Bilingualism and Multilingualism PDF

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 4 Introduction: Bilingualism and language contact consist of a number of independent components, (the phrase structure component, the transformational component, the lexicon, the phonological component), then the question is whether we should not be dealing with components of grammars in contact. This problem may seem very academic, but in chapters 10 and 13 we will argue that it is crucial for understanding what is going on. 1.2 Reasons for studying language contact Turning now to reasons for studying language contact, we can discern strong impulses both from social concerns and from developments in language studies. Countries such as Belgium and Canada, both with language groups that are sometimes opposed to each other, have created centres for the study of bilingualism, stimulated research and produced outstanding scholars. It is hoped that a thorough and dispassionate analysis of bilingual language behaviour will help us to gain insight into the language problems of groups and individuals and thus support language planning and educational policies. This type of research has been recognized as crucial in countries such as India, which faces a combination oflanguages spoken of daunting complexity, and has become one of the world's centres for language-contact research. Sometimes it is called 'the laboratory of multilingualism'. In addition to these countries, characterized by a long history of bilingualism, a large number of countries, particularly in the industrialized West, have become bilingual on a large scale in the last 20 years due to migration. The presence of groups of migrants has had a great impact on these societies: suddenly a number of myths about monolingual and monocultural national identity were shattered. The political emancipation and educational needs of the migrant groups have stimulated in turn a whole new series of language-contact studies, both in Europe and in the US and Canada. It is not only minorities of migrants that have participated in these processes of political and cultural emancipation, however, but also a number of traditional minority groups. These groups have clamoured for political decentralization, recognition oflheir own language and culture and bilingual education. This, in turn, has led to a number of studies on language-contact issues. On the level of ideology, these developments have not remained without repercussions. The process of decolonization has left the former colonial powers, one might say, with a lot to think about. A strong tradition of historical research has emerged that focuses on the conditions, processes and consequences of colonialism, both for the colonizing powers and for the Third World. This tradition has enriched our perception of colonization itself considerably, and allows us to look at the propa- gation and expansion of the European languages in a wider perspective. It also allows us to develop a vocabulary and conceptual model for talking about systems, induding languages, influencing each other. The cultural developments in the West of the 1960s led to a return to the study of the vernacular languages, away from purism, induding the spoken languages of minority groups. An early manifestation of this was the emergence of Black and Amerindian studies in the US in the early 1970s, and certainly the study oflanguage- contact phenomena has profited from this development. Here phenomena such as creole languages were involved that dearly did not fit into a purist conception.  Situations of language contaCl 5 When we turn to linguistics itself, the study oflanguage contact has developed into a paradigm for sociolinguistics as a whole. Sociolinguistics as a discipline has stressed the diversity in language use. The study of diversity leads, of course, to a focus on the clearest example of diversity: multilingualism. All the major issues in the sociolin- guistic study of the so-called monolingual speech communities reappear in enlarged form in the study oflanguage contact: style shift, linguistic change, code selection and speech repenoire, attitudes, and perhaps variation. Both societal pressures, then, and trends internal to our cultural perceptions and internal to linguistics have fostered the study of language contact from a number of different perspectives. We will turn to these shortly. 1.3 Situations oflanguage contact In section 1.1 we presented a schematic typology of bilingualism. Here we will attempt to describe what the dominant language contact situations in recent history are. Such a survey can only be very provisional and tentative, particularly because space and time play tricks on us. What seems like a stable situation now may rapidly change in the future, or be the interim result of an extremely drastic change that escapes our view. A first historical situation of language contact is the linguistic archipelago: many often unrelated languages, each with few speakers, spoken in the same ecosphere. Such situations are rare at this moment, but must have been frequent in the precolonial era. Examples now are the Amazon basin and the Australian desert, where many aboriginal peoples still live in tribal groups. Sociolinguistically these areas are characterized by extensive bilingualism, linguistically by widespread diffusion of words and elements of grammar from language to language. A second setting for language contact involves more or less stable borders between language families. One such border runs between the Romance and Germanic languages through Switzerland (where French and Romansch are spoken in the South, and Swiss German in the North) and Belgium (where Dutch and German are spoken in the North and French in the South). Another example is the border between the Indo-European and Dravidian languages running through India. It is hard to generalize across these cases: for India extensive borrowing is reported, and Ihis does not seem to exist in Switzerland, and only marginally in Belgium. These differences appear to be due to the very different power and status relationships obtaining between the languages involved. In this book we return to such differences repeatedly. If one thing can be learned from language-contact studies it is how important the overall social context is. Sociolinguistics is not like chemistry, and when you put two languages together the same thing does not always happen. The third type of situation in which language contact occurs is the result of European colonial expansion. Colonialism has not only created a number of societies in whICh high-prestige European languages coexist with the native languages of the conquered peoples. New varieties of the colonial languages were created also, resembling the original in the case of English, French, Portuguese and Spanish in the New World and in Australia, but also in often unrecognizable form, as in the Creole languages of\he Caribbean, West Africa and the Pacific. Very roughly, the spread of the colonial languages can be represented as shown in Map 1.1. 