As stated in section 3.2, approaching the development of WAEVs from a lan- guage contact perspective does not entail that they are creoles. The history of colonial and postcolonial North America involves population movements and contacts, even among populations of European descent alone.
Reference to creoles in this context has to do only with the fact that we have learned more about language evolution under contact conditions in creolis- tics. Despite the publication of Trudgill (1986), the literature has continued
to suggest that WAEVs have developed by internally motivated change, whereas, like its Caribbean creole kin, AAE has developed from language contact. None of the genetic explanations proposed above for AAE rests on the premise that they are creoles, only on the premise that they are contact- induced varieties (Mufwene 1997a). My proposal is to also discuss WAEVs as contact phenomena, sometimes with more emphasis on dialect than lan- guage contact, in the spirit of Trudgill (1986). My primary purpose is to highlight similarities and differences in the geneses of AAE and WAEVs.
What initially prompted this perspective is the fact that WAEVs are different from British English varieties, just as they differ from AAE.
Interestingly, in several parts of the Southeast, including South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi, Europeans and Africans arrived at more or less the same time, although this is literally truer of South Carolina than any- where else. It has often been claimed that the differences between WAEVs and AAE in the Southeast are slight, but Rickford (1985) shows that the similarities may be superficial only, at least in the Gullah-speaking area.
These seemingly similar ethnic vernaculars may well be underlain by different grammatical systems. Wolfram (1974) suggests the same thing for the hinterlands varieties.
Also, despite my observation above that AAE varies regionally, it is still less diverse from one region to another – especially if one focuses on AAVE.
There is much more variation among WAEVs, apparently corrresponding to different settlement and contact patterns. These are reminiscent of eco- logical differences that account for variation between Gullah and AAVE or among Atlantic creoles. Approaching the development of WAEVs in the way we have investigated that of creoles can shed some light on how their structures were formed. Moreover, a comparison of the ways they and creoles developed should shed light on how languages evolve, subject to varying ecological factors. Although this question is the focus of chapter 5, we will anticipate its discussion here.
We may start by trying to answer the question of why outside the American Southeast AAE and WAEVs are so different from each other.
Interidiolectal and intra-variety similarities are fostered by regular interac- tions among speakers. African Americans have not interacted with European Americans in the same way that members of each ethnic group (grossly defined!) have interacted among themselves. Segregation has pre- vented them from developing identical ethnic varieties. Although language contact was involved in both cases, it was not the same kinds of languages that were involved and would therefore be likely to bear significant conse- quences in the vernaculars of both groups. African languages were more likely to influence structures of AAE one way or another than they were to influence WAEVs.
3.4 The development of WAEVs 99
However, there are other questions to address, especially because WAEVs have generally been considered less restructured than AAE. If this observation is accurate, how can we account for differences – however slight they might be – between WAEVs and British English dialects? Why are there no identifiable WAEVs that are parallel to specific British English ver- naculars?13And why did German, Dutch, and French, which were spoken in some areas in (the early) colonial years, apparently not affect English in the same way or to the same extent as the African languages seem to have among African Americans?
Note, for instance, that New Netherland (including parts of New Jersey and New York) was initially a Dutch colony and its trade to the English did not entail that the Dutch, Germans, and French who were in the colony left it (Dillard 1992; Buccini 1995). As noted by several historians, including Kulikoff(1991a, 1991b) and Menard (1991), the Germans were among the early indentured servants in other North American colonies such as Virginia. Are the structures of German and English typologically so similar that German could not influence some WAEVs as significantly as African languages have among African Americans, or are there important ethno- graphic ecological differences which prevented a similar kind of influ- ence?14Or is there significant influence, nonetheless, but less conspicuous in general American English and more manifest in varieties such as Old Amish vernacular English? Or is it that early influence is less distinct than later immigrant influence such as can be observed in Yiddish English?
There is one significant factor that should not be overlooked: in general, living conditions did not prevent immigrants from continental Europe from having constant exposure to native varieties of English. Ethnic divisions among Europeans do not seem to have been so prohibitive to the acquisi- tion of native-like English as was segregation between people of European and African descents.15 Besides, there are several typological similarities among Western European languages (Thomason 1983), perhaps more than with the African languages they came in contact with in the New World.
For instance, African languages are generally tonal, whereas European lan- guages have stress systems. This alone may account for prosodic differences between WAEVs and AAE, although neither Gullah nor AAVE is a tonal language variety (contrary to Sutcliffe and Figueroa 1992). Western European languages have largely similar tense–aspect systems and a syntax in which the copula is routinely used in main clauses to form a verb phrase when the semantic predicate phrase is headed by a nonverb (e.g., predicative adjective, as inMary is pretty). A large proportion of African languages do not share these typological features. Moreover, several of them have very elaborate aspectual systems. Such typological differences between the European and African languages that came in contact with English made
allowance for different features to be selected into AAE and WAEVs, although the origins of the selections lie in colonial English koinés.
