Françoise Gadet is Emeritus Professor of Sociolinguistics at Université Paris Nanterre. Her research focuses on variational sociolinguistics, syntax of spoken language, contact linguistics, corpus linguis-

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tics and the description of non-standard, marginal and peripheral varieties of French (français populaire, youth language, French outside France). She has led or participated in several international projects, in particular on suburban multiethnic areas in the Paris area and on the description of NorthAmerican French. Key publications include the edited volume Les Parlers jeunes dans l’Île de France multiculturelle (2017); (with Ralph Ludwig) Le Français au contact d’autres langues (2015); (with Philippe Hambye) Contact and Ethnicity in “Youth Language” Description: In Search of Specificity, in: Robert Nicolaï (ed.), Questioning Language Contact: Limits of Contact, Contact at its Limits (2014). Anna Ghimenton is Associate Professor at the University of Lyon (Laboratoire DDL, UMR 5596). Her research is focused on issues of language acquisition, transmission and socialization in situations of language contact, particularly in areas where minority languages are spoken. Her major fieldwork sites are in Italy and in France. She has published in international journals including Linguistics and The International Journal of Bilingualism. Francesco Goglia is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Exeter. His research interests include multilingualism and language contact in immigrant communities, code-switching, language maintenance and shift, the Italian language in Eritrea. He has published on multilingualism among IgboNigerians in Italy, and in the East-Timorese diaspora in Portugal, the UK and Australia. Matthias Grünert is Professor of Rhaeto-Romance at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). His research addresses the sociolinguistic situation of the trilingual canton of Grisons, diachronic and synchronic description of Romansh of Grisons, language contact (Italian-Romansh, German-Romansh), debates about the norms of Romansh, and Romansh in the new media. He is the primary author of the volume Das Funktionieren der Dreisprachigkeit im Kanton Graubünden (2008). Philippe Hambye is Professor of French Linguistics at the University of Louvain (UCL, Belgium). His research is primarily in the area of sociolinguistics with a specific focus on variation in linguistic norms and practices in the French-speaking area, language practices in education and at work, and language policies. Michel Jacobson is a computer scientist with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in the Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique (LLL). His work is primarily concerned with the management of oral corpora and notably in piloting the management platform Cocoon (Collection de corpus oraux numériques) which is working towards the harmonization of corpora across France. Daniel Kallweit holds a doctorate in Romance Philology from the Ruhr-University Bochum. His thesis addressed alternative spellings in Spanish chat channels and was published in 2015 in the ScriptOralia series (Volume 142). He has been lecturing at Bochum’s Romance Languages Department since 2008. His research interests focus on the linguistics of writing, language in the media, language change, sociolinguistics, language contact and computer-mediated communication. He has published several articles on neography and contributed to a collective article on corpora of Romance languages in tertiary media for the Manual of Romance Languages in the Media.

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Dora Lacasse is a PhD candidate in Hispanic Linguistics at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include language variation and change, language contact, and bilingualism. Her work focuses on morphosyntactic variation in both contact and non-contact Spanish varieties. Ralph Ludwig is Professor of Romance Linguistics at the University of Halle (Germany). His main research interests are orality studies, francophone and Latin American language variation, contact linguistics and creole studies, as well as francophone literature. His publications include (with Françoise Gadet) Le Français au contact d’autres langues (2015), as well as (with Danièle Montbrand, Hector Poullet and Sylviane Telchid) the Dictionnaire créole-français (most recent edition 2012). Ian Mackenzie is Professor of Spanish Linguistics at Newcastle University. His research interests include language change, linguistic variation and standardization. He is the author of six books, most recently (with Nigel Armstrong) Standardization, Ideology and Linguistics (2013), as well as numerous papers such as (with Wim van der Wurff) Relic Syntax in Middle English and Medieval Spanish: Parameter Interaction in Language Change (Language, 2012). Francis Manzano was Professor of Dialectology and Regional Languages at the Université Lyon 3 from 2007 to 2015, following time spent as a university lecturer in Morocco, Burkina Faso, and Tunisia, as well as in France. Now Emeritus Professor, his research interests include Romance linguistics (with a particular focus on Occitan and Catalan), the minority languages of western France (notably Gallo and Norman), and language contact in the western Mediterranean and the Maghreb. Recent publications include Mémoires du terrain: Enquêtes, matériaux, traitement des données (2011) and Maghreb: Une francophonie sur la brèche, Une interface en Méditerranée (2012). Clare Mar-Molinero is Professor of Spanish Sociolinguistics at the University of Southampton. Her main research interests are in urban multilingualism, language ideologies and policies, global languages, and especially in the Spanish-speaking world. Amongst her many publications are The Politics of Spanish in the Spanish-Speaking World (2000); (co-edited with Miranda Stewart) Globalization and Spanish in the Spanish-Speaking World (2006); (co-edited with Patrick Stevenson and Gabriel Hogan-Brun) Discourses on Language Integration (2009). Mairi McLaughlin is Associate Professor of French and an Affiliated Member of the Linguistics Department and the Department of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in French and Romance linguistics, as well as translation studies. Her first book, Syntactic Borrowing in Contemporary French: A Linguistic Analysis of News Translation, was published by Legenda in 2011. She has published articles in journals such as French Studies, The Italianist and Perspectives: Studies in Translatology. She is currently working on two major projects: a book on the origins and evolution of the language of the French press (1631–1789) and an edition of the Journal de la langue françoise (1784–1795). Damien Mooney is Lecturer in French Linguistics at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on transfer in bilingual speech, language death theory, and on the role of contact in the loss of

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pronunciation features in regional varieties of French and the regional languages of France. Major publications include a monograph, Southern Regional French: A Linguistic Analysis of Language and Dialect Contact (2016), and a co-edited volume, Creating Orthographies for Endangered Languages (2017). His current research projects examine phonetic change and new speakers of Occitan and the speech of homosexual men and women in the UK, France, and Canada. Darren Paffey lectures in Spanish and Linguistics at the University of Southampton. He specializes in sociolinguistics, particularly discourse analysis and language policy in Spanish-speaking contexts. His book, Language Ideologies and the Globalization of “Standard” Spanish was published by Bloomsbury in 2012, and his research has also been published in the journal Language Policy and in edited volumes by Iberoamericana Vervuert, Continuum, De Gruyter and Wiley-Blackwell. Giuseppe Paternostro is a researcher in Italian linguistics at the University of Palermo. His research interests focus on discourse analysis and, in particular, the relationship between language and identity in oral discourse. He is the author of numerous essays on oral narratives and political discourse. Paola Pietrandrea is Associate Professor in Linguistics at the University of Tours, France. Her work centres on the expression of modality in morphology, syntax and discourse; corpus linguistics; cognitive sociolinguistics; signed and oral languages. Her publications include the monograph Epistemic Modality (Benjamins, 2005), as well as various papers that have appeared in national and international journals (Cognitive Linguistics, Journal of Pragmatics, Language Sciences, Italian Journal of Linguistics, Belgian Journal of Linguistics, Langue française, Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung). Shana Poplack, C.M., FRSC, is Distinguished University Professor and Canada Research Chair in Linguistics at the University of Ottawa, and director of the Sociolinguistics Laboratory there. She is a sociolinguist who studies language use in everyday situations, with a particular focus on bilingual and minority language contexts. Her work applies theoretical and methodological insights gained from the study of linguistic variation and change to a variety of areas involving French and other Romance languages, including constraints on bilingual language mixing, language contact and grammatical convergence, language ideology, normative prescription and praxis, and the role of the school in impeding linguistic change. Fernando Ramallo is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Vigo. He has published widely on language in society. Since 2013 he has been a member of the Committee of Experts for the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (Council of Europe). His current research interests include language ideologies, language rights, neoliberal language policy and minority languages new speakers. Lori Repetti is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Stony Brook University (SUNY), and the recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service (2016). She has published

Contributors

775

extensively and has lectured widely on the history and phonology of the Romance languages, in particular Italian and endangered Romance languages. She is primarily interested in prosody and its interaction with other areas of grammar (phonetics, morphology, syntax), and she manages a database on Clitics of Romance Languages (http://crl.linguistics.stonybrook.edu). Her research has been funded by both the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Kim Schulte currently lectures in linguistics and translation at the Universitat Jaume I in Castellón, Spain, where he is also carrying out fieldwork on different contact situations involving Spanish, Valencian and Romanian. He studied at Cambridge, Salamanca and Bucharest, obtaining his PhD in comparative Romance syntax from Cambridge University. Eeva Sippola is Associate Professor in Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Helsinki and an expert on Ibero-Romance creoles, in particular Chabacano. Her research interests are in the areas of language contact and sociolinguistics. She recently co-edited Creole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches (2017) and Language Ideologies in Music – Emergent Socialities in the Age of Transnationalism (Language and Communication 52, 2017). Jonathan Steuck is a PhD student in Hispanic Linguistics at Penn State University. His research interests include language variation and change, sociolinguistics, language contact, code-switching, and phonetics. His recent research has examined grammaticalization, the relationship between prosody and syntax in spontaneous speech, and how speakers of different dialects converge/diverge intonation based on their interlocutor. Rena Torres Cacoullos is Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University and editor of Language Variation and Change. Her work aims to discover grammatical structure by quantitative analysis of natural production data in its social context. Rodica Zafiu is Professor of Romanian Linguistics at the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Letters, and Senior Researcher at the Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti Institute of Linguistics of the Romanian Academy. Her main research interests are written vs oral communication, stylistics and sociolinguistics, slang, narrativity, discourse markers, modality and evidentiality. She has published Diversitate stilistică în româna actuală [Stylistic Variety in Contemporary Romanian] (2001), Limbaj şi politică [Language and Politics] (2007) and 101 cuvinte argotice [101 Slang Words] (2010).

