Week 8 LIN321

LIN321
Week 8
Language Contact and
Language History
DR. RUSSELL RODRIGO

General Aims
u To identify the social contexts of language
contact
u To discuss the impact of contact on
languages.
u To discuss how new languages emerge.

What are the social
contexts of language
contact?

Social contexts of language
contact
u Trade/Business
u Work
u Recreation
u Educational institutions
u Worship centres
u Migration
u Willful migration e.g. Asian migration
u Forced migration e.g. Slave trade

What are the
impacts of contact
on languages?

Impact of Contact on
Language
u Language death
u No consensus when a language is to be
regarded as dead.
u Minority languages most vulnerable

Impact of Contact on Language
cont’d
u Language maintenance
uvarieties can be maintained to different degrees.
uThree categories are proposed by Siegal (1990:94-
96). According to him, languages can be:
1. Thriving
2. Declining
3. Dying

1. Thriving
u new, young and native speakers.
2. Declining
uSome language shift is occurring. The older generation are
fluent speakers and a large proportion of the mid
generation are passive bilinguals or semi-speakers.
3. Dying
uThe only fluent speakers are older people in rural areas.
The younger people have preserved a few tokens of the
language but the variety serves no communicative purpose
within the community.

Language cont’d
u Bilingualism
u Multilingualism
u Continuum - A situation where two or more languages in the same geographic
region merge together without a definable boundary.
u Diglossia - a situation in which two languages (or two varieties of the same language) are
used under different conditions within a community, often by the same speakers. The term is
usually applied to languages with distinct “high” and “low” (colloquial) varieties, such as Arabic.
u De jure - refers to things that happen according to law (e.g. The official language)
u De facto - "in fact") describes practices that exist in reality, even though they are not
officially recognized by laws.
Code switching/Code mixing
Borrowing – syntax, lexicon etc.

Language cont’d
u Language Change
u Synchronic language change – study of a language at a
given moment.
u Diachronic language change – studies the history of a
language or language families as it changes over time.
u Syntax
u Phonology
u Lexicon
u Semantics
u (slangs)

Language cont’d
u New varieties emerge
u Jargon – occurs when individuals simplify and reduce
their language on an ad hoc basis with no fixed
norms (for example Jamaicans buying sunglasses in
Caracas)
u Pidgin – a reduced language that results from
extended contact between groups of people with no
language in common. It evolves when they need some
means of verbal communication for example trade,
but no group learns the native language of any other
group. E.g. Tok Pisin spoken in Papua New Guinea

Language cont’d
u Creole Languages
u Spoken natively
u History of slavery
u Spoken natively
u Use covers all aspects of social life
u Examples of Creole languages
u English Lexicon Creole –Carribean
u French Lexicon Creole - TFC
u Portuguese Lexicon Creole - Papiamento
u Dutch Based Creole- Berbice Dutch Creole
u Mexican, Portuguese & Andalusian Spanish based – Chavacano (Philippines)

How do new languages
emerge? cont’d
u Deliberate creation – For example Esperanto
u People are forced to co-exist – Creoles.
u There are various theories of Creole genesis:
u Language Bio-program Hypothesis (Bickerton) - a theory arguing that the
structural similarities between different creole languages cannot be solely
attributed to their superstrate and substrate languages.
u Superstrate view (Mufwene) – contributes to the forms
u Substrate view (Alleyne) – languages contribute to the meaning and
function

Week 8 LIN321

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Week 8 LIN321