The Addition of Indonesian Prefixes meN- and di- to English Bases: A Corpus-based Study

This paper serves as an initial identification of the addition of Indonesian inflectional prefixes meN- and di- to English bases of any word class through a corpus-based study. With the prevalence of English influence in Indonesian native speakers’ linguistic repertoire, particularly within the scientific and computational domain, there emerges a tendency to resort to the original terms in English than those of the Indonesian equivalences. This phenomenon, addressed as leksikalisasi timpang or unequal lexicalization, refers to the use of words in source language to make up for the lack of corresponding lexicalization in target language. This leads to a linguistic innovation to ‘localize’ English words by adding Indonesian inflectional prefixes such as meN- and di-. Out of 1 million sentence size Web corpus obtained from The Leipzig Corpora Collection, this paper is able to yield approximately 489 (0,21%) combinations of meN- + English bases with 2,813 (0,018%) word tokens and 475 (0,20%) combinations of di- + English bases with 2,377 (0,015%) word tokens. Six allomorphs of meN- are also attested, namely meng-, men-, mem-, me-, menge-, and meny-, with meng-, men-, and mem- as the most used allomorphs by word frequency and type. This investigation backs up the hypothesis that the process of word assimilation leads to nasal sound changes. This paper also observes that there are 13 most used typographic forms shared between the combinations of meN- and di- + English bases, and 7 other forms on a very low frequency. The words observed in this paper’s database are then grouped into three semantic clusters based on their use in context: computer-related (CR), non-computer-related (NCR), and both (NCR/CR), where computer-related words are observed to dominate the database. The findings indicate that this linguistic creativity is the outcome of how familiar Indonesians are with English terms than the official equivalences, especially towards technology and computational vocabulary.

History of the Spanish Lexicon

From an historical perspective, the Spanish lexicon consists of three different categories: (1) its historical core of words inherited from the Latin spoken in the Roman province of Hispania; (2) loanwords that entered Spanish over its long history as a result of contact at the levels of both oral and written discourse with other languages; and (3) words created internally through such mechanisms of derivational morphology as suffixation, prefixation, compounding, back-formations, and so on. Over the last 150 years, specialists in the history of the Spanish language have studied in considerable detail all three sources of lexical material. Although most of the lexical items inherited from spoken Latin have cognates in many (in some cases, all) of the Romance languages, Spanish has preserved some words that live on only in Spanish (and neighboring Portuguese) or only in Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian, the geographical extremes of the Romance-speaking world, far removed from the centers of linguistic innovation. As a result of language contact, loanwords from the pre-Roman languages of the Iberian Peninsula, Visigothic, Arabic, Gallo-Romance (northern and southern French), Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, classical Latin, native languages of the New World, and English have entered and taken root in the Spanish lexicon. Although such lexical borrowings have often been studied within a cultural framework, recent research has focused on their introduction and incorporation as examples of contact-induced language change at the level of the lexicon. Throughout its history, Spanish has increased the size of its vocabulary through the creation of neologisms through processes of suffixation, prefixation, and composition. The study of such items has traditionally been the focus of specialists in diachronic derivational morphology. This subfield constitutes in many respects an important component of diachronic lexicology. Indeed, etymology and diachronic derivational morphology are two sides of the same coin. Lexical history is not limited to the study of additions to the vocabulary. Over time, many words have fallen into disuse or have become obsolete. Some recent work on the history of the Spanish lexicon has examined the various external and internal/structural causes of lexical loss in the history of the Spanish lexicon.

How individuals change language

Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker’s linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in the language, and many theoretical proposals exist. We introduce a very general mathematical model that encompasses a wide variety of individual-level linguistic behaviours and provides statistical predictions for the population-level changes that result from them. This model allows us to compare the likelihood of empirically-attested changes in definite and indefinite articles in multiple languages under different assumptions on the way in which individuals learn and use language. We find that accounts of language change that appeal primarily to errors in childhood language acquisition are very weakly supported by the historical data, whereas those that allow speakers to change incrementally across the lifespan are more plausible, particularly when combined with social network effects.

Linguistic innovation during the COVID-19 pandemic: the Spanish language case

The paper contributes to the study of the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has produced and is producing at the present moment on the Spanish language. The impact is, of course, reflected at the lexical level as many new words and expressions have been coined to designate segments of new extralinguistic reality generated by the pandemic and the “new normal”. The article analyses recent “pandemic” updates of the Spanish Royal Academy dictionary electronic version DLE 23.4 and “covidic” neologisms and occasionalisms from semantical and morphological points of view.

