Stratum (linguistics)
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In linguistics, a stratum (Latin for "layer") or strate is a historical layer of language that influences or is influenced by another language through contact. The notion of "strata" was first developed by the Italian linguist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli (1829–1907), and became known in the English-speaking world through the work of two different authors in 1932.[1]
Thus, both concepts apply to a situation where an intrusive language establishes itself in the territory of another, typically as the result of
Substratum
A substratum (plural: substrata) or substrate is a language that an intrusive language influences, which may or may not ultimately change it to become a new language. The term is also used of substrate interference; i.e. the influence the substratum language exerts on the replacing language. According to some classifications, this is one of three main types of
In a typical case of substrate interference, a Language A occupies a given territory and another Language B arrives in the same territory (brought, for example, with migrations of population). Language B then begins to supplant language A: the speakers of Language A abandon their own language in favor of the other language, generally because they believe that it will help them achieve certain goals within government, the workplace, and in social settings. During the language shift, however, the receding language A still influences language B (for example, through the transfer of
In most cases, the ability to identify substrate influence in a language requires knowledge of the structure of the substrate language. This can be acquired in numerous ways:[2]
- The substrate language, or some later descendant of it, still survives in a part of its former range;
- Written records of the substrate language may exist to various degrees;
- The substrate language itself may be unknown entirely, but it may have surviving close relatives that can be used as a base of comparison.
One of the first-identified cases of substrate influence is an example of a substrate language of the second type:
Other examples of substrate languages are the influence of the now extinct
Typically, Creole languages have multiple substrata, with the actual influence of such languages being indeterminate.
Unattested substrata
In the absence of all three lines of evidence mentioned above, linguistic substrata may be difficult to detect. Substantial indirect evidence is needed to infer the former existence of a substrate. The nonexistence of a substrate is difficult to show,[11] and to avoid digressing into speculation, burden of proof must lie on the side of the scholar claiming the influence of a substrate. The principle of uniformitarianism[12] and results from the study of human genetics suggest that many languages have formerly existed that have since then been replaced under expansive language families, such as Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic or Bantu. However, it is not a given that such expansive languages would have acquired substratum influence from the languages they have replaced.
Several examples of this type of substratum have still been claimed. For example, the earliest form of the
When a substrate language or its close relatives cannot be directly studied, their investigation is rooted in the study of
Concept history
Although the influence of the prior language when a community speaks (and adopts) a new one may have been informally acknowledged beforehand, the concept was formalized and popularized initially in the late 19th century. As historical phonology emerged as a discipline, the initial dominant viewpoint was that influences from
Superstratum
A superstratum (plural: superstrata) or superstrate offers the counterpart to a substratum. When a different language influences a base language to result in a new language, linguists label the influencing language a superstratum and the influenced language a substratum.
A superstrate may also represent an imposed linguistic element akin to what occurred with
Some linguists contend that
Adstratum
An adstratum (plural: adstrata) or adstrate is a language that influences another language by virtue of geographic proximity, not by virtue of its relative prestige. For example, early in
The phenomenon is less common today in standardized linguistic varieties and more common in colloquial forms of speech since modern nations tend to favour one single linguistic variety (often corresponding to the
The term adstratum is also used to identify systematic influences or a layer of borrowings in a given language from another language independently of whether the two languages continue coexisting as separate entities. Many modern languages have an appreciable adstratum from English due to the cultural influence and economic preponderance of the United States on international markets and previously colonization by the
Notable examples of possible substrate or superstrate influence
Substrate influence on superstrate
Superstrate influence on substrate
Area | Resultant language | Substrate | Superstrate | Superstrate introduced by |
---|---|---|---|---|
France | Old French | Gallo-Romance |
Frankish | Merovingians' dominance of Gaul around 500
|
England | Middle English | Old English | Old Norman | Norman conquest
|
Greece | Demotic Greek | Medieval Greek | Ottoman Turkish |
Ottoman Turks following the Fall of Constantinople and during the subsequent occupation of Greece |
Spain | Early Modern Spanish | Old Spanish | Mozarabic ) |
conquest of Hispania, and the Arabic and Mozarabic speakers in al-Andalus who were absorbed into Castille and other Christian kingdoms during the Reconquista
|
Malta | Maltese | Siculo-Arabic | Sicilian, later Italian and other Romance languages[23] | Norman and Aragonese control, establishment of the Knights of St. John on the islands in the 16th century[24] |
Romania, Moldova | Modern Romanian
|
Common Romanian, Old Romanian
|
Slavic languages (first Proto-Slavic, then Old Church Slavonic, and later individual Slavic languages such as Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, and Bulgarian) | Polish-Lithuanian, and Russian Empires
|
See also
- Language shift
- Language transfer
- Trans-cultural diffusion
- Pre-Greek substrate
- Graziadio Isaia Ascoli
- Creole language
- Relexification
References
- ISBN 1843833123, pp. 192–214. [1]
- ^ Saarikivi, Janne (2006). Substrata Uralica: Studies on Finno-Ugrian substrate influence in Northern Russian dialects (Ph.D.). University of Helsinki. pp. 12–14.
