Language Contact Research Paper

1. Language Contacts In Time And Space

Languages have been in contact ever since human populations began spreading out into new territories and splitting into independent subgroups. No community in today’s world is so isolated that its language remains untouched by outside influence over a long period of time; probably no language has been so isolated at any time in the last several thousand years. Every so often news reports trumpet the discovery of a ‘stone-age tribe’ that has been isolated from all other communities (and their languages) for thousands of years. A prominent late-twentieth-century case is that of the Tasadays, a small group that was discovered in the rainforest of the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. But the Tasadays, although they are not a hoax (as has been claimed), are certainly not a stoneage tribe (as was originally claimed for them): they are estimated to have been isolated from their nearest neighbors only for five to ten generations (Reid 1997; see also Headland 1991).

Most of the world’s people are bilingual or multilingual. Attitudes toward the use of two or more languages within a community vary widely, however. Sometimes the highly visible symbolic status of language makes it a convenient pretext for interethnic hostilities: conflicts over language policies have erupted over the past few decades in many countries, among them the former Yugoslavia, where Croatian nationalists demanded linguistic autonomy years before the country’s break-up; South Africa, where lethal riots broke out in the 1970s over the apartheid regime’s insistence that the use of Afrikaans be increased in the townships’ school systems; and Sri Lanka, where violent Tamil separatist activities were triggered by the ‘Sinhalese-only’ policy that the government established in the mid-1950s.

But a great many language contacts all over the world display no tendency toward conflict. Long-term bilingualism and multilingualism often flourish as a result of such social institutions as exogamy and regular trading relations with neighbors. Nor is cooperative multilingualism confined to small hunter– gatherer cultures. In some modern nation-states, for instance Switzerland, languages coexist peacefully, even productively.

For the vast majority of contact situations around the world we have no specific information about their onsets. Nevertheless, we can identify a variety of ways in which languages come into contact. At an earlier time in human history, some language contacts must have been established when groups met after moving into previously unoccupied territory; now that the world has no unoccupied habitable territory, this mode of contact onset is no longer available.

In more recent human history, probably the most common way in which languages come into contact is the movement of groups or individuals into other people’s territory. Such movements can be peaceful immigrations, by people who wish to become integrated with the host population and people who want to work in agriculture or other industries. They can also be forced immigrations, as in the notorious Atlantic slave trade and in smaller-scale cases of slavery and indentured servitude. Or the movements can be more or less hostile encroachments by invading armies. The USA, Australia, and northern Europe, for instance, have all been prime immigration destinations over the past century, and the resulting linguistic contacts have been the subject of a rich scholarly literature (to mention just three of innumerable examples, see Haugen 1953, Clyne 1997, and Backus 1996). Language contacts resulting from forced immigration have also received a great deal of scholarly attention, especially in the study of pidgin and creole languages (see e.g., Arends et al. 1994). Not surprisingly, given the long history of European and other colonial expansions, the literature on contacts initiated by invasions is the largest of all—covering contacts ranging from ancient Egyptian expansions to the European Age of Exploration, to Arab conquerors and indigenes in the Maghreb, to Russians and the peoples of the Russian Far East, and many others.

Some language contacts are ephemeral, others are extremely stable, and still others are in between. The stability of a language contact situation depends on many different social factors, among them the relative status and size of immigrant and host groups or of invaders and invaded; the degree to which one or more of the groups in contact desire complete amalgamation with the other group(s); the balance between ‘otherdirected’ and ‘self-directed’ world views, and attitudes toward multilingualism itself, among multilingual groups in contact (Foley 1986, p. 27ff ); and, when there is a dominant group, the amount of pressure it exerts on subordinate groups to shift to its own language.

2. Linguistic Results Of Language Contact

The major linguistic aspects of language contact can be divided into several categories, including at least contact-induced language change, mechanisms of interference, the emergence of contact languages, and language death. But a preliminary comment is in order: one possible linguistic result of language contact, even under the most intense contact conditions, is no change at all. It is true that the great majority of long-term intense contacts all over the world involve significant contact-induced changes; but there are cases where lexical and even structural borrowing are rigorously avoided, so it is not safe to predict that contact-induced change is inevitable.

