Language contact
Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more
When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Intensive language contact may result in language convergence or relexification. In some cases a new contact language may be created as a result of the influence, such as a pidgin, creole, or mixed language. In many other cases, contact between speakers occurs with smaller-scale lasting effects on the language; these may include the borrowing of loanwords, calques, or other types of linguistic material.
Multilingualism has been common throughout much of human history, and today most people in the world are multilingual.[2] Multilingual speakers may engage in code-switching, the use of multiple languages in a single conversation.
Methods from sociolinguistics[3] (the study of language use in society), from corpus linguistics and from formal linguistics are used in the study of language contact.
Borrowing
Borrowing of vocabulary items
The most common way that languages influence each other is the exchange of words. Much is made about the contemporary borrowing of English words into other languages, but this phenomenon is not new, and it is not very large by historical standards. The large-scale importation of words from Latin, French and other languages into English in the 16th and the 17th centuries was more significant.
Some languages have borrowed so much that they have become scarcely recognisable. Armenian borrowed so many words from Iranian languages, for example, that it was at first considered a divergent branch of the Indo-Iranian languages and was not recognised as an independent branch of the Indo-European languages for many decades.[4]
Borrowing of other language features
The influence can go deeper, extending to the exchange of even basic characteristics of a language such as morphology and grammar.
Also, Romanian was influenced by the Slavic languages that were spoken by neighbouring tribes in the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire not only in vocabulary but also phonology.[citation needed] English has a few phrases, adapted from French, in which the adjective follows the noun: court-martial, attorney-general, Lake Superior.[citation needed]
Direction of influence
Linguistic hegemony
A language's influence widens as its speakers grow in power. Chinese,
Especially during and since the 1990s, the internet, along with previous influences such as radio and television, telephone communication and printed materials,[5] has expanded and changed the many ways in which languages can be influenced by each other and by technology.
Non-mutual influence
Change as a result of contact is often one-sided. Chinese, for instance, has had a profound effect on the development of
Mutual influence
In some cases, language contact may lead to mutual exchange, but that may be confined to a particular geographic region. For example, in Switzerland, the local French has been influenced by German and vice versa. In Scotland, Scots has been heavily influenced by English, and many Scots terms have been adopted into the regional English dialect.
Outcomes of language contact
Language shift
The result of the contact of two languages can be the replacement of one by the other. This is most common when one language has a higher social position (prestige). This sometimes leads to language endangerment or extinction.
Stratal influence
When language shift occurs, the language that is replaced (known as the
Outside the
Creation of new languages: creolization and mixed languages
Language contact can also lead to the development of new languages when people without a common language interact closely. Resulting from this contact a
A much rarer but still observed process, according to some linguists, is the formation of mixed languages. Whereas creoles are formed by communities lacking a common language, mixed languages are formed by communities fluent in both languages. They tend to inherit much more of the complexity (grammatical, phonological, etc.) of their parent languages, whereas creoles begin as simple languages and then develop in complexity more independently. It is sometimes explained as bilingual communities that no longer identify with the cultures of either of the languages they speak, and seek to develop their own language as an expression of their own cultural uniqueness.
Dialectal and sub-cultural change
Some forms of language contact affect only a particular segment of a speech community. Consequently, change may be manifested only in particular
In some cases, a language develops an
The broader study of contact varieties within a society is called linguistic ecology.[6]
Sign languages
Contact between sign languages
Language contact can take place between two or more sign languages, and the expected contact phenomena occur: lexical borrowing, foreign "accent", interference, code switching, pidgins, creoles, and mixed systems.
Contact between sign languages and oral languages
Language contact is extremely common in most
See also
- Areal feature
- Language transfer
- Code-switching
- Pidgin
- Creole language
- Lingua franca
- Mixed language
- Calque
- Loanword
- Metatypy
- Nahuatl-Spanish Contact
- Phono-semantic matching
- Post-creole speech continuum
- Sprachbund
- Language island
- Lexical gap
- Diffusion
- Linguistic anthropology
References
Notes
- ^ Hadzibeganovic, Tarik, Stauffer, Dietrich & Schulze, Christian (2008). Boundary effects in a three-state modified voter model for languages. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 387(13), 3242–3252.
- ^ "CAL: Digests: A Global Perspective on Bilingualism and Bilingual Education". Archived from the original on 2012-08-22. Retrieved 2012-05-16. A Global Perspective on Bilingualism and Bilingual Education (1999), G. Richard Tucker, Carnegie Mellon University
- ^ Gooden, Shelome. "Language Contact in a Sociolinguistics Context." in The Routledge Companion to the Work of John R. Rickford (2019).
- ^ Waterman, John (1976). A History of the German Language. University of Washington Press, p. 4
- ^ Nazaryan, Ani; Gridchin, Aleksandr (2006). "The influence of internet on language and "email stress"" (PDF). Facta Universitatis. Law and Politics. 4 (1). University of Niš, Serbia: 23–27. Archived (PDF) from the original on March 7, 2012. Retrieved December 18, 2013.
The Internet, in conjunction with radio and television, telephone communication and printed materials, creates the universal information net, which is called "Cyberspace" [...]
- ^ See, for example, Mufwene, Salikoko S. The ecology of language evolution. Cambridge University Press, 2001.
General references
- Hickey, Raymond (ed.), The Handbook of Language Contact (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell 2010)
- Sarah Thomason and Terrence Kaufman, Language Contact, Creolization and Genetic Linguistics (University of California Press 1988).
- Sarah Thomason, Language Contact - An Introduction (Edinburgh University Press 2001).
- Uriel Weinreich, Languages in Contact (Mouton 1963).
- Donald Winford, An Introduction to Contact Linguistics (Blackwell 2002) ISBN 0-631-21251-5.
- ISBN 1-4039-1723-X.
- van Gijn R, Ruch H, Wahlström M, Hasse A, eds. (2023). Language contact: Bridging the gap between individual interactions and areal patterns (pdf). Berlin: Language Science Press. ISBN 9783961104208.