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.

The Development of Metropolitan Languages in Post-Colonial Contexts: Language Contact and Language Change and the Case of Portuguese in Maputo

1996 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-213
Author(s):  
Christopher Stroud
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Contact Linguistics ◽  
The Social

This article explores briefly some phenomena of potential indigenization of the Portuguese spoken in Mozambique. Data for the study has been taken from work that is currently underway in Maputo, Mozambique, that was originally initiated to investigate contact varieties of Portuguese and to probe their educational implications. Speech samples comprise formal interviews and non-formal encounters from a socio-demographically representative sample of informants. The article first provides an inventory of some non-standard European Portuguese variants that are found in this data, and subsequently focusses upon a discussion of what contribution different linguistic processes make to indigenization, specifically the role played by processes of second language acquisition in a context of massive and diffuse language contact and change. Special attention is also paid to the social contexts in which different manifestations of language contact are found, and the importance of linguistic ideology for the form that language contact takes in particular cases is explored. The article concludes with the suggestion that the salient characteristics of types of non-native speech community such as Maputo require a reconceptualization of models and methods of contact linguistics and second language acquisition, and that this in turn carries implications for the terms of reference and analysis to which indigenization need be related.

scholarly journals Contact-induced sound change: analysis of the alveolar lateral fricative in Yami

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Li-Fang Lai ◽  
Huiju Hsu
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Sound Change ◽  
Strongly Correlated ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Network Integration ◽  
Change Analysis ◽  
Austronesian Language ◽  
Orchid Island

Language change manifests itself in various ways. The majority of studies on language change in Yami, an endangered Austronesian language spoken on Orchid Island, Taiwan, have centered on the rapid language shift from Yami to Mandarin within the speech community (Chen 1998, Li and Ho 1988, Lin 2007, Rau 1995). The present study, however, aims to explore whether the sound change of [ɮ] to [l] in Yami (e.g., soli [ʂuɮi] > [ʂuli] 'taro') is triggered by language contact between Mandarin and Yami. Three variables were considered: Mandarin competence, Mandarinspeaking frequency, and social network integration. The results showed that the three variables were strongly correlated with sound change. Participants possessing advanced Mandarin competence, higher Mandarin-speaking frequency, and/or weaker social network integration into the Yami community (i.e., greater exposure to Mandarin) tended to exhibit the highest rate of sound change, which might be attributed to a cross-linguistic influence from Mandarin to Yami through extensive language contact.

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.

Toward a Speech Communities Approach: A Review Article

2018 ◽  
Vol 78 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 193-202
Author(s):  
Luca D’Anna
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Review Article ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Arabic Linguistics ◽  
Speech Communities ◽  
Prolonged Contact ◽  
Dialectal Arabic ◽  
Arabic Speaking

Abstract The present paper offers a review of Stefano Manfredi’s Arabi Juba: un pidgin-créole du Soudan du Sud (2017), discussing the potential benefits of its methodological approach for the field of Arabic linguistics and dialectology. Manfredi’s volume represents the latest and most comprehensive description of Juba Arabic, a pidgin / creole spoken in South Sudan. It includes a socio-historical introduction describing the conditions from which the speech community that gave rise to Juba Arabic first emerged, followed by nine chapters that provide a detailed description of the language at the phonological, morphological and syntactical levels. The paper also discusses how Manfredi’s approach goes in the direction of a linguistics of speech communities invoked by Magidow (2017) and how it might represent a model for future grammars of dialectal Arabic. Manfredi (2017), in fact, provides a multidimensional description of Juba Arabic, in which the diverse nature of its speakers (monolinguals native speakers vs bilinguals L2 speakers with different L1s) and the prolonged contact with its lexifier language (Sudanese Arabic) give origin to acrolectal and basilectal varieties. Manfredi analyzes internal variation from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective, resorting to the concept of “dynamic synchrony” to describe ongoing processes of language change. The linguistic situation of the Arabic-speaking world after the end of the colonial period, on the other hand, witnesses a more and more intense contact between different Arabic dialects and an increased influence from MSA, through mass media and growing rates of literacy. The situation of language contact that results from these circumstances needs more refined conceptual tools in order to be effectively described. For this reason, and in light of Magidow (2017), this review article argues that the approach adopted by Manfredi might be successfully imported in the field of Arabic dialectology.

scholarly journals Language exposure predicts children’s phonetic patterning: Evidence from language shift

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meg Cychosz
Keyword(s):  
Speech Production ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Expressive Language ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
Motor Planning ◽  
Linguistic Knowledge ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Language Experience ◽  
Language Exposure

Although understanding the role of the environment is central to language acquisition theory, rarely has this been studied for children’s phonetic development; and receptive and expressive language experiences in the environment are not distinguished. This last distinction may be crucial for child speech production in particular because production requires coordination of low-level speech-motor planning with high-level linguistic knowledge. In this study, the role of the environment is evaluated in a novel way—by studying phonetic development in a bilingual community undergoing rapid language shift. This sociolinguistic context provides a naturalistic gradient of the amount of children’s exposure to two languages and the ratio of expressive to receptive experiences. A largescale child language corpus encompassing over 500 hours of naturalistic South Bolivian Quechua and Spanish speech was efficiently annotated for children’s and their caregivers’ bilingual language use. These estimates were correlated with children’s patterns in a series of speech production tasks. The role of the environment varied by outcome: children’s expressive language experience best predicted their performance on a coarticulation-morphology measure while their receptive experience predicted performance on a lower-level measure of vowel variability. Overall these bilingual exposure effects suggest a pathway for children’s role in language change whereby language shift can result in different learning outcomes within a single speech community. Appropriate ways to model language exposure in development are discussed.

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.

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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