Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 4 (2000) - The University of ...

J. MARSHALL
2. Change versus Resistance
McIntosh (1961) writes that it is generally possible to say that in a given
community there is an ‘old-fashioned’ type of speech. That is to say, one
which, as far as our knowledge will permit us to judge, has been less affected
than other types of speech spoken there, by recent influences from outside. For
convenience, those who use this kind of speech can be called ‘resistant types’:
they will often, though not always, prove to have lived all or most of their
lives in the area which is being investigated. He writes that these resistant
types will generally be middle-aged or older, but it will turn out that some
young people are also resistant types and that some older persons are not
(1961: 85). He does not venture to say what it may be about these speakers
that causes them to be resistant, and this leaves us with the question of what
social factors, other than age, will predict language change or maintenance. In
the Doric Study, this notion of ‘resistant types’ is important. The social and
ethnographic data of such resistant individuals shows certain patterns under
quantitative analysis.
People’s attitudes to changes and to the groups in which they originate
are specific and measurable, and have an important effect on the success of
their diffusion (Kerswill and Williams 1994: 9). This has been an important
consideration in the present study, and attitudes have been measured as part of
the questionnaire.
The question of how a language community maintains vernacular norms
in the face of relentless pressure from the standard is one which interests many
linguists. It is very clear that vernacular norms are persistently maintained in
many communities, and that they have important social functions. But when
language change finally begins to occur in a hitherto conservative variety, it
offers the researcher a good opportunity to study the social factors involved in
language change, as well as clear, linguistically distinctive variables to use
when testing for correlations between social and linguistic variables. Most
modern sociolinguists see language variation as inextricably tied with
language change, and this study is based upon this notion.
Language variation provides an explanation of how transmission takes
place, but the problem of actuation remains elusive. McMahon (1994) adopts
the view that language is a system containing ‘orderly heterogeneity’ (Labov,
Herzog and Weinreich 1968: 100). This implies that:
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