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In J. K. Chambers, P. Trudgill &N. Schilling-Estes (eds.)

The handbook of language variation and change

Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 669-702.

Koineization and accommodation

Paul Kerswill 11/9/00

Koineization as language change

Several chapters in this volume [those by Gordon, Bailey, Klemola and Britain] deal with

language change, from a number of perspectives. In this chapter, we discuss

koineization

, a

contact-induced process that leads to quite rapid, and occasionally dramatic, change. Through

koineization, new varieties of a language are brought about as a result of contact between

speakers of mutually intelligible varieties of that language. Koineization is a particular case

of what Trudgill, in his 1986 work, calls ‘dialect contact’; typically, it occurs in new

settlements to which people, for whatever reason, have migrated from different parts of a

single language area. Examples of

koines

(the outcomes of koineization) include the

Hindi/Bhojpuri varieties spoken in Fiji and South Africa, and the speech of ‘new towns’ such

as Høyanger in Norway and Milton Keynes in England. Dialect contact, and with it

koineization, is one of the main external causes of language change – ‘external’ here referring

to social factors, in this case migration, which can reasonably be expected to promote change.

Contrasted with this are ‘internal’ factors, which have to do with aspects of the structure of a

particular language (its phonology and its grammar) which, perhaps because of structural

imbalances, are predisposed to change.

Because koineization can take place relatively swiftly (though it is probably more

gradual than pidginization – see Siegel, forthcoming), a central theme of this chapter will be

the immediate mechanisms of change rather than the description of longer-term trends that

take place over a century or more (like the English Great Vowel Shift or the rise of the

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auxiliary ‘do’). We will be asking questions like, ‘Are permanent language changes

prefigured in the utterances of the people whose speech communities are undergoing

change?’; ‘Is it children, adolescents, or adults who are the main agents of change?’; ‘Do the

social network characteristics of the migrants have an effect?’; ‘Does it matter whether the

contributing dialects are very different or very similar?’; ‘How long does it take for a koine to

emerge?’; ‘Are there circumstances in which dialect contact doesn’t lead to the formation of a

koine?’; On the more ‘linguistic’ side, we shall be asking: ‘Which features found in the

melting pot of the early stages of koineization survive in the koine, and which are lost?’; ‘Are

there particular characteristics of these features that leads to the one outcome or the other?’.

Koineization, as we shall see, typically takes two or three generations to complete,

though it is achievable within one. It is in principle possible for us to observe specific cases,

though this has (to my knowledge) not been achieved for the complete process. Thus, the

literature contains detailed descriptions of koines (the final outcome of koineization) from a

number of parts of the world, together with conjectural reconstructions of the social and

linguistic history of the speakers who contributed to the koine. In the literature, we can also

find a very small number of descriptions of the inception of koines, with direct observations

of the first generation of speakers in new locations. For one established koine, the English of

New Zealand, we even have recordings of the offspring of the original English-speaking

immigrants (albeit as elderly people) to compare with the modern form of the language.

Before we go on, I will outline the general model of language change within which I

shall be operating. Labov (1972) shows that language variation is systematic, in that it can be

related to social divisions within a community, such as class and gender. Change can be

shown to originate with particular social groups based on these divisions. However, a number

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of linguists have recently argued that language change lies with the individual (J. Milroy,

1992, Croft, 2000). Thus, the only circumstance under which language change may result is

when the collective use of a new linguistic feature by individual speakers is sufficiently

frequent to be taken up as a new norm. This position need not conflict with that of Labov,

since these individual-speaker behaviors take place against the backdrop of larger social

structures. As we shall see, the individual-as-agent-of-change approach is particularly

relevant in the case of koineization, because this is a process which starts with the first

generation of incomers adapting their speech to the other speakers they encounter. This

adaptation is an example of

speech accommodation

, a research area to which we will return.

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Mixing, leveling, simplification and reallocation in established koines

The term ‘koine’ (whose Greek meaning is ‘common’) was first used to refer to the form of

Greek used as a lingua franca during the Hellenistic and Roman periods (Siegel, 1985, p.358;

Bubenik, 1993). It arose as a mixed vernacular among ordinary people in the Peiraieus, the

seaport of Athens, which was inhabited by Greeks from different parts of the Mediterranean

(Thomson, 1960, p.34, quoted in Siegel, 1985, p.358). This kind of ‘koine’ is, of course,

rather different from the examples given in the previous section, in that it is not a new variety

used as a vernacular, but rather a compromise dialect used for communication between

speakers of other Greek varieties. This Koine later became the language of the Macedonian

empire, and was widely used as a second language, though it did acquire some native

speakers (Thomson, 1960). According to Siegel (1985, p.358), the Koine was characterized

reduction

and

simplification

. ‘Reduction’ refers to “those processes that lead to a

decrease in the referential or non-referential potential of a language” (Mühlhäusler, 1980,

p.21), involving, for example, a reduced vocabulary or fewer stylistic devices. To judge from

the recent literature, reduction is not pervasive in koines, though, as we shall see, it may be

present. However, it is a defining feature of pidgins, whose genesis is very different from that

of most koines. (Similarities and differences between these two kinds of contact varieties will

be explored in the final section.) ‘Simplification’, which is a notion we will return to

repeatedly, refers to “either an increase in regularity or a decrease in markedness” (Siegel,

1985, p.358, quoting Mühlhäusler). In practice, this means a decrease in irregularity in

morphology and an increase in invariable word forms (Mühlhäusler, 1974, cited in Trudgill,

1986, p.103), to which can be added the loss of categories such as gender, the loss of

morphologically marked cases, simplified morphophonemics, and a decrease in the number

of phonemes. Siegel’s recent definition is a useful, very general, reference point:

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A koine is a stabilized contact variety which results from the mixing and subsequent

levelling of features of varieties which are similar enough to be mutually intelligible,

such as regional or social dialects. This occurs in the context of increased interaction

or integration among speakers of these varieties. (Siegel, forthcoming)

As Siegel (1985) points out, the term ‘koine’ has been variously used to refer to

different aspects of mixed, compromise languages – their form, their function, and their

origin – and there has been disagreement as to what should or should not be included in the

definition. Two categories stand out, already alluded to above:

regional koine

and

immigrant koine

. The original Koine was at first a regional koine, which did not replace the

contributing dialects; on the other hand, a new dialect in a new settlement is an immigrant

koine, which, once established, becomes the vernacular of the new community, replacing the

regional dialects of the original migrants – though not, of course, having any effect on the

dialects in their place of origin.

Between these two categories we find

regional dialect leveling

, which, as we shall

see, shares certain important properties with koineization. ‘Regional dialect leveling’ refers to

the decrease in the number of variants of a particular phonological, morphological or lexical

unit in a given dialect area, and should be distinguished from

diffusion

, which is the spread

of linguistic features across a dialect area. Leveling leads to a reduction in differences

between dialects and hence a gradual homogenization of the vernacular speech of a region.

For example, in many parts of Italy new regional varieties have emerged, usually centered on

a city. Linguistically, they are a compromise between a number of local dialects and the

standard language. Some scholars, such as Sobrero (1996, p.106), actually refer to these as

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‘koines’, a use of the term which has some justification since there is evidence that Italian

‘koines’ do not necessarily supplant the local dialects, with speakers regularly switching

between dialect and koine (Trumper & Maddalon, 1988). By far the more usual case is

dialect leveling entailing the loss, or at least attrition, of dialects. This is widespread in

modern Europe (Auer & Hinskens, 1996; Hinskens, 1996, 1998; Sandøy, 1998; Thelander,

1980, 1982; Williams & Kerswill, 1999) as well as elsewhere (see Inoue, 1986, on recent

changes in Tokyo). Regional dialect leveling may lead to varieties that resemble any koines

that may be spoken in the same region, particularly with respect to simplification – a point we

shall return to.

We will be concerned mainly with immigrant koines, or, to use Trudgill’s term,

new

dialects

(Trudgill, 1986, p.83). In this section, I shall outline some of the key features of

established koines, before, in the remaining sections, tracing the stages through which a

potential koine must pass if it is to reach stability. According to Trudgill (1986, p.127),

koineization is composed of three processes:

mixing

leveling

, and

simplification

(Elsewhere in his book, he refers just to leveling and simplification – a fact that is

unproblematic since leveling can only take place if, in the new speech community, there has

been prior dialect mixing leading to the presence of more than one form for a particular

linguistic category, such as a vowel, a pronoun, or a suffix.) In koines, we also find what

Trudgill has called

reallocation

, which is defined thus: “Reallocation occurs where two or

more variants in the dialect mix survive the levelling process but are refunctionalised,

evolving new social or linguistic functions in the new dialect” (Britain & Trudgill, 1999,

p.245; cf. Trudgill, 1986, p.110). We turn now to the first of our examples.

