Alternative Histories of English

Peter Trudgill, Richard J. Watts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134569342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This groundbreaking collection explores the beliefs and approaches to the history of English that do not make it into standard textbooks.
Orthodox histories have presented a tunnel version of the history of the English language which is sociologically inadequate. In this book a range of leading international scholars show how this focus on standard English dialect is to the detriment of those which are non-standard or from other areas of the world. Alternative Histories of English:
* reveals the range of possible 'narratives' about how different varieties of 'Englishes' may have emerged
* places emphasis on pragmatic, sociolinguistic and discourse-oriented aspects of English rather than the traditional grammar, vocabulary and phonology
* considers diverse topics including South African English, Indian English, Southern Hemisphere Englishes, Early Modern English, women's writing, and politeness.
Presenting a fuller and richer picture of the complexity of the history of English, the contributors to Alternative Histories of English explain why English is the diverse world language it is today.

Part I: The history of non-standard varieties of English

The purpose of this section of the book is to focus on aspects of the histories of as many as possible of those varieties of English which have often – or even always – been neglected in histories of the language. These are varieties which have been marginalised by historical linguists because they have been regarded as non-standard, and/or which have been ignored because they have been considered to be socially or geographically peripheral in some way. We would point out, as justification for this, that there are very many more non-standard than standard varieties of English in the world; that they are spoken by many more people than Standard English; and that to ignore them does our understanding of the history of the English language no service at all. Non-standard dialects of English have histories too, and these histories are sometimes especially helpful because, as a result of the absence of standardisation, many of the forces of linguistic change are played out in these varieties in a much more unfettered and revealing way than in the standard dialect. We would also point out that the disregarding of varieties of English simply because the people who speak them are not White Englishmen who have for centuries been established in the southeast of England is also not only totally ethnocentric, anglocentric, ‘austrocentric’ (as Katie Wales says) and unjustifiable, but is also short-sighted in that it disregards an enormous mass of historical data from some of the most interesting and diachronically revealing varieties of the language in existence.

The chapters in this part of the book by Wales, on northern British English, and by Gordon and Sudbury, on the Englishes of the southern hemisphere, try to redress the geographical balance. This is also the focus of Trudgill’s paper – on lesser-known varieties of the language – which looks at the native-speaker Englishes of a surprisingly large number of small and often unknown communities in different parts of the world which are nearly always ignored by linguistics scholars and which remain untreated in most historical linguistic discussions. The bias against non-standard varieties is tackled in the chapter by Poplack, van Herk and Harvie, which takes as its starting point the remarkable Ottawa Grammar Resource on Early Variability in English, with a particular focus on implications for the study of the history of African American Vernacular English, which in turn also does something to rectify the ethnocentrism of many histories. Preston’s paper on attitudes to varieties of English in North America also deals with the evaluation of non-standard Englishes; and, since Standard English has its origins in the south of England, the paper by Wales also inevitably confronts this issue of the importance of non-standard varieties. Finally, the chapter by Mesthrie tackles the prejudice against the Englishes spoken by non-White speakers in his fascinating examination of the history of Indian English in South Africa. This chapter also confronts the prejudice against ‘new’ varieties of English – ‘newness’ probably also being a factor in the relative lack of discussion in the textbooks of the southern hemisphere varieties generally.

2 The history of the lesser-known varieties of English

Peter Trudgill

Histories of the first thousand years or so of the English language obviously have to have a rather narrow geographical focus. Four hundred years ago, in 1600, English had no very important role as a foreign or second language anywhere, and was spoken as a native language in a very small area of the globe indeed: it was the native language of the indigenous population in most of England, and in the south and east of Scotland. It was, however, absent from much of Cornwall and from Welsh-speaking parts of Shropshire and Herefordshire; most of the population of Ireland was Irish-speaking; nearly all of the population of Wales was still Welsh-speaking; the inhabitants of the Highlands and Hebridean Islands of Scotland spoke Gaelic; those of Orkney and Shetland spoke Scandinavian Norn; the population of the Isle of Man was Manx-speaking; and the inhabitants of the Channel Islands were still French-speaking.

During the course of the 1600s this situation changed dramatically. English arrived as a native language – as a result of colonisation – in Ireland, in what is now the United States, and in Bermuda, Newfoundland, the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos Islands. It also spread during this time into many island and mainland areas of the Caribbean: Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, the Cayman Islands, Jamaica, Montserrat, St Kitts and Nevis, the British Virgin Islands, the American Virgin Islands, and the mainland areas of Guyana and Belize. And it is not widely known that areas other than these (in modern times cricket-playing Commonwealth) countries were also settled by anglophones: eastern coastal and island areas of Honduras, Nicaragua and Colombia remain English-speaking to this day. The Dutch island colonies of Saba, St Maarten and St Eustatius have also been English-speaking since the early 1600s; and the mainly Papiamentu-speaking Dutch colony of Bonaire has a sizeable number of indigenous anglophones too.

