Language Contact. Volume 1

Jeroen Darquennes, Joseph C. Salmons, Wim Vandenbussche, Jeroen Darquennes, Joseph C. Salmons, Wim Vandenbussche

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9783110433258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Language Contact. An International Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of current topics in research on language contact. Broadly conceived, it stands out for its international approach to language contact, complementing the theoretical state-of-the-art with examples from traditionally eclipsed areas and languages. Next to a thorough introductory overview of the ground-breaking methodological and theoretical approaches that shaped the discipline, ample attention goes to the new and innovative insights on language contact in the 21st century. Combining concise introductory contributions with in-depth treatment of the most relevant case studies in the field, the handbook speaks to both junior and established scholars.

1.Language contact research: scope, trends, and possible future directions

1.Introduction

2.Scope

3.Trends

4.Possible future directions

5.References

1.Introduction

Almost a quarter century ago, Mouton published a massive two-volume set called Kontaktlinguistik / Contact Linguistics / Linguistique de Contact (Goebl et al. 1996, 1997). The book you are reading now builds on that foundation, but even as we ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’, the field has progressed so rapidly and changed so dramatically that these two handbooks represent two fundamentally different books about very different fields. The present volume is not really a new edition of Volume 1 of the 1996 handbook in any sense, but instead a fresh collection on the same topic. This introduction provides a brief comparison of the two projects and situates the present volume in a broader context.

As pointed out by Oksaar (1996: 2), language contact phenomena have been “perceived and discussed in their various applied aspects throughout the history of Europe”, and of course far beyond. The emergence of language contact as an area of scientific interest, however, basically dates back to the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, when Hesseling, Paul, Schuchardt, Whitney, and others developed an interest in dialect contact, pidgin and creole formation, and the roles of lexical, phonological, and syntactic transfer in language change (Clyne 1975, 1987; Winford 2007: 22). Also important to the later development of research on the linguistic consequences of contact between people and social groups was the work of Georg Schmidt-Rohr, Heinz Kloss, and other representatives of the Auslandsdeutsche Volksforschung, though Clyne (1987: 456) reminds us with reference to the work of Schmidt-Rohr that this work was “steeped in the racist ideology of National Socialism”; see also Hutton (1999). The bibliographies of Weinreich’s ([1953] 1968) Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems and Haugen’s ([1953] 1969) The Norwegian Language in America offer broad samples of early literature on intra- and extralinguistic language contact phenomena. During the time of the emergence of what Voegelin (s.d.) called ‘hyphenated linguistics’, both monographs are also generally considered to have sparked more systematic study of language contact phenomena (Matras 2009: 1). Particularly Weinreich’s (1968) volume continues to inspire contemporary specialists, for example, Lim and Ansaldo (2016: 187−190).

Less discussed in recent literature, but an equally important source of inspiration for the present volume, is Mackey’s (1976) Bilinguisme et Contact des Langues. The work of Mackey and his colleagues at the University of Laval’s International Center for Research on Bilingualism inspired Nelde’s (1980, 1983) take on language contact. As a consequence, it also had an influence on the scope and the structure of the 12th volume in De Gruyter’s HSK-Series mentioned just above: the international and trilingual (English-French-German) handbook on Contact Linguistics, edited by Peter H. Nelde (who acted as lead editor) together with Hans Goebl, Zdenĕk Starý, and Wolfgang Wölck and published in 1996 (Volume 1) and 1997 (Volume 2). Thomason (2001: 13) refers to the handbook as a “major […] encyclopedic treatment of the subject”. Rindler Schjerve (1999: 8) sees it as offering “an ultimate synthesis of contact linguistic endeavours”. While this might be an overstatement, it cannot be denied that the thematic coverage of the field offered in the first, theoretical volume of Contact Linguistics is vastly broader than that offered in other, more recently published monographs and handbooks on language contact. At the time of this writing, the field has a rapidly growing set of handbooks beyond the original Mouton project, including Hickey (2013, new edition in preparation), Grant (forthcoming), and Mufwene and Escobar (in preparation), as well as textbooks and journals.

As will become clear in Section 2 of this introduction, the structure of and philosophy behind the 1996 volume have inspired the present volume in many ways. Section 3 is devoted to some current trends in language contact research. Section 4 closes with potential directions for future research.

