1. 1 LANE 422 SOCIOLINGUISTICS Summarized from SOCIOLINGUISTICS An Introduction to Language and Society Peter Trudgill 4 th edition. 2000, Prepared by Dr. Abdullah S. Al-Shehri

2. 2 Chapter 9 Language and Contact

3. 3 Language Contact Geographical spread of a language results in a “language contact” situation. This means that the spreading language is used by speakers of other languages. Language contact occurs in a variety of phenomena, including language convergence, borrowing, and relexification. The most common products of language contact are pidgins, creoles, borrowing, code-switching, and code-mixing. The use of a language by speakers of other languages is often different from its use by native speakers. A language that is used non natively by speakers of other languages for communication is described as a “lingua franca”.

4. 4 What is a lingua franca? A lingua franca is a language which is used as a means of communication among people who have no native language in common. In the past, Arabic became the "lingua franca" of the Islamic World (from AD 733 - AD 1492), which at a certain point spread from the borders of China and Northern India through Central Asia, Persia, Asia Minor, Middle East, North Africa all the way to the Iberian Peninsula in the west. Presently, English is considered a “lingua franca” of the World

5. 5 Where did the term ‘lingua franca’ come from? Lingua franca referred originally to a mixed language composed mostly of Italian with a broad vocabulary drawn from Turkish, French, Spanish, Greek and Arabic. This language was limited to the Eastern Mediterranean as the language of commerce and diplomacy in and around the Renaissance era. Franca was the Italian word for Frankish. Its usage in the term lingua franca originated from its meaning in Arabic, dating from before the Crusades, whereby all Europeans were called "Franks" or Firinjah in Arabic.

6. 6 How is a lingua franca different from other languages? The use of a language as a lingua franca reflects a rather interesting aspect of linguistic phenomena. Unlike native languages, the use of a language as a lingua franca is often limited to certain social situations. A language used in limited social contexts (as a lingua franca) usually undergoes a certain amount of simplification and reduction and will be characterized by errors caused by interference from the speakers’ native languages.

7. 7 What is simplification? Simplification refers to the getting red of irregularities, such as irregular verb forms, redundancies, such as grammatical gender, and the avoidance of certain complex syntactic structure, in the lingua franca.

8. 8 What is reduction? As a result of a reduction in social function, lingua franca speakers may use the language for doing business or commerce, but not perhaps for many other purposes. This means that parts of the language, such as vocabulary, grammatical structures, and stylistic devices, will be missing from the usage of non-native speakers. We can say then that a reduction in the social function of a lingua franca results in a reduction in form as well.

9. 9 Language Interference / Errors The effect of the native language can be on any structural aspect of the second/foreign language: vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation etc. Language interference is most often regarded as a source of errors. The greater the differences between the speaker’s native language and the second/foreign language, the more negative the effects of interference are likely to be (negative transfer). But, where the relevant features of both languages are similar or the same, this will result in correct second/foreign language production (positive transfer).

10. 10 How is a lingua franca affected by linguistic interference? Many of the structural characteristics of a lingua franca are usually the result of linguistic interference. Linguistic interference is the effect of the non-native speaker’s first language on his or her production of the second or foreign language they are using, which usually results in ‘errors’. The technical term for the process by which languages may be subject, in the usage of non-native speakers, to simplification, reduction and linguistic interference is pidginization.

11. 11 What is a pidginization? A pidgin language is a lingua franca which has no native speakers and is used as a means of communication between people that do not have a language in common. It is derived from a ‘normal’ language through simplification, reduction and interference or admixture, often, from the native language, or languages, of those who use it. Normally, in the first stages of its development at least, in which we can refer to it as a pre-pidgin, it is used only in trading or other limited-contact situations.

12. 12 An example of a lingua franca is: Swahili Swahili is a language that is widely used as a lingua franca in East Africa. On parts of the coast of East Africa, Swahili is the native language of many of the population, who speak it very fluently. Inland, in Tanzania, it is not widely spoken natively, but it is used to a considerable extent as a lingua franca. Compared to the coastal Swahili, this inland lingua franca variety of Swahili demonstrates some features of simplification, since it is spoken as a second language, and it is subject to reduction, as it is used in a more restricted set of circumstances than on the coast. Further inland still, in eastern Congo, yet another variety of Swahili is used as a lingua franca. In this case, even more reduction and simplification have taken place.

13. 13 Pidgin Swahili However, in another part of Congo, in the rural north, a further lingua franca form of Swahili occurs. This variety again is more reduced and simplified, relative to other varieties of Swahili. The result of this degree of reduction and simplification is that mutual intelligibility with coastal Swahili is minimal. When simplification has taken place on a large scale, and when the result is relatively stabilized form of language consistently employed as a lingua franca, the resulting variety is called a pidgin language (in this case Congo pidgin Swahili).

14. 14 How do pidgins develop? The most likely setting for the formation of a pidgin language is a contact situation involving three or more language groups: one ‘dominant’ language and at least two ‘non-dominant’ languages. If contact between the speakers of the dominant language and the speakers of the non dominant languages is minimal, and the imperfectly learned dominant language is then used as a lingua franca among the non- dominant groups, a pidgin language might arise. Over time, in the speech of lingua franca users, the pre-pidgin will acquire a set of structures and norms for usage which will be accepted by everybody. It will acquire a fixed form which linguists can describe and write grammars for. Most of the well-known pidgin languages in the world are the result of travel on the part of European traders and colonizers. They are mainly based on languages like English, French and Portuguese, and are located on the main shipping and trading routes.

15. 15 Why have pidgins often been stigmatized? Pidgins which have been based on English or other European languages have often been regarded as bad, debased, corrupt or inferior forms of these languages. This is because many people have objected to pidgins thinking that they have corrupted the ‘purity’ of these European languages. Views like this are often accompanied by sentiments about racial and cultural ‘purity’ as well.

16. 16 English-Based Pidgins English-based pidgins were formerly found in North America, the Caribbean, West Africa, New Zealand and in China. They are still found in Australia, West Africa, the Solomon Islands and in New Guinea, where pidgin English is often referred to by linguists as Tok Pisin. Tok Pisin is probably the most widely spoken pidgin derived from English. Tok Pisin has official status in New Guinea, and is used there on the radio, in newspapers, and in schools.

17. 17 From Pidgin to Creole World pidgins are at present undergoing a process of creolization. Creole languages are pidgins that have acquired native speakers. When acquired by children as their first/native language, the pidgin will re-acquire all the characteristics of a full, non-pidgin language. As spoken by adults, the language will have an expanded vocabulary, a wider range of syntactic structures, and an increased stylistic repertoire, and will also be used for all purposes in a full range of social situations. Creole languages are perfectly normal languages – only their history is somewhat unusual.

18. 18 Decreolization Creolization repairs the simplification and reduction which take place during pidginization. Decreolization attacks the simplification and admixture which occurs during pidginization. Contact between the base language and a creole language leads to the gradual introduction into the creole of structural complexities from the base language, and the gradual disappearance of elements derived from languages other than the base.

19. 19 The ‘Decreolization’ of the African American Vernacular of English (AAVE) Linguists have argued that African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is descended from an original creole that has become progressively decreolized, as a result of centuries of contact with English, so that it is now clearly a variety of English itself.