Contact and Language Shift

Abstract

Among the many contact situations those which involve language shift occupy a special position. All language shift scenarios have in common that at the outset there is one language and at the end another which is the majority language in the community which has experienced the shift. This is true now and must also have been in history and pre-history when countless cases of shift occurred. Just consider the early Indo-European migrations. Movements of sub-groups of this family into new geographical locations usually meant that the pre-Indo-European populations were ‘absorbed’, i.e. that they shifted in language (and culture) to the branch of Indo-European they were confronted with. This shift may be partial or complete, for instance, on the Iberian peninsula it was partial with Basque remaining but in the British Isles it was complete. The shift may have lasted into history, making the ‘absorption’ more visible, as was the case with Etruscan in Italy. Whether the Indo-European branches still show traces of this early contact and shift is much disputed (see Vennemann this volume for relevant comments). But going on shift scenarios today and assuming that the same principles of contact applied then as now, one can postulate the influence of earlier groups on later groups if the size of the shifting population was sufficient for the features of its shift variety to influence the language they were shifting to as a whole. This is not always the case, however, so a note of caution should be struck here. Moving forward to recent history one can see in the anglophone world that language shift did not always leave traces of the original language(s). The considerable shift of native Americans to English has not affected general forms of English in either the USA or Canada. What may occur is that the shift variety establishes itself as a form in its own right, focussed with a stable speech community, cf. South African Indian English (Mesthrie 1992), but even then there is usually a further approximation to supraregional forms of English which dilute the specific profile of the shift variety, cf. Australian Aboriginal English and Maori English.