General characteristics of linguistic areas

Lecture 10. Language and Geography

It is well known that there is a relationship between social and geographical dialects in Britain in the way that regional linguistic differentiation is the greatest in varieties. Social reasons for developing regional language differences are complex. They are clearly the result of a language shift in different ways in different places, but the actual process of a linguistic change is something to be still learnt much about.

What about barriers? When a linguistic innovation - a new word, a new accent, a new usage - occurs in some place, it may spread to other places, particularly those nearest to it, so long as there are no serious barriers to communication. If, for example, a language innovation started in London it would later be used in Cambridge before it found its way into the speech of Carlisle (a US town in the south of Pensilvania). It might, though, take a considerably longer time to reach Belfast, because of the Irish Sea. This is an obvious point, and one that does not apply only to language. All technological and behavioural innovations are subject to the same process. When mini-skirts were becoming fashionable in the -60s studies showed that girls were generally wearing their skirts shorter in London than in Newcastle, where, in turn, they were shorter than those worn in Edinburgh.

Social and geographical pressures involved in the spread of linguistic innovations are of course more complex than those connected with fashions. A good example is the loss in English of non-prevocalic [r] in the words like cart and car. The [r]-pronouncing areas on the map suggest that the innovation will begin somewhere in the centre or east of England before spreading north and west. However, maps represent a considerable simplification of the true state of affairs concerning, for example, the use of non-prevocalic [r] in England.

First, it is confined to only some words: an examination of data for other words might reveal additional areas, such as parts of Yorkshire.

Second, it is socially very incomplete. All along the edge of the south-western area, for instance, only older speakers from the lowest social groups of [r]-pronouncers, and even they are likely to pronounce it less strongly than the speakers further south and west.

Third, this map gives information only for rural linguistic varieties. For many urban areas, particularly the larger towns, the data given are very inaccurate. The reason for this difference between urban and rural accents is that linguistic innovations, like other innovations, often spread from one urban centre to another, and only later spread out into the surrounding countryside.

This is due to the general economic, demographic and cultural dominance of town over country, and to the structure of the communication network. The spread of linguistic features from one area to another is therefore not dependent solely on proximity. An innovation starting in London is quite likely to reach Bristol before it reaches rural Wiltshire, although the latter is nearer. The speech of Manchester, for example, is in many ways more like that of London than of nearby rural Cheshire. Compare the following ways of pronouncing four words in the given areas:

London Manchester Cheshire

'brush' [brΛsh] [brush] [bruish]

'such' [sΛch] [such] [sich]

'tough' [tΛf] [tuf] [tof]

'put’ [put] [put] [pur]

Manchester and London forms are not identical, but there is a regular relationship such that all London [a] and [u] vowels correspond to Manchester [u] vowels. In the case of Cheshire forms there is no such regular correspondence.

One interesting phenomenon for sociolinguistics is why some linguistic innovations spread faster than others. The difference between London [Λ] and Manchester [u] is roughly the result of the original pronunciation of [u] being replaced by a new pronunciation of [Λ], which started life as an innovation in London, probably in the sixteenth century. This innovation has since spread northwards and westwards, but has travelled so slowly that it has not yet reached Manchester or other areas of northern England. The merger of [f] and [θ] (thing is pronounced like fing), was for many decades a well-known feature of London English only. Suddenly, it has started spreading very rapidly outwards from London. It seems to have arrived in Norwich in the 1970s, in Sheffield in the north of England in the 1980s, and in Exeter in the south-west in the 1990s. Distance, then, is clearly an important factor in the spread of linguistic forms, although in many cases social distance may be more important than geographical one: two towns may be socially 'closer' to each other than they are to the stretches of countryside.