Index of concepts Abidjan French 317 see also Nouchi Abruzzese 496, 503 Academia de la Llingua Asturiana 316, 320, 482 Acadian French 646, 668, 733 acrolect 97–99, 103, 105, 508, 510 adstrate 91, 94, 108, 598 age grading 5, 205 see also change, in apparent time agreement – with la plupart 267–269 alignment (functional) 606 Alsatian 162, 444–445 analogy 99, 601–602, 644, 670 analysis of deviance see chi-squared test Andalusian 176, 180, 317, 397 Andean Spanish 629–631, 638–641, 643–644 see also Peruvian Spanish anglicism 377, 448, 653–677, 686, 691 Angolar 93 animacy 632–644 annotation 8, 11–12, 18, 27–55 – embedded/online 40–41 – interlinear/multi-tiered 41 – level of 29, 32–33 – morphological 49–51 – phonological 49 – semantic 52 – standalone/stand-off 40–41 – syntactic 51 anticortesía 392 ANVIL 46 application value 69, 72–82 see also response value après, par après, en après 269–272 Arabic 367, 462–463, 465, 577, 598, 645–646, 735–739 Aragonese 115, 122, 316, 318, 321, 451, 462–464, 466–467, 485–486, 598 Aranese 319, 462–463, 466–468, 483 archaism 299, 316, 369-370, 374-375 Aromanian 115, 120 Arpitan see Francoprovençal Asturian/Astur-Leonese 115, 313, 316–317, 320, 323, 451, 462–464, 466–467, 482, 484, 603 – Mirandese 313, 315, 317, 484 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-031

Atlante linguistico italiano see atlas, Atlante linguistico italiano atlas 16, 96, 106, 114, 128, 135–160 – Atlante linguistico italiano 198, 204 – Atlas linguistique de la France 16, 125, 135–141, 147–148, 174, 204 – Atlasul linguistic român 141 – Nouvel Atlas linguistique de la France 148–159 – Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz 142, 198, 200 Atlas linguistique de la France see atlas, Atlas linguistique de la France Atlasul linguistic român see atlas, Atlasul linguistic român attitude 95–96, 106–107, 109, 122, 126, 201, 254–255, 280, 298–299, 322, 324, 342– 343, 412, 433, 487, 506–507, 517–518, 536, 550, 659, 664, 666, 702, 717, 725 – descriptive 298, 300, 314 – prescriptive 18, 219–220, 223, 228, 298–299, 307–324, 380, 652, 656, 662–663 – proscriptive 298–299 – purist 255, 310, 321, 323, 370, 439, 447, 450, 456, 488, 601, 662, 687, 740 attribution see possession attrition 686–688 Ausbau language 321 see also norm, functional elaboration authenticity 7, 102–103, 107, 141–142, 158, 322, 379, 561, 563, 566 auxiliary selection see verb, auxiliary selection banlieue see urban, banlieue basilect 97–99, 102–103, 413, 419, 508, 510 Basque 162, 440–442, 445, 449–450, 452, 462–463, 465, 483, 576, 628 – euskera batua 452 Bergamasco 322 bidialectalism 507 bilingualism 11, 63, 254, 423, 475, 478, 480– 481, 499–502, 516, 526, 535–536, 538, 540, 596, 598–599, 608–610, 616–618, 628–629, 645, 655, 666, 668, 682, 688, 698, 726–727 see also multilingualism – community 497, 536 – endogenous 497 bon usage see correctness

778

Index of concepts

borrowability hierarchy 664 borrowing 103, 147, 374, 513, 724, 728–731, 735 – aller-retour 661, 663 – assimilation/integration of 663, 667–671, 735 – calque 138, 514, 602, 610, 665–666, 669, 672, 675, 691, 736 – direct 664 see also borrowing, lexical/ loanword – functional transfer 627–631, 643–646 – learned 663–664 – lexical/loanword 147, 206, 370, 377, 426, 447–450, 500, 514, 601–603, 611–613, 618–619, 628–630, 645, 654, 656–666, 672, 691, 735 – loanblend see borrowing, loanblend 618, 664 – loan rendition 666 – loanshift 618, 664–665 see also borrowing, calque – pan-Romance 660–661 – phonological 514, 610, 612, 666–667 – epenthetic vowel 667 – palatal 667 – velar nasal [ŋ] 667 – pseudo-anglicism 669 – semantic 665 – structural 666–677 – syntactic/morphosyntactic 602, 604–606, 611–615, 620–623, 628–630, 653, 670–674 Breton 61, 149, 162, 436, 444–445, 505, 576 Cajun French 115, 686, 698 Calabrian 496, 503, 514 Calandreta 445, 578 calque see borrowing, calque Camfranglais 406, 668, 726–727, 730–734 Campanian 496, 503, 517–518 Canadian French 60–61, 190, 223, 255–256, 657, 668, 685–686 see also Chiac; Québécois French Cape Verdean Creole 93, 96, 99–101, 103–104, 706, 711 – Santiago Creole 97–98 CART (classification and regression trees) 86 Casamancese Creole 93 Castilian see Spanish Catalan 34–35, 50–52, 60, 137, 139, 143–145, 149, 151–153, 155, 157, 255, 263, 215–322,

388, 393, 436–437, 440–442, 445, 449–451, 462–472, 474–479, 483, 550–551, 556–562, 566, 576–579, 581, 584–587 – Algherese 320, 585–587 – Valencian 155, 468–472, 478–479, 550, 596–607, 609, 613–615 Catalan Spanish 314 see also Valencian Spanish Cavite Chabacano see Philippine Creole Spanish, Cavite Chabacano Chabacano see Philippine Creole Spanish change 4, 19, 92, 95, 97, 104–105, 147, 197–213, 253–273, 281–302 – community 198–199, 205 – complexification 643–644, 686 – diffusion/transmission of 147, 201, 211, 256, 264-265, 272, 282, 657 – from above 257, 265, 272–273, 308 – from below 7, 190, 257, 265, 272–273, 308 – generational 204–205, 686–688 – in apparent time 5, 12, 203–205, 255, 273, 295, 506 – in real time 12, 204–205, 265, 273, 295, 567, 686 – phonetic/phonological 135, 146–147, 177, 198, 204, 254, 290, 601, 617, 619–620 – devoicing 181–182 – merger 176, 181–182, 204, 601, 610, 695–696 – monophthongization 285, 300 – rhotacization 691, 695–697 see also variation, phonological, rhotacization – semantic 147, 635, 645, 737 – syntactic/morphosyntactic 283, 603–605, 613–615, 620–622, 640–644 – unchange/continuity 283–284, 287, 289, 302 – unidirectional 285–286 Chiac 668, 674, 726–729, 732–733 children’s books 416, 419–421 chi-squared test 74, 83 Circulaires Savary see language planning and policy Cisalpine Occitan 317 clause, embedded 220–224, 228–229, 234, 242, 248 see also verb, embedded clitic climbing see word order, clitic climbing code choice 500 code-mixing 126, 369, 379, 500, 516, 724–741