2.1 Contact-Induced Language Changes

We can point to a number of linguistic and especially social predictors in trying to understand when and why contact-induced change occurs. Only the most trivial predictor is absolute: there can be no contact induced change without contact. But other predictors also permit generalizations that are robustly supported by the linguistic evidence. One of the most important social predictors is the presence vs. the absence of imperfect learning of a target language by a group of people (Thomason and Kaufman 1988, Thomason 2001); another is the admittedly vague concept of intensity of contact. Strictly linguistic predictors, such as universal markedness and typological distance between source and receiving languages, are also important, but they are easily overridden by social factors.

If there is imperfect group learning—typically but not always in a case of group language shift—and a sufficiently intense contact situation, the first interference features to appear in the receiving language are phonological and syntactic features; morphology lags behind, and so, though for other reasons, does lexicon (except, sometimes, in the case of a shift by a superstrate group to a substrate group’s language). So, for example, Latvian, a member of the Baltic subgroup of the Balto-Slavic branch of Indo-European, has undergone significant shift-induced interference in phonology, syntax, and to a lesser extent morphology as a result of shift by speakers of Uralic languages, especially Livonian; among the interference features in the most-affected dialects are its fixed initial stress rule, nominal object construction, and loss of gender distinctions (see Comrie 1981, pp. 147, 149, 152, 154). Shift-induced interference comprises both features carried over from the native language (L1) and failure to learn some target language (TL) features. Whether the shifting group’s version of the TL will ultimately cause any changes in the TL as a whole depends on the extent to which the learners are integrated into the larger TL community. Note that imperfect group learning cannot be predicted with any confidence, though such factors as the relative sizes of the shifting and TL communities permit tentative predictions.

If imperfect learning plays no role in an interference process, the prediction about transferred features differs sharply: in this case the first interference features to appear in the receiving languages are nonbasic lexical items; structural features and basic vocabulary may appear later, if contact is intense enough, but in all or almost all known cases, borrowed nonbasic vocabulary predominates. In these interference processes, which have been labeled ‘borrowing’ in a narrower sense than the traditional usage (Thomason and Kaufman 1988), the people responsible for the interference are fully fluent in relevant aspects of both the source language and the receiving language.

Unlike the prediction of shift-induced interference in cases of imperfect group learning, even the most intense contact does not guarantee that significant borrowing will occur: communities in various parts of the world refuse to borrow vocabulary (or, in some cases, anything at all) from the language of their neighbors, even when (for instance) all members of a subordinate community are fully bilingual in a dominant group’s language. So, for instance, the Montana Salish language in northwestern USA has been in intimate contact with English for 150 years, and the 60 or so remaining fluent speakers of the language are fully bilingual in English; and yet Montana Salish has only a tiny handful of loanwords from English, and no detectable structural interference of any kind.

Still, examples of extensive lexical and even structural borrowing are very easy to find in contact situations all over the world. A typical case is borrowing by Ossetic (Iranian, Indo-Iranian subgroup of Indo-European) from languages of the Caucasus, e.g., the Kartvelian language Georgian: much lexicon, glottalized ejective phonemes even in native vocabulary, several added cases in noun declension, agglutination in noun declension, and sentence structure that is more typically SOV (subject–object–verb) than in other Iranian languages of the former Soviet Union and that has a ‘highly developed system of postpositions’ (Comrie 1981, pp. 167, 171, 179).

Two-language contact situations, complex as they can be both socially and linguistically, are nevertheless easier to understand, in a historical sense, than multilingual contact situations, in particular regions called linguistic areas or Sprachbunde. Although the processes by which a Sprachbund arises are the same as those by which interference occurs in a twolanguage contact situation, establishing the sources of many areal features in a Sprachbund is difficult and often impossible, at least with our present knowledge of such diverse linguistic areas as the Balkans, South Asia, and the Pacific Northwest of North America.

