Semantic Borrowing in Language Contact

After providing a general introduction to loan phenomena, which may be phonological, grammatical and syntactic, morphological or lexical, and commenting on the degree to which various different languages have borrowed elements from other languages, this chapter concentrates on the main types of semantic change triggered by language contact, and underlines the frequency of these processes. First, loanwords are distinguished from loan creations, which are new coinages made from loan material. Then pure loanwords are contrasted with loanblends. Pure loanwords are adopted wholesale, with little phonological or morphological change, while loanblends adopt only part of the form of a foreign lexical item. Loanshifts borrow the meaning, but the form is native. These include pure loan translations (calques), where the original morphemes are translated item by item. The more fanciful among these are called loan renditions, in which the translation of the foreign word is freer and less than literal. In semantic loan (semantic calque), a native word undergoes extension of its meaning on the model of a foreign counterpart. The second half of the chapter deals with the causes of semantic borrowing, and shows that it is often induced by formal similarity of cognates. In this section, attention is paid to pressure from the native language in second language acquisition, and the influence exerted on dialect by the standard language, or vice versa. The chapter ends with some examples of pragmatic borrowing.

Language Contact Considering Signed Language

Language contact of various kinds is the norm in Deaf communities throughout the world, and this allows for exploration of the role of the different kinds of modality (be it spoken, signed or written, or a combination of these) and the channel of communication in language contact. Drawing its evidence largely from instances of American Sign Language (ASL) this chapter addresses and illustrates several of these themes: sign-speech contact, sign-writing contact, and sign-sign contact, examining instances of borrowing and bilingualism between some of these modalities, and compares these to contact between hearing users of spoken languages, specifically in this case American English.

Language Contact in Celtic and Early Irish

There is little doubt that the early stages of the subgroups of the Indo-European language family involved extensive contact. The movements of early groups of speakers across large stretches of land in Euroasia meant that these people came into contact with others who spoke genetically unrelated languages. This contact is responsible for the non Indo-European lexis in Indo-European languages and may also be the source of non-inherited grammatical features. Establishing the precise source of such lexis and grammar is a daunting task, given the great time-depth involved and the dearth of textual records that could provide helpful data for reconstructing the sources of borrowings external to this language family. But there was also contact within the orbit of the Indo-European languages when members of different subgroups came into close geographical proximity with each other due to repeated migrations. This fact accounts for borrowings across Indo-European subgroups (e.g. from Celtic into Germanic). This chapter examines cases of contact and probable borrowing both within the Indo-European language family and at its external interface to languages from other families, inasmuch as this can be established with reasonable certainty. The focus for this treatment is on early stages both of Celtic and of the Irish language as one of the main members of this group. The consideration of contact effects in Irish is limited to the language as it developed up to the late Middle Ages.

Language Contact in Khmer

This chapter discusses the influence on Khmer, an Austroasiatic language which is the official language of Cambodia, of a range of languages. Some of these are contiguous, such as Thai and Vietnamese. Others have been brought into the Khmerosphere as a result of cultural influence, namely Sanskrit, Pali, arguably Malay, Cham and Mon, and latterly (since the nineteenth century) also French and English. Some of these languages, notably Vietnamese and Mon, are genealogically related to Khmer as well. This influence has mostly been lexical but has also exerted features of change upon Khmer structure, including elements in the morphological sphere.

English and Welsh in Contact

Welsh and English have been in contact for centuries. This chapter looks at the long-standing influence of the English language upon Welsh and its changing nature. Welsh is interesting for what it tells us about how English has itself changed phonetically over time. Modern Welsh and English, unlike German, share well-developed progressive verbal systems. Linguistic contact was not always unidirectional across the Welsh border. The chapter assesses some patterns of morphological and syntactic change in Welsh emerging in the 1970s as pressure from Anglicization westwards across Wales. Anglicization can be mapped in the distribution of loanwords as recorded in major dialect surveys of the period. Explaining the distribution of English loanwords across Wales, the assignment of grammatical gender to them, and their accommodation into the Welsh morphological system turns out to be unusually complex, not just dependent on how far the border is away from Welsh speakers, but also on how much Welsh is spoken as a first language in that area but also linked to local attitudes toward the Welsh language itself, and the perception of threats to it from the use and spread of English across most social domains at that time. Code-switching and borrowing is closely linked to unstable bilingualism, and attitudes toward Anglicization.

Theories of Language Contact

This chapter depicts major theories of language contact, including those relating to the outcomes of borrowing, creole formation and other bilingual mixtures, with special emphasis on the framework proposed by Frans van Coetsem. This framework is multi-disciplinary in nature, built around linguistic, sociolinguistic, and psycholinguistic approaches. I first discuss the contributions of sociolinguistic approaches to our understanding of the ways in which social contexts and social factors influence the outcomes of language contact. I then evaluate various linguistic frameworks that have been proposed for describing the linguistic outcomes of language contact, the mechanisms involved, and the classification of contact phenomena. I argue that van Coetsem’s (1988, 2000) model of language contact offers a more consistent, accurate and principled explanation of the processes of change associated with different types of contact. Following that, I show how a wide variety of contact phenomena can be accounted for in terms of just two universal mechanisms of change—borrowing and imposition. Finally, I discuss ways in which psycholinguistic models of language production can contribute to our understanding of these mechanisms of contact-induced change.

Language Contact in the History of English

Britain is not and never has been monolingual. The 2011 census counted inhabitants of Britain speaking nearly ninety languages, including Slovenian, Farsi, Tagalog, and Swahili; a visitor to mid-twelfth-century London might have heard as many as fourteen languages: English, French, German, Flemish, Danish, Genoese, Spanish, Breton, Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek. Britain has therefore of necessity always been a site of language contact. This chapter focuses on what influence this language contact has had on British English, a topic of increasing interest to historical linguists. Following a brief account of some of the methodological challenges attendant on studying historical language contact, the chapter sketches the influence of the four main contact influences on English: Celtic, Latin, Norse, and French.

Creoles

Creole languages are new languages, each of them with communities of L1 speakers, that have developed from adults’ second-language renditions of, usually, European languages amidst conditions of colonization and imperialism. The period in question lasted from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. This chapter discusses various aspects of creolization such as its clinal manifestation, the diachronic relationships between creoles, and especially the various theories accounting for how creole languages were born.

Pidgins

This chapter discusses pidgins, what constitutes pidginization, how it can be identified, and presents material from a range of pidgins.

Contact-Induced Linguistic Change

Contact-induced linguistics change (or CILC) has been a feature of all known languages, ancient and modern, and has manifested itself in a great number of ways, which have on occasion interacted; the matter involves a great deal more than the mere transfer of cultural lexicon from one linguistic system to another, although this is probably the most widespread form of CILC and the easiest for linguists to exemplify. Drawing examples from a wide range of languages, but especially those in which CILC has been important, this chapter discuses themes, techniques, tendencies, and a selection of the major works in contact-induced linguistic change in its many forms.