The previous sections have highlighted the role identity construction can play in explaining patterns of linguistic variation and change, and have provided some theoretical background in models of change and models of identity and its role in language. I now return to the context discussed in this thesis: language revitalisation, and explore some detailed linguistic studies of language revitalisation contexts. These studies are linked to the concepts discussed above in Section 2.5.6. This section is not intended as an exhaustive review of language revitalisation situations around the world. Instead, I here review selected linguistic studies of several languages undergoing revitalisation which are relevant to the context discussed in this thesis, as they explore specific linguistic changes in revitalisation contexts.
2.5.1 Welsh (Jones 1998; Gathercole & Thomas 2009; Morris 2013)
Unlike in Scotland, the Welsh language has long been associated with the Welsh nationalist cause (Williams 2005, 49). In 2001 Welsh was heralded as a case of language revitalisation success when census figures indicated an increase in Welsh speakers ending a trend towards decline. In 2001 21% of the population of Wales could speak Welsh. At the time of writing in spring 2013, results for Welsh (but not Gaelic) in the 2011 census had just been published.
These latest results showed a slight decline to 19%, to the disappointment of Welsh language activists. Nevertheless, these figures indicate a language which has a substantial number of speakers representing a large proportion of the Welsh population. Many of these speakers are young people for whom Welsh is now compulsory in school. Young people were the focus of a studies by Jones (1998) and Morris (2013).
Jones (1998) is a detailed study of Welsh dialects in two contrasting communities in Wales: Rhymney in the south, and Rhosllannerchrugog in the north. Jones recorded young speakers in schools in the two communities and compared their Welsh to the speech of adults local to the two areas. Both children in Welsh medium classes and children in Welsh as a second language classes were recorded. While the southern town was a post-industrial town with only 6.7% Welsh speakers, the northern town in the study was also post-industrial but had a much greater proportion of Welsh speakers (38.1%). In both areas Jones found large differences between the speech of young people in Welsh schooling and the speech of older speakers in the community. While this study is mainly morphosyntactic in nature, the results are still of great relevance to the current study: specifically, Jones found many speakers did not produce initial mutations1, did not produce some complex aspects of Welsh morphosyntax, and included borrowings from English in their speech. In both communities Jones found evidence that the local dialects were being eroded in favour of a more standardised Welsh
1‘Initial mutations’ refers to a set of consonantal modifications which occur to word initial consonants in Celtic languages in certain morphosyntactic conditions. For example in Gaelic a subset of word initial consonants tend to become fricatives in mutating contexts e.g. m`athair ‘mother’ /ma:hIRj/; but mo mh`athair ‘my mother’ /mo va:hIRj/.
(Jones 1998, 297). Jones says this is a direct result of revitalisation measures creating a standard which is taught in schools and shown on televisions, and then reproduced by young people. Jones (1998) also found differences in the speech of the students who used Welsh at home with parents, and those who did not. Specifically, those who used Welsh at home were more likely to speak Welsh similar to older speakers. These results are supported by other studies such as Gathercole & Thomas (2009) and Morris (2013): both of these studies find production differences in the speech of children who use Welsh at home and those who do not.
2.5.2 Irish (Maguire 1991; ´ O Curn´ain 2007; ´ O Giollag´ain 2007)
Irish has been widely supported in the Republic of Ireland since its independence, but as yet has not become a widely spoken community language ( ´O N´eill 2005a, 280). In the census of 2002, 9% of the population said they spoke Irish every day, and 42% of the population said they had some knowledge of Irish. This includes a large number of school-age children for whom Irish is compulsory. The 2001 census of Northern Ireland revealed that 6% of the population claimed fluency in Irish, 10% saying they had some knowledge of the language.
Since the partition of Ireland in 1920, Irish has not enjoyed as much support in Northern Ireland as in the Republic, though this is slowly changing with the growth of new Irish media and Irish-medium schools ( ´O N´eill 2005b, 328).
One significant development for Irish revitalisation both in Northern Ireland and more generally was the founding of the Shaw’s Road Community in West Belfast. In 1969 eleven families who had learned Irish as adults decided to build an Irish-speaking community in which to raise their children as Irish speakers. Set against the context of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the establishment of this community was an extremely impressive achievement.
The community still continues to thrive to this day. Maguire (1991) is a linguistic study of Irish spoken in the Shaw’s Road Community. While she mostly concentrates on the macro sociolinguistic questions of Irish in education and the shift of the local community towards Irish, Maguire does identify some interesting patterns in the Irish of the children in the Shaw’s Road Community school, which have direct relevance to my analysis of Gaelic. These are:
reduction of the case system, simplification of the phoneme system, lack of initial mutations, and influence of English on vocabulary, morphology and syntax Maguire (1991, 197). As the current study is a sociophonetic one, I will here detail the phonetic tendencies noted by Maguire. Maguire states that the Irish of young people in Shaw’s Road is heavily influenced by local English. Additionally, she says that young people’s Irish is characterised by a general lack of distinction between palatalised and non-palatalised consonants, as this distinction is not present in English. Specifically, Maguire notes the sonorant sounds, /l n r/, where young Irish speakers often do not distinguish different Irish phonemes (she does not specify which ones have merged). This tendency was also observed in the speech of some young Gaelic speakers in the present study and is fully explored in Chapter 6.
