Language shift and apparent standardisation in Early Modern English

Abstract

It has been observed that language-shift varieties of English tend to be relatively close to Standard English (Trudgill and Chambers 1991: 2-3). An oftenused explanation for this is that Standard English was acquired in schools by the shifting population (Filppula 2006: 516). In this paper, I discuss three cases of language shift in the Early Modern period: in Cornwall, the Isle of Man, and Shetland. I offer evidence that the role of Standard English education was, in fact, fairly limited, and suggest that the standard-likeness of Cornish English, Manx English and Shetland Scots is most likely due to the particular sociolinguistic circumstances of language shift, where not only language contact, but also dialect contact contributed to a loss of non-standard-like features and the acquisition of a standard-like target variety. This atelic and non-hierarchical process is termed apparent standardisation.

Maidin Cornwall

“…with the death of the language sometime the late 18th century (see Knooihuizen 2015). 5 While the Cornish language has not been used as a vernacular for around 250 years, the variety of English spoken in Cornwall, Anglo-Cornish, remains a linguistic point of difference between Cornwall and (the rest of ) England.…”