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The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact

VOLUME 1

Language contact – the linguistic outcomes of populations speaking different

languages coming into contact with each other – has been pervasive in human
history. However, where histories of language contact are comparable, experi-
ences of migrant populations have been only similar, not identical. Given this,
how does language contact work? With contributions from an international
team of scholars, this Handbook – the first in a two-volume set – delves into this
question from multiple perspectives and provides state-of-the-art research on
population movement and language contact and change. It begins with an
overview of how language contact as a research area has evolved since the late
nineteenth century. The chapters then cover various processes and theoretical
issues associated with population movement and language contact worldwide.
It is essential reading for anybody interested in the dynamics of social inter-
actions in diverse contact settings and how the changing ecologies influence the
linguistic outcomes.

salikoko s. mufwene is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service

Professor of Linguistics and the College at the University of Chicago. His current
research is on the phylogenetic emergence and speciation of languages, and on
language vitality. His books include The Ecology Of Language Evolution (Cambridge
University Press, 2001), Iberian Imperialism And Language Evolution In Latin America
(University of Chicago Press, 2014), and Bridging Linguistics And Economics
(Cambridge University Press, 2020). He is the founding editor of Cambridge
Approaches to Language Contact.

anna marı́a escobar is Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois at

Urbana-Champaign. Through the study of grammatical change, her work
focuses on the emergence of contact-induced linguistic outcomes and minor-
itized Spanish varieties. Her long-term project focuses on the making of Andean
Spanish, with colonial and post-colonial corpora.
cambridge handbooks in language and linguistics

Genuinely broad in scope, each handbook in this series provides a complete

state-of-the-field overview of a major sub-discipline within language study and
research. Grouped into broad thematic areas, the chapters in each volume
encompass the most important issues and topics within each subject, offering a
coherent picture of the latest theories and findings. Together, the volumes will
build into an integrated overview of the discipline in its entirety.

Published titles
The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology, edited by Paul de Lacy
The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-switching, edited by Barbara E. Bullock
and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio
The Cambridge Handbook of Child Language, 2nd ed., edited by Edith L. Bavin and
Letitia Naigles
The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages, edited by Peter K. Austin and
Julia Sallabank
The Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics, edited by Rajend Mesthrie
The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics, edited by Keith Allan and Kasia M.
Jaszczolt
The Cambridge Handbook of Language Policy, edited by Bernard Spolsky
The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, edited by Julia
Herschensohn and Martha Young-Scholten
The Cambridge Handbook of Biolinguistics, edited by Cedric Boeckx and Kleanthes
K. Grohmann
The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax, edited by Marcel den Dikken
The Cambridge Handbook of Communication Disorders, edited by Louise Cummings
The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics, edited by Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley
The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology, edited by N.J. Enfield, Paul
Kockelman and Jack Sidnell
The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics, edited by Douglas Biber and
Randi Reppen
The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingual Processing, edited by John W. Schwieter
The Cambridge Handbook of Learner Corpus Research, edited by Sylviane Granger,
Gaëtanelle Gilquin and Fanny Meunier
The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Multicompetence, edited by Li Wei and Vivian
Cook
The Cambridge Handbook of English Historical Linguistics, edited by Merja Kytö and
Päivi Pahta
The Cambridge Handbook of Formal Semantics, edited by Maria Aloni and Paul
Dekker
The Cambridge Handbook of Morphology, edited by Andrew Hippisley and Greg
Stump
The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax, edited by Adam Ledgeway and Ian
Roberts
The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology, edited by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
and R.M.W. Dixon
The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics, edited by Raymond Hickey
The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, edited by Barbara Dancygier
The Cambridge Handbook of Japanese Linguistics, edited by Yoko Hasegawa
The Cambridge Handbook of Spanish Linguistics, edited by Kimberly L. Geeslin
The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingualism, edited by Annick De Houwer and Lourdes
Ortega
The Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics, edited by Geoff
Thompson, Wendy L. Bowcher, Lise Fontaine and David Schönthal
The Cambridge Handbook of African Linguistics, edited by H. Ekkehard Wolff
The Cambridge Handbook of Language Learning, edited by John W. Schwieter and
Alessandro Benati
The Cambridge Handbook of World Englishes, edited by Daniel Schreier, Marianne
Hundt and Edgar W. Schneider
The Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Communication, edited by Guido Rings and
Sebastian Rasinger
The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics, edited by Michael T. Putnam and
B. Richard Page
The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies, edited by Anna De Fina and
Alexandra Georgakopoulou
The Cambridge Handbook of Language Standardization, edited by Wendy Ayres-
Bennett and John Bellamy
The Cambridge Handbook of Korean Linguistics, edited by Sungdai Cho and John
Whitman
The Cambridge Handbook of Phonetics, edited by Rachael-Anne Knight and Jane
Setter
The Cambridge Handbook of Corrective Feedback in Second Language Learning and
Teaching, edited by Hossein Nassaji and Eva Kartchava
The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax, edited by Grant Goodall
The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, edited by Silvina
Montrul and Maria Polinsky
The Cambridge Handbook of Arabic Linguistics, edited by Karin Ryding and David
Wilmsen
The Cambridge Handbook of the Philosophy of Language, edited by Piotr
Stalmaszczyk
The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, edited by Michael Haugh, Dániel Z.
Kádár and Marina Terkourafi
The Cambridge Handbook of Task-Based Language Teaching, edited by Mohammed
Ahmadian and Michael Long
The Cambridge
Handbook of Language
Contact
Population Movement and Language Change
Volume 1

Edited by
Salikoko S. Mufwene
University of Chicago

Anna María Escobar

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
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www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107174870
DOI: 10.1017/9781316796146
© Cambridge University Press 2022
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2022
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
ISBN – 2 Volume Set 978-1-1071-7487-0 Hardback
ISBN – Volume I 978-1-009-09864-9 Hardback
ISBN – Volume II 978-1-009-09863-2 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy
of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Contents
Volume I: Population Movement & Language Change

List of Maps page ix

List of Figures xi
List of Tables xii
List of Contributors xiv
Preface xix

Introduction
1. Language Contact: What a Rich and Intellectually Stimulating
History since the Late Nineteenth Century! Salikoko S. Mufwene &
Anna María Escobar 3

Part One: Language Contact and Genetic Linguistics

2. Language Contact and Historical Linguistics Brian D. Joseph 43
3. The Chinese Expansion and Language Coexistence in
Modern China Randy J. LaPolla 64
4. Tracing Language Contact in Africa’s Past Bonny Sands 84
5. Populations in Contact: Linguistic, Archaeological, and Genomic
Evidence for Indo-European Diffusion Bridget Drinka 122
6. The Impact of Autochthonous Languages on Bantu Language
Variation: A Comparative View on Southern and Central Africa
Koen Bostoen & Hilde Gunnink 152

Part Two: Linguistic Areas

7. The Balkans Victor A. Friedman 189
8. The Amazon Basin: Linguistic Areas and Language Contact
Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald 232
viii CONTENTS

9. Migration and Trade as Drivers of Language Spread and Contact

in Indigenous Latin America Thiago Costa Chacon 261
10. Language Contact in South Asia Hans Henrich Hock 299

Part Three: Language Spread

11. The Geographic and Demographic Expansion of Malay
James T. Collins 327
12. Geographic and Demographic Spread of Swahili
Alamin Mazrui 358
13. Arabic Language Contact Jonathan Owens 382

Part Four: Emergence and Spread of Some European Languages

14. The Emergence and Evolution of Romance Languages in
Europe and the Americas John M. Lipski 427
15. The Expansion and Evolution of Portuguese J. Clancy Clements 459
16. French and English in Contact in North America
Robert A. Papen 505
17. French in African Contact Settings Cécile B. Vigouroux 540
18. The Geographical and Demographic Expansion of English
Edgar W. Schneider & Sarah Buschfeld 583

Part Five: Language Diasporas

19. Diasporas: An Overview Dirk Hoerder & Henry Yu 613
20. Labor Migrations: Language Change in Communities
and Diasporas Dirk Hoerder & Henry Yu 641
21. The Korean Diaspora Joseph Sung-Yul Park 670
22. The Chinese Diaspora: Language Maintenance and Loss
Sherman Lee 690
23. The Diachrony of Yiddish and Judaeo-Spanish as
Contact Languages Marie-Christine Bornes-Varol &
Anne Szulmajster-Celnikier 716

Author Index 746

Language Index 750
Subject Index 755
Maps Volume I

3.1: Initial Chinese migrations 66

3.2: Chinese Middle Period migrations 67
3.3: Chinese Major pre-modern migrations 68
4.1: Linguistic geographical zones of Africa. 85
6.1: Distribution area, internal classification, and hypothesized
routes of initial expansion of the Bantu family according to
Grollemund et al. (2015) 153
6.2: Distribution of Khoe-Kwadi, Kx’a, and Tuu language
families and main languages in Southern Africa 159
6.3: Distribution of Bantu languages in southern Africa 162
6.4: Distribution of languages spoken by Central African
Pygmy communities 168
7.1: The languages and principal dialects of the Balkan
sprachbund 193
8.1: Languages of the Vaupés and the Içana River Basins 235
8.2: The extant languages of the Xingu Indigenous Park 246
9.1: Major language families and multilingual regions in Latin
America 262
9.2: The spread of major linguistic families discussed in
this paper 265
9.3: Major trade routes in indigenous Latin America mentioned
in this paper 267
10.1: Approximate distribution of South Asian language
families 301
11.1: Some archaeological sites associated with Old Malay
and the Sanskrit cosmopolis (Collins 1998) 331
11.2: Major ports where Malay functioned as the first or second
languages 1550–1650 (Collins 1998) 334
11.3: Banda and Ambon islands in Central Maluku 335
11.4: Indigenous languages of Maluku in the late 20th century 341
11.5: The geographic distribution of regional Malay dialects in
Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei (Collins 1999) 350
x LIST OF MAPS VOLUME I

12.1: Swahili-speaking area 359

13.1: Places where Arabic is spoken as a vernacular majority
language 387
15.1: Portuguese in Africa 460
15.2: Regions of Brazil with relevant areas, states, and cities 465
15.3: Portuguese in Asia 489
16.1: New France in the early eighteenth century 507
17.1: Former French and Belgian colonies south of North Africa 543
17.2: Senegal: major cities and neighbors 546
Figures Volume I

4.1: Chumburung loanword origins page 87

4.2: Distribution of language families in the central Sudan
region 91
5.1: Anatolian hypothesis. Proposed routes of migration by
early farmers into Europe 7000–5000 BCE 123
5.2: Steppe hypothesis. Arrival of steppe ancestry in central
Europe during the Late Neolithic, c. 2500 BCE 123
5.3: Mapping of the parallel migrations into Europe and South
Asia, from the Near East, after 7000 BCE (1) and from the
steppe, after 3000 BCE (2) 129
5.4: Distribution of wheel and wagon terminology 134
5.5: “Aegean-style” disc-shaped clay loom weights from a Minoan
village at Myrtos, southern Crete. Early Bronze Age, mid–late
third millennium BCE 136
5.6: Greek vase from Chiusi, Italy, depicting Penelope at her
warp-weighted loom 136
5.7: Scene of women weaving on a warp-weighted loom on a
Greek lekythos, c. 500 BCE. The Metropolitan Museum
of Art; Fletcher Fund, 1931: no. 31.11.10 137
5.8: Map displaying the distribution of loom types in Eurasia 139
5.9: Culture groups of the Middle Bronze Age, 2800–2200
BCE 145
13.1: Tree 1: Arabic as Central Semitic 384
13.2: Tree 2: Arabic as South Semitic 384
Tables Volume I

5.1: PIE lexicon for wheels and wagons page 133

5.2: Sample of double vocabulary for Greek textile terms 135
5.3: Greek weaving terms 137
5.4: Greek & Indo-Iranian similarities vs. other IE languages 142
5.5: A synthesis of evidence from three disciplines 146
8.1: Extant languages of the Xingu Indigenous Park 247
13.1: Aramaic–Arabic dia-planar diffusion 400
13.2: Degree to which words are idiomatic in Nigerian Arabic 409
13.3: Typology of urban dialect contact 416
15.1: Black, Pardo, and the general population in Brazil in 1872,
1890, and 1940 468
15.2: Numbers (rounded) and percentage of Blacks and Pardos in
Brazil by region 468
15.3: A comparison of features in the colloquial/vernacular
varieties of Brazilian and European Portuguese 470
15.4: Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese verb paradigm variation,
with falar ‘speak’ as an illustrative example 471
15.5: Inflectional suffixes in the Portuguese-based creoles of
Upper Guinea and the Gulf of Guinea 476
15.6: Subject, object, and disjunctive pronouns in the
Portuguese-based African creoles 478
15.7: Numbers of speakers and percentages of the languages
with most speakers in Angola 480
15.8: Numbers of speakers and percentages of the languages
with most speakers in Mozambique. 481
15.9: A comparison of the colloquial/vernacular varieties of
Angolan, Mozambican, Brazilian, and European
Portuguese 483
15.10: Nominal and verbal morphology retained in Asian
Portuguese-based creoles 491
15.11: Subject, object, and disjunctive pronouns in the
Portuguese-based Asian creoles 494
 List of Tables Volume I xiii

16.1: Population by first official language spoken 512

16.2: A comparison of borrowing features in various
French-speaking communities in North America 533
21.1: Population of the Korean diaspora by region. Adapted
from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2015). 671
Contributors

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald is Adjunct Professor at the Centre for

Indigenous Health Equity Research at Central Queensland University,
Australian Laureate Fellow, and Foundation Director of the former
Language and Culture Research Centre at James Cook University. She is a
major authority on languages of the Arawak family, from Northern
Amazonia, and has written several grammars of Amazonian and Papuan
languages, in addition to studies of language contact in Amazonia, serial
verbs, evidentials, classifiers, and the principles of grammar writing
and fieldwork.
Marie-Christine Bornes-Varol is Professor of Judeo-Spanish
language, literature, and civilization at the Institut National des Langues
et Civilisations Orientales, Paris. She has published several works,
including Le judéo-espagnol vernaculaire d’Istanbul (Peter Lang) and Manual of
Judeo-Spanish (University Press of Maryland), as well as Chocs de langues et
de cultures? (Presses Universitaires de Vincennes). Several of her articles
deal with language contact, especially Turkish influence on present-day
Judeo-Spanish.
Koen Bostoen (1975) is Professor of African Linguistics and Swahili at
Ghent University. His research focuses on Bantu linguistics and
interdisciplinary approaches to the African past. He is author of Des mots
et des pots en bantou (2005) and co-editor of The Kongo Kingdom: Origins,
Dynamics and Cosmopolitan Culture of an African Polity (2018), Une archéologie
des provinces septentrionales du royaume Kongo (2018), and The Bantu
Languages, 2nd edition (2019).
Sarah Buschfeld is Professor of English Linguistics (Multilingualism)
at TU Dortmund University (Germany), after previous appointments at
the universities of Regensburg and of Cologne. She works on postcolonial
and non-postcolonial varieties of English and in the fields of language
acquisition and bi-/multilingualism. She has written and edited several
articles and books on these topics, which challenge the traditional
 List of Contributors xv

boundaries between linguistic disciplines and their concepts

and approaches.
Thiago Costa Chacon is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the
University of Brasília. He received his PhD from the University of Hawai’i
at Manoa in 2012 and has specialized in the native languages of the
Amazon, with particular focus on language documentation, prosody,
historical linguistics, and language contact. His research touches on
different interdisciplinary topics, such as Amazonia’s prehistory as well
as socio-cultural and environmental policies for indigenous groups.
J. Clancy Clements is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Spanish
and Portuguese at Indiana University, Bloomington. He works on
Portuguese-based creoles and contact varieties involving Portuguese and
Spanish. His writings include The genesis of a language: The formation and
development of Korlai Portuguese, The linguistic legacy of Spanish and Portuguese,
several edited volumes, and many articles. He edits the Journal of Ibero-
Romance Creoles and was president of the Society for Pidgin and
Creole Linguistics.
James T. Collins is a Distinguished Professor at the Institute of Ethnic
Studies, National University of Malaysia. His principal interests are
Austronesian historical linguistics, Malay dialectology, the minority
languages of is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at San
Antonio. She Maluku and Borneo, and the social history of Malay. He is
the author of 27 books, including Malay, World Language: A Short History
(3rd rev. ed., 2018), Bibliografi Dialek Melayu Semenanjung Tanah Melayu
(2018), and Penelitian Bahasa di Maluku (2018).
Bridget Drinka works on such issues as the sociolinguistic
motivations for language change, the role of contact, and the areal
distribution of the Indo-European languages. Her 2017 book, Language
Contact in Europe: The Periphrastic Perfect through History, was awarded the
Leonard Bloomfield Book Award in 2019 by the Linguistic Society of
America. As President of the International Society for Historical
Linguistics, Drinka organized the International Conference on Historical
Linguistics in 2017.
Anna Marı́a Escobar is Professor Emerita of Spanish and Linguistics
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research is on
language contact, sociolinguistic variation, and language change. Her
publications focus on contact varieties of Spanish, particularly in contact
with Quechua (an Amerindian language), and on Spanish
grammaticalization processes. She has published several books (some
coauthored/coedited), chapters, and articles. She is presently working on
a book on the emergence of Andean Spanish.
Victor A. Friedman is the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service
Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, University of Chicago, Honorary
Associate, La Trobe University, and Doctor Honoris Causa, University of
Skopje. He is a foreign member of three national academies of sciences
xvi LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

(Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia), has been award medals by Bulgaria

and North Macedonia, and has received awards for contributions to
scholarship from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East
European Languages and the Association for Slavic, East European, and
Eurasian Studies.
Hilde Gunnink is a postdoctoral researcher at the UGent Centre for
Bantu Studies (BantUGent). She completed her PhD from Ghent
University in 2018. She has done extensive fieldwork on various Southern
African Bantu languages, with a focus on identifying possible contact
influence. Her current research project focuses on the historical
interactions between Southern African Bantu speakers and speakers of
various Khoisan languages.
Hans Henrich Hock, Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois, works
on Indo-European comparative-historical linguistics with main focus on
Sanskrit. His major publications include Principles of historical linguistics
(3rd ed. 2021); Language history, language change, and language relationship
(co-author, 3rd ed. 2019); Studies in Sanskrit syntax (ed., 1991); The languages
and linguistics of South Asia: A comprehensive guide (co-editor, 2016). Honors:
Fellow, Linguistic Society of America; Sukumar Sen Memorial Gold
Medal, Asiatic Society, Kolkata; D.Litt. Deccan College.
Dirk Hoerder, at Universität Bremen (1977–2008) and Arizona State
University (2007–11), taught US and Canadian social history, global
migrations, and sociology of migrant acculturation. His publications
include Cultures in contact: World migrations in the second millennium (2002),
The historical practice of diversity: Transcultural interactions from the early
modern Mediterranean to the postcolonial world (coedited 2003), and co-
authored with Christiane Harzig and Donna Gabaccia, What is migration
history? (2009).
Brian D. Joseph is Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics,
and Kenneth E. Naylor Professor of South Slavic Linguistics, at Ohio State
University. He has held NEH, ACLS, and Fulbright fellowships. The
Linguistic Society of America (LSA) President in 2019, he is a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for
the Advancement of Science, the American Philosophical Society, and the
LSA. He researches language change, especially involving Greek, Ancient
through Modern.
Randy J. LaPolla (Fellow of the Australian Academy for the
Humanities) is Professor of Linguistics at Beijing Normal University,
Zhuhai, China, and Senior Associate, Centre for Liberal Arts and Social
Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research
focuses on the history and typology of Sino-Tibetan and Austronesian
languages and issues related to the nature of communicative behavior
and functional explanations for the patterns found in languages and
human behavior generally.
 List of Contributors xvii

Sherman Lee is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at

Hong Kong Shue Yan University. Her academic and research interests
cover different aspects of language, culture, and communication,
including: language contact and multilingualism, in particular heritage
language loss and maintenance; Hakka studies; discourse analysis;
intercultural communication; English for academic purposes; and the
enhancement of teaching and learning in higher education.
John M. Lipski is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Spanish and
Linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on
the linguistic consequences of language contact and bilingualism, past
and present, including the African diaspora in the Americas, and ranging
from corpus studies to field-based experimental studies in minority
speech communities.
Alamin Mazrui is Professor of Sociolinguistics and Cultural Studies
in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian
Languages and Literatures at Rutgers University. He holds a PhD in
linguistics from Stanford University. Mazrui has (co)authored and (co)
edited several books and numerous articles and book chapters. He has
a special interest in human rights and civil liberties and has written
policy reports on these subjects. He is also a published Swahili poet
and playwright.
Salikoko S. Mufwene is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished
Service Professor of Linguistics and the College at the University of
Chicago. He works on language evolution, including the emergence of
creoles and the indigenization of English and French, as well as language
vitality. His books include: The ecology of language evolution (Cambridge
University Press, 2001) and Language evolution: Contact, competition and
change (Continuum Press, 2008). He is the founding editor of Cambridge
Approaches to Language Contact.
Jonathan Owens is Emeritus Professor of Arabic Linguistics, Bayreuth
University, Germany. His many articles and books include A linguistic
history of Arabic (2006/9), The Oxford handbook of Arabic linguistics (editor,
2013), and The foundations of grammar: An introduction to Medieval Arabic
grammatical theory (1988). His research encompasses sociolinguistics,
historical linguistics, the Arabic grammatical tradition, as well as African
linguistics. In 2018 he received the prestigious Muhammad Ibn Rashid
Special Service Award for Arabic.
Robert A. Papen is a retired professor at the Département de
linguistique, Université du Québec à Montréal. His numerous
publications analyze varieties of French in North America, including
those of Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick,
Louisiana, Minnesota, and North Dakota. He has also published several
essays on Michif, the intriguing French-Cree hybrid language of the Métis
of Western Canada and North Dakota.
xviii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Joseph Sung-Yul Park is a Professor in the Department of English

Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. His
research explores language in the political economy, with a focus on
South Korean experiences of neoliberalism and transnationalism. He is
the author of The Local Construction of a Global Language (Mouton, 2009),
Markets of English (with Lionel Wee, Routledge, 2012), and In Pursuit of
English: Language and Subjectivity in Neoliberal South Korea (Oxford University
Press, 2021).
Bonny Sands is editor of the book Click Languages (Brill, 2020) and has
conducted field work on minority languages in Botswana, Namibia,
Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa. With the goal of understanding the
complex segment inventories found in these languages, she has
conducted numerous historical linguistic and phonetic studies. For more
than two decades, she has been an adjunct professor at Northern Arizona
University in Flagstaff, USA.
Edgar W. Schneider is Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics at
the University of Regensburg, Germany, and Senior Research Fellow at
the National University of Singapore. Known best for his Dynamic Model
in World Englishes research (Postcolonial Englishes, CUP, 2007), he is an
internationally renowned sociolinguist who has published many books
(including English around the World, CUP, 2nd ed., 2020) and articles and
lectured on all continents, including many keynote lectures.
Anne Szulmajster-Celnikier is Research Engineer in Linguistics at
the École Pratique des Hautes Études and at the Collège de France, in
Paris. She is also the chief editor of the journal La Linguistique. She
published Le yidiche à travers la chanson populaire (Peeters, prefaced by
André Martinet) and is co-author of an article on Yiddish in the anthology
Dictionnaire des langues du Monde. Several of her publications deal with
Yiddish, multilingualism, and secret/cryptic languages.
Cécile B. Vigouroux is an Associate Professor of sociolinguistics at
Simon Fraser University, Canada. She has published several articles and
book chapters on different ethnographic aspects of transnational
migrations within sub-Saharan Africa. Her scholarship focuses on
transnational identity formation, the reshaping of linguistic ideologies,
sociocultural transformations triggered by new forms of mobility,
socioeconomic inequalities, the impact of informal economy on language
practices, and La Francophonie. Her latest co-edited book is titled Bridging
Linguistics and Economics (CUP, 2020).
Henry Yu is Associate Professor of History and Principal of St. John’s
College at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Yu’s BA is from UBC
and MA and PhD from Princeton. He is the author of Thinking Orientals
(2001) and Journeys of Hope (2018); and he was the Project Leader for the
“Chinese Canadian Stories” research and public history project. His
current research is on the “Cantonese Pacific.”
Preface

When we accepted the invitation to edit The Cambridge handbook of language

contact, we did not realize what a big challenge the project would be. To
begin with, we underestimated how difficult it would be to avoid producing
a book that would simply replicate the contents of counterparts published
earlier on the subject matter of language contact except in organizing the
table of contents differently and having the chapters written by different
experts. This would otherwise impart more or less the same information,
though perhaps from some other perspectives and with other takes on
certain topics and issues. We wanted to produce a book that would comple-
ment its predecessors in some ways without omitting subjects considered
central to the research area that preceding handbooks include.
However, being a later addition to this line of publications, we were also
determined to produce a state-of-the-art work that is as representative as
possible of the various research topics that scholars claiming to do contact
linguistics investigate nowadays. We wanted to show how the various
subgroups of scholars associated with these research subareas have contrib-
uted to our understanding of language behavior “under contact condi-
tions.” On the other hand, part of our discussion in Chapter 1 of this first
volume also claims that nothing happens to any language, including the
emergence of norms in a monolingual community, that has nothing to do
with contact. The basic level of language contact is inter-idiolectal,
although, to be sure, contact itself takes place in the minds of speakers
or signers.
We also decided early on, consistent with our own research interests and
with the very beginnings of the scholarship on language contact in the
nineteenth century (see section 2 of Chapter 1, this volume), to give the
project more of a diachronic than synchronic bias. So, many of the chapters
are on language contacts as outcomes of population movements and
changes in population structures. These can be considered as actuators of
language change and of speciation, as well as of language spread and of the
xx PREFACE

emergence of language diasporas and language/linguistic areas. They are

likewise associated with the emergence of lingua francas and language
endangerment and loss where particular languages prevail as dominant
vernaculars at the expense of the competition (see Volume 2). A particular
category of language spread includes the dispersal of Western European
languages, especially how they have evolved in various colonies. However,
this volume includes other cases, which actually do shed light on the
emergence of the European language diasporas, especially in the ways they
highlight the actuating role of emergent population structures – among
other ecological factors – in the formation of diasporic language varieties.
(A subset of these are discussed in Volume 2, where the chapters have been
allocated owing to other considerations that prevailed in our organization
of the Handbook.) These chapters are all positioned in their own separate
groups, in order to enable the reader to make comparisons more easily –
across languages and across geographical regions – if they are so inclined.
However, there are many more topics that are dealt with in contact
linguistics; and our original project grew in size to the point where one
Handbook could not include them all. So, we had to split the book into two
volumes and allocate the following other topics to Volume 2, on
Multilingualism in population structure, a complement to this one on
Population movements and language change. It includes several chapters on
multilingualism and other developments from language coexistence in
the individual and in society in our times, such as urban youth languages,
super-diversity, the emergence of lingua francas, codeswitching and/or
translanguaging, language endangerment, and borrowings. Most of the
discussions are adequately embedded in the relevant population structures.
In part of one chapter (Volume 2), one of the authors even presents longi-
tudinal biographies of some individuals to highlight in part the role of
personal motivation and of one’s socioeconomic position in society, aside
from other factors, in (dis)favoring the speaker’s ability to sustain compe-
tence in one of the languages. There are also chapters on how Norman and
English influence each other on the Channel Islands and about structural
outcomes of language contact. These include the emergence of creoles,
pidgins, and other mixed languages.
Together the two volumes are generally comprehensive, although we
realized too late, while writing Chapter 1 of the present volume, that we
could have invited contributions in the traditions of some forerunners of
the present scholarship, such as on language shift and on diglossia, as well
as on some important topics such as speech continua, which need not be
associated only with creoles coexisting with the acrolectal varieties of their
lexifiers nor with change.
Nonetheless, as the reader will undoubtedly also realize from Chapter 1 –
a great deal of which is devoted to a historical survey of the scholarship of
language contact (Section 2) – this research area is extensive and diverse. It
has evolved and expanded significantly since its late-nineteenth-century
 Preface xxi

origins in Indo-European genetic linguistics. Then, as Western Europeans

were engaging in the last phase of their colonization of the world and
considered colonized subjects as inferior to them, most forerunners of
linguistics as a profession disavowed as “bastard tongues” creoles and
pidgins that had evolved from the contact of European languages with
non-European ones. Colonialism entailed population movements and new
population structures with unequal race-based distributions of economic
and political power, compounded with negative social attitudes toward the
dominated and minoritized people.
All these factors and others bear on the unfolding of language contact as
a vast research area, advocating for the ecological approach initiated
already explicitly or implicitly by a handful of dissenting forerunners in
the late nineteenth century, an approach that today’s scholars can now
augment with a dose of interdisciplinarity even in bridging language con-
tact with other subfields of linguistics. Consequently, the authors could not
write their chapters in ways that make them fit only in one of the categories
adopted for the convenience of organizing the two volumes. We have
allocated some of the chapters to groups that highlight aspects of the
discussions that, we feared, might otherwise be overlooked by some
readers. Thus, in Chapter 1 of this volume, we also discuss particular (but
not all the) contributions of the chapters in an order that is not always
consistent with the table of contents. We thought that doing so will help
the reader navigate easily through the volumes to identify related chapters
that are not grouped together, although they could have been. The subject
and language indexes will also be very helpful. The parts of the two
volumes, as we have conceived them, are intended to help the reader realize
the ways in which the chapters grouped together complement each other,
though they have affinities with chapters in other parts of the Handbook, as
made evident by cross-references in our presentation.
As imperfect as we find the end result (in trying to show order out of
apparent chaos), we are happy to share with the reader this compendium of
scholarship on language contact and change. We apologize to the contribu-
tors for delays that the project has suffered since they responded to the first
round of editing. But we also believe in the saying that “things of quality
have no fear of time.” To the authors, many hearty thanks for your patience
and diligence; and to the reader, we appreciate your interest. We are
grateful to Helen Barton for trusting us, also patiently, with this monumen-
tal project, which we have found intellectually quite rewarding. We are also
grateful to Cambridge University Press’s Syndicate for allowing us to pro-
duce two volumes with the full contents of the accepted chapters rather
than asking us to curtail the Handbook down to one volume with shorter
chapters or even without some of the chapters. The reader will appreciate
the wealth of useful information they provide.
Introduction
1
Language Contact: What
a Rich and Intellectually
Stimulating History since
the Late Nineteenth
Century!
Salikoko S. Mufwene & Anna María Escobar

1. Preliminaries

In linguistics today, stating that one does contact linguistics draws no more
curiosity than saying that one studies, for instance, sign language. Anybody
working on some aspect(s) of language contact should know that the state-
ment is not informative enough, because, as we show in Section 2, there is a
wide range of topics that are subsumed by this umbrella label. Literally, as
well explained by Weinreich (1953) and Cohen (1956), language contact is
used in reference to the coexistence of languages in the mind of a speaker/
signer and/or to their coexistence in a social or geographical space.
To be sure, no contact really takes place in the latter cases if segregation
is so rigid that nobody in the coexistent populations of speakers learns the
other ethnolinguistic group’s language. In reality, from a macroecological
perspective, language contact at the population level obtains when there is
at least one individual that learns the other group’s language and can
spread its features in his/her group. Usually more than one “dispersing
individual” are involved, driven by some reason to interact with members
of the other community, though many other members of the relevant
populations may not engage in such interactions. What is relevant is that
language contact at the population level presupposes language contact at
the level of at least some individuals. There are numerous population
structures in which, owing to differences in economic and/or political
powers between the coexistent ethnolinguistic groups, at least some
members of one or both groups are expected to learn the other
4 SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE & ANNA MARÍA ESCOBAR

community’s language, such as in European colonies during the last few

centuries (e.g., those who worked as intermediaries, interpreters, or colo-
nial auxiliaries; see Samarin 1989, Lawrence, Osborn & Roberts 2006,
Mufwene 2008, 2020a, Van den Avenne 2017).
Contact linguistics is about various facets and consequences of the coex-
istence of languages in individual speakers’ minds and in particular popu-
lations. Instances of these include language shift at the level of either the
individual or a population. A consequence of this may be language
endangerment and loss (LEL), if most or all the members of the relevant
population speaking a particular heritage language stop using it and thus
converge in shifting to one that they either consider more advantageous to
them or are forced by various ecological pressures to speak more often (e.g.,
Fishman 1971, 1991, Mufwene 2020b). The outcome of this convergence of
behaviors can be compared to the emergence of new norms in a particular
language in a contact ecology, when speakers converge in selecting variants
(forms or structures) that come from another language they or some of
them also use.
Such feature adoptions have generally been referred to as transfers or
borrowings, depending on the scholar’s perspective. On the other hand, the
convergences also produce norms even in monolingual populations, out of
the contacts of different dialects or simply out of the contact of different
idiolects, as speakers negotiate tacitly about features of their respective
varieties. One can thus conclude that the fundamental contact is enabled
by interacting individuals, at the level of idiolects, native and/or non-native;
whatever else happens at the population level is produced by convergence
(Mufwene 2001). Labov (1972, 2001) explains this well in showing how
outliers sometimes bring into their social networks linguistic features they
learned in another network. It takes a central or influential network
member that the outlier interacts primarily with to copy the feature from
him/her and spread it to other members (Eckert 1989). That is, the latter
copy it from the central or influential member, or from other copiers,
rather than from the outlier (now the “dispersing individual”) who brought
it to their network. This is basically how change occurs, with some individ-
uals innovating or introducing (different features of course) and others
copying and spreading them (Croft 2000, Mufwene 2008, Fagyal et al.
2010).1 Thus, we can argue later that contact is an important actuator of
language change.
This approach can also help us explain why some language varieties are
less, or more, “focused” than others (using LePage & Tabouret-Keller’s 1985
terminology). For example, foreign-workers’ interlanguages differ from
pidgins, at least the expanded ones that we know today, because they lack
communal norms, although the speakers produce some of the same

