Published in a slightly different format in
The European English Messenger 9:9-15 (2000)
POPULATION CONTACTS AND THE EVOLUTION OF ENGLISH
Salikoko S. Mufwene
University of Chicago
ÝÝÝÝÝ This essay is a combination of provocative observations on the
evolution of English. Questioning some established positions and working
assumptions, I raise some issues on the role of contact in language evolution
and on the nature of language transmission. These factors are presented as
critical to understanding how English started and has speciated into so many
varieties today. The discussion is an appetizer to my book The ecology of language evolution (to appear in 2001 at Cambridge
University Press) which spells out the contribution that research on the
development of creoles can make to genetic linguistics, thus also to
scholarship on the history of the English language (HEL). What follows is a
reconstruction of a hitherto unwritten plenary presentation at the MAVEN II
Conference at the University of Lincoln and Humberside, England, in September
1999. Although space limitations make it difficult to use the illustrations
that complemented the oral presentation, every effort has been made to keep
this written version on the manifold disputation as straightforward as
possible.
ÝÝÝÝÝ Today the word English
applied to language can no longer be defined without qualifications as ëthe
language of the English peopleíócontrary to how one can identify Japanese, Somali, or Kinyarwanda in
relation to the specific peoples that are their primary speakers and bear the
same names. Such a characterization would be historical, for instance, ëthe
language that over one thousand years ago was the vernacular spoken primarily
by the English peopleí.[1]
ÝÝÝÝÝ An alternative diachronic characterization is: ëname associated
with language varieties that can be traced genetically to Old Englishí. An important
reason for considering it is the following: since the moment the construct English was associated with England and
its inhabitants, the English, the
language has been appropriated by various other populations. Some of these
inhabit territories so many thousands of miles away from its birth place that
we cannot be surprised why some of the member varieties have been disfranchised
with labels such as pidgin English, English Creole, new English, and indigenized/nativized
English.[2]
ÝÝÝÝÝ Most of the above terms reflect a social bias that is inherent
in genetic linguistics. They suggest that pidgin, creole, and
indigenized/nativized varieties are by-products of language contact, whereas
other varieties such as spoken in England and by Whites in North America are
not. This assumption is at best disputable. As I focus on contact below,Ý let us now consider the label new English. It most saliently subsumes
indigenized Englishes, though sometimes it also includes other
non-pidgin/creole varieties spoken outside the United Kingdom, if not outside
of England (and Scotland) alone. Whichever way the label applies, it is
inaccurate. There are no 17th nor 18th-century English varieties still spoken
today in England or the United Kingdom.
ÝÝÝÝÝ To be sure, there are some linguists who like to oppose
ìold(er)î languages to ìyoung(erî ones. Paradoxically, the most common examples
in the first category include English and French (since classical languages
such as Latin and Old Norse are presumably dead) and those in the second category
include creoles. As made more obvious in the following paragraphs, advocates of
this distinction ignore the fact that English creoles are as legitimate
evolutions from colonial forms of English as other varieties which developed in
the same territories and during the same time period but have been kept within
the English franchise. They also fail to consider some important unresolved
issues to which I return below.
ÝÝÝÝÝ Since every spoken language is adapted by its speakers to
current communicative needs and contexts, there cannot be any ìold(er)î
languages. Such varieties would be maladaptive óthe way Latin would if it had
not developed into the Romance languages. So, the term new English should apply to all varieties identifiable as English
todayóin the same way that Romance languages can be claimed to be new forms of
the Latin vernaculars spread by Roman soldiers. Conversely, to the extent that
English pidgins and creoles, as well as indigenized Englishes, can ultimately
be traced back to Old English, they all have a long history.
ÝÝÝÝÝ Genetic linguists should re-examine their reasons for
disfranchising especially pidgins and creoles as not genetically related to
their lexifiers. Their typical arguments are that these varieties are
contact-based and not mutually intelligible with presumably the more legitimate
offspring that, say, colonial English vernaculars are. Letís think about it.
