Language contact

And contact induced language change

 • Scenario 1: a group of IITG students is going on a trek in a remote
area and has stopped to take rest near the side of the road. A group
of locals speaking a language that IITG students don’t know was
crossing the same path. They too sit down to rest for a while. The two
groups do not share a single language. After a while they go their own
way.
• Scenario 2: a member of the IITG team likes the area so much, he
wants to stay there for some time. Let’s call him Raj (in true
What is Bollywood style). Raj stays in the nearby village for 2 months. During
this time, he learns some basic vocabulary of the local language and
language the villagers learn a bit of his own language too, say Telugu .
• Scenario 3: here people are not in ‘contact’ directly, but language
contact like? still are. Like Latin traveling to many parts of the world through the
spread of Christianity.
• There are many such cases that qualifies for a ‘language contact’
situation.
• The one that we are interested here is the second type, where
people speaking different languages come in close contact and
remain in contact, for various reasons and this leads to various
changes in the society.
• These changes include bilingualism and specific changes of the
language involved.
• These changes are called contact induced language change.
• Now, languages coming into contact is not a recent phenomena.
• Since prehistorical times, humans have come in contact with each other, that
naturally means language contact. However, we do not have much record of that.
• But we do have some proof of language contact in the historical times, say 2nd
millennia BCE.
• The Gilgamesh epic, a Babylonian epic poem can be traced back to an earlier
Sumerian epic. Gilgamesh was partly translated and partly adapted in the ancient
Akkadian language of Babylon and it later spread to other near eastern groups like
Hurrians and Hittites.
• The famous Rosetta stone (196
BCE) was a trilingual inscription
that included three versions of
the same text : Egyptian
hieroglyphics, demotic (cursive)
Egyptian symbols and Greek.
• there are some direct proofs too.
• King Darius the Great of Persia (550-486 BCE), in his autobiography (which was probably
ghost written) mentions, “in addition to cuneiform writings in Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian,
I made inscriptions in other ways, in Aryan, which was not done before.”(`Aryan’ probably
was an Indic language).
• Herodotus (in The Persian Wars, fifth century BCE) mentions about the altered speech of
Scythian because they were offsprings of Amazon and Scythian men.
• Similarly, the Old Testament of Bible mentions “In those days also saw I Jews that had
married wives of Ashdod, of Ammon, and of Moab: And their children spake half in the
speech of Ashdod, and could not speak in the Jews' language…”. (this refers to the ‘strange
wives taken by the Jewish” mentioned in the book of Ezra).

(S H Thomson, 2021)
• Our own Chandraketugarh shell
and other inscription; mention the
marriage of Vijayasinha, the son
of Sinhapura (of Vanga) King with
Kuveni, from Tamraparni
(Srilanka).

• The turtle shell carving of a Hindu

marriage, complete with fire,
musical instruments etc.
So, how do language come into contact?
Frankly, we do not know exactly how they did in the distant past.
But for more recent pasts incidents, we do have records.
For example:
Alexander’s campaign brought the Greek language into contact with Indic languages in Punjab and
probably beyond
The Khoisan languages in present day South Africa came into contact with Portuguese when the
latter colonized them and employed them as interpreters and nannies.
The Banu and Khoisan languages came into contact and the click sound in Zulu is also a result
of its contact with Khoisan
The Spanish conquistadors conquered the Quechua speaking Incas (present day Peru) and
Spanish became the official language of this place
• Large south Asian population in Africa dates back to importing of plantation workers from
India and other parts, leading to Tamil being one of the significant minorities in South Africa
• In the northwestern US, many tribal groups from the mountains come down to the plains and
have a annual merger (for defence purposes), while they hunt buffalo together.
• Vietnamese women and American soldiers during Vietnamese War.
• Similarly lingua francas existed in large parts of the world, that were essentially mulilingual;
like Greek in the ancient world’s west Asia and Mediterranean, Latin in Europe till 1600s,
Swahili and Hausa in eastern and western sub-Saharan Africa and so no. multilingual
societies mean a number of languages in constant contact.
• And, of course, English has no competition as the global lingua franca in today’s world.
 a. war, conquests, colonization
b. slavery
c. migration --- forced or otherwise
d. inter-marriage
e. adjacent geographical areas---Sprachbund
So, to f. trade or urbanization
summarize 2. types of contact
a. socially separate----
b. family level
c. market place contact, trade,
• d. social contact
theoretical perspectives of contact
induced language change: individual
Vs. social

