Contact linguistics

Michael Meeuwis & Jan-Ola Östman

1. Introduction
2. Contact in relation to classificatory bases in linguistics
3. Contact and location
4. Direction of interference
5. Indirect influence in language contact
6. Contact as process: towards pragmatics
Notes
References

Handbook of Pragmatics Manual (1995) – Revised 2009

© 1994–2013 John Benjamins Publishing Company. Not to be reproduced in
any form without written permission from the publisher.

1. Introduction

The purpose of this article is to give an overview of issues related to the processes
behind, and linguistic impact of various types of contact between languages and
language users, to what happens when languages/language users come into
contact, and when they are (not) in contact. While paying specific attention to
issues directly relevant to pragmatics, the exposition here will be a fairly general
survey of existing research on language-contact phenomena, with an attempt to
present the — often implicit — large-scale framework of study in this field.
Various terms have been used for language-contact phenomena and
processes; we will introduce several of them as we go along. Note, though, that
the term ‘contact linguistics’ has also sometimes been used in a slightly narrower
sense (see Section 3) than it is used in the title of this article, where it is to
designate all linguistic approaches to contact.
The presentation of the different (socio-)linguistic approaches to language
contact, and of the variety of phenomena that are documented to be involved in
cases of language contact will be organized under three headings: the location,
the direction, and the process of contact. Before that, we wish to locate the study
of language contact more broadly with respect to approaches concerned with the
typology and classification of languages.

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 2. Contact in relation to classificatory bases in linguistics

Languages have been classified in various ways over the centuries, but too seldom
attempts have been made to approach the different kinds of classifications
systematically with a view to integrate them.
One set of classifications takes the particularities of individual languages as a
starting point, and focuses on how each language has come to look the way it
does. Two main types of explanation are commonly advanced: (i) genetic
relationships among languages and (ii) areal relationships among languages. The
problem of what is the result of genetic relationship and what similarities are due
to contact situations directly or indirectly received extensive attention all through
the 20th century.
Another set of classifications focuses more on language as a theoretical
concept, on what categories and distinctions are actually made use of in natural
languages, out of all theoretical possibilities. This kind of research focuses on (i)
language universals and (ii) language typologies. The question of what languages
have in common has always interested humans, since such a faculty of language
for long seemed to separate humans from animals. In this respect, theoretical and
systematic studies of language universals and of typological similarities between
languages complement each other in a fruitful manner.
A definitional characteristic of what we consider as human languages is that
they are an integrated part of social contacts. Both phylogenetically and
ontogenetically, a language emerges from contacts; equally important, languages
come into contact with each other via speakers and communities, and within
speakers. The result of linguistic contact, viz. linguistic ‘interference’, or more
generally, linguistic ‘influence’, therefore deserves and requires every linguist's
attention, regardless of her or his subdiscipline of specialization.1

3. Contact and location

Because it is both theoretically and practically impossible to separate out which

characteristics of a language are due to areal and which to genetic causes, the
question as a whole is historically irrelevant if asked in vacuo, i.e., as related
primarily to linguistic form. The physical location of the settlement of the
speakers of a language becomes interesting only when it is coupled with the
culture and ideology of the speakers and their relation to neighboring
communities.
What we regard as linguistically distinctive geographical dialects and
languages have evolved either through long periods of lack of contact between
neighboring communities, or through a process of extensive contact between

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 different language varieties, mediated by stages of degrees of creolization. In
many cases, however, different dialects or languages live side by side for centuries
in a give-and-take relationship, in some way accommodating to each other.
Locations where (a clustering of) linguistic features have been established as
being due to results of such contact processes are often referred to as
Sprachbund/Sprachbünde, or ‘linguistic areas’, and the branch of linguistics
which studies such phenomena is referred to as ‘areal linguistics’.2
Areal linguistics in this traditional sense has obvious connections with
dialectology, geolinguistics, and what is sometimes referred to as ‘contact
linguistics’ proper. However, whereas dialectology is concerned with linguistic
variation at large, and areal linguistics focuses on linguistic convergences in
large-scale areas bound together by a joint culture and history, and geolinguistics
in turn is primarily concerned with what happens to languages that are grouped
together e.g., into a state, contact linguistics stricto sensu is more interested in
contacts between speakers, and what happens in the language and cognition of
individuals. Here, bilingualism and multilingualism are especially in focus.
As mentioned, areal linguistics focuses traditionally on (groups of) speakers
that are located physically as neighbors. Language contact, however, also
significantly occurs within non-locationally defined linguistic groupings (for
which the term Sprechbund is sometimes used). These groupings are united by
similar kinds of interests and features among its members (age, sex, class,
occupation, religion, interests, hobbies, etc.) and they are linguistically
characterized by a social and/or psychological language variety in relation to the
community at large. Due to modern advances in telecommunication and
information technology and to more extensive traveling, members within such
groupings, although not being physically adjacent, come into close contact with
one another, and their languages and communicative behaviors in general take
on features from a joint pool (Paolillo et al. 2005; Androutsopoulos 2006).

