Language change and convergence in multilingual Malaysian Chinese

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-67
Author(s):  
Ralf Vollmann ◽  
Tek Wooi Soon
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Language Loss ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
The Family ◽  
Chinese Dialects ◽  
Standard Chinese ◽  
Malaysian Chinese ◽  
Over Time

AbstractBackgroundIn the multilingual situation of Malaysia, standard languages and spoken vernaculars are interacting in intricate ways whereby various spoken languages share a pool of words from Malay, English and Mandarin. Structurally, all languages converge and influence the spoken varieties of the standard languages.Material and methodThis contribution observes the situation from the viewpoint of Hakka speakers. In an analysis of the communicative practices in an extended Hakka family and their non-Hakka friends, the interactions of the various languages in borrowing and code-switching have been analysed and later discussed with speakers. It is expected that standard languages influence language use over time.AnalysisThe adult generations of the family speak Hakka and effortlessly mix with other languages. Intergenerationally, language change (and possibly language loss) can be observed for Hakka. Mandarin is gaining importance for all speakers. At the same time, loanwords and loan translations from Malaysian, English and Mandarin are frequent. This Malaysian vocabulary is shared by all spoken languages, with only few differences in usage. Standard Chinese is gradually replacing old Hakka words in Hakka.ConclusionsAs can be expected, the spoken languages such as Hakka are quickly losing traditional lexemes and phrases, while Mandarin Chinese as well as English and Malaysian words are used in Hakka; at the same time, spoken Mandarin and spoken English converges structurally with the substratic Chinese dialects.

Taalgebruik op de Markt

1980 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 123-142
Author(s):  
M.E. van den Berg
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Fresh Vegetables ◽  
Language Spread ◽  
Chinese Dialects ◽  
Standard Chinese ◽  
Second World ◽  
Made In

Modern standard Chinese (MSC) was introduced in Taiwan after the second world war in 1945, when the island once more became part of the Chinese political system. In 1956 the population consisted for 74 per cent of Minnan and for 13 per cent of Hakka. Both are immigrant groups from the Chinese mainland, who have come to Taiwan since the seventeenth century, and speak mutually unintelligible Chinese dialects. The remaining part of the population was formed by Chinese who came to Taiwan after 1945. In order to be able to determine the extent to which MSC has spread in the society unobtrusive observations of language use were made in five markets in Taipei city. Markets in Taiwan are the main channels for the supply of fresh vegetables, fruits, fish and meat, and for that reason considered as suitable places for the study of language spread. The instrument used was a modified version of that developed by Cooper and Carpenter (1976) and by Rosenbaum ä. . (1977). Apart from time, market, enumerator and commodity, the observation categories were interaction type (business transaction, touting, conversation), role of participants in the speech act (salesperson, customer), their age and sex and the language(s) they used for the interaction. MSC is used by both participants roughly equally for business transactions. The salespeople accommodate their language use to that of the customers. As to touting, this tendency is furthermore reflected by a relatively high proportion of MSC in the utterances of the salespeople. Among the customers males use relatively more MSC than females. The same is true for the oldest age group of both sexes. In the older city districts relatively less MSC is used than in the newer districts.

Competition as a unifying concept for the study of language

2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 338-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Berg
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Selection Process ◽  
Structure Variation ◽  
Language Structure ◽  
Core Competition ◽  
Changes Over Time ◽  
Processing Network ◽  
Over Time

With linguistics suffering from increasing fractionalization, it is necessary not to lose sight of the overall picture. It seems uncontroversial that the study of language consists of the following five components: processing, use, structure, variation, and change. While some of the relationships between these concepts have been investigated, a systematic integration of these components into a coherent framework is conspicuously missing. A modest attempt is made here to outline such a framework which makes the interrelationships of the components transparent. In all of these components, competition is found to play a key role. At its core, competition is a psycholinguistic effect which arises in the task of selecting an intended unit from among a number of elements concurrently activated in the processing network. The audible and visible outcome of the selection process is language use. Language structure is the prerequisite for competition in that it provides the set of competitors. When competition is low, consistent (i.e., invariant) language use emerges. When competition is high, language use is variable, i.e., synchronic variation occurs. When competition changes over time, language change takes place. Thus, it is language processing in general and competition in particular that constrains and binds together many phenomena of language use, structure, variation, and change.

