Language Contact Situations Research Articles

Classifiers: Setting the scene

Abstract Classifiers are morphemes which occur under specifiable conditions and which categorise nominal referents in terms of their animacy, shape, and other properties. The most widely represented type is numeral classifiers, which occur next to a number word or a quantifier. Further types include noun classifiers, verbal classifiers, classifiers in possessive constructions, and deictic classifiers. One language can have more than one type of classifier. In some, the same set of classifiers occurs in several classifier contexts, corroborating the unity of the phenomenon. Classifiers categorise nouns, and have to be distinguished from verbal action markers used to categorise and count actions. Classifiers have a variety of functions, and are never semantically redundant. Classifiers mirror social attitudes and hierarchies, physical environment and means of subsistence, and are susceptible to change in language contact situations. Contributions to this issue adress the systems and the functions of numeral classifiers and also classifiers in multiple contexts across Asia and beyond, including Austronesian languages of Taiwan, a selection of Tibeto-Burman (or Trans-Himalayan) languages, Zhuang, a Tai-Kadai language, and Kazakh, a Turkic language.

Conditions for the Borrowing of Irregular Plurals in an Intense Language Contact Situation

This article is devoted to borrowing in Frisian of Dutch irregular plurals formed by suffixation and stem vowel lengthening; e.g. dak [dak] ‘roof’ - daken [da:k?/da:kn?] ‘roofs’ instead of Frisian dak [dak] - dakken [dakn?]. Irregular plural formation is unproductive in Dutch and uncommon in Frisian (except in a couple of historical borrowings). Although the appearance of irregular Dutch plurals in Frisian had not previously been described or investigated, we hypothesize their existence in spoken Frisian, based on analogical cases. However, they would not be borrowed without any limitations as various factors would affect their borrowability; e.g. words frequency, phonotactic constraints or paradigm alternation. This study is based on approximately 175 interview recordings. The participants were asked to name different objects shown to them during the interview picture task. The results confirm both the (quite frequent) use of Dutch irregular plurals in Frisian and the involvement of different (morphological) factors in the borrowing processes. Accordingly, borrowing of such plurals is not only a lexical matter, but also a grammatical one. Phonotactic factors do not appear to play any significant role, but paradigm alternation seems to be decisive in whether a plural can successfully be borrowed or not.

German and Turkish as minority languages

Language maintenance has been a central point in different linguistic disciplines, responding to an increasing degree to immigrant minority languages (IML) and the micro-level of language policies. However, while frameworks such as ethnolinguistic vitality theory account for general factors of language maintenance and loss, the individual factors of the respective cases are difficult to work out and challenge comparative studies. This article aims to compare situations of language contact, analysing two language biographies in two settings that have never been read in context: Turkish as an IML in Germany and German as an IML in Chile. Our aim is to investigate emerging factors for language maintenance in these settings, focusing on policies and attitudes, and examining their consequences within the families. Through the qualitative analysis, the importance of sociolinguistic factors from the individuals’ perspectives becomes apparent. The data reveal that the role of parental strategies in language exposure, use and policies is crucial but not sufficient in both contexts, indicating that the appreciation of an IML as a medium of instruction constitutes an insuperable condition fostering efficient language maintenance.

Sociolinguistic Implications of Language Contact Situation and the Development of Kashmiri-Arabic Common Lexicon

Sharing lexicon is a direct outcome of a language contact situation. When two or more languages exist side-by-side while serving the communicative requirements in a particular social situation, they grow in an envelope and environment of linguistic exchange, and sharing of lexicon among them becomes a natural process. In a language contact situation, the speakers of one language are bound to incorporate linguistic items from their contact languages into their language to satisfy their communication needs. In the linguistically heterogeneous and multilingual situation of the Kashmiri Speech Community, Kashmiri, a member of the Indo-Aryan family, and Arabic, a language of the Semitic family of languages, are two significantly dominant contact languages. The side-by-side existence of these two languages while serving different sociolinguistic purposes and the assignment of different roles to them in various domains of the social life of the Kashmiri speech community have resulted in a linguistic amalgamation at a very large scale. This linguistic amalgamation has, in turn, resulted in the transfer of an enormously huge stock of lexicon from Arabic into Kashmiri, thereby paving a smooth path for the development of an extensively large amount of lexicon common to them. In the present paper, an attempt has been made to demonstrate various Kashmiri-Arabic language contact situations and the subsequent transfer of the Arabic lexicon into the Kashmiri language. The paper also considers the impetus and inspiration behind this Arabic-Kashmiri linguistic flow in detail. The influence of some sociolinguistic factors and linguistic implications of the Kashmiri-Arabic common lexicon has also been explored in the study. In the paper, an effort has been made to throw light on the hospitality of the Arabic language in donating an enormously huge amount of word treasure to Kashmiri and the receptivity of the Kashmiri language in accepting this vocabulary treasure from the Arabic language.