2.2 Mechanisms Of Interference

The only two mechanisms of interference that have received much attention in the literature are codeswitching (especially as a mechanism of borrowing) and second-language acquisition strategies (as a mechanism of shift-induced interference). Code-switching becomes a route to interference when a code-switched element, such as a noun inserted into a sentence that is otherwise in a different language, turns up more and more frequently in the other language’s sentences until it is fixed as a part of that language, with or without phonological and morphosyntactic adaptation to the receiving language’s structure. One strategy used by second-language learners is the employment of L1 lexicon and structure to fill gaps in their knowledge of the L2, as when L1 English speakers use an English pronunciation of r in speaking L2 German, or when they use English SVO word order in a German subordinate clause instead of the native German SOV order. A related strategy is guessing what patterns the L2 has on the basis of a perception that the L2 differs from the L1, as when Hungarian learners of a SerboCroatian dialect ended up with fixed penultimate stress—different both from fixed initial Hungarian stress and from free (other) Serbo-Croatian stress. These strategies lead to shift-induced interference if and when the learners’ errors become a permanent part of a community’s language. (The type of guessing that is done in such cases may be subsumable under a separate mechanism, called ‘negotiation’; see Thomason 2001).

But although these are by far the best known mechanisms, there are others as well. One is code alternation, in which a bilingual speaker uses one language with some people and the other with different people—but never both languages with the same person, so that no code-switching is involved. In contrast to code-switching, this mechanism seems likely to be responsible for the importation of more structure than lexicon into one of a bilingual’s languages; but as it has not yet been studied in any systematic way, it’s hard to be sure of its typical effects. An example would be the borrowing of phonological features (e.g., aspiration of initial voiceless stops) and lexical semantic changes in the Italian of an Italian English bilingual (M. Shigley-Giusti, personal communication, 1993). This example doesn’t necessarily point to permanent interference even in this one speaker’s idiolect; but it isn’t hard to see how such local effects could eventually snowball into permanent community-wide interference.

A fourth mechanism of interference is passive familiarity, in which the language of a person or group is altered through contact with a language or dialect that the relevant speakers understand but do not ever speak. An obvious example is the borrowing of numerous words into whites’ American English from African-American vernacular English, e.g., Drop a dime (on someone) ‘to inform (on)’ (as in That dude’ll drop a dime on ya in a heartbeat), boogie ‘go, leave,’ and chill ‘relax, calm down.’ But structural features are also transferred by this mechanism. In fact, it is presumably part of the complex process through which shift-induced interference features make their way into the language of an integrated community consisting of L2 learners and/original L1 speakers of the TL: the eventual community’s language will contain a subset, but not all, of the shifting group’s version of the TL—and those features were in effect borrowed by the original TL speakers, even though they are very unlikely to have spoken the shifting group’s TL version.

A fifth mechanism of interference is bilingual firstlanguage acquisition. Again, however, L1 acquisition as a mechanism of interference has not been studied systematically, so it is hard to know just how widespread its effects are. The clearest examples in the literature to date concern either syntactic features like word order or nonsalient phonological features such as intonation patterns, as in Queen’s (1996) discovery that young Turkish German bilinguals kept two phrase-final intonation patterns that are isofunctional in the two adult languages, and introduced a functional distinction between the two patterns in each of their L1’s.

A sixth mechanism of interference, finally, is speakers’ deliberate decision to alter their languages. This mechanism is best attested for changes in a whole language if the community is quite small, but examples like that of the eighteenth-century grammarians who introduced the Latin-inspired ban against split infinitives into Standard English at least show that the phenomenon isn’t confined to hunter–gatherer societies.