2.Scope

Matras (2009: 1) lists borrowing, areal language clusters, new ‘contact’ languages, pidgins and creoles, and code-switching as topics that receive especially extensive attention in recent publications on language contact. Those are, for example, topics that are dealt with frequently in the Journal of Language Contact (JLC), a thriving platform for language contact research established by Robert Nicolaï in 2007. As stated on the journal’s website, JLC particularly aims at “advancing our understanding of the nature of language” (https://brill.com/view/journals/jlc/jlc-overview.xml), which almost automatically entails a focus on the structural linguistic consequences of language contact rather than on speakers and social groups as the loci of language contact. In the opening article of the first issue, Nicolaï (2007: 17) does, however, point to the variety of intersecting angles from which language contact phenomena are or can be studied. In doing so, he refers to Winford’s (2007: 22) view that “[t]he earliest conceptions of the field of Contact Linguistics envisioned it as a multi-disciplinary area of study, encompassing a broad range of language contact phenomena and issues, linguistic, sociolinguistic, sociological and psycholinguistic”. That is indeed what emerged early on in the preface of The Norwegian Language in America, in which Haugen (1969: xi) writes: “It has been my intention throughout this book to treat language as a social phenomenon, in such a way that it might offer something of value to students of history and sociology”. This is also the vision that Weinreich (1968: 4) presents in the first chapter of Languages in Contact:

Purely linguistic studies of languages in contact must be coordinated with extra-linguistic studies on bilingualism and related phenomena. Geographers and ethnographers have described bilingual populations; sociologists have examined the functioning of coexisting languages in a community; jurists have studied the legal status accorded to minority languages in various states; the inquiries of educators interested in bilingual children and in foreignlanguage teaching have stimulated psychologists to analyze the effects of bilingualism on personality. All the studies are described in a vast, scattered literature. But divergent as they are in purpose and scope, they are all essentially complementary in understanding a phenomenon of so many dimensions.

Work on language change, and linguistic theory more broadly, has long wrestled with how to put material into discrete boxes of ‘internal’ versus ‘external’ motivations, i.e. structural versus social. These passages show that work on language contact has engaged with the problem in a more holistic way, increasingly avoiding what Dorian (1993: 152) calls “the weakness of simplistic dichotomous thinking”. In this regard, other subfields of linguistics are finally catching up with language contact studies.

The broad, inclusive take on language contact research just sketched is reflected in the many working papers and publications of the International Center for Research on Bilingualism (1967−2001; known from 1990 onward as the Centre international de Recherche sur l’Aménagement linguistique), as well as in the 30 volumes of the Plurilingua series published by the Brussels-based Research Center on Multilingualism (1977− 2007). The content of these publications can be classified according to the interrelated main foci of research on language contact identified by Clyne (1975, 1996), Mackey (1976), and Nelde (1992), namely: language, individual language user(s), and society. In line with this view, the first three sections of the present volume focus on these three areas, while the final two turn to issues of methodology and connections to neighboring disciplines.

Section 1 focuses on linguistic aspects of language contact, and contains ten chapters covering contact-induced change from a general point of view (Chapter 2), contact-induced syntactic change (Chapter 3), contact-induced semantic change (Chapter 4), lexicon and word formation (Chapter 5), morphology (Chapter 6), orthography and graphemics (Chapter 7), levels of representation in phonetic and phonological contact (Chapter 8), pidginization and creolization (Chapter 9), varieties in contact (Chapter 10), and constructed languages (Chapter 11).

Section 2 deals with language contact and the individual. Its ten chapters focus on pragmatic aspects of language contact (Chapter 12), borrowing (Chapter 13), code-switching (Chapter 14), age groups (Chapter 15), uninstructed language acquisition in multiple language learners (Chapter 16), first language attrition (Chapter 17), individual variation in bilingual lexical processing (Chapter 18), metalinguistic awareness and multilingual development (Chapter 19), language attitudes (Chapter 20), and gender (Chapter 21).

Section 3 covers societal aspects of language contact. It starts with chapters on multilingualism (Chapter 22), geographical and social boundaries (Chapter 23), language and identity (Chapter 24), and language ideology (Chapter 25). It further contains chapters on the notion of speech community (C...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• 1. Language contact research: scope, trends, and possible future directions · Jeroen Darquennes, Joe Salmons and Wim Vandenbussche
• I. Linguistic aspects of language contact
• II. Language contact and the individual
• III. Societal aspects of language contact
• IV. Methodological issues
• V. Interactions with neighboring disciplines
• Index