Language Contact Research Articles

Informal language contact and formulaic language development of Chinese students abroad during a global crisis

Abstract This longitudinal mixed-methods study tracked the informal language contact and phrasal verb knowledge of 21 Chinese foundation program students in the United Kingdom (UK) during the 2019–2020 academic year through three rounds of data collection. Because of the disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the study was able to capture the impact of a global crisis on the experiences of international students studying abroad and learning a second language (L2). Data from a Language Contact Questionnaire, a Study Abroad Social Network Survey, and semi-structured interviews indicated significant changes in their L2 use and social networks. Our findings showed that the students sharply reduced their L2 contact and increased their use of first language (L1) during the pandemic. Productive and receptive tests assessing phrasal verb knowledge revealed that the students did not make significant gains after the pandemic lockdown. The study suggests that significant changes in the living environment can directly impact students’ L2 usage and their formulaic language development.

Postnominal flagging and OV in Sinitic

Abstract Sinitic languages are known for their SVO order and mostly isolating morphology. This study addresses eleven languages of four different areas in Hunan, Yunnan, Sichuan, and Qinghai/Gansu provinces in China that possess SOV order and developed a postnominal flagging system. This study presents a synchronic description as well as a diachronic analysis of the flagging systems in these languages, focusing on typological properties (ergative or secundative alignment) and the role of language contact. The existence of four separate areas with limited mutual contact allows a contrastive approach and inferences on the role of different contact languages (Tibetic, Mongolic, Tujia) or different types of language contact (borrowing of flags, shared grammaticalization). The study argues against OV order and postnominal flagging as defining features of the “Amdo Sprachbund”, showing that these are universally present in all four areas and are better understood as the result of contact between two Eurasian macro areas.

¿Soy de Ribera o Rivera?: Sociolinguistic /b/-/v/ Variation in Rivera Spanish

This study investigates the impact of language contact on three generations of bilingual Spanish and Uruguayan Portuguese speakers in Rivera City, Uruguay, located on the Uruguayan–Brazilian border. Focusing on the confirmed presence of the Portuguese-like/b/and/v/phonemic distinction, and the lower frequency of the Montevideo Spanish-like approximantized stops in Riverense Spanish (RS), the research examines the production of <v> and <b> in 29 female Rivera Spanish bilinguals belonging to different age groups. More specifically, the aim was to see if the previously observed differential use of language-specific phonological variants could be accounted for by using precise measurements of relative intensity, duration, and voicing coupled with a distributional analysis of realizations derived from auditory coding. At the same time, their production is compared to that of 30 monolingual Montevideo Spanish (MS) speakers, who served as the control group, offering a first description of the production of <v> and <b> within this distinct Rioplatense Spanish variety. Riverense’s higher overall relative intensity, duration, and voicing values support auditory coding results, providing evidence of the expected phonological differences between both Uruguayan Spanish varieties. In particular, an exclusive presence of fricative/v/and less approximantization of/b/in RS speech exposed the influence of Portuguese in Rivera bilinguals and their divergence from MS. In addition, as predicted, the findings reveal a higher presence of Portuguese-like productions of [v] and [b] in older bilinguals when compared to younger generations. This illustrates a continuum from Portuguese-like forms to Spanish-like forms, which is confirmed by both acoustic and distributional analyses. Finally, evidence of the existence of innovative forms resulting from mixing Portuguese and Spanish phonological systems in RS are presented. This study’s findings contribute to sociolinguistics and bilingualism by exposing cross-linguistic influence in a border setting with rigorous analytical methods that offer reliable results and go beyond a basic analysis based on auditory identification.

