Language Contact Situations Research Articles

Mutual contacts and lexical relations among the Finnic varieties of western Ingria and northeastern Estonia

The aim of this article is 1) to describe the historical language contact situation between the genetically closely related Finnic varieties of western Ingria, 2) to give examples of the numerous loanwords originating from mutual contacts among local Finnic varieties as well as areal diffusion, and 3) to discuss the method of investigating contacts and borrowing among closely related varieties. The data are taken from old dialectal materials published in vocabularies and dictionaries as well as preserved in archives. The words that are analysed and discussed etymologically in more detail are drawn from Vote, Ingrian, and Estonian. Although it is often difficult to confirm the direction of borrowing among closely related varieties, I seek to determine the direction of diffusion in the varieties whose development cannot be described merely in terms of a traditional binary family tree model. Examples of mutual borrowing between Vote, Ingrian, Estonian, and Finnish are presented. Estonian loanwords in Vote and Ingrian can usually be recognised by their distribution. Most vocabulary originating as loans (in Vote, Ingrian, and Estonian) has been borrowed from Finnish. Loans in both Vote and Estonian often have a distribution not only in Ingrian but also in Finnish. Because of the phonetic similarity of these varieties, the donor variety usually cannot be defined. Vote loanwords occur only sporadically in Ingrian and Estonian: they may also form a substratum.
 The speakers of Finnic varieties in western Ingria used to live in old rural communities with long-term multilingualism, villages with a mixed population, and vague language boundaries. The arrival of new inhabitants from the countries, which ruled this area and the foundation of St. Petersburg in 1703 changed the ethnographic balance between different peoples in Ingria. This increased linguistic diversity and altered the hierarchy of the languages leading gradually to accelerating language and identity shift of the local peoples of Ingria.

“Nordic Cool” and writing system mimicry in global linguistic landscapes

Fuelled by political and economic trends in the 21st century, the concepts “New Nordic” and “Nordic Cool” have entered the global scene in design, cuisine, entertainment, and general lifestyle (Østergaard et al., 2014; Skou and Munch, 2016; Andersen et al., 2019). Simultaneously, due to globalisation, individuals today are subjected to a higher number of language contact situations than ever before, in face-to-face communication as well as through foreign products and international advertisements. This study explores how Nordic orthographic features are capitalised on in international marketing to elevate the images of various brands. Nordic words and graphemes can be used to evoke positive associations that the consumer may have relating to the region (e.g. associations of ‘nature’, ‘simplicity’, or even ‘luxury’), or simply to index foreigness, globalism, or exclusivity (Jaworski, 2015a).

A Framework of Competences in Intercomprehension Teaching

This framework aims to contribute to the development of teacher educators in order to be able to integrate Intercomprehension in their educational activities in presence and online. This document is therefore an instrument for designing and putting into practice intercomprehension courses in contexts of teacher education and evaluation (including self-assessment) of professional competencies (knowledge, attitudes and skills) for the introduction of intercomprehension in situations of language contact and intercultural communication.

New Dimensions in Code-Mixing and the Sri Lankan Case: An Exploratory Study

Code-switching and code-mixing, two by-products of language contact situations, are widely used linguistic strategies, not only in informal conversational contexts but also in the informal media discourse. The reasons hitherto applicable for the mixing of codes seem non-relevant in some code-mixing situations today. This is true to certain segments of the Sri Lankan media context, too, in that the popular Sri Lankan commercial broadcasting media is accused by prescriptivist groups of making excessive use of code-mixing. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize and explore the seminal research articles available in the field of code alternation so as to better understand the Sri Lankan situation of code-switching and code-mixing, as practiced by its general bilingual populations and by the popular commercial media channels.

