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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1131

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Abrupt vs. gradual change in immigrant groups: Evidence from morphosyntax

Authors: Sharma, Devyani; Tusha, Aurela
Submitted by: Sharma, Devyani (Queen Mary, University of London, United Kingdom)

Recent research (Chambers 2002; Labov 2008; Hoffman & Walker 2010) has suggested that the second generation in an immigrant community may superficially retain non-native phonetic features for identity purposes, but do not faithfully replicate their parents' system.  Sharma & Sankaran (2011) showed that the earliest second generation can in fact replicate the first generation phonetic system while simultaneously controlling features of the local dialect, indicating gradual change with multidimensional competence governed more by social (demographic, political, historical) than purely cognitive (nativeness) factors. The present study extends the investigation of abrupt vs. gradual change to three morphosyntactic features: the quotative system, a/the allomorphy, and was/were levelling. Internal conditioning for all three is distinct in Indian English and London English, and thus allows us to investigate whether British-born Gen 2 individuals in the Punjabi community in West London parallel native London systems (Cheshire et al. 2011) or non-native Indian systems.  The three generations examined (42 speakers) are Gen 1, older Gen 2, and younger Gen 2. We assess frequencies and grammatical conditioning in relation to previous findings for all three variables.

We find different rates of shift for different syntactic variables.  The fastest shift is in was/were levelling: we see no evidence of the L2-style Indian English variation in was/were use among either older or younger Gen 2 speakers.  Notably, was/were variation in Indian English is seen as an L2 error, unlike quotatives and a/the allomorphy, which are more established, indigenized traits.  The older Gen 2 group maintain elements of their parents' Indian English system in their quotative system and in lower use of prevocalic allomorphs for a and the.  With the exception of the allomorphy, the younger Gen 2 no longer show such resemblances, and instead closely follows their British peers.  Thus, we do not see an abrupt shift at the point of nativeness, but rather a staggered, incremental shift. The avoidance of perceived L2 errors but retention of perceived stable Indian English dialect traits by the intermediate older Gen 2 suggests that this instrumental group does not acquire their system mechanistically, but rather ascribes differential social values to variants.  The study builds on the proposal in Sharma & Sankaran (2011) that Gen 2 groups must be broken down by historical phase in order to fully understand the retention of deep substrate systems. It also demonstrates the growing stability and resulting diasporic influence of Indian English.

References:

Chambers, Jack. (2002). Dynamics of dialect convergence. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6.

Cheshire, Jenny, Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox, and Eivind Torgersen. (2011). Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15.

Hoffman, Michol, and James Walker. (2010). Ethnolects and the city: Ethnic orientation and linguistic variation in Toronto English. Language Variation and Change 22.

Labov, William. (2008). Mysteries of the substrate. In Meyerhoff and Nagy (eds.) Social Lives in Language: Sociolinguistics and multilingual speech communities. Benjamins.

Sharma, Devyani, and Lavanya Sankaran. (2011). Cognitive and social forces in dialect shift: Gradual change in London Asian speech. Language Variation and Change 23(3).