Jeff Siegel

Second Dialect Acquisition

What is involved in acquiring a new dialect – for example, when Canadian English speakers move to Australia or African American English-speaking children go to school? How is such learning different from second language acquisition (SLA), and why is it in some ways more difficult? These are some of the questions Jeff Siegel examines in this book, the first to focus specifically on second dialect acquisition (SDA). Siegel surveys a wide range of studies that throw light on SDA. These concern dialects of English as well as those of other languages, including Dutch, German, Greek, Norwegian, Portuguese and Spanish. He also describes the individual and linguistic factors that affect SDA, such as age, social identity and language complexity. The book discusses problems faced by students who have to acquire the standard dialect without any special teaching, and presents some educational approaches that have been successful in promoting SDA in the classroom.

LINGUISTIC IDENTIFICATION IN THE DETERMINATION OF NATIONALITY: A PRELIMINARY REPORT

The authors of this report are five Australian experts in the fields of sociolinguistics, phonetics (analysis of accent or pronunciation)and language testing. Their report raises concerns about the “language analysis” that is being done by overseas agencies and that is being used by the Australian government in determining the nationality of refugee claimants, and concludes that “languageanalysis”, as it is currently used, is not valid or reliable. It appears to be based on “folk views” about the relationship between language and nationality and ethnicity, rather than sound linguistic principles. The report found that: i) a persons nationality cannot always be determined by the language he or she speaks, ii) a few key words and their pronunciation normally cannot reveal a persons nationality or ethnicity, iii) common perceptions about pronunciation differences among groups of people cannot be relied upon, iv) any analysis of pronunciation must be based on thorough knowledge of the language and region in question and must involve detailed phonetic analysis. Further more, in a study of 58 Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT) decisions in which this “language analysis” was at issue, it was found that there were doubts over its validity. The authors have grave concerns that the use of “languageanalysis” in the determination of nationality may be preventing Australia from properly discharging its responsibilities under the Refugees Convention and therefore call on the Australian Government to stop using this type of analysis.

Creoles and Minority Dialects in Education: An Update

This paper renews the call for greater interest in applied work to deal with the obstacles faced in formal education by speakers of creoles (such as Hawai‘i Creole and Jamaican Creole) and minority dialects (such as African American English). It starts off with an update on developments in the use of these vernacular languages in educational contexts since 1998, focusing on educational programmes, publications and research by linguists and educators. It goes on to discuss some of the research and public awareness efforts needed to help the speakers of these vernacular varieties, with examples given from Hawai‘i.

Substrate Influence in Creoles and the Role of Transfer in Second Language Acquisition.

This article discusses how research on language transfer in the field of SLA can help to explain the origins of substrate influence in creoles and provide answers to more difficult questions concerning the distribution and verification of substrate features. First, it argues against the view that both SLA and transfer are not involved in the genesis of pidgin and creole languages. Then the view is presented that, as described in the SLA literature, transfer is not just a consequence of second language learning but also of second language use, and it serves as a communication strategy when the need arises. Such a strategy may be used by speakers of either a prepidgin or an already established pidgin when its functional use is being rapidly extended. Sociolinguistic perspectives on transfer in SLA, described next, throw some light onto the question of why substrate features remain in pidgins and creoles. Research on transfer in SLA also provides important insights into the specific factors that may have affected substrate influence in creoles. Evidence is presented that some transfer constraints discovered in SLA research—rather than other proposed factors such as so-called functional expendability—still provide the best explanation for the absence of particular substrate features in creoles. Finally, it is shown that tests proposed for verifying instances of L1 influence in interlanguage could be adapted for verifying instances of substrate influence in creoles.

Formal vs. Non-Formal Vernacular Education: The Education Reform in Papua New Guinea

A community-based non-formal education movement in Papua New Guinea has led to hundreds of the countrys more than 800 languages being used to teach initialliteracy in local preschool and adult education programmes. The central government, with the help of overseas aid donors, has now embarked on a massive reform of the English-only formal education system. The first three years of formal education will be in vernacular languages at newly established Elementary Schools, run by local communities. But there is a great deal of controversy about the feasibility of the reform and its potential effects on the highly successful non-formal vernacular education movement. This paper describes this movement, the proposed reform and the conflicts between them, demonstrating the importance of community support and non-government organisations in educational language planning initiatives.

Literacy in Pidgin and Creole Languages

Pidgin and creole languages are spoken by more than 75 million people, but the vast majority of their speakers acquire literacy in another language – usually the language of a former colonial power. This paper looks at the origins of pidgins and creoles and explores some of the reasons for their lack of use in formal education. Then it describes some language planning efforts that have occurred with regard to instrumentalisation and graphisation of these languages, and the few cases where they are actually used to teach initial literacy. The paper goes on to discuss how speakers of pidgins and creoles more commonly acquire literacy in the standard European language officially used in formal education. It concludes with a short section on the role of pidgins and creoles in newspapers, literature and other writing.