Can you tell by their English if they can speak Welsh? Accent perception in a language contact situation

Aims: The purpose of this research was to gain a better understanding of accent perception in language contact situations in which monolingual speakers of a contact variety and bilinguals live in the same community. Design: We investigated the English accents of monolinguals and bilinguals from the same area in South-West Wales, and listeners’ perceptions thereof, in three inter-related studies. Data: In Study 1, an accent perception experiment, participants from four different listener groups were asked to differentiate English monolinguals and Welsh–English bilinguals on the basis of short English speech samples. In Study 2, the same participants’ views about differences between the accentual features of monolinguals and bilinguals were examined in individual structured interviews. Finally, in Study 3, the speech samples from the accent perception experiment were analysed phonetically based on the accentual features mentioned in Study 2. Findings: Study 1 revealed that monolinguals and bilinguals can be identified above chance based on their English accent, but performance was unexceptional. Identification was better with greater accent familiarity, but unrelated to the listener’s ability to speak Welsh. Study 2 revealed the specific segmental and suprasegmental features that the listeners considered indicative of monolingual and bilingual speakers’ English accents, while Study 3 showed that only some of the listeners’ views are consistent with the production data from Study 1. Originality: This paper is the first to examine whether monolinguals and bilinguals from a bilingual area with historical language contact can be identified on the basis of their majority language accent, and on what grounds these identifications are made. Implications: This research shows that settings in which minority-language features originate from both historical language contact and individual bilingualism yield subtle accentual differences in the majority language between monolinguals and bilinguals to which even listeners from the same accent background may not be responsive.

Stance-taking viaya′ani/ya′anu: A discourse marker in a Hebrew-Arabic language contact situation

ABSTRACTWe explore two stance-taking patterns in casual Hebrew conversation involvingya′ani/ya′anu, a discourse marker originating in colloquial Arabic. In the first,ya′ani/ya′anu, the same as Arabicyaʕni(lit. ‘it means’), frames reformulations of prior discourse serving to enhance interpersonal involvement and mutuality regarding the interlocutor's stance toward what has been said, thereby constructing intersubjectivity. The second pattern consists of a prosodic variant,ya′ani/ya′anu, functioning as a double-voiced ironic hedge. The latter is an innovation of Hebrew, brought about by its functional association with Hebrewke′ilu‘like’. The two uses ofya′ani/ya′anuelucidate two different processes that discourse markers in language contact situations may undergo: persistence of lexically motivated metalingual meaning, and extension of lexically unmotivated meaning. The considerably low frequency ofya′ani/ya′anuvis-à-viske′iluis explained by its devaluated social meaning in current Israeli discourse, as an index of nonhegemonic religious and ethnic groups such as Arabs and Mizrahi Jews. (Discourse markers, language contact, stance-taking, (re)formulations, irony, metalanguaging, indexicality, intersubjectivity)*

The Language of the Kharg Island

AbstractKhargi is spoken on the island of Kharg in the Persian Gulf. A member of the Southwest branch of the Iranian languages, Khargi is related to the languages spoken in the province of Fārs and along the coastal line down to the Strait of Hormuz, suggesting extensive maritime contact, yet does not lend itself to any of the known subgroups of the family. As Khargi remains largely obscure, this article offers a morphosyntax and lexical analysis based on published texts and those collected by the author. It investigates the linguistic position of Khargi based on comparative-historical phonology as well as areal features, with a look at cross-linguistic influence in the situation of language contact. By contrasting linguistic findings with details of history and economy, an attempt is made to date the original and later human settlements on the island.1

Language proficiency and usage among second- and third-generation Rohingya refugees in Mecca

ABSTRACT This study examined responses from a questionnaire administered to 98 second- and third-generation Rohingya refugees living in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Questions concerned participants’ self-reported language proficiency levels in the Rohingya heritage language and Arabic and patterns of language use in various domains. Findings demonstrate that the respondents from both generational groups reported a good level of Rohingya oral skills, which is a departure from the typical patterns of language shift over three generations. While Arabic seems to dominate the public, media, and religious domains, Rohingya is habitually used in the private domains of the family and ethnic community. The most important factors that seem to encourage intergenerational language transfer of Rohingya include (1) habitual use of the Rohingya language at home, (2) geographical concentration of Rohingya refugees in certain ethnic enclave neighbourhoods that provide exposure to the Rohingya language and usage opportunities, and (3) the ability of bilingual Rohingya refugees to utilise their language use patterns to index their status as ethnic Rohingyas and Muslims in the Saudi Arabic-dominant context. This study contributes to the current understanding of language contact situations and calls for greater attention to be paid to contact dynamics between languages in refugee contexts.