Variation in VOT in English child-directed speech of English-Mandarin and English-Malay early bilinguals in Singapore

ABSTRACT Variability has been observed in the phonetic/phonological properties of child-directed speech from late-second language bilingual caregivers, but less is known about input variation among early bilinguals in multi-dialectal/multilingual contexts. This study examined English stop voicing contrasts in the adult-directed and child-directed speech of 30 Singaporean early bilingual mothers who differed in their other language (Mandarin/Malay) and language dominance. Results showed that, while Malay and Chinese mothers used similar voice onset time (VOT) for voicing contrast, they differed in where on the VOT continuum these contrasts were made, regardless of speech style and dominance. Compared to their English-dominant peers, Malay/Mandarin-dominant mothers also produced smaller contrasts overall. These patterns could be attributed to cross-linguistic influence, as well as effects of long-term language contact and the mothers’ linguistic experiences. Sub-phonemic variation adds complexity to child bilingual phonological acquisition, emphasising the need to consider input properties in sociolinguistically complex contexts.

An Analysis of Lukabaras Borrowed Verbs from English

English as an official language, has come in contact with indigenous languages in Kenya. English has therefore become one of the major donors of loanwords to these indigenous languages, Lukabaras being one of the beneficiaries. This study investigated the morpho-phonological constraints that English loan verbs encounter when adapting into Lukabaras. The research utilized Lukabaras native speakers as respondents to elicit data. A purposive sampling technique was employed to select a sample of 15 English loan verbs, which were then analyzed descriptively based on the tenets of Optimality Theory which states that constraints are universal and are fixed in their ranking and apply to all languages. The loan verbs were transcribed, and the study first analyzed the morphological constraints, followed by the phonological constraints. The findings reveal that English and Lukabaras have different morphological and phonological structures, leading to modifications of English loan verbs to fit the morphological and phonological patterns of Lukabaras. Additionally, the study identifies specific morpho-phonological constraints affecting the adaptation of English loan verbs into Lukabaras, including NOCODA, COMPLEX C, MAX IO, ONSET, DEP IO, IDENT IO, DEP-PREF, DEP-SUFFIX, and ALIGN left edge. Furthermore, faithful constraints are ranked higher than markedness constraints in Lukabaras. The study’s findings contribute to the understanding of morpho-phonological adaptation processes in language contact scenarios. Overall, the study’s findings align with the theoretical framework provided by OT, illustrating how languages manage the integration of foreign elements through a balance of faithfulness and markedness constraints. These findings not only enhance the understanding of loanword adaptation in Lukabaras but also contribute to the broader field of language contact and borrowing, providing a detailed case study of how specific constraints operate in a real-world linguistic context.

DIVERGENT VALUES OF A PARTICULAR CLASS OF OBSOLETE WORDS: HISTORISMEN

The language of German newspapers in Romania exhibits properties which reflect the synergy that led to the genesis of the present form of this variety of the German language. One main trait consists of preserving the stilistic neutrality of words that are now obsolete in Germany or Austria, hence the effortless play of synonyms that belong to different registers throughout the other German-speaking countries. However, the language contact with Romanian may never be underestimated, and is also observable in respect to the norms that shape the way articles are written. Articles about King Michael I of Romania seem to highlight the fact that the culturally-influenced language norms are known and employed deliberately, of which some actually contrast to Romanian language-culture.

International Sign: Nature and Nomenclature

This article explores the nature of International Sign (IS), a linguistic phenomenon emerging from international deaf interactions. It examines various terms such as Gestuno, cross-signing, International Sign, and International Sign Language, revealing differing perspectives on IS as a lexicon, a language, or a dynamic process. The debate on IS's classification draws parallels with contact languages, lingua francas, and national sign languages. The discussion extends to methodological approaches in IS research, contrasting studies focused on IS as a product with those exploring IS as a process and considering how the combination of experimental and ethnographic studies enriches the understanding of IS's nature. I conclude that despite ongoing debates regarding its linguistic status, the role of IS as a lingua franca indicates a future in which it may gain broader recognition and wider influence.

