Multilingual Contact Research Articles

Epistemic modality and evidentiality in virtual intercultural exchanges between Turkish and Texan users of English

AbstractThis study reports on data from two 6‐week virtual intercultural exchanges (VIEs) between teachers of multilingual learners in K‐12 schools in Türkiye and the United States. Using the data from these asynchronous VIEs, we focus on Turkish world Englishes speakers’ use of epistemic markers and evidentials. We examine how participants from Türkiye use markers of epistemic modality and evidentiality in intercultural encounters and how that use influences their construction of cultural information about Türkiye. Our findings show participants selectively code epistemic modality and evidentiality to indicate (their proximity to) the source of cultural information, avoid potential misunderstanding, and claim responsibility for the factuality of the information shared (or not). Our study contributes to understanding how world Englishes and Intercultural Communication intersect in multilingual contact zones that transcend borders―both real and imagined―between cultures, languages, and nations.

Mixed language in flux? The various impacts of multilingual contact on Lánnang-uè’s wh-question system

Aims and objectives: What exactly happens to a mixed language’s system in a multilingual contact setting? This study aims to investigate the interactions between speakers’ exposure to, frequency of, and proficiency in four languages (English, Tagalog, Hokkien, and Mandarin) and their influences on the why-fronting only wh-question system of Lánnang-uè, a mixed language used by the metropolitan Manila Lannangs. It also aims to test the validity of the assertion that symbiotic mixed languages are more likely to be in flux. Methodology: The Lánnang-uè speakers participated in production and acceptability experiments. Data analysis: Likelihood to front (production) and responses to a 7-point Likert-type scale (acceptability) were the dependent variables for several Bayesian linear mixed-effects models with age, frequency of language use, and language proficiency as primary fixed effects, sociolinguistic factors (e.g., attitudes, identity) as covariates, and participant (and when appropriate, item) as a random effect. Findings: Both production and acceptability results showed that the effects of contact are numerous and far from homogeneous. They vary depending on the source language, wh-phrase type, and degree of consciousness. They corroborate the widely held belief that mixed languages are less stable in symbiotic contexts. However, this paper goes an extra step to show that this “instability” or variability is not always a consequence of contact-induced transfer. It demonstrates that when the source languages influence the stability or development of the mixed language, the effects can be diverse, encompassing aspects such as identity processes, language attitudes, structural transfer, and/or other sociolinguistic innovations. Originality: This article is one of the first studies to examine the effects of contact between multiple languages on a mixed language variable using both production and acceptability experimental data in a five-language context. It is one of the very few variationist works in the Philippines that considers the effects of multilingualism on variation and change.

Enacting Chinese-ness on Arab Land: A Case Study of the Linguistic Landscape of an (Emerging) Chinatown in Multilingual and Multicultural Dubai

Abstract An urban space’s linguistic landscape represents a multimodal and multilingual discourse, indexing the historical, socio-political, cultural, and ethnolinguistic aspects of the locale. Contributing to sociolinguistic research in our global cities, this study zooms in on an unexpected Chinese ethnic enclave, or Chinatown, in Dubai, a superdiverse urban space and multilingual contact zone in post-colonial UAE. Drawing on a corpus of authentic LL data taken from Dubai’s emerging ‘Chinatown’, the study shows that a multilingual triad involving Arabic, English and Chinese is a pervasive sight in this area, deviating from the taken-for-granted and ‘choreographed’ bilingual LL in Dubai overall featuring Arabic and English. Notably, Chinese, as an index of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural identity and marker of boundary, is the most prominent and informative, whereas Dubai’s official language Arabic often appears in small font size and is rendered inconspicuous. This gives rise to a scenario I call ‘small-print multilingualism’ – a conscious attempt for small-business owners to include Arabic reluctantly only to get the ‘job’ done and conform to relevant rules and regulations. Theoretically, this article argues for the relevance of Bakhtin’s concepts of centripetal and centrifugal forces in helping shed light on the dynamic and negotiated relationship between official top-down regulations and bottom-up linguistic practices on the ground in ethnic enclaves. Ultimately, this study adds to our understandings of language and multilingualism in (super)diverse global cities

Reciprocal constructions

Abstract This study analyzes the borrowing of Dutch reciprocal pronouns in a corpus of primary field data of Sranan, Sarnami, and Surinamese Javanese, three languages of Suriname. The expression of reciprocity in relevant African and Asian substrates of the languages under study is also presented and discussed. I suggest cognitive and sociolinguistic explanations for the preference of Dutch-sourced reciprocal pronouns during multilingual contact. The three languages show convergent borrowing processes favoring the dedicated Dutch reciprocal pronoun over ‘scattered’ native strategies. Further, Suriname is a hierarchical post-colonial language ecology in which borrowing proceeds mostly in one direction, either directly from Dutch, or from Dutch via Sranan. The parallel multilingual trajectory of contact-induced change in the expression of a complex notion like reciprocity showcases the attractiveness for borrowing of forms and structures with transparent relations between form and content.

