Prehistoric Bantu-Khoisan language contact

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How Neighbours Communicate: The Role of Language in Border Relations

This paper reports on a study of the linguistic situation in the border region where Norway meets Russia in the north. The aim of the study was to investigate language use when contact is revitalised after a long period with closed borders. The Norwegian and Russian languages are very different in vocabulary and structure, which makes communication difficult. How are the two languages affected by extended contact and migration across the border? The study was carried out by the author and Marit Bjerkeng through interviews, a questionnaire and observation of the linguistic situations in two Norwegian communities. The results show an ongoing development where the neighbouring language is increasingly noticeable, and there is a clear link between attitudes, identity and language use. The role of public policy seems to play an important role for the developing linguistic situation, as the Barents region as a political concept introduced in the 1990s has led to cross-border contact within various fields and also inspired local language policy, contributing to cultural pride and changing attitudes

Phrasal Alternation in the Pondok Tinggi Dialect of Kerinci; an Intergenerational Analysis

This paper examines the implications of language contact in a Malay sub-variety known as Pondok Tinggi, spoken in Sumatra. My focus is on the grammatical phenomenon of phrasal alternation. Phrasal alternation is characterized by the presence of two distinct forms for nearly all lexical items, whose final syllables differ in shape. These are termed absolute and oblique (Steinhauer and Usman 1978: 485). The intergenerational transmission of this uncommon feature offers a way to measure the degree of contact-induced language change in Pondok Tinggi. An experiment was conducted to elicit the USAge of the absolute and the oblique forms in order to find out how the distribution of phrasal alternation has changed within the last two generations. I reveal a grammatical simplification caused by contact between Pondok Tinggi and Bahasa Indonesia, a related Malayic variety serving as Indonesia's prestigious official language. This adds a dimension of loss of local linguistic diversity to more familiar tropes of the national success of Bahasa Indonesia

Causes and effects of Substratum, Superstratum and Adstratum influence, with reference to Tibeto-Burman languages

Language contact has become a major focus of inquiry in historical and typological linguistics in the last twenty years, spurred in a large part by the publication of Thomason & Kaufman (1988), which tried to make sense of a large amount of language contact data. They argued that there was a direct relationship between the degree or intensity of language contact and the amount and type of influence the contact would have on one or more of the languages involved. Essentially, the greater the degree of bilingualism, the greater the degree of contact influence (see also Thomason 2001); if the contact and bilingualism was minimal, then there might just be a few loanwords adapted to the borrowing language's phonology and grammatical system, but if the contact and bilingualism was of a greater degree there would be influence in the grammar and phonology of the affected language. As more linguists came to take language contact more seriously, they came to realize how common language contact phenomena are

Christianity, language contact and language change

In this paper, I argued that conversion to Christianity and Christian practice provide a context for linguistic contact between the vernacular language of the converted population and the ecclesiastic language. This contact, as any other language contact, can trigger language change. Moreover, because religious affiliation often provokes the division of social space, it is responsible for the development of strong social-indexical characteristics of innovative features introduced through contact. I suggested a gradual model of language change which implies that the change will first occur and stabilize in ecclesiastic genres and only then spread to the standard or to other varieties. I also emphasized the role of translation in this process. I provided examples of several case studies of change in vocabulary (colonial Maya), morphology (European languages, Latin), and pragmatics (Bosavi). The discussion of examples of syntactic change in Mano, where certain innovations introduced in the situation of contact in Christian context failed to stabilize, suggests that the variability of the ecclesiastic register is the factor impeding the spread of innovations. The model of language change in contact applied in this paper which takes into account the sociolinguistic landscape, as well as such factors as distribution of variants in different registers, can contribute to the studies of language contact and change beyond the Christian context.Non peer reviewe