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The Ecology of Language Evolution. Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact
Abstract
This book explores the development of creoles and other new languages, highlighting conceptual and methodological issues for genetic linguistics and discussing the significance of ecologies that influence language evolution. It presents examples of changes in the structure, function, and vitality of languages, suggesting that similar ecologies have played similar roles in all cases of language evolution. Using theories of language formation, macroecology, and population genetics, it proposes a common approach to creole and other new language development. Eight chapters discuss the following: (1) "Introduction" (e.g., pidgins, creoles, and koines); (2) "The Founder Principle in the Development of Creoles"; (3) "The Development of American Englishes: Factoring Contact in and the Social Bias Out" (e.g., the development of African American English and white English vernaculars); (4) "The Legitimate and Illegitimate Offspring of English" (e.g., mutual intelligibility); (5) "What Research on the Development of Creoles Can Contribute to Genetic Linguistics" (e.g., creolization as a social process); (6) "Language Contact, Evolution, and Death: How Ecology Rolls the Dice"; (7) "Past and Recent Population Movements in Africa: Their Impact on its Linguistic Landscape" (e.g., the linguistic impact of European colonization); and (8) "Conclusion: The Big Picture." (Contains approximately 400 references.) (SM)
... As mentioned in Section 1, in the Dynamic Model the roots of any postcolonial variety lie in the contact situation of a colonizer STL strand and a colonized IDG strand. In line with previous research on contact linguistics (Mufwene 2001;Thomason 2001;Winford 2003;cf. Schneider 2007: 21-2), the Dynamic Model assumes that stronger social contact between these two groups leads to greater linguistic interaction and that language contact in general depends heavily on social and political conditions. ...
... For the evolution of postcolonial varieties, the type of contact scenario therefore assumes great importance (cf. Mufwene 2001Mufwene , 2004Schneider 2007Schneider :24-25, 2020: 49-52): ...
... Yet, while Schneider acknowledges the importance of the local ecology of the initial STL-IDG contact situation (together with the effect of well-known ecological constraints, including the demographic size of groups or the influential 'founder effect' of the earliest members of a new community ;Mufwene 2001;cf. Schneider 2007: 25, 110-112), he also points out that the differentiation of the four colony types is 'important mostly for the early phases of settlement' (Schneider 2007: 25): ...
Varieties of English are spoken all over the world from Africa to Asia, from Europe to America. In addition to its use as a foreign language, English in many of these countries is a first or second language variety that initially arose in a colonial setting. Currently, the most influential sociolinguistic model for the evolution of these 'Post-Colonial Englishes' is the Dynamic Model. In this Element, I outline how Construction Grammar, the most prominent cognitive syntactic theory, can provide a cognitive foundation for the assumptions made by the Dynamic Model. As I shall argue, Construction Grammar naturally complements the Dynamic Model and, in addition to that, a 'Constructionist Grammar Approach to the Dynamic Model' approach generates new research questions concerning the productivity of syntactic patterns across Dynamic Model phases.
... This Element explores questions of what unites IndE accents across the nation, what distinguishes subvarieties, and, to the extent possible, what are the sources of these accent features. As English in India, like English everywhere, has developed through contact and over time, theories of language development (e.g., Mufwene 2001, Schneider 2003, Trudgill 2004 suggest sources of both uniformity and variability may be found through an examination of founder varieties, substrates, linguistic markedness, and processes such as dialect leveling, koineization, and focusing. I begin with an overall description of the linguistic situation in India and English's place in it, along with discussions of the object of study ("IndE accent") and potential factors involved in its development (Section 2). ...
... English in India, like English in Great Britain itself, has developed in a context of languages and language varieties in contact. Theories of language development under these circumstances (e.g., Mufwene 2001, Schneider 2003, Trudgill 2004 invoke the effects of founder varieties, multiple norms, substrates, and linguistic universals, along with the processes of koineization (dialect unification). As IndE is currently transmitted primarily through school, the educational system may also play a role. ...
... American missionaries were particularly active in the northeast, establishing schools as well as missions from the 1830s, contemporaneously with British expansion into the area (Barpujari 1986 Domange (2011Domange ( , 2015, who investigates a vowel contrast in IndE that may have survived from early in the contact period and still persists widely (see Section 4.2.3). Mufwene (2001) uses the general principles of evolution to understand the development of individual language varieties, treating language as a species in the context of a linguistic ecology, with individual speakers as "agents of language evolution" (2001: 149). With a variety of English dialects combined with local languages and multilingualism, IndE arose in an environment where speakers had multiple options available in their linguistic ecology. ...
The sounds of Indian English are distinct and recognizable to outsiders, while insiders perceive variations in how English has developed in this large diverse population. What characteristics mark the unity? Which are clues to a speaker's origins or identity? This Element synthesizes research over the past fifty years and adds to it, focusing on selected features of consonants, vowels, and suprasegmentals (stress, intonation, rhythm) to understand the characteristics of Indian English accents and sources of its uniformity and variability. These accent features, perceptible by humans and discoverable by computational approaches, may be used in expressing identity, both local and pan-Indian.
... These contexts are much less well understood than contexts of stable variation (J. Roberts 2002), yet are those where the most evidence of children leading change is considered (Aboh 2015;Bickerton 1984;Mufwene 2001;O'Shannessy 2012O'Shannessy , 2013. ...
... The most theorizing about the roles of children in contact-induced language change appears in literature on the emergence of oral creole languages, and ranges from children playing no role or a limited one (Lefebvre 1986(Lefebvre , 1998(Lefebvre , 2002Plag 2008Plag , 2009Siegel 2000Siegel , 2008, to their being largely the creators of a creole (Bickerton 1981(Bickerton , 1984. The views that children play little or no role in creole formation posit that creoles are the creations of adults, largely through second language acquisition processes, regardless of whether the lexifier was an actual learning target (Alleyne 1980: 220;DeGraff 2002: 393;Mufwene 2001), and children simply acquire the adult speech patterns as in any other acquisition setting. Within these end points are views that children's processes of acquisition in contact environments are the same as those in other acquisition environments, but the sociolinguistic setting is distinct (Aboh 2015;DeGraff 2002;Mufwene 2001;O'Shannessy, forthcoming), and/or that children add small, incremental changes to the input they receive, resulting in new or more regular grammatical paradigms (Aboh and Ansaldo 2006;Jourdan 1989;O'Shannessy, forthcoming;Sankoff 1991;Shnukal and Marchese 1983). ...
... The views that children play little or no role in creole formation posit that creoles are the creations of adults, largely through second language acquisition processes, regardless of whether the lexifier was an actual learning target (Alleyne 1980: 220;DeGraff 2002: 393;Mufwene 2001), and children simply acquire the adult speech patterns as in any other acquisition setting. Within these end points are views that children's processes of acquisition in contact environments are the same as those in other acquisition environments, but the sociolinguistic setting is distinct (Aboh 2015;DeGraff 2002;Mufwene 2001;O'Shannessy, forthcoming), and/or that children add small, incremental changes to the input they receive, resulting in new or more regular grammatical paradigms (Aboh and Ansaldo 2006;Jourdan 1989;O'Shannessy, forthcoming;Sankoff 1991;Shnukal and Marchese 1983). The greatest role attributed to child speakers in a language contact situation is in Derek Bickerton's (1981Bickerton's ( , 1984 theory that creole languages can be created by children nativizing, and in doing so expanding on, the (minimal) input they receive from their surroundings. ...
Processes in child first language acquisition can be a locus of contact‐induced language change, yet they have received little attention in the language contact literature. This chapter outlines theories and empirical case studies of children significantly influencing change during the emergence of new languages, specifically creoles and mixed languages. It discusses the role of children in the emergence of new varieties of languages, koines, and multiethnolects. In terms of structure, one way in which multiethnolects diverge from the local standard varieties is through the reduction or simplification of grammatical categories. The chapter presents some examples of child‐influenced change where there has not yet been time to see if the changes will consolidate into new ways of speaking, but it is a possibility. The chapter summarizes the types of change significantly influenced by child speakers, and how those speakers’ innovations take hold in a community.
... The poles in the north-western area are further characterised by well-defined linguistic features, some of which may have ties to areas of the insular Brittonicspeaking regions (Cornwall and Wales) as shall be seen in section 4. The uneven distribution of these possible Brittonic features led Solliec to consider that they emerged as a result of a founder effect in the wake of which a pool of linguistic features was constituted, giving rise to new Brittonic varieties. One can compare this with the appearance of Creole languages or colonial varieties of European languages from the 16 th century onwards (Mufwene 2001). ...
