Nancy Rourke: ASL at ease, 2011. Website.
What sort of forces cause language change? Summarise the article by Gregory R. Guy.
How does language change? Gregory R. Guy makes a distinction between three major types of causes. Firstly internal or spontaneous change, such as sound change, semantic broadening, narrowing or pejoration, coinages etc. This would happen even if the speaker community was entirely isolated from other languages. The other two types both arise when the speaker community is not isolated, but is in contact with other language communities. In borrowing speakers of a given language (L1) import aspects of another language (L2) into their own. Imposition or interference entails that speakers of L1 inadvertently use rules and devices from L1 when speaking L2, thus affecting L2.
For both language contact causes there needs to be some degree of bilingualism of some percentage of the speaker community, here understood to mean that speakers speak at least a bit of more than one language, wether learned as a child or later on in life. In order to import words from another language one needs to have some sense of what they are used for in that language first.
Furthermore in contact situations, the relative size, dominance, prestige and degree of standardisation of the languages that are in contact have a lot of influence on the linguistic outcome. If one language has a much larger speaker community, the changes will take longer to filter through to each speaker, although a local variant can develop that shows a lot of influence from language contact in that locality. For a small community, language innovations can reach all speakers of the language more easily. Moreover the motivation for borrowing is often based on status. Therefore the direction of the borrowing will be mostly from the more prestigious language to the less prestigious one, e.g. from that spoken by the upper or ruling class to that spoken by lower and middle class people. Interference is usually not as conscious of a choice as borrowing, and therefore it is not status based. It occurs often in learning or shift situations, where one community has to adapt to the language of another, and where bilinguals are likely to be fluent in their native language but in the process of learning the language that the imposition happens to. However in cases of coexistence of two languages, or for balanced bilinguals, the interference can go both ways. Both languages will influence one another.
I am making a distinction between the dominance of a language and its prestige, dominance describing the status of the language in terms of being used for official purposes and spoken by people with more power. Prestige on the other hand is the "coolness" factor, which language is in fashion depending on current ideology. Often prestige and dominance go hand in hand, as with French in modern France, but social upheaval can lead to resistance against a dominant language and preference for another, which then gains prestige. Such would have been the case in Norway during the rise of Nynorsk, by way of protest against the Danish influence.
The degree of standardisation of a language is important because a language for which there are authoritative reference guides for word meanings, spelling, grammar and pronunciation will be much less inclined to change.
How is the situation of Ulster Scots in Guy's terms?
Ulster Scots coexists in Northern Ireland mainly with English and also with Irish, although the communities that speak Ulster Scots and the ones that speak Irish can be expected to be fairly segregated, i.e. bilingual Ulster Scots and Irish speakers will be rare. There is a coexistence situation, that is, Ulster Scots has been spoken alongside of English for centuries and speakers are not coerced to shift. Yet English is clearly the more sizable and dominant of the languages, being spoken worldwide by about 340 million speakers as a native language and another 430 as a second language (Ethnologue: English). According to the Ethnologue there are 90,000 speakers of Scots in the United Kingdom and 10,000 in Ireland (Donegal), and there is no separate entry for Ulster Scots. Both in Ulster and in Scotland the language has been relegated entirely to the informal sphere, whereas English is used for education and all official purposes. Sheila Douglas writes: "Many Scots people are still half-stifled by a social environment that frowns on the use of Scots for anything more important than casual conversation." Of the people in the communities that speak Scots or Ulster Scots, 97% speak English as well (Ethnologue: Scots) which makes them bilingual speakers.
Due to the revivals of the past centuries Scots and Ulster Scots are gaining in prestige again. Children who speak the language in the playground would now not be beaten, although they might still be corrected. Ulster Scots has benefited from the Good Friday Agreement with considerable funding and some governmental endorsement, and it has been promoted as a marker of a distinct identity.
What can we, therefore, expect to find with regards to language change in Ulster Scots?
Since the speaker community of Ulster Scots consists mostly of balanced bilinguals who use Ulster Scots for informal registers (provided the other speaker understands it) and English for more formal ones, it can be expected that there will be a lot of cross-influence from Ulster Scots on the local variety of English and from English on Ulster Scots. Due to the great intensity of the language contact this influence can be expected to be quite far-reaching, affecting all aspects of Ulster Scots i.e. phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon etc. The influence on English as a whole will be small because of English' giant speaker base, and its high degree of standardisation will mean that the local influence is limited to less formal registers as the standard variety is preferred for the more formal ones.
It may be hard to tell apart the effects of borrowing and intereference. Because the speakers are such balanced bilinguals (fluent in both languages) no useful distinction can be made between their L1 and their L2. The only distinction that is then left between borrowing and interference is whether the innovator made a conscious choice to use a certain aspect from the one language in the other, or whether it was a "mistake". Yet this may show variation on a case by case basis - the one's mistake may be another's conscious choice.
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