Journal of Language Contact最新文献

The article presents the results of a longitudinal study of the language situation in a multilingual village of Andryushkino (northeast of the Sakha Republic). It is one of two localities where the endangered Tundra Yukaghir (TY) language is still used. Data on TY proficiency were collected in this village by one of the authors in 1987 and then, 35 years later, by the other author in 2022. In both cases, the same methodology for assessing the degree of language competence (DLC) with the help of experts was used. Comparison of data from 1987 and 2022 shows a significant decrease in DLC in younger and middle-aged generations. Our data include 13 people whose DLC was assessed in both studies. The degree of TY competence in six cases out of thirteen has increased over 35 years. The article provides several possible explanations for this growth against the background of linguistic biographies of the speakers and the multicultural and multilingual environment of the village of Andryushkino.

The present study uses the apparent-time construct to analyze cross-generational variability of the preverbal double negation construction (i.e., yo tampoco no voy a la fiesta ‘I’m not going to the party either’), traditionally cited as a regional characteristic of the Spanish spoken in the Basque Country. An acceptability judgment task and a semi-structured interview were carried out among four different age groups. The results show that speakers of the two older generations tend to accept and produce the regional construction significantly more than speakers of the two younger generations, who favor the Standard Spanish variant (yo tampoco voy a la fiesta ‘I’m not going to the party either’). It is suggested that this trend is mainly due to the participants’ different language contact situations (Thomason and Kaufman, 1988) and levels of formal education. Since older speakers grew up in a situation of shift via interference and with lower levels of formal education, they prefer the preverbal double negation construction, which was already a norm in the regional Spanish. However, younger speakers grew up in a language maintenance situation and have relatively high formal education levels, factors that have conditioned dialectal leveling in this case.

In this research, the People and Plants method illuminates language interactions in Eastern Mali’s Bandiagara Region. Home to six linguistic groups, the Bandiagara Escarpment has sheltered two populations for at least 800 years, though their pre-cliff origins are unclear. Historical empires might have driven them to this defensible terrain, with fertile lands anchoring them. Notably, evidence points to early pearl millet domestication not far from here, a Sahelian staple, around 5,000 years ago. Examining current plant-related lexemes across local languages and contrasting with distant, unrelated languages offers insights into older forms. Merging these findings with external data depicts language contact layers. Modern Bandiagara residents, likely with pre-existing botanical knowledge, may have been influenced by the ‘Mande Expansion’ and its vast West African trade routes.

The descriptive contribution of this paper is a typology of mouthing constructions in 37 signed languages and an analysis of the ideologies and resources that affect their documentation. The languages are divided into two categories labelled deaf (n=26) and rural (n=11), that are defined based on socio-historical/-cultural properties, but which have been problematised for their conflation of multiple linguistic ecologies (Kusters, 2009: 200; Nyst, 2012; Reed, 2019; Safar, 2020). The analysis is used to argue that phenomena like mouthing are marginalised in documentation, as opposed to marginal, and that the deaf-rural divide tracks differences that are more related to issues of documentation than contexts of language use and emergence. The Semiotic Repertoires approach (Kusters et al., 2017) is used to motivate the unit of analysis, the mouthing construction, and Uniformitarianism in Creole linguistics (Mufwene, 2000; DeGraff, 2005) is used as a lens onto signed language typology.

This study addresses variation in the realization of intervocalic /b/ in the Spanish of Rivera, Uruguay, a border community that is bilingual in Portuguese and Spanish. While Spanish has one phoneme that corresponds to the graphemes ⟨b⟩ and ⟨v⟩, which is normally realized as an approximant or deleted intervocalically, Portuguese contrasts a voiced bilabial stop phoneme /b/ with a voiced labiodental fricative phoneme /v/. Sociolinguistic interviews from 40 native speakers of Riverense Spanish were analyzed acoustically using a consonant-vowel intensity ratio as a correlate of the degree of constriction in the realization of intervocalic /b/. Results indicate that speakers that use more Portuguese are more likely to contrast degree of constriction in words with Portuguese /b/ and /v/ cognates. Speakers that primarily use Spanish, on the other hand, contrast constriction based on orthography, a phenomenon that has been called “pedantic v” and “orthographic loyalty” in other Spanish varieties.

What can we learn from language island research? Answers drawn from German language island research refer to linguistics, ethnology and language politics. German language islands in Russia and Brazil are on the way to language shift. The varieties of these communities display varying degrees of decomposition and simplification in terms of morphology. Regular and irregular morphology are developing differently. How could these differences be explained? What is the impact of language contact? To what extent does variation within language change depend on the distinctiveness of this linguistic community? The contribution is about comparative language island research, relating linguistic results to the ethnographic background and the conditions of language politics.

Résumé

Il existe, dans le sud-ouest de la Mauritanie, un îlot de locuteurs parlant une variété de berbère appelée le zénaga. Dans cet îlot, devenu entièrement bilingue, la pratique de l’arabe ḥassāniyya est devenue beaucoup plus courante que celle du berbère et ne cesse de se renforcer. L’article comporte trois parties après l’introduction. La première, consacrée à la situation actuelle des zénagophones, précise leur territoire, leur nombre, les valeurs qu’ils attribuent aux langues qu’ils parlent et ce qu’elles représentent par rapport à leur identité culturelle. La seconde porte sur l’histoire de la région et plus particulièrement celle des populations berbérophones, présentes au Sahara ouest-africain depuis le néolithique, qui connurent leur heure de gloire au XI^e siècle avec l’épisode almoravide et un enclavement très progressif après l’arrivée des Bäni Ḥassān. La dernière partie propose une étude linguistique qui permet de situer le zénaga par rapport aux autres parlers berbères, de le comparer avec le parler tetserret qui lui est le plus proche et d’évaluer les effets du contact avec les langues voisines.

Sociolinguistically, isolation can be seen as a speech-community event which is commonly the result of migration, e.g., if speakers from a larger speech community migrate into a language island, leading to contact-induced variation. Another type of language island results from extensive language shift when a formerly larger language area shrinks to a remnant speech community, an enclave. The literature shows, however, that in both cases ethno-linguistic vitality is precarious, and that the impact of language contact is observable at all levels. Nevertheless, the question arises as to whether contact-induced variation is sociolinguistically distinct from variation in an enclave island. The paper describes the enregisterment of semi-speech and repair strategies similar to ‘L1 creolisation’ in an endangered Eastern Mande language, Kyanga, spoken on the border of Benin/Nigeria.

The traditional hunter-gatherer group of Akie in Tanzania provides a paradigm example of a language island. Separated from its linguistic relatives by hundreds of kilometres, with no contact whatsoever between the two, the Akie are struggling for survival, both economically and linguistically.

The Siwi language is spoken in the Siwa oasis in the Egyptian Western Desert. It is the easternmost place where a Berber variety (Afro-Asiatic) is spoken. Siwi is not the only language spoken in the oasis, as the entire population speaks at least one variety (Bedouin and/or Egyptian) of Arabic. Siwi speakers can be firmly differentiated from Egyptians or Bedouins settled in the oasis not only because of their language, but also because of an entire set of customs and traditions that contribute to creating their identity. Though recent factors brought by modernity are levelling the gap between Siwa and the other communities, and Arabic influence on the language is increasing, this article discusses some distinctive historical, socio-cultural and linguistic features of Siwa.