4. Direction of interference

A quite different starting point for approaching language contact phenomena is

language ‘interference’, i.e., the use and, to varying degrees, the integration of
linguistic features or elements of one language in another. On the basis of the
sheer amount of documentation in the literature, one might well deduce that this
is the dominant province of research and theorizing in the field of contact
linguistics today.
Haugen (1950), Weinreich (1953), and Clyne (1972) provided a systematic
terminological and typological backbone for the 19th-century and early
20th-century intuitions about language interference. In the aftermath of these
publications, a commonly shared assumption emerged, according to which cross-
language interferences can usefully be divided into two global types. A first group

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 of phenomena consists of interferences that occur from what is for a speaker or a
community a foreign (FL) or second, third, etc. language (L2) to her or his first,
habitual, or dominant language (L1).3 The second type of interferences proceeds
in the opposite direction: elements of the L1 are transferred to the L2/FL.
The most explicit manifestation of the usefulness of this distinction is the
very structure of contact linguistics as a field of study. Linguistic interference of
the first type is commonly dealt with in subfields that are mostly community-
oriented, such as the ones referred to in the foregoing section, whereas disciplines
such as L2 acquisition research typically address linguistic interferences of the
second type.
One of the appeals of this distinction is a common recognition that these two
types differ significantly in the outcomes of, and the processes and mechanisms
at work in, situations of language contact (Thomason & Kaufman 1988; Van
Coetsem 1988; Winford 2003).
The first type of cross-language interference, by some also called ‘borrowing’,
is no doubt best known by cases of lexical interference. But borrowing is not only
a lexical phenomenon. As Thomason & Kaufman (1988) and Thomason (2001)
argue, even if universal tendencies and ‘susceptibility hierarchies’ cannot be
ignored, there are no structural barriers that would preclude any level of
linguistic structuring — from phonology to the most complex syntactic patterns
(see also Heine & Kuteva 2005 on the notion of ‘grammatical replication’ or
‘calquing’) — to be affected by cross-language borrowing. Moreover, studies such
as Prince (1988) and Valdés & Pino (1981) showed that pragmatic aspects like
topicalization features or the organization of speech acts can also be transferred
from an L2/FL to an L1.
The social contexts in which borrowing occurs are manifold. The
traditionally recognized and well-documented contexts of cultural influence by
immediate cohabitation or by contact through various possible types of media
have received renewed interest recently in studies on the effects of globalization
and on related changes in late modernity. These studies deal not only with the
types of adaptation that take place in speech and writing when elements and
structures are getting integrated in the L1, or with the forces (of some level of
normative ‘purism’) that through replacements and the creation of new ‘native’
words struggle to keep the L1 intact, but the impact of speakers' attitudes and
opinions has also been found to be very decisive in these processes. These issues
are dealt with in detail in Kristiansen & Sandøy (eds. forthc.) in relation to the
impact of English in northern Europe, showing for instance the importance of
speakers' implicit, subconscious attitudes in understanding contact phenomena
in relation to globalization phenomena.
In addition to the traditional contexts and the recent trends with respect to
globalization and glocalization, which have also seen an increase in studies on
English as a lingua franca (ELF; cf. Seidlhofer et al. 2006), two further specific
contexts where borrowing plays an important role receive attention in the

