In the introduction to this book, “Prologue: Colonisation and contact” (xii–xiv), Peter Trudgill quotes his colleague David Britain as characterizing some of Trudgill's works as being like detective stories, and says that the present book “is made up of a number of such historical-sociolinguistic tales of detection” (xii).
The investigations start early in the history of English with the first and longest chapter in the book. The question asked in “What really happened to Old English?” (1–35) is how to explain what Trudgill calls “the typological transformation that English underwent between Old English and Middle English” (4). Trudgill characterizes Old English as “fusional” and “inflecting,” whereas Middle English shows “a clear move towards a much more isolating type of morphology” (1). He notes that Middle English had no grammatical gender compared to the three of Old English. It also had “two numbers rather than three, three cases rather than five, and many fewer inflections, conjugations and declensions” (2). Quoting James Milroy, he says that the changes are overall a trend towards simplification (6) that has to be at least partly explained by language contact (8).
Perhaps the idea of a “typological transformation” makes the changes more drastic than they really were. I am not sure that Old English and Middle English would strike a linguist without previous experience of European languages (if that is thinkable) as belonging to radically different morphological types. Middle English (and even Modern English) is still quite some distance from truly isolating languages such as Vietnamese, and all Germanic languages have—in comparison to many other Indo-European languages, let alone languages from other families—inflectional systems that seem quite impoverished, in particular with respect to verb morphology. Old English verbs had (theoretically) fourteen distinct finite verb forms, two or three of which were merged in individual verbs. Modern written French has about three times that number, and Latin verbs had around one hundred finite verb forms.
The idea that the reduction of inflectional complexity in Middle English was due to language contact is obviously not a new one; Trudgill notes that it has been blamed on Norman French, Old Norse, and Brittonic Celtic, with British Latin as another possible suspect. To decide who were really the culprits, he invokes what he calls “sociolinguistic typology” and the suggestion that the structure of a language may be at least partly determined by the type of social environment and social structure in which it is spoken. Thus, he claims, long-term contact situations influencing child language acquisition will tend to lead to complexification through the addition of features from other languages, whereas short-term contact involving adult language learning tends to lead to simplification, due to the problems adults have in coping with irregularity and nontransparency. He accordingly characterizes what happened in Old English as “an extended, fluid and complex process” (34), involving at least four stages during which contact primarily with Celtic and Scandinavian led both to initial complexification and ensuing simplification.
In the second chapter, which has the intriguing title “East Anglian English and the Spanish Inquisition” (36–60), Trudgill returns to his home turf to try to find an explanation to the puzzle with the missing s-ending of present tense verbs in East Anglian English, where, as he claims, the Spanish Inquisition did play a role, albeit a rather indirect one.
It is not so easy to figure out from the title of the third chapter, “On Anguilla and The Pickwick Papers” (61–91), what it really is about, but Trudgill uses both the English spoken in the Caribbean island of Anguilla and the speech of Dickens' character Sam Weller as evidence for a merger of /v/ and /w/ in southeastern England in earlier centuries, later reverted due to contact with other varieties of English.
The English spoken in Anguilla is an example of what Trudgill calls “lesser known Englishes.” Another case is found on the Bonin Islands south of Japan and is the topic of the chapter “The last Yankee in the Pacific” (92–107). The Bonin or Ogasawara Islands were settled in the nineteenth century; the population was of mixed “Western” and Pacific origin, with many different native languages, but English became the lingua franca. After the islands were incorporated by Japan, a number of different languages and varieties were spoken, including what Trudgill refers to as Mainstream Bonin English, Bonin English Creoloid, the Ogasaware Japanese-English Mixed Language, and Ogasawara Japanese Koiné. The focus in this chapter, however, is on the Mainstream Bonin English spoken by a speaker born in the 1880s, which turns out to have been largely based on his grandfather's New England dialect.
The topic of “An American lack of dynamism” (108–29) are two features that characterize American English compared to British English with respect to have as an auxiliary and a full verb: the lack of dynamic uses (as in I had a shower) and the more extensive use of do-support. Trudgill sees a connection here, although his explanation is perhaps not entirely convincing.
Three chapters focus on the Englishes of the Southern hemisphere, primarily New Zealand and Australia. The data for all of the chapters are taken from recordings of New Zealand English of the 1940s, analyzed in the Origins of New Zealand English (ONZE) project. The chapter “Colonial lag?” (130–42) discusses a number of features where New Zealand and Australian English “lag behind” the English of England, according to Trudgill, because children in early colonial times “developed mixtures of features derived from those present in the speech of members of their parents' generation” (142). “The new non-rhotic style” (143–58) tries to explain the presence of “vestigial rhoticity” in some ONZE speakers by claiming that the disappearance of rhoticity in southern English took place quite a bit later than has been usually assumed. Finally, “What became of all the Scots?” (159–80) asks why there is so little apparent influence from Scottish English on the phonology of New Zealand English when there are clear influences in the vocabulary. Trudgill sees new dialect formation as deterministic, with the proportions of variants present in the resulting dialect reflecting the proportion of those variants in the input varieties, provided that these variants reach a certain threshold level.
In the final chapter, “Epilogue: The critical threshold and interactional synchrony” (181–92), Trudgill discusses some more general aspects of the “puzzles” treated in the book. (The term “critical threshold” might refer to the threshold level discussed in the preceding chapter but apparently rather pertains to the critical period for first language acquisition.) He notes the prevalence of solutions involving contact and the necessity of recognizing that there is a continuum with clear cases of language contact at the one end and clear cases of dialect contact at the other. He then turns to the mechanisms that are at work here. While it should be clear, he says, that the consequences of adult language contact have to do with differences between children and adults in language learning abilities, it is less obvious why dialect contact have the effect it has. Why do speakers accommodate to each other even in the absence of comprehension problems? Trudgill rejects the popular idea that the reason is a striving towards a sense of common identity; rather, he says, accommodation “is an automatic consequence of human interaction” and is both an unconscious and “a deeply automatic process” (189). (In this connection, there is a somewhat puzzling mention of a statement by Salikoko Mufwene to the effect that creoles emerge “by accident”—this seems to go against the deterministic views that Trudgill expresses elsewhere.) Although there are some “highly unusual” contact situations where accommodation and dialect mixture does not occur, it happens in most cases, and “this accommodation in turn leads to new dialect formation, as there is no single peer-group dialect for children to accommodate to” (191), the children begin “surrounded by an enormously variable set of models.” But it can be objected that the effect of accommodation in adult language on first language acquisition in the following generation is not obvious. Even if no accommodation took place, the variable set of models would still be there, providing the material for a mixed result; in fact, accommodation arguably reduces variation rather than enhances it. By contrast, due to the limited language learning abilities of adults, accommodation is seldom complete, and also, as noted in Ch. 2, sometimes leads to off-target results, for example, hypercorrection.
As can be seen from the above, Trudgill's “sociolinguistic tales of detection” are more like a collection of Sherlock Holmes adventures than a novel by Agatha Christie; Trudgill says that he hopes that the chapters “combine to produce an overall, more general story which is also coherent” (xii). It is a difficult genre, however, and sometimes the reader may feel that the island-hopping tour around the English-speaking world goes a bit too fast. But at the same time, this tour gives fascinating glimpses of the variability of the English language and the processes behind this variability.
