Convergence Intertwining: An Alternative Way Towards the Genesis of Mixed Languages

Abstract

In this brief paper I will discuss two types of mixed languages. The first type constitutes what has been called intertwined languages (Bakker and Muysken 1995) or bilingual mixtures (Thomason 1997). The process which leads to these languages is called intertwining and they have also been claimed to be the result of 'extreme borrowing', a 'matrix language turnover' in codeswitching or 'relexification'. A sentence in such a language typically has content words from one language and bound morphemes from another, with some crosslinguistic variation as to the origin of free grammatical markers such as pronouns, demonstratives and the like. One typically finds overt morphemes from two languages in even a single sentence. The other type of mixed language has not yet been identified as a distinct type. I propose to call them here converted languages. They are the result of extreme convergence, which may take place rapidly. They show semantic, phonological, morphological and syntactic patterns of one language, but all of the morphemes (both content and grammatical morphemes) are from another language. Typically these languages are both unrecognizable and unintelligible for those people whose vocabulary is found in the language. Even though the term 'mixed language' has been incorrectly applied in the past to all kinds of languages with some visible influence from other languages, one should limit its use to those cases where genetic classification is no longer possible. This classification takes place on the basis of both the basic lexicon and the grammatical system. In almost all languages these are from the same source, even in a language like English which has remained a Germanic language despite pervasive influences from other languages, most notably French. Only if the grammatical system and the basic lexicon of a language are of different origin, OR if both of these components are roughly equally from different language sources can one speak of a mixed language. Mixed languages cannot be placed in a genetic tree, since they have more than one parent language, with some components from one language and some components from a different language.