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Accommodation theory and dialect shift: A case study from Yiddish
Language & Communication,
Printed in Great Britain.
ACCOMMODATION
Vol. 8,
No. 3/4, pp. 307-320,
0271-5309/88
1988.
$3.00 + .OO
PergamIn
THEORY AND DIALECT FROM YIDDISH
SHIFT:
Press
plc
A CASE STUDY
ELLEN F. PRINCE Introduction: accommodation vs dialect shift Over the past decade, there has been a growing body of literature on Accommodation Theory, all showing that accommodation is a robust and important phenomenon affecting verb~/lin~istic performance. The present paper adds to this evidence and carries it further, by showing that accommodation may in fact be the underlying force driving dialect shift (cf. Trudgill, 1986). Accommodation (e.g. Giles, 1973; Giles and Smith, 1979; Beebe and Giles, 1984; Giles et al., 1987) has often been characterised as a shift in the linguistic output of a speaker as a function of the linguistic output of the interlocutor. When the shift is toward (some approximation of) the linguistic output of the hearer, the accommodation is said to be ‘convergent’; when it is in the opposite direction, it is termed ‘divergent’. The key points here are that a speaker modifies his/her speech on the basis of the speech of another, during dyadic interaction with that other. In contrast, dialect shift involves, on the surface, a shift in the output of a speaker of some speech variety, call it Dialect-l, toward the output of speakers of some other speech variety, call it Dialect-2. In principle, then, there is no necessary relation between accommodation and dialect shift. For example, a speaker could conceivably accommodate to the speech of an interlocutor with respect to some non-dialectal feature, say, some speech defect or some non-pathological feature of his/her idiolect. Conversely, a speaker could conceivabIy undergo dialect shift without ever interacting with a speaker of the target dialect, i.e. without ever having someone co-present to accommodate to. Imagine, for example, a case where a speaker of Dialect-l has never heard Dialect-2 but has somehow ‘learned’ what it sounds like, perhaps from books, and works at producing it. What is crucial to dialect shift is that a ‘permanent” change has occurred; how it has occurred is not specified by the definition of the phenomenon. However, the data reported on here give strong evidence that, in one case at least and therefore conceivably in other cases as well, the dialect shift that has taken place has come about precisely as a result of accommodation. More specificatly, we shall consider a longitudinal case study of a single individual, the professional Yiddish folksinger Sarah Gorby, over a 40 year period during which she clearly underwent partial dialect shift (Prince, 1987) and where we will find reason to believe that it was achieved by means of accommodation. The evidence to be presented is compelling for two reasons. First, the data are taken entirely from recordings made by the singer, and thus there is no chance that we are dealing Correspondence relating to this paper should be addressed to Professor E. F. Prince, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, Room 619, Williams Half, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305, U.S.A.
ELLEN F. PRINCE
308
simply with temporary accommodation to an interlocutor, there being no (relevant) copresent other.* Second, by the end of the time-period studied, the singer has a feature that belongs neither to Dialect-l, her original dialect, nor to Dialect-2, which can be identified as the target dialect; it does however belong (uniquely) to a third dialect, Dialect-3, the native dialect of the group of speakers that is, on independent grounds, most likely to be taken as a model for Dialect-2. The otherwise inexplicable appearance of this feature in the singer’s linguistic output can be explained if we take it to be an unintended but revealing side-effect of her having acquired Dialect-2 by accommodating to this particular subset of its speakers, Dialect-2 speakers of Dialect-3 background. Therefore, we must conclude that the dialect shift was effected by means of accommodation. As a result, Accommodation Theory is presented as having greater potential relevance to linguistic theory than previous studies would have us believe, in that it may well be the driving force behind dialect shift and therefore behind the bulk of language change in general. Background Since this study is based on data from a Yiddish singer’s shift from her native Bessarabian Yiddish dialect towards Standard Yiddish, a brief discussion of the dialects of Yiddish, the singer, and the use of singing as linguistic data is in order.
The dialects of Yiddish Yiddish, or ‘Eastern Yiddish’ as it is technically called, is traditionally divided into three major regional dialects, north-eastern Yiddish (NEY), popularly called ‘Litvak’; central Yiddish (CY), popularly called ‘Polish’ or ‘Galitsianer’, and south-eastern Yiddish (SEY). South-eastern Yiddish is further subdivided into Bessarabian Yiddish (BesY), popularly called tote-mome lushn (the BesY version of tate-mame loshn ‘papa-mama language’) and Volhynian, or ‘Voliner’, Yiddish (VolY). In addition, since the 1920s there have been two standard dialects, Standard Yiddish (Sty) and Theatre Yiddish (ThY).3 (See Weinreich, 1980 for a more complete discussion of the dialects.) There are phonological, morphological and lexical differences among the dialects. The major phonological variables are shown in Table 1. (Upper case is not relevant to phonetic value. That is, an item transcribed with EY is homophonous with an item transcribed with ey, an item transcribed with lis homophonous with an item transcribed with i and so forth. The use of upper case is simply to indicate that the vowel in question is nonstandard, i.e. is a variant differing from Sty.) Table sty
NEY
CY
1. Ten phonological ThY
variables
SEY: VolY
in Yiddish SEY: BesY
u
u
I
I
I
I
e
e
EY
EY
EY
EY
0
0
a
u a
u
a
0
ay
w
A:
u a ay/A
A
OY sh
EY
OY
OY
OY
sh/S
sh
OY sh
sh
sh
ey
ey
AY
ey
ey
i
ey i
a
a
a
a
a
a ay
u
Example kumen
‘come’
veg ‘road’ khosn
‘groom’
tam ‘taste’ laydn
‘suffer’
oyb ‘if’ sho ‘hour’ meydl
‘girl’
vi ‘how’ a
-zhe (PRT)
ACCOMMODATION
309
THEORY AND DIALECT SHIFT
Note first that StY is not identical with any regional dialect. In fact, every speaker (except perhaps the children of purist Yiddishists) who acquires StY must do so via dialect shift. One result of this is that there is presumably variation in the output of every so-called StY speaker such that no speaker can be assumed apriori to produce only StY variants. Note further that, with respect to phonological variation, StY is closer to NEY than to the other regional dialects, differing only in the oy/EY and sh/S variables. However, if we consider non-phonological variables, then we see that NEY is in fact quite far from Sty, as shown in Table 2. Thus we see that StY is truly a unique dialect, differing in some important respects from each of the regional dialects. (See Schaechter, 1969 for a detailed account of the provenance of the different features of Sty.) Table 2. Three non-phonoIogic~ StY/CY/ThY/SEY: Gender
Case
BesY
in Yiddish NEY
Masculine/feminine/neuter
Masculine/feminine
DOS kind (neuter)
Der/di
‘the child’
kind (m./f.)
Nominative/dative/accusative
Nominative/oblique
Zen zi in ir
Zen ir in ir
‘See her (accusative) Past tense auxiiiary
VolY/SEY:
variables
Hobn
‘have’/zayn
in her (dative.)’ ‘be’
= ‘he died’
He has died
=
Er hot gezogt
Er hot gezogt He has said = ‘he said’
‘have’
Er hot geshtorbn
Er iz geshtorbn He is died
‘See her in her’ Hobn
=
He has said
Furthermore, it should be noted that, while the influence of StY is apparent to some degree on a very significant percentage of the speech community, it is in the public domain that it has had the most obvious influence. The entertainment world, including the theatre, film and music, has been very heavily standardized, to the point where one virtually does not hear a pristine regional dialect (other than Vol = ThY) in this domain, except perhaps to portray, usually mockingly, a person of the particular region. To understand the spread of Sty, we should consider briefly the relative social standings of the dialects. First, one must distinguish between the religious community and the secular, since the two groups evaluate the different areas and dialects differently. Since the singer and her intended audience are from the secular community, what follows will pertain to them only. Among all the dialects, Lithuanian Jews and their dialect, NEY, are the most prestigious, due no doubt to the fact that this group was on the whole less orthodox and hence more ‘modern’, more westernized, than the other groups and to the related fact that Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, was the centre of secular Jewish learning. VolY (= Thy) comes next and both CY and BesY were and are highly stigmatized, in spite of the great numbers of their speakers. Finally, I should add that many less educated CY and SEY speakers believe that NEY is StY, no doubt because of the high prestige of both and the identity of many of the vowel variants. (It was, after all, Vilna academicians who designed
310
StY; thus is it not coincidental respects.)
