The ""new speaker" as agent of social and linguistic change, SOAS University of London
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2016-07-25

https://www.soas.ac.uk/linguistics/
This talk titled "The "new speaker" as agent of social and linguistic change: exploring evidence from obsolescent Francoprovençal" was given by Jonathan Kasstan (Queen Mary) on 19 January 2016 at the Department of Linguistics.
More about this event: https://goo.gl/pNFDsN
An emerging body of work in the sociolinguistic literature has considered the notion of the ‘new speaker’ in the context of endangered minority varieties, where traditional linguistic practices are in flux, and where language shift has long been taking place (see most recently Jaffe 2015). Research undertaken, for example, on the Breton varieties spoken in France has shown that new speakers can produce linguistic variants that are far removed from the norms associated with traditional native speakers (e.g. Jones 1995). In the context of Irish and Galician, scholars have argued that, where new speakers arise in traditional native speaker communities, they feel a deep sense of social and linguistic ‘incompatibility’ (O’Rourke and Ramallo 2011: 139).

This paper considers emerging new speakers of Francoprovençal: a highly fragmented Romance dialect grouping spoken traditionally on the border between France, Switzerland and Italy by less than 1% of the total regional population (~ 150,000). Quite unlike Breton, Irish or Galician, Francoprovençal is not a clearly defined or coherently demarcated linguistic unit. Its introduction into the Romance literature in the 19th century as a discrete set of varieties has never been fully accepted by Romance linguists (see Martin 1990). There is no one prestige dialect or ‘standard Francoprovençal’, and, given its status as ‘severely endangered’ (Salminen 2007: 261), these varieties can be described as undergoing a process of ‘gradual death’ (Campbell and Muntzel 1989: 182-6).

Through an analysis of data collected in 2012, we examine /l/-palatalisation in obstruent+lateral onset clusters as a linguistic variable in two very different Francoprovençal-speaking regions: les monts du Lyonnais (France) and the Canton of Valais (Switzerland), both regions comprising varieties that have been in long term contact with Standard French. The data come from a wider sociolinguistic investigation into language variation and change in these regions. A sample of 57 informants were interviewed, forming three categories of speakers with very different routes of acquisition: native L1 speakers; late speakers, who acquired Francoprovençal later in life; and new speakers, who acquired Francoprovençal in a purely educational context. The data (n=1359), which come from both spontaneous speech samples and structured elicitation tasks, are assessed against historical linguistic atlas data. The findings suggest that bi-directional change is taking place in these communities. While on the one hand the native speaker and late speaker data evidence convergence with national norms, we find in the new speaker data emerging vernacular forms that, it will be suggested, might form part of a larger pan-regional new speaker norm.

References:

Campbell, L and Muntzel, M. C. 1989. The structural consequences of language death. In: N. C. Dorian (ed.), Investigating Obsolescence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 181-96.

Jaffe, A. 2015. ‘Defining the new speaker: theoretical perspectives and learner trajectories’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 231, pp. 21-44.

Jones, M. C. 1995. ‘At what price language maintenance? Standardization in Modern Breton’, French Studies, XLIX (3), pp. 428-36.

Martin, J.-B., 1990. ‘Frankoprovenzalish – Francoprovençal’, Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik, 1, pp. 671-685.

O’Rourke B. and Ramallo F. 2011. ‘The native/non-native dichotomy in minority language contexts’, Language Problems & Language Planning, 35 (2), pp. 139-159.