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One of the major population movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries was the shipment of people from the Indian subcontinent to work as indentured

laborers in the European colonies (Mesthrie, 1993). This resulted in new varieties of Indian

languages, particularly Bhojpuri (a Hindi variety of north-east India), being established

across a wide region ranging from the West Indies and the Caribbean to South Africa

(Mesthrie, 1992) and Fiji (Siegel, 1987; Moag, 1977). Table 1 illustrates the mixed nature of

the koine known as Fiji Hindi in one area of its grammar.

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Table 1: Indian Hindi dialects and Fiji Hindi definite future suffixes (from Siegel, 1997,

p.115)

Bhojpuri Avadhi

Braj

Fiji

Hindi

1sg

ihau

, u

gau

ega

1pl

ab,

iha

, a

gai ega

2sg (masc.)

ihai

(a)ihai,

(a)igau

ega

(fem.)

, bis

2pl

(masc.)

bâ(h)

bau

(a)ihau,

augau

ega

(fem.)

3sg

, ihai, e

(a)ihau,

agau

3pl

ih,

, ihen

iha

, a

(a)iha

, a

gai

The form

ega

clearly comes from Braj; in fact, it appears to be a compromise between the

various forms available in Braj – an example of what Trudgill (1986, p.62) calls an

interdialect

form. The form

presumably comes

from Bhojpuri or Avadhi. The manner in

which variants have been selected from the range of possibilities provided by the input

dialects is an example of leveling. At the same time, the table shows extensive simplification,

involving the loss of distinct suffixes for the first and second persons singular and plural, the

third person singular and plural, and, predictably perhaps, a failure to adopt the gender

distinction in the second person found in one of the contributing dialects (Bhojpuri). A

gender distinction in verb morphology is functionally redundant, and it is not surprising that

it is lost from overseas Hindi/Bhojpuri varieties generally, including South African Bhojpuri

(Mesthrie, 1993, p.40), Fiji Hindi (Siegel, 1997, p.113), and in Mauritian Bhojpuri except in

the past-tense second-person singular (Domingue, 1980, 1981, cited in Trudgill, 1986, p.109).

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While this simplification can be related to the special conditions of language

acquisition in a mixed, or ‘unfocused’ speech community (Le Page, 1980; a topic to be

explored in a later section), there is one example of simplification (or, arguably, reduction)

that seems to stem directly from the threatening situation the indentured laborers found

themselves in. Mesthrie explains:

The same [i.e. reduction – PK] is true of the feature “respect,” which is manifested

systematically in Indic languages in verbal and pronominal paradigms. It seems this

feature did not survive the koineization process in Natal, for there is no systematic

morphological way of signaling respect in SB [South African Bhojpuri]. Power

relations between interlocutors once indexed by pronoun usage must have given way

to the expression of solidarity on the plantations. (Mesthrie, 1993, p.40)

This is a very clear indication that, for a koine to form, the speakers must waive their

previous allegiances and social divisions to show mutual solidarity. Where they do not,

koineization is slowed, or may not result at all, and we will return to this point in the next-to-

final section. The absence of solidarity is also a factor in pidginization, where social divisions

and restricted communication directly contribute to the reduced nature of pidgins. However,

when dialects (and not languages) are in contact as in koineization, speakers can continue to

use their own vernaculars for all informal interaction within a newly-formed community

(Siegel, forthcoming). When this is coupled with solidarity, mutual accommodation on the

part of the speakers results. (See Trudgill, 1994, for a discussion of the different outcomes of

language contact and dialect contact.) (For a further discussion of overseas Bhojpuri/Hindi,

see Trudgill, 1986, pp. 99-102, 108-110.)

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Our second example is the development of not one, but two separate koines in Odda

and Tyssedal, small towns just five kilometers apart in south-western Norway. Both grew up

at the beginning of the twentieth century around smelting works located at the head of the

Sørfjord in Hardanger to exploit the plentiful supply of hydroelectric power. People moved to

these new towns from other parts of the country, with the result that each now has a dialect

distinct from surrounding rural varieties. Interestingly, the dialects are radically different, in a

way that reflects the regional origin of the majority of the in-migrants. At the same time, they

share features which do not have their origins either in the contributing dialects or in the

existing speech of the area before industrialization. Sandve (1976) describes the differences

between the two new dialects mainly in terms of morpho-lexical variables (the variant forms

taken by morphological categories, such as the Norwegian suffixed definite article, and

closed-class words, such as pronouns). He finds that the distribution to a considerable extent

reflects the dialects spoken by the original migrants. Table 2 shows the origins of the workers

at the two factories, while Table 3 illustrates some of the morpho-lexical and phonological

features.

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Table 2 Origins of factory workers in Odda and Tyssedal shortly after establishment

Origin of people working at Odda Smelteverk in 1916 (from Sandve, 1976, p.19)

Western Norway

Eastern Norway

Norway (other)

Other countries

81%

Origin of people working at Tyssedal Smelteverk in 1916-18 (from Sandve, 1976, p.23)

Western Norway

Eastern Norway

Norway (other)

Other countries

36%

35%

16%

12%

Table 3 Morpho-lexical features in Odda and Tyssedal and in majority West and East
Norwegian dialects (information on Odda and Tyssedal derived from Sandve, 1976)

Odda

Tyssedal

W Norwegian

E Norwegian

i) Odda has West Norwegian, Tyssedal East Norwegian variant:

‘throw’

(infinitive)

‘girl’

ntu j

‘the girl’

g j

i e

g j

‘I’ (pronoun)

kvi

t vi

t kvi

t vi

t ‘white’

‘at

home’

ii) Both Odda and Tyssedal have leveled towards the East Norwegian variant:

vi

‘we’

‘all’

çøt,

t çøt,

t çø

t, g

t çøt,

t ‘meat’,

‘boy’

iii) Simplified and/or interdialect forms:

#&(

, t

#&($

#&(

, t

#&($

#&(

, t

#&)$

#&(

, t

#&($

‘roof’, ‘the roof’

çe

‘come’ (present tense)

$+,

sø

$,,

$-,

‘sleep’ (present tense)

r v

‘walls’ (masc. noun)

‘rivers’ (fem. noun)

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It is clear from Table 3 that the Odda koine closely resembles the majority, mainly rural

dialects of western (strictly speaking, south-western) Norway, from where the vast majority

of migrants arrived. The infinitive suffix is /

/, and the indefinite and definite suffixes of

‘weak’ feminine nouns are /

/ and /u/, respectively, as exemplified by /j

/ and /j

ntu/. The

pronoun ‘I’ is /e

g/, and words such as kvit ‘white’ and kval ‘whale’ have /kv/. Nonetheless,

this koine contains forms such as /vi

/ for western /me

/ ‘we’, as well as the loss of the south-

western cluster /dl/ in favor of /l/ in words such as alle ‘all’. At first sight, this could be

interpreted as straightforward mixing; however, another factor clearly plays a part. One of the

characteristics of leveling is the removal of

marked

forms (Trudgill, 1986, p.98), where

‘marked’ describes features that are in a minority in the mix, in terms of the number of

speakers who use them, or have a restricted regional currency. The latter is clearly the case

here: /me

/ is restricted to the south-west, while /vi

/ is found in the rest of Norway, including

the regional center, Bergen, as well as in most forms of written Norwegian. The cluster /dl/

has practically the same geographical distribution as /me

/, and is therefore used by a small

minority of Norwegian speakers. It is in any case gradually being lost in the rural dialects. By

contrast, the maintenance of the pronoun form /e

g/ and the /kv/ cluster is no doubt supported

by the fact that both are widespread in western and northern Norway, and are also found in

the working-class urban vernaculars in the west, including Bergen.

Markedness (in Trudgill's sense) cannot, however, be a factor in the widespread

substitution of a short vowel in items such as /çø

t/ and /g

t/, since the long vowel is found in

almost all western and many southern dialects. However, the short vowel is found in Bergen

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and in the east, and (like the loss of /dl/) is beginning to spread throughout the west as part of

regional dialect leveling.

Tyssedal has a mainly eastern dialect, the morpho-lexis being eastern in form. This is

surprising, given that the proportion of east Norwegians among the incomers was only 35%.