1
Fagyal et al. (2010) show that “dispersing individuals” store “a great diversity of variants,” some of which can spread in
their interaction networks and constitute change.
 1. Language Contact 5

features in their interlanguages (Perdue & Klein 1992, Perdue 1995). The
reason for this state of affairs is that (allowing some over-simplification)
several migrant workers live in segregated groups in which they socialize in
either their heritage language or some other language of their countries of
origin while their children learn the local language from native speakers.
Interlanguages remain individual-speaker phenomena, which the migrant
workers (adults) produce only when they interact with people that do not
speak the language(s) they are more competent in. By contrast, pidgins are,
according to the received doctrine, communal varieties arising primarily
from the regular interactions of non-native speakers with their trading
partners and among themselves in the trade language to which they have
had limited exposure.
Through their interactions, speakers influence each other – accommo-
dating each other on different features – and converge toward some group
or communal norms (despite some natural variation in the emergent
system). The ecologies in which the migrant workers’ interlanguages
emerge (Pfaff 1981, see below) are not conducive to the emergence of
communal norms, as they do not form a community with their changing
interlocutors with whom they communicate in the host country’s lan-
guage. Although the occasional accommodations made by fluent speakers
to their deviations from the target language – a kind of foreigner talk at the
workplace – may reinforce the departures at the individual level, they do
not at some communal level. Communal norms emerge and can give rise to
new varieties in contact ecologies in which the speakers interact or socialize
frequently with one another, accommodating each other’s forms and
structures.
As much as some literature on (naturalistic) L2 acquisition has focused
on interlanguages, Mufwene (2010) concluded that this scholarship
can only make a limited contribution to research on the emergence of
creoles, because it is focused on individuals, whereas genetic creolistics
deals with communal norms as the outcome of convergence. The same
can be said of contact dialects. To be sure, one can learn about transfer
and substrate influence (such as about possible trajectories of linguistic
influence) but not about how some substrate elements attested in some
interlanguages have converged into substrate influence in a creole, while
some others do not.2
Consistent with Braj Kachru’s (1985) distinction between the “Inner,”
“Outer,” and “Expanded Circles” of World Englishes, the presence of
communal norms helps distinguish the Englishes of the Outer and
Expanded Circles. Because English generally functions as an official lan-
guage in the Outer Circle – which consists of former British exploitation
colonies – and the national elite have embraced it as an emblem of their

2
This regards the complex dynamics of competition and selection from a communal feature pool (Mufwene 2001,
2002) that the ecologies which generate the migrant workers’ interlanguages do not produce.
6 SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE & ANNA MARÍA ESCOBAR

social status and often socialize in it, national or regional norms have
emerged in different parts of the world. This practice has generated what
outsiders can identify as Indian, Singaporean, South African, and Nigerian
norms, among other varieties misidentified as “indigenized Englishes.”3
These norms are the outcomes of competition and selection in their
respective communal (national or regional) feature pools, in which indi-
vidual speakers accommodate each other and converge toward shared
local, national, or regional features (Mufwene 2001). The use of English
in the Expanded Circle, on the other hand, does not lead to the emergence
of national or regional norms. For instance, Japanese or German speakers
of English in, respectively, Japan or Germany do not normally speak
English among themselves.4
The study of language contact at the population level entails an add-
itional level of complexity that has usually been overlooked in the
literature, which we all should be aware of, although this dimension is
generally also missing from this Handbook. The omission appears to be a
legacy of the beginnings of linguistics, with historical and genetic lin-
guistics, in which languages were conceived of as organisms, therefore
without internal, inter-idiolectal variation (without their social life). It is
also a consequence of the coexistence of the research area with theoret-
ical linguistics, so central to linguistics to date, where it is generally
assumed (in fact since de Saussure 1916) that communal features are
shared by all individual speakers. Numerous grammars have been pub-
lished that are based on work with one or a couple of consultants! We
have generally not compared idiolectal systems with their communal
counterparts, which are typically constructs of convenience, in order to
check, for example, whether they are isomorphic in their details. Such
isomorphism would be contrary to what the study of interlanguages
suggests. What is the status of features that remain idiosyncratic of
particular idiolects and are not shared by all the members of the com-
munity of practice?

3
Identifying them as “indigenized Englishes” is quite biased, because American and Australian Englishes have
indigenized as well, in the sense of being rooted in the new ecologies where they have evolved (Mufwene 2009).
Note also that national categories are inaccurate constructs of convenience; those who reside in the relevant countries
make more distinctions. For instance, there are South African Black, Colored, and Indian Englishes, which are distinct
from South African White English, which is associated with White South Africans who are L1 speakers (Mesthrie 2017).
In polities such as the USA, the Natives distinguish between dialects and sociolects, while in many Outer Circle
countries, one can recognize variation associated with particular regions or ethnolinguistic backgrounds. That is, norms
allow variation – from inter-idiolectal to social and regional – in ways that cannot be determined for Englishes of the
Expanding Circle, despite obvious similarities among the idiolects of speakers who share the same vernaculars.
4
To be sure, now that multinational corporations have important offices staffed with senior personnel from different
places around the world and also hold virtual meetings at that senior administration level, people from the same
national background do get to interact with each other in English. However, these are not the kinds of interactions that
would produce national norms. Besides, whoever has observed interactions at such meetings or workplaces will notice
that people from the same national backgrounds will talk to each other privately in their national language.
 1. Language Contact 7

Despite progress in the scholarship on L2 acquisition, studies of

bilingualism and multilingualism are dominated by those focused on the
population level.5 Perhaps because urban youth “stylects” (see Section 3)
have been treated as discourse phenomena (from the perspective of per-
formance), the discussion of the relation between variation at the idiolectal
level and variation at the communal level has not come up. We hope to
make more sense of (some of ) these questions in the next section, where we
argue that research on language contact has evolved from being marginal
in linguistics to acquiring a central position, with contact at the population
or the individual level acknowledged as an actuator of language change.
Thus, the challenge has been to articulate the extent to which contact
dynamics (dis)favor the emergence of new communal norms. These apply
to the emergence of contact varieties – including creoles, pidgins, other
mixed varieties, new ethnolects, and interlanguages – and evidently also to
convergence and divergence between languages. The social histories of
populations in contact, including the roles that multilingual speakers play
in their respective ecologies, draw attention to the complexity of language
change and of the social aspects of linguistic behavior. In the next section,
we provide a selective synopsis of how language contact as a research area
has evolved since the nineteenth century.

2. A Historical Survey

The study of language contact has been part of linguistics since the late
nineteenth century, at variance with what is now known as genetic linguis-
tics. The latter was then preoccupied with the uniparental representation of
language speciation in especially the Indo-European family, and indeed also
with the classification of languages into families and subfamilies such as
Romance and West-Germanic. The comparative method of the nineteenth-
century Neogrammarians has remained the backbone of the research area
to date, though it is now enriched with computational modeling tech-
niques. The Stammbaum, now also identified as cladogram, continues to
serve as the proud demonstration of the success of that particular scholar-
ship.6 Lexical borrowings were excluded from the comparisons. No ques-
tion was asked as to why language contact was considered a spoiler of what
otherwise should be perfect, recursive speciation processes corresponding
to different time depths. Deviations from the regularities of change
revealed by the comparative method, such as “sound laws,” were accepted

5
There is indeed well-established scholarship on child bilingualism, which has also contributed to the important “Talk
Bank” called CHILDES. However, as can be noticed from publications such as Yip & Matthews (2007) and Silva-
Corvalán (2014), the scholarship informs the reader about the development of bilingualism in individual speakers,
even siblings in these specific cases, but not about the emergence of bilingual norms in a community.
6
More recent modeling techniques include splitgraphs for neighboring languages that represent contact zones of
unrelated languages, such as in the Amazonian Basin (Epps & Michael 2017).
8 SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE & ANNA MARÍA ESCOBAR

as exceptions, as long as they were not numerous enough to question the

accuracy of the relevant analyses.
The inconvenience of language contact became more obvious in the late
nineteenth century, when European philologists and other precursors of
(genetic) linguists noticed how English, French, and Portuguese – and of
course also Dutch and Spanish – had metamorphosed into creoles and
pidgins (interpreted then as broken languages) in, respectively, the
European plantation settlement colonies around the Atlantic and in the
Indian Oceans and in trade colonies of West Africa and the Pacific. Both
kinds of new language varieties were outcomes of how differently the non-
European speakers of non-Indo-European languages reproduced the Indo-
European languages they had learned. Contact was obviously the reason;
and the question of the role of language contact in language speciation
needed to be addressed.
However, the social ideologies of the time, which assumed purity of
species and languages, disavowed these new colonial varieties of Western
European languages as impure “bastard tongues” – as Derek Bickerton
provocatively also referred to them in the title of his 2008 book – or
aberrations that were exceptional in the way they had emerged. With some
exceptions, such as Hugo Schuchardt (see below), those who described them
attributed the structural changes to the mental and anatomical inferiority
of their presumably less evolved speakers.7 This is the explanation then
advanced by Adam (1883), Baissac (1880), Vinson (1882, 1888), Bertrand-
Bocandé (1849), and Gonzales (1922). Then, genetic linguists apparently
treated language contact as irrelevant to language speciation, generally
ignoring Schuchardt’s (1882) position that creoles and pidgins suggest
instead how language diversification actually occurs. More specifically,
Schuchardt attributed the current structures of modern languages to what
Roger Lass (1997) calls “imperfect replication” by successive generations of
their speakers, under contact conditions. Notwithstanding some oversim-
plification of the actual restructuring process on our part, substrate influ-
ence during language shift, for example, accounts for how Vulgar Latin had
evolved into the Romance languages, with the “reproductions” incremen-
tally diverging from the lexifier, as in the case of creoles.
Ignoring Schuchardt, genetic linguists dismissed creoles and pidgins by
fiat as “mixed languages” and therefore anomalies by contrast to European
varieties of Indo-European languages, all the way into the first half of the
twentieth century.8 Likewise, Hjelmslev’s (1938) contention that all lan-
guages are mixed to some extent got negligible attention. To date, there is

7
Although opposed to slavery, advocating thinking of races as biological species and noting that non-Europeans
expressed emotions in the same ways as their European counterparts, Charles Darwin nonetheless characterized
Africans and Native Americans as less evolved than Europeans in The descent of man (1871).
8
Whitney (1881, cited by Appel & Muysken 1987) invoked borrowings to account for deviations from the findings of the
comparative method. He actually may have been the first to think of, in Haugen’s (1950) terminology, a “scale of
adoptability” from nouns to grammatical structures. However, we could also see the influence of this genetic linguistics
 1. Language Contact 9

still a category of “mixed languages,” whose definition varies according to

author. For instance, Thomason (2001) offers a less restrictive interpret-
ation, which includes creoles – unlike some creolists who do not fit them in
this category – although she is still at variance with Hjelmslev. Language
contact is the reason why it is still widely assumed that creoles do not
belong in the same genetic families as their lexifiers (Thomason & Kaufman
1988).9 One must wonder why no natural account has been presented for
why, for instance, all the Indo-European languages do not have the same
morphosyntactic template that they would have inherited from Proto-Indo-
European and the grammars of the Romance languages do not represent a
continuous rectilinear or unilinear evolution from that of Vulgar Latin.
Yakov Malkiel (1978) is among the exceptions in invoking contact to explain
differences between Western and Eastern Romance languages.
The first half of the twentieth century saw the development of structur-
alism in Europe, with Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) showing a greater
interest in synchrony than in diachrony and developing more focus on
structure/system (langue in French) than on speech (parole in French),
although he situated much of the actuation of language change in the
latter. The same period also saw the development of descriptivism in
Anglophone North America, also mainly focused on synchrony, which
was prompted largely by the endangerment of Native American languages.
Anticipating that they would soon vanish, North American linguists
endeavored to describe these languages.
The linguists were also in a situation where, unlike their European
counterparts, they could find so many non-Indo-European languages within
their own borders and were sensitive to the negative impact that the
dominant European languages brought by the colonizers exerted on their
vitality. Notwithstanding this, Sapir (1921) acknowledged “individual and
communal variation in English” (p. 157), as well as “linguistic interinfluen-
cing” (chapter 9) between the languages of neighboring populations, where
influence tended to be in one direction, from the most dominant culture to
the other. Bloomfield (1933: 476) also noted that speakers adapt their
speech habits to those of their interlocutors, where the conditioning factors

tradition on Chomskyan linguistics in the 1980s, in the CORE /PERIP H ERY distinction, in which, strangely, the “core” applies
to the largest part consisting of regularities in the grammar of a language, while the “periphery” includes exceptions
(or what Haugen 1950 calls “residual structural irregularities”), which are associated with language contact and other
vicissitudes in the history of the relevant language. This is justified with, for instance, irregular noun plurals in English, as
in children, oxen, stimuli, corpora, and criteria, with the latter three reflecting a history of borrowings from, in this case,
Latin and Greek. By contrast, the first two reflect retentions from Old English and Middle English, in which the suffix -en
was an alternative to -(e)s (as in oxes vs. oxen). Frequency has helped the forms survive the general trend of nominal
plural with -(e)s.
9
This position is disputed by Posner (1983, 1985, 1996) and Trask (1996), who claim that French, Spanish, and
Portuguese creoles are the newest Romance languages. According to Mufwene (2001, 2005, 2009, 2020a), what
matters the most is that they are natural offspring of their lexifiers and have not evolved exceptionally (see also DeGraff
2005).
10 SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE & ANNA MARÍA ESCOBAR

are the “density of lines of communication” and “the relative prestige of

[the] social groups” (p. 345) (Fagyal et al. 2010: 263).
Both structuralist and descriptivist approaches to language yielded
several descriptions of non-European languages, with the “system” as its
object. No significant study of language contact emerged until the middle of
the twentieth century, about the same time Noam Chomsky (1957) would
revolutionize the field with generative linguistics. Although a turning point
in modern linguistics, this new trend has also remained focused on struc-
ture/system (a static framework, Bailey 1973: 34–5) and reiterated commit-
ment to study competence and the faculty of language (or Universal
Grammar – corresponding to de Saussure’s faculté de langage) over perform-
ance (corresponding to de Saussure’s parole). The generative approach
helped cement the view that internal factors were sufficient to achieve
rigor in linguistic explanations.
It was at this critical moment, in the mid-twentieth century, that Charles
Ferguson, Joshua Fishman, Einar Haugen, and Uriel Weinreich, among
others, regenerated interest in language contact, albeit in different though
related ways. While very much interested in the Chomskyan Revolution,
Uriel Weinreich revived the study of bilingualism, identifying the individ-
ual, more specifically the speaker’s mind, as the locus of language contact,
especially through his study of interference. He proposed distinguishing
between three types of bilingualism: coordinate, compound, and subordin-
ate. This terminology has since been used in studies of both second lan-
guage acquisition and societal bilingualism. The research, which
culminated in his book Languages in contact (1953), would also establish
the connection between language contact and language change (a dynamic
framework, Bailey 1973: 34–5), embedding both in the social context of
speakers’ interactions and highlighting “the interrelations between lan-
guage history and culture history” (Bleaman 2017). This is reflected in the
following famous statement of his: “In speech, interference is like sand
carried by a stream; in language, it is the sedimented sand deposited on the
bottom of the lake. The two phases of interference should be distinguished”
(Weinreich 1953: 11).
The distinction Weinreich made between individual and societal bilin-
gualism led him to pay more attention to various social factors that govern
the functional distribution of the coexistent languages in their speakers’
lives, viz., which communicative domains are associated exclusively or
primarily with which particular language (see also Ferguson 1959).
Indirectly, he also advocated for what we are calling “communal norms”
when he wrote: the “impact of interference phenomena on the norms of a
language may be greater if the contact occurs through groups of bilinguals”
(Weinreich 1953: 3).
In collaboration with Marvin Herzog and William Labov, he drew atten-
tion to the actuation of language change, situating this not only in
language-internal variation but also in language contact, a facet of the
 1. Language Contact 11