A bifurcation threshold for contact-induced language change

One proposed mechanism of language change concerns the role played by second-language (L2) learners in situations of language contact. If sufficiently many L2 speakers are present in a speech community in relation to the number of first-language (L1) speakers, then those features which present a difficulty in L2 acquisition may be prone to disappearing from the language. This paper presents a mathematical account of such contact situations based on a stochastic model of learning and nonlinear population dynamics. The equilibria of a deterministic reduction of the model, describing a mixed population of L1 and L2 speakers, are fully characterized. Whether or not the language changes in response to the introduction of L2 learners turns out to depend on three factors: the overall proportion of L2 learners in the population, the strength of the difficulty speakers face in acquiring the language as an L2, and the language-internal utilities of the competing linguistic variants. These factors are related by a mathematical formula describing a phase transition from retention of the L2-difficult feature to its loss from both speaker populations. This supplies predictions that can be tested against empirical data. Here, the model is evaluated with the help of two case studies, morphological levelling in Afrikaans and the erosion of null subjects in Afro-Peruvian Spanish; the model is found to be broadly in agreement with the historical development in both cases.

Gender Agreement in Correntino Spanish

Abstract This article provides qualitative and quantitative analyses of variable gender agreement in Correntino Spanish, the variety of Spanish spoken by both Spanish-Guarani bilinguals and Correntino Spanish monolinguals in the province of Corrientes, Argentina. Drawing on data collected from fieldwork in the province, it will be shown that this variation is conditioned by distance effects and modifier class. Synchronic gender agreement variation in Correntino Spanish is attributed to diachronic source language agentivity effects (Van Coetsem, 1988) given the lack of gender inflection in Guarani. This phenomenon would be unsurprising as a contact effect if found synchronically only in bilinguals; however, its occurrence in monolinguals sets it aside as a rare instance of variable gender agreement in monolingual Spanish. This loosening of gender agreement mirrors the development of gender in Argentine Guarani (Cerno, 2010), and these phenomena taken together shed light on the malleability of gender systems under situations of intense language contact. Together they provide a valuable example of mutual contact-induced changes in gender systems.

Language contact across ethnic boundaries

Abstract Throughout antiquity, the Chittagong Hill Tract was a sparsely populated region. This population increased with the immigration of different speech communities, thus changing its linguistic mosaic, and creating conditions for language contact between vernacular Bangla and between its ancestral Indo-Aryan variety Pali, the superstrate, and the Tibeto-Burman variety, the substratum. In the changing language contact situation, language contact involved various phenomena, such as language maintenance, the creation of new contact languages, i.e. pidgins and creoles as well as the acquisition and integration into a dominant L2. Through this language contact, the processes of language contact have had particular linguistic, social, and political outcomes that have shaped the region. The linguistic outcomes include lexical borrowing, calquing, and structural convergence, as well as the creation of a new contact language combining both the Indo-Aryan vernacular and Tibeto-Burman vernacular. This paper discusses these outcomes, and describes that changes in the social and political makeup of the region have ultimately led to language change. The study argues that linguistic change appears at present in several ways: The lexical makeup, phraseology and syntactic structure of Indo-Aryan varieties spoken by the Tibeto-Burman speech communities; pidgins including Chakma and Tanchangya which have emerged from contact between the Indo-Aryan variety and the Arakanese vernacular; a Tibeto-Burman pidgin which has emerged from contact between the superstrata Marma and the substrates Chak, Khumi, and Kheyang, which are spoken by the Marma, Chak, Khumi, and Kheyang ethnicities. Ultimately, the study presents that these social and linguistic outcomes have manifested themselves in the form of bilingualism and so code-mixing, and where the political outcomes of language contact have forged the political makeup of the Chittagong Hill Tract to bring the region to become one part of the larger political superstructure of Bangladesh.

