Lecture | LUCL Colloquium - Series '24/'25
The dynamics of contact-induced change and language shift
- Date
- Thursday 24 April 2025
- Time
- Serie
- LUCL Colloquium - Series '24/'25
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.23
Abstract
A large percentage of the world’s languages—anywhere from 50 to 90%—are currently spoken in situations of unstable bi- or multi-lingualism where speakers, and often younger speakers, are not using their ancestral language but rather speaking the majority language. Widespread, ongoing language shift today provides opportunities to study language change and loss in process, rather than as an end product.
This talk considers contact-induced change and shift within a framework of shift ecologies that encompasses both structural linguistic features and social process (Grenoble and Osipov 2023). Shift ecologies are dynamic: language choices and preferences change, as do speakers’ proficiency levels. One result is high levels variation of multiple kinds in these speech communities, including variation in the linguistic systems of speakers, as well as in terms of their proficiency. Even rapid shift occurs unevenly across the larger community of all speakers, with some members continuing to use the language in the home even after others have given it up. Moreover, people have varying opportunities to use the language, varying motivations, and varying ideologies (Gal & Irvine 2019); these all have an impact on linguistic outcomes of contact and shift.
Using data from an ongoing project that studies shift in Arctic language communities in northeastern Russia, with examples from Even and Evenki (Tungusic) and Sakha (Turkic) communities whose speakers are shifting to Russian. These languages are spoken in differing language ecologies, with differing social and structural outcomes. The talk provides data on changes in morphosyntax, variation and proficiency with attention to case marking and verbal categories. Contrary to claims about the randomness of what has been referred to as “obsolescence” (Dorian 1989) or “language decay” (Sasse 2001), changes across shifting speakers are not completely haphazard or idiosyncratic but show systematicity, despite claims that predict overall simplification and randomness (Campbell & Muntzel 1989). Perhaps surprisingly, few changes can be explained as interference from the majority (dominant) language; many can be best explained as leveling and innovation using the language’s own resources. Moreover, our current research provides no evidence of a shared innovative or simplified linguistic system used across shifting speakers. Rather, we find differences in how shifting speakers on the one hand, and highly proficient speakers on the other, manage multilingual repertoires. These observations speak to a need to move focus away from the study of monolingual norms and idealized proficient speakers to the study of language practices in a repertoire-based approach.
This research has adapted several experimental methods to gather data that is comparable across different speakers so we can make generalization about patterns (or lack thereof). Research on language shift is often characterized by the description of the linguistic systems of a small subset of speakers, sometimes only one or two. Fieldworkers report what appear to be changes but often rely on single examples and cannot assess whether such changes are tied to an individual speaker and idiosyncratic, or one-time errors, or whether they represent changes at the level of a community of speakers. Our present work relies not only on more traditional field methods (such as language surveys, questionnaires, elicitation, and recording of naturalistic conversation, ethnographic observation and interviews) but also, and increasingly, on quantitative sociolinguistic methods and experimental methods conducted in situ.
References:
Campbell, L. & M.C. Muntzel. 1989. The structural consequences of language death. In N.C. Dorian (ed.), Investigating obsolescence: Studies in language contraction and death, 181-196. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dorian, N. (ed.) 1989. Investigating obsolescence: Studies in language contraction and death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gal, S. & J. Irvine. 2019. Signs of difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grenoble, L.A. & B. Osipov. 2023. The dynamics of bilingualism in language shift ecologies. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 13(1):1-39.
Sasse, H.-J. 2001. Typological changes in language obsolescence. In M. Haspelmath (ed.), Language typology and language universals: An international handbook, 1668-1677. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.