social context of language practice. He characterized this approach to

language change as speaker-oriented. Anticipating one interpretation of
uniformitarianism in linguistics today, their seminal essay, titled
“Empirical foundations for a theory of language change” (1968), argues
that “the same social and linguistic factors that condition linguistic vari-
ation today also account for historical change,” as paraphrased by Bleaman
(2017). Perhaps this explains partly why variationist sociolinguists like
talking about “language variation and change” and even have a journal
named this way.
However, the phrase is problematic from an evolutionary perspective, as
variation provides materials on which evolution works – in the case of
language, through interactions among idiolects, i.e., inter-idiolectal con-
tacts. However, variation is not necessarily indicative of change in progress.
Nonetheless, Weinreich, Labov & Herzog (1968) were correct in arguing
that “finding order and structure” in “linguistic heterogeneity” (which they
also characterized as “orderly heterogeneity,” p. 100) can say something
about the “course of [language] development” (p. 99). The order was to be
found in the “social and stylistic determinants” of heterogeneity that regu-
late what speakers do.
Einar Haugen developed an interest in bilingualism among Norwegian
immigrants to the USA and its impacts on their heritage language.
Embedding (American) Norwegian and its speakers in the population
structure in which English is the dominant and economically more power-
ful language, he went on to study its attrition. This was at a time when, as
noted by Baran (2018), European immigrants who arrived after the
American Revolution were not immediately recognized as American and
all people of European descent were not yet united under the label of
“White Americans.” With his The Norwegian language in America: A study in
bilingual behavior (1953), Haugen pioneered the study of language
endangerment and loss (LEL) in North America. In his subsequent book
Bilingualism in the Americas (1956), he distinguished languages depending on
their social history: native, colonial, immigrant, or creolized.
Haugen also distinguished what he considered true language loss from
language mixing. The former is produced by language shift, while the latter
is a consequence of attrition in the heritage language and represents lan-
guage change. Rejecting the nineteenth-century ideology of language
purity, he would have thus disagreed with those creolists according to
whom creoles coexisting with their lexifiers are dying by “decreolization”
(e.g., Hazaël-Massieux 1999), i.e., the process by which speakers substitute
acrolectal features for basilectal ones. (We return to this topic below.) Note
that both language shift and language mixing can be identified in, for
instance, Nancy Dorian’s (1981, 2010) work on the obsolescence of
Sutherland Gaelic and certainly also in the endangerment and loss of the
languages of immigrants from other nations in European settlement col-
onies since the fifteenth century, where the language of a particular nation
12 SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE & ANNA MARÍA ESCOBAR

has become the dominant one (e.g., Clyne 2003 for Australia; Brown, in
press, for the United States).
Haugen’s investigation of language practice among Norwegian immi-
grants led him to develop, among other things, seminal scholarship on
borrowing, which he characterizes as process rather than outcome.
According to him, the latter can be any number of loan forms or structures
and does not rule out congruence of particular forms or structures between
the languages in contact. His article “The analysis of linguistic borrowing”
(1950) is a classic that any student of borrowing who is eager to figure out
whether they are innovating or working in the footsteps of this pioneer
must read. He situates borrowing in the behavior of bilingual speakers and
is critical of the metaphor of “language mixture,” which can be misunder-
stood as a “concoction” coming out of a “cocktail shaker,” i.e., out of an
unconstrainted combination of various ingredients (p. 211).
Partly anticipating theories such as Carol Myers-Scotton’s (1993) frame
analysis in terms of “matrix” and “embedded” languages, Haugen (1950:
211) argues that speakers always speak one language while resorting to the
other language for assistance. This position is apparently corroborated by
today’s students of urban youth language varieties in sub-Saharan Africa.
For Haugen, the phenomena misidentified as “mixed” or “hybrid language”
are particular consequences or outcomes of language contact and are prin-
cipled, obeying specific structural constraints (the kinds of things that
genetic creolists have been struggling to capture in various accounts of
the emergence of creole vernaculars).
Haugen privileged the historical fold of borrowing over its synchronic
one according to which one could identify loan forms and structures with
certainty, without invoking the history of the language. It is this historical
take that led him to develop his “ecology of language” (1971), which evolved
into a collection of papers put together under the title The ecology of language
(1972) by Anwar S. Dil. He expanded a biology-inspired approach to lan-
guage change, including LEL, that had been pioneered a few years earlier by
C.F. Voegelin, F.M. Voegelin, & Noel W. Schutz, Jr. in 1967. In an article
titled “The language situation in Arizona as part of the Southwest culture
area,” the latter discuss, among other things, the role of boarding schools in
the endangerment and loss of Native American languages. The schools
constituted ecologies of intense language contact where the students were
forced to speak only the colonizer’s language. All these pioneers direct
attention to local interactional dynamics within specific population
structures in which speakers evolve in order to account for how the struc-
tures and/or vitality of their languages change.
This is the right juncture to also mention Pour une sociologie du langage
(1956) by Marcel Cohen. To be sure, the author anticipated sociohistorical
linguistics – aka historical sociolinguistics – more than he did any of the
present-day developments in the study of language contact. However, his
emphasis on embedding language change in its sociohistorical context, in
 1. Language Contact 13

which the population structure plays a central actuator role, is a significant

contribution to the scholarship on language contact as the field developed
from the works of Uriel Weinreich and Einar Haugen in particular. The
same sets of ethnolinguistic groups coming in contact under different
ecological conditions will not produce the same thing.
Also, changes in socioeconomic structures can trigger changes in terms
of how one group speaks the other’s language, and whether in the first
place its members remain “invested” in the language. Among several
examples, Marcel Cohen cites the situation of Jews in colonial French
North Africa. The weakening of segregation between the Jews and the
Arabs led the former to speak Arabic in ways more similar to its heritage
speakers’. However, the rise of French as the new language of formal
economy motivated them to become more invested in French than in
Arabic. Marcel Cohen also highlighted similarities between language con-
tact and dialect contact – now further developed by Peter Trudgill (e.g.,
1986, 2004) – which should lead us to realize, as we noted in Section 1, that
the fundamental level of contact in language is between idiolects, regard-
less of whether they are native or non-native (Mufwene 2001). One may also
note similarities between Cohen’s typology of various ecologies of language
contact with the sociology of language developed by Joshua Fishman (dis-
cussed below).10
In the mid-1960s, Joshua Fishman (1968a) enriched the scholarship on
language contact with insights on the complexity of multilinguals’ behav-
iors in communities where members share similar repertoires of the same
languages, although their competences in each and/or preferences for one
or the other vary to some extent. In an effort to better understand language
maintenance and language shift, he highlights the fact that factors such as
situation, domain, topic, and interlocutor influence their language
choices at particular speech events, consistent with research on the ethnog-
raphy of speaking in monolingual communities by linguists such as Hymes
(1962) and Ervin-Tripp (1964). Like Ferguson in dealing with “diglossia” (see
below), Fishman (1972) directed attention to the fact that one language is
usually preferred for informal interactions while another is required in
formal settings, which may include one’s professional life. Independent of
diglossia, he highlighted the fact that a speaker may also feel more at ease
discussing a particular topic in one language than another, owing to, for
instance, the fact they were trained on or have experienced the topic in the

10
One would also be justified in identifying in Marcel Cohen a precursor of Don Kulick’s (2019) book A death in the
rainforest: How a language and a way of life came to an end in Papua New Guinea. It is an ethnographic/ecological
account of how layers of colonization and the introduction of Christianity prompted the inhabitants of the village of
Gapun to gradually shift from Tayap, their heritage language, to Tok Pisin, the indigenized/pidginized form of
English rather than to English itself. This came as part of the population’s interest in improving their living conditions by
shifting to a cash economy introduced by colonization. The latter provided the ecology for the emergence of Tok Pisin
among plantation manual laborers, which included many of the male villagers who brought the new, European
language to the village as an emblem of their cultural change. The other villagers learned it naturalistically.
14 SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE & ANNA MARÍA ESCOBAR

language they currently prefer to use, that in which they have developed
the best command of the relevant terminology or idiomatic phrases.
Nonetheless, one may also “violate” this division of labor when interact-
ing with particular multilingual individuals in the same community, to
whom they feel socially close, even to the point of mixing codes, as
explained in Fishman’s (1965a) article “Who speaks what language to
whom and when?” Fishman was already anticipating the fascination of
linguistic anthropologists such as Michael Silverstein (2003) and his stu-
dents and colleagues with the indexical role of language and, mutatis mutan-
dis, of particular registers, sociolects, topolects, and other varieties.
The focus on the complexity of the multilingual behavior also led
Fishman to shed light on the gradual and non-uniform way in which a
language dies. If the opposition in status can be cast in terms of socially
weak vs. strong or dominant languages (viz., demographically, economic-
ally, or politically), particular patterns of social interaction can lead
speakers to bring the dominant language into domains associated with
the weak one, or from the public sphere into the private domain, such as
the home. For instance, because members of the family use the same
repertoire, some speakers may find it unnecessary to switch back to the
heritage language at home. Fishman also showed that language shift at
both the individual and population levels does not occur abruptly and
wholesale but rather gradually and piecemeal, from one domain to another,
affecting some individuals before others, until it affects the whole
community.
In another article, “Bilingualism, intelligence and language learning”
(1965b), Fishman dispelled the myth that multilingual speakers are more
intelligent than monolinguals. He did likewise with another myth that
claimed the existence of a state of perfect multilingualism in which no
language mixing occurs. This was in reaction to the distinction between
“coordinate” and “compound bilingualism” mentioned above, which was
then gaining ground. If one thinks about it carefully, phenomena such as
interference/transfer and borrowing would be impossible in speakers whose
bilingualism was coordinate, as there would be no osmosis between
coexistent languages.
Fishman evolved to become a strong defender of linguistic diversity and
even wrote about the possibility of reversing language shift (1991), thereby
underscoring the significance of ecological factors in maintaining or giving
up a language. Nonetheless, we cannot ignore the fact that in
“Sociolinguistics and the language problems of developing countries”
(1968b), he presented multilingualism as a problem for nation-building
and political unity in the newly independent nations of Africa. In this line,
Stewart (1968a) also presented his widely cited “A sociolinguistic typology
for describing national multilingualism.”
Following Fishman, among others, language economists such as
Ginsburgh & Weber (2011) have interpreted linguistic diversity in the
 1. Language Contact 15

developing world as linguistic “fragmentation,” aka “fractionalization”

(Alesina et al. 2003). For them, this stands in the way of economic develop-
ment, a position at odds with linguists’ advocacy for sustaining linguistic
diversity and affording every child an opportunity to be schooled in their
heritage or ancestral language, especially if this is also their mother tongue.
To be sure, Fishman did not argue against linguistic diversity. He
described the difficulties that societally multilingual developing nations
were facing in having to choose between, on the one hand, maintaining
the colonial language as the official language, although it is not accessible
to large segments of the national populations, and, on the other, promoting
one of the many indigenous languages as the official language and thereby
(potentially) disadvantaging speakers of the other languages. One must
wonder why only the Western model of nation building (with a nation
united by one national/official language) had to be considered – though
Fishman must be praised for paying attention to practical problems associ-
ated with language maintenance and economic development.
In papers such as “Nationality-nationalism and nation-nationism” (1968c)
and “National languages and languages of wider communication in the
developing nations” (1969), Fishman highlights the diglossic relation that
has been obtained between the colonial languages that continue to function
as official languages and the indigenous languages. In his view, (rigid)
diglossia has contributed to preventing the displacement of indigenous
languages by the colonial or dominant language, despite some current
language policies that have favored the use of official languages in schools.
He thus anticipated some “heretics” such as Mufwene (2017a) who argue
that the population structures of former European exploitation colonies, in
the Global South – which fosters socioeconomic segregation between the
Natives and the colonizers and now the masses of the population and the
ruling elite – is not conducive to the endangerment of indigenous languages
by so-called killer languages (see below), for instance English and French.
Contributions to the scholarship on language contact really flourished in
the mid-twentieth century. Following Nikolai Trubetzkoy (1923, 1939),
Murray Emeneau (1956) argued for language convergence, aka
“Sprachbund” and “language/ linguistic area,” this time in South Asia. He
focused on shared features of Indic and Dravidian languages that are the
outcomes of language contact, in a way similar to the sharing of structural
features among the Balkan languages (Sandfeld 1930). These studies and
many more since then highlight the role of population movements and
contacts, as well as the ensuing population structure, in the rise of areal
features. They are actuators of convergent language change – with two or
more coexistent but genetically or typologically different languages evolv-
ing shared structures – as is evident from some contributions to this
volume, especially those by Alexandra Aikhenvald and Thiago Costa
Chacon on the Americas and by Victor Friedman on the Balkans. As is also
evident from Gumperz & Wilson (1971), another pioneer classic essay, areal
16 SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE & ANNA MARÍA ESCOBAR

features show how languages can wind up sharing forms and structures not
inherited from a common ancestor, simply through mutual influences
enabled by language contact. Recent book-length publications on the sub-
ject matter in Europe and Africa include Heine & Kuteva (2005), Heine &
Nurse (2008), Drinka (2017), and, in South America, Cerrón Palomino
(1994). The relevant contributions to this Handbook and its companion to
follow just show how current the subject matter has remained in dealing
with regional formal and structural affinities among languages.
Still in the mid-twentieth century, John Gumperz (1964) also pioneered
the study of code-switching. Among other things, he explored a distinction
between “code-mixing” and “code-switching.” This has of course generally
been ignored in the literature since the 1980s, in which “codeswitching”
has become the default umbrella term for both; the distinction has appar-
ently been harder to sustain at the level of discourse. Likewise, his attempt
to show that creoles are particular outcomes of language-mixing has gener-
ally not been referred to, at least not in creolistics, although, based on the
late-nineteenth-century ideology of language purity, creoles have been
assumed to be mixed languages (as noted above in this section). Assuming
an essentially synchronic perspective, Gumperz argued, more successfully,
that code-switching and, more generally, language mixing among plurilin-
guals are normal and principled or rule-governed behavior.
A speaker can alternate deliberately between languages for all sorts of
reasons, including identifying interlocutors in their narrative, quoting par-
ticular characters, or highlighting particular attitudes (e.g., sarcasm, com-
ical effect, attitude toward the interlocutor). Gumperz did not, of course,
exclude the possibility that a speaker may have to use as the “matrix
language” (Myers-Scotton 1993) one in which he has less competence than
another or has less ease in discussing a particular topic, such as when he/
she is conversing with interlocutors who are not familiar with the language
that he/she is more competent in. In sub-Saharan Africa, where the ideology
of language purity is hardly embraced, this accounts for the mixed-code
nature of utterances of speakers who are more competent in the European
official language of their country than in an indigenous lingua franca
spoken in some region of the same polity (Kamwangamalu 2000). It is also
common when such a speaker has acquired a particular knowledge
through formal education in the European colonial language but must
convey relevant information in an indigenous vernacular not associated
with the domain.
Gumperz also initiated the search for constraints in code-switching,
which Carol Myers-Scotton, in collaboration with especially Janice L. Jake
(Myers-Scotton & Jake 2016), just like Shana Poplack (1980, 2017), would
elaborate in several publications to date. Auer (1999) presents a more
nuanced conception of what code-switching involves, especially regarding
whether the grammars used in code-switched utterances are the same as
the juxtaposition of those of monolingual speakers of the relevant
 1. Language Contact 17

languages. Anthologies such as Stell & Yakpo (2015) enrich the scholarship
with diverse perspectives, including the psychological and social.
Gumperz certainly deserves more credit for underscoring the social and
contextual functions of code-switching (see also Eerdmans, Prevignano &
Thibault 2003). This is apparently one of the aspects of code-switching on
which the now growing scholarship on translanguaging (e.g., Williams
2002, Garcia & Li 2014, 2018, Lewis, Jones & Baker 2012) has capitalized,
especially in the classroom context.
The scholarship on language contact at the discourse level has also
evolved into the study of urban youth language varieties, marked by
switching and mixing, on which this volume includes a short discussion,
in Alamin Mazrui’s chapter, regarding Sheng and Engsh in Kenya. Based on
the grammar of a particular indigenous urban vernacular, such as Nairobi
Swahili, Kinshasa Lingala, or Cameroon Pidgin English, the youth varieties
have been characterized as audience-driven and context-dependent
“stylects,” to display the speaker’s/performer’s “authenticity” rather than
command of a particular communal norm. They are best produced at the
street corner where the relevant youth socialize, rather than in private
spaces, especially those including non-group members.
Students of youth language varieties (also identified as “youthspeak”),
which are not recognized as separate languages or dialects, argue that the
mixed varieties have an indexical role. Their speakers – who are otherwise
disenfranchised economically from the elite and affluent white-collar
speakers of European colonial languages – claim their speech indexes
modern urban culture, by contrast with traditional ways of speaking the
related indigenous languages (Mesthrie et al. 2021). Commenting on Sheng,
Githiora (2018: 1) states that “The speech code exists on a continuum of
ways of speaking Swahili within a complex and stratified multilingual
society in search of a modern identity.” Authenticity in the singularity of
one’s utterances seems to carry more weight than the use of some stable
norm, as their producers keep innovating with competing lexical syno-
nyms. These performances appear to be consistent with Peter Auer’s
(1999) interpretation of language mixing as associated sometimes with
group identity.
While such varieties have been studied especially in sub-Saharan Africa
and Europe, one is prompted to also consider varieties such as Spanglish,
Heblish, and Media Lengua, although the latter has disputably been associ-
ated with relexification since Muysken (1981).11 It is otherwise evident that
language contact, through code-switching, code-mixing, “fused lects”
(according to Auer’s 1999 typology), or otherwise, plays a role in language
speciation. In the case of at least sub-Saharan African urban “stylects,”