Perception and Production of Sentence Types by Inuktitut-English Bilinguals

We explore the perception and production of English statements, absolute yes-no questions, and declarative questions by Inuktitut-English sequential bilinguals. Inuktitut does not mark stress, and intonation is used as a cue for phrasing, while statements and questions are morphologically marked by a suffix added to the verbal root. Conversely, English absolute questions are both prosodically and syntactically marked, whereas the difference between statements and declarative questions is prosodic. To determine the degree of crosslinguistic influence (CLI) and whether CLI is more prevalent in tasks that require access to contextual information, bilinguals and controls performed three perception and two production tasks, with varying degrees of context. Results showed that bilinguals did not differ from controls in their perception of low-pass filtered utterances but diverged in contextualized tasks. In production, bilinguals, as opposed to controls, displayed a reduced use of pitch in the first pitch accent. In a discourse-completion task, they also diverged from controls in the number of non-target-like realizations, particularly in declarative question contexts. These findings demonstrate patterns of prosodic and morphosyntactic CLI and highlight the importance of incorporating contextual information in prosodic studies. Moreover, we show that the absence of tonal variations can be transferred in a stable language contact situation. Finally, the results indicate that comprehension may be hindered for this group of bilinguals when sentence type is not redundantly marked.

Fundamental frequency range in the bilingual repertoire of traditional and new Welsh speakers

Aims: This research aims to examine cross-linguistic interaction and intra-linguistic variation in the Welsh and English of bilingual speakers in two areas of north Wales. Specifically, I present an analysis of fundamental frequency range (FFR) and examine both cross-linguistic and intra-linguistic differences in speech production between bilinguals from Welsh-speaking and English-speaking homes. Design: Data were collected from Welsh–English bilinguals aged 16–18 in the areas surrounding the Welsh-dominant town of Caernarfon (Gwynedd) and the English-dominant town of Mold (Flintshire). The sample was equally stratified by speaker gender and home language. Data: The data were elicited from a reading passage task and were analysed acoustically. Measures of level and span were taken. Data were analysed using conditional inference trees and random forests. Findings: The results of the analysis of FFR in Caernarfon and Mold revealed no significant differences between English and Welsh. In Mold, gender was the only significant predictor of FFR across all measures. In Caernarfon, home-language differences in level were found in female speakers’ data only, and gender differences in span were found in the speech of those from English-speaking homes. Originality: The study contributes to previous studies of traditional and new speakers in minority-language contexts by examining both languages in the speakers’ repertoires. Specifically, it is the first study to examine the regional and home-language variation in FFR of bilingual speakers. Implications: The results highlight (1) the importance of community-specific patterns in minority-language contexts and (2) the way in which linguistic background might interact with other social factors in situations of long-term language contact. The results imply that a more holistic approach to examinations of variation in such contexts will be fruitful.

Los «posesivos enfáticos» en dos sociolectos del español europeo

AbstractThe «emphatic» possession has been traditionally related to American Spanish, specially, surfacing in language-contact situations. Taking this for granted, the present paper explores the sociolinguistic and dialectal distribution of this possessive construction in European Spanish and attempts to characterize it both semantically and syntactically. This paper analyzes over 20,000 tokens of possessive pronouns. Data are extracted from two corpus representative of the spoken varieties of urban and rural European Spanish. The analysis confirms the colloquial-familiar character of this syntactic construction and supports that the so-called «redundant» possessive acts as an index of type-shifting from a sortal to a relational noun.

아카디아 프랑스어에 대한 사회언어학적 연구 : ‘시아크(chiac)’를 중심으로

This paper is a first attempt to understand “Chiac” and its goal is to determine the degree of linguistic interference between French and English in a language contact situation where French is the minority language. To this end, we analyzed about 5,000 dialogues in France Daigle’s novel <Pour sûr> and revealed the following two facts through a series of discussions centered on “borrowing scales” and “integration.” First, through corpus analysis, we confirmed that the lexical categories most sensitive to borrowing are nouns, followed by verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in the order of how greatly they are influenced by English. Conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, and pronouns were also borrowed from English but the frequency of their borrowing was less high than those of the higher-ranking lexical categories. Second, in the case of adjectives, conjunctions, and verbs, even if they were borrowed from English, they were often assimilated into the unique grammatical rules of French, which differed from English. In the case of adjectives and verbs, inflections according to gender, number, and derivation according to person appeared; in the case of conjunctions, there was no morphological change but they did not have the power to ruin the grammatical structure of French. From the above two facts, we found that in the case of Chiac, factors such as function of words in a sentence, morphosyntactic differences, and complexity of grammar can affect the degree of language interference. This study hopes to resolve the serious imbalance in domestic studies and promote a broader understanding of French in North America.