While not specifically conducted within language revitalisation context, ´O Curn´ain (2007) notes several developments in his comprehensive study of County Galway (Republic of Ireland) Irish, for example, a reduction of long diphthongs to short productions, monoph-thongisation of diphthongs ( ´O Curn´ain 2007, 397). Some initial consonants are produced as fricatives, for example /t/ and /s/ are produced by some young people as /h/ ( ´O Curn´ain 2007, 407), and one speaker is reported as having a merger between palatal and alveolar laterals ( ´O Curn´ain 2007, 414), which will be returned to in Chapter 6. Similarly, ´O Giollag´ain, Mac Donnacha, N´ı Chual´ain et al. (2007, 11) note large differences in the speech of young people learning Irish through Irish medium education and the older Irish-speaking generations.
2.5.3 Hebrew (Ravid 1995; Zuckermann 2008)
Before the twentieth century Hebrew was used as a literary language among educated Jewish people, but was not spoken as a vernacular. With the creation of modern day Israel the language was revitalised to become both an official language of the country, and the language of daily interaction for its people (Fishman 1991, 289). While the widely held view is that the language spoken in Israel today represents a continuation of Biblical Hebrew, some recent work has disputed this claim stating instead that the language is a contact language formed by combining Biblical Hebrew with the modern first languages of Israel’s founders such as Russian, Polish, Yiddish and Ladino (Zuckermann 2008). Ravid (1995) is a detailed psycholinguistic study of child and adult acquisition of Hebrew inflectional morphology. She considers factors such as the koineisation of Hebrew, literacy in the language, age and gender and produces a sociolinguistically informed discussion of developments in the modern Hebrew inflectional system. Relevant to the current study are the parallels found in Ravid’s work between change in Hebrew and koineisation processes, as well as the significant influence of sociolinguistic factors. Reference to some specific phonetic changes occurring can be found in Zuckermann & Walsh (2011), who state that the prosody of modern Hebrew resembles Yiddish prosody instead of typologically related Arabic, and that the sound corresponding to the grapheme ’ayin, which has no equivalent in Indo-European languages, is not produced by the vast majority of speakers.
2.5.4 Canadian French (Mougeon, Rehner, Nadasdi, McKinnie, Uritrescu 2003-2008)
A large body of variationist sociolinguistic research has examined the speech of students learn-ing French in immersion schoollearn-ing as part of revitalisation measures in Canada (Mougeon, Rehner & Nadasdi 2004; Nadasdi & McKinnie 2003; Nadasdi, Mougeon & Rehner 2005, 2008; Uritescu, Mougeon, Rehner et al. 2004). In all of these studies young people are compared to older speakers who have learned French via intergenerational transmission.
These studies look at what is referred to as ‘Type 2 variation’, which refers to sociolinguistic
competence, and ask whether students in immersion schooling use linguistic variation in the same way as speakers who acquired French in their families. Specifically, these authors examine the use or non-use of variants, the rate of variant usage, the constraints on variation, and the effect of other factors such as interaction with the French-speaking community outside of school hours. Mougeon, Rehner & Nadasdi (2004) examine a range of grammatical and phonological variables and detail a number of widely observed trends in the ‘Type 2 variation’
of young immersion speakers. In summary, young people in immersion schooling do not use linguistic variants in the same way as speakers acquiring French via the family; immersion speakers tend to under-use vernacular variants and over-use formal variants. Speakers who have contacts in the French-speaking community tend to use mildly informal variants to a greater extent than young people who only use French at school.
2.5.5 M¯aori (King, Watson, Keegan & Maclagan 2009)
M¯aori is a Polynesian language which was spoken in New Zealand before the arrival of European settlers. According to the 2006 census, 4.1% of the New Zealand population were able to speak M¯aori. Since the 1980s M¯aori has been subject to revitalisation measures, the most successful of these has been the establishment of K¯ohanga reo ‘language nests’, or pre-school M¯aori immersion nurseries. More detailed information on the recent sociolinguistic status of M¯aori can be found in Harlow (2007, 192-223). King, Watson, Keegan et al.
(2009) is a linguistic study comparing the speech of younger speakers learning M¯aori through revitalisation measures to two generations of older speakers. The study considers changes in M¯aori vowel and diphthong systems and demonstrates that young speakers are significantly different to both generations of older speakers. Specifically, their M¯aori monophthongs mirror changes happening in the New Zealand English vowel system such as the raising of /E/ and the fronting of /u/. While the authors cannot rule out M¯aori-internal change, they suggest that it is highly likely changes happening in English are being transferred to the vowel system of M¯aori. M¯aori traditionally differentiates between phonemically long and phonemically short vowels, but these authors show that young speakers produce less of a length distinction between long and short vowels than older speakers. Also there is some evidence to suggest that certain diphthong categories are merging among younger speakers.
2.5.6 Language revitalisation summary
In concluding, King, Watson, Keegan et al. (2009) suggest some specific directions linguistic developments in minority language revitalisation contexts often take, which are of relevance to the current research: [1] sound changes will parallel sound changes occurring in the community-dominant language; and [2] phonemes which do not occur in the dominant language may be lost. Jones (1998) and Maguire (1991) additionally suggest that changes happening in language revitalisation contexts may involve a loss of certain structures found in traditional varieties of the language, and which structures are affected will be conditioned
by the structure of the community-dominant language. Evidence from Welsh (Jones 1998;
Gathercole & Thomas 2009; Morris 2013) suggests that the language background in the homes of young people will also have some effect on their production of the minority language.
These statements will be applied to the current dataset and their relevance examined.