Contact details

Telephone:  +44 (0)116 223 1235

Email:  mf181@le.ac.uk

Office:  Attenborough 704

Project description

The Dialects in Diaspora project will look at the evidence for phonological change in the Germanic dialects spoken in Britain up to c.700 AD.  There is still a tendency in many studies to think about the speech varieties of early Anglo-Saxon settlers simply as part of the background to Old English.  The emphasis in this project will be on studying them, as far as the available data will allow, in their own cultural context.  The linguistic issues under consideration include:

• To what extent do Germanic dialects in Britain diverge from those of the Continental areas where settlers came from?  To what extent do ongoing contacts with their "homelands" promote linguistic conservatism?
• Do we have evidence for levelling among Germanic dialects in Britain, producing distinctly insular varieties that can be considered early forms of Old English?
• Do the data from this early period provide any support for, or evidence against, the traditional model of four Old English dialects (Kentish; West Saxon; Mercian; Northumbrian)?
• Is there evidence for the emergence of new linguistic varieties or new sociolinguistic pressures parallel to the emergence of new political power structures - particularly those associated with Christianisation - in the seventh century?
  

As well as considering the Germanic dialects of Britain from the point of view of settlers and emerging elites, the project will also look for evidence of linguistic contact between the settlers and the Romano-British population.  In recent years there has been a growing interest in the possibility that the processes which distinguish Old English from the other Germanic languages of the early Middle Ages result from contact with the Celtic and (probably) Latin dialects spoken in post-Roman Britain.  The idea of a mass Anglo-Saxon invasion which displaced or exterminated the Britons is no longer widely accepted, although the scale of the migration remains a matter of controversy.  If, as some researchers have argued, the real situation is one of subjugation by relatively small Germanic-speaking elites, then the development of Germanic dialects in Britain at the expense of Celtic would be an example of the phenomenon of lanugage shift:  intermarriage and day-to-day contact between languages results in increasing bilingualism, with one language eventually abandoned in favour of the other over the course of several generations.

 

There has been a considerable amount of debate about the evidence for language shift among the formerly Celtic-speaking population of Britain in recent years, with a particular focus on syntactic phenomena which are alleged to result from this shift.  Relatively little attention has been paid to phonology, however.  The debate has also concentrated on evidence from Old and Middle English, without considering the earliest linguistic evidence.  This is entirely reasonable in syntactic study, as most of the linguistic material prior to the eighth century consists of single words (chiefly personal names) and short texts.  These are of limited value for understanding syntax, but tremendously useful for phonological analysis.

 

Other research interests

Although my main focus is on runic inscriptions as pieces of linguistic evidence, I am also interested in the reception and use of the runic script in modern times.  I have presented a number of papers on the occult interpretations of runes produced by members of the völkisch movement in German and Austria during the Wilhelmine period.  I am also currently investigating some of the runic inscriptions which are suspected of being modern forgeries, and considering the problems of assessing the authenticity of both the text and the inscribed object.

Publications

“The Germanic diphthongs in the Continental runic inscriptions.”  Under consideration for Runes in Context:  Selected Papers from the Seventh International Symposium on Runes and Runic Inscriptions.

 

“From Hávamál to racial hygiene:  Guido List’s Das Geheimnis der Runen, ‘The Secret of the Runes’.”  In Christina Lee and Nicola McLelland (eds.):  Germania Remembered 1500-2009: commemorating and inventing a Germanic past.  (Tucson, AZ:  Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, forthcoming 2011).

 

“East Germanic and West Germanic in contact: n-stem personal names in the Continental runic inscriptions.”  In Judith Mills and Marjolein Stern (eds.):  North and South, East and West:  Movements in the Medieval World, Proceedings of the 2nd Postgraduate Conference of the Institute of Medieval Research, University of Nottingham.  http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/Medieval/Publications/NorthandSouth,EastandWest.aspx (2010).

 

“The ‘Book of Enoch’, the Angelic Alphabet and the ‘Real Cabbala’ in the Angelic Conferences of John Dee (1527-1608/9).”  Henry Sweet Society Bulletin 48 (2007): 7-22.