... More in-depth research could be carried out in south-western Britain on the distribution of cystic fibrosis mutations but also in Normandy where the Brythons are also likely to have migrated. Similarly, in-depth work on the linguistic traits and characteristics of the different poles of linguistic similarity and their possible origin would make it possible to better understand the selection and restructuring process at work in the basins of linguistic traits (Mufwene 2001). ...
This article was born out of two separate approaches carried out independently of one another. The first dealt with genetic demography and the second with variational linguistics, aiming to study the population and language of Brittany from a certain perspective. In their recent study of the genetic history of France, Saint Pierre et al. show that Brittany “is substantially closer to the population from north-west Europe than to the north of France, in spite of both being equally geographically close” (2020: 863). They propose that the Bretons’ earliest ancestors could be the descendants of early Neolithic pastoralist nomads from the Steppes (SP) who would have arrived in Brittany (i.e. the ‘NW cluster’) via north-western Europe. The second hypothesis would support the idea of a more recent migration from northern Europe with high SP proportion, i.e., Celtic and/or Anglo-Saxon. Our initial hypothesis is that the convergences in linguistics and genetics may be explained by a unique historical event, namely, the Brittonic settlement of the Armorican peninsula from the 4th through at least the 7th centuries and perhaps as late as the 8th century.
The application of linguistic distance measurements in the study of vernacular Breton varieties by means of a dialectometric analysis made it possible to observe clear correspondences between levels of linguistic similarity and the distribution of the genetic pools linked to cystic fibrosis. The convergence of our collective findings is most clearly manifested in the radical opposition of the north-western and the south-eastern zones of Breton-speaking Brittany in terms of the linguistic and genetic data. In our view, the scientific approach inherent to genetic and dialectometric research and the concordance of these data appear to not only reinforce many of the hypotheses advanced previously but to open new avenues for future research.
... Neither the mechanisms themselves, nor their outcomes involve simplification. Instead, contact prosodic systems acquire their properties from 'typological matching' (Mufwene, 1996(Mufwene, , 2001Aboh and Ansaldo, 2007) between the features of the input languages in a specific linguistic ecology. Crucially, the acoustic and phonological realization of tone in the adstrates and substrates is matched with, and where compatible, grafted on the corresponding realization of stress in the lexifier. ...
... Contact prosodic systems acquire their properties from a typological matching exercise between features of the input languages in a specific linguistic ecology (Mufwene, 1996(Mufwene, , 2001Aboh and Ansaldo, 2007). The acoustic and phonological realizations of tone imposed by the adstrates and substrates can initially only be grafted on the prosodic patterns of the lexical material provided by lexifier stress patterns. ...
This study refutes the common idea that tone gets simplified or eliminated in creoles and contact languages. Speakers of African tone languages imposed tone systems on all Afro-European creoles spoken in the tone-dominant linguistic ecologies of Africa and the colonial Americas. African speakers of tone languages also imposed tone systems on the colonial varieties of English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese spoken in tonal Africa. A crucial mechanism involved in the emergence of the tone systems of creoles and colonial varieties is stress-to-tone mapping. A typological comparison with African non-creole languages shows that creole tone systems are no simpler than African non-creole tone systems. Demographic, linguistic, and social changes in an ecology can lead to switches from tone to stress systems and vice versa. As a result, there is an areal continuum of tone systems roughly coterminous with the presence of tone in the east (Africa) and stress in the west (Americas). Transitional systems combining features of tone and stress converge on the areal buffer zone of the Caribbean. The prosodic systems of creoles and European colonial varieties undergo regular processes of contact, typological change and areal convergence. None of these are specific to creoles. So far, creoles and colonial varieties have not featured in work on the world-wide areal clustering of prosodic systems. This study therefore aims to contribute to a broader perspective on prosodic contact beyond the narrow confines of the creole simplicity debate.
... From a historical viewpoint, (Old) Tagalog and other ethnic languages are spoken by the most dominant and most sizeable groups in the language ecology of pre-colonial Philippines (before 1521), and as such, are theoretically projected by scholars like Mufwene (2001) to impact the future language ecology of the Philippines. Some time later, Hokkien (~960 AD) and Cantonese (to a lesser extent) (~960 AD) ostensibly entered the language ecology. ...
... Since Tagalog speakers comprise the majority of the Philippine population (Lewis, Simons, and Fennig 2016), an increase in frequency and perceptual salience of Tagalog structures is expected. And both of these could increase the proportion of Tagalog features, at least according to Mufwene's (2001) idea of the 'feature pool' . Selecting from this pool, contact varieties like PHH are more likely to get Tagalog features compared to Mandarin, for instance, as Mandarin is not frequently used. ...
This article narrates the sociohistory of the Philippines through the lens of a Sinitic minority group – the Chinese Filipinos. It provides a systematic account of the history, language policies, and educational policies in six major eras, beginning from the precolonial period until the Fifth Republic (960 – pres-ent). Concurrently, it presents a diachronic narrative on the different linguistic varieties utilized by the ethnic minority, such as English, Hokkien, Tagalog, and Philippine Hybrid Hokkien (PHH). Following an exposition on how these varieties were introduced to the ecology is a discussion focused on contact that highlights potential theories as to how Philippine contact varieties like PHH emerged. How this account contributes to the overall language ecology forms the conclusion. Overall, this article delineates the socio-historical sources that intrinsically play a significant role in the (re)description of Philippine contact varieties. In its breadth, this article goes beyond providing second-hand infor-mation, and presents ideas that can be crucial for understanding how Philippine contact languages work.
... It is evidently not population size itself which affects phonotactic CC diversity most but rather intermediate factors related to population sizenamely density, area, clustering and social distancewhich contribute to phonotactic diversification. Three causal mechanisms that are directly linked to these intermediate factors are (a) differential heterogeneity and variability in the linguistic input a learner of a language receives (Fay and Ellison, 2013;Nettle, 2012), (b) density of informants available to a learner (Nowak, 2000), and (c) language contact (Mufwene, 2001;Trudgill, 2001Trudgill, , 2004. 18 Our results potentially support all of them. ...
... An alternative account for the observed relationship among phonotactic diversity and demographics might be that dense and mixed populations more easily accommodate highly diverse and more expressive linguistic subsystems which are supposed to be more difficult to learn than reduced systems (Bentz et al., 2017) because dense learning environments promote acquisition (Nowak, 2000). This provides further support for the claim that the development of a particular linguistic system should not be studied in isolation (Mufwene, 2001;Trudgill, 2001Trudgill, , 2004. ...
There is an ongoing debate as to whether linguistic structure is influenced by demographic factors. Relationships between these two domains have been investigated on the phonological, morphological and lexical level, mainly drawing on synchronic data and comparative methodology. In this exploratory study, by contrast, we focus on the lesser recognized level of phonotactics, and adopt a methodologically orthogonal approach. We investigate the diachronic development of a single lineage, namely English, and compare it with concomitant developments of the demography of the English-speaking population. In addition to linguistic and demographic factors, we also derive characteristics of the underlying speaker network (network diameter; clustering coefficient). Empirically, we focus on the system of English consonant clusters, which we argue to be particularly sensitive to linguistic change so that effects of demography are expected to be more clearly visible than in more robust linguistic subsystems (e.g. phoneme inventory; morphology). By employing time-series clustering, it is shown that the trajectory of phonotactic diversity in English coda clusters most closely matches that of covariates related with density and heterogeneity of the speaker population. Linguistic covariates are less closely related. We conclude that heterogeneity of the linguistic input and the number of informants a learner is exposed to are relevant factors in the evolution of phonotactic diversity.
... LS is thus an evolutionary outcome of an ecology in which there are fewer and fewer opportunities or motivations to speak a particular language. Although linguists have been more interested in the process at the population level, individual speakers are the unwitting agents of the process, as they respond adaptively to social or economic pressures they experience (Mufwene 2001). ...
... Such a theoretical assumption suggests that language mixing and code-switching are deviations from the norm, while they appear to be normal behavior in multilingual communities in which interlocutors share more or less the same language repertoires. For such speakers it may simply be convenient to use whatever resource is more immediately accessible in their feature pool (Mufwene 2001) during their interaction. ...
