Dialect Death
The case of Brule Spanish
Author
The Brule Dwellers of Ascension Parish are descendants of Canary Island immigrants who came to Louisiana in the late 1700s. A few residents in and around the Ascension Parish area still speak an archaic dialect of Spanish which is at the brink of linguistic extinction. Because the Brule dialect is in the final stages of what is commonly known as “language death”, the case of Brule Spanish presents an exciting opportunity to investigate commonly held assumptions regarding the structural changes often associated with vestigial languages. Its relative isolation from other dialects of Spanish for over two hundred years serves as a sort of linguistic “time capsule” which provides information that is relevant to critical outstanding issues in Hispanic dialectology and historical linguistics. In addition to examining these issues, documenting the specific characteristics of Brule Spanish, and comparing Brule Spanish with other modern Spanish dialects, this book presents a very accessible introduction to the field of language death.
[Studies in Bilingualism, 13] 1997. x, 220 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
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Preface and Acknowledgments | p. ix
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List of Figures | p. x
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List of Tables | p. xi
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Introduction | p. 1
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Organization of the Study | p. 9
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History of the Brule Dwellers | p. 19
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Language Death | p. 27
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Social Factors | p. 175
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Summary and Conclusions | p. 193
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Notes | p. 201
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Author Index | p. 205
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Subject Index | p. 219
“Holloway's in-depth and extensive documentation of Brule Spanish provides a valuable contribution not only to the area of language death phenomena, but also to the area of historical linguistics, in the references made to changes which have taken place in the dialect transportation to Louisiana from the Canary Islands, and to the area of Hispanic dialectology, in the author's detailed linguistic analysis of the Brule Dialect, and in the comparisons he makes with other Spanish dialects.
General information on language death, with references to primary scholars and works in this area, together with the place occupied by the specific case of the death of the Brule dialect within the general framework of language death, makes this book a viable option on Hispanic dialectology.”
General information on language death, with references to primary scholars and works in this area, together with the place occupied by the specific case of the death of the Brule dialect within the general framework of language death, makes this book a viable option on Hispanic dialectology.”
George DeMello, University of Iowa
“As a study of language death, Holloway's volume describes a classic example of the decline of a minority language in the United States. It is an excellent, and probably the last, source of information on this dying language.”
Felice Coles, University of Mississippi
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2003. English in the Southern United States,
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Roberts, Julie
2006. AS OLD BECOMES NEW: GLOTTALIZATION IN VERMONT. American Speech 81:3 ► pp. 227 ff.
Van Gysel, Jens E. L.
2022. The influence of language shift on Sanapaná vowels: An exemplar-based perspective. Language Variation and Change 34:1 ► pp. 107 ff.
WIRTZ, KRISTINA
2007. How diasporic religious communities remember: Learning to speak the “tongue of the oricha” in Cuban Santería. American Ethnologist 34:1 ► pp. 108 ff.
Wolfram, Walt
2004. Language Death and Dying. In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ► pp. 764 ff.
[no author supplied]
2008. REFERENCES. The Publication of the American Dialect Society 93:1 ► pp. 311 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
Subjects
Main BIC Subject
CF: Linguistics
Main BISAC Subject
LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General