Language Contact and Evolution

Language Contact and Its Influence on Language Evolution

• Language contact refers to the interaction between speakers of two or more languages or dialects that can influence each other.
• Sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and formal linguistics are used to study language contact.
• Language contact can result in phenomena such as language convergence, borrowing, and relexification, leading to the development of pidgins, creoles, code-switching, and mixed languages.
• Multilingualism has been common throughout human history, and most people in the world today are multilingual.
• The most common way that languages influence each other is the exchange of words (lexical diffusion).
• The borrowing of basic characteristics of a language such as morphology and grammar can also occur.
• The direction of influence of a language can be one-sided, mutual, or non-mutual.
• Language shift can occur when one language has a higher social position, leading to language endangerment or extinction.
• Stratal influence can occur when people retain features of the substratum as they learn the new language, leading to the development of a new variety.
• Language contact can also lead to the development of new languages when people without a common language interact closely, resulting in the formation of pidgins and creoles or mixed languages.
• Language contact can affect only a particular segment of a speech community, leading to dialectal and sub-cultural change.
• Language contact can also happen between sign languages or between sign languages and oral languages.