Oxford Studies in Language Contact – serie

During the nineteenth century Irish-speaking communities declined almost to the point of extinction. But in 1922 the new Irish state launched a broad strategy to re-establish Irish as a national language. This book is about that policy and its impact over the last seventy years. Ó Riagáin focuses on the evolving structure of bilingualism in Ireland but he is more centrally concerned with the process of bilingual reproduction. His analysis is based on a series of language surveys conducted between 1973 and 1993. In Part I he reviews the evolution of language policy and the main theoretical perspectives emerging in Irish research. In Part II he is concerned with the position of the Irish language in the residual Irish-speaking areas, and in Part III with the present position of the Irish language in the English-speaking areas. He examines the role of policy in education, in the public sector, and in the forming of Irish-speaking networks. He argues that the various dimensions of Irish language policy have been heavily conditioned by the way the Irish economy and, in turn, Irish society has developed since independence. He concludes in Part IV with a discussion of current issues within Irish language policy.

The Japanese are often characterized as exclusive and ethnocentric, yet a close examination of their linguistic and cultural history reveals a very different picture: although theirs is essentially a monolingual speech community they emerge as a people who have been significantly influenced by other languages and cultures for at least 2000 years. In this primarily sociolinguistic study Professor Loveday takes an eclectic approach, drawing on insights from other subfields of linguistics such as comparative and historical linguistics and stylistics, and from a number of other disciplines - cultural anthropology, social psychology and semiotics. Focusing in particular on the influence of Chinese and English on Japanese, and on how elements from these languages are modified when they are incorporated into Japanese, Professor Loveday offers a general model for understanding language contact behaviour across time and space. The study will be of value to those in search of cross-cultural universals in language contact behaviour, as well as to those with a particular interest in the Japanese case.

This book addresses the issue of language contact in the context of child language acquisition. Lanza examines in detail the simultaneous acquisition of Norwegian and English by two first-born children in families living in Norway in which the mother is American and the father Norwegian. She connects psycholinguistic arguments with sociolinguistic evidence, adding a much-needed dimension of real language use in context to the psycholinguistic studies which have dominated the field. She draws upon evidence from other studies to support her claims concerning language dominance and the child's differentiation between the two languages in relation to the situation, interlocutor, and the communicative demands of the context. She also addresses the question of whether or not the language mixing of infant bilingualism is conceptually different from the codeswitching of older bilinguals, thus helping to bridge the gap between these two fields of study.

Languages in a situation of contact, whether they are receding or being maintained by their speakers, are characterized by constant and rapid change. Thus they provide a testing ground for hypotheses about processes of linguistic change. In this original study of an intergenerational sample of Spanish-English bilinguals in Los Angeles County, Carmen Silva-Corvalán explores in depth the linguistic, cognitive, and social processes underlying language maintenance, as well as changes characteristic of language shift and loss, bringing together analytical techniques employed in sociolinguistics, functional syntax, and discourse analysis.

The territorial contraction and speaker-reduction undergone by the Welsh language during the past few centuries has resulted in its categorization by many linguists as an obsolescent language. This study illustrates that, although it is undeniably showing some signs of decline, Welsh stands in marked contrast to many previously documented cases of language death. Against this backdrop of contraction a steady revitalization is taking place. Based upon extensive fieldwork in two sociolinguistically contrasting communities, this book is the first to examine the position and nature of contemporary Welsh with reference to both obsolescence-related developments and changes under way in the dialects. Jones focuses on immersion education, long heralded as the saviour of the language and, by examining the variety of Welsh being produced by immersion pupils, seeks to determine whether this claim is justified, or whether such pupils are in fact 'speaking immersion'. As well as discussing the recent linguistic change shown by contemporary Welsh within the language death framework, the author examines the ways in which the language has been standardized and their repercussions for language maintenance. By way of comparison these tensions and implications are also explored with reference to the other varieties of P-Celtic, namely Breton and Cornish. Series Information: Oxford Studies in Language Contact Series Editor: Professor Suzanne Romaine, Merton College, Oxford Series ISBN: 0-19-961466-0 Series Description: Most of the world's speech communities are multilingual, and contact between languages is thus an important force in the everyday lives of most people. Studies of language contact should therefore form an integral part of work in theoretical, social, and historical linguistics. This series makes available a collection of research monographs which present case studies of language contact around the world. As well as providing an indispensable source of data for the serious researcher, it contributes significantly to theoretical developments in the field.

