The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

that would emerge would be a varied one, not only on a synchronic level, but importantly on
a diachronic one as well. Latin and its Romance vernaculars are therefore not the only
languages to undergo such changes, and it seems clear that there may be some kind of
underlying linguistic process: “Not many of the world‟s languages have a richly recorded
history, but many that do have undergone morphological simplification” (Lightfoot 2006:
101).
An explanation for this variation was offered by Kusters (2003a), in another
interesting paper, where he suggested that socio-historical factors are of upmost importance
in the loss of complex verbal systems. His theory is that “the more second language learning
has taken place in a speech community, the more internal dialect contact and migrations
occurred, and the less prestige a language has, the more transparent and economic the verbal
inflection will become” (2003a: 275). Such a view was also shared by Bodmer (1944: 204):
“like other formative processes, levelling or regularization by analogy [of synthetic forms
into analytic ones] waxes in periods of illiteracy and culture contact, waning under the
discipline of script”. Kusters takes his evidence from Classical Arabic and Old Norse and
their descendents. Thus, Icelandic is extremely conservative in its morphology and syntax,
and to a large extent highly comparable to Old Norse. This is because of Iceland‟s
geographical isolation, the position of the language as one of prestige amongst its own
communities, social stability and the lack of second language learners. He compares this
with Norwegian Bokmål, which witnessed considerable loss of synthesis from its
grammatical system due to the complex movement of peoples, the political subjugation of the
country and the position of its language as non-prestigious, relegated to a spoken idiom of a
principally peasant population. He also argues effectively that modern Arabic dialects differ
in proximity to Classical Arabic depending on their social history; thus, the Arabic of Najd, a
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