Aesthetics in Styles and Variation: A Fresh Flavor

Speaker attitudes, ascriptions, qualia, and other forms of overt aesthetic commentary function as constraints on language and culture and are central to sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Despite the importance of aesthetics, sociolinguists studying variation and change have largely shied away from the topic. This review suggests that covert aesthetic evaluations play a role in variation and change. We draw on non-Western approaches to aesthetics ( rasa and “everyday aesthetics”) that emphasize the interplay between receiver and the aesthetic stimulus. We present two case studies. One, from fieldwork on Nkep (an Oceanic language spoken in Vanuatu), draws attention to the way aesthetic factors seem to slow language change. The other, from fieldwork on Spanish in California, shows how aesthetic evaluations of linguistic features facilitate the transfer of variation in a situation of language contact.

Diglosia y contacto lingüístico en Limón, Costa Rica

This paper provides a description of the language contact situation in Limón, Costa Rica. It presents a theoretical account regarding language contact in this area and discusses why this linguistic situation leads to challenges for the definition of diglossia and bilingualism that have traditionally been used to describe it. The analysis concludes with support for the thesis that two varieties of English interact with a variety of Spanish in the Costa Rican area of Limón and result in a new variety of Spanish due to this language contact. This study highlights the need to explore these varieties of Spanish to fully understand this contact situation.&#x0D;

Simplifying grammatical gender in inflectional languages: Odessa Russian and beyond

SummaryThis work aims to contribute to the analysis of the morphosyntactic processes of gender assignment and gender agreement in inflectional languages, through the study of gender variation in Russian. We will focus on the data of a special contact variety, Odessa Russian (OdR), and compare it to standard, dialectal, child Russian, as well as other contact varieties of Russian. OdR is a linguistic variety slightly decomplexified by non-native acquisition, which arises from a special language contact situation; it originated as alingua franca, and was passed on later to successive generations of speakers as a native variety. Some of the most striking features of OdR are its divergences in gender assignment and agreement with respect to Standard Russian. The specific processes analysed in this paper are classified in three groups: (i) loss of a gender value (neuter gender), by virtue if a strategy of gender (re)assignment; (ii) transfer or ‘migration’ of gender according to the phonological shape of the words involved (masculine into feminine and feminine into masculine); interestingly, formal rules in this group of processes can sometimes prevail over semantic rules (i. e. over natural gender); and (iii) disruptions of gender agreement (associated with disruption of grammatical case), which can be interpreted as the simplification of the corresponding syntactic tree by eliminating uninterpretable gender features in the language. We will show that these processes go beyond mere substrata effects, and proceed according to more general processes that partially take place also in other (contact and non-contact) varieties of Russian. More specifically: (i) occasional changes in the assignment and agreement of gender are reminiscent of dialectal Russian, but are more widespread in OdR (closer to child language) than in those varieties; (ii) even if gender in OdR was not lost as a grammatical category, some productions point to a partial loss of gender features, reminding us of pidgins and heritage languages.

Morphological Khoisan influence in the Southern African Bantu language Yeyi

AbstractLanguage contact with Khoisan languages has resulted in the adoption of click phonemes in certain southern African Bantu languages. Contact-induced changes outside the phonological domain, however, are less commonly recognized. This paper provides a first ever analysis of morphological influence from Khoisan languages in Yeyi, a Bantu language spoken in Botswana and Namibia. Firstly, Yeyi has a set of lexical verbs that take an obligatory prefixi-orra-, and both these prefixes and many of the verbs on which they occur are of Khoisan origin. Secondly, Yeyi has four verbal derivational suffixes that have been copied from Khoisan languages. The description of these contact-induced changes in Yeyi shows that contact with Khoisan languages, especially those of the Khoe family, involved extensive bilingualism. Dialectal difference in Yeyi furthermore suggests that Khoisan contact was more intense in Botswana than in Namibia. As some linguistic changes appear to derive from Khoisan languages that are not spoken in the vicinity of Yeyi, the language contact situation in which they arose was quite different from the one that occurs today.