Lukas D. Tsitsipis explores a case of linguistic shift in the Balkans. He focuses on Arvanitika, an Albanian variety spoken in Greece which is under threat through a process of attrition. Various factors relating the linguistic to the non-linguistic aspects of the shift are examined in detail. The emphasis is on both the macro-processes responsible for the shift as they emerge from the broader sociopolitical conditions of the Greek nation-state, and on the local communities' discourse as a complex response to these forces. Pragmatic aspects of discourse, power relations, the surfacing of linguistic ideology, and aspects of performance all figure prominently in a synthesis which shows that speakers are active respondents to social and political pressures. The author derives his inspiration from theoretical and methodological traditions in linguistic anthropology, but with political theory becomes as a central concern. In a period when linguistic anthropology is becoming reflexive and facing its social responsibilities, language shift is a locus for critical reflection: discourse about languages is ultimately discourse about human beings and the political process. Series Information Series Editor: Professor Suzanne Romaine, Merton College, University of Oxford Series ISBN: 0-19-961466-0 Series Description: Most of the world's speech communities are multilingual, and contact between languages is thus an important force in the everyday lives of most people. Studies of language contact should therefore form an integral part of work in theoretical, social, and historical linguistics. This series makes available a collection of research monographs which present case studies of language contact around the world. As well as providing an indispensable source of data for the serious researcher, it contributes significantly to theoretical developments in the field.

The Old City of Jerusalem, small and densely populated, is a complex microcosm of Israeli society. It is a multilingual community characterized by unequal power relations between the speakers of the two official languages of Israel - Arabs and Jews. The authors begin with a sociolinguistic sketch of the Old City in the present day. They then provide a historical background to their field study, discussing Jewish multilingualism from the period of the Second Temple until modern times, the sociolinguistics of Jerusalem one hundred years ago, and the recent revival and spread of Hebrew. They go on to develop a model of the rules of language choice which arises from their analysis of language use in street signs, and which they then apply to language use in the market place. In the final chapters they examine language learning and language spread in their social context. The authors demonstrate that, because of the close association between language use and social structure, the study of language use in a multilingual society is at the same time both a powerful and a delicate method of studying the dynamics of group interactions.

This is the first book-length treatment of the social motivations for codeswitching, that is, the use of two or more linguistic varieties in the same conversation. Using data from multilingual African contexts (mostly from conversations studied in Kenya), Carol Myers-Scotton advances a theoretical argument which aims at a general explanation of these motivations. She treats codeswitching as a type of skilled performance, not as the 'alternative strategy' of a person who cannot carry on a conversation in the language in which it began. When engaging in codeswitching, speakers exploit the socio-psychological values which have come to be associated with different linguistic varieties in a specific speech community: they switch codes in order to negotiate a change in social distance between themselves and other participants in the conversation, conveying this negotiation through the choice of a different code. Switching between languages, Professor Myers-Scoton suggests, has a good deal in common with making different stylistic choices within the same language: it ias as if bilingual and multilingual speakers have an additional style at their command when they engage in codeswitching between different languages.

Papua New Guinea's struggle for development is intimately bound up with the history of Tok Pisin, an English-based pidgin which is the product of nineteenth-century colonialism in the Pacific. The language has since become the most important lingua franca in the region, being spoken by more than a million people in a highly multilingual society. Suzanne Romaine examines some of the changes that are taking place in Tok Pisin as it becomes the native language of the younger generation of rural and urban speakers. These linguistic processes, which are by no means complete, have to be understood in the socio-historical context of colonial expansion and strategies for socio-economic development in the post-colonial era.

The study of Native American languages has traditionally paid little attention to linguistic convergence, just as linguists focusing on language contact have often neglected Native American cases. Drawing both on fieldwork and on archival research Emanuel Drechsel presents a grammatical, sociolinguistic, and ethnohistorical study of Mobilian Jargon, a Muskogean-based American Indian pidgin of the Mississippi valley.Mobilian Jargon functioned as an interlingual medium of communication among linguistically diverse southeastern Native American groups, and in contact between these groups and non-Indians, from at least 1700 until the mid-twentieth century. It also served as a a sociolinguistic buffer, providing native peoples with some protection against outside intrusions. The linguistic and extralinguistic evidence points to a pre-Columbian origin, and a role as a lingua franca among mound-building paramount chiefdoms of the lower Mississippi valley.Because of its focus on a non-European based case, Drechsel's study questions the universality of some concepts developed in pidgin and creole linguistics. It also carries significant implications for the ethnology of Native American peoples, and for the history of North America, suggesting that Native American peoples have had a greater historical role than has been acknowledged hitherto.