Katanga Swahili and Heerlen Dutch: A sociohistorical and linguistic comparison of contact varieties in mining regions

AbstractThis article compares sociolinguistic and structural outcomes of language contact processes in two mining areas on two different continents, namely the Katanga region in the southeast of what is now the DR Congo, Africa and Heerlen as centre of the former Eastern Mine District in the southeastern province of Limburg in the Netherlands, Europe. Several similarities between these two regions make this comparison interesting. Both in Katanga and Heerlen, the natural copper and coal resources were located in border regions that were peripheral to central seats of government. In both regions, the exploitation of these resources, the growth of mining industries and rapid urbanization, began in the same period, the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Despite being located on different continents – Africa and Europe – similar social conditions of language contact were responsible for the genesis of the language varieties underground and above ground. The language contact situations in Limburg and Katanga both resulted in structural innovation of Dutch and Swahili respectively. The most interesting innovation we identify in both cases can be characterized as the regularization of grammatical properties, and the expansion of aspect marking.

Automated methods for the investigation of language contact, with a focus on lexical borrowing

AbstractWhile language contact has so far been predominantly studied on the basis of detailed case studies, the emergence of methods for phylogenetic reconstruction and automated word comparison—as a result of the recent quantitative turn in historical linguistics—has also resulted in new proposals to study language contact situations by means of automated approaches. This study provides a concise introduction to the most important approaches, which have been proposed in the past, presenting methods that use (A) phylogenetic networks to detect reticulation events during language history, (B) sequence comparison methods in order to identify borrowings in multilingual datasets, and (C) arguments for the borrowability of shared traits to decide if traits have been borrowed or inherited. While the overview focuses on approaches dealing with lexical borrowing, questions of general contact inference will also be discussed where applicable.

The role of linguistic ideologies in language contact situations

AbstractThe field of contact linguistics has long argued for the paramount importance of social factors in understanding the outcomes of linguistic contact. In contrast, linguistic ideologies have not played a central role in theories of language contact, though this has begun to change in recent decades. This article provides an account of early theorizations of linguistic ideologies and their increasingly important applications to the study of contact phenomena. A brief survey of more recent theoretical advancements with respect to ideologies and contact phenomena follows, paying special attention to studies in linguistic anthropology and variationist sociolinguistics. While recognizing the challenges inherent in the study of linguistic ideologies, this article argues that they should be at the foreground of contact linguistics. To this end, methodological tools for such study are presented, along with theoretical considerations and future directions.

A realização variável da segunda pessoa por bilíngues em vêneto e português em uma comunidade rural do Espírito Santo

Este trabalho objetiva analisar as consequências do contato linguístico que ocorreu em uma comunidade do interior do Espírito Santo, colonizada por imigrantes provenientes do Vêneto, Itália, que ali chegaram no final do século XIX. Especificamente, investigamos o uso da 2ª pessoa do português por parte de quatro bilíngues em vêneto e português, netos desses imigrantes, sendo dois homens e duas mulheres, com idade acima de 57 anos e com baixa escolarização. Os dados foram coletados por meio de entrevistas sociolinguísticas, sendo analisadas cinco variáveis linguísticas e uma extralinguística. Os resultados apontam o emprego de você(s), de cê(s) e de ocê(s) pelos informantes. Nossos resultados não se alinham aos obtidos em outras comunidades brasileiras, evidenciando que, em situações de contato linguístico, a língua materna exerce influência variável na segunda língua, a depender dos fatores linguísticos e sociais envolvidos.

ДИСКУРСИВНЫЕ МАРКЕРЫ В ДВУЯЗЫЧНОЙ РЕЧИ: ВОПРОСЫ ТИПОЛОГИИ И ЗАКОНОМЕРНОСТИ ФУНКЦИОНИРОВАНИЯ

The article examines the poorly studied problem of discursive markers in bilingual speech, considers their typologization and principles of functioning by the example of the Buryat-Russian bilingual discourse. The paper provides a brief survey of the existing classifications and suggests the authors’ original functional-semantic classification of discursive markers. The authors conclude that in bilingual discourse, in the situation of language contact, there appears a tendency for the frequent use of discursive markers from the majority language (Russian). It turns out that discursive markers are used to express meta-textual relations and to transfer subjective, deictic information, whereas propositional information is expressed in the minority language.

