Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shana Poplack
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
Production Data ◽  
Unified Theory ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Lexical Borrowing ◽  
Actual Production ◽  
Language Mixing ◽  
Theory Of Language

Analysis of language mixing in the actual production data of bilingual individuals has permitted us to test and overturn many long-standing assumptions about borrowing and code-switching empirically: borrowing is not monolithic but takes many forms in the speech community; it does not originate as code-switching; integration is not gradual but abrupt; speakers tend not to code-switch individual words but to borrow them. This work has also confirmed that code-switching and borrowing are diametrically opposed, not only structurally but from the perspective of the individuals who engage in them. The observable differences between multiword code-switches and lone other-language items, coupled with the overwhelming preponderance of the latter in every bilingual dataset that has been quantitatively analyzed, together demonstrate that any model of language mixing with pretensions to constituting a “unified” theory of language contact phenomena is in fact a theory of lexical borrowing.

Code-Switching as a Reflection of Contact-Induced Change

2020 ◽  
pp. 192-214
Author(s):  
Ad Backus
Keyword(s):  
Structural Change ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
The Other ◽  
Code Mixing ◽  
Language Mixing ◽  
Lexical Change ◽  
Theory Of Language

Code-switching is often studied in purely synchronic terms, as recorded speech is analyzed for patterns of language mixing. Though this has yielded numerous useful theoretical advances, it has also shielded the code-switching literature from serious engagement with the phenomenon of language change, even from the subtype of change caused by language contact. There is also the additional practice of limiting the study of code-mixing and code-switching to lexical mixing. On the other side of the fence, meanwhile, discussions of contact-induced language change tend to be limited to morphological and syntactic phenomena. This chapter breaks through this stalemate, and argues that a usage-based approach to language change actually demands integration of these perspectives. Code-switching should be seen as a reflection of lexical change. It is for this reason that a synchronic distinction between loanwords and code-switching makes no sense, since the terms refer to the diachronic and synchronic planes, respectively, of the same phenomenon. In the chapter, the author interprets the code-switching literature from this theoretical viewpoint, and explores what both the literature on code-switching and that on contact-induced change stand to gain from linking their empirical findings to a usage-based theory of language change that allocates proper attention to synchrony and diachrony, and unites lexical and structural change in the same framework.

A variationist perspective on borrowing

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shana Poplack
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
Performance Data ◽  
Validity And Reliability ◽  
Lexical Borrowing ◽  
Language Mixing ◽  
Usage Patterns ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter reviews the analytical and methodological tenets associated with the variationist perspective on language and outlines its specific applications to the study of language mixing. Key among them are the principled selection of participants and their validation in the community, the primacy of actual bilingual performance data, contextualization of its major manifestations across speakers, mixing strategies (lexical borrowing and code-switching) and language pairs, and systematic quantitative analysis of usage patterns, incorporating checks on the validity and reliability of the results. We explain how the method enables us to address and answer a number of questions that have plagued scholars of language contact for decades.

scholarly journals Language mixing in Palasa

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-243
Author(s):  
Brian D. Joseph ◽  
Rexhina Ndoci ◽  
Carly Dickerson
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
Levels Of Analysis ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Language Mixing ◽  
The Village

Abstract We explore here several kinds of language mixing to be found in the Greek-Albanian bilingual speech community of the village of Palasa in southern Albania. Palasa is of particular interest for Greek dialect studies because it offers a window in the present day into highly localized dynamics of language contact. Among the mixing observed in Palasa is code-switching, motivated by various factors as identified by Myslín & Levy 2015, borrowing, both lexical and structural, and hybridization, at a number of levels of analysis, including phonology, morphology, and semantics. Our findings indicate that language contact is still alive and well in the Balkans at least at the level of village dialects.