Index of concepts

code-switching 14, 50, 103, 500, 515–516, 598, 617–618, 645, 691, 702–721, 724, 735 codification see norm, codification coding 30, 33, 39 colonialism 91–92, 99, 139, 187, 407–408, 655, 732 commodification 560–563, 566 community (linguistic) 99, 101, 103, 124–126, 128, 130, 140, 174–176, 185, 191, 198–199, 205, 209, 282, 289–290, 309, 474, 543, 595–596, 686–687 – of practice 200, 206, 661 – repertoire see repertoire, community competence (communicative) 294 compound (word) 634–643, 671–672 computer-mediated communication see media, new – CMC-genre 387–388, 391, 399–400 concordancer 38, 45 conditional see verb, mood and modality, conditional constraint (grammatical) 223, 246 contact (language) 14–16, 63, 91–109, 118, 163–164, 254, 319, 342, 370, 406–407, 409, 426, 512–516, 535, 595–624, 627–631, 638–646, 672–677, 682–698, 707–721, 724–741 see also interference – outcomes/effects of 14, 63, 628, 668, 671, 724 convergence 600, 604–607, 624, 644 see also dialect, convergence conversation 339, 341–342, 344–349, 352–354, 356–357, 364–366, 369, 406, 412, 497, 507, 703–704, 708–720 see also orality Cornish 517–518 corpus 8, 11–12, 14, 18, 27–55, 129, 225–229, 245, 254–255, 259–262, 265–266, 324, 339, 344, 691 – annotation see annotation – multimodal 27, 54 – oral 8, 13, 27–55, 314, 341, 344–358 – storage 8, 35–36, 55, 129 – written 27, 30, 48 corpus planning see language planning and policy, corpus planning correctness 297, 299, 310, 312, 315, 598, 616 Corsican 115, 137–138, 162, 318, 323, 444–445, 550–551, 556–566, 577–578, 581–582, 587

779

creole 11, 13, 16, 91–109, 198, 405–426, 706, 729 see also French creole; Portuguese creole; Spanish creole – continuum 97, 99, 102 cross-linguistic comparison see methodology, comparative cultural – capital 191–192, 209, 488 – memory 410 – otherness 497 – turn 192–193 current report see discourse mode, current report cyclicity 286 Daman Indo-Portuguese see Indo-Portuguese, Daman data 7–8, 18, 29, 35, 48, 54–55, 128–129, 224, 272, 289–291, 299, 538 – “bad” 12, 256–257, 290–296 – collection 38–39, 98, 102, 104–105, 107, 124, 140, 225, 716 database 18, 129, 257, 262-263 – multi-genre 12, 261 decreolization 97, 426 demographics 127, 174-175, 189, 475–476, 501–531, 535, 538, 540–541, 544, 607, 705, 734–735 descriptive see attitude, descriptive desemanticization see grammaticalization, desemanticization diacritic 380, 394–398 diaglossia 316, 320, 507 dialect 10–11, 16–17, 19, 55, 119–123, 134–164, 175–176, 181, 208, 315, 317, 368, 379, 433, 438, 450, 494–520, 534–535 see also atlas; patois – base 507–510 – contact 512–516, 716–720 – convergence 323–324, 512, 515, 683 – death/obsolescence 114, 503 – dialect/standard repertoire 507–512 – levelling 9, 17, 19, 515, 668 – literary 512 – maintenance 503–504, 520 – mixing 164, 255 – primary 307, 496–497 – resurgence 519 – rural 99, 104, 134–135 see also rural

780

Index of concepts

– secondary 307, 497 – tertiary 307, 314, 497 – transfiguration 503 – urban see urban – written 255, 518 dialectal variation see variation, diatopic/ geographical/regional dialectization 512–513 dialectology 10–11, 16, 134–164, 174–175, 198–201, 204, 255, 314, 406, 481–482, 533–535, 683 – perceptual 107–109, 312, 319, 322 dialectometry 129, 153–158 diamesic variation see variation, diamesic diaphasic variation see variation, diaphasic diastratic variation see variation, diastratic/ social diasystem 15, 156–158, 175, 316, 321, 508 diatopic variation see variation, diatopic/ geographical/regional dictionary 52, 124, 128, 139, 262–263, 319, 415, 438, 440, 442, 454, 531, 656, 668–669 digital communication see media, new digitization 8 diglossia 55, 97, 254, 316, 320, 375, 409, 436, 497, 502, 507, 510, 553, 582, 596, 598–599, 616, 623–624, 654, 706–707, 711, 717, 724, 732 dilalia 320, 497, 502, 508, 510, 707 discontinuity 691–698 discourse analysis 52–53, 312, 322 discourse genre see text type discourse mode 340–341 – current report 350–352 – narrative 340–341, 345 – report 345–349, 354 – story 345–349, 354 discourse pragmatics 676 Diu Indo-Portuguese see Indo-Portuguese, Diu DMS (Database Management System) 39 documentation 94–95, 115, 121, 123–129, 542 Dutch 253, 259, 409, 646 ecology 15–16, 405–407, 409–410, 426, 724–725, 731–734, 741 economization 388, 394–396 education 94, 114, 118, 122, 204, 317, 367, 399, 408, 426, 438–441, 443–448, 450, 452–453, 465–466, 468, 473, 476,

478–479, 481–486, 498, 517, 530, 535, 538–540, 542–544, 554, 570–589, 599, 609, 685, 689, 698, 735 – level of 103, 106, 176, 188–189, 191, 208, 296, 320, 504, 536 emigration see migration Emilian 115, 119–120, 496, 503, 514 endangerment 11, 13, 94, 101, 114–130, 146, 162, 516, 518 English 4–5, 15–16, 34, 59, 95, 97, 100–101, 108, 126, 162, 205–206, 211–212, 253–256, 259, 262, 264, 335, 341, 370, 395–396, 408, 422–423, 426, 445, 447, 479, 481, 519, 529, 557–558, 646, 652–677, 686, 689, 703, 706, 709–716, 727–731, 733– 735, 739 English creole 95–98, 102, 406, 408 erasure 410–411, 416 ethics 7, 13, 102, 109 ethnicity see speaker variable, ethnicity ethnolinguistics 103, 142–143, 150–151, 207, 309, 322, 511, 543, 549, 673 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML) 120–121, 443, 445–446, 449, 454, 465, 467–472, 476–477, 481–483, 497, 529, 543, 572–575, 577–578, 580, 585 euskera batua see Basque, euskera batua Fa d’Ambô 93, 95 Félibrige 444 fieldwork see methodology, fieldwork Flemish 162, 445, 556 Florentine 494, 496, 508 folk linguistics 96, 99, 106–107, 311–312, 319, 321–324 formality see register, level of formality francophonie see French in Africa; French in North America; French in the Antilles Francoprovençal 116, 130, 135, 162–163, 313, 316–317, 448–449, 501, 505, 511–512, 528, 530, 542, 577, 579–580, 582–584, 587–588, 698 Frantext 262, 267, 269–271 French 5, 10–11, 13–15, 17, 34–35, 47, 49–52, 60–61, 63, 91, 93, 97, 99–101, 103–104, 134–141, 175, 177, 180–181, 184, 204, 206–211, 217–221, 223, 225–230, 232–248, 254–256, 258–262, 264–273, 318, 321,

Index of concepts

323, 341–358, 364, 366–368, 370, 380, 388, 391, 393–397, 406, 408–409, 414, 416, 418–419, 422–426, 435–439, 443–449, 456, 496–497, 511–512, 514, 526-529, 532–533, 541, 544, 554–560, 562–564, 571, 576–580, 603, 645–646, 652–663, 665–675, 703, 710–711, 724–741 see also Abidjan French; French in Africa; French in Belgium; French in North America; French in the Antilles French creole 93, 95–97, 101–102, 407–408, 413–415, 418–423, 645 see also Guadeloupean Creole; Guyanais; Haitian Creole; Louisiana Creole; Martinican Creole; Mauritian Creole; Reunion Creole; Seychelles Creole; St Lucian Creole; Tayo French in Africa 138, 139, 141, 645–646, 726–727 see also Abidjan French; Camfranglais; Nouchi French in Belgium 646 French in North America 260–262, 687–698 see also Acadian French; Canadian French; Louisiana French French in the Antilles 409–410, 419, 424 French Revolution 436–438, 456, 534 Friulian 116, 126, 318, 446, 495–496, 503, 532, 579 Fronteiriço 615–622 functional elaboration see norm, functional elaboration functional stylistics 365–366, 369, 374 functional transfer see borrowing, functional transfer Galician 17, 315–317, 321–322, 440, 442, 450–452, 462–472, 475, 479–482, 550, 603 Gallo 116, 150, 162, 313 Gallo-Italian 151–152, 501–502 see also Emilian; Ligurian; Lombard; Piedmontese; Ticinese Gallo-Romance 61, 134–141, 148–150, 285, 501, 577 see also French Gascon 61–66, 68–87, 116–117, 127, 151, 154–156, 162, 317, 451, 517–518 gender see speaker variable, gender/sex gender paradox 6, 10, 202 genre 8, 13, 253-297, 290, 294, 301, 318, 335– 358, 363