2.3 Contact Languages And Language Death

The field of language contact is vast, and in a limited space only a few of its aspects can be touched on. To round out the picture a bit, this research paper will conclude with very brief comments on two other aspects of great importance, contact languages and language death. Contact languages can (in my opinion) only be adequately defined by reference to their histories; there are no promising approaches that would permit them to be identified by their linguistic features alone. The one thing that all contact languages have in common is the fact that their structures and lexicons cannot all be traced back primarily to a single source language. Given the historical linguist’s standard criterion for membership in a language family—descent with modification from a single parent language—this means that a contact language does not belong to any language family.

There are two basic kinds of contact languages: pidgins and creoles (see, for example, Arends et al. 1994), on the one hand, and bilingual mixed languages on the other (see e.g., Bakker and Mous 1994). The genesis of pidgins and creoles involves imperfect group learning and also a negotiation mechanism; but often there is no true target language in the sense of a language that the creators of the contact language try to learn. A creole, more or less by definition (although, as with most issues in this subfield, the claim is controversial), serves as the main language of some speech community. Prototypical pidgins serve a variety of functions: they permit communication among linguistically diverse groups that share no common language but need to communicate with each other about a limited range of topics; but many pidgins also serve to keep outsiders at a distance. Hiri Motu in New Guinea, for instance, probably developed as a means of fulfilling both purposes. It was a means of inter- group communication, but it also ensured that outsiders would not learn the true Motu language (Dutton 1997).

In sharp contrast to pidgins and creoles, bilingual mixed languages show no effects of imperfect learning: they are clearly created by bilinguals. They also serve a very different function from pidgins and creoles, because they are in-group languages, not intergroup languages.

Some contact languages arise abruptly, probably crystallizing into a language that has to be learned as such within a few years or at most one or two generations; others appear to be gradual developments. Abruptly created contact languages almost certainly include many pidgins and the creole Pitcairnese (which developed after 1790 among the Bounty mutineers, their Tahitian-speaking partners, and the offspring of those unions); they also include such bilingual mixed languages as Michif, a language created by mixed-blood Cree French bilinguals (French noun phrases, Cree verb phrases and sentential syntax), and Mednyj Aleut, the language of mixed-blood Aleut/Russian bilinguals (Russian finite verbal inflection, otherwise mostly Aleut). In all such abrupt cases of language genesis there is a sharp break in transmission; the resulting mixed language is not the product of normal language transmission, which involves the learning of a whole language from speakers of that language (see Thomason and Kaufman 1988). It is not the product of ordinary bilingual L1 acquisition, either, because bilingual L1 learners keep their languages separated from a very early age.

Other contact languages, however, seem to be best understood as the product of gradual development: at every stage in the process, a whole language is passed down from one generation to the next, but so many interference features are accumulated over a long period of time that, ultimately, too little is left of the original language for it to be classifiable as belonging to its original family. Contact languages of this type comprise at least some creole languages born of the slave trade, where successive waves of imported slaves learned versions of a European TL that was increasingly distant from the original TL as spoken by Frenchmen (see Arends 1993, Chaudenson 1989), and also bilingual mixed languages which developed through long-term intensive borrowing that ultimately replaced most of the inherited structure and much of the inherited lexicon. A prime example is Ma’a (northeastern Tanzania), which started as a non-Bantu language ( perhaps originally an ordinary Cushitic language, though the evidence is unclear—Mous 1993) but, over a period of three hundred years or so, incorporated so much lexicon and structure from neighboring Bantu languages that by the 1980s its lexicon was about half Bantu and its structure almost entirely Bantu, including a full set of Bantu inflectional affixes (Thomason 1997, but see Mous 1994 for a different historical scenario).

Finally, the saddest outcome of language contact, often for the speakers and always for linguists’ hope of understanding human language in all its immense diversity, is language death. This outcome is becoming increasingly common in our modern world, and in spite of intensive language preservation efforts in many places, the process is probably irreversible for a shockingly high percentage of the languages currently alive (Hale et al. 1992). The linguistic study of language death has focused on attrition, though other aspects of the topic have also received a considerable amount of attention; for a representative sampling, see Dressler and Wodak-Leodolter (1977) and Dorian (1989).

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