Dialect contact and past BE in the English Fens

Abstract

In the dialect contact framework proposed by Trudgill (1986), relatively little research has investigated the consequences of the mixing of different grammatical systems of English. The apparent time survey of the Fenland dialect of Eastern England reported here provides an example of a range of dialect contact processes reconfiguring variable patterns of past tense BE, resulting in a variety with analogical levelling to was in positive contexts – ‘the farms was ’ – and to weren’t in negative clauses – ‘the farm weren’t’. In focussing this was/weren’t pattern, a number of the processes typical of koineisation can be observed – diffusion (the geographical and/or social spread of a linguistic form from another socio-geographical place), levelling (the eradication of marked or minority forms in situations of dialect competition, where the number of variants in the output is dramatically reduced from the number in the input), simplification (a relative diminution of grammatical irregularity and redundancy) and reallocation (where two (or more) ingredient variants of the dialect mix are refunctionalised to serve new social, stylistic, or, as here, grammatical roles).

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