11
For instance, according to Shappeck (2011: ii) “the only characteristic that distinguishes Media Lengua from other
language contact varieties in central Ecuador is the quantity of the overall Spanish borrowings and not the type of
processes that might have been employed by Quichua speakers during the genesis of Media Lengua.”
18 SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE & ANNA MARÍA ESCOBAR

contact apparently just expands the continuum of the variation between

the languages in contact, producing new, ever-changing synonyms
(Mesthrie et al. 2021). The study of language contact has thus expanded to
include a greater focus on creative performance, at the discourse level, far
beyond what Uriel Weinreich’s and Einar Haugen’s interest in interference
considered as deviations from a specific (native) norm.
We did not intend to provide a comprehensive survey of studies of
language contact in this section. Our goal was simply to highlight some
ways in which the mid-twentieth century was pivotal to the expansion of
research on language contact, diverging from the focus of structuralist and
descriptive linguistics on language structures, chiefly phonology and
morphology, until the Chomskyan Revolution made syntax the central
concern of “formal linguistics.” The same impetus sparked renewed inter-
est in the emergence of creoles and pidgins, starting with publications such
as Lorenzo Turner’s (1949) Africanisms in the Gullah dialect and Robert Hall,
Jr.’s (1958) “Creole languages and genetic relationships.”12 In a way these
were also rejoinders to work produced by Haitian scholars Suzanne Sylvain
(1936) and Jules Faine (1937), who had concluded, respectively, that Haitian
Creole was Ewe relexified with French vocabulary13 or that it was a new
Romance language. The momentum, marked by several other publications
by Robert Hall, Jr. (1958, 1962, 1966) on Haitian Creole and Melanesian
Pidgin, and some studies tracing modern creoles back to some hitherto
unattested Portuguese pidgin that had putatively evolved from the
Mediterranean Lingua Franca (Thompson 1961, Whinnom 1965), led to
the publication of the seminal volume edited by Dell Hymes titled
Pidginization and creolization of languages (1971).
It was simply assumed, not without controversy, that new languages had
emerged under contact conditions created by European plantation and
trade colonies – in which non-Europeans were the overwhelming majority –
and that they were not genealogically related to their lexifiers, because they
had very different grammars.14 In the legacy of the nineteenth century, the

12
Both diachronically and synchronically, creolistics has focused more on morphosyntax than on phonology and
semantics, let alone pragmatics. With substratum claiming such a central position in polemics on the origins of creoles’
and pidgins’ structures, one would have expected phonology to attract more attention. After all, words in these new
varieties diverge importantly from how their cognates are pronounced in their colonial kin, especially the acrolectal
varieties against which the varieties have typically but mistakenly been compared. Note that their lexifiers were
nonstandard varieties (Chaudenson 1992, 2001).
13
This conclusion, at the very end of the book, is curiously contrary to the substance of the book itself, which shows
language mixing especially by way of structural congruence (Mufwene 2001). This position, which has been identified
as the Relexification Hypothesis, has been defended by Claire Lefebvre (especially 1998) and several of her
colleagues and students at the Université du Quebec à Montréal, though disputed or ignored by most other creolists,
especially Chaudenson (1992, 2001) and DeGraff (2002).
14
In the case of French creoles, Chaudenson (1992, 2001) disputed both excessive substratism and the alternative
central role attributed to a child-based bioprogram, which have each generated a lot of controversy for or against what
Michel DeGraff (2003, 2005) called “Creole Exceptionalism.” Some readers may be interested in John McWhorter’s
(2018) The creole debate for a different summary in support of Exceptionalism.
 1. Language Contact 19

emphasis was then on the role of substrate influence or of the language

bioprogram – acting in the minds of children that putatively transformed
their parents’ broken pidgins into creoles – in accounting both for their
structural divergence from their lexifiers and for structural similarities
among them.
In addition to the question of how creoles and pidgins emerged,
Pidginization and creolization of languages determined many of the issues that
have preoccupied creolists to date, including whether creoles are defined by
a particular set of structural features that are unique to them, as Creole
Exceptionalists continue to claim. In addition, the book made it clear that
the terms creole and pidgin had been extended to also include “contact
languages” that were not lexified by European colonial languages. The book
includes chapters on Mbugu, Lubumbashi Swahili, Chinook Jargon, and
convergence between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages in India. This
inclusion followed the publication of Status and use of African lingua francas
by Bernd Heine in 1970, which includes a long list of languages, some of
which have since been counted as creoles or pidgins, such as Lingala and
Sango. Along with other publications, these works would make it necessary
to make some distinctions that are current today, such as not confusing
“intertwined languages” and cases of “Sprachbund/convergence” with
creoles and pidgins.
Also, the significance of inter- and intra-idiolectal variation in identifying
what was misnamed “post-creole continuum” started with Pidginization and
creolization of languages, which includes a seminal chapter on the subject
matter by David DeCamp (1971). Note, however, that the decreolization
hypothesis (picked up by Bickerton 1973 and Rickford 1987, among others),
with which it was too hastily associated, can be traced back to Hugo
Schuchardt (1914). It had also inspired Robert Hall, Jr.’s (1962) hypothesis
of creoles’ “life-cycle.” The basic idea was that if a creole continued to
coexist with the acrolect of its lexifier, it would substitute many of the
latter’s features (grammatical and lexical) for its basilectal counterparts –
thus, it would “debasilectalize.”
Based on his study of Gullah, Mufwene (1994) disputes the historical
validity of this “decreolization” hypothesis. This was not a rejection of
the continuum nor of the useful terms basilect, mesolect, and acrolect,
which Stewart (1965) coined to capture it. What he rejected instead
was the claim that the mesolect was the outcome of contacts between
the basilect and the acrolect. He argued instead that the basilect and the
acrolect are idealized poles of the continuum captured by the mesolect,
and that the continuum had existed since the early stages of the
speciation of the new vernaculars from their lexifiers. There just was
no “post-creole” continuum; creoles had always existed as continua, as
noted by Mervyn Alleyne (1980). As a matter of fact, the continuum
obtains everywhere a distinction is made between a standard variety
and nonstandard varieties connected by a mesolect, often characterized
20 SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE & ANNA MARÍA ESCOBAR

as colloquial speech. Much of the variation on which language evolution

operates is to be found in this continuum.15
Studies of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), especially by
William Stewart (1965, 1968b) and J.L. Dillard (1972, 1977), also fueled
debates on the role of substrate influence to explain the divergence of its
grammar from that of American standard English. (Ironically, standard
English was definitely not its lexifier, just like in the case of English
creoles!) It was assumed that AAVE had originated in an erstwhile Gullah-
like creole spoken earlier by enslaved Africans on the rice fields and cotton
and tobacco plantations and that this ancestor could ultimately be traced
back to a West African Pidgin English. (This position is disputed in
Mufwene 2015.) Marked by several polemics, the scholarship on the emer-
gence of creoles and AAVE has thrived, generating many more publications
than on any other nonstandard dialect of European languages in the
ex-colonies.
The exception to the above generalization can be cited from the scholar-
ship on the indigenization of English in the former British exploitation
colonies of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, which prompted us to invite
contributions on the spread of Western European languages in both the
settlement and exploitation colonies for this Handbook. These include the
chapters by John Lipski on the Romance languages (a comparison between
Europe and the Americas), J. Clancy Clements on Portuguese, Robert Papen
on the contact of French and English in North America, Cécile B. Vigouroux
on French in Africa, and Edgar Schneider & Sarah Buschfeld on English.
In the case of English, the catalysts in the trend regarding what is now
known as “World Englishes” (a term that applies to all modern English
varieties) are Braj B. Kachru, Yamuna Kachru, and Larry Smith’s joint effort
to expose what has been essentially a race bias (like in the case of creoles!) in
disenfranchising the Englishes of the Global South as “new,” “nonnative,”
and “indigenized.” The terms suggest inaccurately that these particular
varieties are deviations or anomalies from the normal evolutionary process
followed by the varieties spoken by the European-majority populations in
the colonies. “Indigenized Englishes,” spoken in the Global South, would
putatively be the only ones to have changed and diverged significantly from
the British norm by appropriation by non-heritage speakers. It is for a good
reason that Kachru (2017) chose “World Englishes” as the umbrella term
that could show all modern English varieties as evolving and new. At the
same time he highlights the political and economic power hierarchy among
the English national and regional varieties with the opposition (from Kachru

15
Mufwene also objects to the term decreolization, which suggests that post-formative adoption of features from the
lexifier’s standard variety entails being less creole. As, according to him, a creole is defined more by the sociohistorical
ecology of its emergence than by any particular set of structural features (Mufwene 2000), he characterizes the
putative process as debasilectalization, loss of basilectal features. If this particular evolution occurred at all in a creole, it
would be similar to a particular dialect becoming less nonstandard under the influence of its standard counterpart, the
acrolect in creolistics (if it is from the same lexifying language).
 1. Language Contact 21

1985) between the “Inner Circle” (which includes all countries of the Global
North, where English is spoken as a vernacular), the “Outer Circle” (which
includes all former British exploitation colonies, where English is the High
variety and functions as an official language), and the “Expanding Circle”
(which applies to the remaining countries that have adopted English as a
lingua franca for communication with the outside world).16
The 1980s were pivotal to the emergence of World Englishes as a research
area, with two journals – World Englishes and English World-Wide – as well as
a book series, English Around the World. They all bridged well with the
publication in, and thanks to, creolistics of the journals Etudes Créoles, the
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, and the Journal of Language Contact, as
well as the book series Creole Language Library, Cambridge Approaches to
Language Contact, and Brill Studies in Language Contact and Dynamics of
Language. A four-volume Atlas of pidgin and creole language structures has also
been published and is now also accessible online (Michaelis et al. 2013), in
the spirit of The world atlas of language structures (Haspelmath et al. 2005,
Dryer & Martin 2013), The world loanword database (Haspelmath & Tadmor
2009), and South American indigenous language structures (Muysken et al.
2016), reflecting the interest of the Max Plank Institute at Leipzig in both
language typology and language contact.
The 1980s are also marked by Sarah Thomason and Terrence Kaufman’s
book entitled Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics (1988),
which promoted a comparative approach to the study of language change.
The book advocated for “the importance of extralinguistic alongside of
linguistic factors in the study of language change (advocated by
Schuchardt in the 19th century and in Weinreich 1953)” (Escobar 2008:
200–1). By directly addressing contact phenomena, Thomason and
Kaufman brought to the forefront the intersection of contact linguistics,
sociolinguistics, dialectology, and historical linguistics. We return to
this below.
By contrast, the 1990s and early 2000s will be remembered for the
renewed interest in the LEL of “Indigenous languages,” to be interpreted
narrowly and accurately as those Native to former European settlement
colonies but more broadly as “non-European,” with a dangerous
Eurocentric bias. If one takes into account the fact that the late wave of
the Indo-European expansion over the past half-millennium had nothing to
do with the same negative processes in China and other parts of the world,
this evolution must be associated generally with population movements

16
Unfortunately, as pointed out by Mufwene (2017b), the typology is not clear on how to classify English varieties of the
Caribbean, which are included in neither the Inner Circle, although they function as their speakers’ mother tongues
and their vernaculars, nor in the Outer Circle, where they do not fit, as they are not by-products of exploitation
colonization. Kachru does not classify African American Vernacular English, perhaps because it should pass as one of
the ethnolects of American English, in the Inner Circle. As a legacy of creolistics, according to which creoles are new
languages not genetically related to their lexifiers (see above), English creoles are not considered at all. One can tell
how resilient the race bias is that Braj Kachru and his collaborators had fought against.
22 SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE & ANNA MARÍA ESCOBAR

and language contact in ecologies in which one economically (and/or polit-

ically) powerful population subjugates the other(s).
An advocacy movement to stop or reverse language shift, the immediate
cause of LEL, has followed a workshop organized by Kenneth Hale and
Michael Krauz at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America
in 1991, the proceedings of which were published in a 1992 special issue of
Language on the subject matter. Interestingly, unlike in the early twentieth
century, when the interest was in describing the dying Native American
languages, this time the focus was on sensitizing linguists to what was
presented as a disaster for humanity in the form of loss of linguistic and
cultural diversity, like in the case of endangered species.17 The advocates
initially laid the blame on “killer languages,” apparently ignoring every-
thing that Einar Haugen and Uriel Weinreich had said about the causes of
LEL. Publications such as Nettle & Romaine (2000) and Crystal (2000) just
focused especially on the powerlessness of “Indigenous” people in the face
of the bulldozing effect of European colonial languages, especially English.
In the early 2000s, UNESCO brought together specialists to implement a
methodology for assessing language vitality and endangerment in the
world. This led to the online UNESCO interactive atlas of the world’s languages
in danger (Moseley 2010).
As often pointed out by Mufwene (e.g., 2016, 2017a), the contribution to
understanding how language contact can negatively affect the vitality of
some coexistent languages – and under what conditions – has been mar-
ginal. (However, see Bradley & Bradley 2019 for a healthy change.) The
omission of any comparison of the loss of “Indigenous languages” with
that of competing European languages in the settlement colonies, precisely
what Einar Haugen has focused on in The Norwegian language in America
(1953), may be part of the explanation for this shortcoming.
However, we cannot ignore that LEL has become a productive research
area that fits squarely in language contact and has the natural potential to
contribute to a broader, more inclusive understanding of language evolu-
tion. The latter research area deals not only with the emergence and loss
of structures but also with maintenance and loss of vitality, aside from the
traditional concern with the emergence of languages and their speciation
in evolutionary linguistics (Mufwene 2018). A research area called “eco-
linguistics” (Mühlhäusler 2003) is now thriving, with the shortcoming
that it is more moralizing about the importance of maintaining the
relevant ecology without explaining how or why. To be sure, the recently
published Routledge handbook of ecolinguistics, edited by Alwin Fill &
Hermine Benz (2018), includes also topics in the tradition of Einar
Haugen and beyond.