When the Construction Is Axla, Everything Is Axla: A Case of Combined Lexical and Structural Borrowing from Arabic to Hebrew

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 337-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roey J. Gafter ◽  
Uri Horesh
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Lexical Borrowing ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Specific Contact ◽  
Theory Of Language ◽  
Contact Situation

This article examines a borrowing from Arabic into Hebrew, which is a combination of a lexical borrowing and a structural one. The Arabic superlativeaħla‘sweetest, most beautiful,’ pronounced by most Modern Hebrew speakers [axla], has shifted semantically to mean ‘great, awesome.’ Yet, as our corpus-based study illustrates, it was borrowed into Hebrew—for the most part—with a very particular syntactic structure that, in Arabic, denotes the superlative. In Arabic itself,aħlamay also denote a comparative adjective, though in different syntactic structures. We discuss the significance of this borrowing and the manner in which it is borrowed both to the specific contact situation between Arabic and Hebrew and to the theory of language contact in general.

scholarly journals Code-switching and dialogism: Verbal practices among Catalan Jews in the Middle Ages

2001 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-402 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOAN A. ARGENTER
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Lexical Borrowing ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Everyday Talk

From a strict linguistic viewpoint, code-switching intertwines with a diverse range of language contact phenomena, from strict interference to several kinds of language mixture. Code-switching has also been addressed as an interactional phenomenon in everyday talk, an approach that implies a synchronic perspective. In this article, however, data are drawn from the records of communicative practices left behind by Catalan Jewish communities of the 14th and 15th centuries. These communities lived under well-defined cultural, political, and social conditions and displayed a rather complex linguistic repertoire of both linguistic resources and verbal genres. I analyze two of these verbal genres, which themselves must be viewed in the context of a broader Hispano-Arabic cultural tradition; they draw on a heteroglot background in which Semitic and Romance languages merged. In this analysis of the functions that code-switching played in these verbal practices, a contrast emerges between the use of code-switching and lexical borrowing (or alternation vs. insertional types of code-switching) in both verbal genres. This has implications for a much debated issue – the alleged existence of a medieval Catalan Jewish language – and challenges the idea that forms of linguistic practice must always be reduced to a bounded code.

Borrowing

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shana Poplack
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Original Research ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Grammatical Structure ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Lexical Borrowing ◽  
Principal Mechanism ◽  
Bilingual Speakers

In virtually every bilingual situation empirically studied, borrowed items make up the overwhelming majority of other-language material, but short shrift has been given to this major manifestation of language contact. As a result, scholars have long been divided over whether borrowing is a process distinct from code-switching, leading to long-standing controversy over how best to theorize language mixing strategies. This volume focuses on lexical borrowing as it actually occurs in the discourse of bilingual speakers, building on more than three decades of original research. Based on vast quantities of spontaneous performance data and a highly ramified analytical apparatus, it characterizes the phenomenon in the speech community and in the grammar, both synchronically and diachronically. In contrast to most other treatments, which deal with the product of borrowing, this work examines the process: How speakers incorporate foreign items into their bilingual discourse, how they adapt them to recipient-language grammatical structure, how these forms diffuse across speakers and communities, how long they persist in real time, and whether they change over the duration. It proposes falsifiable hypotheses about established loanwords and nonce borrowings and tests them empirically on a wealth of unique datasets on a wide variety of typologically similar and distinct language pairs. A major focus is the detailed analysis of integration, the principal mechanism underlying the borrowing process. Though the shape the borrowed form assumes may be colored by community convention, we show that the act of transforming donor-language elements into native material is universal.

scholarly journals Turkish, Bulgarian and German Language Mixing Among Bulgarian Muslim Roma in Germany

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-57
Author(s):  
Hristo Kyuchukov
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
German Language ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Spoken Discourse ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Anthropological Linguistics ◽  
Language Mixing ◽  
Everyday Communication

