Language contact is not just about language. It extends to a whole complex set of sociocultural and historical formations that characterize life in intersecting communities of language users. It is a space of linguistic as well as sociocultural reproduction and transformation. Early anthropologists and linguists focused narrowly on how languages, understood here as structural codes, influence each other, producing lexical, phonological, and morphosyntactic changes. The discipline of linguistics has largely continued this line of inquiry and focused on issues of variation and structural change. In conducting empirical ethnographic studies, sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have exposed the constructedness of the static, bounded notions of “languages” and “communities” of monolingual speakers. They have also increasingly emphasized the embeddedness of language in its sociocultural and historical context (see Foundational Texts). Anthropology of language contact, accordingly, investigates changing practices of language use, unequal acquisition, socialization, and development of linguistic norms. This article highlights the dynamic relationship between the use and conceptualization of language. It includes works on multilingual and dialectal practices (see Multilingual Practices and Discursive Construction of Identity), and how linguistic differences function, produce, and perpetuate forms of social inequality (see Linguistic Differences and Social Inequality). It also addresses the historical, sociocultural, and interactional contexts of encounters and power dynamics. As such, we examine the context of colonialism and missionization (see Language and Colonialism) and the rise of nation-states in which standard language has been taken to be coterminous with the polity (see Language Contact and Nation-Building). Nationalism based on an association between nation and language is important in understanding the processes of language endangerment and revitalization (see Language Endangerment, Documentation, and Revitalization). This article also covers the flow of people and commodities, as well as industrialization, urbanization, and the introduction of new technologies (see Language Contact, Migration, and Globalization). Such flows and movements occur at different scales, from face-to-face interaction to global trade, and transform boundaries between languages (or what counts as such) and the communities that use them. Notwithstanding the fluidity of global communication, the school has been the most important site of the reproduction of standard and monolingual ideologies, closely connected to the process of nation-building, colonization, and the reproduction of privilege and inequality (see Education and Social (Re)production). The final section gathers works that highlight the poetic function of language and individual creative choice in multilingual verbal arts (see Verbal Play and Aesthetics of Contact).
How Do New Languages Arise? A Comparison of Romanization and Gallicization
