EL 2 – Language, Culture, and Society borrowing between speakers of different

languages; more rapid than internal change

Language – system of communication between The English language borrows a lot of words from
individuals and a social phenomenon several languages. Below are just a few
examples. It must be noted that, in most cases,
Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of modern the pronunciation also becomes different. Most of
linguistics, saw language as a type of social behavior the time, borrowed words with new sounds or
sound combinations are just modified
Sociolinguistics –study of language and society; (consciously or otherwise) to fit the sound system
intended to show how our use of language is of the borrowing language,
governed by such factors as class, gender,
race, etc.

Anthropological linguistics –concerned with form

and use of language in different cultures and to what
extent the development of language has been
influenced by cultural environment Speakers may also change the way borrowed
words are used to make them more familiar and
Historical linguistics -study of how languages evolve easier to use. For example, the French phrase au
and how languages are related to each other jus means ‘with gravy’ but in English, it is
understood as just ‘gravy’.
First Language
- Language acquired at birth until the critical period Functional shift (aka conversion or zero diversion)
is considered an individual’s L1 – the process that converts a word from one
- Used at home syntactic category (part of speech) to another with
- Acquired effortlessly and naturally by listening to no change to the form of word (Brinton, 2010)
caregivers Semantic shift (also semantic change, semantic
- Cannot be chosen by the individual progression, semantic development or semantic
- Acquisition process is subconscious drift) – a form of language change regarding the
evolution of world usage; usually to the point that
Second Language meaning is radically different from the original usage
- A new language accommodated after L1
- Takes effort and conscious will to learn Language typology –the study and classification of
- A personal choice; the individual or the languages according to their morphological type. It
community can choose its L2 among other can and does establish connections between
languages languages which are not related to each other by a
common ancestor but by similarities in their
Language change grammars or structure.
1. All languages change but the rate of change may Drift – refers to the slow and imperceptible change
vary considerably due to external and internal of language type in a given direction
factors (i.e. modern English is very different from Types of language typology
Old English while Finnish has changed little over 1. Synthetic – languages which make use of
the centuries) several morphemes to indicate different
2. Language change is regular and naturally grammatical categories
happens because society is dynamic and 2. Analytic – languages where there is almost a
changing one-to-one relationship between words and
Types of language change morpheme
1. Internal change –kinds of change that occur 3. Agglutinative - languages which identify one
because of the way speakers of a language grammatical category with a single
gradually modify their language over time; slower morpheme but where the morphemes can be
change but somewhat more predictable because linked consecutively to each other to give
of existing structural patterns. It produces long words consisting of strings of unique
regularity in the grammar. morphemes
2. External change – kinds of change that occur with 4. Polysynthetic languages which fuse several
no obvious internal reason for it. It can also grammatical elements into a single form,
happen because of language contact and usually containing major syntactic categories
 such as verbs and nouns. This type is not - a trade “language”
represented in the Indo-European language - grammatically simpler in form than a true
family with any degree of completeness but language and does not have full elaboration of
is to be found in native American languages function
and those in the north-east of Siberia
Creole
Language contact - refers to a situation in which - when a pidgin or any other simplified language
speakers from two speech communities are in become more complex and becomes the mother
contact with each other tongue of a group speakers
Direct contact – speakers of one language meet - a fully functional and elaborated language that
face to face with speakers of another (because of emerged from the interaction of two or more
invasion, expulsion, emigration, etc.) languages
Ex. Filipino contact with English - develops when speakers of pidgins are put in a
Indirect contact - through the mediation of situation in which they cannot use their respective
literature, television, radio or the internet mother tongues
Ex. English contact with modern European - develops when a pidgin is regarded by a social
languages group as a desirable language and deliberately
Direct Contact Indirect contact cultivated
• Speakers intermingle • No mixing of speakers - the language on which a creole is based is called
• Lexical loans or • Only lexical loans the “matrix language”
borrowing of words (cultural borrowings)
• Structural transfer in Examples of Creole
closed classes 1. Haitian Kreyol – a French creole spoken in Haiti
(morphology/syntax) where French is the matrix language, but West
African languages contributed phonology,
For grammatical interference to take place, there vocabulary and some elements of the syntax
must be some degree of bilingualism in the 2. Tok Pisin – an English creole language spoken
community, otherwise there are no speakers who will in Papua New Guinea; an official language of
transfer structures from a second language into their PNG; it is standardized and used in written
mother tongue. language
3. Krio - an English creole language that is one of
Language contact arises when speakers of different the official languages of Sierra Leone with
languages interface with each other. The more around 4M speakers (note that there are
intensive the speaker contact, the greater the around 23 languages in Sierra Leone)
likelihood of mutual influence arising between the 4. Jamaican creole or patois – English-based
languages. creole language with influences from West and
Central Africa used primarily in Jamaica; it must
Language variation be noted that despite being English-based, it is
grammatically distinct from English
Pidgin
- a restricted language which arises for the Lingua franca - a language which is used as a
purposes of communication between two social means of communication among those groups who
groups of which one is in a more dominant do not speak each other’s language
position than the other
- the less dominant group develops the pidgin Bilingualism - a type of linguistic situation in which
- developed in colonial situations where the two languages co-exist in a country or language
colonizers (represented by soldiers, sailors, community without there being a notable distribution
tradesmen, administrators) came into contact according to function or social class
with indigenous populations
- natives were forced to develop some form of Diglossia - a type of situation in which there is a
communication with the colonizers, especially if division between two languages or two varieties of a
enslaved language such that one variety, the so-called ‘high’
- may be restricted (used in marginal contact or H variety, is used in public life – in addresses, in
situations such as trading purposes) or extended the media, in schools and universities, etc. – and
(group continues to use pidgin among indigenous another variety, the so-called ‘low’ variety or L
populations having different native languages =
lingua franca)
variety, is used in domestic life – with family and
friends

Code-switching - occurs when speakers move from

one language to another and back again within the
same sentence

Language split – happens when, for political

reasons two varieties of a language, which are
scarcely distinguishable, are forcibly differentiated to
maximize differences between two countries.
Ex. Hindi - official language of India and Urdu, the
official language of Pakistan; difference is only in
writing system (Hindu is written from left to write
while Urdu is from right to left)

Language maintenance - refers to the extent to

which immigrant speakers of a certain language to
retain knowledge of the original language in the host
country into following generations

Language preservation – the extent to which a

country has official institutions to preserve the
language in an ostensibly pure form

One result of language contact can be language

shift, where speakers begin to speak a new
language and stop speaking their former language.
Over time, this can result in language death.

Language death - sometimes applied to those

situations in which a language ceases to exist;
happens when there are no more speakers of the
language. This phenomenon is happening all over
the world, and has already happened to many Native
American languages in the U.S.

A language is moribund if no children are learning

the language as their first language. A language is
dead if there are no living speakers of the language.

Language revitalization is an attempt to “resurrect”

a language that is moribund through increasing the
number of people who are learning and speaking the
language.

Garifuna – a language spoken in Belize and other

Central European countries; became the subject of
a language revitalization program. Parents want
children to learn the language, but children do not
want to and connect the language to poverty