Language - Social Contexts of Use and Transmission - Language Contact

Language Contact

One important source of language change is contact between different languages and resulting diffusion of linguistic traits between languages. Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact on a regular basis. Multilingualism is likely to have been the norm throughout human history, and today most people in the world are multilingual. Before the rise of the concept of the ethno-national state, monolingualism was characteristic mainly of populations inhabiting small islands. But with the ideology that made one people, one, state and one language the most desirable political arrangement monolingualism started to spread throughout the world. Nonetheless there are only 250 countries in the world corresponding to some 6000 languages, so most countries are multilingual and most languages therefore exist in close contact with other languages.

When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Through sustained language contact over long periods linguistic traits diffuse between languages, and languages belonging to different families may converge to become more similar. In areas where many languages are in close contact this may lead to the formation of language areas in which unrelated languages share a number of linguistic features. A number of such language areas have been documented, among them: the Balkan language area, the Mesoamerican language area, and the Ethiopian language area. Also larger areas such as South Asia, Europe and South East Asia have sometimes been considered language areas, because of widespread diffusion of specific areal features.

Language contact may also lead to a variety of other linguistic phenomena, including language convergence, borrowing, and relexification (replacement of much of the native vocabulary with that of another language). In situations of extreme and sustained language contact it may lead to the formation of new mixed languages that cannot be considered to belong to a single language family. One type of mixed language called pidgins occurs when adult speakers of two different languages interact on a regular basis, but in a situation where neither group learns to learn to speak the language of the other group fluently. In such a case they will often construct a communication form that has traits of both languages, but which has a simplified grammatical and phonological structure, the language comes to contain mostly the grammatical and phonological categories that exist in both languages. Pidgin languages are defined by not having any native speakers, but only being spoken by people who have another language as their first language. But if a Pidgin language becomes the main language of a speech community, then eventually children will grow up learning the pidgin as their first language. As the generation of child learners grow up the pidgin will often be seen to change its structure and acquire a greater degree of complexity. This type of language is generally called a creole language. An example of such mixed languages are Tok Pisin the official language of Papua New-Guinea which originally arose as a Pidgin based on English and Austronesian languages; others are Kreyòl ayisyen the French based creole language spoken in Haiti, and Michif, a mixed language of Canada, based on the Native American language Cree and French.