1. Language contact and globalization
Unit 4: Bilingual practices

2. Required reading:
Required reading for this unit is the following text :
Matras, Yaron (2009) Language contact.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 146–165

3. Plan for this unit
In this unit, I will come back to some of the key concepts mentioned in the previous unit 3 in order to discuss them in more detail. The bilingual practices of the individual speaker are central to the notion of contact- induced language variation and change. In times of accelerated globalization, bilingual speakers will become the norm rather than an exception.

4. What do these words have in common?
age; aid; affair; action; air; baggage; beauty; branch; cage; cable; cattle; chance; change; choice; company; consent; coward; couple; cry; cure; damage; danger; delay; demand; departure; difference; difficulty; error; example; exception; excercise; experience; face; fate; favour; fence; fool; force; foreign; fountain; guide; honour; labour; leisure; marriage; piece; pencil; possession; question; language; wages able; ancient; brief; certain; clear; considerable; cruel; different; difficult; easy; familiar; famous; favourable; feeble; faint; fine; general; gentle; glorious; poor; safe; sure achieve; arrive; appear; approve; approach; assemble; assist; attend; advertise; affirm; await; blame; catch; cancel; carry; cease; chase; cry; change; consent; consider; count; cover;demand; deny; depart; deserve; discover; disturb; finish; employ; encourage; enjoy; enter; excuse; escape; increase; examine; force; fail; form; grieve; marry; refuse; perish; suffer; paint; perform; propose; save; touch; travel; tremble

5. Language contact The term language contact is a metaphor.
Languages as such
cannot get in contact
with one another, but
their speakers do.

6. Borrowing - terminology
One of the outcomes of language contact is a change in the inventory of at least one of the languages involved. This is often viewed as a kind of import of a structure from one language system into the other.
The process is best known as borrowing; items affected by it are called borrowings, loans or transfers. The languages involved are frequently labeled donor or recipient languages.

7. Borrowing as replication
The term borrowing emphasises too much aspects of ownership and the boundaries between the linguistic systems involved. This diverts attention away from the dynamic process of sharing a structure or a word form, adapting, applying and using it. We will use the term borrowing in the sense of replication – we are dealing with the activity of employing an item, in context, in order to achieve a communicative goal.

8. Bilingualism leads to borrowing
The seeds of borrowing are found in the occasional use of second-language insertions in the speech of bilinguals.
But what exactly is a bilingual speaker?
The bilingual continuum

9. Bilingual practices
On the other end of the continuum we find the speaker who is fluent in more than one language and engages in communication with other bilingual speakers.
When bilingual speakers communicate they go into bilingual mode (Grosjean 2001) when they know that the other speakers have access to the same languages; they can apply both inventories.
One of the practices bilingual speakers are frequently involved in is code-switching.

10. Code-switching
Example: transcript of Chinese-English code-switching on
an Internet discussion board.
Definition in the broadest possible sense: “Codes switching is the term that is normally applied to the alternation of languages within a conversation.“ (Matras 2009, 101)

11. The study of code-switching
Normative grammarians used to categorize code- switching as ‘language corruption‘.
Since the 1970s, code-switching has become a field of investigation in its own right.
Main areas: the term itself; regularities and constraints; functions;the code-switching – borrowing continuum (see for example Coulmas 2005, 107–125 for an overview).

12. The code-switching – borrowing continuum
We talk about borrowing when a structure or a word from L2 is not only applied in the bilingual mode by bilingual speakers but also by monolingual speakers of L1 in a monolingual context.

13. What motivates borrowing?
The most frequently cited motivations are
gaps in the recipient language.
the prestige of the donor language.

14. Gaps in L1?
Gaps are not necessarily deficiencies in the recipient language.
Typical gap fillers are so- called cultural loans: a new concept – an invention, so far unknown species, thoughts, products are imported with the language of the culture they originate in.

15. The example of “coffee“
Coffee came into the English language via French café and Turkish kahve from Arabic qahwe.
The word did not fill a gap in the narrower sense – it enriched the language as coffee enriched the diet of the English-speaking world.

16. The prestige hypothesis
The prestige hypothesis assumes that speakers imitate elements of the speech of a socially more powerful, dominant community in order to gain approval and social status.
Unlike cultural loans or ‘gap fillers‘, prestige loans often have parallel expressions in the recipient language.

17. More coffee...
In German, it is perfectly possible to say Kaffee zum Mitnehmen instead of coffee to go.
The English phrase is used in order to evoke a concept: the dymanic, global (=English speaking) world of business executives who are too busy to sit down to drink their coffee. (see Piller 2001)
Thus, coffee to go contributes a new concept rather than replacing a German phrase.