781

geographical variety see variation, diatopic/ geographical/regional German 123, 253, 444–446, 448–449, 453, 497, 501, 511–512, 526–527, 529–533, 535–541, 544, 552, 579, 646, 672, 675 see also Swiss German globalization 9, 15, 313, 406, 561–562, 655, 660, 675–676, 683, 706 glocalization 206, 518 Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS) 553, 571 grammarian 269–270, 294–295, 297–302, 321, 409, 442 grammatical gender 514, 605, 612, 670 grammatical influence see borrowing, functional transfer grammaticalization 50, 217–249, 407, 413, 635, 640–641, 643–644 – cline 217–218, 221–222, 229, 237, 243–248 – desemanticization 222, 237, 246, 248 – late-stage 217–249 grapheme 293–294, 388–389, 393–397, 399 Greek 366–367, 375, 446, 449, 579, 654, 663 Grischun see Romansh, Rumantsch Grischun Guadeloupean Creole 13, 93, 96–97, 408, 423–426 Guernésiais 116, 122, 126 Guiana Creole see Guyanais Guinea-Bissau Kriyol see Kriyol Guyanais 93, 102–103, 211, 407 habitus 488 Haitian Creole 92–94, 96, 99–100, 103–104, 407–409, 415, 418 Hispano-Romance 280–281, 285 see also Spanish Historical Paradox 264 historical sociolinguistics 95, 253–273, 280–302 HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) 30 hybridity/hybridization 343–353, 400, 407, 412, 416, 423, 426, 513, 515–516, 599, 606, 617, 621–622, 724, 727, 730–732, 734, 741 iconization 410 identity 13, 19, 92, 99–100, 108, 126, 179, 181, 194, 203, 205–206, 213, 257, 364, 368, 392, 410, 426, 474, 488, 497, 518, 532,

782

Index of concepts

559, 561, 565, 575, 586, 608, 610, 660, 666, 668, 676, 687, 725, 727, 730–731, 738 ideology (linguistic) 17, 62, 92, 95, 99–100, 109, 135, 138–139, 157–158, 162–163, 298, 309–311, 314, 320, 368, 379, 409–411, 413, 435, 444, 446–447, 456–457, 464, 473–474, 477, 484–485, 488, 495, 518, 520, 534, 550–552, 554–555, 563, 565, 570, 579, 666, 683–684 – local 174–194 – standard language 257, 264, 299, 310–311, 313, 315, 317, 363, 495, 732 see also standard (language/variety) immigration see migration impersonal passive see verb, voice, impersonal passive inalienability 632–633, 635–640, 643–644 indicative see verb, mood and modality, indicative Indo-Portuguese 92, 94, 96, 101 – Daman 98–100 – Diu 93, 95, 98–100 – Korlai 94, 98–99, 106 infinitival construction see verb, infinitival construction informality see register, colloquial/popular informant 7, 104–106, 127–128, 140–143, 145, 150, 146, 163, 204 see also NORMs in-group 498, 708, 713–716 innovation 200–201, 204–205, 212, 282–289, 298, 377, 393–396, 597, 602, 619, 621–622, 686–687, 691, 694–695, 726, 728, 733, 738 Institut d’Estudis Catalans 315–316, 320 interactional linguistics 203, 210, 254, 406, 411 interference 286–287, 316, 599, 609–610, 615, 617 see also contact (language) intergenerational transmission 101, 163, 445, 450, 455, 465–466, 473, 476–477, 482–484, 506, 517–518, 520, 538, 542 see also change, diffusion/transmission of internet see media, new interoperability 35, 42, 46, 54, 129 intertextuality 414 interview see methodology, interview Irish 123 irrealis see verb, mood and modality, irrealis irredentist movement 138, 532–533 isolate 682, 685, 688, 698

Istro-Romanian 116, 130 Italian 15, 17, 34–35, 49–52, 91, 120, 122, 127, 152, 206–210, 217–221, 226–230, 232–248, 255–256, 258, 263, 317, 319–320, 323, 364, 367, 373, 379–380, 388, 391, 393–396, 453–436, 438–440, 446–449, 456, 494–516, 519, 526–537, 539–541, 543–545, 579–581, 653–654, 657–660, 662–663, 665, 667–674, 702–703, 707–713, 715–720 see also Italian/Italo-Romance in North America; neo-standard Italian; Swiss Italian Italian/Italo-Romance dialects 11, 14, 16, 35, 50, 122, 127, 151–152, 208, 255, 260, 320, 323, 364, 439, 447–449, 494–520, 537, 541, 579, 703, 707–708, 713, 716–720 see also Catalan, Algherese; Corsican; Friulian; Gallo-Italian; Ladin; Neapolitan; Romanesco; Sardinian; Sicilian; Tuscan; Umbro-Marchigiano; Venetan, Venetian, Veneto Italian/Italo-Romance in North America 126, 656, 665, 668 Jèrriais 116, 126 koiné 164, 255, 474, 510, 512, 515 koineization 308, 513, 740 Korlai Indo-Portuguese see Indo Portuguese, Korlai Kriyol 93 Labovian sociolinguistics 4–6, 9–12, 62–63, 173–174, 179, 199, 202, 205, 209, 211–212, 254–256, 290, 319, 322, 335, 363 Ladin 116, 313, 318, 446, 448, 496, 517–518, 532, 579 language death/obsolescence 16, 62, 95, 101, 114–130, 151 language in the public space see Linguistic Landscape language maintenance 16, 121, 126, 254, 688–689, 702, 715, 720 language planning and policy 9, 17, 95–96, 207, 311, 315, 320, 433–456, 473–488, 517, 529, 532–533, 538–540, 543–546, 542–544, 556–558, 566–567, 570–589, 740 – corpus planning 311, 314–316, 434, 454–455, 483, 572, 656, 662–663

Index of concepts

– Jacobin policy 437–439, 443–444 – language education policy 581 – status planning 434, 443, 486, 571–572 language shift 101, 118, 255, 475–476, 480, 486, 498–500, 502, 519, 531, 535, 541, 545, 550, 686–688, 706 language vs dialect 119–120 langue d’oc see Occitan Languedocian 116, 153, 156, 162, 319 langue d’oïl see Gallo-Romance la plupart see agreement, with la plupart Latin 51, 217, 219–220, 222–223, 238, 244–246, 366–367, 370, 375, 401, 463, 654, 663 lemmatization 31, 39, 47 lexical bias 238-247 lexical creativity 206, 369, 377, 379, 733 see also neologism lexical routinization 238-243, 246, 248 lexicostatistics 160 lexis see borrowing, lexical/loanword; variation, lexical Lia Rumantscha 123, 531, 534–535, 539–540, 545 Ligurian 116, 496, 519 linguae minores 3, 9–12, 14, 16–17, 19, 61, 114–130, 255, 308, 316, 324, 433–456, 462–488, 494–520, 526–546, 549–567, 570–589, 682–698 lingua franca 511, 711, 729–730 Linguistic Landscape 9, 17, 519, 549–567, 753–755, 759 linguistic market 188–190, 192–193, 520, 552, 558, 565–566 linguistic network 6, 181, 185–187, 191–192, 211–213, 322, 719 literacy 412–413, 419, 426, 447, 450, 498, 518–519, 600, 629, 685, 690 literary production 518–519, 531 loan blend see borrowing, loan blend loan rendition see borrowing, loan rendition loanshift see borrowing, loanshift Loi Deixonne see language planning and policy Loi Toubon see language planning and policy Lombard 496, 502, 514, 519, 537, 718–719 see also Bergamasco London Latinos 753-759 Louisiana Creole 93, 324 Louisiana French 646, 668, 674 see also Cajun French