Language description, history and development : linguistic indulgence in memory of Terry Crowley

Terry Crowley, a prolific researcher in the field of Oceanic linguistics and other areas of linguistics, died suddenly in 2005. The volume under review is to honor his memory and to reflect the breadth of his research and expertise. It contains, besides the Introduction by the volume editors, 35 contributions, grouped, with one exception, into three parts: Language description and linguistic typology; Language history and historical linguistics; and Language development and linguistic applications. There is no separate list in the volume of Terry’s publications, but there are six pages of entries in the references referring to his work, nearly all of them sole-authored, clear evidence of his very impressive productivity. Because of the number of articles included in the volume, this review can do no more than present brief summaries. In the Introduction the editors outline Terry’s career as a researcher, and give an overview of the articles in the volume, relating them to the various facets of Terry’s work. Outside the three parts (and preceding them) is a brief article by Helen Harper, a personal account of the legacy of Terry’s early salvage descriptive work in Cape York Peninsula. The speakers of the language Harper worked with some time later regarded Terry’s description “with some reverence” (9), and it led to some resurgence in the use of the language. Part I, Language description and linguistic typology, is the longest of the three parts. It contains 18 articles, most of which deal with Oceanic languages. William Thurston gives an account of his grammatical and lexicographical work on the Papuan language Anêm (New Britain). Many of the issues he has faced will be familiar to other field researchers. The next three articles deal with Australian aboriginal languages. William McGregor discusses a desiderative construction in Warrwa, a non-Pama-Nyungan language of the western Kimberley region (and in nearby languages). The Warrwa desiderative construction uses the verb ‘say’, but McGregor argues that the construction “represents a separate grammatical sign” (38) with its own—desiderative—function, different from a speech-reporting function. Graham McKay discusses and copiously exemplifies noun incorporation in Rembarrnga (Arnhem Land), and argues that the use of noun incorporation is primarily motivated by “discourse considerations of textural linking and backgrounding” (52). And Margaret Sharpe provides a detailed discussion of verbal suffixes in Yugambeh-Bundjalung (New South Wales). Her focus is on the fifth-order suffixes (there are six orders of suffixes), which, she concludes, have to do with marking aspects and moods, not tenses. After the three studies of Australian languages come a number of contributions dealing with Oceanic languages. In her study of certain aspects of transitivity in Saliba (Western Oceanic, Papuan Tip), Anna Margetts argues that even though the language has only one transitivizing suffix rather than separate reflexes of the two Proto-Oceanic transitiviz-

Bilingual literacy in creole contexts

Abstract This article examines whether the conventional notion of bilingual literacy is applicable to speakers of creole languages in terms of autonomy, codification, instrumentalisation, education and literacy practices. It then goes on to describe alternative conceptions of both literacy and bilingualism that appear to be more relevant to creole contexts – namely, the sociocultural literacy approach and truncated bilingualism. The article concludes with a discussion of the educational benefits to creole speakers of adopting either conventional or alternative bilingual literacy practices in the classroom.

Substrate reinforcement and dialectal differences in Melanesian Pidgin

Stabilization of a new contact language involves a process of levelling, or the reduction of variants. One of the factors influencing which grammatical variants are retained in the process is substrate reinforcement – the existence in the substrate languages of a congruent structure with a similar function. This article illustrates substrate reinforcement in the development of the three current dialects of Melanesian Pidgin. First, evidence of earlier variability is presented and the sociolinguistic conditions that later led to greater stability are described. Second, five grammatical features that differentiate the dialects are examined. For each feature, it is shown first that at least two variants were previously in use. Then evidence is presented illustrating correspondence between the particular variant retained in the dialect and a feature of the substrate languages of that geographic area. Differing substrates reinforced different variants, and this accounts for these dialectal differences.

Constraints on substrate transfer revisited

In an article in this journal, Bao ( 2005 ) proposes a constraint on functional transfer that he claims accounts for features of colloquial Singapore English (and other language contact varieties) better than the congruence constraint proposed by Siegel ( 1999 ) and subsequently developed in later works (e.g. Siegel 2003 , 2008a ). More specifically, Bao argues that the requirement of surface syntactic similarity for transfer is too strong. His analysis uses Mandarin to exemplify the Chinese substrate languages that were the source of transfer, following the view that there is a universal Chinese grammar (Chao 1968 : 13). However, the present article shows that Baos claim is unjustified because the actual source of transfer was a variety of Chinese that differs significantly from Mandarin in the area of grammar he examined.