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.

Fashioning ‘Belgian’ Literature and Cultural Mediatorship in the Journal littéraire et politique des Pays-Bas autrichiens (1786)

The present study re-examines the underexplored region of the eighteenth-century Southern Netherlands as a multilingual contact zone, one that is open to and affected by numerous transfers from neighbouring, more established cultures through the mediation of various actors. Embedded in a larger project on (literary) journals and their role in the shaping of a proto-Belgian literature before 1830, this article presents the case study of a short-lived Brussels periodical, founded by the French émigré Jean-Baptiste Lesbroussart (1747–1818). With his Journal littéraire et politique des Pays-Bas autrichiens (1786), Lesbroussart created a literary journal that presented itself as fundamentally reader-oriented. By taking into consideration Lesbroussart’s agency as a cultural mediator, we lay bare three levels of mediation informing his Journal: (1) his institutional mediatorship, or the entanglement of the networks in which he was involved, his intended readership, and the didactic goals of his journal; (2) his aesthetic and ideological mediatorship, meaning the structure and composition of his journal as well as the editorial strategies revealing a reader-oriented strategy; and (3) his cultural mediatorship, or his self-defined role as translator and the emphasis he puts on transfer and translation as means of cultural identity construction. By doing so, our case-study provides a first stepping-stone towards a more encompassing study, and thus it enables new insights into the circulation, production, and networks of eighteenth-century literary culture in the Southern Netherlands.

Bruges as a multilingual contact zone: book production and multilingual literary networks in fifteenth-century Bruges

AbstractMedieval Bruges was an important international economic hub in the late Middle Ages. Similar to other luxury goods, manuscripts produced in Bruges were intended for both local and international audiences. This article scrutinizes the specific urban context of Bruges as a multilingual contact zone focusing on quantitative data of extant manuscripts and case-studies of professional and non-professional book production. The dominance of francophone manuscripts in a Dutch-speaking town is noteworthy and called for an actively bilingual community of book professionals. Furthermore, the social competition of locally embedded social groups (court, merchants, craft guilds) influenced language choice as well. Both ‘official’ production of books for trade by professional writers and librarians, and the ‘private’ multilingual literary accomplishments of Bruges city-dwellers, illustrate the multilingual dynamics of urban contacts in Bruges.

Global Englishes and ‘Japanese English’

ABSTRACT The unprecedented spread of English requires a rethink of traditional concepts, such as the target speech community, target culture, and native speakers of the language. On the one hand, the global reach of English may be understood as having national or regional English varieties in the world, including ‘Japanese English’, which are expected to represent local speech communities, cultures, and identities. In this understanding, English belongs to all these ‘new’ territories. On the other hand, global encounters through English may be understood as multilingual contact among English users beyond geographical boundaries with no preassigned communities, cultures, identities, or power relations. The concept of native or indigenous English speakers is irrelevant to this understanding. In reference to complexity theory, the current article conjoins both of these understandings and thereby identifies the role of ‘Japanese English’ in present-day communication.

Bilingual youth’s language choices and attitudes towards Nahuatl in Santiago Tlaxco, Mexico

ABSTRACT The younger generations are considered one of the principal agents in the maintenance or shift of any language. In the cycle of the language maintenance, children learn their mother tongue, and pass it on to the future generations. The cycle is broken when they no longer speak the mother tongue. The language choices they make are particularly interesting in bi-/multilingual contact situations. This paper explores the language choices and attitudes of bilingual youth in the Nahuatl-speaking community of Tlaxco in Mexico. Bilingual participants, aged 12–17, completed a language questionnaire on their language use with 21 interlocutors and attitudes towards Nahuatl and Spanish. Results showed that the youth used Nahuatl predominately with only one interlocutor, their grandparents, although they expressed favourable opinions about Nahuatl. With other interlocutors, the language use was evenly distributed between only Spanish and both languages. These results indicate a need to expand the domains in which Nahuatl is used, starting with the parents in the home front. This study is the first to assess language use and attitudes of bilingual youth in Tlaxco.

The Swiss Paradigm of Multilingualism and English

The paper addresses quadrilingual Switzerland as a unique sociolinguistic context with reference to the presence and the role of English. The aim is to outline a framework referred to as The Swiss Paradigm that builds on relevant theory blended with the results of a quantitative research. The theoretical reflection comprises the assumptions of contact linguistics and macro-sociolinguistics, whereas the empirical knowledge comes from the CATI (Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing) survey carried out in the canton of Zurich in 2011. A particular interest focuses on the changes that occur in language practices and communicative patterns embedded in the Swiss multilingual setting. The paper intends to provide a macro-sociolinguistic account of multilingual contact where one of the languages develops lingua franca features. Thus, English as a global language in the multilingual context of Switzerland may be expected to yield a peculiar scenario displaying the characteristics of the Swiss context. This model does not claim validity for all multilingual settings, but rather urges that other cases be compared with this one in the light of the paradigm’s predictions. The proposed Swiss paradigmatic framework indicates – viewed through a macro-sociolinguistic lens – that the present linguistic situation in Switzerland eems to reflect a growing symbiotic relationship between English and the Swiss vernaculars.