Language shift (LS) is interpreted in this entry as the outcome of fewer and fewer opportunities or motivations that particular speakers have to practice their heritage vernacular. As a process it may, but need not, lead to language endangerment and loss. It can be domain‐specific and proceeds at different speeds among the members of the relevant population. It occurs especially in polities that are culturally assimilationist and where the socioeconomic structure exerts significant ecological pressures on minority, marginalized, or immigrant populations to adopt the dominant language of the economy. On the other hand, assimilationist pressures in the Global North have not been uniform, especially in relation to immigrants from the Global South, who now have more latitude to maintain their heritage languages. The absence of such assimilationist pressures in the Global South itself has also sustained multilingualism. Overall, LS is shown to be a more diverse subject matter than traditionally assumed.
... In order to describe the relationship of the various languages to one another and to analyse language change, comparative linguistics uses concepts from evolutionary biology (cf. Dixon 1997;Mufwene 2001). Several languages create a genetic unit if they derive from a common previous language, meaning that they can be traced back in the family tree of languages to a common node. ...
... Recent comparative linguistics has employed concepts and theories from evolutionary biology (cf. Dixon 1997;Mufwene 2001) to analyse not only the relationship of different languages to one another but also their linguistic changes. In principal, three constellations can be distinguished regarding the development of the various languages in relation to one another. ...
Globalisation and the political process of European integration opened the European Union member states to one another. As different EU member states have different languages, participation in globalisation and the process of European integration is dependent on Europeans’ ability to speak the languages of others. Those who speak multiple languages can more easily come into contact with citizens of other countries, conduct business and diplomacy, cooperate academically, organise protests across national boundaries, or enter into romantic relations with them. In short, they can socialise transnationally in a number of different dimensions. Those who only speak their native language are, in contrast, tied to their home country and can only take slight advantage of the perks of a united Europe and a globalised world. Possessing transnational linguistic capital is a deciding factor in whether or not someone can participate in an emerging European society; it becomes a new measure of social inequality, a resource that can either lead to societal inclusion or exclusion.The question central to our study is to what degree citizens in the twenty‐ seven EU member states possess transnational linguistic capital and how to explain the differences in multilingualism both between and within the member states. We present a general explanatory model for foreign language proficiency, create hypotheses from this model and test them empirically. Drawing on a survey conducted in twenty‐seven European countries it can be shown that the peoples’ ability to speak different languages can be very well predicted with the help of the different explanatory factors. We find that country size, the prevalence of a respondent’s native language, the linguistic difference between one’s mother tongue and the foreign language, and age affect language acquisition negatively, whereas a country’s level of education has a positive influence. Using Bourdieu’s theory of social class, we show that besides other factors a respondent’s social class position and the level of education are important micro‐level factors that help to increase a person’s transnational linguistic capital.One must put these results in the context of the state of the art. The analysis of multilingualism is a major topic in linguistics, psychology, and education. The societal conditions in which language learners are embedded are hardly taken into account in these studies. This would not be worth discussing any further if sociology was not relevant to multilingualism; but the contrary seems to be true. Our analysis shows that the neglected societal conditions are actually of central importance in determining transnational linguistic capital.
... Following the ecological approach to linguistic evolution -ecolinguistics (Haugen 1972;Mufwene 2001)-these seemingly "discrete" languages (Spanish and English) are themselves the result of previous hybridizations. Thus, Armenia's linguistic landscape highlights the interconnectedness of languages and the continuous processes of linguistic and cultural exchange driven by globalization, leading to greater cultural exposure through digital media, tourism, or commerce. ...
This paper (pre-print / under review) investigates linguistic hybridization in Armenia, Colombia, focusing on the usage of Spanish and English in public signage, particularly business names. Utilizing a quantitative methodology, we conducted a statistical analysis employing Chi-square tests to explore the rela-tionship between symbolic language choice and variables such as location and type of establish-ment. The results demonstrated a significant association between location and language choice (Χ² = 39.353, p < .001), revealing that commercial zones with high tourist traffic exhibited a pro-nounced preference for English (46.55%), reflecting branding strategies aimed at attracting a younger, cosmopolitan audience. Conversely, traditional sectors such as health services (74.24% in Spanish) and religious institutions (80% in Spanish) predominantly utilized Spanish, empha-sizing the community's need for accessible communication. Additionally, establishments in the most commercial area highlighted the presence of hybrid names, indicating a blending of lan-guages. Our findings suggest that the hybridization of English and Spanish serves as both a re-flection and reinforcement of cultural identity and social hierarchies, emphasizing the role of linguistic capital in shaping social dynamics within the urban landscape of Armenia, Colombia.
... Colonization of Asia, Africa, Australia, Americas, and the Pacific regions particularly by Europeans dramatically changed the linguistic landscape in those areas (Al Khaiyali & Akasha, 2018;Mufwene, 2001). English was introduced into Myanmar after the British occupation of the country and became the major language of government institutions. ...
In Myanmar, with languages and dialects of one hundred and thirty-five national races officially recognized by the government, language is highly politicized. The country is still struggling to get a peace agreement to end the seventy-year long civil war between the Burmese-speaking majority group and the ethnic minorities and to establish a federal state. Part of this political crisis has been manifested as the marginalization of minority languages by successive majority-led governments. Since ethnic groups speak languages different from Burmese, the official language of the nation, the current and future status of minority languages is intertwined with the peace process. The struggle of minority languages mainly manifests in education around issues related to teaching and learning those languages and their use as the language of instruction. Myanmar saw some progress in policy and implementation of teaching minority languages in public schools. Moreover, the most recent semi-democratic government led by the National League for Democracy established a new ministry called the Ministry of Ethnic Affairs. However, the progress of ethnic language education was incremental. Through a critical inquiry, this paper examines the historical and current situation of minority languages in Myanmar's education as a power struggle.
... The social conditions under which adult and elderly bilinguals have acquired both Palenquero and Spanish relate to some differences in their particular ecological contexts (for linguistic ecology perspectives, see Gooden 2022;Mufwene 1996Mufwene , 2001Steien and Yakpo 2020). Elderly speakers have experienced discrimination, marginalization, and exclusion more severely than adult speakers in the current ecological context. ...
This study explores the extent to which Palenquero/Spanish bilinguals, a population that is said to have a residual high tone of African origin, keep their two languages temporally and intonationally distinct across statements. While creole languages that emerged from the contact of African and European languages, such as Palenquero, may develop hybrid prosodic systems with tones from substrate languages, and stress from the majority language, language-specific prosody might be expected to converge or simplify over the course of time. As prosodic convergence seems to be inescapable under Palenquero’s circumstances, which factors could support language-specific prosody in this population, if there are any? Two-hundred and thirty-four five-syllable statements were elicited through a discourse completion task, with the participation of ten Palenquero/Spanish bilinguals, in two unilingual sessions. Both phrase-final lengthening and F0 contours were assessed using linear mixed-effects models testing their association with final stress, language, and generation. F0 contours were dimensionally reduced using functional principal component analysis. Despite the strong similarities between the two languages, results indicate that both groups keep their two languages intonationally distinct using plateau-shaped contours in Palenquero initial rises followed by steeper declinations in Spanish. However, elderly bilinguals implement penultimate lengthening language-specifically, being more pronounced in Palenquero. Adults, in contrast, do not show this distinction. In addition to this, elderly speakers show hyperarticulation in Spanish intonation, increasing the difference between their languages. This leads us to believe that adults exhibit a more simplified prosodic system between their languages, relative to elderly bilinguals. In spite of such differences, both generations seem to have the same underlying process (perhaps a substrate effect) driving plateau-shaped intonation in Palenquero, which enhances language differentiation.
... This short introduction to the special issue is not the place to offer an exhaustive review of the different ways in which linguistics elaborates different modulations of space as perspective. However, it is worth briefly mentioning the spatial orientation of diverse fields and approaches in linguistics as the proposal for a linguistics of speaking based on the notion of "surrounding fields" developed by Coseriu (1955b), the study of multilingualism based on the polycentric concept of space as social context organizing linguistic patterns and practices (Blommaert et al. 2005), or the study of the evolution of language and contact based on the idea of ecology (Mufwene 2001(Mufwene , 2008. Álvarez Mella, Héctor, Epistemology of language and space: an introduction 5 ...
In recent decades, space has been at the center of many linguistic fields concerned with how spatiality (territory, place, social space, virtual space) influences and conditions linguistic phenomena, from linguistic variation and communicative interaction to language shift and maintenance, migration, identity, or language policy and planning. This special issue aims to bring together articles that address current epistemological issues in the study of language andspace from both theoretical perspectives and empirical approaches. The goal of the issue is to offer an interdisciplinary mosaic that reflects how conceptual and methodological developments in the study of the language-space relationship open up new ways ofunderstanding the spatial nature of linguistic phenomena and the linguistic and discursive reality of space.