Part of the explanation may lie in the fact that other parts of Norway were well represented,

as well the presence of a substantial foreign, mainly Swedish workforce, whose speech would

have been partly mutually intelligible with that of the Norwegians. The mixing situation in

Tyssedal was clearly more complex than in Odda, with greater linguistic differences involved

and no one group predominating. Tyssedal must have been a linguistically highly

diffuse

community, and this may go some way to explaining the eastern character of its koine.

‘Diffusion’ is the opposite of

focusing

in Le Page’s 1980 terminology: It refers to great

linguistic heterogeneity among the population, with variability both between and within

individuals. There is also likely to be an absence of stable norms of any kind, and hence a

lack of adult norms for children to converge on – again, a point we will return to. Unmarked

forms are more likely to survive here than in koineizing communities which have a dominant

group. In this context, it should be noted that, nationally, speakers of various east Norwegian

varieties form by far the largest group. Moroeover, many of the eastern forms coincide with

the majority Bokmål standard. Thus, the eastern and/or standard forms had a better chance of

surviving in Tyssedal than they did in Odda. Standard forms may also have been adopted as a

‘strategy of neutrality’ in a highly diffuse situation (Mæhlum, 1992).

Yet in one respect the two koines show continuity with the region in which they were

established: both have the uvular [

] for /r/, a pronunciation that has diffusing out from the

towns throughout the west and south of Norway for the past 100 years, replacing an alveolar

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articulation (see Chambers & Trudgill, 1998). The pre-new town Odda/Tyssedal area already

used the uvular [

] (GjØrv, 1986, p.28). What is surprising is its adoption in Tyssedal, whose

dialect in almost all other respects has a strongly eastern character. A possible explanation for

this is that it is an early example of the leveling between the two towns which, according to

Sandve (1976), mainly involves the adoption of Odda features by younger people in

Tyssedal.

Finally in our discussion of these Norwegian koines, we look for cases of

simplification and interdialect forms. First, we note the absence in both dialects of the velar-

palatal alternation in nouns whose stems end in /k/, /g/ or /

/. In western and central dialects,

the definite form substitutes a palatal for the velar, giving /t

#&)$

/ for ‘the roof’; cf. the

indefinite /t

k/. Both koines have the form /t

/. However, this apparent simplification

may be the selection of a ‘simple’ feature from among the possibilities offered by the input

dialects. Second, we observe that, in Odda, the forms /k

/ and /s

are used for the

present tense of ‘come’ and ‘sleep’. These are simple in that they do not show the present-

tense stem change found in some ‘strong’ verbs in parts of the south-west (as in /çe

/ and

/sø

, cf. infinitives /k

/ and /s

). It is likely that these are genuine interdialect forms

– it is unlikely that they existed in any of the input dialects, since they combine the

simplified, eastern stem with the western strong-verb suffix /

/. Interestingly, similar forms

are increasingly found more generally in western dialects through leveling (Sandøy, 1987,

p.234), an indication that, in all dialect contact situations, the same processes are found. The

third feature does seem to have arisen in the koine itself, since there is only recent evidence

of it in the rural dialects (Helge Sandøy, pc): this is the Odda noun plural system represented

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by the forms /v

/ and /

/, which (as Table 3 shows) differ from the majority western

variants. These show an increase in morphological regularity, the reasoning being as follows.

In west Norwegian dialects, masculine and feminine nouns fall into two classes, depending

on whether the plural ending is /

r/ or /

r/. Most, but not all, masculine nouns, like hest

‘horse’, take /

r/, while feminine nouns, like seng ‘bed’, tend to take /

r/. What has happened

in Odda is that this pattern has been generalized to all masculine and feminine nouns, leading

to the new, interdialect forms /v

/ and /

All the features mentioned in the paragraph above are identical to developments in

another western Norwegian koine: that of Høyanger, a new town which grew up under very

similar conditions to Odda and Tyssedal (Omdal, 1977; Trudgill, 1986, pp.95-106). The

Høyanger dialect is strikingly similar to that of Odda, a fact which reflects the mainly western

origin of the incomers. However, it contains features characteristic of its somewhat more

northern location in Sogn (from where many of the migrants came), especially an alveolar /r/

and the infinitive ending /

$01

The results from the three towns taken together demonstrate that

the features that survive the leveling prior to koine formation reflect not only the role of

simplification but also the importance of the geographical origins of the original migrants.

The latter has been explored by Trudgill and his co-researchers in an investigation of the

origins of New Zealand English, to be discussed later (Trudgill, 1998; Trudgill, Gordon,

Lewis, & Maclagan, 2000).

Our final example of a koine is, in fact, often not regarded as one at all: the variety of

spoken Hebrew that has emerged in Palestine/Israel since about 1900. The crucial difference

is that the first modern speakers of Hebrew spoke it as a second language. This meant that, in

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the Hebrew input to the modern spoken variety, there were substrates reflecting a number of

different languages. What leads Siegel (1997, pp.129-30) to accept it as a koine is that all the

features of koineization can be found. Modern Hebrew is a revived classical language which

now performs all the functions of a community vernacular. In its pre-modern form, it ceased

to be a vernacular around 200 AD, but it continued to be used both as a liturgical language

and as a written and spoken lingua franca among Jews in Europe. The decisive phase in its

modern revival as a spoken language came with the establishment by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda of

the Hebrew Language Council in 1890. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Hebrew

was promoted by the occupying forces, including the British Mandate of 1922-48. By 1948,

there were Hebrew-using institutions, including a Hebrew radio station. (See Blanc, 1968,

and Ravid, 1995, for further details.)

Today, practically all the Israeli-born population are speakers of Modern Hebrew,

which preserves much of the lexis, morphology, and syntax of the old language. Ravid points

to the rather slow stabilization of the contemporary language (we return to this issue later in

this chapter), and states that, even today, it has ‘a number of parallel constructions, none of

which has been rendered obsolete by the others’ (Ravid, 1995, p.5). She gives the following

examples, which all translate as ‘the king’s clothes’:

1. bigdey ha-mélex

clothes-of

the-king

2. ha-bgadim

el ha-mélex

the-clothes of the-king

3. bgadav

el ha-mélex

clothes-his of the-king

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Ravid states that ‘they complement each other and are used in distinct semantic, syntactic and

pragmatic contexts, constituting part of the linguistic competence of the Modern Hebrew

speaker’ (1995, p.5). We can say that the variability in the input to modern Hebrew has not

been leveled in this case, but has been reallocated to new functions.

As already pointed out, a defining feature of Israeli Hebrew is the fact that the input

was a series of second-language varieties with European and other substrates, particularly

Yiddish and Arabic. We must also assume that the first speakers’ proficiency in Hebrew

varied a great deal, showing varying degrees of interlanguage (Selinker, 1992). All of this

took place in a situation where there was no established native spoken norm. A look at the

consonant system shows the effect of these substrate languages. Glinert (1989, p.10) points

out that there has been considerable reduction in the phonological inventory when compared

to the liturgical language. Like many other Semitic languages, Biblical Hebrew had a

distinction between the pharyngeal consonants /

/ and /

/ and the velar /x/. Neither /

/ nor /

was acquired by most of the (adult) Ashkenazi immigrants, whose first languages were

European. Instead, they merged /

/ with /x/ – a phone widely found in European languages –

and deleted /

/ altogether. The Sephardic Jews, who had an Arabic substrate, used the

pharyngeals in their Hebrew vernacular. In the majority, high-status Ashkenazi-based

vernacular, the pharyngeals have been leveled out (or never acquired) despite being widely

considered to be correct. This leads to an unusual sociolinguistic situation. According to

Blanc (1968, p.245), when ‘General’ (or majority Ashkenazi) speakers want to ‘improve’

their speech for whatever reason, they use /

/ when the orthography demands it, without

changing other aspects of their speech. On the other hand, /

/ is not adopted by these

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speakers, because it is apparently too closely associated with Oriental speech (in Trudgill’s

1986 terms, it has ‘extra-strong salience’ – a notion to be discussed below). This treatment of

the two pharyngeals – their social evaluation and their sociolinguistic patterning – is a

complex case of reallocation.

Just as with regular sound change, the leveling and simplification of the Hebrew

consonant system has led to complications in the morphology. (See Aitchison, 1991, on the

effect of phonological change on morphology.) Unlike the koines discussed so far, Modern

Hebrew is morphologically more opaque (irregular) than its antecedent. Ravid (1995, p.133)

argues that this is because of the ‘phonological erosion’ due to its being ‘revived as a spoken

medium using a new phonological system only loosely related to that of Classical Hebrew,

with entire phonological classes being obliterated.’ This is, of course, the point at which

Modern Hebrew is radically different from other koines, whose speakers are first-language

users of the input varieties. Not surprisingly, she finds among child learners the development

of non-standard reanalyses of morphological classes promoted by the principles of

‘Transparency, Simplicity and Consistency.’ The ability of these reanalyses to persist into

adult usage and then to become mainstream is, however, constrained by literacy and the

‘literate propensity towards marked structures’ (1995, p.162). Israeli Hebrew was relatively

slow to stabilize; we will return to reasons for this in a later section.

