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.
Abstract In this study, we investigate the contact effects of stability, convergence, and divergence regarding the use of the same linguistic construction in the same contact situation. To do that, ...we collected experimental production and judgment data by native German speakers living in the Netherlands regarding their usage of the complementizer um ‘to’ in German and compared those data to those of a control group of German speakers not in contact with Dutch. The results show that most speakers show evidence for some contact-induced language change in their German. At the same time, speakers seem to experience different contact effects, demonstrating that it is not the structural properties of the construction that result in one effect over the other, but rather factors that pertain to the individual speakers. In particular, we argue that speakers can either focus on the similarities or on the differences between their languages, to some extent driven by their attitudes towards their languages and language change, and then over-generalize these similarities or differences to new contexts. Overall, this result clearly underlines the importance of focusing on individual speakers as the initiators of language change, which is in line with a usage-based approach.
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.
It is usually assumed that modern language is a recent phenomenon, coinciding with the emergence of modern humans themselves. Many assume as well that this is the result of a single, sudden mutation ...giving rise to the full "modern package." However, we argue here that recognizably modern language is likely an ancient feature of our genus pre-dating at least the common ancestor of modern humans and Neandertals about half a million years ago. To this end, we adduce a broad range of evidence from linguistics, genetics, paleontology, and archaeology clearly suggesting that Neandertals shared with us something like modern speech and language. This reassessment of the antiquity of modern language, from the usually quoted 50,000-100,000 years to half a million years, has profound consequences for our understanding of our own evolution in general and especially for the sciences of speech and language. As such, it argues against a saltationist scenario for the evolution of language, and toward a gradual process of culture-gene co-evolution extending to the present day. Another consequence is that the present-day linguistic diversity might better reflect the properties of the design space for language and not just the vagaries of history, and could also contain traces of the languages spoken by other human forms such as the Neandertals.
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