What does dialect displacement mean? Give an example.

Dialect displacement is the evacuation of one dialect which is more important at the society. In the text, Milroy refers to the displacement of West Midland dialects of Middle English by weakly inflected East Midland dialects.

What are “community” or “vernacular” norms? What term that we have used in class is similar?

Norms observed by speakers and maintained by communities in opposition to standardizing norms.

We can link the community norms to the wave theory. This one implies that a change spreads successively until it is realized in all contexts and with all speakers.

What does Milroy mean when he says that h-dropping may not ever reach “completion”?

He is referring to the fact that whilst the practise of “h-dropping” is commonly used, it is possible that we will never reach a point in which all of the speakers of the English language consider this usage as normative.

Explain what Milroy means by “speaker innovation” and change in the system. How are they connected?

An innovation is an act of the speaker, whereas a change is manifested within the language system.  

When an innovation is taken up by a speech community, they start a borrowing process; nonetheless, the implantation of any kind of change depends on the borrowing of an innovation.

Why isn’t borrowing from one language to another and the replacement of one sound by another through speaker innovation with a language as radically different as the Neogrammarians posited?  

Each single event of borrowing into a new speech community is an innovation. This affirmation makes Milroy to set out that the distinction between true sound change and phonological borrowing is poorly motivated.

What is necessary for a sound to spread?

The spread of sounds can result from borrowing or from the replacement of one sound by another. We must point out that this spreading is a social process.

Why does believing in the ideology of standardization lead to believing in “blind necessity”?

From a sociolinguistic perspective, standard languages are not “normal” languages. They are created by the imposition of political and military power, hence, the sound-patterns… and these changes do not come about through blind necessity.  

The ideology of standardization causes people to believe that they are indeed discrete physical entities.

What does Milroy mean by “clean” and “dirty” data?  

Milroy mean by “clean” data that the language is uniform, unilinear and normalized (idealized); and by “dirty” data that is the result of sociolinguistic studies, in which language is considered as irregular and chaotic.