ELLEN
F. PRINCE
that the two dialects
should be so similar,
at least in some
The singer: biographical data Sarah Gorby was born in Kishinev in 1900, three years before the Kishinev Pogrom which wreaked havoc on the large Jewish population. At the time, Kishinev, the ‘capital of Bessarabia’, was part of Czarist Russia; in 1918, it was ceded to Rumania; since the Second World War it has been part of the U.S.S.R. and is the capital of the Moldavian S.S.R. Gorby, the second of seven children in a Jewish merchant-class family, spoke Russian, Yiddish and Rumanian from childhood and each without any linguistic interference from any other language. By the time she was an adult, she was fluent also in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German and English, all of which she spoke with a noticeable Russian accent. From the age of 6, Gorby studied music formally, first in Kishinev and, after graduation from high school in 1917, at the Music Conservatory in Iaci (Jassy), Rumania. There she met and married an industrialist and publisher, a Rumanian-Yiddish bilingual also fluent in French. They did not live together, however, as she left shortly thereafter to study voice in Rome, finally settling in Paris. She had no children. She became fairly well known within the European secular Jewish community, giving concerts and benefits all over the continent in a number of languages, including Yiddish. In the late 193Os, Gorby and her husband emigrated to Haiti to escape the Nazis. From there, Gorby came to New York, debuting in Town Hall in 1940. During the 194Os, she gave many concerts in the United States, Mexico and South America, began to produce records and appeared regularly on the Yiddish radio. After the war, she was deported, for reasons which I have not been able to discover, and returned to Paris. Her husband remained in Haiti, where he died in the early 1950s; her parents and siblings had been deported and killed or were scattered on five continents. She never returned to Kishinev and she refused an invitation in the 1960s to sing in the U.S.S.R. Through the 1950s and 196Os, Gorby continued to give concerts and make records, acquiring a good deal of acclaim (although very little material gain) within the reshuffled Yiddish speech community of Europe and Latin America, and twice winning the prestigious Grand Prix du Disque in Paris. By the 197Os, Gorby’s voice had deteriorated badly and she subsisted mainly by giving singing lessons. However, she still recorded, largely at her own expense, and she still toured constantly, throughout Western Europe, Mexico and South America, as well as Israel and South Africa, in all of which she had a network of friends and associates, mostly Yiddish writers, poets, journalists, singers and musicians. She died, destitute, in Paris in 1980, at the age of 80. Singing as linguistic data Given the unorthodoxy of using singing as linguistic data, a few words are in order about why this is a valid approach, especially given Trudgill’s (1983) study of the phenomenon of imitation among British pop singers imitating certain varieties of American English (see also Trudgill, 1986). First, it should be noted that singing conventions in the Yiddish speech community are very different from at least certain current conventions in the Anglo-American speech community. Imitation of some regional group among Yiddish singers is used in a very limited way, only for parody. Rather, professional public performance in Yiddish-spoken or sung-is appropriately done in either Standard Yiddish or else in Theatre Yiddish, not
ACCOMMODATION THEORY
311
AND DIALECT SHIFT
in any regional dialect. The only nonstandard feature that is considered acceptable in professional Yiddish singing is the use of a trilled /r/ rather than the standard uvular /r/; this appears to result from the use of trilled /r/ in classical (e.g. operatic) singing, in which many female Yiddish singers used to be trained.4 The important point for us here is that, to the Yiddish audience, a (non-parodic) performance in the performer’s native regional dialect is a sign not of authenticity but of lack of education and ignorance.’ Second, one might question how closely pronunciation in singing resembles the singer’s pronunciation in speech. In the case of Sarah Gorby, I have no direct evidence of her spoken phonology. However, 1 have anecdotal evidence, from a Rumanian Jewish journalist in Paris who had known her from 1917 until her death, that her spoken Yiddish became much more standard over the years (J. Flavius, personal communication). In addition, there is evidence from letters which the singer wrote in Yiddish in the last year of her life to a Yiddish journalist in Israel, A. Meilijson, a somewhat standardized speaker of VoiY background. Fortunately for our purposes, she either did not know, or else ignored, standard orthography and appeared to write as she spoke; in any event, we find exactly the same degree of variation in these letters as we do in her singing.6 Finally, for what it is worth, I asked the more than 25 individuals whom I interviewed who knew Corby and who knew Yiddish whether her spoken Yiddish sounded like her sung Yiddish and the response was unanimously affirmative. Thus, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I shall assume that Gorby’s pronunciation in singing, in particular her variation among dialectal variants, was a reasonable reflection of her pronunciation in speech. Sarah Gorby’s dialect shift As mentioned above, the present study grew out of a longitudinal case study of the partial dialect shift from BesY to StY in Sarah Gorby’s recorded singing, reported by Prince (1987). Gorby was perhaps unique among professional singers of her generation in that she intended to remain and did remain identifiably Bessarabian to the end. Why she had this intention is not known; former associates suggest only that she was a generally stubborn person who cared little for what society thought. (Several have added that she dyed her hair blue and purple in the 1940s; they see these as two equivalent floutings of social norms.) In any event, Gorby was clearly not immune to social pressure. As shown in the earlier study, a quantitative analysis of over 10000 tokens of the variants of five vowels in her singing, recorded over the last 40 years of her life, showed a significant shift toward StY, presumably in spite of her intentions.’ The five vowel variables studied were /u-I/, /eEYI, /o-U/, /a-O/ and lay-A/, i.e. those vowels in Table 1 for which the BesY variant differs from that of Sty. Of direct relevance to the present study is the first, /u-I/, since this is the vowel in the morpheme whose behaviour we shall study below. The overall figures for her shift to StY with respect to this vowel are shown in Table 3. Table 3. Sarah Gorby’s variation between BesY /u/ and StY /I/ 1940s sty /u/ BesY /I/ Total number Percentage BesY (%) Probability Significance
73 176 249 71 0.67
195os-1960s
1970s
490 314 453 225 943 539 48 42 0.44 0.38 p
Total 877 854 1731 49
As we see in Table 3, the shift was both gradual and partial. Variation occurs from the beginning to the end of the period studied and in fact is in evidence within virtually each individual song, see Example 1. Example (1) {a) 1940s: Tsim zikh mukhnes fartribene jk;. Friedman) (S78) di kinder tsX mOmes getuiete, the children to mamas cuddled, In tOtes hrbZxykht fitn ye&em, and papas whitened by woes, fun veytik irr drayen geboygn. from pain in threes bent. (b) lP50s-f96Us: G&e bier, roy& ~!~~~~ (Folk) (I-7) iber berg In iber f&der, over rn~~nt~~ns and over fields, iber yOm in iber welder, rno~r~rnoy, over sea and aver woods, you there, geyt mayn benkshaft zlkhn d&h, goes my longing seek you, shneler brengen dikh tsu mir, may-moy. faster bring you to me, you there. besarabie, mAn haymat IOnd, vEYmen bist du nit b&&t? Bessarabia, my home land, to whom are you not familiar? IOnd fun mayne ywgnt tEYg, fA mit lider, ffi mit freyd. land of my youth days, full with songs, full with joy. As we see from afl the upper case vowels fi*e, BesY variants) in rhe tr~s~r~~t~~~s in ExampIe (ljt Gorby uses a good dea3 of marked@ BesY variants through~nt her life. In particular, we see that she shows variation in /u-I/, the variable of present relevance, where all the variants, both the StY u and the BesY I, are given in italics far the reader’s convenience.
During the course of cxding the data for the earlier study, an unexpected change in the singer’s pronunication was found, involving a single morpheme, the inseparable verbal prefix &F.~ More precisely, this morpheme, although containing schwa, a vowel which is the same in StY and BesY, came to vary between the expected /$~a/- and an unexpected itsU/-, as in Example (2) Exampk f;t) EkFlraprshes~~~~~~~~~~ ekh iaptsfies,ir, mqqe, laptskes Iibinke In fayn, oh sandals, you, mine, sandals beloved and fine, oysgetrotn un tsa shotn, iber felder, iber velder, trampled and stretched, over fields, over woods. ekh laptshes, ir, mayne, laptshes libinke In fayn, oysgetrotn un tslishotn, iber felder, iber velder,
The figures for the variation are shown in Tahk 4. Table 4, Corby’s variation between if&Y- and BesYiSfY irsai194Ua /Ml/-
0
BesYBtY /&iiTotal number
6 6
Percentage
itSC.V-
f@f~a)
t3
195os-1960s I__ 13 8 21 62
1970s 1 1 2 50
Total ~ 14 15 29 48
ACCOMMODATION THEORY AND DIALECT SHIFT
313
This was a most puzzling find: since both BesY and StY have /&a/- categorically, why would the singer shift to a pronunciation of /tsU/-? Initially, hypercorrection was thought to be the cause, a matter to which we shall now turn. Hypercorrection is a well-known phenomenon in situations of dialect shift. By ‘hypercorrection’, I mean the phenomenon that arises when two items are homonymous in the speaker’s original dialect but not in the target dialect. In the usual case, one of the two items is the same in the original and target dialects, while the other item differs in the two dialects. Hypercorrection is said to occur when the one that is in fact the same in both dialects is modified on the analogy of the one that differs. As an illustration, consider the case of postvocalic /r/ in most dialects of American English, corresponding in New York City English (as well as in some other dialects) to zero or a glide (Labov, 1966). Thus, for example, moaner and Mona contrast in r-ful dialects, /monar/ and /mona/, respectively, while they are homonyms, /mona/, for the r-less New York City speaker. A NYC speaker who is shifting to an r-ful dialect may treat the two forms identically, introducing /r/ to each, /monar/. When this r-ful form is used for moaner, it is said that shift has occurred; when it is used for Mona, it is called hypercorrection. That is, a standard phoneme, here /a/, is misconstrued as a homonymous regional variant, here /a/ varying with /ar/, and it is mis-standardized to /at-/. With respect to the present study, one might think that the pronunciation of tse- as /tsU/is an instance of hypercorrection, akin to the situation arising among Trudgill’s (1983) pop singers. The story would be as follows. First, the schwa in the original form is misconstrued as a high front vowel, /il. This is very plausible, since tse- is always short and unstressed and schwas and short unstressed high front vowels are virtually indistinguishable in normal rapid speech. Second, this high front vowel is mis-identified as the BesY variant of the /u-Z/ variable. Third, the form is mis-standardized to the StY variant of the variable, producing /tsU/-. The hypercorrection story just outlined would be a very plausible explanation, if not for several other facts. First, in this corpus of over 10000 tokens-all the relevant tokens of the five vowel variables in over 12 hours of singing-there is not one instance of hypercorrection involving any other morpheme. One must wonder then, why only one morpheme was hypercorrected, and this 14 times, nearly half the number of times the morpheme was uttered. Second, these Yiddish variables are different from those like the New York City r-variable: the latter is a purely phonological variable, while the former is a lexico-phonologic~ variable. That is, in the New York City case, as in general with phonological hypercorrection, the variable affects all instances of the phoneme in question: all postvocalic /r/s in r-ful dialects correspond to zero or glide in New York City English, regardless of their lexical environment. In the Yiddish situation, on the other hand, the variables are all lexcially governed. That is, knowing the vowel alternation is not enoughone has to know which lexical items take part in the variation. Thus, for example, while StY /ku/ ‘cow’ corresponds to BesY /kZ/, StY /nu/ ‘well’ is likewise /nu/ in BesY, never */nZ/. The difference between these two types of variables, phonological vs lexicophonological, seems to correlate with a difference in how shift is achieved. Purely phonological shifts seem to be achieved by the addition or modification of a phonological rule, which ignores lexical differences. Lexico-phonologic~ shifts, in contrast, seem to be achieved by modifications in the lexicon and are thus item-specific (see Abdel-Jawad, 1981). Thus, we must reject hypercorrection in its usual sense as the explanation for the occurrences in this corpus of /tsU/- for StY/BesY /tsa/-.
