The historical sociolinguistics of heritage languages

1. The historical sociolinguistics of heritage languages Joseph Salmons with Joshua Bousquette, Christine Evans, Benjamin Frey, Alyson Sewell, Samantha Litty, Mark Livengood, Felecia Lucht, Daniel Nützel, Michael Putnam, Miranda Wilkerson, Brent Allen and many others 7th HiSoN Summer School, Metochi, Greece August 2013

2. Today: Issues and case studies • Questions from last time? • Language shift and substrate influences • Demographics of rapid shift • Structural effects and how they get transferred • Complexity in heritage languages • Syntax • Morphology • Your questions

3. Shift and its effects

4. German in Wisconsin, Hustisford

5. All across the U.S., hordes of immigrants … are chattering away in their native language and have no intention of learning English – the all-but-official language of the United States … . They are being enabled … to defy the age-old custom of immigrants to our shores who made it one of their first priorities to learn to speak English and to teach their offspring to do likewise. It was a case of sink or swim. If you couldn’t speak English, you couldn’t get by, go to school, get a job, or become a citizen and vote. Michael Reagan

6. Did they always learn English? One of the first priorities? • Who were monolinguals? • What was their basic demographic profile? • Were they economically marginal? • Were they Isolated in rural areas or in neighborhoods in town? • How did they fit into the social structure? • Did they belong to separate churches? • Did they attend school? If so, how did they not learn English? Were these true of Wisconsin Germans?

7. Eastern Wisconsin, esp. the village of Hustisford, is a place where monolinguals might be expected to be marginal: • Founded by Anglo-Americans (‘Yankees’) • Always had clear and elite English-speaking presence Yet evidence strongly suggests a profoundly bilingual community that did not exclude Germans. Punchline

8. 1910 Census: Else Kobow

9. Hustisford 1910: Some basics

10. 1910 German Monolinguals

11. 1871: “Resolution that all subjects in the church school be taught in German” • 1872: “Permission granted allowing instruction in reading and writing in English for the upper grades of the school” • 1893: “First mention of a sermon delivered in English” (isolated event) Bethany Evangelical Lutheran Church

12. 1899 Lillie Stewart • 1901 Adelheide Stewart • 1911 Walther Dyer • 1913 Chester Randall • 1918 Mabel Baldwin Names from confirmation classes

13. Home Language

14. Where did they live?

16. Speaker preserves components of L1 in using L2, imposingfeatures of L1 on L2. • Typically more stable components, like phonetics, phonology, core syntax. Speaker transfers features of L2 into L1, borrowing them. Typically less stable components, especially vocabulary. Imposition and borrowing

17. Table 1: Apparent substrate features

18. Table 2: Rapid shift

19. Figure 2: Learning English? Hustisford 1910 Wilkerson & Salmons in preparation

20. Figure 3: And 1920?

21. Children? (1910 vs. 1920)

22. But it doesn’t stop with shift …

23. American English: ‘bed’ ≠ ‘bet’ • bed: more glottal pulsing, longer vowel (widely seen as the most important for ‘voicing’ in American English.) • bet: no pulsing, shorter vowel • Many other cues German: ‘Bad’ = ‘bat’ • Bad ‘bath’, bat ‘asked for 3.sg.pret.’ • Likely complete neutralization, but Kharlamov (2012) • Wisc. English: incipient neutralization? • Earlier discussions have been about phonetics, not contrast. Final laryngeal contrast

24. Southwestern chee[z]e(Richland Center)

25. Southeastern cheese /z/ > [s](Muskego)

26. Trading relations: Purnell et al.

27. Change in cues, stable contrast in one eastern community

28. Wisconsin immigration More German Less German

29. What about fortition? • Brieflicher Sprach und Unterricht fuer das Selbststudium  Erwachsener:  Englisch. von Dr. Carl van Dalen •  "Ganz besonders haben sich Deutsche bei der Aussprache  stimmhafter [weicher] Endkonsonanten in Englischen zu ueberwachen. Im hochdeutschen klingt Gelb wie gelp ... Im Englischen jedoch werden b,d,g,v,z,j, immer stimmhaft [weich] ausgesprochen also auch in Auslaute. Es sind also sorgfaeltig zu unterscheiden: bound -- (baun d), cub (koe b)"...

30. Ahn • "Aehnlich und doch ganz anders werden die, dem f, p entsprechenden konsonanten hervorgebracht.  Spreche ich w, b richtig aus, so fuehlen zugleich die an den Kehlkopf gelegten Fingerspitzen, dass der Kehlkopf leise erzittert.  Dieses Erzittern ruehrt her von den Schwingungen der in Kehlkopf angespannten  Stimme erzeugenden Stimmbaender.  Ich hoere gleichzeitig mit w einen dumpfen vokalischen Laut: ich hoere, dass diese Konsonanten Stimmhaft sind.  Ebenso stehen b,d,g, p,t,k sich gegenueber.  Bei den stimmhaften Konsonanten b,d,gfuehle ich das Erzittern des Kehlkopfes, ich hoere die sie begleitende Stimme- bei den Stimmlosen p,t,k dagegen nicht"

31. Demographics of community formation: Examination of households, neighborhoods, and institutions reveals late monolingualism rapid shift from German to English. • Historical patterns of language use: Children—German or Yankee—were getting more non-native adult input than native-English input. • Leads to German-influence English in the community. • Doesn’t stop after shift: features introduced into the pool can ‘take off’ later. • CLASSIC historical sociolinguistics case: Can’t understand structural without social, social without structural, past without present, present without past. Conclusions

32. Complexity

33. The point • Common claim: Languages in contact, obsolescent languages, heritage languages, creoles are all subject to simplification or at most maintain existing complexity. • Our argument: Even an obsolescentheritagelanguage in intensecontact in a community where many people haven’t spoken it in decades shows clear increases in complexity. • That holds, it seems, however you define complexity. • Even examples of simplification often have unexpected explanations.