17
To be sure, the current engagement in language documentation, as opposed to saving languages, can be considered
as a continuation of the legacy of American linguists in the early twentieth century. However, this is not part of our
concern with language contact.
 1. Language Contact 23

Other developments have also marked the expansion of the scholarship

on language contact since the second half of the 2000s, including the study
of “super-diversity.” In 2007, Steven Vertovec published an issue of Ethnic
and Racial Studies titled “Super-diversity and its implications.” He discussed
the situation brought about in British (and other Western European) cities
by “an increased number of new, small and scattered, multiple-origin,
transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally
stratified immigrants who have arrived over the last decade” (1024). To be
sure, Lesley Milroy & Peter Muysken (1995) had anticipated Vertovec in
referring to “the influence of migration from the Third World on language
practices in the industrial West,” which they connect to the interlanguages
of guest/migrant workers in Western Europe studied in the 1970s by, for
instance, Wolfgang Klein & Norbert Dittmar (1979).
Regarding interlanguages, research conducted by Carol Pfaff (e.g., 1981)
shows that there are many factors that account for why foreign workers in
Europe have not been able to learn the local language fluently. They include
residential isolation from – and hence no socialization with – the host
population; concentration of speakers of the same language in the same
dormitories; little communication with native speakers at work, especially
when this takes place through interpreters; and sometimes negative atti-
tudes of members of the host population to the foreign workers. Population
structure, especially regarding permeability between the host and foreign
populations, affects how much of the local language they and their children
can learn. Regarding the linguistic structures the foreign workers produce,
we also learn that substrate influence and foreigner talk (used by autoch-
thonous speakers) is only part of the story (Meisel 1980). There’s always
more to learn about various aspects of language contact, which, as an aspect
of human social and mental behavior, appears to involve more complexity
than some may have imagined.
Returning to super-diversity, several papers, led especially by linguistic
ethnographers Blommaert & Rampton (2011), have been published that
underscore the unprecedented multilingualism that has arisen in
Western European urban centers as a consequence of foreign immigrations.
As shown by Mufwene (2017c), the interest in this aspect of language
contact generally lacks a historical perspective. The relevant scholars have
generally overlooked ways in which European colonization had already also
changed the linguascapes of the conquered territories, not only by introdu-
cing European languages but also with the addition of languages spoken by
contract laborers brought to the colonies, such as in Fiji, Tanzania, and
South Africa, without overlooking creole-speaking colonies (transformed
earlier ethnolinguistically) such as Mauritius, Guyana, and Trinidad. It also
changed the colonies with the production of new urban centers where, in
exploitation colonies, even indigenous people from diverse ethnolinguistic
backgrounds came to coexist with one another, which fostered the emer-
gence of indigenous urban vernaculars and regional lingua francas.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
c’était parfait et nécessaire. Ensuite nous avons écarté le fils du banquier et
l’héritier du marchand de porc salé... C’était encore très bien. Puis, nous
avons écarté le fils du gouverneur et celui du sénateur... Parfait encore, je
l’avoue. Ensuite c’est le fils du vice-président et celui du ministre de la
Guerre que nous avons mis de côté... Bien, très bien, car les hautes
positions occupées par leurs pères n’ont rien de stable. Alors tu es allée à
l’aristocratie; et j’ai cru qu’enfin nous touchions au but. Nous allions nous
allier avec l’un des représentants de ces vieilles familles, si rares et si
vénérables, dont la lignée remonte à cent cinquante ans au moins et dont les
descendants actuels sont bien purifiés de toute odeur de travail manuel... Je
le croyais, je m’imaginais que les mariages allaient se faire, n’est-ce pas?
Mais non, car aussitôt tu as songé à deux vrais aristocrates d’Europe et, dès
ce moment, adieu nos meilleurs et plus proéminents compatriotes! J’ai été
affreusement découragé, Aleck! Et puis, après cela, quelle procession! Tu as
repoussé des baronnets pour des barons, des barons pour des vicomtes, des
vicomtes pour des comtes, des comtes pour des marquis, des marquis pour
des ducs!
Maintenant, Aleck, il faut s’arrêter. Tu as été jusqu’au bout. Nous avons
maintenant quatre ducs sous la main. Ils sont tous authentiques et de très
ancienne lignée. Tous perdus de dettes. Ils veulent d’énormes dots, mais
nous pouvons leur passer cela. Allons, Aleck, le moment est venu,
présentons-les aux petites et qu’elles choisissent!
Aleck avait souri tranquillement dès le début de ce long discours, puis
une lueur de joie, de triomphe presque, avait illuminé ses yeux. Enfin elle
dit aussi calmement que possible:
—Sally, que dirais-tu d’une alliance royale?
O prodige! O pauvre homme! Il fut si sot devant une pareille
interrogation qu’il resta un moment la bouche ouverte en se passant la main
sur l’oreille comme un chat. Enfin, il se reprit, se leva et vint s’asseoir aux
pieds de sa femme; il s’inclina devant elle avec tout le respect et
l’admiration qu’il avait autrefois pour elle.
—Par saint Georges! s’écria-t-il avec enthousiasme, Aleck, tu es une
femme supérieure entre toutes! Je ne saurais me mesurer à toi. Je ne pourrai
jamais apprendre à sonder tes pensées profondes. Et je croyais pouvoir
critiquer tes façons de faire! Moi? J’aurais bien dû penser que tu savais ce
que tu faisais et que tu préparais quelque chose de grandiose! Pardonne-
moi, et maintenant, comme je brûle d’apprendre les détails, parle... je ne te
critiquerai plus de ma vie.
Sa femme, heureuse et flattée, approcha ses lèvres de l’oreille de Sally et
chuchota le nom d’un prince régnant. Il en perdit la respiration et son visage
se colora...
—Ciel! s’écria-t-il. Il a une maison de jeux, une potence, un évêque, une
cathédrale... tout cela à lui! Il perçoit des droits de douane, c’est la plus
select principauté d’Europe. Il n’y a pas beaucoup de territoire, mais ce
qu’il y a est suffisant. Il est souverain, c’est l’essentiel, les territoires ne
signifient rien...
Aleck le considérait avec des yeux brillants. Elle se sentait profondément
heureuse. Elle dit:
—Pense, Sally, c’est une famille qui ne s’est jamais alliée hors des
Maisons royales ou impériales d’Europe: nos petits-enfants s’assiéront sur
des trônes.
—Il n’y a rien de plus certain dans le ciel ni sur la terre, Aleck, et ils
tiendront des sceptres aussi, avec autant d’aisance, de naturel, de
nonchalance que moi ma canne de jonc. C’est une grande, une merveilleuse
affaire, Aleck. Est-il bien pris au moins? Ne peut-il nous faire faux-bond?
Tu le tiens?
—N’aie pas peur. Repose-toi sur moi pour cela. Il est attaché, il a les
mains liées, il est notre débiteur. Il est à nous, corps et âme. Mais occupons-
nous du second prétendant.
—Qui est-ce, Aleck?
—Son Altesse Royale Sigismond-Sigfried Lauenfeld Dinkespiel
Schwartzenberg-Blutwurst, grand duc héréditaire de Katzenyammer.
—Non! Tu veux plaisanter?
—Il s’agit de lui; aussi vrai que je suis là devant toi. Je t’en donne ma
parole.
Sally restait suffoqué de surprise. Il saisit les mains de sa femme et les
pressa longtemps entre les siennes.
Enfin, il reprit avec enthousiasme:
—Comme tout cela est merveilleux et étonnant! Voici maintenant que
nous allons faire régner nos descendants sur la plus ancienne des trois cent
soixante-quatre principautés allemandes et sur l’une des trois ou quatre à
qui Bismarck laissa une indépendance relative en fondant l’unité de
l’Empire! Je connais cette petite capitale. Ils ont un fort et une armée
permanente; de l’infanterie et de la cavalerie; trois hommes et un cheval.
Aleck, nous avons longuement attendu, nous avons souvent été déçus et
avons dû différer nos projets, mais maintenant Dieu sait que je suis
pleinement, parfaitement, absolument heureux! Heureux, envers toi, ma
chérie, qui as préparé ce beau triomphe. A quand la cérémonie?
—Dimanche prochain.
—Bien. Nous allons donner à ce double mariage un éclat incomparable.
Ce n’est que convenable étant donné le prestige des fiancés. Maintenant,
autant que je peux savoir, il n’y a qu’une forme de mariage qui soit
exclusivement royale, c’est la forme morganatique... Sera-ce un mariage
morganatique?
—Que veut dire ce mot, Sally?
—Je ne sais pas, mais ce que je sais, c’est qu’il ne s’emploie qu’au sujet
des unions des rois ou des princes...
—Alors, ce sera morganatique. Bien mieux, je l’exigerai. Il y aura un
mariage morganatique ou point.
—Bravo! Aleck. Voilà tout arrangé! s’écria Sally en se frottant les
mains. Ce sera la première cérémonie de ce genre en Amérique. Tout New-
York en sera malade.
... Les deux époux retombèrent dans le silence, tout occupés chacun à
part eux à parcourir l’Europe en invitant les têtes couronnées et leurs
familles aux merveilleuses fêtes qu’ils allaient donner pour les noces de
leurs filles.

VIII
Durant trois jours, les Foster ne vécurent plus que dans les nuages. Ils
n’étaient plus que très vaguement conscients des choses et des gens qui les
entouraient. Ils voyaient les objets confusément, comme au travers d’un
voile. Leurs âmes étaient demeurées au pays des rêves et ne savaient plus
revenir au monde des réalités. Ils n’entendaient pas toujours les paroles
qu’on leur adressait et quand ils entendaient, très souvent ils ne
comprenaient pas. Alors ils répondaient très vaguement ou à côté. A son
magasin, Sally vendit des étoffes au poids, du sucre au mètre et donnait du
savon quand on lui demandait des bougies. A la maison, Aleck mettait son
chat dans l’armoire et offrait du lait à une chaise. Tous ceux qui les
approchaient étaient étonnés et s’en allaient en murmurant: «Qu’est-ce que
les Foster peuvent donc avoir?»
Trois jours. Puis les événements se précipitèrent. Les choses avaient pris
une tournure favorable et pendant quarante-huit heures l’imaginaire coup
d’audace d’Aleck parut tout près de réussir. Les valeurs montaient en
bourse. Encore un point! Encore un autre! Elles eurent cinq points de
surplus! Elles en eurent quinze! Elles en eurent vingt!!!
Aleck faisait plus que doubler ses innombrables millions. Elle dépassait
quatre milliards. Et les agents de change imaginaires lui téléphonaient sans
trêve: Vendez! Vendez! Pour l’amour du Ciel, vendez maintenant!
Elle apporta ces splendides nouvelles à son mari et lui aussi s’écria:
«Vends, vends vite maintenant! Oh! ne te laisse pas affoler, n’attends plus!
Vends! Vends!»
Mais elle ne voulut rien entendre. Elle opposa à toutes les objurgations
sa volonté et déclara qu’elle voulait encore cinq points de plus-value.
Cette obstination lui fut fatale. Le lendemain même survint la fameuse
débâcle, la débâcle unique, historique, la débâcle. Tout Wall-Street fut
ruiné. Des multimillionnaires mendièrent leur pain. Aleck tint bravement
tête à l’orage et tâcha de dominer la panique aussi longtemps que possible,
mais à la fin elle fut impuissante à conjurer le désastre et ses agents
imaginaires lui télégraphièrent qu’il ne lui restait rien. Alors, mais
seulement alors, son énergie toute virile l’abandonna et elle redevint une
faible femme. Elle passa les bras autour du cou de son mari et dit en
pleurant:
—Je suis coupable, impardonnable! Je ne puis le supporter. Nous
sommes pauvres. Pauvres! Et moi je suis si malheureuse! Les noces de nos
filles ne se feront pas! Tout est fini! Nous ne saurions même plus acheter le
dentiste, maintenant!
Sally avait sur les lèvres un amer reproche: «Je t’avais priée de vendre!»
mais il se contint, il ne se sentit pas le courage de dire des choses dures à sa
pauvre femme brisée et repentante. Au contraire, une noble pensée lui vint
et il dit:
—Courage, mon Aleck! Tout n’est pas perdu. En réalité, tu n’as pas
risqué un sou de l’héritage, mais tu as seulement beaucoup gagné et
beaucoup perdu en opérations fictives. Courage! Les trente mille dollars
nous restent, ils sont intacts. Et ton incomparable jugement financier aidé de
l’expérience acquise nous aura bientôt rendu aussi riches qu’auparavant!
Pense à ce que tu seras capable de faire dès maintenant! Les mariages ne
sont pas impossibles, ils sont simplement remis.
Ce furent paroles bénies. Aleck en reconnut la vérité et elle releva la tête,
ses larmes cessèrent et elle sentit une nouvelle et noble ardeur envahir son
âme. D’une voix presque joyeuse et sur un ton prophétique, elle s’écria:
—En tout cas, je proclame...
Un coup frappé à la porte l’interrompit. C’était le propriétaire et
directeur du Sagamore. Il avait dû venir voir un parent éloigné qui était près
de sa fin et, pour ne pas oublier ses intérêts malgré son chagrin, il était venu
frapper à la porte des Foster qui s’étaient trouvés tellement absorbés en
d’autres préoccupations qu’ils avaient négligé de payer leur abonnement
depuis quatre ans. Ils devaient six dollars.
Nul visiteur ne pouvait être accueilli avec plus de joie. Il allait pouvoir
dire tout ce qui concernait l’oncle Tilbury et l’état de sa santé.
Naturellement, les Foster ne voulaient ni ne pouvaient lui poser à ce sujet
aucune question directe... sous peine de manquer à leur engagement sacré;
mais ils pouvaient tâcher d’amener la conversation tout près du sujet brûlant
et espérer d’obtenir quelque renseignement spontané. Tout d’abord, cela
n’amena aucun résultat. L’esprit obtus du journaliste ne se rendit compte de
rien, mais, à la fin de la visite, le hasard fit ce que la ruse n’avait pas su
provoquer. Pour illustrer une affirmation qui avait sans doute besoin de ce
soin, le directeur du Sagamore s’écria:
—Terre du ciel, c’est juste, comme disait Tilbury Foster.
Ce nom fit tressauter les Foster. Le journaliste s’en aperçut et dit en
s’excusant:
—Je vous demande pardon. Je ne mettais aucune mauvaise intention
dans cette phrase, je vous assure. Un parent peut-être?
Sally rassembla tout son courage et, arrivant à se dominer par un grand
effort, il répondit d’un ton indifférent:
—Un parent... eh bien... non, pas que je sache, mais nous avons entendu
parler de lui.
 Le directeur, heureux de n’avoir pas blessé un abonné, reprit contenance.
Sally ajouta:
—Est-il... se porte-t-il bien?
—Bien! Dieu vous bénisse! Il est en enfer depuis cinq ans!
Les Foster tressailliront de douleur, mais il leur sembla que c’était de
joie.
Sally reprit:
—Ah bien! telle est la vie... nous devons tous la quitter, les riches aussi
bien que les autres!
Le directeur se mit à rire:
—N’y comprenez pas Tilbury, dit-il; il est mort sans le sou. Il a été
enterré aux frais de la commune.
Les Foster demeurèrent pétrifiés pendant deux minutes. Alors, la face
toute blanche, Sally reprit d’une voix faible:
—Est-ce vrai? Êtes-vous sûr que ce soit vrai?
—Certes! J’ai été obligé de m’occuper des formalités, parce que Tilbury
—qui n’avait pour tout bien qu’une brouette—me l’avait léguée. Et notez
que cette brouette n’avait plus de roue. De plus, cela m’a obligé à écrire une
sorte d’article nécrologique sur le défunt, mais la composition de cet article
fut détruite parce que...
Les Foster n’écoutaient plus. Ils en avaient assez; ils n’avaient plus
besoin de renseignements; ils ne pouvaient en supporter davantage. Ils
restaient là, la tête penchée, morts à toute chose, sauf à leur souffrance
aiguë.
Une heure après, ils étaient toujours à la même place, leurs têtes
baissées, silencieux. Leur visiteur était parti depuis longtemps, sans qu’ils y
eussent prêté la moindre attention. De temps à autre ils hochaient la tête à la
façon des vieillards, d’une manière dolente et chagrine, puis ils se mirent à
bavarder d’une manière puérile et à prononcer des paroles sans suite. Par
moments ils retombaient dans leur silence profond... Ils semblaient avoir
oublié tout le monde extérieur. Quelquefois, aux moments où ils rompaient
le silence, ils avaient une vague conscience d’avoir été frappés par une
grande douleur et alors ils se caressaient mutuellement les mains en signe
de compassion réciproque et comme pour se dire l’un à l’autre: «Je suis
près de toi, je ne t’oublie pas. Nous supporterons le malheur ensemble.
Quelque part il doit y avoir le repos et l’oubli, quelque part nous trouverons
la paix et le sommeil; sois patient, ce ne sera plus bien long.»
Ils vécurent encore deux ans, perdus dans la même nuit de la pensée,
dans les mêmes rêves vagues et chagrins et presque toujours silencieux.
Enfin, ils moururent tous deux le même jour.
Quelques semaines avant cette heureuse délivrance, une lueur de
conscience revint au cerveau ruiné de Sally et il dit:
—De grandes richesses acquises tout d’un coup et sans peine ne sont que
duperie. Elles ne nous ont pas rendus meilleurs, mais nous ont donné la
fièvre des plaisirs. Et pour elles nous avons renoncé à notre simple, douce et
heureuse existence... Que cela serve d’avertissement aux autres!
Il s’arrêta et ferma les yeux. Alors, comme la douleur envahissait de
nouveau son âme et qu’il retombait dans l’inconscience, il murmura:
—L’argent l’avait rendu misérable et il s’est vengé sur nous qui ne lui
avions rien fait. Voilà ce qu’il voulait. Il ne nous a laissé que trente mille
dollars afin que nous soyons tentés d’augmenter cet argent en spéculant et
par là il voulait ruiner nos âmes. Sans qu’il lui en coûtât plus, il aurait pu
nous laisser une bien plus grosse somme, de façon que nous n’aurions pas
été tentés de l’augmenter et s’il avait été moins méchant, c’est ce qu’il
aurait fait, mais il n’y avait en lui aucune générosité, aucune pitié, aucune.
 LE PASSEPORT RUSSE

