Language Contact and Language Change, BATS

This class covers a range of language contact situations and phenomena. After considering basic issues of language contact and change, e.g. the difficulties in distinguishing code-switching from borrowing and modern theoretical approaches to language mixing like translanguaging, we will use these insights to analyse language contact and multilingualism in the history of English, especially in the Middle English period. We will analyse medieval manuscripts that exhibit considerable language mixing and discuss the role of English in relation to other contemporary languages in Britain, but we will also look at language change on different levels of description: morphology, syntax, and phonetics & phonology, and discuss the role that language contact may have played in these changes. These long-term and historical developments have led to the formulation of theories and models of language contact and change such as the borrowing scales in Thomason & Kaufman's seminal work. By considering a contemporary contact situation in Southern Africa in the second half of the semester, we will compare the existing models and language contact phenomena from historical periods with the language structure and use in a currently developing variety of English:

Namibia, a country in Southern Africa that only became independent in 1990, chose English as its sole official language, although it had no direct colonial relationship with Britain. Nambia's recent independence and choice of English as its official language offers us as linguists the opportunity to study the emergence of a contact variety from the very beginning. We don't have to rely solely on imperfect data from the past, but can test theories and models in realtime using experimental data, surveys, and observations as well as existing data. This seminar will introduce you to a number of different empirical studies on Namibian English, covering structural patterns as well as social and cultural aspects related to language choice, language mixing, and language policy. We will discuss the potential and limitations of online data for researching language contact and change, for example. We will discuss these linguistic developments in the context of colonialism and its lasting effects on former colonies and their languages.