34. A closely related point • The rhetoric about contact languages of virtually any sort — creoles, heritage languages, obsolescent languages — is about deficiency: attrition, incomplete acquisition, loss, not to mention interruption, lack, failure, absence, inability, and on and on. • But language is about human cognition and we’re dealing with full and complete systems. • DeGraff(2001:291): Creoles … are reflections of our (species-uniform and species-specific) human biology, … among the “most beautiful and most wonderful [forms that] have been, and are being, evolved” …

35. Complexity • Crystal(2003): Complexity includes “both the formal internal structuring of linguistic units and the psychological difficulty in using or learning them. … However, it has not yet proved feasible to establish independent measures of complexity defined in purely linguistic terms.” • Nettle (2012): “The complexity of different components of the grammars of human languages can be quantified. For example, languages vary greatly in the size of their phonological inventories, and in the degree to which they make use of inflectional morphology.” • DeGraff (2001): “Complexity is no simple matter.” • Roberge (1994): warns us to avoid “simplistic hypotheses” about contact and change.

36. Some views on contact languages • Boas argues that “obsolescent languages may simultaneously exhibit both simplifications … and preservation … of linguistic structures.” (2009:4-5) • Isn’t something missing here? • ‘Complexification’ under language contact by ‘additive borrowing’ Trudgill (2010a:301-309, 2010b:20-24) • “high-contact, long-term contact situations involving childhood language contact are likely to lead to complexification through the addition of features from other languages.

37. Some testable points in here … • Has Wisconsin Heritage German simplified over time? • Or has it preserved complexity? • Or has it gained complexity? • If the last, is it (only) by addition of features from contact languages or dialects?

38. New inflectional morphology Complementizer agreement in Wisconsin Heritage German

39. Complementizer agreement • Standard German • wenn du willst • if you want to.2sg • wennihrwollt • if y’all want to.2pl • Dialectal German (esp. Southern, also W. Frisian, Dutch) • wennst du willst • if.2sg you want to.2sg • wenntihrwollt • if.2pl y’all want to.2pl

40. Complexification: New inflection • In what sense is C-agrmore complex? • Additional inflection • Inflection is the one area where everybody seems to agree that loss comes with contact. • Where did it come from? • Probably present in a few input dialects, but certainly not all; pops up all over West Germanic • Sources • Joshua Bousquette. 2013. Complementizer Agreement in Modern Varieties of West Germanic: A model of reanalysis and renewal. Ph.D. dissertation, UW–Madison. • Joshua Bousquette. Forthcoming. “Complementizer Agreement in Heritage Varieties of Wisconsin German”.

41. The point • C-agr has developed independently • Discontinuous communities and different languages in Europe • Diasporic communities like the Siebenbürger communities in Transylvania and Cimbrian in Italy • C-agr in Wisconsin shares SOME similarities with Continental varieties, but not ALL • different morphological distribution (WI restricted to 2-sg) • Wisconsin attestations more closely resemble one another; they do not directly match any specific input dialect, which includes the dialects of their first generation ancestors • Speakers acquire C-agr in Wisconsin when their European ancestors’ dialects did not have C-agr • Independent, parallel development? • Result of dialect mixing?

42. Example 1 • Wennsdurauchen dust… • If-you smoking do … • “If you smoke…” • (Speaker J, Sheboygan, WI)

43. Example 2 • WennsduzumeinHauskommst, dannkannst du Cake haben. • “If you come to my house, then you can have cake.”

44. Kannst du mirsagenafsdumorgenkomms? • “Can you tell me if you will be arriving tomorrow?” • (Speaker R, Fond du Lac County, WI)

45. Take home on C agreement • Additional inflection, more synthetic. • More redundancy. • Subject marking on complementizers and other elements = non-prototypical inflection. • Very incomplete paradigm. • Highly unlikely that it was in input dialect for most speakers. • Clearly no role for standard language (where this is very foreign)

46. Null elements Multiple gap constructions in Wisconsin Heritage German

47. [Which book]1 did you sell t1 without reading pg1? Sheboygan1is a city that people like t1 when they visit pg1. Welches Buch hast Du verkauft, ohnees/*pgzulesen? Which book did you sell t1, without itto read Sheboygan isteineStadt, die Leutegernhaben,wennsiesie/*pgbesuchen. Sheboygan1 is a city that people like t1 when they it visit. Parasitic gaps: English vs. German

48. “heritage speakers … have difficulty maintaining syntactic dependencies pertaining to a more abstract level of syntactic representation, what was traditionally termed ‘deep structure’.” Especially “low-proficiency” heritage speakers “have significant difficulties producing null elements”. Polinsky & Kagan (2007:382) heritage speakers seem to have difficulty “in establishing dependencies between items, especially if these dependencies are at a distance” (Benmamoun et al. 2010: 36) Gaps, dependencies in heritage lgs

49. a heritage speaker of Russian, 23 years old, acquisition of Russian as L1 “interrupted” at about age 5. • mal’cik # onimelsobakailjaguška. boy 3sg had dog.dc and frog.dc • the boy he had a dog and a frog • # onljubit ego ljaguška 3sg likes his frog.dc • he likes his frog ‘Overuse’ of overt elements, Polinsky & Kagan

50. Wisconsin Heritage German Gap • Sheboygan [ise‘] Stadt die Leit gleichen wennsevisit Nogap • Sheboyganist eine stadt die de leute die da besuchen sehr gern haben