I
Une grande salle d’hôtel dans la Friedrichstrasse à Berlin, vers le milieu
de l’après-midi. Autour d’une centaine de tables rondes, les habitués
attablés fument et boivent en causant. Partout voltigent des garçons en
tabliers blancs portant de grands bocks mousseux.
A une table tout près de l’entrée principale, une demi-douzaine de
joyeux jeunes gens—des étudiants américains—se sont réunis une dernière
fois avec un de leurs camarades qui venait de passer quelques jours dans la
capitale allemande.
—Mais pourquoi voulez-vous couper net au beau milieu de votre
voyage, Parrish? demanda un des étudiants. Je voudrais bien avoir votre
chance. Pourquoi voulez-vous retourner chez vous?
—Oui, dit un autre, c’est bien une drôle d’idée. Il vous faut nous
expliquer ça, voyez-vous, parce que cela ressemble bien à un coup de folie.
Nostalgie?
Le frais visage de Parrish rougit comme celui d’une jeune fille, et, après
un instant d’hésitation, il confessa qu’en effet de là venait son mal.
—C’est la première fois que je quitte la maison, dit-il, et chaque jour je
me trouve de plus en plus seul. Pendant de longues semaines je n’ai pas vu
un seul ami, et c’est trop affreux. Je voulais tenir bon, jusqu’au bout, par
amour-propre. Mais après vous avoir rencontrés, camarades, c’en est trop,
je ne pourrais pas poursuivre mon chemin. Votre compagnie a fait pour moi
un vrai paradis de cette ville, et maintenant je ne peux pas reprendre mon
vagabondage solitaire. Si j’avais quelqu’un avec moi... mais je n’ai
personne, voyez-vous, alors ce n’est pas la peine.
On m’appelait «poule mouillée» quand j’étais petit—et peut-être le suis-
je encore—efféminé et timoré, et tout ce qui s’en suit. J’aurais bien dû être
une fille! Je ne peux pas y tenir; décidément je m’en retourne.
Ses camarades le raillèrent avec bienveillance, lui disant qu’il faisait la
plus grande sottise de sa vie; et l’un d’eux ajouta qu’il devrait au moins voir
Saint-Pétersbourg avant de s’en retourner.
—Taisez-vous, s’écria Parrish d’un ton suppliant. C’était mon plus beau
rêve, et je dois l’abandonner. Ne me dites pas un mot de plus à ce sujet, car
je suis changeant comme un nuage et je ne puis résister à la moindre force
de persuasion. Je ne peux pas y aller seul; je crois que je mourrais. Il frappa
la poche de son veston et ajouta:
—Voici ma sauvegarde contre un changement d’idée; j’ai acheté mon
billet de wagon-lit pour Paris et je pars ce soir. Buvons encore un coup,
camarades, à la patrie!
Les jeunes gens se dirent adieu, et Alfred Parrish fut abandonné à ses
pensées et à sa solitude. Mais seulement pour un instant... car un monsieur
d’âge mûr, aux allures brusques et décidées, avec ce maintien suffisant et
convaincu que donne une éducation militaire, se leva avec empressement de
la table voisine, s’assit en face de Parrish et se mit à causer d’un air
profondément intéressé et entendu. Ses yeux, son visage, toute sa personne,
toute son attitude dénotaient une énergie concentrée.
Il paraissait plein de force motrice à haute pression. Il étendit une main
franche et large, secoua cordialement celle de Parrish et dit avec une
ardente conviction:
—Ah, mais non, il ne faut pas, vraiment, il ne faut pas! Ce serait la plus
grande faute du monde. Vous le regretteriez toujours. Laissez-vous
persuader, je vous en prie; n’y renoncez pas—oh! non!
Ces paroles avaient une allure tellement sincère, que les esprits abattus
du jeune homme en furent tout relevés, une légère humidité se trahit dans
ses yeux, confession involontaire de sa reconnaissance émue. L’étranger eut
vite noté cet indice et, fort satisfait d’une telle réponse, poursuivit son but
sans attendre des paroles.
—Non, ne faites pas cela, ce serait trop dommage. J’ai entendu ce que
vous avez dit—vous me pardonnerez cette indiscrétion—j’étais si près que
je n’ai pu m’empêcher. Et je suis tourmenté à la pensée que vous allez
couper court à votre voyage, quand au fond vous désirez tant voir Saint-
Pétersbourg, et que vous en êtes pour ainsi dire à deux pas! Réfléchissez
encore; ah, vous devez y réfléchir. La distance est si courte—ce sera bientôt
fait, vous n’aurez pas le temps de vous ennuyer—et quel monde de beaux
souvenirs vous en rapporterez!
 Puis il se mit à faire des descriptions enthousiastes de la capitale russe et
de ses merveilles, en sorte que l’eau en vint à la bouche d’Alfred Parrish, et
que toute son âme frémit d’un irrésistible désir.
—Mais il faut absolument que vous voyiez Saint-Pétersbourg—il le faut!
mais, ce sera un enchantement pour vous, un véritable enchantement! je
puis bien vous le dire, moi, car je connais la ville aussi bien que je connais
mon village natal, là-bas en Amérique. Dix ans, dix ans j’y ai vécu.
Demandez à qui vous voudrez; on vous le dira, tout le monde me connaît.
Major Jackson. Les chiens eux-mêmes me connaissent. Allez-y, oh! il n’y a
pas à hésiter. Croyez-moi.
Alfred Parrish était tout vibrant d’ardeur et de joie maintenant. Son
visage l’exprimait plus clairement que sa langue ne l’aurait pu.
Puis... l’ombre obscurcit de nouveau son front et il dit-tristement:
—Oh! non. Ce n’est pas la peine. Je ne pourrais pas. Je mourrais de
solitude.
Le major s’écria avec étonnement:
—Solitude! mais j’y vais avec vous!
C’était là un coup bien inattendu. Et pas tout à fait satisfaisant. Les
choses marchaient trop vite. Était-ce un guet-apens? Cet étranger était-il un
filou? Sinon, pourquoi porterait-il gratuitement tant d’intérêt à un jeune
garçon errant et inconnu? Mais un simple coup d’œil jeté à la physionomie
franche, joviale et ouverte du major rendit Alfred tout honteux; il se
demanda comment il pourrait bien se tirer de cet embarras sans blesser les
bons sentiments de son interlocuteur. Mais il n’était pas des plus adroits en
diplomatie et il aborda la difficulté avec le sentiment gênant de sa faiblesse
et de sa timidité. Il dit avec une effusion de modestie un peu exagérée:
—Oh! non! non, vous êtes trop bon; je ne pourrais pas... Je ne vous
permettrai jamais de vous causer un tel dérangement pour...
—Dérangement? Pas le moins du monde, mon garçon; j’étais déjà
décidé à partir ce soir. Je prends l’express de neuf heures. Venez donc! nous
voyagerons ensemble. Vous ne vous ennuierez pas une seconde, je vous le
garantis. Allons... c’est entendu!
Son unique excuse était donc perdue. Que faire maintenant? Parrish était
interloqué, découragé; il lui sembla qu’aucun subterfuge de sa pauvre
invention ne pourrait jamais le libérer de ces ennuis. Cependant il sentait
qu’il devait faire un autre effort, et il le fit.
Dès qu’il eut trouvé sa nouvelle excuse, il reconnut qu’elle était
indiscutable.
—Ah! mais malheureusement le sort est contre moi, et c’est impossible.
Voyez ceci... et il sortit ses billets et les posa sur la table. Je suis en règle
pour jusqu’à Paris et naturellement, je ne pourrais pas faire changer pour
Saint-Pétersbourg tous mes billets et coupons de bagages. Je serais obligé
de perdre de l’argent. Et si je pouvais me payer la fantaisie de laisser perdre
cet argent, je me trouverais bien à court pour acheter un nouveau billet—car
voici tout l’argent que je possède ici—et il posa sur la table un billet de
banque de cinq cents marks.
En un clin d’œil le major saisit les billets et les coupons et fut sur pied,
s’écriant avec enthousiasme:
—Bon! c’est parfait, et tout ira pour le mieux. On changera volontiers
tous ces petits papiers, pour moi; on me connaît partout. Tout le monde me
connaît. Ne bougez pas de votre coin. Je reviens tout de suite. Puis il mit la
main aussi sur le billet de banque. Je vais prendre ça, il se pourrait qu’il y
ait quelques petites choses de plus à payer pour les nouveaux billets.
Et le bonhomme partit à toutes jambes.

II
Alfred Parrish resta paralysé. Ce coup avait été tellement soudain!
Tellement soudain, audacieux, incroyable, impossible... Sa bouche resta
entr’ouverte, mais sa langue ne voulait plus remuer; il essaya de crier:
«Arrêtez-le!» mais ses poumons étaient vides. Il voulut s’élancer à la
poursuite de l’étranger, mais ses jambes ne pouvaient que trembler; puis,
elles fléchirent tout à fait, et il s’affaissa sur sa chaise. Sa gorge était sèche,
il suffoquait et gémissait de désespoir, sa tête n’était plus qu’un tourbillon.
Que devait-il faire? Il ne savait pas. Une chose lui paraissait claire,
cependant: il devait prendre son courage à deux mains et tâcher de rattraper
cet homme. Le filou ne pourrait naturellement pas se faire rendre l’argent
des billets; mais les jetterait-il, ces bouts de papier? Non certes; il irait sans
doute à la gare, et trouverait à les revendre à moitié prix. Et aujourd’hui
même, car ils seraient sans valeur demain, selon la loi allemande.
 Ces réflexions lui rendirent l’espoir et la force, il se leva et partit. Mais il
ne fit qu’un ou deux pas et, soudain, il se trouva mal et retourna en
trébuchant à sa chaise, saisi d’une affreuse crainte que son léger mouvement
n’eût été remarqué. Car les derniers bocks de bière avaient été à son compte
et n’étaient pas payés; or, le pauvre garçon n’avait pas un pfennig... Il était
donc prisonnier... Dieu sait tout ce qui pourrait lui arriver s’il tentait de
quitter sa place! Il se sentit effrayé, écrasé, anéanti; et il ne possédait même
pas assez bien son allemand pour expliquer son cas et demander un peu de
secours et d’indulgence.
Comment donc avait-il pu être si nigaud? Quelle folie l’avait poussé à
écouter les discours d’un homme qui cependant se montrait, avec toute
évidence, un aventurier de la pire espèce? Et voilà le garçon qui
s’approche! Il disparut, en tremblant, derrière son journal. Le garçon passa.
Alfred poussa un soupir de soulagement et de reconnaissance. Les aiguilles
de l’horloge paraissaient immobiles, mais il ne pouvait en détacher ses
yeux.
Dix minutes s’écoulèrent lentement. Encore le garçon! Nouvelle
disparition derrière le journal. Le garçon s’arrêta—quelques minutes
d’angoisse!... puis s’éloigna.
Dix autres minutes de désespoir et le garçon revint encore. Cette fois il
essuya la table et mit au moins un mois à le faire; puis il s’arrêta et attendit
au moins deux mois, avant de s’en aller.
Parrish sentait bien qu’il ne pourrait supporter une autre de ces visites. Il
devait jouer sa dernière carte, et courir les risques. Il fallait jouer le grand
jeu. Il fallait s’enfuir. Mais le garçon rôda autour du voisinage pendant cinq
minutes... ces cinq minutes furent des semaines et des mois pour Parrish qui
le suivait d’un œil craintif, et sentait toutes les infirmités de la vieillesse se
glisser en lui, et ses cheveux en devenir tout blancs.
Enfin, le dernier garçon s’éloigna... s’arrêta à une table, ramassa la
monnaie, poursuivit vers une autre table, ramassa encore la monnaie, puis
vers une autre... l’œil furtif de Parrish continuellement rivé sur lui, son cœur
palpitant et bondissant, sa respiration haletante, en soubresauts d’anxiété
mêlée d’espoir.
Le garçon s’arrêta de nouveau pour prendre la monnaie, et Parrish se dit
alors: Voici le moment ou jamais! et se leva pour gagner la porte. Un pas...
deux pas... trois... quatre... il approchait de la sortie... cinq... ses jambes
flageolaient... quel était ce pas rapide, derrière lui? oh! son cœur, comme il
battait!... six, sept... bientôt il serait libre?... huit, neuf, dix... oui, quelqu’un
le poursuivait! Il tourna l’angle, et il allait prendre ses jambes à son cou,
quand une main lourde s’abattit sur son épaule, et toute force l’abandonna.
C’était le major. Il ne posa pas une question, il ne montra pas la moindre
surprise. Il dit, de son ton jovial et dégagé:
—Le diable emporte ces gens, ils m’ont attardé. C’est pourquoi je suis
resté si longtemps. L’employé du guichet avait été changé; il ne me
connaissait pas, et refusa de faire l’échange parce que ce n’était pas selon
les règles; alors, il m’a fallu dénicher mon vieil ami, le Grand-Mogol... le
chef de gare, vous comprenez..., oh! ici, fiacre!... montez, Parrish!...
consulat russe, cocher, et vivement!... Je disais donc que tout cela m’a bien
pris du temps. Mais tout va bien, maintenant, c’est parfait; vos bagages ont
été reposés, enregistrés, étiquetés, billets de voyage et de wagon-lit
changés, et j’en ai tous les documents dans ma poche. L’argent aussi. Je
vous le tiens en sûreté. Allez donc, cocher, allez donc; qu’elles ne
s’endorment pas vos bêtes!
Le pauvre Parrish essayait vainement de placer un mot, tandis que le
fiacre s’éloignait à toute vitesse du café où il venait de passer un si mauvais
quart d’heure, et lorsqu’enfin il parvint à ouvrir la bouche, ce fut pour
annoncer son intention de retourner tout de suite pour payer sa petite dette.
—Oh! ne vous tracassez pas de cela, dit le major, placidement. Ça va
bien, allez, ils me connaissent—tout le monde me connaît—je réglerai ça la
prochaine fois que je serai à Berlin. Plus vite, cocher, plus vite! Nous
n’avons pas de temps à perdre maintenant.
Ils arrivèrent au consulat russe un instant après la fermeture du bureau;
le major entra précipitamment. Il n’y avait plus qu’un jeune clerc. Le major
passa sa carte et demanda, en russe:
—Voulez-vous avoir la bonté de viser ce passeport pour Saint-
Pétersbourg, au nom de ce jeune homme, et aussi rapidement que...
—Pardon, Monsieur, mais je ne suis pas autorisé, et le consul vient de
partir.
—Partir, où?
—A la campagne où il demeure.
—Et il reviendra...
 —Demain matin.
—Mille tonnerres! oh! bien, dites donc, je suis le major Jackson, il me
connaît, tout le monde me connaît. Visez-le vous-même; vous direz au
consul que le major Jackson vous a commandé de le faire. Tout ira bien.
Mais ce cas de désobéissance aux lois établies aurait été absolument fatal
au jeune employé. Le clerc ne voulut pas se laisser persuader. Il faillit
s’évanouir à cette idée.
—Eh bien, alors, je vais vous dire, s’écria le major. Voici les timbres et
le pourboire. Faites-le viser sans faute, demain matin, et envoyez-le par
courrier.
Le clerc dit d’un air de doute:
—Mais... enfin, peut-être qu’il le fera, et dans ce cas...
—Peut-être? mais certainement! Il me connaît... tout le monde me
connaît!
—Très bien, dit le clerc, je vous ferai la commission. Il avait l’air tout
interloqué et en quelque sorte subjugué; il ajouta timidement:
—Mais... mais... vous savez que vous le devancerez de vingt-quatre
heures à la frontière. Il n’y a aucun accommodement pour une si longue
attente.
—Qui parle d’attendre? pas moi, quand le diable y serait.
Le clerc demeura un instant paralysé, puis il dit:
—Certes, monsieur, vous ne voulez pas qu’on vous l’envoie à Saint-
Pétersbourg?
—Et pourquoi pas?
—Tandis que son propriétaire rôderait autour des frontières à vingt-cinq
lieues de là?
—Rôder!—Sacrebleu! qui vous a dit qu’il devra rôder?
—Mais vous n’ignorez pas, je pense, qu’on l’arrêtera à la frontière s’il
n’a pas de passeport.
—Jamais de la vie! l’inspecteur en chef me connaît... comme tout le
monde. Je me charge du jeune homme. Je suis responsable de lui. Envoyez
le papier tout droit à Saint-Pétersbourg... hôtel de l’Europe, aux soins du
major Jackson: dites au consul de ne pas se tourmenter, je prends tous les
risques sur moi.
 Le clerc hésita, puis risqua un dernier argument:
—Vous devez bien noter, monsieur, que ces risques sont particulièrement
sérieux en ce moment. Le nouvel édit est en vigueur et...
—Quel est-il?
—Dix ans de Sibérie pour quiconque se trouve en Russie sans passeport.
—Hum... damnation! Il dit ce mot en anglais, car la langue russe est
pauvre lorsqu’il s’agit d’exprimer brièvement ses sentiments. Après avoir
réfléchi profondément, il se secoua, et résuma l’entretien, avec une brusque
et insouciante bonhomie:
—Oh! ça va bien, allez! adressez à Saint-Pétersbourg, arrive que pourra!
J’arrangerai ça, moi. On me connaît partout... Toutes les autorités... tout le
monde.