Le rôle de l’ancien français dans le développement du passif indirect en anglais

Abstract This contribution analyses the role French may have played as a model language in the development of the indirect passive (or recipient passive) in Middle English. It is based on diachronic corpus data showing that the construction appeared in Middle English predominantly with verbs borrowed from French and spread to native verbs only later. The fact that French did not have a recipient passive construction speaks against contact influence, whereas the data as well as the situation of close language contact between Old French and Middle English speak in favour of contact-induced change. The hypothesis of internal change will be contrasted with several explanations in a language contact scenario. The first one is syntactic and regards the type of dative case : English integrated the French structural dative into its native grammar, which so far only had an inherent dative. Passives with structural datives were prior to native constructions and may have triggered them. The transfer may have been facilitated by the reanalysis of certain bridge constructions (proclitics and clausal complements). The more conceptual second part discusses current psycholinguistic research in order to identify methods which help overcome the methodological deadlock that historical linguists are facing when they want to assess the validity of competing explanations.

Turkish-Dutch bilinguals maintain language-specific reference tracking strategies in elicited narratives

Aim:This paper examines whether second-generation Turkish heritage speakers in the Netherlands follow language-specific patterns of reference tracking in Turkish and Dutch, focusing on discourse status and pragmatic contexts as factors that may modulate the choice of referring expressions (REs), that is, the noun phrase (NP), overt pronoun and null pronoun.Methodology:Two short silent videos were used to elicit narratives from 20 heritage speakers of Turkish, both in Turkish and in Dutch. Monolingual baseline data were collected from 20 monolingually raised speakers of Turkish in Turkey and 20 monolingually raised speakers of Dutch in the Netherlands. We also collected language background data from bilinguals with an extensive survey.Data and analysis:Using generalised logistic mixed-effect regression, we analysed the influence of discourse status and pragmatic context on the choice of subject REs in Turkish and Dutch, comparing bilingual data to the monolingual baseline in each language.Findings:Heritage speakers used overt versus null pronouns in Turkish and stressed versus reduced pronouns in Dutch in pragmatically appropriate contexts. There was, however, a slight increase in the proportions of overt pronouns as opposed to NPs in Turkish and as opposed to null pronouns in Dutch. We suggest an explanation based on the degree of entrenchment of differential RE types in relation to discourse status as the possible source of the increase.Originality:This paper provides data from an understudied language pair in the domain of reference tracking in language contact situations. Unlike several studies of pronouns in language contact, we do not find differences across monolingual and bilingual speakers with regard to pragmatic constraints on overt pronouns in the minority pro-drop language.Significance:Our findings highlight the importance of taking language proficiency and use into account while studying bilingualism and combining formal approaches to language use with usage-based approaches for a more complete understanding of bilingual language production.

Multilingualism at church: language practices in a Ghanaian context

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the linguistic repertoires and domains of language use of the members of Victory Baptist Church at Nkwantanang (a suburb of Kade), an Akan-speaking area in the Eastern Region of Ghana. Data for the study is from observations and transcribed recordings of Sunday services, youth and women fellowship meetings, as well as conversations and interviews with selected members of the church. The theoretical underpinning of the work derives from Fishman’s [(2006). A decalogue of basic theoretical perspectives for a sociology of language and religion. In T. Omoniyi, & A. J. Fishman (Eds.), Explorations in the sociology of language and religion (pp. 13–25). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Retrieved from https://sociologyoflanguageandreligion.com/about/fishmans-decalogue/] sociology of language and religion principles and Baldauf’s [(2005). Micro language planning. In P. Bruthiaux, D. Atkinson, G. Eggington, W. Grabe, & V. Ramanathan (Eds.), Directions in Applied Linguistics: Essays in Honor of Robert B. Kaplan (pp. 227–239). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters] micro language planning approach. A major finding is that there are numerous instances of code-switching among the youth, which are attributable to the language contact situation in the church and the town. Additionally, monolingual elderly women resort to lexical borrowing. Furthermore, whereas some studies have proved that smaller communities are diglossic, this study shows that the language situation in Nkwantanang is rather multilingual despite the community's small size and remoteness. Lastly, members of the church have a positive attitude towards the prevailing language situation, which supports principle three of Fishman's SLR.