a. macro level--- social level

· the dynamics of relationship between social forces and contact induced
language change
· at the level of society as a homogenous entity
· focus is on the diffusion of change
· leveling, conventionalizing within the speech community
· so the type of socio-historical situation determines different linguistic
outcomes
· also taken into are the internal variability--- inter-individual & linguistic
constraints on language contact situation
· the primacy of “result” of the change
micro level---- the dimension of the individual level
relative pressure of one language on another
· focus is on the transmission phenomena
· psycholinguistic and cognitive processes of language change residing in individual’s mind
· primacy of process of language change
· e.g. SLA studies: what happens when a group of learners start learning L2
at the level of strategy, with regard to the learner’s plan of action to solve a problem
at the level of execution--- the process of carrying out the strategy
at the level of product--- manifest in learner’s L2 performance of the applied strategy
Some key features of SLA
study:

1. initial focus on grammatical and psycholinguistic

orientation giving way to more sociopragmatic
perspective
2. typological ---- universal ----cognitive approach
3. individual differences
4. use for language teaching
5. interlanguage
Differences in linguistic change due to
types of language contact

I. conquest/ war/colonialism
imposition of a language of wider communication
establishment of standard languages via institutions
thus transforming the local languages into a minority
language
as a result the minority groups have a slow shift in
language through stages of bilingualism realized over
a long period of time
II. immigration
a population moving into another
mobility towards an already existing political scenario
as a result, rapid assimilation resulting in language shift.

III. family level interaction

a linguistic group is incorporated into another as spouses, servants, slaves, refugees
adopted as equal members of the tribe etc.
inter-marriage on a prolonged and large scale interferes with the language structure
a new-comer (e.g. wives) adopt a new language with imperfections and pass it on to
the children
Also marriage of settlers with the ‘native women’ is a case in point
social level
high degree of bilingualism among speakers of adjacent but
(generally) genetically unrelated languages over a prolonged
period of time.
Contact affects all levels of language, specially phonology
Results into a Sprachbund or a ‘linguistic area’.

V. trade situation
need to communicate between groups of people for trade
purposes in market place---- gives rise to lingua franca
also the plantation scenario where the work-force and the
plantation owners do not share their languages
typically gives rise to pidgins and creoles
Pidgin and Creoles

A pidgin is a system of communication used by

people who do not know each other’s language, but
need to communicate with one another for trading
or other purposes.
Purpose:
1. Immediate and practical need of communication
between groups speaking different languages.
2. created mostly in trade situations, like that of
Papua new guinea.
Thus, the definition

• This is a language that arises in language contact scenario, involving more than two
languages
• The groups have no shared language
• They need to communicate regularly, but only for a specific purpose, like trade
• They can/do not learn each others’ language due to economic, social or political reasons or a
combination of these factors
• Hence they develop a pidgin, drawing the main lexicon from one of the languages.
 Typical features:

1. Derived from a ‘normal’ language through simplification, reduction and admixture,

often considerable, from the native language or language of those who use it.
2. spoken non-natively
3. a means of communication with the ‘other’ group, never a means of intra-group
communication
4. Had to be simple to learn for those who benefited the least, the dominant group.
5. Specially constructed to suit the specific needs arising out of the contact situation.
So the vocabulary and other constructions are also severely restricted, and cannot
be used for a new situation and need.
6. Another situation where the pidgins grew was among the African slaves, when
they were broken into groups pf small number of people from various speech
communities and they had to communicate among themselves and with the slavers.
As the slaves did not have the opportunity to learn the masters’ language properly, the
pidgin remained the only language they communicated with others, thus identifying
slaves with pidgins.
Examples of Tok Pisin, a pidgin
language from Papua New
Huinea