ELLEN F. PRINCE
314
As noted in Schaechter (1969), German is often taken as a model for StY when insecurity arises. Thus one may hypothesize, alternatively, that Gorby was influenced by German in the pronunciation of this morpheme. Very quickly, however, we see that such an explanation must be rejected: the German cognate of tse- is zer-, with a front mid vowel, much closer to the Yiddish schwa than to a high back vowel. Another possibility is that a speech error. In fact, there this case make this hypothesis the time, which would give
Gorby’s pronunciation of the item with a back vowel was are several speech errors in the corpus, but the numbers in implausible: tse- is, after all, pronounced /tsU/- nearly half it an error rate which is unique in the corpus.
One detail which has not yet been mentioned is that the pronunciation of the inseparable prefix tse- as /NJ/- is a feature of NEY (Schaechter, 1983). So far as I know, it is not part of any more general phonological or lexico-phonological variation but seems rather limited to this particular item. At first blush, this fact does not help to explain the occurrence of this variant in the corpus under analysis: why should a BesY singer shifting to StY introduce a nonstandard variant specific to another regional dialect? One possible reason, that the singer did it simply for variety, is highly unlikely, given that she introduced no other markedly regional non-BesY variants. A second possible reason is equally implausible: that she did it to give a particular NEY flavour to the songs in which she used this form. Such an explanation must be rejected since all of the songs in which this variant occurs have a great deal of BesY features and no other markedly NEY ones. For example, consider Example (3). Example
(3)
Rozelekh un perlekh (A. Szewach)
(L7) plItsim hot di zIn fun dort zikh Uwpgekert, suddenly has the sun from there self overturned, vi roykh avek dUs gliyk, like smoke away the happiness, skleyne shtEYtele iz shoyn oyf shtoyb ts(lshtert, the small village is already to dust demolished, gemakht hot es der kriyg. made has it the war.
All the upper-case letters in the transcript of Example (3) indicate BesY-and unambiguously non-NEY-variants, with the sole exception of tsUshtert ‘demolished’. Thus we see no evidence for a desire on the part of the singer to give the song a NEY flavour by using the NEY variant /tsU/-. Still one other explanation suggests itself: for some reason, the singer was using NEYturned-sty speakers as models for StY and was accommodating to them, inadvertently importing into her own speech their NEY pronunciation of tse- as /tsU/- along with their StY pronunciation of other items. For this to be plausible, however, we would have to show on independent grounds that choosing NEY-turned-sty speakers as models for StY was a likely thing for the singer to do. In fact, I believe that such a choice of dialect-model was the most likely one for the singer to make. To see this more clearly, consider the task facing a speaker undergoing dialect shift in the direction of a standard dialect. In some speech communities, speakers presumably acquire the standard dialect through formal education, e.g. Swiss-Germanspeaking children learning New High German in school. Clearly, such an option is not a viable one in other situations, certainly not in the case at hand: even if Sarah Gorby had the time and means to attend school as an adult in order to acquire StY, which we have seen above she did not, there were precious few schools in the world that she could
ACCOMMODATION
THEORY
AND DIALECT
SHIFT
315
have attended where she could have done this. Thus she had to acquire it informally, presumably by trying (consciously or unconsciously) to ‘sound like’ StY speakers she heard. Thus we see the beginning of the relevance of Accommodation Theory. However, trying to sound like StY speakers is not such an easy task, for two reasons. First, recall that the relevant differences between BesY and StY are lexically governed. That is, for each separate lexical item, the singer had to learn whether that item was one which showed variation between the dialects. For example, she had to learn that the BesY homonyms /vi/ ‘how’ and /vl/ ‘where’ differed in Sty, where ‘how’ was still /vi/ but where ‘where’ was /vu/, that the BesY homonyms /ki/ ‘cows’ and /kI/ ‘cow’ were StY /ki/ and /ku/ respectively and so on for every single item with a high front vowel in her lexicon (as well as for every item with one of the other varying vowels). Thus the task is arduous and not to be achieved overnight: one must listen for StY pronunciations of vast numbers of items and mark each one in one’s lexicon as varying or not varying in StY. Second, there is an even more basic problem with trying to sound like StY speakers: deciding who the StY speakers are that one should emulate. That is, as noted above, StY is no one’s native dialect. All StY speakers then may show variation between the standard and their regional dialect. Consider again Table 1 above. Imagine a BesY speaker shifting to StY for the /u-I/ variable, for example. As just noted, s/he must decide, for each item with a high front vowel (/i/, /I/), whether it should be shifted to a high back (/u/) or not. Ideally, if a StY speaker is heard to pronounce an item with the front vowel, it should not be shifted; if a StY speaker is heard to pronounce it with a back vowel, it should. However, suppose the StY speaker is of CY or SEY origin. How would one know whether an individual token of a front vowel in this person’s speech was in fact a StY pronunciation and not simply a regional variant from that person’s native CY or SEY? For example, if one heard a CY-origin StY speaker say /vi/ ‘how’, how would one know that this was in fact the StY variant and not simply a ‘lapse’ into CY in place of some StY* /vu/ ‘how’? Short of doing a longitudinal statistical study for each lexical item over a long period of time, the BesY would-be shifter is unable to tell. But now look again at Table 1, in particular at the second column for that vowel variable, the NEY column. Clearly, for the /u-I/ variable (as well as for the /e-EY/, /o-U/, /a-O/ and /ay-A/ variables), it is irrelevant whether a NEY-origin speaker of StY is using a StY variant or a native NEY one: the two are identical. Thus, if the BesY would-be shifter hears a NEY-origin StY speaker say /vi/ ‘how’, s/he knows that the lexical item does not take part in the /u-I/ variation; if s/he hears /vu/ ‘where’, s/he knows that the item does. Therefore, on purely practical grounds, we see that, if a BesY speaker is to acquire Sty, the best candidate for model-speaker would be a StY speaker of NEY origin, for these vowels. Thus we have what appears to be a very plausible explanation of the occurrences of /tsU/for tse- in the singing of Sarah Gorby. First, she was acquiring StY by accommodating to StY speakers. Second, she targeted specific groups of StY speakers as accommodation models for specific features of Sty. In particular, NEY-origin StY speakers were the models chosen for a number of vowel variables, including /u-I/. Third, these NEY-origin StY speakers used, at least on occasion, the nonstandard NEY variant of tse-, which is /NJ/-. Fourth, Gorby, hearing the back vowel /U/ and not knowing that this item had this special variant in NEY, misinferred that it was the back vowel /u/ of the /u-Z/ variable, reanalyzing her own schwa in the morpheme as the front variant /I/, and mis-standardized it to /NJ/-. We shall now present some evidence that this explanation may be correct.
ELLEN F. PRINCE
316
Quantitative analysis shows that Gorby treated the inseparable prefix Ise- as lexicophonologically identical to another morpheme, the separable prefix tsu-, except for stress. Before presenting this evidence, however, we must briefly discuss the relevant morphemes.
Verb prefixes Yiddish, like other continental Germanic languages, has two kinds of verb prefixes, separable and inseparable. Separable prefixes are prefixed to infinitives and participles but are detached from and follow tensed verbs and imperatives. They are always stressed, regardless of the verb or the position of the prefix. In contrast, inseparable prefixes are always prefixed to the verb, regardless of its form, and they are never stressed. Furthermore, separable prefixes are prefixed to the past participle prefix ge-, while inseparable prefixes replace the past participle prefix. Separable prefixes are illustrated in (4a), inseparable prefixes in Example (4b). The ones that concern us here are the separable tsu- and the inseparable he-; these are illustrated in Examples (5a, b). Example
(4) (a) Separable particles: tsu/mishn ‘throw out’, UP’, aroysivarfn ‘introduce’. .
‘add (in mixing)‘, avek/geyn ‘go away’, oyf/vekn ‘wake iber/zetsn ‘translate’, arciyn/kumen ‘come in’, fdr/shteln
(b) Inseparable particles: tse/mishn ‘confuse’, der/klern ‘explain’, far/shttln ‘shield’. . Example
ba/ganvenen
‘steal’, ge/dCnken
‘remember’,
(5) (a) Separable tsi-: (1) er misht dos tsti. he mixes this PRF ‘He adds this in.’ (2) mish dos tsti! mix this PRF ‘Add this in!’ (3) er vet dos tstimishn. he will this PRF-mix ‘He will add this in.’ (4) er hot dos tstigemisht. he has this PRF-mixed ‘He (has) added this in.’ (b) Inseparable tse-: (1) er tsemisht mikh. he PRF-mixes me ‘He confuses me.’ (2) tsemish mih nit! PRF-mix me not ‘Don’t confuse me!’ (3) er vet mikh tsemishn. he will me PRF-mix ‘He will confuse me.’ (4) er hot mikh tsemisht. he has me PRF-mixed ‘He (has) confused me.’
Now note that the separable tsu- has the /u-I/ vowel variable; that is, StY/NEY /tsu/varies with BesY /tsl/-. In contrast, the inseparable tse- has a schwa, which does not in general vary, although just in this item schwa happens to vary with /U/ in NEY, as has already been discussed. Finally, note that there are in Yiddish several other morphemes tsu, all of which take part in the /u-I/ variation: the preposition ‘to’, illustrated in Example (6); the infinitival complementizer ‘to’, illustrated in Example (7); and the adverb ‘too’, illustrated in Example (8). Example
(6)
Preposition: (a) kIm aher tsu mir. come here to me. (Lomir zikh iberbetn; MEL). (b) kIm tsl mir arayn in kheyder. come to me in the room. (Kuterinke; MEL).
ACCOMMODATION
Example (7),
THEORY
AND DIALECT
317
SHWT
Comptementizer: (a) host dokh vayt tsu geyn. hast PRT far to go. (Szewach, Muyn lerer Yosele; REC). (b) veys ikh nit vUs t.sI tin. . . know I not what to do. . . (Euym brunem; REQ.
Example (8)
Adverb: (a) gUrnisht dU far undz tsu shver. nothing here for us too hard (Szewach, Uyf undzer barg; L7). (b) ikh es nor broyt vayl plter iz tsI tayer. I eat only bread for butter is too dear (Ot crzoy. . .; MEL).