Likein English andcomo, como que, andlikein Spanish in the speech of Southern Arizona bilinguals

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions:This study analyzes the use of like in English and como, como que, and like in Spanish in the speech of bilinguals from Southern Arizona to assess the possible influence of like in English on its equivalents in Spanish in a language contact situation in which English is the majority language.Design/Methodology/Approach:Drawing on a discourse-pragmatic variationist approach, this study analyzes the use of like in English and its Spanish equivalents in recorded conversations between nine pairs of young Spanish-English bilingual friends from Southern Arizona.Data and Analysis:3389 tokens of like in English and its Spanish equivalents from 18 hours of recorded conversations (9 hours in each language) were analyzed quantitatively. The analysis assesses the relative frequencies of these variants and their syntactic positioning as clause-external discourse markers and clause-internal discourse particles. The independent variables of the analysis were the language of the conversation and the sex and language dominance of the participants.Findings/Conclusions:Contact with English did not appear to radically influence the use of como, como que, and like in Spanish in the speech of these bilinguals. In the speech of the same bilinguals, like in English was much more frequent and occurred in many more syntactic positions than its Spanish equivalents.Originality:This is the first study of discourse-pragmatic features in contact to analyze the use of discourse markers and discourse particles in both the donor and the recipient language in the speech of the same bilinguals.Significance/Implications:These results contribute to our knowledge of the limited interaction of linguistic repertoires in the speech of bilinguals at the discourse level even in language contact situations with a majority language. They also underline the ability of bilinguals to both understand and reproduce the subtleties of the use of these features in the two languages they speak.

Caspian Language of Šahmirzād


 
 
 Located in the Semnān area (midway between Tehran and Khorasan), the town of Šahmirzād and its neighboring villages are home to speakers of Šahmirzādi, a vernacular sharply differing from the other language types spoken in the Semnān area but closely related to the Mazandarani language spoken across the Alborz range to the north, along the Caspian coast. This article studies Šahmirzādi phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, with a look at cross-linguistic influence in the situation of language contact. The article concludes with a discussion of the possible status of Šahmirzādi as a separate language within the Caspian family.
 
 

Comprehensive documentation and archiving of Teleut, Eushta-Chat, and Melets Chulym. Three areally adjacent, critically endangered Turkic languages of Siberia

The paper reports on the interim findings of the project “Comprehensive documentation and archiving of Teleut, Eushta-Chat, and Melets Chulym: Three areally adjacent, critical¬ly endangered Turkic languages of Siberia”, documenting the lesser described indigenous mi¬nority idioms in southwestern Siberia. The reported phase of the project was dedicated to local assessment of the languages’ functional spheres and the sociolinguistic makeup of the communities. The results of fieldwork data collection and preliminary analysis confirm that all three languages display unique features differentiating them from the larger Turkic lan-guages in the region: Shor, Tatar and Khakas. All three idioms under study exemplify com¬plex situations of local language contact, variation and change in a context of multilingual¬ism and ongoing cultural shift, as well as demonstrating various stages of en¬dangerment, with Melets Chulym being nearly extinct, and Eushta-Chat and Teleut seriously endan¬gered.

Intonation, identity and contact‐induced change among Polish‐speaking migrants in the U.K.

This article examines intonational variation in a language contact situation. The study contributes to sociolinguistic research on the social meaning of intonational variation (Podesva ; Levon ). Intonation is studied in a multilingual context of global mobility: within a group of Polish‐speaking migrants in Britain who, thanks to cheap transportation and new channels of communication, could make use of linguistic resources unlimited by territorial boundaries from the beginning of their transnational experience. The study shows that speakers with seemingly similar linguistic and cultural profiles make use of intonation patterns in different ways in the context of the narrative of the self: speakers oriented towards the global economy and the English‐speaking world incorporate a mainly English intonational pattern, the fall‐rise, with increased frequency to do interactional work that it does in English, while other groups maintain Standard Polish norms. As shown, intonational variation participates in the creation of fluid identities that blur linguistic and sociocultural boundaries.