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 literature: L1 attrition and language death. Research on L1 attrition (e.g., Hansen
& Reetz-Kurashige 1999) involves the study of the way — mostly younger —
learners of an L2 gradually lose knowledge of their L1, and in this process transfer
elements from the acquired language to the L1. Language death goes beyond the
individual and concerns similar phenomena from the angle of the community as a
whole (e.g., Dorian ed. 1989; Crystal 2000).
The most typical instance of the second type of contact interference
phenomena — from L1 to L2/FL — occurs in second language acquisition and
foreign language learning (e.g., Larsen-Freeman 2000; Freeman & Freeman
2001; Ringbom 2006). The community-oriented counterpart to this
individual-based discipline examines ‘language shift’ (e.g., Fishman ed. 1991; Li
Wei 1994). At the intersection of these two disciplines, an important domain of
study which also addresses problems of interference from L1 to L2/FL deals with
so-called ‘world varietes’. The focus of investigation is on how the world-wide
spread of mostly Western languages such as English and French, leads to the
definitive incorporation of L1 interference phenomena in these languages (Bolton
& Kachru 2006).
In much the same way as for borrowing, the linguistic features involved in
interference from L1 range from lexical items over phonological features to
syntactic structures. Further, L2 acquisition research has been particularly
rewarding in drawing attention to the transfer of pragmatic features from L1 to
L2/FL. Bou Franch's (1998), and Barron's (2003) overviews of ‘pragmatic
transfer’ testify to the great importance L2 acquisition research attaches to this
phenomenon. Another important field of study which has stressed the
importance of such pragmatic transfer is to be found in intercultural
communication. Especially the interactionalist tradition within this discipline
(e.g., Gumperz 1982) demonstrated that speakers can master all the purely
linguistic (formal) aspects of the target language, appearing in that way to be
perfect bilinguals, while they at the same time stick to their native pragmatic
system; this often turns out to be the cause for misunderstandings in intercultural
encounters.
Despite the global significance of the dichotomy between the two major
directions of cross-language interference, it should be noted that not all linguistic
processes and products of language contact can straightforwardly be categorized
as either borrowing from L2/FL or transfer from L1. There is, first, the
well-documented case of code-switching. The distinguishing feature that is
generally taken to set code-switching apart from other types of language contact
is the fact that the replacement of original structures by foreign linguistic features
is not fully generalized, and that these foreign features remain to some extent
phonologically or morphologically unintegrated (e.g., Auer 1998; Deuchar et al.
2007; Poplack 2004). A second case is that of ‘mixed languages’ (Mous 2003;
Bakker & Matras eds. 2003). A mixed language draws its grammar from one
language and its vocabulary from another. It is most often the result of speakers'

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 deliberate combinations of two languages in their efforts to mark a new identity.
In time, the original, identity-related intentions become socially less relevant, but
the new language remains in place, and is handed over to new generations. Third,
we have cases where the speakers of the two languages in contact use languages
that are to some extent mutually intelligible, and by virtue of the contact
‘koineization’ occurs, where a new variety comes about. Koineization (cf. Kerswill
2002) typically occurs in combination with migration, and/or when speakers
come together to live in the vicinity of newly established workplaces. Fourthly,
there is the phenomenon called ‘false friends’, where the adoption goes from one
L2/FL to another (Ringbom 1987). A native speaker of German who already
knows French as an L2, may ‘send’ some features of this French to her or his
knowledge of Spanish if s/he acquires Spanish at a later stage. Other problems
with the dichotomy are related to the fact that a clear identification of what
constitutes the L1 and what constitutes the L2 or FL for any given individual or
community is not always feasible. In the case of child bilingualism, for instance, a
child learns two languages at the same time as equivalent first languages, and
easily transfers elements from one language into the other (Lanza 1997).
In language interference a further distinction in terms of the status of the
languages in contact also has to be taken into account. The more ‘powerful’
language, i.e., the language of the dominant culture, is referred to as the
‘superstratum language’ and fulfills the role of donor for the interference, while
the less powerful language is the ‘substratum language’ and acts as the recipient
language. Although this distinction is helpful as an analytic tool, it should not be
taken as explanatory by itself to suggest, for instance, that superstratum
languages and cultures always tend to ‘win’ linguistically. For one thing, there are
clear cases in history which show that this is not the case. Secondly, in cases such
as pidgins and abrupt creoles the new language cannot readily be genetically
affiliated with either one of the languages involved in the contact situation (Sebba
1997), and any distinction between donor and recipient language or between
substratum or superstratum is only likely to distort the picture. In Section 3, we
discussed similar problems in phenomena like Sprachbünde. In cases like these,
where languages are of equal importance for the creation of a ‘new’ language, one
often talks about ‘adstratum’ situations.

5. Indirect influence in language contact

As we argued in the foregoing section, some form of cross-language interference

most typically occurs in language-contact situations. However, other types of
processes and results of language contact also have to be recognized. These types
cover cases in which a certain linguistic change can be said to be informed by a
contact situation but in which this change is not materialized in a feature that can
distinctively be traced to one of the languages involved in the contact situation.