In order to shed light on whether the singer thought that the pronunciation of tse- as /tsU/- was in fact Sty, an inference she would have made if our hypothesis is correct, I did a quantitative analysis of her pronunciation of tse- and the morphemes tsu across the 40 year period, where the schwa in ise- was counted as an instance of /I/, i.e. as the BesY variant of the /u-I/ variable and the back vowel as /u/, the StY variant of the same variable. The figures are presented in Table 5. Table 5. Frequency of vowel variants in tse-, tsu(-) 1940s Preposition
Adverb
Complementizer
Separable Prefix Inseparable Prefix Total
I u Total 2 II Total
I u Total I u Total a=I U=U Total I,a r&u Total
14 0 14 2 0 2 3 4 0
100%
21
0%
93 114 0 1 1 2 20 22 13 7 20 8 13 21 44 134 178
100% 0% 25% 75% 100% 0%
5
6 0 6 28 3 31
195Os-1960s
100% 0% 90% 10%
18%
82% 0% 100%
9% 91% 65% 35% 38% 62% 25% 75%
1970s 1
53 52 0 0 0 0 18 18 3 17 20 1 1 2 5 89 94
Total
2% 98% 0%
36 146 182 2
0% 0%
100% 15% 85% 50% 50%
5% 95%
3 3 41 44 21 24 45 15 14 29 77 226 303
20%
67% 33% 7Q70
93% 47% 53% 52% 48% 25010 75%
The figures in Table 5 suggest that this was indeed the case, since the back vowel seems to become more frequent over time in Gorby’s pronunciation of tse-, as it does in the morphemes tsu as a result of an increasing shift to Sty.’ Next, we collapsed the inseparable prefix tse- with each of the morphemes tsu and analyzed the new categories.“’ The goal was to determine whether we could find evidence that the singer thought tse- was in fact the same morpheme as one of the tsu morphemes, since, as has already been discussed, each morpheme must be dealt with individually by the speaker shifting to StY. In fact, VARBRUL analysis shows that tse- is being treated as indistinguisab~e from exactly one other morpheme, the separable prefix tsu-, precisely
ELLEN F. PRINCE
318
the result we would expect on morphosyntactic These figures are presented in Table 6.
grounds,
given that both are verb prefixes.
Table 6. Probabilities of non-back vowel in tse-, tsu, collapsing inseparable prefixes (I) with prepositions (P), complementizers (C) and separable prefixes (S) and controlling for change over time Nothing
Collapsing
Collapsing
Collapsing
collapsed
I and P
I and C
I and S
0.42
0.48
0.85
0.10 -
-
-
-
-
P
0.47
C
0.10
s
0.87
0.09 0.87
I I+P
0.74 -
0.52
I+C
-
I+S
-
Significance
0.43 p <0.05
0.82
-
p
n.s.
In Table 6, we see that, when each morpheme is taken separately (Column l), the complementizer is least likely to have the non-back vowel, the preposition is basically at chance, and the separable and inseparable prefixes are most likely to have the non-back vowel. As expected from these probabilities, a collapse of the inseparable prefix with prepositions (Column 2) or with complementizers (Column 3) is rejected by the VARBRUL program, while a collapse of inseparable prefixes with separable prefixes (Column 4) is found to be not statistically significant. That is, the two types of prefixes are not pronounced differently from each other to any statistically significant degree.” Discussion In the preceding section, we found the evidence we were looking for: Sarah Gorby seems to have taken /tsU/-, the NEY pronunciation of the inseparable prefix be-, not as the regionalism it is, but rather, as the StY variant of that morpheme, making it phonologically identical to the separable prefix tsu-, except for stress. To do so, she had to reanalyze the actual StY variant (and also her own BesY variant) /tm/ as /tsi/-, the putative nonstandard regional variant. Such a constellation of ‘errors’ is absolutely mysterious-unless we assume that her knowledge of StY was acquired by means of (consciously or unconsciously) targeting particular groups of speakers as speakers to whom she should accommodate with respect to particular variables. For the /u-I/ variable, the most trustworthy group to accommodate to would be NEY-background speakers (since their original regional variant is identical to the StY variant, unlike the situation with CY- or SEY- origin speakers). Thus, if she heard one of them say /u/ in some morpheme where she had a front vowel, that would be sufficient data for her to conclude that the morpheme in fact contained the /u-I/ variable and, as her shift to StY grew over time, she too would use the /u/ variant in that morpheme. When one thinks seriously about the precise mechanisms of dialect shift-or of language acquisition in general-one supposes that accommodation, repeated over a period of time, must of course be at the crux. In the usual case, of course, we have no concrete evidence for this supposition, except that people typically wind up acquiring the dialect/language of those around them, children always and adults often at least to some degree. The case discussed here, however, presents a very special kind of evidence, since the pronunciation
ACCOMMODATION
THEORY
AND DIALECT
SHIFT
319
of one idiosyncratic morpheme acts Iike a tracer dye, showing by its appearance the precise route it has taken. Furthermore, we see that accommodation can be selective: the singer does not wind up with features of NEY that are stigmatized and that cannot be confused with StY, e.g. the NEY variant of the /oy-EY/ variable. That is, she does not adopt NEY variants of variables for which she would not have chosen NEY-origin StY speakers as accommodation models for Sty. Thus, by closely analyzing the phonological output of one individual, we are forced to conclude that accommodation is perhaps even more pervasive and significant than might otherwise be supposed in that it may direct the changes going on in a speaker’s linguistic competence during dialect shift. ~cknowiedgement-I should like to thank Shoshana Balaban, Mascha Benya, Marvin Herzog, Nanka and Aleiandro Meitiison. Susan Pintzuk. Shana Poplack and Mordkhe Schaechter for their help with this work, as _ well as all the other individuals and institutions who provided me with the recordings and bio~ap~cal information on which it is based. Special thanks are due Aravind K. Joshi and the Moore School, University of Pennsylvania for providing me with such an excellent computational environment. Finally, I acknowledge a special debt to the late Sarah Gorby, for producing such a beautiful and fascinating corpus. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 1987 YIVO Annual Conference and at the Conference on Language and Culture, University of Texas (April 1987).
NOTES ‘Of course, such ‘permanent’ changes may be affected by later changes. ?fhe bulk of the recordings were made in recording studios in New York, Paris, Buenos Aires and Tel-Aviv. Co-present others-musicians, technicians, studio personnel-were not interlocutors in any relevant sense and the great majority were not even Yiddish speakers. The remainder of the recordings were made in Gorby’s home in Paris, several in the course of a singing lesson the singer was giving, where the language of interaction was Russian, the rest while she was alone. 3Theatre Yiddish, essentially identical to VolY, was designed for use on the stage when StY is not used (see Prilutski, 1927). There is no evidence in the corpus being analyzed that Sarah Gorby shifted toward ThY. 40ften, middle class women with good voices received classical voice training and sometimes become professional folk singers; their male counterparts were more likely to be trained for liturgical singing to become cantors. ‘To this day, the (serious) use of any dialect other than StY is in fact explicitly outlawed in the Yiddish State Theatre in the U.S.S.R. (E. Gorevits, personal communication.) A more immediately relevant anecdote is the following. A well-known couple on the Yiddish stage, Miriam Kressin and Seymour Rexite, produced a radio show in New York in 1986 on Sarah Gorby. They had read an article on her that I had published in the local Yiddish newspaper in which I had said that I had found that her pronunciation became closer to StY over the years, in spite of its still sounding like BesY to the casual observer. This the couple interpreted and reported as follows: Gorby’s Yiddish, originally BesY, gradually ‘improved’ over the years. It was impossible for themand no doubt also for audience in general-to see the shift as something other than an improvement. 6Yiddish, which is written in the Hebrew alphabet, has a standard orthography which is partly arbitrary (e.g. certain letters of the alphabet are not used, except in Hebrew loanwords) and partly motivated by the phonology of Sty. Gorby used the Hebrew alphabet but clearly not the standard orthography since she used all the letters of the alphabet and spelled the same vowel variable, often in different occurrences of the same word, differently, corresponding to the different variants of that variable. For example, in a letter dated March 14, 1980, she spells kumen ‘come’ as kimen (with yod as the first vowel) and as kumen (with WV as the first vowel) in two consecutive sentences. ‘The following software, written by Susan Pintzuk, was used: READTOK 1.1, MAKECELL 2.2V, IVARB 2.1 and CROSSTAB 2.1. It was run on the VAX Cluster, Computer and Information Science Department, Moore School, University of Pennsylvania. %e- is used here to represent the transliteration of the standard spelling of the Yiddish morpheme. (Yiddish is conventionally written in the Hebrew alphabet.) In StY and BesY, the vowel in this morpheme is schwa, the
ELLEN F. PRINCE
320
mid-central vowel. When this pronunciation is crucial to the discussion, it will be represented as /&a/-, in contrast to the other pronunciation that will be discussed, where the vowel is a high back vowel, which will be represented here as /tsU/-. ‘The figures here are slightly different from the ones presented in Prince (1987) due to an increase in the size of the corpus for the 1970s and to a small modification in the coding criteria. The resulting patterns are, however, the same. “In addition, the few tokens of the adverb tsu ‘too’ were collapsed with those of the preposition tsu since the numbers were so small and VARBRUL analysis showed that the difference between them was not significant. “Furthermore, the position of the particles-preceding the verb, as is the case with all the inseparables and some of the separables, or following, as is the case with the remainder of the separables, has no significant effect at all on which vowel variant occurs. That is, we are clearly dealing with a purely lexical phenomenon and not with a morphosyntactic one.
REFERENCES ABDEL-JAWAD, H. dissertation, University
1981 Phonological of Pennsylvania.
and
social
variation
in Arabic
in Amman.
Unpublished
doctoral
BEEBE, L. M. and GILES, H. 1984 Speech-accommodation theories: a discussion in terms of second-language acquisition. In Giles, H. (Ed.) The Dynamics of Speech Accommodation. International Journal of the Sociology
of Language 46, 5-32. GILES,
H. 1973 Accent
mobility:
a model
and some data.
Anthrophofogical Linguistics, 15, 87-105.
GILES, H., MULAC, A., BRADAC, J. J. and JOHNSON, P. 1987 Speech accommodation theory: the first decade and beyond. In McLaughlin, M. L. (Ed.) Communication Yearbook IO, pp. 13-48. Sage, Beverly Hills. GILES, H. and SMITH, P. 1979 Accommodation theory: optimal levels of convergence. Clair, R. (Eds) Language and Social Psychology, pp. 45-65. Blackwells, Oxford. LABOV, W. 1966 The social stratification Washington, DC. PRILUTSKI, PRINCE,
N. 1927 Di yidishe
E. F. 1987 Sarah Gorby,
bineshprakh.
of English in New York City. Center
In Giles, H. and St.
for Applied
Linguistics,
Yidish Tea&r 2, 129-44.