III
Il se trouva que le major était un adorable compagnon de voyage, et le
jeune Parrish en fut charmé. Ses paroles et ses traits d’esprit étaient comme
des rayons de soleil et des lueurs d’arc-en-ciel, animant tout son entourage,
le transportant en une atmosphère de gaîté et d’insouciante joie; et puis, il
était plein de petites attentions, de manières accommodantes; il savait à la
perfection la bonne manière de faire les choses, le moment propice, et le
meilleur moyen.
Le long voyage fut donc un beau rêve, un conte de fée, pour le jeune
garçon qui avait passé de si longues et monotones semaines de nostalgie.
Enfin, lorsque les deux voyageurs approchèrent de la frontière, Parrish dit
quelque chose à propos de passeport; puis il tressaillit comme au souvenir
d’une chose désagréable, et ajouta:
—Mais, j’y songe, je ne me souviens pas que vous ayez rapporté mon
passeport du consulat. Mais vous l’avez bien, n’est-ce pas?
—Non. Il viendra par courrier, dit le major, tout tranquillement.
—Il... il... vient par... courrier! suffoqua Parrish; et toutes les terribles
choses qu’il avait entendu raconter à propos des désastres et des horreurs
subies par les visiteurs sans passeport, en Russie, se présentèrent à son
esprit épouvanté, et il en pâlit jusqu’aux lèvres. Oh! major... oh! mon Dieu,
que m’arrive-t-il maintenant! Comment avez-vous pu faire une chose
pareille?
 Le major passa une main caressante sur l’épaule du jeune homme et dit:
—Voyons, voyons, ne vous tourmentez donc pas, mon garçon, ne vous
tourmentez pas un brin. C’est moi qui prend soin de vous et je ne permettrai
pas qu’il vous arrive malheur. L’inspecteur en chef me connaît, et je lui
expliquerai la chose, et tout ira pour le mieux, vous verrez. Allons, ne vous
faites pas le moindre souci... Je vous ferai marcher tout cela sur des
roulettes.
Alfred tremblait de tous ses membres, et il se sentait un grand poids sur
le cœur, mais il fit tout ce qu’il put pour dissimuler son angoisse et répondre
avec quelque courage aux paroles bienveillantes et rassurantes du major.
A la frontière, il descendit, se tint parmi la grande foule et attendit, dans
une inquiétude profonde, tandis que le major se frayait un chemin à travers
la multitude pour aller «tout expliquer à l’inspecteur en chef». L’attente lui
parut cruellement longue, mais, enfin, le major revint. Il s’écria
jovialement.
—Il y a un nouvel inspecteur, et, le diable l’emporte, je ne le connais
pas!
Alfred s’effondra contre une pile de malles, en gémissant:
—Oh! mon Dieu, mon Dieu, j’aurais dû le prévoir! et il s’affaissait
mollement par terre, mais son compagnon le retint d’un bras vigoureux,
l’assit sur un grand coffre et, s’approchant de lui, murmura à son oreille:
—Ne vous tourmentez pas, mon petit, allons! Tout ira bien; ayez
seulement confiance en moi. Le sous-inspecteur est très myope. Je le sais, je
l’ai observé. Voici comment nous allons faire: Je vais aller faire contrôler
mon passeport, puis je vous attendrai là-bas, près de cette grille, où vous
voyez ces paysans avec leurs malles. Quand je vous verrai, je viendrai
m’appuyer tout contre la grille pour vous glisser mon passeport entre les
barreaux. Alors, vous vous pousserez dans la foule, et vous présenterez le
papier au passage, avec entière confiance en la Providence qui a envoyé ce
brave myope pour nous sauver. Allons, n’ayez pas peur.
—Mais, oh! mon Dieu, mon Dieu, votre description et la mienne ne se
ressemblent pas plus que...
—Oh! bah, ça n’a pas d’importance... différence entre cinquante et un et
dix-neuf ans... juste imperceptible à mon cher myope. Ne vous faites pas de
bile, tout ira pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes.
 Dix minutes après, Alfred s’avançait en trébuchant vers le train, pâle et
prêt à succomber; mais ayant trompé le myope avec le plus grand succès, il
était heureux comme un chien perdu qui échappe à la police.
—Je vous le disais bien! s’écria le major, fier et triomphant. J’étais sûr
que tout irait bien, pourvu que vous vous confiiez en la Providence, comme
un petit enfant faible et candide, et que vous n’essayiez pas d’en faire à
votre tête. Cela réussit toujours à merveille.
Depuis la frontière jusqu’à Saint-Pétersbourg, le major s’employa
activement à ramener son jeune camarade à la vie, à ranimer sa circulation,
à le tirer de son abîme de mélancolie, pour lui faire sentir à nouveau que la
vie est une joie, et vaut toujours la peine d’être vécue. Donc, grâce à ces
encourageantes admonitions, le jeune homme entra dans la ville, tête haute
et fier comme Artaban et fit inscrire son nom sur le registre d’un hôtel.
Mais au lieu de lui indiquer sa chambre, le maître-d’hôtel le regarda d’un
air entendu, et parut attendre quelque chose. Le major vint promptement à
la rescousse et dit jovialement:
—Ça va bien—vous me connaissez—inscrivez-le, je suis responsable.
Le maître d’hôtel prit un air très grave, et secoua la tête. Le major ajouta:
—Oui, tout en règle, le passeport sera ici dans vingt-quatre heures... Il
vient par la poste. Voici le mien, et le sien vous sera présenté incessamment.
Le maître-d’hôtel se montra plein de politesse, plein de déférence, mais
il demeura ferme. Il dit en bon anglais:
—Vraiment, je suis au désespoir de ne pouvoir vous accommoder, major,
et certes, je serais très honoré de pouvoir le faire; mais je n’ai pas le choix,
je dois prier ce jeune homme de partir; en fait, je ne pourrais même pas lui
permettre de rester un instant dans cette maison.
Parrish commença à chanceler, et fit entendre un sourd gémissement. Le
major le saisit et le retint par le bras, et dit au maître d’hôtel d’un ton
suppliant:
—Mais voyons, vous me connaissez!... tout le monde me connaît... qu’il
reste ici pour cette nuit seulement, et je vous donne ma parole...
Le maître d’hôtel secoua la tête:
—Major, vous me mettez dans une position dangereuse. Vous mettez
mon hôtel en danger. J’ai horreur de faire une chose pareille, mais...
vraiment, il faut... il faut que j’appelle la police.
 —Halte-là! ne faites pas cela. Venez vite, mon garçon, et ne vous
tracassez pas... tout s’arrangera le mieux du monde. Holà! cocher, ici!
Montez, mon petit. Palais du directeur de la police secrète. Qu’ils galopent,
cocher, à bride abattue! Comme le vent! Nous voilà partis, et il n’y a plus à
se faire du mauvais sang. Le prince Bossloffsbry me connaît, me connaît
comme sa poche. Un seul mot de lui, et nous pouvons tout.
Ils passèrent à travers les rues animées de Saint-Pétersbourg et arrivèrent
devant le palais qui était brillamment illuminé. Mais il était huit heures et
demie. Le prince était sur le point de se mettre à table, dit la sentinelle, et ne
pourrait recevoir personne.
—Mais il me recevra, moi, dit le major, avec conviction, en tendant sa
carte. Je suis le major Jackson. Qu’on lui présente ceci, il me connaît.
La carte fut présentée, malgré les protestations des huissiers; puis le
major et son protégé attendirent quelque temps dans la salle de réception.
Enfin, un domestique vint les avertir, et les conduisit dans un somptueux
cabinet particulier, où les attendait le prince pompeusement vêtu, et le front
sombre comme un ouragan. Le major expliqua son cas, et supplia qu’il leur
fût accordé un délai de vingt-quatre heures pour attendre le passeport.
—Oh! impossible, s’écria le prince en excellent anglais. Je n’aurais
jamais cru que vous puissiez faire une chose tellement insensée. Major!...
amener ce pauvre jeune homme sans passeport! Je n’en reviens pas! C’est
dix ans de Sibérie, sans espoir, ni pardon... soutenez-le! il prend mal!... (car
le malheureux Parrish s’affaissait et tombait). Tenez, vite... donnez-lui ceci.
Là... buvez encore un peu. Un peu d’eau-de-vie fait du bien, n’est-ce pas,
jeune homme? Maintenant cela va mieux, pauvre garçon. Couchez-vous sur
le canapé. Comment avez-vous pu être si stupide, major, que de l’amener
dans ce piège abominable?
Le major soutint le jeune homme sur son bras vigoureux, posa un
coussin sous sa tête, et murmura à son oreille:
—Ayez l’air aussi diablement malade que possible! Pleurez pour tout de
bon! Il est touché, voyez-vous, il lui reste un cœur tendre, par là-bas
dessous. Tâchez de gémir et dites: «Oh, maman, maman!» Ça le
bouleversera, allez, du premier coup.
Parrish allait faire toutes ces choses, d’ailleurs, sans qu’on le lui dise, et
par instinct naturel. Par conséquent, ses lamentations se firent promptement
entendre, avec une grande et émouvante sincérité. Le major lui dit tout bas:
 —Épatant! dites-en encore. La grande Sarah ne ferait pas mieux.
Et grâce à l’éloquence du major et au désespoir du jeune homme, la
victoire fut enfin remportée. Le prince capitula en disant:
—Eh bien! je vous fais grâce, bien que vous ayez mérité une leçon bien
sévère. Je vous accorde exactement vingt-quatre heures. Si le passeport
n’est pas arrivé au bout de ce laps de temps, n’approchez pas de moi,
n’espérez rien. C’est la Sibérie sans rémission.
Pendant que le major et le jeune homme se confondaient en
remerciements, le prince sonna, et, aux deux soldats qui se présentèrent
aussitôt, il ordonna de monter la garde auprès des deux hommes, et de ne
pas perdre de vue un instant, durant vingt-quatre heures, le plus jeune. Si,
au bout de ce laps de temps, le jeune homme ne pouvait présenter un
passeport, il devait être enfermé dans les donjons de Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-
Paul, et tenu à sa disposition.
Les malheureux arrivèrent à l’hôtel avec leurs gardes, dînèrent sous leurs
veux, restèrent dans la chambre de Parrish jusqu’à ce que le major, après
avoir vainement essayé de ranimer les esprits du dit Parrish, se fût couché et
endormi; puis l’un des soldats s’enferma avec le jeune homme, et l’autre
s’étendit en travers de la porte, à l’extérieur, et tomba dans un profond
sommeil.
Mais Alfred Parrish ne put en faire autant. Dès l’instant où il se trouva
seul en face du lugubre soldat et du silence imposant, sa gaieté, tout
artificielle, s’évanouit, son courage forcé s’affaissa et son pauvre petit cœur
se serra, se recroquevilla comme un raisin sec. En trente minutes, il avait
sombré et touché le fond; la douleur, le désespoir, l’épouvante ne pouvaient
le posséder plus profondément. Son lit? Les lits n’étaient pas pour les
désespérés, les damnés! Dormir! Il ne ressemblait pas aux enfants hébreux
qui pouvaient dormir au milieu du feu! Il ne pouvait que marcher de long en
large, sans cesse, sans cesse, dans sa petite chambre. Non seulement il le
pouvait, mais il le fallait. Il gémissait et pleurait, frissonnait et priait, tour à
tour et tout à la fois.
Enfin, brisé de douleur, il écrivit ses dernières volontés, et se prépara,
aussi bien qu’il était en son pouvoir, à subir sa destinée. Et, en dernier lieu,
il écrivit une lettre:
 «Ma mère chérie,
«Quand ces tristes lignes vous parviendront, votre pauvre Alfred ne sera
plus de ce monde. Non, pis que cela, bien pis! Par ma propre faute, ma
propre étourderie, je suis tombé entre les mains d’un filou ou d’un
lunatique. Je ne sais pas lequel des deux, mais en tout cas je sens que je suis
perdu. Quelquefois je suis sûr que c’est un filou, mais la plupart du temps je
crois qu’il est simplement fou, car il a un bon cœur honnête et franc; et je
vois bien qu’il fait les efforts les plus dévoués pour tâcher de me tirer des
difficultés fatales où il m’a jeté.
«Dans quelques heures je ferai partie de cette affreuse troupe de
malfaiteurs qui cheminent dans les solitudes neigeuses de la Russie, sous le
fouet, vers cette terre de mystère, de malheur et d’éternel oubli, la Sibérie!
Je ne vivrai pas pour la voir; mon cœur est brisé, et je mourrai. Donnez mon
portrait à celle que vous savez, et demandez-lui de le garder pieusement en
mémoire de moi, et de vivre dans l’espoir de me rejoindre un jour dans ce
monde meilleur où il n’y a pas de demandes en mariage, mais où les
terribles séparations n’existent pas non plus. Donnez mon chien jaune à
Archy Hale, et l’autre à Henry Taylor; mon fusil est pour mon frère Will
ainsi que mes articles de pêche et ma Bible.
«Il n’y a aucun espoir pour moi; je ne puis m’échapper. Le soldat monte
la garde auprès de moi avec son fusil, et ne me quitte jamais des yeux; il ne
sourcille pas; il ne bouge pas plus que s’il était mort. Je ne puis le fléchir,
car le maniaque tient tout mon argent. Ma lettre de crédit est dans ma malle
que je n’aurai peut-être jamais. Je sais que je ne l’aurai jamais. Oh! mon
Dieu, que vais-je devenir? Priez pour moi, maman chérie, priez pour votre
pauvre Alfred. Mais toutes les prières seront vaines et inutiles...»

IV
Le lendemain, Alfred sortit, tout brisé, pâle, vieilli, quand le major vint
le chercher pour le déjeuner matinal. Ils firent manger leurs gardes,
allumèrent des cigares, le major lâcha la bride à sa langue admirable; sous
son influence magique Alfred se sentit graduellement renaître à l’espoir, au
courage, presque à la foi.
Mais il ne pouvait quitter la maison. L’ombre de la Sibérie planait sur
lui, noire et menaçante; sa curiosité artistique était dissipée et il n’aurait pu