Metalinguistic comments and multilingual awareness: Estonian-Russian language contacts in blogs

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-415
Author(s):  
Anna Verschik
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Applied Linguistics ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Language Learner ◽  
Virtual Space ◽  
Metalinguistic Awareness ◽  
Language Environment ◽  
Estonian Language ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThe paper focuses on the manifestation of multilingual awareness (MLA) and the impact of Estonian in Russian-language blogs by ethnic Russians. MLA can be defined as “an ability to focus on linguistic form and to switch focus between form and meaning” (Jessner, Ulrike. 2014. On multilingual awareness or why the multilingual learner is a specific language learner. In Miroslaw Pawlak & Larissa Aronin (eds.), Essential topics in applied linguistics and multilingualism. Studies in Honor of David Singleton, 175–184. Wien: Springer.). The purpose is to show that metalinguistic comments form as a subcategory of metalinguistic awareness, i.e., the latter conditions the former but not vice versa. I consider not only explicit examples of metalinguistic comments, such as discussion on differences between Russian of Russia and Russian in Estonia, proficiency in Estonian, sometimes including discussions on fine points of Estonian grammar, but also implicit and more subtle examples, such as visual separation of Estonian stems and Russian inflections, playful switches from Cyrillic to Latin characters and back within a sentence or even a word. All blogs are in the Live Journal environment, a medium which combines features of stand-alone blogs and social networks. The bloggers are reasonably proficient in Estonian and work or study in a predominantly Estonian-language environment. Data comes from fifteen blogs from the period 2008–2012. The bloggers position themselves as autonomous language users and consider blogs as their private virtual space with an individual language policy. This is in accordance with the views of some contact linguists (e.g., Thomason, Sara Grey. 2007. Language contact and deliberate change. Journal of Language Contact 1. 41–62.), who consider change by deliberate decision as one of the mechanisms of contact-induced language change.

Historical Linguistics

Anthropology ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Tavárez
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Current Knowledge ◽  
European Languages ◽  
The Impact

Historical linguistics is a discipline with strong interdisciplinary connections to sociocultural anthropology, ethnohistory, and archaeology. While the study of language change and etymology can be traced back to ancient societies in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Asia, a number of important methodological approaches emerged in the late 18th century, when European scholars who were engaged in colonial administration set the foundations for research in Indo-European languages. Contemporary historical linguistics has maintained a focus on several large-scale questions, such as the origins of the language faculty; the classification and typology of the world’s languages; the time depth of major language changes; ancient writing systems; the impact of linguistic and cultural contacts on language change; the emergence of pidgins and creoles; the influence of colonial expansion and evangelization projects on language change; and the interface among literacy practices, language change, and the social order. This article outlines all of these important inquiries, with a particular stress on the sustained interaction among historical linguistics, anthropology, and ethnohistory. This survey has two focii: the first one is languages of the Americas, and the second one is ethnohistorical and philological methodology. This choice in focus conveys existing historical strengths and showcases our current knowledge about language contact and language change in the Americas.

Hong Kong written Chinese

2006 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dingxu Shi
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Local Variation ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
Government Documents ◽  
Standard Chinese ◽  
Syntactic Behavior ◽  
Bilingualism And Multilingualism ◽  
The Impact

Hong Kong written Chinese is the register used in government documents, serious literature and the formal sections of printed media. It is a local variation of Standard Chinese and has many special features in its lexicon, syntax and discourse. These features come from three distinctive sources: English, Cantonese and innovation. The main concern of this paper is which features come from English and how they are adopted. It is shown that Hong Kong written Chinese has a large number of English loan words, both localized and semi-localized ones, and quite a few calque forms from English. Some of its lexical items have undergone semantic shift under the influence of English or Cantonese. The most interesting characteristic of Hong Kong written Chinese is that a number of its words have changed their syntactic behavior due to English influence and a few syntactic structures are apparently adopted from English. This particular form of written Chinese thus provides an excellent case to study the impact of bilingualism and multilingualism on language use and language change induced by language contact.

scholarly journals From the Borderland of the Lithuanian Southern Aukštaitians: Changes in the Syntactic Constructions

Kalbotyra ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 72 ◽  
pp. 87-106
Author(s):  
Nijolė Tuomienė
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Plain Language ◽  
Prepositional Phrases ◽  
Slavic Languages ◽  
Local Variant ◽  
Peripheral Area ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Russian Language

