Effects Of Language Contact Research Articles

On Catalan as a minority language: The case of Catalan laterals in Barcelonan Spanish

AbstractThis investigation examines the variable production of alveolar laterals in Barcelonan Spanish as a case study evidencing the effects of language contact between a majority language, Spanish, and a minority language, Catalan. The Catalan‐Spanish speech community constitutes a rather unique case of majority‐minority language contact, particularly within the Spanish‐speaking world, as Catalan, though a minority language in Spain, is characterized by such a high degree of linguistic vitality, linguistic capital, and social prestige in the autonomous region of Catalonia that its status as a minority language is to a degree, questionable. I account for sociophonetic variability in the production of Barcelonan Spanish /l/ by a set of linguistic (phonological context, cognate status) and social factors (gender, age, style, language dominance) that support an analysis of lateral velarization as contact‐induced and situate this case of language contact as a natural or otherwise predictable outcome of this community's sociolinguistic and sociodemographic history, notably concerning changes in immigration patterns, language ideologies, and language use in the last century. Additionally, I highlight how the gradient nature of select sociophonetic variables uniquely conditions nuanced social indexation in the speech community, specifically in the absence of any one singular or discrete, community‐wide acoustic variant.

The bilingualism of Hungarians in the United Kingdom and Ireland: Possible language contact effects in the language use of immigrant communities. A work in progress.

The bilingualism of Hungarians in the United Kingdom and Ireland: Possible language contact effects in the language use of immigrant communities. A work in progress.

Establishing Contact: Slavonic Influence on Romanian Morphology?

Abstract It is not disputed that Slavonic languages have influenced the inflexional morphology of Romanian and its closely related Daco-Romance varieties. For example, Romanian vocatives in -o, Istro-Romanian perfective verb-roots, and probably the Megleno-Romanian first and second person singular endings -um and -iʃ, are all attributable to Slavonic. These cases generally involve loans of ‘morpheme’-like entities, phonological strings associated with a particular grammatical meaning. However, it has recently been suggested (e.g., by Elson, 2017) that certain Romanian paradigmatic patterns of root allomorphy in the verb, notably those involving the effects of palatalization, are influenced by Slavonic models. Some of these patterns appear to be of a qualitatively different kind from run-of-the-mill ‘morphemic’ loans, in that they are autonomously morphological, and cannot be associated within any coherent grammatical meaning. The borrowing of such purely morphological patterns under conditions of language contact has not hitherto been attested in the literature on language contact, and the evidence for such cases in Romanian deserves careful scrutiny. Unfortunately, the arguments provided for these putative borrowings can be shown to be rest on seriously flawed assumptions. Examination of those arguments serves to focus our attention on the kind of criteria that need generally to be met if the effects of language contact in morphology (or any other domain) are to be plausibly demonstrated. In particular, I shall emphasize the need for appeals to language contact carefully to exploit the full range of available comparative evidence, and to establish rigorous criteria to exclude the possibility that apparent contact effects are explicable by factors internal to the history of the recipient language.

Lower Kolyma multilingualism: Historical setting and sociolinguistic trends

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: The region of Lower Kolyma (LK), Russia, exhibits a unique multilingual situation which involves five languages from five different families: Even (Tungusic), Yakut (Turkic), Chukchi (Chukotko-Kamchatkan), Tundra Yukaghir (Yukaghir), and Russian (Slavic, Indo-European). Our research aims to show the ongoing changes in this setting and to explain the historical background of these trends. Design/methodology/approach: Our approach combines the results of a sociolinguistic survey, published data about the history and ethnography of the region, and observed linguistic effects of language contact. Data and analysis: The sample for our sociolinguistic study includes 196 individuals, born between 1878 and 1996. To assess the patterns of multilingualism we use two parameters: the number of acquired languages and the composition of the linguistic repertoires. To model the linguistic situation in the 20th century, an average life span parameter is used. Findings/conclusions: We demonstrate that in 1940 to 1980 it was most common for LK residents to use all languages of the region. Partly, at least, this was a consequence of the introduction of boarding schools, which became an additional domain for interethnic communication. In recent decades we observe a tendency for a shift to Russian with a concomitant decrease in speakers of the minority languages. Originality: We use an approach of retrospective interviews which allows us to cover a large time period and to provide an overview of changes in the multilingual setting during the 20th century. Thus, even though multilingualism in this area has already been discussed by Vakhtin, the methodological approach is different. Significance/implications: The paper contributes to the field of sociolinguistics, presenting a new case study of multilingualism from an area of Siberia which is understudied in this regard.

Language contact and morphological competition: Plurals in central Sicily

This paper explores the effects of language contact in the nominal morphology of central Sicilian dialects. In particular, this study is concerned with the contact-induced changes related to the distribution of three plural formatives that give rise to competition between different inflectional classes with respect to a number of lexemes. It is shown that sociolinguistic factors such as speaker age account for the distribution of the competing plural forms and the high degree of variation. As a consequence, a slow and gradual change is leading to the disappearance of the plural form that has no equivalent in the contact language, that is, in Italian.

La discordancia de número en el doblado de objeto indirecto: nuevos datos del español de Galicia

AbstractThe article analyses the loss of agreement between the dative clitic and its plural nominal referent in indirect object clitic-doubling in Spanish spoken in Galicia. On the basis of the previously defended hypothesis that number disagreement makes part of a grammaticalisation process whereby the clitic becomes a case affix, the paper examines some internal factors which lack consensus in previous studies, such as the relation between (in)transitivity and position of the clitic or animacity of nominal referents of the IO, and other external factors. Data analysis reveals that the percentage of disagreement in this area is much higher than in other Spanish speaking areas. This fact might be a consequence of language contact with Galician, a language where number inflection in the dative clitic is neutralised. To verify this hypothesis, the paper explores the relation between the number of occurrences of disagreement and the level of bilingualism of the speakers.

The Effects of Language Contact on Non-Native Vowel Sequences in Lexical Borrowings: The Case of Media Lengua.

Media Lengua (ML), a mixed language derived from Quichua and Spanish, exhibits a phonological system that largely conforms to that of Quichua acoustically. Yet, it incorporates a large number of vowel sequences from Spanish which do not occur in the Quichua system. This includes the use of mid-vowels, which are phonetically realized in ML as largely overlapping with the high-vowels in acoustic space. We analyze and compare production of vowel sequences by speakers of ML, Quichua, and Spanish through the use of generalized additive mixed models to determine statistically significant differences between vowel formant trajectories. Our results indicate that Spanish-derived ML vowel sequences frequently differ significantly from their Spanish counterparts, largely occupying a more central region of the vowel space and frequently exhibiting markedly reduced trajectories over time. In contrast, we find only one case where an ML vowel sequence differs significantly from its Quichua counterpart-and even in this case the difference from Spanish is substantially greater. Our findings show how the vowel system of ML successfully integrates novel vowel sequence patterns from Spanish into what is essentially Quichua phonology by markedly adapting their production, while still maintaining contrasts which are not expressed in Quichua.

Contact-induced change in the morphosyntax of Turkic in Boldaji, Chahar Mahal va Bakhtiari Province, Iran

This paper investigates effects of language contact on a previously undocumented variety of Turkic (Southern West Oghuz) spoken by sedentarized nomads in the city of Boldaji, Chahar Mahal va Bakhtiari Province, south-west Iran. Located in an area of high linguistic diversity including the Iranic language Bakhtiari and the Charmahali variety of Persian, Boldaji Turkic exhibits numerous contact-induced features. Here, drawing on data collected using the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) questionnaire, we focus on variation in five primarily morphosyntactic features, several of which have not figured prominently in the literature on contact-induced change in Turkic: (i) restructuring of vowel harmony; (ii) the postposed emphatic definiteness marker ǰoġɑz; (iii) an additional oblique pronominal stem based on bela- + possessive suffix; (iv) ‘can/be able’ expressions; and (v) a reduplicated progressive verbal form. In line with well-established criteria from contact linguistics, we assess the probability of contact-induced change for these five features by considering differences with other West Oghuz languages outside the area, namely Turkish and Azeri, to rule out an internal explanation. Unlike previous studies, which use standard-type Persian as the contact language, we show the importance of considering model structures in geographically contiguous languages, with a focus on Bakhtiari and the local Persian variety, to account for areal convergence. Finally, we consider the plausibility of various contact-based explanations in the light of our knowledge of related Turkic varieties in the area. Our data bring into question the common view that contactinduced change is preferentially associated with simplification; rather, we find a mix of structural changes involving both loss and gain of morphological matter, and patterns.

Balanced Bilingualism: Patterns of Contact Influence in L1 and L2 Turkic and Bakhtiari Speech in Juneqan, Iran

Most studies on language contact in Iran have focused on the effects of Persian on the country’s minority languages. There are also many cases where large regional languages such as Azeri, Kurdish, Balochi, Lori and Bakhtiari exert an influence on smaller regional languages, and a few studies have appeared on this topic. This paper examines the effects of language contact in the city of Juneqan in Chahar Mahal va Bakhtiari Province, Iran, where the position of two minority languages—Bakhtiari and Qashqai Turkic—appears to be evenly balanced. The analysis is based on a comparison of L1 and L2 speech from two bilingual individuals with a different L1, as found in responses to the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) questionnaire. Drawing on examples from lexicon, phonology and morphosyntax, the article argues that the equivalent influence of each language on the first- and second-language speech of members of the other language community is likely achieved not by simple equal status, but through the counterbalancing of regional Bakhtiari dominance with majority mother-tongue Turkic population in this city.

Impersonal and reflexive uses of Middle English psych verbs under contact influence with Old French

AbstractThis article discusses the relation between impersonal constructions and the reflexive use of psych verbs of theadmire-type (Levin 1993) copied from Old French to Middle English. The outset of the study is an observation made by van der Gaaf (1904) which was commented on by Fischer (1992) concerning the reflexive use of verbs likeremembren(Old Frenchremembrer) in the course of the development of impersonal constructions to personal constructions. My aim is to answer the following questions: First, was the reflexive use of verbs copied from Old French new to the Middle English system? Second, what is the syntactic and semantic relation between ME impersonal and OF reflexive constructions? I will first examine the reflexive construction in Old English and Old French to answer the first question. I will then deal with the second question taking a closer look at both constructions in Middle English. Supported by lexicon-based and corpus-based small-scale studies of the psych verbremembrenI will provide an analysis of the syntactic and semantic properties of the verb in both constructions and show that what they have in common is an intransitive structure where the subject is anexperiencer, and middle semantics. I will finally address possible effects of language contact through translations, before I conclude.

Bilingualism and sound change: perception in the /ʎ/-/j/ merger process in Majorcan Spanish

AbstractYeísmohas been accounted for as a merger process occurring in Spanish irrespective of language contact effects though some scholars have claimed that the interference between Spanish and the variety of Catalan spoken in Majorca (Balearic Islands, Spain) has an inhibiting effect onyeísmo. This paper focusses on whether this inhibiting effect can be demonstrated at the perception level and whether it has an effect in the linguistic behaviour of bilinguals. To examine these effects, we conducted an identification experiment with three groups of listeners (Majorcan Catalan-dominant bilinguals, Spanish-dominant bilinguals and a control group of Spanish monolinguals). Results show that Catalan dominants do recognise [ʎ] stimuli, but Spanish dominants only identify [ʎ] at chance level. Consequently, it would seem that bilingual subjects display a bimodal performance at the perception level.

