Dialect levelling (or leveling in American English) is an overall reduction in the variation or diversity of a dialect's features when in contact with one or more other dialects.Hickey, Raymond (2014). A Dictionary of Varieties of English. John Wiley & Sons, p. 92. This can come about through assimilation, mixture, and merging of certain dialects, often amidst a process of language codification, which can be a precursor to standardization. One possible result is a koine language, in which various dialects mix together and simplify, settling into a new and more widely embraced form of the language. Another possible path is that a speech community increasingly adopts or exclusively preserves features with widespread social currency at the expense of their more local or traditional dialect features.Britain, David (2010). "Supralocal regional dialect levelling". Language and identities, 193-204.
Dialect levelling has been observed in most languages with large numbers of speakers after industrialization and modernization of the areas in which they are spoken. However, while less common, it could be observed in pre-industrial times too, especially in colonial dialects like American and Australian English or when sustained linguistic contact between different dialects over a large geographical area continues for long enough as in the Hellenistic world that produced Koine Greek as a result of dialect leveling from Ancient Greek dialects.
Definition Dialect levelling has been defined as the process by which structural variation in dialects is reduced,Hinskens, 1996:3 "the process of eliminating prominent stereotypical features of differences between dialects",Dillard 1972:300 "a social process [that] consists in negotiation between speakers of different dialects aimed at setting the properties of, for example, a lexical entry",Lefebvre 1998:393 "the reduction of variation between dialects of the same language in situations where speakers of these dialects are brought together",Lefebvre 1998:46 "the eradication of socially or locally marked variants (both within and between linguistic systems) in conditions of social or geographical mobility and resultant dialect contact",Milroy 2002:7 and the "reduction... of structural similarities between languages in contact", of which "interference and convergence are really two manifestations".Mougeon et al. 1985:480
Leonard Bloomfield implicitly distinguished between the short-term process of accommodation between speakers and the long-term process of levelling between varieties and between the social and the geographical dimensions.Bloomfield On the geographical dimension, levelling may disrupt the regularity that is the result of the application of sound laws. It operates in waves but may leave behind relic forms. Dialect levelling and Mischung, or dialect mixing, have been suggested as the key mechanisms that destroy regularity and the alleged exceptionlessness of sound laws.Bloomfield, Wrede (1919, 10:13), Frings
Dialect levelling is triggered by contact between dialects, often because of migration, and it has been observed in most languages with large numbers of speakers after the industrialisation and the modernisation of the area or areas in which they are spoken. It results in unique features of dialects being eliminated and "may occur over several generations until a stable compromise dialect develops".Siegel 1997:128 referenced in LefebvreHinskens 1998:35 It is separate from the levelling of variation between dialectal or vernacular versions of a language and standard versions.Hinskens 1998:35
Motivations Contact leading to dialect levelling can stem from geographical and social mobility, which brings together speakers from different regions and social levels. Adolescents can drive levelling, as they adapt their speech under the influence of their peers, rather than their parents.
In 20th-century British English, dialect levelling was caused by social upheaval leading to larger social networks. Agricultural advancements caused movement from rural to urban areas, and the construction of suburbs caused city-dwellers to return to former rural areas. The World Wars brought women into the workforce and men into contact with more diverse backgrounds.Kerswill
While written and spoken language can diverge significantly, the presence of long distance communication – which prior to inventions such as the telephone was virtually always written – usually drives or necessitates the use of a lingua franca, dialect levelling or both. To be understood by their correspondence partners farther away, authors will naturally tend to reduce exceedingly local forms and incorporate loanwords from the dialect of the person they're writing to. If enough such correspondence is undertaken over a long enough time frame by enough people a new written standard or de facto standard can emerge. Examples include Middle Low German as employed by the Hanseatic League or Koine Greek. In the absence of long distance communication and travel, languages and dialects can diverge significantly in comparatively short time spans.