Sociolinguistic Representation of The Deli Java Community’s Culture in North Sumatra Province

The study explores the sociolinguistic aspects of language, particularly its impact on the interactions between Javanese and Malay tribes, which significantly influence each other. As a result of people moving from one place to another, there was interaction between the Javanese and Malay Deli communities, which was known as Javanese Deli or "Ja-del." This resulted in language contact and the emergence of new terminology as a result of the community's social interactions. In North Sumatra, there are Javanese and Malay communities. linguistic contact in Javanese and Malay societies gave rise to a variety of linguistic phenomena such as "language codes" and "symptoms of code switching and code mixing." Acculturation of Javanese and Deli Malay culture resulted in a blending of language comprehension and belief values in both parties' civilizations. This research approach employs a qualitative paradigm with 112 informants; however, for the sake of efficiency and accuracy, 60 sources were chosen based on expertise and character. This study explores The use of Javanese by people in Deli Serdang Regency, Serdang Bedagai Regency, Langkat Regency and Batubara Regency is gradually changing. Based on the recognition of the Javanese people, the language used in the Deli Serdang Regency, Serdang Bedagai Regency, Langkat Regency and Batubara Regency was originally pure Ngoko Javanese. The culture of the Javanese Deli community in North Sumatra Province contains a mixture of cultures that lead to globalization. When communicating, the speaker conveys the speaker's speech using Indonesian (BI) and a foreign language (BA) with no intervention from each speaker.

The Origin of North Mesopotamian Arabic

This research paper explores the origin and distinct characteristics of the Noarth Mesopotamian Arabic dialect, specifically the Moslawi dialect spoken in Mosul, northern Iraq. The study begins with tracing the roots of the Arabic language within the Semitic language family tree and examines the emergence of Modern Arabic Dialects. It highlights Ferguson's theory that these dialects originated from a asimplified Koine as the most plausible explanation. The paper then delves into the Mesopotamian dialect group, detailing the division into qeltu and gelet varieties through bedouinization. The phonological and lexical uniqueness of Moslawi is analyzed, emphasizing the persistent use of the phoneme /q/ by Moslawi speakers and the systematic vowel-raising rule that differentiates it from other dialects. Extensive language contact, with Persian, Turkish, Hindi, Kurdish, and English, is also discussed, which explains the numerous borrowed words in Moslawi. This research underscores the complex historical and sociolinguistic factors contributing to the distinctiveness of the Moslawi dialect within the broader context of Arabic dialects.

Ethnic integration and evolution of the phonological features of Northern Standard Chinese Language

ABSTRACT: Ethnic integration is often accompanied by language contact and language shift. The process of "ethnic integration" is the process of "remolding" northern standard Chinese language into an inter-ethnic language and ultimately into a common national language. Only by reevaluating the phonological rules and structure of the languages (mainly Altaic) of northern non-Han ethnic groups and investigating the interference with and influence on Chinese during the language shift by the non-Han ethnic groups, can we comprehend that the common national language is a language community jointly shaped by the Han people and other ethnic groups during ethnic integration. The speakers of ethnic languages are, therefore, not only the transmitters but also the co-modelers in forming the common national language. 摘要: 民族融合往往伴随着语言接触和语言转换。"民族融合"的过程就是 将北方标准汉语"重塑"为族际共同语进而成为民族共同语的过程。 只有基于以阿尔泰语为主的北方诸民族语音系规则和音韵结构特征重 新思考并深入研究以阿尔泰为主的北方诸民族在转用汉语过程中对汉 语形成的干扰和影响，才能理解民族共同语是在民族融合过程中汉族 与其他民族共同塑造的语言共同体。在民族共同语形成的过程中，民 族语者不仅是民族共同语的传播者，也是民族共同语的共同塑造者。

An Overview of L2 Learners’ Comprehension of Conversational Implicatures

This paper provides an overview of the development of research on second language learners’ understanding of conversational implicature both domestically and internationally, aiming to reflect the current state of research in this area. The results show that: 1) Pragmatic research on conversational implicature is becoming increasingly mature and systematic; 2) The research subjects are primarily college students, with limited studies on the pragmatic comprehension of junior high school students and primary school students; 3) From the perspective of interlanguage pragmatics, research on conversational implicature mainly explores the factors affecting L2 conversational implicature comprehension such as types of conversational implicature, second language proficiency, and language contact or exposure; 4) The number of research on conversational implicature comprehension in China is limited and the instructional effects on L2 pragmatic comprehension is scarcely explored. At last, the paper concludes with recommendations for future directions of the studies on implicature comprehension.