6 Introduction: Bilingualism and language contact Map 1.1 Schema!lc representation of (he European colonial expansion A fourth situation reflects individual pockets of speakers of minority languages, cut off by the surrounding national languages. Examples indude Welsh and Gaelic in Great Britain, Frisian in the Netherlands, Basque in France and Spain. Often these groups reflect traditional populations, already in existence when new peoples and languages swept in. The final situation is in some sense the result of a reverse migratory movement: the influx of people from the post-colonial Third World societies into the industrial world. People from the Caribbean have migrated to North America and Europe, people from Central America predominantly to the US, and people from the Mediterranean predominantly to Western Europe. Again, Map 1.2 gives some idea of these movements. The result of these migratory patterns has been mentioned already: newly and uneasily multicultural and multilingual societies, faced with hitherto unknown educational problems but also with cultural enrichment and new possibilities. The history of peoples and languages is very rich. Of many developments and languages aU traces have disappeared. These types oflanguage-contact situation are certainly not the only ones. Imagine all the sociolinguistic upheavals caused by the conquests of the Romans or the Mongols. When we look at a region such as the Balkans, which now is relatively stable, we realize how many linguistic changes involving many different languages must have taken place there. Present stability is the result of movement in the past. 1.4 The history of the field The roots of the linguistic study of language contact go back at least to the comparative and historical tradition of the nineteenth century. William Dwight  Contributing disciplines and structure of the book 7 Map 1.2 Schemallc repre,emalion of the p[)st·colonial migrauon 10 Europe and Norlh America Whitney (1881) explicitly discusses the role of borrowing in language change, and we will return to his views on the matter in chapter 14. Hugo Schuchardt documented a number of complex situations oflanguage contact in publications from 1880 onward, and was the founder of modern creole language studies. His most complex contribution to this field, part of Kreolische Studien IX (1890), has not been followed up. In the wake of Schuchardt's work a number of other creolists, including Hesseling (e.g. 1899, 1905) and Turner (1949) have continued to develop the linguistic study of language-contact phenomena. Their work will be discussed in chapter 15, on pidgins and creoles. Fina!1y, work that can be viewed as presenting the first truly comprehensive view of language contact dates from the early 19505, including both Weinreich's seminal Languages in Contact(1953) and Haugen's detailed study, The Norwegian Language In America (1953). These contributions can be considered at the same lime as laying the foundation for what later came to be called the discipline of sociolinguistics. Quite independent of these scholars, we should mention Marcel Cohen's work in France, who started OUt as an Arabist and whose work gradually came to include a strong concern for language-contact phenomena, as shown e.g. in his Pour une sociologie du /angage (1956). 1.5 Contributing disciplines and structure of the book Bilingualism or language contact in itself is not a scientific discipline. It is an issue, a subject or a field of study to which various disciplines can contribute. The disciplines can interact or, on the other hand, function independently, because of differing viewpoints, methodologies or terminologies. 8 Inlroducrion: Bilingualism and language contacr When in a given society languages are in contact this may be of interest for socio- logists or social anthropologists. Languages are social phenomena or social institutions, and the division of a society into social groups is often reflected in linguistic divisions. Linguistic behaviour and attitudes towards languages in a bilingual society often give further insight into social norms and values. In most cases, the sociological approach to bilingualism involves a language as a whole, disregarding its different varieties, processes of intern::!l change and structural aspects. In the first part of this book we will deal with data, viewpoints and theories from this 'sociology of bilingualism'. More general topics such as the relation between language and (social) identity and the functioning of two languages in a community will be discussed in addition to more specific topics such as the position of minority languages 10 the school, the effects of bilingual education, and the problem oflanguage planning. Earlier in this chapter we made a distinction between societal and individual bilingualism. The bilingual individual can be profitably studied from the perspective of psychology. The second part of thiS book, The bilingual speaker, discusses psycho- logical aspects of bilingualism, such as the different ways in which the two languages may be stored in the bilingual brain, the way in which a second language is acquired, and the psychological consequences of being bilingual. The third part of this book is called Language use in the bilingual community. Here especially the contribution of sociolinguistics per se, i.e. the study of socially governed linguistic behaviour, wiil be presented. The chapters in this part will contain information on the languages people choose in interaction situations, or how they avoid making a specific choice, on ways in which people with different language backgrounds interact, and on the social consequences of specific interaction patterns. The discipline oflingui:;tics proper can contribute by discovering what happens to the structure of languages when they are in contact. This linguistic perspective is presented in the last part of this book. Do languages change when they are in contact with other languages? Can they borrow rules of grammar, or just words? Can