Doesnít modern linguistics also profess that dialects of the same language need
not be mutually intelligible? Isnít Cockney unintelligible to speakers of some
other English dialects? Is New Zealand vernacular English more intelligible to
those who are not familiar with it than Jamaican Creole is? (Yes, familiarity
is with any variety or language is critical to intelligibility!) So why do
genetic linguists capitalize on mutual intelligibility?
ÝÝÝÝÝ Regarding contact-based evolution, how accurate is the history
of English sketched above? Does it really start with a full-fledged Old English
in England by, say, the 7th century? Did the Germanic invaders of England in
the 5th century speak Old English? Did the Jutes, Angles, Saxons, and, later,
Frisians speak mutually intelligible Germanic languages or dialects? Even if
these were mutually intelligible (which is doubtful if we consider, for instance,
Dutch and German today), were they typologically identical? Letís assume, like
Crystal (1995), that the Germanic settlers drove the Native Celts to the
frontiers of their colonies (Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia, Essex, Sussex,
Wessex, and Kent)óin a way similar to what Europeans did to Native Americans
when they colonized the New World. Isnít Old English likely to have originated
in the contacts that the newcomers had among themselves across tribal and/or
dialectal lines? History also suggests that the Germanic invaders settled
EnglandÝ according to their origins, so
that East Anglia was primarily a colony of the Angles and Essex, Sussex, and
Wessex were colonized primarily by the Saxons, etc. The different Old English
communities that developed then seem to reflect interaction patterns that
correspond to these settlement trends, making allowance also for contacts with
the Native Celts, however minimal their influences may have been. These
considerations should account for the dialectal variation in Old English noted
by, for instance, Hogg (1992) and Milroy (1992).
ÝÝÝÝÝ Recent history may shed light on what happened in that distant
past. Kurathís (1928) position that dialectal regions in North America reflect
immigration patterns of the early colonists has found support in socio-economic
histories such as Bailyn (1986) and Fischer (1989). Even indentured servants
had a choice over the particular parts of the American colonies where they
wanted to immigrate. Variable as they were from colony to colony, new patterns
of population and dialect contacts produced new, colonial dialects. By the
Founder Principle, structures of todayís dialects were largely predetermined by
what was spoken by the founder populations and what emerged from their
interactions as they accommodated each other. Of course, stochastic events,[3]
such as massive immigrations from other parts of the British Isles or from
continental Europe, bore on those initial evolutionary trends and modified some
of them, producing todayís American English varieties.
ÝÝÝÝÝ If the Germanic invaders of England were as normal
post-Neanderthal humans as the English colonists in North America, Australia,
and New Zealand, something similar to the latterís settlement experience must
have happened. The birth of Old English is an England-based linguistic
development, a colonial product like American, Australian, and New Zealand
Englishes. According to the OED, the
name England is about as old as the
name English. With their earliest
attestations situated in the late 9th century, they are etymologically related
to Old English terms for the Angles, the former used for their land and the
latter for their language.[4]
One may conjecture that after the term England
was extended to the wider territory of which the older Anglian colony is only a
part and Old English as the new colonial language was supplanting the Germanic
vernaculars brought from the European continent, English could be identified as the vernacular of the new, wider
England. In this respect, the development of Old English is reminiscent of that
of creole vernaculars and their other colonial kin, such as American and
Australian Englishes, which are all local evolutions. Etymologically, creole
vernaculars are varieties typical of certain settlement colonies, like some
plants and animals that were/are also identified with the same adjective, e.g.,
creole cow. Regarding Old English,
one important question that remains open is: What role did the Celts play in
its development?