Youth multilingualism in South Africa’s hip-hop culture: A metapragmatic analysis

This paper describes the practice of youth multilingualism in South Africa’s hip-hop culture, in an online social media space and an advertising space. Based on a multi-sited ethnographic ?eldwork study of youth multilingual practices, comprising of the following data sets – multilingual interviews, observations, multilingual interactions and performances, documents and online social networking interactions – the paper reports on how young multilingual speakers active in the hip-hop culture of the country talk and write about the intermixing of racial and ethnic speech forms, as well as use registers in the practice of gendered identities. The argument I put forth in the paper is that the examples of youth multilingualism suggest a complex picture of youth multilingual contact in postcolonial South Africa, and one that require a sociocultural linguistic response that accounts for the cultural in?uence of youth multilingualisms in local hip-hop culture. To such an end, I suggest that multilingual policy planning in the country should be readjusted to the complex sociocultural changes we see emerge with youth multilingual practices.

Border Crossing: Feminist Sinologies through a Southeast Asian Lens

Wendy Law-Yone’s 2010 novel The Road to Wanting offers a Southeast Asian lens through which one might examine China’s southwestern frontier and relationships forged within the Sino-Myanmar borderlands. The Road to Wanting maps an intersectional, interracial terrain where the past is selectively developed through transnational joint ventures and promises of an improved future with localized flair, a speculative modernity that is fabricated by bodies differentially marked by minoritization, mobility, and capital. Offering a view of “the Wild West of China,” the novel highlights the interactions among peripheral and marginalized populations that are often homogenized in ethnonationalist terms (e.g., as Chinese, Zhonghua minzu, or Burmese). My analysis highlights how Law-Yone’s polyphonic play within this multilingual contact zone generates alternative paradigms for transnational encounters and translocal affective affinities. The essay suggests that an expansive notion of Chinese women’s studies might adapt or borrow from recent transnational and methodological turns in ethnic minority studies and US critical race studies that analyze not only the hegemonies operating within one’s own “home” field (read: nation, race, ethnicity, or discipline) but also imperialistic relationships with a nation’s internal others and geopolitical margins. In this way, then, a transnationally inflected model of feminist sinologies can productively consider the politics of knowledge in the study of Chinese women and men while keeping in mind the effects of Chinese capital and geopolitical power in the nation, in the region, and in the heterogeneous formations of sinophone studies. My reading therefore endeavors to realign our view of what might constitute China studies, feminist sinologies, and Asian/American writing in an increasingly globalized and transnational world.

Digital superdiversity in Luxembourg: The role of Luxembourgish in a multilingual Facebook group

The concept of superdiversity (Vertovec, 2007) is useful for describing the linguistic and demographic situation of Luxembourg. Luxembourg has a historically trilingual language situation incorporating Luxembourgish, French and German. In addition to this, the growth of the financial sector has increased the presence of English as a lingua franca. In addition to changing migration patterns, new online phenomena also influence language and communication practices in Luxembourg. This paper analyses digital communication practices related to superdiversity in a Facebook group associated with Luxembourg. Although the main purpose of this group is to facilitate the gifting of consumer goods, it has the side-effect of promoting intercultural and multilingual contact among diverse residents of Luxembourg. The paper focuses on how communication is organised between the diverse members of the group, based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of language practices over the first eighteen months of the group׳s existence. The analysis illustrates how language became an issue with the growth of the group, shows how members׳ language practices changed over time, and highlights the role of the group administrators, who intervened to regulate incidents within the group and facilitate group communication. The paper also considers how technical features of this particular digital environment impact on communication practices within the group. The results of the analysis show that language practices of group members tend inexorably towards homogenisation rather than diversification, putting into question the relationship between a superdiverse context and superdiverse communicative practices.

Three Stories

Thwarted romances between Garrisoned American Soldiers and Young Filipinas, problems of translation in a multilingual contact zone, and the precarious masculine authority of the imperial agent irresistibly drawn to the mysterious women who surround him—these are the subjects of Frank R. Steward's short fiction about the American military occupation of the Philippines. But Steward's perspective as an African American military officer complicates efforts to interpret such familiar colonial scenarios. The stories' formal experimentation makes them a significant discovery in the archives of empire.

