THE COMPARABILITY OF NEW-DIALECT FORMATION AND CREOLE DEVELOPMENT New-Dialect Formation: The Inevitability of Colonial Englishes

This is an informative book about the development of colonial English varieties that the author also identifies as ‘‘Southern Hemisphere Englishes’’ (SHEs), spoken in New Zealand, his primary focus, in Australia, which is also very much discussed, in South Africa, and in the Falkland Islands. According to T, they all developed much later than Caribbean and North American Englishes, the other colonial varieties, which receive only occasional comparisons in this volume. T’s main argument is that they all derive most of their structural features, especially phonological (the focus of the book), directly from British English varieties. (Australian English influence on New Zealand English (NZE) is admittedly marginal, although it cannot be completely dismissed.) The process of the formation of SHEs amounts to what is identified in Mufwene (2001) as ‘‘competition and selection,’’ leading to ‘‘restructuring’’ (a phenomenon similar to gene recombination in biology). T acknowledges this process more explicitly toward the end of the book. The phrase ‘‘new-dialect formation’’ in the title, whose apparent interpretation as an outcome of several structural changes becomes clearer only as the book unfolds, should not be interpreted as a kind of change in itself. As the rest of this review shows, it is the end-result of several formand structure-changing processes that lead to language speciation. Readers should be critical of some of the author’s conclusions, which are inconsistent with the facts he presents. My own perspective is especially creole-based, because the author invites it through passing inaccurate criticisms that are not supported by the growing history-informed literature on the development of creoles. I show below that, whatever T’s reasons for his comments may be, they turn out to be unfortunate distractions from an otherwise useful contribution to historical dialectology. The book is based on a rich body of data consisting of: (1) ‘‘recordings made for the National Broadcasting Corporation of New Zealand between 1946 and 1948 . . . from people who were children of the first European settlers in New Zealand . . . about 325 speakers born between 1850 and 1900’’; (2) ‘‘recordings [allegedly made by the author] of eighty-four speakers from thirty-four different locations in New Zealand, both North Island and South Island, who were born between 1850 and 1889, which [he] take[s] to be the crucial formation period for [NZE]’’. According to T, ‘‘none of the speakers sounds like modern New Zealanders; some of them sound like English or Scottish or Irish people, and many of them sound like no one at all except themselves’’ (p. xi). Discussions throughout the book involve comparisons with English in the British Isles up to the nineteenth century and afterwards, which preempt any objections one may raise against