783

Lucanian 496, 503 lusofonia 317 markedness 6, 9, 180, 184, 265, 284–285, 287, 298, 302, 341, 369–370, 389–390, 399, 506–507, 513, 515, 711, 738 Martinican Creole 13, 93, 407–408, 416–419 mass media see media Mauritian Creole 93, 96, 321, 407, 418 media 94, 212, 367, 411–426, 470, 484, 486, 517, 539, 541, 598–599, 654–655, 660, 739 – multimodal 377, 379, 406, 411, 416 – new 8, 13, 95, 128–129, 215, 313–314, 367, 380, 386–401, 412–413, 416, 423–426, 481, 517–520, 657–658, 730 – SMS 380, 388, 391, 412, 423–424, 426 – social (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) 8, 391–392, 412, 426 – news dispatches 673–674 – newspaper and magazine 98, 318–319, 364– 365, 539, 541, 657–659, 661, 669, 730 see also register, journalistic – radio 98, 122, 318, 341–342, 344, 350–353, 413, 478–479, 481, 539, 542–543, 730 – TV 98, 122, 341–344, 350–353, 358, 364, 413, 478–479, 481, 539, 542, 596, 730 medium 8, 11–13, 343, 352–358 see also variation, diamesic – spoken see orality – written vs spoken 8, 257–260, 338–339, 343, 352–353, 362, 368 mesolect 97 metadata 28, 30, 35, 38–39, 42–44, 48, 52–53, 55 metalanguage 299–300, 308 metalinguistic activity 308, 312, 374 methodology 4–6, 10, 62–63, 86–87, 92, 95–96, 98–99, 101–109, 124–127, 163–164, 197–213, 226–229, 265, 280–292, 301–302, 309, 312–316, 322, 336–344, 358, 363–366, 371–372, 380–381, 411, 465, 551, 555, 686, 703–704, 720 – comparative 10, 12, 16, 18–19, 218, 225, 249, 256, 273, 339–340, 571, 653, 675–677 – ethnographic see ethnolinguistics – fieldwork 7, 100, 102, 104, 115, 126–127, 139–140, 149–150, 157, 225

784

Index of concepts

– for historical sociolinguistics 12 see also sources for historical sociolinguistics – interview 4, 7, 13, 100, 104–108, 125, 140, 149–150, 312, 314, 335, 633–634, 689–690 – participant observation 6, 10, 103–104, 108–109 – qualitative 12, 107, 151–156, 322, 340, 487 – quantitative 8, 10, 12, 156–157, 173–174, 193–194, 198–199, 209, 261, 335, 340, 380 – questionnaire/survey 106–109, 126, 143, 204 – Third Wave 8, 13, 289 Mexican returnees 759–783 migration 13–14, 207, 210, 212–213, 433, 445, 473, 475, 482, 494–495, 501, 526, 534, 541, 577, 596, 598, 607–608, 615, 628, 656, 683–684, 688, 702–721, 724, 734–735, 739–740 – return migration 14, 608 minoritization (linguistic) 464, 473–474, 476, 484, 488, 545, 550, 559 minoritized language see linguae minores mixed language 645, 724–741 mobility 210–213, 485 Moldavian 317, 321, 455–456 Molisano 503 monolingualism 11, 99, 158, 408, 423, 435, 446, 480–481, 487, 495, 500, 506 mood and modality see verb, mood and modality morphology see borrowing, syntactic/morphosyntactic; change, syntactic/morphosyntactic; pronoun; variation, syntactic/morphosyntactic; verb Moselle Franconian 162, 445 Mozambican Portuguese 313, 317, 322 mude 487–488 multidimensionality 289, 337, 339, 341, 598–599 multilingualism 13–14, 16, 92, 98, 101–103, 109, 158, 203, 254, 412, 423, 435, 526–546, 549–567, 573, 577, 579, 702–721, 724, 732, 735, 738–739 see also bilingualism multimodality see media, multimodal music 413, 416, 422–423, 728, 731, 738 narrative see discourse mode, narrative national/official language 94, 125, 127, 140, 208, 308, 410, 433–456, 462, 478–479,

483, 494, 513, 526–527, 529–533, 540, 542–544, 557, 559, 565, 573, 584, 587, 616, 730 Neapolitan 519, 550, 717–718 see also Abruzzese; Calabrian; Campanian; Lucanian; Molisano negation 353, 355–358 see also polarity neography 386–401 neologism 283, 323, 371, 445–447, 454–455, 514, 656, 662–663, 671, 737 see also lexical creativity – external see borrowing, lexical/loanword neo-standard Italian 320, 512–513 news dispatches see media, news dispatches newspapers see media, newspaper and magazine New York Spanish 631, 640, 668 NLP (Natural Language Processing) 27–55 non-parametric test 78, 86–87 non-standard 294, 363, 368–370, 388–390, 518, 540, 597, 599–600, 685 norm 16, 97–98, 103, 177, 207, 224, 256, 294, 309, 312, 315–317, 319, 322, 370, 410, 412, 433, 438, 440, 450, 452, 513 – codification 309, 315, 317, 319, 321, 496, 531 – functional elaboration 309, 318–319 – implementation 309 – polynomic 316, 582 – selection 309, 455 normalization 67, 442, 450–452, 454, 572, 574, 587 Norman 117, 162–163 NORMs 181, 505, 683 see also informant Nouchi 726–727, 729–730, 732–734 Nouvel Atlas linguistique de la France see atlas, Nouvel Atlas linguistique de la France obligatorification 222 observer’s paradox 4, 6–7, 128, 264, 323, 713 Occitan 14, 34, 59, 61–66, 68–87, 117, 120, 122, 126, 137, 149, 152–153, 156, 317, 319, 355, 436, 439, 444–445, 449, 550, 576–579, 583–584, 588, 646 see also Aranese; Cisalpine Occitan; Gascon; Languedocian; Provençal official language see national/official language Old Church Slavonic 366, 375 oral genre 335–358

Index of concepts

orality 12–13, 95, 98, 224, 249, 257, 259, 262, 335–358, 364–365, 369, 370, 409–413, 415–416, 422, 426 see also conversation orthography 38, 48–49, 53, 94, 293–294, 386–401, 415–416, 419, 443, 448, 454, 519, 582, 668–669, 729 – neography/alternative spelling 386–401 Palenquero 94, 101 Papiá Kristang 94, 101 Papiamentu 94, 415 pa(ra) atrás 672, 674 participant observation see methodology, participant observation participatory research 105, 109 passive see verb, voice, passive patois 135, 137, 139–140, 142–143, 158, 163, 175, 198, 410, 437, 443–445, 542, 576 see also dialect perceptual dialectology see dialectology, perceptual Peruvian Spanish 319, 643 Philippine Creole Spanish 95–96, 100, 104, 107–109 – Cavite Chabacano 94, 101 – Ternate Chabacano 94 – Zamboanga Chabacano 92, 94, 108 phonology see borrowing, phonological; change, phonetic/phonological; variation, phonological Piedmontese 117, 120, 122, 260, 320, 438, 496–497, 502, 509–515, 517–519, 708, 715, 719 pluricentrism 316–317, 319, 707 plurilingualism 379, 462, 739 polarity 231–232, 236–237, 247 political discourse 367, 378, 411, 416–418, 454 polymorphism 316, 321 Portuguese 18, 35, 51–52, 91, 93–94, 98–100, 103–104, 120, 212, 217–220, 226–248, 256, 260, 263, 273, 317, 321–322, 364, 388, 409, 462–463, 465–467, 486–487, 496, 596, 603, 615–622, 706, 725 see also Fronteiriço; Mozambican Portuguese Portuguese creole 93–94, 100, 415 see also Angolar; Cape Verdean Creole; Casamancese Creole; Fa d’Ambô; Indo-Portuguese; Kriyol; Papiá Kristang; Principense; Santome; Sri Lanka Portuguese

785

possession 630–644 pragmatic meaning 516 pragmatics 315 preposing of the adjective see word order, preposing of the adjective preposition stranding see word order, preposition stranding prescriptivism see attitude, prescriptive present participle see verb, present participle press see media prestige 6, 95, 97–100, 103–105, 108–109, 119, 123, 187, 292, 294, 308, 322, 409, 464–467, 473, 478–479, 481, 484, 488, 496, 506, 531, 557, 559, 563, 584, 596, 598–600, 609, 615–617, 654, 685, 739 – asymmetry 99–100, 103 – covert 192 – overt 174, 192 Principense 93 pro-drop language 672 productivity 222, 242, 245, 248, 296, 643, 671 – measure of 244 programming language 676 progressive construction see verb, present participle pronoun 606, 617, 689–691 – clitic 129, 265–267, 604–606 – demonstrative 370 – formal vs familiar 98 – impersonal 622, 690 – on/nous 227, 264–265 – realization 672–673, 691–692 – reflexive 622 – relative 370, 692, 694–695, 697 prosody 691 proscription see attitude, proscriptive Provençal 156, 177, 505, 510, 517–518, 550, 556 see also Occitan pseudo-anglicism see borrowing, pseudo-anglicism Puerto Rican Spanish 203 Pugliese 503 purism see attitude, purist Québécois French 317, 319, 646, 655, 665–666, 670, 695 Quechua 628–637, 641–644 que deletion 672, 694 questione ladina 532–533

