Day care and language change

by Doctor Science

This is a re-blog of something I submitted to Language Log back in early November, about some historical references to new languages forming in groups of children.

---

I happened to be reading (parts of) Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chambers, 1844) and I came across his discussion of language change and evolution. Chambers wrote:

The able and self-devoted Robert Moffat, in his work on South Africa, states, without the least regard to hypothesis, that amongst the people of the towns of that great region, “the purity and harmony of language is kept up by their pitchos or public meetings, by their festivals and ceremonies, as well as by their songs and their constant intercourse. With the isolated villages of the desert it is far otherwise. They have no such meetings; they are compelled to traverse the wilds, often to a great distance from their native village. On such occasions, fathers and mothers, and all who can bear a burden, often set out for weeks at a time, and leave their children to the care of two or three infirm old people. The infant progeny, some of whom are beginning to lisp, while others can just master a whole sentence, and those still farther advanced, romping and playing together, the children of nature, through the live-long day, become habituated to a language of their own. The more voluble condescend to the less precocious, and thus, from this infant Babel, proceeds a dialect composed of a host of mongrel words and phrases, joined together without rule, and in the course of a generation the entire character of the language is changed.” [317 - Missionary Scenes and Labours in South Africa; p10-11] I have been told, that in like manner the children of the Manchester factory workers, left for a great part of the day, in large assemblages, under the care of perhaps a single elderly person, and spending the time in amusements, are found to make a great deal of new language.

Italics in original.

I haven't been able to find an obvious source for the info about Manchester day care, in a superficial search. It's also unclear to me which languages Moffat is talking about in the quoted excerpt: whether they're Bantu or Khoisan.

Language Log readers may be interested in this quote, and also in considering what other day-care-type situations might encourage rapid language change. Orphanages? Child labor gangs? Refugee camps? … the Internet?

---

Rodger C. commented:

I've read somewhere of such a language once spoken by breaker boys in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania. Its remaining speakers are elderly and are divided among those who want to preserve its memory and those who despise it as "broken English" and a product of a bad time.

Various Language Loggers tried, but so far no-one has been able to track down the reference.

Joyce Melton said:

When I was about three, my parents worked in the cotton fields in Casa Grande, Arizona. There were no babysitters, the pay was so good that anyone who could drag a cotton sack around was making so much money they would not take any other job. Even the guys who owned the field were picking cotton.

All us littles were corralled under the water wagons, English speakers, Spanish speakers, local Indian language speakers, hemmed in by boxes, tanks and big wooden spools. In less than two weeks we were all jabbering away at each other in who knows what pastiche.

I only remember one word from that gumbo: pronounced "kitty" it meant, "want". It was years later that I realized it was from the Spanish "quiere".

Too bad I didn't take notes.

When I read the bits from "Vestiges", I immediately thought of Nicaraguan (and other) sign languages, and of creoles — but both the examples I found, and the breaker boys language, imply that the process might take place even when all the children are starting with the same birth language.

I think whatever is going on with African urban youth languages (anyone have a good summary link?) may also be related, though I'm not sure how much input they have from pre-adolescent speakers. Similarly with language change on the Internet, which is dominated by 15-22 year-olds, with little input from pre-adolescents.

Research on Nicaraguan Sign suggests that the natural development of a true language (with its own grammar) requires some number of pre-adolescent human brains, so groups of teenagers are likely to develop all kinds of jargon, but not really grammar.

On the other hand: my experience on the internet, especially tumblr, shows that a population with very few pre-adolescents *can* develop a grammatically fluid language, to some extent.

"Vietnamese children playing", by Nguyễn Phan Chánh. They're playing Ô ăn quan, a traditional board (or dirt) game. I found this out by google-translating the Vietnamese-language page where I found the image, but couldn't make much more out of it.

Comments

[liberal japonicus]

Since I was able to apparently shut down the Star Wars thread (sorry about that), I thought I might offer something here and see if it had the same juice.

The line 'a language is a dialect with an army and a navy', is something Max Weinreich attributed to a person speaking to him after a lecture, which encapsulates my take on this. Similarly, a number of linguistic presentations begin with a joke along the lines of 'this data is from my own personal ideolect, of which I am the only fluent speaker'. The question of whether something is a language is not there is a particular code that a small group uses, it is in the portability of the code. The examples above are not really portable, in that you couldn't meet new people and speak to them in this code to get new information. Meeting someone who spoke that code would automatically mean that they have a certain amount of shared information, which negates the idea that the code can carry all or at least a sizable portion of the information so that someone who knew the code but didn't know the background information could communicate something that was completely unknown to the other person. At least that is my first glance take on this.

[wj]

I'm recalling a case that I picked up in an Anthro class way back in college. A child had parents who were native speakers of two different languages. The nanny spoke a third language, the gardener a fourth and the cook a fifth. (Can't recall, at this point, whether there were other members of the household as well.)

The kid picked up all of those, of course. But he also started inventing a language of his own . . . because, after all, everybody (in his experience) had a language of their own.

Sorry, a quick search didn't turn up the original source.

[Hartmut]

This may be related to the topic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idioglossia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptophasia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poto_and_Cabengo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_and_Jennifer_Gibbons

There was a film made about Poto and Cabengo but it seems not to be freely available on the net (only clips).

[Adam Rosenthal]

The Manchester part seems most unlikely, at least if Chambers means (as he seems to) that this was happening on a large scale.

After all, 'the children of factory workers' presumably constituted a large proportion of the city's population, yet that period actually saw considerable standardising of the English spoken in Manchester. Whereas you'd expect what he's describing to leave significant traces in the colloquial language that weren't found elsewhere in the region.

Liverpool, 35 miles down the East Lancs road, retains to this day major lexical and phonological differences from the rest of Lancashire - let alone the country - much of it apparently stemming from Irish influence (for instance, widespread lenition of stops). Whereas Manchester, while it has a recognisable accent, doesn't have this kind of outlier status.

By the way, my father, who happened to be the son of Manchester factory workers, was evacuated during the War to a little town about 50 miles north of Manchester. It took him a couple of weeks to understand what anyone was saying there - they still used terms like, 'hither', 'thither' and 'yonder', and he said that the phrase meaning "Are you going down [i.e. to the football]" came out as "A t'behn dehn" [a təbɛːn dɛːn]. Sadly almost all genuine dialects are dead now in England, though that vestige of 'thou', t', is still not uncommon in various parts of the North.

[Anne Wittke]

The piture looks like they are playing mancala. I have that game.