Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact with and influence each other. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics. Language contact can occur at ,[Hadzibeganovic, Tarik, Stauffer, Dietrich & Schulze, Christian (2008). Boundary effects in a three-state modified voter model for languages. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 387(13), 3242–3252.] between adstratum languages, or as the result of human migration, with an intrusive language acting as either a superstratum or a substratum.
When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Intensive language contact may result in language convergence or relexification. In some cases a new contact language may be created as a result of the influence, such as a pidgin, Creole language, or mixed language. In many other cases, contact between speakers occurs with smaller-scale lasting effects on the language; these may include the borrowing of , , or other types of linguistic material.
Multilingualism has been common throughout much of human history, and today most people in the world are multilingual.[ A Global Perspective on Bilingualism and Bilingual Education (1999), G. Richard Tucker, Carnegie Mellon University] Multilingual speakers may engage in code-switching, the use of multiple languages in a single conversation.
Methods from sociolinguistics[Gooden, Shelome. "Language Contact in a Sociolinguistics Context." in The Routledge Companion to the Work of John R. Rickford (2019).] (the study of language use in society), from corpus linguistics and from formal linguistics are used in the study of language contact.
Borrowing
Borrowing of vocabulary items
The most common way that languages influence each other is the exchange of words. Much is made about the contemporary borrowing of
English language 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 language 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.[Waterman, John (1976). A History of the German Language. University of Washington Press, p. 4]
Borrowing 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 language, for example, spoken in Nepal, is a Sino-Tibetan language distantly related to Chinese language 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 not only in vocabulary but also phonology. English has a few phrases, adapted from French, in which the adjective follows the noun: court-martial, attorney-general, Lake Superior.
Direction of influence
Linguistic hegemony
A language's influence widens as its speakers grow in power. Chinese,
Greek language, Latin, Portuguese, French,
Spanish language,
Arabic language,
Persian language, Sanskrit,
Russian language, 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,
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
Wasei-kango after they were coined in Japan and based on Chinese forms and using Chinese characters. In
India,
Hindi language and other native languages have been influenced by English, and loanwords from English are part of everyday vocabulary.
Mutual influence
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 language and vice versa. In
Scotland,
Scots language has been heavily influenced by English, and many Scots terms have been adopted into the regional English dialect.
Outcomes of language contact
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
language death.
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 language.
Outside the Indo-European family, Coptic language, 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
Ndyuka language 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 . 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.
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,
, or
speech register. 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 Norman language to the point that it often resembled a dialect.
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
Contact between sign languages
Language contact can 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.
Contact between sign languages and oral languages
Language contact is extremely common in most
deaf community, which are almost always located within a dominant
oral language culture. 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
Notes
General references
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Hickey, Raymond (ed.), The Handbook of Language Contact (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell 2010)
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Sarah Thomason and Terrence Kaufman, Language Contact, Creolization and Genetic Linguistics (University of California Press 1988).
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Sarah Thomason, Language Contact - An Introduction (Edinburgh University Press 2001).
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Uriel Weinreich, Languages in Contact (Mouton 1963).
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Donald Winford, An Introduction to Contact Linguistics (Blackwell 2002) .
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Ghil'ad Zuckermann, Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew (Palgrave Macmillan 2003) .
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