Note also that during the critical periods when AAE and creole varieties developed, the Africans who were not born in the colonies quickly domi- nated demographically, creating the right conditions for extensive restruc- turing of English among them. On the other hand, the massive continental European immigrations of the nineteenth century took place more gradu- ally and white colonial varieties of English may have already stabilized. By the Founder Principle, whatever changes some newly arriving groups effected on the local varieties may be considered peripheral, under circum- stances in which the founder populations were not suddenly eclipsed demo- graphically by the newcomers.
Nonetheless, Kulikoff (1991a, 1991b) and Menard (1991) suggest that the Germans constituted a non-negligible proportion of the indentured servants of the seventeenth century in the Chesapeake colonies, the period in which we may locate the founder populations. Leaving alone the Old Amish vernacular English, what German contributions can be counted in the structure of general American English? Similar questions may be asked of the Dutch and the French, who may be considered the founder popula- tions of some parts of the United States, viz., New Jersey and New York for the Dutch and Louisiana for the French. Is there German influence as sig- nificant in the WAEVs of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina as African linguistic influence is in AAE? Mutatis mutandis for Dutch and French. Did these founder populations contribute to the development of WAEVs in ways that dialectologists or genetic linguists may have paid little attention to?
Can we answer the question of why WAEVs are different from British English varieties without addressing these aspects of the founder popula- tions and their effects? Under the circumstances, can some of us continue to assume that American Southern English, as the variety spoken in the American Southeast, is what it is only because of the influence of the Africans, even when at least 80 percent of the white population’s children did not have African-American nannies?
Southern English set aside, it has often been claimed that WAEVs are vestiges of English varieties in the British Isles during the colonial period.
Supposedly isolation by the Atlantic Ocean made it impossible for the Americans to participate in the changes that have affected British English.
There are undoubtedly some regional varieties in which influence from par- ticular parts of the British Isles is significant, for instance, Appalachian English (Montgomery 1989, 1995, 1996; Montgomery, Fuller, and Paparone 1994). Still, one must not only determine whether the global systems of their vernaculars match those of the regions from which most of
3.4 The development of WAEVs 101
their speakers came but also account for what happened in urban centers such as New York, Chicago, Boston, and the like. So far no answers have been provided to these questions.
We also hear a great deal about the influence of Irish and Scots-Irish English on WAEVs, which accounts for some features selected by several of the vernaculars. However, what factors account for interregional differences among the WAEVs which are claimed to have been influenced by these same ethnic groups? Would it not be informative to learn what favored the selection ofsome(Scots-)Irishisms but blocked other influences (not necessarily the same everywhere!) which the same ethnic varieties could have exerted on all relevant WAEVs?
In other words, did WAEVs not develop as contact phenomena, like AAE and its Caribbean creole kin, consistent with the observations cited at the outset of this essay from Algeo (1991)? This question is addressed by Montgomery (1995, 1996). He argues correctly against claims that colonial American English was homogeneous. He concludes that “the hypothesis of an American colonial koiné is questionable on both philological and lin- guistics grounds. Colonial American English was probably not a koiné in many places; rather, dialect diversity, especially reflected in style shifting, was the rule (1995:233).”16
The claim of a homogeneous cross-regional koiné is equally disputed by what the history of settlements tells us about the typically isolated nature of plantations and small farms, the social and linguistic contrasts which must have existed between these communities, and the fact that, as Montgomery also observes, new immigrants tended to go where they had relatives or people from the same background. However, small-scale koinés must have obtained everywhere speakers of different English dialects came to interact regularly with, and accommodated, one another.
I have insisted on the effect of the founder populations not because this is the only phase that matters in the development of WAEVs and AAE but because it makes their developments more manageable in starting from the first phases and retracing history. I am sure the migrations of the nineteenth century have also affected WAEVs. The question is: how or to what extent?
(Perhaps post-Civil War immigrations from Europe, mostly those from after the passage of the Jim Crow laws, can contribute to explaining the divergence of European and African-American vernaculars, aside from the effects of segregation and the end of importation of labor from Africa.) Adding to complexity in this genetic scenario is what influence was exerted on English in states such as Louisiana and Texas, where French and Spanish speakers had to shift to colonial English which had already crystal- lized in the original United States. Are these later shifts different from that of the Dutch in New Netherland in the seventeenth century?
As stated at the outset, I have no answers to most of these questions.
Research on AAE, as on creole genesis in general, has helped me tease out the above relevant aspects of the development of WAEVs. Without having to characterize them as creoles, we cannot deny the fact that we are dealing here with contact-induced varieties. Therefore the same considerations which have helped us understand what seems to have happened in the devel- opment of AAE and New World creoles may very well help us understand how WAEVs have developed. The research avenues opening up here should shed light not only on the formation of these particular vernaculars but also on the dynamics of language speciation, in this case, those which have produced diverse daughters of the English language around the world.