• Haumas klock?
• Em i drink planti wiski
• Mi sori tumas long yu
• Mipela no lukin dok belong yu
Tok pisin: creole spoken in Papua new Guinea
talk pidgin
These lines are taken from a famous comic strip in Papua New Guinea:

"Sapos yu kaikai planti pinat, bai yu kamap strong olsem phantom."

"Fantom, yu pren tru bilong mi. Inap yu ken helpim mi nau?"

"Fantom, em i go we?"

Translation:

• 'If you eat plenty of peanuts, you will come up strong like the phantom.’
•
'Phantom, you are a true friend of mine. Are you able to help me now?’
•
Where did he go?
Grammatical features:

1. Lexicon derived from the dominant language.

2. Phonology and syntax derived from the dominated
language.
3. No morphology.
4. Severe structural simplification.
Pidgin Other language varieties
1. not an example of bad ‘X’, it is # interlanguage
itself a language , with a community
of speakers.
It is never meant to make the speakers
Master the L2.
2. not case of heavy borrowing, as there # borrowing
is no pre-existing variety into which
terms are borrowed
nor does the grammatical simplification
reflect existing phenomena in the donor
language
3. no native speaker of the language, as the # any other language
language exists along side actively retained
mother tongues.
Pidgins and lingua franca:

Both pidgin and lingua francas appear similar on certain

grounds, in that both are used for communication between
people who do not share their mother tongue.

But, a pidgin is actually a type of language, where as lingua

franca refers more to the use of the language concerned.

So, a language, whether or not a pidgin, can act as a lingua

franca among different groups of people; French is the
lingua franca among various African language speakers
(when their languages are mutually unintelligible). For
example, in Zaire for native speakers of Lingala and
Kikongo.
Creole

What: Creoles are pidgins that have acquired native

speakers.
How: in a linguistically mixed community where a pidgin
is used as a lingua franca, children tend to learn it as
their native language; especially if parents use it at
home.
Features:
1. creoles are natural languages
2. Tends to have prepositions, articles, tense, aspect, mood
morphology, embedding etc.
3. simplification accompanying the creation of a pidgin is
“repaired” while creating a creole----- creolisation.
 1. Creoles prove the bioprogram (Universal Grammar) theory: humans
are born with the genetic resources to learn languages and this has
certain universal rules.
2. It is proved by the existence of similar rules and structures prevalent in
creoles all over the world, irrespective of the lexifier or the native
source languages
3. Children are thought to impose structure on the pidgin thereby making
it a natural language, following the rules of the UG.
4. Children use the rules of a natural language on a pidgin, without the
The debate: existence of input (poverty of stimulus).
VS.
1. The difference between structurally enriched pidgins and creoles are
actually negligible.
2. pidgins develop over time and gradually tend to incorporate more
grammatical features.
3. So, its time and not the infant learners’ contribution that can account
for the grammatical complexity of creoles.
4. the only notable difference between the two varieties is the existence
of native speakers in one and not in the other.
De-creolisation: a phenomenon that happens when a creole is spoken in
a country where the language of communication is the creole’s lexifier
source language.

Process: Gradual shifts towards the lexifier source language, with a

range of inter- mediate structures.

Basilect mesolects acrolect

(Creole) post creole continuum ( source language)
Now, some more varieties
We have already talked about Pidgins and Creoles
Now, there are some languages in the world which look like post-
creoles but are not.

