From: "P&G" <
petegray@...>
>>>The answer is: one generation.<<
>>Really?
>I want to support Miguel (I think it's Miguel) here. Sound change takes
one
generation. You can see this in modern English, where my generation says
/t/ between vowels and finally, but the kids in my school now almost
universally say /?/. That change I have observed in just a few years - 4
to 5 years. So this particular sound change takes one generation because my
generation will die out.>
I suspect it's older than that-- I can recall hearing "dialect" jokes in the
50s involving intervocalic /?/ for /t/...it was usually attributed to
Cockney, and hardly respectable. But I suspect Engl. speakers have been
substituting [?] for final and pre-C /t/ for a long time, without stigma. We
in the US certainly have; but the intervocalic ? is, so far, very uncommon
here AFAIK.
As I recall, Labov's first 1960s paper postulated a 3-generation scheme
(this was based on dialect research on the island of Martha's Vineyard (or
perhaps Nantucket, I forget which) in the 1930s and again in 1950s-60s)--
Oldest speakers in the 1930s had, say, feature X; their young-adult
children at the time were beginning to shift X > Xprime, which was a feature
of the mainland (mainly due to social factors-- identification with the
island's (literally) insular and tight-knit culture vs. identification
with/aspirations toward the broader general/mainland culture).
By the 1960s, the new generation of young adults (gd.children of the oldest
1930 people) showed a strong tendency to have Xprime almost exclusively.
This was ascribed not only to influence of the mainland (and the fact that
the old island culture-- fishing & sea-faring-- was fading), but also to
increased access to mass-media, and the post-WW II influx of mainland
tourists and new residents.
Thus we seem to go from 1. Stasis, Feature A-- to 2. Mixture, Fea.A~Fea.B--
to 3. new Stasis, Fea. B