The shift to Hebrew as a national language is at the root of the creation of Israel, yet many Jewish former immigrants still use the language of their country of origin. Ultra-orthodox communities retain their own codes, and the use of Arabic remains a clear marker of the Israeli-Arab town and village. At the same time Israel's position in international affairs has encouraged a wide penetration of the society, along class lines, by languages of world-wide communication. These very same languages, for example English and French, have different values in their local context, and play active, and different, roles in the formation of social boundaries.In his analysis Eliezer Ben-Rafael focuses on linguistic resources and symbols which reflect and reveal the complex structure of class, ethnic, religious, and national identities and cleavages in Israeli society. More generally, he uses the Israeli case to show how sociolinguistic ideas may be related to sociological approaches to test some general sociological propositions about social aspects of language use.

Recent models of dialect contact, notably in the work of Trudgill, Chambers, James Milroy, and Labov have stressed the importance of the notions of salience, simplification, linguistic complexity, and the speech community in accounting for the patterns that arise. In this case-study of the speech of rural migrants in the Norwegian city of Bergen, Paul Kerswill critically examines the usefulness of these concepts, and puts recent models of dialect contact to the test for the first time against a case of such contact as it is actually happening.Dialect contact often, it is said, leads to Koineization - the emergence of new, mixed varieties of a language resulting from the intermingling of speakers of different varieties of that language. Kerswill investigates the extent to which processes of change typically ascribed to Koineization are already prefigured in the speech of the first-generation adult migrants of this study.While the author's approach is broadly quantitative he also demonstrates the importance of ethnographic and social-psychological explanations in accounting for the wide differences between individuals in the study. He argues for a sociolinguistic methodology founded on a richer and more comprehensive view of the social factors influencing, langague use.

The description of minority or threatened languages with a view to documenting the linguistic consequences of language contact and restriction has now emerged as a distinct area of investigation within sociolinguistics. In this book, Raymond Mougeon and Édouard Beniak present a series of analyses of the impact that contact with English on the one hand, and language-use restriction on the other, have had on the evolution of the French dialect spoken in the predominantly English-speaking province of Ontario, Canada. As a background to the analyses, the authors provide sociohistorical and sociolinguistic information on the Franco-Ontarian community, and make comparisons with other varieties of French both within and outside North America. They address fundamental theoretical issues such as the interplay between linguistic and extralinguistic causes of structural change and the mechanisms of linguistic change in bilingual as opposed to unilingual speech communities.

Singaporean English is an indigenized variety of the language which has developed chiefly through English-medium education. The authors of this book investigate the various factors influencing the indigenization of the language and its use in the family and the wider community. They present the results of quantitative research based on recordings of spontaneous speech of ethnically Chinese Singaporeans who have received an English-medium education. They also trace the influence on Singaporean English of Chinese, Malay, and Indian language characteristics, and examine certain linguistic features in detail, such as the formation of plurals, the use of the past tense, and the verb be.This study will be invaluable for linguistic researchers; it also has important pedagogical implications for curriculum planners and language teachers.

Oxford Studies in Language ContactSeries editors: Professor Suzanne Romaine, Merton College, Oxford and Dr Peter Mülhäusler, Linacre College, Oxford This series aims to make available a collection of research monographs which present case studies of language contact around the world. The series will consider factors which give rise to language contact and the consequences of such contact in a broad inter-disciplinary context. Given the prevalence of language contact in communities throughout the world, there are as yet insufficient studies to permit typological generalization about the subject: this series aims to fill that gap.Bislama is the variety of Melanesian Pidgin spoken in Vanuatu (formerly New Hebrides). In this book Terry Crowley describes its history and development from the 1940s to the present. In the first chapters the labour history of Vanuatu is reviewed in detail in order to establish what were the contacts between speakers of various languages with one another over the period. The written record is thoroughly examined for evidence about how people communicated in the early contact period, and how the contact language developed over the time. In the later chapters the author gives a detailed treatment of selected grammatical constructions and their evolution, including syntactic developments that are currently in progress. In this discussion he addresses the controversial issue of the source of grammatical constructions in Bislama, considering in particular the possible role of substratum patterns. He concludes that while there is good evidence for substratum influence in the grammer of Bislama, the mere existence of stuctural parallels between Bislama and the substrate is not itself sufficient evidence. There are a range of other explanations that may also be drawn upon to account for these similarities.

The term `code-switching' is used to describe the mixing of different language varieties which often results from language contact. Penelope Gardner-Chloros presents the first full-length study of code-switching in a European context. Throughout history, Alsace has been a meeting point of the Roman and Germanic worlds. In spite of its marked regional character, it has been alternately claimed by France and Germany, each anxious to assimilate the region to its own national and linguistic identity. Today most of the population still speak a Germanic dialect, alternating with French which is the language of public life, education, and the media.The author lived in Strasbourg from 1981 to 1988. She describes this exemplar of code-switching not only as a linguist, but also as someone attuned to the many layers of significance which this mode of speech has in the Alsatian community.