Creoloids: These languages, though they show some admixture and

simplification, are not post -creoles because they have not been
creoles, because they have never been pidgins. Case in point is
Afrikaans, a variety of Dutch spoken in South Africa.
This language
• Is mutually intelligible with Dutch.
• Has a lot of mixture from Malay, Portuguese etc
• spoken non-natively by speakers of Malay, Portuguese etc
• was used for all social functions, and therefore, never subjected to
reduction.
 Mixed languages
Another type of language mixing is found in what is
called dual source creoloid or Mixed languages. These
are cases where the source languages contribute
equally to the creation of a new language and the
communities speaking them are not in the traditional
dominant-dominated relationship.

mixed languages are distinct from other regular

languages in that they are new languages and not the
continuation of one of the ancestor languages. It is
not what one of the ancestor languages could have
become through diachronic changes. This is a mixture
of elements of two languages, almost in equal
degree.

• Also important is the fact that these languages cannot

be clearly put under any of the genetic families that
the ancestor languages belonged. These languages
are very often intrinsically connected to the formation
of a new ethnic identity.
• Pitcairnese: sometimes the dual source languages can become
the sole language of a community. This happened in case of
Pitcairnese, the language of remote Pacific Ocean island
Pitcairn. This island community comprises of the descendants
of British sailors, who carried out the mutiny on the Bounty and
Tahitian men and women who went with them to hide on the
island from the Royal British Navy.
• Russenorsk: this is a language spoken in the Northern Norway
until 1917: Russian Revolution. It consisted of elements taken
from Norwegian and Russian in almost equal measures and
arose out of trade between Norway and Russia. Unlike colonial
settings the contributing languages were spoken by people of
equivalent wealth and technology. This also functioned as
lingua franca by speakers of languages like sami, Finnish, Dutch
and German.
• Chindo/ Peranakan Chinese: the Peranakan Chinese are the
descendants of Chinese traders and Indonesian women and are
a separate ethnic group.they use, fir n-group communication, a
mixed language that uses grammatical system of Javanese with
the lexicon of Malay.
Mitchif: this is a language spoken by the descendents of French Canadian fur traders and Amerindian women . it is a
mixture of French and Cree. Unlike the two languages mentioned above, this had a major involvement of children
in the development of the language thus avoiding simplification and reduction. (imperfect language learning is
associated with learner of a source language beyond the age of 14). The speakers are removed both in time and
space from the ancestral languages and their cultures.

• This is a remarkable language where the noun phrases are in French, complete with inflections while the verb
phrases are in Cree, including the complex verbal morphology of that language.

la fam micimine:w li pci

the (fem.) woman she-is-holding-it the (masc) little-one

French French Cree French French

• The woman is holding the child

• Mednyj Aleut: spoken by a handful of elderly people in the Copper Islands in the North Pacific Ocean, east
of Russia. This is spoken by descendants Russian fur traders and Aleut women .unlike Mitchif speakers, the
speakers of this language were never completely broken off from the source languages. Though the
knowledge of Aleut is declining, Russian is gaining ground. 90% of the lexicon is derived from Aleut and the
rest from Russian. Noun inflections are from Aleut and Verbal inflections from Russian.

• Media Lengua: this is a Quechua derived mixed language spoken in the town of San Miguel de Salcedo in
Equador. This is used both as first and second language by Indian peasants, weavers and construction
workers among themselves. They also know both the source languages and use them. Spanish with non –
Indians and Quechua with highland Indians. Researchers believe this language emerged during the
construction of railroad in the area that saw labor migration and urban expansion of the place, however, the
speakers of this language are not a distinct ethnic group. The lexicon is mostly derived from Spanish and the
adverbs, pronouns, numerals, conjunctions etc. the verb and noun inflections, word order, subordinations
etc are from Quechua.
Language shift:

When a community who share a native language abandon it, and

collectively shift to speaking another one
• Whenever two cultures/populations with different languages come in
intense contact, shift is a possibility. Sometimes those who shift are
the weaker group, but sometimes it is the more powerful one who
shifts
Reasons

a. multilingualism:
1. Language shift is always preceded by bi/multilingualism.
2. Move from language-choice-by-audience to language-choice-by-context is a good indictor of shift.
3. When the situation changes such that they code-switch in some contexts, to all speakers, shift
appears to be inevitable

b. attitudes, both internal and external:

