Language Contact Situations Research Articles

Gender Agreement in a Language Contact Situation

Gender agreement between determiners and nouns, and gender agreement between third-person clitics and their referents, are notoriously difficult to acquire by bilingual speakers who lack them in their first language, or in one of their first languages. We present a study that explores the differences between gender agreement between a determiner and a noun and gender agreement between clitics and antecedents or doubled DPs among Shipibo-Spanish speakers. The oral production data that were elicited from 17 adult Shipibo-Spanish bilinguals by using a picture-based narration task show a notable difference in the agreement patterns between nouns and determiners, and between clitics and their antecedents/doubled DPs. Similar patterns are found among five Spanish-Shipibo bilinguals who were living in the same contact situation. While the participants consistently marked strong gender agreement within the DPs, a lack of gender specification was found in the agreement between clitics and antecedents or doubled DPs in the clitic-doubling and dislocated structures. These results are not unexpected as they mirror the results from previous work, where the clitic gender does not systematically match the antecedent gender, especially with feminine antecedents or doubled DPs. Furthermore, this study confirms previous evidence that the gender-specific clitics, lo/la, have been replaced by the invariable clitic, le, in contexts where agreement with a doubled DP or an antecedent is expected. In contrast, there is evidence of agreement between determiners and nouns in this group of bilinguals. These facts allow us to conclude that, although gender is present in Shipibo-Spanish bilingual speakers’ grammar, it is largely absent and is not operative in Shipibo-Spanish speakers’ clitic agreement in oral production.

Variation in Spanish /s/: Overview and New Perspectives

The natural tendency for language variation, intensified by Spanish’s territorial growth, has driven sibilant changes and mergers across the Spanish-speaking world. This article aims to present an overview of the most significant processes undergone by sibilant /s/ in various Spanish-speaking areas: devoicing, weakening, aspiration, elision, and voicing. Geographically based phonetic variations, sociolinguistic factors, and Spanish language contact situations are considered in this study. The sibilant merger and its chronological development in modern Spanish, along with geographic expansion, have resulted in multiple contemporary dialectal variations. This historical lack of stability in these sounds has marked modern regional variations. Tracing and framing the sibilants’ geo-linguistic features has received much attention from scholars, resulting in sibilants being one of the most studied variables in Spanish phonetics. In this article, we provide a concise approach that offers the reader an updated sociolinguistic view of the modern cross-dialectal realizations of /s/. It is essential to study sibilant development to describe Spanish dialects, the differences between Transatlantic and Castilian varieties, and the speech features found in Spanish speaking communities in the Americas. Examining sibilance from different approaches with a representative variety of Spanish dialects as examples advances the importance of sociolinguistic phenomena to index language changes.

The Vulnerability of Emerging Sign Languages: (E)merging Sign Languages?

Emerging sign languages offer linguists an opportunity to observe language emergence in real time, far beyond the capabilities of spoken language studies. Sign languages can emerge in different social circumstances—some in larger heterogeneous communities, while others in smaller and more homogeneous communities. Often, examples of the latter, such as Ban Khor Sign Language (in Thailand), Al Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (in Israel), and Mardin Sign Language (in Turkey), arise in communities with a high incidence of hereditary deafness. Traditionally, these communities were in limited contact with the wider deaf community in the region, and so the local sign language remained relatively uninfluenced by the surrounding signed language(s). Yet, in recent years, changes in education, mobility, and social communication patterns have resulted in increased interaction between sign languages. Rather than undergoing language emergence, these sign languages are now facing a state of “mergence” with the majority sign language used by the wider deaf community. This study focuses on the language contact situation between two sign languages in Kufr Qassem, Israel. In the current situation, third-generation deaf signers in Kufr Qassem are exposed to the local sign language, Kufr Qassem Sign Language (KQSL), and the dominant sign language of the wider Israeli deaf community, Israeli Sign Language (ISL), both of which emerged around 90 years ago. In the current study, we analyzed the signing of twelve deaf sign-bilinguals from Kufr Qassem whilst they engaged in a semi-spontaneous task in three language conditions: (1) with another bilingual signer, (2) with a monolingual KQSL signer, and (3) with a monolingual ISL signer. The results demonstrate that KQSL-ISL sign-bilinguals show a preference for ISL in all conditions, even when paired with a monolingual KQSL signer. We conclude that the degree of language shift in Kufr Qassem is considerable. KQSL may be endangered due to the risk of social and linguistic mergence of the KQSL community with the ISL community in the near future.