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The pre-koine: Linguistic accommodation by the first migrants in a new settlement

We now deal with koineization itself, viewed as a process with distinct, but overlapping

stages and a variable, but finite time span. If and when it reaches completion, a koine, or a

‘new dialect’, results. Trudgill identifies the following three stages of new-dialect formation,

in his opinion roughly corresponding to the first three generations of speakers (Trudgill,

1998, Trudgill et al., 2000):

Stage

speakers

involved

linguistic

characteristics

I adult

migrants

rudimentary

leveling

first native-born speakers

extreme variability and further leveling

III

subsequent generations

focusing, leveling and reallocation

As we shall see, there is a great deal of variability in the time-depth of koineization, with

focusing being possible already by Stage II, and the absence of focusing sometimes persisting

over several generations of Stage III. In this section, we deal with Stage I, what Siegel calls

the ‘pre-koine’. Siegel states:

This is the unstabilized stage at the beginning of koineization. A continuum exists in

which various forms of the varieties in contact are used concurrently and

inconsistently. Levelling and some mixing has begun to occur, and there may be

various degrees of reduction, but few forms have emerged as the accepted

compromise. (Siegel, 1985, p.373)

- 20 -

The question we address in this section is the following: How does this rudimentary mixing

and leveling eventually find its way into the everyday speech of the first generation of koine

speakers? Given that definable changes have occurred as a result of koineization, it follows

that these changes must be foreshadowed in some way in the speech of the pre-koine

generation. Trudgill proposes an extension of

speech accommodation theory

to account for

this process (Giles & Powesland, 1997/1975; Giles & Smith, 1979; Giles & Coupland, 1991;

Giles, Coupland & Coupland, 1991; Trudgill, 1986, pp.1-4). Simply put, accommodation

theory assumes that interlocutors converge linguistically (and on other behavioral

dimensions) when they want to gain each other’s approval, show solidarity, etc., and that they

diverge when they do not. Accommodation can be mutual, or one-sided. It can be

‘downward’ (as when a higher-status person uses lower-status forms, or what he or she

believes to be lower-status forms), or it can be ‘upward’ (the inverse pattern).

Accommodation is therefore a response to a conversational context (though it can also be

used to define the context). When people speak different varieties, as in a new settlement, the

dialect differences are likely to be exploited – consciously or passively – as part of

accommodation. This can explain the mechanism behind the survival of majority forms in a

koine: There will be more ‘acts of accommodation’ involving the adoption of majority rather

than minority variants simply because there are more conversational contexts in which this

can take place.

The link between these individual acts and the new dialect, according to Trudgill, is

long-term accommodation

(Trudgill, 1986, pp.11-38), which can be defined as semi-

permanent changes in a person’s habitual speech after a period of contact with speakers using

different varieties. Long-term accommodation results from the cumulative effect of countless

acts of

short-term accommodation

in particular conversational interactions. These changes

- 21 -

are then picked up by the next generation, who will begin the process of focusing. Trudgill

discusses a number of cases of long-term accommodation in the context of the linguistic and

social constraints that promote or inhibit the acquisition of particular features. Before we

consider these below, we must examine two questions: (1) What is the evidence that the

features found in dialect leveling and koines really are foreshadowed in short-term

accommodation? (2) What is the evidence that these features are found in the long-term

accommodation of the original adult migrants?

(1) Evidence that short-term accommodation foreshadows leveling and koine formation. The

link from individual behavior in specific contexts (short-term accommodation) to a future

koine could involve the following mechanisms. First, the features of the future varieties are

adopted by adult and child migrants in individual acts of accommodation to other speakers

who happen to use them already. This has been called a ‘behavioral-frequency model’ (Auer,

1998; Hinskens & Auer, forthcoming). Second, accommodation may not be in response to a

particular interlocutor, but to images, or stereotypes, of the group the interlocutor belongs to,

or of a socially attractive group not actually represented in the immediate context (cf. Bell,

1997, on the role of different kinds of audience). This can be labeled an ‘identity projection

model’ (Auer, 1998). Third, in the case of interdialect forms, we cannot be dealing with

accommodation at all, since such forms are not in the dialect mix; therefore, they must be

created by these speakers. There is clear evidence of the ‘behavioral-frequency model’ in

Trudgill’s account of his own accommodation to his Norwich interviewees (Trudgill, 1986,

pp.7-10), though the changes only took place in the case of markers (see below, on

‘salience’). Coupland’s study of speech accommodation by a travel agent to her customers is

another case in point (1984). However, as Auer points out, even though there is demonstrable

accommodation, Coupland interprets this more in line with the ‘identity projection model’:

- 22 -

Sue [the travel agent] is not attempting to reproduce the actual levels of standardness

for particular variables that she detects in the speech of her interlocutors; rather, she is

attempting to convey via her pronunciation and presumably other behaviors, verbal

and non-verbal, a persona which is similar to that conveyed by her interlocutors.

(Coupland, 1984, p. 65)

Taking this non-interactional approach to accommodation may also help us understand the

spread of dialect features by geographical diffusion where face-to-face contact with users of

the diffusing features is rare, if it is present at all. An example is the rapid and recent spread

of the merger of /f/ and /

/ in British English (Williams & Kerswill, 1999; Trudgill, 1986,

pp.53-7).

However, studies which concentrate on dialect leveling and koineization provide only

marginal evidence of the use of the new, leveled features in short-term accommodation

between speakers of different dialects. In an investigation of dialect leveling in the Limburg

region of The Netherlands, Hinskens (1996, pp.447-452) finds that short-term

accommodation on the part of speakers interacting with speakers of other varieties does not

follow the predictions of accommodation theory. The theory predicts that speakers should

reduce dialect features that are not shared with the interlocutor, and preserve features that are.

This turns out not to be the case, accommodation being much less differentiated and more

‘across the board’, regardless of the interlocutor’s variety. More striking still are the results of

a study of ongoing dialect leveling in Lëtzebuergesch, the Germanic language of

Luxembourg, by Gilles (1996; 1997). He discusses Luxembourg speakers’ belief that they

accommodate each other’s speech in inter-dialect communication, but finds that this is not the

- 23 -

case (see discussion in Auer, 1998, and Hinskens & Auer, forthcoming). An extremely telling

micro-example of non-accommodation is the following excerpt from a conversation between

two strangers, FA from the north of the Grand Duchy and AN from the south (Gilles, 1996,

p.7):

Bas du och nach am zweete Jor?

‘Are you also in the second year?’

Nä am ischte [i

te] Jor.

‘No, in the first year.’

FA (echoing) Am éischten [e

n].

‘In the first (year)’

Both speakers use their own variant, a pattern which is general in Gilles’s data. Despite this,

leveling is present in the language.

In summary, it appears that short-term accommodation as a precursor to dialect

leveling follows the same patterns as speech accommodation generally: a speaker may well

converge with another’s dialect, but we should not expect this to be the only pattern.

Accommodation theory and conversation analysis show that interactions are highly complex,

with a number of agendas on the part of the speakers – and the creation of a new dialect is not

one of them. The need to distinguish between actual speech accommodation and other factors

was already recognized by Thakerar, Giles & Cheshire (1982) when they posited a

‘psychological dimension’ to accommodation. This refers to “individuals’ beliefs that they

are integrating with and differentiating from others respectively …” [emphasis in original]

(Thakerar et al., 1982, p.222). We need to accept this complexity if we are to understand the

nature of the input to koineization.

- 24 -

(2) Evidence that the features found in dialect leveling and in koines are foreshadowed in the

long-term accommodation of the original adult migrants. While the information on short-term

accommodation is complex and rather unclear, the same cannot be said for the relationship

between long-term accommodation and the outcomes of dialect leveling and koineization.

Our example is the speech of adult rural migrants in the city of Bergen in western Norway

(Kerswill, 1994a). Because they are a linguistic minority in a city, they are not potential

‘koineizers’. However, as we shall see, their accommodation to Bergen urban vernacular

involves the adoption of some of the features found in Odda and Høyanger as well as in the

increasingly leveled dialects of rural south-west Norway. We start with a transcript of

portions of a recorded conversation between Mr. BS, a 41 year old industrial worker who

moved to Bergen at the age of 24, and another rural migrant.