Role in creole formation It has been suggested that dialect levelling plays a role in the formation of creoles. It is responsible for standardising the multiple language variants that are produced by the relexification of substrate languages with words from the lexifier language. Features that are not common to all of the substrata and so are different across the varieties of the emerging creole tend to be eliminated. The process begins "when the speakers of the creole community stop targeting the lexifier language and start targeting the relexified lexicons, that is, the early creole".Lefebvre 1998:46 Dialect levelling in such a situation may not be complete, however. Variation that remains after dialect levelling may result in the "reallocation" of surviving variants to "new functions, such as stylistic or social markers".Siegel, 127 Also, differences between substrata, including between dialects of a single substratum, may not be levelled at all but instead persist, as differences between dialects of the creole.Lefebvre 1998:47
Case studies In New Zealand English
New Zealand English is a relatively new native variety of English. The English language was brought to the islands in 1800 but became influential only in the 1840s because of large-scale migration from Britain. The most distinctive part of the language is the formation of the accent that has developed through complex series of processes involving dialect contact between different varieties of British English, followed by dialect mixture. Although New Zealand English sounds very similar to Australian English, it is not a direct transplant, as Australians were only 7% of the immigrants before 1881, and the majority of the linguistic change in New Zealand English happened between 1840 and 1880. The speed with which New Zealand English became a unique, independent form of English can be attributed to the diversity of speakers who came into contact through colonisation. Features from all over the British Isles and the Māori people, who had inhabited the island for 600 years prior to colonisation, can be identified in the form that New Zealand English has taken.
Rudimentary levelling in New Zealand English occurred around 1860, the result of contact between adult speakers of different regional and social varieties and the accommodation that was required from the speakers in face-to-face interaction. Settlements attracted people from all walks of life and created highly-diverse linguistic variation, but there were still families that lived in almost total isolation. Thus, the children did not gain the dialect of their peers, as was normally expected, but instead maintained the dialect of their parents. Speakers who grow up in that type of situation are more likely to demonstrate intra-individual variability than speakers whose main source of influence is their peers. When the emerging dialect stabilises, it is the result of a focusing process, which allowed for a very small amount of regional variation.Trudgill, Peter, Elizabeth Gordon, Gillian Lewis and Margaret MacLagan. 2000. Determinism in new-dialect formation and the genesis of New Zealand English. Journal of Linguistics 36 (2). 299-318. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
New Zealand English is largely based around the typology and forms of southeastern England because of the levelling out of demographic minority dialect forms. Trudgill (1986) suggests that situations that involve transplantation and contact between mutually-intelligible dialects lead to the development of new dialects by focusing on specific qualities from the variants of the different dialects and reducing them until only one feature remains from each variable. The process may take an extended length of time. Reduction then takes place as the result of group accommodation between speakers in face-to-face interaction. Accommodation may also lead to the development of interdialectal forms, forms that are not present in contributing dialects but may be the result of hyperadaptation.
Vowels Variables have been maintained through the process of levelling, such as the vowels of foot and strut indicate a system of five, rather than six, short checked vowels, a feature common in working-class accents in most of England north of the Bristol Channel, an area that encompasses about half of England's geography and population. However, only one consultant had the feature, indicating that it was likely a minority feature in adults and was then exposed to children. /a:/ has levelled from realisations all over an utterance to being found in front realisations only. Closed variants [i, e, ɛ] (typical of 19th-century Southern England) are more common in the recordings, rather than the open variants of Northern England, Scotland and Ireland [ɛ, æ]. The fact that the close variants have survived suggests an influence from southeastern England, Australia and Scotland. Diphthong shift is equivalent to diphthongs from Southern England to the West Midlands. Most of diphthong shift happens along /au/, starting at a point that is close to [æ] or /ai/ starting farther back than /a:/
Consonants /h/-dropping did not survive in New Zealand English, and the merger of /w/ and /ʍ/ is only now beginning to emerge. Irish English dental /t/ and /d/ have been levelled out in New Zealand English, in favour of /θ/ and /ð/.
In Limburg In this case study, Hinskens (1998) researches dialect levelling in the Dutch province of Limburg.Hinskens, Frans. 1998. Dialect Levelling: A Two-dimensional Process. Folia Linguistica 32 (1-2). 35-52. Based on his findings, he argues that dialect levelling does not necessarily lead to convergence towards the standard language. The research for this case study takes place in Rimburg, a small village on the southeast of Limburg, where Ripuarian dialects are spoken. The southeast area of Limburg experienced rapid industrialisation at the turn of the 20th century with the largescale development of coal mining. That created job opportunities, which led to considerable immigration to the area (Hinskens:38), which, in turn, led to language contact and a diversification of language varieties. It is the area where most of the dialect levelling occurred.
Geographically, the dialects of Limburg are divided into three zones. The westernmost zone (C-zone) features East-Limburg dialects, the easternmost zone (A-zone) Ripuarian dialects, with the central zone (B-zone) being a transition zone between the two varieties. As one travels from west to east, the dialect features deviate more and more from the standard language. Additionally, the dialect features accumulate from west to east and features found in East-Limburg dialects are also found in Ripuarian dialects but not the other way around (Hinskens 1998:37).