During the eighteenth century English began its expansion into Wales and north-western Scotland, and into mainland and maritime Canada.

In the nineteenth century, again as a result of colonisation, English expanded to Hawaii, and into the southern hemisphere – not only to Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, as is well known, but also to the South Atlantic Islands of St Helena, Tristan da Cunha and the Falklands, and in the Pacific to Pitcairn Island and Norfolk Island. There was also expansion from the Caribbean islands to eastern coastal areas of Costa Rica and Panama; and the repatriation of African Americans to Sierra Leone and Liberia, as well as an African-American settlement in the Dominican Republic. During this time also Caribbean Islands which had hitherto been francophone started on a slow process of becoming anglophone to different degrees: Dominica, St Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, and St Vincent and the Grenadines. Other little-known anglophone colonies which still survive today were also established during the nineteenth century in southern Brazil, by American southerners fleeing the aftermath of the Civil War, and in the Bonin islands of Japan, by New England and Hawaiian whalers and seamen, and on one of the Cook Islands in the South Pacific. There are also today long-standing indigenous groups of British-origin native anglophones in Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Kenya.

It is also worth noting that restructured forms of English, known as creoles, are spoken in many parts of the world: since the seventeenth century in Surinam, and since the early nineteenth century in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and northern Australia. The English-based creole Krio has also been spoken in Sierra Leone, West Africa, at least since the early 1800s, although Hancock (1986) has argued for the presence of an anglophone community there since the early 1600s. Creole varieties are, however, not discussed in this chapter. Neither are varieties of English, such as Nigerian English, which are basically second-language varieties of the language.

Of all the areas just mentioned, it is safe to say that only the English of the British Isles, mainland North America, Australasia, South Africa, and, to a lesser extent, the creoles of the Caribbean and the South Pacific, have attracted large amounts of attention from historical linguists. In this chapter I suggest that there is an alternative to this concentration on these major (in demographic terms) varieties. I examine the histories of the other – relatively ignored – native varieties of English in lesser-known areas of the anglophone world, in chronological order of their settlement. (I do not, however, deal here with the diaspora African-American English-speaking communities of Nova Scotia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Samana in the Dominican Republic as these are dealt with elsewhere in this volume.) Research into the grammar and phonology of a number of these lesser-known varieties is currently in progress. Linguistic details of these varieties of English, including some rather remarkable similarities between many of them, are discussed, for example, in Trudgill et al. (forthcoming). Comments on the linguistic characteristics of these varieties in what follows are based either on my own research in the areas in question – as in the case of Bermuda, the Bahamas, Newfoundland, Cape Breton Island, Prince Edward Island, the Chatham Islands, and Guernsey – and/or on tapes that are either commercially available or have very kindly been made available to me by others (see Acknowledgements).

Newfoundland

The island of Newfoundland has an area of 112,790 km². The population is about 550,000. About 95 per cent of these are of British and Irish origin, while fewer than 3 per cent are of French extraction.

Newfoundland was originally settled by Indians and Inuit (Eskimos). Viking ruins dating from about AD1000 show that Norse speakers from Iceland and Greenland were the earliest Europeans to reach the area. The official European ‘discoverer’ of Newfoundland was the Genoese-Venetian John Cabot, who arrived on the island in 1497 sailing under the English flag, but the Grand Banks had been known to Basque and Breton fishermen much earlier. In the 1500s English, French, Basque, and Portuguese fishermen were in competition for the fishing grounds, and by 1600 England and France were the chief rivals. Attempts made at colonisation during the 1600s were not well received by the English fishermen nor, after 1634, by the English crown. In fact, in 1699 Parliament prohibited settlement of the island except in connexion with cod fishing. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the island’s population nevertheless increased, and Britain appointed a governor in 1729 and established a court system in 1792. These remained, however, only during the summer, and a settled colony was not recognised until 1824. Large groups of immigrants were brought in with the peak year of 1814–15 seeing the advent of 11,000 people, mainly Irish Catholics. Most rural areas are inhabited either by people whose ancestors came as early settlers from Dorset and Devon and/or by people with (rather later) origins in south-eastern Ireland.

The history of the settlement of Newfoundland goes a long way to explaining the current linguistic situation there. The phonology of modern Newfoundland English is characterised by considerable social variation by North American standards, and nonstandard grammatical forms, such as present-tense -s for all persons, occur very frequently and high up the social scale. It is, too, one of the few places in North America where it can be said with any degree of certainty that traditional dialects, in the sense of Wells (1982), survive. There is also some well-documented regional variation (see Paddock 1975; Wells 1982: 498–501). A first impression for English English speakers is that speakers ‘sound Irish’, but closer inspection shows that this is not the case. Overall, varieties seem to be the result of a mixture of Southern Irish English and south-western English English varieties, but in different proportions in different places. In communities where immigration from Dorset and Devon played an important role, older speakers may for example still have initial-fricative voicing in fish, thimble, seven, ship, and a number of Irish-origin syntactic features can be found in Irish-influenced areas, such as habitual aspect expressed by do be as in They do be full (see Clarke 1997, 1999).

