Mysteries of the substrate
There can be little doubt about the existence of substrate effects in many cases when a whole population abandons their original language and adopts another. But there are situations in which the direction of linguistic influence remains unexplained, the causal connections are obscure, or the expected effect does not occur. We still do not know just how young children in American society manage not to acquire the foreign accent of their parents. If anything, the effect of parents’ language may be in the opposite direction from that predicted by contrastive analysis. Several cases of unmistakeable but inexplicable substrate effects are discussed: the initiation of the merger of /o/ and /oh/ by Slavic-speaking coal miners in Eastern Pennsylvania; the use of later for earlier in the English of Puerto Rican Spanish speakers, and the confusion of make and let among several generations of Italian-American speakers of English.
Cited by
Cited by 14 other publications
Blondeau, Hélène & Michael Friesner
2014.
Manifestations phonétiques de la dynamique des attributions ethnolinguistiques à Montreal.
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 59:1
► pp. 83 ff.

Carter, Phillip M. & Kristen D’Alessandro Merii
Carter, Phillip M., Lydda López Valdez & Nandi Sims
2020.
New Dialect Formation Through Language Contact.
American Speech 95:2
► pp. 119 ff.

Daleszynska-Slater, Agata & Miriam Meyerhoff
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Sociolinguistic Studies 14:1-2

Grama, James, Catherine E. Travis & Simon Gonzalez
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Ethnolectal and community change ov(er) time: Word-final (er) in Australian English.
Australian Journal of Linguistics 40:3
► pp. 346 ff.

Habib, Rania
2014.
Vowel variation and reverse acquisition in rural Syrian child and adolescent language.
Language Variation and Change 26:1
► pp. 45 ff.

Hoffman, Michol F. & James A. Walker
2010.
Ethnolects and the city: Ethnic orientation and linguistic variation in Toronto English.
Language Variation and Change 22:1
► pp. 37 ff.

Kern, Friederike
2015.
Turkish German.
Language and Linguistics Compass 9:5
► pp. 219 ff.

Litty, Samantha, Jennifer Mercer & Joseph C. Salmons
Newman, Michael
2010.
Focusing, implicational scaling, and the dialect status of New York Latino English1.
Journal of Sociolinguistics 14:2
► pp. 207 ff.

Niedt, Greg
Rankinen, Wil
2018.
Lingering Substrate and Encroaching Exogenous Influences on Finnish and Italian Americans’ Vowels in Michigan’s Marquette County.
American Speech 93:2
► pp. 223 ff.

Sharma, Devyani & Lavanya Sankaran
2011.
Cognitive and social forces in dialect shift: Gradual change in London Asian speech.
Language Variation and Change 23:3
► pp. 399 ff.

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