Language Change: The Interplay of Internal, External and Extra-Linguistic Factors (review)

In the ‘Introduction’ by Kimberly Farrar and Mari C. Jones, we are told that ‘[t]he main aim of this volume is to provide evidence from a number of different languages and language families to counter the apparent tendency that has existed in the past to see the explanation of language change as a choice between “language-internal” (i.e. intra-systemic) and “language-external” factors (i.e. contact)’ (1). This collection comprises fourteen articles, grouped under four major themes, with each article conveniently preceded by an abstract.

The first theme is ‘Levelling’, a concept which has been extended from its ‘internal’ sense of complete or partial elimination of alternations within a paradigm to an ‘external’ sense of reduction of attrition of marked variants whereby two dialects of a language may become more alike in the direction of the more prestigious variety, or the salient differences between two dialects of equal status may be reduced in the direction of a lowest common denominator. The articles in this section are ‘Dialect contact and koinéization: The case of northern France’ by David Hornsby, ‘The depicardization of the vernaculars of the Lille conurbation’ by Tim Pooley, ‘Jordanian and Palestinian dialects in contact: Vowel raising in Amman’ by Enam Al-Wer, ‘ “Salience” as an explanatory factor in language change: Evidence from dialect levelling in urban England’ by Paul Kerswill and Ann Williams, and ‘My Dad’s auxiliaries’ by Edith Esch.

The next theme is ‘Convergence’, which involves a bidirectional linguistic influence that ‘may be perceived as a more insidious form of contact-induced change as the lexicons of the converging varieties are left mainly intact, while the change occurs primarily at the morpho-syntactic level’ (10–11). This section contains Mari C. Jones’s ‘Mette a haout dauve la grippe des Angllaïs: Convergence on the Island of Guernsey’, David Holton’s ‘Modern Greek: Towards a standard language or a new diglossia?’, Laura Wright’s ‘Standard English and the lexicon: Why so many different spellings?’, Joseph Cremona’s ‘Latin and Arabic evolutionary processes: Some reflections’, and David Britain and Andrea Sudbury’s ‘There’s sheep and there’s penguins: Convergence, “drift” and “slant” in New Zealand and Falkland Island English’.

What the editors have termed ‘adaptive mechanisms’ constitutes the subject of the third section. At issue here is primary bilingual language acquisition wherein individual children can be viewed as being in a contact situation in the sense that one language exerts an ‘external’ influence on the other. The two articles that deal with this topic are ‘Convergence in the brain: The leakiness of bilinguals’ sound systems’ by Ian Watson and ‘Language contact in early bilinguals: The special status of function words’ by Margaret Deuchar and Marilyn May Vihman.

The last section revolves around the notion of code-copying, which presents itself as an interactive approach to the description of contact-induced language change, one that deals with concepts such as leveling, convergence, and adaptive mechanisms in an integrative way. Dealing with this topic are Lars Johanson’s ‘Contact-induced change in a code-copying framework’ and Éva Ágnes Csatô’s ‘Karaim: A high-copying language’.

What is most impressive about this collection of articles is the range of perspectives it offers, not only in terms of the number of languages and dialects that are treated but also with regard to the multi-faceted approaches under which language change, variation, and development are studied and analyzed. From phonetics to pragmatics and even orthography, there is hardly an area of linguistic science that is not touched on, and Jones and Esch are to be...