- ^ Giovanni Battista Pellegrini, "Substrata", in Romance Comparative and Historical Linguistics, ed. Rebecca Posner et al. (The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter, 1980), 65.
- ^ Henri Guiter, "Sur le substrat gaulois dans la Romania", in Munus amicitae. Studia linguistica in honorem Witoldi Manczak septuagenarii, eds., Anna Bochnakowa & Stanislan Widlak, Krakow, 1995.
- ^ Eugeen Roegiest, Vers les sources des langues romanes: Un itinéraire linguistique à travers la Romania (Leuven, Belgium: Acco, 2006), 83.
- ISBN 978-2-87772-224-7
- ISBN 978-2-87772-224-7
- ^ a b Matasović, Ranko. 2007. “Insular Celtic as a Language Area”. In Tristam, Hildegard L.C. 2007, The Celtic Languages in Contact. Bonn: Papers from the Workship within the Framework of the XIII International Congress of Celtic Studies. Page 106.
- ^ Savignac, Jean-Paul. 2004. Dictionnaire Français-Gaulois. Paris: La Différence. Pages 26, 294-5.
- ^ Filppula, Markku, Klemola, Juhani and Paulasto, Heli. 2008. English and Celtic in Contact. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Pages 77-82
- ^ a b c d e Matasović, Ranko (2014). "Substratum words in Balto-Slavic". Filologija (60): 75–102.
- ^ Ringe, Don (2009-01-06). "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe". Language Log. Retrieved 2017-09-30.
- ^ a b Leschber, Corinna (2016). "On the stratification of substratum languages". Etymology and the European Lexicon: Proceedings of the 14th Fachtagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft, 17–22 September 2012, Copenhagen. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag.
- ^ a b c Schrijver, Peter (1997). "Animal, vegetable and mineral: some Western European substratum words". In Lubotsky, A. (ed.). Sound Law and Analogy. Amsterdam/Atlanta. pp. 293–316.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ^ Witzel, Michael (1999). "Early Sources for South Asian Substrate Languages" (PDF). Mother Tongue.
- ISBN 9780520912793.
- ISBN 9780739109557.
- ^ Benedict (1990), Lewin (1976), Matsumoto (1975), Miller (1967), Murayama (1976), Shibatani (1990).
- ^ McWhorter, John (2007). "Mandarin Chinese: "Altaicization" or Simplification?". Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars. Oxford University Press.
- ^ Hashimoto (1986), Janhunen (1996), McWhorter (2007).
- ^ For example, take replaced earlier niman in the lexical slot of a transitive verb for "to take", though archaic forms of to nim survived in England.
- ^ The Genesis and Development of Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese Archived 2017-10-10 at the Wayback Machine Page 246, etc
- )
- OCLC 223378429.
Further reading
- Benedict, Paul K. (1990). Japanese/Austro-Tai. Ann Arbor: Karoma.
- Cravens, Thomas D. (1994). "Substratum". The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed. by R. E. Asher et al. Vol. 1, pp. 4396–4398. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
- Hashimoto, Mantaro J. (1986). "The Altaicization of Northern Chinese". Contributions to Sino-Tibetan studies, eds John McCoy & Timothy Light, 76–97. Leiden: Brill.
- Janhunen, Juha (1996). Manchuria: An Ethnic History. Helsinki: Finno-Ugrian Society.
- Jungemann, Frédéric H. (1955). La teoría del substrato y los dialectos Hispano-romances y gascones. Madrid.
- Lewin, Bruno (1976). "Japanese and Korean: The Problems and History of a Linguistic Comparison". Journal of Japanese Studies 2:2.389–412
- Matsumoto, Katsumi (1975). "Kodai nihongoboin soshikikõ: naiteki saiken no kokoromi". Bulletin of the Faculty of Law and Letters (Kanazawa University) 22.83–152.
- McWhorter, John (2007). Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars. USA: Oxford University Press.
- Miller, Roy Andrew (1967). The Japanese language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Murayama, Shichiro (1976). "The Malayo-Polynesian Component in the Japanese Language". Journal of Japanese Studies 2:2.413–436
- Shibatani, Masayoshi (1990). The languages of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
- Singler, John Victor (1983). "The influence of African languages on pidgins and creoles". Current Approaches to African Linguistics (vol. 2), ed. by J. Kaye et al., 65–77. Dordrecht.
- Singler, John Victor (1988). "The homogeneity of the substrate as a factor in pidgin/creole genesis". Language 64.27–51.
- Vovin, Alexander (1994). "Long-distance relationships, reconstruction methodology and the origins of Japanese". Diachronica 11:1.95–114.
- Wartburg, Walter von (1939). Réponses au Questionnaire du Ve Congrès international des Linguistes. Bruges.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - Weinreich, Uriel (1979) [1953]. Languages in contact: findings and problems. New York: Mouton Publishers. ISBN 978-90-279-2689-0.