Linguistic Outcomes of Bilingualism

Abstract

This chapter reviews the work in sociolinguistics devoted to understanding what happens to languages in intimate contact, that is, spoken by bilinguals. This review concentrates on research that, following Weinreich, (i) takes the speech community, rather than the individual, as its angle of vision; (ii) focuses on the linguistic results of contact; and (iii) and seeks to elucidate the social structuring of diversity internal to the speech community. The linguistic outcomes of language contact are discussed in terms of four major domains. This review has sampled work on languages in contact, largely from a sociolinguistic and quantitative perspective, in an attempt to deal with the major outstanding issues regarding the linguistic consequences of bilingualism. This review has not focused directly on the question of diffusion, but it is clear that individual strategies, individual practices in bilingual discourse, add up to community-level change.