- 25 -

Table 6 Extracts from conversational data for Mr BS, a rural migrant in Bergen (Kerswill,
1994a, p.148)

Key: Bergen features: single underlining
Rural dialect features: double underlining
Unmarked forms (i.e. both rural and Bergen): normal type
Except for /r/, the features marked are morpho-lexical.

Example Comment

i [

lø

]

i frå Måløya

‘from Måløya’

Rural dialect

ii [f

]

får ikkje du sova?

‘Can’t you get to sleep?’

Rural dialect

iii [f

676"

n j

87%

n son

lt ...]

for flaskeklirringa den gjekk rett inn så han var heilt ...

‘because the rattling of the bottles, it went straight in so it was

completely ...’

Mixture of rural

and Bergen dialect

iv [bj

Bjørg-the

‘Bjørg’

(female personal name + Bergen idiomatic addition of article in

Bergen common gender form)

Mixture of rural

and Bergen dialect

v [o

n j

]

og ja ho ja

‘oh yes, her’

Bergen dialect

vi [

mti

]

ein gang i framtida

‘some time in the future’

Rural and Bergen

dialect, with

within-word

mixing

vii [

n '

saka opptar deg

‘the matter at hand keeps you busy’

Bergen dialect

- 26 -

The most striking facet of this extract is its extreme variability. Not only are features from

the two dialects mixed within an utterance, but they also appear within a single word, as in

[

mti

], which is [

mti

] in the rural dialect, and [

mti

] in Bergen dialect. The

mixing among this group of speakers is relatively unrestricted, with great variation both

between and within individuals. As we shall see in the next section, this is also characteristic

of the first native-born generations in many koines (Trudgill, 1998; Trudgill et al., 2000;

Omdal, 1977).

While this variability is, of course, not characteristic of established koines, some of

the features involved include those which appear in the west Norwegian koines and in west

Norwegian dialect leveling. Table 7 lists simplificatory features noted in the speech of the

rural migrants recorded for the study (Kerswill, 1994a), along with information as to whether

they occur in koines and dialect leveling in the region.

- 27 -

Table 7 Simplificatory processes found in south-western Norwegian varieties

Process

Presence in the long-

term accommodation

of rural migrants in

Bergen?

Presence in

West

Norwegian

dialect leveling?

Presence in West

Norwegian

koines?

i Simplification

of /dn/, /dl/, and /bm/ to

/n/, /l/, and /m/ in e.g.

/fidn

/, /

/, /kobm

yes yes

Odda,

Tyssedal

(Høyanger did not

have clusters)

ii Reduction

vowel inventory

yes (specifically,

avoidance of /

/ and

/: /g

lv/ -> /g

lv/

‘floor’, /v

/ ->

/ ‘been’ (part.)

yes (general

reduction;

Sand¯y, 1987,

pp.238-9)

yes (general

reduction)

iii

Loss of the

morphophonemic velar-

palatal alternation in

e.g. /t

k/ – /t

#&)$

yes yes

(Sand¯y,

1987, p.234)

yes

Loss of vowel

change in present tense

of some strong verbs,

e.g. /t

k/ > /t

#&7

/, 'take'

(present)

yes yes

(Sand¯y,

1987, p.236)

yes

- 28 -

It is in fact likely that some of these ostensible simplifications represent the straightforward

borrowing of a Bergen item, since in most cases the Bergen form is identical to the simpler

variant. However, for process (ii) – the loss of /

/ and /

/ – this cannot be the case. In

almost all the relevant words, these vowels are replaced by /

/ or /

/ – a simple, predictable

substitution. However, this does not always represent a convergence with Bergen dialect,

which has a range of vowels, and often differing lexical forms, for these words. For example,

rural /h

/ ‘head’ is replaced by /h

/, not by Bergen /h

/ or either of the standard

forms hode or hovud. Similarly, /sk

/ ‘shot’ (past participle) appears as /sk

/, rarely as

Bergen /sk

t/ (Kerswill, 1994a, pp. 157, 159-161). Of course, we cannot claim that any of

these simplifications have been arrived at individually by the particular speakers who were

recorded, because there remains the possibility that these simplifications form part of a

‘norm’ of migrant speech (Kerswill, 1994a, pp.145-7) – and are therefore spread to new

individuals by borrowing. Yet, the processes are natural, and it is likely that some of the

speakers do respond to the contact situation with simplification. Moreover, the rural migrants

do not acquire complex features of the Bergen dialect (Kerswill, 1994, p.161-2).

We return now to the factors that inhibit or promote the adoption of linguistic features

in long-term accommodation. Trudgill discusses a number of cases, including British people

living in the USA, Americans in Britain, and Swedes in Norway. Dealing mainly with

phonological changes, he finds that accommodation follows similar patterns, the basic order

being:

1. ‘natural’ and phonologically predictable phonetic changes. An example is the early

adoption of the tap [

] for intervocalic /t/ by British people in the USA, as in letter – in this

- 29 -

case a feature already present to some extent in many British people’s speech (Trudgill, 1986,

p.19).

2. substitutions of phonemes in clearly defined lexical sets. An example is the substitution of

/æ/ for /

/ in items like dance, last, half, by the same group (Trudgill, 1986, p.18).

3. ‘complex’ changes, some of which may never be acquired. These include:

(i) the reversal of a merger, as when older Canadian children living in Britain

generally fail to separate the sets of cot and caught, which are merged in Canadian English

(Chambers, 1992, pp.687-8)

(ii) the use of phonemes in what are phonotactically impermissible positions in the

speaker’s own dialect, exemplified by the failure of English migrants in the USA to realize /r/

non-prevocalically, e.g., in cart (Trudgill, 1986, pp.15-6)

(iii) the acquisition of lexically unpredictable phonological processes. An example is

the Philadelphia ‘short a’ pattern. This refers to the tensing and raising of the vowel in words

like man and bad, which is both phonologically and lexically determined – that is to say,

tensing/raising only takes place before certain consonants, and there are lexical exceptions;

this feature is rarely learned even by young child incomers to Philadelphia (Payne, 1980;

Roberts & Labov, 1995; Trudgill, 1986, 36-7; Kerswill, 1996, pp.186-7).

This ordering is in effect a difficulty hierarchy, with features higher up being

psycholinguistically ‘easier’ and, other things being equal, more likely to be involved in

accommodation. (See Kerswill, 1996, p.200, for a more elaborated hierarchy which adds

lexical, grammatical, and prosodic features.) The order predicted by this hierarchy interacts,

however, with the factor of

salience

, invoked by Trudgill to explain why some features are

- 30 -

adopted earlier, or later, than others. Trudgill states that the following factors lead to greater

awareness of a linguistic feature, so that it becomes a

marker

, in Labov’s sense, and

therefore has the potential to become salient:

1. The variable has at least one variant which is overtly stigmatized

2. The variable has a high-status variant reflected in the orthography

3. The variable is undergoing linguistic change

4. Variants are phonetically radically different

5. Variants are involved in the maintenance of phonological contrasts in the accommodating

speaker’s variety

(adapted from Trudgill, 1986, p.11)

Trudgill states (1986, p.37): “During accommodation, it is indeed salient features of the target

variety that are adjusted to, except that, in the case of adults at least, a number of factors

combine to delay this modification to different extents.” These factors include those that

come under (ii) and (iii) in the difficulty hierarchy. To complete the model, Trudgill adds a

further inhibitory factor: that of

extra-strong salience

. One of the conditions leading to

salience is the involvement of a phonological contrast. However, in some cases this can lead

to a heightened awareness on the speakers’ part, so that the feature becomes a stereotype and

therefore something to be avoided. This, in Trudgill’s view, explains why Northern English

speakers tend not to acquire the southern vowel /

/ in dance for their own /æ/, while they

may acquire southern /

/ in butter. In the dance case, they are aware that southern speakers

use a different phoneme from themselves, while with butter they are less aware of it, because

/ is not a phoneme for them (Trudgill, 1986, p.155).