786

Index of concepts

radio see media, radio Rapport Cerquiglini 445, 577 regional variation see variation, diatopic/geographical/regional register 6, 8, 11–13, 37–38, 95, 105–106, 164, 209, 254, 257, 263, 267, 273, 308, 315, 318, 337, 362–381, 392, 398–401, 409 see also variation, diaphasic – advertising 364, 379, 519, 669 – colloquial/popular 50, 209–210, 265, 290, 318–319, 368–371, 377–378, 388–392, 400, 512–513, 598 – journalistic 34–35, 364, 367, 374, 376–378 see also media, newspaper and magazine – legal and administrative 53, 365, 367, 370, 372–374, 378, 408 – level of formality 343–344, 352–358, 362, 364–365, 368, 392 – religious 366–367, 374–375, 409, 413 – scientific (academic) 339, 341–342, 364–365, 367, 369–370, 374 – slang 53, 207, 294, 297, 369, 380 regression 67–68, 70–87, 182, 190 – logistic 68–77, 81–83, 182–183, 190 repertoire 103, 213, 290, 294, 297, 299, 320, 507–512, 703, 706–710, 714–716, 720 – community 209, 713 – complex 510–512, 707 report see discourse mode, report response value 69 see also application value restructuring 670 Reunion Creole 93, 415, 418 Reversing Language Shift (RLS) 519, 571 revitalization 9, 16–17, 19, 462, 486–487, 519– 520, 549–567, 570–589 see also vitality Rhaeto-Romance 17, 496 see also Friulian, Ladin, Romansh Romanesco 496, 503, 507, 519 Romani 445, 462 Romanian 13, 18, 51, 53, 141, 256, 273, 317, 320–321, 364–371, 373–375, 377–380, 443, 452–456, 496, 596, 608–615 Romansh 117, 123, 312, 526–528, 530–532, 535–540, 543–545 – Rumantsch Grischun 123, 313, 323, 540 roofing language 497, 514, 585–586, 588 rural 14, 63, 135, 141, 145, 150–151, 166–179, 181, 184, 212, 365–366, 368–369, 406, 480, 509, 512, 515, 598, 682–698

rural vs urban divide 682–685, 698 Salentino 503 Santiago Creole see Cape Verdean Creole Santome 93 Sardinian 115–117, 121, 323–324, 446, 448–449, 495–496, 503, 514, 550, 579, 586–587 Scots 556 segmentation 43 self-evaluation 499, 502 semantic class see verb, semantic class semantics see borrowing, semantic; change, semantic Sercquiais 121, 126 Seychelles Creole 93–94, 96, 407 SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) 29–30 Sicilian 117, 121, 496–497, 503, 515–516, 519, 550, 718, 720 see also Calabrian; Pugliese; Salentino simplification 686, 730–731, 738, 740 slang see register, slang slavery 91–92, 99, 407 SMS see media, new, SMS social see variation, diastratic/social social capital 187–188, 191–192, 209, 478, 488 social network see linguistic network socio-economic class see speaker variable, socio-economic status (SES) sociolect 362–365, 368, 610, 615 see also variation, diastratic sociolinguistic behaviour 284–302 sociophonetics 62–87 sources for historical sociolinguistics 256–263, 293–297 – ego-documents 259–261 – textual sources approximating to the vernacular 257–261, 294 space 175, 177, 206–208, 210–213, 549–567 Spanish 10–11, 13, 15, 17–18, 34–35, 49–52, 60, 91, 94, 108, 153, 176–179, 181–182, 203, 206–207, 217–221, 226–230, 232–248, 254–256, 258, 260, 263, 265, 273, 293–300, 313, 317–318, 322, 337, 339–342, 364, 366, 373, 388–390, 392–398, 401, 406, 409, 435–437, 440–442, 449–452, 456, 463–464, 466–467, 473–478, 480, 484, 487, 496, 557–559, 596–622, 628–631, 635, 637,

Index of concepts

642–645, 653–660, 662–663, 665–672, 674–675, 698, 703, 708, 711, 725 see also Andean Spanish; Catalan Spanish; Puerto Rican Spanish; Spanish in North America Spanish creole 94, 415 see also Palenquero; Papiamentu; Philippine Creole Spanish Spanish in North America 668, 674 see also US Spanish speaker 119, 127–128, 246, 249, 282, 285–291, 298, 301, 308–309, 314, 317, 554 – agent 308, 310–311, 316–321 – lay/non-linguist 297, 308, 310–311, 321 – native 17, 19, 109, 114, 129, 498, 500, 598, 600, 617, 628 – new 9, 17, 19, 324, 475, 477, 485, 487–488, 518 – restricted 685–686, 695 speaker variable 4–5, 10, 16, 18, 173–175, 179, 182–183, 197–213, 256, 301 see also variable; variation – age 47, 53, 140, 182, 203–208, 211, 258, 296, 476, 486, 498, 504, 506, 694–696, 727–728, 730, 732, 734–735, 740 – youth language 48, 53, 734–741 – ethnicity 100, 185–187, 202, 296 – gender/sex 6, 10, 47, 53, 63–66, 70–72, 74, 76–85, 140, 173, 179–184, 193, 200–204, 212–213, 257–259, 296, 505, 609 – socio-economic status (SES) 5, 14, 48, 53, 140, 145, 176, 180, 182, 184, 187–193, 207–208, 211-213, 257–261, 295–297, 320, 498, 504 – spatiality 201–211 speech community see community (linguistic) Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz see atlas, Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz Sri Lanka Portuguese 94–95 standard (language/variety) 13, 16–18, 114, 118, 123, 176, 179, 184, 193, 292, 308–314, 316, 320, 323, 369–371, 378–379, 398–400, 409, 436, 439, 448, 483, 508, 587, 600 see also ideology (linguistic), standard language standardization 48, 119, 123, 254–255, 290, 308, 312–313, 315, 318, 321, 363, 366–367, 370, 434, 442, 454, 463, 478, 513, 519, 535, 540, 550, 572, 582, 585–588, 616, 732 – language standardization evaluation 317

787

– restandardization 319 statistics 8, 59–87, 174, 176, 178, 180, 182–183, 193–194, 229, 232–234, 237, 239–241, 243–244, 247, 266, 268, 270–272, 283, 337, 349, 352, 357, 475–477, 480, 483–485, 498–503, 537, 540–541, 656 – statistical significance 68, 70–71, 77 status planning see language planning and policy, status planning stereotype 176, 738 stigmatization 506–507, 597, 600, 619, 738–739 St Lucian Creole 96 story see discourse mode, story structural conventionalization 222, 246–248 structural similarity/relatedness 617–618, 623, 627, 663, 671, 711 style 13, 103, 207, 282, 290, 292, 312, 320, 335, 362–364 subjunctive see verb, mood and modality subordination see clause, embedded substandard 498, 513, 717 substrate 91, 94, 159–160, 184 superdiversity 475, 684 superstrate 159–160, 486 survey see methodology, questionnaire/survey Swiss German 536–537, 543 Swiss Italian 317 syllabogram 394–396, 401 syncretism 221, 226–227, 514, 690, 694 syntax see agreement; borrowing, syntactic/ morphosyntactic; change, syntactic/morphosyntactic; clause, embedded; negation; pronoun; que deletion; variation, syntactic/ morphosyntactic; verb; word order tagging 36–37, 39, 43–44, 51, 53 see also annotation Tayo 92–93 TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) 8, 30–31, 33, 43–44, 46 tense usage see verb, tense terminology commission 656 Ternate Chabacano see Philippine Creole Spanish, Ternate Chabacano territoriality principle see language planning and policy textism 396 text type 8, 11–13, 106, 256, 264–265, 272, 362–381, 387, 657-659

