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.
2014. Manifestations phonétiques de la dynamique des attributions ethnolinguistiques à Montreal. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 59:1 ► pp. 83 ff.
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.
Walker, James A., John Hajek, Debbie Loakes, Chloé Diskin-Holdaway & Gerry Docherty
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