- 31 -

Trudgill’s account is intended as a comprehensive model of long-term

accommodation. However, there are certain problems with it. Most particularly, these

concern the role of extra-strong salience. It seems that the same criterion, that of the presence

of a contrast in the speaker’s dialect, can lead either to a feature’s adoption or to its rejection

(Hinskens, 1996, pp.10-13). One solution to the problem is to look at a feature within the

linguistic system of both dialects, as well as viewing it from a dialect geography and social

perspective. The dance case involves a number of common lexical items, including grass,

bath, chance, last and past. Because of this, and because it involves a phonemic contrast, it is

easily stereotyped and easily labeled: Southerners talk of the northern ‘flat’ a, while

northerners hear the southern variant as ‘posh’, doubtless because it also occurs in Received

Pronunciation. A second example comes from the dialects in the rural hinterland of Bergen in

south-west Norway. As we saw, these dialects have two vowels, /

/ and /

/, which are not

found in the city. They are widely considered ‘ugly’; speakers, both rural and urban,

comment on them spontaneously. It therefore comes as no surprise that they are being leveled

out, as well as being removed in the long-term accommodation of rural people moving to the

city. Reasons for their extra-strong salience probably lie in the fact that they are both

regionally restricted and phonetically distant from other vowels, typically /

/ and /

/, which

are used in the same words in other dialects (Kerswill, 1994a, p.157).

Even with explanations such as these, we come up against difficulties. In a study of

long-term accommodation among eastern German (former GDR) migrants to western

Germany, Auer, Barden, and Grosskopf (1998) apply criteria for salience that are broadly

similar to Trudgill’s, with some additions; in particular, they draw a more explicit distinction

than he does between ‘objective’ (linguistic) and ‘subjective’ (social and social

psychological) parameters. The principal additional linguistic criterion is whether or not a

- 32 -

feature is lexicalized – that is, it is not possible to predict on phonological grounds which

lexical items are involved. We have already seen an example of lexicalization in the

Philadelphia ‘short a’ pattern. Of the twelve phonological variables they investigated in the

Upper Saxon Vernacular (USV) of the migrants, three will serve to illustrate their point. They

are:

(A:) USV velarized (rounded, back) low vowel: standard [

], USV [

*?&

], as in wahr ‘true’.

(AI) USV monophthong for the standard diphthong: standard [a

], USV [

%?&

], as in kein ‘no’

(determiner). It is lexicalized in that it is restricted to those standard German words

which contain /ai/ derived from MHG (Middle High German) /ei/, not MHG /i

/. USV

[

%?&

] merges with /

/, which occurs in another lexical set, e.g., in [l

%??&

] leben ‘to live’;

hence, in accommodation to standard German, a merger must be undone.

(P,T) USV syllable-initial voiceless lenis stops instead of fortis stops: standard [p], [t], Saxon

], [d

], as in paar ‘some’, Tante ‘aunt’. The USV feature involves a merger between

standard German /p, t/ and /b, d/. Accommodation entails the undoing of a merger.

Table 4 shows that, by their criteria, (A:) is non-salient, while (P,T) and (AI) are rather more

salient. In the table, a ‘yes’ entry is evidence of salience. Auer et al. then compare this

classification with the percentage loss of the USV features between the first interview and the

last, two years later. These percentage changes (a positive score represents a loss), shown in

Table 5, do not match expectations at all.

- 33 -

Table 4 Salience of three Upper Saxon variables in contact with standard German – ‘strong’

vernacular realizations (adapted from Auer et al., 1998, p.177, Table 2a)

Variable

Criterion

(A:)

(P,T)

(AI)

Merger to be split?

yes

Discrete

variable? no no yes

Lexicalization? no no yes

Style

differences?

yes yes **

Represented in writing?

yes

Stereotyping?

yes

** data not available

Table 5 Percentage loss of ‘strong’ Upper Saxon realizations of three variables over a two-

year period (from Auer et al., 1998, p.180)

(A:)

(P,T)

(AI)

Percentage

loss

65% 72% -3%

The authors’ predictions that (A:) would shift the least, and (AI) the most, were patently not

borne out. They argue (Auer et al., 1998, p.182) that the fact that (AI), along with a similar

variable, (AU), is lexicalized shelters it from loss; however, they admit that this is not an

explanation for the “relatively positive prestige of the vernacular realizations” of (AI) and

(AU), and refer to the fact that the Berlin vernacular has similar monophthongs. In the case of

- 34 -

(P,T), expectations are met: a salient, stigmatized pronunciation is rapidly dropped. However,

(A:) is subject to massive attrition as well, even though this feature only fulfills one of the

criteria for salience (style shifting, which as an explanation of salience is circular). While (A:)

does not involve phoneme replacement, it can be argued that USV [

*?&

] could be taken by

some listeners for standard German /o

/ as in Kor ‘choir’ – a possibility not mentioned by the

authors – in which case its behavior is less surprising. The authors conclude that, for this

variable at least, the subjective factors (represented by style shifting) outweigh the objective

ones.

Auer and his colleagues find that there is little match between the objective and

subjective criteria. However, for the lexicalized variables ‘objective’ criteria do play a part;

for the remainder, different ‘subjective’ ones seem to take precedence. Moreover, salience

“does not indicate the attitudinal polarity (positive or negative) of this [social and

interactional] significance, let alone its precise ‘ideological value’” (Auer, et al., 1998,

p.184).

Yet, salience of either kind is clearly an extremely significant factor in dialect

accommodation, as a related case study of an individual migrant showed (Auer et al. 1997).

In this study, a man who had accommodated during the first year restored most of the USV

features by the end of the second, as a result of a drastic change in his social network,

attitudes, and degree of integration following an industrial accident. The authors show that

the features which changed, first to standard, then back to USV, were mostly the ones the

main study had already identified as ‘salient’ by the six criteria given in Table 4. The non-

salient variables mainly had a ‘flat’ graph rather than the ‘zig-zag’ pattern of the salient ones.

- 35 -

The problem with salience is that it may consist of a far more disparate range of

effects than research has hitherto been able to uncover, both linguistic and non-linguistic

(Kerswill & Williams, forthcoming). The fairly wide range of factors discussed in this section

goes some way to address this point.

- 36 -

Focusing: The language of the koineizing generation(s)

Trudgill’s second stage of new-dialect formation involves the first generation of children

born in the new community. As we saw above, he states that this stage is characterized by

‘extreme variability’ and ‘further leveling.’ We will examine four cases to see the extent to

which this characterization is true: New Zealand English, Høyanger, the speech of children in

the English new town, Milton Keynes, Modern Hebrew, and, finally, children’s speech in the

Norwegian Arctic territory of Spitsbergen. To anticipate: we find broad similarities among

speakers of this generation, and conclude that focusing usually belongs to the following

generation (the migrants’ grandchildren). Particular conditions may mean that focusing takes

place earlier, later, or not at all. Moreover, variations we observe are ascribable to a small set

of social and linguistic factors.

The data for Trudgill’s New Zealand study come from recordings made by the

National Broadcasting Corporation of New Zealand in 1946-8. As Trudgill (1998) explains,

“[t]he recordings were oral history pioneer reminiscences, mostly from people who were the

children of the first European settlers in New Zealand … About 325 speakers born between

1850 and 1900 were recorded.” This generation of people represents the first native-born

speakers of English in New Zealand – though of course they were elderly by the time they

were recorded. The most striking fact about this data archive is its tremendous variability,

both between and within individuals. Trudgill (1998) argues that, in situations where there is

no single, stable adult model, children are able to choose from a wider variety of adult models

than otherwise. Also, in the absence of a stable peer-group variety, adults, especially parents

and other caregivers, will have a greater than usual influence on children’s speech (Trudgill

et al., 2000). In such a situation, one can expect individuals to make novel selections of

- 37 -

features from the available choice. This turns out to be the case. Thus, Mr. Malcolm Ritchie

has the following features:

1. /

/ and /

/ are realized as dental stops, [t

] and [d

], as in Irish English

2. Syllable-final /l/ may be clear (i.e. non-velarized), as in Irish English

3. He has h-dropping in words like home, an English feature absent in Ireland

4. He has a distinction between /

/ and /w/, thus distinguishing which and witch. This feature

is never combined with h-dropping in the British Isles.

Not surprisingly, there is great inter-individual variation even between people with near-

identical backgrounds. For example, Mr. Ritchie’s sister-in-law, Mrs. H. Ritchie, attended the

same school at the same time as he did, yet has some quite different features in her speech.

Unlike Mr. Ritchie, she has close realizations of /æ/ as [

] and /e/ as [e], while he typically

has more open variants.

Despite this variability, there is evidence of leveling in this group of speakers. For

example, there is an almost complete absence of the use of the vowel /

/, as in

FOOT

, in the

STRUT

set – a feature of the northern half of England. In terms of the demography of the

settlers, northern speakers were certainly in a minority, and it had clearly been leveled out

already in the first generation of native-born speakers.

