Negative Borrowing in an Indigenouslanguage Shift to the Dominant National Language

Abstract

Receding languages in contact with an expanding language are susceptible to various forms of transfer, including covert transfer or negative borrowing, the elimination of features not shared by the expanding language. Retention of two Scottish Gaelic grammatical features with English parallels and of two grammatical features without English parallel is compared in the Gaelic of bilingual speakers across a 55-year age-and-proficiency continuum. Both kinds of features show change in progress, but only very modest support for negative borrowing emerges, chiefly among speakers who were less than fully fluent in Gaelic by reason of incomplete acquisition or long disuse. The roles of simplification and gender-related speech style in producing these results are considered. The former appears to play a very limited role, while the latter may play a larger role in the unexpectedly strong retention of one unmatched structure among young and imperfect female speakers. Insofar as structural congruity increases the likelihood of negative borrowing, the quite different structures of Gaelic and English may contribute to its weak presence in this case. Long-term language contact before the period of obsolescence may be more productive of negative-borrowing effects than late-stage obsolescence itself.