Multilingualism and Language Contact
Multilingualism and language contact studies the social life of communities where more than one language is used, and the linguistic and social outcomes that arise when languages come into contact.
Definition
Multilingualism and language contact is the area of sociolinguistics that examines how multiple languages coexist within speakers and communities and the social and linguistic consequences of their contact, from code choice to language shift and creole genesis.
Scope
This area covers individual and societal bilingualism, the functional division of languages in diglossia, the alternation of codes within discourse, and large-scale outcomes such as language shift, maintenance, death, and the emergence of pidgins and creoles. It treats domains of language use, the social motivations for choosing one code over another, and the dynamics of minority and majority languages. The structural mechanics of contact-induced change overlap with historical linguistics, and ideology about multilingualism is treated under attitudes.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- How do communities allocate languages across social domains?
- Why and how do speakers switch between codes in interaction?
- What social conditions lead a community to maintain, shift, or lose a language?
- How do pidgins and creoles arise from situations of intense contact?
Key concepts
- Individual vs. societal bilingualism
- Domains of language use
- Diglossia
- Language shift and maintenance
- Pidginization and creolization
Key theories
- Domains of language use
- Fishman proposed that multilingual communities assign languages to distinct social domains such as home, work, and religion, so that code choice is patterned by situation rather than random.
- Contact-induced outcomes
- Weinreich's study of languages in contact, extended by Thomason and Kaufman, framed how interference, borrowing, and shift produce predictable social and structural outcomes depending on the intensity of contact.
History
Modern study of contact began with Weinreich's 1953 Languages in Contact, was given a social-functional frame by Fishman's domains and diglossia work in the 1960s, and was systematized for contact-induced change by Thomason and Kaufman in 1988.
Debates
- Predicting contact outcomes
- Scholars debate how far the linguistic outcomes of contact can be predicted from social factors such as intensity and power asymmetry versus structural constraints internal to the languages involved.
Key figures
- Uriel Weinreich
- Joshua Fishman
- Sarah Thomason
Related topics
Seminal works
- weinreich1953
- fishman1967
- thomason1988
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between individual and societal bilingualism?
- Individual bilingualism refers to a single person's ability to use two languages, while societal bilingualism describes whole communities in which two or more languages are regularly used, often allocated to different social domains.