1. reinforced/caused by contrasts in power/status/economic opportunity between speakers
2. language contact between two linguistic groups representing different social status and are at
different scales of advancement
3. feeling of cultural inferiority results in eventual loss of the language and culture in question
through a process of cultural assimilation
Further down the spectrum: language
loss
Classification of endangered languages: (UNESCO)

§ potentially endangered languages, socially and economically disadvantaged,

under heavy pressure from a larger language and beginning to lose child
speakers
§ endangered languages: have few or no child speakers, the youngest good
speakers are the young adults
§ seriously endangered languages: the youngest good speakers are 50 or older
§ moribund languages: have only a handful of speakers, mostly very old
§ extinct languages: have no speakers left
Language death:
• Shift leading to death --language death is the extreme case: the complete
disappearance of a language most commonly a gradual process spanning
several generations
Reasons:
1. The speech community is in physical danger, due to catastrophic natural
causes
2. genocide (direct confrontation &/or slow process of spreading diseases
hitherto unknown to the community
4. shift in lifestyle that sees a shift away from the traditional way of life, which
is central to the identity of the group, also contributes to the death of
language.
5. marriage outside the community
Language death

Case 1:
During fieldwork in the Mambila region of Cameroon’s Adamawa province in 1994–95, I came across a number of
moribund languages . . . For one of these languages, Kasabe (called Luo by speakers of neighbouring languages and
in my earlier reports), only one remaining speaker, Bogon, was found. (He himself knew of no others.) In November
1996 I returned to the Mambila region, with part of my agenda being to collect further data on Kasabe. Bogon,
however, died on 5th Nov. 1995, taking Kasabe with him. He is survived by a sister, who reportedly could
understand Kasabe but not speak it, and several chchildren and grandchildren, none of whom know the language.

Case 2:
The West Caucasian language Ubuh . . . died at daybreak, October 8th 1992, when the Last Speaker, Tevfik Esenç,
passed away. I happened to arrive in his village that very same day, without appointment, to interview this famous
Last Speaker, only to learn that he had died just a couple of hours earlier. He was buried later the same day.
• Technically these languages ‘died’ with the last speakers.

• But practically, when there is only one speaker of a language in the community,
‘language’ as a tool for communication is already dead.
• Sometimes, even before it comes to single digit numbers.
Should we bother?
Many think we should not.

In the western world, this attitude has often been attributed to the mythical
story of the tower of Babel, where multilingualism is portrayed as a result of
God’s wrath.
One predominant idea in support of monolingualism is that one language
would help unite people, spreading peace and harmony.

Reality cannot be further from truth. (e.g. Combodia, Rwanada, Burundi etc)
Why bother?
· To understand the language faculty itself
· to understand the general and specific cognitive processes
at work
· Language loss entails loss of cultural heritage—
· Bring to light hitherto unknown relationships among
different languages, thus shedding light on prehistory of
human evolution as well
Language revitalization: Is it possible?
1. totals immersion schools and literacy programmes in the
ethnic language
2. language policy of the Government
3. Case in point Hebrew, Maori, Hawaiian, certain Mexican
languages etc.
Bilingualism

1. who is a bilingual?
a. bilinguals should have native like competence in both the languages
b. someone who has a minimal competence of a second language
c. competence in all the four language dimensions

2. levels of bilingualism
a. individual: a psychological state of an individual who has access to two language codes to
serve communicative purposes
b. societal : two languages are used in a community and a number of speakers can use two
languages.
dimensions

a. cognitive organization of the two languages

I. compound: one semantic system for 2 language codes , often refers to a speaker who
learns both the languages at the same time, in the same context.
II. coordinate: two semantic systems for two language codes, refers to one who learns the
languages in different contexts.
III. subordinate: weaker language is interpreted through the stronger language.