Just Enough English to Get by: Language Practices of Transnational Migrants in Chinese Stores in Cape Town, South Africa

Abstract The presence of a Chinese community in South Africa has become increasingly visible over the last decade, particularly in the trading sector. This is illustrated in the sizable number of new shopping centres settled specifically by groups of Chinese traders, known as China Towns. Shopkeepers and shop assistants come from various linguistic and cultural backgrounds, China and other African countries respectively, but living and working in a multilingual South Africa, they communicate in English, which is the lingua franca. This paper explores their language practices and reflects on a particular language contact situation where shopkeepers and assistants of various migrant origins work closely together. The study adopts a linguistic ethnographic approach to the analysis of the interaction between shopkeepers and assistants and uses conversation analysis to elucidate the ways in which meaning is negotiated and understood in interaction between multilingual speakers. Unscripted audio recorded spoken interaction of the participants throughout the workday is the primary source of data. Additionally, interviews and observational notes are used to supplement the interactional data and illustrate the creative forms of language use that emerge in a in a China Town centre near Cape Town in the Western Cape.

A Note on Parameter Setting in Contact Situations

This paper revisits the study of linguistic variation within the Government and Binding approach to parameters, pointing out some limitations of parameter schemata in language contact scenarios. Discussion is focused on the possibility that clustering effects (the schemata themselves) are more complex than conventional approaches suggest. We outline an alternative approach, directly connected to Uriagereka’s typology or parameters, which is itself based on Chomsky’s Theory of Formal Languages. Empirically, we focus on language contact situations, as they provide cases where variation by contact operates under what we call an Excess of Stimulus, whereby access to the relevant data is overwhelming, but somehow ignored by learners.

SOCIOLINGUISTIC REPRESENTATIONS REGARDING LINGUISTIC CHARCTERISTICS OF UKRAINIAN, RUSSIAN AND SURZHYK IN UKRAINIAN MEDIA DISCOURSE

This article examines the widespread social perception of the linguistic characteristics of Ukrainian, Russian languages and Surzhyk, which is commonly known as a mixed language of the two. The aim of this article is to establish a common interpretation of their forms and uses from a sociolinguistic perspective to clarify their perceived valuation in the situation of language contact. We rely especially on the theories of sociolinguistic representations and language majoration and minoration, elaborated in the French sociolinguistics, which allows us to have a clear view of the dynamic system within the multilingual communities. This study gives a detailed analysis of journalistic articles dedicated to language issues in Ukraine published on the internet, for gaining a broad and topical sets of data. Our results show that there exists a complex relation between the mixed language and the two languages, where on the one hand Surzhyk is interpretated to be constructed from the Ukrainian and Russian languages, while on the other hand, the illiterateness of its speakers is emphasized. Furthermore, we see that speaking Surzhyk could in fact be more negatively perceived than speaking Russian, since it has the potential to pose a threat to the existence of the Ukrainian language.