탈(脫)경계적 공간에서의 소통 양상의 변화: 기술의 진보에 따른 새로운 언어접촉 양상

This study aims to focus on the problems posed by space as a variable that affects communication and examine its impact and limitations. With recent technological advancements, modern society is experiencing borderless communication in which physical space and distance variables are gradually disappearing, creating several new forms of language contact. Telepresence and disembodiment, which appear in borderless spaces, are like double-edged swords; they have the positive side of increasing the convenience of language contact and the negative side of creating lies, errors, and distortions. Language contact in new spaces is a significant cause of recent language changes and needs to be noted as a critical issue. This study examines the concept of transboundary space, the problems of language contact and reterritorialization formed in transboundary space, and analyses the issue of the power of English as a central language that may appear in the process of using AI for machine translation. Small and medium-sized languages with weak linguistic and cultural power will likely be marginalized by larger language circles in global change centered on artificial intelligence technology. This is because current artificial intelligence is pursuing extreme efficiency, and when language becomes the target of that efficiency, less frequently used languages are vulnerable to this phenomenon and are likely to be absorbed into more frequently used languages.

Types of Code-Switching Found in The Friday Podcast

The objective of this study is to know the various types of code switching found in The Friday Podcast, especially in episode 213. Descriptive qualitative method is used to analyse the data. This study analyzed the different types of code switching using Appel & Muysken theory of Bilingualism, as presented in their book entitled Language Contact and Bilingualism (1987). There are three types of code switching stated by Appel & Muysken. The findings of this study revealed that all three types of Code Switching were discovered in The Friday Podcast. Intra-Sentential switching is the most common sort of code-switching occurrence in The Friday Podcast. Meanwhile, Intersentential-Switching is the speaker's least dominant data. For the conclusion, the reason why intrasentential-switching got the most occurrences in this podcast because the audience of this podcast is Indonesian people who are the majority of it not really fluent in English. The speakers in this podcast also using the familiar English terms that Indonesian society frequently heard.

A revised digital edition of Wurm & Hattori’s Language Atlas of the Pacific Area

Wurm & Hattori’s Language Atlas of the Pacific Area describes the geographic speaker areas of the languages and language varieties spoken in the Pacific. Thanks to the efforts of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, this monumental piece of work has been available in digital form for over 15 years. But lacking proper identification of language varieties, this digitized data was largely unusable for today’s research methods. We turned ECAI’s digitized artefacts of the Language Atlas into an open, reusable geo-referenced dataset of speaker area polygons for a quarter of the world’s languages. This allows for much more refined analysis methods to, for example, analyse language contact in the area of the world with the highest linguistic diversity. We also describe a number of tool applications and quality checks which may be useful for methodological development in similar digitization efforts.

Language contact and grammatical change

Language contact and grammatical change

Semantic shifts of 'coming out' and 'come out of the closet'

Juxtaposing lexicographic data with authentic corpora-excerpted contexts, this article investigates the semantic variance of coming out and come out of the closet in English and Polish. It discovers the linguistic sources of the LGBTQ+-related sense of coming out in English and focuses on the semantic shift from its sociolectal LGBTQ+-related usage towards nonsociolectal pragmatically marked uses, which result in extended collocability (e.g. Eng. coming out as an atheist; Pol. ateistyczny coming-out). The study contrasts English and Polish corpus data to see whether the nonsociolectal usage of Polish coming out can be argued to be contact-induced – that is, modelled on English. Language contact research shows that contact-induced innovations undergo semantic change through conscious and creative exploitation by recipient language speakers to realise their pragmatic needs. The cognitive-onomasiological theoretical framework, coupled with a usage-based methodology, allows investigation of how native and contact-induced phenomena are used by native and recipient language speakers.