18. Communities of practice which enable borrowing
Do all instances of
borrowing originate
in code-switching?
Bilingual speakers who code-switch in direct interaction, for example in the family, at work, in the neighborhood etc.
Professional networks, for example international academic exchanges.
Business and trade which go beyond the immediate community
Can you think of other communities of practice?

19. “Language Crossing”?
Ben Rampton (1995) Crossing: language and ethnicity among adolescents. London: Longman.

20. Borrowing and globalization
In an ever more connected world more speakers of different languages are in contact and have access to global culture which is currently dominated by English.
As a result, across the world, many languages show traces of borrowing from English.

21. In which country do you think this picture was taken?

22. Pseudo-English
Some English lexical items are used semantically in quite an interesting way in their respective receiver languages:
What do these English words actually mean in German?
1. Body bag …………
2. Handy …………….
3. Public viewing ……

23. Resistance against “Anglicisms”
Many speakers of languages other than English think that it is all going a bit too far…

24. Borrowing hierarchies
Which parts of language – constructions, words etc. – are more likely to be borrowed than others? Ever since the study of language contact began (Weinreich 1953) scholars have worked on establishing borrowing hierachies, mostly based on specific cases of language contact. Borrowing hierarchies allow us to make rough indications of possible predictions on borrowings.

25. Borrowing hierarchy according to Matras (2007)
This frequency-based borrowing hierarchy has been developed on comparative first-hand observations on a sample of 27 languages in contact from different parts of the world:
Nouns, conjunctions > verbs > discourse
markers > adjectives > interjections >
adverbs > other particles, adpositions >
numerals > pronouns > derivational affixes >
inflectional affixes

26. We normally distinguish between
lexical
grammatical and
phonological borrowing

27. Lexical borrowing: nouns
As the borrowing hierarchy on the previous slides illustrates, nouns have the highest rate of borrowability.
This is not surprising, because nouns cover the most differentiated domain for labelling concepts, objects and roles.
Take for examples the following German loanwords in English: hinterland, zeitgeist and kindergarten. They are easy to adapt (orthographically and phonologically) and can be implemented into English without too much trouble.

28. Lexical borrowing: verbs
Verbs are either borrowed as actions (for example abseiling) or they are derived from borrowed nouns.
Different languages have different structural means to derive verbs from nouns; for example Modern Hebrew speakers borrowed the word telephone, interpreted it as a four-consonantal root (t-l-f-n) and created the verb letalfen ‘to ring‘.

29. Lexical borrowing: Adjectives and lexical adverbs
The same applies to adjectives or lexical adverbs: different languages apply their own means of word- derivation to integrate borrowed elements. For more detailed information read the chapter Lexical Borrowing in Matras (2009).

30. Grammatical borrowing
But languages not only borrow words from one another but also grammatical features and structures, although less frequently.
A grammatical feature high on our borrowing hierachy (slide18) are discourse markers which will be used as an example for this lecture. For more detailed information on grammatical borrowing read Matras 2007 and Matras 2009, 193–209.

31. The example of discourse markers
Discourse markers – tags, fillers, interjections, hesitation markers, connectors – are often not recognized or treated by speakers as genuine word-forms, although their functions make them part of the structural repertoire of a language, not the lexicon.

32. Phonological borrowing
In their study of a large cross-linguistic sample Matras & Sakel (2007) come to the conclusion that the borrowing of consonants is the most frequent form of phonological borrowing.
A field not yet fully explored is the borrowing of prosody. There are indications that the borrowing of prosodic features might be the most salient within phonological borrowing, for example the influence of Low German prosody on spoken German in Northern parts of Germany.

33. Translanguaging
is “an approach to bilingualism that is centred not on language as has been often the case, but on practices of bilinguals … translanguaging encompasses multiple discursive practices in which bilinguals engage in order to make sense of their bilingual worlds by applying their bilingual linguistic repertoires strategically in order to communicate effectively. (Garcia 2009).

34. Further Reading:
Coulmas, Forian (2005) Sociolinguistics. The study of speakers‘ choices. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
Matras, Yaron (2007)The borrowability of structural categories. In: Yaron Matras / Jeanette Sakel (eds.) Grammatical borrowing in cross-linguistic perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter,
Myers-Scotton, Carol (2005) Multiple voices: an introduction to bilingualism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Piller, Ingrid (2001) Identity constructions in multilingual advertising. Language in Society 30, 153–186.
Weinreich, Uriel (1953) Languages in contact. The Hague: Mouton.