An introduction to sociolinguistics
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LANGUAGE CONTACT IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS
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AN INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLINGUISTICS 2015 CHAPTER IV LANGUAGE CONTACT Multilingualism and language contact has likely been common throughout much of human history, and today most people in the world are multilingual. In tribal hunter-gatherer societies, multilingualism was common, as tribes must communicate with neighboring peoples and there is often inter-marriage. In present-day areas such as Sub-Saharan Africa, where there is much variation in language over short distances, it is usual for anyone who has dealings outside their own town or village to know two or more languages. When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Languages normally develop by gradually accumulating dialectal differences until two dialects cease to be mutually understandable, somewhat analogous to the species barrier in biology. Language contact can occur at language borders, between adstratum languages, or as the result of migration, with a “disturbing” language acting as either a super- stratum or a sub-stratum. Language contact occurs in a variety of phenomena, including language convergence and borrowing. The most common products are code-switching and mixed languages. Other hybrid languages, such as English, do not strictly fit into any of these categories. The most common way that languages influence each other is the exchange of words. Much is made about the contemporary borrowing of English words into other languages, but this phenomenon is not new, nor is it very large by historical standards. The large-scale importation of words from Latin, French and other languages into English in the 16th and 17th centuries was more significant. Some languages have borrowed so much that they have become scarcely recognizable. Armenian borrowed so many words from Iranian languages, for example, that it was at first considered a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages. It was not recognized as an independent branch of the Indo-European languages for many decades. AN INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLINGUISTICS Download 0.49 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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