“It’s a dangerous business… going out of your door. You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep to your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.” Bilbo Baggins (The Fellowship of the Ring)
I’ve often thought of this line as I’ve gone through life’s adventures. Like Bilbo in The Hobbit, I find that I miss the comfort of the life I left, yet when I finally return home, I find myself changed, more worldly, and somehow unable to slip back into life as I used to know it. It is a disconcerting feeling, as though somehow I’ve been separated from a piece of my identity. Recently, I’ve realized that the same could be said about my idiolect, or personal dialect.
I was born in rural Saskatchewan and grew up in a sheltered, agricultural “Hobbiton” in the prairies, where both language use and the lifestyle seemed to remain untouched by the bustle of the wider world. Some time after graduating from high school, I spent two years inAbbotsford, B.C., followed by another two in Prince George. Eventually, I moved back to the prairies, this time to the “big city” of Regina. There, I completed my undergraduate studies and began my career as an instructor of English as an Additional Language (EAL) at an academic preparatory high school. After nearly seven years in Regina, I moved to Montreal for two years to pursue my master’s degree before returning to Regina.
O’Grady and Archibald (2009) acknowledge that people may shift from one dialect to another depending on the social situation (known as broadly as diglossia), and I had long been aware of shifting my intonation and word choice to align with the interlocutor. As a result, spending years in regions far from home has had more lasting effects. Some of the changes were relatively small. In B.C, I learned that if I wanted to be understood, I had to refer to the noon meal as “lunch”and the evening meal as “dinner,” as opposed to calling the former “lunch” or ”dinner”(depending on whether the meal was hot) and the latter “supper” as I had always done. Similarly, the uniquelySaskatchewan “bunnyhug” has largely faded from my active lexicon.
Once I started teaching EAL, I subconsciously altered my speech to a greater degree. I began to speak more slowly and carefully, enunciating more clearly. I also began to make different lexical choices and reduce my use of idioms. This time the changes were for practical reasons, namely my students’ ease of understanding.
These adjustments were reinforced by my move to Montreal, where nearly all of the people I interacted with were multilingual and/or English language learners, representing vastly diverse linguistic backgrounds and influences. Distinct features of rural Saskatchewan English largely disappeared from my idiolect, and many of these changes have remained since I returned to the prairies, along with Montreal-specific lexical items such as “restos,” the “metro,” and “deps” (instead of “corner stores”).
Recently, someone mistook my accent, thinking I was British, and to my surprise, a member of my extended family remarked that my accent has changed. On the other hand, when my boyfriend, whom I met inMontreal, came for to the family farm for a visit, he commented that when we first got there I spoke “normally,” but as the weekend progressed I began to speak like my family, adopting phrases and intonational patterns that they frequently use.
Last month, I returned to Montreal for my convocation. Pleased to refresh my French, I quickly noticed that I reverted to a trait I had picked up during my previous stay. I found myself speaking English with that ever-so-subtle French influence I had noticed among some of my colleagues—namely, I stopped aspirating syllable-initial fricatives. A word like “pickle” should have a little puff of air after the /p/ sound, but I was saying it without the puff of air, as in French (see Davenport & Hannahs 2010).
Trudgill (1986) describes linguistic convergence, in which a person may alter her accent or other language features to be more similar to an interlocutor, and Britain (2012) suggests that contact between varying dialects is likely to contribute to dialect change. Examining several studies, Britain highlights linguistic changes typically associated with contact, including levelling, simplification, and dialect mixing..
Dialect levelling is a process that entails the loss of“traditional dialect features” (Britain 2012, p. 19) that are marked or used bya minority (Trudgill, 1986) in favour of a common dialect. Simplification refersto the likelihood that the less complex forms and aspects of a dialect are more likely to survive the levelling process, even if they are from the minority dialect (Trudgill, 1986). The result of this levelling and simplification among dialects is often dialect mixing (Trudgill, 1986), which by this point, I believe I have done in my own idiolect.
In examining the journey my speech has taken, I see elements of levelling, simplification, and dialect mixing. I continue to use some of the traits I have appropriated in other locations and situations, while retaining elements of my rural dialect. It was startling to realize that others have noticed a change and that to some people my “normal”dialect is not the way I speak at home with my family, but rather the levelled form I speak in the company of language learners and multilingual friends. Like Bilbo Baggins, it seems I have come back changed. However, it is comforting to realize that although my default dialect has perhaps been altered, I largely remain able to slip back into my home dialect, which I associate with my rural prairie roots, one I am proud to identify with.
References
Britain, D. (2012). Countering the urbanist agenda in variationist sociolinguistics: Dialect contact, demographic change, and the rural-urban dichotomy. In Hansen, S, Schwartz, C, Stoeckle, P, & Streck, T. (Eds.). Dialectological and folk dialectological concepts of space: current methods and perspectives in sociolinguistic research on dialect change. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com.
Davenport,M. & Hannahs, S. J. (2010). Introducing Phonetics and Phonology (3rd ed.). London: Hodder Education.
Hinskens, F. (1996). Dialect levelling in Limburg (Linguistische arbeiten, v. 356). De Gruyter. (1996). Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/mcgill/reader.action?docID=4002671
Nordquist, R. (2018). Definition and examples of linguistic accommodation. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-accommodation-speech-1688964.
O’Grady, W. & Archibald, J. (2009). Contemporary linguistic analysis (6th ed.). Toronto: Pearson Longman.
Trudgill, P. (1986). Dialects in Contact. New York: Blackwell.