ÝÝÝÝÝ The above observations seem so obvious to those of us not doing
HEL. It is, however, not clear why experts have generally not considered
contact an unmarked factor in the evolution of English in England and among
Whites in, say, North America. Exceptions to this observation apply to areas
such as the lexicon, where external influence is too obvious to ignore. The
high percentage of French lexical items in the English vocabulary actually
makes it difficult to deny the role of French in the actuation of the Great
Vowel Shift. That there is no comparable influence from Native American
languages on American English can be explained by differences between the kinds
of interactions the Norman invaders had with the then English populations and
those which the English colonizers had with the Native Americansóa fact on
which I need not elaborate here.
ÝÝÝÝÝ What is shocking is that Thomason & Kaufman (1988), for
instance, dismiss the possible influence of Old Norse and Norman French on some
of the grammatical changes that have affected English. They argue that the same
changes would have happened even if English had not come in contact with these
other languages. One of the issues may be whether external influence should be
limited to only those cases where structural features external to a language
are adopted. Can it not be extended to those where xenolectal characteristics
favor some native variants at the expense of others? I favor the extended
meaning of external influence,
assuming that every specific ecology of language use determines its local
evolutionary trajectory. (I return to this dimension of language evolution
below.)
ÝÝÝÝÝ To be fair to them, Thomason & Kaufman (1988) are
influenced by the then seemingly sound position in creolistics that creolesí
grammatical features are largely contact-induced innovations. This assumption
also leads them to stipulate that creoles are not genetically related to their
lexifiers, a position that I also dispute. It was based on several mistaken
assumptions, some of which make genetic linguistics itself circular. For
instance, it was assumed that restructuring qua system-reorganization occurred
mostly in the development of pidgins and creoles but not in other cases, or at
least not that extensively. However, if restructuring did not happen in other
cases, there would be no new dialects of English. If it is a question of degree
of restructuring, then where does one draw the line, even if this must remain a
fuzzy boundary? In the case of North America, note that since the early stages
of its colonization, EnglishÝ among
Whites came in contact with other European languages, whose speakers were no
more apt to acquire English than the African slaves were. Documentation on
runaway slaves also suggests that many African slaves who lived and interacted
regularly with Europeans spoke the same colonial English that their masters or
white indentured homologs did. This observation questions the argument that
creoles developed in part because there were too few European models to
transmit the lexifier faithfully. I show below that the argument is flawed.
ÝÝÝÝÝ The association of transmission of the lexifier with Europeans
led to another mistaken assumption, viz., break in the transmission of the
lexifier. If there really was a break in transmission, nothing would have been
passed onóperiod. To suggest that one needed Europeans to pass the lexifier on
to African slaves in the New World betrays ignorance of the history of the
colonies. In the early stages, on the small farms that preceded the large
plantations (which never developed overnight), there were no African
majorities, and the Africansóespecially their childrenóspoke like the Whites
with whom they lived fairly intimately. By the time the plantations developed
and segregation was instituted, transmission of the English language did not
depend on the proportion of Whites any more than it does today in Africa or
Asia, where English is propagated by non-Whites. No break in transmission could
be posited in such cases.
ÝÝÝÝÝ Besides, to insist so much on the need for more Europeans to
transmit the lexifier is overlooking the fact that several European indentured
servants didnít speak the lexifier natively and contributed their share to the
restructuring of the lexifier among the European colonists and their
descendants. In English colonies, both among Europeans and among non-Europeans,
it simply was restructured colonial nonstandard English, identified sometimes
as a koinÈ, that was transmitted from
one group to another and from generation to generation. In every group, with
every transmission, the lexifier was being restructured. The difference lies in
degrees of deviation from the original and the sources of external influences.
It just doesnít make much sense to suggest that in those settings external
influence on colonial English was relevant only among Africans and their
descendants, but not among Europeans and their descendants.
ÝÝÝÝÝ The explanation for differences among the varieties spoken by
descendants of Europeans and non-Europeans lies not in the absence of contact
for Europeans and the role of contact for non-Europeans, but rather in how the
ecology of the contacts among the colonists (free, indentured, and enslaved)
varied. Ecology includes, inter alia, the kind of English to which
those appropriating it were exposed, the kinds of languages that came in
contact with English (how different they were structurally from it), the
patterns of interaction between speakers of the target language and those
appropriating it, whether or not segregation was instituted in the colonial
population and at what stage, etc.
