Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more
languages or
varieties interact and influence each other. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics. When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Language contact can occur at
language borders, between
adstratum languages, or as the result of
migration, with an intrusive language acting as either a
superstratum or a
substratum.
Language contact occurs in a variety of phenomena, including
language convergence,
borrowing and
relexification. The common products include
pidgins,
creoles,
code-switching, and
mixed languages. Other hybrid languages, such as
English, do not strictly fit into any of these categories. In many other cases, contact between speakers occurs but the lasting effects on the language are less visible; they may, however, include loan words,
calques or other types of borrowed material.
Multilingualism has likely been common throughout much of
human history, and today most people in the world are multilingual.
Borrowing of vocabulary
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.
Adoption 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.
Newar, for example, spoken in
Nepal, is a
Sino-Tibetan language distantly related to
Chinese but has had so many centuries of contact with neighbouring
Indo-Iranian languages that it has even developed noun
inflection, a trait that is typical of the
Indo-European family but rare in Sino-Tibetan. Newar has also absorbed grammatical features like
verb tenses.
Also,
Romanian was influenced by the
Slavic languages that were spoken by neighbouring tribes in the centuries after the fall of the
Roman Empire in vocabulary but even
phonology. English has a few phrases, adapted from French, in which the adjective follows the noun: court-martial, attorney-general, Lake Superior.
It is easy to see how a word can diffuse from one language to another, but it is not as obvious how more basic features can do the same even if the latter phenomenon is common.
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
substratum) can leave a profound impression on the replacing language (known as the
superstratum) when people
retain features of the substratum as they learn the new language and pass these features on to their children, which leads to the development of a new variety. For example, the Latin that came to replace local languages in present-day
France during
Ancient Rome times was influenced by
Gaulish and
Germanic. The distinct pronunciation of the
Hiberno-English dialect, spoken in
Ireland, comes partially from the influence of the substratum of
Irish.
Outside the
Indo-European family,
Coptic, the last stage of ancient
Egyptian, is a substratum of
Egyptian Arabic.
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
pidgin may develop, which may eventually become a full-fledged
creole language through the process of creolization (though some linguists assert that a creole need not emerge from a pidgin). Prime examples of this are
Aukan and
Saramaccan, spoken in
Suriname, which have vocabulary mainly from Portuguese, English and Dutch.
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.
Mutual and 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
Japanese, but Chinese remains relatively free of Japanese influence other than some modern
terms that were reborrowed after they were coined in Japan and based on Chinese forms and using Chinese characters. In
India,
Hindi and other native languages have been influenced by English, and loanwords from English are part of everyday vocabulary.
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.
Linguistic hegemony
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.
Especially during and since the 1990s, the internet, along with previous influences such as radio and television, telephone communication and printed materials,
has expanded and changed the many ways in which languages can be influenced by each other and by technology.
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
dialects,
jargons, or
registers.
South African English, for example, has been significantly affected by
Afrikaans in terms of
lexis and
pronunciation, but the other dialects of English have remained almost totally unaffected by Afrikaans other than a few loanwords.
In some cases, a language develops an
acrolect that contains elements of a more prestigious language. For example, in
England during a large part of the
Middle Ages, upper-class speech was dramatically influenced by French to the point that it often resembled a French dialect.
Methods from
sociolinguistics, the study of language use in society, are used effectively in the study of language contact in communities. The broader study of contact varieties within a society is called
linguistic ecology.
[See, for example, Mufwene, Salikoko S. The ecology of language evolution. Cambridge University Press, 2001.]
Sign languages
Language contact is extremely common in most
deaf communities, which are almost always located within a dominant
oral language culture. It can also 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. However, between a sign language and an oral language, even if lexical borrowing and code switching also occur, the interface between the oral and signed modes produces unique phenomena:
fingerspelling, fingerspelling/sign combination, initialisation,
CODA talk,
TDD conversation,
mouthing and
contact signing.
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
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) .
*
Ghil'ad Zuckermann''Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew''(Palgrave Macmillan 2003) .
{{DEFAULTSORT:Language Contact