788

Index of concepts

Third Wave see methodology, Third Wave Ticinese 515 time, in apparent time/in real time see change topic (discourse) 500, 704 toponymy 135, 159, 564, 572 transcription 27–33, 36, 38–39, 42, 44, 46, 49, 52, 54–55, 105, 137, 145–146, 150, 290 transfer (linguistic) see borrowing translanguaging 14, 749 translation 318, 561–563, 673–674 transnationalism 584, 586, 706, 745–763 transparency, structural 605–606 tug-of-war theory 287–288, 294, 298–302 Tuscan 496 see also Florentine TV see media, TV Umbro-Marchigiano 503 unchange see change, unchange/continuity unidirectional see change, unidirectional universal 282–289, 340, 358, 396 – sociolinguistic 6–7, 19, 284, 286 urban 6, 13–14, 19, 98, 145, 176, 181, 184, 199, 206, 211–212, 369, 480–481, 484, 486, 504–505, 509, 512, 598, 683–685, 724–741 – banlieue 185–187, 207, 211, 646, 734–737 Uruguayan Portuguese see Fronteiriço US Spanish 655–657, 665, 672 see also New York Spanish Valencian see Catalan, Valencian Valencian Spanish 51 VARBRUL 60, 62, 65, 67–81, 86 variable (linguistic) 4–6, 62–87, 106, 173–174, 182, 223–224, 269, 282, 285, 289, 292, 294, 296–299, 311 see also speaker variable; variation variable rule 59–60, 65, 67–69, 86 variation 15, 19, 27, 34, 53–54, 60, 92, 95–98, 101, 108, 124–125, 217–249, 257, 273, 280–302 see also speaker variable; variable – consensual social-class model of 188–189 – diamesic 4, 16, 512, 574 see also medium – diaphasic 4, 6, 10, 15–16, 51, 209, 265, 268, 307, 362–381, 512 see also register – diastratic/social 15–16, 49, 51, 64–65, 164, 197–213, 295, 308, 315, 362–363, 365, 409, 508, 512, 596, 617, 685 see also sociolect; speaker variable

– diatopic/geographical/regional 5, 9, 15–16, 19, 49–51, 123, 135, 144–145, 151–158, 174–179, 292, 307, 313, 315, 363, 473, 498, 508, 512, 582, 617 see also dialect – different rates of 284 – hearer 54 – intradialectal 512 – lexical 147, 206 – orthographic 48 – personal pattern 685–698 – phonological 5, 10, 49, 60, 62–87, 98, 104, 108, 125, 138, 144–146, 150, 158, 173, 203, 206–207, 211, 254, 293–294, 335, 370, 619, 695–697 – affrication 185–187 – /o/-raising 177–179 – ouisme 285, 300 – rhotacization 62–85 see also change, phonetic/phonological, rhotacization – /r/ variable in Quebec 190 – schwa deletion 180–181 – sibilant 176, 180, 203, 207 – yeísmo 181, 619 – žeísmo 181–182 – syntactic/morphosyntactic 5, 10, 51, 60, 125, 129, 207, 264, 324, 343, 370, 513–514, 692–695 variational sociolinguistics 15, 313–314 Venetan, Venetian, Veneto 117, 126, 130, 254, 260, 496, 503, 514, 519, 707, 717–718, 720 verb 98–99 – auxiliary selection 672, 692–694 – embedded 244–248 see also clause, embedded – governing 220–224, 228–230, 232, 234–249 – infinitival construction 672 – matrix 221–222, 228, 230–233, 247 – mood and modality 5, 38, 217–249 – conditional 228, 231, 233–234, 247, 672 – indicative 219, 221–223, 228, 230, 248 – irrealis 231–232, 238, 246, 340 – subjunctive 60, 217–249, 256, 342, 620, 672 – present participle 672–674 – semantic class 234–237 – tense 60–61, 223, 226, 233–234, 340, 342–343, 345, 347–349, 355, 357, 603–604, 614, 630

Index of concepts

– voice – impersonal passive 673 – passive 672–673 vernacular see register, colloquial/popular; variation, diaphasic vitality 13, 93–95, 104, 121–123, 426, 464, 476–478, 484, 516–520, 534–535, 707, 728, 754 see also revitalization – vitality index 516–519 Walloon 117, 122, 126 word order 345, 604–405, 631–637, 641–643 – clitic climbing 265–267 – preposing of the adjective 672–673 – preposition stranding 672

789

Wörter und Sachen 142, 160 writing system 389, 394-396, 401, 443, 455, 577 written, see medium, written vs spoken XML (eXtensible Markup Language) 8, 30–32, 43, 45 yeísmo see variation, phonological, yeísmo youth language see speaker variable, age, youth language Zamboanga Chabacano see Philippine Creole Spanish, Zamboanga Chabacano žeísmo see variation, phonological, žeísmo

Index of names Aboh, Enoch 406, 408 Adam, Jean-Michel 340–341, 345, 364 Adelaar, Willem 632 Aikhenvald, Alexandra 631–633 Allières, Jacques 152, 156 Alvar, Manuel 174, 176, 397 Anciaux, Frédéric 423–424 Andersen, Henning 282 Anderson, Benedict 474 Anipa, Kormi 12, 280–281, 285, 287, 291, 293–299 Ascoli, Graziadio 125, 135, 161, 440, 532, 534 Assmann, Aleida 410 Assmann, Jan 410 Attali, Michaël 660–662 Austin, Peter 118, 124 Ayres-Bennett, Wendy 12, 18, 254, 258, 262, 264–267, 290, 298, 300, 363, 367, 654, 656–657, 663–664, 667, 670 Baayen, Harald 60, 72–73, 80–81, 86 Bakhtin, Mikhail 336–337, 340, 364 Bally, Charles 363–365 Bartoli, Matteo 198 Baugh, Albert 280, 283, 298, 300 Beaulieu, Louise 300 Bébèl-Jislè, Dany 415 Bec, Pierre 63, 151, 154, 156–158, 317 Bernard-Béziade, Mélanie 660–662 Berruto, Gaetano 16–17, 208, 320, 364, 368– 369, 497, 499, 503, 506–507, 511–513, 515–517, 519–520, 579, 707–708, 710– 711 Biber, Douglas 6, 8, 273, 335, 337–341, 344, 352–353, 355, 358, 362–363, 365, 367, 398 Blanche-Benveniste, Claire 53, 344, 348–349, 353, 364 Blasco, Mylène 341–342 Blommaert, Jan 9, 210, 406, 655, 666, 683–684, 706, 746, 748–749, 754 Boas, Franz 29 Bollée, Annegret 96, 415 Bosque, Ignacio 642 Bottiglioni, Gino 137–138, 140, 161 Boudreau, Annette 300, 726–727, 732 Bourdieu, Pierre 47, 187–189, 191, 193, 209, 310, 312, 488, 552, 750–751 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-032

Bourhis, Richard 9, 549, 551, 572, 754 Bowern, Claire 100, 102–103, 627, 674 Boyer, Henri 206–207, 446 Braselmann, Petra 653, 656, 673, 675 Bruneau-Ludwig, Florence 95, 409 Brunot, Ferdinand 254, 300, 436–437 Bybee, Joan 221, 245, 286, 299, 640 Cable, Thomas 280, 283, 298, 300 Calvet, Louis-Jean 15 Cameron, Deborah 174, 297 Cappeau, Paul 341–343 Carpooran, Arnaud 321, 415 Carroll, Susan 307–308 Carruthers, Janice 13, 344–346, 349, 353–355, 654, 656–657, 663–664, 667, 670 Cerrón Palomino, Rodolfo 633–634, 638 Certeau, Michel de 437 Chaudenson, Robert 95–97, 415, 689 Cichocki, Wladyslaw 300 Comrie, Bernard 623 Cooper, Robert 551 Corominas, Joan 285 Coșeriu, Eugenio 15, 197, 307, 319, 363, 496 Coteanu, Ion 364–365, 369 Còveri, Lorenzo 206, 440 Croft, William 627, 632 Crystal, David 30, 280, 283, 310, 375, 380 Culpeper, Jonathan 283 Dauzat, Albert 141, 148, 208, 300, 364 De Mauro, Tullio 30, 50–51, 255, 447, 498, 500, 579 Díaz Bravo, Rocío 294, 296 Díaz-Campos, Manuel 280, 363 Dixon, Robert 631–633 D’Offay, Danielle 415 Duchêne, Alexandre 561 Eckert, Penelope 8, 206, 289, 364 Edmont, Edmond 16, 125, 137–138, 146–147, 174, 204 Erfurt, Jürgen 437–438 Ernst, Gerhard 258, 260–261, 268, 290 Estienne, Henri 298 Étiemble, René 652

