Language Contact

• Language contact- when two or more distinct languages come into contact with each other either directly through social interaction of the speakers or indirectly through education or literature

  • Borrowing- the transfer of lexical items or structural properties from one language to another

    • Loans- individual words adopted into one language from another

    • Core vocabulary- words for basic items that most societies have words for (usually not borrowed)

    • Calques- phrases acquired through a word-for-word translation into native morphemes

  • Language convergence- languages in contact become more alike

  • Language death- a language has no more speakers left

• Intensity of contact- determined by the duration of the linguistic contact as well as the level of interaction among speakers

• Adstratal- speakers who are equally prestigious

  • Superstratum language- the language of the dominant or more prestige group

  • Substratum language- the language of the less dominant or less prestige group

Borrowings into English

• 38.3% of the 1,000 most frequently used words in English are lexical borrowings from a variety of other languages

  • Scandanavian

  • French

  • Latin

  • Greek

  • Native American languages

  • Spanish

Pidgin Languages

• Pidgin languages- develop in trading centers or in areas under industrialization

  • Prepidgin jargon- the initial stage of pidgin formation in which there is little or no consistent grammar and rampant variation among speakers

  • Crystallizing- establishing grammatical conventions

  • Prototypical pidgins- pidgins that emerged rather abruptly in situations where the contact is limited to certain social settings

  • Expanded pidgins- not limited to certain social settings

• Characteristics of pidgins

  • Consonant clusters ore often reduced

  • Absence of affixes

  • Use of reduplication

  • Comparatively small vocabularies

• Lexifier- the language that provides most of the vocabulary of a pidgin

Creole Languages

• Creole languages- develop from a pidgin language or prepidgin jargon when it is adopted as the first, or native, language of a group of speakers

• Nativization- the process in which an initially non-native language to a group of speakers is adopted as first languages by children in some speech community

Societal Multilingualism

• Societal multilingualism- when whole communities speak multiple languages in everyday life

  • Common among immigrant communities

• Code switching- the use of two or more languages or dialects within a single utterance or conversation

• Diglossia- the situation where different languages or dialects are used for different functions

Language Endangerment and Language Death

• Causes of language endangerment:

  • Problems of access to mainstream economic opportunities

  • Potential for ridicule, overt discrimination, and prejudice

  • Lack of instruction in their native language

  • Limited “scope” for using the language

• Positive aspects of maintaining one’s native language

  • The potential to maintain one’s culture and prevent a sense of rootlessness

  • Enhances pride and self-esteem

  • A well-developed self-identity and group membership that allows access to a different culture

  • Cognitive advantages through bilingualism

• Language endangerment is a locally determined phenomenon

Case Studies in Language Contact

• Possessive pronouns and Adjectives

  • Kupwar Kannada follows a Kupwar Marathi pattern. Kannada spoken outside Kupwar has a distinction that is not present in the Marathi pattern

• Verb formations

  • There are distinct occurences beterrn Kupwar Urdu and Kupwar Kannada