IDENTITY AND NEW DIALECT FORMATION

Trudgill rejects the notion that the social factor “identity” plays any role in colonial new-dialect formation, arguing that new dialects emerge deterministically from the demographic mix of input varieties, and that it is only later that the distinctive features of a dialect become emblematic.

In support of his position he cites Labov (2001:191) on his Martha's Vineyard study, interpreting Labov's comment as indicating skepticism about the importance of “the concept of local identity in the motivation of linguistic change.” But in its context Labov's comment is rather arguing for the importance of paying further attention to local identity. The very next sentence reads: “Hazen 2000 is an impressive advance toward providing empirical support for the concept of local identity.” And while it is true that Labov is pointing out that the correlation between identity and sound change may not be as frequent as has been assumed, he is also arguing that, in order to understand linguistic change, we should pay attention to “local” identity as opposed to expanded identity, and to the “changes in social preferences and attitudes” that give rise to changes in “interlocutor frequencies” (2001:191). We would argue that these socially influenced frequencies have the power to shape, though not to determine, the path taken by linguistic change. We pick up this important point below.

In fact, the “identity” issue is a red herring. There is little doubt that demographic factors will always be important (see below), but the challenge for sociolinguists working on new dialect formation must be to identify the range of social reasons that people adopt one linguistic form rather than another. Social identity is only ever likely to be one of several contenders, and national identity, as Trudgill suggests, is likely to emerge later rather than earlier – if at all. Nonetheless, as Labov indicates, awareness of the associations of particular forms with local identity may turn out to be important. But to imply, as Trudgill seems to be doing, that “national identity” can stand for all types of identity deflects our attention from the real sociolinguistic issues. He is attacking a straw person.

Two further reservations concern Trudgill's deliberately negative argumentation, and his dependence on pre-16th-century sources. Focusing on negative arguments and evidence means that Trudgill fails to demonstrate that the reasons for the emergence of the forms he cites were not social. He merely describes what emerged and accounts for it by citing dialect mixture as the reason, rather than seeking social explanations.

Trudgill's focus on pre-16th-century data makes it difficult to provide counter-evidence. We have no recordings from those times. Trudgill refers to the “uniformitarian principle” (Labov 1994) to justify applying what we know about the distant past (pre-16th century) to explain the more recent past (19th century). But this is the opposite of what Labov was arguing. Labov suggested we use our knowledge of present processes, which we can observe, to infer what happened in the past. We find Trudgill's argument somewhat perverse.

THE FORMATION OF NEW ZEALAND ENGLISH

While we agree with Trudgill that it is implausible that people in the early stages of new-dialect formation make linguistic choices in order to promote a sense of common or national identity (Tuten 2003:29; Hickey 2003:215), we would nevertheless argue that there is no stage in the process of new-dialect formation when social factors are irrelevant.

Turning to the formation of New Zealand English, we face a host of questions, most of which we cannot answer except speculatively, since the crucial empirical data are not available. New Zealand was certainly no linguistic tabula rasa (as suggested in Trudgill 2004). People bring sociolinguistic knowledge, including attitudes to varieties, to any social situation, and those who came to New Zealand brought a range of regional and social identities that they did not completely discard as they stepped off the boat (see Kerswill 2007). This is directly relevant to Trudgill's argument because he identifies “accommodation in face-to-face interaction” as “the fundamental mechanism leading to dialect mixture.”¹

In our view this seems misguided. Elsewhere, Trudgill 2004 has paid attention to demographic factors in dialect mixture, pointing out that the sheer number of people using some variants best accounts for the emergence of a preferred variant. But this cannot account for situations where no particular variant is numerically dominant; and this is where social factors are likely to play a part. Why would one person accommodate to another's speech rather than the other way around? Trudgill does not address this issue, perhaps because it is implausible that the answer would be biologically based. It seems sociolinguistically axiomatic that a desire to be like the other person in a range of possible social respects (status, social group, social role, etc.) is one fundamental explanation. But, as we noted above, non-demographic social factors bear directly on frequencies of interaction. Because people bring to each encounter their personal and social identities, as well as knowledge and beliefs about intergroup relations and about the social marking of linguistic variants, interactions with certain social groups will be sought out or avoided. Thus, social factors influence both the frequency of interactions and the direction of accommodation. In both of these ways, the direction of change is influenced.

Trudgill 2004 argues that the critical generation for new-dialect formation is that of the children of the first settlers. Central to his argumentation against any influence of social factors is the claim that these children select variants from the dialect mix at will, as in a supermarket (2004:151–57). But even in early colonial New Zealand, children would have been linguistically socialized in specific ways; the immigrants were not sociolinguistic tabulae rasae. To understand the kind of sociolinguistic parameters at work in the new communities, we need more information about the places where the distinctive New Zealand dialect developed.

In fact, the places that have been the source of most speculation on how the New Zealand accent developed are relatively small townships, which are in many respects very atypical: gold-mining settlements with a rather odd mixture of people, usually poverty-stricken and often transient. More valuable would be data on the speech of people in urban centers where a range of social factors as well as shared attitudes to language might be expected to play important roles in the development of a new dialect. Those who controlled the development of the urban centers sought “respectful hard-working rural labourers and cultured men of capital” or “industrious immigrants of the labouring class” (quoted by King 2003:173) – hence those who were neither destitute nor aristocratic. These working- and middle-class people fit into the category of those who are described as “linguistically insecure” by Labov 1966, 2001, though a preferable description might be most linguistically innovative and open to the influence of others. It is thus very likely that their attitudes to dialect features (acquired in Britain, on the ship, or in New Zealand) influenced their choice of preferred linguistic variants in the new speech community.

Attitudinal factors must inevitably have played a part in the emergence of the particular patterns of linguistic variation that distinguished different social groups in particular urban New Zealand centers. And it is at this local level, we would argue, that identity issues seem likely to be relevant. Rather than searching for evidence of the development of a “New Zealand” identity at the early stages of dialect mixing, we should be looking for evidence on what it would mean to sound (locally) acceptable within any particular new, socially diverse community. As we have said, language attitudes would be influential, alongside the social activities of influential individuals in the new communities, the “saccadic leaders” (Labov 2001:383). The children of the first settlers did not exist in a sociolinguistic vacuum: Even though they had a lot of work to do in figuring out how to talk, they did not have to make up their own linguistic norms from scratch.

In conclusion, there is clearly a role for demographics, and perhaps even biology, in accounting for new dialect formation. But the picture is more complex than Trudgill suggests and requires us to look at social factors at every stage.