languages mix, and how can new languages emerge out of language contact? Distinguishing between sociological, psychological, sociolinguistic and linguistic contributions to the study of bilingualism and language contact is in many ways unsatisfactory and artificial, because they are so intricately interrelated. It is impossible to study a psychological topic such as the cognitive consequences of individual bilingualism without taking social factors into account such as the relative status of the languages involved. In the same way it is impossihle to study the phenomenon of transfer in second-language ac.quisition without making a detailed comparison of the two linguistic systems involved. Therefore we will often refer to chapters in other parts of the book. The subject matter of this book is a complex one, with societal, psychological and (socio)linguistic aspects that can only be separated on an abstract analytical level. This separation is reflected in the organization of this book because for us it was the only way to present an overview of research results from different discipiines. We hope it will not hinder the reader in developing a coherent view on the subject of language contact. Whatever lhe reason that there are so many languages spoken in the world (and people have been pondering this question since the Old Testament), the fact is that there are; and another fact is that many people find themselves at the  Further readmg 9 frontier of two languages. What we try to show in this book is that there are many ways of coping with this situation. The structural characteristics of the languages involved impose an outer limit on the possible linguistic outcomes of language contact. Which strategy is chosen by anyone speaker depends on many factors: the relation between the speaker and the languages, and the societal context in which the speaker flOds himself. We continue to be amazed at the versatility and resourcefulness of speakers: multilingualism is not just a problem, it can be a triumph of the human spirit. Further reading People interested in modern studies of language contact should consult Mackey's BilingUlsme er con[QC( des langues (I 976), an encyclopaedic survey with much relevant material and Grosjean's Life with Two Languages (1982), a highly readable book with many accounts of personal bilingual experiences. Fasold's The Sociolinguiwcs of SocJe(Y (1984) documents the relations between the study of language contact and sociolinguistics in general. Baetens Beardsmore's Bilingualism; Basic Principles (1982) stresses psycholinguistic aspects, and the title of Skumabb-Kangas's Bilingualism or nor: The education of minorities (1983) is self-explanatory. In addition there are a number of collections of articles, of which we mention Fishman (1978) and Mackey and Ornstein (I979), both focusing on sociological subjects: demography, language maintenance and language and education, and finally McCormack and Wurm (1979), which contains articles on a variety of subjects, including code switching and language planning. II The bilingual speaker 7 Psychological dimensions of bilingualism In this book we are mainly concerned with individual or collective language beha- viour in bilingual communities. However, language behaviour is possible because of some sort of underlying competence. People possess implicit knowledge of the language(s) they speak andlor understand, or to put it differently: they have more or less internalized the language. An interesting question, the focus of this chapter, is how are the two languages of bilingual individuals internalized? Do bilinguals ditTer from monolinguals in this respect? In the first section we will discuss the problem of neural representation of the two languages. Are they localized in the same area or in different areas of the brain? Section 7,2 deals with the mental representation of two languages. In keeping with research in this field of study, we present information about the mental lexicon, connected with each language. Here again, the question is, whether the two languages are mentally or psychologically discrete, with two discrete lexicons, or whether the bilingual individual operates on the basis of one unified mental lexicon. Generally, bilinguals keep their languages separate in language pro- cessing, i.e. in speaking and understanding. Does a special mental faculty develop which enables them to do this adequately, to process the languages without mixing them up? In section 7.3 we will pursue this problem. There is still little information on the issues deal! with in this chapter. Grosjean (1982: 267) says 'the bilingual brain is still very much terra incognita '. Researchers do not have direct access to the brain or the bilingual mind. The question, for example, whether there is one lexicon or two, cannot be answered directly. Possible answers must be inferred from observable phenomena. Furthermore, research results often are not unambiguous, and there is much disagreement between different authors. It is difficult therefore to give a coherent picture of the state of the art in this field of research, 7.1 The bilingual brain It is generally assumed that the left hemisphere of the brain IS mainly responsible for language processing. This dominance of the left hemisphere is particularly strong 10 right-handed males. The question now is whether thIS also holds for bIlinguals, and whether the two languages are localized in the same area of the brain, and share the same neural mechanisms. Answers to this question are mainly based on two sources of 74 Psychological dimensions of bilingualism information: reports on the linguistic effects of brain injuries, and psycholinguistic experiments which measure the involvement of the left and the right hemisphere. Aphasia is the name for all types of disturbances of language and speech resulting from brain damage. This damage can be caused by accidents, shot wounds, a stroke or a brain tumour. Paradis (1977) gives an extensive overview of case studies of bilingual aphasic patients, analysed to gain information about the bilingual brain. In about half of the cases reported, patients followed a synergistic pattern of recovery, i.e. a pattern in which progress in one language is accompanied by progress in another. Paradis further distinguishes a parallel and a differential pattern within the synergistic pattern. It is parallel when the impairment of the languages involved is identical and recovery proceeds at the same rate. The pattern is differential when the languages are impaired to a