Causes and Effects of Substratum, Superstratum and Adstratum Influence, with Reference to Tibeto-Burman Languages

Abstract

Language contact has become a major focus of inquiry in historical and typological linguistics in the last twenty years, spurred in a large part by the publication of Thomason & Kaufman (1988), which tried to make sense of a large amount of language contact data. They argued that there was a direct relationship between the degree or intensity of language contact and the amount and type of infl uence the contact would have on one or more of the languages involved. Essentially, the greater the degree of bilingualism, the greater the degree of contact infl uence (see also Thomason 2001); if the contact and bilingualism was minimal, then there might just be a few loanwords adapted to the borrowing language’s phonology and grammatical system, but if the contact and bilingualism was of a greater degree there would be infl uence in the grammar and phonology of the affected language. As more linguists came to take language contact more seriously, they came to realize how common language contact phenomena are. Dixon (1997) argued for the concept of “punctuated equilibrium”, the idea that for most of history languages exist side by side (the equilibrium period) and slowly mutually infl uence each other, but occasionally there are periods of “punctuation”, generally population movements due to natural or man-made disasters, or conquest of one people by another. What historical linguistics focused on in the past was the clear and rapid changes of the punctuations, and did not pay as much attention to the slow, less obvious changes due to the long periods of equilibrium. An important change in our way of thinking that grew out of all of this research on language contact was the realization that language contact is a part of the development of all languages, and so we cannot treat internal language change independently from changes infl uenced by language contact. In a situation where there is deep and prolonged bilingualism in a society, there are two major types of outcome scenario: