Language Contact Situations Research Articles

Linguistic Variability across Four Generations of Basque Spanish Speakers

Abstract The present study uses the apparent-time construct to analyze cross-generational variability of the preverbal double negation construction (i.e., yo tampoco no voy a la fiesta ‘I’m not going to the party either’), traditionally cited as a regional characteristic of the Spanish spoken in the Basque Country. An acceptability judgment task and a semi-structured interview were carried out among four different age groups. The results show that speakers of the two older generations tend to accept and produce the regional construction significantly more than speakers of the two younger generations, who favor the Standard Spanish variant (yo tampoco voy a la fiesta ‘I’m not going to the party either’). It is suggested that this trend is mainly due to the participants’ different language contact situations (Thomason and Kaufman, 1988) and levels of formal education. Since older speakers grew up in a situation of shift via interference and with lower levels of formal education, they prefer the preverbal double negation construction, which was already a norm in the regional Spanish. However, younger speakers grew up in a language maintenance situation and have relatively high formal education levels, factors that have conditioned dialectal leveling in this case.

Language Contact in Santrokofi, a Ghana-Togo Mountain Language Community: Impact on Selee

The present study examines the language contact situation in Santrokofi, in Ghana, where Selee, a Ghana-Togo Mountain language, enjoys a good degree of maintenance although it is in triglossic contact with Ewe, Akan, and English. With insight from the triglossic structure model, we collected and analysed quantitative and qualitative data which revealed that Selee is the natives’ ingroup language while Ewe (and to a limited extent, Akan) is their intergroup informal language with “others”; English is the dominant language of classroom interactions and other formal settings. There is evidence of lexical borrowing into Selee from the other languages, especially English and Ewe. The youth may be said to be holding on to Selee impressively, but this ongoing language maintenance may be put to the test by the looming encroachment of Santrokofi by Hohoe, the neighbouring major township where most public servants in Santrokofi currently reside.

The Significance of Ijaw Linguistic Features in Ebi Yeibo's The Fourth Masquerade

Stylistics is a branch of linguistic studies, which uses the linguistic features in analysing literary texts and other works of art. Stylistics is also seen as the academic study of styles, where a scholar can look at the language and style of any author he chooses to study. This research work looks at the Ijaw linguistic features Ebi Yeibo employs in The Fourth Masquerade to send his intended messages to his readers. The work's title is The Significance of the Ijaw Linguistic Features in Ebi Yeibo's The Fourth Masquerade. The Ijaw linguistic features are identified and interpreted to the readers. The theoretical frameworks chosen as guides to the study are: Leo Spitzer's Philological Circle and Geoffrey N. Leech's Style as Deviation models. The study adopts the Qualitative Approach as the methodology because it is interpretative, descriptive, analytic and evaluative in nature. The aim of the study is to project the fact that code-mixing and code- switching are veritable linguistic tools in a language contact situation. The data of the study is collected through primary and secondary sources, which include: the careful reading of the primary texts, excerpts from a personal interview with the author, and comments from other critics. The work is significant to both researchers, scholars, critics and the society in general because it reveals that an analysis of a literary text from a linguistic standpoint is possible. The study explicates that Yeibo uses lexical borrowings, Ijaw idioms/proverbs, native rhetorical patterns, semantic extension and dislocation, etc. to address the themes of corruption, oppression, poverty, protest, bureaucratic inefficiency of government and institutional and moral decay of the Niger Delta.

Bilingual literacy learning in adult education

AbstractCommunity-based literacy teaching workshops attend to the learning needs of new students who have not been able to benefit from enrollment as children in the public school system. The following report from the field calls attention to the special circumstances of this heterogeneous group of literacy learners. The workshop described here engages learners who are literacy learners as well as second language learners of the national language, in this case Spanish. Literacy learning proceeds in parallel with second language learning. The report summarizes a series of informal interviews with students and their teacher and observation of their adult literacy program, during a period of approximately ten years. As such it provides preliminary findings for better understanding the problems of community literacy programs in bilingual communities in general. The tasks of learning to read and write present themselves in a special situation of language contact, that of community language and national language.

The Diffusion of Switch-Reference Systems through Language Contact: SR System Transfer versus Morpheme Borrowing

This paper examines the transfer of switch reference systems and morphology in three language contact situations - Coastal Papua New Guinea, The Gulf Region of the U.S.A. and Australia. In this paper, I discuss possible factors influencing the occurrence of either system or morphological transfer or both in each situation, as well as offer evidence that morphological transfer involving switch reference may be more common than so far acknowledged in the literature. Several possible scenarios for how SR may be transferred are also given. The data for this paper come from published sources on the languages discussed, with the theoretical conclusions I offer based on the implications of the data considered.

Utilizing acoustic methods to investigate word-boundary vowel sequences in one Arabic-Spanish contact situation

In the modern world, the globalized nature of both Arabic and Spanish has led to distinct contact situations in different countries. This investigation focuses on word-boundary vowel sequences, which are typically realized as hiatuses or diphthongs in native Spanish speakers. By contrast, native Arabic speakers will not utilize diphthongs across word boundaries, instead preferring to lengthen one vowel or produce a glottal stop (Mohamed 2020).This investigation examines how these distinct strategies are reconciled in the contact situation of Moroccan immigrants to Spain by utilizing acoustic methods to identify and qualify the bilingual approach to word-boundary vowel sequences. This investigation compares monolingual Spanish speakers (n = 3) to two groups of L1 Arabic (Arabic-dominant and Spanish-dominant, n = 7) in Alicante, Spain. Participants completed a language survey, a reading task, and a sociolinguistic interview. All linguistic tasks were recorded and analyzed acoustically on Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2023) utilizing the waveform and spectrogram to identify the strategies utilized to resolve the phonological boundaries. Results from Spanish-dominant bilinguals differ from previous studies in Puerto Rico (Mohamed, 2020), suggesting that this language contact situation differs in Spain and opening up new avenues for study in this area.

L’imperfetto resiano fra tempo, aspetto e modo

The present paper gives a description of the forms and functions of the imperfect in Resian, a Slovene-based micro-language spoken in northern Italy, which has been in a situation of language contact with Romance varieties for centuries. The comparison between the imperfects found in the oldest documents (eighteenth and nineteenth century) and those used in modern Resian shows a significant shift of its functions. The imperfect, in fact, has lost its original aspect-temporal values, now expressing mainly counterfactuality and the future in the past. Our analysis includes a discussion on the possible role of foreign influence in these developments.

Two Raji Dialects Converge with Persian: Contrasting Responses to Contact Influence

AbstractRaji is a Central Plateau (Iranic) language spoken in Kashan district, in the north-west corner of Esfahan Province, Iran. Here, we investigate the nature of Persian influence on the lexicon of two closely-related Raji dialects: that of Abuzeydabad, a desert outpost at 947m above sea level, and Barzok, a well-watered farming community at 2080m in mountains nearby. As expected, our analysis shows many inherited similarities due to linguistic relationship among the three Iranic varieties; cases of difference and innovation that distinguish them; and profound impact of Persian on both Raji dialects. Nonetheless, the degree and patterning of convergence with Persian is uneven, with the dialect of Abuzeydabad showing greater wholesale borrowing from Persian, as well as evidence of structural hybridization. To account for the divergent effects of Persian influence, we review social and geographic dynamics in the language contact situation. Key factors such as population, distance from the nearby Persian-speaking city of Kashan, language identity, and the impact of media and education are equivalent. However, a stark contrast between the towns’ geographic settings defines their social networks and patterns of mobility, and in turn how speakers of each linguistic code respond to Persian influence.

Backflagging revisited: A case study on bueno in English-Spanish bilingual speech

Most approaches to discourse markers tend to rely on observation on the behavior of monolingual classes of markers. In this paper, we offer a detailed analysis of the behavior and function of a single Spanish discourse marker, namely bueno, in bilingual discourse as opposed to its bilingual counterpart well. In particular, we compare pragmatic factors, and namely fine-grained differences between Spanish bueno and English well, with interactional factors such as the position of the marker in monological vs. dialogical sequences. Finally, we also take into account the impact of individual linguistic choices by comparing the behavior of different speakers when using the scrutinized discourse marker. Thus, we do not only contribute to and expand on previous literature on the behavior of discourse markers, but we also offer a new perspective to further study discourse markers in situations of language contact.

Declarative intonation of Japanese-Spanish bilinguals in Spanish casual speech

This study presents an analysis of Spanish intonation produced by native speakers of Japanese. The analysis focuses on the nuclear configurations of 828 declarative tokens in the semi-spontaneous Spanish speech of 12 Japanese-Spanish bilingual speakers living in Valencia, Spain. Results of the analysis show that the speakers can produce the prosodic differences between two declarative utterance types that are differentiated in peninsular Spanish by pitch peak timing and final boundary contours. Specifically, the speakers of this study favored rising final boundary tones when maintaining their turn and the falling final contours for the end of turn. Results show interlanguage with greater variation in final contours and pitch peak placement than predicted. The study contributes to acoustic research on learner intonation by late bilinguals, particularly in a language contact situation involving an Asian language and romance language pair.

Ethnolinguistic Vitality, Social Identity and Inter Group Relationship in a Multilingual Contact Situation

Indian language contact situations are multilingual in nature, due to presence of
 different cultural and linguistic groups. In majority of the Indian multilingual contact
 situations, language groups are not clearly divided under dimensions of dominant/
 non-dominant, majority/minority, etc. In this backdrop the present paper makes an
 effort to understand the nature and dynamics of ethnolinguistic identity of three
 language communities of central Kolkata and their relationships with each other based
 on a study conducted in a language contact situation. The language groups taken for
 the study were English speaking Anglo-Indians, native Bengali speakers, and Urdu
 speaking Muslims of central Kolkata region. The study with help of theoretical principals
 of cross-cultural and social psychological perspectives tried to explore the dynamics of
 a multilingual contact situation, where none of the languages in the contact situation
 clearly fits the dimensions of majority/minority, dominant/non-dominant groups.

Anaphora resolution and age effects in Greek-Spanish bilingualism: Evidence from first-generation immigrants, heritage speakers, and L2 speakers

The present study compares anaphora resolution (AR) data from Greek and Spanish monolinguals and Greek-Spanish bilinguals who live in Chile to identify differences in resolving third-person null subjects (NSs) and overt pronominal subjects (OSPs) in ambiguous non-focused linguistic contexts. Overextension of the scope of OSPs in contexts where NSs are discursively expected has been consistently observed in different language contact situations, including pairs of null subject languages. According to the Interface Hypothesis, this is a compensatory strategy that occurs on account of bilingualism itself (inefficiency in syntax-pragmatic mappings). The study evaluates the Interface Hypothesis, focusing on the understudied combination of Greek and Spanish, by comparing three types of bilinguals: first-generation immigrants, heritage speakers, and L2 speakers, together with monolingual baseline groups. In addition, the study examines the age effects on speakers’ performance. Five groups of speakers (N = 115; age range 16–87; mean: 50.13, SD = 19.33) performed a self-paced auditory AR task. No overextension of the scope of OSPs was found in any of the bilingual groups, against the predictions stemming from the Interface Hypothesis. Significant age effects were found in the interpretation of NSs by both monolingual and bilingual speakers of Greek.

Identifying the dialectal background of American Finnish speakers using a supervised machine-learning model

Abstract This study presents results of two experiments using supervised machine-learning models to examine individual Finnish speakers’ dialectal backgrounds. Data come from interviews conducted with heritage speakers of Finnish in northern Wisconsin and are compared to data from the Finnish Dialect Syntax Archive. The models were constructed and then, following successful validation testing, used to identify the dialectal background of five individual American Finnish speakers. Results showed individual variation in dialectal backgrounds and some correlation to speakers’ likely language input. Our approach offers a new methodological tool for examining speakers’ dialectal backgrounds in situations of language contact.

English/Spanish Relatives and Their Relative Information Structure: A View from Language Contact in Puerto Rico

The goal of this paper is to analyse the impact of Main Clause Phenomena (MCP) such as Negative Preposing (NPr) in four types of relative clauses, namely definite restrictive, indefinite restrictive, non-restrictive and kind-defining relative clauses, establishing a contrast between English and Spanish and discussing the interconnection of the two languages in a language contact situation such as the one observed in Puerto Rico. To this end, I have carried out an experiment with monolingual native speakers of the two languages (control groups), where they have to judge the grammaticality/acceptability of the different types of relatives when NPr takes place. In addition, the same task is carried out by a bilingual group of Puerto Ricans (PR). The main purpose was to detect any interference of one language upon the other one regarding the licensing conditions of NPr in relative clauses. The main empirical result shows that English makes a distinction in terms of acceptability between types of relatives with NPr, whereas in Spanish NPr is licensed in all types of relatives, and this situation seems to be mimicked in the language contact situation in Puerto Rico, though some crucial differences are detected which suggest that PR bilinguals have an integrated I-language (sensu López 2020). The results support the idea that there are two big groups of relatives, namely asserted (very similar to root clauses) and non-asserted relatives. The latter include definite restrictive relatives, whereas the former include non-restrictive relatives, kind-defining relatives and indefinite restrictive relatives. Based on discourse-feature inheritance, intervention and the projection of a factive operator in non-asserted relatives (subject to parametric variation), I argue that the PR results show that when processing one specific language they may apply a syntactic rule of the other language, which I take to support the integrationist view of bilingualism.

The ‘Big DP’ Hypothesis: New Evidence from Gender Agreement in a Shipibo-Spanish Language Contact Situation

Previous evidence suggests clitics and determiners do not enter the same type of gender agreement relations in contact varieties of Spanish, despite proposals that treat clitics as determiners (big DP – Determiner Phrase – hypothesis) (Uriagereka 1995; Cecchetto 1999, 2000; Belletti 2005). We conducted a study on gender agreement between clitics and their antecedents, and determiners and nouns among adult Shipibo-Spanish bilinguals to answer the following question: Do Shipibo- Spanish bilingual speakers have similar patterns of local vs. long-distance gender agreement? Our results show gender agreement between D and N obtains categorically, but gender agreement between the clitic and its antecedent is at chance-level. We propose an alternative analysis for our data that does not assume the big DP hypothesis.

Reiterative Code-Switching: Argument-Marking in Cena

Situations of language contact are often the norm for sign languages. This article investigates a case of unimodal contact between Cena, a young sign language in its third generation that is used in a small rural community in Brazil, and Libras, the national sign language of Brazil. Our analysis concerns one by-product of this contact: reiterative code-switches, wherein signers produce a sequence of two signs—one from each language—with the same meaning to label a single referent. We consider several motivations detailed in existing literature on code-switching, before proposing an explanation motivated by the disambiguation of reversible (therefore potentially ambiguous) verb events, primarily by using reiteration to focus agents. We suggest that with this phenomenon, we see signers employ a previously unattested strategy to mark arguments and thereby aid syntactic disambiguation.

Gilaki: From Language Regimes into Minoritizing

The effects of language contact depend on many different factors, such as language prestige, government and community support, people’s preference, linguistic proximity of the languages, among other things. As such, while there are some broad potentially predictable outcomes in situations of language contact, it is important to analyze each language contact situation in its own context. The aim of this study is to examine the maintenance and social function of Gilaki in the city of Lahijan located in the province Gilan, Iran. This study also poses the question whether Gilaki is at risk of becoming an endangered language. The participants (N=395), students at a language center and their families, completed a questionnaire with 36 questions. The participants were grouped according to gender, age, educational background, occupation, and spouse’s mother tongue based on a self-reported data collection style. The questionnaire, inspired by Parasher’s model (1980), examined the participants’ language use and preference in six social domains of family, friendship, neighborhood, transaction, education, and administration. The findings show statistically significant differences in the participants’ preference toward Persian in all six social domains. This study contributes to the body of work in language contact of lesser analyzed languages and sheds light on the trajectory of minoritized languages.

Linguistic Repertoires: Modeling Variation in Input and Production: A Case Study on American Speakers of Heritage Norwegian

Heritage Norwegian in the American Midwest is documented through a corpus of recordings collected and compiled over a time span of 80 years, from Einar Haugen’s recordings in the 1940s via the CANS corpus up to the present-day in the authors’ own recordings. This gives an unprecedented opportunity to study how a minority language changes in a language contact situation, over several generations and under gradually changing circumstances. Since we also have thorough historical knowledge of the institutions and societal texture of these communities, this privileged situation allows us to trace the various sources of input available to the heritage speakers in these communities in different relevant time slots. We investigate how the quality and quantity of input at different times are reflected in the syntactic production of heritage speakers of the corresponding generational cohorts, focusing on relative ratios of specific word orders (topicalization and verb second, prenominal and postnominal possessive noun phrases) and productive morphosyntactic paradigms (tense suffixes of loan verbs). Utilizing a model of relations between input and output, receptive and productive competence, to show how input–output effects will accumulate throughout the cohorts, we explain the observed linguistic change in individuals and society.

The Main Factors Leading To Code-Switching In Azerbaijan

In today's globalized world integration of languages is a frequently experienced issue. Nowadays, people speak both English and Russian by mixing them with the Azeri language often. In linguistics, this phenomenon of mixing two languages is analyzed and termed in various forms, such as code-switching, interculturalism, code-mixing etc. The study integrates quantitative research to assess interlocutors' and respondents; attitudes toward code-switching by using close-ended questionnaires. By revealing the key aspects affecting the emergence of code-switching from historical perspectives, the paper proves that preserving the originality and uniqueness of a language is a challenge that needs to be overcome. However, nowadays, at some point and by some respondents, this tendency has not been evaluated negatively. By touching upon language contact situations based on intimate intersocietal relations and the outcome of this situation, the author used the quantitative method and data collection to conclude the goal set. Based on the background information of the respective community, the data and calculations are compiled systematically in tables and graphs for further analysis. The research outcome shows that education and other socio-economic relations are vital in protecting the existence and identities of languages. Moreover, the respondents' attitudes toward growing tendency helped to demonstrate the position and perspectives of people from different genders, backgrounds, and occupations.

Possessive pronouns in Russian-German language contact: variation or change?

Abstract The article addresses the question of what happens to internal linguistic variability in a language contact situation by looking at how first-generation Russian immigrants in Germany use two variants of possessive pronouns (reflexive and non-reflexive) for referencing the subject. To what extent does the frequency of the variants, as well as linguistic constraints on their use, remain the same as in the monolingual variety, or change to converge with the structures of the majority language? A forced choice sentence completion task was conducted with 96 adult monolingual Russian and 96 adult bilingual Russian-German speakers to measure the frequency of both variants and the effect of animacy and referentiality of the possessum. The results reveal an increased frequency of the non-reflexive variant in bilingual Russian, indicating convergence with German. At the same time, bilingual speakers observe the same animacy and referentiality constraints on the possessive choice as monolinguals. The effect of linguistic constraints, however, is smaller than the influence of individual speaker-related variables. Overall, our study indicates that convergence in language contact affects the frequency but not the conditioning of the variants and only in some bilingual individuals.