Request for confirmation sequences in Low German

Abstract This article examines request for confirmation (RfC) sequences in Low German (LoG) conversation, a dialect variety of German. The study is based on both a quantitative analysis of 200 RfC instances and a qualitative analysis of selected excerpts in the framework of conversation analysis (CA). As for the question design of RfCs, declarative and phrasal formats, as well as modulations and tags prevail in the LoG data. Concerning the response design, LoG is characterized as a polarity system in which language contact with the high variety plays a decisive role in the answer possibility space. In particular, High German response tokens are predominantly used as unmarked response types, while LoG response tokens are deployed as marked types. Moreover, LoG seems to be a language between the poles of token- and repeat-type languages. Full repeats index different degrees of ‘markedness’ in LoG interaction. Contrary to previous studies on polar answers, repeats in LoG are frequently deployed as unmarked responses in subordinate lines of actions. Repeats are also used as more marked answers after understanding displays. This article attempts to stress the importance of investigating non-standard languages and variety contact in CA, thereby addressing the monolingual bias in research on polar questions.

Metalinguistic Concepts and Attitudes toward Mexican Spanish in Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico

This paper investigates metalinguistic concepts and language attitudes toward Mexican Spanish varieties and Spanish-Amerindian language contact in Oaxaca, Mexico. Theoretical-methodological approaches from Perceptual Dialectology and Metapragmatic Sociolinguistics are used to analyze non-linguists’ views of linguistic variation and their prestige attributions in the multilingual communicative space of southern Mexico. On the data basis of semi-narrative interviews with speakers from the metropolitan region of Oaxaca, we discuss the results of a discourse analysis of these perceptions. The results show a tripartite division of the Oaxacan dialectal space with sporadic mention of salient linguistic features for each conceptualized variational space, an overt prestige for the urban Oaxacan variety and its close link to the Mexico City standard, and a negative attitude toward linguistic interferences coming from Spanish-indigenous language contacts.

Colexification of “thunder” and “dragon” in Sino-Tibetan languages

ABSTRACT This paper explores the colexification of “thunder” and “dragon” in languages spoken in the Qinghai-Tibetan region. A sample of 372 languages from Sino-Tibetan, Dravidian, Indo-European, Mongolic-Khitan, Tungusic, and Turkic was collected. These languages were classified into colexifying and dislexifying languages, depending on whether the two concepts are associated with shared lexical forms. The findings reveal that 47 languages in the sample exhibit thunder-dragon colexification; most of them are Bodic and Na-Qiangic languages, with a few Sinitic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages. This areal pattern results from both inheritance and language contact. For the latter factor, Tibetan influence plays a significant role, as evidenced by the borrowing observed in non-Bodic languages. The linguistic boundary of thunder-dragon colexification aligns with the territory of the historical Tibetan Empire. Moreover, based on historical linguistic reconstruction from Old Chinese, the colexification is a likely feature of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, well preserved in Bodic languages but lost in Sinitic ones. However, some modern Sinitic dialects, particularly the Wu dialects, still maintain the relic connection between “dragon” and “lightning.” Finally, the findings suggest that thunder-dragon colexification originated from North China, and dragon is the mythologized form of thunder and lightning by the Proto-Sino-Tibetan people during the Neolithic period.

Más las oigo, mejor me parecen: comparativas proporcionales idiolectales

Abstract In this work, the symmetric comparative correlatives attested in the journalist Rubén Amón’s speech and writing are analysed. The interest of these constructions lies in the fact that they are virtually non-existent in European Spanish (and have very low frequency in American varieties, as I show). By exhaustively analysing the linguistic production of this journalist, I describe these idiolectal syntactic uses (which have not always been part of his grammar) and I propose a hypothesis about their origin, based on language contact with Italian and French. To understand how an individual feature persists despite not being shared by other members of the community, I examine the perceptions of European Spanish speakers of these constructions.