Brill Studies in Language Contact and the Dynamics of Language – serie

This volume critically exposes problems in present language contact analysis and uses empirical findings to provide answers to the following questions. What can we learn from the study of language contact for our knowledge of languages, their dynamics and their functions (systemic elaborations, language practices, semiotic developments)? How should linguistic theory incorporate the empirical findings of language contact studies, and how could these alter underlying postulates of existing models (choice of analysis and epistemic framework)? Which role has language contact been playing in the history of linguistic research and academic life? And how has this idea influenced individual researchers and their approaches?

Yiddish, the language of Eastern-European Jews, has so far been mostly described as Germanic within the framework of the traditional, divergence-based Language Tree Model. Meanwhile, advances in contact linguistics allow for a new approach, placing the idiom within the mixed language spectrum, with the Slavic component playing a significant role. So far, the Slavic elements were studied as isolated, adstratal borrowings. This book argues that they represent a coherent system within the grammar. This suggests that the Slavic languages had at least as much of a constitutive role in the inception and development of Yiddish as German and Hebrew. The volume is copiously illustrated with examples from the vernacular language.With a contribution of Anna Pilarski, University of Szczecin.

Chinese immigrants who settle in Russia’s Far East without formal instruction in the Russian language communicate with local Russians using Russian vocabulary. Each immigrant forms their language to communicate with Russians, not with family or other immigrants. The ‘single-generation languages’ that immigrants form are not replications or simplifications of Chinese or Russian. Grammatical systems formed by these speakers challenge some fundamental assumptions in early 21st-century linguistic theories. Grammatical systems of single-generation languages provide a unique window into how complex grammatical systems emerge, what are the first formal means of expression, and what are the first meanings expressed in grammatical systems. Given massive migrations in the contemporary world, single-generation languages are common, yet understudied, products of language contact.

What can the languages spoken today tell us about the history of their speakers? This question is crucial in insular Southeast Asia and New Guinea, where thousands of languages are spoken, but written historical records and archaeological evidence is yet lacking in most regions. While the region has a long history of contact through trade, marriage exchanges, and cultural-political dominance, detailed linguistic studies of the effects of such contacts remain limited.This volume investigates how loanwords can prove past contact events, taking into consideration ten different regions located in the Philippines, Eastern Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and New Guinea. Each chapter studies borrowing across the borders of language families, and discusses implications for the social history of the speech communities.

This book presents an empirically based examination of language patterns found among the Israeli Druze community, which is profiled against that of the Arabs in Israel. The results document the emergence of a mixed language previously undescribed and provides a socio-political analysis.This study intends thus to make a contribution to the debate on "mixed languages", introducing a model that facilitates the analysis of the link bewteen codeswitching and sociopolitical identity. Special attention is paid to the assessment of language and identity issues of Golan Heights Druze and Israeli Druze, taking into exam two major political debates within these communities, regarding the Israeli Nation-state Law and the so-called ‘Syrian–Israeli secret Golan deal’ speculation.

The open access publication of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.This study investigates the interrelation between use, meaning and the mind as a central issue of contact-induced linguistic variation and change, using the influence of French, Spanish, German and Yiddish on English as case studies. It relies on innovative methodological approaches, including the use of an integrative, socio-cognitive model of the dynamic lexicon, to describe borrowing processes and their linguistic outcomes. The multitude of socio-cultural contexts relevant to the introduction of the various borrowings since the nineteenth century has been reconstructed. This implies the identification of borrowings reflecting connections of linguistic features and culturally embedded attitudes. Taking the effects of cognitive and social factors on conventionalization and entrenchment processes into account, this study makes an original contribution to existing research.