Book contents
- Millennia of Language Change
- Millennia of Language Change
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue: the Long View
- 1 Prehistoric Sociolinguistics and the Uniformitarian Hypothesis: What Were Stone-Age Languages Like?
- 2 From Ancient Greek to Comanche: on Many Millennia of Complexification
- 3 First-Millennium England: a Tale of Two Copulas
- 4 The First Three Thousand Years: Contact in Prehistoric and Early Historic English
- 5 Verner’s Law, Germanic Dialects and the English Dialect ‘Default Singulars’
- 6 Deep into the Pacific: the Austronesian Migrations and the Linguistic Consequences of Isolation
- 7 The Hellenistic Koiné 320 bc to 550 ad and Its Medieval and Early Modern Congeners
- 8 Indo-European Feminines: Contact, Diffusion and Gender Loss around the North Sea
- Sources
- References
- Index
5 - Verner’s Law, Germanic Dialects and the English Dialect ‘Default Singulars’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2020
- Millennia of Language Change
- Millennia of Language Change
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue: the Long View
- 1 Prehistoric Sociolinguistics and the Uniformitarian Hypothesis: What Were Stone-Age Languages Like?
- 2 From Ancient Greek to Comanche: on Many Millennia of Complexification
- 3 First-Millennium England: a Tale of Two Copulas
- 4 The First Three Thousand Years: Contact in Prehistoric and Early Historic English
- 5 Verner’s Law, Germanic Dialects and the English Dialect ‘Default Singulars’
- 6 Deep into the Pacific: the Austronesian Migrations and the Linguistic Consequences of Isolation
- 7 The Hellenistic Koiné 320 bc to 550 ad and Its Medieval and Early Modern Congeners
- 8 Indo-European Feminines: Contact, Diffusion and Gender Loss around the North Sea
- Sources
- References
- Index
Summary
Adger and Smith (2005: 155) write that ‘one of the most common features of vernacular dialects [of English] world wide’ is the occurrence of plural was as in we was, you was, they was. This, occurring as it does alongside singular was as in I was, she was, obviously represents a regularisation in comparison with Standard English. Indeed, there is a widespread perception in the international English-linguistics community in general that this phenomenon is so widespread as to be the norm in varieties of English other than Standard English, to the extent that it may be a ‘vernacular universal’ (Chambers 2001; Walker 2007; Filppula, Klemola & Paulasto 2008) or a ‘vernacular primitive’ (Chambers 1995: 242). As Tagliamonte (2008) states, ‘according to Chambers’ theory of “vernacular roots,” certain variables appear to be primitives of vernacular dialects in the sense that they recur ubiquitously all over the world’.
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- Millennia of Language ChangeSociolinguistic Studies in Deep Historical Linguistics, pp. 67 - 76Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020