b. age of acquisition
I. infant learners: language learnt before 6 years of age
II. adult learners: language acquired after 12 years of age
c. sequence of acquisition:
I. successive: when one language is learnt after another--- generally the adult learners
II. simultaneous: learning two languages at the same time---infant learners

d. language proficiency/competence:
I. balanced: proficiency in both the languages are similar
II. dominant: proficiency in language is higher than the other
Two views of bilingualism

I. fractional : this view takes the position that a bilingual is equivalent to two monolinguals
put together and entails parallel linguistics competence---hence parallel linguistics
processing.

II. holistic: this view understands that bilinguals integrate the knowledge of and from both
the languages and create something that is greater than each of the languages—sort of a
meta-language system.
Research:

a. do they keep the languages separate?

b. Do they have one lexicon or two?

Through the understanding of;

I. production
II. Perception
II. comprehension
IV. memorization
a. How the languages are organized in the bilingual brain?
I. Research in aphasics: which language has been affected and which not, and what are the process of
recovery for each of the languages?
• II. Language lateralization: whether the left hemisphere is responsible for language in both
monolingual and bilinguals
Attitude towards bi/multilingualism

• Is it good to be multilingual?
• The answer depends on who is asked, where and under what
circumstances.
• People view multilingualism in different and often conflicting ways:
• it is a mark of high education and great prestige,
• it is a social or even a psychological handicap,
• it is a political liability,
• it is a necessity for daily
• living, it is an unremarkable fact of life,
• it is a vital part of a person's ethnic identity etc.
• Almost all these answers would be correct (except the
psychological handicap)
• Response from people tend to tilt towards the emotional
rather than to the objective
• As a scholar famously said, “on such issues most people
seem to subscribe, consciously or subconsciously, to the
`my-mind-is-made-up-don't-confuse-me-with-facts’
school of thought”.
• These attitudes are, most of the time, based on cultural
and social setting.
• For example, in US, being bilingual is appreciated if the
person is native speaker of English; the same feeling is not
extended to those whose first language is not English.
In the ‘oriental’ nations, things have been rather interesting.

Multiple languages have lived here since time immemorial.

Foreign invasions/colonizing brought more languages

This led to change in official language policies

At ground level, however, multilingualism in the ‘native’ languages continued,

leading to interesting phenomenon.
One such outcome is called the creation of ‘linguistic area’.
English DON'T, Mandarin 不要
• Cantonese 篤 duk1 'poke
 • Refers to mixing of linguistic codes
• Bilingual speakers- mix lexical items, phrases,
clauses, and sentences during conversations
• They mix or switch codes according to situations,
topics and various other factors
Code mixing • CM & CS are common factors and frequent mode
& Code of interaction among bilingual speakers
• They are creative outcome of bilingual mind that
switching uses two or more linguistic systems to create an
effective for maximum communicability.
• Interference on the discourse level is known as
CS which is one of the major aspects of
multilingualism.
Code Mixing and code Switching is a communicative strategy.

- Weinreich (1953) describes bilingualism as “the practise of alternatively using

two languages”

- Gumperz (1982) states that code- switching is juxtaposition within same speech
exchange of passages of speech belonging to two different grammatical systems
or subsystem.

- Code mixing refers to the embedding of linguistic units such as phrases, words
and morpheme of one language into an utterance of another language (Myers-
Scott, 1993)

- Code switching is usually inter-sentential while code mixing is an intra-sentential

phenomenon. Linguists believe that there exists a continuum in the manner of
which lexical items transfer from one to another of two languages in contact.