Studying the Role of Media in the Diffusion of English Words Into the Kashmiri Language: A Linguistic Overview

Studying the predominant occurrence and existence of English lexicon in other languages in contact with English has emerged out to be of immense interest among the researchers of sociolinguistics and theoretical linguistics. The present study is devoted to demonstrate various English-Kashmiri language contact situations and the subsequent diffusion/ flow of English words into the Kashmiri language. The study attempts to explore the significant role of media in its different forms in enhancing and determining the transport of English words into the speech of Kashmiri speakers. The study seeks to address the motivation and inspiration of Kashmiri speakers behind the English-Kashmiri linguistic shift, and the influence of the prevailing circumstances on this English-Kashmiri linguistic diffusion. The liberality of the English language in handing over such an enormously huge amount of word treasure to the Kashmiri language, and the receptivity of the Kashmiri language in accepting this vocabulary treasure from English at a very large scale has been thrown light on in the study. In the present study, an attempt has been made to display a comprehensive list of English words used in various domains of social life of the Kashmiri speech community.

RESEARCH OF LINGUOCULTURAL ASPECTS OF THE TERMINOLOGY OF INTERNATIONAL AND REGIONAL TOURISM

The issue of the relationship and interconnection of language and culture has always aroused considerable interest of many linguists, who, despite the originality of approaches to this issue, consider culture and language in interaction. Modern linguistics seeks to comprehend the cultural consciousness of a single nation through linguistic means. International tourism continues to grow and diversify exponentially, creating situations of intense language contact and giving rise to unexpected sociolinguistic dynamics and phenomena.

The development of the encoding of deictic motion in the Bantu language Rangi: grammaticalisation and change

AbstractThe close cross-linguistic relation between the domains of space and time has been well described. The frequent emergence of Tense-Aspect-Mood (TAM) markers from deictic motion verbs in particular, has also been extensively detailed in the literature. This paper focusses on the less well-known link between associated motion, a category of functional morphemes expressing (deictic) motion events, and TAM, in a language contact situation. Specifically, it provides a synchronic and diachronic description of three associated motion prefixes,joo-,tóó-andkoo-, found in the Tanzanian Bantu language Rangi, spoken in an area of high linguistic diversity. It proposes that the prefixjoo-encodes movement towards a deictic centre,tóó-encodes movement towards a goal which is not the deictic centre, andkoo-encodes movement away from a deictic centre. It further contends that whiletóó-andkoo-have maintained a purely deictic function,joo-has grammaticalised to assume an additional function whereby it encodes future tense, possibly aided by the absence of a dedicated future tense marker in the language. This three-way morphological encoding of spatial relations on the verb form is not a common characteristic of East African Bantu languages. However, this paper proposes that the system in Rangi can be accounted for on the basis of cross-linguistically widely attested pathways of grammatical change.

A morphosyntactic approach to language contact in African varieties of English

ABSTRACT This study aims to widen our knowledge of substrate influence and language transfer in World Englishes through the study of the verb complementation system of REGRET in four African postcolonial varieties. An examination of the most widely spoken substrates in each variety does not seem to explain the different tendencies in the distribution of finite and nonfinite complementation patterns across varieties, since English varieties with different complementation systems in their substrate languages, Kenyan English and Nigerian English, for example, show similar distributions in their use of English complementation. Such differences in the distribution seem to be the result of other factors playing an essential role in language contact situations, namely, the tendency towards transparency in second language varieties, the geographical proximity of the English varieties, and the evolution of the varieties measured in terms of the Dynamic Model (Schneider 2007).

Word-order variation in a contact setting: A corpus-based investigation of Russian spoken in Daghestan

AbstractThis paper deals with word-order variation in a situation of language contact. We present a corpus-based investigation of word order in the variety of Russian spoken in Daghestan, focusing specifically on noun phrases with a genitive modifier. In Daghestanian Russian, the nonstandard word order GEN+N (prepositive or left genitive) often occurs. At first glance, this phenomenon might be easily explained in terms of syntactic calquing from the speakers’ left-branching L1s. However, the order GEN+N does not occur with the same frequency in all types of genitive noun phrases but is affected by several lexicosemantic and formal features of both the head and the genitive modifier. Therefore, we are not dealing with simple pattern borrowing. Rather, L1 influence strengthens certain universal tendencies that are not motivated by contact. The comparison with monolinguals’ Russian, in which prepositive genitives sporadically occur too, supports this hypothesis.