The aim of this introduction is not to present an exhaustive historical discussion of the idea of space in relation to language, but rather to offer a conceptual systematization that can serve to sort out the main epistemological issues of language and space. In this sense, a minimal epistemology of space within the study of language needs to address at least two fundamentalquestions: what is space? And how can space be integrated into linguistic research? Both questions are strongly linked to each other, since the place that space occupies in many fields of linguistics depends on how spatiality is defined.
... • Continuously evolving language and culture: Language and culture are constantly evolving, with new expressions, norms, and biases emerging over time. Keeping AI models up-to-date with these changes and ensuring that they remain unbiased is an ongoing challenge that requires continuous monitoring and adaptation [86,87,88]. ...
As the capabilities of generative language models continue to advance, the implications of biases ingrained within these models have garnered increasing attention from researchers, practitioners, and the broader public. This article investigates the challenges and risks associated with biases in large-scale language models like ChatGPT. We discuss the origins of biases, stemming from, among others, the nature of training data, model specifications, algorithmic constraints, product design, and policy decisions. We explore the ethical concerns arising from the unintended consequences of biased model outputs. We further analyze the potential opportunities to mitigate biases, the inevitability of some biases, and the implications of deploying these models in various applications, such as virtual assistants, content generation, and chatbots. Finally, we review the current approaches to identify, quantify, and mitigate biases in language models, emphasizing the need for a multi-disciplinary, collaborative effort to develop more equitable, transparent, and responsible AI systems. This article aims to stimulate a thoughtful dialogue within the artificial intelligence community, encouraging researchers and developers to reflect on the role of biases in generative language models and the ongoing pursuit of ethical AI.
... The continuity between Creoles and their lexifiers has been highlighted and explained on a theoretical level predominantlyalthough not exclusivelyby authors often referred to as "anti-excepcionalists" (cf. Mufwene 2001). In the particular case of Gallo-Romance linguistics, Chaudenson (whose impact on Mufwene is evident) was the author who, together with his disciples, worked the most along this line of investigation (cf. ...
... However, in the face of evidence from studies on migratory contexts where linguistic diversity is more complex, this position has recently been challenged. For instance, Mufwene (2001Mufwene ( , 2008 discusses language contact using a modified version of Haugen's (1971) concept of language ecology, defined as the interactions between languages and their environment. Mufwene (2008, 76) compares the interactions among languages in complex language contact situations to the interactions that occur among species in a biological ecosystem and argues that similar to the way factors within the natural ecosystem influence the evolution of biological species, "languages evolve at the mercy of the socioeconomic ecologies in which they are embedded." ...
This article employs ethnographic methods to investigate communicative practices that shape the linguistic repertoires of child migrants in Agbogbloshie, an urban market in Ghana. Similar studies discuss the relationship between language and migration by focusing on language shift and loss among migrants; this article argues that migrants in complex linguistically diverse spaces—motivated by both social and economic dynamics of their space—make linguistic choices while negotiating their daily lives that lead to the development of complex, heterogeneous linguistic repertoires and practices. Data were gathered from interactions at childcare centers, where child migrants spend the day with peers and caregivers, and migrant homes, where child migrants spend the evenings and weekends with their families. The data reveal that while migrant parents negotiate their own multilingual practices with their migrant children, child migrants expand their linguistic repertoires through relationships and interactions with caregivers and peers in childcare centers and neighborhoods, leading to the development of heterogeneous language practices that neither their parents nor caregivers necessarily possess. The article concludes that migration may lead to complex linguistic diversity. The study contributes to Indigenous perspectives on linguistic diversity and our understanding of the structure and nature of super‐diversification.
... A 'feature pool' is a metaphor that has been used to describe the diverse linguistic resources that speakers can access in contact situations: a pool of features coming from different sources (cf. Mufwene 2001, Cheshire et al 2011. As I have argued elsewhere (Wiese 2013; to appear), such a pool of linguistic resources can support a network of interdependent features, a linguistic ecology that brings forth interconnected linguistic patterns at different levels, and this is what I mean to capture with the metaphor of a "feature pond". ...
I bring together two research strands that rarely interact and might even seem incommen-surable, namely sociolinguistic approaches to linguistic fluidity and multi-competence on the one hand, and structural approaches to linguistic coherence and grammatical systems on the other hand. I show that we can reconcile insights from these two strands in a linguistic architecture that takes communicative situations as the core of linguistic systema-ticity, and integrates them into lexical representations. Under this view, communicative situations are the basis for linguistic coherence and grammatical systems, while languages can emerge as optional sociolinguistic indices.
... • Crioulo: língua nova resultante do desdobramento de pidgin que teve seus contextos de uso ampliados o suficiente para ser língua materna de comunidades estáveis (PARKVALL, 2012), ou resultante de complexo processo de hibridização linguística (MUFWENE, 2001). No segundo caso, são aproximadas línguas de substrato (da população local) e de superestrato (da potência europeia). ...
In this dissertation, I conduct a study on the Portuguese of Timor-Leste (PTL), analyzing in written texts how the Null Subject Parameter (PSN) behaves, following the perspective of the Principles and Parameters Model (CHOMSKY, 1981 and following). Based on this parameter, I will investigate how the subject position is being filled in this non-European variety of Portuguese, and the central question is: there are more non-realized subjects phonetically (null subjects), going in the direction of European Portuguese, or phonetically performed subjects (full subjects)? (CHOMSKY, 1981; RIZZI, 1986, DUARTE, 1995). More recently, generative researchers, when analyzing different languages, concluded that European Portuguese (PE) is a consistent null subject language, while Brazilian Portuguese (PB), a partial null subject language (HOMLBERG; NAYUDU; SHEEHAN, 2009; KATO; DUARTE, 2014). It is worth mentioning that, in Timor-Leste, Portuguese is not currently the mother tongue of the population and coexists with other local languages, being Tetum, a non-null subject language, the most used (ALBUQUERQUE, 2011). The corpus is composed of 582 data, extracted from essays produced by Timorese in an exam for admission to the Universidade da Integração Internacional da Lusofonia Afro-Brasileira (UNILAB), located in the city of Redenção-CE (Brazil). These data were submitted to quantitative treatment after being coded, according to the selected variables (dependent and independent). The results reveal a remarkably close production of full and null subjects, which, according to the other morphosyntactic characteristics analyzed, allows me to consider that the PTL still does not present the properties of a null subject language such as PE. This conclusion probably follows the influence of the multilingual context in which PTL is inserted, as verified in other research (SANTOS, 2009; DEUS, 2009; MARTINS, 2016; GUIMARÃES, 2017, ALBUQUERQUE; RAMOS, 2020).
... The fact that accommodation is mediated through interactions between speakers has lead some linguists to conclude that the primary drivers in the decline of linguistic diversity are travel, commuting and migration [59,65,49,55,66,50,67]. Other potential drivers discussed include changes in social network structure [59,68,65,49,50,55,66], the age structure of the community [69], the influence of mass media [58,70], normative attitudes and education [71,72,58] and relatedly the salience and stereotype status of particular variants [73,55], identity factors [74], the informalisation of public life [58] and socio-economic forces [55]. Purely linguistic internal factors such as structural regularity, functional economy, or naturalness may determine which variants win out in the levelling process [59,67,49,55] or they may not be relevant at all [71,50]. ...
Discovering and quantifying the drivers of language change is a major challenge. Hypotheses about causal factors proliferate, but are difficult to rigorously test. Here we ask a simple question: can 20th Century changes in English English be explained as a consequence of spatial diffusion, or have other processes created bias in favour of certain linguistic forms? Using two of the most comprehensive spatial datasets available , which measure the state of English at the beginning and end of the 20th century, we calibrate a simple spatial model so that, initialised with the early state, it evolves into the later. Our calibrations reveal that while some changes can be explained by diffusion alone, others are clearly the result of substantial asymmetries between variants. We discuss the origins of these asymmetries and, as a by-product, we generate a full spatio-temporal prediction for the spatial evolution of English features over the 20th Century, and a prediction of the future.
... German-dialectologically categorized as Moselle Franconian dialects, and the ancestors of TransylvanianSaxons settled in Transylvania in the 12th century, I analyzed some texts written in Moselle Franconian 16 Some linguists have already used an analogy of genetics for the linguistic systems.Mufwene (2001,, for example, presents such intention to explain the development of creole languages. 17 It is maybe possible to take twins who have grown up in different environment and therefore have different languages, characters, tastes, etc. as a metaphor for this hypothesis. Note that the actual biological studies, however, require much more comp ...