ÝÝÝÝÝ An important issue has been what role languages other than the
target played in the restructuring that took place. Research by, for instance,
Shana Poplack and Sali Tagliamonte over the past 15 years has shown that
overall the features typically associated with African-American vernacular
English (AAVE) can be traced back to colonial English; they are not
particularly African in origin. While I basically agree with them, one must
also consider the following: because those features are not uniformly, nor
universally, used in all English dialects (despite the strong parallelisms that
Poplackís and Tagliamonteís studies reveal in the strengths of conditioning
factors of the variants), the ecologies of contact with African languages
favored the peculiarities that distinguish AAVE from other English vernaculars.
It does not matter at all that most of these peculiarities are statistical.
Basically the same explanation applies also to English creoles, though
restructuring was obviously more extensive in this case. The origins of the
features are undoubtedly English, given the fact that the Africans were
shifting to, and targeted, it. However, the restructuring that produced the new
vernaculars could not be independent of the influence of substrate languages. The
indirect evidence for this position lies in all cases in which a language has
been appropriated by a foreign group.
ÝÝÝÝÝ The latter observations find support in the development of
indigenized Englishes. Despite the guided mode of transmissionóthrough the
scholastic mediumólocal ecologies have favored particular features, including
downright structural importations from the substrate languages. The endogenous
ecologies of indigenized Englishes, with often more structural homogeneity
among the indigenous languages, were certainly more favorable to substrate
influence.[5]
ÝÝÝÝÝ Can such an ecological explanation not be extended to the
evolution of English since Old English, factoring in influences from the Celtic
languages, Old Norse, and Norman French? To answer this question, we must
compare varieties of Old English and these other languages, so that we can
determine whether in the relevant respects they did not indeed influence the
selections that were made in favor of what we now identify as changes. One has
to factor in the proportion of indigenous to non-indigenous populations and the
patterns of interaction between them as groups. Recall also that changes are
not necessarily replacive. They can be additive (introducing new units or rules
to the current system) or subtractive (involving, for instance, loss of
variants). But they can also involve weakening or strengthening of current
variants. The latter two are probably the most significant ones when a
particular language is clearly targeted by an expatriate group.
ÝÝÝÝÝ To be sure, the endogenous contacts with the Scottish and Irish
Celts which produced Scots and Irish Englishes were ecologically not of the
same kind as the contacts with the expatriate Norse and Normans. However, as
Kroch et al. (in press) show, this does not prove that there was no xenolectal
influence on the evolution of English in England. It is indeed interesting that
in these particular cases it is the powerful invaders who lost their languages.
However, it seems misguided to dismiss contact as a factor providing an
ecological explanation to the evolution of the language appropriated by such
numerically important and prestigious groups of immigrants. The Norse and
Normans cannot have been more perfect learners of a foreign vernacular than
modern people, especially in settings where they were not fully integrated,
since they interacted most directly with their servants and administrative
auxiliaries but remained generally removed from the masses of the English
population.[6]
ÝÝÝÝÝ What does all this lead to? The evolution of English has so far
been ecology-specific, depending on the natures of the specific idiolects and
dialects that were spoken in a setting, how cross-idiolectal or dialectal
differences were negotiated, whether or not it was also being appropriated by
speakers of other languages, what influence these languages exerted on it, and
overall how it adapted to new communicative needs of its speakers. We should
remember that a language is transmitted piecemealónot wholesaleóand that
hybridization is fundamental to language transmission, starting with the mutual
accommodations native speakers make to each otherís idiolects. In settings
involving large proportions of non-native speakersóespecially if the latter are
not fully integrated with the native speakersóthey too contribute to the pool
of structural features and pragmatic constraints from which are selected the
set of features that become characteristic of future generations of speakers.
The essence of this is that all language evolution is contact-induced, except
that contact is situated at the level of idiolects.