- Weinreich (1968) described the ideal bilingual as the one who switches from one
language to another according to appropriate changes in the speech situations
(interlocutor, topic, etc.) but not in an unchanged speech situation and certainly
not within a single sentence.
 • Wei (1998) observed that if code alternation occurs at or above
clause level, it is considered code-switching and if below in the
it is considered Code Mixing
• Tayl (1995) explains how came code - mixing functions as

Patterns of
communication strategy in multilingual communities among
proficient bilingual speakers.
• Patterns of Code -switching are found to be different from one
mixing another because of several distinctive processes:
1. Insertion
2. Alteration
3. congruent lexicalization
These three processes correspond to dominant mode approaches (Muysken, 2000)
1. Insertion: it occurs when lexical items from one language are incorporated into another The notion of insertion according to Muysken (2000)
corresponds to what Clyne (1991) terms as transference and Myer Scotton as "Embedding”.
eg: - aaj highway pe ex accident ho gaya
2. Alternation: It accords when structures of two languages are alternnated indistinctively both at the grammatical a lexical level
eg: - Heat ke Karan tired feel kar raha hoon.
3. Congruent Lexicalization: It refers to the situation where two languages share grammatical structures which can be filled lexically with the
elements from either language. (Mysken,2000)
eg: --ye chapatis kacchi hain!
filo-on ko download karke save karlo.
Building me te lift lagi hai par stairs hi use karta hoon.

Reasons for bilingualism-

• Deficit hypothesis (lack of terms)
• Augmentation hypothesis (free will of speakers = creativity of speakers).
Linguistic area
Sprachbund/linguistic area

• Linguistic Area is the English version of the German Sprachbund (language union),
apparently introduced by Nikolai S. Trubetzkoy in 1928.
• a linguistic area is a geographical region containing a group of three or more
languages that share some structural features as a result of contact rather than as a
result of accident or inheritance from a common ancestor.
• The important factor here is the existence of more than two languages, and they
should be in contact.
 • While talking about shared features,
there are many instances where shared
features may be seen but they do not
form a linguistic area
• For example, loan words. Loan words
are also part of LA, but alone they
cannot signal its existence. Certain
First, what is not a words are part of vocabularies across
the world, like burger, pizza, email, coca
linguistic area cola, democracy and linguistics.
• Similarly, few linguistic features arise in
language, probably due to some
manifestation of underlying universal
rules of languages. Like the phoneme /t/
and a clear-cut lexical distinction
between nouns and verbs. So, the
existence of this shared feature is also
not a qualifying marker.
• And genetically related languages inherit their lexicon and structural features from
their common parent language, so that they share features at all levels of the lexicon
and grammar, provided that the time depth of the relationship is not so great that
most or all of the shared features have vanished or changed out of recognition.
• Thus, all languages that descended from the Indo Aryan family share a host of
features.
• English and German inherited both the word for `sing' and the vowel changes in its
past tense and past participle: the English forms sing, sang, and sung correspond
precisely to the German root forms in sing(-en), sang, and ge-sung-en.
• There are two crucial questions here: first, how
do linguistic areas arise? And second, how are
their linguistic features to be interpreted
historically - that is, where did the features
arise, and how did they spread through the
area?

• The answer to the first question is that they

arise in any of several ways - through social
networks established by such interactions as
trade and exogamy, through the shift by
indigenous peoples in a region to the
language(s) of invaders, and through repeated
instances of movement by small groups to
different places within the area
• Natural and political boundaries help to
set the boundaries of a linguistic area,
because they help to limit the spread of
features to languages beyond the borders.

• To understand the variety of linguistic

areas as a social and historical
phenomenon, we need to have an idea of
their distribution and their social and
linguistic nature.
Some linguistic areas around the world