In this article, I aim to identify the mechanisms that potentially cause specific language change with reference to the studies of historical linguistics and typological linguistics. In my research, the coordinating-conjunctional use of the focus/additive particle, auch, observed in an endangered minority language in Romania, Transylvanian Saxon is dealt with as research object to demonstrate my hypothesis that certain changes of languages in contact are caused by activation or deactivation of potentials that the form possesses, which could be compared to heredity of species.
... The general logic of this evolutionary model has been widely applied in the study of language (Atkinson et al. 2008;Mufwene 2001;Newberry et al. 2017;Pagel et al. 2019). The "iterative learning" paradigm, which examines language change as a result of transmission between generations, has found that communication overtime can amplify weak biases for particular grammatical structures in a population, leading separate populations to arrive at similar grammars (Kirby, Cornish, and Smith 2008;Kirby et al. 2008;Kirby, Dowman, and Griffiths 2007). ...
Category systems are remarkably consistent across societies. Stable partitions for concepts relating to flora, geometry, emotion, color, and kinship have been repeatedly discovered across diverse cultures. Canonical theories in cognitive science argue that this form of convergence across independent populations, referred to as ‘cross-cultural convergence’, is evidence of innate human categories that exist independently of social interaction. However, a number of studies have shown that even individuals from the same population can vary substantially in how they categorize novel and ambiguous phenomena. Contrary to findings on cross-cultural convergence, this individual variation in categorization processes suggests that independent populations should evolve highly divergent category systems (as is often predicted by theories of social constructivism). These puzzling findings raise new questions about the origins of cross-cultural convergence. In this dissertation, I develop a new mathematical approach to cultural processes of category formation, which shows that whether or not independent populations create similar category systems is a function of population size. Specifically, my model shows that small populations frequently diverge in their category systems, whereas in large populations, a subset of categories consistently reach critical mass and spread, leading to convergent cultural trajectories. I test and confirm this prediction in a large-scale online social network experiment where I study how small and large social networks construct original category systems for a continuum of novel and ambiguous stimuli. I conclude by discussing the implications of these results for networked crowdsourcing, which harnesses coordination in communication networks to enhance content management and generation across a wide range of domains, including content moderation over social media and scientific classification in citizen science.
... Language does not only shape culture, but it is also itself shaped by history, culture, politics (Anderson & Cater, 2016) and ecology/ environment. Anthropologists and linguists have studied the convergence between nature and language and have observed the similarities in their evolution (Romaine, 2015;Pretty & Pilgrim, 2008;Mühlhäusler, 2003;Mufwene, 2001;Loh & Harmon, 1986;Ortner, 1972;MacCormack & Strathern, 1980;Levi-Strauss, 1962). Ecosystems, cultures and languages are not only interrelated but also a loss of one may result in the loss of the other and/or all. ...
... Figure 17.4 summarizes the diagnostic value of dialect features and suggests a continuum, ranging from high to low degrees of localization. Features toward the left end are ideal for an analysis of founder effects (Mufwene 2001), as they can be clearly demarcated regionally, both in donor and in recipient varieties. Toward the right end there are general features, characterized by wide regional diffusion, both in donor and in recipient dialects. ...
This chapter investigates the persistence and development of so-called dialect roots, that is, features of local forms of British English that are transplanted to overseas territories. It discusses dialect input and the survival of features, independent developments within overseas communities, including realignments of features in the dialect inputs, as well as contact phenomena when English speakers interact with those of other dialects and languages. The diagnostic value of these roots is exemplified with selected cases from around the world (Newfoundland English, Liberian English, Caribbean Englishes), which are assessed with reference to the archaic/dynamic character of individual features in new-dialect formation and language-contact scenarios.
... Founder varieties:One potential explanation is that the varieties of English brought to India may have used the [voice] contrast rather than the [spr glottis] contrast. Such "Founder varieties"(Mufwene 2001) may have a long lasting impact on the development of new Englishes. Scottish English, which was present early in colonized India (McGilvary 2011), has long had voiceless stops with little aspiration and voiced stops with prevoicing, though it may now be undergoing change towards higher VOTs for both ...
Speakers of most American and British varieties of English contrast word-initial stops using aspiration, with long-lag Voice Onset Time (VOT) for /ptk/ and short-lag or lead voicing for /bdg/ (Docherty 1992, Chodroff & Wilson 2017, etc.). However, Indian English (IndE) speakers of Hindi and Telugu backgrounds living in the US produce a short-lag versus lead voicing contrast instead (Davis & Beckman 1983, Sirsa & Redford 2013). We recorded 10 L1 Assamese speakers residing in India reading English wordlists, all bilinguals who attended English-medium schools starting at age 4.3 (±1.3), young enough to acquire the target English of their community (Flege 1991). We are measuring the VOT of ten tokens each of /ptkbdg/ in word-initial position. Results thus far support the interpretation of the contrast in IndE as voicing not aspiration, as unaspirated voiceless stops versus pre-voiced stops. We also measure two expected consequences of using [voice] for the contrast: full voicing of sonorant consonants after voiceless obstruents in onset clusters and full (>75% of closure), rather than passive, intervocalic voicing. Though neither occurs in aspirating languages (Beckman et al. 2013), we find both in the IndE of Assamese speakers, suggesting IndE has developed a distinct contrast from AmE/BrE.
... Labels such as "Australian" and "American Englishes," as well as distinctions such as "Southern" and "Midwestern Englishes" in the USA, evidence the fact that new national and intra-national regional varieties have emerged in especially the former settlement colonies. This evolution is consistent with their respective histories of population movements and language contacts (including dialect contact, Trudgill 2004); and English can indeed be said to have won Pyrrhic victories (Mufwene 2001). ...
The terms Global English and World Englishes reflect two opposite imperial perspectives. The first highlights the success of the British Empire in spreading the language of England to various corners of the world, whereas the second subverts the race-based hierarchy that the European imperial history has added to the speciation that ensued from the geographical spread of English. Kachru (1982, 2017) captured the prestige-laden stratification that has become associated with this differential evolution of English with the opposition “Inner Circle” vs. “Outer Circle” vs “Expanding Circle”, with the latter two apparently merging into one powerless Circle, while speakers of the Inner Circle claim their varieties to be "native" and the only authentic ones. In this commentary, I capitalize on this historical background to explain why Anna Kristina Hultgren is correct in using the term “Red Herring” to characterize the misidentification of English as the cause of social injustice relative to those who do not use it as a mother tongue.
... For example, Wolfram and Thomas (2002) show how the earlier variety of African Americans in Hyde County, North Carolina is more like that of the European American Hyde County residents because of increased contact. Relatedly, Mufwene (2001) showed that the ecology of the different areas where enslaved individuals lived (e.g. cotton, tobacco, and rice plantations) led to different interactions with white people in the area. ...
The Great Migration was the migration of African Americans out of the rural South between 1915 and 1970. In the 1960s, during the early period of sociolinguistic research on AAL, many communities under investigation had experienced massive in-migration over the preceding thirty years. The core findings of this research were, in part, a function of the new urban populations in the midst of sustained migration and intra-ethnic dialect contact. The current paper focuses on the early period of research on AAL in sociolinguistics, using data from 68 speakers recorded in 1968 in Washington DC available in Corpus of Regional African American Language. In DC, many of the of the in-migrants were working class and Southern born, moving into a city with a well-established African American population. To begin to understand the potential linguistic consequences of the Great Migration, we look at the spread of glottal stop replacement of word-final /d/, a feature in modern AAL that is geographically and socially widespread. The results show that young working-class females led in this sound change and that it was a change initially led by individuals whose parents were born outside of DC, demonstrating the impact the Great Migration had on varieties of AAL in Great Migration destination cities.
... However, as Mufwene (2001) acknowledges, the differences between the mechanisms for either external or internal changes are not always significant, and in fact often are operationalized rather similarly. His analogy of language to a parasite follows an ecological perspective, and the subsequent necessity to change based in large part on the social habits of its speakers encompasses both internal and external motivations. ...