Loss of Morphology in Alorese (Austronesian): Simplification in Adult Language Contact

This paper discusses historical and ongoing morphological simplification in Alorese, an Austronesian language spoken in eastern Indonesia. From comparative evidence, it is clear that Alorese lost almost all of its morphology over several hundred years as a consequence of language contact (Klamer, 2012, to appear). By providing both linguistic and cultural-historical evidence, this paper shows that Alorese has historically undergone morphological simplification as a result of second language (L2) learning. The first part of the paper presents a case study comparing the use of subject agreement prefixes in Alorese L1 speakers (n=6) and Alorese L2 speakers (n=12). The results show that L2 speakers deviate from the native norm, and tend to use one prefix as default agreement. The variation found among L2 speakers reveals an ongoing change possibly leading to the restructuring of the Alorese agreement system. The second part of the paper applies models of linguistic change (Kusters, 2003; Trudgill, 2011) to the Alorese community and shows that Alorese has been, and still is, spoken in a community with a large number of L2 speakers, where morphological simplification is expected to occur.

The variable palatal lateral in Occitan and Catalan: linguistic transfer or regular sound change?

ABSTRACTOccitan and Catalan are in an increasing state of language obsolescence in France. Their phonologies both contain a voiced palatal lateral approximant /ʎ/, not present in modern French, that is being replaced in all positions by the palatal approximant [j]. It is not clear whether this is an effect of language contact with French because [j] commonly emerges as a variant of /ʎ/ in non-contact varieties of Romance. This article examines the distribution of /ʎ/ in Occitan and Catalan, using auditory and acoustic data from a wordlist-translation task conducted with 40 native speakers. The analysis aims to determine the nature of this sound change either as the result of transfer from French or as a regular sound change that is motivated by the phonetic similarity of [ʎ] and [j]. The mechanisms governing transfer from French are modelled statistically to account for the distribution of historically appropriate and contact-induced variants of /ʎ/, and acoustic analyses test the hypothesis that the change is internally motivated and occurring gradually. Results show that the factors conditioning the change may be different in each of these related languages in that it is contact-induced in Occitan, but potentially due to internal and external factors in Catalan.

Chinese possesses Japanese style scrambling: the case of Xining Mandarin

Although Chinese is widely regarded as lacking the movement operation known as scrambling as it exists in languages like Japanese and Korean, this view does not take account of Northwestern dialects, which are known to be highly Altaicized. In this paper, a set of diagnostic tests is applied to object fronting in Xining Mandarin (Qinghai province), and the movement is argued to possess the properties of Japanese style scrambling—and not merely topicalization, which derives OSV order elsewhere among Chinese dialects. An analysis of scrambling in the dialect is proposed, and its anomalous presence in the Xining dialect is explained as a consequence of language contact with non-Sinitic languages in the region.

Contact effects on voice-onset time (VOT) in Patagonian Welsh

The effects of language contact extend well beyond the borrowing of lexical items, and can include morphosyntactic, phonetic, and phonological changes over time (Thomason & Kaufman 1998). One especially common structural outcome of long-term contact is phonetic transfer (Matras 2009: 222). The Welsh spoken in Patagonia, which has been in close contact with Spanish for the past 150 years, offers one example of this phenomenon: Jones (1984) observes that younger speakers of Patagonian Welsh may be developing unaspirated voiceless stops /ptk/ as a result of Spanish contact. This paper measures the voice-onset time (VOT) of the Welsh voiceless stops /ptk/ using contemporary conversational speech data from both Patagonia and Wales, for speakers in three age groups (0–29, 30–59, and 60+ years), to examine the effects of Spanish contact on Patagonian Welsh. Results indicate that the tendencies seen in Jones (1984) have held true, and in fact have generalized to become a feature of Patagonian Welsh for speakers of all ages: Patagonian speakers produce the Welsh stops /ptk/ with significantly shorter VOT than speakers from Wales. These results shed light on an important distinguishing phonetic feature of this understudied variety of Welsh, as well as the dynamics of language contact in action.