Yiddish folksinger:
a case study of dialect shift. Sociology
of Jewish languages.
International Journal of the Sociology of Languages 67, 83-l 16. SCHAECHTER, M. 1969 The ‘hidden standard’: a study of competing influences in standardization. In Herzog, M., Ravid, W. and Weinreich, U. (Eds) The Field of Yiddish. Third collection, pp. 284-305. Mouton, The Hague. Also in Fishman, J. (Ed.) 1981 Never Say Die! A Thousand Years of Yiddish in Jewish Life and Letters, pp. 671-698. Mouton, The Hague. SCHAECHTER, M. 1983 Yiddish language modernization and lexical elaboration. In Fodor, C. (Eds) Language Reform. History and Future. Vol. III, pp. 191-218. Buske, Hamburg. TRUDGILL,
P. 1983 On Dialect. New York University
TRUDGILL,
P. 1986 Dialects in Contact. Blackwells,
Press,
I. and Hagege,
New York
Oxford.
WEINREICH, M. 1980 History of the Yiddish Language. Translated of Chicago Press, Chicago.
by Fishman,
J. and Noble,
S. University
Printed in Great Britain.
ACCOMMODATION
Vol. 8,
No. 3/4, pp. 307-320,
0271-5309/88
1988.
$3.00 + .OO
PergamIn
THEORY AND DIALECT FROM YIDDISH
SHIFT:
Press
plc
A CASE STUDY
ELLEN F. PRINCE Introduction: accommodation vs dialect shift Over the past decade, there has been a growing body of literature on Accommodation Theory, all showing that accommodation is a robust and important phenomenon affecting verb~/lin~istic performance. The present paper adds to this evidence and carries it further, by showing that accommodation may in fact be the underlying force driving dialect shift (cf. Trudgill, 1986). Accommodation (e.g. Giles, 1973; Giles and Smith, 1979; Beebe and Giles, 1984; Giles et al., 1987) has often been characterised as a shift in the linguistic output of a speaker as a function of the linguistic output of the interlocutor. When the shift is toward (some approximation of) the linguistic output of the hearer, the accommodation is said to be ‘convergent’; when it is in the opposite direction, it is termed ‘divergent’. The key points here are that a speaker modifies his/her speech on the basis of the speech of another, during dyadic interaction with that other. In contrast, dialect shift involves, on the surface, a shift in the output of a speaker of some speech variety, call it Dialect-l, toward the output of speakers of some other speech variety, call it Dialect-2. In principle, then, there is no necessary relation between accommodation and dialect shift. For example, a speaker could conceivably accommodate to the speech of an interlocutor with respect to some non-dialectal feature, say, some speech defect or some non-pathological feature of his/her idiolect. Conversely, a speaker could conceivabIy undergo dialect shift without ever interacting with a speaker of the target dialect, i.e. without ever having someone co-present to accommodate to. Imagine, for example, a case where a speaker of Dialect-l has never heard Dialect-2 but has somehow ‘learned’ what it sounds like, perhaps from books, and works at producing it. What is crucial to dialect shift is that a ‘permanent” change has occurred; how it has occurred is not specified by the definition of the phenomenon. However, the data reported on here give strong evidence that, in one case at least and therefore conceivably in other cases as well, the dialect shift that has taken place has come about precisely as a result of accommodation. More specificatly, we shall consider a longitudinal case study of a single individual, the professional Yiddish folksinger Sarah Gorby, over a 40 year period during which she clearly underwent partial dialect shift (Prince, 1987) and where we will find reason to believe that it was achieved by means of accommodation. The evidence to be presented is compelling for two reasons. First, the data are taken entirely from recordings made by the singer, and thus there is no chance that we are dealing Correspondence relating to this paper should be addressed to Professor E. F. Prince, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, Room 619, Williams Half, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305, U.S.A.
ELLEN F. PRINCE
308
simply with temporary accommodation to an interlocutor, there being no (relevant) copresent other.* Second, by the end of the time-period studied, the singer has a feature that belongs neither to Dialect-l, her original dialect, nor to Dialect-2, which can be identified as the target dialect; it does however belong (uniquely) to a third dialect, Dialect-3, the native dialect of the group of speakers that is, on independent grounds, most likely to be taken as a model for Dialect-2. The otherwise inexplicable appearance of this feature in the singer’s linguistic output can be explained if we take it to be an unintended but revealing side-effect of her having acquired Dialect-2 by accommodating to this particular subset of its speakers, Dialect-2 speakers of Dialect-3 background. Therefore, we must conclude that the dialect shift was effected by means of accommodation. As a result, Accommodation Theory is presented as having greater potential relevance to linguistic theory than previous studies would have us believe, in that it may well be the driving force behind dialect shift and therefore behind the bulk of language change in general. Background Since this study is based on data from a Yiddish singer’s shift from her native Bessarabian Yiddish dialect towards Standard Yiddish, a brief discussion of the dialects of Yiddish, the singer, and the use of singing as linguistic data is in order.
The dialects of Yiddish Yiddish, or ‘Eastern Yiddish’ as it is technically called, is traditionally divided into three major regional dialects, north-eastern Yiddish (NEY), popularly called ‘Litvak’; central Yiddish (CY), popularly called ‘Polish’ or ‘Galitsianer’, and south-eastern Yiddish (SEY). South-eastern Yiddish is further subdivided into Bessarabian Yiddish (BesY), popularly called tote-mome lushn (the BesY version of tate-mame loshn ‘papa-mama language’) and Volhynian, or ‘Voliner’, Yiddish (VolY). In addition, since the 1920s there have been two standard dialects, Standard Yiddish (Sty) and Theatre Yiddish (ThY).3 (See Weinreich, 1980 for a more complete discussion of the dialects.) There are phonological, morphological and lexical differences among the dialects. The major phonological variables are shown in Table 1. (Upper case is not relevant to phonetic value. That is, an item transcribed with EY is homophonous with an item transcribed with ey, an item transcribed with lis homophonous with an item transcribed with i and so forth. The use of upper case is simply to indicate that the vowel in question is nonstandard, i.e. is a variant differing from Sty.) Table sty
NEY
CY
1. Ten phonological ThY
variables
SEY: VolY
in Yiddish SEY: BesY
u
u
I
I
I
I
e
e
EY
EY
EY
EY
0
0
a
u a
u
a
0
ay
w
A:
u a ay/A
A
OY sh
EY
OY
OY
OY
sh/S
sh
OY sh
sh
sh
ey
ey
AY
ey
ey
i
ey i
a
a
a
a
a
a ay
u
Example kumen
‘come’
veg ‘road’ khosn
‘groom’
tam ‘taste’ laydn
‘suffer’
oyb ‘if’ sho ‘hour’ meydl
‘girl’
vi ‘how’ a
-zhe (PRT)
ACCOMMODATION
309
THEORY AND DIALECT SHIFT
Note first that StY is not identical with any regional dialect. In fact, every speaker (except perhaps the children of purist Yiddishists) who acquires StY must do so via dialect shift. One result of this is that there is presumably variation in the output of every so-called StY speaker such that no speaker can be assumed apriori to produce only StY variants. Note further that, with respect to phonological variation, StY is closer to NEY than to the other regional dialects, differing only in the oy/EY and sh/S variables. However, if we consider non-phonological variables, then we see that NEY is in fact quite far from Sty, as shown in Table 2. Thus we see that StY is truly a unique dialect, differing in some important respects from each of the regional dialects. (See Schaechter, 1969 for a detailed account of the provenance of the different features of Sty.) Table 2. Three non-phonoIogic~ StY/CY/ThY/SEY: Gender
Case
BesY
in Yiddish NEY
Masculine/feminine/neuter
Masculine/feminine
DOS kind (neuter)
Der/di
‘the child’
kind (m./f.)
Nominative/dative/accusative
Nominative/oblique
Zen zi in ir
Zen ir in ir
‘See her (accusative) Past tense auxiiiary
VolY/SEY:
variables
Hobn
‘have’/zayn
in her (dative.)’ ‘be’
= ‘he died’
He has died
=
Er hot gezogt
Er hot gezogt He has said = ‘he said’
‘have’
Er hot geshtorbn
Er iz geshtorbn He is died
‘See her in her’ Hobn
=
He has said
Furthermore, it should be noted that, while the influence of StY is apparent to some degree on a very significant percentage of the speech community, it is in the public domain that it has had the most obvious influence. The entertainment world, including the theatre, film and music, has been very heavily standardized, to the point where one virtually does not hear a pristine regional dialect (other than Vol = ThY) in this domain, except perhaps to portray, usually mockingly, a person of the particular region. To understand the spread of Sty, we should consider briefly the relative social standings of the dialects. First, one must distinguish between the religious community and the secular, since the two groups evaluate the different areas and dialects differently. Since the singer and her intended audience are from the secular community, what follows will pertain to them only. Among all the dialects, Lithuanian Jews and their dialect, NEY, are the most prestigious, due no doubt to the fact that this group was on the whole less orthodox and hence more ‘modern’, more westernized, than the other groups and to the related fact that Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, was the centre of secular Jewish learning. VolY (= Thy) comes next and both CY and BesY were and are highly stigmatized, in spite of the great numbers of their speakers. Finally, I should add that many less educated CY and SEY speakers believe that NEY is StY, no doubt because of the high prestige of both and the identity of many of the vowel variants. (It was, after all, Vilna academicians who designed
310
StY; thus is it not coincidental respects.)