... Para este teórico, las "lenguas mixtas" donde los criollos se han incluido, al igual que los individuos y culturas híbridas (siguiendo la concepción del siglo XIX), han sido estigmatizadas, consideradas como aberraciones bajo la influencia de estructuras primitivas de las lenguas de las que han sido herederas (Mufwene 2006, 65-66). Asimismo, considera los factores ecológicos que rodean al acto comunicacional, fundamentales para poder delimitar estas lenguas, dado que acota la génesis de este fenómeno lingüístico al periodo histórico del siglo XVII, siempre en zonas de plantaciones, áreas tropicales y/o costeras e islas, caracterizadas por una segregación racial de la población y con un crecimiento mayor por importación que por nacimiento (Mufwene 2001), situación que encajaría perfectamente en el caso de las lenguas criollas franco-caribeñas. ...
... La urgencia comunicativa de los distintos núcleos poblacionales -comunidades amerindias, población colona europea y una recién llegada sociedad africana -generó la rápida evolución de un nuevo sistema lingüístico híbrido o mixto, que tomaba elementos de unas u otras lenguas en juego según las condiciones ecológicas de cada comunidad; así, la hibridación lingüística, pese a ser una constante en la formación de las lenguas criollas (pidgins, proto-criollos, criollos 2 ), se establecía de manera desigual según las circunstancias que rodeaban al acto comunicativo. Por una parte, atendían a factores tales como tiempo, lugar y condiciones de desarrollo (Chaudenson, 1992): por otra parte, y entrando al detalle de dichas condiciones, cabía determinar un período histórico concreto, esto es, el siglo XVII, además de establecer fronteras entre espacios físicos específicos, como plantaciones y territorios insulares y, sobre todo, considerando la variable evolución de dichos espacios en cuanto a crecimiento poblacional y segregación racial (Mufwene, 2001). A su vez, los sistemas lingüísticos intervinientes podían no ser estables o no compartir una misma procedencia: la pluralidad de lenguas amerindias, la variación diatópica del actor colono o la multiplicidad de lenguas africanas no podían fijar un nivel de aportación lingüística homogénea, dando nacimiento a sistemas de gran versatilidad, bajo grado de normalización y el desarrollo natural de las lenguas de contacto. ...
Condé's writing is one of the most relevant examples of post-colonial literature. In this context, the social dimension deserves special attention, as it represents the intersection between the main difficulties stemming from West Indies colonization: slavery, social stratifica-tion, identity exile, religion and in particular, women's issues. In this regard, the woman is undestood as a subaltern subject and she constitutes the undeniable protagonist of Condé's story. Surrounded by a striking landscape, the description of all these elements is immersed in a linguistic hybridization, as a result of mis-cegenation of different communities. Thereby, the story has plenty of creolized words, neolo-gisms, idiomatic expressions and a range of linguistic mechanisms that turn this narrative into a literary melting pot and into a real translation challenge. Résumé L'écriture condéenne constitue un exemple clair de littérature postcoloniale antillaise, où la dimension sociale est particulièrement dig-ne d'attention, étant donné la convergence des principales problématiques et conséquences liées au processus de colonisation: esclavage, stratification sociale, exil identitaire, univers de croyances et notamment, les questions relatives à la femme, conçue ici comme l'archétype de la subalternité, héroïne indéniable du récit de Condé. La description de ces facteurs, inscrite à son tour dans un milieu naturel incomparable, plonge dans une hybridation linguistique, résul-tat du métissage de plusieurs communautés, qui couvre le récit d'unités créolisées, néologismes, expressions idiomatiques et de toute une série de mécanismes linguistiques qui transforment cette prose en un melting pot littéraire et en un défi vis-à-vis de la traduction.
... It may be assumed, in past, that languages would have gone extinct as the result of environmental & natural catastrophes, the intervention of deadly weapons, agricultural advancement, population movement to new places & territories, or religious or secular imperialism [5]. At present, however, languages are getting endangered at an increasing rate largely due to globalization and colonization, where the language of the economically powerful takes over the that of weaker ones [6] [7]. Also, there are mostly socioeconomic, political, cultural, and interrelated factors and reasons leading to language endangerment. ...
Some languages flourish, while others may decline or eventually turn extinct in due course of time. When there are fewer and fewer people claim a language as their own, the language falls to endangerment; they neither use it nor pass it on to next generation [1]. Identifying actual vitality of a language is subject to many factors, which interact in dynamic ways and; therefore, they are not entirely predictable. However, recognizable trends may be found on careful observation. This study attempts to create a predictive model based on regression using machine learning approach to forecast the timeline as to when a language may become extinct following its ongoing vitality trend. The main datasets have been used from Census of India surveys of 1991, 2001, and 2011. Presently, this model is tested on the languages of Sikkim. However, the model may forecast the vitality prediction of any language.
... É neste sentido que o termo é usado em ENNINGER; HAYNES (Eds.) (1984), MÜHLHÄUSLER (1996), MUFWENE (2001), CALVET (2006) ou em BASTARDAS-BOADA (2012), mantendo-se, assim, basicamente dentro do domínio das dimensões sociais e espaciais da "languaging" (domínio que está amplamente documentado, mesmo sem utilizar esse termo da moda, como por exemplo, em SCHNEIDER; BARRON, 2008 ou AUER; SCHMIDT, 2010). comportamento, pois não fazê-lo seria prejudicial a todo nosso ambiente acadêmico. ...
Este artigo parte das observações de que (i) todo uso de linguagem combina, inevitavelmente, significado explícito e implícito e (ii) todas as línguas têm meios estruturais à sua disposição para marcar significado implícito. Isso parece uma espécie de paradoxo pragmático: se é possível falar sobre “marcadores de implicatura” (um nome geral para todas as construções tradicionais portadoras de pressupostos e implicações, assim como de estratégias geradoras de implicaturas), estamos ainda lidando com implicatura? Adicionalmente, que (i) implicatura absoluta não existe (na medida em que existe, não podemos dizer nada sobre ela), (ii) explicatura e implicatura não são, portanto, opostos absolutos, e (iii) no grau em que a explicatura de marcadores de implicatura (ou “gatilhos” para processos inferenciais que levam a uma compreensão de significado não explicitamente declarado) é bastante variável, buscar-se-á uma solução descritiva e explicativa ao problema do aparente paradoxo em uma matriz tridimensional para explicar a implicatura.
... There have been proponents and opponents of the view of creoles as special instances of new languages. Among the former are Derek Bickerton (Bickerton 1975) and John McWhorter (McWhorter 1998, 2012 and among the latter one finds Salikoko Mufwene (Mufwene 2001) and Michel DeGraff (DeGraff 2003, 2005. In an attempt to relativize the prototypical view of creoles recent research has examined examples from outside the two geographical regions from which most attestations derive, the Atlantic and the Pacific arenas, see Buchstaller, Holmberg and Almoaily (eds, 2014). ...
The motivation for language shift and the circumstances under which it takes place will vary from case to case but there is sufficient common ground for generalizations to be made about language shift and for the analysis of a single instance to be of broader value to the study of language shift as a whole. This chapter deals with the rise of vernacular varieties of Irish English during the shift period of the past few centuries. It presents information to highlight key aspects of language shift. The case for contact should be considered across all linguistic levels. In particular it is beneficial to consider phonological factors when examining syntactic transfer. Despite the typological differences between Irish and English there are nonetheless a number of unexpected parallels which should not be misinterpreted as the result of contact. In present‐day Ireland, Irish has no influence on English but the reverse is very much the case.
... Even the local terminology for pidgin in Ghana, Kru brɔfo (Kru English), during its inception came from Akan. The reasonable explanation will be to subscribe to Mufwene's (2001) language ecology approach, where based on competition and selection, and the ongoing change in the linguistic ecology (Akan is increasingly becoming a language almost all Ghanaians speak and/or understand), Akan is the dominant adstrate of SP. Thus SP, apart from constantly drawing creatively on English language resources, is in contact with these two Ghanaian languages. ...
Student Pidgin (SP) is a Ghanaian youth language spoken predominantly by male students in the country's high schools and tertiary institutions of education. Akan is an ethnolinguistic term for a group of dialects that constitute the biggest language and the most influential lingua franca in Ghana. Ga is the ethnic language of Accra, the capital of Ghana, and its immediate environment. As these three languages are in contact, we assess the influence of Akan and Ga on Student Pidgin in terms of both grammatical and lexical features. We note that SP appears receptive to grammatical transfers from especially Akan, but that some functional elements also have come from Ga.