Voice onset time and beyond: Exploring laryngeal contrast in 19 languages

In this special collection entitled Marking 50 Years of Research on Voice Onset Time and the Voicing Contrast in the World’s Languages, we have compiled eleven studies investigating the voicing contrast in 19 languages. The collection provides extensive data obtained from 270 speakers across those languages, examining VOT and other acoustic, aerodynamic and articulatory measures. The languages studied may be divided into four groups: ‘aspirating’ languages with a two-way contrast (English, three varieties of German); ‘true voicing’ languages with a two-way contrast (Russian, Turkish, Brazilian Portuguese, two Iranian languages Pashto and Wakhi); languages with a three-way contrast (Thai, Vietnamese, Khmer, Yerevan Armenia, three Indo-Aryan languages, Dawoodi, Punjabi and Shina, and Burushaki); and Indo-Aryan languages with a more than three-way contrast (Jangli and Urdu with a four-way contrast, and Sindhi and Siraiki with a five-way contrast). We discuss the cross-linguistic data, focusing on how much VOT alone tells us about the voicing contrast in these languages, and what other phonetic dimensions (such as consonant-induced F0 and voice quality) are needed for a complete understanding of laryngeal contrast in these languages. Implications for various issues emerge: universal phonetic feature systems, effects of language contact on linguistic levelling, and the relation between laryngeal contrast and supralaryngeal articulation. The cross-linguistic VOT data also lead us to discuss how the distribution of VOT as measured acoustically may allow us to infer the underlying articulation and how it might be approached in gestural phonologies. The discussion on these multiple issues sparks new questions to be resolved, and provide indications of where the field may be best directed in exploring laryngeal contrast in voicing in the world’s languages.

Introduction: Multicultural youth vernaculars in Paris and urban France

The papers in this Special Issue present some of the results of theMulticultural London English/Multicultural Paris Frenchproject, supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) from October 2010 to December 2014 and by the FrenchAgence Nationale de la Recherche(ANR) from 2010–2012. The project compared language variation and change in multilingual areas of London and Paris, focusing on the language of young people of recent immigrant origin as well as that of young people whose families had lived in London or Paris for many generations. Similar projects in other European cities have documented the emergence of new ways of speaking and rapid language change in the dominant ‘host’ language, which are attributed to the direct and indirect effects of language contact; see, for example, Wiese 2009 on young people's language in Berlin, Quist 2008 on youth language in Copenhagen, and Svendsen and Røyneland 2008 on Norwegian). In London, young children from diverse linguistic backgrounds tend to acquire English in their peer groups at nursery school rather than from their parents, many of whom do not speak English or are in the early stages of learning English. Since their peers speak a wide range of different languages, the only language the young children have in common is English; and since many of their friends are also acquiring English, there is no clear target model, a high tolerance of linguistic variation, and plenty of scope for linguistic innovation. By the time they reach adolescence, young people's English has stabilized, and many innovations have become part of a new London dialect, now known as Multicultural London English (Cheshire et al., 2013). New urban dialects and language practices such as these have been termed ‘multiethnolects’: they contain a variable repertoire of innovative phonetic, grammatical, and discourse-pragmatic features. In multiethnic peer groups, where local children from many different linguistic backgrounds grow up together, the innovative features are used by speakers of all ethnicities, including those of local descent such as, in London, young monolingual English speakers from Cockney families. Nevertheless they tend to be more frequent in the speech of bilingual young people of recent immigrant origin, and by young speakers with highly multiethnic friendship groups (see further Quist 2008 for an account of the use of features associated with a multiethnolect in conjunction with nonlinguistic ‘markers’ of style, such as tastes in music and preferred ways of dressing). Our project aimed to determine whether a similar outcome had occurred in multicultural areas of Paris.