Index of names

Fabra, Pompeu 316, 321, 442 Ferguson, Charles 363, 399–400, 409, 434, 599 Fishman, Joshua 374, 409, 553, 562, 571, 581 Fouché, Pierre 300 Fournier, Jean-Marie 255, 264, 300 Gadet, Françoise 14, 16, 197, 207, 341, 343, 353, 358, 364, 368, 405–406, 408–409, 412, 653, 655, 666, 672–673, 694, 724, 734–736, 738, 741, 746 Gal, Susan 102, 177, 410–411, 750 Galet, Yvette 266–267 Gauchat, Louis 135, 198, 201, 204, 534, 542 Gilliéron, Jules 16, 125, 135–138, 140–141, 146–148, 161, 163, 174, 204 Goebl, Hans 129, 532, 534 Görlach, Manfred 652–653, 663–664, 666– 667, 670, 676 Grassi, Corrado 198, 514 Gregory, Michael 307–308 Griera, Antoni 143, 150, 163 Guespin, Louis 434 Guiter, Henri 149, 153, 156–157 Hagège, Claude 311, 657 Halliday, Michael 363, 372, 376, 398 Haugen, Einar 15, 307–309, 315, 318, 324, 434, 664, 682 Hay, Jennifer 62, 67, 70, 72–73, 75, 77–79, 81, 86 Hazaël-Massieux, Guy 97, 409 Hazaël-Massieux, Marie-Christine 96, 413–415 Heine, Bernd 222, 631–633, 635, 640–641, 644 Heller, Monica 561 Hermann, Eduard 204–205 Hernández-Campoy, Juan Manuel 199, 253–254 Herrmann, Theo 301 Herzog, Marvin 59, 281, 319, 685 Hickey, Raymond 282, 652, 683, 695 Hobsbawm, Eric 474 Holder, Maurice 300 Holm, John A. 91, 93, 408 Hookoomsing, Vinesh 415 Hornberger, Nancy 571, 574, 588 Hudson, Richard A. 283, 286, 289–291, 301, 398 Husserl, Edmund 406 Iordan, Iorgu 365 Irvine, Judith 102, 177, 410–411

791

Jaberg, Karl 128, 141–142, 161, 198, 200 Jakobson, Roman 372, 374–376, 673 Jansen, Silke 410 Jespersen, Otto 200 Johnson, Daniel 60, 67–70, 73, 75, 77–78, 80–81, 83, 85–87 Jones, Mari 10, 16, 121, 124, 126, 256, 653, 666, 672–673 Jud, Jakob 128, 142, 160, 198, 200 Kaufman, Terrence 406, 627–628, 652 Keating, Kelle Lyn 300 Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine 342–344 King, Ruth 60–61, 256, 264, 646, 674–675, 726 Klajn, Ivan 652, 661, 667 Klimenkowa, Alla 407 Kloss, Heinz 494, 586 Koch, Peter 268, 352, 364, 369, 411 Koerner, Konrad 405 Kowner, Rotem 653–654, 659–660, 666, 676 Krefeld, Thomas 210–211, 496 Kremnitz, Georg 96, 434, 441, 450–451, 576–577 Kriegel, Sibylle 411, 416 Labat, Jean-Baptiste 413, 415 Labov, William 4–8, 10–12, 59, 135, 161–163, 173–174, 179, 184, 188, 199, 202, 205, 211, 223–224, 228, 257, 264, 281, 283, 285, 287, 298, 302, 308, 315, 319–320, 322, 345, 354, 363, 405, 683, 685, 696 Lakoff, Robin 202 Landry, Rodrigue 9, 549, 551, 572, 754 Lass, Roger 281 Leech, Geoffrey 36, 43 Lepschy, Anna 657 Lepschy, Giulio 657 Lipski, John 10, 96, 100–101, 617–618, 653, 674–675, 698 Lloyd, Paul 302 Ludwig, Ralph 13, 95–96, 406–411, 413–419, 653, 655, 724 Maas, Utz 434 Maiden, Martin 18, 129–130, 256, 494, 665, 668 Manzoni, Alessandro 440

792

Index of names

Marcellesi, Jean-Baptiste 140, 434, 582 Martineau, France 61, 256, 259–262, 264, 646, 653 Martinet, André 147, 204, 287, 291, 302, 673 Matras, Yaron 513, 602, 615, 627, 640, 644, 652, 724, 726, 739 McKenzie, Robert 307, 312, 322 McLaughlin, Mairi 653, 672–674 McMahon, April 282, 290 McWhorter, John 91, 408 Medina Morales, Francisca 294–296, 301 Meillet, Antoine 136, 160, 163, 198, 208, 405 Metzeltin, Miguel 307–308, 463 Michaelis, Susanne 93, 408 Migliorini, Bruno 448, 654, 659 Milá y Fontanals, Manuel 597 Milroy, James 6, 10, 181, 212, 280, 282–283, 286, 291, 298, 310–311 Milroy, Lesley 4–6, 10, 173–175, 179, 185–186, 192, 212, 280, 283, 310–311 Mithun, Marianne 628–629, 644 Mondada, Lorenza 7, 406, 411–412 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric 414 Moreno Fernández, Francisco 254, 284, 287, 313, 473–474 Mufwene, Salikoko 91, 130, 406, 408, 628, 735 Mühlhäusler, Peter 102, 406 Nadasdi, Terry 60, 646, 653 Navarro Tomás, Tomás 145, 176, 390, 397 Nevalainen, Terttu 254, 259, 262, 264, 272, 282, 290, 292 Oesterreicher, Wulf 258, 268, 352, 364, 369, 411 Ong, Walter 405 Orr, John 652 Osthus, Dietmar 307, 312, 322 Otheguy, Ricardo 653, 666, 668, 683, 685 Pagel, Steve 406, 408 Papen, Robert 668, 726 Parodi, Giovanni 339, 341 Patzelt, Carolin 211 Penny, Ralph 255, 654, 665, 671 Pfänder, Stefan 655 Piller, Ingrid 660, 669 Pop, Sever 124, 140–143, 158, 161, 363 Pope, Mildred 300

Poplack, Shana 10, 12, 18, 60, 218, 222–225, 228, 231, 234–235, 238, 242, 256, 313, 646, 657, 685, 724 Posner, Rebecca 160, 281, 284, 286, 294, 300, 725 Potowski, Kim 668 Pountain, Christopher 255, 261, 263, 366, 617, 622, 656–657, 663–664, 667, 671–673 Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena 254, 259, 280, 282, 284, 290, 292 Reutner, Ursula 415–416 Ricento, Thomas 309–311 Rohlfs, Gerhard 151–152, 154 Romaine, Suzanne 121, 253–254, 257, 264, 280, 283–285, 290, 293, 302, 653, 674 Rosenhouse, Judith 653–654, 659–660, 666, 676 Rosset, Théodore 300 Rousselot, Jean-Pierre 137, 198 Rudd, Philip 406 Russell Webb, Eric 661–662 Sallabank, Julia 118, 121–122, 124, 126 Salomon, Herman 415 Salzmann, Tabea 416 Sampson, Rodney 283–286 Sankoff, David 11, 59–60, 68, 188–190, 223, 657 Saussure, Ferdinand de 141, 158–159, 189, 281, 284, 287, 302 Scheuermeier, Paul 142–143 Schleicher, August 595 Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte 437–438 Schmidt, Johannes 596 Scholz, Arno 653, 658–659, 669 Schröder, Anne 406 Schuchardt, Hugo 142, 160, 198 Schwarze, Sabine 410 Séguy, Jean 64, 148–151, 156–157, 159 Seijido, Magali 298, 300 Siegel, Jeff 96–97, 99, 103–106, 629, 631, 643–645 Silva-Corvalán, Carmen 227, 299, 640, 653, 683 Sinner, Carsten 314, 411 Sobrero, Alberto 199, 219, 364, 514 Spolsky, Bernard 309, 320, 551–552, 554 Stäbler, Cynthia 411 Stein, Peter 415

Index of names

Tagliamonte, Sali 4–8, 60–61, 67–69, 72–73, 80–81, 86, 173, 225 Tagliavini, Carlo 201 Tejedo-Herrero, Fernando 60, 254, 263, 281– 283, 290 Temple, Rosalind 60, 654, 656–657, 663–664, 667, 670 Terracini, Benvenuto 198 Texeda, Jerónimo de 298 Thomason, Sarah 406, 627–628, 652, 666, 724 Thurot, Charles 297, 300 Traugott, Elizabeth 640–641, 644 Traverso, Véronique 342–344 Trudgill, Peter 4–7, 9, 181, 187, 199, 367, 643 Tuten, Donald 254, 263, 281–283, 290, 293 Valdés, Juan de 298–300 Valdman, Albert 96–97, 99, 103–106, 408–409, 414–415, 645, 656, 688–689

793

Vaugelas, Claude Favre de 259, 269–270, 298, 409 Veny, Joan 144–145 Vertovec, Steven 475, 747–748, 754 Villalón, Cristóbal de 298 Wagner, Suzanne 174, 205 Walter, Henriette 654, 659 Wartburg, Walther von 135, 143, 147, 161, 163 Weinreich, Uriel 15, 59, 174–175, 281, 287, 291, 319, 535–536, 539, 623, 627, 682–683, 685 Whitney, William 405 Williams, Glyn 465, 488 Winford, Donald 652, 724 Woolard, Kathryn 750