As global or survival issues around the world are becoming the core hot topics in education in general and in foreign language teaching in specific, publications including research, approaches, and materials have emerged recently to train students via global issues by also raising their awareness in them. With the aim of observing the concrete incorporation of global issues in an instructional material, this paper will present the results of an examination of one of the textbooks that was utilized in the ELT prep class of a Turkish state university between the 2021-2022 academic year. The book is Navigate coursebook series published by Oxford University Press and advised by Catherine Walter. While the pre-intermediate B1 book (Krantz & Norton, 2015) was covered in the fall semester, intermediate B1+ (Roberts, Buchanan, & Pathare, 2015) was studied in the spring semester. The book was found worthy to be examined and presented here because the contents of the book were organized around 21st century world issues and skills such as health, living without the internet, monetary issues, natural matters, canned food, survival issues, work environments and so forth covered in the B1 book and spending styles, machine and man, life skills, happiness, advertising, outlaws, and so on dealt in the B1+ book. These and other contents will be examined in relation to the global issues as pre-set themes and will be presented with excerpts from the book. This examination will serve as a first step for a more comprehensive study including the views of the ELT students in the prep class who studied the book series.
Language contact - the linguistic and social outcomes of two or more languages coming into contact with each other - has been pervasive in human history. However, where histories of language contact are comparable, experiences of migrant populations have been only similar, not identical. Given this, how does language contact work? With contributions from an international team of scholars, this Handbook - the first in a two-volume set - delves into this question from multiple perspectives and provides state-of-the-art research on population movement and language contact and change. It begins with an overview of how language contact as a research area has evolved since the late 19th century. The chapters then cover various processes and theoretical issues associated with population movement and language contact worldwide. It is essential reading for anybody interested in the dynamics of social interactions in diverse contact settings and how the changing ecologies influence the linguistic outcomes.
The dispersal of Bantu-speaking people from their ancestral homeland in the borderland between current-day Nigeria and Cameroon across most of Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa had a significant impact on the languages, cultures, and demography of autochthonous populations. Inversely, foragers and pastoralists also considerably contributed to the gene pool of Bantu-speaking communities, the speciation of their languages, and the evolution of their cultures. In this chapter, the impact of indigenous languages on Bantu language variation is assessed by comparing the language contact situations in Southern and Central Africa. Southern Africa is much better documented, because the much shallower time depth of contact between Bantu-speaking newcomers and autochthonous populations allowed the latter to survive as separate populations, often maintaining a language unrelated to Bantu. In Central Africa, the dispersal of Bantu languages is much older. Together with the success of other families, such as Ubangi and Central-Sudanic, it led to the death of all languages previously spoken by rainforest hunter-gatherers. Still little is therefore known about prehistoric language contact between indigenous forest foragers and immigrant communities. Nonetheless, Southern Africa provides us with useful insights to be tested in Central Africa.
Cette thèse étudie la manière dont un pays, Haïti, catégorisé comme « pays en voie de développement » s‘efforce de réaliser la démocratisation scolaire de son système éducatif. Selon plusieurs études, Haïti paraît en échec sur pratiquement tous les indicateurs de démocratisation scolaire : taux d‘accès, équité, égalité, en lien avec une incapacité institutionnelle dénoncée. Haïti, réalise pourtant des processus de démocratisation. Pour analyser ce paradoxe, la réflexion appuyée sur un travail d‘enquête par observations et entretiens, s‘interroge notamment sur la place majeure du secteur privé dans l‘offre éducative. Elle montre que, premièrement, les différentes politiques mises en place par l'État haïtien et par les instances internationales (Banque Mondiale, Unesco, etc..),relatives à la l'école pour tous, n‘ont pas eu l‘effet escompté de scolarisation universelle.Deuxièmement, il y a pourtant une action avérée de différents acteurs (politiques, enseignants, parents, syndicalistes, entrepreneurs) fortement engagés en faveur de la démocratisation scolaire. La thèse étudie ce décalage. Parmi les facteurs d‘échec, elle met en avant le manque de coordination entre les différents niveaux et acteurs de l‘éducation en Haïti ; le manque de financement étatique, les effets de corruption à différentes échelles. Si l‘implication des acteurs publics et aussi privés permet un élargissement de l‘offre scolaire, malheureusement c‘est souvent au détriment de l‘égalité et de la qualité de l‘enseignement.
Language is one of the most important semantic approaches to money essence. Language and money are ways of communication by symbols and rules. Like language, money is also a significant factor in the building of national and cultural identity. Following this analogy, we review the related literature and deploy an adapted ABM model combining linguistic and monetary characteristics that seeks to assess the validity of monetary preferential attachment. The networks are constructed through preferential attachment portraying emergent phenomena. The Money Adoption model is asking "how the properties of money users and the structure of their social networks can affect the course of money change". To answer this research question the model explores the use, by agents, of two competing types of money-a legal tender and a complementary currency in parallel circulation. In the model, three interaction and learning algorithms are deployed. Experimental observations gave verifiable and repetitive results regardless of the number of agents, ranging from 100 to 10.000. Even 1% of the complementary currency in circulation can replace completely the legal tender if the "reward" algorithm is applied, a case that does not apply to "individual" and "threshold" learning algorithms. This minority rule behavior has potential serious policy implications.
This is a morphosyntactic analysis of the tense, mood and aspect categories in Makista. The reason for having undertaken this research is the considerable variation in the means of expressing the mentioned categories in the oral corpus made up of sociolinguistic interviews to some of the last elderly native speakers of Makista. The mentioned variation is produced both between non-standard and standard verb forms, as well as the use and the absence of verbal aspect and mood (TMA) markers. Such variation is only partly produced in both written corpora (Barreiros, 1947, for the 19th century, and Santos Ferreira, 1996, for the 20 th century). Our study took on a varied perspective: i) a synchronic descriptive analysis (of the oral corpus); ii) a diachronic analysis; iii) contrastive and diachronic study, when we compare the expression of the TMA categories in Makista with that in Kristang – the endogenous Creole of Malacca, which for historic reasons is the former’s substrate. As far as theory is concerned, we opted for approaches that consider the transfer of linguistic elements from substrate and superstrate languages in the formation of Creoles, to be similar to those of naturalistic second language acquisition situations (Siegel 2006, 2008). This enabled us to identify continuity and discontinuity traits in the expression of TMA categories between Kristang and Makista. It also aided us in understanding the reason for the use of standard verbal forms in the oral corpus of the latter. On the assumption that Makista may have been formed in a context similar to that of second language acquisition, we followed the Primacy of Aspect approach (Andersen and Shirai,1996): just like in initial fases of L1, learners of L2 select the verbal morphologic markings based on the lexical aspect of the verb associated to those same elements. We employed Labov’s variationist paradigm approach, and applied a quantative analysis to the data, using VARBRUL (GOLDVARB X) .With this means, we produced probabilistic analysis whenever the data permitted. Otherwise we applied percentual analysis. Through such means we were able to indentify both common and divergent characteristics between Makista and Kristang in what concerns the non standard verbal forms and verbal markers. In general, the difference in the use of non standard verbal forms between these two Creoles is an apparent unlimited widening of the 3s for the Presente do Indicativo and the corresponding decrease in the use of the form derived from the Portuguese infinitive. As for the markers in Makista, they differ from those in Kristang, in that they assume a broader range of functions ; thus overlapping the functions of the elements in Portuguese they originally derived from. As for the standard verb forms in the oral corpus of Makista, we found their order of acquisition and use to comply to the proposition in the Primacy of Aspect approach.
Résumé
L’objectif de cette contribution est d’analyser l’opposition entre l’emploi du graphème ‘x’ et celui du digramme ‘ks’ dans l’orthographe du créole mauricien, dorénavant KM, en adoptant une perspective écologique. Nous étudierons les pratiques existantes pour avoir une idée globale de la distribution de ‘x’ et de ‘ks’ dans les mots du KM. Pour cela, nous nous proposons de prendre un échantillon de mots issus de divers textes en KM, parmi lesquels figurent : Proz Literer an Morisien (de D. Virahsawmy), Bilengism Morisien ek Angle (Virahsawmy, 2009), Zistwar Ti-Prens (Virahsawmy, 2006), et Ekolozi Fraktire (John Bellamy Foster, traduit par Ledikasyon pu travayer, 2011), ainsi que deux numéros de la page Forum de l’édition du samedi du journal Le Mauricien en KM (Anou Koz Parol). Nous essaierons également d’étudier la philosophie sous-tendant la conception globale du document Lortograf Kreol Morisien.