ELLEN
F. PRINCE
that the two dialects
should be so similar,
at least in some
The singer: biographical data Sarah Gorby was born in Kishinev in 1900, three years before the Kishinev Pogrom which wreaked havoc on the large Jewish population. At the time, Kishinev, the ‘capital of Bessarabia’, was part of Czarist Russia; in 1918, it was ceded to Rumania; since the Second World War it has been part of the U.S.S.R. and is the capital of the Moldavian S.S.R. Gorby, the second of seven children in a Jewish merchant-class family, spoke Russian, Yiddish and Rumanian from childhood and each without any linguistic interference from any other language. By the time she was an adult, she was fluent also in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German and English, all of which she spoke with a noticeable Russian accent. From the age of 6, Gorby studied music formally, first in Kishinev and, after graduation from high school in 1917, at the Music Conservatory in Iaci (Jassy), Rumania. There she met and married an industrialist and publisher, a Rumanian-Yiddish bilingual also fluent in French. They did not live together, however, as she left shortly thereafter to study voice in Rome, finally settling in Paris. She had no children. She became fairly well known within the European secular Jewish community, giving concerts and benefits all over the continent in a number of languages, including Yiddish. In the late 193Os, Gorby and her husband emigrated to Haiti to escape the Nazis. From there, Gorby came to New York, debuting in Town Hall in 1940. During the 194Os, she gave many concerts in the United States, Mexico and South America, began to produce records and appeared regularly on the Yiddish radio. After the war, she was deported, for reasons which I have not been able to discover, and returned to Paris. Her husband remained in Haiti, where he died in the early 1950s; her parents and siblings had been deported and killed or were scattered on five continents. She never returned to Kishinev and she refused an invitation in the 1960s to sing in the U.S.S.R. Through the 1950s and 196Os, Gorby continued to give concerts and make records, acquiring a good deal of acclaim (although very little material gain) within the reshuffled Yiddish speech community of Europe and Latin America, and twice winning the prestigious Grand Prix du Disque in Paris. By the 197Os, Gorby’s voice had deteriorated badly and she subsisted mainly by giving singing lessons. However, she still recorded, largely at her own expense, and she still toured constantly, throughout Western Europe, Mexico and South America, as well as Israel and South Africa, in all of which she had a network of friends and associates, mostly Yiddish writers, poets, journalists, singers and musicians. She died, destitute, in Paris in 1980, at the age of 80. Singing as linguistic data Given the unorthodoxy of using singing as linguistic data, a few words are in order about why this is a valid approach, especially given Trudgill’s (1983) study of the phenomenon of imitation among British pop singers imitating certain varieties of American English (see also Trudgill, 1986). First, it should be noted that singing conventions in the Yiddish speech community are very different from at least certain current conventions in the Anglo-American speech community. Imitation of some regional group among Yiddish singers is used in a very limited way, only for parody. Rather, professional public performance in Yiddish-spoken or sung-is appropriately done in either Standard Yiddish or else in Theatre Yiddish, not
ACCOMMODATION THEORY
311
AND DIALECT SHIFT
in any regional dialect. The only nonstandard feature that is considered acceptable in professional Yiddish singing is the use of a trilled /r/ rather than the standard uvular /r/; this appears to result from the use of trilled /r/ in classical (e.g. operatic) singing, in which many female Yiddish singers used to be trained.4 The important point for us here is that, to the Yiddish audience, a (non-parodic) performance in the performer’s native regional dialect is a sign not of authenticity but of lack of education and ignorance.’ Second, one might question how closely pronunciation in singing resembles the singer’s pronunciation in speech. In the case of Sarah Gorby, I have no direct evidence of her spoken phonology. However, 1 have anecdotal evidence, from a Rumanian Jewish journalist in Paris who had known her from 1917 until her death, that her spoken Yiddish became much more standard over the years (J. Flavius, personal communication). In addition, there is evidence from letters which the singer wrote in Yiddish in the last year of her life to a Yiddish journalist in Israel, A. Meilijson, a somewhat standardized speaker of VoiY background. Fortunately for our purposes, she either did not know, or else ignored, standard orthography and appeared to write as she spoke; in any event, we find exactly the same degree of variation in these letters as we do in her singing.6 Finally, for what it is worth, I asked the more than 25 individuals whom I interviewed who knew Corby and who knew Yiddish whether her spoken Yiddish sounded like her sung Yiddish and the response was unanimously affirmative. Thus, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I shall assume that Gorby’s pronunciation in singing, in particular her variation among dialectal variants, was a reasonable reflection of her pronunciation in speech. Sarah Gorby’s dialect shift As mentioned above, the present study grew out of a longitudinal case study of the partial dialect shift from BesY to StY in Sarah Gorby’s recorded singing, reported by Prince (1987). Gorby was perhaps unique among professional singers of her generation in that she intended to remain and did remain identifiably Bessarabian to the end. Why she had this intention is not known; former associates suggest only that she was a generally stubborn person who cared little for what society thought. (Several have added that she dyed her hair blue and purple in the 1940s; they see these as two equivalent floutings of social norms.) In any event, Gorby was clearly not immune to social pressure. As shown in the earlier study, a quantitative analysis of over 10000 tokens of the variants of five vowels in her singing, recorded over the last 40 years of her life, showed a significant shift toward StY, presumably in spite of her intentions.’ The five vowel variables studied were /u-I/, /eEYI, /o-U/, /a-O/ and lay-A/, i.e. those vowels in Table 1 for which the BesY variant differs from that of Sty. Of direct relevance to the present study is the first, /u-I/, since this is the vowel in the morpheme whose behaviour we shall study below. The overall figures for her shift to StY with respect to this vowel are shown in Table 3. Table 3. Sarah Gorby’s variation between BesY /u/ and StY /I/ 1940s sty /u/ BesY /I/ Total number Percentage BesY (%) Probability Significance
73 176 249 71 0.67
195os-1960s
1970s
490 314 453 225 943 539 48 42 0.44 0.38 p
Total 877 854 1731 49
As we see in Table 3, the shift was both gradual and partial. Variation occurs from the beginning to the end of the period studied and in fact is in evidence within virtually each individual song, see Example 1. Example (1) {a) 1940s: Tsim zikh mukhnes fartribene jk;. Friedman) (S78) di kinder tsX mOmes getuiete, the children to mamas cuddled, In tOtes hrbZxykht fitn ye&em, and papas whitened by woes, fun veytik irr drayen geboygn. from pain in threes bent. (b) lP50s-f96Us: G&e bier, roy& ~!~~~~ (Folk) (I-7) iber berg In iber f&der, over rn~~nt~~ns and over fields, iber yOm in iber welder, rno~r~rnoy, over sea and aver woods, you there, geyt mayn benkshaft zlkhn d&h, goes my longing seek you, shneler brengen dikh tsu mir, may-moy. faster bring you to me, you there. besarabie, mAn haymat IOnd, vEYmen bist du nit b&&t? Bessarabia, my home land, to whom are you not familiar? IOnd fun mayne ywgnt tEYg, fA mit lider, ffi mit freyd. land of my youth days, full with songs, full with joy. As we see from afl the upper case vowels fi*e, BesY variants) in rhe tr~s~r~~t~~~s in ExampIe (ljt Gorby uses a good dea3 of marked@ BesY variants through~nt her life. In particular, we see that she shows variation in /u-I/, the variable of present relevance, where all the variants, both the StY u and the BesY I, are given in italics far the reader’s convenience.
During the course of cxding the data for the earlier study, an unexpected change in the singer’s pronunication was found, involving a single morpheme, the inseparable verbal prefix &F.~ More precisely, this morpheme, although containing schwa, a vowel which is the same in StY and BesY, came to vary between the expected /$~a/- and an unexpected itsU/-, as in Example (2) Exampk f;t) EkFlraprshes~~~~~~~~~~ ekh iaptsfies,ir, mqqe, laptskes Iibinke In fayn, oh sandals, you, mine, sandals beloved and fine, oysgetrotn un tsa shotn, iber felder, iber velder, trampled and stretched, over fields, over woods. ekh laptshes, ir, mayne, laptshes libinke In fayn, oysgetrotn un tslishotn, iber felder, iber velder,
The figures for the variation are shown in Tahk 4. Table 4, Corby’s variation between if&Y- and BesYiSfY irsai194Ua /Ml/-
0
BesYBtY /&iiTotal number
6 6
Percentage
itSC.V-
f@f~a)
t3
195os-1960s I__ 13 8 21 62
1970s 1 1 2 50
Total ~ 14 15 29 48
ACCOMMODATION THEORY AND DIALECT SHIFT
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This was a most puzzling find: since both BesY and StY have /&a/- categorically, why would the singer shift to a pronunciation of /tsU/-? Initially, hypercorrection was thought to be the cause, a matter to which we shall now turn. Hypercorrection is a well-known phenomenon in situations of dialect shift. By ‘hypercorrection’, I mean the phenomenon that arises when two items are homonymous in the speaker’s original dialect but not in the target dialect. In the usual case, one of the two items is the same in the original and target dialects, while the other item differs in the two dialects. Hypercorrection is said to occur when the one that is in fact the same in both dialects is modified on the analogy of the one that differs. As an illustration, consider the case of postvocalic /r/ in most dialects of American English, corresponding in New York City English (as well as in some other dialects) to zero or a glide (Labov, 1966). Thus, for example, moaner and Mona contrast in r-ful dialects, /monar/ and /mona/, respectively, while they are homonyms, /mona/, for the r-less New York City speaker. A NYC speaker who is shifting to an r-ful dialect may treat the two forms identically, introducing /r/ to each, /monar/. When this r-ful form is used for moaner, it is said that shift has occurred; when it is used for Mona, it is called hypercorrection. That is, a standard phoneme, here /a/, is misconstrued as a homonymous regional variant, here /a/ varying with /ar/, and it is mis-standardized to /at-/. With respect to the present study, one might think that the pronunciation of tse- as /tsU/is an instance of hypercorrection, akin to the situation arising among Trudgill’s (1983) pop singers. The story would be as follows. First, the schwa in the original form is misconstrued as a high front vowel, /il. This is very plausible, since tse- is always short and unstressed and schwas and short unstressed high front vowels are virtually indistinguishable in normal rapid speech. Second, this high front vowel is mis-identified as the BesY variant of the /u-Z/ variable. Third, the form is mis-standardized to the StY variant of the variable, producing /tsU/-. The hypercorrection story just outlined would be a very plausible explanation, if not for several other facts. First, in this corpus of over 10000 tokens-all the relevant tokens of the five vowel variables in over 12 hours of singing-there is not one instance of hypercorrection involving any other morpheme. One must wonder then, why only one morpheme was hypercorrected, and this 14 times, nearly half the number of times the morpheme was uttered. Second, these Yiddish variables are different from those like the New York City r-variable: the latter is a purely phonological variable, while the former is a lexico-phonologic~ variable. That is, in the New York City case, as in general with phonological hypercorrection, the variable affects all instances of the phoneme in question: all postvocalic /r/s in r-ful dialects correspond to zero or glide in New York City English, regardless of their lexical environment. In the Yiddish situation, on the other hand, the variables are all lexcially governed. That is, knowing the vowel alternation is not enoughone has to know which lexical items take part in the variation. Thus, for example, while StY /ku/ ‘cow’ corresponds to BesY /kZ/, StY /nu/ ‘well’ is likewise /nu/ in BesY, never */nZ/. The difference between these two types of variables, phonological vs lexicophonological, seems to correlate with a difference in how shift is achieved. Purely phonological shifts seem to be achieved by the addition or modification of a phonological rule, which ignores lexical differences. Lexico-phonologic~ shifts, in contrast, seem to be achieved by modifications in the lexicon and are thus item-specific (see Abdel-Jawad, 1981). Thus, we must reject hypercorrection in its usual sense as the explanation for the occurrences in this corpus of /tsU/- for StY/BesY /tsa/-.
