This paper is a typological survey of inalienable possessive constructions in the linguistic area of Wallacea and its surrounds. In a sample of 189 Austronesian and non-Austronesian languages, 13 ...have a phenomenon not previously recognised in the theoretical or typological literature: Split Inalienable Coding (SIC), whereby a language has two or more possessive coding strategies that are closely or exclusively associated with expressing inalienable possession. This paper focusses on semantically conditioned splits, where minimally one strategy encodes the possession of body parts, and another the possession of kin terms. Geographically, all of the sampled languages with semantic SIC are located in Wallacea; special attention is therefore given to the development of split inalienables in this region. In most of these languages, SIC has developed very recently. I argue that there have been multiple causes of SIC: Austronesian languages are predisposed to develop SIC, due to the inheritance of a structurally defined class of kin terms that favours the distinction; and contact has also played a role in Northwest New Guinea, with SIC diffusing both across and within genealogical groupings.
This article examines lexical borrowing from Russian that takes the form of loanwords and loan translations, often in connection with an explanation of the concept, in Finnish journalistic writing. ...The material consists of news articles that were published in three major Finnish online news outlets in the three-month period (one month per news outlet) that led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. During that time, with interest in Russian foreign politics growing and political tensions rising, news reporting on Russia also increased. The present study focuses on what was borrowed from Russian during that time and the kinds of translation strategies that were used by journalists to convey the meanings of Russian concepts to Finnish readers. Loanwords and loan translations are analyzed qualitatively and discussed from the point of view of the context of their use from December 2021 - February 2022. The results show that loanwords were not numerous and often did not appear to aim to emphasize the foreign aspect.
When two languages come into contact, they exert a reciprocal influence, often unbalanced. A phenomenon that often occurs in case of language contact is the absorption or borrowing of lexical ...elements, which will enrich the vocabulary of the receiving language. In this article, we deal with words adopted from French in Indonesian and vice-versa. This research shows that most of the words of French origin in Indonesian/Malay language were borrowed through Dutch. Historical background explains why there are no direct loanwords from French language in Indonesian. Nowadays, a second batch of words originating from Old French finds their way into Indonesian through English. On the other hand, very few words from Malay-Indonesian origin were borrowed in French, and their route was not straight either: they were conveyed through Portuguese or Dutch. Phonological adaptation and shift of meaning may have happen when the words were loaned from French to Dutch language or later, when adapted from Dutch into Indonesian language. The data analysed in this article may help teachers of French as a Foreign Language in Indonesia, as well as teachers of Indonesian as a Foreign Language in French-speaking countries, to predict which words will be immediately recognized by their students, and when they should pay extra-attention to faux-amis (cognates whose meanings differ).
•Demonstrates language variation and change in foreign language contact situations.•Presents variation of borrowed English forms with heritage Finnish forms.•Proposes a trajectory for how pragmatic ...borrowings enter into Finnish.•Presents factors that contribute to the success or failure of pragmatic borrowings.•Problematizes foreign language contact vis traditional forms of language contact.
This article focuses on the issue of pragmatic borrowing and how it manifests in language contact settings where the language of influence is a nonnative language for the receiving speech community. In this case, the languages under investigation are English and its unidirectional influence on Finnish. The article first establishes the behavior of pragmatic elements in traditional language contact settings, then moves on to problematize the notion within contemporary language contact settings. The article then offers specific examples of pragmatic borrowings from English into Finnish, including pliis (‘please’), oh my god, and about. The discussion accounts for the social, pragmatic, semantic and grammatical incorporation of these elements into Finnish, demonstrating that the borrowed forms have characteristics which are distinct from both the source language (English) as well as heritage form in the recipient language (Finnish). Included in the discussion of these forms is a proposed trajectory for how such borrowings enter into native discourse, as well as the success vs. failure of pragmatic borrowings in entering mainstream discourse.
This paper contributes to the ongoing Cognitive Linguistic turn in research on lexical borrowing: rather than searching for objective and universal linguistic criteria to demarcate different contact ...phenomena, we prioritize language users’ subjective perception of contact-induced change. In particular, combining insights from folk linguistics and social role theory, this paper presents the results from a survey targeting 177 Belgian Dutch respondents’ expectations on the use of English loanwords. The survey uncovers variation in these expectations, depending on the age of the projected speaker (RQ1), on the social role of the projected speaker (RQ2), and whether (unexpected) use of English by projected social role actors leads to negative evaluations (RQ3). Results reveal shared expectations regarding the use of English loans by age, with a perceived peak in late adolescence. Regarding the use of English by social role actors, we find high anticipated use of English loans for modern roles (e.g. rapper, gamer), whilst the expectation on English use for public (e.g. primary school teacher) and traditional roles (e.g. farmer) is significantly lower. Finally, our results indicate that role violation only seems to trigger negative evaluations when the role actor is a public figure with social responsibility. The discussion reflects on the implications of the results, contrasting the top-down or bottom-up emergence of shared beliefs on speaker groups and contact-induced variation.
This article presents a descriptive and theoretical framework for the analysis of prosodic systems that have emerged from contact between African tone and European intonation-only languages. A ...comparative study of the prosodic systems of two Romance contact varieties, Central African French and Equatorial Guinean Spanish, shows that they feature two-tone systems, fixed word-tone patterns, tonal minimal pairs, the arbitrary assignment of tone in function words, and tonal processes. Evidence from further contact varieties and creole languages shows that similar systems evolved in other Afro-European contact ecologies. We conclude that tone is imposed by default on contact varieties and creoles that take shape in ecologies characterized by source-language agentivity in tone languages. In doing so, we argue against claims that tone necessarily cedes to stress during language contact and creolization. Instead, contact varieties and creoles partake just like other languages in the convergence processes that lead to the areal clustering of prosodic systems.
