Books in the Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact series

The historical spread of Spanish and Portuguese throughout the world provides a rich source of data for linguists studying how languages evolve and change. This volume analyses the development of Portuguese and Spanish from Latin and their subsequent transformation into several non-standard varieties. These varieties include Portuguese- and Spanish-based creoles, Bozal Spanish and Chinese Coolie Spanish in Cuba, Chinese Immigrant Spanish, Andean Spanish, and Barranquenho, a Portuguese variety on the Portugal-Spain border. Clancy Clements demonstrates that grammar formation not only takes place in parent-to-child communication, but also, importantly, in adult-to-adult communication. He argues that cultural identity is also an important factor in language formation and maintenance, especially in the cases of Portuguese, Castilian, and Barranquenho. More generally, the contact varieties of Portuguese and Spanish have been shaped by demographics, by prestige, as well as by linguistic input, general cognitive abilities and limitations, and by the dynamics of speech community.

Using a cohesive approach that combines linguistics, legal history and colonial studies, this study advances our knowledge of creolistics. Focusing primarily on Afro-Hispanic varieties, it will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in language contact, historical linguistics, language variation and change, and Latin American studies.

Although linguistic complexity has interested a growing number of linguists, few of them have gone beyond merely counting units and rules. Exposing the limitations of this approach, this book reveals various ways in which the subject matter can be investigated on the model of complexity theory.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of the role of language contact as a motivator for change. It will appeal to students and researchers of historical linguistics, contact linguistics, language typology, and sociolinguistics, as well as to specialists in Romance, Germanic, Slavic, and other language families of Europe.

Charts the history of Singapore English and explores the linguistic, historical and social factors that have influenced the variety as it is spoken today. This study will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on language contact, world varieties of English, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics.

Although linguistic complexity has interested a growing number of linguists, few of them have gone beyond merely counting units and rules. Exposing the limitations of this approach, this book reveals various ways in which the subject matter can be investigated on the model of complexity theory.

The book will appeal to anyone interested in language contact, the Arabic language, and North Africa. It uses sociohistorical information and a wide range of data sets, including electronic communication, to provide a comprehensive picture of the past and present language situation in the region.

This volume presents a historical-sociolinguistic description and analysis of Maritime Polynesian Pidgin. It redefines our understanding of how Europeans and Americans interacted with Pacific Islanders in Eastern Polynesia during early encounters and offers an alternative model of language contact.

How do children develop bilingual competence? Do bilingual children develop language in the same way as monolinguals? Set in the context of findings on language development, this book examines the acquisition of English and Spanish by two brothers in the first six years of their lives. Based on in-depth and meticulous analyses of naturalistic data, it explores how the systems of both languages affect each other as the children develop, and how different levels of exposure to each language influence the nature of acquisition. The author demonstrates that the children's grammars and lexicons follow a developmental path similar to that of monolinguals, but that cross-linguistic interactions affecting lexical, semantic and discourse-pragmatic aspects arise in Spanish when exposure to it diminishes around the age of four. The first of its kind, this original study is a must-read for students and researchers in bilingualism, child development, language acquisition and language contact.

This book complements and advances the traditional scholarship on the history of English. It is about the role of different forms of colonization and related ideologies in its diversification. It also discusses the consequences of its appropriation by practitioners of different cultures and its indigenization into their own language.

Human language has changed in the age of globalization: no longer tied to stable and resident communities, it moves across the globe, and it changes in the process. In this book Jan Blommaert constructs a theory of changing language in a changing society.

This book explores the social and structural dynamics underlying the creation of new, or restructured, grammars, offering an evolutionary account of contact language formation in the linguistic ecology of Monsoon Asia, including contacts between languages and peoples of Malay, Chinese, Portuguese and English origin, before, during and after Western colonization.

Research on African languages has been preoccupied with understanding similarities across the four distinct language families. This book discusses whether structural similarities and dissimilarities among African languages are the result of contact between these languages, and demonstrates that such similarities are more common than is widely believed.

Research on African languages has been preoccupied with understanding similarities across the four distinct language families. This book discusses whether structural similarities and dissimilarities among African languages are the result of contact between these languages, and demonstrates that such similarities are more common than is widely believed.

How does a child become bilingual? The answer to this intriguing question remains largely a mystery, not least because it has been far less extensively researched than the process of mastering a first language. Drawing on new studies of children exposed to two languages from birth (English and Cantonese), this book demonstrates how childhood bilingualism develops naturally in response to the two languages in the children's environment. While each bilingual child's profile is unique, the children studied are shown to develop quite differently from monolingual children. The authors demonstrate significant interactions between the children's developing grammars, as well as the important role played by language dominance in their bilingual development. Based on original research and using findings from the largest available multimedia bilingual corpus, the book will be welcomed by students and scholars working in child language acquisition, bilingualism and language contact.

The global spread of English has resulted in the emergence of a diverse range of postcolonial varieties around the world. Postcolonial English provides a clear and original account of the evolution of these varieties, exploring the historical, social and ecological factors that have shaped all levels of their structure. It argues that while these Englishes have developed new and unique properties which differ greatly from one location to another, their spread and diversification can in fact be explained by a single underlying process, which builds upon the constant relationships and communication needs of the colonizers, the colonized, and other parties. Outlining the stages and characteristics of this process, it applies them in detail to English in sixteen different countries across all continents as well as, in a separate chapter, to a history of American English. Of key interest to sociolinguists, dialectologists, historical linguists and syntacticians alike, this book provides a fascinating new picture of the growth and evolution of English around the globe.

Children are extremely gifted in acquiring their native languages, but languages nevertheless change over time. Why does this paradox exist? In this study of creole languages, Enoch Olade Aboh addresses this question, arguing that language acquisition requires contact between different linguistic sub-systems that feed into the hybrid grammars that learners develop. There is no qualitative difference between a child learning their language in a multilingual environment and a child raised in a monolingual environment. In both situations, children learn to master multiple linguistic sub-systems that are in contact and may be combined to produce new variants. These new variants are part of the inputs for subsequent learners. Contributing to the debate on language acquisition and change, Aboh shows that language learning is always imperfect: learners' motivation is not to replicate the target language faithfully but to develop a system close enough to the target that guarantees successful communication and group membership.

Written by a leading expert in the field, this much-needed account brings together disparate findings to examine the dynamics of contact between languages in an immigrant context and asks how and why some languages survive longer than others in such a context.

This major 2001 work explores the development of creoles and other new languages, focusing on the conceptual and methodological issues they raise for genetic linguistics. Drawing on major theories of language formation, macroecology and population genetics, Mufwene proposes a common approach to the development of creoles and other new languages.

The phenomenon of language contact, and how it affects the structure of languages, has been of great interest to linguists. This study looks at how grammatical forms and structures evolve when speakers of two languages come into contact, and offers an interesting insight into the mechanism that induces people to transfer grammatical structures from one language to another. Drawing on findings from languages all over the world, Language Contact and Grammatical Change shows that the transfer of linguistic material across languages is quite regular and follows universal patterns of grammaticalization - contrary to previous claims that it is a fairly irregular process - and argues that internal and external explanations of language structure and change are in no way mutually exclusive. Engaging and informative, this book will be of great interest to sociolinguists, linguistic anthropologists, and all those working on grammaticalization, language contact, and language change.