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Mysteries of the substrate

  • William Labov✝
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Social Lives in Language – Sociolinguistics and multilingual speech communities
This chapter is in the book Social Lives in Language – Sociolinguistics and multilingual speech communities

Abstract

There can be little doubt about the existence of substrate effects in many cases when a whole population abandons their original language and adopts another. But there are situations in which the direction of linguistic influence remains unexplained, the causal connections are obscure, or the expected effect does not occur. We still do not know just how young children in American society manage not to acquire the foreign accent of their parents. If anything, the effect of parents’ language may be in the opposite direction from that predicted by contrastive analysis. Several cases of unmistakeable but inexplicable substrate effects are discussed: the initiation of the merger of /o/ and /oh/ by Slavic-speaking coal miners in Eastern Pennsylvania; the use of later for earlier in the English of Puerto Rican Spanish speakers, and the confusion of make and let among several generations of Italian-American speakers of English.

Abstract

There can be little doubt about the existence of substrate effects in many cases when a whole population abandons their original language and adopts another. But there are situations in which the direction of linguistic influence remains unexplained, the causal connections are obscure, or the expected effect does not occur. We still do not know just how young children in American society manage not to acquire the foreign accent of their parents. If anything, the effect of parents’ language may be in the opposite direction from that predicted by contrastive analysis. Several cases of unmistakeable but inexplicable substrate effects are discussed: the initiation of the merger of /o/ and /oh/ by Slavic-speaking coal miners in Eastern Pennsylvania; the use of later for earlier in the English of Puerto Rican Spanish speakers, and the confusion of make and let among several generations of Italian-American speakers of English.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgements ix
  4. Introduction: Social lives in language 1
  5. Photos of Gillian: Then and now 17
  6. Biographies of contributors and email addresses 19
  7. Part I. Language Ideology: From the speakers, what can we learn about the language?
  8. Language, mobility and (in)security: A journey through Francophone Canada 27
  9. Language repertoires and the middle class in urban Solomon Islands 43
  10. Land, language and identity: The socio-political origins of Gurindji Kriol 69
  11. "I've been speaking Tsotsitaal all my life without knowing it": Towards a unified account of tsotsitaals in South Africa. 95
  12. Tok Bokis, Tok Piksa: Translating parables in Papua New Guinea 111
  13. Part II. Bridging Macro- and Micro-sociolinguistics
  14. Chiac in context: Overview and evaluation of Acadie's Joual 137
  15. How to predict the evolution of a bilingual community 179
  16. How local is local French in Quebec? 195
  17. Part III. Quantitative sociolinguistics: From the languages, what can we learn about the speakers?
  18. Ne deletion in Picard and in regional French: Evidence for distinct grammars 223
  19. The dynamics of pronouns in the Québec languages in contact dynamics 249
  20. Subordinate clause marking in Montreal Anglophone French and English 273
  21. Mysteries of the substrate 315
  22. Empirical problems with domain-based notions of "simple" 327
  23. Index of names 357
  24. Index of subjects 361
https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.24.19lab

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgements ix
  4. Introduction: Social lives in language 1
  5. Photos of Gillian: Then and now 17
  6. Biographies of contributors and email addresses 19
  7. Part I. Language Ideology: From the speakers, what can we learn about the language?
  8. Language, mobility and (in)security: A journey through Francophone Canada 27
  9. Language repertoires and the middle class in urban Solomon Islands 43
  10. Land, language and identity: The socio-political origins of Gurindji Kriol 69
  11. "I've been speaking Tsotsitaal all my life without knowing it": Towards a unified account of tsotsitaals in South Africa. 95
  12. Tok Bokis, Tok Piksa: Translating parables in Papua New Guinea 111
  13. Part II. Bridging Macro- and Micro-sociolinguistics
  14. Chiac in context: Overview and evaluation of Acadie's Joual 137
  15. How to predict the evolution of a bilingual community 179
  16. How local is local French in Quebec? 195
  17. Part III. Quantitative sociolinguistics: From the languages, what can we learn about the speakers?
  18. Ne deletion in Picard and in regional French: Evidence for distinct grammars 223
  19. The dynamics of pronouns in the Québec languages in contact dynamics 249
  20. Subordinate clause marking in Montreal Anglophone French and English 273
  21. Mysteries of the substrate 315
  22. Empirical problems with domain-based notions of "simple" 327
  23. Index of names 357
  24. Index of subjects 361
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