ÝÝÝÝÝ To understand all this, one must start with the premise that,
like biological species (not organisms!), languages exist only as
extrapolations from idiolectsóthe real counterparts of biological organisms.
Some of these differ only minimally from each other but others more
extensivelyófor instance, idiolects of speakers of mutually unintelligible
dialects.Ý In the latter case, the
differences may be as significant as in the coexistence of native and
non-native idiolects. Quite significant in all this is also the fact that
languages change not because speakers want to change them but rather through
exaptations that take place in the communicative acts of their speakers, as
these accommodate each other, fail to meet some target sounds, forms, or
constructions, or adapt forms and constructions to new communicative demands.
All of these are processes that have been associated with language contact. The
innovative part of the argument lies in situating contact at the level of
idiolects, making this part of every day linguistic behavior, making individual
speakers the primary unwitting agents of change, and embedding language
evolution in ethnographic ecologies situated in specific socio-economic historical
contexts. Thus, languages do not change on their own nor in abstraction, and
the same is true of English.
ÝÝÝÝÝ Consequently, the distinction between internally and
externally-motivated change becomes purely sociological, having to do with
determining whether a change occurred due the influence from another language
or simply due to the dynamics of the interactions of native idiolects. From a
structural point of view, the distinction is useless, since the only contact
that matters is that of idiolects, regardless of whether or not they contain
xenolectal features. A fundamental question here is why idiolects are
different. A simple answer to the question is: because, cases of Siamese twins
set aside, no two idiolects develop in identical ecologies. Every speaker
evolves in a network of communication that only overlaps with those of their
kin and friends. Under the conception of ëidiolectí assumed above, there are no
restructuring processes that in kind are specific to changes induced by
contacts of languages but cannot be induced by contacts of native varieties.
This all suggests that it is difficult to imagine how English could have
evolved in England, as among Whites in North America, without the causation of
contact.
ÝÝÝÝÝ Evolutionary processes are thus speaker-based phenomena which
spread within a population through the accommodating acts of speakers.
Linguistic features and changes spread like viruses, depending very much on
contacts of interacting individuals, allowing the coexistence of competing
influences from different sources in the same speaker. Since changes are not
necessarily replacive, contact accounts for intra-speaker variation in
linguistic behavior. Every speakerís feature pool is an arena of competition
and selection that bears on the evolutionary trajectory of a language qua
species. Variation in social interaction patterns accounts for the regional and
social speciation of English into varieties such as British versus American
Englishes, or Southwestern British versus Scottish English, or African-American
versus White American varieties of English. Some evolutions are strictly
contained in specific social classes. For instance, most of the English said to
have been heavily influenced by French vocabulary is educated, middle-class
English, not folk, nonstandard speech. In North America, the English said to
have been influenced by African linguistic features is African-American
English, because African languages also contributed to the new feature pool
from which features of African-American English would be selected.
ÝÝÝÝÝ A re-examination of the HEL based on population contacts
suggests that Old English must have developed through more or less the same
restructuring processes that have yielded its more recent descendants. It helps
to start from the competitions and selections that took place among the
Germanic idiolectal features brought over from continental Europe in the 5th
century (with or without the contribution of Celtic features), and then to
factor in layers of the contributions of other languages to the ever-changing
feature pools, as English was appropriated by more and more non-English
populations. Different selections have produced different varieties, all of
them new.
