Language Contact

Question 1

Language Contact at MACRO level:
what is the OVERALL FATE of a language, or use of a language, in a particular community when it comes into contact with another language?

Answer 1

• Language Maintenance
• Language Shift
• Language Death
• Language Birth
• Mostly dependent on SOCIAL FACTORS rather than linguistic factors. Determined by CONTEXT of CONTACT
• migration, conquest, settlement patterns, language attitudes

Question 2

Language MAINTENANCE

Answer 2

A community continues to use their language and becomes bilingual in a second language.

Question 3

Language SHIFT

Answer 3

A community chooses to give up their language and use another.

Question 4

Language DEATH

Answer 4

Either through language shift or through the death of speakers.

Question 5

Language BIRTH

Answer 5

Including the emergence of pidgin varieties and the development of creole languages and mixed/hybrid languages.

Question 6

Language contact at the MICRO-level

Answer 6

• looking at the effects of language contact on INDIVIDUAL ASPECTS of the language(s): CONTACT-INDUCED LANGUAGE CHANGE
• macro-level sitch partly determine type of contact-induced change likely to find at micro-level

Question 7

Thomason & Kaufman’s framework

Answer 7

T&K distinguish
- BORROWING: effect of contact-induced change on a lang being MAINTAINED (introduced by NATIVE SPEAKERS)

• INTERFERENCE: effects that a group SHIFTING to another language may have on a TARGET LANGUAGE (TL), the language they are shifting to (introduced by NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS)

Question 8

LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE - BORROWING SCALE

Answer 8

Matter of probabilities NOT possibilities - predictions can be violated. attitudes effect, typological similarity effect

1. casual contact, little bilingualism among borrowing lang speakers: ONLY NON-BASIC VOCAB BORROWED
2. Intensive contact, inc. bilingualism over long periods of time: MUCH LEXICAL BORROWING: MOD-HEAVY STRUCTURAL BORROWING
3. Overwhelming long-term cultural pressure from souce-lang speaker group: MASSIVE GRAMMATICAL REPLACEMENT / LANGUAGE DEATH

Question 9

What determines degree of borrowing?

Answer 9

• intensity of contact
• speaker attitudes
• TYPOLOGICAL similarity of langs involved

WHY TYPOlogical similarity?
- the more typologically similar, the more identifiable structural elements will be due 2 HIGH DEGREE OF COMPATIBILITY of structural systems

Question 10

Is there anything that can’t be borrowed?

Answer 10

anything given right contact conditions BUT

INFLECTIONAL MORPHOLOGY = hardest to borrow bc component parts fit into a whole that is small, self contained, and highly organised.

Question 11

LANGUAGE SHIFT - INTERFERENCE SCALE

Answer 11

1. Small shifting group or perfect learning - NO INTERFERENCE in TL as a WHOLE
2. Large shifting group and imperfect learning - MOD/HEAVY INFLUENCE (SUB/SUPER/ADSTRATUM INTERFERENCE (esp PHONOLOGY + SYNTAX)
3. Extreme unavailability of TL (very imperfect learning) - ONLY VOCAB SUCCESSFULLY ACQUIRED (ABRUPT CREOLIZATION)
   - effectively reversed borrowing scale - interference starts with phonology/syntax: TL some lexical interference but structural interference dominates

Question 12

What determines the degree of interference?

Answer 12

• size of group shifting

- availability of the TL

Question 13

Borrowing in situation of casual contact

Answer 13

Casual contact (with relatively little bilingualism) may result in lexical borrowings (of mostly non-basic vocabulary).
CAUSE OF:
- NEED (intro of new concept) eg. coffee, automobile
- PRESTIGE (dependent on power relations between 2 langs
eg. beef, pork, mutton, veal

Loan adaptation:
PANYJIMA:
tukey - tharraki
paddock - patiki

Question 14

Borrowing given extensive contact

Answer 14

In cases with a greater degree of contact and more extensive bilingualism, some structural change might accompany lexical borrowings.

For example, borrowed words may remain faithful to their pronunciation in the source language and so new sounds may enter the borrowing language.

STRUCTURAL BORROWING AS RESULT OF LEXICAL BORROWING:

English did not originally have a /v/ phoneme, though it had [v] as an intervocalic allophone of /f/:
leaf - leaves
The borrowing of French words with initial [v], such as very < vrai, led to the development of a phonemic contrast (e.g. very vs ferry).

DERIVATIONAL MORPHOLOGY is present in borrowings too
- conjunctions also commmonly borrowed

In parts of the US where German speakers settled, the varieties of English spoken display certain construction that have been transferred into English from German.
e.g. “Are you coming with?”

Question 15

How can we detect contact-induced language change?

Answer 15

Loanwords = easiest contact features to detect
- easy to detect contact-induced change when “FORM” is involved
- most difficult to detect = transfer of STRUCTURAL patterns
= DIFFICULT to make a good case for STRUCTURAL INTERFERENCE

Question 16

Identification of loan words: phonological clues

Answer 16

Violation of Phonological Patterns

• words containing sounds NOT normally expected in native words = likely to be loans
• words that do NOT follow canonical morpheme structure/syllable structure/phonotactics

if phonological history of lang = known, loans easily identified & direction of borrowing/donot lang may be easily identifiable (i.e. if regular patterns of sound correspondece

Question 17

Identification of loan words: morphological clues

Answer 17

e. g. if a word is morphologically analysable in one of the languages but not in the other, then the donor is probably the language in which the word is analysable
- English vinegar < French vinaigre
- English alligator < Spanish el lagarto

