Bilingualism and Language Contact

1 Introduction: Bilingualism and language contact Imagine the history of mankind, not as a history of peoples or nations, but of the languages they speak. A history of 5000 languages, thrown together on this plane!, constantly interacting. Imagine the treaty of Versailles not as...

1 Introduction: Bilingualism and language contact Imagine the history of mankind, not as a history of peoples or nations, but of the languages they speak. A history of 5000 languages, thrown together on this plane!, constantly interacting. Imagine the treaty of Versailles not as an event of international diplomacy, but in terms of people putting on their best French to make themselves understood and achieve the greatest advantage. Think afCanes' conquest of Mexico in 1532 not as an outrageous narrativeofbravery, cruelty and betrayal, but in terms of the crucial role of his Indian mistress Malinche, interpreter between Aztec and Spanish. Think of the sugar plantations, where [he uprooted slaves were thrown together, as meeting places for many African languages. Imagining all this, two things come to mind: first, how closely the history of languages is tied up with and is a reflection of the history of peoples and nations. Second, how little we know of languages in contact. Far more is known about the economic consequences of Balkanization, the disintegration of the Austrian empire, than of what happened to all the languages of the Kaiserliche und Kiinigliche Reich when it fell apart in 1918. This book tries to provide the concepts needed to understand what it means for two languages to come into contact. What happens in communities where several languages are spoken? How can speakers handle these languages simultaneously? When and why will the different languages actually be used? Which consequences does language contact have for the languages involved? These are the main issues we address here. In this chapter we will give a bit of background to the discussion by sketching a few of the conceptual problems, listing some of the reasons why researchers have wanted to look at language contact (hoping that these may be valid for the reader as well), describing some of the major types of language contact in the world, giving a brief history of the field and presenting, fina!ly, a sketch of the different contributing sub- disciplines and an outline of the book. 1.1 Bilingualism: concepts and definitions Language contact inevitably leads to bilingualism. Generally, two types of bilin- gualism are distinguished: societal and individual bilingualism. Roughly speaking, societal bilingualism occurs when in a given society two or more languages are spoken. In this sense, nearly all societies are bilingual, but they can differ with regard 2 Introduction: Bilingualism and language contact IT m ~ , language A; _ ' language B Figure 1.1 Schemalically represented forms of SOCIetal bihngualism to the degree or form of bilingualism. Theoretically, the following forms can be distinguished (see Figure 1.1). In situation I the two languages are spoken by two different groups and each group is monolingual; a few bilingual individuals take care of the necessary intergroup communication. This form of societal bilingualism often occurred in former colonial countries, where the colonizer spoke English, for instance, and the native people a local language. In societies of type II all people are bilingual. Approximations to such a form of societal bilingualism can be found in African countries and in India. Often people have command of more than twO languages. In the third form of societal bilingualism one group is monolingual, and the other bilingual. In most cases this last group will form a minority, perhaps not in the numerical or statistical, but in the sociological sense: it is a non·dominant or oppressed group. Situations like III can be observed in Greenland, for example, where the people who speak Greenlandic Inuit must become bilingual, i.e. learn Danish, while the Danish-speaking group, which is sociologically dominant, can remain monolingual. Of course, forms I, II and III are only theoretical types which do not exist in a pure form in the world we live in: different mixtures are much more common. The linguistic situation of most countries is far more complex, with more than two groups and more than two languages involved. It is useful, however, to keep the ideal typology in mind when we describe complex bilingual societies. It is fairly dear what indiVIdual bilingualism is, but determining whether a given person is bilingual or not is far from simple. Many people in Britain have learned some French in school and practice it on their annual holiday, but are they bilingual in the same way as young Puerto Ricans in New York, who use both Spanish and English with equal ease? To what e:;tent must a speaker have command over the two languages in order to be labelled a bilingual? Must he or she have fluent oral and writing skills in both languages? Must a true bilingual be proficient in productive (speaking, writing) as well as receptive tasks (listening, reading)? Which components or the language are the criteria: vocabulary, pronunciation, syntax, pragmatics? In the history of the study of bilingualism various defi'1itions have been proposed. We will give two extreme, but well-known variants. Bloomfield made the highest demands. According to him, a bilingual should possess 'native·like control of two or more languages' (1933: 56). At the other extreme, Macnamara (1969) proposed that somebody should be calied bilingual ifhe has some second-language skilis in one of  Bilingualism: conceprs and definitions 3 the four modalities (speaking, listening, writing, reading), in addition to his first- language skills. The problem of a psychologIcal definition, in terms of proficiency, seems to be unsurmountable, not because of measurement problems (which are complex enough by themselves), but because it is impossible to find a general norm or standard for proficiency. Therefore we prefer a sociological definition, in line wirh Weinreich (1953: 5), who said that 'the practice of alternatively using two languages will be cal!ed here bilingualism, and the persons involved bilinguals'. Somebody who regularly uses two or more languages in alternation is a bilinguaL Within this definition speakers may still differ widely in their actual linguistic skills, of course, but we should be careful not to impose standards for bilinguals that go much beyond those for monolinguals. The very fact that bilinguals use various languages in different circumstances suggests that it is their overall linguistic competence that should be compared to that of monolinguals. All too often imposing Bloomfield's criteria on bilinguals has led to their stigmatization as being somehow deficient in their language capacities. With regard to the terminology used in this book, two more things: (\) The terms bl1ingual and bIlingualism also apply to situations where more than twO languages are involved. Only in obviously appropriate cases will we sometimes use the terms multilingual and multilingualism. (2) In this book the terms bilingual/ism refer to conventionally recognized languages and nor to dialects of languages (for instance, London Cockney and Received Pronunciation), although we are quite aware of the fact that many research findings and concepts in the study of bilingualism carryover to bidialectism. Any de'finition of bilingualism has to come to grips with a central problem in the social sciences: that of scale and of aggregation. Are we talking about individuals, about families, neighbourhoods or whole societies? What can 'language contact' possibly mean, since 'language' is an abstraction? Speakers can be in contact, meta- phorically speaking two grammars might be said to be in contact in the brain of an individual, but languages as whole entities? We do find bilingual societies where many individual speakers are not bilingual, particularly societies organized along caste lines, or with very strong social divisions. An example of the latter would be the province of Quebec before the Second World War, where an English-speaking urban bourgeoisie coexisted with a French-speaking farming community (cf. form I in Figure 1.1). A second problem has to do with our definition of languages as welL Is it meaningful to speak of language contact given the fact that we do not know how to distinguish between languages and dialects? Hindi and Urdu are two, religiously differentiated, varieties of essentially the same language: Hindi is spoken by Hindus and Urdu by Moslems. Is there a possibility oflanguage contact here, or just of dialect mixture? The same holds for Dutch and German along the eastern border of the Netherlands. Where does it become meaningful to speak of the two languages being in contact? How different do the two codes have to be? A third set of problems has to do with the level of grammatical analysis that we deal with. If we accept the replacement of the central notion of 'language' by that of 'grammar', then we surely should speak of 'grammars in contact'. Then again, if we accept the notion common in generative grammar since the late 1970s that grammars