Trudgill does not provide any information about the transition from Stage II to the

fully-fledged, focused Stage III of present-day New Zealand English. However, he comments

- 38 -

on the relationship between the apparently random speech of the earlier generations and

present day speech, as follows:

The “original” [i.e. highly individual] mixtures demonstrated by individual

informants such as Mr. Riddle are the result of random selection. But the proportions

of variants present in the accents of groups of second-stage speakers in a particular

location, taken as a whole, derive in a probabilistic manner from, and will therefore

reflect at least approximately, the proportions of the same variants present in the

different varieties spoken by their parents’ generation taken as a whole.

He examines some of the features of Stage III in the light of the proportions of those features

found in his Stage II corpus. Thus, 75% of the speakers (and, to judge from available

statistics, a majority of the earliest immigrants from the British Isles) did not use h-dropping

in words like house, despite the fact that this is the norm in much of England today; h-

dropping has almost completely disappeared from modern New Zealand English. A similar

explanation can be put forward for the maintenance of the distinction between /

/ as in which

and /w/ as in witch, despite its being rapidly lost in England.

Trudgill’s findings on the early speech of New Zealand match Omdal’s comments on

the Norwegian town of Høyanger very closely indeed. Høyanger was founded in 1916 and

received in-migrants from various parts of Norway. Omdal writes:

As it turned out, the first generation to be born and raised in Høyanger, i.e., people

who today [=1977] are in their fifties, do not have a uniform dialect, but have a

spoken language that to a great extent bears the imprint of their parents’ dialect.

- 39 -

There is a good deal of variation between individuals. (Omdal, 1977, p.7; my

translation)

We can presume that the reasons for the lack of early focusing in Høyanger are

similar to those adduced for New Zealand: But are there any specific, local circumstances

that gave this result? It turns out that, in the early years of Høyanger’s existence, there was

considerable social segregation between the families of managers and professionals and those

of the workers, with housing in different parts of the town. Crucially, while the workers

mainly came from the same county as Høyanger, the managers and professionals came from

the east of the country. This meant that linguistic convergence between the two groups could

only take place later, as social and geographical allegiances became more oriented toward the

new community. A second factor is the relatively large linguistic differences between dialects

in Norway, particularly at that time; the factor of dialect differences would have played a

similar part in New Zealand. (See Kerswill & Williams, 2000, pp.73-4, for a more detailed

discussion of Høyanger.)

Koineization did, however, ensue in the next generation:

To find a uniform spoken variety, we must move a generation on, to people who are

in their 20s or younger. The speech of these people gives the impression that it is just

as ‘firm’ as in other similar places with a more stable population growth. (Omdal,

1977, p.7; my translation)

We now have a clearer picture of the relationship between Trudgill’s three stages. The

observations from New Zealand are entirely consistent with what we have seen of the

- 40 -

relationship between the speech of the Bergen rural migrants (who can be taken to represent

Stage I of a west Norwegian leveling/koine formation process), the speech of the first native-

born generation in Høyanger (Stage II), and the features found in the koines which

subsequently developed in those towns (Stage III).

Our next example is the south-east English new town of Milton Keynes, designated in

1967 in a location roughly 80 kilometers from London, Oxford, and Cambridge. From that

date to 1991, the population of the area rose from 44,000 to 176,000. Recordings were made

of children and adults in 1991-2, some 24 years, or one generation, after its foundation.

Further recordings of a different sample were made in 1996 (Kerswill & Williams, 2000;

Kerswill, 1994b; Cheshire, Gillett, Williams, & Kerswill, 1999). Thus, almost all the child

speakers in the samples were the offspring of adult migrants to the town. We consider first

the degree to which this first native generation has focused its speech, in comparison with

that of the caregivers. The variable (ou) refers to the realization of the offset of the vowel /

as in

GOAT

, which is currently being fronted in south-east England. The parents of the

children originate from various parts of Great Britain, and would therefore be expected to

show a range of pronunciations for this vowel, from both the south-east and elsewhere. In

order to see whether any focusing among the children has occurred, we can compare the

fronting scores for the parents (only the mothers were recorded in the study) with those of

their children. The variable has the following values:

(ou) - 0:

], [o

]

score: 0

(Northern and Scottish realization)

(ou) - 1: [

], [

$=D

]

score: 1

(older Buckinghamshire and London)

(ou) - 2: [

]

score: 2

(fronting)

- 41 -

(ou) - 3: [

]

score: 3

(fronting and unrounding)

Figure 1 shows the association of the children’s scores (ranked from highest to lowest) with

those of their caregivers. Two points should be noted. First, with two notable exceptions (at

bottom right on the graph), the overall range of the children is much smaller than that of their

caregivers, suggesting a high degree of focusing. The caregivers’ scores reflect their regional

origins, with the six very low scorers coming from outside the south-east. Thus, the

caregivers’ vowel realizations are not reflected at all in their children’s scores. On the

evidence of this and other variables (Kerswill & Williams, 2000), Milton Keynes children

seem not to be much influenced by their parents’ speech – in distinct contrast to the first

generation native speakers in New Zealand and Høyanger. The fact that the two exceptions

just mentioned turn out to be four year olds suggests that it is the older, not the younger

children who are engaged in the focusing – a point to which we will return. Moreover, the

fact that the children’s scores are significantly higher also suggests that they are orienting

their focusing towards the new, fronted norm for this vowel (Kerswill & Williams, 2000,

p.101).

- 42 -

Figure 1 Association of Milton Keynes children's (ou) scores with

those of their caregivers (from Kerswill & Williams, 2000, p.102)

0.5

1.5

2.5

Subjects

(ou) index

caregivers
children

(Most
fronted)

(Least
fronted)

The Milton Keynes study also allows us to examine which age group is most

involved in the formation of the koine. We saw in the previous section an example of adult

migrants’ speech, characterized by a high degree of mixing and instability, yet also

anticipating the forms that will appear in a later koine. In Milton Keynes, most of the adults

speak varieties of English that are far more similar to each other than their Norwegian

counterparts. This, we must assume, is because of the extensively leveled nature of British

English, especially in southern England; in any case, it means that investigating their long-

term accommodation is difficult.

However, the Milton Keynes child data allows us further insights into the early stages

of koine formation. It has recently been argued that language change is unlikely to be mainly

due to misanalyses of adult grammars on the part of young children during their acquisition

phase, for two main reasons. First, developmental forms that appear in child language are

rarely the same as those which appear in change (Croft, 2000, p.47). Second, young children,

- 43 -

for sociolinguistic reasons, are not able to be part of the diffusion of changes (Aitchison,

1981, p.180). Instead, it seems likely that older children and adolescents are the main ‘agents

of change’, because of their willingness to innovate and their orientation towards their peer

groups and older adolescents (Eckert, 2000; Kerswill, 1996). Careful examination of the

Milton Keynes children’s and adolescents’ data allows us to draw conclusions about their

contribution to any new dialect that may there. Figure 2 recodes the data from Figure 1 into

two categories: mid/back offset and front offset, and adds information from the adolescents

recorded in 1996.

100

percent

Caregivers

(1991)

Age 4

(1991)

Age 8

(1991)

Age 12

(1991)

Age 14

(1996)

Figure 2 Percent front/non-front offset of (ou) (GOAT), Milton

Keynes women and girls (data from Cheshire et al., 1999, Kerswill &

Williams, 2000)

mid/back offset
front offset

- 44 -

100

percent

Caregivers

(1991)

Age 4

(1991)

Age 8

(1991)

Age 12

(1991)

Age 14

(1996)

Figure 3 Percent fronted/non-fronted variants of (u:) (GOOSE), Milton

Keynes Working Class women and girls (data from Cheshire et al.,

1999, Kerswill & Williams, 2000)

mid/mid-back
front/mid-front

As can be seen, the amount of fronting increases with the age of the child subjects from 1991

(the 4, 8, and 12 year olds), while the adults have the lowest score. Interestingly, the 14 year

olds recorded in 1996 show a further small increase. Bearing in mind that the 14 year olds

would have been 9 in 1991, these results strongly suggest that the children themselves

actually increase their fronting as they reach adolescence. Figure 3 shows a rather similar

result for another vowel that is currently being fronted, /u

/ as in

GOOSE

, with the process

remaining vigorous into the teens.

On the face of it, focusing has been fully achieved in the speech of Milton Keynes

children. However, there are characteristics of this new speech community which are not

typical of long-established settlements. We return to this point in the final section.