The paper presents the phenomenon of language mixing with Bulgarian by Muslim Roma migrants from northeastern Bulgaria in Berlin, Germany. They identify as Turks and in their everyday communication speak mainly Bulgarian and old variety of Turkish, in the scientific literature known as Balkanized Turkish. They can speak relatively little German and have low proficiency in the language. The paper describes the language mixing as well as the forms of code-switching between Turkish, Bulgarian and German. These linguistic and social phenomena within the Muslim Roma community are analysed within the framework of several sociolinguistic theories regarding code-switching and bilingualism. The theory of J. Gumperz (1962) about communication matrix is used and patterns of Turkish- Bulgarian, Turkish-German and Turkish-Bulgarian-German are presented and analysed. The grammatical categories which are switched in the Turkish-Bulgarian-German language contacts, involve nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and negations. However, code-switching is used only in communication with other Bulgarians. In communication with Turks from Turkey they switch only between Turkish and German and use another variety of Turkish. References Bugarski, R. (2005). Jeziki Kultura [Language and Culture]. Beograd: Biblioteka XX vek. Friedman, V. (2003). Turkish in Macedonia and Beyond. Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz Verlag. Fishman, J. (1997). Language and ethnicity: the view from within. In F. Coulmas, (Ed.) The Handbook of Sociolinguistics. (pp. 327-343). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Giray, B. (2015). Code-switching among Bulgarian Muslim Roma in Berlin. In D. Zeyrek, C. S. Simsek, U. Atasand J. Rehbein (Eds.), Ankara papers in Turkish and Turkic linguistics. (pp. 420-430). Wiesbaden: Harassowitz. Gumperz, J. J. (1962). Types of linguistic communities. Anthropological Linguistics 4(1), 28-40. Kocheva-Lefedzhieva, A. (2004) Nemski leksikalni elementi v bulgarskite govori [German lexical elements in Bulgarian spoken discourse]. Sofia: Multprint. Kocheva-Lefedzhieva, A. (2017) Smeseniyat ezik na vienskite bulgari. [The mixed language of Vienna Bulgarians]. Sofia: Bukovica. Kyuchukov, H. 1995. The Turkish dialects of Muslim Roms (Gypsies) in Bulgaria. Journal of Turkology, 2, 305-307. Kyuchukov, H. (1996). Etnolingvodidaktika [Ethnolingual didactics]. Sofia: Club '90. Kyuchukov, H. (1997). Psicholingvistichni aspecti na rannia bilingvizam [Psycholinguistic aspects of early bilingualism]. Sofia: Yezykoznanie i Semiotika.   Kyuchukov, H. 2007. Turkish and Roma children learning Bulgarian. Veliko Tarnovo: Faber. Matras, Y. (1990). On the emergence of finite subordination in Balkan Turkish. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Turkish Linguistics, SOAS, (17-19 August, 1990). Matras, Y. (2004). Layers of convergent syntax in Macedonian Turkish. Mediterranean Language Review, 15, 63-86. Matras, Y. (2009). Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matras, Y. and Tufan, Ş. 2007. Grammatical borrowing in Macedonian Turkish. In Y. Matras and J. Sakel (Eds.), Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-linguistic Perspective. (pp. 215-227). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Nikolskij, L.B. (1976). Sinhronnaja Lingvistika [Synchronous Linguistics]. Moskow: Nauka. Schiffman, H. (1997). Diglossia as a sociolinguistic situation. In F. Coulmas, (Ed.), The Handbook of Sociolinguistics. (pp. 205-216). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

scholarly journals Ethnicity and codeswitching

Pragmatics ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-499
Author(s):  
Gerald Stell
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Language Mixing ◽  
Switching Patterns ◽  
Language Alternation ◽  
African Context ◽  
Linguistic Constraints