What of barriers? Humber river, for example, acts as a geographical barrier to the spread of linguistic features in the north of England. There is also another type of barrier, which surprisingly enough does not necessarily have a significant slowing-down effect - namely the language barrier. Linguistic innovations, it appears, spread not only from one regional or social variety of the same language to another; they may also spread from one language into another language. An interesting example is the European uvular [r]. It is thought that until the sixteenth century all European languages had an [r]-type sound, which was pronounced as a rocking [r-r-r], still is pronounced today in many types of Scots English, Italian or Russian: a tongue-tip trill or flap. At some stage, though, perhaps in the seventeenth century, a new pronunciation of [r] became fashionable in the upper class of Parisian French. This new [r], uvular [r], is pronounced in the back of the mouth by means of contact between the back of the tongue and the uvula, and is the type of [r] sound, which is taught today to foreign learners of French and German.

Starting from this limited social and geographical base, the uvular-[r] pronunciation has during the last 300 years spread, regardless of language boundaries, to many other parts of Europe. It is now used by the overwhelming majority of urban or educated French speakers, and by most educated Germans. On the other hand, it is not used in Bavarian or, Swiss German. The uvular [r] is also a feature of local English accents in parts of Northumberland and Durham, the county in the North-East of England. It is not clear whether this phenomenon is connected to the continental pronunciation or not.

Processes of this type, when they involve grammar and vocabulary as well as phonetics, can lead to the development of linguistic areas. This term is used to refer to the areas where several languages are spoken and which, though not very closely related, have a number of features in common. The result is the diffusion of innovations across language boundaries. One of the most interesting areas of this kind in Europe is the Balkans, comprising former Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania. The languages involved are Serbo-Croat, Macedonian and Bulgarian (all Slav languages), Rumanian (a Romance language), Greek, and Albanian. These are all Indo-European languages, but apart from the three Slav languages they are not closely related genetically. Over centuries, they have acquired a number of common features sometimes known as 'Balkanisms', which mark some or all of them off from other (often more closely related) European languages. Rumanian and Bulgarian, for example, have a number of common features, which are not shared by any other Romance or Slav languages.

One of the most interesting features of the Balkan languages is the fact that four of them have a postpositional definite article (the form corresponding to the in English is placed after the noun): Albanian mekaniku; Bulgarian mexanikut; Macedonian mexanicarot; Romanian mecaniciaul. Another grammatical feature shared by many of the Balkan languages is a particular usage of subordinate clauses. Most European languages employ the construction where English, for example, has:

They left without asking me, which corresponds in other languages to: ‘They left without to ask me.’ For example: They left …

French: … sans me demander

German.. ohne mich zu fragen

Danish... aden at spørge mig.

In Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Rumanian, on the other hand, another construction is usual, equivalent in English to:

They left without that they asked me.' For example:

They left...

Bulgarian:.. - bez da mepopitat

Greek:... xoris na me rotisune '

… without that me they asked.'

Many other examples of linguistic areas can be found in different parts of the world. The Indian subcontinent is a good instance of an area where non-related languages have a number of features in common. Generally speaking, the majority of north Indian languages belong to the Indo-European family, while most of the languages spoken in the south of India are Dravidian. These language groups are not related at all. However, in spite of the lack of relationship, many Indian languages from both groups have grammatical constructions in common, and share a number of features of pronunciation. One of the most striking phonetic similarity is the presence in both families of retroflex consonants: consonants formed by curling the tip of the tongue back and bringing it into contact with the back of the alveolar ridge, as in [t], [d].

Lexical items appear to be able to spread across much greater distances. Words can be borrowed from one language into another regardless of proximity. Very often, when speakers of a particular language happen to be dominant in some field, other language groups adopt words pertaining to the field from this language. For example, many English musical terms - like adagio, allegro, crescendo - are of Italian origin, while sporting terms in many languages, like football, goal, sprint, as well as the terms connected with pop music and jazz, tend to be English.

At present, English is a source of loan words for very many languages. Borrowings of this type take place initially through the medium of the bilingual individual. And individuals with the knowledge of English are becoming increasingly valuable as a result of widespread use of English as lingua franca and its teaching in schools. This, of course, is not due to any inherent superiority of the English language as a medium of international communication, but rather due to the former world political, economic, educational and scientific dominance of Great Britain and the similar present dominance of the USA.

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