The changing geo-cultural space of the CIS countries in the 20-21st centuries (on the material of renaming cities)

The article deals with the main cultural and geographical approaches to the study of renaming — critical-toponymic, palimpsest, geoconceptual. From the position of conceptualization of space, a typology of renaming geographical objects is proposed. Among the main motives for renaming are the following: status, national renaming, de-Sovietization and de-Russification of space, “new Russification” of space. On the basis of a large amount of factual material, the changes in the geocultural space of the Neighboring countries are investigated. At the same time, there are 3 groups of countries: countries with a transformed geocultural space, where renaming affected more than half of the studied objects, countries with a changed cultural and geographical space, where renaming covers from 25 to 50 % of the cities considered, and countries with a slightly changed geocultural space (renaming covers less than a quarter of the studied objects). A significant group of countries of the Near Abroad (Abkhazia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, South Ossetia) belongs to the countries with a transformed cultural space. These countries are characterized by the processes of revolutionary attitude to the Soviet heritage (with the exception of Abkhazia and South Ossetia) and active cultural and linguistic innovations. Two countries of the Near Abroad (Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) belong to the countries with a changed cultural space. A significant group of countries in the Near Abroad belongs to countries with poorly modified cultural space (renaming covers less than a quarter of the studied objects). These are Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Armenia, Georgia and Uzbekistan. Some of these countries are characterized by a low rate of cultural and linguistic innovation. Others — the Baltic states, Armenia, and Georgia-experienced waves of renaming much earlier, in pre-Soviet or Soviet times.

Styles, standards and meaning

Style, in the study of variation and change, is intimately linked with broader questions about linguistic innovation and change, standards, social norms, and individual speakers’ stances. This article examines style when applied to lesser-studied languages. Style is both (i) the product of speakers’ choices among variants, and (ii) something reflexively produced through the association of variants and the social position of the users of those variants. In the context of the languages considered here, we ask “What questions do we have about variation in this language and what notion(s) of style will answer them?” We highlight methodological, conceptual and analytical challenges for the notion of style as it is usually operationalised in variationist sociolinguistics. We demonstrate that style is a useful research heuristic which – when marshalled alongside locally-oriented accounts of, or proxies for “standard” and “prestige”, in apparent time – allows us to describe language and explore change. It is also a means for exploring social meaning, which speakers may have more or less conscious control over.

Tireless Translation

In Féerie d’un mutant, Abdelkébir Khatibi creates a dialogue in which one of the interlocutors declares that he is an “étranger professionnel,” a recurring expression in the Moroccan writer’s work that isn’t easily translated from French into English because of the multiple meanings of the first word: “étranger” is most often rendered as either foreigner or stranger, though these terms carry decidedly different connotations for Anglophone readers. This very resistance to translation may be what inspires the individual in the aforementioned textual exchange to specify that this self-description does not refer to a profession, but instead constitutes “a mobile position in the world” that entails “crossing borders: between languages, civilizations, markets.” (Féérie d’un mutant 2005, 38-39). This way of approaching the planet brings the “étranger professionnel” to embrace a stance that stands out in stark contrast to nationalist and xenophobic sentiments: “A foreigner, I must attach myself to all that is foreign on this earth.” (Amour bilingue 1983, 11). The ever-moving, ever-adjusting position that Khatibi extolls has consequences on multiple levels, affecting the body and the relationships of the “étranger professionnel,” but the effects are perhaps most evident on the use of language, which is never taken for granted or considered to be a “given”: “Language belongs to no one […] Hadn’t I grown up, in my mother tongue, as if I were an adopted child? From one adoption to another, I believed I was being born to my own language.” (Amour bilingue 1983, 11). The constant rebirth into language that characterizes Khatibi’s written work involves tireless translation in texts that depict travel as synonymous with self-creation and linguistic innovation that benefit from transnational perspectives that render all things foreign, in complicated but fruitful ways.

Hybridität als Motor und als Ergebnis von Sprachwandel

This paper deals with constellations in which, as consequences of linguistic interculturality, elements of two or more languages encounter each other and result in something partially or completely new, an – occasionally temporary – “third quality”, namely hybridity. The paper contributes to the meta-discourse and theory formation by questioning the concept, term and content of “linguistic hybridity”. It also submits a proposal for a typology of linguistic-communicative hybridity that consists of the following prototypical main groups, each with several subtypes: (1) language-cultural, (2) semiotic, (3) medial, (4) communicative, (5) systematic, (6) paraverbal and (7) nonverbal hybridity. At last, the paper examines hybridity as an explanatory variable for language change. In conclusion, hybridity is generally a place of cultural production, with special regard to communication and language it is potentially considered as an incubator of linguistic innovation. Hybridity can be seen as the engine and as the result of language change, or language development. It represents an essential factor by which language functions and develops as a complex adaptive system. Hybridity operates as a continuous cycle. By generating innovation, it triggers language change, which in turn, leads to further and new hybridizations. The processuality of hybridity creates diversity, while at the same time it can cause the vanishing of diversity.