Czech, Mate: Grammatical Replication and Shift in South Australian Czech

Abstract

Historical linguistics aims to investigate the innovation stage of a grammatical variant as well as the later community-wide propagation in order to fully understand the change (Fischer 2004). This paper focuses on individual contact-based grammatical innovations in a community setting, viewing the speaker as the “locus of change” (Weinreich 1953/1968: 1; Romaine 2005; Wei 2013). This provides a window into the types of innovations community members produce in a situation of shift, wherein such innovations may never become complete changes. The community studied in this article is the Czech South Australian community, whose language situation is previously unstudied. Utilizing Thomason’s (2001) steps for proving whether contact-induced structural change has occurred, this  paper identifies several instances of possible grammatical “replication” innovations in the speech of individuals in this community (Heine and Kuteva 2005, 2008: 2; Kuteva 2017), as well as the influence of shift driven by “divergent attainment” (Polinsky 2018: 18) and intergenerational attrition. This is supported by findings of significant authors in the tradition of Czech diasporic linguistic research (Henzl 1982; Vašek 1996; Dutková 1998; Dutková-Cope 2001a, 2001b; Zajícová 2009, 2012). It is suggested here that the features found are possibly the result of shift and attrition processes and contact-induced language transfer acting together within a Dynamic System (Herdina and Jessner 2002).