Bermuda

Bermuda is a self-governing British colony about 900 km east of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Its total land area is 54 km², and the population is about 60,000. It is said to have been discovered by the Spanish navigator Juan Bermudez, probably between 1503 and 1511. The first anglophones to arrive were some Puritans who were shipwrecked in 1609. In 1612, sixty English settlers were sent to colonise the islands. African slaves were transported to Bermuda beginning in 1616, and soon the Black population was larger than the White. In 1684 Bermuda became a crown colony (Zuill 1973). About 60 per cent of the population are of African origin. Whites are mostly of British origin, but descendants of Portuguese labourers from Madeira and the Azores who arrived during the 1800s are also to be found and some Portuguese is still spoken.

Bermudan English has not been extensively studied, although see Ayres (1933), Trudgill (1986), and Cutler et al. (forthcoming). There are noticeable differences between the speech of Blacks and that of Whites – the former being more Caribbean in character, the latter more like the English of coastal South Carolina.

The Lesser Antilles

It is well known that the majority of the population of Belize, of Jamaica, and of the eastern Caribbean are of African origin. The English-based creoles, semi-creoles and post-creole continua spoken in many of these former, and in a few cases current, British colonies are rather well known to linguists (see Carrington forthcoming).

It is much less well known, however, that the Lesser Antilles of the eastern Caribbean contain a number of communities of White anglophones. The point about these communities is not of course that they are racially ‘White’ but that they are in many cases the direct cultural and linguistic descendants of immigrants from the British Isles and as such speakers of English which, while clearly Caribbean in character, may in some respects show differences from that of Black West Indians, especially since residential and social segregation has been maintained in some places for hundreds of years.

Of the islands which have significant White populations today, direct White emigration to Barbados began in 1627, with large numbers of the migrants being unemployed or otherwise impoverished people from England, many of them coming from or via London, Bristol, and Southampton, who took positions as servants in these newly established colonies. (Immigration also began to St Kitts in 1624, but no White community survives there today.) Many of the English who arrived later in the 1650s were prisoners of the English Civil War or transported criminals. Irish immigration was also significant, particularly in the wake of Cromwell’s harrying of Ireland in the 1650s, when many of the arrivals were also in fact political prisoners or prisoners of war.

The Dutch (but English-speaking) island of Saba was claimed by the Dutch in 1632 but settled by White anglophones coming, often as escapees from indentured labour, from other islands over a considerable period of time lasting until the 1830s. This isolated White community today forms about half the population of the island. Montserrat had a population of Whites until quite recently who came originally from St Kitts: there was one community of Irish-origin Catholics, and another of Scottish and English-origin Protestants. Anguilla has a community of Whites who arrived from other islands in the late 1600s, later reinforced by other arrivals from other islands who came around 1800. White immigration to St Lucia from Scotland, with some settlers arriving also from England and Ireland, dated from the 1830s, but most if not all of these have subsequently emigrated.

Some White communities descend from people who were relocated from other islands by government policy in the 1860s. This relocation was a response to the perceived poverty and unemployment of poor Whites in a number of the original communities. One community arrived in St Vincent from Barbados, and another in Bequia in the Grenadines, and a third in Grenada itself. For further details on settlement patterns and dating, see Holm (1994).

The English of these communities has been very little studied apart from pioneering work by Williams (1987, 1988), which looks at the very interesting question of verbal aspect in White Caribbean English and the extent to which aspectual systems derive from Irish English, British English, and/or Caribbean creoles.

The Bahamas

The Bahamas form an independent state which is a member of the British Commonwealth. They are an archipelago of about 700 islands to the southeast of Florida, with a population of about 270,000.

The Bahamas were originally inhabited by Lucayan Arawak Indians, originally from the South American continent, who had probably been driven into the Caribbean by the Caribs. In 1492 Columbus first landed in the Bahamas. Although he took formal possession of the islands in the name of Spain, the Spanish did not really make any attempt to settle them. Between 1492 and 1508, they enslaved 40,000 natives to work in the mines on Hispaniola, and by the time the English arrived the Bahamas were uninhabited. Serious English involve...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Introduction: In the year 2525
• Prologue
• Part I: The history of non-standard varieties of English
• Part II: The history of communicative and pragmatic aspects of English
• Epilogue
• 12 Broadcasting the nonstandard message