But not foolproof, folk etymology can create complications
e.g. ‘crayfish’ was borrowed into English from French as a mono-morphemic word ‘crevice’, then reanalysed as consisting of two morphemes (by analogy with other fish names e.g. ‘catfish’)

Question 18

Identification of loan words: other clues

Answer 18

GEOGRAPHICAL AND ECOLOGICAL associations of words suspected to be loans can help us to identify whether or not they are borrowed and, if yes, from which other language:

e.g. Nahuatl was originally spoken in north-western Mexico/south-western USA and spread from there to central Mexico. Cacao did not grow in the Nahuatl desert homeland, therefore the word kakawa- 'cacao' is likely to be a borrowing. (*kakawa can be reconstructed for proto Mixe-Zoquean). (Campbell 1998:68)

The SEMANTIC DOMAIN to which a word belongs to may lead us to suspect that it is a borrowing:

e.g. Xincan (small family in Guatemala) most words for cultivated plants are borrowed from Mayan so would suspect other words relating to cultivated plants to also be borrowings from Mayan. (Campbell 1988:69)

Question 19

Making a case for structural interference

Answer 19

• presence of loanwords = easier to argue for structural interference bc loanwords = tangible witness of fact that the two langs were in contact
  BUT loanwords NOT very common in interference situations

phonological + syntactic interference go together, so if one has occurs, the other has probably occurred.

1. identify source language (most cases of shift-induced interference, source lang = prob vanished. look for relatives)
2. must be able to argue that shared features WERE NOT present in RECIEVING lang at time of contact.
3. must be able to argue that shared features WERE present in SOURCE lang at time of contact

Question 20

Long-term language contact within a region; Linguistic Area

Answer 20

LINGUISTIC AREA (Sprachbund)
- a GEOGRAPHICAL region containing a group of 3 or more languages that share SOME structural features as a RESULT of CONTACT rather than accident or inheritance from a common ancestor

situation of LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE

• Ling areas = end product of millennia of individual instances of borrowing between pairs of languages within a region.

Scholars vary in their definitions of what constitutes a linguistic area:

must AT LEAST some of the languages involved belong to DIFF language families? (according to Thomason’s definition: yes)

how many features must be shared before a group of languages can be said to form a linguistic area?

do ALL FEATURES have to be shared by ALL LANGUAGES within the area?

Question 21

Linguistic area VS Language Family

Answer 21

Ling area established on basis of SHARED STRUCTURAL features over CONTIGUOUS GEOGRAPHICAL AREA

a LANG FAMILY is established on basis of COGNACY where phonological FORM of words has central role.

But of course, genetically related languages also share structural features, and languages in a linguistic area may have borrowed word forms from each other …

These factors complicate the picture.

Question 22

Examples of linguistic areas

Answer 22

Europe (Standard Average European, see later slides)

The Balkans (Romanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Albanian, Serbo-Croatian, Greek, Balkan dialects of Romani,Turkish)

South Asia (IE, Dravidian, Munda)

Mainland South-East Asia (Sino-Tibetan, Hmong-Mien, Tai-Kadai, Austronesian, Austroasiatic)

Pacific Northwest (Salishan, Wakashan, Chimakuan etc.)

Siberia (many families including Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Eskimo-Aleut, Uralic, Tungusic, Mongolic, Nivkh, etc.)

Australia

Question 23

The Balkans - Linguistic Area !

Answer 23

So … the Balkans linguistic area could be described as

• consisting of SOMETIMES LOCALISEd, SOMETIMES bROADER clusters of shared features.
• with isoglosses bundling together BUT
  - often not matching up exactly
  - sometimes not matching up at all

Drawing isoglosses on a map creates a confusing mess BUT although there is some bundling of isoglosses - each features DOES represent slightly DIFF pattern of DIFFUSION

Question 24

LANGUAGE BIRTH ! What is a contact language?

Answer 24

a contact language is a language that arises as a result of language contact and that comprises linguistic material which CANNOT BE TRACED BACK PRIMARILY to a SINGLE SOURCE language

• pidgins, creoles, mixed-languages.

Contact Langs DO NOT belong to a language family: By definition THEIR GENESIS was NOT a matter of DESCENT with MODIFICATION from a SINGLE PARENT

Contact languages are “non-genetic” languages (Thomason and Kaufman 1988).
i.e. they are NOT THE PRODUCT OF NORMAL LINGUISTIC TRANSMISSION - they have not been passed down as whole systems from one generation to the next.

Question 25

GENETIC vs NON GENETIC languages

Answer 25

Problem: many langs = “normal” genetic langs have undergone CONTACT-INDUCED restructuring.

There no structural features unique to contact languages and no processes of change that are unique to them either.

So, distinguishing between genetic and non-genetic languages must involve looking at the DERGREE of restructuring.

Question 26

At which point do we draw the line between a genetic and a non-genetic language?

Answer 26

no measure can be provided for the extent of contact-induced restructuring that does/does not affect genetic affiliation
- only real reason Thomason and Kaufman defend position that contact langs = non-genetic = TRADITION “normal” langs have single parent.

Question 27

Modelling language

Answer 27

The idea of a “uniform linguistic system” is a linguists abstraction
- biological metaphor associated w family tree model is that of LANG AS AN ORGANISM - thus, bounded, well-defined.

Language as an “organism” versus language as a “species”:
Language is “… a parasitic species, whose life and vitality depend on (the acts and dispositions of) its hosts, i.e., the speakers, on the society they form, and on the culture in which they live.” (Mufwene 2001:18)

Question 28

That the only real difference between contact languages and non-contact languages is the social context within which they arise.

Answer 28

The main reason for distinguishing contact languages from genetic languages has to do with the very specific set of social circumstances in question.