scholarly journals Unbalanced Language Contact and the Struggle for Survival: Bridging Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives on Nahuatl

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 207-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justyna Olko
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Multidisciplinary Approach ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Minority Languages ◽  
Special Importance ◽  
Language Endangerment ◽  
Historical Trajectory

Looking at the Spanish impact on Nahuatl both in its full historical trajectory and modern synchronic dimension, I focus on the differentiation between ‘balanced’, long-term language contact and ‘unbalanced’ contact leading to rapid language shift in contemporary indigenous communities. I discuss the connection between accelerated contact-induced language change and language endangerment and shift, highlighting and assessing the mutually interdependent extra- and inter-linguistic variables that influence and shape both processes. Of special importance is the synchronic variation linked to speakers’ proficiency that influences language transmission in the diachronic perspective. On the basis of extensive fieldwork and linguistic documentation I identify several types of Nahuatl speakers as agents of this accelerated language change which leads to individual attrition and shift at the community level. This kind of multidisciplinary approach, taking into account both historical and modern data, can also potentially be useful for other minority languages in the scenario of long-term contact with a dominant language.

Language Contact and Endangered Languages

2020 ◽  
pp. 240-260
Author(s):  
Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
Endangered Languages ◽  
Language Loss ◽  
Language Endangerment ◽  
Dominant Language ◽  
Endangered Language ◽  
High Degree ◽  
The Impact

A major reason for language endangerment is intensive contact with another group whose language has gained, or is gaining, greater political, social and economic prestige and advantages. Speakers of an endangered language will gradually lose the capacity to fully communicate in the language, and fully understand it. As a consequence, an endangered language will gradually become obsolescent. The process of language obsolescence ultimately leads to language shift and language loss. The impact of the increasingly dominant language onto an endangered language tends to involve a massive influx of non-native forms from the dominant language; a high amount of structural diffusion; reinforcement of forms and patterns shared with the dominant language; and the loss of forms or patterns absent from the dominant language. Language endangerment and impending language shift may result in dialect leveling, and creating new mixed, or ‘blended’ languages. A major difference between contact-induced language change in ‘healthy’ and in endangered languages lies in the speed of change. A high degree of individual variation between speakers and disintegration of language communities result in the lack of continuity and stability of linguistic change.

scholarly journals Stages of language shift in twentieth-century Inner Mongolia

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 28
Author(s):  
Sarala Puthuval
Keyword(s):  
Inner Mongolia ◽  
Quantitative Research ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
Minority Language ◽  
Retrospective Survey ◽  
Language Endangerment ◽  
Autonomous Region ◽  
Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region

Mongolian as a minority language in China is losing speakers, although several million remain in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The case of 20th-century Inner Mongolia is an example of the long-term processes that may precede language endangerment. This paper takes Fishman’s (1991) notion of language shift as a decline in intergenerational mother tongue transmission and formalizes it for quantitative research, applying the methodology to a retrospective survey of intergenerational language transmission concerning over 600 Inner Mongolians born between 1922 and 2007. Results show that bilingualism with Chinese has penetrated the entire Mongolian-speaking population, but has not thus far precipitated massive language shift.

The Status of Endangered Contact Languages of the World

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 301-318
Author(s):  
Nala H. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
Language Endangerment ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Mixed Languages

This article provides an up-to-date perspective on the endangerment that contact languages around the world are facing, with a focus on pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages. While language contact is often associated with language shift and hence language endangerment, languages arising from contact also can and do face the risk of endangerment. Recent observations and studies show that contact languages may be at twice the risk of endangerment and loss compared with noncontact languages. The loss of these languages is highly consequential. The arguments that usually apply to why noncontact languages should be conserved also apply to many of these contact languages. This article highlights recent work on the documentation and preservation of contact languages and suggests that much more can be done to protect and conserve this unique category of languages.

Language Shift

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lenore A. Grenoble
Keyword(s):  
Language Maintenance ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
Minority Language ◽  
Minority Languages ◽  
Language Loss ◽  
Language Attrition ◽  
Dominant Group ◽  
Language Endangerment ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual

Language shift occurs when a community of users replaces one language by another, or “shifts” to that other language. Although language shift can and does occur at the level of the individual speaker, it is shift at the level of an entire community that is associated with widespread language replacement and loss. Shift is a particular kind of language loss, and differs from language attrition, which involves the loss of a language over an individual’s lifetime, often the result of aging or of language replacement (as in shift). Both language shift and attrition are in contrast to language maintenance, the continuing use of a language. Language maintenance and revitalization programs are responses to language shift, and are undertaken by communites who perceive that their language is threatened by a decrease in usage and under threat of loss. Language shift is widespread and can be found with majority- or minority-language populations. It is often associated with immigrant groups who take up the majority language of their new territory, leaving behind the language of their homeland. For minority-language speaker communities, language shift is generally the result of a combination of factors, in particular colonization. A nexus of factors—historical, political, social, and economic—often provides the impetus for a community to ceasing speaking their ancestral language, replacing it with the language of the majority, and usually politically dominant, group. Language shift is thus a social issue, and often coupled with other indicators of social distress. Language endangerment is the result of language shift, and in fact shift is its most widespread cause.Since the 1960s there has been ever-increasing interest across speaker communities and linguists to work to provide opportunities to learn and use minority languages to offset shift, and to document speakers in communities under the threat of shift.

