Language Contact

Topics and Themes in Linguistics WS 2005/6, Campus Essen Raymond Hickey, English Linguistics

Language Contact

 1) Although we say that a language does one thing or the other, it is not the language which does something but the speakers of the language.

 2) Language contact is the face to face interaction of speakers from two different speech communities. In some types of contact, speakers of one language do not actually meet speakers of another, but encounter this second language in a written context, or today, somewhere in the media. For instance, the French loanwords in Russian were borrowed through writing because French was a prestige language during the 18th and for a large part of the 19th century.

 3) Language contact is one type of language change. All languages change continually and this change is largely regular.

Reasons for contact

 1) Contact can be motivated by necessity (filling of lexical gaps, new terms for new phenomena, e.g. scientific inventions). In the history of English written contact with Latin was responsible for the creation of adjectives such as

acquatic

Latin

equus

(from Latin

acqua

‘water’) and

equestrian

(from ‘horse’) to provide English with adjectives from the respective nouns which either did not exist — *

sea+y

— or were unsuitable because they had other non-neutral meanings,

watery

vegetables’,

horsey

‘having too much water, e.g. ‘like a horse, e.g. in one’s gait’.

 2) Contact can be the result of prestige, or just a passing fashion, as with the many borrowings from English which are not strictly speaking needed by the modern European languages which have them. In the 18th century and early 19th century many borrowings were made from French which were strictly speaking not necessary.

Contact situations

 

One-way borrowing

Receiving language < Donor language  

Language shift

Original language abandoned -> All speakers shift to new language  

Language convergence <->

(both directions) One or more languages become more similar through borrowing in both directions (languages in the Balkans).

 

What is unaltered on contact?

There would seem to be a general principle whereby the ‘deeper kernel’ of grammar in a language (above all inflectional morphology) is more resistant to change because it is so highly structured.

Motivated borrowing

 This refers to situations in which the receiving language has an internal, purely linguistic reason for borrowing from another language. The following example illustrate what is meant.

 Scandinavian personal pronoun forms of the third person plural, beginning in

th-

, giving later English

they, them, their,

were borrowed into northern English (and subsequently spread to the south). A good reason for this borrowing is that Old English had the forms

he

‘he’,

heo

‘she’,

hi

‘they’ and these may well have become homophonous in certain dialects. The Scandinavian borrowings helped to disambiguate these essential forms of English morphology. Supportive argument: the same motivation seems to lie behind the development of

she

which further increased the phonetic distinction vis a vis

he

.

Contact in history



Language contact in European history

    1 2) 3)

Language 1

Finnish Swedish German, etc.

Language 2

Germanic dialects Low German French

Time

Early centuries AD Hanse period 18c/19c 

The history of English

       1) 2) 3) 4) 5)

Language 1

Old English Old English Old English Middle English Early Modern English

Language 2

British Celtic Latin Scandinavian

Time

5c onwards 7c onwards 9c onwards French 11c/13c onwards (Anglo-Norman/Central French) Latin/Greek 17c/18c onwards

Contact scenario



Contact-induced borrowings in the history of English

languages, the vocabulary of English in the history of the language has been characterised by at times massive influence from other languages. There are three main sources for historical loans in English.    1)

Latin:

1700.

pre-Old English, loans after Christianisation, c. 600, borrowings and new formations in the early modern period, c. 1500 2)

Scandinavian:

late Old English, c. 800-1000 3)

French:

Norman and Central French, during the early and late Middle English periods respectively, 1066-1204; 1204-c.1500.

 It is Latin which has continuously donated words to English from its prehistoric stage to the present-day. Often the Latin words are from Greek originally. But also there are many direct loans from Greek in particular in the spheres of science and technology. To group Latin and Greek together one speaks of classical loans in English. Examples for borrowings from these languages can be found on both the CD

Linguistics Surveyor

and on the ELE hompage ( www.uni essen.de/ELE ).