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As noted in Schaechter (1969), German is often taken as a model for StY when insecurity arises. Thus one may hypothesize, alternatively, that Gorby was influenced by German in the pronunciation of this morpheme. Very quickly, however, we see that such an explanation must be rejected: the German cognate of tse- is zer-, with a front mid vowel, much closer to the Yiddish schwa than to a high back vowel. Another possibility is that a speech error. In fact, there this case make this hypothesis the time, which would give
Gorby’s pronunciation of the item with a back vowel was are several speech errors in the corpus, but the numbers in implausible: tse- is, after all, pronounced /tsU/- nearly half it an error rate which is unique in the corpus.
One detail which has not yet been mentioned is that the pronunciation of the inseparable prefix tse- as /NJ/- is a feature of NEY (Schaechter, 1983). So far as I know, it is not part of any more general phonological or lexico-phonological variation but seems rather limited to this particular item. At first blush, this fact does not help to explain the occurrence of this variant in the corpus under analysis: why should a BesY singer shifting to StY introduce a nonstandard variant specific to another regional dialect? One possible reason, that the singer did it simply for variety, is highly unlikely, given that she introduced no other markedly regional non-BesY variants. A second possible reason is equally implausible: that she did it to give a particular NEY flavour to the songs in which she used this form. Such an explanation must be rejected since all of the songs in which this variant occurs have a great deal of BesY features and no other markedly NEY ones. For example, consider Example (3). Example
(3)
Rozelekh un perlekh (A. Szewach)
(L7) plItsim hot di zIn fun dort zikh Uwpgekert, suddenly has the sun from there self overturned, vi roykh avek dUs gliyk, like smoke away the happiness, skleyne shtEYtele iz shoyn oyf shtoyb ts(lshtert, the small village is already to dust demolished, gemakht hot es der kriyg. made has it the war.
All the upper-case letters in the transcript of Example (3) indicate BesY-and unambiguously non-NEY-variants, with the sole exception of tsUshtert ‘demolished’. Thus we see no evidence for a desire on the part of the singer to give the song a NEY flavour by using the NEY variant /tsU/-. Still one other explanation suggests itself: for some reason, the singer was using NEYturned-sty speakers as models for StY and was accommodating to them, inadvertently importing into her own speech their NEY pronunciation of tse- as /tsU/- along with their StY pronunciation of other items. For this to be plausible, however, we would have to show on independent grounds that choosing NEY-turned-sty speakers as models for StY was a likely thing for the singer to do. In fact, I believe that such a choice of dialect-model was the most likely one for the singer to make. To see this more clearly, consider the task facing a speaker undergoing dialect shift in the direction of a standard dialect. In some speech communities, speakers presumably acquire the standard dialect through formal education, e.g. Swiss-Germanspeaking children learning New High German in school. Clearly, such an option is not a viable one in other situations, certainly not in the case at hand: even if Sarah Gorby had the time and means to attend school as an adult in order to acquire StY, which we have seen above she did not, there were precious few schools in the world that she could
ACCOMMODATION
THEORY
AND DIALECT
SHIFT
315
have attended where she could have done this. Thus she had to acquire it informally, presumably by trying (consciously or unconsciously) to ‘sound like’ StY speakers she heard. Thus we see the beginning of the relevance of Accommodation Theory. However, trying to sound like StY speakers is not such an easy task, for two reasons. First, recall that the relevant differences between BesY and StY are lexically governed. That is, for each separate lexical item, the singer had to learn whether that item was one which showed variation between the dialects. For example, she had to learn that the BesY homonyms /vi/ ‘how’ and /vl/ ‘where’ differed in Sty, where ‘how’ was still /vi/ but where ‘where’ was /vu/, that the BesY homonyms /ki/ ‘cows’ and /kI/ ‘cow’ were StY /ki/ and /ku/ respectively and so on for every single item with a high front vowel in her lexicon (as well as for every item with one of the other varying vowels). Thus the task is arduous and not to be achieved overnight: one must listen for StY pronunciations of vast numbers of items and mark each one in one’s lexicon as varying or not varying in StY. Second, there is an even more basic problem with trying to sound like StY speakers: deciding who the StY speakers are that one should emulate. That is, as noted above, StY is no one’s native dialect. All StY speakers then may show variation between the standard and their regional dialect. Consider again Table 1 above. Imagine a BesY speaker shifting to StY for the /u-I/ variable, for example. As just noted, s/he must decide, for each item with a high front vowel (/i/, /I/), whether it should be shifted to a high back (/u/) or not. Ideally, if a StY speaker is heard to pronounce an item with the front vowel, it should not be shifted; if a StY speaker is heard to pronounce it with a back vowel, it should. However, suppose the StY speaker is of CY or SEY origin. How would one know whether an individual token of a front vowel in this person’s speech was in fact a StY pronunciation and not simply a regional variant from that person’s native CY or SEY? For example, if one heard a CY-origin StY speaker say /vi/ ‘how’, how would one know that this was in fact the StY variant and not simply a ‘lapse’ into CY in place of some StY* /vu/ ‘how’? Short of doing a longitudinal statistical study for each lexical item over a long period of time, the BesY would-be shifter is unable to tell. But now look again at Table 1, in particular at the second column for that vowel variable, the NEY column. Clearly, for the /u-I/ variable (as well as for the /e-EY/, /o-U/, /a-O/ and /ay-A/ variables), it is irrelevant whether a NEY-origin speaker of StY is using a StY variant or a native NEY one: the two are identical. Thus, if the BesY would-be shifter hears a NEY-origin StY speaker say /vi/ ‘how’, s/he knows that the lexical item does not take part in the /u-I/ variation; if s/he hears /vu/ ‘where’, s/he knows that the item does. Therefore, on purely practical grounds, we see that, if a BesY speaker is to acquire Sty, the best candidate for model-speaker would be a StY speaker of NEY origin, for these vowels. Thus we have what appears to be a very plausible explanation of the occurrences of /tsU/for tse- in the singing of Sarah Gorby. First, she was acquiring StY by accommodating to StY speakers. Second, she targeted specific groups of StY speakers as accommodation models for specific features of Sty. In particular, NEY-origin StY speakers were the models chosen for a number of vowel variables, including /u-I/. Third, these NEY-origin StY speakers used, at least on occasion, the nonstandard NEY variant of tse-, which is /NJ/-. Fourth, Gorby, hearing the back vowel /U/ and not knowing that this item had this special variant in NEY, misinferred that it was the back vowel /u/ of the /u-Z/ variable, reanalyzing her own schwa in the morpheme as the front variant /I/, and mis-standardized it to /NJ/-. We shall now present some evidence that this explanation may be correct.
ELLEN F. PRINCE
316
Quantitative analysis shows that Gorby treated the inseparable prefix Ise- as lexicophonologically identical to another morpheme, the separable prefix tsu-, except for stress. Before presenting this evidence, however, we must briefly discuss the relevant morphemes.
Verb prefixes Yiddish, like other continental Germanic languages, has two kinds of verb prefixes, separable and inseparable. Separable prefixes are prefixed to infinitives and participles but are detached from and follow tensed verbs and imperatives. They are always stressed, regardless of the verb or the position of the prefix. In contrast, inseparable prefixes are always prefixed to the verb, regardless of its form, and they are never stressed. Furthermore, separable prefixes are prefixed to the past participle prefix ge-, while inseparable prefixes replace the past participle prefix. Separable prefixes are illustrated in (4a), inseparable prefixes in Example (4b). The ones that concern us here are the separable tsu- and the inseparable he-; these are illustrated in Examples (5a, b). Example
(4) (a) Separable particles: tsu/mishn ‘throw out’, UP’, aroysivarfn ‘introduce’. .
‘add (in mixing)‘, avek/geyn ‘go away’, oyf/vekn ‘wake iber/zetsn ‘translate’, arciyn/kumen ‘come in’, fdr/shteln
(b) Inseparable particles: tse/mishn ‘confuse’, der/klern ‘explain’, far/shttln ‘shield’. . Example
ba/ganvenen
‘steal’, ge/dCnken
‘remember’,
(5) (a) Separable tsi-: (1) er misht dos tsti. he mixes this PRF ‘He adds this in.’ (2) mish dos tsti! mix this PRF ‘Add this in!’ (3) er vet dos tstimishn. he will this PRF-mix ‘He will add this in.’ (4) er hot dos tstigemisht. he has this PRF-mixed ‘He (has) added this in.’ (b) Inseparable tse-: (1) er tsemisht mikh. he PRF-mixes me ‘He confuses me.’ (2) tsemish mih nit! PRF-mix me not ‘Don’t confuse me!’ (3) er vet mikh tsemishn. he will me PRF-mix ‘He will confuse me.’ (4) er hot mikh tsemisht. he has me PRF-mixed ‘He (has) confused me.’
Now note that the separable tsu- has the /u-I/ vowel variable; that is, StY/NEY /tsu/varies with BesY /tsl/-. In contrast, the inseparable tse- has a schwa, which does not in general vary, although just in this item schwa happens to vary with /U/ in NEY, as has already been discussed. Finally, note that there are in Yiddish several other morphemes tsu, all of which take part in the /u-I/ variation: the preposition ‘to’, illustrated in Example (6); the infinitival complementizer ‘to’, illustrated in Example (7); and the adverb ‘too’, illustrated in Example (8). Example
(6)
Preposition: (a) kIm aher tsu mir. come here to me. (Lomir zikh iberbetn; MEL). (b) kIm tsl mir arayn in kheyder. come to me in the room. (Kuterinke; MEL).
