- Charles F. Hockett, “Age-grading and Linguistic Continuity,” Language, XXVI (1950), 453.
- Ibid., p. 449.
- J. Vendryes, Language: A Linguistic Introduction to History, trans. Paul Radin (New York, 1951), pp. 35–36.
- A. W. de Groot, “Structural Linguistics and Phonetic Law,” Lingua,” I (1948), 192.
- Hockett himself seems to have discarded this hypothesis, because he writes in A Course in Modern Linguistics (New York, 1958), p. 439, that a sound change is “a gradual change in habits of articulation and hearing, taking place constantly, but so slowly that no single individual would ever be aware that he might be passing on a manner of pronunciation different from that which he acquired as a child.”
- A number of other Dravidian and non-Dravidian languages are spoken in this area. Malayalam is spoken mainly in the southwest, and Havyaka (a Kannada dialect) in the south. Koraga (another Dravidian language, not to be confused with the Koraga dialect of Tulu) is found in the north, and a number of Konkani and Marathi dialects are spread over the whole area. Nearly half the population has Tulu as its mother tongue, and practically all residing in this area can speak and understand the standard dialect of Kannada as a second language.
- Five of the seven caste dialects studied appear to be quite distinct: (1) Brahmin, (2) Bunt, (3) Holeya, (4) Koraga, and (5) Kudiya. The other two (Jain, which in fact represents a separate religion, and Pujari) can be included in the Bunt dialect. Most of the informants interviewed were middle-aged. Prior to the survey, a thorough study of the Brahmin and Bunt dialects (northwest) was undertaken. See my Descriptive Analysis of Tulu (in press).
- I think that it is necessary to emphasize the great amount of stratification existing in these societies; to draw any comparison with Western societies would only be misleading.
- See D. N. Shankara Bhat, “Studies in Tulu,” Bulletin of the Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute (Silver Jubilee Issue, 1965).
- Since only six of the informants belonged to this caste, the above classification can be taken only as tentative.
- For example, the Koragas of the southeast region have an initial ś- (palatal fricative) in the above words: śappu ‘leaf, śali ‘to sprinkle’, Hare ‘head’, and so on.
- Exceptions to this are very few and negligible.
- Since most of the informants used during the survey were illiterate adults, their speech could not have been affected by schooling with children of different castes.
- This also explains the situation reported by William Labov in “The Social Motivation of a Sound Change,” Word, XIX (1963), 273–309. Younger inhabitants of Martha's Vineyard evidently had closer contacts with speakers from outside as a result of tourism than had their parents.
- Any absence of similar distributional differences in dialects of other languages studied so far does not invalidate the above hypothesis. Studies of other dialect areas with similar social stratification would doubtless produce further supporting evidence. We may also note here that there is a different type of regular sound change which occurs when a body of speakers acquire a second or third language (the substratum theory). The mechanism underlying these changes is basically different.
- Speech therapists are of the opinion that defects in speech, such as stuttering or articulatory defects, are likely to be eliminated up to the age of 9 or 10. Yet “little or no change takes place in the speech condition after the child has reached 10 to 14 years of age, unless special therapy is offered” (Robert Milisen, “The Incidence of Speech Disorders,” in Handbook of Speech Pathology, Ed. Lee Edward Travis [New York, 1957], p. 250).
- I am not suggesting that the regular type of change can occur only during the transitional stage, but that, in view of the underlying mechanism defined above, they occur at that stage only under normal circumstances or “unless special therapy is offered.”
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