• The fact that unrelated languages living within a geographical area share a number of
structural features
• This is not exactly a new finding
• a Swedish prisoner of war, sent by his Russian captors to Siberia, compiled a list of
common features linking Uralic Language Contact and Altaic languages of eastern
Russia, among them the presence of vowel harmony and agglutinative morphology.
• And in the nineteenth century Bartholomaeus Kopitar (in 1829 and 1857) and Franz
von Miklosich (in 1861) launched the field of Balkan linguistics by publishing some
areal features of the Balkan Sprachbund.
• However, majority of work in LA belongs to the 20th century.
• Although there are many LAs in the world, the most well known and well studied is the Balkan
Sprachbund.
• The Balkan linguistic area comprises six languages (either the entire language or some of its
dialects) that represent several branches of the Indo-European family: Romance, Slavic,
Albanian,Macedonian and Greek (and possibly Indic, if the Indic language Romani is considered
to be a seventh member language).
• Several phonological and morphosyntactic linguistic features characterize the area; each one
occurs in most of the languages, but not always the same languages, and there is also
considerable variation in the expression of the various features from language to language
• Due to multilingual contacts and political events, it had contributed to shared to the development
of shared linguistic features.
Balkan Sprachbund (source: wiki)
The Baltic

• the Balkan Peninsula is the best-known linguistic area in Europe, it is not the
only one.
• One more such area is called the Standard Average European, or SAE (though
it essentially includes only Indo-European languages of western Europe), and
• Then a third one is the Northern Eurasian Sprachbund (North Eurpoean to
Siberia and central Asia).
• But probably the best-established linguistic area of Europe after the Balkans
is in northeastern Europe in the region around the Baltic Sea, where several
languages belonging to two, or possibly three, different families form a
Sprachbund.
Baltic Sea (source: Wiki)
• One set is a group of Uralic languages of the Finnic branch, including at least
Estonian, Livonian, and Karelian.

• The other main members of the linguistic area are Indo-European: several members
of the Balto-Slavic branch ± Latvian and Lithuanian (Baltic) and northwestern Russian
dialects (Slavic) ± and dialects of German spoken in the Baltic region.

• There are some speculations on whether Turkic language Karaim belongs to this as
well.
Uralic Languages (source:
wiki)
Indian Linguistic Area

• India represents six distinct language families spread over a large region and spoken
by more than one billion speakers - Indo-Arya, Draidian, Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-
Burman, Andamanese, Tai-Kadai
• Though the exact figure of number of languages is not very clear partly because of the
fuzzy demarcation between‘language’ and ‘dialect’ question and partly because of
shifting language loyalty of the people.
• However, a rough estimate is that there are more than 1600 languages spoken in the
present India.
• If India is known for its multiplicity
and diversity of languages it is
because of our tribal languages.

• The rate of bilingualism as well as

the numerical strength of the distinct
varieties of languages is highest
among tribal population.

• For instance, Tibeto-Burman and

Austro-Asiatic language family are
represented by 100% tribal
population.
Hierarchal status of Indian languages and dialects
(https://www.academia.edu/10178488/Languages_of_India_and_India_as_a_Linguistic_Area
• Linguistic Area was made popular by
M.B. Emeneau (1956)who defined it
as “an area which includes
languages belonging to more than
one family but showing traits in
common which are found not to
belong to other members of (at least)
one of the families”. Later it was
named as “Areal linguistics”.

• Areal linguistics explains what is not

explainable by “genetic” historical
linguistics. It is the study that explain
linguistic similarities across distinct
language families.
• Indian linguistic area is characterized by
common linguistic traits such as-
retroflex sounds, SOV word order,
absence of prepositions, morphological
reduplication (expressives), echo
formations, reduplicated verbal adverbs.
• Since Linguistic Areas are result of
convergence of Linguistic features, it
implies a simultaneous process of
divergence of the languages. When a
language ‘A’ becomes like language ‘B’
because of the influence of the mutual
contact, it also starts deviating from the
other genetically related languages of its
stock.
• It is the multilingualism which is
responsible for the genesis of ‘South
Asia’ or ‘India as a linguistic area’.

• Some of the most interesting results of

language convergence have fed into the
research of Genetics, where scientist get
initial clue to look for mixing of
population.

• In genomic studies had been resulted

that “geographical affinity plays a
stronger role than does cultural affinity
in determining genetic affinity”
(Majumdar 1998: 108).