Contrasting Romance and Turkish as Source Languages: Evidence from Borrowing Verbs in Modern Greek Dialects

Abstract In this paper, I deal with verb borrowing in a language-contact situation involving Greek as target and Romance and Turkish as source languages. More particularly, I discuss the reasons and techniques that make verbs of typologically and genetically different languages to be accommodated in a uniform way within the same linguistic system, and verbs of the same donor to be integrated in a different manner within the same recipient. I try to provide an explanation for the observed divergences and similarities by appealing to an interplay of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. For the purposes of this study, evidence is drawn from both written and oral sources from five Greek dialectal varieties: Grekanico, Heptanesian, Pontic, Aivaliot and Cypriot.

Usage-Based Contact Linguistics: Effects of Frequency and Similarity in Language Contact

Abstract The influence of usage frequency, and particularly of linguistic similarity on human linguistic behavior and linguistic change in situations of language contact are well documented in contact linguistics literature. However, a theoretical framework capable of unifying the various explanations, which are usually couched in either structuralist, sociolinguistic, or psycholinguistic parlance, is still lacking. In this introductory article we argue that a usage-based approach to language organization and linguistic behavior suits this purpose well and that the study of language contact phenomena will benefit from the adoption of this theoretical perspective. The article sketches an outline of usage-based linguistics, proposes ways to analyze language contact phenomena in this framework, and summarizes the major findings of the individual contributions to the special issue, which not only demonstrate that contact phenomena are usefully studied from the usage-based perspective, but document that taking a usage-based approach reveals new aspects of old phenomena.

Red, black, and white hearts: ‘heart’, ‘liver’, and ‘lungs’ in typological and areal perspective

AbstractOn the basis of a sample of 424 languages or dialects, this article provides a typological-comparative investigation of designations for three major internal organs of the torso, the ‘heart’, the ‘liver’, and the ‘lungs’. While colexification patterns are relatively unconstrained, the data show a skewing in morphologically complex terms: ‘heart’ and ‘liver’ often serve as head nouns in complex terms for ‘lungs’, but the reverse is rare. Another recurrent phenomenon is that two of the organs –sometimes ‘heart’ and ‘lungs’, but more frequently ‘liver’ and ‘lungs’– share their head noun, and are distinguished from one another by modifiers that refer to their most salient characteristics, as in Azerbaijaniaɣ ǯiyær‘white ǯiyær’ = ‘lungs’ andgara-ǯiyær‘black-ǯiyær’ = ‘liver’. Having thus set the typological stage, I move on to discuss two different regions of the world in which such terms for ‘lungs’ and ‘liver’ have spread through language contact. This has happened in Eurasia, where the abovementioned pattern, which I call “explicitly dyadic”, was brought from Turkish to vernaculars of the Balkans and, most likely through Azerbaijani influence, to languages of the Southern Caucasus. Similar explicitly dyadic terms, but based on a head noun meaning ‘heart’, also occur in the Andes, where they appear to have spread from Quechuan to Barbacoan languages. The evidence not only shows that ‘liver’ and ‘lungs’ form a “semantic dyad” in which designations make use of “opposed characteristics” in different regions of the world, but also that such designations are salient and therefore prone to spread in language contact situations.

A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages. Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World

A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages. Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World

On the fringe between West and North Germanic

Abstract In this paper I investigate the early language contact between North Frisian and Danish. Since we have no direct evidence for this language contact apart from the layer of medieval Danish interferences in Modern North Frisian, the question arises, whether it is possible to say anything about the specific type of language contact that has taken place in the Middle Ages on the basis of the modern language data and with the help of language contact theory. Taking the lead of van Coetsem’s language contact theory, I discuss two phenomena in the (morpho)syntax of Modern North Frisian, the placement of directional particles and the inventory of verbal particles, and argue that they point to a language contact situation in which a considerable number of Danish-speakers shifted to North Frisian.