Linguistic and Cultural Shifts of the Aranadan Tribe in Kerala

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Robert ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Tribal Community ◽  
Cultural Shift ◽  
Cultural Shifts

Language and cultural shifts are the major causes of endangerment of any community, which begins from minor switching of practices and verbal repertoires and ends with a whole change of community, and finally culminates in the community losing its own identity.  Language shift usually takes place in a bilingual or multilingual speech community. It is a social phenomenon, whereby one language replaces another in a given society due to underlying changes in the composition and aspirations of the society. This process transitions from speaking the old to the new language. This is not fully a structural change caused by the dynamics of the old language as a system. The new language is adopted as a result of contact with another language community. The term language shift excludes language change which can be seen as an evolution, and hence the transition from older to newer forms of the same language. Contact between two or more cultures often leads to different sociological processes such as acculturation, cultural change, cultural genocide, and cultural shift. Cultural shift occurs when a community gives up its own socio-cultural practices like customs, rituals and traditional beliefs, and is characterized by changes in cultural symbols, rules of behavior, social organizations, or value systems. It differs from the process of cultural change in which a community’s culture can evolve independently. Shifts may take place at the level of an individual speaker who gradually forgets or shifts to another language and consequently this language spreads to an entire community. This phenomenon can be seen among the Aranadans, a primitive tribal community found mainly in the Malappuram district and in other Northern districts such as Kasargode and Kannur of Kerala, owing to their irreverence towards the preservation of their own language and culture. The socio-ecological, psychological and educational factors impact their language and cultural shifts. This paper illustrates and clarifies the reasons for the language and cultural shifts of the Aranadan tribal community.

An English “like no other”?: Language Contact and Change in Quebec

2006 ◽  
Vol 51 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 185-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shana Poplack ◽  
James A. Walker ◽  
Rebecca Malcolmson
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Scientific Evidence ◽  
Minority Language ◽  
Empirical Measure ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Language Contact And Change

AbstractAlthough the received wisdom is that English in Quebec, as a minority language, has undergone contact-induced language change, little scientific evidence has been brought to bear on this claim. We describe a project designed to assess the impact of a majority language on the structure of the minority language in a situation of long-term contact. The existence and directionality of change is assessed by comparing the behaviour of linguistic phenomena (1) over (apparent) time, (2) according to intensity of contact, and (3) against French as a non-contact benchmark and putative source. We detail the methods employed in selecting a sample and constituting a corpus, and characterize the speakers and aspects of their speech. Finally, we present an analysis of the sociolinguistic situation of the Quebec anglophone community, and offer an empirical measure of the impact of the French lexicon on Quebec English.

PROCESSES OF LANGUAGE CONTACT: STUDIES FROM AUSTRALIA AND THE SOUTH PACIFIC. Jeff Siegel (Ed.). Saint-Laurent, Canada: Fides, 2000. Pp. xvi + 320. $34.95 paper.

2003 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 461-462
Author(s):  
J. Clancy Clements
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Solomon Islands ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
Australian Aboriginal ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Transitive Verbs ◽  
Kinship Terminology ◽  
Substrate Influence

The present volume highlights studies of languages created by contact-induced language change in Australia and the Pacific. Editor Jeff Siegel identifies six processes involved in the formation of pidgins, creoles, and other such language contact varieties: reanalysis, simplification, leveling, diffusion, language shift, and depidginization/decreolization. The process of reanalysis is the focus of four chapters: “The Role of Australian Aboriginal Language in the Formation of Australian Pidgin Grammar: Transitive Verbs and Adjectives” by Koch; “‘Predicate Marking' in Bislama” by Crowley; “Predicting Substrate Influence: Tense-Modality-Aspect Marking in Tayo” by Siegel, Sandeman, and Corne; “My Nephew Is My Aunt: Features and Transformation of Kinship Terminology in Solomon Islands Pijin” by Jourdan; and “Na pa kekan, na person: The Evolution of Tayo Negatives” by Corne.

Language change via satellite

2003 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rudolf Muhr
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
Viewing Time ◽  
Television Programs ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Tv Viewing ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Impact

This article is concerned with media-induced language change in Austrian German (AG) which is caused by language contact with German German (GG) as presented in television programs broadcast via satellite. A detailed overview of the media situation and its impact on a number of linguistic features of AG is given. It is shown that the impact of this language contact is increasing and that it can be directly linked to the amount of TV-viewing time, especially of children. Examples of this are the emergence of the particle mal and other colloquial lexical items in informal AG, as well as the replacement of traditional items of core AG lexicon with their GG equivalents. Finally, factors which contribute to the ongoing process of language shift are considered: the relative powerlessness of a small language culture in permanent contact with a powerful one, the prestige of new media and their associated language usages which frequently symbolise modernity and worldliness, and lack of linguistic pride, such that the native variety is considered outmoded and provincial.

scholarly journals THE OTHER SIDE OF THE COIN

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marissa M. Furaha ◽  
Eunice Nyamasyo ◽  
Joyce I. Wangia
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
The Other ◽  
African Language ◽  
Language Death ◽  
Cultural Contact ◽  
Code Mixing ◽  
Resultant Effect

When languages come into contact, there is some degree of cultural contact, however limited. As a result, there is bound to be some negative as well as positive language change. Borrowing, bilingualism, code switching, code mixing, pidgins, creoles, language shift and language death are some of the products of language contact. The focus of this paper is linguistic borrowing as a result of contact between two languages: Lubukusu, an African language spoken by the Babukusu, a sub-tribe of the Luhya ethnic group of Bungoma County, Kenya and English, a foreign language in Kenya, first introduced through European explorers, Christian missionaries, traders and the British colonialist and its resultant effect on the borrowing language.

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