ÝÝÝÝÝ Although the approach to the HEL sketched here has been very
much inspired by research on the development of creoles, it does not at all
mean that we must revive the hypothesis that Middle English developed by
creolization. There is no such global restructuring process that must be
identified as creolization. The term
is only a disfranchising label that has failed to recognize in the development
of creoles processes of the same kind as have taken place in all cases of
language evolution. The validity of the distinction between creole and non-creole languages is
sociohistorical, not structural (Mufwene 2000). From the point of view of
language evolution the distinction can be ignored. No specific terms other than
change, evolution, drift,
speciation/diversification, and the like already in usage in genetic
linguistics need be coined, except for structural processes hitherto
unidentified. Likewise, indigenized
English is a sociohistorically-grounded term, alluding to the scholastic
kind of English that was transmitted to non-native speakersóI dare observe,
more or less like a dead language to be revived by non-native speakers for new
communicative functions. Indigenization
does not denote a structural process and the development of indigenized
Englishes is as natural as those which marked the evolution of English in
England from Old English to todayís late Modern English, bearing in mind that
the ecology of each restructuring process is different in some ways.
ÝÝÝÝÝ In conclusion, we should take advantage of questions addressed
in research areas hitherto subsumed by language contact and reopen the books on
some established positions and unanswered questions on the evolution of English
and other languages. We cannot take it for granted that the working assumptions
of older scholarship are all justified. I have just scraped the tip of the
iceberg.
References
Bailyn, Bernard. 1986. The peopling of British North America: An
introduction. New York: Random House.
Crystal, David. 1995. The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English
language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fischer, David Hackett.
1989. Albionís seed: Four British
folkways in America. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hogg, Richard M., ed. 1992. The Cambridge history of the English
language. Vol. 1: The beginnings to
1066. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kroch, Anthony, Ann Taylor,
& Donald Ringe. in press. The Middle-English verb-second constraint: A case
study in language contact and language change. In Textual parameters in older language, ed. by Susan Herring et al.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kurath, Hans. 1928. The
origin of dialectal differences in spoken American English. Modern Philology 25.385-95.
Milroy,
James. 1992. Linguistic variation and
change: On the historical sociolinguistics of English. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mufwene, Salikoko S. 2000.
Creolization is a social, not a structural, process. In Degrees of restructuring in creole languages, ed. by Edgar
Schneider and Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh, 65-84. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Poplack, Shana & Sali
Tagliamonte. 2001. African American
English in the diaspora: tense and aspect. Oxford: Blackwell.
Thomason, Sarah G. &
Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language contact,
creolization, and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
[1] This suggests accurately
that the Celts, who then were the only Natives of todayís England, gradually
shifted to English as their vernacular during their colonization by Germanic
populations. This shift is reminiscent of the case of Native Americans in the
United States and Canada, who have been abandoning their ancestral languages in
favor of the ìsameî imported vernacular over the past couple of centuries.
[2] As has often been observed,
the vast majority ofÝ (native) English
speakers live outside England. Statistically, speakers of British English are a minority compared to those of American English alone, bearing in mind
that such national names are oversimplified constructs. I have included English creole among the labels for two
reasons: 1) speakers of such creole vernaculars claim they speak (nonstandard)
English; and 2) as noted by Crystal (1995), statistics of speakers of major
international languages include pidgin and creole speakers. On account of the
arguments presented below, one can certainly question why linguists
disfranchise them as separate languages.
[3] For the sake of efficiency
and to encourage more reflections, I use some technical terms here, some of
them taken from other disciplines. A stochastic
event in chaos theory is one that changes the trajectory of a process by
redirecting it in another direction. A lexifier
is the language from which a pidgin or creole has inherited most of its
vocabulary. Assuming that contact has something to do with the emergence of any
ìnewî language (variety), then every language (variety) has a lexifier. In
biology, the term exaptation is used
for unplanned or spontaneous adaptations that typically have nothing to do with
the original function of an organ, such as the use of the tongue or epiglottis
for speech. Many adaptations that constitute linguistic changes are accidental
developments of the same kind.
[4] This is reminiscent of how
terms such as Uganda and Luganda are etymologically related, the
former for the land and the latter for the language of the Ganda people.
[5] Recall that most creoles
are exogenous evolutions, an environmental factor that may have reduced, or
simply made less obvious, the significance of straightforward substrate
influence.
[6] Better studies may prove
that this observation about social interaction should be qualifiedóthe regular
soldiers undoubtedly mingled with the regular Native populations.