Bad Mouths: Taboo and Transgressive Language

The academic literature on taboo language is flourishing not only in fields such as linguistic anthropology or sociolinguistics, but also in disciplines that usually target language itself as the object of study. Although there is more than a century of scholarly writing on taboo language, new and neglected areas and directions continue to provide valuable insights on a universal linguistic behavior. This review tracks four sometimes overlapping clusters: naming and linguistic avoidance behaviors, taboo language and transgression, taboo language in language contact situations, and taboo language in educational settings and other contexts. The discussion in this review includes examples of how taboo language is inextricably meshed with the relationships found among kinship circles, subcultural group members, generational cohorts, and other social groupings. New areas of research that are proving to be attractive to scholars include taboo language in global media translation, subtitling or scalation, language contact situations, and the teaching of taboo terms in second language instruction.

Aspects of language contact in Newar

ABSTRACT This paper outlines the different aspects of language contact in Newar, the ethnic indigenous language community of the Kathmandu valley, focusing on language use and attitudes. The data were collected in 2016–2017 with the help of survey questionnaire, key informant interviews, informal interviews, and various observations based on the socio-ethnographic research on language contact situations in different domains, namely social, cultural, economic, and official as well as media-related activities where the informants were asked to use different languages along with the use of their own mother tongue, i.e. Newar. The findings mainly include various traits of language use and attitudes of the Newar-speaking people living in the capital city in which the people are shifting towards Nepali, English, and Hindi languages because of media, migration, globalisation, education, and other factors. The paper concludes by providing some clues to preserve and revitalise minority languages that have been shifting, changing, and dying because of various socio-political reasons in the multilingual cities like Kathmandu where language policies have been dramatically changed and get the attention of public discourses to understand the dynamic nature of language contact.

Copying form without content

Abstract Two major types of change are generally distinguished in language contact studies: the transfer of linguistic form (frequently taken to include transfer of concomitant meaning or function) and the transfer of structural and semantic patterns by themselves, without attendant form. A type of change that is less frequently discussed is so-called relexification. This involves the transfer of form without model-language semantic or syntactic specifications that is grafted onto an equivalent recipient-language lemma. Relexification has been suggested to play a role in the development of mixed languages or creoles, but as is shown here, it can also be identified in several ordinary situations of language contact from around the world. This type of change represents a mirror image of the transfer of patterns without lexical material and supports recent models of language selection in bilinguals.

Intonational and Syntactic Innovations in a Language Contact Situation: An Explorative Study of Yes/No Questions in Paraguayan Guarani-Spanish Bilinguals.

Whereas the intonation of Spanish varieties has received considerable attention in the past few decades, the research has so far not included the variety of Spanish spoken in Paraguay, where intensive language contact between the Indigenous Guarani language and Spanish since the 16th century has led to widespread bilingualism. This study compares the F0 patterns of yes/no questions in Guarani-dominant bilinguals with those of Spanish-dominant bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals, formalized within the Autosegmental-Metrical model of intonation phonology. Results show no particular differences between the three groups, with all groups producing an H+L*LH% pattern in all types of yes/no questions, the exception being counter-expectational and echo yes/no questions, which were also realized with an L+¡H* L% contour. In spite of the fact that Guarani-dominant bilinguals exhibited more tonal variation in biased yes/no questions, the findings appear on the whole to support the convergence of two intonational systems due to the long period of contact. Furthermore, both bilingual groups made use of Guarani question particles and other Guarani expressions in their productions. Interestingly, across all groups, some speakers occasionally used the calque expression ¿Será que . . . ("Will it be that . . .?") at the beginning of questions; this construction can be considered to have become grammaticalized as a question particle. Taken together, the intonational and syntactic innovations apparent in Paraguayan Spanish point toward language change brought about by intensive contact with Guarani and show how two levels of linguistic structure-intonation and syntax-may evolve differently.

“Me likey!” A new (old) argument structure or a partially fixed expression with the verb like?

This paper explores the current use of the verb like in sequences such as “me likey”. This new use is practically limited to modern variant spellings (likey, likee, like-y and likie) and resembles the original (and now obsolete) impersonal structure of the verb in which the experiencer was encoded in the objective case and the verb was used invariably, among other aspects. However, rather than the re-emergence of an impersonal construction, the sequence “me likey” seems to be the result of a situation of language contact and it is in line with the informalisation of English as seen, for example, in the increasing tendency for objective pronouns to be used in subject position in a variety of constructions. In light of the evidence from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the TV Corpus, we can conclude that the sequence is used in highly informal registers, and that it tends to appear in rather formulaic expressions, especially in two-word sequences.