scholarly journals Béb község kétnyelvű ragadványnévrendszere

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 165-177
Author(s):  
Kitti Hauber
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Strong Correlation ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
World War ◽  
Homogeneous Population ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Rich

The paper deals with the questions regarding the nature and functions of nicknames in language use and presents the former and current nickname stock of Béb, a small village in the Transdanubian area of Hungary as indicators of the strong correlation between names, a community and its history. For two centuries the rich, heritable German nicknames represented the family relations and the cultural and dialectical features of the ethnically and linguistically homogeneous population of Béb. However, the direct consequences of World War II launched the unstoppable process of ethnic mixing and language change, which had an impact on the nickname stock as well: the former nickname stock began to fade with the oldest generations and was replaced with a new, bilingual nickname stock. The structural, semantic and lingual aspects of the nicknames used by a mostly monolingual younger generation can provide information about the cognitive processes which played a significant role in their creation.

The Development of Homologous (Canine/Anti-Canine) Antibodies in Dogs with Haemophilia A (Factor VIII Deficiency): A Ten-Year Longitudinal Study

1993 ◽  
Vol 69 (01) ◽  
pp. 021-024 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shawn Tinlin ◽  
Sandra Webster ◽  
Alan R Giles
Keyword(s):  
Factor Viii ◽  
Canine Model ◽  
Significant Inhibition ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Haemophilia A ◽  
Variable Expression ◽  
The Family ◽  
Over Time

SummaryThe development of inhibitors to factor VIII in patients with haemophilia A remains as a serious complication of replacement therapy. An apparently analogous condition has been described in a canine model of haemophilia A (Giles et al., Blood 1984; 63:451). These animals and their relatives have now been followed for 10 years. The observation that the propensity for inhibitor development was not related to the ancestral factor VIII gene has been confirmed by the demonstration of vertical transmission through three generations of the segment of the family related to a normal (non-carrier) female that was introduced for breeding purposes. Haemophilic animals unrelated to this animal have not developed functionally significant factor VIII inhibitors despite intensive factor VIII replacement. Two animals have shown occasional laboratory evidence of factor VIII inhibition but this has not been translated into clinical significant inhibition in vivo as assessed by clinical response and F.VIII recovery and survival characteristics. Substantial heterogeneity of inhibitor expression both in vitro and in vivo has been observed between animals and in individual animals over time. Spontaneous loss of inhibitors has been observed without any therapies designed to induce tolerance, etc., being instituted. There is also phenotypic evidence of polyclonality of the immune response with variable expression over time in a given animal. These observations may have relevance to the human condition both in determining the pathogenetic factors involved in this condition and in highlighting the heterogeneity of its expression which suggests the need for caution in the interpretation of the outcome of interventions designed to modulate inhibitor activity.

Language Change and Movement as Seen by Historical Linguistics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Nurse
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Change Over Time ◽  
Comparative Linguistics ◽  
Language Boundaries ◽  
Over Time

The focus of this chapter is on how languages move and change over time and space. The perceptions of historical linguists have been shaped by what they were observing. During the flowering of comparative linguistics, from the late 19th into the 20th century, the dominant view was that in earlier times when people moved, their languages moved with them, often over long distances, sometimes fast, and that language change was largely internal. That changed in the second half of the 20th century. We now recognize that in recent centuries and millennia, most movements of communities and individuals have been local and shorter. Constant contact between communities resulted in features flowing across language boundaries, especially in crowded and long-settled locations such as most of Central and West Africa. Although communities did mix and people did cross borders, it became clear that language and linguistic features could also move without communities moving.