Abstract
The objective of this paper is to analyse the opposition between ‘x’ and ‘ks’ in the Mauritian Creole (KM) orthography by adopting an ecological perspective. We will first have an overview of the existing practice in order to have a broad view on the distribution of ‘x’ and ‘ks’ in KM words. We propose to take a sample of words from various KM texts: Proz Literer an Morisien (Virahsawmy), Literesi Bileng (Virahsawmy, 2009), Zistar Ti-Prens (Virahsawmy, 2006), and Ekolozi Fraktire (John Bellamy Foster, translated by Ledikasyon pu travayer, 2011) and two pages of the weekly Forum section in KM (Anou Koz Parol) in Le Mauricien newspaper. We will also attempt to analyse the global philosophy behind the conception of the Lortograf Kreol Morisien document.
Having its seat in both realms, the subjective and the intersubjective, as a product of human mind, society and culture, language appears to be the most complex phenomenon in the known Universe. It displays multiple layers of organization in its spoken and written manifestations, none of which can be ignored at the expense of any other, in communication, ideation and information processing. Therefore language, being an organic system of utmost complexity, requires holistic and organic methodology. Such methodology requires meeting the criterion of ecological validity. In the realm of psychological research, Gilliam Cohen, a cognitive psychologist, advocates “a return to real-life situations”, such as “remembering real faces, shopping lists, scenes, etc.” She demonstrated a reaction against “rigorous and artificial” psychological experiments, based on “nonsense syllables or words out of context”.[1] Similarly, ‘ecological validity’ in linguistics requires a naturalistic treatment of linguistic data, real usage instances stemming from field work and/or the study of discourse/texts. Both observation and experimentation in linguistic research require naturalistic methods, where the so-called ‘simplicity should not be sought at the expense of factuality’. In this sense, explorations into real texts within the Systemic-Functional Grammar framework, field work in the Anthropological Linguistics tradition, or the usage-based model proposed in Cognitive Grammar, all meet the criterion of ecological validity. This paper is bound to grasp some of the questions inherent within multiple spectra organically resting among the constellations that reflect philosophical, psychological and linguistic points of reference. These points of reference also emerged organically and naturally throughout the history of their evolution, in their own terms, as they evolved in their ‘ecosystems’ of ideas. In this way we hope to provide a broad realm for reflection on language and linguistic methodology, allowing to see unity through diversity, thus creating mutual affiliations of a parallel, convergent and complementary character, in the vein of an organic whole. First, we shall take a bird’s eye view on ontological and epistemological questions regarding any kind of exploration within the Universe of natural phenomena. Next, we shall take a general view on linguistic enquiry in the 20th century. Finally, we shall survey key approaches to language articulating overall aspects of structural, functional, generative and cognitive orientations.[1] Cohen, 1977:6
mskwon@hufs.ac.kr <목 차> 1. 서론 2. 역사언어학의 계통분류, 그 성과와 한계 3. 공동유산과 구조 유사성에 대한 견해 4. 접촉에 의한 구조변화와 역사성 5. 피진-크리올어의 변이와 변화 5.1 규칙성과 임의성 5.2 언어변화와 크리올 생성가설: 보편적 바이오-프로그램가설과 상층어, 기층어, 제2어 습득가설 5.3 문법의 통합화(문법화)와 분석화(재어휘화와 화용화) 5.4 역사언어학 적용범위와 다른 접근법들 6. 아프리카 피진-크리올 사례와 몇몇 특징들 7. 맺는 말 1. 서론 이 논문에서는 역사언어학의 관심사가 무엇이었는지 살펴보고 오늘날 언어비교에서 그 연구전통이 갖는 성과를 아프리카어 연구의 경우를 바탕으로 살펴보고자 한다. 그런 다음 더 나아가 이와 같은 연 구방법과 관심이 그 성과에도 불구하고 갖게 되는 한계점을 제시하고자 한다. 그것은 동일계보의 언어 들이 갖는 공통유산에 대한 이해가 근래에 와서 많이 달라지고 있다는 점이 핵심이다. 요컨대 구조변 화와 유형유사성이 언어의 역사성에서 완전히 배제되어야 할 것인지, 아니면 그것이 규칙적 음성변화 를 바탕으로 한 공통조어 재구와 함께 포함되어야 할 것인지에 대한 문제에 이르게 된다. 조금 더 나 아가면 이와 같은 구조변화가 역사적 접촉상황을 전제로 한 것이기 때문에 역사언어학에서 제외시키 기보다 오히려 과감히 포함시켜야 한다는 주장이 나올 수 있게 되었다. 2) 문제는 그렇게 했을 경우 과 연 체계적이고 통제 가능한 역사비교연구가 가능할 것인지의 문제가 야기되는데 이는 사실 그 다음의 논의사항이다. 이 논문에서 문득 사회언어학적 주제로 알려진 피진-크리올어를 역사언어학과 연결시킨 것은 그것 이 같은 역사성과 구조의 파격적인 변화양상 때문이다. 현재 언어들의 자료를 바탕으로 한 어휘재구로 1만년 역사의 언어를 되돌아보는 대신, 지난 500년에서 100여년이라는 짧은 기간 동안 형성된 피진-크 리올은 생생한 언어자료와 그 역사적, 사회적 배경을 오히려 잘 알고 있기 때문에 역사비교연구의 구 체적 사례가 될 수 있다는 장점이 있다. 3) 더 나아가 역사언어학의 핵심주제인 언어변화를 단순히 어 1) [사]한국 언어학회 2020년 겨울학술대회, 역사언어학의 이론적 전개와 전망(12월 12일, 토) 발표논문집 pp.76-96. 2) 예컨대 박커와 그의 동료들(Bakker et al. 2011)은 수형도를 통한 계통분류라는 전통적 방법 대신 수직적 계승과 더불어 접촉에 의한 수평적 영향도 언어변화의 중요한 역사적 사실임을 감안하여 새롭게 개발된 네트워크 (computational phylogenetic networks) 방식(Bandelt & Dress 1992, Huson & Bryant 2006)을 도입하여 기존 언어들 과 크리올어들의 역사관계를 규명하고자 했다. 3) 역사언어학자들은 언어의 역사적 연구가 1만년까지 유효한 것으로 간주하고 있으나(Rankin 2003:207), 뮈스켄은 보다 적게 200~1,000년 정도로 제한했다. 그 이상의 범위는 유형적 지리적 연구영역(areal typological approach)으 로 넘어가고 200년 이하는 사회언어학적 영역인 2개 언어 상용사회(bilingual community) 연구로 가고, 보다 더 미시적 언어변화 양상을 연구하려면 2개 언어사용자(bilingual speaker)의 언어 사용에 대한 심리언어학적 접근으 로 다가가야 한다고 보았다. 그러므로 학제간의 협업으로 역사언어학의 연구범위, 한계가 극복될 수 있을 것이 다(Muysken 2010:267-268).
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Considering the recent economic milestone achieved by Bangladesh, a downright reformation has emerged as obligatory which is a sustainable and all-round delivery of English throughout the academic journey of all the learners. Still, students are found struggling with the elementary language skills while attending introductory English courses at the universities. This study, conducted in mixed-mode, recounts the findings based on the data collected from twenty-one universities. Through this investigative work, the researchers have tried to diagnose the reasons behind the struggles faced by the learners and attempt to explain such outcomes from the perspectives of the gaps between policy and practice, attitude towards English, and the state of ELT in Bangladesh. Findings suggest that the issue of maintaining the synergy between separate levels of education is ignored by the stakeholders as well as the policy makers since the policy itself fails to uphold the significance of English as an international language. In addition, faulty application of CLT in the learners' secondary levels create a fearful image of English in their minds hindering them from conceptualising English as an international language as well as a tool for their future academic success. KEYWORDS ELT in Bangladesh, classroom instruction, English as an international language, language policy and practice
The relationship between “language change” and “language evolution” has recently become subject to some debate regarding the scope of both concepts. It has been claimed that while the latter used to refer to the language origins in the first place, both terms can now, to a certain extent, be used synonymously. In this paper, I argue that this can partly be explained by parallel developments both in historical linguistics and in the field of language evolution research that have led to a considerable amount of convergence between both fields. Both have adopted usage-based approaches and data-driven methods, which entails similar research questions and similar perspectives on the phenomena under investigation. This has ramifications for current models and theories of language change (or evolution). Two approaches in particular, the concept of complex adaptive systems and construction grammar, have been combined in integrated approaches that seek to explain both language emergence and language change over historical time. I discuss the potential and limitations of this integrated approach, and I argue that there is still some unexplored potential for cross-fertilization.
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