Studying dialectal contact offers linguists an opportunity to critically examine some of our most basic assumptions about language. In particular, careful consideration of geographically constrained ...patterns of linguistic variation highlights the limitations of named language varieties as tools for linguistic inquiry. Ultimately, the locus of contact is not to be found in the interaction of such ions, but rather in the individual minds of those who live in contact communities. The present paper highlights these issues through a discussion of Spanish dialectal contact in the U.S., with a special emphasis on the variable social salience of regionally differentiated features. Work reviewed here is consistent with previous research that finds the relative salience of features to be a key determinant of their trajectory in situations of contact. Change in the use of high salience features is likely to be the result of direct accommodation between speakers, while change in low salience features is likely to arise by other, indirect mechanisms. The role of salience in shaping the outcomes of contact reinforces its inherently social nature, reminding us that what we hope to understand are not the results of dialects in contact, but rather, those of people in contact.
Zambia is home to a complex set of language practices, which involve languages being used in different ways across social contexts. Historically written communication has typically been associated ...with English with African languages mainly associated with used spoken contexts. Recently, however, there has been a shift in this pattern with African languages being used more frequently in and across the linguistic landscape of Zambia in public writing Banda, F., and H. Jimaima. 2017. "Linguistic Landscapes and the Sociolinguistics of Language Vitality in Multilingual Contexts of Zambia." Multilingua 36 (5): 595-625; Simungala, G. 2020. "The Linguistic Landscape of the University of Zambia: A Social Semiotic Perspective." Unpublished MA Thesis, University of Zambia; Simungala, G., and H. Jimaima. 2020. "Multilingual Realities of Language Contact at the University of Zambia." Journal of African and Asian Studies, 1-14. In this paper, we add to the growing body of work within linguistic landscape research that draws on a translanguaging perspective to understand the ways in which language is used as a resource for meaning making in the social world Wei, Li. 2011. "Moment Analysis and Translanguaging Space: Discursive Construction of Identities by Multilingual Chinese Youth in Britain." Journal of Pragmatics 43 (5): 1222-1235; Wei, Li. 2018. "Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language." Applied Linguistics 39 (1): 9-30; García, O., and T. Kleyn. 2016. Translanguaging with Multilingual Students: Learning from Classroom Moments. Routledge; MacSwan, J. 2017. "A Multilingual Perspective on Translanguaging." American Educational Research Journal 54 (1): 167-201; Jaspers, J. 2018. "The Transformative Limits of Translanguaging." Language & Communication 58: 1-10. More specifically, we adopt the concept of translanguaging spaces Wei, Li. 2011. "Moment Analysis and Translanguaging Space: Discursive Construction of Identities by Multilingual Chinese Youth in Britain." Journal of Pragmatics 43 (5): 1222-1235; Wei, Li. 2018. "Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language." Applied Linguistics 39 (1): 9-30; Reilly, C. 2021. 3 Malawian Universities as Translanguaging Spaces. In English-Medium Instruction and Translanguaging, 29-42. Multilingual Matters to explore the ways in which language is used in billboards and advertising spaces and propose that important shifts in language uses are observable. We discuss the changing status and uses of local African languages and why this is important in understanding language use in post-colonial contexts such as Zambia.
In a previous study on voiceless stop aspiration in Heritage Calabrian Italian spoken in Toronto, we found that the transmission of a sociophonetic variable differed from cross-generational phonetic ...variation induced by increased contact with the majority language. Universal phonetic factors and the social characteristics of the speakers appeared to influence contact-induced variation much more straightforwardly than the transmission of the sociophonetic variable. In the current study, we investigate further, examining possible alternative explanations related to the lexical distribution of the aspiration phenomena. We test two alternative hypotheses, the first one predicting that the diffusion of a majority language’s phonetic feature is frequency-driven while change in a sociophonetic feature is not (or not that regularly across generations), and the second one predicting that sociophonetic aspiration decreases across generations by being progressively more dependent on the frequency of lexical items. Our results show that sociophonetic aspiration resists lexicalization and applies to both frequent and infrequent words even in the speech of third-generation speakers. By contrast, the progressive introduction of contact-induced phonetic change is led by high-frequency words. These findings add to the complexity of heritage language phonology by suggesting that the pronunciation features of a heritage language can follow different fates depending on their sociolinguistic roles.
This paper seeks to approach the topic of historical language choice from a quantitative perspective, arguing that solid baseline evidence drawn from a substantial dataset is a much-needed complement ...to the largely qualitative findings of previous research. We propose a methodological framework which enables us to examine the sociolinguistic factors that condition language choice in the private domain. Illustrating the possibilities of our methodology, we present a case study on Dutch-French language choice in the Northern Low Countries (i.e., the present-day Netherlands), focusing on nineteenth-century family correspondence. Our paper shows that a careful selection procedure is crucial in order to achieve a balanced representation of language choice in a large-scale dataset. With respect to our analyses, the role of French in private letters turns out to be relatively small against the prevalence of Dutch. However, interesting patterns become visible when looking at regional differences, gender constellations and familial relationships. These quantitative findings can therefore constitute an interpretational frame for qualitative studies on historical language choice in the Dutch-French context and beyond.
PDF