The impact of the English loanwords in the Central Kurdish dialect on media discourse

This article deals with the frequency of the use of English and Arabic loanwords in the central Kurdish dialect. Whereas a dramatic increase in the frequency of use of English loanwords was witnessed most notably in 2005 and 2011 in response to political and economic changes in Kurdish society, this was not the case with the frequency of Arabic loanwords reduced gradually following 1992 when Arabic ceased being used as an official language in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (K.R.I.). In particular, I examine the period from 2003 to 2013 as an important era due to a series of radical changes in socio-political domains in Kurdish society that resulted in a considerable number of borrowings in the representation of political notions but also because of the Kurdish and English languages intense contact. This article will further look at phonological changes of English loanwords over a period of time as a consequence of language contact. The diachronic analysis suggests that in some cases Kurdish writers have been motivated by their desire to use a form closer to English than Arabic. Methodologically, the study is based on a systematic research of political articles published in the Xebat newspaper. Finally, the article deals with the process of orthographic adaptation of the loanwords. The results indicates that the majority of these loanwords are adapted to the structure of this dialect of the Kurdish language.

On the Word Order of Ditransitive Constructions in Northwestern Chinese

Many studies (e.g., Ren 2004, Xu 2013, Zhou 2016) noticed the oddity of the SOV order of Northwestern Chinese in the context of Chinese as an SVO language, while much less attention has been given to word order in ditransitive constructions in Northwestern Chinese. This article examines the word order of ditransitive constructions in Northwestern Chinese dialects. In general, different ditransitive constructions belong to or are close to different language patterns (either the Chinese pattern or Altaic/Tibetan pattern). DOC and DDC-I in some SVO dialects represent the Chinese pattern. DatC-I and DDC-II have one additional feature that represents the Altaic/Tibetan pattern; i.e., the R is in front of the V. DDC-III and DatC-II, which exist only in the preferred SOV dialects, are closer to the Altaic/Tibetan pattern because the dative marker is postpositional. DatC-III, appearing in SOV dialects, completely turns to the Altaic/Tibetan pattern since the T also moves in front of the V. After the examination above, two typological features emerge. First, in some dialects, the R and T fall on different sides of the V, which is typologically rare. Second, the R is in front of the V, which is different from the placement in Mandarin Chinese. Both features are induced by language contact with Altaic/Tibetan languages in the same area. During language contact, some constructions in recipient languages change faster than others. For example, Wang and Dede (2016) demonstrated that the negative markers in the Xining, an SVO dialect, have little freedom of movement, and they must appear adjacent to the verb they modify; and the noun of a place of destination is located before the verb in SVO Northwestern Chinese. Both are different from Mandarin Chinese. This reveals that even if the basic word order of some Northwestern Chinese dialects is still SVO, the effect of language contact exists in a somewhat unremarkable manner, leading to gradual changes in word order. Take DatC-I as an example. One may not notice that DatC-I relates to language contact, since Mandarin Chinese seems to have the same kind of construction (i.e., the benefactive construction). However, after close observation, we find that DatC-I is the most common and natural construction for expressing a giving event, whereas the benefactive construction in Mandarin Chinese does not apply only to giving events. Therefore, DatC-I is a true ditransitive construction, whereas its formal counterpart in Mandarin Chinese is not. If these “quiet” changes are noticed, one can better grasp the complete picture of language change.

Phonetic transfer in language contact: Evidence for equivalence classification in the mid-vowels of Occitan–French bilinguals

This article examines first to second language (L1-to-L2) phonetic transfer in the speech of ten Occitan–French bilinguals, focusing on the mid-vowels in each of their languages. Investigating transfer in a situation of long-term societal language contact aims to shed light on the emergence of regional French phonological features from contact with Occitan. Using a sociophonetic methodology, the concept of equivalence classification (Flege 1988) is investigated, that is, that L2 words will be (initially) decomposed into familiar L2 sound categories, causing L1 and L2 sounds to resemble each other phonetically. The consequences of language contact are modelled statistically using an original corpus of over 1200 vowel tokens. The findings show that equivalence classification may not lead to equated sounds coming to resemble each other phonetically, suggesting necessary revisions to the speech learning model (SLM) hypothesis, and the need to consider the influence of sociolinguistic factors in situations of long-term language contact is emphasised.