This article aims to compare three distinct grammatical and conversational patterns of code-switching, which it tentatively links to three different South African ethnoracial labels: White, Coloured and Black. It forms a continuation of a previous article in which correlations were established between Afrikaans-English code-switching patterns and White and Coloured ethnicities. The typological framework used is derived from Muysken, and the hypotheses are based on his predictions as to which type of grammatical CS (i.e. insertional, alternational, congruent lexicalisation) will dominate in which linguistic and sociolinguistic settings. Apart from strengthening the idea of a correlation between patterns of language variation and ethnicity in general, the article explores the theoretical possibility of specific social factors overriding linguistic constraints in determining the grammatical form of CS patterns. In this regard, it will be shown that – on account of specific social factors underlying ethnicity – CS between two typologically unrelated languages, namely Sesotho and English, can exhibit more marks of congruent lexicalization than CS between two typologically related languages, namely Afrikaans and English, while – from the point of view of linguistic constraints – insertional/alternational CS would be expected in the former language pair and congruent lexicalization in the latter. That finding will be placed against the background of different pragmatic norms regulating the conversational use of CS within the Black Sesotho-speaking community (which we will describe as ‘language mixing’ in Auer’s sense) and within the Afrikaans speech community (which in the case of Whites we will describe as tending more towards ‘language alternation’ in Auer’s sense, and in the case of Coloureds as occupying an intermediate position between language alternation and language mixing). The summary of findings on grammatical and conversational CS patterns across ethnic samples will finally be placed against the background of ethnicity and its specific definition in the South African context.

[review of:] Vyacheslav Ivanov & Peter Arkadiev, eds. 2013. Studies in the Typology of Slavic, Baltic and Balkan Languages

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 221-239
Author(s):  
Ilja Seržant
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
General Meeting ◽  
Scientific Work ◽  
Primary Reference ◽  
Theory Of Language ◽  
Vyacheslav Ivanov

Вячᴇᴄлᴀʙ Вᴄ. Иʙᴀнов (отв. ред.), Пᴇᴛᴘ М. Аᴘкᴀдьᴇв (сост.), Исследования по типологии славянских, балтийских и балканских языков (преимущественно в свете языковых контактов). Санкт-Петербург: Алетейя, 2013. / Vʏᴀᴄʜᴇsʟᴀv Ivᴀɴov & Pᴇᴛᴇʀ Aʀᴋᴀᴅɪᴇv, eds., Studies in the Typology of Slavic, Baltic and Balkan Languages (with primary reference to language contact). St Petersburg: Aletheia, 2013. ɪsʙɴ 978-5-91419-778-7. The main focus of the book is on various language contact situations as well as areal interpretations of particular phenomena against a wider typological background. The idea is to provide a broader overview of each phenomenon discussed, bringing in comparisons with the neighbouring languages. Two major linguistic areas are in the focus of the book: the Balkan and Eastern Circum-Baltic areas. The book is an important contribution to these fields as well as to areal typology and the theory of language contact in general, meeting all standards for a solid scientific work.

scholarly journals Redefining Forro as a marker of identity: Language contact as a driving force for language maintenance among Santomeans in Portugal

Multilingua ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Eve Bouchard
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Maintenance ◽  
Attitudes And Beliefs ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Group Code ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Sao Tome And Principe ◽  
Semistructured Interviews ◽  
Changing Attitudes

AbstractIn São Tomé and Príncipe, the language shift toward Portuguese is resulting in the endangerment of the native creoles of the island. These languages have been considered of low value in Santomean society since the mid-twentieth century. But when Santomeans are members of a diaspora, their perceptions of these languages, especially Forro, change in terms of value and identity-marking. It is possible to observe such changes among the Santomeans who learn Forro when they are abroad, who use it as an in-group code, and start to value it more. In this article, I address the role of language contact in the maintenance and expansion of Forro. I investigate the mechanisms of language maintenance by focusing on the shifts in community members’ attitudes and beliefs regarding their languages, as a result of contact. The changing attitudes and beliefs have led to a redefinition of the role of Forro in the speech community. This qualitative study is based on semistructured interviews conducted on São Tomé Island and in Portugal. Findings suggest that the change in value attributed to Forro by Santomeans as a result of contact contribute to the valorization of the language.

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