The koines we have looked at in this chapter have generally become focused by the

time of the third generation (the grandchildren of the migrants) – though for Milton Keynes it

is too early to say. As we saw earlier, Modern Hebrew arose under somewhat different

- 45 -

conditions, with second-language speakers forming the input. Despite this, it seems that a

measure of stability was reached by that generation, too, despite the continued massive

immigration to Israel and the fact that most, even Israeli-born, people continued not to be

native speakers. Blanc (1968) sets out the stages of stabilization in terms of ‘typical’ 45-year-

old speakers and their communities at different points in time. They are as follows, with

Trudgill’s stages given in parentheses:

1. 1900: Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s contemporary. East European, a Yiddish native speaker. He

refers to written sources to guide him in his speech. (Stage I)

2. 1930: Still likely to be of East European birth or background, and not a native speaker.

(Stage II) The children of this group start to diverge, and level their speech, especially in

their informal style (incipient Stage III).

3. 1960: A fifty-fifty chance of being a native speaker. By now, there is considerable leveling

of ‘communal differentiation’ (that is, it is no longer possible to tell people’s language

background from their speech). His informal speech is imitated as a matter of course by

many new speakers. (Stage III)

(adapted from Blanc, 1968, pp. 239-40)

It is clear from this that new, leveled norms began to be established 30-40 years after the first

migrations (that is, Blanc’s stage 3 speakers when they were children), in other words, in the

speech of the second native-born generation.

Finally, we briefly look at a new community which, despite having existed for over 90

years, has never developed a koine. This is the Norwegian Arctic territory of Spitsbergen

(Svalbard) (Mæhlum, 1992), where, because families stay on average only for ten years, there

- 46 -

is no possibility of a stable adult norm. Children there have an “unclear dialect identity”

(Mæhlum, 1992, p.123), expressing identification both with the “home” town or village on

the mainland and with Spitsbergen. Very much in line with findings from New Zealand and

Høyanger, these children apparently retain more influence from their parents’ speech than

children do in established communities. Consequently, they are much more heterogeneous, as

well as internally inconsistent. Mæhlum argues that they use code-switching, dialect mixing,

and a version of standard East (Oslo) Norwegian as “strategies of neutrality.”

Three main points emerge. First, the kind and level of social integration of the new

community affects the speed of koineization. Thus, a socially homogeneous community is

likely to koineize faster than one with considerable social divisions. Perhaps surprisingly,

continued massive immigration seems to have only a minor inhibitory effect on koineization

– as long as, crucially, there is a stable ‘core’ of speakers who remain after the initial

settlement who can act as a focus for new incomers (cf. Mufwene’s ‘founder principle’,

1996); this factor differentiates Israel from Spitsbergen. Second, children’s access to peer

groups is crucial. Child speakers must be able to interact freely with other, perhaps older

children for them to be able to establish norms in the absence of a stable adult model The

development of adolescent norms is likely to be accelerated by compulsory schooling – a

point made by Britain (1997a, p.165), in the context of slow dialect leveling in the Fens of

eastern England following seventeenth-century migrations (on this, see Britain, 1997b).

Schooling in early New Zealand was sporadic and not centralized, because many of the

settlements were remote and communications were poor; this is obviously not true of Milton

Keynes. (See Eckert, 2000, on the role of the adolescent years in socialization and language

change, and the importance of the school.) Third, the degree of difference between the input

varieties will affect the amount of accommodation that individuals have to engage in. In

- 47 -

Milton Keynes (unlike all the other cases considered in this chapter), the dialect differences

are for the most part subtle, being restricted to minor subphonemic variations. As a result,

most of the usual heterogeneity found among first-generation children is simply bypassed,

given sufficient opportunities for contact among children and adolescents, and focusing

toward a new variety is accelerated.

- 48 -

Koineization and continuity

In this final section, we compare koineization with other forms of contact-induced language

change. The reason for doing so is to answer the question, “Are there any characteristics

which distinguish a speech community with a koine as its everyday vernacular from one

which uses a language variety which is the result of ‘normal’ transmission across the

generations?” It seems clear that, although koine formation shares some features with pidgin

and creole development, especially in the crucial role of face-to-fact contacts between

speakers of different language varieties, it is very distinct from these. Siegel (forthcoming,

pp.6-7) sets out criteria differentiating koine formation from pidgin and creole genesis, as

follows:

1. Koine formation involves continuity, in that speakers do not need to abandon their own

linguistic varieties. This is not so for pidgin and creole development.

2. In koine formation, there is no ‘target variety’. In pidgin and creole development, there is a

target variety.

3. Koine formation requires intimate and prolonged social interaction between speakers. We

must assume that this is not so in pidgin and creole development, where contact is restricted.

4. Koine formation can be a long process; pidgins and creoles are thought to develop rapidly

from an immediate need for communication.

- 49 -

We can take issue with the first of these points. Continuity is not clear-cut, in that a

community using a koine is likely not to have the ‘normal’ contact with earlier generations’

speech. This places a koine between a pidgin or creole, where transmission is interrupted, and

a dialect that is the result of ‘normal’ transmission. Normal transmission is defined by

Thomason & Kaufman (1988, pp.9-10) as taking place when “a language is passed on from

parent generation to child generation and/or via peer group from immediately older to

immediately younger.” Our final example will illustrate this intermediate status of a koine.

As we have already noted, Milton Keynes children use features that are characteristic

of general dialect leveling the south-eastern area, including the fronting of /

/ as in

GOAT

and /u

/ as in

GOOSE

. How can we be sure that the developments are the result of koineization,

and not regional dialect leveling by geographical diffusion? We now look at evidence

showing that, even if the outcome of the two processes is similar, the mechanism is different,

because of the discontinuity that exists across the generations in Milton Keynes. We examine

the vowel

0F=0

as in

MOUTH

, which appears to be converging on an Received Pronunciation-

GF=H

, moving away from local pronunciations such as

G%6H

and

G%=DH

. Table 6 shows how

this change appears in apparent time in Reading, a town roughly the same size, and distance

from London, as Milton Keynes, but with a long-established local population (Cheshire et al.,

1999). There has clearly been a substantial shift away from the older forms to a leveled

GF=H

- 50 -

Table

6 Percentage use of variants of /

F=0

(

MOUTH

), Reading Working Class, interview style

G%=DH, G%6H,

G%&H, GF&

H, GI=H, GF=H,

Survey of English Dialects (SED)

informants, 1950-60s (Orton et al.,

1968)

✓

Elderly (2f, 2m)

53.5

38.1

3.3

4.1

0.7

Girls age 14 (n=8)

2.3

8.0

90.4

Boys age 14 (n=8)

3.8

3.2

5.7

87.1

Table

7 Percentage use of variants of /

/ (

MOUTH

), Milton Keynes Working Class, interview

style

G%=DH, G%6H,

G%&H, GF&

H, GI=H, GF=H,

Survey of English Dialects (SED)

informants, 1950-60s (Orton et al.,

1968)

✓

Elderly (2f, 2m)

63.2

25.6

9.8

1.2

Women age 25-40 (1991 data; n=48)

11.7

17.2

38.6

31.5

Girls age 14 (n=8)

5.9

4.7

88.8

Boys age 14 (n=8)

12.3

3.8

83.1

Table 7 shows the corresponding data from Milton Keynes. With the inclusion of data from

the ‘young adult’ generation, this gives an apparent-time snapshot of four generations of the

- 51 -

area, with the new town being established between the ‘elderly’ and ‘women’s’ generations.

Despite the similarities, there are differences between the two towns. In Milton Keynes, there

appear to be three stages in the development of this vowel: first, a period of stability in which

=DH

and

G%6H,

predominated, followed at the height of the Milton Keynes settlement in the

1970s by a period of greater heterogeneity in which

, the form favored by the majority of

the in-migrants (represented here by the women aged 25-40), was dominant. A ‘re-focusing’

finally began with the second-generation migrants (today’s children), who are settling on

GF=H

. Starting with the ‘elderly’, there is a marked discontinuity in the scores between each

succeeding generation, shown particularly by the total absence of the older forms in the

speech of the women and children. This reflects the lack of social continuity in this town,

where most children have parents as well as grandparents originating elsewhere. In Reading,

young WC speakers are similarly rejecting the regionally marked forms in favor of

GF=H

However, it is significant that some young speakers retain the old forms of their grandparents

in a way that is indicative of the strong social continuity in this working-class part of

Reading. It is this distinction between the absence and presence of continuity that marks a

koine from a ‘normal’ regional variety: The outcomes may, in the end, be the same, but the

mechanism is quite different.

PAUL KERSWILL

School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies

The University of Reading

- 52 -

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Peter Auer, Arne Kjell Foldvik, Frans Hinskens, and Helge Sandøy for

so willingly providing me with last-minute information during the writing of this article, and

Peter Trudgill for answering my queries so promptly.

- 53 -

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