Revisiting English prosody

Many New Englishes are spoken in what can often be considered multilingual contexts in which typologically diverse languages come into contact. In several Asian contexts, one typological feature that is prominent in the multilingual contact situation (the “ecology”) is tone. Given that tone is recognized as an areal feature and is acquired easily by languages in contact, the question that arises is how this is manifested in the prosody of these New Englishes. Recent work has shown that contact languages, including English varieties, evolving in an ecology where tone languages are present do indeed combine aspects of tone languages. This paper attempts to go a step further, in suggesting not only that such varieties should not be viewed as aberrant in comparison to “standard” English but recognized as having their own prosodic system partly due to substrate typology, but also that in the consideration of New Englishes — here, Asian (but also African) Englishes — the traditional view of English as a stress / intonation language need to be revisited and revised, to consider some New Englishes as tone languages. Singapore English (SgE) is presented as a case in point, with the presence of tone demonstrated in the set of SgE particles acquired from Cantonese, at the level of the word, as well as in the intonation contour which moves in a series of level steps. A comparison is then made with Hong Kong English, another New English in a tone-language-dominant ecology, with a consideration of typological comparability as well as difference due to the dynamic nature of SgE’s ecology.

Macedonian discourse markers in the Balkan Sprachbund

This paper examines the adversative discourse markers ама and ами in Macedonian in order to shed light on the interdependence of typology and convergence. Macedonian is typically located in the center of the Balkan Sprachbund. At the same time, a comparison of these two particular discourse markers in Macedonian and Bulgarian, both Balkan Slavic languages, demonstrates that a simplistic application of the criterion of Turkish borrowings would suggest that Bulgarian be considered the more central member of the Balkan Sprachbund. What the following discussion will reveal, however, is that the source of borrowing (i.e. Turkish versus Greek) is not as important as the actual fact of borrowing, i.e. the intensity of multilingual contact, for the determination of centrality.

Universal constraints and local conditions in Pidginization

This paper looks at the processes involved in the genesis of three pidgins of New Guinea. I will argue that the main principle at work in the formation of the morphosyntax of pidgins is a general human capacity for language simplification, but that these processes of simplification are subject both to the effects of specific linguistic features in the local multilingual contact situation that gives rise to the pidgin and to constraints resulting from a universal linguistic endowment. By a comparative look across a range of morphosyntactic features at the processes of simplification that produced three unrelated pidgins of New Guinea, Yimas Pidgin, Hiri Motu and Tok Pisin, the article exemplifies some of the types of structures that can result in pidgins from this general human capacity for language simplification, sifted through both local conditions and universal constraints.

Township language dynamics: isiZulu and isiTsotsi in Umlazi

Due to the prevalent multilingual contact situation, South Africa is an energetic laboratory for diversity of language varieties and language contact phenomena. Nonetheless, little research has been conducted regarding different urban mixed-codes, and investigations into Tsotsitaal or Iscamtho varieties have focussed on the Gauteng province. This paper, in contrast, focusses on a language variety hitherto discussed only peripherally by South African sociolinguists, an urban mixed-code spoken in the Umlazi township of KwaZulu-Natal, referred to as 'isiTsotsi' by its residents. Furthermore, I analyse the relationship between this urban mixed-code and 'standard' isiZulu by drawing from the theoretical framework of diglossia. The societal phenomenon of diglossia (Ferguson, 1959; Fishman, 1972; Hudson, 2002) has been referred to in multifaceted ways in South Africa's multilingual landscape and English is generally identified as the H(igh)-variety. This paper offers an analysis of a different kind. Considering the attention the English language has already received in South African sociolinguistics, it seems apt and timely to concentrate research efforts on less obvious dynamics. Hence, this paper explores the potential of 'isiTsotsi' as the L(ow)- and standard Zulu as the H(igh)-variety in the township domain (hereafter H- and L-variety).

Before the Lingua Franca: Pidginized Arabic in the eleventh century A.D.

This paper presents and analyzes a ten-sentence text written in a form of pidginized Arabic in the mid-eleventh century A.D. Linguistic features of the text are compared to features of modern Arabic-based pidgins and the Arabic-based creole Ki-Nubi; to Classical Arabic and modern colloquial Arabic dialects; and to Berber languages, which were spoken widely in the part of the Sahara from which the text apparently came. The results of this comparison show that the text shares a significant number of features with the modern pidgins and creole. Although a single brief text hardly provides enough evidence to establish the existence of a fully crystallized pidgin language, we argue that social conditions in towns along the medieval Arab trade routes in northern Africa were likely to have been appropriate for the development of a pidgin. Finally, the main theoretical point we make is that the common view of pidgins and creoles as an exclusive, or almost exclusive, result of European trade and global colonization arises from an accident of history - namely, the fact that most Western scholars are familiar only with European writings from relevant periods - and not from an examination of all the available evidence from multilingual contact situations in which no Europeans were involved.