Koineization and Accommodation

Abstract

Several chapters in this volume [those by Gordon, Bailey, Klemola and Britain] deal with language change, from a number of perspectives. In this chapter, we discuss koineization, a contact-induced process that leads to quite rapid, and occasionally dramatic, change. Through koineization, new varieties of a language are brought about as a result of contact between speakers of mutually intelligible varieties of that language. Koineization is a particular case of what Trudgill, in his 1986 work, calls ‘dialect contact’; typically, it occurs in new settlements to which people, for whatever reason, have migrated from different parts of a single language area. Examples of koines (the outcomes of koineization) include the Hindi/Bhojpuri varieties spoken in Fiji and South Africa, and the speech of ‘new towns’ such as Hoyanger in Norway and Milton Keynes in England. Dialect contact, and with it koineization, is one of the main external causes of language change – ‘external’ here referring to social factors, in this case migration, which can reasonably be expected to promote change. Contrasted with this are ‘internal’ factors, which have to do with aspects of the structure of a particular language (its phonology and its grammar) which, perhaps because of structural imbalances, are predisposed to change.