Through interviews with bilingual users of Kwéyòl Donmnik (Dominica Creole), an understudied and endangered French lexifier Creole, and a questionnaire for users of English, a colonial language that ...has been in intense contact with Kwéyòl for over 200 years, this study investigates the metalinguistic knowledge members of each language community have about a selection of pragmatic markers that are cross-linguistically similar: Kwéyòl konsa ‘so’, èben ‘well’, and papa/Bondyé ‘father/God’ and English so, well, and oh my God. The study also examines Kwéyòl users' understandings of la ‘there’, a locative pragmatic marker. Participants' responses paralleled and expanded upon linguists' observations, and while there were commonalities between the two groups' self-reports, Kwéyòl users attributed greater cultural and communicative value to their markers. This research expands the limited body of work on Kwéyòl and reinforces that pragmatic markers are both procedurally meaningful and culturally embedded. It also demonstrates that, while corpus-based approaches are fruitful, richer insights can be gained by also incorporating language users' lived expertise through direct elicitation of their metalinguistic knowledge about how pragmatic markers are employed and perceived.
•Selected Kwéyòl and English pragmatic markers (PMs) are in intense contact.•Metalinguistic knowledge about PMs parallels and expands beyond corpus analyses.•Despite rich knowledge, English survey takers were more dismissive of their PMs.•Kwéyòl interviewees ascribed greater cultural and communicative value to their PMs.•Both groups report awareness of waning taboos surrounding PMs with religious roots.
Acehnese, like other regional languages throughout Indonesia, is in constant and intense contact with Bahasa Indonesia, a lingua franca of Indonesia. Not surprisingly, many Indonesian loanwords are ...flooding into Acehnese. There are some interesting sound changes affecting both consonants and vowels, phonotactics, and stress. This paper explores the vowel changes occurring in Indonesian loanwords when used within dialects of Acehnese. A list of 285 well-established loanwords was compiled and recorded from native speakers of each of the four main Acehnese dialects (North Aceh, Pidie, Greater Aceh, and West Aceh). The informants were lecturers or postgraduate students and fluent bilingual speakers of both a selected Acehnese dialect and Indonesian. Phonemic transcriptions were compared with their Indonesian correspondences. The results of this study show that the behaviour of the vowels in this list of Indonesian loanwords is not a simple case of phonological assimilation, as usually occurs in loanword phonology, but rather often exhibits phonological dissimilation and must be an expression of Acehnese identity. In particular, the high back unrounded vowel /ɯ/ is a salient Acehnese vowel not found in Indonesian. A wide range of Indonesian vowels is frequently replaced by this vowel, resulting in the loanwords sounding distinctively Acehnese. The conditions when such changes occur are discussed in the paper.
This investigation examines the variable production of alveolar laterals in Barcelonan Spanish as a case study evidencing the effects of language contact between a majority language, Spanish, and a ...minority language, Catalan. The Catalan‐Spanish speech community constitutes a rather unique case of majority‐minority language contact, particularly within the Spanish‐speaking world, as Catalan, though a minority language in Spain, is characterized by such a high degree of linguistic vitality, linguistic capital, and social prestige in the autonomous region of Catalonia that its status as a minority language is to a degree, questionable. I account for sociophonetic variability in the production of Barcelonan Spanish /l/ by a set of linguistic (phonological context, cognate status) and social factors (gender, age, style, language dominance) that support an analysis of lateral velarization as contact‐induced and situate this case of language contact as a natural or otherwise predictable outcome of this community's sociolinguistic and sociodemographic history, notably concerning changes in immigration patterns, language ideologies, and language use in the last century. Additionally, I highlight how the gradient nature of select sociophonetic variables uniquely conditions nuanced social indexation in the speech community, specifically in the absence of any one singular or discrete, community‐wide acoustic variant.
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Aquesta investigació s'enfoca en la producció variable de les laterals alveolars en el castellà barcelonès, amb l'objectiu de demostrar els efectes del contacte lingüístic entre una llengua majoritària, el castellà, i una llengua minoritària, el català. La comunitat de parlants de català‐castellà exemplifica un cas únic de contacte lingüístic majoritari‐minoritari, especialment dins el món castellà‐parlant, ja que el català, tot i que es una llengua minoritària a Espanya, es caracteritza per un nivell tan alt de vitalitat lingüística, capital lingüístic, i prestigi social dins la comunitat autòctona de Catalunya, que el seu estatus com a llengua minoritària al final no queda tan clar. Justifico la variabilitat sociofonètica de la producció de /l/ en el castellà barcelonès amb un grup de factors lingüístics (context fonològic, estatus de cognat) i socials (sexe, edat, estil, perfil lingüístic) que corrobora un anàlisi de la velarització lateral com a fenomen de contacte lingüístic, així demostrant que els productes lingüístics d'aquest cas de contacte són naturals i a més previsibles a partir de la història sociolingüística i sociodemogràfica de la comunitat, en particular pel que fa a uns canvis de la immigració, les ideologies lingüístiques, i el usos lingüístics del últim segle. A més, destaco com és que la qualitat contínua de certes variables sociofonètiques condiciona els seus vincles socials dins la comunitat de parlants, específicament en l'absència d'una variant acústica discreta o singular de la comunitat.
The Kyrgyz are one of the Turkic peoples that have had extensive contact with Mongolian tribes throughout history, and their language has one of the largest numbers of loanwords of Mongolian origin. ...Careful analysis shows that these words were borrowed from several historical Mongolian idioms at various times. Western Mongolian loanwords make up the most recent stratum in terms of chronology. They were acquired in the 16th–18th centuries from Western Mongolian idioms, whose living successors are Oirat and Kalmyk. This article is the first attempt to deal specifically with loanwords from Western Mongolian languages to a particular Turkic language. The author of the paper offers numerous, especially phonological, criteria, for identifying Western Mongolian loanwords in Kyrgyz, and provides examples that meet these criteria. The fact that Mongolian loanwords from the late period are more prevalent than those from earlier layers, and that they also include examples related to Lamaism, Mongolian culture and ethnography, suggests that the Oirat-Kalmyk and Kyrgyz tribes had more intensive interaction than is often recognized.
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