langues Admin
| Subject: Language Contact Fri 30 Sep - 7:45 | |
| Language ContactWhy do we have words in English such as "fiesta" and "macho", "beef" and "bon voyage"? All of these words have entered the language via what we call language contact. Specifically, it's important to note, as we have seen in our discussion of sociolinguistics, that languages don't exist in isolation. Rather, they are used by speech communities whose members interact with one another as well as with members of other speech communities. Those who study language contact study the linguistic results of such interaction. What are the kinds of ways that linguistic systems are affected by language contact? Well, here are some concepts that we want to be in control of:
borrowing
- lexical: the borrowing of words, i.e. the adoption of
loan words such as "ballet" or "fiesta"; there are also loan translations or "calques" such as "it goes without saying" from the French "il va sans dire"
- structural: the borrowing of phonological, morphological, or syntactic features
- phonological: the borrowing of the sound in rouge or garage
- morphological: the borrowing of -able from French
- syntactic: Asia Minor Greek adopted SOV order from contact with Turkish
What factors affect linguistic borrowing? One primary factor is intensity of contact.
- Lexical borrowing requires only low intensity contact.
- By contrast, structural borrowing requires more intense contact, as
knowledge of the system is generally needed for the borrowing to happen; i.e. at least some of the speakers are bilingual
Another factor affecting borrowing is prestige (or power):
- If speakers of the two languages consider themselves of equal prestige, the languages are said to be in an adstratal
relation; your book gives you the example of English and Norse in early England. In adstratal situations, borrowing tends to be more bidirectional.
- if speakers of the two languages consider themselves to be of unequal power/prestige, the languages are said to be in a super/substral
relation. An example of a super/substratal relation would be that of the contact between Spanish (superstratal) and any of the Native American languages of Mexico (substratal), such as the Mixtec language that I work on. In super/substratal relations, borrowing tends to proceed from the superstratal language to the substratal language (though borrowing can happen in both directions).
Here are some other phenomena arising from language contact situations:
- language convergence: this can happen when languages
are in extensive, long-term contact. Such languages can begin to share more and more properties, entering into a so-called Sprachbund 'union of languages'. This has happened somewhat in the Balkans for Albankian, MAcedonain, Greek, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Serbo-Croatian.
- language shift: this is a bit different from
convergence. In this scenario, a group of speakers shifts from using a usually lower prestige language to a higher prestige language.
- language death: this occurs when language shift
involves the last remaining group of speakers of a language. It's happening all over the world today, as many of the world's indigenous languages are dying as speakers shift to a smaller set of languages spoken by socio-economically dominant groups.
Two important concepts: pidgins and creoles
One of the most interesting areas of study in language contact is the study of so-called pidgins and creoles.
Pidgins arise usually as a code used in trading situations in which speakers of many languages come together and need some means of communicating for the purposes of doing business with one another. The interesting thing about pidgins is that they are not the primary language for any of their users. Structurally, pidgins tend to be somewhat simpler than full-blown natural languages. As your textbook notes, though, this is a bit of an oversimplification.
For example, they discuss the development of a transitive marker [im] in Solomon Islands Pidgin. Some linguistis have associated this with English 'him'.
luk 'look'
luk-im see something
But other Oceanic languages such as Kwaio have similar structures:
aga look
aga-si see something
Note that both the pidgin and Kwaio have intransitive verbs that can take a transitive suffix. So, we can think that this grammatical property of the Pidgin comes from the substrate Oceanic languages and not from the superstrate English.
Creoles, on the other hand, are languages with speakers for whom the creole is the primary form of communication--the native language as it were. Creoles are found in many parts of the world. The Caribbean, for example, has English-realted Jamaican Creole and French-related Hatian Creole. In both of these cases, a situation arose (due to the plantation system) in which many Africans speaking a diverse range of mutually unintelligible African languages came into contact with each other and with English or French. Over time, this mixing gave rise to a generation of speakers who spoke none of the original languages but rather new languages that were related lexically and structurally to parts of the languages that came into contact.
One of the miraculous things about human language, as Pinker points out, is its instinctive nature. Pinker discusses the remarkable and documented case of the emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language via the process of creolization of a pidgin form of sign used by Deaf people in Nicaragua. What's so interesting about this is that we have actually seen and carefully documented a case of language genesis. The Deaf children from whom the creole emerged did not have a full fledged sign language as a model. In essence, they, as a speech community, gave birth to a new language (without even trying!). You saw this on the video in your recitation section.
Focus on Pidgins
Here's a list of some of the properties of pidgins:
- They are made from mixtures of contact languages.
- Their vocabulary tends to be derived from the superstrate language
because speakers of the substrate languages have higher motivation to learn the words of the economically powerful.
- In pidgin contact situations, there is often little time or means
for substrate speakers to be formally educated in the superstrate language, so they often acquire lexical items rather than whole grammars.
Here we see an example of some words from Tok Pisin, spoken in Papua New Guinea. Note how the vocabulary is taken from English, the superstrate language.
Tok Pisin
| English
| gloss
| dok
| dog
| dog
| pik
| pig
| pig
| fis
| fish
| fish
| baimbai
| by and by
| soon
|
General Features of Pidgins
phonology: cluster reduction is common, resulting in a favoring of CV syllables. Example: dust becomes dus.
morphology: pidgins often have absence of affixal marking (drop the s-agreement from verbs, for example)
syntax: word order tends to be SVO, prepositions used, articles not generally used, aspectual distinctions often marked by auxiliaries
Here's some data from the pidgin called Cameroonian. Note how the auxiliaries di and don express aspectual notions such as completed, repeated and ongoing.
ongoing
| di
| di laf
| was laughing
| completed
| don
| don du
| have done
| repeated
| di
| di du
| do always
|
semantics: pidgins usually have small vocabularies with words with extended meanings. [wikup] means wake up and also 'get up' (Cameroonian, I think). More compounds employed: dog baby for puppy.
Creoles
In broad strokes, Creoles are precursored by prepidgin jargons.
Your book lists a number of modes of evoloution:
Type 1: pidgin jargon--> creole, ex. Hawaiian Creole English
Type 2: pidgin jargon--> stable pidgin -> creole, ex. Torres Straits Creole English
Type 3: jargon ->stable pidgin->expanded pidgin -> creole; ex. New Guinea Tok Pisin
Important concept: nativization--the process by which some variety of speech that was no one's native language is learned by the children in that community as their first language.
We can think of crreolization as nativization.
TOPIC : Language Contact SOURCE : Linguistic Studies ** http://languages.forumactif.org/ |
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