The dialectological and sociolinguistic material from the Southern Aukštaitian borderland is under the investigation in this article. The most recent records of the speaker of the Lithuanian Southern Aukštaitian in Šalčininkai district are analyzed in order to study the changes in the syntax. The peripheral area of the Southern Aukštaitian located in Šalčininkai district is surrounded or, speaking more precisely, in contact with languages other than Lithuanian, i. e. Belarusian and Polish, and relatively recently with the Russian language as well. The purpose of this article is to reveal the process of interception and convergence of syntactic compounds in the Lithuanian dialect of Šalčininkai district. The paper is based on ideas by Vytautas Ambrazas (2006) on this topic.Because of continuous language contact a lot of variants in the present Lithuanian dialect of Šalčininkai region have developed. For example, very frequently the prepositions ant ‘on’, dėl ‘for’, į ‘to’, po ‘after’ used in combination with case tend to acquire more specific meanings. A lot of them become analogous to those found in the neighbouring Slavic languages and thus are often alien for Lithuanian. The impact of standard Lithuanian cannot be totally disregarded either.The Lithuanian and Slavic languages are in active contact in these neighbourhoods, that is’ why they tend to develop the same patterns and constructions. In many cases the local Belarusian dialect, known as the poprostu (‘plain language’ – a local variant of the Belarusian northwestern dialect), plays a stimulating role here. Relatively recently all three contact languages, i.e. Lithuanian, Belarusian and Polish, have acquired numerous lexical and grammatical borrowings in the dialects of Šalčininkai neighborhoods. This is one of the conditions for accelerating the incorporation and adoption of alien syntactic patterns in the Lithuanian language.In intense contact, borrowing is not limited to several different patterns because syntactic rules could be adopted as well. Surely, the archaic constructions could acquire entirely new semantic content. The prepositional phrases have been adopted and used not instead of pure cases, but rather alongside with them.

American Sign Language in virtual space: Interactions between deaf users of computer-mediated video communication and the impact of technology on language practices

2003 ◽  
Vol 32 (5) ◽  
pp. 693-714 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELIZABETH KEATING ◽  
GENE MIRUS
Keyword(s):  
American Sign Language ◽  
Information Technologies ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Virtual Space ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Deaf Community ◽  
Language Practices ◽  
Computer Mediated ◽  
Impact Of Technology ◽  
The Impact

According to some discussions concerning new information technologies and technologically enhanced communication, we are now in a revolution as profound as the printing press. The Internet is creating new kinds of meetingplaces and work areas and the possibilities of new types of relationships across time and space. This article reports on some ways that the Internet is shaping language practices in the Deaf community, with an interest in how new tools mediate and influence human behavior, including language and the organization of interaction. This includes the development and manipulation of a computer-mediated image of self and other, creativity and problem-solving in new communicative spaces, creating reciprocal perspectives, new participation frameworks, and specifics of language change. For the first time, deaf people can communicate using manual visual language, in many cases their native language, across space and time zones. This groundbreaking situation makes the Deaf community a particularly productive site for research into relationships between technological innovations and new communicative practices.

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.

Language acquisition in the digital age: L2 English input effects on children’s L1 Icelandic

2021 ◽  
pp. 026765832110055
Author(s):  
Sigríður Sigurjónsdóttir ◽  
Iris Nowenstein
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Scale Effects ◽  
Test Case ◽  
First Languages ◽  
Language Environment ◽  
Digital Language

This article reviews prominent research on non-English-speaking children’s extramural acquisition of English through digital media, and examines the understudied scenario of possible effects of such second language (L2) English input on domestically dominant but globally small first languages (L1s), with Icelandic as the test case. We outline the main results of the children’s part of the Modeling the Linguistic Consequences of Digital Language Contact (MoLiCoDiLaCo) research project, which targeted 724 3–12-year-old Icelandic-speaking children. The focus is on English input and its relationship to the children’s Icelandic/English vocabulary and Icelandic grammar. Although a causal relationship between digital English and reduced/incompletely acquired Icelandic is often assumed in public discourse, our results do not show large-scale effects of L2 digital English on L1 Icelandic. English still seems to be a relatively small part of Icelandic children’s language environment, and although we find some indications of contact induced/reinforced language change, i.e. in the standard use of the subjunctive, as well as reduced MLU/NDW (mean length of utterance/number of different words) in the Icelandic language samples, we do not find pervasive effects of L2 English on L1 Icelandic. On the other hand, the results show contextual L2 learning of English by Icelandic-speaking children through mostly receptive digital input. Thus, the results imply that English digital language input contributes mainly to L2 English skills without adversely affecting L1 Icelandic.

Transatlantic linguistic ties: The impact of Jamaican on African youth language practices

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (s4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Renato Tomei ◽  
Andrea Hollington
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Language Practices ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Huge Impact ◽  
African Youth ◽  
Youth Language ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Dancehall Music

Abstract This contribution seeks to shed light on global dimensions of language contact and language change with regard to African youth languages. Looking at the influences of Jamaican speech forms on youth language practices in Africa, the focus will be on transatlantic linguistic ties that link Africa and its Diaspora. As the case studies will illustrate, Jamaican has a huge impact on youths in Africa and is used extensively in their communicative practices. Music, in this regard, plays an important role: Reggae and Dancehall music are highly popular in many (especially Anglophone) African countries, and these Jamaican music genres are quite influential with regard to language practices among African youth and beyond. Music thus represents an important site of language contact, and also serves as a means to learn the Jamaican language. In our paper we will draw on examples from different African countries to illustrate the wide spread of Jamaican influences. Our focus will be on case studies in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Ethiopia, South Africa and the Gambia. We will discuss selected song examples from a sociolinguistic perspective that takes these various language practices as a base and then looks at the contexts and motivations for the use of Jamaican speech forms.

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.

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.

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