Dr Sali A. Tagliamonte - Roots of English: Exploring the History of Dialects

Sali A. Tagliamonte

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521681896

ISBN 978-0-521-86321-6 Hardback

ISBN 978-0-521-68189-6 Paperback

My native language is English Canadian English. It was the mother tongue of my mother and my father, both of whom were born in Canada. But it is my mothers language that was my linguistic model because, like many of my generation, my mother was a homemaker and the one who raised me. My mothers parents were also born in Canada. Yet if I go back just one generation more, to my mothers grandparents, one was born in Ireland and the other was born in England, and both my grandfathers were Scots. Each one of my great-grandparents was a pioneer in a new frontier, the rich farmlands of southern Ontario. They all migrated during the 1800s when thousands of Scots, Irish and English settlers went to North America, the new world of opportunity. To trace my roots back to the ancestors of my great-grandparents in the British Isles is murky. The links are long lost. Or are they?

Have you ever wondered how your ancestry affects the way you speak? For me, it is certain that the dialects of my fore-parents are not directly reproduced in my variety of English. Yet in the bigger picture, Canadian English is a product of development from these founding populations of Scots and Irish and English migrants who first settled in what was then known as Upper Canada. As Canadian English evolved over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it developed into the variety I speak, a variety pretty much indistinguishable from other Canadians like me.

Then I moved to Yorkshire, England in 1995. To my surprise, I shared many linguistic features with my colleagues from Scotland and Ireland, many more than I did with my colleagues from England. I certainly do not sound Scots or Irish, and yet features at all levels of grammar from phonetics to discourse-pragmatics are the same. I have the cot/caught merger, the form gotten for the past participle of got; I am r- full, I say wee for small and its a good job for its a good thing. I wouldnt use verbal s outside 3rd person singular but I know what it means and where it is normal, i.e. in constructions such as The cows eats and I says . I can recall that my mother said things like this occasionally and my great aunts and uncles certainly did. The same is true of regularized preterits come , give and run , zero adverbs such as go quick and speak slow , sentence-final like and many other linguistic phenomena.

If there are correspondences between my variety of English and those of my northern colleagues, the interesting questions are how and why do similarities and differences like these between dialects long separated by time and distance endure? How do the roots of communities and regions and countries play out in the way their dialects are used by contemporary speakers several hundred years later? These are the questions I asked myself, and they are the questions that spurred me to embark upon the Back to the Roots project and to write this book. May it help you explain some strange turn of a word or an unusual name or a unique expression that you or someone else you know uses. May it offer you a fresh perspective on your own roots.

The formative part of my academic career was spent in Yorkshire at the University of York in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science. I interviewed for the post in March of 1995 and was overjoyed to accept a position as Lecturer A in the department, which was to start five months later. A portent of things to come came in a light blue airmail envelope from Lowfield House in Heslington (near York) in June of 1995. It was a letter welcoming me to the department, You will enhance it the letter said, and it was signed Bob Le Page. To me, it was as if the queen herself had greeted me with open arms.

I arrived in York in early August 1995 with three children in nappies and a huge amount of enthusiasm. I left in early August 2001 to take up a position at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto in Canada. The children were not in nappies anymore, my intellectual life had totally changed and Bob had become a confidante and a friend. My sojourn in the UK left a defining imprint on me both personally and professionally. I count among my dear friends many of the people I met between 1995 and 2001 especially Joan Beal, Jenny Cheshire, Karen Corrigan, Paul Foulkes, Paul Kerswill, Jane Stuart-Smith, Jen Smith, Ros Temple, Peter Trudgill and Anthony Warner. Living and working among the British sociolinguistic scene was a mind-blowing experience. My myopic North American-centric perspective changed gear. Many of the non-standard features reported as innovations in Canadian and US circles were alive and well among the people I met on the street and encountered in the pubs and hiked with in the peaks and dales. My own perfectly respectable middle-class Canadian accent had to my mortification transmuted into an ill-regarded American drawl. My children started sounding incrementally more and more foreign. The idea that shepherds in Yorkshire counted their sheep in an ancient Celtic tongue was a source of amazement. In sum, I had embarked on the experience of a lifetime. There I was, a neophyte sociolinguist specializing in language variation and change in English, living on the very ley lines where it all began.