The Sociohistorical Context of Imposition in Substrate Effects

Abstract

A growing literature directly connects historical demographic patterns to the emergence of new dialects or languages. This article moves beyond the usual macro view of such data, relying on simple numbers of speakers and similar information, to focus on the input to new generations of speakers in a so-called substrate setting. The English now spoken in eastern Wisconsin shows a range of influences from German, and we work to reconstruct the kinds of input that the first large generation of English L1, mostly monolingual English-speaking children in the community,likely received at the level of the household and the individual. Evidence strongly suggests that most children in the community would have been widely exposed to heavily German-influenced English, in part due to a critical moment of shift from German to English as the home language in many households.

Reallocation: How new forms arise from contact

“…This model places reallocation at the end of a long process of contact-related changes. Kerswill stresses the variability in this scenario, and, in particular, that these stages can take several generations to develop; as Wilkerson et al (2014) argue on the development of English in Wisconsin: Some immigrants did not learn English for one or more generations, and many remained bilingual for much longer. This is observed as new speakers of different languages and dialects came into the area, with distinct regional varieties only emerging a century and a half after English speakers came to what is now Wisconsin, in significant numbers.…”

“Subliminal accent”: Reactions to the rise of Wisconsin English

“…Though language shift toward English is advanced today in these communities, there are still native speakers and ‘rememberers’ in most communities and revitalization efforts are underway. In many communities, immigrant languages were spoken by a majority of local residents, in some cases with more than one generation of monolingual speakers; the learning of English and the beginning of the decisive shift to English came only in the early 20 th century (Wilkerson & Salmons 2008, 2012, Wilkerson et al 2014; Frey 2013). All of this likely delayed new dialect formation further as well as influencing and affecting dialect formation.…”