Chapter IV Language Contact
Chapter IV Language Contact
CHAPTER IV
LANGUAGE CONTACT
Multilingualism and language contact has likely been common throughout much of human
history, and today most people in the world are multilingual. In tribal hunter-gatherer societies,
multilingualism was common, as tribes must communicate with neighboring peoples and there is
often inter-marriage. In present-day areas such as Sub-Saharan Africa, where there is much
variation in language over short distances, it is usual for anyone who has dealings outside their
own town or village to know two or more languages.
When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to
influence each other. Languages normally develop by gradually accumulating dialectal
differences until two dialects cease to be mutually understandable, somewhat analogous to the
species barrier in biology. Language contact can occur at language borders, between adstratum
languages, or as the result of migration, with a disturbing language acting as either a superstratum or a sub-stratum.
Language contact occurs in a variety of phenomena, including language convergence and
borrowing. The most common products are code-switching and mixed languages. Other hybrid
languages, such as English, do not strictly fit into any of these categories.
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, nor is it very large by historical standards. The large-scale importation
of words from Latin, French and other languages into English in the 16th and 17th centuries was
more significant. Some languages have borrowed so much that they have become scarcely
recognizable. Armenian borrowed so many words from Iranian languages, for example, that it
was at first considered a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages. It was not recognized as an
independent branch of the Indo-European languages for many decades.
E. Linguistic Hegemony
Obviously, a language's influence widens as its speakers grow in power. Chinese, Greek,
Latin, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Russian, German and English have
each seen periods of widespread importance, and have had varying degrees of influence on the
native languages spoken in the areas over which they have held sway.
Some forms of language contact affect only a particular segment of a speech community.
Consequently, change may be manifested only in particular dialects, jargons, or registers. The
South African dialect of English has been significantly affected by Afrikaans, in terms of lexis
and pronunciation, but English as a whole has remained almost totally unaffected by Afrikaans.
In some cases, a language develops an acrolect which contains elements of a more prestigious
language. For example, in England during a large part of the Medieval period, upper-class
speech was dramatically influenced by French, to the point that it often resembled a French
dialect. A similar situation existed in Tsarist Russia, where the native Russian language was
widely disparaged as barbaric and uncultured.
F. Code Mixing
Code-mixing refers to the mixing of two or more languages or language varieties in
speech. Some scholars use the terms "code-mixing" and "code-switching" interchangeably,
especially in studies of syntax, morphology, and other formal aspects of language. Others assume
more specific definitions of code-mixing, but these specific definitions may be different in
different subfields of linguistics, education theory, communications etc.
Code-mixing is similar to the use or creation of pidgins; but while a pidgin is created
across groups that do not share a common language, code-mixing may occur within a
multilingual setting where speakers share more than one language.
Some linguists use the terms code-mixing and code-switching more or less
interchangeably. Especially in formal studies of syntax, morphology, etc., both terms are used to
refer to utterances that draw from elements of two or more grammatical systems. These studies
Zentella explains that the children of the predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood speak
both English and Spanish: "Within the childrens network, English predominated, but codeswitching from English to Spanish occurred once every three minutes, on average."
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