Language change across a lifetime: A historical micro-perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (s2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Bergs
Keyword(s):  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Historical Data ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
The Social ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Linguistic Behavior ◽  
Micro Analysis

Abstract This paper focuses on the micro-analysis of historical data, which allows us to investigate language use across the lifetime of individual speakers. Certain concepts, such as social network analysis or communities of practice, put individual speakers and their social embeddedness and dynamicity at the center of attention. This means that intra-speaker variation can be described and analyzed in quite some detail in certain historical data sets. The paper presents some exemplary empirical analyses of the diachronic linguistic behavior of individual speakers/writers in fifteenth to seventeenth century England. It discusses the social factors that influence this behavior, with an emphasis on the methodological and theoretical challenges and opportunities when investigating intra-speaker variation and change.

Typological shift in lexicalizing motion events: The case of Wenzhou

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jingxia Lin
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Head Motion ◽  
Motion Events ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Chinese Dialect ◽  
Chinese Dialects ◽  
Motion Verb ◽  
The One ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Modern Standard

AbstractTypological shift in lexicalizing motion events has hitherto been observed cross-linguistically. While over time, Chinese has shown a shift from a dominantly verb-framed language in Old Chinese to a strongly satellite-framed language in Modern Standard Mandarin, this study presents the Chinese dialect Wenzhou, which has taken a step further than Standard Mandarin and other Chinese dialects in becoming a thoroughly satellite-framed language. On the one hand, Wenzhou strongly disfavors the verb-framed pattern. Wenzhou not only has no prototypical path verbs, but also its path satellites are highly deverbalized. On the other hand, Wenzhou strongly prefers the satellite-framed pattern, to the extent that it very frequently adopts a neutral motion verb to head motion expressions so that path can be expressed via satellites and the satellite-framed pattern can be syntactically maintained. The findings of this study are of interest to intra-linguistic, diachronic and cross-linguistic studies of the variation in encoding motion events.

Citizen sociolinguists scaling back

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Betsy Rymes ◽  
Gareth Smail
Keyword(s):  
Social Meaning ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Everyday Language ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Multilingual Communication ◽  
The Social ◽  
Linguistic Practices ◽  
Over Time

AbstractThis paper examines the different ways that professional experts and everyday language users engage in scaling practices to claim authority when they talk about multilingual practices and the social significance they assign to them. Specifically, we compare sociolinguists’ use of the term translanguaging to describe multilingual and multimodal practices to the diverse observations of amateur online commentators, or citizen sociolinguists. Our analysis focuses on commentary on cross-linguistic communicative practices in Wales, or “things Welsh people say.” We ultimately argue that by calling practices “translanguaging” and defaulting to scaled-up interpretations of multilingual communication, sociolinguists are increasingly missing out on analyses of how the social meaning of (cross)linguistic practices accrues and evolves within specific communities over time. By contrast, the fine-grained perceptions of “citizen sociolinguists” as they discuss their own communicative practices in context may have something unique and underexamined to offer us as researchers of communicative diversity.

scholarly journals What is special about L3 processing?

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
KEES DE BOT ◽  
CAROL JAENSCH
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Fundamental Question ◽  
Third Language ◽  
The Core ◽  
Dynamic Perspective ◽  
Core Issue ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Over Time

While research on third language (L3) and multilingualism has recently shown remarkable growth, the fundamental question of what makes trilingualism special compared to bilingualism, and indeed monolingualism, continues to be evaded. In this contribution we consider whether there is such a thing as a true monolingual, and if there is a difference between dialects, styles, registers and languages. While linguistic and psycholinguistic studies suggest differences in the processing of a third, compared to the first or second language, neurolinguistic research has shown that generally the same areas of the brain are activated during language use in proficient multilinguals. It is concluded that while from traditional linguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives there are grounds to differentiate monolingual, bilingual and multilingual processing, a more dynamic perspective on language processing in which development over time is the core issue, leads to a questioning of the notion of languages as separate entities in the brain.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document