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 Thus, there is a host of generalizations, avoidance, simplification and other
processes at work in second-language acquisition, language shift, language death
and other types of language contact, which show no isomorphic or qualitative
correspondence with elements in the donor language or in a previous form of the
recipient, affected language. These seemingly internal ‘creations’ of previously
non-existent structures occur simply due to the contact situation, i.e., they would
not have occurred in the language unless it had been in contact (e.g., Campbell &
Muntzel 1989; Thomason 2001) and could thus not be explained without
reference to a linguistic and cultural contact. Also, in all these fields, the
phenomenon of ‘multiple causation’ or, as it is also called, ‘synergy’ has to be
taken into account. Synergy refers to changes that occur internally in a language,
but are triggered by the contact with similar features, patterns, or rules in
another language. Here, some qualitative resemblances to features in the donor
language or in a pre-contact state of the affected language can be observed: the
contact has given rise to a change in existing features. As Dorian (1993) and
Woolard (1989) argued, ‘synergy’ is a widely observable phenomenon that is too
often slighted by keeping the distinction between internally and externally
motivated language change too rigidly separate.

6. Contact as process: towards pragmatics

Late modern society offers considerable challenges to our understanding of

language contact and what direction pragmatic research within contact linguistics
needs to take in the future. Attitudes and social change (Coupland 2009) are
getting more and more attention and processes like ‘dialect levelling’ and
‘regionalization’ may have very different causes, albeit that the results from such
processes may look the same (Östman 2008).
Contact, and interference and influence through contact, are intrinsically
dynamic notions although they are not always seen from this perspective.
Meeuwis (1991) and Meeuwis & Brisard (1993) drew attention to the inherent
a-processual and a-historical nature of the theoretical and methodological
assumptions underlying much of the research in contact linguistics and related
fields concerned with diachronic issues. One possible solution to this is to
approach contact phenomena from a pragmatic perspective which fully takes into
account the continuous adaptation processes involved in contact situations, and
thus avoids treating contact-induced language change as consisting of the mere
temporal succession of static products. Such a perspective should also allow for a
type of analysis in which language, culture, and mind are seen as virtually
inseparable, which is another prerequisite for a processual, dynamic approach to
language contact. This combines the locational and directional/cognitive
approaches and in addition incorporates linguistic manifestations of aspects of
culture, ideology, and implicitness in the analysis. Thus, also, processual analyses

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 of contact phenomena in this sense fall under the study of language function, i.e.,
pragmatics.
Raukko & Östman (1994) and Östman & Raukko (1995) suggested a
processual approach to areal linguistics where the main tenets are precisely that
linguistic and cultural contacts are closely intertwined and that the foundation for
a linguistic area is a cultural area. The socio-cultural, pragmatic aspects are taken
as the basis for analysis; in addition to the results of the process, the process itself
is in focus. It is also suggested that implicit pragmatic aspects are among the first
to be taken over in a convergence situation.
Hence pragmatics as the level of structuring on which linguistic features
affected by language contact are situated, and pragmatics as a preferred approach
to the study of all types of language contact converge.

Notes

1. Although fully aware of the negative connotations attached to the

term ‘interference’, we prefer to maintain its use for the present
article, as it allows us to distinguish between the adoption in one
language of elements from another language (‘interference’), and
the broader sense of ‘influence’, which covers all types of linguistic
processes and results by which languages in contact can be
linguistically affected (see Section 5).
2. The best known and most studied linguistic areas are the
Sprachbünde on the Balkan peninsula (as suggested early on by
Trubetzkoy and Jakobson), the Indian continent and neighboring
areas in Southeast Asia (e.g., Emeneau 1956; Masica 1976), and
various groupings of American Indian languages, for example in the
western and northwestern USA (e.g., Haas 1969). Interesting
borderline cases of linguistic convergence which some linguists are
hesitant to qualify as linguistic areas include (the North Sea littoral,
(cf. e.g., Ureland ed. 1987; and Poussa ed. 2002); and the Circum-
Baltic area, aka Baltic Europe, (cf. Lehiste 1988; Raukko & Östman
1994; Dahl & Koptjevskaja-Tamm eds. 2001), and the
Mediterranean (see Ramat & Roma eds. 2007).
3. As is common in second-language acquisition research and related
fields, we will in the following be using ‘L2’ to refer not only to
‘second’ language, but to all languages (L3, L4 … Ln) acquired after
or next to the first. ‘Foreign’ languages differ from L2's in that they
do not directly fulfill any major socially functional role within the

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 speech community of the individual or group to whom the term
applies.

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Related articles: Bilingualism and multilingualism, Contact, Creole

linguistics, Creoles and creolization, Dialectology, Intercultural
communication, Interjections, Language policy, language planning and
standardization, Sociolinguistics, Speech community, Typology,
Variational pragmatics

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