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  • New-dialect formation: The inevitability of colonial Englishes by Peter Trudgill
  • Paul Kerswill
New-dialect formation: The inevitability of colonial Englishes. By Peter Trudgill. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Pp. xii, 165. ISBN 0195220439. $28.

Trudgill’s book (henceforth NDF) grows organically out of a unique project, Origins of New Zealand English (ONZE), directed by Elizabeth Gordon at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. I say ‘organically’ because NDF picks up and brings to a logical conclusion just one of the many themes in the main ONZE work, Gordon et al. 2004: the idea that new dialects are formed deterministically, without the influence of any social factors except demography. Both NDF and Gordon et al. are based on recordings of about one-third of the 325 pioneer reminiscences collected from elderly people by the Mobile Unit of the New Zealand Broadcasting [End Page 657] Corporation in 1946–48. The uniqueness of ONZE lies in the fact that a great deal can now be inferred about the processes leading to the formation of New Zealand English (NZE) and by extension other ‘new dialects’ as well. This is because the Mobile Unit speakers were the New Zealand-born offspring of the early immigrants from the British Isles, and so represent an intermediate stage in the formation process. They show a large amount of variability, both among themselves and within their own idiolects—more than would be expected in established speech communities. In Gordon et al. 2004, the ONZE team, including T, pieced together much about how order was achieved out of apparent chaos.

However, for T himself, it has been important that ONZE allowed him to test his (1986) hypotheses about new-dialect formation (NDF 100–101). And here lies the source of divergence in the positions taken by the two books. Gordon et al. is a detailed, summative work containing a wealth of information, including historical background and quantitative sociolinguistic analyses of eleven phonetic/phonological variables. Not surprisingly, the book discusses a range of ways of interpreting the path (or paths) leading to today’s highly focused NZE. In several places, faced with inconclusive or conflicting results, the authors admit that some interpretations remain equivocal. In his closely argued elaboration of one of these paths, T makes specific, strong claims about the formation of new dialects in ‘tabula rasa’ conditions where there is no antecedent population speaking the same or a related language. Essentially, T claims that the shape of NZE is predictable given the demographic mix of the English, Scottish, and Irish immigrants in the early colonial period from 1840 to the 1870s. That is, if we know where the people came from and in what proportions, and if we can discover what dialects they spoke, then we can actually predict NZE. This is a deterministic model, which applies automatically in tabula rasa situations—but not, T states, in new-dialect formation in, for instance, European new towns, where there is greater continuity and contact (29; see Kerswill & Williams 2000, 2005).

T’s model makes claims about the role of accommodation in face-to-face interaction, as well as that of social factors such as prestige and identity. These social factors have no role at all except among the original adult immigrants, while accommodation plays a crucial role among both these immigrants and the third generation who, as children, finally form the crystallized new variety. Neither accommodation nor social factors have any influence on the speech of the middle generation, like the Mobile Unit informants, for reasons that are integral to his model. By contrast, the demographic distribution, in terms of proportions, of people speaking particular dialects, and the associated variable of the relative frequency of particular dialect variants, are fundamental to the determinism concept.

T sets out his three-stage model in the central chapters of his book (3–5). Ch. 1 reviews ‘colonial dialects’ of Spanish and French, as well as Australian and South African English, and anticipates his conclusion by demonstrating that all of these new language varieties were the result of mixing and leveling (reduction of input variability) and not mere transplantation of an ancestral dialect as many have supposed. Nor are they the...

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