Slavic Alpine micro-varieties as part of an “Alpensprachbund”?

AbstractThis chapter deals with some characteristics of two more-or-less isolated Slavic varieties in the south-eastern Alps: Resian and Carinthian Slovene, whose nearest relative among the Slavic standard languages is Slovene. Both have been for centuries in situations of total language contact with Romance and Germanic varieties. I will concentrate on thecomepassive. At least in Resian, it developed due to direct Romance influence, which could be claimed to be the overall reason for this grammatical feature in the Alps. The situation in Molise Slavic in southern Italy will serve as a point of comparison.

Bidirectionality of language contact: Spanish and Catalan vowels

The disproportionate number of studies in Barcelona and the Balearic Islands observing Spanish contact effects in Catalan production, rather than Catalan contact effects in Spanish production, is an oversight of bidirectionality and the probabilistic nature of social factors in situations of language contact. Accordingly, the present study analyzes both Catalan and Spanish mid front vowel production data from Barcelona to investigate whether Catalan contact effects occur in Spanish via a process of dissimilation, and whether such effects are strengthened in younger speakers due to the relatively recent implementation of Catalan linguistic policy in the educational and public spheres. The results are suggestive of dissimilation, where phonetic distinctions are maintained between Spanish /e/ and the two Catalan mid front vowels across both F1 and F2. Additionally, analyses of variance across F1 and F2 reveal that Spanish /e/ productions across F1 are more diffuse in younger speakers and Catalan mid front vowels across F2 are less diffuse, providing evidence of reciprocity in contact effects. These results underscore the bidirectional nature of language contact and advocate for the use of variance of F1 and F2 as a metric of phonological contact effects.

THE LINGUISTIC ADAPTION IN AN IMMIGRANT LANGUAGE SETTING IN MAKASSAR, INDONESIA

Historically, the immigrant has been living and interacting with Makassar people and others in Makassar since 2014 until today. These interactions result unique way of how these immigrant use language to communicate. This article mainly aimed to describe how was the language used among immigrant in Makassar. The data were collected through observation by recording the conversation and interviewing some of the participants to confirm how and why they used certain dialect during the conversation. These interactions by using some language variation or dialects can be called a language contact situation. In their early presence that immigrant used English (Eng) and Indonesia language (IL) formally to communicate with IOM staff, UNHCR staff, among immigrant, and out of them, but when they have access to live for a while in Makassar, they interact with Makassar people freely and they use various languages such as Makassar language (ML), Indonesian language by Makassar Malay language (MML) as the trend of Makassar dialect, or sometimes used English as their language code. MML was mostly used compared to other language by those immigrants in some public area in Makassar. The using of MML by immigrant was a linguistic adaptation to the target language.

Is ‘Camfranglais’ A New Language? A Review of Current Opinions

The language-contact situation in Cameroon, where hundreds of ethnic languages coexist with two official languages and a number of lingua francas, continues to evolve and to produce new usage trends and patterns. One of the outcomes of the dynamism of the linguistic situation in Cameroon is the emergence over the last three decades or so of a new linguistic phenomenon that some researchers have styled “Camfranglais” for the simple reason that it comprises a combination of elements drawn from Cameroon indigenous languages (“cam”), from French (“fran”), and from Pidgin English (“anglai”). What precisely this French acronym refers to in linguistic terms remains fairly controversial as some researchers see in this phenomenon the emergence of a new language while other evidence suggests that ‘Camfranglais’ is certainly a new speech form but not a new language in the strict sense of the term.
 This paper sets out to review some of the current opinions about Camfranglais with a view to determining if Camfranglais can be considered a language in its own right or simply as a new speech form which can be said to form a continuum with mainstream Cameroon English. It equally highlights the complexities that render this linguistic phenomenon so elusive to definition.