Volume 43, Issue 5

1. Towards a typological sociolinguistics Is there any sense in pursuing a typological sociolinguistics? The idea recalls the relatively established field of linguistic typology, a comparison with which will provide an initial orientation to this question, as well as serve as the basis for the introduction to the current set of articles. Four points of comparison may be highlighted, situated along a set of common problems. I begin with linguistic typology.

The town of Bethlehem provides a unique case for testing the relations between language, migration, and urbanization. This article explores one aspect of the complex Bethlehemite case. We intend to reveal how urbanization and migration are reflected in the sociolinguistic changes of the Arabic spoken in the town. Whereas most residents formerly used a variety of Arabic similar to that spoken in Palestinian villages, emerging social identity issues seem to have produced new distinctions. Younger women and some Christian men are tending to adopt an urban pronunciation like that of nearby East Jerusalem, at the same time as the speech of younger educated Muslims is showing the growing influence of the standard variety of Arabic. By relating the use of linguistic variants to changes in identity, this study shows that Bethlehem is a town in transition, being transformed from its previous status as a Christian Arab town into an important Palestinian and dominantly Muslim city.

This article analyzes processes of dialectal accommodation among Upper Egyptian migrants in Cairo-Egypt. Rural and provincial migration have played an important role in the demographic growth of the capital from the mid-nineteenth century up to the 1970s. Although migration is today receding, the social and cultural integration of the migrants is far from being completed, and it has raised a number of socioeconomic challenges. Due to underdevelopment, poverty, and religious traditionalism, Upper Egypt is often described as a problematic area, and this perception reflects on the relationship between Cairene and Upper Egyptian migrants. Cairene Arabic and Upper Egyptian varieties are linguistically quite distinct and they do not have the same status, Cairene being a national prestige variety. Based on data recorded among seven adult speakers, this article analyzes the realization of 21 features, taking into account not only Cairo and Upper Egyptian variants but also the influence of fus̥ḥā (Classical Arabic). It shows that the degree of accommodation to Cairo Arabic among the first migrant generation varies according to type of linguistic features (phonological, morphological, lexical), as well as type of interaction/topics and individual personal profile.

One of the most developed models for explaining bilingual constituents is the matrix language frame model (Myers-Scotton 1997). Its basic insight is that a bilingual constituent will be determined by the abstract structure underlying only one of the languages of the constituent, the matrix language. While the model has been tested against many language situations, a situation typical for minority linguistic groups in Maiduguri in NE Nigeria has not been studied in detail. The present study centers on Nigerian Arabs. Urban Nigerian Arabs are typically bilingual in Nigerian Arabic (NA) and Hausa, and additionally they use English and Standard Arabic, particularly for lexical concepts. Bilingual speech (codeswitching) is supported by both NA and Hausa matrices. In a number of respects, however, both lexical and constituent insertions into these two languages are different. This article documents these differences on the basis of an extensive spoken corpus, and examines their implication for the notion of matrix language. It is argued that the structural notion of matrix language needs to be supplemented with a perspective allowing matrix languages to be conceived of in hierarchical terms.

In the literature on the spatial spread of linguistic innovations, traditional models of diffusion have been adopted largely uncritically from (economic) geography. The validity of geographical critiques of these traditional diffusion models is demonstrated through an examination of the diffusion of eight linguistic innovations from the southeast of England to the Fens, a rural area approximately 150 km north of London. Whilst diffusion models in sociolinguistic dialectology have tended to expect vigorous innovations to eradicate conservative dialect forms in their path, and some of the innovations examined here have indeed conquered local variants, it is found that some of the spreading dialect forms are unsuccessful and others only partially so. This article reconceptualizes the diffusion of innovations as a form of dialect contact and demonstrates that in examining changes in this way, we are much better able to account for the outcomes of innovation diffusion than has traditionally been the case. Rather than innovations wiping out traditional dialect forms, they engage in contact with them in local communities: the outcomes of diffusion in the Fens bear all the hallmarks of contact-induced koineization, such as interdialect formation, levelling, and reallocation (Trudgill 1986). The success of innovations appears to be contingent on the social, interactive, and structural compatibility of the new form with the old one. If that compatibility is not present, diffusion may be slowed down, succeed only partially, or in some cases, be rejected entirely.

The establishment of new towns in the twentieth century in many parts of the world is a test bed of koineization, the type of language change that takes place when speakers of different, but mutually intelligible language varieties come together, and which may lead to new dialect or koine formation. This article presents the case of Milton Keynes, an English new town designated in 1967. Our study investigated the speech of a sample of 48 working-class children divided into three age groups: four, eight, and twelve years of age, along with one caregiver for each. We hypothesize that the formation of a new dialect is in the gift of older children. We also hypothesize that dialect leveling, which is part of koineization, will be more rapid in a new town than in an old-established town. Detailed quantitative results for four vowels strongly support these hypotheses. At the same time, we investigate the social network types contracted by new town residents. We found many to be socially isolated locally, but that they maintained contacts with their place of origin. We show that migrants violate what the Milroys argue to be the normal inverse relationship between socioeconomic class and social network density: migrants have uniplex networks, while still having a low socioeconomic status. The consequences for dialect change are considered.

Finland Swedish is the name of the specific variety of Swedish in Finland that is spoken in Finland today by about 300,000 people, mainly settled on the western and southern coasts and in the archipelago in the southwest. In the 1990s a sociolinguistic project, ‘‘Urban Colloquial Swedish in Finland,’’ was carried out in four towns in this area: Jakobstad and Kristinestad in the northern area of Ostrobothnia, and Ekenäs and Lovisa in Nyland in the southern area. The project focused on the social variation of language according to age and level of education of the 94 informants and on the degree of structural dependence of the town on the neighboring dialects. In this article, therefore, migration is examined mainly from an historical point of view. Each of the four towns has, in one sense or another, its own sociolinguistic structure. Sociolinguistically distinguished varieties (sociolects) were identified in Jakobstad, Ekenäs, and Lovisa, but not in Kristinestad. By looking a bit more closely at the two Ostrobothnian towns of Jakobstad and Kristinestad, I attempt to determine under which conditions sociolects are to be identified, and, under which conditions specific urban dialects (town dialects) emerge or fail to emerge as a result of contact between traditional dialects and the standard language. It is shown that Kristinestad and Jakobstad have rather different sociolinguistic profiles, owing in no small part to their different eras of settlement, degree of industrial development, and relation to hinterland dialects.