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- © 2002-2012 University of Bristol
Dates: April 6-9, 2005
Location: Clifton Hill House, University of Bristol
Supported by: The Institute for Advanced Study;
The Bristol Institute for Research in the Arts and Humanities;
The Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB)
?Zoo schrijve ek lievers my soort Afrikaans?
Speaker Agency, Identity and Resistance in the History of Afrikaans
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at the Cape were a time of overt and often polemic linguistic conflict and debate between the advocates of English, (Cape) Dutch ? in its various guises ranging from varieties close to metropolitan High Dutch to eenvoudig Kaapsch Hollandsch ? and the emerging norm(s) of Afrikaans.
In this paper I will draw on two corpora of historical ego-documents (The Corpus of Cape Dutch Correspondence, Deumert 2004, and the Nanny Letters, Deumert forthc.) to illustrate how public, language-political debates influenced and shaped private writing practices and (socio-)linguistic identities prior to the formal codification and institution of Afrikaans as an official language in 1920s and 1930s. Using Le Page?s acts of identity model (cf. Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985) and Coupland?s (2001) notion of stylization, I will trace (a) the process by which linguistic forms which were propagated as ?authentic? representations of local speech in the emerging mass media came to be used as conventionalized ideological resources in private documents (and subsequently formed the structural basis for the codified Afrikaans standard norm); and (b) describe strategies of resistance to these sociolinguistic developments within the wider Cape Dutch speech community.
In historical linguistics and, in particular, in language contact scenarios evidence is accumulating that speakers can and do make rather sweeping changes to their languages and linguistic practices (e.g. Kulick 1992). This paper will provide new analyses of historically-situated speaker agency by focusing on a range of morphological (verb system, tense marking, gender, etc.) and syntactic (nie-2, periphrastic possessives, infinitive clauses) structures in the two historical corpora.
Telling new stories: Three deconstructions and critical reconstructions of episodes in the ?history of English?
In the epilogue of Alternative Histories of English, David Crystal makes the following perceptive statement: ?If there is one thing we can learn from the traditional way in which the ?story of English? has been presented, it is this: that the next period in English linguistic history should not be treated in such an unbalanced way.? There are good grounds for his optimism, since the first steps in the prickly business of deconstructing the ?official? version of that history were made before the appearance of Alternative Histories, cf. Jim and Lesley Milroy?s Authority in Language, Bob Stockwell and Donka Minkova?s ?assault? on the traditional presentation of the Great Vowel Shift, Jim Milroy?s Linguistic Variation and Change, Tony Crowley?s Standard English and the Politics of Language, Lynda Mugglestone?s ?Talking Proper?: The Rise of Accent as a Social Symbol, Laura Wright?s The Development of Standard English 1300?1800, Tony Bex and Richard Watts?s Standard English: The Widening Debate, Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg?s Historical Sociolinguistics, the launching of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics edited by Andreas Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen, the compendious Cambridge History of the English Language and many other publications I could name. The present paper, however, takes up the need to deconstruct three old stories, one of them apparently beyond the scope of linguistic enquiry (although I hope to show the opposite), i.e. the dating of Beowulf. The other two are the traditional explanation of the Great Vowel Shift and the connection between what I call the ?ideology of politeness? and the efforts to standardise English in the 18th century. In all three cases an intimate and, I shall argue, fruitful cooperation between the study of language and the study of literature can throw new light on these problem areas of English. However, deconstructing these stories only makes sense as long as alternative reconstructions are offered and those reconstructions are made with a perspective on the possible social functions fulfilled by varieties of the language in the past. If one bears in mind that each of those reconstructions is still a story and never an objective representation of the truth, the ?history of English? can be prevented from ideological closure and can be opened up to new insights and new avenues of research. ?Telling stories? can also be used in English to refer to lying, but one can only lie about the past where there is irrefutable factual evidence to posit just one possible logical answer. My keynote argument is therefore this: when we?re dealing with language, the kinds of irrefutable factual evidence we have point in different directions and can only lead us to interpretations, never to one single true history.
In a teleological and isolationist approach to the ?big? languages, the traditional historiography of the Germanic languages has usually focused on standard or prestige varieties. This conference will seek to develop an alternative perspective: the view ?from below?, to describe and explain developments within and between these languages in the last 300 years, i.e. roughly since the beginnings of standardisation efforts. On the basis of data hitherto ignored or neglected in language historiography, the question will be addressed to what extent non-prestigious varieties and writers form an important part of the history of Germanic languages. Issues of diachronic differences and cross-linguistic similarities will be of central interest and the organisers will particularly welcome corpus-based contributions to the development of alternative approaches, new sources of data and new topics of interest, such as the following:
social identity, social networks, and individual speakers/writers
communicative patterns of discourse
gender-based variation
contact-induced phenomena
ego-documents (private letter correspondence, diaries)
administrative and legal texts
functional texts (cooking books, instruction manuals, inventories)
pamphlets and newspapers
literacy vs. orality
schooled vs. unschooled speech and writing
prescriptivism and norm codification
linguistic continuities and changes in speech communities
cross-linguistic similarities and diachronic differences
This conference is organised by Nils Langer (Bristol), Stephan Elspass (Augsburg), Joachim Scharloth (Zürich) and Wim Vandenbussche (VU Brussels).
For any information, please contact Dr Langer in the first instance.