ACCOMMODATION
Example (7),
THEORY
AND DIALECT
317
SHWT
Comptementizer: (a) host dokh vayt tsu geyn. hast PRT far to go. (Szewach, Muyn lerer Yosele; REC). (b) veys ikh nit vUs t.sI tin. . . know I not what to do. . . (Euym brunem; REQ.
Example (8)
Adverb: (a) gUrnisht dU far undz tsu shver. nothing here for us too hard (Szewach, Uyf undzer barg; L7). (b) ikh es nor broyt vayl plter iz tsI tayer. I eat only bread for butter is too dear (Ot crzoy. . .; MEL).
In order to shed light on whether the singer thought that the pronunciation of tse- as /tsU/- was in fact Sty, an inference she would have made if our hypothesis is correct, I did a quantitative analysis of her pronunciation of tse- and the morphemes tsu across the 40 year period, where the schwa in ise- was counted as an instance of /I/, i.e. as the BesY variant of the /u-I/ variable and the back vowel as /u/, the StY variant of the same variable. The figures are presented in Table 5. Table 5. Frequency of vowel variants in tse-, tsu(-) 1940s Preposition
Adverb
Complementizer
Separable Prefix Inseparable Prefix Total
I u Total 2 II Total
I u Total I u Total a=I U=U Total I,a r&u Total
14 0 14 2 0 2 3 4 0
100%
21
0%
93 114 0 1 1 2 20 22 13 7 20 8 13 21 44 134 178
100% 0% 25% 75% 100% 0%
5
6 0 6 28 3 31
195Os-1960s
100% 0% 90% 10%
18%
82% 0% 100%
9% 91% 65% 35% 38% 62% 25% 75%
1970s 1
53 52 0 0 0 0 18 18 3 17 20 1 1 2 5 89 94
Total
2% 98% 0%
36 146 182 2
0% 0%
100% 15% 85% 50% 50%
5% 95%
3 3 41 44 21 24 45 15 14 29 77 226 303
20%
67% 33% 7Q70
93% 47% 53% 52% 48% 25010 75%
The figures in Table 5 suggest that this was indeed the case, since the back vowel seems to become more frequent over time in Gorby’s pronunciation of tse-, as it does in the morphemes tsu as a result of an increasing shift to Sty.’ Next, we collapsed the inseparable prefix tse- with each of the morphemes tsu and analyzed the new categories.“’ The goal was to determine whether we could find evidence that the singer thought tse- was in fact the same morpheme as one of the tsu morphemes, since, as has already been discussed, each morpheme must be dealt with individually by the speaker shifting to StY. In fact, VARBRUL analysis shows that tse- is being treated as indistinguisab~e from exactly one other morpheme, the separable prefix tsu-, precisely
ELLEN F. PRINCE
318
the result we would expect on morphosyntactic These figures are presented in Table 6.
grounds,
given that both are verb prefixes.
Table 6. Probabilities of non-back vowel in tse-, tsu, collapsing inseparable prefixes (I) with prepositions (P), complementizers (C) and separable prefixes (S) and controlling for change over time Nothing
Collapsing
Collapsing
Collapsing
collapsed
I and P
I and C
I and S
0.42
0.48
0.85
0.10 -
-
-
-
-
P
0.47
C
0.10
s
0.87
0.09 0.87
I I+P
0.74 -
0.52
I+C
-
I+S
-
Significance
0.43 p <0.05
0.82
-
p
n.s.
In Table 6, we see that, when each morpheme is taken separately (Column l), the complementizer is least likely to have the non-back vowel, the preposition is basically at chance, and the separable and inseparable prefixes are most likely to have the non-back vowel. As expected from these probabilities, a collapse of the inseparable prefix with prepositions (Column 2) or with complementizers (Column 3) is rejected by the VARBRUL program, while a collapse of inseparable prefixes with separable prefixes (Column 4) is found to be not statistically significant. That is, the two types of prefixes are not pronounced differently from each other to any statistically significant degree.” Discussion In the preceding section, we found the evidence we were looking for: Sarah Gorby seems to have taken /tsU/-, the NEY pronunciation of the inseparable prefix be-, not as the regionalism it is, but rather, as the StY variant of that morpheme, making it phonologically identical to the separable prefix tsu-, except for stress. To do so, she had to reanalyze the actual StY variant (and also her own BesY variant) /tm/ as /tsi/-, the putative nonstandard regional variant. Such a constellation of ‘errors’ is absolutely mysterious-unless we assume that her knowledge of StY was acquired by means of (consciously or unconsciously) targeting particular groups of speakers as speakers to whom she should accommodate with respect to particular variables. For the /u-I/ variable, the most trustworthy group to accommodate to would be NEY-background speakers (since their original regional variant is identical to the StY variant, unlike the situation with CY- or SEY- origin speakers). Thus, if she heard one of them say /u/ in some morpheme where she had a front vowel, that would be sufficient data for her to conclude that the morpheme in fact contained the /u-I/ variable and, as her shift to StY grew over time, she too would use the /u/ variant in that morpheme. When one thinks seriously about the precise mechanisms of dialect shift-or of language acquisition in general-one supposes that accommodation, repeated over a period of time, must of course be at the crux. In the usual case, of course, we have no concrete evidence for this supposition, except that people typically wind up acquiring the dialect/language of those around them, children always and adults often at least to some degree. The case discussed here, however, presents a very special kind of evidence, since the pronunciation
ACCOMMODATION
THEORY
AND DIALECT
SHIFT
319
of one idiosyncratic morpheme acts Iike a tracer dye, showing by its appearance the precise route it has taken. Furthermore, we see that accommodation can be selective: the singer does not wind up with features of NEY that are stigmatized and that cannot be confused with StY, e.g. the NEY variant of the /oy-EY/ variable. That is, she does not adopt NEY variants of variables for which she would not have chosen NEY-origin StY speakers as accommodation models for Sty. Thus, by closely analyzing the phonological output of one individual, we are forced to conclude that accommodation is perhaps even more pervasive and significant than might otherwise be supposed in that it may direct the changes going on in a speaker’s linguistic competence during dialect shift. ~cknowiedgement-I should like to thank Shoshana Balaban, Mascha Benya, Marvin Herzog, Nanka and Aleiandro Meitiison. Susan Pintzuk. Shana Poplack and Mordkhe Schaechter for their help with this work, as _ well as all the other individuals and institutions who provided me with the recordings and bio~ap~cal information on which it is based. Special thanks are due Aravind K. Joshi and the Moore School, University of Pennsylvania for providing me with such an excellent computational environment. Finally, I acknowledge a special debt to the late Sarah Gorby, for producing such a beautiful and fascinating corpus. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 1987 YIVO Annual Conference and at the Conference on Language and Culture, University of Texas (April 1987).
NOTES ‘Of course, such ‘permanent’ changes may be affected by later changes. ?fhe bulk of the recordings were made in recording studios in New York, Paris, Buenos Aires and Tel-Aviv. Co-present others-musicians, technicians, studio personnel-were not interlocutors in any relevant sense and the great majority were not even Yiddish speakers. The remainder of the recordings were made in Gorby’s home in Paris, several in the course of a singing lesson the singer was giving, where the language of interaction was Russian, the rest while she was alone. 3Theatre Yiddish, essentially identical to VolY, was designed for use on the stage when StY is not used (see Prilutski, 1927). There is no evidence in the corpus being analyzed that Sarah Gorby shifted toward ThY. 40ften, middle class women with good voices received classical voice training and sometimes become professional folk singers; their male counterparts were more likely to be trained for liturgical singing to become cantors. ‘To this day, the (serious) use of any dialect other than StY is in fact explicitly outlawed in the Yiddish State Theatre in the U.S.S.R. (E. Gorevits, personal communication.) A more immediately relevant anecdote is the following. A well-known couple on the Yiddish stage, Miriam Kressin and Seymour Rexite, produced a radio show in New York in 1986 on Sarah Gorby. They had read an article on her that I had published in the local Yiddish newspaper in which I had said that I had found that her pronunciation became closer to StY over the years, in spite of its still sounding like BesY to the casual observer. This the couple interpreted and reported as follows: Gorby’s Yiddish, originally BesY, gradually ‘improved’ over the years. It was impossible for themand no doubt also for audience in general-to see the shift as something other than an improvement. 6Yiddish, which is written in the Hebrew alphabet, has a standard orthography which is partly arbitrary (e.g. certain letters of the alphabet are not used, except in Hebrew loanwords) and partly motivated by the phonology of Sty. Gorby used the Hebrew alphabet but clearly not the standard orthography since she used all the letters of the alphabet and spelled the same vowel variable, often in different occurrences of the same word, differently, corresponding to the different variants of that variable. For example, in a letter dated March 14, 1980, she spells kumen ‘come’ as kimen (with yod as the first vowel) and as kumen (with WV as the first vowel) in two consecutive sentences. ‘The following software, written by Susan Pintzuk, was used: READTOK 1.1, MAKECELL 2.2V, IVARB 2.1 and CROSSTAB 2.1. It was run on the VAX Cluster, Computer and Information Science Department, Moore School, University of Pennsylvania. %e- is used here to represent the transliteration of the standard spelling of the Yiddish morpheme. (Yiddish is conventionally written in the Hebrew alphabet.) In StY and BesY, the vowel in this morpheme is schwa, the
ELLEN F. PRINCE
320
mid-central vowel. When this pronunciation is crucial to the discussion, it will be represented as /&a/-, in contrast to the other pronunciation that will be discussed, where the vowel is a high back vowel, which will be represented here as /tsU/-. ‘The figures here are slightly different from the ones presented in Prince (1987) due to an increase in the size of the corpus for the 1970s and to a small modification in the coding criteria. The resulting patterns are, however, the same. “In addition, the few tokens of the adverb tsu ‘too’ were collapsed with those of the preposition tsu since the numbers were so small and VARBRUL analysis showed that the difference between them was not significant. “Furthermore, the position of the particles-preceding the verb, as is the case with all the inseparables and some of the separables, or following, as is the case with the remainder of the separables, has no significant effect at all on which vowel variant occurs. That is, we are clearly dealing with a purely lexical phenomenon and not with a morphosyntactic one.
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