Sociolinguistics and Language Influence

Introduction to Language Contact

• Language contact occurs when speakers of different languages interact, leading to borrowing, code-switching, or the creation of new languages.
• Language contact is a fundamental aspect of human history and continues to shape language worldwide.

Dialect Levelling

• Dialect levelling is the process by which regional dialects become more uniform over time, particularly in urban areas.
• Migration and social network shifts are key drivers of this phenomenon.

Case Study of Milton Keynes

• Milton Keynes, a new town in the UK, provides a case study of how new accents and dialects develop in urbanizing communities.
• The study, by Kerswill and Williams, shows how children create a unique accent by blending elements from various parent dialects.

Global Language Contact

• Language contact is a global phenomenon, occurring through trade, migration, and globalization.
• This has resulted in a rich tapestry of linguistic diversity and borrowing.

Pidgins and Creoles

• Pidgins are simplified languages that emerge when speakers of different languages need to communicate but do not share a common language.
• Pidgins are often characterized by reduced grammar and vocabulary, emerging in situations like trade and colonization.
• When pidgins become the first language of successive generations, they evolve into creoles, becoming fully developed languages with complex grammatical structures and vocabularies.

Creole Creation

• Creole languages often arise from pidgins, which have become stabilized and transformed into fully developed languages, particularly in instances where children in a community learn a pidgin as their first language.
• This is often evident in instances of multilingual communities, where children begin to develop a new language by incorporating elements from existing languages, demonstrating the capacity for language to evolve.

Expanded Pidgins

• Expanded pidgins are languages that result from pidgins adapting to more complex communicative needs.
• These languages are often characterized by retaining some simplified structure while also expanding communicative capacities for greater complexity. Example: Hawaiian Pidgin.

Language Contact and Sociolinguistic Theory

• Language contact is central to sociolinguistics and shapes language variation and change dynamically.
• Language contact has lasting implications on regional dialects and helps to understand how communities shift linguistically over time and across space.

Real-Time and Apparent-Time Studies of Language Change

• Real-Time studies examine language change directly over time by collecting data from the same community across different times.
• Apparent-time studies observe language changes by analysing speech from different age groups at a single point in time to infer historical change.
• These approaches each have benefits and drawbacks, and often both are used together to provide greater depth in research.

Profiles of Change

• Profiles of change track how specific linguistic variables evolve via various patterns such as slow adoption, rapid increase, or stabilization.
• These are useful tools for researchers to better understand language adaptation and evolution.

Class Stratification and Language

• Social class can significantly influence language use in a community.
• Societal change, modernization, and shifts in cultural attitudes can alter the perceived prestige of different language varieties in a community.
• The adoption of particular language characteristics is often a tool for expressing identity, marking certain class divisions, or indicating particular social distinctions within a community.

Cross-Over Effects

• Speakers from one class may adopt features of another class, particularly in formal situations,
• These effects reflect changes in social status, community norms, and the interaction between social groupings within a region.
• Many language researchers have shown how different aspects of social groups and cultures are reflected in the forms of language utilized by people in certain social situations.